It's The Largest Corvair Ever Made -- And You Too Can Own One

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A Major Opus: Welcome Back Bloom County

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Politix Update: Please Don't Throw Us In The Briar Patch, Mister Trump!

Every political news story has a narrative arc: Initial reports followed by subsequent reports followed by what-it-all-means analyses followed, sooner or later, by diminished interest and then inevitable flame out, often only a few days after the story broke.  That was the likely course following Donald Trump's announcement on June 16 that he was running for president.  Sniggering, bad hair jokes and practiced yawns.  But nearly a month on, the Trump story not only has legs -- as butt ugly as they are -- but he has sucked pretty much all of the air out of the Republican presidential campaign, leaving the many other candidates gasping for breath, scrambling to get noticed and hopping mad at the xenophobic gadzillionaire who not only has stolen their thunder but come to represent all that is wrong with the Grand Old Party.

The Trump narrative arc is well into the what-it-all-means phase, but it has taken a while for the more forthright political pundits to hint at what I've been saying in Politix Update posts for some time: Trump has legs because he speaks for what he has begun calling "the silent majority" in his stump speeches, white men (and women, as well) whose greatest fears have nothing to do with access to health care or jihadist threats, but their ongoing demographic marginalization.

This explains why Trump's smash-mouth views on immigration -- you know, the hordes of brown ones who are taking away the jobs we don't want in the first place when not selling crack cocaine to our sons or raping our daughters -- have resonated so deeply with the Republican Party's nativist base.

While not disagreeing with that view, a very few pundits are spinning Trump's ascendency as the best thing to happen to the GOP since a former B-movie actor and pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax conned the party into nominating him for president because Trump's very long 15 minutes of fame, while pulling the party far off message in the short term, could help more mainstream candidates in the long term. 

Like Ronald Reagan, Trump is jobbing the Republican establishment big time.  (After all, he is the author of The Art of the Deal.)  Like Reagan, he is all smoke and mirrors -- and despite all their tone-down-the-rhetoric whinging, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his fellow nail biters know that.

My blogging friend Will Bunch over at Attytood suggests that what Priebus and Company are really doing is an update of the classic children's fable: Please don't throw us in the briar patch, Mister Trump!  Bunch adds that the Republicans hitting the panic button probably aren't smart enough to realize Trump could be their savior beginning with the forthcoming presidential debates in a scenario with Emmy-winning appeal:

The script is already written. The salivating cable moderator will ask Trump in the first 10 minutes about Mexico and rapists or what not, and The Donald will launch into his routine. The reply will certainly fall upon Jeb! -- serious and well-spoken, fluent in Spanish, husband and father of Latino-Americans, and he will utter a well-crafted response that will, in essence, be the 21st Century version of, "Have you, at long last, no sense of decency." And the pundits will go wild, declaring the scripted reply to be historic -- the where's-the-beef-no-Jack-Kennedy-Army-McCarthy moment that made John Ellis Bush "a leader."

Bunch further observes, as have I, that Jeb Bush may be the least popular figure with the best chance of becoming president since forever and at the moment is getting creamed by Trump in a goodly number of polls.  This has to do with the fact that although Bush has the kind of name recognition candidates would kill for, it's the wrong name.  And that his lackluster campaign has had to compete with 13 others . . . oh, make that 14 others with Scott Walker formally announcing yesterday.

It is a lead-pipe cinch certainty that Trump will flame out, but at the moment he is dominating the airwaves and lapping the field in appearances on Fox News, the official party Wurlitzer, according to Media Matters.  And nativist Americans finally have the racist demagogue running for president they'd long been hoping for.

BORN ON THIRD BASE & THINKS HE HIT A TRIPLE

Presidential candidates born with silver spoons in their mouths are likely to do or say something embarrassing sooner or later. 

There was President George H.W. Bush staring in marvel at a grocery store scanner during his 1992 re-election campaign and Mitt Romney's 47 Percent remark during the 2012 campaign, both which became symbols of their inability to sympathize with, let alone understand, the everyday lives of average Americans.

Now we have Jeb Bush asserting that Americans "need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families."

There is so much wrong with that statement that it's difficult to know where to begin.  Like Bush père and Romney, Bush frère has inadvertently shown a side of him that not even his spin doctors could rationalize away in saying that he actually was referring to part-time workers.  (Cough, cough.)  Then there is the reality that Americans already work longer hours than any of their counterparts in industrialized nations.  As well as the subtext of his remark, a focus-group favorite of conservatives: Large numbers of Americans are choosing not to work because they can live lives of leisure on the government dime. 

Hillary Clinton, who began rolling out her economic platform in a speech yesterday, excoriated Bush in terms a working stiff would appreciate.

"Let him tell that to the nurse who stands on her feet all day or the teacher who is in that classroom or the trucker who drives all night," she said. "They don’t need a lecture, they need a raise."

Clinton's economic vision (which owes much to Bernie Sanders, thank you) sharply contrasts with Bush's, which comport with the long discredited flapdoodle preached by the "trickle-down" economics crowd.  In other words, tax cuts for the wealthy and wage stagnation for everyone else.

MARCO RUBIO: STUCK IN 1959

You'd think that Senator Marco Rubio, the other Floridian in the Republican race, would be a hero in Cuba as the first Cuban-American with a chance to become president.  Well, you'd be wrong.

President Obama won the Republican Cuban-American vote in 2012, a reflection of how younger Cuban-Americans have moved on although their hyper conservative parents have not and still vilify Fidel Castro and oppose normalizing relations with Cuba, which Obama has set in motion despite ferocious resistance from congressional Republicans.

Resistance to Castro's Communist government has been central to Rubio's political identity.  He believes that normalizing relations between Washington and Havana will only embolden a Cuban government that keeps its people in poverty and violates human rights.  Rubio's stubborn stand brings up an interesting possibility: Should he get the nomination, he could have trouble carrying his home state if he can't bring along Cuban-Americans of his own generation.

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 © STEVE STEGELIN FROM THE CHARLESTON CITY PAPER 

Other Shoe Drops In CIA-Psychological Association Torture Conspiracy

That sound you hear -- or in all likelihood didn't hear at all -- is the other shoe dropping in the scandal involving the secret collaboration between the American Psychological Association and the Bush administration to justify the CIA's use of Nazi-like torture techniques.

The first shoe dropped in April when a group of dissident health-care professionals and human rights activists released a scathing report stating that the APA had tossed ethical concerns aside and created an association ethics policy on national security interrogations which conveniently comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the CIA torture program in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.  This secret deal in turn enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret legal opinions that the program -- since revealed to be ineffective, constitutionally dubious, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and deeply damaging to America's standing abroad -- was legal and did not constitute torture, since the interrogations were being monitored by APA-approved health-care professionals to make sure they were safe. 

The APA, the nation's largest professional organization for psychologists, denied in responding to the report that it had coordinated its actions with the government, which was not surprising since the group's hierarchy -- if not necessarily its rank and file --had been in denial about its complicity for years.

The second shoe dropped last Friday night when official Washington and much of the press corps had decamped for the weekend.  In a scathing report growing out of an investigation by a team led by a former federal prosecutor undertaken at the request of the APA's no-longer-in-denial board, it found that:

* Some of the APA's top officials, including its ethics director, cynically "colluded" with Pentagon officials by keeping the association's ethics policies in line with the Defense Department's interrogation policies.

* Several prominent outside psychologists aided the CIA's interrogation program and helped protect it from dissent from professionals inside the agency's own Office of Medical Services who raised objections over the interrogation techniques, objections that were covered up by the government.

* Two former APA presidents were on a CIA advisory committee and one of them gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture.  This individual later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program.

* The APA assembled a task force in 2005 to study concerns over the CIA torture program that was dominated by national security insiders who, of course, concluded that psychologists could assist in the brutal interrogations.

The association’s ethics office "prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public," the report stated.

"The evidence supports the conclusion that APA officials colluded with DOD officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain APA ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key DOD officials wanted.  The APA chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping DOD, managing its PR, and maximizing the growth of the profession."

Some context is helpful:

The White House, CIA and FBI were unprepared for the 9/11 attacks despite warnings that they were imminent because they failed to take seriously the threat to the homeland that Al Qaeda represented. Intelligence officials, goaded by Bush administration official who prior to the attacks had been content to continue fighting the Cold War although the Soviet Union had collapsed a decade earlier, were desperate to head off new attacks and this spawned the collaboration between the APA and Pentagon, which was willing to pay big bucks for experts who could give the new torture program a veneer of legitimacy.

Both reports are chockablock with analogies that call to mind the machinations of officials in the torture regime of Hitler's Third Reich to create a veneer of respectability for their vile deeds in documenting how the Bush administration, in response to shocking photos of the abuse of prisoners by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, sough to salvage the hitherto secret torture program initiated under the guise of fighting the so-called War on Terror.

The CIA program, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December, included waterboarding, imprisoning detainees in small boxes, slapping and punching them, depriving them of sleep for as long as a week, and sometimes telling them that they would be killed, their children maimed and their mothers sexually assaulted.  Some detainees were subjected to medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" -- a technique that the CIA.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert "total control over the detainee."   The interrogations were carried out at so-called black site -- prisons around the world where suspects were held secretly for years.

There is overwhelming evidence that the use of torture was ineffective nor, despite claims to the contrary did it lead to locating and killing Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

In response to the second report, former APA President Nadine Kaslow said in a statement that "The actions, policies and lack of independence from government influence described in the report represented a failure to live up to our core values.  We profoundly regret and apologize for the behavior and the consequences that ensued."

The APA said it was now considering proposals to prohibit psychologists from participating in interrogations and to modify its ethics policies.

Physicians for Human Rights called on the Justice Department to begin a criminal investigation into the APA's role.

"As mental health professionals, our first obligation must be to our patients," said Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz, a psychiatrist and the vice chairman of the board of Physicians for Human Rights. "The APA's collusion with the government's national security apparatus is one of the greatest scandals in U.S. medical history."

The Obama administration has refused to prosecute the torturers, let alone Bush administration enablers, and only one CIA official has been prosecuted -- a former employee who in protest went public with details about the program.

* * * * *

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and I discussed the issue of members of the "healing profession," as she calls it, collaborating in unethical and unlawful government conduct in 2008.  Dr. E is a psychoanalyst who has been in clinical practice for over 40 years and specializes in post-trauma recovery, often including veterans, as well as being a poet and bestselling author whose books have been published in 32 languages. 

A reprint of our dialogue is here. An index of eight years of torture-related posts is here. 

'Take A Few Steps Toward The Gunman For A Better Look'

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Politix Update: Why Bernie Sanders, Like Gene McCarthy In 1968, Will Fail

NOR LAW, NOR DUTY BADE ME FIGHT / NOR PUBLIC MEN, NOR CHEERING CROWDS / A LONELY IMPULSE OF DELIGHT / DROVE TO THIS TUMULT IN THE CLOUDS. ~ W.B. YEATS

If you weren't coming home in a pine box or wheelchair from Vietnam, the year 1968 was tremendously exciting, and among the waves of change roiling American society none was quite as dramatic as Eugene McCarthy's campaign to wrest the heart and soul of the Democratic Party from the hawks and take the White House in what would be a bloodless and historic coup d'état.

I was a junior in college, editor of the campus newspaper and, while avowedly objective in all things political as a young journalist, I secretly and fervently supported McCarthy.  My roommates took leave of classes, if not their senses, to slog through deep snow in New Hampshire to volunteer for the maverick U.S. senator from Minnesota in the first-in-the-nation primary.  They even cut their long hair and shaved off their beards to "get clean for Gene."

McCarthy stunned President Johnson and won 20 of New Hampshire's 24 convention delegates, while Richard Nixon won the Republican primary.  Robert Kennedy quickly reversed field and joined the race, hastening LBJ's dramatic announcement that he would not seek reelection.  And suddenly anything seemed possible to my friends and I, as well as millions of young people and others opposed to a war that already had taken more than 20,000 American lives and deeply disillusioned with the Democratic establishment, a ruthless president and his lapdog Congress.

The sensational early successes of McCarthy invite comparisons with Bernie Sanders, who like McCarthy nearly five decades earlier, has tapped into a reservoir of disenchantment with the Democratic establishment in the person of Hillary Clinton. 

There are indeed similarities, but they will not hearten the supporters of Sanders, a Democrat-turned-Independent and self-described socialist from Vermont: While McCarthy and Sanders were and are men of principle and there is a not dissimilar reservoir of disenchantment, it also does not run deep.  And like McCarthy, Sanders will get very little rank-and-file support, while his quixotic quest will end as McCarthy's did, a mere footnote in the annals of presidential campaign history.

The lack of rank-and-file support is the key.

Sanders' liberal support, like McCarthy's, is a given.  No surprises there as liberals embody what opposition there is to Clinton, although she is considered "liberal" by contemporary standards.  But despite some seemingly promising poll numbers for Sanders, Clinton holds a huge and insurmountable lead among moderate and conservative Democrats, both white and nonwhite. 

Sanders' lack of black and Latino support is especially striking.  Unlike most of the riders in the Republican clown car, that has nothing to do with how he views minorities and everything to do with how working-class, less liberal Democrats view him.  Which is to say, traditionally Democratic voters. 

So while Sanders may pick up a few delegates in the early primaries, he has no chance of succeeding if he can't attract voters outside of his fairly small constituency.  And he won't.

IT'S 2008, NOT 1968

Overall, a more apt comparison than Eugene McCarthy taking on LBJ in 1968 or Bernie Sanders taking on Hillary Clinton in 2015 may be Barack Obama challenging Clinton in 2008.  More specifically, and this is what especially interests this old war horse with 11 presidential campaigns under his belt, which candidates are capable of bringing new thinking to old problems, as well as dealing with new ones?

By this measure, McCarthy may well have been a problematic president given his prickly personality and a portfolio that did not extend very far beyond foreign policy.  And while Sanders bubbles with idealism, his portfolio is filled with left-leaning policy ideas as out of step with the political mainstream as are those of Ted Cruz or Scott Walker on the right.

The Obama-Clinton match-up resonates for me because of the Iraq War.  Clinton was a conscript in that war, and although she was to disavow her initial support for it, I among others wondered whether she would be a George Bush in skirts as president.  Obama (as well as Sanders) opposed the war from its outset, and he followed through on a campaign pledge to end U.S. involvement in it even if the rise of ISIS has somewhat tempered the American withdrawal.

And there is this as well: Even though party establishmentarian Hubert Humphrey was to vanquish McCarthy (Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in June), and Humphrey was defeated by Nixon, my generation did eventually had an opportunity to set things to rights, and we blew it.  With Obama, there was an opportunity to give the next generation a shot at shaking up the Old School establishment.

Has he?  My answer is a qualified "no," but we'll have to wait and see.

IT DIDN'T WORK BEFORE, SO LET'S DO IT AGAIN

Although Republicans control both houses of Congress, there isn't a whole lot they can do in their unceasing efforts to dismantle President Obama's policies other than what they've done before -- tie things in such knots that there could be a government shutdown at the end of September.

Previous shutdowns over the past 20 years included the Newt Gingrich engineered dual shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 over budgetary standoffs with President Clinton and the John Boehner-engineered 2013 shutdown over Obamacare funding.  And there have been a few Republican-led near misses.

These shutdowns and almost-shutdowns, which of course were all about asserting power and not fiscal prudence, have had two consequences: The impasses eventually were resolved when the Republicans blinked and the Republicans reaped all the bad publicity.  Which is why it would seem to make no sense that they again are on a collision course with shutting down government and reaping the animosity that again would engender, this time with additionally negative consequences for a party that is the midst of another stumbling effort to retake the White House.  (It's not a coincidence that not one of the 17 Republican presidential wannabes are House members.)

Alas, as in so many other aspects of the contemporary Republican playbook, alienating a lot of voters in the service of dangling red meat in front of a few seems to be the only way for this determinedly dysfunctional bunch to go.

CHRISTIE WINS, DEMOCRACY LOSES

We live in the era of the litmus test, at least as Republican politicians are concerned, and there is a whopper of a one looming for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

A voter registration bill passed by the state Legislature last month would make New Jersey, along with Oregon, a national leader through automatic voter enrollment at the state motor vehicle department.  Apply for or renew your driver’s license and Presto! you're registered to vote.

But the bombastic Christie, who once supported a Motor Voter law as governor of arguably the most liberal state, as well as encouraging early voting and expanding multi-language election materials, is now agin' them all because he wants the Republican presidential nomination, although sloppy seconds would be just fine, thank you.

"There’s much more politics behind this than there is democracy," he said of the so-called Democracy Act, and strongly hinted he'll veto it because of that Republican bogeyman — voter fraud, a virtually nonexistent problem but handy excuse to hinder the voting rights of minorities, which is to say Democrats.

THE DONALD & THE DAMAGE DONE

Donald Trump's serial provocations have Republican leaders back on their heels and at a loss about how to curb the party's white nativist poster boy since exiling him from the GOP temple on principle would never occur to these Uriah Heepish cowards, and even barring him from forthcoming debates would backfire.

Trump's meteoric rise in the polls has been unchecked.  He is polling second nationally among all Republican clown car riders (and ahead of Jeb "Dark Money" Bush) in some polls, while he is first in some outlying national polls and a new North Carolina poll.  While the Tarheel State may deserve him, a lot of people clearly support him.

"The fire at this point cannot be tamed. It is not controllable," one veteran Republican operative told Politico. "Donald Trump is the only one to control his fire."

"Trump is just dominating the race right now, he's sucking the air out of this thing," moaned one Republican. "Our candidates are all being forced to react to his comments."

While Trump's racist blatherings appeal to what the New York Times euphemistically calls the "anxious white voters" Republicans dare not alienate, something . . . anything had to be done, so National Committee chairman Reince Priebus shook off his paralysis, hiked up his drawers and called the celebrity candidate to ask him to speak in . . . uh, more measured tones. 

But Trump one-upped Priebus by acerbically characterizing the call as "congratulatory" over his rise in recent polls.  Ha!  But Trump one-upped Priebus by acerbically characterizing the call as "congratulatory" over his rise in recent polls.  Ha!  And although the chattering classes may not take Trump's candidacy seriously, he obviously does because he is willing to tarnish The Donald brand and even burn some financial bridges. 

Ha, ha!

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.

QUOTE FROM YEATS' "AN IRISH AIRMAN FORSEES HIS DEATH," WHICH WAS A GENE McCARTHY FAVORITE.  
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF AMERICA.GOV

Burt Shavitz (1935-2015)

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Beautiful Scenery, Great Food, Ethnic Diversity . . . And Skateboarding

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF XIE SHI VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES

Politix Update: Why Republican Primary Clown Car Isn't At All Funny

I'd really like to see a competitive election next year in which the Republican nominee gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money.  After all, the sooner the GOP shakes off its self-inflicted torpor and becomes competitive again at the national level the better it will be for all of us, not to mention that creaky old contraption known as democracy.  But with a record 17 candidates scrambling to get into the Republican primary clown car and a goodly number of them saying things ranging from the deeply offensive to downright goofy, it is difficult to see any of that happening.

Yes, yes.  Yes!  Election Day is 17 months off and a lot of stuff can happen.  While Clinton

shakes off Bernie Sanders and the small handful of even dimmer Democratic luminaries standing in the path to her presumptive  coronation as the Democratic standard bearer, the Republican field will narrow as one candidate after another jumps or is pushed from the clown car.  We'll come back in a bit to what the result of all this roadkill is likely to be, but first let's address how a GOP desperate to avoid a repetition of the 2012 primary debacle by streamlining the road-to-the-nomination process and limiting the number of debates has ended up with such an historic mess on its hands. 

The reasons for this mess that you will read about over and over again in the mainstream media are a lack of party discipline, tons of money and a changing of the party guard.  

As in candidates marching to their own drummers and not doing the bidding of party bosses, more than enough deep-pocketed sugar daddies with super PACs to go around, and the demise of a hoary old seniority system in which a fortunate few wannabes waited in line for their turn at the big dance a la Bob Dole that has been supplanted, to a great extent, by social media in which candidates can bypass national newspapers and teevee networks and connect directly with voters to try to get a leg up on more establishmentarian candidates.  (Fruitcake Ben Carson shook down faith-based groups for nearly $2 million for "inspirational speeches" last year and now expects their votes in return.)

But the big reason, which the pundits dare not address head on, is that the Republican Party has lost its collective mind. 

The candidate stampede is reminiscent of a mob scene from One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  You know, Martini, Turkle, Cheswick, Taber, Billy Bibbit and, of course, McMurphy, charging through the day room with Nurse Ratchet and a posse of brawny orderlies in pursuit.  But beyond all the yuks, Cuckoo's Nest had a dark side and so does the clown car.

Enter Donald John Trump Sr., the foul-mouthed racist birther, gadzillionaire business magnate, television personality, liver of extravagant lifestyle and all-around celeb.  It is impossible to imagine Trump or anyone as obscene as him running for the Democratic nomination, but today he is ranked second among all Republican candidates nationally and near the top of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first stops on the long and winding road to the big dance.

What the pundits will only hint at in noting that the primary field is . . . well, diverse . . . is that Trump is wildly popular not because Republican voters hope to be invited onto his next reality television show, but because he speaks for many of them in bashing immigrants, questioning our black president's origins, spiritual beliefs and patriotism, as well as his smash-mouth responses to the lefty libtards who criticize him.  And while there have been murmurs of concern about his mud-slinging campaign as performance art from a (very) few fellow candidates, not one wannabe -- not Rand Paul, not Bobby Jindal, not Carly Fiorina, not even Jeb Bush -- responded when George Pataki urged them to sign a joint statement denouncing Trump.  This is because the dears were concerned about alienating the party's angry white nativist base. 

(Bush has been especially gutless considering that he is married to a Mexican-America, and addressed Trump's vile comments about Mexican immigrants only after being prodded by a reporter.) 

Is there anything else you really need to know about today's Republican Party?  No, which brings us back to the consequence of all that roadkill: A bloody primary season highlighted by Trump's epic rants followed by a contentious nominating convention that will leave the party even more fractured, as well as further than it was from taking back the White House four and even eight years ago.  Seventeen candidates with seventeen months to go. 

FINNY FOR PRESIDENT

Let's see, 17 candidates with 17 months to go.  How's that for symmetry?  

And who, you might ask, is the 17th candidate since 16 is the number being most bandied about?  It's that blast from the past, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, who briefly ran in 2008 and is expected to announce a campaign in August that would draw on his experience as an Army counterintelligence agent and focus on military preparedness.  

There are 14 other announced candidates (Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jim Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum and Donald Trump ) and two all-but-announced candidates (John Kasich and Scott Walker).  

My goldfish Finny, who is stumping amongst the watercress in the pond outside our mountain retreat, will soon slither onto the clown car, as well.  His campaign will be based on advocating rotating bowls for tired goldfish.  

TELLING IT LIKE IT ISN'T . . .

Chris Christie's campaign for president is off and running.  Longtime readers know that I believe the New Jersey governor to be a bully and chronically dishonest, but I must admit that he is clever.   And so because there's nothing in his policy positions to distinguish himself from the rest of the clown carpool, he has branded his improbable run as a "Telling It Like It Is" campaign.

 "I mean what I say, and I say what I mean, and that's what America needs right now," he declares at every turn in complaining that Barack Obama has set America adrift because he's leadership averse.  Translation: I'm really not going to say much of anything, but I promise you that I'll be candid even when I don't say anything.

. . . WHILE TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

Time to say something good about a Republican candidate.  That would be Rick Perry, who in a little noticed speech on the eve of Independence Day called out fellow Republicans for taking the black vote for granted -- as in not giving a damn about it.

"Too often, we Republicans -- myself included -- have emphasized our message on the 10th Amendment but not our message on the 14th -– an amendment, it bears reminding, that was one of the first great contributions of the Republican Party to American life, second only to the abolition of slavery," the former Texas governor said with admirable candor. 

"For too long, we Republicans have been content to lose the black vote because we found we didn’t need it to win," he added. "But when we gave up trying to win the support of African-Americans, we lost our moral legitimacy as the party of Lincoln, as the party of equal opportunity for all. It's time for us once again to reclaim our heritage as the only party in our country founded on the principle of freedom for African-Americans." 

Perry framed his rhetoric in terms of the Democratic Party having failed blacks by not improving conditions for them, while saying that as president he would "create jobs, incentivize work, keep nonviolent drug offenders out of prison, reform our schools and reduce the cost of living" for non-whites.  But it was a first step in what would be a very long march back to national relevancy for the GOP, and a pretty good one at that.

WATCH THAT HARD RIGHT TURN, BUDDY

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker thinks he's smarter than everyone else.  That would be enough reason to not like the guy, but his scorched earth approach to his state's public employee unions and fine university system, as well as his efforts to gut the state's open records law and reduce police accountability, puts him over the top.

Walker, who is expected to officially hop on the clown car later this month, thinks he's so smart that he can defy the law of political gravity that says it's not possible to shamelessly pander to conservative voters in the primaries, grab the nomination and then suddenly morph into a moderate more palatable to mainstream voters in the general election.

That didn't work for John McCain in 2008 and doomed Mittens in 2012.  Walker is no different, only worse. 

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.

IMAGES FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  USED WITH PERMISSION.

Politix Update: Why Hillary Clinton's Emails Are Much Ado About Little

It is said that the cover-up is always worse than the crime, but in the case of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails, what is the crime?  And beyond the partisan ankle biting, is the cover-up -- such as it is -- over something any different than what other government bigs, not the least of whom were Bush administration officials, have done?

Perhaps I'm like the last guy in the room to get the joke, but I don't think so, which makes the fevered, Republican-driven dissection of Clinton's personal emails in the mainsteam media, especially as they pertain to the exhaustively investigated September 2012 attack by Islamic militants in Benghazi, Libya that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other people, so much small beer.  Less than meets the eye.  Much ado about very little. 

So far, the best any of the Republican junkyard dogs or the media has come up with is that Clinton, as secretary of state, appeared to have contempt for government transparency and violated a National Archives regulation that government emails sent from personal accounts be preserved for the historical record.  Not exactly Watergate or any other -gates of consequence, and reflective of a woman who has been under the microscope for a quarter century, sometimes unfairly.

At first glance, allegations that Clinton withheld some emails from the State Department are troubling, but the contents of these emails are contextual yawns: For example, her knowledge of the scramble for oil contracts in Libya and the shortcomings of the NATO-led military intervention against the regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi.  And the emails involving former aide Sidney Blumenthal that conservative commentators have compared to kryptonite are not indicative of wrongdoing.  It was Blumenthal, a longtime confidante of Clinton and her husband, who reached out to Madame Secretary and not the other way around. 

(Meanwhile, some of the emails pertaining to career diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who was a hero in my book, are wince-worthy in confirming the view held by many people at State and the White House that he tried to steal others' thunder.  As a consequence, he was marginalized.)

Beyond Clinton not having been particularly smart about how it might look if she used a private email account and some tortured reasoning about what she did or did not do, including the deletion of thousands of emails she said were personal, what the brouhaha does do is confirm your worst suspicions if you view Clinton negatively to begin with: That she's shady and even when she honors the letter of a law, she doesn't necessarily honor the spirit.  That she raises more questions than she answers.  And that she has things to hide. 

Then there is my only concern of consequence: the Clinton family foundation, which although apparently not the subject of any emails while she was secretary of state about which we know so far, has raised some of its money from foreign donors with dodgy reputations.

Never mind that Bush administration bigs also used personal email accounts for official business, among them another secretary of state, Colin Powell, and Karl Rove when he was deputy White House chief of staff.  Then there is the mother of all email controversies, the deletion of over 5 million emails from a non-government server regarding the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys for refusing to do Bush administration political dirtywork after congressional committees asked for them, which were violations of the Presidential Records and Hatch acts.

The email controversy is not going to go away, but then neither is it going to amount to a show stopper when the presidential campaign gets serious after Labor Day 2016.  

This is why the controversy is not going to go away: It's a great modus for attacking Clinton because she has not been candid at every turn.  And while the State Department wanted to release all 55,000 pages of emails in a fell swoop, a judge ordered their release on a monthly basis.

The batch released last week -- the second of the monthly dumps -- covered 3,000 pages from 2009 emails, and except for two dozen that had "classified" status despite apparently innocuous content, the bulk were banal and reflective of a newly-minted Cabinet member trying to settle into a very big job.  And as several emails shockingly reveal, learning how to use her office fax machine.

More typical of the emails is this one from a friend, Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland after Clinton fell and fractured her right elbow in June 2009:

Am so glad to hear frm you//// knew this was painful combined with logistics of being a woman--know.  How streddful this must be--the other night the. Senate. The women had dinner anyway--all sent good words.  And encouragement.  To a woman theb all said.  Just my getting dressed and the. Hair thing. Get your therapy.  Get better.  The senate is slogging along----  health care is starting to sag-- some days it feels we are doing the public option off of backof envelope. Call when you can. X.

It is obvious that Clinton was cognizant that what she wrote might be read later by a wider audience, but expect revelations from future email dumps.  About office carpet colors, travel arrangements, meetings and policy priorities, staffers sucking up to their boss, planning for daughter Chelsea's engagement announcement and future nuptials, and who knows?  Perhaps some red meat, as well.  But the Benghazi tragedy has been so thoroughly investigated that it long ago was bled dry of anything remotely interesting.  And while the email controversy has been a convenient way for Clinton's foes to attack her, it may well have an unintended consequence that will help her in the longer run: Humanize a sometimes polarizing public figure who has been notoriously circumspect. 

We have seen from the emails already released that Clinton has a sense of humor, replying to an aide who had complimented her on a coat she had been photographed wearing on a trip to Afghanistan:

Thx! I bought the coat in Kabul in 03 and thought it should get a chance to go home for a visit!!

The emails also show her trying hard to do a good job.  To find her place at the head of the Cabinet table.  And to interact effectively with a boss who had defeated her for the Democratic Party nomination.

Yes, Hillary Clinton may have been stupid in some respects, but she's not dumb.

WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?

At some point when hardly anyone was looking (I know I wasn't), the notion of electing a woman president stopped being such a huge deal. 

When Hillary Clinton conceded to Barack Obama in 2008 and again last month when she spoke on Roosevelt Island in New York City, she declared that she wanted America to be a place "where a father can tell his daughter yes, you can be anything you want to be, even president of the United States." Now, nearly 100 years after women were given the right to vote, America has become such a place. 

In 1937, the year Gallup began asking people (equally divided between men and women) if they would vote for a woman for president, only 33 percent said they would.  That number hovered at around 50 percent by 1970, while 95 percent now say they would vote for a woman if she were qualified. 

I AM WHO I AM

As I noted above, Hillary Clinton has been notoriously circumspect, and that was a big problem in her 2008 primary run.  She allowed husband Bill and chief strategist Mark Penn to run her campaign, and not surprisingly -- and to her detriment -- it was a man's campaign that forced her to walk, talk and act like a man and not whoever she was. 

I wrote this in June 2008: "Like radio waves reaching earth from some cosmic calamity millennia ago, the yarbling of Hillary Clinton sycophants who believe that her candidacy was gang banged into extinction by the mainstream media, right-wing bloggers and Barack Obama acolytes can be faintly heard, although it is so much background noise . . . Clinton never seemed comfortable with her role as the first serious woman presidential candidate and used her gender more as a cudgel than a talking point. More curious still, the feminist notion of liberation -- one of Obama's memes -- was AWOL from a campaign that was run like a patriarchy."

But seven years on, Clinton appeared to have connected with herself. 

"For the first time," writes Gail Sheehy, "Hillary seems comfortable in her own skin—not just with her age but also with her gender.

"And here's another thing: She's passionate about equal rights for women, but at her stage of post-menopausal feminism, she does not threaten or alienate men. Rather, she co-opts them, turning them into allies. This is old-fashioned feminine wiles at its most mature. It is also why two of the most powerful men in America -- Bill and Barack -- will be among Clinton’s most avid supporters in her second run for president."

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.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF WORLDNET DAILY

Hail And Farewell: 'When There Were No Strings To Play You Played To Me'

ATTICS OF MY LIFE

By Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams; unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

In the book of love's own dreams
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old

When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me
You flew to me

In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me

THIS ANTHEM HAS BEEN MUCH OF MY MIND OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS AS THE GRATEFUL DEAD CELEBRATED 
THEIR 50th ANNIVERSARY AND PLAYED THEIR FINAL PERFORMANCES -- AN EXTRAORDINARY 3,223 IN ALL. 
THE SONG WAS THE SECOND AND FINAL ENCORE AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE LAST SHOW ON SUNDAY EVENING.

ARTIST OF PAINTING UNKNOWN / "ATTICS OF MY LIFE" © ICE NINE MUSIC

'For What Avail The Plough Or Sail, Or Land Or Life, If Freedom Fail'

WHAT INDEED?

Nicholas Winton (1909-2015)

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH VIA BRITISH PRESS ASSOCIATION

Politix Update: The Republican Party's Very Bad Case Of Future Shock

How can Republicans avoid losing the popular vote in 2016 for the sixth time in seven elections when the party is not only increasingly out of step with public opinion but seems determined to look back and not forward? 

Polls show widespread support for increasing the minimum wage.  The Republican Party is opposed.  For a more inclusive immigration policy.  Ditto.  For access to health care.  Ditto.  For addressing climate change.  Ditto.  Against restrictions on abortion.  Ditto.  Against tax breaks for the rich.  Ditto.  And then there's the seismic shift in support for gay rights and same-sex marriage.  Ditto, ditto.

Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll shows that Americans identifying themselves as liberal are at a 23-year high, which makes the reality of "a recalcitrant minority trying to hold off a tolerant majority," as one conservative deep thinker puts it, even more worrisome for Republican moderates who believe that the way back to the White House is to be cognizant of how out of step with the mainstream the party has become and a willingness to become more inclusive.  And, might I suggest, less bigoted.

There is an undercurrent of angst about the state of the GOP in the otherwise happy-face pronouncements of many Republicans in talking about 2016, and it is not difficult to see how the GOP has gotten itself into such a fix:  Its once-vaunted ability to speak with one voice was overrated to begin with, while it is Democrats who have closed ranks, especially on social issues.  The party is attracting young voters (aka those damned Millennials) in droves and they tend to be liberal, and while its solid black and Hispanic bases are not so liberal, they generally are progressive when it comes to those social issues.  

Richard Land, the Evangelical darling of many Republican right wingers and a guy who claims to always have God on speed dial, was unintentionally revealing about the GOP's plight following the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling when he opined that "It's a sad day for the country, and now the battlefield shifts to freedom of conscience."

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE CULTURE WARS

Republicans of the right-wing and Evangelical persuasions, which is to say the people who have methodically torn down the Big Tent that the GOP once was, have continued to fight the culture wars despite ample evidence that such battling is the political equivalent of hemlock tea.

Jonathan Martin, punditizing in The New York Times about all the recent developments that have gone against the Republican grain, wrote: "Conservatives have, in short order, endured a series of setbacks on ideas that, for some on the right, are definitional: that marriage is between a man and a woman, that Southern heritage and its symbols are to be unambivalently revered and that the federal government should play a limited role in the lives of Americans."

So far so good.

But then Martin posits, minus any real evidence, that while 2015 "could be remembered as a Liberal Spring," this gives the GOP an opening to turn away from lost causes sharply out of step with the public and focus on a more conservative approach on economic issues and national security.

This assumes some things that aren't likely to happen.

* That Republican presidential wannabes now have a grace period to sort out their differences on same-sex marriage, as well as other contentious social issues, since the high court ruled on the third-rail issue six months before the first primary vote is cast.  I just don't see that happening. 

* That a ceasefire will be called in the culture wars, which seems extremely unlikely because the foot soldiers in these wars are not live-and-let-live folks to begin with, co-existence is an alien concept to them, and pluralism is their perceived enemy. 

* That a more conservative approach to an economy that is creating jobs at the healthiest pace in 15 years will really improve things, and better protecting the homeland against jihadists when over half of all domestic terror attacks since 9/11 have been perpetrated by crazy white guys will both be Election Day non-starters.

IT'S THE SAFETY NET, STUPID

It sure didn't look like Republicans were out of touch on access to health care when they opposed the Affordable Care Act way back in in 2010.   (Doesn't that seem like ages ago?) But five years later they are. 

The reasons are several and complex, but two predominate:.

* The party's Chicken Little schtick, which included unrelenting chest beating about "death panels" and other dire consequences it claimed Obamacare would wrought, as well as over 50 House votes to repeal it, eventually had a numbing effect.  Then there is my favorite definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

* By the time the Supreme Court weighed in the other day on the federal insurance exchange question, the ACA was providing benefits to millions of people who could not have afforded health care otherwise.  And as history has proven with Social Security and Medicare, once the social safety net expands, it's pretty much impossible to reverse it.

Although members of the GOP asylum like John Boehner and Ted Cruz vow to continue to try to repeal Obamacare, it has suddenly gone poof! as a viable 2016 campaign issue.  That's a good thing for feckless Republicans because they have one fewer indefensible thing to defend against, according to the conventional wisdom, but it still remains fertile ground for Democratic attacks on the eventual Republican nominee. 

I can picture the attack ads already:

(Fill in candidate's name) wanted to take away Uncle Leo's pacemaker and leave Aunt Sue's cancer untreated.  Now he wants to (fill in outrage).

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

There are historic precedents for a political party being so out of step, but you have to go back a way -- a long way.

Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, Sabato being an astute political scientist with an uncannily accurate knack for calling elections.  (He nailed it in 2012, including the number of electoral votes Obama won.)

"You might look at the Whigs in the mid-1800s," Kondik said. "The party was effectively nativist in its outlook, losing votes from immigrants in that timeframe, and it ended up on the wrong side of territorial expansion, at least as history is concerned. The Whigs of course disappeared and re-emerged as the Republicans. But I’m not sure the historical parallels are there, though maybe if the GOP doesn’t start to do better amongst modern immigrant groups (Hispanics, most notably) or continue to improve with white voters, they could have a harder and harder time winning presidential elections."

WAKE ME WHEN HE WITHDRAWS

Chris Christie has muscled his serious bulk into the already overcrowded Republican presidential primary clown car, not merely defying the odds but logic, as well, since he has made an extraordinary mess of New Jersey and his ethical lapses are egregious and many. 

Christie long ago crossed the line from "brash and bold," which he invariably cites as his chief virtue, to "belligerent and obnoxious," which is what a majority of his Garden State constituents will tell you. And he lies a lot.

"Don’t misunderstand me. They all lie," wrote Newark Star-Ledger editorial page editor Tom Moran of politicians in general. "But Christie does it with such audacity, and such frequency, that he stands out."

THE END OF AN ERROR

It's been a tough summer for the Killa From Wasilla and it's barely July.  First Sarah Palin's abstinence-minded daughter, Bristol, fell on a penis and got pregnant.  Then Fox News cancelled the Mama Grizzly's contract.

As one pundit noted, the only thing that makes a Fox News viewer disappear is death, but not so for the conservative network's talking heads.  Palin has been so incomprehensible during recent Fox appearances and has become so irrelevant (I recently called her "a Tea Party carnival sideshow freak") in terms of the national political scene that she had to go.

Bottom line: Palin needed Fox more than Fox needed Palin.

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.