#994: Let the Games Begin!

June 27, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

As I begin writing this blog article, It is currently 6:20 EDT, Wednesday evening June 26, 2024. I plan on finishing, editing, recording, and posting it by about 9:00 AM tomorrow. This means it will be posted about 12 hours before Thursday night’s first presidential debate between FPOTUS Donald J, Trump and his successor, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. There are so many “what ifs” surrounding this debate . . . the first of which must certainly be “What if Trump doesn’t show up?” It is possible. He and his team have already spent quite a bit of time and money proclaiming that the debate is rigged to favor Biden. And in a sense, they are correct . . . at least from their point of view.

How so?

Well, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are both practicing Jews who come from well-educated families; Jake’s father Sam (“Ted”) was a Harvard-trained pediatrician; Dana is, the daughter of long-time ABC news producer Stuart Schwartz. Next; they are both real, honest-to-god journalists, which means that to MAGA Maniacs, they are fatally flawed when it comes to Trump, and should be more than willing to give Biden a pass on anything and everything he has ever done.

Trump supporters have argued that the debate rules have been skewed to favorite Biden (microphones shut off when one debater is not responding), despite the fact that both sides’ teams agreed to the rules weeks ago. Trump’s team has already suggested that the only way Biden is going to beat Trump is by being loaded up on drugs like Adderall (amphetamine and dextroamphetamine), which is used to treat narcolepsy and ADHD, and that the POTUS cannot manage without wearing an earwig or employing a teleprompter (disallowed by debating rules for both candidates). It would seem that Trump’s main argument is going to be that Biden is too old to be POTUS and thus must be, deeply in senescence’s loving embrace. Did none of these MAGA Maniacs watch Biden’s most recent State of the Union?

Yes, President Joseph R. Biden is 3 years older than Donald Trump. Nonetheless, Mr., Biden jogs every day, where Mr. Trump plays an occasional round of golf perhaps twice a week. Biden does occasionally stammer and mispronounce words; it is a lifelong disability that he has spent more than 80 years dealing with. By recent comparison, Donald Trump seems to be in the throes of dysarthria (slurred speech), a motor speech disorder. which happens when brain or nerve damage changes the way one’s muscles work. It can be mild to severe. Considering some of the former president’s recent verbal blunders and incomprehensible gaffs, I would encourage him to make an appointment with a good neurologist. Regarding President Biden, a family truism comes to mind: Growing older is inevitable; growing up is purely optional.

The two men are as different in mood and mien as a gentleman is from a boor. Biden has spent the last week going over issues, and doing practice sessions with his closest debate advisors (including the best of them all, former Chief of Staff Ron Klain); Trump, on the other hand, has been out campaigning before his adoring, unquestioning followers. This doesn’t bode well for Trump; the man does not do well in a speaking format (such as this evening’s televised debate) unless he can hear laughter and applause. He also doesn’t do well without a teleprompter. Heck, even with a teleprompter he goes off the rails more often than not. Add to this the fact that neither Biden nor Trump has been in a debate for several years, and you have to wonder on whom is the rust going to be the most obvious.

Biden’s strategy is likely going to deal first with issues and programs he intends to put into action in the next 4 years, and second, with democracy versus autocracy. Trump, on the other hand, is likely going to be Trump: an abrasive, condescending, revengeful victim who has few concrete plans for the future . . . short of remaking the government in his own image. Pay particular attention to Trump’s use of the first person singular (“I”) versus Biden’s “We.” I can recommend a self-deprecating bon mot to President Biden to get under Trump’s skin when he makes an obvious blunder: “I am old enough to have known and studied with Demosthenes; you Donald are no Demosthenes!”

So who’s going to win this first debate? I would say the smart money is on President Biden. His half-century of successful public service has taught him the importance of deportment, presence, and communication. It also helps that he has 50 years’ worth of experience and accomplishments . . . as well as one of the broadest, most honest smiles in the business. He is a winner. Donald Trump, on the other hand, despite the image he likes to present to the public, is a man of vast insecurity. Biden receives loyalty from his advisors . . . and knows how to take advice. Trump demands loyalty and winds up doing only what he wants to do.

So who will win? Both: Biden will win the debate itself; Trump will win (at least in his own mind) because the debate was rigged from the start.

So tune in this evening at 9:00 sharp and watch, listen and learn.

Let the games begin!

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#993: Far, Far Worse Than Smoot-Hawley?

June 23, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Hopefully, by the time you finish reading this week’s post, you will be able to answer the following 3 questions:

Willis Hawley (1864-1941) & Reed Smoot (1864-1941)

What are the 3 ways the federal government can raise revenue?
Who were Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley (that’s them in the photo), and what’s the only thing they are remembered for?
What is the definition of “stagflation?”

If, by the end of this post you can successfully answer these 3 questions, you will know a hell of a lot more about American political history and economic theory than the Republican Party’s putative presidential nominee.

As MSNBC news anchor Stephanie Ruhle says every weeknight on her 11:00 pm show, Let’s get smarter! But before we do, permit me to confess that I am neither an economist, nor anything more than an amateur when it comes to macroeconomics or monetary theory. Rather, I have spent a lifetime being unceasingly curious about all things intellectual, and had the good fortune to study with a couple of masters in my early years at university: Daniel Burbidge Suits, professor emeritus of economics who specialized in the field of Economic Growth Theory and Models, as well as renowned American political history professors Page Smith and Laurence Vesey. Then too, I have, over the years, devoured just about every word the exalted Richard Hofstadter, Michael Beschloss, and Doris Kearns Goodwin ever wrote.

(I guess that makes me a librarian’s best friend . . . one of the only advantages of being afflicted with Crohn’s Disease. How’s that? Well, in Hebrew, the answer to that question is רק הנאורים יבינו - namely, “only the enlightened will understand.”)

And so, without further ado, let’s roll up our sleeves, don our eyeshades, and get down to the business of learning something about taxes, tariffs, and Trump . . .

First and foremost, the federal government finances its operations with taxes, fees, and other receipts collected from many different sectors of the economy. In the last fiscal year, federal receipts totaled about $4.4 trillion, or 16.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The largest sources of revenues are individual income taxes (49%) and payroll taxes (36%) followed by corporate income taxes (9%).

Another source of revenue comes from tariffs. Tariffs are a form of tax applied on imports from other countries. Most economists say the costs are largely passed on to consumers. Countries have used them to protect domestic industries, such as agriculture and renewable energy, as well as to retaliate against other states’ unfair trade practices. And, if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, thus giving him the power to (among many, other heretofore unthinkable things) make his economic vision a reality: instituting an "all-tariff policy" which would enable the U.S. to get rid of its income tax. Egad! The man actually wants to replace individual and corporate income taxes with tariffs!

Almost every country imposes some tariffs. In general, wealthy countries maintain low tariffs compared to developing countries. There are several reasons why: developing countries might have more fragile industries that they wish to protect, or they might have fewer sources of government revenue. The United States, for instance, maintained high tariffs for decades, until income taxes supplanted tariffs as the most important source of revenue in the 1930s. After World War II, tariffs continued to decline as the United States emphasized trade expansion as a central plank of its global strategy.

Trump’s insane quest for a policy of “all-tariffs-all-the-time,” (which he floated at last week’s gathering of the spineless on Capitol Hill) garnered nary a snicker - let alone a raised eyebrow - from the confederacy of dunces wildly applauding their leader. I’ve got to wonder if any of them - even if but for a nanosecond - heard a voice whispering “Smoot-Hawley . . . remember Smoot-Hawley. It was an unmitigated disaster back in 1930; it will be worse than a catastrophe in 2025.”

Smoot what? Hawley who? Reed Smoot (1862-1941) was a Republican Senator from Utah from 1903-1933; was also the first apostle of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) to be a national political figure. In 1930, he was chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Smoot's election to the Senate in 1903 by the Utah legislature sparked a bitter four-year battle in the Senate on whether Smoot was eligible and should be allowed to serve. Many Americans were suspicious of the LDS Church because of its earlier polygamous practices. In addition, some senators thought Smoot's position as a Mormon apostle would disqualify him from representing all his constituents. Many were convinced that his association with the church disqualified him from serving in the United States Senate.

Willis C. Hawley served as a Republican Representative from Oregon from 1907-1933. Although not what one might call a “shining star” within the House, he somehow rose to the Chairmanship of that chamber’s most powerful committee, Ways and Means, for the 70th and 71st Congress. From that powerful perch, he joined with Senator Smoot to coauthor the eponymous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930. Signed into law by President Herbert Hoover against the advice of almost every titan of industry (including Henry Ford, who stayed overnight with President Hoover to repeat his belief that the bill was “an economic stupidity,” and Albert Henry Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank of New York), Smoot Hawley (the last consequential tariff measure Congress ever passed) contributed mightily to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbor” duties, worsening an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from - and exports to - Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect. It was also but one more nail in the political careers of Smoot, Hawley and President Herbert Hoover, all of whom were roundly defeated for reelection in 1932.

Historically, Smoot-Hawley would become to American economic legislation what Dred Scott v. Sandford and Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization are to Supreme Court Decisions: the worst of the worst. In 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, reducing tariff levels and promoting trade liberalization and cooperation with foreign governments. Some historians have argued that this particular tariff, by deepening the Great Depression, may have contributed to the rise of political extremism, enabling leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to increase their political strength and gain power.

As noted above, Smoot-Hawley was the last time major tariff legislation was enacted by Congress. Ever since, tariff policy has moved from the legislative to the executive branch. Ironically, another Hawley, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, the MAGA Maniac from Missouri, recently introduced S.1537, the “Raising Tariffs on Imports from China Act of 2024,” legislation. According to a report from Reuters, Senator Hawley’s proposal would raise the base tariff rate on Chinese cars by 100% (especially “EVs” - electric vehicles) from the current 2.5%, effectively putting a 125% tariff on imported Chinese vehicles. It also seeks to apply a 100% tariff to cars assembled in Mexico by China-based automakers. Besides being a disciple of “Trump’s Tariff Czar” Robert Lighthizer, the man who never met a levy he did not love, Hawley’s gambit is that this legislative ploy (which to date hasn’t signed up a single cosponsor) might get him a Vice Presidential nod. Just what is it about the family name “Hawley?”

Now, what Donald Trump proposes is, in my relatively untutored opinion, far, far worse than Smoot-Hawley. Suggesting that this "all-tariffs-all-the-time” bilge would put dollars into the pockets of the middle class is, like his tax cut, both a fraud and an outright lie . . . not to mention something which could easily pull the rest of the developed world into economic chaos. As I understand it, tariffs hike consumer prices because companies pass on the cost of the tariffs they pay. Tariffs currently account for $88.3 billion of the $4.4 trillion in revenues the U.S. government reported in fiscal year 2023. Income taxes brought in about $2.2 trillion, the Treasury Department reported. To bring tariff revenues even close to income tax levels would require a dramatic spike in import taxes, much, much higher than Trump’s proposed 10%.

His proposed 10% tax on all imports, and 60% tax on all imports from China, specifically, would also raise costs for average Americans, according to the analysis, amounting to a $2,500 annual tax hike for the typical family. That sum includes annual tax increases of $250 on electronics, $160 on clothing, $120 on oil and $110 on food.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has also said he would use revenues from import taxes to extend his 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, which are set to expire. That would mean the top 0.1% of Americans would experience a tax cut of about $325,000 a year while middle-income families, after extending the tax cuts, would see a $1,600 net tax increase.

Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and a Nobel Prize winner in economics, did some quick math and posted on X that a "first-pass estimate" suggests Trump's proposal "would require an *average* tariff rate of 133 percent.” If Trump had his way, taxes on middle-income households would rise by $5,100 to $8,300 a year, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy group. By contrast, the top 0.1% of households would see their taxes cut by about $1.5 million a year, per the analysis, which notes that it would not be mathematically possible to replace all income taxes with tariffs alone.

Former Treasury Secretary (1999-2001), President of Harvard University (2001-2006) and the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government flatly stated that Donald Trump’s proposal, besides being the worst in all American history, is “. . . a prescription for the mother of all stagflations.” What is “stagflation,” and why is it so incredibly dangerous?

“Stagflation” is a not easily achievable economic amalgam of stagnant (zero) economic growth combined with high inflation and high unemployment all at the same time. The U.S.'s last memory of stagflation was in the 1970s when double-digit inflation and unemployment rates scarred the economy. To combat it, then Fed Chair Paul Volker hiked rates to 20 percent, a drastic and unprecedented move that forced the U.S. economy into a 16-month recession through November 1982. And this is what Trump’s economic plan is for America should he be reelected? In the (supposed) words of that master of the malaprop, Sam Goldwyn, “Include me out!”

There are tons of reasons why Donald J. Trump must be kept far, far away from the White House. The entire alphabet argues in favor of putting him in a padded cell: A(ttitude), B(igotry), C(upidity), D(emeaning). E(gomaniacal), F(atuous), G(ross), H(ateful), I(nsufferable), J(ejune), K(ooky), L(ethal), M(endacious), N(oisome). O(bnoxious), P(eurile), Q(uisling), R(epugnant), S(hifty). T(errifying), U(nstable), V(icious), W(hiny), X(enophobic), Y(obbish) and finally, Z(ombielike).

Class dismissed!

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#992: I'd Swap MTG, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, Matt Gaetz and the Rest of the Congressional Clown Car For Florence Kahn Any Day of the Week. . .and Twice on Sunday

June 16, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Back in the early 1980s, when Chuck Schumer was an unknown, very junior member of the House of Representatives, a savvy political journalist glimpsed into his or her crystal ball and prognosticated: It won’t be long before the most dangerous place in American politics will be the 5 or 6 feet between a television camera and the very young, very brash freshman representative from Brooklyn’s 16th Congressional District.

It turns out, of course, that the journalist hit the nail on the head. For not only has Chuck Schumer been one of the most oft-quoted members of Congress for the past forty years; he is the Senate Majority Leader - the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in all American history. Over the past half-century (Schumer was originally elected to two terms in the New York State Assembly starting in 1975), Schumer has been far, far more than a show-horse; he has long been a doer. He has long been a successful legislative leader whether in the majority or minority. Schumer’s fingerprints are easily visible on some of the most important bills enacted over the years including the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993) and the Violence Against Women Act (1994), as well as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka “Obama Care” 2010), which he played a decisive roil in steering it through committee and on to passage. Throughout his career, he has sponsored or cosponsored more than 2,300 pieces of legislation.

Schumer has long evinced the kind of mind, work ethic, collegiality, and understanding of the political process that easily sets him apart from the current crop of fatuous third-stringers currently striding the Halls of Congress . . . people like Senators Tuberville and Britt, Hawley, and Johnson, as well as Representatives Greene and Boebert, Gaetz, Luna, and Donalds, Gosar, Good, and Mace.

Over more than 3 decades, I have researched, written and published more than 215 biographic sketches and articles on the nearly 225 Jewish men and women who have served in the United States Congress. One of my very favorites, without question, is Florence Kahn, who represented what would eventually become Sala Burton’s, Barbara Boxer’s and Nancy Pelosi’s District in San Francisco. In interviewing the three for my biographic works The Congressional Minyan (2000) and The Jews of Capitol Hill (2010) they all remembered with great fondness the many hours they had spent with their young children (and now grandchildren) at the Julius Kahn Playground and Clubhouse which was named after Florence’s late husband Julius, himself a member of Congress for 24 years. Located at Jackson and Spruce, the “JK” was, until its name was officially changed to the “Presidio Wall Playground” in 2019, the nation’s largest urban park. (The name change came because Julius, it turned out, was also one of the members in Congress who helped extend the racist Chinese Exclusion Act [originally passed in 1882] to 1902. As a result of this, in 2019, the citizens of San Francisco demanded the name change.)

Florence’s husband, the German-born Julius (1861-1924) was originally a pretty well-known actor who trod the boards in his new country for a number of years. His wife Florence encouraged him to go to study law; by the early 1890s, he was a practicing attorney and, with his wife’s guidance got himself elected to the California State Assembly in 1892. She managed his first Congressional campaign in 1899 and worked as his Chief of Staff and campaign manager until he died in 1924. During his quarter-century in the House, Kahn became an expert on foreign affairs and, although a Republican, became President Woodrow Wilson’s guaranteeing American involvement in what was then called “The Great War.”

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 9, 1866, Florence’s parents, who had emigrated from Poland, were actually friends with the Mormon leader Brigham Young. Florence Prag Kahn lived a life of firsts:

The first Jew born in Utah
The first woman to graduate from Berkeley (class of 1887)
The first woman to manage a congressional campaign (for her husband Julius, in 1899)
The first Jewish woman elected to the House of Representatives
The first woman to serve on both the House Military Affairs and Appropriations Committees.

Additionally, she was largely responsible for the funding of both the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay Bridges, and was so instrumental in the early funding of the FBI that its director, J. Edgar Hoover, always referred to her as “The mother of the FBI.”

Politically adroit, fearless and frumpy, Rep. Kahn also had a dry sense of humor and was known to possess the quickest wit on The Hill. Once, when asked how she was able to pass far more significant legislation than most of her male colleagues, she famously responded: “Don’t you know? It’s my sex appeal, honey!” When assigned to the Committee on Indian Affairs, she flatly turned it down, telling then-Speaker Nicholas Longworth III (the husband of T.R.’s daughter “Princess Alice” Roosevelt) “The only Indians in my district are made of wood and sit outside cigar stores . . . and I can’t do a damn thing for them! Put me on Military Affairs!” Then there was the time that New York Representative Fiorello LaGuardia accused her of being “. . . nothing but a standpatter, following the reactionary Senator Moses of New Hampshire.” Mrs. Kahn is reported to have wriggled loose from her chair, jammed her nondescript hat over her nose, and bellowed: “Why shouldn’t I choose Moses as my leader? Haven’t my people been following him for ages?” The House erupted into gales of laughter, LaGuardia - himself the son of a Jewish mother - included.

My favorite Florence Prag Kahn quip - and one which likely wouldn’t get a laugh from members of the current Congressional “Clown Car Caucus” - comes from the time when the House’s most ultraconservative - and least liked - member acidly asked her, “Would you support a birth control law?” Without taking time to draw a breath, Rep. Kahn answered, “Yes I would . . . if you personally make it retroactive!”

I remember doing my initial research on Mrs. Kahn back in the early 1990s. I was occupying a tiny cubby on the top floor of Harvard’s Widener Library. When I came across this line I cracked up and almost fell out of my chair . . . so much so that there quickly erupted the sound of a couple of dozen people “shushing” me. Believe me, it was hard to stop laughing . . .

Frequently, Mrs. Kahn used her rapier-like wit as a cover for her revulsion or distaste; call it the verbal version of Bonaparte’s “iron fist in a velvet glove” . . . firmness being couched not with outward gentleness, but rather with wit. Alas, such is rarely the case within the halls and walls of Congress. Today, instead of wit and double-entendre zingers, we hear catcalls and shouts of “YOU LIE!” as well as inanities such as “a stepmother really isn’t a mother at all,” or “Women who support abortion rights are too ugly to need them. Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”

The various members of “Clown Car Caucus” who make these sort of comments - comments which drip with animus and ignorance - are perfect examples of the sorts of people to whom Florence Kahn was referring - those who would have made far greater contributions to society by never having been born in the first place. Think of the Frank Capra/James Stewart classic it’s a Wonderful Life . . . but in reverse. In the 1946 classic (the best film never to have won an Oscar), Stewart’s character, George Bailey, sees his life fall apart so quickly that he contemplates suicide . . . that his family - indeed, the entire world - would be better off with him dead. But the prayers of his loved ones result in his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, (played to perfection by Henry Travers who’s in the photo alongside Stewart) coming to Earth to help him, with the promise of earning his wings. He shows George what things would have been like if he had never been born. And of course, being a Frank Capra film, everything comes up roses, sweet tea and scones.

Now let’s reverse that by implementing Rep. Kahn’s sarcastic quip, and granting retroactivity to the births of people who are daily making the world more dangerous, less civil, and stupefyingly more intolerant by march, marching to the beat of their dictatorial drums. These are the merchants of mayhem, whose chief wares are fear, fanaticism provincialism, and bigotry . . . four things the world can definitely do without.

Oh, if only they had never been born!

I’ll take the likes of Florence Prag Kahn over the clowns any day of the week . . . and twice on Sunday!

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#991: Contraception and the Future of Medical Research

June 10, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Of all the many “hats” I have worn over the past half-century - rabbi, political historian and speech-writer, author, blogger and essayist, occasional actor, professional “Hollywood Brat,” and medical ethicist - it’s this last one which has always given me the greatest sense of purpose, pleasure, and pride. Why? Well, simply put, it’s the one pursuit that has always given me the feeling that perhaps - just perhaps - I’m making a difference. I mean, week in, week out for more years than I can remember, I have been charged with the task of vetting medical research “informed consent” forms (ICFs) whose purpose is to safeguard the rights of men, women, and children who might well become volunteer participants in serious clinical trials. It is my job - along with a host of brilliant medical specialists, surgeons, scientists, and bioengineers who work for the Institutional Review company called Advarra - to further the aims of medical research in fields ranging from oncology and infectious diseases to gynecology, gastroenterology, and dozens of other ologies in the pursuit of progress. Indeed, it is the greatest of all honors to be the enemies of those who reject science . . . who believe that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a criminal who should be put in jail for crimes against humanity. We who gladly labor in the vineyards of medical ethics are the ones, after all, who were instrumental in making sure that various COVID-19 vaccines got into the veins of people in record time . . . thus saving tens of millions of lives.

This past Wednesday (June 5, 2024), while spending the better part of the day vetting several Informed Consent Forms (ICFs) dealing with trials concerning various diseases and syndromes, I was keeping an eye on a computer “crawler” keeping me up-to-date on a particular vote in the U.S. Senate; one dealing with the future of contraception. In order to understand just what it was that the Senate was voting on this past Wednesday, one must first recall something Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion overturning Roe v Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization et al ): “[The Court] should reconsider” all three decisions, saying it had a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents (Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples had a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.) Then, Justice Thomas wrote, after “overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions” protected the rights they established.

The bill the senate was voting on this past Wednesday, was the Right to Contraception Act (S1999), sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey and cosponsored by nearly every Democrat in that body. Its purpose in being brought to the floor for an up-or-down vote at this particular time was as clear as clear can be: to force Senate Republicans (as well as those in the House where there is a companion bill) to go on the record as to whether they are for or against permitting women to have legal access to virtually any form of birth control (sans complete sexual abstention). From a political point of view - and in an election year - it was a great idea: make Republicans accountable. According to the national poll 538, “, . . . around 90 percent of Americans said condoms and birth control pills should be legal in “all” or “most” cases, and 81 percent said the same of IUDs (intrauterine devices). And, there is very little difference in support for the legality of each of these contraceptives across party lines.’ It seemed like a slam dunk for the Democrats.’

But what did the Republicans do? Instead of voting against Senator Markey’s bill and exposing themselves as a bunch of retrograde Luddites, they voted to block action on the legislation. Senate Republicans, aware that contraception access is overwhelmingly popular even with their own voters, pretended their “no” votes were meaningless. “This is a show vote. It’s not serious. It doesn’t mean anything,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. More than 20 GOP senators signed a statement from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., declaring “There is no threat to access to contraception… and it’s disgusting that Democrats are fearmongering on this important issue to score cheap political points.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., baselessly claimed the bill could be applied to protect access to abortion pills. He also scoffed at the notion that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that struck down state criminal bans on the sale of birth control to married couples, is in danger. “Nobody’s gonna overturn Griswold,” he said. “No way.”

What’s that old retort from childhood? Liar, liar, pants on fire . . . “ I have to believe that those Republicans old enough to remember this verse also remember its response: I don’t care, I don’t care; I can buy another pair. The final vote was 51-39 on this procedural issue that required at least 60 senators in order to move forward. But they are unwilling to go on the record; to put their votes where their mouths are, thus facing the political consequences of their cowardice. In the main, GOP lawmakers said the measure was too broad as well as unnecessary. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, both Republicans, broke with their party and voted to advance the legislation. Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. JD Vance didn’t vote.

At the precise moment the crawler on the bottom of one of my computer screens flashed the news about the failed vote, I was vetting an informed consent document on the efficacy of administering an injection of a particular drug SubQ (into the fatty tissue just beneath the skin, as opposed to IV - directly into the vein) for subjects with Multiple Sclerosis - a long-lasting (chronic) disease of the central nervous system which is thought to be an autoimmune disorder . . . a condition in which the body attacks itself by mistake. The object of the study I was working on was to see if a SubQ injection is as safe and clinically efficacious as the same drug when infused or injected into a vein.

As my eyes moved over to the screen with the crawler, I was reading through the section dealing with pregnancy; both the inclusionary and exclusionary criteria, and what forms of birth control must be used by women (and men) if they are going to be participants in the study. (n.b.: there are currently more than 1 million people living with MS in the United States; women are three times more likely than men to be diagnosed with this potentially debilitating condition.)

Just about any and every Informed Consent Form (ICF) contains a rather lengthy and all-encompassing section dealing with pregnancy. In most cases, pregnancy (or the ability to get a partner pregnant) is an exclusion . . . unless the potential subject of the trial or study uses one or more forms of birth control. Then the form will continue with a long list of various acceptable methods of control.

As I was scanning this section, half my brain was thinking about the vote just concluded in the U.S. Senate. Then it dawned on me: if birth control is (G-d forbid) outlawed, it likely lead to the utter dismantling of most future medical research. How so? Well, if one cannot prevent pregnancy (except via total abstinence) one cannot participate in most - if not all - clinical trials; and without the ability to conduct ethical, well-monitored medical research, few if any new drugs or treatments will ever see the light of day. I wonder if any of these “pro-birth” (my preferred term for what has heretofore been called "pro-life”) conservatives and anti-science conspiratorialists have considered this chillingly ironic political sequela (a medical term defined as “A pathological condition resulting from a prior disease, injury, or attack.”) As much as I would like to give the anti-birth control, anti science crowd the benefit of the doubt - i.e. that they haven’t considered the very serious real-life consequences of their political actions - I cannot; the fact of the matter is that the further they progress, the more medical science - and thus all of us - retrogress.

Not a day goes by without hearing that in 2024, Democracy, freedom, and the right to choose are all on the ballot. Those making this breathless statement are telling the truth. Now we can add another truth: in 2024, the future of both science and medicine are also on the ballot. Think wisely; be proactive; the future is ours to protect, so that we may all be protected in and from the future.

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categories / Medical Ethics, Healthcare, All Politics All the Time

#990: The Verdict?

June 04, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Sidney Lumet’s 1982 film The Verdict, based on a novel by celebrated attorney Barry Reed, has long been considered one of the greatest trial-based films of all time. It’s no wonder for the simple reason that the movie had it all: a dream cast (Paul Newman, Charlotte Rampling, and James Mason) a gripping screenplay by the young David Mamet, an equally gripping plotline, real flesh-and-blood characters, and world-class directing. In a deceptively simple tale, Newman plays hard-drinking Frank Galvin, who is a cynical lawyer on the skids. Then a vital, young woman dies in a Catholic hospital, and Frank smells blood. Suddenly, with something to fight for, Frank comes alive, exploding in the courtroom, taking on both the hospital and the Catholic Church. Tellingly, the original final draft of David Mamet's screenplay contained no verdict. Producer Richard D. Zanuck commented that without a verdict, the title would require a question mark on advertising materials making it "The Verdict?". Director Sidney Lumet convinced Mamet to add a verdict so that the film could have a third-act dénouement. Hence, it became The Verdict . . . plain, simple, and declarative.

Having read the first paragraph of this week’s essay, you are no doubt aware that it is not about a great motion picture. If it were, you would be reading it on my other blog, Tales From, Hollywood & Vine. And you no doubt have already noticed that I am using the original title for the movie . . . The Verdicts. Indeed, this piece is about both the verdict handed down by a jury of 12 Manhattanites against the former POTUS - 12 men and women found Trump GUILTY on each of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case stemming from a payment that silenced porn star Stormy Daniels - as well as what the verdict of Judge Juan Merchan will be when he announces the sentence against Donald Trump on July 11, as well as what verdict the American public will give come November 5 - precisely 153 days from now. Just as a wide swath of the American public - those who actually paid attention throughout the trial’s 7 weeks held their breath awaiting the jury’s decision - so too are an even wider swath of the public waiting to see what verdict the public will issue; will it matter that Donald Trump is a convicted felon?

As the jury foreperson called out each guilty verdict, the former president became transformed. He was no longer a man to whom the laws of gravity no longer applied, but a defendant in a courtroom like any other; one who now faces the indignities of sentencing—potentially including prison time. He has said that he plans to appeal, and an appeals court could eventually toss out the conviction—but that would be a long ways away, almost certainly after voters have finished casting their ballots in November. And even if an appeal succeeds, there is no undoing the moment when the country first saw a former president convicted of crimes in a court of law. Then too, in the just-finished trial, Trump was entering as a non-felon. Now he will enter a series of trials - in 2 Federal cases in Washington, D.C., and one in Georgia - he enters the courtroom a convicted felon. And that, my loyal readers, can make all the difference in the world.

Trump did not help himself one iota when, exiting the courtroom, the first former POTUS found guilty of committing felonies, continued right where he left off: calling the trial “the Biden trials” and a “kangaroo court,” proclaiming his innocence, and accusing both judge and jury of being biased political hacks and a couple of dozen other things. Perhaps no one told him that attacking the judge who holds your very future in his hands is not the smartest move on the chessboard.

My personal feeling about the decision was best summed up by New York City Councilmember Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five, a group of Black and Latino men who were wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park when they were teenagers. In his official statement he said: “Even though Donald Trump wanted us executed even when it was proven that we were innocent, I do not take pleasure at today’s verdict.” He added: “We should be proud that today the system worked. But we should be somber that we Americans have an ex-president who has been found guilty on 34 separate felony charges.”

Amen.

While some Democrats were singing a Hallelujah chorus as a result of the verdict, WinREd, a major conservative money-raising website, proudly announced that it had crashed due to so many contributions being made to Donald Trump. They claimed that within the first 24 hours after Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts, his supporters sent in more than $34 million worth of donations. What percentage of this take will go to his presidential campaign - as opposed to paying his attorneys - is anyone’s guess.

There is no doubt that Trump and his legal team will appeal Judge Merchan’s sentencing decision, regardless of what it may be. Just yesterday Trump said that he would accept home confinement or jail time, but in the same breath warned "I think it'd be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point." There is a faintly “dog whistle-like” quality to this statement, reminiscent of Trump’s September 2020 “Stand back and stand by” message to the “Proud Boys” and other white supremacists. I for one shivered at hearing this. Remember, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “Recent [gun] purchasers and owners who always or nearly always carried firearms in public were more supportive of and willing to engage in political violence than other subsets of firearm owners.” One suspects that Trump and his team didn’t need a scientific study to understand this . . .

It is the Trump team’s hope - and expectation - that the appeals process will eventually reach the United States Supreme Court who, they fully believe, will overturn the verdict. But that likely would not happen until well after November 5, the day of the national elections. Many leading Democrats and legal scholars have already pointedly spoken about the inherent problem of this particular SCOTUS weighing in on a Trump appeal. This court has a deeply conservative majority; 3 of its 4 newest members were named by Donald Trump, the only president who, having lost the popular vote, was nonetheless able to appoint 3 justices. For quite some time, various legal scholars - some liberal, some conservative - have been calling for Justices Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves from any and all cases involving Donald Trump. Both have publicly refused to recuse. In matter of fact, there is no binding Supreme Court ethics code to force them to do so. The roll of the Chief Justice is murky; he has nothing more than the power of moral and political persuasion. Good luck to him.

A recent New York Times op-ed by Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), likely Congress’ leading Constitutional scholar, suggested that there well be a legal way to recuse the two justices, " . . . not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law." In his essay, Rep. Raskin who, prior to entering Congress spent 25 years teaching Constitution Law at American Unviersity, wrote: The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455. Raskin explained the clause thusly: “Any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” The only justices in the federal judiciary are the ones on the Supreme Court. This recusal statute, if triggered, is not a friendly suggestion. It is Congress’s command, binding on the justices, just as the due process clause is. The Supreme Court cannot disregard this law just because it directly affects one or two of its justices. Ignoring it would trespass on the constitutional separation of powers because the justices would essentially be saying that they have the power to override a congressional command.

Yet another verdict to be determined.

Precisely what lasting effect Donald Trump’s recent conviction will have on the 2024 election is, at this point, nearly impossible to gauge. To say that his hardcore supporters will steadfastly remain in his corner goes without saying; to them, he is still the guy, who 2 weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucuses proclaimed he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and he "wouldn't lose any voters." Not that long ago, his legal team suggested in federal court that a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and — unless he was impeached and convicted by Congress — be immune from criminal prosecution. This issue of presidential immunity is currently awaiting a public pronouncement by the SOCTUS. No one knows for sure what effect Trump’s 34-count conviction will have on those voters who self-identify as “Independent.” Let’s face it: we live in an age where there are as many polling firms as there are stars in the heavens (to murder an old MGM tagline).

At the moment, we are living in David Mamet’s original version of the 1982 film - which garnered 5 Academy Award Nominations - The Verdict? Whether or not reality will eventually mirror the Sidney Lumet/Richard D. Zanuck version (sans question mark) is anyone’s guess. Don’t pay attention to the daily polls; they only project the stats their financial backers pay for. We are the only jury that counts. We are the ones who will ultimately add that “third act dénouement.” It is up to we, the jury, to remove that question mark (e.g., “The Verdict?), and make the title plain, simple, and at last, declarative.

THE VERDICT!

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#989: "If Ignorance is Bliss . . ."

June 01, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

The 18th century poet Thomas Gray (best known for his An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, one of the most admired of all English lyric poems) is responsible for the oft-quoted aphorism [or is it an epigram?], Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. President Thomas Jefferson embellished that quotation with one of his own when he said, If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy? — a line that British comedy writers John Lloyd and John Mitchinson co-opted for the title of their recent anthology of quotations which carries the subtitle Quotes For Quite Interesting Times. Of late, Jefferson’s version of Grey’s bon mot has been whirling about in my brain. What is the cause? It has far more to do with politics than poetry. How so? Well, while contemplating the horrifying and very real possibility that we may well be on the brink of losing our democratic republic to a motley mob of ignoramuses, who are in turn being led by Shakespeare’s favorite idiot (“. . . full of sound and fury signifying nothing”) I find myself wondering how it is that so much blissful ignorance hasn’t led to utter elation if not just plain happiness?

Amongst the professional Republican political class (a majority of whom support the candidacy of Donald Trump in public, while “praying before the porcelain god” [i.e. retching into the toilet in private], they are fueled not by the bliss of ignorance, but rather by a cowardice born of abject fear. And that fear is? That if they quit remaining on his good side (even though they find him to be a disgusting excuse for a human being . . . let alone the so-called “Leader of the Free World”) their careers will quickly vanish. I for one cannot imagine how they live with themselves, let alone how they sleep at night. Have they forgotten all the nasty names and nasty truths they said about the Donald before he became POTUS and in the days just after January 6? Haven’t they spine enough to turn their backs on a man who has called them every nasty name in the book? How can so many self-professed patriotic men and women of G-d support an individual who has time and again broken (let alone publicly spit upon) the most basic tenets of their faith? It’s not the bliss of ignorance; it is the selective pusillanimity of craven jellyfish. (I urge Joe Biden’s team to dust off the video clips of various Republicans speaking oh so truthfully about Donald Trump back in 2015 and 2016 and using them in political ads in 2024.

So much for all the professional MAGAites; what of all that vast collective Hillary Clinton referred to as “The Deplorables”? What fuels their unswerving loyalty to a man who makes Benedict Arnold look like a paragon of patriotic political virtue? Are they so blissfully ignorant of how very little Donald Trump thinks of them; of how truly disgusting he finds them, of how very little he has added to their lives or that the only things he demands of them are fealty and funds? To Donald’s loyal base he is the bully they always wished they could have been; the dude who can say what he wants, do as he pleases and get away virtually everything. And to top it all off, Trump’s richer than Croesus (even if they don’t know who in the hell he was or how to pronounce his name . . . kree-suhs) and far more entertaining than Joe Biden. Because of where they get their news and views from (FOX, Breitbart, Newsmax and Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) to name but a few, they are predisposed to believing in virtually every conspiracy they see or hear. As a result, they firmly believe that Donald Trump is both the ultimate victim, and the ultimate redemption. Their total ignorance should bring them ultimate elation; instead, it makes them as angry, miserable, bigoted and victimized as history’s most tyrannized cult.

Is it any wonder that culturally and politically speaking the United States (“US”) is as bipolar as at anytime since the Civil War?

The "bliss of ignorance” has also begun showing up on some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities. The other day, a dear friend and student - my "Pal Al” - emailed me the following video capture. If you are able, please take look. It will absolutely blow your mind as to how very, very little supposedly educated young people know about the the war between Israel and Hamas:

The fact that these newly-minted college graduates - who have closed down the very universities from which they should be donning caps and gowns - is both stunning and as frightening as hell. Where in the world did they get their “knowledge” and talking points? How can it be that they are shouting out anti-Israel slogans without knowing the geographic spots to which they refer, or having not an iota of understanding that not one Islamic kingdom or country has lifted a finger to help the Palestinians? They are being purposely swathed in the bliss of ignorance, so that they may do the bidding of the enemies of freedom, democracy and hope.

As I finish writing this piece, there are approximately 160 days and 5 hours before the November election. It feels like a long time until then, but it is not. The clock keeps ticking down. Remember to do everything in your power to make knowledge - not ignorance - the blissful component of democracy.

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#988: Character Counts

May 19, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

As per the Cambridge Dictionary, “gentleman” (dʒen·təl·mən) is defined as a man who is polite and behaves well toward other people. According to the Nobel Prize-winning author/poet/playwright George Bernard Shaw (pictured at left), “A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.” According to my late father, Henry E. Stone, who was was widely-known as an exemplar of that unique breed, a gentleman is well-mannered, and can effortlessly navigate social and professional settings with confidence and proficiency. Deeply honored to be his son, I have always believed that a gentleman strives to do the right thing . . . even when no one is watching. To me, being a gentleman is a lifestyle. You must live it, not just simply act like one when needed. To be a gentleman (or its female equivalent, a “lady”) is to possess the essence of character.

Alas, in today’s world, to be a gentleman is, for the masses, often considered to be a sign of weakness; a limp-wristed response to reality. Bravado and braggadocio, condescension and cruelty, the hydra-headed marks of the boor, have increasingly become the norm . . . especially in many forms of public life. Just this past week we witnessed the boorish clown-car insanity of Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene during a House Oversight Committee, in which she clashed with Democrats Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez over . . . over what? Over Greene’s comment to Rep. Crockett that hit out at Texas Democrat: "I think your fake eyelashes are messing up your reading." New York Democratic Rep. Ocasio Cortez immediately came to her colleague’s defense, calling Greene's remark "absolutely unacceptable," thus prompting the Republican firebrand to respond: "Are your feelings hurt? Aw." It devolved from there. Chairman James Corner, a Kentucky Republican, branded Greene's remarks "un-decorous" and she agreed the comment could be struck from the record but refused to apologize. Later, in a thinly veiled attack on Greene, Crockett said: "If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach blonde, bad-built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?" (Historically speaking, Congress has never been what one might call a paragon of etiquette. This coming Wednesday marks the 168th anniversary of South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner until the latter lost consciousness.)

On the same day that Reps. Greene, Crockett, and Ocasio-Cortez went after one another before the nation’s cameras, President Biden and FPOTUS Trump agreed to meet for two campaign debates — the first on June 27, hosted by CNN and the second on Sept. 10, hosted by ABC. Included in their apparent agreement were two changes from previous norms: first, the debates would be done in an empty hall, and second, when one candidate’s time expired, their mic would be automatically silenced.

Shortly after their agreement was announced, Trump senior campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles sent Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon a memorandum, challenging Biden to agree to at least two additional debates, suggesting one be held each month, with events in June, July, August and September. “Additional dates will allow voters to have maximum exposure to the records and future visions of each candidate,” the two Trump advisors wrote.

Trump later posted on Truth Social that he had agreed to a third debate, this one hosted by Fox. “Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that I hereby accept debating Crooked Joe Biden on Fox News. The date will be Wednesday, October 2nd. The Hosts will be Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. Thank you, DJT!” he wrote.

Biden campaign chair O’Malley Dillon responded with a statement accusing Trump of having “a long history of playing games with debates: complaining about the rules, breaking those rules, pulling out at the last minute, or not showing up at all. No more games. No more chaos, no more debate about debates. We’ll see Donald Trump on June 27th in Atlanta – if he shows up,” she wrote.

If I were a betting man (which I am not), I would wager that Trump and his team will pick a fight or find a flaw which will give them a reason to back out of any and all debates. The former President will of course pin the blame on the man he can no longer refer to as “Sleepy Joe.” (Trump’s continually nodding off during his most recent trial has driven a stake into the heart of this childish epithet.) In theory, if not in practice, Trump’s debating Biden without his gang of fans could potentially be as disastrous for him as taking the witness stand in his own defense; being a boor, he simply has no “off” button. Biden, on the other hand, is a gentleman with more than a half-century’s worth of political experience under his belt. Unlike the former POTUS, he understands, in the ironic words of Oscar Wilde, “A gentleman never insults anyone unintentionally.”

It never ceases to amaze me how many Trump fans seem to really, truly believe that Joe Biden is “the worst, most corrupt President in the history of the United States.” Whether they do in reality is anyone’s guess; it is impossible to know what anyone thinks or believes when they put their head on the pillow at the end of a long day. But “worst?” “Most corrupt?” Do they know anything about the presidencies of James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, or Franklin Pierce? Are they unaware of the utter corruption of the Harding and Nixon administrations? Are they willing to unquestionably accept the rantings of a former president who possesses less experience and character than any of the other 44 Chief Executives? The dumbing down of the American electorate is frightening to behold . . .

This past Friday, the White House Press Office issued a 216-word release. It announced that President Biden had just declared seven counties in Texas to be major disaster areas due to “severe storms, straight-line winds, tornadoes, and flooding beginning on April 26, 2024, and continuing.” The declaration President Biden signed was both simple and straightforward; nowhere in its 216 words was there even a hint, a scintilla of any partisan political gamesmanship.

The disaster declaration focused solely on the causes and victims of the disaster. There was no implied or express demand that the Texas governor pay homage to President Biden or that Texans “remember” Biden’s generosity in the upcoming election. Turning disaster aid into an opportunity for transactional grift was an invention of Donald Trump.

Nor did President Biden comment on the fact that the period from April to May in Texas was previously known as “spring,” but is now an unrelenting series of “severe storms, floods, tornadoes, and straight-line winds.” See Texas 2036, Texas' weather is getting wilder. While the effects of climate change in Texas deserve discussion, using the grant of emergency aid as a platform to do so would be insensitive and opportunistic. Texans are suffering because of natural disasters. They deserve relief from the federal government. President Biden granted it without hesitation or political agenda. That’s the way disaster declarations should be issued. That’s the way a President is supposed to act.

President Biden’s declaration was that of a caring human being seeking to do what is correct. This marks him as a man of character . . . a gentleman who, despite being far from perfect (who amongst us is?) deserves to be treated with respect. As a gentleman, it is simply not in his nature to hurl epithets and nasty nicknames at members of the (dis)loyal opposition. Then too, as a gentleman, it is not in his character to self-aggrandize whenever he does that which is simply the just and right thing to do. But please, do not mistake him for being a weakling, a dotard, or an inept politician.

He is a man of character and, please believe me, character really, truly counts.

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#987: How Many "Trials of the Century" Can one Century Have?

May 14, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Back in the late 1990s, I taught an 8-week film class at Florida Atlantic University entitled “How Many ‘Trials of the Century’ Can One Century Have?” The course had a dual purpose: first, to introduce students to what, in my opinion, were 4 of the most prominent and salacious crimes/trials of the 20th century, and second, to screen a Hollywood film based on said crime/trial. The four cases and their subsequent films were:

Nathan Leopold (1904-1971) & Richard Loeb (1905-1936)

1. The 1913 Leo Frank case, in which a young Northern Jew Leo Frank) was tried for the murder of a young Southern girl named Mary Phagen; 23 years later Warner Brothers produced a film based on the base called “They Won’t Forget,” starring Claude Rains, Edward Norris and newcomer Lana Turner. In real life, Frank, who was exonerated by Georgia Governor John M. Slaton, was taken out of his cell and lynched. His “trial of the century,” and subsequent murder led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation Committee.

2. The 1924 Leopold and Loeb case in which 2 wealthy, brillant, Chicago-area teenagers who were already college graduates, killed 14-year old Bobby Frank, inspired by the concept of “the perfect crime” and philosopher Frederick Nietzsche's concept of the "superman" — the idea that it is possible to rise above good and evil. This horrendous crime and ensuing trial, were turned into the riveting 1959 film “Compulsion,” starring Orson Welles, Bradford Dillman and and Dean Stockwell. (Yes, there was an earlier film based on this notorious trial, Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking 1948 '“Rope,” but this one was not screened for the course in question.

3. The 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which a Tennessee high school science teacher was arrested for breaking the law by introducing his students to Charles Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution.” This would be translated onto film by the phenomenally-talented Stanley Kramer as “Inherit the Wind,” starring those two magnificent cinematic warhorses Spencer Tracy and Fredric March.

4. The Trial of Adolph Eichman for crimes against humanity. The movie version “The Man in the Glass Booth“, was directed by Arthur Hiller from a novel by actor/writer Robert Shaw (“The Sting”), this highly fictionalized 1975 thriller portrays the trial of the Nazi’s chief originator of “The Final Solution.” Starring Maximilian Schell (who was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor), Laurence Pressman and Lois Nettleton.

There were also several so-called “Trials of the Century” that never made it into the movies, including:

The 3 Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle trials in March/April 1922 in which the beloved (and soon to be both reviled and blacklisted) silent movie comedian stood accused of murdering young starlet Virginia Rappe at a booze-soaked party in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel;
The “Army-McCarthy” hearings, a 36-day television spectacular that held the attention of an estimated 80 million television viewers (many watching the trials at their local saloon or TV store) for an amazing 6 weeks from April 22 to June 17, 1954. This was the first time that television offered “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of a trial. It served to be the Wisconsin senator’s undoing: within 3 years, the once-feared McCarthy took to the bottle, was censured by his colleagues and died at age 48. Although no theatrical film has been made of this “trial of the century,” there is Emile de Antonia’s brilliant 1964 documentary, Point of Order!, in which de Antonia culled from extant kinescopes what is, to this day, the definitive documentary record of America's first great televised political spectacle.
The O.J. Simpson murder trial. Need we say more?

So far, in the first 24 years of the twenty-first century, there have already been quite a few “Trials of the Century.” Eerily, most of them have one thing in common: the name D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P. Among the most widely-covered and widely-viewed trials and Congressional hearings have been:

· Trump’s dealings with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election (the Mueller hearings);

· Trump’s first and second impeachment hearings, and

· The hearings into the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

All of these hearings were nationally televised and watched, at least in part, by millions of viewers. But unlike say, the Kefauver Hearings, which spent more than a year investigating organized crime in Interstate Commerce (1950-1951), and the Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, both of which were broadcast by precisely 2 national networks, the various Trump hearings and now, trials, are and were accompanied by a plethora of on-air commentaries, broadcast by numerous partisan cable outlets. In essence, those who were and are, generally speaking, pro-Trump fans, can view coverage produced and carried by media that makes their hero the victim of a partisan witch-hunt, while those who are mostly anti-Trump (sitting on the fence . . . all 23 of them), can have their views and opinions both validated and buttressed by the cables they most commonly watch.

Donald Trump’s current trial - in which he stands accused of paying off former adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money so that their alleged sexual relationship wouldn’t negatively affect his 2016 run for the White House - is rara avis: there are, by New York State law, no television cameras permitted inside the courtroom. Out on the street . . . well, that’s a different story. Hence, a judicial proceeding which has all the ingredients - conspiracy, money, the former POTUS and a porn star - could have and should have had the highest Nielsen ratings of all time. But no: the thousand-and-one talking heads and their teams of TV attorneys (many of whom are, in fact, former federal prosecutors) are reduced to talking about - rather than reporting on - the latest "trial of the century. Reputable media figures spend the lion’s share of their on-camera mornings, afternoons, and evenings opining on whether or not the former president is sleeping through the trial due to his not being able to get his daily Diet Coke fix; on which Republican Vice Presidential wannabes (Senators Tuberville, Scott and Vance and who knows, perhaps Vivek Ramaswamy) and going to be with him in court; on why not a peep – let alone a supportive visit – from his wife; on whether the jury is going to like Michael Cohen; on whether or not Judge Juan Merchan, tiring of merely fining the FOTUS a grand every time he opens his big yap, will finally send him to jail . . . and on and on.

What precise effect this latest “trial of the century” will have on Donald Trump the candidate is anyone’s guess; the impact it is having on Donald Trump the man is already quite palpable. Never known for having the firmest grip on reality, the former president shows, in my humble opinion, increasing signs of moral and psychological disengagement. Is it any wonder? Here we have an out-of-shape, morbidly obese 77-year-old (he’ll turn 78 on June 14) who has long subsisted on little sleep, a diet of fast food burgers, fries, and at least a dozen Diet Cokes a day; a man who, despite wearing a mask of extreme bravado, sees himself as a perpetual target of victimization. Of late, he has been forced to sit in a courtroom without making a sound or showing outward emotion. In his mind’s eye, he is likely seeing himself in an orange jumpsuit, denied a staff to cater to his every whim and need, and - even worse - being told where to be and what to do all day long by people he considers to be his inferiors. (I have to believe he’s having nightmares about not being able to get his hair styled and colored every morning, noon, and night. God forbid someone takes a surreptitious snap of him without the bird’s nest atop his pate!) Is it any wonder that, when gets the chance to give a campaign speech, he rambles on for an hour and a half, now speaking about how the Chinese Government is putting together an army of Chinese immigrants here in the United States and then going off on a bizarre tangent, praising the fictional Hannibal Lecter (“The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner,”). Even his supporters started walking out on These are definitely not the thoughts or words of a man who has both feet on the ground . . . let alone one who is running for the most powerful job on earth.

So you tell me: how many more “trials of the century” is Donald Trump going to go through before this year . . . let alone this decade . . . is over?

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categories / American History

#986: Déjà Vu All Over Again

May 07, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

We begin with a 1970 song by one of the rock world’s first “supergroups,” CSNY (Crosby, Stills, Nash Young). Entitled “Four Dead in Ohio,” it is a classic protest song Neil Young reportedly took less than an hour to compose. For those of a certain age, it embodies a wide-ranging panoply of a time long gone . . . and now, more than a half-century later, being born anew.

In the spring of 1968, a whole lot of American college students - yours truly included - were spending less and less time in class and far far more marching and protesting the war in Vietnam and the military draft. Those of a certain age will well remember the chant “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, N.L.F. (the National Liberation Front) is gonna win!” Protests were alive on College campuses from Columbia to Berkeley, and from Michigan and Chicago to Harvard, Yale and Duke. The spring was awash with sounds of Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Arlo Guthrie and Country Joe and the Fish, the smell of pot, the antics of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, long hair, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Tom Hayden and eventually, the trial of The “Chicago 7” (or 8).

This generation of political activists may well have been the most productive in all American history. Its fervency, activism, and memorable pranks (some will recall when Abbie Hoffman threw tons of money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange or when throngs of “Yippie” protestors nominated “Pigasus” [also known as “Pigasus the Immortal” and “Pigasus J. Pig”] for POTUS at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National

Convention). played a major in lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, forcing an American president (LBJ) to dramatically announce on nationwide TV that he would not run for reelection, and bred a generation of politically-minded parents and grandparents who to this day are still fighting the good fight for climate change, and the rights of women, voters and those of color. In 1970, the year that CSNY came out with “Four Dead in Ohio,” things had become grim. President Richard Nixon (who was elected POTUS by turning the college students into the focus of his call for “law and order”), launched a “secret” bombardment of Cambodia, in which U.S. forces dropped up to 540,000 tons of bombs, which in turn led to the deaths of an estimated 150,000 to 500,000 civilians. This time around, student protesters were livid times ten. It led to a massive march on Washington, the closing down of many universities, and death . . . the killings of students at Kent State in Ohio and Jacksonville State in Mississippi. The most poignant photo of the time was that of young Mary Vecchio kneeling in agony over the body of student Jeffrey Miller, killed by the Ohio National Guard.

Eventually, the music grew dark (“The Eve of Destruction”), some of the protest leaders went into business (Jerry Rubin became a multimillion dollar stockbroker, and Drummond M. Pike founded the Tides Foundation, a “passthrough” for funding progressive political causes). Others went in to mainstream politics (SDS founder Tom Hayden was elected to both the California Assembly and Senate, and Berkeley’s Ron Dellums served 13 terms in the United States Congress where he eventually rose to become Chair of the House Armed Services Committee). Many, like Columbia University SDS leader Mark Rudd, became professors. Crosby, Stills and Nash (minus Neil Young) continued turning out hit songs “Teach Your Children,” “Southern Cross,” “Love the One Your With”) record albums (“After the Storm,” :Live it Up,” "Looking Forward”) and touring for the next half century. In 2023, David Crosby passed away at age 81; Stills and Nash are pretty much retired at, respectively, ages 79 and 82. In 2010, Graham Nash was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to music and to charity; in 2021, Neil Young sold 50% of his of the rights to his back catalog to a British investment company for an estimated $150 million. The “baby” of the group, the now 78-year old Young still does an occasional concert. . .

Many, many pages have been turned since the anti-war, anti-draft protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. Today, even though protests are once again being carried out mostly on the same college campuses as in an earlier time - Columbia to Yale, Michigan to Ohio, and Berkeley to UCLA - the issues, the underlying narrative, the look, and the sound are radically different. In the earlier era, mostly long-haired college-age students were protesting an optional, America-based war, they believed represented a miscarriage of justice and international law. The earlier student leaders were, to a great extent, both literate and knowledgeable about the sides, and history of the conflict. Their protests were memorialized in tense lyrics accompanied by twanging guitars and tight harmonies. Today, their grandchildren are hiding faces under keffiyehs, chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Globalize the Intifada” and calling for the utter destruction of Israel - America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East. Unlike their grandparents, they show an appalling lack of knowledge about history and Middle-Eastern realpolitik - of understanding the how, when and why of Israel’s creation, let alone the simultaneous "creation” of the "Palestinian people.” And as for their musical memorialization? Sorry, but rap and/or hip-hop just won’t cut it; for me its simply too atonal . . . full of sound and fury, signifying G-d only knows what. Comparing hip-hop to CSNY is like holding Gravity’s Rainbow in one hand, The Great Gatsby in the other.

While I, an American Jew, cannot support and certainly do not condone the Netanyahu government’s overwhelmingly lethal response to the deadly October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas militants, I - unlike many of the student protestors who liken Israel to the Third Reich - understand the enormity of the loss Israel suffered. With a population of about 9.73 million, Israel is about one-34th the size of the United States, which has about 335.55 million people. This means that the reported death toll of more than 1,400 Israelis from the Hamas terrorist attacks is proportional to about 48,300 Americans. The official U.S. count of Americans who died on Sept. 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center was “a mere” 2,977. These facts and statistics (which Twain referred to, respectively, as first, “stubborn things,” and then “pliable”) are either totally unknown or totally unimportant to the today’s protesters.

Terrorists Fighting Under the Banner of Hamas

Have tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of Muslims died at the hands of annihilators over the past decades? Yes, of course. But another truth unknown to the protesters who liken Israel to the Storm Troopers of World War II is this: that far, far more Arabs men, women and children (whether they be Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian, Libyan, Sudanese, or what today we term “Palestinian”) have been plundered, raped, tortured and murdered by fellow Muslims going to war under banners bearing the names حماس (Hamas), حزب الله (Hezbollah), الشباب (Al-Shabab) or الفلسطينيحركة الجهاد الإسلامي (harakat aljihad al'iislamii alfilastinii - Palestinian Islamic Jihad) among others. Have these students even thought about the fact that stockpiling weapons of death and destruction in, around and under schools, hospitals and mosques have virtually nothing to do with creating a Palestinian State and everything to do with the total annihilation and dismemberment of the Jewish State . . . not to mention growing rich in the process? Oh, if only were like low-hanging fruit . . . ripe and ready for the picking.

In many regards, the protesters of the Viet Nam era and those of post-October 7 are similar: in their fervor, their anger and utter certainty that they are on the right side of history. Both, according to those who find solace in conspiracy theories are - and were - accused of being brainwashed, useful idiots and dupes funded by immoral international cabals; Marxists (or Leninists, Stalinists, Maoist or Viet Minh) in the case of the 1960s and 70s) or billionaire backers of mayhem and disunion (most notably the omnipresent George Soros as well as President Joe Biden’s wealthiest backers) today. And while it is likely true that “outside agitators” - as they used to be known - play an important role in the campus protests of two different eras, it seems to me that today’s crop have swallowed far more bilge and blather than their grandparents. Case in point: the demand that America’s colleges and universities punish the “Jews and Zionists” by divesting their endowments of any and all Israel-related holdings. Here, the students are doing the bidding of the “BDS Movement” (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction) which “works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.” To listen to the students, one would imagine that Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, Duke, Stanford and Berkeley (among many others) have extensive holdings in Israeli companies - most notably those that manufacture weapons of war. Truth to tell, this assumption is, as Grannie Annie would have it, “full of canal water.” According to a densely researched, fully-vetted piece in last Friday’s Washington Post, University endowments show few signs of direct Israel, defense holdings. From the little I know about the subject, the lion’s share of any holdings in Israeli businesses are likely to be in the area of pharmaceutical/medical high-tech. I wonder how many protestors’ parents and grandparents are alive because of medicines and/or medical devices that were created in Israel . . . ?

There is one ”Déjà Vu All Over Again” that is already causing me sleepless nights: the upcoming Democratic National Convention. As mentioned, as in 1968, it will once again be held in Chicago. Some will remember the opening lyrics from CSNY’s “Chicago”

Though your brother's bound and gagged
And they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to Chicago
Just to sing

In a land that's known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won't you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It's dying ... to get better

Yes, as ever, CSNY provided a tuneful harmony for a historic event . . . which ultimately became an utter debacle. Outside the International Amphitheatre, thousands of students, deeply aggrieved and in angry mourning for the deaths of Dr. Martin Luthor King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, took to the streets, only to be met by Mayor Richard Daily’s armed police force (we called them “Storm Troopers”). Inside the Hall, Democratic regulars waved placards proclaiming fealty for both Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Mayor Daily. What got the lion’s share of the media coverage wasn’t the goings-on inside the building; it was the urban warfare that Walter Cronkite (CBS), David Brinkley (NBC), and Frank Reynolds (ABC) gave near round-the-clock coverage to. It turned enough Americans against the Democrats that Republican nominee Richard Nixon (who had lost a presidential race to JFK in 1962) beat Humphrey 43.4%-42.7%. Had it not been for 3rd party candidate George Wallace (who captured nearly 10 million popular and 46 electoral votes), Nixon’s “law and order” would have swept him to a landslide victory. Nixon, of course, would then go on to oversee a ramping up of the war in Vietnam, the bombing of Cambodia and eventually the most corrupt and unlawful administration in all American history. Both he and his Vice President (Spiro Agnew) would resign their respective offices in order to avoid being imprisoned. Arguably, the students who descended upon Chicago played a large role in that election.

The Déjà Vu All Over Again is, of course, what role our modern-day protestors might have on the outcome of the 2024 election. If they come to Chicago loaded for bear, shouting, screaming and enacting scenes of urban theatre in front of not a mere 3, but a thousand-and-one social media outlets, some proclaiming RFK, Jr. to be their champion, we could well see Donald Trump’s “law and order” campaign be swept into office by the thinnest of margins . . . ultimately leading to an administration so corrupt, so anarchic and autocratic as to make what happened during the Nixon years seem like a lawful paradise. And if, G-d forbid, this occurs, it will once again be the victory of the craven and corrupt over America’s youth.

I began this piece with Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young in their role as the musical chroniclers of generational angst. I end with CSNY (with an assist from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar) in their role as prophets of hope and understanding:

Teach, your children well

You, who are on the road
Must have a code you try to live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye

Teach your children well
Their father's hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by

Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

And you, of tender years
Can't know the fears your elders grew by
Help them with your youth
They seek the truth before they can die

Teach your parents well
Their children's hell will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by

Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

Ooh, and know they love you
And know they love you, yeah
And know they love you.

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categories / American History, anti-Semitism

#985: As Goes Florida, So Goes . . . ?

April 29, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Mark Twain, that most revered and authentic of all American writers, had the ability to cloak profundity in the garment of wit, better than anyone who ever took pen to paper. And, like all true geniuses, he made it look oh so easy and utterly natural . . . like Ted Williams swinging a bat or Lord Olivier playing King Lear. Twain’s great gift was used to entertain, to make us laugh and above all, to make the reader pause and think. Yes, some of his chapters and paragraphs are, by today’s political standards, decidedly “un-PC.” But this should by no means keep anyone from drinking deeply from the well of his artistry. The man really, truly, understood the human condition with all of its wens and warts.

My five all-time favorite Twain aphorisms are:

The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love Truly. Laugh uncontrollably. Never regret anything that makes you smile.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. And, to my way of thinking, the best of the bunch:
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
I can hear you asking “What in the world do the best of Mark Twain’s epigrams have to do with the title of this week’s blog As Goes Florida, So Goes . . .” As Grandpa Doc would say, “Vell . . . I’ll tell ‘ya.” (In truth, Doc didn’t have an accent; he occasionally would adopt one to make a point or begin a story). The story here is that I was doing my research for this week’s blog, which was meant to discuss some of the wackier, inane new laws passed by our overwhelmingly MAGA-supporting legislature and signed by Governor “Rhonda Santis.” In the midst of reading some of several of the most noxious bills, I found myself wanting to know if all this crappola was keeping people from moving to the Sunshine State. This query quickly expanded to the question of which states were gaining and which were losing, the greatest numbers of people over the past two years. Coming upon an article on the topic published in MarketWatch.com (a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, a property of News Corp, along with The Wall Street Journal and Barron's), I learned that the top 3 states losing people were:
- California (A net migration of -407, 633)
- New York ( −283,792) and
- New Mexico ( -177,710), while the 3 biggest gainers were:
- Florida ( +205,163)
- Texas ( +144,032) and
- North Carolina ( +99,406).

The rest of the states reporting net positive migration are, in order, Arizona, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Nevada and Idaho. With the possible exceptions of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, the rest of the positive-migration states are solidly, irredeemably, hardcore MAGA in their politics and legislatures. (I for one refuse to call it ‘the MAGA wing’ of the Republican Party for I, unlike many, cannot find a solitary remnant of what used to be nicknamed the GOP . . . they are all MAGA). And, from where I sit, this bodes poorly for the future of politics in these United States. For MAGA-controlled legislatures, serving under MAGA-supporting governors, who appoint MAGA-istic Federalist Society judges, can jointly enact just about any measure they please coming out of the autocratic playbook coauthored by the likes of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Susie Wiles, and Stephen Miller.

Think I’m going a bit too far? Well, consider just a few of the things happening here in Florida, the state I have been hanging out in since July 6, 1982:

We have a state Surgeon General/Secretary of Health, Joseph Lapado, M.D., PhD., who is anti COVID and MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccines - among other things - and has totally politicized medicine here in the Sunshine State. As someone who has been gainfully employed on two of the best Institutional Review Boards in America for nearly 30 years, and have reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of clinical trials in the fields of infectious diseases, oncology and epidemiology, I am simply amazed (and scared witless) at the man’s ability to place partisan politics way, way ahead of provable science and medicine. Whatever happened to “First, do no harm?”
Here in Florida, as of July, 2023, we have a gun law which allows Florida residents to carry concealed weapons without benefit of a license - let alone taking a single safety course - with impunity. This is perfectly in keeping with the MAGA reading of the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment; they firmly believe than any limitation on guns is unconstitutional.
Just this past week, the 63rd anniversary of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, (a failed invasion of Cuba supported by the CIA) Gov. DeSantis signed a bill (SB 1264) requiring the teaching of “the dangers and evils of communism” in Florida public schools from grades 1-12. Coming on the heels of so many Republicans in both the House and Senate voting against sending aid to the Ukraine - which is fighting against the Communist expansion of Putin’s Russia - one wonders if DeSantis and his Florida colleagues are living back in the 1950s, when fighting Communism and individuals they deemed to be Communists - AKA “liberals” or “progressives” - was the sine qua non of “true" Americanism.
Less than 2 weeks ago, DeSantis signed a bill into law allowing “volunteer chaplains” to counsel students in traditional public and charter schools, despite warnings from a pastors group, the ACLU and the Satanic Temple that it would violate the First Amendment. In signing the bill, the governor said: “There are some students [who] need some soul prep, and that can make all the difference in the world. And so these chaplains … come in and provide services.” DeSantis said the law, set to go effect in July, would stand up to court challenges because the program was voluntary and parents would have to provide consent for their children to meet with the chaplains. “No one’s being forced to do anything, but to exclude religious groups from campus, that is discrimination,” he said. “You’re basically saying that God has no place. That’s wrong. That’s not what our Founding Fathers intended.” And this guy is a graduate of Yale and earned a law degree at Harvard! His “understanding” of the Founders and the Constitution’s 1st Amendment guarantees is steeped not in knowledge, but in partisan politics. (n.b.: The new law uses the title ‘chaplain’ but requires none of the specialized training that health care facilities, the military, and most prisons require of chaplains.)
Florida ranks second (behind Texas) in the greatest number of banned books. In the most recent ranking by World Population Review, the Sunshine State instituted bans on 565 books in 21 of the state’s school districts. Governor DeSantis is one of the main people leading the charge against called “critical race theory” (CRT). Many of the books that he and his acolytes have targeted have to do with issues related to race. It is important to note that critical race theory is not taught outside of upper-level college and law school classes.
Florida ranks just behind Michigan in the states with the highest annual premiums for auto insurance; it is the 4th highest in the cost of homeowner’s insurance (if you can find it), and 4th most expensive for annual healthcare coverage.
And to add injury to insult, in less than 48 hours, Florida’s new 6-week abortion ban will go into effect. This past April 1, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state Constitution's privacy protections do not extend to abortion, overturning decades of legal precedent and effectively triggering the more restrictive law. On November 5, 2024, Florida voters will vote on a citizen-initiated Constitutional Amendment (#4) which will legalize abortion. Its text states, in part: “The initiative would provide a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability (estimated to be around 24 weeks) or when necessary to protect the patient's health, as determined by the patient's healthcare provider.” The fact that proactive citizens managed to collect more than 1 million signatures to place this measure on the November ballot is the good news. The not-so-good news? It will take a supermajority for it to pass, and there is already a measure on the November ballot that would increase the supermajority voter approval requirement for constitutional amendments from 60% to 66.67%.

So, keeping all the above in mind, why do so many people pick up and move to Florida? For the sunshine? Because it has no state income tax? Because the governor has his own militia? You tell me. If this is the future of even half of America, we are in dire straits. It used to be said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek that "As goes New Hampshire, so goes the rest of the nation.” What the surreality that is currently Florida portends for the rest of the nation is anyone’s guess.

Let us give the final word to Mark Twain (from his Autobiography, Vol. 1): “Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction.”

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categories / All Politics All the Time, American History, The Coming Autocracy

#984: A Movement Or Just a Moment?

April 21, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

At the outset, let me make one thing robustly clear: that despite the fact Speaker Mike Johnson successfully managed to get the House to pass 4 crucial bills - aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, plus a TikTok ban and Iranian sanctions - our political differences are wider than the Grand Canyon and deeper than the Mariana Trench. Simply stated, we view reality through radically different eyes. Nonetheless, I doff my cap to him and applaud the political courage it took to do the right thing. Indeed, in addressing the press just after the bills passed said, most simply, that “History will judge it well.” I couldn’t agree with him more. I can’t remember the last time I heard a House Republican use the word “history” in referencing their mission or motivation.

Three cheers must also go to Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies. Those who understand how Congress truly works – on those rare occasions when it does - know that the most important measures cannot be enacted without a lot of closed-door interaction between both party’s leadership teams. In comparison to Speaker Johnson’s task this past Saturday, Leader Jeffries’ was, relatively speaking, far easier. Although 33 of the 99 progressive Democrats wound up voting against aid to Israel, Jeffries knew that the rest of his caucus would vote in its favor . . . and that virtually the entire Democratic Caucus (210 in number) would vote “yay” on aid to Ukraine and Taiwan. Not so Speaker Johnson: he heads up (it’s hard to say “leads”) a caucus in which an unwieldy minority is as contentious and hide-bound as a congregation of contrarians. And. mind you, most of these naysayers and bomb-throwers are the living embodiment of what another murderous Vladimir (Lenin) termed “useful idiots.” As things turned out, 44 of 48 members of the so-called “Freedom Caucus” (a.k.a. the “Clown Car Caucus) wound up voting against aid to Ukraine.

BTW: It should be noted that the Republicans - both “Institutionalists” and “Freedom Caucus” members voted overwhelmingly (193-18) for aid to Israel, 182-16 for aid to Taiwan, and 186-21 for the TikTok ban/sanctions for Iran. All in all, a very good day; indeed, likely the most memorable of the 118th Congress.

So why the swift change in Speaker Johnson’s political weltanschauung? He certainly wasn’t pushing aid to Ukraine in order to buttress his position as Speaker; truth to tell, by working with Leader Jeffries and the Democrats he merely increased the bile stuck in the throats of Reps. Gosar (R-AZ), Thomas Masssie (R-KY) and their leader, the mouth that roars, Rep. Marjorie Taylor (“Moscow Marge”) Greene of Georgia. The three have publicly threatened that if Johnson won’t resign his position, they will do everything in their power to remove him from office . . . ala Kevin McCarthy. Greene’s kvetchiest kvetch is that by leading the charge for funding the Ukrainians, Speaker Johnson has in one fell swoop become both a RINO (“Republican in Name Only”) and a fire-breathing liberal. From statements he has made, Johnson doesn’t seem overly concerned about being ousted. Could this mean he has already received assurances from Minority Leader Jeffries that should the tyrannical triad try to give him, Johnson, the heave-ho, that the Democrats will provide enough votes to keep him in as leader of the House? No one knows for sure; this isn’t the kind of thing to be bandied about in public . . . But then too, when even Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post fails to side with Rep. Greene, it is a plausible sign that something’s afoot.

Isn’t this the same Mike Johnson who just a little more than a week ago made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to shore up support from Donald of Orange?” Yes it is, without question. But perhaps the Speaker is a better chess player than the former POTUS. In dividing the bill passed by the Senate into four separate measures, Johnson was essentially laying the groundwork for passing all four. And it worked . . . along with a lot of help from Jeffries and the Democrats. Now it is on to the Senate, where it will be quickly passed (over the dead body of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance) and then hustled over to the White House where it will sit on the Resolute Desk (also known as the “Hayes Desk”) for just a minute or two before it is signed into law by President Joseph Biden. Score one for Speaker Johnson; score one for President Biden; score one for the 118th Congress; and above all, score one for American prestige in the eyes of our allies.

Am I the only one who has yet to hear a peep from our former Commander-in-Chief? I keep waiting for him to say that in his heart of hearts he really, truly favored funding the Ukrainians in their war against Putin. As implausible as that may seem, remember this: the man is a world-class liar. In truth, he hasn’t uttered a word. It brings to mind one of best Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” In it, Holmes solves the theft of a prize racehorse by focusing on what didn’t happen rather than what did. In so doing, Holmes (or more precisely, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) gave us the phrase “the dog that didn’t bark.” In the case of Donald Trump, don’t wait for the bark . . . he’s too busy glowering at all the witnesses and evidence against him in a Manhattan courthouse.

As much as I may pray that yesterday’s triumph in the House was the beginning of a movement, I know in my heart-of-hearts that it is a moment . . . a good one, to be sure. And as much as I applaud Speaker Johnson for his strength and courage, I know that come next week, he will still be, at base, an ultra-conservative Christian Nationalist who fully supports a national ban on abortion; a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of the Second Amendment who cannot bring himself to deny anyone’s right to stockpile their own assault weapons and nuclear devices; who wishes to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in order to balance the federal budget. Let’s face facts: a predator isn’t likely to change its markings. Nonetheless, I will never cease praying that the carnivores, once they have stepped back from their predatory ways for even a moment, will see the “humanity” of the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the deep blue sea.

To all of my fellow "Members of the Tribe,” I wish you and yours a kosher un a ziss’n Pesach.

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#983: It’s Lysistrata Time

April 14, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Vicomte Gabriel de Roton (‘Notor)’s 1898 take on Lysistrata

Up until last week, most people of sound mind and more-or-less progressive beliefs, considered June 24, 2022 - the day SCOTUS handed down their retrograde decision in Dobbs v. Jackson - the lowest point in American jurisprudence since the 1867 decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that . . . “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore did not have standing to sue in federal court.”

But as of last Tuesday, April the 9th, an absolute new low in American jurisprudence was reached: the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 law that would ban nearly all abortions. One should keep in mind that until this decision, abortions were legal in Arizona until 15 weeks; the 1864 law banned abortions in toto. Can you say “forward into the past?” For many of us the answer would have to be to be “Yes, we can.” In 1864, Arizona was a mere territory; there were no paved roads leading to the state Capitol. Its first set of laws - called the Howell Code, contained some pretty antediluvian laws which, if reinstated today, could theoretically drag the state - if not the entire country - back to the dark ages. (Eerily, April 9th is also the day - back in 1865 - when General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate troops to the Union's Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, marking thus the beginning of the end of the grinding four-year-long American Civil. Brrr!)

According to the 1864 law, "a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years." This sits perfectly well with the most fanatical supporters of the so-called “Pro-Life” movement. For those who have supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade for decades on end for mostly political reasons, it is beginning to cause them sleepless nights; they are beginning to wake up and recognize that they’ve uncorked a bottle from which a malevolent genie has escaped. They are soon going to be facing a significant majority of the distaff voting public who will neither support nor cast ballots for anyone who blindly and ignorantly supports the position that the government has the ultimate right to control women’s bodies, thus delimiting their freedom.

Aristophanes: author of “Lysistrata” (446-386 BCE)

So what is to be done? What can tens upon tens of millions of women do to politically outmaneuver a bunch of men who seek to control their bodies, their lives, and their very destinies? I think the answer - believe it or not - may just lie in a Greek comedy first performed 2,435 years ago (that’s 411 BCE) named after its protagonist: LYSISTRATA. Written by the brilliant comedic satirist Aristophanes, known variously to history as “The Father of Comedy” or “The Prince of Ancient Comedy,” Lysistrata (λυσιστράτη literally “The one who disbands armies”) is a woman who, along with her friends Lampito, Calorice (Lysistrata’s lieutenant) and Myrhinne (a conventional woman of Athens) organize the entire Athenian sisterhood to end the then 30-year Peloponnesian War, a long (431-405 BCE) and destructive war between Athens and Sparta. How do the women do it? Briefly, the women first storm and take over the Athenian Acropolis, thereby controlling the funds required to keep the war going. Next, they proclaim to all the bellicose men of the land that unless the conflict is brought to an immediate end, they - the women - will henceforth deny any sexual congress which, the women well know, is the only thing their men truly and deeply desire. The men get the message, and before too long, the war comes to an end . . .

A modern theater-going audience or readership can understandably ask “What’s so funny? What makes this a comedy?" First must understand both the classical definition of comedy and the time in which the play Lysistrata was first mounted. To the classical mind, comedy is a genre that places characters in amusing - even preposterous - situations for the sake of humor. To be a comedy, a piece must end on a happy or ‘up’ note . . . whereas tragedy is the precise opposite; the downfall of a great person. In keeping with this definition, Lysistrata is unquestionably a comedy. Secondly, one must realize that for hundreds of years, Lysistrata - like all stage plays - was performed by a cast made up solely of men for an audience made up mostly of men. It must have been successful; it is still being staged nearly 2,500 hundred years later. Too bad that Aristophanes hasn’t been collecting royalties all these years!

For years, Lysistrata was considered to be so controversial, salacious, and risqué. that it was - and in many cases still is - banned from public libraries. It is hardly surprising to learn that it was banned by both the Nazis and the Greek Junta (the “Colonels”) that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. In the U.S. Lysistrata was banned for many, many years under terms of the Comstock Law of 1873 . . . which, hauntingly, is once again in the news. This is the federal law that made it “ . . . a crime to sell or distribute materials that could be used for contraception or abortion, to send such materials or information about such materials through the federal mail system, or to import such materials from abroad.” Back in 1873 it was motivated by growing societal concerns over obscenity, abortion, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, the institution of marriage, the changing role of women in society, and increased procreation by the lower classes.

Sound familiar? It should; many rightwing legislators and jurists are looking to breathe life back into it and prop up a growing movement to ban the mailing, marketing, or use of such progesterone blockers as Mifepristone Misoprostol. and Methotrexate - FDA-approved drugs that are used - among other indications - for medical abortions.

I for one find it both fascinating and horrifying that a 151-year-old act could be used to ban both abortifacient drugs and a classic Greek comedy that satirically suggests a remedy for ridiculousness. And so, to all those - both sisters and brothers - who firmly believe that the government must stay out of our bedrooms or wax theologically over when life begins, please recognize what a powerful and deeply motivating set of issues we possess to unite, fight and expel all misogynists from their platforms of power. And, although the actions of Lysistrata and her sisters long may be little more than an hour’s bit of cheeky satire, their message, their passion, and their ultimate victory are hopefully here to stay.

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#982: Loopy to the Tonsils, Barmy to the Back Teeth

April 07, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Depending on who you ask, April 8 could go one of two ways. It will either be when a total solar eclipse happens, putting on a show for the roughly 44 million people who live within the eclipse’s path, or it will be the end of the world . . . which brings to mind a fabulous pre-rap song by the rock group R.E.M. (Each stanza ends with the lyric “Its the end of the world as we know it . . . but I feel fine.”

During a total solar eclipse, some places on Earth are entirely shielded from the sun by the moon for a few minutes. In North America, the eclipse will start on the Pacific coast of Mexico and travel a diagonal path northeast across the U.S. before leaving the continent shortly before 4 p.m. ET. The U.S. won’t see another total eclipse for the next 20 years. I for one have yet to experience this astronomic marvel. Luckily however they do occur far more frequently than most people could imagine. I have read that they occur somewhere on the globe approximately every 16 months. So, perhaps one of these days, Annie and I will take a cruise and, armed with eclipse glasses, partake in the phenomenon.

Maddeningly, there are millions of people right here in the good old USA who are as frightened as Macbeth before Banquo’s ghost that tomorrow’s TSE spells doom and destruction for us all; that it is a portent that we are all about to be punished for the sins of others. How in the hell is this possible? From whence comes such loopy fear and dread? The answer can be stated in 2 words: conspiracy hucksters - men and women who seek their fortunes and get their jollies out of peddling miracle cures, warning about the enemies in our midst and paving their paths by warning their victims that anyone who disagrees with them are, in fact, the true conspirators. This is the world of Alex Jones and NewsMax, QAnon and the “Watch the Water” charlatans.

Alex Jones, for example, is claiming that the government is planning to use the event as a practice run for declaring martial law during the eclipse, which will allegedly be enacted if former president Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election. And of course, it’s not just Jones. As Quartz reports, there are quite a few people on TikTok claiming the solar eclipse will mark the end of the world, drawing nonsensical parallels to biblical events. And apparently Carbondale, Illinois (population 25,000) is predicted to be doomsday's epicenter, because it sits at the center of an X of the totality paths from both this year's eclipse and the one that graced North America in 2017.

Then, there is a popular theory that the solar eclipse will pass over several towns named Nineveh in the U.S. and Canada. Depending on the post, some have said it’s six towns, others say it’s seven or eight. People propounding this inanity on social media claim it’s notable because Nineveh is also the name of a town that the biblical figure Jonah, visited, and some double down to suggest that an eclipse happened during the biblical visit too. From here, it’s just a hop-skip-and-jump to suggesting that this is a sign from God.

To Sir Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse, KBE, one of my absolute favorite British authors, these conspiracy hucksters are either “Loopy to the Tonsils,” or “Barmy to the Back Teeth.” And yet, despite what “Plummie” (Wodehouse’s nickname) thinks of them, people hawking various end-of-the-world hell-broths, are hauntingly successful. “How’s that?” you ask. “What kind of fools could find an evil conspiracy or divine portent in a TSE?” The same kind of people who believe that the 2020 election was rigged, that no chiidren were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and those who, against virtually every shred of scientific proof, continue “knowing” that the earth is flat.

According to a June 2023 article in psypost.org, “a flat-earther is someone who will have a low level of scientific culture but who nonetheless considers him/herself as someone with a high level of scientific knowledge.” It is terribly difficult for those who tend to find truth in science to understand that no amount of facts are likely to change the minds of flat-earthers or others addicted to the “truths” espoused by lunatics. Conspiracy hucksters, to my way of thinking, are in serious violation of one of the Bible’s most grievous taboos: that of “putting a stumbling block in the path of the blind.” (וְלִפְנֵ֣י עִוֵּ֔ר לֹ֥א תִתֵּ֖ן מִכְשֹׁ֑ל - Lev. 19:14). Those who are in the “stumbling block business” are, to my way of thinking, doing a toxic disservice to a frightened, confused and often grossly unsophisticated segment of society. By their very nature, these merchants of intellectual mayhem are arming their minions to go off to fight a war that will fill their coffers while flattering their egos. And with the geometric growth of social media and now A.I., it is going to become even harder to open the eyes of the blind or the ears of the deaf.

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum notes in her must-read 2020 work Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism:

People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts . . . .
The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, and offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”

To a great extent, these loopy-to-the-tonsils, barmy-to-the-back-teeth conspiracy hucksters are the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Emperors of old: doling out bread and circuses as an expedient means of pacifying discontent, diverting attention away from real, demonstrable truths, and making it safe for autocrats to have their way. There are but 211 days to go until America goes to the polls. (Yes, I know; many of us will be casting and mailing off ballots days - even weeks - before November.) The best strategy I can suggest is that the forces of democracy make a continuous showing on the air, the waves, and the internet repeatedly holding up a megawatt spotlight on the blatant mistruths, the shirking of duty, the utter lack of patriotism, and humility displayed in both words and deeds by the challenger versus the incumbent. For now, more than ever, we need leaders whose conscious allegiance and loyalty are to the Constitution, not a self-professed, would-be dictator.

And for those who will get to see the Total Solar Eclipse . . . drop me a line and tell me all about it! (For those who ask “Rabbi, Is there a proper blessing for observing a solar eclipse?”, I’m afraid the answer is “No . . . just be cautious and feel the power of the universe!”

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categories / Conspiracies

#981: Splitting Rails and Telling Tales

April 03, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

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Question: What do actors Ralph Ince, Sam Drane, George Billings, Joseph Henabery, Francis Ford, Walter Houston, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, John Carradine, Bing Crosby, Gregory Peck, Jason Robards, Jr., Hal Holbrook, John Anderson, Sam Waterston, Kris Kristofferson, Brendon Fraser, Kevin Sorbo, and Daniel Day-Lewis (among many, many others) all have in common?

Henry Fonda in “Young Mr. Lincoln,” 1939, 20th Century Fox

Answer: They all, at one time or another, played Abraham Lincoln on the silver screen. Most film historians agree that ever since the turn of the century (4 score years after Honest Abe’s assassination) until today, there have be more films (at least 200) about America’s 16th President than any other person in human history. And of all the actors to portray Honest Abe on screen, only one - the British born and bred Daniel Day Lewis - took the Oscar for Best Actor.

(There are also more biographies about Lincoln than any other American, including G. Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Donald J. Trump - for which the pestilential predecessor is thoroughly pissed).

From both a cinematic and a literary point of view, Lincoln was - and continues to be - simply too good to be true - just what the doctor ordered: angular and self-taught; an American with a life straight out of Horatio Alger (who, by the way, would not publish his first “boy’s novel” - Paul Prescott's Charge: A Story for Boys - until 1865, the year of Lincoln’s tragic death); he was witty and wise, a great leader and a martyred prophet; a man of mythic proportion who is considered to be the greatest of all American presidents. And, to top it all off, at 6’4”, the tallest of all 46 of that illustrious group.

With his top hat on, Lincoln stood nearly 7’ tall

The mythology surrounding the life of Abraham Lincoln - the kid from Hardin County, Kentucky of a thoroughly undistinguished Virginia family who grew up splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois, who was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, read law and rode the circuit of courts for many years is pretty much the absolute truth. (He did, by the way, wind up being one of the most in-demand and highest-paid railroad attorneys in the country, who could afford to have his suits made by Brooks Brothers.)

His law partner said of him, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” It is utterly remarkable that the hagiography surrounding his early life should be so truthful. It reminds me of the John Cheever short story The Worm in the Apple, in which the narrator discovers that the Crutchmans, a family that seems too perfect to be real, must be hiding a proverbial “worm in their apple” are, in fact, just as good as they seem to be.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln did suffer tremendous emotional and psychological loss in the death of his true love, Anne Rutledge, and yes, his future wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was a difficult person - a harridan by all accounts - which led to her husband’s melancholy (manic depression); nonetheless, he went on to become a brilliant and utterly valorous leader. And oh, how he could spin a tale!

In 1890, a quarter century after Lincoln’s assassination, journalist Alexander McClure, editor of the Philadelphia Times, and one of the founders of the Republican Party, published a large tome entitled Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories. The book contains hundreds of marvelous tales told by a master. Here’s one of my favorites, which still brings a loud guffaw. It’s entitled Done With the Bible. He never told a better one:

A country meeting-house, that was used once a month, was quite a distance from any other house.

The preacher, an old-line Baptist, was dressed in coarse linen pantaloons, and shirt of the same material. The pants, manufactured after the old fashion, with baggy legs, and a flap in the front, were made to attach to his frame without the aid of suspenders.

A single button held his shirt in position, and that was at the collar. He rose up in the pulpit, and with a loud voice announced his text thus: “I am the Christ whom I shall represent to-day.”

About this time a little blue lizard ran up his roomy pantaloons. The old preacher, not wishing to interrupt the steady flow of his sermon, slapped away on his leg, expecting to arrest the intruder, but his efforts were unavailing, and the little fellow kept on ascending higher and higher.

Continuing the sermon, the preacher loosened the central button which graced the waistband of his pantaloons, and with a kick off came that easy-fitting garment.

But, meanwhile, Mr. Lizard had passed the equatorial line of the waistband, and was calmly exploring that part of the preacher’s anatomy which lay underneath the back of his shirt.

Things were now growing interesting, but the sermon was still grinding on. The next movement on the preacher’s part was for the collar button, and with one sweep of his arm off came the tow linen shirt.

The congregation sat for an instant as if dazed; at length one old lady in the rear part of the room rose up, and, glancing at the excited object in the pulpit, shouted at the top of her voice: “If you represent Christ, then I’m done with the Bible.”

Sad to say, were Abraham Lincoln alive and running for the White House in 2024, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting the nomination of the party he founded, let alone getting elected. Why? Well, first and foremost, he had, what laughingly used to be known in Hollywood as “A face made only for radio.” If you think Donald Trump’s bird’s nest hairdo, tailored paunch, and ersatz tan have been the butt of every late-night TV host’s opening monologue, imagine what they would have done with Abe. Then too, there was the matter of his earnestness; he spoke from the heart and refused to slosh about in the political muck ‘n mire like a majority of today’s supposed leaders. He had big dreams and knew how to turn most of them into reality. But most importantly, the average modern American, like the narrator in Cheever’s marvelous short story, is simply too damned cynical, gullible, uninformed, and politically naïve to see what an absolute jewel this man was.

Back in 1938, the great director John Ford approached the young Henry Fonda to star in his next film, “Young Mr. Lincoln.” For an up-and-coming actor like Fonda to star in a film directed by Ford, Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, and penned by the preeminent screenwriter Lamar Trotti should have been a no-brainer. I mean we’re talking about John Ford here; a man who Fonda later described as “A son-of-bitch who happened to be a genius.” And yet, when first asked, Fonda turned Ford down flat.

“What are you,” Ford demanded. “Nuts? Don’t you realize how perfect you’d be for the part?”

“Sorry,” the 33-year-old Fonda replied. “Playing Abraham Lincoln . . . it’s like being asked to play Jesus! I just can’t do it.” Ford, not a man to beg, asked Fonda if he would at least pay a visit to the make-up and wardrobe departments and then do a very brief screen test. Fonda agreed . . . after all, who was he to deny the great Ford a small favor? Fonda went off and spent the better part of a day with makeup stylist Clay Campbell. costume director Sam Benson (who put 3-inch lifts in the 6’1” Fonda’s boots), and then filmed a two-minute scene. By the time Ford put his first in front of the camera lens (which was his custom instead of yelling “Cut!” or “Cease!,” Fonda wanted nothing more in the world than to play the young Lincoln.

And what a choice it turned out to be; the most honest of all American actors portraying the most honest of all American icons.

Do yourself a favor and get hold of a copy of this film; you’ll be glad you did. And who knows? Perhaps it might inspire you to be a bit less cynical, a bit less intolerant of human flaws in essentially good-hearted people who want to serve . . . to unite rather than divide, to split a rail and tell a tale.

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#980: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

March 24, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Believe it or not, back in 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so busy being POTUS that he didn’t really acknowledge he was also in the midst of a presidential campaign until Monday, October 28th. . . a mere 8 days before the election. Republicans were hammering Roosevelt for what they claimed was the nation’s lack of military preparedness, and isolationists and anti-Semites were holding mass demonstrations against America getting involved in Europe. Democrats were alarmed enough to persuade FDR to take to the campaign trail in the final weeks before the election. The Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, seemed to be gaining momentum. Roosevelt fought back in a speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Monday, Oct. 28.

On that date, FDR, perhaps the best pure politician to ever occupy the White House, made his case to the American people, creating a model for how a president can make American leadership abroad a selling point rather than a problem. He named names, and it connected with voters.

In the speech, Roosevelt deployed the full force of his rhetorical talents against three leading Republican isolationist leaders: Mass. Rep. (and future House Speaker) Joseph Martin, the then-House minority leader; N.Y. Rep. Bruce Barton, a conservative ad man and best-selling author who had founded the agency BBDO; and the patrician N.Y. Rep. Hamilton Fish III, who had opposed measures to rearm the nation and aid the victims of Hitler’s aggression.

In the first draft of the speech, the names — Barton, Fish and Martin — were listed in alphabetical order. But during one of their late-night writing sessions, FDR and his speechwriters, Robert Sherwood and Judge Samuel Rosenman (who first coined the term “The New Deal,” and whose daughter Lynn is the wife of Attorney General Merrick Garland), hit on a more rhythmic option: Martin, Barton and Fish. Roosevelt immediately seized on the new rhyming litany. As one aide later recalled, “The president repeated the sequence several times and indicated by swinging his finger how effective it would be with audiences.” Within 2 days, wherever Roosevelt campaigned (whistle-stop speeches), he repeated the rhyming meme to adoring crowds who would drown him out by repeatedly chanting “MARTIN, BARTON, AND FISH!” The 3 became akin to a triple-headed Uriah Heap to FDR’s David Copperfield. It worked well: Roosevelt trounced businessman Wendell Willkie by more than 5 million votes, capturing 41 of the 48 states.

MARTIN, BARTON, AND FISH! It should be noted that Wendell Willkie, unlike so many politicians (which he was decidedly not), and candidates for high office put patriotism before party; he supported FDR’s Lend-Lease program and backed legislation creating the nation’s first peacetime draft. Thanks to its passage, some 1.65 million men were in uniform when America finally entered the war in December 1941. Needless to say, Willkie’s true patriotism - plus the MARTIN, BARTON, AND FISH! chant - made FDR’s reelection to a third term all but inevitable. (It should be noted that Willkie planned on running against Roosevelt again in 1944, but was denied the nomination; he was anathema to a wide swathe of the GOP. He died at age of a massage heart attack at age 52, just weeks before the election.)

Today, it is all but impossible to find (with perhaps the exception of Liz Cheyney) a Republican who will put principle ahead of partisanship. Then too, it is nearly as impossible to imagine President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. employing a slogan that works as brilliantly as FDR’s MARTIN, BARTON, and FISH! Let’s face facts: as good a public speaker as Biden can be, he’s no FDR; indeed, since FDR, the only ones who come close are JFK, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. And of course, both the times and the society in which we live are incredibly different. When FDR spoke to the nation over radio, there were perhaps 5 or 6 microphones sitting in front of him. Today, a speech or campaign stop by Joe Biden has tens of dozens of journalists (some real, some as phony as a 3 dollar bill) videotaping his every word so they may be edited or put through A.I. (artificial intelligence) to make him look like fully-in-charge political figure or an ancient stumblebum who doesn’t know his right from his left.

My suggestion is that President Biden and his campaign staff “show some hair” (as we used to say back in the sixties) and, taking a page from the FDR playbook start putting names in cadence. Shaming and ridiculing the likes of “Gym” Jordan (Chair of the House Judiciary Committee), James Comer (Chair of the House Oversight Committee who never met a high-ranking Democratic member of the Executive Brranch he didn’t want to start impeachment proceedings against), Marjorie Taylor Greene (The Republican Party’s own Tricoteuse (Think Madame Defarge in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities), “Legislative Terrorists” Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, and, of course, Donald Trump himself. And although there is no euphonious twin for "MARTIN, BARTON, and FISH!, perhaps we can come close. How’s about:

JORDAN AND JOHNSON & TRUMP
GAETZ AND GOSAR & TRUMP
TUBERVILLE, HAWLEY & TRUMP
STEFANIK, SCALISE & TRUMP

If anyone reading this piece has their own meme of political names, please drop me an email . . .

Unquestionably, there are more members of Congress and their cult leader whose names can become as effective as MARTON, BARTON & FISH, or as historic as TINKERS TO EVERS TO CHANCE. The main point is to use them as derisive needles. And they have earned these needles. So many of the new class of MAGAite Republicans elected to office have not come to Congress to get things done on behalf of the American people, but rather to undo virtually anything and everything the legislative branch has done since the days long ago when FDR’s speechwriters shot arrows bearing the names of MARTIN, BARTON &FISH!

They have earned our scorn and contempt; they deserve to be forced through a gauntlet of ridicule. Who knows, may, just maybe, Donald Trump himself - whose existence is stretched between the Scylla of financial ruin and the Charybdis of global humiliation - might give vent to his final public tantrum.

Between Trump and his congressional sycophants, they just can’t keep from going against the public will; of proving time and again that they are as unqualified a group of “leaders” as this country has ever seen or known. In refusing to pass a bipartisan bill regarding America’s Southern border (which had great bipartisan support) or backing off support for the Ukraine (which they originally supported), they made the kind of headlines no one wants. Time and again they have shown that these MAGA Republicans (like Gaetz & Gosar or Jordan & Johnson, or Stefanik & Scalise) have only one criterion: following the marching orders of Donald Trump. Through their (in)actions, they are digging their own political graves.

Which is why this article came to be entitled “The Gift That Keeps on Giving.”

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#979 Paul Alexander: Inspiration and Determination; Validation and Immunization

March 18, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Throughout childhood, our maternal grandmother, Anne Kagan, would frequently read aloud to us her favorite poems from a dog-eared volume entitled One Hundred and One Famous Poems. Unbeknownst to us, she was providing the two of us with a glorious, absolutely pain-free introduction to some of the English language’s greatest (and occasionally, long-forgotten) wordsmiths. Time and again we would listen to her read (and quite dramatically, I must say), from Keats (Ode On a Grecian Urn), and Byron She Walks in Beauty); to Kipling (If) and Wordsworth (She Was a Phantom of Delight); and from Whittier (The Barefoot Boy) to Kilmer (Trees).

A couple of days ago, I read the obituary of a man named Paul Alexander . . . a man who, due to polio, was forced to live from ages 6 to 78 in an iron lung. The opening paragraph of the New York Times obit told the entire story: Alexander relied on the machine to breathe. Still, he was able to earn a law degree, write a book and, late in life, buil[t] a following on TikTok.

The poem his utterly remarkable life brought to mind was Frank Lebby Stanton’s Keep A-Going!, whose opening stanza I can still hear Grandma Anne reciting from memory:

Ef you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin'!
Ef it hails, or ef it snows,
Keep a-goin!
'Taint no use to sit an' whine,
When the fish ain't on yer line;
Bait yer hook an' keep a-tryin'—
Keep a-goin'!

I really, really urge you to read Mr. Alexander’s obituary. The story of his life is truly remarkable; in its own way, it rivals that of Helen Keller, who despite being blind and deaf, somehow managed through determination and pluck, a remarkable caretaker and a “never say die” attitude, managed to become the first deafblind individual to graduate from college (Radcliffe College, class of 1904), become a prominent lecturer and author (12 books) and learned to “hear” people’s speech via the Tadoma Method, in which she used her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. Keller even wrote her first autobiography while studying at Radcliffe. Without question, she, like Paul Alexander, are among history’s greatest inspirations.

In 1952, the then 6-year old Paul was stricken with Polio. It came on seemingly in a day, quickly paralyzed limbs and and left him incapable of breathing on his own - the muscles which control respiration had become incapable of movement. He was quickly placed in an “iron lung,” became worse and worse, and was eventually sent home from hospital to die at home. But he did not. When he was 8, Paul learned to breathe on his own for up to three minutes by gulping in air “like a fish” and swallowing it into his lungs, he told The Dallas Morning News years later. He told the newspaper that he was motivated to learn to breathe by a caregiver who offered him a puppy if he tried to learn to breathe on his own. He got his puppy, and it later became the inspiration for the title of his book, Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung. He learned to write by gripping a long, narrow tube with his teeth; at the end of the tube was a pen or pencil. By painstakingly moving his head, he could put words to paper. He managed to graduate from law school, and was a practicing attorney for more than 30 years . . . all the while being trapped (except for upwards of 3 hours a day) in his iron lung. At his death this week, there is now but one person still living in such a device.

Those of us who were children in the 1950s well remember the panic and fear that Poliomyelitis caused. As children, we had no idea of what caused it and had nightmares about catching it. During the early 1950s, 25,000 to 50,000 new cases of polio occurred each year. Jonas Salk (1914–1995) became a national hero when he allayed the fear of the dreaded disease with his polio vaccine, approved in 1955. Although it was the first polio vaccine, it was not to be the last; Albert Bruce Sabin (1906–1993) introduced an oral vaccine in the United States in the 1960s that replaced Salk’s. (The main difference between the two vaccines was that Salk’s - the first - was made with a “killed” virus and administered by tiny needle pricks on the upper arm, while Sabin’s was made with a live though weakened [attenuated] virus and was administered orally via a sugar cube). By the 1970s, Poliomyelitis was essentially eradicated . . . along with the post-war era’s other monster pediatric stay-home-from-school issues: mumps, measles and chickenpox. Today, those 70 years and older have memories of staying home from school; of spots; of having to stay in darkened rooms and calamine lotion; of “chipmunk cheeks” and the possibility of lethal sequelae (side effects) such as a brain infection called encephalitis, which causes it to swell. And then there was chicken-pox, which caused unbelievable pruritus (eternal itching) and necessitated keeping one’s nails very, very short. Some of us still bear its tiny scars . . . especially on the arms, legs and cheeks.

Although these mostly childhood diseases were finally brought under control because of vaccines - Salk, Sabin and “MMR” (mumps-measles-rubella) - the science behind them fired up debates that continue to this day. Why? Partly because many post “Baby Boom Generation” folks (and their children and grandchildren) don’t know drek from shinola about history; they simply have little or no knowledge of these childhood diseases, and claim to have “knowledge” (gained largely through mis- and disinformation spread by social media) that vaccines are a hoax, science itself is a hoax; that when a governmental body or agency mandates children to be immunized before attending school this is a breach of parental authority . . . or part of a Zionist conspiracy (remember: both Salk and Sabin were Jewish) or the CDC is a mere lapdog of the liberals . . . or a thousand other things. Here in Florida, our Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, M.D. recently said in a letter that parents at an elementary school with confirmed measles cases can decide whether their children should attend school. This simply contradicts widespread medical guidance about how to keep the disease from spreading. And spreading it is. However, in all fairness to “The Doctor from Perdition” he’s merely serving the man who hired him, Governor Ron DeSantis, with every ounce of his being. I’m sure he must have learned in his Infectious Diseases course at Harvard Med. that Measles is one of the world’s most infectious diseases. Cases and deaths have been rising across the globe, in part because health officials have struggled to vaccinate people in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and growing vaccine hesitancy.

The same goes for Polio - the disease which kept Paul Alexander imprisoned in an iron lung for more than 90% of his life. It has resurfaced . . . in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and the United States. Answering the question “why now?” isn’t totally clear. However, at base, it seems to stem from a growing percentage of the child population not being vaccinated at an early age. Then too, there is the whole “anti-vaxxer” craze in which “knowledgeable” parents refuse to have their children immunized with the aforementioned “MMR” vaccine because they have “read” that it can lead to autism. And even if you were to ask most anti-vaxxers “which studies state this?” they will be mute. Professional anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who is now running as an independent for POTUS) will site 2 studies - both of which were determined to be fatally flawed. The 2 studies, which were published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet (Published since 1823, it’s on a par with the Journal of the American Medical Association) were so egregiously, so dangerously flawed, that Wakefield (1956- ) was struck off the medical register in the United Kingdom - tantamount to losing his license to practice. And yet, even if anti-vaxxers don’t know his name and cannot identify The Lancet, they continue spouting their bilge.

I think I understand why an ever- growing number of people believe in anti-vaxx myths; they are afraid, frustrated and taught to distrust science and the so-called “intellectual elite.” What I cannot fathom are the creators and perpetrators of all these dangerous myths; what’s behind their willful perfidy? Is it for political gain? Is it for profit or ego enhancement? Or is it for picking off “low-hanging fruit” on the tree of society, in order to eventually fell the tree itself?

It is a pity that a significant percentage of the so-called “enlightened” populace are anti-science . . . in the name of personal liberty or religious freedom. I think of Paul Alexander who, if he’d only been born a few years later, would likely have received a Salk vaccine and would never have had to live out his life in an iron lung. What he was able to accomplish despite this multi-ton millstone that kept him alive is a story for the ages . . . and hopefully a source of inspiration for us all.

When it looks like all is up,
Keep a-going’!
Drain the sweetness from the cup,
Keep a-agoin’!
See the wild birds on the wing,
Hear the bells that sweetly ring,
When you feel like singin’ - SING —
Keep a-going’!

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categories / Obituary, Medical Ethics, Conspiracies

#978: Caffeine, Crucifixes and Cleavage

March 12, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Over the past 96 hours - the time since Joseph R. Biden concluded his 3rd - and by all measures best - State of the Union (SOTU) of his presidency, things have been going pretty damn well for the Democrats. For not only did Biden receive nearly universal applause for his barnburner of a speech; he all but erased the nasty nickname “Sleepy Joe” from the airwaves. Those on the other side of the political aisle who have long portrayed him as a doddering octogenarian likely suffering from pre-senile dementia, are now accusing him of having been “over caffeinated” during his historic address. Even Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, long accustomed to trashing “Uncle Joe” with such front-page headlines as Where’s Joe?, He Said What?, Biden’s Secret Emails, and Glazed and Confused, were forced to damn him with faint praise with the two-word headline He’s Alive!” Of course, in smaller print the front page article says “Bitter exchanges over border,” and “Tax raid on the rich.” Sometimes you just can’t win for losing.

Within 24 hours of giving his SOTU address, the Biden campaign raised more than $10 million in donations from more than 116,000 supporters. Compare this to the Trump campaign/Republican National Committee, which is, as the saying goes, “Down on its uppers.” Most of their cash is going to pay for their boss’s legal bills. The very next day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added upwards of 275,000 new jobs in February, easily besting the Wall street Journal ‘s 200,000 prediction.

Does this mean that the MAGAites are going to stop accusing the President of being a doddering codger? Of course not; I’m sure they’ve already put together a edited version of Biden’s SOTU showing nothing but his rhetorical stumbles and coughs. The only thing they have to worry about is that the Dems also have their own edited takes on all times the “Predecessor” has stomped on his tongue or lapsed into incomprehensible Klingon-speak over just the past week. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander . . . but not so good for Democracy. Would the MAGA cultists on Capitol Hill give Joe Biden at least a couple of days off from their normal stridency? Of course not; as I write this, CSPAN is broadcasting a hearing on why Biden should be impeached for hiding secret documents.

But let’s go back to last Thursday night; what happened within minutes after President Biden’s resounding peroration: the rebuttal by 1st-term Alabama Senator Katie Britt. And what a tone-deaf address it was. She wasn’t as bad as then Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal when he gave the rebuttal back in 2009; she was far, far worse. She wasn’t as much of an amateurish joke as Florida Senator Marco “Water Bottle” Rubio in 2015; her appearance and deliverance (not to mention the June Cleaver kitchen mise en scène) were far too bizarre to be a mere joke. Even Arkansas Senator Sarah Huckabee Sanders did a better job last year . . . sticking almost exclusively to how President Biden and the Democrats were nothing more than tools of left-wing “woke” culture. Jindal Rubio, Huckabee Sanders and now Britt all came in with high expectations; their rebuttals were tryouts for future positions in future Republican administrations. All failed the test; none will ever be POTUS or even VPOTUS.

Britt’s response was so out-there that even as she was speaking, bloggers and podcasters were asking who would portray her on the next Saturday Night Live. Tom Nichols, (@RadioFreeTom) posted at 11:01 that night, There is no way that this Katie Britt address does not end up as part of the SNL cold open. Within minutes his comment had gone viral. The View’s cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin, referring to what she called Britt's ASMR freakiness called it "a disaster from start to finish," pointing out the bad optics of the senator choosing to film her speech in a kitchen — just in time for International Women’s Day. Not to be outdone, Joy Behar put in her own two cents: "Get some medication, Katie. I haven’t seen acting that bad since my wedding night," she joked. "So, which genius in that party decided that she was the perfect spokesperson? I’ve never seen mood swings like this. One minute she’s like [sobbing noise], then she’s like gonna take a knife and stab you. Then she’s laughing like an idiot. What is wrong with her? She’s like Sybil . . . the girl needs mood elevators." (NB: “ASMR,” which stands for autonomous sensory meridian response is a term used to describe a tingling, static-like, or goosebumps sensation in response to specific triggering audio or visual stimuli.)

For those who did not see it, actress Scarlett Johannson absolutely nailed Britt . . . both in look and delivery Her opening lines:

“My name is Katie Britt and I have the honor of serving the great people of Alabama. But tonight I’ll be auditioning the part of scary mom performing an original monologue called ‘This Country is Hell.”

The end of her 17-minute kitchen chat - in which she parroted Britt’s We see you. We hear you. We feel you,” had Johansson add And we smell you. We are inside you. We are inside your fridge. And what do we find there? MIGRANTS.

Where Johansson ‘s parody was both brilliant and hilarious, Senator Britt’s presentation was both haunting and toxic. To paraphrase the end of T.S. Elliott’s The Hollow Men:

This is the way the rebuttal ends

Not with a smile but a sniffle.

In many ways, Senator Britt was the ideal person to deliver the Republican response to Joe Biden. Her selection tells us a great deal about who the Party of the Predecessor is aiming to attract and what values they hoped her presence would imply:

Younger voters: At 41 (and the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate), she is but half the age of Joe Biden.
Women and especially mothers: Almost the first words out of her mouth were “I am a wife and most importantly, a mother . . .”
The Family Values Crowd: clearly wearing a crucifix, hanging somewhat ironically above just a hint of cleavage (like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert), talking about sitting around the kitchen table and discussing their concerns as a family, and standing in a kitchen which may well have been a “green screen” creation. (I mean, when was the last time you saw a real refrigerator without a single magnetized note, report card or photograph on it, or a countertop without a bowl of fruit or a plant?)

The past several days have brought into extraordinary and obvious focus the extreme differences between the newly-refashioned Republican (aka MAGA) Party and the Democrats. When it comes to platforms, the Democrats - whether one agrees in toto or not - at least have fully articulated specifics, and Republicans next to nothing other than bromides and wistful images of times long ago. Where Democrats have dreams they would love to create in an ideal world - dreams that for the most part benefit the many over the few - the Republicans have nightmares - nightmares in which Democracy is what they say it is.

Republicans want us to live in Katie Britt’s kitchen, as if it really exists and we could all afford it. They wish for the nuclear family to sit down to dinner every night - sans televisions, and I-phones and have mom serve a home-cooked meal while the children all say “please” and “thanks.” But this dream - as nostalgically nice as it may seem - would require a time machine . . . or a world which stands before a cosmic green screen,

If we’re ever going to take steps towards healing this world, we’ve got to begin with the search for what is best, and not worst, in one another. We will have to bring into sharper focus that which we demand of others as opposed to that which we are glad to overlook in ourselves. Otherwise, our war of words is going to become an open and bloody battlefield.

I conclude with a bit of wisdom my slightly older sister Erica sent me the other day. (With every passing year, she becomes wiser, wittier and more understanding)

Times zones are weird. In Europe it is today; in Australia it is tomorrow. And in Alabama, it is 1890 . . .

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#977: Putin on 'da Blitz

March 05, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

(Note: The title of this essay is, for those in the know, a word-play on a popular 1927 song by the great Irvin Berlin entitled “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” a slang expression meaning “to dress very fashionably.” There are 2 versions of the song: the original late ‘20s rendition in which the “swells” are Black Harlemites, and the updated 1946 version in which the nabobs are Park Avenue dandies. The latter version is known for the lyric “Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper/Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper”).

Rally for the “Hollywood Ten” (Dalton Trumbo holding microphone)

For the past 7 weeks (with 1 week left to go), I have been presenting a film course at Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter campus, on films written by the masterful two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. He was easily one of the best and most versatile wordsmiths in the 100+ year history of Hollywood. His masterpieces ranged from the romantic (Kitty Foyle and Roman Holiday) to film noir (He Ran All the Way and Gun Crazy), historic spectacle (Spartacus and Exodus), guts and glory war pictures (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo) adventure (Papillon - his last) and two-hankie weepers (Our Vines Have Tender Grapes and The Brave One).

Despite his glowing track record, Trumbo - along with fellow screenwriters John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Cole, Ring Lardner, and Herbert Bieberman, as well as director Edward Dmytryk were sent to prison and essentially blacklisted from the Hollywood film industry as members of the “Hollywood Ten.” Their crime? Members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as what used to be called “Ladies’ Groups”, leading Hollywood gossip columnists (Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Walter Winchell et al), and the Catholic Legion of Decency declared them to be “Communists,” “Communists sympathizers” and “Premature Anti-Fascists.” Eventually the net spread out by the so-called “defenders of 100% Americanism” ensnared hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of actors, editors, cinematographers, musical directors, and trade unionists; some went from the sound stages of Hollywood to the stages of Broadway or the microphones of radio; many lost their jobs, some packed up their families and went into exile; a handful even committed suicide.

Looking back on the politics of that dark, dark time, it is easy to see that the vast majority of those behind the “Reds Under the Beds” scare were staunch ultra-conservatives - largely midwestern Republicans and Southern Democrats. Many were racist or anti-Semitic. Whether or not they really, truly believed all the rhetoric they spewed or had simply found anti-Communism to be a great tool with which to climb the political ladder, is still unknowable. Many reveled in having the ability to look into the eyes of a Hollywood personality and ask, for seemingly the millionth time “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?”

Frequently, the evidence used against a witness to “prove” that they were a “Red” (or a “Pink,” in the vocabulary of the era) was as thin as a sheet of Kleenex. Case in point, Trumbo was asked if he wrote the film “Tender Comrade,” which, at one point, had Ginger Rogers say “Share and share alike . . . that’s the democratic way.” “Yes, Trumbo responded. When he explained that the term “Tender Comrade” came not from his pen but rather from a poem that the late Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses among other wonderful works) had written for his wife. Trumbo read aloud a few lines from Stevenson’s poem, simply entitled My Wife (1896): To my wife: Teacher, tender, comrade, wife. A fellow-farer in life . . . “ The Congressman who asked Trumbo the question then asked, “Was this Stevenson a Fellow Traveler like you?” Shades of Jim Jordan!

There is an old saw which states “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The way things have been going these past several years, I must conclude that this adage must be tossed out. Why? 75 years ago, when Dalton Trumbo and his ilk were facing a Republican-led inquisition those sitting above them were staunchly anti-Communist. Anything - ANYTHING - that smacked of Joseph Stalin, Russia or collectivism, liberalism or universalism was the work of the Devil . . . evil incarnate. Today, large parts of the Republican Party (a.k.a. “The Party of Trump”) treat Vladimir Putin as if he were an ideological ally. Putin, by contrast, continues to treat the U.S. as an enemy. How the Trumps, Jordans, Tubbervilles, and (Mike) Johnsons of this world support the blitz against Democracy that comes from Putin’s Kremlin, Viktor Mihály Orbán’s Hungary and other autocrats with blood on their hands is incomprehensible.

For quite a few years, the loyal opposition has believed that the FPOTUS must walk in lockstep with Putin because the latter has some salacious scandal - with or without photos and video - with which to keep him in line. Whether true or not, I think it goes far, far deeper. As David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick wrote in a recent piece in the New York Times: Trump and many other Republicans seem to feel ideological sympathies with Putin’s version of right-wing authoritarian nationalism. They see the world dividing between a liberal left and an illiberal right, with both themselves and Putin — along with Viktor Orban of Hungary and some other world leaders — in the second category.

Already, House Republicans have blocked further aid to Ukraine — a democracy and U.S. ally that Putin invaded. Without the aid, military experts say Russia will probably be able to take over more of Ukraine than it now holds.

If Trump wins a second term, he may go further. He has suggested that he might abandon the U.S. commitment to NATO, an alliance that exists to contain Russia and that Putin loathes. He recently invited Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t spend enough on their own defense. (Near the end of his first term, he tried to pull American troops out of Germany, but President Biden rescinded the decision.)

Trump has also avoided criticizing Putin for the mysterious death this month of his most prominent domestic critic, Aleksei Navalny, and has repeatedly praised Putin as a strong and smart leader. In a town hall last year, Trump refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine or Russia to win the war.

There are some caveats worth mentioning. Some skepticism about how much money the U.S. should send to Ukraine stems from practical questions about the war’s endgame. It’s also true that some prominent Republicans, especially in the Senate, are horrified by their party’s pro-Russian drift and are lobbying the House to pass Ukraine aid. “If your position is being cheered by Vladimir Putin, it’s time to reconsider your position,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah said last month.

The shift in elite Republican opinion toward Russia and away from Ukraine has influenced public opinion.

Shortly after Russia invaded, about three-quarters of Republicans favored giving Ukraine military and economic aid, according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Now, only about half do.

Republican voters are also less likely to hold favorable views of Zelensky. In one poll, most Trump-aligned Republicans even partly blamed him for the war. Republicans also support NATO at lower rates than Democrats and independents, a shift from the 1980s. These are the kinds of things that those speaking on behalf of the Democratic Party should be warning American voters about. Republican fascination with Putin and Russia is real. - and extraordinarily dangerous to the future of democracy.

And whether they realize it or not, the Russian autocrat is “Putin on ‘da blitz.”

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categories / All Politics All the Time

#976: Just So Long As There's Something in the Glass

February 26, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Just about everyone is familiar with the old saw that goes “The optimist sees the glass as being half full; the pessimist sees the glass as being half empty.” Years ago, I decided that there was actually a third option. This axiom states “As long as there’s something in the glass, there’s always the possibility of hope” I believe this is especially true in the world of politics. How so? Well, if one is overly pessimistic about the outcome of, say, an election or an issue, there is the likelihood that they will sit on their hands and let reality take its nasty course. Then too, frequently an optimist will sit back and await the good news . . . which may never come. The one who finds a ray of hope in what others may find to be either utterly hopeless or a lead-pipe cinch, is more likely to roll up their sleeves and take part in turning hope into reality.

Depending on where you live in these United States, there are just as many prospects for optimism as pessimism. As an example, a staunch Democrat has every reason to feel optimistic if they vote in, say, California, New York or Rhode Island, and every reason to feel pessimistic - if not downright hopeless - if they reside and vote in, say, Alabama, Oklahoma or a majority of Florida. Let’s face it: would take as much of a miracle for Republicans to control the legislature in California or Hawaii as it would for Democrats to rule in Texas or Missouri. Being a progressive Democrat in Florida, I am grateful that we live in the only liberal part of the state; at least those we vote for are likely to be be elected . . . even if they will be part of a tiny minority up in Tallahassee. When it comes to my part of the state, I am an optimist; when it comes to the legislature I am a pessimist; when it comes to capturing the governor’s mansion, I am hopeful. Thank G-d for their being something in the glass.

Every once in a while optimists get their electoral comeuppance because the hopeful have created a miracle. Without question, the presidential election of 1948, which pitted the incumbent Harry S. (“Give ‘em Hell Harry”) Truman (D) against New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey (whom Alice Longworth Roosevelt stuck with the moniker "The Little Man on the Wedding Cake”). Pundits and pollsters alike "knew” that Dewey would win in a landslide. So much so that nearly every newspaper in America carried the same frontpage headline on November 2: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN! As things turned out, those who believed the glass half full lost not to those who saw the glass as half empty, but rather to those - the hopeful - who made sure their fellows went to the polls and voted for the man from Independence. And they saw things, there was something in the glass.

Depending on which side of the aisle you occupy these days, there’s plenty of room or reason for optimism or pessimism. MAGA-ites from Florida to Washington State along with their allies in the various state legislatures as well as the Clown Car Caucus on Capitol Hill, see the political glass overflowing. They firmly believe that G-d’s savior will once again occupy the White House (even if they have to steal the election); that abortion for any reason will be outlawed at the national level; that America will "return” to being a nation of, by and for White Christians; and that LGBT+ people pay the price for defiling G-d’s word and will. Meanwhile, optimists see the tide turning. They believe that finally - finally - Donald Trump will be hit with the two things he most hates and fears: losing his fortune (and thus his name) and forever being identified in the history books as America’s “most notorious grifter and biggest loser.” I believe it will be left to the hopefuls - those who find both strength and motivation in there being something in the glass - of doing whatever is in their power to right the wrongs of the lethal optimists whose world-view could signal the death of democracy. In short, I am hopeful that together, we can turn back the tide of “Trumptastrophe.”

There is far more pessimism than optimism - and just plain fear - emendating from the latest and bloodiest conflict in the Middle East. That which began with a bloody attack on the part of Hamas on October 7 of last year, has metathesized throughout the region and threatens to spread still further. Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen firing missiles and drones at vessels in the Red Sea (which in turn led British and American warplanes to hit missile systems and launchers and other targets); Hezbollah launching missile attacks from Lebanon into Northern Israel; Israel decimating Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians while trying to destroy Hamas; a vexing and dangerous increase in anti-Semitism all over Europe as well as on Ivy League campuses here in the United States . . . the glass keeps draining.

Where it would be both easy and completely understandable to see the glass as being far more than half empty, I am contenting myself with seeing something in the glass. In other words, there just may be a few hopeful signs on the horizon:

After a mostly successful round of talks in Paris last week, negotiations, aimed at securing a temporary cease-fire and the release of some hostages, will continue between an Israeli delegation and mediators from the U.S., Qatar and Egypt. It was announced earlier today (2/25/2024) that an Israeli delegation is expected to arrive in Qatar as soon as tomorrow for intensive talks with mediators aimed at closing the gaps around a new deal for a temporary cease-fire with Hamas and the release of some hostages held in Gaza - this according to an Israeli official familiar with the negotiations.

In last week’s discussions in Paris, Israel’s delegation agreed to a basic outline for a deal that would involve a six-week truce and the exchange of about 40 hostages captive in the enclave for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, The numbers of hostages and prisoners will likely change over the course of further negotiations, the Israeli officials cautioned. Recent discussions around a potential hostage deal have focused on the release of women, elderly and wounded captives.

For the first time, Israeli politicians and political influencers are beginning to imagine out loud what a next step could look like in Gaza. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's newly released plan for Gaza's future lacks much innovation, but it could fit into the outline formulated by the international community. The important question is when will Israel withdraw from the Gaza Strip and allow for its rehabilitation to begin. His proposal, which calls for indefinite Israeli military control and buffer zones in the territory, rankled Arab nations and was rejected by Palestinians. This is not surprising; Bibi must dance to the tune played by his cabinet’s right flank (read: ultra-Orthodox, ultra-Nationalist) if he is to remain in power. Like his American counterpart, Donald Trump, the Israeli P.M. needs to remain in office in order to cloak himself in ministerial immunity in his ongoing corruption trials.

Influential members of the international press - including Serge Schmemann, a member of the New York Times editorial board and the former longtime Jerusalem bureau chief for “America’s Paper of Record,” has recently written about Marwan Barghouti, a long imprisoned terrorist who is considered by many to be the Palestinian’s Nelson Mandela. Unlike most Palestinian leaders, Barghouti has long accepted a two-state solution, speaks Hebrew, and learned diplomacy as a young up-and-coming assistant to Yasir Arafat. Barghouti, now in his mid 60’s, was part of Arafat’s team that helped create the Oslo Accords. During his time in the United States, he proved himself to be open and available to the press, warm and engaging.

The search for a Palestinian leader has become more pressing, as the attention of Israel’s allies and its Arab neighbors turns to “after Gaza,” as Israelis refer to what will follow the extraordinarily destructive and deadly war there. Negotiations involving the United States and Arab states for a way to stop the fighting are intensifying, and one crucial unresolved question is whether there is anyone not linked to Hamas or the corruption in the Palestinian Authority who could take charge in a ravaged Gaza and replace the unpopular leader in the West Bank, the 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas.

Ami Ayalon, a highly decorated Israeli official who had served as naval commander in chief, head of the internal Shin Bet security service and cabinet member, recently referred to Barghouti as “The only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.”

Even before completing, editing, recording and posting this blog piece, I can hear the jeers and catcalls from some of my readers who love to prove how little I know about virtually anything; calling me a fool, a dupe and a naïve self-hating Jew. Fortunately, over the course of a reasonably long life, I’ve developed a pretty thick hide and a desire to feel hopeful whenever I see at least a few drops in the glass.

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categories / Israel

#975: Heroism vs. Cowardice: Alexei Navalny vs Vladimir Putin, Joseph Biden vs Donald Trump and Mike Johnson

February 20, 2024 / Kurt F. Stone

Alexei Navalny (June 4, 1976 — February 16, 2024)

The late Alexei Navalny - who died (murdered, actually) just a few days ago in an icy-cold Russian gulag - and former president Donald Trump, have precisely 2 things in common: first, both will be remembered by history (albeit for totally different reasons) until the end of time and second, neither man will ever be awarded the Nobel Prize. In the first instance, of course, Navalny has earned his eternal niche as a hero among heroes; a world-class political organizer who gave millions upon millions of people hope in a time and a place where human degradation was a - if, indeed, not “the” - operating principle of a brutal autocratic regime. Trump’s place, on the other hand, will always be part of a different archive: one sparsely peopled with history’s most malevolent, narcissistic, self-serving, self-deluded cowards.

(n.b.: It should be noted that since 1974, the Nobel Foundation’s charter disallows prizes, regardless of category, to be awarded posthumously).

Within hours of the announcement that Navalny had died “while taking a walk” around the frozen prison grounds, nearly every leader or person of political influence or importance in virtually every small ”d” democratic country expressed their profound sympathies to the fallen lawyer/activist’s family and followers, and utter outrage and contempt at Russian President Vladimir Putin, who unquestionably had Navalny killed. The one gaping hole in the litany of leaders expressing their thoughts, feelings, and outrage was Donald Trump and the vast, vast majority of Republicans in the U.S.A., who, either through sheer cowardice or a not-so-well-hidden admiration for the Russian autocrat and his thugs, decided to remain mum.

There can be no question that Mr. Navalny, Putin’s most strident and best-known nemesis, was murdered. Most of Putin’s victims “fall out” of second-floor windows or die from exotic poisons or nerve agents. (Indeed, less than 24 hours ago, Maksim Kuzmanov, a Russian pilot who defected to the Ukraine, was “shot dead” in Spain.”)

In addressing Navalny’s death, President Biden said,

Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny's death. What happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin's brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world. . . What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled — not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world. Putin does not only target his [the] citizens of other countries, as we’ve seen what’s going on in Ukraine right now, he also inflicts terrible crimes on his own people.
And as people across Russia and around the world are mourning Navalny today because he was so many things that Putin was not: He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and of — where it applied to everybody. Navalny believed in that Russia — that Russia. He knew it was a cause worth fighting for and, obviously, even dying for.

Biden concluded by saying: He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.

Shortly after the President made his remarks, democratically-elected leaders from nations around the globe began issuing their own statements; echoing the Biden’s sentiments - both on the positive and the negative side of the equation; praising and eulogizing both Navalny’s patriotic charisma and heroic grit, while excoriating and condemning the homicidal psychopathy of Vladimir Putin . . . the man who murders anyone who gets in his way.

Finally . . . finally, 72 hours after Navalny’s murder, Donald Trump, head of the MAGA Party and putative Republican Party candidate for POTUS, made his first and, so far, only statement . . . in which he never so much as uttered the words “Russia” or “Putin.” Having written and delivered thousands of eulogies in my rabbinic career, I’ve got to tell you: this one was sui generis (iunprecidented): a eulogy in which the eulogizer speaks only about himself and not the deceased.

Here, in its entirety are the 63 words he wrote on Truth Social, of which only 2 are devoted to the deceased:

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.

It makes one wonder what in the Hell Putin has on Trump that the latter won’t even utter the name of the former for fear that . . . what? It’s got to be a doozy. Meanwhile, Trump’s cultists, in keeping with their master’s tortured silence, have kept suit and, likewise, maintained their own craven, pigeon-hearted reticence. The assassination of Navalny comes as the GOP is under the thrall of Putin. Trump and congressional Republicans are doing Putin’s work by refusing to provide supplemental funding for Ukraine. MAGA poster boy Tucker Carlson provided a platform last week for Putin to spread his lies about Russia’s history and territorial claims—including his claim that Ukraine is “not really a separate country.” Even Putin was derisive of Tucker Carlson’s pathetic interview. Putin Says He Thought Tucker Carlson Would Ask Tougher Questions.

The heroism of Navalny highlights the craven cowardice of both Donald Trump and House Republicans. Speaker Mike Johnson. for his part, Johnson is damaging US foreign policy so he won’t have to provoke the ire of Trump’s strongest, most obnoxious devotee, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Remember, Johnson’s Speakership hangs by a thread that is even thinner and more fragile than the sword swinging about the head of Damocles. In his mind, should he do the right thing and bring the Ukraine/Israel aid bill to the floor, his head will be quickly become separated from the rest of his anatomy.

Against Mike Johnson’s cowardice (emblematic of all congressional Republicans) is the heroism of Alexei Navalny. In anticipation of his own assassination, Navalny left these words to those who remained behind:

“If they decide to kill me, then it means we are incredibly strong.

We need to utilize this power and not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed . . . . We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing,, so don’t be inactive.”

My friends and readers: go with the heroes and heroines (like Navalny’s widow Yulia, who has sworn to keep up his mission) and do everything in your power to fight the cowardice of the Trumps, Johnsons, Greenes and Tubervillles of this world . . . and always remember Alexei’s self-written epitaph.

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categories / All Politics All the Time, The Coming Autocracy