LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FELON IN CHIEF

 

WHAT JIMMY CARTER MEANS TO ME

 

Today we said farewell to Jimmy Carter, perhaps the most underrated president, statesman and diplomat in the history of the United States. The former president died on December 29^th, at the age of one hundred, prior to which, he was the oldest living president in US history. His state funeral services were held today in Washington, although his mortal remains will now be returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, for burial there.

Even in dying, President Carter demonstrated his stubborn will and resilience. Lucid to the last, he had said he would live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris for president, and did. I can’t help but wonder if , given Vice President Harris’s loss, he didn’t also promise himself to give up the ghost before Donald Trump took office again. 

No matter how anyone views the thirty-ninth president’s single term in office, no one, even more or less in his or her right mind, can be dismissive of the superior moral, ethical and humanitarian standards that marked President Carter’s long and accomplished life and service. Not even President-elect Trump, who always seems ready and able to say something derogatory about some of America’s most admirable people. In the case of Jimmy Carter, Trump surprisingly wrote: “Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History… The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Of course, that hasn’t kept the president-elect from expressing his fury that, thanks to the timing of President Carter’s death, the flag will be at half-staff during the Trump inauguration on January 20^th. (I’m imagining Jimmy’s genuine, toothy grin and a cosmic onery wink to his most ardent fans as I write this). Perhaps that was something that crossed Trump’s mind when he decided, after ranting insanely about annexing Canada, buying Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, to also include “taking back the Panama Canal”, and not ruling out using military force to do so. It’s worth recalling that a major achievement of the Carter Administration was to sign accords with Panama to end US imperialism in the country’s Canal Zone, and to thus return full and effective sovereignty to that Central American nation, while ensuring unrestricted international use of that vital sea link between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

While historic, however, that was not the highest achievement of his brief presidency.  The greatest of his presidential accomplishments was his astute and persistent brokering of peace between Israel and Egypt, leading to the signing of the so-called Camp David Accords of September 1978. Prior to that time, the two countries had fought each other in four wars—the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49, following which the State of Israel was founded, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973—while, in the meantime, barely maintaining a fragile suspension of hostilities.

An ever-stubbornly determined Carter’s peace efforts culminated in a summit between the Egyptian president, Field Marshall Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the Camp David Presidential Retreat. President Carter’s relentless diplomacy and vocation for peace led all three men to remain at Camp David for nearly two weeks straight until an agreement acceptable to both parties in dispute could be hammered out and signed. The agreement ended more than three decades of hostility between the two nations, with Carter negotiating a major commitment from Begin for the return to Egyptian control over territory that Israel had illegally seized on the Sinai Peninsula.

The peace treaty that resulted from the Camp David talks and accords remains in effect and without violation to this day, nearly a half-century later, maintaining a sound peace between those two Middle East neighbors. This, despite the fact that Sadat literally gave his life for that peace. On October 6, 1981, he was assassinated by extremist members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who had long opposed the bilateral peace pact. But his murder appears only to have fortified the resolve of both countries to keep the agreement for which President Carter had served as peacemaker.

The following year, President Carter sat down in Vienna with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to negotiate a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, better known as SALT II. Despite Brezhnev’s reputation as a hardliner, and largely thanks to President Carter’s diplomacy and understanding of positive compromise, an agreement was reached and an accord signed by the two men.

It was as that major agreement was being delivered to the US Senate for ratification, however, that the  Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. True to his staunch commitment to world peace and non-aggression, Carter withdrew the treaty from congressional consideration. But despite that ethical stance against Soviet expansionism, President Carter kept the lines of communication open between the White House and the Kremlin, and managed to broker an informal commitment for the superpowers to abide by the terms of SALT II.

In later life, Carter would express frustration that he had not had a second term in which to continue his work toward a lasting Middle East peace, by seeking a similar agreement to the Camp David Accords—in the form of a two-state solution—between Israel and Gaza-West Bank Palestinians. In this regard, in 2006, he authored a controversial book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he argued that Israel's continued control over and building of settlements on land rightfully belonging to the Palestinians have created the primary obstacles to a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement.

Based on what he posits in that book, the late president has been quoted as saying: “The book has nothing to do with what's going on inside Israel, which is a wonderful democracy, you know, where everyone has guaranteed equal rights and where, under the law, Arabs and Jews who are Israelis have the same privileges… That's been most of the controversy (about his book) because people assume it's about Israel. It's not.”

President Carter apparently saw Gaza the way many other clear-minded observers have. That is, basically, as an open-air prison, not unlike the so-called “townships” of South Africa before the dismantling of Apartheid, which was a repressive means of maintaining segregation between Native Africans and their European rulers.

He made it clear, however, that in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the separation policy isn’t about race, but about territory. In Carter’s own words: “I've never alleged that the framework of apartheid existed within Israel at all, (but) that what does exist in the West Bank is based on trying to take Palestinian land, and not on racism. So it was a very clear distinction.”

He went on to clarify, “When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the two hundred-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”

A series of international developments largely beyond his control had consequences at home that whittled away at the initial popularity of the Carter Administration. Adversaries were quick to claim that Presidency Carter’s “weakness” as a leader was solely to blame and managed to so undermine his popularity that he lost his bid for a second term to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 and left office in January of 1981. Far from considering that the end of his career serving his country, however, many of his truly greatest diplomatic and humanitarian achievements were yet to come.

Less than a year after he left office, President Carter, along with his wife Rosalynn, partnered with Emory University to found the Carter Center, located just minutes from downtown Atlanta. The NGO’s mission statement is to “advance human rights and alleviate human suffering” worldwide. The center, whose board is made up of  business leaders, educators, former government officials, and philanthropists, is currently managing projects in eighty countries, and its activities include election-monitoring, democratic institution-building, conflict mediation, and human rights advocacy. The Carter Center has also taken the lead in projects to treat long-neglected tropical diseases including onchocerciasis (a parasitic illness sometimes called “river blindness”) trachoma (a granular conjunctivitis that causes blindness), lymphatic filariasis (better known as elephantiasis), malaria, and dracunculiasis (parasitic Guinea worm disease).

The Carter Center’s work on such a wide variety of humanitarian endeavors has been so effective that Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee granted President Carter the award for working through the Carter Center  “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

But in closing this tribute to a truly great American patriot, humanitarian and world statesman, I’ll take a moment to express what Jimmy Carter means to me personally.

I had the privilege of working with award-winning international journalist Robert Cox at the Buenos Aires Herald during the dark days of the military dictatorship commonly known as “el Proceso”, that ruled Argentina with an iron fist from 1976 to 1983. In fact, it was Bob Cox who provided me with my first opportunity to work as a professional journalist, and he too who was not only my boss and friend, but also my mentor in those crucial early years.

Although others of us would follow in his footsteps—after the Proceso drove him and his family into  US exile in 1979—by continuing to bear the standard of democracy and human rights that he had raised, it was clearly Bob Cox, and Bob alone, who established our paper’s reputation as a bulwark of freedom and rule of law, and as a small but courageous voice against the gross abuse and state terror perpetrated by the regime.

That said, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to us in that little English-language paper had Ronald Reagan preceded Jimmy Carter as US president instead of the other way around. We’ll never know, of course, but I suspect that, had that been the case, the Herald might well not have survived the regime—and perhaps neither Cox nor James Neilson and I,  as the main editorialists who succeeded him, would today be celebrating a brand new year at ages ninety-one, eighty-four and seventy-five, respectively.

Indeed, those were dangerous times. Some one hundred journalists and writers who dared investigate, who dared dissent, were murdered or “disappeared”, along with tens of thousands of other people caught in the gnashing teeth of the Proceso, never to be heard from again. While it is true that the Herald was, for all intents and purposes, a lone voice in the local press, recording and reporting what was going on in real time, it is also true that, during the worst years of the regime, we had a friend in Jimmy Carter.

After decades of US policy that took a hands-off approach to “friendly dictators”, President Carter imposed a foreign policy whose key tenet was the protection of human rights through diplomacy. The dichotomy of US foreign policy up to then had always been that while Washington preached democracy, rule of law and the Bill of Rights as basic inalienable human and civil rights at home, it applied a double standard elsewhere. It was tantamount to saying that Americans were just a little more human than the people who had to live under the heels of dictators’ boots in rightwing regimes that posed as front men for the US in its war on communism.

Never, in modern times, had a US president emphasized as much as Jimmy Carter did the idea that US foreign policy should reflect the highest human ideals of the United States and Western democracy. And to make sure that his policies actually were implemented at a consular level, Carter’s State Department instituted what was basically a human rights section at the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, capably headed up by career diplomat Franklyn Allen “Tex” Harris.

Tex and Cox worked closely together during Tex’s tenure (1977-1979). It was a job Harris took seriously and one in which he went above and beyond the call of duty to fulfil. The regime was not only uncooperative, but often also obstructive. Still, Tex managed to save lives, using the power and contacts with which  his post provided him to track many of the same cases of “disappearance” as the Herald, and, as often as possible, trying to find out where victims were being held without charge and pressuring for their release. As such, he had a major influence on the Carter Administration’s foreign policy in Argentina.

But Jimmy Carter’s human rights measures didn’t end there. He also named staunch human rights activist Patricia Murphy Derian to be his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. As such,  she immediately took on the authoritarian regimes in places like Chile, Paraguay and Argentina, as well as in apartheid-era South Africa and elsewhere. President Carter’s focus in those years on cleaning up the human rights situation in Latin America and putting these countries on the road to democracy was clearly a question of starting in his own backyard and turning the Americas into a showcase for basic, traditional American ideals.

Assistant Secretary Derian proved a tenacious defender of that policy and of human rights in general. In the case of Argentina, she openly accused the regime of crimes against humanity and became instrumental in setting up an inspection mission that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IHRC) carried out in Argentina under authority from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1979. It was also in September of that year that she helped secure the release of Jacobo Timerman, former owner and publisher of the center-left newspaper, La Opinión, who had been imprisoned and tortured after being falsely accused of helping launder left-wing terrorist extortion money.

Through Cox’s numerous editorials and articles published in the news sections of the newspaper, the Herald had already mounted a two-and-a-half-year local and international campaign for Timerman’s release. But Patricia Derian’s  campaign for  Timerman’s freedom helped catapult his case to the forefront of international interest and put such intense pressure on the Argentine military that they finally had to let him go. Assistant Secretary Derian’s actions so infuriated the Argentine military that they internally declared her their Public Enemy Number One and are even reported to have entertained plans to have her killed. (Not surprising, since this was how they had been handling the opposition of every color up to then, and they were obviously arrogant enough to think they could get away with it).

With Ms. Derian leading the action, President Carter slapped sanctions on Argentina for failing to heed his demands that human rights be respected, alienating the leaders of the Proceso, but at the same time drawing ever-increasing international media attention to what was going on, and making it impossible for the military to operate with the same blanket impunity that they had early on after the coup. Suddenly, the Proceso was high-profile and its image was abysmal.

In Argentina, Assistant Secretary Derian would have to wait nearly three decades to receive the recognition she deserved for hobbling the dictatorship and very likely saving thousands more lives that would otherwise have been taken, but finally, in 2006, she was awarded the Order of the Liberator General San Martín, with the rank of Officer–the highest decoration granted by the Argentine government to foreign officials.

Following Ronald Reagan’s election win over President Carter, things turned dangerous again. Reagan’s old-time “anti-red” approach to foreign policy prompted him to almost immediately send his foreign policy architect, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to let the Proceso leaders know that the Jimmy Carter era was stone cold dead, and that from now on they would no longer have to fret about pesky human rights investigators out of Washington.

Dr. Kirkpatrick was a fervent anti-communist and the author of what came to be known as the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, one of the main principles of which was the exact opposite of the Carter policy of pinning US support to democratic government and, above all, respect for human rights.

The Kirkpatrick policy advocated Washington’s support for just about any kind of government, including harsh far-right dictatorships, with the only prerequisite for membership in the Reagan Administration’s group of ‘friends’ being hardline opposition to all things leftist. The Proceso was, obviously, a shoo-in. It had been so tough on reds that it had wiped out every opponent that ever even dared to blush. And the Proceso was more than willing to lend support to Reagan’s far-right Contra guerrillas in Central America.

My own theory about how the Falklands War between Argentina and Britain in 1982 took shape lays ample blame at the door of the Reagan Administration for coddling the Proceso,  prompting its leaders, erroneously, to believe that Washington would back Argentina’s long-standing claim to the Falkland-Malvinas Islands over that of Britain.  Had Jimmy Carter won a second term, I couldn’t be more sure that it was a war that would have been avoided, and that the regime would have fallen even earlier.

As such, President Carter will always hold a special place in my heart and mind. He represented everything that the United States should be, everything that the US should promote and defend.

May he rest in peace.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JANUARY SIXTH – A CRITICAL CHAPTER IN US HISTORY

 

January 6, 2025 - election certification

Today is an important day.

No, I don’t mean the day that Congress certifies yet another in our long history of democratic elections. That, though fundamental to America’s democratic process,  is a mere formality. Always has been…Except for once.

No, no, I’m not talking about what was once the mere formality of a peaceful transfer of power. I’m talking about the time that it wasn’t.

Today, then, is the fourth anniversary of the January Sixth Insurrection. That’s how it needs to go down in the history books. Although, it could also very fairly be dubbed The January Sixth Trump Sedition. I mean, when some historian with excellent research skills writes about it many years from now, and recalls it as the point when American democracy began to unravel.

The entrance to the Capitol, January 6, 2025

The president—I’m talking about President Biden; he is still the president even though he seems to be allowing the president-elect to suck up all the oxygen in the room—has mentioned how we should never forget the day that Trump and his crew tried to overturn a free and fair election “and democracy prevailed.” The thing is, it didn’t. Nor did the criminal justice system. Nor, then, did the rule of law.

Granted, today Democrats followed the rules, upheld America’s constitutional  tradition, adhered to democracy. They didn’t stir up trouble, call up swing-state colleagues and pressure them to  “find votes” that didn’t exist. They didn’t  attack Congress, doing millions of dollars in damage and hounding legislators in those sacred halls, threatening to harm or kill them. They didn’t call for their own vice president to be hanged or gang up in a violent mob on overwhelmed Capitol Police with bear spray, fists and clubs, killing one of them and sending one hundred forty others to the hospital, some with very serious injuries. Nor did they bitch and rant that the umpire was blind or that the game was fixed.

Democrats play the game with every ounce of energy they’ve got, and if they lose, they quietly go home, figuring they’ve been licked fair and square. That’s because modern-day Democrats are what their name implies: democrats. They live, advocate and uphold democracy and the rights of the people. They don’t simply use democracy as a meaningless buzzword.

Capitol entrance, January 6, 2021

Meanwhile, Trump-Republicans are becoming ever greater proponents, not of the American Republic imagined by our forefathers, but of what is known as a “banana republic”. Not the dictionary definition for the term banana republic, which is, “a small nation dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital.” No, I use the term in its political sense. That is, a badly ruled and corrupt country led by an autocratic or dictatorial government, which pretends to be democratic and to represent the people, while only representing itself.  

So how do I explain the dissonance between that depiction of the soon-to-be-ruling party and the unquestionably democratic process that took place today?  Attempting, as I always do, to be,  in every way, an independent and objective voice, objectivity dictates my bias in favor of anything but MAGA when it comes to democracy, fair play, and the rule of law. And today, democracy, in a certain sense, became its own victimizer, since it was Vice President Kamala Harris’s sad democratic and constitutional duty to certify an election whose winner will, indubitably, undermine the very democracy that, incredibly, returned him to power for a second time.  

The scene inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When it comes to who is committed to democracy and who isn’t, the proof is in the pudding: On the day of the January Sixth Insurrection, Trump Republicans sought to twist history, to pretend they hadn’t lost when they had, in fact, been trounced. They had taken their case to more than sixty courts, to the Supreme Court (which, despite its Trump bias, refused, on the basis of merit, to hear it), and even to then-President Trump’s own Justice Department, and their false claims of fraud were rejected at every turn.

So MAGA did what banana republicans do—denied they’d lost—denied the truth, in other words—even though they knew they had, and backed their authoritarian leader in mounting a protest that turned into a riot, that turned into a full-blown insurrection, for the purpose of preventing that election from being certified, as if halting certification made it any less true that their candidate lost by an unquestionably large margin. In the process, they violated one of the most sacred and fundamental traditions of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power.

That is huge. That is historic. And it should be marked every single year as the historical enormity that it is.

But compare, if you will, what happened today, on this particular January sixth, a quiet, snowy winter’s day, when the certification process, headed up by Vice President Harris, and thanks to the ungrudgingly democratic spirit of her party, came off without a hitch and Donald Trump’s second term as president was formally certified, unquestioned by any member of Trump’s opposition. Democrats simply did what was right, what constitutional law and American tradition expected of them.

But it is unlikely that this will be appreciated by any supporter of a man who considers even America’s heroes to be “suckers and losers” for keeping their oath to support and defend the Constitution and the country with their very lives, if necessary. Donald Trump’s reaction to that sort of display of patriotic loyalty, while standing on the consecrated ground of Arlington National Cemetery?   "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" 

That brings me to why I say that, historically speaking, the January Sixth Insurrection should be recalled as the day when American democracy began to unravel, not when it prevailed. Because it was, and democracy is indeed unravelling.

There is simply no way that the US should be on the verge of inaugurating yet another Trump presidency. I’m not questioning the election figures. I don’t doubt that the election process was as free and fair as it was in 2020. (Let the delusional MAGA crowd still claiming that Biden didn’t win in 2020 take that as they will). I may be utterly baffled by, but do not question the choice made by American voters between the two candidates.

I do, however, question the democratic logic behind the Republican Party’s having chosen Trump as their 2024 presidential candidate. Thanks to the GOP’s leaders, we are about to re-inaugurate a felon, an insurrectionist, a man with as much respect for the rule of law and for the Constitution as for a roll of toilet paper.

But that’s not the only reason I believe that American democracy is unraveling. It is also unraveling because justice, in the case of Donald Trump, has not been served. Trump has been inadvertently enthroned as the prime example of what has until now been a general perception, and that, thanks to Trump, is now an indisputable fact: that “equality before the law” is a mere myth. The rule of law, the Republican Party and their Trump-laden Supreme Court have demonstrated, by endorsing the immunity of such a flawed and openly corrupt man—for a second time—is only for the powerless. If you are powerful enough, you are above it, and are entitled to a get-out-of-jail-free card. And if you are a friend of the most powerful people, you get a pardon, no matter what you’ve done. The probable consequences of that now open fact have even seeped into the current presidency, prompting Joe Biden to go against everything he has ever stood for, and to provide a blanket pardon to his own son for fear of unjust reprisals under a new and ever more lawless Trump administration.

But the GOP, no matter how MAGA-hijacked and democratically bereft it has become, is not solely to blame for the stunning materialization of yet another Trump regime. Blame also rests on the shoulders of current Attorney General Merrick Garland, who dragged his feet for a year before ever even entertaining the idea of an investigation of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and then slow-walked the process afterward so that the possibility of prosecution was perceived as “election interference”, and was rendered, in the end, academic.

As a result, the Justice Department has suffered a humiliating defeat. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and the federal courts have been forced to back down in the face of Trump’s return to the presidency, which hasn’t erased the serious crimes with which the president-elect has been charged, but which has rendered his prosecution moot.

Attorney General Garland has suggested that he might release Prosecutor Smith’s full investigative report to the public. Personally, I can only shrug and ask, so what? Is that supposed to be a consolation prize? Will we get to read the report—I mean, unless Trump’s lawyers are successful in suppressing it—to know “what might have been,” if only Garland had done a better job at defending democracy and the Constitution? Because the truth is that if the attorney general had, from the outset, made keeping a would-be autocrat from ever getting near the Oval Office again, Donald Trump’s candidacy, rather than the rule of law, would have been the moot point. Trump would already have been tried, convicted and sentenced before the election cycle began. He would have been in prison, or, at the very least, banned from ever holding public office again.

Instead, here we are once more…

The next four years are a puzzle, both predictable and an enigma. Trump clearly won’t change. A narcissistic megalomanic can’t change his stripes, so expect more insanely undemocratic and ally-alienating behavior. Indeed, we’re already hearing the most outrageous of rants emanating from Mar-a-Lago about “buying Greenland” and about “making Canada the fifty-first state.” But more serious considerations are inevitable: Questions like, will Donald Trump seek a way around the two-term rule and go for a third, perhaps citing FDR’s mandate as a precedent? And if he can’t swing that, will he again attempt to refuse to leave office at the end of his term and spark an insurrection to back the perpetuation of his reign? And as his autocratic bent becomes more problematic, what will the GOP do? Keep embracing MAGA and kissing Emperor Trump’s ring, or come to its senses and find ways to limit Trump’s quest for authoritarian power?

At this critical point in American history, we have little choice but to watch and see. 

TROUBLE IN MAGADISE?

 Ah yes, adults in the room. Every dictator’s nightmare.

After the incoming—but not yet official—Musk-Trump administration managed twice to tank legislation to avert a Christmas season government shutdown, there was a frantic flurry of bipartisan activity this weekend on Capitol Hill in which cooler, or perhaps just more highly determined heads prevailed, and a bill was passed that will keep the government open and operating into March of next year.

There is really no urgency to pass a debt-ceiling measure. Except that Trump wants there to be for questions of his personal political expediency. The crisis of this past week was an invention of Elon Musk to keep himself from looking bad in his new role as the supposed budget-cut czar of the incoming Trump administration.

How so? By using government shutdown as a bargaining chip to get President Biden’s lame duck administration to approve a higher debt ceiling before Trump takes office. That way, Musk and Trump could blame higher spending on their predecessor and provide themselves with a veneer of fiscal responsibility, while squandering huge sums on more tax cuts for the wealthy. Bernie Sanders could explain this much more eloquently than I can, but you get the picture.

The fact is that the extended tax cuts that Trump has promised his billionaire cohorts, including Musk—Elonius Rex as budget czar is really like putting the fox in charge of chicken-house security—will actually add an estimated four trillion dollars to America’s burgeoning thirty-six-trillion-dollar national debt. That, of course, will come in addition to the nearly seven trillion dollars that Trump already added to the deficit during his first four years, from 2016 to 2020, much of which was also the fault of the veritable tax holiday that he provided then, as well, to his euphoric fellow billionaires.

But this weekend’s vote to leave the debt-ceiling discussions on hold until next year and thus to avert a shutdown tends to show that the “mandate” Trump claims to have been given by American voters isn’t translating to the Senate. The third vote that finally pushed back against Musk-Trump bullying reveals resistance to Trump’s dictatorial bent—after Republicans in Congress caved to him repeatedly in the past as he sought to keep running the show from Mar-a-Lago once voted out of office.

To be clear, this was, by no means, a close vote. The Senate passed the eleventh-hour legislation that will avoid a disastrous government shutdown by a margin of eighty-five to eleven. And the bill—backed by Speaker Johnson—had already been approved by the House by a margin of three hundred sixty-six to just thirty-four. That’s basically the entire bi-partisan population of Congress opposing MAGA on Trump’s attempt to once more savage the whole country for his own advantage. (Some of us are still sufficiently un-amnesiac to recall the last government shutdown fostered by Trump and his congressional  cronies, which tanked Wall Street and laid waste to people’s 401K savings investments—and here I speak from personal experience during that time).

Apparently, only a fanatical fringe joins Team Don & Elon in relishing the chaos that a shutdown would breed.

Perhaps the difference this time has been how Trump’s message reached the Senate GOP. It didn’t come from him. It came from his (world’s wealthiest) handler, Elonius Rex. And, finally, some folks in the GOP “grew a pair” and weren’t having it. Maybe some of that party’s number are finally getting sick of having their party hijacked, not just by Trump, but by any super-magnate who happens along.

Wishful thinking? Yes, maybe. Probably, in fact. Once Trump is back in office, they’re apt to all go back to sleep again. But for now, it has worked.

They’s good reason to believe that Senate Republicans were shamed into action by a week of their being portrayed by opposition  politicians and the media as weak-kneed vassals being manipulated by a not-yet-inaugurated president—one president at a time, please—and his super-billionaire buddy, who holds absolutely no position in government and who has zero government experience.

Alexander Pope once wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Dare we hope Republicans will rein in a would-be dictator and his gazillionaire Rasputin, and manage to keep the wheels on democracy over the course of the next four years?

I have my doubts. But only time will tell.

 

ELONIUS REX

All right, here’s an idea for the coming New Year. Why don’t we just get real and inaugurate—perhaps coronate would be a better term—Elon Musk on January 20. Clearly, judging from January 6, 2021, the GOP isn’t partial to election certification anyway, so what the hell? Why not? Voter will be damned.

I mean, the all-male Republican Party “leadership” has apparently become a sniveling pack of geldlings subordinate to any billionaire dictator willing to hijack the party and call the shots, so, hey, why not the richest man in the world while we’re at it, not some paper-tiger billionaire who got kicked off of the Forbes 400 list in 2023. Okay, in all fairness, if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for billionaires, Trump, hanging by his tiny fingernails, is back on this year—could it have been the golden sneakers, the chintzy bibles (I’m assuming specially designed to be read upside down), or a new surge in MAGA caps that made the difference? Who knows?

But it’s hardly a secret that he’s no longer in charge. At least not after this week, when Elonius Rex bared his teeth and tanked a solid bipartisan attempt to avoid a government shutdown—a thoughtful pre-inauguration gift from Musk-Trump/MAGA to the Nation in the mean-spiritedness of billionaire Noël. Face it, no quantity of ghosts of Christmas Past, Present or Future are going to shame these guys into a Dickensian redemption. They’re just plain mean-for-life.

Anyway, it has become abundantly clear, even before the latest edition of the Trump Era has officially begun, that Elonius Rex isn’t the pasty, clownish, foppish, fatuous Trump cheerleader that he appeared to be during the campaign. No, no, this is the world’s richest man, and that kind of wealth can buy almost anything. I mean, except a way out of a final meeting with the Grim Reaper, and, statistically speaking, Trump and I are a lot closer to keeping that date than Elon is. Personally, I’ve been aware of that for a very long time now. But I have a feeling it will come as an incredible shock to the Trumpster when the Reaper’s schedule-keeper punches the Duke of Orange’s ticket.

Meanwhile, Trump did all the heavy lifting of winning the election and giving Elonius Rex an unofficial, unassailable title. One that allows him to act in Trump’s name with zero accountability before the other branches of power. It’s the Rasputin Effect. Elonius calls the shots, and Trump makes it official. Why? Because, Elonius Rex has bought and paid for a presidency—just what every megalomaniacal magnate wants, the levers of the most powerful position on earth, without the headaches of having to answer to voters. And he bought it—or is reported at least to have bought it, although perhaps he paid more than we’ll ever know—for the relatively paltry sum of two hundred fifty million dollars.

Sure, that sounds like a lot of money to people like us, who, as my Aunt Marilyn used to say, “are just peckin’ shit with the chickens,” but for Elonius Rex, who accumulates an estimated forty-three thousand dollars a minute, it’s pocket change—or taking Aunt Marilyn’s metaphor to the limit, mere chicken feed. And if the government shuts down, it’s certainly no skin off his teeth: he’s never had to be a federal employee, a soldier, a sailor or any of their family members wondering where their next paycheck will come from; he has no government health benefits for a shutdown to suspend; he isn’t on welfare or Social Security and, I’m sure, has never given a split-second’s thought to how such people survive even with those benefits, let alone without them.

No, for Elonius Rex, this is all a game, and he’s showing Mike Johnson and all the rest of the papier mâché members of the GOP’s mock leadership who the winner is. This is The Apprentice: Super Celebrity Edition, and Elonius Rex is the star of the show. The Don is just holding the mic for him.

Stay tuned…

 

IT’S AN OLD WHITE GUYS’ WORLD

 

Here's a little brain candy for the fifty-three percent of white women who voted for Trump and the hijacked GOP. If you love getting things mansplained to you, and having patriarchs tell you what you can and can't do (even with your own body) hey, you just got your wish!

Merry Christmas, then!

For the eighty-five percent of black women and forty-seven percent of white women who didn’t vote to be dominated by white guys and the far-right macho psyche, ladies, you have every reason to be furious. Because, make no mistake, the rights you fought so hard for are on the line.

WELCOME TO GESTAPO POLITICS – Part One

Matt Gaetz

 There is a theory, to which I tend to subscribe, that President-elect Donald Trump’s first cabinet pick—the  naming of former Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general—was coldly calculated. A guy facing credible charges of paid sexual relationships with underaged girls—credible enough that he resigned from Congress in an attempt to ensure that an investigation into his antics was buried—and with possible vulnerability to accusations of human and drug trafficking ties, was going to be dead in the water from the outset. That was especially true considering that Gaetz was, arguably, the most hated personality in his own party, after he led a hostile takeover, with the backing of several other fanatical MAGA representatives, to oust former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy from office.

It seems pretty obvious  that Gaetz was supposed to be a lightning rod, a name that would explode on the political and media horizon like a gigantic Roman candle, and draw all attention to it. Meanwhile, Trump would flesh out the rest of his cabinet with other mostly controversial and inexperienced characters that would, nevertheless, pale by comparison to Gaetz, but who would pledge loyalty to Trump—a paramount requirement for joining the president-elect’s inner circle this time around—rather than to the Constitution.

The level of confidence (or lack thereof) that Trump has in the moral and ethical rectitude of members of what is virtually his “shadow cabinet” seems clear from his attempts to forego any sort of investigation of the candidates’ backgrounds. The question that seems to loom is, what might a thorough probe turn up in such a veritable clown car of nominations?

Fox "talent" Pete Hegseth

This is, then, a test of Senate Republicans and, fortunately, Trump is beginning to meet resistance, since the Gaetz lightning rod was insufficient to mask the glaring skeletons in at least one other cabinet candidate’s see-through closet. I’m referring, of course to Pete Hegseth, a Fox News anchor whom Trump has tapped for defense secretary. These vulnerabilities include reports of general misconduct (including often  being drunk on the job) and questionable financial practices in other organizations with which he has been associated. And then, more important still,  there are strong allegations of on-the-job sexual harassment, and at least one report of sexual assault—which was settled out of court in California with money and a non-disclosure agreement, but the long shadow of which persists.

Perhaps one man’s questionable moral and ethical standing might serve as an expendable distraction for controversial cabinet picks, but can two? That’s the question more than a handful of GOP senators are asking themselves right now. Moreover, it seems to become more obvious all the time that some Republican senators have finally caught on to the fact that Trump isn’t a man who works within any sort of rule structure, and, at least for now, a few of them are willing to push back. Perhaps their idea is to show Trump from the outset that they take their official advise-and-approve role seriously. In other words, some of them have no plans to let the president become a king.

The refusal of Trump to subject his cabinet picks to traditional background checks—if he indeed gets away with it completely—is so far proving to be a pyric victory over traditional norms. Such checks before the candidates were actually announced could have saved him the embarrassment of having Gaetz and Hegseth’s dirty laundry being aired in public. At least in the case of Gaetz, however, there are some compelling questions as to whether Trump would have wanted to avoid such public revelations, if the theory is correct about his using the former MAGA representative as a diversionary prop.

But was that also the case with Hegseth? Not likely. What happened, then, was that, even if Trump and the Senate were going to shirk their background check duties, the media weren’t. In other words, if a secret vetting was ruled out, then the cabinet candidates were pretty much bound to be vetted publicly by the press. This was a fact that caused Hegseth to lose his cool this week and shout at journalists waiting for him in the halls of Congress that he didn’t answer to the media, “not to that camera, and not to any of you.” Which seemed like a contradictory sentiment from a guy who has been making five million dollars a year as a Fox News “talent”. (Even they don’t call them journalists).

That said, however, after what the GOP has considered—erroneously—a “landslide victory”, it is doubtful that the party’s Senate leadership is going to want to give any more black eyes to their chief executive than they absolutely have to. And there’s the rub. While they stood their ground against Gaetz in Justice, and could very well do the same against Hegseth in Defense, it seems pretty likely that other questionable nominations might well get through the confirmation process unscathed.

That, in the view of no few observers, could be a real problem. There are a couple of cases in point that it makes sense to look at in studying this Era of Trump phenomenon. One is Kashyap Patel (for FBI chief) and the other is Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s leave “Kash” for later and, today, start with Gabbard, Trump’s pick to head national intelligence.

Tulsi Gabbard with Trump and Fox conspiracy theorist
and Putin supporter Tucker Carlson

The forty-three-year-old Gabbard has an honorable seventeen-year career record in the military. As an enlisted woman, she reached the rank of Spec-4 in the Hawaii National Guard. She was attached to the Twenty-Ninth Medical Brigade, in which her MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was as a medical instrument repairer. During that time (2004-2005) she was deployed to Iraq in that MOS.  In 2005, she was awarded a Combat Medical Badge for “participation in combat operations under enemy hostile fire.”

When she returned to the US, she entered Officer Candidate School, accelerated out at the top of her class, and was granted a commission as a second lieutenant. As she moved through the officer ranks, Gabbard did a variety of jobs, including serving as a military police platoon leader. That was while she was stationed in Kuwait in 2008 and 2009. By 2015, Gabbard had risen to the rank of major in the Hawaii National Guard. She transferred five years later to the Army Reserve, and, the following year (2021) was promoted to lieutenant colonel while serving in Africa.

Lt. Colonel Tulsi Gabbard

Parallel to her military career, in 2013, Gabbard won a seat in the US Congress as the representative for Hawaii’s Second District, becoming the first Samoan-American ever to serve in Congress. Gabbard ran as a Democrat. She held that seat from 2013 to 2021 and served from 2013 to 2016 as vice-chair of the Democratic National Convention. In 2022, Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an Independent. In 2024, she took a further step to the right and joined the Republican Party.

Clearly, hers is a straightforward and transparent record that is far removed from the shadowy pasts of a Gaetz or a Hegseth. However, Trump’s nominating her to head the nation’s intelligence apparatus is fraught with controversy.  For one thing, she has no background to speak of in intelligence operations. For another, like Hegseth, she is a Fox News alumna, often appearing as a consultant on the Murdoch infotainment network, a major contributor to  the propagation of myriad debunked conspiracy theories that it continues to champion despite numerous lawsuits and a 787-million-dollar loss to a voting machine manufacturer that it slandered in falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Acting as a mere stringer on the dominant mock-news far-right propaganda channel (sometimes referred to by its detractors as “Faux News”) wouldn’t be such a big deal. But Gabbard has even occasionally stood in as a replacement host for top primetime Fox anchor Tucker Carlson—arguably the most nefarious conspiracy theorist on cable, and a staunch supporter of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

But of much greater concern, in this case, are Gabbard’s own links to Russia. The most glaring of these was laid out in a 2017 memo she penned while serving in the House of Representatives. The wording was so extreme that it put her at odds with her own (then-Democratic) party. According to ABC News, which obtained a copy of the memo, Gabbard blamed the West and NATO for Putin’s invasion of Ukrainian territories. It wasn’t a new conspiracy theory, especially not among the far-right and far-left fringes of European politics. But it was certainly an uncommon stance in the US and especially in the Democratic Party.

Gabbard using Tucker Carlson's primetime slot on
Fox News to push her pro-Russia arguments

Had this always been her position, it would not have been nearly as curious or shocking as it was—though clearly just as controversial. But earlier, in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, Gabbard had supported sanctions against the Russian government, saying specifically that the US should not be “standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” The one-eighty that she executed without a hitch three years later couldn’t have come in sharper contrast to her apparent thinking in 2014. In the 2017 memo, according to ABC, she  wrote that the “Russian people are a proud people, and they don't want the US and our allies trying to control them and their government.” (This flies in the face of the inescapable fact that, in Russia, nobody’s position matters but Putin’s, since he is as powerful as Stalin or the Russian czars once were; therefore, what’s happening in Ukraine has precious little to do with the “pride of the Russian people”).

She also blamed the US and NATO directly for the annexation of Crimea, saying that is was Western hostility toward Putin that had forced him to invade Ukrainian territory. “There certainly isn't any guarantee to Putin that we won't try to overthrow Russia's government,” she wrote. “In fact, I'm pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that.”

Both positions were not only contrary to her stance of a few years before, but smacked of the style and wording of Putin’s propaganda playbook, as espoused by RT (formerly Russia Today), an international publication widely believed to front for the Kremlin and Putin’s disinformation mill. According to allegations by staffers in  Congress, it is also a publication that Gabbard has frequently cited and mentioned as a source.

Since then, Gabbard has doubled down repeatedly on pro-Russian stances. On Fox News she has gone as far as to posit that US leaders are “knowingly provoking Putin,” a notion that echoes Putin’s self-justification for threatening any country in the West that aids Ukraine in its use of long-range missiles to drive back advancing Russian forces with possible nuclear attack. Despite this kind of saber-rattling by the Putin regime, Gabbard has more than once suggested that instead of remaining at odds with the Russian strongman, the US should extend a hand of friendship to him.  

Gabbard has made her enthusiastic support for Putin and Russia extensive to Putin’s now freshly embattled ally, Bashar Al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who has slaughtered an estimated five to seven hundred thousand of his own people (often by the cruelest of means including aerial barrel bombs stuffed with nails and poison gasses banned by Western rules of engagement, to say nothing of the fifteen thousand people he is estimated to have tortured to death and the one hundred fifty thousand held without charges or trial in his prisons). Nor does that take into account the more than ten million Syrians now either internally displaced or living in foreign exile as a result of the grinding civil war.

Rebels drive into Homs after retaking the city from
Assad's Russian-backed troops in Syria

The only “crime” of the Syrian people—even more distinct from Assad than the Russian people from Putin—has been to rise up since the Arab Spring of 2011, and demand a democratic opening and an end to the fifty years of tyranny imposed by Bashar Al-Assad and his father before him. That long and costly war in human sacrifice is now apparently paying off. The rebels, taking advantage of the fact that Russia is throwing all of its resources at its war with Ukraine, have, in the last few days, turned the tables on Assad and recaptured major Syrian cities, including the crucial Homs and Aleppo.

Children were among the most highly affected victims
of  Al-Assad's chlorine gas attacks on his own people.

Tulsi Gabbard’s sympathies have not been with the noble cause of a coalition of democracy-prone rebels seeking to shrug off the chains of tyranny. The fact is that she visited Syria just days before a horrific  chemical attack, one of Assad’s worst atrocities of the war, in which he gassed an entire town in the early hours of the morning causing scores of people, including children, to immediately fall to the ground gasping for breath and foaming at the mouth before dying. After her naïvely amiable talks with the Assad regime, the then-US representative declared the dictator “not an enemy of the United States.”

Even then-President Trump, the man who has now tapped her to head up US intelligence, disagreed, and ordered retaliatory airstrikes against sites deemed to be the ones from which Assad had launched the fratricidal attack. But Gabbard, at the time, pushed back against Trump, calling his decision to retaliate  “dangerous, rash and unconstitutional.”

It is important to note that Gabbard’s trip to Damascus, in which she met face-to-face with Al-Assad, was sponsored by none other than the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The SSNP is a fanatically pro-Assad organization that is virulently antisemitic. It basically represents Syrian Nazism. Even its party symbol, the zawbaa, is reminiscent of the Nazi swastika.

Since then she has continued to offer an impassioned defense of Assad, echoing the Kremlin’s argument justifying the actions taken against the Syrian dictator’s  people as being part of an effort to wipe out terrorist organizations that are a threat to the world. Well, speaking of terrorist organizations, it should be noted that a staunch ally of both Assad and Russia in the Syrian Civil War has been the rabidly anti-American, pro-Iranian terror group Hezbollah.  Hezbollah has long been an ally of the Al-Assad family’s Ba'ath regime. In providing anti-rebel fighters to the Syrian dictatorship, Hezbollah has framed its participation as vital to its own position, since, in the terrorist organization’s eyes, the rebellion against Assad is part of "a plot to destroy Hezbollah’s alliance with al-Assad against Israel" (its sworn enemy and America’s staunchest ally in the region).

Gabbard met twice with Bashar Al-Assad during a 
controversial trip she made to Syria while she was a 
US representative. She returned home insisting he was 
"not an enemy of the US," despite his close ties to Putin and
his reputation as one of the world's most ruthless dictators.

But none of that leads to the conclusion that Gabbard has been fronting for Assad. No. She has been fronting for Putin. Or at least that can be conjectured from her open backing of the actions of the Putin regime and Putin’s intimate relationship with Assad.

The truth is that Assad could not have been as successful as he has been until right now in crushing the rebellion against him without enormous Russian aid. And Putin has given that to him, both financially and materially, with Russian fighter pilots and Russian planes running hundreds of bombing missions against the pro-democracy rebels. At the height of the war, there were also Russian troops on the ground in Syria. And still today, Putin has been supplying Assad with military advisers and trainers, as well as military police units to help the dictator try and keep his country locked down.

So, is this all just a love affair between Putin and Al-Assad—with Tulsi Gabbard, possibly the next chief intelligence officer of the United States, as their cheerleader? Of course not. Assad and the permanence of his regime are key to Russian  military and geopolitical interests in the Middle East.

In the post-World War II era known as the Cold War (1947–1991)—a period of bipolar global power in which the world was pretty neatly divided between East and West, with Soviet Russia heading the East and the US the West—Syria sided with Russia. Between 1955 and 1958, Russia provided two hundred ninety-four million dollars in military aid to Syria, equivalent to about 3.2 billion dollars today. Russia was instrumental in aiding Syria during the Suez War (1955-1958) and those relations only deepened as the Syrian Ba’ath Party gained strength. The Ba’ath movement was the big winner in the Syrian Revolution in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and it was in this period that Bashar Al-Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad came to power.

The material and financial support lent to the regime by Russia led to an agreement with the elder Al-Assad to permit the Russians to open a powerful naval military base in Syria at the port of Tartus. In exchange, the Assads continued to receive military and financial aid from Russia, and thousands of Syrian military officers have received professional education and training in Russia from the seventies into the twenty-first century.

Syria has since become the Kremlin’s closest strategic ally in the Middle East, providing it with rapid naval response capabilities by perceived threats from the US and Western allies in the region. And as mentioned before, Assad’s Syria—and hence Russia—is a major threat to US regional allies including Israel.

When we have a president-elect who, in the past, has shown himself to be a sort of dictator groupie, who has spoken admiringly of Putin, it may be hard for some of his most fanatical supporters to keep track of who the bad guys are in Western relations. But let’s keep it simple. Like it or not, as long as Russia is being ruled by Vladimir Putin, it is not America’s friend or ally. On the contrary, Putin’s ultimate plan is to take back everything the former Soviet Union lost with the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. And, make no mistake, Ukraine is where he’s kicking off that campaign. How far he gets will depend on how much appeasement the US and the West afford him.

Some detractors have gone as far as to suggest that Tulsi Gabbard might actually be an agent of Russia. Perhaps, perhaps not, at least in any official sense. But if she is not a double agent, then, she is at least a “useful idiot” for the Putin regime, and as such, far too naïve about who Putin is to head up American intelligence operations, which in large measure, should be targeted squarely on the threat that Russia and Putin pose to the US and to the West as a whole.