FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

The first major government agency Elon Musk attacked in his unvetted ad hoc auditor's post was USAID, one of America's most consequential foreign policy tools, and a major factor in giving the US an edge over China and Russia around the world. That agency has basically been gutted and Musk has been dancing on its shallow grave.

Meanwhile, only months prior to Musk's talking President Trump into turning him loose with a machete to hack the US state to pieces, the Inspector General at USAID--the post in charge of keeping the agency honest--had apparently launched an investigation into USAID's contractual ties with Starlink.

Starlink, as you might be aware, is billionaire Elon Musk's satellite communications firm.

I'll let you do the math.

CONSERVATISM DEFINED

 Definition of a conservative: Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.

NOTE TO MAGA: Stop calling yourselves "conservatives". Your leader is a far-right populist autocrat who is systematically trampling every tradition, institution, custom and value that the US stands for.

Thanks in advance.

 

WHAT IS A PSYCHOPATH?

Recent events—in the past few months since November—have led me to engage in a layman’s study of what is known as ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). It seems that ASPD is a somewhat broad classification of specific mental illnesses that may include sociopathy, borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. It is supposed to be more politically correct today, from our American POV, to use scientific-sounding initials to describe garden-variety behavioral aberrations, hence, ASPD, AvPD (avoidant personality disorder), BPD (borderline personality disorder), DPD (dependent personality disorder), HPD (histrionic personality disorder), NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder), PAPD (passive-aggressive personality disorder), PPD (paranoid personality disorder), SzPD (schizoid personality disorder), etc.

But sometimes nothing but the hard, unvarnished, naked word will suffice. In  this case, the word is: psychopath. 

So what—or perhaps I should say who—is a psychopath? A psychopath is defined as:
Someone with a personality disorder that involves a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. Psychopaths may also be impulsive, manipulative, and exploitative. 

Principal Characteristics 

-         Impulsivity: Psychopaths may act in risky ways.

-         Lack of empathy: Psychopaths may not care about other people's feelings.

-         Manipulation: Psychopaths may be charismatic and exploitative.

-         Egocentrism: Psychopaths may be self-centered.

-         Disregard for rules: Psychopaths may not follow rules, norms, or the law.

-         Physical aggression: Psychopaths may be violent or cruel to others.

-         Lack of remorse: Psychopaths may not feel sorry for their actions.

Psychopathy has been associated with amorality—an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. More specifically, Robert D. Hare, a renowned Canadian forensic psychologist credited with having created a definitive  “psychopath checklist” in the 1970s that is still the psychopathy gold standard test used today by forensic psychologists, writes that “Psychopaths have a narcissistic and incredibly inflated view of their own importance and self-worth. They have huge egos. They’re self-centered to an incredible degree.” According to Hare, psychopaths have “a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, justified in living according to their own rules.”

Another clue to psychopathy, according to Hare, is that while psychopaths love to talk about huge goals, “they typically have no idea of what it takes to achieve them.” And, he indicates, they definitely don’t have a plan for how to achieve them.

Everybody seeks rewards. Rewards drive a lot of our behavior. Even people who have spent their whole lives giving generously to others are at least somewhat focused on the rewarding experience of giving, and seeing the results that it brings.  But psychopaths are obsessively focused on the prize and have no moral, ethical or legal boundaries or compunction when it comes to achieving it. They are incapable of taking a step back and weighing the consequences of what they do, because they are wired to achieve their personal goals no matter what the cost, especially to others, might be. They are almost literally blind to anything other than their own personal goals.

I’ve been looking into these issues, in the interest of journalistic integrity, to ensure that I’m not talking out of turn when I’m tempted to refer to the current president of the United States as “a madman”. The more I research, the harder I’m finding it not to say the words out loud, because it’s not name-calling (something MAGA types seem to be very concerned about…unless it is they who are calling the names) when it is an unavoidable conclusion.

I submit that our country is, regardless of how many people voted for him, being run by a madman. And we should be worried.  

For instance, what sort of a man, in the face of a national tragedy, twists the facts to blame a totally unrelated policy of the previous administration for that tragedy simply because expunging that policy is what he happens to be obsessing on at this very moment? And then too, because the catastrophe in question caused attention to be taken off of him in the news cycle. According to the president, the worst American air tragedy in six decades was caused by policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in American society—which in any logical, human and socially healthy mind should be viewed as a plus in American society. But regardless of one’s feelings about (initials again) DEI, blaming a horrifying air tragedy on it is simply insane. (And was, by the way, repeated by the president’s surrogate lunatic Elon Musk on X, his social media platform).

More evidence of the president’s profound lack of empathy and humanity: When asked by a reporter, in the face of such a tragedy, with the families of the sixty-seven people who died still in shock, if he would go to the crash site, the president responded, “I have a plan to visit, not the site. Because you tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

So let’s examine that rhetorical question of mine about what sort of man would do that. The answers have been right under our noses for nearly a decade. And yet, here we are again!

The answer is:

The sort of man who said, just hours before the US surpassed two hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths (headed for a million deaths of people of all ages before it was all over),  “Now we know it. It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. But they have other problems, that's what it really affects, that's it…But it affects virtually nobody. It's an amazing thing.”

The sort of man who, speaking of one of the most iconic military heroes of the Vietnam War, says, “He's not a war hero…He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you.” He was talking about Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator, who,  during Operation Rolling Thunder in  the Vietnam War, was shot down over the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, was refused medical attention by the enemy for wounds sustained in the crash, was repeatedly tortured and beaten, and remained a prisoner of war from 1967 to 1973. During that time, since his father was a renowned admiral, the Vietcong sought to negotiate a deal for his release, early on in his captivity. McCain refused any such effort as long as his fellow US prisoners remained POWs. The man saying McCain wasn’t a hero, the man who is now president and commander-in-chief, himself acquired five college deferments and eventually managed to finagle a medical deferment for “bone spurs” in his heels, in order to avoid being drafted into the military.

The kind of man who, as commander-in-chief, stands on the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery with a retired four-star Marine general—who, himself, has lost a son in combat seven years earlier in the Middle East—looks out over the vast sea of crosses of America’s war dead and says, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Because, clearly, he can’t even imagine doing anything in which there isn’t something in it for him, and certainly can’t imagine making the supreme sacrifice for something as unrelated to his personal priorities as his nation.

The kind of man who refuses to have US combat amputees present at a White House military event because their presence “doesn’t look good for me.”

The kind of man who publicly belittles the parents of Humayun Khan, a US Army captain, a Gold Star recipient, and a Muslim killed in Iraq, after they dared to criticize him for his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The kind of man who, as US president and commander-in-chief, didn’t want to waste his precious time visiting a cemetery in France devoted to American soldiers who fought and died on French soil during World War I, because he considered them “suckers and losers.”

The kind of man who says he’s entitled to force unwanted kisses on women—“I just start kissing them…I don’t even wait”— or to “grab them by the pussy” because he’s “a star”.

The kind of man (monster) who sexually assaults a woman in a department store dressing room. And then slanders her publicly and calls her a liar.

The kind of man, the kind of leader,  who incites his most radical supporters to “fight like hell” to halt certification of an election in which he was definitively beaten, and then calmly sits back to watch the violence unfold on TV for three hours without lifting a finger to stop it.

The kind of man, the kind of president, who, after more than sixty courts and his own attorney general have ruled out his charges of election fraud, tries to steal the election anyway by pressuring officials to falsify the results.

The kind of man who still can’t move on from that loss, even though he has again been elected to office, and who is now dividing the nation and wasting time and national treasure in mounting a widespread witch-hunt to fire, smear, sue and discredit anyone and everyone who rightly and justly took part in prosecution of the perpetrators of the violent post-2020 election uprising, which he incited.

The kind of man who makes no secret of his admiration for dictators and famous gangsters, and even less of a secret of his disdain for democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.

The kind of man who, in all the time that we, the people, have known him, has consistently and famously and provably lied about, well, just about everything you can imagine—thirty thousand lies (count them, fact-checkers did) just in his first term—a man who seems to have no concept of facts or truth, no grip on reality, a man driven only by his personal ambitions, his vendettas, and, more importantly, by his personal hatred, with which he charismatically infects his base.

Last year, forensic psychologist Dr. Vince Greenwood developed a scientific study of the current president’s background and past behavior in an attempt to establish whether the populist GOP leader is, indeed, a psychopath. He used the well-established Hare Psychopathy Checklist as the basis for his study.   According to his results, the president scored thirty-three.  The usual cutoff point for clinical psychopathy is thirty. Greenwood writes,  “For each item (on the checklist), the diagnostician is asked to give a rating on the pervasiveness of the trait. The guidelines to diagnose psychopathy are straightforward, but the demands on the diagnostician are rigorous.” The test is so rigorous, in fact, that professionals administering it have to undergo specialized training before being cleared to give it.

The doctor’s conclusion? That the president is “a garden-variety example of a particular and precisely delineated psychiatric condition.” Dr. Greenwood goes on to say that “he is, sadly for him and dangerously for the rest of us, a prisoner of his psychopathology, a puppet on the strings of a set of destructive personality traits that dictate his behavior. He is at the mercy of those traits, and, by extension, so are we.”

So what does that score of thirty-three signify on a comparative basis? According to Dr. Greenwood’s study, “The average score for individuals in a maximum security prison setting is 22. I mention that because the typical cutoff to get a formal diagnosis of psychopathy is 30. It’s a high bar that even most serious criminals don’t meet.” 

As to criteria and sources used in the study, Dr. Greenwood writes, “He (the president) is arguably the most well-chronicled candidate in history. A partial list of informational sources would include 13 autobiographical efforts as well as his social media posts, 71 biographies, many of which are richly sourced, and hundreds of interviews from print, radio, and television. A clinical interview is not necessary to diagnose the (then) former president for this condition. Indeed, there is research to indicate that the interview can detract from the assessment of a psychopath because of their facility for lying.”

This was what the president’s psychopathy scorecard looked like:

1. Glibness/superficial charm — 2

2.Egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth — 2
3.Proneness to boredom/need for stimulation — 2
4. Pathological lying and deception/gaslighting — 2
5. Conning/lack of sincerity — 2
6. Lack of remorse or guilt — 2
7. Shallow affect — 2
8. Callous/lack of empathy — 2
9. Parasitic lifestyle — 0
10. Poor behavioral controls — 2
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior — 2
12. Early behavior problems — 2
13. Lack of realistic long-term goals — 1
14. Impulsivity — 2
15. Irresponsibility — 2
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions — 2
17. Many short-term marital relationships — 1
18. Juvenile delinquency — 1
19. Revocation of parole — 0
20. Criminal versatility — 2
Total = 33

And this is not the only study that has arrived at the same conclusion since the president burst onto the political scene a decade ago. Indeed, two hundred thirty American psychiatrists last year signed an open letter affirming their belief that the man currently occupying the White House is far too mentally unstable to be president.

Also, during the current president’s former term in office, twenty-seven psychiatrists collaborated on a book entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which they agreed that, although a diagnosis should not be made without formal examination of the patient, dangerousness may be assessed from observed behavior. And their unanimous conclusion was that this man was a clear and present danger to the US and to the world. One particularly chilling passage concludes that the president “is now the most powerful head of state in the world,” but is also “one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving” of world leaders. It goes on to warn that it is tremendously dangerous, considering the president’s mental state, for him to have “his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power.” It is worth recalling that when the president first entered office in 2017, one of the first questions he asked was, if the US has nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?

The book also points to the effect the president’s mental pathology has had on society as a whole, creating a “malignant normality” in which “what was previously considered unthinkable becomes the norm. Some therapists have seen patients suffering from trauma and re-trauma resulting from the president’s actions, which mimic those of an aggressive abuser.” 

So if I say that a lawless madman is running the country, it’s not hyperbole. It is a stark scientific and medical reality. The country, the world, all of us, are at the mercy of the whims of a diagnosed psychopath. And half the country has apparently fallen under his lunatic spell.

We should all, in the interest of self-preservation, be worried about that. The whole country. The whole world. It’s a monkey-with-a-razor moment in the most militarily powerful nation on earth, and we—Americans and humankind as a whole—are all potential victims of it.

 

THE TRUMP CULT – MORE OF THE SAME…ONLY WORSE

 Donald Trump’s new term in power is beginning just the way the other one ended, with utter disrespect for the law, for the justice system, for law enforcement, for every single person who isn’t a hundred percent behind the Führer or who doesn’t fall within the narrow characteristics of the MAGA ideal, and with open contempt for compromise and unity, and for the Constitution of the United States.  It has begun, literally, “with a vengeance” and with a burning desire to further divide Americans rather than bringing them together.

He wasn’t in office more than a few hours before he overrode investigators, the federal courts system and juries that had worked tirelessly to bring to justice insurrectionists who had raided the Capitol Building on January Sixth of 2021, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, injuring one hundred forty police officers, some very seriously, and killing another, while threatening with bodily harm or murder, members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. Fifteen hundred rioters in total, some still in the process of trial and conviction, and hundreds of others already serving or having served sentences. He also commuted the sentences of six dangerous urban terrorist leaders who conspired to mount the insurrection—among them were Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the so-called Oath Keepers and Enrique Tario, leader of the self-styled Proud Boys gang, perhaps the most militant of the shock-force groups supporting Trump.

The Proud Boys are a neo-fascist ad hoc organization that Tario describes as “Western chauvinists”.  It is an all-male, white-supremacist, domestic terrorist gang. They emerged on the national stage as an active terrorist counterforce during violent race riots following the public suffocation-torture and  murder of Minnesota African American George Floyd by veteran white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in May of 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term.

When, during the 2020 presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would denounce white-supremacy, the then-president hedged. When his opponent, Joe Biden, mentioned the Proud Boys, Wallace asked what Trump had to say to that group. Chillingly, Trump answered that he would tell them to “Stand back, and stand by.”

After he lost the election later that year and, after failing to legitimize his false claim that the election had been “stolen”, the meaning of that ominous message to the Proud Boys became clear, as they, in the style of Mussolini’s Blackshirts of old, led other extremists in mounting the January Sixth Insurrection, which will go down in history as one of the darkest days in American democracy. Despite the fact that, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election Trump surrogates including Vice President J.D. Vance had assured the public that violent criminals involved in the J-6 riots would not be pardoned, Trump’s sweeping decree has fully pardoned or commuted the sentences of virtually every insurrectionist involved in those tragic events, and has stymied the trials of hundreds of others still under investigation.

Trump continues to tout the insurrectionists and terrorist gangs that took part in the extreme violence at the Capitol as “patriots”, and as “hostages” of the Biden administration. Underlying those patently false descriptions, however, is an effort by Trump to obfuscate his own responsibility for the insurrection. Clearly, there were well-documented federal criminal charges against him for inciting the January Sixth Insurrection, prior to his winning the 2024 election, which rendered his prosecution moot. By casting the insurrectionists as “patriots”, perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and pardoning every single person involved, as if the whole thing had merely been cooked up by the Biden administration, Trump may well be offering up a hail Mary that charges against him will simply go away completely once he is no longer president.

In his first hours in office, President Trump has also come with promises—more like blood oaths, actually—to “go after” all of those who did their jobs and served their country, the rule of law and democracy in seeking to prosecute him, to the full extent of the law, for the provable and proven misdeeds that he perpetrated during his first administration (which, in any country or party that cared one iota about democracy and the rule of law, should have been his last). And he makes no secret of the fact that he will weaponize the Justice Department to do it, while falsely claiming that it was weaponized against him and his cronies.

The newly installed president has been chomping at the bit for four years. Not to put forward a formula to make the US a better, kinder, more inclusive place for all Americans, but rather, to exact revenge for his own personal grievances, and to undo every good and humanitarian measure enacted by all administrations but his own going back a quarter of a century. All the way back, indeed, to the Bush junior era, in which that administration introduced plans for legal status and a path to citizenship for twelve million undocumented immigrants, as well as being at least half-heartedly empathic toward the LGBTQ community. As Tim Marshall of Seattle Pride puts it, “Thanks George W. Bush, for being the least regressive GOP politician of the ‘00s. We’ll remember you like a pair of ultra-low-rise jeans: a pain to live with but impossible to forget.”

Regarding this point, clearly, during his last administration, Trump targeted women’s reproductive rights by packing the Supreme Court with radical far-right justices who overturned Roe v Wade, a half-century-old landmark precedent that protected women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies. New restrictions on women’s rights are expected as the far-right’s Project 2025 starts meshing with executive action. But this time, Trump also seems bent of annulling all of the progress the LBGTQ community has made in attaining equal rights over the course of the last quarter-century. Trump pointedly announced during his whining, bullying, divisive and self-congratulatory inaugural address that “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”  Note, that he said “of the US government,” not of his administration, presuming, then, to speak for all three branches, regardless of opinions and/or legislation to the contrary. Spoken, in other words, like the despot he plans to be.

He hours later backed this up by signing a sweeping executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and directing federal agencies to cease promotion of the concept of gender transition. Trump is actively promoting discrimination against the LGBTQ community by vowing to his radically right-wing base that he will rid the US of what he calls “transgender insanity”. This is an only thinly veiled invitation to his radicalized followers to marginalize LGBTQ people across American society.  

Indeed, Trump’s immediate authoritarianism has extended beyond the two-gender rule to also do away with all measures currently promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, measures which, until now, have been a bastion of fairness and humanitarianism hard fought and earned over long years since the Civil Rights Era.  His orders regarding the civil rights of these minority sectors of society include giving departments and agencies of the Executive Branch an ultimatum to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs within sixty days, as of his first day in office.

This action includes firing all chief diversity officers and scrapping all equity action plans. He is also ordering a veritable witch-hunt requiring all departments and agencies to give the  White House Office of Management and Budget a full accounting of any and all previous diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, including the listing of names of DEI grant recipients and DEI government contractors. In short, in the mean and vindictive second autocracy of Donald Trump, diversity, equity and inclusion will have no place. Indeed, they will be areas targeted for persecution, with the Trump administration already encouraging government workers to report any attempt to keep some form of DEI alive in their bureaus.

Other rights violations are in the offing.

For instance, Trump plans—and has issued an executive order to prove it—to do away with birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship (fittingly in this immigrant nation, in which most of use descended, not from indigenous peoples, but from boats) is guaranteed  under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. In other words, anyone born on US soil is automatically an American.  Trump’s  order arbitrarily asserts that a child born in the US is not a citizen if  the mother doesn’t have legal immigration status or “is in the country legally but only temporarily,” and if the father is not a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order further forbids US agencies from issuing any document recognizing such a child as a citizen or from accepting any state document recognizing such citizenship.

In other words, Trump is rendering children across an entire segment of US society virtually stateless, and robbing native citizens of their birthright. This is already under challenge in the federal court system.

Oh, and, remember George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, which gave us the invasive Patriot Act, with all of its “state of siege”-style tweaking of the Bill of Rights, the introduction of torture under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation”, and the holding of certain types of prisoners, without charges and at the disposal of the Executive Branch—all things that administration had in common with every dictatorship I’ve ever covered as a journalist? Well, Trump is now going that one better by planning to use the military in domestic policing operations, with the excuse that illegal immigration is “a matter of national security" and "an invasion,” that entitles him,  as commander-in-chief, to call out “his” troops.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Never mind that this is a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts use of military personnel in domestic law enforcement actions. As I pored over Trump’s barrage of royal decrees, I was recalling the night of the military coup in Argentina in 1976. The Junta issued a series of repressive decrees to let the country know that there was a new sheriff in town and that the constitutional rulebook had just been heaved into the dumpster.

Trump has made it clear that churches and schools will no longer be considered off-limits in plans for government persecution of the undocumented. This brought back memories of my leaving the newspaper where I worked late on that March night in ’76. There were Army trucks everywhere, and soldiers armed with carbines, sidearms, shotguns and light machine guns were checking papers and loading people onto the trucks for transport. Now too, I imagine churches and schools in the US surrounded by military convoys and people being dragged away to concentration camps.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Oh yes, did I forget to mention that Trump has also enunciated plans to use military bases to create concentration camps for undocumented migrants? Yes, he’s calling them “migrant camps”, but make no mistake, the idea is to create concentration camps within military jurisdictions. And don’t kid yourself, once the genie is out of the bottle in terms of authoritarian designs, there’s no putting it back. Nor is there any reason to believe that, in a state of virtual lawlessness, other sectors of American society could not also find themselves in an autocrat’s sights. There is a reason, in a healthy democracy, that the role of the military is external, not domestic, and a reason too that soldiers and officers alike swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, not a king or dictator.

In short, I’ve seen (lived) this movie before, elsewhere in the world, and know how it ends. And it doesn’t end well. This is not the American representative democracy that we grew up with. This is a populist authoritarian regime, headed up by a megalomaniacal demagogue, whose only goal is to be the most powerful man on earth.

 

IN THE DARK

The Tim Campbell cartoon above aptly pictures the humiliating capitulation that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos forced on what has long been a bastion of democracy and investigative journalism, when he overrode a decision by the Post board, in the run-up to the 2024 election, to endorse Kamala Harris for president, and to give their reasons why.

I have no personal bone to pick with Bezos. As an independent writer, I'm really grateful to Bezos's organization for creating Kindle Direct Publishing, which I consider the greatest publishing equalizer since the Gutenberg printing press. KDP is a highly democratic and necessary medium for writers whose work might otherwise never come to light. That said, however, in the case of the Washington Post, Bezos’s judgment couldn’t have been more ill-advised.

The fact is that what the Washington Post sells isn’t merely newspapers and online information. What it sells is trust and journalistic integrity, both in its investigative coverage and in its editorial observations. And once that trust is broken, you can’t simply say, “Well, it was just this one time. From now on, it’s a clean slate and we’ll be trustworthy again.”

In everyday life, once caught in a lie, it becomes difficult to ever regain the complete trust of those around us, often even that of the people closest to us. This is even more true for newspapers, some of whose reputations have been irrecoverably damage by a single poorly sourced story. What Bezos’s erroneous decision not to let the Post pronounce its honest view of the consequences of another Donald Trump administration tacitly indicates to the public is, "Well, maybe another Trump presidency won't be so bad for American democracy after all," when the truth is that it stands to be devastating, as the Post's journalists and board know all too well.

What publisher Bezos did by intervening in what should have been a journalistic rather than business call was, basically, to censor, in an arbitrary act of corporate despotism, one of the erstwhile most courageous and democratic organs of the free press in the US. His silencing of the editorial board is, nevertheless, and unfortunately, a sign of the times.

We should make no mistake. The real threat to American democracy is the dominance of oligarchic corporate influence over every aspect of American life. Money and power, in other words, over truth and democracy. In-coming and former President Donald Trump is just the tool for it, and the caricaturesque symbol of it—a highly pernicious effect, rather than the root cause.

The op-ed attached below and published, at the time, by Boston University, further explains the significance of Bezos’s shortsighted move.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/lack-of-endorsement-shows-bezos-willing-to-bow-to-trump/

 

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.