THE GOP’S OBSESSION WITH SLANDERING AN AMERICAN HERO

 

The latest witch-hunt led by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and a handful of GOP hangers-on against Dr. Anthony Fauci is a tragic and shameful travesty perpetrated against a man who, objectively speaking, can only be considered a scientific hero. The Stalinesque theater of the absurd created by Paul at the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee this past week is a source of shame for not only the Trump-hijacked Republican Party, but for the US as a whole. The mere fact that Rand Paul was able to get away with setting up this throwback to the days of McCarthyism is indicative of the abysmal level of persecutory weaponization to which the Legislative Branch has plummeted with the GOP in charge.

Dr. Fauci has long been the genius far-right anti-science Republicans love to hate. But no one has more fully represented the witch-hunt against him than Senator Paul. Fauci has become a perverse obsession for Paul, one that his powerful position in the GOP-led Congress has permitted him to pursue with utter impunity. This impunity, then, has allowed Paul to raise every sort of unsubstantiated claim imaginable against Dr. Fauci with no need whatsoever to provide convincing evidence of his wild exaggerations and accusations.

As the head of a Senate committee that enjoys the dangerously sweeping powers of Homeland Security, Paul has also been able to entertain his obsession by calling on Fauci to testify under oath, a situation in which his Senate authority has permitted him to not only rake Dr. Fauci over the coals himself, but also to invite other GOP science-deniers to pillory one of the nation’s top scientists during their cross examinations. And to do so in the rudest and least protocolar of ways. Like when Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno shockingly asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck” he thought he was.

In my own mind, I was thinking that someone with a heart and a brain should stand up and provide a ten-minute summary of who the incredible Dr. Fauci really was, and then say, “Senator, we now know who Dr. Fauci is. The question on the table now should be, who the fuck do you think you are?

Rand Paul

The exchange between Moreno and Fauci was ugly in itself but was made uglier by the fact that Chairman Paul—besides making public intimate entries in Dr. Fauci’s own personal diary, which had been subpoenaed—never bothered to call out Moreno for his language or for the disrespectful way in which he formulated the questions he put to Dr. Fauci during the Senate proceedings. All of this is indicative of the depths of parliamentary perversion to which the Senate GOP has fallen. Its most vitriolic representatives are carrying out a veritable inquisition against defenders of America’s finest traditions and natural enemies of the current regime.

Paul would later compound the vile injustice to which Dr. Fauci was being subjected when he had Fauci’s attorney physically removed from the room, when the lawyer sought to respond to a question put to his client, after advising Dr. Fauci to plead the Fifth Amendment considering that the head of the committee was clearly bent on persecuting him.

It is important to note that the target of Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is a top scientist, with a career spanning more than five decades, during which his scientific work and public service have contributed to saving millions of lives worldwide. Paul’s accusations surrounding Fauci stem entirely from the scientist’s work at the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the COVID-19 pandemic—the ham-handed mishandling of which by the Trump administration cost a million lives in the US alone.

The central issue here is not whether Dr. Fauci made mistakes—every public official managing a once-in-a-century novel pandemic is bound to—but whether the campaign against him has been proportional to the evidence. The historical record clearly demonstrates that it has not. More importantly, we should bear in mind whom we are talking about.

So, who is Anthony Fauci? Dr. Fauci's scientific career is virtually unmatched. A graduate of Cornell University’s medical school, where he was top in his class, Fauci was the longest-serving director of a US scientific agency in history, having headed up the NIAID from 1984 until 2022. In that role, he served as a scientific adviser to seven presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In recognition of that incredible service to the people of the United States, in 2008, then-President George W. Bush presented Dr. Fauci with the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for his determined and aggressive efforts to help others live longer and healthier lives.”

Fauci receives Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush

In a 1988 presidential debate Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush paid Fauci—then practically an unknown in the public eye—one of the highest compliments possible. When the debate moderator asked the elder Bush to name a person who should inspire young Americans as a modern-day hero, the former CIA director and future president didn’t name a sports figure or someone in the military. Instead, he said, “I think of Dr. Fauci—probably likely never heard of him. You did? He's a very fine research top doctor at National Institute of Health, working hard doing something about research on this disease of AIDS.” Clearly, Bush had his priorities straight. Men like Fauci were the true heroes of humanity.

Over the years, Fauci has been a visiting professor at innumerable medical centers, and has received numerous honorary doctorates from universities in the US and abroad.

A young Dr. Fauci with George H.W. Bush

The remarkable continuity of Dr. Fauci’s service under both Republican and Democratic administrations demonstrates that, for decades, he has been regarded primarily as a scientist rather than a political actor. It is only in the wake of the first Trump administration’s disastrous handling of the COVID pandemic that the GOP—and particularly Rand Paul—have sought to turn Dr. Fauci into a scapegoat for the one million COVID deaths that occurred on their watch. It should also be noted that Paul—a product of the Tea Party and its later iteration as MAGA—is basically a vaccine denier, who has campaigned for vaccines to be a choice rather than an obligation. He is, then, part of the problem in the trend toward the return of numerous deadly diseases that are today resurging as a result of ever-lower vaccination rates, after having been defeated through obligatory vaccination in my lifetime.

But as George H.W. Bush pointed out in his brief tribute, Dr. Fauci's greatest contribution predates COVID by decades. In the early 1980s, infection with the HIV virus was essentially a death sentence. Dr. Fauci became one of the world's leading researchers on HIV immunology and treatment. Among his major accomplishments in this field were: helping identify mechanisms by which HIV destroys the immune system; advancing clinical trials that produced effective antiviral therapies; promoting anti-retroviral therapy, and supporting a global HIV research infrastructure. His work directly helped shape scientific policies that eventually turned HIV from a fatal disease into a manageable chronic condition.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, Dr. Fauci also played an influential advisory role in the development of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR is widely regarded as one of the most successful humanitarian health initiatives ever undertaken. According to US government estimates, that program alone has saved more than 25 million lives. Of course, no serious historian attributes all of those lives saved solely to Dr. Fauci. But it is equally undeniable that he was among the principal scientific architects whose expertise helped make those live-saving achievements possible.

As if all of this weren’t enough, Fauci’s work has extended far beyond AIDS and COVID-19 research. He also directed major federal responses to SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, West Nile virus, anthrax and pandemic influenza. Under his leadership, the NIAID became one of the world's premier infectious disease research institutions. His published scientific work numbers more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers, making him one of the most cited biomedical researchers in history.

The Trump GOP has frequently accused Fauci of dishonesty. The record shows that this is a facile, self-serving reading of a complex reality. Throughout the  COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci repeatedly testified before Congress, participated in hundreds of press briefings, responded calmly and cogently to intentionally hostile questions for hours on end, and transparently released scientific data as it evolved. He openly acknowledged the fact that recommendations were fluid and would change as scientific knowledge regarding the novel virus evolved and changed.

His statement that early guidance on masks reflected concerns about preserving supplies for healthcare workers has been broadly criticized, but this was a logical priority within his purview as the head of national efforts to deal with a grave emergency that was overwhelming US medical facilities. And he, furthermore, publicly explained the rationale behind that priority rather than denying it. He reiterated endlessly that uncertainty existed regarding many aspects of COVID transmission, and he repeatedly emphasized that recommendations would evolve with the emergence of new scientific and medical evidence.

Changing advice during a novel pandemic is not in any sense evidence of deception. Rather, it was acknowledgement that new scientific information was being applied and adjusted as more was learned, even as the health authorities were struggling to cope with the pandemic in practical human terms. Such adjustments are not evidence of errors or of someone like Dr. Fauci “not knowing what he’s doing.” They are, instead, proof that scientific knowledge is developing and improving almost daily and that, on that basis, recommendations must also change and evolve in sympathy with those improvements.

No elected official has questioned Dr. Fauci’s motive more aggressively than Rand Paul. The Kentucky senator has repeatedly accused Fauci of lying to Congress, funding gain-of-function research, and responsibility for the pandemic. Yet repeated investigations—including both reviews by federal agencies and independent analyses—have never concluded that Dr. Fauci intentionally lied under oath. The question of how to classify certain aspects of coronavirus research has remained scientifically and legally disputed, but no court has ever found Dr. Fauci guilty of perjury or criminal misconduct.

In the absence of evidence of any wrongdoing on Fauci’s part, Paul’s repeated public accusations, then, function basically as a political red herring, aimed at taking the focus off of the Trump regime’s own disastrous handling of the pandemic, and as a distraction from other Trump failures, like his personal war in Iran, which is rejected by more than three-quarters of Americans polled.

The major boogey man in all of this has been Paul’s “gain-of-function” accusations. He has sought to make it sound like some sort of sinister plot on Fauci’s part to create a supervirus capable of wiping out a huge segment of the population. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to comprehend this, it is important to understand what gain-of-function is and how it works.

Gain-of-function refers to any genetic change that gives an organism a new ability or makes an existing ability stronger. This change can happen naturally through evolution or it can be induced by scientists in a lab. When gain-of-function happens naturally, it is because, over time, genes mutate, as a means of helping an organism survive. But gain-of-function can also be provoked intentionally in a lab, with the aim of learning more about how certain organisms work.

Gain-of-function is commonly used to help create medications, to improve crop yields, or to generate more useful bacteria. But its main use in the medical world is to help scientists better understand novel viruses and how they work, and then, ultimately, to create reliable vaccines to combat them. Clearly, these were activities in which Dr. Fauci was likely to be submersed daily during the pandemic, as scientists raced against the clock to discover a safe and effective COVID vaccine—a task they successfully carried out in record time in different parts of the world from Russia, to Britain, to the United States.

Where Rand Paul and other far-right anti-vax and MAGA actors have sought to hang their arguments are reports regarding the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated with an incident at the Wuhan research lab in China. Fauci was involved in American funding for experiments taking place there. A scientist of Fauci’s caliber and authority would, of course, be involved in research efforts worldwide, in seeking to find cures for highly infectious diseases. But from there to accusing Dr. Fauci of being the veritable architect of the pandemic and of intentionally seeking to cover up the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is the height of conspiracy-theory fabrication.

The origin of the COVID pandemic has never been adequately proven. Could it have been due to a leak from the Wuhan lab? Sure. This could have happened because of what is known as zoonotic spillover—in which, at some point, a virus might spread from animals to people—or it could have been due to some incident at the lab that no investigation has yet been able to determine. That’s not a conspiracy theory, but a legitimate scientific question that so far fruitless international efforts have sought to resolve.

But the problem comes when a subjective group motivated by political, personal or ideological leanings decides, based on no hard evidence whatsoever, that a mere theory should be taken as fact. The result is what is known as a conspiracy theory, and that is what is behind the continued persecution of one of America’s greatest medical heroes ever.  Despite the fact that there is still no conclusive evidence regarding the origin of the corona virus and the COVID pandemic, Rand Paul and his merry band of MAGA anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have decided that they are going to believe in the Wuhan leak theory and take it as fact. Very likely because it fits their obsession with vilifying Dr. Fauci, whose only arguable crime against humanity has been making every effort to keep spiteful, bitter people like Rand Paul from dying of some terrible disease.

The pitch that Rand Paul and company are trying to sell to the public is that, thanks to Dr. Fauci, US-funded research may have contributed to the pandemic. The argument is a real stretch, since the funding was granted for research aimed at improving the available means of combating dread diseases. If a problem at that lab was, in the end, somehow responsible for the spread of COVID—and again, there is no hard evidence that this is true—it was a tragic and unintentional consequence. To date, no investigation has established that the virus was either intentionally manufactured or released there.

The thing with conspiracy theories is that they have a lot in common with novel viruses like COVID-19. They have an uncanny ability to move and spread from one group to another. Float a claim in some radical online group, and before you know it, it has spread across the length and breadth of the social media universe. It is easy then, to posit that it is based on “well-known facts”—trust us, on this—and to turn it into a powerful political weapon.

And that is precisely where things stand today in the Soviet-style kangaroo-court hearings through which Dr. Fauci is being persecuted. So the biggest take-away from all of this is the question of how mere conspiracy theories can suddenly acquire a veneer of “authority” when pressed into service by bad government actors. 

Complicating the conspiracy theory, Rand Paul has presumed to portray himself as a medical professional of the same caliber as Dr. Fauci, and therefore, an authority worthy of opining on Fauci’s competency. Let’s look at the facts.

Paul indeed graduated from Duke Medical in 1988 specializing in ophthalmology. He finished his ophthalmology training at Duke University Hospital in 1993. That same year, he and his family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he started working in the private sector with the Downing McPeak Vision Centers and the Graves Gilbert Clinic. He later opened his own private practice in Bowling Green as an eye surgeon. 

At the turn of the century, the American Board of Ophthalmology modified its standards of practice, and required specialists in that field to recertify in order to keep their licenses to practice. Paul failed to comply with the recertification standards—whether because he was afraid he would not be able to meet them or maybe just out of bullheadedness—and his license to practice ophthalmology was revoked.

Instead of simply biting the bullet and taking the recertification examination, Rand Paul got together with a group of other disgruntled professionals and they started their very own rival certification board called the National Board  of Ophthamology. Paul was among the first to be recertified to practice medicine by this knock-off board, with other unlicensed medical school graduates following him in basically recertifying themselves to practice. Clearly, getting around the American Board of Ophthalmology recertification examination was the main purpose of the so-called National Board of Ophthalmology, because after Paul and company recertified themselves with the stroke of a pen, their organization waned in importance and was eventually dissolved.

Under that authority, Rand Paul practiced ophthalmology in Bowling Green until 2008, before launching his campaign for the US Senate in 2009. He won his Senate bid in November of 2010.

So let’s look comparatively at the professional performances of Dr. Paul and Dr. Fauci.

Rand Paul graduated from Duke Medical, practiced privately as an eye surgeon, lost his certification to do so, challenged the recertification standards of the medical board with oversight for his profession, started his own certification board and was recertified under his own authority, decided to run for the Senate, and won a seat. Since then, he has opposed obligatory vaccination for epidemic diseases, supported abolition of the Department of Education, opposed healthcare for all, and supported a free-market medical sector. He has also become—for reasons clear only to him and his MAGA base—the number one detractor of Dr. Anthony Fauci, vowing to put the scientist behind bars. He has spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and taxpayer funds going after Fauci for alleged criminal misconduct, based entirely on MAGA conspiracy theories that have never resulted in any criminal findings against Dr. Fauci.    

Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, has become one of the world's leading infectious disease specialists, spent more than fifty years conducting biomedical research, scored monumental achievements in major infectious disease control and prevention, advised presidents of both parties and been praised and rewarded by two presidents from Rand Paul’s own party, contributed to public health initiatives that have saved tens of millions of lives, transformed the lives of HIV-AIDS victims worldwide, and published more than a thousand scholarly papers that have served as gold standard guidance for broad sectors of the medical profession.

Former President Obama joins Dr. Fauci at a school event to
promote COVID vaccination programs during the pandemic

Paul has clearly devoted far more public attention to unreasonably attacking Fauci than to engaging with the broader scientific consensus on infectious disease and seeking to apply the proven science to making his constituents healthier.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is not infallible, nor does he pretend to be. He has acknowledged mistakes and changing guidance during the pandemic, which was an unprecedented public health emergency.

That said, Dr. Fauci should be judged not on the basis of conspiracy theories supported by the anti-science prejudice of the MAGA movement, but on his   half-century of scientific achievement and service to the American people. Measured over the course of that stellar career, Dr. Fauci stands as one of the most influential physician-scientists in modern American history. His leadership helped advance treatments for HIV/AIDS, strengthen preparedness against emerging infectious diseases, and guide public health responses under seven presidents from both political parties.

By contrast, Senator Rand Paul's sustained focus on portraying Dr. Fauci as personally culpable for the pandemic has not resulted in criminal convictions or judicial findings of misconduct of any sort with regard to Fauci. The obsessively nefarious anti-Fauci—and anti-science—campaign mounted by Paul is no more than a political scam designed to assign personal blame to a scapegoat for a complex global catastrophe in which Paul’s party bore a huge measure of responsibility by generating distrust in the science that sought to save lives, and encouraging Americans to “decide for themselves,” rather than strictly adhering to the science as it evolved and became ever more effective.

Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is simple MAGA deflection, and the Senator, taking his cue from the ghost of Eugene McCarthy, is bent on unjustly trashing Dr. Fauci’s extraordinary reputation as a means of stroking his own ego and of gaining points among his anti-science MAGA constituents.

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.

 

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.

 

DICK CHENEY’S STAND AGAINST TRUMP SIGNALS THE GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION

 
Dick Cheney, the country’s oldest living vice president, and an ultra-conservative icon of the pre-Trumpian GOP far-right, this past week announced that he will be voting for liberal Democrat Kamala Harris for president. His reason? He feels the other candidate, Donald Trump, simply poses too grave a danger to democracy and the republic to vote for him.

Dick Cheney - Trump greatest threat in history

Although Cheney has been an open critic of Trump’s ever since the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021—as has his ticket-mate, former President George W. Bush—until now, he has remained circumspect about the stance of his daughter, former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who has made it clear that there was no way she would vote for her party’s presidential ticket if Donald Trump was heading it. She too recently announced that she was voting for Harris, despite her and Harris’s starkly juxtaposed policy positions.

In the case of both father and daughter, and despite both being dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, they posit that there are times when patriotism requires placing nation above party. Both are the staunchest of true Republicans. Although there had been speculation that Liz Cheney might eventually join other never-Trump conservatives in forming a third party, this never materialized and she has recently been uncharacteristically quiet, after sacrificing her entire career to take on what she considered Trump’s treasonous behavior when she was one of only two Republican members of the nine-person January Sixth investigative committee.

Nor will she or her father act—as have other anti-Trump Republicans such as former Representative Adam Kinzinger or former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan—as surrogates for the Harris campaign. They remain party loyalists, but the kind of loyalists who consider the GOP to have been hijacked by Trump, as a would-be dictator.

On announcing his decision to vote for Harris, Dick Cheney said this past week, “In our nation’s two hundred forty-eight-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” adding that, “He can never be trusted with power again.”

Cheney underscored his decision by saying, “We have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Trump - delusional authoritarian candidate

Cheney made his announcement against a backdrop in which Trump’s own pronouncements are becoming ever more authoritarian, dystopian and insane. For instance, while the Republican-Party-of-Trump candidate continues to waffle on the question of abortion in an attempt to dupe right-leaning independents into voting for him, he has nevertheless made it clear he would support a national ban—an issue on which Harris, at least among women, will likely take him to the cleaner’s. But that’s not the worst of it. He keeps repeating the MAGA conspiracy theory that Democrats want to allow abortion throughout the ninth month, or even that they will allow babies to be murdered after they are born. This is a flat and feverish lie, of course, and an utterly delusional idea. His backers in Vladimir Putin’s election-interference squad have used typical Russian propaganda to try and convince the most gullible among Trump’s supporters that these baby-killings are already, indeed, taking place, but that “nobody talks about it”, which is utterly absurd. But that hasn’t kept Trump from repeating Russian talking points.

Trump has also gone off the deep end with conspiracy theories about what immigration will be like under Harris—despite the fact that she supports increasing the Border Guards by fifteen hundred officers and turning back undocumented migrants at the border, and having drawn criticism from sectors of her own party by publicly warning unprocessed migrants not to come. According to another delusional Trump theory, espoused during a recent rally, “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” He went on to say, “If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids.”

But his latest conspiracy theory, which he has repeated on the campaign trail, is even more certifiably insane. He is now claiming that children (“childs”, as he called them) are being subjected to gender-affirming surgeries at school (at school!!!) without their parents’ knowledge.

“Can you imagine,” Trump has said, “you're a parent and your son leaves the house, and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

Speaking to the radical right-wing advocacy group Moms for Liberty, Trump said, “But the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what's going to happen with your child. And you know, many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, 'What the hell happened? Who did this to me?' They say, 'Who did this to me?' It's incredible.”

There is no way to stress enough just how off-the-wall all of this is, especially coming from a man who could end up with the nuclear codes. These dystopian fantasies of his are, in a word, batshit crazy.

And the madness doesn’t end there. Recently, Trump told a rally of people who identify as “Christian conservatives” that he needed for them to turn out and vote in this election, but adding, “I love you. You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Even coming from Donald Trump this seemed like a shockingly autocratic statement. So much so that the ever Trump-sympathetic Murdoch empire’s infotainment network, Fox News, called him on it. In an interview, one of Trump’s most slavish cheerleaders, Laura Ingraham, pointed out that Democrats were citing the quote as evidence that Trump would end elections if he returned to office. She called the Democrats’ claim “ridiculous” and sought to get Trump to backtrack on his statement. But he didn’t.

 “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true,” Trump reiterated. “Because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”

Ingraham tried again saying, more specifically, “It’s being interpreted, as you are not surprised to hear, by the left as, well, they’re never going to have another election. So can you even just respond…” But Trump cut her off and tried to change the subject, repeating again his (false) claim that Christians vote in small numbers. When she persisted, he repeated exactly what he had posited before, saying, “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November fifth. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

It was a statement that those of us accustomed to covering dictators throughout the Americas, both past and present, have heard many times before. It’s part of the authoritarian playbook to tell the governed that things will be so good for them under the authoritarian government that nobody will ever even care again if there are elections or not—with the elliptical end of that sentence being, because there won’t be.

Following former Vice President Dick Cheney’s announcement that he was casting his vote for Harris, Trump responded by referring to Cheney as an “irrelevant RINO” (Republican in Name Only).

Wait…Really??? An irrelevant RINO? Dick Cheney?

Well, for anyone who doesn’t know him, meet Richard Bruce Cheney:

Born in 1941, Dick Cheney, at eighty-three, is the oldest living US vice president, having served as such for eight years under the administration of George W. Bush. But that came after a very long career as a key figure in the conservative far-right Republican camp. So much so that even moderate Republicans considered him “too far right.” He was, arguably, the most powerful VP in history, considered by some observers to be more of a “shadow president” since he was often seen as calling the shots in the Bush administration.

Cheney started his political career as an intern for US Representative William Steiger, who served in Congress from 1967 until his death in 1978. But already during the Nixon era (1969-1974), Cheney was working in the West Wing. After Nixon’s resignation, Cheney became White House chief of staff for Gerald Ford. He then served from 1979 to 1989 as US representative for Wyoming. Before serving as vice president to George W. Bush, he was appointed secretary of defense by Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1973, during which time he oversaw the US invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause), and the Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm).

Under the younger Bush, Cheney came into his own as one of the Republican Party’s most powerful players. After 911, he was instrumental in expanding the powers of the presidency, and in advocating for exceptional intelligence-gathering methods in the War on Terror, of which he was an architect. These included secret wiretaps, enhanced interrogation (torture), waterboarding as standard practice, and removal of terrorist suspects from the normal judicial system, suspending their civil rights. This allowed, as in dictatorships, anyone dubbed a terrorist to be held, without formal charges, at the disposal of the Executive Branch.

Cheney was also among the earliest proponents of invading Iraq on what would, for the most part, turn out to be false pretenses. As such, he was also a chief architect of the Iraq War, which later expanded into the Middle East War, basically a US war of aggression on the Middle East.  

The extent of his power in government was underscored by his public disagreement with Bush over same-sex marriage. Bush originally endorsed civil unions between people of the same sex. Cheney openly and publicly disagreed with him and backed amended legislation to ban same-sex marriage. It is telling that Bush later the same year (2004) lent his support to the ban. This was unlikely to have surprised Washington insiders, however, since many of them reported that few if any administration decisions were made without Cheney’s okay.

Liz and Dick Cheney, lone Republicans at J-6 observance

In short, Cheney is the sort of far-right Republican that liberal Democrats love to hate. Indeed, many of the policies that would have his full-throated approval are precisely of the sort that would normally appeal to the MAGA base. Furthermore, his daughter is very much of his same bent, and during the four years that Trump was president and Liz Cheney was a representative, she voted in lockstep with Trump policies ninety-three percent of the time.

So, in other words, what has led both Liz Cheney and, now, her father, to write Trump off as what Liz calls an “unrecoverable catastrophe” has little to do with government policy and everything to do with Trump’s dictatorial designs. Both Cheneys have been done with him since January Sixth, 2021. That was the deal-breaker, as was his refusal to concede defeat and maintain the two-and-a-half-century democratic tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.

That is to say, no matter how far to the right father and daughter might be, they are, nevertheless, patriots, who believe in representative democracy, and in their oaths to defend the Constitution and the Nation against all enemies both foreign and domestic. And they see Trump in the same way I and many other small-d democrats do, as a clear and present danger to democracy and to the survival of the Nation. Or, as Liz Cheney succinctly put it in a recent interview, "We see it on a daily basis, somebody (Trump) who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he's not reelected."

All I can say is, “Amen.”  

 

BIDEN OFFERS A LESSON IN HUMILITY AND SERVICE AND HARRIS A MASTER CLASS IN ETHICS AND PROFESSIONALISM

 For the past fifty-two years, Joe Biden has distanced himself from other politicians in taking the moral high ground at the service of his country and democracy. Elected to the Senate when he was barely thirty, his long political career has been bookended by personal tragedy—the deaths in 1972 of his first wife Neilia and their infant daughter Naomi in a car crash a month after he became a senator, and the death of his rising-star politician son Beau of brain cancer in 2015, when, as the incumbent vice president, Joe Biden was first considering running for the presidency—a dream quashed not only by his son’s tragic death but also by a call from then-President Obama for him to stand down in deference to Hillary Clinton.

In both cases, Biden put country over self, overcame his own immense personal sorrow, and concentrated on how best to serve his country. Biden has been, over the years, the embodiment of John F. Kennedy’s dictum: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” In the first case, the junior senator became famous for commuting by train between his home in Delaware and his job in Washington as a means of taking care of both the business of government and his duties to his two surviving and motherless children, Beau and Hunter. In the second, he put aside his grief and the sting of his former boss’s having passed him over in favor of Clinton, and threw his hat into the ring for the presidency in the 2020 election, with the well-placed conviction that he and his long experience in government would be sufficient for him to defeat Donald Trump after Hillary Clinton lost her bid to do the same in 2016.

In hindsight, had Obama thrown his support behind his vice president in 2016, perhaps this would have been President Biden’s second term in office rather than his first, and we would not have had to witness the chaos and disarray into which the political arena has been thrown by questions regarding his age, health and suitability for continuing as president. More importantly, perhaps Donald Trump would have been a mere flash in the pan and the US would not have had to endure the dire consequences of his narcissistic, authoritarian machinations and his clear and present threats to democracy. But we’ll never know. Maybe, however, this is part of the reason that former President Obama is being so circumspect this time around.

Once again, this past weekend, we saw President Joe Biden put his country and party before his own personal wishes and goals. Despite his burning desire to remain in office for another four years and continue the job he had started, as well as staving off the unmistakable threat to democracy of another Trump presidency, he faced the hard and painful fact that he had, because of his age and failing acuity, lost the confidence of many Democratic voters and Independents, as well as of many of even his staunchest supporters within the party itself. In light of this, he seems to have clearly seen that his continued candidacy might well bring another victory for Trump and end up being the death knell for American democracy as we know it. As such, he last Sunday withdrew his bid for a second term and threw his full support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.

While Harris has been something of an enigma and, for some, a disappointment as vice president, one could make the case that she is largely misunderstood. The vice president is a politically savvy person of truly superior intelligence, as she has clearly shown throughout her political career in California—both as a firebrand prosecutor and as state attorney general—and as a Senator for that state. Personally, I see her as a very sharp and capable poker player as well. 

A case in point. During the presidential primary debates for the 2020 election, as Joe Biden’s rival on the debate stage, she did the unthinkable and challenged him on his stellar record as a civil rights activist. She made it personal as well as political. Harris challenged Biden, saying that she wanted to make a point on “the issue of race.” She then prefaced her remarks by saying that she didn’t believe him to be a racist, but quickly went on to criticize him for making “very hurtful” statements about how he had worked with segregationist senators in opposition during the nineteen-seventies and eighties to a federal busing mandate.

Biden had made his comments in the context of his being someone who knew how to work across the aisle in Congress as a means to an end, even when in general disagreement with the other lawmakers’ politics. But Harris demonstrated that politics were about more than policy victories. They had real consequences that affected real people. And to bring the point home, she said, “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

The statement caught Biden off guard and forced him into a half-truth when he countered saying his stance was being mischaracterized, adding that, “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.” In the days that followed, the statement was fact-checked repeatedly and found to be false. In point of fact, the record showed that Senator Biden had been a staunch opponent of busing on principle, and not simply when ordered by the federal government. The exchange had served Harris well and showed her to be a force to be reckoned with.

Had Biden and Harris been different people than they were, it could have ended there, with Harris returning to the Senate and Biden going on to be president of the United States. Instead, however, it seems clear that Biden respected Harris for challenging his largely deserved record as a champion of civil rights and highly likely also felt it was better to have her in his corner than as a challenger. Or perhaps he felt the best way to heal the blow she had dealt him on race relations was to choose her—a highly capable woman of color—to be his running mate—the first woman, the first black and the first Asian in history to ascend to the vice presidency of the United States. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that Biden chose her because she was the most capable to serve in the post. The points he gained in race relations and ethnicity issues were an added perk, and it turned out to be a match made in heaven.

Of course, all of that is anathema to the openly racist and sexist MAGA Republican leadership. Just forty-eight hours after Joe Biden withdrew from the race and threw all of his support behind the vice president, Harris has come under both racist and sexist attacks. The GOP dog whistle for these attacks as voiced by Texas Republican Senator Chip Roy, for instance, is DEI. Many of us would have to rush to the Urban Dictionary to even know what the initials stood for—diversity, equity, and inclusion. Used in the best sense of the term, DEI refers to policies which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability. But in the mouths of MAGA racists like Roy, it becomes a racist and sexist epithet.

Tennessee GOP Representative Tim Burchett got even uglier a day after Biden backed the VP, not only calling her “a DEI hire”, but also recalling that President Biden had said he would pick a black woman as his running mate and wondering aloud, “What about white females? What about any other group?” This could no longer be referred to as a “dog whistle”. This was venturing to say the blatant racist part out loud. And by mentioning white “females”, he was also seeking to lower the status of women to their gender identity rather than seeing them as persons or individuals of equal weight in government and all other walks of life.

On X, Burchett tweeted: “The incompetency level is at an all-time high in Washington. The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president.”

Doubling down when questioned by CNN’s Manu Raju, he said, “Biden said he’s gonna hire a Black female for vice president. What about white females? What about any other group? When you go down that route, you take mediocrity and that’s what they have right now as a vice president.” He reiterated on questioning by Raju that he believed Kamala Harris to be, basically, a token black as vice president, saying, “One hundred percent she was a DEI hire.”

Ex-president Donald Trump himself piled on at his Doral Golf Club in Florida, saying that “If Joe had picked someone halfway competent, they would have bounced him from office years ago. But they can’t because she’s their second choice.”

There is really no way to see any of this as any less shocking and egregious than it clearly is. But the impropriety of this sort of racist and sexist talk is rendered even more ironic and hypocritical considering that Trump’s own pick for the VP slot, J.D. Vance, has all of about five minutes of political experience. And his only claim to fame is of having been a failed hedge fund manager and having written a book about his hillbilly upbringing that caught on and became a bestseller. Somewhere along the line, he met up with far-right-wing tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, who became his political mentor and financial backer, and the rest is history—five minutes of history.

Trump clearly picked Vance because he was sure to appeal to the former president’s far-right, white, evangelical base, not because of any political or technical skill sets he brought to the table. So questioning the current vice president’s political background and acumen seems quite rich coming from Trump, whose own pick is so incredibly incompetent to serve. Especially if the Trump ticket should win the election only to have something happen to Trump while in office that requires his vice president to stand in for him. If Trump was, is and always will be a government outsider who plays everything by ear and based on his gut, Vance is a total novice, who basically hasn’t the slightest idea how the world works.

It seems that in the ever more authoritarianized and dominant MAGA wing of the GOP,  Vice President Harris’s career as a renowned, high-profile prosecutor, as the attorney general of the most populous and most politically and economically powerful state in the union, as a senator for that state, and as vice president to a man who has had one of the longest and most storied careers in American politics are insufficient credentials to keep the Alt-Right from characterizing her as anything but “a black female” and “a DEI hire.” Fortunately, Harris’s stellar education, long political experience, maturity, poise, ethics and intelligence are far more than enough to render such characterizations ridiculous. This is especially true considering the incredibly dubious credentials of the two men she and her ticket-mate will be running against—one a convicted felon and insurrectionist, and the other an absolute newbie in the world of politics.

In short, a prosecutor running against a criminal should make for an interesting election.

Contrary to what many critics have suggested, Harris has also played her cards incredibly well and close to her vest as vice president. She has been there in whatever capacity the president has needed her to be, offering her intelligence, experience and hard work to help find solutions to problems the administration has sought to remedy. The rest of the time she has been a friend and close collaborator to the president, a sounding board for his ideas, treating him with utmost respect, and doing her job without ever seeking to second-guess or overshadow the office Biden holds.

In her role as vice president, she has taken a major political risk by taking charge of anything the president pushed her way. Thus, she found herself overseeing the thorny issues of COVID response, voting rights, women’s reproductive rights and civil rights in general. She was also handed the explosive package of issues surrounding the border crisis. This is the issue on which the GOP is now seeking to hammer her, despite the fact that, thanks to actions taken by the Biden administration, border crossings are significantly lower than previous highs. Furthermore, the GOP is seeking to saddle Harris with the blame for continuing difficulties at the Mexican border, when the remaining crisis is largely of the Republicans’ own doing. That is to say, Donald Trump’s doing.

It is public knowledge that the Biden administration—to a large extent thanks to the brokering efforts of Kamala Harris—managed to cobble together an historic bipartisan legislative package to effectively deal with the border crisis. But that deal never made it into law for one simple reason. Donald Trump kicked over the negotiating table, badgering his MAGA lawmakers into backing the GOP away from the deal. He made no bones about the fact that such a deal could very well prove successful, and he didn’t want to “give” that sort of win to the Biden administration, basically telling GOP lawmakers to hold off until he was president again so he could take the victory lap for a border security package created through the efforts of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the most reasonable lawmakers in the GOP.   

Most important of all, however, has been the ethical capital that Harris has displayed as VP. She has shown unbending loyalty to the president throughout recent months in which he has been increasingly criticized for what people on both sides of the aisle have seen as his failing physical strength and mental acuity. No matter how politically devastating the attacks have been, the presidency and vice-presidency have demonstrated a monolithic front against all comers. In other words, despite having a shot at the presidency within her grasp, Harris has shown herself to be of the highest political and ethical pedigree, a person of honor and loyalty despite her soaring political and intellectual acumen, and her clear desire to serve as president of the United States.

That said, however, she also has been savvy enough to have her ducks in a row if called upon to serve, and within twenty-four hours of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race, she had consolidated overwhelming support among nearly all major figures in the Democratic Party and had garnered such incredible grassroots support that her campaign raised an all-time record eighty million dollars in a single day. This stupendous show of support has left Democrats who were pushing for a “mini-primary” dangling, with their feet kicking in the air. And it has rendered utterly ridiculous and caricaturesque the tentative challenge by Independent (quasi-Republican) Senator Joe Machin, who said he might re-register as a Democrat and go head-to-head with Harris, whom he considers “far-left”, which just goes to show how extremely far-right he is, despite presuming to call himself a centrist.

Sadder still was Manchin’s apparent ignorance of the fact that this election has become one in which age has loomed as a major issue, with the vast majority of Americans—and especially America’s youth—feeling discouraged that they were once again being given a binary boomer choice between two men who would either be, or would become, octogenarians while in office. Joe Manchin, who will turn seventy-seven next month, falls squarely within this rejected profile as well. This also casts a funereal pall over the third-party bid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., himself a septuagenarian, much of whose momentum has been based on the otherwise unsavory choice between Trump and Biden, especially since RFK Jr.’s campaign sounds basically like MAGA without Trump.

In the end, after months in which the shadow of an election where—despite President Biden’s extraordinary service to the country—the best voters could hope for was “the lesser of two evils,” Americans have been in a somber and hopeless mood. But with the arrival of Kamala Harris on the electoral scene, the clouds have suddenly started to lift for both Democrats and a large segment of independent voters. The political scene is being very quickly injected with a new dose of energy and promise. There is now a very genuine choice between more of the chaotic, hate-filled Trump era that we know will just be more of the same, and a new political energy led by a mature and experienced, yet still young and dynamic presidential candidate whose entire career has been devoted to democracy and the rule of law.

Suddenly, Donald Trump is the only grumpy ol’ man in the race. And MAGA’s barrage of open insults, racism and sexism demonstrates just how suddenly off-kilter and desperate they are.