Tag Archives: DNC

D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: Political Rant, No Punches Pulled

Okay, serious question: When did the world get so insane?

When did people start believing wackadoodle conspiracy theories while refusing to believe that wearing a mask over their nose and mouth would keep them from spreading germs that come from their nose and mouth? When did they start believing a President who says that Democrats at the DNC refused to say “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance, despite the fact that we have video showing them saying “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance each night of the convention?

When did people who believe in strength and faith and patriotism start to worship a President who blames everyone else for his failings, uses churches and the Bible as props, and seeks help from foreign powers in order to win domestic election campaigns?

When did the richest country in the world, the self-proclaimed greatest nation on earth, become so clusterfucked, so dysfunctional, that it would find itself leading the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths?

How did this happen? I really want to know.

I hated Ronald Reagan – I know many consider him a great President and even liberal historians cite him as a hugely consequential one. But I was in college and grad school during his Administration, and I despised him. And yet, I cannot imagine Ronald Reagan letting Russia get away with placing bounties on the lives of American soldiers.

I hated George H.W. Bush, too. I cannot imagine him allowing efforts to protect people from a lethal virus to be hamstrung by liberty junkies and science deniers who put their own hang-ups before the public good.

I couldn’t stand George W. Bush and I believe he was a terrible President. I cannot imagine him coddling white supremacists, praising anti-Semitic marchers, demonizing immigrants and peaceful protesters.

I grew up in a Democratic household – we ALWAYS supported Democratic candidates for all offices. But we understood that having two vibrant parties made our nation stronger. Just like the Yankees need a strong Red Sox team to make their successes meaningful, so the two parties need each other to engender of productive debate over how to govern a sprawling republic. I cannot imagine the Republicans I recall from my youth – Howard Baker, Alan Simpson, even Barry Goldwater – tolerating, much less enabling, the malfeasance, racism, and disregard for Constitutional norms that we see from this Administration.

We have faced crises before. We have had Presidents of both parties who lied to us, who held beliefs that to this day make my skin crawl, who were overly partisan and too obsessed with their own electoral prospects.

We have never had a President who lied as frequently or as blatantly as this one. We have never had a President who was so willfully ignorant and lazy. We have never had a President who was so corrupt and who surrounded himself with so many crooks and liars and incompetents.

But beyond all of that, we have never had a President who demonstrated such utter disdain for the norms of republican government, for the Constitutional principles that have guided our elected leaders for more than two centuries.

America, it turns out, is far more fragile than we thought. Yes, we survived a Civil War, and a Constitutional crisis in the 1970s. But we are in danger of seeing our democracy collapse because this President recognizes no limits on his power and refuses to acknowledge that Congress and the Courts are co-equal branches of the government. Without respect for our institutions and governing laws, he will soon make us nothing more than another failed state, another moral backwater ruled by a kleptocratic despot.

That day, I fear, is far closer than any of us imagined it would ever be. This President is willing to use the Department of Justice as his own personal consigliere. He believes the armed forces exist to impose his will on the people he is supposed to serve. He sees in every act of governance an opportunity to enhance his family’s wealth. He has far more in common with the tin-pot dictators of what we used to refer to, in our arrogance, as “the Third World,” than he does with any of his predecessors. And his reelection would be a death blow to all that we Americans have held as sacred and good in our system of government.

These are the thoughts – the terrors – that consume me on this, the first day of the Republican National Convention. No, I will not be watching, thanks very much.

But I did watch the DNC last week. I have given to the Biden-Harris campaign. I have volunteered to write letters to voters in swing states on behalf of the Sierra Club.

What have you done?

Have a good week.

Blogging, Not at all Writing Related

Wikileaks, Bernie, and the DNC

To all my friends who are Bernie supporters:

Please forgive me if I don’t share your outrage at the DNC emails made available by Wikileaks. Bernie was running an insurgency campaign; he joined the party for that express purpose after having been an Independent throughout his entire career. He criticized the party’s rules, he questioned the integrity of the party’s leaders, he railed against the party itself, claiming that it perpetuated a corrupt political system. Anyone who is surprised to learn that DNC officials favored Hillary Clinton either wasn’t paying attention or is spectacularly naïve. OF COURSE they favored her.

That doesn’t change the fact that Hillary received more votes than Bernie — than any other candidate running in either parties’ primaries. It doesn’t change the fact that she will be our nominee against a man so divisive, so uninformed, so egotistical as to be completely unfit for the office.

But I’ll tell you want this episode does do: It demonstrates the underlying worthlessness of all those polls that purported to show Bernie running stronger against Trump. Why? Because such polls don’t take into account all the GOP attacks that would have been leveled at him the moment he became the nominee. Hillary has been taking fire from the right for a quarter century. She has been called a murderer, a traitor, an agent of genocide (seriously). Over the years, conservatives and rabid Clinton-haters have questioned everything from her sexuality to her fitness as a mother. And she just soldiers on.

These emails that have Bernie’s supporters in such an uproar are something out of a high school class officers election. They’re nothing compared to what the Republican attack machine would gin up in the first week of a general election campaign. If this is enough to get Bernie supporters’ panties in a wad, think of what those real attacks would do. His campaign would wilt in no time. He’d be crushed.

We Americans love to hate politicians. They’re crooks, they’re liars, they’re driven by ego, they’re all in it for themselves. And a lot of that may be true. But it’s not a job I’d want. Politicians put up with grueling, cruel campaigns, putting themselves and their pride on the line every day. And ultimately they do it for a chance to serve the public — sometimes well, sometimes poorly — as our elected leaders. They have learned that sometimes they have to compromise their ideals for the greater good. They have learned that in an imperfect world, sometimes getting some of what they want is better than getting none, or worse, getting the antithesis. One need only look as far as Donald Trump to see the dangers in rejecting politicians for some other electoral solution.

Bernie Sanders, for all his progressive ideals and plain-spoken charm, is a politician. He’s not going to #Disavow because of this matter. He knows that when the alternative is Donald Trump, we can’t afford to let ideological purity or bruised ego obscure the big picture. Bernie, unlike many of his most ardent supporters, gets this.

Were the DNC emails revealed by Wikileaks disturbing? Yeah, sure. Do they reveal bias on the part of some in the party? Absolutely. Should anyone be surprised by this? No. Does it mean that those of us who voted for Hillary should now have our votes discounted? Of course not. She won the nomination; nothing revealed in the last 24 hours changes that. And she must win in November, because the alternative is unthinkable.