Category: Politics

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Running for President with Jesus and Hitler

For as long as it has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows–and it has been a while1–I would offer that there has never before been such a strange set as those joined in this year’s Trump campaign for U.S. president.  Riding sidecars on Trump’s chariot toward ultimate power are one of history’s most inspiring and loving religious leaders and perhaps the most evil person to darken American politics.

The Bible tells a loosely similar story, but with a twist or two, in describing the Fall of Lucifer.  Lucifer was once one of God’s most powerful angels, until his lust for worship caused him to rebel against the Creator, resulting in his fall from grace and eternal life to become the destroyer of worlds.  It has been said that Lucifer took at least a third of the angels with him in his rebellion and fall, and that he did so by deceiving them with lies.2

What the Bible does not foretell is that Lucifer ever again joined forces with God or Jesus.  His exile was to be in perpetuity.  So:  How in the world did we reach today’s pairing of this political Odd Couple? Continue reading “Running for President with Jesus and Hitler”

  1. The American writer Charles Dudley Warner offered this statement to the world in his 1870 book, My Summer in a Garden.[↩]
  2. See “What Was the Fall of Satan in the Bible,”  in The Collector.[↩]
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Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968

     I was still too young to vote.  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.

The convening of the Democratic National Convention last night in Chicago takes me back more than five decades, to that other Democratic Convention in Chicago.  It was August 1968, and I was 18 years old that summer before my sophomore year in college.  I was just coming of age politically.

By that August, 1968 had already been a very rough year for the nation.  Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s civil rights and moral trailblazer, had been assassinated on April 4, shocking the conscience of the country.  Two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, just a day after he had seized the momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.1 The country–and the Democratic Party–were splintered by nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality.  More than 100 cities had erupted into riots and arson after the King assassination.

I was a high school freshman when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, an unimaginable event.  Perhaps I was too young then–13–to feel the full effect of that national trauma.  But the events of the spring and summer of 1968 had landed more heavily against my idealistic self.

I was still too young to vote.2  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer. Continue reading “Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968”

  1. On June 4 Kennedy, who had announced his campaign only that March, won the Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota.[↩]
  2. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution changed the legal voting age from 21 to 18 when it was ratified in 1971.[↩]
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Equities and Ironies: Trump, Law & Politics

[Note to Readers:  In this era of wayward ‘truths,’ the field of play for irony has both spread and thickened.  Every now and then, it is worth noting the spawn of this fertile soil, for the record.]

Let’s begin with this one.  In the same week that a former US president is being tried in a criminal court for the first time in history–for the alleged crimes of falsifying business records in his effort to hide incriminating sexual evidence from his voters a scant few weeks before the 2016 presidential election–he is  fleecing these same voters with a new stock scam meant to support financially his deepening legal fees and his 2024 campaign to return to the White House. Continue reading “Equities and Ironies: Trump, Law & Politics”

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The US Supreme Court Cannibalizes Its Own Legitimacy

On February 28 the Supreme Court of the United States did what many legal experts thought  improbable:  it decided to consider Donald Trump’s arguments that American presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for any acts committed while they are in office.

That is, in effect, that presidents’ behaviors while in office are beyond the reach of our laws, that the Rule of Law–the bulwark of our democracy that asserts that laws apply equally to everyone without fear, favor, or position–is simply suspended for the most powerful individuals in the nation, that in fact presidents do enjoy the rank privileges of monarchs and despots.  The nation’s founding generation fought a war to ensure against this result.

One would think that the Court’s justices would cringe at such a notion, not least because it suggests that they themselves could be vulnerable to the punitive machinations of an angry president.  As the old boxing saying goes, protect yourselves at all times, men and women of the Court! Continue reading “The US Supreme Court Cannibalizes Its Own Legitimacy”

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Five Reasons Donald Trump Should Be Jailed Now

Now under three criminal indictments in as many jurisdictions, and likely soon a fourth, Donald Trump presents as an historic one-man crime wave.  Even more, since his two federal indictments–in Florida and in the District of Columbia–he has proven to be an ongoing serial offender despite all.  He continues open attacks on and threats to judges, prosecutors and potential witnesses despite a federal court order to not tamper with the legal process and its personnel, including potential witnesses.

What to do about the ceaseless criminality of a former American president?  One who continues to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of American law and law enforcement with his threatening intransigence?  During his “campaign” for the 2024 presidential election?  Legal experts say judges facing Trump’s trials and ongoing misconduct regarding them have few good options.  I believe they are wrong.  If the nation is to protect its law, order, and–most importantly–real justice, well, here are five reasons the federal judge in Washington should incarcerate him now, pending his trial on the charges of conspiring to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Continue reading “Five Reasons Donald Trump Should Be Jailed Now”

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Notes on an Historic Indictment

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Justice indicted former president Donald J. Trump on four felony accounts associated with his attempts to overturn the legitimate 2020 presidential election.  After watching the various investigations into his misconduct play out through two impeachments and alleged crimes in both federal and state jurisdictions over the past few years, the following observations come to mind. Continue reading “Notes on an Historic Indictment”

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GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it

Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language.  The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population.  Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.   Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.

Does any of this sound familiar today?  Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule.  We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level.  Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation:  the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.

This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S.  Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born. Continue reading “GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it”

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Can an American Political Party Commit Treason?

If recent political developments in the U.S. are any indication, the answer could appear to be yes.

Last week, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on 37 felony counts for illegal retention of classified national defense documents and obstruction of justice.  The first 31 charges assert violations of the federal Espionage Act.

This week he was arraigned in the federal district court in Miami for the charges.  His taking of very sensitive national security documents when he left the White House in January 2021, and his attempts to hide many of them from the federal government’s efforts to retrieve them, constitute the most blatant political crimes against the nation’s security in American history. Continue reading “Can an American Political Party Commit Treason?”

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Mass Shootings and Insanity

Saturday, May 6, 2023, a mall in Allen, Texas:  eight dead, including children, and at least seven more injured.  In America we don’t need the headline above to know what happened there.  It is only the latest event in an epidemic, a plague of guns, a monsoon of bullets.

In just the past two weeks there have been mass shootings–defined as events in which at least four people are shot–in Cleveland, Texas (five killed), outside Tulsa, Oklahoma (six killed), and Atlanta, Georgia (one killed, four injured).  It is only spring, but already this year there have been at least 202 mass shootings, more than the number of days so far in 2023.  Last year, there were at least 647 of them.

Shootings are now the top cause of death of children and teens in the greatest nation on earth. Continue reading “Mass Shootings and Insanity”

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Thoughts on an Indictment

The first indictment of Donald Trump has landed.  Certainly there are more to come.  In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president.  What to make of it all?  These thoughts come to mind.

The Media

In our digital age, the mainstream (traditional) media are also all about attracting eyeballs, most especially our television news programs.  Thus, the coverage to this point–before the indictment charges are even revealed–has been, well, hysterical.  It’s odd, isn’t it?  Trump refers to them as the “Fake News” media, and yet he is able to play them to his advantage like a fiddle.  They cannot get enough of him, his antics and his predicaments.  He is addicted to their attention, and they are happy to provide it. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Indictment”

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