The "calm" before the storm

By all rights, Donald Trump should be a one-term president. Save for the hate fanatics, described in a recent The Guardian story about “Fox News Brain” and how some families are not even on speaking terms due to the “awful shit” people  hear their parents repeating after their daily dose of Fox News. They here Trump continuing to insist as “good people” those who may not be members of white nationalist groups technically, but support their “causes” full-throat nonetheless. It is no surprise, then that it is being reported that 80 percent of “terrorist” attacks in the US last year were hate crimes committed by white perpetrators. Trump’s hate is mostly aimed at Hispanics, although the media hypocritically continues to simplify it as an “immigration” issue when we know that it is really about people who just don’t like Hispanics viscerally and don’t want them around; Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Lou Dobbs have many “fans” for their hysterical, paranoid belief that Hispanics are “out to destroy America.”

But Hispanics have no real “power” to “destroy” America, and in the minds of the extremists, Jews apparently have the power to provide “assistance” in the matter. In San Diego yesterday, a synagogue was attacked by a white 19-year-old from a “respectable Christian” family, in which one person died and several injured. The irony is that this occurred in a city that is a Republican bastion, and likely many people in the synagogue were Trump supporters like, say, Stephen Miller. But that didn’t protect them. The question of why this “boy” decided to stage this attack was again “simplified” by saying he was “suspiciously” reserved and read some white supremacist screeds on-line. But I don’t buy that this was only reason. Is it possible that he came home every night to that trilogy of hate—Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity—that his parents may be fans of?  

If this isn’t enough to turn people off to Trump, what about the fact that he continues to act like a man with something terrible to hide? It turns out after careful reading that the Mueller report didn’t exactly “exonerate” Trump of serious moral or ethical lapses, let alone crimes. The report shows that Trump and his aiders and abettors worked frantically to prevent Trump’s fear that an investigation would mean the “end” of his presidency would become reality. And today, because Trump’s most fanatical aiders and abettors were largely uncooperative in the Mueller investigation, Democrats have been demanding that they appear before them to “explain” themselves, but Trump has declared all-out war on the Constitution and Congress’ prerogative of oversight. No one would be so strenuous in their attempt to deny that Congress hear not Fox News talking points but the actually “rationalizations” for some truly heinous policies in regard to health care, immigration, handing out top secret security clearances to family members for potential “insider trading” for “business” purposes in the future, and of course Trump’s tax returns if there was no truth to the allegations of wrongdoing. If Trump has nothing to hide then why is he obviously so desperate?

But there are still those who believe that Trump will not only win in 2020, but it is only a question of by how much. Trump is like Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, in which a pre-Mayberry Andy Griffith puts in a tour-de-force performance as a drunken vagrant with a violent disposition who is transformed into a television superstar spouting homespun “wisdom,” whose every bigoted  pronouncement is taken as gospel by the provincial “forgotten” people. Seeing how he moves the masses, Rhodes becomes drunk on the notion of political power, until his actual belief in the stupidity of the people he “moves” is “accidentally” exposed to millions of television viewers. The question in regard to Trump is just how much of the hate and bigotry he inspires will be simply too much to take for any person who still supports him who has any shred of human decency left. 

And there are those, like commentator Hugh Hewitt, who is another one of those “conservatives” who once opposed Trump but now fully endorse him, who insist that “it’s the economy, stupid” that will insure his reelection. Democrats are going to have pound on certain realities that may dull some people’s enthusiasm about what the eventual recession might look like, thanks to Trump and the Republicans.  While the 3.2 percent increase in the GDP reported for the last quarter sounds great, it hasn’t done anything to improve revenues and the national debt, in fact is part of the “problem.” 

In its report this past March, the Treasury Department stated that in the first quarter of the current fiscal year there was a budget shortfall of $310 billion, a 77 percent increase over last year. Revenues, thanks largely to the Republican corporate tax cut law, went down 2 percent to $1.1 trillion, while spending rose 9 percent to $1.4 trillion. 86 percent of revenues came from individual taxes and Social Security taxes, while 93 percent of spending was on Social Security, Defense, Medicare, health, SSI, and interest payment on the debt. Despite profits and dividends totaling over $2 trillion in the same period, corporate taxes were practically a drop in the bucket at $60 billion, just over 5 percent of total revenues. Why some people believe that corporate taxes are “too high”—especially when some corporations like Exxon “famously” don’t pay any taxes—just doesn’t jibe with reality. Furthermore, corporations are bringing back money from overseas by the trickle, leaving most of it behind untouched by taxation. While revenues are likely to rise by the April tax deadlines, revenues will again just bottom out and deficits will again rise to record levels.

Just before the Great Depression, there was a lot of optimism, despite some warning signs, that the stock market would continue to rise “forever” even as late as Sept., 1929, when what was the first sign of the Great Depression was merely called a market “correction”—before the “fall” of October. The Dow Jones would eventually fall from nearly 400 points to 41 in 1932. During that time, the Hoover administration was miserly in its efforts to curb the suffering of the quarter of the population that was unemployed, with many more barely making ends meet, while the those at the tippy top continued to live as if nothing had ever happened, like Prince Prospero and his nobles hidden in their castle away from all the suffering from the Red Death. The record rise in the budget deficits thanks to Trump’s and Republicans so-called tax reform bill has made it even more likely that when the fall comes, there will be little left to control the ill winds that will befall the country.

Tiger Woods even has to overcome petty envy in his return to relevance

At the 2008 U.S. Open golf championship one wondered even then if Tiger Woods was literally on his “last legs” as he somehow managed to limp through an 18-hole playoff to win what many assumed in hindsight would be his 14^th and final major championship. Just a year later his whole world would fall apart not just through continuing physical issues but personal ones as well. Money, fame and hanging with “friends” who assisted in fueling temptation with easy women and good times led to disastrous life choices that destroyed his marriage and justifiably incurred the censure of the world, and what followed was (outside of a brief “resurgence” in 2013) was almost of decade of false promises and lost hope. Tiger didn’t just damage his own reputation, but the vicarious connection many people had with his success in a white country club sport that people like him were not supposed to “excel” in. 

Before Tiger, the most successful minority PGA player was Mexican-American Lee Trevino, who won 29 PGA titles, including six majors, and was Jack Nicklaus’ principle challenger from the late 1960s into the early 70s; an injury incurred from a lightning strike probably prevented Trevino from being even more successful on the PGA tour. But Woods blew everyone away; he proved that even those who “didn’t belong” could not only be as good, but even better. His subsequent fall from grace while a bunch of pretenders have tried and failed to assume his mantle was both a supreme disappointment and a major letdown. 

I personally hoped (rather more than believed) that Tiger could somehow “shock” the doubters (for a time even himself among them) and win another major championship. He came close to winning the PGA Championship a couple of times, but winning the Masters again seemed too much to expect so soon on his latest “comeback” attempt. Given the shock and awe expressed by many upon his fifth Masters victory, I wasn’t the only one to feel this way. But that it did happen breathed new life into the dream. It wasn’t so much that Tiger had risen from the “dead” to reclaim lost glory, but that no matter how far you had been beaten down (albeit much of it by his own hand),  nobody could now pretend that he was no longer “relevant.” A “whole” Tiger, even at 43, could still best the latest brand of golf’s privileged. 

Of course Tiger still has his detractors, such as Greg Norman. There was an apparent falling out from Norman’s “mentorship” after the 1996 Masters, which saw one of the most epic collapses in sporting history. Norman had a six stroke lead heading into the final round over Nick Faldo, which in golf terms is like having a 30-point lead heading into the fourth quarter of a basketball game, especially when the golfer happens to be considered one of the “elite” players. As it turned out, Norman only had to shoot par to overcome Faldo’s 67, but he not only failed to do that, but shot six over par to lose by five strokes. As an amateur that year, Tiger failed to make the cut, but having cut ties with Norman’s self-styled “mentorship,” he would win the Masters the next year by a record 12 strokes. Norman has since allowed few opportunity to pass to take subtle and not so subtle jabs at Tiger, such as “he is too old to play,” “I don’t care what Tiger does” and resenting “Tiger talk.” Of course, Tiger himself continues to hold a grudge against Norman, who he believed was trying to take unwarranted credit for his success early in his career and was simply a bandwagon “friend.” 

But sometimes critiques of Tiger can dip into the appallingly petty, as if some people will not be satisfied unless he as a man pays for his mistakes forever. Take The New York Times having the effrontery of publishing a self-serving “feminist” take on his Masters’ win by Lindsay Crouse, who asks “Why don’t women get comebacks like Tiger Woods?” I’m already ill-disposed toward white feminists making veiled racist commentary, but Crouse doesn’t understand that Tiger as a minority success story transcends racial, social or gender lines; Michelle Wie, for example, was another who went on social media to express her intense satisfaction at his Masters triumph, and Serena Williams admitted she was shedding tears of joy upon beholding the event. But Crouse chooses to use Serena in making a highly debatable “analogy” about her “comeback” from pregnancy, calling it a “major” setback (only a feminist would call having a child such a thing). 

Crouse’s petty zingers included the following:

His win “showed America’s eagerness to embrace a man who persevered through years of setbacks, especially self-inflicted ones, regardless of whatever selective amnesia that requires.”

“Achievement in sports somehow makes us more willing to compartmentalize, to forgive transgressions, to make a complicated man more deserving of public redemption. And Woods, at age 43, needed a lot of redeeming.”

“This ability to charm so many different Americans has almost certainly aided his return to grace, while also alienating a large swath of society that sees him as inauthentic.” As does, presumably, envious racists and self-absorbed feminists.

“In men, excessive qualities can be forgiven, even admired — when it works out at least. His trajectory is a reminder of who pays forever for their mistakes and whose transgressions can be set aside.”

“No women have the leeway to behave like Woods and get away with it; a black woman certainly does not. Just imagine the reaction if Serena Williams was caught cheating on her husband, Alexis Ohanian, with numerous men.”

First off, Tiger didn’t “get away” with anything, in keeping with Crouse’ own selective amnesia. For at least a year he was the subject of ridicule and universal condemnation, and his personal failings and indiscretions contributed to a “lost” decade in which he paid dear, little more than a ghost hovering above the golf world, of no substance. Until a year ago he was virtually written-off as even a presence ever on the PGA tour. And frankly, if Serena was caught “cheating” with numerous men, in our society there is just as even a chance that people like Crouse will find some “rationalization” to explain her infidelity, like domestic abuse or otherwise her husband’s own marital misdemeanors. I mean, we live in a society where revisionism like that of one of Disney’s most reviled  villains, Maleficent, is not only turned into a righteous feminist avenger to “appeal” to the current “victim” mentality, but is allowed to live on for a sequel.

And if the most successful American female athletes like Serena Williams are “ignored” by a large swath of the American public, you can thank in part white women who refuse to see a black female athlete as a “role model” to emulate, but rather as an object of petty resentment. Serena has had her own Greg Normans too, like former players Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who only in recent years have hypocritically jumped back on her “bandwagon.”

William Barr as AG proves the truism that by forgetting history, it is bound to be repeated

Far from categorically “exonerating” Donald Trump on Russian collusion and obstruction charges, a more careful reading of the Mueller report reveals that Mueller and his team were continuously hindered from discovering the full truth by the refusal of many Trump loyalists-at-any-cost to either voluntarily testify truthfully or testify at all; the failure to find sufficient evidence to indict these uncooperative witnesses for crimes stymied efforts to force them to talk. We have a right to ask about what they were trying to conceal from the public and prosecutors about either Trump’s or their own wrongdoing. We know that Roger Stone—whose voice we heard bragging about his “role” in advancing an imminent anti-Clinton Wikileaks dump in the presence of Trump—has in the past boasted about his “prowess” in telling lies to keep the media off-guard, although his recent arrest for lying has left him appearing equally as flummoxed by the evidence he was not immune from the consequences of wrongdoing as Julian Assange appeared to be when he was forcibly carried out of the Ecuadoran embassy to face extradition proceedings (a London police officer in the foreground could barely disguise a chuckle at the bizarre scene).  

But not only should we be concerned about the apparent obstruction and still possible collusion by Trump associates is the almost criminal presence of William Barr as attorney general. I think that many Senators decided he was “acceptable” when he praised Robert Mueller as a person, without actually examining his record for clues about how he would act in fact. We are suddenly “remembering” now that Barr’s attitude on immigration, civil rights and law enforcement may be even more extremist and racist than Jeff Sessions’, and we have also seen his stand on the Affordable Care Act as completely partisan with no thought of the consequences to the many millions who rely on it.  But then again the media is partly at fault for falling down hard in its failure to remind the public that this could have all been prophesized by Barr’s past actions as attorney general under the George H.W. Bush presidency (from here, Bush I). 

If you were born after 1973, you probably don’t have a proper grasp of the Iran-Contra scandal, which may actually have been worse than Watergate, and where potentially treasonable activity occurred. People may have seen the Tom Cruise “true story” movie about a pilot who worked out of a secret airstrip funded by a rogue government operation run by Oliver North, “importing” illegal drugs used to pay for guns “exported” to Nicaraguan “freedom fighters,” who were actually nothing more than common thugs looking to receive freeware for their “services.” But Iran-Contra went well beyond that; Congress had passed an amendment banning aid to the Contras, and in order to contravene the law Ronald Reagan directed administration officials to do “something” to support the recently ousted right-wing murder regime in Nicaragua, with the idea of concealing Reagan's culpability with "plausible deniability."

Top Reagan administration officials found a “backdoor” in the most unlikely of circumstances: selling through Israeli “third-party” cooperation weapons (including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles) to the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Iran was continuously portraying the US as the “Great Satan” and was bankrolling terrorism and Islamic insurgencies in the region. The rogue “secret government” operated by North—whose blind fanaticism provided “cover” for his administration handlers when the whole operation blew-up—used the profits from the sale of weapons to help fund the Contras against the legitimate Sandinista government. It is interesting to note that while the U.S. (regardless of the party was in power) actively tried to undermine left-wing regimes in Latin America, it failed in Nicaragua, and "socialist" reforms there begun by the Sandinista government are in large part responsible for that country not being a major source of migrants to the U.S.

What was Barr’s role in this criminal endeavor? After Bush I was elected president, he consulted with the then AG on pardons for one convicted criminal, three who pleaded guilty, and two soon to be on trial—including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, during whose trial prosecutor Lawrence Walsh hoped to expose the full extent of the criminal acts of Reagan administration officials, including that of the former vice president and now president. The highly partisan Barr strongly favored pardons for the same reasons he assailed the Mueller investigation: that the Iran-Contra investigation was just an illegal “witch hunt” against “patriotic” people. But even then Weinberger’s pardon was seen as a bald attempt by Bush I and Barr to obstruct justice—oh, how “we” forget.

Bush I, with the active support of Barr, would pardon all six of those former Reagan administration officials of crimes that Bill Moyers detailed in a documentary that revealed  “A Constitution in Crisis” event where the executive branch concocted a “shadow government” that placed itself beyond the reach of any law or oversight to engage in illegal acts. Everyone involved in the scandal knew what they were doing was illegal, but they satisfied themselves that the American public would “understand” their “patriotic” acts in promulgating an 80s version of a "red scare." This clearly showed that Barr back  then had absolutely no respect for the law—the same concept of “law” that the Trump administration repeatedly foists on asylum seekers from the same Central American countries whose repressive regimes the Reagan and Bush I administrations backed with military hardware to use for the purpose of “legalized” murder and oppression. 

Now we see Barr at it again, the person we heard at the recent Congressional hearings who smugly and contemptuously gave non-answers or Fox News talking points to Democratic lawmakers, the same one whose press conference today betrayed not one single iota of judicial independence, let alone a respect for the law. There can be no doubt that Trump and his associates see in Barr a blindly partisan political hack who will do anything to shield his “boss” because of his hatred of anyone left of far-right.