Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Lunatic With The Nuclear Codes

Bill Kristol recently wrote that “Trump is headstrong, reckless, and out of touch.” It’s a common description applied to our demented President, and all I could think of was: If only that was the extent of the problem! If he was only headstrong, reckless and out of touch!

I don’t understand why the mainstream media won’t acknowledge Trump’s obvious lunacy, and the existential danger his mental illness poses.

Although the New York Times has been a prominent participant in the Trump sane-washing that drives me bonkers, it did publish Thomas Edsall’s recent op-ed, in which he pointedly refused join that project.

Edsall began with a focus on Trump’s incessant and increasingly bizarre lies, including his most recent fantasy about his whereabouts on 9/11. Then he shared portions of a lengthy letter from 36 prominent medical specialists. The specialists directly challenged Trump’s mental fitness for office, writing “We are compelled to warn of a president of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.”

No kidding!

Here are the relevant portions of that letter.

We have closely followed his behavior and his statements over the past year. Objectively observable signs of serious medical concern include: marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings.

Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility, imagery of himself as pope suggestive of a divine mission, being a mythical warrior hero, depicting himself as combat pilot — dropping feces on civilians, and claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited — with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his “own morality.”

Severely impaired judgment and impulse control, reflected in reckless threats of violence, advocacy of lethal force against civilians, encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters, repeated threats and often actions — judicial, prosecutorial, police, military and by invoking emergency power — against political opponents and others who disagree with him.

Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications — e.g., 150 social media posts in one night — fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions.

Trump’s actions, rhetoric and general behavior reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the president’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so.

For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.

This letter simply gives a professional imprimatur to what any sentient person can see.

Donald Trump is clinically insane. He isn’t simply a crook. He isn’t simply someone with a hugely bloated ego. He isn’t simply the walking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. 

Yes, it’s been obvious for a long time that Trump is both massively ignorant and intellectually limited, but the danger he poses isn’t limited to the bad decisions–divorced from both comprehension and evidence–that result from such limitations. There’s a reason the word “sane-washing” was invented. It is a depressingly accurate description of the legacy media’s coverage of Trump, of the constant effort to normalize decidedly abnormal and delusional behavior.

The term also applies to the Republican office-holders who refuse to acknowledge the threat he poses to the country they took an oath to serve. (Arguably, some of those GOP officeholders share Trump’s more concerning delusions, but most probably don’t. Their cowardice is a moral, rather than a mental, defect.)

The complicity of Republicans in the Senate who confirmed Trump’s assortment of clowns, grifters and sycophants virtually guaranteed that no one in the cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment.

So here we are: waiting for the ticking time-bomb to detonate. Our lunatic President has already done immeasurable damage–and he possesses the nuclear codes….

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The Neo-Nazi Party

The title of this post is “The Neo-Nazi Party.” Given what we are learning every day about the MAGA cult that has replaced the once “Grand Old Party,” I’m not so sure about the “neo”…

Even the most partisan of former Republicans are signaling reluctance to align themselves with candidates who are willing to publicly endorse the out-and-proud bigotry of today’s GOP. The Texas Tribune recently reported that Karl Rove, of all people, has announced that he will vote for the Democrat running for the Texas Railroad Commission, after the Republican candidate posted racist comments about South Asian students at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Then there’s Florida. Talking Points Memo reports that a Republican running for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives–Marshall Rawson, who won Florida’s District 10 Republican primary last month–had marched in the infamous neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A photo obtained by TPM showed Rawson standing near James Alex Fields Jr., the neo-Nazi who drove his car into the crowd of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old woman.

Rawson easily won the Republican primary, despite the fact that the primary was held only eight days after a Florida newspaper published an article documenting his long-time involvement with the League of the South, a racist organization. Prior to the primary, a local blog had also listed bigoted statements Rawson made on X, condoning slavery and calling for gay people to be executed. There were also reports that his campaign donors included several known White Supremacists.

Nevertheless,

Rawson is widely expected to win the general election this November in House District 10, which encompasses a conservative part of north central Florida between Jacksonville and Tallahassee, raising the prospect that an unrepentant white supremacist will attain elected office in one of the country’s most populous states with no pushback from the Republican Party.  

Note that last sentence: no pushback from the Republican Party.

The open bigotry isn’t limited to Florida and Texas, of course. Jon Husted, who is running for re-election to the Senate in Ohio, recently fired his campaign’s political director after the Washington Post reported that the man had once used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook photo. (Apparently, Husted was unaware of the man’s political “orientation” before the Post report. And if you believe that, I have an island to sell you…)

Here in Red Indiana, we are currently governed statewide by MAGA culture-warriors, including a Lieutenant Governor who insists that we should cultivate hatred of Muslims and others who do not share his fundamentalist Christian nationalist beliefs. There are, unfortunately, multiple other examples.

As Talking Points Memo has noted in another essay,

This is the fruit of the permission structure President Trump created for right-wing extremism. After Charlottesville, President Trump rolled out the “very fine people, on both sides” false equivalency. It was a precursor to his “Stand back and stand by” in 2020, which became a catalyst for the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump has been feeding this fire almost uninterrupted for a decade now. We see it in congressional staffers turned Groypers, in campaign staffers toying with Nazi imagery, and in the sheer delight in transgressive behavior as a tribal marker.

Each of these incidents not only sows seeds for future division, hatred, and extremism, but does so without shame or opprobrium. It is open and brazen and unapologetic. Each incident gives birth to new legions of supporters who are steeped in the common experiences of their movement.

It isn’t just Jews, Muslims and people of color. The New York Times recently reported on the truly extraordinary efforts of Republican men in Utah to restructure government in order to curtail the power of Republican women, especially judges.

If I seem to be harping on the incredible importance of the upcoming midterm elections, it is because of the degree to which the GOP has become an out-and-proud neo-Nazi party. 

When Republican candidates are too bigoted even for partisans like Karl Rove, you know we are in treacherous territory. 

It has never been so important to vote, and to vote in numbers that will be impossible to dismiss.

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Normalization

As we approach the most important midterm election of my lifetime–an election that really will determine whether we can rescue the country most of us thought we inhabited–it may be useful to summarize some of the consequences of what currently passes for an administration. Just some things to keep in mind as we go to the polls–not a full accounting, because every single day we wake to news of fifty more insane things that Trump has done to damage our common lives and destroy America’s global authority.

One of the best recent summaries I’ve come across is care of Kristoffer Ealy at Lincoln Square. 

After a lengthy discussion of the way legacy media is normalizing everything from Trump’s wack-a-doodle midterm “convention” to the “free” airplane he was gifted, to the collapse of America’s food safety infrastructure, to the return of diseases like measles (and leprosy!), Ealy concludes:

But give us another year of officials occupying positions they do not understand, institutions being hollowed out by people hostile to their missions, and news organizations translating every failure into bloodless language, and it will begin to feel normal. That may be the most dangerous part of this entire mess. Not merely that the plane malfunctions, the convention flops, the agencies weaken, preventable diseases return, or the lettuce fights back, but that Americans are being trained to accept all of it as the natural background noise of government. So yes, I would still like to know whether a brotha can get a motherfucking salad without explosive diarrhea. I would also like the press to stop covering the people responsible for that question as though asking it is the strangest part of the story.

Earlier in the (lengthy) essay, Ealy focused on the way in which normalization works.

As he points out, normalizing what is decidedly abnormal doesn’t require an effort to persuade the public that the dysfunction of the day is good. Instead, it requires that the frequent, repeated dysfunctions be described so politely that people stop recognizing them as dysfunction. It occurs because the “mainstream media keeps sanding down every jagged edge of this administration until dysfunction begins to resemble ordinary governance.”

The first scandal triggers alarm. The fifth becomes a segment. The fiftieth gets squeezed between a pharmaceutical commercial and another panel discussion about whether Democrats have sufficiently listened to six undecided diners at a truck stop in western Pennsylvania. Repetition produces familiarity, familiarity gets mistaken for normality, and soon the country is grading an administration on whether the building remained standing instead of whether the people inside it knew what the hell they were doing.

Ealy cites several examples, but of necessity he omits many others.

As we prepare to go to the polls, I would suggest that we focus on several that he omits–and especially on the growing normalization of multiple bigotries by this administration and by MAGA and Trumpism generally. We need to understand what that particular area of normalization is doing to America’s civic fabric and to our common understanding of what I’ve called “The American Idea.”

What happens to our understanding of America when certain groups of people are so constantly targeted and marginalized that media simply reports the latest attack on “wokeism” along with other news of the day?

It has once again become “normal” to encounter Rightwing influencers and pundits arguing that women belong in the home raising children, that gays should go back into the closet, that transgender folks are freaks, that people of color–especially if they are immigrants–shouldn’t even be living here. What happens to the American Idea when the substantial numbers of Americans who are non-Christians are repeatedly told that this is a “Christian” nation and they reside here only on sufferance? What happens to respect for science and intellectual inquiry when government functionaries routinely insist that global warming is a hoax and education should be limited to job training?

There have always been Americans who harbor these views, but until recently, they were rarely expressed in polite company.

Perhaps the most disturbing change ushered in by our profoundly abnormal President has been the normalization of infantile and vitriolic insults usually abandoned after the third-grade. (I recently saw a video of a speech by former President Obama, and all I could think of was how desperately I missed having a President who could utter coherent and uplifting sentences…)

As we go to cast our (hopefully early) votes, we all need to think about what we want our children and grandchildren to experience as “normal.”

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Early Voting Matters More This Time–A Lot More

As the midterm elections near, Trump and the GOP are becoming more and more frantic, and engaging in a wide variety of tactics to suppress votes. A recent example: email and text messages urging recipients to check their registrations at links to phony sites. Voter integrity groups are trying to get the message out that registration checks should only be made at official sites–never through the links embedded in those messages.

We are seeing legal battles over maps, and over a Post Office effort to undermine voting by mail. We are seeing an outpouring of money by Elon Musk and other billionaires, and reports of election “monitors” being trained by far-Right organizations…All of these and other tactics are intended to send a message: don’t go to the polls. Don’t have confidence in your state officials’ ability to protect your vote.

By far the best way to defeat most of these anti-vote efforts is to vote early and in person.

At Hopium Chronicles, Simon Rosenberg has explained the importance of casting an early ballot. He points out that, in most states, voters can now vote early in person or with mail/drop box ballots. (Not Indiana, of course–we have no drop boxes.) Early voting not only makes it easier for working people to vote, it has allowed campaigns to improve their Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. Every night, campaigns get a list of people who voted that day, allowing them to focus their efforts only on the people who haven’t yet voted. The larger the number of voters who vote early–preferably on Day 1–the easier it is to increase turnout for one’s candidate.

As Simon says,

Voting on Day 1 has other benefits. A heavy early turnout leads to stories about “hey everyone is voting” putting social pressure on people to go vote, which also increases turnout. Voting early in big numbers also becomes a very public affirmation that our democracy and election system is working as intended, which creates a greater incentive for people to vote and makes it far harder for the Republicans to cheat, disrupt or contest the election.

Rosenberg isn’t the only one explaining how early voting can produce a Blue wave that will be harder for the election deniers to question.

The Contrarian explains how the NO KINGS coalition plans to trigger an early vote. In a press release, the groups comprising the coalition announced that October 17 will be a day of “coordinated, nonpartisan action across the country to drive early voting.” Rather than one big protest, the goal is to generate thousands of local events “working toward a common goal: making sure every eligible voter has a plan to vote early (where possible), knows their options for how to vote, and is ready to make their voice count by casting their ballot.”

As the Contrarian acknowledges, Americans are facing a genuinely unprecedented voter suppression onslaught, so the forces protecting democracy must devote their time and resources to combating voter confusion and attempted disenfranchisement.

As Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen (a member of the No Kings Coalition) noted in the press release announcing the event: “The importance of as many people as possible voting early cannot be overstated.” She explained, “Early voting can make the difference between voting and not voting for people who are traveling, who are working on Election Day, who need options for childcare while voting, and more.”

Much more, actually. We’ve all seen reports from prior elections highlighting repeated Election Day shenanigans: long lines due to fewer voting sites in minority neighborhoods and fewer voting machines in heavily Democratic precincts… Early voting is an excellent way to neuter these efforts.

Voting by mail also makes these typical tactics irrelevant, which is undoubtedly why Trump is so fixated on attacking it. (Claims that thousands of illegal votes are cast by mail have repeatedly been proven false; despite those claims, the administration has identified and charged exactly 4 illegal voters in two elections involving hundreds of millions of voters.) Given the uncertainty that Trump has injected into the usually safe and convenient mail-in vote process, voters in states with drop boxes can deliver their ballots that way. In states without, those who still want the convenience of filling out a mailed ballot can deliver them to any Early Voting location or to any Vote Center before 6:00 p.m. on Election Day.

In Indiana, early in-person voting starts October 6th–even before the NO KINGS roll-out–and this old lady plans to be in line then. 

Vote early and VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO. It will make the Mad King even madder….

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The “Wokeness” Of Star Trek

The Guardian recently had a lengthy article focused on the sixty-year tenure of the Star Trek phenomenon, and current efforts by our MAGA overlords to cancel it for “wokeness.”

Evidently, any celebration of diversity and human potential is woke. Or, as Peter Thiel reportedly told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times: “I like Star Wars way better. I’m a capitalist. Star Wars is the capitalist show. Star Trek is the communist one.”  (I have always considered Star Wars an updated version of the old time Western–a horse opera set in space. Thiel’s comment tells us a lot more about Thiel than about either show.)

I have been a devoted Star Trek fan for the entire sixty years of the franchise. Even in my most Republican years, I never would have characterized the show’s inclusiveness and focus on scientific exploration as “communist” –evidently the epithet of the day–but of course at that time MAGA’s cultists and anti-intellectual “warriors” had yet to assume control of the Republican Party.

The Guardian article is long, but for those wondering how Star Trek poses a threat to our current overlords, it is well worth reading. It highlights the elements of the franchise that are being labeled “woke”–its “utopian vision” of a future in which humanity seeks to explore rather than conquer, and especially its celebration of diversity, empathy and reason.

But six decades on, the Enterprise is encountering some cosmic turbulence. Donald Trump’s America is convulsed by polarisation, culture wars and the retreat of liberal democracy, along with anxiety over artificial intelligence and climate catastrophe. Paramount, merged with Skydance Media for $8bn, promptly cancelled the latest Star Trek series amid claims that it was too “woke.”

The Guardian reminds us that television in the 1960s had accustomed viewers to all-white TV, and that Star Trek  introduced a radically-new meritocracy: “an African American woman, Nichols’s Uhura, answering communications with unflappable authority; George Takei’s Sulu piloting the flagship barely two decades after Japanese Americans had been interned; and an alien second-in-command, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock,” acting as ‘the ultimate immigrant.'”

There was also diversity in the guest characters. In one episode in the original series, Captain Kirk’s superior was one Commodore Stone, an African American. That was well before Colin Powell.

Inclusiveness continued as new shows joined the franchise. The original series ran only from 1966 to 1969, a time of considerable national turmoil–the Vietnam war, racial violence and the assassinations of President Kennedy,  Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy. Then came my all-time favorite, The Next Generation, starring Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and several others followed, developing and deepening what fans call “the canon.”

The endurance of the series is a testament to the resonance of its view of humanity. The inclusion and respect for science and intellectual exploration that so offend MAGA speaks to the rest of us as aspirational, not threatening.

The article quotes Mark Altman, producer of a documentary on the sixty-year history of the franchise, who speaks to that aspiration.

Diversity as a strength is something that’s celebrated as a through-line in all the Star Trek series. The series can be very different but one thing that has never changed from 8 September 1966 is the value of diversity in making these crews stronger. If they were all homogeneous, they would not be able to as effectively deal with the challenges they face in the cosmos.

The article also quotes Robert Picardo, who played an Emergency Medical Hologram on both Voyager and Starfleet Academy, noting that both Stephen Miller and Elon Musk had demanded the cancellation of Starfleet Academy.

Do I think it’s a coincidence that the new owners of Paramount cancelled our show the first moment they could have? …Yes, there was the fact that we had a gay Klingon. Did a lot of people get over-exercised about that? My feeling is, get over yourself! There seems to be a movement to drive us back to the 1950s. Star Trek is all about the future, not about returning.

That quote, it seems to me, summarizes our political reality. We currently live in an America where “woke” means working toward a future that is more humane, more equal, more focused on understanding the world and the cosmos we inhabit, and where that wokeness is being frantically rejected by those who see it as a threat to their dominance.

They do want to take us back– to a time when straight White “Christian” males ruled the roost. And they’re censoring any entertainment that highlights a different goal.

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