Tag Archives: GOP Convention

A Factual Rebuttal

In the wake of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the Presidential campaign, media attention turned from the just-concluded Republican convention to the Democratic ticket. While that’s understandable, it’s also important to revisit the fantasies promulgated at that GOP lie-fest. I particularly liked one of those reviews, penned by David French in the New York Times, because French is a conservative former Republican, whose analysis cannot fairly be attributed to progressive ideology.

French-who was a Mitt Romney delegate at the 2012 Republican convention– noted that this year’s event “was the first that revolved entirely around a fundamentally false premise: that in our troubled time, Donald Trump would be a source of order and stability.” As he noted, if past performance is any indication, a second Trump term would be as chaotic as the first.

To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.

Convention speakers emphasized the same themes that Hoosiers saw in the GOP’s primary fight–especially ominous warnings about crime and crime rates. These arguments reek of what Yiddish speakers call “chutzpah,” because acceptance of GOP arguments about public safety requires swallowing a Republican “alternate reality.”

As French notes,

The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.”…

It’s particularly rich for Trump to claim to be the candidate of order when the crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden’s. In 2023, there was a record decrease in the murder rate, and violent crime, ABC News reported, “plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.”

French also reminded readers of Trump’s utterly unAmerican approach to international relations, which consisted of dumping on the country’s longtime allies and cozying up to autocrats and dictators–especially Putin.

Trump’s argument about foreign policy is also fundamentally deceptive. Throughout the convention, we heard variations of the same theme: Russia didn’t invade any other country under Trump, and Iran was broke and powerless. But again, this is misleading. Far from being frightened and intimidated by Trump, both Russia and Iran directly attacked American troops when he was president.

In 2018, Russian mercenaries and their Syrian allies assaulted an American position in northern Syria, leading to a four-hour battle during which American forces deployed artillery and airstrikes to beat back the attack. In 2020, Iran fired a volley of ballistic missiles at American troops in retaliation for our strike against Qassim Suleimani and injured more than 100 American service members.

In both instances, our forces handled themselves with courage, professionalism and skill, but if Russia and Iran were so frightened of Trump, why did they attack Americans?

Trump enabled Iran to restart its nuclear program, and ordered a precipitous withdrawal from northern Syria that abandoned our Kurdish allies, creating an opening for Russia. (Russians filmed themselves occupying an abandoned American base.)

Trump’s obvious disrespect for our allies harmed American interests then, and if he wins they’ll harm American interests again. At the end of Trump’s term, Russia was stronger, Iran was unbowed, and America’s relationship with our key allies was more tenuous. Trump had even threatened to yank the United States out of NATO, our most important alliance, an act that would fulfill one of Putin’s fondest hopes.

As French concludes, Trump wants voters to empty their minds of the past so that he can fill it with his own “alternative facts.”

The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed. The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans’ memories don’t improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears.

The problem is, for the MAGA cult, reality is irrelevant. Climate change is a hoax, NATO isn’t worth supporting, Brown immigrants are all criminals…the list goes on, and at its base is the real glue holding the cult together–White Christian Nationalism and nostalgia for a (largely non-existent) past in which White men dominated the government and the culture.

A Republicans vote is a vote for the Confederacy.

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How Not to Solve Real Problems

In a column about the GOP Convention, E.J.Dionne referred to Chris Christie’s speech,which he dubbed “Rousing, if deceptive.”

Dionne noted Christie’s admiration for his dad. “After returning from Army service,” Christie recounted, “he worked at the Breyers Ice Cream plant in the 1950s. With that job and the GI Bill he put himself through Rutgers University at night to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.”

“Good for his dad. But Christie somehow slid over the fact that it was government — through the GI Bill and by financing New Jersey’s fine state university — that gave the elder Christie his chance to rise. Are we to “sacrifice” the next generation by cutting student loans and even arguing, as is becoming fashionable, that some Americans shouldn’t get the opportunity to go to college?”

This convention’s delusional theme–its insistence that successful people “do it themselves”–has been properly debunked by numerous people; for that matter, it’s self-evidently false to anyone who bothers to spend five minutes thinking about it. As a friend remarked, “Do these self-congratulatory types really believe that people in, say, Bangladesh, are less motivated and entrepreneurial human beings? Do they not understand that you can’t sell goods to other people if those others are impoverished? Do they just not notice their own ‘dependence’ on an educated workforce, public safety and functioning infrastructure–none of which would exist without the government?”

True enough, and evident to anyone who hasn’t totally succumbed to ideological BS or irrational hatred of government. But that shouldn’t be our biggest concern with this particular alternate reality.

The problem with this failure to understand our social interdependence and the extent of the role government plays in our lives is that this particular form of blindness prevents us from fixing things that are broken.

I teach college. A college education is a time-honored tool of social mobility (it certainly helped Chris Christie’s father). When that education is successful, it also opens intellectual doors for students who would not otherwise pass through them. A genuine education that goes beyond mere job training enriches lives and enables human progress.

But the cost of a college education is rapidly escalating; it is becoming increasingly unaffordable, leaving millions of students with massive debt that takes decades to pay off. This is a problem we need to address. But like so many other current problems, we aren’t addressing it, because our energies are being consumed by arguments over the nature of reality.

The problem of rapidly escalating college costs is not going to be solved by cutting the programs that help students pay those costs. As another friend of mine likes to say, “you can’t cure a disease unless you diagnose it properly.”

People who don’t understand the problems–or who see problems that don’t exist rather than the ones that do–can’t solve them. They are not the people who move America forward.