Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

The Picks.

This is the first week there was a general acknowledgement that Joe Biden is president-elect of the United States, and like a dam breaking, the news cycle was flooded with announcements of his cabinet picks. In a cleverly stage-designed event, Biden appeared with Harris and the beginnings of his “national security” team, inclusive of foreign policy. His nominee for Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, caused some serious crowing of approval on Morning Joe with the story of his Holocaust survivor uncle, who escaped from a Nazi death march and ran across an American tank, from which emerged an African-American soldier. “This is who we are,” Blinken said, referring to the image of America as a liberator and a light unto the darkness of a troubled world yearning to breathe free.

What Blinken’s story didn’t include was an acknowledgement that, in all likelihood, the Black soldier was part of a segregated unit, as mixed race units were barred in the U.S. military throughout World War II. That is who we are, too. But that part of American exceptionalism isn’t likely to find its way onto the set of Morning Joe anytime soon, aside from the contributions of Eddie Glaude and a handful of others. And so, while the largely bipartisan imperial consensus experiences a moment of bliss at the re-establishment of its place at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, the manifold failures of this longstanding policy set will fade into the background for hopefully a brief spell. (We’re fortunate to have Rho Khanna and others to jog our memories this time around.)

Let me be clear – I am overjoyed that Trump and his crew of warmongers will be leaving Washington in a couple of months. I think Biden’s administration will be an improvement in many respects. But to say that they will be better than the Trump team is not to say that we are embarking on a new era of enlightenment in American foreign policy. Michele Flournoy, for instance, appears to be edging closer to being appointed Defense Secretary (as attested to by Politico, of course). She was four-square in favor of the Afghanistan surge policy, supported the wars in Iraq and Libya, has worked extensively in the for-profit military consulting and lobbying world, and is poised to place China in the crosshairs of the U.S. “defense” posture in the years ahead – a direction The New York Times appears to be signalling ahead of the incoming Biden administration. (Yes, they’re mostly just reporting on what Biden’s advisors have been saying, but they’ve been drinking the Kool Aid on this for a long time.)

I prefer to remain optimistic about our future – that there are enough countervailing forces now on the left to prevent another Iraq-like catastrophe. But doing so will require constant vigilance on the part of my fellow leftists. No time for sleep, my friends.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Smash and Grab.

This is another one of those “while you were looking over there …” moments. It’s not surprising – Trump is denying the results of the 2020 election, refusing to concede, refusing to cooperate with the transition to a Biden Administration, filing bogus law suits, and so on. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic is going through the roof, infecting many, many thousands of people each day and getting worse. These are enormous stories that demand coverage, but because our media tends towards myopia, we really only hear about these stories, while other important stuff falls through the cracks. This is in fact what is happening right now, as the Trump administration enters its final days, reaching for its final opportunities to remake our federal government in its own contorted image. Here’s some of what they’re doing.

First, Trump is placing some of his political hacks into posts deep within the bureaucracy of key federal agencies, as reported by the Washington Post. By placing Trumpists in these posts, the president is extending his influence far beyond his tenure. These appointees will benefit from Civil Service protections, which means it will be difficult for the Biden Administration to root them out from posts where they can actively sabotage any attempts at progressive policies. The Post cites the example of Michael Ellis, a former aide to Devon Nunes, as General Counsel at the National Security Agency, a non-political post. Ellis is the guy who came up with the secret server where transcripts of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have been secreted away. This and other similar postings are deeply problematic.

In addition to that, the Trump administration is commencing a kind of fire sale of public lands, rushing to put the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the auction block, inviting oil and gas companies to pick out their favorite patches of the now-endangered wilderness area. They’re hoping to take bids on the refuge lands before inauguration day so that claims may be locked in. And according to the Texas Tribune, leases on half a million acres of public land in the Gulf of Mexico have been handed out to oil and gas companies in recent days. The pace of these transactions has been increasing and is likely to get even more frenetic as this grisly administration rolls to a stop.

The combined effect of these efforts and Trump’s stonewalling of the transition is to defy the will of the people as expressed in the November election. Trump is a lame duck, like it or not, and as such his ability to implement massive changes should at least be mediated by the process of preparing for a new administration that does not agree with his policies. We need to demand that they stop this last minute smash and grab, and we need to do it now.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Who won.

Well, wasn’t THAT a cluster fuck.

As I write this, the presidential race has not been called, but it is clear that the Biden campaign substantially under-performed expectations and that they dragged a lot of down-ballot races down with them. Even if Biden pulls it out, which he may have done by the time I post this, the Senate is basically lost – a tremendous lost opportunity in a year when Democrats had a lot of advantages going in to the election. Add to this the loss of a number of House seats – maybe ten – including, quite probably, Anthony Brindisi’s NY-22 seat to former Congresswoman and Trump acolyte Claudia Tenney. That is a terrible outcome by any measure, and I have little doubt that Republicans are high-fiving all over the place at having separated their fate from that of President Trump, with the help of a feckless Democratic party.

There’s no question but that incumbent presidents are traditionally hard to beat. More often than not, they fend off challengers, largely because of the enormous advantages conferred by that office. So as re-elects go, if Trump is successful in clinching an electoral college win (which at this point seems highly unlikely), this would be a remarkably poor performance for an incumbent who was ultimately allowed to retain his office. Then again, he is Donald Trump, and as such, the worst president not only in modern times but in the entire history of the United States. He has presided over a ham-fisted response to the coronavirus pandemic that has resulted in more than 230,000 dead Americans and a major economic contraction the dimensions of which have not been seen since the 1930s. By rights, the man should have been easy to beat, and even Biden should have been able to take this race in a walk. What went wrong?

I’m not the only one to point this out, obviously – far from it – but the Biden campaign was essentially a content-free enterprise. He is the UnCola, the antithesis of Donald Trump (except with respect to his old white man-itude), and his running mate the antimatter counterpart to Mike Pence. But that’s essentially selling a negative, right? What is the affirmative case for electing Joe Biden and, more broadly, the Democratic party? The activist base of the party, both affiliated and non-affiliated, has a clear idea of what they want to get out of a Biden administration – namely, something far more progressive than Biden would opt for without being pressured. But if elections are about convincing large numbers of people to vote in certain ways, that necessarily must include potential voters who are not activists and who do not think about politics and policy on a daily basis. What did Biden and the Democratic congress explicitly offer these people? What was their case for election, aside from “we’re better than Trump”?

There will be plenty of time to ponder the meaning of this race. The sad thing is, that will be time when we will not have the governmental power to slow down the climate crisis, protect people from COVID, improve access to health care, keep people in their homes, and more. And as Dylan once put it, lost time is not found again.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.