Al Franken

Al Franken has been re-emerging from his self-imposed exile, fortunately. 

Al was drummed out of the Senate, largely by other Senate Democrats, for behavior that pales in comparison to what others have done. But I think Al has plans again to get re-involved in politics, and I expect him to run again in the future. For what? Not sure, but he is very popular with rank-and-file Democrats, and he is smart. Judging by what he writes below on his blog, he is considering getting back into politics. 

Trump Will Eventually Disappear

July 23, 2020

by Al Franken

Until the coronavirus hit, Trump had not faced a real crisis in the Oval Office. A global pandemic is a doozy of a crisis. Still, it is inconceivable that anyone could possibly have handled the coronavirus any worse.

The fact is that no matter who was president (Hillary Clinton comes to mind) we still would have faced a pandemic in the United States. What we did not have to do is face a completely out-of-control pandemic. 

There were the six weeks to two months that Trump assured us that everything was “totally under control.” That our cases would soon be down to zero. That the coronavirus would magically disappear.* All this was in direct contradiction to what he was being told by his team. On January 18, when Health and Human Services Secretary Azar warned Trump about the grave threat posed by the virus, Trump called him “an alarmist,” and moved onto what he wanted to talk about – “that f*cking vaping thing.”  That’s right – vaping. The president was very, very angry that he had been dragged into banning fruity and mint-flavored vaping products. Of late, he had been receiving a lot of political blowback from that decision, one that he bitterly regretted. 

We know that there were similar warnings in the Presidential Daily Brief during that period.  But, then again, this president doesn’t read the PDBs. Recently, Joe Biden announced that, as president, he will read the Presidential Daily Brief. And get this. He promised to read them daily!

When pressed about his months-long dismissal of the coronavirus, Trump explained that he was being “a cheerleader” for the American people. Alright. OK. Thing is – I’ve been to a lot of high school football games, and I have never seen the cheerleaders turn around and fire AK-47s into the bleachers. We have lost more than 140,000 Americans to Covid-19. There is no question that had Trump acted – as any president before him would have – tens of thousands of Americans who have died from this horrible disease would still be alive today. This is American Carnage. And Donald Trump is responsible for it.

I was in the Senate during the Ebola crisis. I saw first-hand how the United States led the global response to Ebola. Because the CDC was on the ground in Africa at the time of the outbreak in Liberia, we identified it before it got out of control and sent medical teams there to treat people and staunch the epidemic. The Trump administration cut 80% of the CDC’s funding for just that kind of presence in 39 countries – including a huge cut in our footprint in…China.

Before Trump, most of the world thought of America as the indispensable nation. And so did Americans. Now, after three-and-a-half years of Trump, neither is true. Not only did Trump choose not to lead a global response to Covid-19 – he decided against a national response. Instead, he kicked it down to the states. It’s as if, after Pearl Harbor, FDR said, “This is really Hawaii’s problem now.”

Because he is incapable of admitting any mistakes, Trump has refused to adjust to the realities on the ground. It took until this week for him to finally urge Americans to wear masks. (I must admit that I share one discreet area of agreement with Trump. He did say, in so many words, that he would look like an idiot in a mask.)

If you look at all the countries that have handled this pandemic successfully (and have been able to reopen safely), the path to getting the virus under control is clear. Absolutely essential components are social distancing and masks, testing, contact tracing, and isolation. Nothing could be dumber than saying that we’d have fewer cases if we had less testing.  By that logic, we could finally get a grip on global overpopulation by prohibiting pregnancy tests.

Three months ago, a bipartisan group, including former Trump administration Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb and former Obama head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Andy Slavitt, put together a comprehensive plan for contact tracing and isolation.  It cost a lot – an estimated $46.5 billion. But it included $12 billion to expand the contact tracing workforce by 180,000 people and $4.5 billion for using vacant hotels as self-isolation facilities. Testing, tracing, and isolation is the only way we can start to safely reopen and begin to get our economy back on track. In the end, the program would pay for itself and more. And, yet, Trump has insisted that Congress reduce the funding for testing that is in its latest coronavirus relief package.

Now Trump has declared that he will withhold federal funds for any school district that doesn’t reopen when the school year begins. Clearly, there are very compelling reasons to want our children to get back to school with friends and teachers. In many cases, a school lunch can be the most nutritious meal a child gets that day. Virtual learning is better than nothing, but, as so many parents and kids have discovered, it’s just not the same. Add to that the fact that, disgracefully, too many kids in our country do not have access to the internet. And, of course, millions of parents would like to be able to get back to work.

But, of course, It would be completely irresponsible for schools to open in those areas of the country where Covid-19 has been spiking. The idea of a blanket national policy is just another example of the insanely backasswards way this president has been approaching everything in this crisis. PPE? Let every state fend for themselves and have to bid against each other for masks and for ventilators. But schools? Open or no funding from the federal government.

There are actual rational, intelligent, measured ways to approach these problems. But we have been held hostage by a malignant narcissist. And not just any malignant narcissist. This one. Yes, it would be nice if the president had empathy. But I’d settle for a malignant narcissist who couldn’t give a fig about anybody, but who at least was smart enough to understand that he (and the country) would be a lot better off if he had just followed the science. Who knows? Maybe that malignant narcissist would have had a good shot at being reelected. 

___

*Trump continues to defend that statement, insisting that at some point, the coronavirus will indeed disappear. Of course, on that score, Donald Trump is absolutely correct. Then again, eventually, the sun will also disappear – in the sense that it will burn out. In about five billion years.

Original.

hurry up, yo!

The Lincoln Project

It's refreshing, and somehow appropriate, that some Republicans who are horrified by Trump's machinations have gotten together to oppose him in the upcoming election. Now they are also going after Trump's enablers, namely the principle-free bastards otherwise known as the GOP Senate. Lots of soft targets there. The Lincoln Project guys are sharp, and quick, and I'm glad they are on our side, at least for now.

The Lincoln Project understands that Trump’s enablers must pay a price

Opinion by Max Boot

“The once-mocked ‘Never Trump’ movement becomes a sudden campaign force”

— Post headline, July 11 

If you want any more evidence of the validity of that conclusion, look no further than the frenzied attacks on the Lincoln Project, a political action committee formed last year by four Republicans (George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson) disenchanted with President Trump. With its razor-sharp videos, the Lincoln Project has drawn blood — and counterattacks mainly from the Trumpified right but also, surprisingly, from a section of the self-defeating left. Even Trump has inveighed against the Lincoln Project, in typically understated fashion, as “LOSERS” who are “a disgrace to Honest Abe.” 

The most common charge is that, as Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel put it, the organization has a “record of grift” and “profiting off attacking President Trump.” This charge has been faithfully repeated with no evidence by the lap dog conservative press, e.g., the National Review and Ben Shapiro.

This is pretty rich coming from Trump’s acolytes, since there is no more glaring example of grift in our politics than the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Trump campaign and affiliated committees have spent $22 million at Trump properties since he entered politics in 2015. Now we learn that Trump directed the U.S. ambassador to Britain to ask the British government to steer the British Open to his golf resort in Scotland.

Now that’s corruption. What the Lincoln Project is doing is simply politics as usual. There is no reason to believe, the Daily Beast writes, that “Lincoln Project executives are simply pocketing the money that’s channeled through their political consulting firms.” If those working on the Lincoln Project are compensated, well, they deserve it. They’re turning out brilliant videos at a relentless pace that puts most political organizations to shame.

The attacks on the Lincoln Project’s finances are a thinly disguised attack on its tactics — which are to attack Trump and the GOP from a perspective likely to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters. Right-wingers are especially perturbed that the group has targeted vulnerable Republican senators. How dare they?!? “The Lincoln Project has made itself a Democratic Party organization,” screams a headline in the Washington Examiner. This would seem to refute a charge heard from the far left — namely that the group is a bunch of unrepentant warmongers who haven’t really broken with the GOP.

In fact, the Lincoln Project’s founders have impeccable Republican credentials, but they are thoroughly disenchanted with the Party of Trump. One of the consultants affiliated with the Lincoln Project — Stuart Stevens — has written a forthcoming book called “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump” that explains in coruscating and compelling terms why he is done with a party he has served his whole life. Stevens has run numerous GOP campaigns; he was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012. Yet he makes no attempt to paint Trump as an aberration. Rather, he sees the president as the distillation of decades of GOP dogma.

He calls the GOP “a white grievance party,” and writes that “there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party.” The rest of the Republican platform he dismisses as a convenient fiction: “How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.… [I]t had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.”

Stevens is particularly scathing about all the Republican politicians — many of them his clients — who have made common cause with Trump. “The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice,” he writes. “The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise.”

If you accept Stevens’s searing critique of the Republican Party — and I do — then it is incumbent on the Lincoln Project to target not just Trump but also his enablers. That’s just what it has done with commercials such as this one urging the defeat of Republican senators.

Does that mean the Lincoln Project favors a Democratic takeover of the Senate? Yup. But that doesn’t mean, as Trumpites blare, that it’s gone over to the far left. Its members have stayed on the center right while the Republican Party has been taken over, as Stevens writes, by “paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots.” Even staunch conservatives such as former national security adviser John Bolton and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) are being excommunicated by the Trumpkins.

If we are ever again to have a sane and sober center-right party in America — something we desperately need — then the Trumpified GOP must first be demolished. That is what the Lincoln Project is trying to accomplish, and more power to it. By leading the charge against the Republican Party, its founders have shown greater fealty to conservative principles than 99 percent of elected Republicans.

Max Boot

Max Boot, a Post columnist, is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a global affairs analyst for CNN. He is the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam," a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Original.

Wear a mask, people!

slave rape

Rape is a rarely talked about legacy of slavery. Could be that's why we have so many people with skin tones between white and black, which happened long before it was "legal" to intermarry. White men didn't have any trouble raping black women, and then would turn and spit on them in public.

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument.

The black people I come from were all owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them? 

by Caroline Randall Williams

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Original in the NYT.