There’s something familiar about the way the GOP talks about the poor. If you've been paying close attention to Republicans in the House and Senate, they may strike you as being eerily reminiscent of other curmudgeons we normally hear from this time of year—infamous villains like Ebenezer Scrooge from Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Between defenses of their ruthless attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and their ludicrous justifications for passing a bill that slashes taxes for the rich while hiking costs for the poor and middle classes, Republican politicians are sounding more and more like the grumpy, selfish antagonists from our favorite stories of the season.
Don’t believe it? Take this quiz to see if you can tell the difference between real people and fictional characters. Check your answers at the bottom.
When it comes to the poor, Mitch McConnell's views are virtually the same as Mr. Potter's from "It's a Wonderful Life."
Photo Credit: Liberty Films (Potter, left); Wikimedia Commons (McConnell, right)
1. “I am an old man and most people hate me. But I don't like them either, so that makes it all even.”
a) Mitch McConnell
b) Orrin Hatch
c) Mr. Potter (It’s a Wonderful Life)
2. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence."
a) Paul Ryan
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) Mitch McConnell
3. “Are you running a business or a charity ward? Not with my money!”
a) Paul Ryan
b) Mr. Potter
c) Sen. Chuck Grassley
4. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
a) Sen. Chuck Grassley
b) The Grinch
c) Mr. Potter
5. “Oh, bleeding hearts of the world, unite!”
a) The Grinch
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) Orrin Hatch
6. "Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses, are they still in operation? Those who are badly off must go there."
a) Mitch McConnell
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) The Grinch
7. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”
a) Mr. Potter
b) Paul Ryan
c) Orrin Hatch
8. “Those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”
a) Mr. Potter
b) Mo Brooks, Alabama congressman
c) Ebenezer Scrooge
9. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
a) The Grinch
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) Paul Ryan
10. “Uh-huh. You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.”
In 1814, First Lady Dolley Madison helped hide the White House’s famous portrait of George Washington from the British when they burned and sacked the capital. But if the current pack of brigands raiding DC has its way, by the time they’re done, that painting and every other piece of government property that isn’t nailed down will be stolen and put up for sale on eBay.
That’s because a smash-and-grab mob is running the government. If they continue the way they are, every agency, every social program, every benefit and every one of us not-rich-people will take it in the wallet as they rapaciously loot the system.
The tax reform plan is today’s Exhibit A. This is greed, plain and simple, toadying to the richest of the land who write the campaign checks. Simultaneously, Trump, his associates and Congress seem to be lining their own pockets with ill-gotten gains. And all the time trying to pretend otherwise to a public that by a margin of 2-to-1 already realizes that this so-called tax reform legislation is a total scam, a classic bait-and-switch.
On Saturday, Jim Tankersley noted in The New York Times that the package “leaves nearly every large tax break in place. It creates as many new preferences for special interests as it gets rid of. It will keep corporate accountants busy for years to come… [A]mbitions fell to the powerful forces of lobbying and the status quo.
… What emerged on Friday, in the final product agreed to by Republican members of a House-Senate conference committee, was a bill that layers new tax complexities upon businesses large and small, and which delivers a larger share of benefits to corporations and the rich than to the middle class.
And yet on Sunday, Jeff Stein and Mike DeBonis wrote in The Washington Post that with straight faces, members of the GOP congressional leadership were arguing that the bill “is aimed primarily at helping the middle class, brushing aside nonpartisan analyses that show the bulk of the legislation’s benefits would go to the wealthy and to corporations.”
Here’s one of them, Texas Sen. John Cornyn on ABC’s This Week: “This will benefit hard-working American families, people in the lower income tax brackets, and everybody in every tax bracket will see a tax cut.”
Wow. So much smoke is being blown by Republicans you’d think the capital was sitting in the middle of the California wildfires. The tax code already is complicated and they’ve made their rewrite of existing law a hastily thrown together hodgepodge, an ill-informed and ill-conceived mess being rushed through to get a legislative win ahead of year’s end and to unload the gravy train of its goodies before the electoral whistle blows and we throw the rascals out onto the tracks.
There are tons of profitable dodges laced throughout this behemoth thousand-page bill — more than a trillion dollars’ worth. Changes to the estate tax, for example, lowering the top marginal tax rate and slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. Sen. Bernie Sanders reports that 15 of our largest corporations alone, including Apple, GE, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, will now receive “an additional $236 billion tax cut” on top of the $3.9 trillion in tax advantages they’ve received over the last three decades.
But take a look at this giveaway uncovered by our friend David Sirota at International Business Times (IBT) and his colleagues Alex Kotch, Andrew Perez and Josh Keefe. Over the weekend and on Monday, the investigative team reported in rapid succession that Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the only Republican member who had voted against the Senate version of the bill but who was now reversed himself, did so shortly after a provision was added that gives a tax break to real estate investors like himself, not to mention Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, their families and many others.
Corker then denied that this was why he had changed his vote, defending himself by saying he had not even read the bill he now was supporting (!), let alone known about the new language. He demanded that Utah’s Orrin Hatch, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, tell him how the favorable provision was added. Hatch said he himself had written it (the Center for Responsive Politics notes that since 1989, Hatch has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the real estate industry).
Subsequently, IBT reported that not only does Bob Corker’s chief of staff also stand to make out like a bandit from the real estate tax loophole, but so do 14 Republican senators (including Corker)who “hold financial interests in 26 income-generating real-estate partnerships — worth as much as $105 million in total. Those holdings together produced between $2.4 million and $14.1 million in rent and interest income in 2016, according to federal records.”
Our legislators are supposed to come to Washington to do good. Instead they do well, really well, raking in the dollars at the expense of you and me. Income inequality continues to mount, with the top 1 percent controlling some 40 percent of America’s wealth as benefits are stolen away from those desperately in need.
This tax bill is the Christmas gift that just keeps giving — but not to the millions of Americans who could really use some relief, including and especially the poor and working class who bought Donald Trump’s baloney about never being ignored again. They’ll be lucky to get lumps of “clean, beautiful coal” in their stockings.
Donald Trump is wearing thin. He is inherently boring. Everything he says or tweets is so familiar, no matter how offensive, that it’s hard to pay attention to him anymore.
He generates crisis, offence and chaos every day, and yet he is devoid of information. He doesn’t tell us anything that we haven’t already heard. He is like a political thunderhead giving off rolling thunder, but in his case it is rolling chaos.
Nevertheless, let us examine where this chaos may be heading in 2018. There are signals in the madness that do contain information.
Trump’s Asia tour was novel and renewed our attention. To the surprise of many he proved capable of reading from a teleprompter without giving vent to his inner impulses.
Later in Da Nang, Putin said he was insulted by the Russiainvestigation. What Putin likely meant is that Trump had botched Putin’s plans for him: Lifting sanctions, rescinding the Magnitsky Act and recognizing his annexation of Crimea.
Now other nations, 29 in Europe by one count, are investigating the hitherto comfortable money-laundering schemes of Putin’s cronies. The pyramid of money and power upon which Putin is perched is suddenly shaky thanks to Trump’s ineptitude.
Think Michael Corleone and his brother Fredo, the one who screwed up everything.
Subsequent phone chats between Trump and Putin may have offered some solace to the president. It seems that his Russian pal considers the effort to subvert the U.S. election as, on balance, a great success. Nothing really new here: Putin is playing Trump like a fiddle.
As an expert in Caucasian languages and also politics, and someone who advised the Bill Clinton White House on Russia at various points in my career, I can attest that this is a classic move from the Russian playbook. Usually it fails. With Trump on the scene, it succeeded.
Negative signals
Sometimes information can come from negative signals, as in silence when there should be a signal.
The silence I refer to is the inaction of Congress. No one seems to be acting in light of the one overarching fact that shapes everything said and done since election day: Trump, through the Electoral College, is a minority president to an unprecedented extent, and Congress, through gerrymandering, is a minority Congress.
Neither represents what the majority of Americans want. Given a figure like Trump, incapable, abusive, narcissistic, misogynistic, morally empty and inarticulate, (read The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump for a tour of all that is wrong with this grossly distorted man), you could be forgiven for expecting a prompt remedy to this miscarriage of democracy. Most nations, in fact, might have declared the election null-and-void and tried to get it right a second time.
We even hear now of the adjective “Trumpian,” a distillation of the parochial and damaging policies of Trump.
Some, such as Sen. Tom Cotton, may be able to play up Trumpian values to a following with a longing for a “simpler” past, for values based on heritage rather than self-fulfillment and replete with regional and racial resentments.
As Bernie Sanders showed us, however, the youth of America seem to be looking in a different direction. This message of the young seems unexpected to the GOP, and as such carries a good deal of information — information that the Republicans should be scrutinizing.
And then there is Alabama, a signal from a deep-red state that was utterly unexpected by some Republicans as Roy Moore, an accused pedophile, was defeated by the Democrat, Doug Jones. The voters of Alabama, many of them Black, seemingly cast their ballots for simple decency, to have repudiated the moral squalor into which the GOP, both at state and federal levels, had slid by endorsing Moore.
Bannon, Trump, lose credibility
Both Bannon and Trump lost their credibility and political clout by going all out with their endorsements of Moore. There is no obvious way now for them to regain these intangible powers. The signal here is easy to read: The expediencies of political chicanery will not fool a populace that has been exposed to almost a year of rolling chaos seasoned with the occasional dash of Trump’s depravity.
Other Democratic victories are being scored at the state level, not just in Virginia, but in numerous other venues as well. These developments do not bode well for the GOP.
Alabama, however, makes the most recent moves of Congress all the more puzzling.
I refer here to the effort by Republicans to denigrate Mueller, his team and the entire FBI. Not only is this an unprecedented assault on a man of integrity, it is also an assault on an entire institution that represents the federal policing function.
It seems that the Republican-controlled Congress has betrayed its function to uphold the Constitution.
To what end? So that they can pretend that Trump is not a puppet of Putin, when manifestly he is? Is there something so profoundly wrong with Pence that the entire Congress would rather wreck the republic than remove Trump?
The Russia investigation is expanding and drawing ever closer to Trump’s inner circle. There will be more indictments, followed, one must assume, by eventual presidential pardons.
I hear the occasional media speculation that the Mueller investigation will last at least another year before winding up. I doubt that for three reasons:
Firstly, Republicans traditionally pay little heed to the reactions of their supporters and run roughshod over these trusting souls in their scramble to satisfy the interests of their donors.
The new tax law demonstrates this quite plainly. If they fire Mueller, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and whatever is left of the FBI, Republicans seem to think that no one will care. I would suggest otherwise.
The U.S. military, for example, might care. Americans are fond of thinking they are exceptional, but politics has its own laws and the current course set by congressional Republicans leads directly to the sort of disintegration of norms and institutions that are typically rectified by martial force.
Americans might scoff at the suggestion of a military coup annulling the 2016 election and calling for a new one, but in any other nation this would be a real possibility, and I do not see American exceptionalism somehow standing outside the political forces that shape all other nations.
I cannot predict their diagnosis, but I shall offer mine: Fronto-temporal dementia, with a variant of progressive non-fluent aphasia (inability to speak).
In other words, Trump acts in an impulsive, vulgar fashion and eats compulsively because the machinery in his brain to inhibit such behaviour is disintegrating. Further, his speech production area — known as Broca’s area — is also affected, resulting in limited speech and slurred pronunciation. Onset is insidious, but once symptoms are manifest with this disorder, the course is rapid. By next spring, Trump could likely be unable to speak at all if my suspicions are correct.
Slurred speech, or slipping dentures? No one’s quite sure what was ailing Trump at this event in December.
Third, and perhaps most interesting, is the tectonic shift in cultural values spearheaded by women, a shift of the sort seen once or at most twice in a century.
This tidal wave is immediate, surprising, and hence loaded with information. After decades, perhaps millennia, women are sick and tired of being fondled, groped, invasively kissed, sexually harassed and raped. And they are speaking out with justifiable anger.
This is a remarkable revolt against the male conflation of power with passion.
In the court of public opinion these women are believable. Why? Because so many women have suffered precisely such indignities on a routine basis. Here Trump is utterly exposed by his own words as well as by at least 14 women who accuse him of harassment.
History will be damning
Most of us live our lives in the obscuring murk of anonymity, with its impending oblivion, buried in a fog of information.
Those in government, however, because there are so few of them, bear the risk of having their names carried forward to be judged by those yet unborn. Curiously, with a few exceptions, no one in Congress, or anyone associated with the White House, seems to be pondering this future.
I predict that the judgment on Trump and those who cleave to him and his ways will be damning, regardless of the political orientation of those in judgment.
Trump will not only have destroyed liberal norms and laws, he will have utterly discredited conservatism and the wealthy class that supports it.
He will have made of a great nation a small and irrelevant thing. And “Make America Great Again” will take on the tone befitting a Greek tragedy.
“I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” – Mike Pence, Speech to Republican National Convention, 2017
When (and if) Donald J. Trump leaves office – via impeachment, criminal indictment and conviction, resignation, or the 25th amendment – Mike Pence, his Vice President will become President. Mike Pence does not have a secret agenda – he is all out there: “My Christian faith is at the very heart of who I am,” he said during one of the vice presidential debates. And he means that. Welcome to Christian Theocracy.
When Margaret Atwood’s book A Handmaid’s Tale was converted into a much- watched television series, liberal commentators pointed out that this dystopian nightmare was a fable of life in Donald Trump’s America. They were wrong. Trump’s version of A Handmaid’s Talewould have been filmed at the Playboy Mansion, and would have been full of men grabbing women by the “p****.” No, A Handmaid’s Tale was a horror story of life in Mike Pence’s America.
Trump and Pence are “almost comically mismatched” and while Pence casts his eyes adoringly at Trump in public, the President has taken to humiliating his vice president, openly mocking his religiosity and asking people who have met with Pence “Did Mike make you Pray?”
Pence, whose childhood nickname was “Bubbles,” was raised as a Roman Catholic. During college he became a conservative evangelical Christian. To Pence, secularism is the enemy. In Congress he supported criminalizing abortion, supported “personhood” legislation that would give constitutional protection to fetuses at the point of conception (it is sometimes said that for Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth), voted to criminally punish doctors who performed late-term abortions, tried to defund Planned Parenthood, said that global climate change is a “myth,” worked against equal rights for homosexuals, declared that legalizing gay marriage signaled “societal collapse,” opposed efforts to widen hate crime laws to apply to attacks on LBGTQ+ persons, tried to block federal funding for HIV treatments unless they included a requirement to advise against gay relationships, opposed gays serving in the military, and declared that education should teach evolution only as a “theory” and that such teaching must include the theory of “intelligent design.”
As the governor of Indiana Pence signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The law allowed private businesses to refuse service to those whose lifestyle they objected to on religious grounds (LGBTQ+). Advocates of the law said it protected religious freedom. Shortly after it became law, business leaders pressured the state to eliminate the law. Pence also signed a bill that required fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated. He also signed an executive order barring the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Indiana.
As vice president Pence has been hosting a Bible-study group for members of the Trump cabinet. The study group is led by pastor Ralph Drollinger, who in 2004 wrote that “Women with children at home, who either serve in public office, or are employed on the outside, pursue a path that contradicts God’s revealed design for them. It is a sin.” Drollinger also characterizes Catholicism as “a false religion” and believes that a wife must “submit” to the husband.
Pence is an ardent adherent of “the Billy Graham rule,” a rule adopted by some evangelical pastors and business executives. In an effort to avoid temptation, followers of the rule who want to both appear to be, and to be above reproach, avoid “. . . every appearance of evil.” After several prominent evangelical pastors gave in to the temptations of the flesh and had sexual relations with women (leading to scandals and fall) some men decided that it was unwise to be alone with women. Pence embraces this rule, admitting that “he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife.” He even refuses to attend events where alcohol is served unless he is with his wife.
Apart from this being an admission of personal weakness (Oscar Wilde once said that he could “resist everything except temptation”), observance of this rule is a clear exclusion of women from full participation in political life. This led The Onion to lead its story on Pence’s Billy Graham rule with the headline: “Mike Pence asks waiter to remove Mrs. Butterworth From Table Until Wife Arrives”.
Following the Billy Graham rule means that women are treated as sexual temptresses, as objects of danger and sin. It also excludes women from important meetings at work simply because they are women. Women are not only made into second-class citizens, not only prevented from equal opportunity in the workforce, but they are possessors of the evil powers of sex that mere men cannot resist. Imagine if you will, that the tables were turned, and a female CEO followed this same rule only preventing men from full participation. Working late? Send the men home. Business lunch? No men allowed.
Some liberal commentators worry that a President Pence might be a more competent version of President Trump, that he would actually be able to work with a Republican Congress and get major legislation passed. While more politically experienced than Trump, it should be remembered that in his twelve years in Congress, Mike Pence did not author a single bill that was enacted into law. Hope springs eternal.
But the real danger of a Pence presidency is how seriously he takes the radical “religious” right’s wish list, and how he might try to impose a narrow set of religious rules on a wary population. Pence believes he is in possession of God’s Truth, and why let a pesky Constitution, or an annoying Bill of Rights stand in the way of God’s will? Heaven help us.
Michael A. Genovese is the author of 50 books. He is President of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University.
As a scholar of African-American and Southern politics for the last 25 years, I’ve witnessed a lot of election upsets and surprises. None has been more interesting than the Democrat Doug Jones’ election to the U.S. Senate in a Dec. 12 special election against Republican Roy Moore.
According to exit polls, 30 percent of the over 1 million people who participated in this election were black, and 96 percent of black voters supported Jones. In short, in an election where Jones’ margin of victory was less than 2 percent, Alabama’s near-unanimous black voters were the deciding factor.
Now that black Alabamians have accomplished their goal of electing their preferred representative, the big question is: What will they get in return?
Having done so, black voters may reasonably expect Democrats to thank them by actually tackling the issues that disproportionately affect their communities.
Most of those areas are in the state’s so-called “Black Belt.” In Wilcox County, for example, the white poverty rate is 8.8 percent, but the black poverty rate is 50.2 percent. Nearby Lowndes County has the lowest white poverty rate in the state – 4.1 percent – but almost 35 percent of black people there live in poverty.
Other Black Belt counties show similar wealth disparities, with black households three to four times more likely to live in poverty than their white neighbors. Democrats have talked a lot about poor whites since the 2016 election. It’s useful to remember that black people, particularly in the rural South, still face stunningly high rates of economic exclusion.
Entrenched poverty means that health care access for black Alabamians is also dismal. The Black Belt region has fewer primary care physicians, dentists, mental health providers, and hospitals than other parts of the state. It has a much higher rate of uninsured people than other regions. In most of its counties, more than 25 percent of residents lack access to health care – and that’s with the Affordable Care Act in place.
I believe Jones will also be expected to address Alabama’s educational achievement gap. The state has 20 to 30 percent differences between the reading levels of black and white students, a discrepancy that results from such factors as a student’s family income, residential segregation and school resources – or the lack thereof.
Black voters voted for Jones, rather than just against Moore, because they expect Jones care about issues like these. His campaign centered on liberal causes like abortion access, support for the Affordable Care Act, LGBTQ rights and immigration reform and he has an extensive civil rights background.
In 2002, as a U.S. Attorney in Alabama, Jones prosecuted two members of the Ku Klux Klan for their roles in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four African-American girls. Both men were later sentenced to life in prison.
Jones additionally campaigned heavily in predominantly black areas of Alabama and benefited from an effective get-out-the-vote effort. African-American celebrities and politicians – including NBA legend and Alabama native Charles Barkley, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia – descended on the state to stump for Jones.
On election day in Alabama, numerous reports surfaced of voter suppression in predominantly black precincts. Even so, black voter turnout in this special election may have surpassed levels of the 2008 and 2012 general elections, when Barack Obama was on the ballot.
Moore also has ties to white nationalist groups. In September, he averred that he thought that America had been “great” during slavery, saying that “at the time … families were united – even though we had slavery …. our country had a direction.”
Nor did Moore’s early leadership in the birther movement – which erroneously alleges that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States – endear him to African-Americans, in Alabama or elsewhere.
All of this helps explain why Democratic turnout was far higher than white Republican turnout in Alabama’s special election. That should send a strong message to the Republican Party about the power of black voices.
But, critically, it should also send a message to Democrats. For years, black Democrats have warned that the party takes their votes for granted. If Jones is to stand a chance at re-election, he’d do well to represent the base that sent him to Washington just as soon as he gets there.
Here are the 3 main Republican arguments in favor of the Republican tax plan, followed by the truth.
1. It will make American corporations competitive with foreign corporations, which are taxed at a lower rate.
Rubbish.
(1) American corporations now pay an effective rate (after taking deductions and tax credits) that’s just about the same as most foreign based corporations pay.
(2) Most of these other countries also impose a “Value Added Tax” on top of the corporate tax.
(3) When we cut our corporate rate from 35% to 20%, other nations will cut their corporate rates in order to be competitive with us – so we gain nothing anyway.
(4) Most big American corporations who benefit most from the Republican tax plan aren’t even “American.” Over 35 percent of their shareholders are foreign (which means that by cutting corporate taxes we’re giving a big tax cut to those foreign shareholders). 20 percent of their employees are foreign, while many Americans work for foreign-based corporations.
(5) The “competitiveness” of America depends on American workers, not on “American” corporations. But this tax plan will make it harder to finance public investments in education, health, and infrastructure, on which the future competitiveness of American workers depends.
(6) American corporations already have more money than they know what to do with. Their profits are at record levels. They’re using them to buy back their shares of stock, and raise executive pay. That’s what they’ll do with the additional $1 trillion they’ll receive in this tax cut.
***
2. With the tax cut, big corporations and the rich will invest and create more jobs.
Baloney.
(1) Job creation doesn’t trickle down. After Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cut taxes on the top, few jobs and little growth resulted. America cut taxes on corporations in 2004 in an attempt to get them to bring their profits home from abroad, and what happened? They didn’t invest. They just bought up more shares of their own stock, and increased executive pay.
(2) Companies expand and create jobs when there’s more demand for their goods and services. That demand comes from customers who have the money to buy what companies sell. Those customers are primarily the middle class and poor, who spend far more of their incomes than the rich. But this tax bill mostly benefits the rich.
(3) At a time when the richest 1 percent already have 40 percent of all the wealth in the country, it’s immoral to give them even more – especially when financed partly by 13 million low-income Americans who will lose their health coverage as a result of this tax plan (according to the Congressional Budget Office), and by subsequent cuts in safety-net programs necessitated by increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion.
***
3. It will give small businesses an incentive to invest and create more jobs.
Untrue.
(1) At least 85 percent of small businesses earn so little they already pay the lowest corporate tax rate, which this plan doesn’t change.
(2) In fact, because the tax plan bestows much larger rewards on big businesses, they’ll have more ability to use predatory tactics to squeeze small firms and force them out of business.
***
Don’t let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it. Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years – reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
Shame on the greedy Republican backers who have engineered this. Shame on Trump and the Republicans who have lied to the public about its consequences.
And in the most recent CNN-sponsored debate among Republican presidential candidates, Wolf Blitzer’s closing Merry Christmas wish prompted two Fox News hosts to declare victory, claiming that their side had won the War on Christmas:
Whatever the recent skirmishes, this kind of controversy is not new. American disagreements about the celebration of Christmas reach back to the nation’s colonial beginnings—where ironically, it was a Christian group, Puritans, that offered the discouraging words.
When the Church of England broke away from Roman Catholicism in the 1500s, Calvinist reformers (those Puritans) felt that the new English church did not go far enough in removing Catholic elements. One practice the Puritans opposed was the annual December celebration of Christmas, which they saw as a Catholic innovation not justified by scripture. They claimed that the earliest Christians had no such observance (which was true, because it took more than two hundred years after Jesus’ lifetime before Christians began an annual observance about the nativity of the Christ child).
Puritans also disapproved of the wild partying that seemed widespread on Christmas Day in England. Thus, during the Puritan Revolution in England in the 1600s, Puritans banned special church services on December 25 and mandated that businesses remain open.
In the American colonies the result was more complicated. Puritan New England actively discouraged Christmas: for a few years the Massachusetts General Court threatened fines for anyone found feasting, or absent from work, on Christmas Day. The long term result was that English-speaking dissenters from the Church of England, in the colonial era and in the early years of the new nation, tended to either actively oppose or at least ignore Christmas—that included Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers.
However, other colonists came from parts of Europe not affected by Puritan opposition, and they brought their Christmas celebrations with them, unhindered: Germans, Scandinavians, and the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam (later New York). So Lutherans, Catholics, and the Dutch Reformed celebrated Christmas, along with the Church of England that continued restrained Christmas observances.
As a result of this mixture, in the American colonies and then in the new nation, there was no national consensus supporting Christmas, and the disagreement was between Christians.
American Christmas wouldn’t come roaring back, becoming nearly universal, until the mid-1800s, but it was not because of any campaign by churches. Most credit for the return and advance of Christmas goes to major cultural influences like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the morphing of St. Nicholas into Santa Claus. Dickens’ famous story did not reflect the Christmas of his time but instead was an attempt to resurrect and reinvent Christmas, and it was incredibly successful. A Christmas Carol contains very little direct reference to religion and says nothing about a baby in a manger—but it does promote a spirit of giving and care for others that can be embraced by almost anyone.
The point here is that the Puritan suppression of Christmas created a vacuum, and when Christmas re-emerged and flourished in the 1800s its new form had less of a religious emphasis and was centered more on family and generosity. Christians could embrace those themes gladly, as very consistent with their values and beliefs, but others could also embrace that kind of a Christmas spirit without being especially religious.
In a sense, what emerged were two kinds of Christmas: a Christian Christmas and a cultural Christmas. In modern-day expression of Christianity, some are able to combine the two seamlessly, but others strongly emphasize one or the other. What has been called the secularization of Christmas might also be described as an emphasis on the cultural Christmas, with less interest in the religious version. The outworking of this two-fold Christmas continues to this day, and it is part of what enlivens the ‘War on Christmas’ debates.
Jesus has been described as the best known figure in history, and also the least known. If you mentioned the name “Jesus” and someone asked Jesus who?, you might blink. Or laugh. Even people who don’t think Jesus was God, mostly believe they know a fair bit about him. You might be surprised that some of your most basic assumptions about Jesus are probably wrong.
We have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses or other contemporaries during the time he would have lived or for decades thereafter, and as best scientists can tell, all physical relics of his life are later fakes. Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and artifacts, ancient texts and art, linguistic patterns, and even forensic science, we know a good deal about the time and culture in which the New Testament is set. This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesus likely was—and wasn’t.
Cropped hair, not long. Jewish men at the time of Christ did not typically wear their hair long. A Roman triumphal arch of the time period depicts Jewish slaves with short hair. In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses male hair length. “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” (1 Corinthians 11:14 NRSV). During the 1960’s conservative Christians quoted this verse to express their disgust against the hippy movement and to label it as anti-Christian.
Married, not single. In 2012, when an ancient papyrus scrap came to light referring to the wife of Jesus (most likely a forgery), some Catholics and Evangelicals were scandalized at the very thought. But unlike the Catholic Church, Jews have no tradition of celibacy among religious leaders. Ancient writers documented exceptions like the Apostle Paul or the Essene sect precisely because they violated the norm. In the Gospels, Jesus is called rabbi; and all great rabbis that we know of were married. A rabbi being celibate would have been so unusual that some modern writers have argued that Jesus must have been gay. But a number of ancient texts, including the canonical New Testament, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. For example, the non-canonical Gospel of Phillip says, “[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her [word missing].”
Hung on a pole, not necessarily a cross. For centuries scholars have known that the Greek New Testament word “stauros,” which gets translated into English as cross, can refer to a device of several shapes, commonly a single upright pole, “torture stake” or even tree. The Romans did not have a standard way of crucifying prisoners, and Josephus tells us that during the siege of Jerusalem soldiers nailed or tied their victims in a variety of positions. Early Christians may have centered in on the vertical pole with a crossbeam because it echoed the Egyptian ankh, a symbol of life, or simply because it was more artistically and symbolically distinctive than the alternatives. Imagine millions of people wearing a golden pole on a chain around their necks.
Short, not tall. The typical Jewish man at the time of the Roman Empire was just over five feet tall, which makes this a best guess for the height of Jesus. That he is typically depicted taller likely derives from the mental challenge people have in distinguishing physical stature from other kinds of stature. Great men are called “big men” and “larger than life.” In ancient times they often were assigned divine parentage and miraculous births, and the idea that Jesus was uniquely divine has created a strong pull over time to depict him as taller than is likely. A good illustration of this is the Shroud of Turin, which is just one of many such Jesus-shrouds that circulated during medieval times and which bears the (now reproduced) image of a man closer to six feetin height.
Born in a house, not the stable of an inn. The miraculous birth story of Jesus is a late, maybe 2nd century addition to the gospels, and consequently it contains many fascinating mythic elements and peculiarities. But the idea that Jesus was born in a stable got added to the Christmas story even later. In the original narrative, Joseph and Mary probably would have stayed with relatives, and the phrase “no room for them in the inn (gr: kataluma)” is better translated “no room for them in the upper room.” Later storytellers did not understand that people of the time might bring animals into their ground floor, as in Swiss housebarns, and they assumed that the presence of a manger implied a stable.
Named Joshua, not Jesus. The name Joshua (in Hebrew Y’hoshuʿa meaning “deliverance” or “salvation”), was common among Jews in the Ancient Near East as it is today. Joshua and Jesus are the same name, but are translated differently in our modern Bible to distinguish Jesus from the Joshua of the Old Testament, who leads the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. In actuality, though, the relationship between the two figures is fascinating and important. Some scholars believe that the New Testament gospels are mostly updated retellings of the more ancient Joshua story, remixed with episodes from stories of Elisha and Elijah and Moses. A modern parallel can be found in the way that Hollywood writers have reworked Shakespearean tropes and plot elements into dozens of modern movies (though for a very different purpose).
Number of apostles (12) from astrology, not history. Whether Jesus had 12 disciples who ranked above his other devotees is an open question, as their names vary from list to list. Since the Gospels echo the story of Joshua, the “12” apostles most immediately mirror the 12 tribes of Israel. But the number 12 was considered auspicious by many ancient people, including the Israelites, and the 189 repetitions of the number 12 in the Bible ultimately may derive from the same pre-historical roots as the 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 months of the year. Astrotheology or star worship preceded the Hebrew religion, and shaped both the Bible and Western religions more broadly. One might point to the 12 Olympian gods or 12 sons of Odin, or the 12 days of Christmas or 12 “legitimate” successors to the prophet Mohammed.
Prophecies recalled, not foretold. Even people who aren’t too sure about the divinity of Jesus sometimes think that the way he fulfilled prophecies was a bit spooky, like the writings of Nostradamus. In reality, Scooby Doo could solve this one in a single episode with four pieces of information: First, Old Testament prophecies were well known to 1st century Jews, and a messianic figure who wanted to fulfill some of these prophecies could simply do so. For example, in the book of Matthew, Jesus seeks a donkey to ride into Jerusalem “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet” (Matthew 21:4). Second, “gospels” are a genre of devotional literature rather than objective histories, which means that the authors had every reason to shape their stories around earlier predictions. Third, scholars now believe that some Bible texts once thought to be prophecies (for example in the Book of Revelation) actually relate to events that were past or current at the time of writing. Finally, a psychological phenomenon known as the “Barnum Effect” ensures that those who want to believe in prophecies (or astrology, for that matter) will find amazing coincidences if they look hard enough.
Some Jesus quotes not from Jesus, others uncertain. Lists of favorite Jesus sayings abound online. Some of the most popular are the Beatitudes (Blessed are the meek, etc.) or the story of the woman caught in adultery (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone) or the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which, we are told, sums up the Law and the Prophets.) Which words actually from Jesus? This question has been debated fiercely by everyone from 3rd century Catholic Councils to the 20th Century Jesus Seminar. Even Thomas Jefferson weighed in, but much remains unclear. The New Testament Gospels were written long after Jesus would have died, and no technology existed with which to record his teachings in real time, unless a he wrote them down himself, which he didn’t. We can be confident that at least some of the wise and timeless words and catchy proverbs attributed to Jesus are actually from earlier or later thinkers. For example, the Golden Rule was articulated before the time of Christ by the Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who similarly said it was the “whole Torah.” By contrast, the much loved story of the woman caught in adultery doesn’t appear in manuscripts until the 4th century. Attributing words (or whole texts) to a famous person was common in the Ancient Near East, because it gave those words extra weight. Small wonder, then, that so many genuinely valuable insights ended up, in one way or another, paired with the name of Jesus.
The person of Jesus, if indeed there was a single historical rabbi at the root of our traditions, is shrouded in the fog of history leaving us only with a set of hunches and traditions that far too often get treated as knowledge. The “facts” I have listed here are largely trivial; it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus was tall or short, or how he cut his hair. But it does matter, tremendously, that “facts” people claim to know about how Jesus saw himself, and God and humanity are equally tenuous. In the words of Mark Twain: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
The teachings attributed to Jesus mix enduring spiritual and moral insights with irrelevancies and Judaica and bits of Iron Age culture, some of which are truly awful. That leaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.
Writing in the LA Times, author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman took the American electorate to task for electing "a reckless con man as president," adding the country is now facing a reckoning.
Dorfman admitted that he is tired of hearing about investigations into Russian collusion in the 2016 election of President Donald Trump when the focus should be on how in the hell did American voters let his election happen.
"What is it, in our American soul that allowed the Russians to be successful?" he asked.
"Those were not Russians voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, handing the election to the Republican candidate by a bit more than 80,000 votes. They were American men and women," Dorfman wrote. "As were the 62,984,825 others who decided that such a troublesome, inflammatory figure expressed their desires and dreams. Trump could be impeached or resign, or his policies could simply implode under the weight of their malice, divisiveness and mendacity, and the country would still be defined and pressed by the same conditions and dread that enabled his rise."
"Now, every desperate American must gaze in the mirror and interrogate the puzzled face and puzzling fate that stares back: What did I do or not do that made the cataclysm possible?" he continued. "Did I ignore past transgressions that corrode today’s society: the discrimination, the sexism, the violence, the authoritarianism, the intolerance, the imperial ambitions, the slavery and greed and persecutions that have darkened America’s story? Did I overestimate the strength of our democracy and underestimate the decency of my neighbors? Was I too fearful, too complacent, too impatient, too angry? Whom did I not talk to, whom did I not persuade? What privilege and comforts, what overwork and debts, kept me from giving my all? What injustice or humiliation or bigoted remark did I witness and let pass? How can I help to recover our country, make it once more recognizable, make it luminous and forgiving?"
"We must vigorously protest the president’s craven actions, but above all we need to acknowledge that what ultimately matters is not what a foreign power did to America, but what America did to itself," he lectured. "The crucial question of what is wrong with our country, what could have driven us to this edge of catastrophe, cannot be resolved by a special counsel or a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives or spectacular revelations about Russia’s interference."
If you have any doubts that the phenomenon of Donald Trump was a long time a’coming, you have only to read a piece that Gore Vidal wrote for Esquire magazine in July 1961, when the conservative movement was just beginning and even Barry Goldwater was hardly a glint in Republicans’ eyes.
Vidal’s target was Paul Ryan’s idol, and the idol of so many modern conservatives: the trash novelist and crackpot philosopher Ayn Rand, whom Vidal quotes thusly:
“It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her.
“Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom… or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.
“To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.
“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral…”
In most quarters, in 1961, this stuff would have been regarded as nearly sociopathic nonsense, but, as Vidal noted, Rand was already gaining adherents: “She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who hate the ‘welfare state,’ who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts.”
Because he was writing at a time when there was still such a thing as right-wing guilt, Vidal couldn’t possibly have foreseen what would happen: Ayn Rand became the guiding spirit of the governing party of the United States. Her values are the values of that party. Vidal couldn’t have foreseen it because he still saw Christianity as a kind of ineluctable force in America, particularly among small-town conservatives, and because Rand’s “philosophy” couldn’t have been more anti-Christian. But, then, Vidal couldn’t have thought so many Christians would abandon Jesus’ teachings so quickly for Rand’s. Hearts hardened.
The transformation and corruption of America’s moral values didn’t happen in the shadows. It happened in plain sight. The Republican Party has been the party of selfishness and the party of punishment for decades now, trashing the basic precepts not only of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also of humanity generally.
Vidal again: “That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea that has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race.” It is, one could argue, what makes us human. The opposing idea, Rand’s idea, that the less fortunate should be left to suffer, is what endangers our humanity now. I have previously written in this space how conservatism dismantled the concept of truth so it could fill the void with untruth. I called it an epistemological revolution. But conservatism also has dismantled traditional morality so it could fill that void. I call that a moral revolution.
To identify what’s wrong with conservatism and Republicanism — and now with so much of America as we are about to enter the Trump era — you don’t need high-blown theories or deep sociological analysis or surveys. The answer is as simple as it is sad: There is no kindness in them.
That the draining of kindness from huge swaths of the country occurred with so little resistance is, in large measure, the fault of the media. The media have long prided themselves on being value neutral. It was Dragnet journalism: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Or: “We report, you decide” — a slogan coopted by the right-wing Fox News, ironically to underscore that they weren’t biased, at least not liberally biased.
Of course, not even the most scrupulous journalists were ever really value neutral. Underneath their ostensible objectivity there was a value default — an unstated moral consensus, which is the one Vidal cited and the one to which most Americans subscribed throughout most of our history. But it took a lot to activate those values in the press. The mainstream white media moved ever so slowly to report on the evils of segregation. Yet when they finally did, they didn’t behave as if African-Americans marching for their rights and Sheriff Bull Connor siccing dogs on them were moral equals. Value neutrality had its limits. The reporting of the movement was one of journalism’s proudest moments, and you can read about it in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. It is a story worth telling and remembering in these frightening days — a story that shows how the press can serve us.
However long it took for them to grow a conscience, those journalists who covered the civil rights movement didn’t think they were violating their professional code of objectivity by exposing the heinous conduct of the Southern authorities, because they knew what they were upholding wasn’t subject to debate. The morality was stark. (I have a suspicion from the way the Black Lives Matter movement is covered that it wouldn’t be so stark today.)
Taking sides against the KKK and redneck sheriffs, however, was one thing, as was taking sides against lunatic fringe right-wingers like the John Birch Society who hated government. But what happens when those extremists who advocate a bizarre morality that elevates selfishness and deplores altruism commandeer one of our two major political parties? What do you do then?
We know the answer. You do nothing.
The media sat by idly while American values were transmogrified. Even the so-called “good” conservatives — David Brooks, David Frum, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, et al. — refused to speak the language of kindness, preferring the language of free markets. As far right conservatives took over the Republican Party — the very same conservatives who just a few years earlier were considered crazies — the media dared not question Republican opposition to anything that assisted the disempowered and dispossessed, which is how a value-neutral media wound up serving the cause of conservatism and Republicanism and how the moral consensus was allowed to be turned upside down.
Read those Ayn Rand quotes to your children as moral instruction, and you will see how far we have fallen. This is Republican morality. This is Trump morality. And the media, loath to defend traditional American values in an increasingly hostile conservative environment, let it happen. That is what value neutrality will get you.
Of course I realize there are those who believe a value-neutral press is actually a bulwark against excess, in part because they have seen the alternative. Right-wing and even left-wing media have their own values, and they have no qualms about disregarding fact or truth in pursuing their agendas. Seen this way, values don’t inform journalism; they distort it. Moreover, skeptics will say that everyone has his/her own values and that a journalism that pretends otherwise threatens to create informational and even moral chaos. As my late father, an accountant, used to say, “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.” Do we really want to trust the media to figure?
It is true that we don’t all share the exact same values, though in the past I think our fundamental values were pretty close to one another’s. But even if values differ, all values are not created equal. Some are better than others. Most of us do know what is right. Most of us do know that we have moral obligations to others. Most of us understand kindness. It is just that we have been encouraged to forget it. That was Ayn Rand’s mission. Trump is proof of how well she and her acolytes, like Paul Ryan, succeeded.
This election turned on many things, but one that both the public and the press have been hesitant to acknowledge is the election as a moral referendum: the old morality against the new Randian one Republicans had advanced for years and Trump fully legitimized. There is no kindness in him. We prefer the idea that Trump voters were economic casualties, that they were frustrated with the system, that they felt marginalized and misunderstood. It lets us avoid seeming condescending.
Perhaps. But I think it behooves us to recognize that many of those voters bristled under the old morality and turned to Trump because he removed the guilt Vidal had cited when we tried to harden our hearts. Shame helped keep the old morality in force. Trump made shamelessness acceptable. We are reaping that whirlwind every day.
I don’t know whether a great society can survive without kindness. Unfortunately, we shall have a chance to see. In the meantime, those of us who believe in traditional morality must mount what I would call a “kindness offensive.” We must redouble our kindness in our daily lives, fight for it, promote it and eventually build a political movement around it.
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth,” Tolstoy said. Going forward, that could be the basis for a politics. And we must press our media to understand that they can only restore the values they once took for granted by doing what the best of them did during the civil rights era: observe events through a moral lens. Appealing to our worst selves is usually a winning strategy, as it was for Trump. The media must remind us of what it means to be our best selves. This should be their new mission: a media in opposition. It should be unrelenting, regardless of the right-wing blowback.
America is in moral crisis. Many Americans seem far more interested in making sure that those they consider undeserving — basically, the poor — get nothing than in making sure that they themselves get something. A friend recently told me a joke told him by a Hungarian acquaintance, who intended it as an example of Hungarian schadenfreude, but I have modified it because I think it is a harrowing parable for contemporary America and its strange moral turnabout. This is Trump’s America:
There were three farmers: a German, a Hungarian and an American. Each had a cow. One day, misfortune befell them, and their cows died. Each remonstrated against God, saying God had failed him, and each lost faith. God realized he had to do something to make amends. So he came to Earth and approached the German.
“What can I do to restore your faith?” He asked. And the German answered, “God, I lost my cow. Please give me another cow.” And God did so.
“What can I do to restore your faith?” He asked the Hungarian. And the Hungarian answered, “God, I lost my cow. Please give me that cow and another to compensate.” And God did so.
And finally God came to the American, and He asked, “What can I do to restore your faith?” And the American answered, “God, I lost my cow. Shoot my neighbor’s cow.”
Republicans brought us here with the assistance of a passive media. Whether we can bring ourselves back is the new existential question. Until then, we are shooting our neighbor’s cow.
Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.
On the stump, Donald Trump’s repeated vow to hire “only the best people” was important. It wasn’t just his typical self-flattery, it was meant to blunt concerns about the fact that he was a political neophyte whose knowledge of government made you think that he'd been one of those kids who hadn’t paid attention when Schoolhouse Rock interrupted the cartoons.
We tend to focus on the crackpots and half-baked ideologues he's surrounded himself since taking office with not only because “personnel is policy” – and because presidential appointments don’t make big headlines -- but also because competence and some knowledge should have value regardless of one’s ideology. And because the next normal president is going to have to deal with a bunch of white nationalist crackpots embedded across the government. Rooting them out is going to have to be high on the agenda – perhaps the first thing after completing that epic global apology tour.
Anyway, you’ve probably seen this viral video of Matthew Petersen, Trump’s pick for a lifetime appointment on the crucially important DC Court of appeals, being humiliated by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who had the audacity to ask him some basic questions about judicial procedure that any first-year law student could answer.
In 2008, Matthew Petersen was hand-picked to serve on the Federal Elections Commission by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell because he doesn’t believe that campaign finance limits are legitimate. He has since formed a voting bloc with the other Republican appointees that has effectively neutered the watchdog agency and helped create the Wild West world of campaign cash we live with today.
And he represents a trend. We’ve mentioned previously that Donald Trump has nominated twice as many judicial candidates who were rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association (ABA) as the past four previous presidents combined.
If you’re a Republican lawmaker, you might follow Sen. Kennedy’s lead and demand that the White House send over less embarrassing nominees. Or you might attack the American Bar Association, claiming that it, like all those other supposedly neutral sources of knowledge, is hopelessly biased against conservatives. Those are the choices, and last month, Slate reported that “it now appears that at least one GOP senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, is drawing a line in the sand over Trump’s most egregious picks.”
Since 1953, the venerable legal organization has played a critical, behind-the-scenes role in assessing judicial nominees and their fitness to serve on the bench.
But with the ABA emerging as a major stumbling block in President Donald Trump’s effort to transform the courts, the GOP is accusing the nonpartisan group of holding a liberal slant and is seeking to sideline it.
When in doubt, shoot the referee…
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Getting anti-terror policy right is tough enough for serious professionals. This week, Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie and Nathan McDermott profiled a guy named Frank Wuco for CNN. Wuco is a senior official with an important job: he’s the White House Advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, and he leads "a team tasked with helping to enforce President Donald Trump's executive orders, including the administration's travel ban.”
He’s also a nutjob.
According to the report, Wuco “previously promoted conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama's birthplace, lamented the ‘Zimbabwe-fication of America,’ and mocked the LGBT community.”
A retired naval intelligence officer, Wuco’s previous job was hosting a right-wing radio show out of Florida. As such, he has “dressed up as a jihadist character named Fuad Wasul in videos to teach others about the dangers of Islam,” “said that gay people had hijacked the word ‘gay’ from happy people” and said Barack Obama wasn't black enough to be called the first black president.
Now his job is to implement Trump’s totally-not-targeted-at-Muslims travel ban and otherwise try to keep us safe.
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Meanwhile, Trump’s State Department is in chaos. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sidelined most of the agency’s career foreign service professionals, and surrounded himself “with an insular circle of political aides who are new to the State Department,” according to The Washington Post. There have been dozens of resignations – and a number of senior positions remain unfilled -- and morale at Foggy Bottom is at an all-time low.
And what all this means is that those positions that that have a warm body occupying them have an outsized influence on policy formation.
Meet Andrew Peek, Trump’s choice for “a key position managing policy on Iran and Iraq, a move that will replace two civil servants with a political appointee.” Peek’s a former GOP staffer and captain in the US Army Reserve who lists his current profession as a columnist and political commentator and, according to Foreign Policy, “has no prior diplomatic experience and has not earned a reputation as an established expert on Iran or Iraq.”
Peek’s primary qualification appears to be that he’s a belligerent Iran hawk. As FP’s Robbie Gramar and Dan DeLuce write, “since Trump entered office, White House officials have privately expressed frustration with the career foreign service officers handling Iran policy in the State Department. In deliberations over the Iran nuclear deal, some officials on the National Security Council have clashed with their counterparts, arguing for a more aggressive stance toward Tehran and for laying out options to abandon the nuclear accord.” So Peek's going over to State to make sure that they pursue a Breitbartian approach to Iran.
The nice thing about his appointment, from the White House’s perspective, is that deputy assistant secretaries don’t require Senate confirmation, so there won’t be an embarrassing Youtube video of this guy struggling to cite basic facts about the Middle East.
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The EPA is another agency that’s being run into the ground under climate change-denying wingnut Scott Pruitt. This week, CNBC reported that the EPA's Office of the Inspector General “will examine whether the head of the Environmental Protection Agency misused taxpayer money” by spending $25,000 on “a soundproof booth for making private phone calls from his office.”
When news of Pruitt's renovations first broke, of course everyone referenced this…
And maybe the bad publicity which followed explains another report this week. According to Mother Jones’s Rebecca Leber, Andy Kroll and Russ Choma, the EPA is “using taxpayer dollars” to pay “a cutting-edge Republican PR firm that specializes in digging up opposition research to help Administrator Scott Pruitt’s office track and shape press coverage of the agency.”
According to federal contracting records, earlier this month Pruitt’s office inked a no-bid $120,000 contract with Definers Corp., a Virginia-based public relations firm founded by Matt Rhoades, who managed Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign…
The company… specializes in using the press and social media to “validate your narrative.” According to the company’s website, one of the tools to help do this is its “Definers Console” media-tracking technology. Reed said his firm contracted with Pruitt’s office at the EPA, which is the first governmental client to pay for the Definers Console. The technology promises “war room”-style media monitoring, analysis, and advice, according to marketing materials.
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Finally, imagine being a scientist working at Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You’re a grown-up, you spent years obtaining a degree, and now you get a list of words that you’re not supposed to use in your official capacity.
The Washington Post reported this week that “the Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation's top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including ‘fetus’ and ‘transgender’ — in any official documents being prepared for next year's budget.”
The other forbidden words are "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "evidence-based" and "science-based." Because you wouldn’t want a scientific agency to pursue science- or evidence-based policies – that’s no way to Make America Great Again.
When President Trump slurred his words during a news conference this week, some Trump watchers speculated that he was having a stroke. ... otolaryngologist told me. Ultimately, he reassured me that I should just do what I think is right. Which is warn the president that he needs to be evaluated for a brain disease. FordVox, M.D., is a medical ...
It’s the holiday season, which means plenty of opportunities for uncomfortable interactions with friends and family who are truth deniers. For example, my close friend invited me to her holiday party recently, where I sat across the table from her brother Mike. We got to talking about Donald Trump’s recently-successful efforts to ban people from many majority-Muslim countries from entering the US and his retweeting of anti-Muslim videos.
Mike strongly supported Trump’s ban and rhetoric, and other anti-Muslim policies. By the end of that meal, he grew to be much more tolerant and inclusive of Muslims. To get him to update his beliefs – something I do regularly during interviews with conservative talk show hosts – I relied on my research on how to get people to accept the facts, specifically a strategy that can be summarized under the acronym EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive Reinforcement).
The typical response to truth deniers of presenting facts and arguing is generally not effective in changing people’s minds on charged issues. Research on the confirmation bias shows that people tend to look for and interpret information in ways that conforms to their beliefs. Moreover, studies on the backfire effect reveal that when people are presented with facts that challenge their identity, they sometimes develop a stronger attachment to their incorrect belief as a defense mechanism.
If someone denies clear facts, you can safely assume that it’s their emotions that are leading them away from reality. You need to deploy the skill of empathy, meaning understanding other people’s emotions, to determine what emotional blocks might cause them to deny reality. In Mike’s case, it was relatively easy to figure out the emotions at play by making a guess based on what research shows about what conservatives value: security. I confirmed my suspicion through active listening and using curiosity to question Mike about his concerns about Muslims, and he shared extensively his fears about all Muslims being potential terrorists.
Next, establish shared goals for both of you, crucial for effective knowledge sharing. With Mike, I talked about how we both want security for our society. I also pointed out how sometimes our emotions lead us astray. We might want to eat all the Yule log on the table, but it would harm our health, so we should focus on our goals over our gut intuitions. We should also commit to the facts, as we want to avoid deceiving ourselves and thus undermining our safety and security. I told him that I - along with thousands of others - committed to the Pro-Truth Pledge and asked him to hold me accountable. He appreciated me sharing about this commitment, and it raised my credibility in his eyes.
Third, build rapport. Using the empathetic listening you did previously, a vital skill in promoting trusting relationships, echo their emotions and show you understand how they feel. In the case of Mike, I echoed his fear and validated his emotions, telling him it’s natural to feel afraid when we see Muslims committing terrorism, and it’s where my gut goes as well.
Fourth, move on to sharing information. Here is where you can give the facts that you held back in the beginning. There were eight terrorist acts in the US motivated in part by Islamic beliefs in 2016, with nine terrorists in total. Given that there are about 1.8 million Muslim adults in the US, you have a one-in-200,000 chance that any Muslim you see would commit a terrorist act in one year. That's like picking out a terrorist randomly from the number of people in several football stadiums, and focusing our efforts on surveilling Muslims will make us less secure by causing us to miss the actual terrorists.
Moreover, the FBI praises Muslims for reporting threats, and anti-Muslim policies will make Muslims less likely to report threats. Besides, we already see Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoricused to recruit terrorists in the US, and more anti-Muslim policies will only result in more materials to recruit terrorists. The key here is to show your conversation partner, without arousing a defensive or aggressive response, how their current truth denialism will lead to them undermining the shared goals we established earlier.
Mike was surprised and moved by this information, presented in an emotionally-sensitive manner. He agreed that anti-Muslim policies seem unwise, and we should be more tolerant and inclusive for the sake of increasing our security, even if that’s not how we intuitively feel. I offered positive reinforcement for his orientation toward the facts, a research-based tacticof encouraging people to change their identity.
Think of how much better your holiday dinner could go if you use EGRIP instead of arguing!
He will have made of a great nation a small and irrelevant thing. And “Make America Great Again” will take on the tone befitting a Greek tragedy.
But, critically, it should also send a message to Democrats. For years, black Democrats have 