Opinion

And now, with the inevitable, but quickened, collapse of Afghanistan, comes the blame game and the need to use national embarrassment for political gain.

Call it mistaken national pride or a constant need for a fall guy, Americans always seem to need to personify their collective distaste, particularly if the messages along the way never fully matched the reality.

Nearly two full decades of lies and wishful thinking from U.S. generals, politicians, liberal interventionists and neoconservative talking heads came into full view Sunday as the Taliban in Afghanistan surrounded Kabul while American military forces and diplomatic personnel rapidly evacuated the U.S. embassy and the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani negotiated a surrender and transition government with opposition forces.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Andrew Cuomo is out as governor of New York. Reeling from allegations in a 165-page report by New York Attorney General Leticia James that he sexually harassed 11 women and assaulted at least one, most of whom worked under him in state government, and facing impeachment proceedings, Cuomo announced last Monday that he will resign on Aug. 24.

Cuomo faces charges that he groped and engaged in unwanted touching of several women, made inappropriate and suggestive comments and created a hostile work environment for women who worked for him. One of the women, Brittany Commisso, his former executive assistant, filed a criminal complaint accusing Cuomo of groping and rubbing her butt and slipping his hand inside her blouse and bra and grabbing her breast. The charge filed by Commisso is the most serious allegation against Cuomo. Four district attorneys from jurisdictions in Manhattan, Albany, Westchester, and Nassau counties have announced that they are reviewing the evidence presented in the attorney general's report.

Donald Trump, who never met a fact or figure he didn't want to distort, desperately wanted to prevent the Census Bureau from getting an accurate count of the people living in America. So his administration pursued "policies that suppress the count among hard-to-count communities — including immigrants, people of color, low-income individuals, and those in rural areas — and effectively disenfranchise them," according to a 2020 report by Vox and the Center for Public Integrity. The Trump administration implemented strategies that were cooked up by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, due to their advocacy for immigration policies aimed quite overtly at preserving white supremacy in the U.S.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

When I was young my favorite writers were Ernest Hemmingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and my favorite Thompson novel was his 1971 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Which is why a caller last year who started on a rant about "adrenochrome" caused me to both cut him off the air and go back to my copy of the novel to see if my memory was right.

Sure enough, there it was. Thompson was bemoaning running out of hashish and being almost out of opium when his "fat Samoan" sidekick offered an alternative:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, on the final day of his "cyber symposium," remained unable to produce any tangible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. He attempted to deflect blame for his failed event onto supposed antifa activists — or, actually, "antifa things" — who were nowhere to be seen in this Great Plains city of 177,000 residents.

The pillow tycoon, alongside self-proclaimed "information warfare" specialist Col. Phil Waldron, took to the main stage early Thursday to decry the invisible opposition force he claims has hijacked this event, which he has promised for months would offer "absolute proof" that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

It's easy to dismiss Trump supporters as largely uneducated, and uninformed — stupid people swept up in a cult of hate that plays upon the biases rampant in American culture.

It is true that Trumpism is a cult of hate, and it's true that it emboldens bigotry and white grievance.

A year and a half into a once-in-a-century mass death event, we are still held captive by a deadly pandemic and a scourge of endemic political corruption that enabled Andrew Cuomo to remain in power far too long. Until the New York governor finally saw the writing on the wall and announced his resignation this week, he shamelessly attacked the very same attorney general who, just months earlier, he asked to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

As the world now knows, independent investigators charged with conducting the probe on behalf of Attorney General Letitia James concluded that from 2013 through 2020 Cuomo "sexually harassed multiple women" and violated state and federal law in a spree of "inappropriate groping, kissing, and hugging" while creating "a hostile work environment rife with fear and intimidation."

I want to pick on a point I made Friday. I said Republicans legislators at the state level are codifying into law a draft letter written by a former US Department of Justice official in the remaining weeks of Donald Trump's one and only term. That draft letter, according to the Post's Philip Bump, was "a road map to overthrowing the will of voters." It explained in granular detail how state Republican officials could have pulled off a coup.

This quiet coup attempt failed mere days before the loud coup attempt failed. The sacking and looting of the United States Capitol on January 6 was a last-ditch effort by an outgoing president desperate to hold on to power but exhausted of choices. Nullification of the democratic will would have been preferable, because it would not have drawn so much attention. When that failed, the former president had to risk exposing his true intentions with his last remaining option, a violent revolt.

The months leading up to Nov. 3, 2020, were for Donald Trump almost a carbon copy of what he had done going into the presidential election four years previously: He thumbed tweets, whined at his rallies and complained to anyone who would listen that the election had been "rigged" by Democrats. Of course, after election eve in 2016, we never heard another peep out of him about the dastardly Democrats and the wily ways they had rigged the election against him, because he won.

This article was originally published at Salon

Sane America has had enough.

After almost two years of a horrific pandemic that's killed almost 620,000 Americans — with nearly 20,000 of them from Michigan — and deadly, faster-spreading variants emerging because selfish and ignorant people refuse to get vaccinated — those of us who have tried to do everything right have no more f–ks left to give.

More than 615,000 Americans have died during this life-changing pandemic. In recent weeks, the delta variant of the coronavirus has led to a dramatic increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Even with the widespread availability of vaccines, we have not been smart enough, determined enough or strong enough to finally defeat this public emergency. If we could successfully put a man on the moon 50 years ago, surely we can figure out how to eradicate this virus. But we have not.

The first vaccine was rolled out last December. Two more were available soon thereafter. Yet just 50% of all Americans are fully vaccinated as of now. This fact is both alarming and tragic. It is alarming because Americans do not seem to understand the importance of immunization in defeating the coronavirus. It is tragic because this painful and sorrowful pandemic will not be stamped out soon at this rate.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) was ridiculed Tuesday evening after a random tweet saying the book 1984 is becoming America.

The first important bit of information for Cawthorn to know is that all novels are fiction. The second point is that it is obvious Cawthorn has never read the book. The George Orwell dystopian future details the consequences of totalitarianism, state surveillance and dictatorial regimes from repressive leaders. Orwell was a democratic socialist and was writing his book as a critique on Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany after the war had ended.