Logic, bias, dissembling, fake news

Why We Need a Loyal Opposition

| Rob Ehle

(In which I try to convince you Christians that a Democratic Congress would not be the worst thing for America)

Two years ago, conservatives began a grand experiment: electing a morally repugnant man in order to further a moral aim. To save unborn babies, evangelicals and many other conservatives voted for Donald Trump. Donald Trump has now given them their second Supreme Court judge, a man of dubious moral character himself, and the hope is now kindled that someday soon, abortion will be illegal again.

That abortion itself won’t ever become a thing of the past, or even become less common, doesn’t seem to have been factored in much. That more women will just be permanently injured or will die having unsafe abortions is either ignored, or it’s part of some kind of ethical calculus in which the extinction of Planned Parenthood is worth various other less savory results of a strong-man leader with both congress and the courts in his pocket. It’s worth thousands of (already born) children being ripped away from their parents and kept in cages (because their parents were doing more or less the same thing our great great grandparents did). It’s worth reporters being called the enemy of the people, and the assault of journalists being encouraged by the President of the United States. It’s worth the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, being ridiculed by the President days after a hurricane that left thousands homeless and three thousand dead. It is worth women who’ve been sexually assaulted being mocked (by the President, it goes without saying). It’s worth despots being praised, and democratic leaders and 60-year-old alliances abandoned. It’s worth white nationalist rallies, it’s worth Democratic leaders and liberals being mailed pipe bombs, and it’s worth massacres at synagogues. It’s worth a President responding that “there is blame on both sides,” and Anne Coulter and other conservatives theorizing about a liberal hoax.

I guess to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. I just didn’t expect conservatives, and Christians especially, to be ok with quite so many eggs. Increasingly, it turns out, traditional conservatives are not ok with it. George Will, a conservative columnist I have rarely agreed with on anything, has called for both houses of congress to be taken over by the Democrats. So has Max Boot, another conservative, who says the Republican party is now “a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe.” Trump has set the tone, the Republican House and Senate have followed along like sheep, and with the darkest demons of our natures loosed, now all over the country conservative newspapers are endorsing Democratic congressional candidates. The Arizona Republic has endorsed Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat, not because she’s liberal (she isn’t) but because she is the most likely candidate to be bipartisan. The Des Moines Register has backed a Democrat because the only alternative is an eight-term incumbent who’s shown himself to be an unrepentant racist and (luckily) a completely ineffective congressperson. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle—all conservative papers traditionally backing Republican candidates—have abandoned Ted Cruz and called for the election of Beto O’Rourke as the only politician who “seems interested in making deals or finding middle ground.”

There have been other periods in our history when one party’s had all the power, and it always drives the party out of power crazy, but I don’t know of another time when it was so horrible and hopeless. The Republicans who’d publicly despised Trump when he was a crackpot in the primaries, then who promised once he got the nomination to keep him in check if he became the President, have pretty much all bowed before him since he was elected. The only ones who take him to task are those who are retiring and don’t have to worry about being voted out of their jobs. There has never been a time it was more important to balance a government with a loyal opposition. Trump and the Republicans do not treat Democrats as if we are fellow citizens, but like we’re a foreign enemy. This is why it was so important to them to deny Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee even a hearing, let alone a vote on the Senate floor. It justified gerrymandered voting districts, and in the Democratic districts left over, suppressing the vote altogether. No holds barred, because it’s an existential, good vs. evil battle.

Which is, pardon me, fucked up. Sorry. Effed up.

I first learned the term “loyal opposition” in high school in Canada, with its parliamentary government, and no executive branch. This is the name for the party out of power, and they are so called because it’s important to remember that we may all be of different opinions and have differing ideas on what is best for the country, but we’re all on the same team. We are united in our love for our country and our fellow citizens. As soon as basic loyalty is questioned, we’ve taken a dark turn. The Republican Party and Donald Trump together have taken this turn. That’s why it’s so important that there are people in control of congress who really will keep Trump in some kind of check. Who will, among other things, hold him to account for his lies. Without them, Republicans will continue to only wag their fingers and shrug at his increasingly plutocratic and white nationalist agenda (what else do you call the abolition of birthright citizenship and suppression of the African American vote?) I don’t know how long it will take evangelicals especially to realize that the Republican party is not God’s ordained army. That concern for the health of the planet isn’t a secularist plot and that poverty and illiteracy and a huge gap between rich and poor are the signs not of a great nation but a dying one. There seems to be a remnant. Maybe there’s a little hope. A smidgen.

I’ve gone on long enough. I’d wanted to get this out a week ago. Go vote. Do the right thing. Join the smidgen.

Pedophiles and moral calculus

| Rob Ehle

Last night, Alabama did something I assumed was impossible, and turned their backs on an accused serial child molester. It’s a statement about where our country is at the moment that this was a surprise. There are three lessons I learn from this:

  • Republican cynicism isn’t infinite. While a solid majority of white Alabamians voted for Roy Moore (who in addition to his loathsome treatment of young girls, also said in September that the last time America had been great was “at a time when families were united, even though we had slavery”), just enough of them were sufficiently disgusted that they either stayed home or wrote in an alternate candidate. One or two even voted for the Democrat, Doug Jones.
  • White evangelicals are an aging and dwindling minority. They’re usually more motivated to get to the polls, but in basic numbers, there are more young people and African Americans and other people of color in the country, and once these people are motivated themselves, they will always win in a fair race.
  • Speaking of fair races, we learned last night that even without the safeguards of the Voting Rights Act, there’s only so much work voter suppression can do for Republicans. Whether it’s limiting the number of voting places in Democratic neighborhoods, placing regular voters on “inactive” lists, or any number of other tactics to stack the deck against Democrats, if there’s enough outrage, people will get their votes into the ballot boxes.

That Roy Moore was even on the ballot is a testimony to the terminal rot in the Republican party. I’ve read two prominent conservatives over the last week who have declared themselves politically homeless. (David Brooks, wistful for Reaganomics, says “The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.” Peter Wehner, who served under Reagan and both Bushes, just wrote a piece outlining why he could no longer call himself an evangelical Republican.)

It’s important to note that Donald Trump is no longer an aberration within the GOP. When the Republican National Committee decided to get behind Moore after the revelations that he was groping 14-year-old girls, they were basically saying that ethical behavior no longer had anything to do with the party’s ideals and goals. They’ll take all comers in order to hold their majority. Remember . . . this wasn’t the state organization. This was the national organization. No Republican can any longer say their party just has some bad apples. When the party accommodates repulsive characters like this, the party becomes the bad apple.

Evangelicals can no longer afford to think in terms of litmus tests. They have to start using their grown-up brains. If you go into the voting booth thinking abortion is different from every other issue and you must make certain compromises to hold that line, you are being majorly conned. And you’re in danger of betraying everything you think you stand for, including the sanctity of life.

You folks, you white evangelical folks, will not have the power in 30 years that you have today. You won’t have it in three years. You need to decide how you’re going to negotiate that. You need to start preparing your epitaph. Religious movements wax and wane, and whatever God has in store for the world, it’s not going to look like what you’re used to, because it never does. What I’m saying is, if you want the Lord to bless your country and its future, you’re just going to have to do a much better job than you have over the last year of using the plain common sense He gave you.

Get Uncomfortable

| Rob Ehle

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who called 9/11-responders “menaces of nature,” to speak at West Point

Now that I’ve written about things I learned from a Trump voter, I’d like to make a case for everyone getting out of their comfort zone the same way I got out of mine. Particularly, this means reading things you don’t agree with straight from the people saying them, and not quoted secondhand. Because if we’re not all doing this—liberals and conservatives, black and white—we’re just in our amen corners whipping ourselves into a frenzy at the same time we’re letting the country get weaker and more dysfunctional by the day.

The headline above is from Fox News. The kernel of the article is that West Point has invited a radical black man to address its cadets. The proof of just how radical he is is in the headline. That’s the sum total of the straight news. The rest is commentary. A general is quoted who expects the radical black man to get a respectful hearing in a way that conservative speakers have not been getting lately at liberal colleges and universities. No matter how cadets may disagree with the statement that the firefighters and cops on September 11 were “menaces of nature,” the general says, they will listen. And then respectfully disagree. This is probably true.

Now, I agree that college students are more unruly than military cadets, and a lot of them are dumber than a bag of hammers, but now for a little context . . .

Coates’ controversial statement about the responders comes from a book called Between the World and Me that he wrote in the form of a letter to his son. It won the National Book Award. I read it last year. The title is a line he pulls from James Baldwin, a great American 20th-century writer whom many white people have not read. (Raise your hand if you’ve even heard of him, some of you.) Baldwin had also published a letter to his nephew back in 1962. Coates and Baldwin are trying to prepare these two young people for being men in the world, and in particular, black men. Coates wrote his long letter soon after a good friend of his named Prince Jones was killed at his own front door by a police officer. Jones was black and had a car the same make as a suspect. That was why the officer shot and killed him. The cop was crooked but was exonerated. So Coates wrote this book, basically telling his son that as a black man he was going to always have to watch his back. He was justifiably angry. In the wake of the death of his friend—who was basically seen as nothing but a Young Black Man, and that seemed enough to shoot him—he wrote: “I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”

If cops saw no difference between bad black men and good black men, why should he see any difference between bad cops and good cops? Ok, disagree with him, but disagree in context. More context? The cop was black, too. It’s very complicated. You’ll find plenty to disagree with. But by the way, reading this blog still doesn’t give you the right to disagree or be horrified. Disagree with the source. Read the whole book. It’s 152 pages, you can finish it in an evening or two. Or read James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Even shorter, and it’s a classic. You may then disagree to your heart’s content, and that will be ok.

The thing is? The guy who wrote the Fox News piece almost surely didn’t read the book. Ten to one, he picked up the quote from a conservative column by David Brooks. So if you only read the Fox News story, you are reading Coates not secondhand, but thirdhand. This is how wars gets started, folks. People hearing what they want to hear from people they agree with already, and getting mad as hell.

I write this in the same week the white President of the United States has, citing no evidence whatsoever, accused the black former President of the United States of tapping his phone, after accusing him for years of not being a US citizen. On, apparently, the evidence of his funny name. (Surely not the color of his skin?)

The next time the thought enters your head that some African Americans are way too touchy and need to move on, remember this.

The Week in Trump

| Rob Ehle

Alternative Facts

  • The new president gets in another snit about size, claiming his inauguration day crowd was the largest ever. It was not. Presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway suggests Sean Spicer’s repetition of the claim is an “alternative fact,” immediately sending the George Orwell novel, 1984, rocketing to the top of the best seller lists (actual, not alternative, fact).
  • Trump claims he lost the popular vote due to 2-3 million illegal votes. He did not.

War Against the Media

The Ramparts Go Up

  • Refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries in the Middle East are out of luck.
  • Immigrants from Saudi Arabia (home of the 9/11 terrorists) and other countries in which Trump has business interests not included in ban.
  • On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump says Christian refugees will be given priority.
  • Article from (conservative) Cato Institute puts chances of an American being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist at 1/3,609,709.

Trump Still Won’t Release Tax Returns