Category: Rhetoric

A “growing crisis of ethics and integrity”

Regular readers won’t be surprised when I say I can get behind this:

If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no long grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom. This is the life of non-democratic societies…

A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not, and begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness and demand our pursuit of America’s future be fact-based––not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises––but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are, and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges

…and I don’t even mind a bit that it was a former Trump cabinet secretary who said it; thank you, Rex Tillerson!  (Wonder if someone will think to read this to the president, who wished Tillerson nothing but success in all his future endeavors…)

Holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness…hmmm, I like the sound of that.  It’s crazy enough that it just might work!

 

Donald the Dog Whistler

It’s not the fact that there are throwbacks like the people who marched in support of a Robert E. Lee statue in a park in Charlottesville, Virginia, yesterday that surprises me.  Saddens me, yes, but doesn’t surprise.  The only part about all that happened yesterday that did surprise was the response to it all from the president of the United States: I don’t know if he was excrutiatingly selective about his words, or just tone deaf, but he couldn’t find the words, or even the Tweets, to condemn white supremacists.

He didn’t/wouldn’t take sides in a fight over basic human rights, or even pretend to take sides and be seen as part of the mainstream.

What he did do yesterday was dog-whistle a message to some of his supporters, the people who knew he was an ignorant, truth-impaired, narcissistic megalomaniac with the attention span of a two year old but voted for him anyway, because when he promised to “make America great again” they heard “take our country back.”  If we didn’t realize a long time ago what that means to those people, we know now:

The turmoil in Charlottesville began with a march Friday night by white nationalists on the campus of the University of Virginia and escalated Saturday morning as demonstrators from both sides gathered in and around the park. Waving Confederate flags, chanting Nazi-era slogans, wearing helmets and carrying shields, the white nationalists converged on the Lee statue inside the park and began chanting phrases like “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

(snip)

“We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump” to “take our country back,” said Mr. [David] Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the white nationalist protesters carried campaign signs for Mr. Trump.

The White House is trying to cover his ass about it today, but what the president said yesterday—when it happened; when it mattered—was “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence.  On many sides; on many sides.”

Meaning what, exactly?

Yesterday in Slate, Josh Levin had a great answer to that question:

He then said those three words again—“On many sides”—as if to emphasize that this throwaway phrase was in fact the only bit of his short speech that he truly believed in. He did not talk about white supremacy, and he did not note the prevalence of racist chants. The troubles in Charlottesville, the president said, were everyone’s fault. Or, to put it another way, nobody in particular was more responsible than anyone else for what happened in Virginia this weekend. Not the president. Not the party that enabled him. Not even those who idolize Adolf Hitler.

Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacist violence, coming on the heels of his silence in the aftermath of last week’s mosque bombing in Minnesota, is just the latest affirmation of his fundamental immorality. The president’s racist, anti-Semitic, Muslim-hating acolytes heard the words Trump didn’t say on Saturday. They know they have an ally in the White House, a man who will abet anyone who abets his own hold on power.

Don’t think that it’s only the liberal mainstream media that thinks Trump is favoring the white supremacists—the white supremacists noticed, and cheered, the fact that he did not attack them and their ideology!

Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us.

He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate… on both sides!

So he implied the antifa are haters.

There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all.

He said he loves us all.

Also refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him.

No condemnation at all.

When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room.

Really, really good.

God bless him.

He’s had another 24 hours to think about it, to articulate his beliefs, to try to make clear to people how he feels on the subject.  As of post time, he has not.  [UPDATE 8/14: Here‘s what he had to say today; it does not seem to me that his heart was in it.] [ANOTHER UPDATE 8/15: Never mind, he took it back.]

Josh Levin:

On a day that called for the president to take a stand, he instead made a perverse call for unity. “I love the people of our country,” Trump said at the end of his Bedminster Address. “I love all of the people of our country. We’re going to make America great again. But we’re going to make it great for all of the people of the United States of America.”

The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville heard that call, and so did the posters on the Daily Stormer. “On many sides,” Trump said. These are not anodyne words. They are dangerous ones. On Saturday, the president had the chance to tell the nation what it is he does and doesn’t believe in. That’s exactly what he did.

You could also check out this fine Twitter thread from yesterday, if you want to have a think about the gist of the protest from the white supremacists:

"I have a dream"

This was my post in August 2013 on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, including a YouTube clip of the entire speech; I repost it to honor the holiday is his memory and to remind us of his call to a virtuous future…I think some of us could use the reminder about now.

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took the podium at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; it is still one of the most profound and moving speeches in the history of American rhetoric, on top of what it meant to the civil rights movement.  King did not dream that his children would one day be able to watch the speech on their desktop computer or smartphone, but they can, and so can we.

The whole thing is remarkable, including the peek you get at what a slice of America looked like in the early 1960s; go to the 12:00 mark to catch the dreams, and then on through to the end for the ad-libbed “let freedom ring”s and the promise of ultimate freedom which still stir my emotions.

“…let freedom ring.  And when this happens…and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Out of the coverage leading up to this week’s anniversary I’ve pulled a couple of gems: from Brian Naylor at NPR, a look at the little segregated southern town that was Washington, D.C. 50 years ago; and from Robert G. Kaiser in The Washington Post, a reporter’s remembrance of the event he covered 50 years earlier, with a quite remarkable admission—that the local paper blew it when it all but overlooked King’s speech in its coverage of the march!

Dear Jon Stewart,

Thank you…you and the little army of writers and television gypsies that came together for good, at a time when your country, and I, needed you.  When we were lost, trying to rescue truth from the clutches of the radical political conservatives, and the evangelical Christian extremists, and the political organizations they controlled, you went to the front of the column and screamed, “Seriously?”

Journalism was little help in those dark times.  The major outlets were swampedjon_stewart3 by calls that blamed the “liberal media” for always taking sides against good honest conservatives, so they fell back to reporting controversial stories as little more than “he said/she said” exchanges and refused to identify blatant falsity as such.  They were outmaneuvered by the opposition; they were (and are) cowards, willing victims to what David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times beautifully referred to as “the four horsemen of the journalistic apocalypse: superficiality, sensationalism, preoccupation with celebrity, and obsession with the bottom line.”  So it was left to comedy, satire, to ride to our rescue.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think. – H. L. Mencken

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. – Robert A. Heinlein

It didn’t help that the barbarians at the gate, intent on replacing the tolerant democratic civil society we were aspiring to with a theocracy of their own religious beliefs, decided to unlevel the playing field and refuse to acknowledge any truths that didn’t support their worldview.  The “reality-based community” stood dumbfounded, scrambling for the proper reply to “No, the sky is not blue, and you can’t prove that it is.”  But you found a way.

You like to say that you were just a comedian; true enough, but on The Daily Show you were more than just jokes.  You aimed a most potent weapon—sunshine; the light of day; their own words; common sense—at people who were full of shit and assured us all that the smell was coming from somewhere else.  They deserved what they got from you, and we got to laugh.  And in the process—in pointing out that the emperor indeed did not have on any clothes, that what politicians said quite often was at odds with demonstrable truth, that the 24-hour news channels weren’t worth the paper they were printed on—you reassured a lot of us that there was still hope.  For that, thank you.

Fact is, you did a great job of it just this week and I grabbed the link.  So for old time’s sake, just once more, let me suggest—click the pic, ya maroons.

image

Conductor’s call for boarding: next train to crazytown

The bad news is, more candidates are announcing for the 2016 presidential race in both major parties, which makes it harder and harder from day to day to ignore the pointless noise.  The good news is…OK, there isn’t any good news there.  But I did find a few reminders of the deplorable state of relations between our current president and the radical conservative opposition that we should keep in mind when we get serious about the next election…sometime next year, I hope.

Barack Obama is in the fourth quarter of his presidency but the tone of the attacks against him is as detached from reality as ever: remember, the conservative extremists proudly announced on inauguration day 2009 that their goal in life was to deny him any victories, just because he’s him.  Give them credit for perseverance, I suppose, even as we roll our eyes at their performance.

When the president announced an immigration plan late last year the conservative reaction that he was acting outside his authority thundered down as if an enormous dog whistle had ordered the uttering of talking points.  Never mind that the scripted response was, shall we say charitably, inaccurate; former solicitor general Walter Dellinger wrote in Slate:

Even though the action is breathtaking in scope, there is nothing legally remarkable about what the administration is doing, or the legal analysis supporting it. The announced “deferred action” provides temporary administrative relief from deportation for aliens who are the parents of citizens, or the parents of lawful permanent residents. “Deferred action” is an exercise of discretion in which officials may temporarily defer the removal of an alien. The grant of deferred action in this case will remain in place for three years, is subject to renewal, and can be terminated at any time at the discretion of the Department of Homeland Security. As Eric Posner, who served in the Office of Legal Counsel under the first President Bush, notes, the president “is just doing what countless Congresses have wanted him to do”—setting priorities for deportation enforcement.

That’s not even the most egregious example of the mindless opposition; how about, earlier this year, when Republicans in the Senate took it upon themselves to re-assure Iran—yes, Iran!—not to take the American president too seriously in nuclear arms negotiations.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of the attack on the president’s legitimacy was a letter signed by 47 Republican senators to the leadership of Iran saying Mr. Obama had no authority to conclude negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Try to imagine the outrage from Republicans if a similar group of Democrats had written to the Kremlin in 1986 telling Mikhail Gorbachev that President Ronald Reagan did not have the authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal at the Reykjavik summit meeting that winter.

There is no functional difference between that example and the Iran talks, except that the congressional Republican caucus does not like Mr. Obama and wants to deny him any policy victory.

It’d all be funny if it wasn’t so sad.  Wait, it is funny:

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Thanks, Doonesbury and GoComics.com