Political Commentary
The Silliest Criticism Ever
Over the last quarter of a century, there have been countless allegations and criticisms hurled at Hillary Clinton. Some of them have had merit. Others have been silly. Not a small number have been outlandish. (“She murdered Vince Foster,” for example.)
But by far the most ridiculous criticism ever leveled at Clinton is that she may, on occasion, have said some nasty things about the women who went to bed with her husband. This bit of foolishness is rearing its head again today, as Donald Trump apologists attempt to draw a parallel between his outrageously sexist and porcine statements, revealed this weekend, and how Bill Clinton has behaved with women over the years. Inevitably, Clinton supporters counter that Bill Clinton, unlike Trump, is not running for office, and that Hillary Clinton is not to blame for his behavior. And Trump’s remaining apologists counter, “Yes, but she degraded the women her husband preyed on.”
First, Bill Clinton didn’t prey on anybody, despite Republicans’ repeated insistence over the years that he somehow tricked or pressured impressionable young women into bed. He committed adultery with consenting adults who, like him, should have known better.
Second, and this is an important point, wouldn’t anybody whose spouse cheated have some negative things to say about the person or people he/she cheated with?
Seriously, if you find yourself criticizing Hillary Clinton for voicing a poor opinion of her husband’s mistresses, do yourself and everyone else a favor and just stop talking. You’re being ridiculous.
The Debates Won’t Make A Nickel’s Worth Of Difference
Don’t be expecting too much from tomorrow’s presidential debate, or any of the debates. We live in a time in which most people already have their minds made up and can’t be swayed by anything. If Donald Trump climbs up on the moderator table, drops his pants and defecates right there, his supporters will cheer.
The country is locked into two ideological camps. People are going to tune in tomorrow night largely to cheer for their side, much like a sports contest. They’ll boo if their candidate gets a tough question, in the same way sports fans boo every call against their own team. Most of the few who don’t tune in to cheer or boo will just be watching to see if a train wreck occurs.
Rah-rahs and gawkers. That’s the American electorate. We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Bernie Comes Through
I have been very critical of Bernie Sanders throughout this election season, but I’ll give it to him. He did everything I could have hoped for tonight. His full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton and his point-by-point recitation of how she will come through on issues dear to progressives were pitch perfect. Anybody on Team Sanders who doesn’t come around after this speech is simply unreachable.
Sanders was smart to acknowledge briefly his differences with Clinton; his supporters wouldn’t have bought it if he didn’t, and clearly, some didn’t buy it anyway, judging by some of the reactions from his supporters. But he spent far more time detailing the similarities. He did a very good job tonight. Now it will be up to him to follow through and keep making the case to the supporters he did so much to alienate from the party in the first place.
Don’t Take Ryan’s Pledge At Face Value
Much has been made of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s pledge that he will not accept the Republican presidential nomination if an open convention chooses him this July. We are expected to believe that this mere statement has definitively settled the issue and that there are no circumstances under which the Wisconsin Republican will be the party’s nominee.
Hogwash. Ryan’s statement settled nothing. In fact, his recent behavior — making a highly publicized speech and cutting a web video in which he went out of his way to be statesmanlike — indicates the opposite. These moves give every appearance of Ryan making himself available as an alternative. Even his protestations of disinterest are part of the silly dance expected of candidates.
History shows us that declarative statements are not binding. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt released an open letter in which he said that if he were a delegate to that year’s Democratic convention, he would vote to renominate his vice president, the ultra-liberal Henry Wallace. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Roosevelt was actively working with Wallace’s detractors to ensure the nod would go to Senator Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt as president when FDR died months later.
Politicians lie about their intentions all the time, so why should we automatically believe Ryan?
Oh, but we are told that this pledge is so ironclad that if he broke it, he’d be finished in politics.
Nonsense. There are all kinds of ways to wiggle out of a pledge. Imagine we’re going on the third or fourth ballot at a chaotic GOP convention, and Ryan says this:
“As I have repeatedly said, I did not want the nomination. But many leaders in our party who I respect greatly have told me that I am the only person who can unite our party and lead us to victory in the fall. I cannot in good conscience refuse this call, and so it is with great personal reluctance that I have decided to accept my party’s nomination for president of the United States.”
There. It almost sounds noble, doesn’t it?
Never take any politician at face value if he or she disclaims any interest whatsoever in being president. If the nomination is gift-wrapped and handed to Ryan on a platter, he’ll take it, just the same way he took the speakership he said he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in taking. Don’t be naive. Ryan’s past pledge meant nothing, so why is this one guaranteed to be for real?
Cleaning Up Other People’s Messes
I live in an apartment complex in a town of about 75,000 people, right across the street from San Francisco Bay. It’s a nice place to live, and the scenery is astonishingly beautiful.
We have two shared laundry units in the complex, and this morning, when I went down to move some laundry from the washers to the dryers, I saw that somebody had left a mess of powdered laundry detergent all over the floor.
My initial reaction was to get upset with whoever had been so irresponsible as to leave such a mess for someone else to clean up. Aren’t we all taught, at some point in our lives, that if you make a mess, you should clean it up yourself?
Then I turned my thoughts to more practical considerations. It was only 9:30, and the complex office doesn’t open until 11, so it wasn’t going to get cleaned up anytime soon. And sometimes, when I am moving the laundry from the washers to the dryers, I inadvertently drop an occasional item on the floor. I realized that the only way this situation was going to get any better, for me or for anyone using the laundry room for the next couple hours, was if I went back to my apartment, grabbed a broom and dustpan, and cleaned the mess up myself.
Was it fair, or right, that I had to clean up somebody else’s mess so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it? No. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right. But I realized I could either complain about somebody else shirking his or her responsibility, and still have the powder all over the floor, or I could clean it up myself. Those were the only options.
And then I thought about this situation as a metaphor for community and country, and I thought about all the homeless people I see on the streets of San Francisco five days a week when I commute to and from the city. No doubt many of these people are just unlucky, and no doubt many of them have issues they can’t cope with. And certainly, there must be some among them who are just too lazy to take care of themselves. No doubt, there are those among them who were shipped here from Nevada, where state budget decisions have led to a phenomenon called “Greyhound Therapy.” No, this doesn’t mean giving the mentally ill kindly service animals for their benefit. It refers to putting mental patients on a bus and shipping them off to San Francisco, where some might find help, but others inevitably end up on the streets. In the latter two cases, we have examples of people refusing to clean up their own messes.
And many of us see these people and see “lazy, irresponsible drunks/drug addicts,” and gripe about how they need to take responsibility for themselves. Maybe there are some who could or should. But in the meantime, while we complain, they continue to be in the streets, and this is bad for everybody—both for them and for the rest of us. While we bitch and moan about the “takers,” we also abdicate responsibility for our communities.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a better society, if we are willing to get past what’s “fair” or “right” and just see a problem and take steps to solve it.
And it doesn’t have to be partisan either. The state of Utah, dominated by the Republican Party for generations, has all but ended chronic homelessness by essentially giving housing to the chronically homeless, no questions asked. By so doing, the state has saved itself many of the myriad costs associated with homelessness.
Sometimes, the only way to improve your own life, your relationships, your community, your society, your country, is to recognize that being part of a community—part of being alive and connected to other human beings—means that sometimes you’re going to have to clean up other people’s messes. To do otherwise is to cut off your nose to spite your face.
So let’s all pick up that broom and get to work.
President Obama Should Nominate Elizabeth Warren
We know, of course, that the Republican majority in the United States Senate is not going to approve any candidate President Obama nominates to the Supreme Court. With the death of Antonin Scalia, the conservatives have lost their 5-4 majority on the court and whoever is chosen to replace him will tip the balance. The Republicans would far rather take their chances on the coming election and wait it out in the hopes that they’ll be able to appoint another conservative in January 2017.
Of course, Twitter is abuzz today with all of the potential “blue state” Republicans and halfway reasonable GOP Senators who might be persuaded to join Democrats in approving a nominee, but this is a fantasy. These theories all leave out the facts that there will never be enough aisle-crossers to break a filibuster (which would require any nominee to get 14 Republican votes, not four), or that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) does not even have to call a vote.
So clearly this isn’t going to happen. The next president and the next Senate will select Scalia’s replacement, period.
With this understanding, President Obama and the Democrats should be thinking about how to gain the maximum political benefit from Republican intransigence. And the way to do that is to nominate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) to fill the vacancy.
There is no question of Warren’s qualifications. The former Harvard Law professor has impeccable credentials, so Republicans could not claim she is unqualified. It would therefore become clear, if it wasn’t already, that they were blocking her for strictly political reasons, and this would diminish their standing with the few true swing voters.
But there are greater political benefits to be had. First, a Warren nomination would provide a jolt of energy to progressives who adore her, which could be crucial in terms of base turnout in the upcoming election. Secondly, nominating a fourth woman to the court would reiterate that Democrats are the party of equality.
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders could take this ball and run with it, hammering the Republicans for blocking an eminently qualified (progressive, female) nominee. Meanwhile, the president can also exploit this situation to hammer the Republicans every day.
There is no need to worry about who would replace Warren in the Senate because, as noted above, there is no chance in hell the Republicans will approve her (or anybody) between now and the next presidential inauguration. So if the Republicans want to play hardball, the Democrats have a great way to win the war by losing the battle.
Supreme Court Becomes Top Issue In Election
The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has added a major new dimension to the 2016 elections, as what was previously theoretical is now an undisputed fact: the next president of the United States, and the Senate sworn in the first week of January 2017, will determine whether the Supreme Court will have a liberal or conservative majority. Scalia’s death leaves the court with four liberals and four conservatives, so the next justice will become the swing vote.
Of course, it must be immediately understood that the current Republican-controlled Senate will not approve any appointee that President Barack Obama nominates. With Republicans holding a 54-46 majority, the president would have to get four Republican Senators to support his nominee, with Vice President Joe Biden breaking the tie. While there may be a slight possibility of getting four Republicans, there is no chance whatsoever that the president would get the 14 Republican Senators he would need to break a filibuster. It probably won’t even come to that. It is doubtful that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) would even allow a nomination to come to the floor.
It is not difficult to predict how this issue will play out over the course of the election. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) will angle for votes by promising to filibuster any candidate the president nominates for the remainder of his term. They will also use this opening to undermine Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump by telling conservatives that they can’t trust Trump to appoint a “true conservative” to fill Scalia’s vacated seat. All the other Republican candidates will also promise to appoint a “strict, constitutional conservative,” but Cruz and Rubio, the only Senators in the field, will have the advantage here, and they’ll milk it for all it’s worth.
The Democratic presidential contenders will both stress to their bases the opportunity inherent in this situation to change the composition of the court away from its longtime conservative majority. Hillary Clinton will hammer home to the Democratic base the idea that she is more electable than Bernie Sanders and that it is crucial to nominate the candidate with the best chance to win the election, in order to ensure a liberal majority on the court. Sanders will cast this as an opportunity to bring about revolutionary change and may well float the idea of appointing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) to the court.
President Obama will likely hammer the Republican Senate at every opportunity between now and the election for refusing to act on his nominee or nominees and leaving a Supreme Court seat vacant for a year or more for political reasons. All candidates of both parties will stress the need for their party to control the Senate in 2017. With Senate control up for grabs this year, this will be a key point of emphasis.
This election just got ratcheted up to Defcon 1.
A Time For Choosing
I stayed the night last night in an unfamiliar city in southern California, and needed to get some breakfast before embarking on an eight-hour drive home. As I knew nothing about the town, I didn’t know where I could find a good breakfast place, but there was a Denny’s right next to my hotel. It’s not the most spectacular food, but it is predictable and cheap, and when it comes to road food in an unfamiliar location, predictable-and-cheap is often preferable to the alternatives.
As I ordered—a shaved ham-and-egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheeses on sourdough and hashbrowns—the server asked if I’d like anything else, maybe a short stack of pancakes.
For a second, I was sorely tempted, and then it hit me that the question—which could be paraphrased as “Would you like 600 calories’ worth of pancakes, butter and syrup to go with the 1,100 calories of ham, egg, cheese, potatoes, bread and grease?”—was really a metaphor for the last 70 years of American politics: “You don’t have to choose one tasty meal or the other, hungry patron of mediocre breakfast food! You can have both!”
This is the same idea we Americans have been sold from the political menu since the end of World War II, and by and large, we have happily consumed it. “Guns OR butter? Who says you have to choose? You can have guns AND butter—and you can put that butter on that extra side of pancakes!”
In the heady postwar era, it really did seem like we Americans could have all we wanted and never have to concern ourselves with the consequences. While most of Europe and large swathes of Asia and Africa were devastated, America was the only major industrial power that was largely unscathed. America became the material colossus of the world, the leading supplier of goods. Factories worked in three shifts around the clock, and well-paid jobs were there to be had by anybody who grabbed a high school diploma one day and walked into the local factory the next.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and it is easy to look back and realize that it couldn’t last—that sooner or later the rest of the world would rebuild itself and compete with us, and that we would no longer be the only major seller of industrial and consumer goods, with inevitable consequences for the postwar U.S. economic boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s, with skyrocketing inflation and a growing dependence on cheap imports, made it plain to people such as President Jimmy Carter that the nation’s voracious consumerism needed to go on a diet. The late 1970s was an era of downsizing and increased efficiency—smaller, fuel-efficient cars, turning down the thermostat, installing solar panels. The gravy train was also over, certainly, in the political realm; we either had to raise taxes or cut services, or some combination thereof.
However, Ronald Reagan—who ironically rose to political prominence by delivering a speech, on behalf of the doomed 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, titled “A Time For Choosing”—came along in 1980 and essentially told us all that no, we did not have to make any hard choices. We could continue to have all the essential government services, and we could also institute massive tax cuts (largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans). He gave us a third option by which we could avoid both raising taxes and cutting services, and we eagerly took it: Put it all on the credit card. We’ll pay it off later. Reagan told us we could have both the tasty sandwich-and-hashbrowns meal, AND the pancakes, and we listened because it was what we wanted to hear.
The truth is that we do face hard choices as a society, and the longer we put those choices off, the higher the bill is going to be. In the same way that a person who makes no responsible choices at the table will eventually suffer health consequences, the longer we go on failing to choose as a society, the more it will hurt us in the end.
So our choice is this: do we continue to allow a small number of extremely wealthy people to continue to hoard vast sums of money, more than many of them could spend in dozens of lifetimes, while everybody else lives either in poverty or the realistic possibility of poverty? And let’s be honest, that’s exactly the situation we face. How many Americans today live a life of quiet desperation, knowing that if they lose a job or suffer a major illness, they go from financially comfortable to bankrupt, or even homeless, in a few short steps?
Do we continue to pay our bills as a country on a giant credit card, knowing that at some point, future generations will have to pay the bill? Hell, they’re already paying the bill. As colleges have raised tuition to meet growing costs, students have had to take on massive amounts of debt that were largely unheard of prior to the 1990s. They are then entering a job market in which there are very few jobs for them, in part because older workers, whose ability to draw secure pensions has been severely eroded, lack the financial security to retire. Those same older workers, faced with working into their 70s, are also faced with partially or fully supporting their adult children—as upwards of a third of all Americans between 18 and 31 now live with their parents. And their adult offspring, more and more, are faced with delaying their careers, thereby delaying their ability to save money, pay off their loans, buy homes, have children if they wish, and eventually retire. We are just now starting to see the consequences of our failure to choose.
Sooner or later, we Americans are going to have to understand that we have to choose the sandwich or the pancakes, and maybe eat only half of what we ultimately do choose. We have to unlearn the lie, which we have eagerly accepted, that we can have everything we want and that we never have to choose—that we can continue to spend trillions of dollars on a bloated military budget, and idiotic wars of choice like the war in Iraq, and that we can simultaneously continue to give tax breaks to bloated billionaires and corporations. Meanwhile our cities fill with the homeless and hungry; our bridges and roads crumble; we are losing an entire generation of Americans whose careers and paths to financial security appear hopelessly blocked; and our educational system continues to collapse, in part because of continued political meddling, and in part because teachers are so poorly paid and underappreciated that the most promising college students choose fields such as finance. We need to decide whether it is more important to fund the things that will benefit our society as a whole, or if we are going to continue to buy more of what we don’t need and can’t afford.
Even if you disagree, as I do, with the solutions Reagan advised us to choose in 1964, he was right about one thing: that we do, in fact, face a time of choosing. But he was wrong, when he told us in 1980, that he was just kidding.
Ridgemont High and the Changing Cultural Treatment of Abortion
When I got home from work last night, HBO West was showing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I hardly ever miss a chance to see this classic, which I believe came out in 1983. (For anyone who has been living in a cave for the last 30 years, the basic storyline is a year in the life of a group of teenagers at a typical American high school, learning how to be adults one youthful mistake at a time.) I’ve always thought it was a pretty good representation of that era, as best as I can recall (I was 10 at the time). Every time I see the movie, I can’t help but ponder the societal differences between then and now.
It struck me last night that the society of the 1980s, in some ways, was simultaneously more naive and less sheltered than today’s society. To wit: Stacy and Damone never gave a second’s thought to using birth control when they had sex—and yet, when Stacy became pregnant as a result, she immediately owned and took charge of the situation in a decisive, clear-headed way that I don’t think some adults could do today.
And that brings me to a related point which I think also demonstrates a major societal change in the last 30 years: confronted with an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 15, Stacy decides to have an abortion. The movie conveys that this is just a matter-of-fact thing: She’s 15 years old; of course she’s going to have an abortion. End of story. She has the abortion and goes for ice cream. There’s no long, drawn-out, agonizing decision-making process, no wailing, no seeking out of counseling, no crisis of conscience—either before or after the abortion.
Does anybody think that situation would be dealt with in the same way on screen today? I think it is clear that it would not. In most TV or movie productions we see today, characters who face unplanned pregnancies do not even consider abortion except obliquely and momentarily (such as in Juno, Knocked Up and Fools Rush In, to provide three cinematic examples), and then, they dismiss the option almost immediately. In fact, it seems the very word “abortion” can’t even be used. The most outlandish circumventing of the word comes from a character in Knocked Up, who hints that the procedure the Katherine Heigl character should consider “rhymes with shmashmortion.” Seriously?
Even more interesting is the fact that when abortion is summarily dismissed as an option in these films, it always results in a positive and “ideal” outcome. Let’s examine the three movies I’ve cited:
-
In Juno, the title character is “saved” from her appointment at an abortion clinic by a well-meaning protestor, and she ends up finding the perfect person to adopt the child she will bear. Of course.
-
In Fools Rush In, two total strangers, connected only by the fetus they conceived during a one-night stand, magically overcome tremendous cultural differences and fall in love.
-
Worst of all, in Knocked Up, a successful career woman’s pregnancy, resulting from a one-night stand with a perpetually stoned slacker, causes said stoner to straighten up, overnight, and fulfill his responsibilities.
So this is what the American cinema is selling—just have the kid, ladies, and everything will work out? Yeah, sure, because that’s realistic.
I wonder if anybody in 1983 thought we would be at a point today where we can’t even hear the word “abortion” in a movie, much less see a female character actually decide that abortion is the most appropriate choice for her. What’s next? Are we going to get to a point where we cannot view a movie about Charles Darwin in most American theaters because it focuses on his Theory of Evolution?
Oh, wait.
All Blame Is Not Created Equal
First of all, I consider the Republican position unreasonable because the Republicans are offering the Democrats only one choice, which they know the Democrats cannot accept: either destroy or delay the program they worked very hard for many years to get. The Republicans are offering no other alternatives. They are demanding that Democrats give them 100 percent of what they want, or they will shut down the government and possibly default on the nation’s debts, with potential catastrophic effects for the economy of the country and the world. This is not a good-faith attempt to negotiate; it is blackmail.
Secondly, I consider the Republican position unreasonable because the Republicans are trying to block the health care program before the government has even had a chance to implement it and see if it works or not. Even though the program was enacted in 2010, it has taken time to get it ready, and it won’t be fully functional until 2015. Naturally, Democrats think “Obamacare” is a good idea, or they wouldn’t have enacted it, and Republicans think it is a bad idea. However, there isn’t a single person alive who can tell us, with any certainty, how it is going to work out. Anybody who says he can tell you that it will succeed or fail is either 1) just guessing or 2) lying. Most people would say that it is perfectly reasonable to get rid of the program if it fails. What is not reasonable, in my opinion, is to keep the program from ever being tried out, and that is what Republicans are attempting to do, by trying to force Democrats to defund it or delay it. To defund it would keep it from getting started at all. To delay it for a year inevitably would lead to another Republican demand, a year from now, to delay it again, and another, and another, until such time as a Republican president and Congress are elected and can overturn it. The Republican object is, clearly, to keep it from ever getting off the ground. I do not think this is a reasonable position.
Third, the implementation of “Obamacare” has nothing at all to do with funding government operations or raising the debt ceiling. Changing the health care program is not required to do either of these things. Republicans are simply holding the country’s fiscal health hostage in order to gain leverage to destroy a program they oppose, before anyone knows whether that program will be good for the country or not.
In short, the Republican Party is the party that is making what I consider unreasonable demands, and I do not think the Democrats are at fault for refusing to give into unreasonable demands. To do so would only encourage more unreasonable demands in the future.
It should also be noted that Democrats are attaching no demands to their own legislation that would fund the government, and in fact have already compromised on many of the things they would like to do. The bill the Democratic-controlled Senate passed already had much lower levels of government funding than the Democrats wanted.
And in fact, it is also true that the health care law Democrats enacted in 2010 was much less than what Democrats wanted, or the president campaigned on. The law did not include a “public option,” which would have created a government-based health insurance option to compete with private carriers; Democrats left this out as a concession to conservatives, even though it was a centerpiece of President Obama’s 2008 campaign and very popular with the people who voted for him. The president took a lot of political heat from his own base by leaving the public option out of the final proposal. So to claim that Democrats are being stubborn about government funding or health care is to ignore the fact that they have already made substantial concessions. It is the Republicans who are not making any concessions.