On Gingrich, Trump and Not Putting America First

America First was one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans. This should be no surprise since this slogan encapsulates selfishness, ignorance, and prejudice, three of Trump’s favorite sentiments. But of course, Trump never really did put America first.

 

The first America First was a 1940 committee established to keep the U.S. out of World War II. It was criticized at the time for being too sympathetic to Hitler’s Germany and not sympathetic enough to Germany’s Jews.

 

Here’s a Dr. Seuss political cartoon from that era.

 

 

The Trump idea of America First is different from that 1940 committee, though it is no less self-centered and bigoted. He obviously never did put America or anything else besides his own narcissistic ego first. His corrupt ways were designed to fill his personal coffers not America’s. And as for genuine patriots, like those who fell fighting the Nazis in World War II, Trump reportedly dismissed them as suckers and losers. He couldn’t understand, he said, what was in it for them. He couldn’t grasp, in other words, what it meant to be patriotic.

 

There is a place for genuine patriotism in American politics when it is connected to worthy democratic institutions. But people who cling to the America First slogan never seem to be embracing that kind of patriotism.

 

Trump in 2016 seemed to think he could profit from a presidential run by parroting catchy slogans like, “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Then, when everyone was distracted, he schemed to divert a big chunk of America’s wealth into his own bank accounts.

 

Trump is in trouble now for his prepresidential shady dealings, but the shady dealings he undertook while in office were not a threat to him. He was protected from impeachment during his presidency by hyper-partisan Republicans. The same people who described Trump as “kooky” and “a liar” in 2016, went on to protect him and his malicious kookiness once he was in office.

 

By 2019, the Republican Party had become so hyper-partisan that it actually approved of Trump using American foreign aid for Ukraine as a bargaining chip in his 2020 campaign. Then, in January 2020, most Republicans gave a thumbs up to Trump when he provoked a violent and lethal mob attack on the Capitol.

 

Hyper-partisanship can be found in both parties, of course, but it is originally, and mainly, a Republican thing. As Fareed Zakaria’s historical summary on CNN last week reminded us, it was Congressman Newt Gingrich who encouraged his fellow Republicans to always use disparaging nouns, verbs, and adjectives when describing Democrats. He even handed out a handy cheat sheet to GOP members listing words for attacking Democrats. He offered it as “a lexicon of terms that drive a wedge of distinctions between themselves and members of the opposing party”

 

Here are some of the terms he encouraged his fellow Republicans to use in describing their Democratic colleagues:

 

abuse of power
betray
bizarre
bureaucracy
cheat

corrupt
criminal rights

decay
deeper
destroy
 

destructive

disgrace
greed
hypocrisy
incompetent
 

insecure

lie
obsolete
pathetic
radical

self-serving
selfish
shame
sick
stagnation

steal
threaten
traitors
unionized
waste

Gingrich’s partisan nastiness was successful in that it helped boost the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives for the first time in over 40 years. But it in no way put America first, and its cost was an entrenched mutually hostile and uncooperative attitude between the GOP and the Democrats. We are paying for Gingrich’s temporary partisan victory today by having to endure Trump’s grossly unethical behavior endorsed and supported by practically all elected Republicans.

 

What we can see from Gingrich’s early onslaught all the way down to Trump’s manipulations today is a gradual collapse in our nation’s governability. We slipped steadily downward because of Gingrich’s movement putting the GOP ahead of the country and continued to decline when Trump put his own interests above all else. It’s going to be difficult to recover the ground we lost, and it may even prove impossible if Republican leaders continue to be fearful of confronting Trump and incapable of leading their party away from the likes of him and Gingrich.

 

 

Tribalism and the Defense of Sexual Predators

I don’t really like the word tribalism. For one thing, it is implicitly insulting to actual tribes like the Cheyenne and the Cherokee.

But, that aside, we all know what we mean when we say that American politics has become distressingly tribal. Politicians are fighting for their tribe, i.e., their party, even when such fights are bad for the country.

Democrats are guilty of this, but Republicans are way guiltier.

Okay, that sounds like a tribal defense of the Democrats, but here’s why it is not. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, first got the tribal blood sport going in the early 1990s when he promoted war at all costs against the Democrats. Gingrich, by the way, later became Speaker of the House (his war-to-the-death worked!), but was then forced out of office for being a sleaze. This ouster had nothing to do with his partisan tribalism, however.

The Magna Carta of GOP tribalism was the Gingrich memo of 1990 in which he instructed fellow Republicans to use a specific list of 63 insulting words whenever they talked about the Democrats. Here, as reported in the New York Times, are some of Gingrich’s words for Democrats: “decay, sick, unionized bureaucracy, greed, corruption, radical, permissive, [and] bizarre.”

Gingrich’s fellow Republicans were instructed to memorize the words on his list and to use them whenever they talked about Democrats or any particular Democrat.

When discussing the GOP, Republicans were told to choose words from a flattering list which included “opportunity, challenge, courage, pristine, principle(d), care, caring, common sense, peace, [and] pioneer.”

Now politics ain’t bean-bag, as the philosophical Mr. Dooley once observed, but isn’t routinely and automatically referring to your political opponents as greedy, corrupt, bizarre, etc., going too far? Yes, it is, and doing so was the beginning of the tribalism we see in our politics today. Note that the Democrats, to this day, have not conjured up a list of evil words to throw at the Republicans.

One symptom of the Gingrich-inspired partisan breakdown is the failure of Democrats and Republicans to socialize together in DC. Before Gingrich, it was customary for members of Congress and other officials to get together at local watering holes where bipartisan friendships blossomed. But now our nation’s capital is divided into gathering places that are associated with one party to the exclusion of the other. Bipartisan hanging out is largely a thing of the past.

So, Washington is broken and ruthless tribalism is what broke it. 

Adding to the collapse of cooperative politics was Mitch McConnell’s grossly partisan decision in 2016 to block Merrick Garland's appointment to the Supreme Court. McConnell's excuse was that February 2016, when Justice Scalia’s death gave Obama the opportunity to name Garland, was too close to the election.

Hmm.

See what I mean? The Democrats, whatever partisan fighting they have engaged in, have done nothing like this. Yes, they’ve done other things, but nothing so crass and so grossly un-American as what Gingrich and McConnell have done.

When Senator Al Franken was found to have behaved badly toward women in the past, he was asked by his fellow Democrats to step down from his Senate seat and he did so. Some have argued that his crude behavior toward women was not so unforgivable as to require a resignation. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t as crude or aggressive as the behavior of Justice Brett Kavanaugh as described by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and other women who say he victimized them.

But still, Senator Franken resigned. Democrats did not step forward and demand that Franken fight like hell, accuse the women of lying, portray himself as a victim, etc. But that, of course, is exactly what Brett Kavanaugh and his GOP supporters did – despite the numerous women offering credible descriptions of his predatory behavior. And, I might add, his well-documented tendency to be a frequent and belligerent drunkard in his youth.

So, the Democrats said, “Yes, Al Franken has to go, even though he is an intelligent and effective senator,” while the Republicans are now saying, “We don’t care what those women are saying about Brett Kavanaugh’s assaults, we support him!”

I ask you, who is being more tribal?

Naturally, you can point to past politicians, Democrat and Republican, whose sexual misbehavior is well-known – most notably Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. But the #MeToo Movement is creating an entirely New World - a better world, one in which sexual predators are no longer protected by their “tribe” and are not rewarded with high public office.

Well, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Kavanaugh’s appointment shows that we have not built that New World yet. But maybe, after next month’s election? Let’s see. And let's hope.

                                   (Picture from BBC) 

GOP - OMG

The current leaders of the Republican pack -- Romney, Santorum and Gingrich -- represent the GOP’s three classic prototypes – the Corporate Moneybags, the Christian Jihadist and the Evil Genius. These three types have dominated national Republican politics for decades as evidenced, for example, by George H. W. Bush, Dan Quayle and Richard Nixon. Or John McCain (through marriage), Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney.

It’s actually a bit of a stretch to call Newt Gingrich a genius, but the evil part is self-evident. Dumping divorce papers on his first wife, while she lay in bed recovering from cancer surgery pretty much speaks for itself, as does having an adulterous affair behind his second wife’s back while attacking Clinton for his adulterous affairs. Then there’s the censure from Congress for ethical violations.

Think about that for a minute: Gingrich’s ethics did not even measure up to the minimal standards that Congress sets for itself. Yes, I’m talking about the same Congress that legalizes insider trading – but only for itself – and provides health and retirement benefits for itself that it routinely labels as “socialism” when granted to the rest of us mortals.




  Homo satanicus



 

Where Gingrich’s unspoken motto might be “Power! Must have power!” Santorum’s is more along the lines of “People who no stuff about evolution and global warming and things like that shood just shut up.”

But wait. I’m not sure that Santorum is simply dumb. After all, he earned a B.A. with honors in political science from Penn State and followed this up with an MBA and a law degree. (Hmm. I wonder why he called Obama a snob for promoting college education.) No, rather than raw stupidity, I believe Santorum is motivated by fear. In fact, where pride is the primary motivator of the GOP Evil Genius type, fear is the besetting sin of the Christian Jihadists. Santorum and his followers look at the world as a scary place, and they have an irresistible yearning for the kind of security that doesn’t exist in reality, but that a fanatic attachment to religious ideology can conjure up as an imaginary refuge.

Santorum’s followers want the world to consist of white people who go to church and who will someday go to heaven, except for the ones who enjoy sex or vote for Obama. Suddenly coming to mind as I write this is a hefty white woman from West Virginia who, during the 2008 election was asked by a reporter why she opposed Barack Obama. “I don't like the Hussein,” she began, “I’ve had enough of Hooosane!” - emphasizing this last word with a twangy self-assurance.

Her problems with Obama were that he was not a white guy and he had the same last name as a Third World tyrant that the U.S. had recently demolished. More than anything, she was afraid of people who were different from herself and her neighbors. This, I believe, is the foundation on which Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum build their candidacies.






Homo ignoramus






Mitt Romney, like Gingrich, is driven largely by pride. (Of course all candidates, Republican and Democrat, are suffused with more than a daily recommended dosage of high self-regard. After all, how could a humble person aspire to be president?)

But where Gingrich’s pride is bursting with a deranged megalomania, Romney’s churns with a strong, insistent current of greed. Making lots and lots of money is what Romney’s life has been all about, and his “Make government smaller” position is code for “Don’t let those pesky regulations stop me from siphoning more money out of the middle class into my own bank accounts.” This, after all, was Bain Capital’s primary objective when Romney ran it.




Homo conglomocorpus

Romney with the ones he loves (which are being held by some people he knows)





In addition to these GOP types, of course, there is also Ron Paul, the only one among them who everyone knew from the start could never be president. GOP leaders reject him because they like our monstrous military budget and regard it as a source of strength. Of course, a quick look at history will remind anyone that America became really strong by NOT going to war in the 1930s when the other great powers were bankrupting themselves doing so. Score one for Ron Paul, when he points out that we don’t actually have to spend billions of dollars to station troops in, e.g., Germany.

But Paul is rejected by GOP leaders (and almost everyone else) because of his extreme views on economics. I’ve been looking for a neutral, university-based economist who accepts his rather nineteenth-century economic ideas (eliminate the Fed, go back to the gold standard), but so far I haven’t found any. The economists I have spoken to assure me that following Paul’s economic policies would plunge us into a depression worse than the one we experienced in the 1930s.

So, though I do wish political leaders, Democrat and Republican, would give his foreign policy ideas some consideration (without buying into them wholesale), I’m grateful that nobody believes in his economic plans. I will say for him that at least he is neither a phony nor a standard issue Republican. He’s just an honest but hopeless case. And I wouldn’t at all object to him mounting a third party candidacy…







Homo anachronus

American Nightmare

“No modern society could function under a libertarian government, which is why none exists,” says a reporter in today’s Doonesbury, poking fun at Ron Paul for his utopian delusions.

Well said, though it could be pointed out that no modern economy has enjoyed enduring prosperity under the kind of “small government” raw capitalism that all the GOP candidates espouse. Those eras in which we got too close to this small government model led directly to economic crashes and widespread suffering. Exhibit A: the economic collapse of 1929 which followed a reign of unbridled, pro-corporate, Republican conservatism.

Republican leaders seem to love the idea of small government because it will give rich people, and the corporations on which their wealth is based, more power. This power would come at the expense of the rest of us, who depend on democratic government to protect us from exploitation by the rich and powerful.

It’s peculiar that any middle class voters would support a program aimed specifically against their own economic interests. The explanation for this support seems to lie in the GOP’s success at promoting the idea that democratic government is the enemy of democracy. “Freedom,” the conservatives argue, will be enhanced if we restrict government and thereby further empower the corporations which already dominate our economy – and which, by the way, operate on a “one-dollar/one-vote” principle.

The good news is that lately the GOP primary candidates have been effectively beating each other up. They seem like nothing so much as a pack of drunken kangaroos as they smash wildly against each other. Gingrich says Romney is a politician with no enduring principles and Romney says Gingrich is a loose cannon unfit for the White House. I’m inclined to agree with both of them.

Of the two, Gingrich would make the worse president. He resembles Dick Cheney in his ethical standards, but he has less charm than the former vice president, and an even scarier wife. God forbid that he would ever make it to the White House, but if he did, the end times would surely be near. The only reason he is attracting almost as much support as Romney in the primaries is that he is so damn mean that Republicans who hate the president keep picturing him being vicious and nasty in debates against Obama.

It is still all but certain that Romney will get the nomination, despite Gingrich’s recent surge. As president, it is hard to say what he would do since he apparently would do whatever he thought would get him re-elected. This is one reason why so many Republicans don’t like him. He doesn’t appear to believe in anything except advancing his own interests.














For those of us who believe that the Constitution is not just something to talk about, but is actually the document on which our government and our freedoms are based, none of these fanatic, small-government Republicans would make an acceptable president. Weakening the government would only diminish the power of the Constitution to enhance our rights. The causal chain is direct: it runs from us, the citizenry, through the Constitution into the hands of our elected representatives. To weaken any link in this chain would only strengthen the hands of the oil, tobacco, drug and insurance companies as well as the banks. And if they were to be so strengthened, we could not expect them to do right by us.

A libertarian society, in which every individual struggles against every other, is a society in which those controlling concentrated wealth control everything. That is not the American Dream, though messrs. Romney, Gingrich, Paul and Santorum would have us believe that it is.

GOP 2012

The GOP debates are starting to feel like media enhanced waterboarding. If they go on much longer, I can see myself in the not-too-distant future screaming, “Stop! Stop! I’ll tell you anything you want, just call off Bachmann, Cain and Company!”

On the other hand, I have to grant that the torture has helped reveal the candidates’ characters and personal quirks. They haven’t really clarified much about policy differences, though, since all of the Republican candidates are slavish followers of the same handful of principles:

1. Barack Obama is unworthy to be president because he is (choose all that apply): socialistic, Muslim, Kenyan, wrong about EVERYthing, just plain evil.

2. “Obamacare” is a communist scheme designed to deprive us of all our customary liberties.

3. The government is the enemy of freedom. Only when we shrink the government and let Goldman Sachs, BP, ExxonMobil, R.J.Reynolds, and so on be themselves, will we be free once more.

4. The money we pay in taxes to the (evil, alien) government never does us any good (except when it pays for bombs to drop on Middle Eastern people).*

5. The economy was in great shape until Obama ruined it.

6. Abortion is murder and so are many forms of birth control. And so is Obamacare.

7. Ronald Reagan descended from Heaven to lead us to the Promised Land and if we keep saying his name over and over, we may get there yet.














But back to the candidates’ characters: for starters, Michele Bachmann is just plain dumb. Admittedly she does have a kind of cleverness, the kind that enables you to say things that appeal to the grossly ignorant, i.e., her base. But this won’t save her. What's truly amazing is that Bachmann believes that she can be president, even though she understands less about the world than a bright fifth grader does. How dumb is that?

Rick Perry, ditto. Although, to his credit, he seems to have proven that you can be Governor of Texas while understanding less about the world than a bright fifth grader does. Hmmm.


Herman Cain. Wow. The fact that he still commands a respectable following says something about the human capacity for self-deception. The self-deception I’m talking about is that of his followers, not Cain himself, who, I believe, knows what he did vis-à-vis the women who have complained about him. OK, there has been no trial, but the evidence made public so far, and his ever-changing explanations, are compelling enough that only an absolutely self-deluded fan could believe his claims of innocence. If he were to get on the GOP ticket (very, very unlikely), we could look forward to the pleasure of him on the campaign trail saying “I did not have sex with that woman. Or that one. Or that one either. Nor those two. Nor…”

Ron Paul, Mr. Ten Percent, has the most devoted coterie of followers in the GOP. I wish his unique foreign policy ideas could get more play in the media, but his economic notions are just as doctrinaire and irrational as those of his fellow Republicans. Like them, he claims that he wants to shrink government and thereby give Americans more freedom; he doesn't seem to understand, however, that the ones who will fill the power vacuum if our government is weakened will be those very undemocratic institutions that control the nation’s wealth: e.g., ExxonMobil, Citigroup, etc.

Newt Gingrich is, for me, the scariest of all the GOP candidates. He’s an intelligent man, but one who seems to think ethics are for wimps. I won’t take the time to go further into details about him here, but whenever I hear Gingrich’s words, I’m reminded of what Lily Tomlin once said: “No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.”

Not with Newt, anyway.

Which brings us to John Huntsman, a smart and seemingly decent guy. He doesn’t have a chance.

Mitt Romney is almost certain to get the nomination. He does have problems, many of which stem from his having run for governor on a reasonable platform in Massachusetts, but now having to back away from its most sane principles in order to conform to the right-wing nuttiness that dominates the GOP primaries. This makes him look like a champion flip-flopper, a problem he could have avoided had he been smart enough to start his career in, say, Mississippi or Oklahoma, where right-wing nuttiness is the equivalent of comfort food.

Assuming Romney does get the nomination, he’s going to have to pick a right-winger for his running mate in order to secure the GOP base. He certainly will not pick Bachmann, Perry, or Cain, which means he just might go for Gingrich. Is America ready for such a ticket? A classical stuffed shirt that spins this way and that in the wind, backed up by a conniving schemer of Nixonian proportions? Time will tell.









Suburban Americana











*Ron Paul gets a pass on this parenthetic clause, which is probably why Republican voters aren’t going for him.