Like It Is - Black-ish Style

Black-ish had a great episode this week. The issue at hand was, How could the Johnson family handle the upset victory of Trump in last November’s election? Naturally, lots of anti-Trump sentiments came out. Daphne Lido (Wanda Sykes) had the best line: “That idiot goes bankrupt like Khloe Kardashian changes black dudes.”

Even Dre Johnson’s Republican boss turned away from Trump. He offered some respectable, Mitt Romneyish reasons for doing so, but then Daphne chimed in again, pointing out that his business interests were threatened by Trump’s anti-immigrant posture since the boss man depended on “absurdly underpaid” Mexican workers to jack up his profits.

Pro-Trump opinions also got an airing from a white woman who admitted to her coworkers that she voted for Trump (even though she had voted twice for Obama) because her family and the small town where she grew up had been hurting for years and Hillary just offered more of the same.
Finally, Dre blurts out that the election of Trump was driving him crazy. But then he goes on to say:

“I know how hard it is to deal with the gut punch that we are all feeling right now. It sucks. Now all I'm trying to say is that maybe instead of letting this destroy us, we take the feeling you guys felt the day after the election and say that morning we all woke up knowing what it felt like to be black.”

This exact same sentiment was reflected a few weeks ago in a clever post-election SNL skit in which two black guys (Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock) watch the election returns with their liberal white friends. When the friends start wailing with despair as Trump’s victory becomes inevitable, the black guys say, in effect, “Damn, don’t you people know that this is how we’ve been feeling all along in this country?”

The entire episode was outstanding, bringing out, with humor, both black and white views about what was happening in light of the election, and throwing light on some little known, and not at all edifying lyrics in the Star Spangled Banner as well as the searing words in the heart of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech. Words like, “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright days of justice emerge.”

What kind of a country do we, and Dre Johnson’s family have to deal with now? A troubled one, for sure. But, as Dre encouragingly adds, “Can it be better? I hope so.”

Well done, Black-ish, and by the way, congratulations to Tracy Ellis Ross (who plays Dre’s wife, Rainbow) for her Golden Globe Award.

Reince Priebus - You Are Such A Liar!

I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan proclaiming to us on national television these words: “We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages — nor will we.”

Later President Reagan admitted that he was — repeat — WAS lying when he made this claim. (Reagan did not do the repeat thing when he admitted to lying; that’s me being snarky.)

But this was not actually Reagan’s biggest lie in my opinion. When he said, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” that was his biggest lie. It’s a lie whose consequences we have been living with for 35 years as his efforts to shift the tax burden onto the middle class, cut funding for education, and hold down the federally mandated minimum wage by breaking the power of unions, have paid off for the “one percent.”

In addition to this there is the web of lies surrounding President Reagan’s support for the Contras, the conservative terrorist organization that was trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing government. I remember this aspect of Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal vividly because I went on a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua in 1984 and, during a visit to a rural area, was told that the Contras had killed a Swiss ambulance driver with a roadside bomb on the very road we were then cruising along. About a year and a half later I was in Switzerland visiting friends in the Canton of Fribourg and was upset to see newspaper clippings they had saved that described the killing, by the Contras, of the ambulance driver, their countryman.

Our tax dollars at work.

President Reagan managed to survive the Iran-Contra scandal, though, for a time, it looked like he might face impeachment. As details of Iran-Contra surfaced, the public gradually concluded that the President had been dishonest about the whole affair. According to one poll, only 12 percent of Americans believed him when he claimed he had no prior knowledge of U.S. government funding of the Contras.

So why isn’t Ronald Reagan known as a “congenital liar,” to use the words once employed by conservative columnist William Safire with reference to Hillary Clinton? And how can RNC Chair Reince Priebus get away with saying of her that she is “incapable of telling the truth?” Even more to the point, how can Priebus make this obviously dishonest claim (i.e., lie) about Hillary Clinton with a straight face while at the same time supporting someone like Donald Trump? I, for one, would pay good money to see Mr. Priebus attempt to defend the honesty of Mr. Trump’s various ridiculous claims, starting with his insistence that no, he was not responsible for those Trump-promoting phone calls by “John Miller” back in the 1990s.

But back to Ronald Reagan: his lies were much more blatant and significant than any slick talking or sneaky email usage that Hillary is guilty of, so why should she be perceived as not trustworthy in a way that Reagan never was?

The short answer, as I’ve said elsewhere, is that she has been relentlessly hammered by a Republican Party obsessed with portraying her and her husband as dishonest. These endless attacks have had a payoff, even though they almost invariably turn up no evidence of deceit or wrongdoing on her part. What they do turn up – the emails again – is trivial compared to the deceit and wrongdoing of which Ronald Reagan was guilty. The point is, if the Democratic Party had made up its mind to portray President Reagan as a habitual liar, “incapable of telling the truth,” his reputation would certainly have suffered. I’m glad the Democrats never engaged in such a campaign, however, since I think this kind of character assassination is bad for the country as a whole.

I’m not picking on this particular late president because I believe him to be unusually dishonest. Actually, I think he is about average or maybe only slightly below average in honesty, but no worse or barely worse than most. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is above average. I say this because, first of all, a PolitiFact study of deceit by politicians found her to be above average in her degree of honesty and, secondly, because, despite the mind-numbingly incessant attacks leveled against her since 1992, nothing she has been shown to have done matches in dishonesty Reagan’s Iran-Contra actions. Nor, for that matter, Vice President G. H. W. Bush’s dishonest claim to have been “out of the loop” during the Iran-Contra scandal. Nor George W. Bush’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and connections to 9-11. In light of the dishonesty represented by these various scandals, Hillary is clearly better than most of her predecessors where honesty is concerned.

I say “predecessors” because I believe that she is likely to be our next president. Certainly a win is not in the bag, but the odds are very much in her favor. And when I vote on November 8, part of me is going to be motivated by my hostility toward the character assassinating tactics that the GOP has tried to use against her. I look forward to being able to say, “Congratulations, Madam President. You have prevailed despite the morally repulsive actions of these unscrupulous and small-minded men who have tried to bring you down.”