No Collusion! Well, Maybe a Little Collusion, But Hardly Any

“No collusion! No collusion!” 

Like a deranged parrot, Trump kept repeating these words from his Mar-a-Lago lair last Wednesday – even when nobody was accusing him of collusion with the Russians.
 

Trump’s claim of “No collusion” is bullshit, of course, because we know there was some collusion - Jared and Don Jr. met with the Russians in Trump Tower, for one thing. Then Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos have all been accused of dirty dealings involving Russians, and most of these folks have pleaded guilty to one crime or another.

It may be that the Trump team’s collusion does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. So, if Mr. Trump wants to stick to the facts (bwaahahahaha!), what he should be incessantly repeating is “Not very much collusion!” That at least might possibly be true.

I have a theory about why Trump sucks up to Putin so much and keeps going soft on the Russians even though they have clearly messed with our election. I think he is financially in over his head with Putin and other Russian oligarchs. He probably owes them wagon-loads of money and he doesn’t want us to know about this. But we will know, because Special Counsel Robert Mueller is plowing relentlessly ahead, and eventually he will, I believe, reveal all the Trump organization’s ties to the Russian thugs before he is done.

When that happens, I expect Trump will loudly crow, “See? These are just some innocent cash transactions between friends. No collusion!”

If this is what we end up with, Trump will probably get a reprimand, but no impeachment. And, of course, some of his associates, and maybe even a family member or two, will get jail sentences. These may never be served since Trump will undoubtedly pardon everyone he possibly can (i.e., those charged strictly with federal rather than state-level crimes).

I believe this outcome will damage Trump’s standing with the voting public and may well mean that the Blue Wave that is predicted for the upcoming elections, will turn into a Blue Tsunami.

Even if Trump is shown to have sucked up to America’s Russian enemies, he won’t be impeached and removed from office because there are 30 or 40 Republicans in the Senate who care more about holding onto power than defending America. With a few notable exceptions, like Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, Congressional Republicans have sold their souls to Trump and his deluded base.

Honestly, the way people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell coyly cuddle up to Trump is similar to the way Trump cuddles up to Putin. And let’s not forget Mike Pence, who spends most of his time smirking contentedly in the background, dreaming of his turn in the White House - as Trump systematically undermines the FBI and the Justice Department.

What has made the Trump disaster possible is Fox News. As Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post wrote recently, Nixon was forced out of office for his illegal acts, but Trump may not suffer this fate simply because he has Fox News backing him up.

According to Sullivan, Fox News, and in particular, Sean Hannity, have been “softening the ground” for Trump, by portraying the FBI and the Justice Department as the bad guys. And, she writes, the message is sinking in: “In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, three of four Republicans said they believed the Justice Department and the FBI are actively working to undermine Trump.”

Chew on that for a minute. A large majority of Republicans believe that the FBI, which, of course, is led by Trump-appointed Republicans, is trying to undermine American democracy.

Thanks, Fox News.

Fox is so outrageously irresponsible, that even when it was revealed that Sean Hannity shared an attorney with Donald Trump, he received no reprimand. Contrast this with the firing of Dan Rather by CBS, and the demotion of Brian Williams by NBC for much lesser errors of judgment.

Watching various Fox programs these past few weeks has given me a little insight into their line of propaganda. For one thing, their so-called “reporters” routinely refer to Democrats, the Left, the media, the establishment, the swamp, and what they imagine to be “the Deep State” interchangeably, as though all these entities were one and the same thing. And, in the paranoid nightmarish landscape they strive to conjure up, all are out to get the competent and morally worthy Donald Trump.

I’ve never been a fan of Fox News, but my sense of revulsion over what they represent has reached new depths this year. What they are doing is to make the ideal of a free press seem ridiculous. This is also what authoritarians want us to believe. If a gaggle of shameless hucksters can convince millions of gullible television viewers that Robert Mueller and the FBI are evil, while Donald Trump is good, how can a free press be embraced as a democratic ideal?

Of course, I still very much believe in a free press. I just wish the viewing public were better at distinguishing honest, responsible reporting from partisan propaganda and preposterous lies.

In the meantime, Mr. Mueller, please carry on. Most Americans who are not Republicans believe in what you are doing and look forward to your findings. As far as I’m concerned (I can’t speak for most Americans on this point), I expect that what you find will make Mr. Trump and his people look pretty rancid. And chances are this will hurt the GOP both in the long run and in the upcoming midterm elections, even if it turns out that there was “hardly any collusion.” 

Marching for Our Lives - March 24, 2018

I’ve written before that racial hatred and the love of guns seem to fester together as part of a noxious stew in the hearts and minds of some Americans. But recently I’ve become aware of another correlation, one between domestic violence and mass killings. According to an NPR report of November 7, 2017, “perpetrators of domestic violence…accounted for 54 percent of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014.” The data for this statistic comes from the FBI and media reports as analyzed by Everytown for Gun Safety.

I’m not sure how we can put this information to practical use, except possibly by keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. This means, for one thing, current regulations have to be enforced. The same NPR report cited above points out that “the Texas gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley [who shot up a church congregation], was court-martialed for assaulting his wife and their young child in 2012, although this information apparently was not included in the formal government database that tracks such things.”

The domestic abuse-mass murderer correlation makes me weep for my fellow males. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not hostile to men in general. As I’ve said before, I am not anti-male and, in fact, many of my best friends are men. But there is in our society a certain way of being male that can spell Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for Violence. A key feature of this troubling version of masculinity is its glorification of the male capacity to whup ass or otherwise wreak havoc. I feel sure that this concept of maleness underlies the actions of domestic abusers who wind up killing so many.

I have a suggestion to offer with regard to dangerous males, and I will broach it here even though I realize it is utterly impractical: What if males were to be made ineligible to own guns? Wives, mothers, daughters and female friends could own them, but the men would have to check them out for temporary use - only with the women’s permission.

Okay, this is an impossible dream, but I would like to point out that if it had been in place over the past 20 years, many hundreds of people whose lives have been lost in mass shootings would be alive today.
 

On a slightly more practical level, why not amend the Constitution to nullify the individual’s right to bear arms? For decades the Supreme Court used to rule that this “right” was restricted - as the framers intended - to those participating in “well regulated militias.” But, when conservatives gained control of the Supreme Court, they overturned these customary rulings and expanded this right to all Americans, militias be damned.

Now please note that most democratic countries don’t insist on the right of citizens to weaponize themselves, and yet these countries all continue to be securely democratic. We Americans could do the same. And think about how out of date the Second Amendment is. After all, a militia in the eighteenth century had the capacity to effectively resist federal forces, but this is clearly not the case today. I don’t believe anyone with a lick of sense thinks that the citizens of Lubbock, Texas, (for example) could fend off an incoming division of U.S. Marines by relying on their household arsenals – no matter how many AR-15s those arsenals contained.

In other words, the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect citizens from an overweening federal government, but this Amendment is useless for such a purpose today. What protects us from having a division of Marines overrun our home towns are the values instilled in those Marines and their commanding officers – basically, their devotion to American democracy. We can thank their high school civics teachers, among others, for those values.

I don’t believe it’s necessary to deprive every American hunter or responsible gun owner of his or her guns. But I do think it would be a step in the right direction if we could get gun owners to admit that democracy does not depend on or even benefit from private gun ownership.

In the meantime, what practical goals can we hope to reach today? Well, taking my cue from the remarkable young students who flooded the streets of American cities yesterday, I would say we should hope for:
 

1. A ban on assault weapons
2. A ban on high capacity magazines
3. Universal background checks for all gun purchasers

And about those students, Wow. Hats off to them. Who would have thought, before the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy, that hundreds of thousands of young people could mobilize and organize in such a dramatic and at the same time touching way? I am so impressed. May the Force be with them as they shake Congress to its NRA-funded roots.

In case you missed them, here are a few pictures of these young heroines and heroes.

        Marching in Washington, DC. 

 From Evelyn Hockstein, The Guardian

         11-Year-Old Naomi Wadler, Washington, DC

                      By Andrew Harnik, AP

                           Athens, Georgia
Photo by Joshua L. Jones, Athens Banner-Herald via AP

Once these young activists have achieved their goals, maybe we can start rethinking the Second Amendment.

Letter to the World

Dear World,

Not all Americans are deluded souls or ethically challenged losers. I feel it is important to insist on this point, believing, as I do, that there are those who would dispute it.

Granted, our president is an ethically challenged loser, as are some of the people he associates with, for example, Donald Trump, Jr., Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Rob Porter, Mike Pence, and…okay, pretty much everyone he associates with.

But please note that Donald Trump was not the popular choice of the voters in the last presidential election. Most Americans did not vote for him. Only 62,985,134 did. The rest of us are innocent!
 

Really, if it weren’t for the quirkiness of the electoral college system, along with at least one other factor (or, what is known in Moscow as a “фактор”), Donald Trump would not be in the White House today.

Recently Trump has argued that many of our school teachers should start packing heat. Yes, go ahead and read that sentence again; it is what I meant to write. And it is true. Trump really thinks it would be a terrific idea to have America’s teachers stride into the classroom with their shootin’ irons at the ready.
 

You may well ask, “What kind of incredible loser would want to see teachers and suicidal maniacs having shootouts in the halls and classrooms of public schools???”
 

The answer of course is a violence-prone or ethically challenged loser. The kind of loser that thinks the NRA, in its relentless quest to promote more profits for America’s gun manufacturers, needs a little boost from the White House. And this kind of loser, by the way, is characteristic of practically all the Republicans in Congress today, the Republicans being party that has decided that ethics are bullshit.
 

It is worth noting (as many others have) that every country in the world has mentally disturbed individuals, and every country has law enforcement officials who sometimes fail at their job – as did the deputy who declined to enter Stoneman Douglas High School last week to confront that school’s maniac killer. But not every country is awash with automatic weapons. That’s just us. This doesn’t make us all losers! Only the politicians who strive to put automatic weapons at everyone’s fingertips are losers.
 

America actually has some truly amazing people, people who are the opposite of losers. In support of this statement I submit to you the students who have been leading the discussion about our need for better gun control. These young people are incredible – and they’re Americans! See what I mean?
 

So please, World, don’t give up on us. We will be normal again someday, I promise you. And when we are, it will be because of people like these young Americans - who are striving with all their hearts to make our world better.
 

Sincerely,
Culture World

                       Photo: Newsweek