ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY

A good friend send me this email:

…from David Denby’s piece on the 50th Anniversary of the Chicago convention and Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago:

Mailer is much out of fashion now, though the Library of America, reissuing his work, is doing its best to keep him alive. Surely his prescience about many things is startling. Consider: at the Republican convention in Miami, Mailer experiences a moment of irritation. He and the other reporters were kept waiting by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a disciple of Martin Luther King, Jr.,:

The reporter became aware after a while of a curious emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before—it was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself?

This modest bit of candor would be of zero significance to us were it not for what follows on the next page. Blacks, Mailer writes, were trying to make whites guilty. But how guilty?

Since obsessions dragoon our energy by endless repetitive contemplations of guilt we can neither measure nor forget, political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness. Through betrayal, Hitler had told them.

This premonition of Donald Trump and of what Trump has “loosed” in his audience was written exactly fifty years ago. At the moment, not one word of it seems excessive. “Miami & the Siege of Chicago” was composed at the worst time in our national life, though the current moment is a close second. Reading it gives not only pleasure of a literary sort but strength and solace. If the country could survive 1968, it will survive Donald Trump, too.

END OF AUGUST, THAT’S A WRAP…UP

Wrapping up this month that should be in summer doldrums, should be the dog days, is to realize how intense has been the action in the reality TV show that is the Trump Regime.

This month marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Police riots during the anti-war demonstrations around the 1968 Democratic Party Convention…it was there and then that the Dems nominated Hubert Humphrey, insuring the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon, a veteran of the McCarthy Era red-baiting, was an excellent hater. His character enabled the Republican Party to attract all the angry white folks who hated the LBJ Civil Rights legislation and thus began the process of making the Republican Party ever-more white, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-government, against any kind of protective legislation that might be good for ordinary citizens.  Nixon was the last Republican who could afford to sign into law any legislation to protect the environment.  By the Reagan Era racism and pentecostal religion and hatred of government were folded neatly into the Republican agenda…and half a century later we are still paying the price for the Democratic Party’s stubborn plunge into the dark hole of the Vietnam War in 1968.

THE FELONS LIST

The list of guilty parties grows.  This month alone we added Cohen, Manafort, W. Samuel Patten (guilty pleas today).  Rick Gates had admitted guilt back in February to several crimes, but this month jhe got to describe them in detail, in court testimony in the trial of his erstwhile boss, Paul Manafort.  Manafort, of course, faces one more trial in September.  Today’s plea came from Patten who admitted funnelling Ukrainian money into President Trump’s inauguration, click here for description.

We are now up to seven men guilty of crimes in this spreading scandal–Van Der Zwaan, Manafort, Cohen, Flynn, Papadopoulos, Patten. Rick Gates.  Now Carter Page is claiming he will be charged soon and he will NOT squeal on Trump.  
Do not expect this list to stop growing.  Remember forty guilty characters were finally harvested from the Nixon Administration.

And there are still numerous possible state charges against various and sundry members of the Trump Gang. Click for look at those possible charges and how they would evade all of Donald’s FEDERAL pardon power…dual sovereignty.  If this begins to happen you can bet the Republicans will suddenly want a constitutional amendment doing away with states rights…just as they love states rights when it comes to prayer in school, keeping some of “those” people from voting or negating civil rights… the same party truly hates states rights when those wild Californians decide to limit auto emissions.

One thing to watch: will New York state get rid of its law that protects any body with federal pardon from being prosecuted for the same crime in that state?

OTHER HAPPENINGS

Apparently Attorney General Jeff Sessions will survive until November 8 or 9. The same cannot be said for White House Counsel, Don McGahn, forgotten but not quite gone.  He leaves with his license to practice law intact.  Michael Cohen’s legal career is likely over.

Now, click here to read about what could happen if Sessions goes.  If Sessions resigns Trump can transfer any other Senate-approved official into the Attorney General’s position. Say Pompeo or DeVos or Perry.  If Trump fires Sessions it is an open question…and his ability to make a temporary appointment while Senate is adjourned…even a minority of Senate Democrats could prevent that with a filibuster.

WALLED NATION

Surely nobody rational believed that Mexico would pay for the wall.  But the Stephen Miller’s anti-immigration regime is erecting as many paper barriers as possible… and is now targeting some U.S. citizens who are Hispanic, challenging their birth certificates!  Stephen Miller means there will be no legislation approved on immigration that is not completely anti-immigrant…for now.  He is now being called “President of Immigration.”

LYING TO SELF-PROCLAIMED CHRISTIANS

The current President of the United States hates the nation he governs. He wants to recreate it to match an unrealistic image of a nation that never existed. Even under George III this nation was home to Quakers, Huguenots, Jews, Puritans, even secret deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But this President ignores reality, is ignorant of history and fact, is bordering on an ignoramus. He may be ignorance personified.

Now he has blatantly lied to a bunch of church leaders, Christian one and all.  He told them he had done away with the law that prevents American religious organizations, with their tax exemptions, from openly endorsing or campaigning for political candidates.

In his mind he is the greatest President one could even imagine, and now he has the powers of a 15th Century monarch.  Of course, this is only in Trump’s fictional universe.  

The ignorance comes in because this President knows nothing of the separation of church and state and why and how and where it came into being.  Hint: in a bunch of British colonies that rebelled for independence and freedom. 

FAKE NEWS: TRUMP CANCELS BRENNAN SECURITY CLEARANCE 

This has not happened…will it?  Not even the President himself could tell us the truth.

WE ARE BECOMING GREAT AGAIN…SEXUAL DISEASES RISING

All the budget cuts, all the anti-sex education efforts, all the decrease in public health spending, have given us a renewed growth in sexually transmitted diseases.  Opioids, guns, cars, obesity, STDs–our health problems are self-inflicted.  We may not need climate change to make our lives unnecessarily difficult.

Any good American knows money is more important than public health, education or even treatment; good Repubs go for spending cuts every time…govt. over-reach is coming for your kids. Do you really want the govt. telling your college age offsprings to have safe sex, after all, isn’t it everybody’s right to get as sick as possible?  Besides Secty. DeVos wants sex education now to “Just say NO.”  We all know how well that works.  Look at our President’s maginificent self-control when it comes to matters sexual.

And for a good feeling of austerity, now that the wealthy and corporations got their tax cut, let’s not give federal civilian workers a pay raise.  Could this fuel the first hint of a general strike?