I love the post office. The Duke of Mar-a-Lago does not. While his undisguised contempt for it is inextricable from his animosity toward Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and The Washington Post, it seems probable that he, on his own, saw it as a potential cash cow, the quasi-governmental entity most ripe for privatization. The timing of this stab at an editorial is noteworthy. It was written within a week or so of the installation of the vile Louis DeJoy as postmaster general by a board subverted by His Eminence’s appointees. As challenging as circumstances have been for the postal service, Mr. DeJoy demonstrated how things can always be made worse. I sent the thing first to The Richmond Times-Dispatch and learned that it could not be accepted because of a six-month moratorium on further submissions after an opinion had been printed. I then tried The Washington Post and The Virginian-Pilot without success.
Save The USPS
The USPS is at a crossroads. It could run out of funds in September.[1] Congressional action, or perhaps inaction, in coming weeks will likely settle its fate. The post office’s unique historical, cultural, and economic contribution to American life has made it a singular institution whose future role in the country’s story deserves sober consideration.
First, a confession: My affection for the post office is immoderate. For an inveterate postcard writer, dispatching a bit of epistolary art to any address in the nation for a mere quarter and a dime is a small repeating miracle.
The postal service’s story is fundamentally America’s story. It was there from the beginning. The Constitution enjoined Congress “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”[2] The post office grew with the nation while driving its development. Winifred Gallagher’s history of the post office details its role in virtually every revolution in communication and transportation – canals, stagecoaches, Pony Express, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, civil aviation. Its expansion of services, especially Free City and Rural Free Delivery, helped define lived experience. It still fulfills its creators’ injunction to “bind the nation together” and inform its citizens. Yet, paradoxically, it is a historical treasure whose history is too little known.[3]
The postal service, moreover, suffers from the widespread misconception that it burdens the taxpayer. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 transformed the US Post Office Department into the USPS and mandated that the agency become financially self-sustaining, a goal achieved in 1982. Congress provides funds only to cover congressionally required free services to the blind and overseas voters, a budgetary pittance. It otherwise finances itself solely through sale of services and products.[4]
The USPS perennially faces financial challenges. The internet has eroded its revenues, a circumstance worsened by the Post Office Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This lame-duck enactment compelled the USPS to prepay its full liability for retirees’ medical benefits fifty years in advance across a ten-year period. The impact of this abnormal obligation, unprecedented in either private or public sector, was compounded by the 2008-09 financial crisis.[5] The Independent Policy Institute concludes that, had the USPS not been subject to prepayment, it would have been profitable from 2013 to 2018.[6]
Misapprehensions have created space for specious charges regarding the postal service. Some assert that the USPS loses money by billing private carriers such as Amazon below the cost to move their packages and is hemorrhaging revenue. This claim has been debunked. The USPS is legally obliged never to transport parcels below cost; its arrangement with Amazon makes money. Amazon likely enjoys a favorable rate, but critics should remember that discounting of bulk deliveries is a common business practice and that the USPS handles “last mile” delivery, in other words, not from sender to recipient but only from the recipient’s nearest postal distribution center, where Amazon leaves parcels.[7]
These falsehoods likely arise from desire to privatize the USPS. Cogent arguments can be marshaled for that path; however, privatization would undermine a fundamental pillar of the USPS: its universal mandate, the requirement to deliver to every address at a flat rate. If profitability becomes the postal service’s guiding principle, delivery to rural, remote addresses would not pay. Requiring private carriers to honor this mandate could well push them toward bankruptcy.[8]
The coronavirus has worsened the USPS’s position. It could lose $54 billion in revenues,[9] a major factor in its potential insolvency. A $10 billion loan in the CARES Act has mitigated this shortfall but the need to stabilize the agency’s finances is urgent, especially with the anticipated reliance on mail-in ballots in November.[10] It would also be penny wise, pound foolish during historically high joblessness to hobble an employer of 630,000 workers,[11] the vanguard in offering decent jobs to women, minorities, and veterans. Sustaining the USPS would enable it then to address its long-term financial health. Ending the prepayment obligation would free the agency to focus on capital improvements, research and development, and innovation.[12] Introduction of creative services, such as postal banking or the installation in post offices of media hubs with broadband internet and secure email, could secure the bottom line while addressing socioeconomic inequalities.[13]
The postal service, perhaps because its couriers do indeed make their appointed rounds, is taken for granted. It is easy to forget, as Gallagher emphasizes, that it began as the most democratic of institutions in service of a revolutionary notion: free flow of mail and information as the right of every citizen, not a privileged few. There is reason for hope because of the nearly universal fondness for one’s own carrier and post office.
[1] Lauren Fox and Jeremy Herb, “US Postal Service Warns Congress It Could Become Insolvent Amid Coronavirus,” CNN, 10 April 2020 (www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/politics/postal-service-congress-help/index.html [accessed 14 June 2020]).
[2] Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7.
[3] Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: a History (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
[4] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, pp. 255-61, 273; Eugene Kiely and D’Angelo Gore, “Trump’s Amazon Attack,” FactCheck.Org, 5 April 2018 (www.factcheck.org/2018/04/trumps-amazon-attack/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Kirsten B. Blom and Katelin P. Issacs, US Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits and Pension Funding Issues, Congressional Research Service Report R43349 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 7 January 2015), p. 1.
[5] Jeff Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office,” The Week, 16 April 2018 (https://theweek.com/articles/767184/how-george-bush-broke-post-office [accessed 3 May 2020]); Matthew Yglesias, “The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout Explained,” Vox, 12 April 2020 (www.vox.com/2020/4/12/21218151/usps-bailout-privatization-amazon-trump [accessed 3 May 2020]); Bill McCarthy, “Widespread Facebook Post Blames 2006 Law for US Postal Service’s Financial Woes,” PolitiFact, 15 April 2020 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/widespread-facebook-post-blames-2006-law-us-postal/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Blom and Issacs, US Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits; Al Root, “Why the Stimulus Package Includes $10 Billion for the US Postal Service,” Barron’s, 30 March 2020 (www.barrons.com/articles/the-u-s-postal-service-gets-10-billion-in-the-cares-act-it-needs-the-support-51585489596 [accessed 16 June 2020]).
[6] McCarthy, “Widespread Facebook Post”; Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis–And How to Fix It,” Institute for Policy Studies, 15 July 2019 (https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/ [accessed 15 June 2020]); Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis – And How to Fix It,” Institute for Policy Studies, February 2020 (updated) (www.inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Manufactured-Postal-Crisis-February-2020.pdf [accessed 15 June 2020]).
[7] Nick Wingfield, “Is Amazon Bad for the Postal Service? Or Its Savior?” New York Times, 4 April 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/amazon-postal-service-trump.html [accessed 3 May 2020]); Manuela Tobias, “No, the Postal Service Isn’t Losing a Fortune on Amazon,” PolitiFact, 2 April 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/apr/02/donald-trump/trump-usps-postal-service-amazon-losing-fortune/ [accessed 3 May 2018]); Kiely and Gore, “Trump’s Amazon Attack”; Manuela Tobias, “No, USPS Doesn’t Lose $1.46 on Every Amazon Package,” PolitiFact, 6 April 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/apr/06/eric-bolling/usps-amazon-lose-146-every-package-delivers/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office.”
[8] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 281.
[9] “Postmaster General Statement on US Postal Service Stimulus Needs,” USPS (https://about.usps.com/newsroom/statements/041020-pmg-statement-on-usps-stimulus-needs.htm [accessed 3 May 2020]).
[10] Root, “Why the Stimulus Package Includes $10 Billion.”
[11] “The United States Postal Service Delivers the Facts,” USPS, February 2020.
[12] Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office”; Anderson, Klinger, and Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis.”
[13] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, pp. 266-7, 282-4.
Drat, Grey Lady. Have you no sense of humor? This may be the blog’s shortest entry. The boy scout for all seasons, James Comey, wrote an opinion regarding The Spray Tan Man as the eater of souls. The obvious point Mr. Comey missed is that the already soulless need not fret.
James Comey, “How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Barr,” The New York Times, 2 May 2019, A25 (www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/william-barr-testimony.html).
James Comey’s explication of how President Trump corrupts and reduces those around him is well taken. However, Attorney General William Barr’s conduct suggests his soul was well masticated before he entered the administration and Mr. Trump devoured whole what little remained of it.
Muddying the findings of the Mueller report became a cottage industry in GOP World. If obfuscation is the game, who better to enlist than Victor Davis Hanson? Ever the good soldier, he applied himself with gusto to a willful misreading – if there was a reading – of the Special Counsel’s conclusions. This was not a difficult letter to write, since George Terwilliger III had served as Mr. Hanson’s warmup act.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 May 2019, A9; Yahoo, 9 May 2019 (https://news.yahoo.com/progressives-face-bleak-post-mueller-103001666.html). If The Richmond Times-Dispatch posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version that appeared on Yahoo.
“Hanson Misrepresents Mueller Report Findings,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 16 May 2019, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/letters-to-the-editor-may-16-2019-hanson-misrepresents-mueller-report-findings/article_26be70e6-9913-57d2-88a5-e83a1a4b74ca.html).
Former Attorney General William Barr had his defenders. Whether Thorazine should be prescribed to address their sapiential disarrangement and their tenuous contact with reality makes for good cocktail conversation. Maybe they’re just cynical and dishonest. Whatever the case, onetime acting Attorney General George T. Terwilliger III’s portrayal of William Barr as a paragon of rectitude and the lion of rule of law was perhaps the zenith of Barr apologetics. Then again, Mr. Terwilliger’s balletic skirting of inconvenient, displeasing facts is perhaps a primer on the genesis of the proclivities fueling Trumpism. The Former Fabricator in Chief is not the aberration that GOP worthies would have everyone believe he is. A letter was sent to The Washington Post.
George Terwilliger III, “Barr Acted by the Book,” The Washington Post, 19 April 2019, A15 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/william-barr-did-this-nation-a-great-service-he-shouldnt-be-attacked/2019/04/18/a2e83760-6221-11e9-9412-daf3d2e67c6d_story.html).
“Fallout from the Mueller Report,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A22 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mueller-report-is-out-now-what/2019/04/23/cbcaab9a-6537-11e9-a698-2a8f808c9cfb_story.html).
I don’t read The Wall Street Journal. By all accounts its reporting of news is good, even after having passed under the Mordorian Murdoch regime, but its editorial and opinion pages are, as the kids say, cra-cra, pure, unadulterated, high quality (which means low quality, sapientially speaking) movement-conservative fantasy and supply-side theology. Not wanting digits added to my blood pressure needlessly, I avoid it. I have bought a copy occasionally by accident or for lack of another national newspaper. That’s probably what happened here. When I purchase a newspaper, I want my money’s worth, so I went to the “comforting fiction” pages and was not disappointed. An unsigned editorial and an op-ed by Kimberley A. Strassel were bent upon perpetuating The Conspiracy Theorist in Chief’s assertion that the Special Counsel’s probe was part and parcel of the “Russia hoax” predicated on the mistreatment of onetime National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Ugh. I sent a letter with no expectation it would ever see the light of day. The Wall Street Journal didn’t disappoint.
“The Flynn Entrapment,” The Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2018, A16 (www.wsj.com/articles/the-flynn-entrapment-11544658915).
Kimberley A. Strassel, “Checking Robert Mueller,” The Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2018, A15 (www.wsj.com/articles/checking-robert-mueller-11544745831).
Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI can be equated with “entrapment” only through willful self-deception, the shoveling of manifold facts into the memory hole.
One must first forget that Flynn was informed beforehand that the focus of the interview on 24 January 2017 would be his contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and that Flynn himself signaled his sense that the FBI was already privy to what had been said. He in effect received a take-home examination to which he knew the correct answer and prevaricated anyway. Into the pit of forgetfulness then must be cast Flynn’s dishonesty with Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Sean Spicer in the interval between his chat with Kislyak on 26 December 2016 and the FBI interview. Next to be consigned to oblivion are the potential charges against Flynn for his pre-election dealings with Turkey. One must also ignore Flynn’s grasping for immunity in March 2017 in exchange for testimony before US Senate and House committees because he had “a story to tell.” One finally must purge from consciousness the stated reason for Flynn’s departure from the Trump administration: his dishonesty. To accept that Flynn has been shabbily treated, one must nearly drink the river Lethe dry.
Nor can it be credibly asserted that Flynn was merely doing his job. He had the relevant conversation with Kislyak during the transition just as President Obama was imposing sanctions on Russia for its meddling in the election. There is only one president at a time and Flynn was undermining him, conduct that becomes even more troubling as signs emerge of conversations between Flynn and Kislyak before the 2016 election to arrange a geopolitical “grand bargain.”[1] In light of his misconduct, Flynn has enjoyed gentle treatment.
[1] David Corn and Dan Friedman, “Did Michael Flynn Try to Strike a Grand Bargain with Moscow as It Attacked the 2016 Election?” Mother Jones, 13 December 2018 (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/michael-flynn-contacts-russia-campaign-robert-mueller/ [accessed 16 December 2018]).
After the 2018 midterm elections, President Good People on Both Sides took not days but just hours to send Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III back to Alabama. The dream was had ended for Mr. Sessions. It was a pleasure to see him depart; however, concern arose that his exile from the Trump archipelago represented the initiation of a purge that would endanger the Special Counsel’s investigation. The axing of the Gollum of the South and the elevation of the sycophantic Matt Whitaker to acting attorney general led Indivisible and other activists to stage protests across the country to demand that Robert Mueller be kept in place; I attended one in front of Richmond’s federal building. I sent a letter to The Washington Post in response to its reporting of Mr. Session’s banishment.
Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, and Josh Dawsey, “Trump Forces Sessions Out as Attorney General,” The Washington Post, 8 November 2018, A1, A10 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-resigns-at-trumps-request/2018/11/07/d1b7a214-e144-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html).
“Exit Mr. Sessions, Enter Chaos,” The Washington Post, 11 November 2018, A26 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-exits-chaos-enters/2018/11/09/27e2351e-e38e-11e8-ba30-a7ded04d8fac_story.html). (Scroll down).
It was inevitable that the letter-writing would lead to tinkering with an editorial. This spur for this virgin effort was The Grand Prevaricator’s tapping of the bellicose John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. This was not the choice of a chief executive determined to pursue a reasoned, sober foreign policy. Many hoped that President Stable Genius would never face a crisis for fear of an awful outcome. The installation of the incessantly saber-rattling Mr. Bolton magnified the chances for the genesis of crises where none need exist.
The piece is essentially a call for a Republican, any Republican, to restrain Mr. Trump. No one in the national GOP had done so to this point. The Richmond Times-Dispatch justifiably passed on it because it was double the length of a typical editorial. A pitch was then made to The Huffington Post, but nothing came of it. I then set the essay aside and never returned to it.
Freedland, Trump, Bolton, Lee, Chirac.
While in London in late 2017 I was reading local newspapers and stumbled across an editorial by a favorite writer, Jonathan Freedland (“The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017). As the first year of the Trump administration lurched toward its close, Mr. Freedland reflected on a book he had written two decades ago in which he had professed his admiration for the ideals enshrined in the United States’ founding documents and for the intricate constitutional mechanism devised by the nation’s founders (Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic [London: Fourth Estate Ltd., 1998]). In Mr. Freedland’s view, the colonies had purloined a revolution that by right belonged to the English, hence his call to “bring home the revolution” and reshape the United Kingdom’s government on the American pattern. On 2017’s penultimate day, Mr. Freedland was disillusioned. The first year of the Trump presidency had revealed inherent flaws in the American constitutional order and he despaired of its capacity, despite its manifold merits, to correct itself.
Saddened by Mr. Freedland’s loss of faith, I sent a letter to the newspaper, perhaps as much to “buck up” myself as Mr. Freedland and to assure our transatlantic admirer that, in the words of a British comedy troupe, “we’re not dead yet” (“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism’ and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29). The letter underscored the potency of the “resistance” to Mr. Trump and identified the ultimate corrective to his misrule: the electoral repudiation of his GOP enablers in the 2018 midterms, the removal of Mr. Trump through the ballot box in 2020, and a gradual restoration of normative political practice.
In the months since my sojourn among our British cousins, the United States’ circumstance has gravely worsened and Mr. Freedland’s outlining of a pair of defects in American governance grows in resonance. He asserted first that the proper functioning of the American constitutional system depends upon the election of a chief executive with personal integrity and an unwavering commitment to the public weal. By this standard, it is now incontrovertible that the incorrigible Mr. Trump is a lost cause. Appeal neither to reason nor common decency gives him pause. He stands as a moral and ethical cypher, a man deficient in understanding and allergic to principle, a living syllabus of our darker impulses, the untrammeled national id exposed and unleashed.
Mr. Trump now jettisons one after the another the members of the small and shrinking coterie of “adults” supposed to blunt his impulsivity. He liberates himself from relevant experience, informed opinion, and sober analysis. Still more vexing is his selection of former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. Mr. Trump is installing in this critical post the most unreconstructed, most unapologetic of the neoconservative Iraq War deadenders. A probable Islamophobe and a certain saber-rattler unable to pass the scrutiny of confirmation by a Republican Senate in 2005, Mr. Bolton was a leading light in the Project for a New American Century and among its members who ultimately insinuated themselves deeply into President George W. Bush’s administration. He was a signatory to this cabal’s infamous 1998 open letter exhorting President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power, three years before the 9/11 attacks and five years before Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction became the pretext for the greatest blunder in modern American foreign policy, a misstep whose toll in lost American credibility on the world stage still mounts.
Mr. Trump on his own abrogates American leadership in the community of nations and, when abroad, inflicts misinformed diatribes on America’s allies and seems at his ease only in the company of despots and thugs, a sadly embarrassing affront to every thinking American. Mr. Bolton will neither restrain Mr. Trump nor offer him sage counsel and likely will only encourage Mr. Trump to intermingle American foreign policy with his vanity, vindictiveness, and projection. One must wonder whether Mr. Trump’s personal peccadilloes – his ceaseless need to shift the narrative from his past and present transgressions – will become a driving force in foreign affairs. Be this as may, the elevation of Mr. Bolton near the seat of power pushes the hands of the doomsday clock a few clicks nearer to midnight.
Mr. Trump’s manifest deficiency as chief executive leads to Mr. Freedland’s other critique of the state of play in American governance, his understanding that the constitutional mechanism runs smoothly when political groups operate in good faith, accept the legitimacy of their opponents, and, at any critical juncture, prioritize the national interest above narrow partisan advantage. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is a paragon of political virtue but their defects are asymmetrical, the sins of the GOP active and those of the Democrats reactive. The Democrats in any event are in power in no corner of government. Restraint on an unfettered and perhaps unbalanced executive must come from the GOP. A few months back, one could hope that a drubbing in the 2018 midterms and a few electoral cycles in the political wilderness – an overdue pause for introspection – might return the Republican Party to itself. Mr. Trump’s mercurial conduct unfortunately eliminates the luxury of waiting for a gradual political realignment. Action is imperative. It is incumbent on the governing party to act. The Republican Party must demonstrate that, unlike Mr. Trump, it is not a lost cause.
The signs on this front are not encouraging. GOP senators and congressmen have by and large maintained a studied silence in the face of Mr. Trump’s antics. A few Republican senators – Messrs. McCain, Flake, Sasse, Corker, Graham – have from time to time uttered fine words but a concrete act to constrain Mr. Trump’s misbehavior and malfeasance is nowhere in evidence. The GOP seems to have forgotten a fundamental truth. Retired Sen. Harry Reid has recounted a reminder the late Sen. Robert Byrd gave his colleagues: “I don’t serve under the president; I serve with the president” (Carl Hulse, “Senator’s Farewell: ‘I Just Shake My Head,’” The New York Times, 24 March 2018, A11 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/us/politics/harry-reid-leaves-washington.html]). Do Republicans not recall that the legislature is a coequal branch of government and enjoys pride of place in the Constitution? The federal government is not a parliamentary system, though the GOP sometimes seemingly wishes it were. The political calculus in the US Senate is uncomplicated: A handful of Republican votes in concert with Democrats can serve as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s excesses. This would be less an act of courage than a minimal declaration of fealty to the American constitutional system.
Should Republicans, nevertheless, require an example of political courage to emulate, they need not look far nor to the distant past. In 2001, Rep. Barbara Lee cast the lone dissenting vote in the House against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and there was nary a nay registered in the Senate. Her opposition sprang not from pacifism but from her conviction that the legislature should not abdicate its oversight of the executive in making the most profound decision, to commit the nation’s treasure and its youth to armed conflict. She refused to grant the executive a blank check. To paraphrase Martin Luther, there she stood for she could do no other. The fullness of time has vindicated her adherence to principle. Would that a handful of GOP senators might muster the fortitude of a Barbara Lee.
Despite Mr. Trump’s willful misconduct, the nation still has friends abroad. The stock of goodwill has not yet been exhausted. Hope endures that the United States will return to the first principles that, while often observed imperfectly, made the American constitutional system admired and emulated. Jonathan Freedland’s distress at our present predicament underscores a useful truism: The outsider sometimes perceives us with greater clarity than we see ourselves. Friends also sometimes offer well-meaning advice, counsel that should not be summarily dismissed. The document though which thirteen colonies dissolved its bond to the British crown underscored the importance “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” as the nascent nation embarked on a fateful path. Perhaps in this moment America’s leadership should declaim less and listen more to what the world is saying to it. Nicholas Kristof recently acknowledged his experience of déjà vu, a feeling that 2018 seems uncomfortably like 2002 and 2003 (“I’m Worried Now, as Before the Iraq War,” New York Times, 22 March 2018, A21 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/iraq-war-north-korea-iran.html]). Mr. Kristof is not alone in this. The American political memory can be unforgivably short. As the drumbeat for intervention in Iraq moved to a crescendo, the late French President Jacques Chirac, a man with an abiding affection for America, warned that the country was on the cusp of a potentially momentous mistake. GOP congressmen in response replaced french-fries with “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria and the nation careered toward a grand foreign policy debacle. Must this partisan thickness be repeated? The time for both Democratic and Republican legislators to exercise the prerogatives and responsibilities of their offices is now. This cannot and must not be left to the election.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the gift that kept on giving, until he didn’t. His elevation to Generalissimo El Trumpo’s – apologies to Ted Rall – cabinet left his Senate seat open. The GOP primary to fill it was a freak show. Yet, it was more than a freak show. It was a syllabus of the Republican Party’s vices and the race grew more perverse as it proceeded. The revelation of “Judge” Roy Moore’s alleged high regard for young, delightfully young, women came later. On the plus side, the GOP tomfoolery opened the lane for Doug Jones to secure the seat, a good, albeit temporary, outcome. The Washington Post passed on this missive too. I can’t image why, he mutters to himself once again ironically.
Robert Costa, “Trump’s Fraying Relationship with GOP Colors Ala. Special Election,” The Washington Post, 14 August 2017, A1, A4 (www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/trumps-feuding-base-faces-showdown-in-alabama-senate-race/2017/08/13/b37a6f24-7ed6-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html).
Perhaps the special election for the US Senate seat in Alabama would be a sadly amusing farce were it not an image in microcosm of the maladies besetting the GOP: a religious bigot and homophobe (former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore) vies with a Tea Party zealot (US Congressman Mo Brooks) to unseat a hard-right apparatchik (US Senator Luther Strange) installed by a rank family-values hypocrite (former Alabama Governor Robert Bentley) to serve in place of an unqualified and ethically compromised US Attorney General (Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) who may have perjured himself in his confirmation hearing, each candidate kowtowing to Mr. Trump for his endorsement, each candidate posturing as more Trumpian than Trump. This reality is made sadder by the probability that the Republican Party primary may as well be the election itself in deep red Alabama. With candidates and a political culture such as these, how can President Obama’s forlorn wish for the breaking of the GOP’s “fever” ever be realized?
Nothing appeals more than spewing invective into the vicinity of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. In a rational world, Mr. Sessions would never have been confirmed as attorney general. He is the same man who couldn’t pass muster for a federal judgeship in 1986 because of his bigotry. Was it to be supposed that he grew more tolerant in the interim? Anyway, he had the brass ring in a death grip and it would have to be prized from his fingers. It may have been just as well that he remained in place for a while if it ensured that the country would endure less of William Barr or someone worse. Mr. Sessions is a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging doofus. William Barr is competently malevolent. There remains little sport in lambasting Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of shooting catfish in a barrel. The Washington Post passed on this response to its news reporting. I can’t imagine why, he says to himself ironically.
Robert Costa, Sari Horwitz, and Matt Zapotosky, “Jeff Sessions Says He Plans to Stay in Role, Despite Trump’s Comments about Him,” The Washington Post, 20 July 2017 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-says-he-plans-to-stay-in-role-despite-trumps-comments-about-him/2017/07/20/527e53d4-6d51-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html).
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s determination to remain U. S. Attorney General is unfortunate. Mr. Sessions’ antediluvian attitude toward voting rights, his antipathy toward immigrants, and his resolve to resuscitate a failed war on drugs should have disqualified him from the office. He has blemished the position by enabling Mr. Trump’s basest, most autocratic impulses. His lone unsordid act – recusal from the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election – was not motivated by principle but by backlash against his dissembling under oath.
In the face of Mr. Trump’s recent and somewhat bizarre criticism of him, integrity demands that Mr. Sessions resign. Nothing indeed would so become Mr. Sessions in his time as Attorney General as his leaving of it, if he can muster sufficient principle to use his departure to make a statement: the Attorney General serves at the President’s will but is not and cannot be the chief executive’s lackey.
The Richmond Free Press enabled me to take a swipe at Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, and for that I am grateful. For better or worse, I’m a product of public schools and state university systems. The value of decent public schools is no abstraction for me. Living in Richmond has only reinforced this. Virginia’s twin legacies of “massive resistance” against integration of schools and of the white flight that accompanied desegregation are yet to be resolved. It, moreover, is a sad reality that many state-of-the-art liberals mouth support for public education but then epiphanously discover that it’s a poor fit for their own brood – elegant hypocrisy – while still deeming it fine for everyone else’s children. You people know who you are and you should be ashamed.
Neoliberal takeover and plutocratic meddling have made the terrain that public education must traverse yet more challenging. The right’s impulse to privatize all things manifests itself in propagandistic assaults on public education, especially demonization of teachers. And then there was Bill Gates, who aimed his money cannon at a regime of oversight and testing that unfortunately drew public resources in its wake and has yet to yield positive results, a plutocratic deformation of educational policy that squandered a decade and was foisted on the county by an individual with no discernible expertise in education.
Betsy DeVos is the high priestess of the neoliberal besieging of education. Her contempt for public schools was barely concealed, when concealed at all. In a just world, she would peddle Amway and Bibles door to door for her remaining span on this mortal coil.
Holly Rodriquez, “School Culture Change Needed with New Superintendent,” The Richmond Free Press, 25-27 May 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/may/26/school-culture-change-needed-new-superintendent/).
Associated Press, “School Choice To Be Expanded By Feds,” The Richmond Free Press, 25-27 May 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/may/26/school-choice-be-expanded-feds/).
“Beware of Some Education Solutions,” The Richmond Free Press, 1-3 June 2017, A9 (https://issuu.com/richmondfreepress/docs/june_1-3__2017_issue).