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 drawing of specious analogies seems to have been key to A. Barton Hinkle’s editorializing modus operandi. In this case, it operates on multiple levels. He first equated hard science with economic “science” and insinuated that the laws of each were immutable and irresistible. He then suggested that denial of climate change by the right parallels the left’s belief that a higher minimum wage would not eliminate jobs. After a look into the research on the consequences of minimum-wage hikes, a reply was sent to The Richmond Times-Dispatch, it was printed, and I was “correspondent of the day” again. Huzzah, huzzah.
A. Barton Hinkle, “Is It Time to Start Dismissing ‘Economics Deniers’?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 June 2017, A13 (https://richmond.com/opinion/editorial/a-barton-hinkle-column-is-it-time-to-start-dismissing-economics-deniers/article_c03ebb06-7321-5477-96df-2822a131b3ba.html).
“It’s Too Early to Draw Conclusions,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 20 June 2017, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-july-20-2017-its-too-early-to-draw-conclusions/article_2f9c5a97-0b2c-547e-98c5-bd054702cb5a.html).
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).
Among letters that never reached print, this is one of the more interesting ones. It responded to an opinion from an in-house editorialist at The Richmond Times-Dispatch, A. Barton Hinkle, who since has decamped for the private sector, Dominion Energy I think. Mr. Hinkle’s op-ed was either disingenuous or clueless or cluelessly disingenuous or disingenuously clueless. His thesis, to the extent he had one, was that the media is dishonest, politicians are dishonest, I do declare, whatever am poor, pitiful I to do? He presented this as a symmetrical affliction of both left and right, an annoying and misleading absurdity.
I sent the letter and it didn’t appear in the paper. There’s no entitlement to have an item printed but this one was especially on point and it touched upon journalism. I was curious about why it hadn’t made the cut and had a polite email exchange with the letters editor. I noted that the tetchiness between politicians and the media had gained a further dimension since the letter’s submission because Greg Gianforte, a GOP congressional candidate, had assaulted Ben Jacobs, a reporter for The Guardian. It should be noted, parenthetically, that President World Wrestling Entertainment nodded his approval of Mr. Gianforte’s criminous conduct, the Montanan won his race, and now, after a hot minute in Congress, is the state’s governor.
The editor cited a technicality, that fewer than sixty days had passed since a letter from me had been printed. The point could be contested, but I was invited to resubmit it after the moratorium, which by any mode of counting had passed. I did. It wasn’t printed and, of the stuff on the blog, it has the distinction of double rejection by the same outlet. The relevant wisdom comes from W. C. Fields: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point being a damn fool about it.” This was a wall against which I didn’t need to beat my head.
A. Barton Hinkle, “Who’s Telling the Truth in Washington? Anyone?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 21 May 2017, E5 (https://richmond.com/opinion/editorial/a-barton-hinkle-column-whos-telling-the-truth-in-washington-anyone/article_63dfa5c6-376e-5a2e-a78b-3e119bcc4c8d.html).
A. Barton Hinkle’s recent opinion piece (“Who’s Telling the Truth in Washington? Anyone?,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 21, 2017, E1, E5) misleads and lacks the balanced presentation of fact which Mr. Hinkle purports to champion.
Mr. Hinkle repeats the tired bromide of liberal bias in the “mainstream” media and then rehearses the canonical list of journalistic missteps. Absent from his excoriation of media is a Fox News network whose viewers have repeatedly been found the least informed, indeed the most misinformed, among consumers of major media outlets and are sometimes better served by no news at all. He likewise ignores a network of right-wing “think tanks” whose goal is ideological advocacy, not dispassionate regard for truth.
These omissions are stunning during a week in which Fox News begrudgingly disavowed its “investigative reporting” surrounding the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, a conspiracy theory dragged from the muck of far-right fever swamps. This correction perhaps represents progress under Fox’s new regime, since the late Roger Ailes would acknowledge only the most egregious errors. Is Mr. Hinkle so transfixed by the mote in the “mainstream” media’s eye that the nearby dangling beam vanishes? The comedian Stephen Colbert’s famous quip has never cut so sharp or true: “It is a well-known fact that reality has a liberal bias.”
Mr. Hinkle’s facile cynicism maligns journalists who toil in good faith against deadline to produce “history’s first draft.” This draft is sometimes messy. Sources can mislead. A journalist, like everyone, harbors political views. A rogue reporter sometimes willfully deceives. None of this on balance invalidates journalism’s service as bulwark against public malfeasance and corruption.
Mr. Hinkle seems to offer only a peculiar informational nihilism. In days when Russian President Putin baldly undermines Americans’ faith in media and institutions and President Trump seemingly admires Putin’s program, Mr. Hinkle’s critique, doubtless unintentionally, reads like useful idiocy.
An open question during the first days of the Trump administration began to be answered early on. The fallout from the exile of FBI Director James Comey was clarifying. Hard on the heels of Mr. Comey’s dismissal it emerged that The Dear Leader possibly divulged classified material from Israeli sources to Russia’s US Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavarov. The public then learned of His Eminence’s alleged buttonholing of Mr. Comey to press for quashing the FBI probe of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russians. Would the national Republican Party, those rock-ribbed paragons of civic rectitude, check President Golf Cart’s authoritarian and self-dealing inclinations or would they submit to and become tacitly complicit in his antics? Would a rump of old school GOPers survive or would the Party of Trump devour the GOP tout entier?
The latter seemed more likely with each passing day. Some critical statements came from the usual Republican suspects – Senators Bob Corker, John McCain, Lindsey Graham (as a ventriloquist’s doll), and Ben Sasse and Representative Jason Chaffetz. From these, Mr. McCain belongs to the ages, Mr. Corker is retired, and Mr. Chaffetz fled Congress to become a Trumpy talking head on Fox News. And there is Mr. Graham, whose spine has proven detachable. The GOP leadership otherwise seemed determined to ignore The Fabulist in Chief’s behavior. A Patches O’Houlihan strategy was adopted to cope with a pesky press corps: “Dodge, duck, dip, dive, dodge.” The letter addresses the Party of Benghazi’s hesitancy to look at these matters.
Elise Viebeck, Sean Sullivan, and Mike DeBonis, “Controversies Rattle Hill Republicans,” The Washington Post, 17 May 2017, A7 (www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/lawmakers-to-trump-turn-over-transcript-of-meeting-with-russians/2017/05/16/e9b6deb6-3a3d-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html).
It is understandable that the GOP’s congressional wing is “rattled” by President Trump’s grave missteps; however, mumbling, noncommittal responses, temporizing, and inaction are no longer acceptable.
Strong statements made by some GOP senators – Messrs. Corker, McCain, Graham, Sasse, et al. – have been welcome but these sentiments must now be translated into concrete action. It is noteworthy that the lone GOP committee chair thus far to demand Mr. Comey’s memoranda, Mr. Chaffetz, is not seeking reelection. Is resignation the GOP’s precondition for political courage?
The near silence of the GOP’s congressional leadership speaks loudly. Majority Leader McConnell should for a moment cease to be the “Bluegrass Machiavelli” and Speaker Ryan should endeavor not to live down to Charlie Pierce’s recent characterization of him as an “intellectual invertebrate” (Chris Hayes, “All In,” MSNBC, May 16, 2017). They should jointly support the call for an independent investigation of the Russian affair and for open public testimony by Mr. Comey before the appropriate committees. The calculus of political advantage must yield to the national interest and the people’s right to know.
This is another failed response to a news story, in this instance what historians will likely view as a milestone of the Trump regime, the sacking of FBI Director James Comey. The axing of Mr. Comey, for whom I have no great regard, is wedded in memory with a personal event. The news broke while I was killing time in a waiting room as My Beloved was undergoing laparoscopy on a knee. During her convalescence, the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Comey dismissal was our principal diversion.
The event afforded me another opportunity to take a swipe at the appalling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. By acceding to the Mr. Comey’s banishment, the attorney general undid his lone virtuous act, his honoring of the Office of Legal Counsel’s advice to recuse himself from oversight of the Department of Justice’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It seemed clear that canning the FBI director was intended to hobble the investigation by other means. It was becoming evident by this juncture that neither competence nor honesty nor respect for rule of law would be the métier of Trumpian governance.
The unpublished letter is a standard response to the situation. It does contain a misstep in form, an allusion to another letter that had been published. No one cares about that; however, it indicates how exercised I was by Mr. Sessions’ tenure as attorney general.
Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky, “Trump Fires FBI Director,” The Washington Post, 10 May 2017, A1, A4 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comeys-removal-sparks-fears-about-future-of-russia-probe/2017/05/09/013d9ade-3507-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html).
My recent letter (“Mr. McCain’s Words and Actions,” Washington Post, February 2, 2017) implored Senator John McCain to match his fair criticism of President Trump with action by voting against the most troubling of the president’s cabinet nominees, among them former Senator Jeff Sessions.
Attorney General Sessions’ involvement in the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey – notwithstanding Mr. Session’s recusal of himself from the FBI’s examination of Russian meddling in the 2016 election – exposes the danger inherent in acceding to an unqualified, temperamentally unsuitable, and potentially compromised nominee.
It is imperative that Republicans resist Mr. Trump’s baldly transparent effort to hamstring the FBI probe and stand with Democrats in calling for a special prosecutor to investigate potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Statesmanship and defense of the constitutional system must outweigh partisanship and the Senate must defend the government’s balance of power against a disingenuous and unscrupulous chief executive. Senator McCain and his Republican senatorial colleagues can perform signal service to the nation by joining with their Democratic counterparts.
Once President Ramp Waddler was comfortably installed in his sinecure, he and the congressional GOP revved up the legislative engine to implement its policy for all seasons, the measure that resolves every problem, addresses every issue, redresses every grievance, and virtually ensures the coming of the millennium, except that it has never once delivered on its promise when assessed empirically. It was time to cut some taxes. And, if it’s time to cut some taxes, it’s time to release the Laffer. Yes, voodoo economist – Poppy Bush’s characterization, not mine – Arthur Laffer hit the cable news bricks. The man is incorrigible. His imperviousness to contrary data, indeed to reality, amazes.
Peter Baker synopsized the Laffer saga well. My letter is largely anti-supply-side boilerplate; however, it does contain a small critique. Mr. Baker, had he more room to run, might have examined what was happening in states that were inflicting the Laffer orthodoxy on their citizens. He might also have looked at the states embracing the heretical path and raising taxes. The GOP loves the “fifty laboratories of the states,” except when it doesn’t, and this is one of those times.
Peter Baker, “A ’70s Economic Theory Comes to Life Once More,” The New York Times, 26 April 2017, A19 (www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/politics/white-house-economic-policy-arthur-laffer.html).
The evergreenness of Arthur Laffer’s supply-side theory is a marvel. Given more space, Peter Baker’s lucid assessment of supply-side economics as federal tax policy might have included a few words concerning its efficacy in the putative laboratories of the states.
Kansas’s shuttered classrooms, truncated school years, neglected infrastructure, exploding deficits, and flirtation with fiscal insolvency since Governor Sam Brownback – with Mr. Laffer as his guru – sharply reduced taxes in 2012 are well known. Perhaps more instructive is the counter-example of California’s robust economy since Governor Jerry Brown hiked taxes, also in 2012, an increase borne mainly by the wealthiest, those who routinely benefit most from Lafferian tax schemes.
And yet, despite no instance in which the theory has fulfilled its promise of fiscal neutrality – a balancing of lost tax revenues by economic growth and a broadened tax base – the idea persists. Perhaps it is evergreen like a weed.
Messrs. Trump, Ryan, and McConnell should remember that GOP control of the government grants them full ownership, for good or ill, of a Laffer-style tax giveaway.
Another whiff. It is sometimes possible to say something nice. Stanley McChrystal is one of the more interesting soldiers to have become a general officer. He’s what passes for unconventional in that rarefied demographic. He supports public broadcasting and makes a good case for it, so I sent a note.
Stanley McChrystal, “Save PBS. It Makes Us Safer,” The New York Times, 5 April 2017, A23 (www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/opinion/stanley-mcchrystal-save-pbs-it-makes-us-safer.html).
Kudos to Gen. Stanley McChrystal for his thoughtful defense of public broadcasting and its crucial role in childhood education. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting remains a great value per dollar spent and public radio and television not only inform but uplift and strengthen the bonds of our common humanity. I suspect that General McChrystal has had the experience common to public radio listeners of sitting in the driveway with the car idling while waiting for a compelling report or story to conclude.
This is the first of several failures to connect. It is also my maiden effort to send something to a magazine, The Atlantic.
The letter addresses an article by Peter Beinart, a moderately conservative writer. Mr. Beinart, it seemed to me, was suffering from a malady common to Never-Trumpers following President Two Corinthians’ electoral ascent. Horrified by the incivility of it all, he was grappling with how to account for the ugliness of the politics without implicating movement conservatism as a culprit. This is a quintessential grasping-at-straws project. Mr. Beinart landed on cratering attendance at churches and burgeoning secularism as his analytical magician’s wand. The intersection of religion and politics fascinates me, so I dashed off a response.
The critiques to level against Mr. Beinart’s analysis are legion; the letter hits some high points.
Peter Beinart, “Breaking Faith,” The Atlantic, April 2017, 15-17 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/).
Peter Beinart’s fascinating analysis of the political effects of declining church attendance and growing secularism leaves many germane issues unaddressed. He identifies a coarsening of political impulses but offers no solution, unless one infers a “re-churching” of America as his tacit wish; however, it should not be assumed willy-nilly that even ugly, high-volume political dialogue is a problem or even especially aberrant across the nation’s history.
Mr. Beinart concedes many evangelical voters’ animus toward African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and the LGBT community, but needs to explain the grand value of those attending church being slightly less intolerant than evangelicals outside church. He might also consider whether non-churchgoing evangelicals were already more intolerant than their regularly attending brethren. Mr. Beinart, moreover, ignores another source of the vitriolic intolerance found in corners of the right: the GOP’s progressive stultification of its voters through rejection of every inconvenient fact and its playing of culturally charged, dog-whistle politics since the late sixties, tactics employed particularly to motivate evangelical voters. The GOP’s seemingly calculated failure to fulfill promises to evangelicals makes locating a wellspring of unreasoning anger unchallenging. Mr. Beinart should also remember that political incivility flows top downward as easily as bottom upward. Has either major party been a paragon of civility in recent years? How many political norms can Mr. Beinart name not yet violated by the country’s elected officials?
Like many right-leaning commentators, try as he might, Mr. Beinart seems unable to resist drawing a fallacious equivalence between the “insurgencies” of the left and the right. A long-persecuted minority culture’s drive to embrace and preserve its identity cannot be equated with a majority culture’s sense of entitlement and prejudice.
Mr. Beinart finally must explain why voters across the political spectrum should not gravitate more toward “revolution” than “reform” when confronted by two corporatist parties awash in donations, neither seeming responsive to the individual voter’s travails. Mr. Beinart seems nostalgic for a mythical past during which politics was played by Marquess of Queensbury rules when in fact, across its history, America’s political game has often been, sometimes by necessity, a freestyle cage match.
I am fond of The Richmond Free Press. Free weeklies give a city character and The Richmond Free Press is a quality weekly. Even better, it has a crusading spirit. It suffers no confusion about its mission or its readership. It doesn’t engage in journalistic triangulation. It also presents a vital counterpoint to Richmond’s daily print outlet. Now that the coronavirus is ebbing, I’m looking forward to pulling a pulp copy from the box every week. The paper has a good letters policy; it accepts more lengthy screeds.
In March 2017, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III slithered from the Potomac to the James to address a law-enforcement crowd. What is there to say about the man, other than that he’s a Trumpian sack of trash? Rarely has a cabinet official been more ill-suited for the position or for the moment. Integrity was evinced during his tenure by a lone, solitary act that was in fact a promise not to act; there will be more about that later. Mr. Sessions’ speech in Richmond was a signaling of nefarious intent, a probable expansion of the prison industrial complex by resurrecting practices likely to target Blacks and the poor disproportionately. Somehow it slipped his mind to invite The Richmond Free Press, the outlet most likely to speak to these communities. I do declare, how ever could that have happened?
Free Press Staff, wire reports, “Sessions Seeks to Revive Federal Anti-Crime Program that Targeted African-Americans,” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 March 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/mar/17/sessions-seeks-revive-federal-anti-crime-program-t/).
“Exclusion ‘Appalling but Unsurprising,’” The Richmond Free Press, 23-25 March 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/mar/24/exclusion-appalling-unsurprising/).