In the beforetimes, when the coronavirus was just a gleam in a pangolin’s eye, I took in the odd concert. Richmond has a wonderful venue, the National, where I’ve attended many shows. The National has a sister venue – the NorVa – and I found myself in Portsmouth-Norfolk in May 2019 for a double bill: The Last Internationale (awesome!) and Tom Morello (transcendent!). It was an evening of music to move my pale white booty along with politics to take to the street. Check both out, if you haven’t.
While in town, I sampled the region’s local paper, The Virginian-Pilot. A letter in it defended the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 census. The newspaper took a pass on the letter I sent. The census remains vexing. The worst efforts to skew it – the citizenship question, President Id Personified’s call to purge the undocumented from the numbers used for reapportionment of legislative seats – were thwarted; nevertheless, the pandemic likely ensured a flawed count that will serve right-wing interests.
Maurice F. Conner, “Citizenship Status Is Needed,” The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_6b097382-772e-11e9-bb92-cbbec9217c7c.html).
Maurice Connor (The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12) rightly calls for Congress to address immigration reform and decries President Trump’s divisive rhetoric but he misreads the reasons why the citizenship question will potentially reappear in the 2020 Census after having been deemed unnecessary and counterproductive more than a half century ago.
There is no legal requirement that the census ask about citizenship. The Constitution mandates that the census count people, not citizens, because the nation has always been home to multitudes of non-citizens, documented and undocumented. The Census Bureau estimates that the question will reduce participation by non-citizens by 5.1 percent and cause an undercount of 6.5 million.[1]
Far more troubling is the probability that the resurrection of the citizenship question was politically motivated. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who initially asserted that the question arose from a Justice Department request, conceded last October that he had discussed the matter with then Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who encouraged Ross to contact Kris Kobach, [2] the Kansas secretary of state infamous for efforts to disqualify voters and for leadership of Trump’s farcical voter fraud commission. Beyond any dishonesty by Ross in congressional testimony, the question’s origin smacks at best of an attempt at demographic gerrymandering and at worst of the pursuit of alt-right, anti-immigrant policies through the vehicle of the census.
The Supreme Court should not permit Trump and his minions to corrupt yet another institution by politically weaponizing it.
[1] Dana Milbank, “Saving White Hegemony in Four Little Steps,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A21 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-census-case-presents-how-to-preserve-white-hegemony-in-four-easy-steps/2019/04/23/ef2b6712-660b-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html).
[2] Glenn Thrush and Adam Liptack, “Wilbur Ross Changes Story on Discussion of Citizenship Question in Census,” The New York Times, 12 October 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/politics/wilbur-ross-commerce-census-citizenship.html).
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).
The Richmond Free Press in March 2019 ran a pair of articles touching on education, one of them a wire service report on the College Blues scandal, the other a story by Jeremy M. Lazarus on the mayor of Richmond’s resolve to improve the funding of the city’s public schools. The maladies assailing education from preschool to graduate programs are manifold and my ideas about the sources of the illness are well formed; perhaps there will be more about that later. Suffice it to say that it’s impossible to disentangle the issue from the country’s politics.
“Fallout Continues from College Admissions Scandal,” The Richmond Free Press, 14-16 March 2019, A1, A5 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/15/fallout-continues-college-admissions-scandal/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Stand By Your Plan,” The Richmond Free Press, 14-16 March 2019, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/15/stand-your-plan/).
“Gaming the College Admissions System and Defunding K-12 Public Education,” The Richmond Free Press, 21-23 March 2019, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/22/gaming-college-admissions-system-and-defunding-k-1/).
My regard for Eric Alterman cannot be higher. When he took aim at Facebook for its exploitation of users’ data, it was an opportunity to roll out a short-form version of my spiel on social media. On this topic, consistency is categorically not the hallmark of a hobgoblin-infested small mind.
Eric Alterman, “The Social Menace,” The Nation, 28 January/4 February 2019, 6 (www.thenation.com/article/archive/facebook-spies-alterman/).
Thanks to Eric Alterman for his incisive assessment of the arrogance, avarice, and mendacity of Facebook’s top executives and of the platform’s toxic impact on the nation’s politics.
Equally troubling is Facebook’s sociocultural effect. Years ago, a friend – a recent Facebook hire – pressed my wife and me to join the nascent social media behemoth. I demurred because the enterprise seemed narcissistic, an invitation to drown in the trivial. My Facebook-free existence has been in no respect inimical to personal fulfillment. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of boundless “connectivity” paradoxically leaves people atomized as, stricken by “fear of missing out” and grasping for “likes,” they tap, tap, tap and curate their lives for a faceless electronic throng rather than living them. Immersion in social media is not inherently bad but there are so many better things to do.
Early in 2019, a local guy – Raymond B. Wallace – had an opinion published by The Richmond Times-Dispatch in which he fulminated about the distressing decline in quality of broadcast news, especially the cable news outlets. By decline, he apparently meant that the news was not being reported in a pleasing manner, and pleasing was evidently some version of Fox News. The reasoning was more than a tad motivated. Mr. Wallace also purports to outline the history of the spiral downward in reportage that he perceived. The secret behind offering a history of anything is knowing the history of something; the salient facts of this history seem to have evaded his notice. The Richmond Times-Dispatch didn’t publish my response to Mr. Wallace.
Raymond B. Wallace, “What’s Happened to Television Journalism?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 11 January 2019, A9 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/ray-wallace-column-whats-happened-to-television-journalism/article_5d8598f6-9edc-548e-b68b-1e89bd73cec5.html).
Raymond B. Wallace’s excoriation of cable news suffers from lack of historical context. The genesis of today’s polarized cable news environment is not difficult to locate.
The FCC in 1987 suspended the Fairness Doctrine, under which the granting of broadcasting licenses was conditioned upon a commitment both to cover controversial matters of public significance and to present differing opinions regarding them. Efforts by the US Congress to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine legislatively were thwarted by President Reagan’s veto in 1987 and President Bush’s threatened veto in 1991. The quashing of the Fairness Doctrine fostered the proliferation of political talk radio and it is likely no coincidence that Rush Limbaugh’s show first went national in 1988.
The polarization was sharpened with passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Intended to foster media competition, the legislation has had precisely the opposite effect, the concentration of ownership of electronic media into progressively fewer hands. It likewise is probably not coincidental that Fox News went live eight months after President Clinton signed the bill.
Mr. Wallace seems curiously untroubled by elements of the media environment he decries: the nearly monopolistic domination of political talk radio by the right and the concentration of control of local electronic media into fewer hands, control responsible for the sad spectacle last year of dozens of anchors at Sinclair Broadcasting stations mouthing the same editorial verbatim in a “forced read.” One must wonder whether Mr. Wallace’s problem is less that each cable outlet has selected its editorial lane and more that some outlets have the temerity to gainsay and fact-check the notoriously mendacious Trump administration. Whatever the case, he asserts that a myriad of stories goes largely unreported except by Fox; nevertheless, I, no Fox viewer, was substantially informed regarding every story he cites. How could this have happened?
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]).
President Sword Dance is a transparently defective human being, but that’s not to suggest that he doesn’t possess a singular talent. His capacity to up the ante on public degeneracy is nonpareil. In autumn 2018, the Saudis, apparently by order of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, converted their consulate in Istanbul into an abattoir. American resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi was slaughtered, perhaps vivisected, because he had offended the prince’s delicate sensibilities (i.e., spoken truth to power). President Glow-Orb’s whitewashing of the matter was an appalling example of the potential convergence of his fanboy-level adoration of autocrats, his personal financial interests, and his transactional understanding of all relationships, whether personal, business, or diplomatic. Josh Dawsey, Shane Harris, and Karen DeYoung – reporters for The Washington Post – covered Mr. Trump’s apologia for Mr. Bin Salman; the story was picked up by The Richmond Times-Dispatch and a letter was dispatched.
Josh Dawsey, Shane Harris, and Karen DeYoung, “Trump Says Case Closed in Death of Khashoggi,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 21 November 2018, B5; “Trump Calls Saudi Arabia a ‘Great Ally,’ Discounts Crown Prince’s Responsibility for Khashoggi’s Death,” The Washington Post, 20 November 2018 (www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-defends-saudia-arabias-denial-about-the-planning-of-khashoggis-death/2018/11/20/b64d2cc6-eceb-11e8-9236-bb94154151d2_story.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 the The Washington Post.
Any uncertainty about President Trump’s affinity for authoritarians vanished with his bestowal of diplomatic absolution onto Mohammed bin Salman in the death of Jamal Khashoggi. His disjointed jeremiad – evocative of a college sophomore’s caffeine-fueled all-nighter with a superhero comic book’s sensibility – exposes his moral bankruptcy. His conduct appears even more tawdry if, as reported, the statement’s release proceeded despite a CIA report implicating bin Salman; furthermore, the president’s alleged willingness to surrender Fethullah Gulen to Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan to benefit bin Salman is superlatively cynical [1].
A thread runs through this: Trump’s incapacity to view any relationship through a non-transactional lens. Economic advantage must not be the sole driver of foreign policy. Soft power and moral suasion, the will and stature to condemn moral enormities credibly, are crucial and Trump squanders this. Why, moreover, does Trump deem bin Salman indispensable? There is no dearth of other Saudi princelings not ensnared in murder and mayhem. Does Trump’s official relationship with the Saudis meander into his personal affairs? Jared Kushner’s diplomatic canoodling with bin Salman, his pursuit of loans from Qatar, his support of the Qatar blockade, and bin Salman’s belief he has Kushner “in his pocket” [2] are not hallmarks of a diplomatic fair broker, nor is Trump’s assertion that “. . .I like the Saudis. I make money with them. They buy all sorts of my stuff. . . .They pay me millions and hundreds of millions.” [3] Trump’s recent denial of business dealings in the kingdom invites public scrutiny of his finances.
Trump bookends apologias for authoritarian rulers with bullying of allies and further attenuates the nation’s influence. Implicit in Guy Lawson’s analysis of Trump’s treatment of Canada is a truth Trump and his GOP enablers should ponder: Bullies rarely feel remorse while the bullied never forget indignities rained on them. [4]
[1] Tucker Higgins, “To Ease Turkish Anger over Journalist’s Killing, White House Considers Extraditing an Enemy of Erdogan: NBC,” CNBC, 16 October 2018 (www.cnbc.com/2018/11/15/trump-admin-considers-khashoggi-murder-trying-to-extradite-gulen.html [accessed 22 November 2018]).
[2] Julian Borger, “A Tale of Two Houses: How Jared Kushner Fuelled the Trump-Saudi Love-In,” The Guardian, 16 October 2018 (www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/16/jared-kushner-trump-saudi-khashoggi-mbs [accessed 23 November 2018]); Jessica Kwong, “Jared Kushner Backed Qatar Blockade a Month After Qataris Wouldn’t Finance His Property: Report,” Newsweek, 2 March 2018 (www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-backed-Qatar-blockade-after-Qataris-wouldnt-finance-his-property-828847 [accessed 23 November 2018]); Alex Emmons, Ryan Grim, and Clayton Swisher, “Saudi Crown Prince Boasted That Jared Kushner Was ‘In His Pocket,’” The Intercept, 21 March 2018 [ https://theintercept.com/2018/03/21/jared-kushner-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman/, (accessed 23 November 2018)].
[3] John Kruzel, “Donald Trump’s Claim of ‘No Financial Interests’ in Saudi Arabia? That’s Half True at Best,” Politifact, 18 October 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/oct/18/donald-trump/donald-trumps-claim-no-financial-interests-saudi-a/ [accessed 20 November 2018]). [4] Guy Lawson, “First Canada Tried to Charm Trump. Now It’s Fighting Back,” The New York Times Magazine, 9 June 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/magazine/justin-trudeau-chrystia-freeland-trade-canada-us-.html [accessed 23-xi-18]).
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).