The Democrats who cried ‘Wolf!’

I have said this many times before, and no matter how much my liberal friends may squirm, I’m right: crying wolf was a bad strategy when Reagan and Romney, and the Bushes were around.

Charlie Sykes wrote this in his column this morning, quoting Carl Cannon of Real Clear Politics:

By 2000, calling George W. Bush a racist was the liberals’ standard operating procedure, a tactic used against Romney as well. . . . If Reagan and George W. Bush are routinely portrayed as warmongers, if both Bushes (and Reagan and Romney) are painted as bigots . . . how do we expect rank-and-file conservatives or grassroots independents to respond when Trump is dubbed by the media as an existential threat to democracy?

It was a classic case of “the boy who cried wolf.” The next time liberal Democrats want to know why Donald Trump gets away with behavior that would have made him an electoral pariah not so long ago, and why it’s impossible to hold him accountable for anything, they have only to look in the mirror. They have only themselves to blame. Now the racist, the authoritarian, the existential threat to democracy and American values has come- and nobody is listening anymore when they point it out.

The good guys are winning for a change

Donald Trump is backtracking from his assertion that Vladimir Putin is a “genius” for invading Ukraine. Tucker Carlson actually admits that he was wrong about Ukraine- although it’s Joe Biden’s fault that he’ was wrong.

America and the world have united behind a brave people determined to remain free and their heroic citizen-president. Russia thought overrunning Ukraine and putting a puppet in President Zelenskyy’s place would be easy. It’s turning out not to be.

Putin has been fighting with one hand behind his back. He’s been trying for propaganda reasons to at least appear to be exercising restraint. The more frustrated he becomes, the more likely that he takes the gloves off and fights dirty like he did in Chechnya. He will be even more discredited in the eyes of the world, but it won’t be pretty to watch much less experience. Not that it’s actually pretty now.

Putin has stepped in it. This invasion may be his undoing. But the odds are still overwhelming that Ukraine will be overrun. I don’t think President Zelenskyy will leave, and I’m very much afraid that Putin will have him killed. May God protect him.

But the salient reality is that Ukraine is going to be impossible for Russia to hold. The people of Ukraine won’t accept Russian occupation. A continuing insurgency will make Ukraine a hell for Russia. It will only be a matter of time before Ukraine recovers its independence.

Even Switzerland is joining in the sanctions. Germany has overcome its traditional reluctance to be actively hostile to Russia. Finland and Sweden are considering joining NATO. And barring a return of the Cheeto Benito to the Oval Office, NATO will not only survive but will be stronger and more united than ever.

Brave people are dying and will continue to die. The valiant people of Ukraine are suffering terribly and will probably continue to suffer for a long time. But what looked a couple of weeks ago like it was going to be another bleak triumph for authoritarianism and the bullies of the world seems to have turned completely around and rallied the world to the cause of humanity and democratic values.

However much suffering they inflict, it seems clear that at the moment the bullies are on the run. The forces of illiberalism and reaction are reeling. Right now, the good guys appear, at least in the long term, to be winning. It’s been a long time since that was the case, and it feels good.

Slava Ukraini!

Trump’s ‘authenticity’ should repel Christians

Bob Vanderplaats, one of the most prominent leaders of Iowa’s “evangelical” community, says that if the Former Guy doesn’t run in 2024, his churchgoing supporters here will be looking for someone with his “authenticity,” but without his “demeanor.”

But how does one seperate the two? It’s a revealing- and disturbing- statement. A notoriously unethical businessman, a lifelong bully, a self-confessed serial molester of women who has been accused by one of them of having raped her as at a Jeffrey Epstein orgy when she was 13 (and has an eye-witness to the event), who is a serial adulterer, an apologist for racism and bigotry who continues to lie about having been cheated out of a second term, and above all the most prolific liar, slanderer, and libeler in the history of American politics is virtually the antithesis of the values of Jesus. Yet he claims to be a devout Christian. He is hardly a paragon of authenticity, and the fact that so many conservative Christians miss that point is, one might say, a scandal of biblical proportions.

What does it say to those outside the Church when those inside it praise the “authenticity” of such a man? To be blunt, the fact that they can both praise his “authenticity” and support him casts Jesus Christ and the Gospel in a bad light indeed. As a conservative Christian myself, I have to wonder how many souls will be lost because of “evangelical” support of Donald Trump. Beyond that, it suggests that a great many American Christians may be confusing a deal with the devil- a blind eye to evil in exchange for political power and support for a political agenda aimed at winning its victories by legal compulsion rather than the changing of hearts- with the advancement of the Kingdom of God.

Martin Luther, in commenting on the corruption of the medieval Church and its mistreatment of the Jews, wrote early in his career that if he were a Jew, he would rather be a pig than a Christian. It’s time contemporary American Christians began asking themselves what message they are sending the people whose primary mission is supposed to be the spreading of the Gospel when they can give the “authenticity” of such a man as their reason for supporting him.

Or are the negative things what Vanderplaats means by Trump’s “demeanor?” Strange term to use for established personality characteristics. And strange personality characteristics for a politician so strongly favored by “evangelical” Christians!

As “pro-life” as a MIRVed ICBM

Appropos of yesterday’s post on the incredibly bad logic behind the radical right’s anti-vax rhetoric, Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark had a piece today on the “depraved indifference” of #TeamVirus’s campaign of disinformation and sociopathic posturing in opposition to the efforts of the Biden administration to get us to herd immunity and end this pandemic once and for all by getting enough people vaccinated.

This all started because Donald Trump a) popped off about another lunatic conspiracy theory that struck his fancy and, of course, refused to back down when it was shown to be nonsense, as usual; and b) recognized the economic impact of common-sense public health measures to control the pandemic, realized that it would destroy the healthy economy that was the only real argument for re-electing him, and placed a greater value on his own re-election than on human life.

The willingness of such a great percentage of American Christians to show themselves to be hypocrites by casting aside the very “pro-life” values they used as an excuse to support Trump if that was the cost of getting him re-elected is one of the great scandals of church history. This is not to say, of course, that every pro-Trump Christian is a conscious hypocrite about the sanctity of innocent human life. A great many just got carried away with the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates both sides of the political divide these days, and failed to think the matter through.

But there it is. This issue is a perfect illustration of why I cannot be a Republican any more, and why I have a difficult time understanding how anybody with a conscience and the ability to reason can go along with #TeamVirus, now that it doesn’t even have the excuse of saving Donald Trump’s political hide anymore.

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead who would otherwise be alive because of this depraved, performative pretense that enabling the spread of a deadly virus is somehow a protection of “individual liberty.” One wonders how many unneccessary deaths will be necessary before people with an iota of ethical sensitivity wake up and smell the decomp.

Look. It doesn’t matter that COVID seems only to have a fatality rate of one percent. This is one of the most contageous viruses we’ve even had to deal with. Even with that comparatively low a fatality rate, it’s killed 600,000 Americans in a little over a year.

This isn’t rocket science. And it isn’t just a tragedy. It’s an ethical stain on a large percentage of the American people, and a cause of scandal for American Christianity,

One wonders how many more have to die.

“Because it’s true!”

Seems that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, had a bit of a run-in with The Man a while back.

Barr describes Trump’s ongoing whine about last year’s election having been stolen from him as “bullshit.”

According to a book by ABC Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl entitled Betrayal and scheduled to be published in November, Barr says that his attitude toward Trump’s claims amounted to “put up or shut up time.” That, he says, is why he gave prosecutors the OK to investigate the claims and opened his own investigation.

“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Trump claims that voting machines all over the country were somehow rigged to switch votes from himself to the man who defeated him, President Joe Biden.

“We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told Karl.

“It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy,” Barr added. And he’s exactly right. Trump and his followers to the contrary, the bottom line is that the technology to do what Trump claims was done with voting machines all over the country simply doesn’t exist, and even if it did, using it would have been absolutely impossible to conceal and incredibly easy to document. Yet Trump and his supporters have never been able to produce a single bit of evidence to substantiate his claims, and literally every court case he brought- even before judges Trump himself appointed- has been laughed out of court.

Barr also told Karl that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged him to speak out on Trump’s claims because they could hurt the Republican Party in the upcoming Senate runoff elections in Georgia and said that they were “bad” for both the party and the country. Karl says that McConnell confirmed the conversation when he asked him about it. McConnell apparently thought that maintaining the personal goodwill of Donald Trump was a higher priority than either the Republican Party’s prospect in Georgia or the welfare of the nation.

The way in which the nation’s Republican politicians, with rare exceptions, tremble before the wrath of the psychlogically unsound former president is an amazing thing. Apparently they are conscious of the degree to which the Republican rank and file buys into the Trump line no matter how outrageously he lies or how complete is the lack of evidence to support his claims.

Barr, who isn’t seeking elective office, faced no such constraints. But McConnell apparently believed that Trump’s support was vital in Georgia despite the damaging character of his bizarre claims about the election.

Apparently he found himself on the horns of a dilemma.“Look,” he told Barr, “we need the president in Georgia. And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

“I understand that,” Barr replied, according to Karl. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”

When Trump heard about Barr’s statement that there was no evidence of fraud, the Former Guy demanded to know why Barr had said it. ,“How the f— could you do this to me?,” Trump demanded. “Why did you say it?”

Barr answered, “Because it’s true.”

Interestingly, Trump didn’t dispute the statement. Instead, referring to himself in the third person, he responded, “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”

The disconnect between reality and the radical right where Donald Trump is concerned is one of the things that puzzles me the most about them. I’ve cited and documented evidence that Donald Trump was unfit to be President since before the Orange One was even nominated in 2016, and routinely had it ignored by his supporters and dismissed with the accusation, “You just hate Trump.” Statements of the simple, documented and established truth continue to be dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And the sheer terror he strikes into the hearts of Republican politicians seems to have robbed them of any sense of duty to confront even lies they concede are hurting the country.

There can be no question but that Trump’s lies about the election have undermined his successor, damaged the country’s reputation abroad, and undermined the confidence of the American people in the integrity of our elections and of our most basic institutions. One wonders how long it will be before people like McConnell and other Republicans have enough, and put the welfare of the country ahead of their fear of an unstable demagogue.

They fear that if they do, they’ll be replaced by others who will have no compunctions about putting their loyalty to Trump ahead of their loyalty to the country. Perhaps. But one has to wonder how much worse off we would be in that case than we are now.