Last week, Independent Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, whose bid for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to be faltering, took a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book and attacked the Washington Post for its coverage of him, which he deemed insufficiently sycophantic, propagandistic, and hagiographic. Mr. Sanders’s complaints about the Washington Post not surprisingly found eager echoes among his pugnacious, intransigent, Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island followers. He and they ramped up their performative assholery/ideology (pace Rick Wilson) to a whole new, Trumpian level.
And while Gospodin Sanders was giving further proof of his perfidy, the sycophants of Donald Trump have been waging an all out propaganda struggle to classify the diffuse anti-fascist movement known as antifa as a terrorist movement. Of course, nobody in Washington City apparently has the slightest desire to classify such neo-Nazi outfits as Andrew Anglin’s Stormer, or the far right, neo-Nazi Proud Boys, which are terroristic organizations, as terrorists. Sad!
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Cathedral City -- August 22, 2019 Yesterday, late in the afternoon, the noisy monster that is the telephone in my office rang. Since I was not particularly disposed to take a call as I was on my way to the gym for a workout, I let the answering machine take the call. It was a phone bank appeal on behalf of Cathedral City First Council District wannabe Rita Lamb.
Of course, my office is located in Rancho Mirage, and I myself am a resident of Cathedral City’s Second Council District, all of which could, and should, have been known to Ms. Lamb and her campaign staff had they exercised the barest fragment of due diligence.
Of course, this is not the first time that I have received solicitations and entreaties from Rita Lamb, as she and her minions have importuned me to cast a vote in an election in which I do not possess the qualifications to cast a vote. Now, when I ran for council, and won, back in the Jurassic years of 2002, my election was an at-large election. I had to reach the entire city with my appeal, so I had the advantage of not having to do that kind of due diligence. Yet still, the failure of due diligence on the part of any Council candidate perturbs me. Quite simply, the care and the diligence which one puts into one’s campaign are a predictor of the extent to which one is prepared to put care and due diligence into governance.
Kathleen DeRosa, the quondam mayor of Cathedral City, for whom I have nothing but unfootnoted disdain, used to run such slipshod campaigns that just about every time she campaigned she fell afoul of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. I would not be surprised to see Ms. Lamb fall similarly afoul of the FPPC. Of course, the DeRosa campaign also availed itself of anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Mormon whispering campaigns, as was the case in 2004, when she mounted a whispering campaign to the effect that then-mayor George Stettler was suffering from dementia.
A candidate who is willing to cut corners and to play fast and loose with the truth, either herself, or through staffers working on her behalf, cannot be expected to govern honestly, forthrightly, or transparently. We can also expect that if her campaign effort is as slipshod as the DeRosa effort was, and as the Lamb effort is, Lamb, if (God forbid) elected to the city council, would not put in a tithe of the effort needed to govern effectively. The Council is already lumbered with the presence of a contingent of members who lack significant governing experience. Adding one more to their number would seriously retard the progress Cathedral City has made since Kathleen DeRosa ceased to be mayor. We cannot afford to return to the ten Brezhnev-like winters that we survived under the incompetent, venal, corrupt, mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. Rita Lamb, tainted as she is by her association with Kathleen DeRosa, is utterly and entirely unqualified to serve as dogcatcher, let alone on the city council.
I will support Shelley Kaplan.
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We’ve known since the fall of 2016 of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his followers. Consumed by misogynistic hatred of Hillary Clinton, he and his followers did everything they could to act as a knowing fifth column for Donald Trump.
Not satisfied with providing The Donald with most of the talking points the Trump people used against Hillary, and not satisfied with having trafficked with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Sanders and his followers, evidently frustrated by the way their campaign is so obviously faltering, particularly considering that the front runner is Joe Biden, whom Sanders so evidently despises, have taken up the Trumpian tactic of attacking the news media.
Last Monday, Sanders, speaking at a town hall in Wolfeboro, N.H., attacked the Washington Post, the paper that brought down Richard Nixon, by implying that the Post’s editorial stances and news coverage were prejudiced against him and controlled by Jeff Bezos, against whom Sanders has railed for years: "[a]nd then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn't write particularly good articles about me. I don't know why, but I guess maybe there's a connection...."
It could just as easily have been Donald Trump railing against the “failing” New York Times, whom Trump has defined as “an enemy of the people” so often that it has become extremely tiresome. Indeed, in a comment thread in a Washington Post article criticizing the Vermont Senator’s untruths concerning the media coverage of him, one commentor referred to Sanders and Trump as “two old, cranky white guys from the ‘boroughs’ recycling the same messages.”
Now I don’t propose to get into a screed against New York City’s Outer Boroughs; my father’s people came from the Bronx, not Manhattan. Nonetheless, there seems to be some similarity in personality to be found in politicians from those Outer boroughs. They tend to be cranky, humorless, pugnacious, confrontational, condescending, and combative, as well as dishonest.
Frankly, the Democratic Party has a right to expect better from its candidates. Sanders has a reputation for being dour, sour, grim, prim, humorless, and doctrinaire. Was the Democrats need is not a squatter in the party’s parlor, crapping on the rug, wiping his ass on the drapes, eating it out of house and home, and demanding that the party comply with his every demand. What the party needs, irrespective of age, is a happy warrior, insurgent, who takes joy in the fight and is willing to take that fight straight to Donald Trump. Bernard Sanders, his poll numbers stagnating, is emphatically not that man.
We may, God willing, soon see the time when Sanders begins to realize that there is no second bite at the apple; if he does not do well in the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the time may well be at hand to show his finger wagging butt the door, and apply the Party boot to his posterior. Bernard Sanders must not be allowed to be the nominee of a Democratic Party of which he has never been a good faith member.
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The Proud Boys misbehaved in Portland over the weekend. They took their neo-Nazi white nationalist filth to an otherwise pleasant community and befouled it. They were met by counterdemonstrators from the diffuse, not particularly well organized opposition movement known as Antifa. In the rumble that followed, Portland police arrested 13 people. In Washington City, Donald Trump, and his acolytes, saturated with white nationalist evil, took, to all intents and purposes, the side of the so-called Proud Boys and, almost in chorus, began calling for federal legislation to declare Antifa a terrorist group.
The Trump regime’s push to declare Antifa a terrorist group is the kind of tactic we should expect from a dictatorial, authoritarian regime that has set itself at deliberate odds with the United States Constitution. Authoritarian “leaders,” particularly in authoritarian countries, such as Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, Hungary, and Israel — “leaders” such as Jair Bolsonaro, Nicolás Maduro, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Orbán Viktor, and Binyamin Netanyahu, and former dictatorial “leaders,” such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, the generals of the Argentine junta, and Libya’s late, unlamented Moammar Qaddafi, are very fond of defining their domestic political “enemies,” as “terrorists.”
And, having defined their domestic political “enemies,” real or imagined, as “terrorists,” authoritarian leaders will unhesitatingly deploy the power of the state and of a tame tabby judiciary to suppress any such “terrorist” movement. As of yet, Gospodin Trump has not sought to avail himself of a tame tabby judiciary; he has not sought to gut the Posse Comitatus Act in order to deploy the military in the streets of American cities and towns, nor has he sought to revive the obnoxious British practice of so-called General Warrants that permit the search of every individual or residence in a given area, a practice the British government inaugurated after the Jacobite arising in 1745 which ripped a scar across the face the Scots Highlands, and which the British government sought to implement its North American colonies in the 1770s. Gospodin Trump has not sought to do these things... yet.
Now, bien pensant Democrats, who cannot seem to see the evil lurking behind the façade of the Republican Party, may be inclined to pooh-pooh such predictions and concerns as “conspiracy theories,” unworthy of consideration by "correctly" thinking Democrats. This bears a disturbing resemblance to the tone of much of Jewish commentary during the Weimar Republic. Far too many German Jews and Gentiles pooh-poohed the ominous signs of Hitler’s rise by saying essentially “it can’t happen here; this is the country of Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller. We are civilized Europeans who would never permit someone like Hitler to rise to power.”
Unfortunately, the good Germans of the Weimar Republic took their Hitler naysayers seriously. They turned the other way when the storm troopers took to the streets, they tut-tutted at the Nazi street toughs who smashed the windows of every Jewish shop they could find, and finally, when Reichspräsident Paul v. Beneckendorff u. v. Hindenburg, whose mind was drifting away from him, appointed Adolf Hitler as Reichskanzler on January 30, 1933, they breathed a sigh of relief, convinced that that vulgar little man Adolf Hitler would now be controlled by the institutions of German civil society and by the Reichswehr. The good Germans of the Weimar Republic had deceived themselves and been deceived by Hitler and his propagandists.
I fear that far too many “good Americans” are being similarly deceived. Far too few Americans have read Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which, with a kind of frightening and eerie prescience, predicted the coming of fascism to America in the person of a populist president named Buzz Windrip. Not only did Lewis expertly skewer the pretensions of populism as a political ideology, but he also managed to describe an America in which H.L. Mencken’s dire prediction had come true, that:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
We may safely predict that, if Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and their fellow travelers are allowed to retain even the slightest tincture of power, there will come some great and glorious day when the plain folks of this land will find their consciences utterly unaffected by the presence of what amount to concentration camps for migrants. Writing in 1938, Winston Churchill once observed that
[I]n modern conflicts and revolutions in some great states bishops and archbishops have been sent by droves to concentration camps, or pistolled in the nape of the neck in the well-warmed, brilliantly lighted quarter ofa prison.... We are sunk in a barbarism all the deeper because it is tolerated by moral lethargy and covered with a veneer of scientific conveniences.
And the fiery Scots Calvinist John Knox, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all agreed that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Resistance to Trump and his cabal of evildoers is not merely politics, it is the religious/moral duty of the entire American public. As the French revolutionary statesman Jean-Antoine-Joseph, De Bry proclaimed, “Citoyens! La Patrie est en danger!” Citizens! The country is in danger!
Citoyens! La Patrie est en danger!
¡Ciudadanos, el país está en peligro!
