Election Day Posting, Demeaning Men and a Nursery Rhyme

Election Day Commentary:

Do We Deserve to Live in a Democracy?

Voting should not pose a dilemma for the American people.   Most people in the country, as they did in 2016, will be voting Democratic because of that party’s forward-looking positions on health care, taxes, jobs and the environment.  Sadly, their doing so didn't help two years ago.  More will have to vote Democratic on Tuesday to accomplish that.

The Republicans have no program for health care, their tax reform only benefited the wealthy and businesses so they don’t talk about it.  Contrary to what the Democrats propose, they have ignored the infrastructure, the environment and the economic “safety net.”  The highlight of their accomplishments, reduced unemployment, is cancelled out by the failure of wages to increase, which normally accompanies low unemployment.  Further, growing economic hardships are resulting from their unwise trade and tariff policy.  

Bottom line:  The Democrats have programs to deal with these issues. The Republicans have none so all they can offer are fear, insults and disunity … at which they are very good.  But gerrymandered Congressional districts and tricky voter suppression techniques may bolster Republican chances to lessen their losses anyway. 

The elephant in the room is Donald Trump.  His intemperate appeal to the gullible who permeate his “base” has forced legitimate Republicans legislators to cower in fear of challenges from the right and given reassurance to the bigots, conspiracy peddlers, and racists among his supporters.  There is a direct traceable line between his participating in campaign “lock her up” cheering, his equivocation about racist terrorism in Charlottesville, and his emboldenment of the Pittsburgh synagogue murderer and the Florida mail-bomber by his incendiary speeches and tweets.  

He talks about “nationalism” with no understanding of the word. “White Nationalists,” however, all of whom are within his loyal base, and are far smarter than he is, do understand it.  It is an “exclusionary” word.  The first two letters of “Nazi” parties, wherever and whenever they may be, stand for “Nationalist” in its most exclusionary sense.  Trump is too ignorant to understand that.  He has no knowledge of history and is not capable of reading books.  (I still cannot figure how he got through four years at two very reputable universities, but that is a story yet to be written. I wouldn't be surprised if their accreditation is questioned.)

But he does know that the gullible, without whom he is dead meat, fear people who are “different” and of course, that includes immigrants, so he caters to those fears.  His constant harping on a “wall” to keep “them” out and his mischaracterization of the caravan of Central Americans currently trudging northward is a prime example of this and was probably the direct motivation of the Pittsburgh murderer who associated HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) with that caravan and set out to kill Jews.  The President has abysmally failed to recognize that and avoids taking responsibility for the result of his words and concentrates on changing the subject (with Fox's aid) in order to keep his pathetic and gullible base in line.  

Words have power and once unleashed, their results cannot be easily controlled.  Trump’s fictitious description of the caravan as including “gang-members and Middle Easterners” and calling the press an “enemy of the people” can uncontrollably inflame passions once they are let out of the bottle. The President (and his foul mouthpieces on Fox News and talk radio) cannot absolve himself from responsibility for the results.  He shares guilt with the perpetrators of crimes which, without his words egging them on, would not have been committed.  In other countries, provocateurs like our President ultimately end up in prison or worse. 
  

Enough Americans, even Republicans, are aware of this and they will have their say on Election Day when they vote.  Many decent Republicans, excluding the bigots, racists and conspiracy peddlers who have supported Donald Trump, have had enough of him.   A limit is being reached.  In fact, many Republican candidates are now carefully trying to distance themselves from the President, recognizing that he is becoming as much of an albatross as an asset. 

But that won’t fool many. There will be nation-wide Democratic gains, perhaps enough to give that Party control of the House of Representatives and elsewhere, and this will drive the racists, bigots and conspiracy peddlers into a mad frenzy.  Shortly thereafter, the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team will be coming out, and that, together with the election results, will further polarize the nation, putting it on the cusp of a second civil war.  There are many, having found a home in the right wing of the Republican Party, who are still fighting the first one.

The choice before us seems either to engage in that second civil war, standing up for democracy with demonstrations, legislation and litigation, or to back down, attempting to achieve temporary peace by shameful compromise, which was the course followed during the half century before 1860, which culminated in our bloody first civil war.  This second civil war, if it must be fought, will not be bloodless, because its first blood has already been shed in Pittsburgh.  And the Supreme Court’s cowardly and tortured misinterpretation of the Second Amendment has guaranteed that there are enough weapons around to fight it on many levels.  

There is a lot of blame for this polarization to go around, and it must be shared by (1) Trump-fearing Republican legislators, by (2) right-wing blowhards at Fox and other conservative media, and to a lesser but still very significant extent by (3) otherwise decent Republicans who went along and voted for Trump and his acolytes because they believe in traditional Republican positions and Trump just happened to be the Party’s candidate.  None of them can walk away blameless.  They’ve all slept with dogs and now, they too have fleas!  (The argument that the media is “left-leaning” and therefore must share in the blame is false because the media’s business is to objectivity report well documentable truths, which it does, while Trump’s warehouse is filled with undocumentable lies.  There is a difference.)  

Trump’s combination of shallow ignorance, moral bankruptcy and historic corruption ought to result in most thinking Americans, even lifelong Republicans, voting for Democratic candidates on November 6, because they will have finally recognized that any Republican candidate who is still loyal to Donald Trump is not worth voting for.  

If Americans really are as stupid as Donald Trump believes us to be, we do not deserve to live in a democracy.  

Get out and vote on Election Day … but be aware that regardless of who wins, the years following will not be pleasant ones for democracy in America.  They will demand citizens who are willing to stand up and fight for that which they believe, and not just write letters to newspapers and post on the internet.

Jack Lippman

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,       

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,    

All the King’s horses and

All the King’s men,

Couldn’t put Humpty

Together again.

A "Pseudo-Presidential Election"

We elect a President every four years.  The last time we did so was in 2016.  The  democratic process failed us then and gave us a President who has proven to be incapable of properly filling his office.  All polls show him to have the highest disapproval rate of any President in American history.  But, because both the House of Representatives and the Senate are in the hands of his political party, whose members survive in office only so long as they support him, there is no chance of his being impeached although there are numerous grounds available for that action. 

By electing a Democratic House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate in 2018, however, the nation will be able to severely limit the President’s excesses.  While a majority sufficient to succeed in impeaching the President is unlikely, such victories on Tuesday will go a long way toward limiting his powers.  Even capturing only the House of Representatives would be a massive step in the right direction.

Although we are not voting for a President on Tuesday, this mid-term election is really an attempt to redo the Presidential election of 2016 by electing a Congress which will tie that President’s hands to the extent legally possible. Hence, it is actually a “pseudo-Presidential election,” with the candidate's name not appearing on the ballot anywhere. 

It is a rare opportunity for Americans to have the chance to reverse the wrong direction in which our democracy, and the 2016 election process, permitted the nation to turn two years ago.  We should take advantage of it.

JL 

The Demeaning of Males

A few postings ago, I pointed out how advertisements, particularly on TV, were emphasizing the superiority of women over men, showing the women to be smart and their husbands, usually not so smart.   

Recall the husband attempting to carry about fifty grocery bags in from his Toyota Rav, all at one time, because it was "his thing" and his wife smirking knowing in the background, waiting for him to start dropping some of the bags on his way to the kitchen (which we know he would do, off screen, of course.)

And then there was that poor guy spending hours trying to locate a suitable used car to buy interrupted by his wife who accomplished it in 

about four seconds on some car buying website.   

Equality of the sexes should not mean that it is open season for demeaning men!  Note that the comic strips have even joined in, propagandizing the children who read them.  Check out “Baby Blues” from the Sunday, Oct. 28, comics of your local paper. CLICK HERE TO SEE IT or just go to http://babyblues.com/comics/october-28-2018/.  

After the kids rejected eating supposedly inferior “generic” brands of breakfast cereal, the mother poured the stuff into the father’s bowl.   The dialog went something like this: Mom (to kids) – “I didn’t think you could tell the cheap stuff from the brand-name stuff.”  Kid – “Ha! What kind of doofus couldn’t tell?”  Dad – “Mmm … Good cereal.”

So Dad is a “doofus.”  (defined as a “stupid person.”)  If this kind of demeaning thing keeps up, there will be no required role remaining for males in our culture.  Their traditional duties of being the hunter, leader, provider, breadwinner and protector have been minimized by women being quite able to also perform those activities, and his essential biologic role as the provider of sperm to enable his mate to bear children has been supplemented by “in vitro” fertilization techniques.

The role of men in the centuries to come has yet to be defined but watch TV advertisements and the comics for clues.  Also look closely at anthills.

JL

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Jack Lippman