Why Not a Trump-Trump Ticket?

The ass-kissing wannabees for Trump’s running mate —like Elise Stefanik, Tim Scott — even Marjorie Taylor Jewish Space Laser Greene — are making a ludicrous spectacle of themselves.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (a Melania look-alike trying to be the new Sarah Palin) seems out of the running, having bragged in a book about shooting an unruly puppy (rather than bother with training. And don’t mention the goat). Guess she figured on a macho vibe, playing to Republican proclivities for cruelty and guns. But she overshot the mark. Or maybe MAGA world hasn’t sunk that far . . . yet.

Anyhow, the VP pick must be a tough call for Trump, feeling betrayal when his previous one, Mike Pence, refused to join his coup to overthrow the government.

But here’s some free advice: why not a Trump-Trump ticket? With Donald Junior for VP.

After all, a chip off the old block; that apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Qualifications? Schmalifications. Donald Junior has what it takes to be Veep in a Trump administration. Spouting shameless lies smearing all opponents, with 150% loyalty to the creep-in-chief. He would not have gone wobbly like Pence on January 6.

Of course dynastic succession is de rigueur for authoritarian regimes. North Korea’s on its third generation of their beloved Kims.

It would be a perfectly balanced ticket, with a Trump at each end. The cultists can double down, wrapping themselves in Trump-Trump flags and signs and bumper stickers.

Trump-Trump-Trump-Trumpity-Trump.

Drain the swamp!

Republicans on Abortion: “Full of Shit”

That’s a quote from The Daily Show. Actually applies to today’s Republican party in toto.

Daily said it following a clip of Arizona senate candidate (and election denier) Kari Lake declaiming she wants women having the widest possible health care choices. After she’d previously applauded a measure banning virtually all abortions.

On that subject, Republicans are like the proverbial car-chasing dog who catches it. For decades they thought opposing abortion was a great issue for them — until they finally prevailed, and are flummoxed to find most voters horrified.

So here’s Trump, bragging about his getting Roe v. Wade overturned, yet somehow trying to make himself sound almost pro-choice, saying it’s really just letting each state decide, something everybody wants. Except they don’t. He’s (as ever) full of shit.

The Supreme Court’s voiding abortion rights, so blatantly motivated by religious and political zealotry, has accelerated plunging citizen trust in our public institutions. (Trump’s presidency made the whole government look like a feckless circus; and his vote fraud lies have shredded confidence in our election systems.)

Look — abortion is a difficult moral issue. Pro-choicers err in deeming it merely about a woman’s own body. Not so simple when there’s another life inside it, for whom she has some responsibility, especially in the later stages.

But meantime Republicans posture as the party of “freedom,” the word almost a mantra. Well, freedom for men maybe. Women they want to control — with no freedom for pregnancy health care. Often not even to abort unviable fetuses that might kill them. Just one way Republicans want government regulating behavior they dislike. Freedom for gays? Let alone trans people? Fuggedaboutit.

Then we even have the loony Alabama Supreme Court ruling, full of Biblical bloviating, declaring embryos created during in-vitro fertilization human beings. So no freedom to utilize IVF. That went over like a lead balloon, with Republicans scrambling to tell voters, “Oh no, we don’t mean that.”

Another thing: they’re all for the rights and welfare of unborn children. Once born, not so much. Alabama — typical of Republican fetus fetishizing states — ranks at the bottom regarding the welfare of kids no longer fetuses. Issues of poverty, education, nutrition, health care, etc. “Pro-lifers” only seem to care about children in wombs, not those pesky ones outside.

Meanwhile too, these “pro-life” Republicans are fine with 30,000 Americans killed annually by guns for which they refuse to allow any sane regulation. Yet they prattle “law and order.”

And after months screaming that Democrats were trying to interfere with the election by barring Trump from the ballot (invoking the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause), now in at least two states, Alabama and Ohio, Republican election officials are trying to use legal technicalities to keep President Biden off their November ballots!

Such fundamental dishonesty and hypocrisy pervades today’s whole Republican party. With all that “stolen election” rubbish, and so much more. As The Daily Show succinctly put it: they’re full of shit.

What the Hell is Happening to America?

The American character has ever been one of positive spirit, optimism, self-confidence. Thus conventional wisdom in politics was that positivity always beats negativism. Exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s sunny persona defeating dour rivals. How distant that picture now seems.

Departure from it might be understandable were there some profound national trauma pushing us onto a radical, disruptive path. Something like, say, the Great Depression. Yet even that did not upset our civic applecart. While it did spur some fringe movements, our basic political culture stood resilient. Testament to the goodness of what America had built.

A democracy where election outcomes are respected and accepted by all sides, with peaceful transfers of power, in a spirit of goodwill. Such civility characterizing all our political processes. Agreeing to disagree, often coming together in pragmatic compromise, actually tackling problems, generally respecting opponents. Intolerant of misconduct, vulgarity and falsehood. All in all making our public culture something genuinely noble. Francis Fukuyama has written how such democracy serves our deep need for “thymos,” having one’s human dignity respected. This has been America’s great achievement.

Rejecting that longstanding salutary ethos, traducing this nation’s most essential character, makes today’s Republican politics tragically baffling. It might, again, be explicable were there some severe system shock. But there’s nothing remotely like that.

Nothing like the Great Depression. Or, for that matter, the Civil War, which we also actually got past with remarkably little discombobulation of our political culture. The pandemic was traumatic, but Trumpism preceded that, and normality returned pretty fast. Now the economy boasts strong growth, rising wages, record low unemployment, stocks up and inflation coming down.

And yet what is a national crisis today is so many voters being so pissed-off and disaffected by who-knows-what that they want to burn the house down. Though they don’t see it that way themselves, instead imagining they’re “patriots” somehow saving the country. From a Biden administration that actually merely embodies the kind of politics-as-usual that prevailed for generations. They’d elect instead a sociopath who literally tried to overthrow the government.

And while there’s a feeling our politics is broken, requiring drastic medicine, they empower the very people most responsible for the breakage. And while despite the good economy some are struggling, they’ll be hurt more than helped by Republican policies.

Sure, there are grievances and cultural divisions. Whites who feel a loss of caste position, traditionalists unsettled by acceptance of divergent lifestyles, fear of immigrants, resentments against educated elites, etc. But there have always been such societal discords, yet they didn’t shred our civic culture or provoke such nihilistic political pathology. A sizable Republican contingent now even justifies political violence.

A key aspect is divorcement from reality, embracing a bizarro mockery of it. Like rejecting the reality of January 6, and the 2020 election’s legitimacy. Trump said it was stolen, based on nothing whatsoever, just because his damaged psyche could not accept losing. Any fool could see that. Yet Republicans refuse to.

My Lawn Sign

Why doesn’t their hateful, destructive behavior make them unelectable? For many voters the whole political picture is just a fuzzy blur, they can’t discern true signal from noise, and not even January 6 provides clarity. Meantime Trump’s pantomime of “strength” is psychologically bedazzling as against notional Democrat “weakness.” When it’s actually derangement versus sanity, depravity versus decency.

Too many take for granted our democracy, without much understanding of it, or its vulnerability to what’s afoot. Some see Trump as more symptom than cause, just exploiting passions already extant. Maybe. But such a perfect storm of badness can do immense damage. He already has.

So we’re sleepwalking off a cliff, poised to witlessly throw away America’s quintessential goodness, making this a much darker country. Indeed, Trump loves dictators and will put us on the dark side globally. A world whose Putins are untrammeled won’t be good for us. “America First” will be ashes in our mouths.

This nation is still full of wonderful people. How can we be sucked into such evil?

Trump Documents Trial: J’RECUSE!

Trump operatives aggressively screamed conflict-of-interest because Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, on his 2020 election crimes case, had an affair with a team-mate. How that could have prejudiced Trump’s case was never clear, and the claim was ultimately rejected.

But meantime — his trial for his classified document thefts is before Federal Judge Aileen Cannon — whom Trump appointed to her position.

How does she not recuse herself? (That means bowing out from the case.) She owes her job to the defendant! Could there be a more blatant instance of potential judicial bias? Indeed, it seems to be more than just a potential. Already Judge Cannon has issued a string of rulings favoring Trump (one of them vigorously slapped down by an appeals panel).

It is fundamental to our justice system that, to maintain public confidence, judges should not only be free from bias, but should avoid any appearance of it. Hence recusal is an important feature.

I have some personal experience in this realm. In 1973, sued for libel in a political case, I came before Judge Arnold Proskin. He had been politically active on the same side. That mere fact made him immediately recuse himself. He would not hear another word.

A decade later I was a Public Service Commission administrative law judge, on another politically sensitive case (involving the Shoreham nuclear project). A comment of mine to a reporter (off the record, I’d said) got published, questioning the merits of one party’s proposal. They moved for my recusal. I thought it was a close call, but finally ruled that the comment did not show bias. The Commission agreed on appeal.

The point is that, again, judges must not be seen to rule in cases where possible bias is a factor. Judge Cannon’s failure to recuse is a disgraceful violation of judicial ethics. A moral dereliction endemic to all Trumpworld. He’s been shrieking that our justice system is biased against him, conducting a “witch hunt,” it’s a centerpiece of his campaign. When in reality he’s been getting away with too much, for too long, making a mockery of justice in America. Judge Cannon’s role is just one piece of that picture.

It undermines public faith in our courts. Just as Trump has also cynically undermined confidence in election integrity. He is a civic wrecking ball. He and his MAGA fools have no clue what America is all about. Electing him president again would be insane.

Christian/Conservative Nationalist Populism

It’s not just in America, but burgeoning all over Europe. And it’s not your father’s “conservatism,” but transmogrified into something unrecognizably darker.

Yet many followers don’t seem bothered by the switcheroo. For them it’s more tribal than ideological. Stick with the “conservative” tribe, no matter where it’s going.

Take Russia. For the better part of a century, conservatives saw Communist, totalitarian Russia as the antithesis of the small government individualist freedom they stood for, and threatening our national security besides. Russia is no longer “communist” but if anything worse. Actually even more totalitarian, repressive, and more actively a military threat.

Yet today’s right sees Putin as no enemy, or even somehow an ally. Casting him as a defender of their traditionalist Christian values. Epitomized by Tucker Carlson’s asinine Putin interview and supermarket documentary about how wonderful and advanced Russia is. Overlooking how impoverished the average Russian actually is — and the brutal repression which, if needed to sustain the “traditional values” these fools babble about, might suggest those values are awry.

Meantime it’s really Trump calling this tune — as if he’s moved by any values at all. Taught by his dad that people are either killers or patsies, and seeing Putin as the ultimate killer. Trump’s role model.

So Putin’s Ukraine atrocity shows his badassness, and to them that’s a good thing. “Strength” bedazzles these people. Likewise it’s Trump’s badassness that, deep down, appeals to his cultists. So they do whatever he says. That’s why they’re blocking Ukraine aid in Congress.

Nationalism is a factor here too — the “America First” trope. The idea that we should stick to our own knitting rather than foreign involvements. As if we’re too poor and weak to do both. (So much for American “strength.”) Many on the right even spout Putin’s nonsense blaming the West for somehow provoking his Ukraine invasion. And never mind that America has a huge self-interest in deterring such violent aggression. But a truculent chest-thumping nationalism is characteristic of these populist anti-globalist movements everywhere.

My old conservatism favored small government to generally keep its nose out of people’s business, maximizing our freedom. Today’s right does hate what it calls “the administrative state,” seen as a vehicle of their left-wing elite globalist bêtes noires. Yet contradictorily, while still fetishizing the word “freedom,” they also want big strong government to enforce their own will on people. Notably, for example, controlling women by limiting their access to pregnancy medical care. How is that “conservative?”

What they really hate is classical liberalism, the humanist philosophy arising out of the Enlightenment, freeing people from the shackles of traditionalist society (and religion), enabling them to better flourish. That’s what “liberal” means outside America, and it’s become a dirty word everywhere, with the left too banging on against “neo-liberalism.” This is why Hungary’s authoritarian poster boy Viktor Orban, a darling of the populist right, proudly speaks of his oxymoronic “illiberal democracy.” (As undemocratic as he can make it.)

Immigration is another right-wing populist bête noir. Thus the “replacement theory” nonsense — positing some conspiracy to swap out regular people for migrants supposedly inferior and more politically pliable. In fact migrants tend to be better people. But they’re from different tribes — reason enough to demonize them. (Plain old racism operates too.)

Immigrants are seen as corrupting and degrading the tribal home (“poisoning our blood”), changing its comfortable familiar parameters. Part of a broad narrative of declinism. Thus Trump’s “American carnage” and “Only I can fix it.”

Again the lure of the strongman. People who feel disempowered see the strongman as compensating for their own sense of weakness. As if they can somehow absorb some of his strength. As if all could be fixed by one person of great wisdom and capability. As if Trump had those attributes. And as if removing democratic accountability serves people better.

The old and familiar, for most of these populists, importantly includes Christian religion. Thus the insistence that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” In fact our founders hated the religious oppressiveness they knew all too well, and aimed to banish it.

Our Supreme Court is undoing their work; applying the legal doctrine, “Christianity always wins.” Going so far in one recent case to literally make up untrue facts to achieve that result (the one where a football coach forced students to pray).

The Economist recently editorialized about the threat posed by this movement of populist “national conservatism.” Cover title: The Right Goes Gaga. But they recognized underlying real grievances: people “see illegal migration as a source of disorder and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will grow up to be poorer than they are. They are anxious about losing their jobs to new technology. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been captured by hostile, illiberal, left-leaning elites. They see the globalists who have thrived in recent decades as members of a self-serving, arrogant caste.”

The Economist is itself a standard-bearer for classical liberalism, set against both today’s left and right. Both of which need to be opposed, and countered with sensible policies. But squeezed between the other two, true liberalism hasn’t got much traction.

Impeding amelioration of all those mentioned grievances. Much of the West, and America in particular, has fallen into a scleroticized inertia when it comes to any sort of reform or societal change. The inability to deal with immigration policy is one example. Another is the chronic failure to overcome morasses of restrictions stopping desperately needed expansion of housing. Britain suffers this too. (A big rail upgrade project there is such a fiasco that it may actually slow down trains.) A big reason for it all is the intensification of political antagonisms, in what’s been called a “vetocracy” — one segment of society able to block action by others.

Of course the censorious holier-than-thou totalitarian woke left is bad too. But not remotely so threatening, simply because it’s vastly smaller. Meantime the threat from the right might be even bigger were it not tied to a grotesquely depraved con man. However legitimate their grievances might otherwise be, this is no way to help them. Imagine the movement with a leader more palatable to sensible people. Trump’s awfulness may be our salvation.

However — The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper asked some Republican Nikki Haley supporters who they’d vote for between Trump and Biden. All, former Trump voters, said they were done with him, calling him a bad man, unfit to be president, a threat to democracy and global security. But, agonizing, all but one would still vote for him over Biden. Political insanity is the new pandemic.

Catskill High School and the Great American Insanity Machine

During rehearsals for a school performance, Catskill High schoolers were talking. Stop it or I’ll tape your mouths, Choral Director Michelle Storrs-Ryan said, brandishing some scotch tape. One student briefly taped her own mouth while still talking. Everyone had a laugh.

Then someone, it seems, registered a complaint.

Thrusting Catskill High into the merciless jaws of America’s Insanity Machine. Where the watchwords are “zero tolerance,” and “cover your ass” — and common sense is banished. Often such cases have some political context. But not even that is present here. It’s hard to fathom what anyone could get their knickers in a twist about.

Yet The Great Scotch Tape Abomination has received multiple days’ coverage in the Albany newspaper. School Superintendent Dan Wilson — rather than telling the complainant “Get a life” — declared (in the name of “safety” and “protecting students”) an “ongoing investigation,” and that “there is a process that must be followed.”

Must be.

Storrs-Ryan, apparently well beloved by the school community, has meantime been suspended. So has the principal, Junait Shah . . . because he should have done . . . what?

There’s been a huge backlash against these suspensions, with protest marches, class boycotts, and calls for Wilson’s ouster.

Talk about tempests in teacups. But maybe I’m overblowing it myself, and this is merely a case of a single asshole (Wilson).

Meanwhile I’m surprised there haven’t been demands to change the school’s (and town’s) name — I mean, cats kill?

But the kind of zero tolerance insanity seen there has taken hold in many aspects of American life. Look at so many folks totally demonizing President Biden. I criticize him plenty myself but, people, have some perspective please. I recall conservative satirist P. J. O’Rourke in 2016 saying Hillary Clinton “is wrong about everything — but wrong within normal parameters.” Of course alluding to the alternative. That dichotomy obtains too in our 2024 choice.

Part of why so many are so down on Biden (mindful of his age) is Kamala Harris. And why, exactly, is she so unpopular? Being both female and nonwhite is a factor. But in today’s foul American mood, there seems to be no way any actual political figure could inspire general approval. Meantime I remember a 2019 David Brooks column rhapsodizing so about Harris’s great attributes that I thought he’d fallen in love.

At least Harris has done nothing like paying off a porn star to hush up adulterous sex — or stealing classified documents — or trying to overthrow the government.

So at least there’s one person in America who’s immune from the zero tolerance madness. Having said he could even shoot someone and lose no votes.

Speaking of that guy, and immunity — and shooting someone — our august Supreme Court has done him a massive favor by keeping his insurrection trial on hold while it spends months judiciously considering the preposterous claim of presidential immunity from prosecution for any crime. During lower court arguments, one of his attorneys, when asked if that included ordering a political foe killed, answered yes. (The immunity claim was there laughed out of court).

By the way, presiding over his stolen document trials is Judge Aileen Cannon — whom he appointed to the bench. How does she not recuse herself??*

For that flouting of judicial ethics I have zero tolerance.

* In 1973, being sued for libel, I came before a local judge (Arnold Proskin) who’d merely been politically active on the same side as me. That alone made him instantly recuse himself.

Trump and The End of the World

“Well, he was president before and it wasn’t the end of the world.” Thus do many Americans complacently shrug at the prospect of Trump’s election.

Huge mistake.

End of the world? Actually it was, for vast numbers who needlessly died due to Trump’s opera buffa Covid performance.

Some also romanticize the economy under Trump. In truth that was luck, being bequeathed prosperity by President Obama (who’d inherited a hot mess and fixed it). And already forgotten is the 2020 pandemic-related economic implosion, which Trump’s fecklessness made worse. While few have any notion what damage his promised tariff lunacy will do.

But those are details. The bigger reality is his monstrous depravity of character and behavior. So many fools don’t see it. Or else cravenly accept it for the sake of some socio-political agenda or tribalistic cultism (or just racism). Oblivious to making America — to use his phrase — a shithole country.

He’s also virtually pledged to end our role as leader of the free world, tossing our alliances and aligning instead with dictators, like Putin, whom he admires as role models. Anti-democratic authoritarianism is now a core Republican value. They’re helping Russia crush Ukraine by blocking U.S. aid. Making for a world far worse for our interests. “America First” my ass.

The party is an edifice of lies. The great “Trump won” lie now akin to a religious dogma. Likewise the “witch hunt” narrative that he’s unfairly persecuted by politically biased justice systems. In reality this criminal has gotten away with too much for too long.

It all came together on January 6, 2021, with his conspiracy to overthrow his election defeat and our democracy. While lying that the election was stolen, it was Trump himself trying to steal it. If his presidency was not the end of the world, it was only because that effort failed.

Mainstream news media does try to remind us. Yet half-heartedly, half the time making it seem this election is merely another normal-ish choice; fallen into acceptance of Trump’s inevitability. While half the country tunes them out anyway. And Republican politicians treat Trump as though he’s God’s gift to America, and January 6 never happened. Or its perpetrators were heroes. It feels like a grotesque carnival hall of mirrors.

Proving how insane it was to elect Trump the first time. And if, after his coup attempt — literally the greatest crime in U.S. political history — we nevertheless do it again, that will be the end of America. The end of an America that cherishes democracy, human decency, and rationality itself. The end of an America that leads the world as a beacon for those ideals and values. And thus, yes, the end of that world.

But I’m an old bore taking it too seriously. In today’s Tiktokified culture, Trump is the more entertaining candidate. That’s what matters.

Voting and Demographics: What Really Drives Today’s Politics?

On Election Night 2008, when Obama was declared the winner, TV showed a middle-aged Chicago Black woman jumping up and down, shouting “God bless America! God bless America!” I hadn’t voted for Obama, yet this resonated for me. This was the America I loved, a country of openness and positivity, generosity of spirit.

How far we’ve fallen. Next electing an embodiment of mean-spiritedness, and we may well do it again — despite his attempted coup, only the worst of countless villainies. The uglier his picture gets, the higher in polls he rises. A defacement of American ideals that’s breaking my heart. How are we to understand this?

A host of things sour voters toward President Biden, not seeing those are molehills compared to the other side’s mountains. And mainstays of the Democratic party’s traditional coalition — the working class and ethnic minorities — have been shifting toward Republicans. Polling now shows the longtime Democratic allegiance advantage has disappeared.

The Economist magazine recently reviewed a pair of books analyzing those shifts. Conventional wisdom has Democrats losing connection with their plebeian roots, becoming instead mainly the party of educated elites. Working class economic anxieties have been played like a fiddle by Republicans — even while actually betraying them (as with tax cuts heavily skewed to the rich, and trade tariffs costing consumers money). For Hispanics, the assumption was that they’d be repelled by Republican harshness toward immigrants (like them) — but most aren’t actually recent arrivals themselves and many are culturally conservative.

Thus all the “culture war” stuff. The Economist suggests Democrats are out of touch on such matters, having been taken over by a “strange ideology” of wokeness. But in fact, those “progressives” who “speak in the language of the faculty lounge” are a fringe minority among the scores of millions of normal people who still comprise the heart of the Democratic party. As shown by their decisive rejection of all that in the 2020 primaries in favor of the most moderate, centrist, down-to-earth candidate.

So while The Economist cites the example of “rebranding” Hispanics as “Latinx” — indeed a particularly asinine instance of the woke left’s weaponization of vocabulary to assert virtue one-upmanship — “Latinx” never gained much traction and seems to have largely disappeared.

Blacks are still mostly Democrats. But here too, defections are rife, and Democrats can ill afford that vote loss in close elections. It’s perhaps especially puzzling given the Republican party’s racist heart. The Economist notes, however, that the Black Republican upsurge is largely confined to younger males, with African-American women remaining solidly Democrat — and it deems this gender divide hard to explain.

Actually it may provide a clue to the bigger picture, with a key elemental cause afoot: the macho factor. Osama Bin Laden famously said that if people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will prefer the strong horse.

It’s a powerful psychological proclivity; human beings are, like moths to a flame, attracted to strength, or the appearance of it. Thus the “strongman” syndrome in politics. And this machoism tends to be more prevalent among males, whereas females are more into a psychology of nurturing and our softer side.

This helps explain the gender gap among Blacks vis-a-vis Republicans — and the Republican appeal more generally. Democrats can come across as the party of effete limp-wristed weenies, while Republicans pose muscularly as Bin Laden’s strong horse. This cuts across a whole range of issues. The border and immigration a prime example. Likewise crime, with Republicans prattling “law and order.”

And what’s more macho than gun culture? (However antithetical to law and order!)

Principles, ideals, values? Decency? Never heard of ’em. Truth, reality? Got my own, thanks.

So Republicans — literally — go from strength (or, again, its appearance) to strength. The seeming strength disparity psychologically shapes many voters’ deep inner take on the Trump-Biden contest. Even while in Trump’s case it’s strength in badness. If he wins, Americans may find they don’t like that strength so much after all.

God Save Democracy . . . From Voters

My championing democracy isn’t just sappy sentimentality. Nor merely the principle of government accountable to citizens. Democracy makes for a better society with happier people. Francis Fukuyama wrote about how it serves a deep psychological need for respect and human dignity. It promotes literal law and order, and better policies overall and thus higher incomes. Further, democracies are less prone to destructive warfare. Practically all wars involve dictatorships. A democratic Russia would never have invaded Ukraine.

But most people understand none of this and fall prey to demagogues playing a different tune. The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper has long been visiting Trump rallies and talking with fans. They’re salt-of-the earth people, God love them. But their notions about matters political tend to be altogether clueless or else shaped by Fox News and other even worse crap spewers. They don’t read The New York Times or Fukuyama. Thinking America is screwed up needing strong medicine, oblivious to how much is right about the country, that Trump would screw up. They’re an unnerving counter to my democratic idealism.

And this sort of thing’s been undermining democracy the world over. People falling for the lure of the strongman, the “only I can fix it” shtick, manipulating deep-seated primordial psychology.

Latest off the rails is Indonesia. Got free of a dictator in 1998 and democratic since. They twice wisely elected Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”), of humble background and mien, over Prabowo Subianto, a strutting general guilty of bloody atrocities (and that dictator’s son-in-law). Jokowi’s done much good. But power corrupts. Prabowo was made defense minister, and then, Jokowi being term-limited, he ran again for president, with Jokowi’s son as running mate — exempted from an age restriction by the judiciary’s head — his uncle. Prabowo has won in a landslide.

If power corrupts even good people, it sure never makes bad ones better. How often we’ve seen that movie. Good luck, Indonesia.

Back to America, it’s striking how voters no longer punish Republican politicians for rotten behavior. Not just personal stuff, but matters of public import — like January 6. The day after, I’d naively thought Republicans would pay a huge electoral price. Who could imagine they’d actually be rewarded, winning a House of Representatives majority? Of which they’ve made a shambles.

Regarding their recent fecklessness over Ukraine aid and border legislation, columnist David Brooks said he’d thought himself unshockable — but this shocked him. Yet once again Republicans seem to be paying no electoral price.

It wasn’t always like this. Indeed, Americans have traditionally been puritanically intolerant of politicians’ foibles. Remember Muskie with his tears; Hart with his “Monkey Business;” Dean with his “scream?” And more recently Andrew Cuomo and Al Franken.

Those were all Democrats, punished by Democrats. Republicans today seem to have other fish to fry. Trump said he’d lose no votes if he shot someone. He hasn’t done that, but plenty other awful stuff. Like found by courts culpable for major fraud (Trump University; now his real estate business). Once upon a time that alone would have been totally disqualifying. Worse by far was January 6 and his plot to overthrow democracy itself. But Republicans just slide past it all.

Many voters, and not only MAGA cultists, seem unswayed by Trump being called a threat to democracy, shrugging that off as just political rhetoric. And his vile character? Also widely shrugged off.

And so crime pays. In their latest Ukraine/border travesty, Congressional Republicans nakedly trashed the national interest — indeed, on issues they themselves have been screaming about — for the sake of political advantage. They virtually told us so. Rather than fix the border, they prefer having a mess to smear Biden about. And, voila, they’re gaining that political advantage. Polls show voters trusting them, on such issues, more than Democrats.

Those voters have infantilized themselves. They’re not ready for democracy.

Alexei Navalny’s Murder

Alexei Navalny, Putin’s top critic, was imprisoned under bogus charges and harsh arctic conditions cruelly calculated to destroy his health. Yet Navalny, 47, remained chipper, even managing to smuggle out anti-Putin messages. So the dictator just had him killed. Adding to a long list of Putin’s murders.

I thank President Biden for his cogent statement, I couldn’t have said it better, so I’ll use his words:

“I am both not surprised and outraged . . . [Navalny] bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence, all the bad things the Putin government is doing. In response, Putin had him poisoned, arrested, prosecuted for fabricated crimes, sent him to prison, he was held in isolation . . . even in prison he was a powerful voice for the truth. He could have lived safely in exile after the assassination attempt on him in 2020, which nearly killed him . . . Instead, he returned to Russia, knowing he’d likely be imprisoned, even killed.*

“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death . . . even more proof of Putin’s brutality. He inflicts terrible crimes on his own people . . . [Navalny] was brave, he was principled, he was dedicated to building a Russia where rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody . . . He knew it was a cause worth dying for . . . His courage will not be forgotten.”

In a world with evil strutting all over, it’s a consolation hearing human decency upheld with such moral force.

The contrast with Trump could not be starker. Nothing to say about Navalny. While he’s idolized Putin and excused his many murders before. Biden’s statement condemned Trump’s comments encouraging Russia to attack our NATO allies, which are still reverberating. Just by saying that, Trump has undermined those alliances, and our national security. Calling it treasonous is not hyperbole.

I weep for Navalny. Don’t make me weep for America in November.

* I wrote about this at the time: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2021/01/22/alexei-navalny-courageous-hero/