Biden Must Go

This is all I saw of last night's presidential debate, and all I needed to see:

 

I haven't blogged much about politics these last few years, and for good reason:  it's not safe to speak freely in America anymore.  And the vicious madness of current politics is not good for my mental equanimity.

But I will say that for the good of the country, Biden ought to decline the nomination at the Democratic Convention next month and let some other Democrat run for election this November.

Who that would be, I haven't the faintest idea.  Pete Buttigieg is the only politician I know of who is smart enough and good enough to be the leader of the free world.  He's sharp as a tack, he's got heart, and he's got balls.  But Pete is still a bit too young, and needs more experience at the top of the ladder.

What about Kamala, you say.  Well, what about her?  She seemed like a woman who would really make a mark on Washington when she was elected Veep - but since then has largely faded into the woodwork.  My impression is that Biden has kept her on the bench all this long time, and she's dutifully kept her mouth shut about it.  She's a cypher to me - an unknown quantity.  A fearless, outspoken woman who came out swinging just might energize the the party faithful and capture many voters' attention.  But who knows.

However -- and remember, I told you Biden was too old five years ago! -- the choice before us now is to vote for a bad man who would be an incompetent president (to put it very mildly) -- or to vote for a good man who would also be an incompetent president.  Both are unfit for office, albeit for very different reasons.

A terrible choice.  Whichever way it turns out, we lose, and the world loses.  Big time.

The stakes are too high to be indifferent about this election.  God bless Joe Biden, who deserves our thanks and respect for doing all he could do -- but he should now yield the scepter to a younger and more vigorous man or woman.  Someone who can pick up the baton and win the race, if there is anyone.  It's not just about parties - it's about the continuation of democracy, or the hell of dictatorship.  It's about the lives of millions of people all around the world.  It's about Good versus Evil, and that's no joke.

There, I've said it.  That's my good deed for today.  Make of it what you will.

P. S. --  The more I think about it, a Harris-Kinzinger "unity" ticket might be a real humdinger.  Hmm.

Update, 6/28, 11:30 p.m.:  It's cold comfort, but I see the Editorial Board of the New York Times agrees with me:

“The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence,” the board wrote in an opinion piece published Friday.

“The greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election. As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes,” the Times also said.

Biden is manifestly unfit for the highest job in the world, and the most demanding.  To ignore what is right in front of our eyes is utterly foolish; that's exactly what we reproach the Republicans for doing in the face of all Trump's wickedness, isn't it?  It would be disloyalty to our country to pretend all is well, nothing to worry about. Do you care more about your party or your country?

The board went on to say it would still support Biden as its “unequivocal pick” if the choice remains between him and former President Donald Trump.

Well, yes - if the choice is between Hitler and Pee-wee Herman, you have to go with the latter.  But that's a damn rotten shame.  

Roge Karma summarizes the current state of play in the Atlantic:

As of last night, there are no plausible theories left of how Biden could win the election. Last night was the test of whether Biden was up for the job of campaigning, and he failed it. This wasn’t just a weak performance, like Ronald Reagan’s first debate in 1984 and Barack Obama’s in 2012. The man could hardly speak. To believe that things will somehow turn around come September, when the next debate is scheduled, would be delusional.

The alternative to a Biden candidacy is for the president to voluntarily drop out of the race and either handpick his preferred successor or leave it entirely up to Democratic National Convention delegates to select a new candidate in August. Both come with significant risks; neither has a high probability of working. Vice President Kamala Harris, the most natural choice, may be even less popular than Biden, and other options, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, are totally unproven at the national level. But the notion that a younger, more energetic, more articulate candidate could defeat Trump is at least plausible. Biden turning things around is not.

Your Head Trucker says, without a new quarterback and smart, dramatic, honest game plan to turn things around, we're fucked.  And I mean all of us:  the country, the world, the whole human race.  Remember you heard it here first.

As Elizabeth Bruenig writes, also in the Atlantic:

The candidates said some factual things and some false things, but only one message came across as true: Our nation is shambling along the road to hell, and there doesn’t appear to be an off-ramp. “We are living in a rat’s nest,” Trump said, right for the wrong reasons. “We’re like a bunch of stupid people,” he went on; “we’re a failing nation.” Absolutely, but not because of migrants or the Chinese or the Russians: This mess is made in America, and all of us are going to suffer for it.

-----

Becoming Donald Trump

Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.) told a crowd of supporters in Los Angeles on Saturday to mob and harass members of the Trump administration:

Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.

Now Waters may have done some good things along the road, but this is stupidity in action. It is childish demagoguery, inciting hatred and possibly riot, and inviting a terrible backlash. It is completely un-American, uncivilized, and dumb beyond words. It is just what you might expect out of Donald Trump, only this time it comes from a voice on the left.

The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer's editorial board has this to say:

It might seem satisfying to liberals to see members of Donald Trump's administration fleeing from restaurants after being shamed by patrons or booted by the owner. That happened to three of Trump's people last week, including press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was asked to leave the Red Hen in Lexington, Va., by its owner Friday night. Earlier, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Trump adviser Stephen Miller were shouted out of Washington restaurants. . . .

But such behavior shouldn't feel satisfying, and it's not necessary. It's liberals trying to beat Donald Trump by becoming Donald Trump.

It wasn't long ago that these same Democrats fretted about Trump's crassness and willingness to demean anyone who dared disagree with him. They and we worried that his bullying would do more harm to political discourse, and that's exactly what's happening, as nastiness has bled from the political fringe into the political mainstream.

Certainly, that's been encouraged by members and supporters of the Trump administration, who regularly ridicule the press and political opponents. All the more reason to punch back, say progressives, who contend that the only way to defeat Trump is to fight bile with bile. But that's not true, as liberals themselves showed last week by getting Trump to back down from his policy of separating immigrant children from parents at the border. How'd they do it? By shining a light on injustice, by flooding social media, by swaying public opinion and eventually Republicans in Washington with the force and volume of their voices.

The same approach, by the way, helped save Obamacare last year from Republicans in Congress.

Adding a dollop of shame at some restaurants last week didn't add to the progressive victory. It was self-indulgence, and it gives license to similar behavior. It's not a great leap from disrupting the meal of White House officials or members of Congress to doing the same to any Republican who wears a MAGA hat or Democrat who wears a Planned Parenthood t-shirt. Are we ready for restaurant owners and other businesses to decline service for all manners of firmly held convictions? Are we ready for all the shouting that's ahead?

This is the path we're careening down, in Washington and across our country. Instead of extending grace to those with whom we disagree, we're increasingly deciding they are unworthy of it. We're following the lead of our president, whether we agree or disagree with him. We're losing.

Your Head Trucker agrees. What everybody needs to keep in mind is that just because you've been oppressed or victimized, that does NOT mean you can do no wrong. Every human being on the face of this planet--and yes I mean women, blacks, gays, "liberals," "progressives," "conservatives," and all the other subdivisions of the species, real or imaginary--is capable of wrongdoing at every point in life--it takes constant attention and self-scrutiny to stay on the path of goodness and human decency. We step off the upward path, the path of peace and civility, at our great peril.

Even if you are the sort of person who just doesn't give a flip about decency and fair play and the Golden Rule--do you really want to start this kind of stupid shit?  Because it will surely become in a very short time a game of tit for tat.  How about the first time a howling mob gathers around a member of your particular subcommunity or affiliation, and drives them out of a public venue--or worse yet, starts beating on them, as mobs are wont to do? How will you feel then, bucko?  Hah?

What goes around, comes around.  Count on it.

Don't go there. Just don't fucking go there. We are Americans, we may disagree loud and long in the political arena--but we leave it there. We don't harass the other side in the ordinary streets and shops of private life. We don't check party IDs at the door of any business. We don't persecute people for their politics. That's a filthy thing to do, and so was booting Sarah Sanders from a restaurant on political grounds.  That's not the America I love and believe in.  Waters spoke like an ignorant, self-centered, short-sighted rabble-rouser.

Just like Donald Trump, in fact.  How ugly, ugly, ugly.

We are all standing at the brink of a deep, fiery pit.  Do we really have to jump into it?


Embed from Getty Images

The Moment and the Choice

For the record, here is an open letter, published on Thursday, from the Editorial Board of the New York Times to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

I will make no comment, except to say that anyone who watched Mr. Rosenstein's confirmation hearing in March would find it hard to doubt his integrity and loyalty to the Constitution.  I'm sure at this turning point in the history of our Republic, he must feel himself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Dear Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein:

It’s rare that any single person has to bear as much responsibility for safeguarding American democracy as you find yourself carrying now. Even before President Trump’s shocking decision on Tuesday to fire the F.B.I. director, James Comey, a dark cloud of suspicion surrounded this president, and the very integrity of the electoral process that put him in office. At this fraught moment you find yourself, improbably, to be the person with the most authority to dispel that cloud and restore Americans’ confidence in their government. We sympathize; that’s a lot of pressure.

Given the sterling reputation you brought into this post — including a 27-year career in the Justice Department under five administrations, and the distinction of being the longest-serving United States attorney in history — you no doubt feel a particular anguish, and obligation to act. As the author of the memo that the president cited in firing Mr. Comey, you are now deeply implicated in that decision.

It was a solid brief; Mr. Comey’s misjudgments in his handling of the F.B.I. investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server were indeed serious. Yet you must know that these fair criticisms were mere pretext for Mr. Trump, who dumped Mr. Comey just as he was seeking more resources to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

You must also know that in ordering you to write the memo, Mr. Trump exploited the integrity you have earned over nearly three decades in public service, spending down your credibility as selfishly as he has spent other people’s money throughout his business career. We can only hope that your lack of an explicit recommendation to fire Mr. Comey reflects your own refusal to go as far as the president wanted you to.

In any case, the memo is yours, and that has compromised your ability to oversee any investigations into Russian meddling. But after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from these matters, because of his own contacts during the campaign with the Russians, the power to launch a truly credible investigation has fallen to you, and you alone.

You have one choice: Appoint a special counsel who is independent of both the department and the White House. No one else would have the standing to assure the public it is getting the truth. While a handful of Republican senators and representatives expressed concern at Mr. Comey’s firing, there is as yet no sign that the congressional investigations into Russian interference will be properly staffed or competently run. And Americans can have little faith that the Justice Department, or an F.B.I. run by Mr. Trump’s handpicked replacement, will get to the bottom of whether and how Russia helped steal the presidency for Mr. Trump.

In theory, no one should have a greater interest in a credible investigation than the president, who has repeatedly insisted the suspicions about his campaign are baseless. Yet rather than try to douse suspicions, he has shown he is more than willing to inflame them by impeding efforts to get to the truth.

Given your own reputation for probity, you must be troubled as well by the broader pattern of this president’s behavior, including his contempt for ethical standards of past presidents. He has mixed his business interests with his public responsibilities. He has boasted that conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to him as president. And from the moment he took office, Mr. Trump has shown a despot’s willingness to invent his own version of the truth and to weaponize the federal government to confirm that version, to serve his ego and to pursue vendettas large and small.

When Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million votes, for instance, he created a Voter Fraud Task Force to back up his claim that the margin resulted from noncitizens voting illegally (the task force has done nothing to date). When there was no evidence for his claim that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, Mr. Trump demanded that members of Congress put their work aside in order to dig up “facts” to support it.

Firing Mr. Comey — who, in addition to leading the Russia investigation, infuriated Mr. Trump by refusing to give any credence to his wiretapping accusation — is only the latest and most stunning example. The White House can’t even get its own story straight about why Mr. Trump took this extraordinary step.

Few public servants have found themselves with a choice as weighty as yours, between following their conscience and obeying a leader trying to evade scrutiny — Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, who behaved nobly in Watergate, come to mind. You can add your name to this short, heroic list. Yes, it might cost you your job. But it would save your honor, and so much more besides.

The Nation in Peril: "A Unique and Present Danger"

I suppose you fellas have already seen and read the unprecedented editorial that the Washington Post published yesterday, condemning the Republican nominee as "uniquely unqualified" to be President, and a direct threat to the Constitution.  But in case you haven't, go read it, now, right here.

The Nation, our republic and democracy, is in grave peril, and we must all do what we can to defend it - or watch it dissolve into a perverted Orwellian monstrosity, infernal, putrid, and wretched beyond imagination - so says your Head Trucker, but I think I am merely putting into words what every decent, intelligent person (a particularly articulate one being the writer Joyce Carol Oates) already thinks, and has thought for the past year, ever since that braggart, bully, and charlatan threw his hat into the political ring.

It occurs to your Head Trucker that the word hubris might have been invented just to describe him, the perfect exemplar of what those old Greek boys called a tyrant.  Of course, he will meet his nemesis eventually, as such characters always do, bearing within themselves the seeds of their own destruction - Oedipus, Napoleon, and Hitler are names that spring to mind here, not to mention Faust and even Lucifer himself - but perhaps not until the tyrant has caused incalculable damage and suffering in all directions.  (Now aren't you sorry you slept through Western Civ and World Lit?)

So I will add nothing here to the mountains of commentary already flooding the airwaves and intertubes - but I also recommend that you all read this article, based on a New York Times report this week, which seems to reveal Trump's "business plan" for the Presidency:  namely, that he will let his running mate be "the most powerful Vice-President in history," handling all foreign and domestic policy, and all the other tedious daily details of the Executive Office - in other words, doing the President's job for him - while Trump loafs around in comfort like a chairman of the board and simply "makes America great again," pulling the strings from behind the throne and issuing imperial decrees at his pleasure.

In other words, at a stroke, Trump would break apart the constitutional checks and balances on which our system has depended since its founding, and run it like one of his megabusinesses - a casino, perhaps.  Utterly revolting to the mind and chilling to the spirit.  As are all his other nebulous, infantile, utterly irresponsible ideas and self-serving proposals.

Some of you, at least, are old enough to remember the well-worn phrase used for practice by generations of student typists:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

Though in need of a small edit or two, never has it been truer than now.  The prime springs of History often turn not upon great events, but upon small ones:  for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, and so on.  The choice between renewal and ruin, utter ruin, is ours - but only while democracy lasts.  And the clock is tick-tick-ticking louder all the time.

I am old and rather weary now, circumscribed in action and limited in resources; this slight blog post is about the extent of what I can do: a pebble thrown into a pond. But some of you can do a little more, perhaps, thereby encouraging yet others downstream, as it were, who can do even more than that, and so good luck to you.

 I close by simply saying, as so many patriots have said before me: May God bless the United States of America.  We certainly need all the help we can get.


Addendum, 9:45 p.m., 7/24: Yes, Hillary is well past her sell-by date, and fails to inspire for several reasons. But she is hardly the fiend that the foaming right has made her out to be, and for all her faults, she is, as the Washington Post observed in its editorial, not a threat to constitutional government.

The choice is between a flawed, ambitious leader who is experienced and capable of high office - or a bloated, preening, ignorant toad who with the help of his fawning lackeys would turn this country into the biggest personality cult the world has ever seen. To my mind, there is no question here.

Change You Can't Believe In

Showtime!  Pay no attention to those little men behind the curtains . . .

In the wake of the Verizon phone-trawling revelations, coming hot on the heels of other privacy and civil-liberties scandals in recent weeks, the New York Times today said in a scathing editorial that Obama "has now lost all credibility."  Do you agree?

Excerpt:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive—whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. . . .

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance—with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power—fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

My question is, Who says the feds aren't also listening to every call, with some kind of futuristic, top-secret, voice-recognition software?

But if the Verizon revelation doesn't make you jump out of your socks, maybe this will, as reported by Amy Davidson today in the New Yorker - emphasis mine:

“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”

This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that the order went well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.

The N.S.A.-briefing slides mix corporate cheer and disturbing revelations. There are the logos of the nine companies involved: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. That is the order in which they joined PRISM. The Post describes Apple as a holdout (it acquiesced, coincidentally or not, after Steve Jobs’s death).

In other words, boys:  Everything you've ever done online in the last six years or so is recorded and stored in a government database. Everything.  Just stop and sit with that thought awhile.

I don't know about you fellas, but one reason I voted for Obama in 2008 was to prune the rot from the governmental tree that Dubya and Co. introduced, and to try to preserve constitutional government in this country.

Now it appears I was misinformed. Somebody, please tell me it's not so.


Update, 9:45 p.m.: The Guardian reports that chiefs of the Silicon Valley companies named as collaborators in the PRISM program are shocked, shocked! that gambling is going on in this establishment to hear this story and deny they have any connection with it. Of course.

Round up the usual suspects.


Update, 6/7/13, 11:40 p.m.:   Via Daily Kos, Rick Perlstein in The Nation reports that our government has been massively spying on its citizens by the millions since the 1930's - receiving daily bulk data from telephone and telegraph companies in the pre-internet days - as was revealed in the Abzug/Church congressional hearings in 1975, something your Head Trucker doesn't remember hearing about back then. But then, Perlstein says the mainstream media downplayed the story and buried it in the back pages.

Your Tax Dollars at Work.

Rachel reports on a story that originally broke in 2006, but nobody paid much attention: "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room" - and has more on this week's stories.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

But not to worry. The Prez says, "Chill, people. Nobody is listening to your damn phone calls."

 

Anyway, it's all cool because all of your elected Congresspeeps, Democrat and Republican alike, have known all about this shit since like Day 1. So chillax already! And once again, pay no attention to what's going on over there with that funny little man behind the curtains. And call off your damn dog too.