Author: odd man out

‘Moderate Republican’ is an oxymoron

~ odd man out
Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

I was reading aloud to Swamp Rabbit about how Donald Trump helped Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed for a lifetime gig with the Supremes:

‘As long as [Trump] was willing to go to the mat for [Kavanaugh], it fortified probably people up here, too,’ said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the chamber’s third-ranking Republican leader.

A clumsy sentence, but Thune’s meaning was clear: elected Republicans always play follow the leader if they think it’s in their best interest, even when the leader is an ignorant racist bully who would love to be our first dictator.

“It ain’t just elected Republicans,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s Trump’s base. It’s all them pissed-off guys who hate labor unions and immigrants and science and black people and uppity women. It’s them dummies who think coal is coming back.”

I wanted to argue with him, but he was right — Republicans don’t follow Trump in spite of what he is; they follow because of what he is.

I thought of Trump mocking Christine Blasey Ford, one of the women who’d accused Kavanaugh of sex assault. Rank-and-file Republicans laughed at Ford and cheered Trump. Liberal talking heads on cable news said Trump’s remarks might trigger a backlash among moderate Republican senators — Flake, Collins, Murkowsky. But two days later, two of the three moderates voted with the other Republicans to confirm.

“There ain’t no moderate Republicans,” the rabbit said. “You’re either for Trump or you’re against him. Being against him is like being against tax breaks for the rich. It’s like being for a higher minimum wage, for cleaning up the environment, for affordable health care, for abortion rights. The same goes for Kavanaugh. Voting against him would have been like voting against being a Republican.”

Bottom line? Most Republican senators know Trump is a pig, but he’s their pig. They got on the bandwagon after his victories in the primaries, and they embraced him with real fervor when it became clear he was a faux-populist who had suckered the base into supporting pro-rich policy goals. They confirmed Kavanaugh for him, even after the judge was caught in numerous lies. They would salute him if the law allowed him to become dictator.

Footnote: In a previous post I referred to the more polite Republican legislators — Lindsay Graham and so on — as “discretely vile,” to distinguish them from the overtly vile Trump. It’s a distinction no longer worth making, judging by the conduct of Graham and his gang during the Kavanaugh hearings.

The Times’s Trump story is a few years too late

~ odd man out

“I built what I built myself,” Mr. Trump has said, a narrative that was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times. Certainly a handful of journalists and biographers, notably Wayne Barrett, Gwenda Blair, David Cay Johnston and Timothy L. O’Brien, have challenged this story, especially the claim of being worth $10 billion… But The Times’s investigation of the Trump family’s finances is unprecedented in scope and precision, offering the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald J. Trump a gilded life. The reporting makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth…

It’s good that The New York Times has owned up to being “often credulous” in it’s decades-long coverage of Trump, and that it gave credit to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Johnston, former reporter for The Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, who was on to Trump’s humongous lies way back when he was a failing casino owner in Atlantic City.

But still … Why was the newspaper of record’s masterful, 14,000-word investigative piece not written a few years ago, when it might have helped deny the presidency to a lifelong fraud who has destroyed the last shred of confidence people had in the federal government?

I asked my sagely friend Swamp Rabbit as we chatted on the porch of my shack in the Tinicum swamp. “That’s easy,” he said. “The Times and the rest of the media had been propping up Trump’s public image since the 1970s, on account of they know people like reading about a cocky guy on the make, a bragger who makes big promises.”

“But his promises were empty,” I replied, “He cheated the people he did business with. A lot of them went broke waiting to get paid by him. He was never anything but a con man.”

The rabbit rolled his eyes and spit in the swamp. “His fans liked that he was a con man. They liked the idea that he charmed all them bankers and was a self-made man. They didn’t want to know he started on third base and got dragged across home plate by his father Fred.”

“Trump’s not charming,” I countered. “He’s vulgar, ignorant and delusional.”

The rabbit laughed. “To most people, them things are the same as charming. This is America, Odd Man. Give the people what they want.”

Footnote: Trump is an ogre and U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kanavaugh is a weasel, but they have two things in common: Both are liars and both think their inherited wealth entitles them to behave badly.

Judicial temper tantrum

~ odd man out

Everybody got a good look at Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial temperament on Thursday, and at his fear that he might get caught lying if the FBI investigates Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that he tried to rape her.

Under questioning, Kavanaugh sniped and ranted. He said he was the victim of a left-wing conspiracy to keep him off the Supreme Court. “My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed,” he wailed, as if the Republican majority in the Senate had somehow turned against him. As if the sky was falling.

“I ain’t never seen the like,” Swamp Rabbit said, watching Kavanaugh on TV as he threw an afternoon-long hissy fit instead of refuting the rape allegations. “He thinks he should be in the Supremes, but he keeps losing his shit. You sure he went to law school?”

Kavanaugh was a ball of weepy, petulant anger — the sort of anger a preppy might show when his dad says he can’t borrow the Lexus to party with his preppy friends.

With one big difference: There was panic in his anger, especially when questioners on the Senate Judiciary Committee mentioned the FBI. He looked like the thought of FBI agents interviewing his old sidekick Mark Judge was his worst nightmare. “I’m innocent of this charge!” he whined.

He was cruising toward confirmation despite his pathetic tantrum until Friday, when Republican Sen. Jeff Flake called for a floor-vote delay.

Now the Yale Law School grad who can’t seem to make a coherent argument will have a whole week to think about what Judge and other ghosts from his school days might say to the feds. And about the world of trouble he’ll be in if they say too much.

Kavanaugh’s dirty secrets still surfacing

~ odd man out


The past is never dead. It’s not even past. — William Faulkner

(I wrote the following before a third accuser came forward today.)

I’d just got back from a sales job upstate at a ski resort that doubles as a venue for dog shows. A pit bull had tried to bite me. My glasses fell into the little lake near the slopes and it took me a half-hour to fish them out. I was mad when I got home.

Swamp Rabbit was on the porch at my shack, watching breaking news on TV. Senate Republicans were hurrying to confirm U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a proud graduate of the spoiled rich boy’s club, before Democrats could push to investigate the allegation that he tried to rape a girl back in prep school.

“Did you see him on Fox News pretending he never ran with a gang of preppies, that he was never a drunk?” I said. “Did you see him sniveling? You were right, he’s a weasel.”

“He’s a weasel, but that don’t mean the attempted rape story is true,” Swamp Rabbit replied.”The Dems can’t go around presuming he’s guilty if they don’t have the dirt on him.”

No one’s calling Kavanaugh guilty, I told the rabbit. They’re just asking for a background check now that two women (so far) have accused him of sexual assault. They want to hear from his old buddy Mark Judge, the recovering alcoholic who wrote a book about the boozing and harassment of girls that went on when Judge and Kavanaugh were preppies together. And from his roomy at Yale who says Kavanaugh was a drunk and a braggart. And from the other women who say he was a dirtball back in the day.

“How many dudes you know were goody-goodies when they was young?” the rabbit countered. “I wasn’t into sex assault, but I was a drunk and I wasn’t nice to all the girls. I bet you were just as bad, Odd Man.”

“You’re still a drunk,” I reminded him. “The difference is you and I don’t pretend we were choir boys.”

I tried to explain. Kavanaugh could have admitted he was rowdy in his school days, that he drank too much and did stuff he now regrets. Instead, he told Fox News he never did the sort of things he’s been accused of, and treated women with “dignity and respect.” He’s stuck with the squeaky-clean persona constructed for him by Republicans. If he gets caught in a lie, the structure will collapse.

“By that time he’ll have a gig with the Supremes,” the rabbit said. “He won’t need no structure.”

The rabbit was right, of course. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, he gets a life-long appointment to the Court, which means he’ll have decades to take part in rulings that could screw up the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans.

“What a system,” I said. “What a world.”

“What a weasel,” the rabbit replied. “You got any whiskey around here?”

We live in a democracy. So what?

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

This is what happens when all the president’s men are grifters:

Another day, another set of regulations targeted for reversal by President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. The latest possible rollback affects a powerful greenhouse gas with up to 36 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide. The agency moved [Sept. 10] to make it easier for drillers to meet requirements meant to curb leaks of that gas, methane, from oil and natural gas infrastructure. The rules are not final, and the public will have 60 days to comment on the potential changes after they are published in the Federal Register. While the changes will save industry money, the agency’s own analysis found the proposed rules could pump hundreds of thousands more tons of the climate-warming gas into the atmosphere and add millions of dollars in agricultural, health-care and other costs to the U.S. economy because of climate change.

I read the story and thought nothing can be done, there’s no point getting worked up about corporate polluters and climate change and millions of people who suffer from climate-related hunger and thirst.

But I got worked up anyway.

Then I calmed down and wondered why I feel contempt not only for Trump but for everyone who supports him. Have I become hopelessly intolerant, or am I merely reacting in a sensible way to people who back policies that shouldn’t be tolerated in a civilized country?

I asked Swamp Rabbit, who was visiting my shack. He said, “Ain’t nothing civilized about this country. How are you defining tolerant?”

I told him tolerance is about conceding that people have the right to believe or disbelieve as they see fit. It is not about allowing giant corporations to poison the environment because they don’t believe in science.

“Blah blah,” the rabbit said. “We got Agent Orange in the White House and a bunch of his yes men running Congress. Who’s gonna stop ’em?”

Democracy will stop them, I told him. Even the dimmest citizens will come to realize that Trump, a lifelong bully, thief and liar, is making policies that are hurting the country. (I didn’t believe my own words, but they sounded good.)

“What if they stay with Trump?” he said. “They got a right to believe what they want, you said so yourself.”

For the sake of argument I told him the majority of Americans were sensible, that the majority always prevails in a democracy.

“How are you defining democracy?” he said. “Germany was a democracy until them sensible Germans elected Hitler.”

I was getting mad. “Wait a minute, rabbit. It wasn’t long ago you were warning me not to compare Trump with evil dictators. I think you said comparisons like that are too simplistic.”

“I was wrong,” he said. “There ain’t no such thing as too simplistic. Trump’s the living proof of that.”

Footnote: Let’s not get too pessimistic. Voting in the midterms will be a good first step toward ousting our would-be-dictator.

A weasel auditions for the Supremes

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Brett Kavanaugh knows why Donald Trump chose him to replace Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, and so do all the Republican senators who are so eager to finish the confirmation charade. Even my friend Swamp Rabbit knows, and he’s drunk most of the time. He showed me this last week, from one of the mainstream news magazines:

Judge Brett Kavanaugh declined to answer two questions from Democratic senators related to presidential investigations during his confirmation hearing — if a president should comply with a subpoena and if he has the ability to self-pardon — saying both were hypothetical.

“This Kavanaugh dude is Trump’s ace in the hole,” Swamp Rabbit explained. “He ain’t gonna mess with a sitting president, no matter what the president’s accused of.”

The rabbit mentioned a 2009 law review article in which Kavanaugh wrote that “we should not burden a sitting President with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions.”

Kavanaugh felt differently when Democrat Bill Clinton was in trouble, but that was way back when. He could be the swing vote if the court is asked to rule on whether our overtly corrupt president should be permitted to continue breaking the law. He isn’t about to screw up his career by promising to recuse himself from cases involving the president, or by saying anything honest about his views on abortion, the environment, gun control and other volatile issues.

“Remind me again why Kavanaugh is allowed to withhold the truth, or to tell outright lies,” I said.

The rabbit said it was because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during her confirmation hearing, said she shouldn’t have to answer questions about possible future cases.

“But she did answer questions about Roe v. Wade and other cases, “I replied. “And she didn’t try to hide anything about her record, like Kavanaugh did. She’s been called a liberal lion.”

“The stakes are too high this time,” the rabbit said. “The survival of the worst U.S. president ever may be on the line. Trump don’t need no lion, he needs a weasel. Kavanaugh is his answered prayer.”

Going to church despite the priests

~ odd man out

… The Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and that power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead.

— V.S. Naipal, A Bend In the River

Naipaul was referring to the rise and fall of empires, but his metaphor could also be about the Catholic Church and its waning influence on the many millions of Americans who were born Catholic but don’t go to church except to attend weddings, funerals or baptisms.

“Fallen-away” Catholics, they used to be called, as opposed to practicing Catholics. The former were out in full force at a funeral I attended, for a relative I hardly knew, in a Philly suburb that’s seen better days, at about the same time the Pennsylvania Supreme Court released a 1,400-plus page grand jury report naming more than 300 priests accused of child sex abuse in this state.

It was a funeral mass, but it seemed more like a secular service. The altar looked like a stage kitchen. A few relatives and friends of the deceased went up to share anecdotes about him, or to read aloud from scripture. A woman sang tuneless hymns as the priest and altar boys rearranged the props for each new part of the mass.

Maybe there were many true believers at the funeral, but I doubt it, even though there was a big response when the priest invited practicing Catholics to receive Holy Communion, something you’re not supposed to do unless you’ve recently confessed your sins to a priest. That, at least, was the rule in the old days.

My cousin’s wife and I looked at each other as the pews creaked and most of the congregants went to the altar. We were reasonably sure that few of them had been to confession, and that ever fewer believed that priests have the moral authority to tell them how to conduct their lives.

How could they? The entire Catholic hierarchy has been discredited in recent years by the testimony of all those Catholics who, in their youth, were victimized by predator priests. The “holy father” in Rome can’t bring himself to fire the bishops who moved the predators from one locale to another as their crimes were revealed. He can’t even admit that priestly celibacy is and always was a sham.

Most Catholics seem fairly quiet regarding the ongoing scandal. They grew up going to Catholic churches and schools. They still go to church for the rituals, despite their lack of respect for the priests who preside over the rituals. They go because the rituals help them maintain bonds with friends and relatives they wouldn’t otherwise see. That’s what communion is about.

But many churches have closed or are closing as out-of-court settlements for priestly assault bankrupt diocese after diocese. It’s not hard to imagine a time in which the 2,000-year-old star in Rome has been reduced to a cinder in the minds of American Catholics. The only question is how long its feeble light will linger.

Footnote: My friend Swamp Rabbit asked why I was dressed up on such a stinking hot day. And where did I get that so-called suit? Here and there, I told him. Mostly from the thrift store at Eighth and Wolf that closed last year. I used to go there every six months or so. “It was my favorite ritual,” I said, “but all things must pass.”

New opiates for the masses needed

~ odd man out

marx-321

Yesterday, I googled a piece of old news and ran it past my friend Swamp Rabbit. The gist of the article was that many Democrats and independents who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 didn’t vote at all in 2016 and would have put Hillary Clinton over the top in key states if they had.

Prior to this we’d been jawing about religion, “the opium of the masses,” as Karl Marx called it in the 19th century, before organized religion ran out of gas and the ruling classes came up with other activities — sports fandom, celebrity worship, reality TV watching, Facebook, video games — to distract people from their unhappiness with the status quo.

“Am I leaving out any opiates of the masses?” I asked Swamp Rabbit.

“Opium itself,” he said. “Oxycontin and heroin and all them other drugs. And whiskey, my personal favorite.”

I reconsidered and told him it was unfair to blame Donald Trump’s election on drugs or any other single distraction, even reality TV, the medium he used to become a candidate. All the distractions are merely symptoms, not the cause, of the disease that ruined the body politic.

Swamp Rabbit groaned. “So what is it ruined the body politic, whatever that is?”

Loss of hope was the cause, I told him. The belief that we have government for the corporations, not for the people.

“The Trumpers voted against hope,” I said, climbing on my soapbox. “Against affordable health care and a living wage for the poor, against the idea that whites can co-exist with non-whites. They voted for isolationism and climate change denial, for a guy who routinely cheated every contractors who did business with him, who made fun of the disabled and bragged about grabbing pussy.”

“That don’t make no sense,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Nobody votes against hope. Them peeps that voted for Trump because Hillary dissed them. Because they thought Trump would make America great again.”

I told him they voted for Trump out of spite, not hope. Because Trump was the perfect vehicle for expressing their frustration and fear of the future.

Democrats who didn’t vote were as despairing and spiteful as the Trump voters, I added. They convinced themselves that Clinton, because she wasn’t progressive enough, would be as bad for the country as Trump.

“And now we’re stuck with a malicious fool who’s trying hard to become a dictator,” I said. “How great is that?”

Swamp Rabbit chewed on that thought for a minute. “We ain’t got religion to fall back on,” he replied. “Even whiskey don’t help much. I guess we need a new drug.”

Mama whale’s message to the media

~ odd man out

From NPR:

After carrying her deceased baby for at least 17 days and 1,000 miles, an orca mother has shown signs of returning to normal. She was seen Saturday with fellow members of her pod, chasing a school of salmon. She is no longer carrying her baby, and she looks healthy. “Her tour of grief is now over and her behavior is remarkably frisky,” according to a statement on the Center for Whale Research’s website… Not a single orca born in the past three years has been known to survive, according to the Center for Whale Research. That’s why the fact that [the mother whale] recently gave birth was so exciting, if only for a brief moment. Her calf died just 30 minutes after it was first spotted by a whale watch operator on July 24.

I’m not sentimental, but the whale story moved me. It spooked me. What if she was grieving not just for her baby, but for her entire species, and for all endangered species? What if her “tour of grief” was to remind humans that the huge amounts of toxins we generate are killing the oceans?

And don’t tell me it’s silly to attribute thoughts and feelings to non-human creatures. Whales feel deeply and are highly intelligent. Humans, on the other hand, are too dumb or selfish to care that their behavior might be dooming not just whales but their own future generations.

Footnote: Save the whales! Save the humans! Something’s wrong, as Spirit noted almost a half-century ago: https://youtu.be/YsTK2LHZKPQ

At Musikfest, waiting for something to happen

~ odd man out

The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. A few people may have been standing together – five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are… It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it.

― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

What’s cool about Canetti is that he could be describing a neo-Nazi rally, an inner-city riot, or a big carnival like Musikfest in Bethlehem, PA, where I worked all week.

For me, the event was an outdoor sales ordeal intensified by thunderstorms, daily temperatures in the 90s and a cacophony of power generators, crowd noise and cover bands cranking out the greatest hits of the 1970s. For the crowd, it was… I have no idea. Who knows about crowds?

The crowd was small and then it was huge. Madmen babbled at the sky. Tattooed lover boys stalked giggly girls. Old couples sipped lemonade to stave off heatstroke. Women pushed baby carriages, dawdling forward as the sun beat down on their unshaded, screaming infants. No one moved fast except for kids and the grossly obese pilots of those silent go-carts that zip by without warning.

At night the crowd swelled and the lines at the beer vendors’ tents and the porta-potties grew longer. Thousands of strangers ate greasy gyros and drank from glow-in-the-dark mugs. They squeezed past each other, stopped dead, looked like they were waiting for someone to tell them why they were there.

They was waiting for a signal, it seemed, something that would focus their enormous collective energy. I felt an inkling of that energy only once, on the first night, when hundreds of young dancers at Wireless Disco, seeking shelter from a sudden downpour, converged on a big white tent that collapsed under their weight.

But this was only one small segment of the crowd, which covered many square miles. The rainfall was too fierce to allow people to come “streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction.”

Which was fine with me. I’d rather an ordeal than a catastrophe, so long as the ordeal results in a decent paycheck.