Watch your toes! Any of you who plan to vote for Dupublicans (Republicans) and Scamocrats (Democrats) need to rethink your choice. If you have not done your due diligence in reading about the Parties as they currently exist then you are part of the problem of poor government. Government has never been perfect, that’s why we vote but voting by rote is why we have such poor Congressional and other representation. Do your home work and vote like an adult. The next Congressional error could arrive on your doorstep. The major political race is not where the Governmental problems arise, the real problems are the people we overlook and just vote for due to name recognition. These are the Congressional stiffs who treat us like the village idiots, they invoke us (“the American People”) to support their agendas and those agendas do not include us no matter what they say in the media. It is certainly reasonable to be upset with the current Government but if we ignore the small races ( Congress et al) we are effectively keeping the same ineffective Government. The President will change every 4 or 8 years no matter what but the lesser elected officials will be there until they retire unless we vote them out. These are the same people are willing to shut the Government down and pass laws we do not agree with but invoke us whenever they desire. I caution you to not get caught up in angry rhetoric which leads to errors in voting.
You know that “TrusTed” logo? The one with TRUS and TED merged, yet separated via different colors?
Turns out that when you Google “TRUS”, the logo at once becomes hilarious and hilariously appropriate:
“A transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) is an ultrasound technique that is used to view a man’s prostate and surrounding tissues. The ultrasound transducer (probe) sends sound waves through the wall of the rectum into the prostate gland, which is located directly in front of the rectum.”
Yup, that’s the very top Google result. Basically, it’s an anal probe. Which makes us even more certain that he’s actually an alien.
Never one to hold back, Bette Midler recently tweeted a quote she found which compared GOP racist, sexist, bigoted warmongering presidential candidate Donald Trump, to a characterization out of the American classic novel Catch-22. The book was written by Joseph Heller over fifty years ago.
“…Catch-22 remains “a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time.”
After reading the quote and comparison, some folks can also see Republican lawmaker Ted Cruz and other GOP extremists in Heller’s words below. In any case, the critically acclaimed author who passed away in 1999 seemed to describe the worst of some in the Republican Party—on their best days. See what you think.
Here is the quote from Midler’s tweet
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Catch-22had been called one of the most significant American novels of the 20th century. Cheers to both Midler and Kreizman for bringing to light the words of a great author, which bring to light what’s wrong with the Republican Party and American politics today.
The current Presidential race has shown the darker side of our politics and unearthed the deeper evil of the whole system. Fact checkers uncover the misrepresentation of statements, media sources reveal the truth behind the sitting elected officials and we still vote some of these people in time after time. First let’s think about politics overall, this is a business that hires people to lie, misrepresent and cajole to get us to vote their way. There have been many times staffers have been caught and fired but how many have never been caught and continue to do their worst? These are the things we as voters need to pay attention to. These “stuffers” have created the rifts between us religiously, racially and economically. All of this for an elected position that invariably will benefit the voter very little. Think about the “Watergate Scandal” of the 70’s when our President and his closest aides committed crimes in his behalf. It is entirely possible that these sorts of things are still being done but with more secretiveness. “Lest we forget” our political system is rife with corruption and deceit as evidenced by the lackluster performance of our Congress in the past 20 years. it is always said:” If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck then it is most assuredly a duck!”
Several Dupublicans have met with the President’s nominee for the high court including the ranking member of the Judiciary committee. The majority leader of the Senate has stated along with other Dupublican members that there will be no hearings or meetings on this nominee. I see that happening even though these “meetings” are informal and bear no weight. Are these meetings just conversations or unofficial vettings? Apparently the Dupublican membership is not as united in this issue as Senator McGoogle would like to portray. Think about the idea that these are the people who want to us give them control of our country. Think well before you vote in the upcoming election.
It is unfortunate that we have to filter what we hear and read. It is also unfortunate that the media doesn’t. The most unsettling issue is our lack of will to look beyond the headlines. We all believe in something, that belief is what drives our motivation to do or not do. In our beliefs there are subsets that apply to religious, work and home activities. It is stated in the U.S. Constitution there is a separation of Church and State. The attached article spells that out. This is all about the recent state laws supporting the religious right to discriminate against LBGT Americans.
Yes There Is a Constitutional Separation of Church and State
Perhaps nothing is more important to American politics than a well-reasoned debate. Unfortunately, far too many people are ill-informed to make such discussions possible.
An excellent example of this comes from the responses to an article I wrote examining the concerns of conservative Christians over Tennessee schools’ teaching the five pillars of Islam. While there were a number of topics that readers could have discussed, by far the most outrage centered on my statements regarding the separation of church and state. Comments included “Clearly, someone hasn’t read the Constitution, because there is no such thing as “separation of church and state” in the US Constitution.” “Where exactly in the U.S. Constitution does it address “separation of church and state?” and “Simply put, nowhere in the First Amendment does the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ exist.”
It seems that to some people, if the words don’t explicitly appear in the constitution then the idea they refer to isn’t constitutionally guaranteed. Viewing it in these simplistic terms is meant to dismiss the entire argument; as if every decision based on the separation of church and state is somehow invalid because the term separation of church and state doesn’t appear in the constitution.
Of course the problems with this assertion are many. First and most basic is the fact that the Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter of federal constitutional law. This means that while the term “separation of Church and State” may never appear in the constitution itself, the Court ruling in the case of Everson v. Board of Education stated “the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and State.’”
A quarter century later, the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman further defined this separation when it established the Lemon Test to determine if a law violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Every ruling since has confirmed that, in the view of the highest court in the land the Constitution created a separation of church and state.
Having said that, the separation of church and state is hardly the first unwritten concept that is protected by the constitution. In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court established a women’s constitutional right to have an abortion despite the word abortion never appearing in the constitution. In the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges the Supreme Court established that laws against same-sex marriage were unconstitutional despite the word marriage never appearing in the constitution. In the 1963 case of Gideon v. Wainwright the Supreme Court established that the constitution guarantees the right to an attorney despite the words public defender never appearing in the constitution. In the 2010 case of McDonald v. Chicago the Supreme Court established that the second amendment right to bear arms included the right to bear arms for self-defense despite the words self-defense never appearing in the constitution.
It should also be noted that of the 112 Supreme Court Justices, none of them has been an atheist. In fact 92 percent of them were Christian. What rationale would these justices have for making laws that would create a legal prejudice towards their system of beliefs, especially if the separation of Church and State is a misinterpretation?
The reality is that the constitution was never meant to be a stagnant document that was rigidly adherent to the words on the page. As Thomas Jefferson said “The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please.” Over the past 200 years the Supreme Court has shaped the constitution to contain a clear separation of church and state that protects every religion equally. If only those who argue against this separation could see how they benefit from it instead of inappropriately interpreting it as an attack on Christianity.
The current events surrounding the LGBT community is at once tragic and appalling. The so called religious right has subverted the reason for the various religions in America. Many years ago Europeans arrived on the East coast to pursue their religions without fear of oppression from the Governments in Europe. They brought their own rites and rituals which they quickly tried to apply to the native population even to the point of warring with them in some cases. These are some of the same people who participated in or condoned openly or tacitly in the so called “Salem Witch trials”. You may know of the atrocities committed in a religious fervor on people who deemed witches by the leading religious leaders based on flawed information and often fear. This subversion of religion has carried over to these modern times in the form of restrictive and prolific bias against the LGBT community and by extension along racial lines (there are many races in this community too). The Constitution specifically separates Church and State yet so many States and communities have used religion to deny jobs, housing and services to folks of different and diverse life styles (which if examined are not much different than anyone else’s). The actions to deny services to all Americans regardless of their differences is against the beliefs of most mainstream religions. It is unfortunate that a few narrowly focused people and some of their leaders have fallen to a new low in humanity and taking their religion with them. These are the people who have interpreted the bible in their own way and added things that are not in any bible to support their own biased views. Sounds a lot like the Islamic Radicals who are ravaging the middle east. Both push an agenda of intolerance and hate.
Can anyone do a good job? The politicians and the aspiring politicians all campaign on doing a good or better job than whoever is in the office now. Can anyone do a better job? The answer has yet to be known. Looking at the rhetoric, each campaigner advocates for reform but unfortunately reform is not as easily accomplished as stated. It takes a combined effort of all of the elected officials to do the necessary job of Governing. What we have is a selected group of people whose purpose is to further their own agendas not the required agendas of the Government. That is probably the least of our problems, the most is more dysfunction which ultimately affects the voters. What we as voters do is to select the candidate who most mirrors our opinions (which are often based on what is aired in the media) and thoughts. In a perfect world this would be reasonable but since the candidates are imperfect (as we all are) we need to pay attention to what the candidates say and what we (should) know as fact or reality. Our ability to vote is the main resource we have to insure better government and unfortunately we have not done a very good job so by extension the people we’ve elected haven’t fared well either. We have often kept the same people in office too long even when we know they have not done a good job but we were either swept up in the hype and rhetoric of campaigning or we were lazy. Generally we do what is required of us in our work and home lives but seldom more than that on a consistent basis. With this in mind we have allowed our elected representatives to do the same and less. We hold them to a higher standard because they hold an office that we put them in while forgetting that they are ordinary people in a necessary job. Can they do a good job?, yes they can but we have to keep reminding them to do it and expect it from them. Always remember Government moves at a slower pace due to checks and balances so what is legislated or debated now will not become reality for months to years in some cases. Unfortunately the ill effects will last as long if not longer so who we elect is the first big step to better government and practicality should be the deciding factor not personal beliefs.
The Presidential candidates all have their ongoing talking points and those points are designed to get your attention and hopefully your vote. This is normal for elections but in the last 10 years or so these campaigns have become particularly virulent and nasty. Possibly half of what is said on the stump is either false or half-true. Even with speech writers more stuff is said that is impractical or impossible in the real world but it fires people up and gains attention. Not many of us know (or maybe don’t care to know) what actually happens in the White House on the issues of trade, war and immigration. The candidates can afford to attack the administration since they do not know what is really involved but state with surety that what they say is fact. Not one has proposed a replacement for the Affordable Care Act (no matter how radical or ridiculous), not one has come up with a way to defeat ISIS and not one has an answer to immigration (except a wall). All these things if done improperly will send the U.S. down a dark path worse than Vietnam. The middle east has been in turmoil for centuries in one form or another and what is going on now has more to do with the intervention of some major countries in the past than the current events. The discovery of oil fueled a boom in some countries but did not extend down the people who needed it the most. The various sects have divided the Islamic religion for years but new wealth increased that divide exponentially. Meanwhile we (the west) and Europe bought cheap oil and ignored the internal issues of the region. For some reason we took on the task of removing and installing dictators in hope of helping but our efforts only exacerbated the situation. Now we have a major humanitarian crisis that has engulfed most of Europe and extending to the west via South America and Canada. There is no reason to ban refugees whose home have been obliterated by bombing, family members and entire families killed. The possible solution is tell the truth about the situation so that everyone knows what the real situation is. We in the U.S. should understand better than anyone what the result of this type interference does to people as we did it to the Native Americans, the American born Japanese and the enslaved African Americans. With this knowledge we should really be a lot smarter as voters than we are.
If you’re tired of hearing Donald Trump go on about his ratings and polls, if you’re mystified by the Twitter War of the Candidates’ Wives, if you can’t understand why Wolf Blitzer interviews a former contestant on “The Apprentice” as if she were a political authority, then I’ve got a video you really need to watch.
The video I’m showing you here, courtesy of C-Span’s archive, is of a presidential candidate speaking in 1987, at a moment of tectonic upheaval in our politics and media. Chances are pretty good you’ve never seen it, or even heard about it, and there’s a reason for that.
Before I tell the remarkable story of that eight-minute speech, though, let’s put it in the context of our moment.
Recently, a bunch of commentators — among them the president of the United States — seem to have latched on to the idea that the media is culpable in enabling Trump’s antic march to the Republican nomination. In the New York Times, my former colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Jim Rutenberg have both written columns in the past week asking whether we, as an industry, need to be more accountable.
Regular readers of this column know that I wrote early and often on this theme, including a column last December about the destructive “symbiosis” between Trump and the media — a term very much in fashion now.
In fact, not long ago I wrote an entire book on the collision of entertainment and political journalism, called “All the Truth Is Out,” which seems to have accidentally anticipated the Trump phenomenon. I borrowed from the brilliant work of the social critic Neil Postman, whose 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” feels more relevant today than it probably did then.
But the guy who really predicted all of this was Gary Hart, the protagonist of “All the Truth Is Out.” And man, did he try to sound the alarm.
At this time in 1987, Hart was rather like the Hillary Clinton of his day, only more talented and more visionary; he had been the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party since narrowly losing in 1984, and the Gallup Poll had him beating George H.W. Bush — then the sitting vice president — by double digits. A man of staggering intellect, he was talking even then about the rise of stateless terrorism and the arrival of a high-tech economy.
But his campaign unraveled in the space of five surreal days, during which reporters from the Miami Herald hid outside Hart’s home in order to catch him spending time with a younger woman. Hart found himself undone by the first modern political sex scandal — the inevitable result of myriad forces that were just then reshaping the media, from the echoes of Watergate to the birth of the mobile satellite.
What happened next is interesting and almost entirely forgotten.
Driven from the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hart repaired to his cabin in the Denver foothills, where he and his family were literally penned in by a fleet of satellite trucks and news choppers. His aides wrote him the kind of withdrawal statement we’ve come to expect from scandalized politicians — contrite, gracious, bland.
Hart couldn’t sleep after reading that speech. It made him want to vomit. He called his close friend Warren Beatty (who would later make the film “Bulworth,” not incidentally) and talked through what he wished he could say instead.
Then, the next morning, Hart drove the canyon road down to Denver, stepped before the national media and calmly delivered one of the most stinging and prescient indictments of an American institution you will ever see.
“In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important,” Hart said, decrying a process that he said reduced reporters to hunters and candidates to the hunted.
“And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for high office,” Hart went on. “Now I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself.
“Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match.”
He closed by paraphrasing his idol, Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve.”
Whenever I talk about my book to audiences around the country, I close with those lines. Invariably, I look up to find shocked and silent voters nodding their heads, amazed at how eerily that captures our present reality.
So why haven’t you heard anything about this seminal speech? I’ll tell you why. Because within 24 hours of its delivery, despite the polls showing that the public mostly sided with Hart over the reporters, America’s elite media, led by its columnists and editorial boards, rose up in unison to mock and discredit it.
“Instead of saying goodbye with a measure of dignity, respect and introspection,” A.M. Rosenthal, the Times’ former editor, wrote on the paper’s op-ed page, “Gary Hart told us he had decided that Gary Hart was a wonderful man after all and that everybody was responsible for Gary Hart’s political demise except Gary Hart.” (Watch Hart’s speech and decide for yourself if that was the point.)
Hart’s monologue was instantly buried in an avalanche of defensiveness and moral posturing. “It wasn’t just that I was blaming the media,” Hart recalled when we talked this week. “It was that I was a bad guy, and it was good riddance to a bad politician.”
For 29 years after that moment, until I directed him to it this week, even Hart hadn’t watched that video clip. Nor did he bother to continue pressing his case, despite a stream of offers to give speeches or appear on talk shows.
“I was not put on earth to pick a fight with the media and carry it out,” he told me. “I couldn’t repeat the theme of that talk without the headline inevitably saying, ‘Hart attacks the press,’ and I just didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.
“There was no capacity for thoughtful reflection,” Hart said. “It was all me versus them.”
By the time I got into the business of political journalism in the late 1990s, 24-hour cable news — mindless, sensational, personality-obsessed — was driving the conversation. Then came the Internet, with its frenzied competition for clicks. By 2007, Politico (which does some excellent work, to be fair) was calling itself the ESPN of news, which is pretty much exactly what Hart had prophesied.
And so we systematically created a process perfectly suited to a manipulative, reality-TV performer like Trump (or Sarah Palin before him) — and just as hostile to a guy like John Kasich, who talks about governing as complicated work. We spend half of any given debate talking about poll numbers and strategies, mean tweets and sordid allegations, because the game of politics is so much more alluring than the practice of statecraft.
I asked Hart if, on a week like this one, when battery charges against Trump’s campaign manager were vying for airtime against his war with Ted Cruz over their spouses, he felt vindicated at last.
“No,” he said quickly. “No. No.” After all, he explained, no one (other than me) ever saw the need to revisit what he said all those years ago.
I raise the Hart video this week because if you read this latest flood of self-criticism, some of it from commentators who have worked in our business for decades, you might come away thinking that something transformative has just taken us by surprise. You might get the impression that a tsunami of triviality has suddenly overwhelmed our media, and we barely had time to suck in air and duck our heads.
But don’t let anyone tell you that this is all just about Trump’s suckering us, or about some convergence of recent trends we couldn’t have foreseen. It is, in fact, a generational reckoning — the failure of executives and anchors and reporters-turned-cable-personalities, many of them in our most serious news outlets, who for decades refused to confront the creeping realities of their industry, as surely as a generation of political leaders refused to confront the realities of fiscal and global instability.
Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, did a pretty nice job of encapsulating that failure when he talked about Trump’s campaign this way last month: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
We can say, as Moonves surely would, that we were just responding to market forces beyond our control. We can say that voters, and not us, get to decide what matters and what doesn’t. We can point out that we’ve gone to great lengths to expose the depth of Trump’s ignorance and inconsistency.
What we can’t say is that we weren’t told it would happen.
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