Syria

I’ve been asked on several occasions recently what my take is on the situation in Syria, about which I didn’t consider myself sufficiently informed at the time. But the passage of time and more information can be a big help, except to some of the more enthusiastic Tea Party members. I had no strong opinion on the subject then and still have some ambivalence because the arguments on both sides seemed quite reasonable, even Rand Paul’s.

Enough has been heard publicly so I’ll briefly summarize the arguments. The president and his people feel that an international treaty, agreed on by enough nations including the United States to constitute a quorum, should be honored. To allow this blatant violation to take place without reprisal, would amount to tacit approval of the use of chemical weapons. The most convincing of several opposing arguments concerns the possible ramifications, including an international war of unknown dimensions. Based on political Ideology the Congressional response to the president’s request is unpredictable. One could conclude that making wars is in the Republican DNA had it not been isolationist before World War II. Maybe they just considered Hitler a lesser threat than Stalin. On the other hand it’s hard to imagine them supporting anything that might help Obama politically.

In Groucho Marx’s words I’m now against it, “it” being unilateral action against Syria. I’m skeptical about this nation’s concern over the use of chemical weapons. Ronald Reagan knew that Iraq was using them against Iran during their 1980s war. But that was OK because we were with Saddam on that one. But then in the buildup to the First Gulf War we were told that Saddam was “gassing his own people,” as if he considered the Kurds his people. Later we learned the war was all about the sovereignty of Kuwait and the commodity that went with it. But most important is that Barack Obama’s claim that any action he might take would be enforcing “world” law rings hollow when one considers that only we would be doing the enforcing.

Either Way the international law in question will be effectively null and void. And punishing the slaughterer of 1400 people by damaging his nation’s ability to wage war is not exactly an eye for an eye. It looks to me as if regime change is the only sure fire solution. Now don’t say it can’t be done. Just remember Granada!

The Fifteenth Amendment

The following is the text of the Fifteenth Amendment. (1) “The right of citizens of the United States [to vote] shall not be denied orabridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and (2) “That Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” I italicized abridged, “to reduce in scope: minimize,” because it covers situations where people can vote, but with greater difficulty, financial or otherwise. As I see it section one by itself, properly exercised, should cover it all and section two as simply a “right on guys” to Congress to encourage it to enforce the law.*

The phrase Jim Crow attests to the fact that the Constitution by itself wasn’t sufficient so in 1964 Congress did what it been empowered to do for a century and passed its own legislation. That wasn’t working either so in 1991 it designated nine states that were simultaneously violating both a Constitutional amendment and an act of Congress, for scrutiny of any proposed changes in pertinent legislation.

Things went along fairly well until this year when the Supreme Court, at the request of the states in question, ruled that this scrutiny was no longer necessary. This was proved a major miscalculation in a matter of days when these states began rewriting voting rules that would never have passed muster previously.

I see the importance of this matter as extending beyond these outlaw states to the entire nation in electing candidates for federal positions, not only to proposed revisions, but to the rules as they now stand. There is nothing more essential to representative government than the integrity of its voting system.

This deck is already stacked against citizens of lesser means. Witness the inverse relationship between wealth and time spent waiting to vote. To lose at cards with a stacked deck is to be cheated. But this game is not being played with smoke and mirrors. If we lose this one it will be to bullies doing what bullies do best.

 

*I suspect there are Republican legal “scholars” who would claim it meant that further Congressional approval was required. But then Republicans are known to be a bit contrary.

 

Food Stamps

Hooray! Republicans have found themselves a real live food stamp cheat. No phony like Reagan’s palpably fictitious welfare queen, this guy seems like the real thing, thoroughly unlikable, possibly a product of Central Casting. But then we didn’t expect these guys to pick a pleasant scoundrel.

The main purpose of this effort staged by Fox is to show that the undeserving are receiving a major portion of food stamps. This guy sneering at the camera does an excellent impression of undeserving. He may be only one person, but a million like him wouldn’t surprise me. As part of forty seven million food stamp recipients would they justify punishing the other forty six million? If not how large a percentage of miscreants do Republicans consider enough, a mystery in light of their creative sense of proportion? Remember the fellow who said that Benghazi was our worst tragedy since 9/11?

A second purpose of the program is to expose the do-gooders proselytizing people unaware of their eligibility for food stamps. What a terrible thing, advising people that they are entitled to benefits of which they are unaware. TV commercials commonly do this sort of thing. But snitching on the government by private citizens informing others that it is holding benefits due them, well that’s un-American.

We also hear the continued harping that it’s in the national interest that shame should come with accepting food stamps. Ah the warm side of Republican thinking! I’m certain many of these people already feel built in shame on their own for being on the dole, particularly former tax paying citizens who have been done in by the economy.

There is a built in degree of waste and fraud in all government programs to which the Pavlovian response from the right would be that government programs are inherently inefficient. My riposte would be to ask, as an example, why Medicare insures people at considerably lower cost than the private sector.

There’s such an abundance of conflicting electronic “information” these days that it requires a healthy dose of skepticism to separate the wheat from the chaff. If we believed all of it our politics would slide back to the days of Pony Express and government by anecdote.

 

 

 

 

What Else?

I’m glad the Zimmerman trial is over. Now we can learn what else is happening in the world. It’s not that the trial was unimportant, but that I knew the ending to the story. There was no way he was going to be, or should be, convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of second degree murder for a shooting that took place during a fight. A guilty verdict would have made pariahs of the six jurors who rendered it in Seminole County and well beyond. This says something of a trial by a jury of one’s peers. I say that if justice is a concern these peers should come from diverse parts of the country. This point is demonstrated precisely by the trials of Rodney King’s beating by local police and of O.J. Simpson, whose trial was a mirror image of Zimmerman’s. I’d say that in this case the prosecution left something to be desired. At times I suspect the second degree murder charge was to make it harder for any kind of conviction.

My feeling about the trial doesn’t mean that I believe justice was done. An armed man who violates police orders by getting out of his car, leading directly to the fatal shooting by that man of another, clearly deserves incarceration.

The trial is now history. But it should raise again the perennial question of who enforces our laws. As I understand it amateurs have a legitimate role in vigilance although Zimmerman clearly violated its limits. But the purview of pulling triggers belongs exclusively to professionals who have been trained for the job. Putting one’s hand on a rock, looking to the sky and saying “I am a cop” doesn’t qualify. Had this propriety been observed in Sanford the killing would never have taken place.

As Zimmerman said in the last words of his cell phone call to the police, “they always get away.” It looks as if this also applies to deluded racists like himself.  

Who Goes There?

Given what is known now about the George Zimmerman case I believe he is guilty of the racially inspired murder of Trayvon Martin. He was an armed aggressor stalking an unarmed person without any justifiable cause. If anyone was standing his ground it was Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman ignored police instructions to remain in his car. He was a man looking for trouble. Nevertheless if I were a juror I’d probably vote to acquit. The fact that there was a fight just before the shooting opens the door for “beyond a reasonable doubt” against the serious charge of second degree murder.

My greatest concern is the consequences, whatever the verdict, neither of which bodes well. We’ve seen inner city reaction to adjudication of Rodney King’s beating which was limited to Los Angeles and the assassination of Martin Luther King which went national. In this case I fear that reaction to acquittal would more closely resemble the latter. The consequences of a conviction, while less predictable, are potentially as ominous.

Given the inter-racial nature of the event, it may seem that we are dealing with race, which to an extent we are. But of equal importance in the longer run is the place of vigilantism in this country. It involves militias, guns and the thinking that goes with them. There’s no mystery how this issue will play out along political lines. Days after the event Fox was soliciting donations for Zimmerman’s defense in a trial more than a year away. This was not for his benefit.

There are many gated communities in this country and their occupants have a legitimate concern for their security, in many cases the reason for living there.  But there was no legitimacy to Zimmerman’s behavior prior to the confrontation.

An acquittal would just postpone an inevitable showdown. My hope is for a guilty verdict for something less than second degree murder. As I see it legitimate law enforcement is the purview of only authorized people. We know that some of them are less than perfect. For this reason it makes no sense to entrust these life or death jobs to people who are even further from perfect.

 

Who's In Charge Here?

Who are the most influential spokespeople within the Democratic Party? I can only think of one, Barack Obama. We are a relatively diverse bunch that only knows what we hear or read, so we aren’t privy to much of what happens behind closed doors. But as microphones go the president has a loud one.

It’s much easier with Republicans where three names leap out, Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist and Rupert Murdoch. The Fat Man is listened to by so many of the faithful for three hours a day that no Republican with serious ambitions dares criticize his most atrocious statements. Norquist demands a “no new tax” pledge from candidates that has been taken by all but a handful of current party members in both Houses of Congress. He considers elimination of deductions and subsidies as tax increases, although I doubt that he thinks of Medicaid as such. Murdoch, through Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and other sources of “information” specializes in turning fiction into fact beneficial to the right wing in general.

One thing these three men have in common is that none has served elective office nor, as far as I know ever tried. Yet here they are telling people who have been elected how to vote, indirectly in Murdoch’s case.  

What this says about the nation has provided material for many books. What it says about the Republican Party leads to the inescapable conclusion that many of its members if challenged would respond with old GOP warhorse, “They all do it.”

No Virginia they don’t. To my knowledge it’s now unacceptable for lobbyists to sit next to Congressmen while in session and examine the text of proposed legislation before a vote is cast. In any case the pioneers of this practice were Republicans in the wake of the Gingrich Revolution.

The words spoken by Lincoln at Gettysburg, ”government of the people, by the people, for the people” may apply in some manner today, but differently to our two major political parties. If voter suppression efforts by Republicans say anything they are thinking of fewer people. By allowing private citizens to publicly give marching orders to their elected officials they are clearly thinking of the wrong people.

 

 

Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

It warmed the cockles of my heart to hear Bill Maher take Ronald Reagan apart in the finale of his June 7 show. He opened by taking issue with Bob Dole’s saying that Ronald Reagan himself couldn’t make it today as a Republican. Hogwash! In Maher’s words “He wrote the Tea Party playbook on every issue of consequence.” “Ronald Reagan was anti-government, union busting, race baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people’s taxes in half, had an incurable case of military industrial complex and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom.”

This is Tea Party “logic” almost verbatim. But its current adherents are speaking it in anger and often fury, occasionally brandishing weapons to show they mean business. Reagan on the other hand knew that many voters saw him as the radical right winger he was, so he put his Hollywood experience to use by gently crooning lyrics that would have been X rated if sung by Barry Goldwater 16 years earlier.

Of course Reagan wasn’t elected on charm alone. He was lucky in having an unpopular incumbent as his first opponent. It’s should be mentioned that possibly the biggest of Jimmy Carter’s problems was, in my opinion, exacerbated by private citizens comprising Reagan’s campaign making foreign policy with another nation, Iran during the hostage crisis. This is commonly known as treason.

The world of politics is directly affected by and can’t be fully judged without considering the time in which events take place. Nixon is lauded by many of his fans as some sort of enlightened bi-partisan for having signed clean water legislation, an idea that would be out of the question for a Republican with presidential ambitions today. Even George Bush never suggested some of the things that this crop of Congressional Republicans has. Does that qualify him as a moderate?

As to “Ronrico,” as I used to refer to our 40^th president, I disagree with my friends on the left who criticize Barack Obama for calling him a transformative president. He was certainly that and in a big way. So was a World War 1 German corporal named Schicklgruber.