The Structural Flaw Of Our US Constitution

Ezra Klein published a really succinct, lucid and important article in the NY Times explaining the dilemma which faces the Democratic Party today.

The Republicans are a cohesive, homogeneous army of older, rural white men and women who can take concerted action and win elections, whereas the Democrats are a coalition of people who are unlike one another.

But beyond that, the founding fathers were not sold on democracy and put in place structures to prevent rule by popular will.

As he points out by 2040 70% of the US population will live in the 15 largest states and be represented by 30 US Senators, while 30% of the population in the remaining states will be represented by 70 Senators. If those numbers sent your head spinning, think of it this way: One third of the nation, mostly rural, white and conservation will have an unbreakable lock on the US Senate to make it serve their narrow interests.

And that means the Supreme Court will be locked into a conservative mindset.

And the Electoral College, which reflects the same geography and tumble weed over population, will ensure that "Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more vote than the Democrats..Down that road lies true political crisis.

In the past, Mad Dog has half seriously suggested we divide the nation into the Coasts and some selected states like Minnesota and Colorado and New Mexico and allow the Confederacy and Cowboy states to form their own slave owning states. 

But, as Klein suggests the truth is even the Blue states are liberal, urban patches with Alabama in between. Pennsylvania is the prototype--but Virginia, California, Washington and Oregon follow the same pattern. 

Business is doing well in America. Tech is doing well. Finance, too. But politics is rushing headlong into oblivion.

Elizabeth Warren and Sophistry

When Elizabeth Warren launched her prepared slam in the Democratic debate, that the males on the stage had lost a total of 10 elections, whereas she and Amy Klobuchar had lost none, Mad Dog groaned.

Of course, Warren got a laugh and multiple pundits declared she won the debate with that (excuse the expression) trump line. People Mad Dog respects, were, inexplicably delighted with this crack.

But Mad Dog was confused, perplexed, astonished:  Elizabeth Warren has run only twice.  She won a grand total of two elections.

How many times have Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg stood before the public and run?

What Warren was doing was dealing in percentages rather than absolute numbers.

This is like the baseball rookie who gets two base hits his first two times at bat and is batting 1.000 and claims he's a better, more successful hitter than Ted Williams who only bats 0.400.

Hampshire College issued a bumper sticker which said: "Hampshire College Football: Undefeated Since 1969." Of course, Hampshire College has no football team.

Or, as Cederic Daniels' wife told him in "The Wire":  "You cannot lose if you do not play."

But of course, that wasn't the worst moment for Senator Warren that night: She refused to take Senator Sanders' prof-erred hand at the end of the debate.

As many ways as Mad Dog has  tried to assess this the only conceivable interpretation is that Senator Warren knew/believed Bernie Sanders had said a woman could not/would not be able to win a Presidential election in the current climate of 2018 when he was speaking. 

Mad Dog would like to know
1/ Were Warren and Sanders the only people present for this exchange?
2/ Did Sanders set up any ground rules on which he relied before speaking, such as: "This is not for public consumption," or "I'll deny this if you ever said I said it, but the truth is..." ?
3/ Why Warren would bring up a two year old comment as if it represented Sanders thinking today?

The same argument applied, in my mind, to the attack on Brett Kavanaugh for being a dissolute, depraved 17 year old, as if once you are a drunken frat boy, you can never change your life, behavior, attitudes once you pass through your 30's and 40's and "mature."

Mad Dog may  not vote for Mr. Sanders in the primary because:
1/ He is too old
2/ Everything emanating from Washington DC about Sanders suggests his office was so disorganized as to be dysfunctional; he never listens, only speechifies at his colleagues and so is ineffective 

But Mad Dog, who once was enamored of Ms. Warren finds he cannot vote for her either, because: 
1. She has shown herself to be too rigid and unwilling to answer the basic question: Why not agree to Medicare for All Who Want It if that is all the Congress will give you?
Why not say, "Look, I'd like MFA but I'd accept, a first step in that direction, if people are not yet convinced they'd be better off with the government than with their current union negotiated deals?
2. She has appeared sanctimonious over Mr. Sanders impolitic remark about the challenge of electing a woman President.  Or, worse yet, she may have violated a confidence and then been unwilling to forgive a lie.

Either way, Mad Dog has scratched Warren, Sanders off his list.
Pete is off because he cannot win as a gay, and has not won as a gay in Indiana.
There, I said it, and I will not disavow it. He'd be my choice, but as far as I can tell, he'd lose the majority of Black voters and likely a good part of the Rust Belt.
Biden is off because, even if his stammer is the explanation, he appears too infirm and mentally dull.
Styer is a non entity rich guy who hasn't paid his dues and we already have one of those in the White House.

Which leaves Amy Klobuchar, who may be a little too Bella Abzug, may not be a winning personality, but she might be tough enough to face down Mafia Don. 

Deconstructing Trump

Reading "A Hill To Die On," the part about Paul Ryan's story prompted me to Google Ryan--where-is-he-now?  

Apparently, he moved his family to a Washington, D.C. suburb, and got himself a pay off as a member of Fox board of directors. 

The usual story.  Twenty years in Congress and they put you on the day shift, with a pay off from the guys who run things. For a lot of men who are from small towns and feel insignificant, they get accustomed to all the ego stroking in Washington, DC and they stay there, even after they retire or are defeated.  How you gonna keep them on the farm once they've see DC?

But what I had forgotten, if I ever knew it, was the story of Ryan's conflict with Trump.  Trump would call him several times a day when Ryan was Speaker, but when a story came out in some Washington insider book quoting Ryan as saying Trump knows nothing about how government works, Trump responded: Ryan was a "lame duck failure" and "They gave me standing O's in the Great State of Wisconsin and booed him off the stage."

Well, same old same old Trump.
But then I thought: What was Trump referring to?

A little more Googling and it turns out Ryan had criticized Trump for his belligerence on the campaign trail, for stoking passions rather than dealing in ideas, in March, 2016 at a Wisconsin rally and got booed.  In October, in Ryan's hometown, Trump mentioned his name, at a Trump rally, and boos rang out.

I'm not even sure if this is the whole story, but the whole story is nothing that has to do with anything Trump says. It's just the daily Tweet barrage. You don't think about any of it; you just let it wash over you. It's the pubescent kid trying to establish he is the big dog, belittling a rival.

What was Trump actually doing?

A/ Trump was saying "people in Wisconsin" liked him better than they liked Ryan.
     --"They" liked me but booed him.
B/ Trump was saying that antipathy toward Ryan was deserved.
     --He's a failure
C/ Trump was saying his own popularity was deserved.
     --"They" gave me standing ovations.

Of course, the first question is: Did any of this really happen?
And the answer is, yes, Ryan did hear some boos, but also applause, in his March appearance on stage. And yes, there were some boos from the Trump rally audience in October at the mention of Ryan's name.
Nothing close to being "booed off the stage." But such exaggeration is always greeted with laughter by Trump's supporters. "Given 'em Hell, Donald!"

And what of the "they"? 
Who, exactly is "they"?  Is they all the people in Wisconsin? Just people of voting age? Just people who actually vote? Or just people who come to political rallies, or in the second instance, in October, Trump fans who come to Trump rallies? 

The Trump "they" is that diffuse idea of "everybody." 

Now you've got the equivalence of the audience as the general public, as a rowdy crowd as the voice of the people.

"They" are the people who enjoy watching Trump beat on somebody.

Well, there were always crowds at lynchings, crowds at the guillotine. 

There is one thing Trump was proved right about: When Ryan exhorted the folks in that Wisconsin "Fall fest" event to reject Trump's vitriol and to think about "ideas" instead, he was politically wrong.  Trump was tapping into anger, diffuse, inchoate anger among folks in the Rust Belt and Ryan was telling them to cool off when their passions were running high.

A lot of this is done on instinct, and neither Ryan nor Trump could likely offer much of an analysis. 
Trump could read a crowd and Ryan could not.

The question for 2020 is whether that crowd in front of you represents what most of the folks out there think. 

Hobbit versus Adventure: Trumpsters Nothing New

Reading an unexpectedly wonderful book about America at the turn of the nineteenth century, a time I have not had much interest in--until now--has been an eye opener and thrilling.

Ian Toll's "Six Frigates" is so exotic a sortie into a distant time and at the same time, like so many good histories, an examination of current times. 

Jefferson's Republican Party, which included fellow Virginian plantation society types like John Randolph, really was the "America First" constellation of Hobbits. These folks had inland plantations and they regarded land bound farmers as the very best sort of people, and could not understand or see much value in the coastal seafarers, who lusted for trade with far flung parts of the world, who exulted in intercourse with foreigners, with seeking adventure in the rest of the world.

Jefferson hoped for a time when the tax collector would be an anomaly, rarely seen. Those Tea Party folks took their yellow flag and anti tax rhetoric right from Jeffersonian founding fathers. That government is best which governs least. Leave me alone. Don't tread on me. I'm doing fine.

Of course, those Trumpland folks out there in the impoverished rural parts of Appalachia and the Midwest are not doing nearly so well as Jefferson was at Monticello, with his slaves and his plush debt sustained life. Today's Trumplings are festering, like those darklings in the 1935 cartoon, "The Sunshine Makers." 

Or, one can see it as the story of the happy Hobbit who is dragged reluctantly out of his paradise and out into the threatening, often ugly, violent world beyond.

Jefferson, of course, spent years in France and Europe and spoke French and his restless mind was forever seeking out books from abroad, but he returned to America determined to keep America isolated from France, England, Austria, Russia and China.

He led a party of men who did not care much about the depredations of the British fleet upon American merchant marine ships, as the Brits boarded the American sloops, kidnapped sailors for service in the British Navy, stole American goods bound for foreign ports.  They were unmoved when American merchant men in the Mediterranean were captured by the pirate princes of Tripoli and Northern Africa and when those pashas demanded extortion, tribute, and sold off the unlucky Americans into slavery.

Jefferson rejected an American navy as being too expensive, a burden which would require ongoing taxes and he hated the idea of taxes. He liked the idea of militias of farmers, who could be rallied to defend an invaded town, but then go back to the farm. His idea of coastal defenses were floating, flat bottomed boats which served as platforms for one or two cannon. Even coastal batteries struck him and his fellow Republicans as too expensive. A standing army and most especially a standing navy would result in endless war.

The problem for the Jefferson ideal was two fold:
1/ The world would not leave America alone; the Atlantic Ocean was vast, but sailing ships traversed it from England, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal in the thousands and quickly enough to bring the world to America's door with increasing frequency.
2/ A whole population of adventurous souls from Boston to new York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Hampton Rhodes, Virginia wanted to engage the world, and got rich and happy doing it. If they were part of a real country, a United States of America, then they felt they had a claim on their brethren to stand with them in their grand adventure.

But Jefferson and his ilk wanted none of that deep blue ocean and its shipping lanes. Let the British or the French try to invade the American continent and the Americans would swallow them up, like a bear, but venture into the ocean and you could only expect the sharks and leviathans of the the blue water would eat you alive.

Jefferson had no interest in trade with China or Amsterdam or England. 
We could make all we wanted right here in America.

Obadiah Youngblood, Sunset Lake

Of course, he had benefited enormously from the slave trade which brought Africans to the plantations of the South. If New England's rocky soil meant that shipbuilding and whaling and world trade appealed to those seacoast folks, let them take their chances on the high seas, but don't ask the South and the farmer to protect them with a blue water navy.

So there we have it: America is all we need. Foreigners have nothing important to offer. We are fine staring at our own navels. Why launch explorations?  North Africa, Naples, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Vienna, Istanbul, Jerusalem have nothing to offer us.

Everywhere else is but a shithole.

Here's a link to "The Sunshine Makers."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3VNoJiSN1g

Expunge the Stain: Get These "Psychologists" in Jail

We should always be circumspect when we accuse people of dastardly crimes, knowing how little we can know, sitting out here in cyberspace and local towns.

Twitter and Facebook are full of false accusations, conspiracy theories and just because we see a Hollywood movie about the CIA torture conspiracy doesn't mean it happened just the movie says it did.

But when you know there is a 500 page report detailing the misdeeds, when you can read the parts of the report in the Congressional Record and now, on line,  and most especially, when you can see the two accused "psychologists" on the internet defending themselves as "soldiers doing what we were told to do" echoing the Nuremberg Nazis's defense: "I was just following orders," you may be forgiven for believing what you can so readily believe, given the clips of Dick Cheney saying we have to be ready to resort to torture to save American cities from dirty bombs. 

If these two "clinical psychologists," Jessen and Mitchell, are even half as bad as they look in "The Report," they belong in some maximum security prison splitting rocks for the next 30 years. And, reading more about this mess, Jose Rodriguez, the CIA director of torture should be right there with them. 

Once you listen to Dick Cheney, you have a very clear picture of his mindset and the thinking of all those who sailed with him. And this pair looks like more than willing accomplices. 

Here they are in video from the NYT on line report: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/us/cia-torture-lawsuit-settlement.html

Mad Dog knows he may be accused of being no better than that guy who drove in from Virginia to the Pizza pallor in Washington, DC because he read on line about Hillary Clinton running a pedophile ring out of that joint. 

But the fact is, Cheney was excusing torture in public, on TV; Clinton was not extolling pedophilia. 
And we can listen to these creeps excuse their behavior as if they are well meaning guys, who just provided others with training to waterboard,to  bury people alive in coffins, hang them by their thumbs. 
Just your average, good ol' clinical psychologists, being as helpful as they can be.
Just trying  to prevent a real life episode from "24." 
Jessen says he was told if he didn't torture the prisoners, a nuclear bomb was going to go off in the United States soon, although somehow, CIA officers, who were told the same thing, didn't believe it, and  were resigning in numbers over the torture.

And that phrase: "Enhanced Interrogation." 
Oh, there is an admission of guilt, plain and simple.
Whenever you see our government involved in something really nasty, you know how nasty when they come up with some benign sounding euphemism: Hanging someone up by their thumbs, drowning them on a water board, sealing them up inside a coffin suffused with cockroaches, is not "torture," but "enhanced interrogation." There you have the guilty conscience visible in the effort to call a viper a potentially toxic legless reptile.

The beasts who sold their "expertise" to the CIA, and who were rewarded generously for their depravity, can be seen even today, on the internet excusing their torture techniques with the same argument the Nazi Goering used: History is written by the winners; if we win we are hailed as heroes; if we lose we are war criminals.

In this case "we" i.e., the torturers, did not win or lose. But they are still at large.

But there is another history, and that is the Report Daniel Jones wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:US_Senate_Report_on_CIA_Detention_Interrogation_Program.pdf&page=4


These CIA creeps  were simply criminals who tortured people.
They join their overseers at the CIA and in the Bush White House, and are still at large.
The problem is, you cannot whisk them awake to Jerusalem or Nuremberg for trial. We'd have to do it here.
And right now we've got a guy in the White House who would greet them there with a pardon and a clothes line franchise. 

No Swift Boating for the Salty Frog

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” – George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

When John Kerry appeared at the Democratic National Convention, he saluted the audience and said, "John Kerry Reporting for Duty" and the Republicans went right after his super patriot, war hero thing with the infamous swift boat attack ads.

When Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who was reported by half a dozen fellow SEALS as a war criminal who murdered innocent civilians and a prisoner, he was hailed as a tough guy hero by President Trump, pardoned, and embraced by all the tough guy Republicans, and from his guest suite at Mar a Lago announced his new line of clothes and booze, "Salty Frog."

Why are the Democrats incapable of capitalizing on this?
Why can only Republicans launch a marketing campaign to bring down an opponent?

These are the questions which send Mad Dog into a gloomy funk.

The Report: Torture is US

When the photos of prisoners at the American prison called Abu Gharib hit the news, President George W. Bush looked into the camera, appearing distressed and said, "This is not who we are."

Of course, that is exactly who we were and still are, people who, like those monsters of the Gestapo in all those old movies who tortured people hideously.

"Not Who We Are"

The new movie, "The Report" is a blood boiler and you cannot watch it without thinking:  We have American war criminals who have never been punished and we should have an American version of the Nazi hunter, Simon Weisenthal, hunting them down.

Rodriguez: Torturer

It is an odd sensation, having just listened to hours of Michelle Obama reading her lovely book, with its endearing portrait of Barack Obama, to see how meekly he shrank from his duty, how his instinct to see the other side and to over think prevented him from doing what anyone with a more rudimentary  sense of basic morality would have done: condemned the torturers and pursued them relentlessly.
He did end the torture program within 3 days of taking office, but that only confirms he knew just how horrific it was.

Haslip: Torturer

Of course, this would mean throwing Dick Cheney, Kay Haslip, Brennan and a whole raft of CIA torture chamber "prison guards" into jail and having a Nuremberg trial.

Instead, President Obama reminded us we have to remember the climate of fear and the pressure to prevent another attack, possibly with a "dirty bomb" which prevailed and some of us remember the TV show "24" where the guy who has to save Washington, DC is always doing violent things.  "If you have to crush a child's testicles to prevent the destruction of a city, you have to do it," someone says in "The Report."
The problem with this defense of torture, of course, is that torture does not prevent the destruction of the city. The key defense is, "Well, it works. It's necessary."   The ends justify the means.
The fact is: It never did work. It was both unnecessary and counterproductive, and from the get go, it was always simply criminal and malevolent. Of course, there are always extreme examples of having to do harm for a greater good: The old problem of throwing the switch ahead of the runaway railroad locomotive which will kill a child but spare an entire train station full of people, or, for that matter, bombing cities to end a war and save all the lives which would be lost if the war continues.  

Brennan: Torturer Apologist

The problem is, of course, torturers, war criminals always justify their sadistic acts as "necessary." 

"We have to put on our big boy pants," Jose Rodriguez, a CIA official barks, justifying the torture chambers.

What Senator Diane Feinstein asks the main investigator, Daniel Jones, "If water boarding is so effective, why did they have to do it 183 times on the same prisoner?"

Daniel Jones

What Daniel Jones clearly demonstrates is that torture is completely ineffective, as the victim simply says whatever he thinks the torturer wants to hear. 

Jones, interviewed on WBUR, says after devoting 7 years of his life to the investigation of the CIA torture chambers,  two things really aggravate him:
1. The CIA claimed torture produced the information which led to Osama Bin Laden. The truth is OBL was caught by standard CIA traps started long before the torture program.  None of the information which caught him was obtained by torture. 
The CIA lied about that, later, to cover it's torture tracks, to argue, "Well, it works."

2. President Obama portrayed the torturers as "patriots," who simply over reacted in the fog of war.  Jones notes dozens of CIA employees resigned in protest over the torture, and they were the real patriots, not the sadists, who convinced themselves they were patriots and tough guys making tough choices.
Now we are faced with Trump pardoning the war criminal, Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who murdered a prisoner, and we have to ask: Did Obama not do something similar with the CIA war criminals?

This movie will do little to convince people the federal government is anything but a swamp. But we have to remind ourselves:
The Senate did pursue the investigation; eventually, the truth is outing.
Of course, we can never know the "whole truth" but we can judge well enough, based on what we do know. We see clips of Cheney explaining that the world is a dangerous place and we might see Washington, DC  or New York City wiped out by a dirty bomb, (like that movie, "The Peacekeeper") and what he is saying is, we have to take "extraordinary means" to prevent this. You know he approved the torture program, from other evidence presented, and he prevented anyone telling the President about it, including Condoleeza Rice, who also knew about it. 

Cheney: Torturer 

It is also another reminder that Obama failed as a President in very significant ways:
1. He did not withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.
2. He did not prosecute anyone who was responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, as the Scandinavian countries did.
3.  He did not pursue war criminals, over the revelations of torture, including Cheney. He allowed the crime to go unpunished, which, in some ways makes him an accomplice. 

He was simply not tough enough. 

“I understand why it happened. I think it’s important, when we look back, to recall how afraid people were when the twin towers fell ...It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had."

--Barack Obama

No, this is to excuse those sadistic, murderous people, who are always present in our police and military, and who are  itching to unleash their worst impulses, and who excuse their depredations, when they are caught,  with naive blather that bad things and injustices happen in war and we were at war. In fact, we were not at war, that "war" was a metaphor made up to excuse behavior which is forbidden even in war, and our government did what despotic, repugnant governments the world over had always done--it unleashed a reign of terror. Just because it was directed at relatively few people, out of sight by officials who appeared on TV does not mean it's any less hideous.