The Great Republican Memory Lapse

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz & Sarah Palin join angry Tea Party
protesters to rally against deficit spending in 2013 

Smug Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan are preening with gooey self-satisfaction after the House passed what may well be the single most absurd piece of legislation in American history.

One that's more like a con job.

It's remarkable to watch Republicans literally tripping over themselves to pass what they're laughingly calling a "tax reform bill" that's going to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the federal deficit.

Remember back in fall of 2013 when Republicans and their perpetually-riled-up Tea Party base were literally raging against the federal deficit as if it was the manifestation of evil and a harbinger of the Apocalypse that would end life as we know it?

Who can forget the epic theatrical hypocrisy of Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee joining the bubble-headed right-wing political has-been Sarah Palin at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. on a chilly October Sunday four years ago (pictured above).

Just days after taking to the Senate floor to deliver one of the longest filibuster's in American history to rail against the Affordable Care Act (during which he famously read Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs & Ham"), Cruz joined a group of angry Tea Partiers and anti-Obama veterans at the World War II Memorial to rail against the fact the U.S. Park Service closed it because of the government shutdown.

Never mind that it was Cruz himself who'd intentionally helped to engineer the 17-day partial shutdown of the federal government by working with an obstructionist do-nothing Republican-majority House of Representatives (led by former Speaker John Boehner), and conservative political groups like the Heritage Foundation.

The Republican House famously included "poison-pill" provisions in their appropriations resolution bill to fund the government for fiscal 2014 that would have defunded or delayed implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Ex-Speaker John Boehner takes heat from the media
during the 2013 government shutdown

That essentially (and purposefully) made it impossible to pass an appropriations bill since the Senate at the time was controlled by Democrats.

As we've all been reminded of in the past few days, the House and Senate must reconcile their differences on a piece of legislation in order to get a bill passed by both chambers and sent to the desk of the president to be signed into law.

Remember, Republicans could have simply passed a clean appropriations bill to keep the government running in back in the fall of 2013.

But Boehner chose ideology over the best interests of the American people and famously caved in to pressure from the extremist right-wing "Freedom Caucus" and Tea Party zealots of his own party.

He even sank to taking to the floor of the House to peddle the ludicrous fiction that the Affordable Care Act was "killing American jobs"; it actually wasn't, that was a lie.

So instead of doing their jobs and passing a spending resolution, Republicans basically held the government hostage by refusing to remove the ACA repeal so it could pass in the Senate.

As the editorial board of the New York Times observed back on October 1, 2013 as the shutdown began, locking thousands of federal workers out of their jobs and closing essential government services for millions of Americans, it was a moment that defined John Boehner's failure as the Speaker of the most unproductive House of Representatives in American history.

Mostly because conservatives, unsettled by the presence of an intelligent, two-term African-American in the White House, simply despised President Obama.

Remember the $1.7 trillion added to the U.S. deficit
because of the 2nd Iraq War? Republicans don't

Amidst the turmoil of their 2013 deficit hysteria, Republicans conveniently seemed to forget that their own president, George W. Bush, was responsible for at least $1.7 trillion of that debt because his failed war in Iraq was never paid for in the federal budget.

So not only did hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens and thousands of U.S. and coalition service men and women loose their lives, "Dubya" put the whole thing on the American credit card.

Conservative's self-serving situational outrage over the federal deficit should serve as a warning sign to the American people - a reminder of the Republican Party's willingness to use deficit spending like some kind of prop to suit their ideological needs and financial desires.

As we've seen this week, the Republican Party has a giant memory lapse, and they've shown a willingness to bounce back and forth on the deficit like a ping-pong ball.

Four years ago they were railing against President Obama for his call for over a $1 trillion in infrastructure spending because of their concerns about what it would do to the federal deficit.

And they refused to do anything about it.

(Incidents like the Flint Water Crisis and the horrific Amtrak train derailment in Pierre County, Washington on an overpass on Monday that killed three and injured at least 100, serve as chilling reminders that Republican refusal to act on much-needed infrastructure repair has had deadly consequences.)

A collapsed section of I-10 between California and
Arizona in 2015

So when when President Obama was in office, they opposed authorizing $ 1trillion of the taxpayer's money to conduct long-overdue repairs on the nation's infrastructure (roads, bridges, tunnels, airports etc.) that affect the lives of all Americans.

Just a few years before that they allowed Bush to spend almost $2 trillion on an ill-advised war in one of the most destabilized countries in the world.

The one NOT responsible for the 911 attacks by the way.

But as we've seen recently under Trump, Republicans rushed to pass a bloated, confusing 500-page legislative behemoth that will enrich already-cash-loaded American corporations and the small fraction of the nation who count themselves among the 1% (and of course the Trump and Kushner families) with no public hearings and no meaningful studies of how it will impact the U.S. economy.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) didn't even get to score the much-talked-about tax bill properly, and most Republicans gleefully passed it without even bothering to read what's in it - even though it raises taxes on the middle class and poorest taxpayers.

Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, the 4th wealthiest U.S. Senator who owns vast holdings in real estate, admitted not having read it as he tried to deflect criticism over the fact that he magically reversed his opposition to the bill after a provision was inserted at the last-minute last Friday.

A provision that will allow folks like him and Trump to save millions in taxes on "pass-through" income they receive from the s-corporations where they keep their real estate holdings.

What, me worry? "Corker Kickback" namesake
Tennessee Senator Bob Corker

Corker's lame assertion that he had no idea the provision was added to the tax bill is laughable considering that just a couple months ago Corker was one of Trump's biggest critics, famously telling CNN reporter Manu Raju:

"The president has great difficulty with the truth. On many issues."

Evidently the president isn't the only one...

Remarkably, the Republican tax bill doesn't do anything Trump promised it would do when he was running for office in 2015 and 2016.

You can't fill out your taxes on a form the size of a post card, it didn't cut the tax brackets down to three, it doesn't eliminate sketchy loopholes for corporations and the 1% - and it raises taxes on the same working class white voters who filled Trump rallies and bought "Make America Great Again" hats.

As columnist and author Charles Blow observed in the opening sentence of his latest op-ed published in this morning's New York Times:

"With their tax bill, Donald Trump and the Republicans are raiding the treasury in plain sight, throwing crumbs to the masses as the millionaires and billionaires make off with the cake." 

Amazingly, many mainstream media news outlets (including NPR) keep referring to this as a "win" for Trump.

Just wait, once he signs this mockery of American principles into law and Republicans, their 1%-er billionaire donor base and corporations have all had a chance to cash in on their flagrant looting of the U.S. Treasury, there'll be another collective Republican memory lapse.

And when the automatic spending cuts their legislation mandates begin to kick in, phony deficit hysteria will return just in time for Republicans to set their sights on cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - gutting bedrock social safety net programs to further enrich a small privileged few.

Throwing crumbs to the masses - just in time for Christmas.

Trump's Basket Of Hate

Trump's basket of hate; cartoon by Clay Jones

Over the past couple days it's been rather remarkable to listen to Donald Trump express theatrically-righteous indignation over someone making unfair generalizations about his supporters.

After all this is the same guy who literally kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign last year by claiming that Mexican immigrants in this country were drug dealers and rapists.

But that person happened to be Hillary Clinton, and Trump quickly seized on a single line from the now infamous "basket of deplorables" speech she made at a campaign event last Friday in New York to attack.

As has been widely reported, Clinton speculated that fully half of Tump's supporters could be labeled as deplorables because of their tacit acceptance of the rampant bigotry, divisiveness and intolerance consistently served up in large doses by the orange-skinned ringmaster himself.

Largely left out of what has essentially become massive over-coverage of Trump's reaction to Clinton's speech (rather than the content of the actual speech itself) was the fact that she was introduced by transgender actress Laverne Cox from the Netflix series Orange Is The New Black.

If you read the actual text of her remarks, which were posted on the LA Times Website, Clinton began by building on Cox's enthusiastic declaration of support by citing a laundry list of issues with the Trump campaign that she said she found deplorable.

Including his pledge to nominate Supreme Court justices who oppose marriage equality if elected and the fact that as governor of Indiana, Trump's running mate Mike Pence supported legislation that would have made it legal for business to discriminate against LGBT customers.

It's not like Hillary just walked onstage and declared that 50% of Trump supporters were deplorable.

Of course with the mainstream news media replaying Trump's whining for two days straight, it didn't take long for Trump supporters to rally behind the idea of their having been called out for rallying behind a presidential candidate who has made bigotry the central plank of his campaign.

Trumpies were quick to try and harvest some political crops while the sun was shining.

Some were photographed holding up hand-made signs reading "Deplorable Lives Matter."

It certainly didn't take very long for t-shirts like the one pictured above to pop on the Internet for sale; just Google the images of "Basket of Deplorables" t-shirt and see what comes up.

This morning on the opening segment of The Brian Lehrer Show, the former Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates, the recently-crowned editor of The New Republic, observed that despite Trump's display of outrage, Clinton's comment is actually accurate.

He noted that polling data reveals that significant numbers of suburban white voters find Trump and his supporters to be divisive racists - no need to waste money polling Hispanics, African-American, Asian-American and American Muslims on how they feel about that.

Is there really any question that a large chunk of Trump's supporters are in fact fueled and motivated by bigotry, xenophobia and what can only be described as a slightly polished form of white nationalism?

As Brian Lehrer noted, New York Times columnist Charles Blow's op-ed piece on Monday presented a selection of poll data that backs up Hillary's claim. Some highlights:

A Public Policy poll of Trump supporters taken in February showed that 38% of them wish the south had won the Civil War and 80% supported Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in June showed that nearly 50% of Trump supporters described blacks as more violent than whites and 40% believed blacks were more lazy than whites.


So I'm not the only one who finds Trump's outrage to be phony and self-serving.

He's been intentionally cultivating people eager to blame the nation's problems on people who don't look like them, or worship like them or who immigrated here from other nations.

Trump has been criss-crossing the country for more than a year filling up his basket of hate; Hillary just called him (and his supporters) out for it.

Assumption. Gun. Humiliation. Apology?

Journalist Charles M. Blow

The face and writing of journalist, author and columnist Charles M. Blow (pictured left) are familiar to those who regularly follow his op-ed essays in The New York Times, where he has weighed in on race, culture, politics and other topics since 2009.

But in recent years, particularly since the tragic shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida back in February 2012, his eloquence as a writer, combined with the fact that he's a father of three sons, have lent his op-ed essays an intellectual authority and deep insight on the troubled issue of race in America.

When it comes to the ongoing epidemic of excessive use of force by police against young men of color in this country, Charles M. Blow isn't just writing about the topic, as a black father he truly lives it. 

His column, which appeared in the NY Times on Monday, struck me on a very personal level.

By now you may have heard the news that his oldest son, a junior at Yale University, was stopped by a Yale University campus policeman on Saturday evening who pulled a gun on him.

Click the link above, because you really should read his account of what happened, but it boils down to a recurring theme oft covered on this blog; how quick police in America are to react with aggression to the sight of a young man with dark skin.

Mr. Blow's son had gone over to the Yale University library early this past Saturday evening January 24th to check on a book he'd requested and order some equipment for a presentation.

Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University

When he walked out of the library (pictured left) a campus cop started following him, told him to stop and pulled out his gun and pointed it at him; told him to get on the ground face down.

The Yale cop was black by the way.

The reason for the stop? A common one men of color in America, including yours truly, have heard more than once; I can quote it by heart.

"There was a report of a [BREAK-IN, ASSAULT, RAPE, ROBBERY ETC.] in the area and you fit the description of the suspect."

Only in this particular case, on this particular evening in New Haven, Connecticut Mr. Blow's son was NOT the suspect in question.

He was the oldest son of a highly-respected journalist and a third-year student at Yale.

He was an unarmed, innocent young man walking away from the library of one of the most prestigious universities in the world, but he "fit the description" and his skin was dark - so the cop pulled a gun on him.

As Mr. Blow observed in a NY Times essay back in 2012 in the immediate wake of the death of Trayvon Martin, "This is the nightmare scenario for any parent,"

It's a nightmare for the son too, believe me.

I had a similar experience of being unfairly and unjustly detained by police temporarily in the early 90's when I was a student at Penn State University.

I can still recall the feeling of humiliation, anger, fear and helplessness of being taken to a police station in handcuffs for something I didn't do.

The simmering resentment I felt inside when the police figured out that a simple administrative mistake had led to my being wrongly detained before they let me go is still with me as I write this so many years later.   

Charles Blow's column on Monday unlocked personal memories for me that are still painful; including the recognition that even though I was a student at the college, the police ignored my pleas of innocence and simply saw my skin color.

According to an article posted on TheRoot.com, Yale officials have released a statement apologizing for the incident and have promised to release a report on the investigation they plan to conduct.

Given the ongoing protests over excessive police force in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other unarmed men of color at the hands of police, and this nation's troubled record with the ways some members of law enforcement have systematically treated young men of color, clearly Yale is trying to get out in front of the incident quickly before it blows up in the media.

After all it wasn't all that long ago that preeminent Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested by a cop who saw the nationally-recognized African-American scholar trying to get into the front door of his own house and it became a national media story.

It says a lot about America that such incidents are still taking place on the campuses of the nation's finest universities in the 21st century.

Whether it's a 3rd year student at Yale who's the son of a nationally-recognized journalist, or a highly-respected professor of history at Harvard, sadly for many law enforcement professionals, it doesn't matter where you are, who you are or even whether you're guilty or innocent.

In their eyes it begins and ends with your being black; and that can get you killed.

And that is a truly troubling reality on this day, January 27, 2015 when over 300 Holocaust survivors gathered in Poland to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz by lead elements of the Soviet Red Army in 1945. 

Against a background where Jews are once again coming under the cloud of increased persecution and anti-Semitism in France, Germany and other European countries, the president of the World Jewish Congress Ronald S. Lauder warned the attendees gathered at the site where over 1.1 million people were killed by the Nazis:

"Jews are targeted in Europe once again because they are Jews...Once again young Jewish boys are afraid to wear yarmulkes [skullcaps] on the streets of Paris, Budapest, London and even Berlin."

The terrifying lessons of the consequences of unchecked hate and bigotry are there before us, it remains to be seen if those in America predisposed to hatred and prejudice will heed them.