AND YET IT MOVES

In 1616, the Catholic Church decided that heliocentrism -- the Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the Sun and was not the center of the Universe -- was heresy. The decision was made by the Roman Inquisition, the Church's set of formal tribunals set up in the wake of the Protestant Reformation to enforce it teachings and punish those who denied them. 

By the time the Church made its decision in 1616, heliocentrism as a reasonable hypothesis had been around for a hundred years and fairly conclusive proof either for it or against pure geocentricity had existed for at least six. That proof came in the form of observations of the full phases of  Venus and of the moons orbiting Jupiter, both which Galileo made with his telescope in 1609 and published in 1610. Under the Ptolemaic or geocentric theory, only two Venetian phases could have been observed given the fixed place of Earth and the orbit of the Sun and Venus around it; and under that theory no moons could have orbited Jupiter (because all planets and their moons orbited Earth). 

Once Galileo made his observations, the gig was up. 

Though pure heliocentrism would only become irrefutable two hundred years later with observation of its required stellar parallax, pure geocentricity was dead.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this created a problem for the hierarchs in the Catholic Church. 

For much of the prior century the Church had been at (un)holy war with the Protestant Reformation on the issue of who got to say what the Bible actually meant. The Pope and his Cardinals were not remotely willing to give up the Church's -- in other words, their --  claimed right to being the  final arbiter of the matter. That said, however, from the point at which Copernicus first offered heliocentrism as a hypothesis in 1514 until the point at which the Inquisition condemned the view as heretical in 1616, the Church had been more or less ambivalent on the issue. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, it acknowledged heliocentrism as a hypothesis and watched it compete (unsuccessfully) with both the governing Ptolemaic paradigm and Tycho Brahe's geocentric alternative allowing other planets to revolve around the Sun even as the Earth remained immovable.

That all changed, however, in 1616.

When . . .

Politics got in the way of truth.

The conventional wisdom is that Biblical inerrancy killed heliocentrism and was the reason Galileo was banned from teaching or defending the doctrine in 1616 and then ultimately put under house arrest in 1633 for having violated the ban. At least a half dozen statements in the Psalms and Old Testament said the earth was immovable and in another, Moses' second in command, Joshua, makes the moving Sun stand still. 

All of this, however, was also true throughout the sixteenth century when the Church was tolerating Copernicus and his followers. 

What changed is that, in addition to reporting his observations of the Venetian phases and Jupiter's moons, Galileo weighed in on the authority and meaning of the Bible itself. In a famous letter to a friend in December 1613, he argued that the Bible's authority extended only to matters of faith; that science had to have the last word on whether the Earth moved or the Sun stood still; and that even if one cited the Bible on the issue, parts of its narrative were more consistent with Copernicus than Ptolemy. 

Today, none of this is controversial, either in or outside the Catholic Church.

Back then, however, all of it was -- as we lawyers would say -- a bad move.

Kind of like telling a judge he is full of it.

Even if he (or she) is, you are going to lose.

And so . . .

Galileo did.

On February 19, 1616, the Inquisition issued a unanimous report holding heliocentrism "foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of the Holy Scripture". The next day it ordered Galileo to "abstain completely from teaching or defending the doctrine or from discussing it" and seventeen years later, after he wrote and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Inquisition tried him again.  This second time, it found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", required him to "abjure, curse and detest" heliocentrism and sentenced him to house arrest. Publication of any of his existing or future work was forbidden. 

In 1642, still under house arrest, he died.

In many respects, Galileo's second trial was an utter farce. 

He wrote Dialogue after a new Pope (Urban VIII) asked him to lay out the cases for and against heliocentrism without taking a position advocating the doctrine but specifically including the Pope's own views against it. This he did, and in 1632 the book was published with both papal permission and the Inquisition's authorization. Six months later, however, the Pope banned the book and sent it to the Inquisition for examination, apparently having become enraged in the interim that his position had been conveyed through the mouth of the dialogue's Aristotelian (whom Galileo had named Simplicio, which in the vernacular Italian of the time was understood to mean "simpleton", and whose geocentric claims were systematically refuted by the dialogue's impartial Copernican proponent).

Back then, of course, hell hath no fury . . .

Like a Pope insulted.

Following his second trial, and either immediately after he had complied with the ordered abjuration or after he was transferred to house arrest at his own home, Galileo reportedly looked at the sky and then at the ground.

He then muttered . . . 

"E pur si muove."

"And yet it moves." 

It was the truth that set him -- and later, us -- free, the one no insulted pope or false decree could ignore . . .

Or change.

There is no contemporary record that Galileo made this statement.  It was mentioned for the first time in print in 1757 and was also part of a painting that may (or may not) have been created in the mid-1640s shortly after Galileo's death.

Those who dispute the authenticity of the remark note that it would not have been in Galileo's interest to make it.

Which is true.

But it is also true that, throughout his life, Galileo was not particularly circumspect when it came to commenting on the Church hierarchy's unscientific nonsense.

A long time ago, I was interviewed by a federal prosecutor in a case where a colleague (who later pled guilty) was accused of overbilling the government.  I had had my own run-ins with this guy, am not subtle,  and, to put it mildly, did not think highly of him. In any case, during the interview, the prosecutor asked if I had once said this would-be defendant was going to "wind up in jail" given his dishonesty. At the time, I had no recollection of saying this and said so to the prosecutor. I also told him, however, that I was not saying those who reported this statement to him were wrong.

Because . . .

As I put it . . .

It certainly sounded like something I would have said.

That's where I am with "And yet it moves".

It sure sounds like something Galileo would have said.

Yesterday was January 6, 2025.  

Four years ago to that day, Donald Trump unleashed a violent mob on lawmakers assembled on Capitol Hill to certify Trump's loss of the presidency to Joe Biden. 

Since then, Trump has regularly injected the lie that he won the 2020 election into the political veins of the American electorate, derided and condemned any effort by the courts or Congress to hold him accountable for having attempted to orchestrate a coup, and treated violent and disgusting J6 insurrectionists as political prisoners and hostages he intends to free.

Since then, two American institutions -- the United States Senate and the Supreme Court -- have failed miserably in the performance of their specific Constitutional duties, the first in failing to muster the courage needed to have sixty-seven of its members find Trump guilty of the obvious high crime and misdemeanor that January 6 was and the second in refusing to remove him from the 2024 presidential ballot given the 14th Amendment's blanket ban on insurrectionists holding any civil or military office.

Since then, Trump has also fully turned the Republican Party and its supporters into an army of fellow-travelers and deniers who affirm and rubber stamp his lies, ignore his immorality and dishonesty, and pretend chaos  is a substitute for competence.

And since then he has been (narrowly) elected the 47th president of the United States.

There is another America out there.

Amidst the wreckage that is today and may be the next four years, it is an America true to its "better angels" and best self. Perhaps faintly (these days) but still unmistakably, you can see that America if you look.  It is there in the decency of Jimmy Carter, the courage of Liz Cheney, the determination of Juan Merchan, the grace of Kamala Harris, the competence of Joe Biden and the humanity of Archbishop Robert McElroy. It is also there in the 215 House Democrats, 45 Senate Democrats and two Independents who certified the November presidential election.

Honorably doing yesterday . . .

What 147 Republicans, a soon to be ex-president and thousands of his deranged supporters . . .

Could not do four years ago.

E pur si muove.

CHRISTMAS 2024 -- FINDING GOD IN DARK TIMES

We are always being told to remember the original message of Christmas.

It's not supposed to be about the gifts and the parties, the cards and the carolers, the tree and the lights. It's not supposed to be about the long lines, crowded airports or frenzied families traveling to and fro. It's not supposed to be about the twelve days or seven fishes or eight reindeer.

Or the stockings hung by the chimney. 

Or St. Nicholas.

It's supposed to be about a visit.

By God . . .

To this world . . .

At a Roman backwater . . .

In  a small tribe . . .

As a real man.

And when you think about that seriously, and park all the seasonal tinsel and tumult, the claim is either the most important and earth-shattering thing to have ever happened in human history . . .

Or it is completely nuts.

Each side has had its proponents.

There have been times in the last two thousand plus years when individuals actually looked back in complete shock at the importance of the event.  Upon his own death in 363 CE, Emperor Julian (the Apostate) reportedly lamented the death of paganism and early triumph of Christianity with "Galilean, you have won." Others were in awe. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. Hopkin's wrote God's Grandeur. In the former, the Galilean becomes part of a biblical world order painted on five hundred square meters of a vaulted ceiling, in the latter the light that dispels the dark as the trinitarian "Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

There have been other times -- more prevalent of late -- when individuals looked back aghast at the irrationality of the claim and the disasters created in its name. This era's so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett -- are (or, in the now-deceased Hitchens and Dennett cases, were) contemporary spokesmen for this view. With Hitchens and Harris, the principal gripe is with organized religion; to the extent God dies in their world, it is more on account of what His followers have authored in His name. With Dawkins and Dennett, however,  whether He was there in the first place is the question (they think He was not).

Looking for evidence that God exists is, in my mind, a futile endeavor. 

Evidence of something entirely out of this world cannot really be found in this world. 

The Christian paradigm, of course, contests this claim. Its fundamental contention is "No, the real, actual first century (CE)  Jesus of Nazareth in this world is evidence that God too is here. He is the one who came, saw and conquered, albeit in ways Caesar could never have imagined". But the so-called evidence for this God-man is the Resurrection. Which its proponents admit is a miracle. And which, therefore,  more or less removes it from the realm of evidence (at least of the this-world sort).

So . . .

I look elsewhere.

In 1968, Hannah Arendt published Men In Dark Times. It is a collection of essays she wrote over twelve years about individuals who lived in the dark time of the mid-twentieth century, a time "when there was only wrong and no outrage". 

Though "there was," she wrote, "nothing secret or mysterious about" that dark time, "it was by no means visible to all" or "at all easy to perceive".  To the contrary, she explained, "until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double talk of . . . official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns." 

In this "camouflage[d] . . . public realm", she concluded, the function of which is to otherwise "throw light upon the affairs of men" to "show in word and deed, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do", darkness comes "when this light is extinguished by . . . speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality."

It was odd for Arendt to find my God in that time and place.

But, nevertheless, there He was.

The subject of Arendt's third essay is Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli.  Known to the world since 1958 as Pope John XXIII, Arendt titles her essay with the Pope's given name. My guess is that was intentional. Unknown and unsung at the time Catholic church elders could not agree on Pius XII's successor, they thought he would be "provisional, transitional" and "without much consequence." Throughout his life, however, Roncalli "made Christ his model".  

The "suffering" Christ.

The "gentle and humble" Christ.

"Knowing perfectly well," as Arendt, quoting the young Roncalli, explained, "that to be 'similar to the good Jesus' meant 'to be treated as a madman'".

And so . . .

The John who became a pope was simply the Roncalli who had been a real Christian. He talked (endlessly). And to everyone. He laughed (fully). And with anyone.  He cursed (mildly). But never in God's name.  "Shit" was acceptable; "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" was not. He was not patronizing. He was the fourth (and first son) of twelve children raised by farmers and molded by late 19th century Catholic Action, the church's alternative to the unstable state (from which it was then estranged) that created the cooperatives and credit banks Catholics like the Roncallis used to buy their farms. Born in 1881, he was a seminarian at 12, a priest at 22, and a Bishop at 43.  

Throughout his career, he was loyal to the institutional church.

But his loyalty never interfered with his ability to see and tell the truth about its leaders.

Or his country's . . .

Or the world's.

The popes he most admired in his lifetime were Leo XIII (1878-1903) and Benedict XV (1914-1922). These two were sandwiched between all the Piuses, Leo between Pius IX and X and Benedict between the latter and Pius XI (and then XII).  Leo and Benedict became famous, respectively, as the worker's pope and as a peacemaker. 

The Piuses IX and X were either reactionary or paranoid.  Pius IX became a prisoner of the Vatican after the Italian revolution and the fall of the papal states and forbade Italian Catholics from participating in politics; he was also the pope who shepherded the specious doctrine of infallibility though Vatican I, the council he more or less rigged to vote his way. Pius X manufactured the so-called "modernist heresy" designed to insulate Catholicism from religion not aligned with papal dictate or science and history not the product of medieval scholasticism.

Fortunately for the later church, however, Roncalli grew up under Leo and, upon ordination, became secretary to a modernist bishop -- Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi -- who Pius X had sidelined to Angelo's hometown.  

Radini-Tedeschi was the anti-pope.  

He was a fan of Catholic Action (which Pius X despised), supported striking workers, introduced science labs to the educations of future priests, and thought "authority" (papal and otherwise) had to be "harmonized" with "freedom" rather than deny it. 

The young Roncalli became an ardent supporter.

He found his own historic models in the Counter-Reformation's Charles Borromeo and Cesare Baronius. Through the sacrifice, service and scholarship of the first (a rich nobleman who gave it all up and reformed a debauched church) and the rational historic analysis of the second (who told Galileo, before the latter's trial, that "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go"), he avoided the intellectual poverty of anti-modernism without succumbing to the moral poverty of scientific positivism.

By the time he became a Bishop, he was fully formed. 

And so formed, he spoke truth to power in his dark time. 

He did not let the Vatican's efforts in negotiating and securing its own state (in the Lateran Accords) stop or limit his condemnation of Mussolini's fascism. And when he did it from the pulpit, he was given a one-way ticket out of Italy and exiled to Bulgaria as an apostolic visitor. He spent ten years there. Nor did he let the Vatican's later hesitancy with Hitler get in the way of his own honesty with German diplomats. During World War II, he was the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to Turkey; Franz von Papen was Germany's Ambassador to Turkey at the same time. When von Papen sought his help in securing Vatican support for Germany once it  was at war with communist (and therefore anti-Catholic) Russia, Roncalli bluntly asked "And what shall I say about the millions of Jews your countrymen are murdering in Poland and Germany?" 

His opposition was also more than just talk.

Throughout World War II, his "baptisms of convenience"; "immigration certificates to Palestine"; refugees list from Istanbul Rabbi Markus; and personal interventions on behalf of Bulgarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Italian Jews, orphaned Transnistrian children on a refugee ship, and those held in the Jasenovac and the Sered concentration camps, literally saved thousands from the final solution.

And later . . .

As Pope . . .

Long after it was over and just before he died . . .

He begged for forgiveness. 

Invoking the last words of the Jesus he imitated, he wrote a prayer to be delivered in Catholic churches throughout the world :

"We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren.  We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads.  Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did."

Roncalli's courage and witness to the truth in his time did not make him God or establish that there is one. It was evidence, however, of the power that imitation -- in his case, of Christ -- can have, the good it can do, the barriers it can break, the evil it can block, even the (just) wars it can win. 

It is, unfortunately, taken seriously by the world as a whole only (or mostly) after the fact.  Before the moment "catastrophe over[takes] everything and everybody", when the imitator is being "treated as a madman", the world's default position is to ignore the witness, soften and even deny the truth.  In Roncalli's time, it meant sending him to Bulgaria lest he get in the way of "normalizing" the Vatican's relationship with Mussolini's fascist Italy. In ours, it means bowing to Donald Trump, pretending (illegal) immigrants are inhuman, pretending truths about him are defamatory, ignoring or accepting his pathological lying and misogyny, prosecuting his enemies, attacking the free press, killing critical stories or editorials, abandoning Ukraine and rubber-stamping appointments to high positions of those whose first (and in some cases only) qualification is a sycophantic obedience to Trump himself. 

So much of this is exactly what happened in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. Fascism was immoral long before the Holocaust.

And it also could have been stopped long before then.

"'Do not obey in advance' is the main lesson of the twentieth century," says Tim Snyder. In his book On Tyranny, it is also "the first lesson". "Most of the power of authoritarianism,"  he explains, "is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what is more repressive, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Roncalli wouldn't do that in his time.

But his time did not listen until it was too late.

Nor are many, perhaps most, in ours.

And that, in a strange but not un-Biblical way, may be even more "evidence" for my God.

Because . . .

In His time . . .

The Galilean was ignored too.

Merry Christmas.

THE PARDON

In a political world that these days mixes Kafkaesque nightmares with Orwellian lies in almost equal measure, comes now the pardon of Hunter Biden by his father, the President.

The president's pardon power is plenary.  

He can issue one for any reason or no reason.

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has a whole unit --  the Office of the Pardon Attorney -- whose job it is to evaluate the sea of requests sent to the Oval Office. 

To do so, it has created -- and create is the operative word here -- a set of standards it applies to those requests. 

Thus . . .

In the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an applicant has to wait five years from the point of conviction to apply.  The Pardon Attorney evaluates  the post-conviction conduct, character and reputation of the applicant. He considers the seriousness of his crime, the impact a pardon might have on others, and the extent to which the applicant has accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct. 

None of those standards matter legally.

Yet they exist.

The apparent ultimate goal is to determine whether one who petitions for a pardon is worthy of one.

So . . .

Was Hunter Biden worthy?

As one might expect in today's polarized political world, opinions on that question are divided. As far as I can tell, they fall into the following five categories:

1. Absolutely not;

2. Absolutely f---ing not;

3. No, but understandable;

4. Absolutely, on the merits; and

5.  Absolutely, given the next president.

I fall into Category 5, despise 2, am sympathetic to 1 and 3 and (therefore) less so to 4.  

Category 1 is occupied by purists in the Democratic party who think the President has sacrificed principle. It includes the we-can-never-act-like-them crowd who consider such sacrifices fatal. Category 3 is occupied by those same Democrats but stifles the outrage by conceding any father in the President's situation might have done the same thing.  Category 4 is the ground upon which the Biden himself has for the most part chosen to stand.

Category 2 is peopled by the GOP's MAGA hypocrites who applauded Trump's own unparalleled abuse of the pardon power in his first term.  

In that first term, Trump gave pardons or commutations to friends, relatives and assorted hangers on, most if not all of whom had committed crimes far more serious than Hunter Biden's. Trump's recipients included political henchman Roger Stone (convicted of false statements, witness tampering, and obstruction), campaign manager and Russian-colluder Paul Manafort (guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, failure to disclose hidden foreign accounts, and sentenced to 47 months imprisonment), former National Security Adviser General Flynn (originally pled guilty to false statements), the loud mouth architect of MAGA authoritarianism, Steve Bannon (charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering), seven criminally convicted Republican Congressman (for crimes that included bribery, securities fraud, tax evasion and campaign violations), and his relative, Charles Kushner (convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering; Kushner is daughter Ivanka's father-in-law and Trump's now-proposed Ambassador to France). 

Category 2 folks deserve no sympathy. 

In fact, because their hypocrisy knows no bounds, irritating them is an advantage.

The best defense of the pardon is what awaited Hunter Biden going forward, not a watering-down of what he did in the past. 

President Biden, however, is being pummeled now because he is focusing more on what occurred in the past than on what awaited his son in the future. 

In that vein, the President's argument is that the gun and tax charges to which Hunter either pled or on which he was found guilty were overkill. In the case of the former,  the younger Biden lied on a form by saying he was not a drug addict at the time he purchased the gun. Because he only had the gun for a week (his sister-in-law wisely threw it away) and never committed any crimes with it, the general practice, had it been followed, would have been to not file a charge, especially given the fact that the would-be defendant was in recovery and years sober by the time the conduct was investigated.  In the case of the latter, the taxes Hunter owed were paid in their entirety, as was the interest and all the penalties, and these types of cases are often if not typically resolved administratively with civil penalties.

This overkill boat, however, is leaky.  

Apart from the fact that both crimes are often tried and not resolved administratively, addiction is not a defense to years-long tax evasion and honest answers on background questions are among the little we have left in what remains of any effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. There's a reason addicts and guns are a bad mix. Guns are dangerous and addicts are unstable. 

And there's no "I love my son" exception to those facts.

The justification for the pardon, therefore, cannot be found in US Attorney (and Special Counsel)  David Weiss's prosecution. That prosecution may have been aggressive.  But it was not selective. 

The justification, however, can be found in what awaited Hunter Biden.

The world changed on November 5. 

America elected Donald Trump and Trump has pledged to take revenge on his perceived enemies.  

Among those perceived enemies are the Bidens in general and Hunter Biden in particular. 

Trump has been gunning for Hunter for years and has never let up on his claim that Hunter and/or his father were taking bribes from Ukraine or were otherwise engaged in illegal conduct in connection with Hunter's (obviously) nepotistic seat on the board of Burisma.  Though these charges have been investigated by the GOP for years, no evidence whatsoever has been found to sustain them. In fact, the very evidence the GOP relied upon for the charge -- a statement from FBI informant Alexander Smirnov -- has been deemed false by Weiss, who -- apart from indicting Hunter --  has also indicted Smirnov for lying to investigators and making false claims that the Bidens had accepted bribes from Burisma.

Trump also blames Joe Biden for the two federal indictments levelled against him in connection with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and his subsequent theft and illegal storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. All of this is also baseless. President Biden had nothing to do with those indictments.  They were brought by a Special Counsel who Biden did not appoint. So fastidious was the due process given Trump that he was able to delay the cases until after the election. Given the DOJ's policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, they have now been dismissed. 

Nor, contrary to the GOP's amen-chorus of Trump enablers, were the indictments the product of "lawfare" or "weaponization" of the Department of Justice. There was more than enough evidence to indict the former President on both charges, and though we will not know for a while (and maybe never) whether there was enough to convict him, that was the way to bet. Trump endorsed a scheme to deem fake electors legitimate. On January 6, 2021, he watched his supporters assault police and ransack the Capitol for hours before telling them to leave (which they did upon his order). Back in Florida after his administration ended, he lied about classified and highly sensitive documents he had taken and failed to return, and then tried to over-up his crimes and destroy evidence with the help of idiot-loyalists.

He is now committed to appointing sycophants to run the Justice Department and the FBI.  

His first nominee for Attorney General -- former Rep. Matt Gaetz -- spent years repeating Trump's "weaponization" lie and his second -- Florida's ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi -- is a 2020 election denier who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial and has promised to "prosecute the prosecutors" who indicted Trump during the Biden administration.  

His putative FBI Director -- Kash Patel --  has pledged to "find the conspirators -- not just in government, but in the media . . . who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections." As Patel put it, "We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."  In his 2022 book Government Gangsters, Patel actually named the sixty people he intends to "come after".  The list is a Who's Who of Trump opponents and critics. It includes President Biden, Vice President Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, and witnesses who testified against Trump, some before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, others in Trump's two impeachment trials.

These are not people who can be counted on to uphold the rule of law and they are not people Joe Biden is obliged to assume will proceed in good faith.  The far greater likelihood is that they will turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a today's version of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Wisconsin's then-junior Senator said he had lists of "known communists" working in the US State Department. He didn't but numerous lives were ruined as he pretended otherwise. Today's McCarthyism pretends Trump won an election he lost and wants to prosecute the very people who tried to hold him accountable for his attempted coup. To insure this occurs, Trump is appointing fellow travelers at DOJ (Bondi)  and the FBI (Patel).

For them . . .

Hunter Biden was a target in waiting.  

It wasn't going to end with guns and taxes. 

Regardless of the facts.

Consider this possibility:

Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month. Assume, for purposes of argument, that he was able to avoid serving time in jail and was given an extended probationary sentence and fines, neither of which would be uncommon given the victim-less nature of the gun crime and the full payments (back tax, interest and penalties) on the tax charge.

How do you think Trump, Bondi, Patel and the beholden-GOP would have reacted? 

What do you think Trump would have ordered Bondi and Patel to do on the afternoon of January 20, 2025?

For starters . . .

Fire Weiss, who obviously does not think Hunter or the President were bribed by Burisma?

Joe Biden was not obliged to find out.

Viewed as a life raft for a guy who did not deserve one, the pardon of Hunter Biden is an abuse of the rule of law.

But . . .

Viewed as a barrier that stops a fascist and his loyalists from turning the law into a machine that fulfills his own asinined grievances, pathological narcissism, and baseless conspiracy theories . . .

It is an act of statesmanship.

In light of the lethal possibilities that flow from Trump's inherent narcissism, Bondi's loyalty and Patel's hit list . . .

I hope there are many more.

THANKSGIVING 2024 -- SOUND AND FURY

For inveterate opponents of Donald Trump, and I am one, it seems a bit forced to be happy this Thanksgiving.

And nothing done in his brief tenure as President-elect has made that exercise easier. 

The big news since election day has been the rogue's gallery of incompetents Trump intends to appoint to  his Cabinet. 

For Defense, we have been given a FOX news host who thinks woman can't fight, war crimes are just fine, and the military can be used against any domestic political opponents he deems "Marxist" (the list is long); as the new DNI, an apologist for Putin and Syria's Assad who claimed the US funded biolabs in Ukraine to release deadly pathogens; at the Department of Health and Human Services, a lost Kennedy who thinks vaccines cause autism; and under him, the quack TV Dr. Oz to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Trump's first would-be (but now withdrawn) attorney general (Matt Gaetz) was despised in Congress, probably a statutory rapist, and in any case -- judging from pictures he was said to have shared on the floor of the House -- more than comfortable in whatever locker room Trump occupied during his now-infamous bus ride with Billy Bush.  

His next candidate, ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, is more qualified than Gaetz could ever be and is not a criminal so far as we know. She did, however, serve as one of Trump's defense attorneys in his first impeachment trial and supported his election denial lie. Her selection also makes both the nominated number one and number two (Todd Blanche) at DOJ Trump's former lawyers.

Trump thinks federal employees belong to him. In his first term he routinely referred to Defense Secretary Mattis, DHS Secretary Kelly and National Security Adviser McMaster as his generals and was livid when his two Attorneys General -- Jeff Sessions at the beginning of his term on the Mueller probe and William Barr at the end on President Biden's win -- would not do his bidding. He expects he has now insured nothing along those lines will ever happen again.

If he is right . . .

The fifty-year era of independence at the Department of Justice will have officially ended.

(Pro tip sidebar to Speaker Johnson: when your to-do list includes deep-sixing a report that shows your AG nominee is a statutory rapist while making sure a trans-sexual female cannot use  the House's women's rooms, stay home. It's always a bad look to cover up the sexual crimes of one in your party as you pander to the sexual prejudices of another.) 

In his first term, Trump appointed people who for the most part had a reasonable familiarity with their department's duties and capacities.  He also appointed people willing to follow the law and, as importantly, willing to require that Trump himself follow the law. In this go round, he is giving notice that no one need care.  The only obvious requirements are loyalty to Trump himself and a demonstrated willingness to piss off those who oppose him. 

If competence comes in (or, in the rare case, without) that package, as it does with Sen. Rubio at the State Department and would with either Kevin Warsh or Robert Lighthizer at Treasury (or the latter returned to the USTR), that is accidental. It may also be unnecessary.  Trump and his MAGA minions believe the entire federal bureaucracy is a sea of opposition that must be emptied.  He claims the bureaucrats routinely opposed him in his first term (which, thank God, was often true) and unfairly indicted him after he left office (which is false; Trump earned those indictments and the fact that trials are being aborted is yet another failure of America's institutions, which did not protect us from Trump or, as the last election demonstrated, ourselves). 

With rare exception (Rubio, Warsh, Lighthizer), therefore, lieutenants who might competently run the government are not on his wish list.  

Incompetent loyalists who could help him dismantle it are.

Trump's desire for revenge is also married to the GOP's knee-jerk hatred of government. For decades now, Republicans have won elections convincing Americans that government (or at least the part of government which does things for others but not them) can do no good.  In this world, incompetence is a feature, not a bug, the rule, not the exception. It fulfills the GOP's prophecy.

Because . . .

The easiest way to demonstrate government sucks is to appoint people so inept they prove it.

Trump now thinks he is bullet-proof.  And his fellow travelers are not disabusing him of that notion.  To the contrary, they are claiming he has a "mandate". A "decisive" one, say his billionaire bros Musk and Ramaswamy. To "disrupt", whatever that means. Beyond tax cuts, tariffs, deportations, an inchoate promise to magically negotiate a wars end in Ukraine, or the inherent nature of his personality, we are not being told.

And with that, we can finally get to this years . . .

Thank yous.

Which must be . . . 

To the 74.2 million people, myself included, who voted against Trump.

Thus rendering all this mandate talk . . . 

"a tale    

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

We can thank Shakespeare (or, if you prefer, Macbeth) later.

Once the idiot leaves the stage.

In politics, mandate talk is generally useless and has been for the past sixty years. In that period, the only credible mandate claims were those made by LBJ in 1964 and President Reagan in 1980, each of whom won enormous popular and electoral college majorities and control of Congress (in LBJ's case by almost super-majority margins).  Since 1980, no one has come even close; in fact, the only remote contender was President Obama in 2008. Everyone else won by small margins and governed in the face of significant opposition. Two -- Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 -- lost the popular vote.

Today, Trump marches to the Oval Office having won less than 50% of the popular vote and only slightly more than Harris.  His party has a non-filibuster proof  four-vote margin in the Senate and an infinitesimal (as low as three and no more than five, depending on final counts) margin in the 435-member House of Representatives. Thirty-three senators (twenty-six of them Republicans) will be up for re-election in 2026, as will the entire House. None of their lives will be made easier by Trump, who has always been long on outrage but notoriously short on actual accomplishment. Indeed,  his party was slaughtered in the 2018 mid-terms, i.e., even in the so-called glory days of the pre-pandemic economy Trump continually touts.

Lots of people have never liked him.

Lots still do not.

And he has a habit of keeping it that way.

Mandate lovers -- and perpetually panicked Democrats -- are very good at ignoring reality.  This time, in addition to the small numerical margins, one of the realities being ignored is that Democratic candidates for the Senate actually won in four (Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin) of the seven swing states Trump won, came close in a fifth (Pennsylvania) and won the gubernatorial election in a sixth (North Carolina). In those Senate races, three of the winners (Rosen, Baldwin and Slotkin) were women. Had Harris not failed where they succeeded, she'd be the President-elect today.

In his victory speech in the early hours of November 6, Trump said his "promises made" would be "promises kept."  If so, he is off to a bad start as nothing on order thus far -- tax cuts, tariffs and deportations --  will return the price of groceries to their pre-pandemic level or remedy the severe economic inequality plaguing rural and non-college educated Americans.

Meanwhile, he will appoint judges bent on eliminating substantive rights and Cabinet and agency heads bent (again with notable possible exceptions) on rubber-stamping his whims.

Part of the problem here is that Trump, when he is not dangerous (which is way more often than not), is lazy and not interested in policy.  If he seriously wanted to put a dent in inequality, he'd have to invest his political capital in convincing his party that redistributing some wealth is not a bad idea.  That's the only way it's been done in this country since the frontier closed and moving west could no longer be America's de facto growth and/or welfare policy.  Think anti-trust law, the 16th Amendment (which allowed the federal income tax), the Federal Reserve, Social Security, unionization, the GI Bill and a minimum wage; the Civil Rights laws in the 1960s then removed the racism FDR had been forced to swallow in order to pass his New Deal. Collectively, these measures restrained the top, distributed productivity gains more evenly, and created the middle class.

All of them, however, are anathema to the GOP. 

While Trump is in love with any form of hatred that gives him votes (hence his fascistic claims against immigrants), that's as far as he ever gets. Tax cuts will not cure inequality, and tariffs and deportations will actually exacerbate it, the first by inflating prices, the second by cutting the labor force that creates a lot of the agricultural supply. Real immigration reform replete with paths to citizenship and reasonable guest worker programs would avoid this problem; deportation will only make it worse. Meanwhile, if Musk and Ramaswamy, neither of whom understands how federal spending works, take their proposed meat-ax approach to cuts by eliminating programs where specific authorizations have lapsed, some of the very programs the most vulnerable rely upon (e.g., veterans health benefits) will die.

In a world where a free and aggressive press laid bare the implications of Trump's approaches, the GOP might be forced to change.  That, however, is not today's world.  For, in addition to having convinced struggling white guys that their economic woes are caused by illegal (brown) aliens and affirmative action, Trump and the GOP have also convinced them that FOX is real news and the mainstream media (The New York Times, Washington Post, and three major networks) are not. 

So . . .

Brainwashed, the MAGA base will continue to live in a world of resentment and fact-free pseudo-solutions.  

If we survive that world and Trump's own disorders . . .

The thank yous to Harris voters will be voluminous.

In the meantime, this Thanksgiving . . .

In this year's parade . . .

They get mine.

MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKS

There's a reason they are on the sidelines.

Monday morning quarterbacks, that is.

It's because they aren't playing in the real game.

The 2024 election is now a week old. Trump won.  Harris lost.  That wasn't all that hard to say.  Too bad Trump couldn't say it four years ago.  Too bad millions of Americans couldn't either.  As I write, Trump is going to the White House today to meet President Biden for the post-election congratulatory meeting where the new guy and the old guy (unfortunately, they've all been guys thus far) meet to assure America that the transition will be seamless and peaceful.  Too bad that didn't happen last time either.  Five people died and hundreds were injured as a result.

For the past week, we have been flooded with "analysis" on why Trump won and Harris lost.

The simple answer is Trump got more votes in states where it counted.  

Not a ton more.  

But enough to win.  

Four years ago Biden got not a ton more but enough to win in those states and in the election before that Trump did.  

Frankly, for all the presidential elections that have been held since 1988, that has been the pattern.  

There haven't been any blow-outs.  

America is a divided country.

And has been for over thirty years.

There's also been a see-sawing quality to these results.  In 1992 and '96, the Democrat won. In 2000 and '04, it was the Republican.  Back to the Democrat in 2008 and 2012. Then a Republican (2016), a Democrat (2020), and now a Republican again.

Into this sea of apparent indecision, or at least a sea of different decisions over a relatively short span of historical time, have waded a boatload of analysts ready to tell us the reasons why. Typically, this being America, the loser in this analysis takes it on the chin and the winner is perceived to have wrought some sort of personal triumph. 

Back in 2000, when Florida's hanging chads and a ballot that had Jews in Palm Beach voting for Pat Buchanan allowed members of the Supreme Court to vote twice and thereby make George W. Bush president, Al Gore was upbraided for sighing and making faces during that year's debates, signs -- it was said -- that meant he wasn't the guy you'd want to have a beer with in an election so close that the would-you-have- a- beer-with-that-guy vote had to have mattered.

In 2004, another close one, a war hero lost because he was supposedly a wind-surfing Nantucket elitist.

 In 2016, Hillary allegedly went down for being "unlikeable".  

Hard to believe the "pussy-grabbing" alterative was more likeable.

But what do I know.

Now the swords are out for Kamala Harris.

A week before the election, people were praising her flawless campaign.  

They were marveling at her adept eleventh-hour entry following President Biden's departure and praising the speed with which she herded the cats that are her party, avoided the expected bloodletting, and fought Trump to a toss-up that might be won.

Now . . .

She either wasn't dishonest enough to repudiate Joe Biden.

Or progressive enough to win back the working class.

Or specific enough to sway the undecided.

Or wise enough to pick Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

Or a candidate long enough to have battled through primaries that, I guess, would have somehow increased her appeal among black and Hispanic men . . .

Or resulted in a different candidate with all of her attributes but none of her flaws.

The problem with all of this is that in a race as close as the one we just witnessed, any of these explanations might be right. Or they might be wrong.  In the real world, there is no way to know.  We'd have to redo the election with all these variables changed and see the results.

My own view is that none of them would have mattered.

Because . . .

They all ignore the other side.

They get to have a say too.

Even when they shouldn't.

I think election analysts should have to be certified.  Others are.  Lawyers pass bar exams.  Doctors are licensed. My wife just spent thousands becoming a CFRE.  That's short for certified fund-raising executive.

Here's a modest proposal.

Before you decide why someone lost an election, run in one.

Put your name on a ballot.

Make all these decisions in real time.

In the game.

Not on the sidelines.

I have and I cannot tell you why Kamala Harris lost other than to say Trump got more votes. 

Shit happens. 

Whether Trump should be president is a different question.  

He shouldn't be.  

He is a rapist, a felon and a fascist. 

His election does not change any of that.

The people who voted for him are responsible for putting him back in the Oval office come next January.  They made a bad decision, one that I believe over time they will regret and one that has already done serious damage to the country and will do even more damage in the future. Even as I write, Trump is naming yes-men and women to his Cabinet, demanding that he be allowed to make recess appointments to avoid the need for Senate confirmation, and fulfilling Liz Cheney's dire predictions of a government beholden only to his dictatorial impulses. Abroad, Vladimir Putin is emboldened, Europe and Ukraine prepare for American cowardice, and China eyes Taiwan. 

The voters, however, are not the only responsible parties.

The institutions of America failed.

The two biggest failures were the US Senate and the US Supreme Court.  

Following the carnage of January 6, 2021, the Senate should have convicted Trump on his impeachment and made it impossible for him to ever be president again.  For the same reason, the Supreme Court should have enforced the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause and made it impossible for him to run again.  Both had the power to do so. The impeachment and insurrection clauses in the Constitution were designed precisely to confront and eliminate the problem Trump presents, an autocrat as president who dishonestly and regularly violates the rule of law, seeks to exercise dictatorial power, and resorts to violence as a means to that end. 

The Founders and the authors of the 14th Amendment knew that elections alone could not be counted on to preserve American democracy and a Constitutionally-based republican form of government.  

Sadly, the Senate and the Supreme Court forgot that lesson. 

The fact that Trump won the 2024 election means he will be president again.

It does not mean he should be. 

The fact that Trump won means Harris lost.

And that doesn't mean she should have either.

LOST YOUTH

I am sixty-eight years old.

But I remember August 6, 1968 like it was yesterday.

That was the day my Uncle Al died.  He was forty-two, a New York City cop. Our whole extended family was on vacation at a small house my mother had purchased in Highland Lakes, NJ with her share of the proceeds from the sale of our family home in Brooklyn.  That home had been sold after my parents separated and we moved in with my grandparents. Uncle Al had spent the first week of his vacation painting the new house with my grandfather. On the weekend, however, he woke up sick and had to go to a doctor.  

The doctor immediately put him in the hospital.

A day later he was moved to another hospital.

A day after that he died.

The hospital was not that close to Highland Lakes so my mother and Aunt El were staying in a motel near the hospital.  The hospital called at 5 am and told my mother, who was a nurse, that they had to come over quickly.  When they got there, they were told Uncle Al had died.  They drove back to Highland Lakes and told the rest of us -- my grandmother, grandfather, sister and cousin, Uncle Al's oldest son. His other son, the baby John, was a year old in his play pen.

It was a gut punch to the entire family.

My forty-two-year old aunt had lost her husband of eighteen years.  My twelve-year old and baby cousins had lost their father, my sister and I our uncle and the guy who in many respects had become a surrogate father given our mom and dad's separation.  My grandmother had been through two wars and raised her own (and a good chunk of her extended) family in the when-there-was-no-safety-net Depression.  She was a rock.  

But that day she just kept crying.

Our big Irish-Catholic family held a wake and a funeral. It was and remains the biggest I've been to. After the funeral Mass, a two-block line of cars moved slowly from the church in Brooklyn to the cemetery at Pinelawn in Suffolk County. At the wake, lots of men had promised my cousin they'd take him fishing. He and his father had loved to do that. They'd wake up at 4:30 am and head out to Sheepshead Bay to catch a 6:30 half-day charter for fluke or bluefish.

After August 6, there weren't any fishing trips.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a reporter, Mary McGrory, told Daniel Patrick Moynihan "We'll never laugh again."  Moynihan replied "Mary, we'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again."

Actual tragedy is weird.  It's not like history, where you know the future. It's more like perpetual uncertainty.  You know it's bad but you have no idea how all that badness will play out. There's a sense of emptiness.

That's how I felt on August 6, 1968.

It's how I felt yesterday, November 6, 2024.

America will never be young again.

TRUMP'S LASTING LEGACY -- THE INDECISION TRAP

Sometime this week I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris for President.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

Long after this election is over, history will write its epitaph.  And no matter what the actual outcome is next week, history will not be kind to Donald Trump or those who supported him.  

If Trump wins, he will govern as he has promised.  

Perhaps his only positive quality is his utter transparency. 

He does not disguise any of the ugliness. 

And the government he will lead will be ugly.  

The economy will crater under the burden of inflationary tariffs and trade wars. Human rights -- indeed, simple decency -- will be discarded as 11 million immigrants, many of them innocent children, are seized, jailed and thrown out.  Constitutional norms will collapse as he creates a Department of Justice that takes political opponents off the field and rubber stamps his every lunatic move. America's alliance of democracy will collapse as he sacrifices Ukraine to Putin and the depravity of Russian rape and pillage. 

The courts will throw up their hands in frustration.  

If they disagree with him, he will ignore their decrees, certain that no consequence will follow. He has been  freed from the rule of law by the permission slip John Roberts created when six conservatives on the Supreme Court voted to give presidents immunity for the crimes they commit on duty and by the lemming-like refusal of remaining Republican office holders to ever impeach and convict him no matter how high his crime or misdemeanor.

But what if Trump loses.

How will history treat him then?

The answer is . . .

No better.

Trump has become worse, much worse, over time. 

What started out as puerile schoolyard bullying in a 2016 campaign no one took seriously has become, in the chilling words of Yale author (How Fascism Works) and professor Jason Stanley, "textbook Mein Kampf."  Political opponents are no longer "Crazy Nancy" or "Shifty Schiff".  They are the Hitlerian "enemy within". His attempted coup on January 6, 2021 proved that his love affair with lying, and with himself, is not merely rhetorical. 

He is serious. 

Deadly so.

But too many cannot or will not see this.

These days, even some who used to see, like the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, have put on blinders.

Why?

I think Hannah Arendt knew the answer.

In a 1974 interview with the French jurist and scholar Roger Errera, Arendt said "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."

"This is because lies," she continued, "by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie . . . but . . . a great number of lies".

Unique among politicians in contemporary America, Donald Trump has done more than any other individual to convince the American citizenry that "everybody always lies". 

His own lies are constant and over time have become voluminous. And because he insists upon and enforces blind loyalty, his lies have metastasized. Though often but not always repeated verbatim, his followers never reject his lies. Instead, and as Arendt foretold, they rewrite them. 

Trump's lie that he won the 2020 election becomes JD Vance's lie that he and Trump were merely pointing out "problems" . . .

Or Trump's refusal for three hours to call off the January 6 carnage at the Capitol becomes Vance's  lie that he merely advocated peaceful protest . . .

Or Trump's departure on January 20 becomes Vance's lie that the transfer was "peaceful" and January 6 is beside the point.

Nor does Trump limit his serial prevarications to the 2020 election and subsequent attempted coup.  

As President, he lied about COVID, pretending early on that it would end with warm weather and later that it might be cured with bleach.  Tens of thousands died as a consequence. Throughout the current campaign, he has lied about abortion, claiming the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade was approved by all. It was not. 

He also lies in claiming the decision jeopardizes no one. 

Three women have died in anti-abortion fetal heartbeat states because they could not get the medical care needed to treat their miscarriages or other complications. Given the lag time in undertaking and then reporting on reviews of pregnancy-related maternal deaths subsequent to Roe's reversal, "there are," as Pro Publica reports, "almost certainly more."

"The result," Arendt explained in her 1967 essay Truth and Politics, "is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end -- is being destroyed."

This is fatal to  democracy. 

Because . . .

It is fatal to judgment.

To our ability to think.

"A people that no longer can believe anything," Arendt concluded in her interview with Errera, "cannot make up its own mind.  It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

This is where we are with Trump.

And it is where we will be even if he loses next week.

Over the course of the last four years, I have always been amazed that there were any people undecided on Trump.  I thought his acts so clear and so reprehensible that no one could really avoid not only a decision but also one that unhesitatingly rejected him. The man is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, business fraud and charlatan. As demonstrated most recently at last Sunday's rally at Madison Square Garden, his campaign is a foul-mouthed verbal sewer of racism and denigration never before witnessed in American politics.  His fascism is his worst but by no means only disqualifying trait.

How could anyone be undecided?

Now I know.

It's not that people are undecided.

It's that Trump has undermined, and for some even killed . . .

Their ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Or what is true from what is false

Their ability . . .

To evaluate.

To judge.

To think.

Decisions are different from reactions. Reactions are reflexive, automatic.  Decisions at least at some level are considered. If, as Arendt lamented in the face of a culture of lies, we lose "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end", decisions become impossible and all manner of reflexive reaction takes over. There are no facts. And therefore no gatekeepers, no experts, no standards. 

Everything can be excused because nothing is true. 

And because there are no standards, opponents can be falsely or at the very least hypocritically judged . . .

Or disgustingly dismissed . . .

Or even jailed. 

All of which, in the current campaign, has been done to or threatened against Kamala Harris . . .

And Liz Cheney . . .

And Generals Milley and Kelly.

Kamala Harris is a normal politician with more or less standard Democratic party positions on the issues.  As Biden's Vice President she participated in an administration that led us through COVID, rescued us from economic catastrophe, created jobs, tamed inflation, renewed NATO, helped preserve the post-World War II rules-based order and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. In any other time, with an economy the envy of the world, this would be a record that would seal victory at the polls. In any other time, with the threat to women's rights at an all-time high, the margin would not be close.

But we do not live in any other time.

We live in Trump time.

The time of lies and Hannah Arendt's worst nightmare.

An era where, as the internet meme puts it, "he gets to be lawless and she must be flawless."

It's not that people are undecided. 

It's that they can no longer decide. 

I'm voting for Kamala.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

If you can't decide, do it for them anyway.

History may not treat you kindly.

But they certainly will.