WINTERS -- THEN AND NOW

I used to hate winter.

Not the period from Christmas through New Years.

That was fun.

Family, parties, presents . . .

Egg-nog.

The short days and long nights were illusory at Christmas time. 

The Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in was always a sea of bright lights. The nativity scenes seemed appropriately staged.  The directors had decided that each creche had to be bathed in the warmth of  a well-lit December night.  If the Bethlehem of Jesus's birth had not welcomed Him, at least Brooklyn did.

Eventually, of course, the lights went out.

The long, cold nights returned. 

It was winter.

What to do? 

In the ''50s and '60s, the post-war America of my boomer youth was on the move.  Eisenhower's interstates were being built. People started flying en masse. Because gas was cheap, they drove en masse too. Escaping winter became possible.

In 1971, my family actually went to Florida for Christmas. My retired grandparents had moved to Orlando. An aunt and her two children -- my cousins -- flew down.  My father, mother, sister and I drove.  

It was a learning experience.  

I learned that Eisenhower's interstates were by no mean complete.  This made it impossible to avoid the sharecropper poverty of battered see-through shacks standing aside US-1 in the Carolinas and Georgia. Or the billboards that announced we were in "Klan Country". In Lumberton, North Carolina, where we stayed the first night of our two day drive, my father  learned that restaurants did not serve liquor in that dry state. A guy who liked his martinis, he was disappointed but survived.  

Driving to Florida was also an education on what actually constituted escape.

Back then, New Yorkers in January wanted a respite from the weather.  To get one, however, you could not just "go south".  In fact, if you were driving down that not-yet-finished interstate, things did not really warm up until you passed Jacksonville.  Since states weren't reliably red or blue then, the snowbirds made sure they made it past Jacksonville in their search for summer in winter.  In April or so, most of them also made sure they returned.

A lot has changed since then.

To begin, most of those leaving are not returning.  

According to the US Census Bureau, more than 200,000 people left New York in the year ending July 31, 2023.  This was a net loss, accounting for those who moved in and out. Over the past three years, the state's population has declined by more than 600,000.  New York is not the leader here.  That honor belongs to California, which saw a net out-flow of 338,000 people during the same period.  The six other states that lost population were Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Hawaii and West Virginia.

Republicans think these numbers are to their advantage. 

Of the ten states whose populations grew the most between 2010 and 2023, six were reliably red or Republican, one was reliably blue or Democratic, and the other three were competitive. In absolute numbers -- which matter most when the nation's 435 Congressional seats are apportioned -- the biggest gainers were Florida and Texas.

The GOP, however, might want to curb its enthusiasm

Because . . . 

Depending on the state, the claim that migration from blue to red is a net benefit for the GOP is not at all ineluctable.  

Georgia, for example, is a red state state where population increased by 14.7% between 2010 and 2023. It did not make the top ten but was close at number twelve.  Of its new arrivals, however, the percentages of Republicans and Democrats were roughly equal. And for the nation as a whole, while one study showed that, of those moving to red states, 46% registered as Republicans and 30% registered as Democrats, the largest category of new arrivals were already Republicans and were coming from  Republican states. In other words, they did not alter the national political balance in their favor. 

The same study showed that while moves from red to blue states had more Democrats retaining their identification than Republicans doing the same, in moves from blue to red states the ratio was about even. If that's the case, migration may actually be helping Democrats, i.e., blue states may actually be getting bluer while red states are just running in place.

This data also appears to be consistent with some more general views of where states are heading on the question of political identity. 

To wit:

Florida is reliably red and not changing anytime soon.  Its population has grown but its new arrivals aren't changing the landscape as much as fitting into one that already existed.  Georgia, however, is by no means monolithically red and its new arrivals did not change that reality. The same may also be true in Arizona. And Texas, which has been a magnet for those leaving California, is becoming less red. That may be due as much to immigration as anything else.  But those blue Californians settling in Austin cannot be ignored.

Back in the '70s, and perhaps for all the wrong reasons, the regional divide was not as great. The south still had large numbers of conservative Democrats and the north still had large numbers of liberal Republicans.  That started to change with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and was thereafter turbocharged by Ronald Reagan in the '80s, Newt Gingrich in the '90s, and Trump and the politicization of evangelical Christianity more recently.  The evolution of those three versions of the Republican Party has led us to the present moment.

Which is a very dangerous one.

A large part of the danger has been described ad nauseum over the last few years. A crypto-fascist, pathologically lying narcissist has taken over the Republican Party.  He orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and has since convinced more than half his party that he won an election he lost (and did not rape a woman a jury concluded he had). He owns the Republican caucus in the House of  Representative,130 of whom have endorsed his now third run for the presidency, and is actively working to insure (fellow crypto-fascist) Putin's takeover of Ukraine by having the House kill the military assistance that would stop it. 

His MAGA faithful resemble Germans in the 1930s.

They have swallowed his lies whole just as the Germans swallowed Hitler's.. They think January 6 was either justified, peaceful or allowed to become violent because Nancy Pelosi did not summon a National Guard over which she had no power. They think the four criminal cases against him are political hit jobs, even though the witnesses to his alleged crimes are either Republicans themselves, his former aides and/or staffers, or both. They think the more than 1200 January 6 defendants now found guilty are "hostages".

All this is bad enough.

What is worse, however, is the GOP establishment's gelded inability to end his reign of terror.

This has not been for lack of opportunity.

Nor only for lack of backbone.

And it is persisting.

Nikki Haley is the establishment's latest best hope.  

She is running for president and is Trump's only remaining GOP opponent.  In theory, this is what the non-Trump GOP establishment has been waiting for.  Back in 2016, when Trump was still a political footnote but had started to win attention (and convention delegates) with some decidedly small margins, the political cognoscenti all prayed that the Bush-Rubio-Cruz-Christie-Kasich-Huckabee-Paul-Carson-Fiorina wing of presidential wannabees would reduce itself by eight and send Trump back to reality TV after he lost a string of one-on-ones.

They didn't.

And so he didn't.

January 2024, however, is not January 2016.

Trump entered the body politic in 2016.  Thereafter, our finely tuned political immune system did not deliver the antibodies needed to defeat him.  Over time, we went from pussy-grabbing to Covid incompetence to election denial to insurrection, each more politically virulent than the other.   In 2021, in a unique dereliction of duty,  the Senators to whom our Founders had entrusted the vaccine of impeachment refused to administer the shot. The virus then continued to spread.

Vaccines eliminate viruses because they supercharge the immune system.  They literally create (many) more antibodies to fight the pathogen.  For a number of reasons, however, Nikki Haley is coming up short..

Because she thinks she must, she is campaigning as if President Biden and Donald Trump are equally out of touch.  And for roughly similar reasons. Biden is forever confused, she falsely claims; Trump forever chaotic, she understatedly concedes.  In marrying the first with the second, however, she allows herself and Trump's supporters to ignore his much greater sins (like supporting an attempted coup).  In her world, Trump is not a fascist, a pathological liar, or a dangerous narcissist. Rather, as she puts it, "rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him".  She is silently saying -- or allowing Trump supporters to hear her saying --  "it's not his fault".  Just like it's not Biden's fault he is confused. 

They're just two old guys. 

Who need to be put out to pasture.

Trump voters, however, aren't buying it.

Because . . .

In today's America, Haley's understatement on Trump doesn't take him down.

In fact, it actually builds him up. 

For two reasons.

One is that our culture is enthralled by disrupters.  People like Elon Musk command attention and -- with many -- admiration. Chaos is not something to be embarrassed by or to run from. It is their secret sauce.  In truth, this is probably just an over-hyped excuse for the obnoxiousness inherent in people like Musk or Trump.  But be that as it may, Musk's fatal flaws haven't stopped him from producing high-end cars.  Trump's, on the other hand, have done significant damage to the country.

The truth -- and this is the second reason -- is that Haley is in a bind.

For that bind, she can thank Reagan and Gingrich and her fellow establishment Republicans.

Because it is a bind caused by the GOP's inability to come up with any policies that actually combat the popular distaste which fueled Trump's rise and explains his survival.  

Tax cuts and culture wars have not restored the economic fortunes of the rural white men who form the impregnable part of Trump's base.  Nor has overturning Roe v. Wade (in fact, that just made their wives and daughters less MAGA-friendly). On policy, however, this is all Reagan and Gingrich offered in their heyday and it is all establishment and non-MAGA conservatives (including Haley) are offering now. 

Haley, like many of her GOP establishment cohorts, wants to cut taxes and then reduce the deficit by changing Social Security and means testing entitlements. She is against raising the minimum wage. She opposed Obamacare and as Governor refused to implement health insurance exchanges or expand Medicaid. She called Biden's Inflation Reduction Act a "Communist manifesto" and she opposed the BiPartisan Infrastructure Law.

Given this absence of policy, grievance has taken over the GOP base and Trump has poured gallons of gasoline on the fires of hatred it has lit.  As Tim Alberta has painstakingly recounted in The Kingdom and the Power; American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, many leading pastors in America's evangelical churches have also fanned those flames by turning their Sunday services into holy endorsements of Trump's lies.  In this environment, people like Haley are not putting them out with their talk of tax cuts and chaos.   The base knows more of the first will not work.  And as far as the pastors are concerned, chaos doesn't matter.  In their mind, it followed Jesus too. 

Whether Haley is too little too late remains to be seen.  A sizeable group of Republican voters say they will not vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime. And while others are twisting themselves in knots to avoid commenting on the verdict in E. Jean Carroll's rape and defamation case against Trump, Haley said on Sunday that she "absolutely trust[s] the jury" and "thinks they made their decision based on the evidence."  

For now, she is probably hoping Trump's voters trust the jury as well.  

But even if they don't . . .

There are more juries in Trump's future.

I can't remember precisely when I stopped hating winter 

Maybe it was on February 5, 2000. 

That was the day I got married.

For the second time.

This one worked. 

The federal judge who married us was a Reagan appointee and a former professor at Yale Law School. He was also one of the group of conservative academics Reagan put on the bench.  The others were Scalia, Bork, Posner and Easterbrook,  I became friendly with him when I was a student at the law school and  clerked for him immediately upon graduating. He always bragged about his ability to hire clerks who did not share his political loyalties.  At our wedding, he claimed that he and my wife-to-be were the only Republicans in the room. Debbie corrected him with a quick "Wait'll you meet the rest of his family".  

Over time, he remarked about how uncommon friendships like ours were becoming.

How politics had driven people into silos from whence they never emerged.

The lesson was that it did not have to be that way.

And in not being that way, it wasn't because everyone would be silent and avoid political discussion or disagreement lest kumbayah be imperiled.  

Far from it.  

He and I laughed a lot. An awful lot.  

But we also argued at lot.  

The arguments often became heated.  

Neither one of us could ever be characterized as unemotional or placid.  For every bit of experience he (correctly) claimed I was ignoring, there were professorial barbs I (correctly) challenged as ad hominems.   We weren't equal.  He was more experienced. And on the law, his knowledge was encyclopedic; so there were some arguments I never came close to winning and should not have even made. 

But no one invented facts or ignored them when they refuted a claim. 

No one condemned anyone else.  

No one stopped talking.

And the friendship lasted forever.

America should try it.

I started clerking for him in January 1982. 

I didn't hate that winter either.

CHRISTMAS 2023 -- WHITHER THE WISE MEN

It's Christmas 2023.

In the past, I've focused on this as the season of anticipation.  On kids who cannot sleep while listening for Rudolph.  On adults who millennia ago deemed it the day of new beginnings. ("Twas the Night Before Christmas", 12/24/08, 12/24/16, 17, 18 and 19)

In other years, it's been Shillelagh Law's musical catalogue of downtown lights and wrapped presents overcome by a 9/11 Christmas eve prayer.  From the believer (or was s/he a skeptic) who knelt "down in the last pew, right on the aisle" admitting " 'God I know that it's been awhile.' " ("It's Christmas in New York Again", 12/22/14; "A Christmas Carol", 12/15/21)

One year, I channeled John Lennon's plaintive "what have we done".  ("Silent Night", 12/21/10)

This year I cannot get the three Wise Men out of my head.

The story's original source -- the Gospel of Matthew -- creates as many questions as it answers. 

The first is whether they were all that wise.  The Biblical text is all over the place.  It changes depending on which translation you read.  The King James version intones "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem."  Though the New Revised Standard Version dispenses with King James's awkward meter, it too calls the travelers "wise men". That changes, however, in the New International Version.  There, it's "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem,

So, which is it?

Wise Men or Magi?

And does it matter?

Matthew wrote in Greek and the English "Magi" comes to us from the Greek (transliterated) "magos" that he used in his Gospel. That Greek word, in turn, referred to Zoroastrian priests who, coming full circle now, were deemed reputable astrologers at a time when astrology was considered a science.  More than that, they were also advisers to kings, large in number, and reputedly expert at divining the meaning of dreams. As such, they became important political, administrative  and economic players and veritable king-makers.  

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ancient world thought Magi possessed wisdom. Cicero even said so, calling them "wise and learned among the Persians". Ditto Herodotus, centuries before. And this view survived long enough for King James to put the words "Wise Men" into Matthew's mouth and the English world's Bible.  

Today, of course, astrology and oneiromancy are  closer to sorcery than science.  (Extra points for anyone who even knew the word oneiromancy -- the use of dreams to predict the future -- existed, let alone what it means.) So the ambiguity of Magi is a more useful construction, especially in a world full of atheists and agnostics. That way, the Magi's wisdom can be mediated through the epistemic seas we humans have travelled over the centuries. 

And made real for us.

Put differently, today's Magi would be physicists, counselors and psychologists.

Not astrologers or . . .

Oneiromantics.

In Matthew's Gospel, his Magi come "from the east" bearing gifts of "gold, frankincense and myrrh" for the Christ child. He never tells us how many came but the Christian churches and traditions have conveniently settled upon the number three, largely on account of the three gifts.  

Matthew also does not tell us his Magis' names or precisely where they came from in the "east". This too, however, has not stopped the churches, though here the choice depends largely on which Christian rite one follows. The west decided the three were the Persian Melchior, the Indian Caspar and the Ethiopian or Arabian Balthazar. Other rites settled on different names and origins, some as far east as China.

Almost all of this is historically suspect.

At the time Herod was king, Judea was basically a buffer-state between the Roman west and the Persian-Parthian (present day Iran and Afghanistan) east, the control of which alternated between the two depending upon which contending army had won the latest battle. 

This made Herod's rule inherently shaky. 

Though the Romans made him King of Judea, he was an Edomite (thus not Jewish), had bribed his way to the office, and had by the time of Christ's birth assassinated competitors. Neither fully Roman nor Jewish, he assuaged Rome but also sought favor with the Parthians when the opportunity presented itself. 

In a word, he was cunning.

He was also paranoid.

In Matthew's Gospel, the visiting Magi arrive first in Jerusalem asking "" 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?' " "When King Herod heard this," Matthew reports, "he was disturbed, and all of Jerusalem with him." 

No kidding. 

The Magi were king-makers. 

Looking for someone who might replace him. 

How many were there? 

We don't know.  

But as one Biblical observer notes, "The whole city of Jerusalem wouldn't be upset about three guys on camels; no, this is a major Parthian group, or entourage, that has arrived, and Herod is nervous."

The churches' origin traditions make the Magi's visit a form of international worship and approval.  The gifts they gave are used to symbolize the Christ child's godly kingship and human mortality on the one hand, while restricting the number of visiting Magi to three and keeping politics out of the nativity on the other. 

For the Magi, however, politics was the heart of the matter.

Herod sought to use them.  

Matthew again: 

Herod "called together all the chief priests and teachers of the law" and "asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 'In Bethlehem in Judea, they replied' ". He then "called the Magi secretly . . .  and sent them to Bethlehem and said 'Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.' "

The Magi, however, would not be used.

They were looking for a new king.

Not Herod's next victim.

So . . .

Upon arriving in Bethlehem and "coming to the house", Matthew writes that "they saw the child with his Mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him.  They then opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route."

There's an awful lot hanging on that last sentence.  

In the New International translation, the Magi are "warned in a dream".  In the King James version, "God" delivers the warning "in a dream".  Either way, the message is being delivered to a group (Magi) in a form (dream) they get.  Remember, in the ancient world, these guys were the experts on dreams. Empires rose and fell  depending on the meaning they attached to them. 

They figured dreams out.

Shortly after the Magi left, Herod "realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi" and "was furious".  He therefore "gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under".  By then, however, Jesus had been ferried by his parents to Egypt where he stayed until Herod died.

A lot clearly hung on the Magi's "wisdom".  

On their putative expertise.

What if they had misinterpreted the dream?

What if they had said to themselves:

"Yeah, we know Herod is paranoid. And we know he has killed competitors before. And we know he is dishonest and lies. But, let's get real here. This is a just a baby. Not even a kid yet.  And Herod's pretty old. And that star leading us here, they're saying, is a prophet's sign. So, hey, maybe the old man is softening. Gotten religion even. Let's just go back and give him a chance."

The Magi could have gotten it wrong.  

There were probably even some in their entourage who argued for a return. Herod had worked with Parthians in the past. Been an ally of sorts.  Done them some favors. 

Some perceived him to be a pragmatic politician and wily negotiator. 

Not an extremist bent on killing a mere infant.

Others, however, remained steadfast.  

The were unwilling to forget Herod's past. The bribes, the lies.  They weren't taken in by his false promises.  They knew that a man who had killed kings would not pay homage to another who would be king.  They especially knew he would not do so with another who would bear his own title.

King of the Jews.

The steadfast prevailed.

The Magi did not get it wrong.

Neither should we.

Merry Christmas.

DO BOOKS STILL MATTER -- THE CHALLENGE OF OATH AND HONOR

On January 19, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. The 47-page pamphlet argued that America's thirteen British colonies should be free and independent.  Though shots had by then been fired at Lexington and Concord and Washington's continental army surrounded the British in Boston, Paine's book lit the fuse for actual independence in an environment where the majority stilled hoped for reconciliation. It became and remains America's all-time best seller.

On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin. Almost all of the book had by then appeared serially starting the previous June. The novel painted a picture of black humanity that refuted the claims of slaveholders and woke-up the somnolent rest. It became both an American and international best seller and turbocharged the abolitionist movement. On meeting her in 1862, President Lincoln is reported (perhaps apocryphally) to have said, "So you're the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war."  Apocryphal or not, Lincoln would have agreed with Langston Hughes's later assessment of Stowe's work.  It was, he said, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time."

On February 26, 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle.  In 1904, he  had spent seven weeks working in the Chicago stockyards meatpacking plants.  His novel, initially published serially between February and November in 1905, tells the story of a Lithuanian immigrant and his family as they are swindled by corrupt landlords and politicians, sickened and killed by the unsafe and unsanitized plants, and impoverished by itinerant work and ridiculously low wages.  Called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery" by Jack London, the book sold 25,000 copies in its first six weeks, has never gone out of print, was praised by Winston Churchill and convinced a skeptical Theodore Roosevelt to champion and Congress to pass The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

On September 27, 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The book attacked the limitless use of pesticides as both dangerous and counterproductive -- dangerous because the pesticides themselves were often fatal to surrounding animal life and counterproductive because limitless use actually hastened pesticide resistance in the very species they sought to eliminate.  Her rigorously scientific analysis and precise and measured conclusions belied the critics who claimed she was advocating a return to the Dark Ages. The book became an international best-seller and laid the foundation for grassroots environmentalism. In 1970 during the Nixon administration, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); fifteen years later, a journalist called EPA "the extended shadow of Silent Spring."

On February 19, 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. It was an instant best seller. It argued that post-war America was trapped in a "feminine mystique" that classified women as either unhappy careerists or happy housewives. The unhappy housewives (of which there were many) and happy careerists (of which, after the war, there were fewer and fewer) begged to differ.  Though attacked immediately from the right (by those who assumed Friedan was insulting happy moms) and later from the left (by those who correctly noted that the book suffered from a suburban focus that ignored non-whites and the poor), the book nevertheless "pulled the trigger on history" (according to futurist Alvin Toffler) and sparked "second wave feminism".

Last Tuesday, December 5, Liz Cheney published Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning.

It immediately soared to the top of the best seller lists.  By midday, Amazon's stock had run out. Placed days before, my own order was consigned to Amazon's "we'll let you know when we get it" list.  After frantic calls to two independent bookstores came up empty, I found a Barnes & Nobles a few towns over that had it and hurriedly drove there to pick it up.

It is unclear what it means to be a best seller these days.

We live in the age of Instagram and internet.  Two-thirds of America gets its news from social media or streaming services.  And though more actual books are being published and sold each year, fewer are being read.

So . . . 

Centuries after Paine, Stowe and Sinclair . . . and decades after Carson and Friedan . . .

Do books still matter?

Can a book still . . .

Light a fuse?

Change a mind?

Propel a movement?

Enlighten the nation?

We are about to find out.

Because the ability of America to remain a Constitutional and democratic republic  in 2024 may depend on how many copies of Oath and Honor are actually read. 

Cheney presents her "memoir and warning" in five parts.  

The first two lay out Donald Trump's plot to overturn the election of Joe Biden, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The third, which Cheney accurately labels "A Plague of Cowardice", recounts the impeachment and Senate trial that followed.  And the fourth and fifth report in detail the creation and work of the House Select Committee that investigated the run-up to and  attack on January 6 and the mountain of evidence it unearthed proving Trump intended to stop the electoral count and have himself installed as President despite his defeat at the polls.

Much of this, especially the factual architecture, was known before Cheney put pen to paper.

Here, however, are three things that either were not known or have yet to become obvious enough to overcome America's large amount of apparent blindness.

First, Trump's scheme was a plot to overturn an election.  

It wasn't "truthful hyperbole" or something no one was meant to "take literally".  It also wasn't a matter of opinion on which reasonable minds could disagree.

Given the delays in counting mail-in and absentee ballots, Trump knew early returns on election night  would show him leading. He therefore decided to falsely claim victory that night and demand the counting stop. He was repeatedly told by the end of the week that he had lost, and was also repeatedly told in the weeks thereafter that there was no evidence of any outcome-determinative fraud. Among his lawyers' more delusional claims was the assertion that voting machines had been secretly programmed by foreigners to reduce Trump's numbers or inflate Biden's.He was also told, however, that these claims were bogus and that all but one of his 61 court challenges had failed.

Nonetheless, in the weeks leading up to all fifty states casting their electoral college votes on December 14 and the House and Senate counting those certified electoral votes on January 6, Trump demanded that state officials illegally alter reported vote tallies, approved the creation of fraudulent and illegal slates of fake electors to be delivered to Congress, and demanded that Vice President Pence illegally reject certified electoral votes and send the election to the House (where Trump would have won). 

As part of his plot, Trump also told the Acting Secretary of Defense that he would fire any Pentagon official who claimed the military could and would have no role in the election and was ready to fire the acting Attorney General and appoint a new one to endorse his false claim that  the Department of Justice had found irregularities in the November vote.

On January 6, aware that Pence had rejected his demand, Trump instructed an armed mob to march on the US Capitol and "fight like hell" lest they "lose" their country.   

As the mob ransacked the Capitol, it attacked and seriously injured the police and sought to hang Pence and kill Pelosi. It shut down the electoral count as Senators and Representatives  were hurriedly moved to safety and Congressional staffers hid terrorized in their barricaded offices. Meanwhile, back at the White House, Trump approved of the attack and waited hours before stopping it.

Second, Republican officeholders made Trump's continuing survival possible.  

They knew Trump's election claims were lies.  They also knew he was singularly responsible for the attempted coup on January 6. 

Instead of removing him, 147 of them still voted to object to the electoral count on the very night of the attack. All but ten GOP Representatives later voted against impeaching Trump and only seven GOP senators voted to convict him.  The GOP conference thereafter voted against any investigation of the January 6 insurrection and they later removed Cheney from her party leadership post.  

The sexism that accompanied this last move was transparent.  A number of her male colleagues claimed to be upset by Cheney's "tone" or "attitude" and one explained his anger at her impeachment vote thusly: "It's like you're playing in the biggest game of your life and you look up and see your girlfriend sitting on the opponent's side."  Another claimed she wasn't "riding for the brand." She reminded him that "the brand" was "the Constitution", not Donald Trump.

Some of the GOP betrayals were outright reversals.  

Kevin McCarthy went from condemning Trump on January 6, to refusing to impeach him on January 13, to visiting him for a photo-op at Mar-a-Lago on January 28. Mitch McConnell moved from initially believing Trump should be impeached to delaying the Senate trial until after Trump's departure to voting against conviction because Trump by then was an ex-president.  Though Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the GOP Freedom Caucus, specifically told Cheney that "Every time I think through this . . . I have trouble figuring out how [it] is not impeachable", he nevertheless found a way.

Others just ignored reality or remained silent.

Early on, when Trump et al. were launching and repeating their increasingly nutty election claims, Jim Jordan pretended facts and law were irrelevant. "The only thing that matters," he said, "is winning." In the House Republican cloakroom before the riot on January 6, another GOP member was heard muttering "The things we do for the Orange Jesus" as he signed on to Trump's bogus objections. 

Later, while the Capitol was stormed and the House chamber locked down, Jordan tried chivalry.  "We need to get the ladies out of the aisle," he said, and then offered his hand to Cheney to "help" her.  "You f---ing did this," she said and swatted his hand away.  Thereafter, according to Cheney, although many GOP members investigated and knew Trump had blessed the rioters' conduct, "They lacked courage and patriotism.  They remained silent."

Third, unless Trump is stopped, his election in 2024 will (way) more likely than not end America's experiment as a democratic constitutional republic.

Oath and Honor is an easy book to read but a difficult one to skim.  It has no index.  Those, therefore, who would undertake the infamous "Washington Read" will be stymied.  If, however, you have previously absorbed all things Trump from the ubiquitous daily reporting, the huge number of prior books and the thorough report of the House Select Committee . . .

And you do not need a refresher course . . .

You should still buy the book.

Just to read the Epilogue.

The Epilogue is Liz Cheney's five-page closing argument.

And it is superb.

Here's my (summary) attempt to do it justice.

The peaceful transfer of power is not typical. To the contrary, throughout the world "'in every government and in every age'", changes in government "'have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed"'.  

For two hundred forty-four years, with one exception,  America was different. 

And then Donald Trump made it two.

"In a just world," writes Cheney, "the man who mobilized a violent attack on our Capitol -- who attempted to overturn an election and seize power -- would have no political future. Donald Trump and those who aided him would be scorned and punished."

But we do not live in a just world.

We live in an imperfect one.

So, today, "none of us can tell if the story of January 6 is nearing its end or is only just beginning." 

"Trump is running for president of the United States once again, and holds a sizable lead among Republican contenders."

"[W]e must take Donald Trump's statements literally."  

He "has told us that he thinks the Constitution can and should be suspended when necessary, that what happened on January 6 is justified, that in a second Trump presidency he would seek retribution." He will "run the US government with acting officials who are not, and could not be, confirmed by the Senate." He will "obtain a bogus legal opinion that will allow him to do it" and "ensure that the Senate confirmation process is no longer any check on his authority." 

"The types of resignation threats that may have kept Trump at bay before . . . would no longer be a deterrent. Trump would be eager for those who oppose his actions at the Justice Department to resign. And, at the Department of Defense (where a single US Senator, one of Donald Trump's strongest supporters, is doing great harm to America's national security by refusing to allow the confirmation of senior civilian and military officials), Trump would again install his own team of loyalists -- people who would act on his orders without hesitation."

"The assumption that our institutions will protect themselves is purely wishful thinking  by people who prefer to look the other way. Those loyalists and lawyers who step up to help Trump unravel our republic would do so knowing that they would be pardoned. That they would face no risk of prosecution. And Donald Trump would not hesitate to pardon himself. Any who step forward to oppose Trump will face the type of threats, retaliation, and violence we have already seen -- but this time with the full power of an unconstitutional American president behind them."

As for "the Republicans currently in Congress", they "will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is." They will not "check his power. A Senate of Josh Hawleys certainly will not stop Trump. Neither will House Republicans led by a Speaker who has made himself a willing hostage to Trump and his most deranged supporters in Congress. Meanwhile, those in the media who have willingly spread Donald Trump's dangerous claims and propaganda for profit will continue to propel him forward."

Next year, if Trump is the Republican nominee,  "we must do everything we can to defeat him . . . As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for four years. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution."

At the end of her book, Cheney focuses on the three words that begin the Constitution -- We the People.

"In the era of Trump, certain members of Congress and other Trump supporters -- many of whom carry the Constitution in their pockets but seem never to read it -- have attempted to hijack this phrase, to claim it gives them authority to subvert the rule of law or overturn the results of elections.  They have preyed on the patriotism of millions of Americans. They are working to return to office the man responsible for January 6."

"We the people must stop them. We are the only thing that can stop them."

That, and nothing less, is the challenge of Oath and Honor.

On New Years Day 2021, Dick Cheney walked to her car as Liz Cheney and her family were getting ready to leave his house. 

He gave her a hug.

And then an order.

"Defend the republic, daughter."

She has.

Now it's up to the rest of us.

Buy the book.  

Read the book.

Gift the book.

Be the book.

THANKSGIVING 2023 -- JACK, ROSALYN AND THE PEOPLE OF ABRAHAM

It's Thanksgiving 2023.

Actually it's two days after.

I am a little late with the thank yous this year.

Because I was paralyzed.

By this question.

Is the world too far gone for gratitude?

Consider these facts:

Hamas massacred 1,200 innocent civilians over a month ago. Those killed included babies, children and the elderly.  Intercepted communications disclosed killers calling home to announce all "the Jews" they had murdered.  Approximately 250 innocents were taken hostage and removed to the tunnels beneath Gaza from which Hamas operates.  There, it is shielded by the millions of civilians who live above, civilians Hamas regularly sacrifices as it attempts (often successfully, never correctly or morally) to create sympathy or false equivalence when their terrorism is followed by the justifiable Israeli response.

Meanwhile, back here at home, Donald Trump is still the prohibitive front-runner in the race for next year's Republican presidential nomination and the new GOP Speaker of the House is a Christian nationalist who thinks the Bible (or, more accurately, his view of the Bible) trumps (irony intended) the Constitution. Whether Donald Trump has ever read the Bible or even cares about what it means, Christian nationalists have made him their avatar, the sinner who slew Roe v. Wade and will pave America's way to legislating another (either the fourth or fifth; the history is presently up for grabs) Great Awakening.

The union of religion and politics is always fraught. It can breed intolerance. In the history of the world, the number of those killed in the name of one god or another is much too large to count. It is also much too large to justify.  But those who would do so persist.

This week, Thanksgiving was sandwiched between bookends telling us it was not always thus and need not be so now. 

John F. Kennedy was assassinated sixty years ago this past Wednesday.  Earlier in the week, former first lady Rosalyn Carter passed away at the age of 96.  The forever young president and the aged first lady reminded us of what we have lost

On the day Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961, the world was a dangerous place.  The United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War of  nuclear terror. Half of Europe was controlled by Soviet communists.  Who only four years earlier had violently crushed dissent in Hungary.  The global south was poor. And angry. Uncertain on where it belonged.  Or who it wished to emulate. 

Speaking to this world, Kennedy could have proffered a series of excuses.

Instead, he offered a series of pledges.

To allies, the "loyalty of faithful friends". 

To those in "half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery", "our best efforts to help them help themselves". 

To our "sister republics south of our border", "good words" converted into "good deeds" in a "new alliance for progress". 

To the United Nations, the "last best hope where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace", a pledge "to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective". 

And to our "adversaries", a "request" that "both sides begin anew the quest for peace"

Kennedy knew at least two things as he uttered these pledges.  The first was that his list was long.  "All this," he said, "will not be finished in the first one hundred days". "Nor," he continued, "in the first one thousand days" or "the life of this Administration".  "Nor even perhaps," he concluded, "in our lifetime on this planet." The second was that  waiting would not make things better.  So, he insisted, "let us begin."

In her life, Rosalyn Carter was all about beginnings.  

Her family was poor but she never knew it (though her family had no money, she explained, "neither did anyone else").  Her father died when she was 13. Without bitterness, she said it was the end of her childhood. She helped raise her younger siblings and her mother's dressmaking business. 

She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. 

She married a graduate of the Naval Academy and then managed his peanut farm after he left the service. 

When he ran for the state senate, Governor (twice) and President (twice), she was his most important surrogate. When he was president, she spearheaded efforts to improve mental health care in the United States. After he lost, she began a second life of service, building houses, establishing an institute advocating for unpaid caregivers and continuing her mental health advocacy. 

In his 1961 Inaugural, JFK's most famous line came in his peroration: "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

Rosalyn Carter got the memo.

Yesterday, Israel paused its campaign in Gaza to allow for the release of fifty hostages being held by Hamas and the delivery of desperately needed food, water and fuel for Gaza's civilians.  Many, including President Biden, are being praised for having advocated for the pause and helped with the negotiations that made it and the hostage release possible.

Israel, however, deserves the most praise.

For its courage.

Academics and others can talk about the law of war and the need for restraint and proportionality when civilians are at risk, but Israel's soldiers are on the ground in Gaza putting their lives on the line every minute.  The only reason Gaza's civilians are endangered in this conflict is because Hamas hides behind and under those civilians.  Full stop. It is impossible to avoid civilian casualties under those circumstances and very difficult to apply the legal principles of proportional response in assaying each potential target. Israel, however, is attempting to do so.  Even while Hamas regularly violates the laws to which Israel is being held.

Israel is the only democracy in the middle east.  

Another full stop. 

It is surrounded by those who would eliminate it and Judaism from the face of the earth. It reasonably fears another Holocaust.  And in the face of October 7, it had no choice other than the course upon which it embarked. As a democracy, its government responds to and is bound by the will of its people. And those people have once again risen to the occasion.  "Never again" and "Bring them home" are commitments that co-exist in Israel.  

They do so despite their inherent tension.

But because of the courage of Israel's citizens.

When Kennedy finished his Inaugural Address, he gave us a glimpse of his God.  He said: "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."

JFK never made God an excuse or something to hide behind.

Neither did Rosalyn Carter.

Neither is Israel doing so today.

And, despite my fears, their examples prove that  the world today need not be and is not too far gone.

So. . .

This Thanksgiving . . .

At this difficult time . . . 

And in a difficult week . . .

I thank them.