Author: Benjamin Wendell

I happen to believe that Colin Kaepernick did the right thing by taking a knee during the national anthem, and by extension, I think all the players and coaches who Sunday took a knee, stood arm in arm with those who took a knee, or didn’t come on the field at all during the national anthem, demonstrated the highest form of patriotism, honoring the millions of men and women who have fought and died to defend the Constitution, including the First Amendment. I believe that men and women of color have gotten a bad deal in the USA, starting with the abomination of slavery, continuing through the Jim Crow years, blighted by the long years of lynchings and beatings, and including all the current cases of extrajudicial police executions for the crimes of driving-while-black or failure to show proper respect to the badge. I believe that black lives matter.

What I believe is beside the point. Colin Kaepernick’s principled stand is worthy of societal debate and historical mention, but it is hardly the issue which should supplant all others and rise to the top of the media heap. There are still hundreds of thousands of Americans struggling in the wake of two major hurricanes. The entire island of Puerto Rico is without electrical power or clean water. The GOP is making a last-ditch attempt to deprive millions of Americans of any kind of affordable health care whatsoever. Kim Jong Un clearly has nuclear weapons and the missiles upon which to mount them, and has indicated a burning desire to launch them against US targets. Like a cockroach, ISIS survives through all attempts to destroy it, and there seem to be almost weekly terror attacks in Europe. Robert Mueller continues to accumulate evidence of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in our presidential election, up to and including the hacking of actual voting machines. There are huge issues of global scale that require the attention and focus of the US government, and more to the point, the attention of the President of the United States.

It’s long past the time when Donald Trump should have been impeached or removed by power of the 25th Amendment. He reached the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors the moment he took the oath of office. Every time a lobbyist or foreign dignitary checks into Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC, he’s in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. From the second he fired James Comey from the directorship of the FBI, he’s been guilty of obstruction of justice, the same charge that sent Richard Nixon back to San Clemente to ponder the fiasco of Watergate. There’s plenty more, including probable collusion with the Russians in election tampering, but the conflict of interest and the obstruction of justice alone would be more than ample for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to demand the immediate removal of the president, were he a Democrat.

But there is more to the eviction of the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than high crimes and misdemeanors. Those are merely the legal requirements for impeachment. In a sane world, there are a thousand reasons why the Republicans in Congress and the rest of the GOP should be embarrassed and distraught about their chief executive. Failing to mention the Jews sent to the death camps on Holocaust Remembrance Day is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor, but it is a slap in the face to a constituency that comprises perhaps a tenth of the American electorate. Trying to suggest some sort of moral equivalency between the Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville and those who came to protest the Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville is not a Constitutional breach, but it reprehensible. Standing before the general assembly of the United Nations and resorting to childish name-calling and threats of nuclear war in a place that was founded on the principles of diplomacy and conflict resolution is not an impeachable offense, but it is an egregious breach of protocol and beneath the dignity of the office and the institution.

The list goes on and on, and the latest racist tirade against Colin Kaepernick and the other principled protesters in the NFL is simply the latest in a long line of offenses against everything for which this country stands. Clearly, there is nothing too low, too disgusting, or too embarrassing for the GOP to finally close this regrettable chapter in American history. Trump was right…he could shoot someone in the face in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and his supporters would just love him all the more. All we can hope at this point is that Robert Mueller has video of the event, and that it will finally be enough to shame the Republicans into honoring their oaths of office.

Make no mistake, we’re on the brink, staring down the abyss while the abyss stares back at us. Scientists moved the doomsday clock up thirty seconds on the day Donald Trump took office, ticking down our civilization and our very existence at two and half minutes to midnight. If they’re paying attention, they will probably push it up another minute before this week is out. The last time we were this close to nuclear war, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were playing a game of chicken in Cuba, just ninety miles from what everyone in the Trump White House is now calling “the homeland” (which frighteningly resonates with Nazi Germany’s “fatherland” and the Soviets’ “motherland”). JFK had a law degree from Harvard and hard-won experience in the consequences of conflict from his days on a PT boat in the Pacific during WWII. Donald Trump has a business degree from Wharton and five deferments from the Vietnam War because his debilitating heel spur…the one that doesn’t seem to bother him on the links at Trump National.

There is a report in the Washington Post, based on information from the Defense Intelligence Agency, that North Korea has successfully miniaturized a nuclear weapon to the point where it can fit in the nose cone of an ICBM. The most recent North Korean missile tests have shown a rocket with enough boost and burn time to reach the continental United States. The delivery system is a done deal. We’ve seen it with our own eyes. The rumored warhead is another matter. If we really know for sure that the warhead exists, that would imply that we have a human intelligence asset deep in the North Korean military or government. Do we? It would be the most dangerous job on the planet. If such a person exists, let’s just hope that our erstwhile leader doesn’t tweet out his death warrant.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the warhead and the rocket are armed and ready. Kim Jong Un has directly threatened to bomb our airbase in Guam and implied on many occasions that he would unhesitatingly use his nukes on the continental United States. Donald Trump has replied that if threatened, the US would respond with “fire, fury, and power the likes of which the world has never seen”, and then followed it up by saying that since his election, the US nuclear arsenal is “stronger and more powerful than ever before”. I don’t think any of us need a Rand McNally atlas to connect those dots and see where they lead. Trump seems almost giddy at the prospect of a biblical calamity right out of the Book of Revelations.

What should the United States do? Whatever it is, I can’t think of anyone less qualified to make the decision than Donald J. Trump. We don’t have John Kennedy in the Situation Room with his brother Robert, his defense secretary Robert McNamara, and the rest of his Harvard brain trust weighing every contingency and contemplating every outcome. Instead, we’ve got the mad king and the Insane Clown Posse circling like vultures over the nuclear football, just waiting for the carrion to ripen before they devour it.

This feeling of being trapped in some kind of bad acid trip seasoned with a hefty dose of paranoia just grows with every passing day. It almost feels inevitable that we’d be on the brink of nuclear war since the morning of November 9. It was never a good idea to let a child play with grown-up toys. We’re closer and closer to opening Pandora’s Box and unleashing the furies upon the planet. Once that happens, it marks a turning point from which there is no return. I’d like to suggest what you and I can do, but the honest truth is that there’s nothing we can do. A friend of mine who claims to have a connection to the other side tells me to abandon the fear and pray for divine intervention. My contention is that if there was some deity who was inclined to intercede, it already would have happened on election day. On the other hand, praying certainly isn’t going to hurt. Good luck to us all.

I’m not going to bore you with a long recitation of the evidence, or even enter into a prolonged debate with the disbelievers.  There are some who think the earth is flat as they fly east to China and continue east to get back, and still don’t manage to fall off their discoid planet. Others think there is no global warming as they swelter in the third or fourth or fifth year of highest temperatures ever recorded, watch chunks of ice the size of Delaware calve off the Antarctic ice shelf, and watch hurricanes and typhoons with winds so high they require a new category to even describe.  I don’t want to talk to those people.  It’s like banging your head on a wall: It feels really good when you stop.

For the rest of us, it’s not a matter of proving things beyond a reasonable doubt.  It’s not a murder trial.  The criterion is rather a preponderance of evidence, and by that measure, does any sane person seriously doubt that Donald Trump and his inner circle were in cahoots with the Russians to get him elected?  There are connections upon connections tying Trump to Russian oligarchs, businesses, banks, and officials.  Whether it’s Mike Flynn or Paul Manifort or Donald Jr., they all seem to have more than a little Stolichnaya flowing in their veins.

The latest revelations over the Donald Trump Jr. emails are the proverbial smoking gun. It’s right there in black and white, plain as day:  The “Russian government effort” to elect Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.  Is any part of that unclear or ambiguous? Those emails are just the frosting on the cake of Trump obstructing justice by firing the director of the FBI and then admitting on television before god and man and everyone that he did it because he was tired of the “Russia thing”.

So it’s really not a question of guilt or innocence at this juncture. We’re well past that. Seventeen US intelligence agencies stated unequivocally that Russia interfered with the US presidential election with the clear intent to put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. We now know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the highest ranking individuals in his campaign were aware of the effort, did nothing to thwart it, and even encouraged the Russians to proceed. The various times these individuals outright lied about their knowledge and involvement are too numerous count.

Nah…they’re guilty, guilty as sin. Given enough time, every bit of the evidence will be made clear, every midnight phone call and clandestine contact and every cash infusion through offshore accounts.  But we don’t need that.  There’s more than enough now to impeach Trump and probably imprison a goodly number of his minions.  So what are we going to do about it?

Well, I know what we’d do if Trump was the coach of an NCAA team that was caught cheating.  Just punishing the coach with future suspensions and scholarship restrictions and recruiting limitations wouldn’t be enough.  The wins that had been the product of cheating would be vacated, and the championship game would be reversed, giving the trophy to the second place team. That would be the way to reinforce the notion that “cheaters never prosper”.

And in a fair world, that’s what would happen here. Hillary Clinton would be awarded the presidency that she actually won in the popular vote and would have won in the electoral college if not for Russian interference. Neil Gorsuch would be removed from the Supreme Court, his nomination also having been the product of the cheating. All the regulations that Trump has summarily removed in the last six months, including things like protecting rivers and streams from mountaintop mining would be reinstated forthwith.

And like the home run kings of the steroid era, the Trump presidency would forever be marked with an asterisk, denoting that his record would always be regarded as the product of cheating.  But that’s not how it’s going to go, is it?

I’ve been no fan of James Comey.  I think there is little doubt that without his Hillary Clinton email letter of October 28, 2016, we would not now be in the position we find ourselves, with a president under siege, so far out of his depth that he’d need a periscope just to glimpse the surface.  From the moment that news hit the wires, I thought that Comey was part of some grand alt-right Koch-fueled conspiracy designed to put a final nail in the floundering campaign of Hillary Clinton.  It did in fact seal Hillary’s fate, but I no longer believe that Comey was part of a conspiracy.  If anything, he may have been the victim of a conspiracy.

I watched Comey give his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He was open, sincere, and earnest.  He radiates integrity and honesty. He’s a patriot who lives by a code…exactly the sort of individual you’d want at the head of the nation’s premiere crime-fighting organization.  The man’s a Boy Scout.  So I don’t think Comey was trying to torpedo Hillary Clinton when he announced in October that he’d discovered a new cache of emails on her aide’s server that the FBI needed to review. I think that he knew what kind of devastating effect the announcement might have, and I think he probably went through a gut-wrenching internal debate about making the new emails public, but he genuinely believed that it was the sort of information the American people had the right to know before they decided on their vote for president.

I think that in the last four months James Comey has had an epiphany.  He has realized that it was his choice and his actions, however honest and well-intentioned, that placed Donald Trump in the Oval Office.  Comey has had the opportunity, better than perhaps any American, up close and personal, to see what kind of horror he has wrought.  He’s had to suffer Donald Trump invading his personal space, breathing into his ear with entreaties demanding loyalty.  He’s been subjected to a scene right out of “The Godfather”, where our orange-complected Vito Corleone issued his marching orders with built-in plausible deniability: “Jimmy boy, we’re both men of the world, we understand each other.  I hope this little Mike Flynn thing can go away.  Capiche?”  He’s personally seen Trump say one thing in private and then the complete opposite in public, and he’s suffered the petty wrath of the most thin-skinned leader to ever sit behind the English oak of the Resolute desk. So, at the end of the day, what I think James Comey feels most strongly in the pit of his gut is guilt, guilt that his letter was the fuse that led to Hillary Clinton’s explosive decline, guilt that his own honesty and integrity and loyalty to the FBI installed an ignorant incompetent malevolent Russian puppet in the most powerful seat on the planet.

Now Comey is doing what he can to correct his own mistake.  He’s paying penance and accumulating karma.  When Comey shared his memo detailing that Godfather encounter above and encouraging his friend to release it to the press, it wasn’t about revenge or glory or protecting himself.  It was about balancing the scales.  He can’t use a time machine to return to October 28 and not release the Hillary Clinton letter, but he can do everything within his power to stop the out-of-control rolling train-wreck that is the Trump presidency. I applaud him for that.

 

I’ve been neglecting the blog of late.  Part of the explanation is that my muse seems to have left the building, but I think it’s also what I’m calling “TOES”: Trump Outrage Exhaustion Syndrome.  It’s simply too great a psychological burden to maintain a sufficient level of righteous indignation when confronted with an avalanche of heinous presidential dumbfuckery.  It’s a relentless onslaught.  Every time I think it can’t possibly get any worse, the bar gets lowered another notch.

It seems as if every time I turn on my TV or open my browser or click over to Facebook, there’s a new episode of “He did what?” or “They said what?” or “Holy brimstone boiling hell, that can’t possibly be true!”, and by the time my blood pressure has dipped back into high double digits, some new bigger more horrific gut-wrenching Washingtonian train wreck has left the rails.

By the time it settles into my brain that he’s appointed the CEO of Exxon-Mobil to deal with the Russian oil oligarchs, I’m confronted with an Education secretary who holds public education in the same high regard I reserve for jock itch, and while I’m preparing to rail against that abomination, we get an EPA chief who’s sued the EPA 1500 times, a HUD secretary who sees public housing as “social engineering”, and a guy overseeing our nuclear weapons whose greatest intellectual accomplishment to date was to memorize enough steps to make it way further on “Dancing With the Stars” than anyone had expected.  There just isn’t enough outrage in my whole body to keep up with that kind of assault.

In the last week, Trump has appointed a woman to head the federal family planning program who has argued out loud that contraception doesn’t work, followed in short order by the House passing an Obamacare repeal/healthcare reform bill that essentially limits your healthcare options to death by starvation, death by dehydration, and death by infection resulting in starvation and dehydration.  Just when I thought that would cause some sort of apoplectic aneurysmal rupture, the sons of bitches doubled down with about a hundred rich white guys posing for a self-congratulatory high-fiving butt-slapping circle jerk of a photo op staged behind the mindless smirking countenance of President Alfred E. Newman.

None of it would be near as bad if it wasn’t for this man-child compounding and exponentially multiplying his evident ignorance and stupidity with those fingernails-on-a-blackboard tweets.  Just in the last two days, he attacked Sally Yates’ character and veracity before she even testified and then went on to tweet that she’d said exactly the opposite of what she’d actually said, and included a spelling error! (The kind that you bitch at your own teenagers about, to vs. too vs. two, or in this case council vs. counsel). It’s a degrading and embarrassing indignity on the very institution of the presidency.  If this guy was in middle school instead of the White House, he’d be called into the principal’s office and expelled for cyberbullying.

Ok, I’m done.  It’s Trump Outrage Exhaustion Syndrome.  I’ll be back when it wears off.

 

When’s the last time you seriously worried about nuclear war?  If you happen to be a baby boomer like me, you might recall those nuclear bomb drills from grade school in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  They’d sound the siren and you’d dive under your desk and cover your head.  That’s because they figured even ten year-olds weren’t limber enough to bend over and kiss their asses goodbye.  It was the Cold War, and the US Strategic Air Command had B-52’s filled with hydrogen bombs  in the air 24/7, just as the Soviets had their ICBMs constantly on high alert, ready to launch at the turn of a key.  Nikita Kruschev vowed he would bury us and Dwight Eisenhower warned of the hegemony of the military-industrial complex.  There was a philosophy called MAD, “mutually assured destruction”, accepted as dogma by most of the generals and politicians of that era. The idea was that no one was crazy enough to use a nuke knowing that it would lead to the death of just about everyone on the planet, an extinction level event.  But we all knew things could go wrong.  An apprehensive nuclear cloud occupied the national zeitgeist on a daily basis, embodied in two brilliant films of that era, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Failsafe”.

It was in 1962 that it began to look like the nightmares might actually come true. The Soviets began placing nuclear armed missiles in Cuba, missiles that could be launched and hit US targets before our pilots would have time to pull their pants on.  There were plenty of generals and politicians and pundits who thought the only acceptable response was to nuke Cuba before the Soviets nuked us.  People were scared shitless.  It looked like a nuclear war might start at any moment. Fortunately, John F. Kennedy was president, and with his memories of World War II still fresh in his mind, he had no desire to see the planet in flames.  Rather than push the button, he blockaded Cuba and called the Soviet’s bluff.  Within a few weeks, the missiles were removed, and life returned to some semblance of normalcy.  Nuclear Armageddon was by no means off the table, but it moved back to the sub-basement of the national consciousness, where it has more or less remained for over fifty years.

Fast forward to 2017.  Donald J. Trump is president, and as Lloyd Bentsen might have said, “Mr. Trump, I knew Jack Kennedy.  You’re no Jack Kennedy”.  It turns out that Trump isn’t even George W. Bush.  Bush was no Rhodes scholar, but even when he was pushing fairy-tales about WMD’s and pouring untold billions into two pointless wars, no one, not even bleeding-heart liberals like me, thought he was dumb enough or crazy enough to toss a couple of nukes at Iraq or Afghanistan.  We all remained reasonably certain that we wouldn’t be awakened from sleep by a blinding flash, an ear-splitting boom,  and a mushroom cloud on the horizon.

That’s no longer true.  In the spirit of “just kill me now”, some of us might actually be hoping for the sweet relief of sudden death after nearly a hundred days of Trump. In 2017, MAD might more rightfully stand for Major Asshole Donald.  In just the last ten days, the man with the little hands, in an international pissing match, has lobbed a couple hundred million bucks worth of Tomahawk missiles at an empty airfield in Syria, dropped a MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs, which might just as well be called a BDYES (biggest dick you’ve ever seen), on a couple dozen cave-dwelling ISIS schmucks in Afghanistan, and lost a whole fucking US aircraft carrier task force in the process of again waving his diminutive Donnie dingus at the North Koreans.  You’ve got Mike Pence, a guy who seriously sees the Book of Revelations not as a metaphor but as a blueprint, staring reproachfully across the Korean DMZ and saying that “the US sword stands ready”.  Rex Tillerson, our otherwise mute Secretary of State, warns that “nothing is off the table.”

We’ve never before had a president we believed could start a nuclear war in a fit of petulance and anger.  We’ve never before had a president who we believed didn’t have the intellectual depth to comprehend the grievous consequences of employing even one atomic bomb. We’ve never before had a president who had such a childish preoccupation with his weapons of war, or such a nonchalance about dealing death from a dinner table in South Florida. We do now.

I’m one of those pointy-headed elitist East-Coast liberals who apparently pissed people off enough in 2016 to cost Hillary Clinton the election and install the most manifestly incompetent and dangerous president in our history.  To be completely accurate, I’m not actually from the East-Coast. I was born and raised in Toledo, which used to be the punch line for a lot of jokes about places where you can find your cause of death officially listed as boredom.  But no one ever talks about commie pinko Midwest liberals, so I’ve self-aligned with all those disreputable New Yorkers and Bostonians.  Also, I tend to talk faster than most folks here, who can make short declarative sentences and simple right turns into major life epochs, so I’m often asked if I’m from New York, but I’m not. It’s just that I can make the leap from noun to verb to object without having to call a committee meeting.

I ended up in Bloomington, Indiana by employing a circuitous route through Chicago, Houston, Chicago again, then Champaign,  and finally home sweet home, where my wife and I raised our sons and have spent the biggest part of our adult lives.  At first I thought landing here involved angering the gods to the point where they didn’t need to send me to hell, but figured I’d gain significant benefit by some experience in purgatory.  It turns out I wasn’t completely wrong, but I couldn’t initially see the view of heaven from here, and the view is pretty spectacular.  The other side of that coin, the part that at times is hard to reconcile, is where the whole “Blue Guy in a Red State” comes in.

The people of Indiana are basically good decent folk who care about their homes and their children and each other.  They live for high school basketball and football, spend Memorial Day weekends with a quarter million like-minded people watching South American millionaires drive in circles at high speeds, and have an abiding love of pork products of all kinds.  They also overwhelmingly love their lord, Jesus.  Vice President Mike Pence, previously the governor of the Hoosier state, once famously declared, “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican…in that order.”

Therein lies some of my issues.  For one thing, I’m not just an elitist liberal, I’m an agnostic Jew (with occasional episodes of purely magical thinking).  When I first started as the radiologist at Greene County General Hospital, I seriously don’t think most of the people I encountered had ever seen an actual Jew before.  It took me a good year to convince them I wasn’t hiding horns under my buzz cut, and I didn’t sup on Christian babies at my evening meal.

It goes without saying that most Hoosiers enthusiastically pulled the lever for Donald J. Trump on November 8.  It was with considerable chagrin and not insignificant anger that I saw Trump’s clown-like face with a large red “Indiana” and a larger red check mark above it the very first thing when I tuned in to MSNBC that fateful night. Right there in the middle of the US map, was a big solid red Indiana…before even Mississsippi or Alabama weighed in .  And at the same time, I imagined myself as a tiny imperceptible point of blue just a bit south of state’s center on that map.

There you have it.  Blue Guy in a Red State.  I’ve got some stuff to say.  Stay tuned.

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