gracchusdixit

The improbable Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump lurches from one outrageous pratfall to another so quickly that it is all but impossible to keep up.  The unfortunate result is that truly important questions get lost in all the hubbub before they can be dealt with properly.  In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s stumble at the 9/11 ceremony in New York City and all the phony furor about her (quite justifiable) use of the word, “deplorable,” to describe the racism of many Trump supporters, we have lost sight of something far more deplorable than an all-advised choice of words by the Democratic candidate for President.

Trump’s campaign has, from the start, been fueled by fabrications, falsehoods, and cons, each more outlandish than the last.  Mere hours before the distractions I just mentioned, Trump presented us with a con more colossal than anything he has thus far conjured up—one that has been all but ignored by the media.

In Philadelphia, where our Constitution was crafted more than 200 years ago, Trump delivered what was dubbed a “major address on national security.”  It turned out to be a largely incoherent rant, during which he strove to characterize himself as a figure of steady judgment in a world of chaos, created by a “weak” Barack Obama and a “reckless” Hillary Clinton, whom he described as “trigger happy and unstable.”  All this, from a man who thinks it would be a “great idea” if more countries around the world acquired nuclear weapons and can scarcely contain his thrill at any word of flattery that falls from the lips of Russia’s de facto dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Trump proposed a massive expansion in military spending, rattling off a bill of particulars that sounded like the Christmas wish list of the frustrated and disgruntled ex-generals and admirals who support him.  He promised more divisions for the Army, more battalions for the Marines, more planes for the Air Force, more ships for the Navy—more of everything for everyone.  To justify this extravagance, he claimed that our military has been “degraded” by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, whom he blamed for overseeing “deep cuts, which only invite more aggression from our adversaries.”

Trump neglected to mention that the budget cuts he derided were initiated, not by the President, let alone Hillary Clinton, but by the Republican majority that controls the Congress of the United States.  In any event, he declared that he would pay for all this new military spending by:

1. “Eliminating government waste and budget gimmicks.”
2. Collecting unpaid taxes “estimated to be as high as $385 billion.”
3. “Reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy.”
4. Asking all NATO countries to “pay their bills.”
5. Asking Germany, Japan, Korea, and Saudi Arabia to “pay more for the tremendous security we provide them.”
6. “Unleashing” American energy production.

In deciphering this gibberish, it is difficult to know where or how to begin.  Trump is so ignorant, or so deceptive, that it is all but impossible to disentangle each of his particular falsehoods.  Indeed, that may be his plan, since the fundamental trick behind every con is distraction.

Let us, nonetheless, try to disambiguate this particular set of distractions.

First, Trump’s essential premise—that our armed forces have been “degraded”—is utter nonsense.  Even after the sequestration imposed by Congress, the “defense” budget of the United States is by far the largest in the world, equal to the military spending of the next ten countries put together.  We outspend the Chinese four to one, the Russians nine to one, and the United Kingdom—our closest ally—ten to one.  We are the major arms dealer in the world, selling billions of dollars worth of military hardware to everyone from the Saudis to the Israelis.

Trump’s notion that a massive boost in military spending can be paid for by “eliminating government waste” is ludicrous on its face, because the major source of “government waste” is the military itself.  No other department of government squanders so much money with so little oversight or accountability.  The idea of giving still more money to such a fiscally irresponsible institution is simply nuts.

His suggestion that collecting unpaid taxes might somehow pay for more ships, planes, and tanks is equally ridiculous.  The only institution capable of collecting those taxes, the IRS, has been gutted by a Republican Congress viscerally opposed to everything the IRS stands for.  Unless Trump is proposing to hire more IRS agents—which is clearly not the case—exactly how does he expect these unpaid taxes to be collected?

Trump says that reducing the size of the “federal bureaucracy” will help to pay for his proposed largess to the military.  The reality is that the number of civilian employees in the federal government is lower than it’s been in a generation.  The “bureaucracy” he should be worrying about is that inside the Pentagon.

Trump says that he wants our NATO allies to “pay their bills.” He clearly has no comprehension of how NATO actually works—no surprise from a candidate who understands next to nothing about nearly everything.  NATO countries have a target for defense spending that amounts to two percent of GDP, but that target is non-binding and therefore unenforceable.  Some NATO members strive to meet it; others decide to take a pass (which is their prerogative); still others simply lack the resources.  No President of the United States has any authority to change this situation, and it doesn’t matter in the end.  Even if every NATO member were to spend two percent of GDP on defense, that wouldn’t reduce our military expenditures by so much as a penny.

Trump seems to think that we have troops and military bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to accommodate the Germans, the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the Saudis.  The truth is, we have bases in those countries to advance our interests—and those countries already subsidize our military presence heavily.  In truth, several of them would be quite happy to do without the “tremendous security” Trump says we provide.

Trump’s final proposal—to pay for military expansion by “unleashing” domestic energy production—is a notion that has nothing whatever to do with military costs or energy needs, since we already have more domestic energy than we can possibly use.  It is nothing but a handout to the fossil fuel industry, under the guise of national security.

Apart from the silliness of Donald Trump’s proposals and the falsehoods he uses to justify them, his proposals pose more fundamental dangers.  American military power is a blade with two edges.  When we overreach, which happens all too often, we do not make the world safer; we make it more perilous.  Our disproportionate military power causes other nations, even our friends and allies, to distrust and fear our motives, creating resentment, civil unrest, and chaos.  The Middle East is coming apart, not because we lack sufficient military power or have failed to use it, but rather because we used our power and used it badly.  The last thing we need is still more of that power.

We should never forget Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous phrase, “shock and awe,” invoked to describe and justify the invasion of Iraq.  That invasion did, indeed, produce “shock and awe,” but not the sort that was intended.  To imagine that more military spending, more “shock and awe,” will somehow put the world right is the greatest and the worst of Donald Trump’s innumerable cons.

Twenty four hours ago, Hillary Clinton described what she estimated to be half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” because of their racism, sexism, and xenophobia.  Donald Trump promptly attacked her—by Tweet, of course—for “insulting millions of amazing hardworking Americans.”  She has since apologized.

To all of which I say: rubbish!  Rather than apologizing, Secretary Clinton should have “doubled down,” as Trump himself so routinely does. It’s about time somebody called out his supporters for their toxic opinions and often brutish behavior.

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign has been the claim—usually bellowed in a tone hovering between bravado and belligerence—that he “tells it like it is,” without regard for the constraints of “political correctness,” let alone common courtesy.

Well, then, let us take Mr. Trump at his word and say a few politically incorrect things, not only about the candidate himself but about the people who so fervently support him and what now passes for the Republican Party.

Since the day a year ago when “the Donald” rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to proclaim his candidacy, vast quantities of journalistic ink and time have been spilled and spent trying to explain, or excuse, the thinking and behavior of Trump’s “base.”  We have been told that their deplorable behavior is the result of social and economic disenfranchisement, that global capitalism has left them behind, that they have been neglected or ignored by political and financial elites, that the demography of the country is changing in ways that understandably stir their anxieties.  We have also been admonished that their long-ignored anxieties must now be attended to, if the Republican Party, or even the nation, is to survive.  We have, in short, been asked to empathize with Trump’s supporters, on the grounds that their anxieties are in some sense “legitimate,” even if we disagree with them.

This argument is poppycock.  Indeed, it amounts to a new form of political correctness, one that coddles a tranche of American society that wants to scapegoat others for their problems, particularly vulnerable minorities and immigrants, who have had nothing whatever to do with causing their so-called problems.

To legitimize the Republicans who support Donald Trump is to ignore the politically incorrect reality that a large swath of them are blatant bigots: either racists or sexists or both.  Their hatred of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and anyone who doesn’t look like themselves is so venomous and all-consuming that they are incapable of seeing how bigoted they truly are.

The self-pity of Trump’s supporters is preposterous.  As pitiless as the global economy undoubtedly is, Trump supporters are doing far better than the people they scapegoat and demonize.  The median income of native-born U.S. citizens is 35 percent higher than the income of immigrants.  White Americans earn 43 percent more than Hispanics and 67 percent more than blacks.  Men are paid 38 percent more than women, and white men, specifically, are by far the highest paid demographic group in the country.  If life for these people isn’t quite as pampered and idyllic as it was in the 1950s, all I can say is: it’s about time.

Furthermore, to excuse or empathize with these people is to ignore their willful ignorance.  Trump lies to them every day.  He states as fact things that are not factual in the least.  He makes promises that he hasn’t the slightest chance, or intention, of keeping.  He paints a vainglorious picture himself that doesn’t remotely resemble reality.  He is not a billionaire or even vaguely close.  His business successes pale in comparison with his colossal failures.  His claim to be a world-class negotiator is a sham designed to sell books, contradicted by his record.  Despite all that, Trump’s supporters greet his lies, false promises, and shameless self-promotion with hoots and hollers of glee.

There is no excusing this self-deception.  Indeed, the only mistake Hillary Clinton made was to underestimate the dimensions of the “basket of deplorables.”  Large majorities of Trump supporters believe that our President is a Muslim and wasn’t born in the United States, that all Muslims should be banned from entering the country and those already here should be subjected to special scrutiny because of their religion, that evolution is a fraud, and so on.  In the age of Google and Wikipedia, you don’t need a PhD to check the facts; all you need is curiosity, an open mind, and the click of a mouse.  Trump’s supporters, and most Republicans, are too intellectually lazy even for that.

Insofar as these people have real problems, they also have real political choices.  Nothing compels them to embrace a bully as their savior and a con man as their candidate.  When he betrays them, as he inevitably will if he is elected, he will also do irreparable damage to the country.  There is no justifying the irresponsible choice his supporters are making.  They do not deserve a shred of empathy or sympathy.  Their opinions and behavior are not merely “deplorable,” they are despicable.  The sooner we acknowledge this politically incorrect truth, the better.  It is time, to quote Donald J. Trump, to “tell it like it is.”

On January 17, 1961, Dwight David Eisenhower delivered a farewell address to the nation after eight years in the White House. Before becoming President, Eisenhower had been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, overseeing the invasion of Normandy and, ultimately, the defeat of Nazi Germany.  He was, if not universally loved, almost universally respected, and he chose the occasion of his last address to the nation to deliver a warning regarding what he famously called the “military-industrial complex.”  It is worth quoting his words at some length:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment.  Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.  This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.  The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.  We recognize the imperative need of this development.  Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.  Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.  In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.  We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.  We should take nothing for granted.  Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peace methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together. 

“Ike” was the most conventional of men.  He was an undistinguished graduate of the military academy at West Point, where he played football but failed to make the baseball team, a setback which he subsequently described as “maybe the greatest disappointment of my life.”  Until he ran for President, he had spent the entirety of his professional life in the military and had every reason to speak well of that institution.  Yet, just weeks before John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a Democrat, was to take his place, he decided to warn the nation against the very institutions that had defined his professional and political life.

That was an act of great political courage, and, sixty years later, it is easy to forget how truly courageous it was.  We were in the middle of the Cold War.  There was daily talk of a nuclear Armageddon.  The Soviet Union and communism were looked upon as demonic forces from which only the United States military could save us.  It was therefore stunning that a Republican President of the United States, not to mention a former five-star general, should question what was then the most revered of our public institutions.

That reverence continues.  One public opinion poll after another indicates that Americans have little faith in any public institution except the military.   The Congress, the judiciary, the White House, the media—all are held in contempt.  The military is admired to the point of unquestioning worship.

It now appears that our reverence for the military may be misplaced.  I am not speaking of the countless men and women in uniform who serve our country, often at the risk and sometimes at the forfeit of their lives.  They deserve every possible honor.  Rather, I am speaking of the institution that employs them—the Department of Defense.

Several weeks ago, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense issued a report after completing the first-ever audit of its books.  To say that the report was “damning” would be a grotesque understatement.  It appears that the Defense Department has been engaged in massive accounting fraud, trying to balance its books (or rather, to create the illusion of balance) by making trillion-dollar “adjustments” that cannot be substantiated with invoices or receipts.  In one calendar quarter alone, the phony adjustments amounted to $2.8 trillion; the total fudging for the year amounted to $6.5 trillion.  That’s trillion—not billion.

Sums this large so boggle the mind that a bit of context is required.  The annual cost of Social Security is $880 billion; the cost of Medicare is $550 billion; the cost of financing the entire national debt of the United States of America is $200 billion.  Those are billions—not trillions.

We hear complaints all the time from various political candidates—particularly from Republicans and most particularly from Donald Trump—that our military is underfunded.  We hear claims from people like Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, that social and domestic “entitlement” programs are bloated and inefficient and must be slashed to reduce the federal deficit.

The truth of the matter is that military spending constitutes the largest part of the federal budget and is far and away the major cause of deficit spending—and that doesn’t even include the vast amount (much of it classified, secret, and unaccounted for) that we squander on our sprawling intelligence agencies.  This whirlpool of waste consumes so much money that it has distorted not only government but our social priorities.  In the name of security and strength, we starve our schools, watch our bridges and roads crumble, and contemplate the destruction of the social and economic bargain the nation made in the wake of the Great Depression.

So, the next time somebody tells you that we can’t afford a higher minimum wage, a free university education, or a public health care option, tell them to read the Inspector General’s report.  There’s enough wasted money in the military-industrial money pit to accomplish all those things—and more.

It was not my intention to discuss, yet again, the alternately bizarre and disturbing Presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump.  Having devoted more than a few words to this phenomenon, I had pledged to myself to let it rest a while and turn, instead, to more salubrious subjects. Alas, Trump makes this impossible.  As each new day dawns, he surprises us with another bombshell.

The latest was the announcement that his second campaign manager in as many months—a smarmy lobbyist named Paul Manafort, who has made millions representing dictators, oligarchs, and political criminals around the world—had been kicked upstairs to make room for a replacement.  It took Manafort less than 48 hours to conclude that he was being shoved aside, whereupon he promptly resigned.

Manafort’s successor is an even smarmier character named Steve Bannon, who has been running Breibart News since the death of its founder four years ago.  In case you aren’t accustomed to wading through the murky world that is the “alt-right” corner of the internet, Breitbart is a rabidly right-wing website, favored by racists of all kinds, including white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Muslim haters, and anti-Semites.  It specializes in peddling conspiracy theories dedicated to the proposition that, under every liberal rock, there is a scandal to be found.

On occasion, there actually is a scandal to be found.  It was Breitbart that hounded New York Congressman Anthony Wiener for posting seminude photographs of himself on the internet—a distasteful proclivity, no doubt, but scarcely a threat to the future of the Republic.  On the other hand, it was also Breitbart that advanced the far more serious, but utterly loony notion, that Wiener’s wife and longtime Hillary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is a secret agent in the service of Al Qaida.  For Breitbart, the difference between fact and fantasy appears to be irrelevant, as long as “the narrative” embarrasses a Democrat.  Now, the man who has been in charge of this scandal factory for the last four years is running Donald Trump’s campaign.

All this comes as numerous Trump advisors, the elected leaders of the Republican Party, and the Republican National Committee have been trying to rein in their unruly candidate, urging him to become more “Presidential,” desperately hoping that he may thereby win back the millions of moderate voters he appears to have alienated.  In shuffling his campaign staff, Trump has quite simply thumbed his nose at the Republican powers that be—or were.  His explanation was to say:

I am who I am.  It’s me.  I don’t want to change…I don’t want to pivot…If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.  

This would be an admirable thought if it weren’t for the fact that Trump is as dishonest as they come, a serial liar, who either can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood or doesn’t care.  It also raises the question: Who is the “me” Donald Trump feels compelled to be?

The answer seems to be that the pathetic man-child the Republican Party has made its nominee feels comfortable only in the deferential and self-referential world of  people who shore up his fragile ego—a world of adoring audiences, sycophantic and subservient advisors, and fawning factotums, all eager to validate his every gut instinct, applaud his every outrage, and explain away his every stupid utterance as an antidote to “political correctness,” as if being “politically correct” were somehow a greater crime than being a racist, a sexist, a charlatan, and a liar.

Steve Bannon got the nod, not because of his political savvy—he has no political experience to speak of—but rather because he was an “all in” Trump supporter from the get-go and because one of few confidants Trump seems to trust, Roger Stone, is a frequent Breitbart contributor.  Stone himself is one of the most vicious and dishonest demagogues of the “alt-right.”  It was Stone who recently tried to smear the personal integrity of the Khan family, whose moving appearance at the Democratic National Conventional may have done more than any other single event to kick the legs out from under Trump’s candidacy.

Apart from his staff choices, Trump appears to confuse a Presidential campaign with a beauty pageant.  He goes, not where he needs to go to change the minds of skeptical voters, but rather where already committed crowds will reliably gather to hoot, holler, and stomp their feet at his every incoherent word.  Thus, he recently wasted time at friendly venues in Maine, Connecticut, and Wisconsin, states he does not have the slightest chance of winning in November.   He showed up at those venues, because he was guaranteed approving crowds.  Trump seems incapable of accepting, or even understanding, that a room filled with vocal supporters does not represent the electorate at large.  Thus it was, at a recent rally in Western Pennsylvania, that he declared the only possible explanation for a loss in that state would be a “rigged election,” ignoring the reality that he is 15 points behind in all the Pennsylvania polls.

All this finally reveals Trump for the pathological narcissist that we have long suspected him to be.   When he cannot reconcile adoring rallies with electoral reality, he ignores the latter and creates his own reality.  He is like a petulant, puling newborn who doesn’t find much to like in the world outside the womb.  Since he can no longer return to that warm, safe place, he has decided to make his own.

It might be an act of common decency to pity this sad and pathetic man-child, but it would be an act of irresponsibility to elect him.

Confronted with the plummeting poll numbers of its Presidential nominee, spurred in turn by a series of gaffs, insults, and threats outrageous even by Donald Trump’s elastic standards, the Republican Party has reached a point of no return.   It is now abundantly clear that, whether Trump wins or loses in November, the consequences for the party will be equally disastrous.

With Trump at the head of the ticket, the Republican Party is at war with itself.  A growing number of leading Republicans are denouncing their nominee loudly and publicly.  Senator Susan Collins of Maine has joined other Republican senators and representatives in declaring that she cannot vote for Trump.  Gordon Humphrey, a former two-term Senator from New Hampshire, has called on the Republican National Committee to remove Trump from the ticket and replace him with someone who isn’t (to use Humphrey’s word) a “sociopath.”  A group of major donors have put their money behind an independent candidate in a last-minute, desperate attempt to give Trump-hating Republicans an option other than voting for Hillary Clinton.  Lastly, fifty former foreign policy and security officials, Republicans one and all, penned an open letter to the New York Times in which they said the following:

From a foreign policy perspective, Donald Trump is not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief.  Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.

To call this situation unprecedented would a whopping understatement.  Never has there been such an cavernous rift between an American political party and its Presidential candidate.  A Trump victory will not heal this rift, because these defections cannot be undone and because Trump is a vengeful bully who will not easily forgive those who condemned him.  A Trump defeat will not heal the rift, either; it will merely lead to recrimination, finger-pointing, and further fracture.   If defeated, the candidate will claim that the election was rigged—indeed, he is already laying the groundwork for that claim, as if he sees his own defeat coming—and is just as likely to blame the Republican establishment as he is to blame his opponent.

In a purely official sense, of course, the Republican Party still backs its man, but the painful discomfort of its leaders is plain to see.  They may talk a good game, insisting that their party is unified, but one look at the faces of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or RNC chair Reince Priebus will tell you all you need to know about how they really feel.  They’re trapped, they’re scared to death, and it shows.

It is tempting to watch this pathetic spectacle unfold with grim, gleeful satisfaction.  After all, Republican political leaders brought this calamity on themselves.  For the better part of fifty years, they have been playing with fire, stoking the barely concealed racism, bigotry, and prejudices of their so-called “base.”  It was inevitable that a candidate like Trump, if not Trump himself, would someday emerge and turn the tables.  In the early 90s, Pat Buchanan, whose inflammatory rhetoric was different from Trump’s only insofar as it was more coherent, came uncomfortably close to toppling the first George Bush.  Republicans can’t say they weren’t warned.  They should have seen this coming.  They should have stopped Donald Trump before he even got started.

Although I disagree with virtually everything the Republican Party stands for, its nominal political philosophy—classic conservatism, combining skepticism of government, fiscal prudence, respect for traditional mores, and a belief in private enterprise—is both respectable and legitimate.  It is also a necessary counterweight to the other political ideas that fuel our democracy.  Just as the Constitution provides for checks and balances among the branches of government, democracy itself requires ideological checks and balances.  Left unchallenged, any ideology, no matter where it falls on the political spectrum, is capable of going astray, of becoming too extreme, of trampling on the rights of some to advance the rights of others.  We need conservative ideas, just as we need liberal ones, and we need healthy, functioning political parties to advance those ideas in the electoral arena.

The problem is that the Republican Party is no longer functioning or healthy.    It has been poisoned by its embrace of a self-absorbed demagogue, who doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction, who lies compulsively, whose first instinct is to demean and belittle anyone disagrees with him, who without compunction urges his followers to use their fists or their guns.

The leaders of the Republican Party still have a chance to end all this.  There is still time for them to wash their hands of this monster and, in the process, cleanse themselves, save their party, and just possibly save the country.  Denunciation must   become complete renunciation.  It must come now, before it is too late.

In 1959, during the darkest days of the Cold War, a man named Richard Condon wrote a best-selling potboiler called The Manchurian Candidate.  Its premise was that the offspring of one of our country’s most prominent political and social families, having been captured by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War, was brainwashed and sent back to the United States, programmed, as it were, to assassinate and replace the likely winner of a Presidential election.  Condon’s idea was far-fetched, even in that paranoid era, but that did not prevent Hollywood from turning his book into a hit movie, not once but twice, proving yet again that a preposterous plot has never stopped the American public from buying movie tickets.

Preposterous “conspiracy theories” have long been a feature, not only of our movie-going and television-watching lives, but of our political life.  They usually come from the craziest corner of the political right, where fear, suspicion, and paranoia seem to have found a particularly congenial home.  The dystopian fantasies from that end of the spectrum include such notions as: Lyndon Johnson caused the assassination of JFK; Bill and Hillary Clinton arranged the murder of Vince Foster, one of their dearest friends; the federal government has built a series of underground concentration camps beneath abandoned Walmart stores, where it intends to incarcerate gun owners once they’ve been stripped of their weapons and rounded up; the federal government is—for reasons never made entirely clear—also hiding aliens from outer space in a bleak, top-secret patch of the Nevada desert called “Area 51;” and last, but certainly not least, President Barack Obama is a Muslim mole snuck into the country to undermine the “American way of life” and impose Sharia law on our God-fearing, Christian nation.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as the feverish fantasizing of people who have nothing better to do but read—or worse yet—believe the rubbish published by tabloid rags like The National Inquirer.  Indeed, it is tempting to dismiss the entire genre of “conspiracy theories” as utter and preposterous nonsense.

In the last few days, however, we have been presented with a different sort of conspiracy theory—one that emanates, not from the political right, but from the left,  and, as crazy as it seems, may actually be true.

On the eve of its Presidential convention, the computer system of the Democratic National Committee was hacked, and thousands of its emails were leaked.  They revealed that senior DNC staffers had been deliberately trying to derail the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a show of partisanship that was beyond the pale.  This revelation did not alter the outcome of the convention or derail the nomination of Hillary Clinton.  Nonetheless, it proved so embarrassing that the head of the DNC, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, was forced to step down.

Within hours, top security and intelligence officials had concluded that there was “little doubt” the Russians were behind both the hack and the leak, although these officials stopped short of absolute confirmation.  If they ultimately prove to be right, we will know that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is trying to manipulate the outcome of our Presidential election.  The only possible purpose of such a plot would be to ensure the election of Donald Trump.

How did Trump himself respond to all this?  Instead of condemning the Russians, he egged them on, encouraging them to do more, to go directly after his opponent: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Never in the history of our Republic has a Presidential candidate of either party called upon a foreign power, let alone a hostile and aggressive foreign power controlled by a ruthless dictator, to interfere with an American election.

Whether this call constitutes a crime or even treason, is up to others to decide.  But it was not an anomalous first episode.  It was not an accidental slip of the tongue. It was not a mere gaff, triggered by the heat of the moment.  It was part of a pattern.

Donald Trump has been flirting with Vladimir Putin—some might even say dancing to his strings—for quite some time.  When Putin called Trump a “very talented man,” Trump preened and genuflected simultaneously: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”  Trump has repeatedly asserted that Putin is somehow preferable to the democratically elected President of the United States: “He’s a better leader than Obama, because Obama is not a leader.”  He has also suggested that Putin’s respect is worthy of cultivation: “He has a total lack of respect for President Obama.  Number one, he doesn’t like him.  And number two, he doesn’t respect him.  I think he’s going to respect your President, if I am elected.  And I hope he likes me.”

Let us be clear.  Vladimir Putin may—or may not—be respected within his own country, but he doesn’t command a scintilla of respect anywhere else in the world.  He is a former KGB thug, a criminal, and a vicious dictator.  If he is, to use one of Donald Trump’s favorite words, “strong,” he is also wrong, on every level, about everything.  To defend such a man, let alone bask in his praise, is to betray everything it means to be an American.

How can we explain the bizarre and frightening phenomenon of an American Presidential candidate relishing the approval of a criminal dictator who embodies everything we, as a nation, are called upon to oppose?

There are only two possibilities.  One is that Donald Trump is a feeble and narcissistic fool who will do anything and cultivate anyone to reinforce his precarious sense of self-esteem and shore up his ego.  The other, far more dangerous, possibility is that he is indebted, quite literally, to Vladimir Putin.

Let us consider the second possibility.

Trump’s campaign manager is a man named Paul Manafort.  Manafort is a lobbyist who has become stupendously rich by advancing the interests of many of the world’s most corrupt political and business figures.  They include numerous Russian “oligarchs,” the notorious Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency, the one-time dictator of the Philippines, and the former President of Ukraine who was, until ousted by own people, a puppet of Vladimir Putin.    Thanks to Manafort, the platform that emerged from the Republican Convention in Cleveland is stuffed with proposals that will benefit his clients, Russia and Putin most of all.

And there you have it: a party and its Manchurian candidate, determined to benefit Vladimir Putin’s Russia at the expense of the United States of America.  Whether Donald Trump is personally culpable, or merely a dupe, we will probably never know.  What we do know is this: if we elect this man, there will be no turning back.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would, should, or successfully could bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, Republicans in Congress threw a tantrum.  Their first impulse was to impugn the integrity of the Director of the FBI, an awkward gambit since he is a lifelong Republican who, among other things, once worked for Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who tried for years to drag Bill Clinton down.

Having failed to discredit their own man, Republicans declared that they would call for yet another investigation to determine whether Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for “lying to Congress” when she stated that she was unaware of sending or receiving emails containing information marked as classified, a statement that is not entirely unreasonable, given the thousands of emails a Secretary of State sends and receives, not to mention the ambiguous and ever-changing nature of security classifications.

If this latest witch hunt goes ahead, it will be the twentieth time or so that one group of Republicans or another has wasted taxpayer dollars trying to humble, humiliate or jail Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Thus far, however, the very people who are so obsessed with the slightest missteps of the Clintons haven’t spent a day or a dime investigating the criminal actions of the last Republican President of the United States, George W. Bush, when he decided to invade Iraq on false pretenses, or the criminal actions of the officials who egged him on.  The task of investigating those true and horrific crimes was left to our closest friend and ally, Great Britain.

Seven years ago, the British House of Commons empowered a committee of “privy counselors” to investigate the causes, conduct, and consequences of the invasion of Iraq.  A lifelong civil servant of unimpeachable integrity, Sir James Chilcot, was appointed to head the committee.  Its other members included an expert in military strategy, a former ambassador, and a distinguished Peer of the House of Lords.  More than 100 witnesses were interviewed, thousands of documents were examined, and £10 million were spent.  The findings of this exhaustive investigation were just released in a report that runs to nearly three million words, longer than Tolstoy’s epic tome, War and Peace.  Even the executive summary is a hefty 145 pages.  I haven’t tackled the full report, but I have read every page of the summary.  Though carefully and cautiously worded, it draws a damning picture of deliberate deceit by the government of the United States and cowardly compliance by the government of the United Kingdom.  To quote from the summary:

The declared objectives of the UK and the US towards Iraq up to the time of the invasion differed. The US was explicitly seeking to achieve a change of regime; the UK to achieve the disarmament of Iraq, as required by UN Security Council resolutions.  Most crucially, the US Administration committed itself to a timetable for military action which did not align with, and eventually overrode, the timetable and processes for inspections in Iraq which had been set by the UN Security Council. 

It appears that the British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, was determined, even desperate, to support the Bush administration. He was concerned that “vital areas of cooperation between the UK and the US could be damaged if the UK did not give the US its full support over Iraq.”  There was, in addition, a “belief that the best way to influence US policy was to commit full and unqualified support, and seek to persuade from the inside.”  In other words, the British government and its Prime Minister persuaded themselves, based on a delusion straight out of Kafka, that they could prevent an invasion of Iraq by supporting it.

On our side of the Atlantic, the problem was not merely that the decision to topple Saddam Hussein was illegal and contradicted every prior public announcement about our intentions and motives, it was that the Bush administration knew it couldn’t be “sold” to the American people for what it was, a blatant coup d’etat.  Another excuse had to be found, and that excuse was a double lie—first, that Iraq had been behind the attack on the Twin Towers; second, that Iraq was developing “weapons of mass destruction” which soon would be turned against the United States.

In its haste to “give the US its full support,” the British government did not even consider the possibility that these claims were not only wrong but had been fabricated.  To quote again from the report:

The assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.  Nor had the assessed intelligence established beyond doubt that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.  At no stage was the hypothesis that Iraq might not have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programmes identified and examined by either the Joint Intelligence Committee or the policy community. 

The invasion of Iraq instigated by the United States, and joined by Great Britain,  cost trillions of dollars and lost millions of lives.  It was more than a fiasco and an utter failure, it was the worst military and political catastrophe in American and perhaps British history.  It was also based on deliberate lies.  There were no “weapons of mass destruction.”  We were not greeted as “liberators.”  The war did not “pay for itself” through the expropriation of Iraqi oil fields.  Saddam Hussein was toppled, but no better, freer, more democratic Iraq rose up to supplant his dictatorial regime.

Instead, the invasion of Iraq plunged most of the Middle East into chaos.  It spawned ISIS.  It caused Syria to come apart at the seams.  It sent millions of helpless, hopeless refugees pouring into Europe, stirring up the old evils of racism and xenophobia, which may eventually end the European Union.

Rather than investigating and prosecuting these undoubted and historical crimes, Republicans in Congress are hell-bent on taking one more shot at Hillary Clinton.  May they someday go to the circle in Dante’s hell where they belong.

After more than two years, after squandering millions of taxpayer dollars, after running down every blind alley, after turning over every conceivable rock, the Special Committee of the House of Representatives formed to investigate the deaths of four American diplomats in Benghazi finally issued its report.  It discovered next to nothing that hadn’t already been found by seven prior investigations and, to quote from the report itself, “no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.”  In short, this massive expenditure of time and money accomplished nothing—except to embarrass the committee’s Republican chairman and its Republican members.

Which shouldn’t surprise us.  From the beginning, it was altogether obvious that this so-called “investigation” was designed solely to undermine Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the next President of the United States.  More than one Republican member of Congress admitted as much; indeed, one even boasted of it.

It didn’t work.

None of the conspiracy theories so zealously advanced by members of the committee—that Hillary Clinton knew an attack was coming and ignored it; that she (or President Obama) ordered military forces to “stand down;” that she (and President Obama) were engaged in a clandestine effort to smuggle arms into Libya illegally; that in the midst of the crisis she callously went home and went to sleep—none of these bizarre fantasies proved to be even remotely factual.

This, of course, was not the first time an anti-Clinton witch hunt led to nothing.  For thirty years, the subculture of Clinton Haters, fueled by big money from the radical right, have been hoping to bring them down by cooking up one phony “scandal” after another.  From the purported misdoings of “White Water” and the “Rose Law Firm,” to the trivial peccadilloes of “Travelgate,” to the ludicrous flap called “Hairgate,” to the infinitely more serious and tragic death of their friend and confidant Vince Foster, the Clintons have been accused of everything from accepting bribes to committing murder.  None of these accusations has ever produced even a speck of credible evidence.  No less a one-time Clinton Hater than Kenneth Starr—the “independent counsel” whose investigation, like that of the Benghazi committee, squandered millions of taxpayer dollars striving to turn up something, anything, that might send Bill Clinton to prison—had to fold his tent and give up.  Now, years later, Ken Starr has little but praise for William Jefferson Clinton.

Not that any of this is going for a moment to deter the dyed-in-the-wool Hillary Haters who inhabit the socio-pathetic world of right-wing talk radio, conspiracy-theory web sites, and Fox News Channel.  Against all evidence, or the lack of it, they will continue to rant, rave, and fantasize.  They hate Hillary Clinton with such fury and venom that nothing can change their minds.

Which raises the obvious question: Why do they hate her so much?  Why are they so furiously insistent that she is—or must be—guilty of some vague and never-proven criminality?  Why do they advance the narrative that she is uniquely “dishonest” and “untrustworthy?”

Some cite her indebtedness to Wall Street.  Okay.  Let us grant that she has had an overly cozy relationship with the financial industry.  A similar charge could be made against virtually every other prominent politician in the United States and against both political parties.  Where do the Hillary Haters think Jeb Bush got the money to run his ill-fated campaign for the Republican nomination?  Why are the donations that go to Hillary Clinton more nefarious than the millions of dollars Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s union-bashing governor, accepts to do the bidding of the Koch brothers?

Others say that she and her husband have used their years in public office to enrich themselves by, among other things, receiving lavish fees for speaking engagements.  A fair point, as long we acknowledge that other inhabitants of the White House have done the same and often more shamelessly.  George W. Bush, for one, hired himself out as a low-rent motivational speaker mere days after leaving office.  The only difference between “Dubya” and the Clintons is that they seem to be able to command bigger fees.  More specifically, why is Hillary pilloried for the speaking fees she received from Goldman Sachs when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is the number one beneficiary of Goldman Sachs political contributions?

Still others indict her for being a “liar,” although it is never quite clear what “lies” she is supposed to have told.  Whatever those “lies” may be or may not be, are they truly worse than the lies told by Ronald Reagan when he used money made from illegal arms sales to Iran to fund an equally illegal war in Nicaragua?  Are they truly worse than the lies told by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice when they fabricated a threat from “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist to justify the invasion of Iraq, a war crime that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, not to mention spawning ISIS?

The truth of the matter is that truth has nothing whatever to do with the venomous rage of those who hate Hillary Clinton.  We must therefore look elsewhere for an explanation.

One place to start is with the Hillary Haters themselves.  Of course, neither they nor their motivations can be lumped into a single, all-embracing category.  There are blue-collar voters who dislike her, because she seems to be part of a remote and condescending elite.  There are progressive Democrats who are suspect her authenticity, because they believe she came late and reluctantly to their cause.  There are young women who view her with skepticism or indifference, because (rightly or wrongly) they think her brand of feminism, forged in the 1960s, has little relevance to their lives.  And of course, there are Republicans of all stripes who despise her, because they despise all Democrats, be they male, female, or something in between.

All that said, the red-hot, combustible center of the Hillary Hating universe is situated in one very distinct demographic group—white, older, poorly educated men.  Their reasons for hating Hillary Clinton are crystal-clear.

They hate her, not for what she has done or failed to do, but for what she symbolizes and the threat she poses: a smart, successful, accomplished woman who refuses to play the part assigned to her by centuries of stultifying tradition, who is neither docile nor domestic, who will not quietly submit or subordinate herself, who will not “keep her place” and above all else, will not bow to the proposition that she, as a woman, must defer to men who are her intellectual inferiors. The Hillary Haters hate her, because she threatens their own fragile and precarious self-esteem.  If she wins in November, psychiatrists throughout the land will rejoice, because the Hillary Haters will be in need of a great deal of therapy.

The decision of the British, or more precisely, the English, people to leave the European Union—a decision propelled by a surge of nationalism and anti-immigrant rage—has stunned the world.   Both the United Kingdom and the European Union are scrambling to come to grips with the consequences, global financial markets are reeling, and Britain’s Prime Minister, who staked the credibility of his government on this referendum, has announced his resignation.  The First Minister of Scotland, on the other hand, has declared that the Scots may, for a second time in as many years, vote to break away, not from the EU, but from the UK itself.  There is talk in Northern Ireland of doing the same, a prospect that, just 72 hours ago, would have seemed fantastical.

Apart from the tumult in the UK, the result of this referendum constitutes the most serious setback in the 50-year history of what is sometimes called “the European project.”  It is hard to imagine what that “project” will look like without the participation of the country that is Europe’s second largest economy, its foremost military power, home to its financial capital, and the closest ally of the United States, which is the sole guarantor of Europe’s military security.

The EU will probably survive this blow in some form, though even that is by no means certain.  What is certain is that it has been weakened fundamentally.  In particular, the self-confidence and authority of its governing elite have been shaken to the roots.  That elite is now putting up a brave front and threatening the British with vague talk of economic retribution—which would only make matters worse.  EU leaders may have been able to quash the poor and powerless Greeks, but they lack the means to similarly intimidate the British.  Indeed, they will never again be able to dictate to member states without the nagging fear that those states might, like the United Kingdom, pick up their marbles and pull out.   Right-wing nationalist parties in France, the Netherlands, and Denmark are already demanding their own referenda on EU membership.  More are sure to follow.

It is tempting to think of all this as a peculiarly British or European phenomenon.  After all, there has been tension between the island nation of Britain and continental Europe for centuries.  Concerning the EU, specifically, the British were never “all in.”  They didn’t abandon the pound sterling for the euro.  They refused to entirely subordinate British law to regulations issued by Brussels.  Above all, they remained, in cultural terms, stubbornly British rather than European.

However, there is far more to this political earthquake than a cultural divide between Britain and Europe or a political fissure between insular nationalists and cosmopolitan bureaucrats in Brussels.  It is nothing less than a culminating episode in the latest crisis to befall the global capitalism.  In the relatively short but turbulent history of this economic system, there have been many crises, each the inevitable result of the system’s inherent contradictions, each more lethal than the last.

The first of these near-death convulsions occurred in 1848, when the social and economic dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution spawned another kind of revolution—political and violent—which engulfed nearly every country in Europe.  That revolution was suppressed, leaving capitalism triumphant, confident that it was unstoppable.

The confidence came to an abrupt end in 1873, when the first global economic depression gripped the world.  That depression lasted a generation, fueled the emergence of socialism as a major political force, and ignited a dog-eat-dog battle for economic survival among increasingly aggressive nations, all of them armed to the teeth.  The result was the First World War and, ultimately, the Russian Revolution.  Amidst the carnage, the imperial dynasties of Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern one by one went up in smoke.

The third major crisis was the “Great Depression,” sparked by the crash of global financial markets in 1929.  This time, the economic devastation was so severe that global capitalism came close to collapsing altogether.  In the United States alone, the stock market lost 90 percent of its value, automobile production dropped more than 75 percent, and four thousand banks failed.  The system was “saved,” if you can call it that, only by massive government intervention and, finally, by the Second World War, during which the economy of every major nation in the world was mobilized and all but nationalized.

The financial collapse of 2008 set off yet another global economic crisis, the fallout of which has yet to be resolved.  Insofar as we have “recovered” from this latest collapse, the recovery has benefitted a tiny fraction of the population.  This is not only the case here, in the United States, but even more so in Europe.  Britain’s decision to exit the European Union is merely a reaction, albeit a dramatic one, to this systemic failure—and to the sad reality that the EU has made things worse, not better.

The European Union began more than 50 years ago as a simple common market.  It quickly grew into something far more consequential: a community of shared values, dedicated to a common good.  It opened borders, ended ancient rivalries, and drew Europeans together for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire.  All this the EU accomplished peacefully, without conquest or coercion.

Two decades ago, however, this enlightened vision of the European Union began to slip away, overtaken by something more sinister and oppressive.  Inch by inch, treaty by treaty, the EU became an agent of global capitalism, dedicated, less to a common civilization and the common good, than to public austerity for the sake of private profit.  It became the instrument of its bankers rather than its citizens.

It was inevitable that the latest iteration of global capitalism would someday crack and crumble, as all its predecessors have done.  The irony is that the first crack should have appeared in Britain, where capitalism was invented 200 years ago.  Whether Britain will be helped or hurt, whether the European Union will survive, are comparatively trivial questions.  The more significant question is whether global capitalism will at long last learn from its mistakes.  If the answer proves to be “no,” then the latest crisis in its calamitous history may be the final one.