gracchusdixit

On a clear April morning in 1994, the CEOs of the world’s seven largest tobacco companies testified before a special committee of the United States Congress.  The committee had been convened to investigate whether those companies had deliberately covered up the link between smoking and innumerable lethal maladies: lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and others.  The testimony of those executives proved to be so self-serving, insincere, and transparently false, that the American people were able to see them and their corporations for what they were: liars, profiteers, merchants of death.  After decades of doctored science and misleading advertising, what finally turned the tide against the tobacco companies was the public exposure and personal humiliation of their chief executives.

Today, we have our own “merchants of death”—the executives who profit, not from selling tobacco, but from selling guns.  These executives have yet to face scrutiny, let alone any sort of public tribunal.  Just days ago, we were reminded of how desperately that tribunal is needed.

The slaughter of 49 innocent people in Orlando was unique for its scale and for the fact that the killer’s target was the gay community.  In every other way, however, it was tragically typical.  In the last year alone, there have been nearly 400 mass shootings in the United States, a level of carnage that is unparalleled in the so-called civilized world.  The cause does not lie, as we are so often told, in the motives of demented individuals; every society has plenty of those.  The cause lies in the ubiquitous presence of guns in our society, particularly military weapons like the assault rifle that the Orlando killer was able to buy, without question or examination, just days before he committed his atrocity.   He pulled the trigger, but our laws gave him the opportunity and the means.

The makers of these awful means have thus far succeeded in evading every shred of shame or blame for what they have spawned.  Having learned from the humiliation of their predecessors in the tobacco business, they have cleverly insulated themselves.  Few Americans know their names; most are only dimly aware of the companies they run.  They rarely appear in public or talk to the press.  Instead, they pay someone else do their talking.

That someone else is the National Rifle Association.

The NRA classifies itself as a 501 (c) (4) corporation, which means that it is exempt from paying taxes.  To qualify for this status, the law requires that a corporation “must not be organized for profit and must be operated exclusively to promote social welfare.”  For the NRA to make such a claim is a macabre joke, because the NRA is nothing more than a shill for the gun business—and a very profitable one at that.

The NRA’s annual revenues exceed $300 million.  It owns than $200 million in assets.  It has substantial financial investments, including $5 million tucked away in offshore accounts in the Caribbean.  Its president, Wayne Lapierre, is paid nearly a million dollars a year, and its all chief financial officer, Wilson Phillips Jr.—“Woody,” as he likes to be known to his pals—makes nearly $3 million.

The NRA’s bloated board of directors includes dozens of Republican politicians, conservative political hacks like Grover Norquist and Oliver North, gun-obsessed celebrities like Tom Seleck and Ted Nugent, and wannabe warriors like Robert K. Brown, the founder of Soldier of Fortune magazine.  It is also larded with executives from the gun industry.   And thereby hangs the tale.

More than half the NRA’s revenue comes from what it calls “corporate partners” rather than the dues of the “responsible gun owners” it purports to represent.   These “corporate partners” are, of course, the gun makers.  There is more to the deception than a euphemism, because several gun makers give free NRA memberships to their customers.  Buy one of their lethal toys, and, voilà, you become a member, whether you want to or not.  Thus, NRA membership revenue is directly tied to gun sales.

Today’s Republican-controlled Congress, which is itself controlled and terrorized by the NRA, is unlikely ever to deal with the gun industry as an earlier, more courageous Congress once dealt with the tobacco companies—by subpoenaing their executives, forcing them to testify in public, and exposing their malignant business practices.  In the face of that sad truth, we can at least get the ball rolling—by naming names and calling out the guilty.

At the top of the list is a company most Americans have never heard of, Midway USA. Based in Missouri, Midway specializes in manufacturing high-capacity magazines, which no “responsible” gun owner needs for any “responsible” purpose.   This hasn’t stopped the company’s founder, Larry Potterfield, from touting himself as a pillar of rectitude and a philanthropist.  He also touts himself a management guru, because, as he routinely boasts, his close relationship with the NRA has helped to turn a small family business into a major player in the gun trade.  Which is all you need to know about the motives of Larry Potterfield and Midway USA.

Another major backer of the NRA is America’s largest manufacturer of civilian firearms, Sturm, Ruger & Co., headquartered in Southport, Connecticut, an exclusive enclave with more rich people per square inch than anywhere else in the country.   Ruger’s CEO, Michael O. Fifer, is one of them.  Last year, he was paid two and a half million dollars.   Four years earlier, when 20 children and six teachers were massacred in Sandy Hook, scarcely 30 minutes north of the plush little town where Ruger’s headquarters are tucked away, Fifer claimed to be “deeply saddened.”  That hasn’t stopped his company from giving the NRA one dollar for ever gun they sell.

Right behind Midway USA and Ruger comes, not an American company, but the Italian firm, Beretta, the oldest and the largest manufacturer of small arms in the world.  Its nine-millimeter pistol is the standard handgun of countless military and police forces both here and abroad. That, however, isn’t enough for management.  Beretta also aggressively peddles its guns to consumers, particularly American consumers.    Its CEO is Pietro Gussalli Beretta, the 15th generation of the family to run the company.  Like his father before him, he has made Beretta one of the NRA’s leading “corporate partners.”

On and on the lethal list goes: Browning, Glock, Remington, Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson, Springfield Armory—the elusive or reclusive executives who hide behind these famous corporate names know precisely what they are doing in subsidizing the sham that is the NRA.   They are merchants of death, one and all, who put profit before life.  They are personally responsible for the carnage on our streets, in our schools, malls and movie theaters, and now, in a nightclub in Orlando.

Until these executives are dragged out into the open and confronted with the deadly consequences of their deadly products, until they are compelled to pay a personal price for what they are doing, the epidemic of gun violence in this country will never end.  This is not about the Second Amendment.  This is not about the so-called “right” to own guns.  This is about the thousands of lives that have been lost and the thousands more that can still be saved.  This is about justice.

Consumed as we have been by the burlesque spectacle of Donald J. Trump becoming the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party and quite possibly the next President of the United States, Americans have paid scant attention to a decision looming on the other side of the Atlantic that is far more consequential.  In exactly one week, a referendum will decide whether the United Kingdom remains part of the European Union or leaves it altogether.  The latest polling indicates that public opinion in the UK has shifted toward “Brexit”—i.e., leaving.   If that comes to pass, it will be nothing less than an economic and political earthquake.

With more than 400 million people, the European Union is the largest economic entity in the world—larger than economies of the United States, China, India, or Brazil.  It is no exaggeration to say that, as the EU goes, so goes the global economy.  If Britain leaves the EU, the fate, not only of the EU itself, but of the global economy will be up for grabs.

Apart from economic considerations, there are enormous political, military, diplomatic, and legal stakes as well.  Literally hundreds of treaties and trade agreements will have to be renegotiated—if they can be pieced together at all.   The military obligations of NATO, which are inextricably tied to both the UK and the EU, will be compromised. Shared and fundamental legal standards—regarding human rights, immigration, labor, and environmental protections—will be jeopardized.   Other EU nations may conclude that they too should consider leaving, or, at the very least, renegotiating the terms of their membership.

Specific British interests will also be jeopardized.  The square mile or so of central London that is called “The City” is the financial capital of Europe, and, after New York, the epicenter of global investment banking.  The contribution of “The City” to the British economy is roughly twice Wall Street’s contribution to ours.  If  the British vote for “Brexit,” “The City” will lose its free and open access to the financial markets of Continental Europe.  It will inevitably shrink, if not shrivel.  The same fate will afflict every sector of the British economy: manufacturing, agriculture, technology, transportation, and luxury goods.  The best-case forecasts indicate that British GDP will decline two percent; the worst-case predict a drop of five.  No one pretends to be able to say how long the damage will last or when, if ever, it will be reversed.

Why, one must therefore ask, are the British even considering such a step?

One, not entirely irrational, answer is that the European Union has unquestioned flaws and limitations, combining heartless German economics with heavy-handed French bureaucracy.  It has yet to resolve many of its most important economic and political contradictions, not the least of which is how to sustain a single currency without a single budgetary or fiscal policy.  As a result, the economy of Europe is stuck in a rut, one of its own making, condemning countries like Greece and Spain to severe depressions that show no signs of abating.

Despite all that, the European Union has done more to advance the cause of civilization and common decency than any human institution in the modern era.  As it created the largest free and open market in history, it also promulgated fundamental standards protecting workers and consumers, led the way in combatting the effects of climate change, and established the only legal institutions with enough global credibility to hold the world’s worst villains accountable for their countless evils.  If the British people decide to pull out of the EU, all that could well go up in smoke.

So could the United Kingdom itself—for the idea of leaving the EU is a very much an “English,” rather than a “British,” impulse.  The Scots have made no secret of their desire to remain part of Europe. They came perilously close to turning their backs on the UK two years ago.  Many believed then and believe now that they have more in common with the social democracies of the European mainland than with the laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog economic ideas of the UK’s governing elite.  If the English insist on leaving the EU, it is not impossible that the Scots will go their separate way.

The Scots may not be alone.  The first minister of Wales, which has been part of Great Britain for seven centuries, has warned of a “constitutional crisis” if the English, and only English among the various British peoples, vote to leave the European Union.  Not only is the economy of Wales heavily dependent on its continued membership in the EU, its social, cultural, and moral inclinations bend the same way.   Like the Scots, the Welsh could well choose Europe over England.

In the end, the motivations of those who advocate the suicidal notion of leaving the European Union have little to do with reason or logic.  They are visceral, and they have much in common with what is happening here, in the United States.

The advocates of “Brexit,” like Donald Trump, exploit nativism, racism, and isolationism; they want to build walls and close borders; they scapegoat immigrants for the failings of global capitalism; they inflame a selfish and suspicious hatred of “the other”—Muslims and Hispanics, Syrians and Sikhs, Turkish guest workers and bureaucrats in Brussels.

We are living in a time when the very idea of our common humanity is breaking apart.  If the British and the American people bow and bend to this awful drift, if they yield to the worst instincts of human nature, the future will become darker for the all of us.

It is an article of faith on the political right that the news media—the “mainstream media” in the parlance of Fox News Channel or the “lame-stream media” according to the linguistically inventive but otherwise dumb-as-wood Sarah Palin—have a liberal political bias that causes them to distort “the truth,” disdain “real Americans,” and all in all do damage to the country.

If only it were that simple.

The news media do have a bias, but it is not a liberal or even a political one.  It is a professional bias—one might call it a form of intellectual autism—in favor of what journalists fondly call “objectivity.”

“Objectivity” is the Holy Grail of modern journalism.  It was not always so.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, journalists were openly commercial and joyfully partisan.  Whether their readers (there were only readers in those days) agreed with them or not, at least they knew where they stood.  That all began to change a couple of generations ago, when the slightly disreputable craft of journalism, seeking respectability, began to “professionalize” itself.  With “professionalism” came standards.  Foremost among these was “objectivity.”

Insofar as journalists confuse “objectivity” with accuracy and evidence, they do indeed mislead us—but not in the way conservatives imagine.  “Objectivity” stipulates that any story or question that is even remotely controversial has two competing and equivalent sides that must be “balanced.”  To meet their self-imposed standards of “objectivity” and “balance,” journalists feel compelled to give equal weight and credence to both sides of every controversial question.

This is perfectly reasonable when it comes to questions of opinion or belief rather than evidence and reality.   For example, the existence of a God (or gods) can never be proved or disproved in a conclusive way.  Science is incapable of disproving a proposition that cannot be tested, and religion is incapable of proving a proposition that rests solely on faith.  Thus, any journalistic discussion of this question would necessarily require the two competing sides to be heard—that is, if anyone cared or was prepared to listen to such a boring and ultimately fruitless discussion.

This does not mean that all opposing arguments regarding questions of “belief” have equal claims on our attention.  The Biblical notion that a Judaeo-Christian God created the world in six days and took a nap on the seventh is factually absurd.  So is the notion (advanced by the Anglican bishop James Ussher in the 17th century and accepted as “truth” by evangelical Christians for hundreds of years thereafter) that the Lord rolled up his shirtsleeves precisely on Sunday, October 23, 4004 b.c.  Thanks to the unremitting work of countless geologists, paleontologists, and astronomers, we have known for quite a while now that the world was not created in six days a mere six thousand years ago.  To give equal time and credence to “faith-based” voices that cling to such fairy tales wouldn’t be “objective,” it would be preposterous.

Yet that is precisely what the news media so often do when it comes to questions of far greater consequence.

Perhaps the most egregious example is the news coverage given to the phenomenon of climate change over the course of the last twenty years.  Until just a few years ago, it was the standard practice of every major American newspaper and every American television network to “balance” stories about the effects of global warming with at least one—and usually more than one—voice of disbelief or outright denial.

No matter that these voices were (and still are) in nearly all cases quacks, hacks, or flacks, bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry.  Never mind that a scientific consensus regarding the evidence for, and the causes of, climate change has existed for more than two decades.  No matter that the evidence itself has from the start been in the public domain and could have been read by any journalist who was willing to take the time to consult it.  Never mind that ours is the only country in the industrialized world where the deniers of climate change are still treated with a pretense of respect rather than the cranks or con men they are.   Because of the news media’s obsession with “objectivity” and “balance,” rather than accuracy, evidence, and fact, we as a nation have lost precious time in responding to a problem that threatens the existence of the planet.

For the same reason, we are now threatened by the prospect of an overtly racist, sexist, authoritarian bully becoming the next President of the United States.  The media’s first response to Donald Trump’s candidacy, of course, was disbelief, mingled with derision.  The moment he began winning primaries, however—which happened almost immediately—the cult of “objectivity” reasserted itself.  In the collective mind of the news media, Trump had become a legitimate candidate and had to be treated accordingly.   Every voice critical of his hubris, his vulgarity, his inflammatory and hateful rhetoric had to be “balanced” by another voice of explanation or exculpation, as if there were any meaningful equivalence between the two, as if Donald Trump were entitled to tear up the Constitution, ignore the rule of law, and subordinate the national interest to his personal interests and his all-consuming ego.

This absurd, and obscene, outcome is the direct result of the media’s obsession with “objectivity,” an obsession that makes no distinction between “right” and “wrong,” between accuracy and falsehood, between reality and fairy tales, a doctrine that subordinates all evidentiary considerations to a game of “he said, she said,” “on the one hand, on the other hand.”

As with climate change, it has taken the news media far too long to come to their senses regarding Donald Trump.  In the last few days, after nearly a year, finally, they appear to have realized that a psychopath like Trump must be covered, not “objectively,” but accurately—as the thug, liar, and danger to the nation that he is.  We can only hope that their realization hasn’t come too late.  We can only hope that voters will listen.

After all the pretense, after all the pompous hemming and hawing, after all the high-sounding protestations about “conservative principles,” Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and nominally the most important Republican public official in the land, finally caved, swallowing his oh-so-demure and oft-proclaimed reservations and endorsing Donald J. Trump as the Presidential nominee of his party.  The so-called “Never Trump” movement, insofar as such a movement ever truly existed, has now been consigned to the Neverland where all such political fantasies eventually go to die.  Along with Peter Pan and Wendy, with the crocodile and Captain Hook, this particular fantasy can now be bid a melancholy adieu.

Paul Ryan’s surrender not only signals the end of the “Never Trump” movement, it extinguishes the last flickering illusion that the Republican political establishment stands for anything except its own self-interest.  For all Ryan’s reputation as the altar boy of “movement conservatism,” his decision to swallow hard and put his purported principles aside shouldn’t surprise us.  His capitulation was merely the latest in a series of humiliating and hypocritical reversals.

The first to bend his knee was Ben Carson, whose haste to embrace Trump was in equal measures ironic and embarrassing.  The good doctor had based his ill-fated campaign on “Christian values,” yet it took him no more than a nanosecond to endorse a man who is a thrice-married, serial womanizer, blatantly dishonest, and greedy—a violator of almost everything the Biblical Testaments, both New and Old, condemn.  It is fair to say that neither Moses nor Christ would approve of Donald Trump.  It is also fair to say that, if Ben Carson truly believed in the Judaeo-Christian principles he espouses with such gusto, neither would he.

Not far behind Ben Carson came that gargantuan blusterer, Chris Christie, who on innumerable occasions had declared Donald Trump to be “completely unqualified” to be President.  Put aside for a moment that Christie himself possesses few of those qualifications—his tenure as governor of New Jersey has been such a disaster that an overwhelming majority of the voters in his home state now despise him.  That said, at least good old Chris took a bit more time than Carson before deciding to cave and genuflect—about 72 hours, as best I can tell.  A few hours one way or the other is now what “principle” amounts to in the Republican Party.

Then came Marco Rubio, whose about-face about Donald Trump makes Chris Christie’s seem positively statesmanlike.  It was Rubio, after all, who declared Trump to be what he undoubtedly is: a con man.  It was Rubio who mocked his “small hands.”  It was Rubio who declared him to be a “danger” to the republic.  Nonetheless, it is now Rubio who says that he wants to be “helpful” to the “cause” of getting Donald Trump elected President.

The litany of Republican capitulation and hypocrisy could be extended indefinitely:  Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, even the venerable, albeit irascible, Bob Dole—one by one, all have bowed down and lined up to support their party’s presumptive nominee.  Paul Ryan was merely the latest and the last of the hypocrites to eat humble pie and give in.

With Ryan’s capitulation, the leaders of the Republican establishment have revealed themselves to be what they have in reality been for decades: not conservatives in any true or meaningful sense, but craven careerists.  To hang onto power, prestige, and public office, they will do anything—even to the point of embracing a crude and dangerous bully, a pathological liar, and a criminal.  The fact that Trump doesn’t care a hoot about their “principles” doesn’t appear to deter them.  The damage his election would do the country doesn’t seem to bother them.

Now that their “principles” have been exposed as a sham, now that they themselves have been exposed as liars, the only excuse such people can offer up for rallying around the candidate they once condemned is that Trump would be “better than Hillary.”

Really?  Is that the best they can do?  Do they truly expect the country to swallow the absurd and repugnant notion that a self-absorbed demagogue, a loud-mouthed sexist, a foul-mouthed race-baiter is on any level—personal, political, or moral—“better” than a woman who has spend her life in public service as the former First Lady of the United States, a two-term Senator from New York, and the Secretary of State?

It is perfectly reasonable to disagree with any number of Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals.  It is entirely logical to question some of her political decisions.  It is  even understandable, if not particularly rational, to dislike her on personal grounds.  However, to justify supporting Donald J. Trump because he is “better than Hillary” is an act of criminal insanity.  No matter what you may think of Hillary Clinton, there is simply no comparison between the two.  She may be a “flawed candidate,” as the pundits so often put it, but he is a psychopath.

Whatever else the November election may bring, one thing is clear: it will bring the end of the Republican Party as the voice of coherent conservative principles.  As a political entity, the party may, and probably will, stumble on.  But it can never again claim to be a party of credible ideas that can be tolerated in a democracy.  Whatever credible ideas the Republican Party once advanced have been replaced by a blinkered ideology or—far worse—by pure, corrosive hate.

When the presumptive nominee of this party says that he intends to “make America great again,” what he really means is that he wants Americans to hate again.  Long before Republicans capitulated to Donald Trump the man, they surrendered their party, and their “principles,” to his message.

Now that Donald J. Trump has crushed the last of his feckless opponents, he is all but certain to become the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party.  If the gods truly wish to torture us, he may even go on to become the next President of the United States.  This once utterly unlikely and preposterous turn of events is so astounding and has held the news media in such a thrall of excitement and befuddled wonder, that scant attention has been paid to the more consequential story on the other side of the political Grand Canyon that divides the nation.

That is the story of the improbably resilient candidacy of Bernie Sanders and what it means, not only for the Democratic Party, but, more consequentially, for the country as a whole.

Bernie Sanders will not win the Democratic nomination.  That is now clear.  Yet he continues, against all odds, to defy conventional expectations.  His victory in Indiana, with a share of the vote that was identical to Donald Trump’s, is unlikely to alter the ultimate outcome, unless a slew of electoral miracles occurs in the primaries that remain.  It does, however, send a strong signal that Hillary Clinton has no automatic or absolute claim on the loyalty of Democrats or left-leaning independents.

To win their loyalty, to beat Donald Trump in November, to save this country from the catastrophe that a Trump Presidency would represent, Hillary Clinton and her campaign must do more than they have done thus far—because, thus far at least, rather than coming to terms with the Sanders insurgency, the clam-like Clinton camp has shown little inclination to bend an inch in any direction but their own.

From the very start, the Clinton campaign—less the candidate herself than her surrogates and spokespeople—have treated Sanders with derision, condescension, and pique.  They seem put out, even offended, by the very notion that anyone would dare to challenge what they believe to be Hillary Clinton’s “right” to the Democratic nomination, as if we lived in a hereditary monarchy rather than a democracy.

Bill Clinton’s one-time political mastermind, James Carville, dismissed Bernie Sanders as a “socialist from Vermont,” and asked rhetorically: “Why would Democrats nominate someone who’s not even a Democrat?”  It has apparently never occurred to Carville that the answer might be: for precisely the same reason Republicans are prepared to nominate Donald Trump—because they are fed up with politics as usual and with candidates who represent a status quo they hold in contempt.

Barney Frank, an irascible former member of Congress from Massachusetts and a staunch Clinton supporter, whined, “Bernie alienates his natural allies,” because of an attitude which Frank described as “holier-than-thou.”  He went on to ask, no less rhetorically than Carville: “Is pragmatism the opposite of idealism?”  It evidently hasn’t occurred to Frank that the answer depends upon what you mean by “pragmatism.” When “pragmatism” violates fundamental moral or political principles, the answer to his question happens to be: yes.

Carping like this from people like these is in no way surprising.  Carville and Frank are the political equivalents of operatic divas who sing in only one, shrill key.   No matter what the  lyrics may be, Carville’s key is unremittingly sarcastic and aggrieved, and Frank’s is grumpy and smug.

One would have expected more from Paul Krugman, the Noble Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, a man who customarily is nothing if not reasonable.   When it comes to Bernie Sanders, however, even Krugman seems unable to keep his head.  Among many other sins, he has accused Sanders of deceiving his supporters by accepting their donations in the face of the sheer inevitability of electoral defeat.

These disgruntled and peevish people fail to understand several things about the Sanders insurgency:

First, the Sanders campaign is not about Sanders himself, a fact which the Clinton people refuse to accept no matter how often Sanders repeats it.  Nor is its principal aim to get Sanders elected President.  Its aim is to change a political and economic system that no longer serves the vast majority of Americans.  For Sanders, winning the Presidency would merely be a means to that end, not the end itself.   Conventional politicians and the pundits who make a living trying to analyze them are so blinkered, so convinced that everything and everyone can be reduced to the calculus of personal ambition, that they cannot even comprehend such a notion.

Second, Sanders is not a “pragmatist,” never has been, and has never pretended to be.  To accuse him of failing to be “pragmatic” is therefore an irrelevancy.  He is, fundamentally, an “idealist.”  This does not mean that he is indifferent to the practical arts of political compromise and deal making, at which he is at least as skillful as Hillary Clinton.  It means that he is determined to strive for more ambitious outcomes, even at the risk of failure.  Those in the Clinton camp who criticize Sanders frequently cite the old adage, “The perfect should not become the enemy of the good.”  The trouble is, what seems “good” to them is no longer good enough for millions of Americans.

Finally, those who chastise Sanders for failing to “unify” the Democratic Party by supporting the person they deem to be its inevitable nominee, Hillary Clinton, fail to understand that unifying the Democratic Party isn’t the point.  The point is changing the Democratic Party—because, however dreadful the Republican Party has become, the Democratic Party has its own cross to carry.

It, too, has been hijacked by an elite class indebted to entrenched interests—to investment banks and hedge funds, to trial lawyers and the corporate clients they represent, to tech billionaires and their sometimes delusional ideas about how the country should be run.  When Sanders calls Hillary Clinton to account for accepting lavish speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, he isn’t picking on Clinton exclusively or particularly.  He is challenging the way the entire Democratic political establishment does business.

It therefore isn’t up to Bernie Sanders to kow-tow to the Democratic establishment or its anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton.  He has simply asked them to declare, finally, who and what they stand for.  If they truly want to defeat Donald Trump, if they want to prove their worthiness to do so, if they want to take a stand at long last, it is now up to them to give us an answer.

Just when you thought the competition for the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination had reached—or breached—the outermost limits of craziness, it got crazier still, careening over the edge of any last shred of sanity into an abyss of self-deceptive self-destruction.  Several days ago, after the quick death of a brief and perhaps phony “alliance” with John Kasich, Ted Cruz announced that his Vice President, in the increasingly unlikely event that he himself might succeed in becoming our President, would be none other than Carly Fiorina.

If not altogether unprecedented, this gambit was, to say the very least, unusual.  Presidential candidates do not customarily anoint their Vice Presidential candidates until they are themselves nominated by their parties.  For Cruz to baptize Fiorina three months before Republicans convene in Cleveland to make up their minds about Cruz himself is either a brilliant act of bravado or utter folly.  Between the two interpretations, folly seems the more plausible.

It must be said that Cruz can’t be blamed for trying, however improbably, to save his stumbling campaign from collapsing altogether.  He was steamrolled by Donald Trump in five states just days before this announcement, leaving him with few options or face-saving excuses.  He needed something, anything, to divert attention from the depressing reality that he no longer has any plausible chance of becoming the Presidential nominee of his party.  Nonetheless, the sheer absurdity of this desperate last-ditch maneuver is jaw-dropping.

Everyone says that Ted Cruz is a smart and canny man.  He is, after all, a product of Princeton and the Harvard Law School, a champion debater, a Supreme Court clerk, a frequent and persuasive litigator in front of that court, a contumacious but remarkably successful thorn in the side of the Republican establishment.  Yet, here he is, this supposedly shrewd politician, announcing what can only be described as one of the dumbest political decisions of all times.

By hitching himself to Carly Fiorina, it is all but certain that Ted Cruz has doomed his prospects for winning either the Republican nomination or the general election.

In the first place, Carly Fiorina is a toxic candidate when it comes to matters of substance.

It was Fiorina who cravenly claimed that Planned Parenthood is in the business of “harvesting baby parts,” insisting against all evidence to the contrary that a fabricated video cooked up to support that slander was real.  To this day, she has neither recanted nor repented of her role in perpetuating that fraud.

It was Fiorina who proclaimed, “There is no Constitutional role for the federal government in setting up retirement plans,” a view that, if acted upon, would end Social Security, condemning more than 15 million elderly Americans to poverty.   She has never bothered to justify this assertion, because she can’t.   If the role of the federal government were limited to things that are explicitly stated in the Constitution, we would have no airports, highways, dams, or bridges.

It was Fiorina who said, “We have 470,000 (small businesses) going out of business every year.  And why?  They cite Obamacare.”  She did not mention that the statistic regarding small business failures is not only routine—most small businesses fail and fail quickly—but came from 2011, years before the provisions of the Affordable Care Act had any effect on businesses large or small.  Nor has she ever acknowledged that not a lick of evidence exists to suggest that the ACA has had any deleterious effects on employers, jobs, or business in general.

Beyond such toxic opinions, Fiorina, in purely political terms, contributes precisely zero to Cruz’s dwindling hopes for winning the Republican Presidential nomination.   She has no track record of electoral success; indeed, she has never held public office.  Which means that she has no political constituency, allies, or allegiances to call upon.

Before she dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination last February, Fiorina had competed in exactly two states, with results that can only be described as pathetic.  She won exactly one delegate and a mere 15,191 popular votes—half the number of the people she fired when she was busy running Hewlett-Packard into the ground.

Perhaps smiling Ted Cruz thinks that Carly Fiorina is going to help him in her home state of California, which might just yet provide the last opportunity to stop the Trump locomotive from winning the nomination outright.  If that is the case, Cruz would be well advised to dispose of such a delusion along with the rest of the trash.

Six years ago, Fiorina used a considerable personal fortune to buy a Republican Senatorial nomination in California.  When she finally ran for the Senate—running in a year that was overwhelmingly favorable to Republican candidates all across the land—she was crushed by Barbara Boxer, the incumbent Democrat.  Why would California Republicans, for a second time, wager their votes and the future of their party on such a bad bet?  Why, one must ask, is Cruz crazy enough to think that Carly can save him?

For months now, the national news media along with millions of ordinary Americans, not to mention millions of people around the world, have been fascinated or stupefied by the prospect of Donald J. Trump becoming the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party and just possibly the next President of the United States.  His recent sweep of the New York primary will only make the fascination and stupefaction more stupendous.

Trump’s sudden rise seems to be a freak of nature or a freakish carnival sideshow.   It is, in any event, unprecedented in our political history.  The so-called Republican “establishment” is horrified at what they take to be the hijacking of “their” party by a rambunctious real estate developer and reality television star.  Countless others are simply dumbfounded.   There is much to be dumbfounded about.

“The Donald” is the political equivalent of what used to be called—cruelly—an “idiot savant,” that is, a person who is brilliant at one thing but tragically incompetent at everything else.  Trump’s idiotic brilliance, the skill that makes him a savant, is a knack for grabbing attention all the while he violates every rule of civility and polite behavior.  On a gut level, he seems to know which nerve to poke, and precisely which emotion to stoke, no matter which issue he decides to exploit: immigration, the economy, the biases of media, the assorted peccadilloes of politicians, you name it.   Trump is like a lion tamer who knows exactly which slab of red meat will cause his deadly pets to slaver, roar, and come back for more.

In every other way, however, and by every standard of normality, Trump is a political  and psychological freak.  He is a narcissist of gargantuan proportions, who never tires of talking about himself.  He is a shameless liar, who never repents of his lies and never hesitates to repeat them.  He is a con-man and a charlatan, who has defrauded countless investors and consumers, all the while insisting that his victims “love” him.  He is a bullying demagogue and, if not a fascist or a racist himself, certainly eggs on those of his followers who are.  More consequentially than any of that, his “ideas” for solving the nation’s foremost problems—even  when identifies the problems correctly—are stupendously stupid.

None of which seems to cause Trump’s most zealous followers to pause for even a moment.  Instead, they parrot his self-aggrandizing braggadocio—he is a successful billionaire, he is financing his own campaign, he is beholden to no one, he will force Mexico to pay for a wall, he will bring jobs back to America, he will be “so great on the military”—as if they were mindless pod people in the 1950s sci-fi classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The fact is that, for all the hysteria and delusions surrounding Trump’s freakish candidacy, he has been an absolute gift to the Republican Party and to its other Presidential hopefuls.  In this perverse reality lies a danger far more serious than the perils posed by Trump himself.

Trump’s sideshow lunacy has given the rest of the Republican Party rhetorical “cover,” distracting public attention from the fundamental evils of the other candidates in the race and from the fanaticism that has taken hold of Republican Party itself.  Trump’s sheer outrageousness has allowed these fanatics to pretend to a “moderation” they do not possess.

Ted Cruz, for example, claims to be the only “true conservative” in the race, the one man who can save his party from the Trump train wreck.  Yet Cruz isn’t “conservative” in any meaningful sense.  He is, rather, an evangelical tea-party zealot, whose extremism makes Barry Goldwater seem like the dotty uncle you wouldn’t invite to Thanksgiving dinner but are fond of nonetheless.  It is Cruz who promised to “investigate Planned Parenthood on day one” of his Presidency (if, God forbid, there ever is a Cruz Presidency).  It is Cruz, imagining himself to be oh-so-clever, who smeared immigrants with the label “undocumented Democrats.”  It is Cruz who promised to destroy the IRS, after ensuring that the richest Americans will pay no taxes.

John Kasich’s entire campaign—if he can be said to have a campaign—is predicted on the notion that he is the only “moderate” in the Republican field, a can-do compromiser who can get things done in Washington.  Kasich is fond of saying that, when he was a Congressman, the national budget was balanced, implying that he had somehow been single-handedly responsible for such a miracle of nature but never mentioning that the budget was balanced, not by John Kasich, but by Bill Clinton.   As Governor of Ohio, Kasich has been—and remains—one of the most radical governors in the country.   He has done more than almost any other Republican governor to deny abortion rights, suppress voting rights, and eliminate union rights.

Then, there is that white knight, the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, whose protestations that he has no interest in saving the Republican Party from itself at the last minute of the last hour no reasonable person believes.   For more than a decade, Ryan has been trying to pass something that is now called “the Ryan budget,” which has become the Holy Grail of Republican economic and social philosophy.  In the name of “reform,” the Ryan budget would destroy the New Deal created by Franklin Roosevelt—which is its real but unstated purpose.  Medicare would be turned into a voucher system, and millions of elderly Americans would be turned over to the tender mercies of the private insurance market.  Social Security would be dramatically scaled back for those who now depend upon it and all but eliminated in the future.  Medicaid would disappear in any meaningful sense, and the Ryan budget would turn over whatever remained of the money to the states, on the grounds that the states know how to spend the money better than the federal government.  We all know how that idea—the idea of states’ rights—has worked out for people or color in our country’s long racist history.

So, there you have it.  In a few months, Republicans—and not long thereafter perhaps all Americans—will have a choice to make.  Republicans must choose between a freak and a fanatic.  The rest of us must choose between a decent and a frightful future.  The choice will be up to us, and the consequences will be ours to bear.

After a humiliating primary election loss to Donald Trump in his home state of Florida, where he lost every county but one, Senator Marco Rubio not only “suspended” his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination but tried to explain away his defeat by blaming it on somebody else—a dodge that countless unsuccessful politicians have deployed from time immemorial.   In this instance, the
“somebody” Rubio chose to blame was the scapegoat that he and his Republican colleagues have favored for decades—the so-called “mainstream media.”  To quote Senator Rubio directly:

The media’s pumping him as some sort of unstoppable force… Unfortunately, he’s being pumped up, because many in the media with a bias know that he’ll be easy to beat in a general election.

Republicans have been whining about the “liberal bias” of the “mainstream media” for so long that Rubio’s sniveling would be unremarkable except for the fact that his complaint in this particular case is more contorted and paranoid than anything we’ve heard before.

Rubio claims, in essence, that the “mainstream media,” rather than trying to undermine a Republican frontrunner in the good, old-fashioned liberal way, are now deliberately supporting one—with the devious purpose of precipitating a general Republican defeat in November.  For this fantastical idea to be true, a conspiracy of cosmic proportions and gargantuan guile would be required.

There are two problems with this airy-fairy tale:

To begin with, the news media, however liberal they may or may not be, are quite  simply incapable of hatching such a clever and convoluted plot.  They aren’t that smart, and they certainly aren’t that organized.

More consequentially, even if the news media were capable of such a plot, they would have no interest in pursuing it, because their purported “liberal bias” is merely another in a long list of paranoid Republican distractions and delusions.

The most fervent and feverish right-wingers in the Republican Party can’t quite get their heads around the possibility that responsible people, even “liberal” people, are capable of distinguishing between personal opinions and professional obligations; may be willing to assess evidence objectively; and might, just might, feel obligated to present such evidence without prejudice or parti pris.  Their difficulty in accepting such possibilities reflects the pathetic depth of their partisan delusions.

It is, nevertheless, quite likely that journalists, as a group, are more liberal than not—“likely,” rather than “certain,” because, after decades of study, there is no certain evidence on the matter.

There is, however, a bucketload of evidence indicating that most better-educated people hold “liberal” political and social views.  Indeed, the more educated people are, the more “liberal” they are likely to be.  In this regard, journalists are probably no different from anybody else.

The political views of journalists, in any event, are of little consequence.  What truly matters are the views of their bosses.  They are the people who set the tone, write the checks, and have the power to hire and fire.

Those who own or run our country’s largest media corporations—the broadcast television networks, the cable companies, local television and radio stations, the newspapers—are much slipperier customers than the journalists they employ.   To the extent such people have any actual “political” views, their views are overwhelmingly conservative, but those views are a distant second to their monetary interests.

The national television business is now dominated by five corporations.  Together, these behemoths control 90 percent of everything we see on television.  The people who run or own these companies, with few exceptions, donate far more to Republican than to Democratic political candidates.  These people are perfectly willing to pay lip-service to the liberal causes that have special resonance in Hollywood—gay rights, transgender rights, abortion rights, and the rest—but their ultimate priorities are their own bottom lines and bank accounts.

Fewer than a dozen national corporations now own most of the supposedly “local” television and radio stations in the country.   With few exceptions, the people who run these companies are right-wing—many of them, aggressively so—and they donate far more to Republican than to Democratic political candidates.

The sad shambles of what is left of the newspaper business is now dominated by five national corporations, which own more than half the major newspapers in the country and account for nearly half the daily circulation.  The executives and owners of these corporations are almost without exception case diehard Republicans, a reality that is reflected not only in their political contributions but also in the editorial pages of their newspapers.

Marco Rubio’s complaint about “media bias” can thus be dispensed with as the fantasy that it truly is.  If the media have any bias, it certainly isn’t “liberal.”  Indeed, it has nothing whatever to do with politics.

If there was ever any doubt on that score, it was laid to rest a couple of weeks ago by a man named Les Moonves, the Chairman of CBS.

Let me say that I once worked for CBS, and my view of Les Moonves is, to put it mildly, jaundiced.  In an industry richly populated by overpaid and overrated egotists, he squats at the top of the dungheap.  That said, in an address to a media and technology conference in San Francisco, Moonves inadvertently let the cat out of the bag.  Speaking of Donald Trump’s candidacy, he blurted:

It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS… The money’s rolling in, and this is fun… I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us.  Sorry.  It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald.  Keep going.

There, in a boast of chilling candor, you have all you need to know about the bias of the media: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”  The real “media bias” in our country has less nothing to do with patriotism or even politics.  It has everything to do with money—which, for the Republicans who run out largest media companies, amounts to the same thing.

It is now quite apparent that the Presidential convention of the Republican Party, which will be held in Cleveland at the end of July, is going to be an ugly brawl.  Although Donald Trump is all but certain to arrive in the “Rock ‘n Roll Capital of the World” with more primary and caucus votes than any other candidate, it is anything but certain that he will have an absolute majority.  Even if he eventually manages to pull that off, his opponents seem determined to do everything in their power to gum up the works.

The wily (and oily) Ted Cruz has been lining up delegates by manipulating the arcane rules of state party politics.  John Kasich refuses to surrender, insisting in the face of all evidence to the contrary that he can still become the ultimate choice of the convention, either because so many Republicans detest Trump and Cruz (which is undeniably true) or because only he can beat the dreaded Hillary Clinton in a general election (which is more dubious).  Even Marco Rubio, defeated but apparently undaunted, is now wangling to hang onto the hundred or so delegates he won before dropping out of the race, to what end nobody knows.

All of this melodrama—some of it serious, most of it merely comical—makes the prospect of a contested or “brokered” Republican convention more likely than anyone would have imagined just a few weeks ago.

This prospect absolutely thrills the pontificators in the news media, since such a spectacle hasn’t occurred in decades and would create boundless opportunities for the pontificators to ply their trade, which is to talk endlessly about things that may or may not have any real consequence.  One can scarcely blame them.  They are like children longing for a lollipop.

The problem for the Republican Party, of course, is that the Presidency is not a lollipop, and today is not 50 years ago.

Once upon a time, political conventions were the forums where the real business of national politics was done.  The horse-trading that led to the nomination of Presidential candidates was frequently conducted in secret and was very often shady.  Deals were made and bargains were struck, if not always in the “smoke-filled rooms” of popular imagination, then at least well out of sight.

All that changed—or was supposed to have changed—after the turbulent decade of the 1960s.

At the 1964 Republican convention, Barry Goldwater pulled off what amounted to a right-wing putsch, absconding with the nomination of his party by outmaneuvering its establishment.  His defeat in the subsequent general election was one of the most calamitous in American history—a loss so total and so traumatizing that it galvanized the Republican party to ensure that such a debacle would never happen again.

The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was in some ways even worse.  It was a total shambles as well as a scandal, marred by a “riot” on the part of the Chicago Police Department and compromised by the cobbled-together nomination of Hubert Humphrey, an utterly decent man, to be sure, but also a man that nobody apart from the party’s power brokers wanted as their nominee.  The result was a humiliating loss to Richard Nixon.  We all know how that turned out.

Because of these catastrophes, our country’s two political parties decided, in their own, very different ways, to “reform” the procedures by which their candidates were to be chosen.  Primaries and caucuses, thought to be more democratic—with a lower-case “d”—were to take precedence.  Conventions were to become less important—spectacles carefully orchestrated to display party unity in front of the ubiquitous television cameras.  The bad old days of back-room dealing were to be shut away in a metaphorical closet, like an embarrassing, demented relative.

Shut away but, as it now turns out, not done away.

While the Democrats have (thus far at least) been able to contain and channel the  restless energy of the progressives in their ranks, the Republicans have utterly lost control of the angry chunk of their electorate that is rooting for Trump.  Precisely why these people are so angry remains a bit mysterious, since most of them are far better off than the minorities and immigrants they abhor, and more than a few of them are generously subsidized by the government they abominate.  Whatever their reasons, they seem to be well and truly pissed—not only at the scapegoats they loathe but at their own political party.

If that party denies Donald Trump the nomination, if he is rejected after winning a plurality of primary and caucus votes, if some “white knight” who never bothered to compete in the primaries and caucuses is dropped onto the stage at the last moment, like the deus ex machina in an ancient play, there will be all hell to pay.  Trump and his followers will not go quietly into the night like Barry Goldwater.  They and he will boom and thunder; they will carpet bomb, not the sands of the Middle East, but the political party that did them in.  If the power-brokers of the Republican Party decide to “broker” their convention in Cleveland in the hope of winning the general election, they will not only fail in that, they will break their party into shards and splinters.

Several days ago, the Republican Governor of the great State of Alabama called a press conference to apologize, both to the people of his state and to his family, for having said things that he characterized as a “mistake.”  The statements he was referring to came during a cell phone call with one of his senior aides, a married woman 30 years his junior.

The call was recorded surreptitiously by a member of the governor’s family—we still don’t know who exactly—and was, to put it mildly, “intimate.”  Although the governor denies having had a physical relationship with his aide, the content of the call was so explicitly lascivious that scarcely anyone is prepared to take him at his word.  It would appear that his wife is one of those who does not.  Shortly before the press conference, she filed for divorce, ending their marriage of fifty years.

It would be tempting to dismiss this sordid business as a sad and rather pathetic aberration—except for the fact that Republican politicians seem to get themselves into this kind of unseemly hot water routinely.

There was Herman Cain, whose brief moment in the sun as a prospective Republican Presidential nominee evaporated when it was revealed that he had sexually harassed female employees for decades.

There was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who, having led the fight to impeach Bill Clinton, was ultimately forced to confess that he was himself an adulterer.

There was Mark Foley, a one-time Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, who was compelled to resign after it was revealed that he had a rather unsavory fondness for the young “pages” who serve that body.

There was Larry Craig, a long-serving Senator from Idaho and a stalwart champion of every conservative cause you can imagine, who was arrested and tried for propositioning a young man in a public restroom.  He pled guilty.

The litany of salacious misbehavior by Republican politicians could be extended indefinitely.

If history is any guide, however, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama is likely to come out of this latest scandal intact, forgiven by his constituents and quite possibly enriched by the notoriety.

For all his peccadilloes, it didn’t take Herman Cain very long to pick up a lucrative contract with Fox News Channel.  New Gingrich’s infidelity didn’t stop big-money donors from bankrolling his Presidential prospects.  Mark Foley returned to Palm Beach, where he now hosts a radio talk show about (you guessed it) conservative politics.  And Larry Craig was not only forgiven by the people of Idaho but inducted into the Idaho Hall of Fame—though, under the circumstances, “Hall of Infamy” might be the more appropriate phrase.

It scarcely needs saying that infamous and lubricious behavior is not limited to Republicans.  John F. Kennedy was a legendary womanizer.  John Edwards had the audacity to think that he could run for President while concealing not only an adulterous affair but a child born out of wedlock.  Gary Hart was well on his way to becoming President until he was photographed with Donna Rice sitting on his lap.  Topping all that was the mother lode of Democratic improprieties: Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, snuggled in that closet in the Oval Office.

Although infidelity and lust would appear to be equally—one might almost say, democratically—distributed across the political spectrum, there is one important difference between the two ends of the spectrum.

For all their tawdry behavior, Democrats do not customarily combine personal impropriety with public sanctimony.  Republicans, on the other hand, have made the sanctimonious and hypocritical condemnation of other human beings one of the governing principles of their party.

Robert Bentley of Alabama is a picture-perfect illustration of the phenomenon.   As a deacon of the Baptist Church, he has displayed a fondness for preaching to anyone who will listen about his “salvation through Jesus Christ.”  Indeed, he ran for governor on an explicit platform of Christian “family values,” vowing to prohibit civil unions, denouncing gay marriage as a “social experiment,” opposing abortion under almost all circumstances.  Governor Bentley’s loudly proclaimed Christianity has not stopped him from imposing the harshest anti-immigration law in the nation, drastically curtailing voting rights, and, despite his admission that Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation, refusing to expand Medicaid, because it might encourage “dependency.”  For this septuagenerian governor and Baptist deacon to have been caught on tape having phone sex with another man’s wife is more than ironic.  It qualifies as an act of divine retribution.

Yet Bentley’s stupendous hypocrisy is in no way exceptional.

The aforementioned Herman Cain not only gave us a stupendously stupid plan for taxing everybody and everything at the same nonsensical flat rate, the short-lived “9-9-9,” he also lectured the nation on the sanctity of traditional marriage—all the while he was cheating on his wife.

Newt Gingrich did not even bother even to apologize, once he too had been exposed as an adulterer. Instead, he reverted to pathetically insincere religious platitudes: “There are things in my own life that I have gotten on my knees and turned to God and prayed about.”  It is hard to say which is the more laughable: the image of Newt down on his knees or the idea that God might deign to listen.

Until he was caught swooning over “pages” on the floor of the United States Congress, Mark Foley was an adamant proponent of legislation against a host of “sex crimes,” as well an advocate of abstinence as an alternative to birth control or abortion.

Larry Craig was an unyielding opponent of gay marriage, gay civil unions, and gay rights, until he was caught with his pants down in a public men’s room, whereupon his positions on such issues shed any shred of credibility.

The problem these and countless other sanctimonious Republicans face is this: the “values” they so vehemently wish to impose upon the rest of us do not square with their own values, to the extent they have any values at all.

It is one thing to be a sinner, which, to one degree or another, everyone is.  It is quite another to be a hypocrite.