"A republic, if you can keep it"

The story goes that, as Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention, a crowd awaited him. Elizabeth Willing Powel, a prominent figure from the era, approached and asked the question everyone wanted answered. Would the new United States be a monarchy or a republic?

At the time, Franklin’s answer probably sounded like nothing more than a witty quip: "A republic, if you can keep it."

But, today, it sounds like a warning we didn’t heed.

Trump has said, "I can do whatever I want as president," claiming it says so in the constitution. It doesn’t, of course.

But if congress and the judiciary go along, the constitution might as well have been written with disappearing ink.

Today, he’s withholding more evidence—claiming national security, perhaps to break up the claims of executive privilege that he’s used, to date, to keep incriminating documents and witnesses away from his impeachment hearing and senate trial.

"I've read that testimony," Democratic House manager Zoe Lofgren said Wednesday on the Senate floor. "I'll just say that a cover-up is not a proper reason to classify a document."

If those to whom the constitution gives the power to constrain him won’t do so, Trump’s right: he can do anything. And Ben Franklin wasn’t kidding. 

- Anita Bartholomew

That anti-Trump article you shared? It might also be pro-war.

How can it be that, although Donald Trump has told about 16,000 lies since taking office, in a 2018 poll, his supporters said they’d trust him to tell them the truth, more than they would mainstream media?

Is this madness? Maybe. But maybe it’s also a recognition that corporate news media, wherever it sits on the partisan divide, has reached a kind of “Gentlemen’s Agreement” not to convey the reality of certain situations. Meanwhile Trump, blunt as a sledgehammer, occasionally breaks through the BS to expose inconvenient truths that nobody wants spoken out loud. One such truth: how the military has been historically used to pillage and plunder the resources of other countries. If such a truth is blasted from the office of the president, will propaganda work any more when it claims serial Middle East invasions and occupations are all about spreading freedom?

In a recent issue of Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson brilliantly dissected the propaganda methods used to get the populace to support war. One of his tips for resisting propaganda’s pull:

“Remember what people were saying five minutes ago.” Or, in this case, four years ago.

On only two issues, if you squinted hard, did 2016’s candidate Trump appear more liberal than candidate Clinton: Middle East wars and the TPP free trade deal.

And that's what authors Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker want us to agree we should most fear about Trump’s presidency in a rah-rah Middle East war and occupation message, excerpted from their book, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America, published in the January 17, 2020 Washington Post.

As the text focuses on Trump’s oafish behavior toward his generals and political advisers, the authors’ underlying message is that six months after Trump entered office, his then-reluctance (since abandoned) to prolong Middle East wars was some of the best evidence of his incompetence:

Trump questioned why the United States couldn’t get some oil as payment for the troops stationed in the Persian Gulf. “We spent $7 trillion; they’re ripping us off,” Trump boomed. “Where is the f---ing oil?”

Trump seemed to be speaking up for the voters who elected him, and several attendees thought they heard Bannon in Trump’s words. Bannon had been trying to persuade Trump to withdraw forces by telling him, “The American people are saying we can’t spend a trillion dollars a year on this. We just can’t. It’s going to bankrupt us.”

“And not just that, the deplorables don’t want their kids in the South China Sea at the 38th parallel or in Syria, in Afghanistan, in perpetuity,” Bannon would add, invoking Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” reference to Trump supporters.

The scene’s framing signals to readers that they should reject, not just Trump’s belligerence, but these arguments.

But what’s wrong with not wanting to spend $trillions on war and occupation? What’s wrong with not wanting to send more kids, barely out of high school, to bomb, shoot, displace, and intimidate the people living in these other countries?

And despite the crass transactional nature of Trump’s demand for oil, how is that different from the way the US has been operating in the Middle East all along?

In 1953, the CIA helped topple Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to protect British interests in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.

Bush I launched “Operation Desert Storm” against Saddam Hussein in 1990 because the Iraqi leader had gone after Kuwaiti oil fields.

Bush II and Cheney ginned up a case against Hussein in 2002 to 2003, not because he had anything to do with 9/11—he didn’t—and not for the ludicrous reason embedded in the name they gave the invasion, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” but because of oil.

Yet the authors ignore all that as they recount a tale of noble war-promoters vs a crude commander-in-chief. They label a conference room where military chiefs make their war plans a “sacred space.” They demand we be appalled by any attempt to reject this facade:

… So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs. Tillerson told others he thought he saw a woman in the room silently crying. He was furious and decided he couldn’t stand it another minute. His voice broke into Trump’s tirade, this one about trying to make money off U.S. troops.

“No, that’s just wrong,” the secretary of state said. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.”

Tillerson’s father and uncle had both been combat veterans, and he was deeply proud of their service.

“The men and women who put on a uniform don’t do it to become soldiers of fortune,” Tillerson said. “That’s not why they put on a uniform and go out and die . . . They do it to protect our freedom.”

Of course, most soldiers and Marines recruited into the military believe that they are “protect[ing] our freedom,” despite having that belief betrayed, as, time and again, the military gets deployed to secure “the f---ing oil.”

Rex Tillerson, presented as the hero of this tale, could not be ignorant of the above. He spent his entire career, 1975 to 2017, prior to becoming Trump's first secretary of state, at Exxon, rising to CEO. The oil company, of course, has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of Middle East military adventuring.

“Remember what people were saying five minutes ago.”

Remember what you knew five minutes before reading this book excerpt.

And remember, though Trump might lie so blatantly, he can make you gasp, he also sometimes spills truths that those who George Carlin accurately called “the owners” of the country, don’t want you to hear.

-  Anita Bartholomew

It's time to resurrect the blog

The last time I posted here, it was 2008. Obama had not yet been elected. We were still high on the potential for "Hope and Change." We--well, at least, I--believed back then that "Yes we can" was a harbinger of equality, healthcare for all, and other good things to come. Now, it rings hollow, like the empty slogan it was.

Trump? No one in her right mind would have given him any serious thought as a contender for national office.

And the one guy who might pull us out of this quicksand, if it's not already too late, Bernie Sanders? Barely on my radar. Probably not on yours back then, either.

So, here we are, a dozen years later. As I look back, I see where I was right about some things, wrong about others.

I'll pick up again shortly, hopefully wiser than I was then, but no guarantees. Because, as Niels Bohr said (or maybe, it was Casey Stengel), "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

- Anita