Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Trump Style Vengeance

The evil that men do lives after them. . . .
— W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

It is a threat no one has contemplated and, therefore, not thought to address. We can only hope that that will change and that we will anticipate events that may confront us in November and begin planning to protect the country.

There are few aspects of the malignant trump that we have not become acquainted with during the trump three-year reign of terror over what was formerly known as the UNITED States of America. That we are no longer united is apparent from the hatred that is spewed from the trumpian mouth and its adoring acolytes in the United States Senate, many of whom are such admirers that they seek to emulate the hate speech that is spouted from that vessel. Of course the trumpian venom is not limited to verbal assaults. It manifests itself in retributive acts against perceived enemies.

Following the conclusion of the Congressional impeachment proceedings, the trump promptly got rid of two of the witnesses who had testified during the House proceedings implicating the trump in what our ancestors would have considered impeachable behavior . The first was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman. He was a Ukrainian expert serving on the National Security Council at the White House. He was fired by trump two days after the impeachment trial concluded. The trump had let it be known he was not happy withVindman because of his testimony during the impeachment trial and had repeatedly tweeted messages calling for his dismissal.

Within hours of the Vindman dismissal, Gordon Sondland, a hotelier from Oregon who had given the trump inauguration committee $1 million was fired. He had been rewarded for his generosity by being appointed United States Ambassador to the European Union but was fired because of the testimony he had provided during the impeachment hearings.

The trump’s willingness to avenge himself for actions taken he perceives to be hostile to him is not limited to individuals. He can also exact revenge on an entire population as he has done to New Yorkers.

On June 17, 2019, New York enacted what is known as the Green Light Law. That law went into effect on December 16, 2019. The law allows undocumented immigrants to use foreign-issued documents to prove their age and identity thus enabling them to apply for driving privileges. The law prohibits the Department of Motor Vehicle Division from providing any of its data to entities that enforce immigration law unless a judge orders them to do so. As a result three federal agencies have been denied access to New York data bases beginning in December 2019. The trump was furious.

Although there are thirteen other states that give immigrants drivers’ licenses regardless of their immigration status, the trump has elected to take out his anger on New Yorkers. Since there is no one individual upon whom he can seek revenge as he could with Messrs. Sondland and Vindman, he has done the next best thing. He has exacted revenge on the entire population of New York.

The trump might have liked to invalidate the passports of everyone who lives in New York, thus requiring them to apply for visas before returning home but that was beyond his control. He did the next best thing. He suspended the right of New Yorkers not already enrolled in those programs, to apply to enroll in the Global Entry and other trusted traveler programs thus making it more difficult and time consuming for them to reenter the United States upon returning from foreign travel.

As the foregoing shows, if events are perceived by the trump as conspiring against him, he will find ways to exact revenge, either on individuals or on entire populations. The question we should all be trying to answer is how can we protect the United States from the consequences of a vengeful trump should he lose the election in November.

Between the date of the election and the swearing in of a new president on January 20, 2021, 78 days of the trump administration will remain. Based on the evil that the trump has shown he can inflict on large populations when angry with their behavior, only a fool would think the trump would exit quietly if he awakens on November 4 to learn that his tenure is drawing to a close.

It is frightening to contemplate what evil the trump may inflict on the country during those remaining days and it is none too soon to begin thinking of how he can be thwarted. As Edmund Burke once observed: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” Let the country beware.

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Truthiness

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
—Robert Frost The Black Cottage

It must have been a bit of a downer for the trump. It came just three days before his acquittal of charges of misconduct that had been brought in the House and were being tried in the Senate where his acquittal by jellyfish-like Republicans in the United States Senate was assured. It came just the day before he was to make his “trumpfant” State of the Union speech in which he would brag about his accomplishments and non-accomplishments with equal ease. It came just 2 months after YouTube made it clear that it would not ban the trump’s misleading ads on YouTube about Joe Biden.

It all happened when, in an earlier interview on 60 Minutes, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, had been asked by Leslie Stahl, whether YouTube would continue to air a fake trump ad that attacked Joe Biden. In response Ms. Wojcicki said: “So that is an ad that, um, right now would not be a violation of our policies.”

It came less than three weeks after the trump had posted a photoshopped image of Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a turban and a head scarf respectively in front of an Iranian flag with an accompanying legend saying the image showed “the corrupted Dems trying their best to come to the Ayatollah’s rescue.” Although that image had not been posted on YouTube it was the sort of fake image that the trump took delight in and that as the result of the new policies, may no longer be acceptable on YouTube.

The downer for the trump was the announcement from YouTube that it planned to begin removing from its site misleading election content that can cause “serious risk of egregious harm.” According to a statement in a blog post from Leslie Miller, the vice president of government affairs and public policy at YouTube, “Over the last few years, we’ve increased our efforts to make YouTube a more reliable source for news and information, as well as an open platform for healthy political discourse. . . . She said the policy would apply “without regard to a video’s political viewpoint.”

Since by all accounts we now live in a world where misinformation spreads quickly on the internet un the guise of “true facts,” the hope is that the new policy will slightly slow, if not stop, the spread of “fake” news.” For the trump that has to come as something of a disappointment.

The report says the site will remove altered videos or videos that attempt to mislead readers about the voting process. Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said that a video’s content will determine whether a video is permitted to remain on the site or must be taken down.

The Washington Post, which is a follower of such things, reported that as of December 16, 2019, the trump has made 15,413 false or misleading claims since he was sworn in as president. That comes to 14.6 such claims each day. For a person who has grown accustomed to being dishonest multiple times on a daily basis, the news that one of the major channels for imparting such falsehoods to his adoring followers has to come as a shock and a disappointment. It may almost seem as though the world is conspiring against him when it starts refusing to promote his lies.

It is, of course, impossible to conjure up all the sorts of lies that the trump will no longer be able to promote. A couple come to mind, thanks to the State of the Union message that he delivered to warm praise and applause from the spineless Republican multitude.

Referring to the “long, tall and very powerful wall” he was building, he bragged about 100 miles already completed and over 500 miles to be completed in a very short time. The latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection say new border wall construction has accounted for a total of 105 miles of which all but one mile was used to replace dilapidated barriers that were already in place. Under the new policy that braggadocio as part of a political message might be deleted by YouTube.

Elsewhere in his speech he said: “We will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.” In fact, as pointed out by those fact checking his speech, many of his actions have weakened or eliminated protections enjoyed by those with pre-existing conditions. Among those efforts is the administration’s continued attempts to have the courts declare the Affordable Care Act that protects those with pre-existing conditions, unconstitutional.

The new YouTube policy may or may not make it more difficult for the trump to propagate his lies. It will certainly offer a challenge to those at YouTube who are trying to make sure that their policies are faithfully adhered to. By the time the election takes place they will probably, thanks to the trump, have been able to develop an approach determining what is and is not acceptable to post. Don’t count on it.

Thursday, January 30, 2020

A Double Nadir

How fearful and dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low! — Shakespeare,King Lear

What a sad congruence. It was a stark reminder of what has become of the United States. It was the day the Senate began the impeachment trial of donald j. trump, the man who single handedly brought the institution of the presidency to its lowest level since the country was founded. It was the day James E. Mitchell began testifying in a military courtroom at Guantánamo Bay Cuba about torture methods he and a fellow psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, devised to extract information from prisoners of war in United States custody. The methods of which they were the fathers were a complete betrayal of everything we once thought the United States stood for.

Each of the days of the impeachment hearing were stark reminders of how far the country had fallen from the ideals that its founders had for it at its creation. With each new argument presented by the House Managers, we heard once again how ineptitude, incompetence, corruption, and self-interest motivated the trump and how he thoroughly intimidated the members of his own party so that none of them had the courage to even hint that there was anything inappropriate in his blatantly corrupt behavior. Self-interest, rather than the well-being of the nation, was the driving force behind the response of the Republican majority in the senate. The political welfare and eagerness to remain on the non-existent good side of a corrupt trump, meant not one Republican senator was willing to place his or her loyalty to the country, if indeed a senator had such loyalty and many such as Lindsay Graham made it plain they did not, ahead of his or her loyalty to his or her own political future. The trump impeachment is a low point in the history of the United States.

And as those proceedings were taking place, a completely different hearing was taking place in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Like the one in Washington, it was focused on one of the most dismal times in American history and the nation’s willful walking away from what had been customarily accepted behavior even in times of war. That was the day that James Mitchell, who with another psychologist, John Bruce Jesssen, was the architect of a cruel, and inhuman method of torture, began describing the instruments of torture he created to try to extract information from the men accused of plotting the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The description took place in preliminary proceedings in the trial of the men who were accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks.

In describing the waterboarding technique that he helped design, he said it was so “gruesome” that some of those observing its imposition were brought to tears. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, Jessen “would pour water onto a cloth Mitchell held over the prisoner’s mouth and nose. The water pour could last up to 20 seconds, then be paused, then another 20 seconds, paused, then 40 seconds. The subject feels as though he is drowning. . . . The practice is nearly universally condemned as torture.” During his testimony Mitchell said he would apply the method to other individuals if he thought it necessary but, demonstrating his humanity, he acknowledged that the results repulsed him.

Mitchell justified his role in the torture program explaining that because of the climate of fear that existed in the United States after the 9/11attack, extreme methods to prevent another attack were justified even if they resulted in the “temporary discomfort of terrorists who had voluntarily taken up war against us.”

Joseph Margulies, is a law professor at Cornell University who at one time represented one of the victims of the Mitchell method. He said the brutal methods employed helped numb America to wrongdoing. In an e mail he said that “James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen conceived, designed and executed the first officially recognized torture program in U.S. history. It is one thing that they are utterly unapologetic; that is a commentary on them. But it is something else altogether that so much of the rest of the country is utterly indifferent; that is a commentary on us. . . . Yesterday, we tortured men in cages because we thought they had done something wrong; today, we torture children at the border knowing that they have done no wrong at all. Do not be seduced by linguistic light footedness and ask whether this really is torture. I refuse to play that game.”

Although Professor Margulies was speaking of torture, he could have been speaking of the trump conduct when he said: “A wrong that escapes public condemnation is no wrong at all. Worse, it invites not simply repetition, but expansion.” That is a clear statement of what the future holds for the United States because of the actions of the morally free occupant of the White House and the legacy he is leaving us.

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