I’m trying to start this post and am having a tough time. I don’t know where to start, what outrage needs to be highlighted. To use the word outrage seems too benign as I type it, not suggestive of the mortal attacks on what was once thought of as simple humanity, jettisoned for what is clearly a more compelling agenda.
America has a choice to make. The legitimate if flawed attempt to have a government that reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment, of a world that is directed by factual evidence and intelligent responses to that evidence, all for the greater good of the general public, the people as a whole, began as a parody, a legitimation of white supremacy. As Martin Luther King would point out, however, the course of history bends toward justice, and inadvertently the founders had created a document that would bend in that direction slowly. An unending slog, but toward freedom, toward justice. Slaves were freed, though black people were not. New ways to deny their humanity were devised and perfected under Jim Crow, and that too was dismantled because the Constitution just couldn’t support it. So the focus shifted to law enforcement and the prison system to enslave a race of people, creating a slave state hiding in plain site. That, too, is coming to light, and another baby step toward justice is possible.
Possible. There are no guarantees of anything, and as the centuries have shown justice is won, not given. The threat to our historically white dominated country has emboldened those who would maintain the status quo, and the well documented response to those who are not white and male and even a certain kind of “Christian” by those that are can be seen being unleashed. The Enlightenment ideal of knowledge being power is seen as dangerous to an existential extent to the Master class.
Worse, it is under deliberate attack. The constant drone of “fake news” from the President in response to incredible reporting from legitimate news sources that seek to be directed by a set of journalistic ethics has been embraced by other sources that have no other ethical direction than the dollar. These alternative sources follow a business model that is happy to jettison fact for followers, the highest of higher powers being advertising dollars. If their loyal supporters are dedicated to a particular way of thinking, these sources see it as their responsibility to provide a means to justify that mindset. Tell us what you think, we will concoct a plausible intellectual cover to make it sound reasonable. On inspection it may be easily dissembled, but that will be inconsequential. The inspection will not be important and will never come for their viewers. The truth was never the point.
When I was young, Walter Cronkite had a 15 minute newscast that was a financial loser for his network. He was adamant about leaving out the filler, the non-news fluff that was constantly pushed on him. He fought hard and got his time expanded to a half hour and still resisted the call to make his show more commercial, more pleasant. In doing so, he became the voice of America, fearing no one, speaking truth to power and continuing the tradition set by Morrow in the very infancy of the television medium.
Now these beginnings seem quaint and naive. Being entitled to one’s opinion has morphed into being entitled to one’s own facts, and there is a source for whatever absurdity makes sense to you.
One of those sources is the POTUS, providing the agenda that the rest of the sources must justify. His constant racist diatribes over the entirety of his public life have stopped being dog whistles. Those are no longer necessary in his mind. Most of America prefers white people, I’m just saying what the people think! I think the pushback to this is legitimately confusing to him. Ain’t that America?
But that is only one of the stories that involve investigative journalism today. The New York Times has reported that Russia’s President Putin made it known that a bounty would be paid to Taliban fighters for American soldier deaths, and the Washington Post reported that some of those bounties have been paid. The Afghanistan bureau chief reported that information and the Times story says that the President was informed of this in January, and did nothing. Nothing.
What was the President’s response to this explosive revelation? Nobody told me! It is documented that the British foreign service was most definitely apprised of the situation as they also have people in theater that would be at risk. The President wants us to believe that our intelligence community let the Brits know but kept the POTUS in the dark. This is simply not a credible story. Plausible deniability simply doesn’t stretch this far, and if this is all confirmed, and all evidence suggests that it will be and more will be revealed, this is a whole different conversation.
Impeachment is not the appropriate response for a President supporting a dictator in an unprecedented attack on our forces by not condemning it in emphatic terms at the very least through sanctions.
This would be a treasonous act against the United States.
This is not hyperbole. I could make the case that turning his back on a pandemic when it is growing to a new peak is also worthy of a charge of treason, but this would be incontrovertible by any standard. I don’t care which side of the aisle holds your allies, how much you love the hatred that Trump has invoked throughout his base, or how much you dislike the military’s invasive influence on our foreign policy and our economy, none of that matters. Objectively this would be an ultimate crime against our country, the act of a domestic enemy.
Maybe you read this and think it simply isn’t true, that it is a left wing fabrication to disparage our great leader. That’s fine. I can’t reach you no matter what I or any legitimate journalist or any other institution brings to the table in terms of evidence. But putting that aside, if it was true, as a hypothetical, what should happen to someone guilty of this lack of response to an outright threat to our fighting citizens from outside the parties to the conflict?
It’s treason.
When Trump said he knew nothing about it, that no one had briefed him, he followed up by saying “We haven’t had that many losses”, as if to say that even if this is true it isn’t really that big a story. Not too many of our guys were picked off, not too many Taliban fighters cashed in. No big deal.
As Joe Scarborough reported on this on his Morning Joe program, he asked a simple but pointed question. “How stupid do you think we are?”
Well Joe, that question will soon be answered. My take is that we are pretty damn stupid. He got elected didn’t he?