Tag: Richard Nixon

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Opinion Viewpoint

Enter the Prosecutor

In 40 years of covering Washington politics, I have never seen anything like President Trump’s amazing rise to power. I have seen presidents laid low by botched Congressional investigations that lead to special prosecutors. That’s why I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

Spoiler Alert: This political thriller ends with the president’s top aides striking plea bargains with federal prosecutors to reduce prison sentences.

Juan Williams

The U.S. has a rich recent history of special prosecutors. The odds are rising that one more is coming to look into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The dwindling trust in the GOP majority in Congress to conduct such a probe is due to the fading credibility of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican chairman of that panel, Senator Richard Burr, is widely perceived as a Trump acolyte. 

When FBI director James Comey announced shortly before last year’s election that his agents had reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Burr bragged there is “not a separation between me and Donald Trump.”

Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, was slow to bury Burr with a call for a special prosecutor, perhaps seeking to avoid charges that he was politicizing the probe. But on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer made that call. A special prosecutor was necessary, he asserted, to probe “whether the Trump campaign was complicit in working with the Russians to influence the election.”

Now Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Susan Collins, are starting to peel away. Graham has said that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian diplomats, “then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor.”

On cue, last week Sessions had to recuse himself from the FBI’s probes into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia after The Washington Post revealed he met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice last year. Those details seemed to contradict sworn testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

If trust in the Senate probe is weak, then the credibility of any House investigation is even weaker. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) served with Sessions on Trump’s presidential transition team. Nunes was also one of the lawmakers actively recruited by Reince Priebus to counter stories about Trump’s ties to Russia. In a rambling press conference last week, he said he did not want the committee’s investigation to turn into a “witch hunt” and warned of “McCarthyism,” where innocent Americans were “haul[ed] before Congress.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the committee, further diminished trust in any House probe when he said last week that the FBI director refused to share with the committee more than “a fraction of what the FBI knows.”

Last week, we learned that the Trump White House Counsel’s office issued a memo to all White House staff instructing them to preserve all documents related to Russia. If history is a guide, all that is left now is for public pressure to build on the GOP and the special prosecutor to be named.

Here’s a quick look at that history: During the Iran-Contra affair, President Reagan tried to put the scandal behind him by agreeing to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. Walsh indicted several of Reagan’s top aides, including Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger.

During President Clinton’s first term, shady controversies from his time as governor of Arkansas led to the appointment of the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and set the stage for the Monica Lewinsky sex story that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.

President George W. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself from a White House probe. His deputy then appointed an independent special counsel to find out who leaked the name of a CIA agent. That special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, won the conviction of the Vice President’s chief of staff,  Lewis “Scooter” Libby. 

Senator John McCain said that he has “more hope than belief” that the GOP Congress will properly investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. “Have no doubt, what the Russians tried to do to our election could have destroyed democracy,” McCain said.

Julius Caesar feared the Ides of March with good reason. As the middle of the month approaches, President Trump and his GOP supporters will be under fearsome pressure to go along with the naming of a special prosecutor.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The “Fake News”

For reasons he cannot fathom, President Donald Trump has been asked recently about anti-Semitism, not just the rising number of incidents both here and abroad but also — as he oddly interpreted a question at his latest news conference — his own attitudes. As for the latter, he is, by his own testimony and that of others, no anti-Semite. If he were, he’d have to hate one of his own daughters, her husband, and their children, who are all observant Jews. So when he declares, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” his crude hyperbole aside, I believe him.

Richard Cohen

But either out of calculation or instinct, Trump operates as an anti-Semite of old in the way he describes the news media. Listen for the anti-Semitic tropes: Journalists are urban — or as the communists used to say, cosmopolitan. They live in a bubble, a kind of ghetto. They are rootless — another communist opprobrium — in the sense that few journalists work where they were born and are not responsible to their original community. They are politically and culturally liberal and secular, meaning they are free of conventional morality or religion. They can lie. They can sin. They can, as a result, be attacked with impunity.

Anti-Semitism is largely a spent force in America. We live in an era of Seinfeld and Streisand and Stewart. A Jew ran for vice president (Joe Lieberman), and one recently ran for president (Bernie Sanders), and both of last year’s presidential nominees have a child who was married by a rabbi. This is not your grandfather’s America. That one was virulently anti-Semitic. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Charles Lindbergh cuddled with Hitler, Jews fleeing the Holocaust were told to go somewhere else, and my mother had to go from Pearl Rosenberg to Pat Tyson to find work as a bookkeeper. All that is gone.

What remains, though, is the continuing need for some force that could serve as a scapegoat. Trump, a man of considerable ability in such matters, has found it in the media. As it always was with anti-Semitism, portions of the culture were already receptive. Many people needed to find someone to blame for a society that was becoming less comforting, less conventional, that was depressing their standard of living, closing their factories, favoring foreign labor — doing all the things that Jews once supposedly did. Here is Trump at his news conference last week:

“Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles, in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system. The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk about it, to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

This is a neo-Hitlerian statement — only the word “Jews” is missing. Not missing is the alien, secular big city, the unnamed “special interests,” the loaded word “profiting,” and, of course, the utter mystery of it all. Why are these people doing such things? Why do they lie? Why do they want to hurt “the American people”? Why? It’s because they are not-like-us. They are evil.

You may argue that this is nothing new. I remember Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s corrupt vice president, ranting against the liberal press. At one Agnew event I covered, his denunciation of the media brought Republican women out of their chairs, fists in the air, shouting their agreement and serenely unaware that Agnew’s words were probably written by future New York Times columnist William Safire.

George Wallace, both a racist and self-pronounced champion of the working man, castigated the press for its unaccountable hostility to Jim Crow, naming “the Time magazine,” “the Newsweek,” and so on. Still, even an Agnew or a Wallace would have shied away from Trump’s expansive conspiracy theory.

Trump has set himself an agenda. He must rid America of the evil that he describes and that is visible only to him and his followers. He must, in other words, rein in the news media, limit their scope and influence — a task that will become more and more urgent as he fails in his presidency. The fault for that, after all, cannot be his. He will go from florid-faced fool to brooding menace. It is an old pattern. Only the scapegoat is new.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Good Signs, Bad Signs

Last week, the Flyer threw a party to celebrate its 20<30 Class of 2017. It was held at the Old Dominick Distillery on Front Street, yet another old downtown building being beautifully and creatively retrofitted. Three hundred folks showed up, most of them young and full of sass, hope, and dreams.

And Memphis has a lot to be hopeful about, if these young people are an indication of the talent pool living here. I was blown away by the diversity, the brains, and the ambition on display in that room.

And then I met Senator Brian Kelsey. I’m kidding. Well, not about meeting Brian Kelsey. We did meet, and it wasn’t as awkward as either of us probably expected, given that I have written some less than complimentary things about the man’s politics. I congratulated him on his work with fellow senator — and Democrat — Lee Harris on behalf preserving our Memphis Sand aquifer, and we chatted pleasantly for a few moments with a mutual friend.

And that gives me hope, too. I’m sure that I’ll have plenty of reasons to criticize Kelsey’s politics in the future, but it’s always a good thing when political opponents can find common ground — or water, in this case. That’s the way things used to work, before we all got funneled into our ideological information silos, before the era of fake news and “alternative facts.”

A couple days later, on Saturday, the Memphis Women’s March brought hope to thousands more people in downtown Memphis. It was a cathartic and energizing demonstration, one that was replicated all over the globe, as women and their allies served notice they wouldn’t quietly surrender to the forces of regression that have taken power in the nation’s capitol.

It’s easy to discount the power of protests, but people taking to the streets drove President Lyndon Johnson into retirement — and eventually ended the Vietnam War and helped bring down Richard Nixon. Change can happen from the bottom up. Sometimes we forget that.

Now we have a president who lies like others breathe. I don’t think it’s a moral failing in Donald Trump’s case; I think it’s a mental illness, a crippling narcissistic disorder. How else to explain his going into CIA headquarters and trying to gaslight intelligence workers? Who does that? Trump told them he hadn’t attacked or disparaged them. A lie. He said his Inauguration crowd was the largest in history. A lie. He said he’d been on the cover of Time magazine more than anyone else. A lie. He even lied about whether it rained while he was giving his Inaugural speech.

He left thinking he’d won them over, but post-speech interviews with CIA leaders and workers revealed that he’d done just the opposite. People, this president’s disconnect with reality is a serious liability for all of us — liberal and conservative. He doesn’t have any discernible principles, except self-aggrandizement. Spouting alternative facts doesn’t work when you’re running a country. This will come to a head. It may take weeks. It may take months. But this level of madness won’t stand for four years.

There is precedent. In December 1973, conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater wrote a private note that said, “I have reason to suspect that all might not be well mentally in the White House. This is the only copy that will ever be made of this; it will be locked in my safe.” In 1974, after nearly two years of investigations and hearings, it had become clear that Nixon had ordered the Watergate break-in to Democratic headquarters and tried to cover it up. Goldwater led a delegation to the White House to tell Nixon it was over, that he’d lost Congress and needed to resign. I will not be surprised if history repeats itself.

For the country’s sake, I hope it’s sooner than later. I don’t agree with Vice President Mike Pence on much, but I’d much rather have a president with whom I disagree politically than one who is of questionable sanity.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Nixon & Trump

CREDIT: Dawn Hudson | Dreamstime.com

Hello Millennials. Are you sick to death of that moniker yet? Are you weary of being lumped into a group of millions of people with whom you share little in common, yet are stamped with the same stereotypes as the Kardashians?

If you were born between 1983 and 2001, that makes you a Millennial — a pseudo-scientific name made up by a couple of guys who wrote a book to describe the generation between Gen X and Gen Z, which I never understood in the first place.

If every generation needs a stupid nickname, welcome to my world. Since birth, I’ve been referred to as a Baby Boomer, a childish and silly term that first appeared in a newspaper article. We were the spawn of soldiers returning from WWII, who wasted no time in being fruitful and multiplying.

Now, they’re also calling you “echo boomers,” and studies have attributed certain characteristics to your demographic.  You are “digitally native,” you have a sense of entitlement, you’re narcissistic and disinterested in world affairs, you’re “selfie” absorbed, and you lack social skills because you text instead of talk. You’re attached to your devices. You are the trophy generation, where no one wins or loses and everyone gets an award just for participating. You’re driven by wealth, but you won’t save money. You eat out every night or order pizza. You have disdain for anything and everything that came before you. You won’t buy a car, and you live in your parents’ basement.

Here’s a clue: Aside from the tech stuff, many of the same things were said of my rebellious generation.

A Boomer sounds like someone who comes from Oklahoma. We were born between 1946 and 1964, ancient history to you. If you dropped a telephone back then, you could break your foot. We’re all between 50 and 70 now, and, although deeply divided on everything from politics to pot, we too were smacked with that same giant paintbrush as a studied and analyzed group. We were called the first consumer generation. Everything was handed to us. We were spoiled and self-indulgent. We rejected traditional values and resented authority. We were too idealistic, and we thought we were special.

Anything in there sound familiar? Maybe we have more in common than you have been led to believe. So, even though I’ve read that Millennials both abhor and ignore the past, please indulge your old Uncle Randy, and let me tell you a story about a poet-politician named Eugene McCarthy.

The Minnesota senator had come out early and vociferously against the Vietnam War, and in the election year of 1968, he was the first to challenge the president, Lyndon Johnson. Young people who opposed the war or were vulnerable to the draft flocked to his cause. His slogan was “Get clean for Gene,” which translated into thousands of hippies getting shaves and haircuts so as not to frighten the proletariat when they knocked on their doors with campaign literature.

Considering 1968 was the same year that the musical Hair opened on Broadway, this was a noble sacrifice. McCarthy was the guy who made LBJ drop out of the race and caused Robert Kennedy to jump in. We all know how that ended, but when convention time came around, “Clean Gene” lost the nomination to the establishment candidate, Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, who hadn’t even entered the primaries. The convention ended in chaos and bloodshed, and the Chicago cops, in what was later deemed a “police riot,” gleefully cracked Boomer skulls in the street and got some hippie payback. And you thought Trump rallies were bad.

My generation betrayed you. We didn’t get our preferred candidate, so instead of going to the polls and voting for second best, we stayed home. The result was that Humphrey lost by one percentage point, and we gave you Richard Nixon, a loathsome and venal slug of a man who extended the war by four pointless years. His psychiatrist said that Nixon ordered bombing raids just to impress his friends. He was severely neurotic, viciously anti-Semitic, and racially insensitive, so, of course, he was re-elected.

Dawn Hudson | Dreamstime.com

Richard Nixon

Late in his second term, beset by scandal and skullduggery, Nixon took to the bottle. Late at night, he drunk-called his friends and wandered the halls of the White House talking to the portraits of presidents past. His behavior became so erratic that the Secretary of Defense sent out a general command stating that any order coming from the liquor-ridden Commander-in-Chief had to be cleared by him first. Imagine how different the world would look if my generation had just voted.

We were so upset about not getting our anti-war candidate, we overlooked the fact that Humphrey had been a champion of civil rights since 1948 and was the main author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the end, the nefarious Nixon won the election with 43.4 percent to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent. We gave you a mentally unstable president, subject to bouts of mood swings, and a petulant, thin-skinned sociopath bent on revenge against his critics. If all this sounds familiar, it should.

At its core, this election is between one candidate who’s sane and one who is not. There is one candidate with knowledge and experience and one who is delusional and thinks he’s Captain America. The choice is pretty simple.

Even though Millennials think the hippies were ridiculous and their parents are trapped in an analogue world, there is a lesson to be learned here. Don’t take anything for granted. Your side has to get more votes than the snarling, snapping mad dogs on the other side. This includes the “Bernie or Bust” people who are the modern day equivalent of the die-hard McCarthyites, who sat out one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime. Don’t make the same mistake the Boomers made.

Your knowledge is superior to ours on most things. But if  Millennials fail to learn the lesson from this egregious Boomer blunder and decide that taking Facebook “who were you in a past life” quizzes are more important than the ballot box, we could turn around and find a lunatic in the White House.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

Today, as neofascist candidate Donald Trump prepares to accept the Republican nomination, I’m beginning a new series on the Film/TV/Etc blog. Politics And The Movies will run approximately weekly until the election on November 8. I’ll be examining films whose subject or themes are explicitly political in an effort to relate them to the moment where we now find ourselves.

Dustin Hoffman, Penny Fuller, and Robert Redford in All The President’s Men

All The President’s Men was released in the election year of 1976, when Republican Gerald Ford, the only American president to ascend to the office having never received a single vote for either it or the vice presidency, faced Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, a Naval nuclear engineer from Georgia. Ford took office upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate affair, which was uncovered by the reporting of Carl Bernstien and Bob Woodward. One of director Alan J. Pakula’s best touches is the way he uses the constant drum of TV news reports of the 1972 presidential election as a counterpoint to increasingly paranoid plots taking place inside the newsroom of the Washington Post. Although the media environment of the mid-70s seems completely tame compared to the ravages of the 24 hour news cycle, the jarring tonal differences between the upbeat but sober reporting of Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman)’s journalistic cloak and dagger shenanigans struck a chord with the filmgoing audience. Not only was it nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, but it also made an impressive $70 million on an $8 million budget.

All The President’ Men is a story about the inevitable intertwining of politics and media.Watching it today, the first thing that jumps out at you is the complete lack of computers on the desks of the Post newsroom. Our heroes spend much of the film on the phone, including an incredible extended take where Woodward wakes up a White House official in the middle of the night and tricks him into incriminating himself. Redford’s words are controlled and flat, but his body language and subtle facial expressions steadily ramps up the tension. Hoffman is similarly superb, rendering Bernstein as a neurotic ball of energy held together with nicotine and coffee.

The film leans heavily on its ripped from the headlines context. Nixon had only resigned eighteen months before, so events that Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman mention in passing carried much more weight in 1976 than they do 40 years later. But the movie left indelible impressions on film history. The X-Files ripped off its scenes with mysterious informant Deep Throat wholesale, with Mulder frequently meeting his exposition partner Mr. X in shadowed car garages. 2015’s Best Picture winner Spotlight is practically a remake, substituting rapist priests for crooked politicos.

Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.

But I think the greatest contribution to political discourse is it introduction of the term “ratfucker”. Bernstein tracks down Donald Segretti, played by Robert Walden, who was the head of dirty tricks for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Over coffee and cigs, Segretti admits that any underhanded tactic was in play against the hated Democrats, but defends himself by saying that he and his colleagues only did things with “a little wit”.

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

The ratfuckers got fatally caught in the Watergate scandal, but the culture of dirty tricks and demonizing the opposition thrived in the Republican party for decades. From the October Surprise to the Brooks Brothers Riot to Dan Rather’s forged poison pill, ratfucking has been at the heart of right wing electoral success for the last half century. We take it for granted now, but All The President’s Men shows that the amoral, win-at-all-costs philosophy that brought us candidate Donald Trump was once so shocking that it cost a president his job. The film’s commentary on the power of the press to create and destroy leaders rings just as true today is it did in 1976, but its faith in the basic decency of the Fourth Estate and the Americans who follow it seems like a rosy anachronism. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Elvis and Nixon

In the deep recesses of Elvis lore, there is one image that stands out as particularly surreal: Elvis in full 70s regalia shaking hands with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. As the prologue of Elvis and Nixon reminds us, it is by far the most requested image from the National Archive, more popular than the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi or the Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” shot. As the image stares at us from the walls of countless dorm rooms and t shirts, it poses the inscrutable question, “What the hell was going on here?”

Elvis and Nixon meet in December, 1970

Director Liza Johnson tries to answer that question with Elvis and Nixon, with mixed success. One of the best choices from her and a trio of screenwriters (Joey Sagal, Hanna Sagal, and Cary Elews of Princess Bride fame) is beginning with the morning meeting where advisors Egil Keogh (Colin Hanks) and Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters) try to blithely slip in that the President’s nap time will be curtailed in favor of meeting with Mr. Presley. Kevin Spacey, used to playing a president in House Of Cards, absolutely nails Nixon, all hunched shoulders, quivering jowls, and indignation.

When we meet Elvis (Michael Shannon), he’s restless and irritable, trapped in Graceland’s TV room like a panther in a cage. In this telling, it’s the images of the military flailing around in Southeast Asia and the anti-war movement that drive him to seek an audience with the president. No longer a conduit of youthful rebellion, but an early middle aged, wealthy member of the establishment, he’s disturbed by the direction of the country, and thinks the best way he can help is to become an undercover narc. The alternate theory, long entertained by druggies everywhere, that Elvis, buoyed by the finest formulations from Dr. Nick’s pharmacopeia, was pulling Nixon’s leg, is not entertained here.

Kevin Spacey and Michael Shannon star in Elvis and Nixon.

The truth is, the story of this weird picture of two of the most recognizable figures of the twentieth century is pretty thin gruel for a movie. Johnson treats it as a light comedy, which is appropriate, and is at her most interesting when she’s drawing parallels between the isolation and delusions of the President and the King. Both have two henchmen—Elvis’ are Jerry Shilling (Alex Pettyfer) and Sonny West (Johnny Knoxville)—who dictate the exact terms on which anyone can communicate with their boss. The climactic meeting is like watching two silverback gorillas trade dominance displays in the jungle, and it’s pretty fun.

The film’s weak link is Michael Shannon, but it’s not entirely his fault. There have been many attempts to portray Elvis onscreen, with varying degrees of success. For my money, the best was still Kurt Russell in the John Carpenter-directed Elvis TV movie from 1979. Shannon’s not a bad actor, and he gets Elvis’ body language right for the most part. But the voice is all wrong, and the look is just…well, Elvis was one of if not the best looking man of his century and Michael Shannon is not. He suffers especially when put up against Spacey’s uncanny Nixon.

Despite that glaring flaw, Elvis and Nixon is a good view for Memphis audiences and Elvis fans. It’s understatedly, and sometimes surreally, funny, and Johnson has some genuine insights on the isolating nature of fame. But the definitive film document of Elvis remains to be made.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Giving ‘Em Hill

CREDIT: Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Congratulations, Tea Party. You set out to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama and ended up destroying the Republican party.

It’s not that they don’t deserve it. Pick your idiom: “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas;” “Reap what you sow;” “Chickens coming home to roost.” They’re all appropriate descriptions of what happens when a radical fringe takes over an organization that first gave them succor. In this case, the “Freedom Caucus,” the far-right wing of the GOP, made public fools of themselves twice in one week: first, by not being able to choose a leader of their own party; and second, with their grotesque performance at the so-called House Select Committee on Benghazi. The current chaos in the Republican party could be the parting practical joke by former speaker John Boehner, who couldn’t abide the Tea Party in the first place. He appointed the seven obscure, back-bench, malevolent mad dogs to the committee and sent them off to do battle with Hillary Clinton. Big mistake.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy

Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy had been whipping the steeds for months in anticipation of their much-publicized and nationally televised showdown with Hillary Clinton, but only the horses’ asses showed up.

I’m sorry. I know better than to criticize someone’s looks. That’s Trump’s bailiwick. But doesn’t Trey Gowdy look like someone squeezed his head in a vise? The GOP’s feral beasts tore into Secretary Clinton for 11 hours, unprecedented in American history. MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle said if the Benghazi committee had “been in charge of the Watergate hearing, Richard Nixon would have finished his term.”

Speaking of Nixon, Trey Gowdy has captured the crown as the sweatiest politician to appear on television since, well, Nixon. I was hoping an aide would hand him a towel. The attacks on Clinton were so vicious, that this was the first Congressional hearing with a cut man. The seven Republicans took turns releasing their unbridled rage at Clinton and President Obama — or anyone in his administration. Their tormented hysteria, compared to Hillary’s unflappable demeanor, made the secretary look absolutely presidential. This Republican display of “Clinton psychosis” may well have elected her president. Nice one, Boehner.

Although the perpetually damp Gowdy insisted the hearing was not about Hillary, but gathering the facts about Benghazi, nothing new emerged from the previous eight congressional investigations. All along, Clinton has admitted that there was a well-documented security breach and has accepted responsibility for the tragedy. One must only Google “Khobar Towers” to find the moral equivalency. Still, one by one, the frothing mini-mob had to get their licks in and hope for that cable-news moment when they force Hillary to confess to the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens. After all, she had previously murdered Vince Foster.

The “Freedom Caucus” acted like a bunch of frustrated prosecutors grilling a witness. All that was missing from the 11-hour harangue was the cigar smoke and a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I think they forgot that Clinton is a lawyer too. Like Whitewater led to Lewinsky, Benghazi led to emails. You and I both know that nobody emails anymore. The secretary could be reached by secure cable or phone at any time. This 17-month, $4.2 million inquisition was a forum to hurt Hillary Clinton politically and nothing else. Even Gowdy said the hearing produced no new information. Former Nixon aide John Dean said, “It’s really embarrassing what the Republicans have done here.”

In the end, the Benghazi hearings turned out to be a very long commercial for the Clinton campaign. No one likes to see a bunch of angry men screaming at a woman. In the final grueling hour, Hillary began to cough. I thought we were seeing a recreation of the filibuster scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. At long last, Representative Elijah Cummings demanded the hearings come to a close saying, “This is not what America’s about. We’re better than that.”

No, we’re not. The butt-scratchers still think Hillary is part of some shadow conspiracy to overturn the Constitution, confiscate their guns, and make everyone wear black pajamas. I may have to recalibrate my opinion of Hillary. After her debate performance, and now her escaping from that right-wing coven of ghouls unscathed, I think we should start getting used to the phrase “Madame President.” Alabama Congresswoman Martha Roby, after being told that Clinton returned to her Washington home following the Benghazi attacks asked, “Were you alone (at home)?” “I was alone,” Clinton said. “The whole night?” asked the inquisitor. “Well, yes, the whole night,” Clinton laughed, along with all the spectators, proving Hillary would have to get caught with a teenage intern for anything to stop her now.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Remember Earl Butz, the secretary of agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford? I’m sorry, of course you don’t. Ask Pops if he remembers Earl Butz. He was a right-winger who favored corporate farming and campaigned to end New Deal programs during the Nixon era, but he was best known for his crude humor and a string of personal gaffes. Butz was ultimately fired for telling a racist joke in the company of white-bucs-and-mayonnaise singer Pat Boone and White House Counsel John Dean, that was so repugnant, even Nixon couldn’t stand to keep him around anymore.

Before that incident, however, Butz received worldwide attention after an international conference in 1974 where he ridiculed Pope Paul VI’s opposition to birth control by saying in a mock-Italian accent: “He no playa the game, he no maka the rules.”

The White House made him apologize to Catholics for his insensitivity, but he had a point. Why should a secretive group of celibate men determine the reproductive health options for a billion women who serve under their religious leadership? Then again, why should five, male, Catholic justices of the Supreme Court be allowed to make laws concerning women’s birth control issues in the good old USA? And in the 21st century. I thought we had settled this argument in the 1960s. To the male members of the Supreme Court: What Earl Butz said.

In its controversial Hobby Lobby decision, the court decided that a closely held public corporation, like the Green family’s Christian bead and thread racket, had the right to a religious exemption in providing certain methods of birth control to their female employees under the Affordable Care Act. Specifically, the Greens’ “sincerely held religious beliefs” prevented them from allowing the IUD or the morning-after pill to be included in the health coverage for more than 13,000 employees, because they believe that anything that interferes with a fertilized egg’s development is akin to abortion.

Until now, the Supreme Court has never declared a for-profit company as a religious organization for purposes of federal law. But since they already declared that corporations are merely people using money as speech, why shouldn’t they give them a religion too? We could have Sunday services in the foyer of Home Depot and Wednesday Bible study at Chik-fil-A. If a corporation declared a religious objection to child labor laws or immunization programs or serving a mixed-race couple in a public restaurant, would that also be covered by the Hobby Lobby decision?

Hobby Lobby pays insurance premiums to big companies that are supposed to cover all their employees’ health needs. Their objection to two forms of female contraception in the great realm of health concerns is merely picking and choosing just whose religious freedom is being impeded — the boss’ or the employee’s. Shouldn’t something as personal as the morning-after pill be a discussion between a woman and her doctor or pharmacist, rather than between a woman and her employer?

A male corporate officer is now legally permitted to say to a female executive, “You can take birth control pills, but don’t let me catch you with an IUD.” Of course, if contraception were the sole responsibility of men, it would be universally mandated. This absurd decision was less about religious freedom than a bunch of cranky old men having another whack at Obamacare. When you pay your monthly health insurance premium, you have no say as to how that money is spent. I don’t like part of my yearly income taxes going to finance wars, but I still pay them. 

The three female justices fiercely dissented, especially Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote a blistering 35-page dissent, saying that the court had “ventured into a minefield,” and enquiring whether there might also be a “religiously grounded objection to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); anti-depressants (Scientologists); or medications derived from pigs (like) anesthesia and intravenous fluids (Muslims, Jews, and Hindus)?” In the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision, leaders of 14 Christian organizations have written a letter to President Obama demanding religious exemption from a pending executive order that prohibits federal contractors from discriminating against gays in hiring practices. The letter claims, “Without a robust religious exemption this expansion of hiring rights will come at an unreasonable cost to the common good, national unity, and religious freedom.”

Really? What’s next? Who eats at the drug store lunch counter? These 14 Christian groups wish to reserve the right to discriminate against the gay, lesbian, and transgender community, because that’s what Jesus would do?

What has just happened is the Supreme Court has unconstitutionally declared an official state religion, and until a Congress emerges with the courage to confront them, that religion is right-wing, conservative Christianity.