Author: BC

Recently, I was out to dinner with a close friend. We go back to the care-free days of bachelorhood, when worrying about only ourselves was all we cared to contemplate. Thirty years later, he has three kids now out of the house in various states of college or post-college doings. Since his wife was occupied with her buddies, he was freed up for sushi. 

I never lead with the challenges my son  Luke now faces as Autism sabotages his young-adult well being. However, if asked, particularly by a close friend, I will provide a complete picture. Lately, aside from debilitating attacks of anxiety about lost routines he can’t get back, our most frustrating reality is that nobody we can count on is available to stay with Luke should we want to go out together without him. 

My wife, Sue loves nothing more than to attend the weddings of her friends’ offspring. For several years now such invitations have flowed in regularly, and most always Sue goes solo while I stay home with Luke. The daughter of one particular friend is marrying an exceptional young man in August. We have both gotten to know the couple, so it was a wedding I was keen on attending. What to do about Luke? 

The mother of the bride made clear it would be fine for him to attend. I was not enthused. Luke is audible and unconcerned with public strictures on his impulsive commentary. Moreover, he is always the center of attention, exactly wrong for a celebration rightly focused on the newlyweds. Finally, there is little doubt who would be responsible for keeping up with his mania during the reception. No thanks. 

Relating this predicament to Bob, he floored me with one simple sentence. “Why don’t Kim and/or I just come over and hang out with Luke? What’s the date?” It was flabbergasting as it was direct, banal as it was extraordinary. Taken aback, I protested that I wasn’t fishing around for help.  Bob shrugged that he knew that, but nonetheless it seemed like no big deal and he wanted to do it. Bob has always been one of Luke’s favorites; the whole thing couldn’t have made more sense. I accepted his offer and we moved on to the soft shell crab tempura rolls. 

Reflecting on his offer later, I remembered back to a church support group Sue and I attended nearly 20 years ago, when the wound of Luke’s diagnosis was still fresh. This was a mega church, with a head pastor who started an entire ministry for intellectually disabled kids because his daughter is one of them. So the support group was popular, with more than ten couples ruminating weekly about our common trials and tribulations. Most all had children with Autism, some far more affected than others. Even so, there was one sad refrain everyone shared: family and friends were underwhelming in their offers to help. 

“Why can’t my sister understand the crisis I face and offer to come over and help more often? … My best friend has two healthy kids; why won’t she plan more play dates with my son?” … And so forth. Of course, as years passed most of us matured out of the narcissistic notion that our particular challenges dictated that everyone else close to us stop what they were doing and plunge headlong into our circumstances. Those who didn’t develop this understanding often ruined the relationships they needed most, and dealt with even more isolation, more heartbreak. 

Sue and I long ago put to bed most all resentment of family and friends for not stepping up as much as we’d hope. You live long enough, you understand that everybody has full plates and are dancing as fast as they can. Expecting that your hardship should distract them from the hand they’ve been dealt makes helping you more burden than fulfillment. Possessing this understanding makes my buddy Bob’s offer special, and it’s why I am confident that when we return from that wedding, Bob will leave heartened that he was able to provide a genuinely appreciated solid for his friends. Who knows? He may even offer again. 

There is a useful place for this same reasoning in our national confrontation with MAGA nihilism. That embracing Trumpism reveals biases and character flaws seems obvious to those cognizant of its pervasive malevolence. It’s why so many family ties and friendships have frayed badly since 2016. Sadly, even tragically, it’s equally clear that generalized apathy has permitted Fox/AM an open playing field to radicalize millions because they have not faced sufficient blowback that voicing lies and relentless propaganda warrants 

The first of these facts offers few options. Abiding enthusiasm for MAGA does nobody any favors, least of all the enthusiast. But the second situation requires attention, with a premium on patience and empathy; estrangement from those we value most because they don’t agree with us enough is as wrong as it is unnecessary. Moreover, there is little doubt that convincing, rather than alienating those who still have their wits about them, but are to varying degrees more resistant to allowing MAGA’s assault on our governance to distract them from routine, is perhaps the only chance America has to avoid the cataclysm of Trumpist rule. 

All of which circles back to my buddy Bob. Born and raised in Kentucky, he is highly educated, an engineer as mechanically adept as anyone I have known. That said, Bob keeps his politics close to the vest, and his view on things, particularly the federal government’s proper role in our lives, has certainly been influenced by his lineage. Also, he categorizes such civic obligations downward on his list of life’s priorities. 

Several years ago, right about when the Democratic Presidential primary was heating up, we hosted Bob and his wife, Kim, for dinner. Perhaps too much alcohol had been poured, but after a great evening, the discussion turned to politics and things went south. Bernie Sanders appeared to be surging and Bob said matter-of-factly he would have problems voting for a socialist. I sought clarity that, of course, he meant when voting in the primary…he would surely support any Democrat vs. Trump, right? He replied that, no, he wasn’t fully certain of that; he would have to weigh the issues during the general campaign.  His irresolution on the matter stunned me, and I wasn’t having it. Issues?! Really?! Trump is the issue! When the dust had settled, angry words had been exchanged and a fun night was ruined. A very old friendship was in jeopardy. 

Sue was so furious with me she demanded I drive over to their place that night if necessary to make amends. At that moment, after five years of allowing a plethora of friends, acquaintances and even a couple of family members to take a hike out of my life, I understood clearly where the line was and why it must be respected always, without exception. Luckily, Bob answered his phone that evening. I fell completely on my sword and our friendship endured. I’ll be able to fully focus my attention on quality reception finger food come August. 

Our nation’s house is on fire, MAGA arsonists the cause. Whether we can douse the flames will depend on how many can be recruited to man a hose. A sweet spot exists somewhere between condemning their seeming nonchalance and figuring that general apathy is an intractable fact of life. Our democracy’s survival depends on us finding it. One Bob at a time. BC

In his official proclamation of Thanksgiving, 1936, President Roosevelt held forth on American strength and resolve through hard times. Expressing gratitude that “Devine Providence has vouchsafed us wisdom and courage to overcome adversity…,” FDR gave thanks for “free institutions” that held strong through the worst of the Depression “with no abatement of our faith in them.”

Seventy-nine years to the day later, a Washington Post editorial cited FDR’s words to commemorate Thanksgiving, 2015. However, the Post juxtaposed Roosevelt’s observations with a novel that was published just before he offered them, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 classic It Can’t Happen Here, dystopian fiction about America’s embrace of a fascist demagogue and the destruction of its democracy. One year out from the 2016 Presidential election, alarmed by the success of Donald Trump’s primary campaign, the Post sensed civic peril on the horizon and used our national day of thanks to remind its readers not to take for granted that which is most precious to us… free governance. 

Above all else, fascism relies on two things… fear and loathing. The amount of each required to deduce political salvation from Trump’s unhinged monologues is more than enough to, not simply abide, but actually demand atrocities America has been fortunate enough to avoid. 

Much has been made of his recent use of the word “vermin” during rally ramblings. Indeed, the context in which he employs it, as an adjective to describe the endless list of enemies – which the progressive FDR would surely get top billing on –  he plans to persecute given the chance, differs little from Hitler’s application. Fascism is, after all, substantially about dehumanization of those the state consumes.

Yet and still, one needs no Hitlerian catch phrases to recognize Trumpism has grown ever more virulent as the institutions he now pledges to destroy attempt to hold him to account for his crimes. MAGA has morphed into his vehicle for vengeance, an instrument for settling all of the scores his psychopathy can conjure. The message has morphed from grievance to hysteria; everything is existential, the ends justify any means necessary. For his cultists it is now a totalitarian preoccupation; they won’t be satisfied with half measures. Promises made, promises kept. 

As we feast this Thanksgiving, Trump is poised to sew up the GOP Presidential nomination before the primaries even begin, despite refusing to debate his primary opponents. While Nikki Haley and company jostle about Fox/AM talking points, Trump is now devoid of discipline and offers nothing but stream-of-consciousness more apt for pacing an asylum floor than a candidate’s podium. His platform is malice.  Most Republican primary voters seem fine with that. Constructive governance no longer interests them. 

Hannah Arendt, perhaps history’s most insightful authority on the critical elements of totalitarianism, wrote of the necessity to dumb everything down for the mob, literally persecuting “every higher form of intellectual activity.” Trump enjoys few things more. From Anthony Fauci to Joe Biden, “leftist” history professors to climate scientists, stupidity is “common sense.” While few believe Trump actually “follows a playbook” to invigorate his cultists and infuse the totalitarian mob they have become, a natural symmetry between his impulsive sociopathy and the fundamentals fascism requires clearly exists. His vengeance is their guiding light.

Worse, The Heritage Foundation – the same group who sponsored a series of lectures in early 2017 by none other than Newt Gingrich “to fully explain Trumpism” – is sparing no expense to make certain a new Administration will hit the ground running with an “army” of MAGA zealots. Apparently, the far-right non-profit is ready to supply up to “54,000 pre-vetted loyalists” to consolidate Trumpism’s grasp on US Government infrastructure. What will their mandate be? Exactly what Trump is telling us over and over… installing his version of apocalypse now. 

That pin you hear dropping is the entirety of the GOP resistance to Trump’s new level of absurdist malevolence. Abject cowardice does not come anywhere close to describing Susan Collins or John Thune. Nor does soulless self-seeker get close to the mark on Marco Rubio or Glenn Youngkin. Heading into next November, to be a Republican pol means you are either an exuberant fascist, an amoral opportunist or a pathetic yellow belly; nothing else fits.

Thanksgiving is about expressing gratitude for our past so we can be hopeful for our future. That millions believe that is somehow possible if we elevate an openly unhinged fascist demagogue, whose primary agenda includes nothing more than persecuting his enemies, clarifies the crisis we face. Enjoy another serving of stuffing, and some more vino, a year from now it might not taste as good. BC

The gig is officially up, not that anyone paying even cursory attention to the matter didn’t fully conclude as much from the start. But for those distracted or slow on the uptake, Matt Gaetz and the House nihilist caucus were never actually THAT opposed to short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs) as a means to keep the government open. It was not about shutting the door, merely who possessed the keys to lock it down that ever really mattered.

The issue all along was what Kevin McCarthy surely understood it to be, when he accepted the Speaker’s gavel after a 15-round kabuki siege; it was always only a question of when and under what pretext the “motion to vacate” would arise. Turns out, branding desperate bipartisan efforts to keep the government open as a betrayal of “conservative principles” was as good a reason as any, and ended up working out just fine. Now MAGA owns the House Speakership.

Any doubts about the real Trumpist endgame evaporated last week when Gaetz himself told the posse of media constantly at his beck and call he was “open” to whatever “bridge” new MAGA hero Speaker Mike Johnson thinks may be appropriate. Suddenly, continuing resolutions are no longer apostasy, worth stopping America’s entire legislative process in its tracks.

Of course, Gaetz took pains to make clear “I don’t like governing by continuing resolution.” Apparently, the difference between Johnson, who had possessed the gavel less than 48 hours before floating a CR, and his predecessor is that “Kevin McCarthy wanted to govern by continuing resolution to get us to the next continuing resolution.”

Like W Bush gushed after meeting Putin, Gaetz has looked into the new Speaker’s heart and concluded Johnson “has a lot more credibility” that his CRs are in genuine service to the greater good of Freedom Caucus nihilism. Moving forward, expect the Florida “firebrand” to be more of a team player, and to support whatever means Johnson feels are necessary to achieve results sure to satisfy even the most stringent regressive orthodoxy.

Which is all just another way of saying they get no Trumpier than Mike Johnson… and that was the point all along. The entire stable of MAGA show horses – from Gaetz and Jordon, to MTG and Boebert, right on through to the Normans and Goodes etc. – have finally gotten what they were throwing one tantrum after another to achieve, a seditious extremist they can trust.

Make no mistake, in that regard Speaker Johnson checks off every box and then some. Creepy obsession with anything to do about sexuality? Check. Tax cuts as economic panacea? You bet. Not just climate change denial, but conflation of environmental science with dangerous “leftism?” Of course. Anti-abortion fanatic, Covid denier, pro anything with a trigger; it’s not hyperbole to argue Johnson is the most reactionary person in Congress. His scant resume tells the tale.

Worst of all, nobody on Capitol Hill embraced the Big Lie quicker and devoted more energy and resources his office afforded to legitimating its civic poison. If McCarthy was carrying Trump’s water, Johnson was pumping it from the well. Trump had barely spit out his post-election diatribe when Johnson cooed in his ear to “exhaust every available legal remedy to restore Americans’ trust in the fairness of our election system.”

Not two weeks after Election Day, Johnson was out front of cameras, and all in with Sidney Powell’s rigged Hugo Chavez election machine grift. “You know,” intoned Johnson, “the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that. And when the president says the election was rigged, that’s what he’s talking about.” Johnson would eventually lead the run of 126 House Republicans to sign on to Texas vs. Pennsylvania, the nonsensical case the Supreme Court couldn’t reject fast enough.

So what made Johnson so appealing that he was able to unite a hopelessly divided conference? His one asset? Acting like a jerk is not one of his defining traits, which makes him an outlier within the MAGA caucus. He’s actually capable of collegiality. Speak softly, but carry a big bogus amicus brief. Sometimes not being much is enough, so long as you don’t threaten opponents. Johnson was Jim Jordan in every way except for the latter’s ugly demeanor. The 20 “principled” Republicans who opposed Gym and his pressure tactics could live with that.

Johnson has right off the bat moved to confirm nihilist faith. Decoupling a bipartisan military aid package to Israel and Ukraine was unhelpful, but not fully unexpected; Johnson could argue with at least several shards of credibility that it is necessary in order to expedite backing to both nations. However, making aid to our closest allies under siege contingent on MAGA domestic priorities, such as paring IRS funding as a “budget offset,” is the sort of unprecedented outrage that only an OG Trumpist would pursue.

Moreover, with the Congressional Budget Office documenting such cuts will actually INCREASE the federal deficit, nothing is left to the imagination as to motivation. National interest is no match for Hannity talking points and Trump rally items. Determining the chicken or the egg with Johnson is an impossible task. He IS who he claims he must satisfy… a Freedom Caucus freak. Allies losing faith in American leadership doesn’t mean much to one who believes they should be on their own to begin with. Forget Russian aggression, we’ve got a southern border to lock down!

From the start Trumpism has been consumed with one primary task: making its malignancy more palatable. MAGA’s mission has always been about getting American culture and the politics it influences to once again tolerate intolerance, to abide attitudes and behavior that once was deemed disqualifying. Not too long ago, Mike Johnson would have been a nut, too whack for any public office, even in Louisiana. Now he’s a savior, elevated because those whose worldview and political positions he fully shares were permitted to bring the institution of Congress to rock bottom, where anything other than suicide gets embraced as salvation. Another metastasis of the cancer that plagues us. BC

It’s very hard to overstate the ignominy of Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow. Nine months of pointless intrigue and legislative futility came to its inevitable conclusion, sooner rather than later. It now seems fair to conclude McCarthy never had a plan heading into his doomed speakership. From the start he acted as though obtaining the gavel was the end itself, like finally winning the Masters after years of grinding on the PGA tour, a crowning achievement to a career ambition, a purely personal odyssey divorced from any larger calling. When he avoided round 16 it was a conclusion, not a start. Self service instead of public service. 

When McCarthy finally did emerge victorious from last January’s chaos and accepted the gavel, he observed that US governance is “built on checks and balances” and that it was “time to be the check and provide some balance.” In retrospect, that admonition leaves no doubt he fully understood that the nihilists intended only to obstruct and were never going to take yes for an answer. When he accepted their condition that only one of them would be required to call a vote for vacating the chair, anything bipartisan became an existential threat to his job security.

Thus, there were only two roads available to travel. One was the MAGA mire of demonizing Democrats, proceeding on the delusion he enjoyed a 35-seat vote cushion the “Red Wave” never delivered last November instead of the 5-seat micro-majority Republicans actually eked out. The other was Reality Avenue, selling to the GOP rank and file the common sense conclusion his 15-round ordeal confirmed. Reaching across the aisle would be necessary to, not only govern, but develop some minimum level of trust to fall back on when zombie provocateurs like Gaetz inevitably decided to preen for Steve Bannon and call to dismiss him. Otherwise, a tiny subset of malcontents could end things in one vote. The numbers offered no other option. 

It’s now clear the House Speaker followed the first playbook until its certain failure promised either global economic catastrophe (failing to raise the debt ceiling) or domestic political self-emulation (shutting down the government.) He would tell Gaetz, Norman, Luna, Roy, Perry, et al that he was all in with their intransigence and seek to toss them raw meat whenever possible, even if it required mind-boggling hypocrisy and abject  humiliation. Sham impeachment inquiries without a vote and once near-unanimous defense appropriations measures he couldn’t even pass an open debate on, that is McCarthy’s legacy. 

Dan Balz, the elder statesman of Washington political reporters, today wrote in his infuriatingly understated manner that Matt Gaetz embodies “the worst of performative politics, which have come to typify this era.” That’s way too banal an assessment, and only half true… McCarthy is cut from the same cloth as Gaetz; they are two of a kind. As Maryland’s Jaime Raskin, a Democratic leader who has been on the front lines challenging MAGA sedition while undergoing chemotherapy, put it yesterday when asked why Democrats didn’t prop up McCarthy during his hour of need, “I don’t distinguish that sharply between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz.”

This weekend’s political talk shows will feature every take under the sun to explain how we got to this new nadir in our national story. But as with most all tragic sagas, to adequately appreciate the latest development, you have to revisit the beginning. That means recalling one of America’s darkest days, the first Tuesday of November, 2016. 

That trauma will remain a vivid memory until I go into the dirt, that moment I realized Trump would win the Presidency. It was 10:00 PM, well into election night, and Hillary Clinton was struggling in Virginia, a state she was supposed to have clinched before supper was served. Suddenly all of the unsettling signs of the last days leading up to the election coalesced into a shocking realization; if Clinton couldn’t win Virginia, none of the pre-vote metrics had been close to accurate. All bets were off. It was Xanax time.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s Inauguration Day, the media embraced normalization. Those of us who had paid close attention to his campaign hatefests, not to mention his decades-long history of utter shamelessness and dishonor, found it difficult to buy into narratives about the weight of the office and institutional pressure obviating Trump’s ugliness. 

The worst-case scenario, albeit easy to dismiss as a dystopian fever dream, had Trump as both grievous cause and symptom. America would have to survive ceding him the awesome power of the American Presidency, but even if we emerged intact, the forces that impelled his rise could succeed in perpetuating MAGA’s relevance past his time in office. What if a whole new political ecosystem of nihilist bottom feeders emerged to pursue nothing but divisive chaos in the name of whatever narrative Fox/AM was serving up? Worst of all, what if such a sect consumed the GOP with nothing but servitude to Trump as its main priority? How could America possibly survive that? Fever dream indeed. 

Witnessing House Republicans in full self-destruct mode mirrors Trump’s own rabid meltdown these days as he’s slowly but surely held to account for crimes his mutineers fully abetted. Make no mistake, while both cases may offer a certain degree of immediate karmic satisfaction, the danger to America only intensifies when seditionists have their backs to the wall.   House Republicans were fond of saying how their circus to pick a Speaker last January was merely part and parcel of the “messy” process robust democracy sometimes necessitates. Nobody is saying that now. 

The corpse of the McCarthy months now rots on the US Capitol steps. It lays where an insurrection occurred, a national tragedy he spared no effort to whitewash, at the behest of those who ultimately toppled him.

Meanwhile, the country is now left to absorb another unprecedented desecration to its national brand of governance. A brand that once was the envy of the world, but now appears mortally wounded, just another chapter in a cautionary tale of how democracies can perish. BC

The actual wording of the US seditious conspiracy statute is very broad, expansive enough for anyone with the agency and bad faith to abuse it. Back in the early 1950s, alcoholic Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy did just that. Supported at all times by his own personal Iago – a soulless young lawyer named Roy Cohn – McCarthy “weaponized” the law to pander to the country’s worst civic elements and foment anti-communist hysteria. By the time his lies were recognized and his efforts disgraced, the damage his gratuitous bullying caused was extensive and lasting.

The lessons history taught us about McCarthyist persecution were good ones; common sense, really. Foremost was for the public to have more faith in essential government institutions, like the State Department. McCarthyism happened because too many were primed to accept innuendo and rumor, third-hand accounts and stray puzzle pieces to boost a narrative supported more by fear than facts. Another important moral to the Un-American Activities Committee debacle was that bad faith by lawmakers interested only in their own fortunes is far more of a threat to our way of life than the ghosts they tell us to be deathly afraid of.

Ironically, now another craven pol named McCarthy, while running interference for a criminal demagogue, who uses red scare terminology like “witch hunt” to discredit long overdue efforts to prosecute his misdeeds, is mining the depths of similar fear and ignorance to maintain the power he sold his wretched soul to attain. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy no longer leaves anything to the imagination as to whether he, like the orange monster he buoys, is willing to end the game rather than lose it.

However, unlike 70 years ago, when way too many Americans were ready to believe in an imaginary “menace” conjured up by his namesake, this McCarthy provides cover and credibility to genuine sedition, nihilist totalitarianism constantly reinforced and impelled by a multi-media juggernaut that Cold War muckrakers could only have dreamt of. This time around, in the face of an overt MAGA effort to overthrow US democracy, consequential swaths of the body politic simply don’t want to be bothered, and shrug that it’s merely now how Republicans see things.

From the start of the Trump Presidency
the critical question was twofold: would the institutions he was being entrusted to lead succeed in modifying the unprecedented ugliness of his 2016 campaign; and, if not, would he be successful in spawning a political class beholden to him and fully dedicated to normalizing his efforts to demolish the standards he inherited. McCarthy and the House caucus he leads are the ruinous answer to those questions, the priorities it pursues in full lockstep with Trump’s rabid efforts to avoid accountability for past and present transgressions.

That Kevin McCarthy has somehow avoided scrutiny for his part in permeating the Big Lie with the credibility his position enables is mystifying. It gets no more craven than the timeline of the Speaker’s positions since November of 2022.

Not 36 hours after the polls had closed, with millions of votes still to be counted, McCarthy parroted Trump’s lie that the fix was in:

“President Trump won this election so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes. We need to unite together. You don’t need to be a Republican. If you believe in every legal vote needs to count, you believe in the American process, join together and let’s stop this.”

In the immediate aftermath of the failed January 6th coup McCarthy figured Trump was toast. He couldn’t jump ship fast enough, telling a group of Republican leaders – including Liz Cheney – that “I’ve had it with this guy…What he did is unacceptable.” McCarthy assured all that he wanted Trump to resign in disgrace before Inauguration Day. That was until it became clear the GOP base felt very differently, and Fox/AM shifted into “blame Pelosi” mode. With the change in wind direction McCarthy flitted off to Mar-A-Lago, hat in hand, prepared to supplicate over a club sandwich.

Blasted for bending the knee to a disgraced seditionist less than a month after 1/6, McCarthy feigned incredulity and protested he was simply “in the neighborhood” and dropped by to discuss the GOP’s future. “I can talk to anyone… just as I can go talk to Joe Biden if President Biden wants to talk…I don’t quite grasp why we’re now challenging people that they can’t talk to one another.”

However, his official statement after posing with Trump more than hinted on the horse he was now prepared to bet his future relevance on. “Today, President Trump committed to helping elect Republicans in the House and Senate in 2022…For the sake of our country, the radical Democrat agenda must be stopped.” From there the greased slope led to fully opposing impeachment, and then first obstructing the formation of a House Committee to investigate 1/6 before totally disavowing and ceaselessly trying to discredit it.

Since then, McCarthy’s Twitter feed hardly differs from the rest of the MAGA zealots, except his tweets carry the legitimacy of his office. At every opportunity he employs his position in government to erode public confidence in its existence, slandering virtually every agency of note, either to protect Trump from legal accountability or burnish the Republican platform of opposing any effort by the Biden Administration to make the trains run on time.

Constantly repeated MAGA catch phrases – now one and the same with GOP essential messaging – such as “accountability is coming,” “two-tiered justice” and “socialist redistribution of wealth” translate into just what McCarthy meant after he sought Trump’s forgiveness in late January of 2021: the radical Democratic agenda justifies any and all measures, including sedition in the name of a nihilist criminal and his riffraff to destroy.

McCarthy now heads a pack of hyenas, a caucus that demands a willingness to overcome any pang of self-respect and basic human decency as a prerequisite for job security. Anyone who doubted this need only have witnessed the recent censure of Adam Schiff, carried over the finish line by Trump’s Truth Social threat to primary anyone who didn’t support the measure.

Forget “accountability,” a reckoning is coming. Almost 70 years ago, America finally came to its senses and called out McCarthyism for the empty rubbish it was. Its Senate ringleader was appropriately ostracized and rendered irrelevant. Now, the threat of sedition within our borders is very real, and propagated by a House Majority emboldened by a morally vapid Speaker, guided by the same odious objectives his namesake pursued several generations ago. If he doesn’t meet the same fate as his predecessor, democracy in America will. BC

“We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve.”

JFK

Competent democratic governance requires checks and balances between elected officials and their constituents, a tacit understanding that compromise is what allows the system to function so basic needs are met and crises are not self-induced. Good citizens respect the parameters “making the trains run on time” places on the pursuit of more parochial concerns. Conversely, good lawmakers understand that sometimes they have to say no to even their most ardent supporters, while saying yes to the other side of the aisle; this is called leadership.

Ideally, politicians come to office having devoted some thought to the relationship between their role as community leaders and the electorate, whose aspirations toward a range of policy issues they promise to reflect. It is no coincidence that US history holds in the highest esteem politicians willing to swim against the popular currents of their times because realities on the ground forced them to look past expediency.

Lincoln could have been a lot more like his predecessor, James Buchanan, and played down the reckoning that was at his doorstep. He didn’t, and historians generally consider him our greatest President, Buchanan one of our worst. FDR could have catered to the isolationists as Britain stood alone against the Blitzkrieg; most in America would have praised him for it, as Brits had Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich a couple years earlier, freshly inked deal with Hitler in hand. FDR understood what had to be done. FDR’s fifth cousin, macho Teddy Roosevelt, took plenty of heat for his strong support of women’s suffrage. He’s on Mount Rushmore.

The range between pandering and leading is as vast as the gulf between democracy and authoritarianism, or a grass roots activist and a populist within the thrall of a demagogue. Such spectrums are directly related to how vibrant or how wanting our civic process is. An apathetic citizenry, indifferent to its own civic welfare, creates an environment favorable to rank opportunists and their pursuit of callow ambitions very often at odds with the public interest.

The recent debt ceiling drama is the inevitable product of just such circumstances. Held captive by a Lord of the Flies GOP, whose membership is comprised of either those who pander to Fox/AM’s nihilist sedition or those too cowardly to stand against them, our governing process continues its descent into the abyss of MAGA extremism.

It’s important to remember Biden began this saga declaring what was right and essential: raising the debt ceiling and negotiating the budget are two entirely different exercises. One merely facilitates payment of liabilities already accrued, the other creates a plan for incurring future obligations. Any other view accepts the validity of manufacturing a global crisis.

Of course, it takes little imagination to conjure how bad things could become if the world’s leading economy defaults on more than $31 trillion of debt. Even attempting to minimize that scenario deserves the loss of all credence. It’s like contending that we’d still get up and go to work if only Chicago and Miami were nuked.

Yet there we were last week, 72 hours from detonation, the Senate “hoping” to pass the hasty package sent to it by the House. Despite risking an economic apocalypse, the deal contained only modest adjustments to current spending, a sizable share at the expense of the poorest and most marginalized, symbolic cruelty and nothing much else. What about the biggies, the real drivers of our structural spending spree? Defense, entitlements, massive tax cuts passed during full employment for no other reason than to ensure “fantastic numbers” during Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign? Nothing.

GOP debt ceiling brinksmanship has happened before. In 2011, the Tea Party, MAGA’s OG incarnation, took the Obama Administration to a similar cliff, insisting on budget cuts to match the amount of new credit required to pay debt the US had already incurred. The resulting standoff ended when House Speaker John Boehner realized he was dragged into battle by a platoon of Gomer Pyles, nihilist neophytes, ignorant and unconcerned about the massive damage they could cause, and clueless as to what they even wished to achieve.

The Tea Party Caucus of 2011, which was chaired by Michelle Bachman and included Mike Pence, would soon metastasize into a higher stage malignancy, Jim Jordan’s Freedom Caucus. Boehner retired rather than suffer the indignities inherent in supervising Jordan’s ship of fools. Later, in his memoir, Boehner was outspoken in his assessment of Fox/AM House members:

“Most of these guys who poke their heads up in these crises and vote ‘no’ on every compromise and claim they’re doing it all for ‘conservative principles’ don’t actually give a s— about fiscal responsibility…It’s not really about the money. It’s not about principle. It’s about chaos…. The far-right knuckleheads would refuse to back the House leadership no matter what, but because they were “insurgents” they never had the responsibility of trying to actually fix things themselves… So they got to ‘burn it all down.”

Right now, just as when Biden was finally certified in the wee hours of January 6th, or when it became clear the mid-term elections were not going to be a “Red Tsunami,” it’s easy to breath a sigh of relief that we dodged another bullet. Yet and still, at the end of the day, this episode is just another slip down the slope of normalizing MAGA’s relentless sabotage of the nation’s ability to function as a democratic concern. Moving forward it’s business as usual for Republicans to threaten to destroy the existing global order based on the outlandish lie that they have always sought fiscal constraint (Trump’s Republican Party contributed $7.8 trillion in deficits over only four years.) Moreover, the MAGA bloc who impel such insanity will never accept whatever ransom is finally agreed to as adequate to satisfy their demands. That is how nihilists operate.

The reprieve Biden just signed runs out on New Year’s Day, 2025. Expect the issue to be front and center during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Each of the two GOP primary frontrunners – who together account for, oh, about 100% of poll respondent preferences – made clear defaulting on the US debt would lose them not a moment’s slumber. Biden, if his national address is any indication. appears content to limit his messaging on the whole trauma to its happy ending and his boundless faith in bipartisanship. Meanwhile, it’s doubtful most “undecideds” will have strong opinions one way or the other on the entire issue by then. Better pray gas prices are down and Old Joe stays on his feet. The ruin of normalizing nihilist chaos. BC

Since my son’s mighty struggle with the anxious vagaries of adult autism began, Mother’s Day in our household has become a simple and straightforward affair.  Forget a lavish family outing to some expensive bistro. Counterproductive nonsense. What my wife needs and appreciates most is respite, a few uninterrupted hours of solitude to do whatever she wishes. Lord knows she deserves it. 

And so this weekend my plan was to provide at least two blocks of quality respite, each several hours long. On Saturday afternoon I took Luke with me to see a buddy of mine over in Maryland. Between a traffic-impinged drive across the beltway, the leisurely visit in his basement recreation area, complete with pool and ping pong, and a stop at our favorite Italian spot in Bethesda on the way home to pick up Sue’s beloved fried zucchini and eggplant parmigiana, four hours of solitary bliss was provided. 

Sunday morning I usually take Luke to his hockey practice in Arlington. Since he loves Silver Diner, I decided to include breakfast at its recently opened location right down the way from Kettler Ice Rink, where the “Cool Cats” go through their paces. This itinerary would yield Sue another three hours of quality morning-paper, coffee-enhanced relaxation. 

The only potential fly in the ointment was the brunch throngs certain to converge for the occasion. Luckily, despite maximum capacity and a substantial wait for booths and tables throughout a large dining area with its impressively high ceilings, the marble counter directly in front of the kitchen had a couple of stools available to whoever claimed them. With little need to review menu options I quickly ordered Luke’s usual eggs, sausage, bacon and home fries platter, while I got a side of whole wheat toast to have with the two over easy eggs he would not want. 

With our order placed and the prompt arrival of Luke’s hot “rosy tea,” we had time on our hands. My son is anything but a conversationalist, so my gaze strayed to the area known in industry parlance as “the pass” where all food servers converge to pick up their orders, delivered by the kitchen and dispatched by the MVP of any high-volume restaurant operation, the expeditor. Without a quality expeditor there exists only state-of-nature chaos where standards suffer. Organization is near non-existent, food sits unattended getting cold, mistakes go unnoticed, and general bedlam ensues as servers fight to claim platters others refuse to yield. It is not hyperbole to say a popular eatery is only as good as its expeditor. 

It’s hard to imagine one better than the woman calling the shots during our visit. Small, attractive, perhaps in her late-20s or early-30s, and like almost every other member of the restaurant’s busy staff, Hispanic, she was the poetry of excellence, unquestioned expertise in motion, fully in charge of her domain. Cheerful but authoritative, graceful but bluntly efficient, she was a constant blur of multi-tasking. Any server shying away from running others’ food she promptly enlisted, her stature more than enough to compel cooperation. 

No order the proficient kitchen staff produced escaped her focus, any mistake guaranteeing a terse rejoinder in Spanish while she garnished the other plates to be sent out. At that moment it was hard to imagine anyone, anywhere doing their job better. Likely a mother herself, there she was, tirelessly working for one, two, perhaps even three generations of other mothers who dotted the dining room’s tables and booths as their grateful families feted them. I wanted to get her name, but tarried until Luke was ready to go; and when he’s ready, he goes. I’ll call her “Isabelle.”

One thing is as certain as me never again requiring a comb; the shiny, brand new and -judging by its overflow Mother’s Day customer head count – successful Arlington, VA Silver Diner would never have opened its doors if it relied solely on a “White American” workforce. By my count there was all of one caucasian worker during what was sure to be the week’s busiest shift… a stern older waitress, who brought to mind the image of hardscrabble diners past, a solitary Flo among Angelinas and Eduardos. Diversity was not this Silver Diner’s strength; it was its very existence. 

Mother’s Day in the US dates back to before the 20th century. There seems nothing more American than able, hard working men and women, without fanfare, doing their best to facilitate a celebration for mothers to enjoy. Conversely, nothing is uglier and more inimical to how this nation brands itself and defines its exceptionalism by than ignoring such qualities to condemn people because they are different and you’ve decided to stamp them with the idiotic excuse they might be “illegal.” 

Today America is divided between those who appreciate the former without qualification, and those who embrace the latter because Fox/AM and the first President it got elected disdained such qualities to the point they have become nothing more than components of their hateful intolerance template. 

MAGA nihilism is the refusal to accept that the Post-War II world WE were the principle architect of is interdependent and dynamic. Nations who cut themselves off to go it alone only suffer and fall behind. Countries can no longer afford to inhibit heterogeneity if they are to compete effectively. The stone cold fact is that America needs every Isabelle it can get. Any political party whose members’ ambitions rely on the detestable zero-sum lie that her “American dream” comes at the expense of more “genuine” or deserving recipients is an existential threat to which little said or done in confronting it is an overreaction. 

As we barrel toward 2024 with a Republican Party consumed by Trumpist bigotry, and with nothing to offer but its creator as the favorite to once again relentlessly incite disunion under its banner, here is an important question to consider: is MAGA xenophobic nihilism the last gasp of a dying generation, whose children will abandon and move past as it goes into the dirt; or is it a lasting legacy of mothers and grandmothers who abided and embraced the hatred of men and passed it on to their offspring? We are all our mother’s children. BC

“When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.” 

Newton Minow

It would be hard to overstate the influence Newton Minow had on how America was informed in the television age before cable’s limitless expansion of boob tube options. Fully committed to the idea that control of information conveyed from a platform that reached millions bestowed an awesome responsibility to serve the public interest and ensure truth is protected, Minow left a determinative mark on US communication policy.

Beginning when he took over the chairmanship of the Federal Communications Commission in 1961 as one of JFK’s “best and brightest,” Minow spent a career making sure the power of news and information remained a neutral commodity in service to the common goals of the democratic process. Everything from League of Women Voter Presidential debates to the existence of Sesame Street, indeed PBS itself, owes to Minow’s personal mission statement that democratic government bore an onus of preventing television from becoming what he labeled a “vast wasteland”. Minow understood before anyone else how dangerous information for profit was, and throughout his career he fought to build a wall between news and entertainment. To know and understand Newton Minow is to see clearly the fatal missteps America has taken and how far we have allowed his worst fears to be realized. 

Few entrusted to serve  as elected US officials have uttered more public stupidity than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Elected to Congress in 2020 by voters in a Georgia district who, as Lincoln Project cofounder Steve Schmidt very charitably puts it, aren’t “pulling their weight” as citizens, Greene decided from the outset her victory was a mandate for 24/7 Twitter activity.

Cursed with an inability to process initial brain impulses before presenting them as communication, Greene ruminates for public consumption as she breathes, literally more as a function of the anatomical nervous system than any organized thought patterns. An OG QAnon conspiracist, Greene traffics in everything ranging from the ridiculously inane – Hunter Biden as a sex trafficker – to cruel cowardice – stochastic terrorism toward the LBGT community – to overt sedition with one fictitious diatribe after another in service to Trump’s cult of the Big Lie and the actual rioters who attacked democracy on 1/6. While Democrats held sway in the House Greene was rightly sanctioned and marginalized on the Hill for her constant unhinged stream of consciousness. However, the GOP leadership not only abided her, but courted her, promising relevance when control shifted their way. 

In October of last year Fox’s media shill Howard Kurtz penned a column about how MTG had “positioned herself” to become a “power player” when Republicans took control of the House the following month. He pulled out all the stops gushing about the relevancy coming Greene’s way. 

Her Twitter gibberish became “blistering attacks on the Democrats,” responsible for Greene’s success in “building a national brand by becoming one of the party’s most controversial voices.” Of course, Kurtz dipped his ladle into the false equivalence well and likened Democrat Alexandra Ocasio Cortez to Greene, citing “similar groundless statements” that he failed to provide any example of. Finally, he proclaimed Greene’s own assessment of how her stature was set to skyrocket in return for support of Kevin McCarthy as money in the bank her stardom was nigh.

“…he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway. And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it” 

Indeed, nearly six months after McCarthy received the gavel in round 15, Greene is in fact far closer to the inner circle of House Republican leadership than the back benches of the chamber, despite frequent episodes of erratic behavior. With the catastrophe of debt default now seemingly a GOP priority, Greene just last week tweeted her feelings about reaching across the aisle: 

“We need to remember exactly who the Democrats are.

They would have loved to put all of us in jail.

They want to fundamentally change America.

Republicans should never forget the enemy we are dealing with. You can’t work with Communists.”

How did we reach this nadir in our governance? How could someone so wretched actually be re-elected to Congress? In the early 80s a similar incarnation may have harassed you in the airport for money, part of Lyndon LaRouche’s band of bizarre cultists. In the late 60s she may have found her way to Spahn Ranch in California and joined Charles Manson’s band of odious followers. Back then the US media landscape was shepherded by Newton Minow or Katherine Graham and Ben Bradley of the Washington Post, or Walter Cronkite – responsible people guided by a set of institutional standards. In that world she would have stayed where she rightly belonged… on the farthest fringes of American society, irrelevant to any but her fellow freaks, part of the affordable cost a free society pays for freedom. 

But that was before TV talk show producer turned GOP political operative Roger Ailes convinced an Australian multi-millionaire named Rupert Murdoch that a vast wasteland of US white grievance and resentment did exist, a “silent majority” of everyday Ozzie and Harrietts, many of whom grew up equally beholden to the stars and bars of the Confederacy as to Old Glory. From coast to coast, Ailes contended, millions chafed at the bit as they quietly endured the indignity of social and cultural progress they despised. The money to be made validating, even ennobling, their intolerance was uncountable. And so a “fair and balanced” information for profit operation was born. 

Ailes wasn’t the only one who recognized the opportunities this bloc of malcontents afforded. Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, a Midwest blowhard from a wealthy and deep-rooted Missouri family, who dropped out of college – according to his mother, “he just flunked everything… he was only interested in radio” – to become a DJ, was convinced there was an audience for his far-right monologues. 

Limbaugh began his “talk” format in 1984. What that actually meant until his death last year was that he did most all of the talking. From the start, his show’s content never changed, a relentless rehashing of themes meant mostly to vilify those responsible for “political correctness,” a label he has from the start conflated with a progressive “elite” and its sinister agenda to rain tyranny and persecution on the US heartland. Meanwhile, throughout the decades, Limbaugh would pioneer and perfect the art of manipulating his studio resources to make certain those who called in with opposing views never stood a chance. 

In 1987 he was given the “keys to the kingdom” when the FCC abolished perhaps one of Newton Minow’s most important legacies… the fairness doctrine. This now permitted AM radio stations, eager to reconfigure their profitability models around Limbaugh’s format, to air opinion without offering opposing viewpoints. Limbaugh would go to his grave lauding Ronald Reagan for, as one editorialist put it: “tearing down this wall” and freeing him “from the East Germany of liberal media domination.” 

Since then a devastating 24/7 symmetry has developed between daily right-wing AM radio extremists like Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Fox News, who long ago decided to do away with any pretense of separation between its audience and theirs, employing the very same provocateurs as nightly “news personalities.” 

It’s true Fox has always had a real news division comprised of genuine journalists obliged to actually report the news. However, as emails between Fox News executives and prime time lineup propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, Hannity and Laura Ingraham – made public as part of the discovery process during Dominion Voting Systems’ massive liability action against Fox – clarify, the network has never had much patience for facts that compromise audience share. The unearthed emails lay bare what anyone paying attention recognizes, that the news division’s principle purpose has long been to provide cover and credibility to the constant deluge of nihilist resentment its wretched core consumers demand. 

Fox/AM is now a multi-media colossus, stomping its massive footprint throughout the internet while subjugating one of America’s major political parties to its beck and call. While the gist of its grievance  narrative has never really changed, Fox’s inability to control the megalomania of the first President it created has forced it to cater to a cult of personality most of its audience are enraptured by.

Moreover, after decades of being the only game in town, Fox now faces competition from Newsmax and OAN, networks with no qualms about being unapologetic depots of Trumpist propaganda and conspiracy conjecture. Thus, the political class of MAGA nihilists enjoys unconditional Fox/AM credence. Creator or creation? Egg or chicken? It hardly matters at this point. 

Newton Minow died last week at the age of 97. He was one of the final remnants of a cadre of public servants energized by the common good emerging technology could foster, yet cognizant of the damage its power was capable of wrecking if allowed to be deployed by the unscrupulous. He did his best to protect us from ourselves. Nobody who watches Marjorie Taylor Greene earn her 164K salary can feel he succeeded. The price of freedom has become very difficult to afford. BC

It’s certain few were more born and raised with a silver spoon than Harlan Rogers Crow. Sired in 1949 by Texas real estate magnet, Trammel Crow, young Harlan was the heir apparent to the Crow family wealth by the time he “began his career” as an industrial leasing agent in 1974. By 1988 he was CEO of Crow Holdings, by all accounts critical to steering the company through convulsions caused by a crash of market values. The firm emerged from the rubble bruised but intact, a giant in the real estate investment industry. 

At its zenith Crow interests totaled nearly 300,000,000 square feet (28,000,000 m2) of developed real estate, comprising eight thousand properties in more than one hundred cities. “America’s landlord” is how the Wall Street Journal once summed up the company’s massive reach. 

Harlan Crow has never been shy about pressing his financial position through civic intercourse. In 2009 Dallas city officials proposed a publicly-funded hotel to invigorate the city’s underused convention center. Crow, who wanted the initiative pursued within private sector parameters he could dominate and profit from, launched a multi-million dollar campaign to block the project. While Crow refused to be interviewed or make any public comments about the issue, other than his belief “they’re making a big mistake,” nobody doubted who was writing the checks. 

Since then Crow has only become more generous on the down-low when the cause is enhancing his own business prospects… or big picture rightist efforts to influence America’s political and judicial process. Whether it be 501-C4 organizations or public servants, Crow won’t hesitate to turn on the dark money spigot. And apparently, few have personally received more from Crow’s munificence then Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and wife Ginni. 

Thomas is no stranger to the kinds of problems personal character flaws can create. But even back in 1991, before Anita Hill credibly told her sordid recollection of Thomas’ sexual harassment, his response to questions asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee abjectly failed to inspire confidence that his feet were anywhere near big enough to fill Thurgood Marshall’s shoes. The irony then that the GOP was never going to rethink its vetting of Mr. Black anti-affirmative action, no matter how flawed a pick he turned out to be, matches the pathetic certainty Republicans won’t blink at their token’s overt corruption now. 

For more than 30 years Thomas has mailed it in at SCOTUS, first as a docile “protege” of Antonin Scalia, and now as a shrill cheerleader for demolishing precedent in favor of Fox/AM culture war extremism. From the start his vote was as predictable as an August afternoon thunderstorm in DC. Now, a slew of revelations concerning the graft he gladly accepted from Crow fill in the missing puzzle pieces. Not just intellectually dormant. Not just a self-loathing rightist zealot. A genuine corrupt toady, in it to skim it. 

Whatever his position on whatever case, it’s bought and paid for. Crow-sponsored Indonesia extravaganzas, complete with private jets and $4000 bottles of wine provide a more than reasonable basis to draw such a conclusion. Add to that actual cash purchases of family real estate, not to mention cushy six-figure salaries for the wife to drone on about the menace progressives pose, and it becomes nearly impossible to label it anything else. 

Of course, it is a harrowing notion that one of America’s major political parties is not only no longer willing to accept the democratic process, but fully enthused to subvert it. That’s a situation worth losing plenty of sleep over. However, most Americans prefer other distractions to disrupt their REM, and “partisan politics” has always been low on our list of daily priorities. 

Thomas, whose wife is a documented seditionist, incessantly texting Mark Meadows on January 6th in a MAGA-crazed frenzy to thwart Biden’s inauguration, provides the most accurate barometer yet for measuring just how subversive the GOP has become. Not only will they ignore any and all discoveries of how compromised he is; they will do whatever it takes to keep his robe on. Nothing new, no matter how much it smells, is going to make a difference; it’s 6-3 and it’s going to stay that way. 

Were one assigned the task of compiling a list of priorities a sworn enemy of America could pursue it would have trouble keeping up with the current House Republican agenda. Force the US to default on its debt? Check. Block any efforts to address climate change, even as it wrecks coast-to-coast havoc? Check. Actually push for permitless concealed carry, and assault weapon accoutrements in the face of daily mass shootings that numb the nation. Check. Terrorize the LGBT community, discredit police brutality victims, relentlessly incite seditious nullification of federal mandates, defund whoever seeks to hold Trump accountable, and on and on.  

What the ugly revelations about Thomas add is clarity about how far back the rot goes, and how inadequate our institutions have always been to police recalcitrant offenders higher up the food chain. Once again we are learning the hard way that reliance on some bare minimum of good faith and a sense of shame no longer cuts it when one of our major political parties is bereft of both and proud of it. Leave it to John Roberts to police his own… uh, yea, sure thing. Thomas is simply what he has always been… as bad as we figured and smug as he can be, protected by enemies of our republic he calls friends. BC

When a jury deadlocked recently over giving a death sentence to Nickolas Cruz, the 2018 mass murderer of 17 people at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, it sparked widespread outrage. Though Cruz was barely of age when he carried out his atrocity, and suffered significant mental impairment, in large part the result of substantial childhood trauma, nobody, from the victims’ families – whose aggrieved victim statements before his sentencing made clear anything less than death only rubbed salt into their wounds – to MAGA state politicos always on the come to pander to anger, was at all interested in “mitigating circumstances.” Although the judge made clear Cruz would never sniff the possibility of parole, it did little to abate the visceral ire most felt about him cheating the needle.

There are precious few things America seems capable of reaching bipartisan consensus about; sadly, a common lust for conflating revenge with justice is one of those outliers. Indeed, polls confirm, particularly when taken after episodes like the Parkland massacre, a wide cross-section of Americans seem willing to diminish the human element within the process if it guarantees the likes of Nickolas Cruz will get what’s coming to them.

How a country connects crime and punishment speaks volumes about the depth of substance within its civic discussions. A society fixated on making trespassers suffer as the guiding staple of its penal sensibilities betrays more than just a failure to discipline its approach to essential public policy, it also underlines an injurious lack of collective empathy that will surely leach into other important segments of national life.

More than 60 percent of us favor the death penalty for convicted murderers. That majority has remained solid and unwavering throughout the last half-century despite fairly incredible advancement in forensic science, which has produced many irrefutable discoveries when applied to critical pieces of physical evidence that had previously resulted in the conviction of defendants sentenced to death row.

Of course, the death penalty issue is as complex as it is emotional, as nuanced as it is visceral. On the one side are the innocent victims of unspeakable crimes, often children who suffered through their final moments of life at the hands of depraved beasts. In many of the most egregious cases the state presents incontrovertible proof, well beyond a reasonable doubt. Often, the defendant admits freely his guilt and shows little remorse for what happened, actually leading investigators to where bodies are buried.

That such monsters should not be erased from existence and actually fed and housed on the taxpayer dime for the rest of their lives is very difficult to accept when presented within the vacuum of each isolated case. Indeed, in that context, one can argue that the victims’ basic rights are being violated if the perpetrator receives anything other than the maximum sanction. Moreover, from a broader societal perspective, it assaults the senses to think a child molesting killer should be afforded anywhere from 15k to over 60K per year of state-supported sustenance for the rest of his life. If every episode were so open and shut, things would be much simpler.

Alas, that’s not the case. On the other side of the issue is a judicial system we know is, not simply imperfect, but often patently unjust. In fact, with the advancement of criminal science, applied effectively by pro bono organizations such as the Innocence Project in service to death row inmates convicted under questionable circumstances, it’s clear, as men who spent years on death row are freed, a sizable number of innocent convicts currently face execution. Far worse, it is equally certain, as previously closed cases are examined, that a growing list of men the state executed were innocent of the crimes they were condemned for. The cherry on top is the circle-the-wagons mentality many prosecutors and relevant officials exhibit when presented with the truth. Time and again, rather than own up to the grievous injustice it caused, the court system will dig in its heels and refuse to right the wrong.

So the question, absent any demonstration of the national will necessary to create a responsive death penalty appeals process that shields its participants from politics, really boils down to… do the ends justify the means? Is our desire to make the worst of us pay what we believe they owe for their crimes worth the collateral damage of innocent men falling through the cracks? Do you have more trouble sleeping knowing a vile murderer is in a cell instead of the dirt, or that a penniless kid with an IQ of 70 was railroaded by the state he never stood a chance against?

The former sensibility seems far more prevalent, particularly in Florida, which leads the nation in the number of convicts exonerated while on death row. Governor Ron DeSantis, a MAGA prototype most mentioned as the heir apparent to gain the Trump base’s cultish allegiance, just won re-election in a landslide. It’s certain he spends no time considering the specter of innocent men strapped in for lethal injections when coming up with his policy priorities. Couple that with the public disdain for Cruz’s sentence, and it’s a license for the GOP-dominated state legislature to pander. Such ugly synergy promises to provide a torrent of bills designed only to add “mandatory” to as many sentencing guidelines as possible. If a jury can’t be relied on, exclude them from the process.

Almost all of the world’s democracies have distinguished themselves from dictators by banning the death penalty. The US is not one of them. In fact, we are the only western democracy still employing it. Moreover, one of our major political parties appears hellbent to expand its reach. Of course, it’s common knowledge Trump’s death penalty inclinations are of the Saudi Arabian variety, but when his 2024 challengers gather on the debate stage you can bet they will be arguing about who doesn’t love capital punishment enough.

No surprise there. Underneath, the GOP understands its 24/7 gun lobby servitude makes it fully complicit in America’s bloodbath, MAGA zealotry aside. Any distraction that concentrates the blame somewhere else while inviting another issue that actually enjoys popular support is a godsend.

Yet and still, perhaps the most depressing reality is that so many otherwise sensible Americans allow the rage produced by the worst crimes to addle their perspective about what is and isn’t true injustice, not to mention what societal progress should look like. Commuting death sentences has always been more about profiles in courage than good politics. These days we are having way too much trouble recognizing either. Another important civic barometer that’s moving backwards. BC