While lunching with Charlie Leck, who first inspired me to blog 15 years ago, I committed to returning to this site to ponder on the prairie. As I told Charlie, I gave up regular writing because it felt like I was coming across like little more than an angry old man. The shoe fit; I chose to wear it in private.
We are, however, at a point in our history where my, and your, silence in the face of concerted efforts to undermine the rule of law and our democratic institutions cannot be justified. This country is sliding towards fascism, where politicians are recognizing that minority viewpoints can rule the day if enough effort is put into castigating and silencing truth tellers by engaging in scapegoating, fear-mongering, and lying.
No where is this more evident than the GOP response to the 37 count indictment of Donald Trump for alleged violations of the Espionage Act. In the face of a detailed description of various illegal conduct, corroborated by the testimony of Trump's attorneys, photographs, and tape of Trump acknowledging an awareness of the wrongfulness of his actions, GOP lawmakers are railing against a "weaponized Justice Department" and calling for shutting down the investigation and the trial of Trump and the defunding of the FBI.
Having long abandoned any sense of irony, these defenders of an allegedly treasonous former president "forget" their calls to "lock her up" in response to Hilary Clinton's use of a private server for government business. Then, the GOP were experts in the law of safeguarding government secrets, regularly spinning horrific hypotheticals about the consequences of a foreign government accessing Clinton's secure server. Eight years later, Trump's storage of the country's most critical Defense secrets in banker boxes in publicly accessible locations in Mar-a-Lago, and Trump's actual sharing of Top Secret documents, as evidenced in authorized tape recordings, is a "Democratic hatchet job".
Also lost in the GOP angst is that their cult leader could have saved himself by merely responding as Mike Pence and Joe Biden did when government documents were found under their control. Just return the documents. There would have been no stomach to pursue the matter further. Rather, as described in the indictment in reliance on Trump employees' testimony, Trump engaged in a series of efforts to retain the documents, hide the documents, and, unsuccessfully, destroy the documents in order to avoid their discovery during ongoing investigations.
Reports I've read suggest that Trump retained the documents because he won't accept that he is no longer the president of the United States. I am not so quick to dismiss the possibility that Trump's behavior was based on a belief that the documents in his possession might be monetized. That is more in keeping with his history and, coupled with his string of surviving a long series of crises by whipping his adoring public into a frenzy to the point that applying normal standards, like examining documents and taking witness testimony, is politically inexpedient, a calculated risk for Trump.
It's clear that truth is not an obstacle for Trump and that getting 40% of the U.S. population to believe that the sky is green has served him well. But there is no excuse for those seeking to lead this nation after 2024 to repeat what they know to be falsehoods rather than speak truth to the cult.
The investigations of Trump are not witch hunts. Rather, they've resulted in the successful prosecution of several witches. Trump is being investigated by the Justice Department for Espionage Act violations and fomenting an insurrection against the United States of America because Trump engaged in conduct so egregious that to not pursue the investigations would undermine our criminal justice system. Trump is being investigated by the State of Georgia for election interference in 2020 because his recorded phone call evidences unlawful pressure on elected officials and criminal intent. Trump is being investigated by the State of New York because he falsified business records and took illegitimate tax deductions and got caught.
GOP politicians know all this but rather than call it out for what it is, legitimate enforcement of Federal and State criminal codes, they go along with the subterfuges and, justifying the ends, engage in means that rival the crowd control successes of Nazi Germany. I was castigated in 2015 on social media when I pointed out that Trump's campaign, based on scapegoating immigrants and Muslims and repeating falsehoods vigorously on a regular basis until accepted as fact, was taken right out of Joseph Goebbels' playbook. I knew I was right in 2015; I'm not surprised that the technique was woven into Trump's governing when it bore such fruit from the outset.
According to Wikipedia, a "big lie" (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth, used especially as a propaganda technique. The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his book Mein Kampf (1925), to describe the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Sound familiar?
Enough already. It's time, way past time, for our elected politicians, would be elected politicians, media moguls and talking heads, and blog and podcast purveyors to recognize that truth, justice, and the American way is not just a slogan for a super hero in the Fifties. The pursuit of truth and justice has been a bedrock of our democracy and sacrificing both for perceived electoral success brings high, unthinkable costs. I'm willing to give Trump the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, though it takes much restraint to do so. Trump's GOP sycophants show no such restraint when they seek to burn down the criminal justice system because their idol faces a trial where facts, not politics, will decide the outcome.
