"What goes up must come downSpinnin' wheel got to go 'roundTalkin' 'bout your troubles it's a cryin' sinRide a painted pony let the spinnin' wheel spin. . .Did you find the directing sign on theStraight and narrow highway?"David Clayton-Thomas, of Blood, Sweat and Tears, 1968
There is a lot of reflecting going on among people in my age cohort. It's deja vu all over again.
People old enough to collect Social Security remember campus unrest of the late 1960s and see today with that memory in mind. There was the "just cause," in the form of opposition to the bombing of civilians; we heard opposition voices saying the bombing was necessary; we faulted university "complicity" with national policy; we witnessed police action that some people considered overdue and others considered excessive.
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| Mass Meeting at Harvard Stadium, April, 1969 |
Nixon conspired with his top officials to cover up an election crime -- his team bugged the Democratic National Committee headquarters. A trusted lawyer, John Dean, spilled the beans, and there was a record of the crime, the White House tapes. Now we have Michael Cohen and the signed checks listed as tax-deductible legal expenses. Trump knows better than to tape record himself or to have email evidence, but he slipped up with hush money checks.
Now, as during the Watergate mess, critics say that the actual criminal act was a tiny one. Nixon just told a little fib when he told the FBI to drop the investigation, claiming it was a secret national security matter being handled by the CIA. That fib was obstruction of justice. Republicans back then took that seriously; I think because Nixon himself took it seriously. Nixon was ashamed. He knew it was corrupt and he knew being corrupt was morally wrong. Republican senators picked up on his sense of guilt.
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| John Dean, 1973 |
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| Michael Cohen testifies |
Trump knows full well it was corrupt -- after all, he signed checks valued at over $400,000 to make a net payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels: an expensive way to keep a crime secret. Trump is sticking to his story, that he didn't know Stormy Daniels, that he did nothing wrong. Trump isn't ashamed. He was taking care of number one and that is what people tough enough to be president do. If Trump isn't ashamed, it must not be wrong. Republican senators are sticking with Trump, saying Trump did nothing wrong, so therefore prosecuting wrongdoing is the real crime.
The wheel spins, and we see events today through eyes that saw the world 50 years prior. I learned 50 years ago that disruptive protests are counterproductive short-term but they do change policy, as becomes apparent in two or three decades. I won't be alive to see that. Maybe there will be peace in the Middle East when everyone alive today is long dead.
I learned the lesson 50 years ago that politicians who cheat to win an election get caught and shamed for it. That expectation causes my disappointment with the current generation of Republicans. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie are on the outs, no longer in good standing. Now Republicans tolerate anything their leader does. People who think Trump is wrong are quiet about it, or maybe they agree with Trump. Local politicians place their field signs next to Trump's.
This is the new normal. Young people are watching. In 30 and 40 years they will be in charge of things.
27 comments:
Young voters are unhappy with both parties. They missed out voting for Obama. Biden doesn't thrill. They may stay home and enable Republicans.
The irony is that if they do they are deciding all our futures...and their own.
In 1968 there was less difference between the parties and it enabled a toxic status quo. That was the fork in the road. Democrats embraced civil rights, women's rights and gay rights and a more just tolerant society.
Republicans turned right on a path that has sent them back to 1864.
“At the time, and again, I observe that the protests are backfiring politically. A silent majority of people look at college students as naive and privileged. People who think their cause is pretty good, or even very good, question their tactics.”
Yes. How unseemly of those students to make a scene over people being massacred with weapons we donated to the cause! They seem to think Palestinians also have a right to exist. Isn’t that antisemitic?
I think the other difference between then and now is Trump has successfully redefined or at least harnessed a different national moral compass- especially the religious right. Shamelessness is his brand.
It's hero worship.
Nixon didn't try to appeal to the average voter while TFG has conned the average voter into thinking he has their back (he doesn't care about them).
Mike I don’t disagree, but I also wonder where the moral outrage is for other systems where our collective moral culpability on global human suffering is given a hall pass? Cheap Chinese fashion from unethical (child and slave) factory labor and environmental practices, Cartel-backed produce where farmers are essentially imprisoned and worse (avocados anyone?). Where’s the collective action of students to demand for example, their parents’ portfolios only contain ethical securities? Even they didn’t produce returns sufficient to fund their education? We live in an insanely interconnected world where nearly every choice we make has at least some negative ripples that turn into destructive tsunamis of evil that harm people.
A stand up real criminal doesn’t feel or express shame.
John C:
It isn't a moral compass. It's an amoral compass with no guiding principle but lust for money and power.
A case about paying off a porn star to (at least in public) keep her mouth shut is very different from sending burglars to break into the opposing party’s headquarters. No one cares about Trump and the porn star, except for Democratic Party partisans desperate for anything, however irrelevant, they can throw at Trump. Alvin Bragg, the DA who brought those charges, is an incompetent hack who will most likely end up having hurt Biden‘s chances to be reelected.
The college protests have tipped all the way over from being against high levels of civilian casualties to being entirely pro-Hamas. They chant “from the river to the sea“ without having any clue about which river or which sea, or that the true meaning of that phrase is the eradication of any Jewish presence in that area. They chant about “globalizing the intifada”, clueless that the most recent intifada was a string of 140 terrorist suicide bombings that targeted Israeli buses, cafés, and pizzerias. (That intifada, by the way, was the Palestinian response after they rejected an offer by Israel for a two state solution.) They hold up signs pointing out Jewish victims that they hope will be the next victims of Hamas terrorists. They scream “go back to Poland“ at Jewish students.
In his wildest dreams, Vladimir Lenin could not have imagined the depths of idiocy demonstrated by this current generation of campus “useful idiots“.
"They chant" "They chant." "They hold up signs" "They scream."
Somebody did all those things and worse.
In Israel, some Jews called for the extermination of Palestinians. Some Jews read aloud and believe to be holy passages from the Torah where God demands putting to the sword non-Jew,( man, woman, child, infant, and even the livestock) that inhabited the land God gave to them and only them. It is a sin to share it, the Jewish God commanded. Some Jews have said terrible things, including God as revealed in the the holiest of books.
I don't attributer to Israeli Jews the criminal and cruel words of the most extreme statements coming out of Israel, nor the most bloodthirsty things written in the Jewish Holy Books. To do that is unfair. It is catastrophizing. It justifies continued criminality and cruelty.
There are some very bad financial advisors, some very bad politicians, some very bad bloggers, some very bad college professors, even some very bad Democrats. I don't want to to be conflated into groups and be judged by the worst example of the group.
Peter would be making a good point, except that it is not just a few people in those demonstrations chanting those things: it is the entire group chanting those things, which means that they either believe those chants, or that they are useful idiots chanting things that they do not understand. I mentioned both of those possibilities in my post.
What does “globalize the intifada“ mean? What does “from the river to the Sea“? Either they know, and they are allies of Hamas, or they don’t know, and they are useful idiots.
The Jewish extremists that Peter mentions are not in control of the policies of the Israeli government. It is not the policy of the Israeli government to kill every non-Jew in Israel. 20% of the Israeli population is Arab, and they have full political rights and even their own political party in the Israeli parliament.
Is there some equivalent mainstream of the campus demonstrations that rejects the views of its most extreme participants? I have not seen any such thing. Instead, when someone screams “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada”, they all chant right along, which means they either believe it, or they are useful idiots.
Mike- don’t disagree. In fact we are in “violent agreement” (as they say)
Cheap Chinese fashion from unethical (child and slave) factory labor…
Uighur Slaves Struggling To Keep Up With Demand For Palestinian Headscarves
Regarding all the outrages John C. describes, being perpetrated around the world but not protested by the students:
In the '60s, there were also plenty of things to protest besides Vietnam, but we tended to focus on that war because we were directly involved and the pointless waste of life was horrendous. Now, it isn't the U.S. laying waste to Gaza, but we provided the weapons and just gave Israel a $14 billion aid package. They don't need it, and we shouldn't be contributing to that atrocity.
The theory that the protests here in America are motivated by our provision of funding and weapons to Israel is belied by the fact that the very same kinds of protest are happening all over Europe in countries that provide nothing to Israel. A more likely explanation is a combination of misplaced/ignorant idealism, wokeism, and Palestinian/Arab nationalism.
So far, about the only violence during the student protests has been perpetrated by the police and pro-Israel counter-protesters, probably because partisan zealots don't care for what some of the protesters are chanting. By nature, partisans are neither willing nor able to see beyond their own side - kind of like MR. Magoo. That's why they have no empathy for the tens of thousands Israel has slaughtered or the millions they've displaced and starved. It's called willful ignorance.
It’s called getting at the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered 1200 Israelis in the most brutal and depraved ways imaginable. This has to be done despite the human shields that the Hamas leadership has surrounded themselves with.
Leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza is an unacceptable outcome.
To go back to Peter's opening. I was reading transcripts of the business records trial. It's not going well for Trump haters. For starters, they are slow walking 86-piece last minute evidence to a surely bored jury, forcing them to sit through stuff very close to this:
* Is this a signature?
* Is this a document people normally sign?
* Did your secretary sometimes take calls for you?
* What is accounts payable?
* Do accountants track funds using double entry techniques?
* So there are DUNH DUNH DUNH two ledger entries for this transaction somewhere?
Not once, but over and over. Peter, how long could you suspend the insanity of a classroom full of adults with nothing but a discussion of payable signature trails and fiduciary duty, over and over, every day?
All with nothing but a witness lawyer who handled it and already admitted Trump didn't know and the coworkers of the accountant who made the entry who already admitted Trump didn't know, and a judge who instructs the jury to "look at the evidence but not consider it" in a case where unconscionability is not the controversy.
Like everything else before, "overturned on appeal."
"By nature, partisans are neither willing nor able to see beyond their own side."
Case in point: Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis. In response, Israel has killed over 35,000 Gazans. "It’s called getting at the Hamas terrorists." Right, and a little collateral damage. But hey, they're just Palestinians.
The United Nations, no friend to Israel, has itself just yesterday had to halve its previous estimate of deaths of women and children in Gaza. Moreover, “children” in this connection can be defined to include Arab combatants aged 16-19 years of age. The Hamas-inspired numbers are simply not reliable. Never were.
Nor is the putative moral equivalency Hamas apologists offer as to death counts valid. Hamas mass murder of non-combatants on 10/7 broke a longstanding ceasefire. Israel is entitled to do what is necessary to neutralize the threat of repeat butchery, as opposed to casualties of the war Hamas cynically began.
Meanwhile, it’s almost (almost) amusing to see Nixon comparatively redeemed by juxtaposition to Trump. Hyperion to a satyr, indeed. To the extent 1968 is the focal point, however, Biden as a weary, failed LBJ who won’t stand down is more apt, however. Crazymaking that RFK’s own son figures in the mix too.
Low Dudgeon is mistaken. The United Nations clarified that the overall number of fatalities in Gaza remains at more than 35,000 since the war broke out between Israel and Hamas on October 7, most of them women and children.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/13/middleeast/death-toll-gaza-fatalities-un-intl-latam/index.html
It's best to dig a little deeper on those fatality stats that were revised:
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll-women-children
"Based on the 70% of deaths fully identified by the Gaza Health Ministry, the U.N. says 52% of those killed in Gaza are women and children; around 40% — or 10,000 — are men. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants killed. More than 1,900 people killed are classified as elderly."
I'll be the first to agree that counting casualties is indeed difficult.
Imagine how the future casualty count could decline to near zero if the Hamas fighters would simply lay down their arms and surrender. There are still 4 active Hamas battalions hiding amongst the civilians in Gaza.
By the way, any additional concern for the lives of the hostages? Where is the proof of life? Has Hamas extended any steps to demonstrate that the hostages are being well treated?
And why no condemnation of the Hamas fighters hiding behind the civilians?
And why aren't the other Arab countries willing to provide shelter for the Gazans? I do recall from history that Jordan regrets that they provided shelter in past decades, only to result in attacks from within by Palestinian militants. Same for Egypt.
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have determined that it is better to be allied with Israel, than against them.
NPR, an hour ago: "Why U.N. lowered death toll for women, children".
USA Today: "United Nation cuts estimates for deaths of women and children in half".
Google News aggregator confirms the U.N. still stands by the Hamas-inspired 35,000 total deaths.
People who would like to dismiss Trump's concealment of hush-money to a porn star as no big deal are ignoring the fact that if his various affairs had surfaced before the election, the results may have been different. In my mind, this is a big deal.
FYI: There are two death tolls - one for all the dead, and another for all those who have been identified.
Killing 35 Palestinians for every Israeli is obscene. What happened to people's conscience?
Killing 35 Palestinians for every Israeli is obscene. What happened to people's conscience?
Wrong ratio. How many Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor? How many Japanese did our response kill?
The correct ratio to consider is, how many Hamas fighters have been killed versus Gazan civilians? The answer appears to be somewhere between 1 and 1.1, which is considerably less than the ratio from our eradication of ISIS in Mosul.
The goal is to kill as few of the Hamas’ human shields as necessary to destroy Hamas as a militarily capable organization. Israel is doing a better job of this than anyone else has ever done.
All the carnage and starvation will make Israel no safter, but some people can rationalize anything.
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