Authoritarianism

Foreign Policy Rears Its Ugly Head After Four Months Of The Joe Biden Presidency

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Four months into the Joe Biden Presidency, foreign policy is rearing its ugly head in so many ways.

We have China claiming exclusive rights to much of the South China Sea, and creating naval issues with the United States and other nations that have territories in the Pacific.

We have Russia under Vladimir Putin being belligerent in so many ways, including claiming sole rights to much of the Arctic as climate change leads to melting of much of the ice in that region, opening up new potential for commerce and naval expansion, and being challenged by the US and other nations.

We have North Korea still engaged in nuclear testing and remaining a threat to South Korea and other Asian neighbors.

We have Iran remaining a threat in the Middle East, and the issue of trying to stop Iranian nuclear development.

We have the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which led to an 11 day war, and growing antisemitism around the world, and domestically in America.

We have the growing threat of authoritarianism spreading around the world in so many nations and regions.

We have the continuing global threat of climate change, and also of terrorism.

While the challenges are massive, Joe Biden came into the White House with the most foreign policy expertise since George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon, so the nation is in good hands for these foreign policy challenges!

Elise Stefanik Sells Her Soul To Grab Third Ranking Position In House From Liz Cheney

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New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has sold her soul to Donald Trump at the young age of 36, grabbing the third ranking House Republican leadership position from Liz Cheney.

Starting off as a moderate Republican, Stefanik has now proved she is a sycophant, bowing to the Fascist dictator, Donald Trump, who is destroying the Republican Party.

By all rights, Stefanik should lose her seat, as she has no conscience, and cannot fathom that Liz Cheney is totally accurate in her view of the January 6 Capitol Insurrection.

Instead, Stefanik has swallowed the “Big Lie”, that Donald Trump won the Presidential Election of 2020 over Joe Biden, when more than 60 legal cases, and the Supreme Court, proved otherwise!

Stefanik is a traitor to American values, and will go down in history as having backed a criminal conspiracy, while Cheney will go down in history as a “Profile in Courage”.

This has nothing to do with whether one agrees with Cheney on her conservative values, which this author disagrees with profusely, but simply standing for American democracy and the Constitution against an authoritarian, Fascist take over that is destroying the heritage of the Republican Party in history!

Senator Josh Hawley A Threat To American Democracy And Civil Order, And Must Be Repudiated!

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The New Year of 2021 is upon us, and now we face a dire threat from a young US Senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, at present the youngest Senator at age 41, who defeated Democrat Claire McCaskill in 2018.

Hawley has made a major blunder in joining the Trumpite extremists, mostly Southerners, in the House of Representatives, who are plotting to undermine the normally placid counting of the Electoral College votes in a joint session of Congress on January 6.

Vice President Mike Pence is responsible for operating a peaceful, ceremonial and routine counting of the electoral vote, as has been done constantly by the sitting Vice President at the end of every Presidential term.

Hawley is a highly ambitious young man, who is plotting a Presidential run in 2024, but he is ready and willing to be a threat to American democracy and civil order, by challenging the obvious victory of Joe Biden for the Presidency.

He is joining the true whackos who are a disgrace to the Republican Party, out to promote an outgoing President who is authoritarian oriented, and has no concern for the American people, only about aggrandizement of his own power.

Hawley is destroying his future, and is proving how reckless he is, despite criticism from fellow Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania!

Hawley should be repudiated by all who believe in the Constitution and rule of law, and should be drummed out of the Senate for his abuse of power, as one can sense, in a fashion, he is a new Joseph McCarthy in relation to running rampant on an autocratic bent for his own advancement!

Another Opportunity To Salute The New York Times, Today 169 Years Old, A True National Treasure To Freedom Of The Press!

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This author and blogger has hailed the New York Times numerous times over its courage and principle in always seeking the truth, and has celebrated its birthday many times, and it is time to do so again, on its 169th Anniversary!

The New York Times is a true national treasure to freedom of the press, the best guardian against dictatorship and authoritarianism.

The paper has won 130 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper, and has saved America with its investigations and revelations on government and its leaders since the middle of the 19th century, along with the best, most thorough discussion of foreign affairs, as well as culture and finance.

It was responsible for exposing Watergate, along with its “sister” competitor, the Washington Post, which has won 69 Pulitzer Prizes, the second most of any newspaper, and founded on December 6, 1877, so almost 143 years old.

The fact that both newspapers are seen as the enemy of Donald Trump and crooked Republicans in 2020 is a badge of honor.

The New York Times–“All the News That’s Fit to Print”–will survive Donald Trump, and will report on all authoritarian regimes around the globe, as it has done through the years.

It is not a perfect newspaper, and neither is the Washington Post, and they have both admitted shortcomings over the years.

But to be well informed and understand public affairs, one MUST read the New York Times and Washington Post, or give up a claim to being knowledgeable on all kinds of public issues!

Fascism Is On The Horizon If Donald Trump Is Reelected: Warning Of Author Sinclair Lewis In His Work “It Can’t Happen Here” In 1935

Ronald 18 Comments

In 1935, Novelist Sinclair Lewis wrote a prophetic novel, “It Can’t Happen Here”, stating that what was happening in Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, could happen in the United States. Lewis wrote that it would be “clothed in a flag and carrying a Bible!”

This was way before the horrors of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany reached their peaks over the next decade, but already enough evidence of the dangers of the manipulation of minds with emotional rhetoric dividing groups in a society, based upon race, ethnicity, religion, and national origins.

Lewis was warning about the potential dangers represented by Huey Long of Louisiana, who was assassinated months later in 1935, with the story of his assassination covered in my book “Assassinations, Threats, and the American Presidency: From Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama” (Rowman Littlefield Publishers 2015, Paperback Edition 2017).

It could also be applied later, in the 1950s, to Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin; to third party Presidential candidate George Wallace of Alabama in 1968; and to President Donald Trump.

Only Trump, with his Fascist appeal, backed up by military, police and evangelical support, and rallies to appeal to those who are racist oriented, and also nativists, white supremacists at Charlottesville, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic, is a clear and present danger, as he is the President of the United States.

He has stoked Fascist appeals as a manipulative method for the past five years since he announced his candidacy in 2015, and has set out to destroy all traditions and norms!

A lot of intelligent people, including those I know or knew, and also a lot of not so bright people who have emotional attachment to Donald Trump, since they are ignorant and share his horrific beliefs, have rallied around him.

And yet, many conservatives and Republicans who really care about our Constitution and rule of law, and the perpetuation of our democracy, are alarmed by Trump’s constant attack on “Fake Media”.

Trump calls everyone and everything which opposes his authoritarian bent as unAmerican. He waves the American flag as if he owns patriotism, when it is his critics who are truly patriotic, and care about human rights and freedom.

Donald Trump incites in a crazy manner on Twitter daily, and in the midst of the greatest crises since the Great Depression and World War II, he ignores and refuses to take responsibility for the Second Great Depression and the CoronaVirus Pandemic!

He stokes bloodshed and violence in attacking those who are promoting the need for racial healing, and encourages right wing hoodlums in the streets of Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and elsewhere,

This presents the danger of greater violence in the two months left to the Presidential Election of 2020, and the interim to the next inauguration, and his stated refusal to accept defeat if the election goes against him, an absolutely terrifying scenario!

It would seem that his opponents, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, face constant threats of assassination, and this author of a book on assassinations is truly alarmed that someone who is a Trumpite will attempt to do that!

If Trump is reelected, this nation will be threatened in its basic values in a way never having come to power with Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, or George Wallace, despite these earlier threats in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. It will be an authoritarian dictatorship without any control, a nightmare that will mirror the horrors of Fascist Italy and even Nazi Germany!

As Sinclair Lewis wrote in “It Can’t Happen Here”, it actually “Can Happen Here”!

It Is Official: The Republican Party Has Become A Cult Around A Strong Arm Authoritarian Out To Destroy American Democracy!

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The Republican National Convention began today during the daytime hours, and Donald Trump and Mike Pence were renominated for President and Vice President of the United States.

Donald Trump avoided tradition and spoke for an hour, ranting and raving against his “enemies”, reminding those who know history of Adolf Hitler at his Nuremberg rallies.

We are witnessing the Republican Party officeholders swearing their loyalty to a man who has lied 20,000 times in office; has promoted racism, nativism, misogyny, white supremacy; has become a friend of authoritarians and alienated democratic nations; has undermined the judiciary, intelligence agencies, the foreign policy apparatus, and attacked the news media as “the enemy of the people”; has bullied and attacked all of his critics incessantly; has undermined our environment and civil liberties; has refused to take strong action against the CoronaVirus Pandemic; has shown no sense of compassion, empathy, decency or dignity in any form; and a legion of others sins and shortcomings that has never been matched by any previous President in more than two centuries of American history!

The party of such Presidential luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush has been shamed by Donald Trump!

The party of such Congressional luminaries as Charles Sumner, Robert LaFollette, Sr., George Norris, Arthur Vandenberg, and Everett Dirksen has been embarrassed by the weak kneed refusal of today’s Republican members of Congress to show some backbone to Donald Trump!

Face the facts: the Republican Party has become a cult, and is unlikely to come back into respectability, even after Donald Trump leaves the scene, as he has done so much damage and harm, that the Republican Party name may very well go into oblivion!

Donald Trump: George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Pat Buchanan On Steroids!

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President Donald Trump is a true nightmare, as he has brought to ultimate power the viewpoints and policies of Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran for President on a third party line in 1968, and won 13 percent of the national popular vote, and 46 electoral votes from five Southern states at the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Donald Trump has also brought to mind the then South Carolina Governor and later US Senator Strom Thurmond, who won four Southern states and 39 electoral votes in 1948, also on an anti civil rights platform.

Donald Trump reminds us also of Pat Buchanan, journalist, commentator, and advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who challenged President George H. W. Bush for renomination in 1992, and weakened his reelection campaign in that election year.

All three men were racists, hatemongers, Fascist oriented, and against civil rights.

Additionally, Buchanan was also a big time antisemite, who actually, indirectly, affected the Presidential Election of 2000. Four thousand Jewish voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, were confused by the so called “butterfly” ballot, and punched the hole for Buchanan, rather than Democratic nominee Al Gore, helping to influence the election result, with George W. Bush being declared the winner of Florida’s electoral vote by a margin of 537 popular votes statewide, and winning the Presidency!

All three of these candidates were obnoxious, disgraceful, and reprehensible, but while they all gained popular support to some extent, none was feared or became a dominant factor in leadership of the national government.

But now, we have a President who represents all of the evil and horrors promoted by Wallace, Thurmond, and Buchanan, but he was able to manipulate votes with Russian interference in 2016. Despite losing the national popular vote by a massive nearly three million to Hillary Clinton, he was able to win three states in popular vote combined of 78,000 (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) and become President.

He has unleashed one horror and disgraceful action and utterance after another, doing massive damage to American domestic and foreign policy, and attempting to do everything he can to make himself an authoritarian leader on a level unimaginable in American history.

Donald Trump makes George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and Pat Buchanan look like choir boys by comparison. He raises the historical profile of the President most reviled for his actions and behavior before now—Richard Nixon–to a higher level, with at least Nixon having accomplished some really significant goals that are seen as positive in historical retrospect.

But many of the accomplishments of Nixon are now either gone or being destroyed by this maniac, who if he is somehow reelected by manipulation and fraud, is a clear threat to the Constitution and Bill of Rights!

Donald Trump Unleashes Rubber Bullets And Tear Gas On Legal Protesters: When Will Elected Republicans Speak Up?

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Donald Trump is an authoritarian Fascist, and it showed through last night when he ordered the unleashing of rubber bullets and tear gas on legal protesters, so he could walk to a church and hold a Bible. He was trying to show how “religious” and “tough” he is, after threatening, illegally, that he would send military forces into the states, against the wishes of their governors, to quell the demonstrations related to the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.

And in the midst of this outrage, not one Republican Senator or Governor, other than Lisa Murkowski to some extent, has spoken up in denunciation of Trump’s dictatorial bent.

The party has lost all credibility, and yet, at the same time, conservatives who are not in the government, have come out against Trump in large numbers, including most recently those in the Lincoln Project headed by George Conway, husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway!

Hopefully, most of the elected Republicans who are coming up for election this fall will be retired by voters!

The Growing Danger Of A Constitutional Crisis After November 3

Ronald 2 Comments

With 162 days until the Presidential Election of 2020, we are on the brink of the most consequential constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

We have a renegade President who has made it clear that he has no intention of giving up his office if he loses on November 3.

It may not matter to him if the election is a landslide, and certainly not if it is close.

We have to expect that the Secret Service, the FBI, and military will intervene to insure a peaceful transition of power.

But the possibility of bloodshed and violence by the one third of the nation which are Trumpites is literally terrifying!

Trump is trying every tactic imaginable, including voter suppression; trying to make mail ballots not acceptable even though many people already vote by mail; foreign collusion; and gerrymandering attempts as methods to fix the election of our next administration.

This is a time to worry that anything is possible, as Donald Trump has authoritarian tendencies, and might be willing to unleash his followers to seize the government by force!

A Sense That Pete Buttigieg Is On The Rise As A Moderate Alternative To Joe Biden

Ronald 20 Comments

The big winner of the Ohio Presidential debate this past week seems to many to be Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, who is seen as on the rise as a moderate alternative to Joe Biden.

Mayor Pete has been successful in raising large amounts of money in the third quarter, and his debate performance demonstrated his intelligence, his knowledge, and his perception of what Americans want, similar in his understanding of what Americans were looking for as when they voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

He is not promoting “pie in the sky”, massive changes in four years, as Bernie Sanders, and even Elizabeth Warren are doing, knowing full well that the nation is not going to elect a Democratic Congress large enough in majority to do the kinds of path breaking changes that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson were able to bring about in 1935-1936 and 1965-1966, respectively.

As Pete has said, we first need to recover from the chaos and anarchy of Donald Trump, and to expect the nation to go to the far left, and support a required end of all private health insurance, is simply not reality.

This blogger takes the view that Americans should have a choice of keeping the health care coverage they have, or move toward government control through Medicare, but not force it on everyone over a four year period, and always allow private health insurance as an alternative, left up to the decisions of individual Americans and their families.

A long range goal is extend Medicare in stages, first to those between 50-65, then those in their 40s, then those in their 30s, and continuing on, but again with private insurance allowed if preferred.

And in foreign affairs, Mayor Pete would offer a revival of American respect and responsibility, veering away from the disastrous and reckless diplomacy of Donald Trump, and would restore American rationality and respect among our allies, and recognition that he would not be pushed around by authoritarians as has been occurring with Donald Trump.

A young, dynamic President is needed, and Mayor Pete fills the bill, following in the Democratic Party tradition of John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. A new generation of leadership is required.