PUBLIC MOVING TO GENUINE HORROR STORIES NOT TRUMP’S PHONY ONES

By Dominique Paul Noth

Trump and his allies have already trotted out their scare-you-to-death images: Babies screaming during partial birth abortions. Face-tattooed machete-wielding gangs charging in caravans across the border. Mass socialist murderers chopping children to death -- inspired,  according to  one recent TV ad on Sinclair local news stations, by Alexandria Ocacio Cortez, the pretty Socialist Democrat who has become the GOP’s Wicked Green Witch of Destruction, worthy of being lit on fire before she can cause havoc. Democrats spell death, Trump spells life.

This is already the ugliest campaign in terms of blood-curdling charges. 

But this election the Democrats have profound, blunt,  natural images of gore, unlike the exaggerated extremes of Trump and his allies.

It is the image of a bullet from a high capacity magazine shredding childhood flesh into bleeding gapes that doctors can’t fix in time.  It is the image of children relegated to die by removing them from life-giving US health care. It is children torn from parents and imprisoned in cages at the border.

Beto O’Rourke in the recent presidential debate hit every agonizing true example of assault weapon carnage from a Trump inspired Odessa killer, adding a ferocious and elegant “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your  AK-47!” to cheers from a Texas audience of college students and many viewers around the nation.

Suddenly the Democrats have real inescapable horror stories to match the exaggerations of the right.  The evangelical extremists know in their hearts the real problem with abortion is that it is largely a physically painless procedure and any battle is mental – so they concoct images of suffering dying fetuses to create shame even in women who feel considerable sadness whatever the circumstance.

Similarly, while Trump makes cow eyes at genuine killers like Duterte of the Philippines, Mohammad bin Salman, Kim Jung Un and Vladimir Putin, he and his minions conjure up images of Venezuela and historic death merchants in Cambodia as examples of socialism, though these are examples of dictatorial fascism miles removed from the peace-loving Democratic Socialists whose strains of common sense government have run side by side with American democracy for decades. These Socialists may believe in more government involvement than capitalists but on big social problems that need solutions.

Even as Trump conjures up the forces of darkness, this time, from now on, the Republicans’ imaginary nightmares can be beaten off by reminding the public of the real nightmares invading the waking moments of children and parents – not just border horrors but school shooting drills unlike the automatic fire drills and even A-bomb drills of our youths that everyone knew were  a distant unlikely worry. Nothing distance about an assault weapon intruder.  These monsters have become a palpable reality for every family in the nation. That could be your teenager running down the school hallway as a bullet smashes her back.

 O’Rourke did us all a favor by being blunt.  The kids of Parkland, the mothers of the fallen (in groups and alone), the city children downed by a stray bullet as they play in their bathtub -- all are true crime stories that infect us all.  So are the people removed from live-saving procedures and the traumatized 3 year olds in ICE cages.

Researchers have long known that conservatives in  suburbs fear burglars and murderers in far disproportionate worry than reality – they call the police when a shadow falls on a nearby tree.  But today it is real fear that has caught up with our children.

Here’s why this is a change.  For decades, out of concern with the NRA and their lobbyists as well as law-abiding gun owners, any talk of universal background checks, limiting the size of ammo magazines, keeping weapons from proven domestic abusers and talk of confiscation – all these gun discussions were doomed  pie in the sky dreams. 

Now America is openly talking about it all and the right wing can no longer dismiss  this as unneeded nonsense.  As one NRA member told me about his group in a fervent email, “They better not pull any of this crap about political expediency. My kid is seven and already asking what I’m doing to make him feel safe!”

Maybe Beto made a mistake, politically speaking.  He insists that getting rid of the 10 million assault weapons in private hands should be mandated not voluntary.   In one sense he is right – extreme measures are necessary to save the US. In another sense this is the spectre the NRA will ride with.  It raises the old fear of government confiscating your guns, a fear engendered by a Supreme Court decision that leapt past the first phrase in the Second Amendment and suggests gun ownership as a right.

But look beyond the right wing knee jerk.  The NRA can no longer dismiss even the extreme arguments.  When society moves to protect itself the motion is hard to stop. There may be worry on all sides of the political equation about the government taking stuff away as its first law-and-order step.  But underneath that first step there are a lot of second steps the public wants.

American gun owners want to think of themselves as better than Wayne La Pierre. They want to believe his organization caters to gun owners not just gun manufacturers – and it better start. 

A ban on assault rifles is legislatively coming and most agree with it, but we like to think of ourselves as moral people who would then do the right thing and voluntarily turn in weapons that are illegal and certainly have no place outside the battlefield.  We may make allowances for gun historians and researchers, but what is that – 1000 out of 10 million?

If Americans turn out to be too selfish to give up such weapons, maybe then you make it mandatory.  Given the nuttier on the streets, maybe you’ll have to. But I suspect the progressives will get further by treating everyone as people of conscience first.

Beto will not become president but he has done a service by  eloquently taking the rhetorical burden on his shoulders and frankly daring the right to disagree with his passion.    Every time Trump trots out his dead babies and zombie socialists, America now has a winning and truthful reality to shame him with.    This may be an ugly election, but suddenly the truth has graphic power on its side.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

WHAT SEEMS PROGRESSIVE OPPORTUNITY HITS WI ROADBLOCKS

By Dominique Paul Noth

On paper, Wisconsin is a crucial state for progressive change in 2020 – reflected in the respected Marquette University poll that shows Trump far behind Democratic presidential leaders and tied more than a year ahead with the second tier of candidates.

But look into that poll more deeply and you are aware that Wisconsin is the lagging hind end of the progressive charge, a limping straggler unable to make up its mind on important statewide contests. And without local enthusiasm, the progressive wave will crash against rocky shores.

With a new and admittedly moderate Democratic governor, Tony Evers, and bright prospects for better public education and forward steps on health care, Wisconsin seemed a prime place for Democrats to pick up House seats and state legislative ones. Despite extensive gerrymandering dating to 2011 that seemed to ensure Republican succession, long established GOP names  are scrambling for the exits.

There’s Rep. Sean Duffy, a former lumberjack and reality star wannabe whose wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is a Fox personality. He is nationally known for complaining that his House salary representing the large 7th District is not enough to support his lifestyle and eight kids. Now after nine years in Congress he  has announced he is quitting in September.  The announced reason that many doubt (since there are hidden motives in any political move) is that his pregnant wife has a baby with what many suspect Duffy of having, given his statements about immigrants and Trump actions – a hole in the  heart. 

 It would be noble to abandon politics to care for the unborn, though his eight born children – ranging up in age to 19 -- may wonder where he has been.  But it has thrown his broad northeast Wisconsin district into a scramble by both parties. State GOP legislators are bluntly getting out of the way for an ecological hater, state Sen. Tom Tiffany, to announce his run. 

 Given Tiffany’s anti-ecological reputation he may seem a strange choice for rural farm counties (Ashland, Barron, Bayfield, Burnett, St. Croix, Clark, Douglas, Florence, Forest, Iron, Langlade, Lincoln, Marathon, Oneida, Polk, Price, Rusk, Sawyer, Taylor, Vilas, Washburn and parts of Chippewa, Jackson, Juneau, Monroe and Wood) but the injuries to farmland from tariffs, the crippling of public education funding and blatant attempts to buy goodwill are only now radiating into politics.

So it’s not a shoo-in for the GOP – in fact many see an opportunity for the Democrats. In the years of B.G. (Before Gerrymandering), this was David Obey territory, a Democrat who ruled the House from 1969 to 2011.  There is a strong core of devout Democrats in pockets of the community.  Yet the Democrats typically are having trouble getting their act together though former Duffy opponent Pat Kreitlow remains popular.

Closer to Milwaukee (draw a ring around the city and include all of Jefferson and Washington counties plus key portions of Milwaukee, Waukesha, Dodge, and Walworth), the left should be shouting hallelujah! A veteran GOP name in the House since Jimmy Carter’s presidency is retiring years after he should have. 

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner – long chairman of House Judiciary Committee whose career is a mix of support for defendant rights and resistance to civil rights – is finally hanging it up.  This has produced a lunge of Republicans who have long coveted his seat and a slow march of interesting Democrats trying to determine if they have enough support. A fine Democratic candidate from 2018, Tom Palzewicz, immediately announced he would try again. But his sizable 2018 loss (62 to 38 %) disheartened many Democrats.

While 2018 was a great year around the nation for Democrats, Wisconsin came up constantly short. It was the only state in the nation in which the party receiving the majority of House votes (Democrats) emerged with a minority of congressional seats, and the gerrymandering problem increased in state legislative races.

As a consequence, the unknown Paul Ryan clone whose first term in the House has done nothing to make him more than a shadow, Bryan Steil, feels firmly ensconced in District 1 (Kenosha County, Racine County, most of Walworth County, and portions of Rock County, Waukesha and Milwaukee – in other words the Democratic bastions packed together in 2011 are more and more encircled by conservatives).   He easily beat populist Randy Bryce once Bryce’s brushes with the courts were publicized.

Similarly, while many Milwaukeeans know good people living to their north, that District 6 (dipping down into Milwaukee County’s River Hills) has been structured to protect Republicans (giving the more liberal North Shore suburbs to the 4th District’s formidable Gwen Moore). Though labeled even by his own party as one of its most partisan and dumbest sounding members, Glenn Grothman seems so firmly placed in this east-north district that even the personable and well-heeled nephew of Herb Kohl, Dan, lost 55-45 % in 2018.

Once SCOTUS refused to look into the Wisconsin gerrymandering in its Rucho vs. Common Cause decision this year – what many regard as a stunning abdication of the highest court’s responsibility to the Constitution –  Wisconsin voters were doomed to push beyond their natural strength to make inroads in US House and state legislative contests. Their willingness to fight against the odds is still in question.

Voter indifference to local politics is also reflected in the Marquette poll that on the surface looked so terrible for Trump.  Maybe not so much when readers drill down.

More than half of the 800 surveyed couldn't offer an opinion, favorable or un, on Republican legislative leaders, though clearly they are trying to destroy the new governor’s gains. Fifty-five percent said Wisconsin is headed in the right direction while 37% said it was on the wrong track. Talk to people on the street and such numbers easily flip, one reason why the Marquette poll is viewed uncomfortably in progressive circles and still heralded by conservatives.

State Democrats aren’t that worried about the presidential race since Trump has so much in-grown opposition if voters pay attention to the facts.  But they concede the electorate has to be shaken into awareness in 2020 on localized contests. It is a year where there is no Senate race in on the ballot and the Republicans, despite departures, still dominate the House and the state’s two legislative chambers.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

EVEN OLD MOVIES KNOW AMERICA BETTER THAN TRUMP DOES

By Dominique Paul Noth

When Trump originated his MAGA chant (Make America Great Again) my reaction was what the hell was he talking about?  It quickly became clear he would destroy the actual past for his own fabrication and he dreaded building his policies on past American dreams and progress. He found a cadre of voters that knew as little as he did or thought his fact-free style would improve their lives.

He set out to dismantle every good thing previous administrations had accomplished -- and even the good halfway steps they had taken in hope that America would continue to evolve.

Now after nearly three years, the citizens are at a crossroads – try to get rid of Trump now in what is shaping up, as Nancy Pelosi feared, to a one political party impeachment or grind it out until the end of 2020 while Trump kicks up the level of damage to American institutions and principles, destroying our global reputation while banking on an economy growing shakier every day.

His MAGA chant evokes some imaginary US past in his fevered brain, maybe the Gilded Age of the 19th century when business ran rampant, maybe the 1920s when businesses again ran rampant on the way to the Great Depression, maybe some aspects of the Eisenhower years with the widely spread but misleading slogan “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.”

I don’t like going back when the nation has to keep pressing forward, but Trump clearly isn’t thinking of the era when America’s democratic fortitude emerged and scared the right wing half to death – the greatest generation as Tom Brokaw called it – the 1940s after the war. 

Gregory Peck, Celeste Holm and John Garfield confront
a drunken Jew hater in 'Gentleman's Agreement'

Even Hollywood, a studio dream machine built around making money, was forced to confront the changing globe confirmed by World War II.  Suddenly, even the movies with their historic caution began to say things that were universally American in values.  They had done so hesitantly in earlier decades but this time the bite was more socially pronounced.  Trump would have hated the impulses.

The movies remained cautious on what we now call civil rights, making films where Southern theaters could snip Lena Horne solos out of MGM musicals.  The movies were particularly bad for blacks and native Americans and by the 1960s routinely added Hispanics to the stereotypical mix. 

But there were glimmers.  In 1943’s “Sahara,” starring Humphrey Bogart (and not to be confused with later movies of the same title), a veritable United Nations of straggling soldiers gather in the desert to fight the Germans and it is here that a black man is allowed to kill a white man on screen to the cheers of the audience.  The white man is a blond despicable Nazi and the black man is a Sudanese soldier (played by a famous black actor, Rex Ingram). 

Hollywood was in the myth making business but slowly the world was creeping in.  Noted directors and actors went to war and came back with a harder edge.  Even studio solvers from the stage world like Vincente Minnelli could play a dual game – creating one of  the best showcases for black talent in “Cabin in the Sky” (1943) yet sending a valentine vision to GIs of the white America worth saving -- loving, comfortable,  family knit,  untouched by social upheaval.  His “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944) is a great musical, yet what it doesn’t show is alarming.

Turn of the century St. Louis had  a half million residents,  but 35,000 were blacks, and there is not a black face on the screen, much less horror at how many lynchings were taking place around the World’s Fair. The boy next door romancing sweeps away any sense of darkness until a cork face Halloween nightmare Minnelli inserts.

The right wing had an angry counterblast that roiled the nation after the war with (is this where Trump got it?) fears of socialists, Communists and military Armageddon resulting in HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee, which gave rise to such political stars as Richard Nixon) and the McCarthy era. Socially aware Hollywood names were blacklisted for more than a decade in a fever that also served up politically neutral figures whose celebrity was now sought by Quisling replacements.

So rampant was this fever that a staunch Republican like Ginger Rogers would be dragged through the mud for making a homefront drama about women working in factories, “Tender Comrade” (1943),   because the title  could be made to sound so Bolshevik.

Yet “Tender Comrade’ actually represented a flowering of socially conscious Hollywood movies built around American principles like immigration and justice.   Almost all their creators wound up on the blacklist. 

Dreamers confronting reality: Peggy Ann Garner and
James Dunn in 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'.

Director Elia Kazan, excoriated later for cooperating with HUAC, always urged looking at his films rather than his behavior, because he was 20th Century-Fox’s go-to guy for social dramas. In his first film, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945), set at the turn of the century, a grandmother from the old country in tortured English contemplates how, now that she’s old, she sees what drew her to Brooklyn:

In that old country, a child can rise no higher than his father's state. But here in this place, each one is free to go as far as he's good to make of himself. This way, the child can be better than their parent and this is the true way that things grow better. And this has to do something with the learning, which is here free to all people. l who am old missed these things. My children missed these things. But my children's children shall not miss it.

Weirdly, the same immigrant dream remains 74 years later.

By 1946, returning American veterans confronted the emerging nativism that Trump so typifies in “The Best Years of Our Lives,” from newly observant Hollywood master William Wyler. The encounter then was with an America First boor (sound familiar?).

Then a Hollywood flavored portrait of American middle class anti-Semitism emerged under Kazan in “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947, like “Tree” based on a nationwide best seller). The gimmick is that Gregory Peck pretends to be Jewish to feel firsthand the rejection and humiliation felt by Jews.  The movie simplifies like a lesson play and actually paints over a nasty past when FDR’s state department itself was riddled with anti-Semitism (while McCarthyites later claimed it was riddled with Communists!).

But it contains an interesting excerpt from Peck’s fictional magazine piece after being rejected at the “restricted” (euphemism for anti-Semitic) Plume Inn:

Driving away from the inn I knew all about every man or woman, every youngster, who'd been turned down by a college or a summer camp. I knew the rage that pitches through you when you see your own child shaken and dazed.  From that moment, I saw an unending attack by adults on kids of seven and eight and ten and twelve...  on adolescents trying to get a job or an education or into medical school.   
     
And I knew that they had somehow known it, too. They, those patient, stubborn men who argued and wrote and fought and came up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They knew the tree is known by its fruit and that injustice corrupts a tree, that its fruit withers and shrivels.

The allusions back to nature are typical of the era, conjuring up an integrity to Earth that American principles embody in the writers’ minds.  Seldom since have the Founding Fathers been so nobly portrayed.  Seldom since have the purposes of a free education and a free integrity for all people been so artistically explained to the masses of Americans, assuming a universal level of language and interest in the American ideal.

By 1949 even the issue of undocumented immigrants was recognized for what it really was – an exploitation of cheap labor by business owners and their middlemen  (“Border Incident”), a vision of desperate immigrants  that seems to have vanished from the White House.

For all its warts – and the eras of my childhood had many – there was a presumption of universal acceptance of basic principles.   The MAGA of Trump by his own behavior rejects all that.  I fear he is talking to an audience that, because of their own upbringing and indifference to learning and self-education, has no idea what I’m talking about – or what the majority of Americans are fighting to preserve and restore. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

THROWING A RED FLAG ON RED FLAG LAWS

By Dominique Paul Noth

The idea sounds good.  The police would be empowered to temporarily take guns away from citizens in danger of hurting themselves and others. There is supposed to be follow-up counseling to keep the community safe and decide when the guns can be returned. 

Versions vary from state to state – several have the red flag laws -- but the concept basically is police or family members can petition a court to order the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger to others or themselves.  The idea of a judge is central to the concept, until you start thinking of judges whose political views tend to control their opinions.  That’s when the slippery slope of due process, much more important to me than restriction of gun rights, rears its head.

A plus for the idea is that the NRA is against it and another is that Republicans who have avoided gun legislation find aspects of this attractive. Moscow Mitch is even making favorable grunts.

I frankly find their attraction suspicious. 

Red flag laws are a decent tool if carefully written to not make someone who talks about taking action against Trump sound crazy and committable. If you think my fear is far-fetched, try applying the law to judges who rely on politicians as well as voters to get into office.   Try thinking about the need to remove weapons.  Who decides?  The sheriff? The spouse?   Which judges in Wisconsin?  How is the evidence gathered – and by whom?

In a country when so many gun deaths are suicides, red flag laws have proven to help take guns away from people going through obvious trauma, or drinking bouts or opioid distress.  There is evidence that taking away the methods of suicide – guns, pills, whatever –deter suicidal folk.  But there is little evidence that, outside suicides, red flag laws are more than a drop in the bucket of blood our society endures.

No, this has merit, but limited merit.  It is a feel good piece of legislation rather than a direct assault on our gun culture.  It is shaping up as another salve to the GOP conscience – and frankly, to the Democratic conscience because the Republicans have blocked everything else and now we can all pretend to real progress.

Don’t misunderstand. Guns should be taken away – but not just from people with chronic mental problems.  We all have moments of sickness, of anger, and it is foolhardy to believe police officers or a judge will know best when our fit has passed and we can go about our regular lives.  Temporarily named can become permanently stigmatized. In an era when people lose it for a moment on a phone video, and that moment flies around the globe, a Big Brother mentality can create a lot of problems. 

And once guns enter the picture we have plunged into a world that defies logic. Gun owners are fiercely protective that there is nothing wrong with them and people who fear gun owners are not the best judges of who is safe and who is not.

Moreover this is all happening in the world of Trump.  Law enforcement in general and national security in particular are being politicized.  The president is electing friendlies to the justice department, the intelligence community and the federal courts, which some legislation would seek to get involved. Is this a time when we want to extend police power and claim it will always be rationally employed?

Red flag laws that give more power to law enforcement and to judges in a partisan environment strike me as multiple kinds of danger.

Obviously the legislation has to be tightly crafted. Equally obvious, there will be human beings taking action – motivated after a mass shooting, motivated by a presidential tantrum, perhaps more careful during a lull; hyped with genuine concern about a loved one,  stridently worried about the unloved. 

Republicans now want to do something, but the public shouldn’t let them use baby aspirin when major surgery is required. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

SILLY AMERICA KNOWS THE PROBLEM AND WON’T DO A THING

By Dominique Paul Noth

America is having a cause and effect problem – a dawning realization that sometimes you can’t prove legally what you know is actually true. We know the cause and the effect, yet can’t seem to do anything about it.  We are as paralyzed socially and politically as we are with climate change.

Hate crimes, white nationalism and mass shootings have been a rampant gathering storm for  three years.  They were once a whispered ingrown national shame but this time they have  a direct time correlation to Trump’s statements and behavior.  He cannot be called criminally guilty in the California, El Paso and Dayton shootings, among many.  But you don’t have to be a genius to see the connection.

The Mueller Report is stuffed with examples of Trump playing nice with Russia, with his criminal machinations, yet having nothing to do with his tax returns, emoluments and basic fraud as a businessman. 

The media is still consumed with his every utterance as they typically have been for decades with any president of the United States, which means that citizens know his nasty nicknames for his rivals without being there in person at his rallies or signed up for his tweets.

They know, endlessly, that he equates all groups that dislike Trump as “hate groups”  even those that haven’t killed people. Providing him a megaphone is doing great harm, but that reality  seems to  escape most cable news outlets, aside from the one happy to be his servile megaphone.

It is past time for the media and the public to exercise restraint and sometimes self-imposed silence, so that only FOX is willing to raid the henhouse. 

Everyone watched in disbelief as Trump tried to pontificate against white supremacy (briefly), condemned the Internet but not his own tweets, blamed video games, tried to tie gun control to immigration reform as a crass way to suggest Latinos are responsible for their own mass murders, and read Teleprompter platitudes while Pence stood behind him like a cardboard cutout.

It was a display – mechanical empathy substituting for the real thing --  that inspired revulsion  throughout the world and forced the Secret Service to contemplate they may have to shoot  regular citizens as Trump insisted on visiting Dayton and El Paso. Typically, Trump turned those visits into campaign stops rather than solace calls. 

And yet half the country is not sure all this is grounds for impeachment.  Obvious racism may be enough for Texas Rep. Al Green but history let Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan slide by. And today’s public is letting Trump slide because his racism is out there in the open.

As Shakespeare said in “Hamlet” we are hoisted “on our own petard.” In this case the petard (or bomb that blows the user up and lets the target escape) is free speech.  It is protecting the most outrageous statements and in Trump’s case the most outrageous contradictions. To act against him requires using his own hateful methods or abandoning our core principles.

The courts, already suffering a right-wing sheen from Trump’s appointments, aren’t equipped to validate our historic sense that the presidency is a moral center of decency.  The Constitution may limit his powers but in the heat  of the moment the courts succumb to fears of political involvement.

Even if justices mentally know that using military money to build a wall is a waste of resources, the legal issue is whether the president, empowered with protecting the nation, should be contradicted by the courts if he wants to fritter money away.  As long as the Senate refuses to go along with the House, just how much do we expect the courts to do?

Even when suffering communities like El Paso urged him not to visit, there  were and always will be handfuls fascinated by the aura of a presidential visit and a minority of supporters who demand the same sort of federal protection from harm that other minorities, like blacks attempting to integrate schools in the South in the 1960s, expected from their leaders.  There will always be a few Mexican Americans who may hate what Trump says but add, “At least he called attention to our border problems,” as one told NPR.

In America, before Trump, we thought we had a nation built  around an ethical theme, around  human rights.  Many times we failed – our national tragedy --  but until now we tried to return to the moral center.

The times clearly call for some adjustments, some reckonings that go beyond the slow walk the electorate usually uses to correct  itself.  But these are not the adjustments we are getting. 

As a misdirection, Republicans now want “red flag” laws  to let the police  step in early against those too dangerous to use guns or advocate violence.  Such laws may be peripheral to the real problems, and in a Trump era they could be used against his political enemies, forcing the community  to arrest its own woke citizens.  But many Democrats, including Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, are tempted by the new narrow opening of Republican minds. They know the Republicans are adamant against deeper measures.

It’s not just Republicans, though. In the wake of the gruesome mass shootings, listen in to how debating progressives were fighting among themselves. Some, like Cory Booker, argue for nationwide gun licensing while others also running for president say that doesn’t impact what a survey  suggests already exists in the US -- 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and assault weapons, and 86 million shotguns.  Have to do something about that, too.  But the cry of “Do Something” becomes “Do My Something First!”

California Governor Gavin Newsom, in open outrage after the Garlic Festival shooter got a legal assault  rifle in Nevada, wants every state to ban not just  assault weapons but put strict controls on ammunition magazines  as his state had done.  Republicans claim there is no public appetite for such bans – but they are  clearly not talking to the public in the streets.  Diane Feinstein wants to revive the assault weapons ban.  The organization established after the brain-spattering shooting of Gabrielle Giffords points out that the House has already passed universal background checks and bipartisan control bills that have gone to the Senate to die under Moscow Mitch.

A massive mandatory buy-back proposal is also suggested, yet progressives are arguing among themselves about the details.  The clarity of America’s majority reaction to Trump and to gun violence is already splintering apart in ridiculous opposition and equally ridiculous “on the other hand” debates among Democrats.  How many more mall shootings will it take? Cause and effect can become cause and neglect.

A representative democracy relies on thoughtful measured action after debate and the sausage-making process of legislation.  In the face of a bullish gargoyle elected (in some manner) to the White House, is our democracy flexible enough to react and survive?  Can it keep its essential values and rise to the challenge? Or are we about to find out it can’t?

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

2018 HANGS OVER 2020 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES

By Dominique Paul Noth

The phantom thread under the presidential debates weaves back to how well the Democrats did in 2018, amazingly well given how the Republicans had gerrymandered the states after the 2010 US Census. This underpins why the televised debates seemed so much a dispute between idealistic conviction and skeptical pragmatism

Don’t underestimate the GOP – they still fully control 22 states and have far more state legislators.  But they lost 350 state seats in 2018 and now the Democrats control 14 states -- six were taken from the Republicans in 2018. 

Pew Research provided this graph
to explain trifectas

Pollsters borrow a term more familiar from horse betting to describe the shift – trifectas, when one party controls both the state’s executive (governor) and the legislative chambers (usually two – Nebraska has one and it’s nonpartisan so that state doesn’t count in this pollster math).

It was noteworthy in 2018 that the GOP didn’t pick up a single state in the trifecta game their party had long mastered -- and the Democrats picked up six, another demonstration of how Trump has pushed the nation away from the GOP.

That trend has altered political thinking, affecting the presidential race and the state by state politics, elevating both the interest in forward looking moderates and Green New Deal progressives. Both groups gained in the 2018 election.

As one TV pundit put it: “Democrats ran and won in 2018 on the environment, education funding and health care.” It’s no surprise that many presidential opponents to Trump are running on the same issues.

In every state where Democrats gained a trifecta edge, they introduced bills to expand voting rights.  In several of the GOP trifecta states that party introduced bills to curb women’s reproductive rights, relying on the one gift party leaders think Trump has given them – a more conservative high court that will chip away at Roe vs. Wade or flat eliminate it, as some in their ranks fancy.

Some states didn’t achieve a trifecta despite a proven progressive electorate. In Wisconsin, the GOP lost the vote totals to the Democrats but stayed in legislative power because of the extreme gerrymandering of legislative districts imposed by the Republicans in 2011. In US House races, Wisconsin was the only state in which the party receiving the majority of votes (Democrats) emerged with a minority of congressional seats. 

So Wisconsin got a Democratic governor but a heavily Republican legislature,  a five-seat edge in the state Senate (within 2020 election targeting for the Democrats) drifting into a probably insurmountable  63-36  advantage in the  Assembly.  But the issue of funding education has proven a winner in all the districts for the governor, Tony Evers, who previously served as the state’s chief of public education.  And the GOP margin is not so big as the two-thirds needed to override his vetoes.

He used the most powerful veto pen in the nation more cleverly to serve the public’s demands than did his GOP predecessors. Through nifty methods, he added back some $87 million to public education. 

The outmaneuvered GOP exploded and filed a lawsuit, hoping their conservative pets on the state supreme court will go along with them.

It is a blatant appeal to partisanship since the legal props are wobbly for the lawsuit, but it reflects what the GOP believes they have bought and paid for -- the courts.

There are also signs that the state GOP may try to use a joint resolution in the legislature to block any attempt by Evers to draw a fair election map after the 2020 Census.  Republican leaders deny this is in the works but Democrats were unmoved by the GOP denials, noting leaders were not ruling out running past Evers on new maps – and noting that the same gang of legal extremists had just filed the lawsuit against the vetoes.

This fight for control in one guise or another rips through all states’ politics.   One result is a total rethinking of a typical belief within the national electorate:  splitting the vote.  If the constituents split their votes among the parties – as they did when the House turned Democratic while the Senate and the White House are in Republican hands – the thinking was that might be better for the nation to not let one party run off with the silverware.

Trump’s behavior has changed that game.  He’s running off with the silverware regardless.

The Democratic gains in 2018 are looming strong for the 2020 election but one of the realities hitting voters is that changing the White House is not enough.  They have to change the Senate too. It has become the place where good bills from the House go to die. It is an echo of what Evers continues to go through in Wisconsin, helped only by the power of his office.

This is the political tension of the day.  It’s going to take a nimble Democratic presidential candidate to make the country look past the damage caused by Trump to what the US should aspire to. That candidate will set the tone for how fast the states have to react. Right now it is a fight between the candidates who want an explosion of change after Trump and the more moderate who want to put the country right and move on from there.

Political observers believe the degree of change will reveal itself most at the state levels -- among voters more closely impacted by policy.  It is a highly partisan environment at all levels but change is more quickly affected at the state level, suggests political scientist Carl Klarner who has made his election database at Harvard open to the public. 

Klarner bluntly states the obvious reality for 2020:  “A party needs to control both chambers of the legislature and the governor's office to significantly change the direction of policy.”

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

MUELLER'S EXPECTED DRYNESS ALREADY KINDLING SPARKS

By Dominique Paul Noth

The Internet brims with podcasts delving deep into Robert
Mueller's findings.

Trump by his mere presence in the White House has placed the American voter in a moral dilemma. The worst fears of his opponents – that he’s an imposter -- sound like the crazy conspiracy theories of his rally followers.

In conversation with Trump detesters, many are now convinced there are enough racists and ignorant people in the US to explain his presence in the White House. Some don’t want to believe that white privilege and fear of the brown and black is that deep in our psyche, but others believe it fervently.

But then there is the growing evidence of the Mueller Report.  The special counsel is set to testify Sept. 24 while the Internet is aflood with podcasts from people who have actually read the report and weighed its implications.  Among the best is one from Lawfare, a distinguished legal blog since 2010 whose first episode in entitled “Active Measures” for the Russian term for its cold war style methods of attack.

I hope everyone listens to Mueller’s House testimony yet don’t expect him to draw a simple road map for the unthinking. He clearly believes his report has outlined his findings and explains his limitations as a dutiful member of the Justice Department, which has opined (to my personal dismay) that a sitting president can’t easily (some say ever) be criminally indicted.

Mueller, a lifelong Republican, is hardly bringing a flaming hot partisan poker to his testimony and will probably invite America to absorb his report, as Lawfare clearly has done.

But a cogent reading throws in doubt whether Trump would have won without Russian propaganda – as hard as that is for even voters who don’t like him to admit. Clearly, when Putin started his disinformation campaign against US voters – taking advantage among other things of the popularity and immediacy of the Internet on millions – Trump was nowhere in his mind.  But certainly by 2015 the propaganda direction had switched to support Trump over Hillary Clinton, whose stern warnings to Putin when US secretary of state under Obama still rankled Putin. 

Mueller details an astounding degree of Russian involvement but he was also dealing with legal realities that allowed him to charge some Americans and many Russians but not the president.  He also refused to clear Trump of criminal obstruction in other dealings.

Now no one will ever prove beyond reasonable doubt that Trump won 63 million voters in 2016 by crook more than hook. None of these voters will probably ever admit they were duped and most of his opposition (who have some other weird political explanations for the results) would rather blame Democratic Party leaders than the Russians.

But millions of US citizens were clearly bombarded with views on Hillary that don’t pass muster in the light of day. Millions were subjected to rallies and messages that sounded American, supported Trump with lies -- and could have affected their opinions in the voting booth.

And yet, and yet  those who oppose Trump and suggest his election was tainted tend to sound like conspiracy theorists of their own, like the people who still think Saddam Hussein bombed the towers or believe Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar supported Isis.

We are a-sea in a loony world of attitudes and extremes that lend credence to our Founding Fathers’ concern that education was the key to a winning democracy – “if you can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin warned.

Psychologists are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect and it suggests some fascinating connections to today’s conundrum. “Dunning-Kruger” is a type of cognitive bias, where people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise and the ability to pass judgment on others. This overestimation occurs because they don’t have enough knowledge to know they don’t have enough knowledge. “Not only do they fail to recognize their incompetence,” the effect’s scientists explained in 1999, “they’re also likely to feel confident that they actually are competent.”

It sounds contradictory as does Catch 22 (based on a 1961 war novel but often described as the belief you have to have money to make money, just true enough to sound convincing).   Dunning-Kruger has been extensively explored in psychological terms in the workplace but a recent story in Psychology Today suggests it should also be “studied in one of the most obvious and important realms: political knowledge.”

If it is studied in connection with reading and thinking about the Mueller Report, Trump’s support base will be confronted by some harsh truths. The rest of us can argue about who should succeed him and whether the Democrats have their own Dunning-Kruger groupies.  But replace him we must.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.