Presidents are not messiahs or righteous settlers of seething grievances

For a good long time in this blog I’ve had a tag that I’ve used way too frequently. It is “Democrat Wimps.” I use it when the Republicans do a bad thing over which the Democrats could capitalize – and they do nothing. Or they have a chance to pass legislation to protect our democracy – and they can’t get it done. Over the life of this blog I’ve used the “Democrat Wimps” tag 129 times and the “Democratic Party” tag (when I say something good about them) only 109 times. Along with that, three years ago, while traveling with Brother and Niece, we had interesting discussions. She asked about party affiliation. Yes, I vote Democrat. Republicans have shown me repeatedly and more firmly as the years progress that they are my enemy. The values they declare do not at all match up with my own. I disagree with and work against everything they try to do. The Republican brand is so thoroughly tarnished I will not vote for them at any level of government. However, Democrats have not convinced me they are my friends. Some of that was the huge long time before they embraced the LGBTQ community. More of it these days is they are too much of a wimp on issues I care about, including protecting our democracy. The July 2022 issue (link to the site, not the article) of the Hightower Lowdown, written by Jim Hightower, discusses another big missed opportunity by the Democrats. There’s a great deal of small town and rural America who could be convinced to vote for Democrats. Hightower did it once – in Texas. But the Democratic establishment and their consultants say to not bother. Much better to focus on turning out the vote in urban areas. Since the country has shifted so far right, it is much better to take centrist positions. Yeah, rural America has been voting strongly Republican. But they also see Republicans beholden to the corporate giants that have been decimating their communities – the limited choices in meatpackers who buy their animals on wildly lopsided contracts, the Walmarts that decimate their downtowns, the small town factories that sent jobs overseas, and so much more. That’s a big opening for Democrats. Yet, the party is seen as incompetent and out of touch. Rural America is hurting in the kinds of ways some Democrats would gladly propose policies to fix. They hurt from chronic health conditions from factories; loss of jobs, pensions, and savings; huge medical bills; the opioid crisis; the closing of rural hospitals; and COVID. The party as a whole should be on the side of the common man, standing up to corporate villainy. Doing so, and making a strong effort to rural voters, could keep them in the majority. But this party, under present leadership, has become a corporate party, corrupted by corporate money. It’s not the country that has moved to the right. It’s the Democrats. Hightower suggests we can nudge them through the Movement Voter Project and American family Voices. There are progressives out there, ready to do the work. In the ongoing saga of the FBI searching the for-profit home of the nasty guy and seizing boxes of papers that should be in the National Archives he has been saying if the Archives wanted the papers they should have asked and he would have turned them over. Brandi Buchman of Daily Kos reported they essentially did and he didn’t. That request came in the form of a subpoena delivered on June 3. Buchman also wrote that now that the warrant for the search has been made public it shows the alleged crime that prompted the search was a violation of the Espionage Act, the part that discusses removal, concealment, alteration, or destruction of information related to national defense. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that the nasty guy’s claim the documents were planted is his second Big Lie.

Just like lies about election fraud, this one has two purposes: protect Trump, and drive a wedge between his supporters and the American government. ... When the planted documents lie appeared in the immediate wake of the search at Mar-a-Lago, one thing was immediately clear: Trump knew that the documents the FBI recovered were extremely serious, and there was absolutely no excuse for Trump to have them. Trump railed against the “outrage” of his home being searched, but every single spokesperson who spoke for him, including the Fox News pundits, made sure to get in the word “planted,” because even before the release of the FBI’s document list, it’s patently obvious that Trump was holding onto things for which there is absolutely no justification. ... In this case, the subject of the attack is the FBI and the Department of Justice as a whole. Even without this excuse, Trump has been eager to drive a spike into the DOJ, going back to the point where Jeff Sessions recused himself, and Trump learned that sitting in the Oval Office didn’t allow him to use Justice as his personal means of attacking his enemies.

The mini Build Back Better Bill has passed the House (all Republicans voted against it) and it goes to Biden’s desk. One of the big things in the bill is much increased funding for the IRS. That agency gets three benefits out of the bill: a computer system upgrade, more workers to process paper returns (they’re millions of returns behind) and actually answer the phone, and more agents to investigate corporations who try to cheat on their taxes. Laura Clawson of Kos reported Republicans have started to demonize the IRS in the same violent way they’ve been demonizing the FBI this week. They claim Democrats have weaponized the IRS and are about to send mobs of IRS agents to watch our every move. Never mind poor and middle class households are now less likely to be audited. This effort to brand the IRS as one more government boogeyman coming to get us has prompted the nasty guy’s base to get their guns ready. Someone, possibly a lot of someones, will get shot. I mentioned Republicans are demonizing the FBI. On Thursday this rhetoric prompted an attack on the Cincinnati FBI office. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Greg Dworkin quoited Peter Wehner of The Atlantic and the Republicans call for political violence:

My fear is we’re edging ever closer to that. Some people on the right—enraged and inflamed, caught in an echo chamber of undiluted anger and massive lies—clearly hope for it. They are perpetually frenzied and hyper-agitated, convinced they are in an existential struggle against a wicked foe. In the face of this, virtually the entire Republican Party is egging them on. Based on no evidence right now, Republicans are promoting a narrative that the events of this week prove that the United States government and its chief law-enforcement agency are Nazi-like, corrupt to the core, at war with its own citizens. This can’t end well.

In another roundup Dworkin quoted Tim Alberta, also of The Atlantic, discussing what comes after the search warrant – likely violence.

We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.

Dworkin also quoted Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch:

I’ll put it plainly: If your “belief” in our country is so fragile and pathetic that you will lose “hope for our nation” unless Donald Trump is given free reign to cleanse the land of evildoers, then you don’t actually believe in this nation. If your love of country is contingent on your preferred faction being in power, you’ve confused partisanship for patriotism. Taken seriously, all of this banana republic talk is un-American. I don’t mean it’s a wrong or flawed argument or simply an argument I don’t like—though it is all those things. I mean it is literally an un-American argument because it fundamentally betrays the whole idea of this country. And I’d say this if the claims were made about any politician. ... Presidents are not redeemers, messiahs, incarnations of mystical aspirations, or righteous settlers of seething grievances. They’re not god-kings or the fathers of our American family. They’re politicians elected to do some specific things as the head of one branch of one level of government. They get that job for a limited and defined period of time, and afterward they’re simply citizens. It’s a source of constant consternation and amazement for me that so many people either don’t understand this or simply pretend not to.

Some environmental news. Pakalolo of the Kos community reported of the weather crisis in Europe. It’s not just extreme heat again, though it is that. There is also drought. Crops are withering and this year’s crop will be mighty small. Wildlife and livestock suffer and die in the heat and for lack of water. Electricity is low and power may be cut because rivers and seawater are too warm for nuclear plants to operate safely. The Danube, Po, and Loire rivers are dry – the Loire Valley, France’s source of vegetables, has failed for the season. The source of the Thames is dry. The Rhine is so low barges can’t navigate it. I lived beside the Rhine for a couple years and know a lot of barges use it, or would. A severe shortage of food and drinking water is ahead. Past time to do something about climate change. Here are a couple small somethings. Skralyx of the Kos community reported that Cal and Stanford are teaming up to explore carbon capture technology. The mini BBB bill should help fund it. The existing carbon capture tech is energy intensive. This joint project is looking at another tech that is much cheaper (though still a long way from use). Skralyx discussed the chemistry, if that’s your thing. April Siese of Kos (in a post from before my vacation) reported on agrivoltaics. These are solar panels that shield crops. The article doesn’t say and I’m not sure from the photo whether the panels are continuous sheets or intermittent strips that let some light through. The panels help the crops during heat waves by keeping the plants cooler. When they’re cooler and less stressed they need less water. Prices are to a point that upfront investments might easily be paid off. Just 1% of American farmland covered in agrivoltaics could meet 20% of the country’s electricity needs (so maybe we need to cover only 5% of farmland to meet all of our energy needs?).