Proof That the NRA is a Racist Organization Hiding Behind the Constitution

The truth is that the National Rifle Association (NRA), is not an organization whose sole interest is protecting the right of all American people to bear arms.  The NRA is an Ultra–Right Wing Organization, supported by the gun industry and lobbyists, that exists to ensure that America remains a country enraptured by a gun culture.   For proof of this statement go to the website for the NRA publication American Rifleman and be assaulted by pictures of weapons in an eerie display of what should be called gun porn.  This is their Firearm of the Week:

Interestingly though it seems that NRA appears to be more concerned with the gun rights of White Americans and disturbingly uninterested when it comes to the gun rights of Black Americans.  This NRA reality can be seen in this outspoken Association’s ongoing silence regarding the police killing of Philandro Castile last year and the acquittal of the Police Officer that murdered him last week in Minnesota. The facts of this case are as follows:

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was fatally shot by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony, Minnesota, police officer, after being pulled over in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul. Castile was driving a car with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter as passengers when he was pulled over by Yanez and another officer.^[1][2] According to Reynolds, after being asked for his license and registration, Castile told the officer he was licensed to carry a weapon and had one in his pants pocket.^[3] Reynolds said Castile was shot while reaching for his ID after telling Yanez he had a gun permit and was armed. The officer shot at Castile seven times.

Diamond Reynolds live-streamed a video on Facebook in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.^[4] It shows her interacting with the armed officer as a mortally injured Castile lies slumped over, moaning slightly and his left arm and side bloody.^[5] The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office ruled Castile’s death a homicide and said he had sustained multiple gunshot wounds. The office reported that Castile died at 9:37 p.m. CDT in the emergency room of the Hennepin County Medical Center, about 20 minutes after being shot.^[6]

On November 16, 2016, John Choi, the Ramsey County Attorney, announced that Yanez was being charged with three felonies: one count of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm. Choi said, “I would submit that no reasonable officer knowing, seeing, and hearing what Officer Yanez did at the time would have used deadly force under these circumstances.”^[7]

Yanez was acquitted of all charges on June 16, 2017.^[8][9] The same day, he was fired by the City of St. Anthony.^[10]

This curious silence on the shooting of a Black Man with a legal permit to carry a firearm, by this organization that has been so outspoken to try to explain away the latest mass killings as aberration seems to be related to the skin color involved in this violation of a citizens’ Gun Rights.

This NRA disinterest,  considering the ongoing activism of the NRA, has certainly warranted notice.

While NRA spokesman continually pontificate about the sacrosanct stricture of the  Right to Bear Arms unspoken is the fact that they are really referring to the Right to Bear Arms of White People. As shown here:

For anyone who has held, or shot a firearm, as I have, there is I must admit a certain eerie feeling of comfort and power in it.  As advertised and glorified in our mass media, America is a Gunfighter Nation where a good many of us are imbued with romantic notions of the American Frontier, where men were men and could protect ourselves from the dangers around us with our guns.  However, sadly dovetailing with our American notion of being a Gunfighter Nation is the fact that America today is still a Racist Nation in the way we view and treat People of Color. Our criminal justice system focuses our racism leading to harassing and incarcerating Black People at rates far exceeding their percentage of the population. Our mass media is literally soaked in the propaganda of White Privilege,  which depicts People of Color as dangerous criminals. Unspoken in the enormous amount of American gun sales is that they are to be used to protect oneself from Black People.  That being the case, it is easy to see how the NRA exists as a bastion of the notion of White Privilege and as such has little regard for the murder of innocent, gun permitted Black people, who have clearly been shot because they admitted to being armed.

The killings, I say murders, of Philandro Castile and indeed of Alton Sterling:

Rapidly become mere footnotes as the unwarranted killing of People of Color by Law Enforcement Officers continues apace.  There are no instantaneous solutions available to these continuing injustices.  Perhaps though, the beginning of change could come when the majority of people in the United States, admit to the fact that we remain a racist nation.

Without An Attorney Your Constitutional Rights Are Meaningless….But What If You Cannot Afford an Attorney?

When it comes to those who become targeted and/or arrested by our criminal justice system the key element is neither guilt, nor innocence, it is whether you have access to a lawyer. I wrote about the sorry state of the U.S. criminal justice system in Cheap Justice, Bad Law = A Broken Legal System, The Law Is A Whore and The Law Is A Whore…….Redux. Criminal Justice has been a long term obsession of mine, even while I was writing about it at Jonathan Turley’s renowned legal blog Res Ipsa Loquitor. For instance on January 2013 I wrote about: America’s Broken Criminal Justice System.   Today I read a story that again tweaks my obsession. The story is about the ruling of a Judge in Chicago on the ability of prisoners in jail having access to legal counsel.

Chicago Judge Orders Access To Free Lawyers At Police Stations

Fewer than 1 percent of people in police custody in Cook County ever speak with an attorney.

“Chief Judge Timothy Evans of the Circuit Court of Cook County signed an order Tuesday that would make a county public defender or a designated private attorney available to anyone who is in custody at one of the Chicago Police Department’s 22 stations with lockup  facilities. 

“People watching TV think that’s what happens: You ask for a lawyer, and they just come in,” said Alan Mills, director of the Uptown People’s Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

“In the eyes of the law, everybody is innocent until proven guilty.
Everybody deserves access to justice,” Chief Judge Timothy Evans of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

It does work that way if you can afford your own attorney, but few can in Cook County: 89 percent of defendants charged in criminal cases relied on a public defender, according to 2015 county data. 

“Until a judge appoints a lawyer [to an indigent defendant], you don’t see one,” Mills said. “You can’t get a lawyer until your first court appearance. And that dramatically changes the outcome of your case.” 

The inability of people in police custody to access a lawyer before their first court appearance is what Mills and others said has contributed to Chicago’s reputation as “The False Confession Capital of the U.S.” 

“Here’s the scuttlebutt: No one has ever talked themselves out of charge, but lots and lots of people have talked themselves into one,” Mills said. 

Having access to a lawyer before a bond hearing could also mean significant savings for taxpayers. Mills points to the obvious savings from decreasing the number of wrongful convictions. 

“The city has paid roughly $50 million a year in the past decade or so,” Mills said of Chicago’s wrongful conviction settlements and related court costs. “It’s much better to keep people out of prison than to pay them for being wrongfully put there in the first place.” 

Eliza Solowiej, executive director of the 24-hour First Defense Legal Aid group, said major savings would come from eliminating unnecessary jail stays.

To highlight the cost to taxpayers, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart puts out an annual report of “dead time,” or time served by people whose sentences are less than the time already served or whose charges are dropped. In 2015, about 8,700 people spent time locked up ― at about $143 per person per day ― whose charges were eventually dropped. 

“I want to ensure that constitutional rights are protected from the earliest point of contact with the criminal justice system,” Judge Evans said in a statement Tuesday. “The concept of ‘justice’ demands that we take this step to strengthen an individual’s rights and the public’s  confidence in the system.”

Those of us who feel that the American way of criminal justice has become oppressive in trampling upon our Constitutional right to be deemed innocent until proven guilty, may be heartened by this ruling in Chicago, but it is a drop in the bucket. People being arrested and jailed, awaiting trial without benefit of legal counsel is a formula repeated tens of thousands of time daily in these United States of America.  Even for jail-able misdemeanors the cost of a lawyer is prohibitive if you have a low, or no income. Even those of more middle-class income find themselves struggling to obtain a competent counsel and scraping together the funds to pay costly legal fees.

It must be understood that in almost any trial involving criminal charges there is an extreme imbalance when it comes to the powers of the Prosecution and the Defense.  The Prosecution element has all of the resources of the Criminal Justice System available to convict a defendant.  Against the might of the government, the Defense has vastly inferior resources, unless the defendant is very wealthy, as we have seen in the many high profile criminal cases that have titillated public interest through the years. The Prosecution, besides enormous comparative resources also has the element of time on their side.  Our underfunded court systems dispense justice so slowly and put a defendant under such emotional and financial stress that in more than 95% of all criminal cases a plea bargain is the result simply because the defendant is overwhelmed and exhausted.

“A criminal defendant’s right to an attorney is found in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires the “assistance of counsel” for the accused “in all criminal prosecutions.” This means that a defendant has a constitutional right to be represented by an attorney during trial. The Right to Counsel – FindLaw“

For years though the Sixth Amendment was only considered operative in Federal court cases. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) the Supreme Court ruled that Defendants in State and local cases were also Constitutionally entitled to counsel.  For decades upon decades Lawyers dedicated to The Law and to the Constitution have come to defend people who lack funds to hire an attorney. Here is a discussion of the import and impact of the 6th Amendment on American Criminal Justice:  The Right to a Public Defender.

“The right to an attorney in criminal proceedings is clearly stated in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but the real-world application of this right is quite complicated. Even when a defendant’s right to representation by an attorney seems unquestionable, the issue remains of how to pay for legal services. Courts may appoint an attorney to represent an indigent defendant at public expense. Some jurisdictions have established public defender offices, while others maintain a roster of criminal defense attorneys who will accept court appointments. These programs are frequently underfunded and lacking in resources.“

The various local Legal Aid Societies and Public Defender offices have done extraordinary work on behalf of those unable to defend themselves in criminal court.  While I have nothing but complete respect for the people who do such work, thinking them true heroes, the truth of the matter is that when it comes to time and resources they are routinely outgunned by the resources available to the Prosecution.

Popular culture and the American mythos also play a role in the dysfunctional Criminal Justice System. Politicians frequently overstate the problem of crime and call for draconian measures to fight crime as a demagogic tool to gain votes.  Trump indeed ran on a Law and Order platform that ignored the dropping crime rates that have been in place for almost two decades. This public fear, which leads demagogues to make spurious claims regarding our Constitutional right is abetted by our mass media, particularly television,  where crime shows represent about 80% of all dramatic series. Most peculiarly, American conservatives, who uniformly have a disdain and distrust of government, are mostly on board with lauding police and criminal prosecutors for doing Gods work. The most ironic factor in this is that their draconian Conservative policies make the pursuit of criminal justice far more expensive than it would be in a more Constitutional friendly and benign system and yet conservatives always are concerned about the costs of things.

While I applaud the ruling of Chief Judge Timothy Evans , Chicago is but one jurisdiction in a vast United States of criminal system injustice.

Our Constitution May Be Flawed But Right Now It’s All We’ve Got to Protect Us From The Age of Trump

In this dark time, where extremist Right Wing elements are about to capture all three branches of the Federal Government, there is only one American Institution shielding us from Corporate Fascism. That institution is the Constitution of the United States.  In America’s Greatest Strength Is Also America’s Greatest Weakness I discussed the flaws and the strengths of our Constitution.  These flaws have led directly to gerrymandering that seems to assure Republican Control of the House of Representatives.   Unlimited political funding by Right Wing Oligarchs like the Koch Brothers, exacerbated by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, has led to the Republican capture of the majority of Governorship’s and State Legislatures, which facilitated gerrymandering. My post discussing our flawed Constitution concluded:  “And now in the Gerrymandered States of America, we have a President that the majority of voters opposed,  who will assumed office January 20th per the Constitution, having run a campaign appealing to the worst motives of less than a majority of Americans.  The U.S. Constitution is less than the hallowed document our national history has claimed it to be. Yet given the forces it has unleashed in this Nation today,  I’m far too afraid to call for a new Constitutional Convention  any time soon.”

Thom Hartmann wrote an article today, Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project Going to Rewrite Our Constitution, and They Are Shockingly Close to Pulling It Off, which discusses the movement, funded by the oligarchs, to have a Constitutional Convention.  Thom wants us to imagine what this “convention” would result in:

“Imagine if the U.S. Constitution barred the EPA and Department of Education from existing. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with a national minimum wage.

Imagine that the Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks and even big food and pharma—all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures, because the Constitution prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can’t even enforce voting or civil rights laws.

To add injury to insult, the federal government has to shut down Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, housing supports and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do.“

What we would be looking at if these plans reach fruition, would be an America completely controlled by the forces of entrenched wealth and power. What Thom’s article describes is that there exist three different pathways towards convening a Constitutional Convention.  He goes into details showing that in our Age of Trump these pathways are becoming more likely to achieve their desired result. Read the article and then compare his hypothesis with what we see going on currently in Congress and with the aims expressed by many Congresspeople. While most Americans would rightly be horrified by these aims were they explicitly spelled out, we know that the ultra conservative movement politicians almost never allude to them directly while on the campaign stump.  We also know that most political campaigning today is done via televised ads that are long on stirring emotions and critically short on details. Most of the ads are now funded by Right Wing PACS made possible by Citizens United and are dedicated to spreading meaningless vitriol against opposed candidates.

To cut to the chase, the beginnings of this push-back by the American Oligarchy began with the success of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.  The “Golden Age”  of the “Roaring 20’s”  under successive laissez faire Republican Administrations gave America 12 years of  faux prosperity propped up by rampant stock market speculation.  This speculation was done on “margin trading” which allowed speculators to buy large amounts of stock on  credit. This worked well as long as stock values kept rising in a phantasmal bubble of seeming prosperity,  but collapsed disastrously in 1929 when the stock market crashed and payments for the stock bought on credit came due. This of course led to the  “Great Depression” a phenomenon spreading worldwide. The collapse of the middle-class and the increased poverty of the working classes,  led to roiling discontent and talk of revolution. In Germany the  “revolution” led Hitler and the NAZI Party to power.

Among the American Oligarchs many such as Fred Koch and also scions of old, entrenched wealth like Prescott Bush  admired the Fascist approach.  So much so that when FDR was elected in 1932 they attempted to organize a coup under Marine Corp General Smedley Butler. Butler a true American War Hero and Patriot declined and blew the whistle in Congressional testimony.  FDR though a member of the upper crust himself, understood that the way to save America and its’ Constitution from Fascism was to provide a social safety net for the people,   the centerpiece of which was Social Security. A large faction of the American Oligarchy never forgave FDR for his treason to his class.  Since the New Deal these oligarchs have been plotting and funding to have its’ social safety net eliminated.

The Rich Are Not Like the Rest of Us in their attitudes and in their thinking. Many of the wealthiest, like the Kochs, the Waltons and the Trumps see their inherited wealth as proof of God’s favor and their own innate superiority.  Not only do they seek to increase their wealth and power beyond today’s improbable amounts, but they want to destroy any legislation that gives aid to the undeserving under-classes.  As the article shows their vehicle would be a Constitutional revision tat would severely limit any political attempts to dispute their current hegemony.

As we continue our resistance to the feckless blowhard in the White House, we must include resistance to any changing, or re-writing of our Constitution.  Flawed as that document is, it might stave off the disaster of Fascism, which it seems is all too possible.

 

 

 

 

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We True American Patriots Must Stop Bringing Knives to Gunfights With These Trump Traitors

I originally published this in early October of 2017. Trump had been in power for 9 months, with Republicans controlling all three branches of government and things were looking bleak for Democrats. As much as I understood the threat that Trump posed, back then I probably couldn’t have envisioned how bad things would get and how bitter the taste of our hard fought 2020 victory would taste in the reality of Trump refusing to accept defeat. Sadly, I had known in my gut, that my country was in dire danger from this awful person and the fascists in the party he represented. Now 40 months later my perception has been proven by history and my solution has become imperative, lest our country succumbs completely to Republican Fascism:

Considering my long, Left-wing history as a New Deal Democrat and my minor political activism in the 60’s and 70’s, against American Racism and the Vietnam War, some would think that I am loathe to call myself a patriot.  They would be wrong.  Even as I decry the examples of how our America has failed to live up to the ideals of the American Dream,  emotionally I dearly love the country of my birth and the fact that I am an American.  In the years since the end of World War II,  Republicans and conservatives whose programs are aimed at benefiting the most wealthy among us, have worked to paint those of us on the Left as unpatriotic because we are not warmongering jingoists.  They have done this because they represent programs and ideals that are harmful to most Americans and so they must find ways to get people to vote against their own self-interests.  These purported patriots have sent American troops out to die and be maimed, in wars that never should have been fought and yet they pretend that they Honor Our Troops.  It is time that we on the Left take back the mantle of American Patriotism from those who have really dishonored and disgraced our country, in their greedy need to serve their oligarchic masters.  We need to stop bringing Knives to Gunfights.

Despite all the attempts by some on the Democrats to try to put a bright face upon last year’s election debacle, any words of comfort ring hollow.  Republican’s control the 3 branches of our Federal Government and a majority of our States.  The Supreme Court now has a new justice that makes Antonin Scalia look like a democratic socialist in comparison.  Along with the attempts to rally the Democratic Party and the Left,  we have been bombarded with dueling postmortems on the reasons for this awful loss.  The results of this loss are already devastating for so many of us not shielded by wealth.  At this time, the most important accomplishment that we of the Left can attain, is to organize countrywide at the grass roots level for the 2018 congressional election.  At the same time we must work hard at the local and State level to regain control of these localities and that is indeed an awesome, nearly impossible task.

From my perspective, we need to simplify our analysis of what happened to US this time and distill it down to its’ essence.  The battles that have been fought over the soul of this country, have been waged in earnest by the representatives of aristocratic and corporate wealth since the Goldwater loss in 1964.  They represent a well-funded strategy to disseminate propaganda undermining a sense of national community and perpetrating Right Wing mythology to such a degree that it eradicates history and becomes accepted as fact.  While the issue of a small federal government and an antipathy to taxation have be recurrent themes in American History, it took the would be oligarchs fed up at Goldwater’s debacle, to hire some of the best advertising and merchandising minds to craft the mythology of “evil liberalism” coupled with the accusation that the minorities without power were inexplicably in control of everything.  With Trump’s election, this strategy has reached almost complete fruition.

However, even more important in the battle between the American Right and Left Wings has been the tendency by Liberals, Progressives and Left Wing radicals to be hoisted on their own  petards of pretense.  That pretense has been that America is a Democracy under a semi-divine Constitution and that if only the country can follow the forms laid down by our Founding Fathers all will be well.  I’ve written many times, in many different ways that this is an illusion that has little to do with the real state of affairs in our country. I’ve also written about the false narrative of history that we on the Left have incorporated into our psyches to such a degree that most of us also function in a “bubble” of diminished comprehension.

Following that false narrative causes too many in the Democratic Party to rely on institutional wishful thinking like the Rule of Law,  that dictate we play by the “rules of the game“.  Yet for many of us that means existing in a psychological state of denial, because deep down we Know, or we suspect the truth that this battle is a war for the well being of the many, versus the autocracy of a few. A brief look at past history confirms the fact that the other side plays dirty, while we stupidly play by the “rules”.

• Nixon won election by secretly interfering with the Paris Peace Talks and prolonging the Vietnam War.
• The Watergate Scandal came to light when Nixon attempted to “bug” the Democratic Party
• The un-elected Gerald Ford made a deal to pardon Nixon in order to become President
• The findings of the Church Committee that the Intelligence community was interfering in the political process were ignored.,
• Reagan partisans interfered with Jimmy Carter getting the hostages released by promising arms and other benefits in what became The Iran Contra Affair.
• Bill Clinton was maneuvered into confessing adultery, after first perjuring himself by an elaborate, well financed sting operation.
• George W. Bush became President after dubious Florida voting tactics run by his brother Jeb, the Governor and a SCOTUS decision unprecedented in our history.
• George W. Bush won re-election based on voter suppression and voter fraud in Ohio and John Kerry’s refusal to fight on.

By dint of a combination of voter suppression, Russian Interference,  FBI corruption,  overt racism and the “Big Lies” of Trump,  we have elected perhaps our country’s most malevolent President. As his cabinet is formed from some of the worst elements of corporate greed, aristocratic elitism, and anti-democratic fascists,  most of us are threatened economically and socially. Trump and the Trump Cohort are in effect making war upon an overwhelming majority of Americans.  Yet for many in the Democratic Party establishment, their response to this dire threat is to maintain the belief that in the end reason will win out over the doings of a narcissistic, pathological liar abetted by a Party all to willing to ignore his Russian treason.

Of the many flaws I observed in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, perhaps the most damning was the belief by her political strategists that all they had to do was to emphasize the historical nature of her candidacy and counter point it with Trump’s sexism and misogyny.  They overlooked the fact that this country is for the most part sexist (why the wage disparity?) and that many Fundamentalist Christian women believed only a man should be President.  Meanwhile,  this putrid Billionaire, whose money comes from selling a boorish upper class brand,  was allowed to position himself as the economic savior of the middle class.  Virulently untruthful Republican campaign ads were met by too cleverly bland  and obviously ineffective Democratic ads, mainly showing Trump contretemps, racism and misogyny.  Never once did it occur to the Clinton Team that in truth a sizable minority of this country is sexist and racist.  The appeals to people’s higher natures fell upon deaf ears.

The sad irony of all of this is that Trump ascended to the lead in the nomination battle by appealing to the racism and sexism of the Republican base.  With the nomination secured, Trump actually adopted the message that Bernie Sanders had such success with, that many in the media disdained as a “populist” message.  You see just as Bill Clinton’s winning mantra was “‘it’s the economy stupid“, so Sanders had identified that the key issue in this election was exactly the unfairness of the American economic situation.  Hillary, belatedly moved towards Bernie’s position to secure her nomination, but then in the giddiness of positive polling numbers, began to retreat to her comfortable “Centrism“,  incorrectly believing she could reach out to that non-existent political cadre, the oxymoronic Republican Centrists and the even more non-existent “undecideds“.

My upshot is this.  I see the battle for political power as a war between the “haves” and the “have nots“, over the resources of the country.  We all know instinctively that when it comes to human affairs, “money and power” are fought for by warlike means, with no holds barred and the understanding therefore that all tactics are acceptable as long as they result in victory.  Most Left Wingers,  myself definitely included, see the human condition as a need for harmony and community.  This is the thrust of most of our political action. However, when you are fighting a war against an enemy of implacable fortitude; contemptuous for the normal rule of law; and without qualms or compassion for the innocents hurt as collateral damage;  to respond to that enemy,  you mustn’t allow yourselves to be bound by chivalrous behavioral norms.

We can’t win a war with the antediluvian Conservative Corporatists by dint of weaponry, or violence, because they are already fairly violent and well armed people.  The battle to be fought is with the deadly weapon of propaganda and in Trump’s peculiar case ridicule.  This “war” needs to be fought by creating effective memes and by crafting a mythology that makes people despise our enemies.  The motto of my college was “the truth shall make us free”.  While that is a noble aspiration, we have seen in this election that the  “truth” is malleable to pathological liars and that “love does not conquer hate“.  My take on this, though many might disagree, is that “when they go low, we go lower“.  If we lose the battles to come in the next four years,  we will inexorably lose this country to a Fascism every bit as virulent as that practiced by Hitler and Mussolini. The stakes are high and they’ve got the guns.  I have to believe though, that we’ve got the intelligence and the wit to prevail in the “War of Ideas“,  but we need to unleash it ruthlessly, without regard for the niceties of comity.

A metaphor for my mindset is this iconic movie clip below and the surprise ending, that really shouldn’t be a surprise.  Let’s be sure we’re the ones bringing a better gun to the gunfight of the next three years.

Is Trump a Moron, a Racist or Just an Obnoxious Boor?

My answer to the question posed by my title is that Trump actually can be described by all three of those negative nouns.  Throughout the torture of Trump’s short presidency it seems clear that the majority of Americans would use at least one of those terms to describe their commander-in-chief.  One thing I’ve wondered about though is how this awful person, impersonating a world leader, is seen outside America, by other than the adoring Russians. Below I’m sharing an opinion piece by the Liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in full, because not only do I think it has pertinent insights, but it also places them in an historical context that interests me.

Is Trump Really a ‘Moron,’ as Tillerson Said, or Just Racist and Obnoxious?

“Winston Churchill, savior of Western civilization and arguably the greatest British leader in history, had some dark sides that have receded in memory in the shadow of his epic stand against Adolf Hitler. Churchill was a white supremacist who opposed India’s independence, supported concentration camps in South Africa, viewed Arabs as degenerate horse thieves and backed Zionism, among other reasons, as an antidote to Jewish Bolshevism’s war on the capitalist West. Churchill was also a champion of eugenics, which aimed to improve the human race by weeding out undesirables, a view that was popular in both Britain and the U.S. until it emerged that the Nazis were taking it to its logical extreme. Several decades before that, however, Churchill advocated sterilization of the mentally disabled as well as their isolation in internment camps in which they would be prevented from reproducing.

Churchill was one of the main supporters of the Mental Deficiency Act legislated by the British Parliament in 1913, which replaced the 1886 Idiots Act. In addition to people whose moral corruption cannot be corrected, the Act defined three levels of mental deficiency: Worst off were “idiots,” who needed protection from themselves, then “imbeciles,” from whom society needed protection. and then the “feeble-minded,” those with the lightest mental impairment, who needed constant training and supervision in order to function in society.

The law allowed authorities to detain the mentally impaired and to intern them in homes, camps or so-called colonies: over 65,000 were interned in Britain and a similar number in the United States, although America also instituted mass sterilization of the mentally impaired, which the British did not. The United States had a similar, though not identical, classification of the mentally impaired, which was heavily influenced by the advent of IQ tests. “Idiots” were those with IQs lower than 25, “imbeciles” had IQs lower than 50, but the term “feeble-minded,” which was used in Britain, was replaced by another term coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry Goddard. Those with IQs from 51 to 70 would henceforth be known as “morons.”

All of these terms were eventually deemed to be derogatory and were removed from professional lexicons by the early 1970s, along with the general change in society’s attitude toward the intellectually disabled, as they are called today. The term “moron,” along with “idiot” and “imbecile,” joined the ever-growing stock of insults that include “stupid,” “dumb,” “cretin,” “ignoramus,” “nitwit,” “simpleton,” “numbskull” and the like. But the word “moron” is still pejorative enough that if forced U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to humiliate himself in front of the country on Wednesday after NBC reported that he had used it over the summer to depict U.S. President Donald Trump. In a rare appearance before television cameras, Tillerson praised Trump’s diplomatic wisdom with superlatives worthy of Bismarck, Metternich and Kissinger put together, though he noticeably refrained from denying that he had called Trump a “moron.” That task was left to U.S. State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert, who asserted that Tillerson wouldn’t use such language. Stephanie Ruhl, one of the NBC reporters with the scoop, admitted that Nauert was right: According to her sources, Tillerson hadn’t called Trump a “moron” but a “fucking moron.” True to the principle that one can always find an embarrassing Trump tweet for just about everything, New York Magazine promptly located the 2014 tweet in which Trump showcased a caricature of a Founding Father telling colleagues: “I keep thinking we should include something in the constitution in case the people elect a fucking moron.” Trump probably meant it as a dig at former U.S. President Barack Obama.

Ruhl maintained that not only had Tillerson used the offensive term to describe Trump, but that U.S. Vice President Pence, U.S. Secretary of Defense Mattis and then-Homeland Security chief John Kelly had to dissuade the secretary of state from resigning. Ruhl, whose report was published as Trump was making his way to a Las Vegas still reeling from the horrific shoot-out last Sunday night, said that Tillerson’s tirade came after Trump’s monumentally offensive speech in July to thousands of boy scouts, in which he dissed Obama, praised himself and seemed to be using sexual innuendo to describe the lives of wealthy people with yachts. Tillerson, who devoted many years of his life to the scouts movement as he was climbing to the top of Exxon’s corporate ladder, blew his top and called Trump a “moron” – and probably nastier things as well.

He wasn’t the first and won’t be the last, of course. Stupidity is one of the more easily accessible and widespread explanations for Trump’s behavior. It’s no coincidence, of course, that his election resurrected the futuristic cult classic “Idiocracy’ about a dumbed down America that chooses a loutish porn actor as president. It’s true that Trump has claimed in the past that his IQ is much higher than that of Obama or of comedian John Stewart, but in that case, he’s doing an excellent job of concealing his intelligence, as his visit this week to Puerto Rico showed.

Trump came to the island under a cloud of criticism over the federal government’s allegedly slow response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Maria as well his own dismissive attitude toward Puerto Ricans and their leaders, which stood in stark contrast to the tone of his message in the hurricane-hit states of Florida and Texas. But rather than trying to cheer up Puerto Ricans, as he did in Texas, or console them, as he would later do in Las Vegas, Trump insulted the island’s residents on their own home turf. He told them they should be grateful they weren’t hit with a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. He didn’t stop complaining about the drain of Puerto Rican recovery on the federal budget, which he didn’t even mention in Texas or Florida. And to cap it all off, Trump was filmed tossing out paper towels to his audience in a scene deemed by one broadcaster as “the least presidential ever.”

Some people ascribe Trump’s behavior in such events to obnoxious racism rather than stupidity. Prejudice and racial stereotypes are such a prominent feature of his personality, they maintain, that he just can’t keep them under lock. He has described himself as ‘the least racist person ever,” but since he launched his presidential run by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, Trump has described Puerto Ricans as lazy, Muslims as wannabe terrorists, African-Americans as thugs, Jews as proficient with money and women as inferior sexual objects. It’s only among neo-Nazis, apparently, that Trump has found “some fine people.”

Others cite Trump’s sensational victory in the elections – assuming that it wasn’t all the result of a Russian sting operation – as proof of his political smarts. According to this view, all of Trump’s scandals, controversies, insults and inanities are but a ploy aimed at rallying his base, first to win the elections and then as leverage against the unruly Republican Party. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Trump is a smart guy pretending to be a dunce. If that’s true, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be worried by Barak Ravid’s report on Wednesday that Trump told the United Nations’ secretary general that the prime minister is more problematic that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. If Trump is a “moron,” on the other hand, as Tillerson testified, then his words about Netanyahu should be taken as seriously as his assertions about Obama’s birth certificate, his support for Marine Le Pen in the French elections and his praise for the homicidal Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who will have the privilege of hosting Trump next month.

The problem with the Trump-is-actually-clever theory is that his outlandish statements and unfounded assertions don’t just harm America’s international image or divide its own population – they often do the most damage to Trump himself. The U.S. president has shot himself in the foot so regularly that it is only natural to assume he may not be the sharpest pencil in the box. He fired FBI Director James Comey, a move which Steve Bannon described as the worst presidential mistake ever, but then made things much worse for himself by admitting, contrary to the official line, that he did so because of the investigation of his ties to Russia. Trump made sure that even if Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t collect enough evidence on the alleged collusion, he would always be able to nail Trump on obstruction of justice. The same is true of Trump’s ham-handed effort to concoct a cover story for his son Donald’s hitherto unreported meeting with a Russian lawyer with close ties to the Kremlin, which fell apart within hours. Or the time he undermined administration efforts to claim that his Muslim ban was anything but by confirming that this is exactly what it was. And so on and so forth.

Intelligence is no guarantee of success, of course. Jimmy Carter had an IQ of 176, but most Americans consider him to be the worst U.S. president in modern times. Trump came to the White House with less useful or general knowledge than his predecessors, but his uniqueness lies with the fact that he seems uninterested in learning. He disdains the mainstream media, doesn’t trust his intelligence briefings and seems to rely on Fox News and even loonier right-wing news sites for his basic information about the world. He has admitted that he often makes decisions without knowing the facts, not a trait usually associated with the astute.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote an article about Trump’s suspected dimness, which spawned the term “Trump’s Razor” after “Occam’s Razor,” of which Netanyahu is fond. Whereas Occam’s Razor stipulates that where there are several possible explanations for something, the simplest one is usually correct, Trump’s Razor says that where there are several possible explanations for something Trump has said or done, the stupidest is always the right one. But even if we assume that Trump is far from stupid, and definitely not a “moron,” most people would agree that both his election and his presidency are an insult to America’s intelligence, as well as the world’s.”

Don’t Be Too Sure That There Are Adults “Reining in” Trump

Let’s face it, most Americans with any semblance of independent thinking, have been angry and terrified by the election of our virulent Presidential buffoon.  His performance thus far has actually amplified our initial trepidation.  The situation seems so dire that we grasp for any straw of hope that we and our nation will be saved from this mean moron.  The pundits and newscasters of our corporate mainstream news media are ill equipped to deal with this awful person. Historically, the mainstream media’s role has been to present an “establishment” view of politics, seeing all political positions as falsely equivalent.  They accomplish this mostly by avoiding key political issues, while focusing on electoral horse races. Some cable news journalists have been bravely active in deconstructing the Trump disaster and beyond the FOX propagandists who pose as newscasters,  most others have often waxed critically at the latest Trump idiocy,  but within the constraints commensurate with their status as corporate employees.

A curious development of the Trump news coverage has been the impression given, through the overuse of centrist pundits, that there are some “adults” in the Trump administration trying to maintain a leash upon this  crazy  choleric Commander In Chief. The hope of this establishment punditry serving as news analysts is that these “adults” in the administration will rein Trump in enough to prevent his starting a nuclear holocaust, for instance. Call me a skeptic though, but I am suspicious as to whether these individuals are indeed “adults” in their political leanings, or merely that in comparison to the tumultuous Trump they appear to be sober in temperament. This is the first of a series of sketches I am planning to write about these supposed “adults“,  who are presented as giving us hope that they will prevent Trump from destroying us all.

The first I heard of Marine General John F. Kelly was when he was appointed to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). On the cable news channels, the usual gaggle of neocon pundits who are typecast as sober thinkers on policy, came on professing to know Kelly as a serious thinker.  My personal view is to distrust the assessments of these pundits, because they all represent rather centrist conservative perspectives of world affairs and are closely related to the Corporate/Military/Intelligence Complex.  These pundits seem to uniformly have a high regard for any person of an Admiral of General’s rank and pay them the due deference that these people would expect from their troops. The pundits generally rated Kelly highly, though others expressed concern that his affirmation of Trump’s hard-line immigration stance may not bode well:

“Kelly has stated his respect for religious diversity and freedom, but has also made it clear that he wants to “put a stop to political correctness that for too long has dictated our approach to national security.”………..

Kelly said that Trump supporters had voted to “take back sovereignty at our borders.”……

“He personifies a military approach to the border,” says Chris Rickerd, an immigration-focused policy counsel at ACLU. “That hasn’t gone well over the last 15 years. The border can’t become this zone where the Constitution doesn’t matter, where due process is thrown away, where the historical role of this country as a refuge is abandoned.”  Here.

One of the signature Trump issues, that upsets the majority of Americans,  has been his racist and xenophobic stance on immigration.  It seems that General Kelly’s views are similar to those of his boss, with less overt invective. How will that rein Trump in?

Further wisdom of General Kelly:

“In an April 2017 speech at George Washington University, Kelly said, “If lawmakers do not like the laws they’ve passed and we are charged to enforce, then they should have the courage and skill to change the laws. Otherwise they should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.”^[26]

“Kelly indicated days into the administration his interest in having the U.S.–Mexico border wall completed within two years.^[27] On April 21, 2017, Kelly said the U.S.–Mexico border wall would begin construction “by the end of the summer.”^[28] Two days later, Kelly said he believed “a border wall is essential” as there were “tremendous threats” such as drugs and individuals coming into the US.^[29] On May 2, Kelly stated his surprise in office holders “rejoicing in the fact that the wall will be slower to be built and, consequently, the southwest border under less control than it could be.”^[30]

“In May 2017, Kelly said of terrorism, “It’s everywhere. It’s constant. It’s nonstop. The good news for us in America is we have amazing people protecting us every day. But it can happen here almost anytime.”^[31] He said that the threat from terrorism was so severe that some people would “never leave the house” if they knew the truth.^“[31]

So those of us hoping against hope that General Kelly will serve us by keeping our mad, bad President from being even more despicable, may be placing their hopes in the wrong person. The border wall and immigration are two intertwined issues that expose the virulent racism and irrational ideation of Donald Trump. They serve as metaphors for why this malevolent clown is such a danger to us all.  Yet the supposed adult in the room, General Kelly, is on board with these ideas.  Kelly’s presence does nothing to assuage my trepidation.