THE HYPOCRISY OF HILLARY CLINTON

THE HYPOCRISY OF HILLARY CLINTON

©Wendell Griffen, 2016

Justice Is A Verb!

            I am a state court trial judge.  The ethics that govern my work prohibit me from endorsing partisan political candidates.  I am not endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. 

            However, I am allowed to comment about controversial matters of public policy as long as the controversy does not involve pending or impending cases before me.  There are no cases pending before me involving claims by persons seeking personal injury damages against manufacturers of any firearm that Adam Lanza used to massacre 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, after he had already murdered his mother. 

Secretary Hillary Clinton, her supporters, and media pundits have criticized Senator Bernie Sanders for saying he does not support extending laws to allow relatives of the massacred Sandy Hook victims to sue the manufacturers of the firearms Adam Lanza used for money damages.  As someone with more than passing knowledge about personal injury law, I know that what Senator Sanders said squares with what the law is, and what Secretary Clinton knows, or ought to know, has always been the law.

Secretary Clinton is a very smart lawyer.

Every account one reads about the Sandy Hook massacre indicates that Adam Lanza intentionally committed those murders using firearms.  He selected children and adults, including his mother, as targets.  He fired the firearms and killed his victims.  No gun manufacturer did those wrongful deeds, nor did anyone else.

Secretary Clinton is a very smart lawyer.

Adam Lanza killed those people because he wanted to kill them.  The firearms he used did not malfunction and accidentally fire bullets into people while Lanza was engaged in nonviolent activity.  They fired because Adam Lanza intentionally and deliberately used them to shoot people. 

Secretary Clinton is a very smart lawyer.

Manufacturers are correctly held liable for injuries and deaths caused by defective products.  Manufacturers are also liable for injuries and deaths caused by products that are inadequately labeled to warn potential users about their dangerous propensities. 

But Adam Lanza knew firearms are dangerous—deadly, in fact.  He knew the firearms he used to kill his mother and the other victims would cause death.  He intentionally and knowingly used them for that purpose.  The law calls that murder. 

Secretary Clinton is a very smart lawyer.

There is no law that makes any manufacturer in the United States liable for personal injuries and deaths caused by someone who deliberately and knowingly uses a lawful product to commit a crime.  There has never been such a law. 

Secretary Clinton has a law degree from Yale Law School.  She taught law.  She practiced law.  She knows, and has known for decades, that a product manufacturer cannot be sued for personal injuries, including death, caused by someone who deliberately uses a lawful product for an unlawful purpose. 

It is unlikely that Secretary Clinton would support making manufacturers of matches and butane lighters liable for fires, property damage, injuries, and deaths committed by arsonists.  I doubt she would support making pesticide manufacturers liable for injuries and deaths caused by people who intentionally and purposely misuse them to poison their neighbors. 

Secretary Clinton is a very smart lawyer.

Refusing to support changing the law to make gun manufacturers liable for the massacre Adam Lanza committed has nothing to do with the Second Amendment.  Refusing to support changing the law so that gun manufacturers would become civilly liable for murders committed with firearms does not mean someone lacks compassion for murder victims and their surviving relatives. 

The law does not make gun manufacturers liable for civil damages for murders committed by people who use firearms to kill people for one basic reason.  To do so would be factually, morally, and ethically wrong.  That is why it would also be legally wrong. 

Anyone who does not know it is wrong to make gun manufacturers liable for the deaths  that murderers cause with guns is not smart, whether that person is a lawyer or not.

Secretary Clinton is a very smart lawyer. 

 Anyone who knows it is wrong to make gun manufacturers liable for what murderers do with guns—yet who criticizes someone else for refusing to support making gun manufacturers liable for what murderers do with guns—is not intellectually honest, whether that person is a lawyer or not. 

We have a word for such intellectual dishonesty--hypocrisy.

SHATTERED HOPE AND OPENED EYES

SHATTERED HOPE AND OPENED EYES

©Wendell Griffen, 2017

May 7, 2017 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)[1]

New Millennium Church, Little Rock, AR

Luke 24:13-35

13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles^* from Jerusalem, ¹⁴and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. ¹⁵While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, ¹⁶but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. ¹⁷And he said to them, ‘What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?’ They stood still, looking sad.^* 18Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place ther777e in these days?’ ¹⁹He asked them, ‘What things?’ They replied, ‘The things about Jesus of Nazareth,^* who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,²⁰and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. ²¹But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.^* Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. ²²Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, ²³and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. ²⁴Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.’ ²⁵Then he said to them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! ²⁶Was it not necessary that the Messiah^* should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ ²⁷Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. ²⁹But they urged him strongly, saying, ‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’ So he went in to stay with them. ³⁰When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. ³¹Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. ³²They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us^* while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ ³³That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. ³⁴They were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ ³⁵Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

       

We seem to be always living in a time of shattered hope. 

In 1960, John F. Kennedy, a United States Senator from Massachusetts, was elected to become the 35^th President of the United States.  Kennedy was the youngest person to ever be elected to that office.  His youthfulness, idealism, handsome appearance, and moving personal and family history caused many people in the United States and around the world to hope for peace and justice.  But, those hopes were shattered, on November 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

In 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., co-pastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia and leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was awarded the Nobel Prize in the field of human rights for his leadership in civil rights and social justice when he was only 35 years old.  Dr. King’s advocacy for civil rights, social justice, and peace through non-violent change challenged the United States and inspired social justice movements around the world.  However, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

 

In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a former Governor from Georgia, was elected to become the 39^th President of the United States.  His humility and down-to-earth manners prompted many people to hope that public policy in the United States would be defined by peace and justice.  President Carter embraced equality for women and persons of color.  He promoted energy conservation and human rights.  He convened a historic summit involving President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel at Camp David that resulted in the first treaty of peace and cooperation between Israel and any of its neighboring Arab nations.  But, Carter was defeated in his 1980 bid for re-election by Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California. 

In 2006, Barack Obama wrote a book titled The Audacity of Hope.[2] In his 2006 book, Mr. Obama (who was then a United States Senator from Illinois), set out his vision and views on what he termed a new kind of politics based on cooperation, a shared sense of community, and a conviction that we can work together to improve life for all persons.  In the fall of 2006, The Audacity of Hope became a best seller – and reached the number one position on both the New York Times and Amazon.com best seller lists – after the book was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. 

Barack Obama later became a candidate for President of the United States in the Democratic Party.  He eventually won the Democratic Party nomination.  Ultimately, Barack Obama was elected, in November 2008, the 44^th President of the United States.  His election was viewed in this nation and across the world as a hopeful sign for justice and peace.  After leading the nation to enact Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the most comprehensive health care legislation in its history – President Obama was re-elected, in 2012, to a second four-year term of office.  During his second inauguration in January 2013, he took the oath of office while placing his hand on a Bible that had belonged to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In 2016, Hillary Clinton, who served as Secretary of State during the first term of the Obama presidency, United States Senator from New York after leaving the White House as First Lady during the presidency of her husband, President Bill Clinton, and who devoted her life and career to public service and advocacy for equal rights for women around the world, became the first woman in the United States to be nominated as the presidential candidate by either of the two leading U.S. national political parties when she won the Democratic Party nomination.  Ms. Clinton’s candidacy seemed likely to succeed because of her record for public service, and because the nominee chosen by the Republican Party, Donald Trump, had never served in public office.  Secretary Clinton’s candidacy was buoyed by and personified the hopes of many people – in the U.S. and elsewhere – that a women would finally be chosen to lead our nation.  Her candidacy was openly supported by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. 

However, President Obama was not followed by Secretary Clinton.  In November 2016, the hopes for a Hillary Clinton presidency that would build on the policies advanced by President Obama were shattered when Donald Trump, a New York real estate developer and television celebrity, was elected the 45^th President of the United States.  Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign was defined by white nationalism, hostility toward immigrants and Muslims, bigotry against women, persons who are disabled, and other persons who are marginalized.    

I recount these aspects of relatively recent political history so we will identify with the two men mentioned in the passage we read from Luke 24 who were walking toward Emmaus from Jerusalem days after Jesus had been crucified by the Roman Empire at the insistence of religious nationalists who opposed his ministry.  The two men appear to have been followers of Jesus.  But unlike other men who remained in hiding in Jerusalem, these men left Jerusalem.  Unlike the women who followed Jesus throughout his ministry, supported his ministry, followed him to the site of his crucifixion, watched him suffer and die, followed him to the place he was buried in a borrowed tomb, and who had resolved to pay homage to him afterwards, these men left Jerusalem. 

Why? 

Luke’s Gospel gives us a clue.  After a third person joined them along the walk to Emmaus and asked them what they were discussing with each other as they walked along (Luke 24:17), their reply is found at Luke 24:19-24.

 

“The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in word and deed before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.  But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.  Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place.  Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.  There were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.  Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see him.” 

These men suffered from shattered hope.  Those of us who were remember what it was like days after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 should be able to identify with them.  We who remember what it felt like days after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 should be able to identify with them.  We who remember what it felt like days after President Carter was defeated in 1976 should be able to identify with them.  And those of us who remember what it felt like when Secretary Clinton was defeated and President Trump was elected should be able to identify with them.

Cleopas and his friend are examples of us!  Like them, we have held high and noble hopes.  Like them, we have seen our hopes shattered.  Like them, many of us appear to have thrown up our hands in disappointment, confusion, and disgust.  Cleopas and his friend were not hiding in Jerusalem.  They were not hanging out with the women.  They were not hanging out with Thomas.  They left town!  They quit the place.  They appear to have decided to throw in the towel.

They had seen Jesus ambushed by their own religious leaders.  Their own people had turned on Jesus.  Their own people had turned Jesus over to the Roman occupiers of Palestine.  Their own people had falsified evidence to accuse Jesus with the crime of insurrection.  Their own people, religious leaders, had done all this after bribing Judas, one of the trusted disciples of Jesus. 

After seeing so much corruption, Cleopas and his fellow disciple decided “to hell with it!”  After they had hoped so much in Jesus and seen him do so much for their people only to be rejected by the very people he had served, these men were done with the religion of Jesus.  They were done with hope. 

It is tempting to criticize these men for giving up.  We who have the advantage of knowing “the rest of the story” might be tempted to look down on them.  We might be tempted to think, “Where was their faith?  Why did they leave Jerusalem even after hearing the report from the women who said that Jesus was no longer dead?”  Do you have those thoughts? 

But are we so different from Cleopas and his fellow traveler?  Have we, like them, heard about the risen Jesus?  Have we, like these men with shattered hope, heard that despite everything the principalities and powers of empire and pride did to Jesus, God raised him up!  Have we, like these men with shattered hope, not also been tempted to quit on Jesus nonetheless? 

Shattered hope can cause us to quit believing God will make a way.  Shattered hope can cause us to quit believing that anything we do for God and with God matters.  Shattered hope can make us leave what we believe we were called to do.  Shattered hope can make us stop trusting others we have once trusted. 

And shattered hope can make us blind!  Shattered hope can blind us to realities that contradict and refute our hopelessness.  Shattered hope can blind us to the living presence and power of God walking with us, talking us, listening to us, comforting us, and challenging us.  Shattered hope can make us blind to the power of God.  Shattered hope can make us blind to the truth of God.  Shattered hope can make us blind to the presence of God.  Shattered hope can make us blind to the peace of God.  Shattered hope can make us blind to the unstoppable justice of God. 

Well, if you wonder if there is a cure to shattered hope, there is good news.  The third man who joined Cleopas and his buddy along the walk to Emmaus joined them in the power of God.  God finds us even when have thrown in the towel!  God finds us even when we’ve quit the field.  God finds us and hears, finds us and consoles us, and finds us and challenges us!  God will not abandon us to be people of shattered hope.  In the risen Jesus, God finds us. 

In the risen Jesus, God helps us understand that some suffering is part of every liberation movement.  In the risen Jesus, God shows us that not even God can deliver us without suffering oppression from the principalities and power of empire and pride.  In the risen Jesus, God shows us that even when those principalities and powers appear to have done us in, God has us!  God has a way planned out of our “no way!”  Even when the principalities and powers rise up, rail, and seem to rule over us, God is making a way and God will have the final word.

Because Jesus showed up on the road to Emmaus, shattered hope was eventually replaced by opened eyes.  Because Jesus showed up and drew men with shattered hope into a burning heart fellowship, they could not keep leaving Jerusalem.  They had to return to Jerusalem.  They returned because the power of God revealed by the resurrection of Jesus opened their eyes.  They returned because the Jesus of resurrection had become real to them, not merely a rumor. 

When Jesus becomes real, we will go back to work for God.  When Jesus becomes real, we will not quit when people persecute us.  When Jesus becomes real, we will not dismiss reports from others about what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do.  When Jesus becomes real, people of shattered hope will become people of resurrection truth, justice, and hope. 

We are called to be those people.  We are called, with Cleopas and his companion, to walk with Jesus, learn from Jesus, be challenged by Jesus, have our hearts warmed by Jesus, and then get back to work for God with Jesus!  In Jesus, God is calling us back to the work.  In Jesus, God is calling us back to Jerusalem.  In Jesus, God is calling us to be people of resurrection hope who defy the principalities and powers of empire and pride. 

Thanks to the risen Jesus, people with shattered hope can have our eyes opened, our hearts warmed, and our strength renewed.  Hallelujah!

Amen.

---

[1] The scripture for this sermon is the Gospel lectionary passage for April 30, 2017 (Third Sunday of Easter), and this sermon was originally intended for that date.  However, worship services were canceled at New Millennium Church on April 30 because of severe thunderstorms and flash flooding in central Arkansas on April 29 and 30, 2017.  The sermon is delivered on May 7, 2017  (Fourth  Sunday of Easter) because it is relevant to what Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick called “the living of these days.”

[2] Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope:  Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, (Crown/Three Rivers Press:  2006).  

1876, 1933, AND 2016

1876, 1933, AND 2016

Justice is A Verb!

©Wendell Griffen, 2016

History will record that on November 8, 2016, voters in the United States elected Donald John Trump to become its 45^th President.  In doing so, the voters who preferred Mr. Trump rejected the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.  

The voters who preferred Mr. Trump also renounced the policies of President Barack Obama despite his supposed political popularity and favorable approval ratings. Whatever else one may glean from the presidential election of 2016, President-elect Trump is not and cannot be expected to continue the policies of the Obama presidency.  He ran against those policies and stridently opposed them during the campaign.  

President-Elect Trump will not nominate a constitutional centrist or moderate to the Supreme Court.  

President-Elect Trump will not veto congressional legislation to abolish the Affordable Care Act.  

President-Elect Trump and Vice President-Elect Mike Pence are unlikely to support legislation to protect immigrants, workers, people from ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, and people who are LGBT from discrimination.  They are also unlikely to protect the environment. 

The election of Donald Trump should also be understood, however soberly (if not somberly), in the light of another period in the history of the United States.  The 2016 election of Donald Trump means the end of the brief dawn of progress in civil liberty witnessed during the Obama presidency the same way the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction. 

Remember what happened when Rutherford Hayes was elected President by the House of Representatives in 1876.  Reconstruction ended.  Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South despite knowing those troops protected former slaves from violence and reprisals from white southerners.  After the federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederate states, the Ku Klux Klan was born.   Jim Crow segregation began twenty years later (1896) when the Supreme Court decided that racial segregation on a Louisiana railroad car was acceptable in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that ushered in the term “separate but equal.” 

Remember that Senator Mitch McConnell announced that his goal was for President Obama to have a failed presidency.

Remember that former Speaker of the House John Boehner railed against passage of the Affordable Care Act while he served as House Minority Leader and afterwards while he was Speaker.

Remember that some pundits imagined the Obama election in 2008 as the beginning of a “post-racial era.”

Remember how religious conservatives have raged against the idea that women have the right to choose whether to bear children, and against the idea that people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender have rights equal to the rights of people who are heterosexual.

Remember that the Tea Party movement emerged after President Obama was elected.

Remember that the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2014.

Remember that the U.S. Senate refused to even schedule confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia earlier this year. 

Remember that U.S. voters refused to elect a woman president of the United States who was a former U.S. Senator, former Secretary of State, and who devoted her young adult years to challenging bigotry and discrimination.

In 2008, a voting coalition of moderate and progressive white men and women, African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian-Americans, and white Millennials elected President Obama.  In 2016, a coalition of white working class men and women, white senior citizens, and white religious conservatives elected President-Elect Donald Trump. Time will tell whether the 2016 election of Mr. Trump will have the same unjust consequences as the 1876 election of Mr. Hayes had for the nation. 

We should not only remember what happened in the United States after the election of 1876 if we want to know what could happen in coming years during the presidency of Mr. Trump.  Patriots and prophets should recall what happened in Germany, later in Europe, and ultimately to the world after Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933 on the promise that he would make Germany great again.

It is time for prophets and patriots to come forward, speak, advocate, organize, and live prophetically for social justice and peace as we enter this new and sobering (if not somber) era in U.S. history.  

DONALD JOHN TRUMP AND WHITE MALE SUPREMACY

Justice Is a Verb!

©Wendell Griffen, 2016

The understandable controversy surrounding recent revelations that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump boasted of assaulting unsuspecting women by groping their genitals has been discussed a lot.  Most of the discussion has centered on reactions by politicians to Trump’s 2005 remarks and whether politicians who endorsed or supported Trump’s presidential candidacy will remain in his camp.  But not much has been said and reported on the relationship between Trump’s remarks, other aspects of his personal and business history, and notions of white male supremacy within the United States.

Who believes that a black, Latino, Native American, Asian, or female politician could become the nominee of one of the two dominant U.S. political parties with a history of conduct similar to Donald Trump?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for branding immigrants rapists and murderers?

Would a political candidate from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for suspecting people to be terrorists because they are Muslims?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for deliberately asserting the false charge that a white male President of the United States is not a U.S. citizen?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for inciting political supporters to commit violence against protestors?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for engaging in personal insults, name-calling, and other acts of verbal abuse towards anyone, not to mention targeting disabled and other vulnerable persons for such abuse?

No.

Donald John Trump personifies the privilege associated with white and male supremacy.  His history of abusive, boorish, bullying behavior is dismissed by journalists, politicians, and by people who claim to be “evangelical Christian conservatives.”  That history was not hidden or unknown.   It is excused, dismissed, and tolerated because the political, commercial, religious, social, and moral character of the United States has always been defined by and for the benefit of white males. 

White men have lusted for lordship over this country from the moment they arrived. That lust for lordship inspired and financed their designs to “settle” what Europeans called “the New World.”  Donald Trump’s abusive, boorish, and bullying behavior is contemporary proof of attitudes and behaviors long held, practiced, and validated by white men in this society. 

The election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States was an especially defining event for white male supremacists.  Until President Obama’s election, white men held an unchallenged monopoly on executive power within the U.S. government.  When Obama was elected by an inclusive voting coalition of progressive white women, blacks, Latinos, young adults, Asians, and progressive white workers, white male supremacy was challenged—and defeated—in a way never before imagined, let alone experienced. 

Despite efforts by white male supremacists in Congress acting under the guise of the Tea Party movement, Mr. Obama managed to push through the Affordable Care Act.  He nominated and the Senate confirmed two women who currently are justices on the U.S. Supreme Court (Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor).  After Justice Antonin Scalia died earlier this year the stage was set for President Obama to nominate a third person to the Supreme Court. Republicans in the U.S. Senate (under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) refused to hold confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland (currently the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia) because Judge Garland’s confirmation would be another defeat for white male supremacy. 

Donald Trump has no leadership experience at any level of government.  His history of abusive, boorish, and bullying behavior is plain.  But if Trump is defeated by Hillary Clinton, the white male supremacy establishment will have been defeated in three consecutive national elections.  White male supremacists and white women who routinely enable and are systematically exploited by white male supremacists fear what life would mean in a society where white men are not in charge.  Donald John Trump is their Great White Hope.

Donald Trump personifies the racism, sexism, militarism, crass materialism, imperialism, and idolatrous white nationalism that terrorized and traumatized people throughout the history of the United States.  We will soon know whether U.S. voters want white male supremacy to define the future of our nation and the way it behaves in the world.  

FASCISM, DONALD TRUMP POLITICS, AND ARKANSAS

FASCISM, DONALD TRUMP POLITICS, AND ARKANSAS

©Wendell Griffen, 2017

Justice Is A Verb!

May 10, 2017

Donald Trump has fired James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who may have done more to single-handedly cause the defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Trump’s election as the 45^th president of the United States in 2016. 

Trump’s May 9, 2017 late afternoon firing announcement was achieved with typical Trump clumsiness, disdain for truthfulness, and impudence.  Comey was not summoned to the White House.  Trump did not look Comey in the eye like an honorable person and deliver the news that Comey was being sacked.  Trump didn’t ask for Comey’s resignation, either directly or through a White House emissary (such as the White House chief of staff).  Instead, Donald Trump issued a letter that the White House publicized to the world while James Comey was in California on a FBI recruiting trip. 

Add cowardice to the long and growing list of President Trump’s character flaws.

Firing Comey didn’t solve a single problem facing the United States.   But it clearly achieved one Trump objective.  James Comey no longer leads the ongoing criminal investigation about the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s personal and family business activities, and Russia, the foreign government that directly meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign which Trump ultimately won.  Donald Trump no longer has to worry about Comey announcing anything, as FBI director, about Trump’s financial empire and crime.  Donald Trump does not have to worry about James Comey, as director of the FBI, calling him a crook.

Does this mean Donald Trump isn’t a crook?  NO!

Does this mean James Comey won’t someday call Trump a crook?  No, but if that happens, Trump will say Comey would be calling him a crook because Comey was fired.

Does this mean Arkansas politicians and voters – the people who backed Trump’s candidacy with their money, votes, and influence – will distance themselves from Trump’s presidency?  I doubt it.  You see, Arkansas politicians, Arkansas voters, and anyone else capable of basic moral judgment, have always known enough about Donald Trump to realize he is a crook. 

Trump is many things, but he isn’t an unknown or mysterious character.  He is a narcissistic maniac whose addiction to attention, greed, and disregard for morality appears to be boundless.  In many respects, he reminds one of an inferior model of George W. Bush and the people President Bush “43” chose as closest advisors. 

Don’t take my word for it.  Consider Donald Trump in light of what Kurt Vonnegut said about George W. Bush, with Vonnegut’s usual boldness and clarity, in his last book, A Man Without A Country (Random House, 2007, edited by Daniel Simon).

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.  [This is obviously true about Donald John Trump]

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

The political word that describes what Vonnegut wrote about is fascism.  According to the Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary, fascism is a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.

Donald John Trump is what fascism looks like in the 21^st Century version of the United States. This is what Arkansas voters and politicians openly embraced, cheered, funded, and must now be held accountable for inflicting on our own people, the rest of the nation, and the whole world.    

The fascist personality profile and moral character Vonnegut decried in A Man Without A Country more than a decade ago contaminates all three branches of state government in Arkansas. 

·         Governor Asa Hutchinson’s administration high-handedly dissolved the democratically-elected board of directors for the Little Rock School District January 28, 2015.  The Little Rock School District is governed by State Education Commissioner Johnny Key, an unelected ruler and former state legislator who is unaccountable to the parents, children, and employees of the state’s largest and most diverse public school district.

·         State legislators cut taxes needed to support vital public services to schools, workers, persons who are sick, and to preserve our environment as a healthy place for all persons.  The legislators did this so they could give tax breaks to wealthy persons.    

·         The state supreme court refused to rule in an appeal from a lower court decision in favor of marriage equality.  State legislators wanted to impeach the lower court judge who ruled in favor of marriage equality, but said nothing about the state supreme court’s refusal to decide the appeal.

·         The state correction department engaged in deceitful conduct to acquire a drug from a pharmaceutical distributor.  Then it rushed to use the drug to kill four death row inmates last month before the drugs expired. 

·         The state attorney general appears to have known about the deception and worked to prevent trial judges from holding evidentiary hearings about it.

·         The state supreme court and attorney general worked together to prevent the distributor from retrieving its drug product by defying longstanding legal procedures and principles about fairness, integrity, and transparency in court proceedings.

·         Now legislators want to impeach a judge who followed Arkansas law because they dislike the way the judge ruled and disapprove of the way he practices his religion.  Yes, I’m that judge.

·         Arkansas voters appear unconcerned, for the most part, or not concerned enough to do anything to the politicians responsible for these and other abuses of power.

The Bush-Trump version of fascism not only exists in Washington, DC and Arkansas.  Versions of it are also present in Kansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, to name a few obvious examples.  Fascism is what government now looks like and how it behaves in various parts of the United States and across state government in Arkansas. 

What will we do about it?  What will you do about it?

In the words of actor and comedian Arsenio Hall, “let’s get busy.”  As our emerging leaders (sometimes termed “millennials”) now say, “stay woke.”

HOW THE US TURNED FROM BARACK OBAMA TO DONALD TRUMP

HOW THE US TURNED FROM BARACK OBAMA TO DONALD TRUMP

©Wendell Griffen, 2017

Justice Is a Verb!

            Perhaps you and other people you know may be trying to understand how Donald J. Trump will succeed Barack H. Obama as President of the United States on January 20, 2017.  The answer to that question is multi-faceted and straight-forward, but not pleasant. 

The electoral answer is that Donald Trump received more votes in the Electoral College than did his chief opponent, Hillary Clinton.  While Clinton received millions more votes than Trump did overall, the President of the United States is determined by whoever receives the largest number of Electoral College votes based on choices made by voters in each state. 

Donald Trump is unlike Barack Obama.  Trump has a reputation for personal and commercial racism, sexism, xenophobia, bullying workers, and acrimonious dishonesty.  Obama has a reputation for thoughtfulness, concern about justice, equality, inclusion, and collegiality.  The people who voted for Mr. Trump obviously prefer policies consistent with his reputation and character than that of Mr. Obama.

In other words, the 2016 presidential election contest showed that people in Southern, Western, and so-called Rust Belt States (in the Great Lakes region of the United States) went to the polls determined to elect someone known for being everything President Obama has never been or wanted to be.   It will be interesting to observe how Trump supporters will respond when his presidential conduct resembles his overall personal history. 

White Christians who self-identify as “evangelicals” and self-styled white nationalists were key constituency groups for Mr. Trump.  These voters have supported politicians like Donald Trump for generations.  In 2016, the difference was that these groups voted in larger numbers in the states that mattered most in deciding the election outcome.

The United States will soon enter a period where national policies will be driven by a narcissistic white male supremacist with a known propensity for dishonesty, disrespect for people who are different, and idolatry of self.   It is telling that Mr. Trump received support from so many people who profess to being followers of Jesus, a Palestinian Jew who included women among his closest followers and treated them with respect, someone who was an immigrant refugee as a child (and probably undocumented at that), and a social progressive who was put to death by the Roman Empire based on false testimony fabricated by his religious enemies.     

The truth is that Donald Trump resembles more people in the United States than many people thought were around.  Some of us, however, have always known that the talk about the United States entering a “post-racial” era was hogwash.  We knew what people were really saying when they embraced the Tea Party and signed on to its rhetoric about “wanting my country back.”  Our elders warned us that “smiling faces tell lies.” 

White Democratic politicians in the South distanced themselves from President Obama from the beginning of his presidency.  Democratic office holders in Arkansas, Louisiana, and other southern states, who counted on help from Senator Barack Obama to win their elections in 2006, refused to campaign for his policies after 2008 even when those policies resulted in healthcare becoming more available and affordable for their constituents.

As the nation prepares to observe the holiday marking the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the last time during President Obama’s presidency, we should remember what Dr. King wrote about racial and social inequality in an essay published after his death.  In that essay, titled A Testament of Hope, Dr. King termed the problems of inequality and injustice as being “so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially.”

Remember those words from Dr. King as the nation marks the King Holiday for the final time before President Obama leaves office. 

Remember those words from Dr. King next week as the nation begins a new era defined by the presidency of Donald Trump. 

And from now on, whenever someone asks how the US came to be led by a President named Trump after having been led by a President named Obama, quote these words from Dr. King:  “Despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially.” 

Donald Trump is proof that Dr. King was a prophet.

DONALD JOHN TRUMP AND WHITE MALE SUPREMACY

Justice Is a Verb!

©Wendell Griffen, 2016

The understandable controversy surrounding recent revelations that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump boasted of assaulting unsuspecting women by groping their genitals has been discussed a lot.  Most of the discussion has centered on reactions by politicians to Trump’s 2005 remarks and whether politicians who endorsed or supported Trump’s presidential candidacy will remain in his camp.  But not much has been said and reported on the relationship between Trump’s remarks, other aspects of his personal and business history, and notions of white male supremacy within the United States.

Who believes that a black, Latino, Native American, Asian, or female politician could become the nominee of one of the two dominant U.S. political parties with a history of conduct similar to Donald Trump?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for branding immigrants rapists and murderers?

Would a political candidate from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for suspecting people to be terrorists because they are Muslims?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for deliberately asserting the false charge that a white male President of the United States is not a U.S. citizen?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for inciting political supporters to commit violence against protestors?

Would a politician from any of those less-favored demographic groups be excused for engaging in personal insults, name-calling, and other acts of verbal abuse towards anyone, not to mention targeting disabled and other vulnerable persons for such abuse?

No.

Donald John Trump personifies the privilege associated with white and male supremacy.  His history of abusive, boorish, bullying behavior is dismissed by journalists, politicians, and by people who claim to be “evangelical Christian conservatives.”  That history was not hidden or unknown.   It is excused, dismissed, and tolerated because the political, commercial, religious, social, and moral character of the United States has always been defined by and for the benefit of white males. 

White men have lusted for lordship over this country from the moment they arrived. That lust for lordship inspired and financed their designs to “settle” what Europeans called “the New World.”  Donald Trump’s abusive, boorish, and bullying behavior is contemporary proof of attitudes and behaviors long held, practiced, and validated by white men in this society. 

The election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States was an especially defining event for white male supremacists.  Until President Obama’s election, white men held an unchallenged monopoly on executive power within the U.S. government.  When Obama was elected by an inclusive voting coalition of progressive white women, blacks, Latinos, young adults, Asians, and progressive white workers, white male supremacy was challenged—and defeated—in a way never before imagined, let alone experienced. 

Despite efforts by white male supremacists in Congress acting under the guise of the Tea Party movement, Mr. Obama managed to push through the Affordable Care Act.  He nominated and the Senate confirmed two women who currently are justices on the U.S. Supreme Court (Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor).  After Justice Antonin Scalia died earlier this year the stage was set for President Obama to nominate a third person to the Supreme Court. Republicans in the U.S. Senate (under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) refused to hold confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland (currently the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia) because Judge Garland’s confirmation would be another defeat for white male supremacy. 

Donald Trump has no leadership experience at any level of government.  His history of abusive, boorish, and bullying behavior is plain.  But if Trump is defeated by Hillary Clinton, the white male supremacy establishment will have been defeated in three consecutive national elections.  White male supremacists and white women who routinely enable and are systematically exploited by white male supremacists fear what life would mean in a society where white men are not in charge.  Donald John Trump is their Great White Hope.

Donald Trump personifies the racism, sexism, militarism, crass materialism, imperialism, and idolatrous white nationalism that has terrorized and traumatized people throughout the history of the United States.  We will soon know whether U.S. voters want white male supremacy to define the future of our nation and the way it behaves in the world.