Shaming Trump Supporters

The New York Times published a series of short essays after the election that sought to explain or complain. I thought this one made several good points. But is it also an example of what right wing pundits would call liberals' reflex reaction to blame ourselves?

It turns out that shaming the supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy.

Though job loss and economic stagnation played a role in his victory, so did shame. As the principal investigator on a study of the middle class for the National Institute of Mental Health, I found that working people’s stress is often intensified by shame at their failure to “make it” in what they are taught is a meritocratic American economy.

The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.

So please understand what is happening here. Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality. The upper 20 percent of income earners, many of them quite liberal and rightly committed to the defense of minorities and immigrants, also believe in the economic meritocracy and their own right to have so much more than those who are less fortunate. So while they may be progressive on issues of discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism, they are blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.

The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals and radical activists.

The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans. If the left could abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.

Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition. Only then can we help working people understand that they do not live in a meritocracy, that their intuition that the system is rigged is correct (but it is not by those whom they had been taught to blame) and that their pain and rage is legitimate.

Michael Lerner, the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, Calif., is the editor of Tikkun magazine and chairman of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

Just So There's No Confusion

Reince Priebus's Christmas message:

Merry Christmas to all! Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.

Hat tip to Daniel W. Drezner, who apparently actually reads Reince Priebus's Christmas messages.

UPDATE: The RNC is offended that anyone read Priebus's Christmas message as referring to Trump.

Romney Punked?

What Mitt Romney said about Donald Trump:

Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.

Yet Romney showed up for a job interview as Trump's Secretary of State.

I guess there's a couple of ways you can look at Romney's wanting to be considered for the job. In one version, he's doing his patriotic duty by trying to insert at least one responsible adult (himself, he imagines) into the Trump Administration. Maybe he could limit the damage.

In the other version, he's a man who doesn't even pay attention to himself: "Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud."

The crazy old uncle at Thanksgiving Day dinner, and a confident of Mr. Trump's, Roger Stone, clues us in on what was going on with the job interview:

“Donald Trump was interviewing Mitt Romney for Secretary of State in order to torture him,” Stone claimed.... "To toy with him. And given the history, that’s completely understandable. Mitt Romney crossed a line. He didn’t just oppose Trump, which is his democratic right, he called him a phony and a fraud. And a con man. And that’s not the kind of man you want as Secretary of State.”

The Cabinet

Here at Sempringham, we're trying to be fair to Rex Tillerson, the current ExxonMobil CEO who appears to be Trump's nominee for Secretary of State.

Steve Coll in the New Yorker says this:

In nominating Tillerson, Trump is handing the State Department to a man who has worked his whole life running a parallel quasi-state, for the benefit of shareholders, fashioning relationships with foreign leaders that may or may not conform to the interests of the United States government. In his career at ExxonMobil, Tillerson has no doubt honed many of the day-to-day skills that a Secretary of State must exercise: absorbing complex political analysis, evaluating foreign leaders, attending ceremonial events, and negotiating with friends and adversaries. Tillerson is a devotee of Abraham Lincoln, so perhaps he has privately harbored the ambition to transform himself into a true statesman, on behalf of all Americans. Yet it is hard to imagine, after four decades at ExxonMobil and a decade leading the corporation, how Tillerson will suddenly develop respect and affection for the American diplomatic service he will now lead, or embrace a vision of America’s place in the world that promotes ideals for their own sake, emphatically privileging national interests over private ones.

 Matthew Yglesias tweets:

After you float Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani honestly any Secretary of State pick ends up looking good.

Phil Rucker at the Washington Post tweets:

Other Tillerson boosters, in addition to Gates & Rice: Stephen Hadley, Jim Baker & Dick Cheney. Full court press planned for confirmation.

It looks like Rick Perry is getting the Department of Energy post. Remember Perry's "Oops!" moment in the 2012 Republican debates? Pundits have been having a great time reminding us that it was the Department of Energy that Perry wanted to abolish, but couldn't think of.

Christopher Hayes at MSNBC wonders:

Is it crazy to think Trump named him to the post just so everyone would re-run his most mortifying moment on TV?

The Secret Anniversaries of the Heart

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows....

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Kicking Off the Holocaust - Part 2

As Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder reminded us in Thursday's post, the Nazis created or waited for crisis situations, then took advantage of them to take drastic actions. The day after the Reichstag fire, nearly all civil liberties were suspended in Germany: freedom of speech, freedom of press, habeas corpus, etc.

Professor Snyder's cautions hit home with me because for more than a year I've been immersed in 1930's Germany. I'm working on a book about Emily's family's escape from Mannheim, Germany, and because of that, parallels between that time and our own come screaming out at me.

It's scary.

The Hauptsynagogue in Mannheim, roofless after being set ablaze on Kristallnacht.

The Holocaust began with Kristallnacht, an orgy of thuggery across Germany in early November 1938.  Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps, Jewish businesses were vandalized and ruined, and 1000 synagogues in Germany and Austria were destroyed. As the elimination of civil liberties was "justified" by the Reichstag fire, the destruction and arrests associated with Kristallnacht were "justified" by the assassination of a German diplomat. Interestingly, the assassination was in revenge for the deportation of immigrants.

I have a section in the book about it:

Most mornings a barber visited the Rosenberger apartment in Mannheim. Opa Freiberg had a standing appointment – not for a trim, but to have his head shaved. Heinrich Freiberg's grandchildren thought he was mostly bald anyway, but he actually had a full head of hair; he just preferred a shaved head. Because it was not safe for the barber to serve Jewish customers in his shop, he came to the Rosenberger apartment, where he would not be observed.

On the morning of November 10, 1938, a Thursday, Emil was lying in bed when the barber arrived. Emil had a cold, and his mother decided it was best to keep him home from school. As he was lying there, he might have been thinking ahead to his bar Mitzvah, planned for later that month.

But on that morning, he heard the barber arrive with a terrifying warning: During the night mobs had burned down the Rosenberger's synagogue, he said, and now the SS were going from door to door, arresting all Jewish men.

[snip]

Just two weeks before the barber’s warning, 17,000 Polish Jews (called Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews), including many living in Mannheim and attending synagogue there, had been rounded up and expelled from Germany without warning.  The deportation was the culmination of a German/Polish tit-for-tat of legislation and decrees, each government determined to reduce the number of Jews within its borders.

In March 1938 the Polish legislature passed a law, targeted primarily at Jews, which revoked the citizenship of any person who had lived outside the country for 5 or more years without being in touch with the Polish government.  According to Nazi estimates, there were up to 70,000 Polish Jews living within German borders. If the Polish law  applied to them, they would be rendered stateless – with no country that would accept them – and thus permanent residents of Germany. At first, little action was taken by the Poles to implement their law, allowing the Germans to make a move of their own.

On August 22, a German police order announced that all residence permits for foreign nationals would expire by March 31, 1939. Although foreigners could request new residence permits before the end of 1938, the permits would be issued only to those considered “worthy”.  In the Nazi state, no Jew qualified as “worthy”.

The Polish government understood that the result of the German legislation would be the return of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, and moved to quickly cut off that possibility. On October 15 an order was published by the Polish Ministry of the Interior requiring citizens living outside the country to present their passports at a Polish consulate within the next 15 days. If, upon inspection, the provisions of the March legislation concerning 5 years’ absence from the country were found to apply, the presenter’s citizenship would be immediately revoked.

After seeking assurances from the Polish government that Polish Jews resident in Germany would be allowed to return to their native country regardless of the Ministry’s order – and receiving no such assurance – the German government took action. On October 27, Polish Jews were arrested throughout the country – including at least 75 men, women, and children from Mannheim. They were forced to leave all their possessions behind and transported to the border, where they were unceremoniously, and with great resistance from the Poles, deported.

North of Mannheim, in Hanover, a Polish family named Grynszpan was one of those arrested. Sendel Grynszpan and his wife, Rivka, had lived in Hanover for more than 25 years. At the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, Sendel, a tailor, described his family’s deportation:

On [Thursday] October 27, 1938, in the evening, a policeman came to my home and asked us to go to the 11th precinct with our passports. He assured us that we would be returning directly and that it was unnecessary to take our belongings with us. When I arrived at the precinct with my family, we found many people there, seated and standing, and some of them in tears. A police inspector was shouting at them, “Sign this paper. You are expelled.”

… On Friday night they put us in police vans, 20 to a van, and took us to the station. The street was full of people chanting, “The Jews to Palestine!” We were taken to Neu-Bentschen, the last German city before the Polish frontier, arriving at 6:00 a.m., Saturday the 29th.

… At the border we were searched and our money taken from us. They left us with only 10 RM each. German law forbade the export of capital. They said to us, “When you arrived, you only had 10 RM; there’s no reason for you to leave with more than that.”

Arrested and deported with Sendel Grynszpan were his wife, a daughter, Berta, and probably others of the couple’s six children. A son, 17-year-old Herschel, was in Paris for schooling.

Herschel received a note from his sister Berta on Thursday, November 3, describing what was happening to his family. On Friday he pored over lengthy and graphic accounts of the deportations in Paris’s Yiddish press, becoming increasingly agitated. Sunday Herschel purchased a pistol, and on Monday morning, November 7, he appeared at the German embassy, intent upon assassinating the German ambassador to France in revenge for what had been done to his family. Instead, he shot and wounded the first embassy officer to appear, a third secretary named Ernst vom Rath.

Herschel Grynszpan in French custody after shooting Ernst vom Rath.

Vom Rath died on the afternoon of November 8. Reaction from Berlin was swift in coming.  All Jewish periodicals in Germany were ordered to cease publication immediately. On Wednesday, November 9, inflammatory articles in the non-Jewish newspapers quoted Joseph Goebbels as saying, “The German people are entitled to identify the Jews in Germany with this crime.”

 And that night, using the excuse of a murder by a Jewish immigrant, Kristallnacht began.

Kicking Off the Holocaust – Part 1

The Reichstag Fire, 1933. Hitler used it as justification to suspend civil liberties.

To be clear: we are not predicting that America will become a fascist state. But we will not say it couldn't happen, either.

Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale University and a scholar of the Holocaust, is disturbed enough about the President-elect that he offers "twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today."

A number of items on his list are chilling, like:

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks. 

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

 One item, number five, touched on something I've been meaning to write about for months:

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don't fall for it. [My emphasis.]

Professor Snyder mentions the Reichstag fire, but he may just as well have mentioned the assassination in Paris of the German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, the event that Joseph Goebbels seized upon to launch what became known as Kristallnacht, the first pogrom of the Holocaust.

More about that tomorrow.

Henri Huet – A Guest Post

On Memorial Day I happened to call my eldest brother, Mike.  ("Eldest" sounds better than "oldest", doesn't it?) In the course of the conversation he mentioned that he was dedicating his Memorial Day to the memory of a photographer he met in Vietnam, Henri Huet. The more he talked, the more interested I became, and I eventually told Mike I would write a Sempringham post about Huet.

Then the Republicans nominated a megalomaniac as their candidate for President, and ambition went out the window.

Happily, Mike picked up the torch and wrote the post for me, in the form of an email to our siblings. He has given me permission to edit it slightly to make it more like a blog post, and to publish it here:

It's interesting: you can find many of Henri Huet's photographs in Wikipedia but little of his life. He was born in Vietnam of a French father and a Vietnamese mother. He was sent off to school in France at about the age of five. He studied art while in France and one observer wrote his photos were composed like paintings rather than photos. I can't comment one way or another on that but I do know that he was called "the best photojournalist of the Vietnamese war" by the Saigon AP bureau chief.

Henri Huet

I met him on only one or two occasions at the press club in Danang, Vietnam. One of his bureau chiefs wrote that it was enjoyable working with Huet because he always had a smile on his face. I observed that smile, and even then I thought it was not a smile of a happy man but of one who had seen so much that he felt it was better to smile.

The Marines of the Third Battalion, who were stationed in and around Danang then, thought highly of him. He had been in Vietnam during "The First War". He was in the French Navy, where he learned the basics of photography. He stayed in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Henri had a wife in France and a mistress in Vietnam.

Medic Thomas Cole, wounded himself, assists a wounded soldier from the First Cavalry Division.

The Marines thought highly of him for several reasons. First, because he was the "old man"; he had seen this war back when it was a French war and now it was an American war. He had seen much carnage and death. Second, because he really immersed himself in the life and ways of  the Marines in "I Corps", unlike many photojournalists who were there to "cover the war". It was these people that I saw angrily pushed away by the Marines who didn't want "a goddamn camera" pushed into their faces while they were recovering the bodies of their buddies. I remember distinctly a group of college kiddies from some school in Ohio who came out to report on how horrible the war was. I was seriously afraid that we would have to get those kids out of there before the Marines slit their throats. You don't preach antiwar stuff to Marines who have just finished a firefight. Third, Henri could speak French, English, and Vietnamese, which made him useful. And interestingly, most of all the Marines considered Henri a good luck charm, since he always seemed to come back from even the worst battles with whatever group he went out with. I realize that I met Henri only once or twice but he made an impression on me that lasts until this day.

Infantrymen in a bomb crater search for snipers firing at them.

I don't know if any of you are familiar with his photographs. They made the front page of Life Magazine in the 60's. You might want to look some of them up, they are in Wikipedia. One I had never seen before was in the book that a brother sent me about photojournalists in Vietnam. You see a soldier dragging a wooden ammunition box up the bank of a river and in the background you see a 40 mm machine gun. I thought, "Gee it was pretty clever of them to set that machine-gun up on a sliver of soil in the middle of the Mekong River." And then you look more closely and you see that the machine-gun is being held up by one great big hand! Some soldier was crossing the river and didn't want to get the machine-gun wet so he was holding it up high over his head and that means the river water was over his head, he was walking on the bottom carrying an M60 machine gun (not one of those dinky AK47's)! This is an incredible photo.

Huet also captured this photo, similar to the one Mike describes above.

Henri's luck ran out in the early 70s – not with a bunch of Marines in a firefight but in a helicopter carrying several photojournalists and a Vietnamese general. The crash site was finally found after the second (i.e American) Vietnam War had been settled. They found small pieces of bone along with the helicopter wreckage. At that point there was no way of determining whose bones had been found and there was a big brouhaha about where to bury them. They were finally interred at the Newsmuseum in Washington, DC, in a small ceremony with about 100 attendees.

Huet took this photo of a chaplain administering last rites for photojournalist Dickey Chapelle as she died from a booby trap explosion.

Every Memorial Day I think about Henri and wonder if there are any people left in France who remember him and his accomplishments. Soon we will probably all be gone and people will have to look them up in Wikipedia.

Recount

J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan, explains why, though he does not believe the voting system in Wisconsin was hacked, it makes perfect sense to do a manual recount of the votes there.

For the record, I hope no evidence of hacking or otherwise miscounting is found. I hope they find that the votes were counted correctly. The Trump people just wouldn't be able to handle it otherwise.

Good-bye Public Schools?

Betsy Prince DeVos prepares for her confirmation hearing.

Here's a 2011 article about Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy Prince DeVos, and her husband, Dick DeVos. They have been campaigning for years to end public education in America.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

[snip]

The conservative policy institutes founded beginning in the 1970s get hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy families and foundations to develop and promote free market fundamentalism. More specifically, their goals include privatizing social security, reducing government regulations, thwarting environmental policy, dismantling unions -- and eliminating public schools.

Whatever they may say about giving poor students a leg up, their real priority is nothing short of the total dismantling of our public educational institutions, and they've admitted as much. Cato Institute founder Ed Crane and other conservative think tank leaders have signed the Public Proclamation to Separate School and State, which reads in part that signing on, "Announces to the world your commitment to end involvement by local, state, and federal government from education."

 Only they're not calling it public education:

Dick DeVos also explained to his Heritage Foundation audience that they should no longer use the term public schools, but instead start calling them “government schools.” He noted that the role of wealthy conservatives would have to be obscured. “We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities,” said DeVos, and pointed to the need to “cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”

The whole article is worth reading.

Jonathan Pie Explains Why Trump Won

We've met Jonathan Pie before, when he ranted about Brexit.  The British John Stewart?

His language is too rough for a high-class joint like this, but here's the link.

There are Options!

From Saturday Night Live:

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn – Oh, Jeez!

Be sure to read Nicholas Kristof's take on Trump's new team, including our next National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn. It's called Trump Embarrasses Himself and Our Country.

A few clips:

Flynn had a brilliant military career and did an outstanding job in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five years ago, he was widely admired as the best intelligence officer of his generation.

Then President Obama nominated Flynn to become director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he began to unravel. He turned out to be a catastrophic manager. Colin Powell, former secretary of state, explained in hacked emails why Flynn was fired: “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management.” Powell added that ever since, Flynn has been “right-wing nutty.”

[snip]

Indeed, for an intelligence officer, Flynn seems to have trouble distinguishing truth from falsehood. Earlier this month, he tweeted an obviously fake story claiming that the police had found emails linking Hillary Clinton to sex crimes with children. When he was in government, subordinates had a special name for his delusions: “Flynn facts.”

Another problem is Flynn’s ties to foreign governments. He took money from Russia to attend an event in Moscow, sitting near President Vladimir Putin. He also appears to have taken money from Turkish interests and, without publicly disclosing the money, wrote an op-ed shilling for Turkey.

For his chief of staff, Flynn chose his son, who is a looney on social media, calling President Obama a communist and fascist, tweeting racially insensitive comments and sharing absurd conspiracy theories. [My emphasis]

Scared yet?

Hat Tip to Kevin Drum, who pointed us to Kristoff's column.

The Hamilton Fracas

Since Sempringham readers are, to a person, well-read, informed people, there's no need here to do more than summarize the incident this post will refer to. Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a performance of Hamilton in New York City. When he entered the theater he was met by boos from the audience. At the conclusion of the play the actor playing Aaron Burr (hmmm) – with the support of the cast and the play's author – read a seemingly respectful statement to him, singling him out in the audience, affirming their hope that he will value diversity.

Whereupon Donald Trump tweeted that the cast should apologize. Whereupon Mike Pence stated he was not offended.

Here at Sempringham we were at first supportive of the Hamilton casts' action. Let's face it: no Trump/Pence fans here. But we were persuaded otherwise by the Chicago Sun-Times' drama critic, Hedy Weiss. In her column this morning, Ms. Weiss writes:

[W]hile I oppose almost everything this new administration stands for (aside from infrastructure repair) and admittedly cast my vote for the electoral loser in the race, I think both the New York audience protests and the emotional, carefully worded speech from the stage aimed at Vice President-elect Mike Pence were mistakes. How or why he went to see “Hamilton” in the first place remains a mystery. But perhaps, had he been allowed to just absorb the message of the musical, he might have been changed, if only in the most minute and imperceptible ways. Now, like a bull reacting to a red cape, any possibility of the show itself for serving as an agent of positive change or a subtle awakening in Pence has been lost forever. A missed opportunity, and a pity.

[Snip]

I think it is for Hamlet, not Hamilton, to have the last words on the whole matter: “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

Find Hedy Weiss's whole column here.

Addendum, November 23: Be sure to read Uncle Ted's comment, below.

This for You, and That for Me

On November 17, 1884, European nations met to divide up Africa. It was called the Berlin Conference. Here's how it turned out:

Germany lost its colonies in the Treaty of Versailles; it was one of the things that made them so angry they started World War II.

I'm a Stranger in a Strange Land

Here in Chicago we loved the World Series, but the coverage by Fox Sports came in for a lot of criticism. Mostly it was Joe Buck. He always seemed say something that sounded wise (in a baseball way), but proved to be twaddle. But that's okay – part of the fun is yelling "You MORON!" at the TV.

There was another aspect of Fox's coverage that bothered me more than that:

What were Pete Rose and Alex Rodriguez doing on their panel of "analysts"? Both these guys have disgraced themselves in the sport – Rose with gambling on his own games and lying about it, and Rodriguez by taking performance enhancing drugs and lying about it – and their reward is a gig as  Fox "analysts"? [By the way, although they both were awful, I point out with some delight that before the first game Rose predicted the Cubs' designated hitter, Kyle Schwarber, would "strike out, strike out, and strike out"; Schwarber batted .412 for the Series and got a double in the first game.]

And while we're on the subject:

Kanye West interrupts an award presentation at the Emmys to say, in effect, that the awardee didn't deserve it, and he's allowed back in the door the next year?

Ryan Lochte embarrasses his country by being a lout in Brazil, and his reward is an appearance on Dancing with the Stars?

I don't get it.

What's Next?

Your neighbors will gladly murder you, given the nod by authority, then blame you for bringing your own death upon yourself. They’ll then move into your empty house, live there guilt-free, and years later, should anybody be so impolite as to raise the subject of your death, deny it ever occurred.

That, in brief, is the lesson of the Holocaust....

So writes Neil Steinberg in today's Chicago Sun-Times.

But there's another lesson of the Holocaust, just as important, and that is that the power of denial is strong: denial that such a thing could ever happen here.

Now we have a president-elect who once kept a book of Hitler's speeches, called My New Order, as bedside reading; whose chief policy advisor will be a white nationalist; whose national security advisor will be an unbalanced retired general who sucks up to Putin; and now, whose pick for attorney general used to walk around calling black attorneys "boy". A president-elect who openly mocks the disabled, who encourages his audiences to beat up protesters, who threatens to put his political adversary in jail, and who threatens to get even with newspapers that told "lies" about him.

It's never been easier to hyperventilate about the possibility of extremely ugly things happening in America, and I'm really struggling not to be a Henny Penny. But I have to admit that, when I posted the item below about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, I started worrying that someday it would get me in some serious trouble. I've never had that feeling before, and it's unsettling, to say the least.

Steinberg concludes his article with this:

The Holocaust was in part a failure of imagination. Jews just couldn’t imagine it. Which has to trouble anyone insisting it can’t happen now. Because that’s exactly what they thought then.

If you can’t see how this could turn really bad, really quick, let me ask you this: When Donald Trump fails to provide the boon he promised, when his protectionist trade policies crater the economy, who is he going to blame? Himself? Donald Trump does not blame himself.

Who will he blame? When he’s in Pennsylvania, talking to coal miners whose industry he did not revive; when he’s in Youngstown talking to factory workers whose jobs never returned, who will he blame? Who?

You know the answer.

I think he wants us to say "the Jews", but the answer could be "you".

Soul-Crushing Despair

From The New Yorker:

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: Threat or Menace?

Okay, so it looks like Trump is going the Dangerous Goofball route when it comes to choosing his close advisors. The latest addition: Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), who was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 because the national defense is too important to be run by goofballs.

Kevin Drum thinks he's "the most gullible guy in the Army."

Jared Kushner

Kevin Drum says It's Time to Pay More Attention to Jared Kushner.

Kushner's father's history of jury tampering sounds like something out of The Godfather.