Dusting off the Blog

I wrote the post below this one yesterday when the outcome of the election was still raw and eliciting some… emotions. 

Writing it made me feel better. Before I was halfway through, solutions and hope swiftly supplanted recriminations. 

I’ve heard from quite a few friends and family members since then about their own anger, sadness and disappointment with the election result. So I decided to share what I wrote. 

And when I thought about how best to do that, I remembered the blog I used to maintain many moons ago. And I was surprised to see that after almost 15 years of benign neglect, it still exists! So I took the time to re-read all of my previous posts. And a few things jump out: 

First, I’m struck by how much of what I grapple with in this most-recent post, which deals primarily with Trumpism since 2016, was already nascent eight years earlier. I think that only makes more powerful its argument about the lessons to be learned from Tuesday’s results. 

Second, I was floored by a video of RFK Jr. that a friend included as part of a comment on one of those old posts. It was posted on YouTube in May 2008. I don’t know if the speech it captures occurred then or some years earlier. But the contrast with the RFK Jr. we’ve seen in the past few years is remarkable. I disagree with much of what he advocates for today, regarded his presidential campaign as dangerous and do not look forward to whatever role he may play in public health policy for the next four years. But I have a very hard time not agreeing with almost every word in this speech from way back when, about what happened to the US news media since the Reagan administration and its impact on society and politics. 

Next, I’m somewhat surprised, and pleasantly so, that what I believed then mostly remains what I believe today, despite the world changing and me growing older. I do confess to being the tiniest bit embarrassed by a handful of the things I wrote 13-14 years ago. Is Jersey City really part of the “rust belt”? Should I have been a little more charitable toward Cindy McCain, Katie Couric, Jesse Jackson and teachers’ unions? And I’m a little chagrined by how my writing chops have dulled since those first years after leaving journalism. But I remain proud of and stand by almost everything I said back then. 

Finally, as I read all those old posts from the 2008 election and first months of Obama’s presidency, and considered what I’d written about this year’s balloting, I decided that the latest essay really belongs with all the others here. I often said back then that we don’t pay enough attention, seriously and earnestly, to public affairs or truly engage with one another about them. Sadly, that has gotten worse. The tribes have hardened and split. A somewhat self-indulgent post on a definitely self-indulgent and heretofore comatose blog that few bothered to read in the first place probably won’t make much difference to that reality. But it might help some of us. So here you go. I’d love to hear what you think. 

Making Sense of it All, and Moving Forward

Three times I have voted against Donald Trump and twice he has won the presidency. 

My initial reaction both times was disbelief, anger and sadness. How can this happen? How can people know who Trump is — what he has done, how he behaves and speaks, what he has promised to do — and vote for him? 

And both times, as I thought about it more I realized it was, sadly, more complicated than that. 

Yes, Trump is an awful person. He has spent his life lying, cheating and stealing. He encourages grievance, hate and retribution. He brings out the worst in people. He cares about himself above all else, including the United States Constitution and the rule of law.  

This is not a secret. Most people know these things about him. Many like that he is this way. They will make every excuse for his appalling behavior. Some disapprove of these qualities but may be willing to look past them because our politics and society have failed them so much for so long that they are desperate for a savior. Others may feel a bit of both. Today we need to think about the latter two groups.

During my lifetime, what used to be known as the middle class has all but disappeared. I grew up in that kind of household, in the 1970s and 80s. We definitely weren’t rich. My parents didn’t go to college. We had to watch every penny. Dining out was a luxury. My mom clipped coupons to save a few bucks at the grocery store. My dad would go out of his way to find the gas station that charged the least for a gallon of regular. But we also weren’t poor. My dad’s civil-service job paid him enough to support us. His union negotiated great health benefits, vacation and sick leave and a generous pension. We owned a simple, nice-enough house. My mom went back to work when I was old enough so that we could have extra money, but we would have been okay without her paycheck. We had some degree of security, and hope that we could improve our circumstances. And we were far from alone. America had lots and lots of households like mine. 

Today too many families that would have been middle-class a few decades ago face a completely different reality: insecurity and hopelessness. Parents like mine who didn’t go to college string together two or three low-paying hourly-wage jobs, with no health benefits and no control over their schedules. Often they don’t find out how many hours they’ll be working in a given week, or which ones, until a day or two beforehand. They’re constantly worrying about whether those hours will be enough to pay for rent, food, utilities, transportation, medicine and other necessities. They can’t afford childcare or plan family and leisure time. Without health insurance through their jobs or enough income to buy private coverage, seeing a doctor is a luxury. Getting really sick can mean financial ruin. Inadequate housing supply makes rent too expensive and the dream of owning a home more like an unattainable fantasy. A comfortable retirement? More like a cruel joke. Many younger people can’t even afford to move out of their parents’ homes, let alone start families of their own. Politicians have promised for decades that things will get better, but they only keep getting worse. “Deaths of despair” — from addiction and suicide — have been on the rise. Life expectancy, after decades of increases, has declined. 

To add insult to injury, while things have gotten steadily worse for these families, the profits, wealth and power of giant corporations and the richest Americans have soared. The same retail and restaurant mega-chains that bust unions, deny employees healthcare and refuse to pay them living wages reward CEOs with compensation packages worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The CEOs relentlessly cut costs to maximize profits for their billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity shareholders. And those titans of finance and corporate America are all too happy to funnel some of the billions extracted from workers into campaign contributions. That way politicians won’t don’t do anything to stop the Champagne from flowing. 

Rinse and repeat. Year after year. Election after election. The gap between the very richest and everyone else continues to widen. More Americans feel more pain and resentment at falling farther and farther behind. 

Republicans, under Trump, simply have done a better job than Democrats of recognizing this and turning it to their political advantage. 

I know, I know. Their proposed solutions — more tax cuts for the rich, more deregulation for Wall Street and corporate kingpins, huge tariffs that will raise prices for everyday goods — would make things worse instead of better. Many of their leading politicians and favored media prefer to exploit America’s pain, by shamelessly blaming it on black and brown people rather than the real culprits in boardrooms and private jets. And yes, politics should address the injustices and discrimination minorities still face in America and elsewhere in the world. There is also no denying that President Biden came into office in a huge hole created by the pandemic, which Trump should have handled better. Or that Biden hasn’t gotten credit for digging us out, because we’re just back where we started — a pretty lousy place for so many. 

But none of this negates that Democrats just have not done enough over the years to present a better alternative for working people. In fact, they have done their fair share to make things worse. 

During the 1990s the Clinton administration and Democratic lawmakers cooperated with a Republican Congress to cut welfare benefits and strike global trade deals that further weakened unions. They also repealed Depression-era restrictions on the banking industry, helping inflate the bubble that caused a financial crisis a decade later. 

With the nation still reeling from that massive recession, hopeful Americans elected Barack Obama. Like Clinton, he reversed Republican tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens. And, working with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House, he gave us the Affordable Care Act, which made health insurance more accessible. But Obama and his party stopped short of enacting a truly progressive, pro-worker agenda during the brief period in 2008-10 when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. To be sure, the Republican minority and their affiliated media, which turned obstructing the president’s agenda into a new art form, share much of the blame. But why didn’t Democrats move more forcefully — amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the country seething at Wall Street and corporate America — to enact policies that addressed decades of rising inequality? If not then, when? 

Instead, the defining memory of government’s response to the crisis became the bank bailouts engineered by the George W. Bush administration right before Obama’s victory. The fat cats came out fine, while ordinary Americans lost their homes, jobs and savings. They felt more like losers in a rigged system than ever. And, unsurprisingly, up sprang the Tea Party and Trumpism. 

Then, in 2016, confronted with a choice between Bernie Sanders’ worker-focused economic agenda and Hillary Clinton’s continuation of her husband’s corporate centrism, Democrats chose Clinton. We know how that turned out. A lot of people who voted for Obama in 2008 and either Obama or Romney (who is now very much out of the GOP mainstream) in 2012 abandoned Democrats and voted for Trump. 

American voters have sent this clear message to Democrats by electing Trump twice in the past eight years. I don’t pretend to understand completely where they’re coming from. I am privileged to not worry about living paycheck to paycheck, or whether I can control my work schedule, see a doctor, own a home, educate my children, have time for family and leisure, or retire when I’m old. I have the privilege to vote against Trump based on my belief that he is a vile human being and a demonstrated enemy of our country’s founding principles. But I can understand why people who are less privileged than me might be willing to overlook those things and think “we can’t do any worse” — even if that angers and saddens me. This doesn’t justify the racism, misogyny, indecency and violence many Trump supporters exhibit and tolerate. But it also doesn’t mean that all Trump voters are bigots, chauvinists, bullies and jerks. 

Democrats need to understand this message, too — and, more importantly, act upon it. Vice President Harris faced the unenviable task of mounting a presidential campaign in a fraction of the time candidates usually take, with a deeply unpopular Biden still hung, albatross-like, around her shoulders. Did she run a perfect campaign? Of course not. No one does. But she did remarkably well, given those circumstances. Surely better than Biden himself would have fared. It’s not her fault. 

I pray that the authoritarian tendencies of Trump and many who surround him will not color how he governs during the next four years, and that he will serve the country well. But even after he’s left the scene, Trumpism likely will remain until its root causes are treated. Until the hardship that prompted some people to vote for him, despite who they know he is, actually gets cured. 

Those of us who oppose him are of course disappointed, sad and angry today. We need to stick together. We need to love and support one another. 

But we also need someone other than Trump or a future Trumpist to win. Right now, despite Tuesday’s outcome, the best chance of that happening still lies with the Democratic party.  

And here’s how I think Democrats can defeat Trumpism: craft and relentlessly stick to a message of economic progressivism and only economic progressivism. We’ve seen through a few business cycles now that when “the economy” improves, it usually means rich people and corporations do even better while everyone else loses ground or, at best, treads water. We love capitalism. But, boy, is it broken. Big corporations and billionaire shareholders have taken capitalism hostage for themselves. Let’s fix it, so it works for everyone again. Like it worked for my middle-class family and so many others five decades ago. 

I hate to say it, but leading with or emphasizing the array of cultural issues so many of us, justifiably, value so deeply is backfiring. Rightly or wrongly, many of the voters Democrats lost between 2008 and 2016, and between 2020 and yesterday, perceive these messages as condescending attacks. Or they see candidates whose priorities seem woefully out of touch with their most-pressing economic needs — holier- and smarter-than-thou celebrities and coastal elites preaching down their noses at what they regard as the dumb, uneducated masses. It only fuels Trumpism’s politics of grievance and resentment. Democrats should not abandon those principles, or the desire to fulfill them with policy. But unless they get power — by winning elections — that will never happen. 

Democrats also don’t need to beat voters over the head with “democracy is on the ballot” messaging. Those of us who view Trump as abhorrent and a threat to the rule of law won’t need to be constantly reminded of those very obvious facts. We will vote against him and future Trumpists regardless. Focus instead on the kitchen-table issues that have prompted people to overlook these threats and vote for him anyway. 

Winning by emphasizing progressive economics, and then delivering on those promises, will pave the road toward a more just and equitable society and a government bound by the rule of law. 

And, of course, Democrats will need the right candidate to carry that message. That person should possess certain qualities. Humility. Working-class bona fides. Relative youth (like someone under 60, maybe?). Charisma. Red-state or at least red-county or town roots would be a huge plus, but probably aren’t required. Basically, Democrats need a much-younger Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren who doesn’t lead with and deemphasizes social-issue distractions and isn’t known as having advocated strongly for them in the past. A southern or midwestern governor, perhaps. Maybe even someone in the private sector who understands and can deliver this message to those who need to hear it. If someone like Trump with no government experience at all could win, why not? 

We will survive the next four years, just as we did when Trump last occupied the Oval Office. Let’s make sure we can get rid of Trumpism once and for all when they’re over.

Why the Public Option is a Bad Idea

I've been thinking a lot about the current status of the health care bills in Congress, and I've come to a surprising conclusion: I don't think the so-called public option is a good idea.

Last night Sen. Charles Schumer went on the Rachel Maddow Show to say that he and Sen. Jay Rockefeller had proposed amendments to the Senate Finance Committee health care bill that would insert a public option into it, and that if the public option passed through the Finance Committee, it had a very good chance of being in the final bill that comes to a vote in Congress.

Polls have shown that most Americans support the public option, which the Obama Administration and many Democrats support as a way to "keep the insurance companies honest." Schumer, in his TV appearance last night, spoke of how the public plan would not need to spend billions on advertising and other things that private-sector companies must do to attract and keep customers, and make profits. Therefore, it should be able to provide lower-cost care and pressure private carriers to become more efficient and cheaper themselves.

And this is precisely the problem.

Private companies in all likelihood will have no hope of ever being able to compete with the government. The playing field will not be level. The government plan, if administered efficiently (and I'll grant you this is a big "if"), should ALWAYS be able to deliver cheaper, better care.

The best example of this dynamic: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two government-sponsored enterprises, while technically not owned by the government, enjoyed huge advantages over banks and other fully private mortgage lenders. Investors, thinking Fannie and Freddie were backed by the full faith and credit of the US government (because Congress had established both companies in the interest of broadening homeownership), lent them money at lower interest rates than private competitors could garner in the market. This enabled Fannie and Freddie to build gigantic mortgage portfolios that ultimately contributed to massive systemic risk and prompted the US government to bail them out.

I don't think that a public health plan would contribute to that kind of systemic financial risk, but it would have a similar, unfair, advantage over private insurers in the market. Now I'm not saying insurance companies haven't been responsible for some truly heinous behavior. Nor am I saying that our health care system does not have serious, fundamental flaws that need to be reformed. What I am saying is that you cannot force private companies to compete in the market against a government plan that does not have the same profit motive.

We must either go all the way and establish a single-payer, Medicare-for-all-type system, or find a way to achieve reform while preserving free-market competition among private insurers. Perhaps prohibiting insurers from dropping sick people and boosting safeguards against Americans losing coverage when they change jobs, among other steps, could accomplish the latter task. But we can't expect private companies to compete effectively against the government. Sometimes compromises yield really bad outcomes.

The Know Nothings Are Back, and They're on Elephant Steroids

Our national political discourse has been hijacked by Sergeant Schultz.

If you're too young to remember the TV sitcom "Hogan's Heroes," a little background: On the show, Sgt. Hans Schultz was the hapless guard that Allied prisoners serially outwitted during their World War II internment in a German prison camp called Stalag 13. "I know NOTHING," Schultz would routinely exclaim when superiors blamed him for failing to halt the POWs' scheming.

Sadly, Schultz's motto — but, unfortunately, not his utter fecklessness — has been taken up with gusto by a small but extraordinarily vocal corps of paranoid, infantile jerks who have somehow managed to gain a measure of influence over public affairs.

They call themselves patriots, purportedly protecting the US constitution from all manner of injury at the hands of President Obama and other Democrats in positions of power. Invoking the mantle of the country's founders, they stage self-styled "tea parties" to protest what they deem to be a takeover of capitalism by the government. The conduct of some of these "teabaggers" has been breathtakingly hateful. Witness a few of the signs displayed at these All-American patriot gatherings:

Many also have rudely disrupted public meetings that members of Congress scheduled to discuss health-care reform with their constituents during the summer recess, by shouting insults, screeching epithets and making not-so-veiled threats of violence — the kind of behavior that even my 3-year-old daughter would dare not broach on her worst day.

All of this childishness is woven together with one very important common thread: the expression of beliefs that have zero basis in fact. Let's examine a few of the most commonly voiced teabagger and town-haller tenets and hold them up to the light of reality here on planet Earth.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama is a socialist. Or, worse, a Communist. Planet Earth Truth: Obama over and over again states his belief in the power of free-market capitalism. But upon taking office, he was confronted by the most severe financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The banking system was on the brink of failure, as was the US auto industry. I happen to disagree with the bailout of Detroit, because Asian and European auto makers had already eclipsed the US big three and could easily have carried the industry and absorbed many displaced workers if GM ceased to exist. But the institutions at the very heart of global capital markets absolutely needed to be bailed out, even if their own misdeeds were perhaps the biggest factor contributing to the collapse. Without massive government aid, the economy would have plunged into the abyss. We got a hint of this possibility in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers being allowed to fail one year ago. More broadly speaking, public stimulus was a sorely needed shot of adrenaline for a private sector that had simply stopped functioning. Yes, too much of the stimulus either has yet to be spent or was shamelessly diverted by myopic, greedy legislators to pork projects that didn't do as much to stimulate the economy as investment in infrastructure and renewable energy production would have. But some federal economic stimulus was absolutely necessary. Most importantly, all of this extraordinary government intervention is expressly designed to be temporary — an emergency intervention that will cease once the financial system and the economy recover. Already several banks have paid back billions in TARP money, resulting in substantial investment gains for the federal government. The Federal Reserve is winding down several of its programs that were designed to shore up the financial system during the crisis. Citigroup is pushing a plan that would reduce the government's 34% ownership stake. And Obama has directly and emphatically said that he wants to shed the government's ownership of GM as soon as possible. Next!

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama wants to create "death panels" that would euthanize old people rather than provide them with critical care. Planet Earth Truth: There is nothing in any bill, outline of a bill or any public statement ever uttered by the president or anyone affiliated in any way with the White House that would establish, or states an intent to establish, "death panels." This is a heinous distortion of language in one of the Democratic reform bills that would have covered completely benign and quite compassionate end-of-life counseling for the terminally ill. Such counseling would include advice about living wills and durable powers of attorney, for instance. A far cry from slipping some hemlock tea to Great Aunt Tillie.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama wants to replace private health insurance with a system in which the federal government employs all doctors and other health care providers. Planet Earth Truth: A canard. Obama supports (albeit half-heartedly, because of all the fake outrage about "a government takeover of health care") making a government-provided plan one of many health-insurance options for Americans to choose from. The idea is to give private-sector plans an incentive to become more efficient by letting them compete side-by-side with a federal plan. His plan also mandates that everyone have health insurance -- a policy that has insurers, drug companies and other health-care companies positively drooling because it will boost their revenues by billions annually when 47 million people suddenly have to sign up for a plan. So much for socialism.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama's health care plan will use tax revenue to provide coverage for illegal immigrants. Planet Earth Truth: There is absolutely nothing in Obama's plan or any of the bills in Congress — and there never has been — that would permit tax dollars to be spent on covering illegal aliens. Following Addison Graves Wilson's toddler-esque "you lie!" tirade, Democrats went even further and added language expressly prohibiting any such expenditure. Still, this bogeyman continues to be raised regularly on the Fox News/Teabagger circuit.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama's health care plan will create government panels that issue mandatory, un-appealable decisions about whether citizens can see doctors, have surgeries and receive all manner of other care. Planet Earth Truth: Just one of dozens of lies being spread about Democratic health reform plans. Factcheck.org has a great analysis of these that is worth checking out if you want the truth.

So how did so many people grow so far removed from reality?

A big part of the answer is that an alternative reality has been created for them — by elite millionaire entertainers posing as journalists, and by huge, organized Republican and corporate lobbies posing as little grassroots groups.

Let's look first at the entertainers. A cadre of red-faced, hyperventilating, even weeping commentators call the teabaggers to action by exploiting their basest fears and insecurities. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other entertainers amplify the rankest lies, hatred and misniformation for the masses and, worse, lend them a patina of credibility because their acts happen to be carried by a network that has the word "news" in its name. This is not news. It is hysteria, carefully packaged to appeal to the disaffected, who tune in religiously and support the multi-million-dollar salaries and rich-and-famous lifestyles of the elite broadcasters who purport to "stand up for the little guy."

Then there are the astroturf movements. Groups like Freedom Works, essentially an organ of the Republican party, are the driving force behind the tea parties and town-hall tomfoolery. They not only are promoting the events, but stocking them with professional political operatives who are bused and flown in from around the country to create the impression of grass-roots activism. This exposes the lie that somehow millions of Americans are rising up in a massive, spontaneous movement fueled by disgust at the Obama administration.

Racial animosity is certainly part of the package here. No one can look at the photos above of teabaggers claiming that Obama plans "White Slavery" or holding up signs depicting the president as an ominous-looking assailant threatening to slit the throat of Uncle Sam and deny with a straight face that a significant measure of Obama hatred is in fact racism. This is not, as one family member of mine recently suggested, a case of "lose the argument and blame racism." In fact, there is no argument to win or lose. The core beliefs motivating the teabagger "movement" so obviously lack any basis in fact that there has to be something else going on here. For some, it is undoubtedly the inability to come to terms with the fact that a black man has decisively been elected our president.

But there is also a broader anxiety being exploited here. Anxiety over the massive social, economic and cultural changes that began in the post-World War II era but accelerated drastically over the past decade. The economy has grown more efficient, more globalized, more dependent upon technology, information and a highly educated — often foreign-born — workforce. At the same time it has become less dependent upon manufacturing, industry and unskilled, less-educated workers. Computers, the internet and other technology have so permeated our culture that many who lack technological savvy not only find themselves losing in the global economy but also feeling left out of popular culture. And all of these forces are triggering dramatic social change. Perhaps the most significant manifestation of this has been the drastic growth in income inequality and shrinkage of the middle class in the United States. The great irony here is that this is patently the outcome of the Reagan Revolution. The idea that government is always bad, and should get out of the way of the private sector, freed giant corporations and Wall Street to lobby for policies that allowed them to eviscerate the American middle class. Laws and rules that were put in place following the Great Depression to ensure it did not happen again, including the Glass-Steagall Act, were repealed. The unfettered capitalism that resulted gave us today's financial crisis and Great Recession.

And the folks who have drawn the short straws as a result of all of this change are often the very same people who, in some cases, see in Obama the "other" to blame for their degraded lot in life. They can't possibly be worse off and have dimmer prospects than their parents because supposedly 'conservative' politicians have spent decades dismantling sensible government regulation of the private sector and drastically increasing income inequality. It must be because this black, Jesus-hating, baby-killing Communist managed to get elected president — in a landslide — by the Sauvignon Blanc-sipping coastal elites, even though we all know he is a militant Muslim that has been plotting to destroy "the America I grew up in" since the very day he was born in Kenya.

Reason and truth matter not to these people. This is how we wind up with Samuel Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. "Joe the Plumber," rejecting the Obama fiscal policy that would cut his income taxes and somehow becoming a hero to others like him and a desperate, late-inning centerpiece of the hapless McCain 2008 campaign. It's how GOP governors including South Carolina's Mark Sanford, the holier-than-thou-Bible-thumper-turned-very-public-adulterer-and-duty-shirker, justify rejecting federal stimulus funds — In the Palmetto State's case, funds that would have provide desperately needed help to millions of unemployed and the nation's 39th-out-of-50-ranked public school system. And it is the ugly foundation beneath last week's outburst on the floor of the House of Representatives by Rep. Addison Graves Wilson, also of South Carolina (he's known as "Joe" to the good ol' boys flying the Confederate flag over the state capital building), during which he yelled "you lie!" at the president, who had just told the truth about his health care plan not covering illegal immigrants.

The saddest part of all this is that the virulent teabagger movement is quite small. Glenn Beck's audience on a good day is about 2.8 million people — less than one percent of the current US population of 305 million. And the teabaggers are clearly self-conscious about their size, as evidenced by the fake photo they circulated to create an aura of ample attendance despite official estimates that only about 70,000 people showed up for their recent march on Washington. But organized Republican and corporate interests, teamed with Fox News and other paid liar-entertainers, whip up such hysteria among this small group, and make so much money doing it, that the rest of the media goes along for the ride. When they're not wasting time on celebrity non-news and promoting the other products of their conglomerate-owners, supposedly respectable newspapers and broadcast outlets devote precious space and time to covering the outbursts of the Know Nothings. All this comes at the expense of serious coverage and debate of the real, considerable problems that confront us as a nation.

We've seen this movie before in the United States. Other periods of swift, deep socioeconomic change have triggered paranoia that expresses itself politically. Candidates of the Know Nothing Party, formed in the mid-19th Century by well-off Protestant New Yorkers who were alarmed about an influx of poor, Irish Catholic immigrants, actually won election to mayoralties in Philadelphia and San Francisco and the governor's mansion in California before the Lincoln-led Republicans muted their influence (the likes of Limbaugh would ravage a politician like Honest Abe as too effete, too eloquent and too tolerant, ensuring he'd never make it through a GOP primary for dog catcher in Osh Kosh today). Industrialization and continued waves of immigration in the late 19th century gave rise to populist Democrats like William Jennings Bryan, who preyed on the fears of southern and agrarian America that cities were growing to be the dominant force in the country. Demagogues like Father Coughlin exploited the sheer economic privation of the Great Depression to conjure opposition to the New Deal. And more recently, the success of the civil rights movement, feminism and the 1960s counterculture helped launch George Wallace's Dixiecrats and the "Silent Majority" of disaffected ethnic and suburban whites that Nixon rode to power. A similar dynamic influenced the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.

Most of the time these political movements don't amount to much. It seems, however, that the teabaggers are exerting an outsized influence on public affairs today. Some argue that the best way to combat this is to simply ignore them, which will cause them to go away. I've tried that. I don't think it works in this case. The organized interests whipping up this faux hysteria will keep doing it until the rest of the non-wacko country — another Silent Majority, if you will — speaks truth to its mounting power.

Tom Ridge Confirms a Shameful Truth

At first I was far from shocked at the news that former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge says he was pressured by two Bush administration cabinet members to raise the government terror alert level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. After all, it seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the color-coded system was being manipulated for political purposes. Whenever things started to look bleak for the White House and the Republican party, presto, we went from Yellow to Orange. Ridge, Cheney or Bush started talking about "chatter" and "specific threats" and everyone fell back into line (perhaps the know-nothings parroting Hannity and Beck's ridiculous talking points about Obama's supposed totalitarian tactics at the health care town hall meetings should consider the real and proven totalitarian tendencies of their own party, but I digress).

And, truth be told, I'd rather focus on the present and the future than get caught up in past battles. But the more I see the headlines today and really think about what happened, the angrier I get.

That's because no matter how many different angles I employ to analyze the situation, I can't help but come to the same conclusion: Bush, Cheney and the GOP not only badly mishandled 9/11 and its aftermath, but added insult to injury by shamelessly exploiting the horrific deaths of 3,000 people for their own grubby political gains.

First and foremost — and a fact that seems to constantly get lost in this debate — Bush knew what was coming and failed to stop it. Eight years ago, in August 2001, he began his day with a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The briefing went into detail about Al Qaeda wanting to hijack commercial aircraft to attack US targets. The CIA and FBI were standing on second base stealing the catcher's signs, telling the president to expect the fastball. But instead of taking a swing, Bush and Cheney struck out looking. That's a fact.

So how did they redeem themselves? Instead of focusing all of our military and diplomatic efforts on finishing the job of finding Osama bin Laden and crushing Al Qaeda where it was headquartered — in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq, which, despite being one of many reprehensible totalitarian regimes in the world at that time, had nothing to do with 9/11 and was not a state sponsor of Al Qaeda.

And instead of doing everything possible to protect the homeland from further attacks, the government under Bush and Cheney diverted millions in Homeland Security funds to protect tiny towns in Kentucky and other rural, Republican, Christian strongholds that should have been fortifying actual terrorist targets in godless, Democratic New York and other big cities. As a result, our ports, chemical plants and nuclear power plants lack the protection they need. My family and millions of others are at risk because of this. That makes me very, very angry. With real anger, not the faux froth that Republican operatives posing as ordinary citizens are using to quash reasoned communication and debate at health care town hall meetings.

Indeed, the examples I cite here are all facts, not fake, outrageous rhetoric that gets dreamed up at RNC headquarters and parroted to an anxious country by the reprehensible, hateful little maggots at Fox News for the purpose of stirring up anger and resentment for political purposes (and for rating$, let's not forget). Click the links in each of the above examples and read for yourself (or don't, if you'd rather just believe what you want to believe).

I'm not normally given to angry rants. But I was in New York City on 9/11. I knew people who perished in the World Trade Center. Other friends and business associates narrowly escaped. I watched one of the buildings collapse with my own eyes. I lived close enough to Ground Zero to see the smoke rising from the site and inhale the sickening smell of death for weeks following the attack. It took about a year before I could see a shabby-looking guy wearing a backpack on the subway without my pulse quickening and my stomach getting a bit queasy. And to this day, eight years later, I still commute to New York City. And I still wonder what's going on behind the scenes when, on some days, the cops at the PATH station or on the streets of the financial district are suddenly brandishing assault rifles, or national guardsmen turn up, when they weren't the day before.

It was bad enough for all these years to see and hear 9/11 constantly invoked as a political weapon by the very people who so badly mishandled the attacks and their aftermath. And I can only imagine how the families of 9/11 victims felt. But now I know for a fact that my president and his minions shamefully exploited our sorrow — and exacerbated our fear with their public warnings — with no basis other than their own grubby desire to remain in power.

How could they? And followers of Christ, these people? Where was their sense of basic human decency? Shame, shame, shame.