Public Service Announcements

 My younger son and I settled in for a bit of football one recent afternoon, as we watched the Washington Commanders and the Seattle Seahawks offer up a hard-fought and remarkably entertaining game.  We were watching on broadcast, which is itself a rarity in these days of streaming.  As one must when watching broadcast TV, we made a point of muting the advertisements, as seeing the same things pitched at you over and over again gets a tiny bit tedious.

But one ad, I made a point of listening to.  

The moment it started, I knew it marked a historic shift in American broadcasting.   In it, Donald J. Trump walks glowering down a greyscale hallway.  In the background and over a soundtrack of ominous music, a recording from his last Presidential campaign played, as Donald declared that he's the leader in "the final battle," as everyone needs to rally around him to liberate America.  If you haven't seen it, here it is: 

The funding source for the ad: "Paid for by the U.S. Government."  

This isn't something you've seen before.  For the entirety of my lifetime, spending tax dollars to support a political campaign of the party in power has been fundamentally off limits.  The reasons for this are obvious.

Faced with criticism, the White House said: "The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads; President Trump is not on the ballot and there is no call to action."

Is this true?  Is this, objectively speaking, what you just watched?  

We know that the voiceover is directly drawn from a political campaign, and specifically attacks both political opposition and the independent press.  This is unquestioned and obvious.

We know, from the highly unusual Republican convention in Texas just a month before these ads were released, that Donald J. Trump wants voters to know that he's on the ballot, and that this upcoming election is a referendum on his administration.  He has publicly and repeatedly said those exact words.  

Is there a call to action?  Let's highlight the first person plural action verbs in the text you just heard:

This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists; we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.

It is self-evidently a call to action.  But White House Communications Director Steven Cheung says it isn't.

Instead, we are told to believe that it is a Public Service Announcement.  All of us know what those look and sound like, which is why we know that the White House...not just the president, but all those who serve him...is lying.  Not "spinning."  Not "reframing."  Just lying like an ill-bred child, as they violate one of the core shared moral norms that has governed how we use our collective resources.

 When our leaders lie to our faces, and we cynically accept that as business as usual, we are on a dark and treacherous path as a nation.  

As a reminder of what public service means, here's a Public Service Announcement, one that reminds us to be aware of what compulsive lying does to us, and to our integrity as persons and nation. Knowing is half the battle, eh?

Hillary's Republican

 

As the non-race of the Trumpist party's pretend primaries moves towards its inevitable conclusion, there's a peculiar bit of pushback against the candidate who appears to be consolidating her position as a futile, distant second.

From Trump's camp, there were recent efforts to make hay of the fact that Nikki Haley once noted in passing that she was inspired by Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency.  

"Ahah," cried his hounds.  "Look at her!  Haley said a nice thing about Hillary!  Hale-aree!  SHE'S JUST LIKE HILLAREEE RINO RINO CLINTON HILLARY HALE-AAAA-RrrEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (insert inaudible dogwhistle sound here)!"

This is an odd thing for Trumpists to highlight, simply because were it not for Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump would never have won the Republican nomination in 2016.   

By saying this, I'm not saying "Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 because he was the best person to win against Hillary Clinton."  I am also not saying:  "Hillary Clinton was such a terrible person that opposing her made Donald J. Trump seem like a perfectly reasonable choice."

I am saying: "Donald J. Trump was the person that Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign chose to win the Republican nomination in 2016, as she and her campaign successfully did everything in their power to get him nominated."

Why?  Because Trump was (and is) not just the worst possible candidate for the Presidency...venal, amoral, incompetent, and self-evidently unfit for office.  He was also the only Republican candidate in 2016 that Clinton's internal polling told her she had a shot at beating.   In the emails that Russian operatives hacked from Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, which were subsequently disseminated through Wikileaks, it's without question that Hillary's strategy revolved around manipulating the media to cast Donald J. Trump as her main adversary. 

I mean, it's right there.  There are receipts.  It's a Known Known, as Rumsfeld might have put it.

Knowing how much the Clinton Industrial Complex was loathed by the far right and ultraconservatives, positioning Trump as her opponent would naturally strengthen him in the primary process.  It worked.  Rank and file conservatives took that bait.  I mean, if you're one of the souls who voted for him, you're living proof.

It produced...like about half of what the Democratic party does, and most of what McKinsey recommends...the sort of disastrous outcome that rises from being too smart for your own good.  

Because whenever you intentionally bend probability in a dark direction to your potential gain, your gamesmanship increases the chances for a catastrophic outcome.  If your candidate only beats a potential opponent...whose incompetence is a danger to the republic...by only two to three percentage points, you shouldn't be thinking about elevating that opponent.

What does it benefit you, to paraphrase an old friend, to gain a few percentage points but lose your republic?

The Unwavering Faith of Barack Obama

So having pitched a couple of faith 'n' politics posts out about the Romney, I figured it was time to balance out the airtime a little bit.

A-ways on back in 2008, Candidate Obama was, quite frankly, impressive.   One of the most significant ways he came across as impressive was to those of us who still dwell in the realm of the oldline.   I mean, you asked the man about his faith, and the next thing you know, you're getting an informed, measured, and thoughtful conversation about Reinhold Niebuhr.

He knows and can appropriately cite Reinhold Niebuhr, we gasped, and went a little light at the knees.

Then there was Obama's church, and his pastor.  Yes, I know, he said "God-Damn America," for which Fox News will never forgive him.   And yes, all the attention did kind of go to Jeremiah Wright's head.   But if you listened to that sermon, really listened to it, it kicked behind.  It challenged the idol of nationalism, it was dead on scripturally, and it rocked out hard against our boundaries in the way that the very best prophetic African American preaching always has.

And so the man had some serious faith bona-fides, and we were all talking about it.

Now, we're four years later, and a month out from a likely re-election, if the current meta-polling trend holds.   And the funny thing is, outside of the whackjobs who are convinced that Obama is a Muslim and very possibly a Red Lectroid fifth columnist, his faith is pretty much immaterial.   It gets no press.   There is no buzz.  It's a non-issue.

The campaign knows this, and so they're putting in the level of effort on that front one might expect.   If you go to the  "Faith" portion of the current Obama election campaign...well...it feels a teensy bit familiar.  Generic.  Perhaps even, dare I say it, stale.   Faith, we hear, was very important as he was getting elected.   It was vital, or so the pitch still goes, on the journey from Chi-town to Chocolate City.

But he's been president for four years.  What has his faith meant during those four years?

Because honestly?  He's not the same guy now that he was four years ago.  He can't possibly be.

It's not just that this campaign is different, though it is.   It's far more muscular, stronger, more in touch with its grasp on power.  He is the president, the POTUS, and he knows it and shows it.   He wears it well, as well as he does the grey flecks that now speckle his hair.

So saying the same things about the role of faith in governance both before and after you've been there just seems inadequate.

Here you've been CiC for four years.  You've sent men to their deaths.   You've ordered the deaths of others, and had your orders carried out.  Presumably, this doesn't happen so much when you are the junior Senator from Illinois, although given Chicago politics, one never knows.

There are other things.  The idealistic struggle for civil discourse with the Other Side of the Aisle, which did not work out so well.  The ongoing systemic crisis in the economy, which ain't over yet.  This has not been easy.

And yet the faith-schpiel of the campaign is the same.  Utterly unchanged.  It's untouched by crisis, unmoved by the reality of what must have been experienced over the last four years.   It does not waver.  It is, truth be told, perhaps the only part of the campaign that hasn't shifted to reflect the experience of governing.  It stands like a tree whose leaves are still and calm, unfluttered by the wind that roars around you.

This feels off, somehow.

Anyone who has leaned heavily on their faith in a time of profound existential challenge knows that faith does not remain unchanged.  If faith is irrelevant, it falls away.  If faith is weak, it crumbles.   If faith is strong, it deepens.

But it does not remain the same.   Faith is a living and dynamic thing.

A faith journey is not static, and finding yourself the most powerful human being on the planet is presumably a nontrivial part of said journey.   It's a pity this campaign won't be showing us that.  It might actually be kind of interesting.

Ah well.  So it goes.