Hartmann Report

Yesterday afternoon while watching CNN, Louise and I were treated to an ad by the Wall Street-funded “No Labels” group that finances the “Problem Solvers Caucus” in Congress, extolling the virtues of Kurt Schrader, a Democratic Congressman who represents part of Portland. It’s grim enough that Schrader was one of the 9 Democrats who threatened to blow up President Biden’s $3.5 trillion infrastructure deal; now he’s being lauded on my TV by the very fat cats who own him.

The best of the rest of the news. — Remember when then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said that the Benghazi hearings would cut into Hillary Clinton’s favorable ratings enough let Donald Trump beat her in 2016? “[W]e put together a Benghazi special committee,” McCarthy said. “A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.” Now Republicans are planning a repeat if they seize control of the House in 2022, only this time to batter President Biden with the Afghanistan pullout. The biggest problem they may encounter is that multiple Republicans who were in Trump’s administration, including his Defense Secretary and National Security Advisor, have said that he stupidly sold out America and turned Afghanistan over to the Taliban with no conditions and no plan to get out our allies, leaving it all for the next president. Democrats may want to respond with, “Go ahead, make my day.”

Rightwing billionaires have robbed & pillaged America. Sadly, the future Rosenberrys and Stacks won't hear this listening to AM radio or Fox “News.” So we live in increasingly dangerous times... They are the new faces of American terrorism. Floyd Ray Rosenberry and Joe Stack both grew up in an America before the neoliberal austerity and tax-cut policies of Reaganism gutted our country. They both mourned the loss of the middle-class prosperity of that time in America and looked to rightwing commentary to make sense of it all. They then both turned to terrorism.

The Covid pandemic has exposed how corrupt and dysfunctional our American patchwork-quilt for-profit system has become: America can and must do better. It has to be a scurrilous lie. Seriously: nobody is that evil. Although it is the sort of thing that we’ve come to expect because our unique-in-the-world, for-profit health insurance system leaves Americans financially vulnerable to sickness but offers huge profits to companies and CEOs in the system. Some cynical people are suggesting that the reason Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is forcing teachers and children to sit for hours every day in classrooms with unmasked children is because he wants them all to get infected with Covid…to make money for a friend of his.

Welcome to the “great” America that Trump and his MAGA followers want us to become again: a racist, sexist, repressive and dangerous apartheid state. They’re convinced that there’s an international conspiracy, funded by Jews, to “replace” European-ancestry whites with people of color whose ancestors came from outside of Europe. They’re frightened by the new census data showing that whites are a decreasing majority in America, and terrified by the prospect that Afghans who risked their lives for America might move here.

Language matters, because it’s how we understand what’s real and what’s a scam or a lie. When statecraft language is misused people can die, as happened for decades in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attack was a crime by a small group of criminals, not an act of war by a sovereign state. But we responded to that crime with two war-based assaults, and we won both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in a matter of weeks, not years or decades.

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in terms of money, credibility and blood. We must remember the lies. We can’t afford to let this one go down the memory hole, too. Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush‘s 2004 reelection strategy. After 9/11 the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.”

The best of the rest of the news. — Afghanistan falls. George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy is finally coming to an end. Bush, you’ll recall, turned down the Taliban’s offer to arrest Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, and instead began bombing Afghanistan because he thought it was good politics. Twenty years later, here we are. Meanwhile, if President Biden really expected the Taliban to hold back until we’d evacuated the country, he needs to fire his advisors. No country wants to be occupied and every nation fights occupation: that principle was at the foundation of our nation, when people who’d lived in North America for generations rejected occupation by British forces. The Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban that let Trump ignore the crisis of Afghanistan and further empowered the Taliban; it also made a safe withdrawal even more difficult. But at the end of the day, leaving was really the only option America had. Hopefully, after having experienced this twice in the past 50 years, we’ll learn from the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan…and probably soon Iraq as well. When presidents lie us into wars, it always turns out ugly.

So what do we do as a society when confronted with a psychotic former leader who’s continuing to spread contagious forms of mental illness among our nation? How do we repair the damage? When I was young my favorite writers were Ernest Hemmingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and my favorite Thompson novel was his 1971 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Which is why a caller last year who started on a rant about “adrenochrome” caused me to both cut him off the air and go back to my copy of the novel to see if my memory was right. Sure enough, there it was.

Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens – and thousands of their citizens’ children – die and the people of their states will simply forget and move on. Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement. Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.