Almost

The impacted red state legislatures went into action immediately following the 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County vs Holder, which invalidated Sections 5 and 4(b) of the much-amended Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 required certain states and local governments (all in red states) to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices, and Section 4(b), specified the coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions were subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting.

They did everything they could to marginalize voters likely to vote against Republicans. People in urban areas or too poor to drive (and hence would not have a driver’s license), African American voters, felons whose voting rights had been restored, etc. They started with new voter ID laws, ostensibly to deter non-existent voter fraud, culled voter rolls where precise matching to residential records and voting registrations had slight differences (middle names vs middle initials for example), levied requirements on ex-felons that they could not possibly meet, reinforced and reinvigorated politically motivated gerrymandering and supported campaigns designed to discourage minority voters on the grounds that their votes wouldn’t matter anyway. Most of these efforts were or still are in courts, even the US Supreme Court where a conservative court might just support this pattern of voter denial. 

But one more subtle practice designed to keep voters from exercising their constitutional rights at the ballot box has been a bit more difficult to address in the courts: making sure that polling stations are located in venues far from where minority voters live. Georgia is a pretty typical example. 

Even though Georgia’s largest city and state capital (Atlanta), like most large cities, is blue, the state still manages to stay quite red. The close call, in the 2018 gubernatorial election, sent out a red flag to conservatives. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (left above) carefully orchestrated the culling of the state voter rolls, oddly eliminating voters from districts unlikely to support a GOP candidate. Georgia was one of those red states “liberated” from federal oversight by Shelby County vs Holder.

Particularly odd, because Kemp was also the GOP candidate for governor. His challenger, a charismatic rising star in the Democratic Party – Stacey Abrams (right above) – almost won. “On November 7, Kemp declared victory over Abrams with 50.3% of the vote versus her 48.7%, while Libertarian Ted Metz candidate trailed behind both with 0.9%. The following morning, Kemp resigned as Secretary of State. On November 13, 2018, U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May ruled that Gwinnett County violated the Civil Rights Act in its rejection of absentee ballots after U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg ruled the previous day that the votes must be counted and preserved. On November 16, every county certified their votes with Kemp leading by roughly 55,000 votes. 

Shortly after the election certification, Abrams stated that she would not concede defeat to Governor-elect Kemp, but that she would not win the election.^[5] This was the closest governor's race in Georgia since 1966… On November 16, Abrams suspended her campaign – without conceding defeat – acknowledging Kemp would be elected the next governor of Georgia, thus ending the race.” Wikipedia.

Like most of the other red states now freed of federal supervision over their election process under Shelby County, Georgia’s Republican governor and legislatures continued in their efforts to hold power, even as the numbers of voting Republicans continued to fall. Urban areas were swelling rapidly as a new Democratic power base, and Georgia was no exception. With a most significant African American population, almost entire Democrat, marginalizing that constituency was “job one” for the Republicans in control. Georgia followed that red state blueprint for minority voter suppression. 

To illustrate just how effective these efforts were, one merely has to look at a majority African American area of Hazlehurst, Georgia. In an effort to reduce costs, or so the story goes, election officials began closing what were labeled as extraneous polling stations. Strange how many of those polling sites were in minority neighborhoods. Places where folks were less likely to have cars that would be needed to reach the now-distant polling sites. The above section of Hazlehurst, for example. But people can fight back, even if Trump administration turns a blind eye to renewed voter discrimination.

“When local election officials shut down a polling site in a predominantly black area of a rural Georgia county, displaced voters couldn’t look to the federal government to intervene as it once did in areas with a history of racial disenfranchisement… So residents banded together, circulating petitions pressuring the Jeff Davis County elections board to reconsider, while advocacy groups sent pre-lawsuit demands and organized turnout at board meetings. The grass-roots struggle took two years, but county officials relented and agreed to reopen the polling site.

“With hundreds of voting sites closing or consolidating nationwide, the victory in Jeff Davis County stands out as a rare expansion of in-person voting access since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that freed Georgia and other states from the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s requirement to prove to the federal government that voting changes won’t be discriminatory.

“Most of the African American residents of Hazlehurst, about 100 miles west of Savannah amid pine forests and cotton fields, have voted at the polling site for years and were surprised when it was closed in August 2017. They were reassigned to a new, consolidated poll across town just as the Georgia governor’s race was beginning to heat up… ‘We couldn’t understand or see why the poll was closed,’ Helen Allen said in a recent interview… The 67-year-old had been voting at the little white clapboard building in a dirt lot between a cemetery and an office supply warehouse since she moved just down the road in 1982… She said some older and disabled residents became concerned about how they’d get to the new polling place. Residents began ‘talking about the hardship and how they didn’t want to go all the way across town,’ Allen said.

“Julie Houk, managing counsel for election protection for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said poll closures can create tremendous barriers for voters, especially those with low incomes or no car, and are too often carried out in minority communities.”

“Poll closures were one of several voting rights issues that arose during the heavily scrutinized 2018 governor’s race between Democrat Stacey Abrams — the nation’s first black woman to be nominated for governor from a major party — and Republican Brian Kemp, who was the state’s chief elections officer before winning that election… A plan by local elections officials to close seven of nine voting locations in majority-black Randolph County months before the election drew a national media storm. The plan was quickly sidelined after facing strong opposition from voters and civil rights groups.” Los Angeles Times, December 8^th.

Our Founding Fathers were mostly landowners with great suspicions of city-dwellers. The nation was overwhelmingly agrarian. Today, however, America is well-over 85% urban, but as a result of that ancient suspicion, an average rural voter has over 1.8 times the voting power of an urban voter. Wyoming with around 600,000 people has the same number of US Senators as does California with a population of 40 million. All over the South and Southwest, gerrymandered districts are profoundly skewed against Democrats, in many cases getting Republicans overwhelmingly elected in overwhelmingly blue areas (like Austin, Texas). It’s why the prestigious Economist labels the United States a flawed democracy, because it is not fairly representative. It is a country where the winner of the 2016 popular vote for the US presidency by almost 3 million votes lost.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and as the United States lean towards autocracy and the dominance of a minority over the majority, as polarization without compromise defines our contemporary political process, it is difficult to understand how this nation can hold together for much longer.

Tramadol Baby, International Killer

It’s the little opioid that could. Less potent than its sister painkillers, OxyContin, Vicodin and fentanyl, Tramadol, a narcotic that was born in Germany (originally made by Grunenthal) has spread worldwide. Into the poorest nooks and crannies, the third world and particularly in war zones, often completely unregulated. While Tramadol is controlled substance in Canada and the US, until recently, it was not regulated even in large parts of Europe.

Taken in quantities that have become way too commonplace, Tramadol has also become a killer. Addictive and easy to counterfeit, it has become everything from a coping mechanism for impoverished souls seeking escape from hunger and daily misery, a substitute for genuine but unaffordable medical care, to the currency that finances global terrorism like no other. Vigorous international controls that track other dangerous narcotics have somehow missed these nasty little pills. They are virtually everywhere. Not being on an international control list, Tramadol often passes openly across international borders without even being tracked.

Claire Galofaro and Emily Schmall, writing for the December 14^th Associated Press, paint this dark picture: “[Now Tramadol pills] are the root of what the United Nations named ‘the other opioid crisis’ — an epidemic featured in fewer headlines than the American one, as it rages through the planet’s most vulnerable countries.

“Mass abuse of the opioid tramadol spans continents, from India to Africa to the Middle East, creating international havoc some experts blame on a loophole in narcotics regulation and a miscalculation of the drug’s danger. The man-made opioid was touted as a way to relieve pain with little risk of abuse. Unlike other opioids, tramadol flowed freely around the world, unburdened by international controls that track most dangerous drugs. 

“But abuse is now so rampant that some countries are asking international authorities to intervene… This year, authorities seized hundreds of thousands of tablets, banned most pharmacy sales and shut down pill factories, pushing the price from 35 cents for a 10-pack to $14. The government opened a network of treatment centers, fearing that those who had become opioid-addicted would resort to heroin out of desperation. Hordes of people rushed in, seeking help in managing excruciating withdrawal… For some, tramadol had become as essential as food.

“‘Like if you don’t eat, you start to feel hungry. Similar is the case with not taking it,’ said auto shop welder Deepak Arora, a gaunt 30-year-old who took 15 tablets a day, so much he had to steal from his family to pay for pills. ‘You are like a dead person.’…

“Jeffery Bawa, an officer with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, realized what was happening in 2016, when he traveled to Mali in western Africa, one of the world’s poorest countries, gripped by civil war and terrorism. They asked people for their most pressing concerns. Most did not say hunger or violence. They said tramadol.

“One woman said children stumble down the streets, high on the opioid; parents add it to tea to dull the ache of hunger. Nigerian officials said at a United Nations meeting on tramadol trafficking that the number of people there living with addiction is now far higher than the number with AIDS or HIV.

“Tramadol is so pervasive in Cameroon that scientists a few years ago believed they’d discovered a natural version in tree roots. But it was not natural at all: Farmers bought pills and fed them to their cattle to ward off the effects of debilitating heat. Their waste contaminated the soil, and the chemical seeped into the trees.

“Police began finding pills on terrorists, who traffic it to fund their networks and take it to bolster their capacity for violence, Bawa said… Most of it was coming from India. The country’s sprawling pharmaceutical industry is fueled by cheap generics. Pill factories produce knock-offs and ship them in bulk around the world, in doses far exceeding medical limits.

“In 2017, law enforcement reported that $75 million worth of tramadol from India was confiscated en route to the Islamic State militant group. Authorities intercepted 600,000 tablets headed for Boko Haram. An additional 3 million were found in a pickup truck in Niger, in boxes disguised with U.N. logos. The agency warned that tramadol was playing ‘a direct role in the destabilization of the region.’”

In the end, we are so concerned with what happens inside the United States, increasingly withdrawing from multinational organizations and treaties and not concerned with the pains and struggles of impoverished or war-ravaged peoples elsewhere, that our lack of involvement or concern just makes it all so much worse. Does it matter that terrorists, with “death to America” high on their “to do” list, generate their supporting financing from poor regions far from our shores? 

              I’m Peter Dekom, so whether the United States gets involved for moral reasons, empathy or a just crass desire to survive, our withdrawal from the world does not serve us well or remotely represent who we are as Americans.

The Last Time a President Destroyed a Major US Political Party

He was a military hero who had never himself voted in a presidential election. His name surfaced as the Whig Party and the nation were torn by the legitimacy of slavery. Democrats supported the horrific institution, and the 12^th President of the United States (1849-50) was the last president of the Republic who owned them. His tenure in office was short – 16 months to be precise – dying from either food poisoning from a bowl of milk and cherries, or as some have suggested, poison. The United States was a minor country at the time, so the machinations of the American politics had very limited impact outside of North America.

His name: Zachary Taylor, and he has often been depicted as a blithering incompetent, but with President James Polk ailing and unable to run for a second term, both the Democrats and Whigs were desperately looking for an electable candidate. A major general with major military success was a seemingly attractive choice. Until contemporary historians reconfigure the list, Zachary Taylor is generally considered the worst president of the United States. His tenure was so absurdly misdirected that his political party, Whigs, completely disbanded shortly after his death. Fortunately, he was not in office very long. But it began so well.

“Just days before Congress officially declared war on Mexico in May 1846, Taylor led U.S. troops to two victories over much larger Mexican forces at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. And in February 1847, Taylor’s force defeated Mexican troops despite being outnumbered 3 or 4 to 1 at the Battle of Buena Vista. After the victory, Taylor was toasted from Maine to Georgia. Americans sang, ‘Zachary Taylor was a brave old feller, Brigadier General, A, Number One/ He fought twenty thousand Mexicanoes;/ Four thousand he killed, the rest they ‘cut and run.’ ’

“Members of both major political parties at the time—the Democrats and the Whigs—started holding public celebrations lauding Taylor with elaborate toasts to George Washington, the republic and their new hero. They often culminated with formal resolutions amid loud ‘huzzahs’ endorsing Taylor’s nomination for president in 1848. As the booze-fueled, red, white and blue political excitement grew, one Kentuckian exclaimed, shortly after Taylor’s Buena Vista victory, ‘I tell ye, General Taylor is going to be elected by spontaneous combustion.’…

“[Taylor] would only accept a nomination to be ‘president of the nation and not of a party.’ A genuine nationalist who recognized how much Americans disliked professional politicians, Taylor placed himself above the ‘trading politicians … on both sides.’

“Despite all this talk of staying away from one party or another, Taylor began inching toward the Whig Party, and the Whigs inched closer to him. At first glance, a general seemed to be a strange choice for the Whigs. Founded in the 1830s as a strained coalition of Southern states’ rights conservatives and Northern industrialists united mostly by disgust at Andrew Jackson’s expansion of presidential power, the Whig Party considered the war a disastrous result of presidential overreach. In fact, the popular backlash they stirred against Democratic President James K. Polk was so great that the Whigs seized control of Congress during the 1846 midterm election. But once America’s victory over Mexico triggered such enthusiasm, some Whigs calculated that running an extremely popular war hero like Taylor would prove to voters that the Whigs were patriotic, despite their anti-war stance.

“Taylor also appealed to the Whigs’ founding fear of presidential power. In the letters he wrote, he invoked Whig doctrine, justifying a passive president who deferred to the people and the Congress.

“And then, there was the slavery issue: Taylor’s ambiguous status as a slaveholder who dodged questions about the escalating slavery debate seemed to be a clever choice for a party increasingly divided over the South’s mass enslavement of blacks. The territory the U.S. acquired during the Mexican-American War only escalated the feud, sparking a major political debate over whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories. Both parties (each awkwardly uniting Northerners who disliked slavery with Southern slaveholders) had reason to seek safe candidates that year.” Gil Troy, Professor of History at McGill University, writing for Politico.com, June 2, 2016. At least Taylor voiced his opinion that slavery should not be promted in new states and territories. But Taylor was a total outsider, with economic policy views quite opposed to Whig doctrine, who really did not belong in any political office.

Further, Taylor’s connection to slavery was antithetical to many Whigs, who never believed he should have been nominated. “In the end, 62 percent of Taylor’s votes still came from Southern Whigs, who calculated that Taylor’s nomination would kill the abolitionist movement: ‘The political advantages which have been secured by Taylor’s nomination, are impossible to overestimate,’ cheered one Southerner.” Troy. Dissention among Whigs mounted.

But what did Taylor… and the Whigs… really stand for. They got an electable candidate… but forgot to design a platform. “The party had not even drafted a platform for this undefined, unqualified leader. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune pronounced the convention ‘a slaughterhouse of Whig principles.’ The Jonesborough Whig did not know ‘which most to dispise, the vanity and insolence of Gen. Taylor, or the creeping servility’ of the Whig Convention that nominated him.

“Resisting pressure to run as an independent, but refusing to stump for Taylor, Henry Clay exclaimed, ‘I fear that the Whig party is dissolved and that no longer are there Whig principles to excite zeal and simulate exertion.’ A New York Whig, claiming the convention ‘committed the double crime of suicide and paricide,’ mourned, ‘The Whig party as such is dead. The very name will be abandoned, should Taylor be elected, for ‘the Taylor party.’ ’” Troy. The Whigs were hopeless fractured, and they had elected a novice with no political skills, certainly not the kind of leader who could mend that massive rift.

Taylor was caught trying to placate various factions, but “[m]ost dispiriting, Taylor, who made no pledges and had no principles, gave rank-and-file Whig voters nothing to champion, while alienating many of the most committed loyalists. In The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, the historian Michael Holt notes that Taylor’s victory triggered an ‘internal struggle for the soul of the Whig party’: was it more committed to seizing power or upholding principle? Underlying that debate was also a deeper question, still pressing today, about the role of fame, popularity, celebrity, in presidential campaigning—and American political leadership.

“Unfortunately for the wobbling Whigs, Southerners then felt betrayed when Taylor took a nationalist approach brokering what became the Compromise of 1850. As a result, Holt writes, ‘Within a year of Taylor’s victory, hopes raised by Whigs’ performance in 1848 would be dashed. Within four years, they would be routed by’ the Democrats. ‘Within eight, the Whig party would totally disappear as a functioning political organization.’” Troy.

Signed into law after Taylor’s death, the “Compromise of 1850 is the name given to a package of bills passed in September 1850, aimed at defusing a stand-off between the Northern free states and the Southern slave states. The argument concerned those territories which had been acquired by the United States during the Mexican-American War of the late 1840s and, in particular, their status. The compromise was a qualified success in that it averted the immediate threat of war or secession. However, it did not lead to a long-term settlement: the outbreak of the American Civil War was delayed by barely a decade.” TotalHistory.com. Not so much a success if you believe slavery to be the abomination that is always was. The bills addressed inter-state territorial claims, the division of new territories, where slavery might be allowed and where it could be banned and even protected slave owners against runaway slaves.

Zachary Taylor left both the nation and the Whigs more politically divided than ever. Both the Whigs fractured into self-destruction, and a decade later the Civil War ripped the nation apart. He alienated just about everyone. “It was summer, and a major U.S. political party had just chosen an inexperienced, unqualified, loutish, wealthy outsider with ambiguous party loyalties to be its presidential nominee. Some party luminaries thought he would help them win the general election. But many of the faithful were furious and mystified: How could their party compromise its ideals to such a degree?” Troy. Hmmm. A new clearly antislavery party, the Republicans rose after Taylor and his Whigs were gone.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if the above scenario happened again in the 2016 election of Donald John Trump, now a candidate able to generate votes at the expense of so many basic Republican and American values.

Who’s Gonna Pay, Who’s Gonna Lose?

I’ve blogged about the Marshall Islands facing extinction from rising oceans. All over the world, estuaries, river deltas, low-lying coastal communities and once rich fishing grounds are facing a similar fate. Oxygen-deprived “dead zones” – the result of the unchecked flow of pollutants – are increasing the world over. Marine life is dying as a result, even here in the United States.

The picture (above left) is accompanied by this explanation on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website: “Hypoxic zones are areas in the ocean where the oxygen concentration is so low that animals can suffocate and die, and as a result are often called ‘dead zones.’ The largest hypoxic zone in the United States, and the second largest hypoxic zone worldwide, forms in the northern Gulf of Mexico adjacent to the Mississippi River. This image from a NOAA animation shows how runoff from farms (green areas) and cities (red areas) drains into the Mississippi. This runoff contains an overabundance of nutrients from fertilizers, wastewater treatment plants, and other sources.” If you are commercial fisherman, you are already paying with your livelihood. But that is pollution directly into our water systems.

Greenhouse gasses have created another form of atmospheric pollution that equally impacts our seas and oceans. Temperature rises have elevated sea temperatures, directly expanding the devastation from tropical storms, where they absorb much more water from that heated water. It’s a double whammy. More intense, slower moving major tropical storms dropping vastly more water on hapless communities, plus accompanying storm surges that push seawater inland… combined with the generally rising seas as oceans absorb massive water released from melting glacial and polar ice.

We know that roughly 30% of Florida is likely to disappear underwater within this century, but for those who live in particularly susceptible coastal communities, they are losing their homes and businesses right now. The Carolinas have been particularly hard hit by flooding of late (picture above right). Thousands of homes and business face permanent destruction as this climatic change accelerates. But these communities do not remotely have the financial resources to contain the damage. If Democrats have been struggling to win over these red state constituents, they have an opening with climate change, the same climate change local Republican elected representatives have been denying or poopooing for years.

“Historic cities and towns along the Southeast U.S. coast have survived wars, hurricanes, disease outbreaks and other calamities, but now that sea levels are creeping up with no sign of stopping, they face a more existential crisis.

“With a total annual budget of $225 million, Charleston, S.C., can’t afford the billions of dollars to save itself without federal help. It’s counting on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help surround its downtown peninsula with sea walls, harking back to the barriers the city built when it was founded 350 years ago.

“Keeping water off the streets and buildings is even more difficult for smaller towns like Swansboro, N.C., with 3,200 people and a $4-million budget that doesn’t account for climate-related sea rise… The most vulnerable coastal communities sit only a few feet above sea level and are already getting wet at some high tides. Scientists estimate the sea will rise an additional 2 to 4 feet in the next 50 years.

“Municipal leaders say they need billions of state and federal dollars to save block after city block of low-lying homes and businesses. And although even climate-change-denying politicians are beginning to acknowledge the inevitable onslaught, city officials worry that those who control the purse strings won’t see the urgency of a slowly unfolding catastrophe that’s not like a tornado or earthquake.

“Founded in 1783, Swansboro became the center of North Carolina’s steamboat industry. In 1862, it saw Union troops burn down a Confederate fort guarding the nearby Bogue Inlet to the Atlantic Ocean… Across its quaint downtown on the White Oak River, almost every building boasts a city seal with the date it was built. Most are much older than the gray-haired tourists strolling around and can’t forever withstand the kind of flooding they suffered last year, when Hurricane Florence brought a sea surge on top of 30 inches of rain.

“Stunned, the town commissioned a report for the future. It said the water’s edge might end up a block or two inland from the historic waterfront and soberly suggested: “Consider retracting services or strategically abandoning infrastructure in areas that are likely to be risky or dangerous.”

“Local leaders recognize the importance of Swansboro’s charm, but its future is largely out of their hands… ‘We’re going to be very, very dependent on outside funding,’ new Town Manager Chris Seaberg said. ‘We’re trying to preserve the history but [also] trying to accommodate these new issues that weren’t there 100, 200 years ago.’… North Carolina passed a law in 2012 preventing the state from forming coastal polices based on sea rise predictions.

“But Republican control of the Legislature is waning, and local leaders say hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 and Dorian in 2019 — along with changing attitudes toward climate science— appear to be shifting the state’s outlook. North Carolina created an Office of Recovery and Resiliency this year to plan for floods and other extreme weather events… ‘There will need to be political stressors to get people to understand the importance of climate change,’ said Beaufort, N.C.,  Mayor Rett Newton.” Jeffrey Collins writing for the December 9^th Los Angeles Times. 

Like the Trump administration, which mandated that all government-issued communications eschew mention of man-induced global climate change, many of these coastal red states, like the above-noted 2012 North Carolina statute, have engaged in denying nature’s ravages by law. Nature, however, has refused to back off.

We well may be living in a world of too little, too late. Multiply the above stories by the hundreds, perhaps thousands of US coastal communities that face extinction from coastal sea rise, from storms and rising oceans. It would have been much cheaper to have addressed climate change, which we clearly knew about, decades earlier.

It is too easy for liberals to gloat on the fact that red states are facing the brunt of the coastal flooding catastrophes. But we are Americans. When the going gets tough, I’d like to think we rally as a unified nation to support assaults on our nation, our way of life. It’s time for that rally, very different from the Trump rallies that deny facts and resist the inevitable under a persistent pattern of lies that our President can undo the laws of physics, economics and nature. When any Americans need our help, that is a cry that every American must answer!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and it is time for us again to become “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Professional vs Amateur Liars

You might notice that Vladimir Putin never tweets. He seldom has reactive, impromptu conversations with the press, and he has no need for Fox News, since the state directly controls all media. Most of his statements of denial of the many things Russia is accused of are actually issued though various other government officials. Putin learned to deal in the currency of disinformation, deflection and denial as a professional intelligence officer.

“Putin was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before resigning in 1991 to enter politics in Saint Petersburg. He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined president Boris Yeltsin's administration where he served as director of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency, and then as prime minister.” Wikipedia. When Putin or his administration lie, there is a specific national policy or goal behind that mendacity. It is never random or self-aggrandizing. That latter function is reflected in his athletic poses, hockey play, swimming in cold rivers and training in martial arts. But Putin’s Russia lies a lot.

So does Donald Trump, often reactive, ill-conceived, off-the-cuff and almost always self-aggrandizing or aimed at putting someone else down. Difficult to maintain as long as democratic principles survive (and they might not), Trump’s pattern of lying appears to have alternative ambitions: it riles up the opposition, confuses the electorate, empowers his constituency and the sheer volume of lies has rendered the dramatic impact they should carry… a big nothing (“here we go again”).

The underlying purpose is simple: Trump above everyone else… and if you are not with him, you are the enemy. After six significant Trump corporate bankruptcies and a tsunami of business litigation, much of it lost, there may be really good reasons why Trump doesn’t want his tax returns released; his claim to be the best businessman in the world will probably reside in a flood of continuous losses. His claim to be good with loopholes flies in the face of parallel tax returns from his very sophisticated father’s dealing with comparable real estate… showing profits.

Putin identifies with Russia. He revels in his power but deploys his cruel autocracy with surgical precision. Russia is entitled to Crimea. Those obviously Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine are local freedom fighters. Russia clearly did not interfere in US or western elections. Russia did not supply chemical weapons and sophisticated missiles and bombs to Syria. Russian agents did not assassinate operatives in London or Berlin. Russian athletes do not use “enhancing” drugs; they are simply superior. And so on and so on. He is consistent, does not reverse himself and thinks carefully before he speaks or authorizes someone to speak on behalf of Russia.

For those who believe Donald Trump’s whitewashing of Putin’s mendacity, that “all that bad stuff never happened” – and there are many including many in Congress now pursuing a debunked Ukrainian conspiracy theory from an alternative universe – nothing bring home how lying is just the way the USSR and now Russia operate than sports doping. What do you expect from a former high-ranking officer in both the Soviet and Russian equivalent of our CIA? Putin is obviously so much better at it than amateur Trump.

Russia has denied that it officially condones, and then hides, the support of supplying and encouraging the use of muscle-enhancing chemicals (steroids, etc.) that are uniformly banned in international competition. Repeatedly caught by objective blood tests and substantiated by defectors, Russians have simply attempted to upgrade their chemicals and find better ways to hide the results. Nothing really changed. Except they got caught… again… and again. Business as usual.

This is simply a metaphor for the bastion of continuous mendacity that defines Mother Russia… and has for a long time. David Wharton, writing for the December 10^th Los Angeles Times, writes: “A decision to ban Russia from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and other major sporting events over the next four years has drawn immediate, angry reaction from critics who insist the punishment is not severe enough.

“The World Anti-Doping Agency announced the sanction Monday, the latest development in a long-running scandal in which Russian athletes, coaches and officials have been caught in an orchestrated doping scheme… Though Russia cannot participate as a nation — its name, flag and anthem barred — WADA ruled that individual athletes may compete as ‘neutrals’ if they can persuade authorities they have not cheated.

“The penalty extends as far as the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and is similar to one that was instituted at the 2018 Winter Games at Pyeongchang, South Korea. The International Olympic Committee voiced its support, but others were infuriated… ‘To allow Russia to escape a complete ban is yet another devastating blow to clean athletes,’ said Travis T. Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, adding: ‘Here we go again. WADA says one thing and does something entirely different.’

“In Russia, where leaders have traditionally viewed sports as a national showcase, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the ban as ‘a continuation of the anti-Russian hysteria that has already grown chronic,’ according to a report from the Tass state news agency.

“The scandal dates to allegations from the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Though media reports and a WADA investigation subsequently detailed a state-run doping program, Russia was allowed to compete on a limited basis at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. At the Winter Games two years later, the nation was banned, but 168 Russians participated as ‘Olympic athletes from Russia,’ marching into the opening ceremony under a neutral flag. None of this stopped President Vladimir Putin from lauding a gold-medal performance by the men’s hockey team… ‘This success is a wonderful tribute to the Russian ice hockey school and a great example for our younger athletes,’ Putin said… Many in the Olympic movement saw excluding all Russian athletes from Tokyo and Beijing as a logical next step.”

We accept this because that’s the way it has always been. Russian intelligence is based on deception and disinformation. But Russia is not a democracy. We are. We do not have any excuse to condone, tolerate or justify our chief of state’s pattern of lying like no other American leader in our history, no matter the reason. The whole world has labeled him a liar, an epithet that has decimated America’s global credibility and influence.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and as the ability to manufacture “genuine looking” fake news blends with our President’s addiction to lying, I wonder exactly how American democracy can survive this horrendous change in our political landscape.