Posts published in “Johnson”

The earliest memory I have of Phil Batt, the former Idaho Republican governor who died recently on his 96th birthday, dates to his time as president pro tem of the state senate.

For some reason lost to memory, Batt invited me one afternoon during the legislative session into his inner sanctum behind the Senate chamber to meet his myna bird. It’s not every day a politician introduces a reporter to a bird that can talk. Pretty cool, particularly when you realize the bird had been taught by Batt to say funny and slightly disparaging things about the Democratic governor at time, Cecil Andrus. The bird, of course, was named Bird.

Phil Batt was one of the most accessible, least pretentious, most genuine public officials I have ever been around at close range. He was quick with a quip. Candid to a fault. Honest as the day is long. There was simply no Phil Batt scandal, or even a hint of one.

In those long-ago days, Republicans controlled the Idaho legislature, as they have nearly always in the state’s history, but the partisan margin wasn’t huge. There were conservatives in both parties. And moderates, too. Batt had a skilled politician’s ability to bridge the divides. He wasn’t a divider or a hater or a show horse. Batt was a legislator.

Years after meeting Phil’s Bird, and after both governors wore the “former” title, I had the distinct pleasure of several times playing golf with Batt and his long-time friend and occasional political adversary Andrus. The two men had a genuine friendship never better on display than when one was trying to take a few bucks off the other in a golf game.

On one particularly memorable occasion the golf match was at Boise’s Hillcrest Country Club with Andrus the host. Following the requisite negotiation over strokes, the match proceeded amid much joking and verbal towel snapping. Andrus was waiting for his moment. It came early on the back nine.

Batt had been playing well. He hit a golf ball straight if not long and like his politics his game was consistent. He was clearly headed toward taking a few bucks off the Democrat. As Batt prepared to hit a tee shot, Andrus waited until just before Phil began his back swing to ask the former governor what he knew about love life rumors involving another prominent Republican politician. Batt stepped back from his ball and glared at Andrus – the famous Batt temper – and then smiled. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to say a word. The smile was confirmation.

I think Andrus was intent on breaking Batt’s concentration, but Phil was too focused for that. He kept his eye on the ball. He won the match.

The two formers, as history will record, made a powerful team when they combined to protect the state’s position on nuclear waste cleanup, a position made difficult for Batt because many in his own party opposed taking the necessary hard line with the federal Department of Energy. Still, he persisted.

As the tributes to Batt accumulated this week nearly all noted that the Canyon County onion farmer had left an enduring mark with his principled advocacy for human rights, including helping create the state Human Rights Commission and, as governor, demanding workplace protection for farm workers, many of whom are, of course, migrants.

In that courageous and righteous stand Batt bucked a natural constituency – the state’s agricultural interests. It was a fight, and one worth having, and Phil won. So did the farm workers.

But here is the glaring irony in the many deserved tributes to Phil Batt. The party he once led and literally brought back to life after Republicans suffered a political shellacking in 1990 has fundamentally rejected the moral and ethical leadership around human and individual rights that Batt championed for his state.

The Idaho Republican Party is now dominated by the very forces of intolerance and bigotry that Phil Batt spent his career rejecting. The party’s focus on angry White nationalism is about demonizing and marginalizing the LGBTQ community, youngsters and families dealing with gender identity struggles and librarians and teachers who believe that community libraries and a fair exploration of American history are the essence of good citizenship.

The modern Idaho party, by contrast, believes it’s a conservative value to proscribe precisely how their neighbors will live, what they will read and how they will access health care. And if you’re not like them there is simply no place for you.

The current Idaho governor, Brad Little, who clearly counts Batt among his mentors, praised his predecessor as the epitome of public service and integrity. Batt’s “legacy is distinguished by his unrelenting human rights leadership,” Little said, even as the governor hung out at the repugnant CPAC conference in Washington, a pep rally for the alt right White nationalism of hate and division that Idaho’s governor has done next to nothing to challenge.

Indeed, Brad Little’s acceptance of an invitation to address the CPAC grievance fest might well mark the final capitulation by one-time Phil Batt conservatives to the dominant narrative of the modern Republican Party. To praise Batt and his record and also share a platform with Marjorie Taylor Green and Steve Bannon requires a degree of moral compartmentalization that would never have occurred to Batt. Yet, this is the arc of the modern GOP, a party that long ago left Batt and now thoroughly repudiates his legacy.

In fact, the official statement from the Idaho Republican Party on Batt’s passing was a terse three sentences that read like a news bulletin – “Former Idaho Governor Phil Batt has died today at the age of 96. Our condolences to his family. May he rest in peace.” Nothing about the man, his legacy or his contributions to Idaho.

By contrast the Idaho party featured on its Facebook page a shout out to the alt right provocateur Alex Stein, a loud voice for White nationalism who recently appeared at Canyon County’s Lincoln Day dinner. This is the same Alex Stein who recently featured on his television show the founder of the Proud Boys, the neo-fascist hate group that helped mount the January 6 insurrection.

This is in no way the party Phil Batt once built and led. That Batt stood for the opposite of what passes for conservatism today is just another reminder, a very sad reminder, of how the “establishment” leadership of the modern GOP first let this happen, and then after refusing to fight for the decency that a Phil Batt displayed finds itself bottom feeding in a party of sleaze, conspiracy, grievance and malice.

For sure celebrate the Batt Man. The little giant deserves it. Rejoice in his legacy. Mourn him but mourn also the utterly disgusting decline of a political party that has abandoned his kind and what he stood for.

 

It’s not often you see the ruling class of an entire political movement publicly recant a fundamental tenant of its faith.

Yet, that is precisely what happened in the middle of the recent State of Union speech when the president of the United States openly called out Republican members of Congress for their generation’s long obsession with rolling back (or eliminating) Social Security, a program established in 1935 during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and doing the same to Medicare, a critical part of the modern American social safety net established in 1965 during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

Joe Biden actually got House and Senate Republican to stand and applaud the idea that Social Security and Medicare are off the political chopping block, a reality that some members of the GOP have embraced as they plot to destroy the country’s credit rating by walking up to and perhaps beyond an extension of the debt ceiling.

It was a remarkable moment for Biden, but also for us old codgers who after a lifetime of contributions to both Social Security and Medicare are enjoying the benefits of both programs.

Of course, Republicans immediately howled about Biden’s “lies” about the desire of some Republicans to gut the programs. The resulting uproar was a feast day for the fact checkers. Turns out Biden was correct about Republican desires, as anyone who has paid attention to American politics for the last, oh, 60 years or so knows.

A couple of data points:

• On February 28, 1964, the old Spokane Chronicle newspaper carried a story with a Keene, New Hampshire dateline. Under the headline “Rockefeller attacks rival’s view” the Associated Press reported that Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, was criticizing Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s plan to make Social Security voluntary. The two men were Republican rivals for that year’s GOP presidential nomination. Such a plan, Rockefeller insisted, would bankrupt the program and threaten the economic security of millions of American seniors. Goldwater eventually won the nomination and spent much of his campaign trying to walk back his position on Social Security. Goldwater lost the presidential election in a landslide, in part because Lyndon Johnson ran a blistering TV spot that featured a pair of hands ripping up a Social Security card.

• After George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004 he went all in on privatizing Social Security. “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” Bush said as he began a campaign to “reform” the program. “As we fix Social Security,” Bush said, “we also have the responsibility to make the system a better deal for younger workers. And the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts.” The Bush push deflated like a Chinese spy balloon.

• It’s ancient history now, but you may remember one-time Texas governor Rick Perry, the guy who couldn’t recall the federal Cabinet-level agencies he wanted to eliminate as he ran for president in 2012. Perry, never the sharpest pencil in the box, labeled Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” during his campaign. After many Americans Googled “Ponzi scheme,” Perry started his own great walk back. He never recovered as a candidate.

The list of other Republican Social Security reformers is long, very long. Florida Senator Rick Scott currently has a plan, clearly part of what Biden was riffing off. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the would be next president, advocated privatizing Social Security and changing Medicare when he was in Congress. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan made “reform” of the fundamental American safety net the centerpiece of his entire approach to the federal budget.

Utah Senator Mike Lee got colorful with his aims regarding the programs when running in 2010. “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it out by the roots,” Lee said. That gardening work was his reason for running, Lee said, adding, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

Lee was captured on camera during the State of Union vigorously denying any concerted GOP plan to do just what he once advocated. He looked like a kid with a mouth full of chocolate denying to his mom that he had raided the chocolate stash. Mikey knew nothing, nothing.

Liberals have long been accused of being paranoid about conservative guns trained on the benefits Americans are entitled to collect, but the truth is you’re not paranoid when they really are out to get you.

Before we completely outlaw the teaching of actual American history, it’s worth remembering that Social Security was created during some of the worst days of the Great Depression precisely because older Americans were some of the hardest hit by the economic calamity that struck the country. The original Social Security law also established the broad outlines of the unemployment insurance program still in effect. Despite growls that the program was a stalking horse for rank socialism, the program passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. That hasn’t kept Republicans from trying to dismantle it ever since.

Of course, the programs need both vigorous defense and occasional amendment. The only responsible way to shore up both is to raise taxes, as has been done before. The last significant bipartisan effort occurred in 1983. The changes were supported by Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill.

It is possible to make the programs work better, but that won’t happen when significant numbers of one party always begin with speeches about reducing benefits, extending eligibility dates and fundamentally altering an enduring and extremely important program designed to provide a foundation of economic security for millions of people.

The real genius of Social Security, and later Medicare, was certainly in the economic and medical benefits the programs provide, but there is more to it. In a country as large, diverse and contentious as ours, a program with near universal participation and with benefits easily understood is a very good thing. We’re all in it together. We have a shared interest in making it work. We are better off as a country when our neighbors have a basic level of economic and health security in their later years.

Franklin Roosevelt knew what he was doing. When he signed the law on August 14, 1935, Roosevelt said: “We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.”

It still works, and Republicans are finding out once again that it’s dangerous to mess with success.

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Should you wonder what happens to a political movement that bases its entire existence on dissembling and disinformation you could consider the modern Republican Party.

The leader of the party is a serial liar, a pattern of behavior so well documented that to discount the reality is, for his followers at least, simply a lie they tell themselves.

The lies are ubiquitous, defined as “everywhere” and “all over.” One of the greatest and most persistent is that the party cares about fiscal responsibility. The nation’s troubling level of debt is primarily a function of three things: tax cuts advocated by Republican presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan, continuing with George W. Bush and climaxing with Donald Trump, unpaid for wars and a Pentagon budget that neither party is willing to even talk about scaling back to a level of sustainable reality.

Bush the Younger’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reportedly tried to warn then-Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004 that growing budget deficits posed a threat to the economy, and that Bush’s tax cuts wouldn’t pay for themselves. Cheney cut him off, saying, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

Yet, the GOP now, with the White House in Democratic hands, has – again – discovered that it must slash spending to control the deficit. They are threatening to allow the country to default on its debt – this is money that has already been approved by Congress to be spent – but cannot come up with a plan to do so. Congressional Republicans reportedly won’t touch the Pentagon budget, are afraid to rile up the country with cuts to Social Security and Medicare and they can’t possibly reverse course and tax the wealthiest Americans.

So, they are left with a lie – that they care about the deficit but have no realistic plan to deal with it.

Just one example of the lies and deflection that define the Grand Old Party comes from an Idaho Republican, Mike Simpson, a senior member of the House who has spent his career in Washington appropriating our tax money. On the one hand it’s entirely understandable that Simpson has been crowing about the millions he’s secured for projects in his eastern Idaho district – $5.8 million to widen a street in Ammon; $600,000 for a courthouse annex in Custer County; $5.7 million for an underpass in Pocatello; $2 million for a waste water project in Roberts; and $2.5 million for a water system upgrade in Grace.

The conservative congressman dribbled out the announcements of his fiscal largesse over several days thereby getting a maximum play for the millions that he assures us don’t contribute to the deficit. And a bridge is for sale in Brooklyn, I hear.

In announcing the water system upgrade, no doubt a needed project, Simpson performed some Dick Cheney worthy political jujitsu. “Congress undoubtedly has a spending problem,” Simpson said, “and as chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, I will continue to fight against excessive government spending.”

But look what I got for you!

Simpson goes on to explain that the money he secured is not really very much, and besides if he hadn’t secured the cash for his voters bad ol’ Joe Biden and DC bureaucrats would have spent it somewhere else. This is, of course, contrary to everything you should have learned in high school government class. Congress – Simpson’s branch – appropriates the money and decides how to spend it.

But here’s the very best part: Simpson voted against the legislation that contained all these worthy Idaho projects. Read that sentence again.

Just like all but nine of his Republican colleagues, Simpson voted NO and took the dough, preserving, at least in his own mind, the fiction that he really cares about runaway government spending. Next to hypocrisy in the dictionary you’ll find a photo of a House Republican.

Or you’ll find the photo of the acknowledged leader of the party, the same guy who invoked the Fifth Amendment 400 times during a deposition seeking information about his clearly fraudulent business dealings.

We’ll always have the lies, including the “Russia hoax,” the “lie,” counter to vast evidence and more all the time, that Russia used its influence over Donald Trump to help him reach the White House in 2016. The latest shoe to drop, the indictment in New York of FBI agent Charles McGonigal, “the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation.”

The indicted agent has been charged with money laundering and violating the sanctions imposed on Russia, as well as other allegations involving the Russian oligarch. This same Russian also employed Paul Manafort, the guy who once managed Trump’s campaign, shared sensitive campaign intelligence with Russian agents and was pardoned for his crimes.

As the historian Timothy Snyder, an expert in Putin style disinformation and control, put it recently, “Russian soft control of Trump did not require endless personal meetings between the two principals. It just required mutual understanding, which was abundantly on display during the Trump presidency: think of the meeting between Putin and Trump in Helsinki in 2018, when the American president said that he trusted the Russian one and the Russian president said that he had supported the American one as a candidate. The acknowledgement of mutual debts was obvious already in 2016: Russian media talked up Trump, and Trump talked up Putin.”

Snyder calls the indictment of the FBI’s New York counter terrorism head, a “spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.”

If you believe the entire Trump-Russia matter is a hoax it’s because Republicans have lied to you – think former attorney general William Barr – about what happened and why it is so troubling.

We’ll always have the lies – about stolen elections, a phony border wall, a congressman’s made up life, lies about teaching history, that vaccines are bad.

Lies about Trump’s role on January 6 and lies that the attack on the Capitol was a false flag operation. The lies are so blatant, the dishonesty so deep that the lying continues even as a federal judge this week sentenced 51-year old Daniel Caldwell to 68 months in prison for spraying a chemical irritant on 15 police officers during that horrible day. The sentencing judge stated simply: “You were an insurrectionist.”

So many lies repeated so often that lying has become the party’s brand.

The party’s rehabilitation can begin – and lord knows we need an honest conservative party – with the words Barry Goldwater uttered at the end of the lie fest that was Watergate more than 50 years ago. “He’s has lied to me for the last time,” Goldwater said of Richard Nixon, another serial Republican prevaricator, just as Nixon’s own party ushered him out of American politics.

Unfortunately, this Republican Party is different. The party’s leaders have been lying to their followers so often and for so long that the truth can’t suddenly or easily become a cleansing revelation. Honesty now amounts to an existential threat to the GOP, and democracy is the collateral damage.

 

The distinguished Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan – she’s most famous for a marvelous book Paris 1919 that deals with the aftermath of World War I – has written that “history is something we all do … we want to make sense of our own lives … so we tell ourselves stories, not always true ones, and we ask questions about ourselves.”

MacMillan wrote that in 2007 in a smart little book entitled Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History.”It might as well be the handbook for our times.

Many Americans, including many on the far right of American conservatism are embracing something like “the end of history.” The very teaching of history with all its manifest contradictions and confusion is under a broad and sustained assault from the far right, which, in some cases seeks to eliminate rather than elevate historical understanding. The evidence is plain and troubling: a systematic deemphasis of teaching history at every level, blatant misrepresentations of historical events and a willful embrace of historically fraudulent characters in our national life (read George Santos).

One of the most Orwellian examples, not surprisingly, involves the crackpots now running the U.S. House of Representatives. As Kevin McCarthy sacrificed what little was left of his soul in order to become speaker of the House earlier this month he made a historically bad deal with many of the same people who helped create the narrative of a stolen election and empower the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capital. Among his many bad bargains, McCarthy agreeing to create a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The radicals immediately christened this partisan witch hunt a “new Church Committee.”

What unmitigated rubbish.

The original Church Committee, chaired by Idaho senator Frank Church, a profoundly decent, honorable and intelligent public servant, conducted one of the most important and remarkable investigations in congressional history, uncovering and documenting various abuses by the country’s intelligence agencies. The probe began after the investigative reporting of a New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, who revealed a CIA domestic spying program, a clear violations of the agency’s charter.

The Church investigation resulted in serious legislation and a permanent commitment to congressional oversight of the CIA. We wouldn’t know a tenth of what we know today about what the intelligence community does in our name had not Church been serious, meticulous and committed to democracy.

That’s the history, that’s the fair and balanced interpretation of what Church’s committee did. To warp that history by equating the seditious Jim Jordan, the hyper partisan, Trump protecting show pony congressman from Ohio, with Frank Church is analogous to comparing a four year old’s finger painting to a Monet masterpiece, with apologies to four year old’s everywhere. Or as Loch Johnson, who worked for Church on that investigation in the late 1970s told the Washington Post, comparing Jordan’s partisan act of performance with one of the most significant congressional investigations in history “is really an absurd comparison.”

Jordan’s real aim, aided and abetted by McCarthy, is to, as Greg Sargent wrote, “harass and undermine criminal investigations of Trump and even prosecutions of rioters” who attacked the Capitol looking to harm Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.

Where this “new Church Committee” application of historical analogy really goes off the rails is to remember that for years conservatives smeared Church and his investigation for allegedly doing vast damage to the CIA. But the true damage done was to the country and its ideals when administrations of both parties tolerated or encouraged assassination plots against foreign leaders, domestic surveillance of political activists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and even opening the mail of Church and fellow committee member Howard Baker, the Republican senator from Tennessee who served on Church’s committee.

The Idaho senator, in other words, was a conservative pariah before he became a role model, historically appropriated by a collection of clowns and fakers whose intent is not to legislate, but to lacerate political opponents.

The radical right’s efforts to downplay the Capitol insurrection by discrediting the history of that awful, unprecedented day is, of course, about protecting Trump and people like Jordan, but it’s also propaganda and about power. They want you to forget or at least be confused about what happened. I mean, who you gonna believe, Jim Jordan or you’re lyin’ eyes?

The radical right’s mindless fixation on “woke” history, Critical Race Theory and books that “offend” delicate snowflakes is also part of the “end of history.” As anti-Semitism spikes they resist education about the Holocaust. As conservative voter suppression efforts in places like Milwaukee, a city with a large Black population, drive down minority participation in elections they demand an end to history that informs about the country’s original sin of slavery, the bitter historical legacy of America that haunts our country.

History, as one scholar put it, “is not facts, but interpretation of the record of the past,” and the interpretation must be honest. It must be fair. And it must not be abused.

Do yourself a favor. Read some good history by Margaret MacMillan, by World War II historians Max Hastings or Richard Evans or Rick Atkinson. Read political biographies of the Roosevelts, Churchill, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman and Reagan. Read about the Great Depression. Read about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Subscribe to the widely available work of scrupulous historians like Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College scholar whose voluminous daily output puts people like Jordan and Trump in context.

Be skeptical. Consider the sources. Read separate accounts of the same events and weigh the evidence. But don’t, for goodness sakes, act like none of it matters unless it confirms comfortably with your own bias.

Historian MacMillan quotes the journalist and historian David Halberstam from the last piece he wrote before his untimely death. “It is a story from the past that we must read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in history when things are going unusually well, because it’s leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude.”

“The past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present,” MacMillan has written, but that isn’t history. It’s propaganda meant to control and conform.

A great commentator on the present state of America, Jon Stewart, said it well. “We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things.”

Now, that is a lesson from history.

For two generations the unshakable base of the Republican Party has been white voters without a college degree.

In 2019, the Gallup Poll found that “54% of whites without college degrees identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents, compared with 34% who were Democrats or Democratic leaners.”

Turns out that Donald Trump and those politicians who follow him didn’t need to attract these voters as much as mobilize them. Little wonder Trump actually said in 2016 that he “loved the poorly educated,” who he called smart and loyal.

A recent Brookings analysis of the 2022 midterm election noted that “In addition to the outsized Democratic support among young people, white women with a college degree increased their Democratic support in 2022 compared to the 2020 presidential election. At the same time, white men without college degrees showed increased Republican support, even more so than in the 2020 election.” This block of GOP voters, Brookings says, “anchored Republican support in several Senate and gubernatorial elections.”

For a long time, I wondered why a political party would base a great deal of strategy on an appeal to people who either hadn’t been interested or able to access more education. Was the approach crassly cynical, strategically calculating or just stupid, or some combination of all three?

Then I remember the rule of no coincidence.

If you observe politics closely for long enough you realize there really are no coincidences. This old rule explains much of why Republicans from Ron DeSantis in Florida to the Kootenai County central committee in northern Idaho are engaged in a war on education. Republicans, at least many of them, are feeding the rightwing base. It’s a cynical, calculating and one hopes ultimately stupid strategy, but in many places attacking teachers, undermining schools and diminishing education in a variety of ways is a core belief system of the GOP.

Public school advocates in Idaho are bracing for another huge legislative assault on public education. A very conservative legislature seems sure during the coming legislative session to try and take money from already underfunded public schools and re-direct those resources to private and religious schools. Their talking point is that stripping resources from your neighborhood school improves student performance. It doesn’t.

There is vast evidence from many states, including Wisconsin, Indiana and Louisiana who have headed down this “school choice” path that student outcomes not only don’t improve when vouchers and similar schemes are introduced, but actually decline.

The school wars involve nonsense about how American history is taught and which books ought to be allowed in school libraries. The battlefield commanders in these wars decry student “indoctrination,” but welcome using public money to allow a religiously affiliated school to practice the very “indoctrination” they say they oppose.

The right’s unrelenting assault on education also targets the teaching profession. Poor pay for teachers and crushing workloads resulting from a widespread teacher shortages are driving educators from the classroom even as conservative politicians bemoan poor student outcomes.

A concerted national strategy to ideologically transform local school boards is moving ahead full steam, and is nowhere better illustrated than in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where a radical right majority on the local community college board, with the support of radical local party leaders, have brought the school to the brink of losing its accreditation.

For decades North Idaho College was considered an educational gem in a community that lived for every positive development as their local community college grew and prospered. Republican and Democratic legislators from northern Idaho jockeyed to see who could do the most for NIC and its now 6,500 students. Local property taxpayers have long supported the school, displaying both community pride in the college and its obvious importance to the local economy. A 2020 analysis by the University of Idaho, to cite just one data point, calculated a $4.5 billion annual economic impact from higher education in Idaho and support for nearly 75,000 jobs.

A school like North Idaho College is simply the goose that keeps laying golden eggs, yet the radicals now running the school have suspended the well-regarded president who is suing in response. The board engaged in widespread violations of public meeting law and hired an unqualified right wing real estate lawyer and failed attorney general candidate as the board legal counsel (the prior counsel resigned amid the chaos after 23 years on the job). The radicals have meddled profusely in academic affairs, engendered a no confidence vote from the faculty and students and the board now faces a potentially extreme sanction from the regional higher education accreditation body. All this has happened since the radicals fired the previous president who left with a $250,000 settlement.

If the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities now yanks the school’s accreditation the fallout will be stunning – student credits won’t count, transfers will be impossible, the economic fallout will be massive, including private contributions disappearing. The school’s former legal counsel warns of “cataclysmic damage to the institution.”

You have to wonder: what’s the end game for these anti-education radicals? Do they hope to create such chaos that they can force privatization of the public college? Is the aim to stock the faculty and administration with fellow right wing zealots? Or is chaos empowered by incompetence the only real goal?

Here’s a possible clue. The local Republican establishment, arguably as extreme a local party as you’ll find anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, is noticeably mum, evidencing no interest in redirecting this runaway train of cataclysmic damage. Republican governor Brad Little has called the situation “unfortunate,” but he’s busying himself with the coming legislative session, undoubtedly plotting a way to not get splattered by the crap that will hit the political fan when his party tries to defund public schools by instituting vouchers. Imagine being a student or the parent of a student in the middle of this senseless storm of right wing chaos.

If Governor Little were treating northern Idaho’s four alarm educational fire with seriousness, he’d be pushing his own state board of education to intervene. The board could invoke the state law that spells out its duties, which reads in part that the state board shall “have general supervision, through its executive departments and offices, of all entities of public education supported in whole or in part by state funds …”

They should declare an emergency, which this is and take over management of the college. Let the kooks sue, while sanity saves the college.

But real intervention to prevent a catastrophic of loss of certification would require genuine leadership. And since there is no such thing as a coincidence, that would require a very public commitment to public education, and that is not in keeping with the Republican appeal to the poorly educated.

Standing by while chaos occurs is the most unconservative thing imaginable.

Six weeks ago, Jim Risch, Idaho’s longest-lived political survivor was going back to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The state’s other senator, Mike Crapo, one of the most senior members of the Senate whose lifetime in political office is entirely defined by his devotion to massive tax cuts that benefit his donors in the insurance and financial services industries, was a lead pipe cinch to become chairman of the Finance Committee. From that august perch Crapo could fulfill his re-election pledge to bash the IRS, which, of course, is coming for his constituent’s guns, er, tax returns.

Six weeks ago, Washington senator Patty Murray was headed for retirement, ushered out of office atop a “red tsunami” that would also swamp Democrats in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Hampshire and Georgia.

No less a beltway gasbag than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on November 4 that Republicans would pick up at least three and likely five Senate seats, that Murray’s opponent was closing fast and could win, that the GOP candidate “will almost certainly carry New Hampshire” and football star Herschel Walker would win the Georgia Senate seat “without a runoff.”

Gingrich, whose opinion you might want to avoid the next time you head to the parimutuel window, told Hannity that polls were undercounting Republican voters heading into the midterm election. Newt said the GOP could easily pick up 50 House seats, but Gingrich, the man who contributed as much as any living pol to the toxicity of our politics, said he was more certain of a pick-up of precisely 44 seats.

Turns out Gingrich is as good at predicting election outcomes as he is at dumping ex-wives, once talking over divorce while one spouse was hospitalized with cancer. But that is a digression, because this column is about the GOP clown factor. And Gingrich is no, well, wait.

But back to the “red tsunami.” It turned into a one seat pickup in the Senate for Democrats, and while Republicans narrowly reclaimed control of the House of Representatives the GOP majority is so tenuous and the party so fractured that would-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy should be employing a food taster.

Even if “my Kevin,” as the would-be Mar a Lago felon calls him, avoids the long knives his fellow Republicans have drawn for him and ends up with the gavel he will still wake every morning wondering which one of several nutjobs in his conference will trip him up before lunch.

Any way you slice it, Democrats defied nearly every prediction, including Newt’s, and now have an actual majority in the Senate and a ringside seat to cheer on the House Follies. House Democrats, with an attractive new leader and no responsibility, can hardly lose, while the nation focuses on the antics of the most radical group of House Republicans since, well maybe ever.

Even Gingrich back in 1994 had a plan to try and govern. And by contrast, when Republicans won the House in 1946, ending 14 years of Democratic rule, they actually had a legislative agenda, including a Constitutional amendment to limit any future president to two terms and limitations on the power of trade unions. Those Republicans also approved of the Marshall Plan and reorganized the US military, all stuff that clearly pales in comparison to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

By all rights, Republicans should have owned the Congress after the November election. That they didn’t isn’t really a complex story as the Georgia Senate race illustrates as well as any recent contest.

The Georgia election, decided earlier this week in favor of an eloquent Baptist preacher, Raphael Warnock, who immediately became a national figure by preaching bipartisanship, strangely combined poisonous partisanship, the violence of NFL football and the malicious influence of vast money in our politics. Think of that, if you can, as American exceptionalism.

Who in their right mind could think that Hershel Walker was in anyway qualified, let alone competent to represent Georgia in the United State Senate? Anyone with the experience of a 7th grade student council election would have said Walker was barely qualified to participate in a Capitol tour let alone sit in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Walker was, after all, credibly charged with sexual abuse, threatening women with firearms or knives, abandoning his children, at least those he knew about, and fabulizing much of his background. Walker’s closing argument to Georgia voters involved a crazy story about werewolves defeating zombies. Look it up.

As David Von Drehle put it in the Washington Post: “It’s one thing for a deeply flawed person to accept admiration for his former athletic magnificence, but it’s quite another for him to seek a role in leading the country. The dirty laundry that Walker kept stuffed into the vault behind his trophy case was hauled into the glare of television lights and packaged into millions of dollars of negative advertising. One of Walker’s sons summed up his famous father this way: He ‘left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months’ to escape the mayhem of his own making.”

Doesn’t that sound like Robert Taft or Howard Baker?

Walker, with all his athletic talent, didn’t graduate from college, then denied that he had repeatedly said he had, even while having claimed he graduated in the top one percent of his class. He was a modestly successful professional player and seems a case study for why the NFL concussion scandal remains a scandal.

That the Republican Party, an unserious collection of loons, conspiracy theorists, shameless opportunists and personality cultists (but I repeat myself) would advance this deeply troubled man as a serious political candidate – not to mention similar cranks in several other states – says pretty much all you need to know about the party that once celebrated Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower.

And consider the money. One Atlanta TV station, WBS, pulled in at least $86 million from political ads during 2022. Republicans poured millions upon millions into Georgia to prop up a guy who campaigned on a werewolf versus vampire platform, and it damn near worked. Still, it turns out that all the money in the world can’t overcome too many football hits to the noggin.

Donald Trump promoted Walker, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham debased themselves acting like Herschel was a serious person, Republicans counted on him to secure a chairmanship for Jim Risch and Mike Crapo and send Patty Murray to oblivion, or in their better world back home. In January, by the way, Murray will chair the Appropriations Committee and become Senate president pro tem, third in line to the presidency.

The Gingrich prophesy flopped for one big reason: maybe, just maybe nutjobbery as a political approach has reached its expiry date.

Walker did get one thing right: Werewolves do defeat vampires — see “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” At the closing of that 1948 film “classic,” the wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.) spares Bud Abbott and Lou Costello from the clutches of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi).

When you think about it, you wonder how we kept such intellectual heft out of the U.S. Senate.

 

When celebrated Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck made his 1947 Academy Award winning film Gentleman’s Agreement, the United States – and the world – was only beginning to reckon with the horror of the Holocaust.

Zanuck, a Nebraska boy who served in France during World War I before becoming a movie industry powerhouse, may have been the only Tinseltown big wheel who could have made a feature film about American anti-Semitism. Zanuck wasn’t Jewish.

Anti-Semitism was a potentially explosive issue, even given all that had become known about systematic genocide against European Jews during a horrible war that had ended just two years before the film premiered. With the exception of Zanuck, all the big studios – Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, for example – were headed by Jewish movie bosses, the same people who had been attacked prior to US entry into World War II for disseminating anti-Nazi, pro-British propaganda.

Nazi Germany had been defeated on the battlefield and the Aryan nationalism – and anti-Semitism – at the core of Nazi ideology seemed to have been forcefully and finally repudiated. But Zanuck knew better. The particularly virulent strain of American anti-Semitism had not been repudiated. It wasn’t even underground, but existing in plain sight, tolerated and perpetuated by “good Americans” who couldn’t conceive that “those people” were really the subjects of widespread discrimination, or worse.

In many places American Jews couldn’t be a member of a country club, attend some colleges or own a home in certain neighborhoods. The US State Department, a Waspish collection of mostly-Ivy League Gentiles, was notoriously anti-Semitic. The radical right in the America of the 1930s and 40s trafficked the fiction that Franklin Roosevelt – a lifelong Episcopalian – was really a secret Jew, the mastermind not of the New Deal, but the Jew Deal.

Deeply embedded in the American DNA is the old trope that Jews control the media, entertainment and high finance and are foisting a “globalist” agenda on us. The old slurs and hatreds are back with a vengeance, often accompanied by violence. As journalist Alexander Nazaryan noted recently, “Jews are targets of about 60 % of all religious-driven hate crimes across the United States, a fact that is especially surprising since Jews make up only 2.4% of the American population.”

In Gentleman’s Agreement the supremely talented Gregory Peck plays a hot-shot magazine writer, Phil Green, who is commissioned by a big national publication to write a piece on anti-Semitism. Peck’s character, a widower with a young son, struggles to develop an angle for his story. He could cite numbers and official reports, but such an approach would hardly be compelling. Finally, he settles on an approach – he will pretend to all but his immediate family to be Jewish in order to investigate the slurs, discrimination and hatred firsthand.

Predictably reporter Green begins immediately experiencing the sting of discrimination. His son is taunted as a “dirty kike.” His fiancé is one of the “good people” who abhors anti-Semitism, but nevertheless refuses to do much of anything about it. Green’s pal, an Army veteran and a Jew, is assaulted in a bar and struggles to find a home for his family. The hotel where the journalist and his wife plan to honeymoon is “restricted,” no Jews allowed due to an unspoken “gentlemen’s agreement.”

There is much to ponder in this old and important film and much that sadly remains all too relevant, particularly as a once and potentially future American president welcomes to his dinner table the pathetic rapper Kanye West and one Nick Fuentes, perhaps the most loathsome anti-Semitic white supremacist (which is saying something) in today’s radical right.

There is no real point, given all he has done, to further condemn Donald Trump for enabling and encouraging the racist, anti-Semitic right. Trump is what he is. Always has been.

Rather, this moment of anti-Semitic reckoning is about the “good people” who are smart enough to see this hate in technicolor, but still flinch from action, rather like the actress Dorothy McGuire in Zanuck’s film. In her heart McGuire’s character condemns discrimination, but by her inaction she acquiesces to evil.

This old movie story is little different than a host of Republican officeholders who have either remained silent – again – or condemned discrimination without denouncing the perpetrators of such hatred.

An exception is the most prominent Mormon in Congress, Utah Senator Mitt Romney.

“There is no bottom to the degree to which he’s willing to degrade himself, and the country for that matter. Having dinner with those people was disgusting,” Romney said of Trump’s dining companions. “Anybody else” would be a better party leader, Romney said.

“I don’t think he should be president of the United States. I don’t think he should be the nominee of our party in 2024,” he said. “And I certainly don’t want him hanging over our party like a gargoyle.”

But hang he does. In the same way that hate hovers over the radical right stretching from Idaho’s lieutenant governor who appeared at a Fuentes sponsored event earlier this year to Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green who appeared at the same forum. Both used Trump’s lie – I don’t know this person – to excuse associating with Fuentes.

For the record, Fuentes, a big presence on social media, has called for a dictatorship in America with Trump president for life. He wants to prohibit women from voting, and even end elections. He’s the worst of the worst of the racist core of the radical right. Fuentes, says the Anti-Defamation League, “seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP.”

How difficult is that to condemn? How hard is that to ignore? Ask your Republican congressman or your conservative state legislator, your governor. Good luck getting them to respond.

A remarkable feature of Darryl Zanuck’s 1947 film about anti-Semitism was the ease with which the script called out well-known racists of that time. Zanuck sought legal advice as to whether he risked libel by condemning by name notorious Mississippi racists Theodore Bilbo and John Rankin, as well as Gerald L.K. Smith, a white nationalist media star of his day not unlike Fuentes today. In the end Zanuck said, to hell with it.

“Let them sue us,” Zanuck said. “They won’t dare, and if they do, nothing would make me more happy than to appear personally as a witness or defendant at the trial.”

Smith did sue over the film – and lost, a fitting reminder that bigots confronted can be bigots defeated.

For far too long from Georgia to Idaho, from Arizona to Iowa those who make nice with the racist, radical right have gotten a nearly unlimited free pass from “good people” who know better. Their compliancy only begets more hate.

As one reviewer has noted, “Gentleman’s Agreement reaped high rewards for its bravery, intelligence, and entertainment value” and carried away awards for its director, Elia Kazan. Would it be that a bit more bravery and intelligence presented itself now when hatred once again so desperately needs unequivocal condemnation from conservatives.

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