Tag: Republicans

Reflections on Democracy: Lessons from the White House, 1964 and 2025

I had decided to let this thing go, this WordPress subscription. I stopped it but I was informed by the WordPress powers (that’s their spelling with the capital P in the miDDle) that I had recently paid for a year and I could post until my renewal date but no longer if I didn’t renew. So I left it to fallow and let the old posts rot in the field thinking that I would never post again.

I’m not sure what pushed me over the edge and led me to reach out again last night but maybe it was the criminal destruction of the East Wing of the White House. I have always felt myself to be a part owner of the White House with a bit of personal interest in its preservation as a public historical asset.

I went there once in 1964 as a college student invited by President Lyndon Johnson who, working from a mailing list, asked Dr. Phillip Hoffman of the University of Houston to identify and sponsor a student leader to come to a special White House student leaders meeting.

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Good Morning from Hell

Hell?

This doesn’t seem like Hell. There’s this long and beautiful marriage, two wonderful children and five grandchildren — all of them perfect. A church and a center for arts and sciences with friendships of many years. The pantry is full. The AC keeps me comfortable day and night. I have more doctors than I once had school teachers in high school. My church is involved in mission projects, a food pantry, assisting in a local elementary school, and help for people in need of financial assistance. And if I need, more likely just want, a new electronic toy, Amazon can have it on my doorstep tomorrow. Some of us are getting along quite well.

But something is amiss in our politics.

The president’s authoritarian character is not news anymore. I refer you to well documented reporting in established national media. The president, of course, denies anything that doesn’t glorify him and he decries “mainstream journalism” as creators and bearers of “fake news.”

But that’s just another tool in the authoritarian’s toolkit. 

I will also spare you the well-worn comparisons with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Those can be found anywhere except maybe in Fox media, controlled by the Rupert Murdock family, or the many informational hellholes you can read into on social media. 

However, if you discard these comparisons as illogical name-calling, I refer you to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a report on events in Germany in the 1930s by a CBS and UPI reporter, William L. Shirer. Adolph Hitler was Shirer’s subject with a tip of the journalist’s hat to Benito Mussolini and our ally in the European war against fascism, Joseph Stalin.

But I suspect Hitler did not consider either CBS or UPI to be a credible news source. 

Shirer’s book is one of those thick ones. You may not choose it for bedtime reading.  But if you do, follow it up with On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snider. That’s a short one and easy to read. Invest a few dollars and put it down beside your evening devotional guide. Read a chapter every night before you say your prayers. You will pray more fervently.

So forget about Trump for awhile if you can. Forget all about what many see as readily apparent indicators of an authoritarian future for the United States of America. Think, instead, about where we live now and where we have lived throughout the lives of most of us — Hell.

Really? How could one possibly call this Hell?

More tomorrow about the hell we live in and how it looks from the south of town.

Ugly Doubles Down – How Ugly Will It Get?

I never thought there was much point in attempting to advise my Republican friends on political matters. But now I think they may be in more of a mood to listen than is usually the case.

In my lifetime, our politics has never been darker and uglier than it is today. Look no further than the presidency.

To begin to understand the ugliness, we have to appreciate the president’s situation. His once-upon-a-time personal attorney is in a federal prison for tax evasion, financial fraud and campaign finance violations. In his indictment, an “Individual One” was described as participating in and benefitting from those crimes but was not indicted because that individual is the president of the United States and Department of Justice policy does not allow indictment of a serving president. Rather, it directs complaints of high crimes and misdemeanors to Congress and the impeachment process. Continue reading “Ugly Doubles Down – How Ugly Will It Get?”