The Republican Bonfire

Before there were the Russians and the fundamentalists, there was the Mob, the connections that enabled Trump to achieve what he did as a businessman, the basis for the assessment by his supporters that he's a success, that he knows how to do deals.  Undoubtedly some talent for deal-making there must be to work with organized crime while keeping up appearances; that's not a deal-making talent I'm interested in seeing in leadership, but it is a talent, and I can sort of understand why the people who like and support Trump see it as such. Trump's deep Mob ties have been documented in many places, notably for my own reading pleasure in The Making of Donald Trump  by David Cay Johnston and Mafia Don: Donald Trump's 40 years of Mob ties by H.S. Glushakow.  On the one hand, his facility in dealing with the Mafia in the course of doing his business (big buildings, casinos, wrestling and reality television) acts for his supporters as the symbolic shadow of his repeated st...

"Fundamentalist" is shorthand for my ignorance, of course, as is "evangelical."  Not that I have a desire to know firsthand what it's like to attend a small enveloping community dominated by a cult leader with enough money to rent a space, which is how I think of the galaxy of Southern churches out of which the support for Trump and Moore emerges naturally.  It's a little ridiculous for those of us without any inclination to Christianity to go after the lax moral framework of such folk (though much less ridiculous for those who still practice mainstream forms of Christianity or other God-fearing faiths), in my opinion, because so much of their practice and preaching has to do with the salvation of undeserving sinners, and so little of it with the responsibilities of probity, let alone charity.  And that offered salvation might be what draws the angry, the despairing and the depressed to those who will accept them as they are, so we, who fear not the Lord and...

By that subject heading, I really mean to posit the question: what would it mean for our evaluation of the current political inferno if it were  really about the Russians?  I am supposing first of all that the involvement and attempts to interfere of the Russian government in the American presidential election of 2016 was real; moreover, I believe the Trump administration, including Donald J. Trump himself, colluded knowingly with the Russians. But even taking all that as given, and taking as given that it's a good thing for the legal process to be set loose on these events because they may provide the most straightforward path to the impeachment of Trump, the question remains: is it really about the Russians?  Assuming full culpability of both the Russians and the Trump campaign, it would still remain the case that the interference and collusion consisted in obtaining and promulgating garbage about Hillary Clinton, and messing with people's heads on social media. ...

I was looking for another name for this blog; pretty amazing the variety of specific, seemingly idiosyncratic phrases that have already been taken by somebody starting up a blog on blogger.com.  Took me an hour to get to this option, which doesn't cover everything I had intended, but does at least convey the possibility that my intentions include  attacking the criminal configuration of the current Republican party from the perspective of one who has, on several occasions over three decades, chosen "Republican" when registering to vote.  I don't know that that choice made me a member of the Republican party, exactly -- after all, no one in that organization ever had a chance to say yea or no to my choice -- but it was my own declaration of affinity.  Hence "The Republican Bonfire" points to my sense of the catastrophic decline of the party from what many readers will consider a not particularly elevated level previous to Trump, and lays claim to my desire to...