"Watergate at 50": How Nixon Started the Destruction of U.S. Democracy and Trump Will Finish It

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched the CBS-TV news special on the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in – these shows have been something of a tradition ever since they did the 20th anniversary one in 1992, from which this show took a lot of film clips to represent people who are no longer alive, including former U.S. Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and former Nixon staffer Chuck Colson. “Watergate” became a catch-all term for a series of crimes and “dirty tricks” in which the Nixon campaign indulged to ensure not only that he would win re-election in 1972 but he would win by such an overwhelming and convincing margin there would be no more lingering doubts about his legitimacy. Nixon was well aware that he had won in the first place in 1968 by a narrow margini (similar to that with which he had lost in 1960), and he was obsessed first with establishing Republican control of the United States Senate in 1970 and then, when that didn’t happen, ensuring that he would so totally destroy the reputation of the Democrats who had led the campaign against him in 1970 – particularly U.S. Senator Ed Muskie (D-Maine), who had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and whose pivotal role in the 1970 Senate campaign had made him the Democratic front-runner in 1972.

Nixon was particularly afraid of Muskie for the same reasons Donald Trump was afraid of Joe Biden, to the point where he sought out the aid of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to get (or manufacture) “dirt” on Biden and his scapegrace son Hunter: he thought Muskie was a nonthreatening centrist and the most likely candidate to beat him in 1972. So the infamous Donald Segretti not only forged the infamous “Canuck letter” that led to Muskie publicly crying over its insult to his wife (which destroyed Muskie’s political career virtually overnight), he also stole official Muskie campaign stationery and used it to forge official-looking press releases attacking other Democratic candidates, including Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington). The objective was to sow so much mistrust among all the Democratic candidates for President that whoever got the nomination against Nixon would be unable to hold the party together. One key to the strategy was to ensure that the Democrats would nominate Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota – and it’s an indication of how far our politics have shifted Rightward since 1972 that today it’s inconceivable that South Dakota would ever elect a Democrat to the Senate), the farthest Left of the major Democratic Presidential candidates and for that reason the easiest for Nixon to beat. (As an 18-year-old newly eligible to vote for the first time, I was a McGovern diehard and was too politically naïve to realize that by pushing McGovern we were basically handing Nixon the overwhelming win he wanted and ultimately got.)

During the middle of a campaign that looked like an unstoppable Nixon juggernaut came the weird piece of news that five people had been arrested for attempting to break in to the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 17, 1972. I remember when I first heard the news: I overheard it on a radio as I was making my way home from a free concert by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in San Francisco’s Stern Grove, and as I was waiting on the streetcorner for the bus to take me home to Marin County I heard a broadcast with the news and thought, “I wonder if the Republicans had anything to do with this.” It turned out the Republicans had a great deal to do with it, and that this wasn’t even the first attempt to break into the DNC offices and plant listening devices on the DNC chair’s and treasurer’s phones. The first had taken place three weeks previously, and the bing on the DNC chair’s phone had malfunctioned while the one on the treasurer’s phone had worked but mostly recorded him calling various potential girlfriends for dates. So on the morning if June 17 James McCord, security director for Nixon’s official campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (which as the scandal broke almost inevitably got nicknamed CREEP), and four Cuban exiles who had participated in the CIA’s unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba in 1961 broke into the Watergate again – and were caught by an unusually alert African-American security guard, Frank Wills, who noticed the tape they had put across the office door so it wouldn’t close behind them and lock them in. Nixon and his top aides – including chief of staff H. Robert Haldeman, domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, former Attorney General who had quit that post to run CREEP – instituted a cover-up.

They had a lot more to worry about than just Watergate, including a whole elaborate plan by former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to sabotage the Democratic convention and hire prostitutes to lure promiennt Democrats into compromising positions so they could be photographed and blackmailed, as well as slipping LSD into the water brought by protesters and kidnapping people and holding them on barges off the Florida coast during both the Republican and Democratic conventions. (One would-be protester asked John Mitchell during a break in the 1974 Watergate cover-up trial what would have happened to them on the barges if they had been kidnapped and taken there. “How should I know?” Mitchell testily responded. “It was Liddy’s plan, not mine.”) The Watergate cover-up probably began three days after the break-in and certainly had started six days later, when on June 23, 1972 Nixon had a meeting in the Oval Office with Bob Haldeman and others and Nixon said he was going to ask the CIA to ask the FBI to curtail their investigation into Watergate because they might uncover national security secrets, when Nixon and his men knew full well they wouldn’t. Alas, it would be over two years before the tape of this meeting surfaced and doomed Nixon’s Presidency.

In the meantime the nation lived through the constant drip-drip-drip of national scandal, including the unraveling of the first phase of the cover-up when John Sirica, the judge who drew the first assignment to try the Watergate burglars (the five who were actually arrested on site plus G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt) and became convinced there was more to the story than just what he was hearing in court; the dogged work of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and Lesley Stahl of CBS – all of whom are still alive and were interviewed for this show – and ultimately the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as it was formally called even though it was known as the “Senate Watergate Committee.” One thing about this committee that seems inconceivable today is that, while its members included four Democrats and three Republicans, only one of the Republicans – Edward Gurney of Florida – aggressively took up the cudgels of defending Nixon. Howard Baker of Tennessee, the committee’s ranking Republican member and vice-chair, asked his famous question, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Though a number of Left-wing commentators said Baker had cunningly phrased his question to let the White House off the hook – it’s like asking a bank robber, “What did the head of your gang know, and when did he know it?” And Lowell Weickier of Connecticut was so strong an anti-Nixon voice and so much a member of the now-extinct breed of “liberal Republicans” that in 1988 he lost the Republican primary for re-election to the Senate, though he ultimately ran for and won the governorship of Connecticut as a non-partisan candidate in 1990. (Ironically, the unusually liberal Republican Weicker was defeated in his Senate bid and the seat ultimately went to Joe Lieberman, an unusually Right-wing Democrat.)

The CBS-TV special followed the historical trajectory of Watergate familiar to those of us who were alive and politically aware during the period – though the ins and outs might be confusing to people who just know this as history. Nixon was able to ride the scandal long enough to win the landslide re-election he craved, but then the drip-drip-drip of the scandal emerged and ultimately the Senate Watergate committee’s hearings became must-see TV for millions of Americans (up to 80 million people watched the hearing where former White House counsel John Dean laid out the case against Nixon, compared to just 20 million who watched the recent first hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot). The CBS special showcased Dean’s testimony and also the revelation from Alexander P. Butterfield that on Nixon’s orders he had installed a tape recording system in the White House so that every conversation that took place in the Oval Office or the President’s office in the Executive Office Building was automatically recorded. The idea that there might be recordings that would either confirm or deny John Dean’s explosive revelations about the cover-up and Nixon’s direct role in it. One of ther people interviewed for the show was former assistant special prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, whose memoir Stonewall (written with another former Watergate deputy special prosecutor, George Frampton) is probably the best book ever written about prosecuting Watergate.

In his book Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled the thrill that went through the office when, after a legal battle during which the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had been fired by Nixon and his two top officials at the Justice Department, Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, both resigned rather than carry out the order, the special prosecutor’s office finally received the tapes and they heard the crucial March 21, 1973 meeting in which Dean had told Nixon Watergate was “a cancer on the Presidency.” Listening to it in light of the statement Nixon had just made publicly in which he had famously declared, “I am not a crook,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled thinking that “he was a crook, and we had the evidence to prove it.” The so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Nixon had to work his way down the hierarchy of the Justice Department to find the third in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, willing to fire Cox, led to the start of an official impeachment inquiry, the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee that in those pre-C-SPAN days were the first glimpses most Americans had had about how Congressional committees actually function. Meanwhile,replacement special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Cox’s old team continued their battle to get their hands on the White House tapes.

Nixon famously released his own selective and heavily edited transcripts of some of the recordings, hoping this would put an end to the legal battle over the tapes. His gesture backfired big-time: not only did the special prosecutor’s office continue their battle for the actual tapes (at least in part under the so-called “best evidence” doctrine, in which in order to be admissible as evidence something has to be as close to the original as possible – so transcripts of tapes did not count as long as the tapes themselves still existed), which led to an 8-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision forcing him to release them, but the transcripts were so damning that a lot of Americans thought, “If this is the stuff Nixon thought it was O.K. to release, imagine what there is in the tapes that got left out of these transcripts.” The revelation of the tapes – particularly the three from June 23, 1972 that preserved Nixon’s voice in so many words ordering the CIA to join the cover-up by telling the FBI to back off their investigation – led to the evaporation of Nixon’s support in Congress.

When Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Senator Barry Goldwater went to meet Nixon, Nixon was convinced that he still had the support of 40 Republican Senators, enough to escape conviction and removal from office in an impeachment trial. Goldwater famously told him, “No, you don’t have 40. You have four, and you don’t have mine.” That was when Nixon got the message that he would have to resign the Presidency to avoid being thrown out of it in an impeachment trial, which he did on August 8, 1974. The last 20 minutes or so of the CBS-TV special went off the rails as far as I’m concerned – they tried to portray Nixon’s resignation as a tragedy and his bizarre farewell speech to the White House staff the morning of the day his resignation went into effect as a moment of self-revelation, especially when he said, “People will hate you, but it only hurts you of you hate them back.” This runs counter to a statement Nixon had made in one of his recorded conversations, in which he had sounded positively Trumpian when he said, “Remember, the press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”

The show also presented Nixonj’s successor Gerald Ford’s awful blanket pardon of Nixon for all crimes he may have committed during his Presidency as a noble gesture of national healing in which Ford sacrificed his own chances to win a Presidential election for the sake of binding the nation’s wounds. Bullshit: the pardon angers me now for the same reasons it did then – it established the tradition in the U.S. that former Presidents will not be held legally accountable for any crimes they commit in office, no matter how heinous or how destructive of the ideal of American self-governance. The show also touched on the similarities and the differences between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, including the one I’ve noted before that Nixon was essentially a Presidential version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Jekyll Nixon signed the major environmental bills into law – the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (all things Trump tried his damnedest to gut during his four years in office), opened the door to détente with the Soviet Union and America’s long-delayed recognition of the Communist regime in China, finally brought an end to the war in Viet Nam (albeit after ordering a last round of bombings of North Viet Nam for no apparent reason), and made serious proposals for universal national health care (a considerably more liberal plan than the one that eventually got passed under President Obama) and seriously supposed a guaranteed annual income (an idea both of America’s major parties consider politically radioactive today).

Meanwhile, the Hyde Nixon either ordered or condoned not only the Watergate break-in itself but a wide range of extra-legal activities to ensure his own re-election, including the burglary of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of getting damaging information and offering the directorship of the FBI to the judge in Ellsberg’s trial. Whereas Nixon was Jekyll and Hyde, Trump is just Hyde, a pure sociopath with no redeeming personal or political qualities, who clearly sought the Presidency (and is seeking to regain it, with a very good chance of succeeding) just to feed the two obsessions that rule his life, his ego and his bankroll. One of the most sensational revelations of the January 6 committee hearings is that Trump’s claim that “voter fraud” stole his re-election from him led him to release a series of fundraising e-mails to his supporters, sometimes as many as 25 ini a day, pleading for donations to something called the “Official Election Defense Fund” which turned out not to exist at all. Nonetheless, Trump raised $250 million – that’s a quarter of a billion dollars – including $100 million just in the first week, for this nonexistent “fund” – a pot of money with which Trump can do whatever he likes, including handing it off to his loyal supporters.

One article posted on the CBS Web site (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/watergate-at-50-the-political-scandal-that-changed-washington/), includes æn interview with Garrett Graff, who has just published a new history of Watergate and was asked the difference between then and now, between Nixon and Trump. "Two things: Fox News, and members of Congress who acted as Republicans first and members of Congress second. That's it," Graff replied. "I think if you had Fox News in the 1970’s, Richard Nixon would have stepped down from office in January 1977 totally unscathed." The transition Graff is allouding to was actually a gradual one initiated when President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undid the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which from 1949 to 1987 had decreed that broadcast stations that aired political coverage at all had to maintain a rough balance between various views. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the end of music on AM radio as music stations switched to the better-sounding FM band, AM radio essentially became a continuous transmission belt for Right-wing propaganda. The advent of Fox News in 1996 brought this sort of programming to TV, and the subsequent rise of the Internet and social media have made it possible for millions of Americans to live in communications bubbles, listening only to programming that already reflects their point of view and never hearing the thoughts or ideas of anyone else.

And contrary to the assertions on this program that Nixon’s actions in Watergate were a threat to the American republic on a scale not seen again until Trump, that’s simply not true. Under Reagan you had the Iran-contra scandal and a President so determined to put in place a policy Congress had specifically disapproved that Congress was treated as a minor inconvenience. Under George W. Bush, a compliant Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks passed the USA PATRIOT Act, another step forward in the American Right’s long-term goal to displace democracy and substitute an authoritarian government. Bush even said once, “I don’t see anything wrong with a dictatorship, as long as I’m the dictator,” and his principal aide, Karl Rove, said it was his goal to give the Republican Party “full-spectrum dominance” over American politics. At present, the Republicans are only two elections away from achieving just that. They are expected to win a landslide sweep of the 2022 midterms, as voters pissed off about inflation in general and high gas and grocery prices in particular get ready to punish the Democrats big-time even though there’s surprisingly little the President or Congress can do to stop inflation. This will move Republicans one step closer to total political dominance, and either the re-election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2024 or the election of a Trump acolyte like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott will complete the process and give the Republican Party, already armed with extensive tools of voter suppression and sabotage the U.S. Supreme Court gave them by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and the current nominal Democratic majority in the Senate refused to reverse, complete, total and likely permanent control of American politics.

Uvalde, Buffalo and the Republican Death Cult

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“America cares more about its guns than it does about its children.”
Michael Moore on All in with Chris Hayes, May 24, 2022 –

“The lesson for today is how to die.” –
– Bob Geldof, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” 1979 –
(Written after a 1979 school shooting in San Diego by an 18-year-old, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08-Ukv_0Sbo, when school shootings by students were still relatively rare and shocking.) –

I could have lived a long and relatively happy life without ever hearing of Uvalde, Texas, just as I could have lived my life without ever hearing of Littleton or Aurora, Colorado; Parkland, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; or any of the other localities in the U.S. that have been infamous as the sites of mass shootings. And while I certainly would have heard of El Paso, Texas; Orlando, Florida; or Buffalo, New York even if they hadn’t been the sites of mass shootings, those communities, and all too many others like them, are forever tainted by the actions of crazed gunmen who took advantage of the United States’s insanely lax laws about who can and who can’t have a gun to murder their fellow Americans. –

I’ve spent the last few days, ever since the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde (and the mass shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo less than two weeks before), doing a lot of yelling at my television as I watched the news. Much of my anger has been fueled by despair; when the pious hosts on MS-NBC express optimism that at least something might be done this time to curb the epidemic of mass murder ini this country, I start shouting things like “No” and “Never.” With the eyes of the nation riveted on Uvalde, Buffalo and Laguna Woods, California (where just the next day after the Buffalo shooting, there was another one, this time targeting a church with a mostly Asian-American congregation), people in America on the side of sensible gun regulation are once again daring to hope, against all experience, that this time will be different. –

No, it won’t. America’s continuing obsession with guns and the supposed “right” under the Second Amendment to own virtually any sort of gun you want is as settled an issue as political issues ever get. It has been cemented in place, along with so much else wrong with this country, by the undemocratic features built into the U.S. Constitution: the guarantee that every state has two U.S. Senators regardless of population; the near-total ability of state legislatures to determine who can vote, under what circumstances and what legislative districts will look like; and the Electoral College, which in 2016 allowed a candidate who lost the popular vote to become President and, among other things, appoint one-third of the current U.S. Supreme Court. –

It also has been held in place by the extraordinary political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun lobbying groups (like Gun Owners of America, formed by people who thought the NRA wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in defending gun rights). Though they represent only a minority of the American electorate, they are well positioned in enough states – particularly smaller, more rural ones in which “gun culture” is strong – and they have cultivated a cadre of voters who will vote the way the NRA tells them to. –

If you don’t think the NRA has political power, just ask Al Gore, who didn’t become President in 2000 not because of the Electoral College, the U.S. Supreme Court or Ralph Nader. In 2000 the NRA staged an unofficial but very intense campaign against him in Tennessee and West Virginia. In a razor-close election, Gore became the first major-party Presidential nominee since George McGovern in 1972 to lose his home state. Had Gore carried Tennessee, he would have won the Presidency and Florida wouldn’t have mattered. –

The message the Democratic Party got loud and clear from the debacle of Gore’s campaign was simple: don’t fuck with the NRA. Democrats spent the next two decades avoiding the gun issue as if it were radioactive. Meanwhile, a 5-4 Republican majority in 2008, in a case called District of Columbia v, Heller, ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment confers on Americans an individual right to own guns. That’s not what the Second Amendment says – it says, ““A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” And a previous Supreme Court had ruled in 1939 that government had every right to regulate guns as long as the guns didn’t have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia." –

But the Court majority in Heller, in an opinion by Justice Antoniin Scalia, read the whole idea of “a well-regulated militia” out of the Second Amendment and created a whole new “right” out of constitutional whole cloth – exactly the opposite of the “originalist” reading of the Constitution Scalia publicly proclaimed. In his Heller oinion, Scalia was doing what he always criticized liberals on the Supreme Court and other courts for doing: instead of reading the Cosntitution as its plain text clearly meant, Scalia read it the way he wsnted it to for his own ideologincal reasons. (For more comment see https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/new-gun-restrictions-would-likely-be-undone-supreme-court-n1295799.) –

Since then – as Dean Obeidallah, author of the MS-NBC article cited and linked to above, wrote – federal courts have routinely thrown out virtually all attempts to regulate gun ownership, citing Heller as precedent. Already two Donald Trump-appointed judges on a federal appeals court have voted to invalidate a California law that prohibits people under age 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon Obeidallah said that the current far-Right majority on the Supreme Court – the same five justices that have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and trash the idea that the Constitution protects people’s right to privacy in their sex lives – “based on the questions that were asked in oral arguments, are poised to strike down a New York state law that’s more than a century old that mandates people show ‘proper cause’ to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon.” –

The Right’s Ideological Crusade –

No one can understand American politics today without realizing that the Right is on an ideological crusade. Their goals are sometimes self-contradictory – notably when they proclaim themselves believers in “limited government” and then say that government should have every right to regulate the private behavior of individuals in their bedrooms and how they handle the consequences therefrom. But at its heart is a longing for a past America (which is why both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump ran their Presidential campaigns on the slogan “Make America Great Again”) in which white supremacy was an acknowledged and unchangeable truth; Americans of color understood that they were a permanent servant class, here only by the sufferance of the white majority; women mostly accepted their destiny as being (as the Nazis put it) “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – “children, kitchen, church” – and Queers lived their whole lives in the knowledge that they were almost literally the scum of the earth. –

It’s also an America in which government exists mainly to preserve the fortunes of the rich, and the whole purpose of the environment is to be plundered for private gain. It’s an America in which working people have virtually no rights at all – no right to decent pay or fair working conditions or protections to their health and safety, and certainly no right to organize and form unions. When Hillary Clinton asked the rhetorical question during her campaign against Donald Trump, “Just when does he think America was ‘great’ and to which he wants to return us?,” the answer depended on the issue. In terms of the civil rights of people of color, women and Queers, it was the 1950’s. In terms of the economy, it was even earlier – the 1880’s, when corporations literally held sway over the American political system, offices were openly bought and sold, there was no hint of any government obligation to protect the lives of working people or the environment, and organizing a uniou cuold literally get you arrested (if you were lucky) or lynched (if you weren't). –

Americans of other political persuasions – not only the Left but even the center – grossly underestimate the sheer depth of the Right-wing ideological commitment and the success they’ve had in carrying it out. They have successfully packed the U.S. Supreme Court. They have nullified Congress as a legislative body by keeping the Senate filibuster in place (with the aid of so-called “Democrats” like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona). Their political party is far more unified and disciplined than the Democrats are. –

And they have a breathtaking contempt for the very idea of democracy, including free and fair elections in which every adult citizen may vote and have their ballots counted. Not only have Republican legislators passed hundreds of voter suppression and sabotage bills aimed at making sure they stay in power whether the voters want them to or not, they are using their power to draw legislative districts to ensure that they will never lose control, no matter how people vote or want to vote. The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado has even proposed a system that would replace the one-person, one-vote rule with what is essentially the Electoral College in one state, and the object is to ensure that Democrats can never again win a statewide election in Colorado. –

One part of the Republican myth of America’s past is the obsession with guns and gun ownership. Even Texans who are properly horrified at the Uvalde massacre hasten to add that they are not opposed to gun culture. In fact, they loudly proclaim that they own guns themselves and regularly use them for hunting or target practice. One man interviewed on MS-NBC proudly boasted that he owns an AR-15, the semi-automatic machine gun that was the weapon of choice for the shooters in both Buffalo and Uvalde, and he uses it for target practice. Any sensible person would be horrified that this man thinks he wants or needs a weapon of war for target shooting, but that’s how crazy the gun culture is in this country and how viscerally entrenched it is, especially in the small, rural states that thanks to the Constitutional guarantee of equal representation of each state in the Senate and the Senate rule that it requires at least 60 votes to pass virtually anything, have veto power over government action. –

As I’ve noted before in articles about previous mass shootings (and it’s a sign of how crazy this country is that I have written all too many articles about mass shootings), I have no contact with “gun culture.” I have never even held an actual gun (as opposed to the BB guns and toy cap pistols I played with as a kid), much less fired one. I grew up in San Francisco and Marin County, California, about as far away from the loci of “gun culture” as I could have been. My father broke up with my mother when I was 1 ½, and though I saw him fairly regularly after that, the thought of him taking me behind the barn (we never lived in a place that had a barn) or in the backyard and teaching me how to shoot is inconceivable and laughable. And I regard the Second Amendment, especially as rewritten by the Supreme Court in Heller, as a piece of pestilential dung our Constitution would be better off without. In short, I am exactly the kind of voter red-state Republicans keep telling their constituencies they should be afraid of – and that makes me proud.

Uvalde’s Keystone Kops Law Enforcement –

Since I wrote the above nearly two weeks ago – while the Uvalde shootings were still fresh in the minds of many Americans – a lot has happened. Most horrifyingly, there has been an explosion in the sheer number of mass shootings (officially defined as incidents in which at least four people are killed or wounded). During Memorial Day weekend, there were at least 20 in the U.S. In the next weekend, there were at least 13 more, including high-profile incidents in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where the U.S. Constitution was written); and Chattanooga, Tennessee. (For details on the Philadelphia shooting, see https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/us/philadelphia-south-street-shooting/index.html.) –

Another aspect of mass shootings that should frighten us all is the sheer number of sickos who are willing and able to commit them. They’re able to because the U.S. has an entrenched political base of gun owners that ensure our nation has by far the most lax gun laws in the supposedly civilized world. And they are willing to because we’ve grown up in a culture whose entertainments constantly project and reinforce the idea that the solution to virtually every problem is violence. The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups want to turn America into a kind of fantasy world based on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, in which absolutely every American will carry a gun with them whenever they leave their homes. –

The net result of this, as any American with any degree of logic will tell you, will increase, not decrease, the level of gun violence in the U.S. The Philadelphia shooting reportedly began with an argument between two people who ran into each other on the street. In a less well-armed country – or even a less well-armed era in America’s past – those sorts of confrontations would have been settled with words or, at worst, fists. Now, with the same majority of Right-wing crazies on the U.S. Supreme Court who have already decided to reverse Roe v. Wade on the cusp of throwing out a 100-year-old law in New York state saying you need to show a good legal reason for being allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public, and with state after state eagerly getting rid of laws restricting people’s “right” to bear firearms virtually anywhere they like, it’s almost certain that some of these guns will be used – and more people will die. –

But in some ways the most frightening aspect of the Uvalde massacre is the horrible response of local law enforcement. It reminded me of reading Helter Skelter, the book about Charles Manson;s mujrder of actress Sharon Tate and her friends co-authored by the man who led the prosecution, Vincent Bugliosi. Both times I read the book I had the same reaction to Bugliosi’s description of the spectacular incompetence of law enforcement; I kept thinking, “They had the highest-profile murder in L.A. in decades, and they assigned it to the Keystone Kops?” Manson and his so-called “Family” of killers were finally busted not because of great or even good police work. They were nailed because one of the women involved in the killings got arrested for something else and boasted to a cellmate, “I did Tate.” –

If anything, the incompetence and zealous stupidity of the police in Uvalde makesthe Manson investigation look like a model by comparison. The police chief of Uvalde and the head of the police force of Uvalde’s school system amassed 19 officers from at least five separate agencies – and had them wait in the hallways of Robb Elementary while the alleged shooter took his own sweet time killing schoolchildren in the classrooms they dared not enter. The local and school police chiefs inexplicably decided that what they had on their hands was a “barricade” situation – a man holding people hostage with a gun but not putting them in any immediate danger – instead of the “active shooter” situation they really had. What’s more, police not only wouldn’t let parents of the at-risk kids come into the school to rescue them, they actually arrested them.

Angeli Rose Gomez, an Uvalde field worker and mother of two boys at Robb Elementary, told New York Post reporter Eileen A. J. Connelly that when she was called to the school and told her two sons were in danger, a U.S. Marshal on the scene handcuffed her to keep her from going in (https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/angeli-gomez-says-she-was-threatened-by-uvalde-texas-cops/). Gomez told Connelly that the marshal “said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have to arrest you because you’re being very uncooperative.’” She ultimately got a local police officer to persuade the marshal to take the cuffs off her – and, showing a good deal more courage than the cops on the scene, she immediately went into the school and retrieved both her sons. –

But that wasn’t the end of Gomez’s ordeal. She told Post reporter Connelly that a few days after the incident, she got a call from a local law enforcement official warning her not to talk about the case publicly. The person threatened that if she kept speaking out, her probation on an entirely unrelated case from over a decade ago would be revoked. Fortunately, the judge overseeing her probation not only didn’t revoke it, he publicly praised her heroism. But Gomez remained skeptical of law enforcement’s response. “I was just thinking that they could have saved many more lives,” she told Connelly. “They could have gone into that classroom and maybe two or three would have been gone. They could have done something. Gone through the window, sniped him through the window. I mean, something! But nothing was being done. If anything. they were being more aggressive on us parents that were willing to go in there.” –

The bizarre shabbiness of Uvalde’s law enforcement response has slowly unraveled since, despite the efforts of local and state officials to cover it up. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, standard protocol in mass-shooting situations in schools has been to rush in as soon as possible with the weapons you have. Uvalde’s city and school police didn’t do that. Instead, they waited in the hallways of Robb Elementary for an hour and 18 minutes. Federal Border Patrol agents finally defied the orders of local law enforcement, stormed the classroom and killed the alleged shooter before he could take the lives of more victims. The Uvalde response was so awful that the police in Tulsa stressed at their press conference that they had responded to their mass shooting in just three minutes. –

The Uvalde cover-up has continued and extended throughout Texas’s state government as well as the local officials. School police chief Pete Arredondo was secretly sworn in as a member of the Uvalde City Council and has hidden himself from reporters ever since the day after the shooting. The local district attorney has slapped a gag order on all participants in law enforcement’s response, citing the need to maintain secrecy to avoid compromising any investigation – which, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on his MS-NBC show June 6, is patently absurd since the only person who could conceivably be prosecuted, the alleged shooter, is dead. No one in state or local law enforcement has been fired, resigned or in any way disciplined for their terrible response. In fact, the Uvalde school board just gave Pete Arredondo a vote of confidence. –

The Republicans’ Death Cult –

The other big thing that’s happened as a result of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings – and the myriad of others that have happened since – is a renewed push on the part of certain members of the House and Senate to negotiate a bill to do something about gun safety. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who’s been involved in this issue since he was a Congressmember representing the district in which Sandy Hook Elementary was located, appeared on Stephanie Ruhle’s MS-NBC show June 6 and shame-facedly admitted that his latest bill does not include the two most important features he would want – a ban on military-style assault weapons and expansion of background checks on would-be purchasers of guns – because he can’t get anything through the Senate without watering it down so much it can get at least 10 Republican votes to overcome the vile filibuster. –

Either one of two things will happen. Either the law Murphy and colleagues are working on will die like all other attempts at sensible gun regulation – which is still by far the most likely outcome – or a bill will pass that will be so watered-down it will do nothing to prevent future mass shootings. Then the gun lobby will come back and say, “You see: You see: We told you gun safety legislation wouldn’t work!” In yet another of the grim ironies of Uvalde, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Houston the weekend after the Uvalde shooting – and some attendees wore T-shirts with images of the AR-15 as if it were a rock star. Texas Senator Ted Cruz said that instead of doing anything to control the easy accessibility of guns to Americans, we need to “harden” school sites to keep potential mass shooters out. –

In fact, the Uvalde school district had already done that – and it proved not only useless but counterproductive. While all those cops were waiting outside the classrooms and milling about the hallways of Ross Elementary doing nothing but harassing concerned parents, the alleged shooter used the self-locking impregnable doors to lock himself in the classrooms so he could kill more students. The U.S. Border Patrol agents who finally took him down first had to beg for the key from the school janitor. What does it say about the U.S. as a nation when we need to “harden” every public space – every school, grocery store, church, movie theatre and anywhere else people go for commerce or amusement – to the security level of a prison? And why doesn’t this bother the same people who fought tooth and nail against common-sense restrictions like mask and vaccine requirements to control the spread of COVID-19? –

As Charles Booker, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky who’s challenging incumbent Rand Paul, put it, the Republican Party is a death cult. Over and over again, faced with the choice of acting to protect people’s lives or putting them at risk, the Republicans have chosen death over life. Ironically, they claim to be the “pro-life” party because of their oposition to abortion rights in the name of “the sanctity of the unborn” – though, as the late comedian George Carlin put it, to a Republican, “Once you’re born, you’re on your own.” –

If the Republican Party and its Supreme Court majority overturn Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of real, already born women will die from illegal abortions, either self-administered or underground. The Republicans not only have carried on a jihad against the right of women to end unwanted pregnancies, they blocked an extension of the child tax credit President Joe Biden and the Democrats ini Congress included in one of the COVID-19 relief bills, which would have helped mothers forced to have children by anti-abortion laws to raise them. They have also consistently opposed mask mandates, vaccine mandates and other measures to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They’ve even appropriated the slogan, “My Body, My Choice,” from the movement to give women the right to control their own bodies (which Republicans oppose), to justify their bizarre and insane opposition to COVID vaccines.. –

The Republicans routinely oppose laws to protect workers’ health and safety. They oppose laws to protect the environment. They not only don’t want to address the growing inequality of wealth and income in the U.S., they actively and deliberately pursue policies that would make them even more unequal. They oppose any and all efforts to stop the carnage guns and their easy availability are wreaking on this country and its people. And their undying commitment to maintaining the use of fossil fuels as our primary energy source will lead literally to the extinction of the entire human race as our planet becomes so beset with climate change it will no longer support human life. The lesson is if you vote for a Republican – or a so-called “Democrat” like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema who supports the Republican agenda and the contemptible filibuster that gives a minority of Senators veto power over the entire country – you are voting for policies that will kill people.