CONSERVATIVES MELT DOWN.

++David Frum pens a must-read article in The Atlantic "The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy" where he eviscerates Trump and his supporters and ponders how the conservative movement can ever be rebuilt. Frum expresses astonishment over how everyone from fiscal conservatives to the religious right just folded like kleenex.  Frum pointed out that Trump's biggest foreign policy speech was given with the Russian ambassador in the audience but no representative from a single American ally.

++Fred Malek, perpetual Republican operative, writes in the Washington Post on why TRUMP must stop attacking fellow Republicans.

++Michael Gerson won't give up in his fourth straight anti-Trump article "The Most Depressing Moment of the 2016 Race."  He was talking about "the Future of the GOP" Marco Rubio bowing down to endorse Trump.

++ Charles Pierce had some good fun with Mark Halperin pretending to have an exclusive of Bill Kristol's surprise conservative choice. It turns out Kristol may have persuaded David French, a staff writer for the National Review and an Iraqi war veteran, to run against Trump.

++Eugene Robinson could not resist mocking Trump's Rolling Thunder Review performance and the series of lies he told,including the one about thousands couldn't get in. As I reported there were no one else there. It was a sad sack affair with 5,000.

++You may have missed  David Brooks' column on why #Never,Ever Trump". 

Trump Gets Thumped

++Rushbo attacked The Donald for his remarks about the New York Times reporter. "Attacking a cripple isn't what Republicans do?" Really what about the attacks on Max Cleland? Wait to the attacks on Congresswoman Duckworth this year.

++GOP state chairmen say it looks like the Donald will win of two of the first three primaries if they were held today.

++Eugene Robinson in the Imperial Post has an op-ed about how the Republicans got themselves into this situation. Similar to the thoughts Howard Dean voiced yesterday.

++Meteor Blades at the DailyKos ignored Josh Marshall's warnings and attacked the Donald as a fascist.

++Timothy Egan of the New York Times has a terrific column today on the Donald. He opens with a description of "The Plot Against America",one of Philip Roth's later novels about Lindbergh becoming the President of the United States. As you might remember Lindy was close to Adolf Hitler. The novel is a good read and even mentions Deal, New Jersey since Roth is a Jersey boy.

++Egan methodically recites the Donald's most egregious policy suggestions and notes that Polifact rates him 75% wrong on facts,25% "partly True" and 0% right.

++Since the Donald is getting so much free media time,we are forgetting the other Republicans. Ted Cruz got endorsed by Randy Newman,the head of Operation Rescue and an advocate of killing abortion doctors. Townhall,the conservative on-line newsletter, rejoices about the fall in abortions in America. I guess they didn't get the memo from the Guttmacher Institute two years ago that abortions were falling because of better preventive medicine and contraceptives. This fact is not because the Republicans are shutting abortion clinics and going after Planned Parenthood.

++Dr. Ben Carson is brushing up his foreign policy credentials today by visiting Syrian refugees in Jordan. His prime adviser on foreign policy is Iran-Control great Dewey Clarridge, who said  Carson doesn't seem to understand foreign policy.

Post Says Charlie Hebdo Cover Is Muslim Man

++The New York Times was widely criticized for not publishing the cartoons from Hebdo but the Post praised. Except I noticed that the Post had a disclaimer for their "Christian" readers saying it doesn't intend to offend them. Now getting the cover slightly wrong is offensive.

++Dana Millbank has an excellent column on the Republican flap over Obama not going to Paris. It seems that Secretary Kerry addressed the entire French nation on national television with such moving words that Americanophile Bernard Henri-Levy called it "one of the most moving statements of solidarity". Francois Hollande had cryptically said that Obama himself was very present in Paris. He was referring to personal phone calls and assistance American counter-terrorism was providing. Millbank recalls how abusive Republicans were during George W's administration calling the French "weasels", "cowards" and the like. 

++Donald Rumsfeld managed to creep out of his hole to blast Obama's anti-terrorism record that he lost the Iraq War and couldn't even get a Status of Forces agreement with Karzai. Of course, he did with his successor. 

++Michael Brennen at Huffington Post has an excellent piece on "Paris and the War on Terror". He says we have been living in "anticipatory fear since 9/11" but that these events have basically changed nothing. He rightfully says that it is not clear whether these attacks were organized or ordered by Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula or ISIS. It is not credible that these were sleeper cells since they didn't even have a getaway car and left their IDs behind. Ahmed Coulibaly, the Kosher grocery killer,didn't even seem to know anyone at AQAP or ISIS during his video but blithely pledged his allegiance. The same seems to be true about the Hebdo killers and their connection to Awalki. They seemed to have been in Yemen at the time he was there and he was the coordinator of foreign cadres but he soon was killed. Brennen basically says these attacks change nothing.

++Meanwhile Eugene Robinson captures this era of dread in his column about the prospects of a Romney, Bush fight in the GOP primaries. He also warns Democrats that no one is jumping up and down about having another "Clinton" presidency either.

++The Canadians who also were not at the Paris Rally are hosting a conference that is pertinent to the Paris events on how to prevent radicalization in prison. Our culprits were thoroughly radicalized by their time in French prisons by hanging out with the GIA bombers and the Tunisian member of Al Qaeda. It would be useful to know how one prevents this as a social phenomenon.

OBAMA LIBRE

++Politico has an unusual article with the title above by Edward Isaac Devrne and Carrie Budoff Brown that examines President Obama's recent behavior as a man freed from any electoral responsibilities and charging ahead.

++It is unusual for Politico, which is a Republican owned site. It's like "Let Reagan be Reagan". The article acknowledges that President Obama has done more for the environment than any president and did the single largest action on immigration of any president. Clearly yesterday's move surprised them but it allowed them to follow the logic of their story. 

++Naturally, they had to get Hill reactions to this "new" Obama. The Republicans called him delusional and oblivious to the results of the last election, which means he should totally change direction toward their policies, whoever they are. Democrats are not impressed and not encouraged. They sounded like people who had just survived a train wreck. But the president keeps on moving.

++Eugene Robinson decided to write a piece in the Imperial Post taking issue with their editorial criticizing Obama's Cuba policy. Eugene who travelled to Cuba for his book on the subject thought Obama took the Castros to the cleaners and that critics have to explain how Cubans could get more freedom under the old American policy. Eugene mentions what many travelers to Cuba have found--a proud, ambitious, warm people stifled by a gerontocracy that has ground the economy into the dust while always blaming the embargo. Eugene suggests interfacing with the United States will force either directly or indirectly reforms that will ease the Cubans economic burdens and encourage a type of liberalism. Don't expect the Communist Party to disappear but it may morph into the Chinese version.

++Jimmy Carter appeared on Morning Joe to say that he was grateful to President Obama for taking "the courageous decision he did" by normalizing relations with Cuba. Jimmy Carter saw that this move would lead to a better human rights situation and would foster in the long run a democracy.

++Today in little Havana, Florida, the atmosphere was "meh", the caravan has moved on. The elected officials railed against a sell-out, a betrayal by Obama but the average person actually has their own complex relations with the island, which runs from tourism to remittances to family members. Those who have been forcibly exiled--and this has been done in the past decade--are still angry and think President Obama didn't get as many concessions as he could have gotten.

++Raul Castro said something yesterday that was interesting. he said that President Obama had sufficient executive authority to significantly modify the embargo. That's true and false. President Obama can create different types of tourists but can't wave the travel ban entirely. He can also suggest changes to the embargo for American businesses. He knows the Chamber of Commerce has pressed waives for agriculture and other businesses. As a primary funder of the GOP, President Obama can expect their support to lobby the Hill.

++The Daily Beast has a piece by Eleanor Clift on the prime candidate for the first ambassador to Cuba. He is the current charge d'affaire. A very low-key, methodical guy who played a constructive role in the negotiations. He is already at the embassy. The Washington Latin Americanists all say he would be perfect even though he is known to be incredibly dull. Dull and competent may be the best ticket here.

++Also at the Daily Beast, there is a piece picking up a theme I wrote about yesterday the threat to tourism in the Bahamas posed by an opening to Cuba.

++The euphoria about Cuba has generated some absurd articles like whether casinos will come back to the island and threaten Las Vegas. If you step back a second, you may remember this was one of the reasons for the Revolution in the first place. Think Meyer Lansky in the Godfather.

++One thing to remember. American policy until yesterday was very consistent. The present charge d'affaire has been very active on human rights as well as overseeing the democracy programs that got Alan Gross in trouble. So don't expect this will cease just because President Obama spoke to Raul Castro.

++The first few moments of the opening will be tense, even more tense than the attacks of the Republicans against President Obama. Despite the openings to Cuba and the negations in Iran, the Obama Administration has supported democracy movements in both countries. Sometimes I have disagreed with their approach but despite words like "appeasement" and "sell-out", President Obama has done neither.

++Aside from Central Europe, Cuba and Iran are the two countries in the world where the populations are most pro-American. Policy-makers know this and that is why you have such activist measures put forth by both the Democrats and Republicans. The difference is the strategy--regime change, which always has an implication of military force or "kinetic" action, or negotiation where you have a more direct access to the real civil society.

++The present-day Republican Party forgets that they were way behind in intelligence and strategy in the rise of the Central European revolutions. In fact, despite their homage to Reagan and the late embrace of people like Vaclav Havel, they were not very active in favor of even Solidarity, until John Paul II convinced Reagan they were the way to go. I suggest Reagan had to do an abrupt U-turn to support the Central European revolutions because the GOP position was to back the status quo.

++Pope Francis is playing John Paul II's role for President Obama. As a Latin American, he knows how counter-productive American policy to Cuba has been. In effect, we are being asked to tear down our own Berlin Wall. It's about time and President Obama was courageous in taking the opening.

Rand Paul Romps In Maine

++During the 2012 presidential primary,one of the disputes in the GOP was over the allocation of Maine delegates because of the strong showing of Ron Paul. So it's no coincidence that Rand Paul won the Maine Republican straw poll this year.

++The results are intriguing:
Rand Paul--176 votes
Ted Cruz --   98
Scott Walker-70
Ben Carson-- 62
Chris Christie-60
Jeb Bush -----57
Paul Ryan---- 37

++Bob Schaeffer reports that Mitt "Willard" Romney will run again if Jeb Bush doesn't.

++State Island Republican Michael Grimm was indicted today for fraud--mostly stemming from his restaurant business.

++Ron Christie woke up today to discover racism in America and urged President Obama to take the lead in fighting it.

++Eugene Robinson writes an op-ed in the Washington Post on racism and be sure to read the comment section where racism lives.

++That didn't take long. Bill Kristol's group urged President to fire John Kerry for his remarks about Israel becoming an apartheid society.

Not Munich

++Eugene Robinson slams the Munich analogies in this afternoon's Post. Washington Monthly also has a run-own on who of the conservatives is calling the Iranian deal "another Munich". Charles Krauthammer was first off the block and Alex Castellanos, the GOP operative, was soon tweeting the news. Hard to see how a multi-national agreement supported by Russia,China,the EU, France and the UK could be capitulating to a country which doesn't have a nuclear weapon. Time reports that the Saudis are looking for a bomb now (which they have on convenient lay-away in Pakistan) the deal is done.

++Reuters/Ipsos this afternoon that shows 44% support for the Deal and 22% oppose. God knows what the remainder believe. But if the deal fails,49% are for increased sanctions, 31% support further diplomacy and only 20% support war. 

++It seems to me that those who oppose a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear program should openly state their alternative. 

President Obama Unscripted

On a slow news day, President Obama made a surprise appearance at the White House press room and delivered unscripted remarks about the Trayvon Martin case and why the African-American community has been emotional about it. 

Only the day before Eugene Robinson wrote in the Post that the President wasn't the right one to talk about race given the guff he gets every attempt he's made from the Henry Gates incident on has provoked backlash. But sure enough, the man did it and succeeded.

President Obama's remarks about how he knows what it is to be followed in department stores and car locks clicking when he walks by triggered a flood of African-American males on television recalling similar incidents. The refrain was that each African American male has to sit down and tell his son the same things his father taught him about dealing with the police, how to to look threatening, how to be polite. 

Two most interesting responses, I thought, were Michael Steele, the former RNC Chairman, talking about being followed by cops in Rock Creek Park, and Jonathan Capehart, Post editorial writer and MSNBC contributor. How this is the sorry war story of African-American males was demonstrated by Eric Holder talking to the NAACP about "The Talk" he had to give his son and the audience just murmuring their agreement.

I found Capehart's story the saddest. Here is a young nerdy black guy with glasses who could not be perceived as threatening in the least. You would have to be a raving racist to think otherwise. He was moving because he was in the White House briefing room when President Obama made his remarks. He said his eyes filled with tears when the President talked about his own personal experience that he himself had shared.

Former presidential candidate John McCain complimented the President on his remarks, calling them "impressive" and picked up on his remarks on the "Stand Your Ground"Laws, which McCain said should be reviewed in all the states,including his own Arizona. While the major media were--by and large--complimentary like FOX News Wallace, others thought it was race-baiting and polarizing. Former George W. Bush press spokeswoman Dana Perino criticized Obama for not talking about black males shooting white babies. Sean Hannity blasted the President, suggesting he identified with Trayvon Martin's drug use. 

While some argued it was too late in the African-American communities, there was much relief that the President stood up for the anguish and anxiety the community felt over the not guilty verdict. During the weekend hundreds of cities held marches in solidarity with the Martin family and for justice in the case.And should be said that even after the verdict there was little violence except police riots in L.A. and Oakland.

I found the President's remarks refreshing and his call for a national conversation on the subject appropriate. While this case was especially fraught with racial overtones, the big elephant in the room seems to me the economic and social issues facing all young males in society, white, black and Hispanic. We are commemorating mass shootings in Aurora ,Tucson and Newtown carried out by white males, a Boston bombing carried out by another young male and a shooting in Sanford, Florida by a Hispanic cop wannabe. Homicides caused by guns since Newtown have far eclipsed the deaths in the entire Iraq war. Ladies and gentlemen, we not only have a gun problem but a Young Male Problem. 

I Have A Scheme*

*Kudos to John Stewart for his takedown of Glenn Beck and also to Stephen Colbert for his slam on Beck's martyr complex.

Carnival barker Glenn Beck has been whipping up interest in the two-headed lady, who will appear tomorrow at his Destroy Honor rally. Strange white people--and I mean very strange looking people-- are showing up here in Old Town with signs for the rally in their cars with Midwest license plates. Remember the organizers warned people to stay away from Maryland and the black sections of D.C. Instead they are urged to come here to Northern Virginia. As I wrote before, evangelicals are beginning to freak out about Beck's recent public turns toward Mormon theology, saying that Beck is trying to make America into a Mormon country. Other evangelicals supportive of Beck issued this morning a pastoral letter saying that you don't have to be "de-Christianized" to attend the rally. The Koch family, the nation's largest polluters, are bankrolling the hotels and transportation for the attendees.

This morning's CNN poll showed that only 29% of Americans back the Teaparty people with a large majority against. That's good news.

Gene Robinson at the Washington Post was rather sanguine about the affair , reminding people that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are forever immortalized in our history so that Beck's egofest shouldn't threaten anyone. Gene did remind everyone that the original march on washington for Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" was aimed at jobs and poverty. A. Phillip Randolph spoke on that very subject at the event.

While Gene is right that no one should be upset by this nonsense, this event is another unsettling episode over the last two years of the right trying to re-write history. It follows in the long line of radical right opposition to very basic amendments of our Constitution and the loony-tune elimination of the wall between church and state advocated by the Beckites. The emergence of this extreme view of American history indicates some deeper sickness at work.

So who should I turn to for some answers? Luckily, there is a wonderful new book of James Baldwin's uncollected writings The Cross of Redemption (Pantheon, 2010). This volume is a companion volume to the Library of America's collection of James Baldwin's essays. Even after all these decades,his prose is eloquent, his wit acerbic and his observations penetrating. In two of his essays, Baldwin recalls his terse meeting with Robert F. Kennedy over civil rights where Bobbie told Baldwin that the United States would have a black President in 30 years. Well, he was only off by 10. Most of the essays and speeches were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the awful aftermath of the assasinations had been felt and Richard Nixon re-emerged with his Southern strategy and the country was torn by Vietnam. From the modestly hopeful essays of the early 1960s, Baldwin plunges into despair and he expresses concern that white Amerca was in fact beyond redemption.

Several essays resonate to this day about the obliviousness of white Americans to the history of the United States. Baldwin many times argues that the problem in race relations in particular is that white lacks any true identity. "They don't know who they are." is a refrain heard throughout his writing. He makes the point that "the white" is a fabrication by people who abandoned their own past to belong to the United States and that amnesia of their roots has fueled their racism. Having lived in France, which was supportive of black artists in those days, Baldwin drew sharp contrasts with how he was treated there and how he was treated in the States, particularly in the South. In his testimony before Congress on creating studies in black history and culture, he emphasized that this shouldn't be done just for black Americans but for whites. "My history is your history and until you understand that you can't make progress."

It's all well and good to invoke the periods of nativism to understand this bizarre focus on illegal immigrants or this anti-Islam rage but there is some deeper pathology. Hatred and fear of President Obama isn't simply the old racist theme. It has a new twist. His African roots mean he is not our "darkie" but he's from one of those who escaped being enslaved by whites. And even worse he is a product of miscegenation. This is where the "birther", "Muslim" themes come from. He's totally other. The other you can't control or who does not understand what it is to be controlled by the whites.

You only have to read the body language of the Senate Republicans to get the message. Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions is a prime example of this. The President "that boy" must wait and learn how to behave according to our rules. It is also not a coincidence that all the CEOs speaking at Aspen likened Obama to Mussolini (they actually loved El Duce) and Hitler. If this were not true, you would hear about his Pilgrim ancestors and hear more that he received the largest popular vote in American history, a fact you only heard on election night and not a day after. How insulting is it to have a group of well-meaning Christian ministers write a letter affirming the President's Christianity? Who would dare do such a thing for Richard Nixon or even Ronald Reagan, both of whom never went to church? And why is it that the media so happily plays along?

This time there is a larger agenda than just to race-bait. This is the old bait-and-switch. Rev up the racist sentiment, while we pick more white pockets. A large piece of the American artifice collapsed in the last decade. We have seen all those who own America come out of the woodwork in the last 18 months to ensure their continued privilege. But the raw price of this is devastating and places at risk the survival of the country as we've known it. The last hurrah of the golden horde is here. That's why we are seeing the constant historical revisionism , the review of the constitution itself and the full scale attack on the whole idea of government itself. We are simply not brave enough to discuss the economic reality of the country and what we need to do to create a liveable society for everyone.

Yet we will remain deluded as people try and convince the public that Social Security is at risk and that the national debt isn't fixable so we must destroy the remains of a social welfare system. For this we need the new history of how the white Christian America was duped by "progressives" into creating a social welfare state. And we are actively helped out with this project by extraordinarily wealthy people like the Koch family and other billionaires, who must like the amusement of getting a whole subculture to act as their ministrel boys in the Tea Party Movement. The final looting has begun. And these poor souls will act as lemmings willingly jumping off the cliff for the sake of individual liberty and freedom.

We should have seen this coming. A tentative attempt by conservatives was made in 2008 when the economic system was collapsing . At that time, I received e-mails suggesting that George Soros, Charles Schumer and Barney Frank were at fault for the sub-prime mortgage crisis and that Soros was speculating wildly on the market. In short, the Jews did it. But that soon died because it was obviously uncouth. So then it was all those minorities who got subprime mortgages. The e-mails even threw in Jimmy Carter as a culprit because he outlawed "redlining", the practice of not selling real estate to blacks. Now amnesia sets in and all this is really just a Big Recession, which requires more tax cuts and shrinking the size of government. I had been waiting for any Republican to stand up in the last few months and admit that the white boys screwed up --and almost fatally. It will never happen.

So it makes sense to make whites become victims. You even get a choice. White Christians can believe they are persecuted because of their views on gays. White nationalists can lament the wave of Latinos coming into the country. And all whites can believe they are victims of a "racist" President--constantly warring with his identities--who hates the private sector. Take your pick. When the white boys go wild, they really go wild!

What is actually hopeful in reading James Baldwin is that he describes much of this as it happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a civil war in this country of sorts. And we managed to survive that and move on for a generation. He would have understood perfectly where the attacks on President Obama were coming from. In many of his essays, he talks about the white Southerners' fears of blacks, the fear something was going to be taken away from them. Bayard Rustin always said that race was the 'burr under the American saddle" but he also indicated that it was economics that was the basis for all this conflict. It's too bad we haven't come farther in that understanding.

Recommended reading:
"We Can Change the Country"
"The Use of the Blues" (gratuitous)
"What Price Freedom"
"The White Problem"
"The Price May be Too High"
"On Being White..and Other Lies"
"The Nigger We Invent"