Tag: George Bush

Election Day 2016: Vote for your life

We remember the 1992 election, when Bill Clinton ran against the incumbent George Bush, Sr. The election had been full of candidates duking it out throughout the primaries, which is how it used to be in America (unlike today when the winners in Iowa and New Hampshire and the first few southern primaries generally go on to win and the party conventions are pro-forma). Ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan, who had been a senior advisor to Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and Reagan’s head of White House communications, made a strong run based on urging Americans to turn away from ungodly Democratic social progressivism, and he had a special anti-gay focus. It was Buchanan who introduced the phrase “culture wars” to U.S. politics, claiming that gays and other sinners were trying to destroy wholesome white, Christian American culture. President Bush was losing support because the economy was not doing well, so his campaign took a page from Buchanan’s by deciding to focus on bashing Clinton’s character: he was a Vietnam draft-dodger, he had smoked marijuana, he had an affair.

Clinton went through it all promising Americans a better economy, and to bridge the gap between rich and poor. This promise of equity gave him a fairly solid lead until independent Ross Perot got back into the race (after dropping out for two months) and, in three-way debates between Perot, Bush, and Clinton, Perot eroded a surprising amount of Clinton’s support. As election day drew near, there was more uncertainty about who would win than had been expected over the summer when Clinton seemed sure to become president.

The week before election day 1992, one of the HP remembers a full-page ad that ran in the Village Voice, a New York newspaper well-known for its principled stand on gay rights. The headline was “Vote for Your Life”, and it urged gay voters to vote for Clinton, which would be a vote against the right-wing’s homophobic, racist agenda of the “culture wars”.

It was a very dramatic ad. You can imagine why we think of it today, the week before election day 2016. The culture wars have only intensified and become more high-stakes.

The backlash against equal rights for gay Americans is growing.

There are more Americans than we’d like to think—though clearly fewer than they would like us to believe—who want nothing more than to destroy our system of federal government and live under monarchic rule by one man.

White supremacists and white nationalists, always a feature of American political life, are coming more out of the woodwork to boldly claim they represent mainstream opinion, and endorse the man they think will destroy Washington and allow them to do whatever they want.The KKK openly endorses Trump, who refuses to say he renounces them (claiming he’s never heard of them and therefore can’t judge).

Evangelical Christians who helped destroy Gary Hart’s campaign in 1988 because he had an affair now support a man who boasts about sexually assaulting any woman he finds attractive, and trying to lure many women into sex while he and they were married, all because they believe Trump will stop the gays and Planned Parenthood and women’s libbers and whoever else is attacking traditional Christian marriage and family.

Principles and ideas have been overthrown in favor of blind party loyalty: the only principle for an outspoken segment of Republicans is to destroy the Democrats. Many prominent Republicans in federal government have dropped being “the party of opposition” to become agents of obstruction, committing treason by refusing to perform their duties as members of Congress (including vetting a Supreme Court nominee) until and unless they have the Republican president they want.

Prominent Republican leaders and average Americans alike have said how much they hate and disavow Trump—but they will still vote for him, because they simply cannot vote for a Democrat. When you actively choose to vote for someone whose principles are anathema to you, one of two things is happening: either you’re lying about how much you dislike their principles, or you are committing treason against your country by voting in someone you know will impair or destroy our government.

And while Trump promotes and enables people who hate immigrants, Muslims, blacks, gays, and anyone who isn’t them, there has been a constant refusal by other Americans to call them out on this desecration of our founding principles. We constantly hear people saying “Trump supporters aren’t bad people, they’re just angry.” Angry that they are poor when they should be rich, angry that black people want equal rights, angry that gay people want equal rights, angry that people from other countries (who aren’t their great-grandparents) come to America to live and work, angry that women can still (just barely) get abortions, angry that Democrats exist, angry that they think they are being marginalized.

We have to draw a line: if your anger leads you to support someone whose goal is to destroy our federal government, endorse institutional racism, stop immigration by “undesirables”, put women in their place, and rescind gay rights, you are not a good person. You forfeit that status by your actions. Good people don’t stand for those things.

Good people don’t abandon empathy, common good, and collaboration because they feel slighted.

Good people don’t demand white rights.

Good people don’t call for people in public office to be executed for their misjudgments.

Good people don’t insist that a black president must be a criminal imposter from Africa.

Good people don’t support a man who insists he never said things he is on camera saying.

Good people don’t impatiently dismiss the fact that their candidate claims to have sexually assaulted many women and that those women love it.

Good people don’t support a man who urges them to vote multiple times because “that’s what Democrats do”, then whips people into a frenzy about the threat of voter fraud.

Good people don’t support someone who says he will not accept the results of a federal election if he doesn’t win, and will support his followers if they rebel against the federal government.

If you can support someone who does and claims and demands those things, you are no longer good. We can’t have it both ways. Having a complaint does not mean you are justified in spouting hate speech and attempting to destroy our election process and our government. Having a complaint does not mean you are justified in blaming racial minorities and immigrants and Muslims and women and gays for your problems. Having a complaint does not mean you are justified in voting for someone you say you cannot and do not support personally.

Americans who still support our founding principles of liberty and justice for all cannot call those who don’t “good people.” We just can’t. We undermine our own opposition to hate and lynch-mob mentality and anti-democracy when we do. We make it seem like they are still supporting democracy when they are not.

So fight the good fight. Call people out when they are not good people. Stand by the definition of “good people” as people who promote the common good, respect other people’s rights, support our representative democracy, and believe candidates for president should be subject to the rule of law. Stand up for democracy and representative government. And next week, vote for your life.

Why don’t we remember Watergate?

Hello and welcome to the final post in our series on the Watergate Crisis, in which we ask the depressing question, Why have Americans forgotten about Watergate? This series has only given an outline of the terrible challenge to our democracy posed by President Nixon’s actions, and those of his top advisors. Their attempt to put the executive branch above the law and create an imperial presidency, if successful, would have allowed the president, any president, to commit any crime s/he felt was necessary to achieve her/his goals. Whether or not the president’s goals were good ones would be immaterial.

The American public’s response to this attempted hostile takeover was spectacular. They rose up almost as one to protest. Network news, newspapers large and small, and the man on the street all knew that the Constitution was being violated and they all refused to sit back and accept that. Nixon was out of office once his criminal activities and determination were clear. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The reaction was so swift and complete, and Nixon out so quickly (and immediately pardoned by Gerald Ford, so there was no long criminal trial after his resignation), and Americans so eager to leave the sordid episode behind them, that Watergate was collectively buried. More Americans today know about George Washington’s alleged infidelity (a complete lie, by the way) or Lincoln’s alleged homosexuality (don’t know, but it doesn’t seem likely) than the actual, open, undeniable crimes committed by Richard Nixon.

But we think the amnesia surrounding Watergate is caused by something far worse than a quick burial. One of the long-term effects of the crisis was a deep mistrust of the federal government. This is so inexplicable. Representatives of the federal government, notably the Watergate special prosecutor Cox, Attorneys General Richardson and Ruckelshaus, the Supreme Court, and all the members of the Senate Watergate Committee heroically resisted efforts to corrupt them. It was men within the president’s inner circle who committed and/or ordered the crimes, not the machinery of the federal government. The federal government rejected the attempt to transgress the Constitution, and the next two presidents after Nixon, Ford and Carter, made strenuous efforts to restore the dignity and honor of the executive branch. Yet somehow, over the 1980s, the message of Watergate became “You can’t trust the government.”

Perhaps the controversial/criminal actions of the Reagan Administration, coming so soon after Nixon’s, became merged with Nixon in the public mind, and led people to believe that the government had not been trustworthy since Kennedy.

Or maybe the steady decrease in civics education from the 1970s on created new generations of Americans who have no idea why Nixon’s actions were criminal.

Or maybe the imperial actions of President George W. Bush, and over a decade of invasion of privacy and other constitutional violations, notably by the Patriot Act, have made Americans forget that the president is not supposed to govern by executive order.

Whatever the reason, it’s bad news to forget about Watergate—what it threatened, who stood up to it, and how the Constitution and good government triumphed. If we begin to believe as a nation that we have “never” had good government, that “all” presidents are corrupt, or that the president is “supposed to” rule the nation like a king, then Nixon wins, corruption wins, and it’s as if Bill Ruckelshaus never stood up to the power of the president who told him he had “no choice but to obey” and said, “I have a choice—I can resign.” We all have the choice to refuse to obey when our Constitution is threatened, whether it’s by the federal government, or by our own ignorance.