The Liberal

What does it mean to be a committed Liberal, to stand unflinchingly on the Left? It has been a very long time since the mantel of the great Liberal Cause has been anything other than an election year soundbite/slogan or a party/policy embarrassment. As Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn lead the Left out of the wilderness, it is worth considering the nature and mission of Liberalism in a world that would just as soon accept a strong man in exchange for a meager tax cut and the promise of obsolete jobs returning to comfort those who can't or won't join the 21st Century.

In this world lies are truth, and truth has been banished to the edge of consciousness and covered over with self-interest and hubris. The world of ideas is rotting, buried below a compost of hate, cruelty and scapegoating that will nourish an American crop of malignant nationalism, international isolationism and the pernicious further deterioration of our institutions.

Today the perspicacity, principles and plans of FDR, JFK, RFK and Teddy Kennedy have never seemed more remote and lost to us in time. Still in all, there lives among us the last great liberal president. The guy who was too good a man to be president - that says a hell of a lot more about the office than it does about the man - one James Earl Carter, age 92, still runs around building houses for the homeless. He lives Liberalism and will until the day he dies. That will be a very sad day indeed for those of us who are committed Liberals and stand unflinchingly on the Left.

For the love of ......................

The media is running around pulling its hair out because Trump has said he will testify under oath. For the love of the Holy Goddess, the bastard is a serial liar. He said his wife would give a press conference; he said he would produce proof that Obama spied on him; he said he would give money to the vets; he said he would build a wall and he said he would drain the swamp instead of stocking it with alligators. I tell ya, America is no longer a nation it is a fucking circus.

Honorable Men

That the Russians interfered in our elections goes without saying; that an American or Americans aided and abetted this interference is a damn good bet. Fundamentally, the primary injury in this situation is to the American people. In a secondary and tertiary way respectively, harm was done to the institution of Democracy – empty save for the people it serves – and to the army of self satisfied, bloated officials who live off the largess of those same American people. 

Four of these creatures sat today before a morally sick and ethically anemic Republican chaired Intelligence Committee refusing to tell the people who cloth, feed and make them necessary the extent of one aspect of that injury. To wit: did the president who benefited from the aforementioned interference, and may well have headed an organization responsible for aiding and abetting accordingly, obstruct justice by trying to defend one of his scabs widely regarded as being much too close to the originally mentioned Russians?

Who are these “honorable” men who would deepen the wounding of America with words like “classified” as they refuse in an arbitrary and capricious way to speak to their employers while admitting they may well lack legal justification for their refusal? Who are these oh-so-honorable men who have forgotten who provides their livelihood and gives them their power and privilege? Like Mark Antony I question whether these men can spell the word honorable, much less understand how their honor should serve their country.