Waiting to Pounce

Wonder where your republican lawmakers are?  If Peter McCoy is your representative in the South Carolina State House, I have a good idea.

If you don't know Peter, he is that warm and fuzzy lawmaker whose issues page promises that "South Carolinians can count on Peter McCoy" to do any number of things, followed by no specific item or pledge.  How can you not like someone who you can "count on" to:  provide ethical leadership, improve infrastructure, grow jobs and the economy, protect taxpayers and ratepayers, continue enhancing our quality of life, and continue improving education?  Sign me up.

Actually, if you are a republican legislator in a safe district, the first thing you do is:  nothing.  Mark Sanford was a pro at this, until he got sideswiped by a simultaneous challenge from the right and a progressive Democrat taking advantage of a loophole that in the past had always worked to the republicans' advantage.

Lately, Peter McCoy has had no challengers.  In 2012, Carol Tempel gave him a run for his money, despite the fact that a bizarre rule kept her off the ballot as a Democrat and forced her to run as an Independent.  He was not expecting that to be a serious challenge.

During that 2012 campaign, while Tempel worked tirelessly to get her message out to the voters, McCoy was avoiding anything that might actually inform voters of his stand on the issues, including refusing to show up to a debate, thus becoming the other "empty chair" featured in that year's political extravaganza.

About the time the Post & Courier endorsed Carol, the McCoy gang decided it was time to bring out the big guns they had at the ready.  With more money in his campaign chest, and little need to spend it till the last few weeks of the campaign, McCoy began to litter mailboxes in the 115th with fliers claiming that Carol was the "most liberal" candidate ever, featuring the most unflattering photo of her that they could find and further doctor.

This isn't new.  Republicans here in SC will bring out all the fear-mongering tools at their disposal, starting and spreading rumors about their opponent being a "Nancy Pelosi liberal" when they can't find a skeleton in the closet.  Sadly, in SC this sometimes means a last minute whisper campaign about sexual preferences.  Right this very minute there is a smear campaign going on against a candidate for SC House District 15, featuring the bombastic musings (complete with mug shot) of FitsNews.  This is because, of course, they are unable to fight on the issues.  Because, of course, if they were honest about their stand on the issues, they would lose.

Let's take Peter McCoy, for example.

He has had one issue that he has been hanging his political hat on lately:  SCANA.  This ripoff of South Carolina ratepayers has put McCoy squarely on the side of... pretty much all utility ratepayers.  So he has been outspoken on where he stands, kind of like demanding the end to puppy abuse.  And he was also in the fortunate position of being a leader in the House legislature when this issue exploded.

But what about all those other things McCoy claims you "can count on" him fighting for?

Peter McCoy hasn't yet found a tax he wouldn't want to cut.  He is one of those folks who promises to cut your taxes and improve your... fill in the blank.  The secret is, that he stands by big business (he calls it "small business"), as the answer to pretty much everything.  You can "count on him" to privatize education, vote no to modernizing public transportation in the Lowcountry, and resist any regulation that his donors might oppose.  The result is an education system that continues to lag well behind the rest of the country, roads and public transportation that continue to worsen, and shameful and costly failures in infrastructure.

If Peter was around to debate these issues, he might blame local government.  Or he could, as Carol Tempel does, vow to work with local government to make these incredibly important changes happen.

And then there is Peter and the NRA.  He voted to allow guns in restaurants and bars a short couple of years ago.  He won't concern himself with the gun tragedies that happen on James Island, maybe because so many of his voters come from "safer" (read, "white") parts of town, conveniently gerrymandered (read, "hammered") into House District 115.  When it comes right down to it, McCoy will always vote with the NRA because he knows where the big money comes from.

And as long as we are on favors, let's talk about "counting on" Peter to provide ethical leadership.  It appears that McCoy's wife was easily appointed to a seat on the Circuit Court in Charleston County, leading to charges of nepotism.

In a surprising twist, Peter McCoy has come out in favor of legalizing medical marijuana.  McCoy has a more, shall we say progressive, attitude towards allowing medical marijuana than other knuckle-draggers on his side of the aisle because he has had personal experience with seeing his infant daughter suffering and learning of the relief that is available through cannabis.  To his credit, rather than hunting it down through illegal channels he has pursued legalizing the drug.  Not true for abortion, as I suppose he has never been the unfortunate who has had to face an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.

McCoy will always support life until birth, and gun rights afterwards.

Now, rumors were swirling in the younger days of this never-ending Trump administration that Charleston's own Peter McCoy was being considered for a federal prosecutor appointment.  He had been a good Trump supporter until the cannabis thing.  But whether Jeff Sessions had a conniption over McCoy because of his own irrational obsession over marijuana, or somebody just told Trump that he might score more points by appointing a woman, McCoy continues to be stuck here in Charleston.

Laying low, until the final weeks of the campaign.

This is a strategy that rears its ugly head with the GOP because, frankly, it works.  We need to be aware and educated on this dirty trick.  Let your friends and neighbors know that Peter McCoy is not being forthcoming about his positions on issues, those votes that have not improved South Carolina and the Lowcountry in the years he has had the privilege of representing you.

And be aware, and make others aware, that while Peter presents himself as harmless and endearing, the people behind the money that feeds his campaign are not.  There are likely to be smears and just plain stupid insults, designed to create fear of voting for change.  Don't let it work this time.

South Carolina continues to hang onto the bottom of quality of life measures, and education continues to be underfunded.  As Carol would say, "Education=Jobs."  We are losing good teachers because they can earn a living wage in other states.  Our environment can be protected with adequate funds for infrastructure, and modern public transportation.

We need a state legislator that is honest and ethical.  Time to stop letting the GOP get away with playing games, like spreading innuendos and dirt, or hiding till October and then tossing a grenade at their opponents.

With just over three months to this election, it is time to spread the word, not just about the GOP dirty tricks, but about the good candidates that are running.  Carol Tempel is in this to improve and safeguard District 115, Charleston and the state of South Carolina, and she will be happy to talk to you about it.  She is not just asking you to trust her to do the right thing, she respects the people in her community enough to tell them what she plans to do when she gets to the State House.

Forced to run as an Independent in 2012, Carol came away with 31.9 percent of the vote.  I imagine the republican machine is working overtime to make sure they are armed and ready to fight her off again.  As Will Folks writes in FitsNews:  "There are one or two other competitive SC House races this November... so stay tuned for reports on those seats."  Reports, indeed.

Support her any way you can, because she is one of the great candidates that will actually work to make the changes that Peter McCoy will only make vague promises about.

Forgetting 2016

No, there wasn't a military parade this 4th of July.  But perhaps we Dems won't take back Congress in November, and that military parade will happen in 2019.

Meanwhile, Trump still has his rallies.  Taxpayer funded lunatic rants.  And each one is more rage fueled than the last.  Why not?  Each time he surrounds himself with his stupid and angry followers, he is guaranteed the same national attention he got before he won the presidency.

There have been mad, tyrannical leaders on the world stage in the past.  Who could forget Qaddafi's ninety minute bizarro rant at the United Nations in 2009?

The UN is a favorite stage for the lunatic leader.  Ahmadinahad's 2011 assaults on reality and the world were so offensive that there was a walkout by US and European delegations.

And now we have Trump.  Yes, after the election, the media reflected shamefully that maybe they should not have given him so much coverage.  But the ratings!  Who could take their eyes off this train-wreck in motion?  And yet, the end result was an electorate that had not heard a single Clinton speech while being fed the full blown ugliness of Trump's assaults day after day after day.

What we learned -- what I thought we had learned -- from the election coverage, was that Trump feeds on that coverage.  He may be stupid, but he knows how to play to the crowd.  And he knows that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

He is also batshit crazy.

Put that all together and we have the Trump rally.  He personally hates people.  But he adores his adoring crowds.  And surrounded by people cheering him on, there is nothing he can say that is too unhinged.  And surrounded by TV cameras, he cannot be happier.  Unless, of course, that he knew that those TV networks were going to be playing his insane attacks, name calling and lies, on a regular loop, all damn day.

They even call it "Trump's greatest hits."

Have we learned nothing???

I have been weaning myself from MSNBC and CNN.  Honestly, there isn't that much news being covered.  You can hear the headlines of Trump's daily obscenities in the first five minutes of any hour.  Yes, it is important to keep us informed about what is happening in Puerto Rico, a country neglected by Trump, still not recovered from last year's hurricanes as they anticipate the next one.  And we need to keep hearing about the horrendous abuses to immigrants and families seeking asylum, a humanitarian disaster caused by Trump and his gleeful attorney general.  Jobs being lost, prices going up, wages stagnating as Trump acts out his decades long fantasies about economic power.

We need to keep hearing about how our allies are now needing to defend themselves against our mad leader.  And what happens now that North Korea is doing what it has always done, lies as it pursues its plans to threaten and eventually dominate the Korean peninsula?  And then there is Putin, Trump's favorite dictator.  With no adults in the room to provide an honest reporting, we can be assured that Putin will be leading Trump around by his dick, I mean, promises of wealth and power (or at least a Trump hotel in Moscow).

We have some amazing investigative journalists, who have been uncovering scandal after larceny after lie after outrage.  It has been exhausting for those who worry about our democracy to keep up with the tragedies and the cons.  The last thing we need is for our news organizations to run Donald Trump's rallies on a never-ending loop.  We don't need to see them.

After one of the all-too-many mass shootings, some of the media decided that it was wrong to continue to use the shooter's name.  That kind of notoriety could only exacerbate the problem by encouraging other disturbed potential attackers.

It is not much different with putting a camera on Trump.

I was sickened yesterday when I began hearing the rants from his latest rally.  And then heard them again.  And again.  This morning I posted to @MSNBC to stop playing those vile and violent videos.  I won't watch them.  When he starts to screech and rage, call names and tell lies, I will turn off the television.

We should have insisted on more responsible reporting in 2016, but we didn't know any better.  Today we do.  I hope you will help me by telling your news outlets to stop promoting the goals of this disturbed and powerful dictator.  Tell them to stay on message, keep us informed, and treat the rallies and tweets as the fake news that they are.

The Ironic Cherry Reads... If It Hadn't Been for Dubya

Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights

by Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose

If you don't know Molly Ivins, you missed one of the great political writers of all time.  She came to my attention when I read a review of her collected articles entitled, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"  Molly Ivins once wrote about Texas politics, and with great gusto about the Texas legislature.  After writing in the Dallas Times Herald about one local politician, "if his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day," a number of humorless readers canceled their subscriptions.  To which the Times Herald put up billboards all around Dallas saying, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"  Yes, she could.

She had a wonderful wit and was fearless, lived life as I imagine a Texan would.  She had a great time mocking the idiots in the Texas legislature, so it was only natural that she would be the one to expose George W. Bush in all his ignorance and privilege.  She, along with Lou Dubose, wrote books about the Bush years entitled Shrub (his years as governor and campaign for president) and Bushwacked (the presidency).  Over the years, Molly maintained her sense of humor, but writing about the serious damage that was being done to our country became more dark and pronounced.

In 2007, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose published her last book, Bill of Wrongs, while Molly was dying of cancer.  In the acknowledgements, Dubose has the sad privilege of thanking her for her contributions to exposing injustices and attacks on our democracy throughout her life.  This book was her last attempt to warn us that our rights were under attack.  Molly begins the book talking about how she is less amused and more alarmed by the transgressions of the Bush administration.  For someone who lived her life laughing past the graveyard, this was something to take seriously.

When I hear people talk wistfully of the Dubya years, I find myself missing Molly more than ever.  We need her to give us a good shake, to remind us that without Bush, we would not have become so desensitized to losing our rights.  It was a slippery slope indeed, and on so many fronts.  As we talk about children in cages, we are not talking about the war on Muslims.  We try to fight for women, DACA children, African Americans, LGBTQ, and for gods' sake the New York Times and the Capital Gazette, but can't seem to keep up with the hatred being spewed and violations that are being made on each of us daily, by the twitter president and his partners in crime, the US Congress and the Supreme Court.

We keep reminding ourselves that this is not normal.  Yet after only 24 hours of the media talking about how the Democrats were going to fight Mitch McConnell's push to get another radical right wing supreme court justice on the bench, last night I heard a bunch of talking heads going through Trump's list of potential nominees, assessing them as though this was going to be a normal process.  More air time validating the unconstitutional consolidation of the three once independent branches of our government.

So, let me give you a quick run-through of Molly's reporting of the plundering of the Constitution that went on during the Bush years.

Before Bush, we could protest in view of the president.  During the Bush years, people began to get arrested at rallies for, one example, wearing a t-shirt that read:

This arrest, mind you, wasn't even at a rally; it was during an official presidential visit.  Celebrating the 4th of July.  As he gave a speech about "free thought, free expression."  Those were the days, when we had a president that really knew how to double-talk, with sincerity. 

Molly features South Carolina's own Brett Bursey in his fight for the right to protest, as Bush's own deplorables worked to create the "free speech zones" that now typically make certain that our free speech is hidden from view.

Bill of Wrongs was published in 2007, after years of dizzying changes brought about by the shock of 9/11.  After years of tyrants like Dick Cheney turning our fears into frenzy.  Terrifyingly, the PATRIOT Act that was pushed through Congress in 2003 is now just a fact of life, as we struggle with Russian interference and a president that welcomes it.  I was surprised to recall that the chillingly acronymed ICE -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- was only imagined and implemented in 2003.  As an arm of the creepily named "Department of Homeland Security," which itself was invented in 2002.  All just part of the government these days.  (Since the horrifying past weeks of children in cages, separated from their families, there has been a growing call for the end to ICE.  Infuriatingly, our own Congressional Democrats are walking it back, pleading for moderation.  What can I say?)

During the Bush years, it wasn't just political appointees that were chosen for their loyalty and ideology.  I recall some news about screening and litmus tests for judicial appointments, and a nation horrified.  Unlike the current stable genius who is raiding our democracy, Bush was shrewd enough to deny what he was doing; he knew he couldn't get away with such a flagrant abuse of power.  These days, the orange haired tyrant wants us all to know he is denying us our rights as he does it.  A short year or so ago we were appalled that he had demanded loyalty from his FBI Director; today we don't even blink at the thought of justice department toadies. That slippery slope gets steeper and ever more slippery.  And lest we give him too much credit, our republican Congress has been excluding its elected Democratic representatives from lawmaking since our first black president was elected.  Trump has no new bad ideas, he just flaunts the old ones. 

Way back in the aughts, we had journalists imprisoned for not giving up their sources.  We had unchecked government surveillance of American citizens.  There were Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, black sites, torture memos; that was when the right wingnut John Ashcroft and James Comey got to be heroes, when torture became "enhanced interrogation techniques," and they reached the limit of what they could tolerate.

We talk fondly about Bush defending Muslims after 9/11, but while he was saying the right things, the FBI was surveilling and falsely arresting people who happened to be Muslim; Ivins and Dubose describe Attorney Brandon Mayfield's arrest for the Madrid train bombings.  Sure he was Muslim...  And did you hear that?

But he was Muslim, but they were protesting, but she was crossing the border, but he looked dangerous...

Which brings up the subject of religious freedom.  It was probably Karl Rove who decided that Dubya should call himself a "compassionate conservative."  And the Bush administration happily gave over federal funds to Christian organizations to do the work of government.  We mostly didn't worry about it too much.  It was hard to see what was wrong with doing good.  Unless you are gay and can only appeal for help from a fundamentalist Christian group.  Or you are a young woman who needs contraceptive care (or an abortion, which our government has decided not to pay for decades ago, for religious reasons).

During the Bush years, our librarians fought for our right to privacy.  Many of them.  I worked at a library where the branch manager happily gave up the internet sign-up list because a rape suspect said he was at the library on the computer during the time of the assault.  She was tickled that she could be part of solving the crime.  We had patrons who were unhappy that we didn't keep records of what they had read (so they wouldn't have to...).

I hate to say this, but most of us these days don't understand what could happen if:  our library records, computer records, phone records become available.  We have allowed businesses from Facebook to AT&T to credit card companies to have access to our personal data.  It takes seconds online to apply for and receive a credit card.  Because they have all our information.

The despot-in-chief wanted a national database of our voter registration records, and most of us couldn't understand what the big fuss was about.  Which left our governors and state attorneys general on their own, fighting the fight for our right to a protected secret ballot.

Forget the slippery slope.  We went over the cliff when we allowed ourselves to be frightened and intimidated into The PATRIOT Act.  And if I were more knowledgeable about history, I could go back farther.  We have been complacent about our rights.  We have a government TODAY -- all three branches -- that are complicit in dismantling the Bill of Rights.

Oh, my, I had intended to write a summary of Molly's book, highlighting each area that our rights were violated during the Bush years... but I couldn't help but go into a rant.  So many outrages, so many injustices, so many egregious violations of our civil rights.

And it all started with George W. Bush.  Please take the time to read the book.  Ivins and Dubose have done an excellent job, in just 200 pages, of describing the harm that began with Bush and his own basket of deplorables, many of whom have stuck around and crawled out from under their rocks now that Trump has freed up the swamp for his own personal use.

Our wonderful library still has copies that survived the Henderson Purge (which began around the end of the Bush era).  And because libraries have only so much space, I urge you to check it out, because:  use it or lose it.

Bill of Wrongs is so very relevant and important today.  But go back farther into the beginnings of the political life of George W. Bush.  We need to be clear that without him we would not be tolerating Trump.  As Will Ferrell said in his reprise of Dubya, "I was really bad.  Like historically not good."

Molly Ivins is the journalist that painted the picture of what harm Dubya could do, with a laugh and then with alarm.  If only we had listened.  If only she were here now, to help us through these dark days.