Left Jabs

We don’t need Trump’s tax records to know he’s a con man. It's no secret that he’s a scam-artist, bamboozler, swindler, hustler, bunco artist, flimflam man. All his life, he has cheated, duped, rooked, squeezed, milked, hoodwinked, bilked, and hornswoggled gullible marks all over the world. Some of them banks. Some of them governments. The language of grift is almost as colorful as the language of money. Or sex. The number of synonyms for a word tends to be a leading indicator of our cultural fascination with the subject. And our fascination with fraudulent behavior goes back centuries. How many grifters, embezzlers, and other reprehensible types have we turned into Hollywood heroes? How many handsome actors have talked old ladies out of their life savings? Like all good con men, Trump puts on a beautiful presentation. He paints an enticing picture of a good life, a better life, a life you’d have made for yourself if only those other people hadn’t rig...

  Our country is in a dark place. How dark it ultimately gets remains to be seen, but optimism would be foolish. So would despair, which can be incapacitating. Yes, RBG’s death is a kick in the teeth, but it’s also an enormous distraction. All the machinations to replace her — when, how, and by whom — are going to play out in their own time, no matter what we do. The only certainty is that Mitch McConnell will do what he thinks best for him. Dwelling on the possible scenarios will only make us crazy, and our influence over events is limited. There are plenty of shiny objects demanding our attention, so let’s not chase too many. Because this is still, above all, about the election. No matter what we do, say, think, or fight about, this is the prize we absolutely must keep our eyes on. If Democrats can take over the Congress and the presidency, much of what’s happening now can be mitigated. But right now, the only thing that matters is removing these criminals from office. ...

The number six million has popped up twice in recent weeks. As a nation, we passed the six million mark in Covid cases. This is an ephemeral number that’s heading for seven million at breakneck speed. But there it was: six million cases. For anyone of Jewish heritage, the number six million jumps off the page. It is, of course, the approximate number of Jews who were exterminated in the Holocaust, a number deeply embedded in modern Jewish lore and, to some extent, the wider global culture. While most of the Holocaust survivors have now passed on, their children, grandchildren, and the wider world of Judaism still carry the horrors and humiliations as a persistent background hum to their lives. I’m sure RBG knew that hum well. Even for those far removed from the event itself, even for those as secularly inclined as I, there is real and lasting pain. But more than that, there’s the nagging reminder that anti-Semitism has always enjoyed widespread popularity, ev...

Here in the Detroit suburbs — where people wear their hearts on their lawns — the front yards are only now starting to blossom with signs. Full disclosure, after spending most of my adult life in New York City apartments, I am not fully attuned to lawn sign culture. For all I know, what I’m seeing is typical of other suburbs, or completely anomalous. But my perception is that there aren’t nearly as many signs as there were, even in 2018, a mid-term year. So what gives? I can ride my bike several blocks without seeing a single lawn sign. Will they proliferate as the election gets closer? Or is this an election where people are reluctant to declare their intentions? Michigan is an open carry state, after all. There are certainly fewer Trump/Pence signs than I thought there would be, but I’m guessing it’s getting hard for people to come out as Trump voters. Not that they won’t vote for him, just that they don’t want to advertise it. Some of these people instead put out John Jame...

In the last week or so, we’ve been treated to a cascade of moral atrocities, most of them indictments waiting to happen. Trump and his toadies are now all crime, all the time, and it’s getting really hard to keep up. There seems to be an accelerator effect in play, with more and more Trump-crime getting crammed into shorter and shorter news cycles. In rapid succession, we’ve heard from a variety of sources, all engaged in filling in the sordid details of what was already sordid enough. In rough chronological order, let’s review: First, Michael S. Schmidt of The Times told us that Robert Mueller did not investigate Trump’s financial ties to Russia. Nobody did. Nobody includes the Senate Intelligence Committee, which you’d think might have an interest in finding out if the president is a traitor. But nope, Rod Rosenstein killed that entire counterintelligence side of the probe, then kept it secret. Turns out Rosenstein is as reptilian as any of them, just smart...

  It isn't easy being a Republican these days. You have to harbor a deep suspicion of anything seen with your own eyes. You have to be able to change your beliefs, on a moment’s notice, to whatever the president tweets that day. You must have unusual dexterity, both intellectual and moral, and a gift for reconciling many questionable, if not criminal, activities. These skills are not easily acquired. But as malleable as you’re asked to be on a daily basis, there are some basic tenets you must consider immutable. These are embodied in the Republican Prime Directive: You shall hold no truths to be more self-evident than the word of Donald Trump and his appointed interpreters — Fox, Rush, Breitbart, OANN, etc. All other sources are fake news and must be ignored. Many commandments descend from the Prime Directive: ·        You shall believe that Covid-19 is simultaneously a hoax, a Chinese plot, and a minor problem not unlike the flu. That freedom from fac...

I’ve been saying for four years that the next presidential election was decided on the day after the last one. We’ll see if I’m right. I’m terrified of being wrong. Trump’s election was a smack upside the head for Democrats of all shapes and sizes. Since then, his flamboyant vandalism of what was once a pretty good nation makes them crazy. Myself included. Trump Derangement Syndrome may be a Fox News trope, but to me — and most of my fellow Democrats — it’s agonizingly real. A fetid stench that won’t go away. The morning after that election might’ve been the biggest WTF moment in American history. A wake-up call as stunning as any in our lifetimes, including 9/11. It was the day all those people who “don’t get into politics” suddenly realized they were into politics, whether they liked it or not. It was the day all those people who habitually stay home on election day — because after all “What difference does it make?” — found out what difference it makes. It was the day all those peop...

Call it the S-word, the dirtiest word in American politics. To say that socialism is vastly misunderstood doesn’t begin to state the case. It’s a word that has been cynically manipulated by all manner of right-wing nuts for roughly a century, and it never seems to lose its power to get them worked up. Yet they’ve largely succeeded in villainizing and undermining what is, ironically, a deeply embedded aspect of our society. The usual definitions just confuse the discussion. They tend to say something abstract like “Socialism is an economic system that promotes communal ownership of the means of production,” which is neither useful nor particularly accurate. In practical everyday terms, socialism is another word for government. In the “social democracies” of Europe, where it’s widely practiced to one extent or another — and where it’s anything but a dirty word — socialism describes the set of systems each government constructs to temper the excesses, and make up for the shortcomings, of ...

I started posting these rants on March 22 of this year. A little over six months ago. I wanted to put down some sort of account of life in the time of the plague, which even then was looking like an inflection point in world history. I didn’t know my writing would get so political, and while I had suspected that Trump would not be an astute manager of a major crisis, I’ve nonetheless been dumbstruck at the depths of his depravity. I am not alone. The first post I wrote was of my dread making a final trip to the supermarket, before what surely would be weeks of staying home. Weeks. What I didn’t notice at the time was what now seems as obvious as it is insane. Nobody was wearing a mask. We were being advised against it. We were being told it wouldn’t help, and it could hurt. Were we naïve or just trying to be good citizens? Probably both. We’ve come a long way. But my wife and I have been in a state of semi-lockdown ever since. We’re lucky, still. We’re still living at around 80 percent...