Deadly Hot Air

TUCSON – If Joe Biden has done as much for America as he claims, a snide Wall Street Journal editorial asked after his uplifting 73-minute State of the Union report, “why does most of America not seem to appreciate it?”

Well, one reason is the Journal itself. A carpetbagging ex-Australian Darth Vader weaseled his way to control of the once stately financial daily while weaponizing Fox News and the New York Post. But, of course, Rupert Murdoch is only part of it.

Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.

Elected leaders dissemble by nature, some far more than others. “All governments lie,” I.F. Stone observed decades ago, “but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Today in America, the problem is not hashish but rather hot air.

Days before Biden spoke, TV networks obsessed over a free-floating Chinese balloon no bigger than a few buses, like three others that went unnoticed during Trump’s tenure. A jet shot it down over shallow water so debris caused no damage and experts could examine it.

But Marco Rubio blasted Biden for dereliction of duty. The Republican chorus chimed in: what if it was a bomb to destroy America? It was pronounced a spy balloon, as if Chinese satellites couldn’t read tattoos on troops manning bases anywhere in America. And vice versa.

Antony Blinken had to scrap a trip to China, where he could have demanded answers while working to restore reasoned coexistence between superpowers. Instead, China cranked up the heat.

I am not actually on Biden’s payroll. I began touting him in 2016 when he talked about restoring America’s soul. I was thinking sole; he was a comfortable old shoe. He could compromise without caving at home. He had been everywhere, learning world realities and earning respect.

Yes, he is 80. Pretty soon I will be, too. A lot of us old guys can still tie our shoes. A seasoned hand could steer America into safer waters, then hand over a more decent, unified nation to new leaders of diverse background who he helped to season.

But I had no idea how badly Donald Trump would fracture America’s society, allow a plague to kill citizens en masse, trigger Vladimir Putin’s potentially nuclear war, embolden China to try remaking the world in its own image and set smoldering embers ablaze in the Middle East.

People obsess on Biden’s age, neglecting that Trump is only four years younger, couldn’t do a pushup without a forklift, and acts like a 5-year-old spoiled brat.

Against all odds, Biden picked up the pieces of NATO to arm Ukraine. He got Xi’s attention while salvaging what he could after Trump made Iran a bitter foe. His action to confront climate collapse revitalized global action after the United States abandoned the 2015 Paris accords.

Biden curbed runaway inflation, the result of Covid disruption and Ukraine. A growth spurt reduced joblessness to 3.4 percent. With the thinnest congressional edge in a century, he is doing more for working families and infrastructure than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

A letter to the Tucson daily caught the mood among many of the 27.6 million Americans who bothered to watch the speech: “I am so comforted and relieved to hear a competent, caring, hardworking president who displays decorum, while offering a vision for the America I remember…”

Seasoned analysts on CNN and MSCBC pronounced it a Biden best-of. It was riveting at times, laced with self-deprecating humor and provable fact. When Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled from the floor, he smiled indulgently as the nation got a firsthand look at the alternative.

At times, both sides of the House rose to cheer work in progress he needs reelection to complete. Nancy Pelosi received thundering applause for her work in the speaker’s chair, which Kevin McCarthy reduced to a foot stool to satisfy his fragile ego.

Afterward, for the few minutes my stomach allowed, I watched Sean Hannity deride a “stumbling, mumbling” old fool who has destroyed the booming economy Trump left behind. Republicans he interviewed assailed a crushing national debt they would have to slash.

A quarter of that $31 trillion debt Republicans rail about was run up during Trump’s single term. Biden is now whacking away at it while Republicans gut the IRS. They push for yet lower taxes as they block Democrats’ attempts to make the über-rich pay a fairer share.

Plans are afoot to fix 70,000 miles of highways and rebuild the 150-year-old Hudson Tunnel that chokes off New York. But Americans tend not to see beyond their own line of sight. Rather than focusing on existential threats, Biden is forced to persuade voters to let him finish the job.

Look at who is waiting in the wings. Trump may finally face justice for the highest of crimes and the most ignoble misdemeanors. If not, the alternative is likely worse: perhaps a housebroken nativist demagogue like Ron DeSantis motivated by blind ambition rather than a Bill of Rights.

And that gets to the heart of America’s challenge. Presidents have enough to do fulfilling their oath to the citizens who hire them: to keep the nation prosperous, safe from internal and foreign threats. Once elected, having to sell themselves is crippling distraction.

Until recent times, press secretaries did their job. Reporters asked questions; they answered. If they demurred, questions got hostile. If they lied, or shut out honest journalists to call on sycophants, they were soon gone. Or, in Richard Nixon’s case, the president was.

Trump changed all that. The Republican response to Biden came from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, coiffed and made over as if no one remembered her days as Trump’s junkyard dog, who bullied reporters – remember, the Fourth Estate? – and echoed her boss’s unconscionable lies. In her short career as a Fox hound, she mocked the early stutter Biden overcame.

Sanders said she was America’s youngest governor. More specifically for anyone who missed the point: I am 40; Joe Biden is 80. So? Her background amounts to a B.A. from Ouachita Baptist University, politicking for her evangelical father and toadying to Trump.

Bill Clinton was also Arkansas governor at 40. And in an earlier term, at 36. He had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and after Yale Law School the state attorney general. He faced a full-on impeachment for a consenting affair with an adult intern, hardly analogous to Trump’s trials for extorting a Ukraine faced with war and attempting to steal a presidential election.

Al Gore stepped aside rather than fight a dubious vote count in Florida. He could have rallied the world against climate collapse and likely averted conflict with diplomacy. When a small band of terrorists struck on 9/11, dysfunctional “news media” allowed George W. Bush to needlessly set Iraq ablaze.

In retrospect, much is made of Izzy Stone’s truth-seeking weekly report, but less so his son, Jeremy. For decades he was president of the American Federation of Scientists, bound by observable facts and logical conclusions.

“If something goes wrong with government, a free press will ferret it out and it will get fixed,” he once wrote, “but if something goes wrong with the free press, the country will go straight to hell.”

Free doesn’t only mean unfettered. This is my constant theme. With time and trouble, anyone can find solid facts and sensitive reportage on just about any subject that matters. But talk about needles in haystacks.

As cliché has it, journalism is the first draft of history. But it takes time for historians and scholars to pore over the past. If we don’t get the story straight in the present, there is not likely to be much future.

Upcoming Mort Reports will look hard at global news coverage. At best, it adds up to limited samplings of complex realities. Our most reliable sources are our own eyes and ears, along with common-sense context from thoughtful reading. “Headline news” only confuses.

Good reporters triangulate by starting with one solid source and confirming it with others. When something has a whiff of bullshit, that’s probably what it is.

One useful guideline appears in Sanders’ Wikipedia entry. After the January 6 attack, Forbes warned corporations against hiring Sanders or other Trump propagandists. The editor wrote: “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

Sanders got one thing correct in her speech, if characteristically twisted: “The choice is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal and crazy.”

A grasp on reality won’t help unless it translates into action that gets informed voters to the polls. Most people who watched Biden’s speech were over 50, skewed toward Democrat. In the midterms, 74 percent of eligible voters aged between 18 and 30 did not cast a ballot.

Opposition parties are crucial in a functioning democracy. But those old founders America reveres set safeguards meant for an earlier time. The Electoral College and states’ rights now make it easy for the crazies to prevail.

Beyond the usual far-right media, many millions are bombarded daily in podcasts, radio rants and “newsletters” with murderous hateful blood libel. Because of gerrymandering and voter suppression, only a few swing states can make the difference in a presidential election.

We now know in stunning detail how far Trump’s attorney general went to distort and then undermine Robert Mueller’s damning revelations on Russian meddling. Merrick Garland finally may – or may not – take action.

Garland should be on the Supreme Court with other deliberative jurists who are free of political pressure rather than incompetents unable to isolate personal biases from national interests. Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers should not have to fall on their swords to do the right thing.

Down Alice’s rabbit hole, things don’t work that way. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were booted off the House Select Intelligence Committee, replaced by vengeful partisans, clueless about the real world. I am just getting started, but no one with a conscience and a family needs an endless rant.

In the end, just remember Hitler came to power in a democratic state, where people fretted about high prices and suspicious outsiders in their midst. All that Goebbels’ propagandists had to work with were crackling radios, a few daily papers and rallies that harped on his Big Lie.

If Biden is hardly perfect, he is a lot more than hot air. And he may be America’s last hope.