Tag Archives: Dick Cheney

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

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If the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump — and there’s zero doubt that’s what Trump wants them to do — they’re going to have to be a hell of lot better storytellers than they’ve been so far.

All the reasons not to impeach Trump remain as valid as they’ve ever been.

A: No amount of evidence will convince the Republican controlled-Senate to convict him. As headlines go, he will be found “innocent.”

B: The “verdict”/acquittal will be strung out by Trump’s legal team and Mitch McConnell to conclude dramatically in the heat of next year’s election season, allowing Trump to rant with true finality, “Total exoneration!”

C: As infuriated as every anti-Trump voter will become over the course of the process, there’s no reason to believe the critical fraction of voters who pay little to no attention to details will respond in any other way than by voting in Trump’s favor in 2020.

D: Impeachment will be the only topic every Democratic candidate will be asked about and judged on until election day 2020.

If you are “the chaos candidate” (tutored and guided by the international maestro of chaos, Vladimir Putin), the all-consuming, total partisan warfare of impeachment with certain acquittal is a dream campaign strategy.

That said, Elizabeth Warren and others are absolutely correct when they say Democrats have a constitutional obligation, based only on what is known about the Mueller report today, to bring charges against Trump, politics be damned.

The essential issue is storytelling, which in modern America does not come in the form of a legalistic, 448-page government document, or blockbuster reporting like the two New York Times stories on Trump’s freakishly fraudulent tax-filings. Big complicated stories — a bit like “Game of Thrones” — are best presented on television, serially, regularly, with heavy advance marketing, an eye and ear for sympathetic characters and shrewdly ascending drama.

Raise your hand if you think today’s Democrats have that skill set.

In addition to the enormous obstacles everyone can see in plain sight, (the GOP Senate looking at Trump’s 91% approval among their voters), Democrats have to be aware of what lurks hidden beneath the surface.

A lot of what explains Bill Barr’s behavior — a 68 year-old establishment Republican coming back to go all-in for a flagrant fool and scoundrel like Trump — has to do with his sympathy for the power game as played most recently by Dick Cheney. Barr’s “go [bleep] yourself” attitude toward both Congress and legal tradition is a step-for-step repeat of Cheney’s reign “under” George W. Bush. (I refer everyone interested to Bart Gellman’s “Angler” for a full dramatic narrative of The Cheney Process.)

More to the point — and this is absolutely critical — as Bill Barr plays lead pharisee for a fundamental restructuring of American governmental (and economic) power, he can draw confidence that McConnell, with the conservative and highly influential Federalist Society, have now thoroughly stocked most levels of the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court, with judges sympathetic to their belief system. This is key to support of the so-called Unitary Executive Theory.

As of 2019 the court stocking is so thorough — or at least adequate — that (Republican) presidents truly are immune to any kind of traditional criminal prosecution. The guess is Barr believes that there are now enough judges on “the team” that the wheels of investigation can be gummed up, delayed and conflicted so badly that the only likely result of anything as supposedly conclusive as impeachment is … confusion.

Mitch McConnell, accurately reading the changing demographics of America, where white Americans are rapidly diminishing toward minority status, has long understood that gaming and stocking the judicial system is the best (only?) way to sustain control over American culture well past the point Republicans are able to win presidential elections … by normal means.

However Democrats imagine impeachment playing out, are they truly prepared to deal with how far outside the bounds of good faith, normal politics and litigation McConnell will take Republicans to protect Trump?

I have no confidence that they do.

Democrats are still playing the game as though the rules matter, while McConnell, Barr and others are quite literally writing new rules on the fly.

But … good storytelling is as powerful an emotional device today as it was around the cave fires of the Neolithic age. The Trump-Russia saga has so many primary characters, so many sub-plots, supporting characters and red herrings, unless you’re a sad nerd consuming this episode daily like a tele-novela (guilty) it’s mostly a blur.

Democrats would be smart to seek out some crowd-sourced expertise from professionals with a demonstrated talent for strategic storytelling. When to play up or play down certain characters and information. Key emotional plot lines. Where personality matters. Likewise, they have to conceive of a way to advance their investigation beyond the realms that Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr can control.

The normal, traditional judicial system is not going to be their friend in this matter.

“American Sniper”: Giving Ticket Buyers a War They Can Enjoy

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI finally got around to seeing “American Sniper”. It was last Friday night in Phoenix, which I mention only because if you’re familiar with Arizona’s largest city, you know there’s rarely a day that goes by without some unholy gathering of big-bellied white guys with weird facial hair milling around a “Gun Expo”, a “Gun Swap Meet” or a “Bullet Circus”, or whatever. Arizona loves guns and all the debate about “American Sniper” aside, what it is selling on the most fundamental level is the thrill of righteous gun vengeance. Take away the smoking hardware and the film’s box-office would drop 90%.

That said, the movie, directed by good ol’ Clint Eastwood, is as slick a piece of big time Hollywood filmmaking as you’ll ever see. Terrific editing, great sound work, top notch art direction, a decent script and solid performances from Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller. Warner Brothers, seeing the near perfect box office fusion of Eastwood, hot young star Cooper and a memoir/”true story” of a goddam bona fide American hero who happened to be the deadliest, baddest mutha of our adventure in Iraq, popped for an enormous budget, which Eastwood got up on the screen. (Warners’ investment has paid off handsomely. The film has done astonishing business for a January general release.)

The theater in Phoenix, an enormous 2000-plus seat “UltraStar” auditorium, was packed to capacity, and while there was no yahoo cheering at the moment when our hero picks off his rival sniper … at a preposterous 2100 meters through a shimmering heat haze … the crowd did sit in rapt attention during the end credits, as real world footage ran of sniper Chris Kyle’s actual funeral in Dallas two years ago. (The whacking of “Mustafa”, a character barely mentioned in the book and never listed among Kyle’s 160-plus “confirmed kills”, is almost entirely a Hollywood invention. For that matter, the US Military has a pretty loose system for “confirming” sniper shootings.)

I confess, I have not read “American Sniper”, despite the attention it got here in Minnesota during Jesse Ventura’s successful defamation case against Kyle last summer. I have as much interest in military memoirs as I do bodice-ripping romance novels, although the latter might actually hew closer to reality. (Kyle clearly had a problem with details. His own sense of his “legend” may well have overwhelmed him.)

Anyway, the point here is to simply to say that while the movie is not some patently ridiculous piece of gun-crazed jingoism, it suffers by copping out on elephant-in-the-room realities that are, unlike so much of Kyle’s story, completely and lamentably verifiable.

No doubt Eastwood, a shrewd judge of mainstream American tastes, loved the thought of packaging an exciting contemporary combat film around, “one man’s story.” No need to muss with broader history and politics. Just tell this guy’s story. (In fact, it appears that it was Bradley Cooper who bought the rights to Kyle’s book and then got it to Eastwood.) By dialing out the rather enormous and fundamental question of, “What in the hell were we and this guy doing in Iraq?”, audiences are allowed to remain comfortably unchallenged, which is to say entertained by the action and splatter and moved by the effect it has on unassuming, easy-going, unfailingly polite Kyle’s mental stability and marriage.

I’m sorry. The far, far braver (and commercially problematic) thing for Warner Brothers and Eastwood to have done would be to work in a deeper assessment of Kyle’s good ‘ol Texas boy blind faith in his country’s war-making decisions and at least some reflection, like say after the Weapons of Mass Destruction canard was fully understood, on why (at the very least) they’re not over in Afghanistan hunting Osama bin Laden.

Personally, I found it very interesting that there is no reference to either Dick Cheney or George W. anywhere in “American Sniper”. In the film, Kyle watches the World Trade Center collapse and the next thing you know, as though it was ordained by national acclamation, he and his pals are kicking ass in … Iraq. I.e. direct linkage.

Constructed as it is, Eastwood cannily evokes an audience response that is more somber than flat-out celebratory. War is hell Who does not agree? But a braver filmmaker and lesser businessman would have felt a responsibility to take Kyle’s story (more or less as he told it to his ghostwriters) and stir in the context of what we now recognize was one of the most misguided foreign policy disasters and most poorly-planned military campaigns in American history.

Those are details you can verify.

From Redskins to Warriors?

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The professional football team in Washington, D.C. has an offensive mascot, the Redskins. There have been endless debates about the historic use of the name.  Some argue the name “redskins” was used as a slur and to refer to bounties on Native American scalps, while others say the usage has been more benign.  But historic usage aside, if the name is offensive to the Americans it depicts, it is offensive to keep using it.

Because of a recent court ruling removing trademark protection for “redskins,” the name may finally change in the fairly near future. That’s a good thing.  But according to a survey by the Huffington Post, the favorite to replace Washington Redskins is Washington Warriors (57% support).  That’s a bad thing.

Washington_Warriors_logos“Warriors” has long been pushed heavily in social media.  The suggestion is often accompanied by a logo depicting the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. Other options show  soldiers in video game style art.

We’re all eager for this debate to be over, but I have to say I hate this idea.

If the U.S. only entered necessary wars, such as World War II, I would be slightly more comfortable with this. But the fact is, over the last half century, the military industrial complex that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about, has made a habit of regularly leading us into a series of  unnecessary wars that have had tragic consequences for brave American soldiers and the entire nation.

Part of the way the neoconservatives and defense contractors promote profit-generating military interventions is to glorify wars and warriors with cartoonish depictions like those used in the Washington Warriors logos.   Haliburton’s version of “support our troops” is to send young kids to unnecessary wars, and then salute them at sporting events. My version of “support our troops” is to keep our troops the hell out of unnecessary wars. Haliburton’s version is carrying the day, and that needs to stop.

There are 15 cabinet level departments in the federal government. Others promote learning, economic security, scientific discovery,  natural resource management,  environmental protection, justice, law enforcement, and health improvement. Those are heroic pursuits in their own right, so why does the department responsible for getting us mired in Vietnam and Iraq get singled out for glorification?  Of all the things we want our nation’s capitol to be known for, we choose it’s checkered record of war-making?

Relax, I wouldn’t advocate naming the football team after any of those departments or their work. There are hundreds of possibilities, so digging into the bureaucracy for the name isn’t necessary.

But the last thing America needs is more glorification of the military industrial complex’s war-making machine.   We have had enough of making bloody wars look like a cartoon video game back home.  We have had enough of wars that are rarely fought by the sons and daughters of those getting us into the wars.  We have enough American men and women unnecessarily maimed and killed. We’ve had enough of federal debt driven by trillions of dollars in unnecessary wars.

Starting with the name of Washington’s football team, let’s stop glorifying all of that. Just stop.

– Loveland