Rewind to 1979 and President Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” (a word he never actually uttered) speech after he came down from Camp David and informed Americans that we suffered from an overabundance of angst.
 
Whatever anxiety we felt in 1979 was nothing compared to what we feel today. In contrast, 1979’s rampaging inflation and Iran hostage situation look like the halcyon days of yore compared to 2023.
 
Today we have much to be anxious about:

• Russian aggression against Ukraine, led by an increasingly isolated and paranoid thug who threatens to use nuclear weapons.
• A new Cold War with China that may prove difficult to keep from morphing into a hot war.
• Extremists taking over the U.S. House of Representatives, threatening to blow up both the U.S. and global economy while focusing on bogus investigations instead of the nation’s problems.
• Lowering of the congressional ethics bar to depths that make even limbo dancing impossible.
• Social media encouraging wild conspiracy theories and virulent hate.
• A gun culture gone so crazy that it makes Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders (google it) look like a Zen convention.
• Advances in Artificial Intelligence that threaten the livelihoods of millions of people and encourage students to cheat.
• Virulent diseases against which we have no warning and less protection, exacerbated by anti-vaxxers and a major political party hostile to science.
• Politics so polarized that the extremist wings of each faction want to see the other party wiped from the planet.
• A climate gone bonkers, accompanied by escalating climate denial on social media.
• A former president who is an existential threat to the underpinnings of this country while skittish prosecutors hesitate to bring him to account.
• Confirmation of the increasingly strongly held suspicion that there are, in fact, individuals who are above the law.
• A lopsided tax regime that favors the super-wealthy at the expense of everyone else and fuels obscene income and wealth inequality.
• A broken healthcare system.
• More than 100,000 people dying of opioid addiction every year amidst a prohibitively expensive “War on Drugs” that we have been losing for 50 years.
• A chaotic immigration regime that congressional Republicans resist fixing because repairing it would deprive them of an issue they believe wins them votes.
• Rising racism and anti-Semitism encouraged by irresponsible political leaders and generating an epidemic of hate crimes.
• Democracy under siege here and around the world.
• Millions of homeless Americans.
• A party that intrudes into the most intimate decisions a woman must make while violently objecting to salutary public health measures such as vaccination.
• Librarians who must resort to hiding books.

 
Appalled by what we face, people increasingly retreat into their own cocoons, thus allowing the perpetrators of these ills to continue to damage our lives, our livelihoods and our institutions without electoral or legal consequences for the evils they inflict.
 
Congressional Republicans do not appear to have much interest in tackling our many problems. Responsible conservatism has lost out to performance art.
 
Meanwhile, the downbeat goes on. We can only hope it does not beat us to death.
 
Dick Hermann
February 5, 2023
​

Since the public has neither the time nor patience to parse the differences between the Trump, Biden and Pence classified document situations, here they are:

• It does not appear that Biden or Pence intentionally took classified documents from the White House when their Vice Presidential terms ended. It looks very much like whichever staffers boxed up their papers bundled the lot of them into boxes without examining them one-by-one.
  
  ​Trump, in contrast, intentionally made off with more than 300 classified documents, many of which were Top Secret/SCI, the highest classification there is, and may include some of the most super-sensitive material extant. They were found among a boatload of other documents that, by law, should have been turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration. The very volume of documents he took with him (11,000+) and his subsequent behavior regarding turning them over strongly implies that he intended to take them.

 

• Thus far, it does not appear that Biden or Pence removed any classified  documents from their cover sheets or did anything untoward with the contents.
  
  The cover sheets of numerous Trump classified documents appear to have been removed from their contents, raising questions about what happened to these materials. Could they now be in Russia and/or Saudi Arabia.
  
  
• Biden and Pence understand that they cannot keep these documents. As soon as they were discovered, they were turned over to the Archives and the Department of Justice.
  
  Trump asserts ownership over his classified documents despite the clear language of the law stating that he does not own them. He refers to them as “cool keepsakes.”
  
  
• Trump also asserts that he declassified everything he absconded with, by merely thinking it. That is not the way declassification works.
  
  Neither Biden nor Pence make such a fanciful claim. Trump, FYI, is wrong in asserting that only the President can declassify documents. The Vice President, among others, also has such authority but again, it cannot be a case of simply “make it so.
  
  
• It was the National Archives that discovered that Trump made off with a massive haul of documents, and then made multiple requests that they be returned. After many months, Trump grudgingly returned 15 boxes, but refused to return the rest.
  
  Biden and Pence returned the documents to the Archives immediately upon their discovery.
  
  
• After getting no cooperation from Trump regarding the rest of the documents in his possession, the Archives asked the Justice Department to intervene. Trump then refused to comply with Justice’s subpoena, thus forcing the FBI to execute a search warrant for Mar a Lago following 18 months of Trump’s obstructionism.
  
  Biden and Pence are fully cooperating with the Archives and Justice Department. They both invited the FBI to search their houses.
  
  
• Trump lied to the Archives and Justice Department about having turned over all the documents he stole, falsely certifying that they had all been turned over.
  
  Biden and Pence complied fully with the law regarding return of the documents.
  
  
• Trump was observed tearing up documents while President and flushing some down White House toilets. Moreover, some Trump documents had been mutilated.
  
  To our knowledge, no Biden White House toilets have been clogged with classified documents requiring the services of a plumber. None of the returned Biden and Pence documents have been mutilated.
  
  
• It does not appear that Biden or Pence are going to be prosecuted for any illegal activity surrounding the discovery of classified documents in their possession, as there are not likely to be any findings of intent.
  
  Trump unambiguously violated a number of criminal laws with respect to his classified document cache beyond illegally keeping them. While he merits prosecution, the Biden and Pence discoveries may make it more difficult politically to go after him.

 
This is not to say that Joe Biden and Mike Pence are somehow absolved of blame and condemnation for their sloppiness. Any lower-level federal employee who took classified documents home would probably be quickly indicted, convicted and jailed for so doing. So much for the well-worn assertion (that should be permanently retired) that “no man is above the law.”
 
Despite that, the public’s limited capacity for nuance (intentionality vs. inadvertence) means that it is highly probable that a false equivalency will be made regarding the Trump, Biden and Pence classified documents cases. While the differences in legal exposure are dramatic, the political consequences are not likely to be.
 
Dick Hermann
January 29, 2023

​“Stupid is as stupid does.”
--Forrest Gump
 
Neighboring states New York and Pennsylvania experienced two very different midterm election outcome disappointments. In both cases, the blame for the terrible results for New York Democrats and Pennsylvania Republicans is squarely on the parties’ themselves.
 
Republicans blew a golden opportunity to take back the governorship of swing-state Pennsylvania while also retaining its Senate seat. New York, the bluest of blue states, saw Democrats botch their huge advantage and contribute more than any other state to turn the U.S. House of Representatives Republican.
 
The Pennsylvania GOP is conducting a completely pointless post-mortem, paying over $1 million to outside political strategists to determine what happened and to propose solutions to prevent it happening again. It does not take a team of political pundits to understand what happened. Simply put, don’t nominate election-denying, Trump-loving candidates like extremist Doug Mastriano for governor and a TV snake oil promoter from out-of-state, Mehmet Oz, for senator. Instead, put up mainstream candidates that don’t offend the large and increasing number of voters disgusted by Trump’s chaos and indecency. If Pennsylvania Republicans behaved like a normal political party, it would cost them nothing.
 
The New York case is more complicated. Without diving too much into the weeds, here is what happened: Democrats’ death wish first manifested itself when the party clearly overreached. Rejecting the so-called independent redistricting commission’s maps, their legislative super-majorities redrew the redistricting maps, despite both court decisions and numerous warnings that, in attempting essentially to clear the map of Republicans, they went too far. When the courts shot down the maps and substituted their own, New York was left with perhaps the most competitive congressional districts in the nation. Republicans, consequently, flipped four seats and took the House.
 
In New York, it helped immensely that Democrats also ran lackluster campaigns, the worst of which was in the Third District where Republican George Santos (assuming that’s his real name) won a contest he should have lost by double digits. There was no excuse for bungling this race, especially given that Democrats had two shots at uncovering Santos’s voluminous lies since this was his second attempt at running for Congress. They would not even have had to exert themselves to discover that Santos is a total fraud of Trumpian proportions, had they only paid any attention to a local newspaper that did the work for them.
 
New York Democrats are now stuck with a terrible redistricting hand for the remainder of the decade. They could, however, divest themselves of the monumentally incompetent party functionaries that led them down the rabbit hole to electoral ruin. And they could vastly improve the quality of their opposition research, assuming that they bothered to perform such analysis in the first place.
 
Now both Pennsylvania Republicans and New York Democrats must live with the consequences of their arrogance and hubris. Sadly, in the New York case, the impact of the Democrats’ mess-up is nationwide.
 
Dick Hermann
January 20, 2023

There is a lot to unpack from the farcical and at the same time scary Republican exertions to produce a House Speaker. However, the most surprising impression to come out of the 15-ballot clown show that finally elected Kevin McCarthy was that he still retained any traces of a soul left to sell. This is the much diminished fellow who, after quite properly condemning Donald Trump for his treasonous attempted coup d’état two years ago quickly reversed himself and scurried down to Mar a Lago to kiss Trump’s ring…or whatever.
 
Anyone with even a smidgen of self-respect would have done the honorable thing and given up trying so desperately to become Speaker after a couple of rejections, but not Kevin. He had to realize his life’s dream regardless of any demands made on him by the neo-fascist wing of the Republican Party, the self-styled Freedom Caucus. This gaggle of election-denying, authoritarian-craving performance artists have zero interest in policy and are in Congress only to tear down the institution and get themselves on TV courtesy of Carlson, Ingraham and Hannity, Fox News’s stooge triumvirate.
 
McCarthy’s surrender to the Freedumbers’ outrageous demands was, like Germany’s and Japan’s at the end of World War II, absolute and unconditional. By relinquishing his power and authority to these disrupters, he—and we—can look forward to two years of likely congressional chaos, assuming against the odds that he lasts that long wielding the Speaker’s now Dali-esque gavel. It is the will of this minority that will prevail when McCarthy even hints at doing anything they don’t condone.
 
But not to worry. Kevin’s history of servile subservience indicates that he won’t come close to crossing the Clown-and-Kook Caucus. It’s nowhere near his nature to take a bold, much less principled, stand regardless of the damage to his rapidly shrinking stature. He is now their shameless tool to do with whatever they want. His only objective is to be Speaker, not to do anything constructive with the office.
 
Here is a list of mostly destructive concessions and promises McCarthy made to the Freedumbers to win the gavel:

• Any member can call for a motion to vacate (i.e., a no confidence vote) the speaker’s chair. Translated, any member of the House can initiate the process of bringing Kevin down. He will do whatever is necessary to keep the job regardless of the damage this might cause.
• Kevin pledged to allow House votes on key right-wing bills, most of which are less legislation and more performance art for the MAGA folks back home.
• When the infernal debt ceiling bill looms (sometime this summer), efforts to raise it must be paired with spending cuts. Democrat-favored programs would be targeted. If the debt ceiling bill runs into trouble, causing the U.S. to default on its debt payments, say goodbye to the global economy.
• Freedumb Caucus representation on key committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee. Look for the worst of the worst reactionaries from the Gaetz-Boebert-Greene wing of the GOP cult to be appointed to these committees.
• Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor and thus, drag out debate ad infinitum.
• Make it easier to pass tax cuts (yes, Republicans are still in thrall to the often-debunked trickle-down theory) and harder to pass spending bills.
• Restore the rule that allows Congress to reduce the salary of government officials (to be used to threaten or punish Feds [including civil servants] that the Freedumb Caucus doesn’t like).
• Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government, whatever that means (probably more “deep state” fantasies). Two of their announced targets: the January 6 Committee and the Justice Department, which means that the investigated will investigate the investigators investigating them!

 
There are likely a bunch of additional, secret agreements that, like the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, are even more toxic and disruptive than the ones we know about.
 
These concessions render McCarthy a cipher, the weakest Speaker in the history of the office. That’s fine with Kevin, as long as he can wallow in the glory of being called “Mr. Speaker.”
 
Dick Hermann
January 13, 2023

​The 2024 presidential election campaign will begin in earnest all too soon. With this in mind, we need to contemplate the most important attribute a president must bring to the most powerful office on the planet.
 
The Constitution imposes only three qualifications that a president must meet: being (1) a natural-born U.S. citizen, (2) a resident of the U.S. for 14 years, and (3) at least 35 years of age. In addition, there is one unwritten requirement that voters need to put at the top of their list. Could you trust this person to decide on directing the use of nuclear weapons?
 
America was fortunate for most of its Cold War history to have selected presidents who took this awesome power and responsibility deadly seriously. Harry Truman, the only man who ever actually approved the use of nuclear weapons, did so because he believed that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki would save lives. His only alternative, he believed, was an invasion of the Japanese home islands, an action his military advisors told him would cost at least 500,000 American lives plus millions of Japanese lives. Dwight Eisenhower resisted the temptation to use nukes in response to China’s threats against Taiwan, and advocated the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes (“Atoms for Peace”). Despite his military background, he was our most anti-war post-World War II president. Jack Kennedy eschewed a nuclear response to the Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons and delivery systems 90 miles away in Cuba, overruling the unanimous opinion of his entire group of military and civilian advisors. Lyndon Johnson vetoed the use of tactical nukes in Vietnam to stop Hanoi from supplying the Viet Cong. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (who knew more about nuclear weapons than anyone who ever occupied the Oval Office) vigorously sought nuclear arms reduction agreements with the Soviets. Upon assuming office, Ronald Reagan wrote that he was overwhelmed by the realization that he had the sole authority to go to DefCon One (global thermonuclear war). Both Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were acutely aware of the awesome power and the vital restraints that come with the presidency.
 
And then there was Donald Trump. His erratic, impulsive nature combined with his ignorance regarding both nuclear weapons (he wanted to use them against hurricanes!) and their history terrified both congressional leaders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They worried with good reason that, in the interregnum between the November 2020 elections and the inauguration of a new president, Trump was dangerously unhinged to the extent that he could not be trusted to refrain from blowing up the planet.
 
The lesson from this is that we cannot allow a Trump-like, reckless individual anywhere near the nuclear button. Unfortunately, our candidate selection process does not weed out madmen. And it is clear from both the 2016 and 2020 elections that tens of millions of voters either don’t understand the dangers associated with putting an oblivious lunatic in power or, perhaps unbelievably, don’t care.
 
There is no way, aside from the remote possibility of amending the Constitution, to impose additional qualifications for presidential office to guarantee that a sane, sober, mature individual will always be the one to make such a world-altering decision. The responsible media must fill this void by picking apart the character, intellect and life experience of prospective candidates and report their findings to voters. And voters owe it to themselves and the nation to discount media that promote unfit candidates.
 
Dick Hermann
January 6, 2023

George Santos, the newly elected representative from New York’s Third Congressional District, has admitted that he fabricated virtually all of the information on his resumé: education, work experience, finances, family background. The only truthful statement on this bogus document might be his name, but I wouldn’t necessarily take even that to the bank. Oh, did I mention that he also does not live in the Third District?
 
In interviews, after he duped voters into electing him under false pretenses, he admitted that he “embellished his resumé.” Embellished??? The resumé claims--

• he graduated from two institutions of higher learning that have no record of him ever being a student;
• he worked at two high-powered Wall Street firms that have no record of such employment;
• he and his family own 13 rental properties (which they don’t);
• and so much more.

 
Santos, however, did not stop inventing with just his resumé. His financial disclosure forms also appear to be direct from fantasyland.
 
The capstone on the fictional character he created was an appeal to the large Jewish population of his district based on his being a member of the tribe and his grandparents being Holocaust survivors (they somehow did this while never leaving Brazil). This is deeply offensive to those of us who really did lose family in the Holocaust.
 
It would be interesting to know what his constituents are saying now that they know they elected a fraud. But wait, this is nothing new. Didn’t Americans elect as president the biggest fraud of all time? Not to mention the hundreds of Republican members of Congress who even today continue to parrot Trump’s lies about a stolen election? Santos only lies when his lips and pen move. He will, however, really have to exert himself to approach the 30,573 lies Trump told while president.
 
Being a pathological liar like Trump is not exactly a deviation from the current Republican norm. On the contrary, Santos is a perfect fit for the GOP. This is the party cult, after all, that is all in with QAnon delusions about Democratic child sex traffickers, deep state pipedreams and attempts to pin the January 6 insurrection on either (a) leftists masquerading as Trumpites, or (b) Capitol “tourists” who did nothing wrong.
 
No organization tolerates lying on a resume. If federal employees do it, they can lose their jobs and also be tried for and convicted of perjury. Not, however, elected officials. There are no penalties for uncontrolled lying to win public office.
 
One has to wonder how a pathological liar could become a serious candidate for high office. Surely, the Republican establishment knew Santos was a scam artist long before the election. Apparently they didn’t care. All that counted was the pursuit of power, integrity be damned. See, for example, the many other GOP liars who ran for office in the recent mid-term elections.
 
But we must also wonder about the efficacy of Democratic opposition research, a component of every federal campaign. Uncovering the truth about George Santos’ litany of lies should have been easy pickings. The North Shore Leader, a tiny weekly Long Island newspaper, raised enough suspicions about Santos’ fabrications to alert both larger media outlets and his Democratic opponent.
 
Kevin McCarthy, of course, has not commented on Santos’ lies. He desperately needs his vote to be elected Speaker. Silently or even overtly condoning, and even applauding, lies and fraud is what Republican office holders now do. George Santos fits the mold perfectly.
 
Dick Hermann
December 30, 2022

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered his Churchillian address to Congress on December 21st, he was denied a full house. The 127 empty seats were all on the Republican side of the House chamber. Of those Republicans who did attend, seven—all charter members of the oxymoronic “Freedom Caucus”—Representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Clyde, Diana Harshbarger, Warren Davidson, Michael Cloud and Jim Jordan, remained seated during the many standing ovations Zelenskyy received. They doubled down on their disrespect by not participating when applause was warranted. Three Republican Senators also did not attend Zelenskyy’s speech--Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), he of the January 6th fist-pump, and a few hours later, his cockroach-like scurry out of harm’s way when the insurrectionists got close.
 
I can think of four possible reasons these petty people insulted a foreign leader whose budding democracy is under an existential threat from a brutal, thug-dictator:

1. Lingering anger that Zelenskyy foiled disgraced President Trump’s 2019 attempt to coerce the Ukrainian president into digging up dirt on Joe Biden, whom Trump correctly feared would be his most formidable opponent in the 2020 election. Trump threatened to illegally withhold (and for a time did) much-needed military assistance from Ukraine despite its having been approved by Congress, unless Zelenskyy did his bidding. This led to Trump’s first impeachment.
2. Belief in Trump’s lie that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election in order to help Hillary Clinton, as opposed to Russia, whose intervention helped push Trump to victory. There is, of course, zero evidence that Ukraine had any involvement in the election, whereas there is a mountain of evidence that Russia went all-out to assist Trump (see, e.g., the Mueller Report).
3. Admiration for Vladimir Putin in line with Trump’s adulation of the Russian autocrat and envy at his ability to reign over his country unfettered by annoying restraints like the Constitution and the rule of law.
4. Anti-Semitism. After all, President Zelenskyy is Jewish (a stunning development given Ukraine’s dark, anti-Semitic past), and a significant chunk of the MAGAverse, including its most zealous acolytes such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Jewish space laser renown (she claimed they caused California forest fires), who share Trump’s anti-Semitic views. These folks are doubly aggravated that Ukraine’s Prime Minister is also a Jew.

 
Further Ukraine aid is in for a rough ride. Regardless of their reasons, the Ukraine-hating, Russia-loving Republican caucus is bound to make it difficult to continue to support Ukraine with arms and dollars once the calendar changes and they control the House of Representatives. Kevin McCarthy, who has sold what little remains of his soul to the extreme demands of the Freedom Caucus in his obsessive quest to become the first invertebrate Speaker, has already said that Ukraine will no longer receive a blank check once he is in command.
 
Fortunately, Senate Republicans, with the exception of the likes of Paul, Hawley, Lee and a handful of others, firmly support aiding Ukraine. For assistance to this heroic democracy to continue, it will take at least five House Republicans to break with their radical, pro-Russia colleagues and do the right thing.
 
Eighty-one years ago, almost to the day, Winston Churchill braved packs of German U-boats to come to the U.S. to thank us for assisting Great Britain in its existential battle against the forces of evil and to seal the wartime alliance between our two nations. When he spoke to a joint session of Congress, every member was present and mightily respectful of the Prime Minister. History did not repeat itself this time, thanks in large part to the nastiness of the Republican minnows who could not rise to the occasion, fueled once again by right-wing media hacks like Tucker Carlson, who raged against aiding Ukraine and mocked Zelenskyy’s wardrobe while running a chyron proclaiming another blatant lie: "ZELENSKY HAS DECLARED WAR ON CHRISTIANITY."
 
Dick Hermann
December 24, 2022

​After two years, 950,000+ documents reviewed, 42 hearings and public briefings, 37 staff reports and numerous interviews, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis just issued its Final Report--PREPARING FOR AND PREVENTING THE NEXT PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY: Lessons Learned from the Coronavirus Crisis. Almost no one ever reads government reports, including most members of Congress. However, this one should be a must-read for every member of Congress and every administration official with public health and related responsibilities. Sadly, it has received almost no attention from the mainstream print and broadcast media. My guess is that they consider the pandemic to be ancient history, an unpleasantness the public just wants to forget. In any event, the latest foolishness to spew forth from Donald Trump or the congressional Republicans’ “Kook and Clown” Caucus is much more entertaining to talk about than something really serious and complicated.
 
The Report is a superb piece of work. It lays out a detailed blueprint for future pandemic preparation. For that reason alone, it is a valuable contribution to U.S. public health planning.
 
But that is hardly the only item of interest in the Report. It also itemizes in painful detail the lies, misinformation, failings and shortcomings that comprised Donald Trump’s mishandling of the crisis and the resulting life-altering tragedies caused thereby. In addition to the extraordinary loss of life resulting from Trump’s deceit and incompetence, his administration’s botched oversight of the multi-billion dollar relief programs encouraged predatory actions by private actors, massive economic suffering disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable individuals and businesses, and colossal waste, fraud and abuse. This was the biggest failure of leadership in American history. Trump’s actions and inactions during the crisis amounted to nothing less than extreme criminal negligence.
 
Given its fatal repercussions, his Covid-19 criminality far exceeds even his theft of highly classified documents and his treasonous fomenting of the January 6 rebellion that attempted to overthrow the government. While five people died as a consequence of the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s revolutionary militia, hundreds of thousands perished due to his abysmal performance during the coronavirus crisis. Spurred on by the lies and misinformation he peddled during his daily chaotic television appearances in the early months of the crisis, millions of Americans refused to take the rational, life-saving measures healthcare professionals advised—mask-wearing, social distancing, frequent hand-washing, and most importantly, getting vaccinated. Instead, they responded defiantly to Trump’s politicization of these reasonable actions.
 
Trump’s Covid criminal negligence cries out to be added to the litany of criminal investigations of his despicable conduct in other areas. He and his enablers must not be allowed to avoid accountability for the suffering they imposed on the nation they were charged with protecting.
 
Dick Hermann
December 16, 2022

​The nation’s newest unaffordable bauble and flagrant waste of money, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, is already dead in the water. The Pentagon’s latest expensive toy cost taxpayers $13 billion, which turns out to be money down one of the Defense Department’s $10,000 toilets. Another name for this needless boondoggle might be USS Easy Target.
 
Both China and Russia possess hypersonic missiles that can travel at 10 times the speed of sound, or 7,670 miles per hour. Currently, the United States has no defense against them. A frantic move is afoot to develop laser weapons that could arguably intercept hypersonic missiles. However, deployment of lasers that could manage this is not going to happen tomorrow. It’s a long-term proposition, with no guarantee of success. Unlike anti-intercontinental ballistic missile systems, hypersonic weapons do not necessarily fly in a predictable parabolic path. Their unpredictable, zig-zag flight paths and maneuverability makes them more difficult to detect, track and intercept. Northrup Grumman hopes to have a testable laser defense weapon ready in 2027 at the earliest.
 
Picture the Ford patrolling the South China Sea in the Taiwan Strait. If China launched a hypersonic missile from its coastal battery, the carrier would have less than 45 seconds to detect the missile and fire a laser weapon if it actually had one. At three-and-a-half football fields in length, the Gerald R. Ford is the largest aircraft carrier afloat. Its size means that the folks firing hypersonic missiles at it would not have to worry much about precision targeting. It would be like hitting the broad side of a barn from inside the barn.
 
U.S. intelligence has known for years that Russia and China were developing hypersonic weapons. Nevertheless, the Navy with congressional encouragement continued to go ahead with the carrier project. The existing 10-carrier fleet, accounting for more than 20 percent of the world’s carriers and more than 50 percent of all carrier deck space, was apparently not enough to provide easy pickings for our hypersonic missile-armed adversaries.
 
Having learned nothing from innumerable prior defense debacles, and demonstrating little concern for the good of the nation, Congress is in the process of approving an $858 billion defense authorization bill. This obscene amount of taxpayer largesse thrown at the Pentagon is larger than the defense budgets of the next nine big defense spender countries. It is the poster child for government waste, fraud, abuse and monumental mismanagement. The bill is full of goodies intended to satisfy every state and congressional district and thus secure the votes of virtually every member of Congress without hesitation or even bothering to read the bill.  Moreover, we have become so numbed to grossly inflated defense budgets that one approaching a trillion dollars warrants almost no attention from the media and elicits no outrage from a public which is being fleeced annually.
 
My best advice: Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be sailors on the Ford.
 
Dick Hermann
December 16, 2022

​“Peak Oil” is the term that describes the point in time when the maximum rate of global oil production will be reached, after which production will begin its long decline to exhaustion of the resource. Right now we may be witnessing something similar happening to the global authoritarian movement that, until very recently, appeared to be on its way to conquering the world.
 
What looked like the steady and inevitable advance of dictatorial regimes around the globe suddenly doesn’t seem so inexorable anymore. Four of the “Big Five” planetary despots—China’s Xi Jinping, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and America’s wannabe despot, Donald Trump (the fifth is North Korea’s Kim Jong Un)—are suddenly on the defensive. Each one of these autocrats has recently been stunned by a triggering event, the eventual outcome of which is uncertain but nevertheless revealing of their inherent weaknesses and threatening their long-term survivability.
 
Xi’s mishandling of Covid-19 has suddenly come back to bite him. What began as protests against his draconian Covid lockdown policy, now into its third year, has spread from factory to university and from Shanghai in the east to Urumqi in the far west. Because ideas spread like wildfire in the social media age, the idea of freedom and democracy has emerged from what began as a protest against a specific government policy to questioning the very legitimacy of the Chinese Communist dictatorship and Xi’s presidency. The inevitable brutal crackdown by Xi’s thugs may stifle the protests, but the resistance germ is not likely to be forgotten. Xi is in a tough spot. If he relaxes the lockdown policy, many more people will contract Covid in a country where the domestically-produced vaccines are not very effective and where the vaccination rate is low. Anger is spreading faster than Covid, and Xi has no vaccine for that.
 
What began almost three months ago as an anti-government protest by Iran’s Kurdish minority against the death of young Mahsa Amini for not adequately covering her hair with a hijab quickly morphed into a demand for regime change prompted by women who could no longer tolerate their second-class status. Government suppression has been ruthless, but the protesters remain undeterred. The deaths of more than 500 protesters, including 40 children, have only incited more protests and greater demands for freedom and democracy.
 
Vladimir Putin’s horrific aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s numerous war crimes against the civilian population have thus far ignited only sporadic protests inside Russia. However, the more body bags that are returned to families who have lost loved ones to Putin’s butchery, the more likely it is that the Russian people will clamor for not only an end to his Ukrainian adventure, but also for an end to Putin. Moreover, the example of Ukraine’s heroic resistance to a dictator is inspiring people in China and Iran to question their own despotic regimes.
 
It is a sad commentary on the state of the Republican Party and the evangelical movement that the only reason they appear to be moving away, albeit ever so meekly, from Donald Trump is because his most ardent MAGA candidate/election deniers got stomped in the midterm elections. Neither his cruelty, his incompetence, his lack of a moral core, nor his reprehensible behavior was sufficient to warrant his denunciation by his adherents. Nevertheless, we should applaud any reason for his loss of support. It is ironic that while the American MAGAverse yearns for autocracy, the Chinese, Iranians and a growing number of Russians yearn for democracy.
 
This all may be premature, but my sense is that something is happening now that is encouraging for the forces of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. In an age when controlling people-to-people communication is increasingly difficult for repressive regimes (China cut off World Cup broadcasts because people could see tens of thousands of mask-less spectators crammed into stadiums), the days of tyrants may be limited. The center of gravity appears to be moving toward democracy.   
 
Dick Hermann
December 2, 2022