​A hospital in Gaza is hit by an incendiary device. Hundreds of Gazans die. Both the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and numerous other top-of-the-line news organizations accept without question and run with Hamas’ account that the explosion and resulting deaths are the result of an Israeli missile attack. No evidence is requested, demanded or required by these presumably cracker-jack reporters and editors before rushing headlong into print and on the air, positing blame on Israel.
 
The headlines in these media outlets of record, the most respected on the planet, reverberate in massive, anti-Israel demonstrations around the world. The Arab streets quickly fill with thousands of agitated protestors. Similar protests roil hundreds of Western cities. Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egypt’s President al-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas abruptly cancel a scheduled meeting in Amman with President Biden.
 
The problem is that these blaring, large-type headlines and feverish broadcasts weren’t true. All of the evidence to date, confirmed by multiple intelligence agencies, indicates that the hospital was hit by an errant rocket fired at Israel by another Gaza terrorist group, Islamic Jihad. Note that one-third of all Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets aimed at Israel misfire, often landing in Gaza, killing and maiming local civilians.
 
The damage done by this monumentally irresponsible journalistic jump to a false conclusion is massive. It cannot be undone by one of the usual corrections that newspapers print in small type and position on an inside page. It is not too far-fetched to say that people will die as a consequence of this rush to judgment. The mainstream media’s careless blunder has fueled both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism around the world.
 
While the consequences of this journalistic malpractice are devastating, this is hardly the first time the mainstream media has fallen down on the job and failed to live up to the standards and integrity we expect from the Fourth Estate. The way in which newspapers, cable and broadcast media have covered Donald Trump for five decades is the prime example of what is wrong with mainstream journalism.
 
Aside: I do not include Fox News in my definition of mainstream media. From its beginnings more than 30 years ago, it has never risen above its sole raison d’etre: serving as the chief propaganda and agitprop mouthpiece of the Republican Party.
 
Mainstream outlets twist themselves into knots when reporting on Trump’s uncountable misdeeds. They have still not learned the lessons of 2016, when they were complicit with mega-thug, Vladimir Putin, and disgraced former FBI Director, James Comey, in paving the way for Trump to win the presidency. The boys and girls who earn the big bucks working for the elite media outlets never bothered to investigate Trump’s four-decade background of lies and grifts. Instead, they bought into the fiction that he was a brilliant businessman and a huge success. The truth was easy to unearth, namely that he started out with more than $400 million in inherited wealth, presided over numerous business failures, illegally inflated the value of his holdings, stiffed his vendors and contractors, ran a scam “university,” and played a fictitious businessman on television that had no link to his reality. Instead, they accepted at face value the lie that Trump was a major business impresario. Had they done their jobs as they should have, we might be living in a very different and much better world today.
 
It defies logic and credulity that, despite the lessons they should have learned from their 2016 collapse, they persist in covering Trump today as if this twice-impeached, four-times indicted liar and thief, whose four years as president were marked by calamity upon calamity and incompetence beyond belief, is a normal candidate. He is anything but, and that should be noted in every article, town hall, etc. that is printed or broadcast. When he lies, an all-caps chyron should immediately appear on screen pointing that out.
 
It may be too late to expect the mainstream media to do its job. The irony is that if they persist in their blind adherence to fantasy coverage of Trump, the Israel-Hamas war, and the many other stories that they don’t dig into, they may be the first to go when Trump is elected and blows up what remains of American democracy.
 
Dick Hermann
October 27, 2023

​“America is not sending its best and brightest to Washington, DC.”
–Sen. John Fetterman 
 
“Don’t tell my mother I’m a member of Congress. She thinks I’m a prostitute.”
–Former Rep. Pat Schroeder
 
The level of chaos into which Republicans have plunged the House of Representatives is both stunning and incredibly irresponsible, especially given the major crises America and the world face. It is, of course, not even close to the bedlam the Trump White House wallowed in for four insufferable years. At this writing, it is difficult to see how this once sensible party will extricate itself from out of the mayhem it has wrought.  
 
The overwhelming majority of Republicans seriously believe little ex-wrestling coach, Jim (Gym) Jordan, he of the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil disposition when confronted with a fusillade of complaints from his Ohio State wrestlers that they were being sexually assaulted by the team physician, is Speaker material. That this bomb-throwing Trump doormat, election denier and January 6 co-conspirator whom former Republican Speaker, John Boehner, called a “legislative terrorist” might be second in line for the presidency should scare the hell out of every sentient American and global citizen. That this creature who, in 17 years in Congress, has never had a bill passed, much less one even considered by a congressional committee, could conceivably occupy the respected seat that Nancy Pelosi, Tip O’Neill, Sam Rayburn, Joe Cannon, Thomas Reed and Henry Clay graced with their illustrious fannies is mind-boggling. 
 
Fortunately for America and the planet, Jordan lost his first three votes to become Speaker, his opposition increasing with each ballot. But, as the obsessively opportunistic Quisling, Elise Stefanik (R-NY), told us when she nominated Jordan for Speaker, he is a “fighter who never gives up.” Heck, she even compared the demagogic insurrectionist to…wait for it…Moses! Read on when you finish gagging.
 
The number of Republicans able or willing to withstand the intense pressure from Jordan and his partners in crime is small (24 at last count) and could grow smaller as the holdouts are threatened with primaries and even death threats from the extreme right. Profiles in courage are hard to come by these days.
 
Should, heaven forbid, Jordan actually be elected Speaker, the United States will compound the shame of having chosen both a corrupt, inept, lying grifter as President with the embarrassment of conferring the second most powerful political office in the land on an anti-democratic zero who is certain to attempt to blow up what little is left of our threatened, tattered democracy. Not to mention that aid to Ukraine will be jeopardized and that additional bogus, time and money-wasting investigations of the Biden administration will be launched. The likelihood that the government will shut down in late November will shoot up. The little work our dysfunctional Congress gets done now will cease completely. The inmates will finally be in charge of the asylum.
 
Dick Hermann
October 20, 2023

1. The sudden, unanticipated surprise attack on Israel by the terrorist organization, Hamas, is the biggest intelligence failure since 9/11. Like America’s worst day of this century, it was not only a failure to “connect the dots,” but even more so, a failure of imagination, a condition that intelligence services worldwide have suffered from at least since the Persian debacle at Marathon more than 2,500 years ago. Who would have ever thought that an undermanned Athenian citizen army would do something so unexpected as breaking into a run at their Persian adversaries, rendering the otherwise devastating Median archers irrelevant as their arrows landed harmlessly behind the onrushing phalanx? This time, it wasn’t charging Greek hoplites or airplanes employed as missiles, but rather overreliance on high technology combined with a failure to consider that low tech hardware—motorcycles, bulldozers, paragliders and speedboats could wreak unimaginable havoc. And, as in every single instance of an intelligence breakdown, strong doses of hubris and overconfidence contributed to the tragedy.
 
2. As Israel and Saudi Arabia move closer to normalizing relations, the Jewish state should have factored into its defense planning that a rattled Iran would view a potential combination of its two most powerful regional adversaries to be an unacceptable shift in the balance of power in the Middle East. Consistent with its position as the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, it likely encouraged its Hamas proxy to explode out of the Gaza Strip and attack Southern Israel. To date, more than 10,000 Iran-supplied rockets have been launched against Israel along with land and sea assaults on innocent Israeli civilian inhabitants of towns, villages and kibbutzim near the Gaza border.
 
3. Israeli defenses and defenders were caught napping, distracted by the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth as well as celebration of the Sabbath.
 
4. What happened to the vaunted Israeli reliance on human intelligence? Israel has a long history of successful infiltration into the hearts of both hostile states and terrorist groups. This time that strategy appears to have failed completely.
 
5. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition were preoccupied with the tumult and chaos caused by his efforts to undermine Israeli democracy by neutering the Supreme Court, and the powerful resistance prompted by that proposal. They took their eye off the security ball, the existential issue in Israel. Netanyahu has, for decades, touted himself as Israel’s best security guarantor. I don’t see how he or his government survives this catastrophe once the war ends. When push comes to shove in a nation whose 75-year history is marked by survival in the face of almost universal regional hostility, nothing trumps security as the core issue for Israelis. Netanyahu’s failure to provide that is likely fatal to his continuation in power.
 
6. Some Israel Defense Force troops had been relocated from Southern Israel to the West Bank because of recent increases in Palestinian activism there.
 
7. The ominous symbolism of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War was inexplicably absent from Israeli defense planning.
 
8. Social media misinformation is having a field day with this war. Many of the lies percolating among platforms are anti-Israel and virulently anti-Semitic. Operators such as Elon Musk allow this rubbish on their platforms because it generates eyeballs and riles up the MAGA base to whom he is eager to appeal. We have yet to find out how low he can go.
 
9. Thirty-three Harvard student organizations signed on to a letter condemning Israel while silent on Hamas’ terrorism, including the beheading of babies in their beds and kidnapping children as young as nine months, among its many other atrocities. The Harvard administration’s delayed response actually included a defense of the students’ First Amendment rights! Alums should turn crimson with shame.
 
10. Egypt, which borders Gaza in the south, doesn’t want to allow its fellow Arabs and Muslims to escape to its safe haven while Israel goes about the vital business of decapitating Hamas. Egypt could also supply essential goods and services to Gaza. However, it fears Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood organization that Egypt has been battling for almost 100 years. Egypt has also spent 75 years exploiting the Palestinian plight and profiting extensively from its propaganda value, free from having to harbor any Palestinian refugee camps within its borders, unlike the other “front-line states,” Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
 
11. Israel is rightly concerned about a multi-front war, a challenge they have faced four times in the past. Hezbollah has already begun bombarding Northern Israel with rockets and mortars.
 
12. The Iranian mullahs, without whose support Hamas and its fellow terrorist organization, Hezbollah, could not exist, deny any involvement in Hamas’ terrorist action. This is, of course, bullshit, and must be called out as such and severely punished by the UN and the world’s democracies. The U.S. should henceforth provide all possible support to the Iranian resistance.
 
13. Gone are the days when a foreign policy crisis meant that partisan political battles “stop at the water’s edge.” For the Republican Party/Cult, there is no water’s edge. Failed party chair and major Trump suck-up, Ronna (Don’t Call Me Romney) McDaniel, says that the horrific violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians “is a great opportunity” for Republican presidential candidates to attack Democrats.  Sen. Tim Scott, the incredibly shrinking candidate whose campaign demonstrates that he is not ready for “garbage time,” much less prime time, accused President Biden of “having blood on his hands.” And if this were not nauseating enough--and speaking of garbage—Donald Trump called Biden and his aides “stupid” and Hezbollah “and the rest of them (i.e., Hamas) very smart.” Nothing like praising the butchers, eh, Donald? Impossible to believe that filth like this was—and could once again—be President.
 
14. Finally, Hamas’ slaughter of civilians is the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Everywhere Jews go in the perpetual diaspora, hate and violence follow. Will it ever end?

Dick Hermann
October 16, 2023

​“…the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
During the last half of the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court did, in fact, make manifest Dr. King’s optimistic declaration. The Court’s decisions, for the most part, moved the country forward to a better place: rulings on discrimination, voting rights, criminal justice, race relations, marriage, privacy and other fundamental matters deeply affecting all of us bent the country toward justice.
 
Not so much anymore. We have come to expect, alas, that Supreme Court terms will be unsettling. The 21st century rendition of the Court, increasingly with each term, has reversed direction, bending the arc the other way. The last two Supreme Court terms witnessed a retreat with respect to many of the advances of the prior century.
 
The 2023-24 Supreme Court term just began and we can expect that it will prove to be equally tumultuous. The Court will consider a docket full of cases the decisions in which will impact heavily on every one of us as well as on the future of our increasingly fragile democratic republic. Some of the key cases that could continue the Court’s backsliding-to-the-future include:
 
Whether domestic abusers should be allowed to have guns. The Court’s decision will go a long way toward telling us just how sacrosanct the Second Amendment is. Justice Thomas’s nonsensical standard that a gun law is valid only if it is rooted in our early history and tradition could skew the outcome in favor of wife-beaters, mindful that until the second half of the 19th century, women were deemed the property of their husbands to do with whatever they wished.
 
A series of cases threaten the rulemaking authority of administrative agencies. The first case to get a hearing contests the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an Obama construct that the hard right hates and has attempted to bring down before. The totality of these cases, if upheld by the Court that last term viewed such challenges sympathetically, could severely weaken the full panoply of health, safety, business and other regulations.
 
Racial gerrymandering. The Court will decide whether the South Carolina legislature’s congressional district redraw, which moved 30,000 African-American voters between districts in order to make a district safer for Republicans, violated the Voting Rights Act. South Carolina claims that the adjustment was purely for political reasons with no racial intent. Uh huh.
 
Social media content moderation. The Court will examine whether Florida and Texas laws regulating social media violate the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause. Both states’ restrictive measures were prompted by conservative complaints that Facebook, X, et al., favor liberal posts and discriminate against right-wing ones. Given the barrage of reactionary misinformation countenanced by both platforms, this is a hard argument to make.
 
What makes this term all the more fraught is that this Court is rapidly establishing itself as the most corrupt in history. Two justices—Thomas and Alito—swim in sleaze. A steady stream of new revelations about their unsavory relationships with right-wing ideologues/zillionaires, often with business before the Court, keeps being uncovered by the media. To date, revelations of their smarmy doings have failed to constrain their disgraceful conduct. They continue to sit on cases that cry out for recusal, and continue to vote against the interests of the citizenry. Watching all of this, the weakest Chief Justice in history sticks his head in the sand, refusing not only to institute a serious ethics code, but is also too timid to enforce the feeble one that currently applies.
 
Two other justices should not even be on the Court, but are thanks to the sordid maneuverings of Mitch McConnell, whose hypocrisy vis-a-vis Court appointments gives new meaning to the term, “brazen.” To top it off, the third of the hard-right Trump appointees won his seat despite a strongly alleged history of boozy sexual aggression. This cast of character-less characters defines this Court as the most partisan and reactionary in history, the Taney Court that decided Dred Scott (upholding the Fugitive Slave Act) and the Fuller Court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson (endorsing segregation) notwithstanding.
 
In 2000, 62 percent of Americans surveyed had a positive view of the Court. Today, only 40 percent believe that the Court is an honorable institution. The plummet in Court approval is understandable given the torrent of horrible decisions that have come down from the Court on issues such as campaign finance, guns, abortion, the environment, voting rights, etc., overlaid by the Court’s abandonment of any pretense that it has a moral center. What is incomprehensible is that four in ten Americans still believe that the Court is doing a good job.
 
Dick Hermann
October 7, 2023

As we churn closer to the next presidential election, national polling continues to indicate that Joe Biden is in trouble. While one survey showing him trailing Donald Trump by 10 points appears to be what the left-leaning pundits in denial are calling an “outlier,” it has a large number of Democratic strategists (and me) freaking out.
 
It is contrary to all logic that an incumbent who has accomplished a lot in office could only be  neck-and-neck with an evil, criminal clown. This is a man who recently: (1) bragged that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016; (2) warned that Biden could lead us into “World War Two;” (3) claimed one needs a government-issued ID to buy bread; (4) inveighed against President Jeb Bush for getting the U.S. involved in Middle East wars; and said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed.  And people worry about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline!
 
Aside: We are still waiting for the first congressional Republican to condemn Trump’s statement about General Milley. Tells you all you need to know about these spineless weenies.
 
However, it is clear that Biden has lost some of the spring in his step as he moves into his ninth decade. The perception among a large majority of voters that Biden’s age is an issue is clearly a major and growing problem for Democratic aspirations to hold onto the White House, despite the fact that Trump’s steep mental decline is so obvious.
 
When he ran in 2020, Biden promised to serve only one term. The time is getting very short for his party to hold him to that promise. His argument for seeking a second term is that he is the Democrat best able to defeat Trump, an increasingly questionable proposition. A younger candidate would be a stark contrast to the lunacy that is clearly consuming Trump in his dotage. Unfortunately, no one other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a 69-year old, anti-vaxxer and leading conspiracy theorist, has come forward to challenge Biden for the nomination.
 
For Democrats to salvage an increasingly dire situation, two things would need to happen:

1. A group of Democratic elder statesmen and women (preferably including Nancy Pelosi) would have to go to the White House and tell Biden that, for the good of the party and the country, he needs to rest on his many laurels and retire to the Delaware beaches; and 
2. The younger members of a very strong Democratic bench would need to step quickly forward and offer themselves to the voters. Attractive possibilities include: Amy Klobuchar, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Gina Raimondo, Pete Buttigieg, Michelle Luhan Grisham, Raphael Warnock, Andy Beshear, Roy Cooper, Wes Moore, Jared Polis, J.B. Pritzker, Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Jamie Raskin, and Mark Kelly, among others. Many of these would be strong candidates against Trump.

​Time is getting short. Filing deadlines for state primary elections are imminent. Biden’s poll numbers are underwater due to the age issue and the fact that the administration’s economic successes have not yet positively affected voters. Instead, when they fill up their tanks and grocery baskets, they become upset with high prices and blame the president.
 
It is possible that in the 13½ months between the present and the election, prices could moderate. However, Joe Biden is not going to get any younger.
 
For reasons unfathomable to me, the voting public does not appear particularly revolted by the idea of a lying fraudster crook who has been officially declared a sexual aggressor as a potential president.
 
The first Trump term came dangerously close to destroying our largely successful, almost two-and-a-half century experiment in democracy. Are we willing to risk a repeat?
 
Dick Hermann
October 1, 2023