Last Chance in Loony Land

PARIS — “This time they have him,” Bob Woodward remarked after the Jan. 6 committee’s prime time indictment of an ex-president whose handpicked CIA director likened to a 6-year-old throwing a tantrum when his coup attempt went wrong. “They have him cold.”

But as he does so painfully often, Stephen Colbert caught the essence of America’s reaction to 1,000 witnesses and reams of irrefutable documentation: “Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?”

Above the Atlantic not long ago, I looked back at what is now the looniest country I have seen in a lifetime of reporting, and I recalled a line in “Lawrence of Arabia.” So long as tribes fight among themselves, Peter O’Toole says, “so long will they be a little people, a silly people.”

The complexities are clear at 30,000 feet. Donald Trump’s Republicans are what T. E. Lawrence described: “greedy, barbarous and cruel.” Yet Democrats squabble over grievances and social reforms that can’t fly because their left wing repelled enough voters to deadlock Congress.

In Loony Land, neither yesterday nor tomorrow matters much. Informed voters face an apparent majority — some silent; some obnoxiously boisterous — who make snap decisions based on dubious sources within their own echo chambers. Others just don’t care.

Analysts I respect remain upbeat. At crunch time, they say, Americans do the right thing. Joe Biden won with the largest popular vote margin since FDR in 1932. But despite spectacular reversals of Trump’s folly at home and abroad, polls say two-thirds of voters want him gone.

Crunch time is now. Even if Trump implodes in a whoosh of hot air, a fractured nation is left with others who court a base that shares his twisted values. Those 2016 rivals who called him an unfit race-baiting sexist who lies whenever he opens his mouth now grovel at his golf shoes.

Trump defends gun slaughter and medieval abortion laws that thwart women’s most basic rights while criminalizing doctors’ Hippocratic Oath. He embraces preposterous conspiracy theories and flouts asylum conventions America drafted for the world.

But it is far worse than that. House testimony amplifies what Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times. During those hours when he did nothing to stop his Capitol assault as a mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” he told aides that might be a good idea: “Mike Pence deserves it.”

Vladimir Putin may eventually back off, but Xi Jinping won’t abandon plans for the planet. Nor will Mother Nature. The White House is no place for an Alice in Wonderland mad queen to be running around yelling, “Off with their heads.” Or anyone similar.

But when I googled reaction to the Jan. 6 broadcast, the first hit from The Hill, one ex-Wall Street type bloviator who pops up on Fox (Not) News reflected a lot of others. She began:

“Democrats think voters will be so gob-smacked by the revelations…that they will forget about soaring gasoline and food prices, rising crime, a 15,000-person caravan of people about to cross our southern border, the baby formula shortage and power brownouts.”

That “caravan” is illusory; Republicans reduce intricate border issues to simplified horse crap. Murders spiked by 30 percent in 2020 under Trump, the highest rise in a century; in any case, law enforcement is local. Biden aides recalled unsafe formula and brought stocks from Europe.

Inflation is the big issue. As gas prices increased, Trump gleefully tweeted, “Miss me yet?” This is a hallmark of Loony Land, informed by news media that too often obsess on “breaking news” with little thought to what is broke – and why.

In January 2019, as Trump reveled in the healthy economy Barack Obama left him and a stock market he doped with a $1.9 trillion tax cut, Covid-19 surfaced in Wuhan. Xi tried to hide it, as authoritarians do, but Chinese doctors braved heavy punishment to sound the alarm.

Had Trump not recalled 44 CDC specialists Obama had based in China, they would have detected the threat much sooner. When the virus reached America, Trump told Bob Woodward he knew how dangerous it was. He told the nation that elected him it would magically go away.

Australia has a similar urban-rural society. It acted fast to test, trace, mask and isolate. At the end of 2020, its death toll was near 900, mostly people over 85. In America, adjusting for population, that would be close to 11,000 in 2020 rather than well above 500,000, by far the worst level among developed countries.

Biden pleaded with people to get vaccinated, even offering cash rewards. But Trumplicans refused shots, masks and safe distancing. By now, Lancet and Economist studies agree, Covid-19 has killed more than 1.4 million Americans, and it cannot be wished away.

We saw those drink-bleach briefings. Trump muzzled the gold-standard CDC and crippled the WHO, extending his indifference to human life across the globe. He politicized the plague, pitting red states against blue. Quacks replaced Tony Fauci, who faced death threats. “Depraved-heart murder” carries long prison sentences in the United States.

The impact was beyond people who died painfully alone. Supply chains broke, businesses closed and lives went on hold. Trump’s economic miracle deflated by 37 percent. When Biden brought the economy roaring back, high inflation was inevitable. At record employment, people demanded raises. Essentials were scarce. Companies gouged where they could.

And then there was more. Trump feared Biden could beat him in 2020 so he sought dirt in Ukraine on Biden’s son. An unknown young president who had just replaced a corrupt predecessor was desperate to fortify his defenses against Russian invasion.

Trump, who toadied to Putin and had no interest in Ukraine, tried to extort him. He would release approved Javelin missiles but only in exchange for a public skewering of Hunter Biden. Today, we all know Volodymyr Zelensky and why he so badly needed America’s support.

Putin got the message when Republicans blocked impeachment — a blatant high crime — and Trump repeatedly trashed NATO: Loony Land would barely notice a blitzkrieg on Russia’s smaller neighbor. That is a main reason fuel costs are high. Oil companies’ greed is another.

America’s pain at the pump has little sympathy in Europe, where gas prices above $8 a gallon have been routine for decades. Europeans shun gas-gulping monsters and build fast trains. They are ready to freeze in winter to avert yet another world war on their doorsteps.

Such global realities mean little in a Loony Land obsessed with itself, largely ignorant of the direct consequences it suffers at home and the existential threats to a world in need of a superpower with the values that once defined a United States.

In 1948, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe cost $17 billion, equal to $203 billion today. Trump’s first priorities were to cut nearly nine times that much in taxes and to abolish Obamacare. Then Covid struck. Families struggled with medical bills. The rich who bought stocks when the market collapsed, emerged far richer when Biden restored prosperity.

Putin’s invasion, which Trump called “genius,” sent prices soaring again, and stock prices plummeted – except for oil companies and defense contractors. The Federal Reserve could not have predicted a sudden war that disrupted fuel and food supplies across the world.

Skimming news reports is no longer enough. Journalism schools often teach technical skills rather than how to dig into substance. Some energetic young reporters develop techniques on their own. Others not so much.

I watched one CNN ingenue play gotcha with Rep, Jerry Nadler, haggard after sleepless nights preparing the Jan. 6 commission’s big show. She asked him why that shouldn’t be seen as just another Democratic ploy after investigations and “two failed impeachments.”

Those impeachments didn’t fail. Ironclad evidence was ignored by what P.J. O’Rourke once called in a book title, “A Parliament of Whores.” That is what is looniest about America today. Too few citizens seem to realize that if they don’t bother to vote, they get what they get.

Truth was laid bare in testimony and documents. Little-known patriots emerged as national heroes, who wrote at length about why America is in such trouble. Take Marie Yovanovitch, yanked back from Ukraine overnight when she was so badly needed. She knew too much.

Her book, “Lessons From the Edge,” explains how seasoned ambassadors reduce the need for armies, which only break things. Russia, she writes, “is not so weak that we can ignore it, but neither is it a 10-foot-tall adversary which we cannot counter.” Like all bullies, she says, Putin respects a closed fist. That takes tough diplomacy before unstoppable hostilities start.

She cut her teeth amid Somalia mayhem, then rose through the ranks as a specialist in the ex-Soviet Union. After postings as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, she was sent to Ukraine where she made close contacts as deputy chief of mission in the early 2000s.

Trump smeared her to Zelensky, telling him ominously, she would “go through some things.” And Don Junior, that paragon of propriety, tweeted, “We need…less of these jokers as ambassadors.”

In that CNN interview, Nadler struggled for words to answer stupid questions. At one point, he said: “This is worse than Watergate.” Yes, by orders of magnitude.

“Gate” is now the go-to suffix for any small-bore scandal that surfaces. Boris Johnson just survived “Partygate” for having a good time with his aides on Downing Street while Britain was locked down.

Watergate was only a bungled pre-internet attempt at the opposition research politicians routinely do, “a third-rate burglary” as the White House called it. But it was a crime, and the coverup was worse. Reporters hounded Richard Nixon until he resigned before impeachment.

Compare the response 50 years later to a president who systematically betrayed a nation he was sworn to protect. Now he deflects critics by hurling more false charges at Hunter Biden after his own sons despoiled America as if it were their personal preserve.

America took a turn toward lunacy in 2000 when the world was not yet in peril of blowing up or blowing away. Al Gore, the likely winner who would have fought to head off climate collapse, accepted a Supreme Court ruling. George W. Bush at least apologized for setting half the world on fire and torpedoing the healthy economy Bill Clinton left him.

Barack Obama, if hardly perfect, dazzled America with empathy. He skunked a war hero opponent despite his black skin and a name that was one consonant away from the Muslim zealot whose terrorist band brought down the Twin Towers.

On election morning, I went with a friend to a Brooklyn school at 6 a.m. It was jammed with people lined up to vote. At a party that night, cheers rattled the windows and eyes moistened as returns piled in. America had never felt so great.

The nation seemed to acknowledge that while people have different physical traits, there is no hierarchy among races. Human capacities are personal, not collective. Then Mitch McConnell, with transparent bigotry, vowed to make Obama a one-term president.

As Obama’s sidekick, Biden turned Bush’s economic bust into the boom Trump inherited. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton strengthened NATO, kept Russia in check and persuaded China to join Europeans in blunting Iran’s nuclear program while ending its pariah isolation. Obama was a major force behind the Paris climate accords.

Trump undid it all. He weaponized fear and loathing among Americans, which a Republican hardcore had fed since the 1980s. Their goal is wealth and power. Wars and social injustices make them wealthier. But ignorance and apathy allow them to be the ruling class.

In 2016, we could all see it coming. The choice between Hillary Clinton and a megalomaniac sociopath who reeked of demagogy was a referendumb, and the loonies won.

Now even a Democratic landslide can’t restore sanity unless it is followed by progressive reforms that restore representative democracy after decades of dumbed-down schools that produce voters with a thin grasp of how the wider world works.

In November, 21 Republicans and 14 Democrats are up for election in a 50-50 Senate with two of those Democrats who seem like shills for the opposing party. All 435 House are up for grabs. If polls bear, out, Republicans will dominate Congress. Thirty-six states will pick a governor along with state officials and legislators.

Republicans could finish packing the courts, disenfranchising voters and gaming the system so only a miracle can put a Democrat in the White House. Meantime, imagine what bonehead red-state ayatollahs can do to civil rights and personal liberties.

The Jan. 6 committee offers hope. Trump’s next federal housing could be a barred cell. Or not. He might well be back in the Oval with that nuclear football nearby. This November is likely the last chance to rescue Loony Land.