#max boot

— Columnist Max Boot at the Washington Post.

Max Boot was born in Russia and came to the United States at an early age with his family. He understands the mindset of authoritarians and oligarchs there.

Right now Putin isn't interested in negotiation – just surrender or crippling concessions from Ukraine. Sadly, the only way to end the war is to raise the price for Russia continuing it.

And the only way to push back against Russia is to continue the flow of Western aid – a plurality of it coming from the US.

A vote for Trump or for Congressional Republicans is a vote for Russia.

The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelly, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.” Among Republican commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.

Some Thoughts on This July 4th, 2022

Max Boot, a former Republican journalist who left the GOP after they embraced Trump, provides an outline about how we might be able to move forward as a nation.

Is there a sensible middle ground between vituperation and veneration of the Founders? Yes. We should acknowledge their manifold faults, while also paying tribute to their still-radical vision of a world in which everyone has an “unalienable” right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Above all, we must vindicate their desire to create a “more perfect Union” to “secure the Blessings of Liberty.” [...] Most of the Founders knew better than to try to shackle their progeny to their own worldview. Thomas Jefferson rejected the tendency to “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” He argued “that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

We need not go as far as Jefferson did in urging that “every constitution … and every law” should expire every 19 years. But our institutions do need to be significantly reformed to “keep pace with the times.”

Boot goes on to say we should make Senate representation “proportional” to state population and we should eliminate the electoral college. Yet, since these changes would require Constitutional amendments, they aren’t likely to happen. However, Boot goes on to say:

But there are other steps we can take, even without amending the Constitution, to make our political system more democratic and representative. We should, for example, expand the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. They reached their present size in 1912 and 1869, respectively, when the country was far smaller. (The U.S. population has tripled in the past century.) We should also end the Senate filibuster, whose use has dramatically expanded in recent years, creating a de facto supermajority requirement that gives a small minority of the population a veto over all legislation.

Instead of acrimoniously and endlessly debating whether the Founders were good or bad, let’s focus on improving the system they created so that it better serves Americans in the 21st century. As Jefferson knew, “institutions must advance” along with society.

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This is the presidency George Wallace never had

By Max Boot

May 29, 2020

We know how a normal president responds when a white police officer ignites furious protests by killing a black man. It is the way President Barack Obama responded in 2014 after a grand jury refused to indict a white police officer who had fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the National Guard had to be called in to deal with looting and fires.

Obama expressed sympathy for the protesters — their anger, he noted, was “rooted in realities that have existed in this country for a long time” — while making clear that he had no sympathy with violence: “Burning buildings, torching cars, destroying property, putting people at risk — that’s destructive and there’s no excuse for it. Those are criminal acts. And people should be prosecuted if they engage in criminal acts.”

Note that Obama called for anyone who broke the law to be “prosecuted.” Now compare with the way President Trump has responded to the civil disorder in Minneapolis following the unjustified killing of a black man named George Floyd by a white police officer.

The president had initially and properly mourned Floyd’s “very sad and tragic death,” but in the early morning hours of Friday, he struck an incendiary tone. Trump castigated the “very weak Radical Left Mayor” of Minneapolis and threatened to “send in the National Guard & get the job done right.” His chilling bottom line: “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Consciously or not, Trump was quoting Miami police chief Walter Headley, who used that very phrase — “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — in 1967. Headley also said, “We don’t mind being accused of police brutality,” and he charged that, while most “Negroes” were “law abiding,” “10 per cent are young hoodlums who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign.” Headley’s brutal rhetoric and tactics were later blamed for inciting a three-day riot in Miami in 1968.

More broadly, Trump is channeling the kind of “law and order” rhetoric employed by the Republican Party beginning in the 1960s to woo Southern whites and working-class Northern whites away from the Democratic Party. Richard M. Nixon pioneered this so-called Southern Strategy, but he was much more subtle than Trump, because he didn’t want to alienate white liberals or embrace segregationism. When asked in 1968 how he would define “law and order,” Nixon said: “I have often said that you cannot have order unless you have justice, because if you stifle dissent, if you just stifle progress, you’re going to have an explosion and you’re going to have disorder. On the other hand, you can’t have progress without order.”

Can you imagine Trump saying that? I can’t. Our current president actually sounds more like George Wallace, who in 1968 echoed Headley by saying: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

As governor of Alabama, Wallace had vowed in 1963: “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But during his third-party campaign for president in 1968, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Wallace didn’t run on an explicitly segregationist platform. Instead, he focused on a “law and order” message that drew on white voters’ concerns about rising crime, urban riots, antiwar protests, liberal court rulings, busing and other hot-button issues. His slogan was “Stand up for America.”

Wallace was not subtle about his threats of violence. At Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 24, 1968, he expressed disgust at demonstrators trying to block President Lyndon B. Johnson’s limousine: “I tell you when November comes, the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it’ll be the last one they ever lay down in front of; their day is over!”

A few minutes later, shedding his jacket and clenching his fist, Wallace shouted: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ‘em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks, now!’ ”

As historian Dan T. Carter notes in his history of the modern conservative movement, “The crowd went berserk.” It was obvious to both supporters and detractors what Wallace was saying. An African American protester held up a poster proclaiming “Law and Order — Wallace Style.” “Underneath the slogan,” Carter writes, “was the outline of a Ku Klux Klansman holding a noose.”

In 1968, most Republicans did not support Wallace, who spent most of his career in the Democratic Party. He was considered too much of an extremist even by conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr., and in those days, there was still a substantial number of more liberal “Rockefeller Republicans.”

But now, in Donald Trump, we have the closest thing we have ever had to having George Wallace in the White House — and Republicans are nearly unanimous in their approbation. The president is pouring gasoline on the flames of racial division, and the Republican Party is holding the jerrycan for him. This is where the Southern Strategy has led after half a century.

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Money quote:

We are seeing a slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre, and the lack of pushback from Congress, so far, gives Trump a green light to continue his assault on the rule of law. Every day that Whitaker remains in office is a day that our democracy is being undermined.