Israeli Major Says Palestinians Are Not Our Enemy

The following post (published in The New York Times) is by Nir Avishai Cohen ( a Major in the reserves of the Israeli Defense Forces):

I was in Austin, Texas, for work on Saturday when I received a call from my commander in the Israel Defense Forces to return to Israel and head to the front line. I didn’t hesitate. I knew that the citizens of my country were in real danger. My duty first and foremost is to join the fight against those who unleashed a massacre on my people. I boarded the first flight I found out of Austin to head home to join the I.D.F. reserves, where I serve as a brigade operations command officer.

During my long flight to Israel, my mind couldn’t rest. I was trying to write down my feelings and thoughts about everything happening — and everything that’s about to happen — in my beloved country.

Little by little, the dimensions of the horrors of the most brutal attack that Israelis have experienced since the establishment of the state were being revealed. Hundreds of Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,200 people, including women, children and older people. About 150 citizens and soldiers have been taken captive. There’s nothing in the world that can justify the murder of hundreds of innocent people.

But I’d like to say one thing clearly, before I go to battle: There’s no such thing as “unavoidable.” This war could have been avoided, and no one did enough to prevent it. Israel did not do enough to make peace; we just conquered the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, expanded the illegal settlements and imposed a long-term siege on the Gaza Strip.

For 56 years Israel has been subjecting Palestinians to oppressive military rule. In my book “Love Israel, Support Palestine,” I wrote: “Israeli society has to ask itself very important questions about where and why the blood of its sons and daughters was spilled. A Messianic religious minority has dragged us into a muddy swamp, and we are following them as if it were the Piper from Hamelin.” When I wrote these words last year, I didn’t realize how deep in the mud we were, and how much more blood could be shed in so little time.

I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are being controlled by Islamic extremists.

Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. On both sides, the intractable positions of a small group has dragged us into violence. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel, or more ruthless. The ideology of both have fueled this conflict, leading to the death of too many innocent civilians.

As a major in the reserves, it is important to me to make it clear that in this already unstoppable new war, we cannot allow the massacre of innocent Israelis to result in the massacre of innocent Palestinians. Israel must remember that there are more than two million people living in the Gaza Strip. The vast majority of them are innocent. Israel must do everything in its power to avoid killing innocent people, and focus on destroying the militant army of Hamas.

This war, like others before it, will end sooner or later. I am not sure I will come back from it alive, but I do know that a minute after the war is over, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to reckon with the leaders who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must denounce the extremists who are driven by religious fanaticism. The Israelis will have to oust National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and their far-right circle from power, and the Palestinians will have to oust the leadership of Hamas.

I try to look for shreds of hope. The Yom Kippur War, the most difficult war that Israel had known until this week, started by surprise in 1973. After a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was finally signed in 1979, the border with Egypt — one that was once the site of the dead and wounded — became a border of peace.

Israelis must realize that there is no greater security asset than peace. The strongest army cannot protect the country the way peace does. This current war proves it once again. Israel has followed the path of war for too long.

At the end, after all of the dead Israelis and Palestinians are buried, after we have finished washing away the rivers of blood, the people who share a home in this land will have to understand that there is no other choice but to follow the path of peace. That is where true victory lies. 

Words Are Not Enough - We Need Police Reform NOW

 

The following op-ed is by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:

The spectacle of a televised countdown to the showing of the video in which Tyre Nichols was savagely beaten by Memphis police officers doesn’t just theatricalize Black death; it is a damning indictment of American perversion.

It was horrific, as promised, but unfortunately not singularly so. It was instead yet another data point in a long line of videos showing the torturing of Black bodies by police. It was more snuff porn with Black victims in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume.

America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the historic summer of protest that followed, police killings of American citizens didn’t decrease; they increased. What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.

Even Black people’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement eventually began to fall.

And as Americans shifted to other priorities like politics and the economy, the broader public became desensitized to police killings, or it callously started to see the police killings as unfortunate but ultimately acceptable byproducts of much-needed increased policing at a time of rising crime.

To break through, a killing would have to be truly gruesome and barbaric, the circumstances around it truly ghoulish and the victim of it truly unassailable.

That case has now arrived with the death of Nichols, a Black man, after his horrific beating at the hands of five Black Memphis police officers.

Authorities moved relatively quickly to fire, arrest and aggressively charge the officers.

But instead of leaping to my feet to applaud a system working as it should, rather than as it was designed, I am stuck on the fact that there should have been federal legislation to prevent such killings.

But there wasn’t, and there isn’t, because America has once again failed Black people who were pleading for help and demanding it.

America should be ashamed. It abandoned the issue of police reform.

After Covid lockdowns eased and people were once again gathered for things other than protest, their priorities snapped back to a noninterventionist normality. Their cabin-fever racial consciousness was like some kind of delirium, an outgrowth of end-of-the-world ideations.

As the world reopened, elections approached and crime and inflation rose in tandem, interest in police reform and protecting Black lives from police violence melted away like ice cubes on a summer sidewalk.

And with it, America was taught some horrendous lessons that do more harm to the quest for equality than the protests did to promote it.

Black people were taught that for some, interest in their safety had simply been a dernier cri, that allyship could be transitory and transactional, that some people entered the fight through a turnstile and that when their interest and energy waned, they exited the same way.

Too many liberal politicians showed us that their commitment to legislation, and even language, to protect Black lives from police violence was polling dependent, not rooted in moral rectitude or core values but governed by their ideas’ public appeal. When the winds shifted, these politicians spun like a weather vane.

They ran scared of being labeled woke or supporting a “defund the police” ideology. Rather than rebrand a laudable effort to be smarter about how municipal funds are allocated with a more acceptable slogan, they did the lazy, politically expedient thing: They raced to neutralize the idea by proclaiming their direct opposition to it, not defunding the police but increasing funding to police.

Police unions also learned a lesson: that they could survive the most intense and coordinated denunciation of their practices they had ever faced and still dodge federal legislation to address the violence that happens on their watch.

Yes, states like California and New York moved quickly, while the issue was still in vogue, to rewrite some criminal codes, and a smattering of cities increased protection by doing things like strengthening “duty to intervene” policies, but national reform remained elusive.

If there are rare occasions to employ a cliché, this is one: They dodged the bullet.

If there is a silver lining in all of this, it is at present an anecdotal one. It is the seeming impact that Black women have had to disrupt the system when given power not necessarily to prevent violent excesses but at least to punish them.

The police chief who moved quickly to fire the officers in the Nichols case is a Black woman.

When Rayshard Brooks was killed in Atlanta at a drive-through, the mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Black woman, accepted the resignation of her police chief and decided that the officers should be fired immediately. (Unfortunately, the officers were not eventually charged in the case, sued the city and were reinstated.)

When a white Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, walked into the apartment of Botham Shem Jean and shot him to death, Police Chief U. Reneé Hall, a Black woman, moved quickly to secure a warrant for the officer’s arrest. Guyger was convicted of murder in the case.

I don’t want to imply that a handful of cases are universally revelatory but to circle them as curiosities worthy of keeping an eye on.

Rather than pointing to a system that is evolving and becoming more humane, these examples only underscore the racialized nature of the system and how slow it has been to act in places where neither the people in power nor the accused officers were Black.

Tyre Nichols’s death isn’t only an individual tragedy; he is now a marquee victim of a predacious system that America has lost its willingness to confront. The untreated wound, still festering, bled through the gauze.

Democrats Have A Good Chance To Hold Congress

The following is part of an op-ed by Ryan Cooper at MSNBC.com: 

For most of 2022, Democrats have been sinking ever deeper into a pit of despair. President Joe Biden’s approval ratings (driven by the worst inflation in 40 years), were approaching those of the late Bush administration. The party’s agenda was apparently dead in the Senate, and Republican gerrymandering had given the GOP a substantial handicap in House elections. Election nerds took it for granted that Democrats would lose the House and probably the Senate too, along with control of vital swing-state governments, in November.

But in just a few weeks, things have taken a sharp turn for the better for the party. Democratic senators pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act — a large climate and health care bill that proves the party isn’t completely incapable of governing. Inflation appears to be moderating somewhat. And Republican extremism has produced weak conservative candidates in several states and, thanks to the right-wing majority Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, toxic opposition.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump appears to be in deep legal trouble. Last week, the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate and reclaimed numerous boxes of documents. The entire conservative movement responded with purple-faced outrage, threatening retaliation against Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI and anyone else it could think of. One right-wing terroristmounted an attack on an FBI office, which ended in his death.

But then on Friday, the warrant was released, and everyone learned Trump is under investigation for allegedly violating the Espionage Act.

Democrats just might be able to save their majorities in Congress, if they hustle. . . .

Trump’s unprecedented legal problems are a nice cherry on top of the Democrats’ cake. Republicans definitely did not want to make the election center on the former president when there is inflation to complain about. Now their abject dedication to the most corrupt and lawless president in American history is laid bare. If conservatives have anything to do with it, Trump will be back in power come 2025, ready to carry out God only knows what. That’s a powerful argument in Democrats’ favor.

Now, Democrats would be fools to assume they will win by default. History and electoral common sense suggests that Republicans are still the favorites in the midterms. But the combination of solid achievement and loony extremist opponents is a powerful one. Biden’s poll numbers are improving, and the generic congressional ballot looks even better. If they put up a strong effort this fall, Democrats have a solid shot at remaining in control of Congress and the presidency.

GOP Radicals Are Willing To Kill Women To Oppose Abortion

 

The actions of many abortion opponents is truly frightening. They are willing to let women die instead of allowing abortions in life-threatening situations.

The following op-ed is by Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times:

It’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of women being denied care for miscarriages and otherwise having their lives endangered because of state abortion bans.

The Washington Post reported on a woman who had to travel to Michigan after a doctor in her home state refused to end an ectopic pregnancy because of the presence of fetal cardiac activity. (Ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus, never lead to a live birth and are the leading cause of first-trimester maternal death.)

In an interview with The Associated Press, a doctor described a patient who was miscarrying in Texas and had developed a uterine infection. She couldn’t get the necessary treatment — an immediate abortion — as long as the fetus displayed signs of life. “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine,” The A.P. reported, all because, as the doctor said, “we were essentially 24 hours behind.”

A doctor in Wisconsin, Carley Zeal, told The New York Times about caring for a woman having a miscarriage who had been denied treatment at a hospital. By the time she found Dr. Zeal, The Times reported, “the woman had been bleeding intermittently for days,” which the doctor said put her at “increased risk of hemorrhage or infection.”

Some in the anti-abortion movement insist that the doctors refusing to treat these women are mistaken about what the laws in their states say. “To the extent that doctors or attorneys are confused about whether necessary women’s health care is forbidden under pro-life laws, the fault lies in large part with pro-abortion activists, who have been intentionally muddying the waters,” tweeted Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a writer for National Review and the co-author of “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”

If that was the case, one might think abortion opponents would be eager to see their laws clarified. After all, the suffering caused by mismanaged miscarriages doesn’t serve the cause of fetal life. Ultimately, it will likely be detrimental to the anti-abortion movement. In Ireland, it was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who developed septicemia after being refused a termination while she was miscarrying, that spurred the successful campaign for legalized abortion there. Preventing such deaths should be as urgent a priority for those opposed to legal abortion as for those who champion it.

But it isn’t. Last week, the Biden administration released guidancethat under federal law, hospitals must provide abortions when they’re necessary to stabilize patients suffering medical emergencies, or transfer them to a hospital that will. Texas is suingto prevent that policy from going into effect, saying it would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Idaho’s Republican Party recently changed its platform to call for the criminalization of all abortions without exception. According to a blog post by Idaho Reports, a public policy television program, some delegates shared concerns about ectopic pregnancies and proposed an exemption in the platform when a woman’s life is in “lethal danger.” The exemption proposal was voted down, 412-164.

In The Times, the president of Texas Right to Life, John Seago, acknowledged that abortion bans could delay intervention during miscarriages. Doctors, he said, cannot decide that “I want to cause the death of the child today because I believe that they’re going to pass away eventually.”

I thought I was sufficiently cynical about the anti-abortion movement, but I admit to being taken aback by this blithe, public disregard for the lives of women, including women suffering the loss of wanted pregnancies.

I suspect that part of what’s happening is the right following its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion. It’s common for abortion opponents to claim that abortion is never medically necessary. Among conservative elites, this argument relies on semantic trickery, defining the termination of pregnancy to save a woman’s life as something other than abortion. Hence when the president of Americans United for Life testified before Congress, she argued, about the high-profile case of the 10-year-old rape victim, “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.”

This stance allows some abortion opponents to avoid reckoning with the consequences of the laws they support. Others, however, see those consequences fully and are fine with them. Scott Herndon, an Idaho Republican who recently unseated an incumbent state senator, was the politician who proposed the abortion criminalization language in his party’s platform. A website he runs, Abolish Abortion Idaho, says, of legislation he pushes, “Doctors may not intentionally kill the child in their medical attempts to treat the mother.”

On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Herndon posted a Facebook video arguing for murder prosecutions for abortion patients as well as abortion providers. “This body inside the mother’s body is not her body, and we need to get over the lie that mothers are not accountable,” he said. Men like him are making laws now. Don’t expect mercy.

Pay Attention To The Secret Parts Of Trump's Strategy

 The following op-ed is by Steve Benen (pictured) at MSNBC.com:

Donald Trump made little effort to hide his intentions about his 2020 defeat, even before it happened. In the run up to Election Day, the sitting president routinely said, for example, that he was prepared to reject the results based on whether he liked the outcome or not. All of this played out in public, for everyone to see.

But it’s the secret parts of the Republican’s strategy that warrant special attention.

The fake electors plot, for example, was kept under wraps, and participants were told not to disclose the scheme. But as yesterday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing also made clear, much of Trump’s plan to direct an armed mob to Capitol Hill was also concealed. As The New York Times explained:

President Donald J. Trump attempted to make the Jan. 6, 2021, march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even as he and his team intentionally assembled and galvanized a violence-prone mob to disrupt certification of his electoral defeat, the House committee investigating the attack showed on Tuesday.

The plan was for Trump to not only assemble the crowd, but also to deploy and join it. This simply wasn’t widely shared, however, even inside the White House.

The hearing highlighted a text from a Jan. 6 rally organizer, for example, who said Trump would have his followers march to the Capitol, though the then-president would pretend “to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”

The details, the organizer added, “cannot get out,” because other government agencies would object.

There was even a draft tweet, which documents show Trump personally saw ahead of Jan. 6, in which the Republican planned to tell his followers his rally would soon after be followed by a “march to the Capitol.”

The missive ultimately wasn’t published, but the point is that the then-president and his team planned to dispatch his summoned mob to the Capitol, and they were careful not to share this with others.

The Times’ report added, “For more than a year, Mr. Trump and his defenders have described the violence at the Capitol as a freewheeling peaceful protest gone awry. But the hearing on Tuesday laid out how the former president took a guiding role not only in bringing the mob fueled by his election lies to Washington that day, but also in the plan to direct it up to Capitol Hill, disregarding the advice of his closest aides.”

Indeed, this was a bizarre scenario in which the sitting president and members of his team had to keep parts of the federal government in the dark about his own plans precisely because he was acting against his own government’s interests.

Trump knew he was assembling a mob based on a lie. He knew the mob was armed. He knew he intended to dispatch the mob and have it descend on Congress. He knew top members of his own White House were vehemently opposed to all of this — fearing, among other things, being charged “with every crime imaginable.”

But Trump and members of his political operation quietly proceeded anyway.

Keep this in mind the next time someone on the right suggests the riot was simply a protest that spontaneously got out of hand.

Will GOP Go After Contraceptives After Killing Roe?

The following thought-provoking op-ed is by Steve Benen at MSNBC.com:

It was around this time 10 years ago when Republicans targeted the Affordable Care Act in an unexpected way. The Democrats’ landmark health care reform package expanded access to contraception, and as regular readers may recall, a surprising number of GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill had a problem with that.

In fact, in March 2012, the Senate narrowly defeated a proposal, known as the Blunt Amendment, intended to allow all U.S. employers to deny contraception coverage to employees as part of the businesses’ health plans.

A decade later, the issue is back with a vengeance.

After Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling leaked last week, it quickly became clear that Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court were likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. The initial focus, naturally, focused on the expected demise of American women’s constitutional right to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

But it wasn’t long before many, including President Joe Biden, started wondering aloud about related effects. If, for example, the right to privacy upon which much of Roe was based no longer exists, what’s to come of marriage equality? And court rulings protecting interracial marriages? And access to birth control?

It was against this backdrop that Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves faced some good questions yesterday. The Washington Post reported:

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that his state would ban certain forms of contraception, sidestepping questions about what would happen next if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

The Republican governor specifically told CNN’s Jake Tapper that limiting access to contraceptives isn’t what Mississippi policymakers are focused on “at this time.”

Also yesterday, the Mississippi governor talked to NBC News’ Chuck Todd, and the “Meet the Press” host further pressed Reeves on the issue. Todd asked, “You’ve just said that you believe life begins at conception. If there is legislation brought to you to ban contraception, would you sign it?” The governor replied, “Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen in Mississippi.”

The problem for proponents of reproductive health, of course, is that these evasive answers left open the possibility that GOP officials in Mississippi might very well focus on contraception access in the not-too-distant future. The governor could’ve taken the issue off the table, but Reeves didn’t — and by all appearances, he didn’t want to.

The Magnolia State is hardly the only state where this is an issue:

• Republican legislators in Louisiana are working on an abortion ban that would “arguably criminalize in vitro fertilization and forms of birth control.”
• Republican legislators in Idaho are currently weighing new restrictions on some forms of contraception.
• Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee recently denounced Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 case that struck down a state law that restricted married couples’ access to birth control.
• Each of the Republican candidates running for state attorney general in Michigan also denounced the Griswold precedent.
• Blake Masters, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona, not only denounced the Griswold precedent, he’s told voters that he’ll only vote to confirm judges who agree with him.

For many years, contraception simply wasn’t a major political issue in the United States. There are plenty of reasons to believe that may soon change.

Public Prefers GOP On Inflation - But GOP Has No Plan

The public is very upset about inflation, and polls are showing they think the Republicans will deal with it better than the Democrats. But the Republicans have no plan to deal with inflation -- and they are more likely to pass laws removing restrictions from Big Business (allowing them to price gouge by raising prices even more).

Here is what Steve Benen says about this at MSNBC.com:

As this year’s midterm elections draw closer — Election Day is 27 weeks from tomorrow — Republicans have reason for optimism. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll points to one of the key reasons why.

More than 9 in 10 Americans say they are concerned, at minimum, about the rate of inflation, which has been at a 40-year high in recent months. That includes 44 percent who categorize themselves as “upset.” ... On inflation, 50 percent say they trust the GOP more compared with 31 percent who say that of the Democrats.

That 19-point advantage the GOP enjoys on the issue of inflation is roughly in line with the latest  NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, which showed Republicans leading Democrats on the issue by 21 points.

All of which leads to a relevant detail that’s often overlooked: If voters think Republicans know what do about inflation, they’re likely to be deeply disappointed.

NBC News’ Sahil Kapur, for example, last week asked Sen. Joni Ernst about her plan to address the economic issue on the minds of many American consumers. The Iowa Republican responded, “Stop spending federal money and then start investing in American innovation and energy.”

In other words, to reduce inflation, Ernst wants to spend less and spend more.

Two weeks earlier, Donald Trump was asked on Fox News what he’d do to address inflation if he were in the White House. He gave a long, meandering, and wildly dishonest answer, which didn’t even try to address the question.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, it was last fall when Sen. Rick Scott accidentally told The Wall Street Journal what he was actually thinking. Looking ahead to the next round of elections, the Florida Republican, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, seemed a little eager to celebrate inflation. “This is a gold mine for us,” the senator said.

The obvious problem was that elected officials aren’t supposed to be happy about economic conditions that hurt the public. Scott’s “gold mine” rhetoric made him sound less like someone looking out for Americans’ interests and more like The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns.

But just as notable was the fact that Scott’s party still doesn’t have much in the way of actual policy ideas related to inflation, the Floridian’s glee notwithstanding. NBC News reported last fall, “[B]eyond blocking Biden’s wide-ranging social safety net and climate action plan ... how the GOP would tackle a notoriously difficult economic trend is less clear.”

The report added that much of the GOP’s plan — to the extent that anyone can credibly call it a “plan” — would have “little effect or no effect in addressing the cause of increased costs or would not materially affect the economy for years.”

That was in late November. Six months later, very little has changed.

There’s no great mystery behind the GOP’s strategy: It’s rooted in the idea that Americans are upset about something; Democrats hold the reins of federal power; so voters should blame the governing majority. It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense or whether Republicans have meaningful solutions.

To be sure, that strategy might very well work. Incumbent parties are routinely blamed for things they have little control over. Republican incumbents and candidates will effectively tell voters, “We’re upset about what you’re upset about,” and that could prove to be enough.

But that doesn’t mean the underlying problem will be addressed.

The possible good news, at least for consumers, is that there’s a growing number of economic analysts who believe inflation may have peaked. CNBC published a report late last week quoting Andrew Hunter, the senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, who said the latest evidence suggests inflation “is starting to ease.” He added that Capital Economics’ view is that inflation “will fall a little more quickly this year than Fed officials now appear to expect.”

A week earlier, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also said she believes inflation may have peaked in the first quarter.

GOP No Longer Sharing A National Identity With Others .

 

Our country is divided. It's divided between Democrats and most Independents who fear for the survival of our democracy, and Republicans who no longer care about democracy's survival. Those Republicans don't even want to be identified with others in this country.

Here, from the Houston Chronicle, is part of how Leonard Pitts, Jr. describes this:

What has gone missing from this country is not some idealized unity. Rather, it is something more profound. We no longer share a narrative. We no longer have a common thread.

A poll released last week by Economist/YouGov testifies eloquently to this. The survey, which asked 1,500 Americans which news organizations they trust the most, came back with a truly stunning result:

Republicans trust almost nothing.

Even Fox is trusted only by a bare majority (53 percent). And the rankings go downhill from there.

PBS? Twenty percent.

The Washington Post? Sixteen percent.

CNN? Eleven percent.

It turns out The Wall Street Journal, widely considered the most reputable conservative-leaning news organization in the country, is trusted by more Democrats (52 percent) than Republicans (27 percent).

On its website, YouGovAmerica represents these results with a graphic of dots on a grid. It’s a simple illustration, but the gaping distances between red dots and blue ones makes for an arresting visual. It’s a map of national dysfunction, of a people pulling away from themselves.

So no, unity is not the problem. Let some international enemy bomb these shores and you’ll have all the unity you can stand.

What Americans have lost — to be painfully accurate, what Republicans have trashed in pursuit of power — is the willingness and ability to share a common national identity. The average Republican trusts almost no mainstream source of information. As a result, Americans no longer proceed from the same baseline assumptions, are no longer driven by the same national aspirations, no longer understand the meaning and mission of their country in the same way.

That’s the state of this union. America is a nation in stasis, getting nowhere because it is simultaneously being pulled in opposite directions toward fundamentally different visions. The need to fix this — better education in civics, history, critical thinking and media literacy along with improved policing of social media — could hardly be more urgent. After all, if you pull a thing in different directions at the same time, it can’t move.

But it can break.

The GOP Is Not A Coherent Political Party Anymore

The United States needs two viable political parties (or more). It prevents one party from going to far and damaging our democracy. But the Republican Party is no longer a viable party -- just a cult of sycophants worshipping an orange demagogue. They refuse to compromise on anything -- just engaging in a nasty culture war that labels those who disagree as enemies. 

Here's what Eugene Robinson has to say about today's Republican Party in The Washington Post:

At this point, the Republican Party really ought to change its name. It’s not a coherent political party anymore. To comply with truth-in-advertising standards, it should call itself the Republican Hot Mess.

And yes, this is an election year, and the Hot Mess could take control of one or even both houses of Congress. At a time of overlapping crises at home and abroad, that is a gamble the nation should not take — and an outcome Democrats and independents must do everything in their power to prevent.

Most endangered is the Democrats’ slim majority in the House, where Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — desperate to move into the expansive office suite occupied by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — is spending much of his time dealing with a loony-bin caucus that seems determined to embarrass the party leadership.

The member of his ranks currently giving McCarthy the biggest migraine is Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), who recently said on a podcast that, since taking office, he has encountered “sexual perversion,” including an invitation to “come to an orgy,” and has seen individuals who publicly stand against illegal drugs “do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.”

Cawthorn, 26, said he was shocked by all of this, “being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70.” He added: “I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life — I’ve always paid attention to politics — then all of a sudden you get invited.” The clear implication is that these unnamed hedonists are colleagues of his in Congress.

Fearful of losing support in his quest for the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy has been loath to punish or even meaningfully rebuke Cawthorn’s fellow loony-bin residents such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), who both spoke recently at a conference organized by an avowed white nationalist. But Cawthorn’s allegations were so beyond the pale that McCarthy finally called him in and dressed him down. He told reporters later that Cawthorn “did not tell the truth,” that there was “no evidence” to support his claims and that his words were “unacceptable.”

Does this mean the GOP is beginning to come back to its senses? Not really. McCarthy has said that Greene and Gosar, both of whom have been stripped of their committee assignments by the Democratic majority, will be placed on committees again if Republicans take control. McCarthy also tiptoes around the antics of such clowns as Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.), who called a fellow member of Congress “the Jihad Squad,” and Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), who is under investigation for alleged sex trafficking. The inmates are running the asylum.

Over in the Senate, where Democrats need Vice President Harris’s tiebreaking vote to have a majority, we saw last week the disgraceful way Republican senators handled their questioning of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) tried unfairly to paint Jackson as lenient on child pornographers. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) asked whether she believed babies are racist. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) pressed her to define the word “woman.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) angrily sought to hold her responsible for the way Democratic senators have treated Republican nominees in the past.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) has said Senate Republicans will not produce a legislative agenda ahead of the midterm elections, apparently believing it is dangerous to let voters know exactly what they might be voting for. On the other side of the Capitol, however, McCarthy is working on a “Commitment to America” set of proposals.

I agree that some members of McCarthy’s caucus need to be committed, but not in the way he means.

Looming over the whole Hot Mess, of course, is former president Donald Trump. From his Elba at Mar-a-Lago, Trump has been trying to boost the prospects of incumbents and challengers who support his “big lie” about the “stolen” election — and to end the careers of Republicans, such as Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who stand for the party’s traditional values.

Trump recently pulled his endorsement from Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.), who is seeking a Senate seat, because Brooks — who went so far as to give a fiery speech at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally — has said it is time to move on from the 2020 election. How far out on the fringe do you have to be to get and keep Trump’s support?

By making every race all about himself, Trump could be his (putative) party’s worst enemy. It would be beyond ironic if Democrats held on to their majorities thanks to his whims and grudges.