The late 1990s were difficult times for Democrats and progressives. It was soul searching time for me in those days. The president of the United States became only the second president to ever be impeached. There were numerous defenses for the president and his behavior. Most of those defenses were permutations of the same defense. Essentially they said that what a man (or woman) does in their personal life does not impact them in their professional life. As long as Bill Clinton was a good president from nine to five then what does matter that he isn’t a good man after those hours?

French president Jacques Chirac famously had multiple affairs. The joke was that he kept replacing each significant other with the same woman ten years younger. If the French people accepted him as their leader then we should have accepted Clinton as our leader. As we know, that argument won out. Except, it really didn’t win out. It helped Bush win the election over Al Gore. I ended up voting for Gore because he was a different man and an infinitely better one than Clinton. However, there were millions that punished him for the mistakes of his former boss.

We often have difficulty separating a message from the messenger. It’s one of the important things I point out when teaching Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. One of the steps he mentions before a direct action campaign is self-purification. It’s a challenging concept for students. Yet, it is absolutely crucial. Listening to someone like Newt Gingrich (at the time) prattle on about character is hilarious. However, it doesn’t mean the point is wrong.

If we have learned anything over the last seven or eight years it is that personal character is absolutely a big deal. We just endured a presidency of someone that has no character. We saw what happened. We saw how that spilled into everything. We saw the abject cruelty. We saw the inhumanity and indifference. We saw the lack of a fundamental understanding and empathy.

Whether this inhumanity is merely a reflection of the people that supported him or whether his inhumanity rubbed off on them is hard to parse. His grotesque existence brings forth any number of questions. However, the most important one is whether those that support him really reflect his inhumanity or if they support him simply because that inhumanity bothers us. Either is equally likely. One might ask what the difference is and I suppose it is a minor detail, but it tells me that in one case there are millions of sociopaths/psychopaths out there. In the other case, they have human empathy, sympathy, and concern in most situations, but just enjoy the political nihilism.

Humanity itself is a fragile thing. Everyone we encounter in our lives is flawed. Look at us in the perfect angle and we can be angels or demons. Both of things make us human. We are walking contradictions and so choosing any one to lead us can seem like an impossible task. The former guy may be human in the purest scientific sense, but lacks any redeeming human traits. Such a statement seems impossible and yet objectively true. There isn’t a positive human trait there. Some of us thought those things weren’t necessary to lead. They were absolutely wrong.

Okay, okay, with the help of Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen we have undercovered some of the nastiest scam PAC whatnots happening right here in the good ole USA.

This one is kinda “hey, come over here and let me punch you in the face” scam.  These guys are pretending to be raising money to fight for veterans in congress. They even have the nerve to put this manner of crapola on the internet.  It’s called the American Coalition for Crisis Relief PAC and they ask for your help.

They have raised $3.5 million dollars to lobby for veteran issues.

Let’s look at the second quarter of this year to see their latest filing with the FEC.

The scam PAC raised over $500,000 in the second quarter and spent $0 on candidates. All of the money it raised went to “operating expenditures.”

Oh, and there’s more. They have paid themselves nicely for running the PAC.

And they also paid consultants at this place.

Let me save you the trouble of looking up the address — it’s something called Lashed and Laced, and it looks legitimate.

It’s on the end there.  I thought it was a hair salon and Lord knows I trust hair salons with political activism, but Thelma informed me that Lashed and Laced is most likely a line of ladies basement boudoir accessories and corsets. So, it’s probably an S&M shop, which, even if you don’t think too hard about it, might actually be the best place to hire congressional lobbyist.

So, I dunno.

Reminder:  do not give money to any PAC unless you are very sure who runs that sucker.

Okay, this is a long You Tube and really not really worth your time except that it shows a West Virginia Circuit Court Judge pulling a handgun in a menacing manner while in the middle of a damn hearing. He points it toward the ceiling and then puts it down on his edge bench pointing in the direction of the lawyer he pissed at.

I would like to let this judge know that Texas holds the distributorship on crap like that. If a judge pulls something like that in a courtroom outside of Texas, they have to pay Texas a licensing fee.

It’s the law. Look it up.

And for the of you keeping score, Florida is working hard to fill the quack gap forced upon the country by the departure of Louie Gohmert from congress.

Martin Hyde (R), who is running for Congress in Florida’s 16th congressional district, “says he would have killed the FBI agents who searched…  Trump’s property if they tried to do the same thing to his home,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports.

Once that line was crossed, there’s no going back and competition immediately clawed its way upward.

Florida state House candidate Luis Miguel (R) “was suspended from Twitter after a tweet advocating that Floridians should be able to shoot federal agents on sight,” Florida Politics reports.

So, Florida, that was a twofer day? Keep it up, you can win this thing at Mar a Lago alone.

Joe Manchin has become a thorn in the side of our Democratic-led government. We felt it acutely when he finally agreed to pass the anti-inflation bill that has both short- and long-term benefits. Hopefully it’ll do some good.

That bill was as dead as a door nail. But like Lazarus, it rose again, and when Manchin added his 50th vote, we cried in exultation. But this reminded us, again, how this one Senator can muck up the works.

And now I am wondering if we aren’t going to see more of this in the future.

Axios is carrying this news item today that reports on a Republican state Senator in Colorado.

From Axios:

“A state senator in Colorado is resigning from the Republican Party and becoming a Democrat, citing the party’s complicity in the Jan. 6 insurrection and 2020 election denial as the reason.”

This would be Colorado Sen. Kevin Priola. Like Senator Manchin, Priola is a moderate that has voted on a bipartisan basis but has also voted with Republicans 90% of the time. He has said that he will not alter the way he votes despite his new party affiliation.

Since January 6, there have been several of these defections, all in response to the insurgency and to the continued lying about a stolen election. I like to call these defectors “Mini Manchins”.

So 1/6 has become a Manchin-creating machine. More and more people are changing their party affiliations but not their minds.

I know most of you are going to miss Louie Gohmert.  In case you were distracted, Louie left his congressional seat to run for Texas Attorney General against Texas felony indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Out of four candidates, Louie came in fifth. Okay, okay, almost fifth.

I don’t know diddle-squat about the new guy who will surely win that seat except that he admires Gohmert. That could mean that we move from dumb to big dumb. Our fear is that he’s just like Gohmert except effective.

You see, over Louie’s time in congress, he didn’t have a sterling record in effectiveness.

He exits office as Texas’ ninth most senior member of Congress, having made a mark — but not legislatively. In nine congressional terms, he’s passed just one bill into law, a measure in 2017 that simplified the process for calling 911.

We are worried that the new guy can get something passed. As far as we know so far, he may not cast a reflection in a mirror.

This is the first year I’ve supported a World History class on my campus. Memories keep flooding back to my days teaching World History. In the first week, we asked the kids to tell us which invention they thought was the most important. We gave them several examples to choose from, but they could go off script if they wanted.

The light bulb moments are always the most fun when teaching. When you see students realize how one invention leads to others it is always a joy to watch. History has always worked that way. One event or one discovery leads to others. It’s the butterfly effect in action.

This is why the white-washing of history is so dangerous. You cannot simply erase one event from history and call it good. Those events effect other events and impact millions of lives generations later. These things seem insignificant, but nothing is insignificant.

One tiny example is the story of Henrietta Lacks. Her cells have become famous in the science world, but she only exists in relative obscurity. She died very young from cervical cancer, but before she died the Mayo Clinic harvested some cells to figure out what was wrong with her. They told her about her cancer, but in the process discovered those cells could keep regenerating. In effect, she would live on forever.

The Lacks family sued the company harvesting her cells because they never gained permission to do so. The Mayo Clinic asked the family if they could study her cells and they said no. They did it anyway. It seems like such an insignificant story, but when paired with other similar stories it helps explain why some people have a natural distrust of science and vaccines.

When we deny events like the Tuskegee Study we not only remove that event, but we remove context from our collective understanding of history. We well know these atrocities are not necessarily isolated events. Some of these events have never been a part of the natural teaching of history, but others have been. At present, there are those that want to say the Trail of Tears never happened. They want to call it something else. They want to say the Cherokee chose to migrate to Oklahoma. Sure they did.

When we remove the event and the context of that event then we fail to understand our current condition. We deny it exists. So, we explain it away as something else. People don’t have a natural distrust of people in power. They are somehow jaded because of their own failures and problems. They are scapegoating us for their issues. There is obviously no doubt that some of this is true. Success and failure both have numerous layers, causes, effects, and the like. Our lives are nuanced just like history itself. Nothing is ever that simple.

Understanding history has never been about blame or internalizing the mistakes of the past. It is simply about understanding them and understanding their impact on the current condition. If we understand then we can begin to heal and be a part of the solution. If we don’t then we continue to perpetuate it and compound it.