PMC Commentary

The pablum of pandering

​​​​​Bill Rivers, a speechwriter for former defense secretary James Mattis, has written another of those beastly Thanksgiving columns that the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, herself a former speechwriter (for President Reagan), might pen: a sententious tribute to the familial farce of this annual giving of thanks that Uncle Elmer — a loud, bullheaded, Trump-loving, mossback of a racist ass — should be a beloved member of virtually everyone's unfortunate little clan.

Having reminded us that America has suffered through earlier times of extraordinary sociopolitical strife — his chronology of nationally divisive pain begins, almost comically, with the Whisky Rebellion of the early 1790s — Rivers concludes with secondhand advice that only a qualified psychologist of skin-crawling clichés could ever think to offer:

"Psychologist Dan Goleman has argued that families are 'the first school for emotional learning.'"

Proceeds Rivers: "If so, then we’re all better served by forgetting politics this Thanksgiving and focusing instead on the person across the table, listening authentically, loving them as best we can, and letting them love us.

"In the end, it’s the common acceptance of truth that will set us free from acrimony. Determining the truth is hard, but we can create space for the necessary national dialogue by first starting small in our own homes."

For starters, I've no idea what a "national dialogue" is, other than the course and outcome of the only truly national referendum, of sorts, we hold every fours years. The last one demonstrated that, first (and again), U.S. presidential elections are hideously undemocratic; second, that a subliterate swindler and guttersniping ignoramus can indeed win such an election; and third — evidence of the second — that nearly half of contemporary American voters make H.L. Mencken's booboisie look like Georgetown sophisticates. Such is the spatial salvation upon which Mr. Rivers' hopes hang.

"Determining the truth is hard," observes Rivers in a rather self-evident phrase of utter uselessness, seeing how some truths — some major truths which divide us today — are self-evidently easy at which to arrive: gutting federal revenue does not increase federal revenue; running massive deficits in otherwise propitious economic times would have John Maynard Keynes face-palming; claiming that $700 billion a year is an insufficient amount for the defense department to afford ammunition; caging children is generally regarded as somewhat bad government policy; treating allies as enemies and enemies as allies is likely counterproductive; and so and so forth, straight into the sempiternal hellhole of a country that Trumpism has steeped us.

The problem, Mr. Rivers, is that the "common acceptance of truth" is precisely what's so uncommon these days. There exists an army of fabulists, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh to Hugh Hewitt, who profit enormously from instructing millions of Trump's fellow ignoramuses on horrendous falsehoods.

Elmer is one of them. And "listening authentically" (whatever that means) to one's avuncular crackpot is, colloquially put, a fucking waste of time.

The closest my family ever got to owning an "authentic" Elmer was a John Birch suitor to my widowed grandmother who earnestly argued with my soon-enraged father, upon every visit to our home, that Dwight D. Eisenhower had been a communist president.

Bill Rivers' column is but valid proof of only one thing: To be a valued speechwriter is to be a blithering fabulist oneself.

A happy Thanksgiving of gore

There is, I would argue — and shall — a vague, fleetingly ambiguous but disturbingly connected link between two isolated actions of a dead president, known for his valor, and a sitting chief executive who attempts to merely play the part of his heroic predecessor. Please bear with me, for though the link is tenuous, it is, I believe valid.

In 1912, as former president Theodore Roosevelt departed the Gilpatrick Hotel to deliver a third-term campaign speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium, he waved to the assembled crowd as he entered his awaiting automobile. Suddenly, from a distance of only five feet, a blast from a Colt revolver plunged a bullet into chest. Roosevelt fingered the wound, noticed a roughly 12mm hole, then coughed several times to check for any blood emitting from his right lung. There was none.

Thus personally reassured, rather than having himself transported to the hospital, he ordered his driver to the auditorium, where he stood to speak. "Friends," he announced, "I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot." Thereupon he informed the audience that his speech would be shorter than planned, since, as you can well imagine, blood had by then stained a large section of this white shirt.

Instead, he spoke for 90 minutes, his voice weakening throughout every one.

We now return to the scene of the crime. After one John Flammang Schrank, an unemployed barkeeper later declared criminally insane, had pulled the trigger, the attendant crowd murderously descended on him. Blared T.R., "Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him." That done, he asked Schrank, "What did you do it for?" Schrank did not answer. "Oh, what’s the use," said T.R. "Turn him over to the police."

Schrank's prosecution would be left to the proper authorities, with T.R. exerting no influence on his many political and police connections. The law and Schrank's future (29 years in an insane asylum) would wind their way according to the norms and statutes of American justice.

Enter the travesty of Donald J. Trump and his "manly" interference in the case of Chief Petty Officer and Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who in 2017 was charged with multiple murders involving ISIS captives. Acquitted of these and other charges, Gallagher was found guilty of posing for a Kodak moment with the body of a dead prisoner — a violation of military law. His sentence was light; a one-step reduction in rank and time served.

Against all the norms and traditions of military justice and its courts, Trump personally intervened and rescinded Gallager's demotion. Moreover, the president gutted a Naval review board convened to decide whether Gallagher could retain his SEAL Trident pin.

Writes former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer (fired because he had written Trump, "asking him not to get involved in these questions": "This was a shocking and unprecedented intervention in a low-level review. It was also a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices."

Ethics. uniformity of rules, conventional practices — three traditions at the president level valued by one and shamefully disregarded by another. As an aside, I would wager that had Trump been shot in the chest by Mr. James Schrank, he would have yelped to the crowd: Kill the son of a bitch!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

CNN's latest poll: Devastating with a touch of optimism

Here's some news, from CNN's SSRS polling, that should have you retching for both distance and accuracy, to steal from Martin Crane.

"After five days of public hearings in House Democrats' impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, public opinion over whether the President ought to be impeached and removed from office remains exactly the same as it was in October.

"Half of Americans say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, 43% say he should not."

This seems especially troubling: "Independents are closely divided on the question, 47% in favor, 45% opposed." If by "Independents" one means the somewhat persuadable, then a split in opinion disadvantages House Democrats in swing districts.

Even more troubling for House Dems is this: "The public is about evenly divided over whether there is enough evidence now for the House to vote to impeach … (48% say yes, 47% say no)." That's just to impeach, mind you, not to remove the head of the Trump crime family.

And get this: Among all Americans, "17% say [Republicans] are doing too little and 41% say they're doing the right amount to defend Trump." That's an electorate in which 58% also believe mob lawyers should either kick up their game or they're "doing the right thing" by encouraging their clients to whack any disagreeable witnesses.

The good news is that women may save us yet, next November. "There is now a 20-point difference between men and women on Trump's overall approval rating (52% of men approve vs. 32% of women)…. And the poll marks the first time that more than 60% of women have said they backed impeaching Trump and removing him from office."

Why? Because women have spent the centuries (surreptitiously) developing their brains while men have been content with their nonevolutionary brawn. We men are the apish iguanas of the human species; we figure that as long as our gorilla chests and lizard dicks are big enough, we'll get by just fine. Which leads most of us to support morons and mob bosses like Donald J. Trump.

***

I apologize if I sound a bit cranky. My dehydration has advanced to the point of an emergency-room visit for a petrol fill-up. And I detest emergency rooms.

I'm down again, but I hope to be back later today. 

(Update: I know now it's dehydration, for sure; all the symptoms have worsened since early morning. I'm downing water and G2 and walking around so as not to fall asleep again.) 

Why ignorance rules. It's pretty simple.

This cannot be said too many times, which is why E.J. Dionne is saying it again, and why I am about to quote E.J. Dionne again.

For all the ridicule the left heaps on ignorant, white evangelicals, the latter, when it comes to politics, are far smarter than the former. Because, writes Dionne, "white evangelicals turn out to be the premier pragmatists of U.S. politics":

They know they are losing ground in public opinion on issues such as same-sex marriage. An older group than the country as a whole, they are also in demographic decline as our nation grows more ethnically, racially and religiously diverse.

Nonetheless, their strength in Republican primaries — dominated by older white voters — continues unabated, which helps explain why Republican politicians are either Trump apologists or mealy mouthed about his abuses. The best defense evangelicals have against the new majority is control of the courts, which Trump is giving them. Everything else is negotiable, or ignorable.

Above all, as progressives spend their time eating overpriced chicken wings and drinking outrageously overrated imported beers at sports bars, snickering and snarking at Scripture-thumping hayseeds all the while, white evangelicals spend their time getting their ignorant friends and family members to the voting booth on Election Day, so that we can all be ruled by their fellow, cryptofascistic ignoramuses.

Every two years, every four years, the Democratic establishment (those being muscled out of decision-making roles at, for instance, presidential conventions), swears it will turn these progressives around — whereupon the true American majority can rule. And yet every two years, every four years, the young, the informed, the "enlightened" progressives fuck us all by either staying home or voting for electorally hopeless left-wing candidates in swing districts and purple states.

If it weren't for moderate Democratic voters — who on occasion can outnumber the progressive clowns — the White House would be permanently Red and Congress would be a permanent Reichstag. 

Is Drudge's fudge a grudge?

As if this country hadn't already blundered its way into the bughouse of dissociation — that troubled, collective mental state in which citizens are bothered more by the rising cost of kumquats than the mounting stacks of the president's impeachable offenses — it now seems, reportedly, that Matt Drudge has cooled on the hot-tempered virtues of Donald J. Trump.

"Publicly, Trump hasn’t said a peep about the highly popular news aggregator,"declares the Daily Beast. "But privately, he has simmered over the critical coverage that the site has run and linked to, with regards to the impeachment proceedings.

"'What’s going on with Drudge?' Trump has been asking allies.... Other sources who’ve heard the president complain told The Daily Beast that Trump has asked those close to him why they think Drudge and his website have seemed 'so anti-Trump' lately."

Although Trump, as to impeachment and removal, has more protective backstops than Tom Brady on his best day, he nevertheless frets and fulminates about inadequate allied support in Congress. Like the little corporal in his disintegrating bunker, nearly all his generals on Hamburger Hill are agin' him — he thinks.

Then, "this past week, the president went after the largely Trump-aligned Fox News for hosting certain pro-impeachment voices — 'Losers!' he said—on the air," just before, no doubt, Fox returned to another of its Goebbelseque blitzkriegs in defense of the paranoid scammer.

And now? Trump even suspects the usually baton-twirling Mr. Drudge of pulling back from his oath of personal loyalty to Der Fäilure.

Evelyn Waugh's Daily Beast further reports that Trump is not alone in his creeping distrust of the Dredge Factory. "Numerous others in the president’s orbit … have noticed the site’s drift, as well. Some have expressed their anxieties about it directly to the president." I suspect, however, that Trump's reputed comrades in anguish are merely catering to his all-demanding paranoia.

Still, if there is truth to Drudge's heresy and Trump's inquisitional hand-wringing, I also suspect that what makes this otherwise commonplace saga of Washington intrigue strangely newsworthy is this bit of insight from a former White House official, "senior" level:

"[Trump] knows Drudge isn’t able to be bullied. [Matt] doesn’t owe his career to anyone … [and] can’t be moved the way others can because he’s not afraid."

How can a man — of sorts — re-befriend another man who's unfearful of the shameless, intolerant of grifters, and simply cannot be bought?

He can't.

American logic marches on

After harrowing revelation, after appalling revelation, after damning revelation …

One more revelation and we'll name the crooked son of a bitch "President for Life."

Just Googled:

JUST GET IT OVER WITH. KILL ME NOW.

"Mad Volk"

​​​​Perhaps somehow I've misread — by now, several times over — this comment by the NY Times' masterful Roger Cohen: "[Fiona Hill's] truth made Republicans squirm, because no 'beacon of hope' can survive their craven sellout."

The beacon is the United States, which our multicolored Mephistopheles of a president, rather than keeping or remaking it great, has simply denied what it was meant to be. Trump's prelapsarian mission was "a frontal attack on the rule of law" in this Madisonian republic, a tradition of which we could all be proud.

We were, once. But pride, as we also know, comes before the fall. And rather than "squirm" at Dr. Hill's surgical delineation of the snuffing out of our light — of America's upward, historical gradations of light over darkness — Republicans are reveling at having dodged the bullet of their constitutional malpractice.

Hill's father idealistically dreamed of moving from his class-locked, hierarchical society to one in which the "ever renewed gathering-in of strangers made [everyone] equal," writes Cohen. Such was our theoretical foundation, anyway, in time codified into law. Her father never made it, constrained, as he was, by the tethers of family duty. But Fiona did, and her inherited dream was in fact "the very revolutionary American idea [now] under attack from Trump and his Republican enablers and the Fox News fabulists."

Under Trump and his corrupt privy council, America is now a society in which Republicans are on top, in which Republicans make the rules, in which Republicans effectively rewrite the laws and only selectively follow the Constitution. All others are but pests — militant Dudley Do-Rights who cannot comprehend the need for political expediency; mere blighters who cite antediluvian claptrap that means nothing to those who know better.

Of foremost importance to the ruling class is Trump's reelection. And if achieving that goal means extorting an ally and exposing it to "kinetic" destruction and Soviet-style repression of imperialist roguery, then so be it. "Nothing [here] rises to the level of impeachable offenses," says "moderate" Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. "I’ve not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion," says another extremist moderate, Texas' Rep. Will Hurd.

Dr. Hill may have been better off emigrating to a more democratically destined country — one in which at least two political parties vie for power, and one can't rig the rules so that the other remains a disposable joke. "[The GOP is] not a party anymore in the traditional sense; it’s a cult," Republican strategist John Weaver tells the Washington Post. "So [Trump will] be successful in averting conviction in the Senate and removal from office because the party is completely subjugated to him."

As we all are.

I'll take for "Prostitutes" for $300, Alex

As to who Democrats' national presidential frontrunner is, journalistic disputes intensify with every released polling average showing that Joe Biden lies indisputably in first place. With the sole exception of the Biden-Elizabeth Warren contest, margins of error also put the frontrunner spreads beyond dispute, which of course only further intensify journalists' arguments as to who is the Democratic frontrunner.

Important to note is that the judiciously experienced Amy Klobuchar has also qualified for the 19 December debate.  She is not shown (or grouped) above, however, because of the skewing pestilence of Andrew Yang — who, as just another egotistical political amateur who believes his public-service career should begin at the top, rather than making his bones as a hand-to-hand combative, lifetime custodian of public affairs, did fail to qualify. Yet Klobuchar's ship of state was separated from the main body not because of Yang's higher-than-Klobuchar's polling average, but because of the marginally greater amount of money he raised. Such is politics.

Independent, major polls tend to roughly confirm the average frontrunner findings cited above:  

Respectively, Monmouth's polling is rated by FiveThirtyEight as "A+"; ABC/WP's polling was conducted by Abt Associates, rated "A/B"; Fox News' was conducted by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research, rated "A-"; NBC/WSJ conducted by Hart Research ("B/C") and Public Opinion Strategies ("B-"); and USA's Suffolk polling is rated "A-." 

Thus stand the facts behind the Democratic race for the White House, not the prejudiced yammering of partisan spinners. Such facts are, naturally, as subject to change as Republican defenses of Trump. Yet what makes the "debate" so amusing is that those who merely cite the facts are also those who are generally accused of committing the most grievous partisan spin. 

As far as I can tell, there is only one other avocation as loaded with self-serving, simple-minded mendacity as intense political partisanship. And it tends to spread its legs. Hence the other debate as to which is really the world's oldest profession.   

Says the right: You just can't tug on superman's cape

In a NY Times op-ed, Tobin Smith, a former contributor to, and market analyst for, Fox News, offers a Richard Hofstadter-like assessment of the anti-intellectual rot upon which the network thrives:

In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation…. There’s little in this world that has the emotional manipulative power of a good tribalized — us versus them — narrative....

The Fox News counternarrative model [such as that deployed against the original narrative of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as an honorable American] is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now [that being impeachment]. The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible?

The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the "Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge…. The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.

What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?

Conspiracy theories….

Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the "proof" of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well….

Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to "special knowledge" that the rest of the world is "too blind," "too dumb" or "too corrupt" to understand.

This manner of counternarrative also explains why so many Americans believe in JFK conspiracy theories: Such a seemingly nonsensical assassination simply had to be the result of a complex, organized assault on the world's most powerful man; unquestionably, vast evil forces were at work, forces which exceeded the limited regicidal abilities of a repeatedly failed loner. This delusion helped (and still helps) Americans to regain some control in understanding the world, and allowed them "access to 'special knowledge'" that only the naive would deny.

But more than that, Smith's explanation of Fox's counternarratives comports perfectly with historian Hofstadter's theory of the paranoid style — practiced mostly by the right, though the left is susceptible. too.  What Smith lacked the space to include is that the counternarrative must feature what Hofstadter characterized as the "superman" — the "good's" virtually invincible opponent of infinite power and unspeakable wickedness, without whom the forces of goodness could, after all, triumph.

Today, that superman is, of course, the "deep state," furtively undermining Trump's all-American efforts at achieving national grandeur. That the once anonymous (as the right insisted) deep state has of late been overtly pounding the president utterly destroys the right's paranoid conviction that invisible forces are at work. It has had no nullifying effect on the deep-state conspiracy delusion whatsoever.

The right has its identified superman, and they cannot give him up. Otherwise, the jig would be up. Without the deep state's complex, organized, insidious assault on this innocent president, the right would be left with nothing but honorable diplomats and nonpartisan, career civil servants attesting, in unison and for no discernible reason, to the impeachable behavior of Donald J. Trump. 

The magnificent Richard Hofstadter had little idea, if any, of just how sustainable his paranoid theory of right-wing politics would become.

The GOP wants to stop what's helping it?

Public polls are matching what we’ve seen in our internals:@realDonaldTrump’s approval is the highest it’s been since this sham began.

Opposition to impeachment is growing.

Most voters want Biden investigated – including over a third of DEMS.

This charade is backfiring!

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) November 21, 2019

Then why in heaven's name are they unremittingly bitching about the inquiry? Should they not be cheering it on? 

Trying to stay on top of the Trump administration and allied Republicans' upside-down underworld of defending the indefensible is a task that would swamp, I should think, even the most capacious minds of the weirdest of metaphysics. Should anyone ever comprehend and thereupon explain it, there should be a Nobel Prize in Deciphering Bullshit awaiting the poor bastard.

Are happy days really here again?

​​"Historians, loath to make narrative sense of an age without waiting for the vapors of passion to pass, agree on one thing," writes the Times' Timothy Egan in the somewhat accurate opening to his optimistic "The Day That Decided the 2020 election."

While it's true that historians of the old school are loath to reflect on historical occurrences within roughly the last 50 years, historians of an even older school refuse ro rule on all things historical within, say, the last 500 years. Whatever's fresher than that is but the grist of yesterday's newspapers, more properly left for the deadlines of journalism and the impassioned rabble so fond of "instant" analyst.

What's needed for epochal clarity is the longue durée, as coined by the French Annale School of historical reflection. (Just read any of the school's brilliant works by, for instance, Fernand Braudel or Jacob Burckhardt, and you'll see what I mean.)

So precisely what, I hear you cry, is the point of this appallingly abridged introduction to professional historiography?

The pertinent thrust — or controversial target, I should say — is, in large part, Egan's following contention: "It was, [historians will say], Nov. 20, 2019, that ensured the outcome — a day and a night that crystallized the choice for the majority of Americans ready to toss Donald Trump from office" — the 20th being the day of Ambassador Gordon Sondland's rare outburst of Trump-indicting truth.

Egan's powerful implication is that from there on out — from most modern, judgment-eager historians' point of view — things got better. "Because there was no denying the facts of Trump’s deep corruption and dereliction of duty, because every midnight of the American soul has been followed by a dawn, the outcome on this election night was never in doubt."

That "the past is prologue" (this being, essentially, Egan's argument) can be an instructive aphorism is not in dispute. It can also be a catastrophic assumption, however — one born, perhaps, of reading too much of journalist-turned-historian Jon Meacham's ever-extravagant hagiographies.

Has America always had faults? asks Meachum in each and every of his uplifting 300 pages of biographical half-truths. But golly gee whiz America's historical sins have always evolved into veritably inevitable enlightenment, answers Jon, just as inevitably.

Such is history of ideological sentimentalism; not detached, disinterested analysis. It's also Exhibit A of the perils of hustling contemporary opinion as clinical assessment. Some precipitous historians unquestionably will deem 2019 and 2020 as momentously happy turning points in American history.

Others, most of them long after our earthly departure, will deem 2019 and 2020 as merely the end of the beginning of unprecedented American squalor.

And by that, I mean this — in which I commit the just-derided, historical transgression of instant analysis. (Contradiction can be so convenient as an argumentation tactic, can it not?):

Trump will not only walk with impunity; the outrageous double atrocities of 2019 and 2020 will simply open the barbarians' gate to the maws of Dante's political inferno (and his masterpiece was political, not religious). Anticonstitutional precedents will have been set: U.S. presidents will be free to disregard Congress, usurp its power of the purse, violate any presidentially annoying laws on the books, and, in general, act as an unofficial dictator — a kind of Vladimir Putin for America.

I love Timothy Egan, I love his writing, and I love most of his thoughts. But his thoughts of today? My money is on the dark side — not the premature giddiness of justice being done.

Our informed, educated republic

A lady friend in California sent this 3-minute, man-on-the-street video of Trumpeteers being interviewed about this president's Watergate, Vietnam, DNC-breaking-and-entering crimes, and if he should be impeached for them. (I gotta tell ya, as the interviewer, I'd agree with anything the blond in blue curlers told me, if … you know. But my favorite quote? That Trump has "diplomatic immunity" from impeachment.)

A heroic American woman

The absolutely essential testimony (redacted, in the interest of space) of Dr. Fiona Hill before Congress today, which every American should read:

Opening Statement of Dr. Fiona Hill
to the House of Representatives
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

November 21, 2019

...

Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.

The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.

The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined.

U.S. support for Ukraine—which continues to face armed Russian aggression—has been politicized.

The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country—to diminish America’s global role and to neutralize a perceived U.S. threat to Russian interests. President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter U.S. foreign policy objectives in Europe, including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance.

I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests….

These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes. President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a Super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.

***

That is the statement of a true, heroic American.