The Anti-Griffith Show

In 1925, Bobby Jones lost the U.S Open golf championship by one stroke after calling a one-stroke penalty on himself earlier in the tournament. He believed that a ball had moved after he addressed it even though no one else saw any such thing. Over the objections of tournament officials and Walter Hagen, his playing partner and competitor, Jones insisted on adding the penalty stroke. When the press congratulated him for his honesty, his reply was, "You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.” To Bobby Jones and people like him, integrity was inviolable and not for sale at any price.

This ideal was common in popular culture when I was growing up, but of all the examples I could cite, first and foremost in my mind is The Andy Griffith Show. The show revolved around Sheriff Andy Taylor and the other residents of Mayberry, North Carolina, a typical small American town. While the show was very entertaining, it was also a moral compass and a celebration of our national character at its best. The show inspired us to be better people.

While I may not have had the words for it in my childhood, I was most impressed by Sheriff Taylor always being the bigger man no matter what. He wasn't only kind and unselfish when it was easy, but also on occasions when the rest of us might have retreated from our noblest ideals. People came first and his ego was no part of the equation, For instance, if he had to bring people together, Andy would try to promote peace and harmony without any need to take the credit, and he would even pretend he wasn't as wise as he actually was. He didn't need acknowledgement of his superior insight, and more importantly, he wouldn't buckle if people laughed at him and said. "Gee, Andy, you would think a smart fella like you would have known better!" He would just smile and take it, allowing them to laugh at him because he cared about others and he would do the right thing whether it was hard or easy.

We now have a United States president who is the exact opposite. His narcissism will always take precedence over all else. For this reason he has done everything in his power to erode and destroy the institutions of a free and civil society. Because he isn't man enough to admit the indisputable fact that he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, he'll stop at nothing to have people believe that our very democracy is compromised and unreliable. He has also made any number of jaw-dropping comments about our courts, for instance suggesting that no jurist with any Mexican heritage can be trusted in a case involving Trump or calling a well respected member of the federal judiciary a "so called judge." No judge can be considered legitimate unless he says Donald Trump is absolutely right about everything. Worst of all, his endless ranting about the media and his critics is designed to make us believe that real news is fake and fake news is real. This Orwellian nightmare come to power is the single greatest threat to our national peace of mind and cohesion I've ever lived to see.

I can't help but think of Superman, not only because that comic book gave us Bizarro World, a planet on which everything was the opposite of the earth, but also because I'm now witnessing an American president who is literally at war with truth, justice and the American way.

Birther Don't You Come Around Here Anymore

Yesterday President Obama released his long form birth certificate, which was at the center of the so-called "birther" controversy. While in theory this should have put the entire disgraceful matter to rest, we quickly learned that we couldn't simply move on and try to regain our national dignity. As soon as the document they clamored for was released, rather than apologizing for perpetrating a fraud on the American public, these same people resorted to everything from saying it was a fake to calling for President Obama's college transcripts.

With regard to the latter, Donald Trump claims to have heard that Barack Obama was a "terrible student" who somehow mysteriously got into Columbia and Harvard. Of course this is unsourced and is either based on hearsay of indeterminate reliability, or it's simply a bald-faced lie contrived in Trump's own mind. When assessing how seriously to take this accusation, we need to consider two things. First, since nothing Trump said about the birth certificate, what his investigators were finding, the birth announcement, and so forth had any truth to it whatsoever, we need to evaluate anything he says with the harsh scrutiny that we reserve exclusively for those who have lied to us. Secondly, the one thing we do know about Barack Obama's academic record is that he graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the law review. This would suggest that President Obama was a superb student, not a terrible one.

Moreover, for the sake of argument, I'll even entertain the possibility that Donald Trump isn't lying, and that in his youth Barack Obama wasn't the academic star that he later indisputably became. To a reasonable American, the arc of this story would actually flatter Mr. Obama. He took a weakness of his youth, and worked at it until he was not only no longer weak, but he had excelled to the point that he was among the very best in the nation. We don't condemn that; we celebrate it. However, this is still grist for Mr. Trump's deplorable mill.

What Trump is saying loud and clear to his receptive audience is that this _______ (you know the word) only got where he got in life by being unqualified but stealing what rightly belonged to a deserving white person. Not only do Trump's supporters instantly decode his message, but it's sweet music to their ears. Their wretched and tortured souls can only find peace if President Obama's achievements can be attributed to usurpation and not legitimacy. A shark needs to swim, a racehorse needs to run and a bigot needs to hate.  I'm not judging these people on anything superficial, but on the content of their character, which happens to be an unholy mess.

If the ugly dark cloud of this story has a silver lining it's that, while we still have a long we to go, we've also come a long way. Fifty years ago a black man making a serious run for president would more likely find himself in a round noose than an oval office. Today a man born of a black father and a white mother is the duly elected President of the United States. Yes, it's terrible that millions of Americans refuse to accept that basic truth and they'll do everything in their power to wish it away with shameful attempts to attack his legitimacy, but it seems that our 21st Century vile racists are less dangerous than their 20th Century counterparts. At this point, I'll take any victory, however small.

Race to the Bottom

Let the pandering begin! The race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination has certainly begun, and a number of potential candidates are already in full campaign mode, playing to likely Iowa caucus goers and anyone else from the far right. Unfortunately, this race to the bottom requires the contenders to outdo one another in an effort to sink to a new low. This forces some candidates to give up either their presidential aspiration or their honor.

Take the example of Donald Trump. He's toying with the idea of a 2012 presidential run so he's trying to gin up support among Republicans. To that end he has now become a "birther," which is to say someone who at least purports to question whether or not Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. I say purports to question because even Bill O'Reilly doesn't believe Trump is sincere about this, which buttresses my point. Trump isn't that stupid, ignorant or blinded by hatred, but he knows that people who are now make up a sufficiently large percentage of the Republican base that he has to pander to them. His attempts at playing this ridiculous game have been embarrassing and his claims can be reduced to ashes with the greatest of ease, but that doesn't matter because his target audience is impervious to facts or reason. To make matters worse, Trump is also playing to these people by spewing anti-Islamic bigotry.

Speaking of anti-Islamic bigotry, Donald Trump has his work cut out for him if he wants to catch Herman Cain. Mr. Cain, who's one of only three Republicans to have formed an exploratory committee (there are no formally declared candidates yet), has publicly proclaimed that as president he would appoint no Muslims to his cabinet nor to the federal bench. His rationale for this discrimination is his fear that they will impose Sharia law on this country. Perversely, he justifies his position of treating one religion differently from others with the First Amendment, because it prevents favoring one religion over another. He also states that Muslims should act like Christians and not try to impose their religious values on others, even though his core supporters want us to impose their version of Christian values on this country. Most importantly, this fear of Sharia law is a bogeyman constructed exclusively by bigots for bigots. Proposed laws to bar Sharia are unconstitutional, unnecessary and embarrassing, but defending them will get you a standing ovation at a Tea Party gathering where Herman Cain won the presidential straw poll.

Yes, I'm saying that far too many conservative Republicans have a fear of Islam that extends well beyond legitimate concern regarding terrorism and into the lunatic fringe. Newt Gingrich was counting on that when he warned an audience that we could become a "secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists." That's right; he tried to doubly terrify the stupid by simultaneously advancing the mutually exclusive specters of atheism and religious extremism. Newt's spokesman tried to rescue him by saying that he meant either atheist or radical Islamist, not both. That would make Gingrich's remark slightly less moronic but still utterly worthless since he can't decide which of two polar opposite directions the trend line is moving.

Finally, Mike Huckabee's entry into the race to the bottom makes me the saddest, because I honestly thought he was better than that. Yes, Newt Gingrich made headlines last year by suggesting that President Obama is incomprehensible to us unless we understand the mindset of a Kenyan anti-colonialist, but such words from Gingrich are predictable. Governor Huckabee, on the other hand, was a big disappointment when he essentially took a page from Gingrich's book and tried to paint President Obama as an anti-American, anti-Western, anti-colonialist who grew up in Kenya, sympathetic to the Mau Mau revolution and hostile to the British. Mike Huckabee may not know a Mau Mau from a muumuu, but like the others, he knows how to fertilize the field where fear and hatred grow, a particularly apt metaphor considering what they're spreading. Republicans who now seek the presidency apparently subscribe to the belief that, "The only thing we have to exploit is fear itself." If they insist upon playing to the dregs of their party, they should expect the scorn and contempt of decent people.