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American History for Truthdiggers: Bush 41—Struggling in Reagan’s Shadow

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 34th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, who retired recently as a major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 34 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22; Part 23; Part 24; Part 25; Part 26; Part 27; Part 28; Part 29; Part 30; Part 31; Part 32; Part 33.

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His vice president was everything Ronald Reagan was not. The Hollywood actor in chief had far less political qualification “on paper” than his 1980 Republican primary opponent, George H.W. Bush. Though Reagan oozed optimism and soothed the American people with his confident, digestible rhetoric, he was certainly no policy expert or Washington insider. Bush was both. He was a man born of privilege, scion of a prestigious, wealthy family and son of a Republican U.S. senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush. However, the mid-20th century was different from our own time; it was an era when affluence and social standing didn’t obviate a sense of duty to country and family honor. Bush, like so many thousands of the other members of the American aristocracy, volunteered for the U.S. military in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Not yet 19, he would become the youngest pilot in the U.S. Navy at that time, eventually flying dozens of combat missions in the Pacific theater. In September 1944 he was involved in an action that won him the Distinguished Flying Cross. In the words of the citation, “Bush pressed home an attack in the face of intense antiaircraft fire. Although his plane was hit and set afire at the beginning of his dive, he continued his plunge toward the target and succeeded in scoring damaging bomb hits before bailing out of the craft.” He was the only member of the three-man crew to live through the incident. Afterward, survivor’s guilt bled through his letters home.

At war’s end Bush entered Yale. After moving to Texas and finding wealth and respect in the oil industry, he followed his father into politics. He won a House seat in the 1960s, then lost a race for the U.S. Senate (he was unable to shake his Eastern establishment image with Texas voters, try as he might). In the 1970s, he was appointed ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and head of the Republican National Committee (RNC). After Bush’s 1980 defeat in a rather bitter presidential primary battle with Reagan—in which the Texan declared that his opponent, a “supply-side theory” advocate, was proposing “voodoo economics”—the Gipper chose Bush as his running mate. They stood together at the helm of the executive branch for eight years, though Bush tended to work behind the scenes, overshadowed by Reagan’s big personality.

Though no doubt a conservative, Bush harkened back to the yesteryears of Northeastern centrist, “country club” Republicanism. By 1980, and especially by the time of his successful 1988 run for the presidency, Bush’s credentials and tone made him an anachronism in a party vaulting rightward and increasingly in the grip of Southern whites and evangelical Christians who focused on social and cultural values. Bush tried to fit into the mold that his political base required, but he was always a fish out of water. His entire time as vice president and president, from 1981 to 1993, was, in a sense, defined by his battles with the increasingly dominant right wing of his party. Bush was hardly less conservative, for the most part, than Reagan, but the earlier president, with his soaring rhetoric, charm and (usually unfulfilled) promises, was more successful in holding the Republican coalition together. Bush never really found the knack for it. It probably cost him a second term.

Although George H.W. Bush can be viewed as perhaps the last of the (relatively) centrist Republican presidents, he was no friend to liberals. As president, his domestic policies were rather comparable to Reagan’s, and, at least on the domestic front, he was never much of a bipartisan coalition builder. He sought, just as his predecessor had, to destroy what remained of the liberal consensus. As a result, the opposition party moved rightward, and increasingly conservative “New Democrats”—including one Bill Clinton—would emerge and ultimately defeat him. He was stronger on foreign policy, where he was relatively cautious and methodical in his approach, than on domestic policy. Nonetheless, he was an avowed interventionist and threw U.S. troops into some unnecessary adventures. After his death in the second decade of the 21st century, he was canonized by nostalgic Democrats and Republicans alike. Some dubbed him “the best one-term president” in U.S. history. This was an overstatement, undoubtedly, but one can understand the sentiment. Looking back at his presidency from 30 years on, Bush 41 does appear to be a moderate and decent leader and a gentleman. Still, a close look at the actual substance of his administration complicates this image and deflates many of its myths.

Decent Man, Nasty Campaign: The Election of 1988

Bush may have had a high-bred pedigree and a gentile image seemingly from an earlier era, but he was undoubtedly highly ambitious and willing to practice hard-nosed, even harsh politics. He knew he would have to tack right in the 1988 Republican primaries to best his two insurgent opponents, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Pat Robertson, the Christian televangelist. The race seemed tight at first, but Bush, as Reagan’s anointed successor, won the day. At the Republican National Convention, Bush sought to balance his personal moderation with the increasingly right-wing penchant of his base. He delivered an acceptance speech that at times sounded Reaganesque. Though he called for transforming America into a “kinder and gentler nation,” he adhered to Reagan’s supply-side economic dogma, which many liberals and others had denounced as an expression of a regressive, “trickle-down” practice that benefited only those at the top. “Read my lips: no new taxes,” he bellowed. Finally, to shore up his position with the religious right, he named as his running mate the undistinguished (at times buffoonish) Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana, a darling of the evangelicals.

Bush’s Democratic opponent was Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, who won the nomination after Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware (caught up in a plagiarism scandal) and Sen. Gary Hart (caught up in an infidelity scandal) dropped out of the contest. Dukakis was a proud technocrat and a forerunner of the “New Democrats”—more centrist than their forebears—but was both uninspiring and still far too traditionally liberal to win in a center-right country in which the “L-word” had become a pejorative. Still, that was unclear at the time. On the heels of the Democratic National Convention, Dukakis held an unprecedented 17-point lead in some public opinion polls over Bush.

Then the “gentleman” went on the attack. Bush held his nose and waded deep into the rancorous culture wars. Less than a decade earlier, Bush had held far more liberal views on abortion and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (for women), but by the 1988 campaign he had jettisoned those liabilities and unapologetically flip-flopped on both issues. He hired some of the most ruthless campaign consultants available, notably Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, the latter a future Fox News media mogul. Before the first debate with Dukakis, Ailes gave Bush some vicious advice. As governor, Dukakis had supported the repeal of state laws against sodomy and bestiality. Ailes whispered in Bush’s ear, “If you get in trouble out there, just call him an animal fucker.”

After holding a focus group with swing voters in New Jersey, Atwater and company flooded the market with attack ads that implied Dukakis was somehow un-American. Americans were told that the governor had vetoed a law requiring teachers to lead their class in the Pledge of Allegiance (a genuine First Amendment issue); once called himself “a card-carrying member of the ACLU” (a free speech matter itself); opposed the death penalty (as had most 1960s-70s liberals and most voters in the Western world except Americans); and, finally, had overseen a program that gave a weekend furlough to a convict, Willie Horton, who failed to return and then raped and stabbed a Maryland woman. Atwater was, in his own words, determined to “strip the bark off the little bastard,” Dukakis.

The Willie Horton scandal hurt Dukakis the most. The Bush campaign conveniently ignored the fact that many states had similar furlough laws, that Dukakis’ Republican predecessor had signed Massachusetts’ legislation into law, and that Reagan, when he was California governor in the 1960s, had overseen a similar program. This was a time for political war, not nuance. The most disturbing, controversial but effective TV ad run by Bush supporters lingered on a close-up photo of Horton, an intimidating-looking black man, in what was obviously a race-based message to voters. Bush was uncomfortable with the ad, though his more conservative, newly evangelical son, George W. Bush, thought it useful. And it was indeed effective in moving toward Atwater’s stated goal: “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.” The final nail in the Democrat’s coffin came when he refused during a televised debate to support the death penalty even in a hypothetical case in which his own wife had been raped and murdered. It was an admirable stand, one that was ideologically defensible, but his intellectual courage won Dukakis few votes.

The opinion polls rapidly shifted, and in the end Bush won with a slim 53 percent of the popular vote but a commanding 426-111 in the Electoral College. Still, Americans were disgusted and uninspired with both candidates. A paltry 50.1 percent of eligible voters turned out, the lowest participation rate since 1924. In other words, just over 25 percent of Americans actively supported the new president. Lower turnout, of course, then as now, favored the Republicans, especially with particularly low participation by the poor and minorities—traditionally liberal voters in a country that despite the “Reagan Revolution” still counted more registered Democrats than Republicans. When Bush entered the presidency in January 1989, he hardly had massive public backing.

Qualified, Confident and (Sometimes) Competent: Bush and the World

Ronald Reagan had shocked the nation, and the world, with his stunning turnaround on Cold War policy in regard to the Soviets. He proved his conservative detractors wrong: Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was a solid, actually monumental, partner. To his credit, Bush would mainly continue the Reagan relationship with Gorbachev and work to bring the Cold War to a bloodless and (hopefully) permanent end. From the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall to the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and, finally, to the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union and resultant independence of the various Soviet republics, Bush proceeded with caution, competence and restraint. The result was more nuclear limitation treaties and a relatively peaceable end to a half-century standoff, surely the world’s most persistent of the 20th century. Bush even convinced Gorbachev to stand aside and allow Germany not only to reunite but join NATO! The catch was, as Bush was obliged to prudently promise, the U.S. agreed not to trample on the Soviet Union’s grave or expand the inherently anti-Russian NATO alliance any further. His successors would blatantly break that gentlemen’s agreement and extended NATO membership right up to the borders of Russia, including into the former Soviet Baltic republics. This would prove decisive in the later hardening of tensions between the West and a circumscribed Russian Federation. The result was a veritable Cold War 2.0.

In Central America, Bush was far less responsible. Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega—an alleged CIA asset—had proved a useful partner so long as left-leaning movements held or contested power in nearby Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. By Bush’s term, however, the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua fell from power and suddenly Noriega became a liability. His drug trafficking—which had previously been overlooked even amid the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States—and the killing of a few American troops by Noriega’s security forces gave Bush the “justification” necessary to invade the tiny country. It unfolded like old-school imperialism. Tens of thousands of U.S. paratroopers dropped on the narrow isthmus in the largest American combat action since Vietnam. Noriega was captured and his diminutive military quickly beaten, at the cost of some two dozen American lives. It was an utterly unnecessary, if popular, “patriotic display” for the U.S., a display that killed hundreds of Panamanian civilians.

In the most serious international challenge that Bush weathered, on Aug. 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein’s formidable Iraqi army invaded and quickly conquered its tiny (but oil-rich) neighbor, Kuwait. This proved awkward for Uncle Sam. Perhaps half the world’s oil flowed through the Persian Gulf, mainly from Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s threat to bordering Saudi Arabia was thus taken seriously. Bush seemed keen on military intervention from the start, but there were problems. Saddam was fresh off an eight-year aggressive war with Iran during which the U.S. had supported him and even provided him vital satellite-based intelligence. Furthermore, just days before the invasion, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq—in an epic gaffe—told the Iraqis that the U.S. “had no opinion on Arab disputes such as your border disagreement with Kuwait,” a comment seen by the Iraqis as a U.S. declaration that it would ignore an invasion of the neighboring country. It’s understandable, then, why Saddam was soon surprised by the forcefulness of the American and international response.

Without a declaration of war, Bush quickly dispatched 100,000 troops to protect Saudi Arabia. This would soon alienate Islamist veterans of the 1979-89 war with the Soviets in Afghanistan—including Osama bin Laden—who offered to defend Saudi Arabia against the Iraqis and thus prevent an apostate occupation by Westerners of Islam’s two holiest sites. Those chickens soon came home to roost for Washington. It seems that Bush had decided on war from the first, but he waited until after the November 1990 midterm elections before seeking U.N. and U.S. Senate approval for military action. He didn’t have to do as much, based on earlier (troubling) precedent, but he chose to. The U.N. quickly passed the resolution, and Bush then sent his effective secretary of state, James Baker, on the road to form a representative international coalition. He did so in dramatic, and impressive, fashion—even signing on key Arab states such as Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and thereby lending local (Muslim) legitimacy to American military action.

It was all over in six weeks. One can plausibly argue that Bush could have dislodged Saddam through means other than outright invasion and, had he done so, saved tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. In the minds of most, his prolonged “turkey shoot” air bombardment of fleeing Iraqi troops on the “highway of death” was excessive. U.S. casualties were remarkably light, with 148 deaths. Iraqi fatalities, by some estimates, would reach up to 35,000 soldiers and 3,000 civilians, levels seen as disturbing by much of the world. Bush was soon horrified by images of the massacres and called an end to the war after just 100 hours. While some burgeoning hawks, especially neoconservatives, thought the U.S. should seize Baghdad and overthrow Saddam, Bush prudently limited American objectives to the expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait.

At that point, even Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney supported Bush’s restraint, though the future vice president would later enthusiastically repudiate this early opinion. The Bush decision, in hindsight, undoubtedly represented the prudent course, as invading and then occupying sovereign nations historically has proved messy, lengthy and bloody. Nonetheless, after the U.S. military commander, Norman Schwarzkopf, hastily (and unilaterally) agreed to armistice terms that allowed Saddam to keep his helicopters in the air, Bush’s position deteriorated publicly when those crafts killed thousands of restive Iraqi Shiites and Kurds (groups long repressed by Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime). Many on the American political right, including Bush’s son, the future president, soon came to believe that the senior Bush should have “finished the job” and driven to Baghdad. This lingering feeling and brutal sanctions that would result in some 500,000 Iraqi children’s deaths would prove to be the crucial, tragic outgrowths of an otherwise “neat” victory in the Persian Gulf.

Reagan’s Third Term?: The Last Gasp of Republican Centrism

Frustrated liberals at the time joked that Bush’s administration was little more than “Reagan’s third term,” more of the same and an extension of increasingly right-wing policies. In a sense it was. Bush initially doubled down on “Reaganomics,” and he too appointed a highly controversial and conservative Supreme Court justice and expressed scant concern for minorities’ civil rights (they weren’t part of his electoral base, after all). On the other hand, Bush often proved more practical and less enthusiastic about Reagan’s “voodoo economics.” Furthermore, on the environment and a few other issues, Bush was far more liberal or centrist than either his old boss or (certainly) the party faithful. This, and his willingness to practically shift course on supply-side dogma, earned him the permanent animus of many far-right, and increasingly powerful, conservatives. It may have cost him the next election.

Bush’s postwar popularity, as is often the case, quickly diminished. A serious recession in 1990-91 was persistent and raised unemployment to 7.9 percent by June 1992, the highest rate in a decade. Large companies, such as AT&T and General Motors, fired tens if not hundreds of thousands. Many companies moved their manufacturing overseas into lower-cost, non-unionized areas, and it seemed that the Japanese were buying up more and more American businesses. Former Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Paul Tsongas even joked that the “Cold War is over, and Japan won.” Of course, the recession wasn’t solely Bush’s fault; rather, it was the expected (by many economists) fallout from Reagan’s high-deficit, low-tax, high-military-spending proclivities. Huge parts of the U.S. population—especially urban blacks and rural whites—lived in desperate poverty, and overall income inequality had exploded.

In a genuine attempt to stem the recession, Bush forever angered—betrayed, said some of his erstwhile supporters—his conservative base, both in the populace at large and on Capitol Hill. He increased domestic spending in a (decidedly liberal) Keynesian stimulus package; authorized a taxpayer bailout of the crumbing savings and loan industry (another Reagan-era scandal); and finally, unforgivably to the political right, backed out of his campaign pledge of “no new taxes,” raising rates in order to lower deficits and slow the ballooning national debt. During “Reagan’s three terms,” after all, the federal debt had jumped to 50 percent of the gross domestic product from 32 percent.

Bush’s moves may have been practical, perhaps even an absolute necessity, but they unleashed a congressional Republican rebellion. Some decided, then and there, not to back him in the 1992 election. House Minority Whip (and future Speaker) Newt Gingrich, by then a force on the Hill, walked out of a White House meeting with bipartisan legislative leaders just before Bush was to announce a plan designed to avoid an income tax increase. Bush later chastised Gingrich, complaining, “You’re killing us, you’re just killing us.”

On environmental issues, Bush had some success and, like President Richard Nixon, proved willing to cross the aisle when he deemed a bill important enough. He would claim, accurately, that environment issues should “know no ideology, no political boundaries. It’s not a liberal or conservative thing we’re talking about.” (History has shown that much of Congress would not agree with that sentiment.) Bush’s support of the cap-and-trade compromise on greenhouse gas emissions (whereby companies had limits on output of such emissions but could trade excesses among themselves) turned out to be highly successful. This key element of what became the 1990 Clean Air Act lowered “acid rain” emissions by some 3 million tons in its first year. It was a rare, genuine, bipartisan accomplishment—though, predictably, it alienated dedicated deregulators in the Reagan coalition.

If Bush showed only minimal interest in African-American or other race-based civil rights, he did secure the passage of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), undoubtedly the most significant civil rights legislation since the late 1960s, which guaranteed various federal protections for over 43 million Americans.

President Bush surely considered his appointment of Clarence Thomas, a conservative black judge, to replace the esteemed (first) black justice, the liberal Thurgood Marshall, as a civil rights achievement. This was debatable. In the aggregate, Thomas moved the court further rightward and, paradoxically, was a long-stated opponent of most federal civil rights legislation. Additionally, the then 43-year-old Thomas had limited judicial experience, having served just over a year on the D.C. circuit appeals court. His one major qualification, it seemed, was being both an African-American—nominated for a seat vacated by a black judge—and a rare black conservative. He was extremely right-wing, in fact. As Reagan’s head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), he had ironically opposed affirmative action and other civil rights programs.

Then, one day before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation vote, a leaked FBI interview with law professor and reluctant whistleblower Anita Hill, a 35-year-old black former employee of Thomas at the EEOC, hit the media. She listed a litany of examples of Thomas’ longstanding sexual harassment of her during her tenure at the commission. The judiciary committee chairman, Sen. Joe Biden, already knew about the charges but had chosen to move forward anyway—at least until the FBI report went public. Biden reluctantly called Hill to testify. Thomas was furious and called the hearings and allegations a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” suddenly and ironically bringing race into the picture despite his longstanding opposition to racial protections.

Hill was treated horribly by a room full of male, mostly white and middle-aged or elderly senators. Her character was immediately impugned by Republican lobbyists and judiciary committee members themselves. The hearings quickly shifted to a focus on her character, rather than her accusations against Thomas. In the end, even Biden let Hill down. He once asked Thomas whether the judge thought Hill had made the whole thing up, and then decided not to extend the hearings and seek testimony from other women who also allegedly suffered sexual harassment at the hands of Thomas. It was not the prominent senator’s—and future vice president’s—finest moment. In the end, the Senate confirmed Thomas by a highly partisan vote of 52-48, the narrowest margin in the history of Supreme Court nominations.

The next year, Los Angeles exploded in a fit of racial angst and violence. The immediate impetus was the shocking acquittal of four city police officers who had been caught on tape brutally beating a prostrate black suspect with their nightsticks. Relations between the mostly white police force and black Angelenos had long been strained. At the height of Reagan-era prosperity, 20 percent of residents of South-Central Los Angeles, then predominately black, remained unemployed. Rather than persistently address poverty, the Los Angeles mayor ordered Police Chief Daryl Gates to cut “criminality” to improve the city’s image during the 1984 Olympics. Thousands were arrested, mostly for nonviolent offenses, during indiscriminate police sweeps. More severe was Gates’ ongoing Operation Hammer, a response to the spreading crack epidemic of the late 1980s. The stated purpose of Hammer was to “make life miserable” for gang members, but the ultimate outcome was unending police raids that resulted in 20,000 arrests in the second half of the decade.

The civil violence that sprang up after the acquittal of the four policemen abated only with the arrival of the California National Guard and U.S. Marines. The riots left 51 (mostly blacks) killed, thousands more injured and $700 million in property damage. More persistent, and influential, was the significant loss of trust in the police by urban blacks, and a chasm, nationwide, between blacks and whites in how they viewed the riots. Bush may have appointed a black Supreme Court justice, but clearly grievous problems from America’s “original sin” of racial caste and inequality had not disappeared.

Liberalism Betrayed: Bush, Clinton and the Election of 1992

Single-term presidents are more uncommon than it may seem. In the 20th century, only William H. Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford (who served only part of one term), Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush failed to be re-elected. In the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, in the spring of 1991, Bush’s approval rating was through the roof and he looked unbeatable. Just a year later, with the economy lingering in what was really a Reagan-induced recession, and Bush’s own base frustrated with his tax hike and overall centrism, the president’s public approval ratings hit a pathetic 35 percent. The incumbent faced a rare and serious challenge from the right wing of his own party, with Reagan communications director and culture warrior Patrick Buchanan unsuccessfully facing off against the president. Even after its candidate lost, the Buchanan wing of the party never fully embraced Bush in the 1992 contest. And, in a speech nominally endorsing Bush at the Republican National Convention, Buchanan threw gasoline on the fire of cultural conflict. Sounding very different from the establishment president, Buchanan declared war on liberals and Democrats, even implying that they weren’t “real” Americans. “My friends,” he said, “this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. … There is a religious war going on in our country. It is a cultural war … critical to the kind of nation we will one day be. …” Though Bill Clinton, Bush’s opponent in the general election, was a neoliberal “New Democrat,” far more conservative than almost all the Democratic liberals of the past, Buchanan portrayed him and his wife, Hillary, as radical, godless leftists. He told an impassioned convention audience, “The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand … homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units … is not the kind of change America needs.” Piling on, Republican National Committee Chairman Richard N. Bond gave a TV interview in which he claimed of the Democrats, “These other people are not the real America.”

Despite these alarmist, exaggerated attacks from the right-wing base, Bill Clinton refused to play into his opponents’ hands. He would not make the same mistakes—those of honesty and principle—that Dukakis had made four years earlier. During the campaign, Gov. Clinton even made a show of flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a man so mentally impaired that he asked prison guards to save the dessert from his last meal so he could eat it later. Clinton then permanently alienated civil rights icon Jesse Jackson when, appearing before the Rainbow Coalition, he chose to denounce a rapper named Sister Souljah who had emotionally asked in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton avoided the obvious nuance and hyperbole in the rapper’s remarks and chose—in what was forever dubbed his “Sister Souljah moment”—to use the occasion to distance himself from traditional liberals.

Clinton was a natural politician, arguably one of the best in modern American history. He knew what won elections—“kitchen table” issues—and fiercely counterattacked on the economy. He portrayed the privileged Bush—juxtaposed with his own rise from poverty—as out of touch with the daily financial struggles of average Americans. Clinton, on the other hand, “felt their pain,” or so he claimed. The Democrat’s campaign was a slick public relations machine with laser focus. In the campaign’s “war room,” a sign on the wall read, “IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID.” It was, indeed. Clinton would ride to victory on this economic wave, aided, significantly, by the surprisingly potent self-financed third-party campaign of billionaire Ross Perot. Perot hammered Bush about the rising deficits and national debt and virulently opposed the president’s proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, ironically, Clinton would later support; Perot thereby stole deficit-hawk Republican votes from Bush, allowing Clinton, the Democrat, to (oddly) run as a beacon of fiscal conservatism. The president was cooked. Clinton took 43 percent of the popular vote, to Bush’s 38 percent, with Clinton aided further by the 19 percent who fled into Perot’s arms. Clinton had no mandate, and he knew it. His 43 percent portion of the popular vote was the lowest received by a winning presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson. His election was not a triumph of liberalism, but a slick piece of political work almost wholly disjointed from any meaningful ideology.

So who exactly were the Clintons? Well, Hillary Clinton—a lawyer and activist—was a favorite target for conservative attack dogs. According to Buchanan, she was a “radical feminist.” She was hardly that. Hillary Rodham began her political life as a strident Republican. As a youth she canvassed for Richard Nixon over John Kennedy, then backed Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, considering herself a “Goldwater Girl.” At Wellesley College she even served as president of the Young Republicans. Eventually, however, her principled opposition to the Vietnam War and growing (yet quite moderate) feminism drove her to sign on with the Democrats. Indeed, Hillary Clinton would gradually shift rightward during her time as first lady, then as U.S. senator from New York and, finally, as a two-time presidential candidate. Yet all that lay in the future.

Bill was a 46-year-old charmer who had risen to become a youthful, unlikely governor of Arkansas. He has been described as a “bridge between the Old Democrats and the New.” As a Southerner he could appeal to the party’s traditional base, but as a (once) progressive, well-educated professional, he could also connect with the identity politics of the new base. All the while, Clinton was, as the historian Jill Lepore astutely labeled him, “a rascal.” During the primaries he hung in reports of alleged infidelities and shady real estate transactions came to light. He never really admitted to much, circumventing questions and equivocating time and again. He managed to survive—he would ultimately prove to be the ultimate political survivor—and squeaked into the highest office in the land. In the process, he would become the undertaker for progressive hopes and dreams. Liberalism, as Americans had known it, was dead by 1992. If Reagan and Bush knocked it down, the “New Democrat,” Clinton, drove the fatal stake in its heart. This would become ever so apparent during his proceeding two terms.

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George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, seems, in retrospect, a transitional figure wedged between the “Eisenhower Republicans” of old and the growing influence of neoconservatives and evangelicals who would come to dominate the party. Not that Bush was a martyr or an inclusive bipartisan leader; he was not. He appointed advisers more ruthless than he and ran rather dirty election campaigns. His administration was tarnished by a poor economy in recession, though it must be said this was more an outgrowth of Reagan (and initially Bush’s) dogmatic adherence to “trickle down” economics. Bush, though far less vicious than his Republican successors, was no benefactor of the liberal social welfare state, nor did he concentrate much on persistent issues of racial and economic inequality. Ultimately, his was merely a kinder, gentler—perhaps less doctrinaire—version of Reaganomics. On his watch, hardly anything substantive was done to slow soaring income inequity, as (had been the case since the early 1970s) the poor generally got poorer and the rich richer.

Bush, like John Kennedy before him, had always preferred, and felt most comfortable in, foreign affairs. After all, much of his career had prepared and suited him for global policy. Even here, however, Bush’s term was a mixed bag. He waged “Grenada 2.0”—the ludicrously unnecessary invasion of Panama—and probably killed many more fleeing Iraqi troops than was necessary in the Persian Gulf War. Then again, he carefully, and deftly, worked with Russian Premier Gorbachev to finish the work he and Reagan had begun, ushering in an astonishing, bloodless end to the Cold War. That monumental and dangerous affair certainly could have gone another way. And, though his leadership during the Gulf War was uneven, he demonstrated presciently prudent restraint, limiting U.S. and coalition goals to the expulsion of the invading Iraqi army from Kuwait while eschewing a hasty march toward Baghdad and regime change. His son, George W. Bush, would prove far less judicious in 2003.

On the surface, Bush and his opponent in 1992, Bill Clinton, seemed polar opposites. One was a war hero, the other evaded service in Vietnam. One was born into wealth, the other suffered poverty in tiny Hope, Ark. Bush was, at root, an establishment Yankee, Clinton Southern-born and -bred. Bush was reserved, awkwardly professional and at times stiff, Clinton was smooth, played the saxophone and had smoked marijuana (though he claimed never to have inhaled). Still, politically, Clinton was not totally unlike his predecessor. Neoliberalism, a cheap, facile imitation of conservatism, defined Clintonianism. The eight years that followed Clinton’s victory over Bush in 1992 proved—on a policy scorecard—hardly divergent from “Reagan’s three terms.” The old consensus forged by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson was finished, defeated decisively in the many battles of the transitional 1980s. In the following decades, the culture wars divided Republicans and Democrats ever further apart, but on foreign and fiscal policy there proved to be barely any light between two increasing corporate parties beholden to Wall Street and the arms industry. The consequences, for Americans and the world, would prove tragic indeed.

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To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

• H.W. Brands, “The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War” (1993).

• Gary Gerstle, “American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century” (2001).

• Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974” (2019).

• Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018).

• James T. Patterson, “Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore” (2005).

• Howard Zinn, “The Twentieth Century” (1980).

Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

Mystery of NSA Leak Lingers as Stolen Document Case Winds Up

WASHINGTON — Federal agents descended on the suburban Maryland house with the flash and bang of a stun grenade, blocked off the street and spent hours questioning the homeowner about a theft of government documents that prosecutors would later describe as “breathtaking” in its scale.

The suspect, Harold Martin, was a contractor for the National Security Agency. His arrest followed news of a devastating disclosure of government hacking tools by a mysterious internet group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. It seemed to some that the United States might have found another Edward Snowden, who also had been a contractor for the agency.

“You’re a bad man. There’s no way around that,” one law enforcement official conducting the raid told Martin, court papers say. “You’re a bad man.”

Later this month, about three years after that raid, the case against Martin is scheduled to be resolved in Baltimore’s federal court. But the identity of the Shadow Brokers, and whoever was responsible for a leak with extraordinary national security implications, will remain a public mystery even as the case concludes.

Authorities have established that Martin walked off with thousands of pages of secret documents over a two-decade career in national security, most recently with the NSA, whose headquarters is about 15 miles from his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland. He pleaded guilty to a single count of willful retention of national defense information and faces a nine-year prison sentence under a plea deal.

Investigators found in his home and car detailed description of computer infrastructure and classified technical operations in a raid that took place two weeks after the Shadow Brokers surfaced online to advertise the sale of some of the NSA’s closely guarded hacking tools. Yet authorities have never publicly linked Martin or anyone else to the Shadow Brokers and the U.S. has not announced whether it suspects government insiders, Russian intelligence or someone else entirely.

The question is important because the U.S. believes North Korea and Russia relied on the stolen tools, which provide the means to exploit software vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, in unleashing punishing global cyberattacks on businesses, hospitals and cities. The release, which occurred while the NSA was already under scrutiny because of Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, raised questions about the government’s ability to maintain secrets.

“It was extraordinarily damaging, probably more damaging than Snowden,” cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier said of the Shadow Brokers leaks. “Those tools were a lot of money to design and create.”

Yet none of that is likely to be mentioned at Martin’s July 17 sentencing. The hearing instead will turn on dramatically different depictions of the enigmatic Martin, a Navy veteran, longtime government contractor — most recently at Booz Allen Hamilton — and doctoral candidate at the time of his arrest.

Prosecutors allege Martin jeopardized national security by bringing home reams of classified information even as, they say, he once castigated colleagues as “clowns” for lax security measures. Soon after his arrest, they cast aspersions on his character and motives, citing a binge-drinking habit, his arsenal of unregistered weapons and online communication in Russian and other languages.

The agents who searched his house that August 2016 afternoon found a trove of documents in his car, home and a dusty, unlocked shed. The 50 terabytes of information from 1996 to 2016 included personal details of government employees and “Top Secret” email chains, handwritten notes describing the NSA’s classified computer infrastructure, and descriptions of classified technical operations.

Defense lawyers paint him as a compulsive hoarder whose quirky tendencies may have led him astray but who never betrayed his country.

“What began as an effort by Mr. Martin to be good at his job, to be better at his job, to be as good as he could be, to see the whole picture at his job, became something more complicated than that,” public defender James Wyda said at a 2016 detention hearing. “It became a compulsion.

“This was not Spycraft behavior,” he added. “This is not how a Russian spy or something like that would ever conduct business.”

It’s unclear how Martin came to the FBI’s attention, but a redacted court order from a judge suggests agents may have been looking for a Shadow Brokers link when they obtained search warrants for his Twitter account and property before the raid.

The December 2018 ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett notes that the FBI was investigating the online disclosure of stolen government property. It cites a Twitter message from an account allegedly belonging to Martin — @HAL_999999999 — that requested a meeting with someone whose name is blacked out and stated “shelf life, three weeks.”

In a likely reference to the Shadow Brokers disclosures, investigators said tweets from Martin’s account were sent hours before stolen government records were advertised and posted online. Investigators also alleged that Martin would have had access to the same classified information as what appeared online.

The recipient of the message is redacted, although Politico reported it went to the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which in turn notified the U.S. Kaspersky declined to discuss the Martin case.

The roughly 20 officers who stormed Martin’s home did so with dramatic force, arriving with a battering ram and a “flash bang” device meant to cause temporary disorientation. State troopers shut down the road as agents interrogated Martin for four hours.

Martin was never charged with disclosing information and was accused only of unlawfully retaining defense information. The Shadow Brokers, which two weeks before Martin’s arrest surfaced on Twitter with the warning that it would auction off NSA hacking tools online, continued trickling out disclosures after Martin was in custody, a seeming indication that someone else may have been responsible.

Even so, his case refocused public attention on repeated government failures to safeguard some of the nation’s most highly classified information, with Martin one of several contractors accused of mishandling or spilling government secrets. Most notable is Snowden, a fellow Booz Allen contractor facing U.S. charges and living in Russia.

The NSA has since done more to protect its network and security and increased the monitoring of its employees, said security and counterintelligence director Marlisa Smith.

“I won’t tell you we’ve erased the risk of insider threat, it will never be down to zero, but we’ve worked very hard to mitigate and minimize the risk,” Smith said.

Booz Allen scrambled to respond to Martin’s arrest, hiring ex-FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate. Since Martin’s arrest, the company said it has added policies to improve its review process of employees at hiring and to ensure managers are more in touch with their subordinates.

As for the mystery of who or what is behind the Shadow Brokers, there’s little certainty that the government will ever publicly resolve that lingering question, especially given the classified nature of the theft and the embarrassment it caused the U.S.

“I don’t know if anybody knows other than the Russians,” said former NSA computer scientist Dave Aitel. “And we don’t even know if it’s the Russians. We don’t know at this point; anything could be true.”

Rich Father-in-Law Has Helped, Complicated O’Rourke’s Career

EL PASO, Texas—Beto O’Rourke was running for the El Paso City Council in 2005 when he asked to meet with the illustrious real estate investor William Sanders.

Sanders had earned a fortune and a reputation as a brilliant businessman in Chicago before returning to his remote hometown on the West Texas-Mexico border. He thought the aspiring politician was there to solicit a donation. But O’Rourke was seeking permission to marry Sanders’ daughter Amy, whom he’d met less than three months before.

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“I sat down with him in his office and he was kind of an imposing figure and I was very nervous,” O’Rourke said in a phone interview. After he asked for Sanders’s blessing, it got worse: His future father-in-law spent “a lot of time talking about her previous boyfriend, whom he liked a lot.”

“It was a very awkward — very, very awkward — conversation.”

Thus began a complicated relationship that would color the personal and political life of O’Rourke, now seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Worth at least $500 million according to a conservative Forbes estimate, Sanders has helped make Beto and Amy O’Rourke millionaires. O’Rourke won his city council race and briefly supported an ambitious, though controversial and ultimately unsuccessful, plan to redevelop downtown El Paso that Sanders was leading.

Later, Sanders’ timely donation helped transform his son-in-law from longshot primary challenger to congressman, setting him up to nearly upset U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz last year and catapult him into the presidential race.

The two are both advocates for virtually open U.S. southern borders. While O’Rourke argues it’s a cultural and humanitarian imperative, though, Sanders approaches the issue more as an economic opportunity.

O’Rourke’s campaign says Sanders plays no role — either formal or otherwise — in their candidate’s 2020 bid. Still, O’Rourke, known as a down-to-earth champion of little-guy values, might never have made it on the national stage without the help of an intensely private tycoon who embodies the kind of figure top Democrats now rail against.

“I think Bill has always helped in the background,” said Mike Dipp Jr., an El Paso businessman who has known Sanders for years.

The same year O’Rourke won his city council seat, he married Amy on the sprawling Sanders family ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The former punk rocker said he and Sanders didn’t get along well at first but that he eventually became close to his hard-charging father-in-law, viewing him as a father figure after his own dad died in a 2001 bicycle accident.

By the time O’Rourke came into his life, Sanders had already spent decades at the top of America’s real estate industry, a visionary who spotted trends before others, developed strategies to capitalize on them and built top-notch management teams to execute his plans. He was focused then on industrial developments on both sides of the border, which he believed was the future of manufacturing.

Sanders founded Verde Realty in 2003 to focus on investments in the Southwest, where he believed cheap labor costs and a booming population would make the region thrive. He fostered business relationships in Mexico that envisioned the free flow of goods, people and capital in the most seamless way possible, where the border was little hindrance rather than walled-off.

Journalist Steve Bergsman, who wrote about Sanders in a 2006 book on real estate financing, described him as a workaholic whose vision of making El Paso an industrial powerhouse “really laid the groundwork for Beto’s rise, even before he had probably met or heard of him.”

In the 1990s, Sanders had been dubbed the “Warren Buffett of real estate” for acquisitions and investments that put him in control of a massive portfolio of money-making commercial, industrial and residential properties and made him one of America’s largest landlords.

Investment partnerships tied to Sanders generated more than $780,000 in interest and dividend income for Beto and Amy O’Rourke over the last decade, tax returns show.

Sanders’ wealth has supported virtually all of O’Rourke’s political campaigns — starting with a $250 check for his city council reelection race in 2006. In 2012, a Sanders-owned trust gave $37,500 to a super PAC that worked to help O’Rourke win his congressional seat in an upset. Sanders has given an additional $27,600 to O’Rourke’s congressional, Senate and presidential campaigns starting with that race, while his children and business associates have given O’Rourke tens of thousands more, disclosure filings show.

Still, his presidential campaign is keeping a public distance from Sanders, who donated the maximum $5,600 this election cycle and attended the kickoff rally in El Paso in late March. A spokesman says O’Rourke doesn’t seek Sanders’ advice and that the pair’s interactions are limited to family events.

Sanders now maintains a low public profile and didn’t return phone messages seeking comment. O’Rourke’s presidential campaign didn’t make him available. Many in El Paso’s business community who still have regular contact with Sanders said he wouldn’t want to comment for this story, with some of them agreeing only to speak on background because they feared jeopardizing future working relationships — illustrating just how much Sanders shuns the spotlight while remaining influential.

O’Rourke held a June 10 fundraiser in Chicago, where his father-in-law was one of the most powerful businessmen during the 1980s. The campaign said it had not asked Sanders to help raise money from his contacts in the city, where O’Rourke also raked in cash during last year’s run against Cruz.

After growing up in El Paso and attending Cornell University, Sanders, now 77, founded and built the company that became the renowned La Salle Partners in Chicago. It was a one-stop shop for some of America’s largest corporations for acquiring and managing buildings, land and property. He sold his stake in La Salle in 1989 and left for New Mexico, where his daughter Amy spent most of her childhood.

In the 1990s, Sanders founded the Security Capital Group and built companies that owned warehouses, storage units, office buildings and parking garages. In addition to differing with President Donald Trump’s beliefs about the border, Sanders took a dim view of real estate moguls like Trump who moved from one splashy deal to the next. Sanders purposely avoided skyscrapers in favor of less risky and lower maintenance properties that he considered more lucrative for shareholders.

“I don’t give a darn what a building looks like; I want to be very confident that it is a strategic asset,” he said in a rare 2006 interview published in an industry magazine. “For example, hotels are fabulous, they look good, you walk in and everybody greets you, you are a big shot, but look at the money you have to spend to keep it fresh. It’s a very, very expensive investment. On the other hand, self-storage, you sweep it out, paint it and that is it.”

Sanders, who sold Security Capital for $2.1 billion in 2001, usually relished the low profile such ventures afforded him. That changed less than a year after O’Rourke joined the city council and Sanders led a group of businesspeople who released a plan to redevelop downtown by demolishing old homes and storefronts in favor of new condos, restaurants and a revamped arts district.

Becoming the public face of the project, Sanders modeled his consortium after the powerful Commercial Club of Chicago. O’Rourke supported the plan and initially voted to move it forward. But many low-income, immigrant residents were opposed, saying the redevelopment could displace more than 500 people. It raised the ugly specter of El Paso using eminent domain to displace some of its most marginalized residents while benefiting developers who were part of Sanders’ group.

Critics say O’Rourke had a conflict because of his relationship with Sanders, who promised to donate any of his own profits from his interest in the development to charity. The plan ultimately stalled, and ethics complaints against O’Rourke were dismissed.

Still, the episode has lingered. The conservative Club for Growth Action PAC welcomed O’Rourke to the presidential race in March by releasing an online video accusing him of “doing his father-in-law’s bidding” by supporting “a downtown redevelopment scheme to bulldoze a poor, Hispanic neighborhood while enriching developers.”

O’Rourke has repeatedly denied those charges and noted that he has worked hard to cultivate many supporters in the neighborhoods that would have been most affected. Today, though, even some Democrats question whether O’Rourke is a progressive fighter for the common person as his image would suggest or a tool of powerful business interests.

El Paso attorney Stephanie Townsend Allala once filed a lawsuit accusing the city council of violating state open records laws when discussing the redevelopment plan with private entities. She said O’Rourke consistently backed his father-in-law’s interests and “not once has he supported the grassroots side.”

“It’s a symbiotic relationship. Beto’s standing was aided by his billionaire father-in-law and the billionaire father-in-law was aided by Beto’s standing,” Townsend Allala said. “He’s dancing with the one that brung him, as we say in Texas.”

Sanders started building his fortune as a boy. By 10, he was selling Coca-Cola to golfers on the El Paso Country Club’s 13th hole. “I always wanted both — respect and wealth,” Sanders said, according to the book “The Richest Man in Town: The Twelve Commandments of Wealth.”

Sanders once took the woman who would become O’Rourke’s mom, Melissa Martha Williams, on a double date in 1970 with another couple. Williams instead hit it off with the other man on the date, Pat O’Rourke, and married him less than 12 months later. A year later, the couple’s first child, Beto, was born.

When O’Rourke began a primary challenge to veteran U.S. Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes in 2012, Sanders was again there to help. A super PAC, the Campaign for Primary Accountability, was co-founded by a Houston businessman and GOP donor that election cycle to target incumbents from both parties and try to send new faces to Congress. An investment trust controlled by Sanders gave $37,500 to the PAC in the months before the primary. The trust, which owned corporate stocks and a hedge fund, produced $87,000 in income that year for Beto and Amy O’Rourke.

The donations were “probably 10 percent of what we spent” helping O’Rourke and attacking Reyes, PAC strategist Jeff Hewitt said. Others in El Paso donated more than $45,000.

“What happened was, they got a bunch of people in a room in El Paso, it was all Sanders’ buddies and people like that,” said Hewitt, a Democratic operative now based in Ohio. “They knew what we were doing … and they sent some money.”

The group worked to increase Reyes’ unfavorable ratings through digital advertising and other efforts. O’Rourke says he won by simply out-hustling Reyes, noting he knocked on more than 15,000 doors. He prevailed by fewer than 3,000 votes — a feat Hewitt says would have been impossible if not for outside help.

“He’s the quintessential, ‘Woke up on third and thought he hit a triple’ guy,” Hewitt said of O’Rourke.

Second, Stronger Quake Hits Southern California; Injuries Reported

LOS ANGELES — A quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.1 jolted much of California, cracked buildings, set fires, broke roads and caused several injuries, authorities and residents said.

The quake — preceded by Thursday’s 6.4-magnitude temblor in the Mojave Desert — was the largest Southern California temblor in at least 20 years and was followed by a series of large and small aftershocks.

It hit at 8:19 p.m. and was centered 11 miles from Ridgecrest in the same areas where the previous quake hit. But it was felt as far north as Sacramento, as far east as Las Vegas and as far south as Mexico.

Early magnitude estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey wavered between 6.9 and 7.1.

The area in and around Ridgecrest, already trying to recover from the previous temblor, took the brunt of damage.

Megan Person, director of communications for the Kern County Fire Department, said there were reports of multiple injuries and multiple fires, but she didn’t have details.

The county opened an emergency shelter. Meanwhile, a rockslide closed State Route 178 in Kern River Canyon, where photos from witnesses also showed that a stretch of roadway had sunk.

San Bernardino County firefighters reported cracked buildings and one minor injury.

In downtown Los Angeles, 150 miles away, offices in skyscrapers rolled and rocked for at least 30 seconds.

Andrew Lippman, who lives in suburban South Pasadena, was sitting outside and reading the paper when Friday’s quake hit.

“It just started getting stronger and stronger, and I looked into my house and the lamp started to sway. I could see power lines swaying,” he said. “This one seemed 45 (seconds)… I’m still straightening pictures.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom activated the state Office of Emergency Services operations center “to its highest level.”

“The state is coordinating mutual aid to local first responders,” he said.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology and a former science adviser at the Geological Survey, tweeted that Thursday’s earthquake was a “foreshock” and that Friday’s quake was on the same fault system as the earlier quake.

“You know we say we have a 1 in 20 chance that an earthquake will be followed by something bigger? This is that 1 in 20 time,” she tweeted.

Firefighters around Southern California were mobilized to check for damage.

An NBA Summer League game in Las Vegas was stopped after the quake. Speakers over the court at the Thomas & Mack Center continued swaying more than 10 minutes after the quake.

In Los Angeles, the quake rattled Dodger Stadium in the fourth inning of the team’s game against the San Diego Padres.

The quake on Friday night happened when Dodgers second baseman Enriquè Hernàndez was batting. It didn’t appear to affect him or Padres pitcher Eric Lauer.

“Everyone was jumping over us to leave,” said Daniel Earle, 52, of Playa del Rey, who was sitting with his wife in the stadium’s reserve level.

“People were freaking out,” he said. “There was a concession guy, and he actually was really cool because he was really calm. He’s like, ‘Relax. Tranquilo. Relax. Tranquilo,’ and people were looking around.”

“My wife was holding us, like squeezing. I’m surprised my arm is still here. She was squeezing into it so hard,” Earle said.

Six Flags Magic Mountain in Santa Clarita said in a tweet Friday night it had stopped running rides in the earthquake’s wake.

“The safety of our guests and employees is our top priority and as a precautionary measure, we are conducting an extensive visual, structural, and operational safety checks on all of the rides before re-opening,” the park said on Twitter.

Disneyland had evacuated rides as the park conducted safety checks, the Hollywood Reporter wrote. The park’s mobile app had marked all rides as “temporarily closed” on Friday night.

The quake came as communities in the Mojave Desert tallied damage and made emergency repairs to cracked roads and broken pipes from the earlier quake.

Hours earlier, seismologists had said that quake had been followed by more than 1,700 aftershocks and that they might continue for years.

Jones said aftershocks from the new main quake could occur for three years.

Earlier Friday, Los Angeles had revealed plans to lower slightly the threshold for public alerts from its earthquake early warning app. But officials said the change was in the works before the quake, which gave scientists at the California Institute of Technology’s seismology lab 48 seconds of warning but did not trigger a public notification.

“Our goal is to alert people who might experience potentially damaging shaking, not just feel the shaking,” said Robert de Groot, a spokesman for the USGS’s ShakeAlert system, which is being developed for California, Oregon and Washington.

The West Coast ShakeAlert system has provided non-public earthquake notifications on a daily basis to many test users, including emergency agencies, industries, transportation systems and schools.

Late last year, the city of Los Angeles released a mobile app intended to provide ShakeAlert warnings for users within Los Angeles County.

The trigger threshold for LA’s app required a magnitude 5 or greater and an estimate of level 4 on the separate Modified Mercali Intensity scale, the level at which there is potentially damaging shaking.

Although Thursday’s quake was well above magnitude 5, the expected shaking for the Los Angeles area was level 3, de Groot said.

A revision of the magnitude threshold down to 4.5 was already underway, but the shaking intensity level would remain at 4. The rationale is to avoid numerous ShakeAlerts for small earthquakes that do not affect people.

“If people get saturated with these messages, it’s going to make people not care as much,” he said.

Construction of a network of seismic-monitoring stations for the West Coast is just over half complete, with most coverage in Southern California, San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle-Tacoma area. Eventually, the system will send out alerts over the same system used for Amber Alerts to defined areas that are expected to be affected by a quake, de Groot said.

California is partnering with the federal government to build the statewide earthquake warning system, with the goal of turning it on by June 2021. The state has already spent at least $25 million building it, including installing hundreds of seismic stations throughout the state.

This year, Newsom said the state needed $16.3 million to finish the project, which included money for stations to monitor seismic activity, plus nearly $7 million for “outreach and education.” The state Legislature approved the funding last month, and Newsom signed it into law.

___

McCombs reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press writers Adam Beam in Sacramento, Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles and Tarek Hamada in Phoenix, Sports Writer Beth Harris in Los Angeles and Associated Press freelancer Jolene Latimer in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Noam Chomsky: Trump Is History Repeated as Farce

Even for Donald Trump, the remarks were almost staggering in their density. Last month, in an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Western liberalism has “outlived its purpose,” adding that “it has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” When asked during the G20 summit in Osaka if he agreed, Trump offered this gleaming ruby: “[Putin] sees what’s going on—I guess if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

Trying to deduce any kind of grand strategy from a president who confuses the West with California and believes the moon is part of Mars can feel like a fool’s errand, if not “the purest acid satire.” But as Noam Chomsky argues in an interview with Truthout this week, “there is a strategy”—one that has empowered the far right across the globe and ultimately endangers human life on earth. If Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a tragedy, he speculates, then Trump’s is history repeating itself as farce.

“It’s understandable that the farce elicits ridicule, and no doubt some are relishing the coming photo-op of Trump and Boris Johnson upholding Anglo-American civilization,” claims the celebrated linguist and philosopher. “But for the world, it’s dead serious, from the destruction of the environment and the growing threats of terminal nuclear war to a long list of other crimes and horrors.”

That list includes the administration’s escalating brinksmanship with Iran. While he acknowledges the president does not appear to share his cabinet’s lust for war, Chomsky contends that Trump’s hawkishness is nonetheless hugely destructive. “In the real world, the U.S. unilaterally decided to destroy the well-functioning nuclear agreement (JCPOA), with ludicrous charges accepted by virtually no one with the slightest credibility, and to impose extremely harsh sanctions designed to punish the Iranian people and undermine the economy,” he observes. “The [U.S. government] also uses its enormous economic power, including virtual control of the international financial system, to compel others to obey Washington’s dictates. None of this has even minimal legitimacy; the same is true of Cuba and other cases.”

On the domestic front, Chomsky points out that America has largely born the brunt of Trump’s trade wars, despite the president’s claims that money is now pouring in from China. Citing a study with Princeton and Columbia universities by the New York Fed, he notes U.S. companies and consumers have paid billions more per month as a result of the president’s tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as aluminum and steel. (Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has written these tariffs are “tantamount to one of the biggest tax hikes on Americans in recent history.”) “Trump’s trick is to wave a big club and threaten others with dire consequences unless they stop torturing poor America and agree to ‘play fair,'” Chomsky continues. “When we take all this apart, a different picture emerges, much as in the case of the ominous threat of Iran. But what matters for the con game is the ‘alternative reality’ that the conjurers are concocting.”

For Chomsky, Trump’s presidency poses an existential threat, and the evidence is in his embrace of the worst actors in the Middle East. He also cites adviser Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century,” which calls for nothing less than the complete capitulation of Palestine.

“These objectives fall within a broader strategy of forming a global reactionary alliance under the U.S. aegis, including the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Eastern Europe [Hungary’s Orbán, etc.] and Brazil’s grotesque Jair Bolsonaro, who among other virtues, shares with Trump the dedication to undermine prospects for a livable environment by opening up the Amazon—’the lungs of the earth’—to exploitation by his friends in mining and agribusiness,” he concludes. “That’s a natural strategy for today’s Trump-McConnell Republican party, well ensconced to the far right of the international spectrum, even beyond the European ‘populist’ parties that were not long ago considered a contemptible fringe.”

Read the interview in its entirety at Truthout.

Migrant Child Drawings Depict Jail-Like Scenes of Detention

MCALLEN, Texas — In one drawing, stick figures sleep on the ground under blankets watched by other figures with hats. Another picture has frowning stick figures behind what appears to be a chain-link fence. One shows two toilets in a small room. All of the drawings include imposing jail-like bars covering most of the canvas.

They were done by children asked to depict their experience in Border Patrol custody and photographed by an American Academy of Pediatrics volunteer last week. Their release follows unsettling warnings from a government watchdog about overcrowded South Texas facilities holding migrant families.

The report by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general detailed inadequate food and access to showers. Photos showed people crammed into cells and women and children sleeping on the ground under Mylar blankets.

The three pictures were made by two 10-year-old children and one 11-year-old at a McAllen, Texas, temporary shelter. Two of the children were from Guatemala and it wasn’t clear where the third was from.

Dr. Sarah Gorza, president of the academy, said her organization wanted to make a point that children should not be in Border Patrol custody.

“It was a visual of what the children felt happened to them. It affected us,” she said. “They are living in those cells, cages. That’s what was on their mind when they were drawing.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics Immigrant Health Special Interest Group has maintained that Customs and Border Protection facilities are unhealthy and unsafe for children.

CBP did not immediately respond to phone calls and emails requesting comment.

Cathy Malchiodi, author of “Understanding Children’s Drawings,” said the sketches could reveal signs of traumatic stress.

Malchiodi said the picture offering a bird’s-eye view of five figures sleeping on the floor under blankets with two guards watching two exit doors could reveal that was the “dominant traumatic memory.” The child who drew almost nothing but two toilets may have been especially troubled by the smell, Malchiodi says.

“There are no people, just these toilets. My guess is maybe the smell was the dominant thing,” she said.

Trump Administration Seeks to Force Census Citizenship Question

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Friday it will continue to look for legal grounds to force the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, hours after President Donald Trump said he is “very seriously” considering an executive order to get the question on the form.

Trump said his administration is exploring a number of legal options, but the Justice Department did not say exactly what options it has now that the Supreme Court has for now barred the question.

The government has already begun the process of printing the census questionnaire without that question.

The administration’s focus on asking broadly about citizenship for the first time since 1950 reflects the enormous political stakes and potential costs in the once-a-decade population count that determines the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives for the next 10 years and the distribution of some $675 billion in federal spending.

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by

The Census Bureau’s own experts have said the question would discourage immigrants from participating and result in a less accurate census that would redistribute money and political power from Democratic-led cities where immigrants tend to cluster to whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.

Trump, speaking as he departed the White House for a weekend in New Jersey, said he might take executive action.

“It’s one of the ways that we’re thinking about doing it, very seriously,” he said.

An executive order would not, by itself, override court rulings blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question. But such an action from Trump would perhaps give administration lawyers a new basis to try to convince federal courts that the question could be included.

“Executive orders do not override decisions of the Supreme Court,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement Friday. The organization is representing plaintiffs in the census lawsuit in Maryland.

Later Friday, Justice Department lawyers formally told U.S. District Judge George Hazel in Maryland the administration is not giving up the legal fight to add the citizenship question to the next census. But they also said it’s unclear how they will proceed, according to a court filing.

“They still say they don’t have clear instructions on what to do,” said Saenz, who took part in a conference call with the judge and lawyers for both sides in one of three lawsuits seeking to keep the question off the census. The other two are in New York and California.

Hazel had expressed mounting frustration with the mixed signals the administration was sending, first telling him on Tuesday that the question was off only to have Trump tweet the next day that the administration was “absolutely moving forward” with efforts to include the question.

Trump’s administration has faced numerous roadblocks to adding the question, like last week’s Supreme Court ruling that blocked its inclusion, at least temporarily. Both the Justice and Commerce departments indicated on Tuesday that they were moving forward with the census, minus the citizenship question.

But Trump has insisted otherwise, pushing his administration to come up with a way to include the controversial query. He suggested Friday officials might be able to add an addendum to the questionnaire with the question after it’s already printed.

In the Supreme Court’s decision last week, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s current justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”

The administration had pushed the Supreme Court to decide the case quickly, citing a July 1 deadline to begin printing the forms. The court made the rare move of taking up the case directly from a trial court in New York before an appeals court had weighed in. As recently as June 20, Solicitor General Noel Francisco reminded the justices of the need for a quick decision, writing that “for all practical purposes, the Census Bureau needs to finalize the 2020 questionnaire by June of this year.”

The Trump administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box.

But the question’s opponents say recently discovered evidence from the computer files of a Republican redistricting consultant who died last year shows that, far from helping minority voters, discrimination against Hispanics was behind the push for the citizenship question.

Hazel is considering reopening the Maryland case to take account of the new evidence, which could provide a separate basis for blocking the citizenship question.

Preparations for the $15.6 billion 2020 Census are intricately choreographed. More than 425,000 people have already started applying for the half million positions needed for the 2020 Census. The bureau also is in the middle of a test run, with 480,000 households sent questionnaire information, according to the bureau’s monthly status report from May.

The ongoing legal wrangling itself could hurt the census, said John Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. The group is a plaintiff in the Maryland case. “The government is trying to sow seeds of confusion in the public,” Yang said.

___

Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland, and Michael Schneider in Orlando, Florida, contributed to this report.

The Chronic Illness Killing Generations of Men

“The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making”

A book by Jared Yates Sexton

If it were a virus, this would be an epidemic. If it were a foreign country, we would be at war. If it were an alien from another planet, it would be the villain in a movie. American men are dying and killing, and we are letting it happen.

In Jared Yates Sexton’s insightful and important new book, “The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making,” toxic masculinity is framed as a system of taboos and impossible expectations imposed on men through physical and emotional abuse until they become addicted to performing those expectations.

To understand how Sexton defines “toxic masculinity,” picture the semi-fictional “Greatest Generation.” They grew up in poverty, emerged victorious in war, and provided for their families (if they were white of course), often earning enough to buy a house and a car from one job in a manly industry like manufacturing. And they did it without complaining. Hundreds of thousands of American men returned from World War II (and Korea and Vietnam and the two Gulf wars) with PTSD and lived with it untreated for the rest of their lives, because, of course, “Dad doesn’t talk about the war.” We celebrated their stoic silence as they suffered. We interpreted three-martini lunches, scotch-soaked poker games, Saturdays alone in the garage, demanding their injured sons “walk it off,” intimidating tempers, and corporal punishment as inherent masculine traits rather than as inadequate coping mechanisms. We saw them as ideal men, rather than ill men. From them—how we celebrated them—we drew one fundamental lesson about how men should be: Men should feel no pain, and when they do they are forbidden from sharing it with anyone else.

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Man They Wanted Me to Be” at Google Books.

Toxic masculinity predates the Greatest Generation, of course. A masculine ideal has and will always be impossible to achieve, because, in the words of Dr. Joseph Pleck, “gender roles are social constructs and thus impossible to fulfill, the inevitable failure to live up to them can result in psychological damage,” but in the Greatest Generation, it found a new fuel to supercharge its transmission. Sexton writes, “If our fathers and grandfathers could survive a depression, ship off to Europe or Asia, and fight against the forces of fascism, then we should be capable of conducting our civilian lives without complaint.” Sure, your job batters your body and mind so you feel like a crushed can every night, but your grandfather saw his best friend step on a landmine outside of Bayeux and he never complained about it. Any displayed weakness is fundamental proof that you are not a real man like your grandfather.

According to Sexton, “being a real man” is imposed on men as children through physical and emotional abuse. And Sexton should know. He suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a number of men in his life until he internalized and adopted the principles of toxic masculinity. He writes, “It permeates everything, reverberating throughout our language and tainting our power structure; it plagues our every action and thought. […] Toxic masculinity is a chronic illness, and once we’re infected we always carry it with us.” And that is not a generic first-plural. When Sexton says “us,” he includes himself. The arc of his story is one we’ve seen in dozens of memoirs and movies about addiction.

Toxic masculinity is addicted to performance, to poses and postures of physical endurance, willingness to engage in or actual violence, and stoic absence of any emotion, pain, or discomfort. “John whipped and beat me when I didn’t fulfill my end of the masculine bargain. If I cried, if I complained, if I was sick or if I simply fell short of his expectations, that’s when I received punishment.” Men learn the actions that get them hit or insulted and those that don’t and perform the later “until there’s no performance anymore. There’s just a man who knows no other way.” We know the addiction story arc ends in one of two ways and luckily for us, Sexton’s addiction arc ends when he realizes he cannot do this alone and gets the help he needs to heal.

A great work of nonfiction, on any topic, makes its case and tells its story in a way that lets readers come to their own conclusions and acts as a base for future exploration. Sexton’s ideas about addiction and performance drawn from his experience at Trump rallies leads us to a potentially surprising conclusion. Some of the racist, sexist, and homophobic vitriol spewed at Trump rallies is performative, spewed by men who did not believe it, or at least with that intensity, but were afraid their masculinity would be questioned if they did not pose as an angry, hateful Trump supporter, who doesn’t care about your feelings. Many of Trump’s supporters engaged in the same kind of pissing contest as internet trolls, where the point was not actually to advance an idea, but to prove how tough you personally are through a specific demonstration of emotional disregard and potential, and occasionally actual, violence.

To put this another way, there are members of Trump’s base, especially men, who truly don’t believe in him, but feel obligated to attend his rallies, shout his slogans, and even vote for him to be real men for their friends and family. This is not to absolve them of responsibility, but to define a relationship with toxic masculinity in our search for a way out of it.

Sexton wants to change the world. A perfect review of a book like this would be able to look into the future to see if he has. But we can’t know that. I don’t know if the men who most need to read it, both for their own health and for the health of society, will read it. But their sons might. Their daughters might. A new football coach might. And Sexton implies a potential path forward: Just stop.

Stop beating your sons when they cry. Stop using feminine and homosexual descriptions as insults. Stop telling hurt children to walk it off. Believe yourself when you feel like something isn’t right and stop doing that. Believe yourself when you feel like you are performing and just stop.

“The Man They Wanted Me to Be” is centered in Sexton’s personal experience, drawing on social science to elucidate that experience. He says very little about how people of color experience toxic masculinity, the ways class impacts toxic masculinity, or about the experiences of women and people of other sexualities and genders. Sexton is open about these limits, and frequently clarifies when an experience is unique to straight white men. The story of toxic masculinity is bigger than one man and to tell it completely would require telling the stories of men of color and men of different classes and women and people of other genders and sexualities. But Sexton isn’t trying to tell the story of toxic masculinity, he is trying to find a path forward from it. The scope of his book needs to be narrow, because it needs to be driven by sharing his personal story, sharing the pain he felt, and sharing the help he sought to remedy that pain.

As important as the data is and as insightful as Sexton is with that data, the most important thing he does in “The Man They Wanted Me to Be” is break the taboo about sharing vulnerabilities: He exposes his alcoholism, his eating disorders, his therapy. Taboos lose power when you break them. Toxic masculinity loses power when we, and I especially mean straight white men like Sexton and myself, weaken the taboos that protect it.

This review was first published by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

 

Glenn Greenwald Targeted by Brazil’s Far-Right Government

The Brazilian government is targeting one of its biggest critics, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in a move that has been decried by observers as an intimidation tactic designed to stifle opposition to right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro.

The government’s finance ministry’s money laundering unit was asked by federal police to investigate Greenwald’s finances, O Antagonista reported Tuesday. The right-wing Brazilian news site said that the investigation would focus on whether Greenwald paid for access to leaked records he used in reporting on the Bolsonaro government’s “Operation Car Wash” sting.

“If there is an investigation for doing journalism it is illegal and it is an attempt at intimidation,” University of Sao Paulo law professor Pierpaolo Bottini told The Guardian.

This is a blatant attempt by Brazilian officials to intimidate—or worse—@ggreenwald for his reportinghttps://t.co/FwgDjSTEQm

— jordan (@JordanUhl) July 4, 2019

Attacks on Greenwald and his family, including husband David Miranda, a member of Brazil’s Congress, were criticized by U.N. and Organization of American States (OAS) Edison Lanza and David Kaye. In a joint press release, Lanza and Kaye called on Brazil “to conduct an exhaustive, effective, and impartial investigation on the threats against the journalist and his family.”

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“The Special Rapporteurs remind the Brazilian State that it has an obligation to prevent, protect, investigate, and punish violence against journalists, particularly those who have been subjected to harassment and threats or other acts of violence,” the rapporteurs’ statement said.

Greenwald, co-founder of independent news organization The Intercept, published in the online magazine’s Brazilian edition a number of investigations that use leaked documents to prove that the prosecution of former President Lula da Silva for corruption was steered by now Justice Minister Sergio Moro. The reporting has impacted Brazil’s politics and thrown the Bolsonaro presidency into crisis.

Given the impact of the reporting, said José Guimarães, a congressman who is a member of da Silva’s Workers’ Party, the investigation appears to be “a brutal violation of press freedom.”

That point was echoed by Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. In a statement, Timm said that an investigation into Greenwald would be “not only an outrageous attack on press freedom, but a gross abuse of power.”

“Criminally investigating journalist Glenn Greenwald for reporting on corruption within the Bolsonaro government is a shocking violation of his rights as a reporter,” Timm said. “Worse, the same person who is the primary subject of The Intercept’s reporting—Minister of Justice Sergio Moro—would also have ultimate authority over any Federal Police investigation.”

The fallout from Greenwald’s reporting is having a major affect on Brazilian politics. On Tuesday, Moro appeared in front of the Brazilian Congress to answer questions on “Operation Car Wash” in a hearing that devolved at one point into near-violence.

After Congressman Braga laid out with unflinching clarity the corruption of Minister Moro as exposed by our reporting – see the above videos – the Congress members from Bolsonaro’s party reacted with the sobriety, dignity & eloquence for which they are internationally renowned: pic.twitter.com/k6OmZohnGN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 4, 2019

Greenwald, who spoke to the lower house of Brazil’s Congress about his reporting in June, was invited this week to testify in front of the Brazilian Senate. A date for that testimony has yet to be set.

10 Questions for Robert Mueller

After weeks of dithering, the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees have subpoenaed Robert Mueller to testify July 17 about his investigation into Russia’s election interference and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump. Mueller has reluctantly agreed to honor the subpoenas. He will testify publicly in front of both committees, back-to-back, before continuing in closed sessions.

Here are 10 questions I would ask if given the opportunity. They are grouped by category, together with the rationales behind them and what I anticipate would be Mueller’s answers, evasions and flat-out refusals to comment:

On Mueller’s Agreement to Testify

Why did it take a subpoena to persuade you to testify?

It’s no secret that Mueller doesn’t want to answer any questions from Congress—or anyone else, for that matter—either in public or behind closed doors. He told us as much in the prepared statement he read on live TV on May 29.

It’s understandable. Mueller believes his work is done, and that he should be permitted to ride off into the sunset and return to private law practice, hailed as a hero. As he said on May 29, “My report is my testimony.”

Too bad.

Mueller is a former FBI director. It’s time for him to face the music (and the cameras).

An estimated $35 million was spent to fund Mueller’s work; now it’s time for ordinary Americans to hear from him under oath. His report is 448 pages long, packed with dense legalese, and few people—besides political nerds and constitutional-law wonks like me—have taken the time to plow through it.

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The special counsel has a moral obligation not only to explain what he found, but to clear up ambiguities in his report, of which there are many. A subpoena should not have been necessary to secure Mueller’s appearance before Congress. He should have come forward voluntarily, as independent counsel Ken Starr—not exactly an ethical exemplar—did during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings on Bill Clinton. Yes, I know, we aren’t at the impeachment stage yet, but read on.

Has anyone, within or outside the Trump administration, pressured you not to testify?

The president has ordered his aides, current and former, not to honor congressional subpoenas under the bizarre legal claim that they are “absolutely immune” from being compelled to testify. We deserve to know if the administration has similarly tried to bully the former special prosecutor.

If anyone has attempted to muzzle Mueller, Attorney General William Barr would be the prime suspect. On March 24, Barr penned a letter to Senate and House leaders purporting to summarize the Mueller report’s key findings. Among other things, Barr “cleared” Trump in the letter of any acts of obstruction.

On March 27, Mueller wrote to Barr, complaining that the attorney general’s summary did not “fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of his report, resulting in “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.” And what else is there, ultimately, but context, nature and substance? In effect, he accused Barr of lying. Yet Mueller made an abrupt about-face in his May 29 press conference, declaring that he doesn’t question the attorney general’s “good faith.”

We shouldn’t do the same.

Barr has turned the Department of Justice into something more akin to Trump’s personal defense firm. Even if Mueller refuses to answer the question, he should be put on the spot, if only to underscore Barr’s obfuscation and malfeasance.

Do you agree that the redacted portions of your report should be released to Congress and the public?

Barr released a substantially redacted version of Mueller’s report on April 18.

Last month, after weeks of negotiations, the Justice Department agreed to turn over to Congress some of the underlying evidence discovered by Mueller’s investigators. No agreement, however, has been reached to turn over a completely unredacted version of the probe’s findings.

It is estimated that between 6% and 12% of the report has been blacked out. The redacted sections include, among other matters, important material about the probe into WikiLeaks’ alleged involvement in Russian election interference.

I wouldn’t expect Mueller to answer this question, and if any member of Congress has the fortitude to ask it, I think Mueller will dodge it. Still, the question should be posed. We have a right to know what’s been concealed from the public, like this troubling section from page 30:

On Russian Interference

What is the difference between “collusion” and “conspiracy”?

On page 2 of his report, Mueller makes it clear that his investigation was about “conspiracy,” not “collusion”:

In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collud[e]” was used in communications with the acting attorney general to confirm certain aspects of the investigation’s scope, and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law.

Apart from anti-trust violations, “collusion” isn’t an element of any federal crime. I don’t know how, or when, the term crept into the national discourse and spread thereafter like a disinformation meme.

A writer from the website Lawfare posted an article in June 2018 that traced the use of “collusion” to a July 2016 article published by the Washington Examiner. The term was picked up later the same day by ABC, and in short order was repeated by other media outlets, mainstream politicians and such late-night comics as Trevor Noah.

I think that Mueller, being something of a pedant himself, would offer a brief tutorial on the subject. In any case, he should be asked to weigh in, to help rebut Trump’s claim of “No collusion.”

In the colloquial sense, Mueller discovered a trove of collusion in the form of mutually supportive contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian interests. The report notes, in this respect, that “the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government.”

As for conspiracy, on the other hand, Mueller concluded that the evidence was “insufficient” to establish a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not that he determined there was no evidence of conspiracy at all. To the contrary, as the report advises: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

As long as we’re talking and writing about Mueller, we owe it to ourselves and our audience to get it right.

Did you find any evidence that Russian interference affected the outcome of the presidential race?

It’s very unlikely the Democrats on either House panel will ask this, but the Republicans—Trump quislings all—just might. I urge them to do so, even though Mueller will probably refuse to speculate. In fact, that’s exactly why the question should be asked.

The impact of Russian interference is and will remain speculative, defying objective quantification. Although a recently released statistical analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee found that Trump received a bump in the polls that correlated to every acceleration in the Twitter activity of Russian trolls, correlation isn’t proof.

There were many reasons Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College and the presidency to the most unpopular candidate in the modern history of polling. Russian meddling was one of them. Far more important was the fact that Clinton was a terrible candidate, whom many Americans, desperate for change, associated with decades-old policies that had hollowed out the working and middle classes.

Proding Mueller could help drive these valuable points home.

If it’s wrong for other nations to meddle in our elections, isn’t it equally wrong for the U.S. to intervene in the elections of other nations?

I don’t expect members of either party to have the guts to ask this, as both Democrats and Republicans share a long and ignominious history of engineering invasions, coups and disinformation campaigns aplenty abroad. Neither do I think Mueller would share his thoughts. Still, it’s a vital inquiry that should be pursued.

On Obstruction

Your report cites several instances of possible obstruction that are supported by “substantial evidence.” What do you mean by that term?

Mueller’s report famously declares that the special counsel was unable to “exonerate” Trump of obstruction of justice. The report also states that “substantial evidence” was found to support numerous claims of obstruction, including the president’s directive in June 2017 to then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller, and his subsequent demand that McGahn deny that he had ever ordered that Mueller be fired.

Nowhere, however, does the report define “substantial evidence.” The Supreme Court has defined the term as “such relevant evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion.”

There’s a good probability that Mueller would give another short tutorial, explaining how he used the term. Whatever his response, my next question would be:

But for the Department of Justice’s position that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, would you have recommended the indictment of Trump?

Memoranda drafted by the Office of Legal Counsel in 1973 and 2000 establish DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Mueller said on May 29 that he followed that policy.

More than 1,000 former federal prosecutors affiliated with both major parties have signed a statement declaring that, based on the facts disclosed in the Mueller report, they would have charged Trump with obstruction of justice if he were not the president.

Mueller may refuse to say whether he agrees with them. But declining to answer will nicely underscore the significance of the next, and final, category of inquiry:

On Impeachment

Is your report a road map for impeachment?

This is, of course, the elephant in the room. Mueller refers to impeachment in his report 10 times, but only tangentially and mostly in footnotes, without making any assessment of the merits of the case for impeachment.

I would expect him to demur again, which should lead any competent cross-examiner to ask one last question:

If no one is above the law, whose job is it to hold the president accountable?

By this stage, I’d expect the increasingly cranky ex-Marine to stare icily ahead and, in effect, reply, “It’s your job.”

After the close of the hearing, I’d have one additional question—for House Democrats, rather than for Mueller:

“Are you ready and able to do your job?”

Sadly, unless the Democrats suddenly grow a collective spine, I think we know the answer.