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November 22, 2020

Alsoomse and Wanchese -- Chapter Three -- Scenes One and Two

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Published on November 22, 2020 15:22

November 19, 2020

Alsoomse and Wanchese -- Chapter Two, Scenes Two and Three

Algonquian Words

Cattapeak: spring
Cohattayough: summer
Kwiocosuk: shaman, priest
Mamanatowick: ruler of several villages
Nepinough: earring of the corn season
Popanow: winter
Taquitock: the harvest and the falling of the leaves season
Weroance: chief of a village
Weroansqua: female chief of a village or dominant wife of the village’s weroance

Characters Mentioned

* historically identified person

* Clarke, Richard – 37, master of the Delight
* Gilbert, Humphrey – Colonizer who dies at sea at age of 44
* Granganimeo (He Who Is Serious) – 33,
Roanoke weroance and Wingina’s brother
Kitchi (Brave) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead brother, 11 at time
of death, 1580
Matunaagd (He Who Fights) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s father, 35
at time of death, 1579
Sooleawa (Silver) – 39, Nadie’s sister and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s
aunt
Tihkoosue (Short) – 13, Granganineo’s son and Hurit’s step-son
* Wanchese (Take Flight off of Water) – 20, protagonist
* Wingina – 34, current mamanatowick and Granganimeo’s brother

Scene Two

Humphrey Gilbert and his crew sensed how close to Sable Island’s rocks the Squirrel, riding the turbulent waves, had approached. If he dared to put out to sea, how many days or weeks would it be before he would be able to return? On this island roamed wild pigs and cattle, set ashore decades ago by Portuguese explorers. Here existed the necessary food supply for his planned settlement! The alternative was to return to the Queen disgraced! The Newfoundland fishermen had warned him about Sable Island, about how too many ships had been destroyed on its rocks. “Approach it in the best of conditions. And lead with your smallest ship.” Well, in both instances he had done the opposite.

He had spurned the advice of the Delight’s master, Richard Clarke.

“If you must, utilize a south-west-south course.”

Clarke had contradicted Gilbert’s intended west-north-west direction. “That will take you to disaster, Admiral. The wind is at south and night is at hand. Unknown sands lay a great way off the land.” Gilbert had had to threaten to bring down Elizabeth’s wrath upon Clarke to force the master to comply.

Slanting rain pelted him. He turned his face away from its force. Minutes passed. Sailors were staring at him, turning their faces when he attempted to make eye contact. He would wait a bit longer!

If the fog lifted, he could then be certain. If not, …

The waiting was interminable! He stared, at drifting, amorphous shapes.

A ferocious blast of wind caused him to slip and then fall on the rain-drenched deck. He careened down the deck’s slope, his right leg striking stanchions. Adjusting to the roll of the ship, gripping a foremast spar, painfully, he stood. The boards beneath his feet trembled. Fear constricted his throat.

“Admiral! Here!”

Gilbert hesitated, then followed the beckoning sailor to a cluster of four seamen just aft of broadside. There! The fog had opened. Gilbert's lead ship, the Delight, his largest, was coming apart on dark rocks. And in the water . . . the ship's crew: heads, flailing arms. Miraculously, a boat in the water, just beyond, in one eye-blink, capsized. Churning bodies, disappearing. Gone!

For an hour Gilbert’s two ships maintained their positions. Then he ordered their departure. All one hundred of the Delight’s crew had perished. Numbed with guilt, he retired to his cabin.

Scene Three

“This had better be the tree you want. I am hungry.” Granganimeo’s son, Tihkoosue, glanced out of the shadows of the tops of witch hazel to view the sunny expanse of field they had crossed thirty minutes ago.

“A good bow starts with the best wood. Hickory is best, ash is good, witch hazel, which we have all about, will do. The first thing you have to learn is patience. Making a bow requires most of all patience.” It was not Wanchese’s idea to teach this boy of thirteen cohattayoughs how to make bows and arrows and – afterward, he assumed – how to hunt.

Granganimeo had come to him two afternoons past while he had been shaping flint arrowheads. “That is what my son needs to learn. Come. Let us walk.” The old woman watching, they had left Sooleawa’s longhouse headed toward the landing place, the smoke of fires drifting above them and the limbs of loblolly pine. Wanchese, trailing, had watched his weroance’s bare feet avoid cones and the ends of cut off vines.

Stopping in a secluded space shrouded by wax myrtle and thick spruce, close to the recently expanded burial ground, Granganimeo – his arms folded across his chest – had scrutinized him. Sensing what was about to be said, Wanchese had felt imposed upon.

“It is hard for me to say this about my son.” Granganimeo had tweaked his neck. “You must not repeat what I am about to say. It is only because Wingina and I recognize you to be strong in character, skillful in providing meat, and, we believe, brave in battle – and because you are Matunaagd’s son – that I say this to you.” Granganimeo had squinted, deepened the furrows across his forehead. “That I place my trust in you.”

Wanchese had waited.

“Tihkoosue is a disappointment. Boys his age have already learned the skills of hunting. They make their own bows and arrows. They play the hoop game, they shoot at tree stumps from different distances. Eagerly! They hunt with young braves. Tihkoosue does none of this. Yet he expects to become a weroance. He expects everything to be given to him. He must be taught otherwise.”

Wanchese had shifted his weight, touched his dangling tobacco sack.

“You know what I want you to do.”

Wanchese had nodded. The large turkey feather, its stem inserted in the groove at the top of his forehead, had bobbed.

“It will take much of your time.”

Granganimeo’s crossed forearms had covered partially the square-shaped sheet of copper dangling from his neck.

“I know he is willful,” Wanchese had answered. He had felt he had the right to criticize. “He will not listen to me if he does not listen to you.”

“You have my permission to make him listen. I have seen how you reject weak character. I also know that you are fair-minded. Treat my son as he deserves.”

“I will not be easy with him.”

Granganimeo had smiled. He had touched his chin, then nodded. “I am pleased.”

#

Wanchese concluded his inspection of the witch hazel trunk. “This one will do.” He turned to face the boy. How small Tihkoosue was for his age. He remembered Kitchi to be as tall and two cohattayoughs younger. The bow they had made and the bow he would force this weakling to make would be close to the same length.

“Good. Now we can eat.”

“Now you will watch me mark the dimensions of my bow. Then you will mark yours.”

Wanchese stared at the tree. He removed from the leather pouch, attached to the waistband of his apron, a tough but pliant section of leather and his flint knife. “Watch.”

He knelt upon the soft earth. Reaching behind his back for his apron waistband, he secured his tobacco sack. He removed it, untied its strings, and opened it. He poured bits of tobacco leaves into the palm of his left hand. He stood.

“Tree, I thank you for giving me some of your wood. May the bow I make be strong and send my arrows fast and straight.” He sprinkled the palm’s contents judiciously around the base of the trunk.

Facing the boy, he said: “You must remember always to thank the trees you use and the animals you kill for their sacrifice.”

“I know that!”

Wanchese ignored the petulance. Using his knife, he commenced to cut a line approximately five feet long down the tree trunk. “This takes effort,” he said, “because of the bark. You see that I hold the knife with this deerskin hide. “

“I see that!”

“Then you know the reason.”

Tihkoosue did not answer.

“I cut to about two hands’ length from the bottom of the trunk. Then I cut across. About half a hand in length. Then I cut up the trunk the same length as before when I began. Then I cut across to meet where I started. You are to start now on the tree trunk next to mine. The wood will do for a beginner’s bow.”

He removed from his pouch a second knife and a section of deerskin. He placed them beside the adjacent tree trunk and laid beside them his pouch of tobacco. He started to cut deeply the first of the two, long, parallel lines. Hearing no movement, he said, “It will be very long before we leave.”

“I want to eat.”

“We will eat when I eat.” He continued cutting.

Halfway finished with his parallel cutting, he heard the boy’s footsteps. He did not look. More movement. He heard: “Take this tobacco, tree, because I have to take some of your wood.” Peeking, Wanchese witnessed Tihkoosue sprinkling bits of tobacco leaves.

“Your cut has to be shorter in length,” Wanchese said. “A half an arm shorter, I think.” He continued his cutting, giving the boy seemingly no attention.

“This is hard!” Tihkoosue exclaimed. “How do you expect me to do this?!”

“Like everybody else your age.” He reached the top of his second lengthy cut. “Almost done,” he said.

“I need help.”

“It is a good thing your friends do not see you.”

“I do not have friends! I do not care who sees me!”

“Ah!”

Wanchese finished his second horizontal cut. The boy had marked half the distance of his first cut. “You are doing all right.”

“But it is hard!”

“The hard part comes after we eat.”

Tihkoosue turned, glared. “How?”

“After we eat. Hurry up. I am hungry.” Wanchese grinned.

Thirty minutes later the boy had finished. Flexing the fingers of his right hand, he watched Wanchese make a fire, afterward build a platform of sticks over the flames to cook two moderate-sized bass taken from his previous day’s catch.

Each ate silently.

After awhile the boy asked: “Did you do this with Kitchi?”

Wanchese felt instant pain. “Yes,” he said, tardily.

“How did he do?”

“He complained a lot.”

Wanchese recalled their outing.

“It is hard,” Tihkoosue had said. Everything is hard. It is meant to be. Everybody does what is expected of him. Everybody works together. The gods smile. Even Kiwasa, if he is given enough tobacco. Together we survive, stay strong, defeat our enemies. He had said all of this to Kitchi a popanow before the boy’s death. Unlike this selfish boy, his brother had been willing to work. He had been curious about all things, keen for exploration and adventure. It had been his undoing.

“Was it a good bow?”

“Good enough for a boy his size. He was able to kill rabbits with it.”

“Did you take him hunting?”

“I did.”

“Is hunting hard?”

“Everything is hard the first time.” He paused, licked his fingers, reached with his knife for the unclaimed half of the second bass, lying across two sticks elevated two feet above the fire. “It gets easier.”

They returned to the tree trunks. “Watch me while I cut the lines deeper. As deep as the distance of your little finger. “This will be hard work. Then we wedge the wood out using these pieces of deer antler and that hard rock I brought out of the canoe. The sun will be low when we finish. You should know.”

“Did you help Kitchi?”

“Sometimes, when he asked.” Not watching him, Wanchese anticipated the boy’s next question. “He did not ask that much,”

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Published on November 19, 2020 13:16

November 15, 2020

Alsoomse and Wanchese -- Chapter Two, Scene One

Algonquian Words

Cattapeak: spring
Cohattayough: summer
Kwiocosuk: shaman, priest
Mamanatowick: ruler of several villages
Nepinough: earring of the corn season
Popanow: winter
Taquitock: the harvest and the falling of the leaves season
Weroance: chief of a village
Weroansqua: female chief of a village or dominant wife of the
village’s weroance
Windigo: cannibal monster (plural: Windigoag)

Characters Mentioned

* historically identified person

Alsoomse (Independent) –17, protagonist
Machk (Bear) – 17, Nuna and Wapun’s brother, friend of Wanchese
Nuna (Land) – 16, Alsoomse’s friend across the lane
Odina (Mountain) – 16, Alsoomse’s friend across the lane
Pules (Pigeon) – 11, Odina’s sister
Sokanon (Rain) – 18, Sooleawa’s daughter and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s cousin
Sooleawa (Silver) – 39, Nadie’s sister and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s aunt
Wapun (Dawn) – 12, Nuna’s amd Machk”s sister

Commentary

Chapter Two serves mostly two purposes: revelation of character traits and detailed aspects of Algonquian culture.

Scene One

“Alsoomse, tell us a story.” Odina’s sister Pules asked
.
Alsoomse, her friend Odina, Pules, Alsoomse’s friend Nuna, and Nuna’s young sister Wapun were seated on mats in front of Aunt Sooleawa’s longhouse. It was mid-morning. They were preparing the day’s late meal
.
Sokanon was tending the fire under the large clay pot in which a corn, bean, and fish stew would be cooked. Kernels of corn, bean pods, and deboned fish lay close by in a reed basket. Sokanon had poured into the pot the last of the water she had carried from the creek in her long, hollow gourd. Alsoomse, Odina, and Nuna were grinding corn kernels into flour, each using her family’s large stone mortar and pestle. Pules and Wapun were cracking open walnut shells, centering each shell in the depression of a nutting stone and striking it with a flat rock. Soon they would be grinding the nuts into a paste, repeatedly rolling pestles over their shallow mortars. The walnut paste would be mixed with the corn kernel flour that the older girls were simultaneously preparing. The resultant mixture would be baked in shallow clay pots over a low fire to become bread.

Her shell earrings swinging, Odina grinned. “Oh yes, tell us, most excellent story teller. Tell us one we have not heard more than twice.”

Nuna straightened her back, stood, adjusted the deerskin apron that hung from her waist to her knees. Indentations of the weave of the mat upon which she had knelt marked her knees. She was a broad-bodied girl from breasts to hips. Of the four eligible, unmarried girls working in front of the longhouse, she was the broadest, Odina the largest, Alsoomse the strongest, and Sokanon the prettiest.

“If this story is long, I need to walk a little,” Nuna declared. She stepped past Sokanon, stretched her arms, flexed her knees, twice circled the fire.

“Complaints. All I am hearing are complaints. I might not tell any story.” Alsoomse raised her left eyebrow.

Pules and Wapun immediately straightened. Watching them, Nuna and Odina laughed.

“Really, Alsoomse,” Nuna said, feigning displeasure. “Doing this work is bad enough.”

Alsoomse raised her right eyebrow.

Nuna laughed.

“You may begin.” Odina knelt heavily on her mat. “You may now put me to sleep.”

Pules pointed her rock at her sister. “She does not mean that! She wants to hear your story like I do!”

“Tell your story,” Wapun said, her legs crossed, her netting stone and rock placed beside her right thigh. At twelve, a cohattayough older than Pules, she was demonstrably more perceptive, knowledgeable. “I know you want to, and I know you know we want you to.”

Alsoomse stuck out her tongue. She touched her shell-bead necklace at its lowest place, put her hands on the mat next to her knees, repositioned her kneeling body. “Nuna, Odina, go take a walk to the creek and back. This story is long!”

“Oh, just … start,” Odina said.

“You will need to work while you listen! All four of you! You know that!”

Nuna grimaced.

Alsoomse turned toward Pules and Wapun. Pointing toward the mainland, she said: “Long ago, but not so long ago, monsters walked this land. Windigoag -- giant cannibals, half human -- would hide next to deer paths behind thick branches of pine and cedar, waiting to snatch children! Catching one, a windigo would tie the child’s arms and legs with vines.”

Alsoomse leaned closer.

“Imagine.” She paused, hoping to mesmerize Pules with her eyes. “Outside the cave where he lives, the mean windigo builds a great fire. Using more vines, he ties the child to a tree limb. He places the far end of the limb on top of a large log. Walking around the fire holding the other end of the limb, he brings the tied-up child, a boy, over the fire where he slowly roasts him! When the boy is cooked, …” She made a loud, gnawing sound.

Wapun laughed.

Alsoomse shook her head, mock-admonished Wapun with her right forefinger.

She continued. “Their parents, wondering where their children had gone, would go looking for them. Sometimes, if the windigo was still hungry, he snatched the parents and roasted them, too!” Fighting the urge to laugh, she forced her face to appear sober.

Seated next to Wapun, Nuna stiffened. She pointed past her sister’s right ear. “Look! A windigo! Behind that tree!”

Wapun twisted about.

Nuna laughed.

Twisting back, Wapun glared. “I was not afraid.”

“Of course not, sister. Of course not. We all saw.” Nuna smirked.

Wapun looked instantly at Alsoomse, who had kept her face serious.

Alsoomse resumed. “Not only were the windigoag looking to make children their special meal! Huge animals were hunting to eat human meat! Did you know that, Pules?”

The young girl’s eyes and mouth appeared frozen.

Alsoomse waited.

“My father never told me!” she whispered. She dropped her rock.

Odina giggled.

“You were too little,” Wapun said. “He did not tell you because he did not want to frighten you.”

Alsoomse saw that Wapun was straining not to laugh.

Pules’s brows crowded the bridge of her nose.

“Stop your talking!” Sokanon, standing close to the fire, exclaimed.

Alsoomse’s head and those of her listeners turned in unison.

Smoke swirled past Sokanon’s body. “You need to get busy! This stew cannot wait forever for your bread!”

“Crack and grind those walnuts!” Nuna ordered the two young girls.

Alsoomse pressed her pestle against her corn kernels. “One grinding motion with each sentence,” she said, smiling. “All of you. That includes me. Ready?” She watched them position their pestles over their mortars and rocks over their walnuts.

“The people in all the villages were miserable! Something had to be done!” She pressed down with her pestle. The others followed her example. “Fortunately” – Alsoomse made her voice joyful – “fortunately, they worshiped the sun! Because the great Sun Father liked them, he decided to help them.” She pressed. They pressed and cracked. “He changed himself into a handsome hunter, came down out of the sky, then married a beautiful woman from the North!”

Pules raised her head. “Where the Weapemeoc live?”

Alsoomse shook her head. “Much farther north.”

“Too bad.” Odina frowned. “Just once! Just once I would like to see a handsome hunter walk past me and say, ‘Odina, marry me!’”

“The day that happens,” Nuna answered, “you will see turtles chasing cranes!”

“Grind!” Sokanon ordered. She reached into her reed basket, brought out bean pods, dropped them into the boiling water.

Alsoomse rotated her pestle against the inside of her mortar. “The beautiful woman gave birth to twin boys. Handsome boys, very brave. They grew very fast; and then, suddenly, they stopped growing. They grew to be no taller than you, Wapun. But they were strong, and they were very intelligent, and were full of questions.”

“What kind of questions?’

“‘Who is our father?’ one of them asked not long after they had stopped growing.”

“Grind,” Sokanon reminded.

“What did she say? Did they believe her?”

“She did not tell them exactly. She said they were special. Two days later she carried out of her longhouse two bows about their height and two quivers full of arrows.”

Lowering her chin, Alsoomse resumed grinding. The young girls waited, their rocks suspended above their nutting stones. A drift of smoke temporarily encircled them.

“Why?!” Pules exclaimed.

“She told them that their father had left the bows and arrows for her to give to them. Then he had left. Now grind! Pound!”

They did, almost guiltily, Alsoomse thought. Again she hid her amusement.

“The twins were to use them when they became old enough. The mother brought out of her longhouse several magic rabbit sticks. ‘Take these also and use them but only if you have to,’ she told them.”

“Rabbit sticks? What are rabbit sticks?”

“Sticks covered with rabbit fur,” Alsoomse answered, keeping her mouth small.

“Why would anybody want to put rabbit fur on sticks?” Wapun frowned. “You are making this up.”

“No, the great Sun Father wanted fur on them. There was magic in the fur. Time for two more grinds. And pounds.” She made semi-circles with her pestle.

After the others had acted, she continued.

“The boys wanted to go hunting. Their mother told them to stay far away from the monster animals that could swallow them. ‘And stay away from windigoag! You are just the right size to roast!’ So …” Alsoomse made a what-can-you-do, futile gesture. “Being boys, they thought they could do anything!”

“Like your brother Machk,” Pules said, addressing Wapun.

“The mother warned them not to go to the land across the water because there was a large lake there where a monster wolf lived that loved to eat people. So, being boys, that is where they went! Grind!”

Engrossed, Nuna and Odina bent over their mortars. Wapun and Pules cracked two walnuts.

“They reached the lake when the sun was high, glimpsed the entire shoreline, saw tall trees with leaves of different shades of green.

‘Where is that monster wolf?’ one of them asked. ‘He probably sees us and is hiding.’

‘You are wrong, brother. See? Over there!’ The wolf was bigger than a longhouse. ‘Quick, hide!’”

“Where is that handsome hunter you wanted to meet, Odina?” Nuna laughed. “Never where you want him when you need him!” She moved the tip of her right forefinger across her grinning lips.

Alsoomse nodded. “The giant wolf saw them! Staring through the leaves of a large wax myrtle, the boys saw the wolf lower his snout into the lake. In no time at all the wolf drank the entire lake dry! Staring at the shrub, the wolf advanced across the lake bottom.

‘We cannot outrun him!’ the smarter twin cried. They jumped out in front of the shrub and shot their arrows. The wolf’s sides were so tough the arrows did not stick! He was now as angry as he was hungry.”

Alsoomse stopped, pressed her pestle down upon a new batch of corn kernels.

“Tell us!” Pules cried.

“What happened?” Their heads turned. Sokanon had stepped away from a sudden, breeze-driven, horizontal surge of smoke.
So. She had a fifth listener! Alsoomse laughed. She redirected her attention to her two friends and their young sisters.

“As if they were not in enough danger, the wolf was carrying magic sticks. He threw one of them at them; they saw it coming; they ducked; it passed over their heads! Cursing, the wolf threw his second stick. This time the boys leaped high and the stick passed under their feet!”

“Small but quick!” Odina marveled, pretending incredulity.

“If one of them were ten cohattayoughs older, he could become your pretend husband,” Nuna said.

“Better a handsome pretend one than a big, fat, slow one.” Odina angled her head, for an instant grinned.

“Grind!” Alsoomse waved her pestle. She frowned. Nuna’s belittlement of Odina, disguised as teasing, needed to stop. She looked sternly at Pules. “So, are you ready for the end of the story?!”

Pules nodded, the rest of her body still.

Alsoomse repositioned her knees. “I am sore. Maybe I should take a walk to the creek.”

“No!” the young girls exclaimed.

“All right then. Even if my knees hurt.” She looked at each of the girls. “As you would expect, each boy threw one of his rabbit sticks at the wolf. Each stick struck the wolf in the head. Down went the wolf, immediately dead!”

Both girls stared at her.

“Just like that? A wolf that big?!”

“Pules, the sticks were magic. Anything can happen with magic!” Wapun shook her head.

“There is more.” Alsoomse’s smile widened. “The boys took out their antler knives and cut out the wolf’s heart. They gathered up their two rabbit sticks; and, because they were intelligent boys, they retrieved the magic sticks that the wolf had thrown. Why did they cut out the heart, you might ask? To prove to their mother what they had done.”

“What happened when they got home?”

“They told their mother what they had done; but she did not believe them, so they showed her the heart. The people in the village had a great celebration.”

“Then what? Did the windigoag get them?”

“That, Pules, is a story for another time.” Alsoomse looked at each girl. “So the lesson of this story is …?”

“Make friends with a handsome hunter.” Nuna placed her hands above her hip bones, leaned her head back, laughed.

“Tie the hunter up until he promises he will marry you,” Odina quipped.

“Be bold,” Wapun answered, “but only if the gods want to help you.”

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Published on November 15, 2020 12:18

November 12, 2020

Alsoomse and Wanchese -- Chapter One, Scene Two

Algonquian Words

Cattapeak: spring
Cohattayough: summer
Kwiocosuk: shaman, priest
Mamanatowick: ruler of several villages
Nepinough: earring of the corn season
Popanow: winter
Taquitock: the harvest and the falling of the leaves season
Weroance: chief of a village
Weroansqua: female chief of a village or dominant wife of the
village’s weroance

Characters Mentioned

* historically identified person

Abooksigun (wildcat) – 22, Dasemunkepeuc warrior
* Andacon (Evergreens) – 25, Wingina’s war chief
Alsoomse (Independent) –17, protagonist
Askook (Snake) – 21, Hurit’s brother and enemy of Alsoomse and
Wanchese
* Eracano – 30, Numaes’s husband and Wingina and Granganimeo’s
brother-in-law
* Granganimeo (He Who Is Serious) – 33, Roanoke weroance and Wingina’s brother
Kimi (Secret) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead sister, 4 at time of
death, 1575
Kitchi (Brave) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead brother, 11 at time
of death, 1580
Matunaagd (He Who Fights) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s father, 35
at time of death, 1579
Matwau (Enemy) – Hurit, Askook, and Huritt’s father, 38 at time of
death, 1579
Nadie (Wise) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s mother, 36 at time of
death, 1582
Nootau (Fire) – 20, Sooleawa’s son and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s cousin
* Osacan- 26, elite member of Wingina’s council
* Piemacum (He Who Churns up the Water) -- 25, hostile Pomeiooc weroance
Powaw (Priest) – 31, Wingina’s kwiocosuk
Rowtag (Fire) – Sooleawa’s husband, 36 at time of death, 1579
Samoset (He Walks Too Much) – 19, womanizer, friend of Askook
Sokanon (Rain) – 18, Sooleawa’s daughter and Alsoomse and
Wanchese’s cousin
Sooleawa (Silver) – 39, Nadie’s sister and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s
aunt
*Tanaquincy – 28, Granganimeo’s chief advisor
* Taraquine – 19, warrior and friend of Wanchese
* Tetepano – 27, elite member of Wingina’s council
*Wanchese (Take Flight off of Water) – 20, protagonist
Wematin (Brother) – dead mamanatowick, brother of Ensenore, 50 at
time of death, 1579
* Wingina – 34, current mamanatowick and Granganimeo’s brother

Excerpt

Scene 2

The mist of midday had disappeared. A solitary canoe cut through the somewhat choppy water. Edges of reflected grayish-white cumulous clouds rippled. West of the clouds, high above the mainland, the sky was bright and clear.

Two of the four men in the canoe labored. At the rear of the canoe, gazing at the west bank of the narrow land mass that stretched behind and to the south of Roanoke Island, arms folded below his rib cage, Wingina, mamanatowick of Dasemunkepeuc, Roanoke, Croatoan, Pomeiooc, Aquascogooc, and Secotan, presided. The bottom edge of the large copper square, suspended from his neck, touched and retouched the back of his right hand. Two one inch copper squares, attached to his earlobes, swung.

Seated in front of Wingina was his brother-in-law and trusted friend and advisor, Eracano, four popanows his junior,. Like Wingina, he wore a pearl bracelet about each wrist. Rather than a copper-plate necklace, he wore a string of polished shells that extended to his sternum. Shells hung from his earlobes. Like his superior, both sides of his head were shaved, the hair in between roached, drawn tightly back, knotted at the base of his skull.
Neither man this day had chosen to implant in the crevice cut in the top of his forehead the stem of a large turkey feather.

Not so the younger men that plied the paddles. Wanchese in front and Askook behind wore the white-tipped feather. A smaller feather protruded from a skull incision above each of their ears. The right side of each man’s head was shaved more closely than the left. Each wore around his left wrist an archer’s wrist band of deerskin.

Parts of Wanchese’s body were painted black. A painted v denoted the space on his forehead above the bridge of his nose. A painted band of black circled each bicep. Two v’s, one inside the other, were painted necklaces. Two more bands circled the widest part of each calf muscle.

Above Wanchese’s deerskin apron two pairs of circles – the larger straddling his navel, the smaller straddling his sternum – marked his stomach and lower chest. The circles represented the four deaths in Wanchese’s family.

Askook’s chest was unpainted.

Wanchese saw above the island’s irregular tree line the familiar rising, angling, drifting smoke. He had been gone nearly two moons, confident that cousin Nootau provided the necessary fish and meat and that cousin Sokanon, her mother Sooleawa, and his sister Alsoomse accomplished all else that was essential for the two families’ subsistence.

Living at Dasemunkepeuc, he had at Wingina’s behest traveled with older emissaries to distant villages outside the mamanatowick’s confederation to deliver and receive personal messages. He had traveled also to Secotan -- his mother’s childhood village – and Aquascogooc and once to neighboring Pomeiooc, whose weroance was now challenging Wingina’s authority.

Other braves his age native of Dasemunkepeuc were entirely capable of doing this work. “Wingina is training you,” Tetepano had told him during Tetepano’s, Cossine’s, and his recent trip to Mequopen. Whether or not it was because Wingina’s uncle, Wematin, had relied on Wanchese’s father to lead his braves in battle, Wingina had chosen to elevate his status.

It was his mother, Nadie, however, that this day occupied Wanchese’s thoughts. Today’s impending burial had kindled his remembrances, roiled his emotions.

Many cohattayoughs ago his father, Matunaagd, a young brave, had traveled to Secotan with his mamanatowick, Wematin, and seven high-born, lusty braves to attend the village’s first-harvest corn festival. Secotan and Aquascogooc had recently accepted Wematin as their chief protector. Secotan lay across the great river from its fierce enemy, the Pomouik. Matunaagd had seen a lithe, graceful beauty dance about a ceremonial post. He had spoken to her during the subsequent feast. Her eyes had welcomed him.

He had married her during the second moon of his four moon stay.

Wematin had sent his nephews Wingina and Granganimeo to Secotan to retrieve him.

Nadie had given birth to Wanchese nineteen cohattayoughs ago, then Alsoomse, then Kitchi, and then Kimi. The youngest, Kimi, had died of a fever eight cohattayoughs ago at the age of four. Matunaagd, and Wematin, and Nadie’s brother-in-law Rowtag had been slain by the Pomouik four cohattayoughs ago at Panauuaioc eight days after Secotan’s concluding, annual, falling of the leaves’ corn festival. Nadie, Wanchese, Alsoomse, and Kitchi and Aunt Sooleawa, Nootau, and Sokanon had moved then to Roanoke. One cohattayough later Kitchi had drowned in the Great Waters. Decimated by grief, worn to emaciation, nearly two popanows ago Nadie had succumbed.

He had not valued her sacrifices. How he had raged after his father’s murder! How he had fantasized savage reprisal! He, nearly fifteen, not yet a man! How his mother had comforted him, needing herself to be consoled. He wondered now if all her efforts to assuage him had helped her. He wanted to believe they had!

It was after Kitchi’s death that she had desperately needed him. He had continued to mope. He had bristled. He had raged.

Alsoomse had loathed him. His aunt had lectured him. His Dasemunkepeuc friend Osacan had crossed the waters to reason with him. Granganimeo himself had addressed him, had then sent him to his brother, Wingina, who had succeeded Wematin as mamanatowick. Wingina had put him to work. Gradually, Wanchese had emerged from his funk, but not soon enough, he believed, to demonstrate to Nadie that he was a deserving son.

A screeching gull soared over the canoe, its shadow crossing Askook’s body.

“Be careful, there. Better that he foul you than me,” Eracano remarked.

Wingina laughed.

Askook craned his neck.

“He is gone.” Wingina raised his right forearm. “Kiwasa has chosen not to do you mischief.” He grinned. “We travel under his protection.”

Their canoe rode the path of light of the waning sun. Directly ahead, points of the wind-driven water flashed.

Kiwasa! Wanchese scoffed. Wematin had taken Kiwasa’s statue with him to Panauuaioc, after his brother Ensenore and the kwiocosuk, Powaw, had bestowed ceremonial offerings to Kiwasa and had sprinkled sacred tobacco on the great river’s waters. Powaw had convinced Wematin that the Pomouik’s invitation to consummate peace was sincere! Wematin had had his doubts. Wematin had left behind at Secotan his grown nephews, Wingina and Granganimeo, and his nephew-in-law, Eracano. But he had taken Matunaagd and Rowtag and Askook’s father Matwau, they, similarly skeptical, having left behind their wives and children.

Hours later, the wives and children of all who had attended the great feast had paddled back to Secotan. Their husbands and fathers were dead. While they had been praying to their idol, Pomouik braves, previously hidden in the woods, had fallen upon them. The wicked god Kiwasa had chosen to favor Wematin’s enemy.

Close to five cohattayoughs had passed. Wingina had not retaliated.

Attacking enemies with large numbers was not the Real People’s way. Victory was achieved by subterfuge, by ambush. Because of the foolishness of Wematin’s priests the Pomouik victory had been large! Because Wingina’s enemy expected retaliation, such a victory could not be replicated. Nevertheless, reprisal was essential.

Wanchese believed that Wingina should send ten braves (Wanchese included) across the river above Panauuaioc during a moonless night to wait in cattails for the sun’s first light. Pomouik hunters seeking deer taking water would appear. But Wingina had attempted nothing. Dasemunkepeuc and Roanoke braves, and Wanchese, were questioning his leadership.

So apparently had been the weroances of Aquascogooc and Secotan. Piemacum, the weroance of Pomeiooc, was seeking to wrest from Wingina much of his confederation. Villagers granted weroances their authority for protection. Wingina had received messages from allies in Secotan that Piemacum had come to their village vowing to safeguard its people. During the past two moons, Pomeiooc braves had encroached on Dasemunkepeuc hunting grounds. On one occasion Tetepano, Abooksigun, and Andacon had been driven away by a volley of arrows.
Wingina needed to assert his will. He needed to eliminate Piemacum: if not by execution, then by banishment. Dasemunkepeuc and Pomeiooc had too much in common to be enemies. Would he finally take bold action?! Or would he continue to heed voices of caution?

“Wanchese.” Askook had tapped Wanchese’s right shoulder. They were nearing the island’s north shoreline.

“Wanchese. Would it be wrong for me to seduce your sister?”

“What?!” Wanchese straightened, scowled. “You?!”

“Why not me? I have that gift!”

“Some of us question that.” Was Askook teasing him? Playing a joke? Better that he assume so, pretend to be good-humored, pretend not to be offended. “Who do you think you are, Samoset?”

Askook whispered in Wanchese’s ear. “Young women with large breasts want me.”

“That I would not know.”

Wanchese allowed the flat part of his paddle to skim the water.

“I want to give Alsoomse the pleasure of talking to me before …” He smiled. “Given the reason we are arriving, I am not sure what I should say first.”

“To arouse her?” The sides of Wanchese’s face were hot. This was more than teasing. Askook was intentionally provoking him!

After a pause, Askook answered. “Yes.”

“You will think of something.”

Wanchese dug his paddle into the water.

Unlike Osacan, or Taraquine, Askook lacked honorable qualities. In the past Askook had seemed more intent on wanting to be his friend than being his friend! At best, he had been a nuisance. Now …?

He had his own qualms about speaking to Alsoomse. How much thought had he given about how she had suffered? How often had he sat beside her the past thirteen moons, he more often across the sound fixated in his sphere of pain. She needed a brother better than he. She needed a man to cherish her. A good man. A good husband.

Askook! Hah!

None of his friends had showed any interest in her. It was not that she was less desirable looking than most of the maturing girls he knew at Roanoke or Dasemunkepeuc. She was what, seventeen? It was because she was opinionated. Too much a questioner. Too much the meddler. Why could she not accept who she was, a female meant to do female work to benefit every person of the village?

They were close to the landing place. An arrow’s flight away three men waited at the shoreline. Wanchese recognized Granganimeo and his chief advisor, Tanaquincy.

Granganimeo and Wingina would be presiding over the village burial. Wanchese guessed that maybe six people had died since the previous community reburial, when his mother, Alsoomse, and he had laid young Kitchi’s remains to rest. Wingina had performed his duty then. He would be performing it now, showing his people here and elsewhere that he cared, that every person in every village was respected, regardless of status.

After conversing with Granganimeo and Tanaquincy for close to two minutes, Wanchese was able to break away. He strode up the sandy bank toward the pathway that led to the village. Shadows of pine branches moved across his bare shoulders. Drifting smoke quickened his approach. Outside the palisade that contained the nine village longhouses, oblivious of the sounds of Askook’s footfalls behind him, he saw the top of his aunt’s house. Their hands and arms working, three women – Alsoomse, his aunt, and his cousin Sokanon -- were bent over several reed mats.

Alsoomse glanced his way. She saw him. She rose, took two tentative steps, rushed to him.

They embraced.

“You came,” she murmured, the right side of her face pressed against his chest.

He stroked her hair. “I am here to stay,” he said. For awhile, he thought.

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Published on November 12, 2020 17:11

November 8, 2020

Alsoomse and Wanchese -- First Half of Chapter One

Today I begin the first installment of the first eight chapters of my second historical novel Alsoomse and Wanchese.

The first chapter begins in the fall of 1583 at Roanoke Island, located just inside North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The Algonquian inhabitants have begun the initial phase of a village ossuary burial, a community burial of individuals who had died sometime after the previous ossuary burial, usually five years before.

Early during my teaching career I took an active interest in the events of England’s first serious attempt to establish a colony in North America. The story has four phases, the final phase being the disappearance of the so-called “Lost Colony,” a settlement of Englishmen, women, and children abandoned temporarily by its governor. Historians base their interpretations of what transpired on what five English participants reported to Walter Raleigh, the administrator of the enterprise. Missing is any firsthand accounting by Algonquians. The historian Michael Leroy Oberg wrote: “Indians are pushed to the margins, at best playing bit parts in a story centered on the English. … Roanoke is as much a Native American story as an English one.” I wanted to write an Algonquian story.

Two years of research prepared me to believe that I knew enough about the Carolina/Virginia coastal plains Algonquian culture to create major characters and devise a plot that reflected that culture, that portrayed accurately historical fact, and that revealed universal truths about human beings of any time period. I wanted my novel to instruct and entertain.

My novel portrays the first phase of the Roanoke story: Algonquian life and conflict in 1583 to the departure in 1584 of the first English ships to arrive at Roanoke.

Below is a list of translated Algonquian words and a list of characters mentioned in the excerpt below.

Algonquian Words:

Cattapeak: spring
Cohattayough: summer
Kwiocosuk: shaman, priest
Mamanatowick: ruler of several villages
Nepinough: earring of the corn season
Popanow: winter
Taquitock: the harvest and the falling of the leaves season
Weroance: chief of a village
Weroansqua: female chief of a village or dominant wife of the
village’s weroance

Characters:

* historically identified person

Alsoomse (Independent) –17, protagonist
Askook (Snake) – 21, Hurit’s brother and enemy of Alsoomse and
Wanchese
Chogan (Blackbird) – 12, Wingina’s son by deceased first wife
* Eracano – 30, Numaes’s husband and Wingina and Granganimeo’s
brother-in-law
* Granganimeo (He Who Is Serious) – 33, Roanoke weroance and Wingina’s brother
Hausisse (Old Woman) – 40, Odina’s mother
Hurit (Beautiful) – 25, Roanoke weroansqua. Granganimeo’s second wife
Keeqsquaw (Virgin) – 17, acquaintance of Alsoomse
Kimi (Secret) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead sister, 4 at time of
death, 1575
Kitchi (Brave) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s dead brother, 11 at time
of death, 1580
Matunaagd (He Who Fights) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s father, 35
at time of death, 1579
Matwau (Enemy) – Hurit, Askook, and Huritt’s father, 38 at time of
death, 1579
Nadie (Wise) – Alsoomse and Wanchese’s mother, 36 at time of
death, 1582
Nuna (Land) – 16, Alsoomse’s friend across the lane
Nootau (Fire) – 20, Sooleawa’s son and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s cousin
Odina (Mountain) – 16, Alsoomse’s friend across the lane
* Osacan- 26, elite member of Wingina’s council
* Piemacum (He Who Churns up the Water) -- 25, hostile Pomeiooc weroance
Powaw (Priest) – 31, Wingina’s kwiocosuk
Pules (Pigeon) – 11, Odina’s sister
Rowtag (Fire) – Sooleawa’s husband, 36 at time of death, 1579
Samoset (He Walks Too Much) – 19, womanizer, friend of Askook
Sokanon (Rain) – 18, Sooleawa’s daughter and Alsoomse and
Wanchese’s cousin
Sooleawa (Silver) – 39, Nadie’s sister and Alsoomse and Wanchese’s
aunt
*Tanaquincy – 28, Granganimeo’s chief advisor
* Taraquine – 19, warrior and friend of Wanchese
* Tetepano – 27, elite member of Wingina’s council
*Wanchese (Take Flight off of Water) – 20, protagonist
Wapun (Dawn) – 12, Nuna’s sister
Wematin (Brother) – dead mamanatowick, brother of Ensenore, 50 at
time of death, 1579
* Wingina – 34, current mamanatowick and Granganimeo’s brother

Here is the first half of Chapter One.

Chapter 1

Using a moistened scrap of deerskin, Alsoomse removed dirt and decayed skin cells from the left humerus of her mother’s skeleton.

“I need to know so much,” she whispered. “What I never asked.”

Turning her head, she placed the deerskin on the rim of the clay pot that contained the hot water. She was, maybe, half finished.

She had not cried.

She looked across the dirt lane that separated her Aunt Sooleawa’s longhouse and those of her friends, Nuna and Odina. Loblolly pine stood like sentinels behind Nuna’s and Odina’s houses, gray mist beyond a dismal backdrop. Nuna and her young sister Wapun were kneeling over their mother’s bones. Odina and her young sister Pules were helping. Their sickly mother, Hausisse, was convalescing in her longhouse.

Alsoomse worked alone.

Wanchese! Where was he?! Was their mother’s burial so unimportant?!

How often he had disappointed her! Pivoting on her right knee, she stared at the pines through which the village path twisted. Might there be a canoe arriving? She imagined her brother disembarking from Dasemunkepeuc, where Wingina -- Wanchese’s substitute father and mentor – lived, where Wanchese had spent much of the past two falling of the leaves attempting to advance himself.

Hoping that he would appear made worse her realization that Wanchese was selfish. She was strong enough to do this work herself. She would do this herself, even though her aunt and her two cousins were close by to help. Sokanon had twice brought hot water from the fire to pour into the pot. Nootau was one of the men digging an extension of the mass grave they had dug three summers earlier. Wanchese shamed her.

Her mother Nadie and Aunt Sooleawa had shared this longhouse with their children after they had moved from Dasemunkepeuc the cohattayough following their husbands’ simultaneous deaths. Three cohattayoughs had elapsed. Separating himself from the family, Wanchese had grown into manhood. Alsoomse was not yet a woman. Yearning to accomplish so much, striving to comprehend the limits of her existence, she coveted her mother’s insight.

Footsteps. Sokanon’s shadow crossed Nadie’s upper skeleton. “Let me help, cousin. You have too much to do.” She indicated Nadie’s pelvis and leg bones.

Alsoomse’s eyes refused. “You have helped me, already. I must do the cleansing.” She looked away. Lines creased her broad forehead.

“All right. You do it.” Sokanon frowned. Alsoomse watched her walk into their longhouse. Far better to be independent than needy. If she had offended Sokanon, so be it. She wanted privacy. To ask her questions. To feel her hurt.

Alsoomse moved the deerskin cautiously over her mother’s right thigh bone. The skin caught on something jagged. She touched it with her right forefinger. Part of the top of the bone was cracked. When? What else had her mother kept from her, Wanchese, her father? She could only guess. “You, so respected for being wise,” she whispered. “I need your wisdom.”

Five popanows ago Alsoomse had spoken unkindly to Chogan, Wingina’s son. The boy, seven cohattayoughs old, had asked to be taught how to weave a reed mat. “You are a boy, Chogan, not a girl! Learn how to make bows and arrows and learn how to hunt!” Several of Chogan’s friends had heard her and had teased him. Two sleeps later Wingina had come to their entrance.

“It is your nature to learn from mistakes,” Nadie had said to her.

“I do not want to learn that way!” Alsoomse had answered then and thought now. “I just want to learn.”

Nadie’s eye sockets stared.

“Tell me what you have told me that I have forgotten.” She placed her palms against her ears, as though to impede distractions. “Help me, Mother. Help me.”

She glanced at the entrance to her longhouse, stared across the lane at Nuna and her sister. Satisfied, she lowered her face a hand’s length away from her mother’s skull. “How do you know who to marry?”
Keeqsquaw, a popanow younger than she, had confided that her father two sleeps ago had beaten her mother. “Please, how will I know who is kind?”

Nadie spoke. “Pay less attention to how a man first treats you. Pay attention especially to what a man does when he believes he is not being watched.”

“They do not speak to me, Mother. They walk past me.” She closed her eyes, kept them shut five seconds. “I want to be loved.”

“Do not choose a man only because he wants to look at you. Do not let your loins choose him. Watch him when he is with unimportant people and you will learn if he is kind.”

Alsoomse blinked twice, wiped away liquid with the tip of her left forefinger, shut her eyes hard.

“A kind man, like your father, sees beyond what a girl looks like. He sees a woman’s soul.”

Alsoomse inhaled, held her breath, exhaled. Her left thumb touched her skin above her left eye, her little finger the skin above her right eye. Remembering what her mother may have said once or imaging what she would have said had she not died had not sufficed.

Whom could she approach to entreat?! Not Aunt Sooleawa, to whom she had not been close, who did little else but sit on a log in front of the longhouse where she weaved mats. She had only the living mother of her past and the imagined mother of the present.

“What does a man like father see in a woman’s soul?” she said aloud. She thought: obedience, generosity, tenderness, devotion. She doubted that she could be that person.

“Mother, I want to question things. Know the why of things. Decide things. Why must weroances, kwiocosuks, and a husband – kind or not -- decide who I must be?”

“We gave you your name for a reason.”

“That is not an answer.”

“Be respectful, child, dutiful. The gods have taught us our roles. We must obey them, please them.” These were the words that Nadie had spoken after Alsoomse had refused to admit to Granganimeo that she had taken sacred tobacco from the temple and sprinkled it around her mother’s and Sooleawa’s longhouse. “We must please also the wise ones who speak to them. Life is perilous, Alsoomse. Kiwasa makes it so. Weigh what you think before you act. Accept.”

Had the wicked god Kiwasa decided that her father and uncle and Wematin and more than a dozen Dasemunkepeuc and Secotan braves had to die because they had not demonstrated lavishly enough their reverence? Or, believing that Kiwasa would protect them, had Wematin’s kwiocosuk given Wematin mistaken advice? A summer after her father’s murder, Alsoomse’s little brother Kitchi had drowned in the high waves of the Great Waters. Her sister Kimi had died eight nepinoughs ago from a fever. It had been to gain Kiwasa’s favor that she had sprinkled the sacred tobacco that she had taken from the temple around the perimeter of her mother’s and aunt’s longhouse!

How much of life’s miseries was caused by the gods? How much of it was man’s doing? She wanted to know! She had nobody to ask.

Installments will be posted on Sundays and Thursdays.

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Published on November 08, 2020 18:29

October 28, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections -- 2020 Election -- Dire Anti-Trump Commentaries

Steve Schmidt, campaign manager for John McCain in 2008 and prominent co-founder of the Lincoln Project, had this to say about Donald Trump this past June.

Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don't say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.

When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.

It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk (Cillizza 1)

Another veteran Republican operative, David Frum, attacks the President.

You cannot expect Trump to gain any wisdom, empathy, or compassion for others. Throughout the pandemic, Trump has disdained the hardships suffered by sick and dying Americans, by their families and neighbors, by those who have lost jobs and homes. When NBC’s Peter Alexander asked Trump on March 20 what the president would say to Americans feeling fear because of the disease, he upbraided Alexander: “I’d say you are a terrible reporter.” ...

What you can expect is a lot of victimhood and self-pity. Trump and those around him have always demanded for themselves the decencies that they refuse others. They will get them, too. Trump’s opponents will express concern and good wishes [about Trump having been infected by the Covid-19 virus] —and if they do not, Trump’s allies will complain that those opponents are allowing politics to overwhelm human feeling. …

Trump has all his life posed a moral puzzle: What is due in the way of kindness and sympathy to people who have no kindness and sympathy for anyone else? Should we repay horrifying cruelty in equal measure? Then we reduce ourselves to their level. But if we return indecency with the decency due any other person in need, don’t we encourage appalling behavior? Don’t we prove to them that they belong to some unique bracket of humanity, entitled to kick others when they are writhing on the floor, and then to claim mercy when their own crimes and cruelties cast them upon the floor themselves?

Americans are dead who might have been alive if Trump had met the challenge of COVID-19 with care and responsibility—or if somebody else, literally almost anybody else, had been president instead. Millions are out of work, in danger of losing their homes, living in fear. Tens of millions of young people have suffered disruption to their education, which will follow them through life. The pandemic was not Trump’s fault, but at every turn, he made things worse than they had to be—because at every turn, he cared only for himself, never for the country. And now he will care only for himself again.

Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near any public office. Wish him well [regarding his recovery from Covid-19], but recognize that his deformed spirit will never be well—and that nothing can be well for the country under his leadership (Frum 1-2).

Bill Moyers, White House Press Secretary under the Johnson administration from 1965 to 1967 and longtime broadcast journalist, spelled out Trump’s destructive actions and peril to the nation.

He understands that most Americans are concerned with little more than the economy, health care and jobs. They respond positively to politicians who promise action on these priorities, whether or not they know if those promises will ever be fulfilled. [Norman] Ravitch [emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Riverside] pointed out that like Hitler and like Mussolini, Trump knows how to appeal to a variety of concerns with promises that can be both attractive and contradictory. Because no population is educated enough, sensitive enough, or ethical enough to see through the deception, “the danger is very great indeed. It may in fact be one of the chief weaknesses of democracy that democracy can lead to tyranny just as well or perhaps even more than other political systems.”

… This president is no friend of democracy.

He has declared himself above the law, preached insurrection by encouraging armed supporters to “liberate” states from the governance of duly elected officials, told police not to be “too nice” while doing their job, and gloated over the ability of the Secret Service to turn “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” loose on demonstrators — to “come down on them hard” if they get too “frisky.”

He has politicized the Department of Justice while remaking the judiciary in his image.
He has stifled investigations into his administration’s corruption, fired officials charged with holding federal agencies accountable to the public, and rewarded his donors and cronies with government contracts, subsidies, deregulations, and tax breaks.

He has maligned and mocked the disadvantaged, the disabled, and people of color.

He has sought to politicize the military, including in his entourage the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (dressed in combat fatigues), as his orderlies unleashed chemical fumes on peaceful protesters – all so that the president could use them as stage props in a photo op, holding up a Bible in front of a historic church, just to make a dandy ad for his re-election campaign.

He has purged his own party of independent thinkers and turned it into a spineless, mindless cult while demonizing the opposition.

He has purloined religion for state and political ends.

He has desecrated the most revered symbols of Christian faith by converting them to partisan brands.

He has recruited religious zealots for jobs in his administration, rewarding with government favors the electoral loyalty of their followers.

He has relentlessly attacked mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and “enemies of the people” while collaborating with a sycophantic right- wing media – including the Murdoch family’s Fox News — to flood the country with lies and propaganda.

He has maneuvered the morally hollow founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, into compromising the integrity of the most powerful media giant in the country by infusing it with partisan bias.

And because truth is the foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his lips.

Yes, … the man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance.

Can it happen here?

It is happening here.

Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have only ourselves (Moyers 1-4).

Washington Post journalist Max Boot has warned us about Trump’s apparent plan to steal the election. Boot wrote in September the following.

It is not simply the casting of ballots that makes a democracy. Many dictatorships have faux elections that change nothing. The real test of a nation’s political system is whether politicians respect the will of the voters — and in particular whether the most powerful leader, the one in control of the armed forces, willingly gives up power after losing an election. This is a test that countries such as Belarus and Zimbabwe have failed, and that the United States has passed, in good times and bad, for more than two centuries. Indeed, few presidents are even asked about their willingness to give up power because the answer is so obvious.

That is no longer the case. …

…

… Trump’s talk has a purpose. He is claiming that mail-in ballots will be fraudulent not because any evidence of fraud exists. He is doing so because Democrats in recent years have had a big advantage in ballots that are counted after Election Day. In 2018, Republican Martha McSally was ahead in the Arizona Senate race on election night but lost after all the ballots were counted.

This year the “blue shift” is certain to be even bigger, with more people voting by mail than ever before — and more Democrats than Republicans expressing a desire to do so. By calling the mail-in ballots a “hoax,” Trump is laying the foundation for throwing them out and demanding that he be declared the winner based on ballots counted on election night.

…

… The Constitution provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” [The Atlantic’s Barton] Gellman reports that the Trump campaign is already “discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

Trump’s eagerness to confirm a Supreme Court justice before the election is based, in no small part, on the assumption that the outcome of the vote will be adjudicated. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” Trump said on Wednesday. Trump is seeking to hold on to power any way he can.

…

The Republican Party is unlikely to restrain Trump’s authoritarian instincts. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pledges that “the winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th,” the GOP will do everything possible to ensure that Trump is certified as the winner — even if he should rightfully lose not only in the popular vote but in the electoral college, too.

The only way to avoid the worst election crisis since 1876 is for Joe Biden to win by a landslide on Election Day. Anyone who cares about the fate of American democracy should pray that happens (Boot 1-4).

Heed as well Thomas Friedman.

I can’t say this any more clearly: Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since 1861, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis and more danger than during Watergate.

I began my career as a foreign correspondent covering Lebanon’s second civil war, and it left a huge impact on me. I saw what happens in a country when everything becomes politics, when a critical mass of politicians put party before country, when responsible people, or seemingly responsible people, think that they can bend or break the rules — and go all the way — and that the system won’t break.

But when extremists go all the way, and moderates just go away, the system can break. And it will break. I saw it happen.

…

I worry because Facebook and Twitter have become giant engines for destroying the two pillars of our democracy — truth and trust. Yes, these social networks have given voice to the voiceless. That is a good thing and it can really enhance transparency. But they have also become huge, unedited cesspools of conspiracy theories that are circulated and believed by a shocking — and growing — number of people.

These social networks are destroying our nation’s cognitive immunity — its ability to sort truth from falsehood.

Without shared facts on which to make decisions, there can be no solutions to our biggest challenges. And without a modicum of trust that both sides want to preserve and enhance the common good, it is impossible to accomplish anything big.

“Politics needs a reference point outside of politics,” argues Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. "It needs values, it needs facts and it needs leaders who respect that there is a sacred domain of decisions that will never be used to promote political gain, only the common good.''

Public trust is eroded, added Halbertal, when people feel that this notion of the common good doesn’t exist because everything has become politics. That describes the United States today. The institutions we have relied upon to be outside the game of politics so as to adjudicate what is right and true — scientists, certain news media, the courts — have become so ensnared by politics that fewer and fewer of them are universally trusted to define and pursue the common good. Even mask-wearing has become partisan.

…

The Republicans — who in the past voted for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, sane conservatives who could be counted upon to uphold the common good — have … fallen in line lock step behind a man who is the most dishonest, dangerous, mean-spirited, divisive and corrupt person to ever occupy the Oval Office. And they know it. Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.

To me, the only hope for America is to elect Biden and split the GOP between the Trumpists and whatever is left of the moderate Republicans, and then hope that a big center-left and small center-right can agree on enough things to propel the country forward, heal the divide and act together for the common good.

But for that to happen, Biden has to win (Friedman 1-4).

Works cited:
Boot, Max, “Trump Is the Worst Threat to Our Democracy since the 1930s.” Washington Post, September 24, 2020. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...

Cillizza, Chris, “This Is the Most Succinct -- and Brutal -- Republican Rejection of Donald Trump that You Will Ever Read.” CNN Politics, June 23, 2020. Web. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politi...

Friedman, Thomas, “Trump Sent a Warning. Let’s Take It Seriously.” The New York Times, September 30, 2020. Web. https://www.baltimoresun.com/featured...

Frum, David, “What Did You Expect? Trump Should Never Have Been Allowed Anywhere near Any Public Office.” The Atlantic, October 2, 2020. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...

Moyers, Bill, “We Hold This Truth to Be Self-Evident: It’s Happening before Our Very Eyes.” Moyers on Democracy, June 5, 2020. Web. https://billmoyers.com/story/we-hold-...

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Published on October 28, 2020 12:38

October 23, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections == 2016 Election -- Why Trump Won: Other Opinions

Early on Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I. director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,” “Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still with Hillary Clinton.
…

In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind.

People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because they saw that this slick performer, once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris Johnson and so many others. The Democratic electorate might have taken comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to 4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney, announced their distaste for Trump only seemed to deepen his emotional support.

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. … Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

For eight years, the country has lived with Barack Obama as its President. Too often, we tried to diminish the racism and resentment that bubbled under the cyber-surface. But the information loop had been shattered. On Facebook, articles in the traditional, fact-based press look the same as articles from the conspiratorial alt-right media. Spokesmen for the unspeakable now have access to huge audiences. This was the cauldron, with so much misogynistic language, that helped to demean and destroy Clinton. The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as the oxygen of his campaign. Steve Bannon, a pivotal figure at Breitbart, was his propagandist and campaign manager (Remnick 3-5).

The rifts in the Democratic coalition that had been mostly subsumed during the past eight years broke to the surface, as the capital-loving wing of the party with its branches on Wall Street and in Menlo Park clashed with those to whom economic recovery came less swiftly: Students and young graduates with their accompanying debt loads, and middle-class workers confronting wage stagnation.

Though Clinton carefully cultivated the influential progressive senator Elizabeth Warren to forestall her potential challenge from the left, Sanders was dead set on mounting what he thought of initially as a protest candidacy. He channeled American frustration with his endless criticisms of “the millionaire and billionaire class.” He called for major expansions of the US government to help students with their debt and workers get a fair shake. His unpolished presentation couldn’t have been more of a contrast with Clinton’s poise.

Sanders made hay of Clinton’s retreat on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a landmark free trade agreement she had backed in theory while working for Obama but rejected after its full details were made public. Even more so, he went after her as an ally of Wall Street whose judgment was compromised by her time among the US elite, giving paid speeches to bankers that she wouldn’t share with the public. Clinton, he said, was the establishment, and what was needed was a political revolution.
…

There was no shortage of predictions that Trump would be easy pickings for Clinton, but that belied both the strength of Republican loyalty to their party (antipathy to Clinton) and his particular strength: He emboldened a hard core of enthusiastic conservatives to express racist and sexist sentiments the Republican establishment had previously limited to dog-whistles, channeling the political voice of Pat Buchanan and building on the Tea Party and the racist backlash spurred by Obama’s historic presidency. His willingness to abandon the party’s free markets orthodoxy in favor of a welfare-for-whites approach allowed him to reach across party lines more effectively than past Republicans.

Before the two party conventions in late July, Clinton and Sanders were still repairing their relationship, and the party along with it. A haze of official sanction still trailed in her wake. When the FBI recommended no charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information on her email server, FBI director James Comey still held an unprecedented press conference to call her behavior ”extremely careless.” Journalists, meanwhile, pored over the contents of the server, which showed the sometimes unsavory side of a philanthropic operation that relied on access or the illusion of access to raise money for good causes around the globe. While her critics called it corruption, there was never any evidence of a quid pro quo with any donor or associate.
…

… the convention seemed to miss one key constituency: White voters, especially in rural areas, who felt left behind those same elites and convinced that those minority groups were getting ahead of them in line for the American dream. Clinton’s convention appeared to have something for everyone, but very little left for working-class white voters (Fernholz 1-6).

Works cited:

Fernholz, Tim, “How Hillary Clinton Blew It.” Quartz, November 8, 2016. Web. https://qz.com/831141/2016-presidenti...

Remnick, David, “An American Tragedy.” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...

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Published on October 23, 2020 12:23

October 20, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Why Trump Won: Substantial Voter Disenfranchisement

Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.

Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.

Crosscheck in action:

Trump victory margin in Michigan:                       13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list:                           449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona:                         85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list:                            270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina:               177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list:                   589,393

On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.

Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor.

Those accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.

No, not everyone on the list loses their vote. But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates.

For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities “do not forward.” If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters. GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations.

The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit. However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years. Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported. And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time.”

There is still much investigation to do. For example, there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in. Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says, “Our elections are the envy of the world.” Only in Kazakhstan, Joe.

…

… the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.

What about those exit polls?

Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. …

But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.

So how could these multi-million-dollar Phd-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?

Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”

In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.

In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.

Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.

And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”

Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win. Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump. Really? ON WHAT PLANET? For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states. In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.”

This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck (Palast “Election” 1-2).

Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on -- a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising."

Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.

Bubbles?

Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president.

Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein [third party candidate], told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)

Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.

How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?

No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.

I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.

Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.

…

How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?

Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.

"We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state."

Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.

There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye.

That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.

Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish.

Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name -- popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" -- but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.

However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.

But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match -- exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken -- in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent).

…

This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result.

Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck."

Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.

An eye-popping 499,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost approximately 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.)

…

Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well.

"It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy" (Palast “Republican” 1-4).

Works cited:

Palast, Greg, “The Election Was Stolen – Here’s How…” gragpalast.com, November 11, 2016. Web. https://www.gregpalast.com/election-s...

Palast, Greg, “The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin.” Truthout, December 17, 2016. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/the-rep...

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Published on October 20, 2020 16:00

October 18, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Why Trump Won: Anti-Hillary Sentiment

You have the rich braggart with an inferiority complex so large it dwarfs Saturn using racism, sexism, nationalism and a generalized fear of The Other to elbow his way toward the nomination. You have the rich political aristocrat who votes for war, total surveillance and thinks fracking is the greatest thing since glazed donuts trying to pass herself off as some sort of transformative populist while cashing Wall Street checks by the fistful.

It is madness, but it is madness by design. The Republican Party and its media allies have spent several decades fomenting a sense of terror within their voting ranks -- fear of the immigrant, fear of the Black man, fear of a woman's power to choose, fear of the terrorist hiding under the bed. They have diligently trashed the basic functions of government so they can go on the Sunday talk shows and blather about how government doesn't work. The Democrats, for their part, have been in full moral retreat over those same decades, fleeing the legacy of FDR and their own alleged principles to such a vast degree that a candidate who voted like a conservative every time the chips were down is about to grab the brass ring.

This is the best we can do, really? This is what we have become. The only reason people will vote for Trump in the general election is because they have been trained to be afraid. The only reason people will vote for Clinton in the general election is to thwart Comb-Over Mussolini and his dreams of glory; once again, people will be voting against instead of voting for, because "she can win," allegedly (Pitt 1-2).

A party beholden to corporate power cannot simultaneously be the party of ordinary working people, and thus we can see the Democrats' dilemma. Though the party distinguishes itself from the GOP in some ways - Democrats are more liberal on social issues, for example, and more inclined to defend programs like Medicare and Social Security - there can be no question that corporate money has undue influence on both major parties, not just the GOP. When Hillary Clinton was seen as the inevitable 2016 Democratic nominee, there was no reason to believe this status quo would be challenged. But the rise of Bernie Sanders changes everything.

The genius of the corporate coup that has overtaken US democracy is not that it dominates the GOP - the party that has long favored corporate power anyway - but that it has maneuvered even the opposition party into submission as well. …

Clinton, who once served on the board of Walmart, the gold standard of predatory corporatism, is so tight with corporate power that she's now making efforts to downplay her relationships. CNBC reports that she is postponing fundraisers with Wall Street executives, no doubt concerned that voters are awakening to the toxic influence of corporations on politics and government. Already in the awkward position of explaining six-figure checks from Wall Street firms for speaking engagements and large charitable donations from major banks, Clinton realizes that she must try to distance herself from her corporate benefactors.

And the fat cats fully understand. "Don't expect folks on Wall Street to be offended that Clinton is distancing herself from them," CNBC reports. "In fact, they see it as smart politics and they understand that Wall Street banks are deeply unpopular."

Indeed, everyone knows the game, and few are worried that Clinton - whose son-in-law is a former Goldman Sachs executive who now runs a hedge fund - is any kind of threat to the power structure. This explains why a leading banking executive called Clinton's tough talk about Wall Street "theatrics" made necessary in response to the Sanders campaign, adding that he predicts she'll be known as “Mrs. Wall Street” if elected.

These realities show that the "rigged system" concerns of ordinary voters are not overblown. In a stroke of strategic brilliance, corporate power has created a playing field where even its perceived opponents are advancing its agenda. And the fiction is propagated with impressive expertise, as moderate, corporate-friendly Democrats are portrayed in the mainstream media as "flaming liberals." Even though Barack Obama, for example, filled his administration with Wall Street veterans and stalwarts after his election in 2008 - including Tim Geithner, Michael Froman, Larry Summers and a host of others - he is frequently described as a liberal not just by those on the right, but even in mainstream media.

… If she wins, conservative commentators will react with alarm and relentlessly lash out at her as a "dangerous liberal," but corporate overlords will sleep well at night knowing everything is fine.

This is what has happened during the centrist Obama administration, which bailed out Wall Street without prosecuting even one executive responsible for bringing about the 2008 economic collapse. It also happened in the centrist administration of Bill Clinton, who was attacked by conservatives as an "extreme liberal" while doing little to earn the designation. The Clinton administration, with vocal support from the first lady, deregulated telecommunications and the financial sector, pushed hard for passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement - a tremendous gift to corporate interests and a major blow to the working class - and passed legislation on crime and welfare that was anything but liberal.

Such is the role that corporate America wants Hillary Clinton to play today. Defined as a liberal, she is in fact a consummate establishment Democrat: a hawkish corporate apologist who happens to be pro-choice. Yes, she is to the left of the GOP candidates - she doesn't deny climate change, wants to preserve Obamacare and won't entertain outlandish ideas like privatizing Social Security - but she's still well within the bounds of acceptability to the US corporate oligarchy that does not want fundamental, systemic change. Rest assured, under her watch the system will stay rigged (Niose 1-3).

What is troubling about Clinton's record is that she has left behind a trail strewn with failures and even catastrophes. Indeed, her highest profile undertakings almost universally ended in disaster -- and a person's record should matter when voters are deciding whether to entrust him or her with the most powerful office on earth.

In other words, it's not just a question of her holding one prestigious job or another; it's also how well she did in those jobs. …
…

... is Hillary Clinton really a can-do leader? Since she burst onto the national scene with her husband's presidential election in 1992, she has certainly traveled a lot, given many speeches and met many national and foreign leaders -- which surely has some value -- but it's hard to identify much in the way of her meaningful accomplishments.

Clinton's most notable undertaking as First Lady was her disastrous health insurance plan that was concocted with her characteristic secrecy and then was unveiled to decidedly mixed reviews. Much of the scheme was mind-numbing in its complexity and -- because of the secrecy -- it lacked sufficient input from Congress where it found few enthusiastic supporters.

Not only did the plan collapse under its own weight, but it helped take many Democratic members of Congress with it, as the Republicans reversed a long era of Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Because of Hillary Clinton's health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.

In Clinton's next career as a senator from New York, her most notable action was to enthusiastically support President George W. Bush's Iraq War. Clinton did not just vote to authorize the war in 2002, she remained a war supporter until 2006 when it became politically untenable to do so, that is, if she had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination against anti-war Sen. Barack Obama.

Both in her support for the war in the early years and her politically expedient switch -- along with a grudging apology for her "mistake" -- Clinton showed very little courage.

When she was supporting the war, the post-9/11 wind was at Bush's back. So Clinton joined him in riding the jingoistic wave. By 2006, the American people had turned against the war and the Republican Party was punished at the polls for it, losing control of Congress. So it was no profile-in-courage for Clinton to distance herself from Bush then.
…

… the Iraq War "surge" ... dispatched 30,000 more US troops to Iraq in 2007. The "surge" saw casualty figures spike. Nearly 1,000 additional American died along with an untold number of Iraqis. And despite another conventional wisdom about the "successful surge" it failed to achieve its central goal of getting the Iraqis to achieve compromises on their sectarian divisions.

Yet, the mainstream press didn't get any closer to the mark in 2008 when it began cheering the Iraq "surge" as a great success, getting spun by the neocons who noted a gradual drop in the casualty levels. The media honchos, many of whom supported the invasion in 2003, ignored that Bush had laid out specific policy goals for the "surge," none of which were achieved.
…

… the goals were never achieved, either during the "surge" or since then. To this day, Iraq remains a society bitterly divided along sectarian lines with the out-of-power Sunnis again sidling up to Al Qaeda-connected extremists and even the Islamic State.

But Clinton didn't have the courage or common sense to recognize that the Iraq War "surge" had failed. After Obama appointed her as Secretary of State -- as part of a naïve gesture of outreach to a "team of rivals" -- Clinton fell back in line behind Official Washington's new favorite conventional wisdom, the "successful surge."

In the end, all the Iraq War "surge" did was buy President Bush and his neocon advisers time to get out of office before the failure of the Iraq War became obvious to the American public. Its other primary consequence was to encourage Defense Secretary Gates, who was kept on by President Obama as a gesture of bipartisanship, to conjure up another "surge" for Afghanistan.
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Clinton's enthusiasm for "surges" also influenced her to side with Gates and General David Petraeus, a neocon favorite, to pressure Obama into a "surge" for Afghanistan, sending in an additional 30,000 troops on a bloody, ill-fated "counterinsurgency" mission. Again, the cost in American lives was about 1,000 soldiers but their sacrifice did little to shift the war's outcome.

Virtually all the major columnists and big-name pundits praised Clinton's hawkish tendencies as Secretary of State, from her escalating tensions with Iran to tipping the balance of the Obama administration's debate in favor of a "regime change" mission in Libya to urging direct US military intervention in Syria in pursuit of another "regime change" there.

On the campaign trail, Clinton seeks to spin all these militaristic recommendations as somehow beneficial to the United States. But the reality is quite different.

Regarding Iran, in 2010, Secretary Clinton personally killed a promising initiative sponsored by Brazil and Turkey (at President Obama's request) to get Iran to swap much of its low-enriched uranium for radiological medical tests. Instead, Clinton followed the path laid out by Israel and the neocons, ratchet up pressure on Iran and keep open the "bomb-bomb-bomb Iran" option.

It is noteworthy that the diplomatic agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear program and to give up much of its low-enriched uranium required Clinton's departure from the State Department in 2013. I'm told that Obama understood that he needed to get her out of the way for the diplomacy to work.

But Clinton's signature project as Secretary of State was another war of choice, this time the "regime change" in Libya resulting in the grisly murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the descent of Libya into a failed state beset with terrorism, including the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, and more recently the emergence of the Islamic State.
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Over the next five years, Libya -- a once prosperous North African country --descended into anarchy with dozens of armed militias and now three competing governments jockeying for power. Meanwhile, the Islamic State expanded its territory around the city of Sirte and engaged in its signature practice of beheading "infidels," including a group of Coptic Christians slaughtered on a beach.

Yet, on the campaign trail, Clinton continues to defend her instigation of the Libyan war, disputing any comparisons between it and the Iraq War by rejecting any “conflating” of the two. Yet, the two disasters -- while obviously having some differences -- do deserve to be conflated because they have many similarities. Both were wars of choice justified by false and misleading claims and having terrible outcomes.
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So, is Hillary Clinton "qualified" to be President of the United States? While her glittering résumé may say one thing, her record -- a litany of misjudgments, miscalculations and catastrophes -- may say something else (Parry 1-4).

… It would be wrong to deny that she made certain mistakes which crippled her bid, particularly in the period between when she left the State Department and when she announced her candidacy, for example in taking large sums of money from financial institutions for paid speeches—which was legal, but she seemed oblivious to how it looked. These seem like misdemeanors compared with what Trump has been up to, but they did matter to voters, and Clinton ought to have recognized that. Instead, she lived her life as if she were going to be running against Jeb Bush, a candidate as burdened by charges of dynasticism and political profiteering as she was. When she protested that everything she did was done according to “the rules,” what voters appear to have heard was an admission that the entire system was built in a way they didn’t like (Sorkin 2).

Liberals like me (Harold Titus) recognized readily Hillary’s flaws and resented being forced to choose between her and Trump. Some of us refused to make that choice, electing instead not to vote or to vote for a third party candidate. I did vote for her because supporting Trump was so abhorrent. I believe that the letter I wrote (see below) to my hometown newspaper in April 2016 was reflective of what most liberals felt.

One of Hillary’s major weaknesses is the perception shared by many that she is shifty, that like her husband she places expediency above integrity. Bill, a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1990s, a “new Democratic,” was a friend of large corporations. He vigorously promoted NAFTA. He signed into law the GOP legislative repeal of Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. Because a majority of Americans now recognize the great injury done to them by large corporations and because Bernie Sanders is her primary-season challenger, Hillary has become suddenly a critic of the TPP trade agreement, the Keystone XL pipeline project, big banks, the fossil fuel industry, and Big Pharma. It was expedient for her both to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and to declare in 2007 that that decision had been a mistake. It is expedient for her now to campaign as a progressive Democrat and to wrap herself around President Obama to curtail Bernie’s criticism of certain policies that she asserts she and the president share.

Needing also to separate herself from Bernie, she portrays herself as a pragmatic doer. She agrees with Bernie’s diagnoses (because she has to), but “his numbers don’t add up.” He makes promises; she delivers! … Her preference of a $12 an hour minimum wage and her declaration that natural gas -- its quantity the result of fracking -- is the bridge to clean energy are examples of Democratic Party incrementalism, a cutting around the edges of a serious problem, for corporations a protective backfire to arrest a raging forest fire. By donating campaign funds and paying speaking fees to Democratic Party enablers, corporations are able to hedge their bets.

Bernie declared that we should be thinking big, not small. His reference to European countries that provide their citizens the health care, work benefits, and education that we do not is a telling indictment of the virulent economic system that controls the levers of American political power. To the argument that Congress would never enact Bernie’s policies, I answer, “They didn’t Obama’s. Why would they Hillary’s?” If we ever break the exploitative stranglehold locked upon us, it will be due to a movement started by a straight-arrow champion of regular people, not by an individual who will do whatever it takes – pander, employ three-quarter falsehood attacks, change policy positions – to win a presidential election (Titus 1).

Works cited:

Niose, David, “Hillary Clinton, Corporate America and the Democrats' Dilemma.” Truthout, February 21, 2016. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/with-hi...

Parry, Robert, “Is Hillary Clinton "Qualified?" Consortium News, April 11, 2016. Web. https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/08...

Pitt, William Rivers, “Tuesday Night Massacre: The Looming Trump v. Clinton Debacle.” Truthout, April 27, 2016. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/tuesday...

Sorkin, Amy Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Stunning Win.” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-da...

Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor of the Siuslaw News, April 23, 2016. Print.

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Published on October 18, 2020 11:27

October 15, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Why Trump Won: Russian Interference

In January 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report concluding that the Russians interfered with the election to "undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electibility and potential presidency.”

After Trump fired Comey for “this Russia thing,” former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign. After a 2-year investigation, Mueller submitted his findings to the Justice Department in March 2019. His team found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but concluded Russian interference occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion." Thirty-four individuals and three companies were indicted in the investigation, several of whom were Trump associates or campaign officials (editors 4).

When Russia set out to interfere with the 2016 election, it went all out.

Over the course of the election, a wide-ranging group of Russians probed state voter databases for insecurities; hacked the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee; tried to hack the campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio and the Republican National Committee; released politically damaging information on the internet; spread propaganda on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram; staged rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania; set up meetings with members of the Trump campaign and its associates; and floated a business proposition for a skyscraper in Moscow to the Trump Organization.

The goal, as determined by the U.S. intelligence community and backed up by evidence gathered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller: To damage the Clinton campaign, boost Trump’s chances and sow distrust in American democracy overall.

The details of these efforts have come out in drips and drabs since the 2016 election ended, with information revealed by a memo from intelligence agencies, court documents filed by Mueller, testimony from Trump associates in court and before Congress and investigative news reports.

Here’s what we know about how Russia worked to manipulate the 2016 election.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia did not alter actual votes during the 2016 election. But Russians did target voter registration systems or state websites in at least 21 states before Election Day, fully accessed some states’ systems and stole hundreds of thousands of voters’ personal information.

The FBI alerted states to the threat about two months before the 2016 election when hackers accessed voter registration databases in Illinois and Arizona. Then in January 2017, the government issued its first report on election interference and blamed Russia for the hacks. However, DHS did not tell top state officials that their systems were scanned by hackers until nearly a year after the election.

In July of 2018, Mueller indicted 12 Russian nationals for their part in allegedly hacking into U.S. election systems. The prosecutors offered up more details, including saying that hackers stole information on 500,000 voters from an unnamed state’s website, including names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers. Russians then visited the websites of counties in Georgia, Iowa and Florida, according to the indictment. The hackers also penetrated a voter registration software vendor, according to the indictment, and posed as the company sending malicious emails to several Florida election administrators.

In addition to all this, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report said that in a small number of states, Russians “were able to gain access to restricted elements of election infrastructure” and “were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data.”

One of the most striking elements of Russia’s plan to influence the U.S. election did not involve votes at all, but rather agents with Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, hacking into the emails of staff working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. These efforts, as laid out by Mueller in the key July 2018 indictment, began in earnest in March of 2016.

During that month, the agents sent emails that looked like Google security notifications to many Clinton campaign staffers and volunteers. But rather than helping them lock down their accounts, these emails instructed recipients to click a link to change their password, and when the user did so, this gave the Russian agents access to their accounts. Using this method, the GRU agents stole tens of thousands of emails from Clinton campaign staffers, including campaign chairman John Podesta.

The GRU agents then created a fake online group called Guccifer 2.0 and used that persona to share these emails with WikiLeaks. That group in turn released the stolen emails in the run up to the November election, creating frequent negative news cycles for Clinton and distracting from the message she hoped to send voters in the final days of the campaign.

The hacking did not stop with Clinton’s team. GRU officers also used malicious emails to gain access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee computer network, according to the special counsel indictment. Once inside, the hackers installed malware that allowed them to access more computers and steal thousands of emails and documents related to the election. In April of 2016, for example, the indictment said the hackers searched a DCCC computer for terms including “hillary,” “cruz” and “trump,” and copied a folder titled “Benghazi Investigations.”

This access to the DCCC then allowed the hackers to penetrate the Democratic National Committee network. In early June of 2016, the Russian officers launched DCLeaks.com and posted thousands of stolen documents and emails there. Days later, the DNC announced it had been hacked, prompting the Russians to create the Guccifer 2.0 persona to shift attention away from them and cover who had done the hacking.
The Russian agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, soon shared stolen documents with WikiLeaks, which promised it would ensure the material “will have a much higher impact than what you are doing,” according to Mueller’s indictment. On July 22, just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released more than 20,000 stolen emails.

This dump piqued the interest of the Trump campaign. According to an indictment against longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, a “senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had about Clinton’s campaign. Stone had been bragging about connections to WikiLeaks, and as the election approached, prosecutors say he continued to update the Trump campaign about the group’s plans. In early October, Steve Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, reached out to Stone to express concern after WikiLeaks delayed releasing emails. But Stone reassured him and when WikiLeaks released Podesta’s emails on Oct. 7, 2016, just after the Washington Post published audio from “Access Hollywood” of Trump bragging about assaulting women, Bannon sent Stone a message: “well done.”
…

… just after the 2016 election, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that his presidential campaign’s emails had been hacked … Sen. Marco Rubio … was also targeted by Russians after he dropped out of the [presidential nomination] race in 2016. … Russian hackers also probed some other Republicans, but their efforts were more limited and less successful than those aimed at Democrats.
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Russia’s plans to affect the U.S. election began in April of 2014 with the development of a “troll farm” that could spread false and disparaging messages on social media … Mueller’s indictment in February of 2018 charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies — including the Internet Research Agency — with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and identity theft.

The Internet Research Agency and its employees, the indictment said, sought to conduct “information warfare against the United States of America” in order to spread distrust and support Trump’s election. In an operation that cost millions of dollars, the Russians studied U.S. political groups, traveled to gather intelligence in several states and developed a network of fake accounts that they used to infect the American electorate. Throughout 2016, they posted divisive content about topics such as Black Lives Matter, immigration and gun control; they bought political ads criticizing Clinton; and they pumped out hashtags like #Hillary4Prison and #TrumpTrain to their masses of followers.

All of this was incredibly successful, according to University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Experts disagree about how to quantify the impact of Russia’s social media campaign, but Jamieson, who did a forensic analysis of online activity in 2016 for her book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know argues that it’s very likely Russia did sway the outcome of the 2016 election.
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Beyond getting voters in the U.S. to follow Facebook or Twitter accounts and read fake news websites, the Russians translated their social media influence into real-life events. Posing as American grassroots activists, the trolls set up and promoted rallies in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as at Trump properties in New York, according to the indictment. In one of their most notable moves, the Russian trolls hired a real American to dress as Clinton in a prison uniform at a rally in West Palm Beach.
The Russian influence efforts also included meeting with members of the Trump campaign.

One of the earliest people targeted was George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the campaign. Papadopoulos met a professor named Joseph Mifsud who said he had Kremlin connections and a woman named Olga who claimed to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s niece. When the pair told him they wanted to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, Papadopoulos eagerly passed on this information to Trump and other campaign officials, including future Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Mifsud later told Papadopoulos about Clinton’s hacked emails, and though Papadopoulos continued to push for a meeting with Russian officials, the summit never happened during the campaign.

Papadopoulos was the first Trump associate to plead guilty in the Mueller investigation and has since served time in prison for lying to FBI agents about his Russian contacts.

In April of 2016, Trump himself briefly met with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak before giving a foreign policy speech.

Sessions and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner also met with Kislyak that day.

While the White House later tried to downplay these meetings, the Washington Post reported that Sessions had “substantive” discussions about Russia-related policy.

As all of this was going on, Russians were also setting up a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. A publicist who emailed Trump Jr. promised a Russian lawyer would have documents that could “incriminate” Clinton, and this led to the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort joined Trump Jr. that day.

Manafort himself, who had plenty of Russia connections from his days consulting politicians in Ukraine, has also come under scrutiny for his discussions with old friend Konstantin Kilimnik, who prosecutors believe has links to Russian intelligence. Court filings revealed that Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign and that the two talked about a potential peace plan for Ukraine.

While the special counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government, Mueller’s indictments have shown that people in Trump’s orbit were often happy to accept help from Russians when it was offered. And many of these actions are unprecedented in U.S. history, according to Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
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Economic interests also played an important role in Russia’s relationship with Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Despite Trump’s frequent denials of any business in Russia on the campaign trail, his personal lawyer Michael Cohen spent much of 2016 working on a deal to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen’s efforts, which continued until June of 2016, included reaching out directly to the Kremlin for help, planning a trip to Russia and briefing Trump’s children Trump Jr. and Ivanka “approximately 10 times” about the plans. Cohen initially lied to Congress about the extent of the project, but in November of 2018 he pleaded guilty and then testified again in February, saying that Trump indirectly encouraged him to lie (Abrams 1-10).

Works cited:

Abrams, Abigail, “Here's What We Know So Far about Russia's 2016 Meddling.” Time, April 18, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5565991/russia-influ...

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Published on October 15, 2020 12:09

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