Judge Roy Moore runs into a cultural shift

A version of this was published in the Sky Hi News Nov. 29, 2017 https://www.skyhinews.com/news/muftic-judge-roy-moore-runs-into-a-cultural-shift/

Updated 12/6/2017: Time Magazine named the cultural shift Time's Person of the Year
http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers/

The  firestorm over the candidacy of Judge Roy Moore is not the beginning of a heap full of a cultural shift in the US but a catharsis and a result.  On December 12, as Alabama voters go to the polls.  Alabama  is a battleground  among three  currents of thought: those who put moral and fairness values above political concerns; those who  who believe the accusations,  but put political concerns above moral outrage, and those who hear, see or ,speak no evil and thereby  can avoid making the choice between a clean conscience and and achieving  political goals. However the December vote plays out, the GOP  in the US  loses. They lose either a seat in the Senate or they are burdened with  reputation of a party that does not care enough about the personal qualities of their candidates.

Why the shift? What is different now than earlier is that more women are working side by side with men. Plaintiff attorneys have demonstrated a successful technique to find multiple women  victims willing to speak out so  they could  show a pattern of behavior, which makes each accuser  more credible. I date the technique resulting in women being believed instead of being treated as liars and publicity seekers to the Bill Cosby trial.  What has not changed is that the workplace is mostly still male who are in the position of power over women’s career advancement and who have gotten away with taking advantage of women far too long and who missed the signals of changing attitudes. The cultural shift is still a work in progress. In 2016, moral outrage lost out to political expediency when Donald Trump won in spite of the credibility  of multiple  witnesses to  many of his penchant to grab women  and his boasting of his conduct recorded on the Access Hollywood tapes. “Deny, deny” worked well enough  for him and showed the way  for Roy Moore to defend himself.

All cases of  accusations of  unwelcomed male sexual conduct toward women are not alike. Where the  Roy Moore issue  differs from the accused behavior of Donald Trump and Al Franken  or past president’s infidelities is that Moore preyed on children who  were were not considered old enough to make decisions about their sexual choices. He is an accused pedophile. However, the issue has opened the floodgates to ensnare actors, celebrities, politicians, and intellectual icons whose alleged or proven victims were women of legal age.  

While politics and policies are an integral part of the storm, the issue of sexual victimism of women and girls is non partisan.  Bad male behavior toward women used to be mildly  tolerated and expected by women who were beginning to work in jobs once solely occupied by men. Sometimes public exposure  of sexual misdeeds was used  and excused as political weapons  against political adversaries , or it was swept under the guise of locker room talk, while those who came forth were  publicly shamed.  Even in my memory, the sexual escapades of FDR, JFK,  and Bill Clinton  were either ignored by the good ole boy press at the time, passed off as “he said, she said,” or revealed later by historians and investigative  journalists.  Many of the accused now of past  misdeeds will only stand trial in the court of public opinion or the ballot box or Senate ethics processes because the statute of limitations ran out.  The only president to pay the price while in office was  Bill  Clinton who was nearly  impeached.

Some have called it a Faustian bargain to believe the accusations, but to in spite of that think it is more important to ignore them if it advances a political goal.

Why Faust? The greatest work in German literature, Faust,  was authored  in the late 1700’sby  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  He tackled a basic human dilemma,  a conflicted man making a choice between being moral or losing  out on other personal goals.  In Goethe’s plan,  Faust   makes an arrangement with the devil: the devil will do everything that Faust wants while he is here on Earth, and in exchange Faust will serve the devil in Hell.   That whether Roy Moore is a devil and those who believe he committed those acts, yet support him because his vote in needed in the Senate for other conservative issues is an over the top analogy is debatable. But it does illustrate a common  human dilemma. In most of the accused of sexual predatory behavior  involved of age women or  who were compromised by slipping them a mickey (Bill Cosby). Where the Moore issue is even more extreme and differs from the behavior of Donald Trump and Al Franken is that Moore is an accused pedophile who preyed on children.  But, as Kellyanne Ann Conway, often spokesperson for Donald Trump, said on cable news, the decision is up to the people of Alabama, but his vote is needed to pass tax reform. The Alabama  chair of the GOP gave the same kind of rationalization in the party’s continued support of Moore.  Faust’s bargain lives on.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/politics/kellyanne-conway-roy-moore-fox-interview/index.html

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/24/one-nation-under-perverts-its-time-for-women-to-take-a-knee/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/womans-effort-to-infiltrate-the-washington-post-dates-back-months/2017/11/29/ce95e01a-d51e-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?tidr=notifi_push_breaking-news&pushid=5a1f7d5aedb3621d00000062

The second presidential debate was epic, alright, epic nasty

The second presidential debate Sunday October 9 was an epic one, alright, epically nasty.  The  nation and the world to which this was broadcast was on edge of their seats to see if Donald Trump would  contritely apologize for the leaked audio and video of his boasting of his conquests of groping and sexually predatory behavior toward women.  He did not.  Instead he paraded before the world and placed in the debate audience some of the women with whom Bill Clinton had had affairs. Monica Lewinsky was not among the attendees.   He justified his own behavior because Bill Clinton had spoken or done worse.

 That Trump stopped the run for the exit door of evangelical and “establishment” Republicans withdrawing their endorsement is yet to be seen.  What he did, however, was claim that he “has not groped” and he called the damning audios just “locker room” talk and awkwardly tried to switch the topic to fighting Isis. He can only hope no “groped” women come forward.

It is a good thing that Bill Clinton is not running for president this go around. His actions over twenty years ago were worthy of the consequences.  The candidate, however, is Hillary Clinton and, if anything, she showed remarkable composure, and exuded dignity in the face of Trump’s attempt to rattle her or to paint her with the sins of her husband. In the run up to the debate he had tried to make the point that Hillary was the “enabler” because she showed no respect for women because she dared to try to destroy the reputation of “the other women”.  That must be some male fantasy to expect the victim, the wronged wife, to take a kind and caring approach to the “other women” because of  some feminist ideology. Given the public focus on all of the tawdriness, I imagine not many women would have had the self-control to invoke Michelle Obama’s advice, “when they go low, we go high” as Hillary Clinton did Sunday night.  It is  her steeliness and self control under such provocations that stand in contrast to tweet happy Trump who reacts whenever his manhood or ego is stroked or offended that makes him particularly unsuited to make rational policy decisions regarding war and peace.

Donald Trump made some eyebrow raising comments, especially regarding his differences with his own running mate Mike Pence over policies toward Russia and Syria.  Like a wannabe tin pot dictator, he said he would appoint a prosecutor to put Hillary in jail for her alleged lies on the email server because he disagreed with the FBI director’s findings that she had no intent to relay material marked classified or had lied to him.  In the post-debate spin room, the shock of Trump advocating to abuse legal and due process to get rid of an opponent overshadowed his stock allegations of Clinton lies.  Trump also openly admitted he had used a tax loophole to avoid paying federal personal income taxes for years. She responded by advocating an expanded version of the original  Buffett Rule that would impose a 30% income tax on income over $1 million with her proposed additional surtaxes on the five million dollar earners. She then scored unrebutted points that Trump’s tax proposals would give enormous tax cuts to the wealthy and raise taxes on some in the middle class.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/11/pf/taxes/hillary-clinton-taxes/

So Trump thinks he can damage Hillary Clinton by reminding the nation of her husband’s sexual exploits or her bathroom habits? That is risky politics.

A memo to Donald Trump:   So you think you can damage Hillary Clinton by reminding the nation of her husband’s sexual exploits or her bathroom habits? That is risky politics. You just do not get it when it comes to women. In national polls, 6 in 10 women do not believe you “represent their interests”.  Why? It is about respect.

 Hillary was not the perpetrator in the blue dress affair. She was the victim. Women understand. She is not the first woman to be in that situation.   The marriage almost broke up, but she put family and her support of Bill’s political accomplishments above it. She deserves respect for grit and determination, and for what she has accomplished as her own person and not your crass reminders of those times.

Here is  the significance of what Hillary Clinton has accomplished. She is paving the way for so many in the future.  In the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, women had to overcome a charge that they were “underqualified”, with no experience in government or political leadership.  No wonder.  The corporate and governmental  powers were not friendly toward women moving up the ladder. They may have been loved, but they were disrespected.

In the FDR era Frances Perkins served as the first woman cabinet member as Secretary of Labor and in the early 1950’s Oveta Culp Hobby was the first head of Health, Education and Welfare.   My mother considered their service as proof that women could do such jobs as well as men.   Nonetheless,   women governmental officials and CEO’s were rare in the 1950’s and ‘60s. A few took over position left by deceased husbands.  Participation as unpaid volunteers and civic activists were the other routes left to women and those credentials were not respected as much as experience in government and the corporate world.

 That began to change with the women’s rights movement in the 1970’s, and now women are governors, many more than in the past serve in Congress and as mayors, and cabinet officials, including Hillary Clinton. They have become ones mothers can hold up to their girls as how far women can go because now they have achieved the experience needed to gain respect.

 There is still a long way to go. Only 20% of Congress are women. Nonetheless, it is a foundation on which girls in the future can build because the possibilities of success have been publicly demonstrated.   No candidate running now can claim the international and domestic experience Hillary Clinton has: lawyer, Senator, Secretary of State.

 Bill Clinton deserves every bit of criticism for his personal follies, but if you persist in visiting the sins of Bill Clinton on Hillary Clinton, you will have also risked giving the opportunity for Bill Clinton to remind voters of successes on his watch that puts the GOP in a relatively bad light. When Bill Clinton took office, the deficit was 4.7% of the GDP; when he left, it was a surplus of 2.4%.  Inflation rates were reduced and growth was 3.8%.  Under Bill Clinton’s watch, the unemployment rate was 3.9%. With GOP presidents, the average is 6.1%. More jobs were created per month during the Clinton presidency than during any other presidency in recent U.S. history.

A version of this was published in the Skyhidailynews.com January 8, 2016

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/donald-trump-2016-women-voters-217086

https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_05_3_burns.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/05/the-clinton-economy-in-charts

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/14/women-have-long-history-in-congress-but-until-recently-there-havent-been-many/

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/12/05/in-ranking-presidents-by-job-creation
https://twitter.com/msnbc/status/685147564325273601    Panetta endorses Hillary; experience counts

Remembering Srebrenica, the worst genocide in Europe since World War II; over 8 thousand slaughtered

Imagine if every  male, man and boy, in Grand County were assembled, hands tied behind their backs, marched to a killing field, and shot dead for one reason: they were all of the same religion, an identified ethnic group, hated by a superior force.

  Something like  that took place twenty years ago in a city with a population a little larger than our county.  You say that must have happened in Africa, maybe Rwanda? It is difficult to believe that such a horrendous event  also took place in an industrialized European country, especially since the Western world had hopefully  learned its lesson from the Holocaust. 

The world is just now coming to grips with its failure to stop the worst genocide  in Europe since World War II. July 11 in   Bosnia, former President Bill Clinton and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,   prime ministers, presidents, a queen,  from Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Turkey, Serbia, and Jordan ( Angela Merkel of Germany paid her respects earlier), marked the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, occurring  in a conflict which gave birth to  the term “ethnic cleansing”.

 On July 11, 1995, 8,372 men and boys were  marched to the countryside, shot to death, and  their executioners attempted to cover up the slaughter by moving the bodies, scattering body parts, and burying them so that no one would know.  A few of the victims played dead or hid under other bodies to escape and testify  to the world.    Thanks to DNA and forensic  recovery of the remains, all but 1000 have been identified, and another 136 coffins with parts of identified victims, were buried in the memorial ceremonies Saturday.

Oh, you say,  the Muslims did it?  (In Bosnia at that time, the largest ethnic group was Muslims).  Wrong.  The killers were Bosnian Serbs , Christian Orthodox, and the victims were killed for one reason. They were Muslim.

 It was a bloody incident in a bloody war as the former Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991 and the province of Bosnia struggled to gain its independence, with ethnic Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims engaged in a civil war to determine governance. Bosnia’s population was a little more than Colorado’s. Over 100,000, mostly Muslims, died   before Srebrenica and  in smaller incidents of ethnic cleansing. The United Nations had already intervened and had established Srebrenica as a safe haven, but some Dutch peacekeepers were held hostage and courts later ruled  the Netherlands liable for their failure to protect those in a safe haven.

News of the massacre resulted in the following month with  NATO retaliatory air strikes against Bosnian Serbs  The Dayton Accord three months later   ended the Bosnia conflict, thanks mostly to the belated leadership of the US.  Joined in a federation with a Croatian/Muslim entity, Bosnia Serbs gained autonomy.   War crimes trials of Bosnian Serbs accused of responsibility for Srebrenica are still taking place in The Hague.

 The US last week introduced a resolution in the UN to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide,  but Russia, to its shame, yet  historically allied with Serbia,   vetoed it.  Showing more grace, the prime minister of Serbia attended the commemoration ceremonies and endured rocks   thrown at him by impassioned activists.

Post note: The Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was found guilty in the Hague in 2016  and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Felicia Muftic is a columnist with the Sky Hi News, Grand County, Colorado

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 Highly recommended:http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/11/europe/bosnia-srebrenica-massacre-commemoration/ and listen to the audio version.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/world/europe/srebrenica-genocide-massacre.html?_r=1