Trump, Zuckerberg and their friends are breaking America
If America’s worst enemies had spent years designing a plan to erode our greatest strengths, they couldn’t have done better than what some of our fellow citizens are doing to the country every day for short-term financial or political gain.
Prominent figures in government, politics and commerce are behaving in ways so destructive to the core institutions and norms underpinning our democracy, one can only assume they take the country’s stability as a given — that they can abuse and stress it all they want and it won’t break.
They are wrong. We can break America, and right now we’re on our way there. Not during the Cold War, Vietnam or Watergate did I ever fear more for my country.
I’m talking about a president willing to sink to banana-republic governing norms, including withholding aid to Ukraine to compel its leadership to investigate his political rival.
I’m talking about Republican lawmakers who know President Trump’s Ukraine machinations are indefensible and impeachable, particularly after Tuesday’s disclosures by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, that he personally heard Trump appeal to Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden.
Republicans can let the constitutional impeachment process proceed or attack the process. Alas, a majority seem to be opting for the latter.
In attacking all the diplomats, intelligence officers and civil servants who have stepped forward, at great professional risk, to bear witness against the president, they are attacking the people who uphold the regulations — and provide the independent research and facts — that make our government legitimate and the envy of people all over the world.
There are also the internet barons who for too long ignored the weaponization of social media, which is turning our free press into a house of mirrors, where citizens can no longer cognitively discern fact from fiction and make informed judgments essential for democracy.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned last week at a House hearing regarding why he thinks it’s OK for politicians to run political ads containing obvious lies.
This is all about money for Zuckerberg, but he disguises his motives in some halfbaked theory about freedom of the press — so half-baked he couldn’t explain it even when he knew he would be asked about it by a congressional committee.
Just once I’d like to see Zuckerberg look into a camera and say: “I will take Facebook stock down to $1 if that’s what it takes to ensure that we’re never again an engine for the perversion of democracy in any country, starting with my own. Facebook isn’t going to accept any more political ads until we have the resources to factcheck them all.”
I doubt he’ll do that, though, because his priorities are profits and power, and he seems quite ready to hurt American democracy to get them.
And who is Sen. Lindsey Graham? He’s the senator who’s always willing to ask American soldiers to make the ultimate sacrifice in places like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq — to protect our precious democracy — and he’s the senator who’s always unwilling to make even the smallest political sacrifice to protect democracy when it’s threatened at home by this president.
Graham was all for impeaching Bill Clinton for lying over sex with an intern, and he won’t lift a finger to judge Trump for using taxpayer money to coerce a foreign leader to intervene in our election on Trump’s behalf. Graham — and all the rest of them — will live in infamy.