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If you worry about election integrity — or, at least, about specious claims of rigged elections and the real threat of social unrest — you ought to be scared to death by what a federal judge did on Thursday.
District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington essentially legalized gambling on congressional elections.
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Did you notice what was missing from the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate Tuesday night?
It wasn’t the consumption of household pets. Not the accusation that the other candidate is a Marxist. Not the love letters to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. Not even the promise to end all wars in a single day. All of those were covered. No, it was the $35 trillion elephant trying to hide in the corner of the room. As my old scout master would say to the candidates, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you.” And yet, the ballooning national debt, the one the Penn Wharton Budget Model last year predicted would reach unsustainable levels and crash the economy in about 20 years, sat completely ignored through the entire excruciating evening. If you listen only to protesters at Columbia University, you might not know that an American citizen was brutally murdered by Hamas after spending 11 months in a captivity he earned by simply attending a concert last October.
More than just being held captive, he underwent what must have been horrific pain. A video exists, apparently, of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s capture, right after his left arm was shattered during the merciless attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. The Associated Press said it shows him with “a bloodied makeshift tourniquet around his left forearm with a stump of blood and bone protruding as he was forced into a pickup truck with other young Israeli men.” So, where’s the outrage? In an interview with the University of Connecticut a few years ago, history professor and author Micki McElya talked about the importance of Arlington Cemetery as a sacred place.
“I do believe that Arlington National Cemetery – as ground that has been hallowed over time by civilian and military uses – encapsulates the entire history of the country,” she said. “It’s both profound and beautiful as a space; it doesn’t tell just one story but it tells many stories, including contested and difficult ones.” For most Americans, the war in Ukraine takes on a distant hue that makes it easy to talk about in broad terms. For some, distance makes the war easier to dismiss.
To many people in Europe, however, it’s a much more vivid and constant worry. I just returned from another two-week stay in Sweden, my third within the last 12 months. My wife and her siblings are inheriting property there. Each time I have visited, Ukraine has been top-of-mind in the media and in casual conversation, in ways that conveyed an emotion Americans have a hard time feeling thousands of miles away. This time was no different. I once asked Muhammad Yunus — the Nobel Laureate who invented microcredit as a way to help the poor and who was, at the time, under relentless persecution by the prime minister in his home country of Bangladesh — why he didn’t just leave.
Why keep pushing his ideas of lifting the poor through enterprise, “social businesses,” affordable nutrition that could cure night blindness and cheap cell phones that are within financial reach of the very poor, among many other things? Why continue in a country where the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was threatening him with jail while making public statements about dunking him in the Padma River to teach him a lesson? Why stay when she had forced him off the board of directors of his own bank? For better or ill, Elon Musk likes to point us toward the future. Now he’s done so with elections, and in a way that’s more ill than better.
We all need to be paying attention, especially as this year’s campaigns start boiling. Americans, particularly those with an uncritical partisan bent, are far too easy to fool, and the nation’s enemies are taking note. About a week ago, someone with the handle @MrReaganUSA uploaded to X a doctored version of a campaign video from the Kamala Harris people, in which her voice is digitally altered to say President Biden has been exposed as senile and that she is the candidate now, even though she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country.” Also, her voice is heard saying she is the “ultimate diversity hire” because she is a woman and a person of color. Easy to spot as a fake, right? Don’t be so sure. Does history repeat itself?
George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Well … we may wish we were condemned to repeat the past of nearly 100 years ago, when a soft-spoken, mild-mannered president shocked the nation by announcing he was not going to run for re-election, despite opinion polls showing he was quite popular. But even if that isn’t possible, history does contain some important lessons of which we should be aware. Instead of repeating, history may at times turn itself inside out and provide us with an opposite, negative image of a familiar tale. Still, if we can’t remember what originally happened, we might not appreciate how far we have strayed. “A Supreme Court that welcomes a new justice every two years, and turns over entirely over the course of every 18 years, could wreak havoc on doctrinal stability.” — Suzanna Sherry and Christopher Sundby, Vanderbilt Law School.
If you think Supreme Court nominations are political circuses now, just wait until justices have term limits. Not that I think this will happen. Ten years is a long time when it comes to predicting money matters. But if the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in Washington is right, Utah’s second Winter Olympics might coincide with some shaky economic times in the United States.
This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has paid attention to the nation’s debt problem. What it should do is make voters question why both major political parties have (so far, at least) backed modern-day Neros for president who are content to fiddle away while the flames rise around them. And why so few people seem to care. |
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The author
Jay Evensen is the Opinion Editor of the Deseret News. He has more than 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities. Archives
September 2024
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