But first:

A new day dawns.

Hope reborn for those who side with America’s intelligence professionals over Putin.  With journalists over journalist-murderers.  With decency over vulgarity, honesty over nonstop lies.

There’s so much work to do, but at least now we have a shot.

And now:

John Frager: “Thanks for posting [Umair Haque yesterday].  After 40+ years in the Republican party, I’m abandoning them. Perhaps the only benefit of Trump’s behavior is that more moderate Republicans will come to their senses.”

Joel Margolis: “Haque aserts: <<White Americans as a social group have never voted for a progressive President, ever, not even Joe Biden.>> Could you explain how Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson got elected president?”

→ Great question.  I went back to the piece and saw that what you quoted was linked to another of his pieces wherein he makes clear he is referring to “modern history” at least as far back as 1968.  He should have made that clear in his “Three Big Lies,” and you are right to point this out.

But he might also ask you: would white Americans have elected LBJ in 1964 if they had known how hard he would fight to get black folks the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

Would they have reelected Kennedy after he had stood with civil rights leaders?  We’ll never know.

White voters did elect Truman months after he integrated the military; but in such a squeaker that many papers famously declared Dewey the winner.  At a time of tremendous prosperity, wouldn’t reelection ordinarily have been a breeze?  Had just a few more white voters rebelled against that executive order, you’d have to go back to FDR to find a progressive backed by a majority of whites.

And even FDR didn’t do much noteworthy for equality until after his final reelection.

As for his fifth cousin Teddy — a progressive Republican — “his conviction that white men of European descent were innately superior informed his actions on matters from national parks to foreign policy.”

So I’m not sure we can dismiss Umair Haque’s assertion, let alone his whole piece.

Harris Barer: “Does Haque really hate America this much?”

→ I’m guessing from what I’ve read of his work that he loves the America of invention (Franklin!  Edison!  Bell!  the Wright Brothers!  Steve Jobs!) but hates the America of slavery, Jim Crow, and shooting unarmed black people in the back.  That he loves the America that defeated Hitler and stared down communism, but hates the America where neo-Nazis stormed the Capitol as the president watched gleefully on TV.  That he loves America’s natural bounty, but hates that America among all the nations of the earth left the Paris Climate Accords.

Blind loyalty to everything America does is not what the Founders intended at all.

Enjoy the festivities.