The Constitution 2.0 (Part One)

So. This is the start of my project to repurpose the Constitution of the United States. As I said, I am not a lawyer nor a political science expert, and this is very much a first draft. It is intended for the purpose of public debate, because given how the system is broken, we are going to need to debate what replaces it sooner rather than later, and maybe sooner than we would like. Article I is of sufficient length that I feel the need to present it first, and then move on.

Preamble

We the People of the United States recognize the wisdom of our Founders, that all people have the natural rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights Governments are instituted among the people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers so as to best effect their Safety and Happiness. To this end we do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article I

1. The sovereignty of the government is derived from the body of citizens of the United States.

2. The first principle of a free republic is that the people may act freely except where law specifically prevents it, and the government may not act except where specifically empowered by law.

3. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.

4. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

5. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. Legal constructions such as corporations are not persons for this purpose.

6. The rights of the citizen shall not be abridged by the United States nor any State on account of circumstances of birth, including race, gender or gender identity, nor in regard to political belief, religious belief, or lack thereof.

7. No law shall be made creating an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the media, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and petition the government for a redress of grievances.

8. The natural right of self-defense, in particular the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

9. No Soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in a time of war except in a manner to be prescribed by law.

10. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall be issued without probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized.

11. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in active service in time of War or public danger, nor shall any person for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against themselves, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

12. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously determined by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, to be confronted with the witnesses against them, and to have counsel assist in their defense.

13. In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall be twenty dollars, the right of a trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than under the rules of common law.

14. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

15. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction.

16. All citizens of the United States and each state thereof, as defined above, are automatically registered to vote in all state and federal elections at 18 years of age. The right to vote may not be abridged except if convicted of a felony offense.

17. The laws of each State, and their State Constitutions, remain in effect upon ratifying this Constitution, except insofar as they are contradicted by it.

Notes

The Preamble obviously invokes both The Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the current Constitution. It stems from the premise that governments are established to protect our natural rights, and “whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends” the people have the right to alter or abolish it. Thus the necessity of the document. If the current system had not become destructive to the ends of the original Constitution, this measure would not be necessary.

The original Constitution started with focus on the three branches of government, Article I (Congress, the legislative branch) Article II (the President and executive branch) and Article III (the judiciary and Supreme Court). As part of the debates leading up to the signing of the document, it was noted by critics that certain elements of common law, or desired elements from other State documents, were not included, these being the protections that eventually became the Bill of Rights. Subsequent Amendments (such as the right of minorities, women, and 18-year olds to vote) were added over time as demand arose.

I have put most of that up front, ahead of the role of the Congress, which is now Article II. This is to emphasize the primacy of the citizen and the protection of rights as the purpose of the government. Most of Article I is simply rearranging the constitutional amendments referring to human rights and citizen rights. Including the right of individuals to bear arms. That might come up someday.

The root premise of how free a government should get versus what the basis of regulation should be “is that the people may act freely except where law specifically prevents it, and the government may not act except where specifically empowered by law.” This is similar to what are now the Ninth and Tenth Amendments (the text of which are also included here) but spelled out for emphasis. This idea is taken directly from Ayn Rand in the compilation The Virtue of Selfishness, specifically, “Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted. “

This is also paralleled in the language of France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Articles IV and V. I believe it is important enough that it needs to be emphasized even over what is currently the First Amendment.

In this country, we call voting a right, but in practice states keep putting up a bunch of roadblocks to make it more difficult. Default voter registration addresses this, so that it is not an issue that states can interfere with, and the right to vote only being denied for cause. In some ways this goes against my inclination. I am inclined to make voting eligibility contingent on a civics and basic knowledge test, including the question, “Can you explain the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’?” But as with literacy tests, that sort of thing was declared unconstitutional because it was gaming the rights of citizens so that state governments could pick their voters. Likewise making registration and eligibility a federal matter makes it more difficult for states to select their voters, which is a big part of why the last few elections have turned out like they have. This is especially important in the rules for Congress (Article II) to follow.

To Have No Technique Is Your Technique

So I said that before giving my ideas for a new US Constitution I would need to explain my perspective in order to show where I’m coming from and what my proposal is based on.

To sum up from one of my other pieces, “I am NOT a “progressive.” I am not a Socialist. I am a conservative in the sense that I want to preserve the American system of government. I am a libertarian in the sense that I believe in The Law of Unintended Consequences, and in the sense of Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least” and what someone else believes “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words I am what Jefferson and F.A. Hayek would call a liberal.”

I had previously considered myself a (L)ibertarian, because in the duopoly the Democrats were in many ways flawed and the Republicans were outright insane, no later than when they first started to follow Donald Trump. So I voted Libertarian. Until they went insane. And while the (L)ibertarian movement always has been an exercise in herding cats, things really came to a head with the Libertarian Party with COVID, when their demand to maintain freedom from government rules went up against the need to contain the worst pandemic in this country since the 1919 influenza outbreak. (There were a lot of people masking up then, over a decade before FDR turned this country socialist.) The “freethinker” response to COVID only confirmed that the movement was not based on a healthy skepticism to big government, but rather oppositional defiant disorder, which made it ripe for takeover by the kinds of people whose politics may not have been identical to Trump’s but were starting to run parallel. The common element was distrust and outright hatred of a political establishment composed largely of mainstream Democrats and professional bureaucrats, whom Trump calls “the deep state” and prior to him were simply “the state” or more properly the administrative state. That coalition of people had much to do with why Trump won last year and Kamala Harris lost.

The other reason I quit being straight libertarian is seeing what happens to government when the people allegedly against Big Government get a hold of it. We may not like everything government does, but until we can figure some better arrangement, it will always exist. As long as there are group resources, or resources that cannot be held individually, there will always be some designated agent to administer those resources, to make rules on group activities and to enforce those rules if they are broken. You can call it a commune, a government, or an HOA, but it will exist.

You can’t kill government, you can’t drown it in a tub. We can have a legitimate political debate as to how much is needed, but it is going to exist on some level. As they say, “power abhors a vacuum.” So one of the things we have to do is figure out what we actually need government for, as in, something that is necessary and can’t really be done by anyone else. One could argue whether that applies to, say, education. There are lots of homeschooled people, and some have argued that they do better academically than public school kids. But having government provide schooling at all levels, and creating standards, broadens the opportunities that education provides. Likewise, you could have people sponsor a highway, but the private sector isn’t able to develop the comprehensive infrastructure and highway system that the federal government developed after World War II. These are legitimate debates. But what we’re seeing with the Musk-Trump administration is targeting programs that have been useful, not because they are wasteful but simply on the basis of a reflexive anti-establishment ideology, like a mirror-universe version of the Red Guards. And we will soon see the consequences of seeing what parts of government are necessary or not, especially when the decision is made for emotional reasons.

I still consider myself libertarian in terms of my internal definition, but that doesn’t seem to be one that’s shared by the “official” movement anymore. Which is one of the points that I want to make here: Politics, at least in the US, is not based on ideas and consistent ideology, it’s based on labels. And if you can take over the labels that people agree with, like “freedom” and “America”, you can get people on board with some pretty statist and un-American ideas. Likewise from a leftist perspective, you might think that socialism is a humanist movement, and maybe in Europe it is, but in America, it has always been associated with the worst sort of Maoist and Leninist tyranny. So trying to promote racial and income equity is considered socialism, but autarky, tariffs, having the president directly manage the Kennedy Center and staff it with his cronies and having his patron boost his own government contracts while regulating his own competitors are NOT socialism.

So I do not think my position should be based on ideology as much as philosophy, because that is more consistent and more easy to test. My philosophy is what has been called classical liberalism, heavily based on Ayn Rand. Now, while these days I think Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, I don’t see anybody else in philosophy who gets to the issues with both Left and Right, particularly why the Trump Right engages in magical thinking and the Left, lacking conviction in reality and objective standards, has been powerless to address this. But I am basing my positions on these basics:

Reality exists, independent of subjective perception or opinion.

At the same time we do not have perfect knowledge of reality. Determining the truth of a thing (at least on empirical things) requires a process of examination akin to the scientific method.

For us to have the best chance of gaining knowledge and developing accurate views of the world, we need the maximum freedom to act, particularly in the action of gaining knowledge.

Thus the best systems are those which allow for human freedom in a person’s own sphere while by the same token protecting the same right for others against other individuals.

In regard to the above, I think that for most of this country’s history, our Constitution, with all of its flaws, was still the best government we could have devised. I think that it did not account for the natural tendency of people to engage in partisan politics, which is fine, except in the sense that it directly corrupts the system of checks and balances that the Founders created. This is why, for instance, the Electoral College creates results against the popular vote, because all but two states set up their electors as “winner take all”, meaning that only two candidates have a chance of getting any electors, because we define “democracy” as who wins the popularity contest between the two parties that have set themselves up to have all the advantages. And in the one clear case where we could have used a veto of the popular vote, the 2024 election, the Electors went ahead and certified Donald Trump because to do otherwise would have gone against democracy. Even though putting a check on the flaws of democracy was precisely why the Electoral College exists.

Likewise, the Founders intended impeachment to be a check on the power of an unscrupulous president (or other federal official), but in practice it can’t be. The premise was that the three branches of government are the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary (in that order) and each acts as a check on the other, because each institution serves to protect its own priorities. That’s the system on paper. The system in practice is that the three branches are the Democrats, the Republicans, and the judiciary, and the third is chosen by the dominant of the other two. And with a majority vote required to move impeachment from the House to the Senate but a two-thirds vote required for the Senate to convict, you are never going to get that many Senators to go against a President of their own party, because he is not a competitor in the system, he is their boss. If a President doesn’t have the loyalty of one-third of the Senate it raises the question of how he got elected in the first place.

I am operating on the premise that we should keep most of the government that exists, because it was working pretty well with the capacity for evolution and reform, prior to being gamed by unscrupulous and authoritarian people. This means that such changes that I propose are geared mainly towards addressing those exploits.

You will also note that by the standards of left-wingers who act like the whole Constitutional project was a mistake, all this makes me fairly right-wing. But that is a standard of right-wing prior to the current one, which is “I agree with everything Donald Trump says, even if he changed his mind three times today.” By that standard, I might as well be Che Guevara.

This perspective has been referred to as radical centrism or even ultra-radical centrism. Which is of course a contradiction in terms. But the difference is a matter of means as opposed to ends. In this case it is an acknowledgement that the current system isn’t working, that it needs to be changed, but the changes being implemented now by the anti “deep state” party are taking us further from where we need to go.

It’s been implied that the problem with “no labels” movements outside the duopoly (such as Andrew Yang’s Forward) is that they are not really distinguished from established political systems and in their pragmatism don’t have an identity. “Mark Satin worries that radical centrism, while “thoroughly sensible”, lacks an “animating passion” – and claims there has never been a successful political movement without one.”

In my mind, this objection gets back to the problem I mentioned earlier. A movement based on ideology is in danger of being hijacked by people with ulterior motives. Moreover, its definitions refer only to itself and do not adapt. When the ideology clashes with reality, ideology can only win with force. A philosophy based on finding reality and changing opinions to fit the facts is better for the world than an attempt to make facts fit someone’s opinion.

Bruce Lee was once quoted as saying: “The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique; my movement is a result of your movement.” You need to be able to acknowledge the world around you and act accordingly before you try to change it.

In fact it is that very non-identity that is at the core of original liberalism. It is the premise that since we are so different not every way of life will suffice for all and therefore we cannot make our politics such an ideology that it becomes a religion. As Ludwig von Mises said in Liberalism (a book that the Von Mises Caucus has apparently never read):

“We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. … Liberalism limits its concern exclusively and entirely to earthly life and earthly endeavor. The kingdom of religion, on the other hand, is not of this world. Thus, liberalism and religion could both exist side by side without their spheres’ touching. … Liberalism, however, must be intolerant of every kind of intolerance. If one considers the peaceful cooperation of all men as the goal of social evolution, one cannot permit the peace to be disturbed by priests and fanatics.”

I mean if “radical centrism” seems like a contradiction, well nowadays we are supposed to normalize Nazi sympathies and a unitary executive, but limits on government power are apparently un-American. At this point there IS nothing more radical than centrism.

This is the perspective I’m coming from with my next idea.

To Ourselves, And Our Posterity

I don’t have much to live for anymore.

My Dad died. My Mom died. My brothers died. My two best friends died. My dogs died.

And as I go on, everything I loved and everything I care about dies out before me.

As I get older it is increasingly clear that I am not immortal and I am getting less immortal all the time.

I now basically have the old-fashioned idea that I should just try to leave this world a better place than I found it, or at least not make it worse.

And I had thought that the United States of America would outlive me, but now I’m not so sure.

Because this week, Elon Musk, the actual chief executive of the United States, commandeered the records of the entire US Treasury and sent his own personal staff, who were not government employees, to come in with personal unsecured devices in order to purge the bureaucracy, taking out the separate USAID charity organization (supposedly now being shifted to the State Department) while also seeking to defund or outright eliminate other agencies like the Department of Education. [NOTE: I just found out that the Trump ‘administration’ agreed to restrict DOGE staff access to Treasury records “after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system — and the personal data housed in it — violated federal privacy laws.”]

Now, I still consider myself a right-winger, so in principle I would be in favor of killing the Department of Education. After all, most of the people who voted for Trump after he gave us all Trump Virus ™ were products of American public schools, so clearly it’s not doing any good.

But even if you could make cases against a lot of these agencies, the fact is it is not Elon Musk’s place to cut the funding. The Congress in Article I of the Constitution has sole power of the purse and the executive branch is there to make sure its funds are administered as Congress directs. Even if Vice President Trump designates Musk and his boy band “special government employees” after the fact they have no certification in that system. And nobody, including Republicans, elected Elon Musk to effectively have more power than the President does. This is nothing less than a coup.

We could fight them for real, but as Eric Stratton says, that would take years, and cost millions of lives. The saving grace of our situation is that these people are as incompetent as they are evil. In past examples of encroaching tyranny, we had previously used the example of a frog in a pot of water, which is gradually turned up to the boiling point slowly enough that the frog doesn’t realize what is happening and cooks to death. Well, the Trump-Musk Party decided to just turn the stove to full boil then take the metal pot off the stove and shove it in the microwave.

The escalation is getting to the point that it may raise a critical mass of people against it, including some Trump voters, like all those senior citizens who now know that their Social Security records are in the hands of the world’s most powerful drug addict.

But even if we could claw back some of this power grab, we will never get back to the status quo ante, because it no longer exists. The precedent has been set. The precedent being, that once a guy is elected president, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Even if he’s not currently president. He can stage an insurrection against his successor’s certification, send a mob into the Capitol to try and kill the Speaker of the House and his own Vice President, and not get prosecuted. He can run for president again despite being an insurrectionist, because the Supreme Court wants to pretend the 14th Amendment doesn’t exist. He can steal classified documents from the White House and not get prosecuted because he’s running for president again. And when he gets re-elected he can have Elon Musk and his chemically addled commandos seize control of the infrastructure with no certification whatsoever. Why? Because we let the president do anything he wants. And this is a standard that was set long before Trump. And if you’re a Democrat, not taking advantage of that is handicapping yourself. People complained that Biden pardoned his son, like that was going to be a lowering of our legal standards. But those standards no longer exist. Biden was simply acknowledging that fact.

We need to acknowledge it too.

The system is broken. It cannot be glued back together like a Japanese vase. We need to start over.

We need a Constitution 2.0.

Laws in and of themselves will not restrain evil men, for the reasons we’ve seen, but we can at least change the incentives to make abuse less likely, and resetting the system will make it more clear that the precedent of abuse will no longer stand.

Now, I am not a lawyer, nor do I have a Political Science degree, but neither does Elon Musk, and that’s not stopping him. I think that we need to have this discussion sooner rather than later, and in my next posts I want to go over my ideas for what ought to be changed. You could even call it a prolegomena, if you want to get all Kantian and pretentious.

But prior to going over my ideas, I would need to explain the basis of where they are coming from, so in my next post I want to go over what my philosophy and political positions are now and how I got to that point.

Wait for What?

Response sent to Andrew Sullivan on “Keep Calm, Carry On… And Wait“

Dear Andrew,

Do I think there is NOTHING good about Trump 2.0, otherwise known as Everything I Don’t Like is DEI?  Well actually I am pleasantly surprised that his foreign policy team consists of realists on Ukraine like Marco Rubio and Keith Kellogg, who put the burden of resolution on Vladimir Putin, as opposed to Anthony Blinken, who was trying to preserve a status quo that no longer exists, or a John Mearsheimer, who would tell us all that Putin is just misunderstood.

But otherwise, we go back to your question, “regime change or another shit-show?”  And after only two weeks, the answer is clearly: BOTH.  We have these people creating deliberate chaos with orders and policy changes that are illegal, cannot be carried out, or cannot be carried out because they’re illegal.  You would think that conservatives would know what “Chesterton’s Fence” is.

What we’re seeing are two inter-related points. One, Trump is clearly a senile tapioca brain who is front and center to amuse the proles and distract the media while the actual think tank like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought does the real work.  You can see this in his marathon Oval Office signing sessions where the staffer has to tell him what the order he’s signing is for, and Trump looks at it and always says, “Ooh, that’s a big one.”

From a right-libertarian standpoint, if all this just meant cutting taxes, cutting wasteful spending, cutting counterproductive regulations, and killing wokeness, that would be one thing.   But that gets to point two – clearly people like Vought, Musk and Miller have no clue how government works either, despite being more intelligent and qualified than Trump.  But the point isn’t to do things on procedure.  The point is to break the system. And they’re doing it because they think they can.

Because everyone in the institution, from Mitch McConnell to Merrick Garland to John Roberts went out of their way to tell Trump that he could do anything he wanted and no one would stop him, and last election the public agreed with that, and thanks to the downballot vote, Democrats have less ability to oppose him than ever.  But then, if they knew how to counter Trump, they wouldn’t have lost the election.

But now we’re seeing Musk muscling in to get his people infested in the civil service and his information systems running the record keeping, and various things are being taken out of government websites, like, the text of the Constitution.  Any dissent is being killed, despite the fact that the last nine years have demonstrated that you can dissent against Donald Trump all you want, and nothing can stop him.

The only thing that did stop him was public contempt at his disastrous handling of COVID, and that was only because it was an election year.  And I predict that Trump WILL cause a catastrophe on par with COVID, if not worse.  Because the factors that led to it have been reinforced and the safeguards have been removed.

So when you say, “Keep Calm, Carry On… And Wait”, I ask- wait for what? Things ARE going to get worse, much quicker than anybody expects. The catastrophe is going to happen before the midterms, and at this rate, before June.  And when, NOT if, it happens, we as a country will not be ready.  Because again the election will not be a factor, Democrats cannot stop him and Republicans never would stop him.  And if Trump dies of his various co-morbidities, his handpicked successor is JD Vance, who is a sincere religious fanatic, as opposed to Trump, who is clearly just a religious fanatic for the money.  But in regard to Vance, good of you to point out that every conservative convert to Catholicism suddenly acts like they have more doctrinal authority than the Pope.

But hey, at least we don’t have to worry about the pronoun police anymore.  That’s the important thing, right?

Sincerely,

JAMES

Back To The Plantation

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

– Martin Luther King Jr.

Supposedly Donald Trump got re-inaugurated last Monday. I didn’t see it. Because I have made a deliberate policy to punish Trump’s collaborator media by boycotting any live coverage of his appearances, including his State of the Union or any White House press conferences. After all, most of non-Trump America boycotted Election Day, and that made a pretty big difference.

Trump won the election even though on the one debate His Majesty deigned to grant Kamala Harris , she spanked his ass harder than Stormy Daniels and didn’t even have to get paid for it. He won because a critical plurality of Americans are maliciously ignorant and see all his vices as virtues. But the malicious idiocy of Trumpniks is a known quantity. All you have to do is outvote them. They were not outvoted. Kamala Harris got at least ten million less votes than Joe Biden got in 2020, and if you’re to believe the people in Nancy Pelosi’s camp, Harris did a lot better than Biden would’ve if he’d stuck it out.

Everybody knew Trump was a criminal, everybody remembered, presumably, that he killed hundreds of thousands with Trump Virus (TM) and everybody knew what would happen if Trump was re-elected, and they stayed home anyway because they did not see the Democratic Party as worth voting for.

And it remains to be seen exactly why each and every potential voter who didn’t vote for Trump also didn’t vote for Harris, but there is some more after-the-fact research coming out. “A poll from the Middle East Understanding Policy Project/YouGov released Wednesday found that Gaza was the number one reason why millions who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 decided to stay home in 2024.” The YouGov poll revealed that the issue played a huge role in battleground states, which Donald Trump swept, as 20% of voters in the six swing states that flipped from Biden to Trump said that “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was their top issue followed by 33% of people for the economy. “Even among Biden 2020 voters who did vote for Harris in swing states, voters by a 7:1 margin say they would have been more enthusiastic in their support if Harris ‘pledged to break from Biden by promising to withhold weapons to Israel,’ rather than less enthusiastic.” USA Today: “Harris underperformed with voters of color − particularly Latino voters − but also Black voters in urban centers such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Harris carried Black voters 86%-12% and Latino voters 53%-45%, according to CNN exit polls. But in the 2020 election, Biden won Black voters by a wider 92%-8% margin over Trump, and Latino voters 65%-32%.”

The point isn’t whether Democrats should align with the socialist/progressive/Free Palestine people or go with the centrists like Lucas Kunze, John Fetterman and Seth Moulton who want the party more focused on the old kitchen-table issues. The point is that they aren’t doing either. What is the Democratic Party doing? Who knows? Not even them.

Back in Malcolm X’ day he would talk to Black audiences about the difference between the “field Negro” and the “house Negro.” (Keep in mind, at the time ‘negro’ was the polite term.) In one speech, he said: “The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master’s second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his master’s house–probably in the basement or the attic–but he still lived in the master’s house. … But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses–the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.

“If someone came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s go, let’s separate,” naturally that Uncle Tom would say, “Go where? What could I do without boss? Where would I live? How would I dress? Who would look out for me?” That’s the house Negro. But if you went to the field Negro and said, “Let’s go, let’s separate,” he wouldn’t even ask you where or how. He’d say, “Yes, let’s go.” And that one ended right there.”

Democrats are the house Negroes of American government. Their priority is to preserve the institution, even if it ceases to serve its original purpose. So if that means enabling the Trumpniks that seek to destroy it, well, that’s okay, as long as they keep a seat at the table. Even if it’s the kids’ table. The point is they get to keep all the privileges and perks of being in Washington, which is really all that Republican politicians want, except they actually, y’know, do stuff.

There is this theory in cynical leftist circles called Murc’s Law, which is the idea that in public perception everything is (or is made out to be) Democrats’ fault, including what Republicans do because Democrats somehow provoked them into doing it. Which is not entirely fair. Because it’s pretty obvious that Republicans are going to do whatever they want regardless of how Democrats act. Murc’s Law has also been expressed as “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”. A more accurate expression would be this: Republicans DO have agency, and they have the power of moral choice, whether they want to admit it or not. They go along with Trump not (just) because they’re scared of him and his Mob, but ultimately because he gets them what they want, and for that they will throw away everything they used to call “conservative.” They have agency. They can choose to do the right thing. And for at least since the Clinton Administration, they have always done the wrong thing. And since you can’t control them, and you can only control yourselves, you are responsible for what you can control.

Some would argue that rather than blaming Attorney General Merritt Garland for not prosecuting Trump before the midterms, we should blame Mitch McConnell, because after all, he was Senate Majority Leader during January 6 and in the impeachment could have organized his colleagues to get the necessary two-thirds vote for conviction, which also could have meant barring Trump from office and breaking his hold on the Republican Party. It was his fault for not having the Senate do their damn job. And while that assertion is quite true, it only confirms the point that Republicans have agency and choice, and they always choose evil. Mitch McConnell is the reason why Merritt Garland is not a Supreme Court Justice in the first place. If you’re relying on Mitch McConnell to save the republic, you’re doomed. Which is why the Biden Administration should have taken McConnell’s decision as policy, and acted accordingly.

If Biden had instead appointed Jack Smith or someone of like character to be Attorney General, he would at least have started the investigations earlier so that Trump’s telegraphed strategy of legal delay until re-election would have been less likely to succeed. Biden and Harris kept saying that Trump and Republicans were an existential threat to the republic, but they didn’t act like it. By appointing Garland as AG and not pressing the issue of January 6 while it was still fresh, Biden and Democrats gave the impression that Trump’s behavior was the new norm. If we wanted to preserve the impression of a two-party system where Republicans and Democrats could negotiate in good faith, Democrats needed to address the main aberration preventing such negotiation. Because let’s face it, if you really DO believe that the republic is under threat, refusing to take every legal means to deal with it means you have failed your raison d’etre as government, just as surely as if you had let Mexico or Russia march troops into one of our states.

Another issue that was definitely under Democratic control was the economy. “It’s the economy, stupid” in America is analogous to that Roman emperor who told his heirs “Make the soldiers rich and don’t worry about the rest“. This is what you need to keep foremost if you want to stay on top. Needless to say, one thing you don’t want to do if you want to stay in office is jack up inflation. But while Biden’s America Rescue Plan was intended to deal with COVID impacts on the economy, and other developed nations also had price increases after 2020, in the US prices rose higher and faster. was primarily intended to reduce deficits long term by creating even more spending on IRS enforcement and renewable energy initiatives. However experts say its impacts, if any, will take place over years and it did not have a statistical impact on inflation leading up to 2024, and now that Republicans have all branches of government, they are in position to reverse a lot of these changes. Which is another good lesson in regard to both the Biden and Obama presidencies: Will the changes you want to implement cost you so much politically that they can be easily reversed the next time Republicans get power?

Democrats, you protected an establishment that wasn’t working for the average American, and that’s why the country abandoned you. Now authoritarians control all three branches of government, and thanks to the tech bros and TikTok, they control the media. Something else you completely took for granted. So you can quit defending the establishment, because you’re no longer it. You should do what Republicans did during all those years of liberal Big Government dominance: use the remaining procedures of the system to gum up their plans, while you still have the chance. Create your own media spaces to build a following outside the “Lamestream Media.” Like Rush Limbaugh did. And you should actually do what Rush and Newt Gingrich did with the “Contract For America” when they sought to take control of the House of Representatives: Tell everybody what you’re actually FOR. And publicize a step-by-step plan for how you want to accomplish it in the Congress, as opposed to hoping you elect a president so he can do everything by executive order.

And to the leftist faction, if you really care about the human rights of Palestinians, maybe try not to give political aid and comfort to Jared Kushner’s father-in-law. Just a thought. You could use one.

To come down to it, Democrats need to find out what people actually want from the government and then offer yourselves as the party that can do it. Even if that goes against your protocols or you don’t think it’s going to work. You’ve tried what you think is going to work, and it hasn’t. Remember the Costanza Maneuver.

The fact is, most Americans are not communists. We do not believe that billionaires are inherently evil just because they have more money than everyone else. We do not necessarily hate Christians just because they believe in something no one else can see. The majority ARE Christians, at least nominally. We do not hate conservatism just because. In fact, the reason the once-Republican Party has managed to coast this long is because Americans ARE generally right-of-center. It’s the billionaires and religious conservatives themselves that are promoting an image of petty control freaks against a general public that is disinclined to believe the Left’s opinion of them. In other words, if anyone believes the “conservatives” are the enemy, it’s because of what they actually do, not because of what Democrats say they are. Cause as we saw in November, no one cares what Democrats think.

If there is no constructive opposition to the party in power, eventually there will come a destructive opposition. This is what we saw in at least two elections. People were so sick of the Democrats and their mores and their political correctness that they elected the Trump Party, again, even knowing what that would mean. But what happens when even the opposition becomes insufferable and there is no constructive alternative to them?

If we actually survive four years of this, the Trump Party is going to have to decide if it wants to support Trump for a third term, against the Constitution. (I doubt he will live so long, but remember, God is real, and He hates us all.) Doing so would cause conflict immediately. Worse would be if he does retire, or dies before 2028, in which case the cult will have its various factions fight it out for supremacy, since none of them command the same mass appeal that Trump does on his own. I predict the various proud oathbreaker boogaloo boys will rampage across the land committing bloodshed and mass rape, possibly involving women. Eventually it will escalate across the 48 states, if not beyond, and make The Purge look like Switzerland. When they have exhausted our military resources and manpower, the remaining 40 percent of sane Americans will have to find the least radioactive part of the country and try to rebuild civilization.

But that’s the optimistic view.

More likely Americans will continue to do what they always do, they will continue to normalize, they will continue to rationalize, they will continue to refuse to take radical action against radical action, and the republic will continue to decay into a zombie of itself, dropping once-vital organs out of its body as it shambles on. And future generations will think the current dysfunction is the way things always were, and therefore the way things are supposed to be. While those old enough to remember where everything went south will look at 2025 as the good old days.

In the short term, I’ve decided that when it comes time to confirm my voter registration, I’m going to change back to Independent from Democrat. Not that I am not still obliged to vote for Democrats as the only plausible not-Trump party in the general election, but the only reason to be in the party is to vote in their primary rounds, and it’s pretty clear to me that my opinion isn’t wanted. And if my mental contribution isn’t wanted, most of the party (with some exceptions) isn’t getting my material contribution either. Cause at this point, the main difference between a Kickstarter fundraising campaign and a Democratic Party fundraising campaign is that in the Kickstarter campaign there’s a better chance of getting what I paid for.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Section 31

Star Trek: Section 31 is really more a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh than an examination of the titular secret agency. If you’re not a Star Trek fan (and if not, why are you reading this?), Section 31 was introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the secret service of the Federation, doing grey and black intelligence missions that Starfleet’s laws officially do not allow. If you haven’t seen Star Trek: Discovery, Yeoh played Phillipa Georgiou, the mentor and commander of officer Michael Burnham, who was quickly killed but then turned out to exist in the evil Mirror Universe as none other than the ruler of the Terran Empire. Burnham rescued that version and brought her into the main universe but when Discovery was catapulted into the far future, Georgiou became too much of a dimensional paradox to live, and so was sent to another part of the temporal continuum closer to when she came into it.

After a flashback scene with a truly brutal family reunion, it is announced that Georgiou reappeared in the main universe and was recruited by Section 31 only to go missing after a few years. The story starts with Georgiou running a swanky nightclub on a station outside Federation space, but she is tracked down and given an intriguing mission by Section 31 field leader Alok (Omari Hardwick). He then introduces her to his team: “Fuzz” (Sven Ruygrok), one of those Men In Black-type slugs piloting a bipedal robot in disguise, equipped with a terrible haircut and even more terrible accent, Zeph (Robert Kazinsky) a cyborg mercenary with a slightly less terrible accent, Melle (Humberly Gonzales) a Deltan seductress/’face’ agent, Quasi (Sam Richardson) a Cameloid shapeshifter and theoretical genius, and Starfleet liason Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl, who does look a lot like Tricia O’Neil).

Of course what seems like a simple job becomes more complicated as the mission turns out to be a loose end from Georgiou’s Terran past, one that threatens entire star systems.

The movie moves fairly quickly and lasts only a little more than 90 minutes, but it requires some clumsy exposition to connect most of the parts together. And as one of the action scenes sped along two-thirds of the way in, I found myself thinking of why the original Star Trek holds up so well despite having outdated ideas and really cheap production (which wasn’t much improved in the first two seasons of The Next Generation). And I decided that the Original Series’ painted sets and school-theatre special-effects budgets were almost an asset, because lacking our modern techniques, they had to depend on old-fashioned elements like scripts. And dialogue. And characterization.

I mean, Hardwick is good and Rohl shows promise, but the main reason to see this movie is Michelle Yeoh, clearly having a blast with the whole thing, despite playing a character who is always confronted with a legacy that makes Palpatine look like Mahatma Gandhi. The story’s epilogue clearly sets up “continuing missions”, and the production was originally intended as the pilot of a spin-off series, but with Star Trek apparently cutting production and Yeoh having a higher work profile, this was all that could be made of the idea. Just as well. Star Trek: Section 31 is good enough as a stand-alone action movie but its presentation makes it unlikely to work for a whole season, let alone more than one.

Tick, Tock

I’m going to be fairly brief, cause I have other things on my mind, and the story is moving fast, but the Biden Administration approved a law passed by Congress that says the social app TikTok has to either close in the United States or allow its Chinese proprietor, ByteDance, to sell to an American company by this Sunday, January 19. On Friday January 17, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the ban, notably by a unanimous vote.

My impressions:

I’ve never used TikTok and find most of social media, especially X, to be a giant waste of time that drags the intellect to low levels by focusing on the superficial. In many ways, I’m in favor of the ban given that China specifically uses its media for government purposes and entities do not have the same independence that Western media entities do. In particular, the justices said that their decision was not based on free speech but rather the capacity of the Chinese government to use the medium to gather Western users’ data. The fact that ByteDance is unwilling to sell regardless of how much money is offered seems to confirm this.

Yes, but-

The fact that lawmakers are willing to raise this valid point in the one case while not targeting rather extensive Russian government penetration of our media, not to mention the fact that Elon Musk was able to buy Twitter in order to turn it into a “Dark Web” haven and then an outright Trump support base means that much of the outrage is selective. Indeed, Donald Trump had supported the law banning TikTok, which is one reason it got passed, but has since changed his mind, likely because the owners know how to appeal to his ulterior motives. Indeed, the company CEO is scheduled to attend Trump’s inaugural with Musk, Jeff Bezos and the other tech oligarchs.

In his opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated, “Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us,” also noting that China could simply use another app in the US that is not banned to achieve the same results. In fact it already has.

The app is referred to as “RedNote” in the US but is a mainly Chinese-language app intended for the home country, where in Mandarin it is called Xiaohongshu, which actually means “Little Red Book.” The American fans of TikTok, who tend to be young, are flocking to RedNote largely in protest of the government’s decision, even though the site, unlike TikTok, is not designed for English speakers, and as a domestic app is full of its own censorship including any mention of homosexuality or related social issues. But the information exchange has some interesting effects in that it is both ways. A lot of Americans are specifically intending to reach out to Chinese speakers, and that undermines China’s own attempts to control social media. “Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Weibo and currently a U.S.-based editor with China Digital Times, told Rest of World. “The fact that Americans are using Xiaohongshu is already [stepping] on the red line,” Liu said. “This is something that will not be able to last because Americans don’t practice self-censorship.” To comply with Chinese law, the app may need to create a wall between domestic and foreign users, as ByteDance has done with TikTok and Douyin, he added.”

In the process Chinese people are learning more about the dark side of America because Americans discuss issues that Chinese are not allowed to mention in their own media. One Chinese poster commented: “Xiaohongshu is filled with American stories of how they had to drop out of university due to financial issues, how they could hardly afford a nice meal at a restaurant for their children’s birthday and how they had given up hope and saw no way out of their agony.” Of course the Chinese government will tell their people stories about how American culture and capitalism are inferior to theirs, but they are now seeing actual Americans tell their own experiences, which in some cases are worse than what their government is telling them.

And this is something a lot of Americans had not been aware of, nor were they aware that in other countries (not just communist tyrannies) government covers higher education and health care. A lot of Americans on RedNote were not any more aware that we have school shootings than the Chinese, nor were they aware that you have to pay for ambulance service. None of these things are censored in American media, but neither are they emphasized. To learn about them, you have to be one of us oldthinkers who still refer to regular news media instead of having your information given to you by social media algorithms.

In this way, the attempt to cut off contact with the Chinese viewpoint is actually encouraging Americans to look beyond their established system and realize its problems. And again, it’s working both ways. There is one article about how some Americans are joining RedNote in order to show Chinese how to 3-D print guns.

So even if TikTok IS a Goddamn communist front, banning it is just as counterproductive from a libertarian standpoint as any other kind of censorship, not to mention making us closer to being the very government we here claim to oppose. And this also reveals the corruption in our system, especially given how many elected officials who voted to ban TikTok still use it.

A Proposal To The Congress

Mister Speaker,

it has come to the attention of some of us that our 45th President, soon to be inaugurated the 47th, Donald Trump, is not amused. He recently posted on social media, ““The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration”. How could this be? Because former president Jimmy Carter, having already lived to 100 years old, decided to die on the last day of 2024, prompting the current president Joe Biden to announce a thirty day period of mourning, which would end up including the re-inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, almost as if Carter were intending to ruin the event.

But how could he? How could this fact dispel the happiness of this occasion, in which the divine order of things is restored and our sovereign returns to his rightful place of power? How could it be counted as an omen against the new president? Has he not proven himself invincible?

Donald Trump, whose wrath shakes the mountains and causes storm fronts to recede from his glare. Donald Trump, who single-handedly created the Grand Canyon – after vacationing in Arizona and misplacing his wallet. Donald Trump, whose member is of such length, mass and hardness that he may topple the Washington Monument with a single whack.

And yet, Our President, whose dread majesty has reduced every member of the Republican caucus to fearful obedience, has the sensitivity of a small child, such that the coincidence of another president’s mourning period triggers hysterical emotion. Truly, Our President is a colossus who contains multitudes. Verily, he is like Zeus, only without the modesty or chastity. But why should he NOT be offended? Is Donald Trump not a better president than Jimmy Carter? Has he not done what no man since Grover Cleveland did, winning a presidential election after losing one? A loss, I do not need to remind my Republican colleagues, that only occurred because the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Our President, and yet he returned with an undeniable majority vote – of the people who bothered to show up – despite the fact that there were one million fewer Americans since 2020, thanks to a deadly virus that President Trump allowed to run rampant. Surely that victory speaks to his popularity and his political acumen?

Therefore Mister Speaker, in order to compensate our Dear Leader for the offense committed against him by the real world, I propose the following:

That on the day of Donald Trump’s own death, whatever date on the calendar that may be, Congress shall declare the anniversary of said death to be a federal holiday and a date of remembrance and celebration. It will be a day of feasting and merriment for the country at large and a day of rest for our federal employees and contractors.

In this way, We, the People, will be able to demonstrate to Donald Trump’s family and faithful how much more popular he is than Jimmy Carter, how much more loved he is than Jimmy Carter, and how much better a president he is than Jimmy Carter. I think Trump’s followers will be amazed at the passion of our nation’s response.

And finally Mister Speaker, so that this happy day will not be too long delayed, I hereby offer a solemn prayer to the LORD, that He may take his faithful servant, Donald Trump, home to live with him as soon as possible, so that Elon Musk can get back to running things without further interference.

I yield back the balance of my time.

What Shall We Call Him

I exploit you

Still you love me

I tell you one and one makes three

Oho, I’m the cult of personality

– Living Colour, Cult of Personality

Happy New Year!

Eh, not really. I am not at all expecting this to be a happy year. This week is more about celebrating the fact that 2024 is finally over.

In less than three weeks Trump is going to resume his throne in the country that was once a democratic republic. And if I have to keep talking about him for the next four years (at least) I have to decide how he is to be addressed.

I am now willing to call Trump ‘President-elect’ because clearly he did get elected with a slim majority and a large margin in the Electoral College, but I am not calling him ‘president’ because while he likewise got elected fair and square in 2016, he lost all right to that title with his actions in office.

Likewise I am willing to use the expression POTUS, (President Of The United States) except that we are clearly no longer a “united” states, thus Trump would simply be President Of States, or POS.

I had called Trump Viceroy of Russian North America, but that may no longer be the case. Because now that Vladimir Putin has been grinding his army to death in Ukraine for the better part of three years, and had to pull out of Syria because they needed all the troops they could get for Ukraine, Russia is clearly getting weak. And Trump is like a shark, for example in terms of morality and higher brain processes. But specifically in that if the shark smells blood in the water, it’s going to dive for it. And right now, Putin is literally bleeding. So is Ukraine, but based on the fact that Trump’s foreign policy team includes hawks like Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, Trump may not be as supplicant to Putin as he has been. Probably his staff told him he can get a lot more money from having Ukraine in the Western fold than he can get from having America in the Russian fold.

Which gets to another thing with Trump. Even during his first term, it was often noted that Trump didn’t have a policy on anything, his actions were basically dictated by the last person who talked to him. Well, at this point, Trump is so old that he can’t find his own dick without a smartphone app. He was basically running for president just to feed his Id and stay out of jail, and thanks to his cult, he achieved that goal. So he doesn’t need them anymore. And he doesn’t really need to actually be president, he can just hang around in the White House and Mar-a-Lago and fly everywhere with the Secret Service and overcharge their accomodations on the taxpayer dime and have two scoops of ice cream at every dinner and not have to actually do anything for it as long as the people around him are doing what the Republican brain trust wants them to do.

Coming up to the election it was becoming obvious to a lot of us that the people behind Trump were using him as a celebrity figurehead to sell an autocracy to the masses, and once inaugurated they would be the ones in charge, but now that it’s done and no one can do anything about it, they’re just making it that much more obvious to everyone else.

Which is why I decided that Trump’s new title is:
Vice President Trump.

Because really, has anyone even seen JD Vance recently?

What made Trump’s real status clear even to the Trumpniks is the recent “civil war” over H1B visas. His tech bros, President-elect Elon Musk and councilor Vivek Ramaswamy are in favor of them, ostensibly because we don’t have enough qualified professionals in the States but really because we don’t have to pay immigrant professionals as much and the status of an H1B visa is conditional and can be revoked, giving employers leverage over these employees. Of course people like Elon Musk would never be so unethical as to exploit such undue advantage.

Whereas Laura Loomer and other MAGA nativists object to the H1B not because it allows exploitation but because we’re getting more people of Indian descent – like Ramaswamy – into the culture of this country. And they’ve been saying so. And not unclearly.

Which allows people like Ramaswamy and Musk to actually flip back and pose as defenders of classical liberal capitalism and equal opportunity after playing to the same nativists for all this time. And after the Trumpnik backlash to his policy, President-elect Musk first posted on X “FUCK YOURSELF in the face” and then “Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform”. Twitter was never about positive, beautiful or informative content even before he took it over, and it is certainly not so now.

And of course Musk also de-monetized the accounts of people like Loomer, to prove his commitment to free speech.

And after all this everyone in Trumpworld was waiting to see how the czar would react given his own criticisms of H1B, Trump told reporters this weekend that he’s “always liked” the visas. At his New Year’s party a reporter asked him what made him change his mind, and he said “I didn’t change my mind.”

Well, he IS senile.

December 27, Trump posted “Anyone – of any race, creed or nationality – who came to America and worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect. America is the land of freedom and opportunity. Fight with every fiber of your being to keep it that way!”

And one of his followers responded “Wtf is going on here? This is NOT what we voted for.”

You can’t show it any better than that.

I mean, certainly Trumpniks didn’t vote to keep America as a land of freedom and opportunity for anyone who is willing to work for it.

This is the problem with representative government generally and the American “democracy” in particular. Elected officials only answer to voters every two to six years, but they answer to their donors every single day. So who did you think Trump was going to side with?

Charlie Kirk recently said that we didn’t vote for an oligarch. This just a few weeks after Steve Bannon told the fan club that Trump should run for a third term and put political opponents like Rachel Maddow in prison. But you didn’t elect an oligarch.

Bullshit you did. You wanted a thin-skinned oligarch with delusions of competence, you just wanted it to be Trump. Because you’re a cult of personality and style matters more than substance.

So congratulations, your personality cult just elected a thin-skinned oligarch with delusions of competence, it’s just a different personality.

That’s what you wanted, Trumpniks. That’s what you’re going to get.

And there’s a word for people who conned themselves into getting something they thought they didn’t want.

The word is sucker.

So here’s your sign:

I expect you to be wearing this for me every damn day for the next four years, or however long it takes for people to start CAD-producing guillotines.

Jimmy Carter, RIP

Well, I had thought I was done commenting on 2024, but on Sunday, former President Jimmy Carter died.

In some respect that is not really news. Carter had already lived to 100, making him the longest-surviving president ever. He had lived over a year in hospice care and had also survived his wife Roslynn for over a year. Whatever one thinks of death, they’re together now. So I see little cause to mourn. I also see little reason for praise.

When I was a kid, I read through the TIME-LIFE series of books on World War II, starting with its origins at the end of World War I. The peace talks for that war were supervised by the “Big Four” Allied Powers, but since Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando could not speak English while French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau could, the talks ended up being a Big Three where Clemenceau debated with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and American President Woodrow Wilson. And at one point Clemenceau gave his assessment of Wilson: “I never met a man who talked more like Jesus Christ, or acted more like Lloyd George.”
That’s basically my assessment of Jimmy Carter.

Certainly Carter was a more sincere Christian than most Southern Baptist politicians since, but by the same token he was so self-righteous he didn’t see much reason to work out his differences with others. There was an excellent biographical article on Carter this Sunday where it was recalled that Hunter Thompson said Carter was “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met”, with the other two being Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels. “He’d cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx.” He made a lot of enemies he didn’t need to make, which contributed to a tough primary campaign against Ted Kennedy in 1980. His stubbornness made it possible for him to forge a peace deal between the bitter enemies Anwar Sadat in Egypt and Menachem Begin in Israel but it didn’t help him with Congress. He did a few things that we probably needed to do anyway, like restoring the Panama Canal to its home nation, but that was perceived as weakening American prestige, as opposed to the OPEC-led energy crisis and the Iranian hostage crisis, which did weaken American prestige.

In his Monday morning podcast, Keith Olbermann’s headline was “THE GREATEST PRESIDENT SINCE FDR IS DEAD”. I mean… really? Carter was better than Truman, who handled diplomacy during the Korean War and desegregated the military? Better than Eisenhower, who might have been the last Republican to believe in responsible government? Better than JFK? LBJ?

I can understand why Olbermann wouldn’t praise Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor. In fact, this is his thesis from the transcript: “I will make my case, and more importantly, my case that the fact he WASN’T re-elected was the beginning of the end. The 1980 election was when I realized America wanted a spokesmodel, not a leader. A fake smile, not principles; often somebody dumber than they were. Even Clinton and Obama and their exceptional presidencies prevailed on charisma. That we turned away a complete human for a mentally diminished bad actor who wasn’t that sharp to begin with has set a pattern we may never break before the nation ends.”

Ha, ha, Keith. You’re half right. To be sure, Reagan set the model for a cheerleader president who got by on charisma and sold a bunch of promises that could not be reasonably delivered. But he was hardly a “mentally diminished bad actor who wasn’t that sharp to begin with”, at least not at first. I again invoke the 1980 primary debate between Reagan and then-rival George H.W. Bush on illegal immigration where both men addressed the issue with sensitivity and more articulately than most politicians in either party could do today.

You can criticize Reagan for a lot of things, including racism, but he was a cheerleader, not a prophet of hate. Racism was not the basis of the appeal. Reagan did not make his own immorality the basis of his appeal. Reagan and Reagan Republicans like John McCain did not make fun of disabled reporters or accuse female reporters who questioned them of being on the rag. That took a special kind of moral decay. That’s the second half of the problem with basing politics on charisma. If Carter set a standard of moral integrity, we had another leader who established that a president could break both laws and moral standards and get away with it. That wasn’t Trump. That was Bill Clinton. Because that was where we first had a womanizing pathological liar and real estate cheat commit perjury in a federal investigation and get impeached over it and walk away. Because his party told everybody the charges were “nothing”, that they were a “witch hunt”, that they “didn’t rise to the level of impeachment” – hey Democrats, stop me if this sounds like anything you’ve been hearing recently.

That required normalization by his party and a sympathetic media. Normalization by people like… Keith Olbermann.


See, this is why when Democrats opposed Trump by invoking “the rule of law”, that was in retrospect doomed from the start. Because Democrats don’t use laws. They have norms. And the difference is that a law is on the books whether everybody agrees with it or not. That’s why they’re laws. Norms are just the way we’ve decided to do things. It’s easier for the party in power to operate on norms than on laws that explicitly get in their way. Just call the Constitution a “living document” and ignore the parts you don’t like. The laws are enforced by law enforcement. Norms are only enforced by peer pressure. But when your norm ultimately becomes “we don’t enforce the laws”, well, guess what happens to the rule of law? And what happens to your rule of norms when the norms change on you? We had a whole system of laws, many of which were written after Watergate precisely to prevent a president from getting as bad as Nixon. But really, we quit having the rule of law when we changed the norm to “it doesn’t matter if a president commits perjury, it doesn’t even matter if he’s impeached, as long as he’s in our party and he gives us the Supreme Court justices we want.”

Jesus Christ, Keith, where do you think the Republicans learned that?

To the extent that this piece is even about Jimmy Carter, certainly Carter was a better man than most of the presidents I’ve mentioned, but objectively, he wasn’t even as good a president as Joe Biden. And we can see from that example that winning an election and being a good administrator does not necessarily mean you have the skills to win the public for a second term. And unlike Biden, I wouldn’t even give Carter credit for being a good administrator. The best thing he did domestically was hiring Paul Volcker to handle inflation, and that had effects that were deeply unpopular at the time and through the next few years after Reagan kept him.

If at this time, we’re expected to rank Carter in terms of historical presidents, the obvious comparison is with Herbert Hoover, someone who was regarded as a great humanitarian both before and after leaving the Oval Office, but who as president was so inept at handling crisis that his successor from the other party ended up resetting the whole paradigm of American politics from then on.

One might think given the level of loss that Biden-Harris suffered in 2024 that Trump might be in a similar position to reset American politics, but given what a bag of cats his party has turned into even before his second inauguration, that seems unlikely.

But we’re also expected to give tribute to the dead, and I can at least say this much: When I was coming of age, I thought Jimmy Carter was the worst president ever, certainly the worst in my lifetime. But thanks to Bush Junior and Trump, that is clearly not the case.

So rest easy, Jimmy. You’ve earned it.

Gettin’ Too Old For This

In the news vacuum between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ve been seeing a few things on YouTube where leftists engage in Schadenfreude at an apparent civil war on the Right concerning the outright racists like Laura Loomer who want to bar all immigration to this country and President-elect Elon Musk who wants to keep most of the rules as they are so he can get more “qualified professionals” from places like India (who coincidentally would not command the same wages as American professionals).

And that is good in that conflict between the MAGAts makes it less likely that they will be able to pass laws against the rest of us who just want to live our lives in peace. But ultimately they’re still in charge. Because if you’re not voting for the Democrat, you’re effectively voting for the Republican. The reason The Election happened the way it did is that Trump only got 3 million votes over his 2020 total while Kamala Harris had over 6 million votes less compared to Biden.

And that’s if you voted Green, voted Libertarian or voted for Democrats down ballot and left the presidential choice blank. Or just stayed home. When you don’t vote, you vote. Because you know that the Republicans are motivated to get out and vote, and if you don’t vote, you’re effectively voting for all those people to let their choices win out over yours.

But politically what that means is that if Democrats don’t give people something to vote for, Republicans are going to keep winning by default. So that means the Democratic Party needs to ask itself what it needs to do to win elections again.

First off, like James Carville says, they need to recognize that the purpose of a political party is to win elections, without which none of their ideals can be realized. If your goal is to debate some hypothetical perfect government amongst yourselves when you can’t even agree with each other, much less convert the population at large, welcome to the Libertarian Party.

A good rule of thumb is to adopt the Constanza Maneuver. What is that, you ask? Well, if you don’t know, you are probably not real old and uncool like I am. But there was this one episode of Seinfeld where Jerry was talking with his schmuck friend George Constanza and George was going over his bad luck and bad decisions and realizing that everything he did got the opposite result of what he wanted. So Jerry tells him, “if what you do always gets the opposite of what you want, why don’t you do the opposite of what you want, and get that?” So George tries it. He sees a girl at the deli and rather than try to pick her up with some bullshit story about how he is cooler than he actually is, he just walks up to her and says “My name is George. I have no job, and I live with my parents.” And it works. Obviously it doesn’t work for long, but this is how he ended up getting a job with the New York Yankees, and that lasted for several years.

If you’re old enough to remember that episode, you know what I’m talking about. And unfortunately that means your first application of the Constanza Maneuver is to go against the Democratic Party’s innate tendency to prioritize its seniors over the younger people who actually know how to communicate.

Because in addition to many, many previous examples, such as the continuing presence of Dianne Feinstein in the Senate right up to her death of old age, we recently had an expose’ in the Wall Street Journal about Joe Biden’s general lack of acuity in the White House leading to (among other things) lack of communication within government in regard to our Afghanistan withdrawal, and keeping him on a tight schedule with limited access to others “to limit potential missteps”. And then on the Republican side, in addition to the general ill health of Mitch McConnell who is stepping down as Senate Leader after this term but continuing to be Senator from Kentucky, you had a Texas Congresswoman, Kay Granger, having been missing in action for the last six months, being found in a memory care facility where she was admitted “after being found wandering through her neighborhood while seemingly lost and confused.”

But more relevant for the Democratic Party right now, Nancy Pelosi of California, who is 3 years older than Joe Biden herself, who is no longer Democratic House Leader but has been running a lot of things behind the scenes (including the pressure campaign to end Joe Biden’s run for president) was apparently the big factor in pushing aside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) for the leading Democratic seat in the House Oversight Committee, in favor of Gerry Connolly (D.-Virginia), who is not only elderly but suffering from esophageal cancer.

Again, this is hardly a problem unique to Democrats, but we already know that Republicans don’t particularly care about getting new voices or listening to different viewpoints, because they have a base that doesn’t care about that either. But in the long run that’s going to be a problem for them too. Because to go back, we already know from the 2020 elections that the potential Democratic/non-Trumpnik vote is a lot bigger than the total that actually showed up this year. And whoever can appeal to the people that didn’t show up could win the next election.

And as I had said just after the Brian Thompson shooting, if it seems like it’s odd that the youth of today – along with a lot of other people – are willing to support the murder of an executive but are not willing to support the one party that might have stopped Musk’s current tech oligarchy, the common factor is that people don’t think that that one party really cares about them. The Democrats don’t really care about ending oligarchy when they effectively practice it themselves. And I can see that a lot of the party bigwigs didn’t want a rabble-rouser like AOC in a position of authority on a major committee, but part of the Constanza Maneuver is not giving a damn what the safe position is. Because that’s all the Democrats have been doing since Obama ended his second term, and even during his Administration. Playing it safe. They played it safe picking Hillary over Biden cause it was “her turn”, they then picked Biden over a whole host of younger people cause it was “his turn”, he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate cause she ran all the demographic boxes, then refused to hand over the 2024 campaign to her after the midterms because he thought he would be a safer candidate, then when he had no choice he and the other Democrats transitioned to Harris – who is only 60 – because that was safer than an open convention. The Democrats have been playing it safe while Republicans continue to put all their chips on the riskiest bet imaginable. And where are they now?

This is completely independent of whether the Democrats should be all in on socialists like AOC or doing more to appeal to the center, or even if they know how to appeal to anybody. But that’s a broader issue I intend to discuss in the next few weeks.

But for this essay, I think one way to start general reform is by addressing the gerontocracy in politics, which might be a non-partisan issue but is that much less likely to be addressed by the Trump Party than the Democrats, given that their Dear Leader makes Joe Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. Strictly as a hypothetical, among the many, many changes I would make to the American government – such as, changing the official language to Swedish – I would recommend putting a maximum age limit of 75 on any federal office. After all, if the Founders saw the wisdom of putting a minimum age limit on presidents, it’s just as wise to state maybe someone older than 75 would be too old for office, especially since most people in the 1700s didn’t even live to 75. You wouldn’t be ineligible to run any time before that, but if the end of your term takes you past the age of 75, you can’t run again. The specific exception being Supreme Court justices and lower court judges, who would have to retire at 75, in addition to having term limits. Because as a lot of liberals pointed out, it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying on the Court in hopes of outlasting a Republican President that helped bring things to this point. And that decision, along with much of Joe Biden’s presidency, only points up an issue with people in power: the longer they stay in power, the more likely they are to make very unwise decisions, such as, staying in power in the first place.

And if there is anything that I have learned in my lifetime it is this: Human beings are like milk cartons. They should come with a sell-by date.

Congratulations To President-elect Musk

Elton John has gone on a media tour, and in recalling his past drug use, he has said that it was a bad idea for countries to decriminalize marijuana. Now from a libertarian or even harm reduction standpoint, I’m inclined to disagree. But we’ve been getting a lot of evidence of how dangerous it is for important people to make important decisions while chronically altered.

At 5:58 pm December 20, the Republican House of Representatives managed to pass a two-thirds vote to continue funding the government, which heads to the Democratic Senate. An agreement that had previously been made between the parties got torched by President-inept Donald Trump, or more accurately, by his main advisor, Elon Musk.

Side note: an old friend, Jason Tondro, the same Jason Tondro who had worked for Paizo and is currently working for Wizards of the Coast/Dungeons & Dragons and recently attracted controversy by saying he doesn’t care what old gamers think about the ‘woke’ direction of his company, posted recently on Facebook that he came up with a new word, ‘Xit’ to describe what used to be a ‘tweet’ before Musk changed Twitter into X. ‘Xit’ is meant to be pronounced ‘shit’.

Anyway, this week Musk Xitted that the government should not only throw out the spending bill, but not pass any spending until Trump’s coronation on January 20th. In other words, a whole month, during which government workers would have no salary through Christmas and the civilians who depend on them would have few if any services. The fact that Musk got House Speaker Moscow Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) to go along with this has caused a large number of people to refer to Musk – perhaps jokingly – as the president-elect.

This is not a new observation. Ever since The Election, Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the remaining reasons to watch MSDNC, has pointed out that Musk’s influence on our President-inept makes him the acting President for the new government with Trump as Vice President at best, especially since JD Vance is that much less in the spotlight now than he was as a Senator. Recently O’Donnell pointed out that Musk openly uses drugs and has violated the federal security rules regarding federal contractors, which applied to Musk because of Space X’s work for the government.

But then, the lesson of the first Trump term was that all the laws and all the safeguards our government has to protect against corruption are meaningless if they’re not going to be enforced. And the lesson of this election is that nobody wants to enforce them.

Because America wanted celebrities. They wanted reality TV. They wanted the government to be run like a business. Well, now we once again have a celebrity coming to the White House who got his reputation from playing a billionaire on TV, while his eminence grise is an actual billionaire who’s going to run this country just like he runs Twitter. Into the ground.

Specifically by expecting all the staff to work harder with fewer resources and personnel, and calling the result “efficiency”, and by giving a platform to crank theorists, neo-Nazis and Putin sympathizers, to the extent that they are not all the same group.

Why? Because everybody in the Trump Party, possibly including Trump, knows that Trump is a pudding brain who at this point in his life is just a greasy, unnatural, artificially colored amalgamation of pork. Like the McRib. Except we don’t have to listen to the McRib ramble for 2 hours about how everything it doesn’t like is socialist. So you have Elon Musk, who certainly has more direction than Trump himself even if he might actually be more addled by chemicals. So we have what are ostensibly Trump ideas like “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) to be co-headed by Musk and fellow suckup Vivek Ramaswamy. Because nothing says efficiency like creating a whole new bureaucratic office and then appointing two men to run it.

And all of that is because Musk knows his target better than all the other suckups and having more money and influence than the others is in best position to appeal to him. Also this week, Musk apparently crashed a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump was hosting suckup-in-training Jeff “Democracy Dies In Darkness, And I Should Know” Bezos. Journalist Seth Abramson reacted: “What it also confirms is that Musk not only has no boundaries and believes himself Trump’s superior but has no intention of permitting any other plutocrat to squeeze more juice out of Trump than him. Showing up at that dinner uninvited is a power play intended to cow both other oligarchs and Trump.” This from an article that concluded: “One person was happy with the night, and in the end it’s likely the only one Musk cared about. Trump woke up the morning after the crashed dinner and took to his Truth Social account exclaiming: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”

Because Trump really is a little kid who still needs to be reassured that he is the most important person in the world, even after the public has twice confirmed that he is. And heaven forbid anything should threaten that self perception. This month Trump successfully bullied ABC News into bribing him with a $15 million contribution to his presidential library (I had no idea HUSTLER had so many back issues) because anchor George Stephanopoulos said he was guilty of rape in the E. Jean Carroll civil case (a legal technicality more than a slander) and not only that, he wants to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for a pre-election poll that showed Harris leading slightly in Iowa where Trump ultimately won by a safe margin.

I have never seen a more sore winner in my life.

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, Trump. Can you just let reality WIN, for once? Can you not pitch a fit because you can’t make the sun rise in the west? Can you not sue the H.L. Mencken estate for him predicting that one day America would elect a downright moron? You’re gonna be president again. Despite all the “experts” telling America why that would be a horrible idea. You defied all the odds.

You got everything you wanted. No one can touch you.

You’re Superman now.

So go and jump out of a window, Donnie.

Everyone wants to see you fly.