Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

Some of you may already be familiar with the term “Pyrrhic victory,” but in case you’re not: In the days of Antiquity, when the Roman Republic was starting to take over the Italian peninsula, the Italian city of Tarentum (modern Taranto) recruited Pyrrhus, a king of western Greece, to help them resist the Romans. In the Pyrrhic War (280-275 BC) Pyrrhus’ skills as a general led him to victories over the Romans, but the losses were costly. And while his mercenaries were in limited supply, the Romans had a vastly greater manpower reserve. Eventually, at the Battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus realized that. When one of his people told him they had won the day, Pyrrhus looked at the battlefield and said words to the effect of “another such victory and we are lost.”

Well, here we are.

We now have probably the third-worst possible result of Election 2020: The worst, of course, would be a clear Trump victory that would also secure the Senate. Although no one had expected Democrats to lose the House, at least until this week. Either way, Trump and Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell would have gotten to do whatever they wanted and Nancy Pelosi would be just as powerless to stop them as she is now.

The second worst result would have been if the Democrats’ famous “blue wave” had taken the Senate and expanded the House lead but the Electoral College still secured the presidency for Trump. Then Trump would still retain his toxic influence over the government and the culture, but then Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would be able to hem him in and Mitch wouldn’t be able to protect him. Not only that, Trump would still get the blame for every rotten thing in the government.

What we have coming up is the third worst possible result where the “blue wave” smacked up against the reality of Republican base support, just as it did in 2018 Senate races, but Joe Biden still gets the Electoral College. He’s still got to deal with McConnell, and he’s not going to get much if anything done through the Senate. And all the while, in his next two years, Republicans will be doing their damndest to keep this country bass-ackward and then blame Biden as the figurehead of the Democrats, and quite likely take back the House in the 2022 midterms as a result. And that will set up a humongous effort for Republicans to take back the whole thing in 2024.

And while Trump’s toxic influence would still be removed from institutional authority, unless he’s immediately indicted and effectively prosecuted by the State of New York, he will run again and quite likely win. And if he can’t, you know Donald Trump Jr. is waiting in the wings to wave the bloody shirt for dear old Dad. And I’ve seen Don. He’s not senile, he’s slightly less idiotic than his Dad, and he’s actually a decent public speaker.

You know why I say Democrats are the people who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse? This is why.

Let me first go over the good news: The Biden plan DID work.

It was expected that with the coronavirus, it would be harder to vote in person (almost as if Trump let the virus run wild during an election year so it’d be harder to vote against him), and it was expected that as a result, Democrats would have to concentrate on mail-in voting while Trump implicitly and explicitly told his people to vote in person, even though many affluent Republicans (like Trump himself) had normally voted by mail for convenience. This set up a “red mirage” that caused Election Night to show a huge lead for Trump in critical states like Pennsylvania. But since mail-in voting was a thing even before coronavirus, Trump couldn’t declare that mail-in ballots were “cheating” and therefore couldn’t stop them from coming in. And much to his apparent surprise, most of them weren’t for Trump. And that’s how Biden won Pennsylvania, created run-offs in Georgia, and maintained his lead in Arizona and Nevada.

In short, Trump played himself.

The plan to rely on changing demographics to pull away red states ultimately did not work in Florida, Texas or North Carolina. But it is sorta working in Georgia, and it definitely worked in Arizona.

This doesn’t change the fact that it has not yet worked for Florida, Texas and North Carolina, and it may not work as the Democrats expect it to, partially because a lot of brown and black people “of color” do not assume themselves to be Democrats just because, while a lot of white people DO assume themselves to be Republicans just because.

A libertarian (and black) Facebook friend turned me on to this article by Umair Haque: “America’s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State“. Example quote: “White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way. “Voting conservative” after all doesn’t mean nearly the same thing in Europe or Canada. There, even conservative parties agree on the basics — people should have healthcare, education, retirement, that the only point of the public purse isn’t endless war and death machines. Conservatism in America is off the charts, and so “voting” that way carries a very different meaning. It means that White Americans are the rich world’s most regressive, ignorant, and self-destructive political bloc — by such a long way that they might as well not be in the rich world at all.

“I don’t mean any of that as an insult, by the way. I mean it objectively, literally, factually. You’d think that by now White Americans would have figured out that voting against their own standards of living ever rising just because it meant black and brown people would have public goods too was…imbecilic. Especially watching Europe and Canada rise and prosper. They’ve had more than half a century to figure that out. But they still haven’t. What else do you call the inability to learn from the world and history but…ignorance?”

Now, Haque is a brilliant writer, but I often find him not only anti-American but overly despairing. But again, he is a brilliant writer. And as much as I wanted to disagree with the premise, the harder and harder it was to refute. How can I disagree with it when we’ve got almost a quarter million dead already from Trump Virus because he personally has told so many people that a $3 mask is possessed by evil spirits?

How can I disagree with it when at least three times in the last two weeks of the campaign, Trump bussed in supporters to watch him talk in front of Air Force One and then didn’t pay for the buses to take them back to their cars, literally leaving them out in the cold? Those people turned around AND VOTED FOR TRUMP!

These are the people who went out after the election to parrot the line “STOP THE COUNT” in Arizona, where Trump needed to count all the votes to still have a chance!

It’s not just a case of not wanting black and brown people to have public goods. Maybe it was once, but it’s gotten worse than that. These people have internalized their own bass-ackwardness to the point that they want to inflict it on the rest of the country, if not the world. Like I said in the first campaign: “When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”

The fact that some Americans are trapped in an existential hellhole because of deliberate political strategies, some of which they voted for, isn’t the point anymore. Because now that’s their identity. And identity is everything.

It doesn’t matter that both Biden and Obama are both a lot closer to Eisenhower or even Nixon Republicans than anybody in the Republican Party today, all “conservatives” care about is stopping the guy who they’re told is a socialist.

“What does ‘socialist’ mean to you?”
“Someone who wants to control our economy! Someone who wants to control our schools! Someone who wants to take our guns! Someone who praises Communist dictators! Someone who only wants THEIR party controlling things! Someone who says that anybody who disagrees with him ought to be jailed or beaten up!”

“Oh, so like Trump?”

“Yes! Wh- NO!”

“Socialism” isn’t the point here. Geez Louise, the first retirement system in Germany was created by Bismarck. The point is that you’re acting on tribalism and negative partisanship, and your favorite demagogue knows which buttons to push to make you act like good little robots, and you end up endorsing all the things you say you oppose, because all he had to do was switch the labels.

This is illustrated by a pretty good article by Alex Pareene in The New Republic, where it’s pointed out that in some respects it doesn’t really matter if Joe Biden is too left-wing for the country or not left-wing enough for “progressives.” “Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care, more state intervention in the economy, and more government support for clean energy. We have, of course, just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling, but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors. That Democrats cannot translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop. It is of course true that on many of these issues, like health care, the Democratic Party firmly rejected the left’s popular proposals in favor of a confusing and diluted alternative. That is what Democrats nearly always do. Perhaps that is what the electorate punishes them for. But that same electorate also regularly elects Republicans, who are very vocally opposed to all of those fine, popular ideas.”

The author goes on: “Faced with this dilemma, some commentators have insisted that Democrats just need to shut up about everything else in their great big platform and talk solely of dollars and cents. There is a liberal version of this argument, articulated by people like Mark Lilla: that Democrats should abandon their commitment to “identity” issues. And there is a left-wing version of this argument (caricatured by its opponents as “class reductionism”): that leftist politicians should focus on material concerns to the exclusion of all else.

“But what if the argument itself is moot? What if it barely matters what Democrats “talk about” or “campaign on”? What if this is less a problem of political messaging or positioning than of political education, information access, and ubiquitous propaganda? In other words, if the Democrats actively try to abandon “identity issues,” will anyone in this political environment actually stop associating them with “identity issues”? If they ran a strictly class-focused campaign, how many marginal voters would hear their messaging and believe it?

“It seems possible, in other words, that voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.

“This is not uncharted territory. Writing, in 1979, about the United Kingdom’s “swing to the Right,” the sociologist Stuart Hall argued that it could be explained (in part) by the fact that, once in power, social democratic parties became parties of the state, rather than parties of labor, as the state intervened to put the “national interest” above the “class struggle,” disciplining labor on behalf of the markets.

“In the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives,” he wrote, “the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition. And this ‘experience’ is not misguided since, in its effective operations with respect to the popular classes, the state is less and less present as a welfare institution and more and more present as the state of ‘state monopoly capital.’”

“The Democratic Party, unlike most of its left-of-center brethren in the developed world, has never been a true labor party, but it seems plausible that many voters view it as a party representing a state that never helps them, even as they, personally, practically beg for a large and powerful state that would step in to improve their lives.

“The question Democrats now face is whether saying they will empower the state to improve people’s lives will actually work on anyone.”

This goes to a point that I’ve frequently made. One of the reasons that Republicans can succeed with an apparently counterintuitive strategy to not broaden their base is that this means they only have to appeal to a certain group of people, whereas the Democrats have to simultaneously be the party of woke socialists and the default NotRepublican party for everybody else, including a lot of us who might be Republican if they hadn’t gone insane. In that environment, branding, negative partisanship and team identity are everything. And just as left-wing “parties of labor” eventually become “parties of the state” when they become successful, the formerly Hamiltonian Republican Party switched to a Jeffersonian, anti-Big Government stance with Democratic hegemony, and in their crusade against the other party, they’ve become against any government initiative at all, even as they cling to the perks of government all the more desperately.

And yet it works on precisely the biggest victims of government neglect, precisely because the party that identifies with government is in turn identified with all the areas in which Big Government has failed “flyover country”, the inner cities and everywhere else. And in turn, the party that is conspicuously anti-government and is very transparent about seizing power only to raid the community piggy bank still gets support because at this point, the victims of government expect to get screwed, they just want THEIR team to be the ones screwing them.

It’s a lot like Russia, which is of course one of Trumpworld’s main cultural role models.

Which is where you have the mainstream Democrats like Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D.-Va) saying “don’t say socialism ever again” and socialist Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying “I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss” and – bear with me here – they’re BOTH right.

Remember my axiom: “It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.”

AOC also said in her New York Times interview: “I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this (loss of House races) internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

“I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns. … And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.”

The reporter asked her, “So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy? ” Ocasio-Cortez responded: “These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

“If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

“Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”

The moderate centrists are right in saying that if the Democrats are tied to socialism, they’re doomed. The socialists like AOC are right in that ‘socialism’ isn’t even the fucking point. Her core question: “These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?”
Because Democrats, for some silly reason, still focus on policies, and Republicans focus on branding. And if there’s one thing that Trump is genuinely good at, it’s branding.
We used to think that nobody in America could go along with fascist sympathizers, “white nationalists” and the rest of the human fungi, but look at us now. All they had to do was have the right branding. All that took was the same skill set it took to convince people that a six-time bankrupt career swindler was a financial and administrative genius who “tells it like it is” cause he played a billionaire on NBC.

Whereas a lot of “radical socialist” ideas like a $15 minimum wage have support in a lot of states, including Florida, where Democrats lost the presidential election. Just as “radical” ideas like gay marriage have widespread support now, and (for the moment) legal status, just as interracial marriage used to be some abominable Communist plot to corrupt our pure Christian bloodlines. Mind, those things are still horrible Communist plots where some people are concerned, but they’re no longer literally unthinkable.

The alternative-to-being-right doesn’t actually CALL itself fascist, of course. They wrap themselves in “traditional values”, “making America great again” and all the other stuff that no one should object to. The Left still hasn’t figured out how to make what they want synonymous with what the country as a whole wants, in the way that Reagan or even Trump did.

And I think a large part of that is that the left spectrum, especially the institutionalists who still run the Democratic Party, have no better definition of “socialism” than the libertarians have of “libertarianism.”

And just as (L)ibertarians have not done enough to dispel the public perception of libertarianism as “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine” and the “conservatives” are actually promoting a perception of their politics as making everyone else suffer for the sake of their greed and sadism, leftists haven’t figured out that (especially in this duopoly system where all politics has to be filtered through mainstream parties), they can’t sell “socialism” as though it meant the same thing to the rest of the country that it seems to mean to them. I can go on Facebook until I’m figuratively blue in the face and tell people that libertarianism is not a conservative plot to turn the country into serfs and kill Roe vs. Wade so that women will be forced to give birth so that Charles Koch can go to the maternity wards and eat the babies, but when a lot of the people I’m debating are invested in promoting that assertion, I’m going uphill. But those people don’t understand that the rest of the country has come to think of “socialism” as synonymous with Leninism, and when they try to define it as a social democratic movement (which incidentally is NOT socialism, in that leftist parties in the EU don’t intend to destroy the capitalist system that they need to finance their public funding), they’re going uphill versus the rest of the country. It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of these guys (like Bernie Sanders) DO praise Communist dictators and DO want to take our guns. Not to mention that, again, Democrats seem at odds themselves as to what they really mean by these terms. And if you haven’t defined your terms, the enemy will define them for you.

Now, am I saying that branding is all there is? That Americans, even ones with brains, don’t engage with political issues beyond the surface and only make political decisions in shorthand? That you can get some of them to eagerly devour wet camel shit if you’ve convinced them that that is consistent with their existing programming?

Well, I’M not saying that, I’m saying that’s what the election results are telling me. How else could Trump and his party have gotten as many votes as they did when people knew that a Trump victory would mean rewarding the government that allowed coronavirus to spread, and would continue a policy that would mean no progress and no national policy on the virus, causing continued death and the continued retardation of our economic recovery as a direct result?

Democrats from FDR on did take ideas that their opponents called radical socialism and they did make them part of mainstream American thinking. It’s not impossible. It’s just not possible with the current mindset. What that party needs is someone who can take supposedly radical ideas that are in fact being entertained by voters and make them acceptable to the country at large.

Which is why in retrospect Joe Biden, the old-school guy who is accommodating the New Left (or being used by it, depending on your viewpoint) really was the best candidate the Democrats could’ve had this year. I think he is to the Democrats what Tom Brady is to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Way past his prime, and his team really doesn’t have what it takes to get where they ultimately want to go, but they’re still a lot better off with him than they were four years ago.

The scare among the Trumpnik cult is that Biden is just a tool or a stalking horse for the radicals and that they needed Republicans to act as a counter to that, blanking out the point that Trump, the alleged outsider, was the stalking horse for radical anti-democrats and reactionaries to sell something that could not be sold otherwise. There was a Markos Moulitsas/Daily Kos article on Monday: “There’s nothing “shy” about these people or their support for Trump, yet pollsters aren’t catching them. They turn out for Trump, but they didn’t turn out for Republicans in 2017, 2018, or 2019. Remember, last year Democrats picked up governorships in the blood-red states of Louisiana and Kentucky. … (Yet Republicans stormed back this year) because Trump was at the top of the ballot. So again, who are these people who only vote for Trump, otherwise ignore the Republican Party (despite Trump’s pleading), and don’t talk to pollsters? The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck.”

Which is exactly what I’m saying. The “Trump voter” isn’t necessarily a Republican voter. The reason polls turned out so well for Democrats in 2018 and the Kentucky election and turned out so badly this time was that the Trump voters didn’t turn out then and did turn out this time. Even when they have brains, they don’t engage with issues except on the surface, and even if they are in the abstract against corruption and two-party shenanigans and for ‘progressive’ ideas, they end up endorsing the most corrupt and regressive candidate cause they’ve bought into his spiel.

By the same token, a lot of the left spectrum who “shoulda” turned out for Hillary Clinton last time and didn’t, did turn out this time for Biden, just as they turned out for Obama, because each of these people is a symbol of what their parties represent, and people preferred Trump to the Democrat last time (despite her superior record and policies) because she represented something negative, and people voted in Biden over Trump this time, because Trump’s negatives increased and Biden represented more positives than negatives.

Remember, however much liberals whine about how un-democratic the Electoral College is, it IS the only federal election in which every voter in the country has a say. Every other election race is per House district, or per state. It’s just that the Electoral College filters results state-by-state instead of as a direct national popularity poll. So as you look state-by-state, a lot of voters decided they preferred their Republican Senator or didn’t want their Democratic Representative. But when you look at the Electoral College, when you combine the 100 Electors assigned for the Senate to all the votes for House districts, you get a national consensus where Joe Biden, like Trump in 2016, got at least 306 Electors because the high-Elector states went for Biden, including Arizona and Georgia, which could have gone either way.

It’s almost as if the public at large can’t stand either party and didn’t want either one of them to win, even knowing that one of them was going to win the White House.

So: Woke socialism is NOT popular. Being anti-Trump just for the sake of being anti-Trump is not popular. But neither is Trump ultimately that popular. Yet politics aside, we need to protect the Constitution and human rights. And there does seem to be some grass-roots sentiment for reducing government control over our personal choices, including the right to marry.

Hey- anybody know of a non-leftist political party that believes in liberty and human rights?

So we had what was supposed to be the third presidential debate and was actually the second because Viceroy Trump got himself coronavirus and wouldn’t agree to a virtual debate. This time, both he and challenger Joe Biden were tested on debate night and found negative, so the Commission on Presidential Debates decided to take down the plexiglass barriers that they were going to install between the two men’s podiums.

They were also supposed to mute the inactive candidate’s microphone during the active candidate’s question time, but I still heard these guys talking over each other. And while Trump didn’t “work the ref” with Kristen Welker nearly as much as he did with Chris Wallace (or Lesley Stahl) he still insisted on having his turn even when it wasn’t his turn. But I guess his handlers got the message through to him that not letting anybody else talk at all wasn’t going to work in appealing to the public. So Trump was ONLY as stupid and belligerent as he was in the debates with Hillary Clinton, and it’s doubtful that will work any better for him than it did last time. After all, even Trump fans don’t think it was the debates that won 2016.

The problem is that for all the Trumpublicans’ attempts to make Biden look sleepy, senile and corrupt, when Biden actually gets to talk (as he did tonight) he actually comes off as fairly together and professional, which is only a problem if you, like the Trump fan club, consider being together and professional as a trait of some Deep State disguised lizard person. Trump once again tried to pin Hunter Biden’s scandals on Joe, and he pointed out that the only guy who got in legal trouble over Burisma was Trump when his ethical violations toward Ukraine ended up getting him impeached.

They had a certain amount of time to discuss renewable energy versus environmental initiatives, and Trump said that contrary to opinion, he wanted “the cleanest air… the most crystal clear water..” – all these superlatives without a policy behind them. Apparently no one ever told him that running the White House isn’t like running a used car lot. Biden said (not entirely fairly) that Trump said windmills cause cancer. Trump in his best Biff Tanner mode said, “I know more about wind than you do.” (He’s certainly a lot better at producing it.) And when Biden admitted he wanted a conversion to renewables by 2025, Trump taunted that this would kill the oil industry. And he said, “will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” As he himself would say, he wouldn’t have to beg Texas and Pennsylvania for votes if he wasn’t losing.

It’s certainly not impossible to critique the Democrats or counter their arguments, it just looks that way when Donald Trump is your intellectual champion. He had maybe two good points to make against Biden or for himself, and both are, and were, easily countered. One, the coronavirus is in fact making a comeback in a lot of the places where it seemed to be under control. Biden pointed out that the current outbreak in Europe is from a much smaller base of cases than here, precisely because we let the virus get out of control. Secondly, there were a few different points at which the debate went to prison sentencing and other areas where the Trump Organization has made a few token gestures, and Trump kept goading Biden, saying, “you had eight years, why didn’t you do anything about these problems you’re talking about when you had a chance?” First, Biden did respond, but almost in passing, that a lot of his time in the Obama Administration was with a Republican Congress. Secondly, it’s quite true (as a lot of black ‘progressives’ will point out) that the Democrats really didn’t care about sentencing reform, or police brutality, or civil rights issues, and did take non-white constituencies for granted. But that gets to the real issue that I’m not sure Biden is think-outside-the-box enough to get to and was too diplomatic to raise even if he did: Up to this point, Democrats assumed that Republicans were peers whom they disagreed with, and not an enemy who would never negotiate in good faith. During most of the pre-Trump period under Obama, Democrats (and Obama himself) acted as though negotiation was still possible, even when no Republican would vote for the Affordable Care Act and Mitch McConnell said after getting the Senate majority that his goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Even then, you could still assume that was just partisan conservatism, as opposed to obviously being a reactionary, counter-majoritarian policy to disregard the entire rest of the country (even white people) and run things the way the apartheid regime did in South Africa. Thanks to Trump saying the quiet part loud (really loud, and repeatedly), it’s a bit harder for Democrats to deny where they really are, and there’s no reason for them not to play hardball in response.

Otherwise, Biden did what he had to do: He kept pointing out that for all of Trump’s bragging, the country is in the ditch right now, precisely because of his policies. We can’t “learn to live with” coronavirus, as Trump says, because it means more people are going to die needlessly. We can’t get our economy back until we reverse the spread of the disease. And while Trump mocked at Biden’s “kitchen table issues” talk, mocking was all he could do, because he doesn’t have a plan, and everyone knows it.

But since everyone’s minds are made up, the best Biden could do was not screw up, and the best Trump could do was not make things worse for himself. He probably accomplished that. Is it enough to turn the trend away from losing Texas, Pennsylvania, and the other states he needs? As the man would say, “We’ll see what happens.”

Time for lust, time for lie

Time to kiss your life goodbye

Send me money, send me green, heaven you will meet

Make the contribution and you’ll get the better seat

Bow to Leper Messiah

-Metallica, Leper Messiah

Before the first presidential debate of 2020, two days before Viceroy Donald Trump was announced as having coronavirus, it was clear that his “Republican” Party in the Senate was going to ignore all protocols to push his Supreme Court nominee through, specifically to make sure they wouldn’t have to rely on John Roberts and an eight-justice Court in a political strategy that relies less on votes and more on fixing the judicial system to bypass republican voting.

And now, as we have less than four weeks to go before the next election, it is that much more obvious that Trump and his Banana Republican Party would rather cling to power than life itself.

Of course, there was that now famous moment where Trump left Walter Reed hospital and walked up the stairs to stand at the White House portico to take off his mask, which more than one liberal journalist compared to a Mussolini moment. Presumably that would be where Mussolini walked to a balcony to pose dramatically in front of Roman columns, not the moment where he and his mistress tried to escape from Italy, were captured by leftist partisans, and had their bodies hung up by their heels in an abandoned gas station so everyone in that pissed-off country who could reach the scene could spit on his corpse.

As information surrounding Trump’s activities over the past two weeks haphazardly leaked out, and is confirmed at least in the sense that no one in the Trump Organization will deny it, Trump appeared late for his debate with Joe Biden so that unfortunately he could not be independently tested on site. Members of the entourage, including Melania Trump, who has also tested positive for coronavirus, were the only people in the debate audience who refused to wear masks, against protocols. Perhaps because Trump refused then to tell anyone what he and his people knew about his status, thus raising a very real possibility that he went into debate night intending to expose Joe Biden to coronavirus, The Committee on Presidential Debates announced this week that the debate scheduled for next week would be virtual, which was probably for the best anyway because it had already been planned as a town-hall format where the candidates would take audience questions. This of course offended Trump because the video formatting would indeed allow, perhaps require, moderators to cut the mic of the non-active speaker. Not only that, he wouldn’t be able to appear to the crowd in person so that he and his entourage could flout the mask and testing rules and demonstrate yet again that they don’t apply to them. So, predictably, he refused to attend, and predictably the Committee has officially cancelled the debate.

So now that he’s been saved by the most advanced medicine government can provide, he’s making more speeches from a government podium, promising to have more one-party control over the government, promising to give government more control of the economy and health care, promising prosecutions of his enemies, and promising more celebrations of his power and benevolence. Why? To stop America from becoming a socialist nation, of course!

The real problem of course is that Trump’s stupidity has always been more contagious than any virus, and now all of his courtiers feel obliged to follow his example. South Carolina Senator and White House Purse Dog Lindsay Graham for example decided to cancel his second debate with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison because Harrison insisted that Graham be tested for the virus. I mean, it’s not as though people who hang out on a close basis with the president have been demonstrated as more likely to contract the disease.

Meanwhile as Republicans discuss the election as though it were still a future hypothetical that they don’t have to address in the here and now (much like the possibility that their president’s continual flouting of medical safety could cause him to get COVID-19), people are having early voting and mail-in voting, and it looks like most of the people voting early are Democrats:

“While Democrats fret about the possibility of Mr. Trump repeating his 2016 Election Day turnout that swamped Hillary Clinton’s early-voting lead, Democrats’ early-voting advantage this year, particularly in states like Florida, is worrying top Republicans. While many Republicans expected turnout before Election Day to be slightly depressed by the president’s criticism of mail voting, the gap means that Republicans have to flood the polls on Election Day. And a lack of absentee ballots returned could leave the G.O.P. blind as it adjusts its get-out-the-vote operation in the weeks ahead.

“One of the advantages of having absentee ballots or voting by mail is it gives you a little bit of a snapshot as they are returned, and finding out who is returning them and where you are in your field operation,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist. “If Republicans aren’t getting accurate reads on that, they’re not getting accurate reads on where they need to adjust more.”

Republicans used to take more advantage of the mail-in ballot option. But then, Republicans used to acknowledge science and didn’t think that they should avoid medical safety devices just because their tribal chieftain told them they were full of evil spirits.

This actually matters because to hear observers say it, Team Trump has been betting on an electoral phenomenon called ‘blue shift’ where vote-by-mail and absentee ballots that tend to go Democratic are counted after votes on Election Day and therefore early returns that seem to favor Republicans eventually shift to the other party. However, more states are allowing not just mail-in ballots but early voting where you actually get to vote in person, and thus you don’t have all those votes crammed together to be processed in one day. The early votes would be just as ‘good’ for that purpose as ones in November. This change has happened in some states to account for coronavirus, but other states (like Nevada) have already been doing early voting for years. Republicans, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo, and are still anticipating in-person November voting as having the same impact as it did before early voting started becoming a thing. That’s why when Democrats are telling people to vote as though their lives depended on it (whether by mail or in-person) Republicans are telling their people to vote in person (and risk Trump Virus) as though their lives don’t matter. The problem is even if Trump has enough cultists that survive another four weeks to go to the polls, they have to show up in sufficient numbers that it would clog the system. We know this because, thanks TO Republican state governments making it more difficult to vote in primaries and special elections, lines for those contests earlier this year have been backed up. This creates the real possibility that the ‘blue shift’ may reverse and more votes will come in for Joe Biden in most states before the Trump votes can all be counted. And since Trump is pinning all his hopes on saying that only Election Day votes count and if he gets more of those, he would be forever Your King, Lord and God, if it turns out that Democrats have more votes on Election Day, whining for more time would make him look that much less omnipotent and that much more like a tool.

Of course as far as the Party of Trump is concerned, even stupid shit like votes don’t really matter, cause if Biden actually wins the Electoral College fair and square, Trump and his cronies in Republican legislatures can just whip up their own slate of Electors for their dominus et deus, the actual vote be damned. And if that maneuver goes to the Supreme Court, guess who just got himself a 6-judge majority?

But this is a tactic that implies weakness, not strength. I’ve mentioned for a while now that pretty soon white people are going to learn what it feels like to be black people, that is, to be disenfranchised. Republicans not only don’t want non-white and poor people with no transportation to polling places to vote, they don’t want anyone else to vote either, which is why they’re herding their own people into a situation where they have to risk coronavirus to do so. Forget ‘it’s a republic, not a democracy’ – the whole principle of a republic is that voters pick representatives, and if the government isn’t letting us do that, it’s NOT a republic anymore.

Secondly, if things get to that point, it will be because the Trumpniks no longer have enough numbers to even win the Electoral College by the skin of their teeth the way they did last time. Not only that, any result where Biden won the Electoral College would probably not be a 2000 election where only one state made the difference. It would be enough of a blowout where the Banana Republicans would have to substitute Electors in several states and thus create several challenges. Furthermore, any result where that happened would probably mean that Democrats also ended up winning the Senate, because however much liberals hate that institution, modern Senate races are statewide contests that are subject to neither district gerrymandering nor the Electoral College.

In other words, even if Republicans took this all the way to the House of Representatives (where they have enough delegations to give the election to Trump), the efforts required to do so, while technically legal, would be that much more cheap and desperate than Trump at a Jeffrey Epstein party. People only put up with the results last time because we knew that the Electoral College was a thing, and we had known it since at least 2000 (even if Democrats chose to forget) and however stupid and awful George W. Bush was, he didn’t actually destroy the country. This time? Not quite. This time it’s getting increasingly clear that the only way Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump can be retained as nominal President of this country is if the complicit Republican Party games the system to their benefit. And since it is becoming increasingly clear that the system under their control benefits nobody else, including the Republicans’ favorite interest groups, keeping it in place raises the very real chance that the public is a whole will no longer treat it as legitimate. And at that point Republicans will finally realize that they can’t play “we can do anything we want and nobody can stop us, cause we’re the biggest gang” cause they’re not the biggest gang.

This is why modern people, who don’t find “only one person wins” to be very entertaining, don’t play much MONOPOLY anymore. After four hours of dragging towards a result that everyone can see coming yet has already taken too long to arrive, somebody (maybe even the player in the lead) flips the board over in frustration and everybody else goes, “Next time, why don’t we try Dungeons & Dragons or Cards Against Humanity?”

So in the short term, we had Wednesday’s previously scheduled event where incumbent Vice President Mike Pence went against Democratic California Senator Kamala Harris in the only vice-presidential debate. As in, where you have to choose your favorite vice: socialism or theocracy?

What, you don’t like either of those? You want more choices?? Tough. This is America.

I didn’t actually see any of this live, because as opposed to last Tuesday’s debate, I had something else on my schedule. Plus which: Fuck You, CNN. Going into this, the main controversy was actually over the debate committee’s decision to protect the candidates by installing two plexiglass shields between each of them, an action possibly inspired by the South Carolina US Senate debate, where Democrat Jaime Harrison installed his own shield wall to his podium to protect against Banana Republican (read: rat-licker) Senator Lindsay Graham. I mean, talk about bringing the shade. And because this IS now the party of rat-lickers, Pence’s team objected to installing the shields for the sit-down debate with Senator Harris, although by Wednesday, they eventually relented, possibly because they realized it wasn’t important enough to make a difference.

I mean, most of the post-debate coverage didn’t mention the fly that settled on Pence’s head for about two minutes, but it was all anyone on social media could talk about. It just shows what it takes for Mike Pence to get attention. Plus which, making a big deal of coronavirus restrictions would only point out the fact that Mike Pence is (allegedly) head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and they haven’t actually contained the virus.

Other than that, even though moderator Susan Page got some flak for letting Pence go over his time, he didn’t interrupt nearly as much as resident rump, and it worked somewhat to the Republicans’ benefit, because letting Kamala Harris speak let observers judge whether her answers were valid. She, like Joe Biden, was asked to give a straight answer on whether the Biden-Harris Administration would engage in court-packing to counter Republican control of the Supreme Court, and like Biden, refused to do so. The difference being that Trump kept talking over both Biden and Chris Wallace when he was trying to press Biden on the issue, so that the story last week was not “Biden won’t admit he’d pack the Court”, it was “Biden told Trump, ‘Man, why don’t you just shut up?”

I mean, the Democrats ought to at least say they’re keeping the option open, cause after all, FDR didn’t need to actually appoint six more Justices to make his threat work. And if Democrats think that conservatives are so far gone that the only way they can get balance is to appoint their own people, they ought to say so. Republicans are motivated to the point of risking coronavirus over this because they know the results will shape the judicial system for decades. Democrats shouldn’t be that stupid, but they shouldn’t be afraid to show voters that they take the issue as seriously as Republicans.

Otherwise while both candidates dissembled, they both came off as normal politicians, which is not really a good thing, but if this event was normal, it only reinforces the point that the singular factor in making American politics abnormal is Donald Trump, and that while the unpopularity of both Democrats and establishment Republicans helps explain why Trump won the first time, he has had four years to demonstrate that people do not say “this is not normal” because they think that’s a GOOD thing.

Pundits usually say that the Vice President’s first job is ‘do no harm’ which for the challenger’s party really means that the running mate should do no harm to the head of the ticket. Harris certainly didn’t harm Biden, and Pence certainly didn’t harm Trump. But if the result is mostly a wash, we’re left with the fact that Pence is still defending a Trump Organization that is the primary cause of a coronavirus pandemic in America that not only wrecked the economy and weakened their voter support, it’s currently hollowing out their own membership. And everyone knows Pence can’t really do anything about that.

So in that respect, even if one is generous to Pence and calls this debate a draw, a draw does no favors for Republicans.

So now, our divine Sun King, having lain in the Abyss for three days, has risen from Walter Reed Hospital, on behalf of all mankind (meaning, himself) and returned to the White House, without a mask of course. After all, there’s no point in safety precautions now that everyone else there is infected too.

It was clear to most of the press (as in the ones who aren’t Fox or OANN) that Viceroy Trump was not out of the woods (almost every doctor says that you need to isolate for at least 14 days once you’re shown to be positive) and a lot of them watched the film coverage of him ascending the staircase to the upper balcony of the White House and then take his mask off to stand and salute, and said that he looked unwell, straining to breathe. I’m frankly not sure how that’s different from any other day. He always looks like he’s straining to breathe. The impression I got was that he’d rather have been anywhere else but he had to keep up a brave face. As in, more so than usual.

You ever see that video of the two-year old who picked up an onion and started eating it cause he thought it was an apple? And you could tell from his face that he’d made a tremendous mistake, but he kept eating it anyway, to make it look like he MEANT to do that?

You know, this video?

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=yset_ff_syc_oracle&p=kid+eating+an+onion#id=1&vid=f5854dac6448ba5c730211b0b57a378b&action=click

That’s Trump.

Based on the information that the Trump Organization has deigned to be released, one of the reasons Trump was feeling well enough to return to his forever home was that doctors had prescribed an uncommon regimen of drugs including not only remdesivir but a steroid called dexamethasone, which is only recommended for patients with a severe case of COVID-19. Which actually makes sense, because Trump would never have gone to the hospital if he could have helped it. After all, they weren’t even going to admit that anyone in the White House had the virus until the news about Hope Hicks leaked out.

The reason that Trump feels so well may be related to the side effects of dexamethasone, which while it has been shown to have real effects in treating the disease also has side effects including: “confusion, delirium, mania, and a higher risk of other infections. The drug can even complicate a patient’s recovery by suppressing the immune system’s virus-fighting response.” That is why it’s only recommended for serious cases.

So: confusion, delirium, mania and a higher risk of other issues. Again, what’s the difference from before?

If these side effects are genuine in this case, the real problem is that they combine with Trump’s already existing personality tendencies, specifically his serious belief in the power of positive thinking. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that concept in its limits, if you can psych yourself up to achieve something that is possible with the right motivation. But there’s a difference between keeping the right attitude and whistling past the graveyard, which in most cases is a metaphor we don’t use literally. When Trump left the hospital Monday, he did a video speech from the entry of the White House, where he said “I just left Walter Reed Medical Center, and it’s really something very special. The doctors, the nurses, the first responders, and I learned so much about coronavirus. One thing that’s for certain, don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines all developed recently, and you’re going to beat it. I went … I didn’t feel so good. And two days ago, I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great. Like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently … better than 20 years ago. Don’t let it dominate. Don’t let it take over your lives. … Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk. There’s a danger. But that’s okay, and now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune. I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives.”

Coronavirus? Nothing to worry about. After all, if you’ve already died, there’s nothing to worry about, and if you’re alive, you’ve got the resources of an entire government and the ability to command Walter Reed Hospital to give you experimental drug treatments. What, most people can’t do that? Well, too bad for them, I guess.

But then, if you’ve already lost your job, lost your movie theatres, lost your favorite shops, lost your favorite restaurants, and lost your favorite relative because of a virus that Trump has let run wild for the better part of a year, the advice “don’t let it take over your lives” might seem a bit odd.

Meanwhile, while Trump continues to believe as usual that nothing bad can happen to him, more and more people in his circle are determined to have coronavirus, including White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany and senior staffer Stephen Miller, an event which confirms that the virus can jump species. There were also at least two unnamed housekeeping staff who got the virus but according to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman were told to use “discretion” in discussing it with reporters.

And as for making bad decisions on steroids, that might explain the worse-than-usual decision of Trump on Tuesday to announce that there would be no negotiations on a second coronavirus stimulus deal “until after the election when, immediately after I win” a decision that Jonathan Chait called “The Worst Political Blunder In History.” (I don’t know. I’d say that was either voting for Trump or Trump running for president in the first place.)

The problem with this isn’t the idea that there was any question of whether Congress was ever going to get to a coronavirus stimulus bill. It’s not, because Mitch ‘the Bitch’ McConnell has already held up all Senate business except approving Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Comey Barrett, even though the virus now running rampant through Washington is threatening the lives of Senators and possibly Barrett herself. The problem with this maneuver is the idea that Trump has any say in that process and can hold it up because he’s an almighty god of money and prosperity from whom all blessings flow and who will personally stop any chance at economic recovery unless the voters give him the unlimited power to indulge his petty whims and desires for revenge. What this did was reveal that rather than holding the voters’ fates in his hands, it’s the other way around. Trump has confirmed that both he and McConnell are playing an empty hand with no chips. Not only that, Trump blew the one asset he always had, the idea that he was good for the stock market, and could save himself by priming the economy. Now that’s gone. Stock markets crashed on Tuesday. That and perhaps some choice language behind the scenes led Our Very Stable Genius to reverse course and twit shortly before 10 pm Eastern, “The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business. Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!” Ha ha ha. That’s so cute.

I’ve always thought that Trump’s whole approach to the virus was the same as his approach to everything else, where he could just pretend to be the biggest, loudest, meanest, stinkiest ape in the jungle, and he was gonna pound his chest, and bellow to the sky, and BEAT that virus to death with his bare hands. And then his fan club would just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that Trump! He may be a gorilla, but at least he’s OUR gorilla!”

Again, that IS how he’s done everything else so far. And it’s always worked.

Well, apparently that now is the official position of the Party of Trump. The always moronic Matt Gaetz (Banana Republican-Florida) said, “President Trump won’t have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump.” (Much like the rest of the country.) Embattled Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler actually took an old Donald Trump video from his WWE days and edited it to show him laying the smackdown on coronavirus. (Of course Trump has always had an affinity for pro wrestlers. They have certain things in common: bad decisions, steroids, and making bad decisions on steroids.)

But as I’ve said, it’s one thing to bullshit and bully a social structure, but you can’t bullshit or bully a virus. And while the appeal of Trump may be the idea that he can get away with anything he wants, and you can live vicariously though him, it is getting increasingly hard to live vicariously through Trump when there’s such a high chance of you dying from Trump Virus. (TM) Not only that, it is now harder to believe that Trump can get away with anything he wants, because clearly he was at least infected. And while Trump and his fan club share the goal of presenting Trump (and by extension themselves) as invincible, we’ve already had over 207,000 people die from this thing. How many of them were people who voted Trump in 2016? How many new voters is he going to get this year that he didn’t have last time? Probably not that many, and not enough.

Which is why Trump is so desperate to get back on the stage with Joe Biden for their previously scheduled second debate next week, even though Biden, who at first agreed to continuing the schedule after last week’s fiasco, is now saying that the debate should be called off if Trump is still infected.

But if Trump can’t have a debate, how is he supposed to pretend that everything is okay?? After all: It is better to look good than to feel good. If you know what I mean. And I think that you do.

Well, if Biden won’t let Trump pretend, Trump can always stage his own live event this weekend, and pull out all the stops for his redcap base:

TRUMPOSAURUS!!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch Trumposaurus eat 10 pieces of KFC, a Big Mac, a Filet-O-Fish, a rack of ribs and a large DIET Coke!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch TRUMP ride a rolling-coal pickup truck on six-foot high tires over a supply of American farm produce that we’re keeping from the CHINESE!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch TRUMP force Chuckie Schumer and Crazy Nancy Pelosi into a two-on-one battle to THE DEATH – in a STEEEL CAGE MATCH!!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch TRUMPOSAURUS fuck TEN PORN STARS bareback and then break the neck of an endangered Siberian Tiger and EAT ITS HEART!
ALL before a LIVE AUDIENCE!
Get your tickets NOW!!
SUNDAY!
SUNDAY!!
SUNDAY!!!

Well now.

What’s my reaction to Trump getting the ‘rona after telling us all it was the Democrats’ new hoax?

I would first recommend reading David Frum’s column, reproduced from The Atlantic: “What Did You Expect?” That says it as well as anybody could.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-did-you-expect/ar-BB19Edcu?ocid=ientp

But in the meantime, it’s good to recall something Mitch McConnell always loves to tell Democrats: “Elections have consequences.”
Indeed they do. For while Clinton Democrats will to their dying days damn Jill Stein and Gary Johnson to the sewer system under the 10^th Circle of Hell for “stealing” votes from Queen Hillary the Inevitable, Stein and Johnson both ran against Romney and Obama in 2012 with no bearing on the outcome, and the real problem with 2016 was the substantially greater percentage who DID vote for Donald Trump, because they had no faith in Hillary Clinton and business-as-usual and were in fact so nihilistic that rather than vote Green or Libertarian they voted for a guy who makes Mr. Haney from Green Acres look as honest as George Washington.

Everybody else knew that Trump was just doing what he does best – marketing himself with unbelievable bullshit – which is why nobody took him seriously until it was too late, including Donald Trump, who according to Michael Wolff at least was absolutely horrified on Election Night when he found out he won.

Because rather than getting to live off of right-wing grievance media for the next four years and play shoulda-coulda-woulda, Trump was actually obliged to govern. Moreover, all the Republicans who controlled Congress were obliged to repeal and replace Obamacare and do all those things they said they couldn’t do because of Barack Obama’s veto.

So (since Trump had no idea how to fulfill his pie-in-the-sky populist promises and needed to keep old-time Republican loyalty) Trump abandoned everything he said about healthcare and infrastructure and raising taxes on the rich and went along with what Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell wanted him to. This led to the Ryan Congress’ tax cut bill that Trump signed, and the unpopularity of a tax cut should have signaled that the Republican Party was becoming less popular in general. Seeing the writing on the wall, House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to run for re-election even though he could have easily kept his seat, knowing he wouldn’t keep his Speaker’s post- and not desiring to be around Trump any longer. And while Republicans did keep the Senate in 2018, they also lost the House, and that soon meant that all those scummy deals that Trump made with shady banks to avoid personal bankruptcy prior to 2016 were under investigation by Democrats, along with the possibility that Vladimir Putin put his thumb on the scales to influence our elections (a rumor which, IF true, is probably looking less and less like a good idea every day), not to mention Trump’s arm-twisting of the Ukrainian president to create dirt on Joe Biden, which is what actually got him impeached.

But because the low-tax, pro-business policy of the Republicans superficially bolstered the economy, Trump retained a core of popularity with both his base and people who didn’t really like him but liked the results they were getting. So Trump, being as deep as a layer of water spilled on the countertop, assumed that all he needed to do to stay in power (and stay out of jail) was to keep the good news going and do everything he could to keep anyone from hearing any bad news. In this he was simply emulating an actual one-party dictator: Xi Jinping, who by the time impeachment was winding down at the top of the year was facing reports of a coronavirus out of Wuhan that was rapidly spreading. And at the time, Xi was doing everything he could with his one party socialist state to keep the news from getting out, and then once the disease spread to Iran and elsewhere, to keep people from knowing how bad it really was. But since at the time, Donald Trump was also pursuing a big trade deal with China, he was at pains to help Xi in this effort, even going so far as to tweet on January 24:

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2020

A line which may stand as Donald Trump’s political epitaph, and perhaps his actual one.

It could have been different. The governor of New York, like the leaders in Italy, Britain and other places, at refused to acknowledge the true depth of the threat, and this led to massive casualties. But the leaders in Europe learned from this and radically changed their policies on social gatherings to suppress the spread of the virus and flatten the curve. They did something similar in New York. But we could not, and cannot, do that as a national policy in America, because Trump was fixated on not taking the virus seriously, because making people aware of how serious it was would cause “a panic”, and that would cause the economy to crater – never mind the fact that the economy already was cratering because private businesses and various governors were taking the virus seriously and cutting back their activities, which we now have to do for the foreseeable future because unlike the Europeans, we have never had a plan to reduce the spread so that we can resume some level of normalcy.

And as part of his continuing campaign to present himself as the invincible Sun King, Trump continued to hold indoor events with huge crowds, even after Tulsa, where masks were offered but subtly discouraged, even as Trump himself made sure to be on podiums where his exposure to the masses was minimized. His staffers, and Secret Service detail, weren’t so lucky. This may be why Hope Hicks ended up getting the virus. Which allegedly is how Trump got it. But according to Chris Wallace, Trump was not independently tested in Cleveland prior to Tuesday’s presidential debate, and we might not even know now that he was sick if Bloomberg hadn’t reported the news about Hicks. After all, Thursday October 1 (between the debate and the breaking news) Trump was at a fundraiser at his Bedminister, New Jersey golf resort where he was in casual contact with at least 30 donors, without masks. The campaign apparently knew about Hicks at the time but hadn’t released her condition. And while both Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Britain’s Boris Johnson survived their own cases, the Trump Organization is being cagey about exactly what the president’s symptoms are. One ominous sign: He isn’t tweeting all that much.

If only Trump had never run. And if that’s the thought going through his mind right now, I don’t think it would be the first time.

As I said about Freddie Mercury, I have no problem saying that he and other gay men died as a direct result of their lifestyle when the AIDS crisis first happened, just as us fat folks have to be careful with Type II diabetes and smokers are almost sure to get lung cancer.

Coronavirus is something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Which right now happens to be Trump. But whatever you think of him, the President being laid low is a very serious event. It’s especially serious to his party with about four weeks left to campaign. So because everything is so serious, Republicans are expecting us all not to joke, or gloat, at a time like this.

But as most professional Christians would tell us, gay men could not defy reality forever without either succumbing to the plague or changing their lifestyle, and so we have here. This is not callousness against the unfortunate. There’s a difference between having compassion for one in needless suffering from a random event and walking into the lion pen at a zoo with a raw steak on your head and expecting a healthy result.

I have often told friends that the phrase “The Republican Party” is how Americans pronounce “Schadenfreude.” But there isn’t even much point in feeling Schadenfreude here. It’s like when Stephen Colbert said, “some people are saying this is an October Surprise. It seems more like an October ‘well… yeah.”

We do not need to cast curses on Trump and his cult or say they “deserved” this. As a once-wise man said, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” This is cause and effect.

Cause and effect is not the same thing as karma. “Karma” is a nebulous concept from Eastern religion that holds that two apparently random events are connected by spiritual intent. It’s like when Penn Jillette defined the concept of luck as “taking probability personally.”

If ‘karma’ was a thing, or casting bad vibes at a person actually worked, or the Old Testament God was real, some people would be piles of ash now. You’re not going to get anywhere sticking pins in Donald Trump dolls because you hate him so much. I mean, if witchcraft was real, we could prove it. If witches really did cast a curse on Donald Trump, then his entire life would spiral out of control all of a sudden, he’d get sleepy and confused, and his dick would be like a mosquito.

I have mentioned before that I am, or at least was, a big fan of Ayn Rand. And just as the same Trumpublicans who delight in liberal tears are fluttering their fans at liberals daring to say bad things about our Bestest Most Americanest President Ever now that he’s really suffering, those same liberals who pride themselves on their compassion loathe Rand because of her deliberate lack of compassion in her non-fiction and fiction works.

A big example of this is in the center of Rand’s epic Atlas Shrugged, where the railroad company Taggart Transcontinential had advertised the run of a fancy new diesel-powered train through the Rockies, only to have the train break down. There were no other diesel engines available, and the only other rail transport was an old-timey coal burner. This method was not recommended because the tunnel through the mountains was sufficiently long that a coal-burning train would not be able to get through because the tunnel was not set up to ventilate the smoke. Nevertheless, a connected politician demanded that railroad employees set up a coal train to go through the tunnel so he could get to his destination without having to wait. The result, as predicted, was that the engine went midway through the tunnel and ended up choking to death on its own fumes. As did the politician and all the other passengers. At which point an Army munitions train, going in without knowledge of the makeshift schedule because the diesel train would have normally cleared the route by then, ran into the passenger train and the fumes ignited the munitions and blew everything up.

And over the course of this scene, Rand goes over various individual cases of deaths: “It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men. … The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, ‘I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.’
… The man in Bedroom A, Car No.14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind – how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? – no reality – how can you prove that the tunnel exists? – no logic – why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? – no principles – why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect? – no rights – why shouldn’t you attach men to their jobs by force? – no morality – what’s moral about running a railroad? – no absolutes – what difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?. He taught that we know nothing – why oppose the orders of your superiors? – that we can never be certain of anything – how do you know you’re right? – that we must act on the expediency of the moment – you don’t want to risk your job do you?”

One moral difference that does exist between reality and Rand’s fiction is that she established that everyone in the passenger train was on some level complicit in their fate because the system they endorsed led to that result. This is another reason liberals hate Rand, the suggestion that those who suffer deserve it because of their politics. In reality, the Republicans have made lots of innocent people suffer before them, largely because of their politics and the idea that some people didn’t matter. Like the mother in Bedroom D, Car 10, they didn’t care, cause only the bad people got hurt. And then they did too. Rand’s targets were the left wing collectivists and anti-capitalists, which is why she is so hated by the “compassionate” people, but the principle is the same. Compassion, however virtuous, is not the issue. If one really wants to reduce suffering, one must act on its causes.

The ‘Taggart Tunnel’ was not an example of karma. It was the author’s attempt to demonstrate an ultimate chain of cause and effect. The Atlas Shrugged train disaster is taken by Rand’s critics as a prime example of how preachy and didactic she was, especially since the this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built chain of events were engineered by the author just to demonstrate a certain point. But what we have in reality is a scenario that Rand would have rejected as too obvious and didactic.

According to one report, for every 1000 people in their mid-70s or older who get the coronavirus, 116 will die. Trump is 74.

In the days immediately preceding the Tuesday debate, Trump hosted a Rose Garden party to present Amy Comey Barrett, his choice for the new Supreme Court Justice, who has survived her own case of coronavirus earlier this year. Most of the people at the outdoor event were not wearing masks. After the speeches, there was a lot of casual contact amongst the audience. By Saturday evening, more than a dozen people connected to the White House were reporting positive cases, including Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, Utah Senator Mike Lee, who attended the Barrett event, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, and publicist Kellyanne Conway.

The fact that Senators are affected may ultimately ruin the majority that Trump and Mitch McConnell need to push this nomination through the Senate. It would be Rand Paul all over again, only exponentially more so.

In the short term, Trump is literally killing, or at least maiming, the Republican Party. And as I’ve said, that will create the very result they most claim to fear. Not only are we going to be stuffed to the gills with “socialism” (because we’re going to need A LOT of government spending, and tax hikes, to cover the costs of a preventable illness that Trump let spread, and to stimulate an economy that he decimated) but we on the Right are going to be undermined in our attempts to stop the Left from nanny-stating all aspects of life “for your own good.” Because it’s pretty damn clear that there really are people who not only don’t care about their own good but are actively working towards their own evil. (The fact that they spread misery and death to so many other people in the process is just a bonus.)

And in the meantime- there’s Donald Trump. A man who has probably never heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of coming to terms with loss. And while Trump is very good at the denial and anger part (it’s got him to where he is now) and has spent most of his life trying to avoid depression, let alone acceptance of that which he cannot change, I’m sure Mr. Art Of The Deal is very much engaged in the bargaining stage right now:

“Hey, ah, God? Yeh, it’s me, Donald. So all these preachers around me are telling me I should talk to you. You know how they are. I don’t know how you can stand ’em myself. I only put up with them cause they get me votes. All they says is like ‘love no man or money more than Jesus.’ ‘Anything is possible if you believe on Jesus’ name.’ It’s Jesus this, Jesus that. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Jesus! I mean really, who died and made HIM God?”

“But they’re right about one thing. There’s no way I could have gotten to this point without you. Remember that Access Hollywood tape? Remember me begging for Russian help with Hillary’s emails? And I WON anyway? Remember all those times that people thought I should resign or I’d be impeached, and then I was impeached, and nothing happened! I KNEW you were looking out for me! Everything that’s happened so far must be an act of God! I knew you wouldn’t have let things get to this point if I wasn’t part of your plan! So I can’t die now!

“…what do you mean, ‘I don’t need you anymore…’?

“Nobody says that to Donald Trump! I say that to my wives!!!

“Who do you think you ARE! You know who I am, buddy? Who’s your fucking manager??

“Whaddya mean, I’m subject to the same diseases as anybody else? Whaddya mean I’m not immortal? Who SAYS??

“I’m DONALD TRUMP!!! My entire life has taught me that I don’t have to obey the same rules as other human beings! I’M NOT A HUMAN BEING!!!!

“Wh- you- you better be nice to me, God! You better be NICE to me! This is very unfair! I know where you buried the bodies!! Michael Cohen told me stories about Jerry Falwell Jr. that would curdle your balls! Bill Barr’s a Catholic, he can investigate your Pope! You know what pervy shit he can find out there!

“Look at all these Justices I got ya! You don’t think that counts for something?? I can get ya more! LOTS more! Just let me live!!
“Goddamn it, God, YOU OWE ME, MOTHERFUCKERRRRR”