Thursday Feb. 8, the special counsel posted his final report on the investigation of President Joe Biden on the matter of withholding classified documents.
Let’s get past the point that the only reason this investigation even happened is because The Party of Trump whined long enough and loudly enough that their wonderful little boy was not being treated “fairly” by law enforcement, belying the point that Trump is not only not ruled ineligible to run for office as an insurrectionist over the 14th Amendment, he is not in jail awaiting trial on that matter.
And yet, Hunter Biden has committed crimes, and Joe Biden did withhold documents without justification. It was justified for Attorney General Merritt Garland to appoint a special counsel, and he appointed Robert Hur (a Trump appointee as Attorney General for Maryland until 2021), apparently in the interest of fairness.
But while the body of the 388-page report indicated that Mr. Biden had not deliberately withheld documents after being asked to present them, and did distinguish Joe Biden from Trump in that regard, Hur implied that the main issue in putting the matter to a jury trial was that “(at) trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
This is the sort of thing that people on MSDNC were referring to as a “James Comey moment” where a Republican but nominally non-partisan official makes a report clearing a Democrat of wrongdoing but in such a way as to cast doubt on their fitness. I mean, let’s assume that because Biden had withheld documents, Biden had also done the same thing that Trump did, as if we could equate a shoplifter with Al Capone. Let’s bypass whether it’s a backhanded compliment to call someone “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” as opposed to a repellent and malign old man with a poor memory.
But if we’re going to take all this stuff about Biden objectively and at face value, rather than as having political motivations, then that makes the case for Trump worse.
Because if the political system – which we laughingly refer to as “the people” – dictates that the president must be crooked, must be corrupt, must be old, must be senile, then that would demand that legal oversight on the president is more of an imperative and not less. Yet, the Republican Party, which casts itself as the main check on the Biden Crime Family, wants to give unlimited and unchecked power to Donald Trump, who makes Biden look as honest as Abe Lincoln and as sharp as a monofilament knife.
While Democrats in South Carolina got their primary last Saturday and Nevada gets its primary (sorta kinda) this week, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley doesn’t get to compete in her own state for the Republican primary until February 24. Prior to this she lost to Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump in New Hampshire. Yeah, Haley did get more than 40 percent of the vote but she still lost by double digits and there is no other non-Trump competition. New Hampshire, with its Yankee libertarianism and relatively open primary system, gave Haley favorable ground that she’s not going to have anywhere else, even in her home state of South Carolina, where Republican politics are famously cutthroat.
All the more sad, because I said a while ago that one of these notTrump Republicans really needs to answer a serious question: If your platform is basically the same as Trump’s minus the personal history, then why should anybody vote for you when Trump is already running, has been president and has a built-in following you don’t have? Well, Nikki Haley has gotten as close as anybody to answering that question, by making very good points. Mainly, if she is going to have the same policies people liked about Trump, and the main criticism of Biden is that he’s very old, you can’t choose Trump as an alternative to Biden cause he’s not much younger and no less unsteady. Sure, Biden is old, he’s slow and he might be senile. So let’s replace him with Donald Trump. RIGHT. Donald Trump makes Joe Biden look like Drake.
But we should really quit thinking that Trumpniks remain in the cult because they’re voting for something constructive. Quite the opposite. There is a Politico article that was making the rounds in January where staff writer Michael Kruse did one of those mainstream-media-Trump-whisperer profiles where a journalist tries to get into the head of what the typical Trumpnik is thinking. And he discovered that they aren’t just cynical, they’re nihilistic:
And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.
“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.
“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.
It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.
I’d already sussed this out. Not too long after starting this site, I explained why Trump’s fan club is completely immune to contradiction or appeals to logic:
“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.”
And that was almost… eight years ago. Fuck, why can’t I get a job at Politico?
There used to be such a thing as conservatism in this country, but it was always inherently contradictory. As I said quite some time ago, the real issue with “conservatism” is that it is not a political philosophy. It is a governing approach towards a political philosophy. For example, in the Soviet Union, the “conservatives” were the people opposing Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, even though that meant preserving orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which is the polar opposite of what Americans call “conservatism”. But the contradiction is even deeper in America, because conservatism means preserving the original concept of American government, which is based in 18th-century classical liberalism and anti-royalism. “All men are created equal” is not a terribly conservative concept, even if it was stated by a slave owner. There is still a valid definition of “conservatism” in America, but it is relative, not objective. It refers to conserving that old capitalist, classical-liberal tradition against a leftist tradition that really took hold after Franklin Roosevelt and somewhat resembles the approach of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, although most of its American proponents were not explicit socialists. (Indeed, in the early 20th Century, most of the ‘Progressives’ were in the Republican Party.)
But just as modern Democrats have been associated with a certain stereotype, Republicans have become associated with a certain stereotype of “conservatism” that they have been relying on since at least Vietnam. Their influence reached its high-water mark in the Reagan-Bush period, but since then, and especially in reaction to the Clinton Administration, “conservatism” has become less about promoting ideas and more about living in the stereotype, as intellectual models like Albert Jay Nock and William Buckley made way for political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh. Much like their existing approach to Christianity, “conservatives” focus less on the policies and ideas of actual conservatives and more on the attitudes and postures they associate conservatism with: “toughness”, nationalism, fiscal discipline. Believing in the idea, the feeling, is more important than preserving the reality, which is where “conservatives” always fell down even when they were serious. It’s why they keep talking a good game about budget cutting and border enforcement and always make the situation worse when they’re in office. They don’t really examine what they want or what would happen if they get it, so the “RINOs” – Republicans in Name Only cave to Democrats to make the system work. So Republican voters, with some cause, looked elsewhere for more purist people who would actually live up to the escalated rhetoric that politicians used to get them to vote, and politics, Republican politics in particular, became that much more about the slogans than anything backing them up. In the process, the Republican Party bypassed mere hypocrisy to become the opposite of what it claims to be. Like, how the party that made “McCarthyism” a thing suddenly was okay with Russian sympathizers. Apparently all Russians had to do was trade their army coats for business suits and the Republicans didn’t notice that they never really changed…
This is how the party of “fiscal conservatism” blew up the budget deficit while cutting tax breaks for the middle class. This is how the “borders, language, culture” party blew up a border bill that their Senators demanded.
And this is how “conservatism” came down to Donald Trump speaking to his cult from a podium on January 6, braying, “you have to show strength and you have to be strong.” “Strength”, apparently, comes from a millionaire’s son whose Daddy got him out of the draft by citing bone spurs, who needs a golf cart to travel from place to place at international summits, and who always has an excuse for why every one of his screw-ups is someone else’s fault.
To go over what I’ve said before: This is literally a Party of Trump. It does not have the priorities of a political party, like running the country or even winning elections so that it can run the country. Its priority is serving Trump. The Republican Party does not have the priorities it used to, even if it pays lip service to them. The House has been holding up aid to not only Putin’s target Ukraine but traditional Republican allies like Israel and Taiwan. Why? Because Trump wants it. This party isn’t pro-tax or anti-tax. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-life or pro-abortion rights. It’s “What does Trump say?” If a tornado threatened to wreck a Republican-run town, the government wouldn’t appropriate services to get emergency services or shelters. They’d go, “What does Mr. Trump say?”
Wait, you’d wait for Trump’s permission before ordering emergency services? “Why not?”
Cause he might say no? “Why would he do that?” Cause he’s a petty sadist who gets off on making other people suffer, and if they make themselves suffer just to please him and make him happy, he loves it all the more?
“You’re saying Our President would try to stop us from responding to a natural disaster and let thousands of people die or go homeless, just because he can?” YES! “THAT IS SO COOL! That’s a REAL leader! Not like these pussy Democrats who give charity to disaster victims! Get a JOB, ya hippies!”
What’s worse, because there is no room in politics for anything more than two parties, and one of those parties IS Trump, there is no room for anything outside of Trump even outside his party. There is no practical distinction between ‘real’ conservatives (the near-extinct species of NeverTrump Republicans), between what used to be libertarians (now that the Von Mises Caucus has basically turned the Libertarian Party into the Junior Varsity Club for the Trump Party), no distinction between hack liberals and woke socialists. It’s all just, are you sane, or are you Trump? Do you believe gravity is a thing that exists, or do you believe whatever Trump wants you to believe? Cause I can tell you, if someone convinced Trump that not believing in gravity would keep him out of prison or keep him from paying his bills, he would spread some bullshit story about how The Theory of Gravity is Fake News and everyone in the Party would have to believe it, on pain of death (and that might not be an exaggeration).
Which is a real problem, because the distinctions between conservatives, libertarians, liberals and “progressives” are real and will remain when or if Trump is gone. I say ‘if’ since at this rate Trump might well be immortal. Because God is real, and He hates us all. But assuming that this stale fart of a human being will fly out the window some time before the end of the century, we will have to address why this system is as screwed up as it is, specifically why the liberal-progressive spectrum that seems so ascendant now is in fact so incompetent and unpopular that in 2016 they made Trump look like a GOOD IDEA.
I mean, to a lot of people like myself, it seemed like a good idea to get rid of the “deep state”, which prior to Trump was just “the state” and in more mature terms is defined as the liberals’ “administrative state.” But then we saw what Trump was going to replace it with.
It should be obvious what a dilemma the country is in when the Lamestream Media is practically tearing their hair out wondering why Biden is STILL falling behind Trump in the polls no matter how wonderful they say the economy is. And that’s because we need an alternative to the Democrat mainstream. And that’s not what the Republican Party is giving us. They’re giving us “Trump is like Jesus, only better, cause Jesus has to be celibate.” And if THAT was good enough for America, then the 2022 midterms would have been a “red wave” and not a missed period.
Recently one of my liberal friends had posted something from The Newsroom about why the Will McAvoy character still considered himself a Republican, even though he didn’t think his own party was that Republican any more. It’s before Trump, but it only goes to show where things were heading:
We need a REAL right-wing party in this country. Not a wrestling heel or “reality” TV villain that plays to a bad-boy fan club, and not just as a “loyal opposition” to a social-democrat default. We need a governing party that can win elections and run the country. COMPETENTLY. We need a party that admits that we have a Constitution, it is written the way it is for a reason, and we dismiss it at our peril. We need a government that admits that as rich as our country is, it cannot spend more money than it makes forever and still expect to retain prosperity.
That is not what we have. The Republican Party has not been fiscally conservative since at least Reagan, but at least they used to be able to pretend. And as I say, we’re seeing that when you can’t even lie well anymore, there is a real qualitative decline in your positions from mere hypocrisy.
Because now it’s gotten to the point where Democrats can score by applying the Republicans’ old arguments. You cannot trust Republicans in Florida to keep their hands off of business, because Governor DeSantis killed a perfectly functioning administration the Disney company had in the state, since they weren’t following the right sort of political correctness. Republicans always were against Roe vs. Wade, but ostensibly because the abortion issue should have been left to the states. Well, now that it is up to the states, they want to make sure you can’t leave a slave uterus state to get an abortion in a free state.
In short, Americans don’t need government telling them what to do. This is something the Libertarian Party could take advantage of if it chose to, but like Ron DeSantis, they’ve decided they can get more scratch by being more Trump than Trump. And it’s worked out just as well for them.
And please don’t give us this Andrew Sullivan both-sides-ism that both parties are equally bad as a means of disqualifying the Democratic Party. Whataboutism is a standard Russian tactic for disqualifying your opposition on the grounds that both sides are equally bad and therefore you only need to choose on grounds of aesthetic preference (which the Republican culture warrior making that argument assumes his side will win). But that assumes, one, your preferred side will even do what it says it will, and that’s been a Republican problem. But to act like both sides are equally bad is to avoid a necessary comparison. To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats have equally bad, anti-American nutcases. But a comparison would require asking how many nutcases are in each party and whether they comprise a controlling plurality, if not a majority, of the national party.
To wit – Every “Defund the Police” initiative has crashed and burned in every locality where it’s been proposed. San Francisco Attorney General Chesa Boudin was recalled in 2022 after his “decarceration” program and other policies helped lead to a rising crime wave. Claudine Gay was kicked out of leadership at Harvard due to her (lack of) ethics and competence, not her race or her political positions. The nutsos are not in charge on the default Left and they are not setting the agenda.
By contrast, around one-third percent of Republicans polled support the January 6 riots, and at least a quarter think it was a false flag operation to make our President Trump look bad, and it’s all of a piece with Deranged Jack Smith’s persecution of Trump on fake charges, and if you’re a Republican and you don’t believe these things, you better ACT like you do if you don’t want to get hunted down and killed. So which party is run by the crazies?
Who smeared feces on the walls at the Capitol? Who tried to kill the Vice President cause he wouldn’t throw an election? Who ran the Confederate battle flag through the Capitol hallways, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do? The ostensible Party of Lincoln, that’s who.
And if you’re still a Republican after that… you’re not really a Republican.
All right. So you’re all asking, why did I tell Marazhai to switch teams and join us, after the Druhkari had raided our planets for slaves to torture? After he led us on a goose chase through half the galaxy? After he raided my throneworld and killed thousands of people? After he led us into a trap to take us all to his homeworld to turn us into slave gladiators? Why am I letting that racist snob Yrliet back into the team after she went behind my back to help Marazhai trap us?
Because I want to. And don’t argue. Half the reason some of you are still alive is because I let you. Idira, you listened to the voices in your head too long and they told you your old mistress Theodora was still alive, and your hallucination convinced you to summon a whole bunch of daemons onto the engineering deck of the ship and almost kill us. I knew Theodora rescued you in the first place, so I sympathized. But you can be at least as much of a threat as the xenos. This is along with the fact that just being a psyker means you could open the Warp and summon a giant daemon to kill all of us if you botch your power attempt, or even if you don’t.
And then there’s you, Argenta. You seemed to be so pure and idealistic, and then before our Arena fight, you stopped and told all of us that you were the one who killed Theodora. Now Idira wants to kill you just as much as you want to kill her, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re even.
And then there’s Heinrix. Heinrix is a good guy, for an Inquisitor, but that’s like saying Hitler loved dogs. He’s even more eager to torture these xenos than you are. It’s his job to arrest xenos. Or anybody else the Inquisition wants. Hell, technically he can arrest ME. But I keep him around because he’s useful. You all are.
And you, you giant Viking-Werewolf-Space Marine what-the-fuck, the only reason I haven’t said more about you is that anything I say could get me killed.
So, again, you’re asking me why I put both of these xenos in the party, after everything they’ve done to us? Well, because for one thing, you’re in no position to talk about undermining the group, and two, the most sadistic punishment I can think of for them is to put them on the same team as YOU GUYS!
Well, we have just passed the milestone of 2024’s first election, the Republican Iowa Caucus. In this, Donald Trump, despite being the incumbent president (as far as his Party is concerned) only got 51 percent of the total vote, though that was still 10 percent more than his two main challengers combined, Ron DeSantis at 21 percent and Nikki Haley at 19. The remaining 9 percent was held mostly by Vivek “I’ve Got A Timeshare In Florida That I Would Love to Sell YOU” Ramaswamy, and once he realized how things would play out in a real election, Ramaswamy quickly suspended his presidential campaign.
So there’s that much good news. The bad news is that this makes Ramaswamy the leading candidate to be Trump’s running mate. The good news is that being Trump’s running mate makes one the prime target for assassination by fellow Republicans if (when) Trump loses the general election.
And just Sunday, DeSantis himself suspended his campaign after deciding to not even bother going to New Hampshire. So now Haley is thought to have a better chance of upsetting things in the New Hampshire primary, which is open to non-Republicans, and might also have a chance in her home state of South Carolina, although it’s doubtful this will do more than slow Trump’s path to Party nomination.
But the margins of the discussion, like, the fact that New Hampshire is an open primary and Iowa is closed to non-party members, or the fact that Democrats didn’t have a caucus yet because that Party moved its primary schedule, get to a point that explains a lot of what is wrong with our current election system. It’s the fact that the process is decided more by party officials than by state or federal governments. And this will cause conflicts between party and government when the government decides to set a standard.
It already has. In Nevada, a primary is mandated by state law (passed in 2021, largely to counter the clusterfucks of the last two national elections), to take place this year on February 6. But while the Democratic Party has dropped the caucus format and gone with the state primary, the Republican Party has decided to stick with their caucus on February 8, probably because the primary election process also includes mail ballots, which current Republican dogma holds are the work of the Devil, or worse, Dr. Fauci. So Republicans are able to vote in both contests, but the state party has dictated that only votes from the caucus will count, and candidates who run in the primary will not be eligible to run in the caucus. Naturally, Trump is running in the caucus.
In the Colorado Supreme Court case that is now scheduled for the US Supreme Court, the State of Colorado had ruled Trump ineligible to run for president in his party’s primary on 14th Amendment grounds. The Nevada case is the exact opposite, where the state Republican Party (that is, Trump) said, “No, we’re not going to be in the party primary, because we don’t acknowledge the state position as valid.”
Nor is this strictly a Republican-created issue. As mentioned, Iowa no longer has Republican and Democrat primary/caucus elections on the same day, because the national Democratic Party decided to rearrange the primary schedule because unlike Republicans they didn’t want rural white folks in Iowa and New Hampshire to be the primary representatives of their party. Naturally, the status-conscious people in Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t like that. Iowa had its Democratic caucus moved to the same day as the Nevada primary while the primary in South Carolina (where Biden really sealed the primary race in 2020) goes before both of them. So, New Hampshire, where state law apparently dictates that it hold the nation’s first primary, is still supposed to be holding its primary for both major parties on January 23, and because of the disagreement the incumbent president’s name will not be on the Democratic ballot. “The state’s attorney general is accusing the DNC of voter suppression and sent the organization a cease-and-desist letter last week that threatened further legal action.” Conversely, the Democratic National Committee will not count the delegates from New Hampshire just as the Republican National Committee will not count votes from their Nevada state primary.
The fact that state parties generally set the standards for nominating ballot candidates gives the Supreme Court an out in the Colorado case, and potentially rule that since that is the precedent, each state can decide for itself what rules to set and which candidates to approve. But that gets into the point that the President is the only office where voters across the country vote in one race, yet by our Electoral College system, the results are determined on a state-by-state level, and so barring a candidate in some states but not others would hurt their chances in the Electoral College (however unlikely it is Trump could win Democrat-majority Colorado). And as Trump’s lawyers stated to the Supreme Court (in a rare valid point) :“A ruling that reverses the Colorado Supreme Court while remaining agnostic on President Trump’s eligibility … will only delay the ballot-disqualification fight”.
Milblogger Jake Broe (a Nevada resident) has said that he switched from registered independent to Republican just to vote in the Nevada caucus and vote for Nikki Haley because that’s the only way we’re going to have a Republican party that supports Ukraine. Which I frankly think is naive. Because I remember when I switched from Libertarian to Democrat in 2016 just to vote in the Nevada caucus for Bernie Sanders, because if the Republican Party was going to nominate Trump, we damn well needed someone other than Hillary Clinton to be his opponent. Well, Hillary’s people had other plans. I posted on Facebook in real time about the shenanigans they pulled at the Clark County Democratic Party convention to keep the Bernie people from getting a majority vote, only to fail after dragging things out till near midnight, only to succeed in the end at the state convention in Las Vegas: “The rules specifically (laid) out that all convention votes must be done by voice vote, and that only the convention chair can declare the winner or call for a more specific method of voting among the thousands of delegates. During the vote the convention chair, Roberta Lange accepted the “yeas” even though the “nays” were louder than the “yeas” in the room. Both preliminary and final delegate counts showed that Clinton supporters outnumbered Sanders supporters in the room, though many Sanders delegates had left after Lange’s decision and did not stay to be counted in the final count. When Lange accepted the “yeas”, some Sanders supporters confronted Lange and other members of the party’s executive board on the main stage. The event was quickly shut down after that. Casino spokeswoman Jennifer Forkis said the event ran over its allotted time by about four hours, meaning security hired for the event would soon leave their shifts. “Without adequate security personnel, and in consultation with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and event organizers, a decision was made that it was in the best interest of everyone in attendance to end the event,” Forkis said in a statement.”
Why am I STILL voting for Democrats after that crap? Because Republicans are more crooked and less reasonable than THAT.
The whole POINT of this year’s Republican caucus is specifically to thwart the popular will and get the guy the party fanatics want. That is basically what all caucuses are about, because they are more convenient for the political fan clubs and people with time on their hands as opposed to regular folks with jobs and kids.
And that is a big part of why this country’s political system is as screwed up as it is. In the Republican Party especially, you can’t get to the general election without being the biggest whacko, which either undermines the party’s chances in the general election, or ensures that the seat will be taken by a whacko. Even in the Democratic Party, the obvious self-dealing machinations of the presidential nomination process, especially in 2016, helped alienate a lot of voters that the party really needed and may need even more now.
Because the fact of the matter is, any political system that forces us to choose between the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is already broken. If you seriously tell people that the only way they can avoid fascist dystopia is to vote for Hillary Clinton, well, don’t be surprised if you get the result you got in 2016. I personally think Joe Biden is an infinitely better choice than Clinton and even she would be infinitely better than Trump. But partisan programming means that the kind of people who base their identity on being “conservative” or Republican or “Christian” means that they would never vote for a Demonrat, which means that they would vote for a three-headed Chaos mutant who eats babies (said mutant would also be infinitely better than Trump) regardless of their qualms, rather than vote independent or stay home – and even though non-Republicans with conscience and forethought who don’t like the Democrat for whatever reason would rather vote for an independent or stay home.
Which is why we need various steps to reform – or give an enema to – the federal government. Such as child-proofing the White House to make it explicit that the FBI can investigate and prosecute a President who is suspect in crimes and to make it explicit that the President and other executive officials are “officials” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. We also need to standardize election laws on a national level, at least for federal offices. And a big part of that is making sure that the election process is decided and regulated by governments, not by state parties with ulterior motives or bias. Otherwise you keep what we have now: instead of a party structure that facilitates the working of government, we have a government that exists to facilitate the establishment parties. And the results of that are all around us.
I had thought of doing something on pop culture leading into Christmas/New Year’s, but I wanted to give my opinion on the Colorado Supreme Court upholding a suit to bar Donald Trump from running for President in that state on the grounds of the 14th Amendment. Special Counsel Jack Smith, smelling an opportunity, asked the US Supreme Court to expedite a ruling after the Trump team had already appealed, but this Friday the Court gave a unanimous decision pawning the matter off to the Court of Appeals for DC.
Like it matters. If the courts don’t give King Donnie the ruling he wants, he’s going to keep going up the ladder to SCOTUS so that his justices will give it to him.
So for snap analysis: It’s almost certain that the three liberal women – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – would rule against Trump. It is also almost certain that Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni petitioned to help the coup followers, would find some way to rule for Trump.
And then you have Chief Justice Samuel Alito. The 14th Amendment seems to be plain and clear language, but the whole premise of Dobbs v. Jackson is that the 14th Amendment is plain and clear language, but its meaning opposed Alito’s political agenda, so he just pretended that the Amendment didn’t apply.
This leaves the other four “conservatives” – Chief Justice (in name only) John Roberts and the three Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett, all of whom have ruled against Trump in the past, notably in a case before January 6, where Texas petitioned to throw out the election results in four states and it was ruled that Texas did not have standing to challenge another state’s election procedures.
To recap: The 14th Amendment states in Section 3, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. “
The case was originally taken to the Colorado courts by a coalition supported largely by NeverTrump conservatives. Previously District Court Judge Sarah Wallace had made a ruling that Trump had committed insurrection but was still eligible to run for office because the wording of the Amendment didn’t specifically bar running for President. And as many of us would point out, that position would mean that Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jefferson Davis or some other Confederate that the law was written for would be barred from running for Senator but NOT President.
Wallace’s ruling created an artificial dichotomy. It actually would have been more fair to rule completely in Trump’s favor and say that his free speech and actions on January 6 did not constitute insurrection and therefore he is not barred by the 14th Amendment. If one has decided one matter (is Trump an insurrectionist?) then that decides the other matter. If it is established that one is an insurrectionist then one is ineligible to “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States”. This was the logical finding of the Colorado Supreme Court.
It has also been stated by Laurence Tribe and other judicial scholars that the 14th Amendment is “self-enforcing” – that without the mentioned two-thirds vote of each House, the candidate in question is necessarily ineligible under the Constitution, just as one is ineligible to run for President at younger than 35 years old, and just as, under the federal Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for Governor in California under its laws but not run for US President because he was not born in this country.
The Amendment is however not self-enforcing in that it has not clearly been established that Trump (or some other person) has committed insurrection, which is why the courts need to take this up. So, had Trump by his actions concerning the 2020 election, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against (the Constitution of the United States) or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof”?
Well, after Mike Pence refused to certify Trump’s fake electors, Trump twitted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do right by him and suddenly the crowd at his rally got even more violent and started chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!” Coincidence? Well, given how many of these people thought to bring zipties, riot gear and a hanging scaffold to the proceedings, probably not.
Of course given that, as with Schwarzenegger being elected Governor, states can do as they will in their own sphere, the appeals court or SCOTUS could simply uphold the Colorado ruling as applicable only there (and Colorado is a liberal state where all the Supreme Court justices were Democrat appointees, so not like Trump was likely to win there anyway).
But wait – wouldn’t leaving the matter up to individual states mean some keep Trump on the ballot and some wouldn’t? Wouldn’t that undermine the chances of winning the Electoral College even if Trump states affirmed his right to run? Wouldn’t that be CHAOS? Well, Samuel Alito has made clear that it is not his job to care about the direct consequences of taking a national matter and leaving it to be decided by individual states, it is only his job to rule as he sees fit. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
It is assumed (by Trumpniks and liberals who take them seriously) that any ruling against Trump’s sacred right to run for an office that he plans to abolish once he gets power will undermine Americans’ trust in government. Of course every time the Party of Trump says that no one trusts the government, they are eliding the question of who is generating that mistrust. Contrary to their position, the feds are not going to turn McDonald’s vegan, and they are not forcing white girls to have sex with dark-skinned guys who will get them pregnant, arrange for government-funded abortions, and then raise the abortions as trans. If anything, you talk to the “progressives” and they will tell you that the Biden Administration isn’t radical leftist enough. Perhaps because the Administration, unlike the radical leftists, do not think that the radical left in America is a majority with a mandate.
The reason that no other candidate is being treated like this is that no other candidate has acted like this, because other candidates knew that acting like a five-year-old wannabe Czar was not going to work. As I say, we are not dealing with white privilege, we are dealing with orange privilege, because not even other rich white people get a free ride as much as Trump does. Ask Sam Bankman-Fried.
And then there’s the otherwise valid matter that we should be leaving the matter of Trump’s fitness for voters to decide. First off, this is blanking out the point that the people DID vote on Trump after he was impeached the first time, and they wanted him out.
Republicans say, we’re not allowing “the people” to vote? Are these the same Republicans who sneered at Clintonoids when they lost the Electoral College that “it’s a republic, not a democracy”? Aren’t these the same Republicans who whined when the Dollar Store Duce got impeached the first time, wailing that Democrats were “thwarting the will of the people”? Weren’t they the same ones who supported their boy after the January 6 coup attempt, thereby showing what they think of the popular will AND the Electoral College?
In fact, the whole reason we have all these counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the 14th Amendment – and liberals, you need to read this too – is precisely to make sure we do not elect a criminal (and/) or unqualified moron President just because he got the most votes.
The irony being it used to be “conservatives” who correctly assessed liberals in government granting the President and federal government all sorts of powers they did not have in the original interpretation, while liberal Justices and legal scholars interpreted the Constitution as “a living document” that could be interpreted according to contemporary mores, in practice meaning, however the people in charge wanted government to be. Now in practice it’s the alleged conservatives who are interpreting the Constitution according to their contemporary standard, not “presidents have term limits”, “presidents are subject to the law” or “insurrectionists are ineligible to serve in federal office”, but according to the living document of the Republican Constitution, which is “Donald Trump was sent to us by Heaven, like Vishnu incarnating as Lord Buddha to enlighten the masses, lo, he shall reign o’er us forever and ever- ergo, Donald Trump can do whatever he wants.”
You can only rely on this Court to do what it thinks best for this Court, and most of the time that means a reactionary agenda. But again – you can count on the three liberal women to vote against Trump. You can count on Thomas and almost certainly Chief Justice Alito to go for Trump. That means the balance is with the other four, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, who are certainly willing to promote the reactionary agenda but also seem to have some grounding in reality. And that means asking themselves if the reactionary agenda is best served by allowing a candidate who would almost certainly make the Court obsolete if he is allowed to run again and gets back into power. And they, like every other “conservative” who had a chance to call Trump to account and refused to do so before now, have to ask if they’re any safer as Trump’s step-and-fetch boys than standing up to him and risking the wrath of Meal Team Six. Ask Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham how that works.
If “conservatives” didn’t want to be in that situation, well, maybe they shouldn’t have put all their bets on the horse who is not only a raging authoritarian but a raging incompetent at it.
Happy Festivus, everyone. The Airing of the Grievances will continue until Trump is put in prison where he belongs.
EDIT: The case that SCOTUS sent back to the Court of Appeals was not the Colorado 14th Amendment case, it was the case on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity.
I regret the error. Specifically, the error of Trump being president.
The worst case scenario is that killing Ukraine’s field army support will, at this rate very slowly, let Russia conquer Ukraine. Which, given their rate of success thus far, is still not very likely. I mean, no one wanted to support Ukraine when it was invaded in the first place because the “experts” all assumed Ukraine didn’t have the wherewithal to fight off the largest land power in Europe. But no, the Ukrainians had to disappoint everyone by fighting back cause they didn’t like being targets of genocide. And now we’re stuck with them. But even if Ukraine was militarily defeated, it might make Putin cream his slacks, but it wouldn’t actually end things. It would just turn the country into a very, very large Afghanistan, with a much longer border and more access points to send supplies to the resistance. Consider how much good American money did going TO Afghanistan to help the locals fight occupation compared to all the good it did IN Afghanistan when we were the occupation fighting the locals. Because money isn’t the only factor. The critical factor is a population that doesn’t want you there.
Supposedly Zelenskyy and his allies in Washington tried pointing out to Republicans that the money we spend to help him over there is money that we don’t have to spend fighting Russia in NATO territory, and it’s money that is steadily degrading Putin’s war machine. Except liberals forget, that’s exactly why the Party of Putin doesn’t want to do that anymore.
I honestly think most of the “Freedom Caucus” would rather send military aid and supplies to Russian soldiers than Ukrainian – or American – ones. Seriously, it’s not like Moscow is going to. Won’t someone think about the looters and rapists?
Protecting Israel and opposing Red China were the reflex positions of the Republican Party. What changed?
Well, as I’ve said more than once, if Trump announced tomorrow that he is a woman and starting the process of transition, every Republican in Congress would fight to the death for a pair of rusty garden shears to be the first one to castrate himself on the grounds that masculinity is now “gay.”
It’s like this because the entire Republican Party is simping for Trump, who has long been simping for Vladimir Putin, who, as a direct result of his war of choice, now has to simp more and more to Chinese President Xi Jinping, so that he can replenish the military arsenal he wasted so that he can keep killing Ukrainian civilians. (If he kills Ukrainian soldiers, it’s kind of an afterthought.)
So there’s your new boss, Republicans. A communist, atheist, Chinese.
Think about that while you’re having your White Christmas.
Republicans didn’t have time to help our allies this week, but they could find time to stage a vote approving an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden. This despite the fact that no one on that side can tell us what the charges are. I mean, Democrats had that on Trump. Whether you agree or not, Republicans had that on Clinton. Normally, you’re supposed to have evidence of real crimes and then start an impeachment. Republicans want to start an impeachment and then hope they’ll find real crimes.
Thus confirming that even when impeachment is justified it is completely useless for the stated intention of holding the president (or other official in question) to account and is much more about partisan political games.
Why? Because Republicans want to smear shit on Joe Biden’s face in the hopes that no one will notice that their boy is a talking, shambling Shit Elemental.
It’s of a piece with how Trump says he’s going to be dictator “for Day One,” he thinks Obama is still the President and he says Biden is going to start World War II, but the Republican response is “But Biden is THREE YEARS OLDER!”
Begging the question: Even if we conceded that point, if you can see how Joe Biden is now, what is your boy Trump going to look like in three years?
So as Congress prepares to go home for the holidays, having done everything it can to make the world worse, this year I refer to the European pagan tradition that has at least as much to do with Xmas as the struggles of a refugee family from Palestine. Specifically I refer to the Wiccan principle of Threefold Return. That is: This year, I wish that everything Republicans do returns to them threefold.
This Tuesday, Sean Hannity had Donald Trump on a town hall show for Fox, and Hannity interviews with Trump are always amusing because for once Sean has to be the smart one in the room. But he had one of those by now predictable comedy moments where Hannity would try to reassure the straights that Trump isn’t going to do anything rash or stupid and then Trump doubled down on the stupid. Specifically: “I want to go back to this one issue though, because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power for retribution against anybody-“
Trump: “Except for Day One.” Aside to the audience, “Look, he’s going crazy.” He then went, “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” Lots of cheering at that. But not only is that all stuff you would need more than one day to implement even if you were God-Emperor, it’s just more red meat to the audience that doesn’t care about anything but being played to, which is exactly why he said that.
Of course the real reason Trump would only need to be dictator “for Day One” is that on that day, he’d sell the country to Vladimir Putin and then we wouldn’t have America anymore.
The Atlantic devoted its entire December issue to a set of articles called “A Warning.” I can’t quote The Atlantic directly cause there’s a paywall, but one essay was reprinted on MSN. Money quote: “A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.”
Which is exactly why Trump did not solve any problems in office, why he did not keep (most of) his promises and why he would not do so if elected again. If we solved the border problem, we would no longer have a border problem and then Republicans wouldn’t have any motivation. Trump, and his Party, have to keep making things worse and then offer themselves as the solution to the problems they create. If they solved the problems, people wouldn’t need them anymore. But that’s if you’re thinking logically. The point of Trumpism is not thinking logically. The point is the emotional indulgence of finding an enemy and getting mad at them.
All these Lamestream Media types are so fucking scared of Trump like he’s some invincible Dark Lord, but he’s not. He’s the guy who stares at the can of orange juice for five minutes cause it says “CONCENTRATE”. He’s so dumb he thinks he should’ve gotten a five cent coupon on his Nickleback album. The main differences between Trump and the ratty old bum at the gas station who begs you for change while screaming conspiracy theories are a few million dollars and no excuse for that haircut.
The problem is not Trump, it’s the liberals who think he’s a Dark Lord, and thereby give him credibility in the eyes of the people who hate them. But more than that, it’s those people, who are alienated from “normie” liberal culture and take Trump seriously because he’s the only politician who thinks and acts and talks like them.
Certainly leftists don’t need an excuse to hate this country, and its freedom, and its capitalism, but there is a problem here. Lenin may have been a little early in predicting it, but we are selling ourselves the rope by which we hang ourselves. This is why we have a dysfunctional “gun culture” in this country: Not because of an evil Second Amendment that was NOT causing mass shooters to pop up every fuckin’ day prior to the late 20th Century, but because it serves the profits of gun manufacturers. This is why we have networks and radio hosts who appeal to rage more than reason, because rage sells. That is how Trump got to be a thing. And because of the way the Electoral College works, state by state, that is the reason why the mechanism the Founders intended to prevent a demagogue from using the vulgar mob to take power became the only reason that result occurred. Because if it had been a simple majority vote in 2016, Trump would not have been president.
Because while there may be a critical mass of gullible people who could swing the margin in limited circumstances, the simple majority is not fooled. Because, for now, most people have enough of a value system to put one foot in front of the other every day and pay their bills and not cause problems for others, as opposed to making the world worse and blaming everyone else.
Indeed, this general observation moves me to make it an axiom: Freedom promises emotional indulgence, but sustaining it requires emotional discipline. When you don’t have discipline, you get manipulated by people who want to put you under their control. Or worse, they don’t, and you just cast about making things worse for yourself and the world around you.
If you want to know what a second Trump term would look like, we don’t need to speculate. We have it now in the House of Representatives. Which is, for now, under a Republican majority. Because they only had a five seat majority to begin with, making it that much more difficult to rule unilaterally without input from the other side, as the Republicans are obliging both parties to do now. But they lost one of those votes last week when they got rid of George Santos (BR.-New York). Who’d never actually been convicted or even charged with a crime, as his defenders pointed out. Not like you need to be charged with an actual crime to be impeached though. Still, it was a mystery. This is a party of moralists defending an openly gay drag queen. This is a party that rails against the corruption of the “Biden Crime Family” while Santos won an election with fraudulent claims and used campaign money on personal expenses, a party that defends a man who engages in so much pathological lying that he actually exceeds Trump. But yet enough Republicans voted with the two-thirds majority necessary to expel him, despite the fact that Santos exemplifies all their demonstrated virtues. For example, hypocrisy. Like, acting like Santos’ mendacity is a dealbreaker when they still worship Trump. Of course, Santos doesn’t have a fan club of wannabe murderers who will storm the Capitol for calling him to account, so that’s one thing.
Then this week, former House Speaker (In Name Only) Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California) announced that he was not only not running for re-election next year, he is leaving Congress at the end of the year, which will drop the majority of the House GOP (Grabbing Our Pudenda) to three. The governor of California would then have to call a special election, and of course, Gavin Newsom is a Democrat. And he has a little bit of leeway as to how long he can wait to do so…
Which is just the latest example of why McCarthy lost his position even though Mike Johnson is obliged to do the same things that he did to work with the rest of the government: It’s not so much that hardliners disagreed with McCarthy’s policies, it’s that he’s a petty drip of a human being and nobody likes him.
To the extent that this taxpayer-funded Trump Fan Club does any work, it’s mainly in obstructing the actual process of government. Like, before the end of the year, the House is supposed to provide funding for the government. And Speaker Johnson is holding up both Ukraine AND Israel aid over various beefs and shifting goalposts. Right now, the pretext seems to be a demand for increased border security. In principle, I would be going along with this.
Yes. Lest my other posts make me seem like a flaming liberal, I direct you to recall the great Jeff Daniels quote from the pilot episode of The Newsroom: “I’m a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I think hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.”
Really, we need to crack down on illegal immigration and trade imbalance. We need a strong border policy. I mean, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.
The problem is that the words “principle” and “Republican” not only don’t go together as well as they might have once, now they’re actually opposed magnetic poles. This applies to pretty much everything, but in this particular case, we have the bogus immigration system that we do because both parties want it that way, for reasons I have already gone over. That being the case, border policy, again, is just a lame pretext for obstruction, because the Republicans’ Master’s Master thinks it’s more fun to kill Ukrainians if they can’t shoot back. Killing Jews is less a priority, but Putin is Russian, so it frequently comes down to that anyway. Besides, Iran is Putin’s friend, and Iran funds Hamas. It was only recently pointed out to me that the October 7 raids over Israel’s border took place on Putin’s birthday. Suddenly it made a lot more sense.
And as we can see, it’s all Republicans can do even to accomplish a negative and obstructive agenda. They can’t actually be FOR anything, because while there may be a “silent plurality” of Republicans who remember when it was still politically correct to speak at a high-school level, they won’t have a majority without the dedicated Trumpniks, so that obliges them to be Trumpniks too. What else are you going to do, let the DEMONRATS win and take credit for everything??
But shutting the Democrats out in order to rule unilaterally requires everybody to be on the same page (especially with such a small majority), and that’s impossible when the purpose of your party is to indulge your emotions and petty grievances at taxpayer expense, as opposed to running a government. So these guys end up fighting each other at least as much as the Democrats.
They can’t control the process, because they can’t control themselves. At the same time, they will not acknowledge this and step aside to let the grownups take over. So the result is just extended displays of bullshit and grandstanding.
There are a whole bunch of comparisons that could be made here; I’ve referred to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I could also refer to the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. For the sake of their own self-image, Republicans want to think they’re well-behaved, Good Christians ™ like Mike Johnson, but like Dr. Jekyll, they want the freedom to indulge the Id. So they have Trump. The knuckle-dragging, rapist Mr. Hyde who doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he gets what he wants. They’ve said it themselves. They like Trump cause “he fights.” They think that actual Christianity is “weak“. Their only complaint is “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be“.
And as Adam Serwer said, “the cruelty is the point.”
Of course, in the story, as with real cases of drug use, Dr. Jekyll built up a tolerance to his formula, such that the Hyde persona became his default and he needed more and more drugs to get back to “normal.” This led to cascading liabilities, culminating in Hyde killing someone, so Jekyll ended up killing himself to escape justice.
The Republican Party used to have it both ways, having Trump be their “fighter” while still having the cultural memory of being one of America’s two “real” parties, but the longer they are addicted to Trump, the more they become Trump, and the harder and harder it will be to pose as civilized humans. Only the Trump will remain. At that point they will indeed die, either because voters see that they’re not a “real” party anymore, or their increasing disdain for the republic and active opposition to it will oblige various levels of law enforcement to put them down. In this case it would be more “suicide by cop.”
But the political bargain assumes that those with a monopoly on force are better than us. When it becomes clear that they are not, and that they will not follow the rules they enforce on the rest of us, people start to realize that there is no reason for the public to follow the rules either. You can only game the system for so long before there is no longer a system to game.
Rick Wilson famously said, “Anything Trump touches dies.” Unfortunately that may include the American republic.
Over the past year there have been initiatives in several states to disqualify Once And Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump from running for President, the most advanced of which was in Colorado. This idea is based on the 14th Amendment, which states in (ostensibly) clear language, Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
District Court Judge Sarah Wallace ruled on the case this month, and said on one hand that Trump had clearly engaged in insurrection with his support of the January 6 riots, and yet also ruled that because the wording does not specifically bar a person from being President as opposed to Senator, Representative, or elector OF a President, that therefore Trump still gets to run in Colorado. Apparently “officer of the United States” doesn’t count. As several talking heads pointed out, this would mean that Nathan Bedford Forrest would be clearly barred from running for Senator but NOT President, such is the “logic” of this decision. Note, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” is also the threshold required to convict an impeached officer in the Senate.
It would have been more consistent to either bar Trump from running on the grounds that he had committed insurrection OR ruled the matter in his favor on the grounds that his free speech did not in itself constitute insurrection. By ruling that he had in fact engaged in insurrection yet also ruling that, once again, the laws of this country do not apply to King Donnie, First of His Name, this judge pleased no one, including Trump’s team, who are making an appeal to a higher court along with the NeverTrump Republicans who filed the initial case. Now at least one of those talking heads also theorized that Judge Wallace was counting on exactly this, because her case that Trump engaged in insurrection was a “finding on fact” which is much harder to eliminate than her conclusion, which is a legal opinion. But still: Candy-ass. She knew how things were going to end up, she just didn’t want to be the one blamed by Trump’s mob of trogs.
There is nothing wrong with the US Constitution that cannot be or has not been reformed with the Amendment process. It contains everything it needs to enforce its provisions. But it still needs actual people to enforce them, and this is where America falls down. We are where we are because a Beer Belly Putsch tried to dispatch the core of the United States government, up to and including Trump’s own Vice President, and yet Putin’s Little Bitch Boy still gets to stink up the air with his mouth because a critical plurality of Americans think rule by “strong”man is a good idea. (Even if I agreed with those people, the problem is that Trump is neither strong nor a man.)
If it was a matter of the country going fascist because that is what a majority really wanted, that would of course be awful, but it isn’t even that simple. The last presidential election, not to mention all the midterm elections and special elections surrounding abortion prohibition, have all made it clear that the Trumpniks are not a majority in this country, yet they still have enough numbers to do real damage. Indeed, that is why they fight as viciously and maniacally as they do, because they know that despite all their protests to the contrary, Middle America is not on their side.
Not that it would matter if the rest of the country is against them if their chicanery works next time, because it doesn’t matter that not all the Palestinians are with Hamas, or that not all the Venezuelans support Maduro, or that Putin’s war of choice is increasingly unpopular. What matters at that point is that the thugs run the government and they will kill you for not obeying orders and being politically correct. Which is why we have to defend the republic while we still have it.
And yet that seems to be too much for some people.
As rump continues to get both more brutal and more stupid by the week – for instance threatening to prosecute Joe Biden even though supposedly Barack Obama is actually running things – President Joe Biden is also getting more unpopular by the week. One columnist dismissed Biden’s press secretary: “I would put the president’s stamina, the president’s wisdom, ability to get this done on behalf of the American people, against anyone,’ (Karine) Jean-Pierre said. ‘Anyone, on any day of the week.’
OK, so you’re mad because Biden is siding with the Israelis over the Palestinians. So, apparently the solution is to just hand the government back over to Trump, whose son-in-law handed the West Bank over to Israeli settlers. Gee, I’m glad that makes sense to you, cause it makes no sense to me AT ALL.
Lincoln was wrong. You may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, but if you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, the rest of it doesn’t matter.
People like me didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and look what happened. Now little boy Trump feels entitled to power, and he’s gotten more spoiled, stupid and evil than ever. EVEN Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice than him. And Biden is a better choice than Hillary Clinton. If only by virtue of the fact that he’s not Hillary Clinton. I mean, until we got Trump Virus ™ I could almost understand people preferring the Trump economy to Biden’s, but after 2020, why would anyone in their right mind vote Trump? I mean, I would ask Herman Cain, but…
Fact is, Trump didn’t win the election in 2020 when he had all the advantages of incumbency, and it’s hard to see how he could win with all the liabilities he’s piled up since, and especially since there are fewer sympathizers in position to help him cheat. What he needs is another 2016 where he had just enough people in just enough states to either vote for him or not vote for the Democrat. And this is why Democrats are so hyper-sensitive about “spoilers.” But who exactly is going to do that? Right now the press seems to be focusing on a few candidates: -Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia: He’s not running for re-election next year because West Virginia is the most Trumpnik state of the Union and it’s a miracle he’s held office as a Democrat this long. At the same time, Manchin has so much vanity and sense of entitlement – even by Senate standards – that he seriously acts like he has a mission to lead the country as President. This despite the fact that he can’t win his home state (and as Al Gore could tell you, that’s no way to win the Electoral College) and has no national following outside it, as opposed to-
Democrats are so scared that because he’s a Kennedy, Bobby is going to take Democrat votes away from Joe Biden, but he seems most likely to attract people like himself: aging ex-liberal Baby Boomers whose counterculture skepticism has curdled into paranoid conspiracy theory. In other words, the kind of people who weren’t going for Biden anyway, would have preferred Trump but might like another choice. Thus, he seems more likely to “spoil” things for Trump than Biden. Assuming he gets that far. In my opinion, Kennedy’s real problem is that his voice is completely shot, it’s hard to follow what he’s saying, and I don’t think most audiences would have the stamina to sit through one of his speeches, nor do I think that he would have the stamina to speak for very long.
And something tells me that all those “progressive” kids who aren’t going to vote for Joe Biden over Palestine are the same kids who weren’t a factor when they complained about Bernie Sanders losing the 2020 primaries, which he might not have if they’d voted for him then.
Face it, kids: We’re stuck. It’s either Joe Biden or Donnie Clownboy, and it’s a much easier choice than the media wants you to believe. I can understand why that’s not good enough for you. That’s why I voted “third” party for years. I mean, if you don’t want Joe, his designated successor is Kamala Harris. She ran against him the last time, and if that was good enough for liberals, she’d be at the head of the ticket and not him. And that’s all I need to say about that for now.
You want to do something about these lousy choices, we first need some better ones. There no longer is a center-right alternative to the duopoly, and again, the Greens are that much less a factor than the Libertarians. Even more important in the long run, we need to make the alternatives feasible. You’d first need the non-partisan runoff system like they have in California or the initiative they’re proposing for the 2024 ballot in Nevada to effectively make the primary round the first round of a runoff process.
It would mean changing the Electoral College to work like it already does in Maine and Nebraska, where Electors are apportioned by district and not winner-take-all. Yes, that would mean Republican districts in New York and California count for their candidate, which I’m sure is why Democrats will not change the Electoral College no matter how much they bitch about it. It would also mean that Democratic districts in Texas and Florida would count for their candidate, which they may not have considered. If you can shift enough of Texas to the Democrats, then the Republican Party will go the way of the Whig Party, only more archaic and with a smaller Anti-Slavery contingent.
But that’s going to be next year at the earliest, and only in some places. In the meantime you have the aforementioned problem: Republicans are getting increasingly belligerent and authoritarian at the same time as they get more unpopular (or perhaps vice versa) and thus neither they nor their Messiah will accept their reality. I mean, that would require listening to what voters want, which I guess defeats the purpose of being in government. As it stands, the 2024 campaign cycle will end in only one of two ways: Either Trump becomes God-Emperor or Trump goes to jail. Why not just cut to the chase? It’s going to end up that way because the kind of party that would nominate a Trump is not going to listen to anyone else. The only way out of this is if enough Republicans see the light and nominate someone in their clown car to be the nominee instead of him. They’d still have lots of problems (as Trump would put it) but would be less likely to create a fascist regime. Based on the last eight years, I see little reason to think that would happen.
Hey, if you were paying attention to Washington political maneuvers inthe last few weeks – and you probably weren’t – you knew that the big story was how the Banana Republican caucus in the House of Representatives screwed themselves by voting out Speaker Kevin “King Pissboy” McCarthy (BR.-California) without selecting a replacement. This was really bad for their public relations but it also screwed the whole House because by law no work can proceed if the House doesn’t have a Speaker. At first they tried to nominate Steve Scalice (BR.-Louisiana), who on one hand told a local journalist he was “like David Duke, but without the baggage.” On the other hand, in today’s Republican Party, that made him the reasonable moderate. Which is probably why the Gossip Girl mentality of the caucus turned against him. Instead the consensus started to turn towards Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR.-Ohio) who previously was most famous for his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, where he was “accused of turning a blind eye” to widespread sexual abuse of male students by staff physician Dr. Richard Strauss. This probably explains how he got the endorsement of Donald Trump. And yet despite his support for corruption and sexual degeneracy, Jacketless Jim Jordan couldn’t get more votes from the Trump Party than Kevin McCarthy did. In fact it only took three rounds of voting to make it clear he couldn’t clear the majority, and each round he actually got less votes than the last time, almost as if some people were holding out to make it clear how unpopular he was.
Allegedly one of the reasons Jordan couldn’t clear the hurdle is that like any good acolyte of Trump, Gym refused to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and therefore Donald Trump is the real president. One of the Congressmen who took this position was Ken Buck (BR.-Colorado) who told journalists that Jordan’s election denier posture was the main reason he wouldn’t vote for him. And, yet, Buck and literally every other Republican decided on October 25 to vote in Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) as the new Speaker despite the fact that he’s that much more an election denier than Jordan is. “(Buck) drew a distinction with Jordan, arguing that Johnson did not engage in efforts to overturn the election at the same level that Jordan did. … But Johnson, too, was seen as an active player behind the scenes in in the effort to overturn the election results in late 2020 and early 2021. He collected signatures from fellow House Republicans in December 2020 for a legal brief that supported a lawsuit seeking to throw out the election results in key states, according to The New York Times. That lawsuit was defeated.”
So is Buck another spineless hypocrite like Susan Collins who goes along with the Mob regardless of their alleged principles? Well, he’s a Republican, so that goes without saying. But even if he had principles, it comes down to this: The Catholics have the Credo, the Muslims have the shahada, and the Church of Trump has “the election was rigged and stolen.” Excuse me, “STOLLEN.” This is what you have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, to be in the club, cause if you don’t, you won’t get far.
Basically, they’re ALL Trumpniks, so even if somebody like Buck would have had better taste, he didn’t have other options. Johnson is simply the Trumpnik election denier who had the least enemies. That, and Jordan’s example proves once again that being a bullying moron doesn’t work quite as well on Republicans if you’re not Trump.
Johnson at least seems well-mannered and capable of speaking standard English as opposed to Modern High GooGoo Muck or whatever Marjorie Taylor’s first language is, but he said in his first speech from the House podium, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority” and told Sean Hannity “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”
Y’know, any time somebody says they follow the Bible, I seriously doubt they meanALLof it.
Which goes to the fact that so many liberals and moderates find it odd that this professionally pious man would be so devoted to President Coup de la pousse’, but I’ve already gone over the issue several times: These people are a lot more concerned with power than their declared morality, and they’re just as willing to adapt to Trump as he is to them.
The irony being that the Party of Trump’s lust for power at all costs is what made their leadership of the House so precarious and why it continues to be so even now. The Constitution requires the House to elect its leader from the entire floor, and since that rule was created before duopoly politics was a thing, the House doesn’t have the Senate’s ad hoc precedent of assuming that the majority party’s leader automatically runs the chamber. Both chambers are designed to run on consensus, and that normally happens because the idea is that the elected represent their district or state, not their party dictator. As is, McCarthy and other Republicans whined that this all happened because Democrats wouldn’t vote to save him, which is like whining about water being wet. Not like it’s Democrats’ obligation to vote for McCarthy in particular, especially after the way he treated them. Not like McCarthy HAD to prostitute himself so deeply for the sake of the gavel that he would allow a one-person motion to vacate, specifically to appease Matt Gaetz (BR.-Bugfuckerstan), knowing he would do exactly that for any reason or no reason at all, and it’s not like Gaetz HAD to challenge McCarthy, especially without a replacement in mind. If Republicans had a bigger majority in the chamber, they would have more room to maneuver, but they don’t, which in itself ought to tell them they don’t have the mandate to rule unilaterally. As of now, Democrats under Hakeem Jeffries (D.-New York) are not going to cooperate with Republicans, especially if they want to put election deniers in authority. As for Republicans, a large reason their internal standoff lasted so long was because no one was going to reach across the aisle. Republicans aren’t going to negotiate with Democrats any more than Israel is going to negotiate with Hamas, because Republicans hate Democrats MORE than Israel hates Hamas.
Oh yeah. Speaking of that:
Not even counting the fact that Hamas used the Yom Kippur period to raid Israeli kibbutzim, and kill Israeli civilians, and expatriate bystanders, AND Palestinians, in the wake of their barbarism, the politically correct crowd has decided that anti-Semitism is making a comeback. Really, it never left. But in Sydney, you had protests at the Opera House chanting “Gas the Jews“, you have similar statements coming from the Left in this country, and just recently a Telegram channel for the Russian Muslim community spread rumors that Russia was planning to resettle Israeli refugees on their land. According to the Institute for the Study of War, “The Telegram channel called on Makhachkala residents to demonstrate at the airport on the night of October 28 and 29 and posted flight tracker data for the plane from Israel ahead of its arrival on October 29. …Demonstrators also checked identification documents in search of Israeli citizens, although there are no reports of demonstrators finding any Israeli citizens. Demonstrators have chanted ‘death to Jews’ and have also occasionally gotten physical with security personnel at the airport.” (Remember, with Putin’s Russia, nothing is a coincidence.)
All you “anti-Zionists” wondering why Israel has so little regard for internal minorities or the international community, it’s because the international community clearly has little regard for Jews.
I personally think that if world civilization ever straightens up enough to create a real space program that breaks the lightspeed barrier and reaches alien civilizations, within 40 years of first contact, the natives of Alpha Centauri will be blaming TheJews for everything bad that has ever happened to them since the dawn of time.
Not that Israel doesn’t deserve condemnation – on its own terms. I used to think calling it an apartheid state was an exaggeration, but not so much these days, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is clinging to office mainly to stay out of jail, owes his position to the nutcase religious right, and foisted a scheme to kill the judiciary’s power of independent review so that he would have that much more unitary control. No wonder Trump used to love him so much. Here’s the thing, Israel, very much unlike Hamas-run Gaza or Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, is still a pluralist society where people from all walks of life (including the military) have been fighting against Netanyahu’s bullshit.
In theory, there’s a real difference between “anti-Zionism” and anti-Semitism, for instance with ultra-Orthodox Jews who don’t see the secular Zionist state as the legitimate government for the Holy Land. In practice, with those few exceptions, there IS no difference. The distinction is the idea that there is something uniquely illegitimate about the Israeli government not just in policy but in its existence, for example the idea that you can enforce BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) policies against it, but not against Communist China, whose human rights violations are that much more egregious, to say nothing of the United States, Israel’s main financial support and diplomatic shield in the United Nations. But see, you can’t push Red China around, and you can’t push the US around. You can, apparently, push Israel around, or you think you can, and the fact that you can justifies doing so. But of course THAT position isn’t amoral.
If nothing else, the whole situation gives the lie to the idea that it’s impossible to be racist if you’re in an oppressed community, or that racism is defined only by power relationships. The Jews were an oppressed community practically everywhere, did that mean the Israelis learned fair play? Not really. And if being oppressed automatically gives the Palestinians the moral high ground, are they going to learn mercy and compassion when they get the chance to practice it? Well, Hamas gave us the answer to that question.
As a secular humanist, I would prefer that a religious ethnostate like Israel not even exist, but we know that it has to because Jews have not been safe as a minority in other countries – even the United States, to some extent. That’s part of why the US has basically treated Israel as having a blank check for support, because we know what would happen if it didn’t have one.
Which in a roundabout way gets back to the original subject, because the House prior to Mike Johnson still had to vote on aid to Ukraine, which is attacked by Russia. The House Republicans are dancing on Trump’s strings, and Trump is dancing on Putin’s strings. Hell, he’s practically twerking. Now under Speaker Johnson, the Republicans are obliging the rest of the government to choose between aiding Ukraine and aiding Israel, or in the case of one bill, choosing between Israel aid and funding the IRS.
Matt Gaetz started with a weak Speaker who was nevertheless capable of appealing to both Trumpniks and establishment Republicans, and now he has maneuvered things to where the House is led by someone who is that much more Trumpnik and election denying than McCarthy was. And in the interim he left the House leaderless and unable to approve foreign aid, and about the same time, Hamas, supported by Iran, which is an ally of Russia, decided to attack Israel. Almost as if they were waiting for a cue.
No, I can’t say for sure that Matt Gaetz is a paid agent of a foreign power. I am saying that if he were, it would be impossible to tell the difference.
Before I get to the other stuff, I’m going to briefly go over the hilarity with Viceroy Trump having his little mugshot when he was arraigned in Atlanta. One Internet character had the brilliant idea of casting all the 18 lieutenants who had to take mugshots (like Mark Meadows and Rudy Guiliani) as Batman ’66 villains with the final assembly, naturally, centered on Donnie Clownboy as The Joker. (Giving him the Cesar Romero mustache was a great touch.)
I also think not only that Trump actually rehearsed his pose for the shot, I agree with whoever said that Trump leaned over, not just to make that LookitmeI’msoangryGRRRRR face, but because the further out he projects his jaw, the harder it is to see his other chins.
It’s actually a little sad that because the mugshot was taken after Trump’s time in office (NEWS FLASH: Trump is no longer president) that it can’t be used as his official presidential portrait, since the picture that is actually used, while professional, fails for that very reason: Posing Trump at his desk at the Oval Office almost makes it look like he’s working. Even so, not even the Trump mugshot is as fucked up as the ACTUAL Chuck Close painting of Bill Clinton that is his official portrait in the national gallery. Yes, this is REAL.
But again, Trump staged his little pout very deliberately, and to present an image of being a lot more forceful and powerful than he has proven to be against actual dictators. And while to people like me, the effort is so obvious as to be comical, it actually seems to work with a large section of the public. And that gets to a matter that is a lot more relevant right now.
While The Lamestream Media seems to be focusing a lot on Trump’s malice and malfeasance, and (yet again) giving him a respectable platform for his lying, the main focus of national news seems to be how everyone in the Democratic Party, with the possible exception of President Biden’s own people, doesn’t want Joe Biden to run again.
And this shows that Trump’s emphasis on superficial branding actually works, even on people who aren’t brain-dead Trumpniks. It’s why people think that Trump is a financial genius because he inherited money and played a billionaire on “reality” TV. And they think that Trump is more young and vital than Biden because Biden actually looks his age whereas Trump uses a bronzer that the makeup department on the Original Star Trek would have rejected as too garish and cheap-looking.
But maybe because everybody knows Trump for what he is and some people accept it anyway, they’re more prone to judge Joe Biden in terms of his objective qualifications and circumstances, whereas Trump fans don’t believe in bourgeois conceits like “objectivity.” So “reasonable” and “moderate” people will look at all of Joe Biden’s gaffes and think he’s not fit to be president while a Trumpnik will still think Trump ha sempre ragione even when he says Biden wants to get us in World War II.
To say nothing of the fact that Biden’s physical and verbal stumbles are of a piece with [the late] Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) losing her train of speech and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Kentucky) staring into space for several seconds, on multiple occasions. Here I again point out that the etymology of the word “Senate” traces directly from the Roman Republic, where the Latin senatus is taken from the singular senex, meaning “old man”, which means a senate is literally a group of old men.
Fact is, the Establishment is a mess. That’s why Republicans have been able to capitalize to the extent that they have. But this isn’t 2016, when it was easy to critique Hillary Clinton and the Republicans had been out of power, so they didn’t seem so bad. Back then, Trump’s strongest argument was “Whaddya got to lose?” Well… now we know. And that was all before January 6, and the trials, and Trump saying that General Mark Milley should have been hanged for talking with a foreign power, not to mention being found guilty of fraud in a New York case where evidence was so overwhelming the judge saw no need for a jury trial.
The other issue again is that prior to Trump taking over, the “MAGA” mentality hadn’t been quite so dominant in political life, whereas even with Democrats controlling the White House and the Senate, the Trumpniks are increasingly overbearing in their attempts to impose themselves in state government and to the extent that they can in the Federal government.
This is why we, yet again have Republicans, mostly in the House of Representatives shutting down the government if they don’t get their way. In this case it’s largely because of SINO (Speaker in Name Only) Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California), whom journalists frequently describe as “feckless.” He is totally lacking in feck. Having given up all the authority of his office for the mere privilege of having it, McCarthy is obliged to go along with every childish whim of Matt Gaetz (BR.-Florida) and Marjorie Taylor (BR.-Georgia), for instance, stripping Ukraine aid out of a provision to keep the Department of Defense funded (because their Master’s Master thinks it’s a lot more fun to shoot Ukrainians when they can’t shoot back). Meanwhile in the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville (the name is French for ‘village of tubers’) has been on a long-standing crusade to stop any government promotions of military personnel, including the heads of the Army, Navy and USMC, because the Pentagon allows women personnel to take leave for abortions after the Alito Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade.
You certainly can’t shame right-wingers by saying that government bureaucrats won’t be paid for having to work. But what’s telling is that we’re expecting members of the military to go without pay (while the Republicans who created this mess get paid on schedule, of course). It may seem remarkable how hostile the “pro-military” “conservatives” are to our military and global position, and that not even an appeal to patriotism works on the Party of Trump.
Democrats still haven’t figured out that shamelessness is the Republican superpower. Republicans don’t care. What the real issue is is that you can’t even hit them with appeals to patriotism because they see this country and its government in proprietary terms. That is, unless they OWN this country, it’s not theirs, and until they own this country, this country is their ENEMY. If they were honest – or in some cases, just blabbermouth enough – they’d admit that they’re undermining our defense posture because they’re not patriots for this country, but rather for the country that their Leader does so much to emulate.
And they think that if they can make everybody hate the Democrats as much as they do, they’ll win. There’s just one problem. Everyone already DOES hate the Democrats, and they’re still winning elections against Republicans, which is why Republicans do everything they can to discourage voting and making sure votes don’t count.
So everybody hates the Democrats. Everybody hates the economy. What do Republicans propose to do about that? Shut down the government if Democrats don’t submit to blackmail, no matter HOW MANY TIMES the public sees whose fault it is.
And everybody IN the Democratic Party is the opposite of enthused with Joe Biden. Just like Bill Clinton was already getting to be a liability for his party and Al Gore even before Monicagate. And then Republicans impeached him and the Democrats rallied around their guy. Just like Donald Trump was increasingly unpopular even in his own party for his erratic behavior, and then he got impeached, and everybody in the Republican Party had to rally around him. And because actual conviction in impeachment requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate and there’s going to be at least one-third of the Senate in the sitting President’s party (were that not the case, that party almost certainly wouldn’t have elected the president), impeachment is damn useless for its constitutional purpose and by now both parties should know it. In the short term at least it only serves to boost a president’s support with his own party at the lowest ebb when he needs it most.
So what is Kevin McCarthy going to do? What are you going to do, Kevin? That’s right! Impeach the President!
Reeeeal Men of Geeeeniuus….
And in the midst of all this, I forgot about the second (non-Trump) Republican presidential debate Wednesday September 27. But I guess so did everyone else. For one thing, it was held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, an institution which now has as much influence on the Republican Party as any of the candidates. I gave up watching around halfway through when I couldn’t get past all the shouting and everyone talking over each other. When I could hear one individual speak uninterrupted, it was either lame jokes or more political hack sloganeering than any Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris speech, except Democrats are campaigning for a welfare state and Republicans want a place that makes Gilead look like Ibiza. As with the last show, Nikki Haley made the best impression, especially when she told Vivek Ramaswamy, “Every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber.” So say we all.
So it made even more sense than last time for Trump to skip this whole thing (even though he IS a chicken for avoiding debate) because none of these guys are real competition and they’re not worth the effort. What then did he do Wednesday? Well, there was a lot of noise in the media about how Trump stole Biden’s thunder by using debate night to make a speech to auto workers instead, which is why the Biden Administration decided to counter by having the president join a UAW picket line Tuesday. But then it turned out Trump was scheduled by management to speak at a non-union shop for parts manufacturing, a shop which staffs 150 people even though the event drew 500, and told his massively huge crowd that because Biden was pressing to make all cars electric, “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what (wage) you get because in two years you’re all going to be out of business.”
Donald Trump: It’s Morning in America.
I’m sure there’s lots of Republicans who would rather vote for somebody, ANYBODY, besides Donald Trump, but they’re not going to vote for somebody else, they’re going to vote for Trump. Likewise, Democrats may say they want somebody else besides Joe Biden, but they’re not going to vote for somebody else. Why? Because this is America, where we have freedom of choice.
Among Joe Biden’s many, many Dad cliches in speech is saying “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” And like much of what Biden says, it’s bland, it’s obvious, and it’s absolutely correct. Yes, he’s old, he’s slow, he was never that smooth on his best days, and if people had any confidence in Kamala Harris, people wouldn’t be so scared that he’d die in office. But then compare him to the guy who talks about starting World War II, then compare him to the various ankle-biters still running in what used to be the Party of Reagan, hoping maybe Trump will choke on a steak or something. Biden may not be Almighty God, but God Almighty, the alternative is a shit volcano.
Having nothing else to do on Wednesday and not much capacity to do anything but watch TV, I went on “Max” to check out Ezra Miller in The Flash, just to see if it was AS bad as everybody said. And it’s not that bad… but it sure ain’t that good.
The movie starts with an amusing interlude with Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) pursuing criminals while they set The Flash (Miller) to save civilians from the property disaster the crooks set off as a distraction. It’s good, but the part where The Flash has to save eight babies (and a nurse, and a therapy dog) from falling out a skyscraper looks less like an ingenious use of superspeed and more like Adam West running an obstacle course to get rid of a bomb.
But Barry Allen’s other motivation besides being a superhero is to try to get his Dad out of prison. As a boy, Barry’s Mom sent his Dad to the store to get a can of tomatoes for dinner, and when he came home, he was found with a knife in his wife’s chest. Working with the Central City Police and secretly supported by Batman through Wayne Enterprises, Barry gets footage from the grocery store but it fails to give his Dad an alibi. But, Barry has learned from his power stunt in the Justice League movie that he can break the lightspeed barrier and travel spacetime. And of course, he tells Bruce Wayne (Batman) his idea, of course Bruce warns him about “The Butterfly Effect” and of course Barry blows him off. He tries to change the past on only the smallest level: He goes to the grocery store when his Mom first visits and plants a can of tomatoes in the shopping cart so she won’t forget it, so that Dad won’t be gone when a stranger comes by the house. And it works: Barry sees his Mom and his Dad together again, safe and sound. But he doesn’t realize that he hasn’t changed the past, he’s created a parallel timeline where there’s another Barry who’s about to visit his parents too.
For the sake of distinction I will henceforth refer to him as “Stoner Barry.” Stoner Barry has all the goofiness of regular Barry but none of the intellectual depth. See, this version of Barry didn’t see his Dad go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, so he wasn’t motivated to develop a career in police forensics. That’s another point Bruce made to Barry in their conversation: “Our scars make us who we are.” (Also, our scars remind us that the past is real.) As it turned out not only did Barry go back to the point at which he would have gotten his powers in a lab accident, this is about the same time that the Kryptonian force under General Zod (Michael ‘I’m Only In It For The Money’ Shannon) came to demand the appearance of the last Kryptonian on Earth. So apparently deciding he hasn’t done ENOUGH damage to the timeline, Barry takes Stoner Barry to the police lab to repeat the incident that gave him the Speed Force, except that when he does so, lightning strikes him and then Stoner Barry so that Barry loses his powers but Stoner Barry gets them. So now Barry has to be the rational adult trying to show this goofball how to use his powers and the speedsuit.
In his web searches, Barry realizes that Victor Stone is not a cyborg in this timeline and Aquaman and Wonder Woman don’t even exist. But Stoner Barry’s roommates tell him Batman is real, he’s just been in retirement for years. So the two Barrys take a taxi to the dilapidated Wayne Manor and get in a fight with an old martial-artist hermit who turns out to be – Michael Keaton.
In not too much time, the boys convince this Bruce Wayne to shave his hair and beard and put on the rubber Batsuit again. They trace the location of the Kryptonian refugee to a prison in deep Russia, break in and instead of Superman they see an apparently starving young girl. Barry insists on saving her. She is, of course, Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), kept for examination by the Russians under kryptonite lasers and deprived of sunlight. Of course, Batman gets the team to the surface, and she immediately begins to kick ass.
Batman, Supergirl and Stoner Barry all work together to (eventually) restore Barry’s Speed Force, and the four heroes fly out to where the Kryptonian forces are fighting the US Army in the desert. And this leads to much CGI ass-kicking and stuntwork, but with only one Kryptonian against dozens, the fight is against the heroes. Batman is killed and Zod stabs Supergirl, injecting her with a probe to harvest her DNA as the basis for a program to terraform Earth to Krypton standards, which will kill all existing life.
The two Barrys go back to the time nexus to rewind things to the middle of the fight and change events, but it doesn’t work: Batman is saved (temporarily) but they can’t stop the Kryptonians from taking Supergirl. Eventually Barry realizes this is the fixed event he can’t avoid, and he needs to give up. And Stoner Barry, who has been brought all this way for nothing, refuses to accept this, and won’t let him leave.
This conflict causes the various multiverses to begin crashing in on each other, and at this point the audience sees a whole bunch of crossovers, including George Reeves, Christopher Reeve AND Helen Slater, Adam West, and the Hair Club For Supermen Nicholas Cage, FIGHTING A GIANT SPIDER.
Strange, in the middle of all this fan service, given that DC obviously doesn’t care about paying actors for using their likenesses with cheap CGI, they didn’t bring in Grant Gussin from The Flash series on CW. (After all, Miller did appear there once.) But that probably would have been an unfavorable comparison. Gussin’s Barry may have been an overbearing do-gooder much of the time, but he was a real four-color hero and not a schlemiel.
In any event, Barry overcomes the internal conflict and manages to go back to the day of his mom’s murder, taking the can of tomatoes out of her cart, then going back “home.” At which point, he’s summoned to court in his Dad’s case, because the Wayne Enterprises tape has revealed new evidence. Apparently when Barry put the can of tomatoes back he put it on a different shelf, so when his Dad came to the store, he looked up to get it, so his face was on the security cam, and that proved his alibi. So Barry at least saved one of his parents. After Barry has a brief celebration with his girlfriend, Bruce Wayne comes to give congratulations. Except, now he’s George Clooney.
Oh, sorry. I guess there were spoilers.
I have to agree with some of the critics who point out that for all the comic-relief qualities that made Miller’s performance such a ray of sunshine in the Justice League movie(s), the same approach makes them seem like a nervous klutz when they have to carry their own movie.
The other issue is that just as Barry keeps trying to rewind the past, fans have already seen this before. It was called Flashpoint, a comic book crossover in which Barry’s attempts to save his family had disastrous effects. Flashpoint was one of the major story arcs in the later DC Universe, much as The Infinity Gauntlet is for Marvel, and like it has been re-used for various other media: graphic novels, TV cartoons, and the CW series. And in most of these cases the results were better stories.
The really odd thing is that as this script was hashed and re-hashed over years, in typical Hollywood fashion, two of the listed co-writers (who were previously on track to direct The Flash) were John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who were also directors and co-writers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But the silliness worked in that movie, because it was more consistent with the tone, where the characters were basically gentleman rogues and no one really got hurt. It’s a little more jarring when you have the comedy team of Allen and Allen in scenarios where people are getting shot up with assault rifles or skewered with warblades. You would think that the Dungeons & Dragons movie would not have a code versus killing and the superhero movie would… but this IS the Snyderverse.
Or rather, it WAS the Snyderverse. The problem with building up such a massive movie is that if it doesn’t make an even more massive profit, it becomes one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history. When you combine that with the even more disappointing Black Adam (‘Finally, The ROCK – HAS COME BACK! – to the video bin’), The Flash is clearly the nail in the coffin to the “DC Extended Universe” and makes it that much more easier for producer-director James Gunn to put his stamp on everything. It’s not impossible, but increasingly unlikely, that Ezra Miller and Gal Gadot will be brought back. They’ve already recast Superman and Lois. And the people who actually liked the Snyderverse (apparently, not enough of them) are all bitching about how James Gunn is going to fuck everything up. I say, if the results are like Peacemaker, then they’re going to be even more fucked up than The Flash but more dramatically coherent.
OK, so reviewing the Republican candidates’ debate on Fox Wednesday, let’s go back to the Republican Debate Bingo Card: “Pledge to Pardon Trump” – Yes, actually brought up by the debate hosts, and answers were kind of a blur. “Crooked Joe Biden” “Radical Left” “Two-Tiered Justice System” – not really brought up, though every time people were obliged to admit Trump tried to stop the election verification, they acted like it was Democrats’ fault for doing something about it. “Drag Queens” – not that I recall. “Hillary Clinton Mention” – they MUST have mentioned Hillary, but I can’t recall where. “Child Indoctrination” – yeah, that was DeSantis. “Prosecute Dr. Fauci” – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’d fire Fauci. Even though he’s already resigned. “Biden Crime Family” – not that I recall. “Crime infested blue cities” – not in so many words, but they talked about crime a lot. “WOKE!” -Not specifically. “Climate ‘Hoax'” – actually, nobody other than Vivek Ramaswamy said climate change is a hoax (and he got BOOED), and he was basically taking the “Drill, Baby, Drill!” position. “Mainstream Media” – you had Ramaswamy telling Chris Christie that he was auditioning for a job at MSNBC. He also said Nikki Haley was going to take a nice corporate job after this campaign, which raises the question of what company will hire him once he has to bow out after Iowa. “Biden’s Age” – oh yeah. “Assault on [insert] Liberties” – not an issue for anybody here. These guys don’t believe in liberty, even for themselves. Their approach to liberty is basically the Catholic Church’s position on freedom: They only do what the authorities tell them to do because that’s what they were going to do anyway. “Election Integrity” – not in so many words. “Anti-Ukraine Sentiment” – mainly from DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, which led to pushback from Nikki Haley in one of her better moments of the night, pointing out that on this very day Putin killed his own former henchman. “Hunter Biden!” “CRT” – that was DeSantis, mainly. “DeSantis Makes A Weird Face” – they’re ALL weird faces. “Referring to Insurrectionists as Patriots” – not really. “Soros Reference” – 49 minutes in! “Back the Blue” – not so much, but I did see a few people falling all over themselves to be the first one to invade Mexico to take out their drug networks. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind us violating their national sovereignty. After all, we do it all the time.
I kind of agree with the people who think that Tim Scott and Mike Pence, simply by not embarrassing themselves, did relatively well. And then you had Doug… lemme check… Doug Burgum. Every so often Bret Baier and Martha McCallum remembered he was on stage, and even more occasionally, so did he. And then you had the two mini-Trumps, DeSantis and Ramaswamy, and while Ramaswamy was kind of “cocaine energy” and sometimes just plain wrong, he was forthright and a good speaker. And then you had DeSantis. Baier told him crime was up in Miami. DeSantis responded that “crime is at a 50-year low in Florida.” Which didn’t exactly disprove the statement. (‘Sure I’ve got brain cancer, but my blood sugar is better than ever!’) The very first speech was DeSantis going “Our country is in decline.” Later Ramaswamy said “It is NOT morning in America.” So much for the Party of Reagan, eh?
Nikki Haley was formerly ambassador to the UN and conducted herself in such a manner, speaking very professionally. Haley said, correctly, that it was Republicans under the Trump Organization (where she served of course) that exploded the deficit. She admitted that is an issue everyone has to confront. She said that while she is pro-life, women should not be persecuted and prosecuted for being pregnant. She also said “what (the people) will tell you is, it is time for a new conservative leader… Trump is the most disliked politician in the country – and WE CAN’T WIN A GENERAL ELECTION THAT WAY.”
Asa Hutchinson, who was notably the only candidate who refused to raise a hand on the question of whether they would support Trump as the nominee, didn’t speak much, but he was very forthright on the point that Trump has disqualified himself, morally if not legally. Chris Christie said much the same thing, demurring on the point of whether he committed crimes but saying that character is an issue and the Party should not be supporting someone of such low character. He was basically saying the same thing Nikki Haley did, but took a lot more flak. At which point, he said the line of the night: “That’s the great thing about this country: Booing is allowed, but it doesn’t change the truth.”
And the response was generally, “SEZ YOU, COMMIE!”
Which is of course the issue in a nutshell. This was an audience that seriously believes that emotional partisanship can change the truth. The loudest cheers of the night, as with the question of who would support Trump as the nominee, were for “the elephant not in the room.” It was a decent debate in and of itself actually, mainly in the first hour, because you got these guys to talk about policy issues. And because you didn’t have Trump constantly talking over everybody, including the Fox hosts, to blather about himself. But the point is that policy doesn’t matter. About an hour in they had to bring up Trump and his legal issues, because Republican voters don’t care about policy issues, they want gladiatorial combat, and Fox knows that better than anybody. So since none of these guys have national reputations of their own, Fox got them to catfight over Trump. From their perspective it was the best of both worlds cause they got to bring him up without him being a liability to the event.
With the Republican Party, even the “adults in the room”, that is, the hosts, the network and most of the candidates, also believe that their emotions and wishes can change the truth of their situation, which is that this is not a party of conservatives but a Jonestown cult that would drink the Kool-Aid and belly up to the bar for seconds. They are of course still dominant in certain states mainly because they make the laws in those states, but everywhere else – including a lot of places where Democrats have no purchase – they’re losing the voters. Haley IS right – you can’t win nationally with the most despised person in the country. But try telling that to the cultists who think Trump is an invincible God-Emperor who’s gonna live forever and doesn’t have to worry about what happens when he’s gone. Not that he hasn’t lived an amazingly long time given his habits. But the adults in the room still think that what they do matters, on the impression that SOME day Trump’s not gonna be in the picture.
Ha Ha Ha. They’ve been wishing that for years and it hasn’t happened yet. I mean nobody’s gonna care so much about this on Thursday evening. Cause of course that’s when Liddle Donnie Clown Boy is obliged to surrender himself at the jailhouse in Atlanta, AND get a mugshot like all his lieutenants did Wednesday. Of course on one of his social media posts he taunted the judges for making him post bond, like he’s supposed to be slipping off to “Russia Russia Russia” and crash with Putin for the rest of his life. That would NOT be a good idea for obvious reasons, foremost among them that his overwhelming lead in party polls means he IS going to be the Republican nominee, meaning there’s always a chance he could win the general election. Plus, he’d have to somehow ditch his Secret Service detail, whose job is kind of keeping an eye on him at all times. But you never know. Sometime tomorrow he could be commandeering a white Bronco and trying to get a plane to Venezuela or somewhere. I mean, that would be UNBELIEVABLY STUPID. One of those things where you go “Even Trump can’t be THAT STUPID!” Which is what makes it all the more likely. Trump is like the Homer Simpson of fascism: Every time you think, “he can’t get THAT stupid!” he always finds a way to top himself.
The other surprise factor – which frankly I consider LESS likely than Trump trying to make a break for it – would be if the Georgia authorities, backed up by feds, surrounded Trump in the jail and said, “Hey you know all these conditions we set to release you from detention? You remember where we said you weren’t allowed to defame or threaten anyone involved in the case including law enforcement or witnesses or other people in the trial? And you remember when you posted the bond you specifically agreed you “shall make no threat of any direct or indirect nature” including but “not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media”? And what did you do then, Donnie?”
“Here’s your cell, Donnie. That’s where you’re staying till the end of the trial.”
Of course that would cause the entire “conservative” media sphere to explode like Krakatoa, as would Trump trying to flee America, because then they’d have more egg on their faces than the co-star in a James Deen money shot. Either way, Trump is once again the only object of attention, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
