No kids came to the door this Halloween.
Absolutely NONE.
Fuck You, Trump Virus.
Month: October 2020
No, It’s Not A Democracy, And At This Point, It’s Probably Not A Republic
“Dad- what is democracy?”
“Got something to do with young men killing each other, I believe.”
So now it’s time for the spookiest, SCARIEST time of the year – Election Day 2020!
It is of course spooky and scary this year because of the stakes if Joe Biden loses the election (and Republicans keep the Senate) which seems that much more likely now that “Boofin’ Brett” Kavanaugh and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court have shown their hand in preventing Pennsylvania from taking mail ballots received after Election Day. And Amy Comey Barrett is now waiting to take her place to help rule on the various cases that Viceroy Trump is going to bring to throw out Biden’s votes.
And of course liberals whine and wail about how unfair all of this is, as if there’s any sort of rule against the President appointing a Supreme Court justice during an election year – just as there was not a rule against a President filling a SCOTUS vacancy in 2016, and in both cases it amounts to Mitch McConnell can do any damn thing he wants cause he’s got the votes in the Senate. Which leads to more liberal complaining about how “un-democratic” the Senate, and the Electoral College, and the whole American constitutional system are, as though that wasn’t the point. But at the same time, we have, through constitutional process, made the American republic more democratic and inclusive than the way it started out, and the Republicans really are going back on what we have come to think of as democracy. The real problem is that they are going back on what it means to be a republic.
The fact of the matter is that ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ mean much the same thing.
‘Democracy’ comes from the Greek demos (people or demographic) and kratia (rule or government), thus democracy means ‘the people rule’ or ‘popular government’. According to Wikipedia, ‘republic‘ is derived from the Latin res publica, publica of course being public and res referring to a property or matter in question. Thus the phrase could translate as ‘public matter’ or ‘public concern.’
Political science and history make a distinction between the two. Each Greek polis (city-state) had its own form of government, and the main ‘democracy’ of the period was the polis of Athens. Women, youths, slaves and foreign-born men could not participate in the vote, but every other adult male citizen was obliged to participate in politics in the same way that a State Assemblyman or US Congressman would as their job. However, the Founders of the United States, influenced by classical philosophers such as Plato decided that a pure democracy would lead to mob rule and the prospect that a demagogue could exploit the system and create a tyranny. This was the Federalists’ explicit reason for the Electoral College. In actual history, Athens’ primary example of a demagogue was Alcibiades, who won Athens great victories in the Pelopennesian War, but also turned around and worked for both Sparta and Persia for the sake of his own advantage.
The Founding Fathers, rather than follow the Athenian example or even a contemporary example like the Iroquois Confederacy, modeled their government after the Roman Republic (which is one reason we have fasces at the Speaker’s podium in the House of Representatives and in much of our iconography), which after the overthrow of the Etruscan king was built around the Roman Senate. “Senate”, incidentally, is taken from the Latin senex, or “old man”, thus a senate is literally “a group of old men.”
In the days of the king, the Senate was simply the council of elders that the king consulted, but once the monarchy was overthrown, Roman culture professed to disdain inherited title and kingship while still using the Senate to preserve class privileges of established families, which is similar to the purpose it holds today. Even with a separate House of Representatives (similar to the British House of Commons) and the Progressive reform to have Senators under popular election rather than chosen by state legislatures, the Senate is still very much the upper house that like the Electoral College exists to slow or outright stop the popular will. In the not-too-far-off old days when senior Republicans were moderate and liberal government was the rule, the Senate was the Elephants’ Graveyard where conservative ideas went to die. Now that bipartisanship is dead but the Democrats have retaken the House, the Senate, and its capacity to appoint federal judges to lifetime terms, is all the Republicans have left.
In political language, the ‘democracy’ that we define as separate from a republic is called direct democracy, but the main example of this in Western civilization is Athens itself, and later liberals, like the Americans, hewed closer to the Roman pattern than the Athenian one, or like the British, simply evolved their system of representation in an organic, trial-and-error manner. Thus, while we think of “democracy” in terms of broadly protecting civil liberties and human rights, the form of said democracy is technically more of a republic, or a representative government, in which people vote for a professional class of politicians to represent them in government rather than perform day-to-day governance themselves.
In practice, though, we apply the phrase ‘democracy’ in the generic sense that we use ‘Coke’ to refer to any carbonated soft drink (even when most people who prefer Coke to Pepsi or vice versa will never get them confused). To be really technical, we could most accurately call this country a democratic republic; it follows republican features but has generally sought to expand the franchise to more and more people. However, this also means not every democracy is a republic – the United Kingdom, for instance, still has legacy positions for the Lords and the monarch that do have a real influence on the government from time to time, even as the day-to-day function of government is a parliamentary democracy. Indeed, with the increasing autonomy of Scotland and other localities, it could be argued that the British are now more democratic than us.
It’s just that with the natural ambiguity of the English language and the deliberate ambiguity of political language, American politicians take the primary God-word of our political heritage – ‘democracy’ – and apply it in a completely subjective manner to make it mean something good or bad depending on what they want to suggest at the time. So liberals have suggested for years that the Constitution is a living document that in a democracy changes not so much by the formal amendment process as by how the majority wishes to interpret it, but when the political majority changes to interpret the Constitution against liberal standards, suddenly that’s a violation of democracy. And at the same time, when they point out to the Right that their political majority is misleading because red states in particular have throttled the “right” to vote, the Right will actually agree, and say, with Senator Mike Lee (BR.-Utah) that this is a republic for a reason and “(we) want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Of course, these are the same people who howled that when Democrats in the House impeached their President, they were thwarting the will of the American voter, never mind the fact that Mike Pence would have succeeded Trump as his elected successor and the result of the election would have been preserved.
The character of this sentiment is demonstrated by its implications. The fact that the Right will engage in this doublethink in sanctifying “freedom” and “democracy” on one hand and then disparaging democracy/majority rule on the other simply indicates the package deal we have where America identifies “democracy” not in terms of the “bad” democracy of the Athenian polis but the “good” democracy of the Roman Republic. But even by that standard, “democracy” means that the voters pick their representatives. And if the political class, the current representatives, want to use the courts and other entities to throw out votes, limit ballot access and play other games to keep themselves in power expressly against the voter consensus, then never mind “It’s a republic, not a democracy”, under that system, it’s not even a republic anymore.
Under that setup, the defenders who trash democracy on one hand yet praise “democracy” “freedom” and “liberty” on the other are defining freedom, liberty and political rights as something belonging to only their demographic, and elections are simply a plebiscite to approve what they want.
Right-wing cynics like to joke that “Democracy is just a setup where two wolves and a sheep take a majority vote on who gets eaten for dinner.” By that logic, a republic is just a setup where the sheep has the right to vote on which wolf has the first right to eat him. Keep in mind, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Communist China are all technically republics. A mere republic is nothing to celebrate.
The fact that there is both a distinction and an intersection between the two terms democracy and republic, and that it is possible for the popular will to crush the rights of minorities, as was the case for so much of American history, is why the subject is so complicated, why “conservatives” are able to exploit that ambiguity, and why for instance it is not easy to say that Trump is a fascist or anti-democratic. After all, like Hitler (but unlike Mussolini or the Bolsheviks), he used the democratic system to attain power. This was a subject that the Vox website famously addressed early in the Trump era, and Dylan Matthews recently returned to the subject this month, asking eight experts if Trump qualifies as a fascist. And while most of them agreed that Trump is truly dangerous, they all said that fascism has specific characteristics and Trump doesn’t necessarily qualify. As Roger Griffin at Oxford University told Matthews: “You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist.” He also said later on that “(Trump’s) relationship to democracy, I would really insist, is the key to answering whether he’s a fascist or not. Even in four years of incoherent and inconsistent tweets, he’s never actually done a Putin and tried to make himself a permanent president, let alone suggest any coherent plan for overthrowing the constitutional system. And I don’t even think that’s in his mind. He is an exploiter, he’s a freeloader. He’s a wheeler and dealer. And that is not the same as an ideologue.
“So he’s absolutely not a fascist. He does not pose a challenge to constitutional democracy. He certainly poses a great challenge to liberalism and liberal democracy. And I think real favor will be served by journalists who, instead of seeing liberal democracy as a single entity, see it as a binomial. Democracy can exist without liberalism.”
This observation leads to two points.
First off, using ‘fascism’ as an umbrella label is an old Communist tactic from the pre-Nazi period of the German republic, which unlike us has always had a social democrat mainstream left. And the Communists, seeking to compete with and replace the Social Democratic Party, identified them as ‘social fascists‘ simply because they were not communists. (They were also the originators of the term Antifa.) Don’t fall for it.
Secondly, and more relevant to this piece, the fact that there is such a thing as illiberal (right-wing) democracy and that the communists often refer to themselves as ‘democratic’ or ‘popular government’ movements simply justifies why America’s founding fathers were at pains to distinguish their system from democracy and why it has so many counter-majoritarian elements. They were far more concerned with protecting liberty than democracy. Which in some respect is understandable. If we can argue that the Nazis had broad popular support (and one could argue the opposite) then something like the Nuremberg Laws could be considered an example of democratic action.
Given that, it makes sense to have a Supreme Court acting against the political trend so that they can point to the laws and precedents of the country if the rest of the government wants to pass a racial law like the Nuremberg codes and say, “No, you can’t do that, the Constitution forbids it.” But then, the whole premise of the Republicans’ Supreme Court fight is that the anti-democratic plurality seeks to corner the judiciary, not to protect the original intent of the Constitution against political trends, but to protect their political position against unpopularity.
And in regard to the comparison, Weimar Germany did have a very liberal constitution, but when the Nazis passed the Enabling Act, through perfectly constitutional means, they basically authorized Hitler’s government to act as it wished without approval from the Reichstag.
Which is where we get to the real issue. The Germans had a government of laws, and so do we, or so we thought. We had a whole slew of laws passed to guard against corruption in government, the White House in particular, after Watergate, but if nobody’s going to enforce them, they might as well not exist. And this gets to an overall issue with American government. I have often compared it to the rules of a board game or role-playing game where the Constitution and other written laws are the Rules As Written and the various legal precedents and “norms” are the house rules, how the government actually operates from day to day. And this touches on the classical liberal/libertarian concept of “negative rights.” Negative rights basically mean that government is prevented from doing something, as in the First Amendment starting “Congress shall make no law” and specifying from there. In this case, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” means that our rights to freedom of worship (implying a right not to worship) are insured by the fact that the government cannot dictate a religious standard. Similarly, while government has restricted the press and the right to assemble for both practical and political reasons, there is an overall standard holding that the rights to speech and assembly exist because Congress is not allowed to prohibit them. The reason for the distinction lies in a point frequently made by Ayn Rand:
“The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.
“Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted. This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”
Which is of course, just Rand’s opinion. But even in the Bill of Rights, the Ninth Amendment says “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” and the Tenth says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The whole reason for having a Bill of Rights is to insure that certain rights are protected against the rationale that there is no law preventing (say) interference with the press. The implication of the Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments particularly, is that the government is constrained by law. And yet, as with the Roman Republic, we, both voters and Congress, have given more and more power to each branch of government, especially the executive, because it was considered more convenient (to some people) than using the Rules As Written. There’s also the point that a lot of our necessary rules aren’t even in the Constitution. The number of Supreme Court Justices, for instance, wasn’t set until the Judiciary Act of 1869. And with regard to the President in particular, the person holding the office has been given a great deal of leeway simply because he’s the President. I had mentioned just as Obama was leaving office that libertarians and principled liberals thought that his reliance on executive orders and unilateral actions was setting a precedent that Trump could refer to. Reason Magazine said that the powers Barack Obama assumed were like leaving “a loaded weapon lying around” for his successor to use, and liberals scoffed. But before Obama, the political class in both parties, even Democrats under the George W. Bush Administration, put up with such power creep because however much the opposition might have disliked the guy in charge, he didn’t grossly abuse the privilege, before Trump. But it’s that much worse when the person in question has always had an inflated sense of entitlement and even before becoming a government official always operated on the maxim “it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” Now the standard operating procedure for the Trump Organization is that they can do anything they want because there’s nothing specifically forbidding them from doing so, and even if there is, nobody’s enforcing the laws.
The fact that Trump is simply taking a more blatant approach to what had gone before means that this was a problem whether you think the American government before Trump was democratic, republican, or fascist.
So on one level, the question of whether this is a republic or a democracy, like the question of whether Trump is a fascist, is meaningless compared to the results of actions. A huge part of the issue is a paradoxical matter of trust. Democrats ought to know by now they can’t trust Republicans, and not only do Republicans not trust Democrats, they think they’re Satanists, commies, or worse, liberals. And at the same time, the more politically active contingents know they can’t even trust their own parties, which is how you got the “progressives” on one side and the Tea Party/Trumpniks on the other. Not only does this increase extremism, that in turn increases the power creep in government as the party in power can only rule unilaterally and not by cooperation. I’m sure Obama’s defenders would point out that he had to rely on executive orders, especially after losing Congress, because Republicans wouldn’t cooperate with him. This is also why Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid killed the filibuster on judicial appointments, because prior to Dems losing the Senate, Obama couldn’t get any judges appointed at all otherwise. And then of course, once McConnell took over the Senate, he took the last judicial power Obama did have, because the judicial branch is the only way conservatives can prevail without that pesky “negotiate with the other side” process at all.
The paradox is the fact that as partisans of each camp become more distrustful of the other, the more they have to place their trust in their self-assigned gang, no matter how much they hate them. The cycle of tribalism means you have to tolerate the nutbags on your side no matter how much you would have objective cause to disavow them, because you hate those other nutbags even more. The fact that this is a process that incentivizes being a nutbag, and thus makes bad policies more likely, seems to be lost on everybody.
Therefore, while in the short run it may be necessary to throw out the Republicans, and in the long run it will be necessary to hold Democrats accountable by not trusting them any more than necessary, the real change is only going to occur once each voter examines their own motivations and decides how much to trust the rest of the country versus how much power they want to give government to control the people they don’t trust.
I suspect that the thought of such self-examination is what really scares the hell out of America.
Third Time’s The Charm. Except It’s The Second.
So we had what was supposed to be the third presidential debate and was actually the second because Viceroy Trump got himself coronavirus and wouldn’t agree to a virtual debate. This time, both he and challenger Joe Biden were tested on debate night and found negative, so the Commission on Presidential Debates decided to take down the plexiglass barriers that they were going to install between the two men’s podiums.
They were also supposed to mute the inactive candidate’s microphone during the active candidate’s question time, but I still heard these guys talking over each other. And while Trump didn’t “work the ref” with Kristen Welker nearly as much as he did with Chris Wallace (or Lesley Stahl) he still insisted on having his turn even when it wasn’t his turn. But I guess his handlers got the message through to him that not letting anybody else talk at all wasn’t going to work in appealing to the public. So Trump was ONLY as stupid and belligerent as he was in the debates with Hillary Clinton, and it’s doubtful that will work any better for him than it did last time. After all, even Trump fans don’t think it was the debates that won 2016.
The problem is that for all the Trumpublicans’ attempts to make Biden look sleepy, senile and corrupt, when Biden actually gets to talk (as he did tonight) he actually comes off as fairly together and professional, which is only a problem if you, like the Trump fan club, consider being together and professional as a trait of some Deep State disguised lizard person. Trump once again tried to pin Hunter Biden’s scandals on Joe, and he pointed out that the only guy who got in legal trouble over Burisma was Trump when his ethical violations toward Ukraine ended up getting him impeached.
They had a certain amount of time to discuss renewable energy versus environmental initiatives, and Trump said that contrary to opinion, he wanted “the cleanest air… the most crystal clear water..” – all these superlatives without a policy behind them. Apparently no one ever told him that running the White House isn’t like running a used car lot. Biden said (not entirely fairly) that Trump said windmills cause cancer. Trump in his best Biff Tanner mode said, “I know more about wind than you do.” (He’s certainly a lot better at producing it.) And when Biden admitted he wanted a conversion to renewables by 2025, Trump taunted that this would kill the oil industry. And he said, “will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” As he himself would say, he wouldn’t have to beg Texas and Pennsylvania for votes if he wasn’t losing.
It’s certainly not impossible to critique the Democrats or counter their arguments, it just looks that way when Donald Trump is your intellectual champion. He had maybe two good points to make against Biden or for himself, and both are, and were, easily countered. One, the coronavirus is in fact making a comeback in a lot of the places where it seemed to be under control. Biden pointed out that the current outbreak in Europe is from a much smaller base of cases than here, precisely because we let the virus get out of control. Secondly, there were a few different points at which the debate went to prison sentencing and other areas where the Trump Organization has made a few token gestures, and Trump kept goading Biden, saying, “you had eight years, why didn’t you do anything about these problems you’re talking about when you had a chance?” First, Biden did respond, but almost in passing, that a lot of his time in the Obama Administration was with a Republican Congress. Secondly, it’s quite true (as a lot of black ‘progressives’ will point out) that the Democrats really didn’t care about sentencing reform, or police brutality, or civil rights issues, and did take non-white constituencies for granted. But that gets to the real issue that I’m not sure Biden is think-outside-the-box enough to get to and was too diplomatic to raise even if he did: Up to this point, Democrats assumed that Republicans were peers whom they disagreed with, and not an enemy who would never negotiate in good faith. During most of the pre-Trump period under Obama, Democrats (and Obama himself) acted as though negotiation was still possible, even when no Republican would vote for the Affordable Care Act and Mitch McConnell said after getting the Senate majority that his goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Even then, you could still assume that was just partisan conservatism, as opposed to obviously being a reactionary, counter-majoritarian policy to disregard the entire rest of the country (even white people) and run things the way the apartheid regime did in South Africa. Thanks to Trump saying the quiet part loud (really loud, and repeatedly), it’s a bit harder for Democrats to deny where they really are, and there’s no reason for them not to play hardball in response.
Otherwise, Biden did what he had to do: He kept pointing out that for all of Trump’s bragging, the country is in the ditch right now, precisely because of his policies. We can’t “learn to live with” coronavirus, as Trump says, because it means more people are going to die needlessly. We can’t get our economy back until we reverse the spread of the disease. And while Trump mocked at Biden’s “kitchen table issues” talk, mocking was all he could do, because he doesn’t have a plan, and everyone knows it.
But since everyone’s minds are made up, the best Biden could do was not screw up, and the best Trump could do was not make things worse for himself. He probably accomplished that. Is it enough to turn the trend away from losing Texas, Pennsylvania, and the other states he needs? As the man would say, “We’ll see what happens.”
Vote? Already?
There’s a lot I could say about the Republican Senate’s confirmation hearings for Amy Comey Barrett as Supreme Court Justice, but to me it all just seems like an exercise in disingenuousness on both sides: If abortion was that popular, Democrats wouldn’t need to be ambiguous and call it “the right to choose” as though terminating a pregnancy was like deciding between Swiss or Provolone for your sandwich, and if Roe v. Wade was that UN-popular, Republicans wouldn’t need to pretend that they, or their nominee, were going to be completely neutral on a matter where both they and the nominee have made their position very clear. Nor would they need to ask why everyone is asking Barrett to recuse herself on SCOTUS’ upcoming ACA case, or on a Trump challenge to election results, when they are literally risking giving each other coronavirus knowing that they already have a 5-3 conservative majority on the Court without Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but are afraid that Chief Justice John Roberts would place the health of the nation over an “originalist” opinion that interprets the Founders’ intent for the Constitution to mean “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, not because he’s president, but because he’s Donald Trump.”
But since by design, Republicans don’t want anyone else to have control over the process, we have to focus on what we can control. In Nevada, the state government decided that for safety’s sake, every registered voter would get a mail-in ballot, although there is an option to take it to an official polling place, or to the early voting sites when that option becomes available on October 17th. And as I did the last couple of times, I wanted to go over my decisions for the current election.
President of the United States: Joseph Biden, Democrat.
Why? Because FUCK TRUMP.
What it ought to come down to is looking at the world around you. You don’t like your loss of freedom? You don’t like the fact that your favorite restaurant had to close? That the stores that are still open reduced their hours and their floor space? That everywhere you go you have to wear a mask or people think there’s something wrong with you? Or in the case of Nevada, it’s the law? Blame Trump.
Yes, the virus DID come from China. Yes, the Communist government covered up how bad it was. But Trump helped. And he continued to cover up when everyone else in the world knew it was a pandemic, and even after the extent of the problem became clear, Trump continued to use his “bully pulpit” to belittle low-cost, common-sense measures like social distancing and wearing masks. He continues to do so even after being diagnosed with the virus himself, and part of the reason he can is that the White House won’t be straight with us about what his condition is.
Coronavirus is a little like racism: Trump didn’t invent it. So he can’t be blamed for creating it. He did, however, decide it was to his political advantage to encourage its spread as much as possible. And when it spreads too long unchecked, people get killed.
Even if you liked the Trump economy up to that point, or Trump’s picks for the courts, you have to realize that we are never getting that economy back under Trump, because he didn’t create it, he inherited it. As with his family fortune, he inherited a profit from someone else (in this case, President Obama), took credit for someone else’s work, and then proceeded to completely waste it. If you’re voting Trump and Republican, you’re not voting for the previous three years. You’re voting for four more years of the last eight months.
I was registered Libertarian, and after this election, I probably will be again. I’m not voting Libertarian this time, even though the margin in my state is probably safer than it was when I voted for Gary Johnson, assuming (correctly) that it wouldn’t cost Hillary Clinton my state. And what that comes down to is that the meta-politics have changed. Trump has greater power to interfere with the election results, and the best way to undermine the political support for him doing so is to create such a huge margin against the Party of Trump in every state, including those where Republicans were safe (such as Iowa), that such efforts cannot get off the ground.
As I’ve said before, I don’t have a lot of faith that Joe Biden has a serious plan for coronavirus control or reviving the economy that Trump decimated and that Republicans refuse to relieve. But the first day that Biden is president will be the first day that Trump is not president, and that in itself will do wonders for our recovery.
US Representative: There are several choices on the ballot in Nevada, including a Libertarian in my district, but again I have to endorse the Democrat, who in this case is Dina Titus, someone who’s been a fairly effective representative for the voters.
Why? Because FUCK TRUMP. And that means fuck EVERYONE in his party of enablers, who have revealed over the past four years that he simply represents a mentality that they always held but couldn’t admit to until swayed by his cult of personality.
That goes back to the point above about how we have to think nationally, and not just in terms of the presidential election and local election. Trump can’t do what he does without at least one of the two houses of Congress (especially the Senate) and vice versa. Mitch McConnell may have a safe seat (though he’s not doing himself any favors) but if you take the majority away from him, that’s both houses of Congress acting against a re-elected Trump, and if it gets to that point it’s that much less likely that Trump will be re-elected. It’s extremely unlikely that they will be able to foist the Republican Party maneuvers to install Trump against the popular vote and even the Electoral College if the result can be delayed to the point that it goes to the House of Representatives. Because while under the Constitution, the delegations would be per state and the Republicans currently have a majority of those, that could change under this election. And in the case of a contingent election, the Vice President is elected by the Senate, which again would be changed by this election.
I mean, everyone in the Republican Party is a professional Christian, so most of them ought to know the Book of Exodus, right? About how the Hebrews were liberated from bondage in Egypt, but fell to worshiping a golden calf, and then rejected the land that God had promised them, and so they were made to wander the desert for forty years? Well, then, they can’t be too surprised if they end up in the wilderness for at least two. These guys need to be punished for inflicting the current situation on the country. Pure and simple. We need to get them to the point that they’re going to wish for the good old days of FDR.
And if they wanna whine about Democrats turning this country socialist, we can all say, “Hey! Remember the last time you said you were gonna save this country from socialism, and you sold us a dumbfuck Putin bitch who let the virus spread here from China and it crashed the consumer economy and killed a quarter-million people cause he thought wearing a mask would shrink his weewee? Good times!”
US Senate: This go-round of rotating Senate elections, Nevada doesn’t even have a Senate race this cycle, but still. Fuck Trump. Why? BECAUSE FUCK TRUMP, that’s why.
Now that that’s out of the way – the other choices on the Nevada ballot are basically non-partisan positions that usually don’t have opposition candidates, and I don’t know enough about the local candidates in any event. So I’m moving on to the ballot questions.
Nevada State Question 1: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) remove provisions governing the election and duties of the Board of Regents and its control and management of the State University and require the Legislature to provide by law for the State University’s governance, control, and management and the reasonable protection of individual academic freedom at Nevada’s public higher education institutions; and (2) revise the administration of certain federal land grant proceeds dedicated for the benefit of certain departments of the State University?
In other words, should the Nevada state university system continue to be administered by the Board of Regents or by the state legislature directly? I’m not a huge fan of the Board of Regents. I’m even less a fan of the state legislature. The wording indicates that if the Board of Regents is removed, the legislature would need to create provisions for governance and control, which would probably be the same thing under a different name, only with new bureaucratic shuffling. Plus, the second part indicates that we would need to revise the administration of land grant proceeds for the university, but it is not clear as to whether this is made necessary by the abolition of the Board, nor why, nor what would need to be done. In the absence of more precise explanation, I vote NO on Question 1.
Nevada State Question 2: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) remove an existing provision recognizing marriage as only between a male person and a female person and require the State of Nevada and its political subdivisions to recognize marriages of and issue marriage licenses to couples, regardless of gender; (2) require all legally valid marriages to be treated equally under the law; and (3) establish a right for religious organizations and clergy members to refuse to perform a marriage and provide that no person is entitled to make any claim against them for exercising that right?
This is one of those cases (as with the Civil Rights Act nearly a century after the Reconstruction amendments) where you would think rights are self-evident enough to where they don’t need further legislation, but then it turns out they’re not.
For one thing, the Question refers to the point that there is still a provision in the State Constitution that only a marriage between a male person and a female person may be recognized and given effect in Nevada. The ballot page explains that because of a US Supreme Court decision in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges) this provision is currently unenforceable.
Well, that’s something the Party of Trump is trying to correct this week. It just gets to a huge part of what’s wrong with our current legal system. While we are seen as having a technically liberal country in that our constitution is written with specific provisions as opposed to say the United Kingdom, which political scientists call an example of an ‘unwritten constitution’ with everything being based on a body of precedents, in practice much of our Constitution (Rules As Written) has little to do with the game as actually played, and in the game as actually played, the people in government generally assume that they, in government, get to do whatever they want unless specifically prohibited and the citizen can only act where specifically allowed (against the spirit and the letter of Ninth and Tenth Amendments).
Accordingly, we need to remove loopholes from our law that statists can use to infringe civil rights when they get power. I also agree with the third provision that clergy should not be forced to perform a gay marriage against their religion, because there are plenty of places where you can get a secular marriage under a Justice of the Peace. Besides which, I’m not totally sure why a couple would want the blessing of a person who disapproves of their marriage in the first place.
I vote YES on Question 2.
Nevada Question 3: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) require the State Board of Pardons Commissioners—whose members are the Governor, the justices of the Nevada Supreme Court, and the Nevada Attorney General—to meet at least quarterly; (2) authorize each member of the Board to submit matters for consideration by the Board; and (3) authorize the Board to grant pardons and make other clemency decisions by a majority vote of its members without requiring the Governor to be part of the majority of the Board that votes in favor of such decisions?
This Question standardizes the parole and pardons procedure. A “No” vote would maintain the current standard where there is no set schedule for the State Board and the Board is not authorized to vote on clemency decisions unless the Governor is part of the vote.
I ultimately decided to vote NO on Question 3, not because I do not see the rationale behind it, but because the Board under the Constitution already consists of the state Supreme Court plus the Attorney General and the Governor, and it is unlikely that the Governor will be able to veto any decision where the Board already has a consensus. Plus which, the authors do say there would be necessary expenses to the state (including the creation of an additional administrative position) and since we already have at least one meeting of the State Board of Pardons Commissioners per year, this ought to be sufficient for parole demands, and more meetings can be called if the government is petitioned.
Nevada Question 4: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended by adding a new section guaranteeing specific voting rights to all qualified and registered voters in the State?
Simply put: YES. This is another case where we can’t just assume that we have rights, we have to make sure they are in the system. In particular, Americans assert there is such a thing as a “right” to vote, yet state governments and the US Supreme Court are ultimately asserting the position that voting is a privilege that they can restrict or grant in such a selective way that the political class pick their voters instead of the other way around.
According to the ballot explanation: https://cms8.revize.com/revize/clarknv/Election%20Department/2020/NV4-20G.pdf?t=1602112454755&t=1602112454755
“This ballot measure would amend the Nevada Constitution by providing an enumerated list of voting rights guaranteed to all qualified and registered voters in the State similar to the enumerated list of voting rights currently protected by existing statutes. Specifically, each voter would be guaranteed the constitutional right to:
•Receive and cast a ballot that is written in a format which allows the clear identification of candidates and accurately records the voter’s selection of candidates;
•Have questions concerning voting procedures answered and have an explanation of the procedures for voting posted conspicuously at the polling place;
•Vote without being intimidated, threatened, or coerced;
•Vote during any period of early voting or on Election Day if the voter has not yet voted and, at the time that the polls close, the voter is waiting in line to vote at a polling place at which, by law, thevoter is entitled to vote;
•Return a spoiled ballot and receive a replacement ballot;
•Request assistance in voting, if needed;
•Receive a sample ballot that is accurate, informative, and delivered in a timely manner as provided by law;
•Receive instruction on the use of voting equipment during any period of early voting or on Election Day;
•Have equal access to the elections system without discrimination;
•Have a uniform, statewide standard for counting and recounting all votes accurately as provided by law; and
•Have complaints about elections and election contests resolved fairly, accurately, and efficiently as provided by law. “
I don’t have a problem with any of this. The wording specifically addresses the concerns a lot of voters’ groups have (especially ‘vote without being intimidated, threatened or coerced’) and the long-standing issues that exist with the voting process, in particular not having a uniform standard for how to vote, whether we can vote on Election Day without being effectively suppressed because the state government didn’t create enough polling places for everyone to get in before deadline, and whether there are standardized, straightforward systems for recount and resolution of votes.
I’ve mentioned at several other points that Nevada actually seems to assert much of this principle anyway, as demonstrated by the fact that we’ve already had early voting, and the state mandated a mail-in ballot for pandemic purposes without having to be dragged into it (as opposed to some places like Texas where they’re doing everything they can to restrict the vote) but it’s good to have a standard that is legal and clarified. Of course the fact that Nevada already is better in most states in that respect just illustrates the problem that the greater the need for certain legislation, the less likely it is to happen, precisely because of the forces that made things dysfunctional in the first place.
“Please Note: There is no State Question Number 5 on the ballot. The next question is State Question Number 6.” Why didn’t they just take Question 6 and make that 5? Welcome to Nevada.
Nevada Question 6: Shall Article 4 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require, beginning in calendar year 2022, that all providers of electric utility services who sell electricity to retail customers for consumption in Nevada generate or acquire incrementally larger percentages of electricity from renewable energy resources so that by calendar year 2030 not less than 50 percent of the total amount of electricity sold by each provider to its retail customers in Nevada comes from renewable energy resources?
This was the Question 6 from the previous election ballot of 2018, and as required, needs to be approved twice by voters in order to take effect. Last time I decided to vote NO, mainly because voters (or rather, NV Energy) had already defeated a ballot question requiring the state to create an open and competitive energy market, so any requirement from Question 6 would be administered by the NV Energy monopoly anyway. Nothing I’ve seen has changed that decision. Still, the ballot question arguments against passage almost turned me off enough to vote Yes, with cites from Fox News and Washington Times and quotes like “Home means Nevada! Let Nevadans decide, not some San Francisco billionaire.” Who writes this shit?
Stupid and Contagious
Time for lust, time for lie
Time to kiss your life goodbye
Send me money, send me green, heaven you will meet
Make the contribution and you’ll get the better seat
Bow to Leper Messiah
-Metallica, Leper Messiah
Before the first presidential debate of 2020, two days before Viceroy Donald Trump was announced as having coronavirus, it was clear that his “Republican” Party in the Senate was going to ignore all protocols to push his Supreme Court nominee through, specifically to make sure they wouldn’t have to rely on John Roberts and an eight-justice Court in a political strategy that relies less on votes and more on fixing the judicial system to bypass republican voting.
And now, as we have less than four weeks to go before the next election, it is that much more obvious that Trump and his Banana Republican Party would rather cling to power than life itself.
Of course, there was that now famous moment where Trump left Walter Reed hospital and walked up the stairs to stand at the White House portico to take off his mask, which more than one liberal journalist compared to a Mussolini moment. Presumably that would be where Mussolini walked to a balcony to pose dramatically in front of Roman columns, not the moment where he and his mistress tried to escape from Italy, were captured by leftist partisans, and had their bodies hung up by their heels in an abandoned gas station so everyone in that pissed-off country who could reach the scene could spit on his corpse.
As information surrounding Trump’s activities over the past two weeks haphazardly leaked out, and is confirmed at least in the sense that no one in the Trump Organization will deny it, Trump appeared late for his debate with Joe Biden so that unfortunately he could not be independently tested on site. Members of the entourage, including Melania Trump, who has also tested positive for coronavirus, were the only people in the debate audience who refused to wear masks, against protocols. Perhaps because Trump refused then to tell anyone what he and his people knew about his status, thus raising a very real possibility that he went into debate night intending to expose Joe Biden to coronavirus, The Committee on Presidential Debates announced this week that the debate scheduled for next week would be virtual, which was probably for the best anyway because it had already been planned as a town-hall format where the candidates would take audience questions. This of course offended Trump because the video formatting would indeed allow, perhaps require, moderators to cut the mic of the non-active speaker. Not only that, he wouldn’t be able to appear to the crowd in person so that he and his entourage could flout the mask and testing rules and demonstrate yet again that they don’t apply to them. So, predictably, he refused to attend, and predictably the Committee has officially cancelled the debate.
So now that he’s been saved by the most advanced medicine government can provide, he’s making more speeches from a government podium, promising to have more one-party control over the government, promising to give government more control of the economy and health care, promising prosecutions of his enemies, and promising more celebrations of his power and benevolence. Why? To stop America from becoming a socialist nation, of course!
The real problem of course is that Trump’s stupidity has always been more contagious than any virus, and now all of his courtiers feel obliged to follow his example. South Carolina Senator and White House Purse Dog Lindsay Graham for example decided to cancel his second debate with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison because Harrison insisted that Graham be tested for the virus. I mean, it’s not as though people who hang out on a close basis with the president have been demonstrated as more likely to contract the disease.
Meanwhile as Republicans discuss the election as though it were still a future hypothetical that they don’t have to address in the here and now (much like the possibility that their president’s continual flouting of medical safety could cause him to get COVID-19), people are having early voting and mail-in voting, and it looks like most of the people voting early are Democrats:
“While Democrats fret about the possibility of Mr. Trump repeating his 2016 Election Day turnout that swamped Hillary Clinton’s early-voting lead, Democrats’ early-voting advantage this year, particularly in states like Florida, is worrying top Republicans. While many Republicans expected turnout before Election Day to be slightly depressed by the president’s criticism of mail voting, the gap means that Republicans have to flood the polls on Election Day. And a lack of absentee ballots returned could leave the G.O.P. blind as it adjusts its get-out-the-vote operation in the weeks ahead.
“One of the advantages of having absentee ballots or voting by mail is it gives you a little bit of a snapshot as they are returned, and finding out who is returning them and where you are in your field operation,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist. “If Republicans aren’t getting accurate reads on that, they’re not getting accurate reads on where they need to adjust more.”
Republicans used to take more advantage of the mail-in ballot option. But then, Republicans used to acknowledge science and didn’t think that they should avoid medical safety devices just because their tribal chieftain told them they were full of evil spirits.
This actually matters because to hear observers say it, Team Trump has been betting on an electoral phenomenon called ‘blue shift’ where vote-by-mail and absentee ballots that tend to go Democratic are counted after votes on Election Day and therefore early returns that seem to favor Republicans eventually shift to the other party. However, more states are allowing not just mail-in ballots but early voting where you actually get to vote in person, and thus you don’t have all those votes crammed together to be processed in one day. The early votes would be just as ‘good’ for that purpose as ones in November. This change has happened in some states to account for coronavirus, but other states (like Nevada) have already been doing early voting for years. Republicans, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo, and are still anticipating in-person November voting as having the same impact as it did before early voting started becoming a thing. That’s why when Democrats are telling people to vote as though their lives depended on it (whether by mail or in-person) Republicans are telling their people to vote in person (and risk Trump Virus) as though their lives don’t matter. The problem is even if Trump has enough cultists that survive another four weeks to go to the polls, they have to show up in sufficient numbers that it would clog the system. We know this because, thanks TO Republican state governments making it more difficult to vote in primaries and special elections, lines for those contests earlier this year have been backed up. This creates the real possibility that the ‘blue shift’ may reverse and more votes will come in for Joe Biden in most states before the Trump votes can all be counted. And since Trump is pinning all his hopes on saying that only Election Day votes count and if he gets more of those, he would be forever Your King, Lord and God, if it turns out that Democrats have more votes on Election Day, whining for more time would make him look that much less omnipotent and that much more like a tool.
Of course as far as the Party of Trump is concerned, even stupid shit like votes don’t really matter, cause if Biden actually wins the Electoral College fair and square, Trump and his cronies in Republican legislatures can just whip up their own slate of Electors for their dominus et deus, the actual vote be damned. And if that maneuver goes to the Supreme Court, guess who just got himself a 6-judge majority?
But this is a tactic that implies weakness, not strength. I’ve mentioned for a while now that pretty soon white people are going to learn what it feels like to be black people, that is, to be disenfranchised. Republicans not only don’t want non-white and poor people with no transportation to polling places to vote, they don’t want anyone else to vote either, which is why they’re herding their own people into a situation where they have to risk coronavirus to do so. Forget ‘it’s a republic, not a democracy’ – the whole principle of a republic is that voters pick representatives, and if the government isn’t letting us do that, it’s NOT a republic anymore.
Secondly, if things get to that point, it will be because the Trumpniks no longer have enough numbers to even win the Electoral College by the skin of their teeth the way they did last time. Not only that, any result where Biden won the Electoral College would probably not be a 2000 election where only one state made the difference. It would be enough of a blowout where the Banana Republicans would have to substitute Electors in several states and thus create several challenges. Furthermore, any result where that happened would probably mean that Democrats also ended up winning the Senate, because however much liberals hate that institution, modern Senate races are statewide contests that are subject to neither district gerrymandering nor the Electoral College.
In other words, even if Republicans took this all the way to the House of Representatives (where they have enough delegations to give the election to Trump), the efforts required to do so, while technically legal, would be that much more cheap and desperate than Trump at a Jeffrey Epstein party. People only put up with the results last time because we knew that the Electoral College was a thing, and we had known it since at least 2000 (even if Democrats chose to forget) and however stupid and awful George W. Bush was, he didn’t actually destroy the country. This time? Not quite. This time it’s getting increasingly clear that the only way Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump can be retained as nominal President of this country is if the complicit Republican Party games the system to their benefit. And since it is becoming increasingly clear that the system under their control benefits nobody else, including the Republicans’ favorite interest groups, keeping it in place raises the very real chance that the public is a whole will no longer treat it as legitimate. And at that point Republicans will finally realize that they can’t play “we can do anything we want and nobody can stop us, cause we’re the biggest gang” cause they’re not the biggest gang.
This is why modern people, who don’t find “only one person wins” to be very entertaining, don’t play much MONOPOLY anymore. After four hours of dragging towards a result that everyone can see coming yet has already taken too long to arrive, somebody (maybe even the player in the lead) flips the board over in frustration and everybody else goes, “Next time, why don’t we try Dungeons & Dragons or Cards Against Humanity?”
The Debate Of Vice
So in the short term, we had Wednesday’s previously scheduled event where incumbent Vice President Mike Pence went against Democratic California Senator Kamala Harris in the only vice-presidential debate. As in, where you have to choose your favorite vice: socialism or theocracy?
What, you don’t like either of those? You want more choices?? Tough. This is America.
I didn’t actually see any of this live, because as opposed to last Tuesday’s debate, I had something else on my schedule. Plus which: Fuck You, CNN. Going into this, the main controversy was actually over the debate committee’s decision to protect the candidates by installing two plexiglass shields between each of them, an action possibly inspired by the South Carolina US Senate debate, where Democrat Jaime Harrison installed his own shield wall to his podium to protect against Banana Republican (read: rat-licker) Senator Lindsay Graham. I mean, talk about bringing the shade. And because this IS now the party of rat-lickers, Pence’s team objected to installing the shields for the sit-down debate with Senator Harris, although by Wednesday, they eventually relented, possibly because they realized it wasn’t important enough to make a difference.
I mean, most of the post-debate coverage didn’t mention the fly that settled on Pence’s head for about two minutes, but it was all anyone on social media could talk about. It just shows what it takes for Mike Pence to get attention. Plus which, making a big deal of coronavirus restrictions would only point out the fact that Mike Pence is (allegedly) head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and they haven’t actually contained the virus.
Other than that, even though moderator Susan Page got some flak for letting Pence go over his time, he didn’t interrupt nearly as much as resident rump, and it worked somewhat to the Republicans’ benefit, because letting Kamala Harris speak let observers judge whether her answers were valid. She, like Joe Biden, was asked to give a straight answer on whether the Biden-Harris Administration would engage in court-packing to counter Republican control of the Supreme Court, and like Biden, refused to do so. The difference being that Trump kept talking over both Biden and Chris Wallace when he was trying to press Biden on the issue, so that the story last week was not “Biden won’t admit he’d pack the Court”, it was “Biden told Trump, ‘Man, why don’t you just shut up?”
I mean, the Democrats ought to at least say they’re keeping the option open, cause after all, FDR didn’t need to actually appoint six more Justices to make his threat work. And if Democrats think that conservatives are so far gone that the only way they can get balance is to appoint their own people, they ought to say so. Republicans are motivated to the point of risking coronavirus over this because they know the results will shape the judicial system for decades. Democrats shouldn’t be that stupid, but they shouldn’t be afraid to show voters that they take the issue as seriously as Republicans.
Otherwise while both candidates dissembled, they both came off as normal politicians, which is not really a good thing, but if this event was normal, it only reinforces the point that the singular factor in making American politics abnormal is Donald Trump, and that while the unpopularity of both Democrats and establishment Republicans helps explain why Trump won the first time, he has had four years to demonstrate that people do not say “this is not normal” because they think that’s a GOOD thing.
Pundits usually say that the Vice President’s first job is ‘do no harm’ which for the challenger’s party really means that the running mate should do no harm to the head of the ticket. Harris certainly didn’t harm Biden, and Pence certainly didn’t harm Trump. But if the result is mostly a wash, we’re left with the fact that Pence is still defending a Trump Organization that is the primary cause of a coronavirus pandemic in America that not only wrecked the economy and weakened their voter support, it’s currently hollowing out their own membership. And everyone knows Pence can’t really do anything about that.
So in that respect, even if one is generous to Pence and calls this debate a draw, a draw does no favors for Republicans.
The Power Of COVID-Positive Thinking
So now, our divine Sun King, having lain in the Abyss for three days, has risen from Walter Reed Hospital, on behalf of all mankind (meaning, himself) and returned to the White House, without a mask of course. After all, there’s no point in safety precautions now that everyone else there is infected too.
It was clear to most of the press (as in the ones who aren’t Fox or OANN) that Viceroy Trump was not out of the woods (almost every doctor says that you need to isolate for at least 14 days once you’re shown to be positive) and a lot of them watched the film coverage of him ascending the staircase to the upper balcony of the White House and then take his mask off to stand and salute, and said that he looked unwell, straining to breathe. I’m frankly not sure how that’s different from any other day. He always looks like he’s straining to breathe. The impression I got was that he’d rather have been anywhere else but he had to keep up a brave face. As in, more so than usual.
You ever see that video of the two-year old who picked up an onion and started eating it cause he thought it was an apple? And you could tell from his face that he’d made a tremendous mistake, but he kept eating it anyway, to make it look like he MEANT to do that?
You know, this video?
That’s Trump.
Based on the information that the Trump Organization has deigned to be released, one of the reasons Trump was feeling well enough to return to his forever home was that doctors had prescribed an uncommon regimen of drugs including not only remdesivir but a steroid called dexamethasone, which is only recommended for patients with a severe case of COVID-19. Which actually makes sense, because Trump would never have gone to the hospital if he could have helped it. After all, they weren’t even going to admit that anyone in the White House had the virus until the news about Hope Hicks leaked out.
The reason that Trump feels so well may be related to the side effects of dexamethasone, which while it has been shown to have real effects in treating the disease also has side effects including: “confusion, delirium, mania, and a higher risk of other infections. The drug can even complicate a patient’s recovery by suppressing the immune system’s virus-fighting response.” That is why it’s only recommended for serious cases.
So: confusion, delirium, mania and a higher risk of other issues. Again, what’s the difference from before?
If these side effects are genuine in this case, the real problem is that they combine with Trump’s already existing personality tendencies, specifically his serious belief in the power of positive thinking. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that concept in its limits, if you can psych yourself up to achieve something that is possible with the right motivation. But there’s a difference between keeping the right attitude and whistling past the graveyard, which in most cases is a metaphor we don’t use literally. When Trump left the hospital Monday, he did a video speech from the entry of the White House, where he said “I just left Walter Reed Medical Center, and it’s really something very special. The doctors, the nurses, the first responders, and I learned so much about coronavirus. One thing that’s for certain, don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines all developed recently, and you’re going to beat it. I went … I didn’t feel so good. And two days ago, I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great. Like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently … better than 20 years ago. Don’t let it dominate. Don’t let it take over your lives. … Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk. There’s a danger. But that’s okay, and now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune. I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives.”
Coronavirus? Nothing to worry about. After all, if you’ve already died, there’s nothing to worry about, and if you’re alive, you’ve got the resources of an entire government and the ability to command Walter Reed Hospital to give you experimental drug treatments. What, most people can’t do that? Well, too bad for them, I guess.
But then, if you’ve already lost your job, lost your movie theatres, lost your favorite shops, lost your favorite restaurants, and lost your favorite relative because of a virus that Trump has let run wild for the better part of a year, the advice “don’t let it take over your lives” might seem a bit odd.
Meanwhile, while Trump continues to believe as usual that nothing bad can happen to him, more and more people in his circle are determined to have coronavirus, including White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany and senior staffer Stephen Miller, an event which confirms that the virus can jump species. There were also at least two unnamed housekeeping staff who got the virus but according to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman were told to use “discretion” in discussing it with reporters.
And as for making bad decisions on steroids, that might explain the worse-than-usual decision of Trump on Tuesday to announce that there would be no negotiations on a second coronavirus stimulus deal “until after the election when, immediately after I win” a decision that Jonathan Chait called “The Worst Political Blunder In History.” (I don’t know. I’d say that was either voting for Trump or Trump running for president in the first place.)
The problem with this isn’t the idea that there was any question of whether Congress was ever going to get to a coronavirus stimulus bill. It’s not, because Mitch ‘the Bitch’ McConnell has already held up all Senate business except approving Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Comey Barrett, even though the virus now running rampant through Washington is threatening the lives of Senators and possibly Barrett herself. The problem with this maneuver is the idea that Trump has any say in that process and can hold it up because he’s an almighty god of money and prosperity from whom all blessings flow and who will personally stop any chance at economic recovery unless the voters give him the unlimited power to indulge his petty whims and desires for revenge. What this did was reveal that rather than holding the voters’ fates in his hands, it’s the other way around. Trump has confirmed that both he and McConnell are playing an empty hand with no chips. Not only that, Trump blew the one asset he always had, the idea that he was good for the stock market, and could save himself by priming the economy. Now that’s gone. Stock markets crashed on Tuesday. That and perhaps some choice language behind the scenes led Our Very Stable Genius to reverse course and twit shortly before 10 pm Eastern, “The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business. Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!” Ha ha ha. That’s so cute.
I’ve always thought that Trump’s whole approach to the virus was the same as his approach to everything else, where he could just pretend to be the biggest, loudest, meanest, stinkiest ape in the jungle, and he was gonna pound his chest, and bellow to the sky, and BEAT that virus to death with his bare hands. And then his fan club would just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that Trump! He may be a gorilla, but at least he’s OUR gorilla!”
Again, that IS how he’s done everything else so far. And it’s always worked.
Well, apparently that now is the official position of the Party of Trump. The always moronic Matt Gaetz (Banana Republican-Florida) said, “President Trump won’t have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump.” (Much like the rest of the country.) Embattled Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler actually took an old Donald Trump video from his WWE days and edited it to show him laying the smackdown on coronavirus. (Of course Trump has always had an affinity for pro wrestlers. They have certain things in common: bad decisions, steroids, and making bad decisions on steroids.)
But as I’ve said, it’s one thing to bullshit and bully a social structure, but you can’t bullshit or bully a virus. And while the appeal of Trump may be the idea that he can get away with anything he wants, and you can live vicariously though him, it is getting increasingly hard to live vicariously through Trump when there’s such a high chance of you dying from Trump Virus. (TM) Not only that, it is now harder to believe that Trump can get away with anything he wants, because clearly he was at least infected. And while Trump and his fan club share the goal of presenting Trump (and by extension themselves) as invincible, we’ve already had over 207,000 people die from this thing. How many of them were people who voted Trump in 2016? How many new voters is he going to get this year that he didn’t have last time? Probably not that many, and not enough.
Which is why Trump is so desperate to get back on the stage with Joe Biden for their previously scheduled second debate next week, even though Biden, who at first agreed to continuing the schedule after last week’s fiasco, is now saying that the debate should be called off if Trump is still infected.
But if Trump can’t have a debate, how is he supposed to pretend that everything is okay?? After all: It is better to look good than to feel good. If you know what I mean. And I think that you do.
Well, if Biden won’t let Trump pretend, Trump can always stage his own live event this weekend, and pull out all the stops for his redcap base:
TRUMPOSAURUS!!!
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch Trumposaurus eat 10 pieces of KFC, a Big Mac, a Filet-O-Fish, a rack of ribs and a large DIET Coke!
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch TRUMP ride a rolling-coal pickup truck on six-foot high tires over a supply of American farm produce that we’re keeping from the CHINESE!!
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch TRUMP force Chuckie Schumer and Crazy Nancy Pelosi into a two-on-one battle to THE DEATH – in a STEEEL CAGE MATCH!!!
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch TRUMPOSAURUS fuck TEN PORN STARS bareback and then break the neck of an endangered Siberian Tiger and EAT ITS HEART!
ALL before a LIVE AUDIENCE!
Get your tickets NOW!!
SUNDAY!
SUNDAY!!
SUNDAY!!!
Actions Have Consequences
Well now.
What’s my reaction to Trump getting the ‘rona after telling us all it was the Democrats’ new hoax?
I would first recommend reading David Frum’s column, reproduced from The Atlantic: “What Did You Expect?” That says it as well as anybody could.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-did-you-expect/ar-BB19Edcu?ocid=ientp
But in the meantime, it’s good to recall something Mitch McConnell always loves to tell Democrats: “Elections have consequences.”
Indeed they do. For while Clinton Democrats will to their dying days damn Jill Stein and Gary Johnson to the sewer system under the 10th Circle of Hell for “stealing” votes from Queen Hillary the Inevitable, Stein and Johnson both ran against Romney and Obama in 2012 with no bearing on the outcome, and the real problem with 2016 was the substantially greater percentage who DID vote for Donald Trump, because they had no faith in Hillary Clinton and business-as-usual and were in fact so nihilistic that rather than vote Green or Libertarian they voted for a guy who makes Mr. Haney from Green Acres look as honest as George Washington.
Everybody else knew that Trump was just doing what he does best – marketing himself with unbelievable bullshit – which is why nobody took him seriously until it was too late, including Donald Trump, who according to Michael Wolff at least was absolutely horrified on Election Night when he found out he won.
Because rather than getting to live off of right-wing grievance media for the next four years and play shoulda-coulda-woulda, Trump was actually obliged to govern. Moreover, all the Republicans who controlled Congress were obliged to repeal and replace Obamacare and do all those things they said they couldn’t do because of Barack Obama’s veto.
So (since Trump had no idea how to fulfill his pie-in-the-sky populist promises and needed to keep old-time Republican loyalty) Trump abandoned everything he said about healthcare and infrastructure and raising taxes on the rich and went along with what Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell wanted him to. This led to the Ryan Congress’ tax cut bill that Trump signed, and the unpopularity of a tax cut should have signaled that the Republican Party was becoming less popular in general. Seeing the writing on the wall, House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to run for re-election even though he could have easily kept his seat, knowing he wouldn’t keep his Speaker’s post- and not desiring to be around Trump any longer. And while Republicans did keep the Senate in 2018, they also lost the House, and that soon meant that all those scummy deals that Trump made with shady banks to avoid personal bankruptcy prior to 2016 were under investigation by Democrats, along with the possibility that Vladimir Putin put his thumb on the scales to influence our elections (a rumor which, IF true, is probably looking less and less like a good idea every day), not to mention Trump’s arm-twisting of the Ukrainian president to create dirt on Joe Biden, which is what actually got him impeached.
But because the low-tax, pro-business policy of the Republicans superficially bolstered the economy, Trump retained a core of popularity with both his base and people who didn’t really like him but liked the results they were getting. So Trump, being as deep as a layer of water spilled on the countertop, assumed that all he needed to do to stay in power (and stay out of jail) was to keep the good news going and do everything he could to keep anyone from hearing any bad news. In this he was simply emulating an actual one-party dictator: Xi Jinping, who by the time impeachment was winding down at the top of the year was facing reports of a coronavirus out of Wuhan that was rapidly spreading. And at the time, Xi was doing everything he could with his one party socialist state to keep the news from getting out, and then once the disease spread to Iran and elsewhere, to keep people from knowing how bad it really was. But since at the time, Donald Trump was also pursuing a big trade deal with China, he was at pains to help Xi in this effort, even going so far as to tweet on January 24:
A line which may stand as Donald Trump’s political epitaph, and perhaps his actual one.
It could have been different. The governor of New York, like the leaders in Italy, Britain and other places, at refused to acknowledge the true depth of the threat, and this led to massive casualties. But the leaders in Europe learned from this and radically changed their policies on social gatherings to suppress the spread of the virus and flatten the curve. They did something similar in New York. But we could not, and cannot, do that as a national policy in America, because Trump was fixated on not taking the virus seriously, because making people aware of how serious it was would cause “a panic”, and that would cause the economy to crater – never mind the fact that the economy already was cratering because private businesses and various governors were taking the virus seriously and cutting back their activities, which we now have to do for the foreseeable future because unlike the Europeans, we have never had a plan to reduce the spread so that we can resume some level of normalcy.
And as part of his continuing campaign to present himself as the invincible Sun King, Trump continued to hold indoor events with huge crowds, even after Tulsa, where masks were offered but subtly discouraged, even as Trump himself made sure to be on podiums where his exposure to the masses was minimized. His staffers, and Secret Service detail, weren’t so lucky. This may be why Hope Hicks ended up getting the virus. Which allegedly is how Trump got it. But according to Chris Wallace, Trump was not independently tested in Cleveland prior to Tuesday’s presidential debate, and we might not even know now that he was sick if Bloomberg hadn’t reported the news about Hicks. After all, Thursday October 1 (between the debate and the breaking news) Trump was at a fundraiser at his Bedminister, New Jersey golf resort where he was in casual contact with at least 30 donors, without masks. The campaign apparently knew about Hicks at the time but hadn’t released her condition. And while both Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Britain’s Boris Johnson survived their own cases, the Trump Organization is being cagey about exactly what the president’s symptoms are. One ominous sign: He isn’t tweeting all that much.
If only Trump had never run. And if that’s the thought going through his mind right now, I don’t think it would be the first time.
As I said about Freddie Mercury, I have no problem saying that he and other gay men died as a direct result of their lifestyle when the AIDS crisis first happened, just as us fat folks have to be careful with Type II diabetes and smokers are almost sure to get lung cancer.
Coronavirus is something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Which right now happens to be Trump. But whatever you think of him, the President being laid low is a very serious event. It’s especially serious to his party with about four weeks left to campaign. So because everything is so serious, Republicans are expecting us all not to joke, or gloat, at a time like this.
But as most professional Christians would tell us, gay men could not defy reality forever without either succumbing to the plague or changing their lifestyle, and so we have here. This is not callousness against the unfortunate. There’s a difference between having compassion for one in needless suffering from a random event and walking into the lion pen at a zoo with a raw steak on your head and expecting a healthy result.
I have often told friends that the phrase “The Republican Party” is how Americans pronounce “Schadenfreude.” But there isn’t even much point in feeling Schadenfreude here. It’s like when Stephen Colbert said, “some people are saying this is an October Surprise. It seems more like an October ‘well… yeah.”
We do not need to cast curses on Trump and his cult or say they “deserved” this. As a once-wise man said, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” This is cause and effect.
Cause and effect is not the same thing as karma. “Karma” is a nebulous concept from Eastern religion that holds that two apparently random events are connected by spiritual intent. It’s like when Penn Jillette defined the concept of luck as “taking probability personally.”
If ‘karma’ was a thing, or casting bad vibes at a person actually worked, or the Old Testament God was real, some people would be piles of ash now. You’re not going to get anywhere sticking pins in Donald Trump dolls because you hate him so much. I mean, if witchcraft was real, we could prove it. If witches really did cast a curse on Donald Trump, then his entire life would spiral out of control all of a sudden, he’d get sleepy and confused, and his dick would be like a mosquito.
I have mentioned before that I am, or at least was, a big fan of Ayn Rand. And just as the same Trumpublicans who delight in liberal tears are fluttering their fans at liberals daring to say bad things about our Bestest Most Americanest President Ever now that he’s really suffering, those same liberals who pride themselves on their compassion loathe Rand because of her deliberate lack of compassion in her non-fiction and fiction works.
A big example of this is in the center of Rand’s epic Atlas Shrugged, where the railroad company Taggart Transcontinential had advertised the run of a fancy new diesel-powered train through the Rockies, only to have the train break down. There were no other diesel engines available, and the only other rail transport was an old-timey coal burner. This method was not recommended because the tunnel through the mountains was sufficiently long that a coal-burning train would not be able to get through because the tunnel was not set up to ventilate the smoke. Nevertheless, a connected politician demanded that railroad employees set up a coal train to go through the tunnel so he could get to his destination without having to wait. The result, as predicted, was that the engine went midway through the tunnel and ended up choking to death on its own fumes. As did the politician and all the other passengers. At which point an Army munitions train, going in without knowledge of the makeshift schedule because the diesel train would have normally cleared the route by then, ran into the passenger train and the fumes ignited the munitions and blew everything up.
And over the course of this scene, Rand goes over various individual cases of deaths: “It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men. … The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, ‘I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.’
… The man in Bedroom A, Car No.14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind – how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? – no reality – how can you prove that the tunnel exists? – no logic – why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? – no principles – why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect? – no rights – why shouldn’t you attach men to their jobs by force? – no morality – what’s moral about running a railroad? – no absolutes – what difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?. He taught that we know nothing – why oppose the orders of your superiors? – that we can never be certain of anything – how do you know you’re right? – that we must act on the expediency of the moment – you don’t want to risk your job do you?”
One moral difference that does exist between reality and Rand’s fiction is that she established that everyone in the passenger train was on some level complicit in their fate because the system they endorsed led to that result. This is another reason liberals hate Rand, the suggestion that those who suffer deserve it because of their politics. In reality, the Republicans have made lots of innocent people suffer before them, largely because of their politics and the idea that some people didn’t matter. Like the mother in Bedroom D, Car 10, they didn’t care, cause only the bad people got hurt. And then they did too. Rand’s targets were the left wing collectivists and anti-capitalists, which is why she is so hated by the “compassionate” people, but the principle is the same. Compassion, however virtuous, is not the issue. If one really wants to reduce suffering, one must act on its causes.
The ‘Taggart Tunnel’ was not an example of karma. It was the author’s attempt to demonstrate an ultimate chain of cause and effect. The Atlas Shrugged train disaster is taken by Rand’s critics as a prime example of how preachy and didactic she was, especially since the this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built chain of events were engineered by the author just to demonstrate a certain point. But what we have in reality is a scenario that Rand would have rejected as too obvious and didactic.
According to one report, for every 1000 people in their mid-70s or older who get the coronavirus, 116 will die. Trump is 74.
In the days immediately preceding the Tuesday debate, Trump hosted a Rose Garden party to present Amy Comey Barrett, his choice for the new Supreme Court Justice, who has survived her own case of coronavirus earlier this year. Most of the people at the outdoor event were not wearing masks. After the speeches, there was a lot of casual contact amongst the audience. By Saturday evening, more than a dozen people connected to the White House were reporting positive cases, including Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, Utah Senator Mike Lee, who attended the Barrett event, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, and publicist Kellyanne Conway.
The fact that Senators are affected may ultimately ruin the majority that Trump and Mitch McConnell need to push this nomination through the Senate. It would be Rand Paul all over again, only exponentially more so.
In the short term, Trump is literally killing, or at least maiming, the Republican Party. And as I’ve said, that will create the very result they most claim to fear. Not only are we going to be stuffed to the gills with “socialism” (because we’re going to need A LOT of government spending, and tax hikes, to cover the costs of a preventable illness that Trump let spread, and to stimulate an economy that he decimated) but we on the Right are going to be undermined in our attempts to stop the Left from nanny-stating all aspects of life “for your own good.” Because it’s pretty damn clear that there really are people who not only don’t care about their own good but are actively working towards their own evil. (The fact that they spread misery and death to so many other people in the process is just a bonus.)
And in the meantime- there’s Donald Trump. A man who has probably never heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of coming to terms with loss. And while Trump is very good at the denial and anger part (it’s got him to where he is now) and has spent most of his life trying to avoid depression, let alone acceptance of that which he cannot change, I’m sure Mr. Art Of The Deal is very much engaged in the bargaining stage right now:
“Hey, ah, God? Yeh, it’s me, Donald. So all these preachers around me are telling me I should talk to you. You know how they are. I don’t know how you can stand ’em myself. I only put up with them cause they get me votes. All they says is like ‘love no man or money more than Jesus.’ ‘Anything is possible if you believe on Jesus’ name.’ It’s Jesus this, Jesus that. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Jesus! I mean really, who died and made HIM God?”
“But they’re right about one thing. There’s no way I could have gotten to this point without you. Remember that Access Hollywood tape? Remember me begging for Russian help with Hillary’s emails? And I WON anyway? Remember all those times that people thought I should resign or I’d be impeached, and then I was impeached, and nothing happened! I KNEW you were looking out for me! Everything that’s happened so far must be an act of God! I knew you wouldn’t have let things get to this point if I wasn’t part of your plan! So I can’t die now!
“…what do you mean, ‘I don’t need you anymore…’?
“Nobody says that to Donald Trump! I say that to my wives!!!
“Who do you think you ARE! You know who I am, buddy? Who’s your fucking manager??
“Whaddya mean, I’m subject to the same diseases as anybody else? Whaddya mean I’m not immortal? Who SAYS??
“I’m DONALD TRUMP!!! My entire life has taught me that I don’t have to obey the same rules as other human beings! I’M NOT A HUMAN BEING!!!!
“Wh- you- you better be nice to me, God! You better be NICE to me! This is very unfair! I know where you buried the bodies!! Michael Cohen told me stories about Jerry Falwell Jr. that would curdle your balls! Bill Barr’s a Catholic, he can investigate your Pope! You know what pervy shit he can find out there!
“Look at all these Justices I got ya! You don’t think that counts for something?? I can get ya more! LOTS more! Just let me live!!
“Goddamn it, God, YOU OWE ME, MOTHERFUCKERRRRR”