Month: January 2022

It is testimony to how disingenuous and cowardly the Right is that they continue to proffer their snickering meme “Let’s Go Brandon” as though it were not a candy-ass censorship of “Fuck Joe Biden” while simultaneously continuing to use it in the hopes it will make liberals cry. Your typical leftist response to “Brandon” is, “Dude, grow up. You can go ahead and say ‘fuck Joe Biden’. We’ve been saying it a lot longer than you have.”

As the Biden Administration passed its first year in the White House (News Flash to Republicans: Joe Biden is president), it suffered multiple setbacks last week. Foremost, the Democrats failed yet again in their attempts to pass a bill through the Senate, allegedly because Joe Manchin (D.-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D.-Arizona) wouldn’t accede to a waiver of the filibuster to pass by simple majority. But for all the talk about how the filibuster is a “sacred tradition” and all the leftist talk about how the filibuster is obstruction, the filibuster is ultimately beside the point. As many liberals pointed out last week, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans were perfectly willing to waive the filibuster during the Trump period for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and (along with Manchin and Sinema) to raise the debt ceiling this year, even though Manchin had previously said he wouldn’t support lifting the filibuster for the debt ceiling. Allegedly the difference is that “(a) Senate Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, emphasized that the debate to lift the filibuster for the debt ceiling was a one-time, limited option that Republicans were happy to go along with. By contrast, lifting the filibuster on voting rights would be a lasting change to how the Senate works, and the decision rests entirely on Senate Democrats.” Uh-huh. This is the Senate. When are they NOT going to vote to raise the debt ceiling? When Republicans hold on to that it only gets them fried in the court of public opinion, which is why they let go this time. Why is a debt-ceiling exception more of a one-time exception than a vote on the voting rights bill? Simply put, the debt ceiling was a priority for everybody (even though Republicans did not vote to raise it, they just let the Democrats pass by simple majority), and the voting rights bill was not a priority for 52 of 100 Senators, including Manchin and Sinema. Thus, the filibuster is not the issue. The issue is not that Democrats can’t get 10 people in the Party of Trump to go along with their ideas. The issue is that they can’t get 50 Democrats to go along with their ideas.

As I’ve said more times than I can count, real polarization in this duopoly does not only mean that the Democratic Party only goes Left, though leftism has gotten a lot more popular in that party as the Right moves further from the mainstream and they brand even moderate positions as “socialist”. Rather, the dynamic is that the Republican Party goes that much further away from the center and then the Democrats take in everybody who’s been purged by the Republican Party, including people who don’t really belong on the Left. Like, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Manchin is an old-style Southern pol, socially conservative and fiscally liberal, who favors some public spending, which is more than Republicans who wouldn’t want any at all. Sinema is a former Green who has since become a lot more business-friendly now that she’s in a party that wins elections. In many ways she’s a lot more pro-business than Manchin. But she’s also a bisexual of no declared religion, and she would not fit in a Republican Party which is now basically a fundamentalist Christian concern whose main debate is whether Trump is Christ. Really, Sinema ought to just declare herself a Libertarian. I’d have more respect for her if she did.

I would prefer to be in the Libertarian Party rather than choose one faction of this dysfunctional duopoly, but I don’t have that luxury. Since I don’t, I would prefer to be in the party of Manchin and Sinema versus the party of AOC and Sanders. But I don’t have that luxury either. We are all stuck with the choice of The Church of Trump vs. Everybody Else, and Everybody Else needs a policy and a leader, and right now that leader is Joe Biden. I do not have the luxury of being in the party of Manchin and Sinema, and neither do Manchin and Sinema.

Because here’s the deal, as Joe would say. We’re having a congressional mid-term this year. At the end of it, Sinema and Manchin will have to deal with one of three possibilities: One, Democrats lose the Senate, or both chambers, and Manchin and Sinema will either be voting with a Democratic minority (and be useless) or with the Republican majority (and be surplus, thus also useless). Two, Democrats could lose the House but expand their Senate majority or keep the 50 seats they have. Being the Senate majority doesn’t count for as much if Democrats aren’t going to get bills from their party in the House. Three, Democrats could actually expand their lead in both the House and the Senate, and Biden will be able to negotiate with other Senators, presumably more agreeable ones, to get his fifty plus one. The bet right now is that Democrats lose seats, but any which way, Manchin and Sinema will no longer be in the catbird seat after this year.

Now in that circumstance you could try to build your reputation within your party or you could work to tear it down. As I’d already mentioned, the “progressives” had already conceded to Manchin in that they dropped their demand to tie the 2021 entitlement bill to the infrastructure bill, a demand they had held to precisely because they knew Manchin and others weren’t going to support the first bill, and lo and behold, they did not once the pressure was lifted. Are Manchin and Sinema seriously expecting to get everything they want while the progressive wing gets nothing? (I mean, Chuck Schumer is the Majority Leader, so that’s a real question.) It might be that Manchin doesn’t have to care either way because his West Virginia constituents are that much more conservative than he is, but Sinema’s Arizona is if anything going the other way. A recent poll placed her favorability with Arizonans at 8 percent. Not a typo.

Which is why whatever my preferences, I don’t like what Manchin and Sinema are doing to a party they claim to be members of, because their obstruction has less to do with principles than whatever games they want to play for their impenetrable purposes. And if you’re a Libertarian, you should either be trying to make money (which you could do better in the private sector rather than living on the government tit), or trying to serve in government, and you can’t serve very long if you keep pissing off your own constituents.

It works both ways, of course. Moderates and Biden critics would say that the “progressives” haven’t been accommodating enough to people like Manchin. But we currently have a situation where the Democrats very technically have a majority in both houses of Congress, yet they still don’t have a real majority in the Senate. And that’s because again, the Democrats aren’t a united party. To judge from 2020 election results, if being a Democrat simply means not being in the Church of Trump, then Democrats are a clear, if slim, majority of the country. But if “Democrat” means “I agree most of the time with AOC and Sanders” then the Senate is consistently demonstrating that Democrats are not the majority of the country. That’s what certain people want to impress upon Joe Biden and the “progressives.” Of course what they leave out is that if “Democrat” means “I agree most of the time with Manchin and Sinema” then even less people are in that group. I mean, in theory most of the country is centrist, but in practice anybody who’s not with the Democrats is with the Trumpniks, because it’s not like they care about fiscal conservatism and they sure as hell don’t care about inviolate Senate traditions and decorum.

And that’s what Sinema, and Manchin, and their apologists, don’t seem to get, or if they do, don’t want to admit.

Now supposedly people in Washington are trying to proceed on the basis of taking some of the individual ideas in Joe’s “Build Back Better” and try to get them passed because they’re more appealing to Manchin than the whole package. That at least would address the centrist concern that the Biden Administration didn’t acknowledge their starting position with a Congress that had the slimmest of majorities and therefore could not afford to be too ambitious or “progressive.” But the Congress is not something the president can directly control, no matter how much it seems otherwise. The other issues with Biden concern the stuff he can directly control. For instance, his own mouth.

The day before the one-year anniversary of Biden’s inaugural, he held a press conference for the better part of two hours, which in itself ought to dispel Trumpnik jokes about “Sleepy Joe” having no “stamina.” That didn’t mean he acquitted himself perfectly. Or even that well. Mostly the event was noted for President Biden saying that he would “guess” that Russia would invade Ukraine, and that “a minor incursion” might not merit a serious international response. Which was a terrible thing to say. That is, it was terrible to even admit that we wouldn’t respond to an attack on Ukraine’s borders. Far better to do what Obama did when he just let Putin walk in to Crimea and acted like it never happened.
This was the sort of thing that made people think of Chamberlain at Munich, or later in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and the West didn’t do much of anything until they got invaded themselves. Not to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Hitler had cool sidekicks like Mussolini and Tojo. Putin has Trump. And not like Putin doesn’t have reason to feel that the Western powers are crowding him in, which is why he’s so obsessed with making sure Ukraine can’t get into NATO. But hey, it’s not like our reputation for living standards and human rights is that high any more, and if Ukraine and the Baltic States would still rather deal with us than Putin, maybe he ought to ask himself why.

Thus Biden is in the fix of having to pretend that we are going to seriously react to Putin’s attack on Ukraine (which on the downlow has actually been happening through deniable assets for at least a year) when there are various reasons it’s not going to happen. Biden is reminding people of his withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I thought was a great example of knowing when to cut bait, but which critics are in retrospect seeing as the start of his decline, especially as that country becomes more of a clusterfuck as days go by. The “international community” may be as much of an oxymoron as “gaming industry ethics” or “the conscience of a conservative” but it seems they still demand a position of strength. And that is what Biden is not giving them.

And did you catch where he said he didn’t think that the Republicans would be this obstructionist? After eight years of working in the Obama Administration? What, did Joe think that Mitch and the others would work better with him cause he’s an old, white Senatorial veteran like they are? If anything, the Republicans are treating him with MORE contempt than they did Obama. At least they acknowledged Obama was president.

Biden did say one true thing, though. When set upon by an unusually large number of reporters from the right-wing grievance media, Biden said, “What is their (Republican) agenda? They had an agenda back in the administration when — the eight years we were president and vice president, but I don’t know what their agenda is now. What is it? The American public is outraged about the tax structure we have in America. What are they proposing to do about it? Anything? Have you heard anything? I mean, anything? I haven’t heard anything.”

But that’s been the case for quite some time. Again, when Trump got elected, he told Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell that after so many years of them voting against the Affordable Care Act, that when he was inaugurated, he expected a ‘repeal and replace’ national health care plan on his desk, Day One. And he never got it. Republicans don’t have anything to offer because that’s not their business. They exploit discontent with the Democrat establishment, use that to get power and then when they have power loot the candy store until they get voted out in turn. They attack the establishment without offering an alternative cause it doesn’t matter. They do it cause they know it works, and the fact that this dynamic worked against them so clearly in 2020 doesn’t matter, cause they’re trying to make sure they never have to lose an election again, which is what that voting rights bill was about. But that’s also what happens when you have no philosophy beyond what serves you in the moment and Tuesday you’ve always been at war with Eastasia and Wednesday you’ve always been at war with Eurasia and at peace with Eastasia.

The stakes for this year’s congressional elections are such that Democrats can’t really afford to lose even one chamber to Republicans (among other things, that means the House investigation into the January 6 attack would be shut down by Kevin McCarthy and the other cultists), but discontent with the president’s party is almost a universal, which is why the Democrats are predicted to lose seats, just like the president’s party is predicted to lose seats every midterm. The utter nihility of the Republican Party, not even considering Trump worship, is one reason Republicans might not do that well. But as I had said in reaction to last November’s odd-year elections, “Americans can understand, full well in advance, just how criminal and irresponsible Donald Trump and his party of enablers are, and Democrats can STILL lose an election to them because simply being NotDonaldTrump is not the same as being good for anything.” It ultimately doesn’t matter that Republicans are worse than useless, because people are only looking at who’s in charge now, and Democrats are not really making a good impression for themselves.

Because when Biden first announced his run for president, I concluded, “The strength of Joe Biden as a candidate is the implicit promise that once he’s elected president, things will get back to where they were before. But that is also his real weakness. ”

There is no getting back to the way things were, partially due to everything else happening, but also because, to the extent that we have been getting back to business as usual, it just confirms that business as usual wasn’t working and that things had to change.

So “conservatives”, it doesn’t even matter if you say ‘fuck Joe Biden.’ He and his own party are doing a better job of that than you did in 2020.

Well, we’ve passed New Year’s, so that’s the end of the secular “holiday season.” We are also approaching Epiphany on January 6, which is the end of Christmastide on the Christian liturgical calendar. So we are putting away yet another year of holiday crap. No more worrying which modern pop music act is going to butcher a holiday standard with a contemporary arrangement. No more getting a Hanukkah card for your Jewish friend and then forgetting to give it cause you can never remember which week of December Hanukkah is. No more mispronouncing “let it snow” as “le tits now.”

But as we get into 2022 let me get to a subject that has been cropping up various ways over the last year. In this particular case I was on Facebook and one gamer site I go to had this fairly badass picture of a German Stuka assault bomber in dive mode, and somebody pointed out a little detail in the picture that might have been glossed over: The swastika that historically was on the tail got the center fuzzed out (you know, like Facebook does every time they see a nipple) so you could see the branch arms but not the cross. And this person objected to the censorship and other people objected as though he was sticking up for the Nazis. Apparently there’s some mystery as to why the favorite symbol of a genocidal movement that killed tens of millions of people might be offensive.

Nazism of course was based on a myth that the relatively light-skinned (but still dark) peoples that settled northern India from central Asia were the first “Aryan” race (because Sanskrit is considered a root language for what some still call the ‘Indo-Aryan’ or Indo-European language group). The swastika was, and still is, considered to be a good luck symbol in Hinduism and to some extent in Buddhism. It is considered to be a sun emblem and a symbol of life.

In addition to the Indian civilization, the swastika was also used by the Navajo and variations of the pointed cross also exist in Africa and elsewhere. The fact of the matter is that the swastika (in both left and right-facing varieties) is used by an astounding number of cultures, not just the Hindus, and it’s possible that in addition to the symbol’s “Aryan” origins, the Nazis picked it up precisely because it was so recognized and universal. Which if anything should undermine the white supremacists’ claim of exclusive ownership of the swastika. At the risk of sounding like Randal in Clerks 2, I think we should try to reclaim it.

Of course, that would be tasteless even by Kevin Smith standards. Besides, it’s not the only example of the Nazis trying to latch onto the popular thing. If you’ve seen pictures of Hitler prior to 1919 and in the German Army during World War I, he had one of those standard droopy mustaches (sometimes waxed) but after the war he started wearing the “toothbrush” style – allegedly not because Charlie Chaplin was the most famous movie star of the silent era, but the fact of the matter is that it was a fairly popular style at the time, used also by Oliver Hardy and by fellow Nazis like Ernst Rohm and Heinrich Himmler. Chaplin’s own response to the Hitler image was the immortal film The Great Dictator. But it’s worth noting that by that point, Hitler was already at war and Chaplin hadn’t been using his Little Tramp character for years. But if that was who we most associated with the mustache, you might see it as much as you did in the 20’s and 30’s. But you don’t. Even Ron Mael doesn’t wear it any more.

I mean, that’s how bad it is. You have guys who are willing to shave their heads and tattoo swastikas on them, but wearing a toothbrush mustache is just too much.

Hitler ruined that mustache for everybody.

Which certainly didn’t stop our media from using a lot of Nazi stuff. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, we were just finding out how horrible the Holocaust really was, the Soviets were taking over the power vacuum in Eastern Europe… did we learn anything from that? Well, what did we come up with just 20 years later?

Hogan’s Heroes!

I mean, picture the scene: Southern California, Television City, CBS, a couple of executives are brainstorming in an office, and one of them says to the other, “Prisoners of war in Nazi Germany? What a great idea for a sitcom!”

Thing is, a lot of the cast and crew on that show were ethnically Jewish, including Robert Clary, who actually survived the Holocaust. The Nazi history was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the main reason that a lot of those actors did the show was on the specific condition that the Nazis never get to win one. That Hogan’s crew would always win and that the Nazis would always be the butt of the joke. It was like Wile E. Coyote versus the Road Runner, the fun was watching exactly how the bad guy would get screwed. The outcome was never in doubt.

Back then we had a lot of war movies and Nazi media and Nazi memorabilia because that period was still fresh in the public consciousness and we knew that we had beat them. We wanted to commemorate beating them.

And I think that a lot of what’s going on today is that there’s an unexpressed fear that the Nazis are back and maybe this time, we’re not going to beat them. And the Left is acting like even a mention of Nazism is giving them recognition that they don’t deserve, and if they can’t actually stop the fascists with politics, they can at least shut them out of the media.

Which would have been a great idea five years ago when all those “liberal media” outlets gave Donald Trump free publicity and the status of a serious candidate when he excreted words that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention. But no, they promoted Trump cause he was “great for ratings.” Then he got elected and a year or so afterward, he gave the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville moral equivalence with their counter-protestors, and everyone was just so shocked.

Charlottesville

But now it’s basically a culture war between people who want to preserve certain media for free speech reasons, sometimes even sincerely, but don’t know (or care) that these media are seen as endorsing fascism and genocide. And so the response from the Left is to try to shut down such displays as if pretending that these things don’t exist will make them just go away.

I am not sure which approach is worse. But I know that neither one is solving the problem.

As with the swastika, you used to be able to show the Stars & Bars a lot more – back when Jimmy Carter was running for president, Democrats embraced the flag because he (and the party) had Southern roots. But back then it sorta was “heritage, not hate.” Since then, as the more racist parts of America have decided it’s safe to come out and play, people have been doing a lot of retrospection and have come to realize that it was one thing to try to bring the white South back into the national community, but ever since Reconstruction, the Union has given the Confederate sympathizers an inch and they took it as a mile. A lot more than one mile, in fact.

This peace-and-good-feelings approach to a defeated enemy was also endorsed for the Germans after World War I by the idealist president (and Confederate sympathizer) Woodrow Wilson, and because Western civilization was so shellshocked by that war (and had a whole bunch of other problems, including a major pandemic, to deal with) they basically left the new German republic to its own affairs.

Well, once Germany started another major war, we eventually decided that that approach to peace wasn’t going to work. At the Casablanca conference, the three big Allies (Britain, USSR, US) decided that their military end goal was the unconditional surrender of Germany and the other Axis powers at which point the Allies would occupy the entire nation (which they did not do in World War I) and impose their order of government. In fact, if you think Germany got screwed in 1945, you should have seen what Henry Morgenthau wanted to do.

And of course one of the first things that the postwar governments of Germany did was to ban the display of the swastika and related symbols to make it clear that such beliefs would have no tolerance and no home ground. (That’s another reason you don’t see swastikas in European games, because they’re made for an international market.) But we didn’t think that was necessary here. We were the winners. We were the good guys. We thought that we didn’t have to worry about fascism in this country, or that we didn’t have to worry about domestic terrorism (as opposed to imported terrorism) because the powers that be generally assumed that we had the best of all possible countries and no one could have a problem with our system of government, and people who knew the example of Germany’s history would think, “now that we know better, no one could be THAT stupid!”

Of course the flaw with that thinking is the assumption that Americans learn from history.

Because, in addition to World War II and various other nerd hobbies, I’ve also delved into the the fictional world of H.P. Lovecraft (another politically incorrect racist) and many of these stories are a Pulp/Horror genre where an archaeologist or investigator encounters some black magic cult that wants to summon an extradimensional deity to Earth so that it can destroy reality and eat everybody, and I always thought that killed plausibility. I thought “Why would even evil people want to destroy the world they have to live on?” Now I look around me and go “Oh.”

I mean, right now there’s a cult that worships an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity, and as it turns out, they don’t exist in enough numbers to win a national election, but they’re trying to make sure that having a majority is irrelevant to controlling the country. And part of the reason they have gotten as far as they have is because the majority of Americans are if anything too kind. We are too willing to assume that the cult are reasonable people with good faith motivations and not nihilists who seek out misery and death.

These people are so determined to identify as “free thinkers” that they bypassed the “thinker” part and uncritically accepted any space case idea that some idiot or charlatan threw at them, precisely because it was rejected by everybody else. Ideas like “horse dewormer is good for COVID”, “maybe anti-Semites had a point” and “regardless of your opinion of the morality of anti-Semitism, declaring war on the entire planet at once is GREAT military strategy”.

I don’t think that they realize that just as with the Nazis, they run the risk of making their (not) cool thing not only uncool, but completely unacceptable. Who knows, in the next few generations taking a paint roller to your face and turning it the color of a rotten orange might be considered repulsive and unfashionable. Which is one thing if we’re talking fashion sense but something else if we’re talking about political ideas.

So, this is why we can’t show swastikas anymore. We used to be able to, ten, even six years ago, but back then people were smart enough and well-adjusted enough to keep Nazi cosplay in its place and not make it the basis of a major American political party.

Oh, and on a related subject, January 6 is also the one-year anniversary of the January 6 holiday, in which the Trump cult celebrates their Leader’s ascension from elected official to unaccountable God. So kids, make sure to leave out a burnt steak and a can of Diet Coke for Mr. Trump when he magically appears at your house to steal your silverware and plug up the toilet.