Well, after first announcing that the January 6 congressional hearings would only take place in the month of June, then announcing new hearings for July, they just announced Monday that there was going to be a hearing called on Tuesday the 28th, on the basis of “newly received information.”
By 6 am Eastern time it was announced that the main witness was one Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Today Hutchinson testified, along with many other funny things, that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, heard that the Republican protestors on January 6 had weapons, and told Meadows’ staff, “I don’t f’ing care if they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me.” He was apparently not happy that the Secret Service were screening people for weapons. When he heard about violence at the Capitol, he “almost had a lack of reaction.” Hutchinson said that when Trump was in the limo after his speech (where he said he wanted to join the march to the Capitol), a Secret Service agent who was at the wheel told her that Trump tried to lunge for the wheel to grab it from him. She testified that White House lawyer Pat Cipollone said that one reason the staff was against going to the Capitol with the mob is that Trump and his aides could be charged with “every crime imaginable.” She also corroborated Liz Cheney’s statement that when Trump heard the mob wanted to hang Mike Pence, he said “Mike deserves it.”
Hutchinson also said, “There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of either him (Trump) throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.”
I frankly don’t see any cause for surprise or alarm. Donald Trump is a flaming asshole. Quelle surprise. Lyndon Johnson was a flaming asshole. And he didn’t do anything bad besides, well, start a war in Vietnam while creating a giant redistribution program that combined to give us an inflationary economy that we are still living with. But even if you don’t like Johnson’s programs, at least he didn’t institute them to make the ex-head of the KGB happy.
This does give evidence, as if we needed it, that we need to scrap the Electoral College or at least modify the method of tallies, because the result that the Founding Fathers were so afraid of – that an unqualified demagogue could appeal to the gullible masses to get undeserved power – was only possible because that institution allowed Trump to get critical states and win on that basis even though he never won a popular majority. If the vote had been a national popularity poll, then you would have gotten Hillary Clinton, which really would have been the lesser evil. I mean, a lesser evil on the level of Asmodeus vs. Cthulhu, but the Devil has less slime and tentacles.
If nothing else, these January 6 hearings are gonna make Liddle Donnie’s campaign ads for 2024 SO much funnier.
“Hi! I’m Liddle Donnie Trump! I’m a screaming baby-man who can barely spell his own name, and I want YOU to give me back the nuclear weapons codes!!”
The real punch line is that that appeal works for so many people.
“if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling”
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In my last post, I had just summed up the dilemma of America’s downward-spiral political system thus: “We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.”
For years, I had advocated alternatives to this political trap, specifically advocating the Libertarian Party as a party of free minds and free markets.
Yeah, that was fun while it lasted.
The Libertarian National Convention for the 2022 midterms was held on Memorial Day weekend in Reno, Nevada, which should have been a bad omen right there. It was notable in that the “real” libertarians who call themselves the Von Mises Caucus decisively took over control of the Libertarian Party and immediately started changing the platform to their liking.
I didn’t say much about this at the time cause frankly, it wasn’t worth the effort. Much like this Party is now.
On Wikipedia, the Von Mises Caucus is described as promoting paleolibertarianism and positions itself in opposition to the more moderate positions of 2016 presidential candidate Gary Johnson and former chairman Nicholas Sarwark, apparently because Sarwark wasn’t confrontational enough. (Note for the uninitiated: That was sarcasm) Prominent members include comedian Dave Smith and podcast hosts Tom Woods and Scott Horton. The kind of performers who appeal to the guys who like Joe Rogan, but think he’s too curious and open-minded. In 2021 Mises board member Andrea McArdle announced her intention to run for Party chair at the LP’s midterm convention and got over 69 percent of the vote in May, cementing the Caucus’ takeover.
The keynote speaker for the Convention on Friday May 27 was Justin Amash, a former US Congressman from Michigan who spent most of his career as a Republican before publicly quitting in 2020 once that institution clearly became the Party of Trump. He made a big show of joining the Libertarian Party and serving as their first federal officeholder for the remainder of his term. He is so far their only office holder, because he refused to run for re-election after his term expired in 2020. Nevertheless, he was thought of as a potential candidate for president, which is probably less likely after his speech to the new Libertarian caucus.
Congressman Amash started his thesis by saying “I’m here because I want libertarian ideas to win in my lifetime.” He established his contrarian credentials by saying he had served with Ron Paul and that while he was in Congress during 10 years he was the lone “No” vote on bills 56 times, with all other Congressmen combined having 76 No votes during that period. And he said that the libertarian philosophy, the philosophy that is popular in America and that the Party can win with, is at its core “liberalism.” And he held up a book by that title- by Ludwig von Mises. Amash said, “liberalism, as Mises talks about, is the philosophy of human cooperation. It’s human cooperation that brings progress and happiness. And I think too often as libertarians, we don’t focus enough on that.” Then he reiterated from his first point: “What is the point of a political party? The point of a political party is to win elections.” Then he said: “That brings up the question- who’s a real libertarian? I’m going to quote from some famous libertarians, and I’ll let you decide.”
“…a small number of anti-social individuals, i.e., persons who are not willing or able to make the temporary sacrifices that society demands of them could make all society impossible. Without the application of compulsion and coercion against the enemies of society, there could not be any life in society.” Silence. “Here’s another quote: ‘Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practical only in a world of angels and saints. …Libertarianism is NOT anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism.” Booing at this point. Amash shrugged and went on: “One must be in the position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce to the rules of life in society.” “For the libertarian, the state is an absolute necessity” -more booing at that one- “since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it.” “It is not at all shameful for a man to allow himself to be ruled by others.’ …You like that one?” “Libertarianism’s thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.” “It would be really preposterous to propose that the nations turn to imperialistic policies as a favor to the ordnance manufacturers.” Surprisingly little reaction one way or the other. “The libertarian demands that every person have the right to live wherever he wants.” A little cheering there. “The narrow-mindedness which sees nothing beyond one’s own nation, and has no conception of the importance of international cooperation, must be replaced by a cosmopolitan outlook.” “It is manifestly absurd to break up the ever-increasing unity of world economies into a small number of national territories, each as autarkic as possible.” And finally; “The libertarian demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis.”
Then Amash gave them the punch line: Those were all quotes by Ludwig von Mises. All of them. His point: “Like you, I find a lot of those quotes questionable. … and I think what happens so often with libertarians is we’re quick to judge each other, we’re quick to say someone else is not a real libertarian.. but Von Mises said those things. And if we’re going to be a real political party, forget about being a real libertarian- we need to win over a third of the country- and if Ludwig von Mises, or Justin Amash, or pretty much anyone in this room is not libertarian enough for you, it’s not going to work… just using myself as an example, if Justin Amash is not libertarian enough for you, I’ve got news for you about the rest of the country.”
Apparently a political movement which named themselves after Ludwig von Mises was unaware that he’d said those things.
It’s like seeing somebody with a Pink Floyd T-Shirt and you ask them who their favorite band member is and they go, “Which one’s Pink?”
Which figures. Much like modern “conservatives” do not ponder the details of the Bible or the Hamilton-Madison Constitution, the “Von Mises” “libertarians” do not examine their own source material. Mises, unlike Ayn Rand, did not disdain the libertarian label, but to him liberty referred to a classical-liberal form of government. To liberals like Ludwig Von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the best system was not minarchist or anarcho-capitalist but had some regulation of both society and commerce, as Adam Smith intended. Now, that approach to government is still too pro-capitalist and individualist for the woke Left of today, which is why there’s a distinction between libertarianism and what calls itself “liberalism.” But apparently that’s still too statist for a self-declared Von Mises faction.
But even Amash’s speech wasn’t the biggest joke on the Caucus. The biggest joke was the background of the speech. See, they’d set up cameras to record the events of the day including not only Amash’s speech but the floor proceedings for who got to vote on the platform. This was done through the allocation of delegate tokens. If you look at the YouTube link for the May 27 section of the Convention, someone is asking, around 5 hours and 40 minutes in, someone announces that tokens will be collected in seven minutes for the Party floor debate. Then they started debating while on the mic about whether and in which medium the Party agenda was going to be posted. At 5:41 someone presses on whether, after the 30 minutes time allotted for the keynote speaker, all the debate tokens will actually be counted. He is told “I don’t know. I can’t predict the future.” Amash comes on around 5:42. He starts by saying “This is my first national convention, I think. Do they usually run like this?” He gives the Von Mises quotes after 5:48. But while Amash was speaking you could see a carton of take-out food on camera behind him and as he went on, people were walking around the stage behind him. He had to stop to turn off a ringtone because somebody left their smartphone by the podium. By the time he got to the point of “the point of a political party is to win elections”, you had at least eight people on the stage behind him taking out boxes and counting the tokens, cause apparently that’s how this Party is going to win elections.
I mean, you’re not going to take over the third largest political party in the United States and then set up a camera so that everyone on YouTube can see your organization doesn’t have its shit together, am I right?
The Amash speech ended at 6:06 (so he only used 24 of the alloted 30 minutes). The first person to address the podium after the speech described the scene behind Amash as “the height of rudeness” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves.” The chairwoman apologized that the need to assemble the tallies during a speech “was an unfortunate circumstance that was left, um, because of the agenda adoption.” Oh, so they hadn’t hammered that out before everyone got to debate and vote on it. Good to know. They kept going on with the tallies for the better part of thirty minutes. During that time at least one person asked to skip the procedure to vote for chair while the tallying was going on. One person asked if the tokens may have allowed a person to vote both ways on proposals “because I do not see a mechanism to keep that in mind.” Around 6:40, Sarwark came on to say that only a limited list of candidates was fostered despite the number of tokens collected because “shenanigans occurred.” He said “we are not following our own values – we are trying to silence voices because we disagree with them” – at which point the camera veered quickly away from his mic.
Look, we’re Libertarians. We’re used to Party conventions being Amateur Hour. But guys: When people on the floor of the Convention were telling the organizers it was a shitshow, then it was a shitshow.
Well, that was the stuff that was funny to watch, but the end result was ridiculous without being so funny. Previously the Libertarian Party platform had famously included a statement saying “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” But according to coverage in Reason Magazine, “Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise defended the deletion of the language because “libertarianism isn’t about wrongthink. It’s about non-aggression, self-ownership, and property rights,” and said he believes that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he calls a “woke,” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.
“What is happening nowadays with the ‘wokeism’ is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends,” says Heise. “So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It’s the same ideology that’s happening now, but they’re pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever.”
Basically they’re saying, “We’re value-neutral on bigotry. Also on being irrational and repugnant.”
Ultimately the statement was removed although at the initiative of former vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen they added a new line saying the Party would “uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity.”
But it’s kind of telling that a movement which prizes individualism against a collectivist agenda is invoking the junk-food catch phrases of the alt-Right like “woke” and “cultural Marxist”, to justify removing a pro forma statement against bigotry that was in the platform years before “woke” was a thing, and implying that anybody who disagrees with that is guilty of creating “wrongthink.”
Similarly the Caucus got rid of the Party position on abortion. That always had been value-neutral, because many Libertarians are Christians or secular humanists who hold that abortion, like the death penalty, is the ultimate form of coercion. Thus, the platform had read: “Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration. ” But apparently even that was too much for the Von Mises Caucus. One pro-life Libertarian site quoted a pro-choice Libertarian who voted to remove the statement, saying: “It was a self-contradictory plank: It claimed to be neutral, but it was clearly pro-choice.”
Well, in the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” Didn’t we used to say we were pro-choice on everything? This attitude assumes that “pro-choice” is the same thing as “pro-abortion.” You can, on libertarian or fiscal conservative grounds, refuse to endorse government funding or facilitating abortions that are morally repugnant to many taxpayers. But this posture defeats the purpose of being conspicuously non-neutral on the matter of bodily autonomy and asserting the right of the individual to make their own health choices, including choices that could kill them or (in the case of a pandemic) people around them who didn’t make that choice. Why are Libertarians demanding an end to mask mandates and vaccine mandates and demanding that state governments not dictate how parents can raise their children when they’re apparently “neutral” on the state dictating whether people should become parents? In removing an actually neutral statement asserting a right to conscience under the pretense of neutrality, the Von Mises Party, like Samuel Alito, has in fact clearly taken a side.
It matters now, after Dobbs v. Mississippi, because we have a whole host of unwanted babies that the government (The Supreme Court and the Trump states) expects private citizens to care for, at their expense, we are putting that much more pressure on adoption agencies, and the only “choice” some people have left is hoping they can stretch the cash to drive hundreds of miles out of the way to an abortion clinic, or to move to a state with decent resources for child care. Yet “libertarians” don’t seem to care about the unnecessary costs that “conservative” government has chosen to impose on the individual.
I am again reminded of the Harry Browne joke about how government is like a guy who breaks your leg, throws you a crutch and then brags, “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.” Well, Republicans are that much more laissez-faire than Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.
Wouldn’t it be more moral (and more practical) to just stop breaking legs? The Libertarian Party I voted for would say so. But not anymore.
Money quote: “They claim to be for ‘small government’, but that really means that a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.”
Of course, leftists have been pointing out this issue with the “small government” Right for quite some time, as if it were a problem unique to right-wing psychology, and as if libertarians have not been warning them for quite some time that a government that is big enough to give them abortion rights and “free” healthcare is also big enough to take them away.
Which is why, again, it is simply not enough to base your political agenda on “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” because at some point that attitude applies to everybody. The billionaire doesn’t want the government telling him to pay more taxes and the teenager doesn’t want the government telling her to bear her relative’s baby. Are these the same thing?
Yeah, “freedom lovers” used passive resistance to effectively kill mask mandates. Good for you. Now take a look at all the other stuff government is doing under our noses. We still have to take off our shoes at the airport when 9-11 was almost 22 years ago, and the Libertarian Party was never so hopped up about that.
So really, the matter should start from a point of ethics: Do I want the government telling everybody ELSE what to do? And why? How do you justify that? Cause right now we’ve got a Supreme Court saying “I don’t want the government telling the government what to do. Wait, we ARE the government? Well, hey!”
Amash, who actually IS a Christian, pro-life Libertarian, had it right. You are not going to catch any new people with an attitude of “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” and sotto voce, “I’m okay with government telling other people what to do.” Those people already have a party. It is certainly not a position that will appeal to those of us who were already in the LP and thought we were libertarian before the woke Right changed the definition of “libertarian” the same way they changed the definition of “conservative” and “Christian.” And even if you could get more votes with the Von Mises Caucus than you got with the previous agenda who weren’t already going to the Republican Party, further gains would have to assume that the current party organization has the brains and coordination to act on its new recruitment. And right now, the Von Mises Party makes Gary Johnson look as organized and focused as Mitch McConnell or Lyndon Johnson.
And liberals, keep in mind, I do NOT think that going “third” party, in and of itself, is “throwing away your vote.” If I thought that I wouldn’t have been Libertarian for as long as I was. I AM saying that voting for this particular iteration of the Libertarian Party IS throwing away your vote, and it is throwing away your vote BY right-wing standards. Because if you have no idea how government works but still want to run for office anyway, and think the only purpose of being in office is to suck off the government tit while going on social media and making fun of welfare queens and woke socialists, we already HAVE a party for that. It’s called the Republican Party. And at this point, the main difference between them and the LP is that the Republicans can get people elected to federal office. So what we have right now is at best a duplication of effort. Now, if you want a party that actually follows what the Constitution says and does not believe government can spend all the money it wants and do anything it wants to the public just cause it can, that party doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did.
I will say this, you will see more pastel-colored hair and tie-dye T-Shirts in a Libertarian Party Convention than you ever will at a Republican convention, or for that matter, a Democratic one. But that just goes to the old right-wing critique about liberals’ “tolerance for diversity”: You can have a myriad variety of appearances, but inside you’re all the same political robot.
Now- if I can’t deal with the Libertarian Party any more, am I still a small-l libertarian? Well, yeah. Because libertarianism means being true to your individual self regardless of what the collective thinks, and if not even other libertarians agree with me, I must be fucking Ultra.
You raise up your head And you ask, “Is this where it is?” And somebody points to you and says “It’s his“ And you say, “What’s mine?” And somebody else says, “Well what is?” And you say, “Oh my God Am I here all alone?”
But something is happening And you don’t know what it is… Do you.. Mister Jones?
-Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”
June 24 ad from Evan McMullin in Utah, Mormon and recovering Republican:
“Following today’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, some states are enacting extreme laws — total bans on abortion, onerous limits on birth control, and criminalization of women in desperate situations. I oppose such extreme laws.
“My opponent, Senator Mike Lee, continues to weaponize this issue to divide the country for political gain. I’m running for Senate to accomplish the opposite.
“When we do more to help women and children, abortions decline. Making contraception more available and otherwise doing much more to support families is what truly protects life — not extremist laws that target women in their most vulnerable moments.
“Our commitment to life must be more comprehensive, and start with judging less and doing more to help those in difficult circumstances who need our compassion. “
Of course Mormons were one of the denominations promoting the so-called “three exceptions”, allowing abortions in cases of rape, incest or threat to a mother’s health. But then what we’re dealing with here isn’t even Catholic. Catholic dogma IS pro-life in all cases (as opposed to the pro-gun, pro-death penalty Supreme Court). What we’ve got here is an agenda that makes The Handmaid’s Tale look like Woodstock.
What does a “pro-life” government mean? Well, let’s look at an ACTUAL Catholic country: Ireland. Ireland is (or was) more damn Catholic than Italy, and from its founding as a republic retained a strict abortion ban from British times, saying that the woman (not the doctor) who induced an abortion was “to be kept in penal servitude for life”. There was some support for abortion rights but while it built up steadily over decades, support for abortion bans remained fairly strong. What really changed things was a 2012 case in which an Indian national suffered an unsuccessful pregnancy at 17 weeks’ gestation. Her water broke but this did not expel the fetus. Her hospital refused to remove (abort) the pregnancy and she ended up dying of maternal sepsis. The national outcry led to the country re-writing the laws by 2018 so that abortion is allowed in some cases under 12 weeks’ pregnancy or in cases where medical examiners have determined a threat to the life of the mother or a medical issue indicating the fetus could not survive. Again, the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” used to be nearly synonymous. Not that this issue was the onlyreason for the steep decline of the Church institution in Ireland, but it sure didn’t help.
Yet the anti-Democratic party that appointed six of our nine justices looks at other people’s history and instead of learning from it, does what it always does and doubles down on stupid. Clearly they don’t care that “maternal sepsis” is a thing, that late-period abortions are only performed in cases of medical necessity precisely because the parents wanted a child and are in an unexpected medical emergency, and it doesn’t matter to them that their dogmatic ban will result in the deaths of pregnant women and probably their children too. Any sacrifice, even in the hundreds or thousands, is justified for the sake of PROTECTING HUMAN LIFE.
PRAISE Trump! Uh, ah mean Jesus.
And if one thought that Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the endgame, think again. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas (who apparently was not allowed to write Friday’s opinion because it would have been too extreme) said that the court needs to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence V. Texas, Loving v. Virginia – I’m sorry, what?”
Yet Andrew Sullivan, who was on Bill Maher’s show same day, said in his Friday column: “”Has my previous confidence that the end Roe was unrelated to these precedents waned? Not really. … Abortion has long been controversial — and is still furiously contested. Marriage equality reached a record consensus just this month: 71 percent approval, with 55 percent approval among Republicans last year. Thomas was trolling.”
This was my response to dish.andrewsullivan.com: “Of course Thomas was trolling. He always has been. He and Alito have been trolling for quite some time. They’ve made their positions clear a long time before today, but they needed three Trump SCOTUS nominees before their trolling on abortion became “settled law.” Of course now there is no such thing as settled law, and really, there never was. It’s just that prior to now the Court saw itself as above political bias and wanted to not make it so obvious.
“Here are several other words besides abortion that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.
“By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.
“One only takes such a position, knowing it could be reversed by an equally biased leftist court, on the assumption that one is either immortal, or that the executive branch will keep appointing equally reactionary justices in perpetuity, and largely thanks to Thomas’ gutting of the Voting Rights Act, that will be a lot more likely. And since Republican Party politics are that much more subject to escalating reactionary sentiment than the Court is, future presidents will most likely appoint Justices who make Thomas look like Blackmun.”
I mean yes, the purpose of a court system is to make sure it isn’t subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion, but there’s a difference between not being overly solicitous of public opinion and saying “Fuck public opinion right up the ass with a six-foot cactus attached to a Harley-Davidson engine.” Frankly, that is the stuff of which revolutions are made.
I am reminded of one of those Facebook memes I saw recently. This is one of those jokes where they show a few panels from a movie everybody’s seen, with the dialogue changed to show the characters being perceptive and reasonable rather than reacting as dictated by the plot. Thus the last panel of the meme is the final credits of the movie, cause if everyone did the intelligent thing and cut through the plot contrivance the whole thing would be over.
In this case, the movie was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Specifically the scene where Anakin, Padme and Obi-Wan are chained up in the Geonosis arena. Obi-Wan points out the Clone Troopers to Anakin, then says that he’d discovered that they were part of a secret project by Chancellor Palpatine, then tells him that Count Dooku imprisoned him and told him that Darth Sidious is in control of the Senate. Anakin deduces that if the clone army is Palpatine’s project and Palpatine is Sidious, then Dooku and Palpatine are working together. And then the next panel is “Written and Directed by George Lucas” because if they made the obvious deduction and took the obvious next steps, Palpatine’s whole plot would be over.
I saw that meme and thought, “Wow, it’s like the Jedi in these movies were all Democrats.”
It should be obvious by now that a literally anti-democratic party, enabled by the Alito court, has declared war against the rest of the country and is trying to eliminate not just political opposition to its opinions but legal opposition as well. And yet the institutional Democratic Party refuses to make the obvious deduction and take the obvious next steps, perhaps realizing that such legitimacy as they have depends on entertaining the increasingly unsupported idea that this is a multi-party democracy and that the Republican Party is a legitimate part of it, even as that party seeks to destroy that system from within.
A cartel system is no more healthy for a government than it is for a free market. If the cartel partners eliminate all competition to their establishment, then there is no recourse if one or more of the partners becomes dysfunctional and less able to hold on to its gains. The weaker party eventually goes defunct and the last survivor becomes a monopoly. And that stage is even less healthy for government than it is for capitalism.
We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.
Because Republicans are largely responsible for America’s political dysfunction, and are its main beneficiaries, the serious change America’s political system needs has to first come through the Democrats, and that is unlikely because one, they have their own ulterior motives, two, the system resists change, and three, more than that, the American people resist change.
I mean, I personally think that were it not for COVID, aka Trump Virus (TM) that Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected. Prior to 2020, things were good enough, or at least okay, for the majority of Americans that they would have ignored the negative aspects of his agenda and not gone out to the polls to stop him. But then Trump Virus happened, and it became clear that Trump only cared about dealing with it to the extent that it hurt his chances for re-election, and in fact let it run wild on the assumption that it would most hurt the communities he and his Party didn’t like. At that point the country as a whole started to grasp the extent of Trump’s callous disregard for human life. Or rather, callous disregard for human life was half the reason to vote for Trump, and it only became an issue when that disregard started affecting his voters.
Even then, Trump still got more votes than he did in 2016, which goes to show what kind of cult we’re dealing with. What made the difference was the rest of the country getting that much more motivated to go out and vote for Biden. Now this year is a midterm election, which rarely goes well for the party in the White House, cause enemies blame them for everything that goes wrong, and allies aren’t as motivated by state elections as the national election. But you’d think that if anything could change that, it’s the prospect of Trump state governments agitating for a Fugitive Uterus Act.
I am not really sure that that is enough to light a fire under the notRepublican majority in this country, but it may be the only thing that could. But even if Democrats buck the trend and keep their technical majority in Congress, that’s not enough.
I will have much, much more to say on this in the future, but for now I look at something else that happened this week, which seems to be an unrelated subject but is ultimately the same matter.
Even as the January 6 committee held a Thursday June 23 hearing on how Viceroy Trump tried to foist his election coup by getting an inexperienced attorney named Jeffrey Clark to be his Attorney General (he would have been the third in two weeks after William Barr resigned), they found out along with the rest of the country that Clark’s home had been raided by federal investigators overnight just hours before the hearing focusing on his actions. After which, Clark went on Tucker Carlson’s show and whined that the government acted like the East German secret police. I believe this is what Freudians call “projecting.”
Apparently Attorney General Merrick Garland actually was paying attention to the proceedings and he, or someone under him, acted on what they already knew. As I just said, that’s not enough, but it’s a start, and some of us were beginning to wonder if we’d even have that.
I mean, if one side declares a civil war, the truly civil thing to do is to return the gesture.
The problem with news coming so fast and furious (and with equally silly sequels) is that I really can’t keep up. On the other hand, waiting a little bit to comment means that one catches all the subsequent news that expands the context of the news event beyond the immediate hot take.
For example, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It wasn’t even that long after the fact that people found out the shooter was able to obtain his weapons, legally, once he reached his 18th birthday. Which is exactly what he did.
Every one of these mass shootings brought up by the media is indeed a macabre ritual, and we are reaching the stage of the rite where liberal high dudgeon sinks into resignation and despair as they realize yet again that all their “common sense gun safety measures” would not have stopped the Uvalde shooting, that nothing short of precrime would have stopped this shooting, and barring psychic powers, the only thing that would have is the state of Texas being just as prejudiced against gun fans as they are against women seeking abortions.
Then there’s what we found out about the police response. Or acute lack thereof. Apparently a member of the Department of Public Safety was one of the first officers to confront the shooter. At one point there were cops on the scene for the better part of an hour, but according to the Public Safety officer, they waited because “they could’ve been shot.”
As one Internet wag put it, “Never saw a fireman stand outside a burning building cause they were too scared to go in. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any ‘fuck the fire department’ songs.”
I mean, half the argument made by the gun nuts is that you need guns to protect yourself in the heat of the moment cause 911 Is A Joke, “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six”, and all that. And the liberal counter-argument is that we’re supposed to trust the police to secure law and order. Really?
Maybe Republicans are right and we should be should be arming the teachers. After all, if a thug comes busting in the school, it’s not like the POLICE are gonna do anything.
But Uvalde was hardly the only shooting in the limited period. It’s just the one that got publicity for some reason. If one defines a “mass shooting” as one where four or more people are shot in the same incident, then since the Uvalde shooting on May 24 there have been…. well, I quit counting after 20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022 Four were on June 19. Keep checking the link!
Even so, the fact that Uvalde is just a few bullets dropped on an over-full bucket meant that Democrats in Washington were actually able to pressure Republicans into having bipartisan negotiations toward gun regulations. I guess some professional Christians actually figured out there’s no point in protecting individual pregnancies when it’s so easy to commit retroactive abortion in mass quantities. Of course everyone acted like some progress was going to be made, and then some of the Republicans who declared themselves in favor of negotiation started to back off.
The main objection seems to be with the concept of “red flag” provisions against domestic abusers, including eliminating “the boyfriend loophole” where the laws do not apply to an individual who had not been co-habiting with a potential victim. This is allegedly because of a concern that such laws could be abused against certain targets, but it really seems to be because Republicans know their base.
I mean, I could make serious cases against these laws on Second Amendment grounds or the rights of an accused, but it should be pretty clear from the past few years, if not decades, that “conservative” positions are based on the most superficial, bad-faith and political ulterior motives. Rights of the individual, let alone the functioning of government, are meaningless compared to pandering for votes.
Again, my position is actually that of arch-conservative Senator John Kennedy (BR.-Louisiana) who said, “We don’t need gun control, we need idiot control.” But again, in both cases it’s Kennedy’s Republican Party that’s standing in the way of that, cause if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.
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Which gets to my second issue: The January 6 hearings and why they still matter.
The congressional hearings, managed by Bennie Thompson (D.-Mississippi) and Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney (representing what’s left of the non-Trump Republican Party), determined among other things, that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” fundraiser campaign didn’t go to legal efforts to contest the vote but straight into his pockets (certainly the least surprising news so far), that the Proud Boys (whom Viceroy Trump told to ‘stand back and stand by’ in a debate) would have killed Mike Pence if they had had a chance, and that while some of the actual ‘peaceful tourists’ were milling about the area or listening to Trump’s speech, some of the Proud Boys were taking advance positions, some of which they’d been shown the day before, and assaulted security barricades before Trump’s speech even finished.
“The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot,” committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said. She added that intelligence available before Jan. 6 identified plans to “invade the Capitol, occupy the Capitol, and take other steps to halt Congress’s count of electoral votes that day.”
That sort of advance maneuver and coordination (such as bringing zip ties, body armor and a scaffolding to a ‘peaceful protest’, as one does) not only undermines the idea that we had a spontaneous gathering that “got a little out of hand”, it directly confronts Trump’s best defense, what legal people would call mens rea – basically that Trump was too stupid or ignorant or crazy to know he was breaking the law. Several times, people who were not crazy (like Bill Barr) and even people who ARE crazy (like Rudy Guiliani) told Trump that his substitute-electors scheme was not legally feasible, and the fact that he pursued it anyway demonstrates intent. And while Trump, like any good Mob boss, was at pains to avoid direct involvement, this week the committee brought up how he pressured various state election boards and was caught on tape by the Georgia Secretary of State telling him to “find” just enough votes to swing the state. (Remember, the Trump Organization is like the Corleone Family, except everybody is Fredo.)
All of which returns us to the question that has been pressing ever since the 2016 presidential campaign: Why haven’t we put this babbling orangutan in a cage where he belongs?
But then we know the answer to that question is the answer to how he became president in the first place: Because enough people in enough critical states supported him and continue to do so. It’s why Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell refused to press for a conviction in Trump’s second impeachment, even though his term was over and conviction was simply a matter of making sure he could never run again. Because enough people (besides Trump himself) would like that. Which is pretty clear, because if the Banana Republican Party really wished to “move on” and start over, they wouldn’t be so defensive about the subject. They could just say, “hey we agreed with Trump’s policies, he gave us a conservative court, but he made a huge mistake and we have other candidates who can do what he did without the baggage.” But no.
No, you have Church of Trump junior priests like Congressman Gym Jordan (BR.-Ohio) tweeting that the Democratic Congress is ignoring “Gas at $5 per gallon. Moms can’t find baby formula. Grocery prices skyrocketing. Border in crisis.”
Christ on a pogo stick. Yes, Trumpniks. The economy sucks. Inflation sucks. Democrats suck. Now, can you point out the section of the Constitution that says a bunch of crybabies with Confederate flags get to overturn the result of the Electoral College once gas hits five dollars a gallon? Because if you can’t, that argument is just dodging the point.
As if that objection even matters though, cause even if you acknowledge there’s only so much this or any other president can do about global supply chain issues, it doesn’t make inflation hurt any less. But then the Republican Party is no longer the conservative wing of a political system where everyone believes in market liberal economics and constitutional rule of law. It’s the right-wing version of a Leninist party that participates in the political system only to the extent that it can game its rules to make sure they never have to worry about elections again. And to do that they need to make sure the declared defenders of that system – the Democrats – fail.
And if the suck-ass economy continues to drag down the country, it may drag down the Democrats in the midterms and there won’t be much chance of bringing the coup party to justice.
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Which leads to my third set of observations.
It seems that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is finally starting to turn against the defenders. One bad sign: The Western media isn’t covering Ukraine nearly as much anymore.
The fact is, Putin’s current strategy is the one he probably should have pursued all along. After mistakenly thinking that the Russian military had the logistics and operational capacity to take down a country the size of Ukraine in a few days or weeks, Putin downsized his expectations and narrowed the focus to the small eastern area of Donets where he already has local support and a concentrated front. Now most of Ukraine’s casualties are being inflicted by Russians at a safe distance with artillery, and Ukraine is running out of the Soviet/Russian gear they started off with, while the better Western gear is going to take time to deliver, and time to train with.
To such extent as we have had a sanctions regime, Russia has been getting around it with exports to India, China and other places that aren’t really aligned against or with the US. And since both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of food staples like grain and sunflower oil, Putin’s war of choice is already creating a global food crisis. And we can already see that as this goes on, the domestic impact is undermining the governments that are trying to resist Putin in favor of his local friends.
It’s almost like Russia’s national policy depends on making the entire world worse.
And the domestic impact of this manufactured crisis may be worse for EU countries than it is for America. We can ramp up our oil production, but for nations like Germany and Hungary, American fuel exports aren’t as convenient as those from Russia. But you know who has a lot of oil and mineral deposits in Europe outside of Russia? Ukraine!
Now does all this make more sense?
Putin was clearly trying to assimilate the entire nation (for one thing it was the main export route for Russian natural gas to those EU countries) but what he’s got right now is the next best thing.
Right now, the sketch plan looks like this:
Invade Ukraine, Russia’s main competitor and secondary source for both food and fuel,
Thereby creating both a food crisis and energy crisis which itself raises prices on everything else,
Block off the Black Sea so Ukraine can’t export food and fuel, exacerbating the artificial price crisis,
Keep the pressure on Ukraine (no matter what the cost to ordinary Russians) and maintain the manufactured inflation until the Western nations get sick of it,
Have Putin’s Little Bitch Boy run for president again, help him win (again) and wait until 2025 so he can turn the USA back into Russian North America,
Profit!
Of course bad as things look for Ukraine, and as bad as they’re going to get, this mode of thinking really means that Putin is trying to hurt the West at least as much as Ukraine. And we’re not the ones really hurting. That may be one reason the American public’s commitment is lacking, but by the same token, it’s not like the government really needs a public commitment to engage in foreign policy maneuvers. After all, who really asked for a war in Yemen which is continuing without any real resolution? Nobody, except the Saudis and the Americans who are financing that war effort, and that business opportunity is what matters to them.
Basically, Putin is betting that our entitled consumer culture and greed will cause us to succumb to Russia but Russia will not succumb to the greed and production capacity of our military-industrial complex.
I seem to recall that Putin’s mentors in the Soviet Union made a similar bet with the invasion of Afghanistan. It didn’t work out too well.
My sister took me to see Top Gun: Maverick this week. Critics have pointed out that Tom Cruise returning to his signature action-hero character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, after all these years, makes him look like a man out of time. After all, those were the Reagan days. And the movie starts by pushing all the old buttons: A takeoff montage from an aircraft carrier, set to an 80’s synth score leading to Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” then Maverick putting on his old bomber jacket and zipping to the base on his Kawasaki. He is in a way literally stuck in time: After reaching Mach 10 (and in the process killing an experimental fighter jet) Maverick’s superior dresses him down, saying he’s refused any promotion above Captain and any assignments or command besides flying jets, when with his record he could be an Admiral or even a Senator. But, like a lot of Cruise characters, and other action heroes, he stays in his niche cause that’s the only thing he’s good at, and that’s where he’s found his calling. It is in fact amazing that somebody his age can still be a fighter jock, but then the other reason Maverick is a symbol of bygone times is that Tom Cruise, while not looking exactly like he did in the Risky Business years, still looks remarkably good and fit for his age, as opposed to co-stars like Kelly McGillis (who is not in this movie) or Val Kilmer, who IS in this movie and had to do most of his dialogue on a computer screen because he lost his voice to throat cancer in real life.
In fact it is because of “Iceman”, now Admiral Kazansky, that Maverick’s career is saved, but he has to be sent back to Top Gun in San Diego, this time as an instructor. Of course Maverick being Maverick (and Cruise being Cruise) he ends up being the star pilot anyway. But the situation is wrapped up in Hollywood military drama. The base admiral (Jon Hamm) is a by-the-book stick-in-the-mud. The new team are mostly in rivalry with each other, especially “Hangman” (Glen Powell), who doesn’t play well with others and is just as cocky and handsome as Maverick but doesn’t pull it off as well. But Maverick’s main issue is that he’s still haunted by the death of “Goose” (Anthony Edwards), his radar man and best friend. This comes up because one of the other jocks is “Rooster” (Miles Teller) who we know is Goose’s son because he inherited his father’s mustache. Maverick’s guilt means that he is overprotective of the whole team, but especially Rooster, to the point that he was willing to follow his late mother’s wishes to keep him out of the Naval Academy, for which Rooster naturally resents him.
All this drama is held together (sorta) by the plot: The US Navy air arm is assigned to take out a uranium processing plant in a rogue state that is conveniently unnamed. For extra security against air attack and location, the plant is set in the center of a mountain canyon with steep cliffs ringed by SAM anti-air batteries. The Navy is using older F/A-18s, apparently for security reasons, while the enemy is using fifth-generation Russian fighters. Thus the goal is for the team to get in, dodge the SAMs, do a two-stage, pinpoint bombing and get out before the fighters can reach them, and the Navy keeps moving the schedule and narrowing the window for operation. Maverick’s team are already the best of the Top Gun class, but they don’t know how to run this mission in less than 3 minutes, and Maverick has to keep pushing them. He tells the team, “Time is your adversary.” As if the script had not already been laying down that point.
The joke of this movie, without spoiling much, is that time may be a tough adversary for Maverick (and Cruise) but it hasn’t beaten him yet.
This is one of those Hollywood blockbusters that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too hard, like how McGillis isn’t in it but Maverick has a relationship with Jennifer Connelly that seems to already have a history even though she wasn’t in the first movie. But as corny and egotistical (and problematic) as Cruise can be, he really does sell the concept of personal excellence. Mitchell tells his team that he’s going to push their limits and show them they’re capable of more than they think, and ultimately, he does. And when we saw the film in the theater, they had a short bit where Cruise directly addresses the camera and tells the audience how proud he and the crew are to have made this movie, and how they did most of it without green screens, using real planes and real flight training. That certainly gives authenticity to the flight scenes and helps make them that much more intense.
Top Gun: Maverick is not really sophisticated entertainment. But it’s a hell of a ride.