Month: December 2022

Maybe It’s The Beginning Of The End

“So here are the conclusions that this year tells us:

The first, sad conclusion is that there were a lot of lies this year and it must stop.”

-Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today propagandist

There is still a pretty good chance that Donald Trump may again be the Viceroy for Russian North America, if only because the Republican Party isn’t motivated to stop him from being nominated as their candidate. Even though, weeks after announcing a presidential campaign, he really isn’t doing much with it. Early in December he blasted a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” that some people thought might actually be a major announcement relevant to his political strategy, assuming he had one. Which he doesn’t. Instead he did a video where the big announcement was a new line of NFT virtual trading cards featuring Trump in poses like superhero and astronaut (also, policeman, sailor, construction worker, cowboy, Indian chief…). For $99 each, with no guarantee which one you’d get. This was so ridiculous even Trumpworld felt the need to ridicule it. Steve Bannon, on his “War Room” podcast, said “I can’t do this anymore… We’re at war,” Bannon said. “They oughta be fired today.” Bannon’s guest, Sebastian Gorka, said, “Whoever wrote that pitch should be fired and should never be involved” – as if Gorka and Bannon both didn’t know that Trump isn’t going to do anything he doesn’t want to do.

Around the same time, a Trumpnik with the appropriate alias “Baked Alaska”, who got convicted on misdemeanor earlier this year for participating in the Capitol riot, told reporters, “I can’t believe I’m going to jail for an NFT salesman.”

Poor little Trumpniks. They actually thought he was serious. That he cared about something greater than himself.

They thought Trump was going to be their Hard Man. Their version of Vladimir Putin, or at least Rodrigo Duterte. They thought he was gonna kick ass and take names, and anybody who didn’t march in step was gonna be sent to the Gulag.

What they got was Liddle Donnie Clown Boy. What they got was the guy who sells Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks.

And given that Trump doesn’t drink alcohol, and eats steaks well-done with ketchup, they should have figured that he knows just as much about government as he does about liquor and cooking.

(It kind of raises the question of what Trump would do if he had a Food Network show. ‘Next the recipe calls for a tablespoon of kosher salt, which as everybody knows, is salt that only comes from the front part of the cow.’)

It also doesn’t help Trump’s case going towards the 2024 campaign that the Democrats in Congress finally got access to Trump’s tax returns, with just enough time to release them to the public before Republicans take over the House. Investigative journalist and longtime Trump hunter David Cay Johnston came up with his own take, saying “Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison” even as he also details why that hasn’t happened yet. As Johnston himself says, whatever tax reforms he would recommend are not going to do any good now because they haven’t been enacted yet, and they probably won’t be, because as he says, the people who benefit from the system as it is are also the donor class, and some of the politicians they sponsor in both parties. Of course most of them don’t have the capacity to appoint their own Treasury Secretary and IRS chief, as Trump did.

His usual weasely presentation has been that he did everything legally and he was just working the system and “that makes me smart” and all that. And that may indeed be true. But if so, it just raises the question, if he didn’t do anything wrong, why was he so desperate to hide what he did?

Well, Johnston’s article also points out: “Perhaps most glaring in the tax returns is that they include 26 Trump businesses—or imaginary businesses—with zero revenue and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax deductions for expenses.

“Unless Trump can produce records showing the expenses are real and meet other standards to be deductible, that’s fraud. That Trump did it 26 times as a candidate and as president is powerful evidence that he qualifies for prosecution by the federal government and New York State for criminal tax fraud.”

But again, that assumes that someone’s actually going to enforce the law, and most of the reason things got to this point is that nobody does. When Trump wasn’t a politician, it wasn’t considered a priority to go after him, and even after he used his presidency to make himself a national security risk, for that reason, the political establishment now think he’s too big to fail.

This year, when Saturday Night Live again gave Dave Chappelle a host gig the weekend after an election, he said, among many other politically incorrect things, that Trump is very popular, even loved, among some people at least. Because Trump is “an honest liar.” As in, during his first debate, he said “this whole system is rigged!” And when the moderator asked him to demonstrate why, Trump said, “I know the system is rigged, because I USE it.” He said to Hillary Clinton (according to Chappelle), “if you want me to pay my taxes, change the tax code. But I know you won’t, because your friends and your donors enjoy the same tax breaks that I do.’ …And with that, my friends, a star was born.”

It really brings up the old phrase “Hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.” Or as I said, a long time ago when this all started: “But when the virtue of honesty is conflated with the vice of rudeness – often by a political class who have good reason to fear honesty – the result is that anyone who wishes to sell rudeness can do so by calling it honesty. And thus a population deprived of the virtue will embrace the vice. It’s like living in the most antiseptic circumstances and then finally being exposed to filth, and your immune system has no experience with it.” We can see simply from the example of Hillary Clinton what hypocrisy leads us to. But if one objects to the vice underlying hypocrisy, obviously the solution is to challenge the vice, not openly embrace it. What we’re seeing is the open embrace of vice, and why it’s not an improvement on hypocrisy. Because when the ruling class can’t even bother to lie anymore, they have no reason to moderate their evil, because they know no one’s going to call them on it.

Much as all those professional Christians that Republicans nominated to the Supreme Court told the Democrats that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” (when it wasn’t), that simply ending Roe wasn’t going to undermine the right to abortion in states that still affirmed it (when it did) and the Dobbs decision didn’t set a precedent on civil rights cases like Obergefell v. Hodges (when it does). We have now reached the dangerous point where the powers that be still feel the need to lie, but can’t even bother to lie WELL.

There is still a need to lie because previous evidence to the contrary, there was still a fear that reactionary forces could have pushed the envelope too far. That maybe, hey, we can’t just admit we’re running an entire country only for the benefit of people who agree with us and fuck everybody else in it. Those other people might get MAD. And, previous evidence to the contrary, this election they actually DID.

The reason a liar continues to lie when lying would be unnecessary or impractical is because to lie is to set up a conflict between what wants to be true and what one knows to be true. Thus, self-deception is the root of any lie. But this means that there are only two ways to resolve the conflict: Either force everyone else to go along with the lie or to give up the lie. And the real problem occurs when the outside world makes it clear it will not be forced.

Ukraine is just a more visceral example. My quote at the beginning was from Margarita Simonyan, a “journalist” for Russia Today, the main media service of the Putin government. It was part of a year-end review of Russia’s performance, or lack thereof, in the “special military operation” against the “Nazi” government of Ukraine. Now, simply because one is a propagandist doesn’t mean one can’t tell the truth. Just because one might prefer to believe the Ukrainian government doesn’t mean they don’t engage in propaganda. But it comes down to the fact that you don’t have to “believe” anything but the facts. If Russia were winning in Ukraine, it would be a lot easier for them to say so. If they had actually managed to take the capital in three days, they could have filmed it. Russia and Ukraine can say anything they want about who’s winning, but I believe Ukraine is winning by simple virtue of the fact that they’re still around. We’ve heard that some people can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but that requires a sow’s ear. Russia doesn’t even have a sow’s ear to work with, which is why even their propaganda ministries are unable to point to victories that haven’t happened and instead point fingers everywhere except where the problem starts.

For a shill like Simonyan to truly stop the lies, she would have to start with the first obvious one: That Ukraine is just a “little Russia”, that it doesn’t really exist as its own nationality and that therefore Russia can just walk in and take it without anybody seriously trying to stop them. But by implication that would mean challenging the greater premise that supports it: That you can have faith in a ruthless leader whose decisions are more wise the more unaccountable he becomes. Ending that belief would challenge her whole world view, and she’s not going to do that. Likewise an American fascist like Steve Bannon might admit that his Leader is capable of error, but he’s going to go back to serving Trump, like he has in the past. Where else is he going to go? What else is he going to do? Be normal???

You cannot expect these people to just evolve or grow out of it. On an individual level, people who aren’t fully invested in the lie may realize it isn’t working out for them and quit supporting it, which is a big part of why Democratic candidates won in 2022, either because of Republicans voting for them or simply not voting at all. But the people who are most invested have the most to lose, and not just in terms of money. The best and brightest of the fascists might be capable of acknowledging the facts against them, but they are too emotional to grasp why the facts are against them, because that would challenge their whole view of reality.

We cannot assume that the bad guys will just see the error of their ways, or just die out. Trump and Putin may be old, but they’re not dying fast enough. And even if they died tomorrow, their proteges would be waiting in the wings, because they’ve been taught to think that bad behavior would be rewarded. The only thing that disincentivizes bad behavior is to quit rewarding it. And that means actively resisting it, either on the battlefield or the ballot box. That does not guarantee success, let alone some utopian future, but for quite some time – a little bit before Brexit and Trump, actually – it seemed as though the forces of regression had the upper hand, and were going to direct the world. This autumn the rest of the world showed they would, and could, fight back. And that might be a turning point, a beginning of the end for “post-liberal” lying and corruption.

That might actually be a Happy New Year.

The Art of Modern War

“I don’t need a ride, I need ammo.”

-Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, February 2022

“I don’t need ammo, I need a ride.”

– Russian Armed Forces, September 2022

Welcome back my friends, to the war that never ends.
On November 11, which we celebrate as Veterans’ Day from the Armistice of World War I in the West (in Russia, they weren’t quite so lucky), Ukraine liberated the city of Kherson, capital of Kherson Oblast, the only major regional capital that Russia managed to capture in 2022. It was a surprise how suddenly it happened. Less than three days before, Russia controlled a large territory on the west bank of the Dnipro River which comes into the Black Sea near Kherson. On November 9, Ukraine retook the town of Snihurivka, which is about 59 kilometers drive from Kherson city. And now Ukraine’s military is in Kherson’s center.
It was not expected to be this easy. Given the Putin government’s general contempt for human rights, everyone in the West expected Russia’s telegraphed withdrawal from the area to be a giant trap, with garrisons hiding in the cities to snipe at Ukrainian troops, or worse, Russia blowing the dam on the east side of the river to flood the city and delta, causing thousands of casualties. That didn’t happen, or if there are any traps, no one has seen them yet. On YouTube, the channel Combat Veteran Reacts pointed out that Russia needed to secure bridges to get people across before blowing them up to stop the enemy. With temporary pontoon bridges, they’re usually only one vehicle wide, which means you might have a max of 50 troops in an APC cross the river at a time. That would of course assume that everyone was retreating in good order. “What appears maybe to have happened is that instead of a systematic careful withdrawal that Ukraine can exploit, the Russians just… heard a withdrawal order on the TV, literally picked up their rifles, got into any vehicle, and just drove to the river.” Which, as with their retreat from Kharkiv Oblast in September means leaving a lot of military equipment behind, only worse because the earlier campaign was over more open terrain.

Since then the war has become a bit more stagnant, but as the weather worsens, Russia has tried to press for what advantage it can, mainly by pushing for the east-central town of Bakhmut, which most Western military analysts think has little strategic value. By contrast, Ukraine took not only the Kherson area west of the Dnipro, they really changed the course of the war by taking back most of the Kharkiv oblast due northeast of their capital, Kyiv. That was some time after they had managed to defend the capital well enough to make Russia retreat from their offensive there. Overall, since Vladimir Putin started his war of choice in February 24, 2022, Ukraine has taken back roughly half of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the high mark of their invasion progress.

It is the most impressive military campaign in Europe since World War II. And one of the ironies is that while Putin has tried to combine the reactionary politics of the Orthodox Church with the statism and organized power of the Soviet Union, part of Ukraine’s success is that, intentionally or not, they are doing a better job with World War II Soviet military theory than the Russians.

The Soviet approach to land warfare was called deep operation, or deep battle doctrine, and it was so called because it dealt with not only tactics and strategy but also what the US military now calls the operational level of a military campaign, dealing with the totality of both tactical and strategic affairs. According to the Wikipedia article, “It was a tenet that emphasized destroying, suppressing or disorganizing enemy forces not only at the line of contact but also throughout the depth of the battlefield. …The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy’s logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible, or indeed irrelevant. ” In military history, the theory was most associated with Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a marshal who got executed in Stalin’s purges, but after Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded Soviet Russia, Marshal Zhukov and other generals re-developed it and put it to use against the Axis. However the first theorist to name the theory was Vladimir Trianadfillov, a Soviet general who died in 1931.

Deep battle’s emphasis on mobile warfare and encirclement resembled the Germans’ contemporary ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics (which themselves borrowed from maverick generals in Britain and France) but according to its name, went deeper in intention and results. From the article:

“Blitzkrieg emphasized the importance of a single strike on a Schwerpunkt (focal point) as a means of rapidly defeating an enemy; deep battle emphasized the need for multiple breakthrough points and reserves to exploit the breach quickly. The difference in doctrine can be explained by the strategic circumstances for the Soviet Union and Germany at the time. Germany had a smaller population but a better-trained army, and the Soviet Union had a larger population but a less-trained army. As a result, Blitzkrieg emphasized narrow front attacks in which quality could be decisive, but deep battle emphasized wider front attacks in which quantity could be used effectively.

“In principle, the Red Army would seek to destroy the enemy’s operational reserves and its operational depth and occupy as much of his strategic depth as possible. Within the Soviet concept of deep operations was the principle of strangulation if the situation demanded it, instead of physically encircling the enemy and destroying him immediately. Triandafillov stated in 1929:

The outcome in modern war will be attained not through the physical destruction of the opponent but rather through a succession of developing manoeuvres that will aim at inducing him to see his ability to comply further with his operational goals. The effect of this mental state leads to operational shock or system paralysis, and ultimately to the disintegration of his operational system. The success of the operational manoeuvre is attained through all-arms combat (combined arms) at the tactical level, and by combining a frontal holding force with a mobile column to penetrate the opponent’s depth at the operational level. The element of depth is a dominant factor in the conduct of deep operations both in the offensive and defensive.”

This differed from blitzkrieg and “Clausewitzian” principles of destroying enemy units in the field, which was the main focus of Germany in the two World Wars. The article states that the major example of this approach was Operation Uranus, the Soviet encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad; once the Germans were committed in the city, the weaker military units guarding the flanks were routed and the Germans were cut off from any escape. At that point the Soviets simply waited for winter and lack of supply to defeat the Germans in the city. The Battle of Stalingrad ended up capturing 91,000 Axis soldiers.

The other term used for this military approach in World War II was maskirovka (masquerade), basically deceiving the Germans as to where the Soviet offensive was going to move so that the Axis would try to defend in a different area and then the Soviets would attack at a weak point. What Americans might call “hit ’em where they ain’t.” Not unlike what the Western Allies did in 1944 when they made all their maneuvering in Britain look like our invasion of Nazi Europe was going to start in Calais (a narrower point in the English Channel than Normandy and closer to both Paris and Germany) so that the Nazi garrisons were concentrated there instead of the real invasion points (in Normandy) so that Normandy was less defended and the Allies had more time and space to expand the beach heads.

Ukraine, with its relatively small army and pre-war lack of mobile forces, is not really able to perform Nazi or Soviet style encirclements of Russians on the battlefield. But they have still been operating as much on an operational as a tactical level, with the Kharkiv offensive in particular being not so much simply engaging the enemy directly as wearing down their front and support lines before attacking so that the offensive was on their terms. As with maskirovka, the principal element was feinting moves to make Russia believe that the main offensive was going toward Kherson city. US military support was critical in this regard, as HIMARS missile batteries were used to strike behind Russian lines up to 70 kilometers, hitting critical supply and ammunition depots. Another huge factor in Ukraine’s success with deception is its greater mastery of modern information war; one Ukrainian official said “They are blind, we see everything.” Ukrainian strikes behind the lines also included attacks on Russian radar systems and the use of anti-aircraft systems to counter Russian drones and air missions. By September 6, Ukrainian forces had amassed at a focal point in Balakliia, dazing Russian forces and causing a rapid retreat. By September 9, Ukraine had reached Kupiansk, a major rail and transportation hub, undermining Russia’s ability to resupply and redeploy in the sector and contributing to the armed forces’ decision to withdraw to the Oskil river. But in October Ukraine continued the offensive and managed to reach as far as Kreminna before Russia managed to regroup and push back. In the wake of all this Russia’s forces were further deteriorated by loss of equipment, partially because of Ukraine’s rapid advance but also because Russian attempts to blow bridges frequently occured before they could get tanks and heavy equipment across, and as Russian troops simply abandoned their defense posts.

Which only brings up the point that as cunning as Ukraine’s strategy has been up to this point, its success has at least as much to do with the deficiencies of the Russian side.

Putin launched his invasion in February apparently on the assumption that Ukraine’s field defenses were just going to break, he would be able to take Kyiv, and then whatever rump government managed to hold the west of Ukraine would eventually accede to whatever stooge he wanted to impose on them. He may have thought this because President Zelenskyy really wasn’t that popular at home before the war started, or because the West hadn’t done anything to help Ukraine after Russia’s previous violations of Ukrainian territory in 2014 and after. Indeed, part of Putin’s escalation to full-scale war was his diplomatic recognition of the pro-Russia Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, and the fact that Ukraine had been fighting those separatists on a low level for years despite lack of Western support should have told Putin that his “special military operation” wasn’t going to be just a three-hour tour.

A large part of this is the relative lack of presence of the Russian Air Force. Many of its Sukhoi models of close air support craft are outdated by 21st Century standards. The Ukrainians’ use of anti-aircraft batteries, even before high-level NATO support, demonstrated greater efficiency for the value than Russian offensive air and contributed to making Russian pilots “risk averse.” Part of that is because Russian craft are more reliant on unguided weapons, meaning they have to get close to the target to fire. The overall problem is that Russia’s military does not train their pilots intensively, with their flying time roughly 100 hours per year, less than one-third that of their NATO counterparts. More skilled pilots would be better able to reach “dynamic” targets and still survive.

That hollowness and lack of support point to an even more fundamental problem with Russia’s military. In October, a lieutenant general reported that 1.5 sets of military uniforms had gone missing. Apparently this was 1.5 million sets of uniforms that were supposed to be on record and are now unaccounted for. These were supposed to include winter uniforms. And as the Starks would say, winter is coming. Such gear as they do have is not optimized for winter and is made out of synthetic materials to save costs. Corruption is endemic in the entire Russian government, leading to a military that is more designed for the elites to profit from graft than to perform its national defense or attack purposes. “Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. ” The military’s performance in the Ukraine invasion was foreshadowed by the fact that just a few days after the first attacks, Russia, the greatest fuel exporter in Europe, had army vehicles stuck on the road for lack of gas. The country uses tanks dating back from the 1980s and earlier. And of course it has absolutely no regard for information security, which is why social media has so many examples of Russian soldiers calling home from war zones. So if everyone on YouTube knows where the Russians are and what they’re doing, certainly the Ukrainian Armed Forces do.

So you have a Russian invader force that is easily monitored by Ukraine, poorly equipped, poorly organized, with no one knowing what they’re doing, no chain of command who can tell grunts what the mission is and what to do if conditions change, no one cares about anything besides getting through the day or how much they can scam from the war zone, and no one really wants to be there besides Vladimir Putin. And every day their support network is being hammered by Ukraine so it would be that much harder to hold a position once Ukraine actually advances. And then one day, they advance.

The end result was the ultimate example of “quiet quitting.”

Putin says on one hand that Ukraine is essentially Russia and there is no such thing as Ukraine, but then he forgot why you don’t want to start a war with Russia. Even if YOU ARE Russia.

Moreover, like any good fascist, Putin seems to think that that which he wishes to be so therefore is so. He seems to think that because the “traditional Russia” exists in his mind, that his country still has the tools of traditional Russia, namely an inexhaustible manpower reserve. Like, the Germans could kill all the Russians they wanted and there would still be more. That’s not the case any more, and it hasn’t been the case for quite some time. According to Wikipedia: “From the 1990s to 2001, Russia’s death rate had exceeded its birth rate, which has been called a demographic crisis by analysts. Subsequently, the nation has an ageing population, with the median age of the country being 40.3 years. In 2009, Russia recorded annual population growth for the first time in fifteen years; and during the mid-2010s, Russia had seen increased population growth due to declining death rates, increased birth rates and increased immigration. However, since 2020, due to excess deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s population has undergone its largest peacetime decline in recorded history. In 2020, the total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.5 children born per woman, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 and about equal to the European average.” Also, in 1941, the Russian fertility rate (number of children born to each woman) was 4.6. In 1945 it was 1.92. The previously higher fertility rates did not lead to an overall population increase because of Russia’s Civil War, the two world wars and “political killings”.
This is of course why Putin invaded Ukraine with a peacetime army not nearly the size needed to subdue the population and army of Ukraine, and the failure of that was not even so much because of not having 300,000 more men but because Russia didn’t have the supplies to cover the force it did have.

Which all adds up to the fact that Russia simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to run a military the size of the Soviet Union. Heck, the Soviet Union couldn’t afford a military the size of the Soviet Union’s, which was a large part of why the Cold War ended.

Less than two days after appearing at the battlefield in Bakhmut, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy made a surprise flight (most likely unannounced for security reasons) to Washington DC, appearing at a press conference with President Biden on December 21 to petition the US government for more military support. He then appeared to a joint session of Congress, much as Winston Churchill spoke to Congress just after Pearl Harbor, the difference being that Churchill probably had less fascist sympathizers on the Republican side of the aisle. But Zelenskyy said at one point that most Ukrainians would be celebrating Christmas this holiday by candlelight, not out of sentiment, but because of Russian attacks on their infrastructure. But he continued, “we will celebrate Christmas, and even if there is no electricity, the light of our faith in ourselves will not be put out.”

It gets to a point that applies to both Ukrainians and Russians this winter, which one of the MSNBC talking heads made when they found out about Zelenskyy’s visit Wednesday morning. Quoting Napoleon, he said: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

MAGAGA!!!

“And so the first returns are in, and the Silly Party has taken Leicester! What do you think of that- Norman?”

“Well, yes, the election went much as I predicted, except that the Silly Party won.”

-“Election Night”, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

So now, finally, the 2022 midterms are over. In the Georgia runoff, incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock won – barely – against college football star and Trump friend Herschel Walker, who got a huge amount of Republican turnout despite or likely because being as dumb as an entire store full of left shoes and picked only because Trump wanted him and the rest of the Republicans thought this was the ideal Black candidate. If nothing else, we now know why it’s better to be a werewolf than a vampire: Warnock is an ordained minister, and Clerics can’t turn werewolves.

Now, given that even before this, Democrats had managed to keep 50 seats in the Senate and held the House Republicans to a five-seat majority (who probably aren’t in consensus about their leadership) the conventional wisdom from everyone was that Donald Trump was to blame for pushing a whole bunch of election-liar candidates who wanted to skew state governments to make sure no one could elect Democrats again. That and, the Alito Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade attracted a surprising amount of anger. Well, it surprised Republicans, anyway. Hey, Mr. Alito, it turns out that women had the right to choose after all. Maybe while you were obviating the 14th Amendment and completely ignoring the Ninth, you could have used your magical legal bullshit to eliminate the 19th Amendment and take away women’s right to vote. It would have made things so much easier for your Party.

Usually in a midterm election, voters kick out the party in power. Except, people perceived, not just because of the Dobbs decision, that the party in power isn’t so much the Biden Democrats as the Trump Republicans. Supposedly even before the election, Trump told insiders that creating a pro-life supermajority on the Supreme Court wasn’t going to help him politically, and it’s another one of the factors that pin the blame on him for Republican performance.

That’s one of the reasons why Republicans supposedly begged the former Russian Viceroy to hold off on announcing a re-election campaign until after the election, but just one week afterward, November 15, he made this big presentation at Mar-a-Lago and announced he was running to stay out of prison for President of the United States. Those who actually bothered to watch said it was a great example of what Trump used to call “low energy.” Such that the press caught some people trying to leave the room.

Anyway, somewhere inside a speech that was so wandering and tedious that even Laura Ingraham cut away from it, Trump said he was going to “make America great and glorious again.”

MAGAGA!

Isn’t that Lady Gaga’s final form?

But the problem with paying any attention to this at all is that I simply don’t have time to. In the time between the general election, the Trump announcement and the Georgia runoff, Trump actually managed to get himself involved in multiple fuckups. On the way to Make America Gross And Ghetto Again, Trump decided to host Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Kanye West, who now legally goes by “Ye.” (I assume this is supposed to be ‘yay’ as in the last syllable, but I pronounce it ‘yee’ as in Ye Gads.) He has recently been accompanied everywhere by “traditional Catholic” and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, acting as Ye’s wannabe Salacious Crumb. If you don’t know who Fuentes is, congratulations, you have a life. If you actually want to know, just do a Google search on the phrase WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR CHIN? Anyway, Kanye has been erratic for quite some time, as anybody who follows hip-hop could tell you, but he really started acting crazy – by Kanye standards – when he twitted that he was going to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”. Except DEFCON is an abbreviation and he actually spelled it ‘death’. You would think a black man would know how to spell DEF. Whatever. It got to where Ye and Fuentes appeared on Alex Jones’ show (with Ye wearing full-body clothing and a full mask with zip holes for the eyes, apparently to keep TheJews from injecting him with nanotech) and everyone thought, “Wow, I hope Alex Jones can talk some sense into this guy.”

Ye, like Trump, was also supported by Elon Musk at Twitter at least until Ye said he would allow the banned Alex Jones to post from his account, posted a swastika inside a Star of David, and when threatened by Musk, posted his “final tweet” as a picture of Musk getting hosed down at the beach. (‘I love free speech so much, I’m letting Q people and racists back!’ ‘Hey boss, Kanye posted a pic of you looking whiter than a night light.’ ‘Ban his ass.’) Not that Elon gave up on trying to help Trump: This last week he made an arrangement with Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi to release “The Twitter Files” – on Twitter – being a set of internal communications where Twitter staff debated whether to release emails from Hunter Biden’s pilfered laptop three weeks before the 2020 election. They eventually decided against doing so, but without consulting then-head and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who now calls their decision a mistake. The staff had also consulted left-wing free speech advocate Congressman Ro Khanna (D.-California) who recommended against killing the story.
And you know where this is going. In order to Make America Goonish And Garish Again, Trump committed his compound fuckup. Posting on his Truf Censhal platform, he said, “So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

But here is the crux of the issue that lit the fuse on Trump’s tampon: “The Biden campaign asked Twitter to review five tweets, which were later deleted. Taibbi did not disclose the content of the Biden campaign requests, presenting only their URLs; …four tweets contained nude photos and videos of Hunter Biden, which violate Twitter policy and California law as revenge porn.” Again, the joke to me is that Twitter HAS a policy. Based on history, especially now, I thought anybody could post snuff films and prolapse porn and it’s all good.

But apparently Hunter Biden’s penis doesn’t impress most Americans as much as it impresses Republicans. Especially when the main story of this became not an alleged collusion to keep the Biden family from being smeared, but the owner of the Republican Party demanding to terminate the Constitution, in so doing violating his previous oath and creating incriminating evidence in any case against him for the January 6 riot.

Now, the fact that a lot of this mishegoss involved James Baker, a Twitter legal counsel who was also part of James Comey’s FBI investigation into Trump caused a lot of the Right to think, “Oh, praise Jesus, we’ve finally got something on these Demonrats.” But Tuesday the Trump Organization tax fraud trial in New York returned 17 charges as 17 guilty verdicts. And while Trump himself was not personally indicted, suddenly Hunter Biden and his Dad didn’t seem so crooked and evil anymore.

All of which – and it’s a lot, even for this guy – have caused the political-media complex to think that Trump is at his weakest moment, and that if there was ever a time for the Republican Party to get rid of him, it’s now.

HaHaHa.

No.

Sure the smart Republicans are saying they should get rid of Trump. The smart people have known that Trump is bad news for years. The smart people aren’t the ones running the Republican Party. The Party isn’t run by heartless manipulators like Mitch McConnell and Rupert Murdoch. It isn’t run by functionaries like Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy. It’s run by people like Lauren “Bubblehead” Boebert and Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz. People who either are as dumb and venal as they seem or are putting on an act to appeal to voters who are even worse.

They dismiss the critiques of liberals, “liberal” apparently being anybody who thinks that a mob coup is illegal. They say it all comes down to “Orange Man Bad.” Well, YES. Orange Man Bad. Also: White slavery bad. Leprosy bad. Cancer bad. Why are we debating the given? The problem is not Orange Man Bad, the problem is that the modern Republican Party could defend and support cancer as long as cancer helped them ban abortion.

Trump’s sorta like Hitler. Except Hitler liked dogs. And he served in the military. And he didn’t cheat on his girlfriend.
Now you may be going, “No, No. Stop. Why are you acting like Trump is worse than Hitler? Hitler was Hitler.” Exactly. I’m saying, if the Trumpniks want to sell my country to some idiot clownboy who’s not even AS good as Hitler, maybe we should cut the Germans some slack.

Maybe we should quit thinking America is “exceptional” and admit we were just lucky.

Maybe, just as people of Russian and Chinese and German ethnicity can move to this country and adopt that can-do, optimistic, individualist American spirit, so it is possible for Americans to adopt the sullen, collectivist, Sklavmoral mindset of Russians or Nazi-era Germans, if the local culture changes enough.

Trump might be a loathsome mass of all potential human vices, congealed into something resembling a humanoid form, but if one were to judge from his positions prior to getting into politics, you could see why some made the case that he could be a good leader. He didn’t always agree with Republican orthodoxy and he clearly didn’t care about following the party’s internal political correctness. Unfortunately what seemed like pragmatism was simply not having a moral core beyond “anything that gets me what I want is good”.

Even more unfortunately, that description also fits most of the people who worship Trump, including all the Good Christians (TM) who were amazingly eager to discard their decorum and moralism as long as government trampled over all that procedural stuff that conservatives used to favor. Like, the Constitution.

For all the huffing and handwringing in the media and the Republican Party about Trump palling around with terrorists and wanting to get rid of the Constitution, they really shouldn’t be acting so surprised. And both the Republican establishment and the liberal media should quit acting like this is gonna make a difference. You notice that for the last six years, Trump has always been pushing it. The “good” Republicans and establishment people (including people in his own inner circle) have always tried to pull him back towards respectability. That never works. He always pulls them further and further into the slime. Because he’s been betting that they need him more than he needs them, and so far, that bluff has not been called.

Because if it is, Trump can always take his ball and go home, that “ball” being his voter base. And for both moral and long-term practical reasons, the Republican Party really should cut him off and make it clear that they don’t want to have the kind of people that Trump encourages in the Party. But the implication there is that without those people, they won’t even be as competitive in national elections as they are now, cause this is the base they’ve been cultivating for years before him. He simply said the sort of stuff they were saying to themselves and wouldn’t admit cause that would make them unpopular with the rest of the country. Trump showed them they didn’t have to care about that. He gave the base the freedom to be their worst selves. He gave the base the freedom to be … base.

As I say, it’s horrible enough that these guys emulate the Nazis, but the problem is they’re so BAD at it.

Not even the original Nazis. I mean, back in the ’70s, the ACLU took flak because they defended the right of Illinois Nazis to protest in a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie. Hey, remember when that sort of thing WASN’T tolerated by an establishment political party? But this is them:

Look at these guys. Clean-cut, uniformed, capable of marching in formation, and I can’t see from here, but the slogans they’re carrying are probably grammatically correct.

Now think of the guys who stormed the Capitol. Fat, slovenly, unshaven and just bringing whatever odd gear they had to the riot like it was a BYOB (Bring Your Own Bombs).

I’m just saying, our standards for fascism have really gone downhill.

I mean, if Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and their tanks had the little metal testicles dangling off the back, that would be the Republican Party right now.

Again, Trump IS the base and the base IS Trump. Who in the Republican political class is more like the Republican Party than Trump? Even if they trained to walk with their knuckles at waist level and learned how to talk English gooder, they wouldn’t mean it. And the more civilized Republicans are no longer able to cover for them, because the agenda has been laid bare. And Democrats have been stewing over all those Supreme Court appointees mouthing “settled law” so many times, even they might have figured out they should quit trusting conservatives.


So why NOT keep supporting Trump? The alternative would be to… actually come up with common-sense, centrist and right-wing ideas that would appeal to the general public. But then they’d have to admit the general public into the movement, and then they would no longer have the freedom to be their worst selves. If they could appeal to the wider public, they wouldn’t be who they are.

So for the next two years (at least) they’re going to keep goosestepping behind Trump so he can Make America Gallant And Goofus Again. Reagan would not have recognized this party, but Barry Goldwater would have. He was the one who said “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” But in a lesser-known quote on similar lines, he said: “Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people.”

But this party seems to think that’s commie wokeness or whatever their influencers have told them to hate this week.

It continues to marginalize conservatives and libertarians like myself, who stupidly believed that the Right was about creating a limited constitutional republic and free-market economy, as opposed to trolling the libs and giving more power to the already privileged because one identifies with them as opposed to your fellow working stiffs. Cause apparently the toadies and trolls are more numerous than the liberty caucus, or at least more motivated.

Unfortunately for them, the last election, which should have been the best opportunity for Republicans to make gains against a flawed and unpopular Biden Administration, demonstrated that this approach isn’t going to work with the voting public, even with all the state and federal rules in their favor. The only route left is another coup. In which case, they have to hope that their militia are not as incompetent as their lawyers and legislators have proven to be. But you know what they say: “A failed coup that isn’t punished isn’t a failure, it’s just a rehearsal.”

So step up, Republicans, it’s time to Make America Greedy And Gullible Again!
Or is that Make America Gluttonous And Grabby Again?

We’re still working this out.

A Sermon To The Republican Party

From the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 8 (King James Version):

And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel.

2 Now the name of his firstborn was Joel; and the name of his second, Abiah: they were judges in Beersheba.

3 And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment.

4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah,

5 And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.

6 But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the Lord.

7 And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.

8 According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee.

9 Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.

10 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king.

11 And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

14 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

15 And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

16 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;

20 That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

21 And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord.

22 And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man unto his city.

The Word of the Lord.

And like I said, why should I believe this stuff when clearly you don’t?