Month: December 2023

I had thought of doing something on pop culture leading into Christmas/New Year’s, but I wanted to give my opinion on the Colorado Supreme Court upholding a suit to bar Donald Trump from running for President in that state on the grounds of the 14^th Amendment. Special Counsel Jack Smith, smelling an opportunity, asked the US Supreme Court to expedite a ruling after the Trump team had already appealed, but this Friday the Court gave a unanimous decision pawning the matter off to the Court of Appeals for DC.

Like it matters. If the courts don’t give King Donnie the ruling he wants, he’s going to keep going up the ladder to SCOTUS so that his justices will give it to him.

So for snap analysis: It’s almost certain that the three liberal women – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – would rule against Trump. It is also almost certain that Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni petitioned to help the coup followers, would find some way to rule for Trump.

And then you have Chief Justice Samuel Alito. The 14^th Amendment seems to be plain and clear language, but the whole premise of Dobbs v. Jackson is that the 14^th Amendment is plain and clear language, but its meaning opposed Alito’s political agenda, so he just pretended that the Amendment didn’t apply.

This leaves the other four “conservatives” – Chief Justice (in name only) John Roberts and the three Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett, all of whom have ruled against Trump in the past, notably in a case before January 6, where Texas petitioned to throw out the election results in four states and it was ruled that Texas did not have standing to challenge another state’s election procedures.

To recap: The 14^th Amendment states in Section 3, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. “

The case was originally taken to the Colorado courts by a coalition supported largely by NeverTrump conservatives. Previously District Court Judge Sarah Wallace had made a ruling that Trump had committed insurrection but was still eligible to run for office because the wording of the Amendment didn’t specifically bar running for President. And as many of us would point out, that position would mean that Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jefferson Davis or some other Confederate that the law was written for would be barred from running for Senator but NOT President.

Wallace’s ruling created an artificial dichotomy. It actually would have been more fair to rule completely in Trump’s favor and say that his free speech and actions on January 6 did not constitute insurrection and therefore he is not barred by the 14^th Amendment. If one has decided one matter (is Trump an insurrectionist?) then that decides the other matter. If it is established that one is an insurrectionist then one is ineligible to “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States”. This was the logical finding of the Colorado Supreme Court.

It has also been stated by Laurence Tribe and other judicial scholars that the 14^th Amendment is “self-enforcing” – that without the mentioned two-thirds vote of each House, the candidate in question is necessarily ineligible under the Constitution, just as one is ineligible to run for President at younger than 35 years old, and just as, under the federal Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for Governor in California under its laws but not run for US President because he was not born in this country.

The Amendment is however not self-enforcing in that it has not clearly been established that Trump (or some other person) has committed insurrection, which is why the courts need to take this up. So, had Trump by his actions concerning the 2020 election, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against (the Constitution of the United States) or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof”?

Well, after Mike Pence refused to certify Trump’s fake electors, Trump twitted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do right by him and suddenly the crowd at his rally got even more violent and started chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!” Coincidence? Well, given how many of these people thought to bring zipties, riot gear and a hanging scaffold to the proceedings, probably not.

Of course given that, as with Schwarzenegger being elected Governor, states can do as they will in their own sphere, the appeals court or SCOTUS could simply uphold the Colorado ruling as applicable only there (and Colorado is a liberal state where all the Supreme Court justices were Democrat appointees, so not like Trump was likely to win there anyway).

But wait – wouldn’t leaving the matter up to individual states mean some keep Trump on the ballot and some wouldn’t? Wouldn’t that undermine the chances of winning the Electoral College even if Trump states affirmed his right to run? Wouldn’t that be CHAOS? Well, Samuel Alito has made clear that it is not his job to care about the direct consequences of taking a national matter and leaving it to be decided by individual states, it is only his job to rule as he sees fit. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

It is assumed (by Trumpniks and liberals who take them seriously) that any ruling against Trump’s sacred right to run for an office that he plans to abolish once he gets power will undermine Americans’ trust in government. Of course every time the Party of Trump says that no one trusts the government, they are eliding the question of who is generating that mistrust. Contrary to their position, the feds are not going to turn McDonald’s vegan, and they are not forcing white girls to have sex with dark-skinned guys who will get them pregnant, arrange for government-funded abortions, and then raise the abortions as trans. If anything, you talk to the “progressives” and they will tell you that the Biden Administration isn’t radical leftist enough. Perhaps because the Administration, unlike the radical leftists, do not think that the radical left in America is a majority with a mandate.

The reason that no other candidate is being treated like this is that no other candidate has acted like this, because other candidates knew that acting like a five-year-old wannabe Czar was not going to work. As I say, we are not dealing with white privilege, we are dealing with orange privilege, because not even other rich white people get a free ride as much as Trump does. Ask Sam Bankman-Fried.

And then there’s the otherwise valid matter that we should be leaving the matter of Trump’s fitness for voters to decide. First off, this is blanking out the point that the people DID vote on Trump after he was impeached the first time, and they wanted him out.

Republicans say, we’re not allowing “the people” to vote? Are these the same Republicans who sneered at Clintonoids when they lost the Electoral College that “it’s a republic, not a democracy”? Aren’t these the same Republicans who whined when the Dollar Store Duce got impeached the first time, wailing that Democrats were “thwarting the will of the people”? Weren’t they the same ones who supported their boy after the January 6 coup attempt, thereby showing what they think of the popular will AND the Electoral College?

In fact, the whole reason we have all these counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the 14^th Amendment – and liberals, you need to read this too – is precisely to make sure we do not elect a criminal (and/) or unqualified moron President just because he got the most votes.

The irony being it used to be “conservatives” who correctly assessed liberals in government granting the President and federal government all sorts of powers they did not have in the original interpretation, while liberal Justices and legal scholars interpreted the Constitution as “a living document” that could be interpreted according to contemporary mores, in practice meaning, however the people in charge wanted government to be. Now in practice it’s the alleged conservatives who are interpreting the Constitution according to their contemporary standard, not “presidents have term limits”, “presidents are subject to the law” or “insurrectionists are ineligible to serve in federal office”, but according to the living document of the Republican Constitution, which is “Donald Trump was sent to us by Heaven, like Vishnu incarnating as Lord Buddha to enlighten the masses, lo, he shall reign o’er us forever and ever- ergo, Donald Trump can do whatever he wants.”

You can only rely on this Court to do what it thinks best for this Court, and most of the time that means a reactionary agenda. But again – you can count on the three liberal women to vote against Trump. You can count on Thomas and almost certainly Chief Justice Alito to go for Trump. That means the balance is with the other four, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, who are certainly willing to promote the reactionary agenda but also seem to have some grounding in reality. And that means asking themselves if the reactionary agenda is best served by allowing a candidate who would almost certainly make the Court obsolete if he is allowed to run again and gets back into power. And they, like every other “conservative” who had a chance to call Trump to account and refused to do so before now, have to ask if they’re any safer as Trump’s step-and-fetch boys than standing up to him and risking the wrath of Meal Team Six. Ask Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham how that works.

If “conservatives” didn’t want to be in that situation, well, maybe they shouldn’t have put all their bets on the horse who is not only a raging authoritarian but a raging incompetent at it.

Happy Festivus, everyone. The Airing of the Grievances will continue until Trump is put in prison where he belongs.

EDIT: The case that SCOTUS sent back to the Court of Appeals was not the Colorado 14th Amendment case, it was the case on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity.

I regret the error. Specifically, the error of Trump being president.

In a true Hanukkah – or Festivus – miracle, a bipartisan Congress managed to pass an 886 billion dollar defense spending bill December 14, which includes money for Taiwan and $300 million for Ukraine. It is frankly the best our allies will be able to get since the House refuses to pass President Biden’s request for $61 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine. This on the same week that Vladimir Putin’s main ally in the European Union, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, held a planning session with Republican members of Congress, at the same time that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy (unsuccessfully) petitioned House Speaker Mike Johnson for the aid.

The worst case scenario is that killing Ukraine’s field army support will, at this rate very slowly, let Russia conquer Ukraine. Which, given their rate of success thus far, is still not very likely. I mean, no one wanted to support Ukraine when it was invaded in the first place because the “experts” all assumed Ukraine didn’t have the wherewithal to fight off the largest land power in Europe. But no, the Ukrainians had to disappoint everyone by fighting back cause they didn’t like being targets of genocide. And now we’re stuck with them. But even if Ukraine was militarily defeated, it might make Putin cream his slacks, but it wouldn’t actually end things. It would just turn the country into a very, very large Afghanistan, with a much longer border and more access points to send supplies to the resistance. Consider how much good American money did going TO Afghanistan to help the locals fight occupation compared to all the good it did IN Afghanistan when we were the occupation fighting the locals. Because money isn’t the only factor. The critical factor is a population that doesn’t want you there.

Supposedly Zelenskyy and his allies in Washington tried pointing out to Republicans that the money we spend to help him over there is money that we don’t have to spend fighting Russia in NATO territory, and it’s money that is steadily degrading Putin’s war machine. Except liberals forget, that’s exactly why the Party of Putin doesn’t want to do that anymore.

I honestly think most of the “Freedom Caucus” would rather send military aid and supplies to Russian soldiers than Ukrainian – or American – ones. Seriously, it’s not like Moscow is going to. Won’t someone think about the looters and rapists?

The thing is, it’s not like Ukraine is the only country at stake here. The bill in question is also supposed to send aid to Israel as it defends itself against Hamas. (While we’re talking about looters and rapists.) It’s supposed to give aid to Taiwan even as Communist China continues to take a more aggressive posture in the South China Sea.

Protecting Israel and opposing Red China were the reflex positions of the Republican Party. What changed?

Well, as I’ve said more than once, if Trump announced tomorrow that he is a woman and starting the process of transition, every Republican in Congress would fight to the death for a pair of rusty garden shears to be the first one to castrate himself on the grounds that masculinity is now “gay.”

It’s like this because the entire Republican Party is simping for Trump, who has long been simping for Vladimir Putin, who, as a direct result of his war of choice, now has to simp more and more to Chinese President Xi Jinping, so that he can replenish the military arsenal he wasted so that he can keep killing Ukrainian civilians. (If he kills Ukrainian soldiers, it’s kind of an afterthought.)

So there’s your new boss, Republicans. A communist, atheist, Chinese.

Think about that while you’re having your White Christmas.

Republicans didn’t have time to help our allies this week, but they could find time to stage a vote approving an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden. This despite the fact that no one on that side can tell us what the charges are. I mean, Democrats had that on Trump. Whether you agree or not, Republicans had that on Clinton. Normally, you’re supposed to have evidence of real crimes and then start an impeachment. Republicans want to start an impeachment and then hope they’ll find real crimes.

Thus confirming that even when impeachment is justified it is completely useless for the stated intention of holding the president (or other official in question) to account and is much more about partisan political games.

Why? Because Republicans want to smear shit on Joe Biden’s face in the hopes that no one will notice that their boy is a talking, shambling Shit Elemental.

It’s of a piece with how Trump says he’s going to be dictator “for Day One,” he thinks Obama is still the President and he says Biden is going to start World War II, but the Republican response is “But Biden is THREE YEARS OLDER!”

Begging the question: Even if we conceded that point, if you can see how Joe Biden is now, what is your boy Trump going to look like in three years?

So as Congress prepares to go home for the holidays, having done everything it can to make the world worse, this year I refer to the European pagan tradition that has at least as much to do with Xmas as the struggles of a refugee family from Palestine. Specifically I refer to the Wiccan principle of Threefold Return. That is: This year, I wish that everything Republicans do returns to them threefold.

I wish that their sources of funding dry up when they most desperately need them.

I wish that voters see just how senile and unfit their Leader is.

And I wish that that Leader is prosecuted by the full force of a US government that no longer has any reason to play nice.

You’re a scum sucking maggot, you’re cheap and you’re haggard, Happy Christmas you arse, I hope it’s our last.

This Tuesday, Sean Hannity had Donald Trump on a town hall show for Fox, and Hannity interviews with Trump are always amusing because for once Sean has to be the smart one in the room. But he had one of those by now predictable comedy moments where Hannity would try to reassure the straights that Trump isn’t going to do anything rash or stupid and then Trump doubled down on the stupid. Specifically: “I want to go back to this one issue though, because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power for retribution against anybody-“

Trump: “Except for Day One.” Aside to the audience, “Look, he’s going crazy.” He then went, “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” Lots of cheering at that. But not only is that all stuff you would need more than one day to implement even if you were God-Emperor, it’s just more red meat to the audience that doesn’t care about anything but being played to, which is exactly why he said that.

Of course the real reason Trump would only need to be dictator “for Day One” is that on that day, he’d sell the country to Vladimir Putin and then we wouldn’t have America anymore.

The Atlantic devoted its entire December issue to a set of articles called “A Warning.” I can’t quote The Atlantic directly cause there’s a paywall, but one essay was reprinted on MSN. Money quote: “A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.”

Which is exactly why Trump did not solve any problems in office, why he did not keep (most of) his promises and why he would not do so if elected again. If we solved the border problem, we would no longer have a border problem and then Republicans wouldn’t have any motivation. Trump, and his Party, have to keep making things worse and then offer themselves as the solution to the problems they create. If they solved the problems, people wouldn’t need them anymore. But that’s if you’re thinking logically. The point of Trumpism is not thinking logically. The point is the emotional indulgence of finding an enemy and getting mad at them.

All these Lamestream Media types are so fucking scared of Trump like he’s some invincible Dark Lord, but he’s not. He’s the guy who stares at the can of orange juice for five minutes cause it says “CONCENTRATE”. He’s so dumb he thinks he should’ve gotten a five cent coupon on his Nickleback album. The main differences between Trump and the ratty old bum at the gas station who begs you for change while screaming conspiracy theories are a few million dollars and no excuse for that haircut.

The problem is not Trump, it’s the liberals who think he’s a Dark Lord, and thereby give him credibility in the eyes of the people who hate them. But more than that, it’s those people, who are alienated from “normie” liberal culture and take Trump seriously because he’s the only politician who thinks and acts and talks like them.

Certainly leftists don’t need an excuse to hate this country, and its freedom, and its capitalism, but there is a problem here. Lenin may have been a little early in predicting it, but we are selling ourselves the rope by which we hang ourselves. This is why we have a dysfunctional “gun culture” in this country: Not because of an evil Second Amendment that was NOT causing mass shooters to pop up every fuckin’ day prior to the late 20^th Century, but because it serves the profits of gun manufacturers. This is why we have networks and radio hosts who appeal to rage more than reason, because rage sells. That is how Trump got to be a thing. And because of the way the Electoral College works, state by state, that is the reason why the mechanism the Founders intended to prevent a demagogue from using the vulgar mob to take power became the only reason that result occurred. Because if it had been a simple majority vote in 2016, Trump would not have been president.

Because while there may be a critical mass of gullible people who could swing the margin in limited circumstances, the simple majority is not fooled. Because, for now, most people have enough of a value system to put one foot in front of the other every day and pay their bills and not cause problems for others, as opposed to making the world worse and blaming everyone else.

Indeed, this general observation moves me to make it an axiom: Freedom promises emotional indulgence, but sustaining it requires emotional discipline. When you don’t have discipline, you get manipulated by people who want to put you under their control. Or worse, they don’t, and you just cast about making things worse for yourself and the world around you.

If you want to know what a second Trump term would look like, we don’t need to speculate. We have it now in the House of Representatives. Which is, for now, under a Republican majority. Because they only had a five seat majority to begin with, making it that much more difficult to rule unilaterally without input from the other side, as the Republicans are obliging both parties to do now. But they lost one of those votes last week when they got rid of George Santos (BR.-New York). Who’d never actually been convicted or even charged with a crime, as his defenders pointed out. Not like you need to be charged with an actual crime to be impeached though. Still, it was a mystery. This is a party of moralists defending an openly gay drag queen. This is a party that rails against the corruption of the “Biden Crime Family” while Santos won an election with fraudulent claims and used campaign money on personal expenses, a party that defends a man who engages in so much pathological lying that he actually exceeds Trump. But yet enough Republicans voted with the two-thirds majority necessary to expel him, despite the fact that Santos exemplifies all their demonstrated virtues. For example, hypocrisy. Like, acting like Santos’ mendacity is a dealbreaker when they still worship Trump. Of course, Santos doesn’t have a fan club of wannabe murderers who will storm the Capitol for calling him to account, so that’s one thing.

Then this week, former House Speaker (In Name Only) Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California) announced that he was not only not running for re-election next year, he is leaving Congress at the end of the year, which will drop the majority of the House GOP (Grabbing Our Pudenda) to three. The governor of California would then have to call a special election, and of course, Gavin Newsom is a Democrat. And he has a little bit of leeway as to how long he can wait to do so…

Which is just the latest example of why McCarthy lost his position even though Mike Johnson is obliged to do the same things that he did to work with the rest of the government: It’s not so much that hardliners disagreed with McCarthy’s policies, it’s that he’s a petty drip of a human being and nobody likes him.

To the extent that this taxpayer-funded Trump Fan Club does any work, it’s mainly in obstructing the actual process of government. Like, before the end of the year, the House is supposed to provide funding for the government. And Speaker Johnson is holding up both Ukraine AND Israel aid over various beefs and shifting goalposts. Right now, the pretext seems to be a demand for increased border security. In principle, I would be going along with this.

Yes. Lest my other posts make me seem like a flaming liberal, I direct you to recall the great Jeff Daniels quote from the pilot episode of The Newsroom: “I’m a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I think hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.”

Really, we need to crack down on illegal immigration and trade imbalance. We need a strong border policy. I mean, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

The problem is that the words “principle” and “Republican” not only don’t go together as well as they might have once, now they’re actually opposed magnetic poles. This applies to pretty much everything, but in this particular case, we have the bogus immigration system that we do because both parties want it that way, for reasons I have already gone over. That being the case, border policy, again, is just a lame pretext for obstruction, because the Republicans’ Master’s Master thinks it’s more fun to kill Ukrainians if they can’t shoot back. Killing Jews is less a priority, but Putin is Russian, so it frequently comes down to that anyway. Besides, Iran is Putin’s friend, and Iran funds Hamas. It was only recently pointed out to me that the October 7 raids over Israel’s border took place on Putin’s birthday. Suddenly it made a lot more sense.

And as we can see, it’s all Republicans can do even to accomplish a negative and obstructive agenda. They can’t actually be FOR anything, because while there may be a “silent plurality” of Republicans who remember when it was still politically correct to speak at a high-school level, they won’t have a majority without the dedicated Trumpniks, so that obliges them to be Trumpniks too. What else are you going to do, let the DEMONRATS win and take credit for everything??

But shutting the Democrats out in order to rule unilaterally requires everybody to be on the same page (especially with such a small majority), and that’s impossible when the purpose of your party is to indulge your emotions and petty grievances at taxpayer expense, as opposed to running a government. So these guys end up fighting each other at least as much as the Democrats.

They can’t control the process, because they can’t control themselves. At the same time, they will not acknowledge this and step aside to let the grownups take over. So the result is just extended displays of bullshit and grandstanding.

But that’s what you get when one of the two parties allowed in government is basically the January 6 riot in business suits.

There are a whole bunch of comparisons that could be made here; I’ve referred to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I could also refer to the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. For the sake of their own self-image, Republicans want to think they’re well-behaved, Good Christians ™ like Mike Johnson, but like Dr. Jekyll, they want the freedom to indulge the Id. So they have Trump. The knuckle-dragging, rapist Mr. Hyde who doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he gets what he wants. They’ve said it themselves. They like Trump cause “he fights.” They think that actual Christianity is “weak“. Their only complaint is “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be“.

And as Adam Serwer said, “the cruelty is the point.”

Of course, in the story, as with real cases of drug use, Dr. Jekyll built up a tolerance to his formula, such that the Hyde persona became his default and he needed more and more drugs to get back to “normal.” This led to cascading liabilities, culminating in Hyde killing someone, so Jekyll ended up killing himself to escape justice.

The Republican Party used to have it both ways, having Trump be their “fighter” while still having the cultural memory of being one of America’s two “real” parties, but the longer they are addicted to Trump, the more they become Trump, and the harder and harder it will be to pose as civilized humans. Only the Trump will remain. At that point they will indeed die, either because voters see that they’re not a “real” party anymore, or their increasing disdain for the republic and active opposition to it will oblige various levels of law enforcement to put them down. In this case it would be more “suicide by cop.”

It’s either them or us.