Tag: coronavirus

Time for lust, time for lie

Time to kiss your life goodbye

Send me money, send me green, heaven you will meet

Make the contribution and you’ll get the better seat

Bow to Leper Messiah

-Metallica, Leper Messiah

Before the first presidential debate of 2020, two days before Viceroy Donald Trump was announced as having coronavirus, it was clear that his “Republican” Party in the Senate was going to ignore all protocols to push his Supreme Court nominee through, specifically to make sure they wouldn’t have to rely on John Roberts and an eight-justice Court in a political strategy that relies less on votes and more on fixing the judicial system to bypass republican voting.

And now, as we have less than four weeks to go before the next election, it is that much more obvious that Trump and his Banana Republican Party would rather cling to power than life itself.

Of course, there was that now famous moment where Trump left Walter Reed hospital and walked up the stairs to stand at the White House portico to take off his mask, which more than one liberal journalist compared to a Mussolini moment. Presumably that would be where Mussolini walked to a balcony to pose dramatically in front of Roman columns, not the moment where he and his mistress tried to escape from Italy, were captured by leftist partisans, and had their bodies hung up by their heels in an abandoned gas station so everyone in that pissed-off country who could reach the scene could spit on his corpse.

As information surrounding Trump’s activities over the past two weeks haphazardly leaked out, and is confirmed at least in the sense that no one in the Trump Organization will deny it, Trump appeared late for his debate with Joe Biden so that unfortunately he could not be independently tested on site. Members of the entourage, including Melania Trump, who has also tested positive for coronavirus, were the only people in the debate audience who refused to wear masks, against protocols. Perhaps because Trump refused then to tell anyone what he and his people knew about his status, thus raising a very real possibility that he went into debate night intending to expose Joe Biden to coronavirus, The Committee on Presidential Debates announced this week that the debate scheduled for next week would be virtual, which was probably for the best anyway because it had already been planned as a town-hall format where the candidates would take audience questions. This of course offended Trump because the video formatting would indeed allow, perhaps require, moderators to cut the mic of the non-active speaker. Not only that, he wouldn’t be able to appear to the crowd in person so that he and his entourage could flout the mask and testing rules and demonstrate yet again that they don’t apply to them. So, predictably, he refused to attend, and predictably the Committee has officially cancelled the debate.

So now that he’s been saved by the most advanced medicine government can provide, he’s making more speeches from a government podium, promising to have more one-party control over the government, promising to give government more control of the economy and health care, promising prosecutions of his enemies, and promising more celebrations of his power and benevolence. Why? To stop America from becoming a socialist nation, of course!

The real problem of course is that Trump’s stupidity has always been more contagious than any virus, and now all of his courtiers feel obliged to follow his example. South Carolina Senator and White House Purse Dog Lindsay Graham for example decided to cancel his second debate with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison because Harrison insisted that Graham be tested for the virus. I mean, it’s not as though people who hang out on a close basis with the president have been demonstrated as more likely to contract the disease.

Meanwhile as Republicans discuss the election as though it were still a future hypothetical that they don’t have to address in the here and now (much like the possibility that their president’s continual flouting of medical safety could cause him to get COVID-19), people are having early voting and mail-in voting, and it looks like most of the people voting early are Democrats:

“While Democrats fret about the possibility of Mr. Trump repeating his 2016 Election Day turnout that swamped Hillary Clinton’s early-voting lead, Democrats’ early-voting advantage this year, particularly in states like Florida, is worrying top Republicans. While many Republicans expected turnout before Election Day to be slightly depressed by the president’s criticism of mail voting, the gap means that Republicans have to flood the polls on Election Day. And a lack of absentee ballots returned could leave the G.O.P. blind as it adjusts its get-out-the-vote operation in the weeks ahead.

“One of the advantages of having absentee ballots or voting by mail is it gives you a little bit of a snapshot as they are returned, and finding out who is returning them and where you are in your field operation,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist. “If Republicans aren’t getting accurate reads on that, they’re not getting accurate reads on where they need to adjust more.”

Republicans used to take more advantage of the mail-in ballot option. But then, Republicans used to acknowledge science and didn’t think that they should avoid medical safety devices just because their tribal chieftain told them they were full of evil spirits.

This actually matters because to hear observers say it, Team Trump has been betting on an electoral phenomenon called ‘blue shift’ where vote-by-mail and absentee ballots that tend to go Democratic are counted after votes on Election Day and therefore early returns that seem to favor Republicans eventually shift to the other party. However, more states are allowing not just mail-in ballots but early voting where you actually get to vote in person, and thus you don’t have all those votes crammed together to be processed in one day. The early votes would be just as ‘good’ for that purpose as ones in November. This change has happened in some states to account for coronavirus, but other states (like Nevada) have already been doing early voting for years. Republicans, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo, and are still anticipating in-person November voting as having the same impact as it did before early voting started becoming a thing. That’s why when Democrats are telling people to vote as though their lives depended on it (whether by mail or in-person) Republicans are telling their people to vote in person (and risk Trump Virus) as though their lives don’t matter. The problem is even if Trump has enough cultists that survive another four weeks to go to the polls, they have to show up in sufficient numbers that it would clog the system. We know this because, thanks TO Republican state governments making it more difficult to vote in primaries and special elections, lines for those contests earlier this year have been backed up. This creates the real possibility that the ‘blue shift’ may reverse and more votes will come in for Joe Biden in most states before the Trump votes can all be counted. And since Trump is pinning all his hopes on saying that only Election Day votes count and if he gets more of those, he would be forever Your King, Lord and God, if it turns out that Democrats have more votes on Election Day, whining for more time would make him look that much less omnipotent and that much more like a tool.

Of course as far as the Party of Trump is concerned, even stupid shit like votes don’t really matter, cause if Biden actually wins the Electoral College fair and square, Trump and his cronies in Republican legislatures can just whip up their own slate of Electors for their dominus et deus, the actual vote be damned. And if that maneuver goes to the Supreme Court, guess who just got himself a 6-judge majority?

But this is a tactic that implies weakness, not strength. I’ve mentioned for a while now that pretty soon white people are going to learn what it feels like to be black people, that is, to be disenfranchised. Republicans not only don’t want non-white and poor people with no transportation to polling places to vote, they don’t want anyone else to vote either, which is why they’re herding their own people into a situation where they have to risk coronavirus to do so. Forget ‘it’s a republic, not a democracy’ – the whole principle of a republic is that voters pick representatives, and if the government isn’t letting us do that, it’s NOT a republic anymore.

Secondly, if things get to that point, it will be because the Trumpniks no longer have enough numbers to even win the Electoral College by the skin of their teeth the way they did last time. Not only that, any result where Biden won the Electoral College would probably not be a 2000 election where only one state made the difference. It would be enough of a blowout where the Banana Republicans would have to substitute Electors in several states and thus create several challenges. Furthermore, any result where that happened would probably mean that Democrats also ended up winning the Senate, because however much liberals hate that institution, modern Senate races are statewide contests that are subject to neither district gerrymandering nor the Electoral College.

In other words, even if Republicans took this all the way to the House of Representatives (where they have enough delegations to give the election to Trump), the efforts required to do so, while technically legal, would be that much more cheap and desperate than Trump at a Jeffrey Epstein party. People only put up with the results last time because we knew that the Electoral College was a thing, and we had known it since at least 2000 (even if Democrats chose to forget) and however stupid and awful George W. Bush was, he didn’t actually destroy the country. This time? Not quite. This time it’s getting increasingly clear that the only way Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump can be retained as nominal President of this country is if the complicit Republican Party games the system to their benefit. And since it is becoming increasingly clear that the system under their control benefits nobody else, including the Republicans’ favorite interest groups, keeping it in place raises the very real chance that the public is a whole will no longer treat it as legitimate. And at that point Republicans will finally realize that they can’t play “we can do anything we want and nobody can stop us, cause we’re the biggest gang” cause they’re not the biggest gang.

This is why modern people, who don’t find “only one person wins” to be very entertaining, don’t play much MONOPOLY anymore. After four hours of dragging towards a result that everyone can see coming yet has already taken too long to arrive, somebody (maybe even the player in the lead) flips the board over in frustration and everybody else goes, “Next time, why don’t we try Dungeons & Dragons or Cards Against Humanity?”

So in the short term, we had Wednesday’s previously scheduled event where incumbent Vice President Mike Pence went against Democratic California Senator Kamala Harris in the only vice-presidential debate. As in, where you have to choose your favorite vice: socialism or theocracy?

What, you don’t like either of those? You want more choices?? Tough. This is America.

I didn’t actually see any of this live, because as opposed to last Tuesday’s debate, I had something else on my schedule. Plus which: Fuck You, CNN. Going into this, the main controversy was actually over the debate committee’s decision to protect the candidates by installing two plexiglass shields between each of them, an action possibly inspired by the South Carolina US Senate debate, where Democrat Jaime Harrison installed his own shield wall to his podium to protect against Banana Republican (read: rat-licker) Senator Lindsay Graham. I mean, talk about bringing the shade. And because this IS now the party of rat-lickers, Pence’s team objected to installing the shields for the sit-down debate with Senator Harris, although by Wednesday, they eventually relented, possibly because they realized it wasn’t important enough to make a difference.

I mean, most of the post-debate coverage didn’t mention the fly that settled on Pence’s head for about two minutes, but it was all anyone on social media could talk about. It just shows what it takes for Mike Pence to get attention. Plus which, making a big deal of coronavirus restrictions would only point out the fact that Mike Pence is (allegedly) head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and they haven’t actually contained the virus.

Other than that, even though moderator Susan Page got some flak for letting Pence go over his time, he didn’t interrupt nearly as much as resident rump, and it worked somewhat to the Republicans’ benefit, because letting Kamala Harris speak let observers judge whether her answers were valid. She, like Joe Biden, was asked to give a straight answer on whether the Biden-Harris Administration would engage in court-packing to counter Republican control of the Supreme Court, and like Biden, refused to do so. The difference being that Trump kept talking over both Biden and Chris Wallace when he was trying to press Biden on the issue, so that the story last week was not “Biden won’t admit he’d pack the Court”, it was “Biden told Trump, ‘Man, why don’t you just shut up?”

I mean, the Democrats ought to at least say they’re keeping the option open, cause after all, FDR didn’t need to actually appoint six more Justices to make his threat work. And if Democrats think that conservatives are so far gone that the only way they can get balance is to appoint their own people, they ought to say so. Republicans are motivated to the point of risking coronavirus over this because they know the results will shape the judicial system for decades. Democrats shouldn’t be that stupid, but they shouldn’t be afraid to show voters that they take the issue as seriously as Republicans.

Otherwise while both candidates dissembled, they both came off as normal politicians, which is not really a good thing, but if this event was normal, it only reinforces the point that the singular factor in making American politics abnormal is Donald Trump, and that while the unpopularity of both Democrats and establishment Republicans helps explain why Trump won the first time, he has had four years to demonstrate that people do not say “this is not normal” because they think that’s a GOOD thing.

Pundits usually say that the Vice President’s first job is ‘do no harm’ which for the challenger’s party really means that the running mate should do no harm to the head of the ticket. Harris certainly didn’t harm Biden, and Pence certainly didn’t harm Trump. But if the result is mostly a wash, we’re left with the fact that Pence is still defending a Trump Organization that is the primary cause of a coronavirus pandemic in America that not only wrecked the economy and weakened their voter support, it’s currently hollowing out their own membership. And everyone knows Pence can’t really do anything about that.

So in that respect, even if one is generous to Pence and calls this debate a draw, a draw does no favors for Republicans.

So now, our divine Sun King, having lain in the Abyss for three days, has risen from Walter Reed Hospital, on behalf of all mankind (meaning, himself) and returned to the White House, without a mask of course. After all, there’s no point in safety precautions now that everyone else there is infected too.

It was clear to most of the press (as in the ones who aren’t Fox or OANN) that Viceroy Trump was not out of the woods (almost every doctor says that you need to isolate for at least 14 days once you’re shown to be positive) and a lot of them watched the film coverage of him ascending the staircase to the upper balcony of the White House and then take his mask off to stand and salute, and said that he looked unwell, straining to breathe. I’m frankly not sure how that’s different from any other day. He always looks like he’s straining to breathe. The impression I got was that he’d rather have been anywhere else but he had to keep up a brave face. As in, more so than usual.

You ever see that video of the two-year old who picked up an onion and started eating it cause he thought it was an apple? And you could tell from his face that he’d made a tremendous mistake, but he kept eating it anyway, to make it look like he MEANT to do that?

You know, this video?

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=yset_ff_syc_oracle&p=kid+eating+an+onion#id=1&vid=f5854dac6448ba5c730211b0b57a378b&action=click

That’s Trump.

Based on the information that the Trump Organization has deigned to be released, one of the reasons Trump was feeling well enough to return to his forever home was that doctors had prescribed an uncommon regimen of drugs including not only remdesivir but a steroid called dexamethasone, which is only recommended for patients with a severe case of COVID-19. Which actually makes sense, because Trump would never have gone to the hospital if he could have helped it. After all, they weren’t even going to admit that anyone in the White House had the virus until the news about Hope Hicks leaked out.

The reason that Trump feels so well may be related to the side effects of dexamethasone, which while it has been shown to have real effects in treating the disease also has side effects including: “confusion, delirium, mania, and a higher risk of other infections. The drug can even complicate a patient’s recovery by suppressing the immune system’s virus-fighting response.” That is why it’s only recommended for serious cases.

So: confusion, delirium, mania and a higher risk of other issues. Again, what’s the difference from before?

If these side effects are genuine in this case, the real problem is that they combine with Trump’s already existing personality tendencies, specifically his serious belief in the power of positive thinking. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that concept in its limits, if you can psych yourself up to achieve something that is possible with the right motivation. But there’s a difference between keeping the right attitude and whistling past the graveyard, which in most cases is a metaphor we don’t use literally. When Trump left the hospital Monday, he did a video speech from the entry of the White House, where he said “I just left Walter Reed Medical Center, and it’s really something very special. The doctors, the nurses, the first responders, and I learned so much about coronavirus. One thing that’s for certain, don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines all developed recently, and you’re going to beat it. I went … I didn’t feel so good. And two days ago, I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great. Like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently … better than 20 years ago. Don’t let it dominate. Don’t let it take over your lives. … Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk. There’s a danger. But that’s okay, and now I’m better. Maybe I’m immune. I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives.”

Coronavirus? Nothing to worry about. After all, if you’ve already died, there’s nothing to worry about, and if you’re alive, you’ve got the resources of an entire government and the ability to command Walter Reed Hospital to give you experimental drug treatments. What, most people can’t do that? Well, too bad for them, I guess.

But then, if you’ve already lost your job, lost your movie theatres, lost your favorite shops, lost your favorite restaurants, and lost your favorite relative because of a virus that Trump has let run wild for the better part of a year, the advice “don’t let it take over your lives” might seem a bit odd.

Meanwhile, while Trump continues to believe as usual that nothing bad can happen to him, more and more people in his circle are determined to have coronavirus, including White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany and senior staffer Stephen Miller, an event which confirms that the virus can jump species. There were also at least two unnamed housekeeping staff who got the virus but according to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman were told to use “discretion” in discussing it with reporters.

And as for making bad decisions on steroids, that might explain the worse-than-usual decision of Trump on Tuesday to announce that there would be no negotiations on a second coronavirus stimulus deal “until after the election when, immediately after I win” a decision that Jonathan Chait called “The Worst Political Blunder In History.” (I don’t know. I’d say that was either voting for Trump or Trump running for president in the first place.)

The problem with this isn’t the idea that there was any question of whether Congress was ever going to get to a coronavirus stimulus bill. It’s not, because Mitch ‘the Bitch’ McConnell has already held up all Senate business except approving Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Comey Barrett, even though the virus now running rampant through Washington is threatening the lives of Senators and possibly Barrett herself. The problem with this maneuver is the idea that Trump has any say in that process and can hold it up because he’s an almighty god of money and prosperity from whom all blessings flow and who will personally stop any chance at economic recovery unless the voters give him the unlimited power to indulge his petty whims and desires for revenge. What this did was reveal that rather than holding the voters’ fates in his hands, it’s the other way around. Trump has confirmed that both he and McConnell are playing an empty hand with no chips. Not only that, Trump blew the one asset he always had, the idea that he was good for the stock market, and could save himself by priming the economy. Now that’s gone. Stock markets crashed on Tuesday. That and perhaps some choice language behind the scenes led Our Very Stable Genius to reverse course and twit shortly before 10 pm Eastern, “The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business. Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!” Ha ha ha. That’s so cute.

I’ve always thought that Trump’s whole approach to the virus was the same as his approach to everything else, where he could just pretend to be the biggest, loudest, meanest, stinkiest ape in the jungle, and he was gonna pound his chest, and bellow to the sky, and BEAT that virus to death with his bare hands. And then his fan club would just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that Trump! He may be a gorilla, but at least he’s OUR gorilla!”

Again, that IS how he’s done everything else so far. And it’s always worked.

Well, apparently that now is the official position of the Party of Trump. The always moronic Matt Gaetz (Banana Republican-Florida) said, “President Trump won’t have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump.” (Much like the rest of the country.) Embattled Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler actually took an old Donald Trump video from his WWE days and edited it to show him laying the smackdown on coronavirus. (Of course Trump has always had an affinity for pro wrestlers. They have certain things in common: bad decisions, steroids, and making bad decisions on steroids.)

But as I’ve said, it’s one thing to bullshit and bully a social structure, but you can’t bullshit or bully a virus. And while the appeal of Trump may be the idea that he can get away with anything he wants, and you can live vicariously though him, it is getting increasingly hard to live vicariously through Trump when there’s such a high chance of you dying from Trump Virus. (TM) Not only that, it is now harder to believe that Trump can get away with anything he wants, because clearly he was at least infected. And while Trump and his fan club share the goal of presenting Trump (and by extension themselves) as invincible, we’ve already had over 207,000 people die from this thing. How many of them were people who voted Trump in 2016? How many new voters is he going to get this year that he didn’t have last time? Probably not that many, and not enough.

Which is why Trump is so desperate to get back on the stage with Joe Biden for their previously scheduled second debate next week, even though Biden, who at first agreed to continuing the schedule after last week’s fiasco, is now saying that the debate should be called off if Trump is still infected.

But if Trump can’t have a debate, how is he supposed to pretend that everything is okay?? After all: It is better to look good than to feel good. If you know what I mean. And I think that you do.

Well, if Biden won’t let Trump pretend, Trump can always stage his own live event this weekend, and pull out all the stops for his redcap base:

TRUMPOSAURUS!!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch Trumposaurus eat 10 pieces of KFC, a Big Mac, a Filet-O-Fish, a rack of ribs and a large DIET Coke!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch TRUMP ride a rolling-coal pickup truck on six-foot high tires over a supply of American farm produce that we’re keeping from the CHINESE!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

Watch TRUMP force Chuckie Schumer and Crazy Nancy Pelosi into a two-on-one battle to THE DEATH – in a STEEEL CAGE MATCH!!!

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!
Watch TRUMPOSAURUS fuck TEN PORN STARS bareback and then break the neck of an endangered Siberian Tiger and EAT ITS HEART!
ALL before a LIVE AUDIENCE!
Get your tickets NOW!!
SUNDAY!
SUNDAY!!
SUNDAY!!!

Well now.

What’s my reaction to Trump getting the ‘rona after telling us all it was the Democrats’ new hoax?

I would first recommend reading David Frum’s column, reproduced from The Atlantic: “What Did You Expect?” That says it as well as anybody could.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-did-you-expect/ar-BB19Edcu?ocid=ientp

But in the meantime, it’s good to recall something Mitch McConnell always loves to tell Democrats: “Elections have consequences.”
Indeed they do. For while Clinton Democrats will to their dying days damn Jill Stein and Gary Johnson to the sewer system under the 10^th Circle of Hell for “stealing” votes from Queen Hillary the Inevitable, Stein and Johnson both ran against Romney and Obama in 2012 with no bearing on the outcome, and the real problem with 2016 was the substantially greater percentage who DID vote for Donald Trump, because they had no faith in Hillary Clinton and business-as-usual and were in fact so nihilistic that rather than vote Green or Libertarian they voted for a guy who makes Mr. Haney from Green Acres look as honest as George Washington.

Everybody else knew that Trump was just doing what he does best – marketing himself with unbelievable bullshit – which is why nobody took him seriously until it was too late, including Donald Trump, who according to Michael Wolff at least was absolutely horrified on Election Night when he found out he won.

Because rather than getting to live off of right-wing grievance media for the next four years and play shoulda-coulda-woulda, Trump was actually obliged to govern. Moreover, all the Republicans who controlled Congress were obliged to repeal and replace Obamacare and do all those things they said they couldn’t do because of Barack Obama’s veto.

So (since Trump had no idea how to fulfill his pie-in-the-sky populist promises and needed to keep old-time Republican loyalty) Trump abandoned everything he said about healthcare and infrastructure and raising taxes on the rich and went along with what Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell wanted him to. This led to the Ryan Congress’ tax cut bill that Trump signed, and the unpopularity of a tax cut should have signaled that the Republican Party was becoming less popular in general. Seeing the writing on the wall, House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to run for re-election even though he could have easily kept his seat, knowing he wouldn’t keep his Speaker’s post- and not desiring to be around Trump any longer. And while Republicans did keep the Senate in 2018, they also lost the House, and that soon meant that all those scummy deals that Trump made with shady banks to avoid personal bankruptcy prior to 2016 were under investigation by Democrats, along with the possibility that Vladimir Putin put his thumb on the scales to influence our elections (a rumor which, IF true, is probably looking less and less like a good idea every day), not to mention Trump’s arm-twisting of the Ukrainian president to create dirt on Joe Biden, which is what actually got him impeached.

But because the low-tax, pro-business policy of the Republicans superficially bolstered the economy, Trump retained a core of popularity with both his base and people who didn’t really like him but liked the results they were getting. So Trump, being as deep as a layer of water spilled on the countertop, assumed that all he needed to do to stay in power (and stay out of jail) was to keep the good news going and do everything he could to keep anyone from hearing any bad news. In this he was simply emulating an actual one-party dictator: Xi Jinping, who by the time impeachment was winding down at the top of the year was facing reports of a coronavirus out of Wuhan that was rapidly spreading. And at the time, Xi was doing everything he could with his one party socialist state to keep the news from getting out, and then once the disease spread to Iran and elsewhere, to keep people from knowing how bad it really was. But since at the time, Donald Trump was also pursuing a big trade deal with China, he was at pains to help Xi in this effort, even going so far as to tweet on January 24:

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2020

A line which may stand as Donald Trump’s political epitaph, and perhaps his actual one.

It could have been different. The governor of New York, like the leaders in Italy, Britain and other places, at refused to acknowledge the true depth of the threat, and this led to massive casualties. But the leaders in Europe learned from this and radically changed their policies on social gatherings to suppress the spread of the virus and flatten the curve. They did something similar in New York. But we could not, and cannot, do that as a national policy in America, because Trump was fixated on not taking the virus seriously, because making people aware of how serious it was would cause “a panic”, and that would cause the economy to crater – never mind the fact that the economy already was cratering because private businesses and various governors were taking the virus seriously and cutting back their activities, which we now have to do for the foreseeable future because unlike the Europeans, we have never had a plan to reduce the spread so that we can resume some level of normalcy.

And as part of his continuing campaign to present himself as the invincible Sun King, Trump continued to hold indoor events with huge crowds, even after Tulsa, where masks were offered but subtly discouraged, even as Trump himself made sure to be on podiums where his exposure to the masses was minimized. His staffers, and Secret Service detail, weren’t so lucky. This may be why Hope Hicks ended up getting the virus. Which allegedly is how Trump got it. But according to Chris Wallace, Trump was not independently tested in Cleveland prior to Tuesday’s presidential debate, and we might not even know now that he was sick if Bloomberg hadn’t reported the news about Hicks. After all, Thursday October 1 (between the debate and the breaking news) Trump was at a fundraiser at his Bedminister, New Jersey golf resort where he was in casual contact with at least 30 donors, without masks. The campaign apparently knew about Hicks at the time but hadn’t released her condition. And while both Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Britain’s Boris Johnson survived their own cases, the Trump Organization is being cagey about exactly what the president’s symptoms are. One ominous sign: He isn’t tweeting all that much.

If only Trump had never run. And if that’s the thought going through his mind right now, I don’t think it would be the first time.

As I said about Freddie Mercury, I have no problem saying that he and other gay men died as a direct result of their lifestyle when the AIDS crisis first happened, just as us fat folks have to be careful with Type II diabetes and smokers are almost sure to get lung cancer.

Coronavirus is something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Which right now happens to be Trump. But whatever you think of him, the President being laid low is a very serious event. It’s especially serious to his party with about four weeks left to campaign. So because everything is so serious, Republicans are expecting us all not to joke, or gloat, at a time like this.

But as most professional Christians would tell us, gay men could not defy reality forever without either succumbing to the plague or changing their lifestyle, and so we have here. This is not callousness against the unfortunate. There’s a difference between having compassion for one in needless suffering from a random event and walking into the lion pen at a zoo with a raw steak on your head and expecting a healthy result.

I have often told friends that the phrase “The Republican Party” is how Americans pronounce “Schadenfreude.” But there isn’t even much point in feeling Schadenfreude here. It’s like when Stephen Colbert said, “some people are saying this is an October Surprise. It seems more like an October ‘well… yeah.”

We do not need to cast curses on Trump and his cult or say they “deserved” this. As a once-wise man said, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” This is cause and effect.

Cause and effect is not the same thing as karma. “Karma” is a nebulous concept from Eastern religion that holds that two apparently random events are connected by spiritual intent. It’s like when Penn Jillette defined the concept of luck as “taking probability personally.”

If ‘karma’ was a thing, or casting bad vibes at a person actually worked, or the Old Testament God was real, some people would be piles of ash now. You’re not going to get anywhere sticking pins in Donald Trump dolls because you hate him so much. I mean, if witchcraft was real, we could prove it. If witches really did cast a curse on Donald Trump, then his entire life would spiral out of control all of a sudden, he’d get sleepy and confused, and his dick would be like a mosquito.

I have mentioned before that I am, or at least was, a big fan of Ayn Rand. And just as the same Trumpublicans who delight in liberal tears are fluttering their fans at liberals daring to say bad things about our Bestest Most Americanest President Ever now that he’s really suffering, those same liberals who pride themselves on their compassion loathe Rand because of her deliberate lack of compassion in her non-fiction and fiction works.

A big example of this is in the center of Rand’s epic Atlas Shrugged, where the railroad company Taggart Transcontinential had advertised the run of a fancy new diesel-powered train through the Rockies, only to have the train break down. There were no other diesel engines available, and the only other rail transport was an old-timey coal burner. This method was not recommended because the tunnel through the mountains was sufficiently long that a coal-burning train would not be able to get through because the tunnel was not set up to ventilate the smoke. Nevertheless, a connected politician demanded that railroad employees set up a coal train to go through the tunnel so he could get to his destination without having to wait. The result, as predicted, was that the engine went midway through the tunnel and ended up choking to death on its own fumes. As did the politician and all the other passengers. At which point an Army munitions train, going in without knowledge of the makeshift schedule because the diesel train would have normally cleared the route by then, ran into the passenger train and the fumes ignited the munitions and blew everything up.

And over the course of this scene, Rand goes over various individual cases of deaths: “It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men. … The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, ‘I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.’
… The man in Bedroom A, Car No.14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind – how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? – no reality – how can you prove that the tunnel exists? – no logic – why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? – no principles – why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect? – no rights – why shouldn’t you attach men to their jobs by force? – no morality – what’s moral about running a railroad? – no absolutes – what difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?. He taught that we know nothing – why oppose the orders of your superiors? – that we can never be certain of anything – how do you know you’re right? – that we must act on the expediency of the moment – you don’t want to risk your job do you?”

One moral difference that does exist between reality and Rand’s fiction is that she established that everyone in the passenger train was on some level complicit in their fate because the system they endorsed led to that result. This is another reason liberals hate Rand, the suggestion that those who suffer deserve it because of their politics. In reality, the Republicans have made lots of innocent people suffer before them, largely because of their politics and the idea that some people didn’t matter. Like the mother in Bedroom D, Car 10, they didn’t care, cause only the bad people got hurt. And then they did too. Rand’s targets were the left wing collectivists and anti-capitalists, which is why she is so hated by the “compassionate” people, but the principle is the same. Compassion, however virtuous, is not the issue. If one really wants to reduce suffering, one must act on its causes.

The ‘Taggart Tunnel’ was not an example of karma. It was the author’s attempt to demonstrate an ultimate chain of cause and effect. The Atlas Shrugged train disaster is taken by Rand’s critics as a prime example of how preachy and didactic she was, especially since the this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built chain of events were engineered by the author just to demonstrate a certain point. But what we have in reality is a scenario that Rand would have rejected as too obvious and didactic.

According to one report, for every 1000 people in their mid-70s or older who get the coronavirus, 116 will die. Trump is 74.

In the days immediately preceding the Tuesday debate, Trump hosted a Rose Garden party to present Amy Comey Barrett, his choice for the new Supreme Court Justice, who has survived her own case of coronavirus earlier this year. Most of the people at the outdoor event were not wearing masks. After the speeches, there was a lot of casual contact amongst the audience. By Saturday evening, more than a dozen people connected to the White House were reporting positive cases, including Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, Utah Senator Mike Lee, who attended the Barrett event, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, and publicist Kellyanne Conway.

The fact that Senators are affected may ultimately ruin the majority that Trump and Mitch McConnell need to push this nomination through the Senate. It would be Rand Paul all over again, only exponentially more so.

In the short term, Trump is literally killing, or at least maiming, the Republican Party. And as I’ve said, that will create the very result they most claim to fear. Not only are we going to be stuffed to the gills with “socialism” (because we’re going to need A LOT of government spending, and tax hikes, to cover the costs of a preventable illness that Trump let spread, and to stimulate an economy that he decimated) but we on the Right are going to be undermined in our attempts to stop the Left from nanny-stating all aspects of life “for your own good.” Because it’s pretty damn clear that there really are people who not only don’t care about their own good but are actively working towards their own evil. (The fact that they spread misery and death to so many other people in the process is just a bonus.)

And in the meantime- there’s Donald Trump. A man who has probably never heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of coming to terms with loss. And while Trump is very good at the denial and anger part (it’s got him to where he is now) and has spent most of his life trying to avoid depression, let alone acceptance of that which he cannot change, I’m sure Mr. Art Of The Deal is very much engaged in the bargaining stage right now:

“Hey, ah, God? Yeh, it’s me, Donald. So all these preachers around me are telling me I should talk to you. You know how they are. I don’t know how you can stand ’em myself. I only put up with them cause they get me votes. All they says is like ‘love no man or money more than Jesus.’ ‘Anything is possible if you believe on Jesus’ name.’ It’s Jesus this, Jesus that. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Jesus! I mean really, who died and made HIM God?”

“But they’re right about one thing. There’s no way I could have gotten to this point without you. Remember that Access Hollywood tape? Remember me begging for Russian help with Hillary’s emails? And I WON anyway? Remember all those times that people thought I should resign or I’d be impeached, and then I was impeached, and nothing happened! I KNEW you were looking out for me! Everything that’s happened so far must be an act of God! I knew you wouldn’t have let things get to this point if I wasn’t part of your plan! So I can’t die now!

“…what do you mean, ‘I don’t need you anymore…’?

“Nobody says that to Donald Trump! I say that to my wives!!!

“Who do you think you ARE! You know who I am, buddy? Who’s your fucking manager??

“Whaddya mean, I’m subject to the same diseases as anybody else? Whaddya mean I’m not immortal? Who SAYS??

“I’m DONALD TRUMP!!! My entire life has taught me that I don’t have to obey the same rules as other human beings! I’M NOT A HUMAN BEING!!!!

“Wh- you- you better be nice to me, God! You better be NICE to me! This is very unfair! I know where you buried the bodies!! Michael Cohen told me stories about Jerry Falwell Jr. that would curdle your balls! Bill Barr’s a Catholic, he can investigate your Pope! You know what pervy shit he can find out there!

“Look at all these Justices I got ya! You don’t think that counts for something?? I can get ya more! LOTS more! Just let me live!!
“Goddamn it, God, YOU OWE ME, MOTHERFUCKERRRRR”

So my last two pieces concerned first, what’s wrong with the Democrats and why they could still lose this election, then, what’s wrong with the Republicans and why they could still lose this election, and this piece is about the unfortunate reality that whether the other side likes it or not, one side IS going to win this election.

Because for all the Democrats who think the Apocalypse will arrive if their team loses, the Republicans seem even more convinced of this. This is of course why they’re so fanatic about forcing through Amy Comey Barrett as Supreme Court Justice even though they had a 5-4 Supreme Court before Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and currently have a 5-3 majority – because they’re desperately afraid that in a Republican court action to contest ballots against the president, Chief Justice John Roberts might consider the rule of law before the rule of Trump. And of course a lot of these Trumpniks like Lindsay Graham smugly insist to reporters, “I’m sure that if Democrats were in our situation, they’d do the same thing.”
But you know why they can say that?
Cause they’ve seen it happen with their own eyes.

All the people who say I’m being too cynical about politics, I remember telling them, way before “blogging” was a thing, that giving a pass to a sleazy, womanizing real estate cheat and letting him remain president after perjury charges just because he was their guy and he got them Supreme Court appointments was a precedent that was going to end up biting them in the ass. But did they listen to me? No…

No, that doesn’t mean the Democrats are AS bad as the Banana Republicans, which is part of why I became a registered Democrat this election, but if you want to know why I was a Libertarian last election and why I likely will be again when or IF the Trump Organization is finally flushed down the john, it’s because I have no good reason to trust the Democratic Party. And that’s not because they’re a bunch of woke socialists who want to nationalize Starbucks. The woke socialists who DO want to nationalize Starbucks can’t trust the Democrats either, and that’s part of why the party lost so many votes between 2012 and 2016. It should be obvious by now that not being as bad as the other guy is not enough. You need to give people something to vote for.

So of course Republicans don’t trust the Democrats. But the Republican Party, which is now the only reason that Freud is still relevant, is energetically pushing towards the one result they claim to fear the most. Because they hate and fear the Democrats so much, they don’t want anyone else to have power at all, and that has made them so arrogant and power-mad that even some of their own flock are starting to get sick of their shit.

Among other things, a Democrat victory will mean that the Democratic Party will be the only game in town for at least two years, because the Libertarian Party is not ready for prime time and the Republican Party is an active danger to the country. Like I say, the only political debate will be between Political Hack Democrats, (Pelosi, Schumer, Biden) and Social Justice Warrior Democrats (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, ‘the Squad’). And that’s going to create its own backlash, and that may lead to the Republicans taking back the Senate just two years after losing the White House, as they did with Obama. And then they could take back the White House, no matter how rotten their candidate is. I mean, if Trump’s defense attorneys are any good, it could BE Trump. You would think not, but he shouldn’t have won the last time either, and he “shouldn’t” be polling at least 40 percent with over 206,000 dead from Trump Virus. How popular do you think Republicans will be after two years of Democrats actually being in charge?

The trap that Republicans are in is obvious: trying to create one-party rule created a backlash that may lead to the other party taking over. But if things switch over, Democrats may fall into the same trap. They need to create space for opposition and negotiation even knowing that the Republicans cannot be dealt with and will not negotiate.

The only solution is to break the cycle. And California, believe it or not, shows us one way to do this.

California is the most prominent of three states to use what’s called a “top-two” primary system for state elections, in which all candidates running in the primary round, regardless of party, are voted on by the general population of voters, and the top two finishers move on to a general election. This makes sense in at least two aspects: One, it reflects the reality that the Democratic Party is more of a multi-faction “big tent” than the Republican Party at this point. Secondly, the fact that primaries are not tied to parties undermines one of the major factors in the deterioration of the Republican Party, the fact that in standard closed-primary races, the powers that be have decreed that only the most whackjob ideologues get to the stage, so they get to go to the general election round and in “safe” districts end up winning because if you’re a Republican, you vote Republican, even if they give you a whackjob.

This system has certain drawbacks, or what could be seen as drawbacks. Because there is a lot less variation in the Republican Party, this means that you could have two Republicans with a strong vote base versus three or more Democrats and others splitting the not-Republican vote, so that the general election ends up locking out everybody but the two Republicans. This was a serious fear of Democrats going into the 2018 midterms. And of course, the whole impetus for reform as far as the Democrats are concerned is to minimize any chance of Democrats losing.

So another option that is gaining popularity is the concept of ranked choice voting. This was used in Nevada’s Democratic caucus this year and is now being used as the general election method in Maine (which already apportions its two Electors by Congressional district, not winner-take-all). In this process, the ballot requires each voter to pick not one candidate but to pick all of them in order of preference. Thus, if you really, really wanted Libertarian Jo Jorgensen as President you could pick her but then pick Democrat Joe Biden second (if you’re afraid of ‘spoiling’ the vote the way Libertarians and Greens killed Clinton in the Great Lakes) or you could pick Republican Donald Trump second (if having any qualms at all about the Democrat agenda necessarily means you’re a forced-birth advocating, greedy, racist Trumpnik, which is what all my liberal friends seem to assume). In the extremely likely event Jo Jorgensen isn’t the most popular candidate in your district, your second choice would be counted in with all the votes for that candidate and if for some reason that candidate isn’t in the top two finishers, they take the vote that is. This accomplishes a result similar to the California system without the partisan drawback. According to The Dispatch: “The change hinges on the fact that under ranked choice, candidates have to win a majority of votes, not just a plurality. Simply galvanizing partisan turnout is a less viable path to victory. Instead, advocates say, candidates must ensure that they get enough second-choice votes to push them over the 50 percent line. Ideally, this encourages campaigning that is less partisan and more focused on issues, because polarizing candidates have a harder time amassing second-choice votes.”

So, candidates can’t just pander to the most whackjob mob of goons, or to fears of “the other” or “spoilers” but have to actually be candidates that a majority of voters like and focus on issues that matter to them.

What a concept.

Of course, given the increasing importance of non-negotiable issues like abortion to the Republican Party, even such moderating reforms are not going to stop Republicans from being the Stupid Party. As the number of Q Anon believers run in Republican races increases – and given the number of “safe” seats, some of them will almost certainly get elected to Congress – it’s become clear that while we’re waiting for ranked-choice voting to spread, Republicans are going to drink the Jonestown Kool-Aid and then belly up to the bar for seconds. Indeed, it may be easier for them to maintain their cognitive dissonance as the party out of power, since they’re a reflexively anti-government, anti-intellectual party, and that’s also a huge part of why they want a court system that’s so far to the right of the rest of the country: The courts will kill any Democrat initiatives and spare the Republicans the responsibility of doing anything with government at all. Besides loot it, of course.

Thus, if we assume that Democrats actually sweep the White House and Senate, then they have to do what they did with the Affordable Care Act, and use all the power they have, while they have it, because there’s a good chance that as with the Obama Administration, they’re only going to have that power for two years. And if Republicans are willing to all but declare war on Democrats by turning the judicial branch against them for decades, Democrats need to do the same thing to them. I mean, what they should really be doing is having criminal trials, but first things first.

So that could mean court packing. That would first require getting rid of the filibuster. But what it’s really going to mean is turning every state into California as far as Republicans are concerned. As seen above, Republicans can still win in California, if they’re actually popular with a majority. But they can’t do it by simply relying on party affiliation, and since all most Republicans have these days is party affiliation (or rather, loyalty to the Trump personality cult) elections are getting harder for them.

And yet, I keep seeing all these moderates and liberals in media say (accurately) that this country needs at least two parties and will be unbalanced otherwise. And yet, they aren’t willing to acknowledge the implications of where they are, which is that one of these parties, despite it’s pedigree as a “real” party dating back to Abraham Lincoln, is not only dysfunctional but now an active threat to national security.

The Republican Party cannot be dealt with, because like Leninists in mirror image, they will only deal with the political system to the extent that they can control it. Democrats have to… not kill the Party. That WOULD be un-democratic. Rather, just make it clear that Grandpa needs to move to an assisted living facility where he can spend the rest of his days in his own little world. Preferably without metal utensils.

So if Democrats need a right-wing opposition, and it can’t be the Republicans, then that opposition has to be created. But who could it be?

The Libertarian Party, of course!

However small they are, they’re a lot bigger and more organized than the Greens and they actually have a presence on the ballot in all 50 states, no thanks to you guys.

Plus, having an actual choice spares Democrats the need to be all things to all people, which dilutes your focus as you have to embrace all the socialists, libertarians and would-be conservatives who only agree with you about the need to flush Trump and his Party. Otherwise, again, you’re left with a not loyal opposition that is a threat not only to your survival but the country’s.

I mean, that’s your choice, Democrats. The Republicans have Lindsay Graham and Louie Gohmert. The Libertarians have Starchild and that fat guy who stripped down to a Speedo at the LP National Convention.

I think that’s a step up.

But here’s the rub: That requires a political party to actually exist. And my fellow (L)ibertarians, this is where I have to level with you all.

Remember what I said about how it doesn’t matter that you’re not as bad as the other guys, if you don’t give people something to vote for? Here we are.

I said in the 2016 period that even if you do get rid of the arbitrary barriers that the duopoly imposes, there are real reasons why people don’t vote “third” party: People think that the platform (or candidate) is immoral, that the platform is impractical, or that the party won’t get enough votes. That has to be addressed.

I had also mentioned at the time that I had actually wanted to vote for down-ballot Libertarian candidates in 2016 other than Gary Johnson, but in Nevada, I couldn’t. That’s cause there WEREN’T any.

So before anything else, Libertarians: You need to get people elected, first to state offices and then to Congress and Senate, because your hypothetical President needs a political base to operate with. Not to mention, we need to change the election laws in each state in order to get anything done nationally. That means that instead of putting all your resources into vanity runs for President before the Electoral College system is reformed, you need to put your funds into finding down-ballot candidates and funding them. And don’t tell me, in this age of Kickstarter and GoFundMe, that you can’t do that. If you can sell T-Shirts and bumper stickers on your website, you can sell candidates.

Once you get people elected, you need to understand that your base will still be small compared to the other two parties. The system can only change if it actually changes. We cannot realistically expect to just supplant the Republicans at this stage. We would simply become more like a multi-party or parliamentary system, the way Britain is with the Liberal Democrats. That means playing kingmaker. It means you support the Democrats when they come up with actual civil libertarian initiatives. I would also say that it means supporting Republicans when they make fiscal conservative initiatives, but that assumes Republicans ever cared about fiscal conservatism. You leverage those votes towards the systemic reforms you want.

You have to pull off a trick that Republicans have forgotten and Democrats can barely remember: How to have a coherent political philosophy while still getting enough votes to win elections. It means knowing which parts of that philosophy are non-negotiable and which can be negotiated.

And unlike the Republicans and many of the Democrats, you have to ask the question: If I did have absolute power to create my perfect world, what would I actually do? What is my plan to get from there to here? Because as we saw with both Republican and Democratic periods of total control, they could only push so far before either watering down the initiative (as with the Democrats and the ACA) or not having an initiative at all (the Republicans against the ACA, or almost anything else).

If you do not do these things, you are not a political party. You are a political geek club. We already have a social institution for people who bitch about the American political system but never do anything about it. It’s called Facebook.

If you don’t feel like putting some big boy pants on and being a REAL political party, then you have no right to complain if ten years from now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the moderate centrist of US politics. Because there used to be an opposition to the Left in this country, and in the last ten years it has become less a political movement and more of an insurgency.

If you believe, as Libertarians pledge, that the initiation of force should not be used as a means of achieving political or social goals… frankly, our time for that is running out.

“But the country’s disintegrating. What’s happening to America, Comedian? What’s happened to the American DREAM?”
“It came true. You’re looking at it.”

-Alan Moore, Watchmen #2

Prior to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, my next idea for a column was to examine how the Republican Party has reduced itself to appeals to fear and hatred to motivate voters, and whether or not that would actually work. Now I have to talk about what the short-term situation is in regard to Viceroy Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee and what happens to the political system as a result of that. As it turns out, the second situation is simply another facet on the same gem.

First off, now that Mitt Romney has at least announced his willingness to hold a vote, the fix seems to be in. And you know what, that’s just how it goes. Ginsburg didn’t have to die when she did, just as Antonin Scalia didn’t have to die when he did, but they both had to die sometime. And on Trump’s side, there is nothing in the Constitution that says the President cannot fill a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year. Which meant that when Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell stopped President Obama from doing so, he was not in accordance with the Constitution or any legal precedent, even a so-called “Biden rule.” There is nothing in Article I of the Constitution that says “The Senate Majority Leader shall have sole power to veto the judicial nominations of the President.”

Come to think of it, there is nothing in Article I that says anything about a Senate Majority Leader.

Which only plays up the point that so much of what we think of as American laws are merely social agreements arranged for the convenience of the duopoly, and when one side goes back on those agreements, there is nothing binding the other side to hold to them. There is nothing that would stop the Democrats from retaliating (after they won the Senate) by amending the Judiciary Act of 1869 and packing the Court as FDR once threatened to do. There is nothing legally binding against this any more than there is any legal grounding to the Biden Rule, the McConnell Rule, or for that matter, Mitch McConnell’s secondary job.

Now you might say that if the Democrats pack the Court, the Republicans can always do the same thing when they get back in charge, but that requires two things: One, the Democrats have to take over the Senate, and even if they have at least three seats in reach this year, these are the guys who could strike out in a whorehouse. Secondly, if that happens, the Republicans would have to take the Senate back. That would take at least two more years. And the people who took those seats would not have the seniority of McConnell (who seems safe), Lindsey Graham (who does not) and Lamar Alexander (who is retiring).

With regard to Trump, one liberal pointed out that he once again said the quiet part loud by telling Fox & Friends that he wanted a ninth Justice (and sixth conservative Justice) because he was expecting SCOTUS to rule on the “fake ballots” he is already asking to contest. And of course, he’s giving the game away because a, he’s that stupid, and b, he has a Party that will shield him from his stupidity:

“There’s a certain political calculation to the timing of all of this, but Trump and his anxiousness have basically given away his entire strategy.
1) A more confident President would wait until he was reelected and select the next Supreme Court Justice.
2) A somewhat confident President would wait until after the election and use the choice of Supreme Court Justice as a reason to vote for him. He’d basically say, “Vote for me, and I’ll put so-and-so on the Court.” This would be the wisest move because it would solidify behind him those in his evangelical base who may have been wavering because of his handling of the pandemic, or because he grabs “p*ssies,” or because he uses the Bible as a prop for staged photo ops.
3) An insecure, blathering idiot who has no confidence in winning the Presidency whatsoever would nominate a Supreme Court justice as soon as possible and push her through — Senate willing — so he has the votes he believes he needs if there is a contested election, which he fully plans to orchestrate by undermining the mail-in voting process.”

Thing is, even with an absence, the Court is 5-3 conservative. A 5-3 ruling confirming Trump in a contested election would be no less (or more) legally binding than the 5-4 verdict in Bush v. Gore. A 6-3 ruling in Trump’s favor would be no more or less binding than a 5-3 ruling. But putting all the pressure on Republicans to ram a nominee through (maybe because you think John Roberts is ‘squishy’) will most likely increase Democratic turnout and the odds of a Biden victory by a margin that Trump can’t seriously contest.

You combine that with the essential vanity and self-preservation instinct of the average Senator, and it gives credence to the inside opinion that the Party of Trump is going on the closest thing they have to a “long game.” Republicans know that if Biden gets to approve the next Justice that would simply restore the 5-4 tilt that existed with Ginsburg, but desiring complete supremacy in both elected office and the judiciary, and knowing that they are risking both thanks to the events of 2020, it could be that some of the True Believers will actually be willing to sacrifice their political perks and seniority in elected office to lock in the courts for the next generation, which again, they pretty much already have.

The fact that they’ve already achieved one goal but are willing to risk the other indicates that they’ve basically given up on elected office. Which stands to reason, because as much as Republicans love the perks of power and as terrified as they are of losing it, they never actually do much in office.

You will notice, for instance, that while Mitch kept Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid’s initiative to kill the filibuster on judicial nominees (which Reid approved precisely because Banana Republicans kept stonewalling Obama), the Banana Republican Senate has kept the filibuster for everything else, and McConnell has blocked any legislation from the House from reaching his floor the same way he did with Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland.

One might say that this is the sort of thing that a conservative or libertarian should be on board with, but no matter how right-wing Republicans are, most of them assumed that the maintenance of public order was the government’s reason for being. And that includes disaster relief. Bush Junior might not have done a good job with Hurricane Katrina, but at least he did a job. McConnell (and to some extent Trump) have been against even negotiating with the Democrats for further coronavirus relief even though the declining living standards caused by the current situation are an ongoing threat to Republican Senate and Congressional seats in a way that even the Ginsburg replacement is not.

Which gets to the “Law and Order” appeal of the Party of Trump, or as it ought to be called, lawlessness and disorder.

Especially during the Trump National Convention, Republicans kept pushing the paranoid agenda that civil rights protests inevitably led to violence and attacks on police and property. Even now, Trump’s attorney Bill Barr is declaring that Portland and New York are “anarchist” cities, which is a big surprise to anybody who lives in New York or knows what anarchism is.

And yet most of the demands for more government and more “crackdown” on lawless cities either are not within the federal government’s power (yet) or would require actions that have not actually been taken. It’s not unlike the response to coronavirus, where Trump dodges responsibility for the various customs procedures, executive orders and supply distribution that he either had not done or did too late, while also blaming governors for not taking on responsibilities they don’t have, or in the case of mask mandates, asserting responsibilities that the president will not.

To the Republican, Trump is Schrodinger’s President: an incumbent who is simultaneously not responsible for all the calamities in this country and the only man who can save us from all the calamities in this country.

The common thread, if it isn’t clear, is that both the riots and the pandemic (which Trumpniks continue to cast as a horrible curse cast on Our President by wicked witches, Chinese and/or Democrats) are happening in “blue” states either run or populated by Those Other People, whom real Americans obviously don’t have to care about.

It remains to be seen, and I expect that in the fullness of time we will find out, whether the federal coronavirus policy is the result of a deliberate Wannsee Conference type meeting of the Trump Organization, or if this policy was the simple outgrowth of their natural callousness and psuedo-Darwinism. In any event, result can be traced to policy.

It’s a lot more clear in the case of Trump and Bill Barr that they are deliberately stoking fear of violence even as Trump Organization actions either don’t solve our problems or (like the attacks in Lafayette Park) provoke protester response. The goal of course is to keep both friends and enemies in a constant state of uncertainty and fear, so that Our Savior can step in and say again “I alone can fix it” when most of the problems since 2016 are the result of his actions.

The question is whether the uncertainty and fear does more to demoralize the “enemy” (NotRepublicans) or motivate the base. It may be the other way around. A few days ago scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson was on Seth Meyers’ show, and summed up our coronavirus problem about as well as anyone could: He said that not having a national mask mandate or coronavirus program, or expecting one governor to create mandates while the next state doesn’t, is “like designating a peeing section of a swimming pool.”

That’s not how water works. And it’s not how the virus works.

As I’ve said, just because the pandemic is affecting blue states and people “of color” disproportionately doesn’t mean that white people in “red” states are immune. And while blue New York did severely drop the ball in the initial response to the virus, they since managed to reduce the spread. Meanwhile Trump-friendly states like Florida and Arizona refused to take the crisis seriously and were then obliged to change source as the virus erupted. And even to the extent that Republican governors want to deal with, they’re dealing with a huge Trumpnik contingent that wants to pretend the danger isn’t real, which makes things that much worse for Republicans politically. Because as I’ve also said, it doesn’t matter if you believe in coronavirus or not if you’re dead. And if you’re dead, you can’t vote for Trump.

And it seems that even as fanatical as the Trumpniks are, some of them actually realize that Trump can’t heal the sick or raise the dead, which is why as enthusiastic as his comeback crowd was at Tulsa, it wasn’t nearly as big as it needed to be for political purposes.

And if there aren’t THAT many Trumpniks willing to risk a bullet for him to attend a rally anymore, how many are willing to risk in-person voting?

See, in my last piece, I had said that the Democrats still had a chance of alienating the country and losing this election because the loonies on their side can play into the Banana Republican agenda of making Democrats look worse than them no matter how bad they get. My point here is that none of that may matter because the Banana Republicans may in fact be getting to the point where the public will prefer Democrats no matter how bad they are, because the loonies on the Republican side are the ones in charge of their party, and that party is in charge of the country right now.

Because if there was one advantage Republicans always had, it was motivation and turnout. And that turnout has usually been motivated by fear. But you’ve already got all the “conservatives” convinced that the Apocalypse will happen if Those Other People get elected. Those Other People theoretically outnumbered Republicans, but they were happy and complacent, and they thought Barack Obama had cured racism in America, just like Hillary Clinton was going to cure sexism. They didn’t think they needed to vote like their lives depended on it, like Republicans do.

Now they know better.

Now Those Other People know just how spiteful and fearful some of their neighbors are, and what they will do to impose their will on the country.

So, “conservatives”, what happens when all of Those Other People look at the evidence and conclude that the Apocalypse really will happen if you win? What happens if they think like YOU, and do what you do to win? And what happens if they look at each other and realize they outnumber you?

You’re kinda fucked, aren’t you?

You’ve still got a chance, cause certain states like Pennsylvania are still close and Trump can still try to contest the results if mail-in ballots are the difference. But the odds are not looking good. I mean, what you’re really dealing with here is that you’ve given up. You’ve given up on trying to sell right-wing policy without a salesman who isn’t a sleazy career grifter and demagogue. You’ve given up even the Beltway’s superficial honesty and regard for rules. I mean, back in 1984, Reagan could win every state but Mondale’s cause Republicans actually had good candidates with ideas that people liked, but now, I guess that’s just too hard.

You don’t have law and order. Now all you’ve got is “we can do whatever we want, cause we’re the biggest gang.” And yet everything you do is based on a subconscious realization that if admitted would freeze you in pants-wetting terror: You are NOT the biggest gang, and you never will be again.

And thing is, it is your actions that are making your humiliation more likely, as you alienate the people whose votes you need, and whom you falsely claim to represent.

Yes, you ARE this stupid, yes, you ARE this evil, and you deserve every rotten thing that happens to you from here on out.

I wish I could say that did not include early death, but you guys are the ones pulling masks off of people in a pandemic, because you don’t like being reminded that Trump Virus is a thing.

“Remember we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police “pig” or “white fascist racist” or “motherfucker” and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, “Oh, he’s one of those,” and then promptly turn off. “

– Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals”

I had mentioned that after the duopoly conventions I wanted to touch on three subjects: one, where the “two” party system goes after this election, two, the Republicans’ attempts to scare their way out of losing it, and three, the Democratic-left coalition’s capacity to lose yet another sure thing by alienating the public. I am dealing with the last subject first.

For one thing, Democrats, never forget – never, never, never, never as in FUCKING NEVER – that the only reason we’re stuck with “President Trump” is because the country knew that the alternative to the Democratic candidate was FUCKING DONALD TRUMP and a critical mass of people in critical states still found the Democrat inferior.

As I said at the time, saying “you don’t like Hillary Clinton, do you?” is like asking “you don’t like gonorrhea, do you?” My answer is no, does anybody? I mean, gonorrhea is something you could survive and get treated for, as opposed to sticking your dick in a glowing green drum of radioactive waste, which is what voting for Trump would be, but if you tell me I HAVE to get gonorrhea, or that gonorrhea is actually the healthiest of my alternatives, you can’t be surprised that people reject your political establishment altogether, and voting Trump is just the most nihilistic expression of that. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Recently Cornel West twitted, “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics. In this sense, I agree with my brothers and sisters like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Paul Street and Bob Avakian.” By the same token, if a centrist, “neoliberal” or right-libertarian like myself votes Biden that is not necessarily an affirmation of the radical left politics of West or Chomsky. It’s just… Christ on a pogo stick, look what the alternative is.

And even then, if it was another vote for Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, I can’t say I wouldn’t vote Libertarian if Hillary was the alternative to Trump.

This is what Trump is counting on. He’s not popular even with his OWN people, really; they rationalize his manifest character defects as assets in their projection of him as “a rough man who has to do rough things.” They HAVE to make the NotRepublican nominee look worse, because they can’t make their boy presentable. They have a harder time doing this with Biden and even Harris because they don’t have as many negatives as Clinton, but just because it’s not going to be as easy to smear the Democrat this time doesn’t mean that the Democrats’ fellow travelers have to give the Republicans help.

For example: Antifa. I have at least one liberal friend who refuses to acknowledge these people as allies, since they are often just as violent and either-or in their alignments as the alt-right. This makes it that much easier for the Party of Trump to foist the argument that anyone who opposes them are at best unwitting allies of Antifa, which is some dangerous, all-encompassing conspiracy against Our Gratest Most Americanest President EVAR.

Now, the excuse given on the Left is that Antifa is actually not an organized group, which I guess is true because no one can seem to agree if it’s pronounced “anty fa” or “aunt Teefa.” It’s sort of like how the vegan movement had to change the pronunciation of the word from “vague un” to “VEEgun” because the City of Las Vegas sued them for defamation.

Not to mention, Weimar Germany actually had organized left-wing gangs fighting the Freikorps and Nazis on their level, but did that stop the Nazis from taking the government? No. Partially because the Nazis could pose as the people saving the public from street violence. A bit of history that advocates fail to point out.

But on the less extreme part of political debate, you have the general issue of political correctness, or as it’s sometimes called, “wokeness” (the term woke, like ‘social justice’ being one of those terms that was actually an in-group compliment until the behavior of that group became overbearing). Among the various issues PC creates, you get the opposite problem from Antifa. If Antifa seem too violent for the general public, the PC police are making it that much harder for the rest of us to fight the Trumpniks with words because they’re more concerned with thoughtcrime than winning with the general public.

To take an early example from the Trump period: Stephen Colbert, hardly a Trump supporter, did a routine on May 2017 against him, and at the time, Vox magazine didn’t like it.

Writer German Lopez said: “Colbert was in the middle of a monologue launching various insults at Trump, including some fat shaming, ‘presidunce,’ and ‘pricktator.’ In the course of this, he said, ‘The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.’ … In a setting in which Colbert is deliberately trying to find a way to insult Trump, it’s telling that he resorts to suggesting that Trump is engaging in sexual acts with another man. The suggestion is that the worst thing that could happen for these men is if they engaged in homosexual acts together, as if that devalues them as men, makes them submissive, or emasculates them.”

On one hand: Point taken.

On the other hand, the fact that the Left has to second-guess and virtue-police EVERYTHING helps explain why they’re not very popular right now.

Much like how the N-Word is permissible in the black community (I call it The Richard Pryor Clause), Lopez, as a gay man, is probably aware of how often joking insults are thrown out between gay men. I should think that people who are aware of their own identity ought to be able to tell the difference between homophobia and a slap on two authoritarian personalities who, like most authoritarians, trade in machismo. The fact that Putin is much more officially homophobic than Trump ought to drive the point deeper.

I mean, thanks to President Grab ‘Em By The Pussy, and his esteemed predecessor, President It’s Not Perjury If It Was Just Over A Blowjob, we have reached a point in popular culture where we are THIS close to Gilbert Gottfried being able to tell the Aristocrats joke on broadcast TV. And some Puritans want to spoil it for all of us.

It is perhaps telling that the right-wing backlash to Colbert got more press attention in the long run than the left-wing/PC critique. See, in his remark, Colbert also told Trump, “you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine” and apparently Trumpniks took this as a group attack on their core demographic.

But that also reveals that the Right is a lot better at seizing the narrative than the Left.

Which is one reason why this line of rhetoric is dangerous if you’re a minority, and by “minority” I mean lacking in numbers or unpopular. One of the key reasons we have this “alt-right” crap going on is that we are at a dangerous point in American history. Whites are grouped into this generic category of “white” because it’s possible for them to blend into the system, so they’re considered the majority even though the old English-Dutch culture of the United States was supplanted by immigrants from other European countries a while ago. But even this super-category of “white” is going to eventually lose its numerical majority in the next fifty years. At the same time the default white culture is still dominant. So whiteys like myself are feeling conscious of that in a way they previously had not been, partially because of the demographic change and partially because various groups (black, feminist, LGBT, etc.) are engaged in identity politics. This is why some of them say things like “Why don’t we have a White History Month?” as though a profound conclusion had just come to them.

So when everybody wants to group themselves into collective identities, the group that already is the largest identity gets a political advantage. That will probably continue even after whites lose their numerical majority, because by the Left’s own conclusions, whiteness is identified with the established culture. By contrast, there are conflicts within the Hispanic community, within the feminist community (for instance, as to whether trans women should be included) and within the LGBT spectrum. Some of this is inevitable, and simply casting identity politics as an issue here doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid for the purposes they serve. However, various leftist groups often use rhetoric in ways that alienate the majority and explain some of the politics we’re seeing now. In some cases, that’s inevitable too. But there’s a difference between a necessary confrontation and an unnecessary confrontation.

To elaborate, let me compare two slogans.

“Black Lives Matter” is a necessary phrase precisely because of the fact that the phrase needs to be stated. It is a reference to the fact that for much of American history, black lives have not mattered and do not matter. This has been clear to activists for years, with regard to police brutality as well as mundane cases such as applying for home loans. The long term implications as to why white people should care have become that much more obvious with coronavirus: as many leftists have pointed out, the pandemic disproportionately affects non-white communities. That does not mean it is not affecting white communities. And it is spreading to white communities – after it ravaged large centers like New York and was then contained – because the disproportionate rate of cases in minority communities that tend to be in “blue” Democrat-run states means that the Trump Organization feels no need to create a national mask mandate or testing regime, since they’re not “his” people. But since the virus, unlike Trump, doesn’t care about skin color or state lines, the virus will spread even to “red” Republican states if it is given the environment to do so, an opportunity that Trump’s Republican state governors have been more than happy to provide. More broadly speaking, this is simply the most stark example of how there’s one public support system for the white and well-off in America and one for the rest of us. And when you need to contain a pandemic, that just doesn’t work. If you actually believe that All Lives Matter, then you have to assert that Black Lives Matter, otherwise your life is now threatened by this unequal system too.

“Black Lives Matter” addresses the point of systemic inequality. The question is what to do about it. Which leads me to address another politically-correct phrase: white privilege.

The term “white privilege” does refer to a real thing. For instance, if a black man speaks bad English, abuses women and gets involved in organized crime, they call him a “thug” or a “gangsta.” When a white man does all that, they elect him president. My problem, at least, is the use of the term “privilege.” The dictionary definition of privilege is a special right, advantage or immunity enjoyed by a particular group. And while many on the Left would describe that as the definition of whiteness, they fail to grasp that it wasn’t until fairly recently that people “of color” were about to overtake the collective “white” culture, nor was it always the case that that white culture was monolithic. Not too long ago, people were wondering if Irish Catholic presidential candidate John Kennedy was going to be taking orders from the Pope. But even then, there was an idea that there was an equal standard of law for everybody, and both labor and civil rights campaigns were intended to enforce an actual standard of fairness.

Which is what we’re getting at. The problem if (say) Dylann Roof actually gets fair treatment after shooting up an African Methodist church and Eric Garner gets asphyxiated for selling loosies is not that Roof shouldn’t have been taken in without violence, but that cops so quickly resorted to violence in the case of Garner for a non-violent offense. The standard is not a privilege. The offense is that the standard is being violated. (Privilege would be the cops in Kenosha letting Kyle Rittenhouse walk around with a semi-auto rifle during protests and then walk away from cops AFTER shooting three people, during unrest that started after cops shot Jacob Blake multiple times in the back, allegedly because he was reaching for a weapon that he would have had to get from his car.)

Again, if inequality is real (and it’s kind of hard for even Republicans to argue otherwise) the question is what to do about it. And phrasing the legal standard that most of America does live with as “privilege” is very dangerous, actually, because it plays into a lot of right-wing and moderate fears about socialism. Most of these fears are unjustified (especially in comparison to what’s running the country now), but it is true that most leftist regimes (as opposed to Canadian and European social democrats) were far more interested in leveling the culture they inherited as opposed to reforming it. It usually takes less time and effort to bring everybody down to a certain level as opposed to raising everyone up. And frankly, that requires getting rid of “bourgeois” ideas like personal freedom and political debate.

This is how the Trump National Convention could have the McCloskeys do a video testimony in the safety of their home and talk about how their privilege of a zoned suburban neighborhood was equivalent to the common right to defend house and home. This is how they can phrase an attack on “privilege” as an attack on your rights. And I’m sorry, but if you wonder why they keep going to this tactic, it’s because it’s been proven to work in the past.

When the Republican Party is so malign and dysfunctional, they can only succeed by convincing the majority of “normal” America (including some black and Hispanic voters) that at the least, if they can’t vote for Republicans, they can’t align with the Democrats either. It helps that as with “white privilege” so much of the Left is determined to address a real problem in a counterproductive way that alienates many of the people who need to be reached.

Feminism is another example. “Patriarchy” is invoked in such a way that, “conservatism” being what it is these days, inspires the opposition to double down. There was a 2018 article in that noted right-wing rag The Guardian about this: “On 7 January this year, the alt-right insurgent Steve Bannon turned on his TV in Washington DC to watch the Golden Globes. … In the course of a passionate speech, Oprah Winfrey told the audience that ‘brutally powerful men’ had ‘broken’ something in the culture. These men had caused women to suffer: not only actors, but domestic workers, factory workers, agricultural workers, athletes, soldiers and academics. The fight against this broken culture, she said, transcended ‘geography, race, religion, politics and workplace”.

“Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, was one of 20 million Americans watching. In his view, the scene before him augured the beginning of a revolution ‘even more powerful than populism’, according to his biographer Joshua Green. ‘It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that – this is the Puritans. It’s anti-patriarchy,’ Bannon declared. “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room … Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.’ He concluded: ‘The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history.”

The article went on: “For some sceptical liberals, there is a resistance to the ideological implications of grand concepts such as “patriarchy” (or “neoliberalism”), which are seen as oversimplifications of a more complex reality. Among gender studies academics, it is no longer in wide use. Once a term debated in endless articles, conferences and books, many theorists now regard it is as too blunt and monolithic to capture the nuances of oppression. Paradoxically, some on the right have enthusiastically taken up the term – regarding it not as an evil to be stamped out, but as a ‘natural’ difference between the genders, ordained by God or biology, to be protected against rampaging feminism.

“But for those who have lost a basic trust in the forward motion of human progress – or who were born too recently to have known it – ‘“patriarchy’ seems exactly the word to explain the continued existence of pervasive, seemingly ineradicable inequality.”

Which in a way seems to hit on where we are. Even as right-wingers like Steve Bannon (who once allegedly described himself as a Leninist) take up the social warfare tactics of the Left, the “progressives” and their more radical kin seem to have given up on the Biden-Obama idea that this is basically a good country that just needs to maintain the march of progress. And given that Biden’s best chance of victory is to appeal to the majority and cast himself as the “normal” alternative to polarization and the overbearing political correctness of the Right, there are a lot of people – not just Trumpniks – who see their goal as taking this country in the opposite direction.

I think “Topple the Patriarchy” is the feminist version of “Kill Whitey.” I mean, yes, we understand that if you say “Kill Whitey” you don’t REALLY want to kill every white person in America, but it just doesn’t come across diplomatically, you know what I’m saying? It’s like when Donald Trump started his presidential campaign saying that Mexicans “aren’t sending (us) their best … they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… and some, I assume, are good people” and then wondered why everybody got the wrong idea about his immigration policy. Well, Donald: Either you didn’t explain it very well, or we didn’t get the wrong idea.

The problem, (which if you think about it, applies to both political poles) is that when you demonize a certain group in order to rally or convert people, the audience may not think you’re talking about some abstract Evil or some minority that is so numerically miniscule as to be politically unimportant (for example, the 1 Percent, Muslims, or libertarians). When you cast yourself as “Us” and your targets as “Them” some people may think you’re talking about THEM.

And then you wonder why you get such negative responses for that statement from people that you don’t have any personal disagreements with. It’s almost as if they think you don’t acknowledge their humanity or see their perspective, and they’ll never be able to reason with you.

It’s become pretty obvious that the conservative movement has been degraded because of that attitude. “Progressive” people may want to consider that the Right are not the only folks who have to worry about such temptation.

Again: I don’t think my problems with the Left are nearly as important in the short run as my problems with the Right, but the same people who wail and rage about the Electoral College and a first-past-the-post political system set up by dead white slaveowners are deliberately avoiding the point that said system allows them to persist in the belief that any vote for the official NotRepublican candidate is necessarily a vote for the woke socialists. You can be assured that the Church of Trump is doing everything it can to create that impression among the remaining moderate/right people who are still on the fence about voting for their Messiah.

Like a lot of people my age, I was a fan of Pink Floyd, and recently I was reading the Wikipedia article on Syd Barrett, who was their main singer-songwriter in their little-known early period. At that point in the mid-1960s, Pink Floyd under Syd were much more of a psychedelic pop/singles band than they later became. Things changed because Barrett, well, lost his damn mind. Possibly due to latent conditions, very likely due to drug abuse, he started to do things like detune his guitar to the point that the strings would fall off. Or on stage he would play just one guitar string for the entire song. Or he would not play at all and just glare at people. This is why the band hired David Gilmour as their new guitarist. At the time the plan was that they would officially keep Barrett, but as a stay-at-home songwriter, like Brian Wilson had become at that point in the Beach Boys’ history.

The band realized that that wouldn’t work out when Syd asked the other band members to work on a new song in the studio. The song was called “Have You Got It Yet?” At first the song started conventionally, but as the other band members played along with Syd, he started changing the tune on them, and they couldn’t keep up. And they restarted, and he did it again, more than once, and every time, he would return to the chorus: “Have you got it, yet?” Eventually, they realized that the whole thing was an elaborate joke, and they were never going to get “it” and so they walked out and quit playing with Syd. Permanently.

I think the Left is in serious danger of doing that to the whole country.

So Gilbert Gottfried walks into a political fundraiser’s office, and he says, “Hey, I got this great NEW political party you wanna look at, they’ll knock your socks off.”
And the fundraiser said, “OK, who are these guys?”

The Democratic National Convention, having tried and succeeded in their quest to get even lower ratings than the last presidential cycle, nevertheless gained praise from the media critics who did watch. And given that the outcome of party conventions is never in doubt anymore, the value is not so much to gain ratings as to create an impression among those political insiders who actually do watch these things as to the party’s ability to present itself and its agenda.

And since this year the Democrats had their convention one week before the incumbent Republican Party, it raised the question of whether the Republican National Convention would learn from their example, and what agenda they would present.

Now as you know, all that was complicated by Viceroy Trump’s initial insistence that the agreed-upon site, Charlotte, North Carolina, have the traditional cheering crowds as an old-time convention, even after coronavirus made it obvious to the Democrats that they couldn’t do that approach in Milwaukee. And since Donald Trump is Your Lord GOD whose whim overrides petty concerns like science and disease theory, he didn’t accept the position of the Demonrat Governor of North Carolina that masking and social distancing had to be enforced. So he announced to all that the convention events were being moved to Jacksonville in the much more Trumpnik state of Florida, even though the official convention business (what was left of it) could not be moved from Charlotte. Except that by the time the planning for Jacksonville was in high gear, coronavirus was exploding in Florida, largely because their Trumpnik governor encouraged everybody to go to the beaches and public events with no social distance measures. The only solution to avoid another public health and publicity disaster like the Tulsa speech was to have Trump do his acceptance speech outdoors, in Florida, in AUGUST, around hurricane season.

Somehow this combination of facts penetrated the invulnerable skull of our God-Emperor, and he agreed to have a (mostly) virtual convention after all. But the Democrats had already come to that realization and had months to prepare, whereas by the time Trump bowed to the liberal bias of reality, there were only weeks to go until the RNC was set. And as a result, everything is largely improv, not least because Trump himself kept inserting himself into all the plans.

The first change that people noticed was that whereas the DNC reserved two hours of programming time a night, the RNC decided to cut into evening programming by starting an hour earlier at 8:30 pm, for a total of two and a half hours, apparently reasoning that if the Democrat convention was too dull and boring, the best solution was to add 25 percent more of the same thing.

The second change was in the Party platform, or deliberate lack thereof. Previously the party committees had earned ridicule by refusing to update the 2016 platform, with its remarks like “Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. … Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly — our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long trust us” and “The President has been regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand. He defies the laws of the United States by refusing to enforce those with which he does not agree. And he appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law. ” Well, now the RNC has announced, after first whining that “The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts” that “the Republican Party has and will continuously support the Presidents America-first agenda” and “RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention” – in other words, the Republican Party agenda is literally ‘we agree with everything Donald Trump says’ and furthermore, “RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.”

So one of the few legitimate purposes that a party convention still serves other than anointing the primary winner is officially meaningless. There is no independent thought allowed. There is not even the perfunctory one-minute speech Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was allowed to nominate Bernie Sanders for the roll call, because no one is competing in the roll call. There really ISN’T a roll call; the delegates made a remote vote earlier Monday affirming Trump as their nominee. The whole media event is that much more a TV show than the DNC, and the only thing being promoted is Donald Trump.

Then you combine that with the events between the Thursday acceptance speech of Joe Biden and the kickoff of the RNC Monday, with Trump whisperer Steve Bannon getting arrested for using a “build the wall” project to bilk people out of money, becoming yet another example of why MAGA stands for “My Ass Got Arrested.” And then on Sunday, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, police responded to a domestic disturbance by apprehending Jacob Blake, a black bystander who tried to break up an argument, and as he was walking to a vehicle, officers were caught on camera grabbing him and then shooting him in the back at close range. Blake’s children witnessed the incident from their car. While this case of police violence, like the George Floyd case, has no direct connection to national politics, like the Floyd case it flies in the face of black people and other groups who have seen the corrupt establishment get away with literal murder, and in the short term the Blake shooting has already sparked riots and fires in Kenosha. And as the RNC set up to make its pitch, we have no idea if this violence will have a similar aftermath to the Floyd video, given that the Blake video makes the George Floyd killing look like a hugfest.

So would The Party of Trump be able to prevail in the face of all these embarrassments and present themselves as the positive alternative to the corrupt establishment, even when they’ve BEEN the corrupt establishment for four years?
NO PROBLEM!

Day One

For a lot of critics, the best speech on Day One, if you’re one of us who think that socialism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, was the presentation of a Cuban whose father first fled fascism in Spain then had to flee communism in Cuba. But his example only contrasted with the point that the Trump Organization’s policy stance against socialism in Latin America clashes with Trump’s own desire not to extend the legal status of Venezuelan refugees.

Then you had the couple who, depending on who you ask, either defended their home from bloody-minded rioters or exacerbated a conflict that didn’t need to happen by playing “I’m a Little Teapot” with firearms. And whatever you may think about the Second Amendment or the alleged threat to “single family” home development, these two demonstrate the real reason why it’s gotten so hard to defend gun rights these days: Because these days, most firearms fans have no trigger discipline.

But for those outside the Church of Jesus Trump Latter-Day Suckers, the funniest speech in a convention that had already become more blooper reel than script was from Trump intimate and former Fox News hostess Kimberly Guilfoyle, who delivered an apocalyptic warning against a Biden victory BY SHOUTING AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE IN ORDER TO PROJECT HER VOICE TO THE END OF THE ROOM SO THAT THE ECHO MADE IT THAT MUCH MORE OBVIOUS SHE WAS SPEAKING TO AN EMPTY HALL. That and her appearance gave the impression of Idina Menzel playing the Bob Geldof character in Pink Floyd The Wall (‘I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine/Pink isn’t well, he’s, uh, back at the hotel/And they sent us along as a surrogate band/And WE’RE GONNA FIND OUT WHERE YOU FANS REALLY STAAAND’).

Day Two

Now, this all comes from what I saw of the convention from news reports. I didn’t actually see Day One of the RNC because unlike increasing numbers of Americans after the spread of Trump Virus, I have a job.

And given that I watched the DNC (such as I did) via MSNBC, I had thought, what the heck, I’ll go ahead and watch this on Fox News on my day off, given how devoted they are to The Leader. But then I found out from the news coverage that MSNBC and Clinton News Network were covering the RNC uninterrupted but Fox didn’t. And that’s because while The Trump Convention deliberately cut 30 minutes into prime-time programming, Fox didn’t want to take that time away from the Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity shows. Which only goes to show what I’ve already said: Fox News CAN report the news, and it still has a staff of people who are perfectly skilled to do so, but that really isn’t their job.

So I turned on MSDNC that day and one of the first stories before the 5:30 Pacific start was Chris Hayes telling us that a scheduled speaker, “angel mom” Mary Mendoza, was “cancelled” from Tuesday’s speaker lineup after she went on Twitter that day encouraging people to read an anti-Semitic conspiracy text. Too bad. That speech woulda been LIT.

The first major speaker was Jon Ponder, a Las Vegas native who, after being incarcerated for robbery and turning to Jesus, started a ‘Hope For Prisoners’ program. Trump’s testimony for Ponder was of course prominently featured along with an official pardon. And this story is genuinely nice, but it also drives home the idea that the best support government can provide for black people is through the law-enforcement system, with the secondary implication that Republicans finally care about prisoner rights now that so many of them are facing sentences.

Next speaker was Senator Rand Paul. He said “Donald Trump gets things done.” He gave Trump credit for instituting an insurance plan that Paul pushed and has not actually been passed. He said that if you hate war and don’t want to build roads and bridges in Afghanistan instead of building them at home, you should vote for Trump. By the way, we haven’t gotten out of Afghanistan and the Trump Organization is not building roads and bridges at home. And by the way, Fuck You, Rand Paul.

After a couple of little films, they had Larry Kudlow: “Hi. I’m not really an economist, but I play one on TV!” He went along the same line as the previous line as the short film, which is that we had the greatest economy ever, ‘a rising tide that lifted all boats’ and it was only interrupted by the horrible “once-in-a-century” event of coronavirus, which Republicans seem to think is a horrible curse that was cast on Our President by evil witches, Chinese or Democrats (same difference).

It was at this point that MSDNC (unlike CNN) cut in to do a fact check on Kudlow’s piece rather than go to the speech of a Wisconsin business owner. You didn’t see them cut in like this when the DNC was on. But then the DNC was more likely to alternate political speeches with songs from Jennifer Hudson or John Legend or someone whom people actually like.

Speaking of folks whom nobody likes, the Trump Convention had at least two people speaking in favor of anti-abortion measures, which I guess they had to do since they couldn’t actually write an anti-abortion plank into this year’s Platform, since of course there ISN’T one.

Then they had Nick Sandmann from the redcaps-against-Indians standoff at the Lincoln Memorial, who had previously been criticized for just standing in front of an Omaha protestor and smiling. In a taped speech in front of the Memorial, he went into full “victim of the media” mode and of course praised Trump for taking his side, putting his MAGA cap back on. Thus confirming the axiom “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

After a couple more speeches they brought in Tiffany Trump, which is only fair, since the DNC had to have Hunter Biden speak for his dad, so they had to excavate Tiffany from obscurity when she hasn’t really committed any crime other than being the white sheep of the family. And again, one of the points she brought up in passing was criminal justice reform, and I just can’t imagine why that’s become a focus all of a sudden. But the main point, however haphazardly delivered, was that the media and the universities are creating an atmosphere of “groupthink” where “diversity of thought” was discouraged. This at a convention where six of the twelve featured speakers are named Trump and (again) the Committee wasn’t even allowed to create an official agenda.
As events wound towards the second hour, I noticed that MSNBC, unlike CNN, was cutting in for commercials, and then their standard talking-head commentary, and I found myself wondering if it was worth it to break my pledge to boycott CNN to see a bunch of people talk about “freedom” while anxiously staring at the camera like hostages in an al-Qaeda video.

The other thing I noticed was that how many people in this “Republican” convention gave testimonials thanking Donald Trump personally, like the one who mentioned how Trump brought about the financial support for her business after coronavirus as though the Republican Senate had nothing to do with it.

Eric Trump said that the country is in a fight for freedom right now, “and it is a fight only my father can win.”

Just before the Eric speech they had a straight-up propaganda moment with Trump making an appearance supervising a citizenship oath ceremony being held by (supposedly official) Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. Several commentators, for example on Fivethirtyeight, said that Wolf’s appearance in the Convention film was a violation of the Hatch Act.

Speaking of violating the Hatch Act, you had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking from Jerusalem, except that he didn’t mention he is the Secretary of State, because even though he was on official business abroad at government expense and making a symbolic appearance at a city sacred to Zionists and Evangelicals in order to endorse Trump, he couldn’t say he was speaking as “Secretary of State” because apparently that would be violating the Hatch Act. As if they really cared.

And finally they cut to the Rose Garden, which the First Lady had recently eviscerated apparently to create more room for her Tuesday speech. This speech made her no less than the third person named Trump who was not Donald Trump to speak Tuesday. The live crowd – small and mostly unmasked as it was – brought the speech an energy that hadn’t been present to that point. But like the other Trump relatives, Melania gave the same stiff “read the surrender document or your children will be shot” smile and indirect stare as she went over the same litany as the night’s other speakers.

Melania Trump’s speech – as in, her manner of speaking – brings to mind a joke I heard Sofia Vergara tell about how she is the only Hispanic immigrant she knows whose accent got worse the longer she stayed in America. Which only makes me think I would be much happier if Sofia Vergara was the First Lady for President Joe Mangianello. Now HE’s cool.

Oh, and on Tuesday it was announced that the bullets that hit Jacob Blake in the back pierced his spinal column and he will most likely never walk again.

Day Three

Between the end of the Tuesday RNC and the beginning of Wednesday’s festivities the situation over Jacob Blake escalated as an out-of-state actor appeared to support the Kenosha police and then shot three people in a melee, killing two. He was eventually apprehended but not during the point that he was caught on camera actually approaching police.

In protest, the Milwaukee Bucks team decided to walk out of their scheduled NBA playoff game, which led to the entire league postponing the playoff schedule.

Now, just as I had better things to do on Monday, I had game night on Wednesday, so I didn’t actually see Day Three of the RNC. Mike Pence was the featured speaker, so I’m not sure who saw it, or who remembers it if they did.

Plus which, as if 2020 couldn’t be 2020 enough, there’s a DOUBLE hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that hit landfall in Louisiana on Wednesday night (after midnight Thursday morning) so now Trump has his own Katrina to deal with. Oh, that’s right, two. So that’s pretty much what the news was focused on by the time I got home.

It’s almost AS IF there are more important things in the world than the ruling party of our government fluffing King Donnie, The First of His Name.

But back to the Mike Pence speech: The TrumpNC continued its week-long policy of using its control of government institutions as an implied endorsement of Our President over the evil, corrupt, senile sexual harasser who used his position to get his kid a cushy job. You know, the one who ISN’T Donald Trump. In Wednesday’s case, it was Vice President Pence making his keynote speech inside the grounds of Fort McHenry. This, like the Melania Rose Garden speech, had it’s own (mostly unmasked and undistanced) audience, and it was duller than Lawrence Welk conducting Nixon in China. It was telling that the big standing ovation line was when Pence only acknowledged the Kenosha fiasco by saying “the violence must stop – whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha… we will have law and order on the streets of America” and even the standing ovation seemed deeply subdued. And before that, of course Pence went along with the going theme that for three years Trump was the greatest president since Jesus Himself: “And then, the coronavirus struck from China.”

Several times in this convention, Republicans have referred to China and their plots against the country, and how the Democrats failed to bring them up. On Tuesday, Pam Bondi invoked Hunter Biden’s work for a corrupt company in Ukraine. You know one country they haven’t brought up? Russia.

Gilbert said, “Oh, that reminds me of a joke.”
The political guy said, “What’s the joke?”
“What’s three inches long and covered in Cheeto dust?”
“I don’t know.”

“Vladimir Putin’s dick.”

Day Four

This is where it became clear that the “strategy” to present Trump every day of the convention, once again flouting the conventional path where the candidate is only brought out at the end, might temporarily feed Trump’s bottomless need for praise and attention, but it undermined the dramatic buildup. I mean, if you were given a four-course dinner and the appetizer was Fried Dogshit and the salad was Dogshit Salad with Urine Vinagarette Dressing, you’re not that enthused for Dogshit Parmagiana and Scallopini in Tomato Sauce.

Not only that, it’s been clear for months (and from the previous two keynote speeches, in which Trump appeared in person) that Trump desperately craves to go back to the good old days when he was in front of a podium, with thousands of people surrounding him and eating up everything he had to say, and all this radical-Left crap like “life” and “reality” just keeps getting in the way.

But Thursday they wrapped up with some of the few people in the Republican Party who (now that Paul Ryan has retired) had some standing independent of Trump. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the few Republicans who practiced social distancing by taping his speech back home in Kentucky. And even then, while he actually has some say in how things are run, McConnell just did the same thing that the other speakers did, praise Donald Trump while bagging on the Democrats, saying things like “they even want to control how many hamburgers you can eat.” Well. I’m sure that would be a losing topic for Democrats if they wanted to make that part of their platform, which is why they didn’t.

During his extremely loud speech, UFC head Dana White said that “President Trump realized that one of the best ways of restoring the American people’s sense of normalcy was to restore our entertainment options.” Which explains not only why White is freaking out from a pocketbook standpoint but why Trumpniks are so freaked by the NBA boycott, because more and more people are refusing to acknowledge this regime as normal. But then White also said “(Trump) is one of the most loyal men I’ve ever met”, so that skews his credibility right there.

A little later they had Ben Carson come out and say a few good things about American character, but then he undermined it by saying that Trump kept every promise he’s made.

After that they had America’s Mayor Rudy Guiliani out to attack the Democrats who “allow” crime and go against Law & Order. Here’s the thing, his record as New York Mayor, in comparison to “progressive Democrat mayors” is probably the best advertisement for the law and order approach, even if the emphasis of “stop and frisk” is exactly why that approach isn’t popular anymore. It’s just that Rudy’s own credibility is undermined by his increasingly wacky behavior, such as today’s speech, which was even more Grandpa Simpson in its delivery than the usual Trump speech. Not to mention that Rudy’s own definition of law and order seems to be elastic.

Senator Tom Cotton was one of the few people who made a point by point comparison of Trump and Biden on substance, it’s just that the “substance” was meaningless. For example, Cotton said Trump built up the military by creating the Space Force. Which does WHAT, exactly? Hand out parking tickets to Martians? This was apparently so much for the MSDNC team that they felt obliged to do a fact check after the speech, pointing out for instance that rather than eliminating terrorists, Trump gave support to Turkish strongman Erdogan to drive out Kurdish strongholds in Syria that were helping us fight Islamic State.

Then they had a very effective, Evangelical-style speech from Alice Johnson, another former inmate pardoned by Trump (at the urging of the West-Kardashian family) about how she became an ordained minister in prison and was “freed in body” by the president but “freed in mind by the Almighty God.”

Even Rachel Maddow thought she was good.

Then in the 7/10 o’clock hour they did the main show, led by opening act Ivanka Trump and her truly wonderful, silky hair. It was pretty easy to notice given how much it blew in the wind outside the White House lawn, which was a bad omen for her Dad’s combover. Given that at least 85 percent of the speaking up to this point was vapid praise for Donald, and that’s what Ivanka specializes in, it’s no surprise that that was much of her speech, although I liked the line “he is so unapologetic about his beliefs that he has forced me and countless other Americans to take a hard look at ourselves and ask what we stand for.” Well, true enough. Then she said “America doesn’t need another empty vessel who will do whatever the fringe on his party demands.” Whatever you say, Tucker Carlson.

And with that, Ivanka introduced Donald and Melania, who walked at a reasonable pace down the stairs. Trump approached the podium with an odd smile that reflected either overwhelming emotion or just constipation. He saw Melania off after holding her hand for some time and then began his speech.

After first acknowledging the people in the path of Hurricane Laura, and Mike Pence (which implies that Pence is still his running mate), Trump formally accepted the party’s nomination, saying it was willing to accept Democrats and independents who believe in America’s greatness, which is certainly dreaming big. He once again claimed that the country was struck by an “invisible enemy” and was developing life-saving therapies, even if it wasn’t doing the common safety measures that kept the death toll down in other countries. He then went into the tack that the future of America as a country is at stake in this election, which is the one area where I’m sure Democrats would agree with him. Trump said that “the Democrat Party” was bent on tearing down our country, whereas “we give our faith to Almighty God.” With his hairline patriotically flapping in the breeze, Trump shoved the nitrous oxide in the culture war tank and presented himself as a selfless martyr who sacrificed for the country as opposed to career politicians like Biden.

He got lots of applause for nominating two conservative Supreme Court Justices. He got almost as much applause for saying “I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President” from a crowd that had slightly more black people than people wearing masks. He got applause for moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. From Ivanka, Jared and maybe five other people around them. Trump bragged about himself like a rap star while claiming that Joe Biden was for every rotten thing that’s happened to this country up to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby. He said that when the China Virus ™ hit we launched the largest national mobilization since World War II against it, which was one of the most obvious lies in the series. I mean, contrary to liberal critics, Trump DID acknowledge the virus Thursday, it’s just that everything he said was misread statistics and bullshit. It’s really amazing how much time he did spend on it with this speech, so it’s that much more amazing how much bullshit there was. I mean, the deeper he got into the speech, the more it had to be fact-checked.

Trump self-righteously pandered to the crowd of fetus fetishists about how Democrats do not protect unborn life while being responsible for more deaths outside the womb than any other president. He said “Biden is a Trojan Horse for socialism”, years after declaring that the white nationalists at Charlottesville were “very fine people”. He praised the police and said “we must never allow mob rule” which presumably wasn’t a reference to that kid with the AR-15 in Kenosha. He said that “the far left” wants to make you say the things you know aren’t true, which is presumably why so many more Republicans spoke at the Democratic convention than the other way around.

With his stance becoming more of a lazy slump as the speech wore on, Trump continued to brag and promise and slander. He talked about Americans of the past and their Bibles and covered wagons and how they did things with style, and confidence and flair, and all the other things Trump doesn’t have. And he said “I am very, very proud to be the nominee of the Republican Party.” And that was it. I think. He might still be talking.

In any event the cameras cut away to a beautiful fireworks display around the Washington Monument, rudely interrupted by giant glittery explosions spelling “TRUMP” and “2020” which was about the most on-point moment of the whole event.

….

And the fundraiser blinked his eyes – about twenty times – and asked Gilbert, “So… what are you calling this political party?”
“THE ARISTOCRATS!!!”

So we have passed through the 2020 Democratic National Convention, or the first stage of bowel movements in the Taco Bell overload that is a presidential campaign season.

These are some of my impressions:

I seem to be in the minority, but I think the whole thing would have been better if Julia-Louis Dreyfus had been hosting every night. Now, with the “reconciliation” theme they seemed to be going with, I can see why they wouldn’t want the star of the notoriously acerbic and foul-mouthed Veep on stage the whole time, but some rage at the political clusterfuck is totally justified, and her tone was a nice balance to the overall sweetness of the whole affair.

The DNC got substantially worse ratings than it did in 2016, which frankly stands to reason, because as with so many other media events in the age of coronavirus, it loses something without a crowd. On the other hand, media observers really liked what they saw. This isn’t a contradiction. These duopoly political conventions have been nothing more than “infomercials” advertising a result that was pre-determined by primaries for years. This year, the Democrats actually worked with that, with taped musical pieces and other media events that are designed more for TV than a live audience. This extended to the traditional roll call of states announcing their delegates, which were done by remote on location from the actual states. This played well on camera and a lot of critics thought that they should make this change permanent.

Substantively, the need to play to the “cool” medium also affected the speeches given by the headliners, such that few people (other than Kamala Harris) tried the traditional approach of speaking at a lectern with a set of timed applause lines. I think this change born of necessity worked very well. And it worked best for the final speech of Joe Biden, who is no one’s idea of a master orator.

But at one point, Biden said: “I have some idea how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in the middle of your chest and you feel like you’re being sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes. But I’ve learned two things: First, your loved one may have left this earth, but they’ll never leave your heart. They’ll always be with you. You’ll always hear them.”

Now, I don’t care who you are, or if you believe in an afterlife, but that just hits home.

Joe Biden’s people keep using certain terms to praise him: “Empathy.” “He listens.” “He knows what it’s like.” Joe Biden and his family keep referring to the death of his son Beau, and the earlier death of his first wife and daughter, because he still seems to feel that loss, and it still seems to inform him. And I think that a lot of people are going to gravitate to that, especially at this point in time.

You could be cynical and say that Biden is just milking the sympathy factor, but if you really want to be cynical, the fact is that he CAN and he DOES.

You could never see Donald Trump making a similar appeal on the basis of personal confession – or at least, it wouldn’t be as convincing – because Donald Trump has invested so much of his life and his public image in playing the invincible Sun King, moving from victory to victory, who never has anything bad happen to him. Bad things only happen to those other people. This despite the fact that Trump HAS had his own tragedies, like the death of his parents from lingering illness, or the recent death of his brother, but I don’t he could gain as much sympathy from the average voter with such a confession of loss. Especially since Trump’s main coping mechanism seems to be golfing.

And that goes towards something that Barack Obama said in his DNC speech: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.” Trump is fundamentally lazy and stupid, and he has become that much lazier and stupider by his unbroken chain of success, because he has never had to learn how to change course, and now that events have finally turned against him and he needs to change his approach, he doesn’t know how.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t keep at least half an eye on the Republican National Convention, if only for the “Bearded Lady and Jo-Jo The Dogfaced Boy” factor of watching Nick Sandmann from the Lincoln Memorial standoff, and the Mr. and Mrs. Karen who stood outside their home with firearms during a Black Lives Matter protest this June. To say nothing of even more ridiculous speakers, such as Matt Gaetz, Joni Ernst, and of course, Donald Trump.

Somehow I doubt their sky-is-falling cluckings that Western Civilization is DOOOOMED if we don’t goosestep in line behind Trump will appeal to a country that has already had the sky fall on them under Trump.

In fact, there are already signs that Trump’s big strategy to pinch out a victory – cheat by cutting off mail service – may be backfiring. It not only motivates Democrats to find other ways to vote, it unnecessarily angers traditional Republican demographics who may not even want to vote by mail but who still have to get deliveries to rural areas that UPS and FedEx normally don’t cover. And thus if Trump can’t turn things around – and the whole reason things are still this bad is that he cannot or will not change course – then the November attempt to contest the election will go just as well as the attempt to sabotage the Post Office, and Trump will end up commandeering Air Force One for a one-way trip to Moscow, after first looting all the White House silverware.

Look: I am a cynic. I am NOT a liberal. I have more in common with the Republicans than with the people that Democrats normally pitch to, which is part of why this year’s DNC spent so much more time on the NeverTrumpers than the “progressives” who are already aligned with Democrats. And I have no confidence that Joe Biden has any real ability to contain the coronavirus or to rebuild the economy that Trump decimated. But the first day that Joe Biden is president will be the first day that Donald Trump is NOT president, and that in itself will do wonders for our nation’s recovery.

Not too far back, I said “Very soon, and certainly if Trump is re-elected, we are all going to find out what it is like to be black people.”

Guillotine Insurance

Did that seem like a belligerent, or insensitive, or politically incorrect thing to say?

I meant what I said. I do not mean that white people will be discriminated against in the way that Jews and Catholics and Chinese have been discriminated against in this country. I mean that the Trump Organization, and the political party it absorbed in a leveraged buyout, are going to attack the fundamental rights of white people in the same way that black people have been attacked throughout our history.

For example, with voting.

After Joe Biden told people – in April – that resident rump would try to “kick back” the election after previously threatening to veto Post Office funding in order to ‘do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote’, Trump’s handpicked Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, instituted certain reforms this month. DeJoy, who like most of Trump’s appointees has a conflict of interest with the bureaucracy he’s supervising, staged a “Friday night massacre” with a reorganization of leadership positions including a hiring freeze. This was combined with a severe cutback in vote sorting machines and documented cases of the United States Postal Service removing mailboxes from locations across the country.

And while these changes are defended by the Post Office as cost cutting measures, Mr. Trump, in his “I’m too stupid to NOT say the quiet part loud, and it doesn’t matter, because my party will support me even if they see Vladimir Putin bend me over a desk on live TV” way, said flat-out on Fox Business Network August 14 that “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” The backlash to that was such that on Tuesday the 19^th, DeJoy, now facing a congressional hearing and investigations, told Congress that he is suspending the planned post office changes until after the election, apparently on the assumption he will still have a job. In a statement, DeJoy announced he was reversing course “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail,” which sort of implies that that wasn’t a consideration before.

Now, maybe that seems like he’s backing down, maybe he’s just backing down for the sake of appearances. But it certainly doesn’t contradict the axiom that “character is what you do when nobody’s looking.”

Why was this a bad move? Because unlike, say, Brian Kemp’s election stunts, screwing the USPS doesn’t just affect poor and black people. It doesn’t just affect people who were planning to vote by mail. It affects the mailed payrolls and insurance documents of businesses. It affects the medical documents and prescriptions of veterans. It affects Social Security payments. You know who that affects? Old people. OLD WHITE people.

You knew this was not going to work when the first sign of pushback was when a hard-right Republican Congressman and Democrat Senator got together to stop the removal of mailboxes in Montana.

Do you know how scared Republicans have to be to pull that in MONTANA?

Montana and Idaho are where the Aryan Nations and their fellow travelers love to pilgrimage. It’s their Perfect Place. Even better than Argentina, cause there’s no Jews or Spanish speakers.

For all the cheap excuses of cost-cutting and how “unfair” and “rigged” mail voting is (for everybody except Trump), you know damn well Trump wouldn’t be doing this shit if he was 5 points ahead of Biden in the polls or even at margin of error. He’d be crowing about how invincible he is and how great his polls are. The fact that he’s doing this even before his party convention betrays his own belief that he’s a goner because he can’t turn things around, and that’s because he simply doesn’t know how.

The strategy, to the extent that Trump’s baby-shark brain is capable of formulating one, is like this: Just create as much chaos as possible to undermine the credibility of the entire election process so he can bullshit his way out of losing an election just like he and his party of enablers bullshitted their way out of impeachment. The problem being, the council deciding his fate is now a lot bigger and more diverse than the US Senate.

Not just that, I think Banana Republicans have severely underestimated just how much rage the Democrats are carrying over having lost one Electoral College race with a popular vote majority 16 years prior and then the last election to a candidate they considered far more “deplorable” than George Bush. Such anti-(d)emocratic results, while perfectly fair and square under the Constitution, are not only counter-intuitive, they offend the Democrats’ need to see themselves as the heroes of America’s story. So some of them are spoiling for a fight, and the best way to give them one is to steal the election in such a way that Democrats can actually PROVE you’re doing it.

The Lamestream Media has this cliche that is nevertheless very true when they talk about Trump’s 2016 victory: They say he drew an inside straight. That is, he got a lucky set of cards that he was extremely unlikely to ever draw again, and he has in fact not done so. First and foremost of these: HILLARY CLINTON IS NOT RUNNING. It has been a lot harder for Trump to tag and slander Joe Biden, because he doesn’t have nearly as many negatives as Clinton, and because Biden himself seems like a clumsy, politically incorrect “straight shooter” who appeals to the kind of people that Trump appeals to.

The fact that Biden doesn’t have Clinton’s negatives means that the “third” party option is now much less attractive. (Sorry, Jo Jorgensen.)

Moreover, Trump no longer has the negative advantage of not being the president, and not being in the ruling party. He can no longer go to black and working-class white neighborhoods and go, “What the hell have you got to lose?” Because now we know. He cannot ask the famous question Ronald Reagan asked about Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Is Herman Cain better off now than he was four years ago?

No, because the other factor is that no other president would ignore the spread of a virus from outside the continent cause “I like the numbers where they are“. No other president would have a Minister Without Portfolio who worked on a plan to address the coronavirus and supposedly threw it out because the virus was mainly killing people in Democrat-led states, as if a virus cares any more about political parties or state lines than it does about the Chinese border. And Trump, who is certainly not the cause of the “China virus” but IS the proximate cause for why we have lost a greater percentage of our population than any other Western country, is asking us to reward his performance with another term.

Are you going to reward that?? Are you going to reward the guy who is the reason you got laid off? Who is the reason people are getting foreclosed? Who is the reason your Governor is making you wear a mask? Who is the reason you can’t go to the hair salon? The movie theater? The buffets? You want four more years of the last six months??

I don’t think so, Tim.

And none of that may make a bit of difference because Trump’s singular advantage combines with the advantage he previously did not have: He’s Donald Trump, and he’s the president.

In his private career, Trump always has acted on the principle that “it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.” As president, he combines that with what could be called The Nixon Principle: “If the President does it, it’s NOT illegal.” And flatly stated, if at least one-third of the US Senate are party stooges willing to enable you, then effectively nothing you do can be illegal.

In this case, we’ve got a president deliberately holding up funding for the Post Office while cutting off the services it is still set to perform on the current budget, saying that mail-in voting is insecure, yet there wouldn’t be a national need for mail-in voting if the Trump Virus wasn’t it making it dangerous to go out in public. And yet, Trump is doing a LOT more to stop mail voting than he is to stop coronavirus.

Why, it’s almost as if Trump is doing everything he can to avoid containing the coronavirus because without a public health crisis, it would be easier for people to vote.

Does that seem like a crazy thing to say? Was it crazy when Joe Biden told people that Trump was going to try to postpone the election? Remember when Biden said Trump would try to screw with mail-in balloting, and people (including his own side) said that was crazy?
For a guy who is assumed by some to be too naive and trusting, Joe Biden seems to have Donald Trump’s number. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to be especially savvy. You just have to realize that any disgusting thing that Donald Trump is accused of is something he either has done or WOULD do just because.

And here is one area where Trump’s approach makes a brutal, even Stalinist, sense. There is a long-term phenomenon in election returns that has entered this year’s public discussion called “blue shift“, where because Democrats and their usual demographics often use provisional ballots – which are not the same as absentee or mail-in ballots, actually – and these ballots are legally counted last. These votes have not only led to a slower count of ballots and thus later election results, the later votes are often most likely to be Democratic, and these “blue” votes made the difference in a lot of 2018 midterm races.

Thus the strategy to undermine the process: If the result is not immediately clear, or seems to lean toward Trump on Election Day, it makes it that much easier for him to whine that the whole thing is “rigged” and gum up the works so he can try to win a technical victory against the public. But that’s not the brutal and Stalinist part.

Because this strategy assumes that his cult will be willing to go out en masse in person to vote for Republicans on Election Day itself so that the results will look better for him on Election Day than they will probably be in the final outcome.

Trump is quite willing to have his core supporters risk sickness and death, and losing those people in the future won’t matter to him as long as he gets to keep being president.

If you Trumpniks have not yet realized how self-absorbed and evil the man you worship is, consider that.

Of course there are some Kool-Aid drinkers who really would risk themselves by voting unmasked for The Leader, but it is still possible to go to the polling place and take precautions. And again, that depends on whether you’re even able to go to a polling place, which is another area where Banana Republican vote suppression may affect white people too. Not only that, early voting has been a feature in some states (like Nevada) for years, as in before God-Emperor Trump reset the calendar to Year Zero.

And then, the strategy assumes that the Left won’t just call the bluff. In the Democratic National Convention, which matters as much as it normally does, meaning it doesn’t, Michelle Obama exhorted people to cast ballots “in person, if we can“. And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie previously expressed a similar opinion: “The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.”

And on the other side, you had the Tulsa rally. Trump’s “comeback” had a really big crowd, and a really enthusiastic crowd, but it was only one-third the volume of the venue, which meant that for political purposes it was only one-third as big as it needed to be. Empty seats don’t lie. The event proved that Trump really does have a large number of ride-or-die fanatics (emphasis on the ‘die’) but they are almost certainly not in the numbers he had in 2016, and that’s the last card of the inside straight that he doesn’t have. Now maybe the two-thirds of the Tulsa auditorium who would have come out for Trump before corona would be willing to cast a secret ballot, especially if they got access to a mail-in ballot. But then we come to the point that Trump’s special bond with his base is that he shares all of their negative qualities. Thus Trumpniks, in all their boundless self-absorption, have to ask themselves if they truly care about Donald Trump’s welfare any more than he does for theirs.

So on November 3^rd, let’s see who really goes postal.