James Gillen

Feburary 7, 2023

President Joseph Robinette Biden

Good Evening.

My fellow Americans… I had this big, over an hour long speech set up to go, and then I realized it wasn’t gonna make any difference. The State of the Union speech doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t convince anybody who’s not already in the President’s party, it’s just something you have to do, and nobody cares anymore. I mean look, they’ve got Sarah Huckabee Sanders doing the opposition response tonight, which should show you how much Republicans care about serious discussion.

So I threw it out, and, in consultation with Barack Obama’s anger management translator, I’m just going to lay out what I think right now.

I see we’ve got a lot of celebrities in the audience tonight. Like Bono from U2. He’s probably here to steal my rhymes cause he hasn’t come up with anything good since “Vertigo.” No, really. I mean, Bono, if you guys wanted to do a Ramones tribute, why didn’t you do what Motorhead did and write something that actually sounds like a Ramones song?

A lot of people are here cause they’re just expected to be. They don’t wanna be here. Like Samuel Alito. Congratulations on becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, by the way. At least you act like it.

And then there’s Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, I see you guys. Yeah, same to you. Hey, I gotta ask, why are you both wearing the “I’m With Stupid” T-Shirt?
Seriously, Margie, congratulations on becoming Speaker of the House. I know you worked hard for it.

(Looks over his shoulder) I said what I said.

But that kind of gets to why I’m here tonight. If the State of the Union speech serves anything, it’s for the President to lay out where he thinks our country is in the world right now, and the strength of our country, and what we can do to preserve or improve it. And to the point: The state of our Union is strong. But threatened.

And the point I want to make tonight is that none of that threat is really from outside. We are by far the most powerful economy, in the world. We have by far the most powerful military, in the world. We have, this week, set up a 2.2 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine in its defense against Russia. Now, do you remember, the first time Trump got impeached, it was when new President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was asking for military aid to deal with a Russian backed insurgency in his country, and Trump said, sure, you get that money, if you do us a favor. And that favor was doing opposition research against me, before I’d even really started a presidential campaign and before New Hampshire. Funny coincidence, there. And if you remember before that, when Barack was president, Ukraine had this pro-Russian president who got overthrown in a revolution, he fled to Russia, and then as soon as that happened, Russia just walked into Crimea? Another funny coincidence. It’s almost like, you have all these coincidences piling up to a certain result, and it quits looking like coincidence, doesn’t it?

But the fact that we’re in this position with foreign aid now is because of what we did then. We, and the world, are less affected by Russia or another outside actor than how we as a government, as a people, react. And the threat from outside was influenced by our internal response. Just like, the United States is the most powerful economy in the world. It’s often said that if the US gets a cold, other countries get pneumonia. And we’re reaching that point now. We have a decision to make on raising the debt ceiling, and if that’s not done, it affects our credit rating, and that may affect the entire world economy.

Now, I remember when the right wing was serious, that most Republicans didn’t think the federal government should be doing much more than paying to keep the lights on in the Capitol. Problem is, nowadays, what calls itself conservatism doesn’t even want to do that. They’d rather be in the dark. That’s the joke. Like, how many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? None. They’ll just sit in the dark and praise Trump for doing such a great job changing the bulb.

We lost more men on both sides in the US Civil War than in World War I, and barely lost more men in World War II. Nobody is more of a threat to our country’s success and survival than we are. And I’m comparing this situation to the Civil War, and it seems like it’s got a lot of the same motivations.

You laugh, but why were all those guys rioting to stop my election running through the Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags? Some of them probably aren’t old enough to remember Lynyrd Skynyrd.

It’s almost like even now, they don’t want to admit they lost that war. A war where their idea of “freedom” meant the freedom for some men to keep others in bondage. A war where their concept of liberty only applied to people who looked, and thought, and prayed like them. So of course they’re not going to acknowledge the popular vote OR the Electoral College. That would mean acknowledging other people have the same rights they do. That’s the whole thing: They don’t want to live in reality.

It’s all of a piece. They don’t want to work on climate change, cause that would require admitting it’s real. Democrats, we may disagree on how to deal with climate change, but we can look at the water level of Lake Mead, and the Caspian Sea, and see that it’s real. In large part, they don’t want to help Ukraine against Russia, because they don’t want to admit Russia is not our friend. And officially, the Republican Party doesn’t want to admit I’m President. But guys: I’m here. I’M THE PRESIDENT. I’m here, now, giving the State of the Union speech. This is not some telepathic projection from the Reptoids trying to control your mind. You expect me to deal with you? You’re going to have to deal with me.

Yet, the posture of the Republican Party is just carry on, like reality isn’t a thing. You don’t just have Trump refusing to admit I won, you’ve got this Kari Lake in Arizona refusing to admit Katie Hobbs is the governor and not her. I mean, jeez, if that’s really how it works, we should send the Detroit Lions to the Super Bowl and not the Chiefs.

Look, that was just an example. I’m sorry Detroit. You’ve been through so much already.

We have two years left in my term. I have yet to announce officially that I’m running again. Like it makes a difference. Because we know Trump’s running again, and frankly, I’m the best chance of stopping him from getting the nuclear codes back. If I accomplish nothing else- and you all are sure trying to make sure that’s the case – it will be enough.

It would not be such an existential threat if a Republican won an election in the natural political cycle of things, but it is an existential threat when an individual can’t deal with reality. We can see from the example of Putin’s Russia what happens when an unhinged individual has no tether to outside reality and dissenting opinion. He pursues evil policies regardless of the consequences and no matter how many thousands or hundreds of thousands get killed. That has had its own effects on the world economy and standard of living. Imagine if that were us.

Imagine again if we just refused to pay our debts, a lot of which were built up just under the last Administration in four years. That’s going to cause terrible consequences to our standard of living, and worse in the rest of the world. And who do you think people are going to blame? Me, who warned you what would happen if you do it, or you, who want to do it just because I’m here and your guy isn’t?

Like I care. This is Dark Brandon you woke up here.

You really should have learned what happened the last time, and the last three to five times, you did a budget standoff. Everybody blamed you, not the Democrats. You try this again: I’m going to let you do it. And then I’m just gonna watch as you have to sit and stew and hear your constituents bitch about the budget problems YOU created for THEM. And I’m gonna see you come crying to me as if you didn’t know from all those times what would happen. And then I’m gonna tell you again: You want me to deal with you? You’re gonna have to deal with ME.

You are in no position to threaten anybody, with the budget, or with the military, because to paraphrase Ronald Reagan: Government is not the solution. Government, under Republicans, is the problem. Republicans are the reason we can’t get gun legislation. Republicans are the reason we can’t federalize abortion rights. Republicans are why the minimum wage is still less than 8 dollars an hour. You have spent as long as I remember – and that’s a long time – pulling this scam where you run for office saying “government is the problem” and then once you get elected, doing everything you can to prove it.

And if that was still working out for you, you wouldn’t be losing elections in Georgia and Arizona. You wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop Democrats from voting in Georgia and Texas and Florida. You wouldn’t have lost an abortion referendum in Kansas. You know how hard it is for Republicans to lose Kansas?

For as long as I still have, as long as I have to be here, every time you stand in the way of what needs to be done – with that FOUR SEAT majority you have – I’m not gonna cry. I’m not gonna whine. I’m not gonna pretend it isn’t happening. I’m just gonna let you do it, and I’m gonna let you live in your own mess. And then you’re gonna have to come to me. Because you’re standing in the way for the same reason you’re gonna let Trump take over your party again: Because you don’t have any better ideas.

So until you do, I say, in the immortal words of Dr. Dre,

“Fuck y’all. All y’all.”

Thank you, and God Bless America.

It ended up taking a historic fifteen votes for the Republican-majority House of Representatives to finally elect Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California). Decidedly no thanks to Matt Gaetz (BR.-Florida), who supposedly made a deal on Friday with a few other holdouts like Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert to vote “present” and lower the threshold needed for victory. So in order to be extra Drama Queen, Gaetz withheld his vote when called in hopes of being the guy to make the decision, but when roll call came back to him he still voted “present” even once it became clear McCarthy would still end up short. This led to a whole bunch of arguing and haggling in real time on the floor, culminating in Mike Rogers (BR.-Alabama) having to be restrained from reaching over and pasting Gaetz. Rogers’ own colleague, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, joked that “People shouldn’t be drinking, especially when you’re a redneck, on the House floor.” Or as Jeff Foxworthy would say, “if you’re a Republican Congressman… you might be a redneck.”

(After the fact, Rogers and Gaetz made up and apologized to each other. Gaetz actually said we need more cameras in Congress to show what representatives are doing. Well, that’s one thing I can actually agree with Gaetz on. At least Congress can be entertaining, if it’s too much for them to pass laws and do their jobs.)

But that seemed to be just enough embarrassment that other Republicans got the last holdouts like Matt Rosendale (BR.-Montana) to at least switch from “anybody but this guy” to “present” and McCarthy got nominated after midnight on what was then Saturday morning. It was always questionable whether doing the same thing over and over again would ever work, but apparently McCarthy’s approach of just caving on everything to everybody put the burden on his opponents as to why they still needed to oppose him. Gaetz was actually quoted as saying he was having trouble maintaining his leverage because he ran out of things to ask for. And really, I think it just came down to the same reason the Greedy Old Puritans are still following Donald Trump: They don’t have the imagination to come up with new ideas, no matter how clearly the current ideas have failed.

After the basic formalities, the leader of the opposition got to the podium. Hakeem Jeffries (D.-New York) had gotten all 212 Democrats to vote for him on every one of these ballots. And he gave an oration that was the exact opposite of a concession speech. It quickly became famous for the part where he said, “We will never compromise our principles. We’ll always put American values over autocracy, benevolence over bigotry, the Constitution over the cult, democracy over demagogues, economic opportunity over extremism, freedom over fascism …” and it became clear around that point that he was going to be making these comparisons with every letter of the alphabet, ending with “Yes We Can over ‘you can’t do it’, and zealous representation over zero sum confrontation.”

So Jeffries proved that, unlike Republicans, he knows all 26 letters, not just Q and Z.

Then McCarthy finally got to speak. On paper, it was a decent speech, and points to him if he wrote it himself (which a lot of politicians don’t). But his delivery was a dull, plaintive whine that explains why hardly anybody has respect for him. One key point was where he said, “If this week proved anything, it’s this: I never give up.” But the joke is that in order to get the status of power, he had to give up everything that gives the Speaker power, like giving the caucus the right to challenge him with just one vote. It’s sort of like if you had one of those royal succession wars like in Westeros or real-world France or Spain, and one candidate makes deals with the courtiers and rival nobles to give them all the powers of the kingship in exchange for being allowed to hold the title, and he also has to be the piss boy who runs around the court with a bucket for anyone who wants to relieve themselves. Yes, you’re the pissboy, but you get to wear the crown. It’s good to be the King.

The line of the night was probably in a Daily Beast article: “I just think we should check in,” quipped Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), “and make sure McCarthy still has two kidneys.”

The first bill the McCarthy House passed was an attempt to reverse the recent funding increase for the IRS. Among the first business of the week was a bill to prosecute abortionists if they do not attempt to resuscitate fetuses that are born alive, when there is already a 2002 federal law for that effect. The Party of Trump now wants to defund the Department of Homeland Security because they allegedly aren’t securing the border, when the whole reason the agency even exists was because the last Republican government before Trump wanted another government bureaucracy to club brown-skinned people with. Not only that, the original Open Gaming License is no longer an enforceable document and anything you make under the new License means Wizards of the Coast has rights to all your stuff.

The “Freedom Caucus” might think they won something, but really, what they got was what Democrats got when they finally took the Senate from Mitch McConnell: the most technical of majorities in which one dissent can kill any initiative because dissent in the ranks means they aren’t really a majority, and in order to have the advantages of one, they have to let a couple of prima donnas (like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) turn them all into the supporting cast of their personal opera.

This may or may not matter as much as it did with the Democrats, because Joe Biden actually managed to work with the prima donnas and other legislators to get things done in the stretch. But there was still a lot that “progressives” wanted and couldn’t get. I say it won’t matter as much to Republicans, because they don’t care about boojie shit like “legislation” and “public service” and would rather just stage witch hunts in committee rooms in the afternoon then go on Fox News after 8 pm to brag about how butch they are.
And it seems we don’t even know what Kevin gave away to be King Pissboy. For all the talk that Gaetz and others make about “democracy” and “transparency”, Axios reported that the real details of how the House operates under McCarthy are determined by a “private document that only some House Republicans have seen and others refuse to talk about“. Even conservatives like Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Axios “What I am raising hell about is whatever potential backroom deals may have been done.” So you can imagine what Democrats are thinking. I’m not sure what the Republicans have to hide. I don’t see what could be more discrediting than supporting Kevin McCarthy.

Some of the Republican ideas, like a committee to investigate our dependence on China, and a demand that legislation not be voted on without 72 hours notice, are not bad at all. But even when Republicans could count to eleven without pulling down their pants, you could never get them to do anything that would actually reduce the size of government (again, see the Department of Homeland Security) or protect individual freedom, let alone cut spending and taxes in enough proportion to dent the deficit. So naturally they’re less believable on old “conservative” issues like libertarianism and national defense and more believable on Trumpnik issues like abortion prohibition and pursuing grudges. Like with Ukraine, where their demand to cut funding to the Zelenskyy government is less about fiscal prudence or isolationism and more about the fact that their Master’s Master would rather that he get to complete his genocide without anyone fighting back.

The only problem with letting the kids run the playpen for two years is that we still need two houses of Congress to pass a budget, and most of these brats would rather not pass a budget. Again, not because of any fiscal conservative desire to force Democrats to impose some budget discipline, but because FUCK YOU, That’s Why. They seem to forget that every single time that Republicans forced a government shutdown over the debt, even under Trump, the public relations hit and bureaucratic consequences were such that it always weakened the Republican position in the long run, which is why such standoffs have always ended. But then if Republicans had a long-term memory, they would remember that Joe Biden won the election. As it is, everyone is scared that continued standoff would wreck the US government’s “full faith and credit” and backing of our national debt, which already took a hit in 2011 during the Obama Administration. And if a budget standoff has the global effects that all the conventional thinkers fear, that will end up wrecking the world economy. And as with previous standoffs, voters aren’t going to blame Democrats even if a Democrat is president. Everyone assumes that certain seats are “safe” for Republicans but if they prove themselves to be sufficiently malign and incompetent, even some of those safe Republican states and districts might fall to Democrats, as Georgia and Arizona did in the last few cycles.

At that point Mike Rogers is going to have to get in line behind Mitch McConnell, Dan Crenshaw, and a few other Republicans to kick Matt Gaetz’ ass.

Assuming of course that such cockamamie ideas can even get off the ground. After all, there’s nothing in the Republicans’ little agreement (from what we know of it) that says that a Democrat can’t be the one to call a no-confidence vote on the Speaker. But then they know that if they called that play, the Republicans might go back to conference and find a Speaker with balls.

Like Nancy Pelosi.

“Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly,covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. “

• Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVII

So all the Democrats were fretting and all the Republicans were gloating about all the laws they would get to pass and all the investigations they would get to start against Democrats once they had control over the House of Representatives this term. Except, officially, they’re not in control. Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California) was the designated candidate for Speaker and did get an overwhelming majority of his caucus to make him leader of his party, but unlike the Senate (where unwritten tradition apparently allows the leader of the majority party to run the whole show just because), Article I of the Constitution says the House has to elect its leader by consensus of the entire chamber, including the opposition. Because the Speaker is the presiding officer, no other procedures, including the swearing in of members, can begin until the Speaker is chosen. And since the Republican majority in the House, including the people who voted against McCarthy’s leadership, are only ten more than the Democrats, those opponents only need five votes to torpedo McCarthy’s Speaker bid. Well, guess what. The first round of votes, all 212 Democrats voted for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries (New York) and 19 Republicans went against McCarthy. Since then, they have gone through the same result, as of Thursday night, ten more times. Well, not exactly the same result. In the fourth and subsequent ballots, Victoria Spartz (R.-Indiana) voted “present” which lowered the threshold McCarthy needed but ultimately meant one less vote in his favor since none of the defectors went to his side. On Friday, McCarthy still fell short on a twelfth and thirteenth vote, but got more than ten Republicans back to his side, perhaps because today is the second anniversary of their Viceroy trying to seize control of our government by force, and they wanted to honor the occasion.

This after McCarthy went to any and every length to make sure he had the whole Republican Party behind him in his quest for the Speaker’s office. He admitted on tape after the Trump Riots (TM), “I’ve had it with this guy. What he did is unacceptable” but McCarthy continued to support Trump’s claims that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was illegitimate. For example, he had signed an amicus brief supporting Trump’s case in Texas v. Pennsylvania, which the Supreme Court refused to hear on the grounds that one state cannot contest the election process of another state. Hours after the Trump Riots, McCarthy was one of the Republicans who voted against certifying Biden’s win in two states. On January 28, McCarthy appeared at Mar-a-Lago to take a picture with Trump, an act that the mainstream media described as “kissing Trump’s ring”, since they’re operating on the rules of basic cable. He aceeded to the wishes of Matt Gaetz (BR.-Florida) and other Trumpniks who demanded the excommunication of Liz Cheney (R.-Wyoming) from House leadership for opposing Trump’s auto-coup. This as Kevin insisted, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election”. In June 2021, McCarthy opposed the creation of a bipartisan House commission to investigate the Capitol riots, threatening the committee assignments of any Republicans who participated, inadvertently giving a free hand to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to have her own committee with two Republicans, Cheney and retiring Congressman Adam Kinzinger (Illinois) who were already on the outs with the Church of Trump. Which is part of how the committee got recordings that both McCarthy and Cheney had participated in, which might be why Gaetz and the other Trumpniks won’t back him as leader, since they have no more reason to trust what he tells them than Cheney had to trust what he told her.

McCarthy is – what’s the term I’m looking for here? – Ah yes. A “bitch-ass nigga.”

One of my Facebook friends posted that Kevin must have a thing for public humiliation. I said, “I figured that out from his actions immediately after January 6.”

One of the journalists reporting on this for MSDNC said that Kevin McCarthy’s problem is that he can’t change being Kevin McCarthy. No, I would say the problem is the exact opposite. Kevin McCarthy has changed being Kevin McCarthy lots of times. Nobody trusts him, nobody likes him, nobody respects him, and no one will follow him.

Apparently Kevin didn’t figure out that if you’ve already conceded everything to the other party, you have no leverage to make them hold to their side of the deal. But among Kevin’s myriad vices, the foremost of them is stupidity.

The spiritual lesson I get from Kevin McCarthy is that you should never crave a thing so desperately that you make it obvious to others how much you want it. Because then they know how to make you dance on their string.

He’d already agreed to bring back the old House rule (prudently tanked by Pelosi) that members could bring a vote of no confidence in the Speaker if it had just five supporters. After the sixth ballot, McCarthy agreed that McCarthy’s leadership PAC would not spend any money on “safe” seats for Congress, meaning he would not support any candidate who was opposed to the Trumpniks. He has also now agreed that a no-confidence vote only requires one Congressman, so basically anything he does is subject to liberum veto. What is liberum veto? Well, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this was a right of any man in the Sejm (senate) to hold up any legislation at will, meaning one person could thwart an otherwise overwhelming consensus. This weakness in the system made “Polish parliament” an insult term in Western Europe and is considered one of the reasons that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth declined and died, because Russia (among other countries) figured out they could buy the vote of any Polish senator to stop the Commonwealth from doing anything in its best interest, including stopping Russia from undermining and seizing their territory.

Why am I bringing up Russia buying legislators to act against their own country? No reason.

McCarthy is in a way just as serious about government as his opponents. Any such deal isn’t worth the toilet paper it is written on and will soon be flushed down the john after being used for its natural purpose.

He certainly doesn’t have any serious policy differences with Trumpniks, and Trump himself is pushing for his speakership. But all the pundits cackling over the House defiance of Trump’s dictate fail to realize (as with his endorsement of COVID vaccine) that his influence is entirely negative. Trump just gave a role model to a party base that was already driven by oppositional defiant disorder. When Trump, in his own long-term interest, decides to support the structure rather than tear it down, suddenly the brats don’t listen to him. I mean when you let them get drunk every night, they’re not going to like it when you tell them to switch to milk.

Which is why Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz admitted when called out by McCarthy that he didn’t care if Hakeem Jeffries ended up getting the speakership, and why Gaetz was seen on the House floor in conversations with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in her previous terms was one of the people who thought Nancy Pelosi wasn’t leftist enough.

What it is is that these guys want all the freedom to be bomb throwers and all the privileges of being in the establishment. They want all the rights and none of the responsibilities. They want to have it both ways. In short, they’re Republicans.

Anti-McCarthy Trumpnik Lauren Boebert engaged in a semi-serious discussion with Stephanie Ruhle on MSDNC, the same week she had a discussion with Sean Hannity that was actually more combative, and you know, give Boebert points for showing up, given that most Republicans don’t see going on MSDNC as being worth the effort, and most of that network’s hosts agree. But one of the points she was trying to make is that for years, no one in the House leadership, in either party, really cared about conservative concerns like balancing the budget, and the only way for that to happen was for the “radicals” to use their leverage.

Reason Magazine had at least one web article this week taking this premise at face value, mocking Mainstream Media for saying these guys only care about personal power when they actually have real procedural concerns, or that they are only serving Trump when the leaders (including Boebert) have specifically gone against him to oppose McCarthy. “None of Mr. McCarthy’s opponents reversed course after receiving calls from Mr. Trump encouraging them to do so,” Lerer and Epstein note. If they are not in it for him, the Times suggests, they must be in it for themselves, because they cannot possibly be trying to accomplish what they say they are trying to accomplish—a proposition so absurd that it is not even worth considering.”

Yes, Charlie Brown, and this time I’ll keep the football on the ground FOR SURE.

The fact that Republicans – and a lot of non-Republicans – had serious questions about how Democrats were running things didn’t mean Republicans had a better idea in 2016. What is absurd is thinking that “conservatives” are any more concerned with fiscal restraint and regular order than they were last year, or when Republicans were last in charge. What is absurd is watching Republican majorities balloon the deficit that much more than Democrats who actually advertise how much they tax and spend. The last time a Republican Speaker seriously tried to change things was Newt Gingrich with the Contract With America, and we all know how that went. The reason the Mainstream Media are so quick to assume the rebels are more concerned with power and privilege than good government is because they have had years and years to watch this process, and know not to take any of these presentations in good faith, unlike Reason Magazine.

Taking the rebels seriously is to act under the assumption that these Republicans think that elected office is a public responsibility, when they think that the purpose of elected office is an opportunity to be the Christian conservative version of GG Allin. But then, given that Allin’s real legal name was Jesus Christ, the analogy may be that much more apt.

But the fact that a small minority is holding up the process underlies the point that the vast majority of House Republicans really do want McCarthy, or at least see him as the best of options. But because of their weak margin of superiority, without the holdouts, Republicans are actually outnumbered by the 212 Democrats voting consistently for Hakeem Jeffries. Nobody considers that if the Democrats are the known element and the Gaetz types are never going to vote McCarthy, the main Republicans actually have the power to make a decision. If they can’t get enough people to go McCarthy they can go outside the cycle and find a conservative that the Gaetz types do not hate, or, some Republicans, even just six, can vote for Jeffries, or Republicans can move for plurality vote, which would either lead to a Jeffries win or scare the radicals with that possibility and convince them to go with the main Republicans’ choice.

But that would mean taking a stand, even if it’s for somebody who is on paper more conservative than McCarthy, and the “normal” Republicans don’t want to alienate either McCarthy or the insurrectionists, just like McCarthy wants to be the leader of “normal” Republicans and also of the insurrectionists.

So they want all the freedom to be bomb throwers and all the privileges of being in the establishment. They want all the rights and none of the responsibilities. They want to have it both ways. In short, they’re Republicans.

And if this is the behavior you can expect from the sane and sensible Republicans, it’s no wonder the lunatics are running the asylum.

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

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

-Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today propagandist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That might actually be a Happy New Year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGAGA!

Isn’t that Lady Gaga’s final form?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HaHaHa.

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re still working this out.