Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob
That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything,
Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only,
Bread and circuses.
Juvenal, Satires
I had said at least once that the “original sin” of the US Constitution is not slavery, horrible as it was, because slavery could have been, and mostly was, eliminated by the constitutional process. But the Founders, deliberately rejecting the British parliamentary system, also rejected its party politics and assumed them to be an aberration rather than the political default. So instead of having a Constitution that either accounted for partisanship or sought to eliminate it, they simply assumed that all races would be conducted on a non-partisan basis, which in the first few elections after President Washington proved not to be the case. Over the years, the two parties, whichever they happened to be, adapted the system to serve them rather than the other way around, which is how, among other things, the authoritarian party enacted Jim Crow laws and other institutions to preserve the spirit if not the letter of slavery. The party system is also how, for instance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was able to effectively veto President Barack Obama’s last nominee for the Supreme Court by preventing the nomination from even getting to the floor, where it might have passed. Nowhere in Article I of the Constitution does it give the Senate Majority Leader that power, perhaps because Article I says nothing establishing an office of Senate Majority Leader.
In fact, the problem is even deeper than that. The problem isn’t just that the Founders failed to check a partisan tendency that led to the preservation of our aristocratic groups, in many respects they sought to do this very thing. Followers of Antiquity, they rejected existing models ranging from the Iroquois Confederacy to the Confederation Helvetica, instead modeling the new Constitution on the Roman Republic, even knowing how it ended up. Like Rome, the structure is based on a Senate composed of an aristocratic, land-holding class, with some accomodation for the greater populace. And Rome was supposed to have most of its government done via the Senate, with its executive (consul) being limited to a few functions for specific purposes, but as the senatorial families squabbled with each other, they ended up turning more and more power to the executive just to get anything done, which is how the consul became a Dictator, then a Caesar, then an Imperator, and finally an absolute monarch.
This might seem familiar.
So it really doesn’t surprise me that America could turn into another Roman Empire, since that model is partly baked in. But I am still a patriotic American, and frankly, I find it a Goddamn insult that our first dynastic monarch could be an inbred slug that would make the Senators who approved Elagabalus retch.
There is this one politics show in the UK called “The Rest is Politics” that had a segment discussing “The Positives of a Trump Presidency”. The YouTube clip lasted 1 minute 15 seconds.
There will be some time to go over exactly what Democrats did wrong, and where they can go from here. If, as in the last elections both for and against Trump, people were dissatisfied with the party in power, Democrats ought to have a chance to come back. The problem is they may not get the chance. The model of “post liberal” or “illiberal” government is not to start martial law on Day One, it’s to keep all the trappings of a multiparty republic but to marginalize all opposition so that they can never get any real power. That’s what they did in Hungary and Venezuela (not to mention Russia) and it’s what they’re going to do here. We know this because in some states they already have.
Specifically, in Florida this election, there were state questions on the ballot, one being Question 3 (legalizing marijuana) and Question 4 (legalizing the right to your own uterus) and each got over 56 percent support, but in DeSantis Florida, you need 60 percent for an amendment to pass. A clear majority isn’t enough.
That’s the model. DeSantis Land is actually the best we can expect. And if as seems likely, the House remains Republican, there won’t be anybody stopping these guys from doing what they want to do. Certainly not the Supreme Court.
The problem with saying “Orange Man Bad” is not that it isn’t true, it’s that no one wanted to hear it. Yeah, maybe nobody cared that liberals were all offended that Trump used R-rated language and fellated a mic on stage. That’s part of the appeal. Because punk rock may not sell records anymore, but it’s great for politics. Saying that Trump is a fascist is true, but it’s also irrelevant. Because nobody cares if the government is fascist as long as the economy works. And you know, fair enough. The problem isn’t that you could make a case for a hypothetical Republican or for Trump in his first term (and I could), it’s that Trump in the here and now does not justify that argument.
To some extent if you were to judge the Trump economy only before COVID, you could say that it was a better economy than the Biden/Harris inflationary economy, and that would make a Trump presidency better. But there’s two problems: One, the wonderful Trump economy was actually wrecked by Trump himself, because of his fiasco response to COVID, and two, his main economic policy for the second term is a broad-based tariff program that would effectively shift the tax burden from the wealthiest to the middle class by forcing them to pay higher prices for goods, which pretty much everybody but Trump knows would be disastrous for the economy.
You could have had your hypothetical perfect Barack-Obama-meets-Jack-Kennedy Democrat running against Trump and it wouldn’t have mattered against a media and public that idolized Trump precisely because of his flaws. They support him because he’s vulgar. They support him because he’s ignorant. They voted for him because he hates everybody else.
We decided to have this guy, with his cotton-candy hair, circus peanut skin and retarded toad grin, saying that THIS is what WE want, because THAT is what we think we ARE.
After all, this IS a democracy. NOT a republic.
A comedian I follow on Facebook posted: “I’m sorry to say it, but the best way to increase the median IQ of this country is to have another pandemic.” And I think he’s right.
See, despite all the changes to my own politics, I still define myself as more right-wing than left-wing. For one thing, we have a party based on altruism and political correctness, and look where that got us. But I actually describe myself as a Social Darwinist. Which is exactly why I am against fascism. You would think otherwise, since we think of the two as synonymous. But in biology, Darwin meant “survival of the fittest” to mean “survival of the species best adapted to its environment.” The phrase is a misnomer because it’s meant to endorse “survival of the most fascist.” But fascism, social controls, using force to defy reality, are the exact opposite of adapting to the environment. And the results on the Right were a stagnating economy and living conditions even before going to war. And left-wing collectivism in the communist countries just meant the decline took place over decades instead of years. Darwinism, applied to society, ought to mean the culture (not the ethnic group) best capable of surviving and adapting to the world. But that requires systems that are accountable and capable of responding to information, as opposed to denying information to preserve an ideological agenda.
I had mentioned previously that we have a media environment that created a society where people not only don’t know the difference between reality and media, but don’t want to know. I had also said in 2020 that some people actually want a mass collapse and die-off to clear out the rot. It’s the only explanation for why so many voters actively opposed the one party that still believes in preserving the system. The system isn’t working for them. So rather than fix it, let’s just blow it up.
And when you don’t have a public infrastructure, you don’t have a health system, you don’t have disaster relief, and government serves no purpose except forcing you to pay taxes to support the already rich, you find out whether or not you can survive on just your resources.
Survival of the fittest.
I’m cold about this, but apparently some people need to learn things the hard way. We have developed an environment where people think that we have always had rule of law and social supports and therefore that’s not going to change. But that stuff takes maintenance, and it takes effort. It can be destroyed by our decision making. And you can’t demand radical change and not get radical consequences.
And if you decide you don’t want “the system”, there are consequences, and you’re about to suffer them. And so will everyone around you who knew better. And unlike the Germans in 1945, you won’t get to cry and say you weren’t warned. Because they didn’t have an example from history. This country can’t even learn from four years ago. And the Trump from four years ago is the best we can expect. And because of Trump at his best, over 300K people died from an easily preventable virus. You think the next four years will be better? Well, for some reason, I’m not very optimistic.
One way or another, it won’t be long now. And as we go into the last few days before Election Day, things are still too close to call in the presidential race, and, after all we have seen of Trump, he is still gaining in some polls and early voting. How could this be? Well, two causes come to my mind:
One, God is real, and he hates us all.
But even more important than that, it’s because the American public is deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply,
D
E
E
P
L
Y
STOOpid.
If you don’t believe me, just check out those Jordan Klepper interviews of Trump voters on The Daily Show or YouTube. Or even better, look up the “Jaywalking” segments of the Tonight Show. Jay Leno left TV years and years ago, but that was also years before Trump became a politician, so all you have to do is look at those interviewees and realize that the American public has become even stupider than that.
But the impression I’m getting in all this is actually the same as I got in the last midterms, namely that the press, in its coverage and its polling, is engaging in malpractice, and yet even with them doing their damnedest to sell Trump, the other half of the problem with Kamala Harris and the Democrats not being able to sell the deal is that Americans can’t stand her party, for reasons completely independent of how bad the Republicans are. In 2022, the “red wave” turned into more of a trickle. But now the party of lemmings has their Hero God Emperor on the ballot, and if the Lamestream Media is not clearly declaring the danger in this, it’s because Trump is largely their creation, as is his audience, which they are loathe to lose.
Journalistic Malpractice
It should be obvious why we use terms like “the rule of law” and say that the premise of a democratic republic is that people respect the results of elections. You can’t have a government otherwise. You certainly can’t have a democracy, OR a republic or whatever you want to call a free country if a minority seizes control by force. Yet that is what Trump tried to do in 2021, and ever since he has been saying the election was rigged and stolen, despite all legal recounts and evidence to the contrary. And instead of removing him from office after January 6, Republicans now hold his position as the core profession of faith that you have to believe if you want to stay in the religious cult that used to be the Party of Lincoln.
There is a reason that Nazis and Communists don’t win elections in this country, because everyone realizes what their end goal is, and even if they did get some voters, they certainly wouldn’t get any media support. But because Trump and his sponsors have done a takeover on our only “real” notDemocrat party, everyone in the establishment thinks that they are now obliged to treat them as legitimate when their Leader has not exactly been hiding his sympathies with Hitler and with modern dictators, and the thought leaders of his party are basically the right-wing version of a Leninist cadre that works with the system only until they can control the instruments of force.
Therefore given Trump’s demand to throw out the results of elections and surrender everything to his authority, he should not be given any official legitimacy as a candidate, and the mainstream media organizations (and non-mainstream podcasts) should not be giving him or his campaign any coverage or audience. And that means not letting them do interviews or go on your TV shows, and YES, that means all the members of a previously respectable party who are still going along with the lie of their leader.
In a free country, you can’t ban those parties, prevent them from holding rallies or stop people from voting for them if they get on the ballot, but you don’t give them any comfort or legitimacy. Moreover, every public resource has to be devoted into educating people as to why voting for a communist or Nazi lover is bad and why history shows such politicians are bad for the countries that vote for them, not to mention their neighbors.
(If you’re wondering why this needs to be hammered into everybody’s heads, go up and see the point after ‘God is real, and he hates us all.’)
But in the past month, we have been getting increasingly frequent news of Trump cancelling interviews and engagements, as well as refusing another Harris debate and an interview with 60 Minutes. And then there was that thing where he was supposed to be holding a town hall with Kristi Noem but when people started fainting in a stuffy room, he decided to turn the whole thing over to playing music on the PA system while he alternated between swaying in place and doing his jerking-off-two-men-at-once dance. For about 40 minutes.
If we kept getting news like this about Joe Biden, the “liberal media” would be on a non-stop agenda to pressure him to end his campaign. We know this because they DID.
If the media culture insists that there are some rules that everyone has to follow, and there are some red lines that cannot be crossed, and YET they let Trump cross them with impunity, that is if not overt bias, cognitive dissonance.
But then you look at some of the actual early voting returns, which can’t show how people specifically voted but do show party registration… and it’s STILL tight. The Nevada Independent has been showing rural Republican counties outvoting Democratic Clark County (Las Vegas area) in early returns, and it’s looking like all Democrats can do to maximize turnout in the next week and Election Day, cause that’s what it’s going to take to win the state for Harris.
Because the Democratic Party under Biden was not that popular going into 2024, the main reason Joe won in 2020 was cause of Trump Virus ™, and while Harris has done a great job of presenting herself to the media and her supporters (compared to Biden), she is still running into the sexism that helped Trump win against Clinton and the anti-black racism that inspired Trump to run in the first place.
That would be one thing if there weren’t so many Black and Hispanic voters who have turned off to the Democrats because the economy that Democrats say is so great for Wall Street isn’t working out so well for the working class. In 2022, the middle 20 percent of income earners were down 1 percent in income from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. And recent ads have been hammering Harris on support for immigration, and for supporting the right of transgender prisoners to get gender reassignment on the public dime. That isn’t necessarily popular with non-white demographics either.
At the same time, while Republicans want to project their opponents as being some tranny Muslim commie conspiracy organized by George Soros, if Democrats keep the Senate they probably wouldn’t even do anything so radical as eliminating the filibuster. Which they would need to do in order to do practically anything else.
But if Democrats are as horrible as Republicans say they are, then Republicans should be pulling away with this, and not just in Nevada. And if Republicans are as horrible as Democrats say they are, Democrats should be pulling away with this. In fact, they ARE that horrible. As to why Democrats aren’t pulling away with this, see above for the advantage the media is giving Republicans by presenting them as still being a legitimate alternative. The problem for Republicans is when the rest of the country looks at their positions, and the policies they enact when they’re in charge, and decisively reject them.
That doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats are objectively insufficient, but their incompetence and passivity mean that if they win this election, it will be mainly because voters are trying to restore the balance of power that Republicans did so much to destroy in only four years. If there’s anything that we should ponder, it’s that in the three years since the Dobbs decision, pretty much every state election and referendum to limit abortion rights has been defeated and every election to assert abortion rights has succeeded, even in states like Ohio where Democrats have been marginalized. A lot of these referenda are on the ballot this year, in states like Florida and Nevada. And it’s a little hard to believe that people who vote for abortion rights are going to vote in Trump, the president who is the direct reason Roe v. Wade no longer exists in the first place.
Conclusions
No one can safely predict how this is going to turn out. I would think, given Trump’s increasingly obvious senility, given that his tariff policy would undermine “conservative” positions on the economy, and given that his supine posture towards dictators would undermine our military strength by sabotaging our alliances, that Trump would be getting fewer votes. However, there’s all the people who were reluctant to vote for a woman in 2016 being that much more reluctant to vote for somebody who’s both female and black. And then there’s the growing suspicion that as Trump becomes more ridiculous than he was, that JD Vance is being presented as the brains behind the throne while Trump rules as a dumbass figurehead for public amusement, and a lot of “conservatives” seem to be on board with that idea. Except that Vance’s “post-liberal” statism would be almost as destructive to the economy as Trump’s tariff agenda, and his social policies would actually be worse.
Which again brings us back to the fact that it never should have been this close, even if Democrats win. That would be the problem even if there were no Electoral College, because Trump represents an anti-rational view that has hold of most of the Republican Congress and affects policy between elections.
In the present moment, some ask, “how did they let the Nazis come to power?” And the answer is clear: Because Hitler played a billionaire on “reality” TV and people thought, “This guy must know how to run an economy.”
There was an article from Vox I read recently that’s about a completely different subject: How AI is standardizing our cultural experience of the fall season. “AI-generated content is now infiltrating social media in ways that have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. Knitters and crocheters hoping to craft fall sweaters are being inundated with nonsensical AI patterns and inspo images on Reddit. An entirely fake restaurant has gained 75,000 followers on Instagram by claiming to be “number one in Austin” … Meanwhile, folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of ChatGPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI.”
This is what happens when people not only don’t know the difference between reality and media, but don’t want to know. So no surprise that maybe half of the country seems to think that politics is just some iteration of pro wrestling, about “owning” your enemies and scoring scripted victories. So no surprise that the people who (rightfully) scorn empty-headed Hollywood liberals who think their political opinion matters just cause they’re from Hollywood will worship an empty-headed East Coast celebrity because he was created for them, as Trump might put it, by Central Casting.
Something I saw on Facebook recently that summed the whole thing up:
2 died of Ebola – they said Obama should resign
4 died in Benghazi – they had Hillary testify for 11 hours, held 33 hearings and launched a 4 year probe
Over 300,000 Covid deaths (in 2020), an armed insurrection and theft of classified documents – they cheered, and want Trump as dictator
There is no “both sides” on that shit.
Trump, like other pathological liars, actually seems to believe that lying magically creates external reality, that if you get enough people to believe in your falsehood, that not only convinces them but makes the laws of physics and causality conform to your fantasy. It’s like being God, only better, cause God has to be celibate.
The Trump Virus of 2020 proved, or should have proven, that reality exists outside perception after all. You cannot bribe, bully or bloviate a virus. You cannot make a virus go away by calling it a “Democrat hoax.” And because Trump would not acknowledge reality – which would mean admitting he’d made a mistake – 350,831 people died, which could have included him.
The real joke is that Trump’s virus was what wrecked the economy that he says was so wonderful and led to the Biden corrections that caused inflation (after several markets in 2020 crashed for lack of demand). People lost friends, family and neighbors. And yet, lots of voters want to go back and give Trump back the White House, so he can do it all again.
But if Trump wins, he is either going to start World War III or another global pandemic, and that will cause a mass die-off and technological collapse that will make all that media fakery history. I will probably be dead because of it, and that will be something to look forward to. If anything this is why I still believe Harris will ultimately win this election for the establishment, because if there is anything this world has taught me, it’s that you don’t get out of it that easily.
Some toxic waste from a far-away land Makes you turn green and lose control of your hands These toxic chemicals got me feeling, super weird man Super weird
– Viagra Boys, “Research Chemicals”
Tuesday August 6, Vice President and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris went to Pennsylvania to introduce her new running mate for the 2024 election – Tim Walz, the Democratic Governor of Minnesota. I had personally preferred Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania, not only because the NotTrump Party needs Pennsylvania to win the Electoral College, but because his race for Governor in 2020 revealed him to be a common-sense moderate with a lot of appeal to the kind of moderates and cross-over Republicans that Democrats need. It’s been said that this same not-leftist posture, along with his Jewish/pro-Israel identity, alienated a lot of the Arab-Americans and “progressives” that Harris will also need, but in any event Walz, with his grinning first appearance and regular guy demeanor, made a big hit with the Pennsylvania audience, even as the Harris campaign continued to score huge gains in fundraising and in head-to-head polls with Trump. The two running mates actually used the word “joy.” When has anybody associated that with an American presidential campaign? But for the first time, it feels like the non-Trump majority in this country has cause for … hope.
As Stephen Colbert said recently, “I’m a little worried. Because for the last few days, I haven’t been worried.”
There were several reasons why Harris preferred Walz to Shapiro. Walz is a Midwestern governor who is on balance fairly moderate. During the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, Trump was on a conference call with various governors and said “I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” adding Walz was an “excellent guy” – which Trump doesn’t want anybody to remember now, so a whole bunch of media brought it up when he started bashing Walz this week. At the same time, once Governor Walz got a more liberal majority in his legislature, in January 2023 he signed a bill to confirm abortion rights at all stages of pregnancy in Minnesota, and in June of this year he signed the Minnesota Debt Fairness Act, which prevents health care providers from denying medically necessary treatment because of outstanding medical debt and prevents medical debt from affecting credit scores.
But it seems a big factor in Harris’ choice of Walz over Shapiro or other potentials was his ability to change the momentum. Even before he was announced as a running mate finalist, he did a talking-head interview on MSNBC and said in passing, “We do not like what has happened, when you can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary – and I think- well, it’s true. These guys are just weird.” And it seems to have suddenly taken off. I say, suddenly, because it ought to go without saying that when an alleged billionaire buys his skin care regimen from a paint store and his entire party treats him like Jesus only with less doubt, that’s weird. But it’s like everybody finally noticed it. And the more people noticed it, the more Republicans started to object.
On Facebook, a friend quoted a guy named Kevin Marks, who stated: “The reason calling MAGA weirdos weird works is Wilhoit’s Law: ‘Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and there must be out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.’ If you tell them they’re the out-group their entire worldview collapses and they imagine what it would be like if they were on (the) receiving end of habitual cruelty.”
I think it’s both more and less complex than that.
Wilhoit’s Law definitely describes where conservatism is now, if not for all time. And it also goes to explain why some people think of themselves as both libertarians and Trump supporters. Because just as most of the Right now embraces the Left’s caricature image of the movement, the Right now seems to embrace the leftist definition of libertarianism as “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do, but I’m totally fine with them telling everyone ELSE what to do.” Which in a way makes sense. Because government is totally about telling other people what to do, and if you acknowledge that we all need government at some point (for say, infrastructure, or national defense) then it’s just a matter of who gets told what to do, and nobody wants to be those people. But the new Right goes beyond even that. An actual libertarian would define freedom as being able to live your own life, without interference, and minding your own business. These people think that freedom means not being in control of your own life, but being in control of government, and that means being in control of other people. And this is perfectly “libertarian” to such folk, because they think a government that would push around the people they hate would never do the same thing to them. And if you try to remind them that in a republic, the unaccountable power they give government to use under their favorite party could just as easily be turned on them if another party is in charge, they have a great solution for that: Just make sure they never lose an election again.
Every government prior to the (classical) liberal experiment of the American Revolution was like this, where you had an aristocracy that used the majority as a resource and only considered the common interest for the sake of their own preservation. The main thing that social-democrat liberalism still has in common with classical liberalism was the idea of rule of law, and the idea that the law is supposed to both bind and protect everybody. And that is also the main thing that conservative parties have had in common with leftist parties in representative government, meaning it was one thing that Democrats and Republicans still had in common. Had. Now, the Republican party is taking its cue from Hungary, Russia and (ironically) Venezuela, so-called illiberal democracies where you have the functions of a republic and multiple parties but only one is really allowed to do anything, and that one party is usually controlled by one guy. They call this sort of thing “post-liberalism” but it is in fact pre-liberalism, and the liberalism it rejects is not that of FDR, JFK and LBJ, it’s the liberalism of Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton.
That is malicious and obsessive. In a word, weird.
To say that these people are “weird” is no news, not even to them. In fact, they, especially Trump, embrace transgressiveness and rebellion against normalcy. Which is not necessarily bad. Americans have a tradition of rebelling against authority and conformity. But just as being against the majority doesn’t mean that you’re automatically wrong, it also doesn’t mean that you’re automatically right. When the premises of establishment Democrats were the given and Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, the only national candidate more incompetent and unpopular than he was, he got some cachet from defying the Democrats’ premises and insulting people to their faces. But then he got elected, and at the end of his term he gave us Trump Virus (TM) and if there was anything more destructive to liberty than closing public places and making people mask up, it was pretending there wasn’t a crisis and spreading the disease to maximum extent so that the maximum number of people would die. And that was just DURING Trump’s term. After Trump grudgingly left office, the Supreme Court he created gave us the Dobbs vs. Mississippi decision, and that gave Republican states the opportunity to regulate or prohibit abortion, and among many other things, this made women across the country realize they might have to leave their own states simply to have control of their own bodies. That was not normal before, and it should not be normal now. But liberals saying “this is not normal” for four or eight years didn’t catch with the American public. Saying they’re weird does. Why? Because there’s no better term for it.
Supporting the Second Amendment is not weird. Going to the Republican National Convention in 2024 to buy a replica AR-15 cause it’s the same weapon that shot Trump is.
“She [Harris] said that a 70 to 80% tax hike is “A bold idea that should be discussed.” Oh, that’s nice. She co-sponsored the $100 trillion green new scam. She wants to abolish all oil and coal and natural gas. “We want to work on wind. Wind. We want to have wind blowing.” She vowed to ban fracking. She wants the government to stop people from eating red meat. She wants to get rid of your cows. No more cows. No more cows. Oh, it’s serious. In Europe, you smile and you think about it, but in Europe, they’re sort of doing it. They don’t want any cattle. She wants to get rid of gas-powered cars and replace them with all electric. They don’t go far. They cost too much. They’re all made in China. Other than that, they’re fantastic. And I’m for electric cars. I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly, Elon. So I have no choice. But he knows. “
Dude. That is a Waldorf word salad. It had apple slices and mayonnaise and everything.
The point is not whether fans of Drag Queen Story Hour think that Republicans are weird. The point is whether the swing-state independents, moderates and conservatives that Republicans have always relied on think that Republicans are weird.
And when you consider that in 2023, the Republican Party in Ohio foisted an (unsuccessful) referendum vote to increase the threshold to allow ballot initiatives to succeed, specifically timed to take effect before a special election to ratify abortion rights, you can see how popular the party directors think their own agenda is with their favorite demographic. In Ohio, where the Democratic Party might as well not even exist.
When you tell the Trumpniks that they’re “weird” it works not because they see themselves as the out-group. They are in fact proud of being the out-group versus the liberal establishment. It works because it causes them to see themselves as others see them. I have frequently mentioned that the “conservative” love affair with Donald Trump could be compared with the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Dr. Jekyll sought to indulge his evil impulses while still retaining his respectable life by using a formula to change not only his personality but his being so that he would have a secret identity. The problem of course was that Jekyll developed a tolerance and the Hyde personality became the default, and it became harder and harder to turn back into Jekyll, just as the Trumpniks embrace their Leader “because he fights” and projects the combative attitude that they want in their Party but are taught to see as un-Christian – blanking out the fact that continued tolerance to Trump has made their religion more associated with him, and them, than to its positive virtues. When you tell the MAGAts that they’re weird, you are showing them a mirror. You are showing the Trumpnik that he IS a monster, that he has turned himself into a monster, and it may be too late to turn back.
In that regard, there’s another aspect of this campaign that I need to go over in particular. JD Vance was picked by Trump as his running mate largely because he is a young, aggressive, articulate spokesman for the new Right version of Republican politics, and since the Republican Convention, he has been making that clear, for better and mostly worse. And in the last couple of weeks we have, in addition to the “weird” campaign, had this raft of jokes saying that JD Vance is, well, a couchfucker.
According to Vulture/New York Magazine, “Last week, Twitter (Okay, X…) user @rickrudescalves posted, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, Hillbilly Elegy, pp. 179-181).” And since most people don’t have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy on hand, they didn’t have a way to verify (maybe people just watched the movie.) They also could’ve read the tweet and felt it was probable enough to believe, or more realistically, they realized they had to worry about bigger things like President Joe Bidendropping out of the race. Either way, JD Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch, at least not in the book and none that anyone else can prove as fact. Why can’t outlets firmly deny the couch allegations? One (outlet) tried and deleted the article. Associated Press posted a piece titled, “No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch,” getting straight to the point. But it did not last very long as it was eventually retracted. APconfirmed to Semafor reporter Max Tani that the article was removed as “this story didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process.” Or, as one X user speculated, AP couldn’t confirm that JD Vance has never, ever in his life had sex with a couch. Or if the couch was velvet, leather, polyester, a love seat, a sectional…”
In his coming-out speech with Harris, Tim Walz invoked this joke when he said “I can’t wait to debate this guy (Vance) … that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up. …See what I did there?”
It ought to go without saying that this rumor isn’t true, and that it certainly isn’t anywhere in Vance’s autobiography. But as the article says, you can’t prove a negative. And the question is, why does this joke have such traction? Well, because JD Vance is a drip and nobody likes him, probably including Republicans. One news article said, “Vance seems determined to prove correct the allegation that he’s “stalking” Harris. On Wednesday, Vance pulled an unsettling stunt. He spotted Air Force Two on a Wisconsin tarmac and chased it down in a faux attempt to “confront” Harris. Thankfully, she had left the airport already, avoiding questions about whether it was time to file for a restraining order. But his behavior did create another round of reminders that JD Vance is a nosy creep. Recall that he has even demanded that local police have access to women’s medical records so they can know if patients are or may be pregnant — and can use state force to keep them that way.” And when one journalist on campaign tried to throw Vance a bone and ask “What makes you smile? What makes you happy?” Vance smiled through his teeth and responded, “I smile at a lot of things — including bogus questions from the media, man.“
The joke works not because it’s true but because one easily could believe it.
As James Fell told journalist McKay Coppins, when Coppins complained about how many smart people believe “the couch thing” is real, maybe you should do a post about how many MAGAts still say that the 2020 election was stolen, even though everybody knows it wasn’t, probably including them.
The point of the rumor isn’t that anybody believes in it. The point is to change the mental furniture. This tack is similar to, if not identical to, the “Big Lie” technique where the Nazis would say the same lie, no matter how obvious it was, so often that people started to believe it because that was the data being discussed. And as we see, Republicans have been doing this for years and years, even before they deliberately emulated Nazis. It’s not necessarily ethical to do these smear campaigns with “weird” and the couch thing, but by the same token these aren’t the same stakes as denying the legitimacy of a lawful election. They’re just jokes. Hey, Republicans, remember when we could still tell JOKES in this country without people getting all offended?
With this tack on Vance and the “weird” campaign, basically, Democrats are slowly but surely learning how to fight like Republicans. And it seems that Republicans don’t know how to deal with it.
As we are running towards 2024’s first presidential debate, which Trump probably will attend, because he will never pass up an opportunity to talk (unless it’s under oath) it’s becoming more clear that the Biden Administration sees the debate as a make-or-break moment. Because Biden, after everything we’ve found out about Trump, is still running behind.
This week the FiveThirtyEight poll shows Biden and Trump still tied. Quinnipiac is showing Trump 49, Biden 45. The 270toWin national poll for this week shows Biden 44.33 percent and Trump 44.67 with “Other” holding the remainder.
That IS with the post Trump trial bump.
And we know this is an issue with Biden as opposed to Democrats generally, because of polls. The Nevada Independent quoted an AARP poll showing that Biden is behind Trump in Nevada by 3 points as of June 25 (prior to Robert Kennedy Jr. being factored in) while incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen leads Republican challenger Sam Brown by at least 5 points. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is running 5 points ahead of his Republican challenger in Ohio, according to Politico. Trump leads Biden by 7 points in the same survey.
Certainly I can understand why people would hate Trump. I can even understand why some people would love Trump. He is, that much more than Ronald Reagan, an exemplar of the Republican attitude that being a great entertainer is synonymous with being a great politician. He is a dumbass for public amusement, who gleefully insults his own audience, knowing they will gleefully respond, because they think they’re flipping off the libs together. He is the Lord of Misrule that the drunks at Mardi Gras elect to be king for the duration of the festivities. The problem of course is that Ash Wednesday always comes, and with it, the hangover.
In this case the hangover was Trump Virus (TM) which ruined the economy that Trump keeps bragging about, and is the reason you no longer have local buffets, or 24-hour supermarkets, and is the reason why they actually raised minimum wage over ten whole dollars an hour in some states, with the effect that had on the economy. If not for that, Trump might have actually been re-elected. But he wasn’t because everybody could see that in a real crisis moment, he was too stupid and immature to react appropriately. But now he’s not the one in charge and everyone wants to blame Biden for the way things are, due to policies that were largely a reaction to Trump fucking everything up. As usual, all Republicans have is America’s national short-term memory.
What I absolutely cannot understand is not why some people love Trump; I understand that all too well. What I do not understand is why some people are not just un-enthused by Joe Biden but absolutely loathe him. Because while it’s easy to see both why some people love Trump and some people hate him, the worst thing you can say about Joe Biden is that he’s too dull to hate.
But just as Trump’s fan club exaggerates Trump’s alleged virtues (like his Christianity) outside their reality, they assume Biden is some kind of tyrant or monster. But part of that is Trump’s propaganda campaign acting like Biden is the real threat to freedom because he’s the one in charge and his administration is prosecuting Trump, completely avoiding all the reasons why. It’s bad enough when Trump acts like “I’m rubber, you’re glue” is a serious political strategy but it is absolutely infuriating when the mainstream media enables him to do it.
That might explain why polls also show Democratic voters blame Biden for the Gaza war (which was provoked by Hamas and its anti-American sponsors), 29% of those polled thought the Biden Administration was behind the Trump/Stormy Daniels trial (a New York case that had actually been delayed while Trump was in office) and 17% of voters actually blame Joe Biden for the Dobbs decision killing Roe v. Wade.
It could just be that many Americans are fucking hammerheads, which is my Occam’s Razor explanation for an increasing number of things these days.
The main issue affecting Americans in regard to their daily lives under Biden is inflation, and again, Biden Administration policies like the American Rescue Plan directly contributed to that, but they were a direct reaction to the effects of COVID on the economy, and those lingering effects included supply shortages that would have affected prices whether there was a government stimulus or not, and were also present in other countries that also had post-COVID inflation. Actually, the joke is that if not for COVID Trump might have actually won re-election because up to that point things weren’t so bad for most people, but once he had a moment of real crisis and challenge everybody could see that not only was he not up to it, he was actually making the problem worse by allowing the disease to spread for lack of an organized policy. And yet at the same time, the worse things got, the more Trump insisted on hogging the spotlight of the government’s coronavirus plan (or lack thereof) and demanding even more media than he already got. And so there was an inevitable contrast between this whining, braying prima donna who demanded credit for everything without getting results, and Joe Biden, who was and is the exact opposite. It worked for Biden then, but ironically, that very contrast may be what is hurting him now.
On a personal level, Biden’s biggest weakness, especially when challenging Trump’s ethics, is Hunter Biden and a gun prosecution that Hunter could have avoided but probably didn’t precisely because the system wanted to seem like it was being “fair.” But the fact that Biden has problems with a ne’er-do-well son who has drug problems is actually something that could make more people empathize with him. I’ve said this before, but the reason Biden keeps hitting that “I know what it feels like” schtick is because he can. He does know what it feels like cause he’s been where a lot of people are. Whereas Donald Trump has suffered real tragedies in life, namely the death of close relatives, but you’d never know because he doesn’t want to dispel his image of the invincible strongman who never loses. Acknowledging death (among other things) would mean acknowledging that there are some losses you can’t avoid.
Maybe that’s why Biden isn’t popular with the kind of people who like Trump. Cause they don’t want to acknowledge that reality.
Biden is normal. Biden is the guy who goes to church (and knows how to pronounce ‘II Corinthians’ correctly) and doesn’t cheat on his wife. Biden represents normal America, including ‘flyover country’ a lot better than the wannabe billionaire who said flat-out, “I don’t care about you, I just want your vote.” And everybody who heard Trump say that at the time all had a good laugh, because they think that supporting Trump is a big joke on the establishment. Which it is.
Nobody likes the establishment. Sometimes for good reasons. But all the bad things you could say about Biden and his family pale in comparison to the Trump Crime Family. While all the good things you could say about Biden come down to the fact that he’s normal and well adjusted. And clearly nobody in America wants that. It’s not entertaining. And clearly, being entertained is more important than our national security. Clearly it doesn’t matter that the president is real old and has a crooked son, cause otherwise Trump would be that much less popular than Biden. What matters, it seems, is that Trump is abnormal. He’s larger than life. He has pizazz. He’s compelling to watch.
You what else is abnormal? You know what else has pizazz? You know what else is compelling to watch? A train wreck. Or a car crash. Everybody loves to slow down to watch a car crash. A train wreck is intensely fascinating. Unless you’re in it. Then it’s either terrifying or lethal.
Now it ought to go without saying that if you survived the last year of the Trump Organization in Washington, meaning, if you are more than four years old, you know why you don’t want to give a human train wreck control of the most powerful office in the world, but apparently that’s just too much to ask of some people.
As John Oliver put it recently, don’t dismiss the premise of a second Trump term by saying we survived the first one, because not everybody did.
I don’t have to agree with everything that Biden, Harris, or the Democrats want. In fact, between the normie Biden Democrats and the Trump Party, I’d rather vote for the Republican Party, but that party doesn’t exist anymore. I’d really prefer to vote for the Libertarian Party, but THAT party doesn’t exist anymore either.
As it is, the only choice is between a normal guy and a retarded traitor who gave intelligence to the Russians. And I don’t want the best and most powerful country in the world run by a retarded traitor. I don’t know, maybe I’M weird.
But that also means that if you were going to vote for, say, Jacky Rosen for Senator in Nevada as opposed to Sam Brown, you might as well vote the full Democratic ticket now, because it’s not like a Democratic Congress can do more than put a kids’ BandAid on the hemorrhage if Trump gets in power. If you voted against the Republicans’ special ballot initiatives to ban abortion in your state, and you voted for Democrats in the midterms, there is certainly no logical reason not to vote for Joe Biden now.
As Joe himself would say, this is a big fucking deal.
The word “cuckold” traditionally refers to somebody whose wife is being unfaithful, whether he knows it or not. Wikipedia: “In biology, a cuckold is a male who unwittingly invests parental effort in juveniles who are not genetically his offspring.” In more recent usage it refers to someone who knows full well his wife is cheating on him, often to the extent of making a sexual fetish of it. But in political terms, “cuck” or “cuckservative” has been used as a pejorative within the conservative movement and Republican Party, referring to any normies who are seen as too moderate or accommodating to Democrats. Of course since 2015, that insult is really just a contest of “more Trumpnik than thou.”
Meanwhile in the wake of the 2020 elections, the right-of-center Libertarian Party, having become a home for the kind of people who identified with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan before the Republican Party decided they were pinko, itself had a faction that felt there were too many moderates in the organization, and wished to purify it of the kind of people who wrote “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” The ringleaders of the scheme called themselves the Von Mises Caucus, apparently because they have no idea what Ludwig von Mises actually thought or wrote. In 2022, they elected Andrea McArdle Party chair and took over the outfit, possibly because the National Convention was even more slapdash than usual. And as part of their not-even-trying-to-hide-it effort to turn the LP into the Junior Varsity Club of the Republican Party, at this weekend’s National Convention, McArdle invited Donald Trump to be featured speaker. So, if the common and political definition of “cuck” is someone who watches a man have his way with his lady, what better definition is there for the Von Mises Caucus, which gave free media and exposure to a celebrity presidential candidate who already had them, at the expense of their own candidates, who do not?*
I decided to watch the CSPAN coverage of Trump’s speech just to see how bad it was going to get, enduring Trump’s whiny Mafioso voice for the duration. And you could tell, just from the noise after Trump’s introduction, and the look on his face, that it was not going to be a good night.
But what did these Von Mises cucks expect, when Trump’s attitude is “do what I tell you” and the libertarian’s attitude is “nobody tells me what to do”?
It’s hard to say which attitude is more immature, but in this case, the Libertarians have the right of it.
It is testimony to how objectively terrible Trump is as a salesman – and how lacking in taste the rest of America is for indulging him this long – that his two main pitches to the Libertarian Party were the same two things that every Libertarian always hears from every non-Libertarian: “You’ll never get above 3 percent” and “If you vote your conscience, you’re throwing away your vote because you’ll end up electing the statist you say you hate more. So vote for MY party, and elect the statist you say you hate less.”
Now, there was some cheering for Trump, but it was a bit hard to make out how much of the yelling was for or against him. However it was very clear that his open demand to be nominated as Libertarian candidate for President (despite being the presumptive nominee for a much larger party) was not accepted at all. But contrary to some opinions, Trump did not seem fazed by the hostility. I would say that he thrived on it. But while there are some occasions where it helps you to stir up heat like a wrestling heel, a political convention speech is not one of them. Just ask Ted Cruz.
I was quite surprised that Trump didn’t actually call out, “Can we get Andrea McArdle out? Andrea, get down here and suck my dick. That’s basically what you did when ya invited me, right?”
When Trump wasn’t baiting the audience, he was shamelessly, and cluelessly, pandering to them. Sometimes this worked, like when he promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for creating the website Silk Road, that sold what the prosecution called illegal “hardcore” drugs. (There were lots of ‘FREE ROSS’ placards waving at Trump’s speech.) But most people jeered when Trump stretched out his arms along the Cross and wailed about how badly he was treated by a government that dared to prosecute him for committing crimes, saying “If I wasn’t a libertarian before, I am now.”
(Sort of like how Trump got arraigned in Georgia for being caught on tape trying to fix the state election results, and saying ‘I just got arrested, so now I know what it’s like to be black.’)
Throughout this convention certain Trumpniks like Vivek Ramaswamy referred to themselves as libertarian or alluded to people like Senator Mike Lee (BR.-Utah) as libertarian, despite never having been in the LP. It is pretty easy to tell the difference, even these days. As Reason Magazine put it regarding Ulbricht, “one possibly instructive fact is that Trump had the opportunity for four years to sign such a clemency grant and opted not to.” There are still such things as principle. The Libertarian Party always was anti-government and Trump is only anti-government as long as he’s not in charge of the Justice Department. The Libertarian Party always was anti-war and anti-interventionist and Trump is only anti-interventionist because Putin is having a war and Trump is his little bitch.
What is the libertarian position on drug scheduling? On border policy? I doubt these “libertarian” Republicans know, given that another one of Trump’s boos towards the end of the spectacle was his promise to “end the humanitarian disaster on our southern border”, proclaiming “You cannot have capitalism and open borders because you will soon be turned into a socialist nation.” But then one of the problems with the Trumpnik movement is that they haven’t decided whether capitalism is a good thing.
The irony is that much of the hostility towards Trump was from the new breed of Libertarians, on the grounds that Trump had done too much to “restrict freedom” in 2020 with coronavirus policy, perhaps forgetting that it was Democratic and (some) Republican governors who enacted restrictions on public assembly and activities prior to this country creating a vaccine. Much of the spread of Trump Virus (TM) was precisely because Trump did little on a nationwide level to address the outbreak, only declaring a national emergency a little less than two months after the first confirmed case (despite getting intelligence about the outbreak from China) because he didn’t want to tank the economy, which tanked anyway cause everyone was getting sick. Including him. And the even bigger punchline is that the only reason Trump created his “Warp Speed” vaccine program is because he almost died from the virus, and the only reason he survived is that he had the best doctors that government could provide. In other words, socialized medicine.
Ostensibly in the interest of fairness, McArdle invited all three national candidates, Trump, incumbent President Joe Biden and independent Robert Kennedy Jr. Biden, of course, refused to come, since unlike Trump he was smart enough to know that he would be heckled, and probably worse than him. But Kennedy was invited, and did speak to the Convention on Friday, which didn’t attract nearly as much media attention as the Trump speech, perhaps because Kennedy wasn’t a fucking asshole to his own audience. Cause Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer from way before the COVID era, and he may be crazier than, well, anybody who’s still a registered Libertarian, but by the same token, he actually had points in common with his audience besides “we hate Joe Biden.” I mean, Jesus, Trump, half of the Democrats hate Joe Biden. You need better material.
The main thing that this catastrofuck proved is that even if the Von Mises Caucus has turned the LP into that much more of an anti-liberal, anti-tax, anti-vax party, there is a still a difference between a “conservative” (Republican) and a (L)ibertarian, because Trump could care less about liberals, taxes and coronavirus. We know this from his own flip-flops on the latter issue. Trump came to the Libertarian convention believing (or being given the impression) that he would get another adoring flock of obedient worshipers, and however much genuine support he did get, he didn’t get that. He wasn’t there because he agreed with Libertarian positions, he was there to say “Finish Andrea McArdle’s job of turning your Party into an auxiliary of the Republicans, so that you can vote for me and keep me out of prison. I mean, I don’t want to go to prison. Oh Lordy Jesus, I don’wanna go to prison… I’m too pretty for prison… Hey Andrea? Where’s Andrea… please come back, Andrea… I’ll suck your dick…”
Well, however embarrassing the event was for everyone involved, the good news is that even if Trump still becomes our invincible Lord and God (and Vladimir Putin’s sissy gimp) it won’t be because of the Libertarian Party. Despite all the efforts of its current owners.
This Mardi Gras week, my Aunt and Uncle, who are very conservative Catholics, came from back East to visit the family in Las Vegas, cause this is where you go to observe Lent. So on Ash Wednesday we had a seafood dinner with me and my brother-in-law (who is that much more of a partisan Democrat than I am) and my uncle asked if we could have a civil discussion about the current political situation. And we did. And I confessed, frankly, that I do not see the presidential election as a presidential race between two men. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and Biden is going to end up winning, if only because Trump is going that much more senile, that much more clearly, and that much more quickly.
What surprised me was when my uncle confessed that he’d talked to a lot of his friends in the Republican Party, and their general concern was that Trump wasn’t electable.
But I guess it stands to reason, given that Biden is merely old by anybody’s standards, yet still functional for an 81-year old, whereas the Sundown Clown goes “Bingbongbingbangbing” and calls that a speech.
And really, in a rational universe, Trump would not be electable, but he DID get elected at least once, because just enough people in just enough states wanted him. And people like me have joked that even if he died, the Republican Party would try to stage some “Weekend at Bernie’s” scenario to prop up his corpse, cause they’ve really got nothing better. Which seems to be what they were doing last week.
On February 28, the Samuel Alito Supreme Court announced, after waiting over three weeks from the DC Circuit Court panel decision that Trump does not have “absolute immunity” from prosecution, that they are in fact going to hear his appeal even after most people thought the point was pretty well decided. If only because Ford had to pardon Nixon, implying he was still eligible for prosecution after leaving office. And the Alito Court decided that they weren’t going to start hearing oral arguments on that case until April 22, almost two months from now. This necessarily means that the prosecution on the insurrection case for a trial originally scheduled for March 4 must wait. Now on one hand, “average” length of the process means a ruling before the end of spring or maybe the summer. On the other hand, that means that you’ve put off the date for existing proceedings until then and they may take months to reach a verdict, as Trump’s New York fraud case did. And he could still appeal. And it’s not like SCOTUS needed to grant certiorari on this case, given that the DC Court had pretty decisively shot down the argument that “the president can do anything he wants, cause he’s the president”, which is Trump’s evidence for his pre-existing belief that “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, cause he’s Donald Trump.”
As Bill Maher put it on March 1, Trump’s lawyers are planning to drag it out so that none of these cases can be decided before this election. And by his lawyers, we mean the Supreme Court.
But even so, I think scaredy-cat liberals in the mainstream media are so unconfident in their candidate that they were pinning all their hopes on the courts somehow disqualifying Trump, especially since polls indicate a lot of his (non-MAGA) Republican voters have indicated that they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he got convicted on anything.
First off, you really think that the Republican Party, which has seen Trump cross every line up to this point, wouldn’t goosestep behind him as he crosses the next one? Please keep in mind, cause it seems like the media isn’t, that not only is he found guilty of epic levels of fraud counting for about half a billion in damages, HE WAS FOUND GUILTY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. And as far as the polls tell us, if you can believe them, Trump could still win this.
And if he can’t win as it is now, think of how agitated his fan club that calls itself a political party would be if he did get convicted in criminal court. The Challenged Caligula would just stretch out his arms on the cross and play Orange Jesus and wail to his followers to save the big, rough, tough, independently wealthy strongman from the consequences of his own incompetence and immorality.
No, if you were going to go the route of disqualifying Trump, the time for that was already over by the time he announced his 2024 campaign. Which goes to what I said on Facebook when I heard the news from SCOTUS: You would think that everybody who has observed Trump, not just as a politician, but in his business career, would know that his standard legal defense is Delay, Delay, Delay, wear out the plaintiff, wear out the prosecution, make the verdict irrelevant even if it goes against him.You would think that prosecutors and judges would realize that he would do this in the event of criminal trial, for instance if he tried to assassinate his own Vice President for not assisting in a coup. And therefore given his legal right to do so it is imperative that if you are going to make a case against him on those grounds, that you charge Trump with insurrection and a coup THE GODDAMN DAY he leaves office or failing that THE GODDAMN DAY a new Attorney General is appointed to DOJ so that any necessary defense action (not to mention the unnecessary Delay, Delay, Delay) would not extend past the next election cycle.
Ergo, if you were, say, the Attorney General, or the Supreme Court, and you know Trump is going to Delay, Delay, Delay, (knowing that Trump is not contesting the merit of the charges so much as dragging things out in the hopes that he will win the election, or failing that to have it ruled in his favor by, I dunno, THE SUPREME COURT) any unnecessary permission for such tactics might not be a good faith attempt to protect a defendant’s legal rights but active assistance to Trump’s bad faith strategy to avoid justice for blatant crimes.
To go over, the presidential immunity argument was already well summed up when one of the DC Court justices got Trump’s attorney to admit that by their lights, Trump could use Seal Team Six to assassinate one of his political opponents, and there would be no recourse except for him to be impeached and convicted in the Senate, which is never going to happen. By this standard, the courts cannot rule against Trump. So all of the mainstream media’s experts have been telling us that SCOTUS will not actually rule that Trump’s position is valid, if only because it will make their own jobs obsolete, but then, these experts also said the Court would not decide to hear the case.
I’m thinking I should send the six conservative Supreme Court justices – and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell – each an individual copy of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich. It’s a historical study of what happens when an aristocratic elite decides to enable a deranged racist demagogue to gain absolute power, on the rationale that once he’s destroyed the rule of law, they’ll be able to control him.
And I mention McConnell because also last week, Mitch “the Bitch” announced that he was no longer going to be leading the Senate Republicans after the November elections. On one level, it is an acknowledgement that the Party of Putin has turned against him and he no longer has the influence on his peers that he once did. But I think it also indicates, as with Paul Ryan, who left a seat that he could have easily been re-elected to, that there’s no point in being in Congress without your party in charge, and McConnell sees that between November and the end of what seems to be his last term, his party won’t be the Senate majority.
But given how all these little “conservative” events seem to coordinate, it might also be a case of McConnell stepping down because he knows his work is done.
Several analyses this week have gone over the course of McConnell’s latter-day career as leader. Under a Republican president, his only real legislative accomplishment was Ryan’s tax cut for corporations and upper brackets (which also eliminated tax breaks for lower income levels and high-tax states). What McConnell did do was to use his power as Senate Majority Leader to hold up legislation that ultimately might have passed, simply by controlling the agenda and keeping it from coming to the floor, in the same way that House Speaker Mike Johnson is now holding up a Ukraine aid package that would easily pass with Republican support, despite Trumpnik opposition.
Which also indicates that McConnell could well have engineered a consensus to support Democrats in the second Trump impeachment trial, given that seven Republican Senators ultimately did vote to convict. He chose not to do so.
And of course McConnell also created an extra-constitutional power to act as a one-man veto against a president’s Supreme Court nominations by not letting Merritt Garland’s nomination on the Senate floor, citing the American people’s need to decide the matter in an election year. (They did, Mitch, which is why Barack Obama was president at the time of the opening, and not Mitt Romney.) Then, as early voting was proceeding for the 2020 election, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and McConnell and his Republican cronies frantically maneuvered to get Amy Comey Barrett appointed as her replacement, even at the risk of exposing each other to coronavirus. Because, it was thought by many, the election might need to be decided by the Supreme Court, and even with an existing 5-3 “conservative” majority, Chief Justice John Roberts was thought to be too squishy.
All the while, McConnell facilitated appointments of judges to lower courts who will also rule for decades without being subject to vote. And since the appointment of Barrett and the end of the Trump Organization in Washington, the Supreme Court has made it clear that there is no such thing as stare decisis or “settled law” if it gets in the way of the ideological agenda. The law is what they say it is.
Which might explain why the Alito Court would be willing to entertain a case that would destroy their own authority, just as long as they keep their seats and the privileges of power. It’s been the Republican model up to now.
Cause at this year’s CPAC – which now stands for Cucked Putin Admirers’ Conference – speakers like Jack Posobiec openly bragged that they were trying to end democracy. Which is itself a tacit admission that they don’t have the country on their side, cause if they could reliably get more votes than the Democrats, they wouldn’t need to destroy the system. The CPAC motto this year was “Where Socialism Goes To Die.” Yes. “Conservatives” are getting rid of socialism and replacing it with a new system. One where only one party gets to run the government, only one party has a say in anything, and that one party is run by one man, and that one man gets to say what can be told by the press, what businesses are allowed to sell, what schools are allowed to teach, what people are allowed to read, who people are allowed to marry, and indeed, whether or not you get to live or die.
Y’know, I think there was a word for this in political theory, but I guess “conservatives” killed it.
You know what a conservative is? A conservative is a guy who owns a bank. A conservative is the police commissioner who is friends with the guy who owns the bank. A conservative is the security guard who is hired by the bank owner to protect the bank. A conservative is somebody who realizes everybody has to work together in the system, if only for his own benefit.
Donald Trump is the guy who robs the bank. Donald Trump is the guy who shoots the security guard, or has his henchmen do it. Donald Trump wants to loot the system that supports him for as much as he can, and doesn’t care if he destroys it in the process, as long as he gets his money now. And when he does it, he smirks to his fan club, and brays, “I’m robbing the bank FOR YOU. I’m doing crime FOR YOU.” And because a lot of these people have been, or think they have been, ripped off by banks, they cheer him on. Never mind that THEY ain’t gonna see a red cent of that money. Some of which may be from their deposits. Because their identity fusion is so complete that if Trump is screwing The Man, then they’re happy.
The difference being that with John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, no matter how much street cred they had, they weren’t going to rob a bank, come right outside the bank and stage a press conference then walk away scot free after hollering and whining that it is mean, unfair and politically biased to prosecute them for blatant crimes that would get anyone else in jail.
If anything the bias is what’s kept Trump out of jail. And that’s the joke. He wouldn’t be getting so many breaks from “the system” if the system didn’t want him. Because someone – the courts, Congress, and yes, even our horse-race media – have always had some reason to let him go and keep doing crimes, because someone always saw some advantage in keeping things on this track even if Trump’s personality means he could turn on them at any moment.
The only thing that has ever stopped Trump and his Party of enablers is a pissed-off American public going to the polls and saying: NO MORE.
The problem is that 2020 wasn’t enough. Because as Jon Stewart said, upholding democracy – as in, public participation in the system – is a lunchpail fucking job, day in and day out, and it never ends. This year we don’t just need to say ‘no more’ to the Republicans, but to this entire government. This election is just the start. We need to start pressing on actions that make this government child-proof.
If putting the Supreme Court under the same ethics guidelines as every other level of the judiciary was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.
If appointing more Supreme Court justices (if only to match the 13 Districts) was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.
If requiring term limits for the Supreme Court- and probably Congress- was not a campaign issue this year, it needs to be now.
And if there is any one concrete step to take in this regard, it is to do what California has already done and Nevada is proposing to do on its general election ballot, and make the “primary” a bipartisan contest that really serves as the elimination round for a general election, because otherwise, as we have seen in the Nevada caucuses, the fix is in, and the result is simply the party apparatus forcing their candidate on the national convention no matter how big the plurality is against them and no matter how politically incompetent they are and how unpopular they are heading to the general election. That was what happened to Clinton in 2016, and it may be happening to Trump now. Cause if his Party is stacked to make sure he wins, and there’s no chance for Nikki Haley, why are people still going to state contests and giving her over 20 percent of the vote?
You can’t really get rid of political parties, but you can remove the incentives from the system that incentivize hacks, demagogues and crazies.
To do otherwise is to witness, and ultimately assist, the death spiral of the American experiment.
You know who the enemy is.
You know what they want, and how they plan to get it.
“We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the US. We will destroy you from within.”
– Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, January 18, 1956
I know so many people who think they can do it alone
They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zone
Now what can you tell them? And what can you say that won’t make them defensive? -The Beach Boys, “I Know There’s An Answer”
All right, I’ve about had it.
I have dear friends and family who are Republicans, and I do not mean to denigrate their intelligence when I say that Donald Trump is a willing tool of Vladimir Putin. (Note to Republicans: the word ‘denigrate’ means ‘to put down.’)
But the fact of the matter is, Trump IS a Russian tool and at this point so is anybody who votes for him and his Party.
I have no qualms in saying this. I am not afraid to say that gay men can get AIDS due to unsanitary practices. I am not afraid to say that people like myself get morbid obesity and type II diabetes because we eat too much Haagen-Dazs.
But that’s why I say you can link Russia and Trump, cause the evidence is so obvious. You ask, what evidence? Well, there’s this thing that happened in history called “the last eight years.” Much of it was on tape. Specifically that thing in the 2016 campaign where Trump did a press conference and openly begged, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.” And wouldn’t ya know, that very day, Russian hackers released private emails from the Clinton campaign. If you run a political campaign and you beg a hostile power to release opposition info on your political opponent, most of us couldn’t make that happen. Even if it IS Hillary Clinton.
At this point, asking “Why does everybody think Trump is a Russian tool?” is like asking “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” Everybody else already knows the answer. The question doesn’t just come up from out of nowhere. And frankly, with much of our foreign aid package, not just to Ukraine, being held up by Trump’s machinations with the Republican Congress, everyone in the press and the government needs to flat out say what they already know.
Of course they don’t. Cause as Trump said, “I think you will be mightly rewarded by our press” by helping him make the Democrats look bad. You’ve got one incumbent president who is really old, and then you’ve got Trump, who is so old his Social Security number is 1. You’ve got Biden who seems confused, and then you’ve got Trump, who is so dumb that when the judge said “Order in the Court” Trump said, “Big Mac and Diet Coke.” Simply for the sake of ratings, the press and the other powers that be want this to be more of a horse race than it is. There is simply no contest, whatever you might think of Joe Biden.
But people are looking at 8 dollar milk cartons and $15 Happy Meals and they want to blame the President who’s in office right now, cause that’s what you do.
I mean, contrary to what seems to be gospel these days, I still think that when the federal government spends massive amounts of money (much of which doesn’t go to its stated purpose) then that is a direct cause of inflation. And that’s why I only describe myself as a Democrat very reluctantly. I am not a Democrat because I LIKE these guys. I’m a Democrat Just To Fuck Trump. Because he’s a Russky traitor bitch and at this point so is everyone in his enabler party. And if you think he’s going to make the economy wonderful again, perhaps you don’t remember 2020 when he did everything he could to encourage the spread of Trump Virus (TM) because telling the truth about what the government knew about Wuhan would endanger that sweet trade deal Trump made with President Xi. And half of what’s fucked about the economy now is Trump completely fucking up coronavirus response, cause otherwise he might have won that election. (NEWS FLASH: Trump did not win the last election) But as is often the case, all the Republican Party has is America’s short-term memory.
The problem for them is that Trump keeps acting in the short term. Trump started the biggest round of liberal outrage since the last one when he told a crowd that some big shot in a NATO country asked him what would happen if Russia invaded, and Trump said, “One of the heads of the countries said, ‘Does that mean that if we don’t pay the bills, that you’re not going to protect us?’ That’s exactly what it means. I’m not going to protect you.” And of course BECAUSE the normies are so offended and everyone in the crowd loves it so much, Trump keeps repeating that line in every new speech.
First off, as much as Trump’s fan club was cheering and jeering, they didn’t seem to get the inherent joke that the guy who valued Mar-a-Lago as a private residence for tax purposes when his property contract specifically forbade him to do so is acting like it’s a bad thing to not pay your bills.
The even bigger joke is that these namby-pamby social-democrat Europeans had let the defense budgets go to nothing precisely because it was assumed there was nothing to defend against and if Trump’s Thunder Buddy For Life Vladimir Putin had not only not invaded Ukraine but not followed up with threats to the sovereignty of “natural Russian territories” in the Baltics, Poland and Finland, NATO wouldn’t have stepped up its military budgets. So you can say that Trump did have a real complaint and that it is being addressed, but it’s an issue as to why that happened.
(Incidentally, the name ‘Vladimir’ in Russian means ‘lord of the world.’ No really. Look it up.)
Paradoxically, as much as Trump seems to be in the tank for Putin, I think that’s all the more reason why he’s NOT the victim of kompromat or a deliberate Russian agent. Because the first thing any good intelligence agency teaches their assets is not to act like you’re an asset for an enemy power. But Trump sucks up to Putin every chance he gets, when he doesn’t have to, and when it’s really not in his best interests. For example, when they were together in Helsinki…
What’s funny is that Putin looks the way every other world leader looks when they’re posing with Trump. Meanwhile Trump is just SO happy. Like, “Look, Master gave me this shiny new collar! Isn’t it neat? If I’m a REAL good boy, he’ll clean my dog dish!”
One doesn’t have to produce some “pee tape” or assume that Trump is compromised by Russian intelligence. In 1990, way before his political aspirations, Trump did The PLAYBOY Interview and said that in dealing with the then Soviet Union, “That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.” The interviewer said, “You mean firm hand as in China?” Trump responded: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world”.
After Stalin, the Soviet Union went to a collective leadership in the Politburo, which is how Khrushchev could be deposed and why Gorbachev almost was. In the ostensibly more democratic Russian Federation, the Duma (Parliament) mainly serves to ratify Putin’s decisions. If one can make an analogy to business, the Politburo was a corporate board and Putin’s system is effectively a privately-held company.
Trump has never run a corporation and never been responsible to a corporate board. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. He has always run things unilaterally. Trump doesn’t serve Putin because he has to. He does it because he wants to. Because he thinks that’s what a real leader is supposed to be like. When he goes to bed at night, Trump probably has a picture of Vladimir Putin at his bedside, and tells it, “When I gwow up, I wanna be JUST WIKE YEW.”
Likewise there is no real mystery as to why the Republican Party is so enslaved to Trump. I mean before January 6, Republicans only suspected that any challenge to Trump’s divine right to rule would result in a lynch mob coming for them. But they didn’t need to be threatened into turning their Party into a Mob operation. They did it because they wanted to.
It’s easier than having to live with existential burdens like conscience and responsibility. Just do everything the angry war chieftain tells you in hopes that he will grant your wishes and not kill you or inflict a curse on you when he’s having a mood. It is basically their approach to religion, so it makes sense that they see politics like this. The Republicans have had, and still have, plenty of chances to turn away from Trump and his cult, but that would require taking a stand against the collective, and that defeats the purpose of the modern Republican Party organization.
Because people in general, and Republicans in particular, follow the leader and do what they’re told.
That is largely a principle of conservatism, not so much in that it’s synonymous with authoritarianism, but in that conservatives believe the authorities exist for a purpose and that trusting in proper authority makes more sense than being an iconoclast. So if, hypothetically speaking, you’re a sociopathic dictator marinated in the traditions of the KGB and USSR and you’re already inclined to skullduggery, and you want to subvert your greatest enemy, the best way to do it is to take over the institution that is most associated (at least in the minds of its own people) with patriotism and love of country. If the “official” Party of America is suddenly saying Russia is our friend, then they must be okay, right?
And if you dare to disagree, doesn’t that make you a bad person?
Russia has actually been doing this thing for quite some time, and not just with the Republican Party proper. The National Rifle Association has been on some level synonymous with the Republican Party since before the Reagan Administration, and they’re the main reason liberals can’t pass “sensible gun safety” laws. (When at this stage, they need all the guns they can get to defend against Republicans.) Wayne LaPierre has been an executive in the NRA since 1991. Following various investigations and lawsuits from and against creditors, LaPierre filed bankruptcy on the part of the parent organization and a Texas chapter. However a Texas judge dismissed the bankruptcy petition on grounds that it was intended to escape judgment in a New York court. “LaPierre’s excessive compensation and exorbitant spending of NRA funds on himself and his wife, such as extremely expensive suits, chartered jet flights, and a traveling “glam squad” for his wife, became a subject of testimony in the eleven-day Texas proceedings.” According to a 2022 ABC News report, that year’s NRA finance document showed “Revenue from membership dues has plummeted nearly 43% from a record high in 2018, according to the 2021 financial assessment, pulling in just over $97 million — down from nearly $120 million in 2020. Spending on the areas of “safety, education & training” was cut roughly in half over the past three years”. The article quotes a professor, “”By cutting back on core programs and legislative spending, the risk that the organization runs is that members will suddenly realize that they are paying the same dues for fewer benefits”. Meanwhile: “Investigations by the FBI and Special CounselRobert Mueller resulted in indictments of Russian nationals on charges of developing and exploiting ties with the NRA to influence US politics by using the NRA to gain access to Republican politicians. Russian politician and gun-rights activist Aleksandr Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin,was suspected by some of illegally funneling money through the NRA to benefit Trump’s 2016 campaign.” What got more press attention was how Torshin’s personal assistant, Marina Butina, not only acted as liason to the NRA in America but had an affair with Republican political operative Paul Erickson, and gave him an email proposal on how to influence the Republican Party to support Russia via the NRA. For this reason and others (like drunkenly confessing her ties to Moscow at American parties) Butina was arrested and charged as an unregistered foreign agent, and found guilty. After she served her sentence she was deported back to Russia in 2019 (during the Trump Administration) and now serves as a member of parliament in Putin’s party.
“In 2018, a group of Russians were able to donate to Johnson’s bid for the Louisiana seat he eventually won as the money was funneled through the Texas-based American Ethane company.
“While American Ethane was co-founded by American John Houghtaling, at the time it was 88 percent owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev. Nikolaev is known to be a top ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“A spokesperson for Johnson previously assured in 2018 that the campaign returned the money that was given to them by American Ethane once it was “made aware of the situation.” There was no indication that Johnson’s campaign team willfully broke federal law, which makes it illegal for a campaign to knowingly accept donations from a foreign-owned corporation, a foreign national, or any company owned or controlled by foreign nationals.”
Russia has gotten a LOT farther at suborning the American Right than the Nazis did with the Republican Party in the 1930s, and a lot farther than the Soviets got at undermining the American Left (given how many Democrats were on the House Un-American Activities Committee). Now some of this might be like “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time” or “at least Cuba has free education and healthcare” but you can actually point to real authoritarian achievements there. After his “interview” (or as Van Jones told Bill Maher on February 17, a lap dance) with Putin, Tucker Carlson took his camera out to Moscow markets and the Moscow Metro and praised the city while badmouthing American cities. Here’s the thing, back when the Metro was being built in the 1920s and 30s, it really was considered an engineering marvel and praised by foreign visitors. Of course that was when the fellow travelers for spreading Russian tyranny worldwide were on the Left. But nowadays even Russia’s railway system is going to hell.
And as Russian winters get more extreme – perhaps as a result of that “global warming” fueled by Russia’s petrol-based economy – entire communities, even in large cities, have their central heating systems breaking down from high demand, leading to entire neighborhoods losing water and even power. This winter, YouTube had all kinds of videos showing blackouts in the Urals and Moscow and St. Petersburg areas suffering massive flooding when heating pipes burst. “In one incident, more than a dozen people suffered from burns in the Western Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod when a large heating pipe burst, causing boiling water to flow into the streets, DW reported, citing a local news channel on Telegram. The damaged pipe also caused over 3,000 people to lose access to heating.”
Jeez, it’s like Russia’s maintenance support is ALMOST as bad as Calgary.
From the Business Insider article: “”We are still using the communal infrastructure that was made during the Soviet era,” said Russian lawmaker Svetlana Razvorotneva, who is a member of a national urban engineering committee, per (Deutsche Welle). About 40% of the communal heating grid in the country needs to be replaced urgently, she added.
“However, funding for public utilities made up just 2.2% of Russia’s total expenditure last year, according to the Financial Times. In contrast, Moscow’s spending on military expenses made up about 21% of Russia’s budget in the same year, per Reuters.“
But this is of a piece with a country that was the largest fuel exporter in Europe prior to 2022 having infantry vehicles stuck on the road because they ran out of gas, or the country where Nature stopped both Napoleon and Hitler not having adequate winter uniforms. While Ukraine begs for Congress to end its artificial choke of military aid, Russian soldiers are going without helmets.
“Capitalist” Russia is in many ways worse off than under the Soviet Union. Not as bad as the Soviet Union in its worst days, but on the whole, not as good as its best ones. It was still bass-ackward, given that it was both communist AND Russian, but the Soviets could at least run the largest country on Earth without collapsing. For a while.
Even the United States could not sustain the social and economic costs of being at war for a generation, which is why we left Vietnam, and eventually Afghanistan. And so did the Soviets. But again, Putin makes the Soviets look sane. As is, the Russian Federation has an economy maybe the size of California, so even if Putin’s Fifth Column Party in Washington can stop America from sending anything to Ukraine, the EU will do so, especially since Putin won’t hide the fact that they’re next. But to keep pressing the offensive, Putin has to take materiel, and men, away from the home front, and that actually makes the front line situation worse because there’s no logistical support, while also making things worse on the home front itself.
So here’s the ultimate punchline: The country that “post-liberal” “thinkers” see as the savior of White Christian civilization against the dark southern hordes can only maintain its delusions of power and prestige by making the empire that much more of a dilapidated, shithole country, that much more in hock to Xi Jinping, a communist, atheist, Asiatic. And it’s not like he’s doing so great himself.
But that’s the model for “conservatism” now.
That’s what Donald Trump, our greatest President since Jesus Himself, wants to turn America into.
But sure, let’s give the nuclear football back over to a “reality” TV show host who played a billionaire cause Biden is THREE YEARS older. Nobody complains about the fact that were it not for Biden, Trump would be the oldest guy ever to be President, because Trump is so scared of his own face in the mirror that he has to apply a paint roller to it. No big deal that you look like a reject Captain Planet villain, and think that the Democrats are gonna start World War II, just as long as you don’t LOOK old.
All Putin has left is the gullibility and cupidity of the West. And it may be enough.
This week, America approaches summer as it celebrates Memorial Day. It is a day that we honor those who died to serve this country. It seems approprate that this year we use the occasion to honor the memory of a government run by functional adults, cause it looks like we won’t see it again in our lifetime.
Late Saturday the breaking news was that President Biden and Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy had reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a federal debt default.
“The deal, if enacted, would boost the nation’s borrowing limit for two years and take the volatile issue of America’s credit worthiness off the table until after the next presidential election, according to multiple reports.”
Yeah, IF enacted. There’s the rub. Kevin McCarthy was unable to become Speaker of the new Republican House majority until he’d caved to other Republicans on every conceivable demand, one of which was that any one member could call for the Speaker’s removal at any time. Meaning that approval assumes that the whole thing won’t be torpedoed by some conceited needledick bugfucker just because he can. Please keep in mind that “conceited needledick bugfucker” is just my polite euphemism for “Matt Gaetz.”
The only reason this is even a crisis is because the United States government has imposed an artificial debt ceiling on its budget that frankly doesn’t make any sense because every time we reach or exceed it, the two parties end up raising the debt ceiling again precisely because failure to do so would default the government. And yet it’s retained, mainly by Republicans, because otherwise the budget would just keep going up and up and up and there would be no way to pressure the other party into fiscal restraint.
Again, I’m not a liberal. I DO think this government taxes and spends too much, and we could stand to cut some of that spending. I can even point out a couple of specifics. One Internet friend of mine said one place to trim the budget would be eliminating the US Marine Corps, given that we already have an Army and it did most of our major amphibious landings (like D-Day) and therefore the Marines are redundant. But then, this guy was in Army Intelligence, and Army tends to think the USMC is useless. (Typical Army joke: ‘what has an IQ of 199 and runs screaming through the desert?’ ‘200 Marines.’)
Seriously, there’s supposed to be $56 billion unallocated from COVID relief and you’d think they’d be able to liquidate that to create some room in the budget. Cause according to all the authorities, there’s no longer a COVID emergency, right? And if we’re trying to scale down government COVID response because there’s no longer a COVID emergency, well, it’s been over 22 years since somebody hijacked an airplane, so why do we still need Homeland Security in the airports taking X-Rays to see which of us are circumcised?
But no, up to this point and probably still now, the Democrats and media (same thing, really) continue to hope that they can get a discharge petition to pass a “clean” bill without needing the Speaker to advance it to the floor. All it would need is “five Republicans with courage.” Which is the joke that Democrats and media always subject themselves to. There ARE no five Republicans with courage. This is a party whose most literate members have seen their institution get devoured by a mob (in all senses of the term) and they have neither the courage to admit that they sympathize with the mob nor the courage to stand up to it. Anybody who could qualify as such is dead, retired, independent or already defected to the Democrats. You’re not going to find five reasonable Republicans in Washington for the same reason Jesus Christ wasn’t born there: They couldn’t find three wise men or one virgin.
At the same time, it would still be more likely to find five Republicans willing to work with the Democrats than it would be for Kevin to pass this thing without losing at least five of his caucus.
I would object to the Republican position less if it were actually principled, but we’ve known since fucking Reagan that these guys talk a good game about “fiscal conservatism” and then balloon the deficits by increasing the spending in the areas they like while slashing taxes on the upper percentile. Not to mention how during the Trump Organization, the Republican Congress raised the debt ceiling three times with no preconditions. It’s hostage taking, and Gaetz himself said as much. “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Gaetz told Semafor.
I had already said that : “One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default. An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more.” As it turned out there was already some preventative measure in the system previously. According to Wikipedia, Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt imposed the “Gephardt Rule” in 1979 stating that the debt ceiling was automatically raised when a budget was passed. This resolved the contradiction in voting for appropriations but not voting to fund them. This was in fact the standard until Gephardt lost his majority in 1995 and Republicans repealed the rule. The strange thing is that Democrats have had the majority at least once since then and not re-established the rule. Which further confirms the two main points of the issue: Crisis around the debt is entirely manufactured by Republicans for their own political purposes, and if Democrats can be blamed for anything, it’s their blithe assumption that they don’t need to establish sound procedures when they are in charge.
I’m thinking we should consider the terms of forming America 2.0. Cause this shitty government isn’t going to last the way it’s going.
Not that I am one of those pessimists who thinks America is necessarily going to break apart or decline in comparison to other nations. We still have more capital and resources than the European Union (our main liberal-capitalist rivals) and a more efficient military-industrial complex than China or Russia (our two main authoritarian rivals). But it could happen, and defaulting on our debt would be a big reason why. The problems facing our nation are completely preventable and almost completely the result of our political dysfunction.
Liberals hated Ronald Reagan for saying “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But I’m sure they would have to agree with him now: Government is the problem, if only because the former Party of Reagan has MADE IT the problem. But then again, those Republicans, as reactionary as some of them may have been, were not completely off the deep end like they are now, nor was the Democratic Party exactly like what it is now. Republicans who think they’re clever point out that it was actually Democrat states that held slaves and the former Party of Lincoln who freed them. Which of course is blanking out how much things have changed since. “The problem” with government used to be the Democratic Party, but it just switched tents. The common element is the people who think all that stuff about “all men are created equal” only applies to them and their demographic. This was why they had endorsed slavery and as-good-as-slavery laws for blacks after the Civil War, not only to keep black people under control but to effectively outsource labor in their own country and undercut the value of white labor, so that they would also be under control, but would still support the system cause at least they weren’t black.
The reason Democrats of today aren’t blamed for all the slavery and Jim Crow laws is because they realized there are more votes to be had in the rest of the country. At least in theory. So they quit appealing to the people who liked segregation and theocracy and left them to the Republicans. The problem with the theory is that the Republicans found that their new coalition were Southern Christians, military people, people who’d been burned by liberal policies and the Carter Administration, people who were going to be highly motivated to vote if they had someone to vote for, and Reagan picked them up. But that actually was a “big tent.” Over the years Republicans ran out of ideas and could only survive on the “culture war” issues they’d been flogging since the ’70s. Such success as they’ve had after GW Bush is because they appeal to that Christianist core that will come out to vote no matter what, because while they may not agree with the conservative love of capitalism, they would never vote for a party that supported abortion rights. Or trans rights. Or gay rights. Or voting rights. Well, rights.
It’s not impossible for such a party to appeal to women and non-whites – look at Trump’s performance with women in 2016 and his performance with Hispanics in 2020 – but the more they lean into this strategy of alienating anybody who isn’t a fanatic, the more self-defeating it is in the long run, especially as previously unmotivated young people and middle class women realize that Republican policies are deliberately targeting them. Republicans know this on some level, which is why they have to keep the advantages they still have to block any sort of reform, or indeed anything the other party does at all, since they know they wouldn’t get any credit for the results if they let the Democrats win anything.
I had said that slavery, which we treat as the Original Sin of the republic, was something that could be and technically was corrected in the Constitution. But the real Original Sin of our foundation was that the Founders, looking at the partisan politics of the mother country Britain, never accounted for the natural tendency of people to group into camps and therefore left the process to occur by default. And since it was not accounted for in the Constitution, the ad hoc rules and traditions that Washington (and the states) developed to adapt to it ended up becoming more important to the day-to-day process than the actual Constitution. One result of this is something I had already mentioned: Article I of the Constitution specifically mentions that a Speaker of the House is to be chosen by the entire chamber. The Senate has no such rule, partially because it’s a smaller body and partially because the original Constitution had Senators appointed to represent their State legislatures, not elected by popular vote. Which is another area where partisan politics crept in to the process. So Speaker is a constitutional position. Senate Majority Leader is a position created for the convenience of the duopoly, so there’s apparently nothing in the Constitution that says the Majority Leader can’t, say, exercise effective veto power over a President’s Supreme Court nominees by preventing a vote from even getting to the floor.
This is something that requires more in-depth thinking than I have time for right now. But it’s clear that from both the day-to-day operations of Washington (and many state legislatures that are not just stymied by Republicans but rigidly controlled by them) and the process of screening candidates in the primary round that the “two” party system is at the heart of what’s wrong with this country. Because while the polarization of the two factions means that the Republicans have purged themselves of their non-fanatics (meaning the Democrats are pretty much the coalition for the rest of the country) this also means that Republican power is concentrated so in those areas where they already have historical or cultural dominance, their policies are that much more authoritarian. In short, they’re a danger to the survival of the United States. And the real punch line is that no one wants to admit this, because then the Democrats would be completely in charge. And no one wants that. Including, I suspect, the Democrats.
But if the dysfunction in America’s politics is channeled and incentivized by the party nomination process, incentives can be used to course correct where we’re going. This is already happening in some places. California has changed its election system to have bipartisan monitoring of elections and changed from “winner take all” to a “top-two” system such that the primary round of voting advances the top two finishing candidates regardless of party so that the November general election is effectively a runoff. In Nevada, Question 3, which would change Nevada’s primary round to a ranked-choice voting system, passed by 52.9 to 47.1 percent. (However ballot questions have to survive a second vote in state elections, so this would not be confirmed until 2024, if it passes again.) The goal of such measures is not to ban political parties, given that even if we did, you can’t stop people from associating in groups. The goal is to disincentivize group think, such that only party loyalists come out to vote in the primary round and thus skew the vote in the general election for the rest of the public who might want another choice but wouldn’t get it because they can’t vote in closed-ticket primaries for the candidate they might want.
Of course the real problem with the Republican Party is not so much that they hate abortion and taxes, however much Democrats might object. The real problem is that they are catering to the biggest fucking hammerheads in the country, and again, if the rest of the population knows better but the Party caters to the crazies, moving away from closed primaries dilutes that. The real problem there is that we need to federalize this approach rather than wait for it to happen state by state, especially since the states that are most likely to pass reforms are the ones like California that are already least likely to support Republican national politics. And for obvious reasons, Republicans are not going to support that either. But we might be able to use their existing set of priorities against them.
I mean, as long as we’re going to bring back institutional racism, we should also bring back literacy tests at the voting booth. Just as long as they apply to voters AND candidates.
There is actually more than one Republican candidate for president who has already announced. It’s just that the media don’t pay any attention to them because they don’t have any chance against Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. However, this week a couple of Republicans announced a presidential campaign and they did get a certain level of coverage. In one case, for all the wrong reasons.
On Monday, May 22, Senator Tim Scott (R.-South Carolina) officially announced his presidential campaign after hinting at it for several months. He’s been Senator since 2014 (filling a term for a retiring senator) and has been re-elected twice since then, including 2022. He’s said to be well-liked by members of both parties in Washington, which is kind of rare these days. In his speech, he hit on the Republicans’ usual red-meat issues, including building a border wall, while also playing up a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps past as the son of a black single mother who went on to become the (only) Black Republican US Senator. For many reasons, he ought to appeal to a lot of people who remember the Republican Party as it used to be, and to people outside the Party. In his speech, Scott said: “We need a president who persuades not only our friends and our base.” He added, “We have to have a compassion for people who don’t agree with us.”
Well, that’s how I knew his primary campaign was doomed right there.
Tim Scott is well-spoken (and lest that seem patronizing, how many white politicians in either major party are well spoken these days?) and he seems to have honor. I say, seems to, given that as a Republican he is by definition obliged to go along with any sleazy thing the collective wants to push on the country. But he hearkens back to a time when Republicans were simply one wing of a political establishment that had a common conception of America as a constitutional republic, as opposed to being the right-wing version of a Leninist insurgency that aims to seize the state and remake society in its image.
A person who cares about morality, compassion (what person does that remind you of when you look at the Republican Party?) or persuasion rather than flipping off the libs is not somebody who has appeal to this Republican Party. Incidentally, they’re not a Grand Old Party any more so I refuse to call them “GOP.” Unless it stands for something like “Greedy Old Puritans” or “Guaranteeing Omnipresent Pedophilia.”
The people who run, or at least think they run, the Party are perfectly okay with using culture war agitation to get folks to vote for them while they turn the republic into a corporate feudalism, but the fact that they have to recruit from that group means that it’s harder to get things done in a legislature when some of their people actually believe things like the Flat Earth theory. What they want is somebody who’s going to rile up the proles while still being literate enough to negotiate bills on those increasingly rare occasions that Republicans still rely on legislation rather than courts. And so God made them…
Ron DeSantis.
Ronald Dion DeSantis (yes, his middle name came from the singer) was born in Florida and grew up playing baseball in both Little League and in college at Yale. In 2001, he graduated Yale magna cum laude and by 2005 had received a Juris Doctor law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to getting this degree, DeSantis joined the Navy as a commissioned officer in 2004, joining JAG (Judge Advocate General).
DeSantis was promoted to full Lieutenant in 2006, the same year he was assigned to the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay. According to Wikipedia, “The records of his service in the Navy were often redacted upon release to the public, to protect personal privacy, according to the Navy. Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, who was held at Guantanamo, alleged in 2022 that DeSantis oversaw force-feedings of detainees.”
Wow, even then Ron DeSantis was looking to build his resume as a Republican presidential candidate. That’s some work ethic.
Anyway, DeSantis moved back to Florida after leaving active duty, running for US Congress (Florida 6th Congressional District) in 2012 and getting re-elected twice. In 2018 DeSantis ran for Florida Governor to replace the term-limited Republican Rick Scott. “Asked whether he could name an issue on which he disagreed with Trump, DeSantis declined.” After a controversial recount, he beat Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum (which in retrospect might have been a case of Democrats dodging a bullet). In his 2022 re-election campaign, he went against former Governor (and former Republican) Charlie Crist, who in their one TV debate demanded that DeSantis commit to serving his full term rather than use the office as a stepping stone to the White House. DeSantis dodged the question and ended up beating Crist by 19 points.
DeSantis is considered to do a pretty good job as Governor, if one defines the role of Governor as using one’s executive power in conjunction with a legislative majority to turn their state into a one-party regime. His appeal is expressly to those people who think that’s what America ought to be like. The difference between them and the typical Trumpniks is that DeSantis has the brains and legal background to get things done behind the scenes, and up to this point, that made him politically popular. But as his quest to be more Trump than Trump leads him to areas like abortion prohibition that have not been very popular even in red states, you get to the problem with DeSantis trying to be more Trump than Trump: He would have to have Trump’s “charisma” (which completely evades me) and his command of the media. And he’s completely lacking in both.
Even before he actually made his official announcement, DeSantis was doing everything he could to present the appearance of a presidential candidate, while leaving Donald Trump, the already announced candidate, to keep dunking on him in the media with little reprisal. DeSantis has become rather notorious in the media for refusing to do interviews. He also doesn’t talk very much with voters. So perhaps it’s understandable that when he wanted to make his big announcement, he gravitated to none other than Elon Musk, one of those bigwigs who seems increasingly comfortable with turning America into a corporate state but realizes that Donald Trump, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to that agenda. Of course the last year or so has demonstrated that Elon Musk, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to his own declared agenda. Over the last week, DeSantis’ campaign set up a big presentation announcing that Elon Musk was going to host DeSantis’ official campaign announcement Wednesday on… Twitter Spaces.
If only Elon had a staff at Twitter that knew the system and could review performance issues in real time.
Even if everything had gone smoothly, the announcement was merely an audio feed with DeSantis giving a formal speech. The media reaction to the “event” exceeded the attendance of the event itself.
Donald Trump Jr. actually came up with a good one that ended up becoming the insult tag of the week: “#DeSaster”. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) tweeted, “We had more people join when I played Among Us.”
Put it this way, Jason Johnson at MSDNC said “the Obamacare rollout looked better than this.”
Now with most of these competitors, Trump barely even bothers to acknowledge that a challenger exists. But he really seems hopped up about DeSantis. He takes him personally in a way that he wouldn’t with Scott or Nikki Haley. For various reasons. As a fellow Florida Man, DeSantis is technically Trump’s Governor and not only does Trump have to live under his authority, he’s also the main competition for the title of chief Florida Man. Plus, Trump can say, very accurately, that DeSantis needed his help and his endorsement to run for Governor the first time, to the extent that he was called a “mini-Trump.” On the other hand, in the 2022 off-year elections, DeSantis won re-election very handily without Trump’s help, even as Trump-endorsed candidates were tanking.
And course in order for Trump to really go after a target on Truf Censhal, he has to give them a demeaning little nickname. Like how he calls Chuck Schumer “Little Chuckie”, Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy” and Vladmir Putin “Oh My Precious Lord And Master In Whose Name I Live And Serve.”
Trump still seems to be casting about for the right nickname to give DeSantis. I like “Meatball Ron.” It just has a ring to it. I also like “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Cause it’s so accurate. And it almost sounds clever. Which is why I think Trump didn’t actually come up with that one. I also get that impression because he doesn’t use it too often, probably because it has too many syllables for Donnie to spell or pronounce regularly. He’s more likely to just call him “Ron DeSanctus”, which is just another case of Trump not bothering to spell correctly. But I also think that Trump has a team that monitors his social media posts for typographical errors, and if there aren’t enough of them, they add some in to make the argle-bargle look more “authentic.”
Serious question, independent of my personal feelings on Trump: If you are another Republican candidate for president, and your campaign platform is basically the same as Trump’s except for a couple of slogans or a personal history, then why are you running when you have a candidate who is already running, has already been President, and has a built-in following that you don’t have?
If you can give me a serious and credible answer to that question, I will take you seriously as a candidate.
More than likely though, most of Trump’s alleged rivals are either angling to be his 2024 running mate (which is the assumption about Nikki Haley) or have realized both that Trumpnik attitudes are predominant in the Republican Party but in order to win a general election, a candidate has to do a halfway imitation of a Homo Sapiens, and Trump gave up on that a while ago. The other issue with Trump’s campaign is implied: Why is he running for office as though he planned to follow the lawful procedure of elections, when he’s shown he’s going to do everything he can to ignore the results he doesn’t like, in such a way that even Georgia’s Secretary of State had to push back?
Contrary to what Senator Scott seems to think, the only choice in the post 2015 Republican Party is either Trumpism with Trump or Trumpism without Trump. Which is to say, someone like Ron DeSantis who is attempting to back away from Trump’s influence while being just as radical and reactionary, if not more so.
But as Bill Maher put it on March 10, “Why would you listen to a tribute band when the original act is still out there?” If this Party cared about winning general elections, they wouldn’t have gone with Trump in the first place. Half of the reason he did win is because James Comey decided to re-open an investigation on Hillary Clinton at exactly the wrong time for her. Most down ballot Republican candidates either refuse to admit it if they lose or run in districts that are so safe that the only real contest is for the Republican primary, which is another reason the Party as a whole doesn’t care about general elections. Why is there a surprise that they supported Trump’s insurrection against the Electoral College results? The main difference between Trump and any other potential Republican nominee for president is that all the other politicians might accept the result if they lose. We know for a fact that Trump will not.
Back in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, Republicans knew that they were unpopular, and so they thought their job was to make themselves popular by making their philosophies and policies more competitive, to appeal to the uncommitted and people on the other side and bring them over. These “conservatives” don’t want to do that. It’s just too hard. It would require thinking instead of feeling, and that’s no FUN. More’s the pity, because given the general unpopularity of leftist taxing and spending and the potential appeal of libertarian policies (if the woke Right ever took them seriously), the Right might still be competitive.
Trump has kept going back to an old MAGA slogan: “They’re not after me… they’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” Which like most Trump statements is the opposite of reality. The only reason the government hasn’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because “YOU” (the Trump fan club) are in the way. No one is out to “get” Middle America. No one would care about the Trump base if they weren’t constantly enabling him to stay out of jail, so if they got out of the way of justice, nothing would happen to them. But I suspect that a lot of the cultists know this and that is exactly why they continue to worship such an unworthy master: Because otherwise no one would care about them.
Not the Democrats, who treat working-class America as “flyover country.” And certainly not the Republican establishment, who prior to 2015 would talk a good game about banning abortion, ending affirmative action or moving our Israel embassy to Jerusalem, but would always go with the centrist position for the general election because they still cared about liberal-bourgeois premises like “the candidate that gets the most votes wins the election.”
Of course the 2020 general election and 2022 midterms after Dobbs v. Mississippi made clear that it’s getting harder and harder to win a majority with Right-populist positions, with Republicans losing races they “shoulda” won because worship of Trump and his dogmas mattered more than what the general public wanted. In other words, it demonstrated why the establishment only paid lip service to the populist goals, because they knew better. But it doesn’t matter, because the Trumpniks run the show now. The Republican establishment lives in fear of their populist base, and not just figuratively. After all, before January 6, Republican politicians only assumed that any heresy against Our Lord and Savior would cause a bloodthirsty lynch mob to break into the Capitol to try and kill them. But now they KNOW.
The assumption of some political watchers is that Republicans are waiting for a deus ex machina to save them – if not the 78-year-old Trump getting a heart attack, then Jack Smith or one of these other guys putting him up on federal charges and winning. Here’s the joke, there’s no law saying a presidential candidate can’t run if they’re indicted, or arrested, or even convicted. That’s right, Trump could get convicted of felonies, and still win the election, at which point he could pardon himself, because at that point, who could tell him that he can’t? (In the abstract, this is actually a good thing, insofar as government in other countries has deliberately targeted opposition politicians with criminal charges specifically to keep them from running for office. It’s Putin’s standard procedure in Russia, and it’s what happened to Lula da Silva in Brazil before his case was overturned in the courts.) The only constitutional way to keep Trump out of office would have been to convict him in impeachment, and of course the Republican Party wouldn’t let that happen. Which gets to the point that if they really wanted to stop him, they would have, but they don’t because they would lose his fan club of AM radio and “reality” TV fans, which was what their voter base had turned into even before Trump became a politician.
Which gets to the real problem for these guys: Even if Trump somehow got taken out of contention during the presidential primary rounds, for the Republican Party that would be like if the German Army conspiracy had actually assassinated Hitler in 1944. (My apologies to Hitler for the comparison to Trump.) Seriously, if the conspirators had eliminated Hitler (and his support structure) they would have eliminated the fanatic stubbornness that was the main handicap to their planning, but they still would have been at war with an Allied coalition that by now was demanding unconditional surrender. And why did they? Because by that point Hitler had started a genocidal war with half the planet, and Germany had become too much of a threat to just be set back to “normal.” Remember, World War I ended after the Germans deposed the Kaiser and the Allies agreed to make peace and not invade the country. The Allies decided they couldn’t give the benefit of the doubt again. In 1918, Germany was merely reactionary and militarist (and they were hardly unique in that, frankly). In 1944, they were not only reactionary and militarist, they were enthralled to a radical collectivist philosophy that could not co-exist with the rest of the world. They had to be destroyed.
Even if Trump isn’t in the picture, the Republican Party is still the Party of Trump. It isn’t a party of low taxes and small government. It damn sure isn’t a party of “fiscal responsibility” to the extent it ever was. As much as the Right howls and screams about “socialism”, the reason Americans hate socialism is because socialism in practice is one party taking over the government, with that one party being controlled by one man, and that one man gets to decide for the rest of us what to think, what to say, where we’re allowed to go in public, what businesses are allowed to do, and how (or whether) we can pray. And THAT’s what the Republicans want for this country. And again, that’s not just Trump. That’s DeSantis.
Next year, they shouldn’t just be defeated. They should be outright destroyed. They should get their dick put in the dirt so deep that it fucks China.
What happens to Trump himself is at this point irrelevant. Again, giving him appropriate punishment for his scams is an independent issue from whether he becomes president again. He has to be defeated in court AND the ballot box. But the latter also involves defeating the movement that made him a threat, because it will continue without him. Whether he wants to admit it or not.
In Western Christianity, this is “Holy Week” – commemorating the short period between Christ arriving in Jerusalem, being arrested by the Romans and condemned to die before rising on Easter. It also happens to be the same week that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, was first arraigned on criminal offenses by the State of New York.
Lest I seem mocking in comparing Trump to Jesus, it is a comparison seriously made by his fan club, which was formerly called the Republican Party. As Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (BR.-Georgia) told a reporter in New York Tuesday, Trump is in the same situation as Nelson Mandela and Jesus, being prosecuted by the state.
No, Trump really is like Jesus. I mean, look at the comparisons: They can both turn water into wine and sugar into cocaine, they both hang out with sex workers, and they both have close friends and family who are Jewish even though most of their worshipers don’t like to admit it.
Just as Jesus was arrested by the Romans on a Tuesday, this Tuesday Trump actually had to enter a courtroom and while there were some photos, there wasn’t much of a transcript as to why the proceeding took almost 90 minutes. It was most notable for the photo shot of Trump sitting at a bench with his lawyers, with that same worn-out, defeated look he has when he leaves a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin. Outside meanwhile, you had professional Trumpniks like Greene trying to raise support for their Messiah while getting drowned out by native New Yorkers. It was like the Bane speech to Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, only substitute “the darkness” with “obnoxiousness.” One thing we did find out from the arraignment is that while the Judge, Juan Merchan did not give Trump a specific gag order, he did direct him to refrain from inflammatory statements as the case proceeded to trial. But as soon as he could, Trump got in his motorcade to the airport, almost as if he hated the city that made him as much as it now hates him, then flew back to his fortress in Mar-a-Lago to give a prime-time speech that hardly any major network covered, bad-mouthing the judge and his family -once he was no longer in New York jurisdiction.
Or as the poets said in Ancient Rome, “Alligator Mouth, Hummingbird Ass.”
What did we actually find out during the event?
According to the statement of facts released Tuesday, the Trump Organization’s machinations centered on various attempts to shut down the never-ending scandals that had the potential to sabotage Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Much of it was with the assistance of National Enquirer/American Media Incorporated head David Pecker. These were called “catch and kill” deals, where Trump’s people would get Pecker to offer a certain amount of money for rights to their sleazy story, but instead of publishing the piece, the National Enquirer would sit on it and keep it from getting out. One thing we didn’t know until Tuesday was that a former doorman at Trump Tower had a rumor that Trump had fathered a child with a woman who wasn’t Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal. AMI paid this guy $30,000 for his story. “When AMI determined that the story was not true, the AMI CEO [Pecker] wanted to release the Doorman from the agreement. However Lawyer A [Michael Cohen] instructed the AMI CEO not to release the doorman until after the presidential election, and the AMI CEO complied with that instruction because of his agreement with the Defendant [Trump] and Lawyer A.” Shortly after the Access Hollywood (‘grab ’em by the pussy’) tape, AMI’s editor-in-chief contacted Pecker about another woman, Stormy Daniels (listed in the statement as ‘Woman 2’, as opposed to Karen McDougal, who is Woman 1 – keeping up so far?) who alleged that she had a sexual encounter with Defendant Trump while he was married. AMI arranged a deal to keep Daniels quiet, giving her $130,000. Twelve days before the 2016 election, Cohen drew $130,000 from a home loan, put it into a shell account, and used that to pay Daniels off. After the election, Trump repaid Cohen in installments, but had his Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg double the amount to $260,000 so that Cohen could classify the payment as income on tax returns (for ‘legal services’) rather than a reimbursement, allowing Cohen to make a profit once he’d paid income tax on the payment, assuming a total tax liability of 50 percent. So, not technically money-laundering, but pretty close. Close enough for the law, anyway. Not only did Michael Cohen go to prison over this, it was known during his trial that Trump was in fact aware of the payments Cohen made and agreed to pay him back. It was also revealed in the statement that Trump tried to delay the payment to Daniels as long as possible, preferably after the election, “because by that point it would not matter if the story became public.”
So so much for the idea that Trump was just trying to protect Melania from being hurt by the knowledge he’d had an affair. I mean, Melania was dating Trump when he was separated but not divorced from Marla Maples, so I don’t think it would surprise her that he was cheating. I mean, not like Melania is less likely to leave Trump than Lindsey Graham is. On that score, given that the transactions occurred just after the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump team, and most observers, really thought Trump was on the ropes, and one more scandal might have been enough. I don’t know. People hated Hillary Clinton THAT damn much, and the Trumpniks were that damn fanatic. I mean, early in the campaign, Trump said, in jest, “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” And the Republican Party has proven him right, rhetorically, ever since, every chance they get. All he needs to do now is actually kill somebody on Fifth Avenue, and we’ll know for sure. You might scoff, but I can see Lindsey Graham on Fox News now: “Look Sean, that three-year old was PACKING!!”
The statement of facts says that the participants mischaracterized the nature of the payments “for tax purposes.” The specific details of this constitute 34 felony counts against Defendant Trump. Now, under New York law, falsifying financial records is just a misdemeanor, but there is provision to change the charge to a felony if the State believes the act was to facilitate another crime or frustrate investigation of another crime. Also, misdemeanors have a statute of limitations. However, the statement of facts does not specify what second offense would justify elevating the charges to felonies.
But even though there are weaknesses in the case that a competent lawyer could exploit, that would assume Trump had a competent lawyer. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Trump runs through lawyers like Spinal Tap runs through drummers, and for similar reasons. While there were a couple people on Trump’s legal team Tuesday who looked like members of Homo sapiens sapiens, his main lawyer is currently a guy named Joe Tacopina, who was probably most famous for his grappling match against MSNBC’s Ari Melber as he tried to pull a document from Melber’s hand during an interview.
Even funnier, this guy donated to a Democrat (then-Congresswoman Kathleen Rice) who called for Trump to be prosecuted over his pressure call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough votes to swing the state. Republicans have issued fatwas for less. Not only that, in 2018, when all this stuff with Cohen came out, Tacopina was a legal analyst on CNN where he said that he believed Trump had had an affair with Daniels because “it means it’s true if he hasn’t threatened to sue” and on another show said “this could be looked as an in-kind contribution at the time of the election.”
But apparently this guy wasn’t hired for his smarts or consistency, but because he’d been one of the guys who defended a January 6 rioter in court (unsuccessfully). Like Cohen or Anthony Scaramucci, he’s not really there to provide legal acumen but to be Trump’s mouthpiece to the mainstream media and present that New York Tough Guy attitude Trump loves to fake so much, but with the imprimatur of a law degree.
It’s going to be that much harder for Trump to defend himself, given that when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity and Sean said “I can’t imagine you ever saying, ‘bring me back some of the boxes that we brought back from the White House, I’d like to take a look at them” Trump said, “I would have the right to do that, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Any lawyer who agrees to become Donald Trump’s defense attorney would have to be that much more stupid and gullible than he is, which would certainly explain Joe Tacopina.
Much of what Tacopina and Trump’s other legal minds have put together as a defense, prior to arraignment, was more ad hominem attacks against the various other parties, especially Michael Cohen. And certainly if Cohen wasn’t lying when he was first being investigated, he can be easily accused of not telling the truth now. Which is why I’m sure the prosecution is also relying on other sources, including Allen Weisselberg, who it seems has just switched attorneys.
But as Cohen himself said to Republicans in Congress when he was ordered to testify there, his job was to do what they’re doing now, support and defend Donald Trump. And if things keep going at this rate, they are all going to end up where he is now.
But all that being the case, it just comes back to the point that Michael Cohen is himself Exhibit A in the case. He was the instrument of the transactions, not the person who ordered them made. So if nothing Trump did rises to the level of a criminal offense, why was Cohen investigated on virtually identical charges, and why did HE go to prison for them and NOT Trump?
Which just leads to the other whine of the Church of Trump, that this is all “political” and none of these charges would be pursued if this wasn’t Trump. First, when the Republican Party’s entire agenda for the House of Representatives is “let’s get Hunter Biden’s laptop”, saying that the other side is trying to politicize the justice system is a bit rich. But frankly, none of this stuff would be happening if this wasn’t Trump, and if this wasn’t a particular moment in time. Because if it’s political to go after Trump now, it was no less “political” not to go after him when the transactions occurred. Because then he was a popular celebrity, the nominee of one of the major parties for president, eventually to be the president, and as far as his base was concerned, a sweet little boy who could never do anything wrong. To say that they’re going after Trump now because they can is to tacitly admit that they couldn’t go after Trump then, because the nature of the offenses has not changed, but the system was always acting on the basis of politics and optics and not the objective merits of the charges. So if the charges are the same as they were years ago, what has changed in regard to Trump since he became President?
And when refusing to deal with coronavirus somehow led to more Democrats voting and more Republicans splitting the ticket, he ran through various schemes such as appointing “substitute electors” in red states that went for Biden, personally called Raffensberger to swing Georgia by himself, and when all that didn’t work, tried to pressure his own Vice President, Mike Pence, into decertifying the vote, getting his people like Steve Bannon to organize mobs around the January event, and when Pence refused to go along, that mob broke through the doors of the Capitol, hunted legislators, smeared feces on the walls, and ran Confederate battle flags through the halls of the Capitol, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do.
Let’s just say any ONE of these should have inspired an appropriate response from authorities.
Oh, I didn’t even get into the weeds of Trump holding all those government documents at Mar-a-Lago just cause he says he can.
The outrage is not that Our Lord And Savior is being obsessively persecuted by the “deep state” (which prior to Trump was just ‘the state’) but that it’s taken them SO GODDAMN LONG.
And if this is the weakest case against Trump, look at all the other cases building up, like the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the Georgia case where it’s going to be extremely hard to prove that Brad Raffensberger didn’t catch Trump attempting election tampering on tape. Everybody’s waiting for the next shoe to drop, and Trump’s got more “shoes” than Imelda Marcos.
Happy Easter. Remember, Good Christians (TM), Trump can’t really be Jesus until he’s crucified.
On that day, a New York grand jury, after hearing weeks of evidence, voted to indict former president Donald Trump, on charges to be specified at the hearing. And Trump’s response on Truf Censhal was with the usual flair:
“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, for the 2024 nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”
(Posted in ALL CAPS, because as we know, the three loudest things in the universe are the original Big Bang explosion, Disaster Area, and Donald Trump social media posts.)
Well, at least he spelled “INDICATED” correctly.
Again, the public has not been made aware of the specific charges, but based on the investigations that were known up to this point, charges seem to stem from money paid out to porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would not confess to an affair with Trump in 2006. This payment was arranged in October 2016, just before the presidential election that Trump ended up winning. While some would describe this as a financial arrangement between consenting adults, we know this qualifies as a crime because Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who actually made the payments, was convicted for doing so. At the time, Cohen insisted that he did not make the payments in collusion with Trump, but later turned against his boss and admitted that the money was transferred to his accounts. On May 2, 2018, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. So… if it was a crime for Cohen, why is it NOT a crime for the “Individual One” who was listed as a “co-conspirator” in his case?
Trump’s logorrhea in this case is yet another example that every one of his accusations is either a projection or a confession. He is in no position to talk about free and fair elections when he whined about losing the popular vote in the 2016 election that he won with the Electoral College, and when we actually had a free and fair election in 2020 and he lost the popular vote AND the EC, he attacked that free and fair election by sending a lynch mob after the Congress that met to certify it. And if we are subjecting a former head of government to prosecution for criminal acts – as France has done at least once, and as Israel is doing with Benjamin Netanyahu – we are becoming less like a Third World nation, not more.
Which all leads to the question of how things will proceed. Supposedly Trump has agreed to fly to New York on Monday in order to appear in court Tuesday, when the charges will be unsealed. He will most likely have to be fingerprinted and recorded like any other suspect, although most sources agree he will not have to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs. After all, Trump is already under Secret Service escort at all times. What’s he going to do, flee to Russia as soon as it looks like he’s going to be arrested?
We are being told by the media that in order to preserve “the rule of law” that all proper legal procedures must be in place to protect the rights of a defendant, which is true, but elides the point that throughout his life, Donald Trump has had far more than the presumption of innocence, but has always acted on a presumption of immunity – as the formerly most criminal president in history, Richard Nixon, put it, “if the president does it, that means it’s NOT illegal.”
Of course Trump was not actually president at the time these transactions occurred, but that just gets to the larger point, that he has always acted as though he could do anything he wants because someone is always going to protect him. Because up until now, he has always had reason to believe that.
The liberal media keeps referring to Trump and this case by saying “no one is above the law.” But the fact that Trump has gotten away with as much as he has, as long as he has, proves that’s not the case, and it never really has been. But that’s okay. After all, we also keep saying “all men are created equal”, when in the legal system all men have never been equal to each other, let alone to women.
When we say “no man is above the law” or “all men are created equal”, these are not realities. These are aspirations. These are goals. And as long as we see that they are national aspirations and not the reality, we can make progress. This country has become more equitable insofar as we are capable of recognizing the contradiction between our ideal and our reality. Unlike some ideals, it is quite possible to make the legal system more fair, if not abstractly perfect. We can at least make it better than it was. People like Trump coast on the unfair reality of the world as it is, and that is what they seek to preserve. Far from a fair system, they want a sugar daddy government for themselves and a Road Warrior barbarism for the rest of us. When they whine that being equal under the law makes this country MORE of a Third World regime, they are not asking for a free country with fair elections. They want to indulge their desire to look up to a king.
Bad enough that that is the case, but Trump and the fan club that used to be a political party are willing to resort to intimidation. When Trump first heard he was going to be indicted, he first told his gang to protest at the court (when he should have known from local experience that NYPD aren’t nearly as restrained as Capitol Police) and then made a post on Truf Censhal showing a picture of him with a baseball bat next to a picture of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, raising his hand. When the actual indictment came, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke up for the resident of his state, saying “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent”. So the guy who is setting himself up to be the alternative to Trump in 2024 is going along with all the George Soros dog-whistling and antagonism to big cities, just like Daddy Trump does. Raising the question, is DeSantis really running for President, or Trump’s Vice President?
All of which sort of blows away the tut-tutting on MSDNC and other networks prior to the actual indictment about whether charges over an affair are worth a criminal case against Trump, when there’s so many more serious charges we should be pursuing. But as Cohen himself told the press, Al Capone was only convicted on tax evasion. And let’s review what we’re really dealing with: A populist who bragged about his support from the “poorly educated”, who said he would pay the legal costs for any fans who beat up protestors at his rallies, who openly begged Russia to release hacked intel on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which they DID), who as President fired people specifically because they investigated him, who hired an Attorney General (Bill Barr) largely to undermine investigations against him, who refused to admit the extent of coronavirus in 2020 because it would undermine his deals with Communist China, who told state governments to not allow special measures to vote by mail during the pandemic, because it helped his chances of re-election if people were less likely to vote, who still lost that second election anyway and refused to admit it, and who encouraged social media campaigns to organize violence against the certification, threatening the lives of Republican congressmen, not to mention his own Vice President.
This has gone far beyond having a difference of opinion. When you try to stop an election result from proceeding, you lose all right to talk about “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” or rights when you certainly wouldn’t have given any rights to the people on the other side. Trump isn’t just some mean old conservative that woke liberals hate, he’s an active threat to national security. He has exhausted any benefit of the doubt, and any right to sympathy. And that goes double for anybody who looks at where he’s taken this country and thinks, “we need some MORE of that.” Bluntly, who gives a fuck which charge they get Trump on, as long as they GET him?
And if this doesn’t pan out – remember, it is a jury trial – there are all those other cases that the Feds and other states (namely Georgia) have waiting in the wings. If it was just one case of criminality, you could take your chances with the legal system. But Donald Trump is in a unique situation because of all our public personalities, only Trump lies, swindles and commits crimes like other people breathe. As in, he does so on reflex, and if he ever stops, he might die.
On the bright side, history also shows that while Al Capone got an 11-year prison sentence, he was released after only 7 1/2 years, after doctors diagnosed a case of syphilis that was slowly destroying his brain and his ability to function normally. But then we have no cause to believe that Donald Trump is suffering from an illness that is destroying his brain, much less an illness contracted from sexual incontinence.
Early voting in Nevada ends Friday. The news leading up to the election is certainly stressful and intense. It shouldn’t be. Simply because Democrats could lose an election when Conventional Wisdom dictates the President’s party is going to lose in the midterms doesn’t mean it’s the figurative end of the world or the end of the republic.
Except, it probably could be.
Remember, the Party of Trump is engaged in an organized effort to install state officials who parrot the dogma that the election was stolen and Trump is the real president, and this effort is strongest in states like Arizona and Nevada where Trump barely (but clearly) lost. Lest one think this is not an organized campaign and that the good little Trumpniks all came to the same conclusion independently, Arizona US Senate candidate Blake Masters actually released a video of him campaigning door-to-door, and while he was out he took a call from Trump who told him, “Look at Kari. [Kari Lake, the Trump candidate for Governor] Kari’s winning with very little money, and if they say, ‘how’s your family?’ she says, ‘the election was rigged and stolen.'” All the proof we need that this really is the catechism of the Church of Trump. Just what you’d expect from a movement that is half fundamentalist cult and half snake-oil racket. Always Be Closing. At least Trump knows that much.
As addled as the Trumpniks may be in, for example, running a country, they have a capacity for long-term strategy and a capacity to change the terms of debate in a way that Democrats have so far been lacking. If they win it will make it that much easier for them to game the system and get their dominus et deus back in the White House, and then it won’t matter if Democrats bounce back in the presidential race after they didn’t feel like voting in the midterms because they weren’t enthused about the party in power. If enough Republicans get enough power in enough states next week, Democrats might never get back in power again.
These are my impressions on how this election is shaping up and how we got here.
Silver, you might recall, was pretty optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House in 2016, even if he also gave Trump a bigger chance than anyone else. And FiveThirtyEight, like most pollsters, was a lot more optimistic about the Democrats’ downballot chances in 2020 than the actual results warranted. After the fact, Politico came up with at least one analysis. “The most likely — if far from certain — culprit for off-kilter polling results is that key groups of people don’t answer polls in the first place. …Decreasing response rates have been a major source of concern for pollsters for more than a decade. But the politicization of polling during the Trump era — including the feedback loop from the former president, who has falsely decried poll results he doesn’t like as “fake” or deliberately aimed at suppressing enthusiasm for answering polls among GOP voters — appears to be skewing the results, with some segment of Republicans refusing to participate in surveys. …The most plausible — yet still unproven — theory is that the voters the polls are reaching are fundamentally different from those they are not. And Trump’s rantings about the polls being “fake” or rigged only exacerbate that problem.”
Politico also noted this year : “For the past week or so, polling averages like RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight have seen a steady stream of surveys from Republican (or Republican-leaning firms). That’s led to a social-media debate over whether the GOP’s uptick in the polls is real — or whether it’s an artifact of which polls are comprising these averages.
“How much of an influence are the Republican polls having? In New Hampshire, four of the last seven polls in the FiveThirtyEight average are from Republican firms. In Pennsylvania, it’s the three most recent polls, and six of the last nine. In Georgia, five of the last seven.” The article also noted that polls achieve substantively different results based on methodology: “(Nevada) Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt were tied in the New York Times/Siena College poll, 47 percent to 47 percent. Another new poll out Monday, an OH Predictive Insights poll conducted for the nonprofit Nevada Independent, showed Cortez Masto barely ahead of Laxalt, 43 percent to 41 percent.
“Again, though both polls point to a close race, the differences in vote share can be explained by different methodological choices. The Independent’s poll included all three third-party candidates, plus Nevada’s unique “none of these candidates” ballot option.
“But the Times poll required respondents to volunteer the names of the third-party candidates, and “none of these candidates,” likely leading to higher vote shares for both major-party hopefuls.”
It recalls the physics problem of how the act of observing a phenomenon changes the nature of what is being observed.
There’s also the fact that, as with the Clinton-Trump race in 2016, you have may one candidate who is unpopular but qualified, or in some races a candidate who is qualified AND popular, against another candidate who is objectively inferior, and the press basically stages things to make the race a lot more suspenseful than it arguably ought to be.
Katie Hobbs is the Democratic candidate for the open Governor seat in Arizona against Kari Lake. Some have compared the race to an NPR public-affairs host going up against a Fox News anchor. Hobbs clearly has no charisma, and apparently no faith in herself. Because she went through all kinds of maneuvers to avoid getting into a debate with Lake, and in such a way that it ended up causing more problems. Supposedly this was because Lake “only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue ” and is “only interested in creating a spectacle”. Which is true enough. Of course the spectacle was where Hobbs torpedoed the debate and made herself look like a chicken. On the other side of the country, Democrat John Fetterman is running as the Democrat for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat against Mehmet “Dr.” Oz. Fetterman had a stroke just as he was getting confirmed as his party’s nominee, and had been doing pretty well in the polls even though he refused to do direct interviews or public appearances, citing his need to recover. But then he had to do the late-campaign debate with Oz, and predictably did very badly. (It was noted at the event that Fetterman had to watch closed captioning panels because he still has problems processing what he hears, which made it that much harder to respond in conversational real time.) Now, it may be true that Fetterman will end up recovering fully while Oz will always be an entitled jerk, but his performance still might have had a negative impact on people who hadn’t already made up their minds. Why did Fetterman keep to his schedule when he would have had an excuse not to? Because if he’d refused to debate, he would’ve looked like a chicken. As it is, he looks unfit. And thus two races that had been going pretty good for Democrats are in real danger of going the other way, because the candidates could not or would not perform to the dictates of the press.
Why? Because getting a bunch of career politicians and functionaries to keep running the government the establishment way is boring and bad for ratings. Stuffing a bunch of baboons into business suits and telling them to rewrite the Constitution is funny and great for ratings.
But that would be if the Democrats lose, as if they need any help. The real punch line would be if the Republicans aren’t as popular as they appear and don’t perform as well as the press expects (see below) and the Trumpniks, as they did in 2020, play on this to say everybody expected them to win and therefore an inconvenient result means the whole thing was “rigged” and “stolen.” And who else do you think they’re going to blame?
You would think that these guys learned their lesson by foisting a “reality” TV celebrity who then turned around and sued the press for telling the truth about him, but apparently not.
Nobody likes either of these parties.
But this election, based on all the information I can trust, really is close.
I went to a Walmart the other day and the friggin’ mens’ underwear was locked in a glass cabinet so you had to flag down an employee to get it. I went to their cereal aisle and the prices were almost a dollar higher than they were the last time I was there. Republicans’ anti-Democrat commercials keep hammering inflation and crime, and what am I dealing with when I want to shop in my neighborhood? Inflation and crime.
None of which means that Republicans have any better idea how to deal with these things, but all they have to do is keep hammering on the side that’s in charge and hope voters don’t have a memory span longer than two years.
And it goes to display our civic illiteracy and lack of long-term analysis that nobody considers that when you lose representative government, the economy gets worse in the long run because there is no way to correct a bad government’s bad decisions. Just look at Vladimir “Let’s Have A War” Putin. Or China under Xi Jinping, whose economy is becoming more brittle even as The Leader consolidates more power.
But the apparent weakness of the Democrats in the stretch belies the point that again, in midterm elections with an unpopular president, that president’s party usually does that much worse. And if Republicans are that popular and Democrats are that bad, you would think that their lead in “tight” states would be that much more clear. If Republicans really are a party of brain-dead theocrats, why aren’t Democrats running away with this? And if Democrats are a bunch of woke Commies and everybody hates the economy, why aren’t Republicans running away with this?
Because the Republicans actually ARE a brain-dead theocracy. And while the Democrats aren’t really a Communist regime, they haven’t been doing such a great job.
MAYBE, it could be, Americans don’t like either one of these gangs. But one has to win.
And if Democrats are that unpopular and that incompetent, and Democrat early voting turnout is as lackadaisical as it often is (remember, blowing a big lead on paper is what Democrats DO), the main thing that gives me hope is that in the Kansas abortion referendum this summer – where a “Yes” vote technically would have only meant that the state had the option to write greater restrictions on abortion in the future – the main poll prior to the vote had “Yes” leading by 4 points with a 2.8 percent margin of error and the “No” vote ended up winning by almost 60-40.
Because as much cause as voters might have to hate Democrats, I think some of them realize that they can’t take a chance with the Republicans. “What the hell have ya got to lose?” Well, over a million COVID deaths between January 2020 and November 2022, over a third of which were under Trump in one year.
The Future
So given all that, I’ve got no right to make a prediction for what happens in these various elections other than what we already know: If Republicans win their contests they will do all they can to skew state governments to make sure they can throw out any 2024 election results they don’t like. And if they don’t get the results they want they will scream and cry and throw things, try to pull what legal skullduggery they can and ultimately resort to violence, because that’s just what they did after 2020.
Democrats keep wailing that this approach is a threat to “democracy”, but I’m not sure they understand that in an environment where everything is branding, association of democracy with the Democratic Party might not be such a great idea. Think of our system more as “representative government.” Or even “republicanism.” And right now the ostensible Republicans are against that. A republic means you elect the political class, and if your approach is “either we win or there will be blood”, then there’s really not an election now, is there? I know the Right is, or used to be, the side that said, “it’s a republic, not a democracy,” but as I’ve said, these are functionally the same thing. And if there are no independent elections, it’s not even a republic anymore. It’s more like what you have in Communist countries where you have an “election” to give undeserved legitimacy to the regime, but the outcome is never in doubt. I mean back in the days of Reagan or even McCain, Republicans used to be critical of old Communist politicians but apparently notanymore.
Regardless of who ends up winning in your state, this is my advice to any liberals after the election:
Buy guns. Train with guns. And buy lots of ammo.
Because it is very clear now that the Republican state governments and the Alito Supreme Court don’t think we have any human rights other than the right to have guns, and don’t acknowledge any part of the Bill of Rights besides the Second Amendment. And you need to take advantage of that before they get rid of that too. I mean, if they see enough black, female and gay customers come into the gun shops all at once, they might get wise. Although if you have pastel colored hair and a cannabis T-Shirt, you might be able to pass as a Libertarian.
You might think, “oh no, we shouldn’t escalate”, but kids, the Party of Trump has been escalating for the past six years whether you acknowledge it or not, and this is where we are. These people only acknowledge power and force, and you need to get some of your own. Or, you can just keep playing Eloi to their Morlocks until they’ve gobbled the last one of you.
And if you really think the solution to this country’s political violence is more gun control – meaning, more control of the individual by a government that you are rapidly losing control over – first acknowledge that you’re not going to get more federal gun control as long as the entire Republican Party and several senior Democrats are against it. But you know what will change their minds?
All you need to do is have one hundred big Black men in BLM T-Shirts, flanked by an honor guard of twenty drag queens, marching down the streets of Washington DC all strapped with AK-47s and AR-15s. When they see that on Fox News, the Republicans will all change their minds on gun control right quick. They will change their minds like Saul on the road to Damascus, PRAISE Jesus.
