Category: Foreign Affairs

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At the End of the Long Dash — The time will be past

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 13th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

“At the beginning of the long dash the time will be exactly…”

For the vast majority of Canadians alive or dead (a few of this group were born before Canada became a country) the daily signal at 1pm Ottawa (ET) from CBC notifying listeners of the exact time was a small but significant part of our lives. Known officially as the National Research Council official time signal, the Dominion Observatory where the signal originated was less than a mile east of me. My Dad used to joke that meant the time signal was actually a couple of seconds fast, local time. I used to go by it about once a week when I rode the bus downtown.

It was a small part of my life. When I moved to the States, I have no conscious memory of missing it. Perhaps I was bedazzled by the fact there were THREE nearby radio stations that played nothing but top 40 twenty-four hours a day (14 hours when you subtract ads), or that in LA, they had NINE television stations, all different and all in English.

But many years later, the internet arrived, and I learned I could stream the CBC. Decades made life in my old home town seem pretty alien in a lot of ways. My years in southern California didn’t prepare me for a radio announcer cheerfully telling his listeners, “It’s a beautiful sunny day with a forecast high of twenty below, so come on down and enjoy the show!” Usually I would just catch the news, especially since news on American radio had all but vanished, replaced by shouty fascists and bible bangers.

But along about 1994 or so, I discovered Stuart McLean and the Vinyl Cafe. A variety hour, it featured original music and featured major Canadian artists, and a series of monologues by McLean about “Dave and Morley” a fictional Toronto family whose touching and often hilarious exploits made for some twenty or thirty minutes of pure radio magic.

The only American equivalent was Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” but where Keillor’s show was affectedly and somewhat stereotypically rural (not that Ottawa lacked for Norwegian Bachelor Farmers or the Fargo accents) Vinyl Cafe was contemporaneous. It was unaffectedly genuine. A strange line like “At night, there are rabbits” could be spellbinding in McLean’s voice. Sadly, he died in 2017.

Being an early riser, I started tuning in on the Halifax CBC stream, which was four hours ahead. The noon show was at 8am, Pacific Time. I discovered that what followed Vinyl Cafe was another good hour—sometimes “Madly Off In All Directions” and sometimes some really good jazz. But there was something after that…

At 2pm, Haligonian time, 10 am my time, I heard “At the beginning of the long dash the time will be exactly 1pm, Eastern Standard (or Daylight) Time.”

The first time I heard it, I just grinned from ear to ear as memories came flooding back. So simple, such a small thing, and yet such a significant daily milestone. They were still doing it, I marvelled.

The only way I can explain it is if on the morning commute to work you’ve driven for years, you pass a fast food joint with some big, ugly, colorful statue of a clown or a grotesque kid or something like that. You may never eat there, or even want to eat there. But then, one morning, you drive by, and you see the statue has been torn down. Even though it was stupid and ugly, you find you miss the goddam thing. And of course, if it had any sort of milestone status in your life, you used to meet with friends in high school there, or it happens to be the exact halfway mark on the commute home from work…well.

The time tone played a vital role in people’s everyday lives from 1939 up until the end of the century, when technology made it obsolete. I certainly don’t need to stream CBC to know the time: my computer checks in daily to make sure it’s accurate, and my little weather station next to me has a link to the atomic clock in Colorado.

It got me thinking (and not for the first time) about the role the CBC plays in Canadian life, and the outsize role it plays in demarcating the difference between Canadian and US life. Both countries have very similar cultures (most foreigners can’t tell a Canadian apart from an American), and both have daunting social, cultural and political divides. Canada has the French/English thing, East vs. West, rural vs. urban, highly regionalized economic structures, and an even larger element proportionally of indigenous and immigrant populations.

So why isn’t it the howling mess the US is today? At least one American figured it out. A lot of people think Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” is an anti-gun movie. It isn’t. Moore, then an NRA member himself, went to Toronto and was surprised to learn that gun ownership in Canada is, if anything, higher than in the United States. And while violent crime is much lower, places like Toronto have similar levels of property crime. Yet in Toronto, people didn’t shy away from others that were ‘different’ in some way (and over 100 languages are spoken in Toronto!) or even lock their doors at night. Robin Williams once famously observed that being Canadian was like living in a really nice apartment over a meth lab.

The difference, Moore realized (and he was right) was that the news in Canada, principally through the CBC, was sedate, factual, and non-exploitative. Unlike almost all media in America, the news doesn’t jack up people’s fears and send them careening from one moral panic to the next in hopes of attracting viewers, and thus ratings.

The CBC, like the BBC in the UK, is a private not-for-profit corporation that is subsidized through tax dollars. It isn’t “owned by the government” or any part of it. The government has little or no say in how the funding is used. And since the CBC doesn’t have to worry about ratings, it doesn’t amp up the fear and controversy angles, scaring the piss out of their viewers.

US television used to be like that. The government mandated no ads during the half-hour news broadcasts in the evenings, making them free of the ratings chase. Further, there was the Fairness Doctrine, which stipulated if they opined, they had to provide equal space for responsible opposing viewpoints. It worked beautifully, but the corporations and their puppets in the Republican Party smashed all that.

It can be summed up very simply: when the news is put on a for-profit basis, it stops being journalism. When it’s put on a ideological for-profit basis, then it is nothing but propaganda. Do you really think the shouty boys on Faux have your best interests at heart? That they’re doing all that for you?

America has the Public Broadcast System and National Public Radio, but the corporate propagandists have eviscerated them, claiming they are “government funded” and thus not to be trusted, Almost all their financial support comes from private donations, and unfortunately, the same corporate entities that fuel America’s ongoing panic make up the majority of those donations. Yes, they play a hypocritical shell game with our information.

In addition to beefing up NPR and PBS, America badly needs a not-for-profit online news system, a clearing house for news and information, one accountable only to the legal rules and constraints it is founded on. Funding will come from tax dollars, and Congress would have no say whatever in how those funds were allocated for what stories. Look at Congress: do you really want those clowns controlling what you know and know about? They can’t govern themselves, and half of them want to rule you. No, thank you!

It could even have a daily time signal. A small thing, unimportant, perhaps even obsolete. But it’s the little things like that that bind Canadians together. As it did for nearly every Canadian born between about 1849 and 2017, who heard, “At the beginning of the long dash the time will be exactly…”

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The Hamas Attack — How? Why Now? How Now?

The Hamas Attack

How? Why Now? How Now?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 10th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The scenes out of Israel and the occupied area of Gaza are horrific beyond belief. Hamas cold-bloodedly slaughtered hundreds of people who were doing nothing more than enjoying an outdoor concert on a lovely day. They’ve abducted hundreds of innocent people, and killed hundreds more. Some people are calling it “Israel’s 9/11” and that’s not off the mark. It was a despicable, cowardly sneak attack and it will result in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people before it’s all over.

Israel’s response is every bit as vicious and inhumane. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant moved to cut off all food, medicine, water and fuel to the Gaza Ghetto (let’s call it what it is; it’s just a bigger version of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II) which, if sustained for more than a few days, will result in mass deaths. In the meantime, Israel is engaging in “targeted strikes.” This term means dropping huge explosives pretty much at random on urban areas, including schools, hospitals and other centers, killing large numbers of people indiscriminately, and calling the slain “fighters” or better still “terrorists.” If a child is so thoroughly blown apart you can’t even tell what gender it was, you can decide for yourself whether to tell a compliant press if the remains were a terrorist or a fighter. Israel excels at prettying up slaughter; they learned it from the Americans.

There is also the frightening possibility of it becoming a wider war. Hezbollah is acting up along Israel’s northern border, and Iran and possibly Russia are almost certainly planning at least some involvement. The US, while still partially paralyzed by the GOP, is sending planes to Israel to help target strike more terrorist fighters because that’s the main talent of the US.

That something like this would happen eventually was a given. Israel has turned Gaza into an open air prison, a ghetto, no different from the scenes in Poland in World War II. You can’t hold populations like that forever. Despite that authoritarians fondly imagine, people aren’t willing to give up, lie down and die so they won’t be inconvenient. Bomb them? Ask any Londoner about how well bombing works. They surrendered straightaway to that Hitler fellow, didn’t they? Only bloodthirsty bastards talk about “targeted strikes” in urban areas and only dumb bastards believe them.

It’s a pity the UN or the Hague don’t have any real teeth. The leaders both of Hamas and Israel should be arrested, tried as war criminals and for crimes against humanity, and locked up for life—preferably sharing cells together.

There are no heroes in this: only victims. If you cheer for either side in this there’s something deeply wrong with you as a human being.

How did it happen the way it did, and why now? Part of it, of course was that it was the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, and the day in question was a holiday, Sukkot, which is kind of a Jewish Thanksgiving. It’s normally a festive, happy day.

I’m sure that the collapse of the House of Representatives though GOP insanity emboldened Hamas. It was a given that the US would come in on Israel’s side, but only the House can add funding and provide emergency requisitions beyond that already budgeted. And the House cannot formally meet because it doesn’t have a Speaker.

The Republicans, of course, reacted despicably. They tried blaming Biden for the sneak attack. The theory was Biden gave Iran $150 billion so they could fund Hamas. This was based on the agreement the US reached a couple of years ago where in exchange for hostages, the US would unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian assets (not $150 billion, and it was money that already belonged to Iran, not that Republicans bother to make their lies consistent or even sane) – and that money hasn’t been released yet. And some of the nuttier specimens on the far right are yammering about thousands of Hamas terrorists on the Mexican border because…well, Mexicans, Palestinians, who the hell can tell the difference anyway? They’re brown, they’re scary, and they don’t talk English. What else do you need to know?

With Republicans, when they shout accusations, it’s almost always based on something they themselves did, or suspect they might have done. And in the case of the Hamas attack, that might be a doozy.

Thom Hartmann tweeted Saturday: “Hamas apparently knew how to get around Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. They probably learned this from Iran. Iran almost certainly got the information from Russia. And who gave it to Russia? Sure looks like it was Donald Trump, at the request of Putin.”

Hartmann’s piece ( https://hartmannreport.com/p/did-hamas-somehow-get-inside-information-23e ) contains damning evidence to back up his theory.

It comes just days after the story broke that Trump shared some of America’s deepest nuclear sub secrets with some Australian billionaire who enticed Trump to divulge this information so he could go to his government and perhaps persuade them to buy more American submarines. It’s no secret that Trump was far too cozy with Putin, and a blabbermouth.

One thing Hartmann didn’t mention: along about 2018, Israel let it be known they would no longer be sharing sensitive information with the American government unless there was some immediate urgency because they no longer trusted the President to keep such information secure.

It’s entirely possible that Trump’s mouth and ego made the Hamas sneak attack possible. Hartmann reports that his tweet caused thousand of right wingers to lose their minds in fear and rage.

But it rings true. I believe it. Trump is stupid, megalomaniacal, reckless and disdainful of the US. Putin is calculating, manipulative, and knew that praise and business opportunity promises could cajole Trump into reckless actions. Russia supports Iran, something the right likes to ignore. And Iran supports Hamas. Not the Palestinians—Iran doesn’t give a shit about them. But anything that can hurt Israel is OK by them. I think Hartmann nailed it.

If it comes out in the wash like this, then throw Trump in that same cell with the leaders of Hamas and Israel. They all deserve one another, and the rest of us deserve none of them.

While, let’s all just hope the fighting ends soon, and relief can come to the region. The people there don’t deserve this; just their leaders.

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What Just Happened in Russia? — It feels like 1934, and the start of the Great Purge

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 26th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Despite having had seven years to consolidate his power, Joseph Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich) was feeling uneasy. Despite the propagandistic success of his “cult of personality” leadership (since emulated by Hitler, Mao, and Trump) and ongoing purges of party leadership in show trials for the previous five years, it was already becoming clear that his plans to collectivize the entire agricultural sector was becoming a major social and economic disaster. Millions had already died as a result of the Holodomor, or Great Famine, which struck principally in the bread basket of the USSR, the Ukraine. Millions more starved to death in Russia proper and in the Kazakh regions. Abroad, Hitler had taken power in Germany, openly proclaiming his intent to invade and subjugate “the Slavic regions” which included the USSR. At home, talk of revolution became more open, and in his personal life, Stalin’s wife committed suicide and his eldest son attempted the same. His oldest daughter had massive mental problems.

Stalin’s response was “the Great Purge” which by 1938 was called “the Great Terror.” Some 750,000 people were executed, and tens of millions thrown into the Gulags.

Incredibly, and American right wingers emulate this cult of personality leadership model, Stalin remained fantastically popular. Even the bloody and wasteful way in which he fought Hitler (somewhat akin to a pitcher wearing out the opposing baseball team by making them run around the bases all day) didn’t put a dent in that popularity, and one of the most striking passages in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” is the fulsome and utterly unfeigned grief shown by people imprisoned by Stalin for decades for trival or non-existent offenses upon the news of Stalin’s death.

So why am I comparing 2023 Russia to 1934 USSR, Putin to Stalin? Both were feeling cornered by political, military, economic and personal pressures, most self-inflicted. Both had a triggering crisis that sent them off an operative and subjective precipice.

In 1934, Stalin obsessed over his exiled rival for Soviet power, Leon Trotsky. Exiled since 1922, Trotsky had shifted from nation to nation, and, by then in an unhappy relationship with France, was rumored to be considering a return to the Soviet Union. Stalin feared Trotsky’s influence and possible restoration to power, and that triggered the Great Purge. The biggest of the show trials, in 1936, resulted in executions of Soviet political powers for “Trotskyist–Zinovievist” activities. At that point, the Soviet bloodbath became a result of political calculation, rather than just incompetence and misplaced idealism.

Everyone knows that something very strange happened this past week. Following months of rumors of increasing strife between Vladimir Putin’s Red Army and Ministry of Defence, and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s powerful and vicious mercenaries, the Wagner Group. Prigozhin announced that the Red Army had killed “huge numbers” of mercenaries in what was portrayed as a deliberate attack. Wagner seized control of military facilities in the southern Russian cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezhand announced a march on Moscow, a threat the Kremlin took seriously enough to order the capital on lockdown. Then, less than 24 hours later, Prigozhin announced “We turning our columns around and going back in the other direction toward our field camps, in accordance with the plan.” Some kind of agreement permitted the mercenaries to abandon the march on Moscow, unmolested and unpunished for what Putin just hours earlier had called treason and “terrorist acts.” Prigozhin himself left in a cloud of adulation for Belarus, where the country’s brutal dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has offered him sanctuary. Given that Putin is Lukashenko’s only ally, it’s not clear to anyone why he offered a negotiated out to Prigozhin, although if I were Prigozhin, I would avoid going up stairs in buildings that have windows, odd men with bowlers and umbrellas, and cuppa teas with dusty surfaces. I’m guessing that Lukashenko’s real offer of protection was made to Putin, not Prigozhin, and Putin wants Prigozhin dead or vanished. Prigozhin probably realized that by effectively declaring war on Russia, he bit off more than he could chew. He has since said he was just trying to protect his ‘troops’ and not overthrow Russia. Oh, dear me, no. Just a misunderstanding. Tut tut.

I don’t expect to see Prigozhin still alive by the end of this year. Similarly, Putin took a huge black eye politically, and he’ll either be out of office by then, or Russia will be embroiled in another Great Purge or possibly a revolution.

While nobody has much love for Putin, Prigozhin or Lukashenko, the situation is very worrisome, given that Russia still has more nukes than any other country, and nobody knows who will control those nukes or what they will do with them by year’s end.

For the Ukraine, all this is a golden opportunity to drive the Russians out of their eastern regions, and quite possibly Crimea itself. But remember that will only exacerbate the crisis in Russia and make things even more unstable.

And that’s why I think Putin in 2023 so resembles the position of Stalin in 1934.

This situation hasn’t ended. It may well just be beginning.

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History Lessens — The fall of autocrats bring endless possibilities

History Lessens

The fall of autocrats bring endless possibilities

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 18th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

One of the problems with historical parallels is that they usually don’t hold up very well. For example, when Putin attacked and invaded the Ukraine, a lot of people, including myself, compared it to Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939.

Well, as the old saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat; it just has recurring themes.” History DOES show that similar motives result in similar actions, but the results are rarely similar.

Suppose, that by 1941, Hitler found that he only held a fifth of Poland, and was at risk of losing that relatively small gain. Suppose, further, that the Wehrmacht had lost a quarter of their troops, most of their tanks, and had lost air superiority. Finally, it had obliterated Hitler’s plans to seize all of Europe as a first step toward global conquest.

Some people would be smugly comparing it to any number of failed invasions and occupations (and indeed, most such do fail) and assuring us that history repeats.

I look at how the Russians have been largely stymied in Ukraine and reflect that had western Europe and what later came to be known as the Allied Forces resisted Hitler in 1939 the way they have resisted Putin, World War II might have been averted, at least in Europe, and Hitler would be another failed demagogue who would be forced from office, his fate to be that of a more obscure historical question in British pub quizzes.

For Russians, there are echoes of the their own past, some 100 to 120 years ago. Russia then was reeling from a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese, the economy was crap, autocrats were robbing the country blind, and widening splits were appearing in the social fabric and in the military. Even the Russian calendar, still using the old Julian tabulation, was out of step with the rest of the world by some ten days.

Then WW1 broke out, and while Russia acquitted herself well in helping to subdue the Germans, von Hindenberg was able to expel the Tsar’s Army from East Prussia, further disillusioning a Russian population that wasn’t too enthusiastic about fighting in a family squabble amongst the detested western European nations. Before that “family squabble” was even over, the Tsar was overthrown, and a few months later, a second revolution put the Bolsheviks in power.

Does a similar fate await Russia now? Remember: themes, not repetition. Even though many older Russians miss the “good old days” of the USSR, I don’t expect anything along the lines of a Bolshevik revolution. Conditions are ripe for a revolt of some sort, though, although the nature of the various factions would make such an event a grim prospect indeed for the Russian people, and possibly for the world at large.

The Wagner Group—the fascist private militia Putin imagined could give him plausible deniability for Russian excesses and atrocities outside his borders—seems to be turning on him and his military. The mercenaries are fed up with incompetence and ineffectualness of the Russian military, with cause, and Russian soldiers are disgusted with the mercenaries because they are mercenaries and behave the way mercenaries usually do. (George III used mercenaries in the American colonies, and I suspect that is one of the major reasons the colonies succeeded in breaking away).

Because Russian society is nearly as closed off as it was in the days of Stalin, it’s hard to get a good feel for the social and political currents swirling around the Kremlin, but Russia’s diminished standing in the world, the lackluster-to-poor economy, and the disappointment of Ukraine do not paint a rosy picture for Putin.

If the reports are to be believed, Putin himself is exhibiting the paranoia and self-imposed isolation of an autocrat under siege. That’s usually the most self-destructive trajectory someone like Putin can take, and is widely regarded as a death spiral. Think Hitler in his bunker.

Outside of Turkiye and Hungary, the rest of NATO have to be feeling pretty good. Having resisted the efforts of Trump/Putin to destroy the alliance, they now can point to the Ukraine and lay claim to having avoided a much bigger regional war in Europe. I mention those two countries in particular because they are both ruled by vicious autocrats not unlike Putin, and both are more sympathetic to the fascist leader of Russia than to their own people, let alone NATO.

This summer may prove decisive for Ukraine. If they can expel the Russian forces, they will be a solid member of NATO for many years to come, and it’s likely that Putin will fall. How far Russia falls is a more open question; when the USSR fell, everyone welcomed a new capitalist and democratic Russian Union. Only the capitalists expressed their love through what amounted to a gang-rape of Russia, leaving the country as it is today, a broken kleptocracy.

For the sake of the Russian people, I hope history doesn’t repeat. For the sake of us all, I hope for some of the better themes that might follow in the wake of all this.

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Hawks and Owls — GOP continues lemming plunge

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 18th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I wonder which will happen first? Will the Republicans’ extremism that sometimes slops over into outright treason and fascism cost them enough votes to neuter them, or will they destroy the country first in a mindless attempt at extortion?

Of course, things aren’t going well for them. They lost two mayoral elections Tuesday, both in deep red areas, one under the purview of Ron DeSantis, and the other in the district to Lauren Boebert. Both had been considered locks for the GOP.

Speaking of Bo-bo, she’s getting divorced, and that’s already turning into a white trash rodeo, Palin-style. Maggie Armpits is also getting divorced. Family values and all that.

The GOP is clinging to George Santos because they need his vote so desperately, and the Dems gleefully maneuvered them into voting against expelling the con artist. The Republicans think they can strike back by voting to expel Adam Schiff, because two actions are always the same no matter what. Just like having Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is exactly the same as having Thurgood Marshall.

Speaking of the “all things being equal” mentality, Armpits is whining that “white nationalism” is the same as the N word, because ‘slaveholder’ means exactly the same thing as ‘enslaved.’

Trump is claiming the Durham report proves that he tried to stop Biden from committing war crimes or something. Trump’s buddy Putin has his mercenaries firing on his own troops and he just fired the scientists who developed their hypersonic missiles because, like the jet planes under Hitler, it failed to change the course of the war. Stay in your bunker, Putie. Someone will be by shortly to scrape you up.

Then there’s the Jordan ‘hearings.’ How many courts could a kangaroo court if a kangaroo could quartz courts? The clowns in the little car are the only part that makes any sense. It seems the dawg ate Gym’s homework.

In Arizona, election and reality denier Kari Lake called her star witness, Jacqueline Onigkeit, She was supposed to establish improper verification of voter ballots. She did the exact opposite. The Arizona Republic bemusedly reported, “As a witness for the defense, Onigkeit was dynamite. The problem is, she was supposed to be the star witness for Lake.”

But of course, there is the budget blackmail that is still ongoing. Republicans are hoping Democrats will cave before they have to murder the country, and Biden doesn’t look to be in a caving mood. The crazier boobs of the Republican Party are hoping that they can stay with their tried-and-true approach to governance: Fuck things up, and leave it for the Democrats to fix. This would be more of the same, piled higher and deeper.

Racking up bills is always more enjoyable than is paying them, and for many years, Republicans have gotten away with the lie that the Dems rack up the bills. Don’t believe me? Here’s something my friend Isaac in the Weasels posted this morning: It shows that over nine out of every ten dollars in the debt is from Republican policies and misadventures. It’s only gotten worse since it began with Reagan. It also shows the Democrats tried to staunch the flow of Republican largess to the rich. Read it and weep:

Here’s a look at the budget deficit each president since Lyndon Baines Johnson inherited from his predecessor, and what the budget deficit was when he left office.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (D)
Assumed office November 1963: $5 billion deficit
Left office January 1969: $3 billion surplus
Reduced the deficit by $8 billion

Richard Nixon (R)
Assumed office January 1969: $3 billion surplus
Left office August 1974: $6 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $9 billion

Gerald Ford (R)
Assumed office August 1974: $6 billion deficit
Left office January 1977: $54 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $48 billion

Jimmy Carter (D)
Assumed office January 1977: $54 billion deficit
Left office January 1981: $79 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $25 billion

Ronald Reagan (R)
Assumed office January 1981: $79 billion deficit
Left office January 1989: $153 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $74 billion

George H.W Bush (R)
Assumed office January 1989: $153 billion deficit
Left office January 1993: $255 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $102 billion

Bill Clinton (D)
Assumed office January 1993: $255 billion deficit
Left office January 2001: $128 billion surplus
Reduced the deficit by $383 billion

George W. Bush (R)
Assumed office January 2001: $128 billion surplus
Left office January 2009: $1.4 trillion deficit
Increased the deficit by $1.5 trillion

Barack Obama (D)
Assumed office January 2009: $1.4 trillion deficit
Left office January 2017: $665 billion deficit
Reduced the deficit by $735 billion

Donald Trump (R)
Assumed office January 2017: $665 billion deficit
Left office January 2020: $3.7 trillion deficit
Increased the deficit by $3 trillion

Joe Biden (D)
Assumed office January 2021: $3.7 trillion deficit
Fiscal year 2022: $2.775 trillion deficit
Fiscal year 2023: $1.376 trillion deficit
Reduced the deficit by $2.3 trillion (so far)

So in the past 60 years, only one Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had a larger budget deficit in his last year in office than he inherited from his predecessor. All six Republican presidents had larger deficits in their last budgets than they were handed at the start of their term.

In other words, Republicans love to spend taxpayer money. And yet so many gullible voters have swallowed the GOP line that it’s the Democrats who are spendthrifts, the basis for McCarthy’s current threat to refuse to pay the nation’s bills — something Republicans never did as Trump was adding $8 trillion to the national debt in just four years.

Yes, the party of Trump, DeSantis, Greene, Santos, Luna, Boebert, Lake and Jordan is going to save us all for irresponsibility and financial ruin. Oh, did I say “for.” Cough. I’m aFreud I made a typo…

Let me put it as plainly and as bluntly as I possibly can: if you think the Republicans want to help you, and help the country, and the Democrats don’t, well, you’re a fucking fool.

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Fox News — Where whirlwinds go to die

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 2nd, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.–Hosea 8:7

The term “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” was first popularized by Hillary Clinton in 1998. She didn’t invent the specific term: it was in use in the US at least three years earlier, and in the UK in 1991. The far right, stung, tried to ridicule the phrase, with various deplorables going on line to proudly announce they were part of the VRWC. It didn’t deflect the validity of the phrase—people just pointed to Fox, to Rush Limbaugh, to the panoply of other right wing outlets: Regnery Press, the Scaife media empire, the vast array of right wing think tanks, including the Federalist Society, the Kochs, and the empire of the Christian falangist right, then known as the Moral Majority.

It was around long before 1991, of course. America has always had an authoritarian right wing streak, dating back to the “Know Nothing” party and slavers before the Civil War, and Southern Democrats and groups such as the KKK after. That in turn morphed into the German American Bund, Father Coughlin, and a rise of radio hatemongers. After the second world war, with the term “Fascist” so thoroughly discredited, the far right appropriated the title of “conservative” and began a general infiltration of the actual conservative party in America, which was caught off guard because the new breed of fascists launched by Koch money in the form of the hyper-patriotic John Birch Society were flag wavers and bible pounders. Patriots and God-fearers couldn’t be bad, right? And like most Americans, conservatives thought they were immune to the power of propaganda. Only slave populations like those of the Soviet Union could fall for alluring lies, right? Americans were educated and smart and laughed at propaganda.

Fascist plutocrats such as Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs, and Richard Scaife knew better, and took the lessons taught by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and turned a blare of misinformation on the American public.

Their target was the low-information voter. The methods were time honored: repeat simple lies over and over; persuade their targets that they, and only they, possessed “family values” and held true to American ideals. Sneer at liberals, intellectuals, and non-Christians and imply that they were hostile to America and American values. Explain that public schools, unions, and public interest groups were “communist.” Persuade people that marginalized groups (such as African Americans) were responsible for their poor pay and lousy jobs, and not the plutocrats who spent tons of money in hundreds of outlets to convince them of this.

They targeted the poorly-educated, the impoverished, the fundamentalists, the disaffected and the resentful. They wanted an army of angry morons, not to put too fine a point on it.

But the art of riling up people and getting them angry has a trap. People eventually become numbed to the same provocative speech, repeated over and over, and concepts that once might have created angry mobs just become a background hum in a dull life. So they have to keep topping themselves. Liberalism isn’t just unAmerican; it’s ANTI-American. Blacks don’t want to go to your schools and work in your jobs; they want to take them over. People getting $500 on food stamps are the reason the country is broke, and not the billionaires who pay little or no taxes. Abortion isn’t just unpleasant; it’s murder!

Not enough. People get inured. And of course in instances where the far right could prevail, such as turning back civil rights or banning abortion, they didn’t dare actually try to win because their followers would just look at them and say, “OK, we won. Now what?” Reagan and Bush Junior both ran on anti-abortion platforms, and neither tried to implement change. Bush Junior and the radicals in the House tried to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into an insurance scam and it cost them dearly in the next election.

It was one thing to bellow angry imprecations into the wind, quite another to act on them.

Newt Gingrich took the GOP to a posture of wild and mostly idiotic stances, blind intransigence, and endless scandal-mongering. He was the face of the VRWC, as Hillary Clinton so deftly noted. Not surprisingly, a lot of this platform blew up in right wing faces (the “Contract for America” quickly became a joke, people noticed the GOP was more interested in posturing rather than governing, and the effort to impeach Bill Clinton actually made him more popular. Newt ended up leaving in disgrace.

But the right wing noise machine was there to soothe the injuries of exposed hypocrisy, social amorality, and blind opposition to providing direction to the country. It was all the fault of the liberal media and social justice warriors, they explained. Newt was a victim. The GOP was a victim. You are a victim.

It worked, for a while.

Then Obama was elected, and suddenly every racist coward in the country was scrambling aboard the GOP noise machine to air their grievances. The tone of the VRWC, never sunny and warm, turned far darker and uglier.

The GOP recruited the racists, and the conspiracy theorists. The latter, being the most credulous and dim-witted of the population, were eager to join powerful forces who would at least pretend to validate their crackpot and often flat-out crazed notions. Yes, the government is lying about UFOs. Yes, Jews secretly control the world. Yes, the Moon landing was faked. Yes, you can turn water into gasoline with this simple little pill.

Enter Donald Trump, amoral, narcissistic, and vicious, but wily enough to know that all he had to do was stir the shit just a bit, and he would have an army of howling, screeching lunatics and toy Nazis set to do his bidding.

Which we saw on January 6th, 2021.

And it is still cresting with the House taken over by the worst of the worst, regular Republicans too weak and cowardly to resist, and the claims getting wilder and wilder, the proposed “solutions” more and more draconian and ridiculous. Ban the Democrat [sic] Party! Jews are out to replace us! They have space lasers! M&M candies are attacking American sexual purity! Litter boxes in school bathrooms! The rest of the world thinks America has gone nuts. It’s actually a smallish group of nuts, but then, so were Hitler’s followers in 1933, or Lenin’s in 1919. They are dangerous, no matter how ridiculous they look.

But the Fox News implosion, combined with the tidal wave of accountability facing Trump and his minions, may cause that wave to break and foam and froth harmlessly back out to sea.

The fascist right spent years cultivating morons. They succeeded. Then the morons took over. Hosea 8:7.

And now, hopefully the end to the fascist right-wing madness is in sight.

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SOTU 2023 — Biden—his time

SOTU 2023

Biden—his time

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 7th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I had been kind of ignoring the State of the Union address in recent years. They were pretty bland and formulaic under most presidents—yes, folks, the state of the union is strong and gawd bless the troops. And under Trump, as with most things under Trump, it was a grotesque travesty.

But I had a feeling I might want to watch this, and boy, am I glad I heeded that sense.

Biden staged a masterwork in challenging the GOP in the most conciliatory way possible. It was amazing to watch. He started out lavishing praise on the GOP for all the bipartisan legislation that got passed (some of which only had a handful of GOP votes and caused considerable discomfort amongst the Republicans, who really hate to be seen as cooperating with the Democrats in any way, shape or form.

Then he put the Republicans on the spot by making them sit on their hands while reciting facts that brought thunderous applause from Democrats and the vast majority of Americans watching: the twelve million new jobs, the lowest unemployment since 1969, the rise in working class pay, the explosion in domestic manufacturing jobs, the CHIPS act, the IRA, the COVID relief measures. Republicans had to show they oppose all those things.

Then he spoke about the deficit, which has been falling at record levels since he took office, and noted that a full quarter of the national debt had been racked up under “my predecessor.” While he hid it extremely well (I don’t want to play poker against Joe Biden) this last caused the MAGA caucus to lose their little minds and start screaming at him.

He didn’t try to shut them down, but then, why should he? HE wasn’t the one being embarrassed by them. Instead, he invited them to stop by the White House and he would give them the facts and figures.

He was able to goad the Coo-Coo Caucus a couple of more times, on abortion rights and gun control, and there were loud shouts of “order!” which is was interest to note came, not from Democrats (THEY weren’t embarrassed by these fools, either) but Republicans.

Biden, with surgical skill, went on to recite a number of issues where the majority of Republicans at least tacitly agree with him (debt ceiling, pay for school teachers, etc.) and and really worked the intraparty divisions that exist within the GOP. Biden put his thumb in the gap and twisted, mentioning securing the border and stopping fentanyl.

Watching Kevin McCarthy was a treat. Yes, I just said that. He isn’t a good poker player, and his growing discomfort over the antics of the MAGAts eventually turned into an open glare after the fifth or so outburst from the “Toilet Training is for Sissies” contingent.

So Biden managed the very neat trick of taking the role of “Together, we can make it work” and simultaneously opening the rift between the crazies and the rest of the country wider. And there was no duplicity involved, which is the amazing thing. He did it simply by saying what he had accomplished, what he wanted to accomplish, and why he wanted to do so, and watched as Voltaire’s prayer was answered. “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” Biden defeated the zanies and zealots with the one weapon they cannot counter: sweet reason and even temperament.

It made for the most entertaining SOTU since the days of Clinton, and while the zanies aren’t going to shrivel up and blow away, Biden has done a tremendous job of defanging them by making the show their fangs in response to friendly overtures.

Listening to Huckabye now. She is a hero because her mom survived cancer, and Trump was the greatest leader in history, and Biden has surrendered to a Chinese balloon. She isn’t staging a great comeback. Trump was a great hero. OK, Huckster. Whatever. Not one word about policy or goals; just the usual pseudo-patriotic pablum mixed with the usual god-flogging. America is in danger and god hates us, waaaaugh!

So: all in all a satisfying evening.

One thing for sure: the people who caught the SOTU in order to hate-watch are going to find it a whole lot harder to dismiss Biden as senile or foolish. He’s neither, and he’s smarter than most of you.

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Duck Soup — A canard in flight

Duck Soup

A canard in flight

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 5th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

On a number of occasions, I’ve compared the Presidency of Donald J. Trump to a Marx Brothers movie. I had one such in mind: Duck Soup. Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) becomes dictator of Freedonia, and declares war on another country, Sylvania in order to cover up the blunders and farce of his reign. (“Medals for everyone!”)

We were spared that in real life, due in part to Trump’s personal cowardice. There’s also the fact that there were only three countries he could credibly wag the dog with, and he was too busy sucking up to Putin and Un, and had too much money in China, so he had to be careful about pissing off Xi.

And besides, it was a Marx Brothers movie! Yes, Trump was grandiose and incompetent, a veritable Firefly, but the movie was meant to be a silly comedy, nothing more. Right?

In the past 24 hours, I’ve had cause to revisit that line of thinking. The reason was caused by a balloon.

Yes, that balloon. The Chinese craft that drifted over the Pacific well north of the Aleutians, and then rode the jet stream south through the length of British Columbia and into Montana. Once in American airspace, the American right all lost their collective minds, which average the brilliance of a really slow gas leak.

When I first heard about it, I just grinned and observed that if Xi really wanted to cause pandemonium in the US, he would announce that a small child had stowed away on board the craft. Back in 2009, a Colorado couple, Richard and Mayumi Heene, announced their six year old son had somehow stowed aboard a runaway helium balloon, sparking days of incredible media frenzy. The story was a fake—the kid was hidden in the attic of their home, and the Heenes got convicted on filing a fake police report and spent some brief time in jail and got fined $36,000. I hope they make a movie about it someday, maybe something like Duck Soup, and the kid gets a cut of the royalties. He’s an adult now, and I doubt the incident made his life easier.

The following day I wrote, “This story has more holes than George Santos’ autobiography. For one thing, unless this thing had on-board propulsion and steering, it went where the wind went, and the wind is notoriously indifferent to militarily significant locales. Second, they say the balloon couldn’t gather any information that Chinese surveillance satellites couldn’t already get. Which leads, they think, to the possibility that the Chinese have some kind of super new technology we don’t know about. And the Chinese, being absolute fools, would put this extraordinarily sensitive technology on board an object as easy to spot, track, and shoot down as a balloon. Has anyone entertained the possibility that the Chinese were telling the truth and it was, in fact, just a weather balloon?” Nobody seemed to find any merit in that argument. Maybe next week I’ll be exonerated.

Of course, most of the loudest howls that this was the security breach and casus belli of the year came from the Right, who managed to find time to divert their attention away from such pressing issues as litter boxes in school bathrooms, the sexuality of M&M candies, and the need to expunge history of all mention of non-standard people except happy and carefree slaves.

Donald Trump, in full Rufus T. Firefly mode, posted, and I quote, “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” Yes, all caps. His son, “The condom broke” Junior, and failed attempt to turn a warthog into a super model Marjorie Taylor-Greene, urged Trump supporters to go out in their back yards and open fire on the object, which was 66,000 feet up and not visible to the naked eye. The next day he had a change of heart and wrote, “”The Chinese would never have floated the Blimp (‘Balloon’) over the United States if I were President!!! Who sends a Billion Dollar blimp, with the most sophisticated equipment in the World, and large enough to hold ten cars or 3 large buses, into a complex pattern over the United States, without it quite possibly being manned, such as the ‘manned spacecraft?’ China should have been called to ask. If ‘no,’ shoot it down, if ‘yes,’ negotiate the greatest deal EVER!”

Well, that was actually sort of rational up until the last sentence. He must have remembered he still owes China money.

But then it turned out that three such aircraft overflew the US while Trump was President. The Pentagon announced that they just hadn’t told the Prez about them. They said they didn’t know about it until after the fact.

OK, I have questions.

Balloons, as a rule, don’t leave much evidence of their passing. No contrails, not even chemtrails. No sonic booms, since the speed of your average lighter than air craft only somewhat exceeds that of a constipated pug. No sky writing, no bombs dropped, none of that. Did the balloon call in to OANN to gleefully announce they had just owned the American libs?

So how do you notice a balloon drifted overhead several days later?

Second: they didn’t tell Trump? And they ADMIT they didn’t tell Trump? Isn’t this a bit like Firefly refusing to accept his foe’s surrender until he ran out of fruit to throw at him?

Normally, in a situation like this, willfully refusing to convey word to the president would border on treason. In this case, it may have just been common sense. Who knows how Trump may have actually reacted?

And of course, it may be that the previous three were, in fact, harmless weather balloons, and no motive for malign intent could be ascribed to them. But because Trump was president, the right wing media didn’t feel a need to stage yet another moral panic over them.

As you know, once off the coast, the USAF shot it down, and hopefully the payload will be recovered. They know exactly where it splashed, and the waters are reasonably shallow there, so there’s a decent chance of recovery. The Chinese are annoyed, but they probably would be no matter what intentions underlay the flight. The Pentagon is (belatedly) claiming the craft could maneuver under its own power, although the alleged flight path looks more like the jet stream pattern this past week than any sensible strategy.

Hopefully we’ll get answers. The right wing will be staging their latest moral panic by then and not paying attention, but the rest of us would like to know. Who knows? Maybe we can avoid war with Sylvania.

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Musk Rat Love — Elon’s Reign at Twitter is like a Marx Brothers Movie

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 18th 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Well, Elon finally did something popular. He posted a tweet this afternoon, a poll, the sole question in which was, “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”

At last glance, with some 9 million votes cast, he was trailing badly, with Yes getting 58% of the vote. Now, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether that’s an actual legitimate count, and if Musk plans on honoring the results or not. He discarded one vote he lost badly on, blaming the overwhelming majority of votes on bots.

In any event, his aim isn’t to restore order in the wake of the chaos he has created. He wrote, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” Hmm. Has anyone thought of asking Jack Dorsey? Oh, wait. The former Twitter CEO is running a rival social media known as Nostr. He is professing puzzlement at Musk’s antics, but in private he has to be laughing his ass off, to coin an internet phrase.

Mind you, in just the last 24 hours, Musk banned accounts that promoted or even linked to rival social media sites. He wrote, “we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.” One interesting omission there: TikTok. They are the Yellow Peril Panic of the week in right wing circles, and it’s strange that Musk didn’t pander to them.

The EU wasn’t amused by all this, even if the rest of us were. Per Brad Reed at Raw Story: Éric Freyssinet, the deputy director of France’s Cyberspace Gendarmerie Command, warned Twitter CEO Elon Musk that his company could lose protections against both civil and criminal legal liabilities if it really enforces this policy.

“Any attempt to remove my tweets that link to my other social media accounts, not violating any law, would actually make Twitter an editorial media, and no longer a social media platform, with civil and criminal liability for *any* illegal content therein,” he explained.

Oh, dear. Just Kanye West’s posts about Jews would qualify as illegal content under EU rules. Hate speech is against the law in that civilized corner of the world. Even in the US, editorial media—papers, cable news networks and so forth, steer clear of libelous and/or defamatory content, or like some of the less disreputable outfits that dabbled in it last year, they could face ruinous lawsuits of, oh, say, $1.6 billion. I’m sure you can think of a few examples, and none of them sound very happy about those suits right now.

After that, Musk jaunted off to Qatar to watch the final of the World Cup, aka the Merde! Bowl. He got photographed with Jared Kushner and Qatari leaders, which brought to mind Mos Eisley spaceport from Star Wars. You know the one. “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” The only thing missing was The Former Guy.

Imagine you get a call tomorrow morning from some clerk at Twitter headquarters. “Musk just walked out! It’s bedlam! It’s chaos!” You might ask what Musk walking out had to do with the bedlam and chaos, since it’s a bit like saying the traffic light just turned red and that’s why there’s a full moon. The clerk, sobbing convulsively, screams “Save us, Obi-Wan! You’re our only hope.” (Yeah, I know, you start with one quote from that damn movie and it metastasizes…).

OK, snow’s ploughed, gifts are under the tree, wife just left you for a television repairman. You say, what the fuck? Demand an iron clad contract that says you get a few million for three months work no matter what, put on a firefighter’s gear, and wade in.

What would you do first?

I would do an instant reset. Undo every change that Musk made that still survived his mercurial moods. Invite every employee that Musk canned or forced out back, at the same pay, and with a promise for a fat bonus if at the end of your three month period, they had managed to right the ship. Bring back the voluntary council that Musk just canned earlier this week and tell them to get cracking on rules that were consistent and, even more importantly, able to be applied consistently. Hate speech, disinformation, doxxing and defamatory attacks would once again result in suspension.

Reset to last known version that worked. And then carefully build from there. If you have to move slowly and cautiously, so be it. We’ve seen what brash and impulsive rule looks like. It looks like the Qatari mens’ soccer team.

Musk should help to further degrade the cult-like faith people have that those who are rich and famous must therefore be wise and capable of strong leadership. Gawd knows America has no shortage of overprivileged libertarian cnuts that show, if anything that the exact opposite is true. Billionaires are not your buddy, and don’t care about your interests and needs. In fact, they’re sure that if they had, they wouldn’t be billionaires in the first place. Stop worshipping them.

In the meantime, keep watching Twitter. It’s the best Marx Brothers movie they’ve made in 75 years.

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Big Liars tell Big Lies — Refuting a string of whoppers

Big Liars tell Big Lies

Refuting a string of whoppers

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 25th 2022

zeppscommentaries.online

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

(Goebbels) 

The OSS psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Even though he hasn’t officially declared for President, Trump released an unabashed campaign ad the other day. It’s worth noting that I was shown the ad by an indignant Trump supporter who showed that Facebook declared that the ad had “sensitive content” and “may show violent or graphic content.” and had to be clicked in order to view. Facebook has absurd censorship policies, and they were just as stupid here: the ad is not violent or graphic.

While like all things Trump, it was long-winded (almost four minutes) and self-serving, compared to his multi-hour harangues of the sort that dictators seem to delight in, it did put his top twenty (actually, only nineteen here) lies and mistruths in one easy-to-discuss spot. So lets discuss it.

“We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.”

People have been saying that about the United States dating back to the 18th century. Trump is hoping that his followers will think this is a new development that only started in 2021. Yes, the country is in trouble, but he and his cult following are the biggest single threat now.

“We are a nation that has the highest inflation in over 40 years.”

Yup, and it’s a world-wide phenomenon. Indeed, the US has the lowest inflation rate of nearly all developed nations. Some, like Germany, are nearly double the rate afflicting the US. No Republican has offered a solution to this, while Biden has worked to release oil reserves and undercut corporate gouging on oil prices.

“The stock market just finished the worst first-half of the year in more than five decades.”

Carefully phased, since the second half of 2019 saw a far bigger decline. Incidentally, despite being generally bearish this year, the Dow is STILL above the peak it reached under Trump.

“We are a nation that has the highest energy costs in its history.”

True, but that’s the fault of Putin, the Saudis, and oil companies. The big three had net profits of over $110 billion in the second quarter, nearly double what they made in the same quarter the year before.

“We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant, which we were just two short years ago.”

On fossil fuels, the US is energy-even so far as imports and exports go. On alternate energy sources, we enjoy a clear surplus. The only thing we are dependent on is the charity and good faith of multinational oil companies, which means we are trying to live on a soap bubble.

“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil.”

Saudi Arabia cut production in a bald-faced attempt to manipulate the American election. They want corporate fascists running America, because they know that they will work hard to keep Americans dependent on oil, the world’s biggest suicide pact. Biden did sound out an agreement with Venezuela, but you can’t have your cake and eat it: either Biden should be looking to lower oil prices, or shut the fuck up.

“We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan leaving behind dead soldiers, American citizens, and $85 billion of the finest military equipment in the world.”

Trump unilaterally issued a treaty that would have pulled all US troops out within a month. The Pentagon, utterly appalled, managed to get it reworked to the bug-out date was moved to March 2021. That was still far too soon, with predicable results. Trump certainly could predict them; he created them by ordering the release of 10,000 Taliban members the US had in prison in Afghanistan the week before he announced the unilateral pull-out.

“We are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people and it will only get worse.”

I invite anyone to explain how Trump would have stood up to Putin on anything. I wonder how much confidential military information on Ukraine were in those stolen documents that Trump left office with, and how many of them got passed along to his buddy Putin.

“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before”

Well, law enforcement is supposed to catch law breakers. Deal with it Donald. But you can scare your supporters by pointing out that if Republican criminals aren’t safe, than no criminal is safe.

“We are a nation that no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”

See Goebbels quote above.

“We are a nation where free speech is not allowed…”

Well, I suppose he did have to pay in advance for that ad. It’s pretty bloody silly to tell an audience of millions that your voice is being repressed.

“We are a nation where crime is rampant like never before…”

The crime rate did go up between 2019 and 2020, the latest year we have statistics for. It’s still 40% below the crime rate in 1990, which in turn was far below that of 1975. By the way, who was President in 2020?

“We are a nation where the economy is collapsing…”

No, Trump. Your criminal business empire is collapsing. Capitalism may implode, but Republicans will be one of the main reasons for that, allowing an unprecedented concentration of wealth that exceeds the Gilded Age of the 1920s, or the decade leading up to the French revolution.

“We are a nation where more people died of COVID in 2021 than in 2020…”

New virus variants—Delta and Omicron—were responsible for that. The death rate has been sharply declining (about 250/day now compared to up to 4,000/day early in 2021) but here’s an interesting stat: the majority of those dying from COVID are registered Republicans, who only make up 29% of the population.

.”We are a nation where that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it has taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own…”

There’s no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, although thanks to Trump unilaterally ending the nuclear agreement between Iran and the West, there’s no mechanism to prevent them now beyond their own distaste for such weapons, which are considered fatwa—an affront to Allah. And while China has a formidable military, the “Trillions and Trillions of dollars” weren’t taken from the US: the corporations gave that money to China for cheap labor and lax health and safety standards. Trump himself has added billions to the Chinese treasury, including much of the rubbish he sells to his gullible followers at his endless rallies.

“We are a nation that over the past two years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world…”

Does that one even need a response? I’ll just note that Trump was not invited to the Queen’s funeral. Biden was. Trump was hurt. He wanted to sit on the Queen’s coffin so everyone would be looking at him.

“We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith…”

Americans are hostile to the notion that only a small portion of the population is entitled to liberty, freedom and religious choice. Those rights are for EVERYONE, not just white Republicans.

“We are a nation whose economy is floundering and stores are not stocked and whose deliveries are not coming and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of everyone else…”

The US educational system is in trouble, under unceasing attacks from fascists and zealots on the far right. The LAST thing Trump and his people want is an educated populace.

“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke.”

No, Trump. You are the joke. A very bad joke.

“We are Americans and Americans kneel to god and god alone.”

My only response to that is “Fuck you and whatever trash religion you pretend to observe.” Free Americans kneel to nobody against their will. The Constitution’s main promise is that no church can avail itself of state power to further its ends.

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