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Trump and the Seven Calls — What are he and Putin up to?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 10th 2024

When Bob Woodward, renowned investigative journalist, revealed in his just-published book War that Trump had secretly sent Vladimir Putin seven COVID testing machines, possibly dooming hundreds of Americans, I shook my head in disgust. But I didn’t expect much to come of it.

Trump would issue a blanket denial, and his mindless supporters would immediately reduce it to the level of “he said – he said.” A normal person wouldn’t have much trouble of weighing the veracity of Bob Woodward against that of Donald Trump, but Trump’s followers have pretty much abdicated all human skills of judgment. They would dismiss it, just as they have dozens of other stories about Trump, many of them proven, that would have destroyed the career of any public figure who wasn’t a cult leader. Cults are dangerous, and about one third of American voters have been brainwashed into becoming followers of a cult.

But then something unexpected occurred. The Kremlin weighed in on the story. Per Bloomberg News, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the tests had been sent, but denied the book’s claim that the two leaders had spoken by phone several times since Trump left office.”

I had just expected the Kremlin would issue a denial, or more likely, just ignore the story altogether. After all, the Russian disinformation media loves to portray Trump as a brave hero beset by liberals and Jews in the American press. This would have fed right into this narrative. (One Russian outlet today managed to find a way to portray Hurricane Milton as being somehow Jewish! Dot’s funny…Milton doesn’t look Jewish…)

That was devastating to Trump, and not because I expect the scales to fall from the eyes of his followers. That’s not going to happen overnight. But it struck me as a clear signal that Putin and his mob have written Trump off as a useful asset and no longer expect him to regain the White House. Clear and independent thinking around exactly staples of the Putin regime, but careful analysis and calculation are. They no longer think Trump is useful. Oh, they’ll keep spreading disinformation on his behalf and supporting him because anything that destabilizing to the United States is for the good, but they no longer take him seriously as an ally. (They already reported today that Milton destroyed Disneyland, which will come as a surprise to the City of Anaheim in California). Keep up the good work, Ivan. There will be an extra potato in your paysack this week!

Now, about the seven calls. There may be tapes—there’s reason to suspect both the FBI and CIA have been monitoring Trump’s calls abroad because of suspicion he is a foreign agent. That’s speculation, of course, but not wholly unwarranted speculation.

But it was JD Vance who tried to ride to the rescue aboard the epileptic cow he calls a brain, telling reporters, “I honestly didn’t know that Bob Woodward was still alive until you just asked me that question.” Dismissing Woodward as a hack, he went on to say, “Even if it’s true, look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?”

Well, actually, yeah, there is. Trump is a private citizen, and there’s this thing called the Logan Act. It says, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” It was passed in 1799, so if any of the stooges on the Supreme Court are minded to bring up their originalist bullshit, they might consider that the people who passed the Act were either founders or knew them personally. You might think someone running for Vice President with an ailing 78 year old man a heartbeat away from Ayn Rand heaven would know that, yeah?

Vance clearly thought that was a valid defense. Vance is a moron. But it wasn’t a confession the phone calls took place. The twin enigmas-wrapped-in-a-riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery, the Kremlin and Mar-A-Lago, have both denied the calls took place.

But Donald couldn’t resist the opportunity to swan about in his own imagined importance, trumpeting it was “a good thing, not a bad thing,” that he got along with Putin “very well.” “A lot of people think that’s a bad thing,” Trump said. “No, no, that’s a great thing.”

I’m guessing those calls did take place. And they didn’t benefit the United States in any way. Hopefully the FBI and CIA are on this, and we won’t have to wait three years while Merrick Garland dithers.

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In the Wake of Helene — Trump finds new lows

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 6th 2024

In the days following the passage of Hurricane Helene through the deep South, the shitposters came swarming out of Truth Social, Newsmax, and other anal orifices of the web to decry the horrible, even non-existent response by the Biden administration in the way of disaster relief.

It’s going to be a while before we can even really assess the amount of damage Helene did. Certainly, the region suffered more damage than it did during the Civil War. The number of homeless may number in the millions. A lot of regions are accessible only by helicopter, due to the number of roads and bridges that were swept away.

But to the right wing shitposter, no crisis should go to waste. The tone was often openly gleeful; it would make Harris look bad, which would help Trump, so the more dead Americans the better. They even showed up in non-political corners of the web (non-partisan weather-related sites were especially targeted) to spray lies about the catastrophe like AR-15s in a kindergarten. Biden wasn’t answering calls from southern governors. FEMA was showing a clear “anti-Republican bias” in aid efforts. In a bout of wishful thinking, the Lord Haw-Haws reported the entire nation was furious over the lack of response. Harris spent all the FEMA money on “illegals.” Over a billion dollars was supposedly missing. And there were no signs of rescue operations at all in North Carolina.

These were all blatant lies, easily debunked. Some didn’t even make sense on the face of it. The Vice President has no say in FEMA spending, or access to same. Air traffic over NC was triple what it would normally be due to the huge amounts of helicopters flying food, water and shelter in to ruined areas.

The source of these lies was easy to pinpoint: it was Donald Trump himself. The king of American shitposters. Just last night, he posted, “This has been the worst Hurricane Response by a president and vice president since Katrina—and this is simply unacceptable… Kamala wined and dined in San Francisco, and all the people in North Carolina—no helicopters, no rescue. They’re offering $750 to people whose homes have been washed away—meanwhile, they send our money to other countries by the billions.”

It’s a disgraceful response by a disgraceful man. But his followers are ecstatic. They flooded social media with an AI picture purporting to show Trump, in full business suit, wading into floodwater to rescue victims of the storm. No, really. It’s a shame the image isn’t real; they desperately need rafts down there right now, and Trump would make a fine raft.

Normally these shenanigans wouldn’t warrant a response from me. We’re all so used to self-serving, self-aggrandizing bullshit from Trump and his followers that ranting more about it would just put my readers to sleep. Some of you are probably nodding off like Trump in a courtroom right now.

But there’s a couple of more elements to all this that put this up to a higher level.

First, FEMA really is nearly out of funds. Like most of the rest of government, they’ve been getting by on Continuing Resolutions, which means they aren’t even getting cost-of-living adjustments, let alone funds to deal with the ever-increasing weather disasters that stem from climate change. And no, the money wasn’t spent on undocumented immigrants by Kamala Harris.

Congress is in recess. All the representatives are at home for the campaign, sucking for dollars. But responsible members from both parties have been clamoring for an emergency session to provide FEMA with the needed funds. That seems like a no-brainer, and I’ll repeat that the demands are bipartisan.

The man empowered to call Congress back into session isn’t Joe Biden. The President doesn’t have that authority. Neither is it Kamala Harris, even in the role of Presiding Officer of the Senate. Only House Speaker Mike Johnson can do that.

And he will NOT be calling the House back early to vote on a disaster aid supplemental He told Politico’s Olivia Beavers the cost of damages has to be ‘tabulated’ before a supplemental is considered. And that could take some time.

Remember that $750 that Trump was sneering at? It wasn’t to “rebuild homes”–it was just to give people in areas not totally destroyed money to get food, water and shelter right now in order to stay alive. And it will save thousands of lives. Johnson, in effect, is saying “don’t do anything for desperate people until we have some idea of how much they lost.”

I don’t know if it’s an act of political calculation or just pure sociopathy, but Johnson obviously sees merit in crippling rescue and recovery operations. I’m sure that Trump is delighted.

But there’s more. Another hurricane is coming. Hurricane Milton. It is aiming straight toward Tampa Bay, Florida, and is projected to arrive as a major hurricane. It’s a nightmare scenario, since the heavily populated areas around Tampa Bay are particularly vulnerable to storm and tidal surges. It will arrive at new Moon, when tides are particularly high. The result could be a far smaller area devastated, but far more deaths and property damage than we have seen from Helene.

But not to worry. Congress will reconvene after the election, and if they aren’t too busy figuring out how to steal the election for Trump, they might consider throwing a few bucks to the survivors, even if the survivors were too thoughtless to submit an itemized bill first. It’s the Christian Nationalist thing to do, after all.

Also, the long range is hinting at another hurricane which may sweep up past Miami and up the eastern seaboard and into New England. Unlike Milton, it’s far enough in the future to hope that it won’t happen, but it’s a signal that the climate isn’t finished with us just yet, no matter what Congress thinks.

Call your own reps and demand they meet to establish emergency relief aid. It is critically needed, and it will get far worse in the next week. Or go here (https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/hurricane-helene-how-to-help/story?id=114345534 ) and donate to the charity of your choice.

And if you encounter Trump’s shitposters, don’t bother being polite. They don’t deserve any human courtesy.

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Smith’s Second Filing — More “ruh-roh” moments for Donny

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 2nd, 2024

Jack Smith’s new 167-page filing against Donald Trump contains several bombshells.

Trump, of course, was hoping his lunatic pet fascists on the Supreme Court would give him full immunity against any actions he performed as President. But even his six corrupt right wingers knew they had to figleaf their ruling to give it a pretense of Constitutional law, and they stipulated that immunity only applied to “official acts.” Still “law” on the level of the Dredd Scott decision, but it was enough.

Very little of Trump’s activities between the month or so prior to the election and January 6th fell under the aegis of ‘official acts.’ Even after the Supreme Court decided the United States needed a king instead of a president, most of his activities were flat-out illegal.

So Smith rewrote his filing to stipulate that Trump’s actions did not fall under the official duties of a president. While you can argue that various presidents in American history would have been delighted to see their vice presidents lynched, it is, in fact, not an official presidential duty. The constitution is curiously mute on the issue of when it is proper for a president to have his first-in-line murdered even though at the time of the Constitution, the vice president was whoever got the second-most votes. “Uneasy lies the head,” indeed!

Of course, the endless delays meant that Smith had more time to broaden his investigation and include new allegations in his superseding document. The delays were caused, not by Smith but by Trump, who hoped to delay it all past the election, where hopefully he would win or steal a second term and fire Jack Smith.

Smith had an allegation missing from the first filing: that Trump knew his claims he won the election but it was stolen from him were false. The new filing contains eyewitness allegations that Trump dismissed voting results as “details” that “don’t matter” and the strategy was simply to throw doubt over the results, justified or not. In Trump’s own words, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Trump couldn’t even be bothered with a coherent theory as to how the votes were taken from them. His claims vary wildly from filing to filing, even in appeals of the same case! His estimates amounted to “whatever sounds good,” and the only thing they had in common was an utter lack of evidence to support them. That’s why he lost every single voter fraud filing he made, even though a third of the judges reviewing his filings were Trump appointees. Smith includes first-hand accounts of Trump mocking allegations that voting machines “changed the votes.” I wonder if Fox News will sue Trump if he is found guilty of willfully lying about that; after all, it was repeating those lies that cost Fox News three quarters of a billion dollars in a defamation suit.

Smith hardened the allegations that Trump planned to not only contest, but cast doubt on the election prior to the election. One Trump lawyer’s quote that made it in this time: “What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory. … That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner … that’s our strategy.”

Trump hired Giuliani because Giuliani had stated he would support Trump’s lies. In Smith’s words, Giuliani “was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud” The filing contains one tidbit that Rudy might find interesting: Trump planned to stiff him if the filing failed, and of course it was bound to.

On January 6th, Trump posted to his enraged MAGA monkeys that by failing to invalidate the electoral count, Mike Pence lacked the “courage to do what should have been done.” Learning that Pence had been taken to a safe location so the monkeys wouldn’t lynch him, Trump’s response was “so what?”

Trump’s own people knew he was a lying sack. One staffer’s quote Smith saw fit to include was, “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” Some of Trump’s lawyers have already been sanctioned, and even disbarred for filing his nonsense. More are sure to follow in light of these new revelations. Even the chair of the RNC was warned that Trump’s motions were “fucking nuts.”

More details on the hours Trump spent watching TV and grinning at the chaos he brought to the capitol on January 6th have emerged, and those are included in the filing.

Apparently Jack Smith doesn’t think that watching coverage of a Trump-caused riot is an “official duty.” It’s about on the same ‘official’ level as watching a movie about the French Revolution while munching chips.

It’s pretty safe to assume that Trump’s delay tactics have whipped around and bitten him on the ass.

And this all serves as a warning: Trump plans to pull the same shit again next month.

Smith made it that much harder for Trump to convince Americans with brains of his bullshit.

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Walzing to a Win — Vance dance slick, but hobbled by Trumpentruths

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 1st, 2024

On the surface, tonight’s vice-presidential debates harkened back to debates prior to the Trump era. Both candidates were articulate, reasonable-sounding, and civil. If you stripped the content of the debate of all context, they seemed evenly matched. Give Vance credit: he came across as human, a feature he has struggled with since he was nominated.

But he was badly crippled by the fact that he had to present the general lunacy of Trumpentruths. Thus, he had to spout utter absurdities as “Trump saved the ACA” Really? Nobody remembers Trump’s campaign to repeal it, a drive that was stymied in the final minute by a dramatic midnight thumbs-down gesture by a dying John McCain? Walz, thinking fast, immediately brought up that seven years later, Trump only has a “concept of a plan” to deal with health care.

He had to mirror Trump’s waffling on the issue of bodily autonomy. So he had to simultaneously pretend that Trump ended abortion while saying that the public wanted the states to determine a woman’s right to abortion. Walz parried it beautifully, noting that fundamental rights should not be subject to geography. It was the perfect response to the GOP pretense that it’s a states’ rights issue: the constitution supersedes states in the matter of establishing rights, and no state may suborn a national civil right.

On health care, in addition to the ACA blunder, Vance tried to argue that costs of health care needed to be distributed, and not the sole domain of government. He managed to say it in such a way that he wasn’t saying people should depend on churches for health care.

Vance had to evade answering the yes-no-no question, “Is the climate changing?” His response went, “One of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions, this idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change … let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument.” He fluffed the question, saying that the all-powerful Harris should have reduced pollution by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, saying (falsely) that the US has the cleanest economy in the world. He claimed, again falsely, that solar panels are all made in China, although when pressed, he muttered that the parts that go into solar panels were made there. Under Biden, of course, manufacturing jobs have been returning to the US (Harris may have supported him, doubtlessly did, but vice presidents don’t have any particular authority on this). He tried saying that Trump did not consider climate change despite the fact that Trump is on record, repeatedly, for making that very claim.

Vance had to bash immigrants since that’s the centerpiece of Trump’s Naziesque hate campaign. He tried blaming immigrants for the high cost of housing, but had to back off when Walz noted that immigration was dropping. I would have noted that few immigrants are financially able to buy a home.

Confronted with the fruits of his hate campaign against Springfield, Ohio, he tried saying that the only reason they were there was because Harris (apparently the most powerful vice president in history) let them in under a special refugee law. They did in fact enter under such a law—one signed by Donald Trump. Oh, and at the invitation of Springfield, which needed labor.

Finally, and this was where Vance successfully knocked himself out, he tried the pretense that Trump did not want to overturn the 2020 election, and wanted only a peaceful protest at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He couldn’t handle the question that he had stated that if he had been vice president instead of Mike Pence, he would have rejected the electoral vote citing “questions” and thrown it to Congress. (In the event of a legitimate tie in the electoral college, Congress could vote on who won. And it isn’t a straight up-and-down vote: each state gets one vote, and in 2021, the outgoing Congress had a majority representation in 27 states. They might have overturned the election had Mike Pence not done his job.)

A lot of people have said that Trump made a poor choice when he selected JD Vance as his running mate. But watching him squirm and battle to toe the party line, the absurd Trumpentruths that have turned the GOP into an anti-American and savage cult, I think it wasn’t Trump who made the bad choice for a running mate. It was JD Vance who made the poor choice for a running mate.

Vice Presidential debates rarely shift votes, and it’s unlikely this one did. Walz won, both on presentation and debate points. It wasn’t the utter carnage of the first two presidential debates, and won’t get a lot of attention.

But watching Vance, and how slick and mentally agile he was, I realized how fantastically dangerous this soulless man would be if he elects to run in 2028, armed with his own Trumpentruths.

 

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Helene of Tories — Trump stumps sump dump

Helene of Tories

Trump stumps sump dump

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 30th 2024

We’re with you all the way, and if we were there, we’d be helping you,” Trump said. “You’ll be okay.”

He said that the day after Hurricane Helene, by then a tropical depression, had finished wreaking havoc over a quarter of the United States and was coming to a wet fizzley end clear up in Ontario. Helene, as forecast, was a major disaster. The known death toll is mercifully low (91 so far) but the damage will be in the tens of billions of dollars. Many parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee were flooded, dozens of roads and freeways washed out, and at least several dams failed.

When I first heard Trump’s latest burst of idiocy, I remembered how he famously “was there to help” in the wake of Hurricane Maria in San Yuan, Puerto Rico in 2017. He tossed paper towels to a group of survivors, an action on a par with dropping packets of chewing gun over an area suffering from famine. The BBC reported it this way: “Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described his televised meeting with officials as a ‘PR, 17-minute meeting’. The sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was ‘terrible and abominable’, she added. Mr Trump tweeted it had been a ‘great day’ in Puerto Rico.”

He no doubt would have consoled the people hit by Helene with $10 coupons to use to buy his $500 watches. Trump, after all, is the grift that keeps on grifting.

Trump and the Republicans had waved away reports that Helene was going to be a monster. Part of it stems from their insistence that global warming is just a myth spread by liberals and communists to destroy American capitalism. Part of it is their libertarian fascist drive to convince people that government agencies such as the National Weather Service and NOAA (which runs the vital National Hurricane Center) are just propaganda organs for the left and serve no useful purpose.

As the damage became clear, Trump backtracked in his usual awkward and shameless way, saying, on Sunday, that the storm as “a big monster hurricane” that had “hit a lot harder than anyone even thought possible.” (Anyone except NWS, every reputable meteorologist in the country, and pretty much everyone with enough weather knowledge to know what ‘bombogenesis’ means.)

He criticized Harris for attending weekend “fundraising events with her radical left lunatic donors” in California while the storm hit. “She ought to be down in the area where she should be,” Trump said. I didn’t notice Trump going down there during the storm, did you? In fact, he decided Mar-A-Lago was uncomfortably close to the storm (it wasn’t) and watched from a safe distance—New York.

Per ABC News, “The White House said Harris would visit impacted areas ‘as soon as it is possible without disrupting emergency response operations.’ She also spoke with Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and she received a briefing from Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell while she was traveling.

Trump, of course, can’t be arsed with waiting until emergency response operations have ended and things shift to recovery mode. He’s going to Valdosta Georgia today to swan around. While the water supply is now safe, Valdosta is still under an emergency curfew, much of the town is still flooded, and in addition to the 17 known dead, many more are still missing. He’s going to have his security detail shut down several blocks so he can pose, even as city authorities are begging people, “Text. Don’t Call: Texting leaves lines open for emergencies.” I’m sure he’ll be a big help.

No doubt, Trump will blame Harris for the damage. You know he will. I’ll bet the mortgage he will. As far as he’s concerned, any crisis must be used to blame Harris, real or conjured, natural or caused by Republicans. In Trump World, no crisis should go to waste, and the more dead Americans he can blame on Democrats, the better.

Remember, too that under Project 2025, the Republicans want to eliminate FEMA.

But since FEMA hasn’t yet been removed as part of the GOP’s Ayn Rand’s hellscape America, it’s still massively useful. If you want to help people in the affected areas, go here: https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20240928/how-help-after-hurricane-helene

And if you’re a Trump supporter, stay true to your principles and send rolls of paper towels.

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Trump On The Ladies — Girls, he’ll show you how to be women

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 25th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

From CNN today:

“I always thought women liked me. I never thought I had a problem. But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me,” Trump said in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “I don’t believe it.”

The former president claimed women are “less safe,” “much poorer” and are “less healthy” now compared to when he was president and vowed to end what he described as their “national nightmare.”

“Because I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector,” Trump said.

Women, he added, “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

Well, now, can you little darlings all just calm down now? Uncle Donald is here to protect you from the emotional and hysterical weight of being women, and is going to take care of you all just like your daddies did.

And stop fussing about abortion, for Pete’s sake. Half of you won’t have kids anyway, being over fifty, or under 10, or, you know, ugly. Especially you libbers. Never was such a pack of hairy, ugly wimmin like that. Donald’s gonna get you into the beauty parlor, get you fixed up, make you feel worth while as human beings.

OK. I get accused of having a sick sense of humor. And yeah, that’s true. That gets me in more trouble then just about any other facet of my generally lamentable character.

But in this Age of Trump, there’s a problem with having a sick sense of humor. Events have a way of topping even my darkest comic imaginings.

Trump says he will make women happy, healthy, confident and free. Whew! That’s genius, I couldn’t match that. Andy Kaufman couldn’t match it. Sam Kinnison couldn’t match it. George Carlin would be gobsmacked. I read that, and concluded that either I took far too many drugs in the seventies, or I didn’t take enough.

Even by the standards of Trump and the GOP, this is grotesque. Trump the rapist. Trump the serial adulterer. Trump, the bozo who delighted in humiliating his first wife with his much publicized affair with Marla Maples. Trump, who packed the Supreme Court with religious fascists and crowed loudly when they rescinded a woman’s right to an abortion. Trump, who boasted about being able to “grab them by the pussy.” Trump, who smears and insults nearly any woman who dares challenge him, whether as a political opponent or a reporter asking questions.

As gaslighting goes, it’s unparalleled in its sheer brazenness and scope. Of course, for Trump, it’s just another Monday. At other times, he’s proclaimed himself the great white hope for African Americans, saying he did more for them than any president including Abraham Lincoln. His top example of black people who support him is a howling nut who proclaimed himself “a Black NAZI” and referred to MLK Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Coon.”

Nobody stands for science more than Trump, you know. He had an uncle who attended MIT. Take that, Neil Degrasse Tyson! So when he talks about windmills causing cancer, sharks electrocuting boaters, and climate change being a hoax by AOC to force us all to live in caves, why, he’s speaking as the world’s greatest authority on African Americans, women, sharks, and pets who get eaten. Or something. It’s scientifical, you know.

I imagine that next he’ll address his expertise and compassion for the lives of Asian-Americans and point out he saw all the Charlie Chan movies as a kid.

It’s getting harder to tell how much of this stuff is dementia, and how much is just the same snake-oil bullshit that’s floated Trump through his entire wastrel life. But in the end, that doesn’t matter: Either way, he is totally unfit for office. If he was your grandad, you would be taking away his car keys by now, and keeping a discreet eye on his debit card purchases.

And if you still support Trump at this point, there is something very, very wrong with you.

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Fascism versus Nazism — Both are bad; one is worse

Fascism versus Nazism

Both are bad; one is worse

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 21st, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

David Runciman has an article in today’s Guardian that is well worth reading: Is Donald Trump a Fascist? It’s a well written article and gives a balanced and considered analysis of where Trump stands and what he might do under a second term.

There is, however, one problem with Runciman’s analysis: like many politically-oriented writers, he conflates fascism, a fairly common form of government, with its more vicious and rarer offspring: Nazism.

Nazism is a horrific form of government, It meets Runciman’s analysis of why such regimes are rare: “Calling a 21st-century politician a fascist is so damning – so much worse than any other label – because actual fascist regimes are very rare. One reason for that is none of them ever lasted. They were catastrophic failures – catastrophes not only for their friends and enemies but for the wider world – undone by their own appetite for relentless crisis and confrontation.”

True Nazi regimes are short lived, but extremely vicious, usually leading to mass death through wars and systematic exterminations.

Fascism and Nazism aren’t the same thing. Much of Europe has had fascist regimes at one point or another; Franco in Spain, the early days of Mussolini in Italy, Putin in Russia, Salazar in Portugal. Nearly every central and south American country has been under fascism at one point or another, and many still are. Examples are rife in Asia, as well: Modi in India, Suharto in Indonesia, Shah Pahlavi in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Marcos in the Philippines, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and so on.

I’m deliberately excluding authoritarian regimes that are either military juntas or religious theocracies. They are their own breed of political creatures, and while they share many characteristics with fascism, neither Trump nor the GOP are on a path that leads to either of those types.

Granted, fascist regimes don’t hesitate to use the military or religion to their ends. Both are valuable instruments of social control, after all.

Back in 2003 Lawrence Britt published The Fourteen Signs of Fascism. Trump and his MAGA movement check every box. Indeed, the right wing of the GOP have done so dating back to the early days of the John Birch Society and McCarthyism

A good bumper sticker definition of fascism is that it is the merging of corporate and/or aristocratic power with the power of the state. Church and the military are subordinate, but nonetheless vital.

So fascist regimes are actually all too common, and some might last for decades. Unlike Nazi regimes.

Like monarchies, theocracies, and military rule, fascist regimes are born with the seeds of their own destruction. They are authoritarian, and thus demand unquestioning obedience from the population. They offer relatively little in return: a promise of stability and a sense of glory, with lots of god- and flag-waving. But authoritarianism is power, and power inevitably corrupts. Most such governments rapidly become kleptocracies. with functionaries standing in front of every door with their palms out, and the justice system designed to protect them becoming more and more capricious and cruel.

No free person with a sane mind wants to live under a fascist regime. Or any authoritarian regime, for that matter. George Washington framed the role of government power perfectly when he said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and fearful master.” Democracy works because it puts government on a leash.

Yes, a GOP triumph in November would almost certainly bring about a fascist regime with Trump as an ever-more unreliable figurehead. It would be run by the congregation of plutocrats and other power brokers in their panoply of think tanks, corporate empires and suborned media outlets that I refer to as the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues. But while it would be nasty and corrupt, it wouldn’t be the immediate horrorshow that Runciman has in mind when he uses the word “fascist.” My “association” isn’t a true conspiracy; it’s merely a large group of aligned but often competing interests with similar aims. The cohesion stems from marriages of convenience, and once the country is spread out on the table before them, the knives will come out.

Yes, it will be a mess, and unless you happen to be a billionaire or a nimble functionary, you will suffer.

For a true Nazi regime, you need one final element: a Strongman. Trump, for all his personal power and viciousness, has never really been suited to that role, no matter how big his ego. He’s never had the skills needed to assure the fealty and loyalty of people around him, or the discipline and steadfastness to control people under him. And now, he’s a demented shadow of himself.

However, you do need a Leader for a true nightmare regime: a Hitler, a Stalin, a Putin. It’s the element that blends power and control with paranoia and capriciousness.

There may be any number of people in Trump’s ranks willing to audition for the role of strongman, and no doubt dozens who would have the requisite cleverness and savagery to emerge as a truly fearsome leader.

But they would be competing with others both at their level and facing resistance from others in more subordinate levels. And if Trump is still inconveniently alive, they have to keep it totally out of the public eye. (A Trump administration will bring back the grand old Political Science sport of Kremlin Watching).

But a fascist regime, especially one that is fairly rudderless as this one would be, does contain in its brutality and weakness the seeds for a Hitler, and an elevated chance for the rise of such. A GOP win in six weeks would put us all on the cusp of that, at our own expense.

Trump isn’t the real threat: the money and power backing him is the real threat.


David Runciman’s article can be found here.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/21/is-donald-trump-a-fascist

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The Black Nazi — Ruckus has met his match—and more

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 19th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Fans of the old “Boondocks” TV animated show no doubt remember Uncle Ruckus. In a series renowned for its unblinking, razor-sharp satire of race and racial relations in America, Ruckus stood out as one of the most challenging characters. Obese, slovenly, and an absolute bigot, Ruckus was perhaps the most memorable element in a show filled with brilliant characters.

Ruckus was, to all appearances, an African American. However, he claimed (and presumably believed) that he was actually a white Irish-American who suffered from “reverse vitiligo,” which turned his skin black.

According to Wikipedia, “Ruckus constantly hurls racism at all things black. On being asked if he supports the use of the word “nigga“, he says, ‘No, I don’t think we should use the word, and I’ll tell ya why. Because niggas have gotten used to it, that’s why. Hell, they like it now. It’s like when you growin’ crops and you strip the soil of its nutrients and goodness and then you can’t grow nothin’. You gotta rotate your racist slurs. Now I know it’s hard ’cause ‘nigga’ just rolls off the tongue the way sweat rolls off a nigga’s forehead, but we cannot let that be a crutch. Especially when there are so many fine substitutes: spade, porch monkey, jiggaboo. I say the next time you gonna call a darkie a nigga, you call that coon a jungle bunny instead.’” Well, OK then.

Ruckus routinely says things about black people that most Americans haven’t heard since the 1960s.

It’s a sign of the absolute genius of show creator Aaron MacGruder that Ruckus is actually a relatable character who sometimes is even sympathetic. His mother was a severely damaged woman who internalized feeling of inferiority and self-disgust emerging as self-hating racism. His father was an violent and abusive drunk whose rampages cost a young Ruckus his eye. For all his vicious racism, he was capable of kindness and generosity, including to the protagonists in the Freeman family, all black.

I’ve referred to some African Americans in the Trump orbit as Ruckuses before: Clarence Thomas, Herschel Walker, a couple of others that Bartcop used to call “lawn jockeys.”

But none of those unworthies even came as close to Ruckus-hood like North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson has come.

Robinson not only matches Ruckus in his speech (he referred to Martin Luther King Jr as “Martin Lucifer Coon”) but actually sinks below Ruckus in his vileness and horrific self-image. CNN blew the doors off his long and extremely sordid long-lived role in the resident porn community. Starting with a grandiose claim that Ruckus, in his worst possible moment, couldn’t approach. He described himself as “a black Nazi.” It turns out that his utter hatred for transexuals and “immoral” people such as gays or liberals is an utter sham: He’s a huge fan of transexual porn.

He was already widely known as a porn-dog of long standing, and already had a long resume of dark and incendiary statements including mass killings of various groups of people. In normal times, no self respecting political party would hire him as a janitor, let alone as the candidate for governor.

But these aren’t normal times. Trump took him under his wing, once praising him as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” The GOP, having thrown away any and all pretense of integrity, ethics, common sense or patriotism, went along docilely.

Just for some perspective, Christine O’Donnell saw her political career end when she felt it necessary to deny she was a witch. Bill Clinton was impeached for fibbing about having sex with a consenting adult. Obama endured weeks of abuse for wearing a tan suit. Bush Junior had a questionable service in the Texas Air National Guard. Dennis Hastert retired in disgrace for actions that these days would put you in charge of the House Judiciary Committee.

The standards of the GOP have fallen from sleazy and contemptible to outright nihilistic and demented.

But today’s reports on Robinson were a bridge too far, it seems. Tonight, there are widespread demands for Robinson to drop out of the governor’s race since his very presence will damage the party in an important swing state. Without North Carolina, GOP chances of winning the White House are effectively zero.

But there’s a couple of problems as of 6:20 pm PDT. First, Robinson denies all the stories despite overwhelming evidence (he even claimed they were written by AI, which apparently has the ability to travel back in time over more than a decade to post in his identity), and refuses to leave the race. Second, the GOP face a deadline after which Robinson’s name must remain on the ballot as absentee ballots go out. That deadline is in about 158 minutes: midnight Eastern Time, 9pm here.

For the GOP, it’s pretty much an unwinnable situation. Should Robinson withdraw, they have virtually no time at all to pick a sacrificial lamb to replace him on the ballot. He would surely lose (Robinson was trailing by 18 points anyway) but it would minimize damage to the rest of the party, including Trump, in a state that should have been solid red but was teetering before this happened.

If Robinson stays, the Democrats are going to waste no time running ads showing Trump calling Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Yes, Trump said that in front of cameras.

Robinson deserves what’s coming to him, and so does Trump.

But if there is anything else good coming from this, it may cause many more Republicans to realize the sick and disgusting poison that has taken over their party, and begin to resist.

I’ll hold off until 9 to finish this. I suspect it may sound the death knell for Trump. We shall see.

Whelp, the magic hour has passed, Robinson is still in the race, and both the Harris Campaign and the Lincoln Project have their first ads out.

Trump is going to be wearing Robinson as his own personal codpiece for the next seven weeks.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of guys.

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“Oh Popeye! Oh Bluto!” — Fortunately, morons won’t decide the election now

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 18th 2024

The small group of voters known as “undecideds” break down into two categories. First, there’s the “What? There’s a election?” crowd. They tend to have an exaggerated impact in polls because they rarely actually vote. They need to know to register, and when, where and how to vote.

The others are the Olive Oyls. They’re the ones who are like the old Popeye cartoons character, the weak-willed and ever-vacillating female who can never decide between her two suitors, no matter how stark and obvious the difference between the two might be.

The reasoning might go something like this: “OK, Trump hates Taylor Swift, but Vance tells me Harris eats live kittens!” They can’t tell truth from falsehood, and aren’t ethically equipped to distinguish between normal and abhorrent behavior.

In a nation split almost exactly evenly by the power of propaganda, it’s horrifying to realize that these morons were likely to be the tipping point.

But the good news is that there is a new tipping point, and it lies with a group large enough to send the undecideds to the obscurity they deserve: this group is the Responsible Republicans.

They are a lot larger than most people realize. I started getting an inkling of their presence when I noticed that even in primaries where Nikki Haley wasn’t on the ballot, between 10 and 30 percent of Republican voters were NOT voting for Trump.

I looked at this, and I reasoned that as long as Biden held it together and didn’t do something utterly senile like declare hatred for Taylor Swift or childless cat ladies, and Trump went right on being Trump, these disaffected voters would become a significant factor in the election.

Biden’s withdrawal and the subsequent rise of Kamala Harris put Trump’s deficiencies in a glaring light. People immediately saw it as the Prosecutor vs. the Felon. Not Kennedy vs. Nixon, but more like Perry Mason vs. Tony Soprano. Only this “Tony” has stripped his mental gears and confuses Mason with Ironsides and mocks him for being in a wheelchair.

The exodus of Republicans choosing country over party didn’t begin with Liz Cheney and her father Dick endorsing Harris, but changed from a trickle to a landslide since. The latest round was announced by the Harris/Walz campaign today, when “more than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials who served in senior roles in multiple presidential administrations and in Congress are endorsing Vice President Harris for President.” This is in addition to the hundreds of ranking Republicans—former Presidents and Vice-Presidents, former Congressionals, former members of the Trump administration, hundreds more from both Bush and Reagan administrations, who have either endorsed Harris or refused to endorse Trump.

And now we are starting to see the polls shift. And it isn’t a big increase for Harris (1 percentage point) but a significant decrease for Trump (3 percentage points). He’s bleeding support.

For Responsible Republicans, the message is clear: if you can’t bring yourself to vote for Harris, at least don’t vote for Trump. The country can survive Harris; it won’t survive Trump. They may believe the propaganda on Fox News that Biden has ruined the economy and turned the country into a Taco Stand run by the cartels, but they can see that things are actually pretty good in their town. And because things ARE actually pretty good all around the country, a lot of Republicans are noticing that.

We’re just about at the point in the campaign where Bluto has pulled a dirty trick so egregious that Olive is starting to look even more confused, and Popeye is muttering “That’s alls I can stands, I can’t stands no more” and you know the loud music is about to start.

This week’s “assassination attempt” at the golf course shows just how desperate the Trump campaign has become. The previous attempt in Bethel, Pennsylvania, which was very real, didn’t result in a boost in the polls, but it did earn Trump a certain amount of good will and he might have enjoyed a ‘honeymoon’ period after that, had he not started immediately grifting from it.

This one’s credibility didn’t even last overnight. Trump himself blew the believability of it out of the water by saying that his decision to go golfing that day was a “last minute decision” which, combined with police claims the guy with the gun was parked outside the golf course for twelve hours, added to a huge “this doesn’t add up” from everyone. Not only did the grifting begin almost immediately, but JD Vance and others instantly demanded that Democrats—commies, pet-eaters and baby-killers all—immediately tone down the “inflammatory rhetoric.” If Ashli Babbitt was the MAGA movement’s Horst Wessel, then Ryan Routh, the golf course guy, was Marinus van der Lubbe, the half-wit executed for supposedly starting the Reichstag fire.

This won’t be lost on the remaining responsible Republicans who hadn’t quite decided to break the bond with Trump. What was a trickle of Republicans abandoning him will become a flood.

It doesn’t translate to down-ticket votes necessarily, although candidates firmly aligned with Trump will suffer from it. If you’re a sane Republican in North Carolina, you not only won’t vote for Trump, but you won’t vote for that nutball Mark Robinson, either.

Republicans in the House especially may find themselves vulnerable.

But a lot of those Republicans who see the dangers of Trump may decide Harris is nearly as bad, and vote Republican down ticket to keep the country paralyzed. This could still happen.

Less than seven weeks to go, now. Stay focused.

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“I Hate Taylor Swift” — Don Coyote tilts at windmills

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 15th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

“I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” – posted on Truth Social by you know who.

There are several things about Taylor Swift that Donald Trump failed to notice. She’s richer than him. She’s more popular. Her fan base is more committed. She’s better looking. And she’s a lot smarter.

So sure, Donnie, pick a fight with her. What could go wrong?

Taylor Swift was always pretty apolitical up until this year. I won’t speculate on what her private thoughts on this are except to note that she seems quite sane, which pretty much guarantees that she would take a dim view of our Donald. But just guessing, I would reckon the final straw was when Donald reposted a fake meme claiming that Taylor Swift had endorsed him. That’s damn near defamation, and I would want to set the record straight right away if I was her.

A lot of Donald’s followers are over-the-top assholes, like the person who made up the fake meme, but Donald is just big enough a fool to think that these crazy morons are working to do what’s best for Donald. You just have to look at his inner circle—Laura Loomer, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Chris LaCivita, Steven Miller…to know that these are not “the best people.” Even supporters like Ann Coulter and Marjorie Taylor-Greene are backing away in disgust now. It takes some doing to disgust Coulter and MTG, you know?

I’m guessing he’ll go right on attacking Taylor Swift because it’s perfectly normal for a presidential candidate to attack people for supporting the other candidate, right?

Horrible to say, I’m almost certain Swift is already getting bomb threats from Donald’s gestapitos already. Springfield, Ohio hospitals, the city hall, and police have been getting bomb threats for having the temerity to say there’s no evidence that any residents in that town have been eating anyones’ pets.

I had one Trumpkin on Facebook accuse me of “making democrat spin” for stating that inflation had come to an effective halt over the past three months and manufacturing jobs were on the rise. I asked him to identify anything I said that was untrue, but then added: “First let me know if you think immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield. I want to know if I’m wasting my time or not.”

Granted, when I respond with facts and figures, usually I just get something along the lines of “No! You’re lying!” and then I never hear from them again. So I probably won’t hear back anyway. But I’m mindful of the dictum attributed to Mark Twain: “Never argue with a fool. People might not be able to tell the difference.” Robert Heinlein said something along the lines of “Never get in a mud-slinging contest with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.”

The latest “eaten cats in Springfield” moral panic is part of a list of red flags that cause me to turn around and walk away from a fool. “Litter boxes in school bathrooms” is another, along with “The election was stolen” and “People have always loved Trump.” Some opinions are so incredibly stupid it’s an utter waste of time to argue them.

This is the Age of Trump where no conspiracy theory is too absurd, no lie too egregious, and no pandering to utter morons more obvious. Donald had been hooting that he WON the debate, and of course his followers are chanting it. Yeah, he won the debate in much the same way that Cumberland beat Georgia Tech (look it up). And the conspiracy theories immediately began: Harris was given the questions in advance, she had an ear device for answers from her aides, a special camera lens made Trump look older and Harris younger.

And of course, Harris did cheat, you know. Unbeknownst to Trump, she sneaked the following qualities to the podium: intelligence, experience, wit, wisdom and assertiveness. If she hadn’t brought those advantages along, she would have…well, broken even with Trump. Yeah, let’s put it that way.

She baited Trump, of course, most notably with the remark that people were leaving his rallies. Trump’s monkeys think that’s unfair. It’s nobody’s business if a future President of the United States is easily thrown off his game and manipulated. Besides, all of democracy’s enemies—Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orbán and Modi—all love Trump, and would never take advantage of him, right?

Republicans Against Trump is growing into a significant segment of the Republican electorate, with some of the strongest voices against Trump coming from the politically conservative portion. While some will support Harris, most will simply not vote for Trump, and it’s important to remember that while they are our allies against Trump, they still have their own agenda. They’ll still be voting down ticket for Republicans who aren’t Trump stooges, so don’t make the mistake of believing Harris’ increasing lead in the polls translates to a blue wave.

Although even there, Trump is doing the GOP real harm. He’s gleefully accepting huge donations for his PACs from every vicious fascist plutocrat in the country (but noticeably, not from business leaders!), but he’s not sharing the wealth down-ticket. Quite a few GOP state parties, especially in swing states, are dying on the vine from lack of funding. Yes, even in states where childless cat ladies and Swifties don’t dominate, and the landscape is studded with morons who believe [whichever] immigrant group eats pets and/or drinks the blood of Christian babies.

Some day, America will look back on the Age of Trump with pity and disgust. But we aren’t there yet.