Category: American Psyche

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The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy – Who knew the Trump White House was infested with libruls?

The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Who knew the Trump White House was infested with libruls?

November 25th 2018

I’ve been hearing chatter lately about a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. David Bossie, who was one of Paul Manafort’s wing men during the campaign, told an increasingly strained Chris Wallace, “There is a vast left-wing conspiracy that has been going on since the president won this election. All throughout the transition and through his first two years.”

We’ll get back to that facet of the VLWC in a moment. Bossie went on to say, “A vast left-wing conspiracy, similar to what Hillary Clinton used [to say] about a right-wing conspiracy.” Chris Wallace interrupted him, auto-saying, “Which incidentally didn’t turn out to be true,” since they’ve been denying the existence of such since about 1991. Even before Hillary pointed out the deliberate machinations of the right to undermine and defame the Clintons.

Bossie wasn’t buying it. Saying the VRWC really existed, he said, “Chris, there was an effort by the conservative movement to undermine President Clinton.”

Well, duh.

So let’s get back to the VLWC. There’s absolutely no doubt that liberals and leftists have opposed Trump since he announced he was running in 2015. It goes by many names: The Democratic Party, The Resistance, and so on. After three years of being somewhat ineffectual in their opposition to Pissmop, they finally landed a damaging blow on November 6th with a gigantic “blue wave” vote.

Prior to that, about the only thing we managed to do was to annoy Trump, who was in high dungeon over the fact that members of the opposition party might oppose him, or traitors to America who don’t like fascists and racists. We had absolutely zero luck in shaming GOP officials into trying to stop him before he wrecked the country, and even less luck in budging the polls further away from Trump. (His approval is locked at 41%, +/- 3%).

Trump has taken considerable damage already: his business brand, such as it was, is ruined beyond repair. While still capable of doing considerable damage through his sheer genius at mismanagement, he’s lost the House, so he isn’t going to get legislation to the still-barely-Republican Senate, and support in the upper house is eroding rapidly now that the writing is on the wall.

There’s three primary sources to the most damage Trump has taken, and none of those sources qualify as ‘left wing’.

First, there’s the personnel in all the agencies he’s alienated. Right wingers love to talk about how agencies dealing with education, welfare, science, etc., are all “liberal” but the fact is that while they tend to favor Democratic policies by overwhelming margins, it isn’t because they are liberal. It because for decades Republicans have been dumping on them, calling them dupes, liars, anti-American and anti-God for simply stating easily-proven facts.

Hint to Republicans: when you spend half a century pissing on someone’s head because what they know doesn’t jibe with what you want to believe, don’t expect them to believe you when you tell them it’s holy water—and don’t expect them to vote for you. Trump took that on-going abuse and turned it up a notch.

That he managed to alienate the intelligence agencies took real talent. These are the children of J. Edger Hoover and Wild Bill Donovan, and they’re about as liberal as Genghis Khan.

Yes, there are a lot of people in government who hate Trump. But it’s not because they are Democrats; it’s because they hate Trump, and he’s given them a lot of reasons for doing so.

The Mueller Investigation: It wouldn’t even exist if he hadn’t vindictively fired the best friend he had in all of government, the man who single-handed sank Clinton’s campaign in the final two weeks, James Comey. Comey is no left winger. But it brought about the investigation, run by a Republican, Robert Mueller, and supervised until last week by another Republican, Rod Rosenstein.

All the People in the Know expect Mueller to pounce this coming week, and even if the appointment of the Toilet Heist Master to oversee Mueller pressured Mueller, the results should be damning. Given that Trump’s Congressional support amounts to “Can this crazy son of a bitch help me get what I want” the sliderule governing that support is going to shift heavily against Trump.

White House Staff: Ever had a boss like Trump? I have, once. Weak, authoritarian, vicious. Back stabbing. Plays people off against one another, pays no attention to rights and responsibilities of either his subordinates or himself, and demands absolute loyalty from the people he is abusing. Workplace is a nightmare where the ability to betray is the only currency of the place. Working for someone like Trump is a nightmare. I know, because I have. I got out, and saved my sanity.

It’s a pretty safe bet that the white house staff aren’t secret left-wingers, unless you count the cooking staff and the gardeners. Especially the guy who does the roses; the rose is the symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, you know. It’s a thorny issue.

Most of Trump’s flunkies are absolutely hateful people, partly because those are the only types willing to work for him, and party because they have to front for a hateful person. The public despises them, but many people also pity them.

Some of the most egregious partisans are back-pedaling furiously, trying to save their (generally worthless) asses: Frank Luntz on on Faux News the other day, devoutly declaring he couldn’t call himself a Republican any longer. No blinding lights and fluttering angels to this particular self-apotheosis, though: Luntz went on to say it was both parties, really. He didn’t get enlightenment: he just wants to be standing outside the blast zone when it goes off. That Luntz, always with the liberal sensitivities!

Not to disparage the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: we have been first-most, and steadfast in our opposition to Trump and what he represents. But we weren’t the ones who damaged him. He damaged the people who supported him, including members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and they whipped around and bit him on the ass. They are the ones that did the real damage.

In the end, as always, Donald Trump’s greatest enemy is Donald Trump.

I suppose we should be grateful for that.

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Our Rakish President – Trump uses his to start forest fires

November 21st 2018

“Obama judges have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”

Those were the words uttered by the five-and-dime Mussolini in the Oval Office today, and it may be the scariest thing he’s uttered to date. By implication, Trump judges are good for the safety of the country, whereas non-Trump judges are…well, traitors, apparently. It isn’t enough that the judge he originally picked a fight with yesterday, US district judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco has nearly a decade on the bench (He issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s proclamation that he could incarcerate asylum-seekers). Roberts himself was nominated by George W. Bush in 2005 and while I think he’s far too chummy with business interests, I don’t consider him a threat to the safety of the country.

A relatively straightforward lower court decision, observing the country’s mandate by treaty on how to treat asylum-seekers, seems to have triggered the biggest confrontation between the Court and an Administration since FDR’s famous effort to pack the court in 1936.

The constitutionality of “the court pack” never was resolved. The court began issuing rulings favorable to FDRs New Deal programs even before FDR’s too-smart-by-half idea, and interest in the court pack waned among Congressional Democrats. One judge had a change of heart regarding New Deal Acts that began before the court pack idea was brought up, a fellow named Roberts. Owen Roberts. He had been a swing vote between the four conservatives on the court and the four liberals, the New Deal’s version of Anthony Kennedy.

Our Roberts isn’t that Roberts, and Trump pretty clearly is no FDR. I don’t think we’ll see anything resembling a rapprochement there.

FDR and his allies were slier in their attack on the courts. FDR was the concern troll, fretting that the nine old men, many in their 70s, might find the burden of the many cases before the Court to be an undue burden, and should welcome the help of four or five young, strapping judges who can lift the Constitution over their heads and give it a good stout flapping. His allies are busy, including publishing a book, “Nine Old Men” that inferred that the court might have some problems with senility creeping in.

Trump, of course, is a bit more direct, simply saying that justices not appointed by him presented a threat to the safety of the county. He probably can’t display the same wit and brilliance with the name “Roberts” that he did with “Adam Schitt”. Our President, the third-grader.

Trump has authorized US troops guarding the border against migrant caravans to use deadly force if necessary. Citing “credible evidence and intelligence” (in other words, Trump pulled it out of his ass) Trump believes that thousands of approaching Central American migrants “may prompt incidents of violence and disorder” that could threaten border patrol agents and other government personnel. His order expands the authority of US troops to include “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention and cursory search” to protect the border agents.

Those poor border agents. How will the poor dears deal with a group of unarmed men, women, old folks and children who are still some 800 miles away and won’t even show up until at least March? Or longer, given their travel plans.

You see, those troops that Trump has boldly sent to protect the poor, quivering, border agents from possible contact with aliens? They went to Laredo, Texas. The caravan is going to San Diego, some 1,500 miles to the left of Laredo.

Oh, well, the troops can cover themselves in glory potshotting Mexican kids who look like they might be thinking of tossing a rock at the heavily-armed troops. After all, it worked for Netanyahu. A true hero in Trump’s eyes.

Posse Comitatus? Oh, you’re thinking of the OLD United States, and not the new and improved Trump version.

It’s raining in Northern California right now, and with a sigh of relief, Smokey the Bear can lay down his rake. While this storm won’t bring much to Southern California, the long-range (November 27-December 6th) looks pretty promising. Everybody is ready for a respite in the fires, and I just hope the Camp Fire area doesn’t get too much rain. Montecito is still fresh in our memories (and still at risk, nearly a year later). Likewise the millions of other acres burned in this ongoing nightmare. One clown on Facebook castigated ignorant liberals who probably didn’t know where Paradise was for doubting the acumen of Glorious Leader, showing a picture of a piling cat, saying that this was the ‘rake’ Trump was talking about. A piling cat is about 10-15 feet wide, with 6 or 8 big tines, and resembles the big tilling machines tractors tow around fields. Nobody calls it a ‘rake.’

I see Ivanka was busted for using an unsecured email server for government business. How about it, Pissmop? Gonna chant “Lock her up”? Oh, give it a go! We watched your grotesque turkey pardon thing yesterday: this is your chance to surprise us all with a flash of self-deprecating wit and humor. Or even, “I pardon peas, carrots, Ivanka and myself”.

Of course, if you ever venture out where you can hear crowds, you hear “Lock HIM up” a lot from now on. Unless you feel, as you do with American troops, that if you go out where they can see you, someone might shoot you.

Gosh, that would be a real shame. Stay hidden and stay safe. Keep your rake handy against all the forest fires you’re starting politically.

PS: If Trump is impeached, guess who oversees his Senate trial?

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The Cowardice – If you are a bigot, you are a coward

November 1st 2018

The main premises underlying bigotry are fear of those who are different in some way, any way, and a desire to twist society to give yourself an unfair advantage over the people you hate and fear.

It is cowardice.

That’s not a descriptive; it’s the absolute basis for bigotry. Without fear there cannot be bigotry.

It’s said that we all harbor racist impulses. If you are walking down a street and you find yourself surrounded by people who are different, it’s normal to feel a slight sense of anxiety. On bad days, we may all see someone who is different do something boneheaded or foolish, and think “typical.”

We all are anxious about the Others, and that transcends all races, all ethnicities, all religions.

It’s what we do about it that either makes us decent human beings, or cowards.

Decent people understand what the animal impulse is, and set it aside. Cowards use it to justify and feed their fear.

You can choose to be a coward. You can choose to be a bigot. You have then chosen to be a weak and vicious person. You have chosen to be contemptible.

I can’t help but wonder what the 15,000 troops Donald Trump is sending to the Mexican border are feeling. They’re under discipline; they can’t express their thoughts and opinions on the matter. But they have to know that in being sent, heavily armed, with orders to shoot “rock throwers” from a group of families with children and grandparents, some barefoot, who are walking the length of Mexico and have 1,300 miles to cover, and that they are being used by a low, loathsome man for a low, loathsome purpose.

The Pentagon knows. They leaked a risk assessment report, something they never do. Their conclusion: there is no threat. There have been previous caravans from the desperate lands colonized by American corporations that used vile fascism to control workers and protect industry. Many caravans of frightened, desperate people, taking everything they can carry on their backs, hoping for a better life. They are sometimes barefoot, pregnant, carrying children. Elders ride in hand-drawn carts.

Mexico is a wild and forbidding land, variated and beautiful, but daunting to hike. These people are walking the equivalent of Maine to Florida, through jungle and desert.

It’s something the Pentagon has seen quite a few times, and very few of the people in the caravan actually make it to the American border. And when they get here, they aren’t interested in throwing rocks; they want jobs, and a chance to educate their kids, and a better life.

There has to be a lot of contempt and disgust for this President and his weak followers amongst the American military leadership. They signed on to defend America and the Constitution, and not a mob of inchoate, cowardly strutting bigots. Trump and his howling followers are as alien to American as Hitler and his brownshirts were to Germany in 1923.

Many Germans thought they were better than that, and most of them were. But enough weren’t.

Forty percent of Americans support Trump. They are the worst of America; the coward, the bigots, the vicious and violent, the ignorant and the godstruck. Their strutting masks deep fear.

So they consider it courageous to shoot Jews at their place of worship. They admire Trump for going and desecrating the grieving and mourning of the survivors. They moan about how they are victims and will be until they have put themselves above the law and all others are subject to their laws. Gays have no rights. Immigrants have no rights. African Americans have no rights. The list of people they think don’t deserve rights is very long, and based on a sense of grievance, an insane notion that people who have the same rights they do have an advantage.

Cowardice.

Trump is trying to harvest the Coward-American vote, with grandiose promises to throw hundreds of thousands into tent-cities (with hot and cold running Zyclon-B, perhaps) playing on their yammering fear to crowd around his ersatz aura of Father Invincibility. He vowed to greet the caravan with live ammo, perhaps the most craven moment in American history.

If you agree with Trump, you aren’t just wrong, not just inhumane. You are a coward. You are contemptible. Shooting kids because they look like they could be capable of throwing rocks? It’s why Israel, once the most broadly supported country on Earth, is now met with scorn and disgust. But Netanyahu, another strutting bully and coward and disgrace to his country, seems to be Trump’s role model. Shoot kids. I’ll make you look strong and resolute.

I believe Americans are better than this. The only question is if they contain the ones who aren’t better than this. After all, we have the example of Germany to look to. Lot of good people in Germany.

Just not enough.

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Parasites – America being bled dry

October 31st, 2018

Chuck Collins of the Guardian had an article today ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/us-wealthiest-families-dynasties-governed-by-rich ) that should surprise few and alarm many. Titled “The wealth of America’s three richest families grew by 6,000% since 1982,” the subhead is “Three US families have a combined wealth of $348.7bn.” If you’re curious, the three families are the Waltons of Walmart, the Mars candy family, and the Kochs.

Granted, they satisfied three great American lusts: cheap(ish) Chinese clothing, mediocre American candy, and fossil fuels. They spotted a need, and filled it. The American capitalist dream, writ large.

The like to say they are makers and not takers, the Ayn Rand litany used to justify unbridled greed. Most of them inherited their wealth, and have an army of managers, accountants and lawyers to support their ultra-privileged positions in society, and a similar army of propagandists and lobbyists to legally barricade their positions, a governmental and media fortress devoted to persuading the public that because they are fantastically rich, they are superior and thus deserve to be fantastically rich.

Government and the law are twisted to support them, protecting them from civil and criminal retribution for their increasingly rapacious actions.

“Tort reform” is a euphemism for altering the law to make it impossible for groups of people they have cheated and sickened to sue them. Tax reform took the hundreds of cheats, swindles, and illegals dodges Fred Trump and his wastrel children committed and made them all legal under present-day law.

Media amalgamation ensured that virtually everything in the way of news that Americans are exposed to are bland, corporate pablum, or raving neo-nazi right wing bullshit.

The article continues:

The top three wealthiest billionaires in the US – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population combined.

This is possible because the bottom fifth of US households are underwater, with zero or negative net worth. And the next fifth has so few assets to fall back on that they live in fear of destitution.

Three individuals, according to the article, are wealthier than the bottom 50% of the American population—some 170 million other people—combined. Twenty percent of the population have zero or negative assets, and another twenty percent live paycheck to paycheck, two weeks from being broke. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have more money than all those people.

The article note that allowing for inflation, the wealth of the top 1% has increased sixty-fold since 1982, which coincidentally is when Reaganomics first kicked in.

Even Paul Volcker, no socialist, worried, “We’re developing into a plutocracy.” Much the way Stephen King is developing into a novelist.

The Founders feared the rise of an aristocracy as much as they feared the threats to a democratic government from the churches, corporations and authoritarians. To that end, they favored strong estate taxes (Jefferson proposed that the Constitution include a 100% estate tax on all real property!) and, while not willing to impose progressive income taxes, did worry about the potential for accumulation of wealth.

Since Reagan, estate taxes have all but vanished, and there has been a massive tax shift from corporations and the wealthy to the middle class. How vast? In 1952%, the median 40% of wage earners paid 4% of their income in federal taxes, about 20% of federal revenues. Corporations made up about half of federal revenues. Now, the middle class pay about 60% and corporations less than 25%, and in return for that large tax burden, they get a government spending trillions on a bloated and largely useless military, and scheming to steal the common funds used for old age pensions and what scant medical coverage they have. In the meanwhile, they are ‘entertained’ by propaganda outlets that moan endlessly about how good the penniless have it because they don’t have to pay taxes.

Even as we talk, the Republicans in Congress, in a great, grand finale of a “fuck you” gesture, are trying to eliminate most of the remaining taxes the wealthy and corporations have to pay, another three trillion dollars over a ten year period. But no worries: they plan to cover part of the cost by stealing your pension fund. And Republicans, in a grim, desperate hope that they can fool the people one last time and steal everything else they own, are campaigning on promises to protect insurance companies from out-and-out raping their customers with pre-existing conditions, and still promising to balance the budget (they’ve already more than doubled the annual deficit) and oh, yes, by spending a few billions to send an amazing 15,000 heavily armed American troops to protect shivering, frightened, craven American right wingers from a bedraggled group of families with grand parents and children, all on foot, some barefoot, who are walking towards America, still well over a thousand miles away. You have to be a particularly abject sort of coward to fall for this “threat,” and a particularly vicious, cynical and cruel despot to pretend it’s a threat.

It cannot continue. Regulated capitalist societies lead to unchecked aggregation of wealth and then implode, without exception. And the present aggregation of wealth in America is the greatest the world has ever seen. So the plutocrats are spending billions to persuade the American people that only by sacrificing themselves, their wealth, their livelihoods, and their standard of living, can they help the plutocrats avoid the very destruction the plutocrats are causing.

These parasites—and anyone who makes $100 billion is taking far more than they are giving—have to be checked, or they will destroy the host. You are the host, and you are being bled dry.

Bring back progessivity in taxes. Bring back a strong estate tax. Eliminate Citizens United and make campaign spending from a common fund. Make it easier for people to sue corporations that have cheated them or sickened them. Stop lionizing opulant filth like Donald Trump.

That, or die like a dog in the gutter, convulsed by the actions of a million fleas.

Or perhaps a half dozen fleas, each the size of a hyena.

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Civil War II: The election of 1860, reducere

Civil War II

The election of 1860, reducere

October 28th 2018

There is an article by Stephen Marche in the current Walrus that, while addressed to Canadians, is of major importance elsewhere: “America’s Next Civil War.” https://thewalrus.ca/americas-next-civil-war/

The article delineates a process by which in the fairly immediate future, America may descend into civil war, or perhaps widespread chaos.

The existential threat this provides to Canadians is clear. Much of Canada’s identity and economy result from the twitches and grunts from the slumbering elephant next door, and indeed, Canada’s very existence stems from northern ambition and desire to expand in the wake of their victory in the first civil war. It’s no coincidence that the movement to unify the British colonies into a “not-United States” materialized in 1864, when it was clear the North was going to win. (Some BNA colonists, while absolutely hating slavery, hoped for a prolonged standoff between the Confederacy and the Union, which would nullify American expansionism.)

Of course, the threat is even greater to Americans, who in the event of a civil war can reasonably expect to die by the tens of millions. The first civil war was extraordinarily bloody and vicious; there’s no reason to suppose that a repeat, involving a far larger population that heavily is armed in and of themselves with weapons of mass destruction.

People like to pretend that conditions in the US were more polarized and antagonistic in 1860. They weren’t, at least not outside the more radical enclaves in the deep South. Republicans, sensing the danger the nation faced, backed down and nominated a moderate, who could live with the existing institution of slavery but opposed allowing it to spread westward (reflecting existing law). That moderate, Abraham Lincoln, subsequently became President.

But the southern leadership had adopted an intractable position, and the war happened anyway.

It’s important to remember that most Americans in 1861 believed the war would be brief, relatively bloodless, and would end as soon as the politicians realized it was bad for business. You often hear similar sentiments on the eve of any major war; in living memory, Americans remember how it would take weeks to subdue Iraq and the war would pay for itself. Or so they were told.

Nobody is going to mistake Trump and the Republicans for moderates, and unlike the era of the civil war, the institutions of voting, the judiciary, and congress itself weren’t delegitimize they way they are now. Voters expected their votes to be allowed, and counted. Judges were supposed to be impartial, at least most of the time. Congress was hagridden by moneyed interests, but at least those interests were human residents who had a stake in the country, rather than a multinational bottom line.

I suspect that next week’s election might be the irrevocable last step, the way the presidential election of 1860 was.

The really scary thing is that it may not matter who gets declared the victor in the 2018 elections; the validity will be in grave doubt. If Republicans don’t get their way, they will spin endless conspiracy theories about George Soros, globalists, the ‘deep state’, immigrants and Hillary. If Republicans hold the house, the massive irregularities already evident in George, Kansas and other states will cause many to doubt the validity of the vote count. Nobody will trust state investigators working for states that created the sense of illegitimacy in the first place, And the Trump administration has done an excellent job of carrying out the Republican policy of subverting the courts, making them apparatus of the Party, so there will be widespread mistrust there, as well. And of course neither side will believe press reports, valid or otherwise, seen as coming from “the other side.”

I don’t expect instant disintegration following the election. If the Democrats prevail, there will be lots of outrage on the right, and probably a sharp uptick in terrorist attacks like the ones we’ve seen this week, lots of pearl-clutching on Faux and the right wing media, and outrage as the Trump administration continues to collapse, with the attendant threats of a Reichstag fire or major war as unifying distractions.

The response will be at least temporarily subdued as the same fascists who have been promoting the Republican agenda stop to consider their bottom lines (despite the popular saying, war is actually very bad for business) and strong doubt about what the stance of the American military might be (The officer corps are strongly Republican, but reportedly deeply antipathetic to Trump).

If the Republicans prevail, the chaos may come more quickly. Trump and his handlers will rush to consolidate what they will doubtlessly see as the successful conclusion of a coup against the United States, and a largely disbelieving populace is likely to take to the streets.

Some police organizations are deeply infiltrated by extreme righties and evenneo-Nazis, and they won’t hesitate to use extreme and bloody methods of suppression against what they will call “communist agitators.”

At which point the fuse will be well and truly lit, the ensuing explosion inevitable.

Can this be avoided? I’m not sure. I honestly don’t think so. When America’s closest friend and ally, Canada, begins openly preparing for chaos and bloodshed south of the border and pondering what to do with the inevitable flood of refugees, it means prospects are grim.

Pay attention to this election like your life depends on it. It probably does.

And if you hear public officials opining that the spreading unrest is just temporary and should be over in a few weeks, a month tops, then run for shelter!

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Madness Awaits – The savagery of the GOP laid bare

Madness Awaits

The savagery of the GOP laid bare

October 21st, 2018

As the midterms near, the sheer madness of America’s descent has become nakedly clear. A journalist, an American resident, is tortured and murdered in a Saudi Arabian embassy, and the President of the United States spins excuses on behalf of the Saudi Crown Efrit who doubtlessly ordered the murder.

The next day, Pissmop praises a Congressman who body-slammed a reporter for the crime of asking a question. Later, he claimed he was just joking, but the howling, maddened mob who cheered him and made death gestures at reporters in attendance were not joking.

Meanwhile, the propagandistic pseudo-reporters of the far right are transfixed by the existential threat of a group of men, women, and children who are slowly making their way out of the horrors of their homelands in central America, intent on walking the length of Mexico, some 1,800 miles, to petition for amnesty at the American border. Declaring them criminals—which they aren’t—Pissmop told his mindless screamers that something must be done right away, and only the GOP can save them from the ravening horde limping its way north.

The group includes old people and children, and are on foot, so they probably aren’t moving much faster than Pissmop can waddle around his golf course. Let’s see: 1,800 miles divided by waddle equals lots of time to figure out humane and sensible answers. But Pissmop doesn’t want that.

Pissmop claims that Democrats want open borders and this huge menace will invade America the day after the election unless Republicans keep Congress.

The Republicans have abandoned even the efforts to make their lies credible. Today’s local paper had a column labeling the return of insurers being able to deny insurance to people with pre-existing conditions a liberal lie, but the fact it that is exactly what is happening. Up to 40% of the population is at risk of far higher premiums or losing their coverage altogether.

Republican thieves in Congress, avid to steal the trillions allocated for Social Security and Medicare for their rich masters, have announced they plan to impose deep cuts to ‘pay for’ the huge deficits that they themselves have created. Social Security and Medicare aren’t even a part of those deficit and will make no differences to the deficits. But they will steal the pensions and health care from people who have spent their lives paying for it.

Back in 2002 I wrote an essay about a movie, The Man Who Cried with Christina Ricci and Johnny Depp. The movie concerned itself with the rapid descent into utter madness the citroyens of Paris experienced in the wake of the German invasion in 1940. You never see the German invaders. You just hear them marching. Cronch, cronch, cronch. (And I remember wondering what it must have been like for German citizens between 1932 and the final consolidation of Nazi power by mid 1934. Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner tells that tale).

Things in America were bad in 2002, as the country went through a big surge of hypernationalism and paranoia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (brought to you largely by citizens of Saudi Arabia, the same nation Pissmop is being an murder accessory after the fact for), and the article address the snarling viciousness that consumed the country in the wake of the attacks.

While it never really did recover from that, America at least had a reason then. People were frightened and lashing out, and it was pretty easy to see why.

America doesn’t really have that excuse now. White citizens are not in danger of being subsumed by ‘dusky races’. Christians are not being persecuted or even inconvenienced. LGBT folks aren’t trying to force anyone to their lifestyle: they just want you to let them live their lives in peace.

Other minorities don’t want ‘special rights’; they just want the same rights you enjoy. People who recognize that aren’t employing ‘identity politics’; they just aren’t going to throw the rights of their fellow humans under the bus in order to try to appease swaggering bigots.

Yes, the economy is teetering and likely to crash between now and the next general election, but that’s the inevitable result of unrestrained capitalism. Give them enough rope. Entire economies vanish into oligarchic black holes. Republicans swear they are the solution to that, but the fact is they are the cause.

What’s more, it’s what they want. That’s why the deliberate sabotaging of the national treasury, pensions, health care, and the systematic destabilizing of American institutions from voting to the courts. Economies in vast turmoil mean societies in crisis, and that in turn means a cringing, frightened and dependent populace.

The cause of the crises are mostly imaginary, but the crises that arise are quite real, destructive, and useful to Pissmop and his cohorts who stand to benefit from the destruction and debilitation of your personal reality.

Republicans invent crises to try and panic you and make you their dependents, but the reality is that they are the crisis, and it’s one that can still be solved.

Next month, make the Republican party and its would-be dictator an unhappy footnote in history.

Or follow the path of Germany in the 1930s.

Cronch. Cronch. Cronch.

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Unreality Show I’ll Take Door Number i for $100, Alex

October 12th 2018

Who would have thought, three years ago, that we would have a black entertainer meeting with the President in the Oval Office and arguing for the repeal of the 13th amendment?
Trump has achieved the trifecta of crazy: Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and now Kanye West. A pity Charlie Manson is dead: he could have visited and argued for lowering the age of consent to six.

This spectacle would have been grotesque and awkward under the best of circumstances, but it occurred almost to the minute that a major hurricane was devastating the Florida panhandle coast, completely leveling one town and inflicting major damage from Florida to North Carolina. Even as the Trump administration was arguing that 4C increase was inevitable, so we all might as well get used to it.

At least this time touring Melania Trump didn’t show up wearing a coat that proclaimed her lack of concern; she was off in Africa, wearing a British RA-style pith helmet, recreating “Call Me Bwimbo”. Oh, wait, that’s Bwana. Second look. No, it’s Bwimbo. The woman has a gift for wearing “Fuck You” as a fashion accessory. After getting some light criticism over that, she flounced off, calling herself the most bullied person in America. Easy solution, babe: file for divorce.

Was it really just 23 months ago that people were saying in hopeful tones that Republicans in Congress could keep Trump in line and blunting his more egregious impulses?

Nah. They saw Trump apparently getting away with the most blatant lies and viciousness, and decided they knew a winning approach when they saw it. Now they’re all lying their heads off. As the election nears, it’s a race to the bottom.

You see campaign ads all over the place swearing up and down that Republicans want to protect Medicare, and that Democrats are goddless commie Muslims who want to allow billions of Mexicans to come in and take over the country. They boast about how Trump saved the economy by maintaining employment and growth trends previously seen over the past six years under Obama, and carefully don’t mention the trillions in new debt for the latest tax giveaways to the rich (including the additional $3 trillion last week that the same Republicans who voted for it last week aren’t mentioning now), or the fact that despite the fact that they are fracking and drilling the living shit out of America and working to turn national parks into oil reserves, the price of gasoline is a dollar fifty above what it was last year.

It got so bad that NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece yesterday effectively calling the entire party liars. Such a column would never have seen the light of day a few years ago, but that was before the GOP went mad and abandoned all principle. At least the NY Times belatedly remembered they were a newspaper and what that meant.

Trump had an ‘op-ed’ in the disreputable USA Today that has to be read to be believed. The Washington Post stated that nearly every single sentence included a misstatement or flat-out lie.

In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, is running for Governor, but as SS he retains the power to purge voter rolls. Which he is doing with a vengeance, some 26,000 names over the past few weeks, over such criteria as whether a middle initial is included on the written name but not in the signature. While African-Americans make up 32% of Georgia’s population (and a somewhat lower proportion of the voting population for obvious reasons) they make up 70% of the voters being purged. Oh, and the SS office isn’t bothering to tell the voters they have been purged. Let it be a surprise on election day. Similar, if less egregious stories abound in other states saddled with Republican rule.

Of course, Trump hates a free press, but isn’t above using the more whorish and lower segments of that press to attack the rest. The National Enquirer has been prostituting itself for him for years now, and Fox News is nothing more than the propaganda arm for the GOP. It’s a shameful thing to see in America, which once was proud of its free and independent press. Now the government has fascist whores pretending to be reporters to spread lies and stifle dissent.

It’s no surprise that news that Saudi Arabia lured a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, into the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and proceeded to torture, murder and dismember him. It’s widely believed that it was ordered by the vile despot Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who seized power last year with the somewhat clandestine help from the Trump administration (Chief Wastrel Jared Kushner was on hand to oversee the coup and possibly offer friendly advice and hidden funding).

Trump’s reaction to this was muted, partly because he doesn’t mind seeing journalists being killed for doing their job and partly because his business interests are heavily intertwined with bin Salman’s. Even as most of the corporate world pull away from the swinish and vicious Sauds, Trump is going ahead with another arms deal so Saudi Arabia can massacre a few thousand more Yemanis.

Iran is a vile theocracy, but it’s only the third worst in the region, behind Israel and Saudi Arabia. Guess which of the three the US condemns solely?

Kavanaugh, perjurer, liar and partisan ratfucker, has already established a new precedent, becoming the first sitting justice in Supreme Court history to be under active investigation for violation of judicial practices and ethics, based on his sworn Senate testimony. He managed this odiferous distinction on just the second day on the court. It will get worse.

Trump is submitting written answers to Meuller’s investigative team, about his only remaining constitutional recourse. His lawyers knew he can’t go a minute without lying, so spoken testimony under oath would be a legal death trap, and this at least gives the lawyers time to write and finesse the answers, in the hope they can make Trump at least technically not liable for perjury. We’ll know soon enough if these lawyers, not the most brilliant legal team over assembled, can come up with anything that won’t result in immediate indictments.

OK, admit it: after all that, Kanye West sounds pretty sane, doesn’t he?

At least harmless, right? Right?

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Trump Junior’s War Sour grapes following a sour victory

Donald Trump Junior, vacuous moron, big game killer, child prodigy swindler and defender of the privileged class, rage-tweeted in the wake of the Kavanaugh vote, “Trump supporters – The fight isn’t over. You better believe that Democrats are going to do everything in their power to impeach Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court if they take control of Congress in November…This is war. Time to fight. Vote on Nov 6 to protect the Supreme Court!”

Just imagine how aggrieved and full of empty threats Donny the Lesser would have been had he lost this battle.

He’s right, of course. We won’t forget. Kavanaugh is a perjurer and a liar. He lied repeatedly to the Senate, committing the same crime for which he believed Bill Clinton should be destroyed. He was selected by the criminal Trump precisely because he believes now that no president should be subject to the kinds of legal persecution he inflicted on Bill Clinton. Even a president who is demonstrably a swindler and a tax cheat. One who assaults, rather than diddling consenting adults. One who is staging a coup against his own country. Even one who might be a traitor.

Kavanaugh’s demeanor made it clear that he is nothing more than what Charles Pierce memorably described as “a partisan ratfucker.” He would have been more at home as Rush Limbaugh’s color commentator than as a Supreme Court nominee.

He’s credibly accused of rape and sexual assault. The example he set, and the fact that he and his scumbag president got away with it by smearing and mocking victims, significantly increases the chances that his own daughters will suffer similar fates at the hands of entitled frat boys in the future. If they complain, perhaps Kavanaugh can asked Trump to mock them, so he needn’t suffer political embarrassment.

We will impeach Kavanaugh, and we will drive him from the Court and back under his rock where he belongs.

Then we will come for the moral and ethical abdicates, the criminals and fascists, and the traitors of the GOP. We will drive them from office.

People like Trump and Kavanaugh don’t see themselves as traitors. They don’t see themselves as liars and cheats. They believe they deserve to take what is theirs. Any woman. Any money. Any country. All of us. We aren’t citizenry to them; we are chattel.

Susan Collins only needed a sham FBI investigation to don a g-string and pasties and do a little shimmy for Trump and Kavanaugh. She knows a woman’s place. As long as she’s rich, what value is dignity? Her only remaining role is to demonstrate that when you sell out your own, you can never reclaim the mantle of being their champion.

The Eleven swine on the Senate Judiciary Committee who made such a joke of the Senate and the Supreme Court in their lust for power will never win another election. We will drive them out.

You know what kind of life you can expect if these fascists prevail. Ask the thousands of customers, investors and contractors that Trump has swindled. Ask the women he has raped and mocked.

Watch the tears stream down Kavanaugh’s flabby cheeks as the toy he was promised is held at arm’s reach. How can we take away that which he deserves?

Once he has it, he will give us exactly what he thinks he deserves. His won’t be the sullen rage of the post-turtle Thomas who never was able to convince himself he was anything more than a GOP token, the result of a cynical belief that the great Thurgood Marshall could be adequately replaced by a House Negro.

No, Kavanaugh’s will be an open rage, an aristocrat frightened by an aroused citizenry. Rush and Tucker and Donald will assure him, over and over, that he is the victim, and his persecutors must pay. He is damaged goods, and will inflict damaged decisions.

Kavanaugh is on the Court, and all it cost was the legitimacy of the Court and the Senate. A small price to pay when you think the country shouldn’t have that sort of nonsense when there is money to be stolen and women to be raped.

Yes, Donald the Lesser, you will get the war you so desire. If you are very lucky, you and your wastrel family will merely end up in jail for many years, and the country will emerge intact. That is the deepest wish of all who oppose you and your brotherhood of gangsters.

But don’t count on that desire for a peaceful solution. You’re merely fighting for an imagined right to shoot large animals. The rest of us are fighting for the right to a decent life, something you hold in contempt.

You will not win this war you want.

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Fascism Rising – Trump and Kavanaugh aren’t bugs; they’re features

September 23rd, 2018

One of the many sub-plots in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s brilliant Maniac involves the character Jed Milgrim (played by Billy Magnussen) a “colorful douche” who is a scion of a vicious, powerful, wealthy family, and who stands accused of a heinous sexual assault involving urination. It’s nearly impossible not to think of the Trump family while watching this, not only because of the nature of the crime, or the resemblance Magnussen bears to one of the Trump scions, but because of the calm assurance of the family that in order to protect their power, prestige and wealth, it is perfectly reasonable to commit perjury, blackmail and bribe people (including family members), and stand well above the law in pursuit of their own interests. They are used to dismissing people who they have wronged and who want to fight back as greedy little scuttlers, and resent a legal system that doesn’t just let them destroy such rabble.

The haughty, self-assured mien Magnussen wears is one we have seen far too often, not just in this White House (including many of its nominees from the world of wealth and privilege) but in the faces of the broadcasters on the right-wing media, and the people who trot out endless columns of right wing think tanks to assure us that “identity politics” and “takers” are only showing resentment of their betters, and Americans should not believe people who profess to stand for the people when America’s ultra-wealthy stand ready to defend the people from the people.

Congruent with this, I’m presently reading a book by Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains – The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. I’ll have a full review of the book upon completion of reading it,

America has always had a class of aggrieved plutocrats who believe their property rights trump the civil rights of all other Americans. This dates back to John C. Calhoun and his vigorous defense of America’s biggest economic phenomenon prior to the civil war: slavery. MacLean notes that slavery made North Carolina the richest and most powerful state in the union prior to 1860, and created more one percenters in Mississippi than in New York.

The power of this elite was held in check by the Civil War and various economic crashes, culminating in the Crash of ‘29 and the Depression, resulting in the New Deal.

MacLean explains how a libertarian economist of the 1950s, James McGill Buchanan, created a reality in which vast sums of money could be spent organizing the plutocrat class and using propaganda and control of the media to convince Americans that they were incapable of self-governance and should let the natural leaders of society (the “businessmen”) run things.

It was fascism, pure and simple, although that is a word they never, ever acknowledge and attack all who use it. Governance through corporation.

The biggest problem with fascism is the same that one sees with other unaccountable forms of governments, such as theocracies and monarchies: corruption sets in quickly, and the rot spreads until it finally kills its host.

But as long as there is power and money to be accumulated, corruption isn’t seen as a bug—it’s seen as a feature.

The fascists have taken over the GOP, with the nightmarish and Kafkaesque results that we see in the paper every day, of people grimly determined to fight unions, civil libertarian groups, workers in general, women, and any group that can organize, collectivize and perhaps challenge their power.

MacLean writes, “Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or is this the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history? Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?…Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. Indeed, one such manifesto calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, D.C.”

As you watch this week as the Republicans cling like grim death to the Kavanaugh nomination, hoping to push this vile corporatist down our throats to consolidate their power they way they have with Thomas, and Gorsuch, and you wonder how they can possibly continue to support Trump, reflect on the fact that they are no longer just an American political party: they are a fifth column, enemies to the Constitution and determined to finish a slow coup they have been conducting against America for 40 years.

They know Trump is a bad president. Even without the corruption, the sheer scale of his incompetence and inability to lead would, in a normal party, be enough to impeach him. They see the weirdness and chaos as inconveniences; the fact that Trump is utterly corrupt is what makes him so valuable to them. They know he’s a thief, a crook, a swindler, and possibly a traitor. But so are they, even if they dress it up in self-serving rhetoric, and as for being traitors, they are much closer in spirit to the most corrupt plutocrat of all, Vladimir Putin, then they are to anything readers might recognize as American values. Treason is betrayal against those you owe fealty. By their lights, betraying America is not treason.

Perhaps the saddest element of this is the people they have roped in to support them. The racists. The Evangelicals. The Xenophobes. The growling, disaffected population that feel they deserve a place at the table and the fascists are more than happy to promise them that place.

They’ve always been useful idiots for demagogues. Nothing new there. What is new is what will follow.

Should the fascists win, they will discard these people like used condoms. Not only are their beliefs and impulses bad for business, but they can reorganize and pose a threat to their masters. And they cannot be trusted: they’ve already betrayed America. It would only be a matter of time before they revolt against Trump’s New Order.

And the worst of all is that they would become our allies in a common cause.

If you can vote in November, vote like your life depends on it. It does.

We can avoid having to fight a Fascist Fifth Column again.

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