Thursday, December 29, 2016

So I guess I've been had

The whole fucking world is made up of con men and their marks. Everyone is someone else's sucker and American history in my lifetime has been made up of rotten motherfuckers using up someone else to get ahead or be cooler than thou. It's so fucking tiring. I just poured my guts out that I felt betrayed by Thomas Frank in all his work during this campaign season, tearing down the Democratic Party and helping open the door for fascism. Do you know what it's like to be on the front line under fire while the coddled officers kick back in the rear. Who fucking cares? Nobody. Frank has apparently spent too much time away from the front. After you realize nobody gives a warm squirt of piss about you except your mother and your buddy in the foxhole with you, you are liberated. It's no longer a question of the glorious cause we're fighting for. You push forward when it's time to attack because YOU FUCKING HATE THE OTHER GUYS! You know a word that didn't get mentioned in Listen, Liberal? Extremism. The right-wing variety. The kind that are running the show now. Blue falcons get themselves 'fragged when the shit hits the fan! The guys that couldn't be bothered to show up when it counted ought to be the ones on the front line now because I give up.

Let's backtrack. I wanted to put up my impressions of the book and what Frank has done since the election without outside influence. Since I started looking up other reviews of the book I came across one that was very interesting. It's why I started with the everyone is someone else's sucker part. If Thomas Frank abruptly left the good fight to climb on the "Hillary sucks" bandwagon of "cooler than thou" leftist hipsters, then John Halle of an anarchist bi-monthly called Current Affairs was already on that particular wagon to kick him in the nuts. I don't feel sorry for any asshole out there who didn't give 100% to stop the ultimate con man from putting outright fascism in power. However, if these new-age wailers could confine their purity/dick measuring contests out of earshot of those of us who have to live among the "fashies" you know, that would be nice.

What I got from Mr. Halle was that I discovered Thomas Frank too late, he had already hit the "Black album" phase and lost his edge. Apparently what the cool kids do is bash the Democratic Party and it's sellout ways. Once you turn around and pick on the republicans, you know, go on a "voyeuristic tour of carnival freaks and holy rollers from the flyover states, and the sleazy Washington operatives who manipulate their trust," you lose your 'cred with the left hipsters. The way Halle tells the story, Frank was the coolest of the cool when helming the Baffler magazine during the Clinton years and ripping Bubba a new asshole on a regular basis. But then that carnival freak Dubya hit the beltway and it was off to success on the pop charts for Thomas Frank. All of us who worked for a living then got the long knives but Frank became a respectable pundit for What's the matter with Kansas. Celebrity status for one of the cool kids. Hell I had even heard of him then and yeah, reading that book was like listening to the Black album when I was 12, mind-blowing. What Metallica did for angry kids from flyover country, Thomas Frank did for the equivalent young adults first becoming politically aware. 

He kept up the act all through the tea party days, I really thought we were fighting on the same team. Or at least could agree that the time to fix that team was after the battle was won. I wanted to see what would happen if a Democrat could succeed another Democrat, we were robbed of that experiment in 2000 but I guess Frank and all the other too cool kids who were now hitting middle age had decided the "only way to fix it is to flush it all away" as brother Maynard once sang.

All that I really know is that I'm sick of getting taken for a ride by those I respected. Trust is a pretty big component of hope. I'm fresh out. Not to mix battle metaphors too much but the reason you send a knight into battle is because they have armor, if they fall then they usually survive. The infantry just get killed. I wanted Hillary Clinton to be that knight, swinging at the extremists and carnival freaks so the rest of us could try and fix things on the grassroots level. Now the flawed Barack Obama, so cozy with the bankers and well-graduated professionals is gone, no one is out front anymore. Hillary will be enjoying a long vacation, she's gonna be glad to be rid of us. We're on our own, cannon fodder, without hope. Nothing to believe in.

Blaming the Knight

It was a lot more fun analyzing and critiquing Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal before the election. Now it looks a lot more prescient. Have I come so far from my working class roots that I could apologize for and defend the Democratic Party as it is currently configured? Or perhaps I merely projected my values onto the party and hoped that if things were different they wouldn't be the same. Either way, as flawed as it is, as thoroughly as it has abandoned working people according to Frank, it was the one thing standing between us and president trump.

Every time Frank posted something about how rotten the Democratic Party was, or one of his critiques made it's way into my newsfeed, I kept thinking "this is a really interesting thesis but can't it wait until after the election?" The analogy that popped into my head that I couldn't really fully articulate was "can't we wait to criticize the knight for trampling our rose bushes until after he (she) slays the dragon?" The natural corollary to criticizing the "good guys" is to be happy that the "bad guys" won, so what does he say now that a fascist demagogue is to be inaugurated in less than a month?
“What you can say now, someone told this to me yesterday, is that Trump wrecked both parties and he ended two political dynasties: the Bush’s and the Clinton’s and for doing that we all owe Donald Trump some thanks. That’s the good side of Donald Trump, that he just smashed the ruling faction in both parties in the same year."
Sure, it's just an off-hand remark to some journalism student at the University of Missouri, but seriously, this was not a day after the election, it was a month. So he was aware already of trump's cabinet choices, his twitter wars with all sorts of people and publications, the Russian involvement in our election, the demands from his transition team to the Energy Department to produce all the names of climate scientists, and so on. "We all owe donald trump some thanks"? Are you kidding me? How many people are going to die unnecessarily in the coming years? Was it worth wrecking both parties and ending two political dynasties so we can throw away every facet of liberal democracy?

There is literally no limit to how far the authoritarians can go now. What could possibly restrain them? Most of us are members of the "superfluous population" we don't contribute to wealth production and we are all expendable. Right now neo-nazis are converging on a little town in Montana harassing and intimidating Jewish residents there, before trump has even taken office. Is this an isolated incident or a harbinger of the future? Ending the career of Hillary Clinton is somehow worth this? And the thousand and counting hate crimes since the election, those are worth ending a political dynasty? Last I checked neither political party is "wrecked" the rotten GOP runs the entire country now, and the Democrats are still sitting clueless and bewildered. Nothing was really upended institutionally, republicans voted for the republican candidate.

Let me lay it on the line, Thomas Frank was my hero. I never missed an opportunity to talk about his ideas or interject his analysis everywhere from casual conversation to academic writing. But I guess to be a liberal (outside of the gilded halls of the well-graduated that Frank's book is all about) is to have your heart broken. Maybe that is too much, there have been thinkers and scholars who I really looked up to but outgrew such as Jello Biafra and Noam Chomsky. There have been politicians who let me down like John Edwards, who seemed at least to be committed to the issue of poverty and inequality. But there has really only been one other intellectual who I really felt betrayed me and that is Ralph Nader when he ran again in 2004.

The worst part is there is almost nothing I really can contest in Listen, Liberal; as a party the top Democrats have abandoned working people and embraced a worldview of elite professionals who look down their noses at anyone who can't make it in today's economy. Though Frank does bring up Ricky Ray Rector, the man Bill Clinton flew home to Arkansas during the 1992 campaign to oversee his execution. Frank noted that Clinton used the occasion to grandstand on his "tough on crime" position but neglected to note that the reason Rector was unable to understand what was happening to him was that he suffered brain damage from a suicide attempt while already in prison. The why is important. Why the Democratic Party stopped being the party of the people is also very important, but when an outright fascist is on the ticket opposite from them is not the best time to address it in public.

I would have been more than happy to examine every single wart on every elected and appointed Democrat after donald trump had been rendered a footnote in American history. Whether Frank's book and subsequent work convinced anyone to stay home or vote against Hillary Clinton I cannot say; did anyone in the republican pretty hate machine pick up on this dissenting liberal and play up the "Dems in disarray" meme? Also hard to say. But dragon-slaying is hard work, we only had one knight to try and do the job. They had Vladimir Putin, the heads of all the cable news networks, James Comey, 62 million vicious morons ready to pull the lever for anyone with an "R" after their name, Scott Walker, Rick Snyder, and 29 other republican governors and legislatures monkeying with the election laws and process, and nearly three decades of manufactured scandals to throw at her.

And when we come right down to it, no one is really on "our" side. There is no "our" side, this was a civil war where one side (the right) relentlessly beats down a disparate group of weaklings who can't put aside their differences for anything. The result, in hindsight, I guess shouldn't surprise anyone.

But all these words are coming from a broken heart.

Friday, December 23, 2016

'Tis the season of futility

Which dies first: truth or compassion? I could have sworn that there was something to the idea of Christian charity, especially around Christmas, but then I was introduced the an individual named Matt Walsh and now I despair of that notion. I was scrolling through my news feed as usual and came across something odd from an odd person.
Image result for christmas refugee meme
In case the image doesn't go through, it is an old fashioned nativity with the meme caption "If you would deny middle eastern refugees shelter in America... You don't get to celebrate Christmas." I was able to find it in an article on Wonkette which helps explain it a little. It was out of character for the odd person sharing it because it actually sounds like a meme attempting to shame some compassion and charity out of people who loudly proclaim their Christianity. The person placing it in my feed usually posts things about how vaccines are killing us and the evils of abortion, et. al. The standard issue right wing authoritarian concerns of faux Christians. So I was intrigued that she would post something that was so out of character and clicked on the "Show more" text accompanying the meme. In retrospect I should not have been surprised. From some guy named Matt Walsh:
OK, one of my biggest pet peeves is when people just invent historical facts out of whole cloth and then publish them in the form of a snarky meme, allowing other historically illiterate nitwits to quickly spread the falsehood all over my newsfeed. I guess this isn't really a pet peeve so much as a universal peeve shared by all rational human beings.
That brings us to this meme, or ones like it, which you've probably seen a billion times this month. Chances are you'll see it a billion more times over the next week. It draws a parallel between modern Muslim refugees and the Holy Family at the time of Christ's birth. The Holy Family, according to the meme, were refugees, too. They were even turned away at the inn, just like Republicans want to turn Muslims away! How analogous!
Yes, it's very analogous except for the fact that it's completely wrong on every level. Mary and Joseph were not refugees. They came to Bethlehem for the census because that's where they were born. I've never heard of a refugee fleeing to his hometown for a census.
They were only turned away at the Inn because there wasn't any room. It wasn't because they belonged to a violent religious sect that had been perpetrating terrorist acts all over the globe, causing the innkeeper to be understandably concerned that they might be terrorists.
Now, sometime after Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph did flee to Egypt when they heard from the angel that Herod was going to slaughter all of the male babies in and around Bethlehem. If you want to call them "refugees" at THAT point, fine, but that has nothing to do with Christmas.
Even in the oldest Christian traditions with the longest Christmas seasons, the season still ends at the presentation in the temple, which is before they fled. I'm not aware of any church anywhere in the world that extends the Christmas season beyond that. So on no level at all does this analogy apply.
But, OK, because progressives who've never read a Bible and probably couldn't even name two of the Gospel writers have decided to bring this up, let's talk about it. Why did Mary and Joseph flee, exactly? Well, as I said, because there was going to be a wholesale slaughter of infants.
Hmmmm... I wonder where we can find something analogous to the systematic mass murder of babies? Oh, I have an idea: check your local Planned Parenthood. Mary and Joseph had to leave their hometown so that the Christ child would not be a victim of an ancient form of abortion.
If we're going to use the early life of Jesus to make an[sic] political points, then, I think the point is that you shouldn't kill babies because you may be killing Christ. In fact, you are killing Christ every time you kill a baby, because Christ resides in all children.
There's your meme, liberals. Have at it.
Merry Christmas.
Yes, I agree that it is terrible when people "invent historical facts" and spread it around in a meme. Mr. Walsh does not claim to be an historian, at least he lists no credentials of any kind on his facebook page and I don't care enough to visit his site. If he were he would know that there are facts and there is history but combining the two is redundant. Everything else from his arrogant and obnoxious spewing of unfounded assertions rests on a rather large fallacy; the bible is not an historical document no matter how much you insist that it is.

Now, before the fundamentalists took over just about all discourse about Christianity it was commonly accepted that the bible was a collection of allegories and moral lessons, not the literal truth. From the fact that no one actually knows when Christ was born, the early church fathers decided on December 25th to co-opt the Winter Solstice. If there really was an historical Mary and Joseph, then produce this census record. And produce the decree concerning the slaughter on infants while we're at it. I have no idea if any actual historical documents can prove or even corroborate the existence of any facets of the Christmas story and it doesn't really matter because the bible is the foundation text of the Christian religion, not an actual historical document.

That said, I was raised in and still attend a Christian Church. What was stressed to me in that Church was a moral education, not an empirical one, filled with lessons of humility, compassion, love of neighbors, charity for the weak and less fortunate, and above all not bearing false witness. If Christians are to wage war on something it is sin and evil itself, not another tribe called "liberals" but what do I know right? I certainly am impressed with the mental discipline it takes to turn a message of compassion about refugees fleeing an evil war and drop it on abortion. Or should I say horrified and angry? This Matt Walsh is an incredibly self-righteous propagandist, nothing more. Yet, as most double-high authoritarians he is able to speak the language of right wing authoritarian followers and gain their trust. I am late to the party on this particular charlatan as he has a pretty impressive number of people debunking his crap. See here and here for instance.

I guess both truth and compassion die at the same time. Merry Christmas to everyone but Matt Walsh, I hope you suffer horribly before you meet your maker and explain your behavior.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

A Nation Of Sociopaths

What has become of us? Only scant few hours of daylight remain until the electoral college, that undemocratic firewall of aristocratic statesmanship that was supposed to guard against populist demagogues, unqualified hacks, and agents of foreign hostile powers, propels that very thing into the presidency. This is clearly insane. And what holds us back? The fear of reprisals? Any violence the republican traitors and neo-nazis could do would be tiddly winks compared to when the short-fingered vulgarian has the power of the state at his command. The fear of being called sore losers? We've been called everything, including that, for years. Why would resisting tyranny provoke any harsher language? In the end, it is fear of being impolite. Or of breaking with tradition. In the face of unrestrained anti-American sociopaths, we fold without even trying.

The scope of this failure is truly remarkable. The basis of our republican form of government is single district plurality with one person's vote being equal to everyone else's. The Democratic party, for all its faults, respects this basis and simply sighs and shrugs that it is the "will of the people" that we lost. The Republican party however, pisses on the very notion of following rules as a sucker's game and plays to win at all cost, especially when they can break the rules and make libruls cry. And now, every faction of the children of darkness is getting what they want. Corporate fat cats get an evisceration of any regulation on their actions. The very rich get their tax cuts, especially the complete repeal of the estate tax to codify the de facto aristocracy. Christian supremacists will get to inflict their narrow and vicious interpretation of scripture that conveniently lets them discriminate and oppress anyone they don't like. White supremacists will run wild, free from accountability or even the thin veneer of decency that previously restrained them.

Don't think so? The SPLC reports that 1,094 bias-related incidents have been committed since election day. Many are racist graffiti and trump's name used in an intimidating manner... for now. What happens when trump is running the Justice Department? How about when trump republicans start taking over or asserting control in precincts and sheriff's departments they already are employed in? The basis of authoritarian aggression is the belief that authorities will back them, or at least look the other way, when they attack members of out-groups. The hate crimes occurring now are just testing the waters, how will authorities react? How will the press react? 

How about playing to win at all costs? North Carolina is instructive. After refusing to concede for almost a month after the election, Pat McCrory signed a bill passed by his republican pet legislature to gut the powers of the governor. This comes after the fascist republicans in the state went further than almost any of their brethren in other states to restrict voting by Democrats. The reaction to all this? Barely reported on whisper protests by Democrats. On the other hand, a lively discussion on my friend's facebook page concerned with the prospect of the electoral college refusing to make trump president yielded this as the first comment:
 I've been thinking about this a lot recently. This situation seems to be exactly one of those for which they instituted the Electoral College in the first place. The American public has elected someone who may be crazy...he's certainly shown issues with behavior control and temper.

That said...which scenario is worse?

a) four years of Trump
b) the immediate riots, and long-term fallout, that are 100% sure to occur if Trump is not voted in by the Electoral College
To even a remotely objective observer, Hillary Clinton won. About 50,000 votes in three previously blue states swung through a combination of voter suppression, republicans rigging the voting, the Russians rigging the voting, these awful digital no-paper trail voting machines screwing up, and good old dirty tricks. The result is that Hillary Clinton did not lose, the presidency was stolen from her by people who just do not give a damn about fair play and this time did not get caught. It would not have mattered if it was trump, Jeb Bush, Rubio, Cruz or any of the other dwarves, the trap was set before trump even came down the escalator.

Which brings us to the point, year after year the corporations that supply us with crap entertainment have crafted continuously media that dehumanize, atomize, and demonize everyone. It does not matter that a majority has hung on to their humanity, a sizable swath of Americans are effectively brainwashed sociopaths simply because of the culture of absolute competition and dearth of empathy in the public sphere. It may start small, "hey let's watch this movie where people get tortured" or "let's play this game where we can steal cars and kill any people we feel like" but when other people are no longer seen as sentient equals, the ball starts rolling away from humanity. Soon, those who fall victim to this passive conditioning discover the right wing hate machine and are further programmed to hate all sorts of out-groups.

As I said, not all, not even a majority but enough people are part of the problem. It would take only a nudge to make them a tyrant's willing executioners. In any case, the time to stop a tyrant is before he takes power. Politically inspired violence and vigilantism are coming no matter what, that can't be put back in the bottle, but do we want to face violent lone wolves or organized state sanctioned death squads? They exist, go to any political website or social media page and peruse the comment sections. It is only a matter of time before they grow bored with simply destroying people in cyber space. And in the short-fingered vulgarian they have found a focal point for their engineered rage, in the white house or not. Let's try to keep them on the outside looking in.

Electors, do your job as prescribed by the intent of your creator. Keep trump on the outside looking in as well. Anything that follows, well, we'll just have to hope that the system is not as completely rotten as it looks.

And I hope I'm wrong, I really do.

My letter to the Democratic Party

To the incoming chair of the DNC,
You are not prepared for what is coming, no one is. We have entered a completely new era of unified authoritarian rule, you will have to approach every aspect of your job with that in mind. I'm sure that you are aware that Democrats will be completely shut out of governance, and the party will have to act like a shadow government. Do not collaborate in any way with the republicans, resist in the strongest terms any attempt by them to pin blame for their actions and failures on you or our party. It is time to become an unabashed voice for working people of all shapes and sizes. And you must really mean it. The party will be in the wilderness for a long time, there will be no reason for to remain tied to a party that surrenders or compromises our values. The national government is lost, aim lower at local levels. The republicans must fail alone, only when they have inflicted so much pain and suffering on so many people that not even Fox News and breitbart can make excuses for how bad they are can democracy return.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Rogue One: Prelude to Resistance

I just got home from seeing the new stand alone Star Wars movie. Wow, I know I can't give any spoilers but what an awesome film! I must say that Episode four was one of the first movies I remember ever seeing and was always intrigued by how it just dropped the viewer into the story with so many unanswered questions. Everyone kind of gets that this film is about the events that led to Princess Leia transporting the plans to Yavin and the interception by Darth Vader of the Tantive IV on its way to pick up Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here is the text of the opening crawl for Episode four:
Episode IV: A NEW HOPE"It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy...."
How did that battle look? What were the circumstances leading to it? Why was Leia's starship alone, unescorted, at the edge of space? These were questions I had been asking for almost four decades, finally answered, on the eve of our own collapse into civil war. We know, more recently from the Star Wars universe, that the core of the Rebel Alliance was formed even as Palpatine announced the reorganization of the Republic into the Empire. We know that two separate attempts were made on Palpatine's life by Jedi masters which failed. However, had they succeeded... then none of this would have been necessary. 
Instead, the Jedi were destroyed along with democracy and the rule of law. An entire civilization turned on its head in an instant, and for the benefit and power madness of one man. Granted, a sith lord and not a toupee-sporting orange-skinned con artist with vengeance issues and no attention span, and Palpatine worked alone. He did not have an entire political party eviscerating democratic norms and the last whiffs of fair-play for the better part of a decade, thus laying the groundwork for whatever tyrant just happened to come along. 
Can we learn anything from the fictional totalitarianism of the Star Wars universe? I may be more flexible than most when it comes to life imitating art imitating life (I once spent the better part of a semester trying to convince a medieval history professor that the Jedi were patterned in part after the Knights Templar, thankfully I didn't get graded on it) but there could be merit in examining the idea of what American tyranny could look like through the lens of one of our most enduring (and profitable) stories. 
First, in the rise of Palpatine and the coming of the Empire it was often alluded to, though never "proved" to my satisfaction, of the presence of intolerable and inflexible corruption in the Galactic Senate. There was unbelievable privilege and luxury in the capitol and resentment in the rest of the galaxy. The scene in Episode one where Palpatine explains the iron grip special interests such as the Trade Federation held over the politicians, presumably by punishing enemies and rewarding allies and then presents himself as the "strong man" who could stand up to those special interests seems awfully familiar doesn't it?
Second is the relentless demonization of ideological opponents. It is hard to gauge public opinion in the Star Wars films but in the expanded universe it was understood, perhaps through a force amplified whisper campaign, that the Jedi were aloof, out of touch elitists who stole babies, never gave anything back and tried to enforce cultural norms among citizens of the Republic. All in an effort to delegitimize the order in the public's eyes and make their eventual downfall something the average citizen did not sympathize with.
Third was the definite current of human superiority in the expanded universe that people on the core worlds and colonies felt they were better than the non-humans of the galaxy. The Empire exploited this by making an all human officer corps and enslaving Wookies. This aspect came through pretty clearly to trump republicans who call themselves the "alt-right" which is just a nice wussified way of saying "we're neo-nazis" when they freaked out about Rogue One and called for a boycott. 
Altogether, it is fitting that Rogue One premiered this weekend given that we are about to pass that window on Monday into de facto dictatorship. Audiences across the nation will see what the future holds. That resistance to tyranny is basically a death sentence. It will not be romantic, it will not be heroic, and the death of rebels will be empty of meaning. If you choose resistance, it will often be lonely and you should expect betrayal at any turn. Most of us will just disappear in the night without even the chance to take one of them with us, whoever the "them" may be. I will say, as the film's slogan states so it's not a spoiler, the the image and impression of hope permeates Rogue one that somehow you have to abandon the now and your own life and happiness to think of what could be.
I have none. I have been betrayed by friends and allies to often to believe in anything anymore. For a moment I felt some spark, when everyone applauded at the end. I looked around later at the audience and felt the horrible sensation that by this time next year, half or even more of them could be deported, in prison, dead, or in labor camps and that most of the trump republicans would celebrate. The corollary of hope is rage and even if you feel no solidarity with most Americans right now, we will have to learn to work together as a team, an alliance if you will, possibly even a Rebel alliance. There is no evil in raging against evil, of hating the machine that crushes freedom and hope. We are not prepared for what is coming but perhaps all Star Wars fans can draw strength from this film. At the very least we can shit on any trump voter who claims to be on the side of the rebels. 
No asshole, you're on the side of the empire, own it. 

Thursday, December 15, 2016

The Cold War is Over

So what do we call this?
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
A foreign power reached out through this great invention of ours and meddled in our affairs, not just any American institution, but arguably our most important one. Like most of us I imagine, I have been in shock since this story dropped on Friday and the revelation is so unbelievable that I had no idea how to write about it. 
H/T to who ever made this.

First of all, let's be blunt, this was an act of war by Russia. And an act of treason by Mitch McConnell, along with any other Republicans who were complicit. According to the Times article:
According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
If the revelation that a foreign power was using clandestine means to at once undermine our system of government and boost their preferred candidate does not rise above "partisan politics," what exactly does? The president of Russia understands how unfit, incompetent, and anti-democratic Donald is and what the vulgar talking yam is likely to do to the government of the United States. There was a movie once about this wasn't there? Or do the authoritarians in our country want us to just forget and look the other way because Russia isn't communist anymore? Of course ole' Vlad wants to elect trump, it will completely destabilize a major competitor all on its own. Authoritarian leaders have no conscience, nor morals so they will do whatever they can to grab power. Is that what happened here? Or are we just supposed to accept trump's bullshit explanation that he had no collusion with any Russian state actors? Or do the Russians have such leverage on Trump that he is as much a pawn as incompetent demagogue and authoritarian of the social dominator variety? Or was he just talking to the air when he suggested that Russia hack Hillary Clinton's emails some more?

Ditto H/T
The only question to investigate now is how far the collusion with hostile foreign agents went and how far those hackers and agents were able to get into the voting machines and software. Then someone needs to find out how much, if any, collusion there was between state governors like Rick Snyder and Scott Walker, the republican state legislators and these same foreign actors. I feel fairly certain these scumbags were just domestically rigging the election with their ID laws and closing polling places, etc. but were they smart enough on their own to come up with the exact laws that would cut Democratic turnout by so much. Scott Walker in particular, while ruthless and immoral enough to want to do everything possible to sabotage his own state and political enemies, lacks the intelligence to implement such a perfect plan. Was he only assisted by the extensive network of seditious authoritarian think tanks and their billionaire funders? Or did they look the other way as hackers cut, erased, or lost Democratic votes?

Do republicans hate Barack Obama so much that they were willing to sell out their country to Russia in order to beat him? The worst part of all this is that we will never really know. It was fairly obvious that the recounts would come to nothing in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, I wish I had been able to write about it before they were over but there was no way in hell the republicans in those states were going to let their crimes against democracy be known or discovered. It is also fairly obvious that we can never trust any election outcome again, every subsequent hack, voter suppression measure, and unaccountable or unoverseeable vote counting system will be even easier than this one.

Wars never truly end do they?

Sunday, December 4, 2016

The Long Game and Its Consequences

The time to fight fascism is before it takes power. Those of us outside the fascist movement in America that has anointed a vulgar talking yam as its strongman are already far behind the curve. I am continually reminded of Thomas Madden's analysis of the Roman constitution, unwritten obviously, and the generally conservative tendencies of the Roman state and its people. In Empires of Trust Madden wrote that the Romans didn't like to change things, so when they fought wars with unfriendly neighbors to push danger over the horizon as he puts it, they simply adapted the republican system that had served them more or less well since the revolution that overthrew the foreign Etruscan kings by appointing proconsuls to exercise authority in the provinces instead of overhauling the system for their new far flung empire. We can see in hindsight that allowing proconsuls (they were military generals in addition to being governors) years and years outside the oversight of Rome and the annual consuls allowed them to build up mass bases of power and eventually march on the city. This happened a few times, like dress rehearsals, before Julius Caesar "crossed the Rubicon" and  took over for good simply because he had the biggest, most loyal army following him. This is happening today in the form of the Electoral College, and we; the beleaguered adherents of democracy, the rule of law, the constitution and all that, should have learned our lesson 16 years ago.

The subtitle of this blog is "the past is still with us" for a reason, even though Americans seem to have the collective memory of gnats, there are certain things that the children of darkness never forget. There was no one able to say "what? no!" when George W. Bush and his brother got their daddy's Supreme Court justices to say "no more counting, we got the result we like" to Florida canvassers. Everyone from Al Gore on down just shrugged and said that we need to give the president-elect the benefit of the doubt. And if I or anyone needs to refresh your memory about why letting the guy who received fewer votes take office was a bad idea then I have an awesome pair of towers dedicated to world trade in Manhattan to sell you.

We should have used the last eight years to agitate for a fix, once and for all, to the problem of voters in Wyoming having far more sway in picking our Chief Executive than voters in New York or California. But that would have been impolite, and given the tantrum thrown by our domestic terrorist party it would probably have been futile. The sentiment often left unsaid by Democrats was that demographics had finally turned in their favor, no need to work or plan to counter the next abomination against civility and popular government by the republicans. The rule of stodgy old white men was over! I cannot bring myself to use the term "conservative" to describe the right wing in this country for they are the furthest from, if words have any meaning. However, most official voices rejoiced in the knowledge that there simply were not enough of them to ever again elect a bumbling warmonger to the office of the president. It was the lonely voices out here in the wilderness that understood, however ephemerally, that if the children of darkness could obstruct and lie and prevent the responsible children of light from addressing the myriad issues facing Americans that the electorate would relent and turn over the reins to a republican once more.

It is a great problem for a republic that a quarter of eligible voters can throw that republic away by electing a demagogue, but here we are. Only 16 years removed from the last trial run with tyranny, a minority of voters handed every last lever of power to the greatest threat to civilization in human history. How did it happen? We, like the Romans, are prisoners to a system that outlived its usefulness. The electoral college was obsolete following the Civil War, when the United States became singular. Yet we persisted in treating the election to the highest office in the land as separate state elections. Now it will serve as not a final bulwark against an unqualified, unfit demagogue from sneaking into the office of chief executive of the republic, but the vehicle of that republic's destruction.

Donald the vulgar talking yam snuck his way into the carefully laid trap set for our democracy. The republican governors and legislatures who passed voter ID and other methods of suppressing Democratic voters were simply preparing the way to take America back from demographic inevitability. The republican partisans on the Supreme Court knew exactly what they were doing when they gutted the voting rights act. And it played out as expected, the southern white supremacists barely waited until the ink had dried on the decision before ripping apart the minority protections that previous generations marched for, endured police dogs and fire hoses for, and in some cases died for. Poof, gone. And those of us outside the fascist movement in our midst could do nothing but watch and weep for our democracy.

Our best efforts to stop this fascist from taking office will fail. Our efforts to resist the damage to our people that trump has promised will come to nothing. No one will save us. Elections have consequences, and the republicans thought ahead. We play by the rules, they think rules are for suckers. We try to uphold the American idea, they shit all over it. Lying, cheating, and stealing are all justified to the children of darkness who recognize no law beyond their own self-interest. They will stop at nothing to acquire power and just proved it. The constitution is at best a cudgel to beat their enemies with, to be dropped and ignored the millisecond it impedes the path to total control and power. Democrats revere the constitution and the attendant American traditions, therefore they will not do anything to stop trump and the republicans from completely destroying the republic. I have heard some people claim that somehow the midterms will be awesome, that people will have buyer's remorse and somehow remember how badly total control of the federal government by the GOP last time worked out. I say, what makes you think there will be midterm elections, or a presidential one? Trump has shit on every convention of American government, we are one pretext away from cancelling elections. And no one will do anything to stop them. The most trivial rationalization can be drummed up by relentless propaganda into an existential threat, we don't know what form it will take but history certainly points to possibilities. That's a story for another day though. One I may get to someday, to pass the time before I am disappeared. Maybe you can convince others around you to give a damn that we have lost something great, and unlike promises to "make America great again" it is not coming back.