Sunday, December 10, 2017

There's no moral high ground in war

We cannot depend on Democrats to do the right thing, stand up for anyone, stand up to anyone, or fight... anything... ever. I'm so sick to hear that Democratic senators circled around Al and sacrificed him to the gods of the greatest suckers game in town. Meanwhile, an admitted sexual predator remains in the White House over the objections of a majority of voters and he fervently endorsed a highly possible pedophile for the senate. All the objections to those morally repugnant fascists may as well be a fart in a windstorm for all the good it has done and will do. However, Democrats are still capable of screwing up shooting fish in a barrel. Not all of them, and I'm pinning the blame on elected Democrats and the odd Democrat who actually gets on TV, but anyone who sees the war presently being waged on our system of self-government and the rule of law cannot seem to penetrate the zeitgeist of unilateral disarmament and leading with their faces.

It is already too late, anything that could be called "the moral high ground" is lost for the duration. The children of light never stood a chance in this kind of asymmetric warfare. They just kept on as though these disasters were just disagreements between honorable, patriotic citizens who all want the best for our Republic and simply had differing ideas of how to get there. Historians will puzzle over the exact point of tipping into fascism, Nixon? Reagan? Gingrich? Bush II? exactly as scholars of the Third Reich debate the inevitability of dictatorship and repression in Weimar Germany. But whatever rules American politics operated under during the liberal ascendancy between 1933-1981 began fraying and cracking long before Doughface Donny stuck his stubby little fingers into it.

The point is; we're still at war. The war for America's soul rages on. It didn't end in November of last year; nor did it end on January 20 of this year; or even when the death cult of human suffering literally rammed through their $6 trillion giveaway to the wealthy with $4.5 trillion in tax hikes for regular Americans. It won't end if Robert Mueller manages to frogmarch every liar and con artist out of the White House and Congress in shackles. It won't end if Doughface Donny manages to fire Mueller. I hate to play into a favorite right wing talking point they used to love but if the Democrats who forced Al Franken out were in charge when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, then the man in the high castle wouldn't be fiction.

World War II was a just war, unbelievable evil was aggressively conquering Europe and Asia, and any means to destroy it were justified. We don't like to talk about it but far before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Western Allies used vicious means to combat the evils of Nazism and militarist Japan. The bombing campaigns in both theatres and the submarine war in the Pacific were incredibly violent and unfair. And that was exactly the point, if you read St. Augustine's treatise on just war theory, any means that can end the conflict are fair. The world could not exist half-fascist and half-not, just as the United States cannot continue half-authoritarian and half-democratic. The authoritarians will fight until there is no resistance left, and then will manufacture new deviance to condemn.

People actually believe that throwing Franken to the wolves will defuse the issue of sexual harassment for Democrats, when the opposite is almost certainly going to happen. We will hear nonstop of how Al Franken was a monster and whataboutism with his name will deflect and blunt the impact of any half-assed Democratic attempt to paint the GOP as a party of pedophiles and sex predators. The truth doesn't matter, whoever yells the loudest and longest wins by simply confusing the issue. How many times was Hillary Clinton exonerated for each and every so-called scandal? Did the pit bull death cultists every let it go? How about, for example, Terri Schiavo? The real death cultists danced a jig on her brain dead body for how long and painted the Democrats as the "party of death" while grandstanding from the floor of Congress. Then when she finally was allowed to rest and the autopsy revealed that her brain really was mush, did any of the death cultists apologize? Sure, it was one minor aspect of the midterm elections that finally knocked the death cultists out of control. For all of four years.

Brother Charlie Pierce already did an excellent job showing how republicans crapped their cages while shrieking about a non-existent political rally at Paul Wellstone's funeral. The very event that got Al Franken into electoral politics to begin with. And now the death cult gets to claim one more victim, they must be rubbing shit in their hair with a determined glee at the fact that Democrats did the hit for them. And if a few of them go down in the mid terms this time around, so what? Some nice rich guy will hold out a chair for them at a cushy think tank if they were sufficiently pious to the cause of robbing America blind and sabotaging any attempts to protect the environment or peoples' lives.

Forget reason, forget logic, forget moral or ethical considerations, and above all forget about any conventional weapon penetrating the shield of tribalism and money that protects the death cult formerly known as the Republican Party. People may not directly die from torpedoes or incendiary bombs in this war being waged on your life in this country, but anyone not in the death cult had better abandon their outdated sense of moral high ground. This war requires a guerrilla mindset.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

(Tax) Cuts the Throat of America

The occupying plutocracy finally scored their big "win" Friday night while most of it's subjects slept. The wavering senators showed their true loyalty to party (donors) and fell in line, despite the unpopularity of raising taxes on the supposed middle class that hasn't quite been finished off yet by republican scorched earth policy. The Orwellian "tax cuts and jobs act" that doughface Donny wanted to call the cut, cut, cut act because he's a fucking child, is effectively a tax hike for most Americans that will lead to an imposed recession and massive job losses. It has to be assumed that a majority of the re-programmable meat socks who voted for Donny and the death cult of human suffering will see their taxes go up as a result. As it must also be assumed that most of those meat socks will suffer from the next economic collapse and recession inflicted on Americans by the republicans and predatory capitalism they worship. The script is always the same, deficits are horrible under a Democratic administration but just fine and dandy under the leader of the death cult. What happens now?

How much do you have to hate the poor and how much do you have to love the leaders who push policies that make you poor to never learn the lesson? It goes without saying that many of the meat socks who voted to make a game show host president are old, even the baby boomers are old now. That means that those old people who lived through the stagflation of the '70s, the jobless recoveries, the recessions, the collapse of 2007-9, and every other structural setback that republicans have inflicted on the lives of everyday Americans, voted for their own assassins in spite of every possible good sense they possess. If ever there was a time to shun the morons who vote republican, this is it. They have earned every opprobrium I have ever heaved upon them, re-programmable meat socks, nazi sympathizers, authoritarian followers, willfully stupid, and completely anti-American if that word can possibly mean anything.

But this "fuck you peasant, starve " bill was the end that justified every means. Bush at least held out a crumb or two for the middle class by dropping the marginal rates while setting up the massive deficits, speculative bubbles, and cuts to government spending. This latest giveaway actually raises taxes on the middle class while ladling out the filthy lucre to corporations. Every supposed value the republican party had was stomped on, every supposed crime that republicans accused Barack Obama of was perpetrated by they themselves in the pursuit of these fucking tax cuts for the rich. No matter how much this monstrosity was kept secret, no matter how roughshod the bare republican majority rode over the opposition, and no matter how fast it was jammed through, the media will never let go of how Obama did the same thing with the ACA even though he didn't happen. This was literally voted on in the middle of the night with fucking hand-scrawled notes in the margins.

We are well and truly fucked. It doesn't matter if the blue wave actually occurs in the mid terms. It doesn't matter if doughface Donny and every one of his slimy cronies are frogmarched out in handcuffs. This hack and slash job on federal revenue will finally finish the apotheosis of corporations, permanently enshrine a lawless plutocracy, and render the sovereignty of the people through their government as meaningless. Those angry, racist baby boomers who voted for the game show host may not have to live through the coming dark ages but the rest of us may as well kiss civilization goodbye.