The Game of Minutes

So if American elections are a game of inches (with a huge handicap for republicans of course) but life and death is really on the line, and now that the worst possible outcome is here the Americans who still believe in the rule of law and all that quaint crap are going to have to define small victories down... way down. I say quaint because the only value in America that truly matters is money, who has it, who doesn't, who can use it to get more, and above all who can steal it. It sucks but that is reality. The corollary is cost, all things in life have costs, who pays and who suffers. Every republican tax cut in my lifetime has been theft, every de-regulation, every "free market" decision, and every rent-seeking investment has been about robbing the commons. They are just able to do more damage than Democratic janitor administrations can clean up. But now, it's all over. Doughfacedonny and the American Fascist party owns the government now and every disaster is on them. In this scenario of absolute ruin, every minute will count, every minute republicans can be held up in inflicting their cruelty and malice on the vulnerable is a win. 

Moral clarity in a violent dictatorship is a luxury that is just gone. Pain and suffering are coming, piles upon piles of dead bodies in even the best possible scenario. What gets lost in the shuffle too often is the fact that doughfacedonny is already the greatest American mass murderer in history. Life is dangerous in any case, you only need to spend a few moments in the wilderness to understand that. It was stupidity that caused a great deal of the death last time, holding other aspects constant, it might be stupidity that saves lives this time. Since so many people have trauma-induced amnesia from the pandemic I will recap, doughfacedonny dismantled the pandemic response infrastructure and defunded public health capabilities ahead of Corvid, he then did nothing during the early outbreaks because "it will go away on its own", then the maliciousness began when his administration decided the pandemic was hurting the blue states more and withheld PPE and medical equipment from them. Malice continued when the right wing media, in a disgusting preview of this election, overpowered government and professional organizations advice to prevent the spread. When the shit really hit the fan what happened? Billions to prop up the stock market, billions more in rent-seeking loans in the laughingly named "paycheck protection program" that were promptly forgiven for loyal republican businesses. The trump signed survival checks that so many stupid people cited in voting for him this time, were an afterthought. This is just a few examples off the top of my head.

That was the aftermath of stupidity in a real crisis. Prior to COVID, aside from the massive giveaway to rich people in deficit-ballooning tax cuts, he didn't accomplish much. Oh right, he filled the Supreme Court seat held open by Mitch McConnell and then blackmailed Anthony Kennedy to retire so the so-called swing vote could be firmly captured by a federalist society plant. But it was mostly talk, mean talk for sure, and mostly confined to harming foreigners. I don't mean to make light of family separation, et al. but a word people are going to have to come to grips with in the hell that is coming is "triage". Who are you willing to die for? Who are you willing to be disappeared over? Who are you going to sacrifice for? My only answer is my family and closest friends. My resistance is going to consist of sloth basically, refusing to engage, sandbagging, and dragging ass. I'm too old now to protest, march, I'm not signing useless petitions, and I'm not giving anyone money. Maybe nobody remembers now but in 2016 the shingles of American politics, jill stein, siphoned off a great deal of money that could have actually done some good somewhere into phony recount efforts. Scams and entrapment are going to sprout like mushrooms after a rainstorm, don't get suckered. 

No, what can buy time for the victims is withholding approval, every minute the republicans spend playing grabass is a minute they aren't rounding people up. It's a foregone conclusion that deportation isn't going to happen, you think any of the home countries are going to take millions of their most useless citizens back? They have bigger problems mostly. So the roundups are going to end up in private prisons mostly. We can hope that the quiet quitting phenomenon reaches into the oppression industry. But if doughfacedonny seriously is going to put useless sycophants in charge who can kiss his ass harder than anyone else, managing any kind of mass action is going to be pretty inefficient. Especially if we all remember Tim Snyder's axiom "don't obey in advance". Pretending not to hear or not to understand is a method of resistance that everyone can participate in.

Everyone dies, as Keynes said "in the long run we're all dead". Don't help shorten anyone's life. The longer they have to chase one dissident, the longer the next one gets to live. I have no faith that there will ever be another chance to kick republicans out but if it does it will come through making enough white people uncomfortable when nothing works anymore. 

It Really Happened Here

 Like I'm sure all of you, I'm utterly shocked by the results of the election. Shit is about to get really real for many. I'll put aside the collapse in turnout, and the fact that louis dejoy has had years to put fascists in key positions at the post office. Let's focus on the fact that most Americans are exceptionally dumb and gullible, so easily led to the slaughterhouse by an overwhelming propaganda apparatus that I can't even feel sorry for them. 

What happened on Tuesday was by the exact logic that horror movies use to make you root for the masked psychopath with the machete and laugh as the buxom girls run into his arms. Supposedly 45% of Latinos voted for the ridiculous fascist who promised to deport them en masse and has insulted and demonized them with almost every breath. Because the alternative was a half Black, half Indian woman? I keep coming back to how in revolutionary France the peasants were the King's strongest supporters. Why do struggling poor people identify with strongmen? Did they think the Empire was the good guys in Star Wars and those pesky rebels were nothing but effeminate liberals endlessly litigating microaggressions and changing their pronouns? 

Psychology is really hard, mass psychology is harder still. Did all the young people and minorities just forget the chaos of doughfacedonny's first hamfisted run at fucking up the government? Did covid really cause collective amnesia? Have the bots and troll farms so successfully implanted that Russian collusion and interference was a hoax in dumb Americans? I guess it was willful ignorance on my part to not notice that running a woman for president again would not be okay. Every woman I knew or have seen absolutely assured me that they really were going to turn out for Harris, even maga women were going to go behind their husbands', fathers', older brothers', boyfriends' back and vote for her. We have been lulled into the delusion that young people and minorities will bail us out from old white peoples' cruelty. 

I was so excited to think that this was finally going to be the cycle where Democrats stopped appealing to corporate media for their approval. Going back at least to the Gore campaign it has always been Democrats begging the media to do its job and tell people about how terrible republicans are and always have been. Always staying above the fray and playing right into their "gotcha" questions and never crying foul at the blatant and obnoxious double-standards of corporate reporters. Is Noam Chomsky's critique of "journalism" not common knowledge or have we all forgotten? It goes like this; media in America is owned by for-profit companies whose major investors are all very rich men who want the story told in their interest. The rich endow journalism schools and chairs with big money to turn them into sifting and selecting machines to shake out any potential journalist who cannot internalize the values of big money. It is through internalizing the media values of both sides, and democracy must be restrained lest it run off in a leftist direction that journalists are promoted and put in positions of influence. The idea that the political press as an institution is liberal is laughable on its face, despite howls of protest from the right. You don't get in front of the camera or a spot on the Op/Ed page if you are not sufficiently conditioned to write/report on events in the friendliest to wealth way possible.

In 2016 it was when the Bundy assholes got off for their insurrection against grazing fees or whatever it was that I finally realized there was a real problem. This time it was the repetition of misogynistic memes on social media. Endless stories of women with unreasonable demands of men, insisting on their freedom to do as they please while the man pays for everything. Then single moms who say they are ready to settle down with a good man who can provide for her, and the revulsion of taking another man's leftovers from commenters on these stories. Misogyny runs deep in this country, women fighting back took front and center this time but failed to deliver.

And now... it's all over. I can't help but laugh at all the laments of "the next four years are going to be awful but we'll do better in the next election". News flash, that was it. Tuesday was our last chance to save democracy and freedom. There's not going to be a next time. I used to write frequently about this being an occupied nation when doughfacedonny squeaked in through the antiquated electoral college with a huge assist from Russia and the right wing hate machine. What do we have this time? I tuned out after it became obvious that he was going to win and I'm not going to torture myself with election data analysis. Everything he promised is going to happen and it will be basically permanent. Suspicion and paranoia are now the rules we live by in America, you will never be able to speak freely again lest some maga turn you in to the secret police. Rights only exist because someone else is willing to enforce them, at least to believe in them. I know I know, Tim Snyder says the first rule is not to comply in advance. But if you go out into the world now screaming about rights and how bigoted the cops and government are, you're probably going to disappear in the middle of the night. Going by how dictatorships operate in the rest of the world at least. 

I don't know how violent it's going to get but I refuse to make myself a target. I'm going to protect myself and my family first as best I can. I'm old, I'm tired, I'm in poor health and I'm not going to be leading or even participating in any revolution. And I'm sure as hell not sticking my neck out to get pulverized for anyone because we have all failed and we're all on our own. Resistance is a fool's game, the people you think you're helping are not grateful and they will betray you for the tiniest reward. 

First Presidential Debate 2024

 I know it's pointless to add my voice to the cacophony of hot takes and bedwetting, hand wringing, fear, and despair. And if it wasn't so important I would have stayed in hibernation. But it is important, important to slap a little sanity into my fellow Democrats. We're professional pessimists, the weight of the world is on our shoulders, and by extension on President Joe Biden's shoulders. So when a professional liar and convicted felon was given carte blanche by CNN to rhetorically punch our president in the face for 90 minutes, we feel the same hurt. A hell of a lot of Democrats feel disappointed. Professional havers-of-opinions fret and rend their garments because it feels at this moment in time that we blew it, we backed the wrong horse, and now democracy is going to fall to the most monstrous scumbag ever to crawl onto the political stage.

But it won't. Tell me, who changed their minds last night? Who is suddenly now excited at the prospect of a return and doubling down of the corruption and debasement of society? Who now longs for Project 2025? Who actually watched that farce last night where Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who were probably under threat of career suicide if they disobeyed orders from on high, seemed completely indifferent to Doughface Donny's firehose of lies and disregard of the questions asked, even thanking him for lying to them? Of those, who actually watched the debacle and changed their minds? Who, of those, will even remember anything about it a month from now? 

No, Democrats, through the performance of President Joe Biden, looked bad for 90 minutes. He had a cold, he wasn't on top of his game. The guardrails we thought could contain Doughface Donny's delusions and yelling, no audience and muted mics when not his turn, were not enough. Donny said whatever he felt like saying, I didn't hear one thing that even partially aligned with truth or the real world but that is the art of the con. Just lie with conviction and authority and the marks will fall in line. The beauty of having no responsibility, of acting in bad faith with impunity, having no morals or shame, is that you always have the advantage over those who do have responsibility. Being president is an incredible responsibility and it weighs on any decent individual occupying that office. It is the first and foremost reason we don't want an irresponsible, vicious liar to have that office. 

Which is why being a grown up is hard. And why being a responsible statesman is so difficult, when you care about something you are vulnerable to evil men who only care about hurting you. President Biden cares deeply about this country and the American people, he has shown that he will do his best to defend us from evil men like Doughface Donny. That is why, cold or no cold, he was at a disadvantage. CNN's executives care about tax cuts and scoring enough points to survive to get those tax cuts. They care about ratings, not journalism; spectacle, not truth. So those executives pushed Tapper and Bash onto the firing line and tied their hands behind their backs as a sacrifice. We aren't allowed to see behind the curtain of motivations at CNN or any giant corporation. Noam Chomsky used to say that media is a self-selecting chain of filtration, if you internalize the values you rise in the profession. If you maintain some standards and conscience, you do not get on screen. 

We, all of us who feel some responsibility and care about the full litany of democracy and rule of law, have to persevere despite all of these handicaps. It was 90 minutes of looking bad, that's all. We can recover. President Biden can get this done, he's the only one who can at this time. 

Cut the damn cord already!

 Is cable news really the most important thing in America right now? At the end of the day, how much do Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon et. al. actually impact our lives? CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have become institutions unto themselves and made themselves into the center of the story. Not just mediums of information but power centers that say everything about what the elite want America to be. Fox has always been GOP TV, that was Roger Ailes' explicit lodestar in pitching the idea in 1996, based on a strategy he came up with as an operative in the Nixon administration. Tell fairy tales of grievance to the poorly-educated masses and directly communicate right-wing talking points to the base. It is the strategy of every subversive institution since, whether trump himself, or wingnuts trying to make it big. Social media is therefore just a slightly more interactive form of propaganda, more insidious because sock puppets and 'bots can make an incredibly bad take look more popular than it is. One way media like talk radio and cable news can only sound as big as the confidence level of the host or anchor talking. 

Things aren't any better at the other two cable news channels, CNN has very consciously moved right and is now a parody of itself. While MSNBC is trapped by the balance police, to put it most charitably, making sure there are two hours of conservative talk to every one of center left. These people running the networks are not friends of democracy or freedom, but FOX has always been the problem. Tucker, whom I used to laugh at as the bowtie frat boy squealing on Crossfire all those years ago, evolved into the most dangerous of propagandists. The one who deals in straight ideology and not individual personalities. Just like the phrase "conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed" Tucker laundered neo-Nazi bullshit through his patrician idiom to make the right wing authoritarian followers feel more confident in their eliminationist beliefs. Not better, not more acceptable but validated for sheeplike followers who are actually constantly seething with rage. Getting him off the air and making eliminationism just a little less respectable will lower the temperature on rising American fascism.

Until the next one steps into that vacuum that is. Only about three million people watched his white power hour on Fox, less than one percent of Americans, yet his reach was far greater because the medium is the message and endlessly echoed by others. By making that message about ideology and eternal grievance, and not about and individual leader, Tucker's propaganda left a wide opening for whomever can grab his mantle. Who knew at the time that this whiny, petulant heir to the Swanson foods fortune with the million silly faces could step into Bill O'Reilly's spot and take his audience to even darker places? It had everything to do with the confident impunity that pushed the boundaries of acceptable speech. Individual leaders can be shrugged off when they no longer serve the march to fascism, see Bush, George W. Trump will go the same way, most of the republican base is losing faith in the constant individual grievances that Doughface Donny gives them. The authoritarian followers want to hear about kicking ass on the poor, immigrants, and liberals, not how mean this or that district attorney has been to poor Donny.

Which is why Carlson's firing was a big story. The public had barely absorbed the news of the Dominion settlement when Tucker made all the elite journalists whiplash away from that settlement's implications. As I understand it, that $787 million or whatever is barely half a year of revenue for Fox, most of it will be paid by insurance and the rest will be written off of their taxes. As Keith Olbermann said, "we are subsidizing Fox's punishment". So this is not going to be some great deterrent for the next Big Lie. Neither will that money go toward anything productive, unless the hedge fund that acquired Dominion for a song decides that it must surrender some of it to a pro-democracy nonprofit or something for PR purposes but most will just end up in the pockets of the same elite buccaneers who have ruined so much of American democracy already. 

Will Carlson's firing actually impact Fox's ratings or share price for more than a day? It will be the question of the news cycle unfortunately. Gotta have something to fill that 24 hours of air time each day. And too many people will be caught up in it that could be doing something more constructive. The question I am looking forward to hearing about is whether or not these troubles will impact Fox's negotiations with cable companies for increased "carriage fees" for the network's lies. Did you know that every cable subscriber subsidizes all these rotten channels that nobody watches? I didn't. Though I cut the cable cord over a decade ago and never looked back, I consider it one of the better decisions I have ever made. 

We Americans are at war, or more accurately are having war waged against us, by the fascist movement. Thankfully it is not a full shooting war (although the relentless string of mass shootings is starting to be noticed as an actual military campaign, finally) it is definitely an information war. Cutting the cable cord should be considered a patriotic act. Roger Ailes sold Rupert on Fox as a niche channel for exactly this reason, it isn't even advertisers that make up the bulk of Fox News' revenue but these damn carriage fees. Olbermann has harped on this angle a lot but it bears repeating, Fox has three million regular viewers, there are about ninety million cable subscribers in America so eighty seven million subsidize the poison being fed to the three million. Advertising boycotts make a good story but don't do nearly as much as depriving all these thieves of carriage fees for programs and channels you don't even watch. 

"Broke into the Speaker's house and all I got was excommunication from the people I was trying to impress" It's not easy being Depape

 The first story I read about the home invasion and attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was from NPR via Twitter. The details in story were still a little shaky but the outline was pretty clear, a disturbed white man broke into the Pelosi house and demanded to see the carbon unit designated Nancy for the purposes of tying her up and interrogating her. When the police arrived the home invader struck the 82 year old man in the head with a hammer. Thankfully Paul Pelosi was taken to the hospital immediately and looks to be making a good recovery. But this should not have been necessary in the first place. I put on my HazMat suit (they are expensive in sea monster size) and opened the replies. Yup, Twitter is still awful. But it was the direction that the vitriol went that caught my attention.

Since Brother Charlie Pierce shared the criminal complaint against the suspected attacker, David Depape, to try and get a look into his mind via the dry, legalistic "cop speak" as he put it, I should contrast the observations with what I saw in those comments on Twitter. "It is as good a look as we may get into the pure MAGA mind."

It’s all there. A mind, made soft by hours of conservative media saturation, weirdly dehumanizing the speaker of the House into an ideological doppelgänger named “Nancy,” spoken of with a false familiarity bred by his inability to see her as anything beyond a target for invective and, it turns out, even worse.

The complaint itself is only 8 pages long, I'm not sure why I didn't find it as interesting at Charles P. Pierce but I don't spend much time reading court documents. His take on this idea of the caricature or doppelgänger of Nancy Pelosi brought to mind V'ger from the first Star Trek movie. How little propaganda did it take to dehumanize the person into a monster in Depape's soft mind? Two hours of fox news? Two days? A side of Michael Savage spitting venom into his microphone? There are many books to be written on the self-brainwashing of lone wolves at the hands of stochastic terrorists.

I didn't think it was even in doubt that Depape was an extremist right-winger but the Tweets were just adamant about how he was actually a nudist gay prostitute who lived in a house with BLM signs and rainbow flags so he was totally a lefty. And an illegal immigrant (that code word is enough right? Doesn't matter one wit that he was a white guy from Canada). I had never before seen the authoritarian mob on Twitter work so feverishly to distract with false information, or try so hard to disown a guy who actually went out and did what they all want to do. It was almost like some tinge of conscience was prickling. But where did the uniformity of talking points come from? Was it just monkey see monkey do? Did someone feed a 'botnet the talking points and they went forth to search and destroy? And was it really just to "own the libs"? The truth came out almost immediately and as you can see from the court filing there was nothing about it being a lover's spat, drug deal gone wrong, underwear, or any of the crazy things getting flung against the wall.

So, the republican noise machine radicalized some random guy in San Francisco to attack Nancy Pelosi's house, broke in and assaulted her husband. At once threatening and intimidating anyone daring to oppose the fascist takeover. And now it's practically crickets, a thirty second update on nightly news. A probable assassination attempt on one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, right before the midterms and nothing is going to come of it. Another example that basically sailed through the mainstream media is how fascists in MTG's district drove her opponent out of the race with intimidation and death threats. Despite her being such a disgrace and being such an onmipresent reminder of the danger this fact is barely ever mentioned. I wish her opponent this time good luck and pray for his safety. But the only way to stop this is to trounce all republicans in the elections tomorrow.

Bad Faith Polling and Inflation

 As clogged with lies and misinformation as the interwebs are these days, it still only takes a few intrepid reporters or representatives to get the truth out. Every morning I try to turn on the news, usually on ABC, while making lunches and helping get the clan out the door and on with their days to get a bit of what's going on. And for days it was nothing but "polls are tightening," "GOP surges," and the omnipresent bugbear of 2022 "inflation skyrocketing." 

First, I hate that mainstream media now uses GOP adjectives to poison discourse the way Newt Gingrich taught republican candidates in the '90s. Second, that the mainstream media repeats the same poisonous GOP talking points without context. Third, that any real counterpoint to the BS is shut out. In this case, Rep. Katie Porter gave a master class on inflation and corporate greed that maybe got five seconds of play on the networks. ABC uses terms like skyrocketing, massive, unprecedented, and horrific to categorize inflation but never do they actually define what inflation is. No context as in how inflation is present around the world and actually lower in the US than many other countries. The simple answer to what inflation is is rising prices, businesses raise prices in hopes of inflating their profits. Yes, it really is that simple, nothing about wages and nothing about the cost of labor or any other explanation that then rationalizes crushing workers to squeeze out inflation. Once upon a time there was competition between businesses that could restrain them from raising prices with reckless abandon but there are very few checks on that greed today. 

I have more to say about inflation but I'm trying to be brief.

What I really wanted to nail is the panic about polls. It is in media's interest to have a tight horserace on elections because they can then ignore actual problems and solutions. For instance, what is the GOP plan to fight inflation? Climate change? Healthcare? Sure, we know all about critical race theory now and how republicans all vow to ban it from elementary school (even though it doesn't exist there and is just thinly coded racism). But how would having republicans control Congress hold down inflation? Anyone? No? But hey, Hershel Walker has paid for many abortions of his own children, how can republicans still be supporting him? Look at how close the polls are! We need a 20 minute, carefully controlled panel discussion on why Senator Warnock is failing to pull ahead!

So you have contextless polling data driving discussion and speculation about why Democrats are failing to contest the conventional wisdom that of course republicans are going to sweep the midterms. Because the out of power party always gains. What if, those polls are being manipulated?

Tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors posted a clip on Crooks and Liars of Joy Reid hosting New Democratic Network's Simon Rosenberg. An expert who knows how to read polls and give context to a host who is willing to listen? Banish the thought. Imagine if real discussion and debate were a value that network and cable news shows universally shared instead of the occasional nuggets that feel almost seditious compared with regular broadcasting. Rosenberg reported that poll aggregators like Real Clear Politics and 538.com are inundated with partisan republican polls, which then skew the numbers of polling firms who really are trying to reach people and report accurately. Getting a really representative sample of voters is really difficult, I know I don't answer the phone for unknown numbers. So good faith polling is facing real challenges and losing credibility for the same reason as every other problem and challenge America faces: Republicans.

This is the same thing they do with any liberal book, TV show, film. Flood the review sections with trolling, bad faith, negative reviews to bring down the average of good faith reviewers. Amazon tries to combat this with the "confirmed purchase" icon and other sites try to combat the deluge in other ways. But as I recently read in a book about changing police culture, leaders can make as many rules as they want but if the prevailing culture does not accept them then it will not change. We don't get in-depth coverage of republican training camps and online courses teaching fascists how to most effectively troll and destroy the status quo. And this flood of fake and bad faith polling results from partisan start ups is the latest gambit by fascists to wreck the institutions of democracy. James Burnham wrote about bad faith extremists wrecking democracy all the way back in 1964, it is sad that this sabotage is now the primary platform of his party.

But once you understand that polling is now misinformation because of republican sabotage, you can be less worried about it. The main goal of this particular bout of ratfckery might be to contest the Democratic victories next week and fuel further brownshirt republican violence about rigged elections. There won't be a grain of truth to it.

So, most of the inflation is caused by corporate greed, no one on the networks or cable will ever ask the obvious question: what is the republican plan to fight inflation? Or better yet, why do voters believe republicans have any interest in fighting inflation? Instead they will continue flogging bad polling data all the way to election day. You, dear reader, do not have to sit back and let this continue. Share the links in this post, tweet about it, talk to neighbors. Find credible sources of your own. 

A Spark of Life from the Depths

 So... uh... what's new?

I apologize for my long absence. There is no excuse I suppose but it just seemed like the narrative was outrunning my ability to keep up. If anything, democracy and what we like to believe America actually represents is slipping away faster and faster. I realized that not only was I not able to stem the tide in even the tiniest way I thought I was before but that I don't really have anything novel or useful to add. In short, I am out of practice for any kind of meaningful writing. It is so easy to slip into despair at the powerlessness of individuals to make any impact on political discourse. Or at least what was once known as the "liberal blogosphere" that I tried to be part of. What place can a guy writing under a pseudonym about history's effects on the present have in 2022? I'm not a Youtuber, a Tiktoker, or even particularly good at Twitter or any platform people are using and actually paying attention to. It seemed like spending time with my family or my hobbies was a more productive use of the limited time we have on Earth. My "output" such as it was, dwindled even on Facebook where it was comparatively easy to post a news story with a reaction. What difference did it make?

Then, my father died suddenly in early 2021 and I just completely gave up. He left almost nothing behind of his experiences, ideas, or opinions. Nothing in writing anyway. Over seven decades on Earth and in a moment, all of those things disappeared. I really took that hard. What is the point? Why bother? We're all worm food in the end anyway and very few of us humans will leave any kind of lasting mark. My goal, once upon a time, was to make a difference in even just one person's thinking on what this great experiment in self-government means in the long story of human history. But what difference could it make if I gave even dozens of people tools to fight against this horrible self-delusion of millions on a collision course with fascism? A few more people aware of the crushing wave of organized money and manipulation of masses of stupid people? In times of great evil, maybe ignorance is better. Better not to be aware of how bad it is, how a minority of cruel, self-serving scum will rule over the majority that couldn't fight back and never had a chance.

Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that nothing is inevitable, that wars can be stopped. Tyrants can be prevented from taking over. One of his books was called Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic where he dealt with the disillusionment of whole-heartedly supporting the US war effort in WW1 only to feel betrayed by the cynical exploitation and oppression used to suppress dissent. The fight against evil was not only "over there" but it had to be taken up in domestic politics as well. What was the point of defending democracy with anti-democratic methods? So while the rest of the country partied to jazz and bootleg liquor while cruising in their Model T's, Niebuhr was trying to make peace with the imperfect ways men must use to combat evil on Earth. I don't know where I lie on the spectrum of cynicism, perhaps I am just too weak and cowardly to confront the trolls and too tired to motivate the apathetic. But, in the same way Niebuhr came to realize that despite all the apathy and cynicism, war is not inevitable. The midterms are not a foregone conclusion and there is still a chance to save democracy.

At least, when I go, my children will know where there old man stood. That's enough reason to get back up and try.

Party like it's 1931

 When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible. ~Sinclair Lewis

 

MOUNT JULIET: Desperate for attention, MAGA Grifter “Pastor” Greg Locke just held a literal book burning📚

(We were torn on posting, but feels like y’all should see how low a guy who calls the pandemic “fake” as his own congregants die and says Trump is still president can go) pic.twitter.com/o7Oek204Cg

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) February 3, 2022

Gosh I feel owned.

This is really all they have anymore. As if we needed constant reminders that there are real nazis in America doing real nazi things. I don't know what's actually going on in this video, it just looks like a drunken bonfire of broken pallets and screaming idiots throwing bags of something on it. Are they really books? Or is this juvenile display of pyromania and cult behavior just pretending? After all books cost money. So, if they are burning their own books well that's no different than when the magas were burning coolers and sneakers that they spent real money (that could have ended up in doughfacedonny's pocket, so there's that) to buy. So what, anything mass-market can presumably be reprinted. What is a book burning ritual circa 2022 supposed to accomplish?

Honestly, this is the same superstitious display of "savages" dancing naked around a false idol. It has more in common with a witches' sabbath than anything I recognize of Christianity. 

Either they are burning books or some other thing they own, in which case they paid for it so who cares. Or these are library books or stolen items, in which case they are guilty of actual crimes. And it will depend on the local Tennessee authorities to arrest and prosecute them. Facial recognition software should have little difficulty in identifying these cultists right? These are definitely the kind of people who beta-tested the NSA's facial recognition software masquerading at Facebook games right?

There are midterm elections coming up and this "pastor" just gave the Democrats a free campaign ad. These book burners are supporting the republican, are you with them or are you with America?

Knights and Barbarians in Feudalist American Politics: California Recall Landslide Edition

 Thankfully, Larry Elder is no Arnold Schwarzenegger. I admit I was sweating the astroturf recall in California probably more than was necessary. These kinds of anti-democratic shenanigans are the worst kind really because the best possible outcome is that nothing changes. We liberals can hope that California Democrats will now reform their recall laws to make it harder for right-wing authoritarians to force the state to waste $300 million and reinforce their big lie about fraud, but more likely they will just go back to complacency about the inevitable demographic destiny about winning without delivering.

While Gavin Newsom is no prize, Jello Biafra once talked about him being prominent in "Democrats for Bush" back in the dubya tyranny, his repulse of the latest republican chevauchee gives me a chance to revisit a hypothesis made after doughfacedonny stole the presidency. Namely, that elected Democrats are knights in feudalist America. Republicans are the barbarians at the gates, who reject civilization and are only interested in the power to dominate and oppress. While those two components are readily apparent in a White hat/Black hat sort of dichotomy, the other layers of feudalism in America line up less neatly but I still think knights and barbarians are a better comparison than cowboys and cattle rustlers or Old West outlaws and lawmen. 

What are the practical effects of Newsom maintaining his seat? The It Can Happen Here Podcast did a fairly good summary of where California is and will continue to be now that the recall is over recently, especially concerning wildfires and other environmental issues. Just having a grown up in charge of state efforts is a start IMO. Not to go back to the Jello well again but he is the foremost California leftist that I know, he summed up the republican desire pretty well in his spoken-word piece "The Last Big Gulp" where republicans (mainly boomers) want to use up everything on their way out to preserve their selfish, decadent lifestyles of consumption and waste, fck everyone else. Elder would have thrown open the spigots and depleted the freshwater supply drastically while taking even modest controls off of developers to turn green spaces into strip malls and McMansions. Efforts to help people would all be channeled into militarized security forces to keep white boomers safe from poor people. As the Talking Post Memo article from the top said, "negative partisanship worked in this election" telling people how awful republicans are and reminding them of how badly republicans govern can do a lot. 

It is a bit like the hypothesis I also have used in the past to say that half of half a loaf is better than a boot stamping on a human face for all eternity. Which, if you paid attention to the destruction wrought by Dubya and doughfacedonny, along with all the teabag and MAGA governors basically speaks for itself. The problem was that Democrats did not take the problem of republican barbarism seriously when they held power. Eight years of Dubya running roughshod over the constitution after stealing the presidency on a technicality and no action on reforming the Electoral College during Obama's administration. They wasted valuable legislating time debating republicans and letting them hang poison pill amendments on the ACA while doing almost nothing to counter the teabagger's racism and mobs at townhalls. Democrats acted during those years like demographic destiny had arrived and they could rest on their laurels... then losing a thousand legislative seats over the next series of elections. 

Still, I one hundred percent prefer Democrats in office over republicans. Despite their flaws Democrats are the only political party in the country, the other being a death cult of human suffering that is so dedicated to the ends of power they will sacrifice their own members to make Joe Biden look bad and simply reject democracy when they are so toxic that no one will vote for them. It would be a catastrophe if the lessons of 2010 disappear down the memory hole and we wake up to a republican congress. Recently I heard leftist activists complain that the Democratic Party is a fundraising machine and little else, which pigeonholes into the comparison I wanted to make about medieval knights. If I could contribute even a little bit to bolstering morale and encouraging Democrats to show up to vote and stay involved by reaching with an imperfect analogy then let's go.

To Be Continued...

Comparing Weimar and the contemporary United States

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -George Santayana

This quote actually makes more sense in it's original form, nothing about learning from the past, simply remembering is enough. Or is it? Far too often, those who remember the past and study it intensely are ignored by those in power. Even if Mark Twain's aphorism about history rhyming rather than repeating is closer to reality than a simple cycle of growth, destruction, and regrowth in human history, it is st, ill all-too-common to draw the wrong conclusions or simply not see the comparisons. This is why so many mainstream commentators eschew comparisons to nazis when republicans embrace violence, authoritarianism, and insist that every day is Day Zero. Erasing the past is a very high priority for revolutionaries, at least past evidence of your crimes because whataboutism and any perceived misdeeds by your enemies are not just fair game but integral to destroying the legitimacy of the opposition.

Making comparisons in history is fraught with danger, one needs to be an expert on both sides of the comparison and most historians specialize in one area. Are we really in a Weimar period of placid exhaustion between two political and social tragedies? Will remembering the past in Germany and the United States help us to avoid repeating it? And can we possibly educate enough people to care and make a difference? Salon shared this article by Matthew Rozsa today, I must have missed it when it was originally published in June but the content is still entirely relevant so I feel confident in analyzing it now.

If Donald Trump's movement is destined to be America's answer to Nazism, than the Joe Biden administration is currently a rough equivalent of the Weimar Republic — the unstable constitutional democracy that governed Germany before the rise of Adolf Hitler. The comparison is imperfect, but the cautionary tale is still clear. There is an obvious risk that Biden and the narrow Democratic majorities in Congress will fail, and that Trump or a successor will take over and then cement themselves into power for at least the next generation. Every American who wants to avoid this — especially Biden and the leading Democrats in Congress — needs to learn the right lessons from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

Rozsa is an historian, his bio says that he is all-but-dissertated for his PhD but does not list his specialization. I have a feeling it is not German history because while he states that it would take at least a medium length academic article to really analyze the similarities between Weimar and the contemporary US, the similarities he presents are not really adequate to make the comparison. I am not a German historian either but have studied it enough to elaborate on these five points.

 1. Both sagas began with an incompetent right-wing ruler. In Germany's case, they had the misfortune of being led by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who has been described as viewing "other people in instrumental terms," as a "compulsive liar" and possessing "a limited understanding of cause and effect." That sounds more than a little bit like Donald Trump, whose administration was plagued with scandal and who failed to effectively manage the COVID-19 pandemic. On both occasions, that ruler was eventually removed from power (through losing both World War I and the German Revolution in the case of the former and losing the 2020 election in the case of the latter).

 A friend of mine is a German historian who specializes in that countries' involvement in the two world wars. He agrees that good 'ol Kaiser Bill II had a lot in common with doughfacedonny, they were both lazy, stupid, bullies with huge chips on their shoulders and were never meant to rule. But this comparison would make trump both the kaiser and hitler, which may or may not play out. American and German history prior to these points really muck up the comparison as well. Germany only became a unified state in 1871 and had no prior experience with republican politics, at least at the chief executive level. Though the German Empire after unification had some resemblance to a federal system of states in a union and elections to the national legislature, the major political party was subject to suppression and persecution by the monarch in a way that isn't true in the United States. Nor did the German press have the freedom to viciously slander and lie in bad faith the way the right wing media does in the US. 

2. Both stories continued because of a Big Lie. Hitler appealed to nationalist sentiments by claiming that Germany had actually won World War I but been betrayed behind the scenes by a conspiracy of socialists and Jews. Trump, who displays narcissistic traits and has spent years telling people that any election he loses is by definition stolen from him, has without evidence or any logical argument insisted that Biden cheated in 2020. Another defeated president might have been dismissed as a pathological sore loser, but Trump's cult of personality is so strong that his Trumper tantrum has now become a defining part of Republicanism.

This is true, but the actors are separate. Trump's whining about losing the election has continuity with his whining during the 2016 election and all the way through his "presidency". After Germany surrendered, the Kaiser abdicated and fled to the Netherlands. Trump fled to Florida, and while that state is awful and insane, it is still part of the US. Trump has a lifetime of morally-depraved, narcissistic, and criminal behavior behind him that republicans looked at and decided were messianic traits. Is it worth noting how they came to power? Wilhelm II ascended the throne by birthright, trump squeaked in with an archaic and undemocratic electoral institution by the votes of 70,000 citizens in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump's big lie is entirely manufactured and illegitimate, perpetuated by himself and sore loser republicans. Germany's loss in WWI was devastating to the German people, by the end of the war they were starving and then the Versailles treaty was an humiliation imposed by outside forces that hobbled the nascent Weimar regime before it even started. The US was coming out of 8 years of scandal-free administration and relative prosperity when trump snuck in. 

The relevance of history depends so much on where and when you start the story. Rozsa leaves out a pretty significant point by starting with trump's "presidency" and not factoring in Dubya Bush's 8 years of war, lies, economic collapse, and authoritarianism. The impotence of democratic function and republican institutions were clearly evident in America when Dubya snuck into office almost the same way that trump did (the lower case letters are meant to disconnect those terms from our political parties). The big lie used by republicans after 9/11 to get us mired in defeat in Iraq should play a part in this story. The complicity of mainstream corporate media and ease with which trampled on the constitution should also factor into the story. Which should play a role in point 3.

3. Both used their Big Lies to break democratic norms. In Hitler's case, he became a de facto legal dictator shortly after rising to power. Because America has a much longer history of unbroken democratic government than Germany did in 1933, things will be trickier for the Trumpists. In Trump's case, he became the first president to lose an election and refuse to accept the result (there have been 10 previous defeated presidents, and all accepted the voters' verdict), as well as the first to incite an insurrection to stay in power. Trump is now reportedly fueling conspiracy theories that he could still overturn the election; just as significantly, Republicans are using his Big Lie to restrict voting for Democratic-leaning groups throughout the country. Through these methods, they will make it possible for Republicans to steal future elections — presidential and local — through means created to "fix" the problem they manufactured through their Big Lie. No doubt there will be many future Big Lies.

Again, this is true but without the historical context for both countries is so superficial as to be almost meaningless. I don't mean to criticize Rozsa because these are all important ideas to consider but someone like Rick Perlstein would argue that the Big Lie is not necessary for republicans to break and destroy democratic norms, he has chronicled the descent into authoritarianism by republicans from Barry Goldwater in 1964 in a whole series of books. Fifty-six years prior to hitler's seizure of power Germany was a brand new country with few democratic norms to break. We could spend a few medium length academic articles comparing the core of the German Empire, Prussia, to the old South in America but it is sufficient to state that democracy was not what Germany was based on. While voting restrictions and the suppression of Democratic constituencies' ability to vote have really accelerated in the face of trump's Big Lie, they are definitely not new. 

4. Both Hitler and Trump use fascist tactics to win over their supporters. These include appeals to nationalism, vilification of "out" groups and conditioning their followers to use self-expression as a substitute for authentic political self-agency. (It helps when they can create a cult of personality around the leader figure.)

Absolutely. The nationalism to which each tyrant appealed to differs markedly enough to require more explanation though. Hitler's goal of "one nation, one people, one leader" had some bearing on German history and the corrupted phrase "Deutschland uber alles" was originally a rallying cry for revolutionaries in 1848 that wanted a united Germany. Germans had cultural and ethnic similarities and can be identified as one nation. What does it mean to be an American? We have so many cultural and ethnical differences that the only nationalism that can define America is support and belief in the constitution. Trump and his republicans hate the nation that adheres to the crazy idea of democracy, liberalism, pluralism, individual liberty, and the rule of law. As Driftglass always says, "republicans hate this country." Trump and the republicans appeal to a white nationalism that doesn't really exist and is quite nebulous in form.

5. Both may wind up using their legal troubles to create resurrection narratives. Hitler famously served nine months in prison for participating in a failed coup d'état known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Trump may go to prison for anything and everything from his own coup attempt to the numerous financial crimes alleged against him. If he's convicted, he will likely be held up as a martyr; if he doesn't, that fact will be cited as vindication. 

This is a speculative point so comparison is problematic. Yes, hitler tried to violently overthrow the government, the fact that he only served nine months should tell us what the lesson is from that event. Brother Charlie Pierce has been using the phrase "looking forward, not back" to describe Democrats' reluctance to prosecute actual crimes. The biggest mistake in my opinion that the Obama administration made was not prosecuting bankers or the Bush criminals because it convinced American authoritarians that they can do whatever they want and get away with it. The insurrectionists on 1/6 were so sure of their impunity that they videoed themselves trashing Congress. Part of the rule of law means that breaking the law must have consequences and thus far there have been none. A couple of people were thrown under the bus for Watergate but Nixon himself was pardoned. A few people went down for Iran-Contra but were easily rehabilitated by the mainstream. And extensive war crimes by the bush thugs went unpunished. If the same goes true for all of the trump thugs and the insurrectionists, it will simply embolden them to try again. Neither I nor Rozsa or anyone else in the mortal world can pressure the Biden administration or Merrick Garland's Justice Department to seek actual justice, but this is where remembering the past would be kind of useful. 

Wall Street Under Siege? About Time

 It is ironic in the most humorous way that Gamestop, the mall videogame retailer, was quite recently ridiculed by many of the same people now conducting an uprising to save it and boost the share price beyond imagining, for the ridiculously low trade-in value of games. But this is kind of the exact flip I was hoping for post-doughface, populist action against brazenly corrupt hedge funds instead of fascist takeovers of the Capitol. 

I am sure by now that everyone is up to speed (and probably more in-the-know than me) on the story. Hedge funds took a huge short position in Gamestop (GME), looking to make a killing by destroying the company. This is an incredible example of how something can be legal and yet corrupt and destructive at the same time. Day traders, that are now called "retail investors" in a twist of understanding what roles are as this makes them sound like marks to be taken by the "institutional investors" i.e. Hedge funds and other predators, with online accounts to trade stocks at home rallied on a subReddit thread called WallStreetBets to buy the stock like crazy and screwing the short sellers. Also of no surprise to readers is what short selling is, borrowing shares from a pension fund or university endowment, etc. that hold extremely long positions and selling them immediately in hopes of buying them back at a later date at a lower price and pocketing the difference. It is betting on failure, a way to make money after the top 1% tank the economy or a wildly mismanaged pandemic throws the economy in chaos.

There are all kinds of laws and regulations concerning stock and other forms of trading, they are selectively enforced and are usually written and regulated by Wall Street executives taking sabbaticals from milking the productive economy and doing their time as "public servants". This is the reason so many Goldman Sachs executives end up as Treasury Secretary and the like. Sure, they want to keep markets fair... for them, but they are throwing a fit when those rules are used by small time investors to make money. 

The last time arrogant financiers crippled the country the response from the left was Occupy Wall Street, a physical takeover of space but no real action. It was met with responses from the Obama Administration about the sanctity of contracts even if they are company killing bonuses for executives that ran it into the ground. As usual, fox news demonized the occupiers and cops did their duty for property and protection of elites. Regardless of how many connections were made, how many organizations gestated due to a bunch of people hanging out in the park, when it was all over how many dollars did the whole episode drain out of Wall Street? Did anyone get their house back because of physical activism? I hate to be a downer because I really appreciated the energy and commitment, but in the end they were all just sitting ducks. Why did we have to start at square one like that? Why did organizing against one of the top priorities of everyone born after 1964, wealth inequality, have to start almost from scratch? Well I guess I gave it away huh?

A lot of the framing around WallStreetBets has been about millennials clawing into elite boomer terrain. There are a lot of comments about how their generation has been screwed and born to fail. That is part of a much larger discussion, for now it is enough to say that yes, when it comes to wealth and opportunity the boomer generation pulled the ladder up behind them. And this episode of screwing short selling hedge funds is an attempt at revenge. Revenge, sticking it to the man, screwing Wall Street after they ate our generation's seed corn these are all much more concrete motives, and tangible rewards (enough "amateurs" are getting windfalls for their positions that it is a significant transfer of wealth downwards) than Occupy Wall Street's vague "common good" arguments for activism. 

We ended 2020 with an insurrection of fascists rampaging the Capitol and are starting 2021 by punching arrogant hedge funds in the nose and some little guys actually getting some of the filthy lucre. It remains to be seen whether even this much can be maintained, but I like the energy. 

McConnell begs to keep his vile weapon of bullying as minority leader

 The shamelessness never ends:

[#Moscow Mitch McConnell],now the minority leader, is holding up the basic organizing agreement required at the beginning of each new Senate. He’s insisting that Democrats pledge to leave the legislative filibuster intact over the next two years, or else he won’t let the resolution pass — and without it, the Senate’s work won’t get done, and the majority-party Democrats won’t even be able to take over as chairs of Senate committees. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is asking for the same deal that the parties worked out in 2001 under similar circumstances. McConnell hasn’t budged, more than two weeks after Democrats clinched the last of their 50 Senate seats in two special elections in Georgia and two days after the new senators and new Vice President Kamala Harris, the tie-breaker, took office.

The odd thing is that what McConnell is doing is, as Congress scholar Sarah Binder points out, “not a credible commitment.” That is, whatever the Democrats say now — and remember, they are not currently threatening to eliminate the filibuster — it simply won’t be binding on them over the course of the next two years. At the same time, McConnell doesn’t appear to be offering anything in return for the Democrats’ pledge, such as a reciprocal promise to limit use of the filibuster, which gives the minority the power to stop most legislation that can’t command 60 votes. He simply wants Democrats to agree to play by his rules, even if that means passing nothing for the next two years. 

While no one expected the turtle to stop threatening democracy or actually let Democrats govern and clean up his seditious party's incredible, mind-blowing mess of corruption and cruelty, this is a new low. As everyone should remember, #Moscow Mitch used the filibuster as a regular weapon of business during his last tenure as Minority Leader, stymying important measures meant to rescue the economy and the country after Dubya broke it last time. And he was utterly unapologetic and shameless in doing so. He was equally shameless in crushing the Democrats' use of the filibuster when stealing Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court. I believe the Jews call that Chutzpah but I don't think I'm qualified to use that term. 

McConnell should be in a position to demand nothing. With several members of his caucus courting expulsion for supporting and aiding a violent insurrection just over two weeks ago, logic would dictate that you sit down and shut up. But this is the most anti-democratic Senator in modern American history, who despite looking like he can barely push open a door by himself, is used to throwing around incredible power to disrupt, obstruct, and steal anything that furthers the republican agenda.

The framing in this Bloomberg article is important and does seem to indicate a shift, at least in the short term, of how mainstream media are going to react to republican BS. It only took economic collapse, a pandemic, and violent insurrection to get this news outlets off their asses to see the danger in pandering to them but we liberals and Democrats have to support it while we can. Saying "holding up the basic organizing agreement" and "insisting" that the majority bend to his will to leave the vile weapon of slavery and segregation intact is a major change in the way bullying has been written about in recent years. 

Thankfully Chuck Schumer has not caved, calling the demand "unacceptable", so we should be thankful for that. How long before he backslides is anyone's guess. But this episode shows that doughfacedonny may be gone, but the virus of authoritarianism never dies. It will take eternal vigilance to defend democracy. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene Picks up the Torch

In a normal year where insurrectionary republicans weren't storming the Capitol and letting their freak flags fly with bloodthirsty bravado, this might be an interesting event, kind of like a sideshow attraction:

Marjorie Taylor Greene says she will introduce impeachment articles against Biden

So freshman congresscritter MTG, who shall be known as the chicken-biting sideshow geek on this page, is going to crassly pick up where the seditious republicans planned to go if Hillary Clinton had been inaugurated. I know, I know, that feels like 128 years have passed since everyone was so sure Clinton would win that no one felt the least compunction about bashing her ferociously to show how tough they were but it really was only 4 years ago. It all seems so quaint that republicans had already lined up a couple years worth of slander and grandstanding investigations for the second Clinton Administration. Since then we've had neo-nazi marches, beer bashes on Capitol Hill to celebrate yanking health insurance from 20 million or more Americans, babies in cages, impeachment, a pandemic raging out of control, economic collapse, and an insurrection. So thank goodness we dodged the bullet of suffering through endless republican grandstanding with investigations *snark*. 

Here however, we have a freshman member of congress who openly espoused the Qanon conspiracy theory (Nazism slightly rebranded), won her seat in a deep-red district in Georgia by virtue of being unopposed, who is now grandstanding on a threat to pass meaningless articles of impeachment on issues already investigated and based on nothing more than conspiracy theories in the first place. And against a man who has not even taken office yet.

“I would like to announce on behalf of the American people, we have to make sure our leaders are held accountable, we cannot have a president of the United States who is willing to abuse the power of the office of the presidency and be easily bought off by foreign governments, foreign Chinese energy companies, Ukrainian energy companies, so on Jan. 21, I will be filing articles of impeachment on Joe Biden,” Greene told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. 

This really is just "Go Sportsball team Go!" Lots of observers are worried that the next doughface to threaten the nation will be smarter than Donald, but there will be mobs of really dumb ones too. And it looks like the chicken-biting circus geek is angling to be the new queen of the reprogrammable meatbags.  Hat tip to Driftglass for that one, but as he often also says, this is a right-wing monster factory that produces both the meatbag marks and the con artists who manipulate them. Sooner or later they were going to merge, as they did with Doughfacedonny, and produce what Robert Altemeyer termed "double high right wing authoritarians." These people combine the aggression and dogmatism of the followers with the sociopathic narcissism of the leaders to create true believers. Doughfacedonny was famous for being famous because he could stick his face and name into every nook and cranny to sell his fantasy of luxury and quality. While the seeds of his fascism were already apparent when he took out the full page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five in 1989, he became hooked on fox news and hate radio the same way your grandparents or uncle Liberty did, he is gullible and loves to have his prejudices reinforced. So by the time he came down the escalator he was able to sell himself to the republican base of racists and imbeciles because he really was one of them.

And that is the impression you get from Marjorie Taylor Greene, this isn't an act, she really is that stupid and gullible to just follow the leader: Democrats impeach Doughfacedonny for inciting insurrection, so a republican moron tries to impeach their enemy over conspiracy theories. Are you ready for another round of vicious, mean-spirited obstruction, grandstanding and lies from the republican party? Because they are already coming. I hope this time it will look less like a threat to be taken seriously and more like the carnival side show that the republicans have always been. 

When republicans attack the US Capitol

Like probably most members of the left of center blogosphere, I am having a devil of a time coming up with the right words to match the emotions of seeing that mob storm the Capitol yesterday. Just about every member of that community of thinkers and writers, most of us locked out of every getting words to appear in a reputable magazine or newspaper, and certainly never going to be interviewed on TV for being right a heck of a lot more often than we are wrong were watching said screen thinking, 'yup I knew something like this was bound to happen'. 

I didn't expect the big push to look like that. Are you kidding? Storming the Capitol? I was listening to NPR coverage of counting the Electoral Collage votes in the joint session through Twitter. First it was a trickle, reporters outside talking about the protestors flocking towards them. The republican grandstanding about Arizona's votes had been getting louder when they switched to watching the maga republicans outside, waving trump flags, start to break through the barricades (they looked like bike racks, were those seriously what police use?), and ooze up the stairs. The footage was so much stranger than the still photos we're seeing now. It was like these call of duty cosplayers and assorted deplorables were moving in slow motion, just little by little getting through the doors, breaking windows, and then slowly shambling through Statuary Hall (between the rope lines too) and then breaking more windows. 

I had to stop everything else I was doing and was glued to the screen, it was so surreal. And, like everyone else watching, I had to ask; where the fck were the cops? It was not long before footage showed up of Capitol police appearing to open the barricades and wave the mob in, cops taking selfies with them, and generally just milling about as these fcking traitors busted into the People's House. Why? I guess Occam's Razor would tell you that the Capitol police in particular are utterly incompetent in the face of republican treachery because believing they were complicit would require a lot of evidence that I don't have. But it would probably only take the suspicion that some of the officers there were in league with the mob to make a lot of others who wanted to do their jobs wary of getting Serpico'ed. On top of the fact that republican mobs are always armed and have little fear of police, but there's no excuse for folding that completely.

And that made the job of Secret Service agents inside the chamber next to impossible. The mob is lucky that only one ambitious true believer was shot when they were pushing up against the barricaded doors. And breaking windows, and breaking into offices, and looting the place. Then outside, the cameras caught a little pagan ritual where the fcking animals were smashing cameras and broadcasting equipment, most of it said "AP" on it. Remember when the tea baggers were lionized in the media for "always cleaning up their trash", good times.

We should probably define what actually took place. Doughfacedonny conscripted the followers that he has been inciting to violence for four years now into a mob. They voluntarily walked to the Capitol, with no promise of compensation for their work on behalf of the wannabe dictator, after listening to him harangue reality and pretend that political violence is somehow a legitimate response to losing an election. So this is stealing an election by insurrection, not a coup d'état, it could be defined as an auto-coup where the dictator dissolves the legislature to consolidate his rule. However far-fetched the conspiracy and sedition seemed to the reality-based community. But republican base voters have nothing left to sell but their cult of violence, cruelty, and suffering. What is amazing is not that they failed ultimately, but that they even got within spitting distance of the floor of Congress in the first place. It is tired to compare republican mobs to demonstrations against injustice that sometimes get out of hand, but yeah, if this was "antifa" or BLM attempting to storm the Capitol... they'd still be sweeping up the eyeballs. Didn't stop the cult from immediately claiming that this was an antifa false flag, republican keyboard warriors are so conditioned at this point that they didn't even need signals from HQ to start the conspiracy theorizing. 

Since the insurrection began there have been a myriad of calls for action, "we need to impeach him!" "we need to do X... this has to happen!" 

And I am sorry as hell if I have ever inflicted this on you. 

I understand now that many of the advocates and activists have only slightly more power to do any of the things that need to be done than my cat has to make me pancakes. 

My goal, before this insurrection made it plain to everyone, was that we don't need to entertain republican "ideas" as legitimate when they clearly aren't. We don't have to act like republican elected officials have any moral authority when they are wholly bankrupt of morals, and we do not have to treat them with respect or deference when they clearly hold us liberals in utter contempt. A big thing to convey is also that the boomers, our elders, are so often full of shit that they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Especially republican boomers, they seem to have learned absolutely nothing in their years and we owe them nothing. I have watched many people I know become interested in politics since doughfacedonny stole the election and almost all have been on the Democratic side. Now it seems I have nothing to teach them. This blog is therefore at a crossroads, do I still try to do things as I have always done or should I try to get more serious and take things up a notch?

This insurrection could be a breaking point in the fever, or it could simply be another year zero. When donny is finally dragged out of the White House is the cult going to go underground for a bit, only to reemerge as tea party 2.0. Will the political press let them get away with it again? Will the Biden administration make the same mistakes as the Obama administration and let a whole year get away before actually doing something? Will all the organizing in the last four years fray and fracture again?

What Happens Next - Lawsuits without Evidence and Stochastic Terrorism

 Studying history and writing about it is so much more straightforward than white-knuckling crisis after crisis and trying to analyze them in real-time. I have read an awful lot of hypotheses about why doughfacedonny won't concede and why his sycophants refuse to admit the obvious, where the meritless lawsuits come in and every trump-appointed government official refusing to cooperate with the transition. Everything from garden variety narcissism, fund-raising, Ed is pretty sure it's all a dry run for a future election with non-braindead republican authoritarians. All these may be true to one degree or another, but what has me defecating diamonds is that the mass chaos and obstruction is about more than gaslighting and money; it's sending signals to the lone-wolf "patriots" out there to start spilling blood for the leader.

This is correct but overlooks that everything happening now and for the past six months to undermine an election outcome is a dry run for doing it for real in the future. https://t.co/AfdKxguTm8

— Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2020

Jack Holmes at Esquire put the Driftglassian theory of how much republicans hate this country and hate anyone not on their team or under their control pretty well last week:

The Republican Party is an authoritarian outfit. They do not believe in democracy and, in their actions, they are enemies of democracy. This is a polite way to say "fascist," which freaks people out and shuts down their brains. But it's the same. They believe they should be in power, and if they don't win the support of a majority of citizens—which these days, they usually do by stopping certain citizens from voting and drawing maps where those citizens' votes count for less—then they'll simply try to steal the election. That Donald Trump is lazy, and his plot to do so has been clumsy and telegraphed, does not change the fact that international observers have already issued a report on his behavior this election cycle that reads like an indictment of some tinpot dictator.

 Fascists also do not believe in the rule of law. As Robert Altemeyer pointed out a while ago, authoritarian leaders (social dominators) believe in the law of the jungle, 'if I can take it I will, the rules don't apply to me', and can and will say anything they need to in order to get power and wealth or whatever other shiny things they want. Most are simply not smart enough or powerful enough to get this far. But now Pandora's box is open and the fascist republican base will accept nothing less. So, because doughfacedonny and his sycophants have no shame, don't give a squirt of piss about rules and norms, and spent the last 4 years stacking the courts with as many partisan judges as they could, they will throw every stupid, baseless argument they can at the wall and see if anything will stick.

But the larger point is creating chaos, convincing the brainwashed fascists that the election was illegitimate, and fearmongering to plant the seeds of revenge. The "stab-in-the-back" narrative floating beneath the surface since Vietnam is what at least some of donny's people are trying to stoke. And because the rural republican followers don't get out of their caves very often to see how utterly unpopular trump really is, revenge for having their leader ripped away from them might be marinating within some of the 71 million reprogrammable meatbags. We have already had a ring of fascist "patriots" rounded up for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, and maga idiots arrested with guns in their cars. If even one in a million of these republican assholes gets through to commit violence in trump's name they could cause innumerable casualties.

Doughfacedonny is the greatest mass murderer of Americans in history, even now as COVID races through rural, republican areas of the country as well as the cities his administration does nothing. Sure, he's not coughing in people's faces personally, but deliberately acting against even the most basic public health measures ensures that the death toll will continue to rise. Republicans are doing this to their own supporters.. because they hate America and just want as many of us to die as possible. If some good 'ole boys start shooting people in his name, acting on his urgings that is, it is the same thing, this is the definition of stochastic terrorism. As usual I hope beyond hope that I am wrong, but every day that passes with no one throwing a damn net on doughfacedonny and dragging him away is another day for those seeds of revenge to grow. Every day of confusion and doubt is a day where some ammosexual can decide to go out with a flash of glory (from their diseased perspective) and take as many of "them" with him as possible. 

I win means you lose to doughfacedonny, he can't get away with this.

The Democratic Story

 My God this has been frustrating to watch. Yes, I admit it I was disappointed and let down that it wasn't a blowout. I'm pissed that good Americans threw away millions on Senate races in South Carolina and Texas that really didn't have a chance. Also, that Democratic elites lit another giant pile of money on fire trying to fight the wonderturtle, #MoscowMitch himself, with an incredibly flawed candidate who was no one's choice. And of course, the funding and imprimatur of legitimacy to never trumpers and the Lincoln Project. How many seats will these republicans be taking that could have gone to actual liberals on TV? How did some segment of elites stamp get out of jail free cards for those republicans with TV spots, book deals, and laundered reputations?

Even though it now looks like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to the White House and the Democrats will remain in control of the House of Representatives, somehow, against all common sense and logic more people actually turned out to vote for doughfacedonny than in 2016. This is great news that Democrats will be able to replace all the corrupt fascist pricks currently infesting the executive departments. No more corrupt ideologues will be put on the federal bench, and no more tax giveaways for the rich. But that smug turtle-faced scumbag McConnell will still be running the Senate, even if with a reduced majority. That means no reforms, no budget, no making the rich pay back some of the filthy lucre they have stolen, no really going after foreign and domestic hackers or other enemies of democracy and the rule of law. #MoscowMitch will probably be so emboldened by this that he won't allow votes on any permanent cabinet secretaries or any other executive positions. Gridlock rules, republicans broke the government at so many levels and somehow they gain all the support from public cynicism and dance around like savages when the political press blames "Washington" or "Congress" for that gridlock.

On the latest TPM podcast Josh Marshall criticized liberals who, like myself, are upset that so much money was spent on those Senate races because we have to try, Democrats cannot just cede all those races to fascists. He said we have to spend money in places like Kentucky and the Carolinas to build infrastructure in those places so next time Democrats will be a little more competitive than last time. I'm skeptical, was any of that money spent to actually build infrastructure? Or was it all spent on useless TV ads? Is there anything left behind to base an election campaign on next time? A few months back Ed had a liberal activist from Kentucky on his Mass for Shut-Ins podcast and they spent almost an hour talking about how elite donors buried a progressive candidate for the Democratic nomination for Senate there under an avalanche of money so Amy McGrath could stride in and claim it. I have no personal knowledge of McGrath or the state of politics there but the guest had nothing good to say about her, that she was a trump-supporting Democrat and had no backing of any kind from anyone but somehow they got stuck with her. Let's set aside Progressive or Liberal infrastructure, did McGrath's campaign leave anything behind that is an alternative to republican fascism? 

Instead of setting giant piles of money on fire to run ads on TV, maybe, just maybe, it's time to take those piles to build things. Democratic Party local offices open year round, with paid staff and resources to keep liberal and progressive ideas in the public view. Local media with truth as their focus instead of balance, that's a worthy investment, credentialed reporters able to call liars out for what they are. I think I have mentioned Drew Westen's The Political Brain a few times on this page, but his prescription bears repeating. Politics is a story, humans respond to stories, and when the story is not being told or refreshed regularly people will lose interest or find other political narratives to follow. Democratic Party politics lack this consistent story, there's no baseline narrative, so every 2-4 years we start from scratch and republicans run circles around Democrats in the story because they pound their narrative into their supporters constantly. The worst part of it is that the republican story is not only self-sustaining but highly profitable through fox news, hate radio, right-wing websites because high RWAs will sit and consume their lies along with a healthy dose of ads for dick pills, reverse mortgages, and any other stupid thing they can sell the rubes. 

Democrats have nothing like that. The mainstream, corporate, media and dedicated political press in this country is not on the side of Democrats anywhere regardless of the shrieking on the right. No matter how unpopular they are, no matter how many lies they tell republicans get half of the time to sell the story already laid out by the right wing noise machine for the broader public. So liberals are naïve to think that somehow the networks and NYTimes are going to act as referees. So, the prescription holds that this country needs a partisan liberal media outlet with enough reach to counter the RWNM. It's not even a new idea, newspapers used to be partisan all the time from the revolution until radio and television came along and needed the broadest audience possible to make the capital intensive mass media work at scale. This is still the default liberal mindset, the need to sell ads to the most eyeballs made media drop their bias and actually professionalize journalism. Now, Roger Ailes was an evil man and I hope the torments of hell are making him repent, but he figured out that cable was a different animal and that he could build a niche network catering to a smaller but more loyal and active audience of conservatives. He turned generations of milquetoast old fart conservatives into rabid, authoritarian monsters and donald trump was his finest creation. 

This is a long-winded way of saying that rich liberals need to stop lighting giant piles of money on fire every 2-4 years and instead invest it into a permanent, self-sustaining liberal ideas network that can keep the story going. How to convince someone like Michael Bloomberg or George Soros that this is the way to go is the key to unlocking a real balance in politics. And if the fascists had to fight on an even playing field they lose, and that key could unlock solutions to all the other problems in America. 

What Happens Next - Sometimes Even Sea Monsters Need Security Blankets

I am typing this right now with my son's security blanket on my lap (he has two others, don't worry) because the anxiety is really getting to me. I've tried everything else, so this seemed worth a shot. The trauma of reliving the insanity of 2016 is crushing. I could really use some reassurance right about now. The gloating after Comey/Russia/GOP voter suppression/media complicity in sinking Hillary's campaign over fucking emails was unbearable. All the Jill Stein voters and other spoilers either slinking away without apologizing or proudly proclaiming they would fuck us all over again given a chance because "something, something, Hillary is worse" still echoes in my ears. 

And eight trillion dollars of new national debt, thousands of laws broken, tens of thousands of lies told, three stolen supreme court seats, millions without health care or jobs, closing in on a quarter of million dead from a virus that could have been controlled later they are still silent. Maybe some of the Holier-than-thou leftists have learned their lesson, maybe a new generation of young people have been become politically aware and progressive, maybe a large number of white suburban women finally figured out that mindlessly voting as their husbands told them to is actually harming them. 

It could all continue. I have dwelled on this Tweet for what feels like a month now:

the election is openly being discussed like a point spread in sports betting, like Biden doesn’t really win unless he wins by at least ___ otherwise the courts or whoever will just rule that he actually lost. It’s healthy to have separate thresholds for victory for the parties!

— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) October 29, 2020

And then the pre-gloating from people like Robert Cahaly of a partisan hack polling group called Trafalgar gets a platform in Politico to claim that people are lying en masse to pollsters, inventing a new "silent majority" level object of fascination called "shy" trump supporters. In essence, this guy tries to make money by guessing how people lie and making up a story to support his agenda. 

I believe [shy voters] was prevalent. In 2016, the worst being said about Trump voters is that they were “deplorable.” 2020 is a whole different ballgame. It is worse this time—significantly worse. This year had more things where you can get punished for expressing an opinion outside the mainstream than almost any year I can think of in modern history.

I’m finding that people are very hesitant [to share their preference for Trump], because now it’s not just being called “deplorable.” It’s people getting beat up for wearing the wrong hat, people getting harassed for having a sticker on their car. People just do not want to say anything.

Where are these awful things happening Cahaly? Meanwhile republican CoD cosplayers walk around brandishing guns at political events all the time. I believe he just got lucky, there were so many variables in 2016 that had everything to do with fragmentation on the left and the racist, sexist lather republicans had worked themselves into. How many shy Democrats in red communities are there Cahaly? Do they get any weight? In the red, red town I used to live in republicans would drop threatening, anonymous notes in your mailbox if they suspected you of being a Democrat. That's a bit different than "the one guy I know who hates trump squints his eyes at the other trump voting houses". Lots of people commented how Trafalgar is setting this up to make it look like doughfacedonny is ahead in battleground states so that the republicans can challenge any results they don't like and get their hand-picked partisan judges to rule in their favor. But God, I don't even want to voice an opinion lest I jinx us all. But it is horrid to contemplate that we have to play everything exactly perfect and if we make one mistake BAM the cell door of authoritarianism can close on us. 

I want to throw out a couple thoughts on the electorate. The holier-than-thou leftist tendency has to be diminished now that Hillary isn't around to kick anymore. NBC News reports that third party spoilers are probably a rounding error this year. What have been the demographic changes in the electorate since 2016? More republican seniors have probably died than have been sprouted, boomer republicans have been dying off in droves to "diseases of despair" and the young people becoming politically active have got to be several magnitudes more Democratic than republican. That doesn't even factor in COVID. 

It is well established that fear of death or danger causes a breakdown of higher, enlightened brain function and causes people to activate their "fight or flight" response. In other words, fear makes people more authoritarian. But how is that affecting their attitudes towards the authoritarian this time when he is the cause of so many people suffering and dying? I for one have always had a rather healthy level of fear that republicans could, through malice or incompetence, really hurt my life personally. How many others have now awakened to that reality? A missing piece for the "dormant and low-propensity voters" that Cahaly seems to think [wrongly] are a hidden army of trump voters, has been that "AHA" moment when they realize that government is not some remote, magic thing way over there and not any part of my life. Education may not be the silver bullet many neoliberals believe it to be, but for almost a quarter of a century now fox news has been programming those gullible non-voters into machines that would crawl over broken glass to vote against their interests out of fear. The only dormant voters out there have avoided becoming fox news zombies thus far, are they suddenly going to spring into action for a reality teevee star with a now four year solid record of bullying, wonton cruelty, easily provable lying and inaction while people all around them are losing jobs and healthcare in the middle of a pandemic. 

This is a long-winded way of saying: sixty two million and change republicans turned out to vote for doughfacedonny four years ago, the probability that that number has increased is very low. And yet, here we are; here I am, on the edge of my seat that the horrid possibility that he could somehow win again. Is there anything that could calm my nerves?

Thank goodness for this blanket... and beer. Halloween is tomorrow but the scariest days are yet to come. 

 

We Finally Get to Play the Game

Mrs. Kraken and I watched SNL last night VOD from the NBC network app with Adele hosting. I don't know if they are losing their nerve or what but Alec Baldwin and Jim Carrey played trump and Biden during the debate for the cold open lacked any power or energy. It just seemed kind of flat, like as we are all feeling, exhausted by the endless firehose and anxiety that has reality while being ruled by the most incompetent, lazy, cruel, and corrupt assholes in our history. 

What really got me though was the prerecorded skit from the "trump addicts of America" where a bunch of normal Americans fret that life will become boring without the zest of trump constantly threatening their well-being. It reminded me of a book I reviewed recently for a gig called Why Soldiers Miss War, the author gets an "E" for effort in trying to define the relationship between trauma and euphoria when one is constantly in danger and then that danger is removed. Nothing is exciting anymore, food doesn't taste as good, and things that scare civilians are shrugged off as not rising to the thrill of combat. Personally, I like boring, I like not having to maintain that hypervigilance you have to keep up in dangerous situations. I have never experienced that Raymond K. Hessel moment of being so thankful for being alive that everything is awesome. And I would really like the domestic enemies of the United States that I swore to defend the republic against to be out of the government of that republic. 

Of course it was a joke, SNL usually does a good job of mixing just enough reality into the humor to make it seem identifiable for average viewers. Not bad for a cast and crew that embodies New York City, where most Americans still really do not fully understand, but they understand us enough to entertain a decent-sized audience. Here's where it gets serious though, if by some miracle doughfacedonny (or donnyCOVIDseed as I've seen on Twitter) is thwarted in stealing the election. If the polls are to be believed and republicans lose power and seats across the country, what then? Just as some find the aftermath of war to be boring, the aftermath of a domestic reign of terror will probably cause a lot of people to tune out. Do schools teach much about Germany or Japan after WWII? Maybe those cases aren't relevant for our discussion but Reconstruction after the US Civil War certainly will be.

But to the title of this post. After seeing the SNL skit I got to thinking about an episode of South Park where the kids are playing a World of Warcraft type online game and there's the proverbial 300 lb basement-dwelling loser who has a super-powerful character who, for no explained reason, goes around killing other players and preventing anyone from having any fun. Eventually the kids train hard enough to barely defeat this tyrant and one of them asks "what do we do now?" Cartman replies, "what do you mean, now we finally get to play the game." I'm not a big South Park fan anymore, never really was but that really gets to the heart of what happens next if republican tyranny is finally cut down to size in January. Still, not to put the cart before the horse but there just hasn't been enough bandwidth to think about anything other than getting these monsters out of positions of power. If they are gone, we liberals go back to the same old struggle. Certainly, we all deserve a break after living through this trauma but probably 60 million republicans are still going to vote for doughfacedonny. They cannot be allowed to skirt away this time without consequences only to form a new tea party under the leadership of never trumpers and the Lincoln Project.

Beyond passing laws to keep republicans from cheating their way back to power, the big questions will return to real discussions. We finally get to play the game of "what are the optimal progressive tax rates for this country?" "What can be done to effectively limit corporate power and bring truth back to news media?" "How can we organize labor and bring balance back to the economy?" You know, the questions that could have been discussed during Hillary's term. We could finally play the game of working on the extreme backlog of reforms necessary in an age of climate change, cyberwarfare, beating back fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world (through diplomacy and economic warfare of course, bombs only seem to make the problems worse). It is time to rethink the first amendment because we cannot go back to simply accepting propaganda as legitimate or that monsters like Alex Jones or Qanon have any place in a representative democracy. 

While it will definitely take a far lurch to the left to address these issues, the end of reclaiming a vital center where democracy, compromise, and the defense of education will be worth radical action in the short term to destroy fascism in this country. I had an idea yesterday towards that end that would be easy and eminently doable, before you can comment on or share a news item or thinkpiece you should have to take a civics quiz. Then the button will be active, if you don't answer them all correct you will have to take a history or political science lesson before you can try again. The problem is that boomers and others who simply decided they never needed to learn anything about being a responsible citizen in a republic or had no need to maintain that knowledge because "how do you make any money off of that?" can voice their ridiculous, uninformed opinions with the same weight that an informed, responsible citizen can. There should be obstacles in the way of spreading propaganda or trolling good people. 

But that would be the kind of discussion we could have if we don't have to constantly worry that trump's three stolen Supreme Court seats will undermine the will of the people with impunity or that a madman has the nuclear button and command of the Armed Forces. 

Will any of this actually happen? Not if we don't dedicate ourselves anew to the project. In my lifetime there have been three consistent cycles of republicans stealing the White House, wrecking everything, skating away with no consequences, the Democrats put in office to clean up the mess disillusion the enthusiastic voters who put him there, liberals stay home and allow republicans to sneak in again to wreck things anew. Carter's poor performance allowed Reagan to sneak in by at least borderline treason with the Iran hostage crisis (which was shown to be effective when Nixon stalled peace talks in Vietnam to win). Twelve years of relentless tax cutting and hacking away at social and regulatory spending by the Reagan and Bush administrations gutted this country until Clinton won with a plurality (who knows if even that would have been possible without Perot spoiling) in 1992. Two years later and enough good people stayed home to let Newt Gingrich and his carefully trained asshole republicans to take the House of Representatives, hobbling any good that might have come out of the rest of Clinton's administration. And enough propaganda allowed a rather prosperous and happy America to sit back and watch Dubya steal the election. See where I'm going with this? The 24/7 fear-mongering and war hysteria reversed what could have been a correction in Congress during the mid-terms. Do liberals my age and older even remember being called traitors and terrorist-lovers during those years? It doesn't seem like it. Then there was the great "shellacking" of 2010 because "Obama doesn't inspire me" or the Glenn Greenwald acolytes sucking the oxygen out of any relief at Bush being gone. THIS CYCLE CANNOT CONTINUE!

The election of 2016 was supposed to be the first time republican fascism was really repudiated by a Democratic succession. I cannot believe that after four years of tyranny there are more than a handful of idiots still willing to vote for this disgrace of a man, but they are never going away until they are put away. So, we need to stay on that wall, stay frosty and alert, and most importantly not lose sight of how it can all go back to republican rule. No matter how the holier-than-thou left wails that Democrats don't inspire them or memories of this reign of terror fade and we go back to "both sides are equally bad and corrupt" because the next wannabe dictator won't be as stupid or lazy as doughfacedonny.