Category Archives: Politics

A Party of Quislings

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Saturday marked the 3rd anniversary of the violent attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 US Presidential election. For a moment, and only a fleeting moment, many elected Republicans saw clearly that their party’s leader was a criminal desperate to retain power that had been duly, legally, and properly removed from his grasp. The moment passed and now the entire rotten party is as corrupt as depraved and as unworthy of the American people as their mentally addled and emotionally stunted leader.

Of course, they do not see it that way. It has been illuminating to watch ‘conservatives’ online twist, distorted and invert the traits and characteristics of their political opponents. In their projection it is Joe Biden that is the corrupt criminal, trading political access for cash. It is Joe Biden twisted and warped with anger. It is Joe Biden that is that violates the constitution and that strips the rights away from the people. Each of these imagined ‘charges’ is of course the reality of Donald Trump but the dissonance between what they want, their own selfish policies and the vehicle that must lash themselves to in order to get it breaks their minds and forces the funhouse mirror interpretation of reality, one where all their crimes are neatly placed on the shoulders of others leaving their hands clean and their morality unblemished.

But the truth remains.

It is the Republican party that has an utter disregard for the rule of law.

It is the Republican Party that strips people of their rights.

It is the Republican Party that has contempt for our two centuries of democratic rule.

It is th Republican Party that capitulates and appeases out enemies and the enemies of freedom around the globe.

They are a party of Quislings.

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An Unimaginable Future

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I was born in the early 1960s making be part of the tail-end of that massive generation the Baby Boomers. Bright beckoning futures such as Star Trek filled my childhood while the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation hovered over our heads. For decades the go-to and standby baddies of most fiction was the menacing duplicitous and seemingly everywhere conspiracy of International Communism as exported to ever trouble spot around the globe by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but we just called it Russia.

The United States led the ‘Free World’ against the spreading, infecting, and corrupting influence, and subversion of freedom by Russia. Our allies, while not always endeared to out ways and over-sized personalities, stood shoulder to shoulder with us in that fight, united in the belief that freedom was a universal good. Even if we, and I mean all of the allies, more often than we’d ever admit, fell short of that lofty ideal. The striving for that goal, for a more perfect realization of freedom for humanity, for the rights of self-determination, is what stood as apart from the vast police states of Russia and her brood of puppet nations.

Throughout the 1980s I had friends across the American Political spectrum and my conservative ones were steadfast in the belief that Russia posed a threat to democracy and freedom. That Russian intelligence services infiltrated and manipulated groups in our open society creating conflict and divisions that weakened the ‘free world.’ They were right. After the fall of the USSR so much came to light about their massive operations attempting to exploit both our divisions and our freedoms against us. My conservative friends crowed in being proved right.

And now I live in a future that would have been unimaginable to all of us in the 1980s. I don’t mean the power computers we carry about in our pockets like so many dimes, nor do I mean the fantastic imagery we created with keystrokes, or that we can now launch and land rockets as we envisioned in the SF movies of the 1950s.

No, I mean that those same conservatives who crowed so loudly about their correct detection of the threats to our freedoms have so willingly, so enthusiastically wedded themselves to the very same threat. That violations of the constitutional order and attempts to steal power from legitimate free and fair elections are swept away as mere distraction of ‘personality.’

Back in the 1980s a common criticism of the left from my conservative friends was that the people on the left were only voting for their own selfish interests, free food, and money from the teat of the government. It is clear now that this charge is quite accurate to the conservatives. All professed dedication to the ideals of democracy and the ‘free world’ are casually overthrown for the party that promises to keep delivering the goodies you want. Maybe those goodies are tax cuts and commerce unrestrained by the public good. Maybe it’s the power to compel people to live by your own hypocritical ethics. Or perhaps it’s the promise to not encumber your choice in firearms. Whatever the ‘goodie’ it is clear that the ideals of Freedom are disposable when weight against that selfish interest.

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The Current War in the Middle East

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I have not a lot to say about the matter because I am fully aware of just how little I know, how little I understand, and how terribly complex the entire situation is. I have not the arrogance to presume the wisdom to proscribe solutions. I am as Theodoen when in the film he utters ‘What can men do against such reckless hate?’

To my eye there is no doubt that injustice has been perpetrated by all involved parties, and it is equally clear that not all injustices are anywhere close to equal.

Because one side in a conflict is evil or commits evil does not absolve its opponents or elevate them to be ‘good.’ Evil committed remains evil.

It does seem to me that both sides are trapped by the delusion that they can with acts of cruelty, vengeance, and malice ‘break the spirit’ or their enemies. This is such a rare occurrence as to be nearly unheard of. The Blitz did not break the British, nor did indiscriminate bombing break the Germans. Even in the face of Atomic horrors the Japanese people would have continued to fight, their spirit had not been broken, only a rational judgement by some their leaders and their Emperor summoned up the courage to surrender. Atrocities will not break the Israelis and cruelties will not break the Palestinians. We can only hope and work for the day when rational reasoned judgment finally brings a lasting peace because peace is never won by punishing vengeance.

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Appeasement Only Begats Destruction

There was a time, and not that long ago for it was within my political lifetime, when the Republican Party was the party that warned of appeasement, that at every instance, and often when it was far from justified, invoked the specter of the terrible policy of appeasing Hitler and the Nazis. It is both ironic and fitting that they are destroyed by the same mechanism that they so vocally insisted others be wary of.

As I have written before it was the ‘Southern Strategy’ that invited in the segregationists following that passage of landmark civil rights laws that first began the process of infecting the GOP with its current disease. Once invited in racism is painfully difficult to excise, particularly if that action cost you power.

Rather than face that pain, the GOP has for decades appeased it. Throwing scraps of legislation to this faction while feeding it lies and outrage in an attempt to satisfy its hunger and hatred. Of course, like the patrons of The Menu they could never be satisfied. Fed lies and outrage their appetite did not reach fulfillment but only grew. So, the GOP fed its racist hateful base more lies, more outrage in an ever-growing movement of appeasement.

With the coming of Trump, a sadly predictable event, the faction now having grown strong and large on its near endless diet, now longer needed to beg for scrap from the legislative table but rather determined the entire menu. The masters of the party found that instead of appeasement that they now paid blackmail, begging for their money and their lives with subservience to the monster of their creation.

No person better epitomizes this than Kevin McCarthy. An experience feeder of lies and sower of hatred, in his vain, egotistical quest to be Speaker of the House, paid and paid and paid the blackmailers, giving them every lie and every hatred that they demanded foolish in his delusion that he could pay off the blackmailers enough to save himself.

He had as little chance of satisfying the MAGA as the Europeans did of buying off Hitler. I weep no tears for McCarthy, he paved the road to his own destruction, delineated lanes, and posted signs to hell before he drove it to his doom. He hasn’t suffered a portion of what he has earned, but I do weep for my nation, my imperfect, flawed, but beautiful country, ravaged and on the brink of ruin by these little men and their foolish appeasement.

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RINO Hunting Destroyed the Conservative Ecology

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Biological ecologies are a complex web of interdependencies between their constituent elements and the same is true for political ecologies.

There was a time, not that very long ago, when the two political parties in the United States each contained divergent factions of liberals, moderate, conservatives and assorted minor ideologies. The Civil Rights movement and legislation fractured the Democratic Party as a considerable number of their ‘conservatives’ were more invested in segregation than anything else politically. After a brief turn as ‘Dixiecrats’ this faction was wooed and welcome into the Republican Party as the wedge that allow the GOP to begin winning elections in the deep South.

This additional faction swelled the GOP and ushered in the Reagan Regime that dominated American politics from 1980 until well into 1990s. However, like HYDRA with SHIELD this racist driven conservatism grew like a parasite with the Republican Party. With the power to win or cost elections it soon, welded to its fast-growing cousin the Social Conservative faction, determined the shape and course of American Conservatism, and thus began the period of ‘RINO hunting.’

RINO is a slur for member of the Republican Party not sufficiently subservient to the conservatism imported from the deep south and it stands for Republican In Name Only. The very nomenclature reveals the transformed nature of the GOP. It became a party that tolerated no dissention, no variation, and no other factions. There had become just one way to be a Republican and those who did not conform, who were not of the body, were cast out, chased out, and hounded out of the party. What had once been a collection of factions became a movement and a movement can only proceed in one direction.

Throughout the late 90s there was a giddiness every time a ‘RINO’ was defeated, resigned, and switched parties. Like a boiling solution what remained concentrated in its purity. Led and goaded by non-politicians such as Rush Limbaugh and bomb-throwing politicians such as Newt Gingrich the GOP moved more and more in lockstep to a beat that had been determine decades earlier by fleeing segregationists.

Racism has always been an American problem and both parties have a long history if welcoming it within their domains. However, once the Democratic party began moving in a direction of racial justice, awareness, and correction the racist had but one party that welcomed them. At first tacitly, then subtly, and eventually openly, the GOP.

With the RINOs, primarily the Northeastern liberal Republicans, driven out of the party, and the communists threat collapsed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the GOP turned it unified and obedient movement on American itself. It abandoned all pretense at governing or morality. A political movement that embraces torture is capable of anything.

Is it any surprise at all that such a movement, such a political ecology now deprived of any contrary thought, proved such fertile ground for a con man and a demagogue? That after decades of beating obedience into its base that it would lash itself with the fanaticism of a cult to that new leader?

No, not at all.

The GOP hunted the RINOs into extinction and without that balance dove into neo-fascism endangering us all.

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A More Apt Nazi Germany Analogy for the GOP

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This is coming off the top of my head, but I think there are some useful analogies to be found here.

Fascist Italy: This is the Old Guard Republican Establishment. With the ‘Southern Strategy’ and playing directly to disaffected racist voters they built the new Fascism believing that the dominate position would always be theirs, dreaming of a great Empire that would never materialize. Now they find themselves the powerless junior partner, locked out of their own systems and suffering at the system that they created.

Nazi Germany: This is Trump and his death-cultist, poisoned by the Flavor-Aide and devoted to the one man, the one leader, that is leading them to destruction. Trump seized the machine built by the Establishment and made it serve himself and only himself. Trump and his cult are the driving force of the conflict and they will never stop believing their own deluded lies and myths.

Austria: Remember that Austria was an independent Republic that was ‘annexed’ by Nazi Germany, well these are the Evangelicals. They share a language and a culture with the Trumpists at their side but had until the death-cult ‘annexed’ remained their own force in Conservative American Politics. However, after enthusiastically welcoming the new strong man across their borders they have lost all that independence. Look to that new survey that reports more Republicans trust Trump to tell them the truth than their own pastors. They are now indistinguishable from the Trumpists.

Romania and the minor Axis Powers: These are the wealthy seeking their tax cuts, the businesses looking to escape any and every regulation that impedes even a single penny to their coffers, and the gun-right enthusiasts. They have signed the Axis pact; they have supplied the men and material for the invasions and conquest but now see that they have lashed themselves to a foundering ship. They desperately want to be saved from the consequences of their own actions but are wholly occupied by the death-cult and there is no escape. Their fate, deservedly so, is tied to the cult’s.

Finland: These are the ‘Anti-anti-Trumps’. For these there is no greater enemy than ‘liberals.’ And like Finland they’ll give resources and co-ordinate attacks against the shared ‘enemy’ with the Trumpists all while tutting the co-belligerents war crimes, genocide, and racism. I also suspect that they will also flip the moment their own survival is imperiled turning on those that had just moments before been defending.

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Nothing Will Change

Yesterday, the latest set of indictments were charged against Donald Trump, these related to his direct assault on American Democracy and the attempt to overthrow the election.

There are those who hope, futilely I believe, that this will finally break ‘the fever.’ There is no fever. There is no madness gripping the Modern Republican Party from which sanity can be restored. This GOP is the GOP that is logical and inevitable result of decades of committed action. The party Trump usurped was once crafted to believe the big lies, to reject reality, and one motivated by hate, primed for a man such as Trump to come and take it away from the monied interests who foolishly believed such a monster would remain forever in their control.

So, one more set of charges, one more barrage of criminality, one more assault on democracy will matter not at all to a base cultivated to reject reality for their own twisted and hateful fantasies.

Within the GOP primary I suspect Trump numbers will move no more than the usual amount dictated by statistical noise. Old School Republican Pols such as Mike Murphy will continue to cling to their own delusions of a weakening Trump and the spineless will continue to supplicate themselves for breadcrumbs of power from this poisonous party.

The salvation of this nation, this democratic experiment, lies outside of the Republican Party. The GOP must be defeated everywhere and at every level of political power. Not just in the next election or the one after that but for the next twenty years. Saving America is a generational project and only a new generation of Republicans might be trusted with any power at all.

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37 Counts

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It is hardly shocking, surprising, or even unanticipated but thoroughly unprecedented that the former president and leading Republican candidate for that office has been charged with 37 serious criminal felonies.

Nor it is it unexpected that scrums of Republican pols flock like birds to his defense. Oh, there are a few, very few, willing to mouth some platitudes that these charges are serious, but their protestations are the elaborations of bad liars.

There are voices speaking out from beyond the party in hopes that this time the fever will break that this time things will be different. They insist that these are serious charges, that the evidence is too solid, the facts too damning for the former guy’s support to remain intact. And in my head a tiny voice from a fantastic film answers them.

The Republican party, the one built over decades of poisonous politics, insisting that anything to their left was complete and utter communism, the party that invited, welcomed, and nurtured bigots under the delusion that they could safely harvest their votes with ever actually granting them power, has been utterly captured by these illiberal anti-democratic forces and I do not see that ending for a decade.

Today Trump is to be arraigned but with only the most modest of legal actions this will be dragged out beyond the election. There will be no trial before November of next year unless Trump is his unmatched idiocy allows it. The future of our nation and the world’s rational order is at stake. It is up to us to save it.

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Pride 2023 Terrifies Me

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It is not what Pride celebrates that scares me, since the late 1970s I have found the legal and social discrimination against the gays and their brethren utterly evil and idiotic. I am old enough to remember the Anita Bryant kerfuffle and recognized even then just how wrong and hateful her campaign was no matter how many times they repeated the delusional incantation, ‘love the sinner hate the sin.’ No, Pride represents the beginning of the real fight for freedom and equality and for aspect of our nation is it as important as the 4th of July.

What terrifies me is the poisonous atmosphere of 2023 with its escalating number of mass shootings along with the rising tide of Family Values Fascism.

Mass shootings are a social contagion, with each instance acting like a chemical catalyst lowering the activation energy of the process, accelerating the reaction brings more shootings and more death. As reported by the BBC there have been more than 200 hundred mass shootings in 2023. The contagion is running unchecked.

The political environment is particularly dire. An entire political party in our two-party system is succumbing to an anti-democratic dogma that can best be described as neo-fascist. Abandoning the rule of law and democratic norms they have embraced hatred and scapegoating as tools to seize power. Still bitter over marriage equality, but recognizing that the tide had turned against them, they targeted another sexual minority for their hatred, lies, and venom, the transsexual community. Empowered by their reactionary fury they stoke fear, anger, and hatred in a base already inclined to violence.

These twin lethal cultural currents are what terrifies me about Pride 2023. It is my most sincere hope we can get to the 4th of July without any deadly violence at Pride events but there will be no shock or surprise if we do not.

Should Pride events be canceled during this terrifying time?

No.

The danger must be recognized and dealt with, but it must not be appeased. That only empowers it more. Pride must go on.

I am terrified but I am also hopeful. These are the dying spasms of an older ideology and generation, survive these and better days are ahead.

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Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Contest

 

Though it is more than a year in the future the next presidential contest will be upon us fast and horrid.

THE PRIMARIES

On the Democratic side, barring any extraordinary exogenous event, such as a serious health event, Joe Biden will be the nominee. Robert F Kennedy jr., despite a name of Democratic royalty, will be a gadfly and I fully expect that vaccine denying idiot to be tossed aside and not present any serious threat.

For the Republicans things are much dicer, dangerous, and chaotic.

No declared and soon to be declared candidate has shown the chop, the skill, and the willingness to be a ‘Trump killer’ if such a thing is possible within the poisonous voter base the GOP has built over the last 30 years. So, there will a fight across the primaries, and I suspect right on to the convention floor, unless Trump simply wins the primary contest right out. If Trump wins the delegates count in the primary the GOP will stay true to their runny, warm jello spines and supplicate themselves again the macaroni Mussolini. IF Trump does not win the primaries, then he will challenge each and every loss as stolen, turning to the courts and the local party apparatus, the latter which he has gained a firm hand on, to take the delegates anyway.

Should Trump fail to steal the delegates in the courts or in the local committees, then the floor fight will start, and it will not be a calm, considered conflict, but a vicious brawl waged with Trump’s well-known restraint.

Should he win that fight he will go into the election with the GOP fractured, a weakened but not a defeated candidate.

Should he lose that fight, I do not think, as many do, that he will run as a third-party pick, but rather he will stand on the side and throw figurative eggs at the GOP candidate. Pettiness and vengeance are much more powerful emotions for Trump than any form of reason. This alternate future I think would give Biden his best chance for a clean and easy victory.

Th worst outcome for Biden, the nation, and democracy would be for Trump to clearly win the primary contests, putting him in the strongest position to win.

Remember, while Biden racked up millions more votes than Trump in 2020, he actually won by only 40 or 50 thousand votes. 2024 could go to Trump with Biden having an even larger popular vote win.

I do not think the court cases, or the criminal charges will seriously damage Trump with the GOP base. These events only ‘prove’ that the liberal system is out to get him, further enhancing the ‘persecuted’ complex of the modern GOP. Nor will he be in jail, even if convicted, he will be free on appeal, as all rich people are, and that appeal process will turn slowly, leaving him free to chase that election.

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