Category Archives: Politics

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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Fast Thoughts

 

The GOP is a parade of corruption, anti-American ideology, and moral collapse.

There is no credible reason for voting for this political party save, grift, power, and bigotry. Everything else is rationalization, justification, and lies.

There are arguments to be made about the size, scope, and reach of government but that is not the question of the day.

The question of the day is do you stand with democracy or against it?

There is no third way.

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The Fragility of Reputation

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Imagine a woman in a monogamous relationship. She has recently discovered texts on her partner’s phone to a young, attractive woman, but the partner dismisses these are innocent conversations with a friend. He’s allowed to have friends, right? The she uncovers gifts to the woman in question, but they too are innocent he protests, it was her birthday and people give gifts to people on their birthday.  Her friends bring photos of her partner enjoying upscale dinners and theater and the man continues to insist all of this, none of which he had shared with his partner means anything at all. After all, she has never seen him screwing this other woman, so there’s no proof that he’s been misbehaving.

With everything that has been concealed and hidden she would utterly right in suspecting him. He has shredded his reputation with her without a private eye snapping photos of him in her bed. The reputation, the belief that he was worth of trust exists only in her mind and once that questioned it is very difficult to ever hold again.

This is precisely the situation with Justice Thomas. No one can prove that he exchanged a single vote for all the elaborate gifts and lifestyle he has enjoyed at the benefit of his conservative billionaire friend. But that proof is immaterial to shattering of trust.

The courts survive entirely on reputation. They have no armies, no police, no real enforcement capability. If you doubt that look up the Trail of Tears. They work because everyone accepts that they are fair and if that is questioned everything crumbles.

The court must clean house or our very nation will teeter even closer to a point of no return. No nation is guaranteed a tomorrow.

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Potpourri of Thoughts

I awoke with a headache today and so I have little in the way of coherent thoughts to post, so once again some unconnected ramblings.

Current Politics:

Everything in my mind comes down to one theme: The only good Republican is an unelected Republican.

May The 4th:

Happy Star Wars day, and another on the 25th which is the anniversary of the release. It was months after the release before I saw the film in 1977.

The WGA Strike:

After following screenwriting podcasts for a few years, I am solidly with the WGA on this. It sucks for the consumers but if we want high quality product in the future, we need to endure the pain today.

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Frighteningly Prophetic: Shock Treatment

20th Century Studios

 

Shock Treatment, made following the cult success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, started its cinematic existence under two cursed stars, the folly of attempting to craft a film to be a cult hit, something that nearly aways fails, and the terrible timing of hitting production during a writers’ strike. A bomb at the box office and with the cult crowd, Shock Treatment is film discarded and nearly forgotten.

And yet these days it haunts my thoughts.

Budgets and strikes reduced the original vision until the film’s setting transformed symbolically in a single location, a television soundstage where all the action and the character’s lives are played out for the live audience. A bizarre collection of characters populates the story, a seemingly blind game show host, played by the recently late Barry Humphries, a brother/sister pair of actors (Richard O’Brien & Patricia Quin) portraying doctors on a hit medical show from which the viewers take real medical advice, and puppeteering all of it the media creation and fast-food spokesman, Farley Flavors (Cliff de Young in a dual role). Flavors manipulates opinion and emotions with his broadcasts finally presenting Janet (Jessica Harper) while drugged out of her senses as a model of mental health to sell the audience on committing themselves to his mental institution. Even Janet’s rejection fails to derail the plot, with Flavors discarding her as trash, the sudden reversal irrelevant to the masses under his spell.

I cannot but see the striking parallels between this 41-year-old film and today’s political environment. In 2019 I wrote another essay about this foresight and the 4 years that have passed has only strengthened the film prophetic nature. It is far too easy to see that the wildly cartoonish character of Farley Flavors is a dim shadow of the real-life threat that is Donald Trump. Impeachments and insurrections have no more damaged his ability to control his own cult than Janet’s rejects damaged Flavors. The film’s depiction of the nearly irresistible pull social conformity and the facade of community from the fake history of Americana of the 50s is eerily predictive of the entire MAGA movement, that could so easily and without any irony adopt the song ‘Thank God I’m a Man’ as their anthem.

I had never before considered Shock Treatment a horror film but it undoubtedly. lives in that space now.

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The Clown Car Has Crashed Into The Police Van

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For the first time in American History a grand jury has indicted a former president of the nation on criminal charges. The exact nature of those charges are still unknown as the disclosure will occur at the defendant’s arraignment and everything said about those charges, their strengths or weaknesses is mere speculation. But hey, there are clicks to harvest and commercial airtime to sell so the speculation is not going to stop.

Of course, all of this is so utterly predicable that the most fraudulent telephone psychic of the 80s or 90s would have foretold its coming. Trump, a man who idolized and admired the organized crimes goons of his city, who famously stiffed nearly everyone single person he ever owed money to, and who envisioned himself, despite his soft doughy nature, as a hard man of cruelty, was always at some point exceed his limited intellectual capacity and finally violate the law in a manner that he would not be able to bribe, buy, or dodge his way out of. That was a predictable as the law of gravity.

And yet, notwithstanding all that the Republican Party, lashed themselves to his fate and, depending on your point of view, either revealed their utter hypocrisy or shredded their final and weakly held principles as the party of ‘individual responsibility’ and devoted their time and treasure to this small, weak, and stupid man’s defense.

Having spent the previous decades chasing away anyone with a modicum of decency towards their fellow person while making every effort to enrichen the wealthy the elites and powerbrokers of the GOP transformed their once proud vehicle into a clown car and then handed the wheel over to the biggest clown of all.

Now devoid of principles save the authoritarian ‘my way!’ they GOP as shocked and terrified to discover that the clown car has ended up into the police station and there is little chance to escape the terrible, inevitable, and wholly foreseeable fallout of their self-destruction. They fervently pray that a conviction or a Big Mac will remove the orange clown from their care, but even if that were to come to pass it would change very little. The army of clowns that they had spent decades building, fooling themselves that it obeyed their commands, has taken control and will remain there for at least another decade.

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The Coming Election ‘Fraud’ No One is Talking About

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An oft repeated observation about Trump and his approach to elections is that he can never lose, he can only win or be cheated.

We saw this in the run up to the 2016 election where he voiced, repeatedly, his willingness to dispute the results if he did not win. Again in 2020 when he launched a coup attempt in part by convincing millions of people that the election had been ‘stolen’ from him. And we are bracing for the coming cries of fraud should he once again be the presidential nominee for the Republican Party.

Among the political talk there is a great deal of chatter and debate concerning Trump’s chances of grabbing that nomination. ‘Is he slipping? Who can beat him and take the base away from him? Is Candidate X the Trump-killer?’

Not once in all the articles I have read or the podcast I have consumed has anyone addressed the most glaring and obvious fact about the GOP primary and Trump.

He can’t lose, he can only be cheated.

Even if some other rabid and foaming at the mount southern governor wins the contests, Trump will concede to reality. That mad narcissist is incapable of admitting any sort of error or defeat. He will take the air, to the social media, and to his rallies with cries that the ‘establishment’ colluding with the ‘deep state’ has stolen the primary election and even if the convention goes against him, he will claim that ‘rigged’ that too.

What happens then?

What happens when he insists he really won the primaries and demands all those spineless, sniveling, cowardly politicians who have bent the knee to this obscene protofascist once again repeat his lies and throw themselves on those electoral grenades?

Would that finally explode the GOP? Shattering it with schisms and internecine warfare? People talk of a GOP civil war now, but I think the debates and appeasements we see now would fade into invisibility compared to this scenario. Elected in solidly gerrymandered districts might survive reject his lies but not the next primary or even possibly recall elections, but candidates in more evenly distributed districts would face losing voters from their base because they didn’t back Trump or losing voters from the middle because they did while still facing the wrath of the base in the next primary.

The GOP is far from done with Trump and he is far from done with them.

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Bruce Lee, JFK jr., and Trump

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A common statement I hear repeated endlessly on political discussions is how the majority of GOP electeds, not the base mind you, are hoping for a Big Mac, or a Heart Attack, or a stroke to remove Trump from the political field by removing him from life. They suffer twin delusions with this fantasy.

The first is that somehow Trump vanishing from the scene would magically return the Republican Party to its state before that grotesque vainglorious buffoon descended that elevator. This ignores the fact that decades of stoking fear and hate created the condition that allowed Trump to seize the party from its establishment. It also ignores the basic truth of the universe, that time flows in one direction and the past is forever lost to us. The GOP today without Trump will carry forward Trump’s stamp. He has remade the party and while it can be remade again it will never be something from the past.

The second delusion is the idea that Trump’s sudden demise would be accepted as factual by his most fanatical supporters.

In July of 1973 actor, athlete, and producer Bruce Lee died. For many this was simply unbearable and rather than accept the simple fact that everyone dies and sometimes death is visited upon the healthy and fir conspiracy theories sprang up and continue to this day.

In July of 1999 JFK jr., son of the slain president, died when the airplane he was piloting suffered ‘controlled flight into terrain.’ The terrain being the Atlantic Ocean. One of the Q-Anon conspiracies is that he did not die, it was a hoax, and that he would return. The fact that so many very right people are holding out hope for a Democratic persona to returned gives evidence to the unhinged nature of conspiracy theories.

Trump’s death would instantly become a new and probably vast conspiracy theory. It may seem far-fetched and beyond reason to many of us but remember this is the population of people who accept that there is a secret cabal of Democrats feasting on infants in the basement of pizza parlors.

Between the lasting effect of Trump’s years at the head of the GOP and the fanatical followers who would not accept his death the party would find itself tethered to Trump ghost far tighter than they ever had been to Reagan’s.

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