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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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.
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.
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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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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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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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.
Many, if not most, people with some understanding of history are at least familiar with the poem by Pastor Neimoller. A confession and an awareness of where his support for the NAZIs and his apathy for the suffering of others had ultimately led. If you are not, here is the text.
First They Came by Pastor Martin Neimoller
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
‘They’ are coming. Right now, here in the United States of America, they are coming for the Trans Community and most of you are not Trans, maybe you don’t know anyone who is or who has transitioned, but they are coming for them, and you have the choice of speaking out and standing by and saying nothing because it does not harm you. ‘They’ will make all manner of ‘justifications’ for their actions, invoking the ‘children’ as the noble reasons for their actions but these are lies. They know that they are lies, we know that they are lies. If you stay silent you murder the truth for their lies.
Just as the poem progressed, so will their march of suppress and destroy everything that they do not approve of. You may be number on their list, or number two, or number three, but they will eventually reach you.
Do not wait until it is your pain and torment to see their evil. Open your eyes and see it now. They are counting on your apathy for those quite unlike you, prove them wrong.
Conservatism does not equal fascism, but the modern GOP has surrendered to it fascistic elements. Until that cancer is excised from the body politic and burned back into the shadows no member of that party deserves any position of power. Your vote is your voice, use it or be complicit.
Terrible Days Lay Ahead
I have been voting since the 1980 elections and throughout that time there have been those that conflate ‘conservative’ with ‘fascist.’ To be fair it was with equal abandonment that ‘liberal’ was conflated with ‘communist.’ Both conflations were the product of the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality that required political opponents be treated as enemies rather than people with different views, opinion, and premises. A natural consequence is that the weight of those terms evaporated. If everything conservatives, right or wrong, is fascist by sheer frequency of occurrence fascism becomes more commonplace and therefore less terrible.
Now, the fascists that always hid inside conservatism have taken the movement and its devices. This was not a bolt from the blue because of a single presidential candidate or election. This is the result of decades of tolerating hatred, bigotry, and cruelty because it yielded electoral benefits. Eradicating fascism from American political life will be long, arduous, path requiring an unending commitment to its defeat at every level.
Because this is a long war, dark days are coming. The fascist war on people, currently the focus is on the Transgendered community, but should they win, they will move against their next target, is not a war about any sort of sane policy or principled stand. The fascists, as fascists have always done, are fixated on myth, lies, and a history that never existed. They have created a prior existence and view of the world that is no more real that Camelot’s Court or Wakandan Science.
From 1980 through 2003 I was a registered Republican, though I scarcely agreed with everything the party argued for. (IF you do agree 100% with a political party I seriously doubt that you are critically considering all aspects and are more of an ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality.) To me it was clear that the growing authoritarian movement within the GOP was ascendant when they embraced torture of prisoners. A political philosophy capable of torture is capable of any terrible atrocity. The intervening two decades has only strengthened my conviction on this matter.
The fascists are going to win some of the battle ahead. There will be setbacks for liberty and freedom. At times all will seem lost, but we must never stop fighting. Only by thoroughly crushing this poisonous ideology and idolatry can we move forward to a future where everyone can live their true authentic lives.
Dine and Dash for those who are not aware is the underhanded trick of ordering and eating the food at a dine in restaurant and then leaving without paying the check.
It is also an excellent metaphor concerning the Republican Party and the Debit Limit.
Raising the debt limit is borrowing money, because the United States does not have it on hand, to pay for spending already done.
The spending is the meal at the nice restaurant, good food, a bread plate with bread, and even a dessert that doesn’t involved flambéing your diners. However, when the check arrives it is the GOP, who ordered food and happily ate it, insisting you do all their chores at home, or they will not pay the bill.
Except of course that not raising the debt limit, defaulting on our creditors, is not a minor irritating powerplay by an ass but rather a move that will ignite a global economic crisis.
The US Dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Anyone anywhere will take US Dollars for payment but that won’t be true if we crash the US and the world’s economy. People will turn elsewhere. The Pound’s time in the sum has passed, the Ruble won’t ascend to that perch, but the Yuan could.
The GOP’s idiocy could not only unleash hell on the US and its citizen’s it could launch the Communist Chinese Century. All because some Baby Boomer Bigots can’t seem to grasp the domination of the WASPs is ending.