What Real Strength Looks Like

 

This moment from @BarackObama 🔥 pic.twitter.com/UbKo7g0sif

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 11, 2024

Former President Barack Obama gave a hell of a speech campaigning in Pennsylvania for Harris/Walz and Senator Bob Casey today. and there were some things that really struck me. For one thing, he did address that Trump's pretend wonderful economy was the one that Obama and Biden rescued from the collapse in 2008. 

 How would we say it? Oh, right. Trump didn't build that. He didn't build the wall, he didn't end "American Carnage" and his fumbling foreign policy he gave to "read 25 whole books" son-in-law Jared Kushner obviously didn't hold. And he certainly can't be considered some economic stable genius when he gave us double digit unemployment and deliberately made the stock market about himself. 

This man Tweeted to manipulate the market. I swear I am not making this up. That's crazypants, but it's some shit he did. He has also used his "bully pulpit" to try and antagonize corporations--especially media corporations, that have disagreed with him. 

You know, like his beef with CBS over his weird paranoic ideas about the 60 Minutes interview with VP Harris.. 

But more than Trump's basic and obvious incompetence, which his followers refuse to see, is his entire lack of character, which should be obvious to them, and they dismiss. In my mind, part of the dismissal of Trump's badness comes from the phrase "Orange Man Bad." It's dismissive of everything. You hate Trump because he wears bronzer and is a jerk, therefore, I don't care whether um--

He really is actually bad?  Because that is just stupid. It should matter to you whether the guy is basically competent (increasingly questionable every day) or has ever given a good goddamn for anyone but himself. Where, literally, WHERE! do you see him doing this? Where is his much-vaunted competence? Where is his supposed heaven-sent genius rescuing anyone's ass? 

The Lies Vance and Trump are Selling

 

The most striking thing that JD Vance has admitted out loud and in public is that even if Haitians are supposed to be here legally, he's still going to call them "illegal aliens". He knows and knew that the "people eating pets" thing was a lie when he spread it. He could easily bother to check whether crime really was up or whether communicable diseases were up, But the point isn't whether he's being honest--he's not. 

It's whether he can induce people to follow up on his story and keep it alive as if it were a big deal. Just like big public lies could induce people to follow up on a land deal in Arkansas, or a lie about a man's honorable service in Viet Nam, or a lie about a fully American man's birth certificate, or an attack on an embassy in Libya by Islamic terrorists, or an email server, or a man's son's laptop, and try to make that into a big deal, whether it really is or not. 

But there is something else in Vance's particular set of lies that is revealing--the idea that if a person can wave a wand over someone and declare them citizens, having a particular office means you can "uncitizen" them.  Or unperson them.

Just Say "Kamala", This is Taking Forever

 

Obvious plant Catturd cut right to the bone, here. I mean, seriously, he ate. You can free-associate how the imaginary problem of pets being eaten by people who just want to come somewhere with good-paying jobs and settle down is a "real issue", but the real issue is: are we othering Kamala Harris enough and making her the foreign person who might even eat pets herself? 

Sure, it's an obvious form of faked-up concern a la the litter boxes and the on-demand sex change operations in public schools and all that. But what they are also doing is trying to make that about how immigrants and people of color are not like us--and neither is Kamala Harris. It's going from John Eastman-style "Where's the birth certificate?" to "Obama ate a dog." 

Maybe she identifies more with the supposed pet-eaters? The ones that don't actually exist? Maybe she identifies with this weirdo who at least has an immigrant parent who kills local animals:

Taking the Measure of a Man

 

On the second night of the DNC, something happened that to me, was entirely hilarious. Of course, Chicago was rocking because the rollcall affirmed our candidate, and who isn't turned up for the Obamas? But at the exact same time, VP Harris and Governor Walz filled the house in Milwaukee at the same venue the RNC occupied. Who the hell can cast that much shade at night?

Stars do.

I noted in the comments of an earlier post that Trump was going to speak on crime at Howell, MI, a town associated with the Klan, and it happened, and it was dull, and Trump was Trump. He lied a lot, but listlessly. He wonders why suburban women don't want him, a sex pest associated with other sex pests, a serial philanderer, a shitty role model for boys, a misogynist, and a person who does not respect women's rights over our own bodies or lives. It really makes you wonder what funhouse mirror view of himself he's always had. 

And then at the DNC, he got called out in a standup funeral. Sure, Democrats and a few Republicans were there to talk about why Kamala Harris and why now, and what needs to be preserved for our future of this great democratic experiment. 

It was uplifting and magnificent and of course I was teary-eyed and in the front pew of the church of what's happening now. It's a beautiful thing to see people come together to build a better future. I love it, and I love it for us. 

But you know what?  I stay petty. 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Debate

 

In a statement that was positively BOLD in its chicken-shittedness (it's a word now--I have the best words!) the Trump campaign tried to back out of debated presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris because former President Barack Obama had not endorsed her yet. And, they wanted to imply, was not going to. Because obviously, Donald Trump is the foremost Democratic Party understander. 

So you will never guess what happened next. Go on. (OK, you probably already know.):

Earlier this week, Michelle and I called our friend @KamalaHarris. We told her we think she’ll make a fantastic President of the United States, and that she has our full support. At this critical moment for our country, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins in… pic.twitter.com/0UIS0doIbA

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 26, 2024

Any surprises, there?

TWGB: Not Like King David, Either

 

This morning, while working out his deep feelings over how impecunious he was about to be, Trump shared with us a Psalm that, like 2 Corinthians, he had no context for, and as a matter of course, was funny to people who do know scripture. Trump didn't compare himself to Jesus, he was biting off old busy-shanks David. He was saying, though he didn't even know, the beginning of a harsh imprecatory prayer against one's accusers, that basically says, when God is on your side, they just let you do it, and your accusers will get fucked up in due time. 

You know why I know this one? Because it was deployed on President Obama not as the King, but as the evil overseer. And I knew when I heard it then, it was intended as a word of wrath being dripped in the ear of those listening like poison, asking them to act. And Trump is giving himself to "prayer"  (curses) against his foes. Because he wants others to carry out his wrath. Not God. Just...someone. 

Act against Judge Engoron. Act against the prosecutors.  Act as if God whispered it in your ear. 

He's as subtle as a sock in the face. 

Trump Just Repeats His Lies

 

Is Trump a liar or just in early-stage dementia?

Trump says he got legislation passed for veterans that was actually passed in 2014 during the Obama-Biden admin. He says no one else could get it passed in 59yrs. pic.twitter.com/NOhxNkRlU0

— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) November 11, 2023

This thing about the Choice legislation of 2014 is that Trump has been lying about it since it was passed. The entire time he was president. It's one of those things like tariffs, or the corporate tax, He remembers things wrong because he barely had anything to do with them. But he likes to tell stories that make him the main character.

Now, the thinking he's either won an election against Obama or is still in an election against Obama is possibly dementia. He has a lot of feelings about Obama.  I don't know why he isn't equally as mad at Seth Meyers for cutting his ass up a the WHCD in 2011 or Osama Bin Laden for helping Obama look competent by obligingly dying when he sent Seal Team Six on his ass. Or maybe he is scared about Biden, in more than the sort of, beat around the whole of eastern Europe for dirt and extort the Ukrainian president to fight off a Biden challenge kind of way.

After all, being president again is the best way he knows of to dismiss his legal woes. 

TWGB: Trump Doesn't Have to Be Explicit

 

It seems that people are wondering why the story that an armed man who participated in the 1/6 insurrection was arrested in Barack Obama's neighborhood after wandering about a school while armed and oh! the important thing--after Trump posted former president Obama's address to his Truth Social (which no one is flocking to in the pending demise of Twitter, and which has already accrued some insider trading trouble) isn't given more attention. 

I don't exactly know this for a fact, but it feels like the media have trained themselves to ignore that Trump is always crowdsourcing violence. He has been from the very beginning. The wouldbe gunman, Taylor Taranto, said he chose the school because it was close to the home of Rep. Jamie Raskin. Ponder that. 

It doesn't take some wild leap to recall Cesar Sayoc, who sent improvised pipe bomb-like things to the journalists and political figures he believed to be on Trump's hitlist. Or maybe this reminds you of the Pelosi home invasion. Or because this violent individual was also a part of the 1/6 insurrection, it can't help but remind you of those fools for Trump, doing his dirty work. 

TWGB: They Aren't Joking

 

There's a funny thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that if she and Steve Bannon were at the head of the 1/6 insurrection, they would have won, and they would have been armed: she says she was joking, now. But she certainly was not.  We know this because we know her record. She was explicit about what she stood for--talking about "the price of blood" pre-election.  We know in December 2020 she was at the White House meeting with other GOP electeds. We know some 1/6 insurrectionists actually were armed.  What she seems to be saying, and pretending to walk back, is that she would want more bloodshed of Capitol police and possibly her own colleagues in congress. 

Ha ha. The conservatives are getting better at humor, and the libs don't like it, indeed. (See latest iteration thereof.)  Actually, we know what "only joking" means to fascists. (Can't you take a joke? Why are you punching yourself? I'm not the problem, you have no sense of humor. etc.)

When the NY Young Republicans, who I used to think were just twenty-somethings who looked like forty somethings and had the values of the 1950s and wanted to undo the civil rights movement, has VDARE's Brimelow and Posobiec, I start to think we've got people in their thirties and forties who look like they are traitors and have the values of would-be herrenvolk and want to undo Reconstruction. 

So, color me pretty alarmed by that. Also alarmed by Justice Kavanaugh hanging out with the Schlapps, you know, the CPAC wanna-be domestic terrorist Orban enthusiasts. Just a Supreme Court justice hanging out in the most partisan and kinda-fash-leaning crowd, and we're supposed to shrug about that? (And shouldn't RW SCOTUS justices be more on guard about their propriety since we know they are cozy as hell with activists? I mean, Clarance Thomas' wife is a whole activist, which is as cozy as things get.)  

It isn't a joke. 

Republicans Aren't Patriots Anymore, They Admit

 

New: Nearly 200 House Republicans have written to President Biden warning any nuclear deal made with Iran without Congress' approval "will meet the same fate" as the 2015 agreement by President Obama later abandoned by President Trump. w @zacharybasu https://t.co/OEzlmxdg40

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) February 17, 2022

Look, this isn't new. Obviously, this is the same fuckery as we saw in 2015 when freshman Senator Tom Cotton decided to get very fresh and formulate a movement against the one thing a reasonable democratic government could do: multilaterally negotiate in good faith and encourage inspections backed with relief of sanctions--to encourage Iran to step into a better 21st century agreement with us. And the GOP House contingent backing this is not accomplishing anything, actually, except for stating their willingness to fuck things up.

It's sort of weird that this is a theocratic thing: people wanting to do what certain Israel right-wingers prefer because of end-time reasons that you could look up if you felt like being really depressed about humankind. But in the real world, it would be actually great if we did actually useful things to discourage people thinking nukes are a solution because nuclear war is bad.  

Nearly 200 House Republicans don't think diplomacy regarding a nuclear Iran is worth admitting that diplomacy is a thing or Democratic government is legitimate. They are goddamn near revealing themselves to be lower than Iran hardliners on this score. They want to positively state that the very nature of democratic government is not to be trusted. They will never put US interests first if there is a specific political need for their party. They will always fuck over Democrats if they can. 

Even if it makes things demonstrably worse.  

I really can not stand these fuckers. They have no moral core, and don't know a good thing from a bad thing. They only know signifying for an audience that is dumb as hell. They can't even show the leadership needed to explain why their dumbass people are wrong, they would rather be popular than right. And this is wrong on so many levels. 

UPDATE: I'm the least professional person writing about this, because I'm literally putting out statements like "I hate these fuckers" (but I do, because acting like when the US government switched from a Democrat to a Republican in the WH means we are a whole new entity, as if we aren't one of the longest running democracies, is entire ass)  but there's kind of a FU clause in the new dealings:  

The Middle Eastern diplomat and an Iranian official indicated, however, that Tehran was prepared to accept a lesser measure - that in the event of a U.S. violation of the pact, Iran would be allowed to enrich to up to 60% purity again.

And frankly, I'm cool with that, because the US is the party that withdrew from the multilateral deal and the party whose participation undergirds whether Iran stays on target, so yeah, put in writing that reneging has a consequence because the soft skulled crabs who want no part of it don't seem to understand what the whole deal is about. 

Alex Jones and the Horrific Lie

 

Breaking: Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been found guilty by default in all of the Sandy Hook defamation suits — granting the families of 10 Sandy Hook shooting victims four sweeping victories.https://t.co/nBSFLNwuul

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 15, 2021

The Sandy Hook mass murder took place December 14, 2012.  It doesn't even feel that long ago. I remember the thing that broke me about it was thinking about all those little kids that close to Christmas and how that was going to be the anniversary for some families--thinking about their little kids and the presents they never got to open. Just every damn year. It should be unthinkable, but it wasn't unbelievable, because post-Columbine, mass shootings just kept happening. West Nickel Mines. Red Lake. Virginia Tech. 

But Alex Jones told a horrific lie about the Sandy Hook families. He said that the mass shooting never took place and they were crisis actors. What these families have gone through was extraordinary.  They suffered a horrific tragedy, and were persecuted for it on the basis of absolute liars and scoundrels saying their tragedy was a lie. 

Their loss of their children was called a lie. Can you imagine the horror? Wishing your kid was alive and you could hold them and being called a fake and threatened by online assholes who just didn't want to believe the objective truth of your life? 

Like me, like a normal person, the US president at the time, Barack Obama, cried talking about that loss, and was pilloried by conservatives for having normal human feelings. Alex Jones lied about that event and was rewarded by interviews with 2016 GOP candidate Trump and a continued listenership of extremely dumb people who never noticed that he was always wrong and also selling them stuff. He's a chubby little dude in his forties who looks sixty and sells vitamins because obviously. Look at him! Such vigor! Such angry abusive ex-husband who shouldn't have custody energy! Such eventually gonna help do an insurrection for clicks and clout kind of guy. Sure. Who doesn't want that? 

Yet he still has fans. He's a disgusting caricature of the worst kind of bloodsucker--but he's been made a mostly acceptable part of conservative media because of the Trump connection and because no one over on that side seems to give a shit about right and wrong anymore. They can't stake their vampires, stop their zombies, even acknowledge the monsters on their side are monsters. 

What Alex Jones has used his platform to do has been monstrous. He demonized people suffering a great loss, the kind that stays with one for life. Whatever financial price he pays (it won't ever be right) isn't enough. Had he decency, he would stop broadcasting lies. Had his listeners decency, they would stop wanting to hear them. 

But we don't live in the world where the people who like Alex Jones get why he's a scumbag, and we don't live in a world where scumbags naturally repent. So I hope he loses his ability to do his stupid show because it's a financial hardship and his followers go do something else. Fucking snort bathsalts and wrestle alligators. I don't know if I even care. 

I do, though. How did anyone get so warped as to call the families of murder victims out as liars and treat them so horrifically because of lies any critical thinking would have easily disposed of? This inability to think first, this lulling by platformed liars--we need to tell the people they must truly think about the things they think about. But like leading a horse to water--how do we make them think? 

Our Better Angels and Our Greater Devils

 Colin Powell knew that the UN speech he gave to lay out the case for war against Iraq on the sketchy basis of their weapons program would haunt him to the end. He was an intelligent man capable of great insight and scrupulous honesty. That's what makes his fault a bit worse: how does an adult, experienced leader go and peddle half truths (and unsubstantiated nonsense) to set the stage for a ground war that he knew would be brutal, that he warned the Bush Administration about (albeit in terms like "the Pottery Barn" rule, which seems awfully flip in the aftermath, doesn't it?) , as if guilelessly led by "a bad crowd"? 

It's impossible. And yet, he was not the worst of the Bush Administration lot, at all; just at the time, so exceptionally disappointing. And also, I believe in his own way he understood the extent to which his reputation was used to promote a war of choice that was not legitimately reasoned, and I note his later support of Obama and his rejection of Trump--but they were low key. 

Could he have served his country better were he more vocal? See, I don't have responsibility to not be vocal, so I say what I want. His position was as a soldier with a respect for civilian leadership who ceded his reputation to the service of his CINC. Maybe he felt that he served best by offering his opinion, but leaving it to the person selected by 5 members of the Supreme Court elected by the people. Maybe he understood, at least since the time he whitewashed the My Lai massacre, He had a vantage to to a political window of how war history got made. 

I don't believe in hero worship. We're all fragile skin sacks barely containing the drama caused by mutant brains that perceive and personify and signify a lot--a blessing and a curse. Colin Powell was better than a lot of our kind are, and not better than he could have been. He was a trailblazer and the people who know him well liked him a lot, but I have noted how one can smile and be a villain, I've noted how intelligent people can be persuaded to get it all wrong and defend getting it wrong long past when it made sense. 

Our better angels sounded in him, and our greater devils also had their way. This man died at the age of 84, with Parkinson's and multiple myeloma, a cancer that sadly, specifically has implications for the immune system, and he died of "Covid-19 complications", which is more like, "COVID-19 was fatal to Powell because of his immunocompromised state". Which, because he was also fully vaccinated, means anti-vaxxers are using his example to wage their war on science. 

This is sadly typical, and not what he or we deserve, It is only too sadly what our greater devils do with themselves, finding a figure to make their mischief with. Once again, his profile is lent to a bullshit right-wing narrative.

But my sympathies and condolences to those who loved him. One could not regret his fault so much, were there not also so much to redeem. And for those whose care for him predated his Iraq/Bush era error, perhaps redemption was never even in question. But I could not post an elegy without a reckoning--this is just my way. 

(Adding: Notwithstanding, read about something like birth defects in Iraq, and see how you feel about anything at all about the US as a country.)

9/11: Over the Horizon

 

The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family: https://t.co/eUX5WSImrD

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

There just isn't anything more apt to round out our 20 year misadventure in the War on Terror, than by this--a misguided drone strike that showed how far we had come, that we could be wrong from farther away instead of having to be wrong face to face and street by street. 

The memorial of 9/11 has been fraught for some time with me because of the cant and formulaic expressions of remembrance and the truisms that just strike me as false. "We came together that day." Tell it to visibly brown Muslim or Central Asian people who experienced discrimination, and find a kernel of what people came together to be. We needed to be unified to move forward, but we didn't need to do all we moved forward to do. 

The 9/11 fallen, those who died that day, and also their survivors, and the ones who have died of assorted toxins breathed in from working near or on the pile since and their survivors--they deserve every respect and support. But they were also used to sell an open-ended global war that was misguided in many ways. These ill-conceived decisions, occurring in part because short-sighted people didn't want to know any better and acted on what felt "right" politically, did more harm than good.  

Failure Has Many Fathers

 

Taliban Commander Who Led Attack on Afghan City Was Released From Prison Last Year, Officials Say - WSJ https://t.co/4qDJdyTyYc

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 16, 2021

The co-founder of the Taliban was captured under Obama and was released under Trump, and is now going to be the new leader of Afghanistan. Somehow, this is Biden's fault, because he inherited a withdrawal plan from Trump that was supported by the former guy until it looked bad, because that's how Trump rolls. 

But the problem was not just settling Al-Qaeda business and departing in Bush's first term, which always seemed like it should have been possible, but I think strategically, they fucked up Afghanistan in Bushworld because they really wanted to take a poke at Iraq. And if Afghanistan was wrapped up, the Iraq WMD crisis wouldn't have seemed as immediate.

 Leaving Obama to try and wind down Iraq according to the Bush-signed SOFA. Which wasn't leaving him with a great bunch of choices. Obama, to his credit, never tried to leave a mess in Syria--except of course, ISIS happened. 

And you know what Trump did with regards to our attempts to unfuck that. I'm not trying to place a partisan frame on what had happened, of course, just trying to smash the stupid lies Republicans want to tell about what they've been doing the last two decades. 

 (Just like the economy, re: unemployment and the debt, GOP does the damage, Democrats clean up.)

Mike (Klepto) Pompeo doesn't walk away from it. (Even if he'd rather be obnoxious about CRT and other stuff right now.)  The Bush Administration certainly shouldn't. They initiated the lie that kept us there--that we could fix it. That women and children depended on us. 

We were guilted into forever war. Biden is doing the honest thing. The buck is stopping with him. So for many lazy pundits, that means he gets the onus of failure? Pshh. I am not a goldfish. and can remember years of effort. Media pundits can and should do the same. 

Let Them Know, Joe!

 

President Biden's speech this evening presented us with good things--policies that will move us forward from the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, the resulting economic damage, and the deep divisions we still feel from the flame-out and attempted insurrection under the former guy, and they were presented with a fervid belief in the possibility and reality of America's greatness. It was a speech that promised to build on the successes of the first hundred days and invited the "other side" to please come along for the ride to do things that would be both really popular and beneficial.

He let us know: we could be creating good-paying jobs for the workers we currently have in a way that uses what we once trumpeted as American ingenuity and the spirit of invention. We could be working to provide cleaner water and safer infrastructure. We could be educating today's kids for tomorrow's jobs. We could be putting our money where our mouths are and invest in the future we want to see--because we believe in America. The ability to pull ourselves up and do better is within our reach, so let's get reaching. 

Joe Biden is in favor of the idea of America and the ideals of America. He just wants to do stuff better. Come on, man. Isn't that what we're about?

And you know what? I applauded the hell out of Biden's vision. He promises tough, vigilant national security and a robust economy--I'm for it. He wants us to reform immigration in a way that is not cruel and tries to confront the realities of migration in terms of the economic, political, and environmental challenges people are facing in their nation of origin. He's a realist, not an ideologue, but he does believe in the liberal tradition and the small "d" democracy that are this nation's great heritage. We are a nation made of an idea. And the idea is really good. We should probably do more of it.

( As a side note: Fuck you, Rich Lowry. We aren't a nation in the sense of people bound by blood, religion, or even a common tongue, and the expansion of this country's borders historically, combined with immigration, make the idea of thinking of us in simple geographical terms ludicrous. What are we? A creedal nation. An aspiration nation. An idea set forth by our nation's forefathers. The blood and soil notion has nothing to do with our historical or current experienced reality--but thanks for playing and demonstrating the limitations of trying to even perform discourse with today's "intellectual" conservatives!) 

Of course Republicans didn't like this speech.

Sleepy Ted Cruz might look like he's just dreaming about Cancun in the picture above, but I think he's really just closing his eyes because the idea of Democrats putting on their work boots to accomplish real things for their constituents while he's just slipping into his clown shoes every morning to do prat falls and seltzer sprays for great culture war justice might almost make him self-aware enough to develop an actual personality instead of just hating libs and calling it a personality. 

And I have nothing, not one damn thing, to say about Tim Scott's speech because there is nothing to say about it. It was a Republican rebuttal to a speech Biden didn't give about an America no one in particular lives in, and Joni Ernst, Bobby Jindal, or Marco Rubio all have done similarly out of touch responses. I am unmotivated by the GOP's message regardless of the face they put on it, because the message is always the same: Blame Democrats for stuff and do basically nothing but tax cuts and culture war. 

Anyway, my takeaway is that the man the Former Guy once called "Sleepy Joe Biden" is wide awake and ready to do stuff for the American people, and Republicans can't do anything but complain about it. And that just figures. And if they can't even do bipartisanship when it's good ideas that create jobs (do they hate jobs?) or provide health care innovations like lowering insurance premiums and drug costs and funding research for cancer and vaccines (so what, are Republicans in favor of high drug costs and cancer?) then fuck'em and let the electorate figure out who's putting in the hours. 

Joe let them know. And I am yet another woman (like Vice-President Harris and House Speaker Pelosi--the historic event of two women behind the president during an address of this nature) happy to stand behind this president and what he wants to do for us--like support VAWA, gun control, equal pay, protections for LGBTQ workers and so much more. 

To echo the sentiment from the last Democratic president: Yes, we can! And I want to believe we will.

Party Like it's 1959

 

You know, being lectured about whether it's cool to say "Jim Crow" or not about present voter suppression laws passed/proposed by Republicans is mighty Rich (Lowry), but the funny old thing about invoking Godwin is he isn't exactly right about what Godwin said (which was only that in online discussions, a comparison to Nazis will eventually come up--not that one has lost by so invoking, although it usually is over-the-top) and sometimes you have to call a fascist a fascist. But having another National Review writer argue that suppressing votes is good, actually is just--

Well, it's tradition, obviously. Of a long-standing sort. 

It's really hard to be sympathetic to cries that calling voter suppression laws what they are instead of the GOP's present sleight-of-tongue "voter integrity" are unfair when if we consider what voting can mean to a community in terms of allocation of resources--as our present argument regarding what constitutes infrastructure and who needs it, and as the previous arguments about, for example, the ACA, indicate, demographics do say a lot about what policies are proposed, what laws are enforced, what resources are allocated, and who benefits. It certainly isn't an argument about who is a "better" voter. Or at least, a better educated one. 

It's been about race, and we know this very good and well by now. Take the recent NYT story about what motivated the January 6 rioters. It only said something we already knew about Trump supporters in general: they are mad white people mad about white stuff. 

The GOP in the post-Trump era is just McCarthyism and anti-civil rights shit interspersed with pro-nuclear family circa-1950s and pro-religion stuff. Witness the Trump campaign's evangelical lawyer (who doesn't seem to know "Do not bear false witness" is one of Moses' top ten) calling Sen. Raphael Warnock a false Christian for saying that the resurrection alone is not the sole message of Christianity. As a Catholic adjacent atheist, I was raised to understand "faith without works is dead" and remain, culturally Christian as a Matthew moralist--I hold that you have to werk for your salvation, honey. 

But calling a Black pastor a non-Christian isn't just an echo of denying President Obama his Christian faith as a way of rejecting fellowship with him in mere racism, It's like denying him his Christianity because he's a Commie, the same way the hard-right once denied MLK his faith. Just as the Right today wants to label every little thing to the left "socialist". And use, as a donation-begging scam, the fear of being a traitor to encourage people to subscribe to more funding of this bullshit--otherwise you are a DEFECTOR!  (The term we used to use for people from behind the Iron Curtain who came here to the "free world" or vice versa.)

They aren't a 2021 party--they are regressive and backwards. And suppressive. And yeah, kind of racist. 

Talking Past the Problem

In response to the growing outcry for police reform, President Trump had a Rose Garden signing of an executive order to try to encourage some change in policing, and while some have referred to the effort as "woeful",  I'm not entirely sure what more can be expected from this president at this time. 

I guess that sounds damning, and of course, that's how I mean it. The man has honestly spoken in favor of police brutality in the past, and has long been critical of the Black Live Matter movement. It's easy to be skeptical of the intentions of a politician (for this is exactly what Trump is, now) who has shown no concern for a reckoning regarding policing previously, and has even advertised the desire to see the death sentence for men eventually found to be innocent of a grave crime. His most recent step towards addressing the protests in the wake of the George Floyd slaying was an empty photo op that relied on brutality towards protesters to even be made possible. 

Which isn't to say that the executive order is completely useless. I think that some of what is raised has utility in regards to creating a more flexible emergency response that doesn't rely only on police force alone but integrates social services, and creating a culture with strong professional standards and a culture of accountability through training programs and a database to keep track of officer violations (that might lead to removing officers who consistently engage in civil rights abuses and prevent their being moved along to other police forces) are actually reasonable and apt responses. I just don't know how as an executive order it can reach down to the local level, and feel that congressional legislation would have more leverage in facilitating change. 

But the actual remarks made by Trump today strike me as problematic, and consistent with a worldview that isn't going to really address what has brought so many people to the streets. In a campaign year, he had to take a dig at former President Obama and his current presidential opponent, the former Vice-President Biden--quite undeserved, in that the previous administration certainly did do the work, and Trump's DOJ tore it down (just like the Admnistration tore down the previous administration's pandemic response tools).  Trump had to talk up the economy that he squandered with his pitiable COVID-19 response with a promise to bring it back, deviating from the topic. 

He also quite wildly referred to school choice:

We achieved the lowest black, Hispanic, and Asian unemployment rates in American history and we will do it again, we’ll do it again. We’re fighting for school choice, which really is the civil rights of all time in this country. Frankly school choice is the civil rights statement of the year, of the decade and probably beyond because all children have to have access to quality education. A child’s zip code in America should never determine their future and that’s what was happening. We’re very, very strong on school choice and I hope everybody remembers that. And it’s happening, it’s already happened, but it’s happening. We have tremendous opposition from people that know they shouldn’t be opposing it, school choice. All children deserve equal opportunity because we are all made equal by God, so true.

This history of school choice has not actually been all that much about equality, so much as segregation of schooling by other means. That felt a little like an intentional dog whistle.

But he also wildly deviated off topic to say things like there is an AIDS vaccine (nope--and PrEP, although great, is not the same thing), and made empty platitudes like this:

Americans can achieve anything when we work together as one national family. To go forward we must seek cooperation not confrontation. We must build upon our heritage, not tear it down. And we must cherish the principles of America’s founding as we strive to deliver safe, beautiful, elegant justice and liberty for all.

This, along with "Americans want law and order, they demand law and order. They may not say it, they may not be talking about it but that’s what they want. Some of them don’t even know that’s what they want but that’s what they want...sounds an awful lot to me like: "You will take the law and order you get, so we'll create the law and you go and be orderly." And that is not exactly how this democracy is supposed to go.

He is saying things that some people might want to hear, but he's talking past the problem--it's a set piece for his campaign. We need a partner who will work towards a bigger solution, and he won't be it.

Not ever.

(FWIW--I failed to point it out myself, so if it were unclear, Trump is as disinclined to ever mention structural or systemic racism as part of the roots of our injustice system as he once claimed Democrats were to --inaccurately--refer to Islamic extremism as a driver of terrorism.)

The So-Called Grown-Up President is Mad

The level of projection here is just incredible pic.twitter.com/1rzNgKl9Qa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 17, 2020

Well, at least, he sounds a bit testy, to me. I guess it might have something to do with the former president seeming to refer to him obliquely with the mention of "so-called grown-ups" in his address to the 2020 graduating class, but Obama has been very much on his mind in other ways, as well. After all, you can't have an "Obamagate" (which seems to be, which shouldn't be surprising by now, a bit of fake news from Trump and friends) without Obama. Or maybe he's still mad that the president he wants to call "incompetent" didn't leave him with clearer instructions on how to do the job he is currently struggling at. (After all, the comparisons were always odious, and become more so all the time.)

But I think it's not just one thing about Obama that eats at him, it's everything. And as far as I'm concerned, Trump can be mad, stay mad and die mad.

United States of Disaster

For the first time ever, all fifty states are under a declaration of major disaster. Even if the spread of the deadly virus has not afflicted all states equally, all states have been seeded with the germ and are negotiating mitigating practices with the predictable effects such limitations have on regular economic commerce. We have reached milestones unparalleled in other nations: a half million infected, 20 thousand dead. We have outpaced the toll of Italy and Spain, and despite the successes in California, Washington, and the plateau appearing in New York's numbers, it is reasonable to assume that the struggle is far from over, especially as testing remains sporadic and local approaches to social distancing nationwide are indifferently followed. 

It's probably just a reflex of the pedant to point out that whenever Trump says "no one saw this coming", that of course everyone did. FEMA did.  Military intelligence did. The previous administration was aware this could happen:

But really, what does that have to do with the Trump Administration, except an awful lot?  Trump could have seen what was coming, but was too far up his own behind, and had advisors too keen to please him to bother with telling him terrible things. And even when he was told terrible things would take place, he didn't understand them. And you can really tell, because he goes off and talks about the wily invisible genius germ, that won't be tamed by mere antibiotics, which is so wrong as to the science of anything as to exist in it's own universe of wrong.

Actually, whenever Trump opens his mouth he seems to do more harm than good. He blames others, he casts about for conspiracy theories, he berates the media, he blames the victims, he shows no compassion or sympathy, and spreads misinformation. And people echo his more dangerous offerings, like his desire to reopen the economy at the signs that social distancing is for now succeeding, as if unaware that this could be disastrous for both human lives and the economy in the longer run if such measures are ended too soon, or his paean to unproven pharmaceutical protocols (which he obviously doesn't have the "common sense" to talk about, at all, because actual common sense would require knowing he is not, in fact, a doctor, but a reality show con artist who bankrupted casinos).

The remarkable thing in all of this, is that Trump will even ask you to show some measure of concern for himself! The most put-upon human to ever be in office! To have endured all this. And even get impeached, and have a media who never says anything good about him, besides!

Like a person who kills his parents and wants mercy for being an orphan (or would have let the virus wash over this country like a refiner's fire, assuming some part of it was dispensable dross).  The whole country is a disaster area. Let's never forget under whose watch that happened.  Let's not forget who made everything worse. He has. With the determination and zest and wrongness that almost (?) seem deliberate, as if no mere mortal could be that wrong, by sheer chance.  And he owns this, and no arrow-in-flight prediction of "acceptable" deaths should really suffice. The damage is well underway. We're just enduring it. And whenever we pull out, however well things might eventually go--nothing ever erases the faults that are Trump's.

Those successes will be the result of the people we actually saw doing the work, regardless of what comes out of Trump's lying mouth.

Scoundreltown

There is a saying to the effect that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and I guess it looks a little bit to me like some folks want to set up a flag-draped resort community and throw stones from their little red white and blue glass bungalows. Of course, it's the Squad, alleged Ayatollah sympathizers, who can't be patriotic enough, or even deserving of PTSD if they came up in a war zone. According to the new hymnal,  Democrats are supposedly "in love with terrorists" now, as Rep. Doug Collins wants to put it, prompting veteran and Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth to respond explicitly:

"I left parts of my body in Iraq fighting terrorists." Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost both of her legs serving in the Iraq War, ripped into the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee who has accused Democrats of being "in love with terrorists." https://t.co/2NpcDSyWdk

— CNN (@CNN) January 10, 2020

I don't expect Republicans to feel the sting of that one. I remember Max Cleland, who also left body parts behind, having his patriotism questioned, too.  I remember how scurrilous lies against John Kerry (who was later integral to the Iran nuclear deal and speaks about it eloquently) led to propaganda against his presidential campaign that also had some confused partisans practically mocking all purple heart recipients.

I know Trump had no problem mocking John McCain's service, or feuding with Gold Star families (plural--more than once). All the more reason for Collins to rethink his sycophancy for Trump if he really cared about who supports Gold Star families. (Trump, by the way, penalized Gold Star families with his tax plan, habitually lies about who achieved the veteran's CHOICE bill (it was a McCain-Sanders bill, signed by Obama)  and has given lip service to reducing troop levels in our wars abroad while raising troop levels.