TWGB: Terminal Main Character Syndrome

 

A young DOGE staffer has left because the Wall Street Journal had some questions, as in, "Is this racist account you? " I'm sure Elon Musk is shocked--shocked! That there are little racist pishers in his Kekistanian domain.  Wow. So exotic and not-vetted. 

What's really funny about this is, when our actual confirmed Secretary of State, former US Senator and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio, made a big statement about not going to the G20 in Johannesburg:

I wanted to ask the Real President (tm) Elon Musk if this was the result of his bitch titties being in a wringer over the concept of the US confronting the Woke Mind Virus on what used to be his terf. I mean, "turf".

Of course, I do. I was just confused because the US is obviously in a transitional period and our pronouns stopped being US and seem to be he/huh! regarding Astroboy. 

He's not the president that MAGA voted for, but he's what they got. Up in our databases, taking our numbers, deciding the size of the government HE thinks we deserve. Regardless of what any vetting into him might show, or what his conflicts of interest might be. 

The Kennedy Hearing was Ugly

 

When your own family thinks you are a weird conspiracy freak who is uniquely unqualified and literally call you a grifting predator, well, that's probably bad news, right? 

But when quizzing by US Senators demonstrates you don't know Medicare from Medicaid and have not just trimmed your public pronouncements to suit your audience but are a legal grifter profiting off of your own BS (as Sen. Warren demonstrated), well, that hurts to be aired publicly, in so many words, doesn't it? 

Or maybe it doesn't.

This guy gave himself a brainworm from consuming roadkill, admits to dumping a bear corpse in a public park, seems sketchy about how germ theory works, has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, has opinions about the AIDS virus and vaccines that would have been shameful and out of date 25 years ago, let alone today, and yet?

He's got influence in his corner. Why they want him, I don't know. You might think people would want someone who isn't a whole fucking flake in an important position like Secretary of Health and Human Services--

Unless you just aren't that interested in health and will be goddamned if you see it as a basic human service. 

"Free" Florida and "Don't Say Gay"

 

I don't talk a lot about the identity I simultaneously have and don't express. I'm queer. I'm a straight-married bi woman. I don't have a lot of experience as a queer person because I'm basically massively introverted and if you're a stacked femme-presenting female, dudes ask after you and that's easy enough. But I don't read as straight out in the world exactly, either, and I'm pissed about the idea that people need to be shoved back in the closet. Which is what Florida's "Don't say Gay" is about. 

"Don't ask, don't tell" was discontinued in the US military in 2011. I was a bi person in college when this was initiated in the US military in 1993, and was somehow the enlightened option. This was after the ACT-up/Queer Nation demonstrations regarding AIDS and the decision of GOP administrations (Reagan and Bush) that queer people had no lives that straight (Christian) people were bound to respect. 

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.)

Heads on a Pike, Anyone?

TONIGHT: White House impeachment defense surrogate Mark Meadows (R-NC), alongside three GOP members of Congress, tells @NorahODonnell that he believes Republican senators will face political repercussions if they break with Pres. Trump; watch more at 6:30 p.m. ET. pic.twitter.com/uke5VOCEgg

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 27, 2020

I'm reasonably sure that the artificial pearls of the GOP Senators who balked at Rep. Adam Schiff's reiteration of a CBS news story are at least durable enough to withstand this assault upon their wide-eyed cherubic vision of the benevolence of President Trump and their boundless appreciation that he has not politically poleaxed any or all of them yet, amen.

See also:

Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man. He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2020

Oh jeepers creepers, there's no vengefulness here, oh my gosh no. I mean, unless you look at everything Trump does ever including the time he denied health insurance to his dead brother's boy and the long-standing feuds he continues with people even after they have died.

The correct response to this of a co-equal branch of government might, and I am not holding out hope, just offering suggestions, be to say "Fuck you, now it's war." He's guilty. Manifestly, even self-confessedly so in some ways. Mulvaney copped to the quid pro quo, Bolton is fixing to publish it, and Sondland spilled his heart out in the House testimony that everyone was in the loop. The picture will never get better, and there are "tapes".

But here's my epistle to the Republicans:

I hate to do the Bible stuff myself as a nonbeliever, but what price the presidency (the world) if the cost is your integrity (immortal soul)? Dems might even try to forget how much Pence is entirely in the loop if you sold the MF out.

Who stands for the truth? There's no reward in it. It isn't going to save your seat. It isn't going to make you a hero. It just makes you actually good.

If there was any other reason to ever run for the Senate than to be honest and do the right thing, I am so sorry. That reason was wrong. Just give a shit about the truth. Just do the right thing. At the end of the day, not having a government of moral monsters might just mean something, and if you ever wanted civility to return, you have to start with siding, even sometimes, against madness. These fellow party-members are saying the calculus is, serve Trump or politically die. And if you go along, you are already some kind of dead. Because you went with the flow, and followed a multitude to do evil.

Feck. I don't think the GOP Senate listens to me, a D-list blogger of The Left. And the schmaltzy moral smack-downs have already been flying fast and furious to no avail.

So here's another way of looking at it--you're not locked in here with President Trump, so much as he's locked in here with you. If you found your unified voice, you could peel the bark off his support. Wrong is just wrong. There is only so much shit any reasonable person can take, let alone a party of reasonable commonsense people who have been asked one nonsense thing too far.

I am not rooting for the Republican party. The Republican party has been the party of Kissinger and Watergate and Iran-Contra and laughing at AIDS patients my whole life. The party of misrepresenting MLK while promoting Voter ID and Crosscheck, the party of Gingrich and Hastert, and the party where after 40 years of knowing what was up the reality of the October Surprise and El Mozote massacre are finally being proven history. (Vindicating many journalists and human rights activists reportage at the time.)

Look, I never wished your party well. If the US had a Liberal Democrat and a Socialist party as our main two, I'd be satisfied. The Republican party is too insular and anti-multicultural to even be competent at diplomacy. You actually had 47 should-have-known better people sign a letter against the "Obama" (multilateral) Iran nuclear deal. Tom Cotton is a life-support system for an adam's apple, not a plausible foreign policy hand, but older, wiser people signed on to effectively troll....Dems. Against an actual plausible multilateral enforceable Iran antinuclear deal. Bravo. This was how you got Trump. By watching Fox News and believing it or thinking your constituents believing it mattered instead of showing leadership and cancelling them!

Let me tell you about cancel-culture--it's great! When some fuckhead news shill or other asshole signifies assholery, you counter them with facts and say they can't exist unless they get right. That's how you dominate your party's discourse, instead of Tuna Lamprey being out there on a national news network for some reason ever. What is her expertise? Like, what?

We are different, you conservatives and me. But we live on the same landmasses. What about admitting "orange man" (we know it is tv makeup which actually makes it sorrier!) actually is bad because all the things he does looks bad, and then we move on to how we talk like human beings with sense together from here? Your heads don't have to be on a pike. We get honest. You recognize Trump is a racist obnoxious pig who isn't relevant to our shared future.


Leftists love asylum-seekers. Treat us like the sympathetic bitches we are. Ditch that zero and be the hero you want to be. We will support you. Maybe. But Trump in power means everybody will eventually get just a little fucked. Some a lot. Is that your king?

A little Late for World AIDS Day, But Aren't we Ever?

I fond myself transfixed by this video of White House press conferences regarding AIDs, and I think the thing I need to single out is the laughter. The stigma of being gay overrode the seriousness of the spread of a killer disease, and continued to do so among government officials and press personnel for some time. Right about this time, Rock Hudson tried to inveigh upon the White House to let him get treatment where he might actually get results. (He was turned down. )