TWGB: Fall of the House of Trump?

 

Trump, looking mad as a coot and wheezing faintly, made up for the lack of public appearances he has made lately by offering an hour of his time to reporters at Mar-A-Lago. It was awkward. Usually, Trump is one burnt-ochre joker, projecting bravado and landing insults--even if he's vague on policy or leery of answering questions directly. Here, he seemed pale, tired, sandbagged by recent events. 

Among weird damn things he said: he might have confused Jerry Brown and Willie Brown in a story about a helicopter ride. Both gentlemen have the same last name and are longstanding figures in California politics but there are some differences. Trump never told Willie Brown to rake the damn forest to prevent fires, for example. (I know Trump alleges he has survivor's guilt over a tragic helicopter ride from like 30 years ago or so, but that's about another coast entirely.) 

He sadly whinged on about how President Joe Biden must be feeling--with his "presidency stollen" (I swear!) from him. Shades of this post on his FAILING! Truth Social:

There's a Trend

 

NEW: The NRCC cut a $5k check to Marjorie Taylor Greene in late September, solidifying its ties to the Q supporting candidate https://t.co/SVwM73BOJK

— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 24, 2020

See, I have been doing this stupid blogging thing for more than a minute, and this year, the Republicans are fielding conspiracy theorists, open racists, and seem to be ready to make the worst sort of people (yes, the worst) (no really, even at such a tender age) into faves. And they are smearing actual heroes. 

You know, the way John Kerry was swiftboated and Max Cleland as well. Democrats send their best to do their best, and as for Republicans? Well, as Mitch McConnell's bench-stuffing with barely and even unqualified people shows, for them, any warm body will do for the judiciary branch, and we can assume something very nearly the same about the legislature, I mean, they don't even think everyone should vote, or that every vote should count, so they would greatly rather Congress not be some kind of meritocracy or god-forbid popularity contest. 

 In this way, the people who settle into office as Republicans are either ok to pretty bad people frightened of being primaried* by even worse people that the party will still support, and the folks running for office as Democrats understand they need to be better and work harder to withstand the worst that will (yes, will) be thrown at them.

What do you think better serves this country? To my mind, the party that isn't in a race to the worst should be your choice, but hey. I ain't the boss of you. 

* You take Sen. Lindsey Graham, who always behaved like a man terrified of being primaried from the right while also being aware of a demographic time bomb that might make running hard-right anyhow less desirable over time. And so he did his shiny faced best and there's the thanks he gets. 

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.

When Did This Thing Go So Wrong?

Hey, all, long time, no post here, but I just wanted to check in to say I'm pretty good, even if the Republic seems a little weird. If you know my handle, you can follow me on Twitter, where I don't comment often, but retweet with a sure hand and a speed-reading eye. Or something like that. Don't bother emailing me. Email is like using the telegraph or a fax machine. 

Anyhoo, obviously I've got some thoughts to jot if I'm taking to ye olde longforms again, and this is about the whole Kavanaugh nomination. I have no idea if he's getting up or down-voted (even if I feel like, barring a bombshell in three minutes, McConnell is definitely on track to speed to a vote regardless of the optics because his programming on SCOTUs appointments is a legacy issue timed to elections and partisanship, and I also know that pretend-moderates like Collins can't be stupid enough to think we are all that stupid), but I do know that one of the delights of not blogging with the flow of the news cycle is getting some rudimentary sense of history back. I also think my regular readers know me regarding me esteem for the timeliness and need for the Me Too movement. Kavanaugh strikes me as a member of Team Bro--he (apparently) has ascribed since early manhood to a version of masculinity that talks shit and does dumb things. Does that mean he has for real and certain done things that disqualify him for the seat?

Well, I know he's a partisan hack and perjured himself during the hearing so far and not for the first time, and probably is a vote against Roe vs Wade, so, frankly, even if I didn't natively have enough to nail him as a sexual assault perpetrator as a larval popped-collar preppy young Republican, I can feel pretty sure that he's a big old nope-in-waiting in a world where just the facts pertained--he's a guy who wouldn't be at the top of your SCOTUS list unless you were a chief executive who really was hoping that some executive privilege shine would prevent you from getting indicted on a charge of potential light treason. (Can I briefly mention what a wondrous penumbra executive privilege would have to cast on such an occasion where written opinion would presume that other assumptions of rights bestowed by the white spaces in the law as opposed to the black were eclipsed? But I digress.)

And yet it's been quite clearly alleged that the hesitant claims of drunken sleaziness (by other people, not those admitted in his own yearbook or memorialized in an albeit fictionalized version of himself from a close high school companion) are a part of a "Vast Left Wing Conspiracy".  Great shades of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" commented upon by the 2016 presidential election popular vote-winner, back when Kavanaugh was a part of that brigade, who uselessly spent taxpayer money investigating the suicide of her good friend Vince Foster, despite the pain of that man's family, and who spared no feelings in encouraging the most salacious and hurtful lines of questioning re: Monica Lewinsky.

If Kellyanne Conway or Mitch McConnell think they can get my fucking sympathy for poor old disrespected Brett, they've got this whole thing badly wrong. But they don't want my sympathy, they want the pissed off RW base who needs to see whores give birth to their babies they didn't want to be overjoyed that Roe Vs Wade has finally fallen. (See: Everything Erick Erickson has been Tweeting, lately because, wow! Us bitches have just been killing our children, for a value of children for us feminazis that is mostly teaspoon-sized with tails and no possible threat of pain, and his version being angelic teacup-toddlers who have a hotline to babby Jesus.) Also payback for Robert Bork, I guess, because Merrick Garland never existed. And the base doesn't realize Bork was a fucking mess. Or maybe they do--their kind of fucking mess. 

See, the other thing I have gotten perspective about from my blogular absence was the sheer difference between the sides. I abstained from chiming in about the death of Senator John McCain because I wanted to abstain from his hallowing--the spectre of St. McCain threatened to dampen the urge to Resist, and this doesn't work in any way, shape or form. For us libs, McCain's actual progressive usefulness to our side was always more of a promise than a threat to the Republican establishment. And the touchy-feely niceness of bipartisan remembrance, like GWB sharing hard candies with former FLOTUS Michelle Obama, really doesn't change a thing. Kavanaugh worked for Bush, and those withheld docs from his time working for that administration mean something. Did he support torture? (Amnesty International never weighs in on court noms--but here, they have.) Bush is still supportive of this freaking guy.  He didn't suddenly morph into some resistance dude over Werther's Originals with our "going high" spokesperson. 

And I'm not for going high, myself anymore. I am entirely down with hitting these fuckers right in the nuts.  Mitch McConnell, Russia's dubiously-useful idiot Donald Trump, and yep, even pore ole alleged incel until he was shockingly past high school Brett Kavanaugh, who somehow thinks talking about the activity of his junk post secondary school absolves him of any weirdness (as if penetration was the only kind of abuse!) all probably need some down-low smacking where it will hurt and count. 

And that down-low smack goes to anybody who wants to know where this thing went so wrong and why people are talking about their personal business (protesters of Kavanaugh are telling Congressional aides the stories of their assaults, the time they also realized they were Me Too) while they protest this latest outrageous degradation of norms and propriety. 

Trump and McConnell and any number of RW spokesfolks can claim Kavanaugh is a "fine man". I don't know what their definition of fine man is, though. Copacetic? Role-knowing? See, I remember the 2004 election, when John Kerry was what many of us libs would call a fine man, and he was Swift-boated by the same folks who called Obama a Kenyan and a Muslim. And he mentioned Dick Cheney's daughter in what all of us would have considered an off-hand way as being lesbian--which isn't a smear for Dems. It isn't. And yet--this mention was a big deal for Republicans.  It was completely true--she was lesbian, and mentioning it was beyond the pale. Even if things said contemporaneously about Kerry were fucking lies. And Dick Cheney was and is a proponent of torture. 

The right wing and the left in this country seem to have totally different ideas of what is even good. There isn't a great overlap of ideals anymore from what I can tell, and if that is the case, I'm just for fucking the Pro-Trumpists side right the hell up.

I don't know or care where this thing went wrong. I just know I stay resolutely on the side that isn't pro-torture and pro-infinite executive stay out of jail cards, and I'm pro-women aren't the sum total of their reproductive parts and pro-rubbing Mitch McConnell's Stepford Senator jowls into not delivering this particular Bro Keggernaugh to the SCOTUS.

Here I stand, I can do no other.  

So Much Iran News!

Between snarking on public figures and dishing out environmental news, I try (key word: "try") to keep on top of foreign affairs. This week was trying. I was already a bit behind on blogging about the SOTU, so I also missed blogging about the capture, and release, of 10 US sailors who were in Iranian waters.

It's not that I didn't care, mind you--it just that when I heard of it, it was already determined that they were going to be released. I might be conflicted by how it was handled on Iran's part, but I'm wholly unsympathetic to people who want to play the "optics" game about how what the Iranian footage of the sailors looked like. Yes, Iran has to make it look a certain way for their folks at home. Yes, it looks shitty to us. It's almost like there are two very different points of view at work! But did I second-guess whether they were really releasing them--no. Timing.

It is coincidental that Iran has also released four Americans ahead of confirmation by the IAEA that Iran has complied with their end of the nuclear agreement. But it should also be recognized as being due to very hard work by the US State Department occurring alongside the work on the nuclear deal. I'm also (no surprise if you're following this blog) not really sympathetic to criticisms of either deal. The seven Iranians we're releasing aren't "most wanted criminals"--they violated sanctions on trade (and the US apparently feels so-so on that score depending upon who one is). The $150 billion that Iran is supposedly "getting" is the unfreezing of their own assets as a part of sanction relief. And we can always add sanctions as Iranian misbehavior dictates without necessarily scuttling any part of the deal.

All in all, it seems like pretty positive news to me.

The Iran Deal: A New Beginning

The announcement of a deal to curb Iran's nuclear program should be viewed as a pretty epic diplomatic achievement. They're giving up an awful lot, and what the West is doing is not punishing them economically so much. When you look at the details, it probably helps to consider that if there were no deal--we would actually not get any of this. They'd still have the same amount of uranium, keep all their centrifuges, and enrich it to whatever the hell degree they like. The alternatives to negotiation that some people seem to favor, which is war, is conceding billions of dollars and lives, compared to which, giving up some sanctions that can always get slapped back on with a resolution pretty much sounds asinine.

What I'm saying is: I genuinely think most of the critics haven't looked over the details, and are making no sense. Their complaints are a little like a dog barking at a vacuum cleaner. Something's going on, they don't approve, woof! Dumb, kneejerk "appeasement" rhetoric just doesn't line up what has actually taken place. (It's especially rich when Jeb Bush tries to use it, but frankly, he doesn't seem to understand foreign policy--period. Too many big-syllable words, I guess.)

This achieves what 30 years of hostility hasn't done. It's a big freaking deal. If we had an informed, sane national dialogue, the reaction would not be so partisan.

A Solid Framework to Build On

Today we heard good news about an agreement regarding the framework of a deal to prevent the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and it sounds like it might be pretty comprehensive in terms of inspections and making sure things are working, and it seems like there are many Iranians who are happy about it-not including the hardliners but they can stick it, anyway.

For what it's worth, I think our hardliners can stick it if they don't like it, too. And I am really hoping they listen to some anti-proliferation experts and not op-ed columnists for a backgrounder. But I seriously do not expect much from the bright boys and girls who wanted to really, really let the Iranian government in on the little secret that US leadership changes, like as a popularly-elected democracy and all. (Which we've been for over 200 years--so maybe they have got the idea, already?)

Senator Rubio and the Foreign Policy Gap

Via ThinkProgress, an important moment in the discussion regarding US foreign policy with respects to Iran occurred between Senator Marco Rubio and Secretary of State John Kerry:

During a tense exchange with Kerry at a Senate Foreign Relations committee on Wednesday, Rubio confronted the former Massachusetts senator. “I believe that much of our strategy with regards to ISIS is being driven by a desire not to upset Iran so they don’t walk away from the negotiating table on the deal that you’re working on,” the potential GOP presidential candidate declared. “Tell me why I’m wrong.”

Kerry responded forcefully. “Because the facts completely contradict that,” he said, before offering to discuss more details in classified session with Rubio. But the likely GOP presidential contender didn’t take up the offer and pressed on with the line of questioning, claiming that the United States is going easy on terrorism because Iran does not support America’s campaign against ISIS.

But the two assumptions that he has are false--of course, the US is involved in fighting ISIL, whether Sen. Rubio thinks the response is adequate or not, and of course, Iran is also opposed to ISIL, because why in the world would a Shiite government want a radical Sunni Wahhabist caliphate in their backyard? To think, nay, insist, that the Obama Administration is soft-pedaling the fight with ISIL to please Iran would be weapons-grade ignorance. And that is precisely where Rubio is coming from.

You "Twig" This?

A very interesting exchange happened between Secretary of State Kerry and Sen. John McCain today as they sparred over foreign policy from two different outlooks:

First, McCain blasted Kerry for taking what he considers tepid measures against Russia. 

“My hero Teddy Roosevelt used to say talk softly and carry a big stick,” McCain said. “What you’re doing is talking strongly and carrying a very small sick. In fact, a twig.” 

When it was his turn to speak, Kerry took issue with the Arizona senator's pessimistic outlook on negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. 

"We’re talking! The option is, you go to war," Kerry said. "A lot of people are ready to drop bombs all the time. We can do that. We have the ability.”

(Via Talking Points Memo)

I've long been of the opinion that foreign policy biases in part revolve around feelings of security or insecurity. Leaving aside the somewhat, um, Freudian? note regarding whether the US at present is carrying "a twig", I want to point out that it kind of sounds like Sen. McCain is saying that without the potential of military force, US foreign policy has no leverage. Sec. Kerry, on the other hand, is confident that we have the ability to use force, but have other kinds of leverage. The latter position strikes me as being more secure about what we can do--and more flexible about what we ought to do.

I don't think it makes sense to disparage a "twig" when one might be looking at an olive branch. Just saying.

Climate Sunday: Weapons of Mass Distraction

I have to give Secretary of State John Kerry credit for giving climate change its proper due in his recent speech in Jakarta, even though the language he used seems to have rankled some nerves.

By comparing climate change to weapons of mass destruction or terrorism and criticizing climate change denialists, he received quick responses from the likes of Newt Gingrich, who suggested that Kerry should resign over the comments, and Senator John McCain, who expressed surprise that this was a major concern of Sec. Kerry's while other things were going on in the world.

To tackle the obvious first--seriously, John Kerry should resign for a somewhat different opinion from one held by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was for doing something about climate change before he was against it? That seems awfully severe, doesn't it? And really, the rest of his complaint is pretty much similar to Sen. McCain's--isn't there other things the US should concern itself with?

To answer the first question--I am not sure why Newt Gingrich doesn't think global climate change is of sufficient seriousness to merit exactly that kind of speech, but that is on him. We've already begun to experience severe weather events, which are coming more frequently. Climate change will affect the availability of water in some areas (see how drought affects Texas and California today) and the ability to grow food to feed ourselves, raising the prices of everything.  Economies of nations will suffer and collapse. Climate refugees will flood the areas that remain temperate enough to still have opportunities for survival. If this scenario plays out--that is deadly damn serious and affects our whole global civilization. (You know, the one where humans are the dominant species on this planet.) Avoiding it would be preferable, dealing with the unavoidable bits would be nice. You might think a person as interested in saving western civilization as Gingrich purports to be could get behind saving this place, Earth, where we are having it.

Climate Sunday: Are Things Looking up for Political Change on the Climate Front?

I'd really like to think so. For one thing, Obama gave addressing climate change a strong mention in his inaugural address:



For another, it looks like we will see some movement on climate in congress (if movement is still a thing congress ever does) with a new task force being introduced. Also, another heartening thing is that Sen. Kerry during his confirmation hearing for Secretary of State gave a great answer regarding his views on climate change and how policy could not only address the science, but tie into jobs and investments:



(Although if I compare this to the response to climate from one of the GOP's rising stars, Sen. Marco Rubio, I wonder for the future. I really do.)

What I hope to see in the coming months and years is for politicians who support and accept the science to simply continue mentioning it as accepted science and proceed as if the denialist p.o.v. is so much bushwa. Because it is.