Category Archives: current events

Suicide by gun doesn’t count! UNFAIR!

Our democracy is pay to play, now more than ever.   The Federalist Society caucus on the Supreme Court, in its infamous (unanimous) 5-4 Citizens United v. FEC decision, in 2010, ruled that money is speech and limiting its power in politics offends the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.   If you have more money, you get more speech, unlimited money equals unlimited speech, fair is fair.   Even if you’re a legal fiction, a certain perpetual type of business organization, you get additional, unlimited speech as a “person”.   Corporations are people.   You want proof?   They have freedom of speech, the intoxicating freedom, since 2010, to spend unlimited sums to advance their political aspirations.  That’s freedom, baby.

Sometimes such freedom is not reasonable or explainable.   Let me explain.

I’ve long noticed that gun suicides, an alarming number of American dead every week (about 458 at the 2018 rate), are not counted for purposes of gun fatality statistics in the United States.  I know, I know…  The National Rifle Association (reputedly Trump’s largest single donor during the 2016 election cycle) insists that including the bloated number of gun suicides would totally skew the gun fatality numbers and make gun ownership look way more dangerous than it actually is.  They don’t even have a rationale for not including gun suicides in the tally, but, the beauty part, they don’t need one.  The mass media always seems to go along with the NRA on this.

I noticed last week that PBS (our public broadcasting service), in a recent NewsHour piece about gun violence, didn’t mention the shocking number of suicides by gun — which they excluded while simply noting that gun suicide “makes up the largest proportion of gun deaths in America.”    PBS reported, in another recent piece I found, that last year 23,800 Americans killed themselves with guns.    We also hear that American suicide numbers are going up constantly and that suicide by gun is by far the most successful of the way of doing it, comprising more than half of the deaths (although only 6% of all attempts).  [1]

An hour after sending off a piece on this hideous truth to the Times, which I titled Et tu, PBS? I was watching a clip of Ari Melber from MSNBC that made me add (to myself) Et tu, MSNBC?  Melber spoke of encouraging signs of bipartisan progress on combatting the gathering climate catastrophe and our American plague of deadly gun violence.   He showed this graphic of gun deaths so far in 2019:

Screen Shot 2019-08-14 at 8.39.24 PM.png  

I did a quick mental calculation of 7.5 months of 23,8000 annual suicides by gun and realized the Gun Violence Archive (whatever that is) [2] had not counted (here I reached for my calculator) at least 14,875 victims of fatal gun violence (seven and a half months at last years rate).  Neither had MSNBC. 

So here we have another cooked “statistic” that is served up to us as a sobering “fact”.  Ari Melber and his team could easily have done the quick search and the calculation I did — in our instant information age it would have taken them a moment to get the actual number of gun fatalities in America. 

The number they would have arrived at for 2019 gun deaths so far is 23,967 (using last year’s gun suicide number).  Admittedly, 9,092 dead sounds better than 23,967 dead — by a long shot (or even a point blank shot to the skull), but still…

What the fuck, what the fucking fuck?

We live in emotionally unstable times, the predominant public emotions being fear, anger and hatred.   These emotions are stirred constantly by personally tailored notifications on the little computers we all carry with us in our pockets.   Our president, the billionaire offspring of the son of a lawless man deported from his native Germany (tax evasion and draft dodging) and a dirt-poor Scottish domestic servant, speaks on behalf of the desperate Americans who are setting new records for blowing their own brains out and killing themselves by drug overdoses in areas that no longer have paying jobs.  The president says, most recently, that only immigrants who are not dirt poor, or criminals (as he’s pointed out, many Mexicans are rapists.  they’re rapists) are welcome here.   Fuck refugees, people fleeing horrors of every kind, fuck all those subhuman fucks.  No room.  Get the fuck out.  USA!   USA!!!!

This troubling, divisive, false creature has a puncher’s chance of winning re-election, particularly in a system where a 78,000 margin in “swing states” is good enough to win, no matter how many millions of “popular votes” that candidate loses by.  Add to it that his party is successfully resisting all efforts to safeguard the integrity of our elections and ensure fair and accurately counted voting.   This in the face of proof that the 2016 electronic voting systems  were sweepingly and systematically hacked into, in all fifty states.  We’ll never know if vote totals were manipulated since there are no longer any paper records to consult.   The status quo seems to have favored Trump, look at his historic election mandate, so his party sees no problem with it.

Donald Trump may seem like a vain, thin-skinned strutting idiot who has no business running a candy store, let alone the world’s most powerful nation, but at least 60,000,000 Americans love him unconditionally.  His support has never varied much from around 40%, no matter what he does.   A writer named Adam Serwer put it perfectly, at the top of his piece The Cruelty is the Point:   [3]

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. 

Meanwhile, due to the policy of a powerful lobbying group, the voting public can’t even get basic information like how many of our desperate fellow citizens are using a few of their 393,000,000 constitutionally protected guns to blow their own heads off every day (about 65).   The NRA says “nothing to see here” and “UNFAIR!”.   And so it is.

Opinions are like assholes, true, but it would be nice if they were washed once in a while.   Lots of clean water would help, and some soap.  Sunlight, we are told, is the best disinfectant. 

 

 

[1]  I wrote a long, detailed piece on this the last few days, larded with quotations and citing every number I included,  that I was urged to send to the New York Times.   The Grey Debutante has two business days left to tell me if they’ll run some version of the overwrought piece.  They want an exclusive, so I had to take down the original and rewritten pieces from this blahg, just in case they did a google search.   If I don’t hear back by end of business Friday, I’ll be free repost it here.  And I shall.

2]  The nonprofit Gun Violence Archive has this cryptic statement on its daily ledger of gun deaths:  22,000 Annual Suicides not included on Daily Summary Ledger.  

{3]  The article ends with this beautiful, horrific paragraph:

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

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An Inconvenient Truth

Google:

Oscar-winning documentary about the environment featuring the unlikeliest of movie stars. Former presidential candidate Al Gore holds this film together as, in front of an audience and with few aids beyond photo slides, he explains how humans have messed up the planet. Gore issues an urgent warning on what must be done, and done quickly, to save the earth.      

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I really should make a new category, like homo imbecilis or something, for posts like this, which are essentially about the heedless stupidity of “The Wise Ape”.  This award winning film was screened everywhere thirteen years ago, clearly presenting a dire picture of our ravaged earth and setting out things that needed to be done, “and done quickly”.    That was in 2006, thirty six years after the first Earth Day rally, thirteen years ago.

It’s 2019.  Our latest effort to save our planet here in America was electing a man who claims the freedom-hating Chinese invented the hoax of Climate Change to screw American business, a man who appoints former fossil fuel executives to oversee the climate and diplomacy, a man who removes government scientific findings from the EPA (Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency) website, a man who mocks anyone who disagrees that he’s the smartest and handsomest (and sexiest) man ever to hold the office of president.  

A man who must have heaved a big sigh of relief yesterday when his former buddy Jeffrey Epstein woke up dead in his cell [1].   Bagpiper Bill Barr issued a statement, apparently they are going to mount a full investigation into Epstein’s convenient death, an investigation even more thorough than the exhaustive five day FBI probe that completely and totally exonerated Justice Kavanaugh of the sick, dangerous Clinton-orchestrated accusation of youthful, drunken groping.   Their boss — a man for the ages.

Homo imbecilis, amigos… 

 

[1]  A death as convenient as the perfectly timed death of Ken Lay, the Dubya Bush compadre who was going to prison for fraud connected to Exxon.  The only executive in many years poised to be actually imprisoned (actually, his codefendant Jeffrey Skilling, wound up serving 12 years).  Makes you think.

Kenneth Lee Lay (April 15, 1942 – July 5, 2006) was the founder, CEO and Chairman of Enron and was heavily involved in the Enron scandal, a major accounting scandal that unraveled in 2000 in the largest bankruptcy ever to that date. Lay was indicted by a grand jury[4] and was found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud in the trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.[5]Lay died in July 2006 while vacationing in his house near Aspen, Colorado, three months before his scheduled sentencing.[6] A preliminary autopsy reported Lay died of a myocardial infarction (heart attack) caused by coronary artery disease; his death resulted in a vacated judgment.[7][8][9]

Lay left behind “a legacy of shame” characterized by “mismanagement and dishonesty”.[10] In 2009, Portfolio.com  ranked Lay as the third-worst American CEO of all time.[11] His actions were the catalyst for subsequent and fundamental corporate reform in regard to “standards of leadership, governance, and accountability”.[10]

Thank you, Jesus, for that fundamental corporate reform.  Ken didn’t die in vain…

Lay was one of America’s highest-paid CEOs; between 1998 and 2001, he collected more than $220 million in cash and stock in Enron and sold 1.7 million shares.[12][13][14][15] However, during his trial in 2006, Lay claimed that Enron stock made up about 90% of his wealth, and that his net worth at that time was negative $250,000.[16]

blah blah blah

As President, Lay flew Bush and his wife to Washington on an Enron corporate plane.[27] In December 2000, Lay was mentioned as a possible candidate for United States Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.[28]

From 1989 to 2002, Lay’s political contributions totaled $5.8 million, with 73% going to Republicans, and 27% going to Democrats.[2] From 1999 to 2001, he gave $365,410 to the Republican Party.[1]

Too Much Truth can be dangerous!

Truth, a thing that actually happened, or a process that is really taking place, is often excluded from a conversation.  This is done to benefit the side that the truth would be harmful to.   Someone coined a good term for it “an inconvenient truth”. This is a large, explanatory truth that allows us to fully understand something otherwise unknowable.  

Few problems can be solved unless this often troubling truth is set on the table, since without it the clues to the more difficult underlying part of the problem have been made to disappear.  The suppression of this kind of truth is necessary if your intent is to hoodwink people, or to continue an unfair system.   When an important underlying truth, or even a key fact or two, is excluded from a conversation about problems, it’s impossible to arrive at a reasonable solution.  All that remains is the anodyne explanation, a partial story that puts everything in its best light and leaves out anything troubling, upsetting or controversial.

I have a personal tic about the importance of a truthful laying out of facts, of “transparency”.  I grew up in a home where most discussions immediately became adversarial and key points that needed to be addressed were swept off the table.   My poor father’s main technique in conducting these impromptu adversarial proceedings was constantly reframing what we were actually talking about.   This reframing served to remove certain topics from the discussion entirely and to constantly shift the “burden of proof” onto a set of moving cross-accusations.

Whenever you got close to making a point, the conversation would be redirected to your anger, your intractability, whatever unrelated point was necessary to derail your train of thought and make you eventually back off in frustration.  Luckily for me (he said, spreading irony like butter), decades later, as my father was dying he admitted with regret that he’d done my sister and me a grave disservice by turning everything into an unfair zero-sum fight to the death.  I say that with a touch of snideness, though it was a piece of great good fortune, to have my father confirm that for me before he went.

I can see things from another side more now than I could as a young man.  I can easily see now that an upset eight year-old asking his father to tell him about the dozens of family members killed by the Nazis only thirteen years before he was born would be very upsetting to a father.   My father, admittedly, did not respond well, but I can now fully understand the painfully difficult position my question put him in.   His regrettable reaction was to turn the inquiry into a conversation about “mere abstractions” (the people who died) and, more importantly, about why, at eight years of age, with all my so-called maturity, I still couldn’t simply act like a man.   My whimpering, defensive responses only confirmed the sorry image of my unmanliness.   The People rest.

“Nothing to see here!”, following a quick hiding of an inconvenient truth, is so common a refrain today that it’s hard for me to refrain from barking it out regularly.  Shame concealeth itself, only a sucker admits anything!  We live in a competitive culture where any admission of guilt, wrong-doing, shame, is seen as the mark of a loser.  Look at Al Franken [1].  Loser!   The winner, we all know, will always deny everything and make them prove every aspect of the case against him, and if it takes ten years, and a mountain of money for lawyers, so much the better.   The loser will question himself when accused, guiltily slink away, even if he hasn’t really done anything that bad.

I was thinking about this concealing damaging truth business in connection with the National Rifle Association’s wildly successful effort to have the number of Americans who shoot themselves to death daily with a gun (about 55 a day, more than two an hour) excluded from all discussions of gun violence in the United States.   It’s a standard ploy, take a harmful piece of verifiable information, claim it’s irrelevant — for any reason pulled out of your ass–  and bury it as deep as possible.

Here’s a recent personal example, you be the judge if the larger truth changes anything about the story.

An old friend recently refused to do me a relatively simple favor.  When I asked why he told me he didn’t need to explain anything to me, that I was a pushy bastard to ask, that I don’t know how to take no for an answer.  He eventually gave me a flimsy rationale, and later, when things began turning tense, admitted he wasn’t doing me the favor because of his anger and resentment toward me, which finally made sense, although it was not reassuring.

Do the facts really matter?   They don’t really, in terms of our friendship, though they help me see there was probably nothing I could have done to avoid his hidden anger.   Looking at the only solid facts we have, our recent emails and texts, and reading his original offer to do me the favor, before changing his mind later and getting angry when I asked why, it was hard to see this sudden rage as anything I could have seen coming.  Or anything I might have been able to avoid.  It was clear, in hindsight, that he’d been looking for a damned good reason to explode, my pushy query was the fucking last fucking straw!   

Feelings are often this way.  We feel a certain way and then marshal whatever facts we need to support the utter reasonableness of our feelings.   You can’t argue with feelings, they’re as real as our breathing, as the awful prospect of our inevitable deaths.   I can’t help thinking that the things that actually happened, or are currently taking place,  matter and should be part of our consideration, part of any real conversation.   A raw feeling, like rage, should not have the final say in a conversation or friendship (though, sadly, it often does).

This concealing of “harmful facts” is at the root of virtually every vexing and hard to resolve situation we face, as individuals, as a society.   The tobacco industry knew very well that it was pumping up the addictiveness of its deadly product, but nobody needed to know this.  They denied it for years and spent millions defending their denial against a giant class of addicted plaintiffs, before finally agreeing to make a huge payout to a fund for their past, present and future victims.   

The oil industry hired scientists, decades ago, whose studies laid out the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels, the relation of this massive burning to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and the warming of the planet.  They had the answer they didn’t want, so they decided to hire another army of experts to deny the science and create public skepticism and “debate”.   Hard to blame these industries, these “job creators,”  if you truly believe that maximum monetary profit is society’s most important product.

Has our current president monetized the presidency in a way that offends norms, laws, the constitution itself?   Too bad you can’t see his financials, he has an army of lawyers to fight that to the very end and beyond.   In fairness to him, those documents could reveal business connections to wealthy international criminals and even his own criminal money laundering.  The president would be a fool to let these fall into the hands of his enemies, whatever the law might say about it. 

Did former White House Counsel Don McGahn commit perjury, as Trump claimed, when McGahn told Mueller’s investigators, under oath, that Trump called him twice on a Saturday to pressure him to fire Mueller and then asked him write a memo saying they’d never had any conversation about it?   Too bad it will take months, if not years, for the courts to decide on the facially absurd blanket immunity defense the president is asserting as he blocks all subpoenas and document requests of any kind.  Etc…

I heard a great discussion of an issue deeply related to this whole truth vs. half-truth spin business on the July 31, 2019 broadcast of  WNYC’s On the Media.   The show is about an alternative to punitive incarceration and the hopeless cycle of violence caused by our carceral state.   The conversation centered on Restorative Justice, a community-based process of truth and reconciliation where perpetrators acknowledge the harms their actions have caused and seek the forgiveness of their victims.  Bob Garfield’s guest,  Danielle Sered, a pioneer in the Restorative Justice movement and executive director of an organization called Common Justice, makes a strikingly succinct and deep point well worth pondering:  

The four core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one’s economic needs.    The four key features of prison are shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one’s economic needs.

These are also, coincidentally, four key features of poverty: shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one’s economic needs.    It is a terrifying and demoralizing constellation of features that all but guarantees a terrible outcome, including a high likelihood of being locked up.   Those four factors form a terrible truth that explains a lot about the failings of our prosecutorial law enforcement culture and our enormous prison population.   We have a bumper crop of hardened, violent criminals that no amount of humiliating punishment seems to be curing them of.  Same goes for drug addicts.

If we were truly intent on creating a safer, better society, we would take this hard truth into consideration.   We need to seriously consider it in any discussion of creating a safer, more just society  that protects all of its citizens and maximizes their chances for a peaceful life largely free of shame and violence.   Like in a discussion of the crisis of opioid addiction and overdose, if we addressed the causes of this desperation instead of criminalizing and punishing the addicts…  If… we… were… truly… intent… (don’t forget, there is a very lucrative private prison system here, and a more profitable than ever private immigration detention center industry here, and a super profitable opioid production and sales industry… don’t forget).   

Or we can leave that awful truth about shame and violence and hopeless poverty out of it entirely.  Here’s an idea.  We could simply, honestly say that people born to the unspeakable shame and violence of poverty are just fucked.  Sad but true.  You know, in a way, they kind of made their choice to be born poor.  Had they been of better stock and born wealthy, they’d have every right to live peacefully and happily in the most exceptionally free and luxurious society the world has ever known.  Too bad those young children of the poor are already weak, dirty, morally compromised, lazy, other-blaming parasites.   

I leave the “race” and ethnicity of these doomed children for you to imagine.  Keep in mind, many millions of them are as white as the president’s family, as his mother’s nine pale, dirty-faced siblings in Scotland [2].  As Martin Luther King said often in the last years of his life, the color of poor people has little to do with it.  Poor children of every color in America are growing up in a country that has no use for them, except as cash cows for the privatized prison barons.   Racism, militarism and poverty are three faces of the same vicious, insatiable monster.   But that will have to be a hard truth for another day.

 

[1]  Former Senator Franken was accused, by a conservative media provocateur (and former nude model), of making her feel sexually abused on a USO tour years earlier.   It was not a super-credible accusation, not supported by a single witness, and it was made public before Franken was given any chance to comment, then was quickly followed by a handful of women who came forward to claim Franken had put his hand creepily low on their waists, or otherwise touched them inappropriately during photo ops.   

Franken responded to these charges by calling for an ethics investigation of himself (during which he’d be able to hear the full accusations, call witnesses and defend himself against the charges).   Hopped up members of Franken’s unthinkingly politically correct party, led by the ambitious Kirsten Gillebrand, formed a kind of lynch mob and angrily, publicly demanded that their colleague immediately resign instead.  Another reason to shake your head about elected Democrats and their high-minded circular firing squads.  Franken resigned, something he regrets every day, something I regret whenever I think of it.   

Read this excellent investigative piece by Jane Mayer and you’ll see what I mean about the poisonous effect of throttling the truth, and a lawful inquiry into the truth.   Do the actual facts of the case matter?   They fucking should.

[2]   Trump’s mother’s ancestry:

Mary Anne MacLeod (Trump) was born in a pebbledashcroft house owned by her father since 1895 in Tong on the Isle of Lewis.[2]Local historians and genealogists have described properties in this community at the time as “indescribably filthy” and characterized by “human wretchedness”.[5][6] The outbreak ofWorld War I weakened its economy and male population.[2]

Raised in a Scottish Gaelic-speaking household, Mary was the youngest of ten children born to Malcolm (1866–1954) and Mary MacLeod (née Smith; 1867–1963).[7] Her father was a crofter,fisherman and compulsory officer at Mary’s school.[2][3][8][9]English was her second language, which she learned at the school she attended until secondary school.[2]

 

As one account has put it, she “started life in America as a dirt-poor servant escaping the even worse poverty of her native land.”[8] Having obtained a U.S. Re-entry Permit—only granted to immigrants intending to stay and gain citizenship[8][9]—she returned to Scotland on the SS Cameronia on September 12, 1934.[13] She was recorded as living in New York by April 1935 in the 1940 U.S. Census.[13]

Though the 1940 census form filed by Mary Anne and her husband Fred Trumpstated that she was a naturalized citizen, she did not actually become one until March 10, 1942.[3][8][9]

FredTrump1950-02.png

 

Check out the mustache on Fred Christ Trump, in 1950, for fuck’s sake, five years after Hitler’s defeat in World War Two..  Talk about yer Nazi bastards….

Trump’s Aktion at Koch Foods, Forest, Mississippi : Torture

We are torturing people again.  MAGA, man, as great as we ever were!

Lawrence O’Donnell shared a Mississippi television station’s report on the aftermath of Wednesday’s roundup of 680 low-paid Hispanic workers at seven chicken “processing plants” by ICE.   Democracy Now! also played a clip from the wrenching piece in their report on the president and Stephen Miller’s latest aktion against “illegals,” many employed by Koch Foods.  I hope outraged accounts of this video of the crying children of the workers dragged away get onto the front page of the New York Times and on Fox as well.  The largest ever ICE raid in a single state, history making.  Maybe WJTV’s short report will wake up the collective conscience of our citizens.

O’Donnell introduces the short clip, which he shares in its entirety, saying “Alex Love and his video crew found the victims of Donald Trump’s torture  in Forest, Mississippi yesterday.”     It is hard to watch the upset children who are seen in the short report, but the entire piece is only about a minute long.   The cruelty Trump is displaying toward these children and their parents is undeniably torture.   Watch this short piece , if you haven’t seen it, and tell me it’s not.

O’Donnell notes that the only people arrested in the coordinated ICE raids were undocumented Latino workers, not any of the employers who illegally hired them.   He opines that this is so because we now have Republican law enforcement, Trump law.   It’s hard to disagree with his assessment.   You can’t arrest the Koch Brothers, who own at least one of the seven raided facilities!    This is America, where liberty and freedom from government coercion rule!

O’Donnell’s entire nine minute report is important to watch (I know you readers rarely click on the links here, but click this one, I have it cued up for you).  He nails an essential element of the fundamental unfitness for power that animates our cruel 78,000 vote Electoral College president.  Trump is a man without any empathy for anyone.  He is a sadist who orders torture, and apparently enjoys the power to make others suffer.   The law is never an obstacle to Trump’s appetites.

Federal law and the Army Manual define torture as 

an act committed by a person under the color of law specifically intended to inflict physical or mental pain and suffering  

Torture, in spite of its rebranding and widespread use under Cheney and Dubya, is still against American law, against multiple treaties and international agreements America is a signatory to.  Torture is also an offense against common decency, even among modern day savages.   This president authorizes and encourages torture, along with numerous hateful practices that make it permissible in his world — racism, misogyny, xenophobia,  intolerance, contempt for law, scorn for due process (fairness), exemption from all law for those in his circle, the harshest application of the law for his many enemies.  His angry base apparently loves these kind of public displays of utter contempt by Trump. 

O’Donnell, in yesterday’s piece, is outraged by the in-your-face hypocrisy of the shallow, self-serving, empathy-lacking Donald John Trump, seeking a propaganda op for a campaign clip where he can show fake empathy to recent victims of gun violence as his administration is busily torturing children.   O’Donnell pulls no punches in laying out Trump’s utter lack of temperament (and experience) to make policies of any kind.

This latest incident of the public torture of children (only seen by Americans because “enemies of the people” aired it) was carried out at the very moment Trump was at an El Paso hospital for a photo op, pretending to care for people who’d been shot.   Although his party continues to block all reasonable restrictions on weapons of mass murder, Trump planned to pose with people wounded in two cities ravaged by recent mass killings.   Two cities mourning recent gun mass murders whose leaders asked Trump not to come.  All eight survivors of the El Paso massacre declined to be visited by the president for his staged moment of false empathy.   Prudently, Trump’s handler’s banned the press from the hospital, seeking to write the alternative narrative as they saw fit.

Those eight survivors of the mass killing fighting for their lives in an El Paso hospital may have been squeamish about being in the presence of the man who’d inspired the shooter to drive hours to kill Mexicans in the border city.  Some may have heard Trump attacking Democrats in Dayton earlier that day, on a similar mission of staged, fake compassion.   Perhaps they believed that the mass killing had been perpetrated by a violent coward fired up to kill by Trump’s nonstop hateful rhetoric.  The shooter’s manifesto  made reference to Trump’s constant memes: infestation, invasion, rapists, criminals, replacement.  It could have been written by Trump, with help from the slightly more literate Stephen Miller.  

Trump was at the El Paso hospital for photo/propaganda ops with victims of the shooting, to show how much he cares.   Not one of the eight consented to see him, so he stood in the hallway, in character,  nonchalantly lying for a cellphone video about the size of his enormous crowds of support in El Paso and how much of a loser former Congressman Beto O’Rourke was with his tiny crowd.  We can talk about this, what an obliviously lying braggart Trump is, instead of Trump’s deliberate infliction of torture on children.

The great David Bromberg paused late in his show at Town Hall a few years ago, during the falsely sold war in Iraq (Operation Shock and Awe), and started musing about what has happened to our great nation, a democracy that once gave hope to the downtrodden of the world.   A man a few rows behind us, in a military uniform, stood up and demanded that Bromberg cut the politics and just play his music.  Bromberg stopped, looked at the man, thought for a second and said “we torture people now?”   Then he did as the protester requested, he continued playing, his point made.

Obama famously admitted “we tortured some folks” (the only “accountability” moment for any American involved in the recent hideous, inhuman, illegal practices)  so now we can simply get back to torturing children and their parents in the spirit of Dick Cheney’s “Dark Side” and American Exceptionalism?

We torture people now?   Seriously?

A lot to keep up with … Koch edition

The “news” shit storm comes at us hard, fast, furious, disgusting and delivered  directly to our pockets, with little notification beeps to inform us of the latest.   The instinct to turn away from this hurricane of spattering fecal matter is hard to resist and we resist that instinct at our peril.  I commonly respond to “what have you been up to?” with “trying not to go insane.”   I keep looking as the disgusting squadrons of turds are propelled like an endless fleet of bombers dropping their awful payload.  

The only way to counter the massive disconnect we are confronted with in today’s politics by sound byte is to make larger connections.   Nothing happens in a vacuum, context is crucial.   The constant aggravating ruckus makes it difficult to see the bigger picture, by design.   Meanwhile, the abused earth itself veers toward the premature end of its life cycle as good people despair.

Here’s a quick piece on how all roads, in the radical right, lead to the Koch network.  Determined, extreme right wing “liberty lovers” the Kochs have played an outsized, skillful, ruthless, long game.   Until recently this long game was played secretly, though lately the octogenarian Charles and David Koch are taking their bows in public.  After more than forty years of savage, determined fighting they have largely won everything they dreamed of — moving American democracy close to a permanent one-party far right government that will protect their glorious liberty in perpetuity.   

How do the Koch’s have anything to gain from Trump’s clampdown on immigrants?

We learn that 680 immigrants were arrested in a massive roundup in Mississippi yesterday.  They were grabbed at work, working in  Koch Foods’ chicken “processing plants,”  working for the Koch Brothers.   How does this help the Kochs?   As Democracy Now! reported today:

The arrests targeted chicken processing plants operated by Koch Foods, one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S. Last year, Koch Foods paid out $3.75 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission class-action suit charging the company with sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latino workers at one of its Mississippi plants. Labor activists say it’s the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

source

“Labor activists say it’s the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions.”

Why did the Kochs hire so many illegals to work in their factories, slaughtering, dismembering and packaging chickens?   Who knows, probably a strictly practical business decision.   The Kochs hate unions, and discrimination laws, and health and safety rules for food production.   Recall that Libertarians like the Kochs don’t like regulations of any kind.   Such restrictive laws strangle freedom!

For more on the talented, well-born brothers, their background and the source of their family fortunes and beliefs, listen to the great Jane Mayer, interviewed shortly after her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, came out.     

Check out the interview, it is fascinating, and horrifying.

The Grey Lady takes a bold, principled stand

There was apparently a shitstorm from readers after the NY Times ran the neutral-sounding headline “Trump  Urges Unity vs. Racism.”    The Times heeded this outraged critique and changed the headline to read: “Assailing Hate but Not Guns”.  Way to go, New York Times, paper of record.   First draft of history and all.

New-York-Times-Headline-Change-Trump-Speech-Shootings-with-border-e1565102571711-620x434.jpg

As always, America’s finest news source, The Onion, said it best:

‘New York Times’ Amends Recent “Hero Trump Disarms Would-Be Shooter’ Headline.

…“We were wrong to imply that President Trump courageously rushed into an active-shooter situation inside a Washington, D.C. gas station, held the gunman in a chokehold until he dropped his weapon, and then provided first-aid to casualties, thus single-handedly preventing more bloodshed. We deeply regret intimating that the shooter realized the error of his ways and denounced his bigoted beliefs after a tough-love conversation with Mr. Trump. Readers will see that these statements have been retracted from the second edition.” At press time, the new headline, “Trump Gives Speech” had been changed to “Unifier-In-Chief Provides Hope To Fractured Nation.”

source

 

 

Not to worry, unless you’re made of mostly water

Amid all the other chaos our chaos monkey president is involved in, it should be recalled how hastily and unconditionally he took the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords.   This international agreement was a first step toward setting goals to avert the looming climate disaster that we can all easily see gathering.   He did this because he says that so-called climate change is a Chinese hoax.    Some of the best scientists apparently say so, according to the man who sincerely consoled the people of Toledo the other day for the slaughter by automatic rifle in Dayton.  (At the end of a teleprompter statement in which he condemned racist violence with all the sincerity of a carefully reading, mouth breathing zombie.)

We know, of course, why, aside from the strong opinions of the unbelievable (literally) Mr. Trump, the USA is the only country where there is a “debate” about what everyone can see with their own eyes, feel with their own skin.   The earth is getting warmer, the last four years have been the hottest on record, last month was the hottest month ever.

This warming causes water to evaporate faster, among other things (like increasing desertification of the earth).   The warming is caused by increased greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (largely from burning fossils and the dairy/meat industry) in the atmosphere.   We have known for literally a half a century or more, Exxon did a pioneering study in the 70s.   

Yet in America there is skepticism about all this. The fossil fuel industry spent a ton of money, over decades, to suppress their own scientific findings and create “climate change skepticism”, a movement very much like “Birtherism” or “Trumpism” itself, sustained only because millions or even billions of dollars are poured into relentlessly promoting it.   Only in America, folks, is there any debate about this deadly warming trend or its causes.

Now we come to water.   The human body, we learn, is up to 60% water. [1]   We need to drink water, in some form, regularly.  We need more water as it becomes hotter.   We can last many days without food, it turns out, but very few without water, particularly in the heat.    The disappearance of drinkable water for many millions is likely to be the first step on the road to real, massive human cataclysm.  We hear very little about increasing water scarcity, though anyone who has ever considered it is very alarmed about it.

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This is part of what I am thinking of when I advocate for a party platform.  Take a clear, unambiguous position, Democrats.    Any candidate running against Trump would, for example, commit to advancing public knowledge about approaching climate disaster, the steps needed to slow it and promise to fight for certain measures to slow it. 

Look at what makes a given crisis worse and what improves the situation, commit to improvement, say so in a short statement.   This party platform doesn’t need to be a detailed action plan that each candidate signs on to — it is a commitment to stated values, a pledge to be on the right side of important issues with a promise to do at least X about each one.   It sets out a minimum we should be fighting for, whoever the candidate is.

The creators of Climate Change Skepticism are not climate change skeptics themselves.  They are powerful psychopaths.   They needed a popular belief in the news to counter actual science and enable them to sustain their unsustainable, highly lucrative, practices.  Like the tobacco industry, they will fight until the last smoking caused lung cancer death to dispute the harmfulness of the product their fortune, their already obscene wealth, is based on.

These political actors have created a body of beliefs to sustain their power.   If you want their money, and all political candidates need mountains of it for advertising, you sign on to it.

Beliefs:  Freedom and liberty are the most important human values.  We must all be free from all forms of government coercion.  The government must not be allowed to tell us what to do: unless (and there’s always a caveat, a detail where all the devils live) you are a pregnant woman who is desperate not to give birth, a poor person, an old person without wealth, from a historically despised racial or ethnic group, an injured worker or consumer, unemployed, disabled, etc.   The “liberty” that Libertarians espouse, mainly, is their own liberty to be free from all government restraints, especially taxation, and for the freedom to use their wealth (most of this liberty-loving class of better citizens are wealthy) as they see fit and not to give a dime to the masses of parasitic takers.

Every judge that Trump has appointed to lifetime federal posts has signed on to this belief system.  A belief system articulated and espoused by a society now active in every law school in the country, the Federalist Society.  If you are a Federalist Society member you don’t need to be told how to vote on a close issue, how to judge a case where a parasite is seeking huge damages from an innocent corporate person.  You will not hesitate to legally and skillfully use the law to get the outcome your belief system demands.   

It is a demanding belief system.   Demand number one is obedience.    The good boys and girls of the Federalist Society can be depended on to do what must be done to limit the tyranny of “democracy”.   You see, the masses really are stupid and don’t know what’s best for themselves.    You have to give them that, as our unbelievable president reminds us every day.

Once millions don’t have sufficient water a massive die off will begin.   At the same time, as arctic ice melts and sea levels rise, coastal regions will become uninhabitable.  Add to that the vast areas of once arable land that is now desert. There will be tens, or hundreds millions made homeless and without water.  Desperate climate refugees.  There will be a planetary catastrophe and most likely widespread cannibalism. 

The US military, years ago, considered this nightmare scenario a grave threat to stability in the world, our most daunting military challenge as a nation.  Now, everyone who works for the government is explicitly instructed to shut the hell up about it by an unbelievable president who is interested in other things. 

Like the hawkish, murderous, torturing, aptly-named Dick Cheney, who had “other priorities” when his government wanted him to fight in Viet Nam.  Like President Bone Spurs, the self-proclaimed major league baseball prospect who was crippled when it came to being drafted for military service.  Like everyone who will never die from, or even be inconvenienced by, a lack of common drinking water.   Just send your maid to the store and have her buy a case!   What is your problem, losers…?

 

[1]   This is according to the US government:

Up to 60% of the human adult body is water. According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.

Denier-in-Chief and the ‘rational observer’

The easily manipulable winner in the Oval Office has a simple mantra, honed at the hideous breast of the evil Roy Cohn, “I know you are, but what am I?  Make me. loser!”  It is his life’s credo.   It has served America’s Greatest Winner well, eventually giving him the loudest megaphone in the world.

Yesterday, with great cosmic timing (right after two bloody mass killings by deranged white assholes with high-powered guns designed for military assaults) Cesar Sayoc, the guy who sent non-functioning pipe bombs to many of the president’s many vicious enemies, was sentenced to twenty years in prison.  

His lawyers made a plea for leniency, as every good lawyer must in advocating for their client.   Sayoc, portrayed by his advocates as a man of limited cognitive abilities, had been repeatedly raped by a priest at the Catholic boarding school he was sent to and was a chemically addled victim of his longtime steroid abuse.  He was a loner, estranged from his family and addicted to Fox News.   And, of course, he was madly in love with and devoted to father figure Donald J. Trump.

As Sayoc’s lawyers persuasively wrote:

At a rally in October 2018, around the time Mr. Sayoc sent the packages, President Trump announced that Democrats “destroy people. They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.” See Maggie Haberman & Peter Baker, Trump Taunts Christine Blasey Ford at Rally, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 2, 2018).7
In his statements, Trump specifically blamed many of the individuals whom Mr. Sayoc ultimately targeted with his packages. For example, on June 25, 2018, President Trump tweeted:
Screen shot 2019-08-06 at 2.33.52 PM.png

A rational observer may have brushed off Trump’s tweets as hyperbole, but  Mr. Sayoc took them to heart.

This “rational observer” is the law’s “reasonable man” a person who does, in a given situation, what any reasonable person would do.   It is unfair to convict somebody of doing something any reasonable person would have done in the same circumstances, and so the law uses the standard of reasonableness to assess whether someone has committed a crime or just done the reasonable thing.   Still, the phrase has a deafening echo in today’s America:  “a rational observer”.   Where do we find such a creature?

Fox news apparently ran this headline in the immediate aftermath of the latest mass murders, in El Paso and Dayton, by enraged white cowards with assault rifles :   

“Dems unleash profane attacks on Trump, Republicans over mass shootings”

(here you go, have a good time)

A rational observer, cruder than myself, might say “I got your fucking profane attacks right here, you racist, fear-mongering, democracy-hating, tyranny-enabling, massacre-inciting, lying sacks of fucking right-wing shit”. Of course, that kind of harsh, angry language only plays into the Fox/NRA/Koch/Republic Party narrative. You see, in that universe, the real problem is that Dems are fucking sick fucks, dangerous, evil, some of the worst people, the worst people, traitors and criminals, with filthy fucking toilet mouths, too.

So, while it might seem to be irrational to keep appealing to a ‘rational observer’, I can’t help but notice a few things in the above section of the pleadings of Sayoc’s  lawyers.

As they wrote, citing a piece from the lying, failing, desperate, traitorous, freedom-hating, openly communist rag, that Enemy of the People par excellence, the NY Times:  

At a rally in October 2018, around the time Mr. Sayoc sent the packages, President Trump announced that Democrats “destroy people. They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.” 

In fairness to the president, the partisan Dems were then in the process of viciously and unfairly attacking his controversial extremist, charter member of the Federalist Society, former choirboy [1] nominee to fill Anthony Kennedy’s carefully orchestrated Supreme Court vacancy. [2]  Be fair!   Who among us was not, at one time or another, a blackout drunk at the expensive, exclusive prep school we went to?   Who among us, in a drunken state, did not at least once try to feel up a younger girl against her will?  Come on, now.

At that same Trump reelection rally where the president called Democrats “really evil people” he famously mocked the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, a troubled woman who clearly had everything to gain (aside from her lost privacy, death threats, being forced to move with her family several times, etc.) and nothing to lose (aside from her privacy, her home, freedom from hate mail and death threats, etc.).   Trump mockingly said, to a crowd that loved it, that Blasey Ford couldn’t remember anything.  Didn’t know where it happened, when it happened, whose house it was at, who was there, why she was there, all she recalled was that this well-loved girl’s basketball coach, unbelievably great judge and defender of America was the one who drunkenly fell on her and tried to take her clothes off. The crowd ate this delicious mockery up as Trump did that famous thing were it looks like he’s sort of smiling.

It would be crass of me to point out that the president was lying about most of this.  She knew when it happened, in the summer after her Sophomore year in high school, she knew the approximate date.   She did not know the exact location of the house she was in only once, but it was within walking distance of the country club she’d been swimming at and clearly belonged to the parents of one of a small handful of teenagers assembled there that day.   She explained that she knew who Brett Kavanaugh was, had seen him before.  She described the physical layout of the house, exactly where the assault took place, who else was there in that room with her and Kavanaugh, and exactly why the traumatic event was seared so photographically in her memory.

The pathetic Jeff Flake, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who had already announced he was leaving the Senate, had a weak-kneed moment of conscience after pressure was applied to him following Blasey Ford’s credible testimony (recall that Fox was wringing its collective hands after she spoke to that Committee, every pundit on the air at the time predicted Kavanaugh’s nomination was toast.)   Flake eventually refused to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination going before Moscow Mitch and the senate until a severely limited FBI probe was promised.  

The “probe” lasted less than a week.  The FBI felt no need to interview Blasey Ford or Kavanaugh, or any of the many witnesses who contacted the FBI to be interviewed.  In that short five day time span, with severe pressure and limitations from the White House, the FBI was unable to determine whose house the alleged attack had taken place in (which would have enabled them to verify Blasey Ford’s detailed description of the layout), or find anyone who could remember that otherwise unremarkable day when a younger girl nobody knew was arguably groped, behind closed doors upstairs, by a well-known prep school drunk. Therefore, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, Justice Kavanaugh, sir!   51-49, done and done and suck it, libtard cucks.

Now all this would have been sickening enough, to a rational observer, if we didn’t have this to add to it.

Trump’s lawyers knew he’d be incapable of avoiding perjury if he spoke under oath to Mueller’s investigators.   The famous “perjury trap” that no compulsive liar can avoid, if pressured enough, or at all, or even if not pressured at all.  They prudently forbade him from answering spoken questions, consenting instead to written answers to written questions.  

Each of these detailed questions was answered “I don’t know, I don’t remember, I don’t have any independent recollection, I can’t seem to recall, I don’t recall being aware,  I can’t say for certain, I’m not sure, who could be expected to remember a detail like that? I had no reason to notice it…” and so on.

Dubya Bush’s moronic former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez testified in a similar fashion when he was summoned to Congress over something.  Jon Stewart (a comedian attacked by Trump) noted to Bill Moyers that Gonzalez would rather be seen as a ” low functioning pinhead” who could literally remember nothing than as someone disloyal to the president.   The only other possibility was that Gonzalez was a perjurer, so he went with pinhead who had zero recollection of anything.  The Extremely Stable Genius, same deal.  No memory of anything because, you know, fuck you.

I direct the rational observer to one final fun fact.   In those non answers Trump’s lawyers crafted to keep him out of his “perjury trap” (in fairness to Trump, his inability to tell the truth does not appear to be voluntary) one stands out as the world’s greatest example of what Mueller called, with mind-blowing understatement “inadequate answers”.  

It was the president’s answer to Mueller’s final original question (follow up questions were ignored by White House counsel).   The question was a minefield for Trump and his team of lawyers, it involved convicted but not yet sentenced (or pardoned) former National Security Adviser Michael “Lock Her UP!” Flynn.   Trump’s answer reads, in its entirety:    

TRUMP:

(No answer provided.) [3]

 

here is part of what the Denier-in-Chief squeezed out of his tweethole immediately after his new Roy Cohn, Bagpiper Bill Barr, completely and totally exonerated him of any wrongdoing, ever, in the past, present and future:

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To a rational observer, “sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason” would be taken considering the hyperbolic, often hysterical sounding source.

To a disturbed, threatened white patriot with a powerful gun, surrounded by Mexican rapists, surly Negroes, politically correct Social Justice Warriors… what more needs to be said by the president to let you know what should happen now that it’s “finally time to turn the tables and bring justice” to these vicious, toilet mouthed criminal motherfuckers?

To a rational observer, I mean.

 

 

[1]  It has been my feeling, since seeing the former choir boy break down alternately crying and snarling at the well-funded cabal of dark-money Clinton-loving partisan liars who orchestrated Blasey Ford’s unfounded attack  for all of America to see, a sick attempt to “destroy his life”, that Kavanaugh– and I add that I have only a feeling, a mere opinion, a suspicion, not a jot or tittle of evidence — was most likely diddled by a priest in his day.  If this was so, who could blame him for his righteous rage?  

[2]  Kennedy, as part of his inducement to retire during Trump’s presidency, was given input into which of his former clerks he’d like to see nominated to fill his chair on the Supreme Court.  NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!!

[3] Read all the answers to the Special Counsel Trump claimed to have written by himself here.

 

 

UNTHINKABLE! (until someone thinks it)

When something is beyond the strictures of the popular imagination, a thing which is conditioned by a lifetime of mass media (and increasingly “social media”) consumption, it is unthinkable.   We cannot even entertain unthinkable ideas because they are simply… unthinkable.  Until they are thought, expressed, discussed, debated, formed into things we can now easily think about, talk about, make part of law and culture [1].

A quick thought experiment:

We presently have more than twenty political candidates from an opposition party, united in their determination to defeat a president who squeaked into power with a surgically engineered 78,000 vote margin in the Electoral College and has been stacking the federal courts with record numbers of ideologically pure lifetime appointees of the extreme far-right (thirteen more were confirmed by Moscow Mitch and his crew right before Congress went on holiday).    He put a controversial, pouting, crying, angry partisan on to the Supreme Court, 51-49 — fair is fair!  (Ain’t democracy great, folks?) 

This Electoral College president has done many cruel things, attacked countless foes, lied thousands of times and demands complete loyalty from a rotating cast of mostly unqualified sidekicks who are each busily doing maximum damage in their appointed spheres.    Picture the climate disruption denier-in-chief removing the US from the Paris Accords, itself a fairly weak attempt to avoid a deadly climate refugee apocalypse, and restoring the federal death penalty so as to, hopefully (they hope) execute Julian Assange, for a quick whiff of this guy’s style.

What do we do here in America in the face of this?   What we always do.  We begin the presidential election campaign a year and a half before the election and make every fart and hiccup of it daily news for months and months and months.   We hold a competition, a popularity contest, and put all the contestants to unseat this disastrous president (if they qualify by raising X millions in campaign funds)  into a game show format where they fight it out on live TV until there is only one candidate standing.   

Think of it as Political Survivor, a zero-sum gladiatorial contest won by brute strength, cunning and sheer determination to be the last one alive.  The spectacle gets great ratings, like the Hunger Games in that thinly veiled depiction of our dystopian society where the  majority of citizens don’t have the $400 they need to avoid an immediate crisis, or homelessness.   Everybody tunes in, everyone has an opinion about who won, who lost, who sucked, who sucked worse.  Advertisers line up to buy a spot during the most heated contests.

Unthinkable thought: instead of this contest have well-spoken representatives of various factions in the Democratic Party (or the Republican, or any party, really) sitting around a table making their best, crispest case for what their party stands for, ironing out a unified party platform that whoever their eventual candidate is will put into action once in office.   How about a few nights of televised debates as follows: 

Night one, a presentation of the many problems caused by global warming, a tight ten minute slide show, showing the scope of the problem, its causes, describing why we haven’t been able to make much progress (and here discuss Exxon-Tillerson and the Koch’s well-funded, exceptionally American ‘climate skepticism’ movement)  then set goals and talk about the best way to move toward them.   

If you like the “America’s got Talent” or “Dancing with the Stars” format, add realtime on-line voting about the propositions being discussed.   Run the numbers as they discuss various ideas, to add excitement and immediacy to the discussion of policies that will decide the fate of the planet and all life upon it.

“Oh, look, Dolores, that chyron shows 89% of Americans watching actually believe drought and flooding and heatwaves and wild fires are getting worse every year and it’s the government’s job to do whatever is necessary to slow this looming catastrophe down!”   

“Look, Ed, 91% think the government should regulate the polluting industries that put the most CO2 in the air.   58% support a carbon tax.   72% support regulations requiring more efficient automobiles that emit less CO2.   Who knew Americans were so smart?”

The next discussion would be health care.   Then poverty.  Then education, then the ongoing, silent crisis of American military veteran suicides, and so on.   A week after each show the party would present its platform on that issue, published on line, its essence delivered in a five minute prime-time spot.  Whoever becomes president from our party is committed to this set of principles.   Let Americans know what we actually stand for, exactly what we will fight for once in power.  

As it is now it’s up to the individual who survives the Darwinian winnowing process and emerges as the candidate to decide exactly what she or he is going to do as president and leader of the party.  If so, what’s the point of having a national party at all?   What’s the point of that party putting its considerable thumb on the scale during the nominating process?  (As it did when it decided in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had waited long enough for her turn and made her the candidate in a rigged primary system — she started the games with a several hundred ‘super-delegate” lead).

There are, of course, several reasons why this kind of thoughtful public policy party platform discussion is unthinkable. 

The first is that Americans are not used to it and might very well hate it.  We prefer exciting bouts where one person punches out the other and we raise the winner’s hand and everyone cheers.  We are used to gladiators.    We crave the excitement of blood sport.   How boring would it be to see a bunch of thoughtful people agreeing that the present administration has done these specific disastrous things and, when elected, we will do these specific things to fix the deepening problems these cynical hucksters have exacerbated?   Who would watch two hours of that?  Where’s the drama?

Instead we have an animated squabble  between vying contendets, egged on by celebrity moderators, about whether Medicare for All must eliminate the many private health insurance companies in business now or not.   Few Americans (unless they work for a health insurance related company– and millions are likely in this category) give a rat’s ass one way or another what entity helps them pay the cost of needed medical care.   The real debate is “do Americans have the same right as the French, the Japanese, the Germans, the British, Canadians, Iraqis under Saddam, for fuck’s sake, to decent, affordable nationalized health care?”   

The framing we have, and the jibing, sniping “how you gonna pay for it?  how you gonna pay for it?” (a question never asked about endless, unprovoked war) make a serious discussion of how to move forward almost impossible.  It’s like Reagan, cheerfully slamming Jimmy Carter over and over with “there you go again!”.   “I know you are, but what am I?”   “Keep talking, spongey gums, it tickles”   It’s a long gotcha contest where candidates wait for their star-making moment to distinguish themselves as the most poised under attack, the most stylish with a put-down.

As always, there are specific reasons why intelligent non-adversarial discussion is unthinkable.  First, it’s simply not the way it’s done here.   They go at each other in a robust debate, no holds barred, and we pick the one whose style, whose courage under attack, we like the best.    Elizabeth Warren turned to a fretful “how you gonna pay for it?” naysayer on the stage with her the other night, attacking her idea for redistributing 2% of vast, largely hereditary, wealth in a way that would benefit most Americans, and asked  him who “goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for?” 

Personally, I loved that answer.   Full disclosure, I’ve loved Elizabeth Warren since I first saw her interviewed by the great Bill Moyers many moons ago, when she was still teaching law at Harvard, talking about her idea for a federal consumer protection agency.

Second, everything in America must be paid for, we all know that.  TV time (supposedly publicly owned, remember) is very valuable.  If you don’t have viewers, no advertisers want to buy ads.   The network loses a ton of money.   That’s one reason Trump was so good for business.  Not every candidate can eat 50 corndogs, then bite the head off a live chicken and claim, bloody lipped and covered with feathers, that his vicious, lying opponent did the disgusting deed.   He was great for ratings.  You never knew if the zestful flag-humper was literally going to take a shit on stage.  The man was made for TV, reality TV, that carefully scripted alternative fact world so many Americans crave.   If we run thoughtful discussions about real, pressing problems and how to best solve them– we’d be fucking CSPAN, nobody would tune in.  No profits for anybody.   

Third, the mass media is run by advertising dollars.  Les Moonves, former CEO of the company that owns CBS,  (before he was “disgraced” over his non-consensual sexual practices and forced out with a gigantic golden parachute) said, during the lead up to the Trump presidency, that he didn’t necessarily like the man or what he stood for, but, by God, he’s making us a shitload of money!   More than one network showed the empty Trump podium, while bad for business Bernie Sanders addressed another huge crowd, uncovered by the cameras, after yet another improbable primary victory.   “We’re still waiting for Trump, he’ll be out in a minute to say something explosive (or possibly even take a dump on stage)!   Please stay tuned, we’ll return to his empty podium right after this important message.”

Fourth, in America it’s all about the Benjamins, baby.   We live in a profit-driven culture.  If you have a net worth of fifty billion there is no shame attached to an ambition to double that wealth — go for it!  The people we admire the most, as a culture, are the biggest winners.  In America we call these money-crazed oligarchs “philanthropists” and give their opinions about problem solving the greatest weight.   They have the money to form giant non-profit companies to put their ideas into practice.  Their ideas carry great weight because they are clearly brilliant, since they have amassed billions as a result of their obvious genius.  Even if they are born to their great wealth, they’re better than most people, in a materialistic culture that values only acquisition.

Fifth, the political parties themselves, and all of their candidates (with a few notable individual exceptions) are dependent on Big, Dark Money, corporate and personal, and lots of it.  Corporate lobbyists/colleagues/lobbyists are a big factor too, you can’t snub your old friends, and the powerful causes they represent, and expect to survive in the marketplace of “donations”.   Everybody seems to like this horse race model of electoral campaigning, keeps the money flowing.

Down through all the rest of the numbers here, the answer is the same.  People make money, a shit ton of money, from the way things are arranged here in our “free market”.   The mass media is run for money, every political debate is a source of revenue for multiple corporations.   We run our elections like the Super Bowl, a parade of the world’s most expensive and ingenious advertisements, made by the greatest advertising minds, vying for the coveted title of best Super Bowl advertisement.  If you have a billion to spend on your political ad campaign, versus an opponent with only ten million, chances are excellent that you win!  Money is speech, baby, Supreme Court said so, loud as hell, in Citizens United.   If you have a billion you just get to speak louder than a punk with a puny $390,000.  Freedom, you dig.

Children separated from their desperate parents, kept in filthy conditions in privatized child prisons?   Nobody is paying us for soap and water for these stinking little bastards!   Fuck you, Commie.   These kids are evil, illegal, alien.   You can do whatever you want to them, they have no rights, no humanity.   We’ll fight you to the death against charges that we don’t care about children, are deliberately cruel to deter these pricks from sneaking in to ask for asylum.   How fucking dare you?   Why have a bully pulpit if you can’t be a bully?  Suck my ass while I tweet about your ass-sucking, loser!

Unthinkable, really, to have intelligent people of different points of view squarely facing the most difficult actual challenges of our lives here– climate catastrophe, intergenerational poverty, massive American despair, rage, violence, addiction, untold American deaths from preventable diseases, suicide —  and hammering out the best ways to improve things.

Better for everybody to just let our most charismatic and well-funded gladiators hack each other’s arms off for our amusement.  Let the fucking games begin!  Anything else?  UNTHINKABLE!!!

 

[1]   A short list of long-time unthinkable ideas:

Constitutional abolition of Constitutionally protected slavery (1865)
alcoholic beverages made illegal in every state (1920)
alcoholic beverages made legal again (1933)
universal women’s suffrage (1920)
federal regulation of child labor and creation of the 40 hour work week (1938)
$15 minimum wage (adopted in many states and municipalities)
legalized recreational marijuana ( currently the law in eleven states, see map) 
Constitutional right to same-sex marriage in all states  (2015, but 5-4, watch out my gay brothers and sisters)
“pre-existing condition” right to refuse health insurance coverage abolished  (2010)

One quick question, sir

Trigger warning:   this post contains the unexpurgated word “nigger”.

The president took a few moments the other day to viciously attack another critic who, even though the ever-honest president is “the most transparent president in history” and has “nothing to hide”, is still doggedly pursuing potentially compromising documents the president has lawyered up to refuse to provide. 

The chairman of the Congressional Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings, is the latest “person of color” to be crudely attacked by the president who pretended not to know who David Duke was when asked about the support of the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan during the run-up to his impressive 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate.   

The president, confronted with the multiple racist messages he had tweeted out against Cummings,  doubled down (it’s a reflex with the craven transactionalist), after attacking the chairman and the vermin “infested” city the chairman represents, calling African-American Elijah Cummings a “racist” [1].

Michael Cohen testified to Congress about the president’s long time racism, the disdain he has always shown toward poor blacks (he doesn’t have much more use for poor whites, of course, losers) who live in various American shit-holes.   Though he has posed with a few high profile black celebrity “friends” over the years (the demented Kanye West in the Oval Office comes to mind), Trump repeatedly reveals his deep racism through his statements and his actions.

So just one question, Mr. President, sir.  You pride yourself on plain talk, you speak like the average opinionated ignoramus and those who love you get a tremendous kick out of it.   You can double down one more time.  Why not just say what’s really on your mind?   “These goddamned niggers are out of control.”   

Don’t you feel better?

I know America would, to hear you simply say it.

 

[1] To translate the “dogwhistle” into the president’s own idiom:

That fucking nigger is the fucking racist, not me!  I don’t have a racist bone in my body, it’s the niggers who are the goddamned racists!