Popularity polls, the right-wing ecosystem, unregulatable social media and the laser focus of “liberal” corporate mass media, convinced enough Americans that Joe Biden was so diminished by age that, in spite of his many impressive accomplishments as president, he was a failed president unfit for office. Compare his mental acuity and ability to communicate clearly and intelligently — both so disparaged throughout his campaign that he was forced out of the race — to those of the dancing Dictator on Day One we have now.
God bless, and Heaven help, these United Shayssssh.
Elon Musk, union-busting beneficiary of billions in US government contracts (and holder of high security clearance/buddy of Putin’s) hired vans full of door-knockers to spread the word about Trump/Vance. These poor devils had to sign NDAs so none can discuss the harsh quotas they had to fill if they wanted to be paid and have their motel bill handled by the world’s richest humanoid. In other news, his fake million dollar a day lottery is admittedly not a lottery, winners are carefully vetted and pre-selected. On the other hand, giving an old woman on line to vote in Georgia a cup of water is a state crime.
Just one more election day dingleberry. Who will be in charge of advising dictator on day one Trump about medical matters? The insane son of Robert Kennedy, decapitator of dead animals and vaccine skeptic who will make polio great again. There’s a good hat for MAGA — Make Polio Great Again.
WTF…
A vote for Trump/Vance/Musk/RFK Jr. is a vote for the BEST PEOPLE, THE BEST PEOPLE, AND DRAINING THE SWAMP AGAIN, IT WAS ALL A WITCH HUNT BY SICK AND DANGEROUS PEOPLE, RAPISTS, DRUG DEALERS, PET EATERS, I NEVER LOST IN 2020, 2024 OR 2028, YOU WILL ALL PAY, WATCH!
Maybe it’s just something Hollywood movies instill in us when we’re young — the idea that we can have real emotional closure, a dramatic, satisfying, healing ending to even an unbearably tragic series of events. I think of this in terms of my own life and the life of our experiment in democracy. I will focus on the second one, on this day before Election Day.
We can, as a democratic nation, repudiate the forces that are determined to control everyone based on the insatiable greed of a privileged few and, in service to their huge Christian evangelical voting block, impose perverted religious views on everyone. A girl who is raped, her trauma multiplied when she discovers she’s pregnant, has less rights than the rapist’s six week and one day old fetus, according to these twisted lovers of a funhouse mirror version of Jesus. Destroying the planet with unregulatable pollution is the right of those with the power to do so, if it will make them the world’s first trillionaires, because — freedom. Hoarders of obscene wealth are admired while those living in intergenerational poverty are reviled as parasitic “losers” who didn’t have the sense to be born to wealthy families.
Let’s say Harris wins by 20,000,000 votes (she should), and wins the accursed Electoral College, her party takes the Senate and the House, and MAGA’s attempts to overturn the results, including the cherub faced soulless fanatic from Louisiana’s “secret plan” to nullify the results, a rash of riots across the country and frantic appeals to Scalia’s evil spawn on the Supreme Court, fail to install Trumpie as president for life.
It would be a great relief to at least 180 million Americans to have a president who doesn’t spout endless lies, launch hourly, bullying attacks on countless “sick”, “dangerous” “enemies”, conduct secret talks with dictators and war criminals and unleash hate speech addressed toward entire groups of “the enemy within” while constantly threatening violence. It would be excellent to live under an administration that actually has reality-based positions and an agenda to make things better, instead of the far-right’s enforced loyalty to a figurehead deranged in his anger and drunk on fantasies of deadly revenge. Would a resounding Trump defeat be closure? No, but it would be a very good start.
Closure comes only when a sense of fairness is restored, the widening chasm between the top 1% and everyone else is closed. Powerful criminal conspirators get prosecuted alongside the hapless, violent foot soldiers they unleash. A treason preaching former general is recalled to active duty and dishonorably discharged, his pension cancelled. Bullying and abuse become the subjects of serious cultural scrutiny and national dialogue. The wealthiest citizens and corporations are required to pay their fair share of taxes. A living wage is guaranteed to all workers by federal law. Police violence is curbed, use of excessive, often deadly, force is not shielded by “qualified immunity”. Gun violence is curbed by regulating who can own firearms and when they may be reasonably restricted. The Supreme Court is recalibrated, with term limits, a strict, enforceable ethics code, the addition of several non-partisan justices who don’t belong to an orthodox far-right judicial fraternity. The right to vote is once again protected by law, as are women’s rights, healthcare, and civil rights of all kinds.
Partisanship in drawing gerrymandered districts to consolidate minority power is ruled as unconstitutional as nakedly racist gerrymandering. Serious care is given to solving the existential, rapidly accelerating climate crisis mankind, and all of the creatures of the earth, are facing. Norms of civil society are restored, and codified into democracy-protecting law, where necessary. Hatred of minorities, and baseless attacks on judges and other public officials, may no longer be preached by elected officials with impunity. The fairness doctrine is restored for mass media news reporting, including fact-checking for social media. The filibuster, that relic of human slavery, is ended, along with the Electoral College. Democratic debate on issues of public importance returns, in a robust and meaningful way.
These things would be a good start to real closure on our Age of Raging Narcissism and the rule of the angriest and most corrupt among us. We have more things that unite us, more common goals, than the things that are used to divide us.
Maybe I’m just primed by Hollywood, and the human longing to see justice, but that kind of closure seems entirely reasonable to me. With communication, conversation, an ability to listen and make oneself heard and understood, closure is possible. The problem is the millions among us who cannot communicate, except on their strict terms, and who are able to listen only until they feel violated (and they’re hypersensitive to this feeling), at which point they respond the only way they know how. That way of responding never leads to closure, and, to my eternal disappointment, it is still hard for me to get closure about the fact that closure will often be impossible.
Sorry for that lack of closure, here, I truly am. Even as I am hopeful for a good result in the election between an insane agent of eternal grievance and senseless retribution (and the 39 year-old, self-righteous psychopath who will be installed as soon as the figurehead is taken out of the picture by their handlers) and flawed, human, well-intentioned public servants who will earnestly address actual problems and don’t aspire to lead a Nazi-like national cult and rain violent repression down on the meek and helpless.
I can dream, can’t I? But, of course, the main thing at the moment is heading off the worst case scenario. Talk about a bad dream.
It takes diligence, many times, to arrive at the truth about complicated things. It is a process that sometimes involves pain and can result in punishment. Many truths are hard to accept, so we retreat to endless nuance, interpretation, seeing it from another point of view. Certain truths, if you don’t see them in time, will smash your face and leave you wondering how you wound up bloody and chained in a sadist’s basement.
Lies, on the other hand, can be constructed to fit your needs perfectly. Feel threatened but can’t put your finger on what’s going on? How about this: there is a vast conspiracy conducted by elites, who are beloved public figures, very influential, who, behind the scenes, meet to share child sexual slaves and drink their blood? Doesn’t that explain why your spidy senses are tingling? If you fear a certain type, the lie becomes much more potent by slugging those folks into the scenario. It’s Puerto Rican pedophile cannibals, Jewish ones (of course), Muslims, Illegals, etc.
Obvious as it was once I heard Timothy Snyder say it out loud: the thousands of brazen lies we have been told by Trump and his spokes-sphincters over the last nine years have smudged the line between truth and lies. Truth, what is that, really? Aren’t alternative facts really just another spin on your so-called actual facts? Different strokes for different folks. Isn’t truth what you believe in your heart? Doesn’t your heart know what is real, much better than an easily confused brain?
Once the line is sufficiently blurred it is time for the Big Lie. This is a lie so audacious that people simply can’t believe it’s a lie — it’s unthinkable that a Hitlerian scale lie could be told over and over by everyone in a political party. If 25% of Americans actually believed the endless ads Trump ran that his 2020 election victory had been stolen from him, as Ted Cruz insisted on January 5th, 2021, isn’t that a reason to call time-out until the other 75% could be convinced of the same thing?
Here is five minutes of Snyder’s brilliant discussion of this hideous, all too popular, dynamic. Truth can be elusive and involves pain sometimes, lies are direct and easy to swallow, designed to make you feel just and righteous. Which one is your favorite?
A fascist is a certain type of leader: authoritarian, top of the hierarchy of strict obedience to orders, surrounded by those who take an oath of personal loyalty to him, ruthlessly repressing dissent, threatening and controlling all professions and the mass media, spouting divisive lies, using the force of the state to terrify and punish enemies, and its treasury to reward wealthy friends and patrons.
All of these things Donald Trump has done, or tried to do, during his first term in office. Even now, we don’t know the full extent of his crimes regarding a trove of illegally retained classified military secrets and his ongoing post-presidential negotiations with his handler/blackmailer, renowned war criminal and buddy of Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin.
In attacking his opponent Kamala Harris, in addition to the usual dog whistles to the Klan and Nazi contingent of his base, and millions of ordinary misogynists, Trump routinely calls her a radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist. In the country Trump’s family comes from Marxists and Fascists were fighting deadly battles in the streets less than twenty years before Trumpie was born.
No fascist can be a Marxist and vice versa. Only someone intent on name-calling, inspiring maximum loathing and ignorant of, or careless about, the meaning of the words he uses, would call a communist a fascist. They can both be totalitarians, authoritarians, but calling Harris a communist fascist is like saying she’s a cat dog (both delicious, by the way, people are saying, the weave, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I?).
Personally, I blame advertising for the distraction and credulity of Americans. Our attention spans are shattered at an early age by the constant bombardment of commercial messages, attention grabbing non sequiturs which we often tune out even as they interrupt whatever we were thinking about a second before. Watch any video on YouTube and, precisely as the video tees up the pay-off, the money quote, the volume jumps and some shill is excitedly shouting over loud music. They are shouting about something completely unrelated to what you were interested in, focused on a second earlier, but not a problem. In America these interruptions are simply an inescapable feature of the marketplace of ideas, just as valid as anything else in a society whose only real value is monetary profit. Everyone understands the profit motive, no?
So you get to vote for a presidential candidate/huckster who lies compulsively, is ignorant about history, incurious about the present and almost everything else, a businessman who started with a small $400,000,000 nest egg from his father and failed in every business venture he started, declaring bankruptcy six times, while touting himself as the greatest business genius of all time, as seen on TV. He knows how the game is played, so he can mock his opponent, call her any name he likes, literally throw shit at her.
Here’s the unfunny punchline: when she is asked whether she agrees with two of his former generals and his former secretary of defense that he is indeed a fascist (it’s virtually impossible to make an informed argument that he’s not) and she says she does, Trump screams bloody murder that she’s name-calling. Every fascist in history has done that, as have many communist dictators, although dogs and cats (equally tasty when prepared well, many people are saying, see that skillful weave I’m doing?) rarely do.
“How dare that nasty, low IQ, brown sonof a bitch who doesn’t know if she’s Black or Indian, or Malaysian, or Samoan, or even a human being, call me a name I already call her?”
In his rage the other night he fantasized to replacement theory promoter Tucker Carlson about disloyal war monger Liz Cheney not being so brave if she had a rifle and was looking down the barrels of nine rifles pointed at her head. The New York Times did mention this threat in today’s edition, but carefully, with plenty of respectful nuance (they don’t want to face down the barrel of nine automatic weapons). The Washington Post (spineless puto-owned) presumably also gave a balanced portrait of the candidate’s understandable bad mood as he uttered his arguably well-veiled, deniable threat to Tucker Carlson, a craven lying toady who cackles like a startled school girl. As Tuckems said the other day at the beautiful Madison Square Garden love fest that had not a hint of the 1939 Nazi rally held there (I got the proof for you right here):
“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.”
A far cry from Tucker’s January 6th tweets about Trump being a demonic force and talking about how much he hates the sore loser Orange Fraud. Tucker has always shown an almost Jeff Bezos-like level of personal integrity (see, for example, his recent infomercial for Vlad Putin in a Russian supermarket).
Ah, fuck those lying, name-calling, thin-skinned, transactionally pearl clutching, fainting couch humping, fascist fucking crybaby putos. Better to see exactly how fucked Mr. Musk will be if Trumpie loses the election and can’t get his goons to overturn the results.
Democracy dies in a greedy rich man’s tightly clenched asshole.
Or, as Dan Rather put it the other day, in describing the uber-billionaire’s cowardly, antidemocratic twitch decision not to publish the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, already written and ready to go (and Bezos’s sickening written attempt to sanitize and justify his weasel dicked self-interest):
He is scared of Donald Trump. I am not saying he shouldn’t be. Trump has threatened to go after his perceived enemies, and that includes members of the media. But as the owner of one of the most important newspapers in the country, you have to have skin like a rhinoceros.
Bezos says there was no quid pro quo involved, but that claim raises suspicion, at the very least. And to many it rings downright hollow. His companies have billions of dollars in federal government contracts and are bidding for billions more. Those contracts generated more than half of his companies’ profits in the last quarter.
Trump’s fondness for retribution is legendary, so the possibility of payback, in the form of a canceled contract, is real.
Trump and Bezos have never been chummy. Trump has been critical of the Amazon founder, but there seems to have been a thawing of late, with recent overtures by Bezos and his executives.
In July, Bezos called Trump after the assassination attempt to tell him how much he liked the fist pump photo.
According to the Post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called Trump in August to further the relationship. “Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.”
And the head of Blue Origin, Bezos’s space exploration company, spoke with Trump last Friday — coincidently, the same day the Post announced it would not endorse anyone.
“While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high,” Bezos wrote. Careful getting off that high horse of yours, Jeff. . .
. . . What might be the most upsetting aspect of this cowardice is that it proves Trump’s strong-arm tactics work. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and scholar of authoritarianism, has published a list of ways to avoid succumbing to autocracy. Three of five apply here: “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions,” and “Remember professional ethics.” Jeff Bezos has so much money that if he never makes another dime, he would still remain one of the richest men in the world for the rest of his life. So the courageous thing to do would be to stand up to the bully, rather than yield to his threats in advance. That would do more to restore America’s faith in the media than the gutless act of not endorsing Kamala Harris.
“All violence,” says psychiatrist James Gilligan, after years working with violent inmates in American prisons, “is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.” Fear of shame drives all kinds of extreme, harmful behavior.
Self-delusion is another adaptation to fear of shame. “I could not have lost, because I am a winner and winners never lose. So-called reality is conspiring against me because it is jealous and it fears me, and rightfully so. I will destroy so-called reality and all the feeble cucks who try to cite facts as though they are more real than my feelings. Nothing is more real than my feelings, they rule the universe!”
Give someone like this power over others (and they often crave it as the only way to feel safe from a feeling of worthlessness) and hold on to your seat. The driver is now a hostage and a lunatic is at the wheel with only one goal — never to feel the traumatic agony of his shame again. If it takes driving off a cliff to prove he’s fearless, not a problem to someone hellbent on outrunning the terror of shame, failure, a paralyzing fear of utter worthlessness.
We have been watching this struggle play out in public for the last nine years. It is playing 24/7 at the moment in a party that must swear loyalty to a debasing lie about a lost election that was, like the Civil War, never lost, but stolen. This power dynamic has always operated behind the scenes, in throne rooms, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms and behind closed doors, but now the agents of this divisive, controlling rage have their perfect front man. He has no filter, will say and do absolutely anything, and insist on his perfect right to whatever he feels he must say or do. No human laws can stop him, he is superhuman, magical in his powers to overcome reality itself.
To my great personal sorrow, I had a painfully close front row seat to the highly personalized version of this dynamic a few years ago. My closest, most trusted friends, people I’d known and counted on for fifty years, all sneered angrily at me from the windows of a bus driven by one of these unleashed fucking maniacs. There was no appealing to their humanity, to our long friendships, to our actual experiences of each other over decades. They were united in their sudden certainty that I deserved only their united contempt and eternal anger for my stubborn refusal to take responsibility for willfully and singlehandedly destroying the happiness of a group of lifelong friends. The best formulation I got for my permanent expulsion from this close social circle was a demented “we can never forgive you for not being able to forgive.”
The lesson I was forced to learn was an extremely harsh one. In certain circumstances, a popular person can quickly and easily convince all the other kindergarteners in the schoolyard that you have cooties. Cooties are highly contagious. If you go near Cootie-boy you will have cooties and that will be the end of you, too. Life, my little five year-old friends, is a binary choice, always. You choose black or you choose white. In a shame-based world there are no other options, no nuance, no gradation, no possibility of EVER working out any problem with a loved one that might make their shame rear its monstrous head for them.
Therapy doesn’t work with these creatures, although often everyone around them, not as strong and self-sufficient as the shame-based charismatic, will seek therapy. To begin to change anything about yourself that causes you pain you must be able to look at faults in yourself, your reflexive reactions that often lead to misery. The idea of honestly looking at their own faults is terrifying to someone whose entire personality and worldview is based on never again being traumatized by shame. They will not do it. Nothing bad can ever be their fault in any way, that’s the inhuman rule these poor bastards live by.
Poor bastards or not, they can’t be negotiated with, persuaded or made more empathetic. They cannot change in any significant way, because of the particular nature of their damage. They are doomed to their fate, but we are not. We can be polite to them, speak calmly with them, but they can’t be counted on for anything besides their own self-preservation. Horrible but not uncommon, the worst feature of their affliction is their ability to convince others of their magical worldview.
Talk about an American Hitler, his boss has nothing on this moral contortionist Ivy league educated lawyer, billionaire staked venture capitalist, 18 month senator motherfucker. Five minutes of his lie-fueled bullying should do it for you.
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