Category Archives: History and Politics

Incoherence can prevail, for a time

An incoherent insistence on the righteousness of your beliefs isn’t the same as a persuasive argument that can convince somebody else to change their point of view. Incoherence is only only persuasive to people who are already angry and who share your belief and your outrage. Their anger will make them agree without question.

So, cunningly, wealthy reactionaries have, over decades, spent billions to create an industry to stoke and focus the rage of millions of powerless Americans who need to feel righteous and powerful, somehow.

Cue the AR-15 sales reps, these vultures ain’t merchants of death they’re purveyors of security and freedom from Socialist tyranny and oppression by an illegitimate government! If the occasional mass killing of tiny children is an unfortunate side effect, we have ways of protecting these kids, by “hardening” the schools in which they are slaughtered against would be slaughterers , and other common sense things of this nature. Besides, to be brutally candid, only the children of losers ever get slaughtered in their classrooms anyway.

And, like gambling addicts who can’t walk away from the table until they’re bankrupt, these incoherent motherfuckers only know how to “double down” like their leader, the most insecure and perpetually angry victim we have seen in public life in living memory of the oldest among us.

Incoherence can prevail for a time, sometimes for years, but reasonable people eventually figure out how to get together and put a stop to it. Time to get busy.

Stating the obvious

If the law allows the creation of limitless nonprofit organizations that are actually partisan lobbying groups, and allows these groups to be funded by anonymous donors giving unlimited amounts of “dark money” (tax deductibly, don’tcha know), then, obviously the NRA, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Council for National Policy, and the rest, are all funded by the same handful of supremely generous reactionary hereditary billionaires.

When we talk about the NRA, or Judicial Watch, or the Institute for Humane Studies, we’re talking about the selected mouthpieces of autocrats like fucking Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Jared Kushner and their insatiable ilk, make no mistake who these devils are or what their insane goal is.

Herschel Walker on preventing school shootings

My apologies for this non-embedded YouTube video, apparently can’t do it from my phone these days, at least not with the short clip I made. At any rate, check out Jimmy Kimmel’s introduction and reaction to a stunningly incoherent expression of something by leading Georgia candidate for US Senate, and apparent TBI victim, Herschel Walker.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxtVNIR7ZPoG5ujuvUtAv67iZpHYevlsiN

Mass media and the soul of America

From progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the opening of their most recent podcast, Counterspin:

Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

https://fair.org/home/matt-gertz-eric-k-ward-on-the-buffalo-massacre-replacement-theory/

Leave it to The Washington Post to put everything into perspective in a tweet. Of course, in our profit-driven, corporate advertising-driven mass media, the 18 year-old avowed racist’s racially motivated mass murder spree in Buffalo a few days ago is old news, wiped off the front page as pundits and politicians argue about whether it was right or wrong for Texas law enforcement not to intervene for an hour while another enraged 18 year-old mass shooter used his brand new legally acquired military assault weapon to shoot his grandmother in the face and massacre children and teachers in a Texas elementary school.

And the GOP’s united, incoherent talking point is always the same, cannibal socialist pedophiles are trying to politicize this terrible, horribly regular (27th school mass murder in 2022 so far) tragedy that can’t be avoided in the greatest country in the world has ever known. And that Biden, like slippery, illegitimate Obama before him, is too weak to make good on his promise to fix hundreds of years of racist custom and practice in this country and bring everybody together as he lyingly promised.

But tip of the yarmulke to Jeff Bezos and the influential liberal media outlet he owns, for the helpful framing of the ineptly managed ‘fight for America’s soul’. Good job, Jeff!

Incoherence is the LAW, sir!

A perfect encapsulation of the utter incoherence that has taken over the party of Goldwater/ Reagan/Koch/Trump, by the incomparable Sarah Lazarus:

Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick, who’s neck and neck with Dr. Oz for the GOP nomination, has filed a lawsuit to require counties to count mail-in ballots with undated envelopes. The RNC and Pennsylvania GOP have intervened to oppose McCormick and, uh, ensure that their own voters’ ballots aren’t counted.

So, after six good guys with guns finally succeeded in killing the kid who shot his grandmother in the face before barricading himself into a public school and turning his assault weapon on nine and ten year olds, amid the party of the Big Lie’s pious expressions of being sickened and horrified by the uniquely American carnage and praying for a better outcome than the constant mass shootings by enraged young men infuriated by their powerlessness and goaded to violence by a mad “gunman” narrative spread endlessly by the same NRA backed freaks who speak so incoherently, urging them in the name of freedom to fight like hell for Jesus Christ and all He stands for.

My prayers go out to these self-righteous, incoherent pieces of shit, may they all go blind like Paul on the road to Damascus, fall to their knees and break down sobbing when they realize they are the lynch mob who would have nailed Jesus to the nearest cross [1].

[1]

Without of course, going on, like the former Saul of Tarsus, to become history’s most famous and effective propagandist for religious anti-semitism. A big ask, I know.

A wee taste of the liberal mass media

A taste of the Grey Lady’s famous objectivity, from a piece entitled 

Democrats Fight Headwinds in Georgia and Beyond: ‘The Problem Is Reality’

Or as I read it:  Democrats likely fucked in Georgia, and elsewhere, with only selves to blame.

The piece stresses that Democrats, in disarray, its wide coalition unable to agree about anything (rather than clinging to the narrowest of majorities and unable to accomplish anything due to unified obstruction and the filibuster created to defend white supremacy and slavery), will probably lose the upcoming midterms, as so many pundits predict, as data from past midterm elections show almost always happens, because, you know, “reality” is against them (however you’d like to interpret that highly objective term). 

The battle being described is not between democracy and a robust debate about public good versus a drooling rush to American fascism, it’s, ya dig, radical socialist Democrats fighting pragmatic centrists, yo, plus reality:

“The problem is not messaging — the problem is reality,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, citing inflation as the “greatest obstacle to retaining the majority.”

The reality that giant corporations, who profit much more handsomely from a corporately run government are able to drive prices as high as they like,  while reaping record profits, in order to oust a president whose party favors making them pay fair taxes?   While liberal media drives the obvious story about inflation being a heavy burden to citizens and harmful to the incumbent president, no matter that no president is able to do much about it when it happens, particularly if the inflation is global. 

Plus, weak Democratic messaging is a huge part of the problem with famously meek Democrats who are clinging to a majority too slim to accomplish any change, no matter how urgently that change is needed, Ritchie.

The greatest hope for Democrats appears to be potential Republican acts of self-sabotage: the party nominating outside-the-mainstream candidates or failing to coalesce after divisive primaries.

In Washington, much of the Biden agenda is frozen in a congressional morass. The party’s left wing and centrists are busily blaming each other for the state of affairs and clashing over what to do next, with student loan forgiveness emerging as one divisive flashpoint.

Or, more accurately, much of Biden’s agenda is being obstructed by a lockstep reactionary party united in its fear of a vindictive former president and his angry, violence prone base, reluctant to possibly alienate their super generous corporate backers, and eager to weaken Biden and take back power, whatever harm they may do to millions of Americans, including their own voters, who favor large parts of Biden’s agenda.  With a one vote majority in the Senate, all you need to buy are two corrupt members of Biden’s party to see an enemy president’s agenda “frozen in a congressional morass”.   Ms. Synema, when she is voted out, will immediately settle into her comfortable five million dollar a year job for any of the industries whose interests she loyally protected by opposing any carve-outs to the filibuster, for any reason or, in the case of Ms. Symema, none but brazen self–interest.

I don’t have the stomach to review all the ways this article sickened me, but it is as good an example of the trouble with “objective” “liberal” corporate media like the New York Times as any I’ve seen recently.  Of particular note, the confirmatory quote selected from Bernie Sanders himself, to wit:

“The Democratic base is quite demoralized at this moment,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of the party’s leading progressive voices, put it bluntly.

Just one more:

Ms. Abrams has emerged as a national star among Democrats. But privately Democratic strategists fear that her high-water mark might have come in 2018, when she lost in a Democratic wave year.

In a state where her opponent, then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, disenfranchised ,(purged) many times more likely Democratic voters than his slim 50,000 vote margin of victory over Abrams.  But, that has nothing to do with anything, Democratic strategists fear, in a state whose independent Republican state legislature has made it much harder for minorities to vote in the wake of Trump’s unsuccessful call to Georgia to just find him a stinkin’ 11,780 votes, one more than he needed to win.

Oh, yeah, just one more. This nice objective summary of the debate on student loan repayment (mine, borrowed to pay a state law school, is locked in at a historic low 3.75% interest rate)

The party’s left wing and centrists are busily blaming each other for the state of affairs and clashing over what to do next, with student loan forgiveness emerging as one divisive flashpoint. .

. . . That issue, in particular, has divided the White House into factions — including Mr. Biden himself who has both expressed opposition to perceived giveaways to college-educated elites and said he was considering wiping out some debts. Progressives have pushed for sweeping loan forgiveness to motivate the base.

Fucking objective, omniscient, elite New York Times, what don’t you understand about the destructiveness of this kind of seemingly objective, mealy mouthed reporting that plays so reasonably into the dominant right-wing narrative/reality? 

If what you predict is inevitable, enjoy your last few months of not being sued over and over again, and repeatedly subpoenaed to Congress, by powerful hate-filled maniacs with armies of lawyers paid by taxpayer dollars, literal fascists who will eventually send mobs to chase y’all with pitchforks, torches and guns.  Because you are, of course, in a sense often challenging to succinctly explain, real enemies of the People.

Side order of incoherence, anyone?

Take the two sides of the “controversy” over unaccountable police killings of unarmed civilians, disproportionately “minority” citizens, in avoidable confrontations that could be deescalated instead of ending in the death of the civilian. You can talk about what actually happened in each of these cases, or you can deny that these cases mean Jack shit, motherfucker.

If you have no worries about making a coherent, persuasive, evidence-based presentation of facts, if you don’t give a rat’s ass about what might be true or what might be demonstrably false and you agree with Mr. Hitler that effective political marketing is equal parts terror and rage, you can contest anything at all. When you do, your outraged fans will be wildly tickled, so it’s win-win, baby.

First, the tragic facts :

George Floyd was murdered, in public, on suspicion of passing a counterfeit twenty, by a policeman who was sentenced to a long prison term for his murder, after a trial that happened because a brave teenager captured the entire murder on her phone’s video camera.  We can see that the calm murderer cop was helped by three colleagues who kept the small crowd at bay and helped subdue the large “suspect” under their knees, while they choked the life out of a handcuffed, prone man who was gasping that he couldn’t breathe and finally calling for his mother, over the span of eight or nine minutes it took for them to kill him.   We know this because we watched George Floyd’s murder on a horrific video that captured every minute of the man’s agonizing slow death at the hands of those who vowed to protect and serve the rest of us. Under those unique conditions, with the filmed proof in hand for all to see, and credible eyewitnesses all telling the identical story under oath, one policeman who murdered one unarmed, non-resisting Black man was indicted, tried and convicted of murder.

Cue the gigantic multi-ethnic crowds, before the indictment, here and in cities all over the world, millions marching during a pandemic, protesting the deadly violence that is spmetimes a first resort for stressed out policemen armed to the teeth and protected by a unique legal immunity and one of the world’s most powerful labor unions.

The proposition of the protests was simple:  it is intolerable for those enforcing the law to routinely murder people (disproportionately Black and brown people) who pose no threat to them because … police have a dangerous and thankless job, or are badly trained, or are sometimes angry assholes who were bullied as kids.   It is never right to kill an innocent young woman in her bed because you suspect there may be a cache of illegal drugs in the apartment, after you break down her door in the dead of night pursuant to a “no knock” warrant.  Or to shoot into a car when the passenger informs the officer he has a legal gun and is producing a permit.   Or in a playground, seconds after arriving on the scene where a Black kid is seen waving a toy gun.  It is a sin that this long, bloody history of unaccountable, deadly state violence against non-threatening persons, going back to the original Slave Patrols, is allowed to continue in our democracy.  With the filibuster (nowhere enumerated in fucking Alito’s sacred constitution) no change is possible to any law that is arguably in controversy with at least 41% of the Senate!

The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, though there were instances when some in those large crowds, confronted by heavily armed military style anti-riot squads usually only seen during violent civil wars, expressed outrage by breaking windows, overturning cars, burning stores, looting.   There was also probably some “unprovoked” destruction of property.   

The relative rarity of such violence by the George Floyd murder protesters was no problem for defenders of police violence, no matter how misguided, or, frankly (and God forbid we offend anyone) racist.  All you need are a couple of vignettes of “irrationally” angry crowds of Black “sons of bitches” (in the disgraced former president’s earthy language about protesting football players), and their guilty, conscience-stricken “woke” white allies burning cars and buildings, disrespecting the police.

Run the instances of violence on a loop, play them over and over to your frightened, angry audience, insist that no crowd has a right to such anger, except your crowd, because they’re absolutely right to feel rage against some fucking cheating liars who constantly claim your leader is lying — while they steal from you! — because not only are they liars, they are the living embodiment of Satan.  Fucking Satan, who loves the Child Tax Credit, for some reason understood only by old Beelzebub himself.

My favorite part (in the sense of “favorite” as a powerful emetic) is the “liberal” media jumping into the fray to be balanced and neutral.   The New York Times is one the greatest purveyors of this toxic, “objective” neutrality [1].   

Switzerland was neutral during Nazi military aggression, laundering money for the Third Reich and scrupulously not taking sides in the larger dispute known as World War Two.   As a young child I thought, fair enough, they were neutral.   But if you are neutral when one side is intent on exterminating the other, including all civilians and children who look like the other in any conquered land, and silencing anyone who has any complaint about the victorious army’s right to do whatever military might and fanaticism enable them to… well, probably by the time I was ten I understood that in World War Two Switzerland basically sided with Hitler by not taking sides.   The Pope, for his own reasons, made a deal with Hitler also, called the concordat, because the Pope is very fancy.

The incoherence of the reactionary counter narrative is bad, but the seemingly objective, normalizing reporting of the incoherence, as though there are equally good people, equally compelling arguments, on both sides, on every side, is even worse.  It gives a veneer of truth and an air of respectability to arguments that are not even arguments, treating something like “Birtherism” as a disproven or disputed theory rather than calling it what it actually was — a marketing slogan to galvanize racists behind an insane banner based on an angry, racist fantasy of kicking an illegitimate Black liar out of office. 

Propaganda is essential to the rise of any tyrant, and without media amplification of propaganda (with George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, the GOP company line is that the protesters were just violent “woke” assholes with no excuse for their outrage much worse than the peaceful Trump rioters of January 6th) the culture cannot be saturated with it and authoritarianism can never take root and flourish.

[1]   Never mind, this article needs its own post, to follow soon.    Meanwhile, here’s the “gift” link for you, if you have stomach acid to spare.  Democrats likely fucked in Georgia, and everywhere, with only selves to blame.

Why the voices of the “opposition” party are so consistently muted, timid and measured, while white racist violence and intimidation, even terrorism intended to ignite further killing and bigger, more consequential hate crimes (like that mass murdering young racist in Buffalo, New York the other day in his online Manifesto) continue unabated, with their promoters screaming around the clock that what you are seeing is not what you are seeing, that they know you are but what are they, that violence by white nationalists is not like violence by unarmed, angry, “woke” protesters, attacking police is “legitimate political discourse” because … and get ready for the unbearable bullshit that follows in a torrent, from a high pressure firehose.  Nazis [2]  never sleep, not a wink.   You going to be Switzerland, or pick a side?

[1]   Never mind, this illustrative article I’m thinking of needs its own post, to follow.    Meanwhile, here’s the “gift” link for you, if you have stomach acid to spare.  Democrats likely fucked in Georgia, and everywhere, with only selves to blame

[2]  Lest you take offense at my use of “Nazi” to describe unquestioning, ambitious followers of a deranged, compulsively lying, hate-filled, easily manipulable, revenge-driven maniac frontman for obscenely wealthy reactionaries (Mr. Trump), consider that the Nazis were around for years before they took power, doing the same street level bullying and public screaming the right wing militias and their elected Republican allies are doing now.   

It was five years after the Nazis took power, at first with the same 39% support that Trump enjoyed throughout his term, and purged leaders of their street fighters in “The Night of the Long Knives”, before the first night of nationally organized mob violence against Jews, “Kristalnacht“, and eight long years until the “Final Solution,” the mass killing program for which the Nazis are so rightfully famous, or infamous, as the case may be.  Like the NY Times, I dread to seem one-sided… now back to my fabulous new place in the Hamptons with me!

In other news of corrupt lawyers

John Eastman’s lawyers argued that their client disagreed with the judge about the 2020 election, and that everything Eastman wants to be hidden from scrutiny should remain hidden from scrutiny, to protect Eastman and his “client”, the corrupt former president.

In their filing, Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote that their client disagreed with Judge Carter’s conclusion that he had undermined democracy, arguing that Mr. Eastman truly believed the election was stolen. The filing cited the work of conservative media figures — including the new film “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, which fact checkers have described as misleading — as evidence that widespread fraud occurred in the election.

“If, as seemed clear to Dr. Eastman and his client at the time, there was illegality and fraud in the election of sufficient magnitude to have altered the outcome of the election, then far from ‘undermining’ democracy, Dr. Eastman’s actions and advice must be seen for what they were — a legitimate attempt to prevent a stolen election,” Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote. “Perhaps Dr. Eastman was wrong about that. But even if he was, being wrong about factual claims is not and never has been criminal.”

link below

If they believed this in spite of Trump’s former gunsel Bill Barr telling Trump on December 1st that the claims of electoral fraud had been investigated by DOJ and determined to have been “bullshit,” then the judge must, arguably rule for the rabid Doctor Eastman, Doctor Eastman’s lawyers argue.

Lawyer Says He Dealt Directly With Trump Over Jan. 6 Plans https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/john-eastman-trump-jan-6.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkTVUZAybIRp8_qRmHmfnE2_s-gX_4aSWcUipHxuJQH5Kd_l-IZ6NlIoV13yieQJUJFo4Tc8FI770VOV1xGU7vq4GYmZ8BLmI_893pAD89h9eTB-w2tGKzMmP8eLYjlfjm7kjfPjXpUPPa1iExNU0y98seAFKg3HICwq_AE_ckmYUtmKd8We0pAGsIdyKIvPL3ChlhO93gbx3U6Ac-WegxSiiE1JfHqOpGKFMOfAqAGHBv4m8868deP8cVOcv9Kx0hfsn_gdYBGxjgHn1jaf9jybCatGEEGVU