Category Archives: History and Politics

Party of Bad Faith and Obstruction

If transparency/honesty and a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve are necessary when facing vexing challenges, like, say, the regularly occurring mass shootings of American school children, opacity and obstruction, the two main tools of reactionaries intent on turning the clock back, are the sworn enemies of problem solving.   This reflex to hide evidence, blame, conceal, obstruct and obscure works in politics as well as it works in personal life, as long as “winning” is the highest and only value in play.

The GOP, the party of Gingrich/Koch/Cruz/Trump, is in the business of angrily keeping their base hopping mad over wedge issues, period.   Which is worse, another gun massacre of several young children by a maniac or deliberately teaching millions of those same children that we once had a particularly vicious form of race based slavery in this great nation, a shameful continuing legacy fueled by racism that is a major cause of ongoing injustice and violence today?   

There’s always an angle to make people mad.  Since even many older liberals may feel uncomfortable with the idea of transsexuals, why not attack that odd group?   If it makes people enraged, and helps obscure the underlying issues, the GOP will say it loudly, repeatedly and in one voice.  The entire well-disciplined Republican party is dedicated to one party rule, purging anyone not extreme enough to repeat the talking points and devoted to blocking any investigation of anything that could prove embarrassing or compromising.   See how it trickles down to the local level:

Uvalde Police Department stonewalls Texas Department of Public Safety investigation of their botched handling of the armed maniac in the school with ten year olds he was keen to kill.  The Department of Public Safety already announced it was wrong for the Uvalde police to have 19 officers wait an hour in a school hallway while the shooter was massacring children, while more than one might have been bleeding out, so why cooperate with a witch hunt that has already found you guilty?

News reports today said that the Uvalde police stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety investigation after TxDPS director Colonel Steven McCraw on Friday told reporters that the police made “the wrong decision” and had not acted in accord with protocol, suggesting they had already come to a conclusion, but TxDPS later said that it was only Arredondo who was not responding to their requests. The Department of Justice is also reviewing the police response to the mass shooting.

<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://&lt;!– wp:paragraph –> <p><strong>source: </strong><a href="https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-31-2022-tuesday?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&quot; target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-31-2022-tuesday?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email</a></p&gt; source

That investigation of the RNC’s “legitimate political discourse”, that passionate mob of innocent tourists who inadvertently put 140 police officers in the hospital on January 6th?  Another fucking witch hunt, just like Mueller’s, just like that attention seeking partisan DA in Fulton County (over another totally innocent “perfect” phone call), just like her angry “sister” at the head of the NY State AG’s office.  Subpoena?  From an “illegitimate” partisan committee formed only to persecute the rightful president and innocent patriots rightfully incensed at a provably stolen election?  Fuck that.   

Now a criminal grand jury is sending a subpoena to the Trump sidekick who went on TV to describe the political arm of the insurrection in detail, and if the guy defies that subpoena he can be thrown in jail … how unfair is that?  That guy, Peter Navarro, already said, after defying the congressional subpoena, that he’s protected by the executive privilege he waived on TV by describing the “Green Bay Sweep” to some sneaky Jew lawyer/”journalist” on a left wing corporate network!   The witch hunts continue, and will, until the GOP claws back Congress and Biden and Harris start getting impeached once a week, along with Raskin, Schiff, Cheney, Pelosi and others, and we’ll see how they feel when the tables are turned… Speaking of politically motivated witch hunts:

To prove that the Trump/Russher thing was a hoax, that Trump’s  campaign never sought or accepted any help whatsoever from the Russians, in spite of the lies told, under oath, and reported by Mueller and Marco Rubio’s senate committee (which explicitly named the compromised, cash strapped, Russian oligarch-friendly, pardoned felon Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort as a conduit, via Konstantin Kilimnik, to Putin and the oligarchs), and that the whole Mueller probe was an illegal, partisan witch hunt based on pure bullshit promoted by lying Democrat [sic] spies, Bill Barr appointed a stern-looking hard-ass religious conservative federal prosecutor named John Durham to provide some juicy proof of illegal Clinton/Obama/Democratic treachery in the months and weeks leading up to the 2020 election. Durham indicted one guy, in three years, but the trial didn’t go well.

After six hours of deliberation, a federal jury today acquitted Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman of making a false statement to the FBI. This is the outcome of the Trump administration’s attempt to discredit the investigation into the ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. . .

. . . Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about “voter fraud” in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. [1]

<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://&lt;!– wp:paragraph –> <p><strong>source: </strong><a href="https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-31-2022-tuesday?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&quot; target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-31-2022-tuesday?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email</a></p&gt; source

If you understand the troubling power of deliberate, targeted disinformation that can almost instantly spur thousands to wild action, skip this next story of Republican bad faith.  When formation of Homeland Security’s new Disinformation Governance Board was announced, the right wing media megaphone went into overdrive, accusing the newly launched board of being Biden’s “woke” censorious propaganda gazpacho police agency designed to crush patriotic, First and Second Amendment protected, right wing dissent.  It was a highly inaccurate description of the mission of that new office, but it did the trick and the Biden administration was very slow to respond forcefully to the right wing narrative.  Pressure and threats of violence by angry Trumpist trolls who released the director’s home address and other personal and family information caused the director of the newly launched Disinformation Governance Board to resign amid an online onslaught by radicalized “patriots”. 

Lest we forget, Christina Blasey Ford, who testified credibly and at personal risk, that she was sexually assaulted by a drunken teenaged Boof Kavanuah and his friend, has had to move four times as a result of death threats her family received in the aftermath of her testifying.   Blasey Ford’s allegations and Kavanaughs actions were never investigated by the FBI, neither she, nor Kavanaugh, nor his reclusive alcoholic friend were interviewed and the agency sent thousands of tips about Kavanaugh directly to Kavanaugh’s sponsor White House Counsel Don “we’ll tie up your subpoena in court for two years” McGahn, for a decent burial. The onetime drunken teenager now sits, unimpeachably, on the Supreme Court, after narrowly missing having his life destroyed by dark money funded vindictive Left Wing operatives shamelessly using this so-called victim, who has been the target of one righteously angry mob after another.  The real victim was Kavanaugh!

It is hard, dirty work, but we have to keep our eye on verifiable reality, the one based on truth and evidence, not the one based on pure, righteously angry faith.  One party plays by the rules, the other uses the rules only to delay, obstruct, manipulate.   There is a vast difference in those two worldviews.  One  leads to the rule of law, our best shot at a fair, if imperfect, society, the other to the unaccountable rule of the very few, “born booted and spurred” [2] to ride the masses of losers lustily, backed by volatile lynch mobs of passionate, peaceful patriots engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”   

The signs today are that this lawless cult has overreached, in its zeal to seize complete control of American life and what is allowed in the land of the free and the home of the brave, that the tide will be turning, if the good guys with the vote turn out in numbers too big to rig by bad guys counting the vote with their desired outcome foremost in mind.  The tide will turn, or we are all done for. We all have some work to do.

[1] Heather Cox Richardson with the backstory of the Durham anal probe.

In May 2019, then–attorney general William Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation to see if it was “lawful and appropriate.” This was a pretty transparent attempt to salt the media with stories about how Trump was being persecuted by Democrats and how the connections between his campaign and Russian operatives were, as he said, a “hoax.”

Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about “voter fraud” in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.

Durham’s investigation seemed to be in this vein. Although a Department of Justice inspector concluded that the investigation had been begun properly and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed that conclusion, in summer 2020, Barr publicly disagreed, saying that the Russia probe was “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and that Durham’s job was not to “prepare a report” but to establish criminal violations that would lead to prosecutions. Trump supporters expected that Durham’s report would help Trump in 2020, and although DOJ policy is to avoid roiling the country in the 60 days before an election, Barr said that he would feel free within that period to release the results of Durham’s investigation.

In September 2020, then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he had seen “additional” documents from Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. “Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously,” Meadows said.

That month, a top aide to Durham resigned from the investigation, allegedly out of concerns about political pressure. A Republican congressional aide told Axios: “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn’t happen before the election.”

But it was not until September 2021, days before the statute of limitations ran out, that Durham announced a grand jury indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign, for lying to the FBI. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the campaign, and he took to the FBI the information that cybersecurity security experts had uncovered a possible computer link between Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank and Trump Tower.

Durham said Sussman had lied to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity experts. In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions. In any case, the DOJ inspector general concluded that the FBI investigation started over something completely different: a boast from a member of the Trump campaign to an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://

source: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-31-2022-tuesday?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

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[2] To quote the great description of the entitlements of hereditary wealth stolen (from the words delivered from the gallows by a man executed years before by the British crown) by the always eloquent Thomas Jefferson, who, though born booted and spurred, and living a luxurious life, nonetheless saw the galling injustice of this arrangement. An arrangement, like slavery, that he feared no just God could ever allow the perpetrators and beneficiaries of to avoid a hellish eventual punishment for.

Corporate profits are at a 70 year high

As Robert Reich explains in testimony to the Senate’s budget committee the other day, corporations, enjoying the highest profits in seventy years, are raising prices and making windfall profits as the economy recovers from the pandemic. These giant legally created persons are using using those fortuitous profits to buy back shares and drive up their stock prices at the expense of consumers, who groan under inflation.

Of course, blaming Biden and the “tax-and-spend Democrats” for Biden Inflation (worldwide, what a dick he is!) increases their chances for a president Pompeo or Mnuchin or Kushner or Carlson, and even higher profits when all government regulation is finally abolished, along with all income tax (for the wealthiest). It all goes to prove, if proof is kept strictly independent from the facts, that fairly taxing the rich means the destruction of all of us.

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.