I feel like the former president, agitatedly tapping away at my phone… fucking depressing, but there it is, as I shop for a new computer to replace a mint condition macBook that has been rendered obsolete “to protect my privacy”…

When the candidate of White Nationalists, Militant pro-fetus Christian Conservatives, Climate Change Deniers, anti-government “Libertarian” billionaires, rich people who wanted a tax break and every fascist-leaning follower Steve Bannon could bring into the fold, narrowly became president in 2016, his party’s electoral mandate, as reflected in the Senate, was 51-49 [1].

It was no problem for this narrow Republican majority to give a $1,900,000,000,000 tax break to the wealthiest Americans and their favorite corporations. It was a simple matter for them to change the filibuster rules to ram a 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court down America’s throat, in perpetuity.

Now, with Democrats in the narrow majority, there is a sudden cry for “bipartisanship” in our deeply divided nation, a cry taken up by two suddenly supremely powerful cartoonishly corporate Democrats, oil baron Joe Manchin III and the narcissistic Sphinx of Arizona, a senator who only talks to big donors and the president.

I’ve got no news here, except that Americans will have to settle for a somewhat puny compromise Build Back Better Act that will leave prevention of climate catastrophe underfunded and several popular, long overdue programs cut entirely. Manchin (who appears quite vulnerable in Red West Virginia — GOP voters hate him for disloyalty to Trump, any other Democrat outpolls him as the “blue” candidate) announced he will go no higher than 1/4 of the bloated U.S. military budget, and won’t sign on to any Clean Energy initiative that threatens his coal business or those of his fossil fuel donors.

Biden has agreed to all of the right-wing moderate’s demands. It will still be great, Biden insists, his party’s chance to do anything dramatic rapidly slipping away, amidst routine, painless, phoned-in GOP filibusters of all legislation the majority party proposes.

After all, as McConnell points out, it’s not like the fucking Democrat [sic] party has a goddamned mandate in this deeply divided coin flip democracy , you snowflake cucks.

Lifting millions of American children out of poverty, keeping multitudes safe from the threat of homelessness, preventing the destruction of our planet? Not nearly as compelling, to corporate Free Market donors, as more profits for the greedy investor class that funds the whole shit show. Ask “centrists” Kyrsten and Joe III.

You know what I’m sayin’?

[1] from senate.gov

115th Congress (2017–2019)
Majority Party: Republicans (51 seats)
Minority Party: Democrats (47 seats)
Other Parties: 2 Independents (both caucused with the Democrats)
Total Seats: 100
Note: At the beginning of 115th Congress, there were 52 Republicans and 46 Democrats. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) resigned on February 8, 2017, and was replaced by Luther Strange (R-AL). Doug Jones (D-AL) subsequently won the special election held on December 12, 2017, to replace Sessions and was sworn into office on January 3, 2018.

Muhammad Ali coined the term “rope a dope” to describe his fight plan for winning a fight against a more powerful opponent.   He exhausted his opponent by laying against the ropes round after round, head and torso covered by forearms and gloves, goading the opponent and letting him take out his fury as Ali leaned back against the ropes, resting while he let his furious opponent exhaust himself and then, when the time was right, whuppin’ him.  Rope A Dope is a stalling tactic that allows you to survive round after round against someone who’d otherwise beat you like a drum until the bell rings.  In the end, if you are able to delay things as long as you need to, your opponent is exhausted and frustrated and you have a good chance to win the fight by the end.

While Bill Barr auditioned for his role as Trump’s gunsel, with a memo stating that Mueller’s entire investigation was “untenable,”  Federalist Society favorite Don McGahn, Trump’s then White House Counsel, was busy getting first Gorsuch, then Kavanuagh, on the Supreme Court.   Barr devised a Rope A Dope strategy for the serial obstructor of justice, the 45th president, advising him to assert unlimited, absolute, blanket protective immunity against any testimony or document release that could hurt the Unitary Executive in any way.  The president instructed his faithful to defy Congress, under this untenable legal theory.   

Barr knew in the end this overbroad assertion of limitless privilege was doomed, like Trump’s ridiculous all-inclusive, lifetime non-disclosure agreements that have now started falling in courts, but the main thing was to buy time for his boss, to run out the clock as Trump continued to work his magic for the far right.

During Mueller’s “untenable” investigation he encountered numerous attempts by the Polyp and his myrmidons to obstruct justice.   Trump flatly refused to answer the last question of the interrogatories he agreed to answer for Mueller, left it blank and there was simply no consequence for failing to provide an answer to the most potentially incriminating question.   Manafort and Stone, two of the most cynical and evil fucks on the scene, repeatedly lied to Mueller, which was no problem since they had pardons dangled in exchange for their obstruction to protect the man who would pardon them.   Quid pro quo, defiance, silence and lies in exchange for a pardon from their co-conspirator. 

In one instance of apparent obstruction of justice documented by Mueller, McGahn (who we recently learned collected and trashed every tip called in during the short sham FBI investigation of Boof Kavanaugh) refused his boss’s request to fire Mueller, tendering his resignation instead.   The following day Trump instructed him to write a memo for the record stating they never talked about McGahn firing Mueller.  McGahn, in an uncharacteristic show of integrity, refused.   He told the story to Mueller’s investigators, under the penalties of perjury.    When he was called to testify during the impeachment inquiry he cited the absolute privilege Barr had pulled out of his capacious ass and piously announced that he would abide by the eventual decision of the court.

McGahn’s public testimony would have been devastating to Trump.   As McGahn’s court case meandered through the courts the public never saw him (or any others) confirm the damning details they’d revealed under oath to Mueller’s investigators.   In the end the court ruled that McGahn must testify, but it was two years later, both impeachments were history.   When he did finally testify, he negotiated the rules for his testimony, including that he would not take an oath to tell the truth.   You can read the transcript of him cagily confirming the truth of what he’d told Mueller, but it is a purely academic exercise.  Rope A Dope works again.

The Democrats, a party firmly controlled by its corporate donors, are not known for the stiffness of their collective spine.  Technically they have a razor thin majority in the House and Senate, but they are being Rope A Doped and played by a party that has shown its willingness to embrace any tactic and any lie that will keep them in power.   Our government’s ability to pass needed laws is being held hostage by a united mass of 50 Republican senators and by two basically Republican Democrats, “moderate centrists” Manchin and Sinema.  If one of the two contrarian Democrats (both defenders of the “bipartisan” filibuster, naturally, and well-paid for their steadfastness) flips to the other party, it’s game over for Biden.   If one of the two holds fast against what 49 other Democrats vote for, it’s game over for Biden.  A lot of power for one contrarian to hold over their party’s policies. 

When Steve Bannon worked for his billionaire patrons the Mercers, they supported Lyin’ Ted Cruz, until Trump knocked him out of contention for the GOP presidential candidate and was the last turd standing.  Throwing their support behind the new GOP candidate they introduced the flailing Trump campaign to Bannon and Kellyanne “Alternative Fact” Conway.   The rest, as they say, is history.  Strategist Bannon is a thinking man’s fascist, straight up, he doesn’t even attempt to hide it.   The administrative state?  Enemy of freedom and of the people.    We need 20,000 shock troops for January 6 2.0 and I call for them now.  Jews, not for my kids. Bannon will say whatever he needs to in order to advance his radical right wing agenda of securing a one-party state eternally hospitable to the Mercers and their privileged ilk.

Now Bannon, pardoned by the Polyp for ripping off the Polyp’s most loyal supporters in a fake “Build the Wall!” scam, is doing the McGahn Rope A Dope.   It may be a fanciful, even frivolous, claim that a man who hasn’t worked for Trump directly as a government official since the summer of 2017 is protected by Executive Privilege, but that’s for the courts, not the administrative state Bannon is devoted to destroying, to decide.   

The Democrats current plan is as practical and principled as the one the democracy supporters of the Weimar Republic employed to reign in Mr. Hitler and his top guys.   The law provides for criminal contempt penalties that Bannon can fight in court well past the 2022 election, at which time, Biden having passed no meaningful legislation, might have Trump as Speaker of the House.

The solution to this Rope A Dope doesn’t take much guts, but it takes seeing and fighting sworn lockstep marching enemies as the danger they are.  Congress has the power of inherent contempt which allows it to send marshals to arrest and detain any  contemptuous motherfucker who tells Congress to stick their subpoena where the sun don’t shine.    Send a couple of marshals to arrest Steve Bannon, and, while you’re at it, get his equally handsome autocracy-loving co-conspirator, The Orange Polyp, who has publically told Bannon and others to tell the illegitimate Congress to go fuck themselves.  Lock him up. 

The answer to someone who punches you hard in the face is not a careful study of the best way to react, it is an immediate, strong reaction to prevent another blow to the kisser. Unless, of course, a kingmaker like Manchin or Sinema gives the saucy thumbs down, with a wink to their equally compromised buddies across the aisle (not that either of these shitbirds have anything to say about what the House does to enforce its powers).

In other Rope A Dope news:

Conservative  Democrats, yesteryear’s moderate Republicans, the ones almost universally called “centrists”, are concerned that by focusing on the needs of human citizens, rather than the souls of eternal, judicially created corporate persons, the government will create an “entitlement mentality”. 

That’s Joe Manchin III’s line, echoing Reagan’s racist and hugely successful “Welfare Queen” meme.  That’s the rationale behind Manchin’s objection to raising the minimum wage to $15 as well as to funding programs to help struggling Americans, create well-paying jobs to care for other Americans and combat the looming climate catastrophe. 

 
Of course, Manchin III is kind of a cartoon character, a smug, lying rich fuck who lives on a yacht, takes in bushels of toxic polluter cash, and has his son, Joe Manchin IV, manage his coal interests, which net him a cool half a million dollars or so every year while avoiding all conflicts of interest. 

When I say “lying fuck” I am thinking of Joe’s recent claim that he never crunched the numbers, which is only a lie because of the “soft-infrastructure” budget memo he prepared, with a price tag just north of one trillion, and gave to Chuck Schumer at the beginning of this hammering out period for the Build Back Better Act.  Joe now thinks $2,000,000,000,000 over ten years sounds a hell of a lot better than $3,500,000,000,000 over ten years.   He just doesn’t think it’s fair to expect billionaires to pay their workers a living wage, or to force them to pay more than a small percentage of their income– not wealth, God forbid! — which will disincentivize them from creating jobs that pay something like the f$11/hr. that Manchin proposed. A “moderate” compromise with the radical socialist members of his party, who point out that $15 is already a compromise when the actual wage, adjusted for inflation, should be about $24/hr.   

Joe’s not a billionaire, not by a long shot, but like many members of Congress, he is a millionaire.   He’s concerned that taxing the corporations and billionaires that support him so generously will hurt them, will lose him what he is entitled to, with his rich guy’s entitlement mentality.   Those fat checks from Exxon, Chevron, Koch, the rest of ’em, the campaign funds he’s entitled to, that he’s earned by his consistent votes and actions and inactions as chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will dry up and blow away like a fart in the wind if the Coal Baron of West Virginia does not deliver for his peeps, the big donors.   

Same deal with “moderate, centrist” Kyrsten Sinema.  If I was an even more coarse person than I am, I’d be tempted to call them both whores.  I suppose they are.   But they’re entitled to be, because the system pays some whores very well. 

I’ll let Heather Cox Richardson, writing the first draft of history night after night, put Joe Manchin’s compromise offer in context of what our government spends on our behalf to “defend” us and how automatic those trillions over the decades, 39% of our annual budget, have become.