Category Archives: politics smells like meat

How the radical right do it

It is something of a cliche to say that anyone far to the political right is a fascist.  That person is only a fascist if, among his other authoritarian traits he seeks the power to silence all dissent.  An extreme right wing person determined to stamp out all opposition views is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-up fascist.  You can have that on the left too, though in America, so far, that type is fairly rare.   Open discussion is a hallmark of democracy, using government power to silence criticism is the mark of every fascist and totalitarian regime in history.

Avigdor Lieberman is the guy with the stylish Van Dyke in the photo below.   Ladies and gentlemen, one-time anti-Arab extremist member of a fringe far-right opposition party (and present day Israeli Minister of Defense) Avigdor Lieberman.   Check this piece of shit out.  

An Israeli artist writes a poem apparently supporting a Palestinian woman who Lieberman hates, a symbol of everything Lieberman hates. His reaction is to try to ban the Israeli’s work from the media, starting pronto with Army Radio.   “There is no room for discussion with haters!!!” says Lieberman, indignantly.

Fascism means never having to listen to anything that you fucking hate.

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Avigdor has zero tolerance for terrorists and those who write poems about those who support terrorists.   His position is that anyone attending an anti-Israel protest on the Gaza-Israel border is a terrorist and therefore has only him or herself to blame if shot by snipers armed with live ammunition.   Shot, sometimes to death, as they assemble in the No Man’s Land on the occupied side of Israel’s long border fence with Gaza.  Avigdor is also in favor of a law criminalizing the photographing Israeli soldiers in a manner that “could hurt military morale”, with a five year prison term.   He has advocated that all Arab Israelis be forced to take a special loyalty oath of eternal allegiance to the Jewish State.  His party is called Israel is Our Home and many in that party, like Lieberman, are from the former Soviet Union, originally.  The fringe-party right-wing Soviet Russian emigrant is now the Israeli Minister of Defense.  

As Yaakov Smirnoff used to say of the U.S.A.— “whatta country!!!!”  Which also brings to mind Groucho’s quip, pointing at Chico– “I rest my case, restrict immigration.”

Fascist fuck.

An Incoherent Narrative

The triumph of irrationality in human affairs is made possible by the ready acceptance of incoherent narratives.   A narrative that supports our point of view is generally accepted at once, even if it makes little or no sense.  This is often called the ‘confirmation basis’– we tend to agree with anything that supports what we already feel or believe.   The shapers of public opinion have made a science of exploiting this bias.  

They take a feeling, say anger, or dispossession, or fear of dispossession, and create a narrative to mobilize a mass of people who feel this way.   The narrative gives body to the shapeless feelings of malaise, fear, rage.  The story does not need to bear any scrutiny at all, can be internally inconsistent, key details can be changed at any time, on the fly — the main thing is that the story is simple in its outlines, easy to repeat and available to forcefully offer in support of a point of view.   The effect doesn’t follow from the purported cause?  The story is incoherent?   Who cares? Fuck you!  I know you are but what am I?  Make me!

I had a PT therapist the other day tell me that he thinks Trump is doing a great job, particularly with the economy.    I pointed out that Trump inherited a good economy [1], the same way he’d inherited a fortune, that virtually all of his businesses except his reality TV show were failures, that his trade war policies are beginning to have bad effects, that he recently had to give $12,000,000,000 in emergency relief to farmers hurt by his tariffs.    

The opinionated PT therapist allowed that Trump doesn’t care about anything, but insisted he is doing a great job with the economy.   Besides, he said, China is screwing us big time, and then went on to describe an out of control China, madly polluting the air and water, lustily fucking away, while laughing at America.  Good to know America’s big problem is those fucking Chinese, I thought, as the therapist wrenched my knees into uncomfortable positions.

Each of these things could be discussed, many of the PT guy’s opinionated statements countered with facts, but that that is not the point.  The point of any narrative is to give your own feelings a rational sound and to have a ready story to shove down somebody’s throat if they disagree with your feelings.  Trump would smile to see this PT therapist who likes him, a brown-skinned Indian immigrant with an accent, led away in handcuffs by ICE agents, while his children bawled, but I thought it an insult to mention this inconvenient counter-fact to the incoherently opinionated fuck.    

Hillary Clinton was not the most naturally gifted politician but it’s hard to believe she’s running a vast pedophilia ring with young sex slaves for hire in the basement of a pizza place in D.C.   Hard to believe, perhaps, even impossible to believe, particularly when we learn that pizza place doesn’t even have a basement, but, though the details might be a little wrong– it’s exactly the KIND OF THING a despicable person like that would do, according to those who hate her.  In fact, there’s a story out now, tacitly endorsed by the president, raging across the internet like a California wildfire, that the corrupt liberals are all in on this pedophilia thing, with fucking Tom Hanks fucking away as lustily as China is fucking the U.S.  Hanks using young children for his sick sexual thrills… disgusting. [2] Make America Great Again!!!!

We can see incoherent narratives at work throughout history.   Hitler’s forceful story comes to mind:  Germany was never defeated in World War One, it was betrayed by Jews.   These treacherous Jewish criminals, in addition to controlling the world, fomenting war and profiting from it, were determined to impregnate as many Aryan women, preferably virgins, as they could.  They were intent on polluting the gene pool with their poisonous DNA, in this way undermining and eventually destroying the superior race.   It was a matter of simple self-defense then, to fight these preternaturally evil degenerates.   The only way to deal with these ruthless fucks was by rooting them out, every one of them, and doing whatever was necessary to ensure they would never reproduce.

That’s the basic blueprint of an incoherent narrative.  The beauty is the simplicity.   You hear the story, it confirms your suspicions, and now you know what you must do.  I always hated that fuck who ran the candy store, that Jew bastard.  Now, after listening to Mr. Hitler,  I know exactly why I was right to hate that piece of dreck.  My spider sense, tingling, in the presence of the very evil that is destroying everybody and everything I love.   What must be done is now clear.

In America we had a huge economic crash in 1929 that reverberated around the world as The Great Depression.  Our capitalist economy was saved by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bold initiatives.   With tens of millions of Americans destitute and hungry, FDR devised plans to put as many as possible back to work, to ensure that those who had no work didn’t starve.   The New Deal “social safety net” was our nation’s first real attempt to make sure masses of people didn’t die, or become Communists, because the richest Americans were, in a sense, lustily fucking them.  Like Tom Hanks, like China.  

One of the first key pieces of New Deal legislation made it illegal for banks to make huge speculative gambles using customer money.  That was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  For almost seventy years it protected the U.S. from another massive economic collapse.  Then some very rich people had an excellent idea: why gamble with our own money when we can use those countless billions people have put in the bank, money that’s just sitting around, idle?   Deals were made, Clinton signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, his successor made many cynical decisions that benefited the richest Americans et, voila, the massive misery of the fraud-driven 2008 economic collapse.  Now the right wing project is dismantling the entire New Deal.

You can’t do this without a compelling narrative.   The brightest and most determined of these super-wealthy radical right wing folks have been playing the long game to convince Americans that government is not the solution to anything, using the incoherent narrative brilliantly.   Government is the problem.   Simple and direct.  Government regulation fucks everything up, destroys liberty and kills initiative along with freedom.  Government is the enemy of liberty.   We need to restrict the government’s power, shrink government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub.  We do this by starving the beast.  The monster runs on tax dollars.  Stop the tax scam.  If millions of parasites on dismantled government programs die, so much the better.  Eh, scratch that last statement, it does not advance our narrative really, true though it is.

The only trouble with this narrative is that the government performs a host of crucial functions and that many government programs are greatly appreciated by millions of participants who benefit from them. Clearly not every beneficiary of Medicare, or Social Security, is a parasite. So here’s what we do.  We fund campaigns to put people in office who will sign a pledge to advance our anti-government agenda.  Once the government can be literally shut down by obdurate, disciplined zealots, our point is beyond dispute.  

See, can it be more clear?  Government, fucking government, can’t do anything, deadlocked, stupid, corrupt.  All despicable, self-serving whores. We should know, we paid many of the whores, raised them out of obscurity, put them in office after they pledged to cripple the hated liberal president and his overreaching government programs.  

In 2012 our network spent $120 million, lost the presidential election, damn it.  In 2014 we spent $180 million, did much better.   In 2016 we spent twice that and the results speak for themselves.  We have more than $400 million in the war chest for the 2018 midterms.   Plus, campaign funding practices that were once illegal are now TOTALLY legal, constitutionally protected “free speech” and we have a clear corporate wealth-friendly majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.   How far we have come in convincing millions of average Americans that their government sucks!!  

See, government is the problem.  Fuck the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, the right to collective bargaining, anti-pollution laws, a so-called environmental agency to enforce those laws, the Communist inspired catastrophic climate change hoax supported by partisan NASA scientists, so-called Civil Rights legislation, programs to make sure children and old people don’t starve, all the rest of that fucking liberal bullshit.  The government is fucking you as lustily as Tom Hanks, China, Oprah.   Disgusting!!!

I suppose it is the mind-fucking prevalence of these incoherent narratives in public life that makes me so intolerant of incoherent narratives in my private life these days.  If I can’t have a conversation with a back and forth, a serious mutual effort to understand the other person’s point of view, and some internal coherence to the thoughts presented, I’m out of there.   I thought of this one the other day, which I offer as my last example.

A friend has an issue with his memory, sometimes things we agreed on are simply forgotten.  Shit happens.  He’s quite sensitive about his memory issues, I’ve learned.   We had an uncomfortable confrontation on my apparent treachery: I had not told him something I’d told his family (waiting to tell him only if and when my efforts had born fruit) and he felt betrayed and belittled.   He confronted me about this.  It was an uncomfortable confrontation.

Later I recalled that I’d told him the entire story, starting with the recent good news and including why I’d left him out of the loop, months earlier.  I mentioned this to him, as an example of his faulty memory, responding to his insistence that his memory of our recent conversation was clearly as good as mine.  

Granted  he was on the defensive, but what he said next surprised me, and not in a good way.  He told me that in fact he hadn’t forgotten that I’d told him the entire story weeks earlier, that he remembered the whole thing, every detail.   Apparently this vindicated him, his memory is fine.  

“That makes putting me on the spot like that much worse!” I said in exasperation.  “If you remembered that I’d told you everything already, how can you then confront me about it in an inquisitorial way as though you knew nothing about it?”    

He bulled right past this point, for purposes of his narrative that I was wrong about his faulty memory, my last point made no difference at all.   This kind of thing works fine in current American politics, as we have seen, though it has does nothing to support friendship, let alone love.

 

 

[1]   Good economy, in this case, being synonymous with a thriving stock market.   More money for the wealthiest investors.  More profits for corporations.  Less taxes for the wealthiest.   To the bitch on the street, working two or three jobs, this “good economy” bullshit is a little fucking galling, considering her real wages haven’t gone up in decades.   Millions of children in poverty going to sleep hungry every night in the wealthiest nation on earth has nothing, really, to do with the “good economy”.

[2]  Why the talented, down to earth, self-effacing Tom Hanks?  I have no fucking idea, except, maybe that he said something these trolls found offensive and why not make the story really fucking good?   If the all-American seeming Hanks is in on it, who could have any doubt that Bill and Hillary are gang banging five and six year olds in their secret sex dungeon, not to mention all the child sex Jay-Z and Beyonce, George Soros, the hated Obamas, Oprah, Al Franken, etc. are in on?

 

Irrationality 101

For most human purposes, rationality takes a back seat.   All that is necessary for human action, most of the time, is a rationale, a slogan, an emotionally resonant excuse.   It is hard to think of a collective misfortune more horrible than war.   Yet every war is always somehow justified, even when it is inexcusable aggression, illegal under the spongey law of nations and conducted solely for the profit of a few who don’t care how many others must die so they can grow richer and more powerful.  Justified.  Read your history book, read virtually any history book.   War, unfortunate, yes, hell, of course, but necessary, you see, because… that guy over there is Hitler.  He’s fucking HITLER!   Nuff said.

My sister and I had a good laugh when she pointed out a howlingly imbecilic line I’d written in an otherwise promising first draft about our family life.   Describing our nightly fights around the dinner table as a battle field I went a step too far.   My sister read the line with beautiful archness: “the brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was as nightmarish as any war scene you can imagine.”    ANY war scene, she repeated, with deft intonation for maximum ironic emphasis.  In the beat it took me to reply she reeled off a string of famous atrocities that left no doubt of the idiocy of my claim.   Instead of a reply I burst out laughing.  We had the best laugh we’ve had together in years.   Then I caught my breath, pulled myself together and deleted the absurd line.  

There I had a rare moment of good fortune, somebody gently pointing out my foolishness, and doing it with humor and superb understatement that made me see it for myself.   The laugh made it undeniable, how laughable my claim had been.   I submit that this moment was an outlier in general human affairs, a rare moment when rational good sense triumphs over a feeling of poetic license, shoddy but justifiable thinking, emotional overstatement.    

Yes, of course, no child should ever be subjected to the mistreatment my sister and I regularly endured from our parents.   Yes, of course, I have a right to be hurt and indignant, even angry, about the abuse we were made to suffer.   But was it really as horrific as Turks on horseback driving helpless Armenians into a river to drown, worse than the Janjaweed, ISIS, the viciousness of the fanatical SS?

Eh, probably not, now that you put it that way.

But there’s the thing about irrationality, as a general rule it doesn’t stop anyone.    We have an irrational chaos-monger insisting he will make our country great again, apparently by wiping out every vestige of decency that people have fought for centuries to achieve here.   All he needs is a slogan and his base will roar, full-throated support, chant anything, no matter how idiotic.  “Drain the Swamp!” which they chanted during his historic presidential campaign, a slogan he told an interviewer he had his doubts about, but then decided was great when he saw how the crowds took to it, was actually translated from the original Italian– it was a mantra of Benito Mussolini as he rose to power [1].  Many people are saying Mussolini was a fascist, but there are many views, on many sides, on many sides.  Just sayin’.

There is no point feeling superior to a stadium full of desperate people chanting “lock her up!” or “Fake NEWS!” or “Suck my ass!!!”.   No reason to feel superior to a strutting, supremely confident-seeming cruel bully with seemingly very few actual thoughts in his head.  As a species, we are no more rational than anyone in that Make America Great Again crowd.   Which is not to say we don’t each have the ability to be more rational — all it takes is somebody stating the truth in a way we can hear it.   After my sister and I had a good laugh, there was no way to deny how laughable my claim about the atrociousness of our family war was.   Is being called a “fucking cobra” as bad as being locked in a church with everybody in your town and having it burned to the ground?   I suppose not.

And so it goes down virtually every issue we constantly debate in our battling society where unfair competition for material possessions is shrugged off as merely the law of nature.  One of the “debates” that drove me most insane during those madcap Cheney-Dubya days was the torture debate.  A fucking “debate” that will not fucking die, I might add.  We had an administration determined to use practices we’d long ago signed on, as part of the civilized world, to ban forever.   All that was necessary to overcome all those treaties was a horrific event followed by convening a small team of partisan lawyers to craft an argument — how idiotic an argument didn’t matter, just a secret memo to justify it in the odd event anyone was ever held accountable for the illegal program.  

In light of the secret torture memo a hard kick in the balls was now “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture” because it was not as painful as the shutdown of a major organ system.  Nobody in their right mind could argue that a little kick in the balls is as bad as, say, your lungs shutting down.  Are you fucking crazy, you’re going to claim a kick in the balls, or sleep deprivation, or a freezing cell, or stress positions, or “walling” or water-boarding is as bad as your goddamn heart stopping?  Fuck off, peace bitch, we reframed this “debate” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The other day I had a tiny moment of blessed relief, when a friend who loves to argue somehow drew me back into the fucking torture debate for a moment.   “You’re saying even if you have the person who planted the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill 5,000 children, you can’t use torture to make him talk.”   I took a breath.  

“In that one in a million scenario, where you have the actual guilty fuck strapped to a chair, and in a matter of minutes 5,000 kids will die if you don’t get him to talk– yeah, sure, put the fuck on a water-board, electrodes on his balls, the works.  I’ll fucking torture him myself, if we somehow know for sure that this is the actual psycho who planted the bomb.   The murderous fanatic probably won’t talk in any event, but it’s worth a shot, to save that stadium full of kids.    But the likelihood of that imagined scenario ever happening  is less than a lightning strike, winning the lottery,  inheriting 300 million from dad, like David and Charles Koch did.” 

In that liberating moment I felt free from the moronic “ticking time bomb scenario” hypothetical always used to justify torturing anyone who might possibly “hate our freedom”.   But it was a momentary feeling of relief.  My friend, although he backed off a bit, still seemed to believe that there are situations where, the absurdity of the highly unlikely (how about NEVER) “ticking time bomb” hypothetical notwithstanding, that you would be justified in torturing somebody.   It reminded me of our long ago torturous debate on the subject via email when I eventually asked in exasperation: what next, are you going to start actually torturing me?    To which he wrote something to the tune of: Oh, but I already am…  

So here we have a man, highly intelligent, well-read, a skilled debater, a moral person with nuanced political views, many of them progressive, for whom a “hypothetical” with a likelihood of 0.001% is good enough to justify, in some cases, an otherwise morally unjustifiable position.   Not to say I could picture him torturing anyone (not physically, anyway) but that idiotic hypothetical is all he needs to keep arguing the position of the most vicious, ruthless, cruel and lawless among us.  

Imagine the average person, without my friend’s fine education, generally refined moral awareness, wide reading, long professional experience making and dissecting arguments,  confronted with an irrefutable bit of logical sounding rhetoric like “we got to fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here!”   Jesus, that makes perfect sense.   We just need to go over there, kill or capture all of ’em, detain the live ones forever, torture ’em — end of problem!  Next!

You see, they hate our fucking freedom.   They’re not like us.  They don’t love their children, they use them as human shields.  They’re terrorists who hate us because we’re better than them.  You get that?   They have a massive cultural inferiority complex that makes them insane.  Somebody who would do what they do is not a human in the same sense that a middle class white American is a human.   They’d kill us all, and certainly not hesitate to torture us, in much worse ways than the many techniques in the $10,000,000 manual our legal team deemed totally legally defensible.  You see, we’re talking savage, primitive fucking fucks here.   You do understand the difference, don’t you?  

On the other hand, my dear fellow American, you can see the obvious flaws in that stinking pile of horse diarrhea.  I know you can.   You just have to look directly at it, get a real whiff, think of your friend from school, the kid from Pakistan, a self-effacing, warm, funny guy…  well, you would exempt Fahrid from any torture program, if you could…

 

 

[1] According to Madeline Albright in her recent book Fascism: A Warning.

A Bit of homemade Fake News

The president recently imposed tariffs on various countries as part of his plan to Make America Great Again.    The jury is still out about whether these trade wars he started will have a disastrous effect or not.   One small bit of news:  after retaliatory tariffs by China caused the price American farmers get for soybeans to plummet, the president vowed to bail out farmers with a $12,000,000,000 emergency government grant like the type used during the Depression to prevent foreclosures on small family farms. [1]  

On the surface, there is a lot of heedless idiocy here, as in many of the president’s angry, hastily implemented policies, which are promulgated largely to stoke the anger and resentment of his angry base.   To fix a problem directly caused by his policy, the president now offers to pay twelve billion dollars of taxpayer money, right after radically slashing taxes for the largest taxpayers — and driving the national deficit steeply toward an even trillion dollars.   Way to make a deal, buddy.

On a level just below the surface, this is business as usual.   Welfare for individuals struggling to survive a poverty lifestyle is frowned on by the radical right (current custodians of the GOP) as socialism, Marxism, a hated vestige of the hated New Deal, a reflection of liberal hatred of American values.   Make them work, make them take urine tests, make them pull themselves up by their own Adidas, let them miss one arbitrary, last-minute face-to-face meeting and –goodbye government tit!   “Welfare” for the wealthiest… well, that’s a little more complicated.

It’s true that “farmer” evokes the image of salt of the earth people working hard to bring forth the bounty of the land.   The farmers who will reap most, if not all, of the $12,000,000,000 the president proposes to give them, probably do not fit this image.  Most American farms today are owned by large corporations.  It is hard to find out who will be the main beneficiaries of this bailout, though I suspect not all of it will go to salt of the earth families battling the earth itself for their livelihood.  

The people who owned slaves and lived in genteel antebellum luxury were invariably called  “Planters”.   They planted nothing themselves, except perhaps the occasional seed in the womb of a good looking chattel they owned.   They were, in one way of looking at them, parasites and monsters, even if everything they did was perfectly legal and morally correct at the time.   After all, the Bible said so, as did the Supreme Court, did they not?

I haven’t spent the additional two minutes to research this, but you are welcome to. [2]   I would wager that the recipients of the bulk of this twelve billion dollar giveaway are the kind of farmers known as “agribusiness”.   Huge tracts of land, owned by corporations, worked by hired hands who are not going to be buying private planes in this lifetime.   Farmers.   Absolutely.   Nothing to see here.

But let’s assume they are all small farmers struggling to keep up with mortgage payments and laying out great sums to grow their crops, their hogs, what have you. [3]  I like what Republican senator Nebraska Ben Sasse had to say about the administration’s trade war: “cutting the legs out from under farmers and White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend $12 billion on gold crutches.”   (source)

Sasse added, gratuitously and unfairly:  “this administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again.” (The Great Depression began in the U.S. that year.)   (ibid)

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that has all the earmarks of a Koch Brother’s front group, was also dismayed, calling the president’s bailout plan “a recipe for disaster that would undo decades of progress toward weaning agriculture from financial dependence on federal subsidies.” (op cit)

Way to go, fellow stable genius from Queens!  Pay no attention to fake news.  Those enemies of the people suck!

 

[1] The plan will rely in large part on a 1933 program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a division of the Agriculture Department created during the Great Depression to provide financial backup for farmers.          source

[2]  This is as close as I came in one minute trying to find out who the main beneficiaries of this complicated bit of presidential generosity will actually be:  

While such efforts are widely popular in rural states, some anti-spending Republicans and urban Democrats have said they unfairly prop up agribusinesses at taxpayers’ expense. Trump’s proposed 2019 budget also would have slashed funding for the CCC.    

(same source)

Note that until the other day the president was all for slashing funding for this program, Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), that he now uses to pay $12,000,000,000 to some of our greatest citizens, our greatest citizens.  He even made green hats for them, saying “Make Our Farmers Great Again.”   Way to go, buddy!

[3] Perhaps you’ll have more patience for this complex article than I did.

American Democracy in Action

I was on youtube just now and clicked on a video clip from Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show.   The clip was entitled: 

The Putin Plot Thickens with an Alleged Russian Spy 

There was an ad before the clip.  It was paid for by an outfit called DonaldJTrump.com, apparently the president’s 2020 presidential campaign. The ad urges viewers to sign an online “SCOTUS petition” for federal appellate Judge Brett Kavanaugh, POTUS’s pick for the Supreme Court, a man the ad praises lavishly.  

As any red-blooded American knows, this is the way Supreme Court justices are picked: by on-line petition.   The power of our great democracy at work.  It’s not as if the Republicans don’t have the votes for the newly slimmed down simple 51 to 49 majority needed to confirm this radical conservative, but, as our man of the people president has been saying all along: let the people speak.  Here’s one of the best bits of recent American speech.

God bless these United States of America.

A few more words about Jane Mayer

This is an addition to my previous review of Jane Mayer’s impressive 2016 Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

The shit hit the fan in America when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The Democratic president had both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court still had a “swing vote” [1]. Hope and Change were in the air after two terms of bungling, warring, tiny minority-enriching right wing rule that culminated in a massive fraud-driven economic crash. It was a bleak time for the radical right, and their best and brightest got busy strategizing and putting their strategies into action.

After their victory in Citizens United, the cleverly argued case that legalized unlimited campaign-related spending as the protected speech of legal fictions now considered “persons”, Charles Koch and his network went into overdrive. The secretive billionaire group funded the “grassroots” Tea Party making it possible for Americans to see continual, locally organized anti-Obama protests on television every evening from every corner of this gigantic nation. There appeared to be a groundswell of spontaneous, united opposition to Obama, who was otherwise enjoying a 60% approval rating, but no matter. The optics are key.

After putting Scott Brown into office, with a huge infusion of cash right before the interim election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, ending the Democrats ability to overcome a filibuster, Koch’s network got busy nationwide in the lead-up to the 2010 midterms. In that election they spent over $137,000,000, gaining 63 seats in the House of Representatives and wresting control from the Democrats. The massive spending also allowed Republicans to further eat into the Democrat’s Senate majority, where a bunch of the contested seats were flipped. Crucially, Republicans also picked up massive influence in state elections across the country, taking over a majority of state governments. This last bit was crucial as electoral district lines were about to be redrawn after the 2010 Census.

Democracy was not necessarily going to be the long-term solution for the Koch network and their unpopular ideas, but this kind of unprecedented national electoral victory was intoxicating. Unlimited “dark money” changed the game. Few candidates could survive being massively outspent by an opponent who could constantly air effective attack ads right up to election day.

Not much was known about the roots of powerful advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity and many other interlocking right wing foundations, think tanks and non-profits set up by the Kochtopus until investigative journalist Jane Mayer and her colleagues began researching the players and their connections. She wrote a long 2010 piece in the New Yorker that infuriated Charles and David Koch and their friends. Mayer had previously written about the billionaire funder of liberal causes George Soros, whose foundation, the Open Society Institute, spends up to a hundred million dollars a year on its causes. Soros, unlike the Kochs, had agreed to be interviewed for Mayer’s article. He accepted the unflattering things about about him and his influence machine in the piece without protest. David Koch went wild when he read Mayer’s article about his family business.

Koch complained in a four page letter to the New Yorker about the unfair portrayal of his “covert operations,” insisting there was nothing secret about his well-funded and extensive network of political influence, without citing any factual inaccuracies in the article. Koch then gave an interview during which he called Mayer’s New Yorker piece “hateful, ludicrous and just plain wrong”. [2] Not long after Koch made those comments, a smear campaign was underway to discredit Jane Mayer, featuring e-mailed threats and ultimatums, private investigators and an opposition research staff.

They didn’t find much they could use, but trumped up a “plagiarism” case against her that was posted briefly on-line, before it was taken off-line, probably to avoid litigation over the attempted libel. The plagiarism case was extremely thin, with four insubstantial paragraphs cited (from a long career at the New Yorker.) Two of the four citations contained attributions to the people she was allegedly plagiarizing. The Kochtopus, not directly implicated in the smear campaign because — why would they be? — didn’t succeed in destroying Jane Mayer or her reputation, but not for lack of trying. Fortunately, they also didn’t succeed in shutting her up.

In January 2016 her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right came out. It is a hell of a book, an important story that should be widely discussed as we are locked in this vicious zero-sum fight between the facts (and truth) and endless spin (and powerful lies). Who are you going to believe, a bunch of hysterical climate scientists claiming that our escalating global climate catastrophes are somehow related to man’s heedless pollution of earth, sky and water, or two of the richest men in America who make their money dirtily extracting a highly toxic, and very lucrative, natural resource, while defending liberty?

Integral to the radical right’s position in the “post-factual” fight is sowing skepticism, doubt, outrage about things that are otherwise indisputable. We see this in the right’s pre-emptive dismissal of the mainstream media, well-researched, carefully vetted work of honest American journalists is now reduced, for the simple minded, to traitorous “fake news,” the hateful spewing of “enemies of the American people.” Bizzarro world, my friends.

Take a look at how the two sides of this debate are stacked up, and how unlimited money (“speech”) among a tiny group of super-wealthy anti-government radicals makes for slaughter sides. Tell me which side is the more deadly enemy of the American people.

[1] albeit a swing vote who voted with the right in Citizens United, actually writing the partisan majority opinion.

[2] David Koch, a world-class philanthropist, is not always so self-righteously pissed off. As Jane Mayer writes in her 2010 article, and in Dark Money, he is also capable of world-class self-deprecation:

David Koch joked about his good fortune in a 2003 speech to alumni at Deerfield, where, after pledging twenty-five million dollars, he was made the school’s sole “lifetime trustee.” He said, “You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!”

A Cause for Optimism about Democracy

I thought I had possibly dreamed this, but apparently not.  

Our president, the man who can’t seem to stop bragging about his historically large 106,000 vote Electoral College mandate (take those close votes in three states and flip them and Hillary wins), was rebuked 98-0 by a viciously divided senate the other day.

It happened like this.  He met with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin last week in Finland.  The strongman apparently easily lifted our large president over his head several times during their secret meeting, greatly impressing our great leader.   After the meeting Putin was wearing the smile of the cat with the canary in its mouth and our president seemed even more childish, confused and foolish than usual.   Putin apparently asked that he be allowed, in return for granting the Mueller team access to twelve recently indicted Russians, to interrogate a similar number of American diplomats including the former American ambassador to Russia.  Our president said he would consider it.   The Senate, bitter partisans who can agree on nothing, immediately voted 98-0 to “shut the fuck up, you imbecilic asshole!”

I find a reason for optimism in that unanimous vote by hacks for both supremely corrupt pay-to-play parties.  There is a limit, ladies and gentlemen, to what someone who has contempt for democracy, fairness and even honesty can be allowed to do, even if he’s the almost unanimously elected president of the United States.  I like to think so anyway.

Here’s a short article about the vote.

 

Healthcare as a human right

The radical right is consistent, most of the time, I have to say that for them.   They latch on to something like “Right to Life” (no abortion under any circumstances) or “Right to Work” (the legal right of the employer to fire your ass at any time, with or without cause) and ride it to the end.   Their disciplined relentlessness is impressive, even if it’s not always good for democracy, people, animals, plants, children, old people, babies, the environment, health, human dignity, human survival.   The important thing is that they give their supporters a rallying cry to scream, a cry that never changes, if it works.   That these phrases may not bear much scrutiny as ideas in the marketplace of ideas is not the point.  Winning is the point, the only point.

As Republican icon Ronald Reagan said, either being pithy or already in the first throes of dementia: “the right to life ends at birth.”   “Right to Life” means that the right of a fetus to be born is absolute, more absolute than a mother’s right not to die from complications of pregnancy, far greater than the right of a fourteen year old girl not to have to go through the trauma of giving birth to her rapist’s baby.   Like every right extended, except to wealth that has perpetual life (corporate folks, persons just like you and me except they never die) it terminates at a reasonable time.   In the case of an unwanted baby, the right to life ends as soon as the poor bastard is born, breathing air and crying.   When the unwanted child is born society says “you’re on your own now, motherfucker, we protected you for nine months, your own mother wanted to kill you, but we saved you from that murderous bitch.  Now get the fuck out and get a job, asshole. And try not to stink so much… can’t you change that sagging diaper already?  No self-respect, you little shitass…”   Nothing to see here.

The way America’s wealthiest and least scrupulous organized themselves to make sure Obama was not able to get bipartisan support for anything, especially his hated plan to give access to healthcare to more Americans; priceless.  Jane Mayer reminds us that when Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009 left a vacancy in the Senate, a flood of dark money was unloosed immediately before the special election in Massachusetts.   After that election unknown Republican Scott Brown would sit in the seat occupied by a Democrat (a Kennedy, in fact, Ted took over JFK’s seat in 1962) from time immemorial.   Read all about it here.  

The Koch influence machine (the Kochtopus, as admirers dubbed it)  had secretly pulled off a stunning, history defying upset in a blue state that hadn’t had a Republican senator in generations.   Wikipedia is pretty even-handed about the invisible tentacles of the Kochtopus:

As of January 8, 2010, Martha Coakley raised over US$5.2 million in total, and had $937,383 cash on hand. Scott Brown had $367,150 cash on hand. Brown spent $450,000 on television advertisements, while Coakley spent $1.4million.[99] A week before the general election, Brown raised $1.3million from over 16,000 donors in a 24-hour fund-raising effort. Reports also indicated that Brown raised an average of $1 million per day the week prior to the election.[100]

The effect of this historic upset was that the Senate, with Brown, was now 59-41 Democratic, meaning Obama’s majority in the Senate, although impressive, was no longer filibuster-proof.   The loophole now existed for the entitled vulture class to defeat the hated president’s hated, albeit mostly conservative-think-tank-created, healthcare proposal.   The compromise that became known as the Affordable Care Act, when it was passed, had many, many faults, none of them ever fixed.  The ACA contained a few huge improvements over America’s past ruthless health insurance regime, the biggest being the abolition of the vicious “pre-existing condition” loophole that allowed health insurance companies to only insure people who were good bets not to need massively expensive healthcare.   The business of America is business, how it is fair that some fuck with cancer expects to get all those expensive treatments and drugs paid by insurance?   Pre-existing condition, totally unfair to make the insurer pay!

Some socialist types, and others, believe that included among the rights of citizenship in a wealthy society is the right to decent, affordable health care, administered through a publicly supervised health care system.   Americans pay by far the highest prices for our health care, far more than the citizens of other wealthy, industrialized nations, yet our health outcomes are no better than most places, except, arguably, at the very top end of American medical care.   Wealthy patients can always seek out and buy that top high-end healthcare, if they want to pay for it (and why not? they deserve it).  

The rest of us believe we have a right to not die of the many preventable and treatable diseases that are always stalking us.  A “right to life” if you will.   50,000 or more dead Americans every year who die because their only access to health care is an emergency room where the ER doc will say to a family member “oh shit, if only we’d seen him two years ago…”   These unfortunate American dead and their loved ones unwittingly make a sacrifice for all of us, a small price to pay for the freedom of eternal, legally created “persons” to live in perfect liberty, enjoying maximum profits protected by a friendly government, with the populist cover of a manipulated mob of confused, angry, powerless people chanting “USA!   USA!!!”.

I get my health care through the problematic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  I can tell you dozens of ways the law sucks, and have written about many of them here (click the category Obamacare to read ’em).   Top of my list is the difficulty of actually finding care in this corrupt, lobbyist-written regime.   After years of rabid Republican opposition to the law, and more than fifty attempts to repeal it in its entirety (check ’em out), some elected Democrats are organizing to fight back with the hated “public option” (something that already exists and works pretty well for millions of Americans 65 and older, as well as in most other wealthy nations).   Seventy Congressional Democrats have apparently formed a caucus to discuss lowering the age of Medicare to cover even that fucking unwanted baby who selfishly insists on its right to care after the government has already zealously protected its ungrateful little ass for nine long months.

Here’s the petty detail that bugs me today, as I work on rehabbing my aching knees.  It took me about a month to find and get an appointment with a sports medicine doctor for a referral to Physical Therapy (PT).   A rep for my health-insurance company (think of how fucking asinine it is to give people health care via private, profit-driven insurance companies…) assured me that referrals are no longer required by their company for things like PT.   Every place I contacted about PT disagreed.  Obviously, they said, you have to have a doctor’s referral before we can give you PT.  Made sense.   I finally was able to see the sports medicine doctor who immediately referred me for PT.   Then it was a few weeks of searching, not getting calls back from the “in-network” PT offices where I left  messages, until I finally hobbled over to a place I could walk to that accepted my insurance and where I could have PT.    

Note this:  every week I searched, without finding service, every obstacle I had to crawl over to get to the next step in finding treatment, was money in the pocket of the insurance company.  Multiply my search by a few thousand searches, by a million, and you begin to get the idea of how lucrative it is to make this basic of medical care, finding and seeing a doctor in your “network”, so difficult.

There was one last hoop to jump through on my ailing knees, now weeks and weeks, months, in fact, after they’d become acutely painful.  I’d have do be “evaluated” for PT for my knees, by doing a half squat with my back against the wall of the PT room.  I did the half squat and was told now all I had to do was go home and wait to see how many sessions my insurance company would approve.  You see, the doctor is not the one who decides what’s medically necessary, nor is the physical therapist, it is someone at your insurance company who decides exactly what course of treatment, under the current law, you are entitled to.  Fair is fair, they’re the ones paying, you dig.

They decided I was entitled to seven sessions of PT, twice a week.  If you do the math, the approved PT would last just over three weeks.  Not much time to fix a problem that had taken a year or more to get this bad, now I just had to wait until they got the go ahead from my insurance company.  A week later I was able to start PT.  It is slow going, physical therapy.   No long-festering physical ailment can be cured in seven sessions.   After session six I asked the receptionist at the PT place what I had to do to get more sessions.  Another referral, she told me.   I contacted the office of the sports doctor I’d seen for a second time a week or so earlier.  After session seven of PT I was told that once the referral arrived I would have to be re-evaluated.

Stand against the wall in the room where you’ve completed your seven sessions of PT and squat as far down as your creaky knees will take you, then just go home, without further treatment of any kind, and wait.   In about a week, if all goes well, they would get the OK from the insurance company, if your particular insurance policy authorized more physical therapy for you.  Then, the following week you could continue your PT, with only, at most, a short one or two week gap.   You see, it’s impossible to determine if you’ll need more than seven sessions until you’ve completed seven sessions, right?  That’s just basic logic, right?   No matter what your fucking know-it-all sports medicine doctor might have to say about it (the rehab could take several months of hard work, she told me sympathetically).  No matter what.

God fucking bless America, boys and girls!

Basic Goddamned Fairness! How about it?!!!

People are unfair to the President of the United States of America, as they so often are to the true, unapologetic geniuses walking among us.    It is reported the U.S. president “attacked” our NATO allies, calling them cheap, demanding that they pay more into NATO’s military budget, claiming afterwards that they had agreed to his new terms.  Immediately after those remarks the French leader said there had been no such agreement.    The leader of Germany has never shown much respect for our president — he offered her some advice, told her what she needs to do for political survival, as he smoothly told one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV hosts in Britain the other day, but she, sadly, appears to be doing exactly the opposite.   He took some modest credit for the great feeling of collegiality at the recent NATO meeting, something he said never existed until recently, when, presumably, someone of his caliber finally came into the room.  

His meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday, we learn, no surprise, will be secret, mano a mano; apparently no other witnesses, no recordings, no official record of any kind.   Just the account that will be given of the meeting by two world leaders who have never lied about anything, nor have they ever agreed to lie about anything, nor would either ever have the slightest motive to lie about anything, clearly.   No point to unfairly mention Cheney and Dubya’s controversial top secret, tandem testimony, not under oath, to the 9/11 Commission they reluctantly agreed to allow to proceed.   I’m not going to knock our current president, he’s had a very challenging life, is constantly treated very unfairly by many, many, many corrupt liars and gets so little credit for his many towering and historic achievements from our communistic mass media.  

One of the people who attacked the current president, while our leader was still a candidate, texted terrible things about him, this FBI man and one-time member of Robert Mueller’s team on the witch-hunt to find some kind of corruption to link to the highly principled POTUS.   This Peter Strzok as much as called him a “fucking asshole”.   When the defamation laws are tightened up (and truth is no longer an absolute defense to the charge of speaking words that harm another’s reputation) people like him will face justice.  For now, he was dragged into a Congressional Hearing to explain to hostile interrogators what the fuck he was fucking doing texting these vicious, personal opinions to another FBI employee he was having an extra-marital affair with.    Instead of apologizing, the adulterer Strzok was defiant.  He said this, among other inflammatory things:

Peter Strzok: “That was written late at night, off the cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero. And my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior, that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States. It was, in no way, unequivocally, any suggestion that me, the FBI would take any action whatsoever to improperly impact the electoral process.”

source

That dickhead’s words speak for themselves.  Traitor.

I thought the NY Times was too respectable a paper to publish outright mockery of America’s president.  Apparently I was sadly mistaken.   Not only did the fuckers splash headlines about 12 Russians indicted today for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails and other records, the president “trying to repair damage after criticizing British leader,”  another headline reading, with leering suggestiveness, that he “Invited the Russians to Hack Clinton.  Were They Listening?”  but they also published a disrespectful, even humiliating little video of disgusting Brits ‘taking the piss’ on the NY Times website.   The disrespect for our commander-in-chief that these fucking out of control goddamned Brits mirthfully displayed when our president came to tell their head of state she’s wrong and misguided, and that her extreme right-wing political rivals are smart and with the times?  Fuck those fucking so-called “protesters”, you know what I’m saying? Totally unfair.

If you have a morbid curiosity about the depths the failing NY Times will now sink to in their hysterical hatred of our blameless leader, click here.

“Spokesreptile”

No idea where the president got this particular spokesreptile, Alex Azar (no offense to snakes and lizards) but check out this beautiful attempt at auto-fellatio yesterday in response to the nettlesome question of why the administration has been unable to comply with a federal judge’s order to reunite families: to wit, 3,000 children forcibly taken from their parents at the southern border:

Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar: “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally.”

source (hear the quote for yourself, spoken yesterday to Wolf Blitzer, on TV)

Here is CNN’s own account of the conversation (you can see that, in context, it’s not quite as simple as I made it sound above, but that’s just nuance).

Azar is the administration official who told  the Senate Finance Committee recently that it would be easy to reunite children forcibly separated from their parents.  It was a matter of a couple of keystrokes, he said on June 26, to find any detained child on the government database.   He claimed “hundreds” of children had already been reunited with parents and gave the numbers to back it up:  2,047 currently in HHS custody, down from about 2,300.    These claims were soon belied by many other reports, even by HHS’s updated numbers of detained children separated from parents (up now by about 1,000 from the 2,047 figure).   This is often the case with claims made by those speaking for our compulsively untruthful commander-in-chief.   Here you go.

I am sure Mr. Azar is as highly qualified for his position as Betsey DeVos is for her position as Czar of Public Education, or Ben Carson is for his stewardship of all federally subsidized public housing in the the United States, or Jared Kushner is for solving the Opioid Epidemic and making peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or as the environment-hostile Scott Pruitt was to head the Environmental Protection Agency.   Mr. Azar is possibly even as highly qualified as the president himself, even as the cruel president doubles down to escalate a bullying, counterproductive, unwinnable trade war with America’s enemies and allies alike.   But let us parse this “great act of American generosity and charity”.

The hateful program designed to terrorize those thinking of fleeing terror and seeking refuge in the United States is blandly called Family Separation.   Reads much better than Forcible, Possibly Permanent, Removal of Children from Asylum Seeking Parents, (and you get no receipt for your fucking kid, who we will send hundreds of miles away with no records kept, s-word asshole) in Order to Deliberately Terrorize Asylum Seekers, no?  

The president and his spokespeople freely admitted that the program was designed to scare would-be asylum seekers from coming to our borders.   It was designed to inspire the greatest terror someone fleeing persecution could ever face: the loss of the little brown children whose lives they are fleeing to protect.  Make no mistake about the class and race-based animus at work here: the despicable program is directed against impoverished brown people, not Aryans, the kind of genetic material, the best people, the very best of the best, that the president wishes were clamoring to enter the United States instead of these brown, raping hordes.

The diminutive, racist Attorney General sharpens this to a finer legal point.  We are no longer allowing asylum applications based on reasonable fear of deadly violence to those fleeing domestic violence or gang violence.  

He points out, as defenders of the Ku Klux Klan did successfully for generations, that gang violence is not “state-sponsored”.   See, this is a supremely important legal distinction.   When the Klan tortured and hung a Negro who didn’t know his place it was never “state action”, the kind of thing that would have triggered the federal laws made to enforce the long-slumbering Fourteenth Amendment.   Since it was not “state action”, you understand, it was solely within the province of the individual state to convene a jury to decide, if a trial was even necessary, whether the allegedly murdered black person had crossed a goddamned line that would have made any white person justifiably enraged enough to kill him.  Nothing to see here, says Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, as so many of his ilk pompously intoned since before he was even a glint in his racist pappy’s eye.

Peter Fonda, an actor currently promoting some project, angrily tweeted that Barron Trump, son of the president and his third wife, Melania, should be ripped from Melania’s arms, that she might wail in agony to her supremely cruel husband (I think Fonda used the less precise adjective “asshole”) as the mothers of the forcibly seized young children wail to their husbands, if their husbands have not already been killed by the forces the US now claims no longer constitute “reasonable fear of persecution” for purposes of political asylum.  Fonda was forced to retract the tweet and apologize, since he was promoting a movie that is probably already being boycotted, based on his outrageously offensive, if morally justified, tweet.     

There is only one person in the country who is immune from apologizing for anything: the birdbrain-in-chief whose tweets, while largely incoherent brain farts emanating from his constantly enraged insular cortex, are often clearer than his oral pronouncements, his oral pronouncements, his very fine pronouncements, the repeated, idiotic sounding cadence, the idiotic sounding cadence, repeated, familiar, familiar from reality TV, which is real TV, let there be no doubt, and I repeat, I repeat, because he has, like, you know, the finest words, the best words, the very best words money can buy, and when I say money, I’m talking about money, MONEY, heaven-reaching towers of golden money piled on top of more money than you can ever imagine.  I have the greatest words.  Your words suck, but my words are the greatest, the best, the finest words.  I have the finest words, the best words, and I always get the last word, the last word, the greatest word, the greatest last word.  I always get the last word!  Which is the greatest word, the greatest word.