A gas chamber looks better by gaslight

I offer this anecdote to illustrate how even a very smart person, perhaps especially a very smart person, can create a world of shit simply by selectively using their intellectual gifts. You can turn anything into anything else, with the will and the skill. We see this all the time in public life now, not even done skillfully much of the time, but it is also sadly prevalent in personal life.

The common phrase for somebody pissing on your leg and dismissively insisting it’s raining is gaslighting. That term is based on an old movie where a guy, to drive his wife insane, makes the gaslight dimmer and dimmer and, when the wife keeps commenting on the increasing dimness in the house, insists the light is the same as it always was, and that the wife is insane, which eventually breaks her, I think.

I once worked for a brilliant man who had a very smart assistant and an armed guard in the room where he presided. He had a good sense of humor, and of the absurd, but he was also used to being listened to, respected and having the final word.

He had a theory about why so many people act out in our society, and a term for it: Honor Anemia. In this country we are not listened to, given even the minimal respect or recognition that every human being needs, so we are constantly seeking it, sometimes by acting out, even becoming criminals. The theory made a certain amount of sense to me.

We were having lunch one day, in the crowded outside area of a restaurant near the meatpacking district. He asked me if I had any theory about why child molesters, of all criminals, are so universally despised, even by rapists and murderers. I said it was probably because they prey on the most vulnerable of victims and pretty much destroy their young lives. This answer didn’t satisfy the philosophical man, who continued to probe.

Wasn’t it possible, he asked, if the adult truly loved the child he was sexually involved with, and always gentle to and considerate of, that the relationship wouldn’t harm the child? I told him that could theoretically be true, but even if it was true in 50% of cases, it didn’t account for the terrible wound it inflicted on the other 50%. Putting the traumatic damage to the kid on a coin toss, for the sake of sexual gratification for the adult seemed a very callous bet, to me.

I pointed out that the likelihood of lifelong harm to the child was probably closer to 99% than my hypothetical coin flip. I also said that if the adult truly loved the child he wouldn’t risk destroying the kid’s life to have sex with the child, he would wait until the kid was an adult to begin a romance. He chewed on this and we continued to talk.

It became less and less clear to me what he was talking about. Whenever I’d ask for clarification, he would nimbly digress to some other point I couldn’t grasp. I finally told him “look, I’m happy to talk about whatever you want, and I’m not squeamish about this subject, or any subject, it’s just that I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about at this point.” He thanked me, for being willing to talk about the taboo subject, telling me that nobody else had ever let him discuss it so frankly. I told him he was welcome, but that, really, I hadn’t gotten the point he was trying to make.

As we left the restaurant, walking over to meet his wife, he asked me what I thought of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, two whistleblowers who had been much in the news. I offered a tepid defense of both of them, pointing out that whatever their criminal exposure, both of their revelations, which had required great personal courage to disclose, had been of immense public importance. He immediately began to snarl that they both had committed textbook treason, then raised his voice, denouncing me as an idiot, as someone obviously unaware of the findings of a series of great sociologists and political scientists of yesteryear that I’d never heard of, let alone read.

He raged at me so long that his wife, an intolerable termagant, a harping harridan, told him to let me get a word in. He did not. We were in his car, crossing the bridge back to Queens, then on the highway, I was a sitting duck.

I was no longer working for him and had no reason to forgive or forget his merciless tongue lashing. He called to apologize, then asked me to do him a favor, procure a bit more of something for him that was then still illegal in New York State. For reasons I can’t understand now, I did him this one last favor. When he came to pick up his contraband I foolishly accepted a ride to Sekhnet’s with him. Now he wanted to take me to dinner. I only wanted to not interact with him anymore, already regretting the favor I’d done. I declined his invitation, he insisted.

It was important that we had a good meal and talk everything over, he told me, we were friends. Friends, I pointed out, don’t mercilessly bully their friends over a difference in opinion. No, he said, we have to talk this out, over dinner. He pulled up in front of his favorite restaurant. I started heading for the nearest subway, but he grabbed me in a bear hug. “Please,” the large man said, “let me treat you to dinner.”

I was in my fifties at the time, he was in his early seventies. If you wound the clock back a few decades, he would have been in his thirties, I would have been around ten. None of this escaped me as I disentangled from his embrace without shoving or striking him. For reasons I also don’t understand, I went into the restaurant, ate a meal, and we had a talk I recall not a word of. It was like talking to a mummy, I suppose.

The next time I ran into the purveyor of contraband he asked me about my former boss, who’d been a good customer of his. I told him the story; the incomprehensible shift from thanking me for listening to his odd rambling meditation on child molestation to his rage that we disagreed about the nature of what Snowden and Manning had done.

“Psychology 101,” he said “he revealed that he was probably a child molester, and you’d been understanding in some way, and he hated himself for that and had to immediately make you hate him too.”

Though my neighbor is not generally known for his psychological astuteness, I thought he put things in a very insightful nutshell. If I had any doubt about my former boss’s intention in the odd discussion of child molestation, it was removed when he bodily intervened to prevent me from leaving him at the restaurant. It was a distinctly rapey move. Another kind of man would have roughly shoved him away, told him to fuck himself, slapped him hard if he persisted, knocked him to the ground, if necessary. I ate a plate of linguine and watched his mouth move without hearing anything he said, then it was all over.

Three faces we should all know

John Durham

John Durham, Special Counsel appointed by Bill Barr to investigate and root out the “traitors” who brought the “baseless, lying, partisan witch hunt” investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to the Department of Justice. Durham has now been at his work longer than Mueller was. He recently issued a third indictment, arresting a man who allegedly did the same kind of thing Mike Flynn did — lying to conceal the fact that he was lying.

In Flynn’s case the lies were eventually deemed ‘immaterial’ by Barr. In the case of the indicted Clinton-supporting alleged liar who gave unfounded rumors to the author of the anti-Trump Steele Dossier (a document which was not, in fact relied on by Mueller – the definition of ‘immaterial’ lies when investigating the oringes of the “Rusher thing”), and allegedly lied about it to Durham’s investigators, he will face justice.

Durham’s face (and this seems to be his official DOJ photo) says a lot about him — he is fierce, implacable, deeply conservative, a devout Catholic (like fellow Christian dominionists [1] Bill Barr, former White House Counsel Pat Cippolini, Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo) and a dogged ratter.

So as not to appear “political” Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland has authorized Durham to continue hunting for the partisan liars who brought the fake and embarrassing “Rusher thing” in an attempt to compromise and humiliate the honest and never the least bit corrupt or “transactional” Donald Trump.

Presumably the same fear of appearing partisan has restrained Garland from convening grand juries to indict any of the people we now know conspired with the defeated former president1 to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Not Rudy Giuiliani (who brought numerous baseless post election lawsuits promoting Trump’s Big Lie and, prior to the election, played a key role in the smearing and ouster of US ambassador Marie Yavonovich, so as to promote a fake Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden), not either of the two lunatic fringe Federalist Society lawyers, Jefferey Bossert Clark and John C. Eastman, who energetically served the mad former president in his mission to remain in office after losing the election.

Jeffrey Bossert Clark

Clark is the ambitious Trump appointed weasel [2] who wrote a letter based on Trump’s lies and tried to pressure the acting Attorney General into signing the letter to top Georgia officials falsely claiming there had been massive voter fraud in Georgia, that there was an ongoing DOJ investigation into that fraud. Both claims were false, knowing lies, in Barr’s phrase “bullshit.” Clark gave it his best shot in the days immediately before the January 6 riot, he was ready to step in as acting AG, sign the lying letter himself, if Trump said the word. Trump backed down under pressure from DOJ officials and his own White House Counsel.

On January 14th Clark resigned his post at the Department of Justice and immediately went to work for a far right nonprofit that brought lawsuits against mask and vaccine mandates and abortion providers. The latest on this fucker, who cited a vague privilege instead of testifying before the January 6 Committer on Friday:

“The Trump taint is sticking to Jeffrey Clark,” Business Insider reported Thursday. “In the 10 months since the would-be Justice Department coup, Clark’s name has been scrubbed from the conservative legal group where he’d landed his first post-Trump job. He lawyered up in the face of congressional scrutiny. But, just days before his Friday interview with the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Clark parted ways with the defense lawyer Robert Driscoll, Politico reported late Wednesday.”

Clark is just the latest attorney to suffer repercussions for their relationship with Trump.

“In the eyes of several former colleagues, Clark has joined the ranks of once respected conservative lawyers — including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor Sidney Powell, and the constitutional scholar John Eastman — who have been burned flying too close to Trump,” the report noted.

After Clark stonewalled the January 6 Committee last week he should have been found in contempt and locked up pursuant to Congress’s power of inherent contempt, until he agreed to testify truthfully. Unfortunately, while legal, it would appear as “political” as the prosecutions Merrick Garland is thus far not pursuing. To the party that honors rules and norms, and places a quaint reliance on empirical facts, this kind of hardball tactic is apparently inconceivable.

Which brings us to another Federalist Society stalwart and former dean of a presumably right wing law school, John Eastman.

This jackass, who spoke at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally and subsequently lost his job, turns out to have authored a battle plan for Mike Pence to defy the Constitution, and more than 200 years of precedent, on January 6th and insist that since there were alternate slates of electors from each swing state Trump lost (there were no alternate electors — every state had certified its electors a month earlier) he was invoking his (imaginary, counter-factual) Twelfth Amendment power to disqualify the electors in those disputed states, call the election undecided for lack of an Electoral College majority and send it to the gerrymandered House for a straight party-line vote (that would, under the rules for deciding a deadlocked election, bypass the actual majority in the House) where Trump could be declared president by the loyal members of his own party, who enjoyed a majority in the House for this purpose only. You can read this braying jackass’s short, to the point, memo to Pence HERE.

Under Eastman’s learned constitutional analysis, the Vice President who loses a re-election bid, under powers arguably (but only by someone insane) granted by the convoluted, procedural 12th Amendment, has the absolute final say on whether or not he lost his re-election bid. Clearly the intent of the Framers, no?

The absurdity of this claim aside, Eastman provided step by step instructions for how Pence needed to proceed, to sidestep constitutional and procedural objections and silence Democrats when they “start to howl”. Eastman was in the war room at the Willard Hotel, taking the short walk over to exhort the crowd to go to the Capitol, shortly before the January 6th Stop the Steal rally unaccountably turned into a violent assault on the Capitol. His hotel bills, we learned recently, were paid by the Trump/Pence 2020 campaign.

Of course, indicting him for anything — and how can you indict a lawyer for a good faith argument for illegal actions to overturn a certified election? — would only play into the hands of the really hardcore right wingers who want a violent overthrow of democracy. And so, in Biden and Merrick Garland’s judgment, you dig, we must avoid the appearance of being overtly on the side of not overturning US elections, because, you know, it would only infuriate powerful American Nazis.

Makes me wanna holler.

[1]

Dominionism, or Christian Dominionism is a term coined by social scientists and popularized by journalists to refer to a subset of American Christianity that is conservative, politically active, and believes that Christians should, and eventually will, take control of the government. The term is sometimes used as a “catch-all” by bloggers to describe any politically active Christian, but not every conservative, politically minded Christian is a Dominionist.

Christian Dominionists believe that God desires Christians to rise to power through civil systems so that His Word might then govern the nation. The belief that “America is a Christian nation” is sometimes called “soft dominionism”; the idea that God wants only Christians to hold government office and run the country according to biblical law is called “hard dominionism.”

Dominion theology’s beliefs are based on Genesis 1:28, which says, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (emphasis added).

This verse is taken by Christian Dominionists as a divine mandate to claim dominion over the earth, physically, spiritually, and politically. However, this is taking a large step away from the text, which only says to have dominion over the creatures of earth, and to “subdue” the earth. It is likely that this verse simply means for humanity to a) multiply and expand over the face of the earth instead of staying in one place and b) keep and take care of all other living things. There were no political entities in Genesis 1.

However, dominion theology goes even further with this verse, leading to two other philosophies: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. Christian Reconstructionism is an intellectually high-minded worldview, most popular among the more conservative branches of Christian faith. Reconstructionism says that dominion will be achieved by each Christian excelling in his or her individual field (Christian artists taking dominion of the art world, Christian musicians taking dominion of the music world, Christian businessmen taking dominion of the business world, etc., until all systems and fields are “subdued”).

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[2] From a January 24, 2021 story in the New York Times

WASHINGTON — It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s top leaders had little to celebrate as they discussed Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who had repeatedly pushed them to help President Donald J. Trump undo his electoral loss.

Huddled in the department’s headquarters, they noted that they had rebuked him for secretly meeting with Mr. Trump, even as the department had rebuffed the president’s outlandish requests for court filings and special counsels, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting. No official would host a news conference to say that federal fraud investigations cast the results in doubt, they told him. No one would send a letter making such claims to Georgia lawmakers

When the meeting ended not long before midnight, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen hoped that the matter was settled, never suspecting that his subordinate would secretly discuss the plan for the letter with Mr. Trump, and very nearly take Mr. Rosen’s job, as part of a plot with the president to wield the department’s power to try to alter the Georgia election outcome.

It was clear that night, though, that Mr. Clark — with his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about voting booth hacks and election fraud — was not the establishment lawyer they thought him to be. Some senior department leaders had considered him quiet, hard-working and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He struck neither his fans in the department nor his detractors as being part of the Trumpist faction of the party, according to interviews.

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Beautiful writing

I was sitting in the Fresh Meadows public library one afternoon, this was probably almost fifty years ago, turning the pages of a book by Russian writer Maxim Gorky. I recall reading a very short piece, maybe half a page long, where a shell-shocked soldier sees the blown up body of one of his comrades, hanging from the dark branches of a dead tree.

The corpse’s glistening organs have spilled out, festooning the branches, and the first birds were arriving. The light catches the entrails as the soft breeze makes them sway. The shell-shocked soldier, who narrates the anecdote, takes this in and immediately bursts out in uncontrollable laughter, he laughs until he can’t stand, throws himself on the ground and continues laughing his ass off.

I mention this beautifully drawn anecdote by Maxim Gorky, which I read many years ago, to illustrate that the most beautiful writing may be used to evoke the most terrible horrors. In fact, the more beautifully you can describe an atrocity, the more forcefully the and poignantly yhe horror of it hits you.

Beautiful writing at the moment, it seems to me almost every day, needs to be marshaled to illuminate and clarify the horrors we are up against. To mobilize readers to get involved in standing against atrocity, and the enraged irrationality that always accompanies and justifies atrocities.

The Department of Defense, years back now, did a study that concluded the disruption of populations as a result of global warming making areas uninhabitable was the biggest defense threat we face as a nation. Around the equator it would soon become so hot and water starved that people living on the land would have to migrate north. Island nations and coastal areas, including many of our largest cities, would be under water, former inhabitants of these places on the move by the tens of millions.

Picture any zombie movie you’ve ever seen and then imagine tens of millions of real life homeless refugees, climate refugees, moving en masse in search of food. It would not take long for cannibalism to take hold among these hungry hoards. Then the wealthy nations would have to “cleanse” the world of these cannibals, for the sake of the rest of the delicious population.

That scenario, by itself, should be enough to get every person of conscience on the earth to join an energetic search for solutions. Sadly, we are not that kind of wise ape, homo sapiens.

We read the most beautifully written accounts of the greatest joys we can imagine, and that is a good thing from time to time, to reconnect with the miraculous side of being alive. On the other side of the scale, the ticking time bomb of the earth’s greediest, sacrificing millions of lives, daily, for the sake of greater acquisition and perpetual hoarding by the few, the entitled, ain’t no unlikely hypothetical employed by right-wing defenders of torture. It’s as real as the soldier’s guts, swaying gently, and hilariously, from those branches as the birds get ready for a good meal.

You can’t blame Trump supporters for being mad

They came to Washington D.C. in the days before January 6 to fight like hell against a stolen election. Trump and his dark money allies had spent $50,000,000 on ad buys hammering home the infuriating message that, like the lying Black guy before him, Biden was an illegitimate lying bastard fake presidential cuck. Trump himself tweeted this invitation:

On the morning that a Black pastor and a Jewish journalist replaced two die-hard Trumpist senators from Georgia, giving the illegitimate Sleepy Joe a razor thin majority in both houses of Congress, Trump’s most passionate people were there, fired up and ready to be wild and Stop the Steal.

What most in that large MAGA crowd did not know was that Trump had been meeting with a group of elected GOP representatives and senators, working the phones to state officials, threatening and cajoling state election board members, including a few he summoned to be his guests at the Trump Hotel.

They also probably had no idea he’d been working tirelessly to convince the DOJ to release a statement indicating widespread voter fraud, even though none was found, had considered replacing the acting AG with an American Eichmann-type, an ambitious weasel named Jeffery Bossert Clark willing to do whatever it takes, had wildly right-wing lawyer (John Eastman) writing a literal script for Pence to nullify Biden’s victory under bizarre, even absurd, constitutional claims.

They didn’t know Trump’s inner circle, Steve Bannon, Rudy, felon Bernie Kerick, John Eastman and others were in a war room at the Willard Hotel, paid for by the Trump Pence 2020 campaign, providing tactical support while the Stop the Steal rally and the MAGA riot were taking place.

They knew Mike Flynn, Rudy and Sidney Powell were in and out of the Oval Office, along with the MyPillow guy, in the days leading up to the Capitol riot, that Trump was capable of any lie that could possibly benefit him. Many in Trump’s crowd may even have known there was no evidence to establish any detail of Trump’s lie about a stolen election, a conspiracy in which Democrats and treasonous Republicans, including Federalist Society judges he had appointed for lifetime tenures on the federal bench, had worked together to victimize Trump.

If they had known all that, it would have made no difference to people eager to fight for the higher truth. Trump may be a compulsive liar, but he also knows exactly what his audience wants to hear to fire ’em up.

On the Opposition side, the Democratic party, we have incomprehensibly spineless leadership. The party’s hand-wringing leaders have been in deadly embrace with corporate titans and their legions of lobbyists, in spite of almost half of its shaky House majority Progressive Caucus members. This collective lack of spine and corporate dependence was accelerated by Bill Clinton, a people pleaser and the greatest Republican president of the twentieth century, under whom the corporate donor grip on the party was cemented. Clinton and the DNC were handsomely rewarded for the party’s unapologetic move to the political right, in terms of corporate generosity. Obama opted out of public financing of his first presidential campaign since he had out raised McCain by a good margin, largely from the financial sector.

In the swamp that is Washington D.C., where a coal lobbyist like Joe Manchin III, as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, freely casts the deciding vote on whether to mitigate looming, easily observable Climate Catastrophe, the Democratic party has had the same corporately beholden leadership for decades. Leadership that, while making sure corporate donors are never alienated, has allowed the GOP to exercise almost total control over framing public debate, legislation, judicial appointments, war making and every other function of government, whichever party is in power.

Do the Democrats have a problem with messaging? They certainly do, with the excuse that their message, like their policies, is nuanced, takes complicated realities into consideration. Do Americans understand that we are the only wealthy nation that provides no paid family leave to new parents? Do Americans know that we pay the highest rates in the world for prescription drugs made by our own pharmaceutical companies? Do Americans know that the world is on the edge of literal destruction, mass extinctions and the destabilizing dislocation of millions made homeless by rising sea levels caused by global warming? That our billionaires, required to pay less tax than their counterparts elsewhere, can easily evade most tax on their income and wealth? The some of our largest corporations not only pay no tax, but receive generous government handouts, funded by tax dollars?

On the GOP side you have the dozens of well-funded academic and policy initiatives by the Koch network amplified through Rupert Murdoch’s relentless media blitzkrieg, using simple, enraging arguments, often based only on strong opinions, to convince half the country that the Democrat [sic] party is a bunch of radical Communist puppets who work for, as Florida senator Marco Rubio accused them the other day, Marxist corporations here in the USA. Last week Little Marco told a conservative group:

“They are the product of decades of anti-American indoctrination at our elite universities and they feel no obligation to America or its national interest,” the Florida senator said of America’s corporate leaders. “I’m not here to tell you big business is the enemy. But I’m here to tell you big business is not our ally in the fight against socialism.” . . .

. . . “The real fight isn’t about the tax rate on billionaires,” Rubio said. “The real fight is about a small, radical, but incredibly powerful minority that wants to… erase our culture and traditions, throw away our values, and walk away from a free enterprise economy that is still the envy of the world.”

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We all know the real enemy here, don’t we?

So, like I said, don’t blame MAGA nation for being good and goddamned mad.

Filibustering the Right to Vote

Seeing it from their point of view, American Nazis are right to fear both federal government coercion/law enforcement and majoritarian tyranny/democracy. Their party has only one idea, outside of loyalty to a dangerous maniac they fear: cripple the government, take it over, bend democracy to the needs of the few, the entitled, and fuck the rest of these “entitlement mentality” putos.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most effective anti-racism, democracy protecting law in our history. It cured much of the abuse it was enacted to fix. It enjoyed broad support under Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and, under Bush II it was reauthorized in the Senate 98-0, just a few years before Dubya’s appointee John Roberts took a sharp gut hook to it, pulled it hard and gave the Voting Rights Act a nice, thorough evisceration [1].

Check out the numbers the Voting Rights Act kept getting reauthorized by in Congress:

(that Senate tally for 1982 doesn’t look right)

Here is what is included in the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Republicans unanimously (minus one) filibustered for the 3rd time the other day

Here’s a good, short video tour

Heather Cox Richardson:

Republicans are holding tight to the idea of pre–Civil War Democrats that our system of democracy gives to the states alone the power to determine how people within those states live, and who in those states gets to vote to determine those rules. After that idea led to the Civil War, Republicans overturned it with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which give the federal government the power to protect equality within the states.

Since World War II, the federal government has taken that charge seriously, protecting minority voting in the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and, most thoroughly, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the passage of that measure, Congress repeatedly reauthorized it by large, bipartisan majorities, most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted unanimously in favor of it. But then in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted that law, and now, only 8 years later, Republican senators claim federal protection of voting rights is an assault on states’ rights.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-4-2021?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

One year anniversary of 2020 election cigar

[1]

A guided tour through the benign seeming, bloodlessly vicious Roberts decision, and highlights of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant dissent are at https://wp.me/p2DHRV-j6q

Why incoherence is so dangerous

It is pointless to have a discussion with a person taking an incoherent position. Not only will you learn nothing, but no problem can ever be resolved reasonably.

If someone is content to stand on incoherent “logic” there is very little you can really do about changing their mind. A person clings to an incoherent position because he truly believes it. There is almost no way to move them off of their deeply held belief.

I know that ‘incoherent’ sounds judgmental, but consider a few examples, from the world of recent politics. and one drawn from my personal life.

Take Joe Manchin III’s warning to progressive Democrats to stop playing games if they want his obstruction of Biden’s agenda to end.

Manchin, enjoying his moment as the most powerful man in the Senate, timing his pantsing of Biden perfectly for maximum political effect, calls “bullshit” on the progressive caucus for not trusting a suddenly all-powerful rich guy opposed to a $15/hr minimum wage to vote for the Democrats-only Climate Catastrophe mitigation and social spending infrastructure bill after the bipartisan bill, which addresses long overdue disasters in waiting like crumbling bridges and treacherous roads, is passed.

His reason for not signing on to Build Back Better — he insists he is concerned with the cost of the radically scaled down proposal. In all the months he’s been fighting against it and making progressives cut programs from it, he tells us he has not had a chance to grasp the finances of the proposal.

These are not arguments that can be countered successfully by arguments based on fact. The Build Back Better plan was intended to pay for itself by increasing taxes on billionaires and corporations to just under what they were before Trump slashed them in a $1.9 TRILLION dollar giveaway to America’s wealthiest. Manchin is against raising taxes on the wealthiest and expresses concern that the unfunded bill will be far too expensive.

He takes up the Republican mantra of “fiscal responsibility”, whenever “tax and spend” Democrats have the presidency and majorities in Congress. What kind of Commie economy destroying bullshit is trying to get a $15/hr. minimum wage?!!

Republicans are also united against increasing the IRS budget for law enforcement so that tax evasion by corporations and billionaires can be detected and the scofflaws can be fined, taxes collected. Figure that one out. Manchin, apparently, is also against this, along with funding for enforceable ethics standards for members of Congress .

Now, without taxing the wealthiest, since we can’t pay for this (and it’s not like the $7.8 TRILLION [1] — over ten years– for our military, don’t even suggest that!) we have to cut some of the things that will unfairly impact the wealthy, even if they also help millions, including millions of children growing up in dire poverty.

Dental, vision and hearing as part of healthcare for seniors? COMMUNISM! We all know that the teeth, eyes and ears have nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s health! Same for those too poor to afford decent childcare, eldercare, go to junior college, a few weeks of paid leave for new parents and so forth. HOW WE GONNA PAY FOR IT? DON’T TELL ME TAXES OR ENFORCEMENT OF THE TAX CODE OR TIGHTENING UP ETHICS RULES ON SITTING LOBBYISTS/SENATORS!

You can agree or disagree with Manchin’s conservative positions, his constant, roosterish sabotage of Biden’s presidency, but it is difficult to find coherent reasons from someone iike Manchin. They will say or do anything to maintain their position and their power. Incoherence is no longer any kind of handicap in public life.

Look no further than the new governor of Virginia, former CEO of the Carlisle Group, just a regular dad in a vest concerned with “parents’ rights.” You see, he is strongly against the teaching of Critical Race Theory to Virginia kids, since it is a divisive theory that views American history through a lens that makes former slaveholders and those who took up arms on their behalf look like bad people and presents a false view of a racially divided nation where racism is embedded in every aspect of our legal and social system.

The theory is not taught in any Virginia school, except perhaps a law school here or there, and the only exposure any child or parent will ever have to it is in the denunciations of cynical, dog whistling politicians like Mr. Youngkin, and around the clock on Murdoch’s FOX news, but IT WORKS. White people as a group are afraid of the voting power of Black and brown people and demonizing Critical Race Theory works wonders mobilizing that terror. It is a terror former governor of Virginia Thomas Jefferson knew well:

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever…”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782

Jefferson was referring to the “hideous blot” on our nation’s ideals and morality that was represented by chattel slavery. Glenn Youngkin has vowed that ugly shit like this polarizing history will never be taught in his state, where (victimized, “white”) Parents’ Rights will be respected.

Coherent? Not particularly. A potent political message? Indeed. Particularly when Joe Manchin III is on board, fighting the president’s signature policy initiative in the name of imaginary “bipartisanship” — he stands with the solid 50 vote GOP bloc that will oppose anything that would make Biden look like a competent deal-maker.

Like the filibuster Manchin is devoted to, his kind has been a feature of our democracy since the days when slavery was being debated in the Senate. For a few generations they were known as Dixiecrats, guys who protected the right of angry mobs to lynch what are now politely called “n-words” without the damned federal government swooping in tyrannically to crush States’ Rights.

Personal anecdote:

Someone expresses anger, judges you harshly for being narcissistically unaware of your ongoing violation of a long standing moral rule they made years ago and never told you about. When they tell you about this long violation, you can apologize, but you are still accountable for violating an agreement you never even knew about!

How fucking dare you?!! You don’t get to use the fucking f-word, you fucking fuck, because you use it abusively while I only use it as a last resort, in justified outrage. My right to continue being angry at you, in spite of your so-called “apology”, is not in dispute.

Without the guide of Reason, in other words, laying out an argument based on things that can be reasonably agreed on, we are only flailing emotional creatures subject to being inflamed by appeals to loyalty from those who speak loudly to our anger, fear and other strong emotions that keep us from asking reasonable questions, confident that we will get a reasonable answer.

A quick look around confirms that we are living in largely incoherent times where a strong, angry argument — denying there is anything that can be fairly talked about — is enough to carry the day, whatever the merits, or senselessness, of that argument may actually be.

[1]

The House passed a $768 billion 2022 defense policy bill on a 316-113 vote late Thursday — authorizing a $24 billion increase to topline spending over the Biden administration’s budget proposal — a move that potentially lessens debate conflict as the legislation moves forward.

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