Remember this fuck?

The Democrats on Jim Jordan’s House committee to prove that the Democrats are actually the lying traitors who have weaponized the government against decent, good Americans (like the innocent political prisoners who legally protested at the Capitol on January 6th and were viciously treated as rioters) wrote a report on three sketchy whistleblowers, all former FBI employees, who seem to have received some payments, or employment, from Trump-related entities in exchange for their candid, partisan whistleblowing. The New York Times reports:

The Democratic report includes excerpts from depositions and evidence of conspiratorial social media posts.

It also details the ties between Mr. Trump’s inner circle and the witnesses. For instance, Mr. Patel found Mr. Friend his next job, working as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by Russ Vought. The center is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is run by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

source

Yes, Russ Vought is the current advisor to the MAGA House on how to use the debt ceiling to hold the country hostage (see previous post). He is Trumpie’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget. The guy who oversaw a $1 trillion increase in the national debt in his first great year and another $4 trillion in his second.

Or as they say in MAGAland — FUCK YOU!

MAGA intellectual firepower, batteries not included

Republicans, now MAGA (they virtually all vote with MAGA, every time, out of “fear of the base”) have been trying to cut back the hated government “entitlements” that protect many tens of millions of vulnerable Americans, at the expense of the corporate bottom line and vast, untouchable hereditary wealth. 

The entitlements of the superwealthy, of course, are never on the table, since the table is owned by the rich and powerful.  As God and Jesus both intended. The drive to limit, eliminate or “privatize” programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Affordable Care Act, public education, regulation of toxic pollution, has been a constant in conservative politics, and vocally, ever more loudly expressed, since at least 1980 (“The Reagan Revolution” — it’s cool to be greedy as sin, if you’re filthy rich).

The theory is that government spending is exactly like a family’s spending.  You have to prioritize and budget, to spend every one of your hard earned dollars wisely.  If you need, say, an extensive arsenal of deadly weapons to defend your home, you may have to cut back on things like medicine and a slightly more expensive healthy diet, even if the doctor has prescribed it.  If, the analogy goes, the country needs the largest military budget in human history every year, well, poor people and old people who can’t afford their own things have to suck it up and tighten their belts a bit more.

Also, key to this pisspoor analogy is the denial that raising income — for government spending tax revenue, something an elected majority could increase at any time by imposing a fair tax system — has anything to do with a family’s ability to buy things, (except, in the case of government spending) things that poor people or old folks might need. 

Because the US is the only civilized country that requires a 50+% majority to vote to fund allocations made the year before (the “Debt Ceiling”) a tiny majority of say five in the 435 seat House can hold the US credit rating, and the world’s economy, hostage by making big demands.   

What is the razor thin MAGA majority demanding, in return for this generally automatic bipartisan approval to increase the “debt ceiling” to cover current financial commitments?  At first it seemed to be cuts to the social safety net.  Biden called them out on it during his State of the Union, and they have squirmed away from that obvious plan of attack. Their latest “proposal” in the hostage standoff is reported by Heather Cox Richardson:

Now that Republicans have committed to taking cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table, Vought has a plan to cut $9 trillion from domestic programs over the next ten years by cutting more than $400 billion from food stamps, cutting hundreds of billions from education, cutting in half the State Department and the Labor Department, and cutting $2 trillion from Medicaid and more than $600 billion from the Affordable Care Act.

“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought says in his proposal. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish…. The battle cannot wait.”

source

Russell Vought, Heather informs us, was Trumpie’s former budget director.  Of course he was.  Heather continues:

But, as Jeff Stein, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post point out, Vought’s stand is a little awkward, since he oversaw the explosion of the national debt as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. In his first year as director, the debt grew by $1 trillion; in his second, by $4 trillion. Now he claims that the Biden administration is abusing its power by arresting people who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and so must be reined in.

Vought’s proposal promises to balance the budget in ten years, but it also predicts the number of working people in the U.S. will increase by 14.5 million more people than the Congressional Budget Office says will enter the workforce. That surge—if it were to come—would push the economy to grow faster, thus reducing the deficit by an additional $3.8 trillion. But where the people will come from is a mystery.

Who says MAGA, who always unconditionally protects its own (until they need to be thrown under the bus to protect their loyal leader) is not led by the nation’s greatest intellectual giants?  You act like lying and magical thinking are bad things, you egghead, elitist prig!

In four years Trump and his appointees appear to have increased the national debt by 25% [1]. So?!

Yet Heather Cox Richardson continues to quote Biden, a president who 25% of Americans believe was illegitimately inserted into office by a powerful secret cabal of cannibalistic child abusers who hate our freedom and everything white Christians stand for:

Biden noted that Republicans have voted more than 50 times to change or repeal the Affordable Care Act since it passed 13 years ago. He also pointed to the fact that the chief budget consultant for the House Republicans is Trump’s former budget director Russell Vought.

Biden lies!!!

[1] Given the current debt is just over $31.4 trillion, Jolly’s self-described “rough” 25 percent figure claimed by Jolly is imprecise based on Treasury data; it is actually 22.3 percent of the current total. source

Nuages

A beautiful, famous tune by a genius named Django Reinhardt.

Decided to try to do this lilting number as well as I possibly could. Needed to learn the slightly odd, genius form by heart, which I don’t always do, and learn the essential parts of the original arrangement, and then be able to play the melody over it comfortably enough, and in different positions, that I could start throwing the blues over it a little bit. This one’s much of the way there (after a solid couple of days playing it a lot) though not quite ready yet. But I thought it was worth a  listen.   If you get a third of the enjoyment listening that I had playing it, it will be well worth your minute and a half.

I hope you are well, and if not well, at least not too bad. 

According to Bill Barr, and MAGA, there is no systemic racism against black people in this country

The lede of a recent troubling New York Times article, under this headline:

Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds

In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.

The graphics at the beginning of the online version of the article (link above) show the number of children who die in the first year of life per 100,000 childbirths for wealthy white, poor white, wealthy black, and poor black mothers.

All I can say right now is fuck Bill Barr and his bad breathed, bagpiping, culture warrior, killer asshole ilk.

NYT opinion writer Charles M. Blow cited this hard truth from a fifty-five year old report by a Presdidential Commission:

As the 1968 Kerner Commission report put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

source

It’s a tragic law of human nature, if a deadly thing doesn’t affect you, or anybody you know, it’s hard to work up much feeling about it. Most of the time you are not only unaware of it, but, if it threatens your worldview in any way you will indignantly deny it if somebody brings it up.

Homo sapiens, the wise ape.

The real injury of abuse

Abuse is a specific kind of cruel behavior that leaves painful wounds that can come back and bite hard many years later.  The abuser always reserves the right to keep doing whatever it is the abused person is hurt by — which, in the case of a child in particular, makes the pain traumatic and permanent.  Trauma is ready to be reawakened at any time, it springs up with full fury when the same nerve is roughly touched.   The hurt of being traumatized is compounded by self-recrimination — why do I always make people treat me like that?

The real injury of abuse is the abuser’s implacable reaction to the hurt person’s pain, the complete abandonment of the person the abuser hurt.  Incapable of yielding, listening, understanding, reassuring, acknowledging that they caused the pain, the abuser tries to force the other person to accept the fault for whatever happened and to shut up about it, forever, often with a threat of much worse to come if they continue looking for sympathy that only a needy weakling would ask for in the first place.

We all hurt other people sometimes, because we human beings are an imperfect breed.  We don’t always treat others the way we’d like to be treated.  If we behave in a way that hurts somebody close to us we can often fix it by listening, understanding, reassuring, letting the other person know that we’re sorry and will do our best in the future to treat their feelings with more care.

None of that basic decency and conflict resolution has anything to do with abuse.  When an abusive person angrily hurts somebody and the hurt person reacts with pain, the abuser reflexively goes to work.   The ongoing “I’ll give you something to cry about, you little bitch,” is much more traumatic, in the long run, than the original slap, kick, punch or cruel words.  It is the complete withdrawal of all sympathy afterwards, making the injury purely the problem of the one who suffered it, that leaves the deepest cut.

Abusers are famous for elegant displays of faux regret, flowers, lavish gifts, praise, assurances that they’ll never do the bad thing again. Every victim of domestic abuse, every consumer of popular culture, is familiar with this kind of false charm campaign.  The charm and ostentatious shows of tenderness serve to overcome the defenses of the beaten spouse, reassure them of a love they long for, a love that is, at best, problematic.  “If only you hadn’t done that,” someone like OJ will say, after the beating, gently stroking the lover’s face, “I wouldn’t have had to do that to you.  You know how much it hurts me when you make me act like that, my love.”

A horror story as familiar as any ever told.  You made me do it, asshole.  What happens after the little explosion of rage is the truly injurious part of abuse, it makes you doubt yourself in a way that guarantees more of the same.  “You want some more?” the bully will say, trying to make you flinch.  Flinch and you lose.  Treating the bully to a hard kick in the nuts is always in good taste, but not always practical.   Getting away from people who abuse you, as soon as you can, is a better, safer way to avoid more abuse.

Impossible Letter #1 Big Surprise…

Impossible letter, indeed.

A few days ago (a mere 70 hours) I sent a short email to the daughter of longtime close friends, asking for her address so I can print out and mail a letter to her.  I told her I thought the letter might be useful to her. I wanted to mail it, rather than send it electronically, to give her a few moments of privacy with it before forwarding an electronic version of it to the family board of refutation.  (Here is a slightly redacted version of that letter.)

Crickets.

Her father had told me over and over, before withdrawing his friendship forever, that no matter what I said about our conflict, he wasn’t going to change his mind about anything.   He’d told me that he’s walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him (whatever that may have been — he never elaborated).  He told me I’d never seen him really angry, and that, trust him, I didn’t want to. As for anger, it was unfair, and totally wrong, to call his wife’s rage at me “rage”, it was just ordinary anger and she had apologized for allowing herself to be so provoked by my threatening aggressiveness.  He reserved the right to get indignant, over and over, as we ‘worked out’ our differences (I was hurt — no you weren’t!).   He spun every hurtful encounter, no matter how destructive to our friendship, into “progress”.  When I presented him with stark facts, he went silent, for a month, then called to see if I had learned my fucking lesson.  He concluded I hadn’t and that’s that.

I told my physical therapist that the adult daughter’s solution to having grown up in this kind of home was to openly declare her parents gods.  At every New York performance she would take a moment to salute her parents, her idols, and announce that her mother is a goddess.

“That’s creepy,” the therapist said, stretching my leg.  I nodded.

“Creepy, but smart,” she said, and I chuckled at how astute that was.

Big surprise that my final offer to tell the young woman what I thought would be helpful to her — not to blame herself because her parents had forced her into musical regimentation at a critical time in the young prodigy’s development out of ignorance, they didn’t know musical geniuses like Paul Simon couldn’t read music — fell again on deaf ears.  I thought I could help, relieve the kid of the burden of blaming herself for everything painful between her and her difficult parents, but apparently I can only hurt, now that I’ve brutally, gratuitously tortured and decapitated both of her godlike parents.

So the thing she learned from her upbringing in a house of absolute right and absolute wrong is the thing she does by reflex.  I get it.   As long as she remains sober, she’s ahead of the game, I suppose.  Like Eric Clapton.

The political is also gruellingly personal

It is not novel to observe that the personal and the political are closely related.  In my case, the present political situation is also a grim, constant magnification of my personal experience. For those of us who are personally susceptible, who find constant hideous echoes of our personal experience in the political landscape, following the news produces a form of PTSD.  

Gabor Maté made an interesting point about PTSD.  Apparently of 100 soldiers sent into a hellish war zone, like house to house fighting in cities in Iraq where it is impossible to even know who the enemy is, only a certain percentage will emerge with PTSD (I think it was something like 15%).  Every one of the soldiers who wind up with PTSD have childhood trauma that makes them susceptible to it.  Not to say that the other soldiers are happy about the hell they’ve been sent to, or don’t have the occasional nightmare about it, but the exact re-experiencing of the original pain and terror happens only to a select few.  So it is with the news.

The personal is political:  there is a progressive personality type and a repressive personality type, an authoritarian personality type (that can go either way politically) and a type that embraces differences.  There are inquisitive, talkative, collaborative types and close-minded, taciturn, competitive types. It’s easy enough to observe that some types are prone, by personality and life experience, to be liberal, others lean conservative.  Some believe in harsh punishment, support the death penalty and others abhor the thought of a possibly innocent, usually poor, person being executed (as happens frequently) and embrace policies like restorative justice initiatives.  

We have seen a deliberate, massively well-funded project (to be fair, engineered by the far right, guys like Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, and their highly effective network of morbidly wealthy fellow traveler influencers) to divide these types into uncompromising partisan camps that must fight the other side’s evil to the death.  Who does this simplistic, eternal, total war benefit?  The people who already enjoy every benefit.  It comes at the expense of everyone else.

On a grand scale we see the triumph of selfishness, greed, heartlessness, corruption and flagrant lawlessness among the powerful and the hypocritical application of harsh law, even spontaneous death sentences for powerless citizens suspected of minor crimes.  It can all be explained in an anodyne, New York Times style way that makes the status quo look less grotesque.  

For example, economists of capitalism have a neutral term for the human cost to making vast profits — like babies born deformed and clusters of cancer near runoff from a chemical plant — externalities.  You have to pay these poor people a certain amount in legal settlements, so your profit is slightly offset by the expense, but in the name of raising stock value to shareholders, externalities are an acceptable and unavoidable part of doing business, if the profit is otherwise high enough.   Some would say that decision makers who factor such “externalities” into the cost of doing business belong out of business and in prison, but that’s a political view, incompatible with the “freedom” we all enjoy here in the free market.

When millions marched, during a pandemic, to protest the intolerable injustice of ongoing police killing of unarmed civilians for minor offenses — or none — they were met with teargas, tanks, helicopters, horseback charges by police, batons, handcuffs.  The protesters were treated like an insurgent army, a force the right-wing administration claimed were a deadly, terroristic threat to national security that had to be neutralized with superior force.   What’s up with that?

“If you are angry about something you claim gives you the right to be angry, then FUCK YOU! You want to protest so-called state violence?  We’ll give you some violence you can take back home with you, when you get out of jail, asshole.”

This is the predictable reaction of a narcissistic psychopath.  They will unleash the full force of whatever they’ve got to defeat anyone who has a problem with how they need to do things.

I learned, only very recently, at 66 years-old, that I’ve been shaped by and fighting narcissists my entire life.   A few months ago I described the gruesome parade of many of my closest longtime friends as highly intelligent, darkly funny, prone to anger/angrily denying anger, deeply damaged, unable to compromise, determined to win no matter what the cost, etc.  I did not yet know that this constellation of traits also describes the narcissist.  I guess what made me finally understand what I was actually up against was suddenly being confronted by a series of outright lies, desperately, brazenly spat into my face in an attempt to make me submit.

Narcissism can be very subtle, as I also learned.  The fact that my narcissistic father never needed to outright lie to “win” our arguments early on hid the cardinal trait of all narcissists from me: falseness.  Without that lying piece I could see my father as disturbed, a jerk, an asshole, a tragic man, etc. but his overarching personality type, narcissist, was until very recently hidden from me.   

Now it is all I can see, when I doom-scroll the news, hear George Santos angrily rebut the true charges that he’s a lying sack of shit, the passionate calls to impeach Biden, (details of charges to follow), a strutting donkey of less than average donkey intelligence calling for a national divorce, a spineless political worm’s defense of the “transparent” move of handing all January 6th security footage to a propagandist for autocracy and on down the list.

Narcissists rule, yo, as they were born to do.  They always have the same answer to every concern you might raise “FUCK YOU.”  They may say this harshly, or politely as can be, but the answer will always be a close variation on that staunch proposition.   “You want to know why I have nothing but contempt for you, asshole? How about FUCK YOU, that fix the boo-boo?”

“And have a very nice day.”