I had said that with the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, they didn’t fail so much in execution as in full-bore pursuing a direction that just happened to be the wrong one. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s the execution that’s off.
This was clear to me in the first episode of the current (and last) season of Discovery, which starts out in slamming Space Pulp fashion with Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in a space suit literally riding the outside of a starship while attempting to disable its engines to prevent criminals from getting away with a top-secret artifact. But then the scene cuts to flashback at a Starfleet celebration party and spends a bit too long on exposition before getting right back to where it was. Better direction – from say, Jonathan Frakes – or better scriptwriting could have created tension or irony by going back and forth between the two events, but this is an example of how Discovery kills momentum even when it is able to create it.
The incident stems from a double-secret “Red Directive” from the mysterious Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg), which apparently justifies going against all Federation protocols. Burnham naturally doesn’t like this, and has her team investigate what little they’re allowed to know. In the meantime the pursuit is hampered because the criminals have endangered civilians while escaping, and Burnham directs Discovery to stop and clean up the mess because after all, the Federation are supposed to be the good guys. (As opposed to certain other ‘good guy’ nations of the real world that I will not name here.)
Eventually Burnham gets Kovich to reveal the purpose of their mission: The couriers Moll and L’ak (Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis) had gotten their hands on the diary of a Romulan scientist who was a bit actor in none other than “The Chase” episode of the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard picked up the lead of his late archaeology professor and, pursued by Klingon, Cardassian and Romulan teams, managed to find a hologram from the “Progenitors” who were the ultimate reason why humaniform life is so common in the Star Trek galaxy, and who left their last message in hopes that their descendants could live in peace. And while at the time nothing ever came of it (I liked the reaction where the Klingon captain said ‘That’s IT??’), apparently this Romulan scientist was taking notes and managed to trace the secret of the Progenitors’ universe-creating technology. And obviously the Feds don’t want these two criminals to exploit the secret for themselves, much less sell it to someone really nasty. Whatever that secret is.
And while the story manages to bring back Tilly (Meg Wiseman) and Book (David Ajala), who turns out to have a family connection to Moll, the main guest star of this season so far seems to be Captain Rayner (veteran Canadian character actor Callum Keith Rennie) whose ship interferes with Discovery’s mission about as much as it helps it. Rayner is a combative jerk, and in this respect greatly reminds me of Ruon Tarka from Season 4, except that Rennie has enough charisma to make it work. Not only that, Rayner seems to be more moral and self-aware than Tarka.
So at the same time that Rayner is pressured to give up his command because his rash actions led to the aforementioned endangering of civilians, Captain Saru (Doug Jones) decides to join the diplomatic core and marry T’rina of Ni’Var, so before leaving Discovery he tells Burnham to find a replacement Number One who is just as much of a “force” as she is. So she gets Admiral Vance to let her pick Rayner. Precisely because he’s not going to be a yes-man, and also to honor Saru, who took a chance on her as an officer after she’d been that much more insubordinate.
All well and good, but just as the issue with Season 4 was that they took the premise of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and stretched it over thirteen hours, the premise here seems to be revisiting “The Chase” and going from one episode to over 10. It’s not bad so far, but I’ve been seeing almost as many chances for this season to go wrong as it has to go right.
Keep men, lose land: Land can be taken again. Keep land, lose men: Both men and land are lost.
–Mao Zedong
This was a lesson that Chinese Communist leader Mao had to learn the hard way. After the fall of the Chinese Empire, various (small-r) republican factions united against the warlords and petty nobles holding parts of the country; the Communists and the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were both inspired by Sun Yat-sen, but the Nationalists were opposed to the Communists and their Soviet influence. They joined forces but each faction tried to subvert the other until Chiang-kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists, turned on the Communists in 1927, destroying their strength in the urban centers. At this time Mao was only one of several revolutionary commanders, but he and others managed to escape Nationalist encirclement in a campaign that Chinese Communist mythology calls “the Long March”. Thus they developed a “space for time” strategy by necessity that ended up being mirrored by Chiang himself when the Japanese invaded and took over most of the coast and the Chinese capital of Nanjing.
Meanwhile in the present, the command of Ukraine’s defense went into transition. Until this year the Ukrainian Commander in Chief was the popular general Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, who was popular with his troops, especially after the 2022 campaign to clear the Kharkiv Oblast. But his position allowed him to say things that were unpopular with the government, like in 2023 when he famously did an interview with The Economist stating that the government’s counter-offensive had stalled, and why. In February, President Volodomyr Zelenskyy dismissed Zaluzhnyi while also appointing him Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Zaluzhnyi was replaced by General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who is thought to be more a follower of the old Soviet school of military thinking, and while given credit for the Kharkiv offensive was also blamed for continuing to lose troops at Bakhmut past the point that the city served any military purpose. According to one article, “So popular was Zaluzhnyi that Zelensky’s own approval rating dipped by five points to 60% after he fired the general. … The sense at the moment is of a political class that is factionalizing and selecting sub-optimal solutions to thorny problems. Syrskyi’s approach since his appointment has been to mimic Zaluzhnyi’s cautious, realist style—he has drawn up contingency plans in case American military aid never shows up, withdrawn from Avdiivka to avoid massive troop losses, and redoubled the army’s commitment to technological advancement and drone warfare. That close resemblance to Zaluzhnyi’s approach poses the question of why Zaluzhnyi was dismissed at all. And by all indications, the answer is that it had little to do with military strategy but was rather about personal friction between Zelensky and the former military leader.”
The popularity, or lack thereof, of each side’s government also relates to how many men each side can recruit, which is another point.
The Russian colossus has been underestimated by us. Whenever a dozen divisions are destroyed, the Russians replace them with another dozen.
–Wehrmacht Chief of Staff Franz Halder
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other dumb bastard die for his country.
–George S. Patton
As a lot of people have pointed out, Russia is always dangerous because they will literally waste their own troops and send untrained and even unarmed men into combat in order to make the enemy use up ammo and potentially erode their manpower, and then – eventually – gain ground after losing a lot more population than a more humane, or at least more intelligent and pragmatic, country would. In both World Wars Russia would actually send unarmed conscripts onto the field and order them to pick up any weapons they found on their comrades who’d already died. Basically, the Zapp Brannigan Killbot strategy decades before Futurama.
You might ask, how does one defeat such an enemy? Well, it happened at least once. Largely because the Russian homefront was so deprived in World War I, people revolted against the Czarist government in 1917. While this is not emphasized by popular history, The Bolshevik Revolution was not against the Czar but against the liberal “Provisional Government” that succeeded the Czar and remained unpopular because they wanted to keep fighting the Germans on behalf of the Allies. Also little known, the Soviets initially wanted to make peace with Germany – no surprise given that Germany had facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia from exile – but balked when the treaty included separating Poland and the Baltics from Russia “on the principle of self-determination that the Bolsheviks themselves espoused.” The only reason the Reds agreed to a peace treaty was because they had even less ability to resist German advances than the Czarist army did.
The other example of a military defeat in modern Russian history comes from the occupation of Afghanistan, originally to support a local Marxist party that had seized control from the former monarchy in 1978. And after about ten years, the Soviet Union realized that that conflict was their Vietnam, and was only bleeding their manpower and treasury to prop up a government nobody wanted, and so after about ten years, they left. It is telling that the figure for Soviet killed in that period is between 14,000 and 26,000, over ten years, while in less than three years of fighting in Ukraine, Putin’s Russian Federation has (according to US intelligence) lost 315,000 killed and wounded, while also losing two-thirds of its pre-war tank fleet.
In both cases, it didn’t matter so much that Russia had seemingly infinite numbers of men to throw away if the people at the home front didn’t see the conflict as futile.
In this war, both sides need to recruit as many men as possible, and both have problems. Russia in theory can recruit a lot more men than it has, and probably will now that Putin has won his election as easily as Trump wins at his own golf courses, and for basically the same reason. But one of the big reasons Putin hasn’t done so yet is that even he feels the need to worry about domestic dissent, and if the war gets closer to home because the draft affects the home front, that becomes more of a factor. The problem of course is that the war already has affected the home front, given that the country’s winter infrastructure collapsed in several places this year because the national budgets are entirely focused on the war and men who could have been servicing the heating systems are down at the front.
Meanwhile, despite its own critical need for personnel, Ukraine is that much less able to mobilize, given that as a democracy it is even less able to commandeer the population than Putin’s tyranny. In response to a Ukrainian request, the Estonian government is saying it is willing to repatriate Ukranian refugee men to serve in the war. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is over 40. Even if Ukraine had enough materiel to support the war, it would be hard for them to take the offensive with manpower shortages, and it becomes that much more difficult to gain international support if it can be perceived that Ukraine’s own men aren’t going to fight. Probably the best solution at this point is where individual Ukrainian brigades are doing their own recruitment, “shunning an official mobilization system that they say is dysfunctional, often drafting people who are unfit and unwilling to fight.”
Neither one of these countries has a lot of logistical support right now, Ukraine because of Trumpnik interference and the EU mobilizing too late, and Russia because despite all of its built in advantages, it’s still Russia. You would think that this being the case Russia would realize it has time on its side, and all other things being equal it could just keep pushing with conventional attacks to undermine Ukraine in the long term. But if they thought that way they wouldn’t be throwing as many men into a meat grinder as possible for minimal amounts of land that they would probably get just as well with constant artillery bombardment.
It’s almost as if military conquest and the material benefits of taking Ukraine were secondary to Putin’s ultimate goal of killing as many people as possible, even if they’re on his own side.
As in a lot of wars, the Ukraine war basically amounts to who can kill the most people. And if Russia seems to have the advantage in that it has a lot more people to kill, it’s setting things up to where Ukraine can kill that many more of them.
It’s good to trust others. But, not to do so is so much better.
–Benito Mussolini
You will all wind up shining the shoes of the Germans!
–Italo Balbo
The first quote reflects the cynical, “Machiavellian” attitude of the fascist who thinks he knows better than the liberal just how the real world works. The second quote is from another veteran Italian Fascist, air ace Italo Balbo, who remembered that Italy preceded Germany in prestige and had a fascist government 11 years before Hitler. Much like Mussolini’s own son-in-law, Foreign Minister Galezzo Ciano, Balbo was very suspicious of the Nazi government and warned Mussolini and his fellow Fascists against increasing their ties to it. Balbo ended up assigned out of the way to govern Italian Libya. In 1940, Balbo died in Libya during the North Africa campaign when his scout plane was shot down by Italian anti-aircraft fire, further proving one of Murphy’s Rules of Combat: “Friendly fire – isn’t.”
And because Italy did not and probably could not become an industrial power on par with Germany or even France, it suffered more as it became more entwined with the Axis coalition, leading to the Allies taking their colonies and invading the homeland itself. By the time they reached the mainland, Mussolini was arrested by his own government, only to be “rescued” by Nazi commandos and installed as the head of a German puppet state running the remainder of Axis Italy. And when the war had brought both Italy and Germany to ruin, Mussolini tried to escape to Switzerland, only to get captured by partisans and executed in very sordid circumstances.
In his recent “interview” (rather, setup speech) to Tucker Carlson, Putin not only went on at tendentious length about why Ukraine isn’t a separate country from Russia, he attacked Russia’s old enemy Poland by saying Poland actually forced Nazi Germany to attack it by not agreeing with German negotiations. Blanking out the minor point that up until 1938, Hitler’s expansion was into his German-speaking “back yard” of Rhineland and the nation of Austria, while his takeover of the Sudetenland (in modern Czechia) was justified on similar grounds. That got some pushback from the West because that territory included mountains and fortifications that had been set up precisely to protect Czechoslovakia against German expansion, but Hitler promised everybody that that would be his “last territorial demand.” And then months after the Munich agreement Hitler walked into the defenseless remainder to invest Czechia and separate Slovakia from Czechoslovakia to become a separate puppet. So by summer 1939, Poland knew not to trust Hitler’s diplomacy, and so did everybody else.
Except Stalin.
On September 17, 1939, 16 days after Hitler attacked Poland, Stalin moved his troops in from the east to take ethnically Ukranian and Belorussian territory that Poland had won from Russia in a 1921 war (largely because of Stalin’s incompetence as a Red Army general, but I digress). This was the result of a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose secret provisions allowed Stalin to not only take eastern Poland but pressure Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into joining the USSR, and also forcing Romania to cede Bessarabia (modern Moldova). Stalin also used the opportunity of the larger war to invade Finland, but had to settle for taking border territory rather than conquering the “historic Russian territory” outright.
And then after Hitler had conquered or subverted damn near every other country in Europe, on June 22, 1941, he invaded the Soviet Union in a move that surprised practically no one, except Stalin.
“Nine days before the invasion, the Kremlin ordered Moscow radio to assure listeners there was no prospect of a German invasion. An official TASS report dismissed “rumors” of a coming German attack as “clumsy propaganda” spread by countries hostile to Soviet Russia. Even as the offensive unfolded, Stalin still thought it was a provocation by German generals. “I’m sure Hitler isn’t aware of this,” Stalin told military aides.”
It’s like “I can’t believe the amoral bastard who I assisted in destroying another country was going to turn and try to destroy ME.”
And because of that, tens of millions of Soviets died who only died because Stalin had enabled Hitler in the first place.
And in our period, even as Donald Trump and his pet political party, along with Stalin’s former satellite Hungary, continue to do Putin’s bidding to help Russia kill Ukraine, promoting a country that defines itself as being at war with the West, Putin himself is increasingly obliged to orient his economy towards Red China because his war isolated him from Western economies – even as Chinese Premier Xi Jinping wants to maintain economic ties to the West and therefore refuses to give him more active support. China is at least as tyrannical, expansionist and racist as Russia, but just as Putin dreams of regaining all the Czar’s old territories like Finland, China dreams of retaking lands stolen from them by the Czar.
It’s almost a paradox that the most evil, untrustworthy and untrusting people are nevertheless practically gullible when dealing with people who are that much more treacherous than they are. But it makes sense if you consider that such people consider treacherousness to be an admirable trait.
As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
–Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a socialist. The “good” kind. As a result he was in something of a moral conflict during the Nazi period. A Jewish German, he had to flee Germany during the Nazi period and he ended up violating his own pacifist principles to urge American President Franklin Roosevelt to speed up nuclear fission research in 1939 for fear that Nazi Germany could beat the West to an atomic bomb. (Never mind that the Nazis handicapped their own research by outlawing the work of Jewish scientists like Einstein.) When America did develop the bomb, we used it on Japan, and Einstein protested, with some accuracy, that the A-bomb attacks were partially motivated by “US-Soviet politicking” and the need to stop the Russians from dividing Japan the way they did Germany.
The book Out Of My Later Years (ISBN-13 978-1453204931) is a collection of Einstein’s various essays on a number of subjects, including but not related to physics. The section “Public Affairs” includes not only defenses of socialism but the 1947 “Open Letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations”. In this, he addressed the danger posed to the world by nuclear weapons and the inevitable arms race that was developing between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. He said:
“The UN cannot be blamed for these failures. No international organization can be stronger than the constitutional powers given it, or than its component parts want it to be. As a matter of fact, the United Nations is an extremely important and useful institution provided the peoples and governments of the world realize it is only a transitional system towards the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority vested with sufficient legislative and executive powers to keep the peace. The present impasse lies in the fact that there is no sufficient, reliable supranational authority. Thus the responsible leaders of all governments are obliged to act on the assumption of eventual war. … There can never be complete agreement on international control and the administration of atomic energy or on general disarmament until there is a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty. For as long as atomic energy and armaments are considered a vital part of national security no nation will give more than lip service to international treaties. Security is indivisible. It can be reached only when necessary guarantees of law and enforcement obtain everywhere, so that military security is no longer the problem of any single state. There is no compromise between preparation for war, on one hand, and preparation of a world society based on law and order of the other.”
The principal objection to this essay was placed by a group of four scientists from the Soviet Union.
A man has to be alert at all times if he expects to keep on breathing. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch is going to sneak up and beat him to death with a sock full of shit.
Well, Star Trek: Discovery is setting up its fifth (and last) season in April, so it occurs to me I should give my impressions on Season Four.
In comparison to the previous series Star Trek: Discovery, the main complaint Trek fans seem to have with the last season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is that it only went for ten episodes. Whereas most people think SNW didn’t go on long enough, you can’t say that about “DISCO” Season 4, which went on for 13 episodes. And to me, it seemed a lot longer.
This is the problem with being a Trek fan who is neither a “progressive” nor a knee-jerk anti-liberal: Discovery isn’t BAD, certainly not as bad as certain pundits would tell you, but it’s often hard to give a damn about it.
Season Four reminded me of nothing other than Star Trek: The Motion Picture (or as my friends and I called it, ‘Star Trek the Motionless Picture’). It centers on a strange space anomaly that has the power to destroy entire planets and cannot be stopped. The solution centers not on violent confrontation but on scientific inquiry, exploration and humanist values. But it takes A REAL LONG TIME to get there.
If fans of the time thought that Star Trek: The Motion Picture was too slow and ponderous, Discovery Season 4 is basically the same story done over about 13 hours. Though not entirely. There are some interludes where support characters like Owosekun get some spotlight. One of my favorite characters, Saru (Doug Jones) has a chaste affair with the Vulcan ambassador from Ni’Var. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) decides she’s not cut out for ship duty but still has a role in the main story. Adira’s Trill personality/lover Grey Tal (Ian Alexander) is given a synthetic body (much like Picard’s) so that he can interact with the physical world, and while this story doesn’t go anywhere cause Grey really doesn’t have a place in the crew, it’s nice to see that this plot element was addressed at all.
While the focus remains on Sonequa Martin-Green playing Michael Burnham as Captain, Season Four is largely the story of Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) whose homeworld was the first victim of the “Dark Matter Anomaly” and whose grief is the source of much of the show’s drama, even as the DMA proves to be a threat to the entire galaxy. Ajala is good enough in this story that it would have been that much more dramatically interesting if Book had initiated the conflict in trying to destroy the anomaly, but he doesn’t have the resources to do so, so the story introduces Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle) an arrogant scientist who offers his services, but is so high-handed in his approach that it’s pretty easy to see why Burnham goes against him, and thus it’s also predictable when his plan doesn’t work out. As such it’s a little difficult to care about Tarka even though the series does establish an effective back story explaining his motives.
Other than that, I thought the most interesting thing about Season Four long-term is how it continues to develop the independence and legal status of the Discovery’s now-sentient memory library and computer, Zora (Annabelle Wallis), assisted by the professional advice of Dr. Kovich (played by director David Cronenberg in what is probably the best stunt casting since David Bowie in The Last Temptation of Christ). I say long-term because just as characters like Kovich, Adira, Grey and Admiral Vance got introduced in the future timeline of Season Three and continued on, Zora is continuing to develop. In fact her continued existence is something of a loose end.
But it’s kind of telling that again, I found a “side trek” story of Season Four to be more fascinating than the actual plotline that was omnipresent from the end of Episode One onward. Season Three by contrast was genuinely dramatic even if I thought the reveal and the resolution were kind of anti-climax. Now supposedly the producers, taking the example of SNW Season Two, are making Season Five more episodic and action-packed, which would help. As I said about Discovery regarding Season Three, I like the characters and the actors but the writing falls down, and if you like the characters, that actually makes a bad story more disappointing. Let’s hope that they turn things around like SNW and Star Trek: Picard Season Three.
This Mardi Gras week, my Aunt and Uncle, who are very conservative Catholics, came from back East to visit the family in Las Vegas, cause this is where you go to observe Lent. So on Ash Wednesday we had a seafood dinner with me and my brother-in-law (who is that much more of a partisan Democrat than I am) and my uncle asked if we could have a civil discussion about the current political situation. And we did. And I confessed, frankly, that I do not see the presidential election as a presidential race between two men. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and Biden is going to end up winning, if only because Trump is going that much more senile, that much more clearly, and that much more quickly.
What surprised me was when my uncle confessed that he’d talked to a lot of his friends in the Republican Party, and their general concern was that Trump wasn’t electable.
But I guess it stands to reason, given that Biden is merely old by anybody’s standards, yet still functional for an 81-year old, whereas the Sundown Clown goes “Bingbongbingbangbing” and calls that a speech.
And really, in a rational universe, Trump would not be electable, but he DID get elected at least once, because just enough people in just enough states wanted him. And people like me have joked that even if he died, the Republican Party would try to stage some “Weekend at Bernie’s” scenario to prop up his corpse, cause they’ve really got nothing better. Which seems to be what they were doing last week.
On February 28, the Samuel Alito Supreme Court announced, after waiting over three weeks from the DC Circuit Court panel decision that Trump does not have “absolute immunity” from prosecution, that they are in fact going to hear his appeal even after most people thought the point was pretty well decided. If only because Ford had to pardon Nixon, implying he was still eligible for prosecution after leaving office. And the Alito Court decided that they weren’t going to start hearing oral arguments on that case until April 22, almost two months from now. This necessarily means that the prosecution on the insurrection case for a trial originally scheduled for March 4 must wait. Now on one hand, “average” length of the process means a ruling before the end of spring or maybe the summer. On the other hand, that means that you’ve put off the date for existing proceedings until then and they may take months to reach a verdict, as Trump’s New York fraud case did. And he could still appeal. And it’s not like SCOTUS needed to grant certiorari on this case, given that the DC Court had pretty decisively shot down the argument that “the president can do anything he wants, cause he’s the president”, which is Trump’s evidence for his pre-existing belief that “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, cause he’s Donald Trump.”
As Bill Maher put it on March 1, Trump’s lawyers are planning to drag it out so that none of these cases can be decided before this election. And by his lawyers, we mean the Supreme Court.
But even so, I think scaredy-cat liberals in the mainstream media are so unconfident in their candidate that they were pinning all their hopes on the courts somehow disqualifying Trump, especially since polls indicate a lot of his (non-MAGA) Republican voters have indicated that they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he got convicted on anything.
First off, you really think that the Republican Party, which has seen Trump cross every line up to this point, wouldn’t goosestep behind him as he crosses the next one? Please keep in mind, cause it seems like the media isn’t, that not only is he found guilty of epic levels of fraud counting for about half a billion in damages, HE WAS FOUND GUILTY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. And as far as the polls tell us, if you can believe them, Trump could still win this.
And if he can’t win as it is now, think of how agitated his fan club that calls itself a political party would be if he did get convicted in criminal court. The Challenged Caligula would just stretch out his arms on the cross and play Orange Jesus and wail to his followers to save the big, rough, tough, independently wealthy strongman from the consequences of his own incompetence and immorality.
No, if you were going to go the route of disqualifying Trump, the time for that was already over by the time he announced his 2024 campaign. Which goes to what I said on Facebook when I heard the news from SCOTUS: You would think that everybody who has observed Trump, not just as a politician, but in his business career, would know that his standard legal defense is Delay, Delay, Delay, wear out the plaintiff, wear out the prosecution, make the verdict irrelevant even if it goes against him.You would think that prosecutors and judges would realize that he would do this in the event of criminal trial, for instance if he tried to assassinate his own Vice President for not assisting in a coup. And therefore given his legal right to do so it is imperative that if you are going to make a case against him on those grounds, that you charge Trump with insurrection and a coup THE GODDAMN DAY he leaves office or failing that THE GODDAMN DAY a new Attorney General is appointed to DOJ so that any necessary defense action (not to mention the unnecessary Delay, Delay, Delay) would not extend past the next election cycle.
Ergo, if you were, say, the Attorney General, or the Supreme Court, and you know Trump is going to Delay, Delay, Delay, (knowing that Trump is not contesting the merit of the charges so much as dragging things out in the hopes that he will win the election, or failing that to have it ruled in his favor by, I dunno, THE SUPREME COURT) any unnecessary permission for such tactics might not be a good faith attempt to protect a defendant’s legal rights but active assistance to Trump’s bad faith strategy to avoid justice for blatant crimes.
To go over, the presidential immunity argument was already well summed up when one of the DC Court justices got Trump’s attorney to admit that by their lights, Trump could use Seal Team Six to assassinate one of his political opponents, and there would be no recourse except for him to be impeached and convicted in the Senate, which is never going to happen. By this standard, the courts cannot rule against Trump. So all of the mainstream media’s experts have been telling us that SCOTUS will not actually rule that Trump’s position is valid, if only because it will make their own jobs obsolete, but then, these experts also said the Court would not decide to hear the case.
I’m thinking I should send the six conservative Supreme Court justices – and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell – each an individual copy of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich. It’s a historical study of what happens when an aristocratic elite decides to enable a deranged racist demagogue to gain absolute power, on the rationale that once he’s destroyed the rule of law, they’ll be able to control him.
And I mention McConnell because also last week, Mitch “the Bitch” announced that he was no longer going to be leading the Senate Republicans after the November elections. On one level, it is an acknowledgement that the Party of Putin has turned against him and he no longer has the influence on his peers that he once did. But I think it also indicates, as with Paul Ryan, who left a seat that he could have easily been re-elected to, that there’s no point in being in Congress without your party in charge, and McConnell sees that between November and the end of what seems to be his last term, his party won’t be the Senate majority.
But given how all these little “conservative” events seem to coordinate, it might also be a case of McConnell stepping down because he knows his work is done.
Several analyses this week have gone over the course of McConnell’s latter-day career as leader. Under a Republican president, his only real legislative accomplishment was Ryan’s tax cut for corporations and upper brackets (which also eliminated tax breaks for lower income levels and high-tax states). What McConnell did do was to use his power as Senate Majority Leader to hold up legislation that ultimately might have passed, simply by controlling the agenda and keeping it from coming to the floor, in the same way that House Speaker Mike Johnson is now holding up a Ukraine aid package that would easily pass with Republican support, despite Trumpnik opposition.
Which also indicates that McConnell could well have engineered a consensus to support Democrats in the second Trump impeachment trial, given that seven Republican Senators ultimately did vote to convict. He chose not to do so.
And of course McConnell also created an extra-constitutional power to act as a one-man veto against a president’s Supreme Court nominations by not letting Merritt Garland’s nomination on the Senate floor, citing the American people’s need to decide the matter in an election year. (They did, Mitch, which is why Barack Obama was president at the time of the opening, and not Mitt Romney.) Then, as early voting was proceeding for the 2020 election, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and McConnell and his Republican cronies frantically maneuvered to get Amy Comey Barrett appointed as her replacement, even at the risk of exposing each other to coronavirus. Because, it was thought by many, the election might need to be decided by the Supreme Court, and even with an existing 5-3 “conservative” majority, Chief Justice John Roberts was thought to be too squishy.
All the while, McConnell facilitated appointments of judges to lower courts who will also rule for decades without being subject to vote. And since the appointment of Barrett and the end of the Trump Organization in Washington, the Supreme Court has made it clear that there is no such thing as stare decisis or “settled law” if it gets in the way of the ideological agenda. The law is what they say it is.
Which might explain why the Alito Court would be willing to entertain a case that would destroy their own authority, just as long as they keep their seats and the privileges of power. It’s been the Republican model up to now.
Cause at this year’s CPAC – which now stands for Cucked Putin Admirers’ Conference – speakers like Jack Posobiec openly bragged that they were trying to end democracy. Which is itself a tacit admission that they don’t have the country on their side, cause if they could reliably get more votes than the Democrats, they wouldn’t need to destroy the system. The CPAC motto this year was “Where Socialism Goes To Die.” Yes. “Conservatives” are getting rid of socialism and replacing it with a new system. One where only one party gets to run the government, only one party has a say in anything, and that one party is run by one man, and that one man gets to say what can be told by the press, what businesses are allowed to sell, what schools are allowed to teach, what people are allowed to read, who people are allowed to marry, and indeed, whether or not you get to live or die.
Y’know, I think there was a word for this in political theory, but I guess “conservatives” killed it.
You know what a conservative is? A conservative is a guy who owns a bank. A conservative is the police commissioner who is friends with the guy who owns the bank. A conservative is the security guard who is hired by the bank owner to protect the bank. A conservative is somebody who realizes everybody has to work together in the system, if only for his own benefit.
Donald Trump is the guy who robs the bank. Donald Trump is the guy who shoots the security guard, or has his henchmen do it. Donald Trump wants to loot the system that supports him for as much as he can, and doesn’t care if he destroys it in the process, as long as he gets his money now. And when he does it, he smirks to his fan club, and brays, “I’m robbing the bank FOR YOU. I’m doing crime FOR YOU.” And because a lot of these people have been, or think they have been, ripped off by banks, they cheer him on. Never mind that THEY ain’t gonna see a red cent of that money. Some of which may be from their deposits. Because their identity fusion is so complete that if Trump is screwing The Man, then they’re happy.
The difference being that with John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, no matter how much street cred they had, they weren’t going to rob a bank, come right outside the bank and stage a press conference then walk away scot free after hollering and whining that it is mean, unfair and politically biased to prosecute them for blatant crimes that would get anyone else in jail.
If anything the bias is what’s kept Trump out of jail. And that’s the joke. He wouldn’t be getting so many breaks from “the system” if the system didn’t want him. Because someone – the courts, Congress, and yes, even our horse-race media – have always had some reason to let him go and keep doing crimes, because someone always saw some advantage in keeping things on this track even if Trump’s personality means he could turn on them at any moment.
The only thing that has ever stopped Trump and his Party of enablers is a pissed-off American public going to the polls and saying: NO MORE.
The problem is that 2020 wasn’t enough. Because as Jon Stewart said, upholding democracy – as in, public participation in the system – is a lunchpail fucking job, day in and day out, and it never ends. This year we don’t just need to say ‘no more’ to the Republicans, but to this entire government. This election is just the start. We need to start pressing on actions that make this government child-proof.
If putting the Supreme Court under the same ethics guidelines as every other level of the judiciary was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.
If appointing more Supreme Court justices (if only to match the 13 Districts) was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.
If requiring term limits for the Supreme Court- and probably Congress- was not a campaign issue this year, it needs to be now.
And if there is any one concrete step to take in this regard, it is to do what California has already done and Nevada is proposing to do on its general election ballot, and make the “primary” a bipartisan contest that really serves as the elimination round for a general election, because otherwise, as we have seen in the Nevada caucuses, the fix is in, and the result is simply the party apparatus forcing their candidate on the national convention no matter how big the plurality is against them and no matter how politically incompetent they are and how unpopular they are heading to the general election. That was what happened to Clinton in 2016, and it may be happening to Trump now. Cause if his Party is stacked to make sure he wins, and there’s no chance for Nikki Haley, why are people still going to state contests and giving her over 20 percent of the vote?
You can’t really get rid of political parties, but you can remove the incentives from the system that incentivize hacks, demagogues and crazies.
To do otherwise is to witness, and ultimately assist, the death spiral of the American experiment.
You know who the enemy is.
You know what they want, and how they plan to get it.
When last we left: In the space feudalism of the galactic Imperium, the reformist House Atreides has been in a cold war with the evil House Harkonnen for years. Harkonnen has power in the nobles’ council (Landsraad) largely because they control the planet Arrakis (commonly known as ‘Dune’) which is the only source of the drug “spice.” The spice is critical to galactic civilization because it is a psychoactive drug that allows navigators to make the calculations necessary to fold space-time and reach other planets. As the story starts, the Emperor has turned the Harkonnen fief in Dune over to the Atreides, a move that is so lacking in obvious motive that Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) rightly suspects a trap. As it turns out the Emperor has fully shifted support to Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgaard) and supplied him with some of his Sardukar commandos. The Atreides, no longer on their home turf, are dealing with an enemy that knows the territory, and Harkonnen troops with Sardukar support anhiliate most of the Atreides forces. Leto is betrayed by his household doctor, Wellington Yueh, paralyzed and brought to the Baron because the Baron is holding Yueh’s wife hostage. Either knowing or suspecting that the Baron will not let him and his wife out alive, Dr. Yueh implants a poison gas capsule in Leto’s jaw, so after the Baron predictably kills Yueh, he floats over to Leto to gloat, Leto bites down on the capsule and the poison gas kills everybody in the room – except the Baron, who barely managed to survive because of the anti-grav harness he needs to compensate for his abnormal obesity. (Or as Oscar Isaac might put it, ‘somehow, Baron Harkonnen returned.’)
What is not confirmed at the time is that Leto’s concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and heir Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) managed to escape capture and were able to survive in the desert with help from some surviving retainers. They eventually made their way to the territory of Stilgar (Javier Bardem) a Fremen (native) leader who had been negotiating with Duke Leto.
Given that this intellectual property has been around for years longer than Star Wars, there are no real spoilers given how many fans there are of Frank Herbert’s original books, so there is not much point in going over the original narrative, which has already been brought to film at least twice. But filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has changed some things that may alarm Dune purists. Notably, the second half of the first book, which is the scope of this film, takes place over the course of years, whereas this movie takes place only over a few months, given that Jessica’s second child, Alia, is still in the womb, whereas in previous versions Alia ends up taking a major role in the final act.
At first, the external conflict that led to this movie is made secondary to Paul’s internal conflict. He, and his new girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) realize that the Fremen belief in a savior from beyond the planet isn’t a supernatural revelation but the result of centuries of manipulation from Jessica’s Bene Gesserit order. Chani and her best friend serve as examples of how Paul still manages to win over the Fremen as a whole, by his sincere desire to learn their ways and serve their people. But Jessica is quickly told to take on the role of the “Reverend Mother” for the community, which involves an alchemical ritual that warps her unborn child. This is all very involved, and I haven’t actually read the books myself, but with the Bene Gesserit, a Reverend Mother gains access to all her ancestral memories, but only from her female line. No male has ever gone through the process and lived, which is the main reason why there are no male Bene Gesserit. In fact, their multi-generational goal is to eventually produce a male child who will succeed at the ritual and become a “Kwisatz Haderach” who has total awareness of the past and future.
Jessica heads south to join a gathering of the tribes, and Paul’s budding psychic power lets him realize that the path she is leading him on will lead to war and the deaths of literally billions. He refuses to take on this destiny so he can stay with Chani, but when the Harkonnens trace and destroy Stilgar’s lair, he is left with no choice. Chani herself tells Paul, “Our choices are made for us.”
Dune: Part Two is very much about the idea that there is no free will, especially if one can see the future, and yet it trips up the destiny that everyone seems to have planned. The Emperor’s daughter, Irulan (Florence Pugh) confronts her Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) who tells her flat-out that the Bene Gesserit manipulated the Emperor, and thus the Harkonnens, into destroying House Atreides because they had become too independent and too threatening to the status quo. Even the existence of Paul is a choice: Because Bene Gesserit can control their bodies, and arrange a timetable of marriages for the sake of the breeding program, Jessica could have had a daughter as her first child instead of a son, and was in fact told to by her superiors. Paul was born because Jessica had fallen in love with Leto and wanted to give him an heir, meaning the Kwisatz Haderach was born a generation early.
Compared to prior adaptations, Villeneuve’s Dune gives a realistic presentation of the Fremen as grubby desert survivors with their own language and culture, but that complexity goes out the window with House Harkonnen, gratuitously evil villains whose devotion to a bald monochrome aesthetic leads to a fight scene in their arena that is completely bleached of color, while House heir Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler) looks more like a buff Nosferatu than Sting.
But otherwise, the fight scenes are great, the acting is great, and while the direction is not quite so dependent on sensory overload as Part One, it gets the point across. I have a couple of friends who are fans of the book and saw the movie early, and they said that while it’s a great action movie, it isn’t really Dune. Certainly it changes things up with regard to the end-stage dynamic between Paul, Chani and Irulan, meaning that any presentation of Dune Messiah (which Villeneuve has not confirmed, but says would be his last production in the long and involved book series) would necessarily be different than the original material, which would be one reason to tell a story when all the fans know how the first one went.
“We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the US. We will destroy you from within.”
– Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, January 18, 1956
I know so many people who think they can do it alone
They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zone
Now what can you tell them? And what can you say that won’t make them defensive? -The Beach Boys, “I Know There’s An Answer”
All right, I’ve about had it.
I have dear friends and family who are Republicans, and I do not mean to denigrate their intelligence when I say that Donald Trump is a willing tool of Vladimir Putin. (Note to Republicans: the word ‘denigrate’ means ‘to put down.’)
But the fact of the matter is, Trump IS a Russian tool and at this point so is anybody who votes for him and his Party.
I have no qualms in saying this. I am not afraid to say that gay men can get AIDS due to unsanitary practices. I am not afraid to say that people like myself get morbid obesity and type II diabetes because we eat too much Haagen-Dazs.
But that’s why I say you can link Russia and Trump, cause the evidence is so obvious. You ask, what evidence? Well, there’s this thing that happened in history called “the last eight years.” Much of it was on tape. Specifically that thing in the 2016 campaign where Trump did a press conference and openly begged, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.” And wouldn’t ya know, that very day, Russian hackers released private emails from the Clinton campaign. If you run a political campaign and you beg a hostile power to release opposition info on your political opponent, most of us couldn’t make that happen. Even if it IS Hillary Clinton.
At this point, asking “Why does everybody think Trump is a Russian tool?” is like asking “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” Everybody else already knows the answer. The question doesn’t just come up from out of nowhere. And frankly, with much of our foreign aid package, not just to Ukraine, being held up by Trump’s machinations with the Republican Congress, everyone in the press and the government needs to flat out say what they already know.
Of course they don’t. Cause as Trump said, “I think you will be mightly rewarded by our press” by helping him make the Democrats look bad. You’ve got one incumbent president who is really old, and then you’ve got Trump, who is so old his Social Security number is 1. You’ve got Biden who seems confused, and then you’ve got Trump, who is so dumb that when the judge said “Order in the Court” Trump said, “Big Mac and Diet Coke.” Simply for the sake of ratings, the press and the other powers that be want this to be more of a horse race than it is. There is simply no contest, whatever you might think of Joe Biden.
But people are looking at 8 dollar milk cartons and $15 Happy Meals and they want to blame the President who’s in office right now, cause that’s what you do.
I mean, contrary to what seems to be gospel these days, I still think that when the federal government spends massive amounts of money (much of which doesn’t go to its stated purpose) then that is a direct cause of inflation. And that’s why I only describe myself as a Democrat very reluctantly. I am not a Democrat because I LIKE these guys. I’m a Democrat Just To Fuck Trump. Because he’s a Russky traitor bitch and at this point so is everyone in his enabler party. And if you think he’s going to make the economy wonderful again, perhaps you don’t remember 2020 when he did everything he could to encourage the spread of Trump Virus (TM) because telling the truth about what the government knew about Wuhan would endanger that sweet trade deal Trump made with President Xi. And half of what’s fucked about the economy now is Trump completely fucking up coronavirus response, cause otherwise he might have won that election. (NEWS FLASH: Trump did not win the last election) But as is often the case, all the Republican Party has is America’s short-term memory.
The problem for them is that Trump keeps acting in the short term. Trump started the biggest round of liberal outrage since the last one when he told a crowd that some big shot in a NATO country asked him what would happen if Russia invaded, and Trump said, “One of the heads of the countries said, ‘Does that mean that if we don’t pay the bills, that you’re not going to protect us?’ That’s exactly what it means. I’m not going to protect you.” And of course BECAUSE the normies are so offended and everyone in the crowd loves it so much, Trump keeps repeating that line in every new speech.
First off, as much as Trump’s fan club was cheering and jeering, they didn’t seem to get the inherent joke that the guy who valued Mar-a-Lago as a private residence for tax purposes when his property contract specifically forbade him to do so is acting like it’s a bad thing to not pay your bills.
The even bigger joke is that these namby-pamby social-democrat Europeans had let the defense budgets go to nothing precisely because it was assumed there was nothing to defend against and if Trump’s Thunder Buddy For Life Vladimir Putin had not only not invaded Ukraine but not followed up with threats to the sovereignty of “natural Russian territories” in the Baltics, Poland and Finland, NATO wouldn’t have stepped up its military budgets. So you can say that Trump did have a real complaint and that it is being addressed, but it’s an issue as to why that happened.
(Incidentally, the name ‘Vladimir’ in Russian means ‘lord of the world.’ No really. Look it up.)
Paradoxically, as much as Trump seems to be in the tank for Putin, I think that’s all the more reason why he’s NOT the victim of kompromat or a deliberate Russian agent. Because the first thing any good intelligence agency teaches their assets is not to act like you’re an asset for an enemy power. But Trump sucks up to Putin every chance he gets, when he doesn’t have to, and when it’s really not in his best interests. For example, when they were together in Helsinki…
What’s funny is that Putin looks the way every other world leader looks when they’re posing with Trump. Meanwhile Trump is just SO happy. Like, “Look, Master gave me this shiny new collar! Isn’t it neat? If I’m a REAL good boy, he’ll clean my dog dish!”
One doesn’t have to produce some “pee tape” or assume that Trump is compromised by Russian intelligence. In 1990, way before his political aspirations, Trump did The PLAYBOY Interview and said that in dealing with the then Soviet Union, “That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.” The interviewer said, “You mean firm hand as in China?” Trump responded: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world”.
After Stalin, the Soviet Union went to a collective leadership in the Politburo, which is how Khrushchev could be deposed and why Gorbachev almost was. In the ostensibly more democratic Russian Federation, the Duma (Parliament) mainly serves to ratify Putin’s decisions. If one can make an analogy to business, the Politburo was a corporate board and Putin’s system is effectively a privately-held company.
Trump has never run a corporation and never been responsible to a corporate board. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. He has always run things unilaterally. Trump doesn’t serve Putin because he has to. He does it because he wants to. Because he thinks that’s what a real leader is supposed to be like. When he goes to bed at night, Trump probably has a picture of Vladimir Putin at his bedside, and tells it, “When I gwow up, I wanna be JUST WIKE YEW.”
Likewise there is no real mystery as to why the Republican Party is so enslaved to Trump. I mean before January 6, Republicans only suspected that any challenge to Trump’s divine right to rule would result in a lynch mob coming for them. But they didn’t need to be threatened into turning their Party into a Mob operation. They did it because they wanted to.
It’s easier than having to live with existential burdens like conscience and responsibility. Just do everything the angry war chieftain tells you in hopes that he will grant your wishes and not kill you or inflict a curse on you when he’s having a mood. It is basically their approach to religion, so it makes sense that they see politics like this. The Republicans have had, and still have, plenty of chances to turn away from Trump and his cult, but that would require taking a stand against the collective, and that defeats the purpose of the modern Republican Party organization.
Because people in general, and Republicans in particular, follow the leader and do what they’re told.
That is largely a principle of conservatism, not so much in that it’s synonymous with authoritarianism, but in that conservatives believe the authorities exist for a purpose and that trusting in proper authority makes more sense than being an iconoclast. So if, hypothetically speaking, you’re a sociopathic dictator marinated in the traditions of the KGB and USSR and you’re already inclined to skullduggery, and you want to subvert your greatest enemy, the best way to do it is to take over the institution that is most associated (at least in the minds of its own people) with patriotism and love of country. If the “official” Party of America is suddenly saying Russia is our friend, then they must be okay, right?
And if you dare to disagree, doesn’t that make you a bad person?
Russia has actually been doing this thing for quite some time, and not just with the Republican Party proper. The National Rifle Association has been on some level synonymous with the Republican Party since before the Reagan Administration, and they’re the main reason liberals can’t pass “sensible gun safety” laws. (When at this stage, they need all the guns they can get to defend against Republicans.) Wayne LaPierre has been an executive in the NRA since 1991. Following various investigations and lawsuits from and against creditors, LaPierre filed bankruptcy on the part of the parent organization and a Texas chapter. However a Texas judge dismissed the bankruptcy petition on grounds that it was intended to escape judgment in a New York court. “LaPierre’s excessive compensation and exorbitant spending of NRA funds on himself and his wife, such as extremely expensive suits, chartered jet flights, and a traveling “glam squad” for his wife, became a subject of testimony in the eleven-day Texas proceedings.” According to a 2022 ABC News report, that year’s NRA finance document showed “Revenue from membership dues has plummeted nearly 43% from a record high in 2018, according to the 2021 financial assessment, pulling in just over $97 million — down from nearly $120 million in 2020. Spending on the areas of “safety, education & training” was cut roughly in half over the past three years”. The article quotes a professor, “”By cutting back on core programs and legislative spending, the risk that the organization runs is that members will suddenly realize that they are paying the same dues for fewer benefits”. Meanwhile: “Investigations by the FBI and Special CounselRobert Mueller resulted in indictments of Russian nationals on charges of developing and exploiting ties with the NRA to influence US politics by using the NRA to gain access to Republican politicians. Russian politician and gun-rights activist Aleksandr Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin,was suspected by some of illegally funneling money through the NRA to benefit Trump’s 2016 campaign.” What got more press attention was how Torshin’s personal assistant, Marina Butina, not only acted as liason to the NRA in America but had an affair with Republican political operative Paul Erickson, and gave him an email proposal on how to influence the Republican Party to support Russia via the NRA. For this reason and others (like drunkenly confessing her ties to Moscow at American parties) Butina was arrested and charged as an unregistered foreign agent, and found guilty. After she served her sentence she was deported back to Russia in 2019 (during the Trump Administration) and now serves as a member of parliament in Putin’s party.
“In 2018, a group of Russians were able to donate to Johnson’s bid for the Louisiana seat he eventually won as the money was funneled through the Texas-based American Ethane company.
“While American Ethane was co-founded by American John Houghtaling, at the time it was 88 percent owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev. Nikolaev is known to be a top ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“A spokesperson for Johnson previously assured in 2018 that the campaign returned the money that was given to them by American Ethane once it was “made aware of the situation.” There was no indication that Johnson’s campaign team willfully broke federal law, which makes it illegal for a campaign to knowingly accept donations from a foreign-owned corporation, a foreign national, or any company owned or controlled by foreign nationals.”
Russia has gotten a LOT farther at suborning the American Right than the Nazis did with the Republican Party in the 1930s, and a lot farther than the Soviets got at undermining the American Left (given how many Democrats were on the House Un-American Activities Committee). Now some of this might be like “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time” or “at least Cuba has free education and healthcare” but you can actually point to real authoritarian achievements there. After his “interview” (or as Van Jones told Bill Maher on February 17, a lap dance) with Putin, Tucker Carlson took his camera out to Moscow markets and the Moscow Metro and praised the city while badmouthing American cities. Here’s the thing, back when the Metro was being built in the 1920s and 30s, it really was considered an engineering marvel and praised by foreign visitors. Of course that was when the fellow travelers for spreading Russian tyranny worldwide were on the Left. But nowadays even Russia’s railway system is going to hell.
And as Russian winters get more extreme – perhaps as a result of that “global warming” fueled by Russia’s petrol-based economy – entire communities, even in large cities, have their central heating systems breaking down from high demand, leading to entire neighborhoods losing water and even power. This winter, YouTube had all kinds of videos showing blackouts in the Urals and Moscow and St. Petersburg areas suffering massive flooding when heating pipes burst. “In one incident, more than a dozen people suffered from burns in the Western Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod when a large heating pipe burst, causing boiling water to flow into the streets, DW reported, citing a local news channel on Telegram. The damaged pipe also caused over 3,000 people to lose access to heating.”
Jeez, it’s like Russia’s maintenance support is ALMOST as bad as Calgary.
From the Business Insider article: “”We are still using the communal infrastructure that was made during the Soviet era,” said Russian lawmaker Svetlana Razvorotneva, who is a member of a national urban engineering committee, per (Deutsche Welle). About 40% of the communal heating grid in the country needs to be replaced urgently, she added.
“However, funding for public utilities made up just 2.2% of Russia’s total expenditure last year, according to the Financial Times. In contrast, Moscow’s spending on military expenses made up about 21% of Russia’s budget in the same year, per Reuters.“
But this is of a piece with a country that was the largest fuel exporter in Europe prior to 2022 having infantry vehicles stuck on the road because they ran out of gas, or the country where Nature stopped both Napoleon and Hitler not having adequate winter uniforms. While Ukraine begs for Congress to end its artificial choke of military aid, Russian soldiers are going without helmets.
“Capitalist” Russia is in many ways worse off than under the Soviet Union. Not as bad as the Soviet Union in its worst days, but on the whole, not as good as its best ones. It was still bass-ackward, given that it was both communist AND Russian, but the Soviets could at least run the largest country on Earth without collapsing. For a while.
Even the United States could not sustain the social and economic costs of being at war for a generation, which is why we left Vietnam, and eventually Afghanistan. And so did the Soviets. But again, Putin makes the Soviets look sane. As is, the Russian Federation has an economy maybe the size of California, so even if Putin’s Fifth Column Party in Washington can stop America from sending anything to Ukraine, the EU will do so, especially since Putin won’t hide the fact that they’re next. But to keep pressing the offensive, Putin has to take materiel, and men, away from the home front, and that actually makes the front line situation worse because there’s no logistical support, while also making things worse on the home front itself.
So here’s the ultimate punchline: The country that “post-liberal” “thinkers” see as the savior of White Christian civilization against the dark southern hordes can only maintain its delusions of power and prestige by making the empire that much more of a dilapidated, shithole country, that much more in hock to Xi Jinping, a communist, atheist, Asiatic. And it’s not like he’s doing so great himself.
But that’s the model for “conservatism” now.
That’s what Donald Trump, our greatest President since Jesus Himself, wants to turn America into.
But sure, let’s give the nuclear football back over to a “reality” TV show host who played a billionaire cause Biden is THREE YEARS older. Nobody complains about the fact that were it not for Biden, Trump would be the oldest guy ever to be President, because Trump is so scared of his own face in the mirror that he has to apply a paint roller to it. No big deal that you look like a reject Captain Planet villain, and think that the Democrats are gonna start World War II, just as long as you don’t LOOK old.
All Putin has left is the gullibility and cupidity of the West. And it may be enough.
Mister Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,
On the case of Trump vs. Alexander, where the State of Colorado asserts that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to run for president as an insurrectionist under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the defense has taken two positions. One, which I will address immediately, is that because ‘President’ is not among the offices listed under section 3, that therefore it does not apply to Mr. Trump. The other argument is that the 14th Amendment should not apply to Mr. Trump and he should be allowed to run for president because section 3 allows for the prohibition to be removed by a joint act of Congress, a position which implies that the President is in fact subject to the Amendment.
To address the first point briefly, the defense has stated that there are such things as officers who are appointed for a certain purpose, but such officers are not elected officials and would thus not be subject to the Amendment in any case. It was already mentioned that when the 14th Amendment was being discussed for passage in the Senate it had in fact been brought up that the wording does not include ‘President’ and Senator Lott Morill said, “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
This was a matter already addressed in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Judge Wallace’s position that former President Trump has committed insurrection but is still eligible to run for office because the 14th Amendment does not specifically mention the President. It was ruled that the language is nevertheless inclusive and that the matter in question is that Mr. Trump is ineligible because he participated in an insurrection. The advocates of this position state that it is “self-executing” in the sense that such a person is necessarily ineligible to run for office in the same way that the Constitution says a 14-year old or a foreign-born citizen cannot run for President. It is not however, self-executing in the sense that there is no official determination that Mr. Trump or some hypothetical subject has or has not participated in an insurrection.
I am going to go off on a tangent here. There is a theme on social media where someone will post two frames of a movie in which he has characters react according to intelligence and common sense rather than as the plot of the movie went, and the third frame of the movie is the end credits, because if people made the sensible conclusion instead of acting as dictated by plot, the movie would be over.
The example I’m thinking of is Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This is the scene where Senator Amidala and the two Jedi, Anakin and Obi-wan, are captured by the Separatists under Count Dooku and led into an arena, and get rescued by the new clone army created by Chancellor Palpatine. And before that, Obi-wan tells Anakin that he was captured by Dooku, who told Obi-wan that the head of the Sith controls the Senate. And Anakin deduces that if a Sith controls the Senate and the clone army is Palpatine’s project, then Dooku and Palpatine are working together. And the third panel of the meme is “Written and Directed by George Lucas” because if the Jedi made the logical conclusion, Palpatine’s scheme would be over.
We are being asked to believe that what happened on January 6 was coincidence, not conspiracy. We are asked to believe in an absurdity. We are being asked to believe that when the president assigned responsibility to his Vice President for taking his case, then blamed that vice president for not doing so, and the mob in the Capitol reading his social media posts reacted by chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE”, that was coincidence, not conspiracy. We are being asked to believe that when testimony to a Congressional committee revealed that the president told his security to disregard the metal detectors in Washington because “they’re not there to hurt me”, that was not assisting an insurrection. When he refused to send troops to restore order for several hours and left that matter to Mike Pence himself, that was not assisting an insurrection. When supporters of the president guided tours through the Capitol halls for people who committed violence on January 6, that was not assisting an insurrection. When Jefferson Davis was placed on trial for treason after the Civil War, his own lawyers argued that he had already been punished by the provisions of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment when he had committed no actual crime other than simply being the head of the insurrectionist government.
We are being asked to believe that we cannot declare Donald Trump ineligible for federal office as an insurrectionist because the mere fact of his actions is not enough, and he is innocent because he was not so stupid as to declare, “Ey, I’m committing an insurrection here!”
When that was never the standard when the Amendment was written and when it was previously applied.
I am going to go on another tangent and this does relate directly to the matter at hand. In board games, there is a concept known as “rules as written” because the rules as written are often different from the game as actually played. In Monopoly, it is a little-known rule that when you land on a space and you don’t want to purchase the property, you can’t just end the turn and pass to the next player. You have to set up an auction, in which all players are eligible, including the one who refused first purchase, and the winning bid wins, even if it’s less than the listed price of the property and even if it’s made by the person who refused the straight purchase.
This actually makes the game go faster because the properties get snapped up faster, but because you have to run through auctions, most players don’t bother with the rule cause they don’t want to deal with it. So for the sake of making the game easier and less complicated, we actually make it longer and more complicated.
We run the American government according to house rules all the time. For instance, we have been having the President take this country to war for decades. The last time Congress formally declared war was after Pearl Harbor in World War II. We give the President all kinds of powers that aren’t really enumerated in the Constitution. Because it’s easier than having Congress do its job. This is what happens when we do not place Article 1 ahead of Article 2.
And this is what ties to the matter at hand, because the discussions have related not only to impeachment of the president but the matter of how Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is to be enforced or reversed. As we know, Article 1, section 2 of the Constitution states that the House of Representatives shall have sole power of impeachment, implying a simple majority vote in the absence of another threshold. Section 3 of Article 1, referring to the Senate, says impeachment cases must be tried in the Senate, and does specify that “no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.” This would seem to be an easy enough standard because in theory it allows the case to be established but only allows conviction when the guilt of the subject is clear and the offense is grave. It is assumed that because the Senate is the senior house of a separate branch of government that they are a neutral judge. In practice, we disregard the fact that since 1800, the President of the United States is the de facto leader of his political party in Congress. And thus while a preponderance of the House might be enough to send a case to the Senate, in practice a conviction in the Senate will never occur, because due to party allegiance, which is not accounted for in the Constitution, at least one-third of the Senate is going to be taking the President’s side regardless of the charge. Were that not the case, it raises the question how such an individual could get to be President in the first place.
Now on the matter of the 14th Amendment, Trump’s defense goes between stating that the Colorado decision was improper because Congress can act once a candidate is elected but before taking office, or that the Court does not need to take responsibility in this case because it properly rests with Congress. From the text, no person may run for office who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion”, but, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” That is an even higher standard than the threshold for impeachment. It would require not only a two-thirds vote of the Senate but of the House of Representatives. And if we can see the practical chances of a successful impeachment, what are the chances that the joint Congress would restore an insurrectionist by a two-thirds margin?
When we say that an unethical president can be corrected and removed by impeachment, in practice we are saying “that’s not ever going to happen.” When we are saying that the issue with section 3 can be corrected by a two-thirds vote of Congress, we are saying, “that’s not ever going to happen.”
We are supposed to take the plain text of the Constitution and make that the ruling as though that were the only matter that applied.
When, in a past decision, the Court overruled precedent and decided that the the rights of citizens could be taken away by the states on a certain matter, in practice meaning that these rights apply to Americans in some states and not others, there was no consideration given as to the consequences or whether that would cause social chaos. All that mattered was the purity and the principle of the decision itself. And we are now asking whether applying the insurrection clause against one candidate, even with cause, should be avoided because that would disenfranchise voters? We are saying, in that case, that the State of Colorado cannot make that decision, if only on its own behalf?
In the past, there was no consideration as to whether the Court’s unilateral decision disenfranchised people in some states but not others, and now we’re expected to believe that that question matters?
On one recent opinion, it was remarked, “the current Court is textualist only when it suits it.When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get out-of-text-free cards.”
And yet we are supposed to believe that courts make decisions on the law as it is written with no consideration of context or consequences, that this is a place of law, not politics.
We all know that is not the case.
And to state this is not an accusation of bias or malfeasance, it is a statement of fact. It is impossible to make a decision on law that has no bearing on politics because law shapes politics and vice versa. The law in an absolute monarchy is going to be different than the law in a constitutional republic, and necessarily that dictates the process of politics and the governance of the country. When we create this arbitrary distinction between what the law says and how the government actually works in practice, and apply it only as we select, we are making sure that the law cannot be applied practically.
Any decision you make is going to have consequences, including the decision to do nothing.
What then is the role of a separate and independent judiciary? The role of an independent judiciary is, and can only be, to make a fair ruling that is consistent with both a small-d democracy and a small-r republican system of government. To wit – you cannot have a democracy if one man can overrule an election. You cannot have a constitutional republic if one man can override the Electoral College. The decision here for us today is not just whether Donald Trump is immune to section 3 of the 14th Amendment, or to any laws at all, but whether the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment even applies or is merely an appendix that can be removed from the constitutional body without consequences. Because if it does not apply in the case of Donald Trump, then find a case in American history where it would be more appropriate.
Thursday Feb. 8, the special counsel posted his final report on the investigation of President Joe Biden on the matter of withholding classified documents.
Let’s get past the point that the only reason this investigation even happened is because The Party of Trump whined long enough and loudly enough that their wonderful little boy was not being treated “fairly” by law enforcement, belying the point that Trump is not only not ruled ineligible to run for office as an insurrectionist over the 14th Amendment, he is not in jail awaiting trial on that matter.
And yet, Hunter Biden has committed crimes, and Joe Biden did withhold documents without justification. It was justified for Attorney General Merritt Garland to appoint a special counsel, and he appointed Robert Hur (a Trump appointee as Attorney General for Maryland until 2021), apparently in the interest of fairness.
But while the body of the 388-page report indicated that Mr. Biden had not deliberately withheld documents after being asked to present them, and did distinguish Joe Biden from Trump in that regard, Hur implied that the main issue in putting the matter to a jury trial was that “(at) trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
This is the sort of thing that people on MSDNC were referring to as a “James Comey moment” where a Republican but nominally non-partisan official makes a report clearing a Democrat of wrongdoing but in such a way as to cast doubt on their fitness. I mean, let’s assume that because Biden had withheld documents, Biden had also done the same thing that Trump did, as if we could equate a shoplifter with Al Capone. Let’s bypass whether it’s a backhanded compliment to call someone “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” as opposed to a repellent and malign old man with a poor memory.
But if we’re going to take all this stuff about Biden objectively and at face value, rather than as having political motivations, then that makes the case for Trump worse.
Because if the political system – which we laughingly refer to as “the people” – dictates that the president must be crooked, must be corrupt, must be old, must be senile, then that would demand that legal oversight on the president is more of an imperative and not less. Yet, the Republican Party, which casts itself as the main check on the Biden Crime Family, wants to give unlimited and unchecked power to Donald Trump, who makes Biden look as honest as Abe Lincoln and as sharp as a monofilament knife.
While Democrats in South Carolina got their primary last Saturday and Nevada gets its primary (sorta kinda) this week, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley doesn’t get to compete in her own state for the Republican primary until February 24. Prior to this she lost to Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump in New Hampshire. Yeah, Haley did get more than 40 percent of the vote but she still lost by double digits and there is no other non-Trump competition. New Hampshire, with its Yankee libertarianism and relatively open primary system, gave Haley favorable ground that she’s not going to have anywhere else, even in her home state of South Carolina, where Republican politics are famously cutthroat.
All the more sad, because I said a while ago that one of these notTrump Republicans really needs to answer a serious question: If your platform is basically the same as Trump’s minus the personal history, then why should anybody vote for you when Trump is already running, has been president and has a built-in following you don’t have? Well, Nikki Haley has gotten as close as anybody to answering that question, by making very good points. Mainly, if she is going to have the same policies people liked about Trump, and the main criticism of Biden is that he’s very old, you can’t choose Trump as an alternative to Biden cause he’s not much younger and no less unsteady. Sure, Biden is old, he’s slow and he might be senile. So let’s replace him with Donald Trump. RIGHT. Donald Trump makes Joe Biden look like Drake.
But we should really quit thinking that Trumpniks remain in the cult because they’re voting for something constructive. Quite the opposite. There is a Politico article that was making the rounds in January where staff writer Michael Kruse did one of those mainstream-media-Trump-whisperer profiles where a journalist tries to get into the head of what the typical Trumpnik is thinking. And he discovered that they aren’t just cynical, they’re nihilistic:
And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.
“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.
“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.
It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.
I’d already sussed this out. Not too long after starting this site, I explained why Trump’s fan club is completely immune to contradiction or appeals to logic:
“When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”
And that was almost… eight years ago. Fuck, why can’t I get a job at Politico?
There used to be such a thing as conservatism in this country, but it was always inherently contradictory. As I said quite some time ago, the real issue with “conservatism” is that it is not a political philosophy. It is a governing approach towards a political philosophy. For example, in the Soviet Union, the “conservatives” were the people opposing Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, even though that meant preserving orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which is the polar opposite of what Americans call “conservatism”. But the contradiction is even deeper in America, because conservatism means preserving the original concept of American government, which is based in 18th-century classical liberalism and anti-royalism. “All men are created equal” is not a terribly conservative concept, even if it was stated by a slave owner. There is still a valid definition of “conservatism” in America, but it is relative, not objective. It refers to conserving that old capitalist, classical-liberal tradition against a leftist tradition that really took hold after Franklin Roosevelt and somewhat resembles the approach of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, although most of its American proponents were not explicit socialists. (Indeed, in the early 20th Century, most of the ‘Progressives’ were in the Republican Party.)
But just as modern Democrats have been associated with a certain stereotype, Republicans have become associated with a certain stereotype of “conservatism” that they have been relying on since at least Vietnam. Their influence reached its high-water mark in the Reagan-Bush period, but since then, and especially in reaction to the Clinton Administration, “conservatism” has become less about promoting ideas and more about living in the stereotype, as intellectual models like Albert Jay Nock and William Buckley made way for political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh. Much like their existing approach to Christianity, “conservatives” focus less on the policies and ideas of actual conservatives and more on the attitudes and postures they associate conservatism with: “toughness”, nationalism, fiscal discipline. Believing in the idea, the feeling, is more important than preserving the reality, which is where “conservatives” always fell down even when they were serious. It’s why they keep talking a good game about budget cutting and border enforcement and always make the situation worse when they’re in office. They don’t really examine what they want or what would happen if they get it, so the “RINOs” – Republicans in Name Only cave to Democrats to make the system work. So Republican voters, with some cause, looked elsewhere for more purist people who would actually live up to the escalated rhetoric that politicians used to get them to vote, and politics, Republican politics in particular, became that much more about the slogans than anything backing them up. In the process, the Republican Party bypassed mere hypocrisy to become the opposite of what it claims to be. Like, how the party that made “McCarthyism” a thing suddenly was okay with Russian sympathizers. Apparently all Russians had to do was trade their army coats for business suits and the Republicans didn’t notice that they never really changed…
This is how the party of “fiscal conservatism” blew up the budget deficit while cutting tax breaks for the middle class. This is how the “borders, language, culture” party blew up a border bill that their Senators demanded.
And this is how “conservatism” came down to Donald Trump speaking to his cult from a podium on January 6, braying, “you have to show strength and you have to be strong.” “Strength”, apparently, comes from a millionaire’s son whose Daddy got him out of the draft by citing bone spurs, who needs a golf cart to travel from place to place at international summits, and who always has an excuse for why every one of his screw-ups is someone else’s fault.
To go over what I’ve said before: This is literally a Party of Trump. It does not have the priorities of a political party, like running the country or even winning elections so that it can run the country. Its priority is serving Trump. The Republican Party does not have the priorities it used to, even if it pays lip service to them. The House has been holding up aid to not only Putin’s target Ukraine but traditional Republican allies like Israel and Taiwan. Why? Because Trump wants it. This party isn’t pro-tax or anti-tax. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-life or pro-abortion rights. It’s “What does Trump say?” If a tornado threatened to wreck a Republican-run town, the government wouldn’t appropriate services to get emergency services or shelters. They’d go, “What does Mr. Trump say?”
Wait, you’d wait for Trump’s permission before ordering emergency services? “Why not?”
Cause he might say no? “Why would he do that?” Cause he’s a petty sadist who gets off on making other people suffer, and if they make themselves suffer just to please him and make him happy, he loves it all the more?
“You’re saying Our President would try to stop us from responding to a natural disaster and let thousands of people die or go homeless, just because he can?” YES! “THAT IS SO COOL! That’s a REAL leader! Not like these pussy Democrats who give charity to disaster victims! Get a JOB, ya hippies!”
What’s worse, because there is no room in politics for anything more than two parties, and one of those parties IS Trump, there is no room for anything outside of Trump even outside his party. There is no practical distinction between ‘real’ conservatives (the near-extinct species of NeverTrump Republicans), between what used to be libertarians (now that the Von Mises Caucus has basically turned the Libertarian Party into the Junior Varsity Club for the Trump Party), no distinction between hack liberals and woke socialists. It’s all just, are you sane, or are you Trump? Do you believe gravity is a thing that exists, or do you believe whatever Trump wants you to believe? Cause I can tell you, if someone convinced Trump that not believing in gravity would keep him out of prison or keep him from paying his bills, he would spread some bullshit story about how The Theory of Gravity is Fake News and everyone in the Party would have to believe it, on pain of death (and that might not be an exaggeration).
Which is a real problem, because the distinctions between conservatives, libertarians, liberals and “progressives” are real and will remain when or if Trump is gone. I say ‘if’ since at this rate Trump might well be immortal. Because God is real, and He hates us all. But assuming that this stale fart of a human being will fly out the window some time before the end of the century, we will have to address why this system is as screwed up as it is, specifically why the liberal-progressive spectrum that seems so ascendant now is in fact so incompetent and unpopular that in 2016 they made Trump look like a GOOD IDEA.
I mean, to a lot of people like myself, it seemed like a good idea to get rid of the “deep state”, which prior to Trump was just “the state” and in more mature terms is defined as the liberals’ “administrative state.” But then we saw what Trump was going to replace it with.
It should be obvious what a dilemma the country is in when the Lamestream Media is practically tearing their hair out wondering why Biden is STILL falling behind Trump in the polls no matter how wonderful they say the economy is. And that’s because we need an alternative to the Democrat mainstream. And that’s not what the Republican Party is giving us. They’re giving us “Trump is like Jesus, only better, cause Jesus has to be celibate.” And if THAT was good enough for America, then the 2022 midterms would have been a “red wave” and not a missed period.
Recently one of my liberal friends had posted something from The Newsroom about why the Will McAvoy character still considered himself a Republican, even though he didn’t think his own party was that Republican any more. It’s before Trump, but it only goes to show where things were heading:
We need a REAL right-wing party in this country. Not a wrestling heel or “reality” TV villain that plays to a bad-boy fan club, and not just as a “loyal opposition” to a social-democrat default. We need a governing party that can win elections and run the country. COMPETENTLY. We need a party that admits that we have a Constitution, it is written the way it is for a reason, and we dismiss it at our peril. We need a government that admits that as rich as our country is, it cannot spend more money than it makes forever and still expect to retain prosperity.
That is not what we have. The Republican Party has not been fiscally conservative since at least Reagan, but at least they used to be able to pretend. And as I say, we’re seeing that when you can’t even lie well anymore, there is a real qualitative decline in your positions from mere hypocrisy.
Because now it’s gotten to the point where Democrats can score by applying the Republicans’ old arguments. You cannot trust Republicans in Florida to keep their hands off of business, because Governor DeSantis killed a perfectly functioning administration the Disney company had in the state, since they weren’t following the right sort of political correctness. Republicans always were against Roe vs. Wade, but ostensibly because the abortion issue should have been left to the states. Well, now that it is up to the states, they want to make sure you can’t leave a slave uterus state to get an abortion in a free state.
In short, Americans don’t need government telling them what to do. This is something the Libertarian Party could take advantage of if it chose to, but like Ron DeSantis, they’ve decided they can get more scratch by being more Trump than Trump. And it’s worked out just as well for them.
And please don’t give us this Andrew Sullivan both-sides-ism that both parties are equally bad as a means of disqualifying the Democratic Party. Whataboutism is a standard Russian tactic for disqualifying your opposition on the grounds that both sides are equally bad and therefore you only need to choose on grounds of aesthetic preference (which the Republican culture warrior making that argument assumes his side will win). But that assumes, one, your preferred side will even do what it says it will, and that’s been a Republican problem. But to act like both sides are equally bad is to avoid a necessary comparison. To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats have equally bad, anti-American nutcases. But a comparison would require asking how many nutcases are in each party and whether they comprise a controlling plurality, if not a majority, of the national party.
To wit – Every “Defund the Police” initiative has crashed and burned in every locality where it’s been proposed. San Francisco Attorney General Chesa Boudin was recalled in 2022 after his “decarceration” program and other policies helped lead to a rising crime wave. Claudine Gay was kicked out of leadership at Harvard due to her (lack of) ethics and competence, not her race or her political positions. The nutsos are not in charge on the default Left and they are not setting the agenda.
By contrast, around one-third percent of Republicans polled support the January 6 riots, and at least a quarter think it was a false flag operation to make our President Trump look bad, and it’s all of a piece with Deranged Jack Smith’s persecution of Trump on fake charges, and if you’re a Republican and you don’t believe these things, you better ACT like you do if you don’t want to get hunted down and killed. So which party is run by the crazies?
Who smeared feces on the walls at the Capitol? Who tried to kill the Vice President cause he wouldn’t throw an election? Who ran the Confederate battle flag through the Capitol hallways, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do? The ostensible Party of Lincoln, that’s who.
And if you’re still a Republican after that… you’re not really a Republican.
All right. So you’re all asking, why did I tell Marazhai to switch teams and join us, after the Druhkari had raided our planets for slaves to torture? After he led us on a goose chase through half the galaxy? After he raided my throneworld and killed thousands of people? After he led us into a trap to take us all to his homeworld to turn us into slave gladiators? Why am I letting that racist snob Yrliet back into the team after she went behind my back to help Marazhai trap us?
Because I want to. And don’t argue. Half the reason some of you are still alive is because I let you. Idira, you listened to the voices in your head too long and they told you your old mistress Theodora was still alive, and your hallucination convinced you to summon a whole bunch of daemons onto the engineering deck of the ship and almost kill us. I knew Theodora rescued you in the first place, so I sympathized. But you can be at least as much of a threat as the xenos. This is along with the fact that just being a psyker means you could open the Warp and summon a giant daemon to kill all of us if you botch your power attempt, or even if you don’t.
And then there’s you, Argenta. You seemed to be so pure and idealistic, and then before our Arena fight, you stopped and told all of us that you were the one who killed Theodora. Now Idira wants to kill you just as much as you want to kill her, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re even.
And then there’s Heinrix. Heinrix is a good guy, for an Inquisitor, but that’s like saying Hitler loved dogs. He’s even more eager to torture these xenos than you are. It’s his job to arrest xenos. Or anybody else the Inquisition wants. Hell, technically he can arrest ME. But I keep him around because he’s useful. You all are.
And you, you giant Viking-Werewolf-Space Marine what-the-fuck, the only reason I haven’t said more about you is that anything I say could get me killed.
So, again, you’re asking me why I put both of these xenos in the party, after everything they’ve done to us? Well, because for one thing, you’re in no position to talk about undermining the group, and two, the most sadistic punishment I can think of for them is to put them on the same team as YOU GUYS!
Well, we have just passed the milestone of 2024’s first election, the Republican Iowa Caucus. In this, Donald Trump, despite being the incumbent president (as far as his Party is concerned) only got 51 percent of the total vote, though that was still 10 percent more than his two main challengers combined, Ron DeSantis at 21 percent and Nikki Haley at 19. The remaining 9 percent was held mostly by Vivek “I’ve Got A Timeshare In Florida That I Would Love to Sell YOU” Ramaswamy, and once he realized how things would play out in a real election, Ramaswamy quickly suspended his presidential campaign.
So there’s that much good news. The bad news is that this makes Ramaswamy the leading candidate to be Trump’s running mate. The good news is that being Trump’s running mate makes one the prime target for assassination by fellow Republicans if (when) Trump loses the general election.
And just Sunday, DeSantis himself suspended his campaign after deciding to not even bother going to New Hampshire. So now Haley is thought to have a better chance of upsetting things in the New Hampshire primary, which is open to non-Republicans, and might also have a chance in her home state of South Carolina, although it’s doubtful this will do more than slow Trump’s path to Party nomination.
But the margins of the discussion, like, the fact that New Hampshire is an open primary and Iowa is closed to non-party members, or the fact that Democrats didn’t have a caucus yet because that Party moved its primary schedule, get to a point that explains a lot of what is wrong with our current election system. It’s the fact that the process is decided more by party officials than by state or federal governments. And this will cause conflicts between party and government when the government decides to set a standard.
It already has. In Nevada, a primary is mandated by state law (passed in 2021, largely to counter the clusterfucks of the last two national elections), to take place this year on February 6. But while the Democratic Party has dropped the caucus format and gone with the state primary, the Republican Party has decided to stick with their caucus on February 8, probably because the primary election process also includes mail ballots, which current Republican dogma holds are the work of the Devil, or worse, Dr. Fauci. So Republicans are able to vote in both contests, but the state party has dictated that only votes from the caucus will count, and candidates who run in the primary will not be eligible to run in the caucus. Naturally, Trump is running in the caucus.
In the Colorado Supreme Court case that is now scheduled for the US Supreme Court, the State of Colorado had ruled Trump ineligible to run for president in his party’s primary on 14th Amendment grounds. The Nevada case is the exact opposite, where the state Republican Party (that is, Trump) said, “No, we’re not going to be in the party primary, because we don’t acknowledge the state position as valid.”
Nor is this strictly a Republican-created issue. As mentioned, Iowa no longer has Republican and Democrat primary/caucus elections on the same day, because the national Democratic Party decided to rearrange the primary schedule because unlike Republicans they didn’t want rural white folks in Iowa and New Hampshire to be the primary representatives of their party. Naturally, the status-conscious people in Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t like that. Iowa had its Democratic caucus moved to the same day as the Nevada primary while the primary in South Carolina (where Biden really sealed the primary race in 2020) goes before both of them. So, New Hampshire, where state law apparently dictates that it hold the nation’s first primary, is still supposed to be holding its primary for both major parties on January 23, and because of the disagreement the incumbent president’s name will not be on the Democratic ballot. “The state’s attorney general is accusing the DNC of voter suppression and sent the organization a cease-and-desist letter last week that threatened further legal action.” Conversely, the Democratic National Committee will not count the delegates from New Hampshire just as the Republican National Committee will not count votes from their Nevada state primary.
The fact that state parties generally set the standards for nominating ballot candidates gives the Supreme Court an out in the Colorado case, and potentially rule that since that is the precedent, each state can decide for itself what rules to set and which candidates to approve. But that gets into the point that the President is the only office where voters across the country vote in one race, yet by our Electoral College system, the results are determined on a state-by-state level, and so barring a candidate in some states but not others would hurt their chances in the Electoral College (however unlikely it is Trump could win Democrat-majority Colorado). And as Trump’s lawyers stated to the Supreme Court (in a rare valid point) :“A ruling that reverses the Colorado Supreme Court while remaining agnostic on President Trump’s eligibility … will only delay the ballot-disqualification fight”.
Milblogger Jake Broe (a Nevada resident) has said that he switched from registered independent to Republican just to vote in the Nevada caucus and vote for Nikki Haley because that’s the only way we’re going to have a Republican party that supports Ukraine. Which I frankly think is naive. Because I remember when I switched from Libertarian to Democrat in 2016 just to vote in the Nevada caucus for Bernie Sanders, because if the Republican Party was going to nominate Trump, we damn well needed someone other than Hillary Clinton to be his opponent. Well, Hillary’s people had other plans. I posted on Facebook in real time about the shenanigans they pulled at the Clark County Democratic Party convention to keep the Bernie people from getting a majority vote, only to fail after dragging things out till near midnight, only to succeed in the end at the state convention in Las Vegas: “The rules specifically (laid) out that all convention votes must be done by voice vote, and that only the convention chair can declare the winner or call for a more specific method of voting among the thousands of delegates. During the vote the convention chair, Roberta Lange accepted the “yeas” even though the “nays” were louder than the “yeas” in the room. Both preliminary and final delegate counts showed that Clinton supporters outnumbered Sanders supporters in the room, though many Sanders delegates had left after Lange’s decision and did not stay to be counted in the final count. When Lange accepted the “yeas”, some Sanders supporters confronted Lange and other members of the party’s executive board on the main stage. The event was quickly shut down after that. Casino spokeswoman Jennifer Forkis said the event ran over its allotted time by about four hours, meaning security hired for the event would soon leave their shifts. “Without adequate security personnel, and in consultation with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and event organizers, a decision was made that it was in the best interest of everyone in attendance to end the event,” Forkis said in a statement.”
Why am I STILL voting for Democrats after that crap? Because Republicans are more crooked and less reasonable than THAT.
The whole POINT of this year’s Republican caucus is specifically to thwart the popular will and get the guy the party fanatics want. That is basically what all caucuses are about, because they are more convenient for the political fan clubs and people with time on their hands as opposed to regular folks with jobs and kids.
And that is a big part of why this country’s political system is as screwed up as it is. In the Republican Party especially, you can’t get to the general election without being the biggest whacko, which either undermines the party’s chances in the general election, or ensures that the seat will be taken by a whacko. Even in the Democratic Party, the obvious self-dealing machinations of the presidential nomination process, especially in 2016, helped alienate a lot of voters that the party really needed and may need even more now.
Because the fact of the matter is, any political system that forces us to choose between the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is already broken. If you seriously tell people that the only way they can avoid fascist dystopia is to vote for Hillary Clinton, well, don’t be surprised if you get the result you got in 2016. I personally think Joe Biden is an infinitely better choice than Clinton and even she would be infinitely better than Trump. But partisan programming means that the kind of people who base their identity on being “conservative” or Republican or “Christian” means that they would never vote for a Demonrat, which means that they would vote for a three-headed Chaos mutant who eats babies (said mutant would also be infinitely better than Trump) regardless of their qualms, rather than vote independent or stay home – and even though non-Republicans with conscience and forethought who don’t like the Democrat for whatever reason would rather vote for an independent or stay home.
Which is why we need various steps to reform – or give an enema to – the federal government. Such as child-proofing the White House to make it explicit that the FBI can investigate and prosecute a President who is suspect in crimes and to make it explicit that the President and other executive officials are “officials” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. We also need to standardize election laws on a national level, at least for federal offices. And a big part of that is making sure that the election process is decided and regulated by governments, not by state parties with ulterior motives or bias. Otherwise you keep what we have now: instead of a party structure that facilitates the working of government, we have a government that exists to facilitate the establishment parties. And the results of that are all around us.
I had thought of doing something on pop culture leading into Christmas/New Year’s, but I wanted to give my opinion on the Colorado Supreme Court upholding a suit to bar Donald Trump from running for President in that state on the grounds of the 14th Amendment. Special Counsel Jack Smith, smelling an opportunity, asked the US Supreme Court to expedite a ruling after the Trump team had already appealed, but this Friday the Court gave a unanimous decision pawning the matter off to the Court of Appeals for DC.
Like it matters. If the courts don’t give King Donnie the ruling he wants, he’s going to keep going up the ladder to SCOTUS so that his justices will give it to him.
So for snap analysis: It’s almost certain that the three liberal women – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – would rule against Trump. It is also almost certain that Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni petitioned to help the coup followers, would find some way to rule for Trump.
And then you have Chief Justice Samuel Alito. The 14th Amendment seems to be plain and clear language, but the whole premise of Dobbs v. Jackson is that the 14th Amendment is plain and clear language, but its meaning opposed Alito’s political agenda, so he just pretended that the Amendment didn’t apply.
This leaves the other four “conservatives” – Chief Justice (in name only) John Roberts and the three Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett, all of whom have ruled against Trump in the past, notably in a case before January 6, where Texas petitioned to throw out the election results in four states and it was ruled that Texas did not have standing to challenge another state’s election procedures.
To recap: The 14th Amendment states in Section 3, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. “
The case was originally taken to the Colorado courts by a coalition supported largely by NeverTrump conservatives. Previously District Court Judge Sarah Wallace had made a ruling that Trump had committed insurrection but was still eligible to run for office because the wording of the Amendment didn’t specifically bar running for President. And as many of us would point out, that position would mean that Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jefferson Davis or some other Confederate that the law was written for would be barred from running for Senator but NOT President.
Wallace’s ruling created an artificial dichotomy. It actually would have been more fair to rule completely in Trump’s favor and say that his free speech and actions on January 6 did not constitute insurrection and therefore he is not barred by the 14th Amendment. If one has decided one matter (is Trump an insurrectionist?) then that decides the other matter. If it is established that one is an insurrectionist then one is ineligible to “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States”. This was the logical finding of the Colorado Supreme Court.
It has also been stated by Laurence Tribe and other judicial scholars that the 14th Amendment is “self-enforcing” – that without the mentioned two-thirds vote of each House, the candidate in question is necessarily ineligible under the Constitution, just as one is ineligible to run for President at younger than 35 years old, and just as, under the federal Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for Governor in California under its laws but not run for US President because he was not born in this country.
The Amendment is however not self-enforcing in that it has not clearly been established that Trump (or some other person) has committed insurrection, which is why the courts need to take this up. So, had Trump by his actions concerning the 2020 election, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against (the Constitution of the United States) or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof”?
Well, after Mike Pence refused to certify Trump’s fake electors, Trump twitted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do right by him and suddenly the crowd at his rally got even more violent and started chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!” Coincidence? Well, given how many of these people thought to bring zipties, riot gear and a hanging scaffold to the proceedings, probably not.
Of course given that, as with Schwarzenegger being elected Governor, states can do as they will in their own sphere, the appeals court or SCOTUS could simply uphold the Colorado ruling as applicable only there (and Colorado is a liberal state where all the Supreme Court justices were Democrat appointees, so not like Trump was likely to win there anyway).
But wait – wouldn’t leaving the matter up to individual states mean some keep Trump on the ballot and some wouldn’t? Wouldn’t that undermine the chances of winning the Electoral College even if Trump states affirmed his right to run? Wouldn’t that be CHAOS? Well, Samuel Alito has made clear that it is not his job to care about the direct consequences of taking a national matter and leaving it to be decided by individual states, it is only his job to rule as he sees fit. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
It is assumed (by Trumpniks and liberals who take them seriously) that any ruling against Trump’s sacred right to run for an office that he plans to abolish once he gets power will undermine Americans’ trust in government. Of course every time the Party of Trump says that no one trusts the government, they are eliding the question of who is generating that mistrust. Contrary to their position, the feds are not going to turn McDonald’s vegan, and they are not forcing white girls to have sex with dark-skinned guys who will get them pregnant, arrange for government-funded abortions, and then raise the abortions as trans. If anything, you talk to the “progressives” and they will tell you that the Biden Administration isn’t radical leftist enough. Perhaps because the Administration, unlike the radical leftists, do not think that the radical left in America is a majority with a mandate.
The reason that no other candidate is being treated like this is that no other candidate has acted like this, because other candidates knew that acting like a five-year-old wannabe Czar was not going to work. As I say, we are not dealing with white privilege, we are dealing with orange privilege, because not even other rich white people get a free ride as much as Trump does. Ask Sam Bankman-Fried.
And then there’s the otherwise valid matter that we should be leaving the matter of Trump’s fitness for voters to decide. First off, this is blanking out the point that the people DID vote on Trump after he was impeached the first time, and they wanted him out.
Republicans say, we’re not allowing “the people” to vote? Are these the same Republicans who sneered at Clintonoids when they lost the Electoral College that “it’s a republic, not a democracy”? Aren’t these the same Republicans who whined when the Dollar Store Duce got impeached the first time, wailing that Democrats were “thwarting the will of the people”? Weren’t they the same ones who supported their boy after the January 6 coup attempt, thereby showing what they think of the popular will AND the Electoral College?
In fact, the whole reason we have all these counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the 14th Amendment – and liberals, you need to read this too – is precisely to make sure we do not elect a criminal (and/) or unqualified moron President just because he got the most votes.
The irony being it used to be “conservatives” who correctly assessed liberals in government granting the President and federal government all sorts of powers they did not have in the original interpretation, while liberal Justices and legal scholars interpreted the Constitution as “a living document” that could be interpreted according to contemporary mores, in practice meaning, however the people in charge wanted government to be. Now in practice it’s the alleged conservatives who are interpreting the Constitution according to their contemporary standard, not “presidents have term limits”, “presidents are subject to the law” or “insurrectionists are ineligible to serve in federal office”, but according to the living document of the Republican Constitution, which is “Donald Trump was sent to us by Heaven, like Vishnu incarnating as Lord Buddha to enlighten the masses, lo, he shall reign o’er us forever and ever- ergo, Donald Trump can do whatever he wants.”
You can only rely on this Court to do what it thinks best for this Court, and most of the time that means a reactionary agenda. But again – you can count on the three liberal women to vote against Trump. You can count on Thomas and almost certainly Chief Justice Alito to go for Trump. That means the balance is with the other four, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, who are certainly willing to promote the reactionary agenda but also seem to have some grounding in reality. And that means asking themselves if the reactionary agenda is best served by allowing a candidate who would almost certainly make the Court obsolete if he is allowed to run again and gets back into power. And they, like every other “conservative” who had a chance to call Trump to account and refused to do so before now, have to ask if they’re any safer as Trump’s step-and-fetch boys than standing up to him and risking the wrath of Meal Team Six. Ask Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham how that works.
If “conservatives” didn’t want to be in that situation, well, maybe they shouldn’t have put all their bets on the horse who is not only a raging authoritarian but a raging incompetent at it.
Happy Festivus, everyone. The Airing of the Grievances will continue until Trump is put in prison where he belongs.
EDIT: The case that SCOTUS sent back to the Court of Appeals was not the Colorado 14th Amendment case, it was the case on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity.
I regret the error. Specifically, the error of Trump being president.
