Category: Politics

The problem with news coming so fast and furious (and with equally silly sequels) is that I really can’t keep up. On the other hand, waiting a little bit to comment means that one catches all the subsequent news that expands the context of the news event beyond the immediate hot take.

For example, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It wasn’t even that long after the fact that people found out the shooter was able to obtain his weapons, legally, once he reached his 18^th birthday. Which is exactly what he did.

Every one of these mass shootings brought up by the media is indeed a macabre ritual, and we are reaching the stage of the rite where liberal high dudgeon sinks into resignation and despair as they realize yet again that all their “common sense gun safety measures” would not have stopped the Uvalde shooting, that nothing short of precrime would have stopped this shooting, and barring psychic powers, the only thing that would have is the state of Texas being just as prejudiced against gun fans as they are against women seeking abortions.

Then there’s what we found out about the police response. Or acute lack thereof. Apparently a member of the Department of Public Safety was one of the first officers to confront the shooter. At one point there were cops on the scene for the better part of an hour, but according to the Public Safety officer, they waited because “they could’ve been shot.”

As one Internet wag put it, “Never saw a fireman stand outside a burning building cause they were too scared to go in. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any ‘fuck the fire department’ songs.”

I mean, half the argument made by the gun nuts is that you need guns to protect yourself in the heat of the moment cause 911 Is A Joke, “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six”, and all that. And the liberal counter-argument is that we’re supposed to trust the police to secure law and order. Really?

Maybe Republicans are right and we should be should be arming the teachers. After all, if a thug comes busting in the school, it’s not like the POLICE are gonna do anything.

But Uvalde was hardly the only shooting in the limited period. It’s just the one that got publicity for some reason. If one defines a “mass shooting” as one where four or more people are shot in the same incident, then since the Uvalde shooting on May 24 there have been…. well, I quit counting after 20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022 Four were on June 19. Keep checking the link!

Even so, the fact that Uvalde is just a few bullets dropped on an over-full bucket meant that Democrats in Washington were actually able to pressure Republicans into having bipartisan negotiations toward gun regulations. I guess some professional Christians actually figured out there’s no point in protecting individual pregnancies when it’s so easy to commit retroactive abortion in mass quantities. Of course everyone acted like some progress was going to be made, and then some of the Republicans who declared themselves in favor of negotiation started to back off.

The main objection seems to be with the concept of “red flag” provisions against domestic abusers, including eliminating “the boyfriend loophole” where the laws do not apply to an individual who had not been co-habiting with a potential victim. This is allegedly because of a concern that such laws could be abused against certain targets, but it really seems to be because Republicans know their base.

I mean, I could make serious cases against these laws on Second Amendment grounds or the rights of an accused, but it should be pretty clear from the past few years, if not decades, that “conservative” positions are based on the most superficial, bad-faith and political ulterior motives. Rights of the individual, let alone the functioning of government, are meaningless compared to pandering for votes.

Again, my position is actually that of arch-conservative Senator John Kennedy (BR.-Louisiana) who said, “We don’t need gun control, we need idiot control.” But again, in both cases it’s Kennedy’s Republican Party that’s standing in the way of that, cause if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.

—

Which gets to my second issue: The January 6 hearings and why they still matter.

The congressional hearings, managed by Bennie Thompson (D.-Mississippi) and Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney (representing what’s left of the non-Trump Republican Party), determined among other things, that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” fundraiser campaign didn’t go to legal efforts to contest the vote but straight into his pockets (certainly the least surprising news so far), that the Proud Boys (whom Viceroy Trump told to ‘stand back and stand by’ in a debate) would have killed Mike Pence if they had had a chance, and that while some of the actual ‘peaceful tourists’ were milling about the area or listening to Trump’s speech, some of the Proud Boys were taking advance positions, some of which they’d been shown the day before, and assaulted security barricades before Trump’s speech even finished.

“The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot,” committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said. She added that intelligence available before Jan. 6 identified plans to “invade the Capitol, occupy the Capitol, and take other steps to halt Congress’s count of electoral votes that day.”

That sort of advance maneuver and coordination (such as bringing zip ties, body armor and a scaffolding to a ‘peaceful protest’, as one does) not only undermines the idea that we had a spontaneous gathering that “got a little out of hand”, it directly confronts Trump’s best defense, what legal people would call mens rea – basically that Trump was too stupid or ignorant or crazy to know he was breaking the law. Several times, people who were not crazy (like Bill Barr) and even people who ARE crazy (like Rudy Guiliani) told Trump that his substitute-electors scheme was not legally feasible, and the fact that he pursued it anyway demonstrates intent. And while Trump, like any good Mob boss, was at pains to avoid direct involvement, this week the committee brought up how he pressured various state election boards and was caught on tape by the Georgia Secretary of State telling him to “find” just enough votes to swing the state. (Remember, the Trump Organization is like the Corleone Family, except everybody is Fredo.)

All of which returns us to the question that has been pressing ever since the 2016 presidential campaign: Why haven’t we put this babbling orangutan in a cage where he belongs?

But then we know the answer to that question is the answer to how he became president in the first place: Because enough people in enough critical states supported him and continue to do so. It’s why Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell refused to press for a conviction in Trump’s second impeachment, even though his term was over and conviction was simply a matter of making sure he could never run again. Because enough people (besides Trump himself) would like that.
Which is pretty clear, because if the Banana Republican Party really wished to “move on” and start over, they wouldn’t be so defensive about the subject. They could just say, “hey we agreed with Trump’s policies, he gave us a conservative court, but he made a huge mistake and we have other candidates who can do what he did without the baggage.” But no.

No, you have Church of Trump junior priests like Congressman Gym Jordan (BR.-Ohio) tweeting that the Democratic Congress is ignoring “Gas at $5 per gallon. Moms can’t find baby formula. Grocery prices skyrocketing. Border in crisis.”

Christ on a pogo stick. Yes, Trumpniks. The economy sucks. Inflation sucks. Democrats suck. Now, can you point out the section of the Constitution that says a bunch of crybabies with Confederate flags get to overturn the result of the Electoral College once gas hits five dollars a gallon? Because if you can’t, that argument is just dodging the point.

As if that objection even matters though, cause even if you acknowledge there’s only so much this or any other president can do about global supply chain issues, it doesn’t make inflation hurt any less. But then the Republican Party is no longer the conservative wing of a political system where everyone believes in market liberal economics and constitutional rule of law. It’s the right-wing version of a Leninist party that participates in the political system only to the extent that it can game its rules to make sure they never have to worry about elections again. And to do that they need to make sure the declared defenders of that system – the Democrats – fail.

And if the suck-ass economy continues to drag down the country, it may drag down the Democrats in the midterms and there won’t be much chance of bringing the coup party to justice.

—

Which leads to my third set of observations.

It seems that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is finally starting to turn against the defenders. One bad sign: The Western media isn’t covering Ukraine nearly as much anymore.

The fact is, Putin’s current strategy is the one he probably should have pursued all along. After mistakenly thinking that the Russian military had the logistics and operational capacity to take down a country the size of Ukraine in a few days or weeks, Putin downsized his expectations and narrowed the focus to the small eastern area of Donets where he already has local support and a concentrated front. Now most of Ukraine’s casualties are being inflicted by Russians at a safe distance with artillery, and Ukraine is running out of the Soviet/Russian gear they started off with, while the better Western gear is going to take time to deliver, and time to train with.

And while the goal of the West was to use sanctions to cut off Russia from its oil-based economic supports, according to Business Insider, “Russia is on track to make more money off oil and gas exports this year than it did in 2021, and it’s got the EU to thank“. The Russian ruble actually increased in value from its prewar levels. As it turns out, restricting the supply of something, either via war or sanctions, makes it more valuable. Capitalism works, who knew? Apparently not the Biden Administration.

To such extent as we have had a sanctions regime, Russia has been getting around it with exports to India, China and other places that aren’t really aligned against or with the US. And since both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of food staples like grain and sunflower oil, Putin’s war of choice is already creating a global food crisis. And we can already see that as this goes on, the domestic impact is undermining the governments that are trying to resist Putin in favor of his local friends.

It’s almost like Russia’s national policy depends on making the entire world worse.

And the domestic impact of this manufactured crisis may be worse for EU countries than it is for America. We can ramp up our oil production, but for nations like Germany and Hungary, American fuel exports aren’t as convenient as those from Russia. But you know who has a lot of oil and mineral deposits in Europe outside of Russia? Ukraine!

Now does all this make more sense?

Putin was clearly trying to assimilate the entire nation (for one thing it was the main export route for Russian natural gas to those EU countries) but what he’s got right now is the next best thing.

Right now, the sketch plan looks like this:

1. Invade Ukraine, Russia’s main competitor and secondary source for both food and fuel,
2. Thereby creating both a food crisis and energy crisis which itself raises prices on everything else,
3. Block off the Black Sea so Ukraine can’t export food and fuel, exacerbating the artificial price crisis,
4. Keep the pressure on Ukraine (no matter what the cost to ordinary Russians) and maintain the manufactured inflation until the Western nations get sick of it,
5. Have Putin’s Little Bitch Boy run for president again, help him win (again) and wait until 2025 so he can turn the USA back into Russian North America,
6. Profit!

Of course bad as things look for Ukraine, and as bad as they’re going to get, this mode of thinking really means that Putin is trying to hurt the West at least as much as Ukraine. And we’re not the ones really hurting. That may be one reason the American public’s commitment is lacking, but by the same token, it’s not like the government really needs a public commitment to engage in foreign policy maneuvers. After all, who really asked for a war in Yemen which is continuing without any real resolution? Nobody, except the Saudis and the Americans who are financing that war effort, and that business opportunity is what matters to them.

Basically, Putin is betting that our entitled consumer culture and greed will cause us to succumb to Russia but Russia will not succumb to the greed and production capacity of our military-industrial complex.

I seem to recall that Putin’s mentors in the Soviet Union made a similar bet with the invasion of Afghanistan. It didn’t work out too well.

You have to understand. Most people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured and so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

-Morpheus, The Matrix

I could be talking about… all this… that happened Tuesday, over the last weekend, or over the last month or so, but I’m going to talk about something else that seems to be unrelated but actually touches upon exactly how this country got so fucked up.

There was a recent article on The Nevada Independent website showing how the state’s Democratic Party establishment is speaking out against a ranked choice voting reform that is on the ballot for this year. In his statement to the Independent, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak said the initiative was “a rushed constitutional change that would make our system more confusing, error-prone and exclusionary.” Senator Jacky Rosen said that it would “make casting a ballot more confusing and time-consuming, lead to increased errors that cause eligible votes to be thrown out, and disproportionately impact communities of color.”

Not only is this a really patronizing attitude in and of itself, it actually plays into the “Great Replacement Theory” of Tucker Carlson and other professional racists, who state that the liberals are out to undermine America’s system of government with an influx of brown, “obedient“, easily led immigrants who need voting to be as easy as possible. For Republicans like Carlson, the fact that they want to make voting a more complicated pain in the ass than a do-it-yourself colonoscopy is exactly the point, because they don’t think voting is a right for all but a privilege of the select. Voting should be left to those square-headed folk of good Nordic stock who grasp Western concepts like analytical thinking.

The Democrats might indeed have a point about how the change would make casting a ballot more complicated, but the actual wording of the initiative isn’t that hard to figure out: “The general election ballots for partisan office shall be designed so that the voter is directed to mark candidates in order of preference and to mark as many candidates as the voter wishes, but not to assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office.” In and of itself, that’s hardly different from the process Nevada Democrats themselves used for the Nevada presidential caucus in 2020. Reading deeper, the establishment’s objection seems to be the creation of a new Section 17 in the state Constitution’s Article 15, stating “A person may become a candidate at the primary election for a partisan office regardless of the person’s association with a political party, or lack thereof.” Further: “Any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter or any political party preference indicated by the candidate. The primary election for partisan office does not serve to determine the nominee of a political party or political group but serves only to narrow the number of candidates whose names will appear on the ballot at the general election for partisan office.” In effect, this would mean that the “primary” is no longer a partisan event but the first stage in a runoff system election process.

Which I’m pretty sure is what’s got the Democrats’ undies in a wad.

For both the socialist Left and corporatist Right, freedom of choice only counts if you pick the result they like, and if you don’t, they’d rather you have no choice at all.

Now, Sisolak and the other Nevada Democrats may indeed be the best choices we have available, but that’s not because they are ideal or even good. It means exactly that- they’re the best choice we have available because the selected alternative is so poor. That would be the case regardless of whether we had a ranked choice system now. For example, in the Nevada Governor’s race, the Republican primary includes Joe Lombardo, who will be retiring as Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff this year. That’s a non-partisan office. I think that by and large, Lombardo was a pretty good Sheriff and on paper would be a fair choice to be Governor. However he’s running as a Republican and feels obliged to go full Trump robot on all the political buzzwords and catchphrases, and playing ¿Quien es mas macho? with points like “Joe Lombardo is the only candidate in the race for Governor who has carried a gun every day for the past three decades“. So if he weren’t a Trumpnik, I might have voted for Lombardo, but as long as he and his party continue to believe in performative idiocy over governance, I have to go for Sisolak.

But that gets to the point I want to make: Most sheriffs are politically conservative or at least “law and order”, but their races are non-partisan. Nobody votes for sheriff on the question of whether they think George Soros wants to encourage abortion on demand so that trans people can adopt the abortions and then teach the abortions critical race theory.

Why is this craziness incentivized? Because of the political party system, specifically the modern primary system.

That is, if you’re aligned with a major party, you have to vote for their candidates if for no other purpose than to stop the other party from winning. And that means that your choices are really made for you in the primary round, so the people pushing certain candidates can just push the most partisan, “red meat” issues to display ideological loyalty, the most partisan, red meat voters are the ones who are more likely to show up for the primary (since it’s only that party voting on its own candidates), and they basically dictate the course for everybody in the general election. Even if you would have in the past voted for a non-Trumpnik, non-Q candidate in the general election, if you’re a Republican, you HAVE to vote for Ms. Jewish Space Lasers, cause what else are you going to do, let the DEMOCRAT win????

Why? Because those ideological fanatics in the Republican Party are the ones you can count on to show up and vote no matter what. And so the party has catered to them more and more over the years, and as they did so, the fanatics realized their pet issues (like abortion prohibition) were being given lip service by a party establishment that (correctly) assessed that those dreams were unpopular with the rest of the country. And so they started pushing more and more candidates who were taking positions that would have been rejected by earlier Republicans, and those candidates started winning primaries, and in “safe” districts, that means they won office. That’s why when Trump ran in 2016, all the establishment Republicans refused to really organize against him, because that would mean pissing off their “base”, since he was directly appealing to it. And once Trump did get nominated for president, every Republican had to go along with his idiocy, even the ones who knew better. And since he was the official candidate, all the stuff he said that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention as being too immoral or impractical suddenly became the respectable mainstream position.

And as a result, a major-party system that conservatives like William Buckley intended to be a screening mechanism to keep the Birchers, Randians and other crazies out of conservatism instead became the very mechanism by which the crazy became the governing majority, at least on that side.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is still capable of screening its ideologues to keep them from positions of real power (just ask Bernie Sanders), and while that is on balance a good thing it also means that the Democrats are, ironically, more conservative in the general sense than the Party of Trump, which say what you will, actually changed with its base. And that desire for control I think plays into Sisolak’s apparent fear of reform.

Perhaps with the Biden Administration’s other problems, the only way Democrats think they can win this year is to frame the election as a choice between the two parties. In other words, rather than objectively assess whether incumbent Democrats are doing good jobs, just point out that the Republicans would be so much worse.

I guess some of them still haven’t figured out that that didn’t work in 2016.

I would prefer an old-style, center-right party that reflects the practical, “common sense” attitude that I think most Americans prefer. I had thought that was the Republicans, but if they ever really did have a constructive approach to government, they threw it out long ago. I had thought it was the Libertarians, but right now they’ve decided to join the Republicans in COVID-land.

It might be better to just throw out political parties altogether and make all races, including federal races, nonpartisan in the way judges’ elections and most sheriffs’ races are. That’s not quite the same as banning political parties. You can’t stop freedom of association. We also cannot directly control people’s minds and get them to engage in what one party or the other considers to be goodthink. What we can do with government and specifically with elections is to create incentives and disincentives.

Specifically, we need to remove the incentives that make it so easy for ideological nutjobs to get into office by catering to a few while discouraging the participation of the general public. Right now the Republicans are the ones who are most consciously engaged in creating the political system they want because they are the ones who have both the desire to change a system they see as being against them, and the position to do something about it. Democrats are only just starting to realize that their status quo ante is not the best and perfect and permanent state of affairs and that the incentives they created are being turned against them.

With all the various roadblocks and complications that Republican-run states are putting in the way of voting, mainly to stop Democratic constituencies from mobilizing, it should be clear that Republicans are turning Democrats into a “third” party by doing to them what Democrats and Republicans have done to the Libertarians and Greens for years. And it’s testimony to the institutional bias of establishment Democrats that they won’t react appropriately or even acknowledge the issue. Now, some of them have, which is how you have ranked choice voting in other states (including Alaska and Maine, which are more Republican-friendly), and open primaries in California, which has hardly hurt Democrats’ dominance of the state.

We are reaching the terminal point in the duopoly’s downward spiral, and giving people more choices may be America’s only way out. Of course that would require Democrats to both acknowledge the problem and give up some of their control over the process. So we can’t be surprised that some in the party of “choice” want to put a stop to it.

Prior to last week, the month of February was notable for the continuing attempts of our once and future Viceroy, Donald Trump, to stay relevant, although some of those were actually more like embarrassing revelations. For one thing, in their attempts to recover presidential artifacts, the National Archives (allegedly) discovered that Trump was flushing government documents and plugging up the White House toilet. I’m pretty sure that Trump has been plugging up toilets for most of his life, but not for that reason. But then after weeks of military buildup, Trump’s Thunder Buddy For Life, Vladimir Putin, directly attacked Ukraine on February 24, allegedly to “de-Nazify” an anti-Russian country. “De-Nazification” of course, is code for liquidating a Jewish head of state and imposing a hard-right government that beats and kills ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Prior to this, most people other than the Biden Administration had assumed that all of Putin’s maneuvers, including the recognition of “independent” Russian republics inside Ukraine, were just a game of chicken. But that assumes that Putin had any cause to back off.

Be advised that one can only take a Hitler comparison so far. But: Hitler was born in Austria, a German-speaking country that had never been under the Berlin government. As a racist and pan-nationalist, Hitler believed that all Germans should be united under the same government. And he finally achieved that goal with Austria when he united it with Germany in 1938. And because this was actually fairly popular in Austria itself, this didn’t cause too much of a backlash. But then Hitler decided to go after the Sudetenland, border territory formerly run by the Austrians and now part of the Czech Republic, and the rest of the world realized that would be a much greater disruption of world peace, especially since the move was not universally popular in Czechoslovakia. Various attempts were made to pacify Hitler short of the Munich conference, and later various attempts were made to negotiate when he mobilized against Poland, but nothing worked because Hitler didn’t want peaceful relations. He wanted those German speaking territories and was willing to sacrifice any economic convenience and ultimately go to war.

Same here. I had mentioned that the Crimean peninsula always had a Russian population and was only shifted to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under Soviet Russia’s internal bureaucracy, partially because there was no expectation that Ukraine would ever be independent of Moscow. So when that did happen, there were a whole bunch of people in the borders of Ukraine who were really more loyal to Mother Russia. So when Putin pulled his little fait accompli to seize Crimea during the second term of the Obama Administration, not only did America not do much about it, there might not have been much cause to do so. The move was fairly popular, at least in Russia itself. However Russian emigration during the Soviet period also meant a lot of Russians had settled the eastern provinces that always had been considered Ukraine proper, and thus Putin’s none-too-subtle sponsorship of “independence” movements in the Donetsk region was harder for Ukraine, and the West, to tolerate.

Of course there’s the real reason any comparison between Hitler and a Russian leader can only go so far- Russia has nukes. No matter how much we protest, we’re not going to go to war with a fellow nuclear power. Period. Just like we didn’t when Putin’s heroes stomped on East Germany in 1953, when they stomped on Hungary in 1956 and when they stomped on Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, it doesn’t seem to have reached that point yet with Ukraine. That’s partially because on those occasions, Soviet troops were already in the borders as occupiers and here the Russians have to fight just to get in. It may be partially because Ukrainian defense forces are tougher than anyone (including the West) gave them credit for, or that Russian conventional forces are not as tough as most people (including Putin) thought they were. In any case, outside analysis indicates that Putin hasn’t concentrated all the force that he could have, even towards Kyiv, which is only a few dozen miles south of Putin’s ally Belarus. And that may because he’s bought into his own hype that the Ukrainian government is illegitimate and even non-Russian Ukrainians would greet him as a liberator. And that means he hasn’t contemplated exactly the level of force that would be needed to conquer territory, let alone hold it against resistance.

I also think there’s a psychological dimension here that isn’t being elaborated on. Russia, like America, has a certain romantic relationship with war. We used to say “we don’t start wars, we finish them.” Of course that was before the Bush Administration. But generally we believe it is neither moral nor practical to have wars of choice. Russia is marked by an extremely defensive posture. They were first invaded ages ago from Central Asia, then by Napoleon, and twice in one century by Germany. When the Nazis invaded Stalin’s Russia, they called it “the Great Patriotic War.” This is a war of choice. Putin can’t even justify it the way the Soviets could justify attacking their satellites, cause they were under occupation at the time. And if he wants Russians to think of Ukraine as part of the same country, he doesn’t seem to realize the effect it has on Russians to attack fellow Slavs in the same way that Hitler did.

Indeed, while America’s Dipshit Duce Donald Trump has always looked up to Putin in a “when I gwow up, I wanna be JUST WIKE YEW!” way, Putin had always seemed to be the rational adult in the relationship. Now, not so much. Trump’s defenders will frequently point out that Trump has never invaded anybody, unless you count Washington DC. Putin is the one who’s lashing out and being emotional. I think that’s also causing new feelings in the Russian domestic audience. “Wait, OUR guy isn’t the violent racist dumbfuck! He’s the guy who exploits violent racist dumbfucks! Right…?”

It got to the point where this weekend Putin announced he was putting his nuclear forces on alert. Which is kind of rhetorical in itself because strategic forces always have to be on call. But this is what happens when a tyrant or abuser doesn’t get his way all the time. The mask of civilization slips and he makes clear what he really is. Putin is quite literally trying to hold the world hostage to get Ukraine, cause apparently he wants the whole territory to be as radioactive as Chernobyl. And again, that just reveals the weakness of his position, because if this were the “golden days” of the Soviet empire, he would be winning by now. As it is, observers like Rachel Maddow have been pointing out that the Russian Federation doesn’t even have the domestic product of Italy, and if it wasn’t for his petro-chemical syndicate, he’d have no non-combat influence at all. And the best example of how things were going last week is that Russia, the biggest fuel exporter in Europe, is having stalled vehicles during the invasion cause they’ve run out of gas.

But the very fact that Putin went this far means that even if things work out for Ukraine, we have clearly come to the end of the post-Cold War era in which the great powers were no longer in an ideological death struggle. In fact that’s been the case for quite some time, it’s just now a lot more obvious.

Russia and China decided to abandon orthodox Marxism for capitalism (because you can’t rule a population when they’ve all starved to death) but that doesn’t mean they embraced nice Western liberal concepts of a world order. Having abandoned leftist internationalism, they embraced more primal and regressive ideas of human nature, rejecting concepts of universal human rights in favor of nationalism or a government with “Chinese characteristics.” Naturally, the Chinese model of totalitarianism is a little difficult to export to white Western countries, but the Russian model is another story.

Not just here, but with the Le Pen family in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary (who has coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’) you have a whole bunch of people whose model of government not only smells of fascism in its reaction to social-democrat liberalism, it is a reaction to the classical liberalism of Jefferson, Monroe, Locke and Voltaire. This general movement is often called “the Dark Enlightenment” or is associated with Catholic integralism and other philosophies that hold that classical liberalism and its alienating pursuit of individual fulfillment is spiritually exhausted and therefore the solution is to hearken back to the traditional, collectivist, authority-based models that liberalism replaced because they were spiritually exhausted (not to mention, counterproductively bloody).

As Rod Dreher says, this is part of why Putin, having abandoned Leninism in ends if not means, publicly embraced the Russian Orthodox Church: “he knew that he needed some kind of legitimating authority, so he began to rehabilitate the Orthodox Church in public life. It was a wise thing for him to do, strictly speaking from a political perspective.” This veneer of Christianity creates a role model for other anti-liberals, at least those who actually care about philosophy or theology more than bashing liberals. Dreher thinks that while such a fusion of Church and State would work in Russia or a Catholic nation like France, the US is too Protestant for that, and “We are far more likely to get a nationalist-conservative government like Hungary’s, a Christian democracy that provides something that a majority can potentially affirm. That’s what I hope for, anyway”. Of course that assumes that Hungary is either a democracy or Christian, let alone whether years of jiggering the elections and legal system have resulted in a country where we can fairly confirm that the majority is on board with Orban. But apparently that’s what guys like Dreher hope for.

Hungary is also the role model of much more public figures like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who took his show to Hungary and spent some time there expounding on the virtues of Orban’s system over America’s. While America’s liberals were sleeping, thinking that each election would go like the one before, Republican thinking evolved. Well, changed at least. It went from Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to Steve Bannon and now to guys like Carlson. The former disputes between the two ruling factions over taxes and the like degraded to what lots of people are referring to as a Cold Civil War, where the two parties cannot agree to co-exist and are ultimately trying to destroy each other, but cannot do so openly for practical reasons (namely, the risk of killing the gravy train they are each trying to control).

Even that was too much balance of power for a party that takes its emotional lead from Donald Trump and grievance media and its intellectual lead – to the extent that it has one – from outspoken anti-liberals like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, who make no secret of their distaste for liberal artifacts like “civilian control of the military” and who have also not been ashamed of their associations with Putin.

The problem, as always, is when the wishes of this crowd smack up against complex reality.

Even Dreher, who is a lot more sympathetic to Orban than I would be, pointed out in his Monday morning post that Orban, despite getting 80 percent of Hungary’s natural gas from Russia, is totally on board with European Union measures against Putin. (Maybe because of that little misunderstanding in 1956? That’s the other thing with reactionaries, they know how to hold a grudge.) But nevertheless, Orban’s willing protege and advocate in America, Tucker Carlson didn’t seem to get the memo that Putin is a bad guy and beating up on innocent countries is not cool. He said that Ukraine wasn’t really a democracy, which apparently justifies threats from a country even less democratic. He said, in his usual bad-faith, just-askin’-questions way, “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?” Is he turning our children into transsexuals who are going to have abortions and then raise the abortions as gay? No, but apparently Biden is.

But suddenly once Tuck heard that the invasion was actually happening, that it was unpopular, AND it was not going well, he suddenly opined: “Vladimir Putin started this war. He is to blame tonight for what we’re seeing tonight in the Ukraine.” Well yes. When you start a war of choice against another country that’s not attacking you, that’s your fault, not the fault of some politician you hate. This is what’s known as a logical chain of causality. A concept Tucker might not have been aware of.

And then of course there’s our own Mini-Vlad. Leading up to the shebang, Trump continued to praise Putin and even after the invasion started, said, “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine… Putin declares it as independent,” Trump said. “Oh, that’s wonderful. …He continued of Putin: “Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. I know him very well. Very, very well.” Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told an audience, “I mean, (Putin)’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” This last quote was from a Daily Beast article headlined “Trump Pals Beg Him to Stop Kissing Putin’s Ass During Ukraine Invasion“.

I mean really, if Trump doesn’t stop sucking up to Putin, his handlers are gonna have to move him from Fox News Channel to Pornhub.

But this weekend they were having the CPAP convention, even as the cool kids of the Republican Party seemed to be going elsewhere. And of course the man of the hour Saturday was Trump. He basically said that none of this would have happened if his election hadn’t been “stolen.” One suspects that if Trump ever went to church, he’d tell the congregation that Jesus wouldn’t have been crucified if the Democrats hadn’t cheated in 2020. But he also praised the Ukrainian people for their bravery, including President Zelenskyy. You know, the guy he tried to blackmail in hopes of conjuring dirt on Joe Biden.

Which just goes to show that Trump has always been a little kiss-up yes-man. What Ayn Rand would call a “second hander.” Or as Bob Dylan would say, “you just want to be on the side that’s winning.”

And maybe even Trump is starting to grasp that his personal role model is no longer winning, or at least is not invincible. I had said a while back that if the Trump Organization had been running Nazi Germany in 1939, and they had invaded Poland on September 1, the Polish Army would be reaching Berlin by September 4. Well, now you’ve got the Soviet Union’s successor state under Putin trying to invade a former satellite, and clearly it’s not THAT bad, but it ain’t good.

It’s still too early to tell, especially with all the other things that could go wrong, but this might be a turning point. If nothing else, the “conservatives” who pretend to intellect might realize that Putin is just as emotional and irrational as Trump, maybe even more so, just with less opposition. And maybe the rest of this country might start to snap out of it. Not the Party of Trump of course, which is more clearly than ever the Party of Putin. After all, at that CPAC con, he still got an overwhelming preference in the people polled for the next Republican presidential nominee. It doesn’t matter if Mitt Romney looks at Trump and calls his actions “borderline treasonous” or says that Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are “morons.” After all, Mitt is a Mormon, and Mormons are heretics. As in, they think that Jesus Christ is someone other than Donald Trump.

But this country was already run by these guys for four years and as long as some people thought the economy was good, they didn’t care what Trump was doing to certain demographics or to the law. But then Trump Virus hit, largely because the Leader, like Putin, was a thin-skinned little tyrant who didn’t want to hear anything that made him look bad or feel bad. And a clear (though not big enough) majority of the country decided that whatever benefits they were getting out of the Trump Administration having our government in its financial portfolio, they weren’t going to matter if you were intubated. Nevertheless, these guys have been winning the culture war after Trump’s de-thronement, since it’s always easier to bitch about something than to do things yourself. Now that the international Party of Putin is exposed in its moral rot, people might quit taking their cues, if only because their aggression against the innocent and actual attacks on freedom might cause people to grow a sense of perspective. Or as one internet post this weekend put it, “As I’m watching husbands and fathers say goodbye to their loved ones, their children, not knowing if they will ever see them again, I just cannot believe that for two years we’ve been watching people cry and protest over having to wear a fucking mask.”

Cause just as people these days can’t seem to remember the politics of the Cold War, they also wouldn’t know that this is not America’s first experience with fascist sympathizers. It may not even be our worst one. Back in the 1920’s and 30’s, it seemed like fascism was the “new way.” They said “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” Winston Churchill said, “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. But in England we have not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form.’ As for the Nazis, they were obviously a big inspiration to a lot of people in the US, where institutional racism was still fashionable.

Aviation hero Charles Lindbergh pursued closer ties with Nazi Germany, at first because of their aviation research, but he still refused to return a medal the Nazis had given him after Kristallnacht. He ended up being one of the founders of the isolationist “America First” Committee. This movement culminated in a German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden, February 1939, where the head of the organization went on about “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal.”

What changed? Well, after Pearl Harbor, Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, so it’s not like we had a choice to be on the sidelines anymore. But even before that, the increasing aggression of the people who claimed to be fighting against liberalism and Bolshevism included the peoples of France and Britain, countries we actually like. By 1941, it was clear that there was a global conflict with a moral dimension, no matter how much we wished to avoid it, and that if it were forced on us, that would be no fault of ours. As with World War I, Germany’s submarine warfare in the Atlantic was affecting American ships. Roosevelt got to pass the Lend Lease programs and by late 1941 72% of Americans agreed that “the biggest job facing this country today is to help defeat the Nazi Government”.

And the average American decided that however much they hated FDR’s heavy-handed, top-down socialism, they hated lickspittles and bullies even more. And largely as a result, Republicans didn’t have the White House for a full 20 years.

And it’s on the verge of happening all over again.

I am not sure Trump realizes this, except maybe in the sense that a dim shock comic realizes he’s losing his audience. But I’m pretty sure Mitch McConnell does.

Yeah, What ABOUT Ukraine?

It is testimony to how disingenuous and cowardly the Right is that they continue to proffer their snickering meme “Let’s Go Brandon” as though it were not a candy-ass censorship of “Fuck Joe Biden” while simultaneously continuing to use it in the hopes it will make liberals cry. Your typical leftist response to “Brandon” is, “Dude, grow up. You can go ahead and say ‘fuck Joe Biden’. We’ve been saying it a lot longer than you have.”

As the Biden Administration passed its first year in the White House (News Flash to Republicans: Joe Biden is president), it suffered multiple setbacks last week. Foremost, the Democrats failed yet again in their attempts to pass a bill through the Senate, allegedly because Joe Manchin (D.-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D.-Arizona) wouldn’t accede to a waiver of the filibuster to pass by simple majority. But for all the talk about how the filibuster is a “sacred tradition” and all the leftist talk about how the filibuster is obstruction, the filibuster is ultimately beside the point. As many liberals pointed out last week, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans were perfectly willing to waive the filibuster during the Trump period for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and (along with Manchin and Sinema) to raise the debt ceiling this year, even though Manchin had previously said he wouldn’t support lifting the filibuster for the debt ceiling. Allegedly the difference is that “(a) Senate Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, emphasized that the debate to lift the filibuster for the debt ceiling was a one-time, limited option that Republicans were happy to go along with. By contrast, lifting the filibuster on voting rights would be a lasting change to how the Senate works, and the decision rests entirely on Senate Democrats.” Uh-huh. This is the Senate. When are they NOT going to vote to raise the debt ceiling? When Republicans hold on to that it only gets them fried in the court of public opinion, which is why they let go this time. Why is a debt-ceiling exception more of a one-time exception than a vote on the voting rights bill? Simply put, the debt ceiling was a priority for everybody (even though Republicans did not vote to raise it, they just let the Democrats pass by simple majority), and the voting rights bill was not a priority for 52 of 100 Senators, including Manchin and Sinema. Thus, the filibuster is not the issue. The issue is not that Democrats can’t get 10 people in the Party of Trump to go along with their ideas. The issue is that they can’t get 50 Democrats to go along with their ideas.

As I’ve said more times than I can count, real polarization in this duopoly does not only mean that the Democratic Party only goes Left, though leftism has gotten a lot more popular in that party as the Right moves further from the mainstream and they brand even moderate positions as “socialist”. Rather, the dynamic is that the Republican Party goes that much further away from the center and then the Democrats take in everybody who’s been purged by the Republican Party, including people who don’t really belong on the Left. Like, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Manchin is an old-style Southern pol, socially conservative and fiscally liberal, who favors some public spending, which is more than Republicans who wouldn’t want any at all. Sinema is a former Green who has since become a lot more business-friendly now that she’s in a party that wins elections. In many ways she’s a lot more pro-business than Manchin. But she’s also a bisexual of no declared religion, and she would not fit in a Republican Party which is now basically a fundamentalist Christian concern whose main debate is whether Trump is Christ. Really, Sinema ought to just declare herself a Libertarian. I’d have more respect for her if she did.

I would prefer to be in the Libertarian Party rather than choose one faction of this dysfunctional duopoly, but I don’t have that luxury. Since I don’t, I would prefer to be in the party of Manchin and Sinema versus the party of AOC and Sanders. But I don’t have that luxury either. We are all stuck with the choice of The Church of Trump vs. Everybody Else, and Everybody Else needs a policy and a leader, and right now that leader is Joe Biden. I do not have the luxury of being in the party of Manchin and Sinema, and neither do Manchin and Sinema.

Because here’s the deal, as Joe would say. We’re having a congressional mid-term this year. At the end of it, Sinema and Manchin will have to deal with one of three possibilities: One, Democrats lose the Senate, or both chambers, and Manchin and Sinema will either be voting with a Democratic minority (and be useless) or with the Republican majority (and be surplus, thus also useless). Two, Democrats could lose the House but expand their Senate majority or keep the 50 seats they have. Being the Senate majority doesn’t count for as much if Democrats aren’t going to get bills from their party in the House. Three, Democrats could actually expand their lead in both the House and the Senate, and Biden will be able to negotiate with other Senators, presumably more agreeable ones, to get his fifty plus one. The bet right now is that Democrats lose seats, but any which way, Manchin and Sinema will no longer be in the catbird seat after this year.

Now in that circumstance you could try to build your reputation within your party or you could work to tear it down. As I’d already mentioned, the “progressives” had already conceded to Manchin in that they dropped their demand to tie the 2021 entitlement bill to the infrastructure bill, a demand they had held to precisely because they knew Manchin and others weren’t going to support the first bill, and lo and behold, they did not once the pressure was lifted. Are Manchin and Sinema seriously expecting to get everything they want while the progressive wing gets nothing? (I mean, Chuck Schumer is the Majority Leader, so that’s a real question.) It might be that Manchin doesn’t have to care either way because his West Virginia constituents are that much more conservative than he is, but Sinema’s Arizona is if anything going the other way. A recent poll placed her favorability with Arizonans at 8 percent. Not a typo.

Which is why whatever my preferences, I don’t like what Manchin and Sinema are doing to a party they claim to be members of, because their obstruction has less to do with principles than whatever games they want to play for their impenetrable purposes. And if you’re a Libertarian, you should either be trying to make money (which you could do better in the private sector rather than living on the government tit), or trying to serve in government, and you can’t serve very long if you keep pissing off your own constituents.

It works both ways, of course. Moderates and Biden critics would say that the “progressives” haven’t been accommodating enough to people like Manchin. But we currently have a situation where the Democrats very technically have a majority in both houses of Congress, yet they still don’t have a real majority in the Senate. And that’s because again, the Democrats aren’t a united party. To judge from 2020 election results, if being a Democrat simply means not being in the Church of Trump, then Democrats are a clear, if slim, majority of the country. But if “Democrat” means “I agree most of the time with AOC and Sanders” then the Senate is consistently demonstrating that Democrats are not the majority of the country. That’s what certain people want to impress upon Joe Biden and the “progressives.” Of course what they leave out is that if “Democrat” means “I agree most of the time with Manchin and Sinema” then even less people are in that group. I mean, in theory most of the country is centrist, but in practice anybody who’s not with the Democrats is with the Trumpniks, because it’s not like they care about fiscal conservatism and they sure as hell don’t care about inviolate Senate traditions and decorum.

And that’s what Sinema, and Manchin, and their apologists, don’t seem to get, or if they do, don’t want to admit.

Now supposedly people in Washington are trying to proceed on the basis of taking some of the individual ideas in Joe’s “Build Back Better” and try to get them passed because they’re more appealing to Manchin than the whole package. That at least would address the centrist concern that the Biden Administration didn’t acknowledge their starting position with a Congress that had the slimmest of majorities and therefore could not afford to be too ambitious or “progressive.” But the Congress is not something the president can directly control, no matter how much it seems otherwise. The other issues with Biden concern the stuff he can directly control. For instance, his own mouth.

The day before the one-year anniversary of Biden’s inaugural, he held a press conference for the better part of two hours, which in itself ought to dispel Trumpnik jokes about “Sleepy Joe” having no “stamina.” That didn’t mean he acquitted himself perfectly. Or even that well. Mostly the event was noted for President Biden saying that he would “guess” that Russia would invade Ukraine, and that “a minor incursion” might not merit a serious international response. Which was a terrible thing to say. That is, it was terrible to even admit that we wouldn’t respond to an attack on Ukraine’s borders. Far better to do what Obama did when he just let Putin walk in to Crimea and acted like it never happened.
This was the sort of thing that made people think of Chamberlain at Munich, or later in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and the West didn’t do much of anything until they got invaded themselves. Not to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Hitler had cool sidekicks like Mussolini and Tojo. Putin has Trump. And not like Putin doesn’t have reason to feel that the Western powers are crowding him in, which is why he’s so obsessed with making sure Ukraine can’t get into NATO. But hey, it’s not like our reputation for living standards and human rights is that high any more, and if Ukraine and the Baltic States would still rather deal with us than Putin, maybe he ought to ask himself why.

Thus Biden is in the fix of having to pretend that we are going to seriously react to Putin’s attack on Ukraine (which on the downlow has actually been happening through deniable assets for at least a year) when there are various reasons it’s not going to happen. Biden is reminding people of his withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I thought was a great example of knowing when to cut bait, but which critics are in retrospect seeing as the start of his decline, especially as that country becomes more of a clusterfuck as days go by. The “international community” may be as much of an oxymoron as “gaming industry ethics” or “the conscience of a conservative” but it seems they still demand a position of strength. And that is what Biden is not giving them.

And did you catch where he said he didn’t think that the Republicans would be this obstructionist? After eight years of working in the Obama Administration? What, did Joe think that Mitch and the others would work better with him cause he’s an old, white Senatorial veteran like they are? If anything, the Republicans are treating him with MORE contempt than they did Obama. At least they acknowledged Obama was president.

Biden did say one true thing, though. When set upon by an unusually large number of reporters from the right-wing grievance media, Biden said, “What is their (Republican) agenda? They had an agenda back in the administration when — the eight years we were president and vice president, but I don’t know what their agenda is now. What is it? The American public is outraged about the tax structure we have in America. What are they proposing to do about it? Anything? Have you heard anything? I mean, anything? I haven’t heard anything.”

But that’s been the case for quite some time. Again, when Trump got elected, he told Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell that after so many years of them voting against the Affordable Care Act, that when he was inaugurated, he expected a ‘repeal and replace’ national health care plan on his desk, Day One. And he never got it. Republicans don’t have anything to offer because that’s not their business. They exploit discontent with the Democrat establishment, use that to get power and then when they have power loot the candy store until they get voted out in turn. They attack the establishment without offering an alternative cause it doesn’t matter. They do it cause they know it works, and the fact that this dynamic worked against them so clearly in 2020 doesn’t matter, cause they’re trying to make sure they never have to lose an election again, which is what that voting rights bill was about. But that’s also what happens when you have no philosophy beyond what serves you in the moment and Tuesday you’ve always been at war with Eastasia and Wednesday you’ve always been at war with Eurasia and at peace with Eastasia.

The stakes for this year’s congressional elections are such that Democrats can’t really afford to lose even one chamber to Republicans (among other things, that means the House investigation into the January 6 attack would be shut down by Kevin McCarthy and the other cultists), but discontent with the president’s party is almost a universal, which is why the Democrats are predicted to lose seats, just like the president’s party is predicted to lose seats every midterm. The utter nihility of the Republican Party, not even considering Trump worship, is one reason Republicans might not do that well. But as I had said in reaction to last November’s odd-year elections, “Americans can understand, full well in advance, just how criminal and irresponsible Donald Trump and his party of enablers are, and Democrats can STILL lose an election to them because simply being NotDonaldTrump is not the same as being good for anything.” It ultimately doesn’t matter that Republicans are worse than useless, because people are only looking at who’s in charge now, and Democrats are not really making a good impression for themselves.

Because when Biden first announced his run for president, I concluded, “The strength of Joe Biden as a candidate is the implicit promise that once he’s elected president, things will get back to where they were before. But that is also his real weakness. ”

There is no getting back to the way things were, partially due to everything else happening, but also because, to the extent that we have been getting back to business as usual, it just confirms that business as usual wasn’t working and that things had to change.

So “conservatives”, it doesn’t even matter if you say ‘fuck Joe Biden.’ He and his own party are doing a better job of that than you did in 2020.

Well, we’ve passed New Year’s, so that’s the end of the secular “holiday season.” We are also approaching Epiphany on January 6, which is the end of Christmastide on the Christian liturgical calendar. So we are putting away yet another year of holiday crap. No more worrying which modern pop music act is going to butcher a holiday standard with a contemporary arrangement. No more getting a Hanukkah card for your Jewish friend and then forgetting to give it cause you can never remember which week of December Hanukkah is. No more mispronouncing “let it snow” as “le tits now.”

But as we get into 2022 let me get to a subject that has been cropping up various ways over the last year. In this particular case I was on Facebook and one gamer site I go to had this fairly badass picture of a German Stuka assault bomber in dive mode, and somebody pointed out a little detail in the picture that might have been glossed over: The swastika that historically was on the tail got the center fuzzed out (you know, like Facebook does every time they see a nipple) so you could see the branch arms but not the cross. And this person objected to the censorship and other people objected as though he was sticking up for the Nazis. Apparently there’s some mystery as to why the favorite symbol of a genocidal movement that killed tens of millions of people might be offensive.

Nazism of course was based on a myth that the relatively light-skinned (but still dark) peoples that settled northern India from central Asia were the first “Aryan” race (because Sanskrit is considered a root language for what some still call the ‘Indo-Aryan’ or Indo-European language group). The swastika was, and still is, considered to be a good luck symbol in Hinduism and to some extent in Buddhism. It is considered to be a sun emblem and a symbol of life.

In addition to the Indian civilization, the swastika was also used by the Navajo and variations of the pointed cross also exist in Africa and elsewhere. The fact of the matter is that the swastika (in both left and right-facing varieties) is used by an astounding number of cultures, not just the Hindus, and it’s possible that in addition to the symbol’s “Aryan” origins, the Nazis picked it up precisely because it was so recognized and universal. Which if anything should undermine the white supremacists’ claim of exclusive ownership of the swastika. At the risk of sounding like Randal in Clerks 2, I think we should try to reclaim it.

Of course, that would be tasteless even by Kevin Smith standards. Besides, it’s not the only example of the Nazis trying to latch onto the popular thing. If you’ve seen pictures of Hitler prior to 1919 and in the German Army during World War I, he had one of those standard droopy mustaches (sometimes waxed) but after the war he started wearing the “toothbrush” style – allegedly not because Charlie Chaplin was the most famous movie star of the silent era, but the fact of the matter is that it was a fairly popular style at the time, used also by Oliver Hardy and by fellow Nazis like Ernst Rohm and Heinrich Himmler. Chaplin’s own response to the Hitler image was the immortal film The Great Dictator. But it’s worth noting that by that point, Hitler was already at war and Chaplin hadn’t been using his Little Tramp character for years. But if that was who we most associated with the mustache, you might see it as much as you did in the 20’s and 30’s. But you don’t. Even Ron Mael doesn’t wear it any more.

I mean, that’s how bad it is. You have guys who are willing to shave their heads and tattoo swastikas on them, but wearing a toothbrush mustache is just too much.

Hitler ruined that mustache for everybody.

Which certainly didn’t stop our media from using a lot of Nazi stuff. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, we were just finding out how horrible the Holocaust really was, the Soviets were taking over the power vacuum in Eastern Europe… did we learn anything from that? Well, what did we come up with just 20 years later?

Hogan’s Heroes!

I mean, picture the scene: Southern California, Television City, CBS, a couple of executives are brainstorming in an office, and one of them says to the other, “Prisoners of war in Nazi Germany? What a great idea for a sitcom!”

Thing is, a lot of the cast and crew on that show were ethnically Jewish, including Robert Clary, who actually survived the Holocaust. The Nazi history was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the main reason that a lot of those actors did the show was on the specific condition that the Nazis never get to win one. That Hogan’s crew would always win and that the Nazis would always be the butt of the joke. It was like Wile E. Coyote versus the Road Runner, the fun was watching exactly how the bad guy would get screwed. The outcome was never in doubt.

Back then we had a lot of war movies and Nazi media and Nazi memorabilia because that period was still fresh in the public consciousness and we knew that we had beat them. We wanted to commemorate beating them.

And I think that a lot of what’s going on today is that there’s an unexpressed fear that the Nazis are back and maybe this time, we’re not going to beat them. And the Left is acting like even a mention of Nazism is giving them recognition that they don’t deserve, and if they can’t actually stop the fascists with politics, they can at least shut them out of the media.

Which would have been a great idea five years ago when all those “liberal media” outlets gave Donald Trump free publicity and the status of a serious candidate when he excreted words that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention. But no, they promoted Trump cause he was “great for ratings.” Then he got elected and a year or so afterward, he gave the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville moral equivalence with their counter-protestors, and everyone was just so shocked.

Charlottesville

But now it’s basically a culture war between people who want to preserve certain media for free speech reasons, sometimes even sincerely, but don’t know (or care) that these media are seen as endorsing fascism and genocide. And so the response from the Left is to try to shut down such displays as if pretending that these things don’t exist will make them just go away.

I am not sure which approach is worse. But I know that neither one is solving the problem.

As with the swastika, you used to be able to show the Stars & Bars a lot more – back when Jimmy Carter was running for president, Democrats embraced the flag because he (and the party) had Southern roots. But back then it sorta was “heritage, not hate.” Since then, as the more racist parts of America have decided it’s safe to come out and play, people have been doing a lot of retrospection and have come to realize that it was one thing to try to bring the white South back into the national community, but ever since Reconstruction, the Union has given the Confederate sympathizers an inch and they took it as a mile. A lot more than one mile, in fact.

This peace-and-good-feelings approach to a defeated enemy was also endorsed for the Germans after World War I by the idealist president (and Confederate sympathizer) Woodrow Wilson, and because Western civilization was so shellshocked by that war (and had a whole bunch of other problems, including a major pandemic, to deal with) they basically left the new German republic to its own affairs.

Well, once Germany started another major war, we eventually decided that that approach to peace wasn’t going to work. At the Casablanca conference, the three big Allies (Britain, USSR, US) decided that their military end goal was the unconditional surrender of Germany and the other Axis powers at which point the Allies would occupy the entire nation (which they did not do in World War I) and impose their order of government. In fact, if you think Germany got screwed in 1945, you should have seen what Henry Morgenthau wanted to do.

And of course one of the first things that the postwar governments of Germany did was to ban the display of the swastika and related symbols to make it clear that such beliefs would have no tolerance and no home ground. (That’s another reason you don’t see swastikas in European games, because they’re made for an international market.) But we didn’t think that was necessary here. We were the winners. We were the good guys. We thought that we didn’t have to worry about fascism in this country, or that we didn’t have to worry about domestic terrorism (as opposed to imported terrorism) because the powers that be generally assumed that we had the best of all possible countries and no one could have a problem with our system of government, and people who knew the example of Germany’s history would think, “now that we know better, no one could be THAT stupid!”

Of course the flaw with that thinking is the assumption that Americans learn from history.

Because, in addition to World War II and various other nerd hobbies, I’ve also delved into the the fictional world of H.P. Lovecraft (another politically incorrect racist) and many of these stories are a Pulp/Horror genre where an archaeologist or investigator encounters some black magic cult that wants to summon an extradimensional deity to Earth so that it can destroy reality and eat everybody, and I always thought that killed plausibility. I thought “Why would even evil people want to destroy the world they have to live on?” Now I look around me and go “Oh.”

I mean, right now there’s a cult that worships an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity, and as it turns out, they don’t exist in enough numbers to win a national election, but they’re trying to make sure that having a majority is irrelevant to controlling the country. And part of the reason they have gotten as far as they have is because the majority of Americans are if anything too kind. We are too willing to assume that the cult are reasonable people with good faith motivations and not nihilists who seek out misery and death.

These people are so determined to identify as “free thinkers” that they bypassed the “thinker” part and uncritically accepted any space case idea that some idiot or charlatan threw at them, precisely because it was rejected by everybody else. Ideas like “horse dewormer is good for COVID”, “maybe anti-Semites had a point” and “regardless of your opinion of the morality of anti-Semitism, declaring war on the entire planet at once is GREAT military strategy”.

I don’t think that they realize that just as with the Nazis, they run the risk of making their (not) cool thing not only uncool, but completely unacceptable. Who knows, in the next few generations taking a paint roller to your face and turning it the color of a rotten orange might be considered repulsive and unfashionable. Which is one thing if we’re talking fashion sense but something else if we’re talking about political ideas.

So, this is why we can’t show swastikas anymore. We used to be able to, ten, even six years ago, but back then people were smart enough and well-adjusted enough to keep Nazi cosplay in its place and not make it the basis of a major American political party.

Oh, and on a related subject, January 6 is also the one-year anniversary of the January 6 holiday, in which the Trump cult celebrates their Leader’s ascension from elected official to unaccountable God. So kids, make sure to leave out a burnt steak and a can of Diet Coke for Mr. Trump when he magically appears at your house to steal your silverware and plug up the toilet.

Well, as we flush out another bad year like so much cheap Mexican food, there was at least one more significant celebrity death this week (besides Betty White, of course): Former Nevada Senator and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

It was only a few weeks ago that the state of Nevada completed its goal to rename Las Vegas’ famous McCarran Airport to Harry Reid International Airport, which now seems even more appropriate, since Reid was that much more powerful a Senator and that much more beneficial for Nevada than Pat McCarran, the Nevada Senator for whom the airport was originally named.

There have already been lots of biographical articles out for Reid: I recommend an excellent obituary by Megan Messerly for Jon Ralston’s The Nevada Independent, to which I will be referring. Most coverage of Reid’s life refers to his small-town values, his hard work, his Mormonism (although neither he nor his wife were raised Mormon) and his hardscrabble upbringing, but now that he is gone, it might be best to compare where the Democrats were with him to where they are without him.

Reid’s record belies the impression in modern politics (among both Democrats and Republicans) that power and virtue are mutually exclusive. Of course, many would argue whether Reid was truly virtuous. In office he engaged in land deals that benefited him and his family. In the 2012 campaign, Reid accused fellow Senator (and Republican presidential candidate) Mitt Romney of having not paid income tax for several years. This led Romney to release his records, which proved Reid wrong but also illustrated how Romney gamed the system. Asked if he had any regrets, Reid just said, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

Reid was never really that popular; in his last election in 2010, he barely beat Sharron Angle, or as I called her, “the glassy-eyed fanatic.” That campaign was a great example of how Democrats struggle against the other party but succeed not so much through their own efforts but because the Republican challengers have made themselves that much more unpopular.

And with Reid it wasn’t just a case of “Democrats are bad, but Republicans are worse.” Reid actually did constructive and proactive things with his position, which matters because as we’ve seen from the last few elections, simply being a net zero or not actively bad doesn’t really help Democrats when voters want change and reform.

I’ll tell you this, even back when I was a lot more conservative and Republican-sympathetic than I am now, I knew that Harry Reid was the main reason that Nevada avoided having the Feds foist the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository on us. Or as we in the state call it, the nuclear waste suppository. (It was so called when former Nevada Republican Senator Chic Hecht accidentally used that term in a public appearance and created one of the great Freudian slips of American politics.)

And that’s because Reid may have been cynical and ruthless, but it was because he had a purpose. One reason he had endorsed the Affordable Care Act for President Obama (and bitterly resisted President GW Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security) is because of that hard early life, in which he and his family had to get along with no medical care at all, and his father ultimately died of suicide. He had ideals, but no real illusions. Reid mentioned how in one pressure campaign to stop financing of a polluting copper mine, “I called the head of a hedge fund. I said, ‘I don’t know how I can get even with you. But you mark my word, I will get even in some way. I don’t know how. You back out of that deal to build that plant or you’ve got me just out there looking at everything you do.’ So, I did that with all four of them, and they all backed out.”

Reid illustrated one of the issues with politics, where people become corrupted for the sake of ostensibly valid goals, pursuing those goals with any means necessary. This may be why a lot of Democrats, both mainstream institutionalists and idealist “progressives” try to imagine themselves as being above such games. But Reid knew what approach worked against the opposition he had, and that Republican opposition had a lot more respect for the mainstream institution than the Party of Trump and Mitch McConnell does now.

I mean, I assume there is a reason that Chuck Schumer is still the Democrats’ Senate leader, I just don’t know what it is. By comparison, I don’t think much of Nancy Pelosi as a person, but everyone acknowledges she knows her job and she can enforce a consensus among her party. A large part of the Biden Administration’s problem is that they can’t enforce a standard even as well as Democrats could when they had a majority under Barack Obama, but then, Harry Reid was the Majority Leader back then.

And in regard to the mainstream institution and Mitch McConnell, Reid’s record is often disparaged for his decision to remove the filibuster for judicial nominations, but it isn’t considered that this was the best compromise he could make towards eliminating it altogether. And this was done largely in response to McConnell pre-emptively declaring a filibuster on every initiative the Democrats wanted. It demonstrated the reality of politics: You have to have a goal, but you also have to know where you are, and how to get to the goal from where you are. Reid’s decision did ultimately pave the way for Donald Trump to have no less than three Supreme Court nominations (again, partly with McConnell’s help) but it also meant that President Biden has been able to nominate more judicial appointments in his first year than any president since Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Reid’s hardball approach is an example of the way Democrats used to do things: using power unapologetically and often unethically. But it got results. And after four years of a Trump Organization whose persistent self-dealing made the nepotist Kennedy Administration look like actual Camelot, Republicans are in no position to argue that Reid or any other Democrat is more crooked or self-serving than they are, and unlike Reid cannot seriously argue that their changes benefit anyone other than the Religious Right and the donor class.

Basically, as we remember Harry Reid, Democrats who seek to honor him should try to learn from his example. That is, they need to be the vicious partisan bastards that Republicans merely project them to be. If more of them were like Reid than Schumer, they might be able to get more done with Joe Manchin, if not with actual Republicans.