James Gillen

You raise up your head
And you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says
“It’s his“
And you say, “What’s mine?”
And somebody else says, “Well what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”

But something is happening
And you don’t know what it is…
Do you.. Mister Jones?

-Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

June 24 ad from Evan McMullin in Utah, Mormon and recovering Republican:

“Following today’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, some states are enacting extreme laws — total bans on abortion, onerous limits on birth control, and criminalization of women in desperate situations. I oppose such extreme laws.

“My opponent, Senator Mike Lee, continues to weaponize this issue to divide the country for political gain. I’m running for Senate to accomplish the opposite.

“When we do more to help women and children, abortions decline. Making contraception more available and otherwise doing much more to support families is what truly protects life — not extremist laws that target women in their most vulnerable moments.

“Our commitment to life must be more comprehensive, and start with judging less and doing more to help those in difficult circumstances who need our compassion. “

Of course Mormons were one of the denominations promoting the so-called “three exceptions”, allowing abortions in cases of rape, incest or threat to a mother’s health. But then what we’re dealing with here isn’t even Catholic. Catholic dogma IS pro-life in all cases (as opposed to the pro-gun, pro-death penalty Supreme Court). What we’ve got here is an agenda that makes The Handmaid’s Tale look like Woodstock.

What does a “pro-life” government mean? Well, let’s look at an ACTUAL Catholic country: Ireland. Ireland is (or was) more damn Catholic than Italy, and from its founding as a republic retained a strict abortion ban from British times, saying that the woman (not the doctor) who induced an abortion was “to be kept in penal servitude for life”. There was some support for abortion rights but while it built up steadily over decades, support for abortion bans remained fairly strong. What really changed things was a 2012 case in which an Indian national suffered an unsuccessful pregnancy at 17 weeks’ gestation. Her water broke but this did not expel the fetus. Her hospital refused to remove (abort) the pregnancy and she ended up dying of maternal sepsis. The national outcry led to the country re-writing the laws by 2018 so that abortion is allowed in some cases under 12 weeks’ pregnancy or in cases where medical examiners have determined a threat to the life of the mother or a medical issue indicating the fetus could not survive. Again, the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” used to be nearly synonymous. Not that this issue was the only reason for the steep decline of the Church institution in Ireland, but it sure didn’t help.

Yet the anti-Democratic party that appointed six of our nine justices looks at other people’s history and instead of learning from it, does what it always does and doubles down on stupid. Clearly they don’t care that “maternal sepsis” is a thing, that late-period abortions are only performed in cases of medical necessity precisely because the parents wanted a child and are in an unexpected medical emergency, and it doesn’t matter to them that their dogmatic ban will result in the deaths of pregnant women and probably their children too. Any sacrifice, even in the hundreds or thousands, is justified for the sake of PROTECTING HUMAN LIFE.

PRAISE Trump! Uh, ah mean Jesus.

And if one thought that Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the endgame, think again. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas (who apparently was not allowed to write Friday’s opinion because it would have been too extreme) said that the court needs to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence V. Texas, Loving v. Virginia – I’m sorry, what?”

Yet Andrew Sullivan, who was on Bill Maher’s show same day, said in his Friday column: “”Has my previous confidence that the end Roe was unrelated to these precedents waned? Not really. … Abortion has long been controversial — and is still furiously contested. Marriage equality reached a record consensus just this month: 71 percent approval, with 55 percent approval among Republicans last year. Thomas was trolling.”

This was my response to dish.andrewsullivan.com:
“Of course Thomas was trolling. He always has been. He and Alito have been trolling for quite some time. They’ve made their positions clear a long time before today, but they needed three Trump SCOTUS nominees before their trolling on abortion became “settled law.” Of course now there is no such thing as settled law, and really, there never was. It’s just that prior to now the Court saw itself as above political bias and wanted to not make it so obvious.

“Here are several other words besides abortion that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.

“By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.

“One only takes such a position, knowing it could be reversed by an equally biased leftist court, on the assumption that one is either immortal, or that the executive branch will keep appointing equally reactionary justices in perpetuity, and largely thanks to Thomas’ gutting of the Voting Rights Act, that will be a lot more likely. And since Republican Party politics are that much more subject to escalating reactionary sentiment than the Court is, future presidents will most likely appoint Justices who make Thomas look like Blackmun.”

I mean yes, the purpose of a court system is to make sure it isn’t subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion, but there’s a difference between not being overly solicitous of public opinion and saying “Fuck public opinion right up the ass with a six-foot cactus attached to a Harley-Davidson engine.” Frankly, that is the stuff of which revolutions are made.

And while we’re on the subject of revolutions, or Justice Clarence Thomas, let’s not forget that his wife, Ginni Thomas, was one of the people pushing Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to “stop the steal” by putting Democrats and establishment Republicans in Guantanamo Bay, and for some reason Justice Thomas was the sole dissent in the post-election case the Trump Organization brought to SCOTUS, which confirmed that Trump had no right to block the release of documents to the January 6 congressional investigation.

I am reminded of one of those Facebook memes I saw recently. This is one of those jokes where they show a few panels from a movie everybody’s seen, with the dialogue changed to show the characters being perceptive and reasonable rather than reacting as dictated by the plot. Thus the last panel of the meme is the final credits of the movie, cause if everyone did the intelligent thing and cut through the plot contrivance the whole thing would be over.

In this case, the movie was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Specifically the scene where Anakin, Padme and Obi-Wan are chained up in the Geonosis arena. Obi-Wan points out the Clone Troopers to Anakin, then says that he’d discovered that they were part of a secret project by Chancellor Palpatine, then tells him that Count Dooku imprisoned him and told him that Darth Sidious is in control of the Senate. Anakin deduces that if the clone army is Palpatine’s project and Palpatine is Sidious, then Dooku and Palpatine are working together. And then the next panel is “Written and Directed by George Lucas” because if they made the obvious deduction and took the obvious next steps, Palpatine’s whole plot would be over.

I saw that meme and thought, “Wow, it’s like the Jedi in these movies were all Democrats.”

It should be obvious by now that a literally anti-democratic party, enabled by the Alito court, has declared war against the rest of the country and is trying to eliminate not just political opposition to its opinions but legal opposition as well. And yet the institutional Democratic Party refuses to make the obvious deduction and take the obvious next steps, perhaps realizing that such legitimacy as they have depends on entertaining the increasingly unsupported idea that this is a multi-party democracy and that the Republican Party is a legitimate part of it, even as that party seeks to destroy that system from within.

A cartel system is no more healthy for a government than it is for a free market. If the cartel partners eliminate all competition to their establishment, then there is no recourse if one or more of the partners becomes dysfunctional and less able to hold on to its gains. The weaker party eventually goes defunct and the last survivor becomes a monopoly. And that stage is even less healthy for government than it is for capitalism.

We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.

Because Republicans are largely responsible for America’s political dysfunction, and are its main beneficiaries, the serious change America’s political system needs has to first come through the Democrats, and that is unlikely because one, they have their own ulterior motives, two, the system resists change, and three, more than that, the American people resist change.

I mean, I personally think that were it not for COVID, aka Trump Virus (TM) that Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected. Prior to 2020, things were good enough, or at least okay, for the majority of Americans that they would have ignored the negative aspects of his agenda and not gone out to the polls to stop him. But then Trump Virus happened, and it became clear that Trump only cared about dealing with it to the extent that it hurt his chances for re-election, and in fact let it run wild on the assumption that it would most hurt the communities he and his Party didn’t like. At that point the country as a whole started to grasp the extent of Trump’s callous disregard for human life. Or rather, callous disregard for human life was half the reason to vote for Trump, and it only became an issue when that disregard started affecting his voters.

Even then, Trump still got more votes than he did in 2016, which goes to show what kind of cult we’re dealing with. What made the difference was the rest of the country getting that much more motivated to go out and vote for Biden. Now this year is a midterm election, which rarely goes well for the party in the White House, cause enemies blame them for everything that goes wrong, and allies aren’t as motivated by state elections as the national election. But you’d think that if anything could change that, it’s the prospect of Trump state governments agitating for a Fugitive Uterus Act.

I am not really sure that that is enough to light a fire under the notRepublican majority in this country, but it may be the only thing that could. But even if Democrats buck the trend and keep their technical majority in Congress, that’s not enough.

I will have much, much more to say on this in the future, but for now I look at something else that happened this week, which seems to be an unrelated subject but is ultimately the same matter.

Even as the January 6 committee held a Thursday June 23 hearing on how Viceroy Trump tried to foist his election coup by getting an inexperienced attorney named Jeffrey Clark to be his Attorney General (he would have been the third in two weeks after William Barr resigned), they found out along with the rest of the country that Clark’s home had been raided by federal investigators overnight just hours before the hearing focusing on his actions. After which, Clark went on Tucker Carlson’s show and whined that the government acted like the East German secret police. I believe this is what Freudians call “projecting.”

Apparently Attorney General Merrick Garland actually was paying attention to the proceedings and he, or someone under him, acted on what they already knew. As I just said, that’s not enough, but it’s a start, and some of us were beginning to wonder if we’d even have that.

I mean, if one side declares a civil war, the truly civil thing to do is to return the gesture.

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.