This Wednesday former Trumpnik Joe Walsh (no, not that one) did a comment on the Wall Street Journal article confirming that the Justice Department (a name it was given before Orwell was born) not only concealed Epstein Files mentioning Donald Trump, it did so specifically at his behest. “Do you understand—and I’m an old guy—but do you understand that there would have been a day where this alone, this story alone, that the President of the United States ordered the Justice Department to keep his name hidden from the Epstein files, would have been enough to remove a President from office back in the day?”
Well, that’s because Trump is so media savvy. He is an idiot savant of manipulation. Emphasis on the idiot. His strategy for avoiding consequences for one scandal is to create an even bigger and better one, which has worked on our superficial media time and time again. “Never mind that teenager I raped. Lookit here at all these kids I killed!”
Speaking of killing kids: Among the targets of last weekend’s “precision strike” on the Islamic Republic of Iran was an all-girls school near Tehran, cause apparently Republicans hate educating women even more than Islamic fundamentalists do. We did at least kill the loathsome theocrat Ali Khameini, who was 86 years old and probably ready to die from I’ve Fallen And Can’t Get Up. But as a result you’ve got Iran firing rockets all over the region, hitting Israel, threatening Cyprus (which is an EU country), and hitting our troops at a Gulf base, killing at least four. So the Straits of Hormuz, essentially the coast of Iran, are a no-go zone for oil shipping, and we have yet to see how much damage that’s going to do to the world economy.
Our bear of very little brain broke open a hornet’s nest cause Israel and Saudi Arabia told him it would be full of tasty hunny.
The problem is, Iran is way too big, way too mountainous and way too populated to take on in a land invasion. For similar reasons, just hoping that Iran’s people will rise up and overthrow the theocrats is very unlikely. We supposedly had a list of people under Khameini that we were willing to deal with in the event of his death, but according to Trump, we were SO successful in killing that they’re all eliminated. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” Making it that much less likely that we’re going to have a negotiated settlement. And the pretext for all this was that the regime which has been an “imminent” threat to the US since … 1979 … was just “a week away” from getting a nuke. Which is contradicted by the point that we staged a strike on the hierarchy of the government and declared our intent to destroy them, and they haven’t used nukes yet. If they had them, they would use them, and if they can’t reach us they would hit Israel or Europe. And, incidentally, making it less likely that they will ever stop trying to get a nuke because they know that’s the only way the US and Israel will stop bombing them.
All this does is make the situation worse. Of course making everything worse is the reason that Donald Trump was sent to Earth by God Almighty, whom as we know, hates us all and wants us to suffer.
Not only that, the missiles Iran has been using are causing so much damage that we’re actually running out of air-defense missiles, since Iran builds for cheapass quantity over quality and we build the most expensive stuff possible to pad somebody’s business contract. It’s actually gotten to where our military asked Ukraine’s government for help with defense tech, since they have a similar policy of building as many cheap drones as possible to counter Russia’s attacks, which are usually made with Iran-designed Shahed missiles.
Gee, Your Majesty, Ukraine seems like they might be able to help us out here. I hope nothing bad happens to them!
Of course now I see all the Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor types posting that they oppose this war and “this isn’t what we voted for.” Kids: THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR. You voted for Clownboy cause he was going to do all the things the other presidents didn’t have the guts to do. And why didn’t they? Why didn’t anybody start a global tariff war before? Why didn’t they kill the Iranian command when they’ve been a “perennial” threat for years? Well, cause up till now, the American people hadn’t elected a president who had a two-digit IQ before dementia and the emotional control of a five-year old with rabies.
And of course when a War Powers resolution came up for a vote in the Senate, it got shot down on Party Lines, with all 47 Democrats but John Fetterman voting for it and all Republicans but Rand Paul voting against it. So, in effect, Republicans, you DID vote for this and YOU CONTINUE to vote for this. (Meanwhile, Mike Johnson’s House shut down a Congressional bill to release all internal sexual misconduct reports.)
We are in something of a limbo. We are certainly not a constitutional republic, not in the Founders’ sense and not even in the modern Beltway sense. We are a democracy only in the pejorative sense that the most irrational and emotional mobs get to anoint their favorite reality TV demagogue a tyrant in order to dunk on the people they hate (which is everybody, ultimately including themselves). We are still a free country in the sense that we are free – for now – to say publicly that the demagogue is not only an incompetent but a career criminal who is, if not an actual pedophile, clearly covering up for people who were convicted of such acts.
What we are not free to do is DO anything about it.
Why is this? Partially because the Democratic Party is as useless as an entire store full of left shoes. Part of that is that they are obliged to be “liberal” in the sense of both “free healthcare and gender transitions for everyone” and the more classical sense of liberal, like “maybe we should be under the rule of law and the president shouldn’t just get to treat an entire nation like he treated E. Jean Carroll”. So they’re not as focused and united as a Trump Party that is all in on “make liberals cry, even if we lose our jobs from Trumponomics.” And Democrats are not an effective party due to a combination of controlled opposition, learned helplessness and the fact that they ARE the conservative party in government. They just don’t seem like the conservatives because their Founding Father is not James Madison or Alexander Hamilton but Franklin Roosevelt. But they want to preserve the system they inherited. And they want to maintain the perks of the system and their offices. To preserve that access they will make any compromise to keep a seat at the table. Even if it’s the kids’ table. And ironically, their fecklessness is a big part of why they couldn’t get anybody to vote for them in 2024, which is why the Republicans have the majority that they have in Congress.
(Those downballot results are why I don’t believe the theory that Republicans stole the presidential election, though by the time all this is over, the idea that Trump cheated to win is going to be the received wisdom with most of the country, probably including Republicans)
But the real issue is that Trump Party, because they’re the ones in charge. Trump would be over in a second if 67 Senators agreed with an impeachment resolution, and that’s never going to happen as long as at least one third of the Senate is in Trump’s cult. As we know from Clinton, party loyalty always trumps loyalty to the Constitution. But this goes a lot deeper. A lot of these guys are operating on blind faith, and a lot of them are operating on fear. After all, before January 6, they only suspected that any disloyalty to their Messiah would cause him to send a mob of mouth-breathers into the Capitol to lynch them. But now they know.
It goes back to a debate that historians often have as to whether some figure like Napoleon or Hitler is a “Great Man of History” who shapes the world or whether he is simply a product of material circumstances like everybody else. I don’t think it’s either-or. I think it’s both. Look at what happened to Soviet communism once Lenin died and Stalin took over.
With Hitler, for instance, would somebody else have been able to turn Germany into the racist warmongering power that it became? Probably not. German parties of both the Left and the Right were fighting for control with little result for most of the 1920s. But would Nazism have happened somewhere else? When you consider that the Nazis took much of their inspiration for anti-Semitism from Henry Ford, and that in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler praised the United States for keeping its White population mostly pure and segregated while Spanish America had colonials and natives merge into a mestizo population, it’s clear that the US pioneered such institutional racism a long time before Germany did. So why did Nazism happen there and not here?
In large part because we won the “Great War” (World War I) and they lost. From that point the German republic had to rebuild from disarmament and humiliation. It was a lot easier to push the idea that some terrible “they” were the reason for the country’s misfortune. So when the Great Depression ruined everybody Germany turned to Hitler and Jew-hatred where America decided to challenge capitalism not from the paranoid Right but from the center-left position of Roosevelt. And certainly the way things wound up here says a lot about both the character of America and Roosevelt in particular.
It isn’t just the (L)eader or the movement. One requires the other. One doesn’t really develop without the other.
The movement here is the paranoid, persecution complex strain of anti-liberalism thrown in a burlap sack with the Evangelicals and the elites who don’t care one way or another about civil rights or the Constitution as long as they don’t have to deal with taxes and regulations. Some of these groups overlap, but not always. And the one thing they had in common was Donald Trump, because he is a shameless flim-flam man who could pretend to be all things to all customers. He could be the racist for David Duke and the Israel supporter for the Adelsons. He could tell the farmers he would bring prices down and then start a trade war for the donor class, telling us that tariffs are going to replace progressive income tax. The fact that he was both tactless and a vulgarian convinced a lot of people on the fence that he really wasn’t going to go all in on the Religious Right while he was also going to do the “hard” stuff that conventional politicians weren’t going to do.
If it doesn’t seem to make any sense, that’s because it doesn’t. But marks are not known for their common sense, and the last thing they want to do is admit they were conned. So even after Trump gave us all Trump Virus ™ lots of people went to the polls to re-elect their Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man cause he was going to fix all our problems with his magic wand and his Patented All-Purpose Miracle Snake Oil.
Again, that reflects on the character of the movement as well as the leader. But the problem with the con scheme is that you run out of people to con while you build the list of people who get mad that they were conned. They may not admit it publicly, but they may not vote for you anymore either. And that seems to be an issue.
It was pointed out that in the Texas US Senate primary this week, both Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico in the Democratic race each got more votes than the top two finishers in the Republican race, challenger Ken Paxton and incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Daily Kos pointed out “if the state held a jungle primary like in California and Louisiana—where all candidates run on the same primary ballot and the top-two finishers advance to the general election—then Republicans would have been shut out of November’s election.”
Kos also reported on Wednesday that Utah Republican Congressman Burgess Owens is retiring as is Republican US Senator from Montana Steve Daines. Earlier this week Montana Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke announced he was retiring after this term.
It’s similar to how former House Speaker Paul Ryan didn’t run for re-election midway in Trump’s first term. His seat was safe. But however much you may think you gain by selling your soul to Trump, it raises the question of how long you can tolerate being under his eye. Even now, with Cornyn and Paxton set for a runoff, the Clownboy Caligula is trying to bully the result telling the country that “soon” he’s going to endorse one or the other and then the other one had better get out of the way. It must be hell, being so dependent on a tyrant who is less dependable than a teenage girl on her first period.
Of course the other reason Ryan didn’t run is because he figured his party would lose the House majority and he would no longer be Speaker. That’s the same calculus a lot of these other guys are making, even when their seats are safe. There’s just one problem: Their seats are not safe.
The famously one-eyed Republican Congressman from TX-2, Dan Crenshaw, lost in the primary round to former state representative Steve Toth, apparently cause Crenshaw wasn’t right-wing enough. In a special election this week for state District 70, Democrat Alex Holladay beat Republican Bo Renshaw. This is Arkansas. A state so redneck they had to add an “Ark” to “Kansas.” And to reiterate, neither Paxton nor incumbent Senator Cornyn got as many primary votes as Jasmine Crockett, who lost to Talarico.
And that’s in Texas. The stereotypically right-wing state that has spent damn near two generations using the legislature and judiciary to create a Venezuela-style permanent majority.
Oh, AND, just as of Thursday, Slayer of Canines Kristi “Garden” Noem got fired, excuse me, transferred, from her post as Secretary of Homeland Security because her adultery, corruption and mismanagement got too embarrassing for the Trump regime. Which at this point would be a contradiction of reality. And God-Emperor Trump decided that her replacement would be Markwayne Mullin (BR.-Oklahoma) sitting Senator and former Imperial Space Marine. So while Mullin resumes the fight to purge the Imperium of Chaos Mutants illegals, that means we have yet another formerly safe seat that is now going to be contested, meaning the Republican campaign fundraisers are going to need to spend that much more money.
So the good news is that all we have to do is wait this regime out. Of course victory is not guaranteed. Again: God is real, and He hates us all. More to the point, some of the Trumpniks have brains and know exactly how unpopular they are, which is why in Texas they’ve been ginning the system for years, and why they had their little district redistribution scheme that the Roberts Court kindly let them pursue. Just this primary, the previous system where voters got to use any legal polling place was effectively scrapped when Republicans refused to use it, which obliged Democrats to only use the polling place they were registered for, which (coincidentally) caused a great deal of confusion. Democrats had a court extend voting in a couple of places, and Ken Paxton, who is (coincidentally) the Attorney General, appealed to the state Supreme Court to suspend that order. So that’s what we’re dealing with, and in the general election the state is actually in charge of monitoring the systems. So any appeals go to Ken Paxton. Nice work if you can get it.
Things trending as they are, though, Republicans may need to cheat this much because the non-Trumpnik part of the country is that fucking pissed and they’re going to get that much more pissed as gas prices (and related prices) skyrocket over Iran and Americans and Israelis get killed by Iranian rockets. What’s more important, the movement or the leader? It doesn’t matter. You can’t get the leader until 2028, but you can get the movement in November.
Kill the body, and the head will die.
And have you seen Trump’s head lately?
