Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

And there’s always a place for the angry young man

With his fist in the air and his head in the sand

And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes

So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks

But his honor is pure and his courage as well

And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell

And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man

-Billy Joel, “Prelude/Angry Young Man”

So: February is over. And so is this year’s CPAC. The keynote speaker, of course, was Russia’s Viceroy in exile, Donald Trump, who actually told his crowd that he was looking forward to beating the Democrats a third time, so fat chance that any of these people will see reason. It’s pretty obvious that unless homeboy dies from swallowing a chicken bone whole, the Banana Republican Party is gonna hold the nomination open for him, and if he dies, they’re probably going to pave the way for Junior or Ivanka or one of his other sperm products. I guess it’s easier than coming up with new candidates or new ideas.

The former Party of Lincoln isn’t a political party anymore: It’s a pity party. In 2016, Trump achieved white-trash apotheosis by telling his audience what they wanted to hear (like ‘we’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it’) even though they, contrary to image, were educated enough to know this could never be true. Now, these same people, most of whom are old enough to remember when the Republican Party had a reputation for competence, are agreeing with Donald Trump and telling Donald Trump what he wants to hear, knowing now that it’s only lost them the White House and the Senate, not because they believe it, not because he really believes it, but just because it makes him feel better.

What is the alternative to the “alt-right”? The NeverTrump organization, The Lincoln Project, which was already in bad odor with a lot of “progressives” because it was run by exactly the kind of people who were mean to them before Trump took over the Republicans (and therefore, unlike the Left, knew how to fight him with his own weapons) practically disintegrated in the first two weeks of February when New York Magazine and other sources revealed that Project co-founder John Weaver was using his position to pressure young men into sex. I mean, this isn’t the first time that somebody I rooted for turned out to be a creepy sex predator, so let’s just say that February wasn’t a good month for me.

What’s the alternative to the Right? The Democrats, whom the Party of Trump will say are more lefty than Leon Trotsky at a Frida Kahlo party. Try telling that to the Left. Right now “progressives” are mad about at least two events in the Biden Administration, their bombing of Iranian allies in Syria, and their lack of support for Office of Management and Budget Director nominee Neera Tanden, who had to withdraw her nomination this Tuesday. This second issue is that much more rich because Tanden is one of those disingenuous, arrogant establishment liberals who has pulled off the diplomatic feat of pissing off both the woke Left and the Trumpnik Right. Not that it’s in any way hard to piss off either one, but it’s usually for radically different reasons.

It has been pointed out for instance, that Tanden is a Beltway insider and former head of the Center for American Progress, an ostensibly centrist think tank with strong Democratic Party roots, and while managing it catered to wealthy donors, including foreigners. She has also been slagged (mainly by Bernie Sanders fans) for “late-night, out-of-control rage-tweeting”, which is now the stated rationale for cloth-coat Republicans like Mitt Romney to oppose her nomination in the Senate, even though for most Republicans other than Romney that was hardly a disqualification for Trump being president. David Sirota:

“On the left, the Democratic noise machine is calling out the Republican party’s hypocrisy, while wrongly pretending that Tanden is a victim. These self-righteous Tanden defenders have gone completely silent about her actual record.

“Meanwhile, save for a few bits of solid policy-focused reporting, journalists are mostly hounding senators to get their reactions to Tanden’s tweets rather than asking them about her past behavior. Some media folk are even promoting the Neera-As-Victim mythology, somehow disregarding and distracting attention from Tanden’s alleged attack on a union of journalists.

“As evidenced by her record, Tanden is a victim in the same way war is peace, which is to say that she is not a victim, she is a perpetrator. But the Republican party, the Democratic party and the Washington media machine will not allow the record documenting that basic, verifiable, indisputable reality to be reviewed, litigated or considered. …

“Moreover, the Tanden brigade – and their online army now bullying reporters with racist vitriol – are cynically relying on a political and media environment that will allow such memory-holing to take place. They are banking on the brute force of their own denialist propaganda and a miasma of distracting misinformation to make sure that nobody recognizes that they are exposing themselves. They are making clear that their hope for career advancement, their desire for White House access, and their personal connections to a thinktank powerbroker are more important to them than any social cause.

“Taken together, such behaviors represent more than the death of expertise. They signify the premeditated murder of the most basic facts that are supposed to inform democratic decision-making. The motives here are unstated but obvious: nobody in either party or in the Washington media wants to center Tanden’s nomination on her actual record, because if that record becomes disqualifying for career advancement in Washington, it could set a precedent jeopardizing the personal career prospects of every creature slithering through the Washington swamp.”

As for the Syria bombing, I have to agree with a summary in New York Magazine’s website: “Biden has much more regard for constitutional checks and balances than Trump ever did, but the legal basis for Thursday’s action remains thin. To his credit, at least he attempted to make an argument on the basis of self-defense, and perhaps the threat the target posed was more imminent than we know. But most likely, the administration proceeded with the strike without asking Congress’s permission simply because the defense and national security brass knew they almost certainly wouldn’t get it and wouldn’t face any real consequences for acting without it. Dropping bombs in the Middle East without congressional approval has become a humdrum exercise by now.”

In other words, Democrats don’t seem to have learned anything either. And half of the reason we had the last four years is that America was sick and tired of Beltway business as usual no matter how obviously unqualified the alleged alternative to the swamp was. Biden won because Trump made the swamp that much more murky and vicious, but the reason bad politicians continue to win elections is because Americans have a notoriously short memory for what happened two to four years ago, and it’s that much easier to fleece an audience like the current Republican Party, which doesn’t want to remember what happened even yesterday.

On MSDNC in December, (before he was called to account over John Weaver) Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt told one of the talking heads that he’d officially switched to the Democratic Party. He said, “At the end of the day, there’s now one pro-democracy political party in the United States of America and that’s the Democratic Party. And I am a member of that party because of that. I’m a single issue voter. I believe in democracy.” Problem is, it’s a bit hard to present yourself as a defender of democracy if you’re actively working to reduce, not expand, the number of choices in the system. (It’s also possible that Schmidt’s claim of being a Democrat wasn’t on the up-and-up.) It may in fact be the case that there is only one practical choice, but again, America as a political consensus has a terrible memory, and when it is fueled primarily by negative partisanship, that means that there is always a chance that people will vote for the not-incumbent member of the duopoly no matter how objectively terrible it is. People apparently need to be reminded that that is how Trump won last time.

I keep seeing all these liberals and centrists tell me that a serious political system needs two parties to work, but I don’t know how serious they are when they say that. Basically they want the illusion of debate with a “Democrat Lite” party that is more generically conservative than they are. That’s half of why the Party of Trump is such a radicalized personality cult, because they really don’t like the Republican Party establishment either. And why should they? They’re just as much swamp creatures as Neera Tanden.

The problem with that zombie party is not that they disagree with Democrats, but that they disagree with reality. They are a malignant organ in the body politic. And frankly, I don’t see why the entire country (many of whom would still be Republican, except that they believe in heresies like that Earth-revolves-around-the-Sun thing) has to get swallowed up into the Democratic Party just to oppose the anti-reality insurgency, when that party isn’t even a good fit for the Left.

One of the better burns I’ve seen recently was somebody on social media pointing out that all the stuff they told us would happen under socialism is in fact what’s happening now under capitalism. “There will be lines for food! They won’t be able to keep power on! Medical care will be rationed! You won’t have real choices in elections!” Yes indeed. And I’m still not socialist, because all that stuff that socialists tell us is happening in this country IS in fact still happening in Venezuela, and if anything pissed me off about the Party of Trump winning Florida last election it was all the people who fled Cuba and Venezuela who were willing to vote for a corrupt thug to create a one-party regime. I guess it’s okay if you pay lip service to religion or something.

The problem in both cases is not whether the country is socialist or capitalist. The problem is whether public affairs are accountable to the whole community or merely to an elite (whether that be a political party or a business elite). And that is never going to change as long as the only alternative to the Republican Party is the Democratic swamp, and the only alternative to the Democratic Party is… what we saw at CPAC last weekend.

And I am not bringing up Democratic malfeasance to engage in whataboutism, because the premise of whataboutism is somewhere between “X is morally superior to Y because no matter how bad X is, Y is always worse” and “X doesn’t need to be better than Y because the two are morally equivalent.” The Right can’t play that game any more because after years of history it is too obvious that Republicans go out of their way to be more immoral and corrupt than Democrats when they get real power, escalating all the traits that they rightfully attacked when Bill Clinton was president, and combining them with incompetence to boot.

What I am saying is that if Y is going to be better than X, that has to be proven by action. You can’t just give one side a pass because you have good reason to not want the Republicans back in charge. The only way to break the cycle is to have something that is better than X or Y, and right now, the Libertarian Party ain’t it. However it has more potential to be “it” than anything else in America.

It’s pretty Goddamn obvious now that the Republicans not only will not learn anything, at this point they may not be able to. If Democrats expect me to vote for them again, they need to demonstrate that they’ve learned something after all this.

To Be Continued…

As we know, Rush Limbaugh died last week as a result of the cigars he held in his formerly nicotine-stained fingers. I leave it to you to decide what the “RIP” stands for.

The news of Rush’s death led to a LOT of negative comments on social media, which I shared in because of my current feelings about Limbaugh and the movement that he boosted. However my opinion isn’t that of a liberal who hated Limbaugh’s guts just because. I’m speaking as somebody who used to LIKE Limbaugh, and listened to his show (and to a lesser extent, Sean Hannity and Fox News) and while I may be more in agreement with liberals than I used to be, my antipathy toward Limbaugh is not because I always hated conservatism, but because I once agreed with it and hate what people like Rush turned it into. And even then, as with leftists saying “real socialism has never been tried” it’s a question of whether what I hate was a giant scam that I was persuaded had real merit or an agenda with real merit that was co-opted for a giant scam.

You have to understand, as much as some people think otherwise, politics is not eternal. I’ve already mentioned how liberals who find it hard to believe how Reagan destroyed their perfect world of regulations, upper tax brackets and unions don’t comprehend that at the time, a lot of people didn’t see that as a perfect world. I’ve heard it said, “if you remember the Seventies, you weren’t really there.” Well, I did remember that period, cause I was a kid, and unlike a lot of kids, I didn’t like drugs and didn’t like what they did to my peers. So I got to look at what was going on around me and I didn’t like it: Double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, an energy crisis, President Carter getting humiliated by the Iranians and even by a bunny rabbit. Reagan was my fuckin’ hero, frankly. If I’d been old enough, I would’ve voted for him. By the time I was old enough to vote, the Republican choice was George HW Bush. And as I said of him, he acted like Mr. Rogers when he should’ve acted like John Wayne, and he acted like John Wayne when he should have acted like Mr. Rogers.

So I was a conservative, or thought I was, and even in my conservatism I was still skeptical. I saw the whole political bag with a certain sense of humor that was lacking in most conservatives and certainly liberals. And of all the political observers, Rush Limbaugh was the least inclined to take the Beltway culture seriously. At the time, I considered that attitude a necessary corrective to politics as usual.

Rush was of course influential enough that when Newt Gingrich successfully won back Congress for the Republicans in 1994 – for the first time since 1954 – the Republicans invited Limbaugh to speak to the new Congressional delegates.

And among other things, he said, “You people in the press have got to understand something. This country is conservative, it has been for a long time. Get used to it. You tried to change it and you failed… (these reporters) were all trying to say in a roundabout way that I took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to mind-numbed robots. … there may be some talk show hosts who do that and I don’t think they’re the majority, I think the reason you’re sitting here tonight and liberals aren’t is that you understand the American people are intelligent. They are aware. They care.”

None of this is eternal. Even if both liberals and conservatives act like it is. Leftists assume that the government is built around the assertions of conservatives and reactionaries, when that was not always the case. The “conservatives” act as though the government is still built around the assertions of liberal Democrats and get-along-to-go-along Republicans, when that hasn’t been the case since at least Newt and Rush’s heyday. But both of those guys did perceive conservatism under attack, they did have a plan to get control of Washington, and they did execute it. That’s why there is still so much praise for Rush Limbaugh in conservative circles, because they remember when Rush was a serious influence on politics, hard as that may be to imagine today.

But then, it’s a bit hard to imagine today that Rudy Guiliani was once called “America’s Mayor” after 9/11. Which is for a similar reason.

Limbaugh is today less remembered for a constructive influence than a destructive one. For example, saying that Chelsea was the White House dog during the Clinton Administration. I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t care. I mean, the whole point of being transgressive is that you don’t care about other people’s peer pressure and political correctness. But a lot of us who did listen to Rush and fell out of that habit did listen because we thought conservatism was supposed to be promoting something positive. Capitalism, opportunity, the chance to make a success of yourself, and challenging government mainly when it got in the way of all that. Over the years, it became obvious that even if there was a core there, that’s not what was being advertised. Years later, I wrote that the problem with “conservative” philosophy was that there really ISN’T a conservative philosophy and that to be conservative means to be conservative relative to something. And that was the problem with trying to convey conservatism as a positive philosophy, and I think why the Republican Congress never really tried to do that even back when they aspired to ideas: “Conservatives don’t get anything done because they don’t know what they want. And they don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they ARE.”

Over the years I’d also noticed that Rush was starting to somehow… lose it, as a radio host. His voice seemed off, and he rambled. It wasn’t for some time that he announced he was going deaf, and that was only after he had to respond to investigations that he was using unprescribed painkillers. (Which wasn’t his only incident with unprescribed drugs. In 2006, he returned from the Dominican Republic and customs officials confiscated a supply of Viagra that was not in his name. After the incident, Rush told his audience, ‘I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it.’)

But I also mentioned in my piece that if one wants to find out what happened to conservatism, or why the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan turned into the Trump Fan Club, the mentality that led to Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere:
“Conor Friedersdorf had an excellent column in The Atlantic where he talked about how one of Rush Limbaugh’s own listeners (along with a columnist at RedState) called him on supporting Trump even when it was clear to many he would flip-flop on immigration, even when Rush said “I never took him seriously on this!”

“But that’s something I picked up on a while ago. Back when I was still conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh’s show, I remembered that right up to the last week of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign against Rick Fazio, he was predicting that she would find some reason to back out. Or that she would end up losing. Of course, she didn’t. I distinctly remember the day after the 2006 midterm elections (when Democrats under President George W. Bush regained the House) when Limbaugh angrily confessed, “I feel liberated. … I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.” Heck, way back in 1992 (when Rush had a TV show) I remember a TV Guide cover with a blurb on an article, “Rush Limbaugh: I’m so-o-o happy Clinton won!”

In other words, whether he wanted to admit it or not, Rush was a political hack. I’d mentioned in another column that I was reminded of another incident where I deliberately tried to go over Fox News programming for a whole day to get my impressions of it, and it just so happened to be the day that Malik Hasan shot up Fort Hood, so I got to see that Fox News does have a real news operation, and the fact that there was real news to report put the midday events in contrast to the speculation of opinion pundits like Bill O’Reilly (now Tucker Carlson) in prime time, where Fox makes its real money and ratings. I said that that wasn’t the end of my watching Fox News, but I started watching it less and less, cause it felt like I’d seen the wires behind the magic trick. That’s pretty much how I felt about Rush saying that he was carrying the water for the Republican Party. Who was making the implication that he was? Wasn’t Rush the brave truth-teller against the RINO establishment? No. He was there to tell his audience to support the Party. Calling himself a water carrier was simply an admission of what should have been obvious by then.

I’ve been saying this many times, many ways, but in politics, you don’t succeed unless you give people something to fight FOR. And when Democrats didn’t figure that out, they lost to Republicans in 2004, and in 2016. Republicans won under Reagan and (sometimes) under the Bush family because they associated their party with positive traits that Americans wanted to be associated with. Apparently that’s just too hard now. Rush could have used his golden microphone to present constructive ideas for what Republicans could do, as opposed to just making fun of Democrat women and using “socialism” as a Devil word. I say this because I seem to recall in the old days that he would come up with ideas. But I guess that just wasn’t commercial. Rush Limbaugh, like Rudolph Giuliani and even Donald Trump, took his ‘tell-it-like-is’ reputation, and rather than use it to tell it like it is, became a cartoon character whose job was to amuse a limited demographic. And as with the demagogue who basically stole his act and took it to the White House, a lot of people took him as seriously as the Gospel (more seriously, in fact) when his ideas were becoming less and less serious.

Now that is okay if you see your role in the culture as being a jester or wrestling heel, but it’s not okay when you’re trying to lead the free world. Even in this country, you normally win elections by getting the most votes, and the flukes where that has not been the case have convinced the Republican Party that they can survive on the political campaign equivalent of AM radio niche programming, and that’s why they are where they are now. The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it. Because if the uncommitted middle of the country can compare what woke cancel culture is telling them about you with what you actually do, and they see you are not the racist, sexist, whatever they are painting you as, you can prevail. But if you go out of your damn way to be associated with racists and other knuckle-draggers, then that’s on you. That’s how Joe Biden won Arizona, and Georgia, and the Electoral College by 74 Electoral votes, because even if Trump got more votes than he did in 2016, he got that many more people pissed at him who might not have been otherwise.

When all you have is negative partisanship, and you’re an effective minority, you’re setting yourself up to fail against a majority whose negative partisanship is earned by your actions. Of course, Biden also had positive partisanship, in that he seemed to be a real human being and professional government official, not a celebrity who made Snidely Whiplash look like Albert Schweitzer.

As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” I accidentally observed the same thing about Rush’s connection to Trump years before Rush’s death, as Trump was starting to take over the Republican Party, and concluded, “This attitude has been going on for quite some time, at least by the start of the second Obama term. The Republican Party has been Trump’s party for years. They were just waiting for him to show up.” And that’s because there isn’t a whole lot of space between Trump and Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush at least was coming off an intellectual tradition of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, and what he ended up doing was making something that didn’t even deserve to be called Zombie Reaganism. His fan club, who professed to disdain empty-headed celebrity millionaires, ended up becoming “mind-numbed robots” to a radio celebrity and a “reality” TV star, only one of whom could make a claim to being a self-made man.

Among the various other NeverTrump conservative autopsies of Limbaugh, on the 19^th Andrew Sullivan said (on Substack): “As with Roger Ailes, it’s stupid to deny Limbaugh’s media genius. He created an entire world for his ditto heads to live and breathe in; he mastered an often hilarious gift for self-mockery disguised as self-flattery; and he had an unerring ability to expose and prick the self-righteous humbug of pious lefties. I will confess to laughing out loud many times at his blasphemy.

“And in the context of the once-smothering liberal monopoly of mass media of the 1980s, this insurrection was ballsy and overdue. But like the Gingrich phase of conservatism in the 1990s, which also broke a long-held liberal monopoly on the House of Representatives, it curdled over time. The tribal mockery was funny when allied with a coherent and counter-intuitive defense of conservative ideas and arguments. But as the years went by, and as conservatism remained calcified in a Reaganite zombie phase, the mockery began to replace the ideas completely, faute de mieux. What was originally an argument became merely an attitude, like the grin that slowly became all that was left of the Cheshire Cat. And with the emergence of a figure like Trump, who was a walking assault on conservative ideas and sensibility, the attitude became detached from any principle but tribalism, and based itself in exactly the kind of personal cultism Limbaugh innovated for himself.

“He was as personally kind and generous, we are told, as he was publicly shameless. And it’s important to see the man as a complicated whole. But what he did to conservatism was ultimately to facilitate its demise as a functional governing philosophy; and what he did to the country was intensify its cynicism and tribalism. Few did so much to popularize conservative values; and few did more, in the end, to discredit them.”

In fact, the real summary of Limbaugh’s spirit was already written over ten years before he died:

https://www.theonion.com/i-dont-even-want-to-be-alive-anymore-1819584611?utm_campaign=The+Onion&utm_content=1613585718&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=facebook

Thursday I saw this clip from Ultra-Radical Centrists on Facebook, detailing the last place we’d seen Jen Psaki, under the Obama Administration. “Time for a flash back to this classic performance of hers from 6 years ago where she told with a straight face that it was a ‘long standing policy’ for the US to not promote coups in Latin American nations.”

Simply doing a standard press briefing on January 20 seems to have pacified the Washington press corps, but that’s just because we’ve moved from a pack of surly liars who want to gaslight you over them stealing the silverware to a group of professional liars who know how to keep the story straight.

Yes, going back to normal is an improvement, but only the first step. After all, “normal” is how we got Trump.

—

It seems as though Viceroy Trump’s shocktroopers are starting to have second thoughts.

“Proud Boys are ditching Trump hours after he left the White House for good, calling him a ‘shill’ and ‘extraordinarily weak'”

“However, as Trump left office, some Proud Boys were disappointed that he didn’t put up more of a fight to stay in power, and that he later condemned the violence that ensued during the Capitol siege, which led to five deaths.”Some members called Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” and have since urged others not to attend any more Trump events or even those from the Republican party, The Times reported.

“Members are angered that Trump didn’t help the Proud Boys arrested for their involvement in the January 6 siege.”

“Q Anon followers are giving up on their conspiracy theory after Biden’s inauguration: ‘Is anyone still holding the line?'”

“One hour after President Joe Biden was inaugurated in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, QAnon conspiracy-theory chat rooms had an overwhelming — albeit familiar — sense of hopelessness.

“What are we waiting for now?” one comment in a QAnon Telegram channel said. “Is anyone still holding the line?” said another.

“So, was Q just one big lie and psyop that I foolishly followed and believed for over 3 years?” another user said.”

“Wednesday was the final chance at redemption for QAnon, a baseless far-right conspiracy theory alleging that former President Donald Trump was fighting a “deep state” cabal of pedophiles and human traffickers.

“Many believers of QAnon had anticipated that Biden would be arrested at his inauguration, or that Trump would do something, anything at all, to prevent his successor from taking office.

“But in the end, Trump said goodbye, danced to the ‘YMCA,’ and flew to Florida, and Biden became president.”

…You mean he LIED to me???

—

The Beltway media is telling us that the two parties in the Senate are in a standoff over the use of the filibuster. Actually not just the filibuster, but the whole ‘organizing package’ of the current Congress that determines who controls committees. “The longer the standoff over the organizing package persists, the weirder the Senate will become. New senators have not been added to committees and the ratios have not changed, leaving the GOP in the majority on some panels.” This is all done, of course, for the sake of Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell and his attempts to retain effective personal veto power on all activity despite no longer being Senate Majority Leader. “Schumer may be able to satisfy McConnell with something less than a written commitment, perhaps a speech on the Senate floor or a verbal acknowledgement that his preference is not to invoke the nuclear option. But even some Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will give up their leverage so easily and simply trust that Republicans will work with them on legislation. McConnell’s “reasoning is let’s do it now while we’re all in this management mode as opposed to under fire when there’s a burning issue,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “I’m skeptical of the outcome. I think Mitch’s effort is noble but I just don’t think it ends there.”

This of course is happening at the same time that the Senate has to take Viceroy Trump’s second impeachment trial, and even after he basically sent a mob to kill them, hardly anyone in the Republican caucus is definitely saying they’d vote to convict. Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that “a third of Republicans will leave the party” if it goes along with impeachment. Well, again: sounds like a You problem.

Look, Democrats have two imperatives before this Biden Administration even gets off the ground: One is to stop the Republicans from filibustering every damn thing on the Senate floor or else it will take 60 Senators to get anything done, meaning, nothing will get done. The other is to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection, because even if he’s only the President of Mar-a-Lago now, a conviction would mean that there would be a simple majority vote on banning him from federal office again, and even if Rand Paul is inclined to forgive his Master for sending his mob to trash the chamber, I don’t think the fellow Senator from Kentucky will, especially since Trump, combining the worst traits of Archie Bunker and Inspector Clouseau, single-handedly killed the Republicans’ chances in Georgia, and with those losses, took McConnell’s control of the Senate. Which is why he has to fight for what he can now.

Democrats are probably not going to outright kill the filibuster (otherwise that would kill the influence of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the last conservative Southern Democrat, and they need all the Senators they have), but they at least need to maintain the option. Currently neither party has reason to back down, but someone has to. And again, the key factor for Republicans is that if they got what they want in both floor assignments and impeachment, Trump would go free to run again, and the more foresighted Republicans (such as they are) realize that would be as much a problem for them as anybody. At the same time, convicting Trump is a short-term priority for Democrats compared to the ability to organize the floor, since they know (from experience with Obama) that Mitch and the Republicans will try to obstruct every single thing they want to do and then turn around and say that Democrats can’t get anything done and use that as the reason to campaign for more seats.

Democrats have to use the Republicans’ position against them. They have to be willing to let Trump’s conviction go to fight for the Senate, because that’s what they actually HAVE now, and it’s only McConell who is forcing the issue. McConnell would (probably) like to convict Trump but he can’t press his caucus and Democrats still need at least 17 defectors from the Party of Trump. But after their second opportunity to hold Trump accountable, if they smile for the reporters and say he’s “learned his lesson” again, that’s a liability for anyone in 2022. And if they want to keep their committee assignments, Democrats have to go around them and bring everything to a floor vote, which Chuck Schumer can do now.

Democrats have to make it clear that they can bear the consequences of not going along with the Republicans – not having committees and not having a Trump conviction – better than the Republicans can. Trump is now just as much of a problem to them. And the committee system is a convenience for the body, and if Republicans want to make it inconvenient for the majority, Democrats will have to govern without it.

In short, if Chuck Schumer is capable of realizing it (which I doubt), Democrats really have Republicans over a barrel and he ought to just make them work with him and not the other way around. If Republicans don’t like it? Tough. It was Mitch McConnell who said “Elections have consequences.” It is the Republican Party that acts as though 51 percent of the vote (in their case less) earns 100 percent of the power. And however many conservatives pretend to Social Darwinism, there isn’t even a point in having elections if we cannot enforce consequences for peddling stupidity.

Yeah, I should’ve known that an impeachment seven days after the president incites an insurrection is as fast as this government is ever gonna get.

Still, given that the process didn’t start until after the weekend was over, the second impeachment of Donald Trump did conclude remarkably fast, in less than 24 hours, after it officially started. It actually had ten Republicans on board, which is the most defections from the defendant’s party in any presidential impeachment case. And since there have only been four impeachments of a president in American history, and Trump has made history by being impeached twice, he has also attained an achievement in having half of them all by himself.

Not like it matters that much, since Mitch McConnell (in direct contrast to his Operation Warp Speed-like maneuvering to fill Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat) is not convening the Senate until at least January 19, so while it is legal to impeach a president after he has left office, those of us who think Trump should get kicked out and Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Collect $250,000 are going to be disappointed. Actually disappointment isn’t the issue, it’s how much damage Putin’s little boy can still do in six days.

“Mr. President, you’ve just become the first president to be impeached twice after inciting insurrection! What are you going to do NEXT?”
“I’m gonna start a nuclear war, so I can go for the hat trick!”

In a certain respect it’s actually better for the prosecution (Democrats) that the Senate trial proceed after the government changes hands, because with the Senate tied, a Democratic Vice President (Kamala Harris) as legal head of the Senate, gives that party the majority, meaning the prosecution case isn’t going to have the legs cut out from under it right at the get-go the way McConnell did in the last impeachment. (But on the bright side, Republicans, it looks like the president gets impeached every January from now on.) On the other hand, you still need 67 Senators to convict, meaning 17 Republicans (or 18, if Democrat Joe Manchin wants to uphold his conservative reputation). And the likelihood is against that, precisely because the stakes are that conviction would lead to a second vote to bar the former president from any future Federal office (which requires only a simple majority) the internal Republican Party support for Trump in both his 2020 challenge and a future 2024 campaign is still a majority. It’s also assumed that if Trump is no longer in the picture that Republicans will see less need to act so boldly against him. The problem with that “let’s just move on” posture is precisely that Trump will never give up the spotlight willingly, and the Party has brought itself to this crossroads precisely because they would not confront him. The fact that some Republicans (including McConnell and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski) are willing to even entertain the idea of convicting him on that basis indicates that they’re foresighted enough to get him out of the picture. But ultimately this Senate trial, like the last one, is less the Democratic Party pressing its already known opinion on Trump and more the Republican Party decision as to whether it wishes to continue being ruled by him, even as the costs start to outweigh the benefits.

The prosecution at least is going to be pretty straightforward based on the article of impeachment: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/13/incitement-of-insurrection-impeachment-resolution-full-text “On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country any more.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.”

Lest one think this is taken out of context, here is the text of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech, all the rambling and interrupting chants included: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-save-america-rally-transcript-january-6 Notably he mentions how “They’ll knock out Lincoln too, by the way. They’ve been taking his statue down, but then we signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years and everything stopped.” But I’m sure the part Trump would want emphasized is “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Never mind that in Trumpworld, “peaceful protest” is code for “all these darkies get to march in the streets without masks on, so why can’t we?”

The legal question then is, is Trump legally liable if he didn’t specifically tell people to hunt the Vice President and Congress?

There was a completely unrelated question on Quora, I can’t find it now, but it was basically “what is a great detail in a movie scene?” And one person answered with one of the courtroom scenes in A Few Good Men, where Cruise’s defense attorney questions a corporal, the prosecutor (Kevin Bacon) comes up with a line of argument to undermine Cruise’s assertion, and Cruise comes back up with another line of questioning that proves his point. And as they take the witness off the stand, Cruise walks back to his desk and the camera shows Bacon nodding in rueful admiration of Cruise’s skill. That was considered to be an example of good character detail.

But I bring up that particular scene because of the specific context and dialogue.

In A Few Good Men, two Marines are up for court-martial due to the death of a recruit at Guantanamo Bay. Lieutenant Kaffee, Cruise’s character, has a Corporal Barnes from the unit on the stand (played by Noah Wyle) and goes into several questions asking him to detail a “Code Red”, which is basically a hazing process designed to break down a Marine who seems to be screwing up. The prosecutor, Captain Ross, gets up and gives the corporal the Marine outline for recruit training and asks him to detail the regulation involving the use of Code Red. He can’t. He then picks up the manual for the garrison at Guantanamo Bay and asks the corporal where the use of Code Red is. The corporal just says that “Code Red” is a term for an informal process, meaning it’s off the books. Ross’ point is that the defense can’t bring up a process that’s not in regulations as though the defendants were giving orders. But as he walks back, Kaffee gets up, snatches the book out of Ross’ hand and asks the corporal to describe where in the Guantanamo manual he would find the mess hall. And Barnes says he can’t. And Kaffee asks if he never had a meal on the base then, and Barnes says of course he did. So Kaffee asks, “I don’t understand, how would you know where the mess hall is, if it’s not in this book?” And Corporal Barnes just says, “Well I guess I just followed the crowd at chowtime, sir.”

You don’t need to know what the specific order is. You just follow the crowd at chowtime.

This goes with the often-mentioned similarity between Trump and the New York mob, specifically the “Teflon Don”, John Gotti, who craved the spotlight more than most Mafia bosses. A reporter who covered the Mob confirmed that the similarity is somewhat intentional: “It’s important to remember that Trump learned his ABCs for success from Roy Cohn, who was mixed up in the Mafia, defended them, and mentored Trump exactly how to succeed in life. “Always be aggressive, take no prisoners …”

“Trump resembles John Gotti. Most mob bosses were quiet, stayed in the shadows, didn’t want any kind of publicity or exposure. All Gotti wanted was the spotlight, all the time. That bolstered his ego, made him feel important. …Gotti would never say, “Hit that guy.” He’d just say, “Do me a favor, get rid of that stone in my shoe.” He would just say, “He’s a problem.” You never caught Gotti saying, “Let’s do a hit job on him,” but the understanding is clear to their acolytes. They know what the code words mean. … Just remember, Roy Cohn. He taught him his ABCs. He was a mentor. Trump was proud of it! Remember that line about, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The government works for him; he doesn’t work for the government.”

Not only that, there is legal precedent with the case in question. An article in Politico goes over the potential problems for Trump: “As a person with good lawyers and experience being investigated, Trump would undoubtedly claim these comments were nothing more than First-Amendment-protected political speech if he were charged with encouraging the mob to commit seditious conspiracy. But that might not help. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brandenberg v Ohio, found that the government can punish inflammatory speech when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

So did Trump know that his statements were “likely” to produce imminent lawless action?

Well, in his NOW BANNED Twitter account, Trump said “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” after also saying “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” For weeks, Trump supporters fed by his own mythologizing on Twitter and rumors spread amongst themselves and the Q Anon network, organized for a protest specifically timed for the Elector count on January 6, even before Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert and Senator Josh Hawley announced their intent to contest the slate. “The story of how the pied-pipers of Trumpism enlisted supporters illustrates the dramatic evolution of Trump’s voters into an effective and well-financed network of activist groups. The crowds that rally organizers recruited were joined in Washington by more radical right-wing groups that have increasingly become a fixture at pro-Trump demonstrations – including white supremacists and devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which casts Trump as a savior figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and cannibals. “

Trump also knew that the people doing his bidding in denying coronavirus strategies by state governments were willing to take violent extremes. A month before the election, Trump’s own FBI announced charges against 13 men in a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, “and otherwise violently overthrow the state government.” Now most of the time it’s extremely easy for Trump to plead ignorance, but it stretches credibility for him to say he was unaware of what people say about him on social media, especially pro-Trump networks that repeat his opinions and support his position that opposition to his rule is illegal by definition.

It was that much harder for Trump to deny the potential for violence when he came to the outdoor podium on January 6 and saw exactly how many people were outside ready to respond to what he had to say. I’m not sure if he would have seen the hanging scaffold that someone set up for Mike Pence. And while he did indeed say “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” he also used fascist bullyboy code language like “We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong” and “The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

So certainly there’s more legal basis for a criminal claim – both in the context of impeachment and outside it – than “you’re mean, and you’re haters, and you’re meanie haters, and you just want to take down the bestest most Americanest president we’ve had since Jesus.”

But as I keep saying: Not like it matters. Because in this government, the only way you can stop a malicious incompetent from doing this much damage as President is not to elect him in the first place, and that’s very difficult when the duopoly does even more than the Constitution to enforce a first-past-the-post election system, and that binary logic thus causes a huge plurality of America to program themselves into thinking that the only alternative to the Democratic Party is the designated official NotDemocrat party, even if that party endorses the most cuckooland nonsense, because you don’t want to be a DEMOCRAT, do you?? And because that self same election system causes all political functions in the Federal government to be apportioned between the two parties, and again, you’ve got that 2/3 requirement to convict on an impeachment, you’re most likely not going to get even 1/3 of the 50 Republicans required to convict their Leader, even knowing he started a brushfire without caring if they got burned. And that’s only partly because there’s a genuine (M)ob intimidation campaign against them. In other cases the identity fusion with Trump is just that strong, and even the more sensible people refuse to do anything constructive because that would be seen as surrendering to the Democrats.

This is why there are several reforms being proposed – such as creating DC and Puerto Rico as Democrat-friendly Senate bastions (giving statehood to DC would also mean they’re not waiting on Federal approval to restore order in the district), or severely reducing the lame-duck period so that sedition campaigns against a lawful election don’t have nearly as much time to brew.

These reforms are almost as unlikely to work as impeachment and removal of a president by the Senate, because even if they weren’t specifically intended to cripple one of the two parties, the Republicans will certainly perceive that intent. The only solution then would be the long-term process going on now, in which the Republicans continue to alienate the center of the country. But Democrats learned from 2020 that they can’t count on every race, especially in “red” states, going their way, and they have every reason to suspect that if the sitting president’s party (theirs) loses seats in the midterm, as they are expected to do in 2022, Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell will do exactly what he did to Obama after 2010 and hamstring Joe Biden as much as possible and use that as the pitch for why Republicans should retake the White House. And if Trump is not in prison, and still has an audience, there’s every reason to suspect he will get nominated again, and win the White House again, because certainly no one in his party is going to stop him.

Which is why, in terms of having a national audience, the strongest consequence of Trump’s little stunt on January 6 wasn’t yet another impeachment trial where his pet political party can enable him yet again. It was getting kicked off social media, especially Twitter.

Simply not having his media megaphone seems to have demoralized Trump to the point that he isn’t even trying to get his message out to the public, even though he has all the pre-Twitter methods that a president has historically had to communicate, including TV. Except he’s sort of alienated Fox News, too.

But while the Left has embraced Twitter’s decision in the short term, it’s inspired them to a lot of tut-tutting about the control that Twitter and other corporations have over social discourse. Even Jack Dorsey has admitted this is an issue.

I personally think the system is working, at least now that it’s finally reached the extreme. I don’t think that we should be passing more laws on these media platforms, and ironically the people who want to get rid of Section 230 (including Trump) are blanking out the point that removing the platforms’ shield of liability would have only created the result that has already happened, where the companies de-platformed Trump and his goons on their own, because he was becoming a liability to their reputations (such that their own employees were near revolt) and potentially a legal liability.

The solution would have been for Twitter and Facebook to enforce THEIR OWN RULES of conduct that they are perfectly willing to impose on Joe Schmo, but no, because Trump is a big time celebrity (and incidentally the president) every excretion from that upper colon he calls a brain is “newsworthy.” All I know is, if Trump had posted more than two topless photographs, Facebook would’ve banned him for life.

Supposedly others have pointed out that if someone in the private sector had said half the stuff that Trump said on Twitter as a matter of course, they would lose their job. And we can say this because a lot of Trump’s supporters got fired from their jobs after they joined the Beer Belly Putsch January 6 and bragged about it on social media. And yet both the traditionally anti-capitalist Left and the woke conservatives who suddenly realized that capitalists are dictating terms to politicians are unable to regulate a threat to public safety half as expediently as Twitter did by removing Donald Trump’s power within their medium, which he has less claim to than he has to the Republican Party.

This is part of why I’m libertarian, because I think that private business is often doing a better job of regulating itself and reading the consequences of its public actions than government regulators do. And if I were liberal, I would be concerned not just that reactionaries are trying to take over the government, and not just that private companies have so much control over public activity, but that private businesses, as mercenary and dysfunctional as they are, are still regulating themselves better than the public sector is able to regulate and reform itself.