Category: Politics

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitler ruined that mustache for everybody.

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

Hogan’s Heroes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is something that a Facebook friend told me a little while ago and it makes as much sense in describing America’s current government as anything else.

This month, Senate Democrats are still trying to hash out the “Build Back Better” act for President Biden (and speaking of communication, that name is some awfully lame branding) with various people putting delays in the process. And as we speak, Biden held a virtual meeting for the first-ever “Summit For Democracy” saying “Here in the United States, we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort. American democracy is an ongoing struggle to live up to our highest ideals, to heal our divisions and to recommit ourselves to the founding idea of our nation.” But either for the sake of a global audience or just to be nice, he didn’t name names and point out what the real problem is with an American democracy that had been chugging along for over two centuries: The fact that one faction of the duopoly has rapidly regressed in intellect and now is not only against the Left’s vision for our nation, but is against the founding idea of our nation itself.
Go back to this November’s odd-year elections. Or as I describe it, further evidence that the Democratic Party couldn’t score in a bordello.

I mean, the previous off-year elections in Virginia, and the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election had me thinking that the Democrats might have learned the central lesson of 2016: that Americans can understand, full well in advance, just how criminal and irresponsible Donald Trump and his party of enablers are, and Democrats can STILL lose an election to them because simply being NotDonaldTrump is not the same as being good for anything. But then Virginia’s Democratic Governor was longtime Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe, so some people clearly didn’t learn. And a lot of conventional wisdom pundits thought that Republican Glenn Youngkin won by accusing Democrats of promoting “critical race theory” in schools even as Democrats insist that it’s only a collegiate-academic discussion.

What, you’re going to tell Republicans, you’re going to tell these people, who tell you with a straight face that “Let’s Go Brandon” is not code for “Fuck Joe Biden” and that there is no connection between Donald Trump and the neo-Confederate thugs who brought riot gear to the “peaceful protest” on January 6, you’re going to tell those people that antifa is not an organization and that critical race theory has no strict definition? Please. You can’t out-bullshit these people. Don’t even try.

Define your terms, liberals, or the enemy will define them for you.

The thing is, it wasn’t just Virginia, which was only starting to turn blue in recent elections. In New Jersey, which is almost as much a Democrat monoculture as New York state, incumbent Democratic Governor Phil Murphy was expected to coast against Republican Jack Ciatarelli, and ended up only winning by a slim margin, 24 hours after Election Day. One writer for New York magazine gave his analysis (and being on the New York Magazine staff, that makes him basically a Democratic Party insider right there): “Who could have predicted this? Well, anyone with a kid in public school during the pandemic paralysis of last year. I won’t pretend that my own experience is more meaningful than anyone else’s. But the singular of data is anecdote, so let me tell you what happened in my town.” Andrew Rice goes over some of the background: “There was a brief moment, in the summer of 2020, when it appeared as if Murphy might be edging toward a more proactive role. The scientific evidence was already pretty clear by this time: With masking and contact tracing, it would be possible to resume in-person learning. Other states were already doing so. But many teachers were understandably terrified. Over a few days in August, the state’s largest and most powerful teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, declared that it was unsafe to return to classrooms, and Murphy immediately reversed himself, saying local districts could continue with remote learning if they provided a “good reason.” Oftentimes, that reason turned out to be the objection of the unionized workforce. It was hard to escape the suspicion that Murphy was removing himself because he was unwilling to cross NJEA, his most important political ally. Among other things, the union had secretly funneled millions into a super-PAC formed to advocate for Murphy’s policy objectives.”

(I mean, for all the Facebook leftists telling me how important it is that we get people unionized, they haven’t seemed to learn why unions outside the government sector aren’t that popular any more.)

And then Rice goes over how this played out with actual parents (you know, those suburban moms who went big for Democrats the last few years): “Many parents — women especially — found themselves acting as involuntary substitute teachers and full-time caregivers, continually on call to dig out crayons, serve snacks, and solve technical problems with the Zoom. It was only natural that many of these frustrated parents started to pay closer attention to what was happening in the classroom — it was right there in their home. In the run-up to the election in Virginia, which was considered the one to watch, the media mainly focused — probably too much, in retrospect — on Fox News–driven controversies over critical race theory that erupted in conservative suburbs in Virginia. These were only one culturally specific manifestation of a universal ramification of remote learning. Parents were watching. They were Zooming into school board meetings. They were bombarding principals with emails. They were livid; they wanted to know who was in charge.

“But where was the manager?”

As for all that talk about how Washington Democrats’ inability to get a budget deal passed before the election hurt their chances, it is difficult to see how much that hurt in retrospect, but it’s hard to see how that helped. Some guy on Facebook posted “Sign I saw yesterday said ‘I wanted a large pizza with mushrooms and voted for who I thought would deliver. What I got was a medium cheese instead. But the the other party wanted to feed me arsenic and nails.” I commented, “You forgot the part of the joke where Joe Manchin scraped off the cheese and tomato sauce cause it wasn’t paid for.”

But even so, certain people wanted to rationalize that the Democrats’ hammering was a good thing in the long run, since after all the president’s party tends to lose off-year elections, and maybe if there’s a typical changeover that will help get things back to “normal.” Andrew Sullivan, whose remaining point in common with the Right is a loathing of PC wokeness, said after the Virginia election, “I know it’s an incredibly low bar, and if the Dems had won, we might have returned to Bannonland, but still. A peaceful, sane transfer of power? At this point, I’ll take it. A GOP victory with Trump off-stage? Every one counts. You have to repair norms bit by bit. Part of what the American voters had wanted from Biden was congenial, bipartisan normalcy. But the left mugged him. Youngkin had a chance to fill that abandoned moderate space in our politics — and grasped it. … Youngkin seemed like an old school Republican, spoke in reasoned language, did not resort to vile insults, proposed massive spending on education; promised to end a grocery tax; and took the 2008 moderate Obama position on race and history.”

The Left refuses to trust that this is just politics as usual, because they can’t trust that the Republican opposition is coming back to normal. Nor should they.

Please do not forget, conservative apologists, that the Republican Party started its Orwellian “election integrity” foist after, not during, Trump’s whiny campaign to “Stop the Steal” (that is, stop the Electoral College). Do not forget that they changed the laws to take power away from local Secretaries of State after, not before, January 6. You can see what the deal is. These people want to appease the Trumpniks, but they’re doing it a bit too late to make a difference. This time. Having seen that a motivated coalition of NotRepublicans can take out even the most popular Republicans (such as they are), they want to gin the system to make sure that can’t happen again, but they’re doing it in the hopes of getting a competent demagogue, someone who can push the buttons of the gullible, angry mob but who doesn’t eat paste (or well-done steaks with ketchup). I say it’s a hope because if they had a competent authoritarian, they wouldn’t have gone all in on Trump. I’m sure they’re hoping that by now some politically-correct governor like Ron DeSantis will run for the presidential nomination in 2024 and be a Trump with (relative) brains, but if anybody in the party had even the balls of a mouse to confront Mister Mean Tweets, again, they wouldn’t have Trump. And it’s not like they’re challenging him even now. They’re just hoping that without the presidency and the exposure that the Mainstream Media and Twitter unwisely gave him, that he’ll fade away. But even then, their best case scenario just means that America is run like DeSantis’ Florida or Greg Abbott’s Texas, and you can ask people in Texas how well that’s working out. You probably shouldn’t ask over the internet, because their power may go out this Christmas, and you probably shouldn’t ask by mail, because Louis DeJoy is still Postmaster General.

A few weeks ago I saw a Medium column from Umair Haque and it was yet another of his despairing attacks on America in general and how he predicted how the Virginia race was going to go because his parents moved there when he was a child, and he went over how horrible it was for him as a dark-skinned boy of British Commonwealth origins to grow up in Redneckistan.

He said “So there white Americans are. Let me say it again. They’ve got the society they want. They. Nobody else wants that kind of society — a place denuded of public goods and social protections, where guns have more rights than women do. By and large, minorities don’t want to live in that kind of ultra-competitive, individualistic society — they want something more like Canada or Europe.” Ah yes, the countries that are LESS multi-racial and more white than we are. So clearly we’re operating on different definitions of “white.”

But again, Haque does make great points even in spite of himself. He also said, “What on earth are white Americans so angry about? If you think about it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. They’ve got the society they want. The very one they keep on voting for. Sure, they don’t have healthcare and retirement and decent education and any kind of social systems or public goods. But that’s the society white America wants.”

That’s why I call this political movement “whiny fascism.” I mean, with Germany, they used to be this bad-ass Great Power that rivaled Russia and Britain and France, then they lost World War I, lost their colonies, got East Prussia split off from the rest of the country, got the Rhineland occupied, got inflation that jacked the price of goods into billions, and that was BEFORE the Great Depression. You can understand why they went for rage and hate. You can understand why Russia went for Stalin. Between the March Revolution and the consolidation of the Soviet Union, the country was in absolute chaos and civil war. Many more Russians died from the Russian Civil War than in World War I. You can understand why they wanted order. This country, people want to give the nuclear codes to Gary Busey’s idiot sidekick from The Apprentice cause they got sick of calling customer service and hearing “para espanol, oprime’ el numero dos.”

And in the wake of a Chinese virus that Trump did not cause (but did everything in his power to help Xi Jinping cover up) we entered 2021 with a new president in position to use what we’d learned about the pandemic, including the beginnings of a vaccination program. And that was working pretty well. Not like we don’t already require vaccines in schools for all kinds of diseases without panicking about them. But no, suddenly vaccines are the worst thing since Hitler. As opposed to say, getting a bunch of paramilitary thugs to carry flags and seize a seat of government in an attempt to overthrow the republic.

Many of our issues with supply chains and economic disruptions are at least partially due to the lingering coronavirus and its continuing mutation, and since a lot of that started outside the States, there’s a limited amount that individuals or this government can do about that. Even so, there are things individuals and the government can control. The fact is, going along with the vaccine regimen would help get things back to normal, and normal is the last thing Trumpniks want. Even when Trump himself asked people to get vaccinated in one speech, half the crowd booed him, because at this point that would mean giving Biden, and Fauci, and the Deep State a win, and we can’t have THAT. We already knew, when Trump was president, that governors like DeSantis and people in states like South Dakota weren’t going to enforce or even allow masking and social distancing, no matter how many of their fellow travelers died, and now that there’s a vaccine option, that’s just one more pretext for the cult to engage in performative defiance, just one more icky vegetable that they don’t wanna eat.

Republicans are in fact quite explicit about this, one of them saying that the Party needs “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” to get the House back in 2022.

Part of communication is pointing out that the current malaise isn’t (just) because Democrats can’t get anything done, it’s because moderates like Joe Biden are largely in consensus with “progressives” but the entire Republican Party and at least two conservative Senate Democrats are deliberately standing in the way, and if the president has any influence with the public, and (allegedly) the gist of the Democrats’ agenda polls better than actual Democratic politicians do, then Biden and his people need to point out that not only does change not happen by itself, it is happening in the face of sabotage and opposition.

I mean, I’m not even sure why I’m rooting for tax-and-spend Democrats to win, but then I remember that the Libertarian Party, which has never been ready for prime time, is actually getting worse and following the Republicans’ Know-Nothing lead on COVID, and any vote for Republicans is a vote for the Party of Trump. And the last four years ought to demonstrate why that’s a terrible idea.

As I may have said once, a good idea beats a bad idea, but a bad idea beats no idea. In theory, Democrats have an idea: it’s expressed in the massive legislative package set up for the Biden Administration this year. But they didn’t get around to passing even half of it until it was too late for the off-year elections, and that because Democrats assume, as with the Affordable Care Act, that you have to pass the bill to actually see what’s in it, where in fact if they promoted the bill in such a way that voters could see what was in it, they might put more pressure on Congress to get it passed.

Meanwhile Republicans don’t really have any constructive ideas, but they do have rage and hate and discontentment, some of which they have ginned up from phantom buzzword slogans but some of which is due to real issues like inflation that the government either cannot or will not do anything about. And at this rate if you get more Republicans in charge (whether Trump is the specific leader or not) it’s only going to justify Trump’s position that massive death tolls from Trump Virus aren’t government responsibility. But when you have a Democratic Party which assumes that every personal or political concern IS government responsibility, and then doesn’t do anything about them, why not elect Republicans? Because at that point, substance is clearly meaningless and all that matters is one’s preference on culture war aesthetics, and that’s where Republicans always have Democrats beat.

I mean, the Democrats ought to see, or at least deduce, what’s going on. They ought to realize that Republicans aren’t just going to passively wait for liberals to sabotage their own agenda (though that’s usually a safe bet). They’re going to actively work to make things more difficult for Democrats, and they have been, just as they did with Obama. Democrats ought to see that whether “conservative” behavior is an ant-like organized policy or just the spiteful stubbornness of a group of individuals, it is having a collective effect and that is impacting their chances of political success. They ought to be able to pick up on this, react to it and create a counter-strategy. And yet November 2 showed that they’re totally surprised.

I was trying to figure out what this behavior reminded me of, but this October GEICO brought back that commercial they do every Halloween season spoofing slasher horror movies. The one where the small group of people is running through a darkened town in a panic, going, “Let’s go to the barn!” “No, let’s hide at the post office!” And one of the gals wails, “Why don’t we just get in the running car??” And one of the guys with her says “Are you crazy? Let’s go hide behind the chainsaws!” So of course, that’s what they do. And if that isn’t the Democratic Party, I don’t know what is.

Because if the Republicans and Libertarians are just variant intensities and flavors of chowderhead, the Democrats present as people who ACT like they got some sense but refuse to draw obvious conclusions from available data. So, given that the Libertarians actually won a large number of local offices in the off-year election, and the local offices are starting to be where the action is, you may want to reconsider them. I mean, yes, at the end of the day Libertarians may just be Republicans who like pot and support trans rights, but that’s more than you’re going to get from the actual Republican Party. And I’m starting to think it’s more than we’ll get out of the Democrats.

The big news ending last week was that the big vote that Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up in the House for Democrats’ reconciliation bill had to be postponed because the left wing of the party balked at the current state of negotiations. Basically there was a “bipartisan” bill, so called because even Republicans said they would agree with it on paper, for $1.2 trillion to cover infrastructure, versus the bill that both President Biden and Democratic “progressives” want, which was over $3.5 trillion dollars for a whole bunch of “progressive” stuff that that wing of the party wants and thinks they can load on while we’re spending over a trillion dollars regardless. And as with a lot of these bills that absolutely have to be passed to avoid the collapse of Western Civilization, the current ruling faction wants to sneak in a lot of stuff without analysis.

For example, I am not as much a fan of the Libertarian Party as I used to be, but I caught one post on their Facebook page where they discussed a “mileage tax” buried in the bill. If you take a deeper dive, you will find articles clarifying that it is officially a “National motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot”, and it is not a tax. What it is, however, is a proposal to fund a study on how to implement a per-mile fee on vehicles in this country, supposedly as a replacement for gas taxes. So on that score, I’d agree with the LP’s rebuttal: “If they support a program to study a tax, they 100% support that tax. And 19 Senate Republicans already voted yes on it.” Before that, they said: “Imagine supporting that and still looking poor people in the eye and say that you want the rich to pay their fair share.”

The fact of the matter is, we have the government revenue system that we do because the politicians who are already in charge have already decided they’re not going to “make the rich pay their fair share” and even if they did, government is going to spend as much money as it wants regardless of how much it makes. I said this earlier: It doesn’t matter whether Jeff Bezos pays his “fair share”, you would need to multiply Jeff Bezos’ total assets by a factor over almost 25 to get this government’s budget for 2020. And if we all agree it’s unfair that the rest of us have to pay taxes when Jeff Bezos effectively pays none at all, that’s the decision of the people who are actually running the government. After all they only deal with voters once every two years at most and they deal with their contributors almost every day.

In similar terms, liberal Judd Legum posted on Facebook: “This isn’t tough. Let’s say you are paying $1000 a month for health insurance. Then America shifts to Medicare for All and you are paying nothing but your taxes go up by $750. Calling that a ‘tax increase’ is a dishonest Republican talking point.” Yes, except: it’s dishonest to say that’s NOT a tax. It IS a net decrease in the amount of money you need to pay out, and that’s what liberals ought to be emphasizing. But the end result is accomplished VIA a tax. And this is why liberals are losing the public debate, because their best advocates are on Facebook, Twitter and MSDNC, and they’re being disingenuous about how their agenda really works, and even in that disingenuousness they’re still more articulate and effective than the Biden Administration or most Democrats in government.

Remember in the early 20^th Century, they told the public that when they changed the Constitution to allow for a direct income tax, it was only 1 percent for income of up to $20,000 a year (which back then was real money). And now look. This is why Republicans can get away with opposing all taxes no matter what, cause the average person doesn’t care if Jeff Bezos gets soaked, he cares that some guy named FICA is taking over one-sixth of his paycheck.

So maybe that’s why not everyone in this country or even everyone in Congress is as exercised about this negotiation as the Left and the Mainstream Media are. Or maybe it’s something else. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema held a Capitol Hill wine fundraiser on September 28, during budget negotiations. Or as I say, “Priorities.”

And the other Democratic Senator who usually gets blamed for Congress not getting anything done, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, told reporters who questioned his position on his Party’s bills, “I’ve never been a liberal in any way, shape or form. There’s no one that’s ever thought I was.”

Well, thanks for saying it, Joe. Even if you ARE a Democrat, that doesn’t make you a liberal even if that’s where binary American political logic is these days. I’M not a liberal. And it seems to amaze “progressives”, but just because the nominally progressive (or at least not regressive) party they belong to is technically in control of the government, that doesn’t mean they are a majority in this country, just as they aren’t really in control of the government.

If the duopoly system deceives Republicans into thinking their theocrat-corporatist dogma is a lot more popular than it actually is, “progressives” have deceived themselves into thinking their agenda is more popular than it is just because they’re the movers and shakers in one of the two parties that Americans have deceived themselves into thinking are the only ones we can vote for.

That setup ultimately hurts Republicans in a lot of ways, which is why they’re now trying to compensate with their state laws for “election integrity” because they’re losing even some of the people who have voted for them. But in the meantime, duopoly and binary thinking hurt Democrats and “progressives” more because for one thing, they’re actually trying to get stuff done against the premises of a system that has all kinds of safeguards against swift and radical change, and all the Republicans need to do is game that system.

But it also hurts the Left because the need to glop everyone together in two broad coalitions means that their focus is diluted. Many times, I have gone over how America’s alleged polarization is really a case of one party polarizing itself to purge everyone but the True Believers and the other party taking everyone else by default. What calls itself conservatism today basically sums up as “We hate abortion and gays.” Not that previous conservatives didn’t oppose abortion and homosexuality, but they had a little more philosophical grounding. So on just those two subjects, which are both more complex than blanket approval or opposition, anybody who acknowledges that complexity is necessarily outside the party of “We hate abortion and gays.” But that means that the Democratic Party has to include a whole bunch of people who support abortion rights and queer rights, and also a bunch of people whose opinion is more like “I oppose abortion, but I don’t think it should be prevented in cases of rape or incest” or “I don’t like gays and trans people, but I don’t think they should be sent into camps.”

In other words, because some of us are in the Democratic Party simply because we don’t want this government to be returned to the business portfolio of the Trump Organization, doesn’t mean we’re equally enthusiastic about all aspects of the “progressive” agenda. And that group includes the Democrats in Congress.

Assuming of course that Manchin and Sinema are the only two holdouts against the reconciliation bill.

As for the president, Joe Biden is a leftist only in the minds of “conservatives” who think that anybody to the left of Mitt Romney is a leftist. And given that Biden is the one pushing the $3.5 trillion bill (at least I think he is), the question of whether you are or are not a progressive isn’t the issue in getting a bill passed. If it was, you could negotiate. It shouldn’t be too much to say that the “progressive” figure is too high and spends too much money when we don’t know where it’s going, and it shouldn’t be unthinkable to haggle it down. The main reason I’d agree to even $1.2 trillion is because our country’s infrastructure, including medical infrastructure, has been neglected for so long that America threatens to be a Third World banana republic with nuclear weapons. (Much like Russia, which is another goal that Vladimir Putin and the Republicans have in common.) It is something else to deliberately hold up any progress just for the sake of doing so, because that’s what your donors want, or just because your party’s hair-thin majority means you get to make everybody dance for you.

I mean, this is where Republicans want the Democrats. They know that if they just hang together as a party and not agree to a single thing the governing party wants then the Democrats will have to conduct all bill negotiations amongst themselves. And that will end up having “progressive” bills watered down or even stopped. This is what happened with the Affordable Care Act. And the public disappointment from that made it that much easier for Republicans to retake Congress in 2010. And that undermined everything President Obama wanted to do from then on, even though he got re-elected. And that was BEFORE Trump. And Democrats know all of this too, they know this is the Republican strategy, and yet they keep playing into it.

Right now, the Democratic Party reminds me of that recurring gag in Peanuts with Charlie, Lucy and the football, except that Charlie Brown is the one yanking the football away from himself.

And that is because the Republicans are thinking strategically and the Democrats aren’t.

And that is because paradoxically, the party of altruism, collectivism and (democratic) socialism is incapable of getting everyone united on the same goal, whereas the party (that claims to be) of selfishness, individualism and capitalism can get all of its members to subordinate their personal consciences to the will of one leader, whether that leader is a paragon of Machiavellian cunning like Mitch McConnell or a pumpkin-colored inbred who is so lazy he thinks Manual Labor is the President of Mexico.

And THAT is because the party of selfishness and individualism has everyone pretty much on the same page. However much they may talk about the virtues of hard work and the free market, they know they’ve got it made as members of Congress, they have benefits that they would not get even in the private sector (if you’re already rich, like Mitt Romney, so much the better) and the best way to maintain what are effectively lifelong privileges is to cater to the donor class and run the country for their benefit.

Whereas with the Democrats, you can’t get “progressives” and centrists to agree, but while some progressives realize the consequences of letting Republicans win (namely, that the January 6 mentality takes over government), centrists don’t seem to think that’s such a big deal. Cause in the end, the main thing they have in common with the Republicans is that they want to keep their lifelong privileges and do to that, they have to do what the donors want. The fact that America might become a fascist state without the intellectual depth isn’t something that concerns either the donors or them.

That being the case, the old Washington system of negotiating with senators for quid pro quo isn’t going to work on the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, cause her donors are clearly giving her more than Joe Biden can.

So assuming he hasn’t already done so, I would counsel Joe Biden to be a bit less Barack Obama and a little more LBJ. If I was Biden, this is what I would be telling Sinema, Manchin, and anybody else who needs it:

“You’re representing your states and your country, even if your donors think that you’re just running the government for their benefit. Cause they don’t care if America becomes a Third World banana republic.”

(And they really should. As former Senator Al Franken said recently, ‘if your local bridge collapses when you’re trying to cross, your Mercedes will sink in the river just as fast as a Hyundai.’)

“So here’s the deal. This is the budget bill I agreed to. In Washington terms that means the Party agreed to it. That means YOU agree to it. If you expect to have the benefits of Democratic Party affiliation you need to work with the Party. If you work against it, you’re not getting one red cent for your re-election campaigns. You’re not getting any other Democrat to endorse you and if you get primaried, I’m endorsing that person.

“If that seems all or nothing, you’re the ones giving me nothing. Give me something to negotiate with. If you won’t, you kill my Party’s agenda and my chances of getting re-elected and that doesn’t seem to bug you, but you can’t screw with me and expect me to just smile.

“Your other choice is to do what you’re doing indirectly and do it out in the open and join the Republican Party. Because in this system we’ve created, if you’re not on my side, you’re on theirs. After all what’s the point in saying we have a majority if we’re not going to act like it? I know that’s a big bluff on my part, but hey, if you call it, I’m sure Mitch and the Republicans will treat you just as generously as you’ve treated us.

“Look at it another way. Do you know Roman history? Well- imagine I’m Caesar. So you can stab me in the back, just remember how that worked out for Brutus.”

Well, I suppose the fall of Kabul requires some sort of commentary, although I think the reason Joe Biden could get away with letting things collapse as quickly as they did and blame the Afghanistan government because they “gave up” is because the average American doesn’t care what happens there any more than he does.

I can give Biden a certain amount of credit in acknowledging, better than his President Barack Obama ever did, that the Afghanistan occupation was a Bush boondoggle that wasn’t doing us any good, especially after Bush divided our focus by taking Iraq. And as much as I hate Donald Trump, even he had the sense to want to get out. I could only blame Trump for two things: Not actually getting out, and then blaming Biden for actually carrying out the withdrawal plan that he initiated.

And of course all the liberal partisans like MSDNC are playing up the point that Viceroy Trump was the guy who first had the idea to negotiate with the Taliban directly AT Camp David (which his advisers got him to fall back on) and did make an agreement, bypassing the Kabul government, that released 5000 prisoners who ended up going back to fight for the Taliban. But what do you expect? Blaming other people for what he did and taking credit for what he didn’t do is Trump’s thing. I’m just wondering why Trump was so desperate to stay in the White House knowing that he had already planned to pull out of Afghanistan and would therefore get blamed if Kabul fell while he was in charge. But then again, he IS senile.

But that’s what happens when you’re the president. You get blamed for anything that goes wrong on your watch, just as you get the credit for what goes right even if you really had nothing to do with it. And of course, Biden knows this. Neither Trump nor (frankly) Obama wanted to make a difficult decision, because they knew they would get blamed for exactly what’s happening now: the country falling apart without American forces because Afghans would not fight back no matter how much hardware we gave them, and religious fundamentalists marching into towns, rounding up dissidents and telling women they can’t go outside the home. (Republicans only object to religious fundamentalists rounding up dissidents and oppressing women when said fundamentalists wear beards and don’t worship Jesus.)

Again I can at least give Biden respect for knowing to cut bait even knowing that he’d be the one to get blamed for something that everyone knew had to happen anyway. But then I think he’s willing to take the lumps because everyone, including the superficially pro-military Republican Party, knows this had to happen anyway.

And it comes down to one point Biden made in his Monday speech: “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

It reminded me of a time when, after getting taken advantage of too many times by professional drug addicts, I dealt with another friend who was not a narcotics addict but was still doing everything he could to destroy his own life while still relying on me for material support and the enabling of his bad habits. At one point, I told him, “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do.”

The Afghanistan, uh, project was something that Americans, or rather the foreign-policy “blob” always cared about more than the Afghan population at large. However much benefit Westernizing the cities had and however much it helped to give girls opportunity for education, this was really more a side benefit for the occupation and not really of benefit to the population at large, at least not enough to get them to support the Western-backed government.

If you’ve ever worked in a call center and have ever tried to show a senior citizen how to sign up for an Internet account over the phone, then you know why we needed 20 years to get Afghanistan out of the Dark Ages and it still didn’t work.

Plus which, it’s not like that’s necessarily a good idea. Both conservative imperialists and liberal technocrats thought they could take an ancient culture and fit it into our way of doing things as if that was the only valid system. It by and large bypassed the way people had been doing things for ages and so all those technical and financial advantages didn’t help against an enemy that knew the terrain.

In an article just out for The Atlantic, a former Pentagon official recounts how he visited Kabul in 2017 and the delegation had to travel by helicopter instead of by road: “As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.” Monday on The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow played the tape of when she and Richard Engel were touring Kabul 11 years ago – so, only halfway into the occupation – and observed a walled neighborhood built from scratch that wasn’t there before 9-11, and noted how the locals derided the architecture as “narcopalaces”, “gangster chic, big, garish, gigantic, rococo” places designed to look very, very rich. And she said: “I feel like it taught me something that you can only sort of experience by being there… if you do churn billions of dollars a month, every month, into the economy of one of the world’s poorest countries, and you do that month in and month out for a whole year, and you do that month in and month out for a second year… ultimately you do billions of dollars a month, for 20 solid years, if you do that and at the end of 20 solid years of investment, it’s still one of the poorest countries on Earth? There’s a problem.”

In one of the more glaring examples of US incompetence and carelessness during the “planned” withdrawal, we pulled out of the Bagram air base without telling the locals. “The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. … Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour’s drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan military officials.

“… The big ticket items left behind include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them, and hundreds of armored vehicles. Kohistani said the U.S. also left behind small weapons and the ammunition for them, but the departing troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not being left behind for the Afghan military was blown up before they left.

“Afghan soldiers who wandered Monday throughout the base that had once seen as many as 100,000 U.S. troops were deeply critical of how the U.S. left Bagram, leaving in the night without telling the Afghan soldiers tasked with patrolling the perimeter.

“In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” said Afghan soldier Naematullah, who asked that only his one name be used.”

It’s of a piece with our whole approach to the military in a foreign base, where everything is set up to the benefit of an outside infrastructure without any coordination with the locals, based on the ultratech that the US military has become addicted to, and therefore unusable by the local military that doesn’t have access to our support structure, to the extent that we gave a damn about that in the first place. Which meant that once deprived of that outside technical support system the Afghan military had no resources, because there was no thought in asking the locals how they would fight the war, and therefore no advantage to having greater numbers than the Taliban (in theory) and the same knowledge of the terrain. This was not a great arrangement for the Afghans or the Americans on the ground, but it was great for our military-industrial complex, and that’s all that matters.

You would think – you would think – that after so many historical examples like Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh using a poor but highly motivated army to deliver a strategic defeat to forces that figuratively had all the money in the world but weren’t having any of that trickling down to them, that the United States would have learned that the top-down approach doesn’t work. But if we cared about anything other than the top, things wouldn’t be like this.

Nobody learns anything because nobody has to. The US isn’t going to do either the moral nor the practical thing. That’s not what this government does. The government just sets up a gravy train for connected people and keeps it going regardless of whether it fulfills the alleged goal, and no matter how many times we find that it isn’t working out, we keep it going as long as there’s enough money to do so. But then one day you may not have enough money to do so, as both the British and the Russians found out.

I am mainly reminded of the lesson learned by the computer at the end of Wargames: “The only way to win is not to play.”