James Gillen

“If you’re not with me… you’re my enemy.”

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

I see a whole bunch of people reacting to Viceroy Trump’s attempt to label “Antifa” a terrorist organization, despite the fact that it technically doesn’t exist. And I see a whole lot of these people posting on their Facebook walls saying “I am anti-fascist.”

So let me get something straight.

I am NOT anti-fascist.

I am anti-collectivist.

I am pro-liberty, pro-individualism and pro-thinking for yourself.

And that means, IN ADDITION TO being anti-fascist, I am also anti-communist. Among other things, this means I am against people who rationalize the crimes of Castro’s Cuba by saying the Castros “gave people free education and healthcare”, which is on par with the old Right saying “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

Not all anti-fascists are the same. STALIN was anti-fascist. I am also anti-Stalinist. And because I am anti-collectivist, I am ALSO anti-racist and anti-fascist. Specifically, I am against anybody who acts like National Socialism or the Confederacy were good for anybody, including their ostensible support base.

That means I am against any “conservatives”, “libertarians” or “freedom lovers” who talk a good game about protecting the Second Amendment to make sure citizens can defend against a tyrannical government but when they see REAL people getting shot by THIS government, they go, “Yay! Finally, Law and Order!”

It means I am against any white boys, leftist or white nationalist, who turn peaceful protests into excuses for violence, because more than fascism or communism they hate “normie” government and just want an excuse to hurt people.

It means I am against the Republican Party, a pagan cult of the state that used to be the Party of Lincoln, which worships a gold-plated calf because they know the rest of the country is against them, and the only way they can maintain their power is through force and fraud.

It means I am against cultists who worship an “anti-communist” who praised President Xi on January 24 for containing the coronavirus in China, and who previously came out of a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin slumped over and walking funny.

And it means that I am against any attempt to brand “Antifa” as some kind of Enemy of the State, because if the leftists are correct and the Trump Organization’s declaring war on anti-fascism means that they have implicitly identified with fascism, that is quite likely what they are counting on, because apparently all you need to do is change people’s programming is to change the labels they use, to define censorship as “free speech,” violence as “peacekeeping”, the Electoral College as “democracy” and Trump as “your president.” And because the Right is that much more reductionist and simple-minded than the Left.

Basically, I am against any bullshit attempt to use labels to foist a package deal of ideas that are anti-liberty, anti-individual, and anti-thinking for yourself.

There are two serious problems in this country that might not seem to be related, but they are.

On May 25 in Minneapolis, a black person, George Floyd, was arrested – apparently for trying to pass a $20 counterfeit bill – and during the arrest, officer Derek Chauvin, guarded by three other police, restrained Floyd by putting his knee to Floyd’s neck, a maneuver that most police departments disavow precisely because it is likely to cause breathing problems. The incident was caught on video and the officers were yelled out at the time. As a result of his restraint, Floyd was pronounced dead by paramedics after they got him to the hospital.

The Minneapolis Police Department did immediately fire the four officers involved in the arrest, but outrage in the city continued to build as Chauvin was not arrested, even after the Mayor said that should happen, and the FBI had a Thursday press conference to announce an investigation. It got worse when it turned out that Chauvin in his time as a police officer has had at least 12 complaints against him, including use of excessive force.

(It turned out that in at least one of these incidents, Amy Klobuchar was the state prosecutor who declined to press charges on Chauvin, and this revelation has made it a bit less likely that she will be Joe Biden’s running mate, which would be a crying shame.)

The public outrage might seem to be an overreaction, IF one believes this is an isolated incident.

Thursday on Facebook I saw a clip from 2019 about a case that actually occurred in 2016. The Dallas Morning News posted it in 2019 because it took them three years to get the records in court. In the incident, a disturbed man – a white man – named Tony Timpa called the police himself in an adult store and told them he was off his meds and couldn’t control himself. By the time the cops got there the site security had already handcuffed Timpa and got him on the ground. However rather than simply wait for the paramedics, the cops first pushed Timpa down, keeping him in a “controversial” hold and lying on his chest. Paramedics then gave him a sedative. After a few minutes they realized Timpa was unconscious. A few minutes later they got him in the ambulance, but he died afterward.

Which is ultimately proof that the cops don’t JUST fuck with black people. They fuck over whomever they can get away with fucking over.

Most free speech advocates – and other people who study how democracies become authoritarian – have observed that if we do not think of rights as universal, if we can say that “certain people” don’t deserve them, then certain people become test cases and legal precedents for what the authorities can get away with. This is why anybody who thinks that all lives matter – or that their lives matter – ought to think that black lives matter, because if the authorities don’t have to care about black lives, there is no reason, other than social conditioning, why they have to care about yours either. And on a political level, such authoritarians often start with an unpopular target whose punishment would have some level of popularity, in order to make an example of them and show that they can do so.

Which leads to the second serious problem: Donald Trump.

The Heather-in-Chief, as part of his snitfit feud with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski on MSDNC, continued to make sleazy insinuations on Twitter that Scarborough was behind the death of an aide, even as Brezinski claimed she was talking with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the subject of Trump’s tweets. And so, possibly because letting the issue go on might end up in legal liability for either Twitter or Trump, Twitter announced this week that it was going to post fact checks in questionable tweets. This outraged Trump, which is perfectly understandable, cause it’s not like Dorsey had EVER imposed Twitter’s own standards on him before. And yet, after Trump twitted out another misleading statement that vote-by-mail leads to voter fraud (since after all, it would not be subject to hacked ballot machines or coronavirus health orders), Twitter did in fact post links, not censoring Trump’s words, but saying in so many words that this position was incorrect. In response, Trump cried like Lucille Ball and said that Twitter was violating his “FREE SPEECH!”

So, in order to (ahem) protect free speech, Trump excreted an Executive Order declaring the authority to review and revise protections given to social media, attacking Twitter specifically because social media outlets have “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”

Which is to say: “Not treating Your President, Donald Trump, as an omniscient, omnipotent GOD whose every word is objective Truth and whose every desire is an unbreakable law of Nature, at least until I change my mind again.”

By at least January, Trump knew from government contacts in China that the Chinese hadn’t contained the Wuhan virus. He didn’t stop travel from China until the virus was already a pandemic in Europe, so when he closed travel there, it was like closing the barn door after the horses had run out. We have never had federal containment orders. We have (officially) 100,000 dead and counting from coronavirus. We STILL don’t have a national testing regime.

But Twitter puts a fact check link on just two of Trump’s tweets, and they get an executive order in 48 hours.

I ask again: How DID this man sire five kids with that mosquito dick?

Pretty much every news article is saying that Trump’s premenstrual political maneuver is not going to get anywhere in the courts, but most of them are saying that’s not the point. Jack Shafer said in the centrist Politico: “Even if a state attorney general assures a governor that Trump can’t legally punish his defiance, what governor wants to force the test match? No less a liberal luminary than Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who has been savaged by Trump, just admitted she censors herself when talking about him publicly.

“Trump doesn’t pay a political price for his threatmanship for a couple of reasons. First, even though we act like we think Trump means all of the wild things he says, 3½ years of his presidency have conditioned us to understand that much of what he says is bluster and that we should wait for action before we scramble the jets. Second, we tend to let many of the outlandish things Trump says slide because the last thing Democrats want to do is hold his feet to the fire and force him to make good on his threats. In a weird sort of gentleman’s agreement, Trump gets to say wild things and the Democrats get to shout back their displeasure until the portable outrage generator runs out of fuel and a peaceful silence returns. Except for when it doesn’t.”

The implication that Shafer doesn’t spell out is that even when the “portable outrage generator” doesn’t do anything concrete, Trump’s caterwauling sets a precedent that allows him to do what he wants, even if legally he can’t. Part of this is simply because he’s the president, and we are all technically obliged to treat him as the president, which means that his job (ostensibly) is to protect the government and the country, as opposed to screaming like a retarded ape-boy that he is the Most Exalted Potentate while acting as though he were the paid stooge of a hostile power whose real job is to fuck this country in every manner possible. And part of that means that the government officials underneath him are obliged to take his Jackson Pollock-meets-Dada art and translate it into geometric forms. So even if legal experts tell us that Trump’s whim has no more enforceability than the hormone shifts of a teenager, it’s kind of the government’s job to make what the president wants enforceable. There’s a good piece on Trump’s Executive Order in Reason’s website: “Somehow, out of Trump’s several paragraphs of paraphrasing Section 230 with random erroneous asides, federal officials are supposed to intuit a new paradigm and “apply section 230(c) according to the interpretation set out in this section.”

“The FCC is also tasked with defining this bit of Trumpian gobbledygook: the conditions under which content moderation will be considered “the result of inadequate notice, the product of unreasoned explanation, or having been undertaking without a meaningful opportunity to be heard.”

@jess_miers

If you’ve ever wondered why Internet companies don’t follow their own rules, this is it. The one time Twitter attempts to elevate social discourse by experimenting with moderation that goes outside the binary leave up/takedown scheme, it’s met with an #executiveorder.

195

6:23 PM – May 27, 2020

Which gets to the point that Trump is gaming the system just as much as Twitter is. He can say that none of his twits are an official presidential statement (ex cathedra, so to speak), because they’re on his personal Twitter account. But Jack Dorsey will never enforce the same Code of Conduct on Trump that applies to other users, cause he’s the president, so what he says is newsworthy!

Well, in this brain-dead celebrity culture, Kylie Jenner is newsworthy. Does she get to quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact without being called on it?

Of course, as Jello Biafra might say, we’ve got a bigger problem now. On Thursday, after 8 pm local time, the police protests in Minneapolis turned violent. There is no report on if anyone has died, but there is a tremendous level of property damage and the 3^rd Precinct police building was put to flames. And if Mayor Jacob Frey seemed to be a bit deer-in-the-headlights at his press conference and unwilling to use the National Guard, certain other authorities seem a little TOO willing to use force.

Libertarians like me are often criticized – usually by the Left – because we don’t give enough deference to government. But at times when people lash out in reaction to something that is the fault of government, and in their nihilism destroy their own neighborhoods, it’s the “conservatives” and “liberty lovers” who complain that libertarians are anti-police because we don’t give enough deference to government. If anything, Americans on the whole give too much deference to government. And actually, that’s because in order for government to even work, there needs to be a certain level of deference to it. We understand that the police have a tough job. You never know who’s got a gun. And we know how important the national government is, even if we might want it to be smaller. A national disaster, like the spread of a pandemic to this country, is something beyond the power of a state government to handle, and you would want to assume in such case that the federal government is run by competent and conscientious people, as opposed to a tweezer-dick Putinya suka who literally doesn’t care about anything but himself.

People like me are cynical because as much as we want and need government to be run by competent and conscientious people, they are likely to be run by the worst of us: People who see public responsibility as a means of using the public to their will. And they prey on the herd need for order and stability by holding us hostage to their malice and incompetence. They game the social contract in order to expand the range of what they can get away with.

But the political bargain assumes that those with a monopoly on force are better than us. When it becomes clear that they are not, and that they will not follow the rules they enforce on the rest of us, people start to realize that there is no reason for the public to follow the rules either. You can only game the system for so long before there is no longer a system to game.

In 2014, it was Ferguson. In May, it is Minneapolis. In November, it may be Washington DC.

I’m just tryin’ to protect my stacks

Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax

-Kanye West, “To The World”

If the current occupant of the White House wishes to see himself as a “wartime president,” the results help explain why libertarians and some liberals are so leery of the government’s attempts to phrase every major government endeavor as a “war.” Not just because “war is the health of the state”, but because as with the Energy Crisis, the War On (some) Drugs and the less-rhetorical War On Terror, the main results of our war on coronavirus seem to be spending gigantic amounts of money that mostly goes to people and companies that already have money and government influence while the population at large get crumbs at best, and our personal liberties and standard of living all continue to erode… for the sake of “freedom.”

It’s been mentioned by quite a few people that we can’t keep up coronavirus shutdown, or quarantine, or whatever you want to call it, forever. And so after two months of a haphazard, half-assed, containment regime that is more state-by-state than federal, more governors are starting to open their states, greatly aided by Russian Viceroy Donald Trump riling up his redcaps to “liberate” their states from the majority who wanted to keep things locked down. Of course, just because we call America a democracy doesn’t mean that the majority rules. This week the same Wisconsin Supreme Court that mandated a physical state election in the face of the coronavirus and poll shutdowns also decided that they would approve a Republican legislative challenge against Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ stay-at-home orders.

Not that other countries have been able to keep up a containment regime indefinitely, but they were doing a better job of it than we were, and even they are experiencing their own virus resurgence as they start to relax controls. But the mostly (not entirely) Republican leaders in state government, following their Leader, don’t even have that level of patience, and knowing we haven’t gotten anywhere close to beating this virus, have decided that America is going to declare victory and go home.

Except we already are home. If we had achieved victory, we could leave.

It might be that the Trump Organization thinks they can live with this because unlike some people, they could actually live with this. They have a regular coronavirus testing regime in the White House and for Vice President Pence, even as they have refused to standardize testing for the nation, since, as Trump put it, “by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad“. But Trump said that last Thursday, and this was a day after one of the presidential valets, a military man not identified, was confirmed as positive for coronavirus. Trump was reportedly “lava level mad” when he heard about this, and you know what? I would be TOO! The whole purpose of presidential security is so that the President and Vice President are protected from immediate danger. And yet less than 24 hours after this, Mike Pence’s aide, Katie Miller, tested positive for coronavirus just before his plane was about to take off, delaying his schedule by an hour. Miller is the wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It is not yet determined if Stephen Miller himself got the coronavirus, because that would require a second jump between species. In response to this, Trump said, “She’s a wonderful young woman, Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of the sudden today she tested positive. She hasn’t come into contact with me. She’s spent some time with the vice president. This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.” So because a prophylatic measure isn’t necessarily perfect, better not to use it at all. I think Stormy Daniels said this was pretty much Trump’s approach to condoms.

But if this is the level of security that the elites can expect in their ivory house… how safe is anybody?

Memo to Donnie: Sanitary measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, in addition to washing hands and surfaces, wearing masks in public and practicing social distancing, also include not walking around with your thumb up your ass for over two months.

But here’s the thing, whatever sense of Schadenfreude I might feel at Trump’s suffering is counterbalanced by the fact that it wouldn’t do any good. I mean really, he’s already wheezy, coughy, discolored and suffering obvious circulation problems, so if he got coronavirus, who would know? If he got it – which at this rate might be inevitable – he would either continue in oblivious denial or do what he usually does and make his position the standard that all the other Republicans have to follow if they want to stay in the Real American Patriot He-Man Woman Haters Club.

“Oh yeah, I’ve got a doozy of a virus. Nobody’s sicker than me. You see that lung I just coughed out. Ooh, that’s a beautiful lung. That I can tell you.”

Again, if even governments that don’t have their thumbs up their asses can’t contain the virus under normal conditions, we need to get serious about treating it rather than declaring victory or wishing it away. Let’s look at another issue that’s got everybody’s undies in a wad. There’s supposed to be an impending meat shortage that has already affected prices in most markets – and thus the business chances of those restaurants that are re-opening. Why is that? “It’s actually not a supply problem. It’s really more of a production issue,’ said Katherine Jacobi, President of the Nevada Restaurant Association.” Last month, Smithfield Foods had to close a major meat-processing plant in South Dakota because nearly 300 employees tested positive for COVID-19. This isn’t because the industry is getting shut down. The governor of South Dakota is a Trump supporter. Viceroy Trump, no vegetarian he, actually bothered to use the Defense Production Act to mandate that meat plants stay open, when he was reluctant to do so to boost the manufacture of testing supplies. (Or as I like to say: ‘Priorities.’) The production issue isn’t that the industry was shut down. The meat industry is essential. It’s still running. There is no evidence that the virus can be spread through packaged meat. The problem is that as plants have continued to run at the same or higher pace, more people have been getting the virus and spreading it, and plants have been shut because it is no longer feasible for those people to work. This is exactly what you would expect to happen at the current rates of infection if we do nothing, which we basically are. And that means that what happens at meat processors will happen in other industries. So rather than “recover” the economy and then deal with the virus, we need to deal with the virus and then re-open the economy. If the virus wasn’t already undermining the economy, we wouldn’t have shut it down in the first place.

In the immortal word of Billie Eilish: “Duh.”

Which leads to another private industry that a lot of people think should be public. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals were closing across the country, especially in the rural areas where Trump has usually been strongest. And part of that is because hospitals are private businesses that operate on profit motive like everything else. Part of this is that the public system is state funded and a lot of states are not funding Medicaid services. By contrast, urban hospitals rely largely on “elective” procedures to cover their margins and most of their patients are covered by employer plans, whom they can charge more than Medicare/Medicaid services. But now those hospitals are swamped with COVID-19 cases. It doesn’t help that health coverage is also a for-profit business, which for practical reasons is tied to employment for most people, and the economic shutdown means tens of millions have lost their health insurance along with their jobs.

When liberals disparage the concept of libertarian government or public services, they usually say something like “let’s privatize the fire department.” And actually, we can see from the current clusterfuck that we would be better off with a stronger, more organized federal approach to medical care and redistribution of resources. The problem is that the real reason why we would be better off also reveals why a lot of libertarians would rather privatize the fire department. The point of having less national control over everything is not that things wouldn’t be more organized under a stronger government, it’s that that would only work depending on who’s doing the organizing. A privatized fire department would in theory be worse than a public one that is not built around profit incentives. But even if the public institution were acting on profit incentives, it would make a difference if the company is run by Bill Gates versus Donald Trump. And the fact is that Trump is not a president who just happens to be a businessman, he is a businessman who just happens to have the world’s largest government in his portfolio. Because that’s the way he runs it. And putting a public resource under such a businessman means that rather than socializing our resources, you’ve taken the worst-case scenario of privatization and applied it to the entire country.

The liberal conceit is that we not only can socialize resources, but must do so, and it’s a conceit because it assumes that everyone in government is going to be civic-minded. The premise of libertarianism and (former) conservatism is that we cannot and should not socialize everything because we CAN’T trust that everyone would be civic-minded, and since there is nothing inherently different between humans in the private and public sectors, any person who would be corrupt and vicious in the private sector would be corrupt and vicious in the public sector, only in their case they would have the government’s monopoly on force and authority.

For instance, this week the Supreme Court has been hearing a case between prosecutors in the state of New York and Mr. Trump (using the Justice Department basically as his defense team) in which the prosecutors are asking for the defendant’s financial records and the defendant saying he should be immune to subpoena simply because he’s the president. A legal question which Trump’s old buddy and predecessor has already decided.

If the business sector is corrupt and out of control, there’s a balance against that: the government. But what if the government is corrupt and out of control, and is in fact taken over by corrupt businessmen? Vote them out! But what if the majority vote against the (more) corrupt party doesn’t matter due to the Electoral College? “It’s a republic, not a democracy!” And if what’s left of our checks-and-balances try to hold the corrupt Administration accountable to existing laws and standards? “They’re thwarting the will of the people who elected Our President!!”

Not like it’s going to matter, because the screaming incompetence of government under Trump is going to lead to an even bigger government under Joe Biden, in the increasingly more likely event that he’s elected. A recent New York Magazine focus takes excerpts from Biden’s brainstorming while sitting in quarantine, such as “he said he would forgive federal student-loan debt – $10,000 per person, minimum – and add $200 a month to Social Security checks.” Author Gabriel Benedetti: “And while 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. … While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people – desperate for relief – will have in January.”

And any Republican wails against all this will be taken as just more bad faith from the same people who wail about Tara Reade after over four years of worshiping Monsieur Coup de la Pousse’. These same people will look at the new New Deal, or Great Society, or whatever it’s going to be called, and they will invoke “checks and balances” and the “rule of law”, and all the Democrats will have to do is play the tapes of Adam Schiff at the impeachment trial invoking “the rule of law” to Republican Senators while they sneered and played with fidget spinners.

Thanks to “conservatives” who would rather identify with Russian autocrats than American liberals, most non-Trumpniks see any calls for “freedom” and “states’ rights” as meaning only some people’s freedom to do what they want regardless of who gets hurt.

All the Trumpniks, even the former conservatives whom I know have good brains, have rationalized their worship of the gold-plated calf as a “lesser evil” because he’s supposed to be the only thing protecting American capitalism from a takeover by socialism. Yet as we’ve seen, the capitalist economy, which Trump can only take credit for insofar as he passively chose to not interfere with what he inherited from Obama, is now ruined because of Trump’s active policy of confusion and incompetence. And his ultimate legacy, in creating a need for government assistance, government healthcare, and organized government policy, is that Donald Trump will end up doing more to create socialism in America than any president since FDR.

And that’s if he loses in 2020.

If he wins re-election, of course Trump will do that much more to turn America into a socialist country. Of course, since Trump is a self-described nationalist, his Socialism would be more of the National type.

“Do not think that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of these answers. They know that their statements are empty and contestable, but it amuses them to make such statements; it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much, they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: Their only fear is that they will look ridiculous or that their embarrassment will make a bad impression on a third party whom they want to get on their side. Thus if the anti-Semite is impervious, as everyone has been able to observe, to reason and experience, it is not because his conviction is so strong, but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen to be impervious.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”, 1944

A few weeks ago the frequent accounts of Joe Biden’s “handsy” behavior parted way for a more serious accusation. In April 2019, a former staffer for Senator Biden, Tara Reade, accused him of inappropriate touching while she was on his staff in the 1990s but did not describe anything graphic. But in March of this year she approached a journalist and escalated the complaint, saying that in 1993, Joe Biden had pressed her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers. Only after this did she file a report with Washington, D.C. Police. Reade says she did file a written complaint at the time with the Senate personnel office, but she says she does not have a copy and it has not been found in the Senate records.

The latest developments are that (after cancelling an interview with Fox News) Reade did secure an interview with Megan Kelly on Kelly’s own social media pages, where Reade declared she would take a polygraph if Joe Biden takes one, and escalated further by calling on Biden to suspend his campaign. Not only that, on May 7 Douglas Wigdor, whose firm has represented six victims of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, has announced he is representing Reade.

While it seems (to ‘conservatives’) that the liberal media were trying to sweep this whole thing under the rug, that is less and less the case.

The goal here is not any old-school journalist sense of both-sides fairness and objectivity, but the media’s need for sensationalism and ratings, and if that means making Discount Caligula more feasible than he would be otherwise, then they’ll do it. Trump has said more than once that the media will save him because he’s great for their numbers. And more than once, I’ve said he may be right.

Because as I’d mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s a bit suspicious that this particular accusation came up at exactly the point that Trump is beset by unfriendly news on all sides and it looks like all Biden has to do to win in November is show up and not die of old age. The same people who fret about balancing “#metoo” with the need to support a liberal over Trump aren’t going to stress how Reade made a story already damaging to Biden that much more of a criminal accusation, or how her anti-Biden efforts increased as she supported Bernie Sanders politically, or how she wrote a 2018 article (since deleted) on the left-wing Medium site waxing rhapsodic about “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” and talking about her political evolution “after reading authors like Noam Chomsky, (and) my eyes opened to the great extent of our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.” But this is the money quote: “President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail, using up their energy, while he gains position. Currently, President Putin has a higher approval rating in America then the American President, particularly with women. [‘Citation needed‘ – Wikipedia] President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. Although his job may seem like in the words of writer, Elizabeth Gilbert on genius, ‘trying to swallow the sun.’ This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women. Especially since the bloated, American President is so negative, denigrating and dismissive of anyone but himself as he stumbles even playing golf (which is not a real sport anyway but a past time, sorry golfers). “

(It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone could support Putin while denigrating Trump; after all, most open Trumpniks are more fond of Putin’s approach to government than our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.)

A Vox journalist who is personally sympathetic to Reade said, “If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers, her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we are here.”

Which is another reason that news outlets have been leery of getting more involved, because this could all blow up in their faces. But with the involvement of Wigdor, the stakes have been raised, and this campaign is at least less amateur hour than the Party of Pizzagate attempt to smear Anthony Fauci as a sexual assaulter.

The problem being that escalating the stakes to the level of “suspend your campaign or we have a rape investigation” means that someone’s bluff is gonna be called. And lest we assume that having a hot lawyer means that your case is solid, I’m old enough to remember when Michael Avenatti was a hot lawyer. That would make me at least two.

Until this actually does get investigated, this is just the rationalization for some people to say (with a straight face) “I won’t vote for a creepy senile rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job.”
Well. Good thing we’ve got TWO parties, so there’s a real CHOICE.

Let us go straight to the worst-case scenario, because let’s face it, this is Trumpworld, and in Trumpworld, the worst-case scenario is the most likely one. The worst-case scenario of course is that Joe Biden actually did rape Tara Reade. That would of course require a serious investigation actually proving the charges, which at this point are no more substantiated – or capable of substantiation – than E. Jean Carroll’s recent charge against Trump, or 22 other separate allegations from individual women over the years, before he ran for president, and are certainly no more grounded than Trump actually confessing on tape that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” or telling Howard Stern that as owner of the Miss Universe pageants he could walk into contestants’ dressing rooms. (The Miss Universe franchise includes Miss Teen USA.)

So for this to get beyond where the Trump accusations have already gone, there would have to be a more developed investigation of Reade’s charges. There’s a recent piece in The Daily Beast, succinctly titled, “Hell No, Joe Biden Shouldn’t Play By Rules That Donald Trump Never Has.”
Yes, I know, it’s Michael Tomasky. But he’s not wrong. In particular, I point out the following:

“I’d like to live in a world where Biden could do the clearly honorable and above-board thing here. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor. That’s Trump. “

Let me re-emphasize: We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor.

That’s Trump.

When Democrats in 2020 had an amazing surfeit of candidates, and a very strong Bernie Sanders run, and yet Joe Biden attained a strategic victory even before the virus shutdown, that indicates that voters in his party wanted Joe Biden. They may have been thinking strategically, but ultimately, they wanted Joe Biden. When Republicans in 2016 had a surfeit of candidates, most of whom did not have Trump’s vices, his pettiness, his disrespect, and they nominated him anyway, that indicates to me that Republicans, and the others who voted with them that election, wanted Trump, not despite his pettiness and disrespect but actively because of these vices. For Democrats, supporting a potential rapist is a contradiction. For Republicans, it’s the whole point.

If you’re going to say rape is the disqualifier… you’re going to give TRUMP a pass?? You’re so desperate to win that you’ve completely thrown away your Christian ™ morality, but you assume Those People aren’t so desperate to win that they wouldn’t throw away their feminist morality? Why should NotTrumpniks care about their guy committing rape when YOU DON’T??

This is the standard YOU’RE operating on. You don’t get to cry foul when the enemy plays by your rules.

And yes, Trumpniks, I DID tell Clintonoids this four years ago.

If your position is that They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck, you haven’t actually abandoned the responsibility of judgment. You have merely changed the standard of judgment to They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck. In which case, Trump is clearly the superior to both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but then what is the point of acting like their vices are disqualifying?

This is the problem. Not just that tu quoque works both ways, which was Clinton’s problem facing Trump. The key is the Trumpnik desire to have it both ways. Saying They’re All Crooked and They All Suck is their rationalization for worshiping the most crooked and sucktastic politician of all time, precisely because of his flaws. But it’s also a means of disarming anybody who actually believes in morals and standards. After all, hypocrisy is disloyalty to a standard that one actually believes in, and one cannot be a hypocrite if he has abandoned all standards. The Trumpnik’s only standard is Trump, and if Trump changes his mind whenever he feels like it, so does the Trumpnik.

(This, incidentally, is why Trumpism can’t be considered ‘conservatism’ because conservatism was always based on the idea that there are human standards that should be more durable than one dysfunctional person’s whim. But then, the problems with conservatism in practice help explain how these guys went for Trump.)

There was a recent journalistic effort through the New York Times called The 1619 Project, which was about how the slave economy of colonial America was in fact at the foundation of colonial culture and thus at the foundation of the American republic. Right-wingers (with some reason) have critiqued the articles as an attack on the generally positive message of the American Dream and the premise of freedom. There are in fact a lot of leftists who act as though the whole American project is invalidated “because slavery”, not withstanding the inspiration of the United States as a colonial revolt to people in Haiti, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. But in February, on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah hosted the main writer of 1619, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and among other things she talked about was how her black father was the only person in her Missisippi neighborhood who flew the American flag. And Noah asked her Jones about her thesis that “black people have the job of making it a truth.” And her response (3:39) is, “When Thomas Jefferson writes those famous English words, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’, he owns 130 human beings, even some of his own family members. And he understands that one-fifth of the population will enjoy none of these rights and liberties. We are founded on a hypocrisy, a paradox. But black people read those words and said, ‘oh we believe that those words are true and apply to us, and fight.”

As I say: It is possible for two things to be true at the same time. It is a fact that Jefferson was both a slaveowner and a founder of classical liberalism. You can look at the hypocrisy of that and throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater in rejecting the American project over its contradictions, or you can see what is good in the project and work to make it more consistent and apply its rewards to everybody. It is in fact the anti-liberals (not conservatives, but people who hearken back to the age before Jefferson) who insist that freedom is zero-sum and that only some people can have it.

If you’re going to say the two factions of duopoly are both hypocrites, the difference is between the one that might reform towards actual progress and consistency and the one that wants to go in the other direction. If that’s not good enough for you, liberals, well again: THAT’s why I’m a Libertarian. Rationalizing that the corrupt party that might clean up it’s act is actually going to do so is not good enough in the short run, and it’s a large part of why people didn’t trust you guys enough to carry Hillary Clinton in the states where she needed it. Which is why even more than minimum wage or national health care, what this country really needs are election reforms like mail voting and automatic registration (as opposed to making people jump through flaming hoops just to exercise a civil ‘right’) and especially ranked choice voting so there’s MORE than two people to vote for. That might hurt Democrats, which is why they haven’t done it yet. But at this point, it’s a matter of their survival, not just ours.

In point of fact, both major parties ARE crooked, and they DO all suck, but this is my comparison. Democrats are the Mob. Republicans are that scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker sees the mountain of money that the Mob has compiled for him, lights one side on fire, and says “I’m only burning MY half.”

It might be one thing to play “I’m rubber, you’re glue” in a world where the economy is good, and politics is just a game and people take it on the same level as rooting for the Cowboys over the Redskins. (NFL team metaphor being completely intentional.) But now there’s coronavirus, and while Trump is not the direct cause of the actual virus, his policies, or lack of such, have made him the proximate cause of the problem in this country. And for a lot of people, especially those who were already in compromised health, the choice in November is a bet on whether they will be alive next year – assuming that they survive long enough to vote this year.

Not to mention that even Trump, with that walnut between his ears, seems to understand how a truly serious investigation of Biden could backfire on him, just as an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh would have caused real problems if it hadn’t been carefully manicured from beginning to end by the Republicans in control of the confirmation process. Republicans will not be in control of this process. After all, it’s not like someone on the Left couldn’t make a strategically timed accusation against Trump. And if “the liberal media” takes an investigation of Biden seriously without doing a serious investigation of Trump’s “playboy” history, it won’t just be the Right questioning their credibility.

No, however likely it is that Tara Reade is not lying, it is far more likely that the charges she makes against Biden will go the way of all the other charges against Trump: stoked for sensationalism and ratings, but nothing will ever come of them, because taking them seriously would turn over the wrong stones.

So Democrats (and hopefully other non-Trumpniks) will go back to supporting Biden even knowing he had problems with women, which they already did. And Trump will go back to his otherwise successful Karl Rove approach of always accusing the enemy of the thing he’s been doing all along.

So next month, he’s probably going to blame Joe Biden for bankrupting Atlantic City.

“This is the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”

– Network

On Thursday April 23, Viceroy Donald Trump had his daily press briefing/propaganda rally/Airing of the Grievances and brought out Bill Bryan at the science and technology division at the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Bryan told the press,

“If I may have the first slide please. And while that’s coming up, our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the (corona) virus, both surfaces and in the air. We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus. … If you look at the fourth line, you inject the sunlight into that, you inject UV rays into that, the same effects on line two as 70 to 75 degrees with 80% humidity on the surface and look at line four but now you inject the sun, the half-life goes from six hours to two minutes. That’s how much of an impact UV rays has on the virus.” He went on to say, “We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just bring it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva. This is not the end of our work. “

In response, this is what Donald Trump actually said in his April 23 press briefing:

“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”

This made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move.

I bring up the original context for all the cultists in the Church of Jesus Trump Latter-Day Suckers who think that their Messiah was “taken out of context” as though we can’t just replay the video tape or get the transcript (like I did) and as if the people who wank off three typos in one sentence are going to judge anyone else’s command of English. This was also the excuse of White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany last Friday when she said, “President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing. Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.” Article: “But Trump undercut that defense and others pretty quickly Friday, telling reporters he was just kidding around when he suggested injecting disinfectants: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” he told reporters in the White House, according to a pool report.”

Was hoser being “sarcastic” about a half an hour after posing that idea when he lit into Philip Rucker from the Post, when Rucker said, “You’re the president and people tuning in to these briefings they want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do. They’re not looking for rumors” and Trump responded, “Hey, Phil. I’m the President and you’re fake news. And you know what I’ll say to you, I’ll say very nicely… I know you well. I know you well because I know the guy, I see what he writes. He’s a total faker”? See, that’s the problem. If ANYTHING you say can be taken as sarcasm, how do we know when you’re being serious? Donnie, are you going to say that you were just being “sarcastic” when you ran for President and this whole thing was just an elaborate practical joke that you and the Clintons set up to show what a bunch of gullible power-lusting goons the Republicans were? It would be nice to get the grownups back now that everyone’s gotten the punchline.

With all the dumbass things Donnie has said, and WILL say for the rest of his life, this “injection” musing may just pass in the wind like every other mental fart that comes out of his upper asshole. But it’s kind of telling that it hasn’t yet. Maybe because the one thing that Trump was good at by right-wing standards was getting out of the way of the economy, and as long as that was good, nobody cared if the president acted like a wannabe Mussolini. But it was Trump’s interference with our disease monitoring systems, his refusal to respond to the initial reports from China, and his not being straight with the public because he didn’t want Wall Street to crash that caused Wall Street to crash, because he created uncertainty that didn’t need to exist. And now that this country has far more coronavirus cases than any other Western nation, we would like real leadership and not a “reality” TV clown boy.

I can actually believe that some part of Trump was being sarcastic, or only musing, because this crisis has already revealed that he doesn’t take the whole issue seriously. Like where he justified the shutdown protestors as having “cabin fever,” which apparently is supposed to justify risking actual fever. Or when he said “we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” when the phrase is actually “can’t let the cure be worse than the disease.” But then when he had his injection idea, he said, “I’m not a doctor, but I have a very good (pointed to his head) you-know-what.” The word is “brain.” But given how Trump’s brain is rapidly withering from willful neglect, maybe “brain” and “disease” are the two words that dropped out of his vocabulary last week.

The criticism over April 23 – some of it apparently internal – caused Trump to announce later Friday that the Administration might “scale back” the daily briefings, and over the weekend, in one of his decreasing moments of lucidity, tweeted, “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

But be that as it may, homeboy went back to press briefings on Monday April 27, this time whining about how we had such a wonderful best economy ever before the China Virus ruined it. But again, at the time China was failing to contain the virus from global spread, Trump was tweeting, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!“

In his defense, Trump might have forgotten about this position for the same reason that he forgot the words “disease” and “brain.”

Who knows what Trump will do next? Will he make Ivanka the Senate pro tem? Will he replace Dr. Fauci with Dr. Oz? Will he declare the official language of the United States to be Swedish? Nobody knows! Not even him! Tune in tomorrow at 5:45 (or whenever he feels like walking out) for The Trump Show! ™

But this week I want to go back to a hidden truth in Trump’s Sunday tweet, where (to repeat) he said “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

Like much of what Trump says, this piece is inadvertently confessional. On several levels. First: it’s his decision to have these press briefings in the first place. Secondly, whether you think the press “asks nothing but hostile questions” it isn’t true that they refuse “to report the truth or facts accurately” or that the result is “Fake News.” Leaving aside the point that in Trumpspeak, “Fake News” is not fake news but any information that contradicts The Leader or makes him look bad or feel bad. When news networks cover these events they usually just let the camera roll. They are reporting the facts accurately. The event itself is the news.

But then there’s the kicker: “They get record ratings”. And they do. In late March, the events were marked as having ratings of around 8.5 million viewers, which caused Trump to brag that even Teh Failing New York Times was showing he had better ratings than the “Bachelor” finale.

In large respect, this whole foofaraw illustrates the love-hate (or rather, co-dependent) relationship Trump has with the media. He picks on them almost the way Hitler picked on the Jews. (No, Trumpniks, I’m not saying your innocent little boy is Hitler. Hitler actually ran a successful economy for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.) And yet, one could argue that if it weren’t for the media, Trump would not be president. These guys gave Trump all sorts of free media, and you know Trump loves nothing more than not having to pay for something. And it was all because everyone, especially the media, knew that Hillary Clinton had all the appeal of shredded wheat, and they dreaded the prospect of covering her coast to the coronation and subsequent four years with nothing more than the business-as-usual scandals to look forward to. Trump was their godsend. His job was to be dumb for public consumption, and despite being more “extreme” in his platform than the third-party candidates, news networks latched on to him because he was an entertaining buffoon who was great for ratings.

Trump is much more their creation than he is that of Vladimir Putin or even Mark Burnett, and that has to create a certain tension, even in the doubtful event that he is aware of it. The fact that he needs attention like a lawn needs manure, the fact that even now he needs the media more than they need him, just reinforces the point that Trump isn’t the invincible Sun King and is not a self-made man. Everything he has is from someone else’s largesse, and being made aware of this makes Trump realize he’s a fraud. The real tension is that his only recourse to confirm his importance is to go out and hog the spotlight and talk about what he’s supposedly doing, and the more he does this, the more obvious it is that he’s a fraud.

The few times I’ve seen Morning Joe on MSDNC recently, Joe Scarborough and to a lesser extent Mika Brezinski have been pushing the idea that Trump is going senile, which as I’ve already implied is very easy to believe. But I think the reason these two in particular are pushing the insinuation so hard is because they used to be friends with Trump in his pre-Caudillo days, there’s been a certain amount of bad blood between them as his behavior in politics has alienated them personally, and most importantly, they know for these reasons that Trump is watching their show.

I’ve said more than once that “gaslighting” only works if your target already has little sense of objective reality, and since Trump’s only sense of outside reality is “the shows”, he is far more vulnerable to gaslighting than the liberals who complain about it.

A similar point was made in Pajiba, no less. There seems to be a deliberate effort to lionize virus specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, not just because he’s genuinely competent, but because that perception antagonizes Trump. (Remember, Trump pushed Alex Azar out of the coronavirus czar role and gave it to Mike Pence as a publicity stunt, then took over the coronavirus briefings cause he didn’t like Pence getting the attention.) Dustin Rowles: “This is all coming to a head, because we have a feckless, thin-skinned idiot for a President, and also because the media has been dying to see this play out. Everyone in the media knows exactly what Anthony Fauci thinks of Donald Trump. The entire world knows what Anthony Fauci thinks of Donald Trump. Anthony Fauci rang the bell on this pandemic early on, and the President didn’t listen to him. If the President had listened, thousands of lives would be saved. But Fauci is honest to God trying to do what’s best for the country, which is to give us the truth while also trying to remain on the President’s good side by [pretending to give] him the benefit of the doubt. Fauci wants to keep his job, because his job is so important to our health.

“But the press? They’re pushing Fauci, basically daring him to sh*t on the President, because we all need the clicks, because the ad rates are gone. And so, the media wants more than just another NYTimes investigation showing without any doubt whatsoever that Trump’s slow response to the pandemic led to the massive loss of life, the media wants the most trusted man in America right now to weigh in on that investigation and indict Trump for his failures.” His conclusion: “The political media is more interested in pitting a hero (Fauci) against a villain (Trump), which may provide a few more (mostly worthless) clicks, but it is decidedly not in the interest of our collective public health. Baiting Trump into firing Fauci, which seems almost inevitable at this point, will not make us safer. “

All this ties into a debate that is often held within the media itself as MSDNC stars like Rachel Maddow vocally question the worth of these little shindigs and others (like Ari Melber) flat-out cut away from the press briefings once they drift away from any public-information purpose. One of the few reporters who deliberately takes the traditional “sunlight is the best disinfectant” position is Olivia Nuzzi, now writing for New York Magazine, who did a piece on April 28 saying among other things, “Just like the reality-TV contestants who have walked the corridors of Trump’s West Wing, I’m not here to make friends. If members of the press endeavor to do so, I believe we’d more likely be protecting the president from himself, while helping him prove that the press condescends to the public it claims to serve.

“What a lot of Trump critics miss is that the biggest threat to his presidency isn’t the pandemic and the collapse of the global economy. It’s Trump. The more we see him — rambling, ranting, casually spitballing about bleach and sunlight — the clearer that becomes. But that’s not the media’s problem, and taking the spotlight off of him as he displays the full extent of his inadequacies would only serve to help him and to make the public less informed about what the federal government is doing — or not doing.

“Watching Trump dangerously improvise is, in itself, information. It’s pure access to his thoughts and ideas and emotional state, presented to the world in real time.”

This is itself a confessional statement. If you’re a right-winger convinced that Teh Librul Media are out to get Our President, or a left-winger convinced that they’re not doing enough, the fact is that nothing Teh Librul Media could do to slant the news will set the American people against Trump more than just keeping the camera on him to show what he really is.

But if anything that is an even bigger reason to put a stop to all this.

If Trump is being too cute by half in acting as though his press briefings are more public information than self-promotion, then so are the media. We are certainly not taking the spotlight off Trump to make the public more informed about what the federal government is doing or not doing. We are not putting nearly as much attention on the fact that at least one Governor felt the need to procure personal protective equipment from South Korea and have the state National Guard secure it at an undisclosed location to make sure Trump’s federal government wouldn’t hoard it. We are not emphasizing how much of this bailout went to the people who already have money and influence while most taxpayers got a one-time check of $1200. And some didn’t even get that.

No, the press would rather cover The Trump Show.

In her article, Nuzzi says that the other approach to presenting Trump unfiltered is the observation of an Australian journalist who said it was a “shock” to endure 30 minutes of “unfiltered meanderings” because when Trump’s words are processed through the media, the effect is that Trump sounds more coherent than he is. “I realized how much of the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.” (In other words, translating Trumpspeak into coherent English, and assuming that there is substance to translate.)

This is a good point, but it avoids the other reality: The medium is the message, and the message is the medium. What Trump counts on is the air of authority that comes from being President, and his lust for power and the trappings of office are a means of justifying the self-image that had always been contradicted by his grubby reality. The fact that homeboy is on TV matters to him more than whether what he says is helping him. Because he knows that certain people will go along with anything he says because he’s the one saying it. This is why liberals and mainstream gatekeepers were wailing about Trump offering quack medical advice in stream-of-consciousness observations, while others said, “Oh, it was just musing out loud, it’s not like anyone was taking it seriously.” Well, no less than Fox News said that poison control centers have reported an increase in calls regarding exposure to cleaners and disinfectants, and that was on April 20, before the press conference in question.

Trump is in all ways unfit for office, is too emotionally incontinent to handle the stresses of the office, and his uninformed opinion is at least a factor in getting people killed. It is in fact, not good for him to be out there engaged in a mutual baiting game with the press. It increases the likelihood that he is going to act out and do something really dangerous. And if the press realizes this and continues playing the game anyway, then they too care more about self-promotion than informing the public.

The same press keeps telling us to practice sanitation and social distancing because when there is a virus you have to prevent it from having a vector. In the absence of a serious treatment which may be months away, we have to do everything to prevent the disease from being communicated. And some people would flaunt common-sense guidelines because they have a short-term conception of freedom. Yet the same press, rather than protecting the president from himself, or protecting us from him, would rather maintain themselves as a medium for political contagion than abandon their short-term business priorities.

The only treatment is social distancing.

“Leadership: Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.” -Donald Trump, Twitter, Nov. 8, 2013

“Responsibility’s a heavy responsibility, man.” -Richard “Cheech” Marin

Hi, Trumpniks! Sick of winning yet?

No really, are you sick yet?

Boy, I bet it was fun the last few years getting to lord it over all those liberals and vegans and “experts” who read books and know stuff. And having Gary Busey’s idiot sidekick as president was fun, in a sliding-your-dick-against-a-cheese-grater sense of ‘fun,’ but then the stock market crashed and you had to decide whether having a job was worth Gramma dying.

In the fight against coronavirus, Trump says we are fighting a war against an “invisible enemy”, which must be difficult for him, since his usual psychology is to assume that someone is the enemy just by their appearance. But what do Our Wartime President and his cult know about real war? Have they ever sacrificed? In World War II, would they have put up with rationing? Would they have put up with blackouts? Would they have donated blood? Would they have volunteered for the military? Or would they dodge the draft? If these “patriots” had been around in the ’30s and ’40s, would they have treated military preparedness as a joke, said the whole war effort was a socialist plot against our freedoms, and spread rumors that Roosevelt’s real name was “Rosenfeld”?

Maybe.

Most of the actual “war” has been fought on the state level even as the Party of Trump creates a resistance against the program. Take Michigan as a major example.

While the Left holds Governor Gretchen Whitmer as a hero, largely because Trump seems to have picked on her as his latest bete noire, right-wingers have varying degrees of skepticism. In several pieces, Reason Magazine pointed out that some Michigan sheriffs are refusing to enforce her virus shutdown orders, because among other things the Michigan shutdown “includes a prohibition on large retailers selling allegedly nonessential items, such as paint and outdoor supplies, meaning stores like Home Depot had to tape off those sections from customers. Lawncare services have been temporarily shuttered. With very few exceptions, the order prohibits people from traveling between residences, even to their cottages in the northern part of the state, where there are few COVID-19 cases. Residents of other states, however, may still travel to such properties in Michigan if permitted by their respective home states. Individuals may not use motorboats, but they are authorized to use boats without motors. The order bans “public and private gatherings of any kind,” yet it still allows for the sale of lottery tickets, the proceeds of which go toward funding K-12 education in the state.”

Well, as I keep saying: it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. It is possible to want to take the virus seriously and make serious public preparations against it, and also to say that government can go too far in saying what’s good for the public. But if you don’t like Whitmer, I give you the same advice that I give to anyone who doesn’t like Trump: Next election, VOTE THE FUCKER OUT.

That doesn’t seem to be good enough for some people in Michigan and other states who came out at the end of the week and over the weekend into Monday to block traffic – including ambulances – while carrying firearms, wearing military gear and waving Trump campaign banners and Confederate flags.

Yeah, because nothing says you love freedom and America more than flying the traitor flag of a slaveholders’ rebellion.

And as simultaneous leader and follower, President ALL CAPS twitted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA” over its Second Amendment policies. First off: Liberate them from whom? Liberate them how? With “Second Amendment solutions”? Why, because Democrats are now in charge of those states? Gee, who was it saying that people couldn’t accept the results of the last election?

There has been a lot of talk about “freedom” and “liberty” being thrown around, not only by right-wingers but by leftists who look at them and see “liberty” as a joke. In fact the coronavirus crisis (the crisis being not the virus itself but our response to it) does a lot to demonstrate why we don’t have a more libertarian world or in particular a more libertarian America. In a perfect libertarian world (itself a subjective hypothetical) we would need less laws because people would be educated enough to make decisions for themselves and exercise common sense. We have all the laws we do because people do not have education and common sense. And every time there’s a crisis, government uses that as a pretext to take more and more liberties, and they can do so because people do not exercise common sense.

Liberty doesn’t just mean rights, it means responsibility. And contra libertarians, it used to be conservatives making that assertion. Liberty means not only taking responsibility for one’s free will but accepting that we need to protect others’ rights. But some people define “rights” as belonging only to them, not even to “white people” but only to white people of a certain tribe and political alignment. And these rights do not imply taking responsibility for one’s own decisions or extending the same right to others.

Just as their role model demands all the power and none of the responsibility, the cult demands the freedom to do as they please without acknowledging the consequences. Such shutdown policies that have been enacted – on a state-by-state level – are based on observation of other countries and the fact that even now, we have far more cases and more total deaths than any other Western country (not counting China or Islamic states that are not transparent in their reporting). You go against these policies, the likelihood is you will get the virus and spread it to others. And yet such folks are willing to say that someone has to die and bear the statistical loss because staying the course would be a greater cost to the economy. And yes, they’re still calling themselves “pro-life.”

These people are just as serious about being pro-death as they are about being pro-life, which is to say: Not. They are no more serious about saying “someone has to die” than they are about someone else’s unwanted pregnancy. It’s not THEIR problem. The reason leftists can say things like “name one member of your family whom you are willing to sacrifice for capitalism” is because they can. Because with what we know about the virus, if you do not practice distancing, that challenge is no longer an abstract hypothetical. It’s not ‘their’ problem any more, it’s YOUR problem. But as soon as it becomes YOUR problem, Lawdy, it’s the biggest injustice in the world. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.

If one New Yorker dies every 12 minutes over three days, nobody panics, that’s all part of the plan. But shut down lawn care service, and everyone loses their minds!

We are seeing the wisdom of Jello’s phrase. Certain people are more agitated at the loss of conveniences they have been accustomed to than the actual rights that they never bothered to exercise.

Your president is blowing millions to pacify the farming community and compensate for the fact that they have been rendered uncompetitive in the free market due to government policy (first tariffs and now the virus response). And that isn’t socialism?

In the last few days we have had more and more reports of Our President’s federal government deliberately intercepting shipments of medical supplies to states after the states had procured and paid for them. And THAT isn’t a government overreach?

Philando Castile had a license to carry a gun and a policeman killed him anyway. Are you protesting THAT government abuse?

Flint, Michigan STILL doesn’t have reliable drinking water. Are Michiganders protesting that?

No. You’re protesting because you can’t grow seeds or get a haircut.

If there’s anything more contradictory than liberals demanding the Federal government exercise more power when they know they can’t trust it under current management, it’s so-called small-government conservatives whining about state governors after all these years talking about federalism and “states’ rights.”

And yet, in their continuing pathology in wanting it both ways, Trumpniks insist that their Leader is the rebel against “the establishment.” Never mind that he needed the Republican establishment to get anything done at all, and to keep his ass in power after he incriminated himself. Look, Trumpniks, I know most of you are AM radio fans, so you’ve read Rules for Radicals, right? Remember the twelfth rule: “The twelfth rule is: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. ” In other words, once you’ve achieved your goal, you are in the position that your target was in, and now you have to actually do those things you said your enemy wasn’t doing. In still other words, you can’t stick it to The Man when YOU ARE THE MAN.

Your people are in charge. And while you may not control the House any more, you still have the Senate, which means you still appoint judges. You have a whole government of people who think like you. Not just Trump, but people like Supreme Court Justice “Boofing” Brett Kavanaugh, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Congressman Louie Gohmert, representing the great state of Gohmert.

How can you hate the government when YOU ARE the government?

You got everything you wanted from a President who’s just like you, for at least two years. So why are you whining?

You’re whining because state governors are going against the political correctness of Fox News and AM radio and the Internet and enforcing public health restrictions, and they can because that’s the way federalism works. Because it was set up that way by the Founders precisely to make sure that a corrupt autocrat couldn’t have too much power, and you “freedom” lovers are mad that your little King can’t do whatever he wants to stop them.

Freedom and balance of powers means that no one has absolute power, INCLUDING YOU.

So do me and the rest of us actual libertarians a favor and SHUT THE GODDAMN FUCK UP, because people like you are making the leftists look good.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: The real worst-case scenario of Republican domination is that they will turn America into a one-party state – that one party being the Democrats. Because after Republicans completely destroy the political reputation of anybody to the right of Joe Biden, the only competition in our politics will be Political Hack Democrats (like Biden) versus Social Justice Warrior Democrats (like AOC).

Because keep in mind Trumpniks, the main reason your control is not complete any more is because of the midterm elections and the last round of state elections, which occurred after 2016, when you had both houses of Congress, and the effects of Republican dominance in the states were becoming clear. If 2018 demonstrated anything, it’s that the more the Republicans cater to ooga-booga tribalists who hate science and fear evil spirits, the more likely it is that more people like them will turn into people like ME: Former Republicans who are sick of their shit.

I mean, back when Republicans hadn’t completely pissed away their reputation as a party of liberty, the joke was that “a conservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.” Well, by that standard, a libertarian is a conservative who got mugged by Republicans.

No matter how you interpret the 2018 midterms, the special elections, and the 2019 Kentucky election, it comes down to three factors: Either more people voted for Democrats than in 2016, more people who voted Trump in 2016 voted third-party/Libertarian in the next election or more people who voted Trump just stayed home. Possibly all three.

Because if lots of people (including me) agree with “conservatives” about how incompetent and venal the Democrats are, and they voted them back anyway, what does that say about Republican incompetence and venality?

And seriously kids: I don’t like this either. I don’t like going without clubs, and restaurants, and movie theaters. I don’t like being told I CAN’T do something. I know it’s a huge issue not being able to physically go to church. But if there’s any one person to blame for the loss of your liberties, blame the guy who was for the ‘China virus’ before he was against it. Blame the president who killed the Pandemic Response team, who removed the agents we had in China to observe disease trends, and who, like the World Health Organization, took China’s lead in the early stages of the Wuhan spread because no one wanted the Communist government to look bad. Blame Trump, who was informed by his own people what was going on, but who said in January, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” It was your right-wing capitalist icon who wrecked the market by giving Wall Street mixed signals, and it was your libertarian rebel who did China’s bidding, and that’s why the governors have to shut down the stores, because YOUR president didn’t want this country to be prepared for a pandemic.

You wanted a Third World dictator who said he’d do everything by himself. That’s what you got. Liberty for other people wasn’t important to you, and now you’re living with the result of what YOU wanted.

Look, Trumpniks: You had your fun for three years. You got to do everything you wanted to this country, and as many predicted, you completely fucked it up. Now it’s time for you to sit down, shut up and let the grownups run things again.

Or else come November, you’re really gonna have something to protest.

“Why is this night different from all other nights?”

“Because our country is misruled by a retarded sociopath who doesn’t care if we live or die.”

“Oh.”

Wednesday morning, April 9 – Passover – Bernie Sanders announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign. Supposedly he is “negotiating” with Joe Biden, but has not endorsed him. Nevertheless with all other candidates out, Biden, former Senator and Vice President, is the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Look, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise in the long run. Not just because Sanders was too easily baited and branded as a “socialist” when that word doesn’t mean the same thing to most Americans that it seems to mean to him. But the reason for that common impression is that America is, on the whole, conservative. Not in the “we hate abortion and gays” sense but in the broader sense of a play-it-safe, work-within-the-system temperament. And sad to say, most Americans seem to prefer a male President to a female one, an older presidential candidate to a younger one, an Anglo-Protestant or Irish Catholic to an atheist or ethnic Jew, and somebody who thinks that America is a fundamentally good place that just needs to be kept on track as opposed to a radical who just wants to burn the motherfucker down.

This isn’t like 2016. If you don’t like Joe Biden, you can’t say you didn’t have enough choices. But voters in the main rounds didn’t like what they got. Kamala Harris? Too pushy, too hard on criminal suspects “of color.” Elizabeth Warren? Too lecturing, too vague. Pete Buttigieg? Too young, too gay. Amy Klobuchar? Too Klobuchar.

And yet, the Left is not happy. They say Joe Biden is “sundowning.” He’s got all kinds of baggage from his time in the Senate, including grilling Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Trumpniks are still going to shout “BURISMA” like it’s a magic word that strikes you with lightning and gives you superpowers. And, supposedly, along with all Biden’s documented cases of inappropriate touching of women, there is a former Biden Senate aide, Tara Reade, who is now saying that in one of their office meetings he pushed her up against the wall and went up her skirt, penetrating her with his fingers. Reade is a Sanders supporter who told reporters she was “deliberately holding interviews only with left-wing outlets” and her story is considered a “credible accusation” mainly by the hard Left, the Trump Right, Reason Magazine, and other people who have a vested interest in making Shinola out of shit.

Y’all notice that this “credible accusation” was never brought up until Biden secured the nomination?

Y’all realize that Trump had two years of Republican control in the Senate AND the House, and they could’ve used that time to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden to their hearts’ content, and it was only after they lost the House and Biden was announcing a presidential run that Hunter Biden working for Burisma became the biggest, most scandalous injustice of 2019? (Y’know, OTHER than Trump getting impeached over it?)

And even this week when Sanders made his announcement, Trump pandered to you, going “OH poor Bernie!! He woulda gotten the nomination, but the system is RIGGED!”

This is why liberals fail. You keep reading the Republicans’ script and thinking it’s yours.

“The system is rigged”? Yeah, I’ve been telling you, the system IS rigged, but that’s NOT why Bernie lost.

I mean, all’y’all saying “I’m only voting Bernie in the general”, if more of you had bothered to show up for the primaries in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, maybe Bernie would be going to the general. Just saying.

As it is, when you threaten not to vote in November, the mainstream liberals and NeverTrumpers will look at you and go, “it’s not like you’re voting in enough numbers now.”

I mean kids, if being a senile potential rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job automatically disqualifies one to be president, you may want to sit down in a strong chair while I explain who the president is now.

Because who the president is now, and what the Banana Republican Party is now, is bearing on our current situation.

The day before, Tuesday, was the primary for Wisconsin. Even given that people were telling Bernie to drop out, the vote needed to be held because this is actually a state election in which one of the state Supreme Court races is at stake. But coronavirus has shut down a lot of states, and a lot of state Democratic parties had agreed to postpone their primaries. There is already talk of making the Democratic National Convention virtual. Earlier this year, Mike Dewine, the pro-life, conservative Republican Governor of Ohio, had postponed their primary at the last minute, and that created a certain amount of controversy. So in Wisconsin, Democratic Governor Tommy Evers agreed with the Republican-controlled legislature that the state contest would proceed as scheduled. But that was before people got a grip on how bad coronavirus was and why social distancing was necessary. So Evers tried to postpone the election, the legislature refused to let him, and they took the case to the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court (who have a justice race on the ballot).

The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided – by video conference – that it was safe for people to go out and vote. The Governor immediately took the case to the US Supreme Court, and the Court decided – by video conference – that it was safe for people to go out and vote. In addition, SCOTUS decided that there would be no extension for absentee ballots.

Mr. Trump was asked about this in one of his lookit-me-I’m-the-president press conferences, where a reporter asked, “You voted by mail in Florida’s election, last month, didn’t you?”

“Sure,” he replied. “I can vote by mail.”

“How do you reconcile with that?”

“Because I’m allowed to,” Trump said.

Incidentally, Trump also announced that the federal government is ending support for national coronavirus testing as of April 10. Good Friday. [NPR just announced that the government is reversing course on this and continuing the program after all.]

Now, it’s gonna be bad enough with the Supreme Court as a 5-4 majority of relatively young and healthy conservative justices for the foreseeable future, but it is getting increasingly obvious that they will take up and throw down decisions with little regard for how partisan or ridiculous they look, precisely because they are the ultimate constitutional authority. Under John Roberts – who is relatively sane – the Court is getting that much more into enforcing the Trumpnik line of We Can Do Whatever We Want To This Country, Just Because We Can. You let Trump win a second term, he WILL get at least one more justice appointed and the results will be that much more ridiculous, and all the “anti-socialists” who mourned how the Chavistas used the courts to twist Venezuela into their image will suddenly define their take on this attitude as “strict constructionism.” And all the liberals who told us the Constitution is a “living document” that changes according to political norms will find out why others told them that was a bad idea.

And as with Brett Kavanaugh, you can bet that any sexual assault accusations against the Republican nominee will be taken a lot less seriously than Democrats are taking accusations against Biden.

What was all this jazz about “Vote Blue, No Matter Who”?

What was this about “Not Me. US”?

You “progressives” are no more serious about “no matter who” than the mainstream Democrats were when it looked like Bernie was gonna win this. I mean, I’d voted for Bernie in the caucus. Both this one and the last one. And I told people how bogus it was that some mainstream liberals were thinking it would be better to throw the election to Trump rather than let a self-declared socialist become president. But now that Bernie voters are in that position, they think Biden is no better than Trump.

I mean, everybody was asking how Biden was getting so much of the older black vote. Because those people remember Nixon, they remember real segregation, and they know what the stakes are, you entitled prigs. You let Trump get re-elected, he’s gonna make Nixon look like a fuckin’ hippie.

But now that the stakes are more obvious than ever, you “progressives” are telling the rest of us that you’re not going to vote for the designated NotTrump candidate, because you think he’s not worth forcing on the country – knowing that you’re forcing four more years of Trump by default?

Really?

REALLY?

NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY I’M A LIBERTARIAN, YOU DIPSHITS??

Anybody who thinks Joe Biden isn’t good enough for them, you have lost all right to talk shit to me about voting for Gary Johnson in 2016. EVER again.

Cause I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given the results to the country, I would regret it more, except that my state ended up going to Hillary without my vote. The reason she lost with a majority of gross votes is because the Electoral College measures results state-by-state, and that’s where third-party votes or “I’m just gonna sit this one out” made a difference in states that Hillary “should’ve” won but didn’t. I don’t think the results will be quite the same this time, cause we now KNOW what we’ve got to lose, and I don’t think that Biden will let Pennsylvania, at least, go for granted.

I do know that the same people who wailed about the Electoral College in 2000 had sixteen years to anticipate Bush v. Gore repeating itself, and they failed to press for the necessary reforms. Not necessarily killing the Electoral College altogether, which is near-impossible and might not be advisable for federalist reasons. But at the very least, working within each state to make the results proportionate within the state, not winner-take-all, and not tied to party affiliation, which would actually be closer to the original intent. No, like “third” parties, Democrats put all their chips on an all-powerful presidency without dealing with the lower levels of government, and now that the presidency and the courts are in the hands of the enemy, Democrats are getting marginalized just like the third parties.

See, Democrats, this is why people don’t want to deal with you, even lots of people on the Left. It’s bad enough to be self-righteous, but self-righteousness is tolerable if you actually know what you’re doing. If you don’t, where do you get off being self-righteous?

What we need is a straight-out reform of the political system, and since Banana Republicans want to make this country more of a Banana Republic, we need Democrats to do what we want. We need ranked-choice voting. We need mail-in and absentee voting. If it’s good enough for our troops, it should be good enough for civilians. We need, ultimately, to nationalize voting in the same way that we have a national post office, so that you don’t have one community with state-of-the-art polling technology and a neighborhood station versus another community where you have to drive miles to vote at Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.

No one has trusted you to do any of this, because you didn’t do it when you had the chance. Third-party people told you that we needed to reform elections, and you went, “Oh, don’t worry. Just give us the government, and then we’ll listen to you. Maybe.” Well, we can’t wait anymore, because if it isn’t blindingly obvious to you (and it isn’t, cause you’re Democrats) the Republicans will not give you another chance at power if you don’t win this year. They have the White House, they have the Senate, they have more and more of the courts, and anything the House wants is gonna be flat-out ignored by Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell. You will still be allowed to exist, like a pet bird or house servant in the manor, but the people you claim to champion will be ground deeper and deeper into the dirt.

So here you are, Democrats. You want the rest of us to goosestep in line behind the political hack? You want “Vote Blue, No Matter Who?” Well, FUCK YOU, cause you’re stuck with it now. You’re going to go out and vote for Joe Biden along with black voters and NeverTrump right-wingers and the rest of NotTrump America who cannot wait four more years for your perfect candidate that you will probably not even nominate anyway. You are going to get Biden over.

And then you are going to LISTEN TO US for a change.

Otherwise don’t cry to us when Jerry Falwell Jr. crowns Donald Trump Jr. king.

I have changed my mind.

I have seen the light.

After years of screaming out Donald Trump, Viceroy of Russian North America, I have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

In fact, I have not only given up my opposition to Donald Trump, I have decided to endorse his re-election in 2020.

Why?

Because I work in a call center.

I am not going to tell you which center it is, or exactly what it does or the precise details on the calls. Because as much as it can suck, I still need the job. You see, I have “pre-existing conditions” and after 60 days I get medical benefits which I would not get from sucking cocks on Boulder Highway, which is the only other job that I can get with my resume.

The other reason is that most of the time, this call center is not that bad compared to other ones I’ve been at. It’s just that when the calls are bad, they were dredged from the sewer system under the 10^th Circle of Hell.

Anybody who has ever worked in a call center knows exactly why Donald Trump won in 2016. Because Donald Trump is the kind of motherfucker who calls a call center. The kind of person who is grateful that I’m a white guy who speaks “American.”

In a lot of these cases it’s a hard guess as to whether the problem is a person who’s been repeatedly stiffed by inattentive staff or a person who had a solvable problem that they have made worse because they couldn’t pick up a clue if you held it in front of them with two hands. But in either case, I get the shit end of it.

And then after nearly two hours of back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls, I can actually feel the muscles in my neck and my eye sockets contracting on themselves, but the queue starts to die down, and I’m starting to relax, and then I get a call from a number I’d seen before – “Hey, James! Remember ME? The worst call you had all day? The guy who raised your blood pressure 100 points expecting you to do the impossible and coming up with every excuse I could to not end the call and prolong your agony? Well, GUESS WHAT? I’m back after 90 minutes and I just talked to another office who told me something completely different so now I’m going to start over at Square One and go over the same harangue I gave you for ANOTHER 25 minutes because I didn’t understand what the fuck you were trying to tell me on the LAST 25 minute call!”

A call, that by the way, would have been about 20 minutes less if I had been given two uninterrupted seconds to explain what the hell was going on with his account.

Why? Why do I get all the difficult people? Because Jesus loves me THAT much, that’s why.

Oh, that’s the other thing, I not only gave up being anti-Trump, I gave up being atheist. I now know that God is real and He is doing miracles for me every day. Because no fucking way could I be under such a sustained, intense and prolonged concentration of screaming bullshit by sheer Goddamn fucking ACCIDENT.

But after about two years of not doing customer phone service, I have to be back in the thick of this, and I remember what it is that turned me off about the Annoying Orange in the first place. My worst callers weren’t all white, they weren’t all Southern, and I have no way of knowing how many of them were conservative, but they all had that attitude of oblivious entitlement. The people who cut you off with “EXCUSE ME” as though they’re being polite and you’re being rude. The attitude that they knew more than you when they really didn’t know jack. The need to spend untrackable amounts of time rambling on over everything yet getting nowhere. Complaining that they had to spend thirty minutes waiting on hold, not considering that maybe that’s because the person ahead of them wanted to waste time for twenty minutes and then complain another ten minutes about having to be on hold, and MAYBE if everyone was a little less piggy the line would move faster. The emotional disconnection from reality, expecting you to have a magic wand and do ten impossible things before breakfast even AFTER they spent 20 minutes explaining – over and over and over and over and over again- that the last five people they talked to couldn’t do the impossible thing either. And even after you’d made it clear to them what the situation was, they WOULD.NOT.GET.OFF. THE.GOD.DAMN.FUCK.ING.PHONE. Instead they would rather rage and whine and scream and cry about the existential unfairness of the universe, which they could do perfectly well by themselves on their OWN time instead of keeping you on the phone while people who could actually be helped were in the queue, because they seem to think the only reason you were born is to be their bartender/Father Confessor/emotional punching bag.

If you’ve dealt with Trumpniks on social media, you know what I’m talking about. And if you’ve seen Republicans at the mic during Congressional committee hearings- you know too.

And just as most of what I hate about Trump is his cult, half of what I hated about Hillary Clinton was hers. The people who normalized a president committing obstruction over an affair, letting him get out scot-free, and had no idea that would ever come back on them. The people who took Hillary’s genuine achievements and made her out to be some kind of Superwoman. They all went, “Oh, look at how BRAVE Hillary was over Benghazi! She had to sit there over eight hours, while a bunch of belligerent rednecks took turns asking Gotcha questions trying to blame her for stuff that wasn’t her fault!” And I was like, “Bitch, please. I work in a CALL CENTER. That’s my FUCKING JOB.”

And if I could, I would ask Hillary Clinton, could you put up with that treatment from Republicans, eight hours a day, every day, for at least two years, AND only get paid ten dollars an hour? Could you put up with that progressive, building level of stress AND the stress of not knowing if you could stretch to the next payday? And if that question was answered, I would then ask Hillary, now do you understand why you lost? Because that’s the kind of job that Democrats were citing as an example of “economic recovery.”

The problem, two years after The Election, is that things are not getting any better under Trump, and for a lot of people – especially his “base” – they’re getting worse.

But this goes beyond just one guy, however much Trump thinks that he is the center of existence. This is deeper. Existential. What it comes down to is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the vast majority of humans are not actually human beings. We are a species of balding apes that were somehow trained to wear polyester suits and use smartphones, and it seems that our technological and emotional sophistication does not go beyond that. And the pressure of having to live in a civilization designed by smarter people is slowly but surely driving us fucking MAD. I mean really, half the reason Trump won is because a critical part of the population got sick of being on hold and hearing “para español, oprime’ el numero dos.”

We can’t handle all this stuff. We can’t handle all these options. We don’t have time to catch up on all the Netflix shows. All our emails. We don’t have time for all the automated “conveniences” that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier but just add up time and stress because that ends up meaning that you have more things to do. I sometimes think we would be better off letting the bad guys win. Let the bullies, bigots and morons stomp all over the wonders of 21^st Century civilization and bring us to a new age of barbarism. Kill this increasingly inconvenient culture of “convenience.” Go back to houses made of sticks and stones because we as a species are clearly too primitive and emotional to live in a world made by better people.

If there is such a thing as a “collective soul,” then that soul, at least in America, is sick unto death. Put bluntly, Americans want a Zombie Apocalypse. We want a mass die-off and technological collapse to bring us back to basics. But since zombies are scientifically impossible, voting Republican is the next best thing to get us to Doomsday.

Because it’s not like they aren’t doing their best.

Not even counting… all this… but if you believe Democrats – and objectively speaking, I’m not sure why you would – the clock is ticking on global climate change.

And the main thing getting the way of their “Green New Deal” is the Republican Party, of which Donald Trump is only a part. Why? Because either they’re in the tank for fossil fuel companies, or as Good Christians (TM) they think that Man is the steward of the Earth and not just a renter, and in any case, Jesus is going to come back and make everything cool.

Now, whenever I see some Chicken Little liberal tell us that the world will be destroyed if we don’t go whole-hog on the socialist agenda, I just remember the soothing words of George Carlin:

So that would be my message for today. Don’t just re-elect Trump. Re-elect the Republican House majority. Make Trump God-Emperor and the tenth Supreme Court Justice. Just get it all over with.

In fact, if the Republican Party is interested, I even have a slogan picked out for them:

Vote Republican – Because This Species Can’t Die Fast Enough

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

-Ayn Rand

Monday, Viceroy Donald Trump had another one of his press briefings, which are clearly less a means of informing the public on coronavirus and more a weak substitute for the redcap rallies where he gets to chew out the press and other cosmopolitans who want to destroy Real America. It doesn’t work as well, because he doesn’t have a crowd, and while the press themselves are allowed to practice social distancing (which means less reporters in the scrum, which I’m sure Trump thinks is a feature and not a bug) Trump has Mike Pence, Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci and whoever else he can rope in standing with him on the same stage, against the rules of social distancing, which kind of undermines the idea that he takes it seriously.

And what I saw on Monday makes it that much more clear how Donald Trump bankrupted at least four Atlantic City casinos: he would be a TERRIBLE poker player. The transcript reveals several tells: “I want Americans to know that we will get through this challenge, the hardship will end, it will end soon, normal life will return and our economy will rebound very, very strongly”,

“We also have a large team working on what the next steps will be once the medical community gives a region the okay — meaning the okay to get going, to get back; let’s go to work. Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down.”

“This was a medical problem. We are not going to let it turn into a long-lasting financial problem. It started out as a purely medical problem, and it’s not going to go beyond that. We’re just not going to allow that to happen.”

And, “Our country was at its strongest financial point. We’ve never had an economy like we had just a few weeks ago, and then it got hit with something that nobody could have ever thought possible. And we are fixing it. We’re fixing it quickly. And I want to just thank the American people for what they’ve been through and what they’re doing. Our country will be stronger than ever before, and we fully anticipate that. And it won’t be that long.”

The tells are that much more obvious in the video, but I won’t ask anyone else to subject themselves to Trump and his Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. But the point is, that wonderful economy Trumpniks have been crowing about makes him invincible (as far as they’re concerned), and without it, he is going through actual physical withdrawal.

I saw an entry on Quora asking what Trump’s real coronavirus notes would be if he’d written them in Sharpie, and I responded “PLEASE BRING THE ECONOMY BACK PLEASE RE-ELECT ME PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE I’M TOO PRETTY FOR JAIL”.

So now the plan – if “plan” can be used in association with Donald Trump – is for the economy to be restarted by Easter. This makes sense. Easter is when we celebrate a man coming back from the dead through faith. And since Trump is (for the sake of his job) a professional Christian, he is asking America to test that theory.

In the meantime, the joint Congress managed to pass an $8 billion dollar aid package (no thanks to one Senator – see below), and everyone’s time in Washington has been taken up with trying to create a large-scale “stimulus” plan that is less about stimulating the economy than about keeping people (and businesses) afloat while they’re not allowed to work. And as desperate as they are, Republicans still wanted to gum up the works. Before the Senate passed the stimulus on Wednesday night with a unanimous vote, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sen. Ben Sasse (BR-Nebraska) that would have limited unemployment benefits. At the same time they complained of the features that Democrats wanted to insert, such as providing stronger unemployment benefits than are otherwise available, considering it isn’t the workers’ or even employers’ fault that people are unemployed. There were plenty of Facebook conservatives wailing over real (riders for increased environmental standards for airlines) and fake (funding of abortion) obstacles that Democrats had created to stop passage of the Senate bill, including Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of a separate House bill against the Senate one. As it turned out, much of Democrats’ objection was to a $500 billion “Exchange Stabilization Fund” that the Republican majority had written into the Senate bill, which is totally at the discretion of Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Despite everyone (including Trump) being publicly against bailed-out companies being able to use their money for stock buybacks (like they did in the last financial crisis), the language also allows Mnuchin to withhold the names of the companies who do get money for up to six months. And when asked who would be the oversight, especially since his own companies would be eligible, Trump said, “I’ll be the oversight” – which made exactly one person in the room feel better.

As a New Republic article points out,

“In its design, and in the panicky desperation to pass it without argument, the bill resembled a repeat of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, crafted by people who thought the problem with the original TARP was that it included far too much oversight and transparency.”

The Democrats let the Bush Republicans buffalo them with a lot of shit after 9-11, because “In this national crisis, we must all put aside our differences and work together in support of Our President”. It would seem that even Democrats can learn from experience, although again this remains to be seen.

The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter if you love the Democrats, you hate the Democrats, or you’re a leftist who thinks that Democrats ought to have put Mitch McConnell’s head on a pike, collectivized the farms, nationalized McDonald’s and turned it vegan. The fact is, the Democrats can only do so much because Mitch McConnell knows the Senate rules and he has the majority. And the reason that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can actually twist his arm, why Democrats have forced more than one vote since Sunday, why Bernie Sanders was able to push Wednesday to re-insert jobless benefits and why McConnell can’t just pull his usual Fuck You maneuver of forcing a party-line vote that he will always win, is because he no longer really has a majority.

And that is because some of the Republican Senators could not be present on the floor. Why was that? Well, mostly because Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) found out he was positive for coronavirus after having himself tested last week. But between getting tested and getting the diagnosis on Sunday, Paul refused to practice social distancing and continued to use the Senate gym and pool. He did say “I believe we need more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms. … The nature of COVID-19 put me – and us all – in a Catch-22 situation. … For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol.” And he topped off by saying, “Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so.” And yet before this weekend, Rand Paul was the only Senator to vote against the initial aid package that has since been agreed to in both Houses and signed by Trump.

Thing is, because of Paul’s behavior between testing and diagnosis, other Republican Senators, including Mike Lee of Utah and Mitt Romney of Utah felt obliged to enter self-quarantine (despite being asymptomatic themselves) to avoid further spread. By Tuesday there were four Republicans missing the Senate for this reason – so Mitch no longer has his floor majority.

So now, even Republicans are saying: Fuck You, Rand Paul.

That’s what happens when you pretend this shit isn’t real. It has consequences. And Rand Paul is going to have to practice social distancing from his fellow Republicans for the forseeable future.

As in, AFTER he recovers from the virus.

But like it matters, because it is still easier for Republicans to find consensus with Democrats on an economic package than for non-Republicans to agree with the new foist that we can declare the crsis over with by presidential decree. There are two factors here that Banana Republicans don’t want to address. One, based on the exposure we’ve seen thus far, if we lift the state-by-state restrictions we do have, the virus WILL recur or spread to areas where it has not already. We need a serious nationwide regimen of testing to see who’s got the virus, and we don’t have that right now, because SOMEBODY didn’t think it was important. So we’ve got to make up for time that we don’t have.

The second issue is that because the virus did come from outside this country, and ravaged China, Iran and Europe before us, even if we lift restrictions and even IF we had testing and treatments available (which we don’t), the other parts of the world are still trying to contain the virus. So even if King Donnie, The First of His Name could wave his royal scepter and decree that the coronavirus crisis is over in America, the global economy is still fucked.

I mean, all the professional Christians have told us that playing Dungeons & Dragons is corrupting and destroys your sense of reality, but they’re the ones living in a fantasy world. We’re living in the real world. And in the real world, Clerics don’t have cure disease spells.

And this is the other reason Trump is so desperate and scared, because it’s becoming clear that the magic power of bullshit doesn’t work on coronavirus. You cannot bullshit or bully a virus. You cannot hand your lawyer a check and tell him to give the check to the virus so it will go away and not testify against you. Reality exists, regardless of human perception. Who knew?

And yet, if reality doesn’t conform to their fantasy, Trumpniks will do what Trumpniks do and carry on regardless. It has now made national news that “pro-life” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has endorsed old folks dying from exposure to the coronavirus if that’s what it takes to get the economy back, telling Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country”. This line has since been pushed by other Fox people, such as Brit Hume, commenting on Patrick’s remarks saying “The utter collapse of the country’s economy — which many think will happen if this goes on much longer — is an intolerable result”. And this might just be a coincidence, but Trump’s stance on virus control changed from working with Dr. Fauci to pushing for a return to normal by Easter after he realized how much money he was going to lose by keeping his resorts closed.

I have a Facebook friend who works (or did work) at one of the Strip casinos, and he talked to me on Wednesday about how pissed he was at his Mom and her new husband because they’re both Trump fanatics going along with the new politically correct dogma, and he said basically “Its just insulting thinking I need to keep making shit money while legit risking my health… (Mom’s) husband thinks we are a bunch of pussies. My mom hopes everyone goes back to work on Easter. They have no authority, that isn’t my point, my point is their shit opinions (are) making me dislike them cause they don’t give a fuck about our health”.

We’re getting to that scene in Jojo Rabbit where the Nazis are drafting 12-year olds and senior citizens and giving them hunting rifles and Panzerfausts to stop the Allies, cause there’s no more Jews or Communists for the government to blame.

Because just as Germany (sort of) survived the death of Nazism, the threat that Trump and his people care about is not the death of individuals. It’s the death of their system.

It goes back to what I’ve said about being a libertarian as opposed to a collectivist: A government is a creation of individuals. It is an empty set without its constituents. A government cannot exist without people. The people CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. And if the liberals need to be told that their favorite system of government is not a priori and inherent, that it is the product of consensus agreement and subject to change, then libertarians and “conservatives” need to understand that what we’re calling capitalism is likewise not an inherent condition but is an agreed-to situation and subject to change.

And while libertarians are pointing out that a lot of our budgeting and regulations are largely makework for bureaucrats, and that if we need to dispense with these things in an emergency, we probably never needed them in the first place, liberals and socialists are pointing out that our lack of health care and sick leave is inadequate for emergencies, because they were inadequate for everyday needs in the first place.

Isn’t the common thread that THE WHOLE FUCKING SYSTEM IS BULLSHIT and is not working for everybody?

Isn’t it true that so much of what we think of as “normal” is written up to serve the priorities of administrative classes, in both the public and private sectors, and now that we have (however haphazardly) been obliged to go without “normal”, we are starting to discover that we can survive without it?

And isn’t it obvious that the people squealing most loudly for “normal” to come back are the political-media complex that now controls both Big Business and Big Government? And that public health is NOT their first priority?

The elites aren’t afraid of the Constitution, or elections, because they’ve got that system sewn up on both ends. But they’re relying on capitalism to save them, and the irony is that it will save the public, because that is the last area where we have serious choices that affect the Powers That Be.

Right now, negative action – not participating in the economy – is causing more of a scare to the donor class than voting for Democrats. Those people are learning that WE are learning that they need us more than we need them. The people who are engaging in social distancing have a potential to create real change and have their demands heard, especially since the people who insist that this is no big deal are the most likely to take themselves out through exposure to the virus. And the fewer of them there are, the weaker they will be politically. To survive, they have to participate in the same safety measures as everyone else. And if they want to go out shopping again – why force them not to? Where are they going to shop? If they want us to go back to our workplaces when even our own bosses say it’s a bad idea – how do they force us?

Suppose they brought back the economy and nobody came?

Stay the course. And flatten the curve.

Hi, Trumpniks!

Sick of winning yet?

How’s your 401K?

Boy, it turns out that just because you have a captive political party that lets you do anything you want regardless of evidence, that there are still factors that can make your perfect world a little less perfect. Like markets, and science.

Of course this whole coronavirus thing really started in a lab somewhere in a lab somewhere in China that the Democrats sponsored just to undermine the stock market and make Our President look bad. But if this whole thing was a political hoax, somebody forgot to tell the Chinese, and the Iranians, and the entire Italian government, and the nursing home in Washington state where over 20 people died because our government knew that a global contagion was going on and yet the Trump Organization refused to accept World Health Organization-approved coronavirus tests.

And so since all these outside factors were contradicting the whims of our Dear Leader, the stock market continued to tank in the last ten days, wiping out virtually all the gains it had made since Donald Trump was declared president.

And as bad as that was, things got worse when Russia and Saudi Arabia decided to break their agreement on oil prices and boost production, dropping prices and thus market demand, along with the rest of the market.

Putin and bin Salman? They’re Trump’s two bestest buddies in the whole world! Well, next to Kim Jong-un, of course. I mean it ought to figure, both of these guys are probably best known for ghastly assassinations of political dissidents who fled abroad, so it stands to reason they’d stab each other in the back. The good thing of course is that the price of gas is low. But of course that’s due to the simple market factor of gas not being as necessary since no one has anywhere to go. If they really wanted to make a killing, the Russians would find out how to corner the market on toilet paper.

So perhaps realizing that it might help if Trump said something besides “just go to work, you’ll be fine,” the Trump Organization got its mini-brain trust of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner to help draft a speech that Trump read on Wednesday, which among other things didn’t help because of the extremely flat affect he has on camera when he isn’t allowed to just be an off-the-cuff insult comic. Not only that, he didn’t look well, after he was repeatedly photographed with people who have turned out to have the coronavirus. Of course he has been sniffing and wheezing his way through public events since at least the Hillary Clinton debates. But now we have to ask, was Trump sniffing and wheezing his way through that speech because he has coronavirus, or just because he’s a 73-year old man with sleep apnea and an Adderall addiction?

But what really didn’t help was when people actually went over the details of what Trump said, and apparently he wasn’t supposed to say the Europe ban “will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval”. But this was a prepared text on teleprompter! Did somebody insert the wrong lines into the text just to trip him up? Did he riff? Oh, that Trump! He’s such a card!

I mean, eventually on Friday Trump did finally announce a national emergency, which he said was “two very big words” (for him), and he did announce various initiatives to coordinate with Walmart and a few other companies. Of course some of these companies didn’t know exactly what the plan was. And Trump still seemed to have a bit of an issue with cleanliness, and not touching the mic at the outdoor press conference, and not shaking hands, and all that. But the idea that he was at least trying to act like a president and take the situation seriously did inspire Wall Street to gain 900 points, which sorta made up for losing so much in the previous four days.

Here’s the thing, not only did Trump’s surprise block of European travel royally piss off EU nations, it did that much more to undermine the stock market on Thursday because of that throwaway line about trade and cargo! And when the travel restrictions were officially imposed over the weekend, the end result was American travelers from Europe being channeled into one of 13 designated airports where an already over-worked Customs and TSA staff will be obliged to get them in line and answer questions. (Of course they won’t be tested for coronavirus, because we don’t have the technology that frackin’ South Korea has.) Twitter and other media reported vast crowds of people in line for the process, returned from Europe, all crammed together in one place. Coughing and sneezing. Talk about social isolation.

Hey – I wonder what THAT’s gonna do to the stock market on Monday?

Who woulda thought that containing a global pandemic could be so complicated??

I mean, are you guys really this clueless or is this intentional policy? Because if it is, and all this chaos and suffering is on purpose, what does that say about your morality and ultimate goals?

Liberals keep saying, “the cruelty is the point,” but this is cruelty you’re inflicting on white and affluent people!! It’s almost like you hate everybody!

See, there’s a difference between Donald Trump and the coronavirus. Viruses aren’t racist. Viruses don’t care if you’re Chinese or Italian or American. They can’t be stopped by your magic wall (anymore than it stops ladders and bolt cutters) and they can’t be stopped by Mike Pence’s prayers. A virus is a factor of science, and as Neil DeGrasse Tyson likes to say, “the beautiful thing about science is that it works whether you believe in it or not.”

And just as the virus is not impressed by balderdash, bluffing and bullying, apparently the markets are not either, because the people there have to predict trends for a living. And even if the United States continues to stick its collective head up its collective ass (without hand sanitizer) the rest of the world will look at the evidence and their governments will set their own policies that affect us whether we like it or not.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong about Donald Trump. I’ve been wrong before. Look, Donnie. You know I don’t like you. And maybe things seem kinda negative right now, and I know you don’t like to hear any bad news. That is of course, part of why things are like this. But just remember: Where you are now is because of what you did to get here. And you’ve gotten this far on balderdash, bluffing and bullying, and nothing has touched you yet! Not even coronavirus! (Or so your press flacks have told us.)

It’s ALWAYS worked!

Just like it always worked for Hitler. And Saddam Hussein! And the Soviet Communist Party! And all your other role models!

So now that you’ve restored the confidence of the markets, you can get out there Monday and get yourself back on track. All you need to do is pay attention to the world around you and not make things any worse. And what are the odds of THAT?

Just remember, Donnie:

You are GOLD!
(Gold!)

Always believe in your soul

You’ve got the power to know!

You’re indestructible-

Always believe it!!