James Gillen

“Remember we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police “pig” or “white fascist racist” or “motherfucker” and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, “Oh, he’s one of those,” and then promptly turn off. “

– Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals”

I had mentioned that after the duopoly conventions I wanted to touch on three subjects: one, where the “two” party system goes after this election, two, the Republicans’ attempts to scare their way out of losing it, and three, the Democratic-left coalition’s capacity to lose yet another sure thing by alienating the public. I am dealing with the last subject first.

For one thing, Democrats, never forget – never, never, never, never as in FUCKING NEVER – that the only reason we’re stuck with “President Trump” is because the country knew that the alternative to the Democratic candidate was FUCKING DONALD TRUMP and a critical mass of people in critical states still found the Democrat inferior.

As I said at the time, saying “you don’t like Hillary Clinton, do you?” is like asking “you don’t like gonorrhea, do you?” My answer is no, does anybody? I mean, gonorrhea is something you could survive and get treated for, as opposed to sticking your dick in a glowing green drum of radioactive waste, which is what voting for Trump would be, but if you tell me I HAVE to get gonorrhea, or that gonorrhea is actually the healthiest of my alternatives, you can’t be surprised that people reject your political establishment altogether, and voting Trump is just the most nihilistic expression of that. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Recently Cornel West twitted, “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics. In this sense, I agree with my brothers and sisters like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Paul Street and Bob Avakian.” By the same token, if a centrist, “neoliberal” or right-libertarian like myself votes Biden that is not necessarily an affirmation of the radical left politics of West or Chomsky. It’s just… Christ on a pogo stick, look what the alternative is.

And even then, if it was another vote for Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, I can’t say I wouldn’t vote Libertarian if Hillary was the alternative to Trump.

This is what Trump is counting on. He’s not popular even with his OWN people, really; they rationalize his manifest character defects as assets in their projection of him as “a rough man who has to do rough things.” They HAVE to make the NotRepublican nominee look worse, because they can’t make their boy presentable. They have a harder time doing this with Biden and even Harris because they don’t have as many negatives as Clinton, but just because it’s not going to be as easy to smear the Democrat this time doesn’t mean that the Democrats’ fellow travelers have to give the Republicans help.

For example: Antifa. I have at least one liberal friend who refuses to acknowledge these people as allies, since they are often just as violent and either-or in their alignments as the alt-right. This makes it that much easier for the Party of Trump to foist the argument that anyone who opposes them are at best unwitting allies of Antifa, which is some dangerous, all-encompassing conspiracy against Our Gratest Most Americanest President EVAR.

Now, the excuse given on the Left is that Antifa is actually not an organized group, which I guess is true because no one can seem to agree if it’s pronounced “anty fa” or “aunt Teefa.” It’s sort of like how the vegan movement had to change the pronunciation of the word from “vague un” to “VEEgun” because the City of Las Vegas sued them for defamation.

Not to mention, Weimar Germany actually had organized left-wing gangs fighting the Freikorps and Nazis on their level, but did that stop the Nazis from taking the government? No. Partially because the Nazis could pose as the people saving the public from street violence. A bit of history that advocates fail to point out.

But on the less extreme part of political debate, you have the general issue of political correctness, or as it’s sometimes called, “wokeness” (the term woke, like ‘social justice’ being one of those terms that was actually an in-group compliment until the behavior of that group became overbearing). Among the various issues PC creates, you get the opposite problem from Antifa. If Antifa seem too violent for the general public, the PC police are making it that much harder for the rest of us to fight the Trumpniks with words because they’re more concerned with thoughtcrime than winning with the general public.

To take an early example from the Trump period: Stephen Colbert, hardly a Trump supporter, did a routine on May 2017 against him, and at the time, Vox magazine didn’t like it.

Writer German Lopez said: “Colbert was in the middle of a monologue launching various insults at Trump, including some fat shaming, ‘presidunce,’ and ‘pricktator.’ In the course of this, he said, ‘The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.’ … In a setting in which Colbert is deliberately trying to find a way to insult Trump, it’s telling that he resorts to suggesting that Trump is engaging in sexual acts with another man. The suggestion is that the worst thing that could happen for these men is if they engaged in homosexual acts together, as if that devalues them as men, makes them submissive, or emasculates them.”

On one hand: Point taken.

On the other hand, the fact that the Left has to second-guess and virtue-police EVERYTHING helps explain why they’re not very popular right now.

Much like how the N-Word is permissible in the black community (I call it The Richard Pryor Clause), Lopez, as a gay man, is probably aware of how often joking insults are thrown out between gay men. I should think that people who are aware of their own identity ought to be able to tell the difference between homophobia and a slap on two authoritarian personalities who, like most authoritarians, trade in machismo. The fact that Putin is much more officially homophobic than Trump ought to drive the point deeper.

I mean, thanks to President Grab ‘Em By The Pussy, and his esteemed predecessor, President It’s Not Perjury If It Was Just Over A Blowjob, we have reached a point in popular culture where we are THIS close to Gilbert Gottfried being able to tell the Aristocrats joke on broadcast TV. And some Puritans want to spoil it for all of us.

It is perhaps telling that the right-wing backlash to Colbert got more press attention in the long run than the left-wing/PC critique. See, in his remark, Colbert also told Trump, “you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine” and apparently Trumpniks took this as a group attack on their core demographic.

But that also reveals that the Right is a lot better at seizing the narrative than the Left.

Which is one reason why this line of rhetoric is dangerous if you’re a minority, and by “minority” I mean lacking in numbers or unpopular. One of the key reasons we have this “alt-right” crap going on is that we are at a dangerous point in American history. Whites are grouped into this generic category of “white” because it’s possible for them to blend into the system, so they’re considered the majority even though the old English-Dutch culture of the United States was supplanted by immigrants from other European countries a while ago. But even this super-category of “white” is going to eventually lose its numerical majority in the next fifty years. At the same time the default white culture is still dominant. So whiteys like myself are feeling conscious of that in a way they previously had not been, partially because of the demographic change and partially because various groups (black, feminist, LGBT, etc.) are engaged in identity politics. This is why some of them say things like “Why don’t we have a White History Month?” as though a profound conclusion had just come to them.

So when everybody wants to group themselves into collective identities, the group that already is the largest identity gets a political advantage. That will probably continue even after whites lose their numerical majority, because by the Left’s own conclusions, whiteness is identified with the established culture. By contrast, there are conflicts within the Hispanic community, within the feminist community (for instance, as to whether trans women should be included) and within the LGBT spectrum. Some of this is inevitable, and simply casting identity politics as an issue here doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid for the purposes they serve. However, various leftist groups often use rhetoric in ways that alienate the majority and explain some of the politics we’re seeing now. In some cases, that’s inevitable too. But there’s a difference between a necessary confrontation and an unnecessary confrontation.

To elaborate, let me compare two slogans.

“Black Lives Matter” is a necessary phrase precisely because of the fact that the phrase needs to be stated. It is a reference to the fact that for much of American history, black lives have not mattered and do not matter. This has been clear to activists for years, with regard to police brutality as well as mundane cases such as applying for home loans. The long term implications as to why white people should care have become that much more obvious with coronavirus: as many leftists have pointed out, the pandemic disproportionately affects non-white communities. That does not mean it is not affecting white communities. And it is spreading to white communities – after it ravaged large centers like New York and was then contained – because the disproportionate rate of cases in minority communities that tend to be in “blue” Democrat-run states means that the Trump Organization feels no need to create a national mask mandate or testing regime, since they’re not “his” people. But since the virus, unlike Trump, doesn’t care about skin color or state lines, the virus will spread even to “red” Republican states if it is given the environment to do so, an opportunity that Trump’s Republican state governors have been more than happy to provide. More broadly speaking, this is simply the most stark example of how there’s one public support system for the white and well-off in America and one for the rest of us. And when you need to contain a pandemic, that just doesn’t work. If you actually believe that All Lives Matter, then you have to assert that Black Lives Matter, otherwise your life is now threatened by this unequal system too.

“Black Lives Matter” addresses the point of systemic inequality. The question is what to do about it. Which leads me to address another politically-correct phrase: white privilege.

The term “white privilege” does refer to a real thing. For instance, if a black man speaks bad English, abuses women and gets involved in organized crime, they call him a “thug” or a “gangsta.” When a white man does all that, they elect him president. My problem, at least, is the use of the term “privilege.” The dictionary definition of privilege is a special right, advantage or immunity enjoyed by a particular group. And while many on the Left would describe that as the definition of whiteness, they fail to grasp that it wasn’t until fairly recently that people “of color” were about to overtake the collective “white” culture, nor was it always the case that that white culture was monolithic. Not too long ago, people were wondering if Irish Catholic presidential candidate John Kennedy was going to be taking orders from the Pope. But even then, there was an idea that there was an equal standard of law for everybody, and both labor and civil rights campaigns were intended to enforce an actual standard of fairness.

Which is what we’re getting at. The problem if (say) Dylann Roof actually gets fair treatment after shooting up an African Methodist church and Eric Garner gets asphyxiated for selling loosies is not that Roof shouldn’t have been taken in without violence, but that cops so quickly resorted to violence in the case of Garner for a non-violent offense. The standard is not a privilege. The offense is that the standard is being violated. (Privilege would be the cops in Kenosha letting Kyle Rittenhouse walk around with a semi-auto rifle during protests and then walk away from cops AFTER shooting three people, during unrest that started after cops shot Jacob Blake multiple times in the back, allegedly because he was reaching for a weapon that he would have had to get from his car.)

Again, if inequality is real (and it’s kind of hard for even Republicans to argue otherwise) the question is what to do about it. And phrasing the legal standard that most of America does live with as “privilege” is very dangerous, actually, because it plays into a lot of right-wing and moderate fears about socialism. Most of these fears are unjustified (especially in comparison to what’s running the country now), but it is true that most leftist regimes (as opposed to Canadian and European social democrats) were far more interested in leveling the culture they inherited as opposed to reforming it. It usually takes less time and effort to bring everybody down to a certain level as opposed to raising everyone up. And frankly, that requires getting rid of “bourgeois” ideas like personal freedom and political debate.

This is how the Trump National Convention could have the McCloskeys do a video testimony in the safety of their home and talk about how their privilege of a zoned suburban neighborhood was equivalent to the common right to defend house and home. This is how they can phrase an attack on “privilege” as an attack on your rights. And I’m sorry, but if you wonder why they keep going to this tactic, it’s because it’s been proven to work in the past.

When the Republican Party is so malign and dysfunctional, they can only succeed by convincing the majority of “normal” America (including some black and Hispanic voters) that at the least, if they can’t vote for Republicans, they can’t align with the Democrats either. It helps that as with “white privilege” so much of the Left is determined to address a real problem in a counterproductive way that alienates many of the people who need to be reached.

Feminism is another example. “Patriarchy” is invoked in such a way that, “conservatism” being what it is these days, inspires the opposition to double down. There was a 2018 article in that noted right-wing rag The Guardian about this: “On 7 January this year, the alt-right insurgent Steve Bannon turned on his TV in Washington DC to watch the Golden Globes. … In the course of a passionate speech, Oprah Winfrey told the audience that ‘brutally powerful men’ had ‘broken’ something in the culture. These men had caused women to suffer: not only actors, but domestic workers, factory workers, agricultural workers, athletes, soldiers and academics. The fight against this broken culture, she said, transcended ‘geography, race, religion, politics and workplace”.

“Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, was one of 20 million Americans watching. In his view, the scene before him augured the beginning of a revolution ‘even more powerful than populism’, according to his biographer Joshua Green. ‘It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that – this is the Puritans. It’s anti-patriarchy,’ Bannon declared. “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room … Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.’ He concluded: ‘The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history.”

The article went on: “For some sceptical liberals, there is a resistance to the ideological implications of grand concepts such as “patriarchy” (or “neoliberalism”), which are seen as oversimplifications of a more complex reality. Among gender studies academics, it is no longer in wide use. Once a term debated in endless articles, conferences and books, many theorists now regard it is as too blunt and monolithic to capture the nuances of oppression. Paradoxically, some on the right have enthusiastically taken up the term – regarding it not as an evil to be stamped out, but as a ‘natural’ difference between the genders, ordained by God or biology, to be protected against rampaging feminism.

“But for those who have lost a basic trust in the forward motion of human progress – or who were born too recently to have known it – ‘“patriarchy’ seems exactly the word to explain the continued existence of pervasive, seemingly ineradicable inequality.”

Which in a way seems to hit on where we are. Even as right-wingers like Steve Bannon (who once allegedly described himself as a Leninist) take up the social warfare tactics of the Left, the “progressives” and their more radical kin seem to have given up on the Biden-Obama idea that this is basically a good country that just needs to maintain the march of progress. And given that Biden’s best chance of victory is to appeal to the majority and cast himself as the “normal” alternative to polarization and the overbearing political correctness of the Right, there are a lot of people – not just Trumpniks – who see their goal as taking this country in the opposite direction.

I think “Topple the Patriarchy” is the feminist version of “Kill Whitey.” I mean, yes, we understand that if you say “Kill Whitey” you don’t REALLY want to kill every white person in America, but it just doesn’t come across diplomatically, you know what I’m saying? It’s like when Donald Trump started his presidential campaign saying that Mexicans “aren’t sending (us) their best … they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… and some, I assume, are good people” and then wondered why everybody got the wrong idea about his immigration policy. Well, Donald: Either you didn’t explain it very well, or we didn’t get the wrong idea.

The problem, (which if you think about it, applies to both political poles) is that when you demonize a certain group in order to rally or convert people, the audience may not think you’re talking about some abstract Evil or some minority that is so numerically miniscule as to be politically unimportant (for example, the 1 Percent, Muslims, or libertarians). When you cast yourself as “Us” and your targets as “Them” some people may think you’re talking about THEM.

And then you wonder why you get such negative responses for that statement from people that you don’t have any personal disagreements with. It’s almost as if they think you don’t acknowledge their humanity or see their perspective, and they’ll never be able to reason with you.

It’s become pretty obvious that the conservative movement has been degraded because of that attitude. “Progressive” people may want to consider that the Right are not the only folks who have to worry about such temptation.

Again: I don’t think my problems with the Left are nearly as important in the short run as my problems with the Right, but the same people who wail and rage about the Electoral College and a first-past-the-post political system set up by dead white slaveowners are deliberately avoiding the point that said system allows them to persist in the belief that any vote for the official NotRepublican candidate is necessarily a vote for the woke socialists. You can be assured that the Church of Trump is doing everything it can to create that impression among the remaining moderate/right people who are still on the fence about voting for their Messiah.

Like a lot of people my age, I was a fan of Pink Floyd, and recently I was reading the Wikipedia article on Syd Barrett, who was their main singer-songwriter in their little-known early period. At that point in the mid-1960s, Pink Floyd under Syd were much more of a psychedelic pop/singles band than they later became. Things changed because Barrett, well, lost his damn mind. Possibly due to latent conditions, very likely due to drug abuse, he started to do things like detune his guitar to the point that the strings would fall off. Or on stage he would play just one guitar string for the entire song. Or he would not play at all and just glare at people. This is why the band hired David Gilmour as their new guitarist. At the time the plan was that they would officially keep Barrett, but as a stay-at-home songwriter, like Brian Wilson had become at that point in the Beach Boys’ history.

The band realized that that wouldn’t work out when Syd asked the other band members to work on a new song in the studio. The song was called “Have You Got It Yet?” At first the song started conventionally, but as the other band members played along with Syd, he started changing the tune on them, and they couldn’t keep up. And they restarted, and he did it again, more than once, and every time, he would return to the chorus: “Have you got it, yet?” Eventually, they realized that the whole thing was an elaborate joke, and they were never going to get “it” and so they walked out and quit playing with Syd. Permanently.

I think the Left is in serious danger of doing that to the whole country.

So Gilbert Gottfried walks into a political fundraiser’s office, and he says, “Hey, I got this great NEW political party you wanna look at, they’ll knock your socks off.”
And the fundraiser said, “OK, who are these guys?”

The Democratic National Convention, having tried and succeeded in their quest to get even lower ratings than the last presidential cycle, nevertheless gained praise from the media critics who did watch. And given that the outcome of party conventions is never in doubt anymore, the value is not so much to gain ratings as to create an impression among those political insiders who actually do watch these things as to the party’s ability to present itself and its agenda.

And since this year the Democrats had their convention one week before the incumbent Republican Party, it raised the question of whether the Republican National Convention would learn from their example, and what agenda they would present.

Now as you know, all that was complicated by Viceroy Trump’s initial insistence that the agreed-upon site, Charlotte, North Carolina, have the traditional cheering crowds as an old-time convention, even after coronavirus made it obvious to the Democrats that they couldn’t do that approach in Milwaukee. And since Donald Trump is Your Lord GOD whose whim overrides petty concerns like science and disease theory, he didn’t accept the position of the Demonrat Governor of North Carolina that masking and social distancing had to be enforced. So he announced to all that the convention events were being moved to Jacksonville in the much more Trumpnik state of Florida, even though the official convention business (what was left of it) could not be moved from Charlotte. Except that by the time the planning for Jacksonville was in high gear, coronavirus was exploding in Florida, largely because their Trumpnik governor encouraged everybody to go to the beaches and public events with no social distance measures. The only solution to avoid another public health and publicity disaster like the Tulsa speech was to have Trump do his acceptance speech outdoors, in Florida, in AUGUST, around hurricane season.

Somehow this combination of facts penetrated the invulnerable skull of our God-Emperor, and he agreed to have a (mostly) virtual convention after all. But the Democrats had already come to that realization and had months to prepare, whereas by the time Trump bowed to the liberal bias of reality, there were only weeks to go until the RNC was set. And as a result, everything is largely improv, not least because Trump himself kept inserting himself into all the plans.

The first change that people noticed was that whereas the DNC reserved two hours of programming time a night, the RNC decided to cut into evening programming by starting an hour earlier at 8:30 pm, for a total of two and a half hours, apparently reasoning that if the Democrat convention was too dull and boring, the best solution was to add 25 percent more of the same thing.

The second change was in the Party platform, or deliberate lack thereof. Previously the party committees had earned ridicule by refusing to update the 2016 platform, with its remarks like “Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. … Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly — our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long trust us” and “The President has been regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand. He defies the laws of the United States by refusing to enforce those with which he does not agree. And he appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law. ” Well, now the RNC has announced, after first whining that “The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts” that “the Republican Party has and will continuously support the Presidents America-first agenda” and “RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention” – in other words, the Republican Party agenda is literally ‘we agree with everything Donald Trump says’ and furthermore, “RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.”

So one of the few legitimate purposes that a party convention still serves other than anointing the primary winner is officially meaningless. There is no independent thought allowed. There is not even the perfunctory one-minute speech Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was allowed to nominate Bernie Sanders for the roll call, because no one is competing in the roll call. There really ISN’T a roll call; the delegates made a remote vote earlier Monday affirming Trump as their nominee. The whole media event is that much more a TV show than the DNC, and the only thing being promoted is Donald Trump.

Then you combine that with the events between the Thursday acceptance speech of Joe Biden and the kickoff of the RNC Monday, with Trump whisperer Steve Bannon getting arrested for using a “build the wall” project to bilk people out of money, becoming yet another example of why MAGA stands for “My Ass Got Arrested.” And then on Sunday, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, police responded to a domestic disturbance by apprehending Jacob Blake, a black bystander who tried to break up an argument, and as he was walking to a vehicle, officers were caught on camera grabbing him and then shooting him in the back at close range. Blake’s children witnessed the incident from their car. While this case of police violence, like the George Floyd case, has no direct connection to national politics, like the Floyd case it flies in the face of black people and other groups who have seen the corrupt establishment get away with literal murder, and in the short term the Blake shooting has already sparked riots and fires in Kenosha. And as the RNC set up to make its pitch, we have no idea if this violence will have a similar aftermath to the Floyd video, given that the Blake video makes the George Floyd killing look like a hugfest.

So would The Party of Trump be able to prevail in the face of all these embarrassments and present themselves as the positive alternative to the corrupt establishment, even when they’ve BEEN the corrupt establishment for four years?
NO PROBLEM!

Day One

For a lot of critics, the best speech on Day One, if you’re one of us who think that socialism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, was the presentation of a Cuban whose father first fled fascism in Spain then had to flee communism in Cuba. But his example only contrasted with the point that the Trump Organization’s policy stance against socialism in Latin America clashes with Trump’s own desire not to extend the legal status of Venezuelan refugees.

Then you had the couple who, depending on who you ask, either defended their home from bloody-minded rioters or exacerbated a conflict that didn’t need to happen by playing “I’m a Little Teapot” with firearms. And whatever you may think about the Second Amendment or the alleged threat to “single family” home development, these two demonstrate the real reason why it’s gotten so hard to defend gun rights these days: Because these days, most firearms fans have no trigger discipline.

But for those outside the Church of Jesus Trump Latter-Day Suckers, the funniest speech in a convention that had already become more blooper reel than script was from Trump intimate and former Fox News hostess Kimberly Guilfoyle, who delivered an apocalyptic warning against a Biden victory BY SHOUTING AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE IN ORDER TO PROJECT HER VOICE TO THE END OF THE ROOM SO THAT THE ECHO MADE IT THAT MUCH MORE OBVIOUS SHE WAS SPEAKING TO AN EMPTY HALL. That and her appearance gave the impression of Idina Menzel playing the Bob Geldof character in Pink Floyd The Wall (‘I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine/Pink isn’t well, he’s, uh, back at the hotel/And they sent us along as a surrogate band/And WE’RE GONNA FIND OUT WHERE YOU FANS REALLY STAAAND’).

Day Two

Now, this all comes from what I saw of the convention from news reports. I didn’t actually see Day One of the RNC because unlike increasing numbers of Americans after the spread of Trump Virus, I have a job.

And given that I watched the DNC (such as I did) via MSNBC, I had thought, what the heck, I’ll go ahead and watch this on Fox News on my day off, given how devoted they are to The Leader. But then I found out from the news coverage that MSNBC and Clinton News Network were covering the RNC uninterrupted but Fox didn’t. And that’s because while The Trump Convention deliberately cut 30 minutes into prime-time programming, Fox didn’t want to take that time away from the Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity shows. Which only goes to show what I’ve already said: Fox News CAN report the news, and it still has a staff of people who are perfectly skilled to do so, but that really isn’t their job.

So I turned on MSDNC that day and one of the first stories before the 5:30 Pacific start was Chris Hayes telling us that a scheduled speaker, “angel mom” Mary Mendoza, was “cancelled” from Tuesday’s speaker lineup after she went on Twitter that day encouraging people to read an anti-Semitic conspiracy text. Too bad. That speech woulda been LIT.

The first major speaker was Jon Ponder, a Las Vegas native who, after being incarcerated for robbery and turning to Jesus, started a ‘Hope For Prisoners’ program. Trump’s testimony for Ponder was of course prominently featured along with an official pardon. And this story is genuinely nice, but it also drives home the idea that the best support government can provide for black people is through the law-enforcement system, with the secondary implication that Republicans finally care about prisoner rights now that so many of them are facing sentences.

Next speaker was Senator Rand Paul. He said “Donald Trump gets things done.” He gave Trump credit for instituting an insurance plan that Paul pushed and has not actually been passed. He said that if you hate war and don’t want to build roads and bridges in Afghanistan instead of building them at home, you should vote for Trump. By the way, we haven’t gotten out of Afghanistan and the Trump Organization is not building roads and bridges at home. And by the way, Fuck You, Rand Paul.

After a couple of little films, they had Larry Kudlow: “Hi. I’m not really an economist, but I play one on TV!” He went along the same line as the previous line as the short film, which is that we had the greatest economy ever, ‘a rising tide that lifted all boats’ and it was only interrupted by the horrible “once-in-a-century” event of coronavirus, which Republicans seem to think is a horrible curse that was cast on Our President by evil witches, Chinese or Democrats (same difference).

It was at this point that MSDNC (unlike CNN) cut in to do a fact check on Kudlow’s piece rather than go to the speech of a Wisconsin business owner. You didn’t see them cut in like this when the DNC was on. But then the DNC was more likely to alternate political speeches with songs from Jennifer Hudson or John Legend or someone whom people actually like.

Speaking of folks whom nobody likes, the Trump Convention had at least two people speaking in favor of anti-abortion measures, which I guess they had to do since they couldn’t actually write an anti-abortion plank into this year’s Platform, since of course there ISN’T one.

Then they had Nick Sandmann from the redcaps-against-Indians standoff at the Lincoln Memorial, who had previously been criticized for just standing in front of an Omaha protestor and smiling. In a taped speech in front of the Memorial, he went into full “victim of the media” mode and of course praised Trump for taking his side, putting his MAGA cap back on. Thus confirming the axiom “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

After a couple more speeches they brought in Tiffany Trump, which is only fair, since the DNC had to have Hunter Biden speak for his dad, so they had to excavate Tiffany from obscurity when she hasn’t really committed any crime other than being the white sheep of the family. And again, one of the points she brought up in passing was criminal justice reform, and I just can’t imagine why that’s become a focus all of a sudden. But the main point, however haphazardly delivered, was that the media and the universities are creating an atmosphere of “groupthink” where “diversity of thought” was discouraged. This at a convention where six of the twelve featured speakers are named Trump and (again) the Committee wasn’t even allowed to create an official agenda.
As events wound towards the second hour, I noticed that MSNBC, unlike CNN, was cutting in for commercials, and then their standard talking-head commentary, and I found myself wondering if it was worth it to break my pledge to boycott CNN to see a bunch of people talk about “freedom” while anxiously staring at the camera like hostages in an al-Qaeda video.

The other thing I noticed was that how many people in this “Republican” convention gave testimonials thanking Donald Trump personally, like the one who mentioned how Trump brought about the financial support for her business after coronavirus as though the Republican Senate had nothing to do with it.

Eric Trump said that the country is in a fight for freedom right now, “and it is a fight only my father can win.”

Just before the Eric speech they had a straight-up propaganda moment with Trump making an appearance supervising a citizenship oath ceremony being held by (supposedly official) Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. Several commentators, for example on Fivethirtyeight, said that Wolf’s appearance in the Convention film was a violation of the Hatch Act.

Speaking of violating the Hatch Act, you had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking from Jerusalem, except that he didn’t mention he is the Secretary of State, because even though he was on official business abroad at government expense and making a symbolic appearance at a city sacred to Zionists and Evangelicals in order to endorse Trump, he couldn’t say he was speaking as “Secretary of State” because apparently that would be violating the Hatch Act. As if they really cared.

And finally they cut to the Rose Garden, which the First Lady had recently eviscerated apparently to create more room for her Tuesday speech. This speech made her no less than the third person named Trump who was not Donald Trump to speak Tuesday. The live crowd – small and mostly unmasked as it was – brought the speech an energy that hadn’t been present to that point. But like the other Trump relatives, Melania gave the same stiff “read the surrender document or your children will be shot” smile and indirect stare as she went over the same litany as the night’s other speakers.

Melania Trump’s speech – as in, her manner of speaking – brings to mind a joke I heard Sofia Vergara tell about how she is the only Hispanic immigrant she knows whose accent got worse the longer she stayed in America. Which only makes me think I would be much happier if Sofia Vergara was the First Lady for President Joe Mangianello. Now HE’s cool.

Oh, and on Tuesday it was announced that the bullets that hit Jacob Blake in the back pierced his spinal column and he will most likely never walk again.

Day Three

Between the end of the Tuesday RNC and the beginning of Wednesday’s festivities the situation over Jacob Blake escalated as an out-of-state actor appeared to support the Kenosha police and then shot three people in a melee, killing two. He was eventually apprehended but not during the point that he was caught on camera actually approaching police.

In protest, the Milwaukee Bucks team decided to walk out of their scheduled NBA playoff game, which led to the entire league postponing the playoff schedule.

Now, just as I had better things to do on Monday, I had game night on Wednesday, so I didn’t actually see Day Three of the RNC. Mike Pence was the featured speaker, so I’m not sure who saw it, or who remembers it if they did.

Plus which, as if 2020 couldn’t be 2020 enough, there’s a DOUBLE hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that hit landfall in Louisiana on Wednesday night (after midnight Thursday morning) so now Trump has his own Katrina to deal with. Oh, that’s right, two. So that’s pretty much what the news was focused on by the time I got home.

It’s almost AS IF there are more important things in the world than the ruling party of our government fluffing King Donnie, The First of His Name.

But back to the Mike Pence speech: The TrumpNC continued its week-long policy of using its control of government institutions as an implied endorsement of Our President over the evil, corrupt, senile sexual harasser who used his position to get his kid a cushy job. You know, the one who ISN’T Donald Trump. In Wednesday’s case, it was Vice President Pence making his keynote speech inside the grounds of Fort McHenry. This, like the Melania Rose Garden speech, had it’s own (mostly unmasked and undistanced) audience, and it was duller than Lawrence Welk conducting Nixon in China. It was telling that the big standing ovation line was when Pence only acknowledged the Kenosha fiasco by saying “the violence must stop – whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha… we will have law and order on the streets of America” and even the standing ovation seemed deeply subdued. And before that, of course Pence went along with the going theme that for three years Trump was the greatest president since Jesus Himself: “And then, the coronavirus struck from China.”

Several times in this convention, Republicans have referred to China and their plots against the country, and how the Democrats failed to bring them up. On Tuesday, Pam Bondi invoked Hunter Biden’s work for a corrupt company in Ukraine. You know one country they haven’t brought up? Russia.

Gilbert said, “Oh, that reminds me of a joke.”
The political guy said, “What’s the joke?”
“What’s three inches long and covered in Cheeto dust?”
“I don’t know.”

“Vladimir Putin’s dick.”

Day Four

This is where it became clear that the “strategy” to present Trump every day of the convention, once again flouting the conventional path where the candidate is only brought out at the end, might temporarily feed Trump’s bottomless need for praise and attention, but it undermined the dramatic buildup. I mean, if you were given a four-course dinner and the appetizer was Fried Dogshit and the salad was Dogshit Salad with Urine Vinagarette Dressing, you’re not that enthused for Dogshit Parmagiana and Scallopini in Tomato Sauce.

Not only that, it’s been clear for months (and from the previous two keynote speeches, in which Trump appeared in person) that Trump desperately craves to go back to the good old days when he was in front of a podium, with thousands of people surrounding him and eating up everything he had to say, and all this radical-Left crap like “life” and “reality” just keeps getting in the way.

But Thursday they wrapped up with some of the few people in the Republican Party who (now that Paul Ryan has retired) had some standing independent of Trump. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the few Republicans who practiced social distancing by taping his speech back home in Kentucky. And even then, while he actually has some say in how things are run, McConnell just did the same thing that the other speakers did, praise Donald Trump while bagging on the Democrats, saying things like “they even want to control how many hamburgers you can eat.” Well. I’m sure that would be a losing topic for Democrats if they wanted to make that part of their platform, which is why they didn’t.

During his extremely loud speech, UFC head Dana White said that “President Trump realized that one of the best ways of restoring the American people’s sense of normalcy was to restore our entertainment options.” Which explains not only why White is freaking out from a pocketbook standpoint but why Trumpniks are so freaked by the NBA boycott, because more and more people are refusing to acknowledge this regime as normal. But then White also said “(Trump) is one of the most loyal men I’ve ever met”, so that skews his credibility right there.

A little later they had Ben Carson come out and say a few good things about American character, but then he undermined it by saying that Trump kept every promise he’s made.

After that they had America’s Mayor Rudy Guiliani out to attack the Democrats who “allow” crime and go against Law & Order. Here’s the thing, his record as New York Mayor, in comparison to “progressive Democrat mayors” is probably the best advertisement for the law and order approach, even if the emphasis of “stop and frisk” is exactly why that approach isn’t popular anymore. It’s just that Rudy’s own credibility is undermined by his increasingly wacky behavior, such as today’s speech, which was even more Grandpa Simpson in its delivery than the usual Trump speech. Not to mention that Rudy’s own definition of law and order seems to be elastic.

Senator Tom Cotton was one of the few people who made a point by point comparison of Trump and Biden on substance, it’s just that the “substance” was meaningless. For example, Cotton said Trump built up the military by creating the Space Force. Which does WHAT, exactly? Hand out parking tickets to Martians? This was apparently so much for the MSDNC team that they felt obliged to do a fact check after the speech, pointing out for instance that rather than eliminating terrorists, Trump gave support to Turkish strongman Erdogan to drive out Kurdish strongholds in Syria that were helping us fight Islamic State.

Then they had a very effective, Evangelical-style speech from Alice Johnson, another former inmate pardoned by Trump (at the urging of the West-Kardashian family) about how she became an ordained minister in prison and was “freed in body” by the president but “freed in mind by the Almighty God.”

Even Rachel Maddow thought she was good.

Then in the 7/10 o’clock hour they did the main show, led by opening act Ivanka Trump and her truly wonderful, silky hair. It was pretty easy to notice given how much it blew in the wind outside the White House lawn, which was a bad omen for her Dad’s combover. Given that at least 85 percent of the speaking up to this point was vapid praise for Donald, and that’s what Ivanka specializes in, it’s no surprise that that was much of her speech, although I liked the line “he is so unapologetic about his beliefs that he has forced me and countless other Americans to take a hard look at ourselves and ask what we stand for.” Well, true enough. Then she said “America doesn’t need another empty vessel who will do whatever the fringe on his party demands.” Whatever you say, Tucker Carlson.

And with that, Ivanka introduced Donald and Melania, who walked at a reasonable pace down the stairs. Trump approached the podium with an odd smile that reflected either overwhelming emotion or just constipation. He saw Melania off after holding her hand for some time and then began his speech.

After first acknowledging the people in the path of Hurricane Laura, and Mike Pence (which implies that Pence is still his running mate), Trump formally accepted the party’s nomination, saying it was willing to accept Democrats and independents who believe in America’s greatness, which is certainly dreaming big. He once again claimed that the country was struck by an “invisible enemy” and was developing life-saving therapies, even if it wasn’t doing the common safety measures that kept the death toll down in other countries. He then went into the tack that the future of America as a country is at stake in this election, which is the one area where I’m sure Democrats would agree with him. Trump said that “the Democrat Party” was bent on tearing down our country, whereas “we give our faith to Almighty God.” With his hairline patriotically flapping in the breeze, Trump shoved the nitrous oxide in the culture war tank and presented himself as a selfless martyr who sacrificed for the country as opposed to career politicians like Biden.

He got lots of applause for nominating two conservative Supreme Court Justices. He got almost as much applause for saying “I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President” from a crowd that had slightly more black people than people wearing masks. He got applause for moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. From Ivanka, Jared and maybe five other people around them. Trump bragged about himself like a rap star while claiming that Joe Biden was for every rotten thing that’s happened to this country up to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby. He said that when the China Virus ™ hit we launched the largest national mobilization since World War II against it, which was one of the most obvious lies in the series. I mean, contrary to liberal critics, Trump DID acknowledge the virus Thursday, it’s just that everything he said was misread statistics and bullshit. It’s really amazing how much time he did spend on it with this speech, so it’s that much more amazing how much bullshit there was. I mean, the deeper he got into the speech, the more it had to be fact-checked.

Trump self-righteously pandered to the crowd of fetus fetishists about how Democrats do not protect unborn life while being responsible for more deaths outside the womb than any other president. He said “Biden is a Trojan Horse for socialism”, years after declaring that the white nationalists at Charlottesville were “very fine people”. He praised the police and said “we must never allow mob rule” which presumably wasn’t a reference to that kid with the AR-15 in Kenosha. He said that “the far left” wants to make you say the things you know aren’t true, which is presumably why so many more Republicans spoke at the Democratic convention than the other way around.

With his stance becoming more of a lazy slump as the speech wore on, Trump continued to brag and promise and slander. He talked about Americans of the past and their Bibles and covered wagons and how they did things with style, and confidence and flair, and all the other things Trump doesn’t have. And he said “I am very, very proud to be the nominee of the Republican Party.” And that was it. I think. He might still be talking.

In any event the cameras cut away to a beautiful fireworks display around the Washington Monument, rudely interrupted by giant glittery explosions spelling “TRUMP” and “2020” which was about the most on-point moment of the whole event.

….

And the fundraiser blinked his eyes – about twenty times – and asked Gilbert, “So… what are you calling this political party?”
“THE ARISTOCRATS!!!”

So we have passed through the 2020 Democratic National Convention, or the first stage of bowel movements in the Taco Bell overload that is a presidential campaign season.

These are some of my impressions:

I seem to be in the minority, but I think the whole thing would have been better if Julia-Louis Dreyfus had been hosting every night. Now, with the “reconciliation” theme they seemed to be going with, I can see why they wouldn’t want the star of the notoriously acerbic and foul-mouthed Veep on stage the whole time, but some rage at the political clusterfuck is totally justified, and her tone was a nice balance to the overall sweetness of the whole affair.

The DNC got substantially worse ratings than it did in 2016, which frankly stands to reason, because as with so many other media events in the age of coronavirus, it loses something without a crowd. On the other hand, media observers really liked what they saw. This isn’t a contradiction. These duopoly political conventions have been nothing more than “infomercials” advertising a result that was pre-determined by primaries for years. This year, the Democrats actually worked with that, with taped musical pieces and other media events that are designed more for TV than a live audience. This extended to the traditional roll call of states announcing their delegates, which were done by remote on location from the actual states. This played well on camera and a lot of critics thought that they should make this change permanent.

Substantively, the need to play to the “cool” medium also affected the speeches given by the headliners, such that few people (other than Kamala Harris) tried the traditional approach of speaking at a lectern with a set of timed applause lines. I think this change born of necessity worked very well. And it worked best for the final speech of Joe Biden, who is no one’s idea of a master orator.

But at one point, Biden said: “I have some idea how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in the middle of your chest and you feel like you’re being sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes. But I’ve learned two things: First, your loved one may have left this earth, but they’ll never leave your heart. They’ll always be with you. You’ll always hear them.”

Now, I don’t care who you are, or if you believe in an afterlife, but that just hits home.

Joe Biden’s people keep using certain terms to praise him: “Empathy.” “He listens.” “He knows what it’s like.” Joe Biden and his family keep referring to the death of his son Beau, and the earlier death of his first wife and daughter, because he still seems to feel that loss, and it still seems to inform him. And I think that a lot of people are going to gravitate to that, especially at this point in time.

You could be cynical and say that Biden is just milking the sympathy factor, but if you really want to be cynical, the fact is that he CAN and he DOES.

You could never see Donald Trump making a similar appeal on the basis of personal confession – or at least, it wouldn’t be as convincing – because Donald Trump has invested so much of his life and his public image in playing the invincible Sun King, moving from victory to victory, who never has anything bad happen to him. Bad things only happen to those other people. This despite the fact that Trump HAS had his own tragedies, like the death of his parents from lingering illness, or the recent death of his brother, but I don’t he could gain as much sympathy from the average voter with such a confession of loss. Especially since Trump’s main coping mechanism seems to be golfing.

And that goes towards something that Barack Obama said in his DNC speech: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.” Trump is fundamentally lazy and stupid, and he has become that much lazier and stupider by his unbroken chain of success, because he has never had to learn how to change course, and now that events have finally turned against him and he needs to change his approach, he doesn’t know how.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t keep at least half an eye on the Republican National Convention, if only for the “Bearded Lady and Jo-Jo The Dogfaced Boy” factor of watching Nick Sandmann from the Lincoln Memorial standoff, and the Mr. and Mrs. Karen who stood outside their home with firearms during a Black Lives Matter protest this June. To say nothing of even more ridiculous speakers, such as Matt Gaetz, Joni Ernst, and of course, Donald Trump.

Somehow I doubt their sky-is-falling cluckings that Western Civilization is DOOOOMED if we don’t goosestep in line behind Trump will appeal to a country that has already had the sky fall on them under Trump.

In fact, there are already signs that Trump’s big strategy to pinch out a victory – cheat by cutting off mail service – may be backfiring. It not only motivates Democrats to find other ways to vote, it unnecessarily angers traditional Republican demographics who may not even want to vote by mail but who still have to get deliveries to rural areas that UPS and FedEx normally don’t cover. And thus if Trump can’t turn things around – and the whole reason things are still this bad is that he cannot or will not change course – then the November attempt to contest the election will go just as well as the attempt to sabotage the Post Office, and Trump will end up commandeering Air Force One for a one-way trip to Moscow, after first looting all the White House silverware.

Look: I am a cynic. I am NOT a liberal. I have more in common with the Republicans than with the people that Democrats normally pitch to, which is part of why this year’s DNC spent so much more time on the NeverTrumpers than the “progressives” who are already aligned with Democrats. And I have no confidence that Joe Biden has any real ability to contain the coronavirus or to rebuild the economy that Trump decimated. But the first day that Joe Biden is president will be the first day that Donald Trump is NOT president, and that in itself will do wonders for our nation’s recovery.

Not too far back, I said “Very soon, and certainly if Trump is re-elected, we are all going to find out what it is like to be black people.”

Did that seem like a belligerent, or insensitive, or politically incorrect thing to say?

I meant what I said. I do not mean that white people will be discriminated against in the way that Jews and Catholics and Chinese have been discriminated against in this country. I mean that the Trump Organization, and the political party it absorbed in a leveraged buyout, are going to attack the fundamental rights of white people in the same way that black people have been attacked throughout our history.

For example, with voting.

After Joe Biden told people – in April – that resident rump would try to “kick back” the election after previously threatening to veto Post Office funding in order to ‘do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote’, Trump’s handpicked Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, instituted certain reforms this month. DeJoy, who like most of Trump’s appointees has a conflict of interest with the bureaucracy he’s supervising, staged a “Friday night massacre” with a reorganization of leadership positions including a hiring freeze. This was combined with a severe cutback in vote sorting machines and documented cases of the United States Postal Service removing mailboxes from locations across the country.

And while these changes are defended by the Post Office as cost cutting measures, Mr. Trump, in his “I’m too stupid to NOT say the quiet part loud, and it doesn’t matter, because my party will support me even if they see Vladimir Putin bend me over a desk on live TV” way, said flat-out on Fox Business Network August 14 that “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” The backlash to that was such that on Tuesday the 19^th, DeJoy, now facing a congressional hearing and investigations, told Congress that he is suspending the planned post office changes until after the election, apparently on the assumption he will still have a job. In a statement, DeJoy announced he was reversing course “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail,” which sort of implies that that wasn’t a consideration before.

Now, maybe that seems like he’s backing down, maybe he’s just backing down for the sake of appearances. But it certainly doesn’t contradict the axiom that “character is what you do when nobody’s looking.”

Why was this a bad move? Because unlike, say, Brian Kemp’s election stunts, screwing the USPS doesn’t just affect poor and black people. It doesn’t just affect people who were planning to vote by mail. It affects the mailed payrolls and insurance documents of businesses. It affects the medical documents and prescriptions of veterans. It affects Social Security payments. You know who that affects? Old people. OLD WHITE people.

You knew this was not going to work when the first sign of pushback was when a hard-right Republican Congressman and Democrat Senator got together to stop the removal of mailboxes in Montana.

Do you know how scared Republicans have to be to pull that in MONTANA?

Montana and Idaho are where the Aryan Nations and their fellow travelers love to pilgrimage. It’s their Perfect Place. Even better than Argentina, cause there’s no Jews or Spanish speakers.

For all the cheap excuses of cost-cutting and how “unfair” and “rigged” mail voting is (for everybody except Trump), you know damn well Trump wouldn’t be doing this shit if he was 5 points ahead of Biden in the polls or even at margin of error. He’d be crowing about how invincible he is and how great his polls are. The fact that he’s doing this even before his party convention betrays his own belief that he’s a goner because he can’t turn things around, and that’s because he simply doesn’t know how.

The strategy, to the extent that Trump’s baby-shark brain is capable of formulating one, is like this: Just create as much chaos as possible to undermine the credibility of the entire election process so he can bullshit his way out of losing an election just like he and his party of enablers bullshitted their way out of impeachment. The problem being, the council deciding his fate is now a lot bigger and more diverse than the US Senate.

Not just that, I think Banana Republicans have severely underestimated just how much rage the Democrats are carrying over having lost one Electoral College race with a popular vote majority 16 years prior and then the last election to a candidate they considered far more “deplorable” than George Bush. Such anti-(d)emocratic results, while perfectly fair and square under the Constitution, are not only counter-intuitive, they offend the Democrats’ need to see themselves as the heroes of America’s story. So some of them are spoiling for a fight, and the best way to give them one is to steal the election in such a way that Democrats can actually PROVE you’re doing it.

The Lamestream Media has this cliche that is nevertheless very true when they talk about Trump’s 2016 victory: They say he drew an inside straight. That is, he got a lucky set of cards that he was extremely unlikely to ever draw again, and he has in fact not done so. First and foremost of these: HILLARY CLINTON IS NOT RUNNING. It has been a lot harder for Trump to tag and slander Joe Biden, because he doesn’t have nearly as many negatives as Clinton, and because Biden himself seems like a clumsy, politically incorrect “straight shooter” who appeals to the kind of people that Trump appeals to.

The fact that Biden doesn’t have Clinton’s negatives means that the “third” party option is now much less attractive. (Sorry, Jo Jorgensen.)

Moreover, Trump no longer has the negative advantage of not being the president, and not being in the ruling party. He can no longer go to black and working-class white neighborhoods and go, “What the hell have you got to lose?” Because now we know. He cannot ask the famous question Ronald Reagan asked about Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Is Herman Cain better off now than he was four years ago?

No, because the other factor is that no other president would ignore the spread of a virus from outside the continent cause “I like the numbers where they are“. No other president would have a Minister Without Portfolio who worked on a plan to address the coronavirus and supposedly threw it out because the virus was mainly killing people in Democrat-led states, as if a virus cares any more about political parties or state lines than it does about the Chinese border. And Trump, who is certainly not the cause of the “China virus” but IS the proximate cause for why we have lost a greater percentage of our population than any other Western country, is asking us to reward his performance with another term.

Are you going to reward that?? Are you going to reward the guy who is the reason you got laid off? Who is the reason people are getting foreclosed? Who is the reason your Governor is making you wear a mask? Who is the reason you can’t go to the hair salon? The movie theater? The buffets? You want four more years of the last six months??

I don’t think so, Tim.

And none of that may make a bit of difference because Trump’s singular advantage combines with the advantage he previously did not have: He’s Donald Trump, and he’s the president.

In his private career, Trump always has acted on the principle that “it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.” As president, he combines that with what could be called The Nixon Principle: “If the President does it, it’s NOT illegal.” And flatly stated, if at least one-third of the US Senate are party stooges willing to enable you, then effectively nothing you do can be illegal.

In this case, we’ve got a president deliberately holding up funding for the Post Office while cutting off the services it is still set to perform on the current budget, saying that mail-in voting is insecure, yet there wouldn’t be a national need for mail-in voting if the Trump Virus wasn’t it making it dangerous to go out in public. And yet, Trump is doing a LOT more to stop mail voting than he is to stop coronavirus.

Why, it’s almost as if Trump is doing everything he can to avoid containing the coronavirus because without a public health crisis, it would be easier for people to vote.

Does that seem like a crazy thing to say? Was it crazy when Joe Biden told people that Trump was going to try to postpone the election? Remember when Biden said Trump would try to screw with mail-in balloting, and people (including his own side) said that was crazy?
For a guy who is assumed by some to be too naive and trusting, Joe Biden seems to have Donald Trump’s number. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to be especially savvy. You just have to realize that any disgusting thing that Donald Trump is accused of is something he either has done or WOULD do just because.

And here is one area where Trump’s approach makes a brutal, even Stalinist, sense. There is a long-term phenomenon in election returns that has entered this year’s public discussion called “blue shift“, where because Democrats and their usual demographics often use provisional ballots – which are not the same as absentee or mail-in ballots, actually – and these ballots are legally counted last. These votes have not only led to a slower count of ballots and thus later election results, the later votes are often most likely to be Democratic, and these “blue” votes made the difference in a lot of 2018 midterm races.

Thus the strategy to undermine the process: If the result is not immediately clear, or seems to lean toward Trump on Election Day, it makes it that much easier for him to whine that the whole thing is “rigged” and gum up the works so he can try to win a technical victory against the public. But that’s not the brutal and Stalinist part.

Because this strategy assumes that his cult will be willing to go out en masse in person to vote for Republicans on Election Day itself so that the results will look better for him on Election Day than they will probably be in the final outcome.

Trump is quite willing to have his core supporters risk sickness and death, and losing those people in the future won’t matter to him as long as he gets to keep being president.

If you Trumpniks have not yet realized how self-absorbed and evil the man you worship is, consider that.

Of course there are some Kool-Aid drinkers who really would risk themselves by voting unmasked for The Leader, but it is still possible to go to the polling place and take precautions. And again, that depends on whether you’re even able to go to a polling place, which is another area where Banana Republican vote suppression may affect white people too. Not only that, early voting has been a feature in some states (like Nevada) for years, as in before God-Emperor Trump reset the calendar to Year Zero.

And then, the strategy assumes that the Left won’t just call the bluff. In the Democratic National Convention, which matters as much as it normally does, meaning it doesn’t, Michelle Obama exhorted people to cast ballots “in person, if we can“. And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie previously expressed a similar opinion: “The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.”

And on the other side, you had the Tulsa rally. Trump’s “comeback” had a really big crowd, and a really enthusiastic crowd, but it was only one-third the volume of the venue, which meant that for political purposes it was only one-third as big as it needed to be. Empty seats don’t lie. The event proved that Trump really does have a large number of ride-or-die fanatics (emphasis on the ‘die’) but they are almost certainly not in the numbers he had in 2016, and that’s the last card of the inside straight that he doesn’t have. Now maybe the two-thirds of the Tulsa auditorium who would have come out for Trump before corona would be willing to cast a secret ballot, especially if they got access to a mail-in ballot. But then we come to the point that Trump’s special bond with his base is that he shares all of their negative qualities. Thus Trumpniks, in all their boundless self-absorption, have to ask themselves if they truly care about Donald Trump’s welfare any more than he does for theirs.

So on November 3^rd, let’s see who really goes postal.

The big news for Thursday, July 30 – at least for one hour – was that Herman Cain, Republican activist, businessman and former presidential candidate, died today from coronavirus after attending resident rump’s campaign rally in Tulsa in June, in close quarters without a mask.

This really isn’t something that deserves either sympathy or gloating. When you refuse to take cheap, common sense precautions against a disease with at least a one-percent fatality rate, and which may cause permanent damage even if you do survive, that should not even be considered a news event. “Conservative Mask Denier Dies Of COVID-19” is no more a news story than “I Turned On The Tap And Got Water” or “Man Wearing Honey and Raw Steak On His Skin In Bear Country Eaten By Bears.”

It is no more a surprise than Wednesday’s big story, where Congressman Louie Gohmert (R.-Gohmert) revealed that HE has the coronavirus, which apparently he only found out about because he was scheduled to go with Trump on a campaign event in west Texas (Gohmert’s district area) and as part of the president’s security procedure, he had to be screened. As it turns out, it was a surprise not only to Gohmert but to his staff, who found out when he told them in person. (Most likely, without a mask.)

So no surprise either that one of the other stories surrounding the event was when a staff member sent a tweet to the reporter who broke the story and asked: “When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that ‘we could be an example to America on how to open up safely,'” the aide added. “When probing the office, you might want to ask how often were people berated for wearing masks.” As it turns out, he could do this because there was no policy in Congress for containing the coronavirus other than the decision of individual politicians for themselves and their staff, and it was only as a result of this event that Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted an official mask mandate for House buildings and the chamber. And that of course, is because so many representatives, pretty much all Republicans, resisted the idea of any guidelines for containing coronavirus, let alone requirements.

As they say on the Internet: “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

I mean we’ve heard the phrase “King Midas in reverse”, and Trump certainly is that, but he also seems to be Jesus in reverse: Everyone around him seems to be getting sick all of a sudden.

What we are seeing is what happens when you assume that laws – whether the Laws of Man or the Laws of Nature – don’t apply to you, because your tribal allegiance trumps reality itself. This is what happens when you ignore the people screaming in your ear that you’re driving the car off a cliff, and tell them “Fake News” or “Look man, gravity’s just a theory.”

The other huge event – at least for one hour – was when the financial reports came out for the end of the month and the second quarter, and it turned out, “Gross domestic product shrank 9.5% in the second quarter from the first, a drop that equals an annualized pace of 32.9%, the Commerce Department’s initial estimate showed on Thursday. That’s the steepest annualized decline in quarterly records dating back to 1947 and compares with analyst estimates for a 34.5% contraction. Personal spending, which makes up about two-thirds of GDP, slumped an annualized 34.6%, also the most on record.”

It is of course not good to an incumbent president’s chances to have the worst quarter and the worst consumer spending slump ON record, but never mind that, never mind the coronavirus, never mind the coverage of John Lewis’ funeral, to Trump, the REAL atrocity is that the news wasn’t all about him, even if he is the proximate cause for most of what’s wrong with this country. So once again he sought out the short-attention-span media by making himself the biggest atrocity.

So after the economic news and the Herman Cain news, and the Barack Obama eulogy for Herman Cain, but before his press conference, Trump twitted, “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good) 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote???”

Translated into Lucille Ball: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

As one guy on Facebook said: “Well yeah, cause see, if you have enough money to travel, it’s important to be able to vote. But if can’t afford to travel, you should instead drive 5 miles to wait in line for 4 hours to vote.”

Sure, we can say that the president has no authority to delay an election on his own behalf, and the term of the president and Congress end on January 2021 whether there’s an election or not, but the fact is, Trump has been able to bullshit his way around every other aspect of the Constitution up til now – largely because the enforcement mechanisms are mostly in the hands of the president himself – so why not this one?

The fact of the matter is that the president can’t unilaterally stop an election, but as with Trump’s deliberate efforts to undermine mask wearing and an organized campaign for virus containment, he can exert influence on various voters AND state governments who take his rhetoric seriously, and get them to undermine vote-by-mail in their states. The irony being that these efforts are most likely to succeed in the states that were more likely to vote for Trump anyway, and thus discourage senior citizens and other high-risk groups (who are more likely to vote for Trump) from using alternative voting methods, and thus encourage them to either risk the coronavirus by in-person voting, or be safe and not vote at all. Thus Trump’s disingenuous bellyaching is most likely to suppress the vote in the states where he is most likely to need it. In any case, “vote-by-mail is illegal cause it hurts Republicans” (allegedly) is like saying “we should abolish the Electoral College cause it hurts Democrats.” (Mind, I have gone over serious reasons why we should ditch or at least modify the Electoral College, but ‘Democrats don’t like the results’ should not be one of them.)

Then there’s the other liberal fear that Trump will call out the troops to enforce his will, but the reason he had to cobble together his wannabe stormtroopers from the “alphabet soup” bureaucracy to engage in the suppression campaign in Portland was because after the limited military participation for Bill Barr’s publicity stunt in Lafayette Square, the negative feedback, both outside and within the ranks, was such that the Defense Department heads made it clear they weren’t going to get behind such tactics again. As for Portland, Oregon’s Governor announced Wednesday that they will begin pulling out tomorrow. So either the “riots” failed and Law & Order (TM) succeeded, or the latest distraction campaign failed and it’s time for this week’s distraction.

I mean this is the problem that Trump is only now starting to deal with. He’s such a fountain of evil ineptitude that any horrible thing he does is going to be overshadowed by the even more horrible thing he does tomorrow, but that creates its own problems. “Never mind that teenage girl I raped! Lookit all these 10-year olds I killed!”

And if Trump is starting to get pushback from “my” military when he clearly DOES have presidential authority, I am not sure he will be able to use the military to save himself once his authority is in doubt. It’s testimony to the personality we’re dealing with that his delusions of godhood become more loud and insistent the more incompetent (and impotent) he proves to be.

None of which will make any difference if Biden can’t win a clear victory in 2020, at least as clear in Electoral terms as Trump got in 2016. Which is where we come to the next round of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes. Early this week, Joe Biden announced that he will announce his choice for Vice-Presidential running mate by next week, before the Democratic National Convention, which due to coronavirus will be mostly video-conference this year. And most people would say the choice of Vice-President doesn’t mean much, but then Joe is 77 and there’s a good chance he could die in office. He probably won’t, but then in 2016, a racist and obvious dumbass was probably not going to even get nominated by a major party, much less win an election, cause everybody could SEE how unlikely that was. I mean you have to admit, Kennedy’s choice of a running mate in 1960 was pretty consequential, wasn’t it?

Biden has already decided his running mate will be a woman, and it is increasingly likely to be a person “of color.” These are the most likely choices, with their pros and cons:

Senator Kamala Harris (D.-California) – by libertarian standards, both she and Biden are bad choices, given that both suffer a reputation for counterproductive ‘law-and-order’ legislation that they try to counter with even more ham-handed moves to the ‘progressive’ wing. Which of course makes it that much more likely that she’s going to be Biden’s pick. The main factor against her is that she cut Biden hard in the pre-primary debates when it looked like he was the weak one in the pack.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D.-Massachusetts) – certainly the best choice from a ‘progressive’ standpoint, but that may be the best reason to keep her in the Senate where she would actually stay on the floor. As a matter of fact, that’s the main factor against any pick who is a current Senator. If Democrats are smart (and if they were, we wouldn’t be here) they would realize that taking out Mitch McConnell and/or his Senate majority is more important even than taking out Trump, because Mitch is the one who’s been enforcing a one-man veto on any government reforms even before Trump took office. If McConnell lost his seat, even if Republicans re-take the majority in 2022, it’s unlikely that any other Republican Senator will have the same seniority, or ruthlessness. And Republicans have to defend 23 seats this cycle. Prior to coronavirus, most of them were safe. Now, even Mitch’s seat is in question. All Democrats need to take a majority is a net gain of three (with the Democratic Vice-President as a tie-breaker) or four if they somehow win that many without winning the White House. But it is now feasible that they could take enough seats for a three-fifths majority. That’s not very likely, but no longer impossible. In either case, Biden will need all the Senators he can get.

Senator Tammy Duckworth (D.-Illinois) Along with Warren, she is the leading non-Black candidate to be running mate, and again, simply because she is a Senator, this is a problem. On the other hand her being maimed during active service in Iraq undermines Republican attempts to say the evil Demonrats don’t support our troops, unless of course you think that baiting a combat veteran worked better for Tucker Carlson than it did when Trump insulted McCain. And in the long run, it’s hard to say how well THAT worked.

Stacey Abrams – was the Democrat candidate for Governor in Georgia and lost largely because Republican Brian Kemp was the Secretary of State setting the rules for the same election he was running in. (Nice work if you can get it.) Con: unlike the Senators, she doesn’t have much experience with national government. Pro: simply for being who she is, she, along with Duckworth, would be the most likely choice to make Republicans cry.

Who will Biden pick? Will he survive to January 20? Will Trump declare himself Emperor? Will he make Ivanka a Senator and Jared his horse? Tune in next time for: Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes!

In belated honor of Bastille Day, I would like to discuss the concept of guillotine insurance.

“Guillotine insurance” is a term a lot of leftists use to discuss ideas like national healthcare, or minimum wage, or something else that is supposed to keep the peasants from revolting. There’s at least one reason why a lot of people don’t take such rhetoric seriously, and I’ll get to it later. But as I’ve said, it is irrelevant to argue that “health care is a human right” or that anything else leftists want is a “right” when we have rights that are enumerated in the Constitution and the current government won’t even acknowledge those.

For example, Portland.

Apparently the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon had been dying down – one reason they hadn’t been in the news before now – but then someone decided to send in some people, not that anyone will take credit or give specifics. Starting July 7, resident rump sent in US Marshals Special Operations Group, Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and the Federal Protective Service, which is in charge of protecting federal properties. In the early morning hours of July 15, officers in unmarked camouflage were filmed as they got out of an unmarked van and grabbed a person in a helmet. More such reports came up in social media. According to the BBC, “The role of federal troops sent to Portland is the subject of intense speculation at the moment … They belong to a new federal force created last month in an executive order signed by President Trump which tasks them to protect historic monuments, memorials, statues, and federal facilities … When asked about the arrest of a protester captured on video, the CBP said the individual was suspected of destroying federal property. They said agents had identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia but their names were not displayed “due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.”

The goal is precisely to make sure that no one is accountable. If the tactic works (as in, it boosts Trump’s polls), Trump can step up to the podium with his retarded-toad grin and take credit for everything, and if it blows up, he can fire the alleged guy in charge like one of his wives. It’s the same way that Peter Navarro supposedly acted outside the White House when he wrote an op-ed against Anthony Fauci when we all know that Navarro won’t pee standing up before getting verbal permission from Trump. I call it “implausible deniability.”

Trump and his people have confirmed that this lawbreaking-and-disorder effort is just a test run for a wider campaign. Supposedly they’re going to go to Chicago next. Well, at least people there have guns.

I’m almost not joking. There is no reason why civilians can’t just shoot these guys. Why not? What agency do they represent? None? You won’t tell us? For THEIR protection? But if they haven’t done anything wrong, what do they have to hide? If you won’t tell us what authority you represent, you don’t represent ANY authority, and you have no more right to use force than anyone else, therefore anyone else can use force on you. Self-Defense! Stand Your Ground, man!

As terrible as this is, and it IS terrible, because it sets yet another precedent eroding American rights against an already established standard of letting the president of either party do whatever the fuck he wants, it’s worth remembering the analyses of people who point out that if Trump hadn’t let so many people die from coronavirus and the economy wasn’t endangered as a result, he wouldn’t be resorting to the usual tactic – escalate the chaos (even if he has to create it himself) and then tell his cult that only he can solve the problem he created. And as even Fox News told him, that’s not working anymore.

This, incidentally, is why the coronavirus is directly linked to Donald Trump’s decline in the polls and declining political fortunes when nothing else, up to and including impeachment, has knocked him off. Because people in 2016 already KNEW Trump was an unqualified, bigoted idiot, and they still liked the cut of his jib. Further revelations of his low character just reinforced the support of the people who voted for Trump precisely because of his low character. As long as his character deficiencies didn’t hurt THEM, they were glad to have a head of state who was dumb for public consumption and triggered the libs. Now that Trump’s dysfunction is the proximate cause of the spread of coronavirus in America, and even those people who aren’t directly affected yet still can’t go to bars and buffets and hair salons, they can blame the governors in their states, but deep down they know the governors aren’t the reason for the virus itself. Why else would Trump get such a horrible crowd in Tulsa, when he carried Oklahoma in 2016 by over 36 points?

Back in PC (Pre-Corona) it didn’t matter that our president was Liddle Donnie Clown Boy, because he at least knew enough to not interfere with one thing he’d inherited from Obama, and that was the economy. But because Trump isn’t even deep enough to be one-dimensional, he couldn’t understand that the coronavirus can’t be left alone to spread, and that if it isn’t contained, THAT destroys the economy. (Almost as if human beings are a necessary component of said economy!) Now we actually need a plan of action, and all Clown Boy can do is juggle his balls and holler at the marks to buy tickets to his next three-ring circus.

Just as Trump’s destabilization of Portland not only made the local situation worse but is counterproductive for his image as a “strong leader” who is actually solving our problems, his constantly casting about for demons and radicals and socialists to hunt down is doing more to radicalize the population than anything the Left has done on their own initiative. The apparent radicalization of America is nothing more than a growing part of the population realizing that cops already can abuse and kill anyone when they can get away with it, and the only reason this hasn’t happened to more white Americans is that it was not politically correct for authorities to do so. White protestors are dealing with what black people have been dealing with all along.

Among the various norms that Trump has destroyed, the latest is the most ironic: he is undermining the concept of white privilege itself. This is a term often used by the Left, I would say, used to death, but if “white privilege” means anything, surely it means the privilege of not being harassed, beaten or killed, even IF you’ve committed a crime?

When you try to explain the concept of white privilege to a non-leftist, salt-of-the-earth, “Why don’t we have a WHITE History Month?” kinda guy, you can point out that when the cops confronted Dylann Roof after he shot up everyone in a black church, the FBI de-escalated and got him lunch on the way to the police station, whereas Eric Garner was strangled by cops over selling loose cigarettes. When you put it that way, a lot of people get it.

Very soon, and certainly if Trump is re-elected, we are all going to find out what it is like to be black people.

No, not in the figurative “The Irish are the blacks of Europe” sense, or the disingenuous “Irish Catholics were the first indentured servants in North America” sense, I mean in the practical sense that I’ve already mentioned. It was easy to treat black people and other minority groups as having no sovereignty because they didn’t have much in the way of numbers and even less political influence. Black people still don’t have much in the way of numbers, but as a whole, people “of color” are an increasing plurality. More than that, the country as a whole, including white people, is turning away from a Republican view of the world, even as the Republican world is becoming increasingly self-enclosed and reactionary. That’s why they’re so afraid of mail voting and absentee voting (even though upper-class groups and absentee homeowners have often had to use such measures) because they don’t think they can win elections fair and square anymore. The ruling class is afraid of public sovereignty.

David Frum was right: “If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” It used to be that Republicans like Reagan and even the Bushes could win majorities by giving the public something to vote for, and a vision of government that appealed to the majority. But apparently now that’s just too hard. What you are seeing under Trump and Mitch McConnell is an effective agenda to rule not only as a plurality, but actively against the majority, sort of like apartheid South Africa. After all, Frum has also said: “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”

There always was a contradiction in the Declaration of Independence in saying broadly, “all men are created equal”, but in practice asserting that only white men are equal. We have lived with this contradiction because we saw the universal point behind the declaration and worked to resolve the contradiction by creating a white ethnic “melting pot”, freeing the slaves, giving women the vote and moving towards greater equality. The Banana Republican Party now seeks to resolve the contradiction by rejecting the Declaration itself, by asserting that men are not created equal, that there is one law for the ruling class, and the law for everyone else is simply to serve. The fact that this standard would have kicked both Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s ancestors out of the country is an irony that is lost on them, as most ironies are.

The Trump Organization is undermining the legitimacy of government itself.

Now if you’re one of those “libertarians” who always votes Republican and is perfectly fine with anonymous thugs throwing civilians in vans as long as they’re the people you hate, you can at least take comfort in knowing that your heroes are undermining support for Big Government, just not in the way you expected.

When leftists raise the concept of “guillotine insurance” they are perhaps being a bit naive in assuming that that’s how government in America works. We don’t assume we have to fight the government for our rights, which is one reason why we never assert them. We don’t have guillotine insurance in America, because we didn’t think we needed it. Partly it’s because there was more of a race culture than a class culture (compared to largely homogeneous European countries) but one of the reasons that we didn’t even have a class culture is because all of us, even the elites, actually believed in the American Dream. We had reason to believe that it didn’t matter how poor you were or where you were born, you could make it. That was the case for the white melting pot, and it’s even true for the large numbers of non-white immigrants who continue to come to America.

But that may not be the case any more. Income inequality in the US is not only higher than it’s ever been, it approaches the inequality levels of 1789 France. This is not an exaggeration. Trump Republican policies did indeed keep the economy going, but they deliberately hollowed out the safeguards we needed to keep it going in an emergency, including the pandemic response team that helped stop Ebola. And once Trump let the coronavirus spread to a national catastrophe, his Republicans only grudgingly allowed middle-class supports for a cratered private sector while cronies were allowed to dip their beaks in the limited “small” business fund. And it doesn’t matter if that was too little too late, we’ve gotta get the kids back in schools, even though there’s no vaccine and the resident is deliberately undermining mask-wearing efforts, we’ve gotta get adults back to work and get the economy going again. After all, it doesn’t matter how many people die, Wall Street bounced back, and that’s all that really matters. You’re just supposed to shut up and obey. Goosestep back into the offices, back into the shops, back into the schools, be a good little soldier, cough out your lungs and die for The Leader.

FUCK.

THAT.

A political class doesn’t do that sort of thing if it fears losing power. And if it doesn’t see a threat to its rational best interest in flipping off the public, it must be because they have reason to believe they’ll never lose an election again.

People on my side – or what I thought was my side – have used slogans like “Fear the government that fears your gun.” I would add, “Fear the government that fears your vote.”
Because if you don’t use one, you’d better be ready to use the other.

“Every government in history has been run by assholes. The beautiful thing about democracy, is that in a democracy, the assholes are us.”

-P.J. O’Rourke

I was trying to find exactly where P.J. O’Rourke said that quote. It turns out he used a marginally less offensive version that became the title of Parliament of Whores: “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.” The version I remember was way, way back in the old days when P.J. O’Rourke was still writing for Rolling Stone and he was doing this takedown of Senator Joe Biden’s previous attempt to run for President. Another line I remember from that article was in reference to Biden stealing speeches from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock: “That’s like stealing lyrics from LL Cool J.”

But another thing O’Rourke said in one of his books that is at least as relevant to the current time is this: “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

Here’s the reason I bring this up. About a week ago I saw this Facebook post from the handle “Quarynnetine Valente” saying “The pandemic has managed to do what so many couldn’t: just completely disprove libertarianism and all it’s brethren – No, people will not do the right thing if left to their own devices without the government. They won’t even do so much as wear a small piece of cloth over their faces.”

I’d also seen a Reason article about how even a necessary element of Federal coronavirus response was screwed up, where the GAO reported that at least a million of the coronavirus stimulus checks were actually sent to dead people. And I’d quoted that woman’s post in commentary: “Liberal comment today on Facebook: ‘this crisis completely disproves libertarianism! We can’t even trust people to wear masks without government telling them!’
Government: [cuts off regular recipients and gives COVID checks to billionaires and dead people] “

And a Democrat partisan friend responded, “No, (she’s) right. Libertarians like to concentrate on the handful of government failings and utterly ignore the sea of benefits. One of the reasons I have a hard time taking you seriously some times.” And I responded: “This is why I don’t take government seriously some times.”

I’m serious. It was private citizens and businesses who did more to encourage the shutdown in the first weeks of coronavirus spread than anything the national government has done – indeed, while the New York City and State governments both fell down at first, they started to create serious public health policies while the Trump Organization still refuses to do so.

Monday in The Atlantic, David Frum presented a damning timeline of events that conclusively demonstrate that Trump is not only refusing to take coronavirus seriously, he is actively encouraging the spread of the disease among the public. This is less by what he is doing than what he is not doing – notably not wearing a mask and not encouraging social distancing, even though Mike Pence and even Mitch McConnell now do appear in masks. It’s as though Trump were acting to do the exact opposite of what a president should, which ties into the other recent controversy that continues to bleed out, where reporters continue to investigate credible stories that Russia offered the Taliban bounties to kill our troops in Afghanistan and that Trump was aware of this and continued to take Vladimir Putin’s side on the world stage, for example, continuing to push for Russia to be re-invited to the G7 summits.

This all makes a lot more sense if you just assume that Trump is a Putin bitch whose specific job is to do everything he can to destroy America and everything it stands for. An idea which with every passing week becomes less and less conspiracy theory and more and more Occam’s Razor. But I digress.

In the last, perfunctory coronavirus task force hearing – at which, notably, Trump did not appear – reporters asked Vice President Pence why the Administration, specifically Trump, was encouraging people to gather in large crowds for Trump rallies and not follow experts’ advice to practice social distancing and use masks in public. And Pence started his response by saying: “The freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.” Yes, and in Die Hard With A Vengeance, John McClane had the free speech right to walk around Harlem wearing a sandwich board with the N-Word on it. That didn’t make it good for his continued health.

This Tuesday I was watching one of the talking-heads shows on MSNBC, and Jacob Frey, the Mayor of Minneapolis spoke in reference to the subject of police reform and said, “Culture eats policy for breakfast.” For someone who has done so much to undermine American soft power, Viceroy Trump does understand how to use it, by using the power of his office to shape the public culture. It was bad enough when the “liberal” media gave Trump free airtime that they never would have given a Libertarian or Green candidate because they wanted Hillary’s ride to the coronation to be less boring. But since he is now president, the dysfunctional people who follow him have that much more justification for their beliefs. It is largely for fear of offending them that those governors who had instituted coronavirus controls started to retract them before all, or even any, states had met the White House’s own guidelines for re-opening. So now, for SOME reason, there seems to be a huge surge in virus cases, even in states like California and Nevada that seemed to have it under control. So now in Nevada, Governor Steve Sisolak made it mandatory to wear a mask in public. And I’ve had at least one friend tell me that Sisolak can kiss their ass, but really, what do you expect? Trusting that people would do the right thing without being forced didn’t work.

So Quarantine Valentine or whatever her fucking name is is right about that, but it’s not quite as simple as “Government Good Liberty Bad.” And even then, it’s not like it matters. This Sunday I had to go out and stopped to get gas and got out of the car, and realized I hadn’t brought my mask from the house. I was kind of ashamed of myself, and then I realized that none of the other customers at the gas station were wearing a mask either. And this week I went to get my car looked at, and was at the garage for over two hours, and for half of that time, I was the only one with a mask on.

If I am a libertarian, and I think that a lot of regulations are just a bureaucratic power-grab to micromanage transactions that previous generations never had to micromanage, why does this matter to me? Why do I wear a mask and encourage others to do so? Because I see the need for it, because I educate myself, and I know (from my own recent brush with sickness in March) what the stakes are. I have what is perhaps mislabeled as common sense.

To me, a large part of libertarianism is the impression that government can get in the way of common sense. And what we are seeing in America’s approach to “liberty” is that the opposite of common sense is getting in the way of government.

And all this gets to a larger point. Libertarians might not like government much, but the fact of the matter is, the reason it got as big and intrusive as it has is because people saw a need for it. Sometimes that need is even genuine. In the case of this pandemic or any other genuine emergency, you need an authority who is going to be able to coordinate resources and set policies. And then there are other cases, like the entire Transportation Security Administration, where you have government micromanaging things that we were perfectly happy doing for ourselves before 9-11. And the uselessness of the TSA is only reinforced by the fact that government policy was deformed by the shock of 9-11, yet the 9-11 attacks had an immediate death toll of 2,977 plus the hijackers, yet our government has let over 120,000 die from coronavirus, and the Republicans who demanded a security state after 9-11 don’t bat an eye.

And yet we do need a government, because we need to have some kind of treatment for coronavirus, precisely because we as a collective of individuals cannot micromanage our public lives and private behavior to contain casual contact indefinitely, we cannot get even the most authoritarian government (for example, China) to micromanage individual behavior indefinitely and we sure as Hell cannot get THIS government to manage public behavior.

Government is on some level an admission of social failure. If the Facebook poster is correct in saying that we as a people cannot be trusted to put on a stupid mask to stop the spread of disease, anything government does to encourage that will be imperfect at best. But people are still going to ask for government, because the alternative default is unacceptable. If one advocates for libertarianism, then by definition you cannot create a more libertarian society with more government and more force. It means changing the culture so that we do not need as much government, so that people do the right thing without having to be told. Because again, government cannot do everything, even if we thought that was a good idea. And changing the culture so that people are more capable of self-government requires education and socialization.

In March, I’d said: “The Trump Administration is what you get when you combine class privilege with the government’s monopoly on force. Trump himself is the natural result of a system that pretends to capitalism but actually relies on social capital – what Randians would call ‘pull’ and we in Las Vegas call ‘juice’ – in order to avoid the checks and balances that are supposed to be inherent in the capitalist system, in much the same way that party solidarity has destroyed the checks and balances written into the Constitution.” You can see this in how anti-Trump commentators go on about how Trump has undermined the “rule of law”, which as we can see in retrospect is less a rule than an agreement from all parties to follow the law. It doesn’t matter how strict the law is if the people in charge of enforcing it allow it to be broken, or ARE the lawbreakers. Which gets to the point that what we’re dealing with is psychological as much as political. If all government is just a matter of social agreement, then the same thing applies to every other social arrangement, including business. Which also means that a right-wing “anarcho-capitalism” would not work any better than a left-wing anarchy, because there is no such thing as trade without rules and enforcement of rules, and there is no such thing as common property because resources have to be administered. It doesn’t matter whether you call that administration a government or not, it will come to exist by default. And that means it doesn’t matter if things are administered through officials acting in the public sector or the private sector if they all grew up with the same expectations as to what is acceptable.

They’re the SAME FUCKING PEOPLE.

And if that ought to give pause to a libertarian who thinks that people can be trusted to do the right thing without government forcing them, it really ought to give pause to a statist who thinks government can be trusted to tell people what the right thing is.

Ironically, Viceroy Donald Trump has something in common with Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, and the other professional Trump-haters on late-night TV: Their jokes go flat without a live audience. And if you watch Colbert (and I’m not sure why I still do) you know he’s very vocal about wanting to get back in front of a crowd. So if it’s that bad for him, how bad must it be for Trump, who craves attention the way a tweeker craves meth?

Last Saturday, the answer proved to be: Pretty fuckin’ bad.

How must it feel to sell your soul for success? There have been many stories of making a deal with the Devil for power or fame, for example, becoming a world-famous songwriter only to die in an elevator and find out that Hell is the elevator playing Muzak versions of your songs for eternity. But for at least three years, Donald Trump got damn near every thing he wanted. He got elected president with everyone telling him it was impossible. Even after various financial and corruption scandals were exposed, nobody could touch him, because Republicans protected him. And that’s because Trump has, or at least had, a cult of fanatics who really would vote for him if he shot somebody on 5^th Avenue.

But then coronavirus happened. And it happened because Trump thought that doing anything at all about it would depress the stock market. And even when that downturn proved to be short-lived, Trump refused to create a national policy or announce tests because the virus seemed to be hitting hardest in “blue” states with Those People. And the need to create public health measures meant that primary elections had to have a lot of polling places shut down, especially in economically disadvantaged areas, which to Trump and his Party is a feature and not a bug. But then the George Floyd case happened, after the Breonna Taylor case happened, after the Ahmed Arbery case happened, and the reason the Floyd case caught fire when the others didn’t might have had something to do with the fact that a whole bunch more people were quarantined or unemployed than might have been a few months ago. So a lot of those people ended up on the streets, which led to both civilian riots and police brutality, which led to Trump ordering the crowds around Lafayette Square to be gassed and dispersed so he could walk to St. John’s and hold a Bible, which was his biggest public relations fiasco until the next one. In the face of rocketing coronavirus numbers both nationally and in Oklahoma, Trump decided to hold his first big time America Is Back rally on the weekend of Juneteenth, in the safe, heavily Republican state of Oklahoma, in Tulsa, for some reason. It should have been a sign when both the pro- and anti-Trump crowds outside the venue were much smaller than expected. Then it turned out that no less than six staffers in Oklahoma already tested positive for the virus by Saturday June 20. Then by the time Trump got to Tulsa, they had to cancel the speech at the outside overflow podium because there WAS no overflow. As it turned out, a venue that had a capacity for 19,000 ended up with about 6,200 Trump fans. So by the time Trump came out to take the stage, he was the happiest man on Earth. And then, did you see the picture of Trump stomping back to the White House with his tie off, clutching a MAGA hat in his hand? Wow. He looked like Vladimir Putin paid him for an hour.

How must it feel to know that this is the price of the deal? That no, as a matter of fact, not everyone is going to love you so much that they would risk sickness and death for you? That maybe you’re NOT invincible forever?

And did anyone even care what Trump had to say about politics? All this week, all the talking heads could deal with was how Trump spent over ten minutes making excuses for why he needed to drink water with two hands. Just to prove he could, he drank water with one hand and threw the glass away, and THAT was the biggest cheer of the night, which only proves where Republican standards are. Then he went on about having to walk slowly down a ramp at West Point cause he was so afraid he was gonna slip. And this is another reason he’s losing against Joe Biden: The more he tries to ridicule Sleepy Joe and prove he’s the roughest, toughest man in the room, the more he comes off like George Costanza.

“I was in the pool! I WAS IN THE POOL!!”

But really, we’ve all gone on along enough about Trump’s greatest self-own (until the next one). The problem is, it may not matter. In fact, the shrinkage of Trump’s crowd size may not really be good news for Democrats.

What we have here is a moment that separates the men from the boys, so to speak. All of us, but especially Trump Republicans, have to face the possibility that we may not be alive to vote in November if we don’t wise up now. Half the reason Trump retained such popularity he had is because the economy was good, and now that’s endangered. But he’ll still have a certain core of cultists who support Trump because they look at the Book of Revelations and think that he might bring about the Last Days. Not that Trump is the Antichrist. Lucifer actually IS a man of wealth and taste.

But it is now proven that 12,800 people who “should” have been at the Tulsa rally chose self-preservation instead. That doesn’t mean they all became Biden voters. It means they realize they can’t vote for Trump in November if they don’t practice self-preservation. It also doesn’t mean they want the government to do anything about the coronavirus; after all their main regret about Trump, if they have one, is that “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” It never occurred to them until now that the people he’s doing the best job of hurting are them. But he’s still doing a bang-up job of undermining the rest of the country, and since they hate this country, that’s what matters.

The dilemma, as was always the case, is having a government that lasts long enough to destroy the liberal status quo ante without being so stupid and incompetent that it destroys itself first. In the most recent primaries, Republican voter registration has actually gone up from the midterms in which Democrats made gains. The Hill: “In 2018, both parties (in Georgia) had gubernatorial primaries, and turnout was 555,000 in the Democratic primary vs. 607,000 in the Republican primary. This year, even though there were no contested statewide contests on the Republican side, almost a million voters cast ballots in the GOP Senate primary and almost 1.2 million voted in the Democratic Senate primary. That’s an increase of more than 120 percent in the number of Democratic primary voters and more than 60 percent in the number of Republican primary voters compared with 2018.

“This year, for the first time since 2008, more voters took a Democratic primary ballot than a Republican primary ballot. In the Senate primary, 53 percent of voters took a Democratic ballot — and this does not seem to have been a result of the absence of a contest on the Republican side. In the Seventh Congressional District, where the Republican incumbent is retiring, there were hotly contested primaries in both parties, and 57 percent of voters took a Democratic primary ballot. Likewise, in the Sixth District, the Democratic incumbent, Lucy McBath, was unopposed while Republicans had a contested primary to choose her challenger; yet 58 percent of voters chose a Democratic primary ballot.”

According to the Intelligencer of Charleston, West Virginia: “As voters turn in absentee ballots, turn out for early voting or prepare for the June 9 primary election, more Republicans and unaffiliated voters are registered to vote than Democratic voters this election in West Virginia. “According to voter registration numbers released Thursday by the Secretary of State, the number of voters registered with the Democratic Party as of the close of the primary election registration period on May 19 was 474,961, or 38.63 percent of the state’s 1.2 million registered voters.

“The number of voters registered with the Republican Party as of May 19 was 425,008, or 34.57 percent. The number of unaffiliated voters was 281,587, or 22.9 percent. The May 19 voter registration totals put the Republican Party just 4 points away from tying the Democratic Party in voter registration.

“If this pace continues in just over 24 months, Democrats will lose their long-held voter registration advantage,” said Melody Potter, chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Executive Committee.”

Republicans are scared. They will not admit that they’re scared of coronavirus, but in Tulsa, they voted with their feet. And of course, they’re even more scared of Democrats. And while they may not consciously realize this (a huge part of modern ‘conservatism’ is being reactionary rather than conscious), in order to have a chance to destroy “the deep state” (formerly just ‘the state’) and create the government of their liking, they have to keep Republicans in charge of government. And that means that they have to save Trump from himself.

Just because they now realize they can’t follow Trump into the ditch, doesn’t mean Republicans have quit negative partisanship or the motivation of Trump’s cult of personality. They just have to tactically withdraw from it right now. Because as in 2016, all the opinion polls don’t matter as much as the general election vote, and in 2020, you don’t get to vote in the general election if you’re dead. Don’t look at the polls. Look at how many Republicans are registered, and look at who’s winning their primaries.

So, with all this in mind, Trump is hardly knocked out, the Biden Democrats can still make a mistake and Republicans can still pull through. All Trump has to do is focus, grasp the moment, and not be lazy, stupid or incompetent!

…In other words, Trumpniks, see you next year in Commie Muslim Transmanistan.