James Gillen

This week, America approaches summer as it celebrates Memorial Day. It is a day that we honor those who died to serve this country. It seems approprate that this year we use the occasion to honor the memory of a government run by functional adults, cause it looks like we won’t see it again in our lifetime.

Late Saturday the breaking news was that President Biden and Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy had reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a federal debt default.

“The deal, if enacted, would boost the nation’s borrowing limit for two years and take the volatile issue of America’s credit worthiness off the table until after the next presidential election, according to multiple reports.”

Yeah, IF enacted. There’s the rub. Kevin McCarthy was unable to become Speaker of the new Republican House majority until he’d caved to other Republicans on every conceivable demand, one of which was that any one member could call for the Speaker’s removal at any time. Meaning that approval assumes that the whole thing won’t be torpedoed by some conceited needledick bugfucker just because he can. Please keep in mind that “conceited needledick bugfucker” is just my polite euphemism for “Matt Gaetz.”

The only reason this is even a crisis is because the United States government has imposed an artificial debt ceiling on its budget that frankly doesn’t make any sense because every time we reach or exceed it, the two parties end up raising the debt ceiling again precisely because failure to do so would default the government. And yet it’s retained, mainly by Republicans, because otherwise the budget would just keep going up and up and up and there would be no way to pressure the other party into fiscal restraint.

Again, I’m not a liberal. I DO think this government taxes and spends too much, and we could stand to cut some of that spending. I can even point out a couple of specifics. One Internet friend of mine said one place to trim the budget would be eliminating the US Marine Corps, given that we already have an Army and it did most of our major amphibious landings (like D-Day) and therefore the Marines are redundant. But then, this guy was in Army Intelligence, and Army tends to think the USMC is useless. (Typical Army joke: ‘what has an IQ of 199 and runs screaming through the desert?’ ‘200 Marines.’)

Seriously, there’s supposed to be $56 billion unallocated from COVID relief and you’d think they’d be able to liquidate that to create some room in the budget. Cause according to all the authorities, there’s no longer a COVID emergency, right? And if we’re trying to scale down government COVID response because there’s no longer a COVID emergency, well, it’s been over 22 years since somebody hijacked an airplane, so why do we still need Homeland Security in the airports taking X-Rays to see which of us are circumcised?

But no, up to this point and probably still now, the Democrats and media (same thing, really) continue to hope that they can get a discharge petition to pass a “clean” bill without needing the Speaker to advance it to the floor. All it would need is “five Republicans with courage.” Which is the joke that Democrats and media always subject themselves to. There ARE no five Republicans with courage. This is a party whose most literate members have seen their institution get devoured by a mob (in all senses of the term) and they have neither the courage to admit that they sympathize with the mob nor the courage to stand up to it. Anybody who could qualify as such is dead, retired, independent or already defected to the Democrats. You’re not going to find five reasonable Republicans in Washington for the same reason Jesus Christ wasn’t born there: They couldn’t find three wise men or one virgin.

At the same time, it would still be more likely to find five Republicans willing to work with the Democrats than it would be for Kevin to pass this thing without losing at least five of his caucus.

I would object to the Republican position less if it were actually principled, but we’ve known since fucking Reagan that these guys talk a good game about “fiscal conservatism” and then balloon the deficits by increasing the spending in the areas they like while slashing taxes on the upper percentile. Not to mention how during the Trump Organization, the Republican Congress raised the debt ceiling three times with no preconditions. It’s hostage taking, and Gaetz himself said as much. “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Gaetz told Semafor.

I had already said that : “One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default. An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more.” As it turned out there was already some preventative measure in the system previously. According to Wikipedia, Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt imposed the “Gephardt Rule” in 1979 stating that the debt ceiling was automatically raised when a budget was passed. This resolved the contradiction in voting for appropriations but not voting to fund them. This was in fact the standard until Gephardt lost his majority in 1995 and Republicans repealed the rule. The strange thing is that Democrats have had the majority at least once since then and not re-established the rule. Which further confirms the two main points of the issue: Crisis around the debt is entirely manufactured by Republicans for their own political purposes, and if Democrats can be blamed for anything, it’s their blithe assumption that they don’t need to establish sound procedures when they are in charge.

I’m thinking we should consider the terms of forming America 2.0. Cause this shitty government isn’t going to last the way it’s going.

Not that I am one of those pessimists who thinks America is necessarily going to break apart or decline in comparison to other nations. We still have more capital and resources than the European Union (our main liberal-capitalist rivals) and a more efficient military-industrial complex than China or Russia (our two main authoritarian rivals). But it could happen, and defaulting on our debt would be a big reason why. The problems facing our nation are completely preventable and almost completely the result of our political dysfunction.

Liberals hated Ronald Reagan for saying “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But I’m sure they would have to agree with him now: Government is the problem, if only because the former Party of Reagan has MADE IT the problem. But then again, those Republicans, as reactionary as some of them may have been, were not completely off the deep end like they are now, nor was the Democratic Party exactly like what it is now. Republicans who think they’re clever point out that it was actually Democrat states that held slaves and the former Party of Lincoln who freed them. Which of course is blanking out how much things have changed since. “The problem” with government used to be the Democratic Party, but it just switched tents. The common element is the people who think all that stuff about “all men are created equal” only applies to them and their demographic. This was why they had endorsed slavery and as-good-as-slavery laws for blacks after the Civil War, not only to keep black people under control but to effectively outsource labor in their own country and undercut the value of white labor, so that they would also be under control, but would still support the system cause at least they weren’t black.

The reason Democrats of today aren’t blamed for all the slavery and Jim Crow laws is because they realized there are more votes to be had in the rest of the country. At least in theory. So they quit appealing to the people who liked segregation and theocracy and left them to the Republicans. The problem with the theory is that the Republicans found that their new coalition were Southern Christians, military people, people who’d been burned by liberal policies and the Carter Administration, people who were going to be highly motivated to vote if they had someone to vote for, and Reagan picked them up. But that actually was a “big tent.” Over the years Republicans ran out of ideas and could only survive on the “culture war” issues they’d been flogging since the ’70s. Such success as they’ve had after GW Bush is because they appeal to that Christianist core that will come out to vote no matter what, because while they may not agree with the conservative love of capitalism, they would never vote for a party that supported abortion rights. Or trans rights. Or gay rights. Or voting rights. Well, rights.

It’s not impossible for such a party to appeal to women and non-whites – look at Trump’s performance with women in 2016 and his performance with Hispanics in 2020 – but the more they lean into this strategy of alienating anybody who isn’t a fanatic, the more self-defeating it is in the long run, especially as previously unmotivated young people and middle class women realize that Republican policies are deliberately targeting them. Republicans know this on some level, which is why they have to keep the advantages they still have to block any sort of reform, or indeed anything the other party does at all, since they know they wouldn’t get any credit for the results if they let the Democrats win anything.

This partisan warfare is the reason no one can cooperate and why one party in particular deliberately selects its politicians for their most negative and belligerent traits.

I had said that slavery, which we treat as the Original Sin of the republic, was something that could be and technically was corrected in the Constitution. But the real Original Sin of our foundation was that the Founders, looking at the partisan politics of the mother country Britain, never accounted for the natural tendency of people to group into camps and therefore left the process to occur by default. And since it was not accounted for in the Constitution, the ad hoc rules and traditions that Washington (and the states) developed to adapt to it ended up becoming more important to the day-to-day process than the actual Constitution. One result of this is something I had already mentioned: Article I of the Constitution specifically mentions that a Speaker of the House is to be chosen by the entire chamber. The Senate has no such rule, partially because it’s a smaller body and partially because the original Constitution had Senators appointed to represent their State legislatures, not elected by popular vote. Which is another area where partisan politics crept in to the process. So Speaker is a constitutional position. Senate Majority Leader is a position created for the convenience of the duopoly, so there’s apparently nothing in the Constitution that says the Majority Leader can’t, say, exercise effective veto power over a President’s Supreme Court nominees by preventing a vote from even getting to the floor.

This is something that requires more in-depth thinking than I have time for right now. But it’s clear that from both the day-to-day operations of Washington (and many state legislatures that are not just stymied by Republicans but rigidly controlled by them) and the process of screening candidates in the primary round that the “two” party system is at the heart of what’s wrong with this country. Because while the polarization of the two factions means that the Republicans have purged themselves of their non-fanatics (meaning the Democrats are pretty much the coalition for the rest of the country) this also means that Republican power is concentrated so in those areas where they already have historical or cultural dominance, their policies are that much more authoritarian. In short, they’re a danger to the survival of the United States. And the real punch line is that no one wants to admit this, because then the Democrats would be completely in charge. And no one wants that. Including, I suspect, the Democrats.

But if the dysfunction in America’s politics is channeled and incentivized by the party nomination process, incentives can be used to course correct where we’re going. This is already happening in some places. California has changed its election system to have bipartisan monitoring of elections and changed from “winner take all” to a “top-two” system such that the primary round of voting advances the top two finishing candidates regardless of party so that the November general election is effectively a runoff. In Nevada, Question 3, which would change Nevada’s primary round to a ranked-choice voting system, passed by 52.9 to 47.1 percent. (However ballot questions have to survive a second vote in state elections, so this would not be confirmed until 2024, if it passes again.) The goal of such measures is not to ban political parties, given that even if we did, you can’t stop people from associating in groups. The goal is to disincentivize group think, such that only party loyalists come out to vote in the primary round and thus skew the vote in the general election for the rest of the public who might want another choice but wouldn’t get it because they can’t vote in closed-ticket primaries for the candidate they might want.

Of course the real problem with the Republican Party is not so much that they hate abortion and taxes, however much Democrats might object. The real problem is that they are catering to the biggest fucking hammerheads in the country, and again, if the rest of the population knows better but the Party caters to the crazies, moving away from closed primaries dilutes that.
The real problem there is that we need to federalize this approach rather than wait for it to happen state by state, especially since the states that are most likely to pass reforms are the ones like California that are already least likely to support Republican national politics. And for obvious reasons, Republicans are not going to support that either. But we might be able to use their existing set of priorities against them.

I mean, as long as we’re going to bring back institutional racism, we should also bring back literacy tests at the voting booth. Just as long as they apply to voters AND candidates.

There is actually more than one Republican candidate for president who has already announced. It’s just that the media don’t pay any attention to them because they don’t have any chance against Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. However, this week a couple of Republicans announced a presidential campaign and they did get a certain level of coverage. In one case, for all the wrong reasons.

On Monday, May 22, Senator Tim Scott (R.-South Carolina) officially announced his presidential campaign after hinting at it for several months. He’s been Senator since 2014 (filling a term for a retiring senator) and has been re-elected twice since then, including 2022. He’s said to be well-liked by members of both parties in Washington, which is kind of rare these days. In his speech, he hit on the Republicans’ usual red-meat issues, including building a border wall, while also playing up a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps past as the son of a black single mother who went on to become the (only) Black Republican US Senator. For many reasons, he ought to appeal to a lot of people who remember the Republican Party as it used to be, and to people outside the Party. In his speech, Scott said: “We need a president who persuades not only our friends and our base.” He added, “We have to have a compassion for people who don’t agree with us.”

Well, that’s how I knew his primary campaign was doomed right there.

Tim Scott is well-spoken (and lest that seem patronizing, how many white politicians in either major party are well spoken these days?) and he seems to have honor. I say, seems to, given that as a Republican he is by definition obliged to go along with any sleazy thing the collective wants to push on the country. But he hearkens back to a time when Republicans were simply one wing of a political establishment that had a common conception of America as a constitutional republic, as opposed to being the right-wing version of a Leninist insurgency that aims to seize the state and remake society in its image.

A person who cares about morality, compassion (what person does that remind you of when you look at the Republican Party?) or persuasion rather than flipping off the libs is not somebody who has appeal to this Republican Party. Incidentally, they’re not a Grand Old Party any more so I refuse to call them “GOP.” Unless it stands for something like “Greedy Old Puritans” or “Guaranteeing Omnipresent Pedophilia.”

The people who run, or at least think they run, the Party are perfectly okay with using culture war agitation to get folks to vote for them while they turn the republic into a corporate feudalism, but the fact that they have to recruit from that group means that it’s harder to get things done in a legislature when some of their people actually believe things like the Flat Earth theory. What they want is somebody who’s going to rile up the proles while still being literate enough to negotiate bills on those increasingly rare occasions that Republicans still rely on legislation rather than courts. And so God made them…

Ron DeSantis.

Ronald Dion DeSantis (yes, his middle name came from the singer) was born in Florida and grew up playing baseball in both Little League and in college at Yale. In 2001, he graduated Yale magna cum laude and by 2005 had received a Juris Doctor law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to getting this degree, DeSantis joined the Navy as a commissioned officer in 2004, joining JAG (Judge Advocate General).

DeSantis was promoted to full Lieutenant in 2006, the same year he was assigned to the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay. According to Wikipedia, “The records of his service in the Navy were often redacted upon release to the public, to protect personal privacy, according to the Navy. Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, who was held at Guantanamo, alleged in 2022 that DeSantis oversaw force-feedings of detainees.”

Wow, even then Ron DeSantis was looking to build his resume as a Republican presidential candidate. That’s some work ethic.

Anyway, DeSantis moved back to Florida after leaving active duty, running for US Congress (Florida 6^th Congressional District) in 2012 and getting re-elected twice. In 2018 DeSantis ran for Florida Governor to replace the term-limited Republican Rick Scott. “Asked whether he could name an issue on which he disagreed with Trump, DeSantis declined.” After a controversial recount, he beat Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum (which in retrospect might have been a case of Democrats dodging a bullet). In his 2022 re-election campaign, he went against former Governor (and former Republican) Charlie Crist, who in their one TV debate demanded that DeSantis commit to serving his full term rather than use the office as a stepping stone to the White House. DeSantis dodged the question and ended up beating Crist by 19 points.

Part of DeSantis’ popularity was playing to the anti-mask/anti-vax sentiment during the COVID eruption, even though he was not so doctrinaire as to avoid all containment measures. This appealed to people who didn’t like COVID restrictions on public activity and public school attendance. This and his fierce social conservatism allowed him to pose as a defender of “freedom” against “socialism”, and that also had a huge appeal to Florida Hispanics whose families fled countries like Cuba and Venezuela. But he also used that culture war posture as a wedge to define “freedom” as the freedom of government to restrict other people on behalf of his favored political demographic.

DeSantis is considered to do a pretty good job as Governor, if one defines the role of Governor as using one’s executive power in conjunction with a legislative majority to turn their state into a one-party regime. His appeal is expressly to those people who think that’s what America ought to be like. The difference between them and the typical Trumpniks is that DeSantis has the brains and legal background to get things done behind the scenes, and up to this point, that made him politically popular. But as his quest to be more Trump than Trump leads him to areas like abortion prohibition that have not been very popular even in red states, you get to the problem with DeSantis trying to be more Trump than Trump: He would have to have Trump’s “charisma” (which completely evades me) and his command of the media. And he’s completely lacking in both.

Even before he actually made his official announcement, DeSantis was doing everything he could to present the appearance of a presidential candidate, while leaving Donald Trump, the already announced candidate, to keep dunking on him in the media with little reprisal. DeSantis has become rather notorious in the media for refusing to do interviews. He also doesn’t talk very much with voters. So perhaps it’s understandable that when he wanted to make his big announcement, he gravitated to none other than Elon Musk, one of those bigwigs who seems increasingly comfortable with turning America into a corporate state but realizes that Donald Trump, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to that agenda. Of course the last year or so has demonstrated that Elon Musk, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to his own declared agenda. Over the last week, DeSantis’ campaign set up a big presentation announcing that Elon Musk was going to host DeSantis’ official campaign announcement Wednesday on… Twitter Spaces.

Did you know that Twitter Spaces was a thing? Yeah, neither did I. And apparently neither did anybody at Twitter, including Elon Musk. “The audio stream crashed repeatedly, making it virtually impossible for most users to hear the new presidential candidate in real time.” More than 20 minutes passed before the scheduled start time because of audio drop-offs and other technical issues. Musk insisted that the problems were because servers were crashing due to the attendance being so high.

If only Elon had a staff at Twitter that knew the system and could review performance issues in real time.

Even if everything had gone smoothly, the announcement was merely an audio feed with DeSantis giving a formal speech. The media reaction to the “event” exceeded the attendance of the event itself.

Donald Trump Jr. actually came up with a good one that ended up becoming the insult tag of the week: “#DeSaster”. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) tweeted, “We had more people join when I played Among Us.”

Put it this way, Jason Johnson at MSDNC said “the Obamacare rollout looked better than this.”

Now with most of these competitors, Trump barely even bothers to acknowledge that a challenger exists. But he really seems hopped up about DeSantis. He takes him personally in a way that he wouldn’t with Scott or Nikki Haley. For various reasons. As a fellow Florida Man, DeSantis is technically Trump’s Governor and not only does Trump have to live under his authority, he’s also the main competition for the title of chief Florida Man. Plus, Trump can say, very accurately, that DeSantis needed his help and his endorsement to run for Governor the first time, to the extent that he was called a “mini-Trump.” On the other hand, in the 2022 off-year elections, DeSantis won re-election very handily without Trump’s help, even as Trump-endorsed candidates were tanking.

And course in order for Trump to really go after a target on Truf Censhal, he has to give them a demeaning little nickname. Like how he calls Chuck Schumer “Little Chuckie”, Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy” and Vladmir Putin “Oh My Precious Lord And Master In Whose Name I Live And Serve.”

Trump still seems to be casting about for the right nickname to give DeSantis. I like “Meatball Ron.” It just has a ring to it. I also like “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Cause it’s so accurate. And it almost sounds clever. Which is why I think Trump didn’t actually come up with that one. I also get that impression because he doesn’t use it too often, probably because it has too many syllables for Donnie to spell or pronounce regularly. He’s more likely to just call him “Ron DeSanctus”, which is just another case of Trump not bothering to spell correctly. But I also think that Trump has a team that monitors his social media posts for typographical errors, and if there aren’t enough of them, they add some in to make the argle-bargle look more “authentic.”

Serious question, independent of my personal feelings on Trump: If you are another Republican candidate for president, and your campaign platform is basically the same as Trump’s except for a couple of slogans or a personal history, then why are you running when you have a candidate who is already running, has already been President, and has a built-in following that you don’t have?

If you can give me a serious and credible answer to that question, I will take you seriously as a candidate.

More than likely though, most of Trump’s alleged rivals are either angling to be his 2024 running mate (which is the assumption about Nikki Haley) or have realized both that Trumpnik attitudes are predominant in the Republican Party but in order to win a general election, a candidate has to do a halfway imitation of a Homo Sapiens, and Trump gave up on that a while ago. The other issue with Trump’s campaign is implied: Why is he running for office as though he planned to follow the lawful procedure of elections, when he’s shown he’s going to do everything he can to ignore the results he doesn’t like, in such a way that even Georgia’s Secretary of State had to push back?

Contrary to what Senator Scott seems to think, the only choice in the post 2015 Republican Party is either Trumpism with Trump or Trumpism without Trump. Which is to say, someone like Ron DeSantis who is attempting to back away from Trump’s influence while being just as radical and reactionary, if not more so.

But as Bill Maher put it on March 10, “Why would you listen to a tribute band when the original act is still out there?” If this Party cared about winning general elections, they wouldn’t have gone with Trump in the first place. Half of the reason he did win is because James Comey decided to re-open an investigation on Hillary Clinton at exactly the wrong time for her. Most down ballot Republican candidates either refuse to admit it if they lose or run in districts that are so safe that the only real contest is for the Republican primary, which is another reason the Party as a whole doesn’t care about general elections. Why is there a surprise that they supported Trump’s insurrection against the Electoral College results? The main difference between Trump and any other potential Republican nominee for president is that all the other politicians might accept the result if they lose. We know for a fact that Trump will not.

Back in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, Republicans knew that they were unpopular, and so they thought their job was to make themselves popular by making their philosophies and policies more competitive, to appeal to the uncommitted and people on the other side and bring them over. These “conservatives” don’t want to do that. It’s just too hard. It would require thinking instead of feeling, and that’s no FUN. More’s the pity, because given the general unpopularity of leftist taxing and spending and the potential appeal of libertarian policies (if the woke Right ever took them seriously), the Right might still be competitive.

Trump has kept going back to an old MAGA slogan: “They’re not after me… they’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” Which like most Trump statements is the opposite of reality. The only reason the government hasn’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because “YOU” (the Trump fan club) are in the way. No one is out to “get” Middle America. No one would care about the Trump base if they weren’t constantly enabling him to stay out of jail, so if they got out of the way of justice, nothing would happen to them. But I suspect that a lot of the cultists know this and that is exactly why they continue to worship such an unworthy master: Because otherwise no one would care about them.

Not the Democrats, who treat working-class America as “flyover country.” And certainly not the Republican establishment, who prior to 2015 would talk a good game about banning abortion, ending affirmative action or moving our Israel embassy to Jerusalem, but would always go with the centrist position for the general election because they still cared about liberal-bourgeois premises like “the candidate that gets the most votes wins the election.”

Of course the 2020 general election and 2022 midterms after Dobbs v. Mississippi made clear that it’s getting harder and harder to win a majority with Right-populist positions, with Republicans losing races they “shoulda” won because worship of Trump and his dogmas mattered more than what the general public wanted. In other words, it demonstrated why the establishment only paid lip service to the populist goals, because they knew better. But it doesn’t matter, because the Trumpniks run the show now. The Republican establishment lives in fear of their populist base, and not just figuratively. After all, before January 6, Republican politicians only assumed that any heresy against Our Lord and Savior would cause a bloodthirsty lynch mob to break into the Capitol to try and kill them. But now they KNOW.

The assumption of some political watchers is that Republicans are waiting for a deus ex machina to save them – if not the 78-year-old Trump getting a heart attack, then Jack Smith or one of these other guys putting him up on federal charges and winning. Here’s the joke, there’s no law saying a presidential candidate can’t run if they’re indicted, or arrested, or even convicted. That’s right, Trump could get convicted of felonies, and still win the election, at which point he could pardon himself, because at that point, who could tell him that he can’t? (In the abstract, this is actually a good thing, insofar as government in other countries has deliberately targeted opposition politicians with criminal charges specifically to keep them from running for office. It’s Putin’s standard procedure in Russia, and it’s what happened to Lula da Silva in Brazil before his case was overturned in the courts.) The only constitutional way to keep Trump out of office would have been to convict him in impeachment, and of course the Republican Party wouldn’t let that happen. Which gets to the point that if they really wanted to stop him, they would have, but they don’t because they would lose his fan club of AM radio and “reality” TV fans, which was what their voter base had turned into even before Trump became a politician.

Which gets to the real problem for these guys: Even if Trump somehow got taken out of contention during the presidential primary rounds, for the Republican Party that would be like if the German Army conspiracy had actually assassinated Hitler in 1944. (My apologies to Hitler for the comparison to Trump.) Seriously, if the conspirators had eliminated Hitler (and his support structure) they would have eliminated the fanatic stubbornness that was the main handicap to their planning, but they still would have been at war with an Allied coalition that by now was demanding unconditional surrender. And why did they? Because by that point Hitler had started a genocidal war with half the planet, and Germany had become too much of a threat to just be set back to “normal.” Remember, World War I ended after the Germans deposed the Kaiser and the Allies agreed to make peace and not invade the country. The Allies decided they couldn’t give the benefit of the doubt again. In 1918, Germany was merely reactionary and militarist (and they were hardly unique in that, frankly). In 1944, they were not only reactionary and militarist, they were enthralled to a radical collectivist philosophy that could not co-exist with the rest of the world. They had to be destroyed.

Even if Trump isn’t in the picture, the Republican Party is still the Party of Trump. It isn’t a party of low taxes and small government. It damn sure isn’t a party of “fiscal responsibility” to the extent it ever was. As much as the Right howls and screams about “socialism”, the reason Americans hate socialism is because socialism in practice is one party taking over the government, with that one party being controlled by one man, and that one man gets to decide for the rest of us what to think, what to say, where we’re allowed to go in public, what businesses are allowed to do, and how (or whether) we can pray. And THAT’s what the Republicans want for this country. And again, that’s not just Trump. That’s DeSantis.

Next year, they shouldn’t just be defeated. They should be outright destroyed. They should get their dick put in the dirt so deep that it fucks China.

What happens to Trump himself is at this point irrelevant. Again, giving him appropriate punishment for his scams is an independent issue from whether he becomes president again. He has to be defeated in court AND the ballot box. But the latter also involves defeating the movement that made him a threat, because it will continue without him. Whether he wants to admit it or not.

In Western Christianity, this is “Holy Week” – commemorating the short period between Christ arriving in Jerusalem, being arrested by the Romans and condemned to die before rising on Easter. It also happens to be the same week that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, was first arraigned on criminal offenses by the State of New York.

Lest I seem mocking in comparing Trump to Jesus, it is a comparison seriously made by his fan club, which was formerly called the Republican Party. As Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (BR.-Georgia) told a reporter in New York Tuesday, Trump is in the same situation as Nelson Mandela and Jesus, being prosecuted by the state.

No, Trump really is like Jesus. I mean, look at the comparisons: They can both turn water into wine and sugar into cocaine, they both hang out with sex workers, and they both have close friends and family who are Jewish even though most of their worshipers don’t like to admit it.

Just as Jesus was arrested by the Romans on a Tuesday, this Tuesday Trump actually had to enter a courtroom and while there were some photos, there wasn’t much of a transcript as to why the proceeding took almost 90 minutes. It was most notable for the photo shot of Trump sitting at a bench with his lawyers, with that same worn-out, defeated look he has when he leaves a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin. Outside meanwhile, you had professional Trumpniks like Greene trying to raise support for their Messiah while getting drowned out by native New Yorkers. It was like the Bane speech to Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, only substitute “the darkness” with “obnoxiousness.” One thing we did find out from the arraignment is that while the Judge, Juan Merchan did not give Trump a specific gag order, he did direct him to refrain from inflammatory statements as the case proceeded to trial. But as soon as he could, Trump got in his motorcade to the airport, almost as if he hated the city that made him as much as it now hates him, then flew back to his fortress in Mar-a-Lago to give a prime-time speech that hardly any major network covered, bad-mouthing the judge and his family -once he was no longer in New York jurisdiction.

Or as the poets said in Ancient Rome, “Alligator Mouth, Hummingbird Ass.”

What did we actually find out during the event?

According to the statement of facts released Tuesday, the Trump Organization’s machinations centered on various attempts to shut down the never-ending scandals that had the potential to sabotage Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Much of it was with the assistance of National Enquirer/American Media Incorporated head David Pecker. These were called “catch and kill” deals, where Trump’s people would get Pecker to offer a certain amount of money for rights to their sleazy story, but instead of publishing the piece, the National Enquirer would sit on it and keep it from getting out. One thing we didn’t know until Tuesday was that a former doorman at Trump Tower had a rumor that Trump had fathered a child with a woman who wasn’t Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal. AMI paid this guy $30,000 for his story. “When AMI determined that the story was not true, the AMI CEO [Pecker] wanted to release the Doorman from the agreement. However Lawyer A [Michael Cohen] instructed the AMI CEO not to release the doorman until after the presidential election, and the AMI CEO complied with that instruction because of his agreement with the Defendant [Trump] and Lawyer A.” Shortly after the Access Hollywood (‘grab ’em by the pussy’) tape, AMI’s editor-in-chief contacted Pecker about another woman, Stormy Daniels (listed in the statement as ‘Woman 2’, as opposed to Karen McDougal, who is Woman 1 – keeping up so far?) who alleged that she had a sexual encounter with Defendant Trump while he was married. AMI arranged a deal to keep Daniels quiet, giving her $130,000. Twelve days before the 2016 election, Cohen drew $130,000 from a home loan, put it into a shell account, and used that to pay Daniels off. After the election, Trump repaid Cohen in installments, but had his Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg double the amount to $260,000 so that Cohen could classify the payment as income on tax returns (for ‘legal services’) rather than a reimbursement, allowing Cohen to make a profit once he’d paid income tax on the payment, assuming a total tax liability of 50 percent. So, not technically money-laundering, but pretty close. Close enough for the law, anyway. Not only did Michael Cohen go to prison over this, it was known during his trial that Trump was in fact aware of the payments Cohen made and agreed to pay him back. It was also revealed in the statement that Trump tried to delay the payment to Daniels as long as possible, preferably after the election, “because by that point it would not matter if the story became public.”

So so much for the idea that Trump was just trying to protect Melania from being hurt by the knowledge he’d had an affair. I mean, Melania was dating Trump when he was separated but not divorced from Marla Maples, so I don’t think it would surprise her that he was cheating. I mean, not like Melania is less likely to leave Trump than Lindsey Graham is. On that score, given that the transactions occurred just after the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump team, and most observers, really thought Trump was on the ropes, and one more scandal might have been enough. I don’t know. People hated Hillary Clinton THAT damn much, and the Trumpniks were that damn fanatic. I mean, early in the campaign, Trump said, in jest, “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” And the Republican Party has proven him right, rhetorically, ever since, every chance they get. All he needs to do now is actually kill somebody on Fifth Avenue, and we’ll know for sure. You might scoff, but I can see Lindsey Graham on Fox News now: “Look Sean, that three-year old was PACKING!!”

The statement of facts says that the participants mischaracterized the nature of the payments “for tax purposes.” The specific details of this constitute 34 felony counts against Defendant Trump. Now, under New York law, falsifying financial records is just a misdemeanor, but there is provision to change the charge to a felony if the State believes the act was to facilitate another crime or frustrate investigation of another crime. Also, misdemeanors have a statute of limitations. However, the statement of facts does not specify what second offense would justify elevating the charges to felonies.

But even though there are weaknesses in the case that a competent lawyer could exploit, that would assume Trump had a competent lawyer. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Trump runs through lawyers like Spinal Tap runs through drummers, and for similar reasons. While there were a couple people on Trump’s legal team Tuesday who looked like members of Homo sapiens sapiens, his main lawyer is currently a guy named Joe Tacopina, who was probably most famous for his grappling match against MSNBC’s Ari Melber as he tried to pull a document from Melber’s hand during an interview.

Even funnier, this guy donated to a Democrat (then-Congresswoman Kathleen Rice) who called for Trump to be prosecuted over his pressure call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough votes to swing the state. Republicans have issued fatwas for less. Not only that, in 2018, when all this stuff with Cohen came out, Tacopina was a legal analyst on CNN where he said that he believed Trump had had an affair with Daniels because “it means it’s true if he hasn’t threatened to sue” and on another show said “this could be looked as an in-kind contribution at the time of the election.”

But apparently this guy wasn’t hired for his smarts or consistency, but because he’d been one of the guys who defended a January 6 rioter in court (unsuccessfully). Like Cohen or Anthony Scaramucci, he’s not really there to provide legal acumen but to be Trump’s mouthpiece to the mainstream media and present that New York Tough Guy attitude Trump loves to fake so much, but with the imprimatur of a law degree.

It’s going to be that much harder for Trump to defend himself, given that when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity and Sean said “I can’t imagine you ever saying, ‘bring me back some of the boxes that we brought back from the White House, I’d like to take a look at them” Trump said, “I would have the right to do that, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Any lawyer who agrees to become Donald Trump’s defense attorney would have to be that much more stupid and gullible than he is, which would certainly explain Joe Tacopina.

Much of what Tacopina and Trump’s other legal minds have put together as a defense, prior to arraignment, was more ad hominem attacks against the various other parties, especially Michael Cohen. And certainly if Cohen wasn’t lying when he was first being investigated, he can be easily accused of not telling the truth now. Which is why I’m sure the prosecution is also relying on other sources, including Allen Weisselberg, who it seems has just switched attorneys.

But as Cohen himself said to Republicans in Congress when he was ordered to testify there, his job was to do what they’re doing now, support and defend Donald Trump. And if things keep going at this rate, they are all going to end up where he is now.

But all that being the case, it just comes back to the point that Michael Cohen is himself Exhibit A in the case. He was the instrument of the transactions, not the person who ordered them made. So if nothing Trump did rises to the level of a criminal offense, why was Cohen investigated on virtually identical charges, and why did HE go to prison for them and NOT Trump?

Which just leads to the other whine of the Church of Trump, that this is all “political” and none of these charges would be pursued if this wasn’t Trump. First, when the Republican Party’s entire agenda for the House of Representatives is “let’s get Hunter Biden’s laptop”, saying that the other side is trying to politicize the justice system is a bit rich. But frankly, none of this stuff would be happening if this wasn’t Trump, and if this wasn’t a particular moment in time. Because if it’s political to go after Trump now, it was no less “political” not to go after him when the transactions occurred. Because then he was a popular celebrity, the nominee of one of the major parties for president, eventually to be the president, and as far as his base was concerned, a sweet little boy who could never do anything wrong. To say that they’re going after Trump now because they can is to tacitly admit that they couldn’t go after Trump then, because the nature of the offenses has not changed, but the system was always acting on the basis of politics and optics and not the objective merits of the charges. So if the charges are the same as they were years ago, what has changed in regard to Trump since he became President?

Shall we review again?

Fired the FBI director who was in charge of investigating Trump’s activities prior to the election, telling Lester Holt that he did so specifically over the “Russia thing”, immediately thereafter gave intelligence to the Russian Foreign Minister while he was in Washington, had a press conference with Putin where he basically spread his cheeks and let Putin ream him in front of international cameras,

Played “both sides” to support white supremacists at the Charlottesville protest, including Richard Spencer and David Duke,

Gave his son-in-law a position of power in his Administration, basically as Minister Without Portfolio, since he was never approved by Congress, said son-in-law used that position to make money off the Saudis, and used that influence to pressure Qatar into refinancing his real estate deal, including a Saudi blockade of Qatar, said son-in-law was appointed to lead a coronavirus task force in 2020, and in that capacity shut down vaccine research, allegedly on the grounds that “the political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors and that would be an effective political strategy.”

And when refusing to deal with coronavirus somehow led to more Democrats voting and more Republicans splitting the ticket, he ran through various schemes such as appointing “substitute electors” in red states that went for Biden, personally called Raffensberger to swing Georgia by himself, and when all that didn’t work, tried to pressure his own Vice President, Mike Pence, into decertifying the vote, getting his people like Steve Bannon to organize mobs around the January event, and when Pence refused to go along, that mob broke through the doors of the Capitol, hunted legislators, smeared feces on the walls, and ran Confederate battle flags through the halls of the Capitol, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do.

Let’s just say any ONE of these should have inspired an appropriate response from authorities.

Oh, I didn’t even get into the weeds of Trump holding all those government documents at Mar-a-Lago just cause he says he can.

The outrage is not that Our Lord And Savior is being obsessively persecuted by the “deep state” (which prior to Trump was just ‘the state’) but that it’s taken them SO GODDAMN LONG.

And if this is the weakest case against Trump, look at all the other cases building up, like the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the Georgia case where it’s going to be extremely hard to prove that Brad Raffensberger didn’t catch Trump attempting election tampering on tape. Everybody’s waiting for the next shoe to drop, and Trump’s got more “shoes” than Imelda Marcos.

Happy Easter. Remember, Good Christians (TM), Trump can’t really be Jesus until he’s crucified.

March 30, 2023.

A day which will live in Schadenfreude.

On that day, a New York grand jury, after hearing weeks of evidence, voted to indict former president Donald Trump, on charges to be specified at the hearing. And Trump’s response on Truf Censhal was with the usual flair:

“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45^th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, for the 2024 nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”

(Posted in ALL CAPS, because as we know, the three loudest things in the universe are the original Big Bang explosion, Disaster Area, and Donald Trump social media posts.)

Well, at least he spelled “INDICATED” correctly.

Again, the public has not been made aware of the specific charges, but based on the investigations that were known up to this point, charges seem to stem from money paid out to porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would not confess to an affair with Trump in 2006. This payment was arranged in October 2016, just before the presidential election that Trump ended up winning. While some would describe this as a financial arrangement between consenting adults, we know this qualifies as a crime because Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who actually made the payments, was convicted for doing so. At the time, Cohen insisted that he did not make the payments in collusion with Trump, but later turned against his boss and admitted that the money was transferred to his accounts. On May 2, 2018, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. So… if it was a crime for Cohen, why is it NOT a crime for the “Individual One” who was listed as a “co-conspirator” in his case?

Trump’s logorrhea in this case is yet another example that every one of his accusations is either a projection or a confession. He is in no position to talk about free and fair elections when he whined about losing the popular vote in the 2016 election that he won with the Electoral College, and when we actually had a free and fair election in 2020 and he lost the popular vote AND the EC, he attacked that free and fair election by sending a lynch mob after the Congress that met to certify it. And if we are subjecting a former head of government to prosecution for criminal acts – as France has done at least once, and as Israel is doing with Benjamin Netanyahu – we are becoming less like a Third World nation, not more.

Which all leads to the question of how things will proceed. Supposedly Trump has agreed to fly to New York on Monday in order to appear in court Tuesday, when the charges will be unsealed. He will most likely have to be fingerprinted and recorded like any other suspect, although most sources agree he will not have to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs. After all, Trump is already under Secret Service escort at all times. What’s he going to do, flee to Russia as soon as it looks like he’s going to be arrested?

We are being told by the media that in order to preserve “the rule of law” that all proper legal procedures must be in place to protect the rights of a defendant, which is true, but elides the point that throughout his life, Donald Trump has had far more than the presumption of innocence, but has always acted on a presumption of immunity – as the formerly most criminal president in history, Richard Nixon, put it, “if the president does it, that means it’s NOT illegal.”

Of course Trump was not actually president at the time these transactions occurred, but that just gets to the larger point, that he has always acted as though he could do anything he wants because someone is always going to protect him. Because up until now, he has always had reason to believe that.

The liberal media keeps referring to Trump and this case by saying “no one is above the law.” But the fact that Trump has gotten away with as much as he has, as long as he has, proves that’s not the case, and it never really has been. But that’s okay. After all, we also keep saying “all men are created equal”, when in the legal system all men have never been equal to each other, let alone to women.

When we say “no man is above the law” or “all men are created equal”, these are not realities. These are aspirations. These are goals. And as long as we see that they are national aspirations and not the reality, we can make progress. This country has become more equitable insofar as we are capable of recognizing the contradiction between our ideal and our reality. Unlike some ideals, it is quite possible to make the legal system more fair, if not abstractly perfect. We can at least make it better than it was. People like Trump coast on the unfair reality of the world as it is, and that is what they seek to preserve. Far from a fair system, they want a sugar daddy government for themselves and a Road Warrior barbarism for the rest of us. When they whine that being equal under the law makes this country MORE of a Third World regime, they are not asking for a free country with fair elections. They want to indulge their desire to look up to a king.

Bad enough that that is the case, but Trump and the fan club that used to be a political party are willing to resort to intimidation. When Trump first heard he was going to be indicted, he first told his gang to protest at the court (when he should have known from local experience that NYPD aren’t nearly as restrained as Capitol Police) and then made a post on Truf Censhal showing a picture of him with a baseball bat next to a picture of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, raising his hand. When the actual indictment came, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke up for the resident of his state, saying “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent”. So the guy who is setting himself up to be the alternative to Trump in 2024 is going along with all the George Soros dog-whistling and antagonism to big cities, just like Daddy Trump does. Raising the question, is DeSantis really running for President, or Trump’s Vice President?

All of which sort of blows away the tut-tutting on MSDNC and other networks prior to the actual indictment about whether charges over an affair are worth a criminal case against Trump, when there’s so many more serious charges we should be pursuing. But as Cohen himself told the press, Al Capone was only convicted on tax evasion. And let’s review what we’re really dealing with: A populist who bragged about his support from the “poorly educated”, who said he would pay the legal costs for any fans who beat up protestors at his rallies, who openly begged Russia to release hacked intel on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which they DID), who as President fired people specifically because they investigated him, who hired an Attorney General (Bill Barr) largely to undermine investigations against him, who refused to admit the extent of coronavirus in 2020 because it would undermine his deals with Communist China, who told state governments to not allow special measures to vote by mail during the pandemic, because it helped his chances of re-election if people were less likely to vote, who still lost that second election anyway and refused to admit it, and who encouraged social media campaigns to organize violence against the certification, threatening the lives of Republican congressmen, not to mention his own Vice President.

This has gone far beyond having a difference of opinion. When you try to stop an election result from proceeding, you lose all right to talk about “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” or rights when you certainly wouldn’t have given any rights to the people on the other side. Trump isn’t just some mean old conservative that woke liberals hate, he’s an active threat to national security. He has exhausted any benefit of the doubt, and any right to sympathy. And that goes double for anybody who looks at where he’s taken this country and thinks, “we need some MORE of that.” Bluntly, who gives a fuck which charge they get Trump on, as long as they GET him?

And if this doesn’t pan out – remember, it is a jury trial – there are all those other cases that the Feds and other states (namely Georgia) have waiting in the wings. If it was just one case of criminality, you could take your chances with the legal system. But Donald Trump is in a unique situation because of all our public personalities, only Trump lies, swindles and commits crimes like other people breathe. As in, he does so on reflex, and if he ever stops, he might die.

On the bright side, history also shows that while Al Capone got an 11-year prison sentence, he was released after only 7 1/2 years, after doctors diagnosed a case of syphilis that was slowly destroying his brain and his ability to function normally. But then we have no cause to believe that Donald Trump is suffering from an illness that is destroying his brain, much less an illness contracted from sexual incontinence.