Category: Politics

“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

-Joe Biden, 2019

Among numerous other bits in the news recently, people are still debating the potential impact of the “election reforms” passed by the Republican government in Georgia. Defenders are telling cynics to “read what it actually says.” The text is here. https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121 It starts off in a fairly defensive manner, Section 2 pointing out that “Many Georgia election processes were challenged in court, including the subjective signature-matching requirements, by Georgians on all sides of the political spectrum”, eliding the point that none of these court challenges produced fruit because the election processes were found valid, and concluding therefore that “changes made in this legislation in 2021 are designed to address the lack of elector confidence in the election system on all sides of the political spectrum”, which is a subjective interpretation at best, given that the lack of successful challenges meant that the only people creating a lack of confidence in the system were Donald Trump and the political party that gives his fingers a reach they would otherwise lack. Many conservative media have pushed their own defenses of the law, and some of them make a little sense. Like, the fact that the runoff period after the general election is now only four weeks. I don’t see why the race had to go into January. A runoff by definition means there are only two candidates left and everyone already knows who they are.

But if you’re criminalizing getting people food and water who are standing in line to vote, and are standing in long lines for extended periods BECAUSE the government has also reduced the number of polling places and hours, then clearly this is the political class picking its voters instead of the other way around, because they saw how a get-out-the-vote campaign shifted the results in Georgia, and they don’t want that happening again.

I am reminded of the old Libertarian joke that government is the guy who breaks your leg and then hands you a crutch and says ‘if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’ Well, in this case Republicans are more laissez-faire than the Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is a good-faith position. Cause we know that in Florida, Catholic Cuban and Venezuelan communities came out in a big way to vote for Trump and other Republicans last November. If black communities were the stable base for Republicans that Florida Cubans are, they wouldn’t be pulling this shit. Nevertheless, they are pulling this shit, because black vote turnout was critical in winning Georgia for Democrats. So saying they’re only targeting racial communities for political reasons rather than actual racism is either a chicken-or-the-egg question or a distinction without a difference.

I actually kind of think that for all their flapping of fans, Republicans lean into how much liberals hate the idea of not giving water to voters in (post-summer) Georgia, because that’s what conservatives do these days, embrace their heel status as a sort of punk rock credential. It’s also distracted the press from the real problem with S.B. 202: Section 5 amends existing Code 21-2-30 to create a State Election Board which does not include the Secretary of State (who previously had authority over elections and who was personally leaned on by Trump to conjure votes he did not have) and in Section 6, the bill directs that “After following the procedures set forth in Code Section 21-2-33.2, the State Election Board may suspend county or municipal superintendents and appoint an individual to serve as the temporary superintendent in an election.”

Again, there were existing rules that highly benefited Republicans (for one thing, in the 2018 Governor’s race, Stacey Abrams was defeated by Republican Brian Kemp, who was still serving as the Secretary of State overseeing his own election). These were modified only as necessary last year because there was a global pandemic. Democrats played by Republican rules and still won, and Republican officials and judges determined that the results were indeed valid. So now they’re trying to change the rules so that such a result can never happen again.

Basically these guys had the same goal as Donald Trump, this is just the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Stupid.

Make no mistake: This is how the government works in Russia. This is how the government works in Venezuela. This is how governments worked under the Warsaw Pact: You could say you had a “Democratic Republic” and maybe even have more than one opposition party, but somehow they would never have enough votes to win, or even come close. That’s the goal.

And that is why Democrats and the other NotRepublicans of America are looking to see what Washington is going to do about all this. That and other things. After another round or two of shootings, pardon me if I gloss over the details, President Joe Biden announced on April 8 that he is “trying to limit ‘ghost guns’ and make it easier for people to flag family members who shouldn’t be allowed to purchase firearms with a series of executive actions taken Thursday in the wake of recent mass shootings.” In response, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott declared that Texas was going to be a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.” Then a few hours later Abbott had to express that he was praying for victims of a shooting in Bryan, Texas.

I actually have to agree with Senator John Kennedy (BR.- Louisiana) when he said, “We don’t need more gun control. We need more idiot control.” The problem is that in both cases, it’s his party that’s getting in the way of that, because if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait quotes Andrew McCarthy in National Review, saying “The conservative movement has argued for decades that the problem with voting is that too many people do it because it’s too convenient. ‘Voting is a privilege,’ National Review’s Andrew McCarthy argues. (A privilege, not a right.) ‘It would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people, hypnotized by the flimflam that a great nation needs to be fundamentally transformed rather than competently governed.” And I’d agree with that too. And to elaborate on my last paragraph, the problem isn’t the superficial truth of the Republican statement, it’s the deeper truth that they are the problem they claim to be against, since the whole premise of modern Republican politics is preying on civic illiteracy, selling emotionalism and flimflam, teaching people that what we need is not competent government but a transformation away from the Founders’ Republic. The irony being that while the Founders intended counter-majoritarian systems to act as a check on the civic illiterates, this agenda is never going to appeal to a majority and can only work if a gullible plurality is allowed to rule over them.

So since one faction of this “two party system” is so malign that it’s worse than useless, that means everyone is obliged to see what the Democrats are going to do whether we like them or not. And that means Democrats have to consider not only their near-infinite desires but their very limited room to move.

Whereas the Republican platform as of the 2020 convention is literally “we continue to support Donald Trump’s America First agenda” (and we can see exactly how they’re planning to do that), the Democratic platform is basically giving the Federal government that much more control over our affairs, given that certain states are creating supporting evidence that they shouldn’t be running without supervision from Washington. But this unitary agenda, not even considering the social angle, implies a lot more legislation, and a LOT more spending, which really means a lot more taxes, though they’re hoping you won’t notice that part.

I am still basically a Reason Magazine, Niskanen Center, center-right type of guy. I still think that John Maynard Keynes was the worst thing to happen in Western economics last century, although not because his theories were invalid. In fact, the older I get, the more I see how right they were. It’s just that they set the wrong example. The main dynamic of Keynesianism is what he called “countercyclical spending”, or what I might call counterintuitive spending, where the government spends money when there is no money (like in a recession or depression) to “prime the pump” and then cuts back on spending when the private economy is flush. This seems counterintuitive because the government is spending money when there isn’t any revenue from the private sector, but that’s the point: In tough times (like now) there isn’t any other source of money, so it has to be created. The problem is that you take on debt. Which leads to the real problem with Keynesianism, which is that both parties dismiss the other side of the countercycle, cutting spending (and even raising taxes) during a boom period. For obvious reasons, Republicans are loath to raise taxes and even Democrats have become leery of doing so, but neither party is that concerned with cutting spending, which is why the overall size of government increases under Democrats and why the debt increases are even greater under “fiscally conservative” Republicans and especially under the Trump Organization.

Again, this is one of those times when you need to have government spend money that the private sector can’t, so I’m not doctrinaire libertarian on this, but just as the Laffer Curve is a curve and not an a priori axiom that “lower taxes equal more government revenue”, taking on more debt does not automatically lead to greater prosperity. Just ask Italy or Greece. Creditors accept a large debt load only if the party in question has so many assets that it’s more feasible to let them hold the debt than to make them default. In the case of the US government, our assets are such that “the full faith and credit” of the country allows us to take on a debt that would be unimaginable to anyone else. But that assumes we’ll be good for it, and further financial mismanagement and incompetence may change that assumption.

Keynesianism only works because of the ancient principle, “If you owe the bank 100 dollars, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much Donald Trump’s whole approach to finance.

Which is why Democrats aren’t going to care about the consequences of taxing and spending, cause they’ve got this thing called MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, or as I call it, Magical Monetary Theory, cause it holds that since government creates money, government is the source of capital, and therefore any degree of desired spending can be justified as necessary and beneficial to the economy. And the laugh is that the best evidence for this “deficits don’t matter” attitude were the Administrations of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, the free-marketest, most libertarianist president EVAR.

Like it matters, because there are limits to how much the President can do by executive order, and there are even more limits to how much the House can do without the Senate, because even if Democrats have a technical majority, in practice the chamber operates under a lazy version of the filibuster where the minority party doesn’t even have to hold the floor as long as they announce their attention to vote as a bloc to prevent a three-fifths majority vote. And this is why the liberal media was all aflutter at the announcement that Democrats are able to proceed with one more budget reconciliation bill this year (on the grounds that one was never passed for the 2020 fiscal year), because rather than hash things out with the other party like grownups (because the other party are not grownups), the Democrats who supposedly control the chamber have to wait for the word of the Senate Parliamentarian like she is the Oracle of Delphi.

There was an opinion recently from Jessica Levinson at MSNBC: “Democrats have the power to save democracy. Here’s why they won’t.“

Essentially, the only way Democrats can actually use their majority is to get rid of the filibuster, at least provisionally, but the main reason they don’t is that just as Republicans need it to keep such power as they still have while a minority, some Democrats want to keep the filibuster for the same reason, remembering how Harry Reid changed the cloture rules so that a filibuster is not required for judicial nominees, and then seeing how Mitch McConnell used that new standard to help Donald Trump flood the courts with new conservative appointees.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these unnamed Democrats that the only reason they even have a technical majority is because Raphael Warnock was elected Senator from Georgia, the 2020 runoff election was to fill the last two years of a seat where the previous (Republican) Senator had to retire, Warnock has to run again for a regular six-year term in 2022, and thanks to S.B. 202, it just got a lot harder for Democrats to keep that majority. And then guess what Mitch McConnell is going to do to the Democrats’ filibuster once he’s back in charge?

The Democrats did come up with HR1 (or S.1), the “For the People Act”, which is supposed to address a lot of the issues that Republican states want to create with voting, but that’s another one of the things that ain’t going to pass unless they ditch the filibuster. (Not like anyone who isn’t a Democrat will find it much help in opening up our politics.)

And if anyone ever does try to name those Democrats who are so dead set against actually acting like a majority, the name they usually get to is Joe Manchin, Senator from West Virginia. Manchin is notable in even being an elected Democrat in West Virginia, back from the days when that was the norm and not a blue moon event. He’s big on traditions, like back when he and other Senators could commisserate regardless of party. But however culturally conservative he might be, he’s also an old-time Democrat who believes in big spending, which is hard to see how his priorities as a representative and a Democrat align with his priorities as a Senator.

New York Magazine had this bit about how Manchin is actually keen on promoting an infrastructure bill that could actually be twice as costly as the $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan just passed. Such an expensive bill would seem to be at odds with his desire to maintain the (alleged) tradition of bipartisanship through the filibuster, since anything that expensive likely won’t get passed by Republicans.

“He should want to get rid of the filibuster because he suddenly becomes the most powerful person in this place — he’s the 50th vote on everything,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, sketching out, though not embracing, the argument.

When Senator Manchin wrote a Washington Post op-ed staking his position, including the idea that we shouldn’t even be using reconciliation to pass legislation, leftist blog Lawyers, Guns & Money rendered its interpretation: “The most natural reading of the op-ed is that Joe Manchin is an abject moron who has never paid attention to anything that’s happened in the Senate during his entire tenure there, but I don’t believe this is accurate. Essentially, there are two major possibilities:

• Manchin is setting up a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger defense when Republicans refuse to compromise on anything and Dems agree to some kind of filibuster reform Manchin can sell as technically maintaining his pledge.
• Manchin is perfectly fine with total gridlock, and is happy not to accomplish much of anything as long as people have to continually kiss his ass to even get judges and cabinet officials approved.

“Alas, while I used to have optimism about door #1 at this point it seems like the latter is much more likely.”

Problem is, if Manchin either seriously expects good faith from the Party of Trump or is trying to create a position to change his mind when they do not act in good faith, then refusing to endorse filibuster reform even as a negotiating tactic removes the only tool Democrats have to pressure Republicans with. As for gridlock, a Senate with no filibuster and a majority by tiebreaker makes Manchin The Man Whose Ass Must Be Kissed to an even greater degree, for the reason Senator Coons stated. Thus one returns to the rejected theory: That Joe Manchin is an abject moron who, if he ever paid attention to what the Senate was like in his entire tenure, is certainly not aware of what it’s like now.

Which means in the short run at least, the direction that “conservatives” claim to hate so much keeps reinforcing, as we turn more and more powers over to an imperial executive because Congress can’t get anything done. And that direction keeps getting more and more “radical left” because the former Republican Party refuses to act as a moderating influence because it has no more moderate influences within itself, and Democrats now know there is no point in dealing with them.

I used to think of our politics as a situation where the Democrats were Soviet Russia, the Republicans were Nazi Germany and America was Poland. It’s even more sad and absurd than that: It’s more like a fight between two squads of Star Wars Stormtroopers where neither team can hit a target, yet one of them falls down anyway.

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

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

And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes

So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks

But his honor is pure and his courage as well

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

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

-Billy Joel, “Prelude/Angry Young Man”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Be Continued…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…You mean he LIED to me???

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Well, it was long past time, but it’s certainly time now.

In 2016, Republicans were going, “We can’t have the president elected by majority vote! We need the Electoral College, or else the government will be held hostage to an unqualified demagogue and his gullible angry mob!”
Republicans in 2021 formed a gullible angry mob at the behest of an unqualified demagogue and stormed the Capitol building in order to stop fellow Republicans from lawfully contesting the Electoral College slate.

This was, of course, after Donald Trump, who is not the POTUS, but the PLBB (Putin’s Little Bitch Boy), encouraged the masses of people who he told to come out and party with him today on Twitter, telling them “we’ll walk down, and I’ll be there with you… to the Capitol, to cheer on our brave Congressmen and women” and then scurried off to his limo and drove back to his bunker to watch TV and bask in the results of his work. To smile, and laugh, and have a little joke at the expense of all his followers. At Mike Pence. At Mitch McConnell. At all the people who’d ever stood up for him. To watch reporters take pictures of the yahoos in the House and Senate chambers, looting the offices and carrying Confederate flags.

Jefferson Davis, thou art avenged.

Make no mistake, even though there were quite a few Republicans willing to continue the charade of contesting the Electoral slate, Trump put the mob up to this, against his own party’s lawful request to contest the results, because he knew that would fail, and he knew that he would lose his last chance to keep America as the favorite satellite country in Putin’s new Warsaw Pact.

This, like the Trump arm twist of Georgia’s Secretary of State, was the tactic of a mob boss. As in, “I’ve got a mob, I got my boys, you better be nice to me, cause if I don’t get my way, my boys are gonna make things ugly. You don’t want it to get ugly, do ya?”

As I write, the Senate has reconvened, and Georgia Senator Loeffler, one of the opportunists who had jumped on that bandwagon, and just lost her seat probably because of it, took the floor in a subdued voice and withdrew her objection to the slate of Electors. It seems as though most of the people, at least in the Senate, who were going to support this little stunt in order to give Trump and his army of babies a pacifier changed their minds, perhaps because they now see that there’s no way to pacify them, perhaps because, like Loeffler, it’s now too late to save themselves, and others because they now know that if they want to save their political careers, they need to choose between the mob and the rest of the country.

So what was going to be at least a symbolic triumph for the Party of Trump in the Congress (and remember kids: moral victories don’t count) has been completely dashed because of the real Party of Trump that what’s left of the Republican Party was trying to keep a lid on.

Good JOB, Trumpniks.

But what happens now?

Do we just say, “Oh thank goodness, that’s over. Let’s go back to normal”?
FUCK that. The Trumpniks don’t want normal. They want war.
It would be impolite to deny them.

As the TV talking heads point out, Trump is still president for two more weeks, and he can do a lot. Or as Trump would say, A LOT. There is now a movement in Congress, supported by Rep. Ilhan Omar among others, to impeach Trump AGAIN. It’s doubtful that would work, since even if McConnell isn’t able to gum up the works as Senate Majority Leader, you still need 2/3 of the Senate to actually remove an official. I’d still like to see it happen, just so Trump can make the history books yet again, but that’s gonna take at least 14 days, and we don’t have that kind of time.

We do not want Putin’s Little Bitch Boy in charge of the nuclear weapons.

It has also been suggested that we invoke the 25^th Amendment. This is a bit more realistic. And I think it’s telling that the recent reports are saying that it was Mike Pence, not Trump, who approved sending the National Guard to DC after the shenanigans. But that’s probably because even now, Trump cares more about the perks of being president (such as, FBI immunity) than actually being one.

Just now (after 9 Eastern) Democrat Steny Hoyer mentioned how he remembered being in the Capitol when the country was assaulted from without, on 9-11. This is an assault from within.

This is the domestic 9-11.

Trump should be IMMEDIATELY removed from office, along with anybody else who wants to continue this stunt, under the terms of the 14^th Amendment, which to repeat states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Not only should Trump be removed from office, the Republican Party should at least have the guts of Facebook and Twitter in even temporarily removing Trump from their platforms. Trump should be expelled from the Republican Party immediately and permanently, or they will have learned nothing, they will not be able to break from this mistake, and the rest of the country should treat them as the party of sedition.

In conclusion, I leave you with the immortal words of Senator Lindsey Graham:

When he’s right, he’s right.

Wow, just when we thought Viceroy Trump couldn’t do more to stage a coup or do so in a more incompetent and incriminating fashion, here we are.

Sunday January 3, somebody released a recording of a call that Trump and his staff (including Mark Meadows) made in conference with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger AND his attorney Ryan Germany. This ended up getting sent to the Washington Post and is available online. In this call, which lasted over an hour because Trump rambled, wandered, conjured conspiracies and made up big fish stories in his Racist-Uncle-at-Thanksgiving way, Trump insisted several times that “there’s no way I lost Georgia” despite Raffensberger telling him several times that the numbers were not with him, he told Raffensberger, who is in charge of election tallies, “The people of Georgia know that this was a scam, and because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote. A lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president.” He added: “You would be respected if this thing could be straightened out before the election.” How did he propose to do this? He said: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In other words, start with the result I want, and create the statistic I know to achieve it.

This is of course Oh We’ve Got Trump’s Ass On A Rack And He’s Cooked For Sure THIS Time incident #14547, cause no matter how many times little baby gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his pet political party is so pussywhipped that they really will give him legal immunity even if he did shoot someone on 5^th Avenue. Not to mention the fact that the learned-helplessness contingent of the government (aka The Democratic Party) wouldn’t do anything even if the Banana Republican Party was standing out of the way. Still, with Trump trying to Stop The Steal with an actual steal, it’s telling that the Church of Trump is more determined to create a dogma to explain this paradox of faith than Christianity is at explaining, say, why we even need Jesus if Mary was without sin. At one point Trumpnik Jason Miller scream-tweeted that the Post had only released 4 to 6 minutes of the call, apparently under the impression that the entire thing would exonerate The Leader. It’s possible the WP released the entire thing just to piss in his mouth. Then you had several other members of the Church twitting that because Trump had the state of Georgia under a lawsuit for the election results that releasing the audio was illegal and a breach of the legal action. I presume that Mr. Germany is a better lawyer than (say) Sidney Powell, and could have notified Raffensberger if that was in fact the case. For somebody who so clearly wants to be a Mob boss, Trump still hasn’t figured out that “he was wearing a wire” isn’t a legal defense.

This in fact was only the escalation of the continuing campaign of the Party of Trump to assist him in his wishful thinking and denial. Last week, Rep. Louie Gohmert (BR-Gohmert) sent a lawsuit to force Vice President Mike Pence, in his official position as presiding officer of the Senate, to accept “alternate electors” (i.e. Acolytes in the Church of Trump) over the Electors officially approved after the ‘safe harbor’ point. A lawsuit, by the way, which was thrown out by Saturday. But Gohmert was also one of the first to demand a challenge of the Electors on what would normally be a pro forma certification of the election on January 6. For this challenge to proceed, Gohmert or another Representative would need to be supported by at least one Senator, and despite Mitch McConnell imposing an iron discipline on his caucus otherwise, Senator Josh Hawley (BR-Missouri) just came out to support the motion, which everyone knows is going to fail, if only because the Democrats still have a majority in the House and there won’t be enough Republicans to support it. But at this point it’s all about playing to the ex-Tea Party/now Trumpnik/future Qanon “base”. And given how everybody tells me that Hawley is NOT a blithering idiot (as opposed to Gohmert), and therefore must know that Trump isn’t going to roll over and let somebody else get the presidential nomination in 2024 if Trump (or at least one of his genespawn) can get it, I have to assume Hawley is pandering to that crowd for his future political ambitions on the assumption that Trump will soon have to change his accommodations from separate beds with Melania to sharing a cell with a 7-foot Samoan named “Desiree.” The joke, of course, is that the smart Republicans refused to take down Trump in 2016 before he got too big for his britches, cause they didn’t want to alienate that precious “base.” And that’s why Trump is now dragging them all by the shorthairs.

Not to mention that a lot of institutional Republican paralysis is that they can’t afford to buck The Leader when there’s still a runoff election in the two US Senate races in Georgia, which due to weak but still net-positive Democratic gains in the chamber mean that if both those races are lost, Mitch “the Bitch” is no longer Senate Majority Leader because it would be 50-50 and Kamala Harris would break ties. And most polls show the two Democratic challengers barely edging the Republican incumbents. At this point, it all comes down to seeing if the Republicans’ Election Day vote floods the Democrats’ early vote the way it did in so many elections elsewhere. But the early numbers are not looking good for Republicans. But it may not matter. If the Trumpniks realize that their Leader’s back is really against the wall, they may rally to save him from all the lesbians, atheists and other Democrats.

Here’s the thing. I’ve often discussed how the process of government resembles both role-playing games and old-time boardgames in that there are Rules As Written (in this case, the Constitution) and the house rules everybody uses, which in this case are the various rules of Congress and unwritten “norms” by which the system really works day to day, which is part of why the “rule of law” Democrats (who didn’t care much for the ‘rule of law’ the last time we had a pathological liar and real-estate cheat in the White House) are so helpless against Trump, because they don’t operate on laws, just norms.

But with both the Trump Party stunt against the Electoral vote and Trump himself pulling a Zelensky on Raffensberger, it seems to have gone a lot further than that.

Most boardgames always use the same set of components, so if you play Monopoly or Risk, you’re always playing a variation on the same game. But in 2011, Hasbro released RISK Legacy, which was unique and controversial because it was specifically designed to be altered in play. For instance: “What makes this game unique is that when powers are chosen, players must choose one of their faction’s two powers, affix that power’s sticker to their faction card, then destroy the card that has the other rule on it – and by destroy, the rules mean what they say: ‘If a card is DESTROYED, it is removed from the game permanently. Rip it up. Throw it in the trash.’ This key concept permeates through the game. Some things you do in a game will affect it temporarily, while others will affect it permanently. These changes may include boosting the resources of a country (for recruiting troops in lieu of the older ‘match three symbols’ style of recruiting), adding bonuses or penalties to defending die rolls to countries, or adding permanent continent troop bonuses that may affect all players. The rule book itself is also designed to change as the game continues, with blocks of blank space on the pages to allow for rules additions or changes. Entire sections of rules will not take effect until later in the game.” This brand actually inspired a whole new genre called the legacy game, which is based on the idea that the game as bought is to some degree permanently altered in play.

The US government prior to Donald Trump was Monopoly or Risk. The US government under Donald Trump is Risk Legacy.

The only way the “rule of law” marshmallows are going to actually have the rule of law back is to admit that is exactly what we do not have now, and we are not operating under the set of rules we think we are. And in some respect we have not been operating under the Rules As Written for quite some time. You want to go back to vanilla Risk, then you buy a new board of vanilla Risk at the department store and start over with the REAL rules system, because this is Risk Legacy, and half the board is in the garbage can.

That means, among other things, using ALL resources at one’s disposal to slam the people who are trying to subvert the government. When the Congressional Trumpniks announced their scheme to make their gold-plated calf President For Life, a lot of leftists went over the 14^th Amendment, specifically Section 3, which states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” This, along with the other sections, was passed because there were in fact a bunch of Confederate state representatives who had been kicked out of Congress in 1861 after secession, and the Union needed to make sure that such behavior was not rewarded after the Civil War. We had not needed to consider it until now because we didn’t have a bunch of redneck reactionaries trying to overthrow the government through the Congress until now. And when the idea of kicking the Trumpniks out of the new Congress was first proposed, I thought it was too harsh. But after Sunday? Fuck ’em.

At the very least, make sure any Representative who signed the petition to contest the Electors, and any Senator who supports the challenge, lose all their committee assignments for the duration of the Congress, because that’s all these vain little creatures really care about anyway.

You can’t end the game and set up a new one if the other players are still playing a completely different game without you. Bad enough that it’s Risk Legacy, but with Republicans, you’re gonna have a situation where they’re playing Risk Legacy and Trump is playing Calvinball.

You want the rule of law? Start enforcing the law for a change.

You don’t do that, it doesn’t matter if Democrats win Georgia.