Tag: coronavirus

Confession time, so to speak.

This Mardi Gras week, my Aunt and Uncle, who are very conservative Catholics, came from back East to visit the family in Las Vegas, cause this is where you go to observe Lent. So on Ash Wednesday we had a seafood dinner with me and my brother-in-law (who is that much more of a partisan Democrat than I am) and my uncle asked if we could have a civil discussion about the current political situation. And we did. And I confessed, frankly, that I do not see the presidential election as a presidential race between two men. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and Biden is going to end up winning, if only because Trump is going that much more senile, that much more clearly, and that much more quickly.

What surprised me was when my uncle confessed that he’d talked to a lot of his friends in the Republican Party, and their general concern was that Trump wasn’t electable.

But I guess it stands to reason, given that Biden is merely old by anybody’s standards, yet still functional for an 81-year old, whereas the Sundown Clown goes “Bingbongbingbangbing” and calls that a speech.

And really, in a rational universe, Trump would not be electable, but he DID get elected at least once, because just enough people in just enough states wanted him. And people like me have joked that even if he died, the Republican Party would try to stage some “Weekend at Bernie’s” scenario to prop up his corpse, cause they’ve really got nothing better. Which seems to be what they were doing last week.

On February 28, the Samuel Alito Supreme Court announced, after waiting over three weeks from the DC Circuit Court panel decision that Trump does not have “absolute immunity” from prosecution, that they are in fact going to hear his appeal even after most people thought the point was pretty well decided. If only because Ford had to pardon Nixon, implying he was still eligible for prosecution after leaving office. And the Alito Court decided that they weren’t going to start hearing oral arguments on that case until April 22, almost two months from now. This necessarily means that the prosecution on the insurrection case for a trial originally scheduled for March 4 must wait. Now on one hand, “average” length of the process means a ruling before the end of spring or maybe the summer. On the other hand, that means that you’ve put off the date for existing proceedings until then and they may take months to reach a verdict, as Trump’s New York fraud case did. And he could still appeal. And it’s not like SCOTUS needed to grant certiorari on this case, given that the DC Court had pretty decisively shot down the argument that “the president can do anything he wants, cause he’s the president”, which is Trump’s evidence for his pre-existing belief that “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, cause he’s Donald Trump.”

As Bill Maher put it on March 1, Trump’s lawyers are planning to drag it out so that none of these cases can be decided before this election. And by his lawyers, we mean the Supreme Court.

But even so, I think scaredy-cat liberals in the mainstream media are so unconfident in their candidate that they were pinning all their hopes on the courts somehow disqualifying Trump, especially since polls indicate a lot of his (non-MAGA) Republican voters have indicated that they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he got convicted on anything.

First off, you really think that the Republican Party, which has seen Trump cross every line up to this point, wouldn’t goosestep behind him as he crosses the next one? Please keep in mind, cause it seems like the media isn’t, that not only is he found guilty of epic levels of fraud counting for about half a billion in damages, HE WAS FOUND GUILTY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. And as far as the polls tell us, if you can believe them, Trump could still win this.

And if he can’t win as it is now, think of how agitated his fan club that calls itself a political party would be if he did get convicted in criminal court. The Challenged Caligula would just stretch out his arms on the cross and play Orange Jesus and wail to his followers to save the big, rough, tough, independently wealthy strongman from the consequences of his own incompetence and immorality.

No, if you were going to go the route of disqualifying Trump, the time for that was already over by the time he announced his 2024 campaign. Which goes to what I said on Facebook when I heard the news from SCOTUS: You would think that everybody who has observed Trump, not just as a politician, but in his business career, would know that his standard legal defense is Delay, Delay, Delay, wear out the plaintiff, wear out the prosecution, make the verdict irrelevant even if it goes against him.You would think that prosecutors and judges would realize that he would do this in the event of criminal trial, for instance if he tried to assassinate his own Vice President for not assisting in a coup. And therefore given his legal right to do so it is imperative that if you are going to make a case against him on those grounds, that you charge Trump with insurrection and a coup THE GODDAMN DAY he leaves office or failing that THE GODDAMN DAY a new Attorney General is appointed to DOJ so that any necessary defense action (not to mention the unnecessary Delay, Delay, Delay) would not extend past the next election cycle.

Ergo, if you were, say, the Attorney General, or the Supreme Court, and you know Trump is going to Delay, Delay, Delay, (knowing that Trump is not contesting the merit of the charges so much as dragging things out in the hopes that he will win the election, or failing that to have it ruled in his favor by, I dunno, THE SUPREME COURT) any unnecessary permission for such tactics might not be a good faith attempt to protect a defendant’s legal rights but active assistance to Trump’s bad faith strategy to avoid justice for blatant crimes.

To go over, the presidential immunity argument was already well summed up when one of the DC Court justices got Trump’s attorney to admit that by their lights, Trump could use Seal Team Six to assassinate one of his political opponents, and there would be no recourse except for him to be impeached and convicted in the Senate, which is never going to happen. By this standard, the courts cannot rule against Trump. So all of the mainstream media’s experts have been telling us that SCOTUS will not actually rule that Trump’s position is valid, if only because it will make their own jobs obsolete, but then, these experts also said the Court would not decide to hear the case.

I’m thinking I should send the six conservative Supreme Court justices – and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell – each an individual copy of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich. It’s a historical study of what happens when an aristocratic elite decides to enable a deranged racist demagogue to gain absolute power, on the rationale that once he’s destroyed the rule of law, they’ll be able to control him.

And I mention McConnell because also last week, Mitch “the Bitch” announced that he was no longer going to be leading the Senate Republicans after the November elections. On one level, it is an acknowledgement that the Party of Putin has turned against him and he no longer has the influence on his peers that he once did. But I think it also indicates, as with Paul Ryan, who left a seat that he could have easily been re-elected to, that there’s no point in being in Congress without your party in charge, and McConnell sees that between November and the end of what seems to be his last term, his party won’t be the Senate majority.

But given how all these little “conservative” events seem to coordinate, it might also be a case of McConnell stepping down because he knows his work is done.

Several analyses this week have gone over the course of McConnell’s latter-day career as leader. Under a Republican president, his only real legislative accomplishment was Ryan’s tax cut for corporations and upper brackets (which also eliminated tax breaks for lower income levels and high-tax states). What McConnell did do was to use his power as Senate Majority Leader to hold up legislation that ultimately might have passed, simply by controlling the agenda and keeping it from coming to the floor, in the same way that House Speaker Mike Johnson is now holding up a Ukraine aid package that would easily pass with Republican support, despite Trumpnik opposition.

Which also indicates that McConnell could well have engineered a consensus to support Democrats in the second Trump impeachment trial, given that seven Republican Senators ultimately did vote to convict. He chose not to do so.

And of course McConnell also created an extra-constitutional power to act as a one-man veto against a president’s Supreme Court nominations by not letting Merritt Garland’s nomination on the Senate floor, citing the American people’s need to decide the matter in an election year. (They did, Mitch, which is why Barack Obama was president at the time of the opening, and not Mitt Romney.) Then, as early voting was proceeding for the 2020 election, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and McConnell and his Republican cronies frantically maneuvered to get Amy Comey Barrett appointed as her replacement, even at the risk of exposing each other to coronavirus. Because, it was thought by many, the election might need to be decided by the Supreme Court, and even with an existing 5-3 “conservative” majority, Chief Justice John Roberts was thought to be too squishy.

All the while, McConnell facilitated appointments of judges to lower courts who will also rule for decades without being subject to vote. And since the appointment of Barrett and the end of the Trump Organization in Washington, the Supreme Court has made it clear that there is no such thing as stare decisis or “settled law” if it gets in the way of the ideological agenda. The law is what they say it is.

Which might explain why the Alito Court would be willing to entertain a case that would destroy their own authority, just as long as they keep their seats and the privileges of power. It’s been the Republican model up to now.

Cause at this year’s CPAC – which now stands for Cucked Putin Admirers’ Conference – speakers like Jack Posobiec openly bragged that they were trying to end democracy. Which is itself a tacit admission that they don’t have the country on their side, cause if they could reliably get more votes than the Democrats, they wouldn’t need to destroy the system. The CPAC motto this year was “Where Socialism Goes To Die.” Yes. “Conservatives” are getting rid of socialism and replacing it with a new system. One where only one party gets to run the government, only one party has a say in anything, and that one party is run by one man, and that one man gets to say what can be told by the press, what businesses are allowed to sell, what schools are allowed to teach, what people are allowed to read, who people are allowed to marry, and indeed, whether or not you get to live or die.

Y’know, I think there was a word for this in political theory, but I guess “conservatives” killed it.

You know what a conservative is? A conservative is a guy who owns a bank. A conservative is the police commissioner who is friends with the guy who owns the bank. A conservative is the security guard who is hired by the bank owner to protect the bank. A conservative is somebody who realizes everybody has to work together in the system, if only for his own benefit.

Donald Trump is the guy who robs the bank. Donald Trump is the guy who shoots the security guard, or has his henchmen do it. Donald Trump wants to loot the system that supports him for as much as he can, and doesn’t care if he destroys it in the process, as long as he gets his money now. And when he does it, he smirks to his fan club, and brays, “I’m robbing the bank FOR YOU. I’m doing crime FOR YOU.” And because a lot of these people have been, or think they have been, ripped off by banks, they cheer him on. Never mind that THEY ain’t gonna see a red cent of that money. Some of which may be from their deposits. Because their identity fusion is so complete that if Trump is screwing The Man, then they’re happy.

The difference being that with John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, no matter how much street cred they had, they weren’t going to rob a bank, come right outside the bank and stage a press conference then walk away scot free after hollering and whining that it is mean, unfair and politically biased to prosecute them for blatant crimes that would get anyone else in jail.

If anything the bias is what’s kept Trump out of jail. And that’s the joke. He wouldn’t be getting so many breaks from “the system” if the system didn’t want him. Because someone – the courts, Congress, and yes, even our horse-race media – have always had some reason to let him go and keep doing crimes, because someone always saw some advantage in keeping things on this track even if Trump’s personality means he could turn on them at any moment.

The only thing that has ever stopped Trump and his Party of enablers is a pissed-off American public going to the polls and saying: NO MORE.

The problem is that 2020 wasn’t enough. Because as Jon Stewart said, upholding democracy – as in, public participation in the system – is a lunchpail fucking job, day in and day out, and it never ends. This year we don’t just need to say ‘no more’ to the Republicans, but to this entire government. This election is just the start. We need to start pressing on actions that make this government child-proof.

If putting the Supreme Court under the same ethics guidelines as every other level of the judiciary was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.

If appointing more Supreme Court justices (if only to match the 13 Districts) was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.

If requiring term limits for the Supreme Court- and probably Congress- was not a campaign issue this year, it needs to be now.

If establishing what constitutes insurrection and how that standard is to be enforced was not a campaign issue this year, it NEEDS to be now.

And if there is any one concrete step to take in this regard, it is to do what California has already done and Nevada is proposing to do on its general election ballot, and make the “primary” a bipartisan contest that really serves as the elimination round for a general election, because otherwise, as we have seen in the Nevada caucuses, the fix is in, and the result is simply the party apparatus forcing their candidate on the national convention no matter how big the plurality is against them and no matter how politically incompetent they are and how unpopular they are heading to the general election. That was what happened to Clinton in 2016, and it may be happening to Trump now. Cause if his Party is stacked to make sure he wins, and there’s no chance for Nikki Haley, why are people still going to state contests and giving her over 20 percent of the vote?

You can’t really get rid of political parties, but you can remove the incentives from the system that incentivize hacks, demagogues and crazies.

To do otherwise is to witness, and ultimately assist, the death spiral of the American experiment.

You know who the enemy is.

You know what they want, and how they plan to get it.

The only one who can stop them is you.

“We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the US. We will destroy you from within.”

– Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, January 18, 1956

I know so many people who think they can do it alone

They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zone

Now what can you tell them?
And what can you say that won’t make them defensive?
-The Beach Boys, “I Know There’s An Answer”

All right, I’ve about had it.

I have dear friends and family who are Republicans, and I do not mean to denigrate their intelligence when I say that Donald Trump is a willing tool of Vladimir Putin. (Note to Republicans: the word ‘denigrate’ means ‘to put down.’)

But the fact of the matter is, Trump IS a Russian tool and at this point so is anybody who votes for him and his Party.

I have no qualms in saying this. I am not afraid to say that gay men can get AIDS due to unsanitary practices. I am not afraid to say that people like myself get morbid obesity and type II diabetes because we eat too much Haagen-Dazs.

Haagen-Dazs. Ben & Jerry’s. Steve’s Ice Cream. Anybody remember Steve’s Ice Cream? Wavy Gravy flavor? Aw, wow, man…

But that’s why I say you can link Russia and Trump, cause the evidence is so obvious. You ask, what evidence? Well, there’s this thing that happened in history called “the last eight years.” Much of it was on tape. Specifically that thing in the 2016 campaign where Trump did a press conference and openly begged, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.” And wouldn’t ya know, that very day, Russian hackers released private emails from the Clinton campaign. If you run a political campaign and you beg a hostile power to release opposition info on your political opponent, most of us couldn’t make that happen. Even if it IS Hillary Clinton.

At this point, asking “Why does everybody think Trump is a Russian tool?” is like asking “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” Everybody else already knows the answer. The question doesn’t just come up from out of nowhere. And frankly, with much of our foreign aid package, not just to Ukraine, being held up by Trump’s machinations with the Republican Congress, everyone in the press and the government needs to flat out say what they already know.

Of course they don’t. Cause as Trump said, “I think you will be mightly rewarded by our press” by helping him make the Democrats look bad. You’ve got one incumbent president who is really old, and then you’ve got Trump, who is so old his Social Security number is 1. You’ve got Biden who seems confused, and then you’ve got Trump, who is so dumb that when the judge said “Order in the Court” Trump said, “Big Mac and Diet Coke.” Simply for the sake of ratings, the press and the other powers that be want this to be more of a horse race than it is. There is simply no contest, whatever you might think of Joe Biden.

But people are looking at 8 dollar milk cartons and $15 Happy Meals and they want to blame the President who’s in office right now, cause that’s what you do.

I mean, contrary to what seems to be gospel these days, I still think that when the federal government spends massive amounts of money (much of which doesn’t go to its stated purpose) then that is a direct cause of inflation. And that’s why I only describe myself as a Democrat very reluctantly. I am not a Democrat because I LIKE these guys. I’m a Democrat Just To Fuck Trump. Because he’s a Russky traitor bitch and at this point so is everyone in his enabler party. And if you think he’s going to make the economy wonderful again, perhaps you don’t remember 2020 when he did everything he could to encourage the spread of Trump Virus (TM) because telling the truth about what the government knew about Wuhan would endanger that sweet trade deal Trump made with President Xi. And half of what’s fucked about the economy now is Trump completely fucking up coronavirus response, cause otherwise he might have won that election. (NEWS FLASH: Trump did not win the last election) But as is often the case, all the Republican Party has is America’s short-term memory.

The problem for them is that Trump keeps acting in the short term. Trump started the biggest round of liberal outrage since the last one when he told a crowd that some big shot in a NATO country asked him what would happen if Russia invaded, and Trump said, “One of the heads of the countries said, ‘Does that mean that if we don’t pay the bills, that you’re not going to protect us?’ That’s exactly what it means. I’m not going to protect you.” And of course BECAUSE the normies are so offended and everyone in the crowd loves it so much, Trump keeps repeating that line in every new speech.

First off, as much as Trump’s fan club was cheering and jeering, they didn’t seem to get the inherent joke that the guy who valued Mar-a-Lago as a private residence for tax purposes when his property contract specifically forbade him to do so is acting like it’s a bad thing to not pay your bills.

The even bigger joke is that these namby-pamby social-democrat Europeans had let the defense budgets go to nothing precisely because it was assumed there was nothing to defend against and if Trump’s Thunder Buddy For Life Vladimir Putin had not only not invaded Ukraine but not followed up with threats to the sovereignty of “natural Russian territories” in the Baltics, Poland and Finland, NATO wouldn’t have stepped up its military budgets. So you can say that Trump did have a real complaint and that it is being addressed, but it’s an issue as to why that happened.

(Incidentally, the name ‘Vladimir’ in Russian means ‘lord of the world.’ No really. Look it up.)

Paradoxically, as much as Trump seems to be in the tank for Putin, I think that’s all the more reason why he’s NOT the victim of kompromat or a deliberate Russian agent. Because the first thing any good intelligence agency teaches their assets is not to act like you’re an asset for an enemy power. But Trump sucks up to Putin every chance he gets, when he doesn’t have to, and when it’s really not in his best interests. For example, when they were together in Helsinki…

Photo taken from this article: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/07/204518/trump-putin-press-conference-helsinki-summit-meeting

What’s funny is that Putin looks the way every other world leader looks when they’re posing with Trump. Meanwhile Trump is just SO happy. Like, “Look, Master gave me this shiny new collar! Isn’t it neat? If I’m a REAL good boy, he’ll clean my dog dish!”

One doesn’t have to produce some “pee tape” or assume that Trump is compromised by Russian intelligence. In 1990, way before his political aspirations, Trump did The PLAYBOY Interview and said that in dealing with the then Soviet Union, “That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.” The interviewer said, “You mean firm hand as in China?” Trump responded: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world”.

After Stalin, the Soviet Union went to a collective leadership in the Politburo, which is how Khrushchev could be deposed and why Gorbachev almost was. In the ostensibly more democratic Russian Federation, the Duma (Parliament) mainly serves to ratify Putin’s decisions. If one can make an analogy to business, the Politburo was a corporate board and Putin’s system is effectively a privately-held company.

Trump has never run a corporation and never been responsible to a corporate board. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. He has always run things unilaterally. Trump doesn’t serve Putin because he has to. He does it because he wants to. Because he thinks that’s what a real leader is supposed to be like. When he goes to bed at night, Trump probably has a picture of Vladimir Putin at his bedside, and tells it, “When I gwow up, I wanna be JUST WIKE YEW.”

Likewise there is no real mystery as to why the Republican Party is so enslaved to Trump. I mean before January 6, Republicans only suspected that any challenge to Trump’s divine right to rule would result in a lynch mob coming for them. But they didn’t need to be threatened into turning their Party into a Mob operation. They did it because they wanted to.

It’s easier than having to live with existential burdens like conscience and responsibility. Just do everything the angry war chieftain tells you in hopes that he will grant your wishes and not kill you or inflict a curse on you when he’s having a mood. It is basically their approach to religion, so it makes sense that they see politics like this. The Republicans have had, and still have, plenty of chances to turn away from Trump and his cult, but that would require taking a stand against the collective, and that defeats the purpose of the modern Republican Party organization.

Because people in general, and Republicans in particular, follow the leader and do what they’re told.

That is largely a principle of conservatism, not so much in that it’s synonymous with authoritarianism, but in that conservatives believe the authorities exist for a purpose and that trusting in proper authority makes more sense than being an iconoclast. So if, hypothetically speaking, you’re a sociopathic dictator marinated in the traditions of the KGB and USSR and you’re already inclined to skullduggery, and you want to subvert your greatest enemy, the best way to do it is to take over the institution that is most associated (at least in the minds of its own people) with patriotism and love of country. If the “official” Party of America is suddenly saying Russia is our friend, then they must be okay, right?

And if you dare to disagree, doesn’t that make you a bad person?

Russia has actually been doing this thing for quite some time, and not just with the Republican Party proper. The National Rifle Association has been on some level synonymous with the Republican Party since before the Reagan Administration, and they’re the main reason liberals can’t pass “sensible gun safety” laws. (When at this stage, they need all the guns they can get to defend against Republicans.) Wayne LaPierre has been an executive in the NRA since 1991. Following various investigations and lawsuits from and against creditors, LaPierre filed bankruptcy on the part of the parent organization and a Texas chapter. However a Texas judge dismissed the bankruptcy petition on grounds that it was intended to escape judgment in a New York court. “LaPierre’s excessive compensation and exorbitant spending of NRA funds on himself and his wife, such as extremely expensive suits, chartered jet flights, and a traveling “glam squad” for his wife, became a subject of testimony in the eleven-day Texas proceedings.” According to a 2022 ABC News report, that year’s NRA finance document showed “Revenue from membership dues has plummeted nearly 43% from a record high in 2018, according to the 2021 financial assessment, pulling in just over $97 million — down from nearly $120 million in 2020. Spending on the areas of “safety, education & training” was cut roughly in half over the past three years”. The article quotes a professor, “”By cutting back on core programs and legislative spending, the risk that the organization runs is that members will suddenly realize that they are paying the same dues for fewer benefits”. Meanwhile: “Investigations by the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller resulted in indictments of Russian nationals on charges of developing and exploiting ties with the NRA to influence US politics by using the NRA to gain access to Republican politicians. Russian politician and gun-rights activist Aleksandr Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin,was suspected by some of illegally funneling money through the NRA to benefit Trump’s 2016 campaign.” What got more press attention was how Torshin’s personal assistant, Marina Butina, not only acted as liason to the NRA in America but had an affair with Republican political operative Paul Erickson, and gave him an email proposal on how to influence the Republican Party to support Russia via the NRA. For this reason and others (like drunkenly confessing her ties to Moscow at American parties) Butina was arrested and charged as an unregistered foreign agent, and found guilty. After she served her sentence she was deported back to Russia in 2019 (during the Trump Administration) and now serves as a member of parliament in Putin’s party.

And who didn’t see this coming?

https://www.newsweek.com/who-konstantin-nikolaev-money-mike-johnson-1870600 “News of money previously given to House Speaker Mike Johnson‘s congressional campaign by Russian nationals has re-emerged after the Republican rejected a $95 billion foreign aid bill passed in the Senate.

“In 2018, a group of Russians were able to donate to Johnson’s bid for the Louisiana seat he eventually won as the money was funneled through the Texas-based American Ethane company.

“While American Ethane was co-founded by American John Houghtaling, at the time it was 88 percent owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev. Nikolaev is known to be a top ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“A spokesperson for Johnson previously assured in 2018 that the campaign returned the money that was given to them by American Ethane once it was “made aware of the situation.” There was no indication that Johnson’s campaign team willfully broke federal law, which makes it illegal for a campaign to knowingly accept donations from a foreign-owned corporation, a foreign national, or any company owned or controlled by foreign nationals.”

Russia has gotten a LOT farther at suborning the American Right than the Nazis did with the Republican Party in the 1930s, and a lot farther than the Soviets got at undermining the American Left (given how many Democrats were on the House Un-American Activities Committee). Now some of this might be like “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time” or “at least Cuba has free education and healthcare” but you can actually point to real authoritarian achievements there. After his “interview” (or as Van Jones told Bill Maher on February 17, a lap dance) with Putin, Tucker Carlson took his camera out to Moscow markets and the Moscow Metro and praised the city while badmouthing American cities. Here’s the thing, back when the Metro was being built in the 1920s and 30s, it really was considered an engineering marvel and praised by foreign visitors. Of course that was when the fellow travelers for spreading Russian tyranny worldwide were on the Left. But nowadays even Russia’s railway system is going to hell.

And as Russian winters get more extreme – perhaps as a result of that “global warming” fueled by Russia’s petrol-based economy – entire communities, even in large cities, have their central heating systems breaking down from high demand, leading to entire neighborhoods losing water and even power. This winter, YouTube had all kinds of videos showing blackouts in the Urals and Moscow and St. Petersburg areas suffering massive flooding when heating pipes burst. “In one incident, more than a dozen people suffered from burns in the Western Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod when a large heating pipe burst, causing boiling water to flow into the streets, DW reported, citing a local news channel on Telegram. The damaged pipe also caused over 3,000 people to lose access to heating.”

Jeez, it’s like Russia’s maintenance support is ALMOST as bad as Calgary.

From the Business Insider article: “”We are still using the communal infrastructure that was made during the Soviet era,” said Russian lawmaker Svetlana Razvorotneva, who is a member of a national urban engineering committee, per (Deutsche Welle). About 40% of the communal heating grid in the country needs to be replaced urgently, she added.

“However, funding for public utilities made up just 2.2% of Russia’s total expenditure last year, according to the Financial Times. In contrast, Moscow’s spending on military expenses made up about 21% of Russia’s budget in the same year, per Reuters.“

But this is of a piece with a country that was the largest fuel exporter in Europe prior to 2022 having infantry vehicles stuck on the road because they ran out of gas, or the country where Nature stopped both Napoleon and Hitler not having adequate winter uniforms. While Ukraine begs for Congress to end its artificial choke of military aid, Russian soldiers are going without helmets.

“Capitalist” Russia is in many ways worse off than under the Soviet Union. Not as bad as the Soviet Union in its worst days, but on the whole, not as good as its best ones. It was still bass-ackward, given that it was both communist AND Russian, but the Soviets could at least run the largest country on Earth without collapsing. For a while.

Even the United States could not sustain the social and economic costs of being at war for a generation, which is why we left Vietnam, and eventually Afghanistan. And so did the Soviets. But again, Putin makes the Soviets look sane. As is, the Russian Federation has an economy maybe the size of California, so even if Putin’s Fifth Column Party in Washington can stop America from sending anything to Ukraine, the EU will do so, especially since Putin won’t hide the fact that they’re next. But to keep pressing the offensive, Putin has to take materiel, and men, away from the home front, and that actually makes the front line situation worse because there’s no logistical support, while also making things worse on the home front itself.

So here’s the ultimate punchline: The country that “post-liberal” “thinkers” see as the savior of White Christian civilization against the dark southern hordes can only maintain its delusions of power and prestige by making the empire that much more of a dilapidated, shithole country, that much more in hock to Xi Jinping, a communist, atheist, Asiatic. And it’s not like he’s doing so great himself.

But that’s the model for “conservatism” now.

That’s what Donald Trump, our greatest President since Jesus Himself, wants to turn America into.

But sure, let’s give the nuclear football back over to a “reality” TV show host who played a billionaire cause Biden is THREE YEARS older. Nobody complains about the fact that were it not for Biden, Trump would be the oldest guy ever to be President, because Trump is so scared of his own face in the mirror that he has to apply a paint roller to it. No big deal that you look like a reject Captain Planet villain, and think that the Democrats are gonna start World War II, just as long as you don’t LOOK old.

All Putin has left is the gullibility and cupidity of the West. And it may be enough.

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.

Early voting in Nevada ends Friday. The news leading up to the election is certainly stressful and intense. It shouldn’t be. Simply because Democrats could lose an election when Conventional Wisdom dictates the President’s party is going to lose in the midterms doesn’t mean it’s the figurative end of the world or the end of the republic.

Except, it probably could be.

Remember, the Party of Trump is engaged in an organized effort to install state officials who parrot the dogma that the election was stolen and Trump is the real president, and this effort is strongest in states like Arizona and Nevada where Trump barely (but clearly) lost. Lest one think this is not an organized campaign and that the good little Trumpniks all came to the same conclusion independently, Arizona US Senate candidate Blake Masters actually released a video of him campaigning door-to-door, and while he was out he took a call from Trump who told him, “Look at Kari. [Kari Lake, the Trump candidate for Governor] Kari’s winning with very little money, and if they say, ‘how’s your family?’ she says, ‘the election was rigged and stolen.'” All the proof we need that this really is the catechism of the Church of Trump. Just what you’d expect from a movement that is half fundamentalist cult and half snake-oil racket. Always Be Closing. At least Trump knows that much.

As addled as the Trumpniks may be in, for example, running a country, they have a capacity for long-term strategy and a capacity to change the terms of debate in a way that Democrats have so far been lacking. If they win it will make it that much easier for them to game the system and get their dominus et deus back in the White House, and then it won’t matter if Democrats bounce back in the presidential race after they didn’t feel like voting in the midterms because they weren’t enthused about the party in power. If enough Republicans get enough power in enough states next week, Democrats might never get back in power again.

These are my impressions on how this election is shaping up and how we got here.

The press is engaging in malpractice.

This week Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight made a hypothetical case for how Republicans could actually have a red wave this year, titled “The Case For A Republican Sweep On Election Night.” And I thought to myself, ‘that’s got to be the best news Democrats have had all year.‘

Silver, you might recall, was pretty optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House in 2016, even if he also gave Trump a bigger chance than anyone else. And FiveThirtyEight, like most pollsters, was a lot more optimistic about the Democrats’ downballot chances in 2020 than the actual results warranted. After the fact, Politico came up with at least one analysis. “The most likely — if far from certain — culprit for off-kilter polling results is that key groups of people don’t answer polls in the first place. …Decreasing response rates have been a major source of concern for pollsters for more than a decade. But the politicization of polling during the Trump era — including the feedback loop from the former president, who has falsely decried poll results he doesn’t like as “fake” or deliberately aimed at suppressing enthusiasm for answering polls among GOP voters — appears to be skewing the results, with some segment of Republicans refusing to participate in surveys. …The most plausible — yet still unproven — theory is that the voters the polls are reaching are fundamentally different from those they are not. And Trump’s rantings about the polls being “fake” or rigged only exacerbate that problem.”

Politico also noted this year : “For the past week or so, polling averages like RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight have seen a steady stream of surveys from Republican (or Republican-leaning firms). That’s led to a social-media debate over whether the GOP’s uptick in the polls is real — or whether it’s an artifact of which polls are comprising these averages.

“How much of an influence are the Republican polls having? In New Hampshire, four of the last seven polls in the FiveThirtyEight average are from Republican firms. In Pennsylvania, it’s the three most recent polls, and six of the last nine. In Georgia, five of the last seven.” The article also noted that polls achieve substantively different results based on methodology: “(Nevada) Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt were tied in the New York Times/Siena College poll, 47 percent to 47 percent. Another new poll out Monday, an OH Predictive Insights poll conducted for the nonprofit Nevada Independent, showed Cortez Masto barely ahead of Laxalt, 43 percent to 41 percent.

“Again, though both polls point to a close race, the differences in vote share can be explained by different methodological choices. The Independent’s poll included all three third-party candidates, plus Nevada’s unique “none of these candidates” ballot option.

“But the Times poll required respondents to volunteer the names of the third-party candidates, and “none of these candidates,” likely leading to higher vote shares for both major-party hopefuls.”

It recalls the physics problem of how the act of observing a phenomenon changes the nature of what is being observed.

There’s also the fact that, as with the Clinton-Trump race in 2016, you have may one candidate who is unpopular but qualified, or in some races a candidate who is qualified AND popular, against another candidate who is objectively inferior, and the press basically stages things to make the race a lot more suspenseful than it arguably ought to be.

Katie Hobbs is the Democratic candidate for the open Governor seat in Arizona against Kari Lake. Some have compared the race to an NPR public-affairs host going up against a Fox News anchor. Hobbs clearly has no charisma, and apparently no faith in herself. Because she went through all kinds of maneuvers to avoid getting into a debate with Lake, and in such a way that it ended up causing more problems. Supposedly this was because Lake “only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue ” and is “only interested in creating a spectacle”. Which is true enough. Of course the spectacle was where Hobbs torpedoed the debate and made herself look like a chicken. On the other side of the country, Democrat John Fetterman is running as the Democrat for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat against Mehmet “Dr.” Oz. Fetterman had a stroke just as he was getting confirmed as his party’s nominee, and had been doing pretty well in the polls even though he refused to do direct interviews or public appearances, citing his need to recover. But then he had to do the late-campaign debate with Oz, and predictably did very badly. (It was noted at the event that Fetterman had to watch closed captioning panels because he still has problems processing what he hears, which made it that much harder to respond in conversational real time.) Now, it may be true that Fetterman will end up recovering fully while Oz will always be an entitled jerk, but his performance still might have had a negative impact on people who hadn’t already made up their minds. Why did Fetterman keep to his schedule when he would have had an excuse not to? Because if he’d refused to debate, he would’ve looked like a chicken. As it is, he looks unfit. And thus two races that had been going pretty good for Democrats are in real danger of going the other way, because the candidates could not or would not perform to the dictates of the press.

Why? Because getting a bunch of career politicians and functionaries to keep running the government the establishment way is boring and bad for ratings. Stuffing a bunch of baboons into business suits and telling them to rewrite the Constitution is funny and great for ratings.

But that would be if the Democrats lose, as if they need any help. The real punch line would be if the Republicans aren’t as popular as they appear and don’t perform as well as the press expects (see below) and the Trumpniks, as they did in 2020, play on this to say everybody expected them to win and therefore an inconvenient result means the whole thing was “rigged” and “stolen.” And who else do you think they’re going to blame?

You would think that these guys learned their lesson by foisting a “reality” TV celebrity who then turned around and sued the press for telling the truth about him, but apparently not.

Nobody likes either of these parties.

But this election, based on all the information I can trust, really is close.

I went to a Walmart the other day and the friggin’ mens’ underwear was locked in a glass cabinet so you had to flag down an employee to get it. I went to their cereal aisle and the prices were almost a dollar higher than they were the last time I was there. Republicans’ anti-Democrat commercials keep hammering inflation and crime, and what am I dealing with when I want to shop in my neighborhood? Inflation and crime.

None of which means that Republicans have any better idea how to deal with these things, but all they have to do is keep hammering on the side that’s in charge and hope voters don’t have a memory span longer than two years.

And it goes to display our civic illiteracy and lack of long-term analysis that nobody considers that when you lose representative government, the economy gets worse in the long run because there is no way to correct a bad government’s bad decisions. Just look at Vladimir “Let’s Have A War” Putin. Or China under Xi Jinping, whose economy is becoming more brittle even as The Leader consolidates more power.

But the apparent weakness of the Democrats in the stretch belies the point that again, in midterm elections with an unpopular president, that president’s party usually does that much worse. And if Republicans are that popular and Democrats are that bad, you would think that their lead in “tight” states would be that much more clear. If Republicans really are a party of brain-dead theocrats, why aren’t Democrats running away with this? And if Democrats are a bunch of woke Commies and everybody hates the economy, why aren’t Republicans running away with this?

Because the Republicans actually ARE a brain-dead theocracy. And while the Democrats aren’t really a Communist regime, they haven’t been doing such a great job.

MAYBE, it could be, Americans don’t like either one of these gangs. But one has to win.

And if Democrats are that unpopular and that incompetent, and Democrat early voting turnout is as lackadaisical as it often is (remember, blowing a big lead on paper is what Democrats DO), the main thing that gives me hope is that in the Kansas abortion referendum this summer – where a “Yes” vote technically would have only meant that the state had the option to write greater restrictions on abortion in the future – the main poll prior to the vote had “Yes” leading by 4 points with a 2.8 percent margin of error and the “No” vote ended up winning by almost 60-40.

Because as much cause as voters might have to hate Democrats, I think some of them realize that they can’t take a chance with the Republicans. “What the hell have ya got to lose?” Well, over a million COVID deaths between January 2020 and November 2022, over a third of which were under Trump in one year.

The Future

So given all that, I’ve got no right to make a prediction for what happens in these various elections other than what we already know: If Republicans win their contests they will do all they can to skew state governments to make sure they can throw out any 2024 election results they don’t like. And if they don’t get the results they want they will scream and cry and throw things, try to pull what legal skullduggery they can and ultimately resort to violence, because that’s just what they did after 2020.

Democrats keep wailing that this approach is a threat to “democracy”, but I’m not sure they understand that in an environment where everything is branding, association of democracy with the Democratic Party might not be such a great idea. Think of our system more as “representative government.” Or even “republicanism.” And right now the ostensible Republicans are against that. A republic means you elect the political class, and if your approach is “either we win or there will be blood”, then there’s really not an election now, is there? I know the Right is, or used to be, the side that said, “it’s a republic, not a democracy,” but as I’ve said, these are functionally the same thing. And if there are no independent elections, it’s not even a republic anymore. It’s more like what you have in Communist countries where you have an “election” to give undeserved legitimacy to the regime, but the outcome is never in doubt. I mean back in the days of Reagan or even McCain, Republicans used to be critical of old Communist politicians but apparently not anymore.

Regardless of who ends up winning in your state, this is my advice to any liberals after the election:

Buy guns. Train with guns. And buy lots of ammo.

Because it is very clear now that the Republican state governments and the Alito Supreme Court don’t think we have any human rights other than the right to have guns, and don’t acknowledge any part of the Bill of Rights besides the Second Amendment. And you need to take advantage of that before they get rid of that too. I mean, if they see enough black, female and gay customers come into the gun shops all at once, they might get wise. Although if you have pastel colored hair and a cannabis T-Shirt, you might be able to pass as a Libertarian.

You might think, “oh no, we shouldn’t escalate”, but kids, the Party of Trump has been escalating for the past six years whether you acknowledge it or not, and this is where we are. These people only acknowledge power and force, and you need to get some of your own. Or, you can just keep playing Eloi to their Morlocks until they’ve gobbled the last one of you.

And if you really think the solution to this country’s political violence is more gun control – meaning, more control of the individual by a government that you are rapidly losing control over – first acknowledge that you’re not going to get more federal gun control as long as the entire Republican Party and several senior Democrats are against it. But you know what will change their minds?

All you need to do is have one hundred big Black men in BLM T-Shirts, flanked by an honor guard of twenty drag queens, marching down the streets of Washington DC all strapped with AK-47s and AR-15s. When they see that on Fox News, the Republicans will all change their minds on gun control right quick. They will change their minds like Saul on the road to Damascus, PRAISE Jesus.

And everyone here hates everyone here for doin’ just like they do

And it’s best that we all keep it quiet instead

-Matchbox 20, “Back To Good”

“New Rule: …if you believe that the world is going to end, then you don’t get to vote on next year’s budget, BECAUSE IT DOESN’T CONCERN YOU.”

-Bill Maher, Oct. 11, 2013

The early mail-in ballots for Nevada elections came in this week. And if Republicans take over at least one house of Congress, as seems likely, they’re going to do that much more to wreck this lousy economy than they already have, in order to blame a Demonrat Party that is still nominally in charge as long as Biden and Harris are still in the White House. And if they win certain state governments, they will have charge of who certifies elections. And that will make it that much more likely that they will be able to reinstall their boss, Donald Trump, meaning, Vladimir Putin, in order to turn the United States back into Russian North America, and make it that much harder for Ukraine, and thus Europe, to resist Putin’s expansion.

I was trying to find this article I read in Politico or some place, where somebody mentioned the experience of trying to talk to their Trumpnik relative and being told “I don’t care” about all the stuff one could say for the Democrats or against Trump.

Trumpniks, what you all haven’t figured out is that I don’t care if you don’t care. If nothing will persuade you, I’m not going to try. I’ve written you off.

Don’t try to tell me I don’t know where you’re coming from. I mean, I AM you. I am a cis het white guy. I actually do ask myself, “When did Motley Crue become classic rock?” I have no idea why everybody became transgender and vegan all of a sudden. And while I wasn’t old enough to vote for Reagan, I was old enough to remember when the Republicans really seemed to know what was going on and how to run the country, while Democrats were completely clueless. And I’ve said, in my posts about the Trump Organization, that as long as Trump superficially held to the fiscal conservative policies of earlier Republicans, the economy was good, at least for certain people, and I can certainly understand how those people could support Trump as long as their ox wasn’t gored.

But then coronavirus happened, and Trump and his Republican governors wanted to pretend it didn’t happen. And as a result almost a quarter million Americans died by the time Trump lost his election (News Flash: Trump lost the 2020 election) and over a million have died in total. But don’t worry, it will all work out well, thanks to President Xi.

Needless to say, quite a few Republicans got more than their ox gored, including Herman Cain. Not only that, the low-wage, low-demand economy that the conservative business class had been leaning on was at least temporarily wrecked because the virus threatened those service industries whose employees couldn’t just sign in at a workstation from home. You want to know why all those jobs now have to pay more than (oh no) ten dollars an hour, that’s why. Because the Law of Supply and Demand actually works for labor, too.

If you want to know why I, as a member of my demographic, became a race traitor and commit daily blasphemy against Our Lord and Savior, it’s for more reasons than I can really count, but what’s relevant here is however bad you think the economy is now, we aren’t nearly at the point of catastrophe that we were under Trump and his Party of enablers.

Under Trump, Republicans lost the House, then the White House, and eventually the Senate. And a lot of them lost their lives. And the economy, the main thing people give Republicans credit on, was lost too, and there is little objective reason to believe they will do a better job if we let them back in charge. There is in fact every reason to think that in the short term they will make it worse. And whatever you think you’re getting from Trump, you’re really not getting it, unless what you want to get from him is more rage and hatred and justification for those emotions, because those are the only things he really delivers on. In which case, that is the only thing that justifies your loyalty.

Because you are that much more loyal to Trump, who has lost you everything, than you were to prior Republicans under whom you had a good economy and renewed national standing.

Like I said, if the Republican Party was still more benefit than drawback I could understand your rationalization. But this is not the Party of Reagan. This is not like Chik-fil-A, where liberals can go, “Yes, the company is run by a family of homophobic fundamentalists, but I REALLY LOVE THE SANDWICHES!” Your boy is serving chicken vomit sandwiches and shit nuggets, but you’re still lining up around the block.

The other huge reason I oppose the Church of Trump is because I’ve seen this happen before. Bill Clinton, already known to be a pathological liar, ended up committing perjury over Monica Lewinsky. (Liberals would say Ken Starr set up a ‘perjury trap’, I think Bill was just that much more scared of Hillary than everybody else.) So he ended up getting impeached. And the liberal Democrats all went “it’s nothing”, “it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment”, “it’s a political attempt to thwart the will of the voters”… y’know, all the stuff that the Church is saying to defend their Lord and Savior from crucifixion. Where do you think they learned it? The difference being that Clinton’s perjury, while still perjury, was perjury over an affair, whereas Trump committed obstruction over an attempt to strongarm a head of state who was himself pressured by another head of state (Putin) in order to get dirt on his potential election opponent Joe Biden. The other difference being that however much I hate them, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were somewhat competent.

So if I hated the Clintons that much, and you want to act like the Clinton Party on steroids, you better believe I’m going to be hating you like I hated them, on steroids.

And when I say I hate you, I don’t mean Trump, I mean you. If you weren’t defending him, Trump would be just another bum at the gas station hollering conspiracy theories at strangers while begging them for change. At least he would have an excuse for that haircut.

The only reason that we haven’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because the contingent claiming to represent “real America” says he’s their hero. Not Reagan. Not Goldwater. Not even Ted Cruz. Trump.

I’m sure you know that line in social media that Trump has repeated himself: “They’re not after me. They’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” By the same token, YOU wouldn’t be the issue if you weren’t supporting someone who is so uniquely malignant, and by treating him seriously, giving him power completely out of scale to his merit. Kamala Harris is not going to send the Food Police after you to make sure all your food is vegan and gluten-free. The government does not have the absolute power that you want it to have under Republicans and fear under Democrats, otherwise both Trump and Biden would be able to get away with a lot more than they have. If anyone is after YOU, it is because you’re the only thing keeping this colon cancer of a politician viable. He’s not “in the way”, YOU are. That’s how he likes it, because that is what sniveling cowards do: Shove their flunkies in the way so they take the hits instead.

Look, nobody HAS to do anything. In life, the only thing one HAS to do is die. You don’t serve Trump because you have to, you do it because you WANT to. Because he’s what you wish you could be but can’t. After all, you’re Good Christians. (TM)

And that seems to be what it comes down to. Because no way can you justify this anti-sense unless you believe that the world of cause and effect is secondary to a world that we can’t prove but we’re supposed to take on faith.

For example, the Georgia US Senate election, which pits Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, an actual black Christian minister, against Herschel Walker, whom the Republicans nominated mainly because he is black. And an acolyte of Trump. And being an acolyte of Trump, it is probably not a surprise that at a critical moment in the campaign, Walker got accused of paying for a girlfriend’s abortion even as he now opposes abortion in most or all circumstances. And yet the Church embraces him that much more strongly as if his martyr status made him that much more a Christian than the incumbent Senator who is an actual Reverend.

It’s of a piece with their attitude towards the Clintons and Hunter Biden, whom they abominate even as their Leader does all the nasty shit they did and worse. If you’re going to ban abortion, yet your lawmakers have abortions, and you’re going to demand consequences for corruption, yet the people demanding prosecution are even more corrupt than the people they’re accusing, clearly you’re not focused on the sin, but the sinner. You don’t care that the people you’re replacing are even more evil than the ones they replace. You just want your team in charge.

I had seen some talking head recently say that Walker’s position on abortion might actually help him with some voters, because a large plurality of Republicans are actually pro-choice personally. They see this as much the same thing as their own position, endorsing a “pro-life” stand in public while doing what you want in private.

But then anybody with enough fame, money and influence has always been able to get past the law. Trump certainly teaches that, and so do people like Herschel Walker. And if a Republican politician is a hypocrite on moral issues, that is hardly a shock anymore. It may actually be a membership requirement. What is relevant is the practical consequence of electing such people. Herschel Walker is expecting, as a man and as a Christian, to be forgiven for something that was not illegal at the time he did it, but he is asking voters to elect him to a position where he will support laws that will criminalize women for doing the same thing he did, and in that scheme Christian forgiveness will be irrelevant. The fact that he doesn’t believe in saving poor, innocent unborn life any more than Trump does is irrelevant, because those women do not have the fame, money and influence that he does to get away with what he did. In any case the cult is sending a message to the entire rest of the country who are not in the Church of Trump: “Rules are written to control you other people. Rules never apply to US.”

There is no better word for that position than injustice.

I’ve often talked about Rod Dreher, the columnist and author who is nominally a Christian apologist but often seems more motivated to deliver apologia for this “post-liberal” “traditional conservative” mindset. He is probably most famous for writing a book called The Benedict Option, inspired by Benedict of Nursia, the monk who first developed the Benedictine Rule. Dreher’s thesis was that the world of secularism is now sufficiently omnipresent that the Christian community will not be able to prevail in what liberalism calls the marketplace of ideas, so the solution, at least until the worldly culture burns itself out, is not to compete with it but to withdraw and find or create committed spiritual communities. Historically, Benedict was born just after the end of the Roman Empire in the West; by that time Western Europe had been Christian for at least a century but the temporal authority behind the Church was gone.

But then Benedict was experiencing the end of a world, not necessarily THE world. Christians have gone through “the end of the world” several times, and yet, it never actually ends. And believe it or not, Christianity hasn’t ended either. It changes like the rest of the culture, but there have been two main apostolic church organizations since at least the Middle Ages, there have been numerous Protestant churches since the Middle Ages, and yet Catholicism and Orthodoxy still exist.

In the Wikipedia entry on The Benedict Option, the book’s title is an allusion to a quote by philosopher Alasdair McIntyre: “If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without hope … We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” But McIntyre later spoke out regarding the book saying that Dreher had misinterpreted his meaning as advocacy for traditional conservatism while his own “virtue ethics” are neither liberal nor conservative. “This is not a withdrawal from society into isolation of a certain sort; this is actually the creation of a new set of social institutions that then proceed to evolve…So, when I said we need a new St. Benedict, I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.” In practice, Dreher would seem to agree, as more recently he had been given a paid fellowship in Hungary by the government of strongman Viktor Orban. “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” Dreher told The New Yorker‘s Andrew Marantz in 2022. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.” And while professing to be appalled by Trump, he was so much more appalled by the Left’s response to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court that he sided with Kavanaugh: “I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge.” (Because, as the experience of Trump should educate us, it doesn’t matter what calendar age a man is if he continues to act like a 17 year old lout.)

If Dreher were serious about his thesis, he wouldn’t have counseled a Benedict Option, he would have counseled a John of the Apocalypse option. John, of course, was the mysterious writer of the Book of Revelations who is also thought to be the author of the fourth Gospel. Revelations, cutting out all the mystical allegory, is really about the message that we don’t know when the Day of Judgment will be and we have to act as though it’s today, because some day, it will be.

The cult doesn’t believe in the Kingdom of God. They believe in what Christ called “the world.”
And why shouldn’t they? In Matthew 6, Christ also says ““Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. “

Have you ever tried to get your daily bread by just praying for it and hoping God would provide? I do NOT recommend it.

All the real accomplishments of Christianity – the Byzantine Empire, the monasteries and universities, the Puritan settlements, global evangelism – were because Christians rolled up their sleeves and did the hard work to make things happen in this world before they could focus on the next one.

But then I follow another book of Scripture: Atlas Shrugged. And in the later acts of that novel, Ayn Rand has John Galt use his weird science to commandeer the national airwaves to give a marathon speech explaining Objectivist philosophy, and at one point he tells the audience:

“Do not remind me that (my position) pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you. “

I mean, if your religion tells you to focus on the world to come, why are you so obsessed with controlling this one? If the afterlife is better, why do you cling to this one so desperately? Because, frankly, y’all don’t believe in this stuff any more than I do. You can’t be surprised that I, and increasing numbers of other Americans, don’t believe in religion when clearly you don’t.

Religion might teach some positive virtues, like forgiveness, charity, and dis-attachment from a temporal universe that we are going to leave quickly enough anyway, but taking it literally is potentially deadly. And I am starting to think that anybody who still has a working brain but does take religion literally is just trying to sell something to people more gullible than they are.

As I’ve said, the irony of the Electoral College in practice is that it was intended to act as a screening mechanism against an angry mob being gulled by a demagogue and “creature of foreign powers”, yet the only reason that result actually occurred is because we had certain states swing the EC for Trump. And of course the priests of Trump in the US Congress who wailed that impeaching him would be “thwarting the will of the people” had to eat their words when Trump lost even with the Electoral College, and to defy it, he resorted to a gullible angry mob.

This is why the Church is so (ahem) hellbent about controlling those state governments and election systems, in order to control the Electoral College, and why they are so fanatic about the shahada that “Trump didn’t lose, and Biden isn’t the real President.” This despite the fact that most of them are willing to say their OWN elections were perfectly lawful, because the Electoral College had nothing to do with them. And if they still lose an election, all they have to do is say they won! “I’ll accept the results, cause I’m gonna win.” “What if you lose?” “I’M GONNA WIN!!!” Well, that’s a great way to solve all your problems. I mean, I’m a Las Vegas Raiders fan, that would make things so much easier! We’re going to the Super Bowl!!! What do you mean we’re not 15-1? What do you mean Tom Brady is still the winning quarterback! Fake news! I roll to disbelieve! Save versus illusion!!

It’s amazing how much stuff in life we do not assume we can resolve with fantasy and wishes, yet something trivial like who’s going to run the country is a case of “you create your own reality.” This despite the fact that politics is the exact opposite of living in your own subjective world. This is why we need laws. But laws are what the Church of Trump want to destroy.

The problem with throwing out the rule of law is that you have to resort to having the biggest gang, and the whole reason Trumpniks are so existentially afraid is the fact that they are not the biggest gang. Even when their Messiah was in the White House, he had done so much to alienate the military brass that they were starting to pull back from being involved in his various political stunts.

Which means that while the cult doesn’t want the rule of law, it really doesn’t want rule by brute force either, cause they ultimately don’t have it. What do they want, then? What they really want is a “civilized” population that can be bullied and cowed into doing what they say, because then you have all the advantages of arbitrary brute force without the danger of confronting a larger enemy.

I again refer to the great quote by Robert E. Howard: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

The villain is actually better protected under the rule of law than under chaos, because he has a right to an unpopular opinion. If you want to throw out the rule of law and rule by the Law of the Jungle, you better be able to back it up.

Again, the Ukraine situation is a good analogy here. Czar Vladimir I clearly does not believe that Ukraine deserves to exist as an independent nation and probably doesn’t think Ukrainians deserve to exist as a people. And he was proving it by biting off little bits of the country, one by one. And because Russia was (perceived as being) such a large and powerful country, Ukraine, and the West, had no choice but to accede. But then for whatever reason escapes me, Vlad decided that wasn’t enough, and decided to “de-Nazify” Ukraine by sending his army to conquer the nation so his secret police could liquidate the Jewish head of state. And at that point, Ukraine started fighting back because Putin was clearly aiming to destroy Ukraine as a country. And when they did, the big, bad Russian military was revealed as being not up to snuff. And the result of that is that Putin Russia has become the junior partner to China in the We Hate America coalition, and even Russia’s satraps in far-off places like Azerbaijan are losing stability, because their patron is no longer able to back them up.

And again: All it took was fighting back. But when did Ukraine start fighting back? When it became clear that any further concessions would only be annihilation. When there was nothing to save by NOT fighting back.

While you pay your worship to Donald Trump, your true spiritual model is Vladimir Putin. And like Putin, you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, but it was Putin who ended up getting backed into a corner. Now the civilized world is trying to find some way to return to peace and normalcy while at the same time knowing that Putin has given up on being a civilized human being who can be trusted to co-exist with others.

The same situation is going to happen with you people in America, because you will not peacefully co-exist with others, and while the political system will help you win elections, it will not give you a mandate, much less a majority. And as with Ukraine, we can only hope the denouement does not involve nukes.

And it’s over now

And I don’t know how

Guess it’s over now

There’s no gettin’ back to good

“if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling”

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In my last post, I had just summed up the dilemma of America’s downward-spiral political system thus: “We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.”

For years, I had advocated alternatives to this political trap, specifically advocating the Libertarian Party as a party of free minds and free markets.

Yeah, that was fun while it lasted.

The Libertarian National Convention for the 2022 midterms was held on Memorial Day weekend in Reno, Nevada, which should have been a bad omen right there. It was notable in that the “real” libertarians who call themselves the Von Mises Caucus decisively took over control of the Libertarian Party and immediately started changing the platform to their liking.

I didn’t say much about this at the time cause frankly, it wasn’t worth the effort. Much like this Party is now.

On Wikipedia, the Von Mises Caucus is described as promoting paleolibertarianism and positions itself in opposition to the more moderate positions of 2016 presidential candidate Gary Johnson and former chairman Nicholas Sarwark, apparently because Sarwark wasn’t confrontational enough. (Note for the uninitiated: That was sarcasm) Prominent members include comedian Dave Smith and podcast hosts Tom Woods and Scott Horton. The kind of performers who appeal to the guys who like Joe Rogan, but think he’s too curious and open-minded. In 2021 Mises board member Andrea McArdle announced her intention to run for Party chair at the LP’s midterm convention and got over 69 percent of the vote in May, cementing the Caucus’ takeover.

The keynote speaker for the Convention on Friday May 27 was Justin Amash, a former US Congressman from Michigan who spent most of his career as a Republican before publicly quitting in 2020 once that institution clearly became the Party of Trump. He made a big show of joining the Libertarian Party and serving as their first federal officeholder for the remainder of his term. He is so far their only office holder, because he refused to run for re-election after his term expired in 2020. Nevertheless, he was thought of as a potential candidate for president, which is probably less likely after his speech to the new Libertarian caucus.

Congressman Amash started his thesis by saying “I’m here because I want libertarian ideas to win in my lifetime.” He established his contrarian credentials by saying he had served with Ron Paul and that while he was in Congress during 10 years he was the lone “No” vote on bills 56 times, with all other Congressmen combined having 76 No votes during that period. And he said that the libertarian philosophy, the philosophy that is popular in America and that the Party can win with, is at its core “liberalism.” And he held up a book by that title- by Ludwig von Mises. Amash said, “liberalism, as Mises talks about, is the philosophy of human cooperation. It’s human cooperation that brings progress and happiness. And I think too often as libertarians, we don’t focus enough on that.” Then he reiterated from his first point: “What is the point of a political party? The point of a political party is to win elections.” Then he said: “That brings up the question- who’s a real libertarian? I’m going to quote from some famous libertarians, and I’ll let you decide.”

“…a small number of anti-social individuals, i.e., persons who are not willing or able to make the temporary sacrifices that society demands of them could make all society impossible. Without the application of compulsion and coercion against the enemies of society, there could not be any life in society.” Silence. “Here’s another quote: ‘Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practical only in a world of angels and saints. …Libertarianism is NOT anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism.” Booing at this point. Amash shrugged and went on: “One must be in the position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce to the rules of life in society.” “For the libertarian, the state is an absolute necessity” -more booing at that one- “since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it.” “It is not at all shameful for a man to allow himself to be ruled by others.’ …You like that one?” “Libertarianism’s thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.” “It would be really preposterous to propose that the nations turn to imperialistic policies as a favor to the ordnance manufacturers.” Surprisingly little reaction one way or the other. “The libertarian demands that every person have the right to live wherever he wants.” A little cheering there. “The narrow-mindedness which sees nothing beyond one’s own nation, and has no conception of the importance of international cooperation, must be replaced by a cosmopolitan outlook.” “It is manifestly absurd to break up the ever-increasing unity of world economies into a small number of national territories, each as autarkic as possible.” And finally; “The libertarian demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis.”

Then Amash gave them the punch line: Those were all quotes by Ludwig von Mises. All of them. His point: “Like you, I find a lot of those quotes questionable. … and I think what happens so often with libertarians is we’re quick to judge each other, we’re quick to say someone else is not a real libertarian.. but Von Mises said those things. And if we’re going to be a real political party, forget about being a real libertarian- we need to win over a third of the country- and if Ludwig von Mises, or Justin Amash, or pretty much anyone in this room is not libertarian enough for you, it’s not going to work… just using myself as an example, if Justin Amash is not libertarian enough for you, I’ve got news for you about the rest of the country.”

Apparently a political movement which named themselves after Ludwig von Mises was unaware that he’d said those things.

It’s like seeing somebody with a Pink Floyd T-Shirt and you ask them who their favorite band member is and they go, “Which one’s Pink?”

Which figures. Much like modern “conservatives” do not ponder the details of the Bible or the Hamilton-Madison Constitution, the “Von Mises” “libertarians” do not examine their own source material. Mises, unlike Ayn Rand, did not disdain the libertarian label, but to him liberty referred to a classical-liberal form of government. To liberals like Ludwig Von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the best system was not minarchist or anarcho-capitalist but had some regulation of both society and commerce, as Adam Smith intended. Now, that approach to government is still too pro-capitalist and individualist for the woke Left of today, which is why there’s a distinction between libertarianism and what calls itself “liberalism.” But apparently that’s still too statist for a self-declared Von Mises faction.

But even Amash’s speech wasn’t the biggest joke on the Caucus. The biggest joke was the background of the speech. See, they’d set up cameras to record the events of the day including not only Amash’s speech but the floor proceedings for who got to vote on the platform. This was done through the allocation of delegate tokens. If you look at the YouTube link for the May 27 section of the Convention, someone is asking, around 5 hours and 40 minutes in, someone announces that tokens will be collected in seven minutes for the Party floor debate. Then they started debating while on the mic about whether and in which medium the Party agenda was going to be posted. At 5:41 someone presses on whether, after the 30 minutes time allotted for the keynote speaker, all the debate tokens will actually be counted. He is told “I don’t know. I can’t predict the future.” Amash comes on around 5:42. He starts by saying “This is my first national convention, I think. Do they usually run like this?” He gives the Von Mises quotes after 5:48. But while Amash was speaking you could see a carton of take-out food on camera behind him and as he went on, people were walking around the stage behind him. He had to stop to turn off a ringtone because somebody left their smartphone by the podium. By the time he got to the point of “the point of a political party is to win elections”, you had at least eight people on the stage behind him taking out boxes and counting the tokens, cause apparently that’s how this Party is going to win elections.

I mean, you’re not going to take over the third largest political party in the United States and then set up a camera so that everyone on YouTube can see your organization doesn’t have its shit together, am I right?

The Amash speech ended at 6:06 (so he only used 24 of the alloted 30 minutes). The first person to address the podium after the speech described the scene behind Amash as “the height of rudeness” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves.” The chairwoman apologized that the need to assemble the tallies during a speech “was an unfortunate circumstance that was left, um, because of the agenda adoption.” Oh, so they hadn’t hammered that out before everyone got to debate and vote on it. Good to know. They kept going on with the tallies for the better part of thirty minutes. During that time at least one person asked to skip the procedure to vote for chair while the tallying was going on. One person asked if the tokens may have allowed a person to vote both ways on proposals “because I do not see a mechanism to keep that in mind.” Around 6:40, Sarwark came on to say that only a limited list of candidates was fostered despite the number of tokens collected because “shenanigans occurred.” He said “we are not following our own values – we are trying to silence voices because we disagree with them” – at which point the camera veered quickly away from his mic.

Look, we’re Libertarians. We’re used to Party conventions being Amateur Hour. But guys: When people on the floor of the Convention were telling the organizers it was a shitshow, then it was a shitshow.

Well, that was the stuff that was funny to watch, but the end result was ridiculous without being so funny. Previously the Libertarian Party platform had famously included a statement saying “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” But according to coverage in Reason Magazine, “Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise defended the deletion of the language because “libertarianism isn’t about wrongthink. It’s about non-aggression, self-ownership, and property rights,” and said he believes that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he calls a “woke,” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.

“What is happening nowadays with the ‘wokeism’ is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends,” says Heise. “So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It’s the same ideology that’s happening now, but they’re pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever.”

Basically they’re saying, “We’re value-neutral on bigotry. Also on being irrational and repugnant.”

Ultimately the statement was removed although at the initiative of former vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen they added a new line saying the Party would “uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity.”

But it’s kind of telling that a movement which prizes individualism against a collectivist agenda is invoking the junk-food catch phrases of the alt-Right like “woke” and “cultural Marxist”, to justify removing a pro forma statement against bigotry that was in the platform years before “woke” was a thing, and implying that anybody who disagrees with that is guilty of creating “wrongthink.”

Similarly the Caucus got rid of the Party position on abortion. That always had been value-neutral, because many Libertarians are Christians or secular humanists who hold that abortion, like the death penalty, is the ultimate form of coercion. Thus, the platform had read: “Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration. ” But apparently even that was too much for the Von Mises Caucus. One pro-life Libertarian site quoted a pro-choice Libertarian who voted to remove the statement, saying: “It was a self-contradictory plank: It claimed to be neutral, but it was clearly pro-choice.”

Well, in the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” Didn’t we used to say we were pro-choice on everything? This attitude assumes that “pro-choice” is the same thing as “pro-abortion.” You can, on libertarian or fiscal conservative grounds, refuse to endorse government funding or facilitating abortions that are morally repugnant to many taxpayers. But this posture defeats the purpose of being conspicuously non-neutral on the matter of bodily autonomy and asserting the right of the individual to make their own health choices, including choices that could kill them or (in the case of a pandemic) people around them who didn’t make that choice. Why are Libertarians demanding an end to mask mandates and vaccine mandates and demanding that state governments not dictate how parents can raise their children when they’re apparently “neutral” on the state dictating whether people should become parents? In removing an actually neutral statement asserting a right to conscience under the pretense of neutrality, the Von Mises Party, like Samuel Alito, has in fact clearly taken a side.

It matters now, after Dobbs v. Mississippi, because we have a whole host of unwanted babies that the government (The Supreme Court and the Trump states) expects private citizens to care for, at their expense, we are putting that much more pressure on adoption agencies, and the only “choice” some people have left is hoping they can stretch the cash to drive hundreds of miles out of the way to an abortion clinic, or to move to a state with decent resources for child care. Yet “libertarians” don’t seem to care about the unnecessary costs that “conservative” government has chosen to impose on the individual.

I am again reminded of the Harry Browne joke about how government is like a guy who breaks your leg, throws you a crutch and then brags, “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.” Well, Republicans are that much more laissez-faire than Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.

Wouldn’t it be more moral (and more practical) to just stop breaking legs? The Libertarian Party I voted for would say so. But not anymore.

And RE: “small government” –

Just watch this, and then get back to me.

@racabacar

republicans’ messaging problem

♬ original sound – Josh

Money quote: “They claim to be for ‘small government’, but that really means that a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.”

Of course, leftists have been pointing out this issue with the “small government” Right for quite some time, as if it were a problem unique to right-wing psychology, and as if libertarians have not been warning them for quite some time that a government that is big enough to give them abortion rights and “free” healthcare is also big enough to take them away.

Which is why, again, it is simply not enough to base your political agenda on “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” because at some point that attitude applies to everybody. The billionaire doesn’t want the government telling him to pay more taxes and the teenager doesn’t want the government telling her to bear her relative’s baby. Are these the same thing?

Yeah, “freedom lovers” used passive resistance to effectively kill mask mandates. Good for you. Now take a look at all the other stuff government is doing under our noses. We still have to take off our shoes at the airport when 9-11 was almost 22 years ago, and the Libertarian Party was never so hopped up about that.

So really, the matter should start from a point of ethics: Do I want the government telling everybody ELSE what to do? And why? How do you justify that? Cause right now we’ve got a Supreme Court saying “I don’t want the government telling the government what to do. Wait, we ARE the government? Well, hey!”

Amash, who actually IS a Christian, pro-life Libertarian, had it right. You are not going to catch any new people with an attitude of “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” and sotto voce, “I’m okay with government telling other people what to do.” Those people already have a party. It is certainly not a position that will appeal to those of us who were already in the LP and thought we were libertarian before the woke Right changed the definition of “libertarian” the same way they changed the definition of “conservative” and “Christian.” And even if you could get more votes with the Von Mises Caucus than you got with the previous agenda who weren’t already going to the Republican Party, further gains would have to assume that the current party organization has the brains and coordination to act on its new recruitment. And right now, the Von Mises Party makes Gary Johnson look as organized and focused as Mitch McConnell or Lyndon Johnson.

And liberals, keep in mind, I do NOT think that going “third” party, in and of itself, is “throwing away your vote.” If I thought that I wouldn’t have been Libertarian for as long as I was. I AM saying that voting for this particular iteration of the Libertarian Party IS throwing away your vote, and it is throwing away your vote BY right-wing standards. Because if you have no idea how government works but still want to run for office anyway, and think the only purpose of being in office is to suck off the government tit while going on social media and making fun of welfare queens and woke socialists, we already HAVE a party for that. It’s called the Republican Party. And at this point, the main difference between them and the LP is that the Republicans can get people elected to federal office. So what we have right now is at best a duplication of effort. Now, if you want a party that actually follows what the Constitution says and does not believe government can spend all the money it wants and do anything it wants to the public just cause it can, that party doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did.

I will say this, you will see more pastel-colored hair and tie-dye T-Shirts in a Libertarian Party Convention than you ever will at a Republican convention, or for that matter, a Democratic one. But that just goes to the old right-wing critique about liberals’ “tolerance for diversity”: You can have a myriad variety of appearances, but inside you’re all the same political robot.

Now- if I can’t deal with the Libertarian Party any more, am I still a small-l libertarian? Well, yeah. Because libertarianism means being true to your individual self regardless of what the collective thinks, and if not even other libertarians agree with me, I must be fucking Ultra.

“You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.”

-Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Well, it’s been over a year since Trump Virus (TM) made it big in the States, and as the cartoon goes, it would like to dedicate this next song to all the people who never believed in it when it was coming up.
Cause if it wasn’t for all those people, it wouldn’t be as big as it is today.

Even after we developed a workable vaccine distribution program, there’s still at least 25 percent of the population nationwide that refuses to take it, and that’s an average. In some Republican states the numbers are a lot higher, as are coronavirus cases.

Again, Trump himself tried to get his cult to get vaccinated, and that’s one direction from their Leader that they just won’t take.

I saw something recently at the store that explained everything. It was on a box of Pop Tarts. If you are a connoisseur, you would know that while Pop Tarts can be eaten raw, they are supposed to be heated in a toaster, or in extremis, in a microwave. So consider that. I looked at the back of the box, and in large capital letters, it said: “REMOVE FROM FOIL BEFORE HEATING”.

When you have fully pondered the implications of this directive, namely the fact that the food company deemed it necessary in the first place, you will understand why we haven’t beat COVID.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if this is a case of being on brand or just trying to jump on the culture war, but the national Libertarian Party is putting up social media posts and ads saying “Already Against the Next Mandate.”

I have come to the distressing realization that the word libertarian is one of those words that should only be used in air quotes, much like “conservative” or “progressive.”

I mean, last weekend we had to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the 9-11 attack – and you know, it’s distressingly commercial how 9-11 Season seems to keep coming up earlier every year – and it really amazes me how the people who scream and howl and threaten civil war over wearing a mask or getting a vaccine for a temporary situation don’t care so much about the fact 20 years after 9-11, we STILL have a TSA and it’s STILL making us take off our shoes at the airport over airplane hijackings that we learned how to counter maybe a week after the event, when largely thanks to these “patriots”, we are losing a third of the people we lost in the 9-11 hijackings to COVID EVERY DAMN DAY.

You know, the same people losing their minds over Joe Biden mandating employer vaccines through OSHA, saying “he doesn’t have that power!” and all the Liberal Media going, “well, yes he does, cause this is part of OSHA’s charter and it’s been that way for years.” Now, all the actual Libertarians, who don’t assume government’s powers as existing a priori, would be telling you, “uh YEAH, that’s what we’ve been warning about” but apparently this is a huge shock to everybody whose first definition of “libertarian” is “not being a Demonrat.”

I mean, good for you if you’ve finally realized that government doesn’t always (if ever) have your best interest at heart, but strange that you only feel this way about the one mass initiative that is doing something right, and just happens to be the one that the grievance media wants to use to gin up the next round of the culture war.

In the last few decades the libertarian movement was greatly associated with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, but Rand herself despised the original libertarians, calling them “hippies of the right”. This is why. As I say, Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, but those personal issues were largely due to her disregarding her own statement: That reality exists objectively (thus the name), independent of emotion and perception and it can only be properly apprehended through reason and examination, not “whim-worship” and emotion. And nobody seems to get that these days, because the only opponents of the normie Democrat system are a Libertarian political party that is not very organized at all and an organized political party that must rely on emotion and whim-worship because its “conservatism” is that much less coherent than it was in previous years. And when, as a natural result of that trend, the movement experiences identity fusion with the most emotional and whim worshiping politician in our history, you can’t just turn on a dime and ask them to suddenly start thinking. When said figure (in his own long term self interest) asks people to get vaccinated, the cognitive dissonance is too great. It’s like Uncle Festus saying you CAN’T get drunk and fuck your cousin.

I don’t think we should need a mandate or government action to take the vaccine. I also don’t think we need a law banning people from sticking forks into wall sockets, but if enough “freedom lovers” decide that’s the best way to own the libs, that might happen.

But then, I told people that joke on a Libertarian Party Facebook page and got pushback on that. I was told, “do you want government to have the power to tell you what you can put in your body?” I said, “there’s this thing called The Law of the Excluded Middle you might want to look up. Also the word ‘sarcasm’.”

Let me see if I can break it down for you, people.

To begin with, viruses are real. Like God, they cannot be perceived with the naked eye. Unlike God, they can be perceived with advanced microscopes, so if you can believe in God, you can believe that viruses are real. Moving on. On a related subject, science is real. And as Neil DeGrasse Tyson was quoted as saying, “the beautiful thing about science is that it exists whether you believe in it or not.”

One aspect of viruses is that they mutate. This is only a matter of time. It is the reason new viruses pop up despite our immunization procedures. It is that much more likely that a virus will mutate if there is no immunization procedure, which we did not have until Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program, and even then the benefits did not really manifest until after Biden’s inauguration. (Oh, that reminds me of another fact you might not have been aware of: Biden is President.)

This would be happening whether government was restricting public action at all. It is in fact, happening for largely the reason that it hasn’t restricted public action much during the last year of the Trump Organization or the first few months of the Biden Administration. Part of that is because the US actually is a federal system where states have power, as opposed to a ‘unitary’ government like Britain or France, and virus containment policy was not a matter of scientific consensus but a governor’s decision on what would benefit them with their pet voter demographic. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also said in regard to the coronavirus that because virii do not acknowledge state boundaries, this means that not having a national mask mandate or expecting mandates to only be enforced by some governors and not others is “like designating a peeing section of a swimming pool.”

A virus spread can only be contained and reduced if the virus is not given the opportunity to go to new hosts, because since a virus is not actually a life form, it needs the cells of a biological host to infect so that it can replicate itself. Social distancing before the vaccination program was a very imperfect method of preventing the spread, and so is masking, but they are better than nothing, which was what we had last year. Because we had vaccination proceeding nationally we were having state and local governments remove mask and distancing restrictions and were on track to making things controllable, but then people decided to make disease treatment into a political football again at the same time the coronavirus achieved its Delta mutation. (This is from the Greek alphabet where ‘Delta’ is the fourth letter in sequence. We now have scientists warning of Lambda and Mu variants, which are the eleventh and twelfth letters. THAT’s the timetable of mutation and spread we’re dealing with here.) Delta is more effective than base COVID-19 at infecting people even when they are vaccinated, so yes, kids, vaccines are not a cure-all. They are however still better than nothing. In fact, according to the CDC (if you’re one of those gullible sheep who believes experts) ‘breakthrough’ cases among people who have been vaccinated are still a lot less likely to lead to hospitalization. But because the virus continues to spread and mutate, restrictions are coming back, and if you are not vaccinated you do not even have the imperfect defense that the vaccines give you.

In other words:

THE ONLY ENTITY WHOSE FREEDOM YOU ARE EXPANDING IS THE FREEDOM OF THE VIRUS TO SPREAD AND MUTATE, AND BECAUSE OF THAT EVERYONE ELSE STILL HAS TO WEAR A MASK AND WAIT FOR BOOSTER SHOTS, BECAUSE YOU DECIDED NOT TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. EVERYONE ELSE IS LESS FREE BECAUSE OF YOUR “FREEDOM”, INCLUDING YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT MUCH MORE LIKELY TO GET STUCK ON A VENTILATOR IF YOU NEVER GOT THE SHOT. AND I AM PRINTING ALL THIS IN ALL CAPS ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU WILL FIND BIG LETTERS EASIER TO READ.

The 2016 election, in which the two most unpopular and incompetent candidates the duopoly ever presented faced each other, should have demonstrated the bankruptcy of the system and given the Libertarian Party the perfect opportunity to capitalize.

And yet you have somehow managed to combine the feckless incompetence of the Democrats with the childish ideology of the Republicans. Now, if you could combine the popular civil libertarianism of Democrats with the Republicans’ skill at winning the game no matter what, you’d actually be dangerous.

The Libertarian Party still has the best chance to challenge the Republicans if only because the Democrats are the only other popular alternative, but you can’t challenge them by being that much more emotional and stupid than they are. You can’t challenge them by being more “punk rock” than they are. Once you might have been able to present yourself as being anti-establishment, but after Trump, the Republicans pretty much stole that act. The problem there is that too many people define “the establishment” not as the Democratic Party but as the whole concept of a constitutional republic. And given the backlash against Republican childishness, it does not help a smaller fringe party to be even MORE childish and unpopular just to prove how Xtreeem and Edgee we are. At this point you are no longer challenging the Republicans, you are following them. And that’s not going to work.

As I said recently:

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

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

“Just as their role model demands all the power and none of the responsibility, the cult demands the freedom to do as they please without acknowledging the consequences.”

Libertarianism at base is nothing less than what liberals have been calling “the American experiment” – the idea that We, the People of the former colonies are fit to manage our own affairs without the Parliament in London or the King in his court overriding our priorities. But that assumes we are in fact fit to manage our own affairs. If you want a more libertarian world, you need to demonstrate that you DON’T need a whole bunch of new intrusive laws because you acknowledge common sense ways of living. Coronavirus has made it that much more clear that the reason we have all the laws we do is because common sense ain’t all that common, at least in this country.

That is, if you want to be treated as a rational adult, you first need to start acting like a rational adult. If you want to act like a child who wants everything except responsibility, you should expect to treated like a child: That is, to be pushed around by grownups and told what to do because you are clearly incontinent to make your own decisions. There is a reason that adults don’t let children run around naked and throw their own shit, and it’s that much more obvious when the “shit” in question is a deadly contagious disease.

And I can hear the response even now: “Why CAN’T I run around naked? What do you mean THERE ARE ALREADY LAWS against public nudity? Who says?? That’s just another step towards The Holocaust! Do you want the Democrats to turn this country into SOCIALIST NORTH KOREA?!?!?”

No, I don’t, “freedom lovers”, but if anything is going to make that more likely, it’s you. You are exactly the sort of libertarian that the Left points at to say how useless the movement is and now you’ve made it that much easier for them to brand any dissenters as a public health danger. It would be a lot harder for them if you were not in fact a public health danger. Again, this is exactly how government grows and spreads, because not only are there opportunists in authority taking advantage of a real crisis, other people react to that crisis by making things worse for themselves and others, and that makes the heavy hand of authority that much more popular.

In fact there are a couple of recent articles (both in New York Magazine) indicating that this anti-Democrat virtue signaling might actually be helping the Democrats. One September 10 article quoted a previous article in The Atlantic on the California recall effort, and then says more generally, “Democrats also are aware that the ranks of the fearful and possibly angry vaccinated include a disproportionate percentage of seniors and college-educated people, who are the most likely to vote in non-presidential elections like the California recall or next year’s national midterms. It’s not safe to assume that all vaccinated people will embrace mandates (which is where these predictions of this being a 75-25 winning proposition for Biden come from), but it’s not unreasonable to think that on balance it represents smart politics for a president who’d rather be talking about fighting COVID-19 than about not fighting the Taliban or about Democrats fighting with each other over his domestic agenda.”

This leads to a Sunday article reviewing the current status of California’s ballot initiative to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who was never all that popular to begin with, but the recall effort didn’t really get serious until what the article describes as “a series of slapstick-quality self-owns” like Newsom appearing maskless at a fancy restaurant when mask restrictions were still on. Once the petition for recall got enough votes, the referendum started to gain more attention as right-wing talk show host Larry Elder entered the race as a Republican. Elder is fairly famous in talk radio, but if you didn’t already know who he was, don’t worry, liberal outlets like New York Magazine will be happy to tell you. “Shortly after Elder got in the race this summer, Newsom’s political consultants sat the governor down with a highlight reel of the radio host’s most offensive claims. A sampling: Systemic racism is “a lie”; employers should be able to fire women who get pregnant; the women who marched against Trump in 2017 were too unattractive to be sexually assaulted. “What the fuck?” Newsom said, according to someone who was there. “Is this serious?” Soon Politico reported that Elder’s ex-fiancée had accused him of waving a gun at her while high. “I say he’s even more extreme than Trump,” Newsom now routinely tells supporters. It’s worked. By the end of August, Newsom had reeled in huge donations from unions, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Netflix’s Reed Hastings has donated more to Newsom than most of his opponents have raised in total, while producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Priscilla Chan, and Connie Ballmer aren’t far behind.”

The result: “Polls that showed “keep” and “remove” voters almost evenly split in August, thanks to liberal apathy and right-wing fury, have now widened to a comfortable 13-point margin in Newsom’s favor, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.” The article implies that a lot of the turnaround is because of the two different factions’ approach to the virus, not to mention other things: “And yet Newsom, in the final stretch, has now allowed that there’s something to the idea with the politics of COVID blending into Republican power grabs blending into a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment around the country. “You see what’s happening in Florida! You see what’s happening in Texas! We have to give those ballots back in!” he said on an early-September Zoom call with LGBTQ+ activists. “Forgive me for being intense about this, but, man, this is real! This recall is real!”

If there is anyone who epitomizes limousine liberalism and its clueless, statist approach to the virus more than Nancy Pelosi, it would be Newsom. And he might win this recall because the presented alternative, one of the most prominent “small l libertarian” right-wingers out there, is perceived as being even worse.

In this Cold Civil War between left-wing faith in government and right-wing “liberty”, each side is handicapped by its own disadvantages, namely deserved unpopularity that will only increase as everyone becomes more polarized. Thus the fight will end up being won not on a positive level, with one side proving the worth of its arguments, but on a totally negative level with one side losing because its malice, incompetence and compulsion to alienate the general public ends up pissing off more voters than the other team. Well, I guess we know who’s winning that fight.

“I bear true and an existing witness to this barrel of monkeys.

A self proclaimed immoral success, Perfected by each whereof

Individually deadly and equally so

And spread about the surrendered troops,

For even thousands of miles will not tear apart their communication, or the lack thereof.

Vultures, liars, thieves, each proclaim their innocence

In no suggestion or rhyme, your weapon is contained in the wrecking of the keeping the desired effect.

The breaking of the spirit thwarts the whole being.

Your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt.

Guilt.”

-Alice in Chains, “Sludge Factory”

It’s almost time for Congress to go into its annual August recess. If you need to ask why Washington must have a recess in August, you have obviously never visited Washington in August.

Before that can happen, there’s a couple of bits they have to get out of the way. Tuesday they finally started the “1-6” investigation in the House of Representatives, which in its first day gave us the surprising news that the people who attempted to kill black police officers while storming the Capitol were racist, giving MSNBC the opportunity to play the N-Word more times than an episode of The Dave Chappelle Show. The investigation started no thanks to House Republican “leader” Kevin McCarthy, who last week attempted to throw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a curve by announcing his Party’s picks for the investigation panel would include Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR-Ohio) and a couple others who voted not to certify the 2020 Electoral College results, in effect endorsing the January 6 attack on the process. When Pelosi said she wouldn’t let the election-deniers on the panel, McCarthy said he was withdrawing all Republicans from consideration, including the ones who did vote to certify the election. Basically McCarthy’s posture was that if he can’t get his way and troll the committee with joke picks, then he’s going to take his ball and go home. The joke’s on him, cause he has no ball.

The Democrats, as the party in charge this Congress, offered a “9-11 style” bipartisan commission on January 6, but this was under the impression immediately after the event that Republicans, who were threatened by the attack too, would be willing to investigate it. They are not, for the same reason that Osama bin Laden would not have cooperated with the 9-11 commission, because he knew what they would find. The only threat McCarthy could make was to withdraw his party’s endorsement and thus the appearance of bipartisanship. But having already given up on bipartisanship, and conceding his Party’s identification with the rioters, McCarthy had only the pretense of legitimacy in the debate, and since everyone knew it was not sincere, he gained nothing by refusing to cooperate.

And in what is allegedly not a related event, Democrats in the Senate are having trouble passing a $600 billion dollar infrastructure bill, which apparently cannot be passed as a simple-majority budget bill because West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin (of course) wanted it done on a bipartisan basis. Which of course requires negotiating with Republicans, who since Bill Clinton have decided that giving Democrats any help doesn’t help them.

It also didn’t help that Donald Trump, He Be King Dick Who Got Biggest Of All Dicks, ordered his subordinate microdicks in what used to be a political party to not cooperate with the Democrats.

Trump Calls Republicans “Weak Fools and Losers” for Negotiating Infrastructure

I am not so sure that this is a brilliant Machiavellian strategy so much as Trump’s usual reactive emotion when the grownups are doing something serious without him in the room: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA nobody’s payin’ ATTENTION t’ MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

But as I keep saying, not like it really matters, cause even when the Crybaby Caudillo does the right thing – like getting the COVID vaccine and telling other people to do so – it’s with a lot less emphasis than when he tells people to do the wrong thing, cause he is at least as much follower as leader. Trump is the leader of the former Party of Lincoln because he is what they want. He personifies the attitude they already had even before he became a presidential candidate.

To a very limited extent, very far back in time, this intransigence was understandable. If you saw much of American history after FDR (after Wilson, really) as less “progress” and more an entropic slide towards more and more statism and unnecessary government controls, even compromise that gained some of your goals was a defeat in that the other side got further toward what they wanted, especially since victory by gradualism is an explicit strategy of democratic socialists.

But even if you favor socialism over evil “selfishness”, the real problem with the Right these days (including a lot of libertarianism, sadly) is that reliance on talk show hosts as intellectual role models has rotted their former reputation in philosophy. This was made that much worse by the fact that radio hosts and their descendants on basic cable were able to monetize politics, and that meant telling people what they wanted to hear, not the hard facts. They never put their ideas up for test and debate; rather Republicans used “safe” districts to maintain their place in national government, and since certain seats were safe, primaries were really a contest of the biggest whacko ideologue. This created a party where appraisal of facts was not only not a priority, it was actually unwelcome. This was BEFORE Trump. The Right got lazy, basically. So Trump is just the logical extension of that. He can tell the redcaps to hate science and hate eggheads and not cooperate with the Beltway establishment. That’s what they want to do. If he tried to push people towards vaccinating to stop the Delta virus, that wouldn’t be popular, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t follow the crowd.

The stubbornness of the NotDemocrats is not a Randian refusal to compromise with evil. It is a five-year-old who refuses to have peas for dinner. (And yes, liberals, there IS a difference, not that Republicans care to acknowledge it.)

Regarding the infrastructure bill, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the (bill’s) sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts might wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrat — the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power — would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.”
Which is of course the same reason Republicans have to stick together: to make Joe Biden unsuccessful. Which is basically the same motive as making Barack Obama unsuccessful. Blame the other party for not being able to keep its promises (eliding the role you had in that result) and say that you’ll do a better job if you get elected to Congress. The problem of course is that they did that with Obama, it didn’t work, they tried it again and that time it did work (cause Obama’s successor was Hillary Clinton) but then Republicans had to spend the next four years proving they would do a better job than Obama Democrats, and absolutely failed. Not that Trump’s (sorta) fiscal conservative policy didn’t have real benefits for the economy, which was the main reason he had as much popularity with serious people as he did, but the crash in face-to-face business thanks to Trump Virus (TM) followed by the rapid recovery of the Wall Street sector made it clear to a lot of people that Wall Street is not the entire economy and should not be treated as such. This also means that middle class Americans are becoming less sympathetic to the idea that whatever is good for Big Business is automatically good for them and should be promoted at their expense.

What is happening is that each party is doing what makes sense for them, and many Democrats (namely Joe Manchin) can’t understand that what makes sense for Republicans is not what Democrats think makes sense for the country, and they ought to give up assuming good faith from them, since Republicans have already decided to assume the worst about Democrats. The two ruling factions have been a state of cold war (not competition) for a while, and Democrats are finally starting to realize it.

The architects of duopoly are now becoming victims of the system they sought to create. Democrats have painted themselves in a corner with duopoly – however much they claim they need two parties to have a political debate, it’s not something they really seem to believe. Well, now they’ve gotten their wish because now all of the centrist non-progressives are basically on their side, but that means, as with the Affordable Care Act, that all political debate is within the Democratic Party, because Republicans refuse to offer any ideas. And that means that despite their technical majority in numbers, Democrats can’t get anything done because they aren’t one movement, they’re just a coalition of NotRepublicans. The altruist-socialist Left that claims to be the real Democratic Party has never really been a majority of public opinion, and if I do find myself voting with the “progressives” more, that’s only because the last two years of Trump Virus (TM) has made it clear that this country’s lack of support systems is an outright national security issue that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. (And if those leftists sneer that the virus proves people can’t be trusted to do the right thing without being forced, it also proves that government can’t make them do the right thing, either.)

Meanwhile, if it seems odd that Republicans are only enacting the Trump agenda of voter suppression and vote nullification after he lost (as opposed to succumbing to his demands in the moment, like he wanted) it’s because the aftermath of January 6 has made two things clear: However much the sensible Republicans wished Trump would go away after Biden’s inauguration, the “base” will not give up Trump no matter what, and the factors that caused Republicans to lose the suburbs and critical Electoral College battles will only get worse as sane people realize that electing Republicans would mean electing Trump and electing Trump would mean January 6 every damn day. It was all the Party could do to get swing states with white people and Hispanics and now they have to worry that not even a majority of white people are on board anymore.

Republicans have basically painted themselves in a corner with duopoly: they survived mainly by suppressing any competition for the not-Democrat vote, just as Democrats suppress any competition for the not-Republican vote. And just as Democrats scare their people into voting for them on the premise that if they don’t, America is going to become a fascist hellhole, Republicans scare their people into thinking if Democrats win, America will become a socialist hellhole. But Republicans were starting to gain the advantage in that, one, Republican presidencies may have been disagreeable to liberals but were not Hell on Earth to the rest of us, and two, the Democrats’ main constituencies were sick of waiting for that party to keep their promises, and despite outnumbering Republicans on paper, didn’t vote in enough numbers to throw Republican governments out. Meanwhile Republicans did have voter loyalty because their main constituencies were convinced that the evil Demonrats were going to have all the white babies aborted and then turn them gay. The difference is that Democrats are starting to listen to people outside their inner circle and are trying to get a majority of votes, and however haphazardly, are starting to do so. Republicans however are only listening to their biggest fanatics, which is how we got Trump, who may not have believed in all the birther-Tea Party-Q nonsense at first, but told the suckers what they wanted to hear, to such an extent that he bought into it. Basically, Trump is to lying what Al Pacino in Scarface was to cocaine: He used to just be a dealer then he became his own biggest customer.

And just as Trump single-handedly killed Atlantic City by putting his casinos in competition with each other so that they cannibalized each others’ business, he eventually created a situation where his continued lying and incompetence meant that his fortunes as president were at odds with his Party’s generally strong performance in the 2020 elections. The short term results of that became clear as Trump sabotaged his own Party in the Georgia US Senate runoffs by saying that his loss could only happen cause the system was rigged, therefore the whole thing was rigged, by implication meaning the same system by which other Republicans won. In that runoff, the dynamic started to reverse: Now that people besides leftists saw America as turning into a fascist hellhole, it was the Democrats who were turning out to vote no matter what, and it was Republican constituencies who stayed home cause they felt like they were being lied to. And then the day after Kelly Loeffler lost her Georgia Senate seat, the Congress had to certify the Electoral College result, so Trump, his family and his stooges came out to the mob of thugs who’d been organizing for weeks and implied that it sure would be a shame if Mike Pence and the other Republicans didn’t throw out that whole “Electoral College” thing and declare God-Emperor Trump our immortal Lord and Savior. And for some reason the guys who had been bitching about the election online for two months, coordinated over social media, and came to DC with zip ties, riot gear and scaffolding for a hanging suddenly decided to get violent.

And as amazing as Democrats find it that the senior Republicans haven’t run Trump out of their Party by now, if not voting with them on impeachment (given that he tried to KILL them and all), you have to look at it from their side. I’m sure Mitch McConnell would want to make sure Trump can’t run for President again, even if he wasn’t going to let his perfect little boy get convicted on impeachment, but Mitch knows that if the Party did what it should have done a while ago – kicked out Trump and any other politician who supports his lies – then all the registered Republicans who believe those lies will quit voting Republican and either stay home or vote for whatever clown car of a political organization Trump wants to put together. At that point, Republicans might still have a few places where they could win, but most of the places where their seats are safe are only safe because of Trumpniks. Kicking out Trump would mean the end of the Republicans as a competitive national party, and if Republicans won’t openly admit this, Democrats are too polite to bring it up. In any case, Republicans are clearly less afraid of a permanent dictatorship of Trumpism than a permanent dictatorship of the Democratic Party, because in effect, that is what abandoning Trump would accomplish.

However much I might not want a one-party state, even under the Democrats, I still have to ask Republicans: whose fault is that? Your whole attitude is “You HAVE to vote for us, no matter how horrible we are, cause you don’t want those OTHER people taking over, do you??” Dudes, ask yourselves: How well did that work for Hillary Clinton?

Because going into the 2022 elections, the question is not whether Republican strategy makes sense for their priorities but whether their priorities are good strategy. In his orders to the troops, Trump said, “Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise (Hmm?), and regain a strong negotiating stance”. Now, given the strength of Republican performance in November 2020, and the usual weakness of the president’s party in a midterm elections, Republicans would have reason to believe that they can just hold out and be “strong” and end up getting what they want if they just wait out the election cycle. It’s what they’re inclined to do anyway. But then again there was every reason to believe the incumbent US Senators of Georgia would win their runoffs and keep Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. And then somebody had to open his mouth and cause problems. And THEN January 6 happened.

To say that this “conservative” movement is evil would be true, but it avoids the point. Because whether you want to admit this or not, Americans like evil. We like Nazis. We like Confederates. We like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars and the Klingons in Star Trek.

But to paraphrase General Patton, one thing Americans absolutely will not tolerate is a loser.

And while real Christians might have been waiting over 2000 years for Christ to come back to life and regain dominion over the universe, I don’t think even Republicans can afford to give Cheeto Jesus that much benefit of the doubt.

“We’ve got to rise above the need for cops and laws”

-Dead Kennedys, “The Stars and Stripes of Corruption”

The Fox News website said that last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire “ignited a social media firestorm” when its Twitter account posted: “Legalize child labor. Children will learn more on a job site than in public school.”

First let me say: I actually agree with this. But that is not an endorsement of child labor so much as my assessment of the public school system.

Now, the text of the article indicated that the LP position had a little more nuance: “”Our proposal is that the minimum age requirement be lowered to 16 without school superintendent approval, if a child is homeschooled, this option is difficult for them,” (party chair) Jarvis said. “We also propose that if a minor has graduated high school or obtained a GED, they have already proven themselves and should not be required to obtain permission to be employed. The law in [New Hampshire] currently prohibits these individuals from seeking employment without a signed written document from a parent on file.”

Even so, 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson went on record saying, “I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t what libertarianism means to millions of Americans – pushing a disturbing and out of touch stance on child labor is entirely detached from what people need in America today. This does not advance liberty, or help change people’s opinions”. Jiletta Jarvis supported his right to an opinion even though she said “I know that there was an emotional reaction to his criticism and we are working internally on that issue.” Personally I think they should take Johnson more seriously. I mean, he’s the leading expert on how to make libertarianism look bad by taking a public position with absolutely no knowledge of the subject.

As far as the “working internally” on the emotional reactions, this whole thing seems to be just one example of an extremely confusing mini-civil war, where other state parties of the national Libertarian Party are having their say, where Jarvis asserts that “I have watched secret plots occurring” and new members wish to discredit the Party and use the same tactics to take over the Republican Party. The LPNH Executive Committee, or “Mises Caucus” (Twitter page ‘Temporarily the home of the @LPNH Executive and Communications committees’) published a tweet from the Connecticut Party saying “There was no convention … that disaffiliated the original LPNH… Jilletta Jarvis’ actions were not authorized by any noticed meeting under any set of bylaws… Our Regional Representative is ORDERED, DIRECTED and COMMANDED TO BRING A MOTION TO THE LNC FOR THE REMOVAL OF THE CHAIR”.

Now here’s the real fucking joke: Nobody else knows this. There are a few newspaper websites covering the story, but you’d have to know to look for them. The only reason I even bring it up is because I know any time I try to advocate for libertarianism against authority, some smart aleck liberal is gonna look up that LPNH child-labor tweet and go “Yeh whaddya thinka THIS, Mr. Glibertarian? Ha? Ha? HA? Oh, I almost forgot: SOMALIA!!!”

Nobody else is gonna CARE, because it doesn’t matter. For all the impact you actually have, the Libertarian Party may as well be a bunch of SciFi geeks arguing over whether the Millennium Falcon could beat the USS Enterprise, and on that score, the Millennium Falcon is to the Enterprise what your uncle’s 1970 VW stoner van is to a modern US Navy guided missile cruiser, the Falcon is using a point-to-point hyperdrive jump system when the Enterprise can operate at faster-than-light warp speed, and in any case, neither of them are real and at the end of the day you’re just debating the minutiae of fictional fantasy BULLSHIT.

Not that fantasy and science fiction are bad. Take the cellphone. A ubiquitous convenience of modern life. A lot of Star Trek fans would say it was inspired by the flip-communicators the Enterprise crew used in the Original Series. I always thought it was derived from Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. But in any case, it used to be fiction, and now it’s reality. That’s the difference between supernatural fantasy and science fiction, science fiction shows you that there is a path between desire and reality. But you still have to create that path. You still have to have organization and planning and marketing to get the cellphone to be other than just a cool idea or a project in your friend’s basement. And you also have to acknowledge that some cool ideas are more feasible in the present than others. Our science does not yet allow us a feasible path to cold fusion, the atmospheric conversion engine, or immortality technology, let alone a social system that makes government obsolete. And here’s the thing, we’re that much LESS likely to get there if we disregard what science we do have cause the coronavirus or the vaccine or both are some kind of government conspiracy to control the masses. If you know how many people have already died and you don’t want to get vaccinated cause “FREEDOM” then the Science Fiction future you’re most likely to advance is the one where chimpanzees and gorillas on horseback oversee naked humans in labor camps because We, the People have chosen to become inarticulate apes.

Now, any professional libertarian-hater would be telling you all of this and already has, but I AM a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian who thinks I’m NOT one cause I think we should be practical and reform the government we already have rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, well, who cares? Your premise is, “libertarianism means you can’t label me or tell me what to do.” Right back at you, guy.

And why would I still call myself a (L)ibertarian, especially after this shit? Sadly, it’s the same reason I still called myself a Libertarian in 2016 – as sad as the LP is, the Party of Trump is that much worse. As for the Democrats, I already reconciled myself to the practical reality of having to vote Democratic because the greater evil is not simply disagreeable but an active threat to national security. That doesn’t change the fact that while the Democrats may be the only party with any relation to reality, sometimes it’s hard to tell. At times they seem that much more smug and naive in their assumptions about the world than the Libertarians, and it’s that much more irritating because they claim to know better. They’re constantly telling us all the wonderful stuff that they’re going to do now that they’re in charge, and constantly crying about how they can’t do any of it because the Republican bullies are taking their lunch money every day, and only a few of them have figured out that they need to stop wringing their hands and fight back.

According to a 2021 Gallup poll (that President Biden referred to this week) only 25 percent of voters identify as Republican and only 30 percent identified as Democrats. Now, when you add independents who lean to one faction or the other for practical reasons, you have slightly less than half of polled voters (49%) identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning, but only 40 percent of people are Republican or lean Republican. Do the math and that’s a 9 percent gap in favor of the Democratic coalition. But this also means you have 19 percent of voters as “left” independents and 15 percent as “right” independents and when you do that math, that total is 34 percent. So we have reached a point at which the largest group of voters, over a third, might not agree on anything else, but agree they can’t align with the duopoly.

But when someone in the Libertarian Party seriously pushes an idea like child labor, that is to the libs what “Drag Queen Story Hour” is to the conservatives: Waving the freak flag in front of Middle Americans that we might have otherwise been able to persuade.

There was this one guy discussing the subject on YouTube who lamented the situation insofar as libertarians almost don’t want to be taken seriously. They do have some real critiques, such as, that our government is too powerful and unaccountable, or our civilian police are too militarized. He also said that what usually happens when he debates a libertarian is that they’re capable of a cogent argument for about 72 seconds, then they go off into the Ether. That clip also led to the usual dopey, sneering arguments like “libertarians are just Republicans who like pot.” It’s a lot harder to argue the point when libertarians concede it. A lot of them seem to be more exercised about taxes and COVID regulations than the fact that a large segment of the society is more oppressed than white people were under COVID, and have been for decades if not centuries.

But that just gets to the point that the problem is not the stupid leftist caricature. The problem, as with their caricature of the former Republican Party, is when right-wingers obsessively seek to live up to and exceed the caricature. Because a lot of these guys are living on social media and think that the main aspiration of life is to be a cartoon. This is why both libertarians and “conservatives” will promote child labor, or reducing the voter franchise or some other innovation from the 19^th Century, cause they’re trying to show their punk rock edge.

And that just gets to the point that you’ve already got one party in government that is actively against government and has written itself out of any idea of what they want to do when they get a majority, that thinks asking what voters want is too much of a compromise of the ideal, that as a result, they’re losing voters left and right, and as a result of that, act like majority rule is communist. I am again reminded of that one time where Thomas Massie, a Republican Congressman who claimed to be libertarian when that was still sorta cool with his team, said: “But then when I went to Iowa (in 2016) I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

If all you have to offer is being the craziest son of a bitch in the race, you can’t compete with what the Party of Trump is now. THEY STOLE YOUR ACT.

Maybe try writing some new material?

With what we have misruling the country, there is plenty of room for alternatives. There is plenty of opportunity for Libertarians to take advantage. Which is why it pisses me off that they refuse to do so.

I am sick and tired of my Party and my movement being taken as a joke.

But apparently you’re not.

So maybe I’m getting sick of you.