A Half-Century of Magical Thinking

Ajit Pai provides another reminder of Republicans' penchant for magical thinking. He says the obvious screwing of poor people he's proposing--in shutting down subsidies for broadband--is somehow (here comes the magic!) going to result in more and better internet among the needy. I have some experience with this, Ajit.

Poor Mr. Pai might be out of the loop: I have been trying for years to get better bandwidth. I can see it on a telephone pole from my property. There is plenty of it there but the utilities go underground at that point. Sure, they'll bring it back--for $8000 per household. So, I have lived a long time with lowly (but decent) DSL. 

I want my magic! Where's my trickle down and supply side? Where's my rising tide? Where's my internet and the promised democratic miracle in the Middle East for which we have paid so much? Again, we are left to comment on what a deep bench of smirking, incompetent, lying assholes Republicans have, men like Mr. Pai. 

Life as a Spectator Sport

I have lived among the savages and I try to explain to those who haven't the curious ways of those throwbacks and aborigines. How, reasonable people ask, can the support of evangelicals for Donald Trump actually increase after it is learned he has helped himself to some porn pussy?

You have to understand, I tell them, all the attitudes associated with the fatalism and existential despair of Calvinism. Why bother with life at all when your destiny is set from birth? Nothing anyone can do changes the outcome in the only thing that matters, your heavenly salvation.

Evangelicals aren't participants in their lives they are spectators. Now, think about how Trump works out in that scenario. He's entertaining, in a crude sort of way. He infuriates snooty northerners and the apostates among the elect. Evangelicals envy people who are invested in life.

They hate and despise humanity and all of creation because of its distance, as they interpret it, from God and perfection. What better example of human imperfection and hopelessness than Donald Trump? And, Donald reeks of the end-times and destruction. What more can an evangelical want?

The Man in the High Chair

The big baby in the high-chair--blubbering, bawling and throwing his food--is our president, a role model for the grownups, Donald Trump.

Black Like Thee

I've got news for you, southern white people. Like the idiots you are you are voting yourselves into the very situation you most wanted to avoid, being part of a mass underclass including black people. Physical, interracial intimacy, of course, is the ultimate horror and most of that is still to come but as you continue to impoverish and screw yourselves it will be more unavoidable and inevitable.

Perhaps you should listen to the losers out on the fringe who are pushing for a racist, segregated substate. I would love to see you go there. The world would see what scum you are. And you will no longer be able to hold down the decent people left in the country who have had to support you and try to undo all the damage you have done WHILE you blame them for the trouble you cause.

Truth Decay

Jennifer Rubin is writing mighty good stuff lately on the horror of Donald Trump and she's technically some kind of conservative. So, where is she, I'm trying to understand, on owning the disaster of George W. Bush? I might have overlooked it, because she cranks out a remarkable volume of journalism, but she still seems to defend him. 

We see in Bush Trump's smaller-dicked mini-me, a hopelessly incompetent pawn of the greater interests of world-domination, income consolidation and the irrationality of the religiously-driven social policies of southern, rebel, reactionary, retrograde, fundamentalist, self-styled "Christians". The actual faction in charge are the Cheneyites.

Cheneyites believe in American domination and exploitation. They believe in it for its own sake--gratuitously, universally and arbitrarily. It is simply an article of faith. Smoke that in your pipe, Jennifer Rubin. I'll believe you have principles when you apply something other than a survival instinct, which has clearly kicked in with Trump. 

Jennifer is afraid Trump is heralding the end-times. There I agree with her. But her criticisms of Trump, as strident and contemptuous as they are, apply equally to Bush and Cheney and other such criminals. The truth, Jennifer, will set you free. Own your shit. Join those of us who believe in rational, responsible, representative government.

Declare yourself a Democrat. History will remember us well, if with sad resignation at our failures. They will know the truth, how right we were, but they will know as well in their wisdom how impossible it can be to win against lunatics and paranoid, delusional people. There's a lot of regret on our side these days but it's still better there.

Something is Wrong

Authoritarian personalities are drawn to Republicanism. How they get so mean and bitter is another matter. I think it's a defect in personality formation, originating in a deep sense that something is vaguely, systemically, irreducibly and mysteriously wrong.

There is something wrong--with them. They project their suspicions onto the world at-large, seeing their own corruption and weakness in others and trying to tame it through them. The victims are left confused and disheartened by the irrationality of it.

An Extraordinary Populist Delusion and the Madness of the Republican Crowd

The overiding delusion of Republicans, who are now supporting a populist president no matter his obvious incompetence, is that they are somehow victims. They believe they are the injured ones--downtrodden and disenfranchised. They WERE disrespected, I will allow, but reasonably. Being racists, they construed the disrespect as existential when it was only circumstantial and behavioral. 

If they had stopped the behaviors--the paranoid, combative, divisive, war-mongering insanity--the disrespect would have ended. We would again have been a relatively united country and people. Instead, they maintained the entrenched and dysfunctional delusion, giving their souls over entirely to corruption. They disenfranchise their antagonists and abandon democracy and decency.

Republicans have controlled everything for decades and still feel persecuted. They rage about "taking back the country" when it is a reflection of nothing but them. They want to "make America great again" not realizing they are longing for the days of Democratic control or, at least, a time of balance and compromise. Republicans are lost and compulsively seek redemption in continuing depravity.

That, really, is madness.

Feeling Groovy

Donald thinks he's hitting his groove. His blight brigade charges on, despite desertions, heavy losses, courts-martial, resignations for moral turpitude, and self-immolations by suicide-stunt. It careens into the unknown.

Moron Donald is waging an imaginary war. His instict in the face of failure is to double down in pursuit of cosmic affirmation and always attack. He’ll take any kind of affirmation. It’s the only currency that matters.

I fear the casino fate awaits us. No way is drama-queen Donald going to admit to himself his incompetence. If he implodes it must be biblical. It must be epic and epochal. If he implodes all the damage will accrue to us.

So, why should he care. He doesn’t. When the crash happens he’ll rationalize, refinance, restructure and move on, leaving the mess behind. He'll leave the mess to us. We are the mess. Atlantic City, here we come.

I Call it Treason

We know now that Republicans choose party over country and themselves over party. We know now that they choose themselves and what they want--a Christian, fundamentalist, fascist state or an oligarchic one concentrating money and power. It might be some horrible, hybrid monstrosity, the culmination and codification of what it is under Trump, southern sleaze and various, sociopathic capitalists satisfying assorted lusts. 

That exact brew constituted South Carolina's ante-bellum coalition once. Republicans are traitors and Donald Trump proves it every day as he drags the country down and Republicans scramble to see what they can get before the inevitable reckoning and collapse. Huckabee Sanders and similar low-life are racking up points with Jesus in anticipation of the Rapture. Maybe Sarah will levitate before our eyes in the middle of some lie. 

Wouldn't that be cool, an ex machina evasion. And Donald and the rich boys assume they can weather whatever happens, as they did after '08, and eventually come out ahead. They took an oath and are there to execute certain functions, granting some breadth of interpretation and performance not to include the utter destruction and dismemberment of the entity they were sworn to preserve. What else and whatever can you call this?

I call it treason.

Baubles, Bangles, Bentleys... and Assault Guns

Now that Mnuchin and Cohn have seen a tax bill passed that will make them heroes in the Hamptons, I have to ask, what was the point? It's one thing to simply want more. It's another to do it in a public role for which you are paid and supposedly accountable to your citizen-employers. Isn't this illegal?

Yes, they work(ed) for us and are technically entitled to a PAYCHECK for ripping us off, not that it isn't a pittance in relation to what they already have. They actually took oaths of office. The crooks in Congress did as well but most of the Republicans swore-off again at Grover Norquist's house of shame.

They, the Cohns and Mnuchins of the world, are free to ponder existential questions of the meaning of multiple Bentleys and the marginal impact on one's life of another house or retreat, at the point at which they might forget how many they already have. It is a weird, fucked-up, fanciful place they inhabit.

I wonder how it would work out if we imported rednecks into their lives? I mean, require that the people who vote together live together. I wonder how they would get along and what familiarity would breed, not intending that they would necessarily mate. Remember, the rednecks have LOTS of guns.

It would be an interesting mix as the rednecks pondered the existential question of most concern to them, the marginal impact on their lives of yet another handgun, howitzer or massive magazine. And they must all dine together, as allies and compatriots should, on barbecue and Beef Wellington.

The rednecks will undoubtedly want to have their assault rifles in the dining rooms and restaurants, at-the-ready in the event of an attack, as is the will of God and their declared constitutional right. Let the rich people live with that crap. And bless them all and may they be together in peace, or whatever.

I Dub Ye Dubya...

No doubt Republicans will one day want to name battleships and airports and other shit after George W. Bush as part of their efforts to rewrite history and save their asses from accountability for all the deaths and horror they have left behind. Let it be known as the Battleship "Dubya" as the champagne splatters across its bow. The "George W. Bush" is entirely too dignified. 

Is Evil Battle-Ax Barbara Bush Still Alive?

Some of these people, I just want them to die. Like Billy Graham, certain Bushes have lived way too long. You think how much worse-off the world is because they were in it, and how they have never suffered any consequences but been unbelievably fortunate, and I only want to be rid of them. 

On the Massive Oedipus Complex of Republicans

It's easy enough to see the more egregious aspects of the Oedipal fixations of Republicans. Their presidential candidates--those seeking the office of national patriarch, nominal head and performative exemplar of masculinity--are all the sons of highly successful men, back as far as Reagan. Trump, Romney, McCain and Bush all had reasons to have father issues and have demonstrated a clear need to try to measure up and prove themselves, no matter that they had it made from birth and were almost irreversibly secure.

With George Bush the need was too transparent to demand analysis or explication. Observe how he had failed at everything and became president only through inherited wealth, family connections and repeated interventions when things went wrong. Eventually, a bipartisan panel including James Baker tried to save him from himself and the country from him. Their recommendations were ignored--the son's final, pathetic assertion of autonomy as he left the nation a shambles and a rudderless, hulking, fiery mess.

Fittingly, the Democrats Clinton and Obama, self-made men, were despised, reviled and attacked as usurpers at a level of extremity and irrationality reflecting the repressed, archetypal, delusional strength of the survival fantasies of Republican white men, who feel unconsciously threatened with annihilation by the dark, shadow forces of their insecurities and the inability to ever demonstrate actual self-worth. The feminine, nurturing side of the equation is in some ways even more compelling and shameful. 

The federal government represents mothering--the infantile font of sustenance and security, the source on which they all suckle. Their protestations against it, avowed attempts at avoidance and determination not to "marry the mother" all fail as they symbolically supplant their fathers and succumb to the warmth of the federal womb. I won't enumerate the sad specimens of arrestedness and compulsion but only mention Paul Ryan, whose life has been spent jealously depending on and sucking off the government. 

He probably decries it more than anyone. Similarly, most large corporations make their disgraceful profits by manipulating the government in their favor and taking advantage of the system. My only hope is that you, having read this, will have your eyes opened and see the sorry, submissive, self-serving mechanisms at work. 

Republicans continue to disclaim interest in the federal support they covet and, at the same time, reflexively take all they can get at the tavern and dispensary known as our national treasury, now to the exclusion of all other citizens as the disorder reaches its crescendo in Trump and his cast of crooks. When they rail against regulations and castigate bureaucracies as depending on the unjust proceeds of taxation you should see them as they are--small, frustrated men in denial of the reality of their fate.

Fry Me Up Some

There's a characteristically great Yiddish word, frayer (or fryer, or friar), that captures the American ethos of ignorance. Americans are suckers. Americans are sheep. Where else do you find people who will consistently vote themselves down the river into servitude and against their own interests?

Look at the graphs of the incomes of everyone but the rich, flatlining since the dawn and debut of supply side. Still, the morons vote for Republicans. They believe the bald-faced lies. Middle Class citizens get crumbs while Republicans rain millions on their wealthy associates and the idiots still vote for them.

An Unfair Criticism of Trump

Donald Trump is being unjustly charged with referencing Gary Cohn antisemitically, calling him a "globalist.” Trump was only speakingly carelessly. Remember, Trump is stupid. Donald understands innuendo and insinuation. But, basically, Trump is a boor. Trump is a dolt and a dotard. He finally violated Cohn's ethical imperatives, that more money must only go to the rich forever, with talk of tariffs. So Cohn quit.

That was more than Cohn could handle. He was fine with Nazi sympathizing, pussy-grabbing and killing people worldwide with impunity. But those are next to nothing in comparison with messing around with money and profits. Always, in assessing him, remember that Trump is a dope. Trump is a pig. Sometimes he might be cunning but he is not smart. He's a rich child with a record of failure. Like Cohn he's a crook.

I hate to see anybody criticized unfairly. Donald wasn’t being antisemitic, just stupid.

Mike Pence's Plan for God

How does a person recognize evil? Let me suggest that Mike Pence is evil, by a biblical standard, that men are known by their deeds. Pence is at least open about loving his role as Trump's most reliable lackey. But is Pence working for God or God for Pence?

Where does it say in the Bible that a society shouldn't provide for its citizens? Where does it validate the "prosperity gospel" and say that God loves the rich? Where does it say that it's our prerogative to invade any country we want and kill others at will? 

Nowhere does the Bible say any of it but the Koch brothers promote it at every opportunity. I posit that Pence works for them and their allies and that God is enlisted as another useful prop for their cause. And what a great prop God is--abstract and unaccountable. 

I think we know who is using who here. I wonder how God likes being a second-hand shill for Donald Trump? That’s awfully undignified for a deity. If Pence had any sense he would be quaking in his shill-shoes. Presumption against God is a scary thing in my book.

The Inexecutable Command: Be Like Jesus

Puritanism entails an inexecutable command to aspire to perfection. Take this command too literally and seriously and a person implodes. They burn up like Roy Moore. They short out and toe-tap in bathroom stalls. They rail against abortion and then ask their pregnant mistress to get one. They preach love and forgiveness and act out of hatred and fear. They condemn everyone but themselves. After all, they have a personal relationship with Jesus. 

About that and only that they are certain. Their salvation is assured. They are self-righteous, judgmental, hypocritical, egotistical and mean. Empower these idiots to manage and administer a society and the society implodes. Empower these idiots and you get Donald Trump, George Bush, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich and less food for the hungry. It's good they have Jesus on their side. Any normal person would want to kill them.

Human imperfection and the decrepitude of creation are more than fundamentalist, puritanical, evangelical Christians can handle so they execute a command to achieve the impossible and forgo their freedom and humanity. They forgo decency and compassion. They choose death over life. In a "halt and catch fire" command a computer stops whatever, presumably productive, task it is on and tackles a circular, flawed or unsolvable problem.

It has a meltdown. The computer requires a restart. Utopian Christians require a restart. I guess death would count as a "restart" by their metaphysics. So, die! I'm a little less otherworldly. I'd like a little sanity and justice in this world. I'd like healthcare and a secure old age. I'd like fewer guns and mass killings. Christians love the killings. It reeks of crusades and the end-times. It must be God's will in some way as it's conveyed to them by Jesus.

Man, do they love the misery of other people. It might bring them to Jesus and cause a conversion. Or, they die and get to see Jesus anyway. That's what the meltdown looks like when they run things, when your life is ruined by fatalistic crazy people and religious nuts. They will be like Jesus and identified with Jesus or there will be hell to pay, in this world. There is hell to pay. Go, now, ye Christians--HALT AND CATCH FIRE! Let's get it over with.

Suicidal Squeeze

Corporate profit is now the only force animating America. Corporations aren't only people they are royalty and divinity. They don't necessarily die. They are potentially transnational, transcendent, abstracted and mighty powerful, if not omnipotent. Corporations are gods. 

Bow down and pray for their pity. Only then can average citizens have the components of good lives--healthcare and the rest. Do you find this hard to conceive? There are apostles and angels in the corporate world, emissaries and intermediaries to whom you can appeal.

They are called Republicans. Watch how they grovel and kowtow before the ark of their covenant containing the holy of holies: profits and dividends. Meanwhile, undeserving, lesser beings are squeezed out of their existence. Beg for crumbs. Beg for your lives. Just beg.

Americans are dying before the altar and grail of greed. A high priesthood of lackeys and conservative shills stands between us and our own lives. They stand between us and our alienated rights. They stand between us and claims to our humanity and existence.

Let us pray to the gods of greed for mercy. They are all the gods there are now, the others decamped, evacuated and evicted from a place unsuitable for gods who demand decency and accountability. There is none of it here. We have no other gods to pray to anymore.

Trump the Traitor

It turns out that Christopher Steele, creator of the "dossier," has more integrity than Trump's gang of thieves can put in the pot collectively. Furthermore, though the Trump crowd might obviously be motivated more by greed, ego-gratification and a lust for power than anything, those traits are so fantastically out of proportion it appears many of those rogues have committed treason incidentally and unknowingly. 

Try to take that in. 

These people are so incomprehensibly corrupt and unfamiliar with accountability and responsibility they could destroy their country, which they are employed to defend and protect, out of negligence, ignorance and indifference. A pubescent mind-set is running amok so completely among them it conjures up images of biblical prophesies and dystopian, futuristic, science-fiction fantasies in its destructive capacities.

But it is the nightmare of mindless destruction we inhabit every day. The implication is that Trump isn't even competent enough to be accountable. He could only, justly, be released into the custody of his parents, remanded to guardians or placed in an orphanage or asylum. It's hard to pity such a pernicious piece of wreckage but the blame resides with us, the sick society that fostered, nurtured and encouraged him. 

We are such an unbelievable disgrace.

They Walk Among Us

Never did I dream there were so many assholes, lunatics and conscienceless reprobates among us. It is especially obvious after an event like the Parkland shooting, which is somehow construed by the most degraded, submissive right-wing shills and sycophants as a chance to enhance their crazy cred. 

Matt Gaetz and others like him have only one remaining place to go after the next inevitable massacre--to arm the students. Everyone else will already be armed and, of course, de facto and a priori, the answer can only be MORE GUNS. Or, rather than arm the students, we can turn our schools into fortresses strangely resembling prisons.

Maybe it's not so strange. The schools can have fences glistening with razor-wire, towers poking machine guns and guards fondling assault weapons menacingly. Who knew aspects of the New Jerusalem, our city-on-a-hill and the hoped-for utopia of evangelical Christians, would look so much like Dachau.

The Grand Delusion

The greatest delusion anyone can succumb to is that there is security in isolation. There is nothing in isolation. Isolation is a fantasy and an impossibility. Isolationism is nihilism. 

Isolation is death. Old-school Calvinism is schismatic and spiritually regressive. The only reality is you and God in an ineffable, one-on-one bond that is a solipsistic, mental-health mess of paranoia and a resulting collapse into delusional aggression. Oh, and did I say? 

We are all living there now, courtesy of evangelical Christians and Donald Trump. Welcome to the nuthouse. Watch what you get when you give up on reality. Thanks, Republicans.

A Fine Bromance

The insiders are falling like flies. To be an administrative intimate of Trump is to know the meaning of unstable and precarious employment. Who is left now? Hope Hicks and Omarosa are history. 

Who will hold Trump's hand? I think the musical version of Trump's White House, when it appears, must feature the unlikely bromance, now enforced by necessity, of Donald Trump and John Kelly. 

Picture them singing and serenading one another in their cozy, oval enclave, isolated more by the day, firstly from the competent stewardship of trained help, then from reality as they lose sight of it. 

Hell, we might already be there...

An important transition is taking place under our noses. Injustice is no longer a failure or an unrepresentative function and secondary, unavoidable, regrettable occurrence but an essential practice and defining trait of the American culture and economy. 

This, again, is an indication of the takeover of the American state and government by the forces of the Confederacy. At some indeterminate and unknowable time the economy will be unable to operate above some threshold of viability without injustice. 

Hell, we might already be there.