Raw Kavanaugh

Brett Kavanaugh has revealed himself to be a partisan hack and a technician of doom, not a legal sage, scholar or an open-minded individual. He has no business being on any court.

The Horror Show Continues

There will never be an end to Republican lies, their quest for power and insistence on ideological purity. I couldn't watch the Kavanaugh spectacle but he proved to be, as I suspected, a pure political hack.

He embodies lying and hypocrisy in a way perfected by Republicans. It guarantees the incapacity of conscience. They have found a way to turn conscience off. Or, many ways, it might be more accurate to say.

Rewards are administered for ideological alignment and punishments for waywardness. Weak, striving, self-serving vermin like Kavanaugh will never stray. He is a partisan, political person to his core and emptied of integrity.

Kavanaugh is aghast that he is accused of sexual assault but it was done in an entirely legal, forthright and appropriate way. He pursued Bill Clinton like an avenging troll in that irregular, rankly partisan investigation.

Later, of course, he discovered he had principles of respect for executive authority and immunity from judgement under George Bush whose crimes defy enumeration.

The Great Pout

I resist the implication that Trump is anything other than the fulfillment of everything it means to be a Republican. His presidency is the reigning achievement of Republicanism. Trump is George Bush, bailed out by family money and protected from real danger but having shed his effective army of babysitters, a loose cannon. He is an actor like Reagan living a narcissistic if less attractive fantasy.

Republicans, after controlling things for decades, still believe or at least pretend to believe that they are put-upon, maligned and disadvantaged.  We see in Trump the apotheosis of everything Republican—the aggrieved attitude, the aggression, the greed, the resentment, the delusional grandeur and attachment to melodrama and the sense of a mission to right the wrongs of being disrespected. 

What a mess of mistaken, retributive folly. Republicans need to believe that incompetence will never be exposed and uprooted and that justice will never be had. They deny any responsibility. They have never gotten over being uncool in college or some other form of delusional insecurity. Kavanaugh, no? Behold, the Great Pouter prepares to preside:

Get the attitude. Donald is in the lion's den. It is a den aspiring to decency and accountability, the things he most fears and resists. Fear not, Don-boy. Bush destroyed the world and walked away. I doubt you will ever get what you deserve, as a crook and a coward and a bully, to be stripped of everything and put in jail.

Entrepreneurship as the New Salvation

"Entrepreneurship" has entered the arena of fable. Americans can't seem to do anything without it becoming a matter of salvation and a justification for separating individuals into predestined groups of lesser and greater innate good. We were never created equal or endowed with anything other than an inescapable destiny which might be manifested in temporal, worldly success.

Freedom doesn't enter into it. We are everything but free because we believe everything to exist and occur by the perverse, incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary will of God. Arbitrary destinies and injustice are reassuring signs of the divine will at work. Successful entrepreneurs are manifesting their predetermined destiny as members of the chosen class of the "saved."

The Troll Army Has Some Trouble

Trolling. Bullying. Harassment. Abuse. All assume a power differential and the impossibility of retribution or justice, that the perpetrators are immune to their own tactics. Oh, but how they squirm and complain when it unavoidably happens, that upending of the order of the universe wherein they are arbitrarily and permanently on top and infinitely deserving. When they get a dose of their own awful medicine they whine like anything. 

Often, of course, their tactical advantage is in the willingness to go lower and play dirtier, sometimes in ways inconsistent with the continuing existence of the system that supports them and makes their mischief possible. Brett Kavanaugh resists justice and proclaims his purity and innocence--in reality, his sexual incompetence--which again makes his boorish and brutish behavior more understandable, believable and likely. Ah, adolescent boys. 

He is aghast at his mistreatment. His allies react with typically nasty, irrational, ill-considered counter-accusations. They are indignant at the resistance. 

View the privilege. It is pure privilege. Brett, the vicious little Puritan, gleefully took every cheapshot he could at Clinton, in an illegal and unjust persecution, the original and only modern American witch hunt and "high-tech" lynching at that level. Then he was PART OF and fully implicated in the horror and murderous reign of George Bush, which has left over a million dead and and untold lives destroyed. Stuff just happens, on their watch. 

Yes, there are grownups in the virtual room, hardened sociopaths, unlike the opportunists. Their perverted consciences choose power over principle. Those are not the trolls, street fighters, underlings, hacks and henchmen of the movement but its invisible hand and guiding spirit. Kavanaugh, currently a hack, seeks elevation in his status into a certified bunker of privilege. He is still an enforcer for the untouchable uber-rich hovering above the fray.

He isn't rich but he wants to hover. He wants that status. He was screened to ensure he was a true, degraded follower of the cause, and ideologue immune to the inroads of conscience--consistent, pure and unwavering in his corruption--a bad actor to begin with. After the mess he is going through now he will only be more vengeful and vindictive on the Court. Great. Just what we need, a warrior troll in place of a complacent, self-satisfied hack.

Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Nihilist Assault Group

If we ever needed salvation from nihilism, the time is now. I've heard it pointed out that some terrorists are nihilists, people without political goals, but I think that nihilism can reside within a rational frame of reference, as a tactic, and then rise up in an uncontrollable Freudian melodrama and begin to run the show. So it is with racism. Reconstruction ran this way. Deconstruction is a technical term used originally to apply to the analysis of texts.

It seems to have become loosely associated with leaving things in pieces when I think, in fact, it assumes the integrity of the whole in order to function as an analytical framework. But the leaving-in-pieces part appeals to nihilists in a broad, fuzzy, adolescent-boy, wouldn't-it-be-cool-to-blow-this-up-and-see-what-happens kind of way. This appears to be the underlying ethos and ethic of the Trump administration--institutional self-destruction. 

It is our society's suicide by Trump. Anyway, think of how, in your own lives, a rational tactic can play out poorly in a larger context. More money is good. You pursue more money and, presumably, more happiness follows. Aha, but there are other, un-independent variables on the same side of that equation. There's a bunch of them, factoring in the irretrievable time lost in the pursuit and how that focus affects you and what happens when the kids realize daddy is deadbeat and a money grubbing dick.

Turning now to Steve Bannon we see that in his mind, assuming he's not out of it, deconstruction appears to entail stripping down an entity--our entity, the federal government--to its most essential, limited level of function, leaving in in parts on the ground, which would then supposedly be reassembled by master, government-craftsmen from Breitbart and Heritage and similarly revered organizations, never mind that it would have been nice if he'd asked our permission, seeing how they didn't exactly get it in the last election and the thing being "deconstructed" is ours and us.

Never mind, never mind--because they know they are right with all the assurance that denial can get you. And deconstruction, it turns out, is a fancy, ambiguous term for dismantle. Why would Steve use such a word? I looked it up and it doesn't apply, in its usual sense, to something such as the government. But it sounds cool, abstruse, learned and abstract and most Americans don't want their government dismantled so its annihilation must be rebranded.

State of Nature (lite)

Frustrated by their inability to kill their fellow citizens by a direct assault on healthcare Republicans are now attempting the old tactic of defunding Medicaid to death, simultaneously bankrupting the government. Budgetary necessity will later be used as an excuse to try to destroy Social Secutity and Medicare.

Republicans want a dog-eat-dog, brutal, barbaric kind of society but only up to the point at which it affects them adversely, an arbitrary and biased choice, since the entire social contract is at risk. They are challenging not just the formal aspects of our social system, its laws and traditions, but civilization itself. 

Why should people acquiesce when deprived of the means of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness let alone when those rights are explicitly granted to them? They should not but it is clear now why we have the anti-democratic push from the right--so that government "of, by and for the people" might perish from America.

Wonder no longer why they want to have hoards of guns and unlimited, extra-judicial control of domestic surveillance, foreign intelligence services and the military. They want to control everything. That power will be employed selfishly. That power will be employed against us, those among whom it was intended to reside.

Professional Racist

Consider that one of the most powerful people in America, and therefore the world, Stephen Miller, can only best be described as a professional racist. It is his defining characteristic and attribute, however it might appear on a résumé.

I Hope for Jesus

I don't believe in the second coming and I have a qualified belief in the first but I long for Jesus now, convinced that those most adamant about their association with HIM are working for the other guy. Sarah and "Beau" Sessions are my stand-ins for all the promulgators of lies and corruption.

Who knew there were so many of them? It was always thus, that human weakness creates a market for souls. It is so glutted and deflated the owners are giving them away. The great stories in the myths of the civilizations reference dark times of decay when evil ascends and confusion reigns.

But I never thought to live through it. I thought the myths had been pastured and replaced by articles of reason, a scientific method and institutional wisdom of another kind. Was I ever wrong. We are consumed by stories and, for our sins, the false ones, cooptions of reality, are winning.

A Report on the Wrecking Crew: Mission Accomplished

Thomas Frank wrote an observant and prescient book, The Wrecking Crew, about the barbarian horde within our walls, Republicans, determined not to streamline, pare-down and improve the federal government but to destroy it. It is still unclear to me what their real motivations were, apart from vandalism and adolescent, sociopathic recreation.

Greed, certainly, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Mission accomplished. Our government is on its knees, ready for beheading, and sabotaged beyond recovery. Good job, boys. Put away the sledgehammers, dynamite and other tools of ruin. Are there limits to your thirst for vengeance? I haven’t seen any sign of it, especially since the advent of Trumpism.

I thought the election of Obama was a rejection of the politics of national suicide and self-destruction but you barely broke stride. Now that we are under the control of ideologues and a miraculously incompetent and depraved piece of shit what do we do? Where is our promised utopia? Where are all the wonderful effects you swore would ensue?

It was always a lie: https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/

Heroes of the Devolution

All that is wrong with America is attributable to Republicans. Since they insist on controlling everything how can they not be responsible? Such an overwhelming wave of corruption, incompetence and malfeasance is hard to keep organized in a person's head. 

I can't do it, so I am proposing a Rogues' Gallery History of the United States. That is, assigning credit for messes to the idiots and ideologues most responsible, starting with American agriculture, the destruction of which can be credited to Earl Butz. He decimated smaller and family farms as best he could. "Get big or get out" was his slogan. He was asked to keep food prices from rising in the face of the 1970's oil shock so that Nixon might get reelected, a typical rationale from hell.

Next there is Robert Bork, whose love of monopolies influenced Reagan to deregulate businesses and deprofessionalize the government. Remember, Republicans don't like businesses generally they like BIG businesses. Little guys can go fuck themselves. Think of Bork the next time Spectrum or AT&T makes you livid. Bork wrote a book extolling the benefits of monopolies. Both Butz and Bork were open about their aims. This is before the movement went clandestine and guerrilla.

Newt Gingrich and his soldiers from evangelical hell created our hopeless divisiveness with their contemptuous and contemptible self-righteousness. Republicans have always excelled at generating economic downturns and depressions. Their brand of predatory capitalism--welfare for the rich--produces booms and busts which result in horrific injustice. Phil and Wendy Gramm are behind the ideas Newt finally, permanently enforced, deregulating everything possible. It's an Enron economy.

For military industrial-complex malfeasance we cite Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. When Republicans talk of "synergies" consider this: they pour trillions of dollars into needless military hardware which money then comes back to them in part in campaign donations if not in more direct ways. They are corporatists of doom, peddlers of death, arrogant traitors and paranoid misfits. They prefer to put a match to the money of working Americans than see it used on social welfare.

Haley Barbour will represent the seedy society of lobbyists. He initially recreated the ways of Mississippi in Washington. Decisions are made by rich white men cutting deals in back rooms. This method of minority rule has taken over the whole country as state legislatures fall to well-monied, self-serving monopolists, power brokers and bigots. The revolving door is very active in this sphere though vested interests, collusion and corruption permeate everything everywhere now.

Stand back and look with wonder at the new America created by Republicans. It has nothing to do with anything but empowering the rich at the expense of everyone else.