Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Revised Outlook

I used to think Americans were industrious. Trump and his supporters cause us to rethink that. A hardworking, responsible electorate wouldn’t place irresponsible people in roles of power, let alone a horror like Trump. We have nothing but a drive to plunder.

Trump is the plunderer president, an embodiment of the real American ethos. We are and always have been, as is now revealed, rapacious.

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Redirecting...

Whatever Trump-voting Americans wanted in the last election I don’t think they got it. Now they’re too stubborn or proud to admit it. Nobody wants to admit they’ve been suckered and scammed and deceived. And, I don't think they’ll ever admit it. They are too implicated.

It’s up to the rest of us.

Monday, November 25, 2019

Fire Sale Chats

Trump should take his case directly to the American people. The anti-democratic case. If our democracy is bankrupt he should make his argument. Then we will decide. But, enough with the lies and deceit.

How Republicans Caused the Holocaust

You might look in awe at Republican stupidity, arrogance and treachery and think it’s unprecedented but it has happened before, in the 1920s, under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. They created the Great Depression, the misery of which caused a fascist upswing culminating in the Holocaust. The same small-government, anti-immigration, laissez-faire doctrines prevailed then as prevail today. Once the Depression started Herbert Hoover practiced an equivalent of austerity, locking in the suffering.

Republicans love and celebrate suffering. Thank God we had Obama to lessen, to the extent they would allow it, the effects Republicans created in 2008. Still, the economic casualties have been many and the rich have only gotten richer as they always will under Republican policies. We are in a full fascist upswing and nobody knows where it will lead. I think these are games of inches and one good leader could save us. Democrats, however, are coughing up an uninspiring bunch. We need a Roosevelt.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

The Intimidation Phase

I don’t want to downplay, diminish or fail to honor the significance of all the bullying and betrayal Democrats have endured up until now—I know it has been horrible—but something is seriously different since Trump’s thugs have taken over.

On balance we have moved from a period of pretense, illusion and deceit to one of intimidation, increasingly open hostility, suppression and domination, I assume because the lies are so undeniable. The mask is off and Republicans are exposed.

Exposed as what? I don’t even want to use the language of treachery, all the epithets appropriate in a society irreversibly falling apart but it is that and then some. The sadness so many of us feel is because we know we have already failed.

We are already doomed and screwed. We fight on as though it can be fixed. It can’t. We have to be reborn now as something entirely new and different. Foreword is the only way. And the only way to be reborn is to crush the Republican thugs.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

What it means to be a “Burkean” conservative in the age of Trump...

Watch “conservatives” scramble around trying to save face and convince the world they stand for anything other than living like pigs in the age of Trump. There was the “fiscal,” small government ploy, which a few of them still cite to try to separate themselves from the “social” conservatives, as though it makes any sense at all when they spend money like water on the military and the surveillance state and still cut taxes (mostly on the rich) thereby producing inconceivable deficits and bankrupting the government.

There’s the “Democrats are worse” faction who fail to mention Democrats haven’t had their way for forty years or since Republicans decided bullying their adversaries, subterfuge and hostage-taking, as in shuttering the government in the budget wars and other forms of intimidation, were appropriate tactics. What a gig! They insist on controlling everything but deny any responsibility for the outcomes. The occasional left-wing victory, like Obamacare, which was still crippled by them and a compromise, makes them livid and completely insane.

It becomes an obsession—a touchstone and focus for every irrational argument and unsupported assertion. Their culturally superior, literate, philosophical wing, like Andrew Sullivan and P. J. O’Rourke, call themselves “Burkean” alluding to vague, anti-progressive norms that fetishize an idealized state that never existed while plucking supposed nuggets of goodness from the huge sewage treatment apparatus surrounding Trump. They only want intelligent, thoughtful social evolution, I suppose. Where is that in Trump?

Where is it in his tsunami of incompetence and insults and in his extravaganza of decadence, debasement and decay? I give up. There is no dignity or decency among them, only a torrent of lies, so they forfeit the presumption of integrity. They look out for themselves while our institutions burn.

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Sic Transit Trump

Something has to give. Trump is going to have to go. He is too ridiculously, stupendously incompetent to carry on in his job. Though, he’s really good at destroying things. Is that a talent? Still, in any case, it argues for getting rid of the son-of-a-bitch.

Wrassle Back

Republicans are trying to wrassle their way out of Trump’s tribulations. They placed Jim Jordan of Ohio, a soul-selling acolyte of Trump if there ever was one, on the intelligence committee and he showed up without a suit on, all ready to wrassle.

Trump loves wrassling but the fake kind, just like his entire life. His father left him so much money Donald could play and pretend at being a real developer and businessman and at having a life but Jim Jordan is a real wrassler trying to save a pretend president.

Donald pretends at president like everything else because he doesn’t know how not to. So, he’s screwing it up really badly. Oh, Lord, I just realized Trump doesn’t know he’s a fake and a fraud, kinda like The Truman Show. The names are almost the same.

Truman. Trump. What a discovery! Trump was, obviously, a huge mistake and somebody better pull the plug on our president. His whole life he’s been humored and protected but he could do fantastic damage. He flops around now like a fish out of water.

Saturday, November 16, 2019

Undue Respect

Congressional Republicans deserve no personal respect and whatever they might claim from their elected positions they forfeited when they betrayed their oaths and responsibilities. Fuck them and the elephant they rode in on. It wasn’t the real one but a Trojan horse.

Ready for Primal Time

The barbarians aren’t just within the gates. They are running everything.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

I’m so tired of it all.

It’s so wearing watching Republicans destroy the world.

Bachelor Trump

Under Republicans the American government has become a reality show. Sell your soul to win. Compare it to The Bachelor. Actual life is secondary to the show. Weddings occur at the end, not that it’s required but everyone understands the dramatic necessity. I don’t know their demographic but I bet the show is very popular among those who believe in the “sanctity of marriage.” Contestants can sleep together and hardly know one another but in some weird way the forms are observed.

Similarly with our government which, by the way, has the power to destroy the world in an instant. (To show their restraint they are doing it slowly.) Winning is the only thing that matters among Republicans. That and putting on a show, a whole lot of low drama. Masses must be entertained. Reality, the life and death-matter of running the country, is an afterthought. It’s not quite Jerry Springer yet but we’re trending there with concerns of dick size in debates. What will it be next?

Monday, November 11, 2019

O Captain! My Captain!

He divided a country because he was bored, amusing himself by opening old wounds. Or, rather, out of blind, pathological ambition.

The ship of state is Fox News. Hate is at the helm, steering by fear. There’s a hole and void where democracy and decency used to be.

A frantic Captain barks incoherent orders. He is the master and commander of a pirated ship now and the crew is kept in check by fear.

Sunday, November 10, 2019

We Got Fooled Again

Pick your poison. Choose your lies. An entire generation thought it could see through the haze. They thought they could live in the truth but they are awash in lies as never before. No one can live in the bright light of pure truth.

People must choose the lies of freedom and the stories of decency. Choose your myths carefully or you’ll fall back right into the arms of despair. Don’t delude yourself. Or, delude yourself well. No one escapes. Think you can?

Friday, November 8, 2019

EDHD—Driven to Destruction

Ethical Deficit Hyperpartisan Destructivity (Disorder) is a newly epidemic malaise classified based on field observations and studies of Republican politicians, their appointees and surrogates. It is broadly considered a compensatory reaction formation and spoken of among psychologists as a disorder of insecurity and suspected inferiority, causing aggression, acting-out, domination displays and personality malformation.

It is also a type of vandalism and related to arrestedness in adolescence and Oedipal fixations playing out as denial, projection and repression. The federal government is the mother image to which Republicans are compulsively drawn for gratification while vehemently denying those desires. Many victims are pudgy, pathetic, inferior physical specimens, like Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, Phil Gramm and Scott Walker, but it is a psychological and not a physical ailment per se.

Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan, others among the afflicted, are even somewhat buff. Democratic men are the responsible father figures and providers Republicans are unwittingly driven to try to displace and destroy out of jealousy. Democratic presidents, especially self-made men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, will render them completely insane and elicit extreme agitation and extraordinary aggression.

Now, I don’t mean to be hard on them. This is a medical condition requiring treatment but if Bob Barr, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are the pride of Republican manhood someone should order up SOME FUCKING HELP. The impaired should be involuntarily admitted to an asylum and facility if they won’t admit themselves. Deep down they want to be stopped, the theory is, and thus reassured of the society’s resiliency.

Any understanding of the origins of this locus and epidemic of failed manhood is preliminary, speculative and hypothetical but it seems certain that it is generational and related to the inability of the “baby boomers” and the man-groups following on those that built the culture and fought in WWII to “measure up” and grow up. They are stuck intractably in a most vicious and destructive kind of adolescence.

Money. Prestige. Power.

Why do Republican representatives and appointees want to hold onto their positions so strongly they will eat dirt and grovel before Trump, these public servants? Their jobs are meant to involve the sacrifice of uprooting themselves and abandoning the lives they have cultivated with complete freedom in a prosperous and fruitful land for the constraints of serving their fellow citizens.

How laughable! We can see now that they came to plunder. The public good? What a quant idea for people who champion greed and say it will all somehow work out to the benefit of everyone. Their “invisible hand” is invisible because it doesn’t exist. Or, it is the hand of oppression and servitude for their victims. They should all be thrilled to get back to their private lives and go home.

Washington is their home. Like Trump they never gave up their selfish ambitions. They are creatures desperate to maintain the system they have made, in defiance of law and tradition, to benefit themselves. Newt Gingrich rocketed out of obscurity in some Georgia shithole, using his master’s term, to wealth and fame. He waddles around Rome now, erupting occasionally in support of Trump.

He feasts away at our expense looking like the emperors he emulates—an obese, gesticulating clown sputtering through his spittle. Government checks have made his life. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan followed the same track and married rich women for insurance. They love the easy lives WE provide and will fight to keep them by their practiced tactics: lies and intimidation.

They have created a government modeled on multi-level-marketing, transitioning to a culture of inheritance and permanent Republican hegemony. The money flows in and they don’t have to do anything but sit atop a corrupt organization and beat down challenges. They beat down competition. They came not to serve but for money, privilege and power. The will do anything to keep it.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Driving While Democrat

Democrats are about to get pulled over by Bill Barr's Boss Hogg. He is playing a small-town sheriff in the segregated South.

Unequitable, racist, bigoted, biased, flagrantly prejudicial enforcement is his plan. Democrats are the new black underclass.

First He Wasn’t. Then He Was. Now He Isn’t.

Initially Donald Trump wasn't the issue. Nobody knew how incompetent, stupid and inconceivably corrupt he was. Then he became the issue, with a childlike reliance on all the infrastructure Republicans have built up over the years to guarantee America would be a paradise for rich people and reduce everyone else to misery and inconsequence.

Donald wanted to be liked. New Yorkers knew he was an oaf. He was never accepted there and, at some level, he knew it but, as president, he could make even the highest reaches of the aristocracy pay attention and, to some extent, dance to his tune. He used every kind of incentive and threat, like any good grifter, huckster, briber and blackmailer.

Now he isn’t the issue again. He is so blindly, recklessly, garishly corrupt he makes impeachment easy, not that the Senate will comply or anything will be admitted. That is what is interesting now—the resulting issue. Trump exposed the Republican Party as a treasonous and seething mess of self-serving frauds and scoundrels, a fifth column.

Republicans are the swamp and they have compromised the government. They were always disloyal. They have owned and managed Trump because he was a characterless void:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/swamp-trump/551807/

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Donald’s Special Day

No, it’s not his birthday.

Donald loves to hurt and belittle people and Americans, in their wisdom, made Donald Trump president so every day is his special day now. He gets to belittle people and, as for hurting, it goes on even on his many days off playing golf because of his enormous power and the opportunity to delegate the pleasure and privilege of hurting to his surrogates, enablers, underlings and enforcers.

There is, of course, a children’s book of this title and the first to be rated “R” which is a real breakthrough in despoiling and perversion. You might think it’s bad business to have a children’s book they can’t even buy but this is Donald’s genius and particular gift, to build failure into everything he touches. His failures continue creating chaos and doing damage even once he has moved on.

Failures are strewn about in his wake like carnage on a battlefield and people are corrupted and demeaned by Donald to such a degree they go right on demeaning like little Trump mini-trolls even when set free from the immediate influence and active oversight of their evil master. In business they refer to “multipliers” and Donald, as a businessman, prides himself on his power to multiply turmoil.

It is his special skill and gift to the world. He is so damaged and degraded his soul has ceased to exist. It only wants to share and promote this destruction. Donald’s only function is to annihilate other souls. He is the kind of demon or vampire you read about in novels, a black hole of despair, gluttony and greed. Donald’s is a need incapable of being filled so every day is his special day of doom.

Corruption is his compulsion or quest and Americans, desiring to die, made him their leader—a harbinger and agent of the end of the world. Jesus, they believe, will then swoop in and gather up his special, chosen souls and take them to heaven. And you thought the Taliban and ISIS were insane. They are amateurs and powerless little perverts, by comparison. America must always be the best.

Even, or especially, at this satanic, soul-sucking enterprise.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

The Grand Mufti of Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump refuses to be a president and do his job. His “policies” are based on whim, superstition, magical thinking and political expediency of a sort which means he must placate two groups, oligarchs and bigoted extremists. The latter are largely religious and certified throwbacks.

This makes him not a president but a satrap or a grand mufti. He increases his power by narrowing and parochializing his vision. Sadly, that is not his job. He was always a narrow, ignorant guy anyway, lacking the bandwidth to be anything else. Let’s put him back in appropriate circumstances.

From Florida Trump can stream fatwas and insults at his leisure and ease. That pesky press won’t bother him. In Florida Trump can feel like a king, well-insulated from reality. Reality bites and sucks for Trump. From Florida our coddled champion can throw tantrums at will. Get thee back, Don-boy.

Monday, November 4, 2019

Trump: A Walking Superfund Site

The chicken and the egg. Does Donald Trump’s diet fuel his mangled psyche or the other way around? Who knows but I think it’s a feedback loop of doom:

https://www.salon.com/2019/11/03/self-destructiveness-paranoia-and-disdain-trumps-unhealthy-food-choices-impact-his-mental-health/

The Economics of Adolescence Among Republicans

Guess who’s back. Phil Gramm, the person most responsible for the ‘08 economic downturn, has a new opinion piece in the WSJ, having been drawn into the fray by the wonderful surge in unreason. He condescendingly explains to the “takers” how lucky they are as though they aren’t the experts on what their lives are like.

Gramm is another instance of a Freudian’s field day—physically substandard, morally stunted and exhibiting compensatory intellectual disdain, a “Peter Pan” if there ever was. He avoids honest, productive enterprise while hating those who actually engage in it. In his case I condemn both the sin and the sinner, he is so loathsome.

Repressed stuff has a way of surfacing, however. Phil Gramm married a girl named Wendy, his partner in delusion and deregulatory crime.

That’s the Way the Country Crumbles

Every single Republican in Washington, it appears, thinks nothing of subverting the law and the government for personal and partisan gain. So, this is how it all ends, with a sigh and a whimper and a lot of undeserving idiots scampering around, not with high drama and people of character battling it out over knowingly momentous issues.

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Honest Exploitation

A great shift is afoot. Republicans used to represent sustainable, honest exploitation. Now it’s suicidal and compulsive. I see two likely causes. Firstly, with increased mechanization and then robotics, labor is no longer such an important factor in production.

Secondly, Republicans, doomed forever to minority status in a democracy in which they openly championed the interests of a wealthy elite, gained power by playing political footsie with a faction of racist troglodytes in the American South and elsewhere.

Perhaps at one time they thought there would never be a price to pay. I don’t know but the troglodytes have finally asserted themselves after a couple of decades of giving up their votes without receiving the insane, retrograde social shit they wanted in return. 

Those days are over. Troglodytes are running everything and rampaging through the country’s rules and standards like so much chaff and waste. They crave an end to everything. That, or a return to Calvin’s Geneva, a rule remarkably resembling the Taliban’s. 

Bonehead’s Border Wall Falls to Inexpensive Saws

Republicans, being weak-minded, must have fixations. They try to arrive at confidence and feelings of certainty and security by reducing everything to a sound bite or sweepingly simple stab at policies requiring more intelligence and insight than they have. Therefore, we have the tax cutting fixation, the mother of them all. We have the free market and deregulatory fixations and the military spending fixation.

We have a fixation on cutting social services.

On paper, these add up to bankruptcy. In reality, these have added up to bankruptcy and a failing middle class. Hence the lies. Republicans, having caused social deterioration and distress, observable to anyone, have to enforce a break with reality. We are there now. All they do is lie. Enter “the wall” and Donald Trump. A person can be stupid and shrewd at the same time, you know. Trump not only speaks he thinks in fixations.

He’s a bigot and a moron, with a weak intellect.

This means he can’t adapt. He’s a one trick moron. Attack, attack, attack. Refugees are sawing through his wall with inexpensive tools. He’ll try to lie his way out of it, of course. He craves complete control with no accountability. In a sane world control comes with responsibility. Theirs is not a sane world but a world of lies. Let’s watch Trump lie some more. “I wanted concrete but the Dem’s wouldn’t allow it” might be his spin.

We will see but remember that nothing is ever his fault. The Tao of Trumpism and the Republicans is irresponsible living resulting in maximized capital accumulation. Their grail is greed—a quest for control, unaccountable power and their own earthly dominion.

They are all parasites and predators, incapable of productive, cooperative, responsible living. Jails were invented and built for such people. 

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Watch for It

An eclipse is nothing in comparison with an ethical inversion. And, an ethical inversion can be viewed from anywhere. No need to drive all over and lie down in a field out in the middle of nowhere or put on special glasses. All you have to do is have a conscience.

We are approaching totality now. Good is bad and bad is good. Bloodied and battered, the truth is in retreat against an attack of lies. “Christians” live in hate, destroy people’s lives and insist they are destined for heaven. “Patriots” undermine the government.

The anointed guardians of democracy are the products of privilege, claiming infinite entitlement, to the extent that their frivolous desires outweigh others' rights even to exist, and they claim unlimited recompense. That is, “rights” are determined by power.

Those without power have no rights.

Individuals are so wealthy they can corrupt the government and deny the collective will of millions. ONE PERSON, that is. No institution can resist them when they form alliances. They have “think tanks” and PACs. They have organizations and own newspapers.

They have legions of lackeys who whoop at every victory for falsehood and decry attempts to enforce accountability and return the world to sanity. They attack viciously. They respect no rules. Laws are subverted. Equitable enforcement is impossible. People live in fear.

We are on the cusp now but ethical inversions can only be verified once they happen. No one knows when we will cross the line into totality and darkness. But the results, in chaos and brutality, are unmistakable. People without consciences are blind to inversions.

That aspect of it is confusing. They really can’t see them.

Prosperity Slut to Infest White House

Paula White, prosperity slut, will now show up for work at the White House and get a government check. Say what you will about Trump, he has an ear for insulting behavior.

Overwhelming Farce

Trump’s administration is trying to find its way to victory, against their fellow citizens, by employing overwhelming farce and impropriety. In some ways it seems to be working.