Vlad Enablers

We'll never know where we might be without Bush's military adventurism and Trump's soft spot for autocrats. Explain it to me, and the rest of the world while we're at it, why Putin shouldn't think he can behave the way we do? We might believe we're exceptional. Why should anyone else think that when we behave like lawless idiots and spoiled, privileged amateur world leaders and dilettantes?

My Favorite Autocrat

Who's the Right's favorite dictator? Firstly we must consider if this means the Trump camp, or the lunatic business wing probably best represented by Tucker Carlson, or the religious nutballs whose leadership is more decentralized and diffuse. The last group breaks along Catholic and Orthodox versus insane evangelical lines. Evangelicals want the world to end in fire and fury, God's version of 'shock and awe' in Bushian terms. There's a cornucopia of crazies on the right these days. 

Among the MAGAs Kim Jong Un is the favorite because he's so entrenched and his family stands to rule North Korea forever. Did you notice how Trump's degraded followers fancy a multigenerational dynasty? So, there. Un it is. Putin wins among the corporate elite by familiarity. Though Carlson plays the religious card as well we know he's only using the troglodytes. For whom he has immeasurable contempt. Bankers and all love kleptocrats as much as they hate competition.

They want to print money. Nothing is better than having control over an ostensibly representative government. The favor of the religious elements is spread about. Help me out if I've miss an autocracy or two. They see aspects of what they love in Iran, Afghanistan, Hungary, Poland, Turkey and even Italy. The thrill they feel at the possibility of another Calvin-in-Geneva situation is almost sexual. My God, the repression. The sublimation. The projection. The cruelty and bigotry. A return to torture. Again we see how Bush was a harbinger of so much that was to come. 

Millions of lives destroyed and all in God's name. Too good to be true! I mean, these are hopeful times for power hungry madmen and their followers. So much to applaud and the possibility of nuclear annihilation increasing as we speak, just as God wanted it and ordained. 

How To Stop the War

Somebody shoot Putin in the head. And the rest of the world, especially America, should notice how high the costs are of unaccountable, irresponsible leadership. Presumably, it wouldn't take a bullet to stop Ayatollah Trump. But, in any case, his revenge tour must be stopped. In whatever way it takes.  

Fuck Florida

Let Florida clean up its own hurricane mess, as the price they pay for electing garbage like Ron DeSantis.

Trump Sabotages Pipeline

Think of how nice it is to not have Trump in power with so much crazy stuff going on in the world. He's capable of anything. Especially now that he's under the pig farmer's spell.  

Asshole Juice

Asshole juice is rising among Republicans. I don't mean stuff's leaking out of their anuses. Who knows, though, since buttholes are one of their many fixations. But that, with an election upcoming, they're going nuts with accusations and attacks. 

Cheapshots by the dozens. 

Once upon a Time in the Midwest

This is a story about how farmers became a crop. And it's instructive because the trend has continued. Farmers are famously individually powerless in the marketplace, being close to an example of 'perfect' competition. Historically they've banded together or been backed by the government since food is essential and agricultural markets are inherently unstable without some structural support.  

And farming is essential unlike whatever it is, let's say, that hedge funds do. Enter Republicans, who hate 'the little guy.' With typical arrogance and self-serving political motivations agriculture secretary Earl Butz reinvented modern farming under Richard Nixon. An 'oil shock' had threatened to send food prices up which Nixon didn't want for political reasons. Butz argued for agricultural consolidation. 

'Get big of get out' was his motto. He believed in big farms. Farmers weren't relevant in the equation. Electoral prospects were. And transferring profits up to the corporate level which Republicans akways do. Consumers are another, parallel, case, individually powerless but with massive influence in the aggregate. The competition for their allegiance, their purchasing power, is normally intense. 

But not when all choice is removed in a system that favors consolidation. Another arrogant Republican, Robert Bork, actually FOR monopolies, writing a book on it. Cheaper shit for everyone! But  the point wasn't cheaper shit it was disempowering consumers and higher profits. Businesses hate competition. Any rational business wants to print money. So they invest in influence. They kill competition.

If influence is available for sale they're buying. Under Republicans everything is for sale. Now consider Haley Barbour, who invented modern lobbying--the market for influence--as much as anyone. Consumers have lost their power and become a crop, milked for profits like cattle until they die. Fertilized and harvested like crops, powerless over their destiny, servants of corporations and slaves of capitalists.

A Modest Proposal

I'm concerned about the vulnerability of Washington to nuclear attack. Someone could set off a device in a truck or float it up the Potomac. We wouldn't even know who did it. The place is indefensible. President Biden should declare an emergency or martial law, especially given the problems Putin is having, and immediately move all the branches of government and essential bureaucracy into a remote area.

Representatives and the Supreme Court justices will have to live in tents, temporarily, until new infrastructure is built, but it's a small sacrifice to keep the country safe. And the military is well-practiced in setting up such facilities, notably in deserts, wastelands and rough country. Meanwhile, this will be an extraordinary opportunity to pass legislation outlawing lobbying and the buying of political influence.

No doubt our representatives will wail and cry the over the loss of their opulent dinners and high living. But that's not what they're there for, they should be reminded. Additionally some heroic Democrat could then divert the Potomac through the city after some rains to cleanse it of the stench of corruption. Wash it clean. We'll be left with Washington as a city of museums, monuments and educational centers.

A place where Americans can learn about our democracy and appreciate the extraordinary good fortune we have had. Especially since by then the survival of our republic will be ensured, unlike now when corruption rules everything. I don't see how Republicans can object to any of this. They say they're the party, above all else, of national security. Unless, of course, they've been lying about that too. 

Trump Signals Allegiance to Pig Farmer

In a recent speech Donald Trump has signaled adherence to the online QAnon Philippine pig farmer cult. QAnon casts the once and future president in the role of savior which apparenty appeals to him. Consider that, as far as protecting Americans from another Trump reign, and clipping his wings in the meantime, the Twitter ban has done more for us than Congress ever did. That's how helpless we are.

RINOplasticity

Remember, authoritarians normally purge their own ranks first, not that disloyalty is an issue or matters because it's about making clear the risks to those who are left once the cleansing is over. And it might be a Year of the Long Knives, instead of a Night, but you don't want to be on the receiving end of the kind of hurt they dish out. 

No way. Part of that is for it to be arbitrary. That way the fear never loses its hard edge. So Trump, the cunning piece of shit, is throwing 'RINO' around as though it means something. It does and it doesn't, since it's Trump's will or whim at any certain instant, and we know how consistent that is. That's why it's called authoritarianism.

DeSantis Squanders Tax Dollars

Ron DeDantis has squandered the money of Florida taxpayers by flying around immigrants in private/chartered planes. Rail with cattle cars would have been much cheaper. Or, tractor trailers like those used to move livestock and chickens. Ron's political progenitors figured this out so there's no excuse. Speaking of which, if Ron really hates these immigrants, many of whom are fleeing instability caused by us, a much as it seems he can dig huge pits and shoot them so they fall in or gas and burn them. 

Look to your roots, Ron. In the hate movements of the past. No need to reinvent it. And no wonder DeSantis wants to whitewash history. He has a friend in forgetting.

Disaster Comparedness

Let's compare Republican and Democratic ideas of disasters. Republicans think Obamacare is a disaster, though it has largely succeeded in spite of being compromised and sabotaged by Republicans. Noted humanitarian Marco Rubio, for example, who thinks he should be president, slipped something into a bill that defunded the 'risk corridor' and caused all kinds of problems for Obamacare.  

Heaven forbid we take care of people. Democrats, speaking for myself, think George Bush was a disaster, for lying us into wars which he then botched beyond belief because the only constituencies that matter to him, big money and evangelical nutcases, wanted to make a killing and witness the Second Coming, respectively, Bush exploded a whole region of the world, the Cradle of Civilization.  

He got hundreds of thousands of people killed and displaced over 30 million. I stand by my assessment. Mass murder and incalculable human suffering are disasters. Obamacare is not. 

In the Shit

Donald Trump is more scared than ever that his criminal days are numbered. He's more frantic and enmeshed in his delusions--old classics such as grandeur and, recently, the Philippine pig farmer drops, droppings or dung spread about under the QAnon brand. This pig shit postulates an upcoming 'storm' in which heroic Herr Donald declares martial law and stages a mass hanging of Democrats and maybe a Republican or two like Mitch McConnell who are deemed not to have been accommodating to Trump's demands to lick his anus which were so successful among Republican representatives.

Now, what is it with Republican fixations on anuses and shit? This is very primal and it has it roots in the American South where, if you think back, the northern victory in the Civil War and especially Sherman's March to the Sea were termed a form of rape. It's crucial to understand this is not about the old southern fear of big-dicked black men having sex with white women who had alway craved them 'some of that' but the homosexual rape of southern white men such as McConnell and Lindsey Graham. The word is Graham might not mind but that's another story. A light bulb should be going off.

The Republican obsession with homosexuality? Bathroom activities? They can't not graphically envision these private, constitutionally protected activities because of secret desires and fears. Remember, southern white men routinely raped black women. The black men, who were strikingly physically superior to the Boss Hogg characters of the Old South, were kept in check by violence and threats of violence where they were brutalized and bullied, to say the least. These are the origins of the incredible festering fear. And the need for total control and domination, especially of minorities and women. 

And now, through their persistent, behind the scenes, illegal activities to undermine the American state, we are all living in the land of nullification, the old southern dream of a lunch buffet of laws from which you pick and choose. This right does not apply to Yankees, since they didn't have slaves and don't need it, as we saw with southerners crying and wailing like babies when northerners tried not to enforce the (actually unjust) Fugitive Slave Act. Republicans get to improvise and do whatever they want, like the Confederate traitors. The 'rule of law' is meaningless. Unjust power is everything. 

The Barre Seid Institute

I don't understand, if he was proud of his intended legacy, why someone didn't name the new institute created entirely with a single massive bequest by Barre Seid after him. While they were at it, why not have the institute's name reflect its purposes? Something like, 'The Barre Seid Memorial Institute for Fucking Over His Fellow Citizens and Promoting Hate, Lies, Division and Minority Rule.'

I know, it's a little wordy. But at least it honors the organization's source of funding and the role it will play in further disenfranchising the majority of American citizens who don't want what 'conservatives' are offering and so are therefore being deprived of the right to have a say in their governance by a dangerous cabal of fanatical Republicans determined to have their way no matter what. 

Why Me?

Something I love about Trump is, since he's so infantile, he exposes the soul of conservatism, a philosophy of human variability that rejects pluralism, adaptation, and the idea of the existential value of human life. In the normal curve of populations they were born in the tail of excellence, they think, and already so fully evolved, so what good is change and what do we do with all these inferior people? 

They spent their lives trying to figure it out and expect us to support them while they do it because they are, well, so superior. The inferiors are also useful as cannon fodder, in addition to keeping food on the  table, which conveniently counteracts their propensity to reproduce recklessly.

The prolific and interminable wars started by righties, I mean.  

Trump, who slithered into existence very rich and whose only talent in life is belittling other people and defiling and desecrating everything he touches, is also a Social Darwinist but he's so incurious he doesnt't engage in their usual round table discussions dedicated to figuring out, why me? Why was I born so superior? There's an unanswerable question. And a roadmap to a life of circular reasoning. 

They beg the question, in the old sense, by assuming something not in evidence, that they are in fact better. Again, hail Trump!, because he assumes and asserts his superiority in clear proportion to his lack of it, so it's all about compensation for insecurity, feelings of worthlessness, and the disappointments of dealing with an imperfect world. Trump's 'why me?' arises from his sense of persecution. 

Of injustice.

How can they be so mean? So mean they don't instantly bow down and worship him and give him everything he wants? Any complexity Trump exhibits is in the multifariousness of his arrestedness. He's simultaneously a child, an adolescent, and everything in between, but nothing approaching adulthood. He's a gullet. A digestive tract, bellowing and shitting his way through life, the ultimate taker. 

Reign of Toads

It's still a shock to me. And, I think, to most Americans, how many of our fellow citizens were closeted criminals. Trump brought them out of the woodwork. We assumed there were shared values and a core commitment to the rules and a modicum of tolerance and good-will. But, no.

It was an illusion. Culpability becomes an issue. I'm against the 'insanity' defense because it muddies the waters and raises unanswerable questions. Someone who commits a crime should be found guilty. Then, competency, compassion and suitable consequences can come up in the sentencing. 

If there were compulsions or delusions in play it makes a difference. We are there now. We are there with an entire political movement openly engaging in illegal acts. Where to draw the line? If some Trump toady commits crimes for Herr Donald, by order or inference, how guilty is he? 

The Manson Family is the model. Which, it is to say, it's a judgement call. Various factors must be weighed and balanced. The 'scales of justice' analogy is apt, but it's harder with the Trump movement. Layers, and so many of the actors are insulated. Evil Stephen Miller had his own lesser crime cult. 

A professional racist and hate czar, he was responsible for terrible acts of cruelty, but couldn't have done it without Trump. It would be hard to hold him accountable, which counts. Trump must be held accountable. He and his close associates who committed obvious criminal acts must be jailed. 

The rest is a judgment call. Miller wasn't a drone. Many of Trump's underlings were. He was a separate locus of evil authorized and empowered by Lord Sauron, aka Trump. But most of the Trump movement consists of toadies. They'll do opposite things on different days if Herr Donald orders it. 

Fealty is everything. In that sense they are less guilty than Miller but practical aspects of the prosecution will win out. So, the toadies get busted and Miller goes free. Sorry, it's probably the best we can do. I know it's not right. It's irritating as hell. But Miller can be found guilty in the 'court of public opinion.'

Spat on in restaurants and such. 

He can be made the pariah he should be and scorned. If we come to our senses. Or if, I should say, the people who have any sense and care, who still constitute a (slimmer than we thought) majority, regain the power and restablish the rule of law, a term I don't even like but it's all we have. 

Deliberately Failed States

Let's say you're a person who only cares about himself. To an unbelievable degree. It's not that you want other people to die, necessarily, but they're just not real to you. There's no proportionality or balance. So, for example, it's more important that you get your way in every little detail of your life all the time and feel powerful and important than that other people have enough food to eat and aren't starving. 

Now. let's say, having extraordinary drive and maybe a bit of an inheritance from a driven daddy, you get rich as shit. You truly have more money than you can make sense out of. What entity is there remaining that is threat to your desires? The government. Only the government can possibly constrain you or require you ever comply with anything, notwithstanding you have the usual psycho adolescent egotist yacht, island, and planetary conquest fantasies. And by that I mean even other planets.

Your egotism is so infantile, boundless and regressive it results in a neediness that is never assuaged. You can never get 'there' because there is no there there. There is no sense of self independently of the neediness--the bottomless imperative to feel a certain way, important and significant, at every possible moment. What you hate the idea of, more that anything, is someone telling you what to do.

Nobody tells you what to do. Back to the state. The government. It has no legitimate function, in your mind, other than to serve your interests, which, politically, is not a particularly good selling point. But you have enough money and determination it doesn't matter. Even elected officials can be bought, it turns out, so you buy some. A dystopia ensues. A perversion of government. All based on (your) lies. 

Yes, it's all justified and rationalized. They want freedom. But they don't specify of what kind. They want smaller, efficient government based on business principles, a conveniently anodyne and vague objective. These are sorts of indirect lies. Because you're lying partly to yourself. But you win. You 'principles' become the norm because you pay for that to happen. And the freedom looks like slavery. 

It looks like slavery to average citizens because locking in your power requires diminishing theirs. Or so you think. But somewhere, deep inside, in your guts, you're frightened. Something in there knows security is impossible in isolation. Security is only possible through cooperation. We're looking at a deliberately failed state now, a perversion by any standard. It serves the long-term interests of no one. 

Welcome to the libertarian perversion of a free state, in which we're all slaves. 

Bad Moon

The issue of Trump's White House portrait will inevitably come up. I'm fine with it as long as it shows him ass-side up with his pants down. He should be represented, to Democrats, as mooning them for fun and to Republicans as expecting them to kiss his ass which they all did with such ease and alacrity.

No Surrender

Republicans will never surrender. They will have to be apprehended or expelled. 

Finally, "Mine"

Finally, coming from Trump, we have as concise a statement of the Republican ethos as we can get. "Mine." Whatever it is, if they want it they will claim it. Globalization? We knew American workers would get hurt, but also that there would be overall benefits. 

Where did the benefits go? 

Workers should have gotten Scandinavian levels of social benefits. But, "mine." So declared the financiers and corporate flunkies. And it all went to them. All and then some. They even plunder the future. They are the "takers." It's been the biggest scam in history.

The Anti-Trump Paradox

Anti-Trumpism normalizes Trumpism by trying to handle it within a system which it negates, invalidates and undermines by its authoritarian ideology and criminal behavior. Trumpists are not customary combatants but non-state, international actors like terrorists. Therefore, the systems don't work.

The 'rule of law' is useless against them. They are its antimatter. Luckily, we have suitable infrastructure and means in place, thanks to Republicans, to handle such an existential national threat. Facilities at  Guantanamo and elsewhere, and approved methods such as 'extraordinary rendition' and torture.

All legally vetted, approved and tested by Republicans. They are a massively bigger threat than al-Qaeda ever was. We see immediately the appropriateness and necessity of the detention, isolation and quarantine of MAGA Republicans and Trump himself, the worst threat the country has ever faced.

Hands Up!

Just wondering, what's the mouth version of 'hands up!' since it's Donald Trump's fucking mouth we have to deactivate? As long as the mouth is loose we are not safe.