Category Archives: Donald Trump

04/11/2022
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Alice Brandeis, Big Lie, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Sacco and Vanzetti, Stop the Steal, US Supreme Court, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas

1000 Words: Recuse Yourself

[No video today, because…, well, I’m lazy. You’re gonna have to read; I hope you can bear it.]

Ginni Thomas

Ginni Thomas, previously known as a run-of-the-mill right wing ideologue, has recently revealed herself to be, in truth, a brainsick conspiracy theory trafficker and a danger to the republic. A lot of people are calling for her husband, US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — himself a rather nightmarish I’ve got mine and to hell with everybody else-ist — to recuse himself from any future potential cases regarding ex-President Donald Trump’s risible if it weren’t so petrifying January 6th insurrection. Ginni, you see, has bought into the Big Lie — that the 2020 national election was stolen by perpetrators unnamed using methods unspecified to jigger the vote counts in locales undisclosed.

The Justice’s bride sent a series of frenzied texts to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging the outgoing administration to overturn the vote results by means neither legal, constitutional, or for that matter honorable.

Ginni has a long history of political activism. She was active in her college Republican club and immediately after graduation went to work as a legislative assistant for a newly-elected Republican member of the US House of Representatives. Neither of those activities is — or should be — a deal killer but they reveal where her heart always has been. Later, as an attorney for the US Chamber of Commerce, she fought hard against the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Family and medical leave being perks enjoyed by the residents of more than 120 nations on this goddamned planet. In 2009, she founded a conservative advocacy nonprofit aligned with the Tea Party and in 2010 started Liberty Consulting, dedicated to helping utility companies deny climate change. She also worked hard to defeat equal pay legislation in Congress.

In the wake of the Capitol riot with the “Stop the Steal” canard spreading like malignant cells through the nation’s lymph system, she dreamed of this remedy:

[That the] Biden crime family & ballot co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over the coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

Phew! And I though I had a propensity for run-on sentences.

Anyway, she’s been a board member of the Council for National Policy, a group that pressured Republican legislators to appoint alternative members to the Electoral College, who, presumably, would put Trump back in office come Inauguration Day, 2021. And on the social medium that she’s so contemptuous of, she has consistently spread baseless “Stop the Steal” charges and even encouraged the Trumpists gathering in Washington, DC on the morning of the 6th.

Clearly, Ginni Thomas has an agenda. Traditionally, spouses of US Supreme Court justices have kept their noses clean when it comes to politics or any other issues that may or may not come before their wives’ and husbands’ Highest Court in the Land docket.

Married People.

The idea being, we want our Supremes not to be swayed by their bedmates’ pillow talk. And, as anybody who’s married knows, keeping one’s better half happy includes listening to them and, if even for appearance’s sake, indulging them.

Still, the Justice and his fellow Republicans recoil in horror at the notion of recusal. They’re trying to position the call as just more political gamesmanship. But it ain’t.

The Thomases swear they don’t talk about their respective businesses when in bed or over the dinner table. Their chitchat in the TV room, though, remains uncommented upon.

I dug up a precedent for Justice Thomas to declare himself out of any cases having to do with the election or the insurrection. Back in 1920, a couple of Italian-American anarchists named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were accused of murdering two people during a payroll heist at a Massachusetts shoe factory. At the time, both anarchists and Italians were generally viewed as worse scourges than the recent worldwide flu epidemic or cancer or even the possibility of Prohibition. Many, many, many people back then were more than eager to believe that a couple of immigrant radicals were, in reality, bloodthirsty killers. Sacco and Vanzetti were swiftly found guilty and sentenced to death.

Protesters in New York City.

Roars of protest arose among American progressives and many observers around the world. Celebrities voiced support for the two men. Songs were written and impassioned opinion pieces dashed off. Protesters gathered by the thousands in cities around the world. Strong evidence existed both for and against the two men, but the touch point was the mob mentality that swept the nation, the desire to bring the terrible sword of justice down on them. The fact that both men were avowed atheists also helped make them America’s favorite villains at the time. Some commentators even admitted that Sacco and Vanzetti might not have been the actual killers but nevertheless ought to be electrocuted because surely they’d done something rotten in their lives.

One of the people enraged by the whole affair was a woman named Alice Brandeis. She’d donated a large amount of money to the men’s defense fund and publicly called for justice for them. 

Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense attorneys had hoped to gain a stay of execution for them through an appeal to the US Supreme Court. Their hopes rested upon reaching either of the Court’s two progressive jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes or Louis Brandeis.

The latter being Alice Brandeis’s husband. Justice Brandeis promptly recused himself from considering the defense attorneys’ appeal. To him, it was a simple decision; his wife was a participating party in the contretemps, therefore, he’d been tainted, merely by marital association.

Alice and Louis Brandeis and Family.

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed at midnight, August 22nd/23rd, 1927. Violent demonstrations broke out in several international cities and, subsequently, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts institution drastic court reforms to ensure wrongly convicted defendants could get retrials.

If you can’t see the parallels between the Brandeis and Thomas situations, then you just can’t see. Or don’t want to.

04/01/2022
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Aum Shinrikyo, Cold War, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, USSR, Vladimir Putin

1000 Words: Dumb Luck

We’re living in real fear of the mushroom cloud again for the first time since the Soviet Union collapsed more than three decades ago.

That event signaled the end of the Cold War, the half-century-long standoff between the United States and the USSR with each side brandishing thousands of nuclear weapons and promising to incinerate the planet should the other side push its luck too far.

Following the Soviet collapse, people’s fears about a coming nuclear holocaust eased off. By the time the Millennial generation started becoming aware, few of them gave the merest thought to the dreaded mushroom cloud. Those of us alive in 1962 or 1985 lived in constant panic over the possibility that, at any moment, we’d witness, in the last fleeting second of their lives, the pikadon, Japanese for flash boom, the otherworldly brilliant white light and hellish concussion signaling the detonation of a nuclear bomb over a city.

But, for a tantalizing few years, we forgot about nuclear weapons.

Then, when Donald Trump was technically elected president in 2016 and immediately engaged in a verbal pissing match with the equally lunkheaded leader of North Korea, Kim Jung-un, nuclear dread became a thing again. It wasn’t as acute as it had been a few decades before, but people actually began thinking about the bomb. Now that Vladimir Putin, perhaps even loonier than either Trump or Kim (although it’s a real contest) has launched his invasion of the Ukraine, nuclear anxiety is again becoming foremost in our minds, especially after he reminded the globe that Russia might nuke the hell out of anyone who tried to stop his Ukrainian adventure. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now fear nuclear war may break out sooner rather than later, according to a late March Associated Press/National Opinion Research Centers poll.

But, again, during the thirty-year period after the USSR’s collpase, if anyone thought about nukes, it was the fear that, say, India and Pakistan might find themselves in a shootin’ war or that some terrorist gang might stumble upon an old Soviet bomb and use it to blackmail an entire nation. Even so, not too many people fretted over either possibility.

The problem is, a terrorist group may well have mined, refined and weaponized uranium, and built its own nuke as far back as the mid-1990s.

Oddly, there was a only brief but terrifying report in the New York Times back in 1997 about an unexplained seismic event in Australia a few years earlier. In the middle of the night on May 28th, 1993, seismographs around the world jumped and the very few people within hundreds of miles of a point in the Great Victoria Desert reported seeing a sky-filling flash followed by an earth-shaking rumble.

The blast — or whatever — was so big that scientists at first thought it had to have been a meteor or asteroid striking the Earth. But no evidence of such an event has ever been found. The Times report revealed that the Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, had purchased a huge tract of land in the desert, had mined uranium, constructed a state of the art refining laboratory, and — here’s the kicker — had been joined by several nuclear scientists from the old Soviet Union.

Aum Shinrikyo, you may recall, was the gang that released the toxic nerve gas, sarin, into the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing 14 people. It was merely the group’s latest attack at the time. Aum already had carried out assassinations and other less ambitious poison gas attacks in Japanese cities. Investigators determined that Aim Shinrikyo members hoped to trigger World War III, at the very least, or, believing in a predestined apocalypse, wanted to get the ball rolling on it.

Investigators also learned Aum already had tried to purchase a few Soviet nuclear weapons on the black market but had been unsuccessful.

The Great Victoria Desert blast force was estimated to be the equivalent of 2000 tons of TNT — two kilotons in nuke parlance. The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, for comparison, delivered the equivalent of 15 kilotons. So, if the desert blast really was a nuke, it would have been a baby. Some land-based thermonuclear weapons possessed by the United States and Russia today yield explosive forces in the megaton range — that’s a million tons of TNT.

So the putative Aum bomb — it’s never been proven it was a nuke — would have been a firecracker, albeit one that, had it been exploded over a city, would have killed tens of thousands of people in a…, well, a flash.

Suffice it to say that although the Great Victoria Desert incident remains a mystery, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and there was plenty of metaphorical smoke in the western Australia bush that May night in 1993.

Even if Aum Shinrikyo was only trying to develop new and creative uses for nerve gas to hasten the expected apocalypse, the fact that a cult of loons was mining uranium and recruiting nuclear engineers should terrify the bejesus out of us to this day. Aum Shinrikyo has been de-fanged in the years after the Tokyo sarin attack, but there surely exist in the world plenty of doomsday-ists and similar hoodlums hoping to put millions of us out of our misery.

Why hasn’t it happened yet? Why, when they had the chance, did the United States and the Soviet Union refrain from frying the planet? Why, for that matter, haven’t any of the purported nuclear states — the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — pressed the button as yet?

A pollyanna might suggest that the threat of existential annihilation has prevented world leaders, presumably sane, from ending it all. But what if one of those nine nuclear states comes to be headed by a psychopath? And what if one or more of them happens to be in power as we speak?

Equally as terrifying, how lucky are we that no doomsday cult or wild-eyed terrorist organization has, as yet, accumulated enough money, materials, and maniacs to wipe a city off the face of the Earth?

How long will our luck hold out?

02/22/2021
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COVID-19, Donald Trump

Hot Air: Enemies

I want to get this on the record as the United States marks a half million fatalities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

No, let me correct that. I need to get this on the record.

The number of American dead in the last year because of this illness is greater than all the soldiers and civilians killed when we as a nation turned against ourselves in the Civil War. The number of dead by the virus has exceeded that of the combined American fatalities of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam together.

The previous President of the United States of America criminally and morally abdicated his duty as the leader of this nation from the very onset of this health emergency. A true leader, one who thought a bit more about the welfare of his people and his country, would have said something on the order of the following as the novel coronavirus first made inroads on these shores:

We are facing an enemy. One that is as dangerous and fraught with peril as any hostile army we have ever encountered. We must come together now to conquer it.

We are a strong people, a determined people. We have faced crises and terrors time and again throughout our history. We will face this crisis and triumph.

We will sacrifice. We will suffer hardship and grief. But we will emerge united and well for having made the effort, a truly patriotic effort to eradicate the virus that has invaded our nation. We love our nation and that is why we will embark on this fight.

Join with me as I put on my mask. Join with me as I maintain recommended social distancing. Join with me as I stay indoors as much as possible. It won’t be easy. We won’t be terribly comfortable. We’ll feel hemmed in. Businesses will suffer. People will lose income. Our world will be changed.

We’ll do all these things, and we’ll do them now, because that is the best and quickest way for us to return to normal. And we will return to normal because — it bears repeating — we are a strong and determined people.

That’s what the previous President of the United States of American could have said in mid-March 2020, when the real impact of the pandemic was becoming known.

But no. Here’s the message the President of the United States of America imparted to the 335 million citizens of the nation at the time:

This virus is a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats and my other enemies to make me look bad.

That message completely ignored the danger to be faced by 335 million people. The president’s sole concern was himself. As it ever has been.

Two Scourges.

And so, a half million people are dead. The bells of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC today pealed 500 times in succession, one ring for each thousand Americans dead. Many experts say that 500,000 figure is short, that because of misdiagnosis and other factors, the real number may be closer to one million. As far as I’m concerned, half a million is plenty.

And, as far as I’m concerned, when that criminal, that immoral former President of the United States of America dies, this world will be a better place.

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02/18/2021
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Donald Trump, Fairness Doctrine, GOPac Memo, Newt Gingrich, Political Correctness, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh

Hot Air: Rush to War

Rush Limbaugh is gone and that’s that. He became part of our collective consciousness about 30 years ago and that was far too long for such a verbal vandal to hold sway. And hold sway he did.

I had a friend named Terry for whom I worked back in the early- and mid-’90s. Terry idolized Rush. I spent a lot of time in Terry’s little red pickup truck as he blared WLS in Chicago carrying the man’s program in the afternoon. Every day. Every single goddamned day.

Terry and I argued like cat and dog back then. Seemingly every sentence out of Rush’s gaping face hole drove Terry to exclaim “YEEE-aaaah!” and me to scream, “You’re both fuckin’ deranged.”

Truth is, Terry and I dug the ongoing fight over Rush. Neither of us really saw him as the voice of a huge swath of the American population. To me, he was just an over-the-top, lonely voice broadcasting from some uncivilized backwoods to a few thousand equally lonely borderline sociopaths. To Terry, he was the courageous voice of righteousness whom the vast majority of Americans were ignoring.

We enjoyed our fighting over him because it seemed more a game than a cultural touchstone. Sadly for our country, that’s what Rush became. He was as important to the growth of the Tea Party, Trump, the border wall, climate change denial, misrepresenting Black Lives Matter, hatred of women, obsessive anti-Clintonism, and all the rest of the dog whistles and overt calls to idiocy he spewed for lo these many decades as any other living human being.

It can be argued he was one of the single most important people in the history of the country. As recently as last year, his radio program attracted a daily average audience of 15.5 million, a jaw-dropping number considering how much the overall radio audience has shrunk since the dawn of the internet. One of St. Ronald Reagan’s pet projects, tearing down the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, allowed radio stations all over the country to air Rush’s viewpoints without having to present opposing opinions. It was deregulation run amok and led to a dramatic growth spurt for Right Wing blowhards in all forms of media. Rush was the chief blowhard. He earned, it has been estimated, more than half a billion dollars yelling into his microphone over the years.

Melania Trump Hangs the Medal of Freedom on Rush.

A current friend of mine has said Rush became popular because he raised his middle finger to all those “politically correct” hall monitors who wanted to tell the rest of us what to do. My friend is right. Rush’s listeners detested college eggheads telling them what to think and say — as if some TA at the likes of Oberlin College held any sway over breakfast diner conversations in Topeka, Kansas. But Topekans and millions of others like them felt aggrieved, felt assaulted for chrissakes, that they had to feel guilty for calling Black people colored or woman bitches among their pals. Thanks to Rush, they were granted the imprimatur to substitute instead the N-bomb and the C-bomb.

They felt free at last. Much like a three-year-old pulling out his penis in front of the dinner guests.

More truth: Having lived in this college town, Bloomington, for a touch more than ten years now, I can attest that “political correctness” — or, as I prefer to characterize the phenomenon, orthodoxy v. heresy — is alive and well and, in fact, probably more insidious than ever. That said, Rush’s strategy of fighting it employing racism, nativism, misogyny, male idolatry, anti-intellectualism, and every other evocation of hatred and incuriousness in his sick arsenal is not so much refreshing as flat out evil. What we need is a voice that says “Fuck you, don’t condemn the whole of me because you disagree with a sliver of my perspective. I’m still in the fight with you.” Key words: “with you.”

But that brand of “good behavior” isn’t turning us into wholly self-centered, hateful, incurious, regressives. It’s just annoying and we can handle that. It was the reaction to “political correctness” that’s destroying us.

More than anything else, Rush led the charge to skew, perversely, the very nature of public discourse. Hand in hand with Newt Gingrich, aided by the former Speaker’s infamous Gingrich Memo, people who dissented from their orthodoxy no longer were opponents but satanic child molesters.

No wonder so many Dittoheads and Right Wingers armed themselves to the teeth and are itching for the coming civil war.

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11/22/2020
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Donald Trump, God, Identity

Hot Air: The Real Identity Politics

Here it is almost three weeks to the day after the 2020 election and as The Loved One and I took our traditional Sunday drive through South Central Indiana we both were struck by how many people in these rural environs still are proudly displaying their Trump flags and yard signs. It brings to mind a meme I saw a couple of days ago that went something like this:

Okay, I voted for Biden, but I’m not going to keep a Biden sign up in my front yard for the next four years like a freakin’ idiot.

And, the truth is, many, many, many of those Trump signs we still see in the hinterlands have been there since 2016. A lot of them are faded and tattered from having weathered four goddamned frigid, windy winters and four sun-baked summers. Isn’t the whole idea of putting up yard signs and other candidate paraphernalia an attempt to persuade neighbors and passersby to vote for the person you think is best for the job? That argument needs only to be made every four years, not every day of every year from now until the end of time.

I guarantee you the vast majority of the Trump signs on display today will still be there the day Joe Biden gets sworn in as the 46th President of the United States as well as the day, November 5th, 2024, of the next presidential election, whether there’s a Trump running or not.

So, what’s the deal, what’s the argument these people are trying to make? My answer: They’re not making an argument at all; they’re making a statement. They’re telling the world who they are. These people now have a rock-solid, distinct identity. Before, they were just anonymous schlubs, mowing their lawns and reclining in front of the the TV to watch American Idol like every other schlub on the block or down the country road. They are somebody now because they’ve seen and attached themselves to an idol of their own, someone who talks like them and thinks like them and maybe even messes up like they would if only they had a billion dollars and didn’t have to give a shit about anybody else in the whole wide world. For all Donald Trump’s sins and peccadilloes, any and all of which should have precluded him years ago from any consideration as the leader of the last remaining superpower on Earth, for his ridiculous dyed combover, for his ballooning backside, for his contempt for the authority of experts, for his utter un-interest in books or reports or studies, for his proud ignorance of the needs and wants of anyone who’s not directly related to him, everything about him is exactly how tens of millions of people in America would see themselves if they suddenly woke up one morning with an unimaginably huge fortune and the keys to the White House in their pockets.

He is me. That’s what they’ve been saying when displaying Trump’s flags and signs every day for the last four or five years.

And there, finally, is the answer to the question, How can people still back Trump after all the shit he’s pulled? After he’s screwed up this nation’s relationships with its allies, after he’s dismantled the government’s environmental protection apparatus, after he’s rammed through tax cuts for hundred-millionaires, leaving the middle class to pick up a greater share of the burden of supporting America, after he’s defanged all the federal consumer and workplace protections he could find, after he insulted and demeaned handicapped people, fat people, brown people, foreign people, Muslim people, urbanites, immigrants, asylum seekers, women, veterans, prisoners of war, and everybody who, again, was not Donald J. Trump or anybody related to him?

The answer is they still back him because he is their avatar, their icon, their god, for chrissakes. Throughout human history, people have created gods in their own image, created them to validate who they were, to tell everyone else who and what they were. They still do it today. And their new god is Donald J. Trump. He is me.

That’s why you can’t argue a Trumpist away from the outgoing president. You’re asking them to deny who they are. You’re asking them to admit the identity they’ve assumed is warped. Nobody wants to lose their identity.

To tens of millions of Americans, He will always be me.

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11/16/2020
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1984, Apollo 11, Donald Trump, Earworm, Manuel Noriega, Robert Goddard, Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66, The Turtles

Hot Air: Torture & Tyranny, Happy Monday!

Two things, today. First:

Stuck

Back when I was a kid, I’d heard of Sérgio Mendes and Basil ’66. It was a small combo featuring a pair of female singers that produced a few bossa nova/jazz/funk singles and some LPs that the kind of self-identified sophisticates who read Playboy had on their hi-fi’s.

I didn’t pay much attention to the group because I was too busy listening to the Beatles and the Stones and even the Turtles. Or, I should say, especially the Turtles.

The Turtles, the Coolest Geeks Around.

Over the ensuing decades, my musical tastes have broadened and I’ve become extremely partial to the Brazilian sounds of samba and its stepchild, bossa nova. I delve regularly into the recordings of Joāo Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Walter Wanderley, Elis Regina, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa, among many others.

So, the other night, I was surfing through YouTube looking for new songs and came upon something called “Pretty World” by Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66. Hmm, I thought, let’s give it a spin. I did and the thing turned out to be the biggest earworm I’ve experienced in years.

It’s the most insipid tune imaginable, in terms of lyrics, melody, and arrangement. Here’s a sampling of the words:

Why don’t we take a little piece of summer sky,

Hang it on a tree.

For that’s the way to start to make a pretty world,

For you and me.

And for the sun we’ll take a lemon bright balloon, You can hold the string.

Oh, can’t you see that little world of ours will be,

The prettiest thing.

I want to scream!

Later, the two female singers harmonize that in this prettiest of worlds, “Nothing must be made but breakfast and love.”

I want to break things!

There’s a little one-measure keyboard bridge, repeated twice, that’s about as musically vapid and inane as the tinny canned calliope in a carnival merry-go-round.

I’ve got to control myself!

Turns out Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66 churned out a kind of Disney-version of South American music. It’s sort of like the real thing but, all in all, it’s not really. That’s no sin. All I have to do is not listen to it — and I haven’t.

That is, I haven’t clicked the play button on my laptop. But the damned song has been playing over and over and over and over and over in my head for the last week! It’s insane, I tell you.

Get out! Get out! Get out!

Earworms are torture. It’s no wonder the US Army used blaring music to drive Manuel Noriega out of his compound back in January, 1990. Apparently George Orwell never thought of it, preferring his character O’Brien to torture Winston Smith to the point of madness via a face-cage containing a rat rather than, say, playing for poor Smith over and over and over again something like “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me).”

I believe I’ll survive this bout of psychosis. “Pretty World,” one day, hopefully soon — very soon, dear god please! — will be forgotten. But, honestly, what a bizarre thing it is for us to flagellate ourselves so.

At least nine noted researchers and psychologists have studied and written about earworms, Oliver Sacks among them. There’s even a formal medical term for the phenomenon: Involuntary Musical Imagery, or INMI. Some 98 percent of people experience earworms. A study sponsored by the American Psychological Association actually found that the most common earworm among those polled was Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” I’ve never heard the song, thank goodness.

One group of scientists suggested in a paper doing anagrams or Sudoku puzzles can break the cycle or even reduce the occurrence of earworms. Another group actually advises sufferers to chew gum.

I’ll try anything.

Second:

Baby Steps

All great advances come incrementally. The electric lightbulb wasn’t invented without the discovery and understanding of electricity, the means to generate electric power, the ability to create a vacuum inside the glass bulb, the resilience and brilliance of a charged tungsten filament, etc. The automobile depended on the discovery and refinement of petroleum, the interworking design of pistons, rods and the camshaft, the transfer of torque energy though the drive shaft to the wheels, etc. That is, is if you consider the age of the automobile an advancement. As the planet warms and species die off and the weather becomes a horror show, we really have to reconsider whether it was all worth it for every-damned-body to have an SUV so they can go four blocks to the Kroger for fifty-five pounds of steaks and ground beef, which itself is destroying millions of acres of rainforest and arable land that might otherwise produce a healthy grain or two.

Whatever. Countless seemingly insignificant inventions and developments precede any great achievement. Nothing happens like magic, like a miracle, popping into existence so suddenly, so unexpectedly that people gasp in shock. Yeah, they may gasp in awe at, say, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module landing on the Moon in July, 1969, but no one was surprised because humankind had been toying with rockets for warfare and fun for the previous half century.

Robert Goddard and the First Liquid-Fueled Rocket, 1914.

Same goes for horrible happenings. Hitler didn’t climb out from a cave. Wars don’t start in the snap of a finger. And, of course, climate catastrophe has been racing toward a climax ever since the first internal combustion engine was built.

This year, today, the President of the United States is refusing to acknowledge that he lost the general election, both by popular vote and in the Electoral College. He’s tweeting and pouting and raging and suing everybody in sight. His federal administrator in charge of presidential transition is refusing to get to work. He’s moaning about voter fraud without producing any evidence. He’s shrieking about some huge, vague conspiracy involving the Democratic Party and the mainstream media and everybody else up to and including the Mexicans, BLM advocates, and Tom Hanks.

His gambit is not going to work. He will vacate the White House at noon, January 20th. We’ll say, Hurrah, democracy works!

But Li’l Duce, as he has in countless ways since he won the presidency on a technicality in 2016, has moved the bar, lowered the standard, muddied the waters. Pick a metaphor; it doesn’t matter. What does is the next guy who comes along and thinks himself greater than the nation, greater than the very idea of democracy itself, will stand on Pres. Gag’s shoulders and bring us even closer to authoritarianism, to tyranny than the outgoing president. He may very well push us over the edge.

So, yeah, cheer nine and a half weeks from today when Joe Biden swears out the oath. But don’t think we’re home free. The term of the disgraceful 45th President of the United States very well may be merely an incremental step toward a glum and alarming development.

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11/06/2020
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Donald Trump, Electoral College, Gerrymandering, US Presidential Elections

Hot Air: It’s People, Not Dirt

Longtime Bloomington city council member Susan Sandberg has found a terrific image illustrating where people live in this holy land and why all those dumb maps that show Democratic voters segregated in tiny little enclaves here and there while Republican voters are spread over enormous tracts of land are, basically, full of shit.

Republicans often refer to those latter-mentioned maps to make the logically insupportable point that these tiny ghettoes of Dems somehow have connived their way into sharing power with the vast coast-to-coast swathes of GOP-ers and Trumpists. And, honestly, those maps do look alarmingly unbalanced. Let’s watch as the map Susan found transforms from a land representation to a population one:

 

Truth is, thanks to the Electoral College and the Republicans’ extremely effective efforts at gerrymandering and voter suppression, that party has garnered power far beyond its numbers. To wit: Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight United States presidential elections. If this were a true one-person, one-vote democratic republic, there’d have been a democratic president for 24 of the last 28 years. And, truth be told, the one prez race the Republicans actually won was the reelection of the incumbent in 2004. People, remember, tend not to like to throw leaders out unless there are dramatic or extenuating circumstances. Plus, we were still involved in two wars at the time, another reason voters wanted to stay the course. Had Al Gore been declared winner thanks to the popular vote in ’00, he’d have been the incumbent next time around and he’d have been the wartime C-in-C. (Of course, if Gore were the boss at that time, the Afghanistan war would have been wrapped to one extent or another without having been left undone by the Iraq war, a strictly Republican gambit.)

Not only that, if one totals all the votes earned by Senate and House candidates, the Dem vote far outnumbers the Republican even though the GOP has run Congress in part and wholly for the last ten years. Democratic candidates for the US Senate, for instance, in 2016 outpolled their Republican rivals by 53.8-42.4 percent, yet the Republicans held a firm grip on that chamber. That same year, Democratic candidates for the House bested their Republican counterparts, nationally, by 49.1-48.0 yet, somehow, the Republicans retained control of the House after that election.

Truth is, this is a Democratic nation.

Then again, throwing a bucket of ice water on this argument is the fact that some 70 million people have voted for Li’l Duce in this year’s election. That’s about 49 percent of the participating populace.

Here’s the biggest truth I’ll share herein: when it comes to President Gag and his fans, I’m baffled.

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11/04/2020
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2020 US Presidential Election, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Resist

Hot Air: Our Two Faces

The 2020 presidential election is still up in the air as I type this.

Old Joe Biden is about 3 million actual votes ahead of Li’l Duce and leads the incumbent by a 248-214 Electoral College count.

From The Guardian at 4:20 PM EST, Wednesday, November 4, 2020.

Nevertheless, it’s nearly 24 hours after many polls closed and we still don’t know who’ll be taking the oath of office next January. A candidate needs 270 EC votes to win. The actual vote count is relatively irrelevant, something we have to remedy but won’t until a Republican wins the popular vote but loses the EC. Then we’ll see some action.

Anyway, President Gag already has amassed 4 million more votes than he did four years ago. This despite everything he’s done during his term in office: withdrawing from the Paris Accords; quitting the Iran-nuclear pact; dismantling many, if not most, federal agencies; trying to throttle the Postal Service; calling for a return to the darkest days of the nuclear arms race; voiding or annulling hundreds of environmental protections. The insults. The bizarre behavior. The obsessive tweeting. The pussy grabbing. The mocking of the handicapped reporter. The utter lack of respect for John McCain’s prisoner of war experience and the Muslim family’s tragic loss of a US soldier. The comical, if it wasn’t so awful, mishandling of the coronavirus crisis.

Some 67.7 million people at this hour have iterated that they want him as their leader, him as the symbol of America, him to steer the course of this holy land.

Perhaps Old Joe is on his way to victory. The Democrats will keep the House and just may take control of the Senate (although I wouldn’t bet on it).  Even so, more people went for P. Gag than did in 2016.

All this proves one thing: we are a divided nation, almost irreparably so. There are two Americas right now. One that says, beaming proudly, when they cast their gaze upon Li’l Duce, “There goes my leader.” The other, discouraged and fretful, says, “There goes my country.”

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11/02/2020
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Barack Obama, Dan Quayle, Donald Trump, Jeffrey C. Isaac, John McCain, Joseph Stalin, Mitch Daniels, Mitt Romney, Pol Pot, Sarah Palin, The Bulwark

Hot Air: A New Perspective

Our long national nightmare may be over and done with after the polls close tomorrow. National? Hell, it’s been a planetary nightmare, for pity’s sake!

Then again, let me tweak the above statement a bit. Tomorrow may signal the beginning of the end of the nightmare, something I’ve been warning about for months. My pal Jeff Isaac cites this piece, making the same point in the conservative-lite website The Bulwark.

The point is even if Li’l Duce gets his well-deserved ass-whipping tomorrow, he’ll still be in office for another 89 days, plenty of time for him to dismantle our democratic republic even more than he has already.

So, to torture the analogy further, for the next two and a half months we may be trying to rouse ourselves out of the the troubled sleep we’ve been in since 2016 even as the gremlins and ogres and monsters and swarms of rats and bees, the falling from an airplane, the drowning in the backyard pool, the being caught naked outdoors, the looming high school semester final you’re not prepared for — all the beastly terrors that torment us as we repose in the arms of Morpheus — continue to flood our half-awake imaginations.

But, beginnings are good. Throwing President Gag’s sorry carcass out of the White House tomorrow at the polls will only be a start but, of course, a journey of a thousand miles…, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I realize I’m about to stun into catatonia the loyal followers of this global communications colossus but the hellish Trump regime just may have done something good for us. Not good in the sense of, say, ending world hunger or curing one or another of the cancers but, like the journey that begins with a first step, even the slightest good is a net positive.

Here’s the good thing: the presidency of one Donald John Trump has put politics in perspective for those of us who reside, metaphorically, on my side of the fence. See, when I first came to this bizarre state back in 2009, the Democrats, the liberals, the progressives and everybody else to the left of Dan Quayle (Hah! Bet you hadn’t thought of that name in decades.) viewed the relatively innocuous likes of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Then, when Mitt Romney, Barack Obama’s white clone, challenged the incumbent president in 2012, we all gasped in horror that he’d take a page from Pol Pot and turn America into a westernized Killing Field. I’m exaggerating, natch, but not by as much as you might think.

Brethren?

We ran around like chickens sans tetes, worrying about the hell in a hand basket we were surely falling into under the malignant watch of Daniels or the putative reign of Romney. And what of John McCain, who ran the first broadside against Obama in 2008? He was close enough to his opponent on the political spectrum to flash him a subtle wink yet, in our petrified eyes, a win by him would surely have turned this holy land into a tyranny, or at least into another c. 1960s Alabama.

It must be conceded, though, that McCain selected as his running mate an unprepared, incurious, anti-intellectual dingbat of a half-term Alaska governor — and a wannabe beauty queen and aspiring small potatoes TV talking head at that. Sarah Palin was the Republican Party’s failed experiment in creating a franken-candidate, although they did learn from their mistake, bringing us to their successful model, our current president.

And herein lies the aforementioned good thing. Now we know what happens when the American electorate elects on a whim the worst possible person to take the reins of government. We get a vengeful, impulsive, ignorant, corrupt, pathological liar who appeals to all the worst instincts in humanity.

This, my friends, is what we should have been living in terror of for the last 25-50 years. The likes of Mitch Daniels and Mitt Romney were merely guys whose philosophy of governing were different than ours. Yet we shrieked and moaned about them as if they were sexual predators, tinpot dictator wannabes, and Constitutional vandals. Sickos. Terrorists in business suits. Family dynasty progenitors. All of which, BTW, we wound up getting in one package, known unaffectionately herein as Li’l Duce.

My guess is as P. Gag goes down in flames tomorrow, his party (if they have any sense about them at this point, which is a consideration after all) will commence to mend their ways and revert to something resembling a norm.

And, should that occur, mirabile dictu, we won’t have to live in panic at the prospect of every single Republican coming down the pipe. I say this even though I am deeply committed never, ever to vote for one so long as the party refuses to back the ERA, continues to appeal to white supremacists, pretends climate catastrophe hasn’t begun yet, and fights tooth and claw against universal, single-payer health care.

From now on, it is to be profoundly hoped, we won’t view all Republicans as a Stalin, even if their current top dog fancies himself a Putin.

Brothers.

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10/16/2020
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Donald Trump, Milton Berle, Resist, Television

Hot Air: Show’s Over

I’ve been so petrified by the rise and rule of Li’l Duce, fearing a hostile takeover of the US by him and his family, that the only logical outcome of his arrival on the scene escaped me. His people are getting tired of his act. They want to change the channel.

He’s never been anything but a cheap TV star, the 2010s version of Milton Berle. The TV audience ate him up and snickered in everybody else’s faces when he did the most outlandish things. But even his base is falling asleep in front of the TV (that is, except for the radical militia terrorists and the dyed-in-the-wool racists — they’re with him until the end of time). More people tuned in to Biden’s snooze-fest than Trump’s burlesque show. That’s just one piece of evidence bolstering my argument. Another is the long, long, long, long, long long, long lines at polling places across America.

Nobody in my lifetime has driven more people to the polls than President Gag. I’d like to kick them all in their asses for voting for him in the first place in ’16, or opting to sit that election out, but let’s bygones be bygones. We’re seeing a national cancellation of the show.

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