Politics

13 IX 2020: Predictions

I’ve been musing about what might happen if Trump loses the election.

Here are some random predictions:

Even if Biden were to have a landslide lead over Trump, the Trumpists will be yelling for years to come “We was robbed!”

In the interim period between the election and Trump leaving office:

Trumpists’ slogans will be “take the money and run” and “burn it down.”

Government money will flood into Trump properties..

Efforts will be made by legislators and Trumpist judges to make permanent the current distribution of wealth.

Deportation of immigrants of color will be expanded and speeded up.

William Barr will be hired by a posh law firm or become a lobbyist or defect to Russia or be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Trump will organize the largest ever legal defense fund and team to be ready to delay his being sent to jail.

Peace-criminals like Stephen Miller will find refuge in right-wing “think” tanks.

Racist gun-nuts will come out of the woodwork and parade in the cities to menace non-Nazis.

Large numbers of Trump’s minions and of his supporters in Congress will begin declaring they never really liked Trump.

Evangelical clergy who have supported Trump will begin, with crocodile tears, to confess “We have sinned,” and go on as usual.

9 III 2019: Democratic Party

I read today a title on the CNN site: “8 times Democrats clashed with each other since taking power.” It has always been this way with Democrats. Will Rogers’ description of the Democrats remains accurate: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

I insist on calling it “the Democratic Party” resisting an emerging anti-grammatical trend to call it “the Democrat Party.” I recall that years ago President Eisenhower and other Republicans of that era tried calling it “the Democrat Party,” and that President Harry Truman commented that it was fine for them to take two letters from “Democratic” if he could subtract two letters from the name of the opposition, making it “the Publican Party.”

16 IX 2018: Corruption all around

Well, things are going along very much as usual. But who can predict how everything will turn out? What will Trump have to lie about next? How much more complicit can the Republican congress be in Trump’s follies and deceptions? How crooked is Brett Kavanaugh? We cannot know this because the Republican coverup gang will not release all the data. I’m only guessing on the basis of what I’ve seen, but I think that Judge Kavanaugh is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. His vote on the Supreme Court is already bought and paid for.

29 VIII 2018: Josh Hawley and pseudo-theocracy

The newspaper brings news of a new phase in Ivy-leaguer Josh Hawley’s senatorial campaign. A while back he tried out “Small Town Values.” The cynicism of this prep-school, Ivy-league, affluent phony’s affirming small town values of which he knows nothing was obvious and so this sales pitch was shut down pretty quick. His new slogan is “religious liberty” which, he says, “is under attack in this country.”

Now it seems to me that the opposite is the case. Our society’s freedom from the coercion and duplicity of the pseudo-evangelicals has been under attack and very near destroyed. What Hawley means by religious freedom is the social and political dominance of the “chosen people,” the “real Christians,” just like it was in the good ole days, when brand-x Protestantism was the established church, when we kept Catholics and Jews in their place, when we persecuted foreigners and, at God’s command, slaughtered the Canaanites, sc., the native American.

He thinks preachers ought to be able to pitch politics from the pulpit without losing their church’s tax exemption. I think, rather, that churches should have no tax exemption at all, for this tax exemption amounts to a union of church and state. Moreover, the tax exemption is hardly needed. The mega-churches and tele-churches are awash in cash. The so-called Christian churches are an instrument of the political right and the political right will make sure they are well financed.

I wish Hawley would say what he feels without camouflage: “I am a disciple of Donald Trump. I am exploiting the anti-intellectual and reactionary elements in Missouri in order to gain power.”

27 VIII 2018: If it acts like a Nazi …

I am struck by the parallels between the Nazi purges of undesirables and the Trump regime’s treatment of immigrants. Immigrants of color have been the traditional scape-goats of the Republican party who have long aroused the ignorant against immigrants. Trump continues this and has set in motion a program of ethnic cleansing. To carry out his ethnic cleansing he has turned ICE into an American SS, agents who hunt down immigrants of color, imprison them in concentration camps called “detention centers,” or as surreptitiously as possible expel them from the United States.

As with the Nazis, Trump is supported in this by a remarkably large number of people who demand a return an “authentic America” that is white, protestant, and patriarchal. Trump’s gross demagoguery encourages their delusions. Delusions, because white supremacy, state religion, and patriarchy are all falling away, as the urgent intensity of current attempts to reassert them make quite clear.

23 VII 2018: Hand me the disinfectant!

Today I received a text message from Rep. Devin Nunes urging me to get behind “Our President and conservative majority.” What have I done? Why should the despicable Nunes reach out to me? Oh, I know. Some time ago, when Nunes was blathering about impeaching Rod Rosenstein, I sent Nunes an email in which I expressed my conviction that it was he, Nunes, that ought to be impeached, and thus my email address got into his listserve. Rep. Nunes’ behavior since that time has only strengthened my conviction. He is a thoroughgoing Trumpite, an opportunist, and died-in-the-wool sycophant, who finds the truth so awkward that he has to make up lies and conspiracies. I guess I’ll have to soak my iphone in disinfectant overnight.

12 VII 2018: Contempt FOR Congress

“Contempt of Congress” is used to threaten those who can’t or won’t answer captious questions and cooperate with unalloyed stupidity. But I’m free, so far, to feel and express my contempt for Congress. I watched some of the interrogation of Agent Peter Strzok on TV. The Republicans were sweating and straining to force reality to appear as they wanted it to appear, but Mr. Strzok’s tough and dexterous answers thwarted them at every turn. So three cheers for Strzok! – three raspberries for the Republican marionettes on the committee! I feel annoyed by the silliness of congressmen, as always. But their kissing up to the Trump, the American Nero, makes me feel ashamed.

7 VII 2018: Where should we look for barbarism?

CNN reports some of the stated views of Kansas State Senator Steve Fitzgerald, a candidate for the House of Representatives:

“Outside of Western civilization there is only barbarism.”

This very statement suggests he knows much more about barbarism than about any civilization.

“Our Judeo-Christian ethic is what is civilization.”

But wait, he virtually excludes the Judeo- part:

“And that is under attack here and abroad.

It goes by a different name. Christendom. It’s under attack.”

Who does he think he is, Urban II? and here’s that buzz-word Christendomwhich is dog-whistle talk for “us” as opposed to “them.”

“And even speaking about it can bring you under attack.

It has brought me under attack.”

Why do you suppose he was he attacked and by whom? I am a Christian and would gladly attack him because in his speech and attitude he is traducing Christianity and making a laughing-stock of Western civilization.

The article also reports that he maintains that Planned Parenthood is worse than a Nazi concentration camp.

Clearly he must know nothing either about Planned Parenthood or about Nazi concentration camps, but that does not keep him from pontificating like Archie Bunker (remember when Archie was funny?). Mr. Fitzgerald looks like a ready candidate for the unFreedom Caucus. Is he really such so ignorant? or is he cunningly pitching this foolishness to the ignoramuses in his district? I’m afraid he and his constituency bear grievous testimony to the state of American education. Trump and all he represents are only symptoms of the decay of our schools. It is the collapse of our educational system that is undermining American democracy more extensively and more irretrievably than Trump and all his minions.

4 VII 2018: A. Naïve retrospective judgements, B. The siege of Khan al-Amar

1948. “Vatican Under Fire for Tapping ‘Anti-Semitic’ Priest to Become Saint” is the headline of an item in today’s Daily Beast that reported “The Vatican is under fire from several Jewish groups for its move to recognize a Polish priest as a saint despite his record of anti-Semitic remarks.” Well, it turns out that “a Polish priest” is August Cardinal Hlond, primate of Poland 1926-1948.

Who are these ‘groups’?? I am weary of this sort of reporting. I want to know who they are, where they are coming from. There is such a thing as fraternal correction, there is also such a thing as slander, telling lies about another to diminish her prestige, and detraction, telling the truth about another with a view to diminishing his prestige. I need to know more about these ‘groups’ if I’m to decide whether this is an instance of fraternal correction or an essay in detraction/slander.

However this may be, I am very weary of the denunciation of admirable figures from the past simply because they did not share all our beliefs, or, rather, our highly selective, self-aggrandizing, and self-serving versions of these beliefs. Contemporaries have set themselves up as inquisitors, seeking in people of long ago traces of some prejudice that is offensive specifically to contemporary liberals, and if found, this prejudice serves as a warrant for the categorial and complete rejection of the past. The glamorous “hermeneutic of suspicion” must to applied, it seems, to all except contemporary illiberal liberals, who alone are sufficiently free of prejudice to sit in judgement on their betters.

 

Today’s Daily Beast also brought a report from Al-Jazeera of the siege of Khan al-Amar, a Bedouin village in occupied East Jerusalem. The invaders have decided to grab some more land by evacuating all the residents and demolishing the village so that the site can be seized by the occupiers. So the occupying troops showed up with the ubiquitous demolition equipment, and beat up and/or arrested those who stepped forward to protest. We’ve seen this pattern in 1940s Europe and now again and again in the contemporary Middle East. The project is the same, sc., to seize the territory, deport or enslave the inhabitants, colonize the newly desolate land, claim it as one’s own, and at last, when the results of the aggression are irreversible, to attempt to palliate the aggression by phony legal maneuvers and appeals to a higher power. And what is odd here is this: one group of semites has forcibly dispossessed another group of semites, seizing their and driving them out or installing them in concentration camps. And yet in the world’s eyes the term anti-semitic applies to a bias against only one of these groups. Isn’t this odd. How did it come about?

28 VI 2018: Trump sells out to Russia

The announced “summit” between Trump and Putin was arranged without informing those democracies that were once our allies. First the rigged election, then America’s unilateral abandonment of the environment, then the G6 where Trump invited the rogue Russians without consulting the others, then the endless Trumpian denials of any significant Russian tampering in his election, next the continuing Republican attack on the Special Counsel, Justice Dept., and any other agency that might bring Trump to justice, and now the secret summit at which Trump will sign over the USA to Putin.

Why does Trump, why does America cow-tow to Putin? Did Putin once sodomize Trump, a fact too embarrassing to be known by any? Does Russia own Trump financially? Trump never has worked well with money. Are the Republicans forcing a rapprochement with Russia …?

However unlike the last sounds, it may be the closest to the truth. The entire drift of right-wing politics since the election and re-election of Obama has been counter democratic, not counter Democratic, but counter democratic, i.e., contrary to democracy itself. We have seen clearly that large numbers of frightened Americans would rather be ruled by a dishonest strong man supported by a spineless, mindless Congress than share power with non-whites and non-Christians, and are willing to be sold out to the Russian Empire to maintain the status quo.