16 VI 2022: Misc. complaints: Republican trash in House of Representatives, political abuse of women, contagious mendacity.

Headline from today’s CNN site: House Republicans plot investigative revenge on January 6 panel as Trump itches for payback.

The fact that trash like the so-called Freedom Caucus can be elected to high office causes me to doubt the viability of democracy, at least in the United States. The past ten years have shown us that universal suffrage cannot work here. Democracy depends on voters, and on a particular kind of voter, sc., one who is thoughtful, dispassionate, and informed. Half of America’s voting population plainly fail to measure up to this standard.

The efforts of the minority Anti-female (a.k.a. Right to Life) Movement to impose their preferences on the majority has not abated. Republican state legislators vie with one another to think up new forms of abuse of women. These legislators, usually from one of our slave states, remind me of students stoked up on “school spirit.” No one can have too much school spirit, and anyone thought to be wanting in school spirit is a pariah. So there is no limit to pep-rally posturing, declarations of esteem for “the team” and hatred for its opponents, no limit to the foolish, wasteful paraphernalia that fans are expected to purchase. So too, no one can be too anti-abortion, too anti-women. Excesses in this area are rewarded in Republican states.

Now we learn that even the Secret Service has been destroying evidence relevant to the Insurrection. Trump’s dishonesty is like an aggressive infection that has spread itself to anyone associated with Trump, from aides to the entire Republican Party. To them applies the phrase from Scripture: “Every man is a liar!”


14 VII 2022: Good help is hard to find!

On 18 Dec. 2020 President Trump, leaving no stone unturned, met at the White House with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the once-pardoned Michael Flynn.

On 21 Dec. he met with a group of Republican congressmen at a meeting arranged by Rep. Mo Brooks. The representatives who attended were: Rep. Brian Babin, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rep. Louie Gohmert, Rep. Paul Gosar, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Jody Hice, Rep. Jim Jordan, Rep. Scott Perry, Then-Rep-elect. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Bold type indicates the names of those who received or have been seeking a pardon from Trump.

Who would assemble a group like this? and for what purpose? These two meetings highlight Trump’s desperation, lack of discrimination, and his true character as he surrounded himself with sleazes and crazies like these. All these false counselors were relentlessly telling Trump what he wanted to hear and driving away his temperate advisers. Their manic energy combined with Trump’s self-aggrandizing bitterness to produce the Insurrection of January Sixth.

No one with ambitions to accomplish anything at all, would select a crew like this, no one with a modicum of sanity and prudence. The delusionists at the Dec. 20 meeting heated up Trump’s delusions, and the chorus of yes-men of Dec. 21 kept the pot boiling. Good help is hard to find, and America can be grateful that Trump got the help he deserved.

7 VII 2022: Conservatives and slaves

The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom is finally removing Boris Johnson. It has taken them all too long to ditch Johnson, but they have finally united in absolute rejection of this destructive anomaly in British politics. The contrast with the Republican Party in the United States is altogether striking. Trump’s behavior has been much more destructive and far more criminal than Boris Johnson’s, but a majority of Republicans remain enslaved to Donald Trump, their worst enemy.

3 July 2022: Dictators for life?

Haiti’s one time blood-soaked dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier was “elected” President for Life, as had been a number of his predecessors, as have quite a number of dictators world-wide. This title is, of course, a euphemism for Dictator for Life. In the U.S. no elected official in the executive and legislative branches can hold office for life. However, the federal judiciary is dominated by appointees who hold office until retirement or death. This anomalous lifetime tenure in office is intended to free the judges from having to seek re-election and so from subservience to any particular voting base, and supports an indifference to politics that we would expect of an honest judge.

But federal judges are appointed by the President, must be confirmed by the Senate, and are thus the same as all other high-level political appointees except that their terms of service do not end with a change of government. So if a justice of the Supreme Court is nominated because of her/his political orientation, upon the recommendation of an radical political organization (e.g., the Federalist Society), and is hastily confirmed only by the votes of a temporary majority in the Senate, the odds are, it seems to me, that the justice so appointed may continue as a creature of the political faction that brought about his/her appointment and confirmation throughout her/his lifetime term. And if connivance and misfortune create enough justices of this sort to constitute a majority on the Court, we have all that is needed for a judicial dictatorship for life.

30 VI 2022: A census of “Trump world”

I am seeing, as the Jan 6 Hearings progress, more and more references to “Trump World” or “Trumpworld.” This expression is puzzling. What and where is Trump World? One could think that it exists only in Donald Trump’s mind, an imaginary world of shining hyperbole that orbits around King Donald. But as commonly used, the term means Trump and all the more public members of his entourage, Donny Jr. and Eric, Ivanka and Jared, Mark Meadows, Roger Stone, Sean and Laura, Stormy Daniels, Jim Jordan, Steve Bannon, and Trump’s legal team: Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, John Eastman. However, there are many more inhabitants of Trump World than these, and I would like to see them dragged out of the shadows so that we will know their names as well.

Trump’s campaign to retain power has been long-lasting and multi-faceted. Now among Trump’s well known deficiencies are his attention deficit disorder, his disinclination to read anything, his impetuosity, and his furious impatience. These are not the character traits of one who is to design and execute a grand scheme over an extended period of time. I am ready to agree that the Big Lie was actually born of Trump’s lifelong conviction that he is absolutely the best and therefore unbeatable unless someone cheated him. But unless the Big Lie is surrounded and supported by a lot of little lies and little liars it must look like the paranoid delusion it is. Quickly deploying so many vocal supporters and convincing them of the truth of the Big Lie, or, rather, convincing them to pretend that the Big Lie is true, requires a capacity for detailed planning and an organizational ability well beyond Trump’s poor powers. No, Trump had many co-conspirators, many more than we know, in disseminating the Big Lie and organizing and funding the attempted coup. I want to know specifically who were these seditionists, and I want to see them brought to justice along with the more public and less effective members of Trump’s entourage.

28 VI 2022: The Party of Hostile Misogyny

Jill Filipovic published a piece on , “Cruel GOP rhetoric about rape survivors and abortion is far more than words,” that concluded: “The GOP has become the party of hostile misogyny.” I surely agree, though I would have phrased it “has long been,” for misogyny has long been a foundation stone in the Republican base. 

American males and their females suffer from what I would call “gynophobia,” i.e., fear of women, and that fear metastasizes immediately into the anger and hatred of misogyny. And, yes, women of the Republican base are misogynists as well, for they fear, as they ought, that the equality and independence of women will destabilize their privileged world of class consciousness and racial discrimination.

So the pot of misogyny, ipso facto hostile, is always simmering in the U.S.A., just waiting to be brought to a boil by demagogic dog whistles, pseudo-Christian posturing, and declarations of disdain for women like the recent Supreme Court ruling.

27 VI 2022: Human life begins at … we’ll have to get back to you about this.

Quite a few states have seized the opportunity to ban abortion consequent on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Some had, in fact, seized the opportunity well before the demise of Roe v. Wade by passing so-called “trigger laws,” bans on abortion that were required to take effect immediately upon the repudiation of Roe v. Wade. I guess the reversal of Roe v. Wade came as no surprise to many reactionary state legislatures. I guess you could wonder if they knew that “the fix was in” with the Court.

Now we will see what kind of ban the anti-abortion states will enact or, anticipating the end of Roe v. Wade, have already enacted. The states with trigger laws have banned abortion absolutely, save in the case of peril to the health or life of the mother (and I wonder how long this exception is going to last). Other states have laws on the books that permit abortion during the first 6 weeks of pregnancy, during the first 15 weeks, during the first 20 weeks, and during the first 22 weeks, or until fetal cardiac activity can be detected. No doubt, some of these grace periods in which abortion is permitted will be shortened or eliminated, as legislators compete to seem more radically anti-abortion than their colleagues.

There appears to be some confusion or, perhaps, breadth of opinion about when life begins, some urging that life begins upon conception, others allowing abortion within 6 weeks after conception or 15 weeks or 20 weeks or 22 weeks after conception. The easiest answer to the question of when life begins, when abortion would be murder, is to say “It is my belief that life begins at conception” or, for the politically motivated, to say “Let’s assume that life begins at conception.” Thus, that life begins at conception is both an article of faith and a best guess. But it remains to see the reaction to this of people who don’t share the faith or who are reluctant to make a guessing game of human life?

25 VI 2022: Not a majority decision

The faction that brought about the appointment of Trump’s Anti-abortion Triad does not represent a majority of the American people but is, rather, a clique that manipulates the frightened reactionaries among American voters who are aroused and driven by fear of the end of white domination, the end of Christian hegemony, and, most frightening, the end of patriarchal supremacy. This greatest fear arises from the increasing independence of women, and a crucial part of this independence has been a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion. 

The political opposition to abortion has nothing to do with the unborn. The majority of pro life politicians don’t really care about the lives of the unborn, no more than they care about the lives of anyone born who is not one of themselves. But they “got religion,” i.e., became ever increasingly pro life as a way to hang on to the few voting blocs on which they can always count, frightened males, Catholics, and evangelicals.

Within the pro-life movement there are, of course, many who are motivated by their authentically religious beliefs. But it was not the devout who managed the appointment of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Rather they were put in place by a clique who seek to retain power by promoting the division of the American people.