28 VII 2021: Joe Isuzu again

The Jan 6th Committee has begun to gather evidence about the Jan 6th Insurrection, to pierce through all the confusion and industrial-strength obfuscation that suround it. Nancy Pelosi facilitated the Committee’s work by wisely excluding from the Committee the deceit-prone congressmen the Republican establishment had put forward And so, in the face of massive resistance, the work of the Committee has begun.

Republican response to the first hearing has been muted, obvious, or old-hat. Rep. Andrew Clyde is still marketing his invention of insurrection-tourism, and Sen. Ron Johnson goes on affirming his faith in the “peaceful protest” myth. However, the creativity of the Republicans in Congress has been given new life by Rep. Elise Stefanik who has announced that Nancy Pelosi is to blalme for the Insurrection. This is truly star-quality hutzpah that shows that Stefanik can surpass even Trump in the shameless creativity of her deceit. 

25 VI 2021: Crowd was loving of what?

Trump has described the crowd that was soon to attack the Capitol as “loving.” But we must ask “loving of what?” For I do not think that the epithet “loving” can be applied to this mob-to-be in any ordinary sense.

What’s evident in the increasingly available videos of the Insurrection is whole-hearted hooliganism. Yes, there may have been a few deluded patriots in the crowd, but the vast majority seem to have been hooligans with a temporary cause. As usual, they wanted some uproar, wanted some violence, wanted to show off before one another, wanted to overcome the frustration they endure as across-the-board misfits. So they loved the vandalism, loved to abuse police, loved menacing the members of Congress, loved glorying in their own ignorance, and especially loved the publicity.

They were little different from sports mobs around the world, whether the soccer mobs in Europe or the football and basketball mobs of many a college campus, mobs that are thought-repressing and conscience-numbing, mobs in which what would otherwise sink to the bottom rises to the top. However, sports mobs usually have an occasion for their violence: long-standing or momentary hostility to “the other side,” losing a game, or winning a game. These things may not be the absolute cause of the violence, but they provide the occasion for it.

In the case of the insurrectionist mob, all the preconditions were there in the people assembled: a lot of anger about whatever, an incapacity for independent thinking, a desperate craving to “belong.” So the insurrectionists were pre-disposed to what they were to do. But they needed a cause, an “occasion.” They needed someone to point them towards the target they were ready to attack, and our traitorous President was just the one to do the pointing. It was his peak so far as demagogue and wrecker of law and order. The “loving” mob may have loved Trump, but clearly Trump loved the mob.

22 VII 2021: Why should we endure them? Why should we pay them?

I have seen more than enough this week of Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and of Congressman Jim Jordan. They seem to have an urgent need for attention almost as great as the perennial boy D. Trump. They are lacking in self-control and so cannot comply with the demands of decency and even the rules of congressional procedure. 

I’m sorry that Jim Jordan is still a jock, sorry that Rand Paul was taught no manners, and sorry that no one at all likes or admires Ted Cruz. But they should have dealt with their problems before they entered public office, for now they’re turning the Congress into a poorly behaved therapy group. They are wasting the time of their colleagues and the money of the American people. Well, the sleaze tends to rise to the top, and though their gaucheries might be tolerable. But their immature posturing, obstructionism, and lack of anger control is more than we should have to endure or to pay for. 

28 VI 2021: Trump’s lost cause

Donald Trump persists in his claim that the election was stolen from him. His claim may become comic, for I think investigation into the Trump Organization will show that it has usually been Trump that did all the stealing. Trump’s big lie campaign will continue to be enfeebled and soon members of the Cult and lying politicians will be the only one’s keeping the Grand Old Pretense alive. So I’m wondering if we are going to see “Stop the steal” transformed into another “Lost Cause.” We’ll see statues of Trump erected in the courthouse squares of all the most backward counties. These will be paid for by a new women’s organization, The Daughters of the Chicanery. And racists, misogynists, homophobes, and well-to-do preachers will, in their cups, shed a tear for their lost cause.

18 VI 2021: Attacks on Chinese-Americans

I have been both horrified and puzzled by the steep upsurge in the verbal and physical assaults on Chinese Americans. Who would behave in this way, and why? I suppose the attacks are due to terrified stupidity and enabled malice, terrified stupidity, because fools in fear of COVID19 lash out at those whom the King of Fools has told them are responsible, enabled malice, because violence-prone, envious, resentful people are always quick to take advantage of any imagined license given them by persons in authority.

Let me end with Mark Twain’s observations on the Chinese and White-Chinese relations in his memoir Roughing It. He writes of the Chinese and the treatment they received in his time.

“They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it – they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as elsewhere in America.”

16 VI 2021: Trump and D.O.J.

So we’ve learned of the pressure Trump and his helpers applied to the Department of Justice to get it to play along with Trump’s Big Lie.

Did this come as a surprise to anyone at all? If we learn Al Capone has bribed a government official, that too is no news. These crimes are noteworthy, to be sure, but they are not news because they are only what we should expect.

We learn too that it was not only a matter of White House exerting pressure on the D.O.J., but there was also a Quisling at work in the D.O.J. I refer to Jeffrey Bossert Clark, an assistant Attorney General, who seems to have been ready to sabotage the D.O.J. to ingratiate himself with Trump. We should not simply blow off Mr. Clark with a “sleaze will be sleaze” shrug, but investigation is required into his activities at the D.O.J.

4 VI 2021: Trump with Hitler in Argentina?

I heard some speculation online that if Trump is forced to stand trial he will flee the country. (I really don’t care why he leaves, so long as he leaves.)

The thought of Trump in exile made me wonder how the “base” would handle it. And I immediately thought of those die-hard Nazis that maintained that Hitler had escaped the Bunker and was living in Argentina, planning his return to power. Some such fantasy would work very well for the die-hard Trumpies. A large number of them are crazy already so lunacy like this would find a ready audience. And there will be the phone calls from Trump, with “experts” trying to figure out if it is really his voice. And, I imagine, there will be Trump sightings, some even supported by blurry photographs. And it will become a religious test for Trumpies to insist that Donald is down there in Argentina with Adolph planning their returns.

3 VI 2021: Rand Paul crowing on his dung-heap

I read that Senator Rand Paul, in the latest example of his chronically eccentric and obstructionist behavior, is claiming some kind of vindication for himself as a result of the publication of a pile of Dr. Fauci’s emails. Not only that, but Paul says he holds Dr. Fauci “morally responsible” for the COVID19 pandemic. 

I suppose he is claiming some vindication by way of an excuse for the amount of time he wasted showing off when Dr. Fauci testified before the Senate committee. As to moral responsibility, Sen. Paul should avoid making judgements about morality or responsibility, since, as a Trumpublican, he lacks any credibility in these spheres.

2 VI 2021: The Lounge Lizard Speaks

News report:

Criticism circulated of the [new Army recruiting] ads including from conservative media and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who responded to the ads by tweeting, “Holy crap, perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea.”

“We have the greatest military on earth, but Dem politicians & woke media are trying to turn them into pansies,” the Texas Republican senator added.

I don’t see how anyone who has groveled before Donald Trump for the last 5 years would want to call anyone else “emasculated.”

30 V 2021: Why did they die?

Memorial Day is here. It is a day to commemorate those who died in America’s wars and to assuage America’s guilt for sending these citizens out to die. We are constantly told that these men were heroes who died to protect our freedom. But how often was this the case? 

The Revolutionary War, War of 1812, the Civil War, and WWII can be said to have been fought to protect our freedom. However, I don’t think our freedom was at risk in ongoing genocidal Indian Wars, or the great landgrab of the Mexican War. The Spanish American War was the beginning of the American Empire, and the ensuing Philippine-America War was a colonial war to tighten our hold on the Philippines by doing away with native government and culture. High Wilsonian ideals were the propaganda for WWI, but the war is more likely to have been fought to stabilize Britain and France so that they could repay, with interest, funds borrowed from American bankers. Of the modern conflicts, the Korean War and the Vietnamese War were fought to maintain American zones of influence in far off Asia. Desert Storm was about oil. We don’t really know who we’ve been fighting in Lasting Freedom and the invasion of Afghanistan, but it is a real stretch to say they’ve been fought to protect American freedom.

In saying this, I maintain the highest respect for those who died in these wars, but their patriotism lay not so much in protecting freedom as in their obedience to the call of a country that exploited them to “protect American interests,” interests that had little to do with freedom and a lot to do with American capital.