23 I 2021: The “Patriot” Party

I’ve read rumors that former president Trump, by way of avenging himself on the United States of America, is investigating the possibility of founding a third party to be called “The Patriot Party.” Of course, “patriot,” as I’ve complained before, doesn’t mean patriot in any ordinary sense of the term. “Patriot” is the 21st-century equivalent of “Good old boy,” sc. Someone “like us,” one who shares our prejudices, and, when all is said and done, will hate the people we hate. So I guess The Patriot Party would be a good title for a party composed of the sort of people that Trump attracts. 

Of course, the Patriot Party, like any other, is bound to have factions within it, and it may take someone with Trump’s charism to keep it all together. The factions would include The Evangelicals, The White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the Xenophobes, the Patriarchists, the Gun Nuts, the Downhome Soldiers of Fortune (militias), the Anti-environmentists, Anti-scientists, Conspiracy Addicts, and the Abortion-fixated. And, of course, non-violent criminals, like grifters and embezzlers and filers of fake bankruptcies, will be welcome, as will, no doubt, well-to-do sex-offenders and mobsters who have good tailors.

On consideration, however, I don’t think the diverse interests and enthusiasms will prove divisive. These factions have so much in common that no incidental differences could imperil party unity.

21 I 2021: Soaring/boring ambition

Two of the Trump residue, Stephen Miller, fascist, racist, and cruel, and Sen. Ted Cruz, Ambition’s son, have started what will be a barrage of denunciations of President Biden. Each was inept in his own way, but the details of their criticisms are less important, I think, than the timing.

They want to get an early start in the coming race to become the new Trump. They are both morbidly ambitious. Cruz has shown this again and again by his political shenanigans. Miller does not so much seek the public eye, but, brighter than Cruz, shrouds his Trumpism and implements his neo-Nazi cruelties in secret.

So the race is on and we wait to see which of these and many other power hungry people will be the Trumpers’ new messiah.

19 I 2021: Lindsey needs an exorcist

I see that Lindsey Graham has quickly relapsed into his old degeneracy and is mindlessly boosting Trump once again. He lapsed and distanced himself from Trump for a moment after the invasion of the Capitol, but now he’s back playing this old role.

Again I have to ask: What does Trump have on Lindsey Graham? Charity suggests that maybe Lindsey lost his mind four years ago. Otherwise we have to wonder what would compel him to support Trump and all his works and pomps so slavishly, even to the point of making himself a golfing buddy and looking away from the Trump’s cheating also on the golf course.

So is Trump blackmailing Lindsey? I’m sure Trump would if he could. Or is it something even more compelling? Is Lindsey, like so many Republicans, possessed by a devil? In that case, we need to find a brave exorcist to expel Lindsey’s devil along with all the demons that possess the Republican Party.

18 I 2021: Reactionaries set the Capitol afire

It is now clear that the crowd at the Capitol was not just a spontaneous gathering that happened to include criminals and crazies, but was assembled according to plan by a coalition of Tea Party leftovers, Trump campaign aides and former White House staffers, a rogues gallery of old and new right-wing women’s groups, and members of the House of Representatives.

Now one could say that these conspirators really meant no harm, that they were only bringing together genuinely concerned citizens for a peaceful protest against the imagined theft of the election. But that would be like claiming that the heap of oily rags purposely stuffed into a closed space had nothing to do with the ensuing fire.

17 I 2021: Final human sacrifice to Trump

Yesterday Dustin Higgs was executed at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, IN. He was the 13th death row inmate to be killed since July 2020 and the third to be killed in Trump’s final week as President.  

The whole business has a queer, Republican smell about it. No honest pharmaceutical firm would supply the poison, so it was obtained from a secret supplier. Someone decided not to have employees of the federal government act as executioners, so the execution was carried out by “contractors” who were paid in cash. (I thought contract executioners were found only in the underworld.)

A lot of deceit was fired off in defense of these murders. The Justice Department proclaimed “Seeking the death penalty and carrying out capital sentences is not a political issue, nor have political considerations influenced the department’s decisions.” Clearly the Justice Department thinks we are all astonishingly gullible, or else it is simply without shame. Bill Barr himself played the family card, “we owe it to the victims and their families.” I don’t know how much these executions cheered up the victims or what they could do for the families except satisfy a need for revenge.

These executions were brought to us by a coalition of pro-life supporters: contributions from an unimaginably greedy President, an enslaved Department of Justice, a compromised Supreme Court, a manipulative Republican Party, and a host of false Christians made these murders possible.

15 I 2021: Naked without my gun

A number of Republican legislators, inspired, no doubt, by Rep. Lauren Boebert, a.k.a. The Capitol Glockette, have refused to pass through the metal detectors installed to protect our Congress. Clearly they are fishing for fanatic Trumpist votes, for the insurrectionist vote, and for the gun-nut votes. 

Some of our fellow citizens are passionately protective of their guns because they have made the gun the symbol of their whiteness, their lawlessness, and their manhood. This firearms/phallus fixation is based on their inability to tell their pistols from their peckers, and, by gum, the feds are going to have to wrest both from their dying hands. The chief instigator of this falsehood-based paranoia is the NRA. That Association’s bankruptcy and flight to Texas show that the premier “gun rights” organization has long been an enormous scam.

14 I 2021: Trump Flag, the The new Stars and Bars

The news reports that the insurrectionist photographed parading in the Capitol with a large Confederate flag, Keven Seefried, has been busted. Mr. Seefried’s home state, Delaware, was a slave state, but the people of Delaware voted in early 1861 not to secede from the Union. Even so, Seefried chose to display the flag of rebellion, secession, and slavery of black to white. This constellation of evils was defeated in the 1860s, but has risen up again and again, and in 2020-2021 has once more attacked the United States of America.

But an additional flag of racism and rebellion was seen everywhere at the insurrection. Rep. Cori Bush reports in her account of her experience of the attack on the Capitol: “I could see Trump flags and Confederate flags gradually moving closer. I froze in disbelief.” This dramatizes the fact that the Trump flag is the new Confederate flag, for the Trump flag also symbolizes lawlessness, rebellion, and white supremacy.

13 I 2021: An overlooked Trump atrocity

It is reported that 4,400+ Americans died Tuesday as a result of contracting COVID-19. Trump is not to blame for the fact of COVID-19, nor for COVID-19’s entering the United States. But I believe he must bear the blame for a vast number of all the deaths. He minimized the threat of the disease, telling lie upon lie, for fear that the truth of COVID-19 might hurt “his” economy. His deceit and delays guaranteed that the United States would be almost wholly unprepared for the pandemic. He screwed up the response to the pandemic with his silly recommendations of cures and with numberless obstructions of the efforts of expert physicians and scientists.

By his words and example he started the anti-masker movement, and not wearing a mask came to be a sign of solidarity with Trump. He held some notable super-spreader events, infecting staff and guests at the White House and who knows how many at his maskless rallies. And now he and his incompetent political appointees have made a complete muddle of the vaccine program.

His mishandling of COVID-19 was not a pardonable lapse in judgement or a failure to realize the gravity of the pandemic. No, in a planned series of misrepresentations and delays he put what he perceived to be his interests before the lives of some 388,000 Americans so far, and the die-off has no end in sight. 

He is a mass murderer.

13 I 2021: Collaborators in Trump’s big lies can’t let go of them

There was an article in today’s Post Dispatch by Eugene Robinson in which he described the current crisis as “a battle for objective truth over paranoid fantasy,” and observes that the Republican Party is on the wrong side.

I find remarkable the continued adherence of Republicans to the lies of Trump. This suggests that they think complicity in these lies is still to their advantage. 

Most of the Republicans in Congress are educated people of average intelligence who ought to know that

1)    Wearing masks is a proven way to restrict the spread of COVID-19. 

But while legislators were hiding in cramped quarters during the attack on the Capitol, Republican congressmen were filmed resolutely refusing to wear masks, just like Trump. Do they still believe that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu? Why did they refuse the masks that were offered to them? Would it have hurt them to put on a mask in those close quarters? No, but they thought that putting on masks would make them seem less than Trumpian.

2)    The presidential election was deemed sound and fair by all responsible parties who have examined it.

But we still have Republican legislators explicitly or implicitly questioning the validity of the election, echoing Trump’s lies in this sphere as well. Do they believe that the election officials, state by state, who monitored the election are corrupt? Do they too believe that the great number of judges who rejected allegations of fraud were ideologically driven or on the take?

I suppose that maybe a few of these Trumpian legislators do believe that COVID-19 is a hoax and that the presidential election was rigged. But most of them are, it seems to me, far too intelligent to have been taken in by Trump’s obvious lies. So why support what they know to be untrue?

They do so because covering up for Trump and repeating and defending his lies is an ingrained habit developed over a period of four years, and because a lot of their voters, convinced by the lies that Trump and they have been telling, would be alienated if they departed from Trumpian orthodoxy. Rejection of masks and doubting the election are badges of Trumpism that they are afraid to give up because numbers of their constituents choose to FEEL with great determination that Trump’s lies are the truth.