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A little ridicule could go a long way, a modest suggestion

Sunday, April 11, 2021

I’ve been reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland, which argues that the United States, for a number of historical reasons which he explores, is particularly vulnerable to irrational behavior including, without limitation, extreme religiosity, susceptibility to grifters, and belief in conspiracy theories. It’s an entertaining read, and though sometimes I think he may be engaging in just a bit of exaggeration to support his arguments, he makes a reasonably compelling case for his thesis. After reading his book one would have to conclude that the QAnon folks and the religious fundamentalists of our era are solidly within an American tradition that has beeen around since the pilgrims landed.

But not everyone in America has embraced irrationality, as Anderson notes in the book. The forces of reason have battled the forces of ignorance for centuries, sometimes winning and sometimes losing. Anderson argues that they were winning in the twenties and the thirties, citing as an example the tendency of the press of that day to mock folks like Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, and the derision heaped upon the state of Tennessee, William Jennings Bryant, and other anti-evolutionists during the Scopes trial. H.L. Mencken called them what they were: morons.

Which leads me to my modest proposal for the day. It’s time for the Democrats and their fellow travelers to stop trying to reason with the forces of irrationality, be they Republican politicians, their evangelical enablers, or conspiracists of any other sort. You are not going to persuade them of anything. As Andersen argues, there is a certain strain of American that insists it is their god-given right to believe what they want to believe, evidence, lack of evidence, or rationality be damned. The cult of Trump is not a new thing.

It’s the folks that are not engaged with the irrationality one way or the other that you need to win over, and one way to do that is by adopting a strategy of mocking the irrational. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with some good lines to parrot over and over. After all, we already have our own H.L. Menckens. They are, for the most part, late night comedians, who have had a sort of monopoly of straight on truth telling, while the punditry desperately clings to both siderism.

At this moment in our history, most of the mockery is coming from the folks who are, in truth, most susceptible to mockery. Remember, it was just a few months ago that Matt Gaetz was mocking the rational for wearing face masks. It’s best to be on the attack in this political age, and treating conspiracists, dupes and religious nutcases with the derision they deserve would be a winning political strategy for the Democrats. The fact is, making fun of people works, especially if they are, in fact, ridiculous. I realize that national Democrats have lived in a defensive crouch so long they are having a hard time coming out of it, but there are signs that it’s happening. For instance, who would have thought, a mere year ago, that Joe Biden would essentially be telling the Republicans to shove it when they start whining about his failure to reach out to them for bipartisan solutions. The only bone I have to pick with him on that is that he’s doing it, for the most part, implicitly when we have reached a time when it is to our advantage that he do it explicitly.

C’mon Democrats. We can do this. You can start with Matt Gaetz since he’s so easy, but you can quickly move on to Mitch and the rest of them.

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Matt Gaetz, Man of Principle

Friday, April 9, 2021

Matt Gaetz has been in the news a lot lately, in case you hadn’t noticed. Even if you have, you may not have noticed that no one (until now) has given him credit for being a Republican who has principles. You may think that’s a contradiction in terms, but in Gaetz’s case, it isn’t!

Think about it.

Let’s step back a bit. What is the one word that describes almost every Republican act and utterance? I’ll give you a hint: it beings with an “H” and ends with “ypocrisy” Who keeps moaning about deficits while running them up for no reason? Republicans! Who warns against voter fraud while engaging in voter fraud? Republicans! Who warns against the threat of non-existent left wing terrorists while coddling actual home grown right wing terrorists? Republicans! The list could go on and on, but I am too lazy to elaborate further.

The point is that we must recognize the courage and principled conviction that must be at work when a Republican breaks the mold, and Matt Gaetz has done just that and gotten no credit for it. For, can’t we expect that a Republican would condemn sex trafficking while engaging in sex trafficking? Of course! But…Not Matt Gaetz! He had the courage of his convictions. When it came time to vote on a bill to combat sex trafficking, he was the sole member of Congress to vote against it. No hypocrite he, at least not on this issue. He stuck by his fellow sex traffickers. The other Republican sex traffickers, and please don’t try to tell me there are no others, took the hypocritical way out and voted in favor.

The sad part is that up to now, no one in the media has given Matt credit for his amazing lack of hypocrisy. Even Fox has simply preferred to ignore it, possibly because if they acknowledged such an unusual trait in a Republican they would be, as we lawyers say, sub silentio acknowledging that he is a Republican outlier. Well, I give him credit, and I really think that when he’s sentenced, the judge should take his moral courage into account, and take a day or two off his sentence.

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A book report of sorts

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

A while back I attended a Zoom seminar hosted by my Alma Mater. The guest presenter was David A. Bell, a professor from Princeton, who was there to talk about his new book Men on Horseback, The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. It is a study of the role charismatic leaders played in the Revolutionary age that accompanied the Enlightenment. I bought the book, and have just finished it. The introductory chapter explores the nature of charisma, and among other things considers the way in which the manner in which a charismatic leader presents him or herself to the public fluctuates as the nature of media changes. Printing, newspapers, and writing techniques that flowed from the invention of the novel had a profound impact on the way in which leaders were able to form a relationship with the public.

People of my generation immediately think of John Kennedy when we hear the word charisma. Quite likely he could have been considered a charismatic leader today, but the fact is that he lived in an almost entirely different media world. The news media, particularly television news, played things pretty straight. There were no propaganda outlets, as there are today. For the most part, the networks did not chase ratings so far as the news was concerned. That came much later. Also, of course, there was no internet, no Facebook, and no twitter. The connection Kennedy made may have been partly the result of a sort of star quality, but the media’s relation to him was not much different than its relation to other politicians of notoriety. Kennedy, charismatic or not, would have been unable to stray outside the norms that Bell’s charismatic leaders had a habit of successfully disregarding. Bell’s book deals with charismatic leaders in the Age of Revolution. He writes primarily about Washington, Bonaparte, Simon Bolivar, and Touissaint Louverture.

Which brings us to the former guy, to whom Bell often alludes, but never expressly mentions. He never met a norm he didn’t disrupt.

It was lost on most of us, but one can’t deny that he was a charismatic leader as far as the brainwashed were concerned. I think an argument can be made that his charisma stemmed from the fact that he was primarily an entertainer. The media loved him, because he was good for ratings and provided plenty of pundit fodder. The non-Foxers couldn’t stop talking about him in 2016 at the same time they were insisting he was a joke. Even the Fox folks took their time about coming on board so far as taking him seriously. Meantime, every word he spoke and every speech he made was broadcast to an adoring multitude who he entertained more than he did anything else. They never cared, and still don’t care, whether he lied to them or delivered on any of his manifold and contradictory promises. The internet played a role as well, obviously, as every nonsensical tweet he emitted was devoured by his fans and the media. The good thing about twitter, from a grifter’s point of view, is that you don’t really have to be factual, you can just make it up and entertain.

His grift wouldn’t have worked in another media age. In the newspaper only ages, he would have sunk like a rock, assuming anyone took notice of him in the first place. His speeches, which really amounted to free form stream of consciousness rants, would not have translated well to the printed media. Even in the early television age, he would have gotten nowhere, as he would not have gotten the billion or so worth of free air time he got from the cable networks and the pundits desperate for ratings.

Now, you might say, rants worked for Hitler in an earlier media age. But Hitler was a much smarter politician than the former guy. In his case, the rants were necessary, but not sufficient. He knew how to appeal to people’s grievances and bigotry, just like the former guy, but he also knew how to organize a movement and how to maintain himself in power. A Hitler would have understood that he should deal effectively with a pandemic even as he blamed it on the Jews. The genius did nothing but blame it on the Chinese, or the Democrats, or the scientists, but, as we know, did nothing effective to stop it. He was too stupid to understand that it was his ticket to reelection, had he simply stepped up and done the right thing. The USA lucked out this time, as the dictator wannabe was just too stupid and incompetent to pull it off.

One of the only bright spots (we must always look on the bright side) in our political firmament is the fact that there are no Republicans out there, likely to pick up where the former guy left off. None of them are able to entertain the cretins like the genius could. Ted, Josh, Lindsey, none of them have it. This post at the Palmer Report says it well, discussing the troubles in which Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis now find themselves:

There’s a reason Gaetz and DeSantis can’t make the Trump playbook work for them: they’re complete idiots. Donald Trump was a one dimensional villain, but he had a sort of brute force cunning that allowed him to survive for decades, if never stay ahead. Gaetz and DeSantis don’t even have that. It would be like me thinking that reading the Dan Marino playbook will make me able to throw a touchdown. Even with the playbook in hand, you’ve got to have the skill to pull it off. And these clowns don’t.

If there’s a competent politician out there who can use the playbook and throw the touchdowns, we’re doomed.

Afterword: It is perhaps worth mentioning that while all of the Men on Horseback started out as committed republicans (emphasize the small “r”), they all, with the exception of Washington, became dictators, claiming that the acclamation of their followers was sufficient to legitimize their seizure of power. If that sounds familiar, then we can take solace from the fact that each one of them (again, other than Washington) ended his life in prison or in some form of exile. Mar-a-Lago is not exactly an uncomfortable place of exile, but there’s still a reasonable chance that the genius will share Louverture’s fate and die in prison.

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Looking on the bright side, a CT Blue tradition

Friday, April 2, 2021

Yet another Good Friday has arrived.

This blog has a Good Friday tradition, and traditions must be respected, so once again, let the folks from Monty Python remind us that we should always look on the bright side. In fact, it’s easier to follow that advice this year than it has been for a while, as there are at least a few glimmers of hope. At least we haven’t been chewing on as much of life’s gristle as we have in the past, and we’re also getting the chance to watch as folks like Matt Gaetz are chewing on the gristle they deserve. Anyway, here’s Eric and the gang for the umpteenth straight year.

In truth and in fact, my wife and I are looking on the bright side at the moment. Once we had our vaccinations scheduled, we decided to book a getaway for a weekend after our post vaccine probation period. So, here we are in Plymouth, Massachusetts. I’ve always wanted to see Plymouth. If I was going to look on the dark side, I’d talk about the fact that the place is a bit like Mystic on steroids. I sort of expected it to drip history. You can find the history if you really look, but it’s mainly restaurants, shops and more shops.

But, looking on the bright side, being as I’m a chocoholic, I have my work cut out for me sampling the goodies at more chocolate shops than you can count. Tis the season for chocolate bunnies, so I might make a collection. Also, on the bright side, it’s nice to be able to go back to restaurants, even if there’s still a bit of residual anxiety left over from pre-vaccination days.

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An easy prediction

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

It seems that the guy who stole his own election, Brian Kemp, has just allowed as the recently passed Georgia Voter Suppression Act “has nothing to do with potential fraud”. The writer at Crooks and Liars makes what should be a reasonable observation that those words might come back to haunt Kemp as the lawsuits challenging the statute make their way through the courts.

The right got what it wanted from useful idiot former guy. The judiciary is now stacked top to bottom with right wing zealots who will be totally unimpressed with the fact that Kemp made such a statement and will, in fact, simply swallow whole the lies that Kemp and other Georgia legislators are telling about the bill.

When I was in law school the professors all disdained “results oriented” judicial thinking, but that’s what we have these days and it’s what we’ll have for quite a while. No reasonable person could deny that the intent of the Georgia law, and the laws proposed elsewhere, is to disenfranchise people, particularly people of color. However, the courts will choose to turn a blind eye to that reality and uphold these laws, always leaving themselves wiggle room to rule the other way should they get a case involving Democrats doing precisely what the Republicans are doing.

Am I too cynical? I don’t think so.

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The Pillow Man Speaks

Monday, March 29, 2021

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, says the Supreme Court is going to put the genius back in office by July. He has inside information, he says, quite likely of the same quality as the information he claims to have about the voting machine companies. The Pillow Man, along with all the other things he doesn’t know, doesn’t know anything about the Supreme Court, as I’ll explain in due course.

Part of me, I must admit, misses the Trump years. It was so much easier to think of things to post on this blog. If you couldn’t come up with anything else, there was always the outrage of the day to fall back on. Those days are gone. Up to now, Joe Biden has been the Ned Lamont of presidents, quietly going about the job of doing his job. Even the right wing outrage machine has had a bit of a tough time ginning up controversies, though some in the media are doing their best to buttress the right wing talking point that Biden is somehow responsible for a border situation that commenced long before he took office and which, curiously enough, was worse under Trump but for which Trump was not responsible. Oh well.

Anyway, back to my main point, assuming I have one. If the court handed the genius his “job” back, it would make it far easier to come up with things to write about. On the other hand, were that to happen, we on the left could kiss free speech good-bye, as any such decision would spell the end of American democracy. That denouement is an ultimate objective of the current Supreme Court, but they prefer to do it, as the Wicked Witch said, “delicately”, and, as the Three Stooges often said, “step by step, inch by inch”. The objective is to create an autocracy gradually, so that the warnings from people like me and every other left wing blogger can go unheeded. So the genius will continue to ramble on at Mar-a-Lago for the time being, and should the state of New York manage to convict him of fraud, the Supreme Court will not stand between him and a prison cell. He has already served his purpose, so far as they are concerned. In the meantime, the court will slowly but surely go about its business of dismantling the Republic.

As for Lindell, he’s going to have to sell a lot of pillows to the rubes to pay that libel judgment.

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Upcoming Judicial Decision, A CTBlue exclusive!

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

RULING ON MOTION TO DISMISS

Defendant Sidney Powell has moved to dismiss this libel action brought by Smartmatic, a manufacturer of voting machines. Powell is a lawyer who puts herself forward as being an expert in election law. She has, while purportedly acting on behalf of the former guy appeared on Fox and other right wing media platforms claiming that Plaintiff Smartmatic’s voting machines were rigged, thereby throwing the recent election to Joseph Biden. Plaintiff has suffered damages as a result.

Powell initially recites the legal requirements for proving libel, then states:

This inquiry is determined as a matter of law. Bucher v. Roberts, 595 P.2d 235, 241 (Colo. 1979) (“Whether a particular statement constitutes fact or opinion is a question of law.”). Analyzed under these factors, and even assuming, arguendo, that each of the statements alleged in the Complaint could be proved true or false, no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.

Defendant thus refuses to admit that her repeated allegations that plaintiff rigged its voting machines were fabrications, but maintains that if they were fabrications, no reasonable person would have believed them. Defendant thus implicitly asks this court to suspend judgment as to whether the statements she made were true, while arguing that no reasonable person should believe they could be true. For the reasons stated below, this court is constrained to do exactly that: pretend the statements might have been true, yet rule that because no reasonable person would have believed them, defendant was free to spread her fabrications without legal consequence to her.

Plaintiff submits that the purpose of libel law, like any other tort law, is to compensate the plaintiff for damages suffered as a result of a legal wrong. Defendant, however, argues that there should be an exception: that a person may engage in libel so long as those libels are directed at unreasonable people who believe the lies. This implies that any person may spread an outrageous lie designed to be believed by Fox viewers (who apparently are, by definition, not reasonable people) and that any murder, death threats, injuries to business, or destruction of property (such as that in the US Capitol by the unreasonable people to whom defendant apparently claims to have intended to direct her remarks) that may result from the actions of people motivated by defendants statements of asserted fact must be borne by the plaintiff, despite being caused by the defendant, because those people are not reasonable.

The Supreme Court has not yet carved out an exception from the laws of libel for right wing conspiracists. However, this court is obligated to make a good faith effort to determine what the court would do when presented with these facts. The court finds that the Supreme Court will likely rule that there is an exception to the law of libel for individuals who propagate lies intended to benefit the Republican Party, Republican candidates, or intended to stir up resentment among unreasonable people provided those people are predominately white. The court is unable to conjure up the precise obfuscatory language the court will employ to do this, but is confident of the net result. The court also notes the persuasive precedent of McDougal v. Tucker Carlson, et. al., in which a district court ruled that Tucker Carlson is incapable of libeling anyone, because no reasonable person would believe anything he said.

Plaintiff argues that such a ruling would give the media carte blanche to libel anyone and get off the hook by simply arguing that no reasonable person should have believed them. The plaintiff is simply incorrect. For example, were Rachel Maddow to allow a guest to spread a falsehood of the nature of that spread by the defendant on Fox, she would be liable for the simple reason that reasonable people do believe what she and her guests have to say.

Plaintiff argues that if such is the case, then Fox and its ilk should be required to run disclaimers to the effect that its viewers can not believe a word anyone says on their media platforms. The court declines to issue such an order because free speech.

For the foregoing reasons, the court grants the motion to dismiss.

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Friday Night Music, Connecticut Edition

Friday, March 19, 2021

A week or so ago, I got yet another app for my IPad and IPhone, an internet radio app called Radio Garden. It’s a fun app. You can explore a map of the world, and find radio stations by location. You can also search by name and, to a certain extent, genre.

Anyway, I chanced upon a radio station from London, The UK 1940s Radio Station, which I put on my favorite list, so I can listen to it when my wife’s not around, as she is not a fan of the old time stuff. Anyway, here I am listening to a radio station from London and what do I hear? Judy Garland and Bing Crosby teaming up to sing Connecticut (is the State for Me), a song about our fair state! And I had to go to England to hear it.

I broke a rule I stuck to when this was a regular feature, as I avoided YouTube “videos” that consisted of a song and a picture, but I made an exception for this song for the obvious reason that there is no video for a song this old. Near as I can gather it was written by Hugh Martin, the guy who wrote Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas for some sort of Yale related event.

DuckDuckGo tells me that the official state song of Connecticut is Yankee Doodle, which never mentions the state of Connecticut. I seem to recall that Tom Meskill tried to get a song called The Hills of My Connecticut named the state song. It doesn’t hold a candle to Connecticut, as you can hear here, but then, The Yankee Nutmeggers are not Judy Garland and Bing Crosby. Nothing against Yankee Doodle, but it seems to me that Connecticut does a better job promoting our fair state.

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The Republican Party, the eternally black pot

Thursday, March 18, 2021

If you want to know what crimes Republicans are committing, all you have to do is listen to what they are accusing others of doing:

Yet another case in point:

The former Florida state senator accused of masterminding and funding a sham candidate to manipulate voters last November is now facing charges of felony campaign finance crimes.

Frank Artiles was booked into Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on Thursday, a day after his Palmetto Bay home was raided.

Shill candidate Alex Rodriguez was also booked Thursday morning.

Their charges (all third-degree felonies) include: ?>>Making or receiving campaign contributions over or in excess of limits??>>Conspiracy to make or receive two or more campaign contributions over or in excess of limits??>>False swearing in connection with voting or elections

According to a warrant obtained by Local 10 News, investigators say Artiles offered to pay Rodriguez $50,000 — half during the election and half afterward — for Rodriguez to enter November’s District 37 state senate race, where he shared a last name with the incumbent Democrat candidate Jose Javier Rodriguez.

Republican challenger Ileana Garcia ultimately defeated Jose Javier Rodriguez by just 32 votes for that seat. The plant candidate Alex Rodriguez, a deep-in-debt machinery rep who actually lived two counties away from the district, got over 6,000 votes despite not actually campaigning, nor having actual political aspirations.

In this particular case, the fraud was successful. No doubt the Republican “winner” will feel no compunction about keeping the seat that was stolen on her behalf.

It truly is a useful guide for prosecutors. If Republicans accuse others of crimes, you know just what to look for.

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Are the Democrats Learning?

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

It seems that, perhaps, the Democrats have learned some lessons from their experiences over the last 12 years. This is a remarkable phenomenon, since as recently as a year ago, Joe Biden seemed determined to learn nothing, as he predicted that the Republicans would have an epiphany should they lose the election in 2020. We’ve all seen how that worked out, but apparently Biden put that belief aside long before the moment when that epiphany was supposed to happen. Now we have a couple of other encouraging developments.

If you want to change your ways, it helps to admit your mistakes, and apparently the Democrats are coming to terms with one of the biggest mistakes they made:

As Democrats pushed this month to pass the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, they were eager to rebuke Republicans for opposing en masse a measure filled with aid to struggling Americans. But they had another target as well: the core policy of President Barack Obama’s first-term agenda.

Party leaders from President Biden on down are citing Mr. Obama’s strategy on his most urgent policy initiative — an $800 billion financial rescue plan in 2009 in the midst of a crippling recession — as too cautious and too deferential to Republicans, mistakes they were determined not to repeat.

It wasn’t just Obama. I can’t recall a single Senator questioning this strategy, though I may be wrong about that. Despite evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Republicans would obstruct and do nothing else, Democrats continued to pay lip service to the fairy tale that they could bargain in good faith with McConnell and his ilk. Even Susan Collins played them, trading an affirmative vote for neutering the bill by making it heavily skewed toward unnecessary tax breaks for…well, you know who for.

Besides acknowledging that there’s no use bargaining with Republicans, Democrats are also facing up to the fact that they can’t allow the Republicans to frustrate the Democratic agenda by using the filibuster. Dick Durbin’s recent speech can only be interpreted as the opening shot in a campaign to change the rules to render the filibuster fairly toothless. It also may mean that they have persuaded Manchin, Synema and Feinstein that they must get with the program, and pronounce themselves satisfied with whatever fig leaf they are given so they can claim that the filibuster survives.

Mitch McConnell wouldn’t be making threats about what he will do if back in power if the filibuster is destroyed, if he wasn’t afraid that the end is near, and those threats provide further proof that the Democrats have learned their lesson, since they have essentially responded that he would do those things anyway if he took power once again. The filibuster has never served the purposes of progressives; it has always been a weapon of the right. They want to use it now to make sure they can keep the federal government from interfering with the states that are trying to disenfranchise Democratic leaning population groups. If the Senate does not pass HR 1, we can pretty much kiss Democracy in America good-bye.

If the Democrats want to maintain control of the House and Senate (while hopefully expanding their majorities) they have to prove to the people of this country that they can deliver. Republicans don’t need to do that; all they have to do is feed the base red meat, suppress the vote where possible (with the help of the right wing judiciary), and convince a slice of the electorate that there’s no use voting. They do the latter by harping on the theme that the Democrats have failed to deliver on promises. It was exactly that strategy that they used against Obama after he agreed to the weak tea that was the stimulus bill of 2009.

It appears that the Democratic establishment may have learned what has been obvious to us dirty hippies all along. Here’s hoping they pull it off.

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