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Give credit where due

Friday, July 31, 2020

I’m a big fan of Driftglass, who is constantly and accurately reminding us that today’s “Never Trump” Republicans consist largely of political operatives who helped shape the electorate that brought us Trump. As he points out, it is considered impolite (though he does it all the time) to remind these people that they shaped the modern Republican Party, and that Trump is merely the natural outgrowth of all their hard work. Indeed, many among them still maintain that Trump is not the Republican Party, and we can expect, if we’re able to dislodge him, that come January 21st, the media and the Never-Trumpers will make common cause once again in their never ending proclamation of the false equivalency that our woes are equally attributable to both major parties. Driftglass has, until now, also pointed out that none of the GOP operatives that helped bring us to where we are have acknowledged their responsibility for doing so.

So give Stuart Stevens , a Republican operative who I’ve never heard of before, some credit for actually fessing up to being partly responsible for the fact that the Republican Party is the party of racism, reaction, and fascism.

I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today’s Republican Party.

…

… There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What others and I thought were bedrock values turned out to be mere marketing slogans easily replaced. I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought they were actually beating the market.

For the most part, the highly visible never-Trumpers have failed to acknowledge their own roles in laying the groundwork for Trump. As I’ve said before, I got a degree in theology from Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, and I can tell them: you can’t go to heaven unless you confess your sins and perform a sincere act of contrition. So maybe Mr. Stevens, having confessed on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times has a chance to enter the pearly gates.

On the other hand, I’m not sure about Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi’s chances for the hereafter. He is now calling for Trump’s removal after defending him in the face of a mountain of evidence of his criminality. The Federalist Society has helped lay the judicial groundwork for the move toward fascism that Calabresi now deplores. Seems Trump’s suggestion that the elections be postponed was the tipping point for him. I guess we have to assume that Calabresi prefers good old fashioned voter suppression.

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A helpful writing tip to a man in blue

Sunday, July 26, 2020

This morning’s New London Day has an article about two complaints filed by Groton Town Council candidates against the police last year. One Republican and one Democrat, so this is an instance in which both sides do it.

I won’t say much about the substance of the Republican’s complaint, though his observation that:

“If you have a chief’s best friend and a subordinate investigating him, how effective is that investigation going to be?”

Seems to have some logic behind it, which is strange coming from a Republican.

The Democrat, Juliette Parker, was running (successfully) for re-election to the Town Council in October 2019. Her day job is secretary to the Groton City Chief of Police. The Groton Town Police union was upset because they weren’t allowed to cash in on providing security during a planned protest in the City at a submarine launching. Bear in mind, here, that the City of Groton has its own police department, separate and apart from the Town of Groton police department. It apparently fell to Juliette to deal with the union, and give them the sad news that they wouldn’t be getting extra pay on the City’s dime. Stephen McAndrew, president of the Union, then sent an email to all of the members of the Groton City Council and the Groton Town Council (yes, for those non-Grotonites who may read this, there are separate councils as well):

“There are members of the Town of Groton Police Local #3428 who were displeased with the way they were spoken to by the secretary of Chief Spellman,” McAndrew wrote. He added that Parker “seems to have an inflated sense of self with regards to her position,” and that the union believes it is a “major conflict of interest in this regards as it is apparent she believes her position as Councilor gives her the ability to talk down to officers and order high ranking union members of the Town Police Department to carry out certain tasks.”

The sole reason I’m writing this blog post is to just provide a little help to McAndrew, so far as writing prose is concerned. I’ve always been in favor of clear, concise writing, and it seems to me that he could have saved a lot of words by simply saying what he meant: that Juliette was an uppity black woman. I mean, why beat around the bush? The phrase popped to mind the second my wife read the above quote to me.

Poor writing aside, Juliette got the message, anyway:

In her complaint, Parker said there are recordings of the courteous and professional phone calls she made to Groton Town police about the submarine christening coverage. She said McAndrew had turned it into a personal attack containing false information.

She wrote that McAndrew’s comment about her “inflated sense of self” is “a sexist comment, and at best a racially insensitive one.”

“Should I as an African-American woman ‘know my place’ and step away and let Caucasian men like Sergeant McAndrew make all decisions?” she wrote in the complaint.

I’ve known Juliette for years now, and you’re not going to find a nicer person. I would lay odds that McAndrew’s lips would have been sealed had he been dealing with a white male. After all, a sense of entitlement only goes so far.

Somewhat Irrelevant Afterword: I will not write a word about the absurdity of the fact that Groton has both a Town Police Force and a City Police Force, and the attendant waste of tax payer money involved, including, for instance, paying two inflated chief’s salaries rather than just one inflated salary. No, I will not mention this absurdity, even though it is somewhat relevant to the above. Nor will I mention the even greater absurdity of the fact that the Town subsidizes what is, in effect a private security service known as the Groton Long Point Police, which exists solely to keep non-residents of that rich enclave out of said enclave, and which “police force”, to the best of my knowledge, has never investigated a white collar crime, which is pretty much the only type of crime likely to be committed there.

No, I shall not mention any of these things. I will stick to helping Mr. McAndrew improve his writing style.

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The wrong bogeyman

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Over at the Palmer Report, we are assured that the threat of Donald Trump refusing to leave office is an illusion:

We can’t stress this enough: this an imaginary narrative that pundits have manufactured for the sake of ratings. Donald Trump is playing into this fake narrative because he’s hoping to use the empty threat of refusing to leave office in order to perhaps get certain things to go his way during the transition period. But Trump will only have that leverage if the public is gullible enough to believe that he can actually somehow just not leave office. Your job is to not fall for this crap when you hear it from the worst of pundits.

They’re right, as is Lawrence O’Donnell, about whose bursting of this bubble they were reporting.

The thing is, that’s not the threat.

It is entirely possible that Trump will get more electoral votes by stealing the election in plain sight, and there may be nothing that can be done about it, given the current make up of the Supreme Court.

First, the Republican Party itself may launch a massive intimidation campaign. It was under an injunction to refrain from such activities, but that injunction has lapsed.

Second, he could use his Gestapo to occupy the cities of swing states and prevent the people of those cities from voting. The rather subdued media reaction to the occupation of Portland, Oregon presages the reaction nationwide when the storm troopers roll in to strategically chosen American cities.

All of this is reviewed at more length here, in an article I’ve linked to before.

That’s the real threat. Despite the fact that all of this will have been done in plain sight, there is no reason to think that Congress or the courts can (in the case of the Democrats) or will (in the case of the Republicans) do anything about it. See the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, which was stolen by slightly less blatant means, but was still stolen in plain sight.

We may very well find ourselves in a situation where only a military coup can restore our republic. Such coups have been staged in other countries for that purpose, but somehow, the republic never seems to get restored.

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There’s something happening here

Sunday, July 19, 2020

What it is, is exactly clear.

(With apologies to Stephen Stills)

When Trump unleashed a fairly mild (in comparison) version of Nazi Stormtroopers on protestors so he could hold up a Bible, it made headlines. Apparently, he learned his lesson. So long as you start the process somewhere other than D.C. or New York, the media will little notice nor long remember what you have done. Stormtroopers are patrolling the streets of Portland, arresting and detaining people totally at random. It is an action unprecedented in the history of this nation. It is not just a little like the Gestapo. It’s a lot like the Gestapo. But, being as it was started in Portland, Oregon, and it was done by Trump, who has done lots of outrageous things, it’s immediately the new normal, and while it is somewhere buried deep in the bowels of today’s papers, it’s simply not worthy of front page coverage.

Maybe they’ll cover it more intensely when he orders his storm troopers into America’s cities on Election Day to make sure only the right votes are counted.

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Sounds familiar

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Yet another sign of hope, assuming of course that they can’t steal the election:

Brian Kilmeade gave hope to worried Trump supporters.

“But of people who believe that Donald Trump will be successful they talk about a secret vote, the underground vote because if you wear are a red hat or bumper sticker on your car you’re open to derision, maybe physical visit attacks so people keep their mouths shut,” Kilmeade told viewers. “There’s a lot of people who believe there’s underground support for the president.”

Co-host Steve Doocy then took over and ranted about how reliable the polls are with this new “secret voter” information.

This is what they do when they’re behind and they know it. Remember back in 2012 when a guy with no credentials convinced the Republican world that the polls showing Obama was ahead were “skewed”, and Romney was really heading toward victory? This is a repeat of that. I’m not quite sure what purpose it serves for the Republicans, but maybe Fox thinks it’s good for ratings. Anyway, the fact that they’re beating this drum tells you they think the cause is lost.

Of course, if they can, they’ll steal it, but they may not be able to do so if current trends continue.

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The Times edges toward saying the obvious

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

It has long been obvious to the casual, somewhat informed, halfway intelligent observer that the very stable genius is, in fact, a very unstable, seriously mentally ill individual, possibly mixed with a heaping helping of incipient senility. For purposes of this piece I’m going to assume it has been even more obvious to the New York Times reporters who cover him on a daily basis, since by definition, anyway, they should be somewhat informed, halfway intelligent observers.

But, of course, since Trump is a Republican it is verboten to state the obvious about him, since that would be a failure to maintain journalistic objectivity or something of the sort, though, of course, it’s entirely okay for the same newspaper to literally make up Joe Biden lies to maintain the fiction that both sides do it in equal measure.

Still, one can’t help but feel that reporter Peter Baker is trying to send a message in this report on Trump’s public breakdown yesterday:

What followed instead was an hour of presidential stream of consciousness as Mr. Trump drifted seemingly at random from one topic to another, often in the same run-on sentence. Even for a president who rarely sticks to the script and wanders from thought to thought, it was one of the most rambling performances of his presidency.

He weighed in on China and the coronavirus and the Paris climate change accord and crumbling highways. And then China again and military spending and then China again and then the coronavirus again. And the economy and energy taxes and trade with Europe and illegal immigration and his friendship with Mexico’s president. And the coronavirus again and then immigration again and crime in Chicago and the death penalty and back to climate change and education and historical statues. And more.

“We could go on for days,” he said at one point, and it sounded plausible.

At times, it was hard to understand what he meant. He seemed to suggest that his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would get rid of windows if elected and later said that Mr. Biden would “abolish the suburbs.” He complained that Mr. Biden had “gone so far right.” (He meant left.)

Even for those who follow Mr. Trump regularly and understand his shorthand, it became challenging to follow his train of thought.

For instance, in discussing cooperation agreements with Central American countries to stop illegal immigration, he had this to say: “We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

The entire thrust of the article amounts to an implied shout that Trump is mentally ill and/or senile. Of course, Baker never comes out and says that, but he comes close.

On a final positive note, there is a link at the Times website at this article linking to another article discussing “Trump’s Falsehoods”. Again, close, but no cigar, as they continue to avoid the much shorter and more accurate term.

On the negative side, neither the title of the web article (The White House Called a News Conference. Trump Turned it Into a Meandering Monologue) or that in the print edition (White House News Conference Takes a Rambling Turn) come close to conveying the disturbed mental faculties that were on display. The print article was on page A17, and I dare you to claim that it would have been placed there had Clinton or Obama performed in such a fashion.

Irrelevant postscript: While I was typing the word Obama on my Ipad, Apple helpfully suggested “Obamagate” by way of its autocomplete function. I guess they’ll allow any right wing fantasy to creep into their algorithms.

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If you made this up people would think you were crazy

Monday, July 13, 2020

Many years ago Tom Tomorrow inked a good cartoon, in which he posited that George W., Dick Cheney, et. al., were a bunch of leftists who figured they could destroy the Republican Party from within by governing in a manner so obviously bad that people would turn en masse to the Democrats.

What brings this to mind is the current election campaign by the incumbent who I shall not bother to name. If you were to write a dark comedy, in which that group of leftists was in power during a plague, they could not have done worse than follow the genius’s playbook in order to assure overwhelming defeat. Such a comedy would go nowhere, because it would have been considered far too implausible.

The latest atrocity is yet another example of what appears to be a deliberate attempt to get even the most stupid Americans to vote Democratic for a change. The genius and Cruella de Ville Betsy Devos are threatening to defund schools unless children are forced to put their own health, and that of their teachers at risk, to say nothing of the health of those back home. I’m sure that many parents are in a terrible fix trying to make ends meet and take care of home bound children, but it goes without saying that they’d rather deal with a bad situation, which could be made much easier for them by truly enlightened governmental action, than risk their children’s health. Given that the genius’s grades for handling the pandemic are already in the tank, how does it make sense for him and his lackeys to once again dismiss the experts and make pronouncements that are transparently all about winning an election.

And there’s the conundrum, isn’t it? It is clear as day that these things are being done because the genius thinks they’ll help him in the election, yet it’s also clear as day that they serve only to harden the attitudes of a large national majority that has decided not to vote for him under any circumstances. The school issue is not an isolated example. Every move he has made in response to the pandemic has been a transparent attempt to improve his electoral prospects, and not a single one has done so. Sometimes I suspect that the stable genius isn’t stable or a genius.

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There must be a word for this

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

“Hypocrisy” comes to mind, but I’m not sure that captures the essence of it.

The Texas Republicans are planning to hold a convention in which they cram people together like cattle. But…

The Republican Party of Texas is moving forward with its controversial in-person convention during the coronavirus pandemic — but elected officials including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will be giving their scheduled speeches virtually.

“All the elected officials are switching from a live, in-person speech to videos,” Kyle Whatley, the party’s executive director, said during a town hall livestreamed Tuesday night. “They’re doing that for us in order to focus all the attention on the business of the meeting and to get everybody in and out of here as quickly and as safely as possible.”

Don’t you just love the bullshit explanation for their refusal to mix with the herd? I guess it’s nice to know that Republican politicians expect even other Republicans to die for them, and aren’t reserving that privilege solely to the lower orders.

Postscript: As it turns out, saner heads have prevailed, though they don’t necessarily belong to Republicans:

Editor’s note: On Wednesday, the operator of Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center canceled the Texas GOP convention.

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You read it here first!

Saturday, July 4, 2020

I just came across this:

It is easy to imagine [Trump] is the worst leader the US has ever had. It is a view endorsed by the American Political Science association, which canvassed some 170 historians who ranked Trump dead last—a largely bipartisan verdict, too, since even self-identified Republicans on the panel rated him fortieth against the forty-four other contenders. C-Span has conducted similar surveys of presidential historians in 2000, 2009, and 2017 (none of these, naturally, include Trump). The bottom ten in the most recent survey were James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, Chester Arthur, and Martin Van Buren. (There were some shifts in the group over the three surveys, with, for example, George W. Bush making the bottom ten in 2009, but just missing the cut in 2017.)

My faithful readers will recall that I covered this story back in December, 2016, in a post which surely bears rereading. I reported:

It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.

Unfortunately, the concluding paragraph was far too prescient:

Journalists attending the press conference at which the Society announced its conclusion went away puzzled. They noted that while all of the points the Society made about Trump were well founded as a matter of fact, that facts themselves clearly didn’t matter anymore, and that to them, Trump’s presidency was looking more normal by the day. Trump himself tweeted: “History on the way out. No one reads it and no one learns anything from it. So repetitious. Sad!”

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Math Lesson

Friday, July 3, 2020

I was a bit struck by this from an article on Crooks & Liars about a poll that found that Trump has not had much luck painting Biden (of all people) as a dirty fucking hippie:

There is at least one cause for hope for Trump in the poll: Forty-one percent of voters agreed with the statement that Biden is “more liberal than me,” and 20 percent didn’t know or had no opinion on the matter, meaning that they may be persuadable.

Okay, first let me say that I am going to skip any rant about this question presuming that “liberal” is a pejorative term, understood by all in that sense, even though literally everything we have in this country that’s any good was a product of liberalism, such as, by way of a microscopically small partial list:

  • Public schools
  • The end to child labor
  • Workplace protections and legalized unions
  • The New Deal
  • Social Security
  • Medicare
  • The 13th through 15th Amendments
  • The 19th Amendment

Okay, now that I’ve skipped that rant, let me get to the math lesson. Trump has a solid base consisting of the 41% of the most stupid people in this country. They all watch Fox News and all consider liberals to be evil. They will never vote for Biden under any circumstances. Since they consider themselves to be the chosen people and conservative, by definition, to them, all Democrats are more liberal than them. All this question proves is that the nutcases are the only people with a (presumably) negative opinion of Biden’s liberalism. Biden more than likely has a bigger problem with people who don’t consider him liberal enough. You know, the Bernie dead-enders. We all know one or two of them.

This question might have some upside value for Trump if it could be shown that somehow a significant number of the same people who told the pollster they were voting for Trump also felt Biden was not more liberal than they. What are the odds that any Fox viewing nutcase thinks he or she is more liberal than Biden, or even as liberal as Biden?

As to the 20% with no opinion or didn’t know, the overwhelming likelihood is that these are people who don’t think in ideological terms. As the article points out “ roughly the same percentage of voters said they didn’t know or had no opinion on whether Trump was more liberal or conservative than them”. We don’t know for sure, but I’d lay odds that almost everyone who “didn’t know” about Biden also “didn’t know” about Trump. Some people just don’t think in those terms. It’s unlikely that Trumpian name calling is going to make much difference to them.

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