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Why I didn’t watch the debate, and won’t watch the next one

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

I didn’t watch last night’s debate, but then, if you read the title of this piece, you already knew that.

I didn’t actually watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates, being only 10 at the time, but I did become aware, even then, that the “winner” was not the person who made the better argument, but the one who came across better. Poor Nixon (I never thought I’d use that phrase) lost the TV debate, in large part, because he refused to wear makeup and looked like he hadn’t shaven in several weeks. Radio listeners thought he won, since they couldn’t see his face. So we may have missing makeup to thank for delaying his presidency by eight years.

As the years went by, and debates piled up, the “winner” was inevitably the guy ordained by the press, not because he (or she) had the better of the argument on substance, but because he (no shes relevant here) made a snappy remark, like Reagan saying “There he goes again”, when Carter accused him of wanting to destroy Medicare, which no one bothered to point out was perfectly true. No, Reagan won because…well, because the press wanted him to win.

So what really matters is not what happens during the debate, but after. I had no desire to rant and rave at my computer screen while Trump lied unchecked. Better to wait until the morning after and just read the reviews. Less strain on the blood pressure.

The internet has facilitated some very awful things, but it has accomplished some good, one such good being the fact that the press is no longer the sole arbiter that decides who won or lost. On-line reaction is probably more important than punditry these days.

So, anyway, all the really matters is the post debate fallout, and you can assess that without even having to watch the highlights (lowlights?) of the debate.

My overall impression is that Trump lost the debate. Biden “won” by default, inasmuch as Trump acted as if he wanted to lose. People sometimes have trouble assessing policy positions, but they can usually spot an asshole without much effort, and Trump apparently acted like a total asshole, making it almost impossible for the press to both-sides it, and also, quite likely, making the attempts at both-siding it ineffectual. If there are any undecideds, and who are such people anyway, it’s quite likely Trump turned them off.

The next two debates will be more of the same, so once again, I’ll take a pass and wait for the post-game wrap-ups.

All that being said, I might watch Kamala destroy Pence.

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A cynical pattern

Sunday, September 27, 2020

It’s not hard to detect this pattern.

When Justice Thurgood Marshall, a giant of the civil rights movement died, the Republicans went out and found themselves a black person who could be counted on to help undo all of his achievements. They found him in Clarence Thomas.

Now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. She was a giant in the women’s rights movement. So they went out and found themselves a woman who could be counted on to help undo all of her achievements. They found her in Amy Comey Barrett.

I never thought I’d be in favor of packing the court, but should Trump fail to steal the election, and should the Democrats take the Senate, I’m all for it. Turnaround is fair play. Or, to put it another way, tit-for-tat.

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Our little Hitler

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Not much time for blogging these days. I am the treasurer of our local town committee, and it’s been a busy time, as I have to account for the multiple donations people are making in exchange for Biden signs, which are going like hotcakes. There’s a lot of frightened people out there, and they’re doing what they can.

In my down time I’m sitting back reading Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Downfall, the second volume of Ullrich’s Hitler biography and by far the most fun to read. I read Ascent a few years ago, but there’s only so much you can enjoy reading about a guy like HItler when he’s on a roll. It’s a whole lot more fun reading along as he slowly deteriorates, even though he does manage to kill millions of people in the process. Plus, you know the end turns out reasonably well, something we can’t say about our current situation.

I’m reading it on an e-reader. While I’ve been reading it I’ve been highlighting various things that remind me of our Hitler.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Trump is just like Hitler. Hitler was a lot smarter than Trump and actually knew things. He was likely more evil as well, but, all in all, besides the obvious fact that both were racist sociopaths, they have some other similarities as well.

Hitler, like Trump, could become wedded to conspiracy theories, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. His delusions about the Jewish conspiracy is an obvious example, but there were many more, such as his insistence that an assassination attempt against him by a lone assassin was actually the work of a broad ranging conspiracy.

Hitler, like Trump, was obsessed with the loyalty of his underlings. He was far more interested in having underlings who were blindly loyal to him than competent to do the job they were chosen to do. Once any given underling became insufficiently sychophantic, Hitler would go out and find someone who would tell him what he wanted to hear. Just like Trump.

Hitler, like Trump, was convinced of his own infallibility. As soon as something he set in motion went awry, he would find someone else to blame.

Hitler, like Trump, was dependent on medications to get him through the day. His doctor gave him stimulus shots on a daily basis. It is overwhelmingly likely that Trump is addicted to Adderall, and who knows what other stuff he is taking. Since he’s the master of projection, his recent claim that Biden is getting injections of performance enhancing drugs is likely a confession of his own medical regimen.

It goes without saying that Hitler was, and Trump is, a bigot of the first order. Lest you think Trump is only bigoted against people of color, it is a fact that he is also anti-Semitic, though he can’t be as open about it as Hitler, and, to be fair, he may not yet have settled on a final solution so far as people of color are concerned.

Even the little things: Hitler, like Trump, during his decline, was unable to negotiate stairs and ramps.

I am aware that it is considered tacky to compare our Fascist to Hitler, since we’re not supposed to have fascists in this country, and any use of the word is by definition, according to much of our punditry, overblown. However, I think it’s instructive that Trump shares so many of the mental illnesses and pathologies that Hitler had, and that fact should be acknowledged. And, I am informed by Crooks and Liars that even the mainstream is beginning to recognize the reality, as Morning Joe and his cohorts spent an hour talking about the F word’s salience in these United States. Right now I think Trump has a better than even chance of getting the Supreme Court to steal the election for him, and if he is successful, we will become a full blown fascist state.

UPDATE: A great mind thinks like mine. I mean..Hitler, Stalin, what’s the difference. The megalomania is all the same.

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Now for something completely different

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

One of the mysteries of the internet is the lack of websites devoted to connecting people who collect Kabuki Theatre Stamps.My brother in law, is such a collector, and he’s had a tough time connecting up with other collectors. As we’re sure I have multitudes of such collectors as readers, or, that such collectors will find this entry if they are googling around, I’ve agreed to let my brother in law put up the following.

See, even Argentina has kabuki stamps

Hello out there fellow collectors of kabuki on stamps! I now have an album of 224 pages identifying the actors, characters, plays and theatres of kabuki stamps. I have another album of 77 pages of kabuki frame stamps from Japan. Please contact me at mailto:evondorster@orange.fr to share your ideas, questions and comments. Or as they say in Japan, via Google Translate:
?????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????224?????????????? ???????77?????????????????????????????? ????????????????????mailto:evondorster@orange.fr??????????

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Dershowitz takes unintentional aim at Fox

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Alan Dershowitz is suing CNN because:

Alan Dershowitz, a retired Harvard Law professor, is seeking $300 million in a federal libel lawsuit against CNN, alleging that the news network attempted to damage his reputation by misrepresenting a statement he made during President Trump’s impeachment trial.

…

Dershowitz was one of several attorneys who represented Trump during the Senate trial, which resulted in the president’s acquittal.

The lawsuit, filed in Florida Tuesday, alleges that CNN omitted a crucial part of a widely discussed argument Dershowitz made before the Senate, and then CNN hosts and guests “exploded into a one-sided and false narrative’’ criticizing Dershowitz.

Basically he’s claiming that they took a quote of his out of context, though “somewhat out of context” might be closer to the truth, to be charitable.

I would suggest that the folks at Fox must be shaking in their boots at the thought of Dershowitz prevailing. Taking things out of context is, after all, their business plan. Actually, I suppose it’s more accurate to say that in their more responsible moments they take things out of context, instead of merely lie or spread conspiracy theories. If Dershowitz wins it should be open season on folks like Hannity.

Of course there’s always the possibility that the federal courts (assuming that’s where he filed the case) will rule that libel laws are different when Fox is involved. We are, as is plain to see, rapidly becoming a country where there are two sets of laws: one for Republican politicians and enablers, and one for the rest of us. Republican judges are quite skilled at amplifying “distinctions without a difference”, a judicial dodge that was once looked down on, but is not very much in vogue. See, e.g., Bush v. Gore.

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Sounds familiar

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

A few weeks back I “reviewed” Kurt Andersen’s book, Evil Geniuses, about the long game played by the American right to take over our political system. The increase in inequality was a prominent part of the book. I made the point in my post that Andersen didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, but that it was helpful to have it all in one place and so well documented.

But it turns out that some folks didn’t already know why inequality has increased dramatically, so they hired a think tank to look into the question.

They could have saved themselves some money and just read Andersen’s book:

“We were shocked by the numbers,” says Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who came up with the idea for the research along with David Rolf, founder of Local 775 of the Service Employees International Union and president of the Fair Work Center in Seattle. “It explains almost everything. It explains why people are so pissed off. It explains why they are so economically precarious.”

Notably, it isn’t just those in the middle who’ve been hit. RAND found that full-time, prime-age workers in the 25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution would be making $61,000 instead of $33,000 had everyone’s earnings from 1975 to 2018 expanded roughly in line with gross domestic product, as they did during the 1950s and ’60s.

Hanauer and Rolf fingered the specific causes:

They say the blame lies, in large measure, with decades of failed federal policy decisions—allowing the minimum wage to deteriorate, overtime coverage to dwindle, and the effectiveness of labor law to decline, undermining union power. They also cite a shift in corporate culture that has elevated the interests of shareholders over those of workers, an ethos that took root 50 years ago this week with the publication of an essay by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

Wow. Is it just me, or haven’t all these things been hiding in plain sight for the past fifty years. Do you really need to hire the folks at RAND to figure this out for you?

Filed in Economics, Occupy | | Comments (0)

Proof positive. He really is stupid

Monday, September 14, 2020

These are hard times for part time bloggers like me. There’s an outrage an hour, but, for the most part, there’s nothing new to say about any given outrage, and how many times can you make the inevitable observation that had Obama committed said outrage it’s shelf life in the mainstream would have been longer than the hour or so that a Trump story lasts.

Anyway, a few thoughts on Trump’s latest self reported triumph.

Before getting there, a few preliminary thoughts. There is a lot of legitimate debate about whether Trump is mentally ill and/or stupid and/or senile, or alternatively a crafty political genius who knows how to manipulate the electorate. There’s a lot of truth in the first three, and a little bit of truth in the last, as he’s been a successful grifter all his life and he can still feed his base the red meat they like, though he doesn’t understand that he can’t win with the base alone. But, as to stupidity, well that’s a no-brainer.

We all know that Trump’s campaign has made much of the fact that he’s been nominated for the Noble (sic) Peace Prize by a rightwing Scandinavian, a nomination that will go nowhere. It is to be fervently hoped that when Greta Thunberg gets it, we will not have to be too smugly satisfied, as Trump will be pouting about his loss as someone about to exit stage right, and off to jail at that.

So, we all know about the “Noble” Prize, but how many of us knew that, as he recently announced, he has already taken home the non-existent yet much coveted “Bay of Pigs” Award. Read all about it here. This is where he totally makes the case for his own stupidity. And yet, ironically, it’s an award, if it did exist, of which he would be totally worthy, given his record in office. The Bay of Pigs was a minor glitch compared to his disastrous presidency. But even here, we must pause. JFK took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster, though truth to tell, the planning began under Eisenhower. Trump has never taken responsibility for anything, except things he claimed happened, but didn’t.

Filed in The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

A Good Samaritan

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

This is not about politics. It’s the only way I can express my appreciation to someone who did an extraordinarily good deed for me today, appreciation I failed to adequately express at the time. It’s also an admission that while I continue to have nothing good to say about organized religion it is also the case that some people are truly inspired to do good by their religious beliefs.

I’m writing this from Maine. We drove here this morning. I was driving my wife’s car in the leftmost of three lanes on 495 just north of Lowell when I ran over something, I’m not sure what, which left a three or four inch gash in my rear tire. There was no room to pull over from the left hand lane so I had to cross over to the breakdown lane on the right, which was itself a rather unpleasant task.

I managed to get the “spare” tire out of the trunk, a mammoth job considering it was situated underneath a pile of stuff we were bringing here to Maine. It was one of those temporary tires, but I figured it would be good enough to get us to a tire store to get a replacement.

Let me back up a bit and say that situations like this tend to be stressful. It’s no fun trying to change a tire when cars and trucks are whizzing by at 70 miles an hour. It’s even worse when your tires are outfitted with wheel locks. Getting the locked nut off the wheel is not easy, particularly if you’ve never done it before and really aren’t quite sure how you’re supposed to do it. As a result, you tend to be a little agitated. Make that a lot agitated.

It was when I was trying to figure out the wheel lock issue that a young African American guy pulled up behind me and got out of his truck. He said, and these are his words as best as I can recall, “Brother, I don’t know if your a praying man, but this morning I prayed that God would give me the opportunity to do good to someone, and when I saw you get that flat tire I thought that god had answered my prayers.”

He had been driving somewhere close behind me. After seeing me get the flat, he couldn’t stay behind me, given the traffic flow, so he had taken the next exit, looped around and found me and stopped to help. I needed it too. He figured out the wheel lock issue, we got the flat tire off the car, and the temporary tire on.

I offered him money, but he wouldn’t take it. I suspected he wouldn’t. I was so frazzled that I couldn’t think of any other way to express my gratitude, except with an effusive “thank you” so I’m doing it in this small way as well. Truly a good person. Far better than me, for if I had seen the same thing I would just have kept on driving.

Postscript: I fully realize that the fact that my benefactor was an African American should be entirely irrelevant to this little story. But this is America in the year 2020.

Filed in American Life, Good News | | Comments (1)

Housekeeping

Monday, September 7, 2020

I just discovered that somehow comments were closed on this blog. I’m not sure how that happened. I have set them to be open again, but it will only apply to new posts. This post is just an experiment to make sure it works.

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Trumpers in the hands of an angry god

Saturday, September 5, 2020

As I’ve mentioned often, and also just recently, I have a degree in theology from Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, so I am totally qualified to speak on all matters of religion, and though I don’t actually believe in God anymore, I’m going to grant His existence for purposes of this post, for I hereby declare that there is no explanation for this other than the judgment of an angry god:

When you look at Donald Trump’s terrible approval rating numbers, it’s easy to see that he’s broadly unpopular across a wide swath of the American population. But for whatever reason, Trump seems to be popular with people who own small boats. We’ll have to dive into the psychology of that on another day. For now, it’s enough to know that Trump’s boat parade is sinking – literally.

It’s now being reported by the CBS and ABC affiliates in Austin, Texas that several boats in the Trump boat parade have sunk. The local sheriff’s office has confirmed that it’s responded to several boats in “distress.”

Now you may remember when Pat Robertson declared a hurricane or some other natural disaster to be a sign of god’s displeasure about our society’s tolerance of gays, but we theologians rejected that interpretation because in order for that to be so 1) god was wreaking his vengeance on gay haters and gay lovers alike, which hardly sent a coherent message, and 2) he was wreaking his vengeance in the South, while most of the gay tolerant folks are here in the North. That’s not how god works. In the Bible he showed his displeasure with the Sodomites by destroying Sodom. I.e., the message was clear. He didn’t destroy some random, unoffending little hamlet somewhere else to send a message to the Sodomites.

So it follows as the night the day that those boats didn’t sink without reason. Only Trump lovers got hit. This is the judgment of an angry god. Yes, I realize that I’ve used the adjective “angry” twice to modify the term “god” in this post (and once again in the title-a tip of the hat to Jonathan Edwards), but that’s because we’re talking here about the Old Testament god who was angry pretty much all of the time, not the new and improved “loving” god of the New Testament. The fact is, god has a bit of a split personality. He’s got his angry side and his all loving side, though when he sends a message to us folks on earth, it’s usually from the angry side.

I could go on, but that’s enough for today’s sermon.

Update: Something my wife just found.

Update 2. Even the pagans are getting into the act.

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