Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Donnie in Nixonland.

Our president offered a little fascist theater performance this week. The resulting spectacle was simultaneously ludicrous and terrifying, as most reality television tends to be (at least for anyone who is sane). Pumped up by his most reactionary advisors – Barr, Stephen Miller, etc. – the Cheeseburgler-in-Chief waddled out to the microphone to deliver a Miller-esque train wreck of a statement, then waddled over to St. John’s Church, freshly cleared by the 82nd Airborne, to have his photo taken while awkwardly clasping a bible. (Not clear that he was happy with the tome they handed him, perhaps preferring an edition with “Holy Bible” written in enormous gold letters on the cover.) This sorry spectacle was had at the cost of gassing, pelting, and beating thousands of peaceful protesters, journalists, and bystanders in an effort to drive them back from the vicinity of the White House.

What did the president gain from this effort? A badly produced propaganda video featuring scenes from his baby elephant walk to the church. (And I mean really bad, like every video they’ve ever made, starting with that laughable intro reel they ran at the 2016 GOP Convention.) He obviously wants to take advantage of the national anti-racist uprising to push a law and order narrative similar to the one used by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. This sounds a bit like the work of Steve Bannon, though perhaps not clever enough … more Miller’s or Barr’s speed. Honestly, they have little else to run on this year. They obviously blew the COVID-19 crisis, the economy is in the toilet, and Trump shows no interest in expanding his appeal beyond people in white hoods.

Here’s the problem with the 1968 strategy: It’s not 1968. At that time, the ruling party had been in power for eight years. The Vietnam war, vastly expanded by LBJ, was at its peak of violence, and young people in particular were in open revolt over the killing, the draft, etc. It was a much more openly, deeply racist country back then as well, and many Black Americans were only just beginning to get the franchise. What’s more, Nixon was the challenger, not the president. The “I’m going to clean up this mess” gambit doesn’t work if you’re the incumbent. For that to fly, you need to be calling out a party in power whose coalition is divided and hostile to their office holders. That’s not to say that the law and order tactic won’t work – nothing is beyond the scope of possibility these days. But if Trump is once again walking in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, he might want to be careful where he steps.

More than seven hundred billion dollars appropriated this year to spend on the U.S. military, and Trump uses them to liberate Lafayette Park. Worth it?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Time running out.

While you were looking over there, Donald Trump, our racist five-year-old drunken Twitter-troll of a President, pulled out of yet another arms control treaty with the Russians. Signed in 1992 by then president George H.W. Bush, the Open Skies Treaty allowed for short-notice, unarmed reconnaissance flights as a way of verifying compliance with other arms control treaties. As he always does when announcing the end of an international agreement, Trump breezily claimed that the Russians were not adhering to the treaty, and that by pulling out we will eventually end up with a new agreement that’s better than the current one.

This announcement comes in the context of:

  • Withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which removed extremely destabilizing and dangerous medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe;
  • Trump’s reluctance to renew the New START treaty next February when it expires. The accord provides for inspection of nuclear forces in by both parties, and is the final remaining pillar of the U.S.-Russian arms control regime.

This madness is another case of Trump’s key role as a rubber stamp for the most extreme elements in the right-wing political grouping that is currently running the country through him. I am certain Trump did not wake up in the middle of the night and say. “We must toss out all of our arms control agreements with Russia!” My guess is that the president’s strongest negative feeling might be reserved for New START, as that was signed by Obama in 2010, but otherwise this planet-saving series of treaties is probably of very little interest to him. Sure, there is some posing involved here, Trump trying to appear “tough”, trying to please daddy, etc., but why even bother getting into that? The man’s only ideology is himself. He is a uniquely valueless human being – the perfect vessel for a resurgent militarist right.

The administration’s rhetoric points to prompting a new arms race that will spend both China and Russia into a hole. Set aside for a moment the blatant insanity of such a policy (recall the dark days of the early 1980s) – it appears to be based on a popular misconception of what happened in the last arms race. We didn’t spend the Soviet Union into oblivion; empires decay, that’s what they do. We nearly spent ourselves into oblivion, investing trillions of dollars in the production of waste (useless military hardware) instead of putting those dollars into building a better society. Soviet military spending was pretty much flat through the 1980s. A renewed nuclear arms race puts humanity at risk, pure and simple – there’s no upside.

What is presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s position on this issue? Good question. I can’t find anything about it on his web site. For some more discussion about the lack of evidence of a Biden foreign policy, see the current episode of Strange Sound, our new podcast.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Sickness as strategy.

Some may consider what I’m writing about today as controversial, but frankly, I don’t care at this point. If you don’t see this as a real possibility, you’re not looking very hard. The Trump administration and its allies in the GOP-led states are pursuing a very cavalier policy regarding COVID-19 and their plans to reboot the economy. They have minimized the impact of the current crisis, essentially hiding the ball on fundamental questions of who has been infected, who has been exposed, and even who has died as a result of this awful virus. They have openly denigrated the idea of expansive testing, Trump first among those calling testing “overrated” and complaining that more testing means more cases. They have characterized the risks of ending the shutdown as risks worth taking, and have encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” worthy of sacrifice.

Now, we know that Trump wants things to magically return to normal so that he can have a better shot at re-election. But why would any president seeking a second term advocate policies that would result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead Americans? I think a fairly convincing answer lies in the demographics of those most severely affected by this virus. According to current research (see this APM report), the COVID-19 death rate among Black Americans is almost 2-1/2 times that of White Americans. Nationwide, Blacks make up 22.7% of COVID deaths, significantly over-representing their numbers; they make up a much larger percentage of losses in states like Georgia, Mississippi, Michigan, South Carolina, etc. It’s no secret, either, that this disease hits people harder when they have fewer resources, less access to quality health care, more exposure to conditions associated with poverty, and so on.

In other words, this disease hits hardest those people who tend not to vote for Donald Trump in particular and Republicans in general. When Trump and GOP governors push for workers to go back to the mill, the restaurant, the fields, etc., they know that those people are not their core supporters. If they drop dead, it’s no skin off of Trump’s nose – in fact, it may in some small way contribute to his victory. A cynical suggestion? Not at all. Trump bends every effort towards giving himself an advantage in the November general election. He has railed against vote-by-mail, particularly in states like Michigan, whose leaders he has threatened with federal funding cuts – this in the odd belief that vote-by-mail favors Democrats. (Based on his own comments, he certainly thinks that more people voting is bad news for Republicans.) He is a self-dealing bullshit artist, and not a particularly convincing one, either. How he garnered as many votes as he did in 2016 I’ll never know. (PT Barnum had a theory about that.)

Dark people, poor people, undocumented laborers … they’re all expendable, worthy of sacrifice for the sake of decent economic numbers going into the Fall. How long are we going to stand for this crap?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.