Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Clueless Rudy.

Impeachment is now officially under way. That’s not what I’ll write about today, however, because you are most likely hearing about that absolutely everywhere else, and I have little or nothing to add to what’s being said elsewhere. Today I’ll opine on the career and slime trail of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose evident losing battle with dementia is being televised nightly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask, what happened to Rudy? The answer is simple: nothing. Like Trump, he’s just as nasty as he ever was, only older and more scrambled.

Because of the nature and the timing of the 9/11 attacks, many people remember Giuliani fondly as “America’s Mayor”, I think mostly because he didn’t run up the street screaming when the towers fell. What he was then, of course, was a failed mayor at the end of his term, a man with the blood of many people of color on his hands, and an immensely corruptible individual whom Jimmy Breslin once famously described as a small man in search of a balcony. Well … he found that balcony, and then some. Anyone who remembers Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and Abner Louima knows something about what policing was like in NY City under America’s mayor. His personal abuses were legendary. At one point during his tenure, I remember a random cab driver (unofficial one; the 90s equivalent of an Uber driver) complaining about how Giuliani’s lover’s kids would run wild in the driver’s apartment building, bragging that they had mayoral protection. But I digress …

Why pick this photo? Because he effing deserves it.

After achieving hero status in the wake of 9/11 (despite his placement of the emergency command center up a few precarious floors in the World Trade Center after the 1993 attack and his sweetheart contract with Motorola for emergency communications that failed on the fateful day), Giuliani went out into the world, proffering his supposed expertise in security and anti-terrorism, helping police agencies, despotic governments, and corporations keep the rabble in line … for a steep consulting price. I suspect he thinks of Trump as just another despot who needs his services, and he would be right. Now, in his dotage, Giuliani may make a lot less sense, but he is still treated with some deference in foreign capitals, and more so thanks to his close association with the president of the United States.

Let’s be clear: in 2016, Giuliani openly bragged just days before the election about the New York office of the FBI having the goods on Hillary Clinton. A short time later, the story broke about Anthony Weiner’s laptop and the revival of the email probe, effectively torpedoing any chance of a Clinton victory. He and Trump relied on this tactic to get candidate Trump over the electoral finish line. It worked then, and it may work again without some real effort on the other side.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Raising the Barr.

Last week, Attorney General William Barr gave an address to a gathering of police at an awards ceremony held by the Justice Department. Much was made, and rightfully so, of his comments about “communities” that do not show enough respect for law enforcement possibly finding themselves “without the police protection they need.” This is a remarkably lawless comment by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer – police are sworn to protect the communities they serve, regardless of their political views, attitudes, etc. But what’s even more troubling is Barr’s lead-up to these comments, which I’ve only seen reported in any detail on by the Majority Report.

He began with a long rant about the fabled widespread vitriol and contempt shown to veterans returning from the Vietnam war, and how the public sentiment about members of the military turned around during the Gulf War, when Barr was serving in the first Bush Administration. His point with respect to policing was that officers are no less at war than soldiers on the battlefield; that police endure a daily conflict with “predators”, and when they come home at night, there’s no parade, no celebration, and their “war” never ends. This extremist, adversarial view of policing sounds like that of an unreconstructed Reagan-era ultra conservative, in favor of mass incarceration and heavy-handed police tactics. But Barr’s worldview draws from a much deeper well.

Movement conservative s.o.b.

When Barr was a freshman at Columbia University in 1968 during that year’s massive protests against the Vietnam war, he followed his father’s example in criticizing the protesters. Of course, Barr was draft age. Before his confirmation last year, he had said that he wasn’t required to register for the draft, but later retracted that statement as it obviously wasn’t true. Barr was draft age in 1968; I don’t know, but my guess is that he had a college deferment that year, then drew a high number in the first draft lottery at the end of 1969. According to Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner, Barr hated the protests because they kept him out of the library. He saw them as anarchic – a view his conservative headmaster father shared. Barr’s father lost his job at the somewhat progressive Dalton School for his right-wing views. Brenner suggests that may have contributed to his contempt for liberals. Hard to say … but he seems to embody some of the same nastiness you find in other chicken-hawks.

Of course, the line he spreads about Vietnam veterans returning home to a land ruled by ungrateful hippies is nothing new or unique. Old-school conservatives have been repeating this trope for years, and those of us old enough to remember those years know that it’s mostly hogwash. My family was full of anti-war people. We had friends who went to Vietnam, and we loved them to pieces. They were as against the war as we were, and I hasten to add, it was an era when nearly anyone could end up in Vietnam via conscription … so today’s hippie was often tomorrow’s infantryman.

Barr is a menace to justice in America. He is also a shameless front man for a crackpot president … and, dare I say it, more dangerous even than Jefferson Sessions. Frankly, we can do better than either of them.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Stalking horses.

The Democratic race for president is one candidate smaller today than it was a couple of days ago. Kamala Harris dropped out this week, and it took about five minutes for the talking heads in the corporate media to attribute the failure of her campaign to the push for Medicare for All. By Wednesday morning, Claire McCaskill, failed candidate for senate, was on Morning Joe taking shots at M4A as a far-left government takeover of insurance, amounting to some kind of expropriation from hardworking Americans. They’re taking our corporate insurance away! People from the heartland won’t like this!

Let’s think for a moment of what would be taken away. I have one of those insurance policies people like McCaskill and Scarborough think so highly of. (I’m sure they have nothing like it, by the way.) My plan is what used to be termed a “Cadillac plan”, not because the benefits are so generous but because my employer pays 80% of my premiums. Even so, the plan costs me thousands of dollars a year even when things don’t go wrong. What M4A would take away from me are co-pays, which are considerable, and a $3,600 deductible, plus additional costs associated with out-of-network providers. Would I pay more in taxes than I do currently? Possibly, but when we’re sick, we can go to the doctor, to the hospital, to urgent care, and not even think about cost. That’s a level of liberation I have never experienced.

It’s not hard to work out why shows like Morning Joe make such a determined effort to scuttle any attempt at bringing about M4A. Just look at their advertisers. No, not the military contractor ads – they’re mainly shooting at a more specific target (i.e. lawmakers and congressional staffers). The drug companies, the hospital groups, the medical device manufacturers, and of course, the big insurance firms. They are dropping a lot of coin on advertising and lobbying, as always, but if either Bernie or Warren gets anywhere near the White House, you can bet they will be directing their ample coffers to a concerted comm strategy to kill M4A before it is even drafted. That strategy will include targeted ads, but it will also involve appearances on talk shows, columns, video news releases and inserts on local TV news broadcasts – you name it. We saw some of this during the Obamacare fight. This will be much, much more determined.

I don’t say this to discourage anyone on the left from fighting for M4A. Quite the opposite – with the forces arrayed against us, we are going to need a sustained effort like nothing any of us has experienced before. It’s a fight worth having, so please … be ready both before and after election day.

luv u,

jp