Tag Archives: Strange Sound

Political Rants

Lying in state.

The body of Officer Sicknick lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda this week – the same Capitol he died defending about a month ago when bloodthirsty right-wing thugs invaded the building by the thousands, hoping to forcibly stop the Senate’s counting of the electoral votes which, somewhat remarkably, reflected the will of the majority of American voters in denying Trump a second term. For all of the failings of law enforcement that day, Sicknick and many of his fellow officers fought fiercely to keep the insurrectionist mob at bay long enough so that members of Congress and the Vice President could be moved to more secure locations. As I have said before, this was nothing less than an attempt at a self-coup, and though there are many in the political class who would prefer that we forget about it and move on, that is the absolute last thing we should do. We forget this at our own peril – they have provided the template for future attempts, and we must be prepared.

I’ve talked about this quite a bit on my podcast, Strange Sound, but I think it bears repeating, hopefully by people with larger audiences than mine. There’s a lot to criticize about our federal government. It has inequities built into its very constitutional foundations, such as slave economy measures like the electoral college, the Senate, and so on. Even the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery, explicitly allows that toxic institution to persist for incarcerated people. Bernie Sanders is right, in fact, when he says that we need a kind of revolution in governance, but I think he would agree that he’s not talking about an actual political revolution involving a forcible overthrow of the U.S. constitutional order. Actual revolutions are a bloody business, and you never know where they’re going to end up. They also require more effort, energy, and suffering than just hardscrabble organizing in all fifty states. So from a left perspective, in my humble opinion, overthrow of the national government is a bad idea and an unnecessary one for the promotion of positive change.

That’s the left. The right, on the other hand, are bomb throwers. The people who attacked the capitol last month were bent on autocracy. They had been fed the big lie for years, with a ramp up over the course of the 2020 campaign – the election is rigged, vote by mail is rife with fraud, the whole thing is fixed, etc. This was Trump’s plan A in 2016. It never got implemented because something unexpected happened – he won. This past year he resurrected Plan A, and it nearly led to the gutting of the federal legislature, the murder of our representatives, and the installation of someone who plainly lost the last election, hands down. Do these deluded right-wingers want a revolution? I don’t know, but they almost got one, and that is some pretty scary shit. For all the “defense” bluster our government puts out on a regular basis, all the posturing on terrorism, all the billions it spends on war materiel, it seemed somehow powerless to stop a bunch of white Americans from trashing the center of government. Plainly all that anti-terrorism prep, like that clause in the 13th Amendment, was not meant for whitey.

R.I.P., officer Sicknick, and condolences to your family. We’ll have to work harder to ensure that his loss was not in vain.

luv u,

jp

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

Death and taxes.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog and listening to my podcast Strange Sound for any length of time knows that I’m a sometimes harsh critic of the institutional Democratic party. That same anyone would be aware that I am even more critical of the Republican party. The reason for this is fairly simple: whereas the Democratic party has some individuals within it – albeit a minority – who are principled progressives who want to make a difference in people’s lives, the Republican party is now literally a death cult that wants to cut rich people’s taxes. This week we exceeded 300,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, and you would barely know it by listening to GOP lawmakers or their idiotic president. (And yes, he is their president, lock, stock, and cracker barrel. I’m of the opinion that Trump is the purest expression of Republican values – selfishness, ignorance, bigotry, and self-aggrandizement.)

I know both parties have a lot to answer for, but frankly, Republican politicians are almost universally out of their minds. As I write this on a day when more than 3,400 people died of this virus across the country, we’ve seen further evidence that the administration was explicitly pursuing a strategy of “herd immunity” with regard to the Coronavirus. As reported in Politico, part-time Canadian college lecturer Paul Alexander was helping to press the CDC into adopting a strategy of having everyone become infected … or as many people as possible. This was the crack-head notion they shared with Dr. Atlas that somehow everyone getting the disease was a good thing. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how “herd immunity” should work – the idea is to keep people from getting a disease by inoculating large numbers of them against it. Infecting people to prevent disease is like jumping off a building to avoid falling. These people are seriously cracked.

I can’t quite work out why Trump would choose to align himself with these people and take the hands-off approach he took to this virus when to do the opposite – investing heavily on safety and prevention – would possibly have made him a much more popular president and perhaps earned him re-election. The only thing that seems likely to me is that he thought the emergence of this novel Coronavirus was just unfair, and that like a five-year-old he didn’t want to accept it. And of course, because he is, as president, the head of his party, Trump set the tone for everyone else. But make no mistake – the Republican political class would have gone there anyway. As I’ve said before – every time they come back, they’re worse. Reagan was worse than Nixon, Bush Jr. worse than Bush Sr., and Trump worse than them all. Each one of these presidents was backed up by a party that supported practically every move they made.

With all of the challenges we are facing, we need to keep them out of power. We can no longer afford to play defense on these terminal issues.

luv u,

jp

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

Soft coup.

The president of the United States is not going to give this up. The party that made him president is not going to stop supporting him in his delusions. All you T.V. pundits and mainstream media commentators waiting with baited breath for Republican lawmakers to “pivot” or “come to their senses” or “admit in public what they acknowledge in private”, save your breath. Donald Trump is the chosen leader of the Republican Party – chosen because he encapsulates all that they stand for: celebration of greed, white aggrievement, authoritarianism, and destroying the useful parts of government (i.e. the parts that help people in some way). They can no more abandon him than a snake’s body can slither free of its head. And while they haven’t tried this blatantly in the past to steal an election by ignoring or invalidating millions of ballots that have already been counted and certified, they have always demonstrated their potential for doing so.

Let me be clear. As I have said in my podcast, Strange Sound, this is Trump returning to his original Plan A from back in 2016. I know that sounds like Plan 9 From Outer Space, but it’s true – Trump ran his 2016 campaign as a branding exercise, thinking that he would lose, cry foul, claim fraud, and use the resulting white outrage to build his new media empire. Things didn’t work out as planned, of course – Trump won, and had to resort to Plan B: milk the Presidency for all its worth, and as it turns out, it’s worth quite a bit. Now that he has obviously lost his bid for re-election, he’s resorting to Plan A, only it’s different than it would have been in 2016, because he is now President of the United States, and the power of that office amplifies everything you do to a level unobtainable via any other means. I think people tend to underestimate this dynamic, but it’s true – the Presidency has enormous influence, far beyond that of any cheesy reality show star or phony billionaire.

And so, unlike what would have happened four years ago if he had pulled this in the wake of an electoral defeat, his insistence that there was massive fraud is backed up by the United States Justice Department, all of the resources of the Executive Branch, and the entire spectrum of right-wing media. That amount of power and influence is enough to shake even the firmest of governmental foundations. Even if Trump’s lawsuits and challenges are vacuous, ill-constructed, and unsuccessful, the very attempt to overturn the results of this election is creating an indelible impression in the minds of millions upon millions of Americans. This, at best, will undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s administration and, at worst, will prompt political violence and mass unrest. What the president and his enablers are doing is profoundly irresponsible and detrimental to the stability of our democratic institutions. It is a kind of soft coup in that it robs the new administration of its ability to govern. Just as badly, it creates a playbook for future authoritarians of the right who will surely emerge from the GOP in the coming years.

Don’t treat this as a joke. That is not what this is. This is an attack on the administrative state, and it remains to be seen whether or not this attack will succeed.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.