Tag Archives: Trump

Political Rants

Stop hiding your light under that bushel.

Well, Trump started channeling QAnon in a big way this week at an Ohio rally. I’m assuming anyone who reads this blog knows what QAnon is. It’s basically the blood libel, updated for the modern age. Some idiot posted some random shit on 4chan (which happens basically every second) claiming that s/he is a secret intelligence operative and was spilling tea on upcoming FBI raids on Trump’s political enemies. It was supposed to happen in 48 hours and, of course, it didn’t.

That failure, however, didn’t stop the true believers. These people must be total knuckleheads. Who would earnestly believe this crap? Of course, people have a tendency to believe whatever places them in a positive light. Whatever the case may be, QAnon has a lot of followers, and they are apparently laser-focused on the conspiracy theory. Trump is their greasy, corpulent pope. It makes total sense that he would pull those people close – they are the scrum who never left him.

What they think they’re running on

Trumpist conspiracy theories aside, the Republican party appears to have settled on their central issue for the 2022 mid-term elections: brown people are coming over the border to KILL you. Sure, they’ll carp about inflation, spending, taxes, etc., but when they really want to motivate their voters, nothing works better than a solid dose of bigotry/racism. DeSantis and Abbott are leading the way on this currently, but they’re all saying it, tweeting about it, and trying to fill the airwaves with it as hard as they can.

Our own Claudia Tenney, soon to be the ex-congressmember from NY-22, has been tweeting furiously about the “border crisis” and an unprecedented two million apprehensions of people crossing the border to sew together her garments, grow and harvest her food, care for her sick relatives, and so on, all at tremendously low pay. She’s running for the bright red 24th district seat, so I doubt she has to pander very hard, but she also wants to keep her beloved Trump happy, so it’s under the bus with the brown people. I’m sure her GOP colleagues in the House all have similar motivations for saying the exact same things at the exact same time.

What they’re actually running on

The fact is, the last thing the Republicans want to talk about is what they’re planning on doing if they return to power. The reason for that is simple: their policies are desperately unpopular – politically toxic, even. Unfortunately for them, Florida Senator Rick Scott mapped it all out for them in a very public fashion earlier this year with his 11-Point Plan to Rescue America. He seems to be soft-pedaling it a bit now for some reason, almost like he and his colleagues are afraid of blowing their own horn.

One of his 11 points involves rescuing more tax revenue from working people. It’s basically one of the biggest tax hikes in American history, hitting poor and working families hard. This should surprise no one – for all their complaints about taxes, Republicans have raised our taxes more than a few times in recent decades, particularly in the wake of their 2010 takeover of the House when the eliminated Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit. Not sure why Scott would think this is a great political move. Is he as stupid as he looks? Perhaps.

Help the kids out, will you?

Hey – Republicans don’t want to say that they will, for instance, ban abortion nationwide if they win back the House, Senate, and Presidency in the next couple of years. So we should say it for them. Let’s get the facts out on their policy positions every chance we get, on social media, in conversation, and elsewhere. They should like that, right?

luv u,

jp

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

Same old same old (and I loathe it)

Remember when, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that he would return us to the Iran deal (or JCPOA)? Yeah, that was awesome. Except that they haven’t done that, which is not so awesome. In fact, it’s infuriating. But it’s also exactly what we should have expected out of him, frankly – namely, that instead of reversing Trump’s most heinous foreign policy initiatives, Biden would adopt and even extend them into his own term.

Some readers may remember my posts from during the Biden/Trump race regarding Biden’s lack of focus on foreign policy issues. I wrote at the time about how his campaign site issues section didn’t have a single item on global affairs, other than some dreck about immigration from the southern cone nations. My contention at the time was that he had little good to say about it, and that he assumed his voters didn’t care about those issues. Perhaps he was right, but I have to think a section of Democratic party voters are a bit taken aback by some of his policies.

The toxic alliance

The JCPOA is the most glaring example of this. Biden could have reinstated this agreement with the stroke of a pen in the first days of his presidency. Instead, he chose to consult with then Israeli PM Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia – both openly hostile to Iran – before proceeding. Our State Department is balking on sanctions relief, and there’s little sign of progress over the past year. This agreement, very favorable to the U.S., is essentially dead in the water. Why?

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, who appeared on Majority Report last week, talked about Biden’s apparent support for strengthening the alliance of nations that are signatories to the Abraham Accords, a Trump initiative to defuse support for the Palestinians and isolate Iran. Parsi suggests that the JCPOA is a casualty of the administration’s desire to build a common front against the Iranians, pulling Israel together with some of the more pugnacious gulf states – an alliance built on common enmity. What a good idea.

Continuity: not our friend

Okay, so … why is our government – the government of normie Joe Biden, not crazy-ass Donald Trump – encouraging conflict in the Middle East instead of working toward peaceful outcomes of the sort the JCPOA was designed to produce? Well, this is nothing new in American foreign policy. Yes, they are extending one of Trump’s worst decisions. But they are also doing the same sort of thing the U.S. always does in various parts of the world.

Other examples aren’t hard to find. The first that comes to mind is another Trump reversal of a late Obama administration policy, the opening to Cuba. Trump shut that down entirely, and Biden has failed to even act as though he’s willing to reinstate it. The domestic political motivations are obvious, but again – why perpetuate conflict when normalization would bring greater stability and, of course, more benefits to Cubans living in the U.S.?

The other obvious example is Korea. Here is one instance when Trump’s instincts were, at a certain point, better than Biden’s. Why have we failed to settle the Korean conflict when the solution is almost entirely in our hands? Same reason with all of the other endless conflicts: we want to remain a force to be reckoned with in all of these regions. We want to keep potential economic rivals – like an integrated Asia – from emerging. Same old, same old.

The way forward

There are a handful of members of Congress who understand these issues. We need more like them. I know elections are not the only thing, but they’re worth the modicum of effort we all need to put into them. Look at the candidates vying for your district’s House seat, find the most progressive, and vote. We need allies in government before we’ll see some movement on backing off of the bipartisan neoimperialist agenda.

luv u,

jp

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

How the hearings stack up against hearings past.

As someone who tends to pay attention to these things, I watched the first night of the January 6th Committee hearings with some interest. MSNBC spent a week winding up to these public meetings, and the committee did not, in my estimation, disappoint. I don’t know who in America remains persuadable on this issue, but it’s hard to watch the proceedings and not come away thinking about what an outrage January 6 was.

When I say January 6, I mean the whole enchilada. The day was just the culmination of a long process which the president at the time set in motion. As shocking as the attack was – and I, like many, watched it unfold with disbelief – Trump had long demonstrated his contempt for elections, and spent much of 2020 undermining the credibility of mail-in and absentee ballots. This was because he knew that Democrats were more likely to opt for vote by mail than to show up at the polling place. The hearings are highlighting this dynamic, and it’s all to the good.

Haldeman’s racist lawyer

Not surprisingly, many commentators have invoked the Watergate hearings back in 1973 to give context to the current proceedings. I’m old enough to remember these being broadcast on television, though I can only recall the high (or low) points, like when Haldeman’s shriveled old lawyer called Senator Dan Inouye – a wounded WWII veteran – “that little jap”. That was world-class.

The thing that’s notable about the Watergate scandal was its iceberg-like quality of revealing just the tip of what was hidden from view. Author Jefferson Morley talked about this on Majority Report this week. Several of Nixon’s “plumbers” were CIA assets or agents with a long history of involvement in the Agency’s abuses at home and overseas. More of the truth came out during the Church Committee investigation a few years later, but it was kind of a controlled burn, according to Morley. (Practically at the same time as Church, Cuban exile Agency assets blew up Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in D.C. and the Cuban Olympic Fencing team in mid-air.)

Reagan’s little game

Perhaps the second most well-known Congressional investigation was Iran Contra during the Reagan administration. This, too, represented a tiny corner of a much larger enterprise. The select Committee (led by Inouye, incidentally) looked into Reagan’s circumvention of the Congress’s law barring direct aid to the Contra terrorists operating in Nicaragua with our assistance. (We had essentially created the force out of thin air.) The crime was breaking the law passed by Congress, not the persecution of Nicaraguans.

Beyond that, though, Reagan’s team headed by Oliver North and General Secord sold TOW missiles and some spare parts to the Iranian government, which was defending itself against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – an invasion supported by the United States! Interestingly, very little about America’s role in the Iran-Iraq conflict came to light through these hearings. Neither did the committee touch on how the U.S. government was supporting murderous dictatorial regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere.

Old fashioned grift and graft

The January 6th Committee proceedings are looking at something kind of different. This is more garden variety corruption and authoritarian tendencies, though as always, racism is part of the story. Trump tried to lie his way into permanent status as president, and has thus far failed. He bilked his own supporters out of hundreds of millions of dollars, saying they were contributing to a legal defense fund. Guy has no shame.

I guess the thing that ties them all together is authoritarianism and a strong desire to override the will of the people, either by discounting their votes or ignoring their elected representatives. That much hasn’t changed.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.