The final hour is one of the best hours in any Star Wars movie, period. But it takes a really long and meandering time to get there. Full review and spoilers below the cut
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Russians and Putin and Bears, Oh My.
It's a story that practically writes itself: A blundering idiot of a candidate calls out for a foreign government to hack his rival's email and splash it across the media landscape. There are emails of substance, others less so, suddenly leaked, damaging the rival's campaign. Rival loses, idiot becomes President.
On the surface, it's not hard to accept the story on face value. Trump's second campaign manager was a lobbyist for the Russian government in Ukraine, and his Secretary of State pick is an oil executive who has cried many a public tear over the sanctions imposed on the Russians in the wake of their seizure of Crimea and their on-going backing of the Ukrainian rebels. Trump himself has yet to find an unkind word to say about Putin or his government, so all-in-all, things are looking pretty good for Russia in the wake of the elections. This is the strongest and only proof needed apparently that Putin twiddled with our sacred democratic process.
But I've never really bought the liberal narrative that Russia played a direct and malignant role in the 2016 election. The story has struck me from the very beginning as a way for Democrats to blame their massive political failure on literally anything other than their own terrible decisions over the last 25 years or so. Hillary couldn't have lost because she was the worst possible candidate to run in a populist political era, obviously. It also couldn't have been the fact that she was widely and deeply hated by the people she needed to win and did nothing at all to win them over. Nope, can't be that. And it most certainly isn't because the Clintons have spear-headed the Democratic Party's strategy of feeding their old middle-class base to rich in return for political power which embittered said base against her and left for the first person to actually acknowledge that they'd been fucked over. Naturally, all these reasons had to be dismissed out of hand, because it's hard to embrace the outlandish when the blatantly obvious keeps getting in the way.
More importantly, no one has ever actually submitted or aired any kind of actual proof that the Russians have done, well, anything. Wikileaks has said from the beginning that the Podesta emails were leaked to them by an internal source, not the product of a Russian hack. Considering that Wikileaks has always run on whistle-blower leaks, I don't see a reason to doubt it. And there's also the small matter of, you know, anyone anywhere finding any evidence to the contrary. The CIA's big report "confirming" Russian involvement has been all over the news lately, but, again, literally none of the stories mention specifically how the Russians tipped the scales and since the report is classified, we can't even see the evidence the CIA is basing their conclusion on. Not to denigrate a national institution or anything, but the CIA has a solid history lying about, well, everything, so I wouldn't exactly count them as a trustworthy source.
Say it's true, though. The report is accurate and the CIA has known about Russia's play for months. Well, now you have to deal with the question "Why didn't anyone do anything?" Harry Reid is blaming James Comey, because why not. Reid alleges that Comey sat on evidence that proves everything for... reasons. Well, fine, let's say that's true, too, that the head of the nation's largest law enforcement agency is deliberately allowing a foreign power to directly manipulate the government he works for for no apparent reason. Sure, okay. This kicks us up to the final level, and the thing pretty much everyone's been avoiding, why didn't Barack Obama say something? One assumes the intelligence community would've briefed their boss about Putin fucking with who would be his successor; and yet, Obama didn't do much of anything to counter or even mention this supposed incursion against his political ally. I'd call that an odd move.
The only way to explain why people kept their mouths shut and nothing was revealed until now is to weave so many layers of conspiracy on top of each other that you may as well start listening to Alex Jones as a "how-to" series.
Honestly, though, even if my skepticism is proven wrong, even if there's actual concrete evidence out there that indisputably proves Putin played in active role in getting his fellow cunt supreme elected, I can't really find the energy to be outraged. Nothing Russia is being accused of is any different from all the times that we have interfered with, manipulated, or flat-out disregarded democratic elections to make them suit our favor. Why should we be immune from that? What makes us so fucking special that we should always be the ones breaking the world but never face any consequences for doing so?
The worst aspect of this whole thing, for me, is that Democrats will become so wrapped up in making this Russia thing The Real Story of this election and blustering about how anyone who doesn't believe them is just an idiot or a fool or blah blah blah. This will inevitably prevent them from changing anything and instead of getting their shit together to nominate someone worth voting for, they'll throw out another Clintonite candidate which saddles us with a full eight-fucking-year Trump Presidency. Just once I'd like the Democratic Party to figure out that to get people to vote for you, you actually have to give them a platform worth believing in. That really shouldn't be so much to ask for, should it?
On the surface, it's not hard to accept the story on face value. Trump's second campaign manager was a lobbyist for the Russian government in Ukraine, and his Secretary of State pick is an oil executive who has cried many a public tear over the sanctions imposed on the Russians in the wake of their seizure of Crimea and their on-going backing of the Ukrainian rebels. Trump himself has yet to find an unkind word to say about Putin or his government, so all-in-all, things are looking pretty good for Russia in the wake of the elections. This is the strongest and only proof needed apparently that Putin twiddled with our sacred democratic process.
But I've never really bought the liberal narrative that Russia played a direct and malignant role in the 2016 election. The story has struck me from the very beginning as a way for Democrats to blame their massive political failure on literally anything other than their own terrible decisions over the last 25 years or so. Hillary couldn't have lost because she was the worst possible candidate to run in a populist political era, obviously. It also couldn't have been the fact that she was widely and deeply hated by the people she needed to win and did nothing at all to win them over. Nope, can't be that. And it most certainly isn't because the Clintons have spear-headed the Democratic Party's strategy of feeding their old middle-class base to rich in return for political power which embittered said base against her and left for the first person to actually acknowledge that they'd been fucked over. Naturally, all these reasons had to be dismissed out of hand, because it's hard to embrace the outlandish when the blatantly obvious keeps getting in the way.
More importantly, no one has ever actually submitted or aired any kind of actual proof that the Russians have done, well, anything. Wikileaks has said from the beginning that the Podesta emails were leaked to them by an internal source, not the product of a Russian hack. Considering that Wikileaks has always run on whistle-blower leaks, I don't see a reason to doubt it. And there's also the small matter of, you know, anyone anywhere finding any evidence to the contrary. The CIA's big report "confirming" Russian involvement has been all over the news lately, but, again, literally none of the stories mention specifically how the Russians tipped the scales and since the report is classified, we can't even see the evidence the CIA is basing their conclusion on. Not to denigrate a national institution or anything, but the CIA has a solid history lying about, well, everything, so I wouldn't exactly count them as a trustworthy source.
Say it's true, though. The report is accurate and the CIA has known about Russia's play for months. Well, now you have to deal with the question "Why didn't anyone do anything?" Harry Reid is blaming James Comey, because why not. Reid alleges that Comey sat on evidence that proves everything for... reasons. Well, fine, let's say that's true, too, that the head of the nation's largest law enforcement agency is deliberately allowing a foreign power to directly manipulate the government he works for for no apparent reason. Sure, okay. This kicks us up to the final level, and the thing pretty much everyone's been avoiding, why didn't Barack Obama say something? One assumes the intelligence community would've briefed their boss about Putin fucking with who would be his successor; and yet, Obama didn't do much of anything to counter or even mention this supposed incursion against his political ally. I'd call that an odd move.
The only way to explain why people kept their mouths shut and nothing was revealed until now is to weave so many layers of conspiracy on top of each other that you may as well start listening to Alex Jones as a "how-to" series.
Honestly, though, even if my skepticism is proven wrong, even if there's actual concrete evidence out there that indisputably proves Putin played in active role in getting his fellow cunt supreme elected, I can't really find the energy to be outraged. Nothing Russia is being accused of is any different from all the times that we have interfered with, manipulated, or flat-out disregarded democratic elections to make them suit our favor. Why should we be immune from that? What makes us so fucking special that we should always be the ones breaking the world but never face any consequences for doing so?
The worst aspect of this whole thing, for me, is that Democrats will become so wrapped up in making this Russia thing The Real Story of this election and blustering about how anyone who doesn't believe them is just an idiot or a fool or blah blah blah. This will inevitably prevent them from changing anything and instead of getting their shit together to nominate someone worth voting for, they'll throw out another Clintonite candidate which saddles us with a full eight-fucking-year Trump Presidency. Just once I'd like the Democratic Party to figure out that to get people to vote for you, you actually have to give them a platform worth believing in. That really shouldn't be so much to ask for, should it?
Friday, December 9, 2016
One Month Down, So Many More to Go
So, we've now had one month of President-Elect Trump and, at this point, I think it's fair to say that his Presidency will be as awful as most of us expected it to be.
Exhibit A is his cabinet picks, which, so far, are one bag of awful after another. His picks for Secretaries of Education, Labor, and the head of the EPA are all people who spent their careers being actively hostile to the mission of the agencies they will now be leading. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican donor who has literally spent decades and millions of dollars trying to destroy public education, Scott Pruitt made his name in the environmental game by repeatedly suing the EPA over its environmental regulations and is a full fledged climate-change denier, his latest pick, Andrew Puzder is the CEO of CKE, the company that owns Carl's Jr., has been repeatedly named in class action lawsuits over failure to pay overtime to restaurant managers. And then there's Steven Mnuchin as the Treasury pick. Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs executive who wanted to pad his Bond-villian resume, so he got into the foreclosure industry where he once foreclose on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents. It almost seems a shame that he doesnt have a mustache to twirl.
Remember how Trump was going to drain the Washington swamp of all the donors and politically connected CEOS that got top cabinet picks? Me neither.
Trump also has taken the opportunity to start flinging his weight around on the foreign policy front, too. I do think controversy over the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is largely overblown, mostly because I don't think there's anything real behind it. The Washington Post reports that the call had been in the works for some time, and initially, I thought the call was another one of those situations where Trump does something while being completely ignorant of its consequences.
But when he named Iowa governor Terry Branstad as the Chinese ambassador, I changed my mind a bit. Branstad has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since 1985, so in that sense, he knows the lay of the land and how to best approach Jinping. In a larger context, I think this another example of Trump talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it. On the one side, he gets the China hardliners nice and stiff by thumbing his nose at a decades long policy specifically designed not to ruffle any Chinese feathers. Then, out the other side, he nominates a man with a deeply established relationship to the same Chinese government he's supposedly dead set on snubbing, so I wouldn't expect any follow through on Trump's blowhard attitudes towards China anytime soon. Remember, Trump is and always has been about the projection, not the actual substance.
This carries over to Trump's main claim to domestic affairs, too. Trump is parading the Carrier plant deal as real, concrete evidence that he can save jobs on a mass scale. Trouble is, dig into the details a bit, and he really didn't save much at all. For one thing, he didn't save 1,100 jobs- that number is closer to 800. For another, Carrier's parent company is still going to fire 1,300 people in Indiana. Oh, also, Carrier is going to invest $16 million to automate the plant in question so it can fire more people down the road. And, as the cherry-on-top, Carrier is going to get a $7 million tax break, courtesy of the good people of Indiana that they're so busy firing. Truly, how have we managed without such an obvious economic genius to guide us?
Again, though, the pomp matters more than the circumstance here. Because even though it's a rather hollow "victory" we're talking about, it's still a sideshow that gives people who have largely been abandoned the top billing they desperately crave. And hey, it's working out for him, polling wise, so why should he change anything?
It's not really Trump's fault that the American people, by and large, only have time to browse news headlines and not get into the gory details which just makes it easier to pull the wool over their eyes until it all ends in tears. A con man is nothing without his marks, after all. So Trump will continue to bask in the glory of his propaganda moves while the world continues to rot behind him and he'll get cheered for it all the through. At least we'll get the schadenfreude of Trumpgrets.
Exhibit A is his cabinet picks, which, so far, are one bag of awful after another. His picks for Secretaries of Education, Labor, and the head of the EPA are all people who spent their careers being actively hostile to the mission of the agencies they will now be leading. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican donor who has literally spent decades and millions of dollars trying to destroy public education, Scott Pruitt made his name in the environmental game by repeatedly suing the EPA over its environmental regulations and is a full fledged climate-change denier, his latest pick, Andrew Puzder is the CEO of CKE, the company that owns Carl's Jr., has been repeatedly named in class action lawsuits over failure to pay overtime to restaurant managers. And then there's Steven Mnuchin as the Treasury pick. Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs executive who wanted to pad his Bond-villian resume, so he got into the foreclosure industry where he once foreclose on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents. It almost seems a shame that he doesnt have a mustache to twirl.
Remember how Trump was going to drain the Washington swamp of all the donors and politically connected CEOS that got top cabinet picks? Me neither.
Trump also has taken the opportunity to start flinging his weight around on the foreign policy front, too. I do think controversy over the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is largely overblown, mostly because I don't think there's anything real behind it. The Washington Post reports that the call had been in the works for some time, and initially, I thought the call was another one of those situations where Trump does something while being completely ignorant of its consequences.
But when he named Iowa governor Terry Branstad as the Chinese ambassador, I changed my mind a bit. Branstad has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since 1985, so in that sense, he knows the lay of the land and how to best approach Jinping. In a larger context, I think this another example of Trump talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it. On the one side, he gets the China hardliners nice and stiff by thumbing his nose at a decades long policy specifically designed not to ruffle any Chinese feathers. Then, out the other side, he nominates a man with a deeply established relationship to the same Chinese government he's supposedly dead set on snubbing, so I wouldn't expect any follow through on Trump's blowhard attitudes towards China anytime soon. Remember, Trump is and always has been about the projection, not the actual substance.
This carries over to Trump's main claim to domestic affairs, too. Trump is parading the Carrier plant deal as real, concrete evidence that he can save jobs on a mass scale. Trouble is, dig into the details a bit, and he really didn't save much at all. For one thing, he didn't save 1,100 jobs- that number is closer to 800. For another, Carrier's parent company is still going to fire 1,300 people in Indiana. Oh, also, Carrier is going to invest $16 million to automate the plant in question so it can fire more people down the road. And, as the cherry-on-top, Carrier is going to get a $7 million tax break, courtesy of the good people of Indiana that they're so busy firing. Truly, how have we managed without such an obvious economic genius to guide us?
Again, though, the pomp matters more than the circumstance here. Because even though it's a rather hollow "victory" we're talking about, it's still a sideshow that gives people who have largely been abandoned the top billing they desperately crave. And hey, it's working out for him, polling wise, so why should he change anything?
It's not really Trump's fault that the American people, by and large, only have time to browse news headlines and not get into the gory details which just makes it easier to pull the wool over their eyes until it all ends in tears. A con man is nothing without his marks, after all. So Trump will continue to bask in the glory of his propaganda moves while the world continues to rot behind him and he'll get cheered for it all the through. At least we'll get the schadenfreude of Trumpgrets.
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