Jennifer Rubin is a columnist at The Washington Post, she writes a blog called "Right Turn" which is the the Post's way of having ideological balance in its opinion pages. She's famous for being a Never Trumper and considered a voice of reason in the conservative movement. Relatively speaking, that's true enough; but when your competition is a white supremacist like Tucker Carlson or a rapid-fire goblin like Ben Shaprio, being more "level-headed" than they are is less than impressive.
I bring her up because her latest column, "Trump can't afford to lose his state TV" is a nice case study in why being a Republican intellectual with a functioning brain can still be astoundingly blind to the larger currents or consequences of their political movement.
But first, credit where credit is due. Rubin correctly diagnoses that Trump's tweet storm this past Sunday where he took shots at Fox News anchors Shep Smith - the only legitimate journalist to ever work at Fox News - Leland Vittert, and Arthel Neville. Rubin correctly pointed out that Trump's insistence on loyalty as he defines it, an unquestioning obedience and deference coupled with unrelenting hostility to any who would criticize him, is a sign of weakness and fear, not of strength.
She also points out this little tidbit, which I think most people legitimately overlook when talking about Trump's relationship with conservative media:
"He needs Fox News and the crew of sycophantic blogs, talk radio hosts and formerly respectable print publications more than they need him. Sure, they’d lose some audience if they deviated from the Trump party line, but Trump might lose his grip on power. The stakes are much higher for Trump than for the intellectually corrupt right-wing media chorus."
Granted, I think Trump has done his usual Trump thing where he has so ingratiated himself into the right wing media ecosphere that he's made their unconditional support of his presidency as much a facet of their legitimacy as they have for him.
Like all parasites, Trump latched firmly on to a, in this case, willing host, and made their relationship seem a critical component of both's survival, but if ever there came a time when the two separated, Fox News and the rest would survive, albeit weakened than they are now, but Trump- and by extension, his presidency - would not.
As Rubin says, if there came a time where Trump couldn't watch Fox News for the at least six hours a day to get his fix of affirmation and adulation, the meltdown that would result would be something unseen in the annals of presidential politics.
This is all head-noddingly good stuff, it's on point, insightful, and deftly delivered. But then, the turn comes, and it becomes apparent how Rubin, and other conservatives of her ilk, completely failed to see why Trump happened, and why the Republican party base clings to him so fervently.
Speaking of how Fox News is going to run by an newly formed independent company after the media aspect of 21st-Century Fox has been consumed by Disney, Rubin points out that one of the first things the new company did was hire Paul Ryan to the board of directors. Speaking of Ryan's legacy vis-a-vis Trump, Rubin says this:
"Now, as House speaker, Ryan wasn’t one to stand up to Trump. To the contrary, Ryan excused Trump’s behavior and enabled his presidency, only rarely speaking out of school. But maybe this is his chance at redemption. Along with Murdoch, Ryan might make up for the damage he did to the United States by refashioning Fox News from an RT clone into a real news operation. He might actually insist that journalistic standards be upheld by everyone who goes on air. A pipe dream? Probably. Ryan’s hardly a profile in courage."
The thing I want to highlight here is that, even though Rubin acknowledges the scenario as a pipe dream, that dream still has roots in the belief that Ryan will one day find the courage to act on his differences with Trump, and stand up to all that he represents. The problem here is, there is no meaningful difference between Trump and Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan is a man who built his entire career on the idea that all the protections The New Deal and other social programs to protect people from the vagaries and brutalities of the rich and powerful were, in fact, bad things that needed to be reversed and spent a lifetime working to make it so.
The whole point of Ryan's quest to destroy programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Food Stamps was so ordinary people would be forever at the whim of rich businessmen who doled out jobs and wages at whatever pittance level they deemed acceptable as everyone else scrambled to survive on the bones of what was left.
It is, in a word, serfdom.
It is a worldview based entirely on the subjugation, degradation, and humiliation of everyone Ryan deemed to be unworthy, of living off the gains stolen from those who rightfully earned them.
The only difference between Ryan and Trump is that while Ryan seeks these things as a political and sociological reordering, Trump seeks them for his own personal and petty means. Imagining there will ever be a time where these two disagree over anything more substantial than personality styles is just that, fantasy.
The real whooper though, is this (italics original):
"The question is whether Fox News executives, shareholders and employees decide that they are making money off the anguish of their country and the assault on democratic values and norms. Ultimately, they have to decide whether their business model — stirring up hatred and misleading mostly older, right-wing white audiences — is sustainable and whether they want their legacy to be: Helped make America a worse place."
I don't know what alternate universe Rubin dipped into when she this train of thought crossed her mind, but here, in this timeline, the answer is, and always has been, an unequivocal "Yes."
Jane Mayer had a really great story in The New Yorker detailing how Fox News grew into its role as the agenda setter for the Trump president and, looking at that, and the entire 22-year existence of the network who's sole goal has been to bolster and foster power for conservative figures, why would they change? The network as achieved everything it's set out to do from the moment Rupert Murdoch conceived it and they're going to give all that up because what, it's bad for democracy? Please.
This belief, that there's some nugget of legitimacy or decency in modern conservationism is adult equivalent of believing in Santa or the Easter Bunny. As I've said pretty much from the beginning of Trump's career, he isn't an aberration, he's the trend. If we refuse to recognize that, or prop up writers like Rubin who just want the GOP to do all the same things Trump is doing but with better table manners, then we'll just keep getting more of the same until we drown in the filth we never bothered to throw out.
Since America is incapable of letting one election finish without immediately focusing on the next one, we already seem to be shifting into the presidential race for 2020. And with that op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, this piece in the Chicago Sun-Times and not one but two features in The Guardian, it increasingly looks like Hillary Clinton is going to throw her hat in the ring, again, so I feel we should just drill this mantra into our heads at the soonest opportunity:
Hillary Clinton will never -ever- be President of the United States.
A major reason for this is that no one, including her, can articulate a reason why she should be president. "Well, she's experienced," is a common refrain, usually followed by the fact that she's been First Lady, a Senator, and Secretary of State. Notably, however, the gushing over her CV usually ends there which is weird, right? Don't you think if Clinton and her supporters were touting her time occupying positions of power as one of her central qualifications that they'd spend just as much time pointing to things accomplished using that power? Maybe they don't want to talk about how she was an ardent supporter of both the crime and welfare "reform" bills her husband signed way back when, bills that fed more non-violent offenders into the prison system and gutted the welfare benefits most poor Americans depended on. Considering that Clinton will need the votes of poor people of color, especially African-Americans, you can see why this would be a sensitive legacy to bring up.
Oh, right, how could we forget how, as a Senator, Clinton also voted down a bill that would reform how student loans functioned, such as their recipients being allowed to declare bankruptcy, after receiving a massive influx of cash from the financial institutions administrating those loans. For Clinton to win, she needs the millennial block (which are people aged 20-35, remember) to stay with her and not splinter off to 3rd-parties or not show up like they did the last time. Considering that my generation is the first to have a shorter life expectancy than the one before it because we're literally drinking ourselves to death, ODing on heroin, or using more traditional means of suicide in the face of massive economic pressures due to low wages and inescapable student loan debt, it goes without saying that any pitch Clinton makes about how she pinkie swears to solve a problem she had a direct role in creating will be something of a hard sell.
Finally, let's note that Clinton's crowning achievement as Secretary of State was convincing Obama to pursue regime change in Libya, disposing Muammar Gaddafi.
How'd that turn out? Sure, we instituted the regime change easily enough, but now Libya has two militia-controlled governments with one of the most bustling slave trades in the entire world. So... not great, it seems. Suddenly, being saddled with the Benghazi bullshit doesn't seem like a bad thing for Clinton's image.
All in all, the focus on Clinton's legacy is one of the most incompetent "don't look at the man behind the curtain" games in all of politics. You're supposed to be awed by the majesty of her accumulated titles, but any investigation into her actual policies, who they benefited, and who ended paying the most for her ambitions gets you labelled a misogynist or a Russian agent. A winning strategy this is, obviously, not.
That being said, presidential elections are based more on popularity and public engagement than any real experience so, how is she on that front? The last Gallup poll that asked about her was in September 2018 and two years after losing her approval rating is sitting at the rather abysmal 36%.
For comparison, Trump's approval rating during the same polling period (September 4-12) ranged between 41-38%.
Let's just pause to reflect on the fact that Trump, the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling by a mile, is still more popular Hillary Clinton two years into his presidency.
This is usually the time that someone pops up with the refrain of "Popular vote! Three million votes!!!!" Which, okay, sure, she won the most irrelevant vote in politics, but how significant is that vote margin?
When you convert those numbers to percentages, the final vote tally comes out to Hillary getting 48% of the vote to Trump's 46%. You can see why people insist on screaming out the three million number because it makes it seem like she achieved something significant instead of barely winning a popularity contest against a proto-fascist pig by the skin of her teeth.
This isn't even touching on the fact that she couldn't even muster 50% of the fucking vote. The idea that there's some overwhelming popular support just waiting in the wings that will rally Hillary to victory is a fantasy on par with Trump's supporter's insistence that he's an honest man.
So, why the disconnect? How can Clinton be in the hole to a man so utterly repugnant as Trump? The answer lies in the fact that the Republican base is solidly behind Trump, while the Democratic base is more ambivalent about Clinton. In that Gallup poll I mentioned earlier, the party breakdowns for Clinton's approval went this way: Democrats had a 77% approval rating, independents had a 30%, and Republicans had 4 %.
In comparison, Trump's approval rating among Republicans and Independents over that same period were 85 and 36%, respectively. I guess there's an argument to be made that she could close that gap to something more competitive in a campaign, but I will point out that she's failed to do that twice already; there's no reason to believe that she'll be able to do so on the third go round, either.
Take, for example, one of her features in The Guardian, where she says that Europe must focus on curbing migration to cut off the far right's exploitation of the issue to rally people behind nationalist causes. On the surface, seems like something of a decent idea, right? If you "solve" the problem your enemies are using as a rallying cry, then you've cut them off at the knees, right?
Except, that's not how politics work.
Consider, if Republicans passed a comprehensive Medicare-for-All bill that instituted a national, single-payer system in the U.S., do you think people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would stop with the rest of their agenda? No, of course not. All they'd do is say, "Look, we created enough political pressure to get the opposition to accomplish one of our goals for us, let's cross it off the list and keep pushing for the rest." The far-right parties of Europe, and here, would behave no differently.
There's also this lovely quote, where Hillary describes the motivations of Trump's supporters:
"The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality."
Remember when Hillary dropped the deplorable line and it turned into a rallying cry for Trump supporters and galvanized their opposition to her? Imagine what's going to happen if she's the nominee and every single campaign ad from the Trump camp includes this quote where she's dismissing all of them has freedom-hating bigoted automatons. When the only people you can effectively mobilize are members of your opposition, you probably shouldn't be running for higher office.
More importantly though, Clinton is just not up to the task. Right now, we face two existential threats - climate change and the rise of fascism - both of which will require radical reforms implemented by leaders who understand the goal is to defeat the opposition, not try to co-opt it. Hillary's insistence that the center-left parties of Europe implement a right-wing agenda for their own survival shows that her political instincts are misguided at best and deliberately obtuse at worst. If your main advice to a party losing power in the face of waning support from your political base and an emboldened opposition is to implement the policies of your opposition which further alienates your base, you probably shouldn't be listened to by anyone wanting to win their next election.
This also touches another important point to make about Clinton: namely, that she isn't really an opposition figure to Trump.
Clinton's political philosophy means that, when she's faced with political opposition, she will try to find a "balance" between the two sides. In practical terms, this means she'd recall the troops stationed at the border, rescind the executive order that basically cancels our amnesty policy, but those kids in the tents? They'll stay right where they are. Because in the end, Clinton is a difference of degree from Trump, not kind.
Trump is the ass end of American attitudes; he's aggressively stupid, knows absolutely nothing about the world or how it works, and is a petulant bully who incessantly whines about not getting his way. Clinton, on the other hand, is more the dignified face that we want our leaders to put on our activities.
Hers is the face that stands behind sanctions on Iraq that kill 500,000 children, or invade Afghanistan and Iraq which kills hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians, who can stand idly by as we kidnap and torture people all over the world, wcan leave a nation in chaos and thousands in slavery, who can help the Saudi's institute a famine for years on end in Yemen, without any guilt or even the slightest acknowledgment of our actions.
Hillary has made her entire career making decisions that will doom millions of people at home and abroad to starvation, death, imprisonment and misery and she's done it without flinching or even pausing to reflect on all the wreckage her goals have left behind. And we let that happen, we want it to happen, because we think as long as our leaders can commit atrocities with a facade of dignity and composure, then the actions can't really be all that bad no matter the consequences.
To get back to the issue at hand, though, we can't trust Hillary to solve the problems of fascism or climate change. On the fascism note, you have to do more than just beat Trump in an election. The Republican base has obviously shown it has no issues with the practice, so when the next Trump comes along, they'll flock to him as well. Fascism breeds in times of economic depression, which, if you haven't noticed, is what we're still experiencing ten years after the crash. To do away with this, there has to be a massive government spending program that puts people directly to work along with a new progressive tax regime that taxes the richest elements of society both so they don't have as much wealth to use to buy off politicians and so that money can actually be put to good use instead of just hoarded in off-shore bank accounts or mutual funds. You have to put through a single payer health system that eliminates the biggest source of bankruptcy in the country. You also need to do a debt jubilee covering medical debt and student loans so people whose income is being hoovered up to stave off the worst effects of those debts so they can use that money for more efficient economic activity.
In addition to all that, you need renewable energy resource and power production like solar and wind set up and incorporated across the country to reduce the reliance on the fossil fuel industry which is literally killing off the ecosystem we need to survive. I'm sure everybody saw that UN report that said we've only got twelve years as a species to fix this issue or we'll be facing catastrophic consequences we have an uncomfortable chance of not surviving. We won't even have the potential to implement these changes in the U.S. for another two years, so, we literally don't have the time for a measured, balanced approach to policies that may or may not come to full realization in a few decades if ever. We need leaders who understand the urgency of the moment and act like our lives depend on it.
There's a term I've seen thrown around, unicorns, which refers to a type of candidate that leftists prefer who only want the perfect candidate that will give them all their policy dreams and actively sabotage real, capable candidates like, well, Hillary Clinton. And while there is a certain truth to this (see, all the people who voted for Jill Stein or wrote-in Bernie Sanders) I also believe that the term applies just as well to people who want someone like Clinton to be president.
Because if the idea that a woman with no real popular support or platform, who's already lost the chance to be president twice, and has a history of caution, compromise, and appeasement is the person to not only win but boldly lead us to safety in a world on fire isn't magical thinking then, well, nothing is.
We're a week out from the midterms, and now that the dust has settled a little bit just wanted to say a few things about them.
It's been curious to see the litany of articles and think pieces trying to figure what "happened" to the supposed Blue Wave that was coming. The easy answer is, people fundamentally misread the political situation which led to unrealistic expectations which naturally collapsed in the face of reality. The core idea of this, it seems to me, was that this election would be like 2006, where Democrats retook both houses of Congress and then built even larger majorities in 2008. That was never going to happen for a very simple reason: no real swing voters. A large part of the Democrats success in turning previously red states like Colorado in the late aughts was due in large part to conservative voters who were tired of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the response to Katrina, and the looming-then full-on- financial crisis that they were ready to try something new and the Democratic party was happy to supply candidates who were mostly the same as the Republican incumbents so those disgruntled conservative voters could jump ship without feeling like they were betraying their principles.
The difference this time is that the Republican electorate doesn't have the split to exploit like it did in the later years of the Bush presidency. Trump's approval rating among Republicans has stayed in the mid-to-high 80's (with dips into the 90 and a few in the high 70's) for his entire presidency, so even if, theoretically, that remaining 10-15% of Republican voters put off by Trump voted for Democrats wherever they are around the country, that really isn't going to make a difference. The Republican party is solidly behind Trump, any hope that there's going to be a firm rebuke of him and all he stands for from the majority of the Republican electorate is a delusion that needs to be abandoned.
So, when you look at the midterms in the context of a deeply divided partisan electorate where both sides where highly motivated and turned out in near-presidential election numbers, the Democrats did pretty well. Taking control of the House is no small thing, Scott Walker will no longer be the governor of Wisconsin, a Senate seat in Arizona flipped, and even now votes are still being counted in Georgia and Florida because of how narrow the margins are turning out to be. Yes, Beto lost, but two years ago if someone told you a Democrat running on an unapologetic progressive platform with only small donations would come within three points of beating the incumbent Senator in Texas, you would've been right to laugh it off as ridiculous. But now we know it can be done, that is as close to a winning strategy that anyone has found for the ridiculously gerrymandered state, so yes, while six years is a long time for Ted Cruz to be a Senator and inflict even more damage on the country, it's also a long time to build up the political infrastructure in Texas so when Cruz is up again in 2024 there's an even better chance of being free of that sniveling ghoul once and for all.
Turning back to those Georgia and Florida elections for a moment, I also want to stress how, even though both Republican states did everything they could to tilt the elections- or in Kemp's case outright steal it- the sheer number of people turning out to vote has prevented that from happening. In Georgia, on top of all the things that Kemp did before the election to stop as many people as he could from voting, he then upped the ante by shorting heavily-Democratic areas on voting machines; in one polling place the machines actually died because their batteries ran out and Kemp's state department "forgot" to provide the polling station with enough extension cords to keep the machines powered.
The real kicker though, was the state department keeping at least 1,000 possibly up to 1,500 voting locked away so they couldn't be used on Election Day. Kemp's excuse was that the state had been court ordered by a judge to sequester those machines because of an ongoing lawsuit regarding the hacking vulnerability of Georgia's voting machines. The truth is that the judge did not order Kemp or the State Department to keep the voting machines locked away, she just criticized them for "[standing] by for far too long, given the mounting tide of evidence of the inadequacy and security risks of Georgia’s DRE voting system and software." You have to appreciate the gall Kemp has to have to site a federal lawsuit accusing him of being actively negligent in protecting voting machines from hacking and manipulation as a reason to keep those machines from districts that would've voted for his opponent to sabotage her chances of winning. Honestly, Kemp is so brazen and open about his attempts to steal the election that it's actually kind of impressive.
Just one last point about this; the actions of Kemp, of the Texas state department, and how Rick Scott is saying with a straight face that counting every vote is a form of voter fraud should be proof positive that Republican politicians don't care about democracy. I've said before that the goal of conservatism as a political project is to protect and further entrench established power hierarchies whether they be social, political, economic, or cultural. Things like democracy or civil rights are means to that end, once those things no longer serve the end purpose, they are to be sabotaged or outright discarded. So when you see the Texas state department insist on keeping voting machines that change your vote, or Kemp being worried that people will turn up to vote, or see Rick Scott's escalating panic as he creams fraud, this is why. An engaged, high turnout electorate is an active threat to Republican power, which is why they're so committed to making voting as onerous as they can.
Anyway, now that we've got all the optics out of the way, let's get down to the actually important consequences of the election which, basically, what are the Democrats going to do now? Unfortunately, that all pretty much comes down to what happens with Nancy Pelosi.
In all probability, Pelosi will be Speaker of the House again which doesn't bode well for, anything, really. A big part of the sales pitch for voting Democrats into power was that if they were in charge of the various Committees, they would have the ability to launch their own investigations into the Trump administrations activities with subpoena power to compel people to testify under oath in the pursuit of those investigations which could, in all likelihood, turn up enough solid evidence to impeach Trump. The issue is, even in the event that the Democrats receive actionable evidence either from the Mueller report or their own investigations, Pelosi is unlikely to act on it.
The Atlantic has a good interview with Pelosi where she lays out her thinking on the matter and it basically boils down to she won't make any move unless the Republicans in the Senate go along with it. Her reasoning for this is that Nixon impeachment only got off the ground with Republican cooperation and she wants to avoid the disastrous consequences that came as a result of the failed Clinton impeachment in the 90's. First thing, there's a big difference between impeaching someone for openly fraudulent, expedient reasons like Gingrich did and impeaching them for actual, legitimate crimes which Trump as already, openly committed. Second, waiting for the Republicans to come around is a dodge, full stop. Pelosi has many of the undesirable traits one expects of politicians, but she's not stupid; she's seen every Republican Senator line up behind Trump and every aspect of his agenda, no matter how abhorrent. Rewrite the Constitution by executive fiat? Sure, why not. Lindsay Graham even introduced legislation in support of it. Possibly illegally replace the Attorney General he forced to resign? No problem.
Point is, Pelosi has seen the entirety of the Republican political establishment, media, and voter base circle the wagons around Trump. Any evidence the House investigations or the Mueller investigation produces will be dismissed like literally everything else as Fake News or Witch Hunt. It takes a staggering level of idiocy or incompetence to believe any Republican will cross Trump-and, by extension, the entire Republican base- on the word of a Democrat or Robert Mueller. And like I said, stupid she is not, so this is all a play for her to deflect responsibility for not wanting to impeach Trump to uncooperative Republicans in the Senate.
You can see her pulling a similar move with all those calls for bipartisanship, too. With a new wave of progressive candidates on her heels demanding legislation for things like Medicare-for-All, tuition-free college, aggressive action on climate change, Pelosi is going to have to find some way to stall all of those things, so, enter Republicans stage right. Pelosi will use them as a prop to squash any progressive policy agenda as an ugly yet necessary sacrifice on the alter of bipartisanship and cooperation, because "[she] owe[s] it to the country to find common ground" with Trump and the Republicans. This is flat-out dangerous, the more she engages the Republican party and all it stands for, the more she legitimizes their policies and their goals as normal, acceptable aims. Compromise in and of itself isn't terrible, but when your compromise is to renew the DACA protections only for the people who recently had them, but let Trump build the wall (like Schumer was willing to do or give him everything but the wall like they both agreed to), then you really haven't achieved anything. All you've done is abided fascism instead of stopping it, which is what she should be dedicating herself to.
If you feel like I'm being unfair to Pelosi and her aims, I just want to remind all of you that we've seen this before. In that Atlantic interview above, she mentions how she had direct evidence that W. Bush lied to the American public to start the Iraq war and she did... nothing. The entirety of her term as Speaker when Obama was president consisted of reaching out to Republicans to create bipartisan friendly bills like the ACA, Dodd-Frank Act, and the Stimulus package, all of which kinda sorta worked, but not very well- and in the case of Dodd-Frank, largely inert- which led to the Democrats losing Congress which lead us to Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh so... yeah. We've already seen the effects of her leadership and they aren't good on either political or policy fronts. So when she's signaling that she has learned absolutely nothing in the last eight years and plans to do everything the exact same way she did the first time, it's cause for concern and benefit of the doubt doesn't really play in her favor.
So while it may seem like our time is done and we can leave the handling of the Trump presidency to the professionals, but, no- we're going to have stay engaged, stay angry, for a lot longer to make sure these people don't kill us all.
P.S. Based on this article in the Wall Street Journal, Hillary is "definitely" going to run again for 2020. Two of her former aides say "She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House." I don't know how you write that sentence with a straight face, but, you know, how does being emphatically told "We don't want you has president" twice not deter you from trying a third time? Please, for the love of god, someone find her a new hobby because her current one of losing presidential elections hurts us so, so much more than it hurts her.
Good lord it has been a month. As usual, we've managed to cram what would normally be an entire year's worth of drama into a few weeks so let's get to it.
We'll start off by looking at the excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book, which the Washington Post and others reported on from an advance copy. Overall, it doesn't reveal anything new, per se, it just gives us more specifics on what a complete shit show this administration is. From calling Jeff Sessions retarded, to wanting to assassinate Bashar al- Assad, to just forgetting to pull out of a trade deal with South Korea because Gary Cohn just took the order off Trump's desk before he could sign it, the book is apparently filled to the brim with stories of a beleaguered staff doing whatever they can to hold off the worst impulses of the most unqualified president in history. None of this should be shocking, since the only thing Trump has ever proven competent at is keeping his cadre of bootlicking supporters to overlook his constant, repeated failures. Everyone who spoke out against his candidacy said that this is what his presidency would be and now the book is just confirming our ability to point out the obvious.
The most damaging anecdote for me is the one that pertains to Trump's former attorney John Dowd. In a mock-Mueller interview, Trump collapsed and went on a 30-minute rant that kicked off with "This is a goddamned hoax!" Dowd, seemingly finally realizing just how terrible his client was, told Trump not to testify because it was that "or an orange jump suit." Amazingly, after he had a complete meltdown in a practice session, Trump still thought that he'd be a "real good witness." Dowd also said Mueller couldn't interview Trump because our allies would say "I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?” Two things: 1. It's bold of Dowd to assume they weren't - or aren't - already doing that and 2. How bad do you have to be when you're own lawyer is basically begging the man investigating your client not to interview him because it'd make us an international disgrace?
If that wasn't bad enough for Trump, The New York Times publish an anonymous op-ed from someone claiming to be an administration official telling the world all about how the Cabinet members are all quietly working to sabotage Trump's worst impulses. Before anyone gets into the mindset of believing the op-ed writer's justifications that they're doing this because they feel they have a higher duty to the country than just the president, I'm gonna stop you right there because that rationale is, in a word, horseshit. I think the anonymous author and his cohorts honestly believe that what they're doing is for the good of the country, but that to me reads more as a surface level explanation that serves a deeper, more cynical end. Because here's the thing, if you're actively sabotaging the president you work for, than you obviously believe that that president is unfit to hold the office. As it happens, the Constitution provides a way for the Cabinet to remove a president who is mentally unfit or otherwise incapable of performing the duties of the office and that is the 25th amendment. The relevant section in this case is Section 4 which reads, in full:
"Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office."
In plain English, the VP and a majority of the of the Cabinet officers tells Congress that the president can't preform his duties, Trump, in this case, sends a letter saying "Nuh-uh", to which VP et al. send another letter saying "Double Nuh-uh" and then Congress votes on it to decide either way. Think of it as a presidential vote of no confidence. Anyway, the author name checks the amendment as something his fellows discussed but ultimately decided against because they "didn't want to cause a constitutional crisis" so they decided on a game of low-key sabotage instead because hey, it's Trump, he's too stupid to notice.
So why do I think all this self-congratulations isn't as sincere as the writer would have us believe? In short, it's because all these people want to work again. Every once in a while, Politico or someone else will run a story about how all the Trump staffers who work in the administration can't get a job or a date because everyone's disgusted by them. What's more, the author, and by extension, his colleagues, are all die-hard Republican partisans. The author laments at one point about how the press is ignoring the actual "accomplishments" of the administration like "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more." For context, one of those proposed effective deregulations is from the EPA concerning power plant emissions. It's an Obama-era rule (of course) that the EPA estimates prevented up to 11,000 deaths a year, so that's nice. Let's also not forget about how the FCC repealed net neutrality which lead us to the wonderful situation of Verizon throttling firefighters phones and trying to bilk them for a higher data plan while they fighting the (current) largest wildfire in California history. The tax cuts are nothing more than the outright transfer of wealth to the super rich, so uh, score one for the oligarchy, I guess?
Point is, these people don't have any actual problem with what Trump is doing, they just have a problem with him, specifically. They see the writing on the wall, they've undoubtedly read all those same articles detailing how their former compatriots association with Trump has poisoned every aspect of their lives, they've got front-row seats to see Trump's reactions to Cohen's guilty plea, Manafort's conviction, and how his financial adviser was given immunity by the Mueller investigation. They definitely saw that leaked GOP spreadsheet that lists every investigation the Democrats could potentially launch into the Trump White House if they retake the House in the midterms. So yeah, the walls must feel a little closer than they used to be, so before the tide really starts turning, all these people who will probably need jobs sooner rather than later want to give themselves some cover.
Which brings us back to this op-ed. For all its claims about higher duty and what they feel they owe to the American public etc. etc. this op-ed is more of a signal to the monied and professional political world that when they get ex-Trump staffers looking for work, those people will be able to say "Did you read that Times op-ed? I was one of the people it was talking about." It's a way for the rats to set up some cover when they start fleeing the sinking ship or if Trump starts mass firing people they can point to the op-ed as the reason why; that they were tragically found out and now can't protect America from the degradation's of the Trump presidency any longer.
For all the talk about wanting to protect America and it's constitutional republic from the whims of an anti-democratic president, the author and his cohorts are doing nothing more than the literal bare minimum to stop him and explicitly say they refuse to use the constitutional methods provided to them to remove Trump from office. So instead of doing the brave, principled thing, these people are going the underhanded and unaccountable route while they wait for other people to solve a problem they're too cowardly to directly confront. I'm sure that there won't be any negative consequences now that the famously paranoid, conspiratorial, and retaliatory president they've insisted on leaving in power knows that he has people working against him in his administration. That should work out great.
Then, we had a story also in the Timesconcerning Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his alleged efforts to secretly record his conversations with Trump to gain material for possible 25th amendment proceedings. The timing of the story was pretty suspicious to me since it was concurrent with the first rumblings of the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, but also because of all the other legal developments I mentioned earlier. A story like this serves a perfect pretext to fire Rosenstein and, by extension, Mueller in a last-ditch effort to end the investigation that is clearly closing in around Trump and his family.
On the other hand, it's also hard to believe that the story was planted by people working on Trump's behalf as anonymous sources who could corroborate the tip to the Times reporters when they came calling. For one thing, this requires more sophisticated media relations than Trump or anyone in his administration has ever proven capable of. It also shows a remarkable amount of planning and strategy that he's never once demonstrated in any aspect of his life, ever. I imagine if Trump did plant this story he'd have done so by calling up the Times himself pretending to be somebody else saying that this Rosenstein fella tried to spy on the great, fantastic really, President Donald Trump.
Since the Times doesn't mention a detail like that, I'm resigned to taking the story at face value. Which, is really embarrassing for Rosenstein, because the story the Times tells is of a man who is hopelessly out of his depth. He seems legitimately blindsided by the fact that Trump used his memo criticizing James Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation as the basis (however short-lived) for Trump's firing of Comey. I honestly can't think of what other the purpose Rosenstein thought the memo had other than providing a pretext to fire Comey and derail the Russia investigation, but, he apparently had one in mind.
From there it presents a man who spirals out of panic, proposing to wear a wire himself in his meetings with the President or by getting the men Trump was interviewing to replace Comey to wear one instead. No one in the administration appears to have gone along with this plan because it's an obviously a bonkers and haphazard one, and things seemed to just fade away into the background until now. Rosenstein still has a job, although for how long seems to be an open question and one that likely won't be answered until the Kavanaugh confirmation is done.
Which brings us to the latest open sore the Trump administration has inflicted on us. I'll make this clear up front, Brett Kavanaugh has no business being a Supreme Court Judge. His entire judicial career has been one where he was groomed to move up through the judicial ranks so he could rewrite the law to fit right wing partisan goals. That's it. The law is irrelevant beyond providing a pretext for Kavanaugh to reshape it to make this country a better place for the already rich and powerful while they crush everyone else under heel. If you're wondering why he immediately started raving about how these allegations where the by-product of an extensive outside money campaign undertaken by people looking to revenge the Clintons well, it's because that's exactly the kind of thing he's been involved in from the very start.
So, what to make of the assault accusations against him? Personally, I believe them for a couple reasons. First is the well documented fact that false rape accusations are incredibly rare and, more importantly, all Kavanaugh has to defend himself is his word and his word is, objectively, shit. Common Dreams has a good breakdown of all the things Kavanaugh has lied about over the years, but I just want to go over some highlights. In 2002, Kavanaugh received documents stolen from Democrats on the Senate Judicial Committee that outlined lines of questioning the members planned to use in upcoming confirmation hearings at the time. Kavanaugh said he never received or saw the documents in a 2004 hearing regarding the issue and in 2006 when at his confirmation hearing to the appellate courts but proof that he received the documents came out earlier this month, so whoops. Another incident involved Kavanaugh saying he had no knowledge of the Bush administrations wiretapping program except again an email turned up where he was asking John Yoo about that very subject. Lastly, Kavanaugh denies ever taking a position on whether or not presidents could ever be prosecuted for crimes or not which would be true except for all the times he did just that.
In short, on the one hand we have a man who's spent at least the last fourteen years lying to members of Congress under oath about issues that could complicate his career path and on the other we have three women with no equivalent evidence for dishonesty. That's not really a toss up in the credibility game. That hasn't stopped people from trying, though, and since the efforts have largely been focused around Dr. Christine Ford, that's what we'll work with too. The main talking point around Ford's accusation is that it can't be true because she waited so long to report it, that if she had really been assaulted she would've reported it at the time but since she didn't, her claims is obviously dubious. What I love about this line of defense is that ignores all the death threats, the public accusations of being called a liar, having your entire life put under a microscope, plus just the general humiliation and trauma that comes with having your assault become common knowledge to millions of strangers all over the country. But sure, the only reason she could have for not coming forward publicly is just because it never happened.
The other usual "reasonable" point people wanting to cast doubt on Ford's claim is that she's coming forward just now. What drives me nuts about this is that line of reasoning is that it acts like there's no larger context the accusation is happening in. Kavanaugh is being considered for a seat on the Supreme Court which sets him up as one of the most powerful people in the country. It also makes him virtually untouchable, in the entire history of the United States, only one Justice has ever been impeached. So you're telling me if the man who tried to rape you was about to become one of the most powerful and unassailable men in the country, you'd keep quiet about it? You wouldn't feel compelled to share that information, to give a fuller scope of the person who's going to shape the country with every decision he makes for decades on end? Under that context, is it really so surprising that Ford and the others would come out with their allegations when there's still a slim chance those accusations will actually matter?
Not surprisingly, the accusations haven't made any dent in Republican will to see Kavanaugh confirmed. The week-long investigation the FBI is going to launch will likely be inconclusive, so people like Jeff Flake and red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin can have something to point to as cover when they vote to confirm Kavanaugh to the bench. If nothing else, the last week has given people a real time example of what rape culture looks like and how it functions. You see, a key aspect of rape culture is scrutinizing the victims actions while dismissing or excusing the perpetrator's. From Tucker Carlson asking whether Ford failed in her obligation to tell the world that Kavanaugh was a rapist to the evolving defense of Kavanaugh's behavior going from "he didn't do it, he may have did it but it's outside the statute of limitations, okay he did do it but who hasn't violently held down a woman and tried to fuck her?" you can see a dedicated effort to make the conversation about how since Ford and the other accusers didn't behave like "real" victims, than they obviously can't be. Any attempt to bring the conversation back to Kavanaugh's actions- the actual relevant topic here- is met with the kind of dismissal this woman provides such a great example of. There's also Lindsey Graham lamenting that these accusations will ruin Kavanaugh's life if they prevent him from being confirmed which, yeah, speaks for itself.
I've seen some things about how the confirmation hearings will have negative effects for the Republicans going forward because women will take note of Dr. Ford's treatment etc. etc. I highly doubt that anyone is losing sleep over that possibility. Republican presidential candidates have won the white women vote in every election since at least 2004, which is unlikely to change anytime soon. The most likely groups of women to look in disgust at the Kavanaugh hearings are women of color, but since they don't vote for Republicans anyway in very great numbers and they're part of groups that state Republican parties actively disenfranchise through laws and gerrymandering efforts likely to survive legal challenges with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch as sitting members on the bench so this is really a situation where Republicans don't lose anything at all.
What I think is the most revealing aspect of this whole drama though is that it was never supposed to happen at all. Dianne Feinstein received Ford's letter in July and then did nothing with it. She refused to tell the other Democrats on the committee of the letters existence until news stories about its existence were printed earlier this month. The reason Feinstein gave is that she thought the Democrats would have better chance attacking Kavanaugh on legal ground instead of personal controversies. Sounds reasonable, but doubtful when you take into consideration that she also ignored a lawyer representing people who would testify about Kavanaugh's conduct as a judge over his career. This makes me think that the plan was to let the nomination go through relatively uncontested to protect red state Democrats like Joe Manchin (WV), Heidi Heitkamp (N. D), and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) while letting other members like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have flashy but ultimately irrelevant moments for them to stump on in the primaries next year.
A big part of why I believe this is because at the end of August right before the Kavanaugh hearings started, Chuck Schumer struck a deal with Mitch McConnell to fast track the confirmation of 15 Trump appointees in exchange for a paltry number of Obama holdovers explicitly so those same Senators mentioned above could have better reelection chances in the upcoming midterms. The timing of that deal combined with the fact that Feinstein sat on the assault allegations and other damning material on Kavanaugh draw a clear picture to me that Democrats were pulling their usual game of playing for penny-ante political gains in the face of Republican power moves. It's amazing to me in this day and age that the Democratic leadership is willing to trade away lifetime appointments for people who will actively work to undermine any sense of equality the law has provided in the last 50 years for the chance to stay in the Senate for another six years. Honestly, on policy, they aren't as bad as Republicans, but is it really worth the trade-off of them being politically useless? (Oh, right, Tom Perez said the DNC would still campaign and protect Senators who vote yes on Kavanaugh. Because fuck your base and their principles, right?)
In milestone news, this month also marked the 10th anniversary of the Bear Sterns failing and the financial crisis that failing triggered. The main things I want to reinforce about this is that the response to the crisis and its aftermath is, in my opinion, the biggest failure of Obama's presidency. The crisis was the result of years of Wall Street's fraudulent activity via their sub-prime loans. TO recap, the sub-prime loans where loans banks and other mortgage firms like Country Wide made to pretty anyone with a pulse, often falsifying the loan recipients personal information to make it look better on paper. They then bundled these things together and sold them off to pensions, retirement funds, hedge funds, whoever they could find, so that when the loans started going bad and failed, their customers would eat the loss instead of themselves. This went round and round until the music stopped, the banks couldn't unload the loans fast enough, then credit everywhere froze at which point things went haywire and governments got involved and you know the rest. Point is, the crash wasn't the result of things just going badly, it came about after systemic economic frauds couldn't find any more suckers to feed of off.
As I've said many a time before, the Obama's response to the blatant criminal activity was to let the entire industry off scot-free and let them walk off into the sunset, intact, with no repercussions whatsoever. His stimulus plan was also a weak half-measure that only promised that whatever recovery we had would be slow, stagnant, and wouldn't actually allow people to recoup what they lost in the first place. Which, if you haven't noticed, is the economy we have now. This stagnation, with its pitiful to non-existent wage growth, to seeing the people who wrecked the world get richer than they were before made people desperate for a candidate who was unconventional, who would buck the system, who didn't seem to play the standard Washington game.
Obama will usually defend his performance by saying that politics is an air carrier that can only change course in subtle, discreet ways, and can't make any radical changes in direction too quickly. Which, in normal times, is true. However when the world is burning down around you people will often give you leeway to radically change the game. In fact, that's what people were hoping Obama would do. Instead, he passed on the opportunity, following his near dogmatic belief in reasonableness no matter the circumstance. Say what you will about Obama has a person, but as a president his failure/refusal to take bold action when it was needed the most hamstrung us into the conditions that would make Donald Trump. That failure should hang around his legacy like a millstone, but it probably never will.
For news on the American Reich front, we found out this month that the Trump administration moved $10 million from FEMA and $260 million in cancer and HIV/AIDS research among other programs over to ICE to help cover the costs of the detaining the nearly 13,000 children still in federal custody. The other fun part is that the administration also proposed changing the licencing of detention facilities from the states to the Department of Homeland Security. The reason for this is so the administration can avoid a legal settlement that only allows them to detain children for 20 days and they can proceed to hold them indefinitely like they do to their parents. Like I said before, this is barbaric cruelty as policy, nothing more. There's no ethical or moral defense for a system that intentionally causes mental and emotional trauma for the children or where the agents responsible for their care starve, beat, and rape them. The rule change, like all federal rules changes, is subject to a 60-day open comment period and is also open to legal challenges. The comments don't have any kind of binding power, and a legal challenge is somewhat doomed by the fact that it will end up in front of a stacked 5-4 court who will in all likelihood rubber stamp whatever flimsy national security reasoning the administration uses to justify the policy change.
Moving on to good news/bad news, the Trump administration admitted climate change exists. In a July report from the National Highway Safety Administration, the agency says that they believe there will be a 7 degree Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures by 2100. Bad news comes in when the same agency says we should do nothing to stop this. To put things in context, the last time global temperatures increased by that amount it resulted in something known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event a.k.a. The Great Dying a.k.a the worst mass extinction in Earth's history. The Trump's administration's argument is that the rise in temperatures is so catastrophic that any measures to prevent it- in this case maintaining higher fuel standards- are essentially pointless so we shouldn't do them at all.
This is, in blunt terms, suicidal policy. During the Permian-Triassic, temperatures rose 10 degrees Fahrenheit, so for the Trump administration to just wave off a temperature increase that puts us in the range of the largest extinction event in our planet's history is just, well, I don't have really have another word except suicidal and I already used it. But think about it, within the span of one average human lifetime, the climate of the Earth could change to the point where it becomes too hot for us to survive and then we'll all be gone. And this administration's response to that is "Eh, who gives a fuck anyway?"
There's something in physics called the Fermi Paradox which, in a nutshell, is trying to figure out in a universe as old as ours, with billions upon billions of stars and planets, where is everybody? Why haven't we run into any alien civilizations or, at least, the ruins of alien civilizations? It's a fascinating thing to think about with tons of hypothetical answers. One of my favorites is something called the Great Filter which posits that something in the development of life-whether it be abiogenesis, sexual reproduction, or ecological destruction- prevents intelligent life from developing to a point where it becomes capable of interstellar or intergalactic travel. Since we haven't encountered any other civilizations, that means there hasn't been one to survive the filter. The more I look at ours and see a dedicated effort to write off the extinction of our species to save car makers the hassle of making cars with lower emissions, the more that hypothesis seems credible and the less I think it will be any great tragedy if/when we do check ourselves out of existence.
To end on a good note, here's a video of Trump making himself the literal laughing stock of the entire world. Enjoy.
Every now and then, when the stars align, the internet gives us the chance to gain some actual insight amidst all the cacophony we subject ourselves to. Over the last week-and-a-half, there've been three articles published that give us a rather unguarded look into the current conservative mindset, so it's worth taking a look into them.
The first is an article from the Tucker Carlson owned Daily Caller, where one its editors, Virginia Kruta, went to Missouri rally for gubernatorial candidate Cori Bush with special guest star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By now, you may have the seen Kruta's hilarious money quote where she says,
"But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided."
We'll get to the full unpacking of this in a second, but I think it's also important to note how Kruta closes the piece: "I left the rally with a photo — in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I." Kruta's been the butt of many a joke over her gut reaction to hearing that the government could indeed see to it that she could live a life free of the suffering caused by not being paid enough for her work so she wouldn't struggle to pay her bills, or that she would have to stress out over whether she'll go bankrupt if she has a medical emergency, or if her children want to go on to higher education they wouldn't have to take on a crippling amount of debt to do so is sheer abject terror, but, while she deserves all of that, it's important to note why she feels that way.
See, the amount of of suffering people experience in today's economy isn't an accident, it's the whole point of it. If a student comes out of college with an advanced degree but mountains of debt that means they can't leverage their education to get better pay because they need whatever they can get to start paying back those loans. The threat of medical bankruptcy is used as a way to keep workers stuck at whatever job they have because if they leave that job, they lose their insurance. The whole point is to create a meager existence that keeps people obedient and cowed out of fear of losing what little they have if they stand up for themselves.
So why do people who are products of that system want to keep it going? Why wouldn't they want to change things for the better? Because in this style of system, the brutality of it is legitimized when one generation passes the suffering they went through down to the next. This is sold as a way to reclaim a sense of agency- they survived this world and became tougher for it so they now get to pass it on to their children and their children after them. If younger people seek to end or change they system that causes all that suffering, then its treated like older generations- like Kruta's - are being cheated because if it's proven that all that suffering is entirely meaningless and unnecessary then, well, maybe all those times she sacrificed or went without so she could scrape by one week to the next, were unnecessary and meaningless as well.
In this system, suffering is the point. The whole point of that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense is that you know you've "made it" when you stop being the recipient of beatings and degradation and start administering those things to other people. If, all of sudden, people have the means to live without the indignity of working full-time living paycheck-to-paycheck or the stress of staying at a shitty job because they'll lose their benefits or they'll get the same shit pay everywhere else, then all of a sudden people like Kruta and her ideological brethren lose a lot of their power. They don't know what to do in the face of someone legitimately offering a better way forward, all they have is that fear and a feeling of "Thank god I don't believe people should live with dignity like those whackos." It does really go to show that they don't think that a fair days work should come with a fair days pay, or whatever other platitude about the value of hard work that drizzles out their mouth is true, at the end of the day, they just want to make sure as many people as possible are absolutely miserable so they can condescend to them when they dare think they deserve better.
Next up is this hilariously incompetent polemic against single-payer from The Hill. Written by Dr. Deane Waldman from a Texas think-tank, Waldman's piece is a greatest hits of anti-single-payer arguments conservatives have trotted out for years now. Classics like "it costs too much!" make their early and obligatory appearance: "Most people thought the cost of Obamacare, $1.34 trillion, was excessive, but that’s peanuts compared to the $18 trillion price tag for Bernie Sanders’ — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s — Medicare-for-All." True, recent analysis has put the price tag of Bernie's plan at $32 trillion over ten years. Considering that we spend about $3.2 trillion right now on healthcare, keeping our current level of spending with even more coverage is actually a pretty successful plan. If we keep the law as is, then by 2026 we'll be spending $5.7 trillion a year so... tell me again how single-payer is too expensive?
Next up, Waldman trots out the oldie-but-goodie "people die waiting for care" scare chord,
"There is death-by-queueing in single payer systems, where sick persons die from treatable conditions because they could not get care in time and succumb “waiting in line” for care. You don’t even have to go outside the U.S. to see these avoidable deaths. In our own single payer or Medicare-for-All system, the VA, “307,000 veterans may have died waiting for medical care.”
Yes, it is an unfortunate reality that, especially in recent years, more people are dying because the NHS cannot handle the sheer amount of people they need to treat. Likewise with the VA, that 307k number was the cumulative total of veterans who died while they were waiting for their applications to be processed. That number came from a 2015 report detailing problems with the VA's patient intake process and some of the deaths go as far back as 1988. Obviously this presents a lot of problems for how VA documented and kept track of the veterans seeking to get care which do need to be solved, but just dropping the number without any context over how many years it took to reach it is misleading to say the least. That Waldman also tries to make the problem of patients dying because they can't get access to care an exclusively single-payer problem by omitting the 50,000 people who die a year here because they don't have insurance is a signal that he's not using these numbers in good faith. Lastly, a significant reason why the NHS and VA have these problems keeping pace with their patients needs is that they have been subject to massive budget cuts and under-funding for years on end. Apparently when you don't give doctors or hospitals the resources they need to keep track of or properly care for their patients, those patients end up dying. Odd, that.
But we haven't gotten to the best part of Waldman's little screed. Here's Waldman's utopia healthcare scenario:
"In 2017, the U.S. spent $3.4 trillion on healthcare for 323 million Americans, or $10,526 for every man, woman and child. Imagine if every family of four put $42,105 in an HSA every year! and simply shopped for and paid for their health care. No government stealing our money to pay its bureaucracy. No insurance company delaying or denying care. Just the old but right doctor-patient relationship with no one and nothing in between.
The answer isn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rebranded socialism. The answer is for us to turn away from government dependence and rely on ourselves."
This is fantasy. It'd be like if Waldman said that if men wanted to save money on their colonoscopy's, they should look into alien abduction because they don't bill for their time. Even if we indulged the absurd notion that the average family of four just has $40k laying around doing absolutely nothing, let's see how far that actually gets people. The average stay in a hospital here runs people $5,220. So, if you stay in a hospital for eight of the 365 days out of the year, hope you don't need any other care. Keep in mind, that's just the cost for laying in bed. You want even more bundles of joy for your family? Be prepared to pay $10 grand if you go the natural route or $16k if you need a C-Section. Need a heart bypass? Kiss $28,000 of those savings goodbye.
Reading this idiocy, I was reminded of this article by The American Conservative from last year which said that within five years conservatives will either directly offer or quietly assent to a universal healthcare policy. The reason, they said, was because it was the only way to effectively cover everyone at the lowest possible price. Which, yes, that's true as any Google search comparing our healthcare costs with the rest of the world will tell you. As far as they where concerned, "[t]he objections to socialized healthcare crumble upon impact with the reality." Which, again, is 100% true. My objection to this article is that it assumes that the conservative movement as a whole actually gives a shit about reality or is capable of recognizing it. Because right here, in the face of ever-growing popularity for Medicare-For-All single-payer system, we have a man contorting himself to put forward a solution which depends on not only turning away from government health programs but the entire concept of insurance itself. He's committed to something so abjectly ridiculous because that is what he is paid to do so. Waldman, and all the other hacks along with him, will only double-down on their farcical positions opposing single-payer healthcare the more popular and inevitable it becomes, expecting them to examine their beliefs and adjust them in response to evidence is a fools errand.
Which brings me to the last article I wanted to talk about, because when it comes to ignoring reality in all its forms, no one has anything on religious fundamentalists. This story from the Washington Post covers one evangelical congregation in Alabama and how they handle the supposed moral crisis that would come from being a Christian and a Trump supporter. Their pastor, a guy named Clay Crum, is even doing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments and just got to the one about adultery. I guess there's supposed to be some sort of tension in whether or not Crum will say something in his sermon condemning Trump as an adulterer, but if you're able to remember a year back when the good Christian white folk of Alabama did their damnedest to elect a child rapist, it won't come as a surprise when Crum says nothing or how easily the congregation is able to wave away something as petty as philandary.
The article does try really, really hard to act like there is a serious conundrum that Christians are trying to solve, which, I guess they get points for trying? The Post sets things up like this:
"In poll after poll, they have said that Trump has kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, fight for religious liberty, adopt pro-life policies and deliver on other issues that are high priorities for them.
At the same time, many have acknowledged the awkwardness of being both self-proclaimed followers of Jesus and the No. 1 champions of a president whose character has been defined not just by alleged infidelity but accusations of sexual harassment, advancing conspiracy theories popular with white supremacists, using language that swaths of Americans find racist, routinely spreading falsehoods and an array of casual cruelties and immoderate behaviors that amount to a roll call of the seven deadly sins."
All I can really say here is that "awkward" is one hell of a word choice here. Maybe if we have a sit down with Sheilia Butler, a member of Crum's church, we can better understand this issue, (apologies for the wall of text)
"we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians...
“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in."
She continues:
Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.
“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”
Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”
Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”
“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”
To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”
“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne.
“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?”
“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila.
It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives.
“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”
She thought an all-out race war was now in the realm of possibility."
So let's just do a quick run down, shall we? Here we have conspiracies popular with white supremacists (the idea that Obama was a Muslim), language that swaths of America would find racist/spreading falsehoods (the slavery wasn't that bad trope, citing the time of Montgomery Bus Protests as a bad thing), and casual cruelty (the complete dismissal of even the idea that she should show compassion to immigrants). Huh, it's almost as if she supports Trump because she's exactly like him. Weird.
What makes this unintentionally hilarious is that the congregation is under the umbrella of the Southern Baptists, whose leadership is a little sensitive to the faith's staunch support of Trump since they have a history of- as the article so euphemistically puts it- "whiffing" on major social issues of the time. During the Civil Rights era, for example, the Southern Baptists either supported or said nothing against segregation, so when it comes to supporting a man who's putting people in concentration camps, you could see how they might be aware of history repeating itself. Not that they're going to so anything, mind you, but they're aware this time that supporting Trump makes them look bad, which I guess counts as growth, if you want to really abuse the term.
What really gets me about all this though is how just painfully obtuse all of these people are. They honestly believe that because they live in a world where black men get to be president, gays can get married, and they're called out for being the hypocritical pieces of shit that they are, that all of that somehow makes them oppressed. Crum says of the election that "[i]tencouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country," which, my only response to this is: Are you fucking kidding me? Conservative Christians have been the bedrock and sole dictator of Republican's social policy for almost forty years. You can't be a Republican politician at any level without mentioning how much you love Jesus, every presidential candidate has to make the obligatory promise to nominate judges who will strike down Roe vs Wade; these people have one of the two major political parties in this country by the balls and they still think they're disenfranchised? Honestly, what world are these people living in? (That's not a hard one- they live in the world where Muslims are coming to kill them in the night by sneaking in with Mexicans while simultaneously stirring up black unrest to keep the police busy and since Democrats took all their guns away, they'll be helpless to defend themselves in the religious war waging all around us)
What's ironic about all of this is that Crum left the church for a time when he realized how morally bankrupt it was. As he put it,
"He saw the pastor of his childhood church stealing money, and as he got older, he saw deacons having affairs, Christians behaving in hateful ways and finally he came to see it all as a big sham.
“I thought it was very hypocritical,” he said. “That they pretend. That it’s all a show.”
Unfortunately, Crum is now just another cast member. He's taken to wearing this lapel pin of tiny baby feet with the tagline that the pin is the size of a fetus' feet at ten weeks. It's all part of his (and the churches) commitment to being Pro-Life. But that's just as hypocritical, pretend, and performative as everything else that lead Crum to leave the church in the first place. It's easy to care about a fetus- it's not a real person yet so it hasn't had a chance to do anything disagreeable like being black and angry, or being born on the wrong side of a border, or gay, or pro-gun control, or for whatever other reason these people come up with to say that they don't have to follow through on their god's commandment to love their enemy as they love themselves. That hypocrisy isn't unique to this one congregation- it's the cornerstone of the Pro-Life movement, after all- but it serves one of my larger points that you can't expect people to turn away from Trump when he gives them everything they want.
Christianity for these people ultimately isn't a philosophy for them to live their own lives by or seek comfort in during troubled times; at the end of the day, their faith is a weapon to bludgeon everyone else into submission. It's why they don't mind that Trump denigrates every other aspect of society while telling them that they're the rightful heirs of America, it's why they don't care when he throws non-white people into cages or tears children from their parents arms. This is the world they want to live in, where they're told over and over again how special they are and all the threats to their power-real or imagined- are mercilessly crushed by the state. All Trump has done is remove the illusion that they were ever anything else. I can understand why they would want to perpetuate that illusion, but we're not under any obligation to go along with it.
It's been a running thing between my brother and I for the last two years that, whenever Trump does something, to say "If you ever wondered how the Nazi's sold their ideas, well, now you know." From his wholesale demonization of an entire minority group from literally day one of his campaign, to his talk about how the press is the enemy of the people, to his promising to use official state power to go after the supposed enemies of "righteous" white conservatives, all of it has followed a very predictable pattern. He jumped the gun a little on concentration camps, but we all make mistakes when we're eager to get things done. Right now, we're in the period were the Administration is actively trying to expel immigrants from as many aspects of public life as they can- like purging the military of immigrant service members or having ICE find whatever pretext it can to strip naturalized citizens of their green cards so they can then be deported to countries they haven't lived in for decades.
For anyone still asking, "How could this happen here?" well, hate to break it to you, but the lines dividing America from the Reich were always much thinner than we've been lead to believe. For one thing, the U.S. was a direct model that the Reich copied on their way to gassing millions of people. The Jim Crow segregation laws were what the Nazi's used as a baseline for the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their property, businesses, homes, establishing curfews and the ghettos they were then forcibly moved into. The eugenics movement that started in America provided the language of what a "pure" society looked like once it had been purged of all undesirables. And Goebbels learned most of the propaganda techniques he would use from American advertising. Considering how fervently America clung (then and now) to the idea that the only "real" citizens are the white ones, it's not too surprising that the Nazi's would find a lot to appreciate in a culture like that.
We've kept other aspects of fascism alive and well in our culture, too. The unquestioning, compulsory patriotism and fetishistic worship our military are both easily exploitable for anyone with Fuhrer ambitions. After all, how weird would it really be to for kids to say a pledge of allegiance to the flag and a picture of the Beloved Leader every morning? How strange is really to "force" public displays of national pride and servitude when the National Anthem plays before literally every single sporting event, and at almost every public gathering in general? Add to that the Republican party has spent the last 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act slowly but surely turning itself into a haven of white nationalism with its own media ecosystem that actively gaslights its consumers into believing that the "Mainstream Media" is merely a front for leftists to undermine their culture by letting the blacks, women, Mexicans, gays, and the (((globalists))) but they were safe now, safe to hear how the Feminazis, and the PC Police where all working to implement the gay agenda of a Islamic Communist New World Order. All in all, we were a country that kept itself primed to accept a fascist paradigm, all we needed was the right circumstances.
And then the 2008 crash happened. The pillaging of the middle class to feed the rich that started under Reagan and refined under the Clintons finally came due as all the credit funding the gambling racket that had become the housing market collapsed under its own weight. Suddenly there were millions of people jobless, homeless, and coming to the quick realization that the government would only give them half-hearted and poorly executed mortgage relief plans while it was busy dumping trillions into rescuing the banks that broke the world in the first place. With the economy so terrible for so long, I figured it was only a question of "When" Republicans would cough up something like Trump, not "If."
So, while America becoming the fascist hell-hole it secretly wanted to be is depressing but not all that surprising to me, what I underestimated was how strong the "civility" response would be. I mean, I've read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail a lot, had shaken my head at the false empathy King lays out when he talks about the White Moderate and how their council to the Civil Rights movement was to suffer their indignities until they, the White Moderates, deemed the appropriate time, place, and methods for black people to be treated as actual people. It made sense on an intellectual level that society would be made up of people who were complacent with the way the world was set up and didn't want to rock the boat because, hey, they got the perks of being automatically higher in social hierarchies and if they had to actually earn that spot, they might not be able to. Even then, seeing these people up close and personal is a hell of thing to behold.
What makes them so dangerous is that these are the people that autocratic and repressive systems depend on the most to sustain themselves, but they get to pass themselves off, both in their minds eye and to the public at large, as the voices of reason, people who are just trying to find a way for all the disparate pieces of society to come together and comprise on their differences. This is fine when you're trying to figure out what movie to go see or what kind of food you want for dinner, but when you have a group on one side saying, "we think immigrants are an infection that needs to be eradicated to keep our country pure" and the other is saying "This is literally how shipping people to gas chambers starts," it's somewhat... lacking.
Their plays at compassion are nothing more than cowardice, no exceptions. If you think that a woman who speaks for the administration who is taking people's children away by saying they're just going to give the child a bath, or that their children will be in a camp nearby where they'll be able to visit, then whisk those children away never to return- again, exactly the same thing the Nazi's did- if you honestly believe that the woman who defends and justifies the administration that does this suffers the same indignity because a restaurant wouldn't serve her, then your moral compass is downright pathetic. The separation policy- and the straight indefinite detention plan that replaced it- are monstrous things that makes anyone who supports them, carries them out, or defends them monstrous in turn if they weren't already. Hemming and hawing your way out of condemning those actions and those who champion them isn't a mark of highly developed sense of empathy, it's just complicity.
Part of this stems from how we're taught about the evils of the past, or, more specifically, the kind of people who perpetrate them. We’re taught that the Nazi’s or the racists in power during the Civil Rights Era were always cut from obviously evil cloth who used their power to stomp down all who would oppose them until finally, heroic virtue had its rightful triumph. The image of screaming crowds surrounding black children while they walk into school or the cheering crowds at Hitler’s speeches have all been used to make us think that the only people who openly support these things are the virulent, frothing hordes that we can then safely Other.
What gets left out is all the seemingly perfectly polite people who treated the denigration or extermination of entire sections of society as natural as the sunrise. They are otherwise perfectly sociable, naturally bigoted without any of the obvious stink that comes with say, marching around with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Again, these are the people oppressive regimes live and die by because, when push comes to shove, they’ll be the ones fighting to block any measure of progress or reform by tut-tutting protests as being too disruptive and how they’d be much more effective if people conducted their marches in such a way that they’d be easily ignored. Deep down, these people understand they benefit greatly from “the way things are” and that if they change, they run the risk of losing those benefits which they'd rather not do, thank you.
The other part of this comes from the White Moderates friends, the ones who go to the same clubs and dinner parties but who feel a stronger urge that Something Should Be Done when they watch the news. These are usually the people bemoaning the lack of civility because they don’t like seeing their social circle lumped in with the open bigotry of people in Make America Great Again hats. These are the people who have “Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice, everywhere” on at least one placard in their home or office and always told themselves that, if they ever lived through a time of moral crisis, they would no doubt be on the side of justice and freedom etc. etc. Now that they find themselves in the that position, they’ve found out that calling out the villainous Other means calling out their mimosa brunch clubs, suddenly standing up for the equality of all mankind against bigotry gets slightly awkward or, horror of horrors, possibly even rude.
So instead of living through that dreadful reality, they start chanting out America is and always has been a land of great compromise; we should all learn to see things from each other’s point of view to find the hallowed middle ground. They keep pushing this idea so that they never have to confront how they’re much more comfortable defending the despotic people than they ever wanted to believe. They think there’s some way to go back to the time where the subtle bigotries and quiet authoritarianism of their social circles could be easily ignored.
Except that’s not going to happen. ICE has already separated an American family by “accident” in their rush to be the new Gestapo, and the time will come where that isn’t a mistake anymore. Don’t brush off the idea that it would never happen because it already has. We’ve already been the land where one ethnic group monolithically ruled over everyone else through direct or state sanctioned violence and executions. Returning us to a time where the state would actively punish or suppress anyone who threatened the white hegemony was the explicit platform of candidate Trump which he’s spent the last year-and-a-half carrying that promise through. You can’t shut the door on that now that the people who wanted to live in that world again know it’s perfectly acceptable to demand it loudly and publicly with the hope that they’ll back off once they rediscover their alleged decency.
Yes, I know the policy was shut down by the courts, as was part of Trump's new plan to hold families together indefinitely. but these will be talked about as obstacles to be overcome by finding judges and Congressmen who will alter the laws so that they can punish these criminals as they deserve. When that moment comes, it'll come to cheers, it'll be made into a galvanizing force for the Republican base, which they will respond to. There isn't going to be a moment where they go "Wait, are we the baddies?" Anyone still riding the Trump train is in it for the long haul, wherever it takes them.
I’m sure someone somewhere will say that I should still give all these people the benefit of the doubt, but, what doubts am I or anyone supposed to have this point? Trump has been doing all his Trump things for three years; everyone by now has had a chance to figure out where they stand. If literal concentration camps aren’t enough of a warning bell that maybe we’re headed in a bad direction and that we shouldn’t be willing to extend so many good graces to the people who support that, I don’t know what will be. There aren't any complicated reasons or motives left for us to discover, there's just the question of what are we going to do.
My bet is that we'll try to sweep all this under the rug of hyper-partisan polarization so we can pretend there's nothing to worry about, or anything to do, because it's just the usual Democrats and Republicans, always calling each other names. We'll retreat into complaining about how the internet has made everyone so much more disconnected, more willing to be mean to one another rather than connect to find a compromise like we did in mythic days of yore. And then, when someone worse than Trump gets the nomination and possibly the presidency, we'll start to wonder all over again how our strategy of doing absolutely nothing to fix our problems could have gone so wrong.
