Blunderbots, Roll Out

On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi formally called for Articles of Impeachment against President Trump. This is based on the report issued by the House Intelligence Committee led by Adam Schiff which alleged after weeks of testimony, that Donald Trump attempted to use the power of his office to solicit Ukraine for assistance in his 2020 reelection campaign, which Trump confessed to on live TV months ago.

To be blunt, nothing's going to come of this. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in the House have bungled this from the very beginning, which isn't a surprise given that the leadership never wanted to impeach Trump in the first place.

We'll start with the bungling. One criticism that has been lobbed at the hearings from the very start is that they're boring as hell to watch. Obviously, there's a disingenuous aspect to this critique when it comes from people like Trump's son or on Fox News since they have a vested interest in making all of the President's abuses of power seem like nothing more than triggered liberals getting the vapors over the actions of a True American Hero. That being said, that there are those making the criticism with corrupt motives, doesn't mean there's no substance to the criticism at all.

The thing to realize about impeachment investigations is that the point isn't really to find out what's happened; by the time impeachment hearings start in the House, the broad strokes of the president's transgressions are already known and undeniable, the point of impeachment hearings is to generate and drive home the idea that the president is unfit for office and must be removed for his actions. Removing a duly elected sitting president is inherently a moment of high drama, if you want the effort to succeed, you have to lean into that, you have to give people a good show to keep their attention and passions high.

Instead of that, Schiff and the Intelligence Committee decided that the better approach was to let the hearings be a somber, stolid affair, where sensible, responsible government imposed itself over the chaos of the administration.

I can't emphasize enough how fatal of a mistake this is. In normal times, a government with unnecessary drama or grandstanding is fantastic. But if we're at the point where impeachment is not only possible but necessary, an ethos against making a fuss or causing a ruckus is going to get you absolutely nowhere.

This strategy makes even less sense when you consider the environment the inquiry would be taking place in. In the world of Fox News, the Republican base is going to be blasted literally every minute of every day that the proceedings are baseless, vindictive, or, hilariously, unconstitutional. Every thing that needs to be done to reinforce the idea that the Left is viciously attacking their dear president for no reason will be done, no matter how ridiculous.

Are they going to trout out an absolutely preposterous idea that impeachment hearings are a violation of the 6th amendments due process protections? Sure, why not. How about championing the conspiracy theory that it was really Ukraine who hacked the DNC server and interfered in the 2016 election? Fine, fuck it, whatever we need to do.

In this environment, the chances of swinging enough Republican voters- and, by extension, Republican Congressmen, is close to nil. So, instead of beating your head against the wall trying to achieve bipartisan support, you use that to make the noose tighter, to paint the picture that a failure to condemn Trump both in the House and the Senate isn't an act of exoneration, but complicity.

Now, I get the idea that calling something like impeachment hearings "boring" and expecting to be taken seriously is stupid, a sign of our hollowed out attention spans ruining our ethics of citizenship. What's at stake here are the foundational principles of our democracy, but we're too busy griping about not being entertained.

There seems to be this idea that there's a divide with politics on the one side, and principles like Duty, Honor, etc. etc. on the other. The politics side is seen as dirty, as the mire which we must overcome to reach the lofty principles of better, more refined civilizations. Thing is, if you want people to do those things, you gotta bring them there, you have to give them reasons, something to believe in, and to do that, it takes doing the dirty work of politics to convince people that there's something more to them, and the world they live in.

A few weeks of staid testimony followed by a day of constitutional law professors lecturing the public on the finer points of impeachment does not a compelling case make, so all this will just die on the vine in the face of a Senate with no incentive to side against Trump.

Which, isn't a surprise, since the Democrats came into this on their back foot.

It's been clear since the beginning of the year that Nancy Pelosi had no intention of doing any impeachment inquiries no matter what happened. Even when Robert Mueller handed Congress a report detailing ten times Trump used the power of his office to commit literal crimes, she passed. The only reason this is happening is that she was facing a revolt in the ranks because of her refusal to do literally anything to hold Trump to account. Which, just as a sidebar, think about that, faced with one of the most corrupt, unpopular presidents in the history of the country, supposedly master politician Nancy Pelosi was on the verge of losing the support of at least half her caucus. That's talent.

Anyway, they don't mean to fuck up, they just do. Democrats from Pelosi's generation operate under a philosophy of politics that shuns public passions as rule, so it makes sense that they'd fail so abysmally in marshaling them effectively. Deeper than that, though, is something else, I think, that impeachment is a fight Pelosi is afraid to lose but absolutely terrified of winning.

The losing part makes sense; Pelosi's power comes from her ability as fundraiser, securing money from people with more power than her by convincing them she'll be the best person to carry out their interests. She was in Congress for Clinton's impeachment, she saw the fallout of how that fight went both for the Republicans as a whole and for Newt Gingrich personally. She saw how Gingrich went from being one of the most influential and powerful men in politics to having to scrape by as a talking shill on Fox News, forever blacklisted from any strata of real power. I imagine Pelosi sees her nightmare version of that being a special guest on MSNBC, eternally trading quips with Joe Scarborough in the morning and tut-tutting Russia with Rachel Maddow for the evening crowd.

Still, even that pales next to the Boschian hellscape she would face if Trump was successfully impeached. Part of how the mainstream Democratic political strategy works is by reinforcing the idea that powerful political figures operate behind a protective veil of influence and power that can't be penetrated by regular ol' public pressure, it's just too hard. The idea is to make it feel like there's a barrier between those in power and the electorate that puts them there. This is done to make sure that any populist policies like Medicare for All or Debt Free college are both dead on arrival, and that Democrats have sufficient cover after killing them.

Most importantly, for this philosophy to work, no one must be held to account, for anything, ever. Think of literally everyone from the Bush administration who still appear on TV, work in the Trump administration, or do whatever the hell they want not living in prison where they belong. I mean, sure, you can lambaste Trump for giving John Bolton and Gina Haspel jobs, but he wasn't the one who let them walk away from their atrocities with no consequences.

That's why all the talk about holding Trump accountable, that no one is above the law blah blah blah falls so flat. The Democrats were happy to let Trump get away with literally everything he's done so far, including helping pass a $4 billion border security bill with no oversight after the concentration camp conditions the Border Patrol were holding asylum seekers in became common knowledge. People who behave or operate with the kind of incentives that Pelosi and her ilk operate cannot successfully hold Trump to account because, at heart, they don't really believe they should or are even capable of doing so.

It's honestly amazing that Trump has found himself in this position. He's a petty, real estate grifter operating as chief executive of a political system that almost explicitly encourages his kind of grift. Even with that handicap, he still manages to get himself in trouble by sheer repulsive force, backing a inept, submissive Congress into a shambolic display of what it should be doing as a co-equal branch of government.

If Trump fell, it'd prove that presidents are touchable, that with enough public pressure and action, they can fall just like anyone else. And what would happen then? Well, people might get the idea in their head that they can, and should, hold everyone to account, to make sure all those who put us in this position are banished for their failures.

For Pelosi and her ilk, that cannot, must not be allowed to happen. And for that, she will almost instinctively sell all of us out, even protect Trump as president, to keep whatever strands of power she can grasp.

In the end, this will go much the same way as Trump's bankruptcies- anyone who could bring him to heel will let him walk away clean as he passes  the ruin onto everybody else.

Brexit, Revisited

As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm fascinated by the politics of disaster. How governments and societies navigate their way through chaos and havoc has always been something I've been drawn to mainly because the primary strategy is to act like there is no disaster. Everything gets played off as business as usual which, of course, makes everything worse and any solution impossible. Over the last three years, the two primary examples of this dynamic have been the Trump administration and Brexit. The former I talk about all the time, so I think it's only fair I pivot to the latter.

I wrote a post about the referendum a few years ago, and, looking back on it, I'm still pretty happy with it. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, said she wants to call another Scottish independence referendum by 2021; considering that a significant factor in the last referendum was the UK threatening Scottish admittance into the EU- a thing Scotland really wants to be a part of- isn't going to be at play anymore, I imagine the vote would be closer if not flipped if it happened again. Right now, the polls I could find on the issue usually fall between 49% opposed- 43% in favor with the rest undecided. It's a tight spread, one I can easily see being swayed by whatever shape Brexit takes over the next few years.

The other prediction I feel even more confident in though is that Northern Ireland will leave the UK and reunite with the rest of the island to make Ireland a whole republic. Because of how Theresa May pursued the Brexit project and the redlines that came with that position, I believe has only made Northern Ireland's exit an inevitability. 

 

To put this in context, May, as Prime Minister, set out to achieve what was called a "Hard Brexit" meaning that the UK would have no membership in the Single Market, or be in any way a part of any trade or customs agreement with the EU except those it negotiated after the UK left. This presents a problem because if the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland aren't covered by a shared set of laws any more, then there must be a border between them, which makes everyone really uneasy because any border with all the guard towers and military checkpoints that come with it will bring back the Troubles almost instantly.

So what to do? Well, the EU proposed, and the UK agreed to, a measure called the "backstop." Basically, it says that, barring any other options- which don't exist - when the UK leaves the EU, Northern Ireland will effectively stay inside the EU so it maintains all the same legal standards as the Republic, therefore eliminating the need for a physical border. The kicker of this arrangement, which May and the Democratic Unionist Party both complained about, is that instead of a physical border on the island, it creates an internal "sea border" between NI and the UK- meaning anything transported from NI would have to go through the full range of customs checks before it could be sold to the rest of the UK and vice versa.

How does this all tie together and make me think that the break up is inevitable? Because, at the end of the day, the consequence of Brexit for Northern Ireland is going to be one of two things- a return to sectarian partisan violence, or further integration with the Republic at the cost of isolation from the rest of the UK. If there's violence, all the old political questions of why do family's on the same island have to suffer border and military checks just to visit or do business with each other resurface in all the same ugly fashions. The other added wrinkle is that Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly against Brexit and it's own domestic legislative body - Stormount - hasn't been in session for two years after the fallout of a corruption scandal involving the current head of the DUP, Arlene Foster. If violence does come, it will be because of policies pursued against the popular will, Catholic and Protestant alike, so I expect people to start asking rather pointed questions about why they should live in fear and die over a political project they didn't want to happen and was pursued with no regard to their rather delicate situation.

On the other hand, an internal sea border, by nature, would force greater cooperation between the Republic, Northern Ireland, and the EU, with the rest of the UK left out in the cold. This is why May, along with Foster, were so dead set against the idea of the backstop. It reinforces the idea that Northern Ireland has more in common, and more to gain, by being closely allied to Ireland proper while keeping the UK at arms length (Foster and the DUP as a whole have the added incentive of wanting to stay in the UK because that's the only way their regressive Protestant asses can stay in power.)

No matter how you look at it, whether it's a the problem is of returning violence or the wonky reality of trying to manage one country with two separate legal frameworks, the easiest, less convoluted answer to the Irish question is for Northern Ireland to just be Ireland. That reality is acting like a political singularity, pulling every discussion of the matter into its orbit until the crushing effect of its gravity brings the idea to fruition.

And while I believe that wholeheartedly, I don't want to put any kind of time table on when this will happen because of the major mistake I made in the first Brexit post I did. In that piece, I predicted that the EU would react with its general ruthlessness in enforcing its political agenda against what it saw as an existential threat. I was basing my analysis on the Greek debt debacle, where the EU Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund- collectively known as The Troika- ground the newly elected Syriza party officials into dust over the issue of Greece's debt repayments. Syriza's (correct) position was that the Troika's terms of austerity were madness, that imposing such drastic cuts to public budgets would only make it more impossible for Greece to repay its loans which would drive them deeper into debt, which would only make the Troika demand deeper cuts for further assistance etc. etc. This argument fell on deaf ears and the Troika went about setting and forcing the Greek government to agree to absolutely punishing terms to the point where Greece still hasn't recovered from the 2008 crisis.

I expected the negotiations with the UK to go much the same way. In the early days after the referendum, Theresa May was making moves that pointed to UK's strategy being basically cherry picking EU membership benefits; full, unrestricted access to the single market, but without accepting any of the four freedoms central to that market. Obviously, this wasn't going to happen, and I foretold a brutal negotiation process where the EU laid out in excruciating detail that the extended grace which kept the UK sitting at the adults table of international affairs was now over, and would forcibly show it to its proper place where the other hanger on powers belonged.

This didn't happen. It didn't happen because the UK has, for three years now, acted like a senile, delusional old family member who's only around to rave about politics at Thanksgiving. It's almost impossible to lay out in full the sheer incompetence and bad faith the government has shown over the last three years. From triggering the Article 51 clause to leave the EU without any clear idea what it meant, to insisting, repeatedly, that the EU would grant it special exceptions to allow UK products and financial services when the EU negotiating team loudly, publicly, and insistently said that under no circumstances would that ever happen.

While she was Prime Minister, May would constantly go to summits in Brussels, seemingly come to an agreement with the EU team, then, when news broke in Britian about whatever the agreement was, would immediately backtrack and denounce the very same provisions she had spent the weekend negotiating. She would also try to make an end run around the European Commission by going directly to the different European heads of state to get support for her half baked initiatives even though the heads of state and the Commission told her every single time that such action wasn't appreciated and was completely unprofessional if not outright disrespectful.

Look, if a member of a foreign government names their cat "Brexit" because the constant indecision about wanting to go outside or stay reminds them of your government,  you've lost all credibility past, present, and future.

 

The only good moment Theresa May had came last November after negotiations closed and produced the withdrawal agreement. She said that the options before Britain were her deal, no deal, or no Brexit. It's literally the only moment of honest reflection in her entire tenure and it mattered not at all. 

Three votes were held to get Parliament's approval for the agreement and each time the measures went down in flames.

The final defeat prompted May to resign, which means the UK spent three of the six month extension the EU gave it on a meaningless election that changes absolutely nothing. Her replacement, Boris Johnson, is a buffoon who's spent his entire career honing that natural talent to become a living spectacle worthy of P.T. Barnum.

Recently, Johnson said that the backstop was dead, that he wouldn't honor it, and that he plans to go back and renegotiate not only that provision but the entire Withdrawal Agreement. That the EU has said, repeatedly (again), that renegotiating wasn't an option, that the Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal on the table and that the only reason the UK was granted an extension was so they could figure how to pass the Withdrawal Agreement is, of course, entirely ignored.

All this means that the UK is more likely than not to crash out of the EU without a deal of any kind which, is absolutely insane.

At their core, countries are legal entities with shit tons of people and land attached to them. Relationships between countries, by extension, are also just elaborate legal agreements. This is why Michael Barnier, the lead negotiator for the EU, set up that Brexit chart- it's basically a staircase of "If-Then" scenarios that break down "If these UK redlines, then this outcome." It's as close as a man can come to sketching out the terms of the deal in crayon so the UK could fully understand the consequences of their choices. Alas.

In effect, deal or no-deal, it doesn't really matter because Britain is screwed either way. One of the main rallying cries for this whole project was that it was an effort for the UK to take back its sovereignty from faceless EU bureaucrats. I'm curious about what they're getting though. Does forcing an ambassador to retire because he pointed out the obvious about the Trump administration or acting as proxy agents seizing Iranian ships off the coast of Spain sound like the actions of a sovereign nation, or do they sound like a client trying not to piss off its lone sugar daddy?

This dynamic is going to play out in social policy, too. When Trump did his state visit in May, he talked about the possibilities of the new trade deals that would come in the Brexit wake. In his usual "say the quiet parts out loud" way, Trump mentioned that one of the new avenues the US was excited for was opening up the NHS to US healthcare companies. Many a British politician - including Tories - lambasted the idea that the NHS would be auctioned off for profit to foreign companies.

That's all well and good, far as outrage goes, but when that request comes, what, exactly is the UK going to do to say no? If they leave with no deal, they'll need whatever deal they can get and it's not like Boris Johnson has shown any inclination to take an aggressive stance against Trump, or any U.S. administration's, demands. There's also the issue that the Tories can't protest too much about privatizing and crapifying the NHS since they've been doing that for years.

Then, you know, there's the EU. If the UK wants to do business with the EU, then they have  to sell products that conform to EU standards; standards the UK complained were too stringent and now will have no say in crafting or implementing. Because nothing says sovereignty than having to match your entire regulatory framework to a power that you didn't elect and can't influence in any way. (This dynamic is why the UK joined the EU in the first place.)

In the end, none of this really matters. The minute the referendum results came in, the UK set itself up for a path where the only possible outcome would be a UK diminished, humiliated, and dependent on the world powers that filled the vacuum left in the disintegration of the British empire. The only question was how.

You do have to wonder, now that they've got the "independence" they thought was so cravenly taken from them, are they happy?

Disposed to Suffer

Lately, I've been thinking about this Q&A at Zhul Library at NMSU I went to as part of my non-fiction class. The event was held during Sunshine Week- a week celebrating transparency and press freedoms- and featured three journalists and the spokesperson of the Border Patrol in this region. The spokesperson had a somewhat unenviable job of facing down a room of people in the wake of the stories that two children had died while in BP custody. Touchy subject, to be sure, which the agent attempted to get around by saying that Border Patrol is the immigration equivalent of beat cops- they're the ones on the metaphorical street, the actual detention of the migrants was handled by other parts of the federal immigration apparatus.

He did as well of a job as he could, but, throughout the initial discussion of the panel members, I kept getting a "I was just following orders" vibe from the intrepid PR stooge and wondered how quickly the Nazi comparison would come once the floor was opened to public questions. 

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long. The first question from the public was whether the immigration policies the administration was pursuing was moral, and what, if any concerns the members of Border Patrol and ICE had in pursuing such policies. The spokesperson's answer amounted to saying that the thing he most liked about his job was that people were either following the law, or not. If they had proper immigration papers, he wouldn't arrest them; if they didn't he would. He then went on to say that the best part of his job was that, in effect, he didn’t have to think about any of these things, he just applied the law. The man who asked the question shot back with a comment about how that defense didn't work out very well at Nuremberg and the room was off to the races.

I've been wondering how our spokesmen feels now that 24 people have either died in ICE custody or shortly after being released from it. I wonder if he feels a little disheartened going to work now that the stories of how children and teenagers are stuffed into bedless rooms where the children are living in soiled clothes, with the teenagers in breast milk stained clothes because there's no one else around to feed the baby's. I wonder if he rolls his eyes a bit thinking about what he'll have to say when the government argues with a straight face that taking away soap, toothbrushes, and forcing children to sleep on concrete floors under bright lights satisfied the "safe and sanitary" obligation of the Flores agreement. I wonder if he's been thinking about what it means for him personally to go out into the world and defend intentional policies of cruelty that kill people who wanted nothing more than a chance for a better life.

Maybe I'm being too hard on our Pontius Pilate spokesperson. It's not like he's defending an organization whose current and former members- including his boss- are part of a Facebook group celebrating the deaths of those children or making threats to Congresswomen who criticize them; it's not like he's defending his fellow agents who made unofficial commemorative coins to mock the children they're keeping in camps. No, all he's saying is that he just represents the part of the system that feeds people into the meat grinder, but because he doesn't directly grind people into pulp, his hands are clean.

It's quite the abdication, but it's not like he's alone. In response to Trump's "Go back to your own countries" comment to four American citizens, Nancy Pelosi said well, this:

I reject @realDonaldTrump’s xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation. Rather than attack Members of Congress, he should work with us for humane immigration policy that reflects American values. Stop the raids - #FamiliesBelongTogether!

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 14, 2019

Somehow, I don't think asking the man who is purposefully creating a crisis that's killing people is interested in making that crisis more palatable to his victims. It's almost, as if, the cruelty is the point. 

 

But what strikes me the most about that tweet is the “he should work with us” line. To me, it speaks of an attitude that Trump isn’t going anywhere, that he’s going to be president for the foreseeable future and that, no matter what else she says, she doesn’t really see Trump as a fundamental threat to anything because she’s not going to do a damn thing to get rid of him. Instead, she wants to work with him, to mitigate his growing fascism and the official discrimination that’s pouring out of his administration every day.

Its cowardice masquerading as political savvy which she’ll get away with because, well, why wouldn’t she? It’s all she’s ever done, and she gets to be Speaker of the House, twice.

I took the title of this post from the Declaration of Independence, which says “mankind [is] more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Nothing more accurately describes this time and the reluctance to meaningfully confront Trump and what he represents beyond pithy clapping. Tucker Carlson is running segments that Ilhan Omar is representative of refugees who come to America because we accepted her, at great cost, only for her to become an ingrate spitting in America’s eye. Sure, language like that will spark a greater movement for ethnic cleansing and xenophobia but you can’t impeach Trump or explicitly call him a white nationalist because it’ll divide the country too much.

Even then, I feel like it goes so much deeper. When Bernie Sanders pitched his plan to forgive all student debt, the biggest push back came from people who repaid their loans who felt like the plan was an insult to them, that it made all the suffering they went through to pay their loans back meaningless. But, here’s the spoiler alert: if the only way you can make your suffering meaningful is to perpetuate it on someone else, it was always meaningless and unnecessary.

America is addicted to the philosophy that freedom is only as good as the suffering you endure to achieve it. No matter what it is, anything that would make life better is automatically rejected because it would make people indulgent or devalue their freedom. Universal Healthcare? No, it’s more important that people have the freedom to choose health insurance policies that will abandon them to die than for the government to ensure its people live. Welfare? That’s only for the lazy, dependent, unperson. Never expect to retire? That’s amazing, it’s the ultimate freedom to feel so insecure that you expect to be cast aside like trash the second you stop working.

This attitude paralyzes us, drowning us in misery for no reason other than the suffering is point. It’s the societal equivalent of those old self-flagellating priests looking to edify themselves before their god. This brutality does nothing but mutilate us into grotesque, pathetic, groveling creatures addicted to a ritual of pain because its absence has become so foreign, we’re afraid to live in a world without it.

The New York Times recently had a story talking about a woman who, through a bureaucratic quirk, wasn’t an American citizen anymore. She was born to two Americans in Canada, but because of the way ICE is acting these days, she couldn’t get the documents she needed to prove she was a citizen and spent a year in this legal limbo terrified of being deported as a result of her, on paper at least, non-citizen status. The kicker of it all was that she voted for Trump and plans to do so again.

Just think about that for a second.

This woman gets the barest hint of what it feels like to live in the existential terror that every immigrant, with papers or without, experiences in the age of Trump. She got just a small taste of what it feels like to know that the government could do whatever it wanted to her with no consequence and her response is to make sure that keeps happening. She said, “she continues to believe Mr. Trump will 'make America great again' and if that means thousands of people have to live their lives in fear or people are thrown into concentration camps, then so be it.

This is what I mean. Even with firsthand experience, this woman actively chooses to give power to the man whose policies caused her so much stress because hey, it has to be somebody right? Somebody has to suffer all those degradations, just as long as it’s not me.

That hypocrisy is what’s killing us, that no matter which direction you turn, the fundamental policy question isn’t how to improve society but “how can we impose the worst effects of the status quo on the people who matter the least to keep it all going?” The only possible result of all this is fascism, because if that is the central question of your society, that’s really the only ideology with a ready-made answer. If you don’t want to live in that, than you have to get used to changing the world in which you are accustomed which, honestly, shouldn’t be too hard because the world to which we are accustomed fucking sucks.

The End of Game of Thrones

I, like many people, did not like how Game of Thrones ended.  I really, really wanted it to finish on a good note, or at least have moments I could appreciate even if the whole didn't quite do what I was hoping for. But nope, all I've got now is the need to do an autopsy on a show that I liked, if never quite loved.

There will be many think pieces dissecting what happened in this season, but ultimately I believe it comes down to the fact that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss just didn't understand the work they were adapting. I've never read the books, but I think you can back up the idea that D&D don't understand the material just by looking at the show in isolation. Beginnings are important, and the first thing we see is meant to build the context of the world, and the threats facing it. So it's important to remember that our first experience in Game of Thrones is three rangers, members of the Night's Watch, finding a bunch of dead things in a quiet area of the woods before they're all brutally murdered by a White Walker. It's only after that that we get to see the Starks and Winterfell, and King Robert Baratheon with all the political intrigues and conspiracies and murder that will follow.

If the story was meant to be about those things, than that's where the story would've started. The entire reason that we get the White Walkers first though is so we remember that all this drama over who killed Jon Arryn, is Joffery the son of Robert, all of that is just flashy noise distracting us from the true enemy coming out of the dark with the dead coming with them. But it's clear that D&D believed that the real action of the series was found in the machinations of who sat on the Iron Throne rather than, you know, the war to save stave off the extinction of mankind. That's why in the final season the White Walkers are dealt with first, the apocalyptic threat they represent is only a speed bump to the more important question of who's going to rule Westeros afterwards.

This bending of the the conflict to the Iron Throne is why everything feels petty and unfulfilled. Jon's entire arc is about discovering that borders and kingdoms are arbitrary boundaries that lead to fragmented, incomplete responses to existential threats, all of which gets thrown out the window once the reveal of his parentage starts spreading. Bran gets hit with this too: he becomes the living memory of the world, able to see past present and future at will, which only matters because it will give him a unique perspective a king. It's like D&D looked at George R. R. Martin's work that the world was bigger than what ass parks itself in a fancy chair and said "Ah, no, it's not."

A large part of this is how D&D never really got a firm grip on consequences or ever bothered to treat character development as anything more than guidelines to be blown off whenever they needed rather than the underpinning of their entire show. Jamie is a good example of the latter- remember how he spent season 3 tied up, realizing how he's kind of a piece of shit, and how he had that moment where he opened up to Brienne about why he killed the Mad King to save literally millions of people? Remember how all of that made him seem like a conflicted anti-villain trying to find a legitimate way to live as honorably as he could? Remember how a season later Jaime rapes Cersei in front of their dead son and D&D saw no friction between his attitude to try and be better and that action? So it's not all that surprising that in the end they would chuck Jamie's development out a window so he could march his way to King's Landing and die with Cersei because... well, just because, that's why.

Which, speaking of her; Cersei's plot is the worst example of the show's habit of just forgetting that consequences are a thing. This is a woman who has no real claim to the throne, who only got it after assassinating every rival to her power by blowing them up in the Sept of Balor which caused her son to drop himself out a window so, yeah, she's got problems. This doesn't even begin to take into account how palpably hated she is for sleeping with her brother and all the naked contempt she has for the people she wants to rule over.  All these problems, compounded by Arya annihilating the Freys in the Riverlands, should have Cersei up against the wall, under siege in the Red Keep from enemy and ally alike even before Daenerys shows up because well, she murdered her way to the top and that tends not to go over very well when you're already hated and your machinations kill noble and civilian alike. Trying to survive making an enemy out of everyone should be an intense, high tension drama, but the show can't even bother to show her doing anything other than stand aloof getting drunk for two-and-a-half seasons.

This isn't just sloppy oversight but outright sabotage. Tryion and Varys, for example, know firsthand how much money the Iron Throne owes to the Iron Bank of Braavos which, in early seasons when they were still competent, would've been something they would have worked to apply as much leverage as possible. It's even more galling that this doesn't happen because it dovetails so nicely with Daenerys goal of winning Westeros without massacring everything in sight with the dragons, Dothraki, and Unsullied. Leveraging how unpopular Cersei is and how tenuous her hold on power is would be a pretty significant coup- get the Iron Bank to withdraw their money, and Cersei collapses under the weight her rule by paranoia has brought her.

It's thematically appropriate and fits with the goals the characters have in mind and how they would want to achieve them; Tyrion by using his knowledge of money and fiance and Varys could encourage a few riots here and there before making a pit stop in Braavos to talk to the Iron Bank. Instead, Tyrion becomes the dumbest person on the show and gets blindsided by every major event the plot takes and Varys just stands around waiting to get burned to death.

All that said, I don't think anyone got their character sacrificed more for plot reasons than Daenerys. What I always liked about Daenerys story was that she was a ruler who had at her disposal the equivalent of living nuclear weapons to use in her burning mission to reclaim her stolen destiny. There's a lot of temptation to just turn everything in your path to ashes because, why not? And while that temptation is certainly there for Dany throughout the series, she does seems to grow into someone who legitimately does want to make the world a better place, and who wants to rule by more than fire and blood alone.

Take this scene from season 6, for example. As terms for her support of Dany's war in Westeros, Yara asks for the independence of the Iron Islands, which Dany grants as long as the Ironborn quit their reaving and raping. It's a big moment, one that shows how Dany has learned from her time in Mereen that she can't take a no-holds-barred top down approach to ruling; if she wants to lead, she'll have to build coalitions of respect with those she seeks to rule instead of just demanding their blanket submission. Contrast that with the scene where she meets Jon for the first time- gone is the air of respect, instead, she's petty, demanding, and arrogant. Everything she should have carried over from her time with the Ironborn is just, gone, forgotten to set up the eventual turn where she burns King's Landing to the ground.

Which, yeah, Mad Queen Dany. The show really, really wants to retcon all of Dany's previous brutal actions as signs of foreshadowing that she totally had it in her to lay waste to innocent people and would do so given the right provocation. The death of Viserys, the killing of the warlocks in Qarth, the sack of Astapor, the crucifixion of the slave masters in Meereen, the burning of the Dothraki Khals, all these are shaded as the actions of a blood-thirsty tyrant who equates opposition to her as signs of inherent evil she needs to destroy. "All those people were against her and seen as evil, so that's how she sees everybody" the show tries to say, conveniently leaving out that literally every single example provided were people who explicitly wanted to enslave her to use for their own purposes, which are slightly different circumstances than being a surrendering civilian population which never acted against her.

The justifications for this aren't much better, either. In behind-the-scenes discussions and interviews laying out the reasoning for Dany's actions, D&D say that the setbacks she's faced in Westeros- the deaths of two dragons, Jorah, Missandei,  the loss of Dorne and the Reach, and the Ironborn as allies, the revelation of Jon's true parentage, have all accumulated and pushed her past her breaking point. To borrow some language from my creative writing workshops, "I don't buy it."

On paper, I can see it- Dany loses everything she loves and has spent years protecting, the appearance and rejection of a male relative that jeopardizes the destiny she's built so much of identity on, all of this builds into a pressure cooker of grief and paranoia that she finally breaks under right at the moment she's won every thing she's ever wanted. Again, in theory, not a bad idea, but the lynch pins of this are the sudden stupidity and incompetence of her closest advisers or not being able to see stationery ships while she's flying above them in clear skies. In other words, she's only backed into a corner because the plot demands her to be so, with all the contrived mechanics grinding the story into a twisted, incompetent version of itself.

It's a shame really, for the show to end on such an ignoble note. But it makes sense that it would given that the lesson D&D took from some the shows most iconic moments- Ned's execution, the Red Wedding- was that they were big, shocking moments of heavy, world altering spectacle. They thought that's all they had to deliver but missed that what made those moments work was the long, slow work of characters making choices- choices they thought they had to make, or didn't want to, or felt perfectly justified in making, that no matter what, all bound them, trapped them in an inevitable moment they couldn't see coming.

And maybe that’s the most powerful, underlying bond between this show and its audience. We too made the choice we believed was necessary, to continue on the same path when only doom was on the horizon in the hope that somehow, somewhere along that path there would a turn, a fork towards a better end that we just had to press forward to see; until, finally, we met our inevitable, miserable end that was waiting for us all along.

A Quick Word on Jennifer Rubin

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.

This is How You Get Ants

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.

Belated Midterms Thoughts

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.