This Is Why We Don't Have Nice Things

Every now and then I come across a piece of punditry that's just so amazingly bad and mendacious that it really bears breaking down on a line-by-line level. So that's what we're going to do with Dougles Schoen's "Why Democrats Need Wall Street" column in Tuesday's New York Times. Now, before we get started, it's important to note that Dougy was a pollster for Bill Clinton from 1994-2000, so he has something of vested interest in making sure the strategy his boss implemented doesn't look so horrible. He starts off with 

"Many of the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party, led by Bernie Sanders, are advocating wealth redistribution through higher taxes and Medicare for all, and demonizing banks and Wall Street.
Memories in politics are short, but those policies are vastly different from the program of the party’s traditional center-left coalition. Under Bill Clinton, that coalition balanced the budget, acknowledged the limits of government and protected the essential programs that make up the social safety net."

It's nice that right from the start we're already pretending that the whole Democratic Party structure is moving in the direction of Bernie Sanders' populism. And sure, he has Elizabeth Warren and maybe a few others on his side, namely a bunch of people looking to be President in three years and are covering their asses now by co-sponsoring his Medicare For All bill, but to act like the DNC or the  party leadership in Congress like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have any interest in moving away from the holy "center-left" coalition is laughable.

The other bit of comedy comes in acting like the this is somehow violating Democratic "tradition;" a tradition which is barely over thirty-years-old.  The Clintons and their ghouls all sprang from something called the Democratic Leadership Council which formed in the wake of the 1984 Presidential election and the party's second loss to Ronald Reagan. Their strategy was to move the Party away from the working class and make it more appealing to Wall Street and other donors with lots of cash on hand. And hey, it worked, didn't it?

Anyway, back to Schoen:

"As the party has left behind that version of liberalism, it has also found its way to its weakest electoral position — nationally and at the state level — since the 1920s. Hillary Clinton’s lurch to the left probably cost her key Midwestern states that Barack Obama had won twice and led to the election of Donald Trump."

This is really where the column makes the jump from your average bullshit punditry to some truly artistic levels of outright fuckery. First off, Schoen just glides over the fact that the Democratic party lost Congress and the majority of governorships and state legislatures - that weak electoral position -  during the Obama Presidency. You know, the same Obama who Wall Street gave more money to in both of his Presidential Elections than his supposedly more business friendly Republican opponents. Also the same Obama whose Attorney General confirmed that they were intentionally not arresting or prosecuting Wall Street for their litany of criminal acts in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2007-08 and who threw trillions upon trillions of dollars at the banks through whatever bailout method he could find. Yeah, that's totally the actions of a party moving away from acting in the interests of Wall Street, sure.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that Clinton's loss of key Midwestern states had more to do with not even bothering to campaign in them once she secured the nomination but, I don't get paid for this so what would I know.

Speaking of, here's Schoen's primary reason why Democrats should snuggle up closely to the Vampire Squids:

"Democrats should keep ties with Wall Street for several reasons. The first is an ugly fact of politics: money. Maintaining ties to Wall Street makes economic sense for Democrats and keeps their coffers full.
In the 2016 election, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, employees and companies in the securities and investment industry donated more than $63 million to the Democratic Party."

And that, right there, is the core of the entire piece: politics is a job and we all need to get paid. The idea that we should change our system to one that eliminates or at the very least mitigates the influence of money in politics is never considered in the column mainly because, if it was, Schoen would have to address the overwhelming majority of people who want nothing money to have as little to do with our politics as possible.  

 

One poll has 78% of the country saying that we need new laws limiting the influence of money.  Think about that, in a country as polarized as this one, you still get eight out of ten people across the political spectrum all agree on that one key fact. That same pole shows 81% of Democrats saying they support their elected officials working across the aisle to come up with legislation to that effect, with 79% of Republican voters saying the same thing.  

You would think that someone whose literal job is to collect and analyze the data on the political and ideological trends of the voting public would see that massive, bi-partisan suspicion about money and its corrupting influence on our political system as something of a hint that advocating for its continued prominence is something of a liability. You might also think that, in the wake of the DNC having its worst fundraising year since 2003 because there are so many voters refusing to give the party money for refusing to turn away from the direction Schoen is advocating for, would be a hint that they shouldn't fucking do that anymore.  

Oh well; back to the party:

"If voters really hated ties to Wall Street and financial elites, Republicans would not enjoy such a commanding electoral position — or have elected a New York plutocrat president. Most voters’ major problems with President Trump stem from his performance, not from his wealth or connections to Wall Street."

This would be a real solid stumper and excellent point if it wasn't so busy ignoring literally everything about how Republicans work to win elections. I've gone over the Southern Strategy so many times even I'm kind of sick of doing it, but, really, it's easy to think of the Republican strategy as having three main pillars: stoke as much racial/cultural resentment as humanly possible (the "Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays" or whatever other Judeo-Christian values nonsense is in this season), voter suppression like the voter I.D. laws that by sheer coincidence keeps poor minorities from voting Democrat and turn out favorably low, and finally, the grand American tradition of gerrymandering. As far as Trump goes, his connections to Wall Street mattered far less to his base than his appeal to their good ol'-fashioned racism.


And now, one of my absolute favorite passages:

"A second reason Democrats should keep ties with Wall Street: Despite what the Democratic left says, America is a center-right, pro-capitalist nation. A January Gallup poll found that moderates and conservatives make up almost 70 percent of the country, while only 25 percent of voters identify as liberal. Even in May 2016, when Senator Sanders made redistribution a central part of his platform, Gallup found that only about 35 percent of Americans had a positive image of socialism, compared with 60 percent with a positive view of capitalism."

The whole "Americans identify has conservative" trope is one of my favorites in political hackery precisely because it such a naked ploy to ignore actual policies the public supports.  

 

Let's take regulation, as an example. In a poll released this year, Americans for Financial Reform found that 70% of Independents and 53% of Republicans felt Wall Street should be more tightly regulated. The same poll also found that 90% of Independents and 87% of Republicans think it's important to regulate Wall Street activities.  Oh, and Medicare For All? That's at 60%.  Tuition-free college is at 62%.  Higher taxes for the rich and corporations? Those poll at 76% and 52% support, respectively.  So yeah, Americans may not like the label of Socialism, but they're pretty fond of the expanded social policies, higher taxes on the richest people, and tighter regulations of businesses.  Point is, there's no way you can look at those policy preferences and say that the American public is of an overwhelmingly conservative mindset when it comes to economic and social policies.  In the 90's and early 2000's, I can see Schoen and his ilk easily getting away with this kind of tactic because no one could easily disprove what they were saying.  But now, in the Google era?  That he's still trotting out this shit when it takes all of five minutes to get a full, comprehensive rebuttal is just insulting.

Moving on:

"Third, it is hypocritical for Democrats to maintain ties to Silicon Valley and then turn their backs on the very people who help finance its work. The financial industry brings to market the world’s most innovate products and platforms that expand the economy and create jobs."

Schoen actually stumbles onto a solid point here, so, good for him.  I think it merits a participation award, even.  To the core of his point, though, I will say that given the rampant racism, sexism, and massive invasions of privacy perpetrated by the tech industry, the easiest way out of this conundrum is to cut ties with both of those toxic industries and hold them to account.  Pretty simple, when you think about it.

Next:

"Fourth, demonizing Wall Street does nothing to bridge the widening gaps in our country. Wall Street has its flaws and abuses, which were addressed in part by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. And yes, the American people are certainly hostile to and suspicious of Wall Street. But using this suspicion and hostility as the organizing principle for a major political party will consign Democrats to permanent minority status. 

Here’s what the Democrats need to do instead: develop a set of pro-growth, inclusive economic policies. Democratic leaders must prioritize entrepreneurship, small-business growth and the expansion of job-training and retraining programs."

You can really see Schoen running out of rhetorical thread here, since his main argument in the top paragraph boils down to "Yes, Wall Street has done bad things, which we kinda-sorta already punished them for.  And yes, most people still hate them.  But playing to that majority opinion will only make you unpopular, so there."  Also, the Democrats already have a plan that follows his whole thing about prioritizing entrepreneurship etc etc, it's called "A Better Deal."  That Schoen has apparently forgotten or never even knew that the Party already did the thing he wanted them to speaks for itself in how successful they would be in pursuing that path.

And now, the beginning of the home stretch:

"American leadership in finance will make it possible for our country to invest as much as $1 trillion in infrastructure, extend health care access to every American at an affordable rate and lift the 76 million Americans who are barely surviving financially, as reported in May 2016 by the Federal Reserve, into the middle class. 

The Democrats need to partner with the financial community on these issues. Most important, the Democrats have simply had an ineffective, negative and coercive economic message. Advocacy of a $15 minimum wage and further banking regulation does not constitute a positive, proactive agenda."

Okay, so, first of all,you really have to admire the casual contempt Schoen has for the idea of paying people more money so they can maybe have a living wage.  It's such a tell that he views "pay workers more money" as such an obvious waste of time that he can't hide his frustration with the, from his perspective, utter stupidity of pursuing such a thing in the first place.   More importantly, if the government really wanted to expand social services or spend money repairing and rebuilding our infrastructure, they could do it all on their own.  The government creates the money used to do all of those things in the first place, they don't need the financial industry for shit.  The only reason to include the public-private partnerships in those kind of public services is to give the private sector a chance to fleece the public to profitability.

Finally, the closer:

"The Democrats cannot be the party that supports only new, stifling regulations. Reducing regulation allows banks to employ capital and finance investment in our country’s future, making electric cars, renewable energy and internet connectivity across the globe a reality 

This was evident to Democrats in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2000, for example, Democrats led the way on two key economic legislative victories. First, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the communications and cable industries, increased growth and enhanced market competition. Second, the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 removed regulations placed on financial institutions by bureaucrats and expanded opportunities for Wall Street to engage in mergers and acquisitions, adding wealth to the retirement accounts and other investment portfolios of millions of middle-class Americans. 

If the party is going to have any chance of returning to its position of influence and appeal, Democrats need to work with Wall Street to push policies that create jobs, heal divisions and stimulate the American economy."

I already covered the regulations bit, so I won't go over it again.  But, I will say that it's hilarious that Schoen uses deregulating the cable/internet industry, an industry that has spent the last several decades consolidating into regional monopolies and provides the absolute worst internet and broadband services in any industrialized country on the planet, as a "win" for deregulation.  The real balls-of-steel moment though, comes right after, where he uses the deregulation of Wall Street as the apex move of the moderate Democrats.  Schoen really expects everyone to forget, or just ignore, that the end result of that bill was a financial industry so untethered from consequence or oversight that they made fraudulent mortgages to any warm body they could pull off the street, and then packaged those up with other toxic loans and falsely sold them off as quality products that would never default only to turn around and bet heavily that those products would implode, and finally, when all that and more finally came crashing down and nearly caused a second Great Depression, wrote off the entire thing with taxpayer bailouts and walked away into the sunset, free and clear of absolutely everything.

It takes a real piece of shit to wax nostalgic about the time where everyone turned a blind eye to the thing that turned our financial system into little more than a government-backed criminal enterprise but, hey, Schoen has to be good at something, I guess.

Vegas

Another year, another "worst mass shooting in American history."  It's an honorific that is quickly losing all sense of tragedy or weight since we have a new event so often and we do absolutely nothing to stop the next from happening, a pattern that shows no sign of breaking anytime soon.  Still, it's worth it I think to at least look at the components of why.

Don't expect the numbers to shift anything, at least this time.  Mass shootings are, quite literally, an everyday occurrence.  We've all grown used to the fact that 4-5 people are being shot somewhere in the country so the only thing that makes these things newsworthy is if they happen on a large scale.  Point is, we are long past the time where you can count on the horror of a mass shooting to have any real world consequences in a political sense.  When events like this become part of the everyday life and culture, the only possible thing that really push them back out into the extraordinary is if the sheer scale of the dead hits something previously thought impossible.  I don't really know what that tipping point is- hundreds dead, maybe?  Thousands?- but if that's what we're waiting for then a whole lot of other people are going to die before we find it.

Also, we should stop paying so much attention to the motives and reasons of the shooter.  They are, in the grand scheme of things, not all that relevant.  As the NRA and their stooges love to point out every single time this happens, there will always be crazies.  And on that, they have a point; you can't legislate and craft an effective gun control policy that will foresee every murderously homicidal motive people can craft for themselves.  What we should be more concerned about is that no matter the motive, everyone before this shooting and everyone after it who wants to build an arsenal to kill as many people as possible will be able to do so without any real impediment.  That's really where our focus needs to be, the supply side.  If we want to really stop people from using these guns for their intended purpose than the easiest way to do so is just not allow those guns to be sold.  But since no one is really advocating that, it's not gonna happen.  And even if there were, the Supreme Court decisions in the DC vs Heller and McDonald vs Chicago cases would kill any law enacting such a ban dead the moment anybody filed a suit against it.

One more thing on that point, it's brought up, again by the NRA/stooges, that people who want to do harm can always buy guns on the black market so it doesn't make sense to stop people from legally buying all the hardware they ever wanted legally.  My main question to these people is, where do they think black market guns come from?  The quick answer is: they come from legal purchases.  To be fair, some of the guns are stolen from their owners, although only DC has a law requiring owners to report the theft to law enforcement.  But mostly, they come from straw purchasers and let's say flexible dealers.  Why not just shut those dealers down, you ask?  Well, because it's against the law for the ATF to share gun trace data with... pretty much everyone.  There have been exceptions made to the law since it passed which allows the ATF to share the data amongst other law enforcement agencies (keep in mind the amendment establishing these conditions was passed in 2003.  The law enforcement exception didn't come along until 2008 and the exception to access the data beyond one specific criminal case didn't happen until 2010) but the ATF is still legally barred from releasing that information to the public.  Ignorance and conjecture for everybody, woo-ho.

The law also requires the FBI destroy approved sale background checks within 24-hours so the actual ownership of a gun can't be easily tracked from person to person and also bans the ATF from requiring gun shops and dealers to submit their inventory records for federal review.  So if someone is selling things on the side and later reports it "missing" there's no real way to confirm they ever received the gun in the first place.   So when people say "They should just enforce the laws on the books already" they either don't know or don't care that "the laws on the books" are the exact thing stopping law enforcement agencies from doing that.  So, probably shouldn't listen much to anybody who says that, just to be safe.

The tag for all of that is that even you point out to people that having an unrestricted legal market is the number one thing creating the black market they're all so afraid of, it probably won't change their mind at all.  Because, like most things associated around guns, the argument isn't for the logical side, it's aimed at the emotional part of our brains.  By creating this fear of potentially being outgunned by criminals who may one day bust down your door in the night, you create the need for people to have unlimited access to buy the biggest, deadliest weapons they can get their hands on with the added benefit of getting to react like someone is killing their children whenever any gun control measure gets brought up.

None of these things would be possible, though, without the quiet dedication and perseverance of the National Rifle Association, the tumor which kills all hope in decent people everywhere.  There's no real mystery to why the NRA has the stranglehold that they do on this issue- they're the ones who show up everyday of every year with their money and political pressure at every level to keep gun laws weak to non-existent.  Democracies are won by the people who show up, and who do so consistently.  The NRA can weather all the storms of these mass shootings because they know that in a week, a month, maybe two, everyone screaming for gun control measures will give up and go on to something else and when the next day comes, they'll still be there.

What happened in the wake of Sandy Hook is a perfect example of this. Everyone thought that twenty dead kids would be too much to ignore, a tragedy that demanded a response. But four months later the universal background check bill was dead and the public response was... nothing. No calls to Congress, no backlash, just, nothing. And so the NRA went about it's work, confident in the fact that if the opposition couldn't sustain themselves after a killing like that, they would never be a serious threat.

Until a separate counter organization gets built up to match the commitment the NRA shows, or until the supposedly 75% of their membership who support gun control actually do something about their leadership, than the status quo will stay as it is.

Even then, it will be hard to effectively counter the NRA because everyone attempting to do so will be missing any significant facts to clear away the mountains of bullshit the NRA dumps on this topic.  The primary reason for that is something called the Dickey Amendment, which was passed in 1996 after the NRA lobbied to prevent the CDC looking into gun violence because in 1993 they published a study saying that people with guns in their homes tend to shoot other people in their homes more often than people who don't.  Shocker, I know.

Specifically, the amendment bars the CDC from "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control," which doesn't explicitly bar the CDC from researching gun violence and gun deaths, true, but since no one at the CDC is stupid enough to believe that if they do a study about gun violence and someone in Congress uses that research as the basis of a gun control bill, the NRA and their minions will cry foul and say they're violating the spirit or whatever of the amendment and threaten to cut the CDC's budget in retaliation.  So, instead, they do nothing to save themselves the hassle and I don't think anyone can really blame them for that.

The consequence of this is that when it comes to the gun control "debate" nobody has any real ground or authority to stand on because no one knows anything about the exact details surrounding gun deaths and gun violence in the country, which is just what the NRA wants.  Without any clear facts, all we have is emotional grandstanding and pleas to have some vague notion of human decency and kindness and all that jazz.  Predictably, this goes absolutely nowhere, and everybody just gets exhausted and stows whatever feelings they have left away to use whenever the next massacre comes they have enough good will so all the thoughts and prayers they send out don't feel completely meaningless.

But you really have to ask, how bad and how hard have we given up when we feel that's the absolute best we can do?

The Darwin Award President

So Trump made his big U.N. debut this week and it went... about as well as you could expect it to.

He gave a fire and brimstone speech about how we totally don't want to but, ya know, we could destroy North Korea any second now if we wanted to.  Or if they made us do it.  Point is, we could kill everything living thing in that country and it wouldn't be our fault at all, oh no.  It's all Kim Jong-un's fault, yep, his and nobody elses.  For one thing, it takes an individual truly blessed in the art of delusion to believe you can threaten an full-on nuclear war that will wipe out an entire country and still be able to see yourself as the good guy in the story.  Only a complete idiot could look at how North Korea has responded to  threatening rhetoric with more frequent and ambitious missile tests and think "Maybe this time go with genocide?" and think that will be an effective deterrent.  The only people who could come to that conclusion are people so mind-numblingly dense that they can't see that North Korea's entire nuclear strategy revolves around not wanting to become another Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan etc. etc. and that the lynch-pin of having a nuke is that there would never be anyone so suicidally stupid as to attack them when they knew a nuclear strike against South Korea would be the immediate retaliation.

Apparently they never anticipated someone of such spectacular capacity as Donald Trump.  To be fair, it's a common failing.

Trump also made mention of how he doesn't believe Iran is living up to its end of the 2015 nuclear agreement and that if it doesn't get in line, well, they'd just better watch out too.  He closed his speech saying that the rest of the world should be more like him and focus on strengthening their countries internally instead of focusing on things like interventionism and nation-building.  That this is an inherently contradictory and mutually exclusive to his earlier idea that the righteous nations of the world should go out and smite the renegades with holy artillery to preserve world peace is just something the rest of us will have to make sense of on our own.

I want to circle back to Iran, though, because if Trump pulls out of the agreement like he's signaling to do and re-instate the nuclear sanctions on Iran as a prelude to war, then he will have done something so remarkable I didn't expect to see it in my lifetime: He will have made an even bigger mistake than Bush did when he invaded Iraq.

Real quick, let's just get out the whole "they aren't living up to their end" bit out of the way: It's a fucking lie.  The International Atomic Energy Agency, the agency responsible for verifying Iran's compliance with deal, says that Iran is living up to the agreement and following it to the letter.  There is no debate about this.  The only real thing they're trying to do is say that Iran is violating the spirit of the deal, or to be more specific:

"The secretary of state said that Iran had not lived up to the expectations expressed in the document’s preface, which says the signatories “anticipate that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security.”

Pointing to Iran’s role in the Syrian, Iraqi and Yemeni conflicts as well as its missile programme and cyber operations, Tillerson said: “It’s pretty difficult to say that the expectations of the parties that negotiated this agreement have been met.”

This is pretty rich considering that in Syria, we were the ones who directly armed al Qaeda and ISIS, in Iraq we were the ones who installed the Shia friendly government and empowered most of the Shia militias Iran later allied themselves with in the first place, and, last but not least, we are the ones in Yemen guaranteeing that the worst famine on the planet and a cholera epidemic continue unabated for the foreseeable future.  So, really, the only thing proven by complaining that Iran is either on the same or slightly not as terrible sides in conflicts we either started or directly contributed to, is that Tillerson is just as much a cunt as everyone else in this administration.

When Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords, it primed much of Europe to prepare themselves to live in a world where they would no longer need to respect the tone or actions of the United States.  Pulling out of the nuclear agreement would tell the entire world that the United States cannot be counted on to fulfill its commitments, that our word is shit because the next President could come along and say "Nope, we're not doing this, we're just gonna take our ball and go home."  It's unclear how Trump expects to pull off reneging on a deal almost the entire rest of the world is in favor of and acknowledges is working exactly as intended and still have the U.S. come out as a leading figure on the international stage.  I mean, there's no way he can do that, but it would be nice to at least have an inkling as what these people are thinking.

With Bush and Obama at least, you knew where they were coming from.  Bush thought he would deliver the Middle East to Jesus with bombs, bibles, and democracy and Obama followed the idea of "I can blow up as many weddings, funerals, and rescuers as I want as long that story stays on page 10 and nobody gives a shit" to an equally religious degree.  Both of those are pretty terrible and they played a direct role in creating the chaos the Middle East is in right now, but, at least they're an ethos.  The only real question Trump seems to be capable of asking when he looks out at anything in the wider world is "Do I look like a bitch?"

Also, let's really take a look at what a war with Iran would look like.  We'd be all alone except for the Saudi's and the other Gulf theocracies and Israel, which, honestly, is a coalition of the incredibly useless.  We'd be a global pariah for starting a second war of aggression within twenty years of each other and unlike Iraq, our standing on the global stage is damaged to the point to where the idea of actually punishing us for that will seem like a good idea to more than a few countries.  When it comes to the actual fighting, for the first time in a long time we'd be fighting a trained, dedicated, and cohesive army that's capable of putting up a sustained and coordinated resistance against us.  If we go by Korean and Vietnam wars as examples, we really don't come out well when we fight someone who can actually punch back.

There's also the issue of what to do about the guerrilla fighting coming from the civilians.  Iran's people may have a shaky and reformist attitude towards their own government, but they are unified in that they absolutely have no love for ours or our military, so you can bet  once we come in guns blazing killing their families, they're going to want blood to even the score.  So what do you do about that?  How many hundreds of thousands or millions of troops will you need to fight the army, revolutionary guard, and the guerrilla fighters all at the same time?  Where are all those bodies going to come from?  Because right now, only the desperate and true believers are signing up for the armed services, and for some reason, I don't think that'll be enough.

But let's say that it is.  Let's say we "win" and install a new government in Tehran, what then?  What are we going to do about the civilians and surviving army members who will go about blowing up troops, checkpoints, and whatever else they can put an IED next to?  Are we really going to spend decades occupying Iran until it's "pacified?"  And that's not even getting into the secondary consequences which will be the Taliban retaking full control over Afghanistan while we're committed elsewhere, the flood of Sunni terrorists groups into Iran to inflict as much carnage as possible on the strongest symbol of Shia Islam in the world right now, the renewed fighting in Iraq as the Shia government loses the resources of both its primary backers, and that really, is just the off-the-top-of-my-head scenarios.  Who knows what the fuck else will happen if that ever gets started.

The irony of a man who got elected President on the promise that he would make America great again single-handedly convincing the world that the sooner they get away from American influence is almost too much to process.  It'd be hysterical, even, if he wasn't dragging us down with him.

Wind River Review

Taylor Sheridan continues to prove that he is one of the best working film makers right now with his directorial debut Wind River.  Full review below the cut.

The Defenders Review

It's not groundbreaking or spectacular, but it's a solid series that's fun to watch.  Full review below the cut.

This Won't be 'It'

 On Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, a bunch of neo-Nazi's and other white supremacists groups gathered ostensibly to protest the city's decision to remove the statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park.  Really, though, the demonstration was to make a show of force after the same group of people got chased off after standing around for ten minutes back in May.  Things went much better this time, they didn't get harassed by the cops, and-as a bonus- one of their own even got to kill someone.  Publicly the groups have to disavow any affiliation with the asshole who plowed through twenty people in his car- can't have fascists supporting violence, oh no- but privately I'm sure they're positively giddy that at least there's one less race traitor in the world.

Condemnation came quickly and from all sides after the days events except, rather notably, from the President himself.  Sure, he finally got around to saying racism is bad, m'kay on Monday after quite literally everyone pointed out that not condemning Nazi's killing people is the single worst thing he's done (so far).  I just imagine Trump having multiple people surround him on the golf course holding pieces of paper that just has "Nazis=Bad!!!" printed on them and just trying to get him to sound out the words and say them out loud.  To their frustration Trump's response probably went a little something like "But there are many sides.  Many,many wonderful sides.  Just, tremendous, you don't even know.  Even that paper has a side that doesn't say Nazi's are bad, so how can you know?" Maybe they made him watch Crash to finally get the point to sink in.

There's no mystery has to why it took Trump so long to so begrudgingly denounce racism like he was plagiarizing an after school special; after all, these people fucking love him and we all know that, at the end of the day, Trump's only real evaluation of anything is how much does that thing like Donald Trump.  It must've killed Trump watching his VP, Attorney General, basically everyone else with a functioning brain denounce all the Nazi's who loved him, who took time out of their busy lives to stroll about on a Saturday afternoon chanting his name and saluting him.  It must have been like a child watching his parents throw away all their favorite lead painted toys.  The child can't understand that all of his bright shiny friends are toxic and will kill him, all the child knows is that those toys are his and he wants to keep them safe and sound where he can always play with them.  That, really, is the relationship Trump has with the neo-Nazi's and all the other white supremacists who came out of the woodwork to worship the ground he walks on: he doesn't care about losing their votes, he cares about losing their admiration.

Think about it, Trump won the electoral college, he's the most powerful man in the world, but, still, almost a year later, he cannot stop bitching about losing the popular vote.  Anytime he talks about it he makes the same bullshit claim about millions of people voting illegally voting and that, literally only that, is what kept him from winning the popular vote.  Really run that through your mind: The guy gets to lead be the head of government, but, because he lost a meaningless vote that showed people don't like him, he can't stand it.  I'm sure that, given the chance, Trump would much rather live in a world where Hilary Clinton was President but he got the popular vote.  That is his dream, to be adored, to be respected, to be the subject of awe.  That's where I think people who are reading political decisions into his duddering are wrong; Trump could be kicked out of office tomorrow and if these people were still there tweeting #MAGA at him, he wouldn't give two shits about not being President anymore.  But if they were gone, or had moved on to a new daddy figure?  That would crush him.  Basically, by this point anyone trying to read complex motives into Trump's behavior is giving the man way too much credit.

I would also be suspicious toward any claim that Trump's equivocating will 'hurt' him because, well, who exactly are those pieces expecting Trump to lose?  All the white supremacists shit heads where out in full force in the primaries supporting Trump, but that didn't stop him from being the unquestioned lead candidate from the day he announced.  The guy pretended to not know who the fucking KKK were but that didn't put a dent in anyone's support in him, so why would this?  And don't say "because this is on the news more."  Conservatives have spent almost thirty years brainwashing themselves into not believing any media except the kind that they produce for themselves.  Having a bunch of swastika armband wearing assholes shouting "Heil Trump" on ABC will have no real effect at all on these people's mindsets.   All you can really expect from them is to follow Trumps complaining lead, as always, that his johnny-come-lately "denunciation" just isn't enough for the mainstream liberals; it's a ridiculous standard, they'll say, expecting someone to trample on free assembling Nazi's like that.  Why should it matter that it came two days later?

"What about the moderates?" you may ask next.  Don't expect much out of them, either.  If "moderates" really existed in large enough numbers to derail Trump, he wouldn't be President.  Also, if someone held their nose at all the racist shit Trump represented and voted for him because of tax-cuts or repealing Obamacare or forcing women into the alley's to get their abortions or whatever, that person doesn't really have any principles you could appeal to anyway.  At best, that same voter today is just frustrated that Trump has brought more unnecessary "drama" upon himself that will only further hamper his legislative agenda.

Trump's efficiency, not his bigotry, has always been the point of contention for the "moderates" so expecting them to jump ship now out of some moral decency is less than realistic.  In fact, expecting anyone who voted or supported Trump to bail on him now out of ethical, moral, or just basic decency concerns is foolish because if those people had any of those qualities, they wouldn't be Trump supporters in the first place.

If anything, I wish people would stop hunting for that magic bullet that will forever de-legitimize Trump and all that he stands for.  That isn't going to happen.  What Trump and his followers represent is the ugly reflection of what America has always been, they're the America that was in love with fascism before the war started because they too saw that the only purpose of government was to facilitate all the profits of the business world.  When those sad-sack Nazi's moan and wail about how the U.S. was originally a country exclusively for white men, they aren't wrong.  Everything this country has ever done has been to make sure white people, and only white people, had access to the lives they'd always wanted.  From the westward expansion to urban development, the laws were explicitly written to make sure that white families got the best of everything, and everyone else got shit if they got anything at all.

That is as much our heritage and culture as the Civil Rights movement and women's suffrage.  We can't reject that people like Trump and Richard Spencer and all the other pieces of garbage with Tikki-Torches were the exact kind of people the country was created for until we acknowledge that and own it, out loud, with no caveats or excuses.  Until then, all those fascistic bastards will stay as American as apple pie and that, is no way for any place to be.

Atomic Blonde Review

Atomic Blonde is a nice addition to the action style brought about by the John Wick franchise and the Daredevil series, but it is a terrible spy drama.  Full review, and spoilers, below the cut.