Ocelot II
Ocelot II's JournalI have become cynical in my old age, having realized over time
that America is not, and never was, Reagan's "shining city on a hill." We are not exceptional. We are not special. We are just a very large collection of humans who happen to live on a very large tract of land and have had to figure out how to live together on it and not kill each other. That's how countries work - some better than others. And humans, no matter where they live, can be really nasty creatures, something history should have taught us. We aren't exempt from history. We are just as capable of atrocity and oppression as anyone else. We pat ourselves on the back for America's "greatness," really meaning its prosperity, but the reality is that our prosperity depended in the first instance on stolen labor and stolen land - a fact that is conveniently forgotten when politicians bloviate about American exceptionalism.
So as I have become old and watched the successive American shitstorms of Vietnam, Watergate, gun violence, Iraq, and the Trump cult, my assumptions and my expectations have changed considerably. It does not surprise me all that much that almost half of us think it's OK to have a leader as degenerate and despicable as Trump, who in his dotage is now effectively controlled by a similarly despicable billionaire and a Russian despot. We are in for some strange and bad times. But the cool thing about being a cynic is that you are rarely disappointed. So while I wait for the excrement to impact the airfoils I will continue to enjoy the things I've always enjoyed: Music, art, all the beautiful things that people create even though people also suck; my friends, lakes and trees and birds and sunrises and sunsets, the fact that I'm still alive and kicking and still capable of hope. Cynicism isn't the same as despair.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
They weren't simpletons at all; they were trying to construct a government
that could avoid or combat the problems Europe had experienced for centuries and with which they were very familiar, especially religious wars, autocratic monarchs, class structures and the effects of feudalism. England was still recovering from the civil wars of the 17th century and its revolving-door monarchy, which by 1776 was controlled by a king who was certifiably nuts. If you'd ever actually read the Federalist Papers you'd know that these were not stupid people. But they were dealing with issues pertinent to the times they knew of and were living in. If it were possible for the smartest among us to start from scratch now and design a new system that works for our time, it would certainly be different. But 250 years from now, would that system and its designers also be considered stupid if the system couldn't deal effectively with whatever had transpired since it was created?
Adaptability is also necessary.
While I agree that chronological age shouldn't be disqualifying just because some people think there's too much of it, and that experience is unquestionably important, it's also essential that our representatives be able to adapt to changing conditions, and flexible enough to reconsider the way they've always been doing things. It's not enough to say "We've always done it that way!" and then keep doing it that way, not noticing that the ground has shifted under their feet. They have to notice the changes, both political technological, and and adapt to them. It seems to me that some of the more senior members of the party are doing their work and managing their campaigns just as they've done since the '70s, but everything is different now. If you're 75 years old and you can get with the drastic evolution (devolution?) of political thought and strategy, great; but if you think you're still in Lyndon Johnson's Congress you'd better think again, or retire.
I'm old. I don't want to see anyone turfed out on account of the date on their driver's license, but some of these folks need to park their stick-shift cars, shitcan their Blackberries and their VCRs, and get with the program.
I'm afraid Trump's GOP will do everything it can to cut funding
for the arts and humanities. They've been trying to kill the NEA since the Reagan administration; Trump tried to kill it in 2017, and this time they might finally succeed. We need the arts and the humanities to maintain any semblance of a civilization - which seems already to be circling the drain. AI threatens to kill creativity, and the arts aren't valued by the tech bros or the plutocrats. Voltaire said, "Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats." Will we even know how to sing when the shipwreck comes?
Brian Thompson has become an avatar for the health insurance industry,
and his killing created a focus for the public's rage toward its predatory practices. Of course nobody should be murdered in cold blood, regardless of how harmful his business practices might be. However much a particular person might symbolize the excesses of a business, no one is entitled to appoint himself judge, jury and executioner of that person; Thompson's killer should be arrested and tried for murder. The real problem is that regardless of how immoral and harmful UHC's and other health insurers' practices are (and how immoral Thompson and other executives might be for implementing and supporting them), we have a health care payment system that preys on people's illnesses and injuries and it's perfectly legal.
The insurance industry, especially health insurance, is parasitic - and it's largely unregulated, and it has enough money and enough lobbyists to make sure it stays that way. The ACA improved the situation slightly but not nearly enough, because our Congress didn't want to derail the insurers' gravy train and had little incentive to do so. Killing off a few CEOs won't change a thing; they will be replaced by more CEOs with the same incentive to maximize profits at the expense of their captive customers by delaying claim reimbursements or denying coverage altogether. Maybe Thompson's murder will help focus the public's anger enough to get Congress to regulate these pirates, but I wouldn't count on it. Money doesn't just talk; it shouts more loudly than anything else.
Bingo. He realized that Trump's DoJ and FBI would never leave Hunter alone.
There was an op-ed in my morning paper, which I will not link to because it pissed me off so deeply, in which the author stated that Biden disregarded the Rule of Law (as to which concept, see my rant at https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219783695) by choosing his son over his country. WTF? How does pardoning Hunter hurt the country any more than Trump's pardons of all manner of miscreants, with more certainly to come? Like it or not, the Constitutional power of a president to pardon is absolute, and there have been many controversial pardons over the years (Clinton got a lot of blowback for pardoning Marc Rich, an act that seems almost comically inconsequential vs. Trump).
No president has ever pardoned an immediate family member before; but it's never even been an issue before, since no presidential family member has ever before faced ongoing punitive prosecution intended to harm the president himself. The country vs. the son is a false choice. There will be and already is political blowback, as was expected, but actual harm to the country? Any harm arising from inappropriate pardons has been done; that ship has sailed beyond the horizon. Did Joe weigh the very real, anticipated harm to his son against the illusory and largely imaginary harm to the country? Clearly he did, and he chose his son. Hunter wouldn't have been prosecuted as he was if Joe hadn't been president, and certainly Joe wasn't going to throw his son to the wolves so the wolves could have the pound of flesh they couldn't get from Joe himself. How could he have done anything other than what he did and live with himself? Fuck the blowback and fuck the self-righteous blowhards who suddenly believe in a rule of law they never cared about before.
"No one is above the law!" That's what the GOP (and some Democrats) are bellowing,
in high dudgeon and paroxysms of pearl-clutching over Biden's pardoning of Hunter. Leaving aside the weapons-grade hypocrisy of any GOPer daring to say a goddamn word about how nobody should be above the law, the sad fact is that the statement is, and always has been, false. It's limply aspirational and only that. It would be nice if it were true, but for all the chest-beating and virtue-signaling, it's a load of bullpucky. The law is said to treat everyone the same, and the way the laws are written - neutrally on their face - we can at least to pretend to believe that to be so. Anatole France once said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” But the wealthy and well-connected and politically favored are almost always above the law; we just act like they aren't, pointing to the occasional rich person who does suffer some consequences - Bernie Madoff, for example.
I was in law school in the late '70s/early '80s, and in those days, when I only knew legal theory and case law, I really believed in The Law as a thing you could believe in; that most of the time it really was applied fairly and justice was done. At that time, though, there was also a school of thought called Critical Legal Studies (Critical Race Theory developed out of this), which explained in almost incomprehensibly recondite academic language that the law has inherent social biases that support the interests of those who create the law; favoring the historically privileged and disadvantaging the historically underprivileged. The law thus becomes an instrument for oppression in order for the wealthy and powerful to maintain their place at the top of the social hierarchy. I thought this was Marxist-adjacent nonsense. After actually practicing law for awhile, though, I wasn't so sure. A lawyer I worked with, who was also my mentor and one of the most excellent humans I have ever known, and who had a cynical streak, used to ask rhetorically, "How much justice can you afford?" After about 20 years I burned out on the whole business of law (not in small part because I started to think the CLS scholars might be right) and went into another line of work, though I kept up with the interesting, scholarly part of it.
So anyhow, when I hear politicians and others getting up on their high horses to insist no one is above the law, I cringe a little. I don't know how they can sincerely believe it, all evidence being to the contrary. Now in Trump we see CLS made flesh, the richest and the most powerful wiping their asses with the Constitution and making a mockery of the law and proving the absurdity of the notion that nobody is above it. And those same iniquitous shitters on the law (and the poltroons in the media who need something to be outraged about) have the gall to suggest that Biden's pardoning Hunter is of the same rule-of-law-pissing-on magnitude as Trump stealing classified documents, sexually assaulting women and inciting an insurrection. Hunter, they say, is an example of the inequity of the law - a president's son being pardoned for a crime only because he's the president's son. Unfair! they howl. Hunter was spared from the consequences of his misdeeds because his father had the power to spare him, they whine. Yet the only reason Hunter was in that jam in the first place was because his father was the president! A guy named Hunter Dingleberry who did what Hunter Biden did would have been given the benefit of the plea deal that fell apart - if he'd even been prosecuted in the first place. So yes, the law did not treat Hunter Biden the same as it would have treated anyone else because he was the president's son - it treated him worse; and it treated him worse because powerful people wanted him treated worse, and bent the law to be sure that happened. The law is not neutral and justice is not blind. Swear to God, if I hear one more pompous dickhead of a politician, whether a GOPer or a Democrat, or one more censorious douchebag of a media pontificator, insist that NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW I will throw a kitchen implement, maybe a toaster or a teakettle, through my TV screen. Do not tell me that ever again. It's bullshit.
I agree. If it's true that the election was stolen somehow and evidence of it is found,
I still see no way to undo it. If it wasn't stolen, that means more people voted for Trump than for Harris which sucks just as much. Why that happened will be analyzed and fought over forever, but it still doesn't change the fact that he and his Nazi-adjacent minions will control the federal government for some yet-unknown duration and we're stuck with it. No matter how it happened we're stuck with it. Discovering why we're stuck with it may be useful in trying to prevent recurrences, but for now we have to deal with life under a great big pile of shit. There is no possible analysis or explanation that makes me feel better about living under a great big pile of shit.
Trump requires only one thing of his appointees: Blind loyalty.
Competence and experience are irrelevant, maybe even a hindrance, because people who actually know what they're doing will probably clash with him when he inevitably wants to do something stupid. So this cabinet will be even more North Korean than the last one; at first there were at least a few appointees who could feed themselves and zip their own flies. But we all remember that totally cringe episode where they went around the big conference table extolling the virtues of Dear Leader, and we can anticipate a rerun of that, only worse. Expect more 20-something former golf caddies and shoe salesmen and internet trolls along with the triumphant return of Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and Stephen Miller and Kash Patel. And before long they'll start fucking things up because they don't know how to do anything but carry golf bags or sell shoes or post Nazi slogans on Xitter, and Miller and Bannon and Patel will fight with each other while JD Vance holds their beer, and Trump will encourage them to fight with each other because he loves the chaos. If his first term was a shit show this will be a shit festival, a shit extravagaza, the apotheosis of shit. It will be the World Cup of shit. The shit Superbowl. The World Series of shit. Die Scheißedämmerung.
I can hardly fucking wait.
Ya know what bugs me about the claim that it was all about the economy?
It's the fact that Black women - the most economically disadvantaged group of all - voted overwhelmingly for Harris, while White men, the people who have most of the money, went for Trump. Black women were hurt at least as much as anyone else by the cost of groceries and gas, probably more. Why didn't they swing over to Trump like those White men who were so outraged at having to pay an extra buck for a carton of eggs? Sure, there are poor White people who struggle on account of inflation, but at least the Black women understood that voting for Trump meant selling out our rights and our democracy for the empty promise of cheaper groceries. So don't tell me it was all just the economy and not the racism and the misogyny.
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