Ocelot II
Ocelot II's JournalBrian 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.
We were bamboozled by the incessant claims of American exceptionalism.
When we older folks were kids in the '50s and '60s we were taught about Manifest Destiny, the notion that we were entitled to take the Natives' land for our own as white European settlers moved westward. We heard about the "savages" who tried to fight off the nice white settlers who just wanted the land they were entitled to. We still hear both Dem and GOP politicians constantly talk about how this is the best, strongest, most free, etc. country in the world (except for Trump, who says it's a terrible place but for all the wrong reasons). But it isn't. We are just people, not special, no better than the people of any other country - and, as it turns out, just as susceptible to the lies of a demagogue as were the citizens of Germany in the 1930s. And we conveniently forget that we became a great and prosperous nation because white Europeans stole the labor of captured and enslaved people from Africa and stole the land of the people who already lived here.
And so, believing as an article of faith that we are an exceptional nation full of good, honorable and noble people, it was a terrible shock when half of our fellow citizens were suckered into believing Trump's lies and being persuaded that he would "fix" everything for them. And by fixing he meant, among other things, getting rid of the immigrants who were stealing and raping and murdering and getting government welfare. He meant making sure women didn't have agency over their own reproductive choices. He meant keeping trans people from playing on sports teams or using the "wrong" bathroom. He identified enough groups of Untermenschen, to use the Nazis' term, to give the disgruntled and bigoted and angry folks among us plenty of other people to feel superior to.
And this election, in which about half of the voters told us that they approve of how Trump others people, shows us once and for all that we are not a special nation. We, as a nation, are no less hateful and degraded and stupid than the people of any other nation. I don't want to hear any more bullshit about American exceptionalism. I don't want to hear one more politician announce that "This is not what we are." Because it's exactly what we are.
I'm with you.
As a general rule I think grave dancing is tacky, because even awful people have at least a few friends and relatives who love them and would be sad that they are dead, and in light of that it would be kind of cruel to celebrate. But when Satan finally calls him home, I don't think anyone will be very sad, not even his immediate family. Oh, Melanoma will spend a few grand on a black designer dress and veil, and she'll do the grieving widow routine, and Gums and Junior and the rest of that nest of vipers will lie about what a great man he was and how they'll miss him and they'll insist on the flashiest possible state funeral, but as soon as they're off camera and before his stinking corpse is cold they'll be looking for the will and start fighting over the estate, or what's left of it. So I won't feel the slightest twinge of guilt over my celebratory Macarena and my grand jetés and gavottes and gigues and drunken break dancing which will continue until I'm out of liquor and have collapsed from exhaustion. So I'll sleep and then I'll dance some more.
They didn't mention the fact that he's the Antichrist.
No, I don't believe in a literal Antichrist, but if there was ever someone who fit the description of the mythical one, it's Trump. He embodies every aspect of human sin and evil. For his entire life he has committed the seven deadly sins - pride, anger, gluttony, sloth, lust, envy and greed - flagrantly, defiantly and unapologetically. He's all the badness humanity is capable of stuffed into a bulging, lumpy orange sausage skin. And he holds up a mirror to our society so some people can see themselves in it - and tragically, they like what they see. What does that make them, I wonder?
I'm beginning to wonder whether some percentage of his rally attendees
aren't there just for the spectacle and have no intention of voting for him. It's something I might have done in my crazed youth: "Hey, let's do a few bong hits and go to that Trump rally! I hear he's a real trip!" It would be like going to an infamously bad movie just for the laughs (I've done that) or watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. I recall a time in the early '70s when about six of us got colossally stoned, crammed into my boyfriend's ancient Volvo and went to the seediest porno theater in town to see "Deep Throat." We were hysterical through the whole thing. Maybe it's like that.
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