The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
He might as well have named Donald J. Trump, the description fits so well. A hat/tip to Justin Amish and the Washington Post for publishing his opinion piece today. It motivated me to go look up Washington’s farewell address just to verify that was the language in the document.
Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party. No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system — and to work toward it. If we continue to take America for granted, we will lose it.
They are rats leaving a sinking ship. It’s just too bad that the GOP put him in power in the first place. I don’t think their tactical retreat will do them much good; or rather, I hope they don’t profit from it. They don’t deserve it, they backed him solidly right up to this point and now, Now, NOW that he’s admitted impeding an investigation into his and his campaign’s actions, NOW they think this presidency is questionable.
So the targeting of hispanics and muslims wasn’t bad enough? The scapegoating of the poor wasn’t disqualifying enough? The bragging that he could kill people in the street and he would still win wasn’t troubling enough? The evidence that he is a sexual predator wasn’t damning enough?
Now he fires Comey and brags that he told him to lay off the investigation, the investigation that he insisted was fake news since day one, so this isn’t surprising behavior, and NOW they have a problem.
Well, welcome to the club, dumbasses. Wipe the drool off your collective chins and try to pay attention. Caveat Emptor.
I reposted it today because of the events in Washington DC, where the congress and His Electoral Highness Donald J. Trump are trying to undo all the work done by President Obama. They are trying to repeal the ACA which they nicknamed Obamacare specifically trying to denigrate his accomplishments and tar him with the failures of the policy they helped to shape. The ACA, deemed to be not going far enough by most Americans especially the ninety-nine percenters, and condemned as going too far by the most vocal minority segment (self-identified conservatives) of the electorate.
In what should have been an obvious if counter-intuitive turn, the same people who protested that Obama did not go far enough voted for what was popularly seen as the opposition party, the Republicans. However, what the Republicans are is the party that confined Obama to the minimum that he was able to do. What is now transpiring in Washington DC is what happens when fiscal conservatives who think they have a mandate propose doing exactly what the people who voted for them don’t want done. To the utter consternation of the public who doesn’t follow politics as maniacally as I do, the hardliners in the party think that this barbaric proposal they’ve dubbed the AHCA is not punishing enough. The hardliners want it to be more punishing on the poor, the sick and the disabled, the complete opposite of what the popular mandate was.
Candidate Trump in one of his only sane moments said he would protect Medicare and make sure that everyone had healthcare better than they did under Obamacare, the ACA. However, His Electoral Highness has also forgotten his own promises on the subject of healthcare in his efforts to rally the party that saw his stances of protecting Medicare and Social Security as being too liberal.
We now find ourselves caught in an example of the argumentum ad absurdum brought to life. The people who voted for one kind of change, people like the one in the image, discovering their representatives apparently do want to see them die in the streets after all. That the reason conservatives knew there were death panels in Obamacare was because they were planning on creating death panels themselves. Death panels staffed by health insurance insiders who want to protect their profits. I’d laugh at the absurdity of it, if only I weren’t so busy focusing on not giving in to vertigo.
When I stumbled across that image in my Facebook timeline for 2011, I was immediately struck by the notion that I could craft a similar statement. Mine would have to be computer printed like his because dysgraphia would make it take two days to write by hand. It would go something like this,
I worked for 30 years until my health failed me. Unable to sit or stand without pain or dizziness, move without assistance, constantly medicated, I faced a future where the only hope of seeing my family fed or for them to continue to have shelter was to apply for disability. The federal government refused to honor my claim for almost five years. They said I wasn’t really sick. They said I wasn’t an American. I had to proved that I was both before they would pay me anything even though I had faithfully paid my taxes for my entire life.
Now I must stay unemployed in order to keep my family fed and sheltered and keep my insurance, the only thing that allows me to live an almost normal life. In the meantime my wife and children do not qualify for aide because my disability payments amount to more income than is allowed for the poor to make and still qualify for benefits. I have better care with Medicare than any of them receive even though they live in my house and must subsist off of the meager payments the government provides for my disability.
I am the 99%
If you voted for Republicans in the last election, what happens next to people like me, people like him, will be entirely your fault. Think about that the next time you are tempted to complain about your taxes, or to vote for people who promise to save you money by taking a lifeline away from other people. You could well be me one day. Probably will be.
While the current word is that the AHCA is dead, we should never forget that the hardest of the hardliners, the most conservative of the conservatives, the ludicrously named Freedom Caucus, refused to vote for it because it didn’t strip enough benefits from the poor, the sick and the disabled. Think about that the next time you try to out-conservative your conservative neighbors..
As of this writing, the Senate has postponed their version of the AHCA (which finally did pass the House, a meaningless achievement that they still celebrated on the White House lawn) it won’t come up for a vote until after the July 4th holiday. If there is any justice in this world, it will never be voted upon at all. It is a waste of time, a waste of lives and a waste of fortunes. What needs to happen now is Medicare for all, a basic level of coverage that every American chips in for, so that everyone pays into the system that we need when we get sick, and all of us will be sick at some point in our lives.
I am currently on Medicare and having the least trouble I’ve ever had getting my health problems tended to. Sadly, becoming chronically ill appears to have improved my overall health. That is what making your health a non-commodity will do for you. Make you healthier.
In case you’re asking “what’s a cuck?” I might ask in return “where have you been hiding for the last year?” In any case, cuck is short for cuckold, an insult that the alt-right (read as white nationalist) hurl at people they believe are being cuckolded by the system. They think they are being amusing, pretending that people who are happy in the current system are somehow weaker than they are. They are pretty typical trolls. That this has some untraceable connection to sexual potency or your willingness to live in an open relationship if that’s what suits you. It is just more coded language. Next time someone uses a word that you don’t understand, ask them point blank “what does that mean?” If they can’t tell you, they are the stupid ones. #MAGA=Misguided Appallingly Gullible Americans.
In this episode, Sam Harris talked to David Frum. The one thing I will say about David Frum (aside from the fact that he echos most of what I say in Caveat Emptorand the rest of the #MAGA posts) is that his projections into the future are as skewed as most conservative political operatives are these days. He totally dismisses the possibility of the Democrats rallying and handing defeat to the Republicans in the next election. Provided, of course, that we survive as a country to the 2018 elections, which is an open question in my mind. He doesn’t understand the government’s legitimate role in bolstering the economics of the poor with desperately needed cash handouts, typical of most conservatives. He doesn’t understand that transgendered issues are important, in the typical WASPish fashion. He doesn’t understand that religion is part of humanity’s past, not its future.
There is a clear-cut case for how the Republicans see their way clear to a Trump impeachment that isn’t mentioned in this conversation Sam Harris. That is the looming prospect of being turned out of office by angry voters. As the pressure against Trump mounts (and it will) the more likely it is this route will be pursued.
I do like his analysis of the financial angles leading to a Trump exit. His Electoral Highness’ health would suddenly take a turn for the worst if a law requiring the secretary of the treasury to release the tax returns of any major party candidate for president, and the sitting president and vice president every year, was passed. He will suddenly discover he is too ill to continue serving in office. Too ill, as in; he won’t survive if the Russian and Chinese mafias come after him for potentially exposing their financial ties to him.
We should also agitate continuously for an independent inquiry with full subpoena powers to get to the bottom of the Trump/Russia connection. This would be a more satisfying outcome, in my opinion. I don’t want him just out of office. I want him, his supporters, his staff, his family and anyone who enables his crimes to face trial. Sooner rather than later. Unless we light a legal fire under the asses in congressional seats, they will sit around and pretend this is politics as usual until the country breaks apart through neglect and mismanagement. Quite a legacy for the party of Lincoln to be saddled with.
David Frum’s experience working in the real estate business lends more weight to his insights on the subject of Trump. It’s been my experience that people who are enamored of free markets or business acumen really need to spend more time in the trenches that lead to getting crap built in this country. Probably in any country. They’ll come away far less misty-eyed about the subject.
“happy people never became nazis”
Dorothy Thompson via David Frum
Postscript
A few years after this episode aired, Sam Harris retitled his podcast to Making Sense, which really isn’t any better subtext-wise than Waking Up was. It still infers that your opponents don’t do the thing you do, as if they don’t make sense or are awake, which makes it just as subject to misunderstanding or misuse. I stopped listening to Sam’s podcast after his run-in with Ezra Klein. Basically I substituted Ezra’s show for Sam’s show and called it an improvement. Ezra now works for the NY Times as of this writing, I still listen to Vox podcasts and not Sam’s, and Sam is still being Sam on his podcast, the last time I checked. Still being the living, breathing Dunning-Kruger example that caused me to stop listening to him.
When Waking up became Making Sense, Sam pulled down all his old Youtube versions of his podcast. Some of them went back up on Youtube. Some of them did not. I didn’t look that hard, but this one did not come up in a search and I didn’t care enough to go find it on Youtube. Knock yourself out if Watching audio files on Youtube is your thing. Spotify self-embeds like Youtube does and takes less bandwidth. Thank you Spotify.
A few days ago it was announced that Hillary Clinton will attend the inauguration of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States. Of the groups I belong to where this was posted, almost no one took the tack that I would think made sense in the kind of weather we are about to be facing. Most people lauded her for being big enough to go to the swearing in for the victor in the election she most wanted to win. I believe the complete opposite. I don’t think she should go. I don’t think anyone should go.Trump should have to pay attendees to show up. He should have to pay for the judge to swear him in. That is how we should hold him to account for all the bills he’s never paid, and for all the bills he’s going to make us pay.
We have reached that point in US politics. That precise political instant where it will profit us to understand what the words Caveat Emptor or Buyer Beware really mean. Donald J. Trump is a successful businessman as so many of his supporters insist. He is his own biggest booster. He talks about himself incessantly, Tweets pictures of himself constantly, congratulates himself publicly for things that he thinks he’s done whether he has actually done them or not.
But he is a businessman, that much is true.
There are many different kinds of businesses. One might easily argue that there are as many different kinds of business as there are people doing business; however the real estate developer is a special kind of business animal. They ain’t quite like any other form of business on the planet, these real estate developers. Their business is selling their delusions. Delusion is an essential part of the psyche of the real estate developer, and it helps if he is a charismatic delusional because his job requires him to infect the people he talks to with his delusion. He has to infect them with his delusion, or they won’t give him their money, their property, their effort.
Let’s say you want to repurpose a downtown Washington D.C. post office, just to pull a random location out of thin air. We’ll pretend we’re going to take this random location and turn it into a hotel. Not just any hotel, but the most fabulous hotel you’ve ever seen. I mean beautiful, you know? The first thing you need to do to start this project is actually not what you might think. No, the first thing you do, before anything else, is get money for the project. If you have money, then you can influence people to see things your way. You can say “you see my investors over here? They believe in me. They’ve promised me money, so this is going to happen one way or the other and I know you want to be part of this.”
The most important factor in real estate development is getting the money for the stake, for the start of the process. People don’t give you money for nothing, not even if you are trustworthy and you ask real nice. No, you only get money if you have collateral, something you can promise to the lender in exchange for their capital investment. Now, depending on who has the money and where the money came from, what your collateral can be is very flexible.
It is a dirty little secret in the real estate business, especially development and construction, that a large portion of real estate development is done for the purposes of laundering money. It isn’t merely happenstance that some of Donald J. Trump’s business partners are a little on the shady side. That is the kind of money that a big developer needs access to. Liquid capital, and lots of it. The people with dirty money know they are going to lose at least half of their money just making it clean anyway, so they really aren’t interested in tight accounting practices. They just want their share when the clean money starts coming back in.
In New York City back when Trump was laundering his father’s fortune and building Trump tower, you didn’t do business in real estate without being friends with several of these types of people, and Trump knew and dealt with them for as long as he was active in real estate there. What do I know precisely about his connections to organized crime? Nothing. I don’t know anything about his business and the sad part that fact is this, all of us should have demanded we know about his business before electing him to the highest office in the land.
I can tell you that the reason we never saw his tax returns is he doesn’t want anyone to know how much money came in, how much money went out, and who the money went to. How much money he currently has, and how much debt is stacked against it. Those are the things no one can know aside from his bookkeeper, and I guarantee you that person isn’t talking to anyone. The one thing bookkeepers are paid for is discretion and they know it.
When Savings & Loans were a thing, I worked for a few different real estate developers. I was the guy who had to make the developer’s delusions look real. I was the draftsman/graphic artist and eventually a staff architect in several different firms of architects. But back in the S&L days I was just a flunkie newb draftsman and what I did was what the developer told me to do. If he wanted letterhead for a new company, I made new letterhead. If he wanted art for a cover, I drew or found better artists to draw convincing art to sell his delusions, his dreams. My drawings were my stock in trade and my drawings were masterpieces of illusion, because very few of them were ever built. But damn they did look good when I was finished with them.
I have actually lost count of the number of different proposals I worked on back then. It was one every few months for several years. The number of sales pitches I’ve heard really aren’t important for this story. But the charisma? Oh, yeah. They all had it in spades. You’d believe any damn thing they told you while they were talking to you. It was only later that you would kick yourself for agreeing to do whatever stupid thing they asked you to do. But invariably the dream of getting paid would be too much and you’d do the thing on the off-chance that the crazy guy could sell it, and damned if they didn’t generally get something for their effort.
When I say they got something for their effort, I mean the real estate developer got something to show for our collective efforts. They usually made off like bandits. As a paid flunkie draftsman I punched a clock and I got paid, even paid time and a half for time over forty hours a week. You don’t work less than forty hours a week if you are drafting for someone who wants drawings ASAP. So the pay wasn’t bad compared to the minimum wage I had been making previous to studying drafting. But what I made was chickenfeed next to what they banked, and you’ve never heard someone whine so hard about writing you a check until you’ve had a developer by the balls, him needing his next drawings, and you won’t give them up till the check is in your hand.
That is rule number one when dealing with a developer. You don’t do jack shit until at least half the money is in your hand. If you do work on contingency for a developer, you are working for free. You are working for free because he never has to tell you whether he made money or not, which generally means not. Not money for you, anyway.
So let’s say you’ve been around the block a few times. You’re pretty savvy. You know your contracts and your in’s and out’s. You know to get money up front and to get signed contracts before doing any work and all that business school stuff they teach you or you learn from hard knocks along the way. None of that means a thing to a developer like Donald J. Trump.
Nope. That’s what shell corporations are for. The best (and when I say best, I mean wealthiest) architects in the business also use shell corporations. You create this legal fiction and you make it responsible for all the contracts you sign as a businessman. This is all completely legal and above board even though it is a fiction you are engaged in. You pay all your employees and rent and utilities on your place of business through that corporation; but don’t forget the important part of this equation. You also pay yourself a salary.
In fact, you can be paid a salary from all the corporations you own at the same time. All you have to do is justify the expense to the board, and if it is a shell corporation the board is probably you or someone you appoint to say yes to the things you want. So spend a half-hour a month, make a half-million dollars. No one will complain because no one will know except you and your bookkeepers.
I left the best part for last. When you pay yourself too well (and Donald J. Trump does this in spades) you just get to walk away from your contracts. The business you created and hopefully sold beforehand (that is the important part) will go bankrupt, sure. But that really isn’t your problem. You paid yourself a salary and that debt comes before paying contracts. Designers and craftsmen, engineers and architects; everyone who signed contracts and aren’t working for a wage, they get the scraps. You and the investors walk away smelling like roses with freshly laundered money in your pockets.
It is a neat financial trick, one that Donald J. Trump has repeated 6 times now. He has been sued more than 4,000 times. You don’t rack up that many bankruptcies or get sued that many times unless you are doing something bordering on illegal. Bordering on illegal is still legal though, and that is what counts.
Ruthlessness and business acumen only get you so far. You still fall prey to the same failures to predict the future that everyone else does. The crash of the gaming industry nearly did Trump Incorporated in. Even he didn’t understand just how big the financial bubble we were all sitting on was, and he was caught flat-footed just like everyone else as the Wall Street money dried up and Atlantic city’s gaming industry cratered. But hey, that is when the charisma that someone like the Donald has really comes in handy.
If you’re good at it (and Trump is very good at it. Just ask him, he’ll tell you) you can turn yourself into a TV star. He hawked himself onto every media outlet that would have him, spending so much time on radio that he became the butt of several jokes in the New York area radio business. But it paid off in the end, just like he knew it would deep in his delusional heart. The only reason he has any money today is because The Apprentice and its spin-offs have made money, and he made money just like everyone else who works in TV does, successful or not. If you are working you are making money in television. And if your show has ratings you make lots of money. Producers can make more money than anybody and they do less work if they know what they are doing. The Donald talked his way into a producer’s percentage, and he still gets paid to this day for producing the show that he no longer works on.
But down deep in his rotten heart, Donald J. Trump is still that delusional little kid that thought a million bucks gifted from his father was a pittance, and even that is a lie. The same guy who took dirty money from shady characters in NYC to finance his early projects. The same guy who believes every single lie he’s ever told just to make the next buck in a nearly endless line of billions of bucks. Believes those lies and every single conspiracy fantasy he’s asked to put stock in by people like Alex Jones and Breitbart news. He believes them but knows they are false. It doesn’t matter, because the charisma makes him the next buck, and the next buck is what really matters.
That is why we as citizens of the United States need to understand caveat emptor, and we need to understand it now. It would have been better if we had understood it before November 8th, but that deadline passed and we were #MAGA in a big enough percentage in the wrong places. He’s going to be sworn in as the leader of our country on January 20th, with a congress willing and able to do his bidding, if actions and trends are to be believed. He will have the keys to the White House soon, and we need to understand that this life-long con artist is about to pull off the biggest con of his life.
…and that he has no idea how to do the job we’ve given him.
The wealthy believe that they shouldn’t be governed by the same laws as the rest of us. The lives they lead are almost unbelievable to those of us who have never had more money than we could spend on a single purchase. Trump is one of these people. He has always lived that lifestyle.
His contempt for our system goes far beyond simple greed, his need for more money and more fame. He’s hired relatives to run parts of the administration in violation of nepotism laws. He’s named appointees for cabinet seats that have clear conflicts of interest. He’s named appointees who have declared their intention to destroy the department they will be in charge of, pretty much across the board. He’s been bought and paid for by billionaires across the country who are counting on him to deliver on the promises he’s made to roll back clean energy and approve expanded drilling and pipeline proposals.
Robert Reich asked Facebook What do you think? in the wake of Trump’s pick of former Gov. Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy. What do I think? I find it impossible to take anything about this election seriously; which is weird, because I was one of the people who took Trump seriously from the beginning and discounted his chances with the voting public because he was demonstrably unqualified for the office he was seeking. Everything that he has done since the election has demonstrated, again and again, just how unqualified he is financially, mentally, temperamentally.
He can’t be president.
…and still the media people act like he can be president and “aren’t you outraged about this?” I’m well beyond outraged now. The surreality of the approaching cataclysm, surrounded by the same old news organizations parroting the same old garbage news as if there would be a United States for us to live in if this dangerously deranged person were to be allowed to take and hold the office of the president for the next 4 years has me all but convinced I’m the only real person in a video game gone horribly wrong.
He can’t be president. If they make him president anyway the US won’t be here for long if we don’t remove him, and we may not survive his removal if we do. You may well say “that can’t happen” but I guarantee you the average inhabitant of the USSR never thought that they would be reliant upon the truncated government of Russia and the other severed states of the former Soviet Union, either. But they did all the same; and if you think that isn’t Vladimir Putin’s favored dream, the end of the USA, then you really don’t understand the mind of a former KGB agent turned dictator like Putin.
Donald J. Trump is going to step up to take that oath in less than 24 hours now, and you as an American citizen need to understand that you are about to buy into something with no warranty and no guarantees, and you had best inspect each and every proposal put forward by these delusional people as if your life depended on it, because it very well might.
He will come into office with a House of Representatives packed with delusional people who think they can spend money and cut taxes at the same time (it worked for Bush. Temporarily) and there is only so much more of our debt that the Chinese will be willing to buy. Willing to buy from His Electoral Highness Donald J. Trump, that is. He has insulted the Chinese more times than I can count now. Apparently no one has told him that the Chinese have been the biggest buyer of American debt for several years now.
That debt load the country has been carrying? That is about to come due. Guess who will have to foot the bill for paying it? We will, the citizens of the United States. That bill and all the money Trump spends or puts in his pocket during his brief term in the White House. We have to pay that. Us, our children, or grand children and their grandchildren. But not Donald J. Trump and his family. No, they don’t pay taxes, because they are smart. So they won’t be paying the bills, at least not directly and not in a way they would notice. The currency will inflate and those of us with the least will go hungrier than we are now. We’ll lose property to foreign investors spending dollars we’ve convinced them to buy as debt. Federal lands will be privatized and sold. Federal programs will be privatized in the name of cost-cutting.
The latter will go as well as the private prisons did; private prisons that will once again be approved by the Justice Department under its new leadership. Public schools will disappear into voucher programs which won’t cover the cost of teaching poor children who won’t even be able to feed or clothe themselves properly because there won’t be jobs for their parents (automation being the reasons low wage, low skill jobs are disappearing. It isn’t outsourcing and immigrants #MAGA once again) and there won’t be welfare for them to rely on. There certainly won’t be any healthcare unless you are wealthy or lucky enough to qualify under the newly restrictive measures imposed on that program.
Don’t believe me? Remember that wall the #MAGA wanted Trump to build, the wall he said he’d make Mexico pay for? We’re going to pay for it. But trust Donald J. Trump when he says he’ll bill Mexico for the cost of the wall. The wall that there will already be tunnels under when it is built.
Illusions are important when you are trying to sell someone on your dream of pocketing that next dollar.
In reality, Trump’s administration is a rebuke to the very notion that the public interest diverges in any way from private ones. The Labor Department will be run by a man whose interest in the field is dominated by a mania for cheap labor; the Environmental Protection Agency will be run by a virtual pass-through for fossil-fuel interests. Trump’s government will make policy by and for the rich and well-connected. As Politico reports, “the extent to which donors are stocking Trump’s administration is unparalleled in modern presidential history.” As Kudlow makes clear, Trumpism regards the fear that government might favor capital over labor or some other public interest as inherently nonsensical.
Since Obama’s election in 2008 it has become fashionable amongst the conservative elite to pretend that they never were in favor of anything government might do. Not in favor of anything a government headed by a black Democratic president might do, which equates to not in favor of government, embracing anarchism from behind. Too bashful to look anarchy in the face, but heading down the road to anarchism all the same.
Now they find themselves with the reigns of power, all of the reigns of power, unexpectedly in their hands. These people have clearly voted for what they believe is a strong leader. People who want that leader to ignore the constitutional limitations on the office of president. People who want desperately to pretend that their opponents are the bad guys. The brownshirts. The people who want to destroy America. The truly surprising thing about the current crop of conservative Republicans isn’t that they are ignorant; as in, they don’t know that fascism was a right-wing ideology. That strong central leadership is one of the defining attributes of dictatorship. No, the surprising thing is that they know what the truth is, but simply deny it because they want the opposite to be true.
I’ve seen this type of willful ignorance applied to atheism, to evolution, to climate change. But I never thought I’d see the day when they denied their own political ideology, their worship of the strong leader as being anything other than what it truthfully is. This is newspeak/newthink on a really frightening scale. They have to know that they are being false, but they simply lock that knowledge away and blithely pretend that white is black and black is white. I don’t know of any way to deal with this level of insincerity (I first noted in conservative pundits like William Kristol and Pat Buchanan) no way to deal with this level of denial of reality short of eradication. Open warfare. I’d love to hear a way to get through to people who have voluntarily shut their brains off. Please let me know if I’m missing something here.
I mean, they can’t be reasoned with. They simply redefine everything to mean the opposite of what it is for their own convenience. They not only lie to everyone around them, they lie to themselves and believe the lies. This is why Donald Trump is their current leader. He is the king of liars, leading a host of liars.
After eight tedious years of one wild-assed glassy-eye conspiracy theory after another, after nearly a decade of endless birthers and a parade of truthers and more goddamned lame-ass Benghazi reboots than the Batman franchise, after robot alien reptiles in rubber human suits, after Obama is a Muslim, Obama is gay, Obama went to Mars (no really, there are people who believe the CIA teleported Obama to Mars as a teenager, twice, and those silly sons of bitches write me letters), Obama killed Antonin Scalia, Obama has 39 different Social Security numbers, Obama secretly worships Satan, Obama is going to invade Texas, Obama was adopted, Obama’s wife is a man, Obama’s kids were stolen from Africa (because Obama’s wife is a man), Obama is a commie, Obama is a Nazi, Obama refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, Obama is a time traveling super-villain here to gayify white Christian babies with his Magic Negro Ray of Chocolate Mojo, and etcetera, and etcetera, and etcetera up to the part where conservatives are actually floating the idea Obama is conspiring with Hillary Clinton to kidnap kids for some world-spanning Soros-funded pedophile wholesaler operating out of a pizza joint in Washington D.C (which they’ve figured out from “clues” they “deciphered” by reading John Podesta’s emails which were stolen by Russians and fenced via an international criminal organization run by a guy who actually is wanted on sexual assault charges), after 8 years of that, let’s not resort to the same defective Creation-Science based reasoning here. Please.
The problem with #MAGA, this undefinable need to take America back to a previous era, is that America was never the place they believe it was. The problem is also deeper than that. America has a near-terminal case of amnesia when it comes to its own history.
America became someplace else after WWII. Before WWI, before the crash in ’29; before all of that, the US was mostly farms and light industrial manufacturing focused on delivering products to Americans who needed them. There were no interstates, no giant airports, no Military Industrial Complex. There were just farms and farmers and a few scattered cities that corresponded to centers of government or industrial manufacturing.
After WWII we became aware of our power. More importantly, our leaders became aware of it and used it to throw our weight around the globe, influencing other nations to enter our circle of friends, the people who would get rich off of our prosperity with us. Today we consume most of the production that the world generates, while paying little to nothing for it aside from letters of credit. Demanding what we want at the point of a gun, as we have done since the 80’s, is getting old now. The rest of the world is beginning not to care what we whiney Americans want, and they aren’t going to keep buying our debt.
The system which worked following WWII has come to it’s functional end. It is time for a new system to be born, and I don’t think the world is ready to take on that herculean task. I don’t think we can afford to wait, either. This change since WWII, this focus on the Military Industrial Complex and it’s servants in Washington D.C. are why Philip K. Dick’s stories have played so well in the last few decades. There is a madness there in his stories, a madness that the man himself suffered from profoundly. That madness is echoed in the world around us, the disconnection between what is real and what we want to be real. It is almost as if we didn’t win WWII. It is almost as if we… lost?
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
The future has not been written yet. There is still hope for the future. The errors of the past are revealed for us. Hindsight is always 20/20. If the Democrats had not let the Clintons control the party the way they did, if Hillary had allowed real competition at the top of the party and ticket, not forced an outsider to challenge her, if the people who want justice and equality from their system get up and join their local precinct meetings now, if the Democratic party itself embraces new technology to ramp up inclusion; then we’ll get candidates with a broad base of grassroots support rather than the crop of power brokers we currently have to pick through.
But that just deals with the open question of who to vote for in 2018 and 2020. That doesn’t get us through the next two years. Doesn’t get us through the harrowing times that await us on the other side of January 20th.
With The Art of War firmly in mind; Rather than meeting your enemy on their battlefield, pitch your tents where you want to fight. Make them fight on your battlefield, out in the open where greater numbers (and we have greater numbers than they do) will turn the tide of battle and we will be able to win handily. That observation relies on the vast majority of Americans to take an interest in their own government. I’m not holding my breath on this occurring since Americans getting off their couches and doing anything proactive in the realm of politics would be an unprecedented act in the history of human governance.
Which is why I repeat the title of this post again, one last time.
I have practiced this principle almost by rote for most of my adult life, having pretty much always been poor since leaving my hometown in Kansas. I can’t afford to be taken to the cleaners by shady dealers. I prefer to think of caveat emptor more as due diligence, ensuring that what is being promised is reality, making sure that what you are buying is actually what the seller claims it is. When money is tight and purchases are made on promises and shoe strings, you have to know that what you are buying is actually going to do the thing you want it to do.
I say all this, every single word of it that I’ve written on the subject of Donald J. Trump or his 3am rage tweeting alter-ego The Orange Hate-Monkey over this past year with the personal knowledge I have gained through experience. That we have elected a con-artist to the presidency. That when you are forced to deal with a con-artist you keep your hands on your wallet and don’t agree to anything without seeing it first in writing; and even then, don’t let go of those purse-strings. Keep your legal representation on retainer and make a point of running every single thing the con-artist says to you past your counselor before responding in any fashion to him.
Above all, understand that you’ve already bought whatever it is he does while he has the office of the president in his control. If that knowledge keeps you up at night, then you are just beginning to glimpse the nightmares I’ve been having since November 8th.
I’ll see all of you at the polls in 2018. I hope.
Postscript
I left an Orange Hate-Monkey link at the end of this post when I looked at it for deorangification. If you are offended by the reference, please put a gun in your mouth and blow your brains out. You will be doing all of the rest of us a favor, and the final act of failed fascists is generally to blow their brains out anyway. You’ll be following the general trend, just one of the pack. Just like you always have acted, a predictable member of a predictable pack. A pathetic excuse of an individualist.
Every article that is about Donald Trump’s pathetic excuse for a presidency is grouped in the category Trumpismo. Enjoy the retrospective view of our four years of barely dodging head-on collisions with transparently obvious threats. I said it in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. I will say it again in 2024 if the Trumpster fire isn’t put out by then. CAVEAT EMPTOR. The people who voted for Trump bought the Coronapocalypse, second-class status and potential death for all American women, a re-Talibanized Afghanistan and a Muscovy invasion of Ukraine. They’ll be buying something even worse if we don’t stop them from re-taking control of our country. Get out and fucking vote! It is the literal least that a citizen can do.
There is a definite sense of the surreal in my reality this week. I was behind in most of the podcasts I listen to because I was trying to follow the news right up to election day. I have blissfully ignored most of the news since Tuesday, November 8th 2016, with a few glaring exceptions that I will get to shortly. I have been wading into the swamp of audio that has flooded my feed in the last two weeks, putting off listening to episodes of Waking Up, as one example. I’m saving those for when I have the capacity to concentrate on serious philosophical subjects again. I’m tossing out the dross that is no longer relevant now that reality has shifted post-election. Don’t really need to keep abreast of the latest tech, so no TWiT.tv for awhile. The science podcasts are my bedrock, though; which is why the last episode of Inquiring Minds has deepened the surreality I’ve been experiencing since Tuesday.
(the eyeless, open-headed logo for the show is creeping me out as it stares at me now)
Listening to the people who attempt to defend their affinity for the Orange Hate-Monkey in the podcast isn’t helping. Oh poor, misunderstood me whining by rural whites strikes me as just this side of pathetic. As if urban blacks don’t have problems, haven’t had worse problems for the better part of two hundred years. The fact that the researchers on this podcast are so divorced from the truth of the matter, that the reality-disconnected people they have been interviewing actually turned out to be the ones who had the last laugh, that they got their American Psycho candidate on a collision course with the White House, in the face of the researcher’s own blithe belief that Hillary Clinton was a shoe-in for the presidency, isn’t helping with the surreality of this moment in time.
When I coined the phrase Orange Hate-Monkey, I wasn’t just being mean or childish. Repeating Chris Hayes‘ Birther-in-Chief label is something I do mean and childishly. Like the label for his profession, Real Estate Developer, which is just another form of epithet for an architectural design professional like myself, the moniker Orange Hate-Monkey is an attempt to describe the particular type of reality disconnect I perceive when this dangerously psychotic man speaks.
The man (and I use that term loosely. I assume he has working male parts because he has children he claims as his own. He isn’t a man in any other fashion that I can determine) does love to talk, and other people seem to find his blather endlessly amusing for reasons which I cannot fathom. No matter how many times I yelled at my television screen “why are you asking this liar questions when you know he will just lie to you?” in the last year, no one ever seemed to stop and ask if this person they were talking too was really all there, mentally.
All I ever heard in his voice was deception and hatred. All real estate developershave a looser than average grip on reality. It is a hazard of the job, sizing up the real estate you can afford and then putting lipstick on that pig so that you can get the best price. Sincerity sells, so they learn to believe their own bullshit more fervently than anyone else around them, more fervently than used car salesmen, even though they know it’s all bullshit. As a real estate developer, these delusions are an asset to be utilized.
You sell the delusion. The delusion is all you sell, as a real estate developer. The sales receipts go in your own pocket, the development bills go to the corporation you create as a front. When the time comes you walk away with the cash, leaving the corporation on the rocks to soak up the costs your delusions incurred. This is the business model of the real estate developer in question, the Orange Hate-Monkey. Theft of service, his standard of practice. He is still in the same business.
Politics is almost pure delusion, stories we tell ourselves and each other to further a social agenda. Every single one of us creates a narrative in our heads that is mostly false, except to us. That we are more important than we are. That our opinions matter. That our votes count. That we know what is real and what isn’t. That what we think is real is real, as if our thinking it makes it real. That our leaders think of us when they do their jobs. That our leaders value us beyond the vote we cast, the duties we can perform. None of this is true, except to us individually. Internally. As a part of our narrative.
The notion that eleven million people can be deported from the United States, as the Orange Hate-Monkey stated when he launched his campaign, is pure delusion. No matter how many racists and sociopaths work the numbers in pretense that this is an exercise divorced of prejudice or bias, the fact is that Hitler wanted to deport the Jews prior to having to institute the final solution, and he only had to get rid of six million people. All the hand-waving in the world will not change what it is they want to do when they actually embark on the road to doing it. He and they are the American fascists we have been warned about, and that isn’t even touching on the promise to exclude Muslims from the country. The corollary with the holocaust is even firmer there, and so is pointless to belabor.
The great wall he wants to build, can’t be built. This is also a delusion. Engineers have weighed in on this. It would alter climate (explain that one away, please) and render several bird species extinct, even if it could be built. Mexico won’t pay for the wall that can’t be built, either. Insisting otherwise is just that much more evidence of mental instability, not a firmness of resolution.
Then we get to the real subject of his mental instability, aside from the beliefs about the place of Obama’s birth. That would be his blatant denial of science.
Science is almost the opposite of politics. Science is one of the very few things which we can say for certain is real. Science is quite likely our only link to objective reality; and that only briefly, in glimpses. Science can determine when someone is lying or not. Science can determine when the globe is warming, and what those warming effects might be. Science can say that evolution is a fact, even though I’ll lose half of America’s attention asserting this fact as fact.
I add that last point consciously, just as I crafted the phrase Orange Hate-Monkey consciously. It’s all well and good to talk about being able to establish facts, it is another thing to start telling people they might need to get an electric car, or that they are related to their dogs and cats far more closely than most religious people are comfortable accepting. But those are facts all the same, and denying those facts sets you on the trail to madness, to insanity.
Like the moniker Orange Hate-Monkey, I crafted the phrase Conspiracy Fantasist for a reason. I have consciously rejected grand conspiracy theories and derided them as fantasies ever since I started noticing the woo, the craziness, which is rampant in health discussions. Almost without trying I can summon a dozen arguments I’ve heard concerning Big Pharma and GMO’s and I could spend all day and all night for the rest of my life arguing fruitlessly with science deniers on these subjects, but that isn’t why I bring this subject up. I bring it up because once you start questioning science as a basis for determining the likelihood of truth, all logic goes out the window and anything can be real. Everyone has a conspiracy fantasy that they hold dear including yours truly, but if you don’t know that what you are harboring is a fantasy you leave yourself open to manipulation by people who do that for a living.
A real estate developer is one of those kinds of people. A real estate developer that appears to believe every single conspiracy fantasy that comes along, believes it right down to his soul, will use those fantasies to sell you on what they want you to buy and they will drink that kool aid right along with you, because they believe just as strongly as you do.
Therein lies the problem.
As much as I am ignoring the news this week, I can’t help but notice certain facts that rise to the surface. The Birther-in-Chief is floating cabinet appointments and Supreme Court nominees and the disconnect with reality that is present in these selections begins to be painfully obvious. Ben Carson for Health and Human Services? Yeah, the guy who is in the back pocket of an MLM (read that as Pyramid Scheme) he’s got his own problems with perceiving reality. A fracking billionaire for Department of Energy. An oil man for Secretary of the Interior. Bridgegate Chris Christie as the Attorney General. That will be pretty hard to pull off after he is disbarred. Serial philanderer Giuliani is even less attractive. Flynn for Defense. A climate denier for the EPA.
As you go down this list, this basket of deplorables, you begin to notice that all of those names, all of them, are vociferous supporters of the Orange Hate-Monkey’s conspiracy fantasies. Nearly all of them are climate deniers, birthers and other types of fringe-thinking lunatics. The dangerous disconnection with reality that he already displays will not get any better with any of the names he offers up as his advisors.
Our problems just get worse.
There is no requirement that the president be of sound mind, even if we wanted to advance the Birther-in-Chief’s soundness of mind as a basis for disqualification. Here is the passage from the Constitution,
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Although any attempt to imprison a person without due process, as he has threatened to do on the campaign trail several times, would be an impeachable offense. Consequently anyone who thinks Hillary Clinton should go to jail can just sit down and shut up now, unless they want him impeached. Go ahead and goad him, I will not stop you.
Our last hope to keep this dangerously deranged person, this person who is only going to get more deranged in office, is the electoral college, and I see little hope in that. As Robert Reich noted recently, Hillary Clinton only needs forty-two electors to change their vote to her, and we avoid the cost, pain and violence that will be required to pull the Orange Hate-Monkey out of our government by the short-hairs. As much as I will be right there with Senator Sanders when the Stormtrumpers show up for minorities and Muslims, it would be so much simpler if the electors just did their jobs and made sure the person who won the popular ballot is named as the president-elect. That the person they name isn’t under federal indictment. That the person isn’t currently awaiting trial. That the person isn’t actually dangerously psychotic, mentally deranged and a sexual pervert to boot.
I’d settle for it being Hillary Clinton, but I think you get the point. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 2,000,000 votes. She is the second Democratic candidate to do this and not win the election in the last twenty years. City residents, people who tend to be more liberal, are clearly at a disadvantage electorally. What is needed is a change in state laws, something like this. Maryland is the latest state to say #TrumpNotMyPresident 11 other states have also passed this. Let’s see if we can get all 49 to pass it. It is either that, or we liberals will have to occupy all the state houses until they do. State houses which are all inside large cities. Where the liberals are.
In any case, I’ll see you on the other side of December 19th, at least when it comes to the subject of someone officially becoming the President-Elect, which the Real Estate Developer is not and hopefully will never be. Maybe the world will look brighter then.
This talk from Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times is exactly what we need to stay focused on, those of us capable of rational thought today. Carry on Post-Brexit, whether calm or not easily applies to the US today and for the next few months after the disastrous returns from the 2016 general election.
In the spirit of carrying-on I decided to go through Robert Reich’s points published on his wall this morning point by point, just to get a feel for what I think we have in store for us. We’ll see if my post-election predictions are as off as my predictions of the election of our first female president were.
Waking up this morning in an altered universe, trying to avoid despair, as I’m sure many of you are.
What to do, now? Let me offer a few suggestions.
The first temptation will be recrimination – against the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and all the other establishment figures who prevented Bernie from getting the nomination. That’s understandable, but recrimination won’t get us where we need to be.
Bernie would have lost. Every other Democratic candidate presented would have lost (maybe not Julian Castro, but he didn’t want to compete with Hillary for the job either) because this is the same kind of malcontents who upset the Brexit vote. They want things broken, and their change agent will be expected to break things. They voted for him with the expectation of breaking things, that is why he is the President-elect, not for anything he promised to do, but the damage he is expected to cause. With cynics like that at the helm, be prepared for ugliness to occur.
As a practical matter, our first priority must be to defend civil rights and civil liberties. Trump has unleashed the furies, and the furies will now feel unbridled. Be conscious and beware. We must protect those who need protecting. Trump isn’t yet president. We still have a court system, at the least.
This is probably one of the few points that is actually doable, because we don’t have to rely on our opponents to get it done. We just have to fund the ACLU and other defense organizations with enough funds to pull this off. The one thing that the break-everything’s who won the 2016 elections cannot control is the actions of the sane half of the United States. If we keep our heads and stay focused on the important goals. Goals like that one.
Our second priority must be to hold on to as much of the progress already made as possible. Use political jujitsu to turn the Republican’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act into something closer to Medicare for All, which it should have been all along – based on the most popular program in the federal government. Hold on to the progress on the environment we’ve already achieved, and fight off attempts to link a carbon tax to a huge corporate tax cut. Use this populist moment to raise taxes on corporations and the rich rather than cut them.
There is a steep slope ahead for anything we do on this front (see the previous note about breaking things) the ACA is gone. It ain’t coming back. Anyone who had insurance? You will lose your insurance. The subservient congress he has been handed will tacitly do whatever he asks, and his plans are to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, disabled and non-citizen workers. Look to see a reversal of the private prisons decision and an expansion of prisoner work programs. Militias will probably start rounding up what they term “Illegals” which we will have to counter with the ACLU and other rights programs. Budget cuts for everything that isn’t the military are likely. The military will be expanded over the objections of the generals, who will probably be replaced.
Worse, Obama (whom I love) will hand the Birther-in-Chief a blueprint for how to screw all of this up in his attempts to hand off the baton in this relay race he thinks he is running, unless he suddenly gains an understanding that not all of us want the same things.
Which is why the taxes on the wealthy will be lowered, as will the corporate tax rates (which is a far more complex issue than I can outline here. Suffice it to say lower corporate tax rates are not necessarily a bad thing) the memory of Ronaldus Maximus will be served, even if the actual policies of Ronald Reagan are not.
A carbon tax has no chance now. The Birther-in-Chief thinks climate change is a hoax. So repeat this mantra till it sinks in Americans are dumber than most of us thought, the dumber than dirt kinda dumb. They voted for the conspiracy fantasist who will be sworn in next January, they are definitely not smarter than he is.
Those of us blessed to live in progressive states must use this opportunity to move the agenda forward at the state level — to show what can be done on the minimum wage, paid family leave, single-payer health insurance, tuition-free public college, and election reforms.
I see a mass exodus to the blue areas of the map in the near future, as if that isn’t already happening. This will further exacerbate the problems in the red areas, areas which already do not have enough population to do the jobs they need doing, to maintain the industries they are demanding come back to the U.S. This is only going to make the in-fighting between the cities and the rural areas (blue and red, respectively) uglier, not better. How that will shape up is anyone’s guess. It might be possible to use the tax base of the cities to address problems of the rural areas that feed it, but that will take some pretty creative thinking on the parts of city managers across the country. City managers who are already underfunded and understaffed. Not holding my breath on that one.
Our fifth priority should be to organize with an eye to the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election. I know many of you are exhausted, and the mere thought of more politics almost sickens you. But we have no choice.
I’m trying to remain hopeful that there will be a recognizable US in 2018 at this point. I really don’t see how we get there. If we do, we better be sure that we are positioned to take back congress and the senate. That means the 2018’s start next week. Find your local precinct office, invite your neighbors, take over the party machine. Do it now so that we don’t have to think about it in two years, we’ll just be doing what we planned all along.
Finally, we must take over the Democratic Party, or begin a third party, in order to bridge the gap between the white working class and people of color – thereby creating a coalition that can not only win elections, but take on the moneyed interests and reverse the inequalities that have driven us to this point.
Third parties are a really bad joke. The delusion that another party will fix the problems of the party system which excludes them from the system they want to fix, is the same kind of insanity that has gotten us here (doing things the same way expecting different results) The system does not allow for them. If we are inordinately successful, a speed of change not seen in the history of the world, we might be able to see the system modified to allow for minority party voices. That means ending gerrymandering, reforming campaign finance and altering the voting system itself with some form of ranked voting. All of this will likely require amending the Constitution to be successful, and there are several active groups out there attempting this now. Go join one of them. Until they are successful, taking over the local party machines (both Democrat and Republican) is the only method we have for fixing this system which has delivered us here.
There’s much more to talk about. But I wanted to start somewhere, and to give you a sense of possibility. Please do not fall into cynicism. That’s a self-fulfilling prophesy
What do you think?
I love Robert Reich’s posts for that last sentence. Sometimes it is maddening, but the professor in him makes him ask his students, his audience, to engage the problem directly.
Cynicism is what put the Birther-in-Chief where he is supposed to be in January. Cynicism drove his candidacy and cynics elected him to break the system. If we want to do better than the people who elected this real estate developer to the highest office in the land, cynicism is the first thing we have to evict from our minds.
The least productive congress, the least popular congress in history returning to office at 96% rate. That is the definition of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I’ve noticed this behavior in Texas for decades now, and I am at a loss to explain it outside of just calling it insanity. For twenty years and longer Texas has doubled down on electing the most conservative candidate they can find; and when that idiot turns out to be, well, an idiot, they elect the next idiot who claims to be even more conservative. So it has gone again and again and again and they never seem to figure out that if you want to see different results, you have to change the parameters, the criteria, whatever it is you think you want from your government, from the people you elect to government.
Until then, until we do that, we will be that crazy dude in the alleyway that keeps walking into the wall over and over again. The guy who smells like alcohol and urine, looks like he slept in his clothes for a month, and wants to bum $20 bucks off of you to buy gas for his car. The world isn’t going to follow us while we blunder into walls repeatedly like a crazy person. They will stop buying our debt, create their own default market currency and move on without us. I don’t even want to think about what happens then.
Don’t be Texas, America. Learn from our bad example.
They tell me every time I go in the ballot box to turn off your cellphone. Have done so for a decade and more. I never did turn it off, until the last election. I don’t turn it off because I use the phone to reference the online voter guide, sparing myself the cost of the paper to print it. The last election I stupidly argued with the woman behind the desk. She refused to let me go to the ballot box until I had shown her I turned it off. Of course, I turned it right back on again as soon as I was out of sight.
Since it is ‘illegal’ to have your cellphone on in the booth, it is illegal to take a photo with your ballot, no matter what stupid excuse they give you as to why. The photo itself is proof of the violation though, so you’ll have a tough time proving you didn’t violate the law.
My Only Selfie
Yes, I know, it curtails free speech.
Personally, I don’t have the cash or the interest to carry the fight as far as it will have to go. On the other hand, I was never interested in taking a selfie with my ballot in the first place. Never have understood selfies or other people’s need to take them. Enjoy your battles. I pick mine a little more carefully these days. I’ll toast your victories in a few years when you achieve them.
There is no real protest vote. That is the problem. There might be a realistic vote of protest, as in voting for “none of the above” essentially voting “no confidence” in the system as it is currently offered, but there isn’t that possibility in the US system.
Again, as I’ve said many times in the past in other place, you cannot show up once every 4 years and expect to have people pay attention to what you want. You have to show up week after week, month after month, to precinct meetings, county meetings and State meetings so that when these major elections come rolling around your party knows what you want already and then you just go out and vote for the candidates who are doing what you want.
That is how the party system works. Even for third parties. If you don’t want to participate at that level, then you are going to have to first alter the way the parties work so that you can spend less time engaged in party politics. Either that or you have to accept that the parties who hold power will at best operate only tangentially to what you actually want.
Take it or leave it, but don’t pretend to yourself that a protest vote means anything to anyone aside from you. Because it doesn’t. What it will mean, in swing states, is that someone else picks the president you have to live under, we all have to live under. Don’t be Florida in 2000. That is my sound advice on this subject.
Yesterday a friend of mine published this video from Reason on Facebook. It struck a chord with me. A negative cord. Did I laugh? I’ll let you be the judge of the humor content.
This was my initial response.
Yes, let’s piss on the one good thing that is occurring in this election. Surely that won’t piss off the other 80% of the population.
What the video represents is precisely the kind of miscue that first started alienating me from the LP and libertarians. They just can’t see the kinds of emotions their attempts at humor generate. That their principled stands generate. They are, as most of us are, their own worst enemy.
What this reminds me of is the LP precinct meeting I attended immediately following the attacks on 9-11. I’m going somewhere with this. Let me take you there.
Try if you can to imagine that time, even if you were there. Shell shocked. In denial that we could be targeted by a foreign group, in the heart of one of the greatest cities on Earth. The entire world in mourning over the senseless loss of life and destruction. The first rumors of retaliation were circulating, and a meeting was convened at the precinct level of the Libertarian party with the specific purpose of passing a resolution condemning retaliation and war.
Now try to imagine me in this situation. It’s hard. I know. I’ve been told enough times. Here I am, a guy who roundly condemned Bush I for being a warmonger. It was how I became a libertarian. Hung images up in my cubicle at work that made my employers livid. I was a radical advocate for staying the hell out of the Middle East, slipping flyers into free magazines and newspapers in the area condemning the First Gulf War. Celebrated joyously when the conflict was over in weeks.
And I know that this resolution proposed by my peers in the Libertarian party was completely the wrong move. I know it, in my gut. It is going to alienate people who rightly think we have to strike back at whoever attacked us. It ignored the real possibility of continued violence on the part of the group that we had just started hearing about, Al Qaeda and their leader Osama Bin Laden. It was the wrong thing, politically, morally, strategically.
So I went to the meeting specifically to scuttle the motion, prodded by a few members who agreed with me that sometimes it is best to let sleeping dogs lie. We were on a surge in popularity in Texas at the time, needing to get recognizable percentages of votes to stay on the ballot, and negative press about the pacifist Libertarian party was not going to play well in gun-toting Texas.
I had been looking into how to postpone a motion and had stumbled across the idea (or it had been whispered to me, I can’t remember) of motion to table. So I made that motion and it was promptly seconded by my allies and the purpose of the meeting was defeated. Some of my more pacifist friends were livid with anger. Why? Why would you do that?
I tried to explain to them that the trends that had been set in motion were bigger than a personal stand against war and violence. That standing in the way of the juggernaut that was about to be unleashed was suicidal at best. In the end, several of them never forgave me for that sneaky tactic, and that is understandable. The discomfort I felt after that event lead me to study Robert’s Rules and in so doing I realized that I had broken the tabling rule as it is currently spelled out. But we got what we wanted and the Texas LP was one of the few branches of the LP that didn’t denounce the retaliation that occurred in Afghanistan.
I questioned my own wisdom when Bush II decided to go to war in Iraq on what I just as firmly believed was a contrivance, a method to establish a firm beachhead in the Middle East from which to advance throughout the area, subjecting it to American rule through proxies. And for awhile it looked like he might actually succeed in that operation. Until the resistance started, and the costs mounted and the housing bubble collapsed in 2007.
The financial bubble bursting is what made it possible to hope again, politically. Which is a weird way to look at it, but it was the culmination of nearly 30 years of Reaganomics and it was bound to happen eventually given that trickle-down economics just doesn’t work.
So it wasn’t just coincidence that Obama’s campaign tag was “Hope & Change” and I really wished him luck on that course. In hindsight it looks like he’s been a very good president, possibly the best one to serve in my lifetime. But now his 8 years are at an end, and we need to decide where to go next.
Which brings us to that video, and my sense of where we are now.
There is a wisdom in large groups. Large groups of people will generally come to a better estimate of value, quantity, etc. than any one member of the group can achieve. We have known Hillary Clinton for a very long time. I hated on her along with most of my fellow Texans through her husband’s entire presidency. Still cringe remembering how I had to explain sex to my children because of something the president was caught doing. Was outraged by the parsing of is in lawyer speak like so many others.
But Hillary Clinton happened to be right. Which is also weird to admit now. Right on a number of things. We rejected her as not having enough experience in 2008, and she wisely went back to the drawing board, was appointed Secretary of State and managed to do a passing good job at a very difficult task. Perhaps one of the most difficult times to be a Secretary of State for the United States.
And now she is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party, a feat that no woman in history has achieved. She has proven herself to be a consummate politician, outmaneuvering many of her peers so that she was the presumed candidate for the Democrats long before she even officially threw her hat into the ring.
But another way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed Sanders.
The fact that a woman has finally run the gauntlet and will likely receive her parties nomination is well worth celebrating; and if she wins, it is more likely to be because she is perceived to be a better leader by the average person, than it is that she’s a woman.
Deriding her because of the imperfections (near fatal flaws, worst case) of the government she will take control of is not only unfair or unjust, but puts the lie forward as the truth; that we cannot change government with her in charge. If that is true then nobody in that chair or in any chair in government can make changes to government by their participation, and that is obviously false on its face.
The bully pulpit has limited power. There are a whole host of ways to make changes in government without taking control of the presidency. Ways that are better, more reliable and possibly welcomed by her government if she is elected. What she will bring with her is the most progressive slate of Democrats to be seen since at least LBJ’s time in office, and if we support them we may actually see the change that Obama promised eight years ago.
I’m not supporting Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. I’m not supporting her because I think she will win. This is the first time in my life where I actually think one of the candidates for the two major parties is a decent choice before they were elected to office. Weirdly that happens to be Hillary Clinton. No one is more surprised by this than I am.
