I’m going to rant/ramble and not try to make a neat argument this morning. I need sleep and coffee and it looks like I may be snowed in again and I want to get to the shop and make some wood chips before the roads are impassible.
I track Daily Kos as one of my input streams about current politics. It’s an interesting place but it’s a bit pro-military, highly pro-democrat, and it has a silly set of language policies wherein they’ll ban you if you are foul-mouthed or say anything that crosses various invisible lines in the sand regarding political violence or anti-police/anti-military sentiment. It strikes me as a bit sad and I usually envision a bunch of tea-drinking old ladies with lace coverlets on their table, trying to be genteel and courteous as the house they are sitting in burns down around them. Anyhow, one of the trends over at Kos is a posting in the form of:
- Stuff the democrats are doing wrong
- But: if we work hard and donate a lot maybe it won’t be so bad
- Please, no “naysayers”
I’m a naysayer; it’s in my DNA (if you believe Jordan Peterson regarding the degree to which our behaviors are genetically influenced) (actually, either way I got it from my dad) – so I’m attuned to those posts, immediately flipping them around in my mind and asking, “what, exactly, are you being naively optimistic about?” I find it odd that a political faction like the democrats can be so thoroughly pounded, then flounder in abject disrepair, deconstruct their leaders and realize that they’re the party of Diane Feinstein, Joe Manchin, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, etc., and think that anyone who is saying something about how terribly bad the democrats are is a “naysayer.” To me, it’s as if a doctor sat down next to my gurney, with a radiologist in tow, and said “we need to talk about these shadows on your CT scan” and I screamed “naysayer!” at them. Hey, it’s diagnostics.
(A great moment in Asterix, where Caesar gets the idea for a moment in his biography)
So there are two camps, one of which has become increasingly suspicious about endless claims of “now we’ve got him!” regarding Trump. You know: it was Meuller time and then two unprecedented impeachments, cast against the backdrop of a long-running investigation in New York, and now congress is investigating whether a coup attempt that went down live on TV was a, uh, coup attempt and whether a bunch of congresspeople who were twittering and cheering it on were more involved, etc. – soon; they’re gonna do something real soon. It’s been a year, now, and the Jan 6 committee has issued some subpoenas and put together a tremendous catalog of facts that make it pretty clear that what happened on TV happened. They’re issuing subpoenas against all and sundry, and they’re getting blown off regularly by the apparently guilty (because ignoring subpoenas is totally what innocent people do!) and we’re getting the same kind of “Merrick Garland is a 6-dimensional chess player, just wait” routine we got about Robert Mueller. [stderr, I predicted a whitewash, because that’s what Mueller did with most of his career]
From my perspective, the folks who are complaining about “naysayers” are the bitter, rejected, exes who are still trying to hang on to a bit of belief because otherwise they’d have to confront the ugly fact that they are patsies. I’m in shrug mode about that: the American political system forces us into three roles: patsies, revolutionaries, or disgusted disempowered bystanders.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that nothing’s gonna happen, mostly out of some lingering hope that the cynical universe decides to prove me wrong. But it’s pretty obvious to me that nothing’s going to happen and it never was, as soon as the wheels of justice decided that they were going to jam up and stop turning because there was a little obstruction in their path: namely the custom that nobody indicts sitting presidents. The democrats are such feebs they’re choosing political disempowerment over breaking a custom.
Flip that on its head and we’re left with an assertion that it’s a custom that presidents are criminals (which is true) and that the DOJ really can’t touch them (which is also true) because they’re there to stop poor people from smoking reefer and they’re there to run speed traps and keep immigrants out – not actually enforce the laws. Nothing’s gonna happen, Michael Cohen got some jail time because he pissed off Trump and Roger Stone got a pardon and Paul Manafort disgusted everyone so who cares about him, and we’re all going to be shocked if any of this goes higher than picking off a few more of the obvious deplorables. I.e.: Giuliani may wind up in prison for dropping an invoice for legal services on Trump that was “too big” to pay, and Sidney Powell will end up broken and poor someplace because she made the oligarchy look like it was bad at choosing its servants. Loyal ass-wipers like Tucker Carlson will not even experience a dip in their ratings.
It’s pretty obvious if you watched what was happening on TV that the majority of the republican apparatus was in on the coup attempt. That’s how and why they have the unity, as a bloc of witnesses, to refuse to testify. It’s pretty obvious that they’re doing like they did before the coup attempt: having meetings and briefings to get their story straight and hire less obviously stupid people than last time, so that when they try to take over the government again, it works. Then there will be pardons all around, back-slapping, and a few lynchings so everyone knows what the new world order’s going to be like.
In that frame, then the Jan 6 Committee’s work is for history: they’re trying to get all this stuff pulled together in one place so that 50 years from now someone will write a great Netflix series on it and it’ll be all propaganda anyhow, but at least they had the facts in one place so they could ignore them all together. The democrats have just discovered that political parties are a stupid idea if you don’t ideologically vet your membership because then the other guys are going to embed their people in your ranks, who can be called upon to drop the pretense at a critical time. Conspiracy or emergent conspiracy, who cares? Opportunists or spies? It makes no difference. The only significant difference is that, so far, none of the sitting legislators have turned out to be deep-cover CIA or FBI operatives.
Anyhow, I think the democrats are toast. American democracy (the democracy that never was) is going to get a bit worse, which is saying something, but the fact is that we’re already able to look at the legislature and say, with a straight face, “wow, look at that minority rule” and then say “we need to protect democracy.” Sorry, but, you needed to protect democracy but that ship sailed when the founding fathers brokered some sick deals to count owned slaves as the owners’ votes in order to assure southern participation in the new scam they were putting together on the world stage.
This, then, is what I think is necessary: like in great American films The Wild Bunch and Seven Samurai sometimes a grand suicidally foolish gesture is what’s necessary as the future crushes you – the Jan 6 Committee needs to dump all their evidence on the DOJ and the DOJ needs to issue a bunch of warrants and arrest freakin’ everyone involved in plotting the coup. Arrest them, charge them, let them post bail and lawyer up, and have the biggest, most entertaining circus/show trials ever. Put it in front of a jury. Throw the dice.
It would be incredibly distracting and being in jail waiting to get out on bail would really cramp some of the republicans’ style in the mid-terms. The few smooth-talkers among the democrats could make some moopy speeches about how “we tried to protect voting rights legislatively but we were blocked using parliamentary tricks, so our only choice is to put it in front of the public embodied in the form of a jury.” Smooth-talking democrats should be doing the apologetic-sounding goony bird dance saying “it’s not our fault you guys rammed through legislation making it a serious crime to trespass on federal buildings during a protest. That was your legislation. #sad.” The Jan 6 Committee isn’t going to be able to get its evidence out any other way because if they haven’t dumped it on the historical record by mid-terms, the republicans are going to pull Bill Barr out of retirement to re-write the report, again. The democrats are so stupid they just can’t see that they keep doing the same thing over and over and it ends the same way. Or maybe they’re not stupid – maybe it’s performative – in which case: fuck them. They have helped fuck the world and their legacy is going to be dust and ashes anyway.
This is a manifestation of a general problem with how Americans do justice on other Americans: there is a filtering-layer in which, instead of just holding a trial and letting lawyers and juries have at it, there’s got to be a “select committee” or something like that, which meets in secret and decides if there is enough evidence to warrant a trial. Excuse me? If there’s enough evidence and the situation is significant enough to warrant a grand jury or a “select committee” or a “Court of Star Chamber” or whatever you want to call it – there’s enough evidence to warrant a jury trial and it’s time to stop fucking around. The whole system of plea bargains and grand juries exists as an intermediate layer by which the oligarchy can effectively control the machinery of justice. That’s how you can have a situation where a bunch of politicians launched an incompetent coup on television and they’re still not in jail. Meanwhile, the methamphetamine dealer up the street from me (who did much less damage to society than any republican congressperson) was arrested, convicted, and started his sentence in less time than it takes for the Jan 6 Committee to hold its roll-call in the morning.
Is that “naysayer” enough? Time to ride into the hail of bullets in search of meaning, or admit that you haven’t got what it takes and you’re willing to go down in history as wringing your hands while Rome burns.
It’s after posts like this that I wonder: you’re a smart guy. You’ve obviously got plenty of cash and no particular need to work to make more. You’re the kind of citizen most countries would consider to be self-supporting and desirable. Why the ever-living fuck do you remain in such a shithole and not emigrate to somewhere civilised?
Be patient: Rome wasn’t burnt in a day.
In a minimally functioning democracy, the least that would happen is that the ones involved in what is publicly available would be removed from office, for the elected ones, and barred from being involved in politics for ever, for everyone elected or not (and I’m sure there a lot much worse that is not yet public). Of course that would mean over half the republican party at the federal level and in some states, so no one is even going to suggest that let alone having the guilty sent to trial and prison.
The only thing that will happen is that the guilty will be confirmed in their belief that they are above the law and there will be smarter people involved who will make sure the next time the coup works. Or even better, that it’s not necessary because the game is rigged from the get go to never allow any unwanted result (except for some theater).
I’m glad I’m not a USian but being in the neighboring country to the north, it will still have a significant impact and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Also, about the vetting of candidates, there seems to be some but it’s not for what you would want it to be since the AOCs have a lot more difficulty getting some backing from the party compared to the Manchins. And the only consistent characteristic for most US politician is the desire for more money and power so that makes for very elastic ideology making vetting unreliable.
sonofrojblake@#1:
You’re the kind of citizen most countries would consider to be self-supporting and desirable. Why the ever-living fuck do you remain in such a shithole and not emigrate to somewhere civilised?
I have considered it. A few years ago, I was looking at using my Irish ancestry to get an EU citizenship via the Irish “right of return” law. And then there was back in 2008 when everything was spiraling to crap, I did some research about moving to a cheaper place to live. The problem is that the cheaper they are, the more politically unstable they seem to be and authoritarianism seems to be on the rise world-wide; it would be a really bad idea to move someplace cheap then have them decide they’re going to levy extractive taxes and suddenly I’d be someplace where I have no career, not a lot of opportunity, and I’m trying to find work. I’m set up pretty well, but that presupposes that I can do exactly what I have done, which is live in a cheap part of the country and not spend a lot on cocaine and lamborghinis.
For example, I could live for about 120 years in the nicest hotel in Kashmir, without having to worry about income except: 1) hotel, 2) Kashmir is not politically stable – part of my problem is that, while I can subsist in a cybercafe and a place with good food and somewhere to take nice walks, I’d have to become a completely different person in terms of what I do and how. I had occurred to me: I could live someplace nice but cheap and program games; all I’d need is a laptop and some clothes, right? But is that the person I wish to become? I’m happier doing what I am doing, and that’s a problem because my operation right now consists of about 50,000lbs of stuff and a couple buildings worth of space on many acres. To live like this in, say, Ireland, I would have to buy a small county. And I know about European real estate prices, so that’s not an option.
If I was 20 years younger, I’d be willing to consider re-inventing myself one more time. As it is, my current plan is to keep my head down and run out the clock. I am not looking forward to dying of old age under the auspices of the US medical establishment. Perhaps things will break the way they want to, and right wing death squads will roam the streets looking for bloggers, and they’ll offer me a way out. I don’t know.
I wound up in Istanbul at loose ends a few years ago, for a couple days. OK, it was a decade ago. I fell totally in love with the place and thought I could find an apartment and a job crafting or doing computer security stuff. I don’t think, though, that I’d have been very happy watching the place I had just moved to sliding into a dictatorship, and there’s the added icing of potential anti-Americanism on top of that. There are a lot of really cool parts of the planet but it seems to me like the assholes are taking over everywhere; there won’t be any place to hide and North Central Pennsylvania sure is a big place to hide.
The only difference of opinion I have with this post is:
I predict 10 years, not 50.
@5 no, 10 years will be a terrible Netflix series on it. It’ll take until the 5th reboot before they get something decent out.
My take is that the main reason for the Democrats’ inaction is that most people in the US would be opposed to prosecuting leading Republicans. Rightly or wrongly, it would be seen as a political persecution rather than criminal justice. At best, it would lead to the Republicans sweeping back to power on a wave of sympathy votes, and it worst it would actually start a civil war.
Don’t forget this is a sequel. It’s not original. Some minor version of this occurred already and that’s how we got Bush. The difference is the Bushes and the Trumps are different kinds of incompetent. The Bushes know how to fail upwards. Trump is middling bad at that, which is why his reputation of failure gets to filter out to people like us. If he were any good at failing upward we’d barely hear a whisper about it.
What seems to have really gone wrong here is that a bunch of people who are not at all clever tried to act like they were. Their scheme seems to have been a bit too complicated and it scared off some of the key participants. It was also a little too out in the open. The point of the unruly crowd, like in Bush v. Gore, is to give plausible deniability. If you directly tell them to do what they end up doing it gets a lot harder to deny.
The reason nothing will happen as a result of any of this is because the corporate democrats are out of touch. Their donors are still happy so they think they can just keep getting money and keep getting elected. They’ve been collectively tacking against popular ideas for a very long time and it’s made them complacent. They’re hoping that most people are also complacent and will be happy with a government that just makes token gestures towards not mistreating minorities and women. They hope you don’t want anything new and that you don’t even really care enough to demand equality for minorities and women; they think they can string you along with a few token gestures here. Meanwhile the other side howls over this meaningless quibble while continuing to do whatever it wants anyway. A month after the show is over it’s all forgotten and no one cares anymore.
I feel like democrats are aware that the country is tipping, but they’re too scared to do anything about it, out of fear that it’ll make it worse. Unfortunately, that leaves republicans with both the initiative and the (probably correct) sense that there will be no consequences for what they do. So, why wouldn’t they try again?
Democrats want to go back to business as usual, not recognizing that their notion of it died 20 years ago. The new business as usual is the one where republicans are in control of everything and even when democrats get elected, they’re effectively powerless.
LykeX@#9:
I feel like democrats are aware that the country is tipping, but they’re too scared to do anything about it, out of fear that it’ll make it worse. Unfortunately, that leaves republicans with both the initiative and the (probably correct) sense that there will be no consequences for what they do. So, why wouldn’t they try again?
Exactly. I think this is the democrats’ “all or nothing” moment, and they’re just flapping their hands and preparing to blame teachers and gig workers for the wipe-out they’re going to experience in the midterms. They’re already making excuses for the wipe-out and as usual, it’s anyone’s fault but their own. We’ll never hear “sure, Biden was electable but maybe he’s shit, as a leader.” It’d going to make it easier for them, that the republicans are packing the process and gerrymandering like mad – but that just means now is the final chance to fight, not “let’s wait for Merrick Garland to save us!”
The democrats need to have come out swinging after getting Trump out of office, but instead they’re just being their usual ineffective, squabbling, inarticulate selves.
I’m tired. Nearing exhaustion. My patience for process, and faith that process works in any meaningful way, is gone. What is needed is a broad and bold gesture. Something unequivocal.
Then again … this might be more self-serving fantasy, too much coffee and frustration and not enough sleep, than rational. Still, in the back of my reptile brain this feels right:
IMHO the weakness of us Democrats is the urge to be fair, to equivocate, to consider every side and malign influence in an attempt to mitigate blame and temper justice. The profound and dedicated need to titrate intent, action, outcome, and consequence and seek the most perfect justice. The desire is for a satisfying, resolute but nuanced outcome that combines toughness with fairness. Which means, the legal system being the imperfect system it is, the result resemble what you get when you measure with micrometers, but cut with an axe. The results are, at best, spastic and inconsistent. They seldom resemble any recognizable form of justice
On the other hand Democrats, when pushed too far, can be quite resolute and coldly rational in the excision of evil. An acquaintance of mine, I’m sure he’s dead now, played a part in bombing Nagasaki. He made no bones about it as necessary to decisively end the war and that this was the best way. He was well aware of all the alternative points but he is sure it had to be done and any other path would have ended poorly. His statement was that the cancer had to be burned out of the hearts of the Japanese. His daughter wrote her masters on why it was not necessary but he, after patiently reading her paper and speaking well of it, was resolute that it was the only way.
Nobody is going to like my solution; Arrest Trump, the Republican leaders of Jan 06 and the top three layers of all the organizations involved. Haul them in front of a military tribunal and give them five minutes to explain themselves. The sentence is death. To be carried out immediately. Biden will want to show clemency for a few cases, commuting death to life at hard labor. The whole bunch is shot in one day.
You want it fast so there is no time to equivocate. I figure perhaps two hundred dead. All of them, including Trump, cremated and dumped into the ocean.
The payoff is manifold:
– The Q-anon people have been waiting for ‘The storm’ where the guilty are killed en-mass. They get their wish but not quite the way the expected. The ‘tree of liberty’ gets watered.
– The remaining Trumps will dissolve into a bickering mass over who gets the inheritance and who else might get stepped on.
– The label of weak and indecisive is stymied for Biden and Democrats in general. They say monster; we say patriotic defender of democracy.
– This lines up with previous precedents about ‘coming at the king’ and ‘assassinating the devil’. Point being: You better not fail. I suspect that a whole lot of the Republican power players will quietly admire this sort of play.
– Even Putin, the consummate hard-ball power player, will likely admire the audacity. A couple of hundred you say? Guess they fucked round and found out. I suspect the relationship would be much more forthright.
Of course all of this has to be done without apology or remorse. Have it done over the weekend and come Monday the administration should be back to business as usual. All smiles. No interviews, no commentary, no explanations. The phrase should be: We did what had to be done to deal with traitors … no further comment.
Segueing quickly to a formal request that all Americans should get vaccinated against both COVID-10 and the flu.
Yes, there would be endless bitching and moaning. Lots of lawsuits. But a whole lot of tough guys and psudo-military cosplayers getting very real.
Just a thought.
@lorn, 11: many good points, and it underlines how, when things get so far out of whack, it’s because the opposition has no spine.
In Italy we just barely got out of having that waddling pervert Berlusconi as a President, just because he was not locked up and forgotten 20 years ago. Nice going you lumps.
@ Marcus: concerning getting out of dodge, it’s true that the “contemplative life in a tent somewhere remote” can appeal only to people with an infinite attitude for doing nothing, and buying elsewhere can be plenty expensive.
But please consider that in Europe there’s plenty of places being sold for a song:
https://1eurohouses.com/1-euro-houses/
and not only in Italy. In France, house and land in the Massif Central zone are to be had for very low prices, same in Germany in some of the former DDR territories, and so on. Basically, this is the effect of the abandonment of many areas in the countryside, and is in complete reverse compared to the absurdly soaring prices in metro districts. And on American distance standard they are next door to the big city.
Maybe Europe can gain a good knifemaker?
It is super sad that the news cycle is even talking about Biden’s calling some dumb son of a bitch republican a “dumb son of a bitch” – OMG get me to the fainting-couch. Meanwhile, the party of Trump is all about playground insult-naming people. Nobody should care. I suspect nobody does, except for a few journalists.
Meanwhile, we are stumbling toward a pointless war in Ukraine. Pointless, because it’s going to devolve (if Putin is smart, and he is) into an insurgency and we sure know how to lose insurgencies. We won’t even be able to carpet-bomb parts of Ukraine with high explosives, because that might trigger the end of the world. So the US is sending troops to, uh, sit there, and eventually suffer some mass casualty events, and they’ll go home in 20 years if there’s a home in 20 years and the current generation of Curtis LeMays can be told to sit down and shut up.
I’ve been meaning to write a bit about the US ‘strategy’ for containing China that the Obamaites made a big deal of during the “pivot” – it’s embarrassingly horrible, as usual, and has the usual “roll the dice for your saving throw” chance of sucking everyone into WWIII. Why? Because we are the world’s most powerful democracy or some shit like that.
Some days it’s hard to move.
lorn@#11:
Nobody is going to like my solution; Arrest Trump, the Republican leaders of Jan 06 and the top three layers of all the organizations involved. Haul them in front of a military tribunal and give them five minutes to explain themselves. The sentence is death. To be carried out immediately. Biden will want to show clemency for a few cases, commuting death to life at hard labor. The whole bunch is shot in one day.
If there’ve got to be coups, I’d rather have a left-coup than a right-coup, but the US has always been fascistic and it’s never going to break liberal. The whole topic of “how do liberals have a revolution” is relevant and I think I’ve touched on it before: the democrats lack the unity to mount an effective coup. The republicans don’t. It’s that simple.
My dream scenario would be to resurrect the ghost of Smedley Butler, who stomps down the capitol mall to where the old guard soldiers are guarding the tomb of the unknown. He then hands out live ammo, they load up, and march in perfect formation up the mall, into the capitol, and arrest the most prominent republican coup-plotters.
You’re probably right that taking them out and shooting them would be a whole lot more likely to succeed than the massive circus of squabbling that would happen if the DOJ actually tried to arrest and bring to justice any of the coup plotters. That’s why I don’t think that latter thing is going to happen. All that will happen is that a layer of the republicans that none of the other republicans liked anyway is going to get peeled off and thrown away to lubricate the undercarriage of some bus.
This is the endpoint of a long trend-line. The republicans have already been doing things like passing laws gutting the powers of a newly-elected democrat governor, on the way out of office – minority rule is a thing and it goes back to before Jim Crow.
maybe “like” is the wrong word/term, but, yeah, I wouldn’t have any objections to a response like what lorn@11 mentioned.
It may not fit with our desire to have a fair, just, and merciful justice system, but I feel an attempted coup is a different matter than most criminal cases. If nothing else, it’s about the survival of a governmental system, and governmental systems that don’t act to ensure their survival, won’t survive. I think we might get to witness that first hand in the near future here in the U.S.
:/
Obvious but it depends how youdefine “democracy” and what form of democracy we’re talking about. Ancient Athens had no women and slavery. The USA and Britain, Oz, France etc .. have now improved with no slavery and women and people above a certain age getting to vote. Not sur ethere’s ever been an absolute democracy where everyone gets to vote and would love tosee some major political reforms in the USA and Australia and probly elsewhere too.
It’d be real nice if people would start to discuss and work on actually acoomplishing reforms like banning lie sinpolitical advertising, banning political donations, making politicians accountable fro lting and doing things inoffice that they didn’t say they’d do inelection campiagns , reforming SCOTUS, abolishing the Electoral Court, et cetera.
Yes, things do seem disturbingly bad and trending worse right now though.
YES!!! :-)
I love that idea and really hope they do that.
I don’t think they will sadly and seems if they haven’t done it already they’re no t goingt o justa sTrump wasn’t immediately arrested for sedition, incitinga riot, corruption, etc ..after Biden became POTUS whichis another thing Ireallywnated to see but didn’t. Still.
@11. lorn :
I like the first part of that. Up to the sentence is immediate death bit.
Isn’t your idea after that arest and try and speedily convict part basically the Quanonist delusion of the “Storm” where the same sort of thing happens just to all the Democratic party people they hate? (Ie umm, all of them.)
Capital punishment & especially applied en masse to a whole side of politics – as utterly repellentand arguably deserving of it a sthey are – is bad idea and that would lead to civil war, assuming that’s not pretty much where the USA is at now albeit in cold war form.. Jail them, sure. Execute? No. Not even Trump.
Clarification :
Probly very obvious already but for clarity, of course, ancient Athens had women and slavery and those women and slaves didn’t get to vote thus even the very different and arguably much more democratic (slaves and who got to vote aside which, yeah) Athenian model had some very major flaws.
The ancient Athenian idea of exiling unpopular / divisive people like say their version of a Trump or for that matter HRC :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
and abhorrence of tyrants OTOH does have quite a bit to recommend itself in my view. Imagine if we could ahev voted say, Trump, Gingrich, McConnell, Manchin, Bill Clinton, etc ..out of the nation for 10 years. Mind you, with social media and travel etc .. now vs then..