They said Trump was golfing as Biden winning Pennsylvania was announced

 

You Think The Networks And The NYT Would Have Waited This Long If Trump Had Won?

I haven't been able to find the list I'm looking for, of the state vote in numbers for either Biden or fascism, I suppose with our appalling chaotic and ripe for ratfucking elections non-system, it's early to get firm numbers for that.  My motive for wanting it was to find out how many votes were entirely thrown out, as the electoral college, winner-takes-all system does that and has done that since the slavery protection racket put it in place.   As one smug Canadian pointed out two days into the four days of Staters sitting on the razorblade, "we always know the same night."  Elections Canada should be in charge of our elections from now on, we Staters don't seem to have a clue how to do it honestly, transparently and efficiently. 

If you want to piss me off mightily you would show one of those blue-red maps that also disappears, in this case, a little under half the voters in the country, I'm sure there are plenty of Democrats who voted for Biden over fascism in even the most benighted and corrupt of our states, Ohio, Louisiana, and for fascism over Biden in the most relatively enlightened states, I know my state of Maine is not high among those, as reliable as the First District here is generally more so than the Second one. 

I'm doing more and more reading of the non-hagiographic kind to see just how sleazy the Constitution we are supposed to revere and pretend is perfect really was from the start, those features put into place by the coalition of slavers and crooks being the very features that the Republican-fascists on the courts use to nullify egalitarian democracy and the common good over and over and over again, as they have throughout our history.   It is a lot more interesting than the bullshit feel-good pop history that gets on the morning talk shows and shows up on the NYT Bestsellers list and that gets the rap and dance moves treatment on Broadway.  You won't retain many of your illusions about the plaster saints among the "founders,"  even the relatively good of them were sleeveens.  They were buisnessmen.  We just found out what having one of them as president really is instead of in Frank Capra Hepburn-Tracey bullshit.  Adam Smith, the real one, not the as-seen-on-PBS and touted by the likes of the young Ted Cruz or Benny Shapiro,  said it plainly enough.

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” 

I'm looking forward to the inevestigation of the Trumps, the Kushners, Pence, Mnuchin, Ross, Devoss, . . . 

Lo We Walk A Narrow Way - Making Progress Within The Possible Instead Of Helping The Fascists With Play-Lefty Fantasy

My admission the other day that the Black Women Voters (ALL CATEGORIES DESERVING THE HONORIFIC CAPITALIZATION FROM NOW ON) of South Carolina had more political savvy than I do was acknowledging a group which is credited with putting probably the only possible winner of the election against Donald Trump in 2020 into serious contention for the nomination.   I still would have rather had Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris as president next year,  my first and second choices on my ranked-choice vote ballot, Joe Biden was listed as my third choice, so, as ranked choice voting is supposed to work,  I got one of my top choices for president and another for vice president though not my tip top choice.  Which is one of the wonderful things about ranked choice voting, you stand a chance of getting one of your top picks and less of a chance to get your never would vote for the asshole winning the election.   

Take my word for it, get ranked-choice in your state, it is wonderful, though it doesn't fix all problems or do the work for you.

I haven't dared to look at the secular lefty blogs or magazines since last weekend, or listened to their YouTube channels, podcasts to read the sniping at Democrats for not doing better in the race, as if it was as easy in reality as it is in their lazy-assed, big-mouthed imaginations.    I have not listened to Sam Seder and his crew, or most of the others who did little to help and a lot to hurt the effort.  I am sure they will be attacking Biden and Harris, Pelosi, Schumer and talking up some bullshit purity lefty who would never have stood a chance against Trump.  It's what the secular play-left does, they never produce anything but division and discouragement for the left, they were doing Trump's political act a long time before he started doing it.

That's the big, really big, should be definitively established rule for the left of which I am a part, that with all of the criminality, the massive irresponsibility,his active pursuit of homicidal policies and behavior as he wrecked the economy, as he got a quarter of a million (and counting) Americans killed by a disease he encouraged the spread of, as his vileness and cruelty was matched with incompetence and public incitement to fascist violence to keep him in power JOE BIDEN WAS PROBABLY THE ONE CANDIDATE WHO WOULD HAVE DEFEATED HIM.   I hate to say it but Elizabeth Warren would never have won the goddamned electoral vote and she very likely would have lost the popular vote even as moderates, liberals, progressives, lefties, real and secular-play lefty, pulled out all the stops and not a few tricks to defeat the closest thing to a real gangster, fascist dictator we have had since the antebellum period.  Perhaps ever in the history of the United States.

The imaginary margins of the polls that made so many confident that Mainers would give up their fantasy version of Susan Collins, the polls that placed the Senate securely within reach of the Democrats along with an expanded Democratic Caucus in the House will certainly figure in the whining of the "Majority Report" types (who, by the way, are no majority, speaking for, obviously, a tiny splinter) but that was as delusional as their fantasies that Bernie Sanders would have won easily over Trump over the last two cycles.  

The lesson for the real left is that the boundaries within which progress is possible are a lot narrower than we may like or even need them to be but with the TV-hate-talk-radio-Facebook,Twitter addled American People, who would appear to be convinced they want a combination of stupendous and stunning ignorance and unreason and active and massive cruelty and evil.   About half of the largest electorate voted for Trump AFTER HAVING HAD FOUR YEARS TO SEE WHAT HE IS AND WHAT HE DOES AND THE DAMAGE HE DOES. 

I'm not advocating that the left give up its ambitions, I'm advocating that it be more realistic than the addled Trump supporters.  Demanding what cannot be delivered is no more realistic than Trump supporters wanting Covid to be as deadly as the common cold or that he's going to have their back.   The professional play-lefty thing won't, of course, be realistic, their audience is as immune to hard reality as Trump's is.   And they will be a problem for us, both in 2022 and 2024.   They will demand the impossible. They will insist on supporting spoiler candidates, they will insist that AOC is a traitor as she faces the reality of what this election showed, that their raising her as the new level of what was possible was grotesquely stupid.   She will either face that reality or I am sorry to say, her career will be very short.  

Either We Scrap This Disgusting Anti-Democratic Blackmail Deal Among Slave Holders And Bankers Or We Deserve To Live Under Insane Despotism I'm Not Willing To Deserve It

IT is an intolerable anti-democratic abomination that the loser of an American election, sometimes even the loser of both the popular and Electoral College, can illegitimately become president of the United States.  After Bush II and now Trump, it is entirely intolerable if that is not changed.

We need a mass, national movement of Americans to abolish the Electoral College.  An implacable movement that won't give up and take no for an answer.   We do that or egalitarian democracy is dead here.  After more than 230 years that long delayed task of Constitutional amendment cannot be put off for even another decade.

Since it will be hard as hell to get small-state legislatures, so many of them dominated by Republican-fascists, to ratify the necessary Constitutional changes to do that without being forced to,  those who live in large states that are disadvantaged by it and those who live in smaller states who are constantly disenfranchised by the Electoral College or who just favor egalitarian democracy over the empowerment of corrupt minorities who believe they are entitled to exercise more power than the majority are going to have to play real hard ball against those states that are dominated by Republican-fascists or those who are opposed to equality.  

The large states and smaller non-Republican-fascist states should join together to block legislation to force states which will not ratify egalitarian democracy to comply.  I would have no problem blackmailing the Dakotas and Wyoming, even Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont into it if they rejected egalitarian democracy finally being practiced.  I would have no problem with that considering the alternative is either to remain under the rule of the organized, corrupt anti-democrats or to have the North East, the West Coast and other states who are unwilling to allow this to continue to leave the United States, finally turning around the corrupt bargain between the Hamiltonians of the North and the slave powers in the Southern States that inserted the vile thing into the Constitution to start with. 

After Bush II and Trump within eight years of each other, the fascists are getting better at installing incompetent crooks as president. 

It's A While Since I Did Stupid Mail - Better The Day Better The Deed

Working to get direct popular election of the president and vice president is, literally, in every way entirely more radical than anything the entire population of Marxist meatheads have proposed in their lazy-assed futility.  Even good things they may have joined onto (and taken credit for) were certainly more harmed than helped by them.  Marxism may have been vilified in the beginning but it has, since then, more than justified its total discrediting.  The same can't be said for democracy when that has been allowed to happen.

Direct popular election of the president is a means of preventing illegitimate governments, no president who has not been put into power by the largest number of votes of the American People has any right to anyone considering them as legitimate.

Considering how great a store of affection those dear old commies of Hollywood, Broadway and small magazine lore had for some of the worst mass murdering, genocidal tyrants in history, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, even, before he fell out of favor due to premature exposure of his mass murders in the New York Times Pol Pot (he really did briefly have a place in lefty support) even within memory the Kim regime, it's no wonder they have not thought it worth struggling against the worst features of the American Constitution.  

  

And, yes, I will always point out that those dear old commies of Hollywood and small magazine lore, Dalton Trumbo, the Hollywood 10, Lillian Hellman, did support mass murdering dictators in the Hitler class of such genocidal mass murderers. No Marxist should ever get to live that down no more than any Nazi or Darwinist should have what they've supported overlooked.

 

Apart from the practical repair of American democracy being too boring for their cultivated minds,  if there is anything they couldn't depend on it would be gaining power through the popular vote of Americans.

The little satirical instructional video that Stephen Colbert showed last night was good except they left out that the motive in creating the electoral college was a protection of the slave owning minority elite and their allies among Northern financiers and bankers from the morality of the majority of Americans, should they ever take the Golden Rule, the Great Commandment of Jesus more seriously than just words they heard in church, now and again. It is their ideological and financial descendants who have gained the most skill at ratfucking American democracy through it and the use of "freedom of the press" and "speech" and the mass media to lie Americans into a state of moral depravity. 

 

 

Well, you won't have democracy without a combination of accurate information believed by an effective majority of the population AND A BELIEF IN THE METAPHYSICAL, MORAL EQUALITY OF US ALL. The Electoral College was established as a safety measure for the privileged and depraved in case lying and debauching the American People didn't do it for them. It even trumps the matter of people voting in their own best interest, as can be seen throughout the Trumpist states on the electoral map. I'm sure there are millions of sane, moral people who live in those states, they are disappeared politically under the hegemony of the Electoral College. They may as well not have bothered to vote as they are disempowered by the combination of slave-owning blackmailers and sleazebags like Hamilton and John Jay.  A non-romantic view of the "Founding Fathers" especially their economic interests and things like their racism and other forms of bigotry is sorely needed in the United States.  The plaster saints made of them are a tool that covers up the fact that their words and schemes in the Second Continental Congress provide todays billionaires and millionaires, their political arm in the Republican-fascists, the supporting media like FOX and Sinclair with what they have used to thwart the aspirations of equality and democracy.   Knocking those phony figures off of their plinths is as necessary as knocking Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest off of theirs and for exactly the same reasons.   And if we've got to knock those dear old commies off of theirs first, well, as I said, better the deed.

Strip Iowa Of The First In The Nation Status, We Should Never Have Let Any State Take That For Themselves To Start With

One thing I can say as a result of the 2020 election is that if Iowa tries to hold the first in the nation contest in 2024, Democrats should disqualify the result in favor of a Democrats only primary by mail conducted by the Democratic Party.  It's a long time ago that they sent Tom Harkin (who I stood up for in the Maine Caucus in 1992) to the Senate and they should be punished for what they've done since. 

I am on record of favoring the Democratic Party scrapping the caucuses, entirely and on bypassing the system in control of often hostile legislatures entirely for a Democrats only, by mail primary of, if not the entire country, then of slates of states from around the country going first, second, etc.  

I am also done feeling sorry for Iowa farmers after this.  They bought Trump, they can go down with him.   They think they want the market, I say let them try to live in it without subsidies from the rest of the country.  Let them go under.

" What do you think we should do? "

Someone asks.

Off the top of my head my first inclination is to encourage anyone with any sense of morality to not buy anything except what you absolutely need and to give your money away like you're supposed to, to those who won't pay it back, especially with interest.   Don't feed the evil, let it be known that's why you're not buying stuff.  Have a no-stuff Christmas.  If you did that you could drive them to their knees.

I am sure there will be lots of lefty romance about setting up an underground.  If you want to do that I'd advise against trying to do it online and to exclude those with an addiction to social media.  If you're going to use a computer, don't use one with wi-fi to type into.  Don't use e-mail, not even that which you superstitiously believe is encrypted.  The tech companies are in thick with thieves with their fellow billionaires, I don't trust them.  Even the ones who are hesitant to make common cause with the Republican-fascists.

Read Brueggemann, this has all happened before.  It always does when people believe lies tailored to be sold to them, that's been going on well before it was through TV and movies or even through "historical" fiction.  Don't believe for a second that Marxism or other ideologies are going to save us, if those were going to work they wouldn't have so invariably brought as bad and in some cases worse. Marxism is alive only in the stupid romanticism of people who work in universities who type out words, no one who had a taste of it wants it back.  The American left were massive suckers for them, that should be over, definitively.   Dump all of the -isms.  They're a hold-over from romantic era bullshit when people figured they just had to find a method that would bring us to utopia.  There is no such formula. 

They are disappointed because they were confident; they come there and are confounded. Job 6

 6 Then Job answered:

² “O that my vexation were weighed,
    and all my calamity laid in the balances!
³ For then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea;
    therefore my words have been rash.
⁴ For the arrows of the Almighty are in me;
    my spirit drinks their poison;
    the terrors of God are arrayed against me.
⁵ Does the wild ass bray over its grass,
    or the ox low over its fodder?
⁶ Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt,
    or is there any flavor in the juice of mallows?
⁷ My appetite refuses to touch them;
    they are like food that is loathsome to me.

⁸ “O that I might have my request,
    and that God would grant my desire;
⁹ that it would please God to crush me,
    that he would let loose his hand and cut me off!
¹⁰ This would be my consolation;
    I would even exult in unrelenting pain;
    for I have not denied the words of the Holy One.
¹¹ What is my strength, that I should wait?
    And what is my end, that I should be patient?
¹² Is my strength the strength of stones,
    or is my flesh bronze?
¹³ In truth I have no help in me,
    and any resource is driven from me.

¹⁴ “Those who withhold kindness from a friend
    forsake the fear of the Almighty.
¹⁵ My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed,
    like freshets that pass away,
¹⁶ that run dark with ice,
    turbid with melting snow.
¹⁷ In time of heat they disappear;
    when it is hot, they vanish from their place.
¹⁸ The caravans turn aside from their course;
    they go up into the waste, and perish.
¹⁹ The caravans of Tema look,
    the travelers of Sheba hope.
²⁰ They are disappointed because they were confident;
    they come there and are confounded.
²¹ Such you have now become to me;
    you see my calamity, and are afraid.
²² Have I said, ‘Make me a gift’?
    Or, ‘From your wealth offer a bribe for me’?
²³ Or, ‘Save me from an opponent’s hand’?
    Or, ‘Ransom me from the hand of oppressors’?

²⁴ “Teach me, and I will be silent;
    make me understand how I have gone wrong.
²⁵ How forceful are honest words!
    But your reproof, what does it reprove?
²⁶ Do you think that you can reprove words,
    as if the speech of the desperate were wind?
²⁷ You would even cast lots over the orphan,
    and bargain over your friend.

²⁸ “But now, be pleased to look at me;
    for I will not lie to your face.
²⁹ Turn, I pray, let no wrong be done.
    Turn now, my vindication is at stake.
³⁰ Is there any wrong on my tongue?
    Cannot my taste discern calamity?

 NRSV

Early Morning Thoughts After Another Sleepless Night

I am afraid it will take another civil war to finally overturn the evil inheritance that the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution and a civil war will not have any guarantee of doing it.  Revolutions as a means of creating utopia are a delusion of the so-called Enlightenment, civil wars are the worst and riskiest of all national plebiscites, the one we had here had a brief effect against the habit and institution of slavery and racism, only to be nullified in the corrupt deal under the Electoral College that brought Rutherford Hayes to the presidency and inaugurated the re-institution of de-facto slavery in Jim Crow, with the full support of The Supreme Court.   What we are seeing is the reversion to it under Republican-fascism, with the encouragement of the entertainment industry - with all those feel-good movies about the nobility of our institutions also comes all of the Hollywood provided Neo-Confederate symbolism and propaganda, the stereotype of masculinity that is so much a part of the Neo-fascist resurgence.  The list of such evil enabling romanticism could fill pages.

I have mentioned a number of times how, when I heard the cute slogan "the first person to say 'fascist' loses" I realized the primary beneficiaries of such a rule were the fascists.  In the United States that rule, which I believe I first heard said on NPR's All Things Considered (yeah, I used to listen to NPR) and knew it must be something that had currency among the college-credentialed media crowd.   As long as the word was used in its formal meaning it could retain its protective aura of foreignness, of being something that was alien to the United States and its culture but that was always a self-serving lie.   We've always had it here.  The genocides against the natives for the purpose of stealing the land they inhabited, the intended extinction of the buffalo so the rail way could solidify the theft of the country through the starvation of people.   Slavery was an entire race held in much of the country under a more severe fascist boot than most Italians ever experienced under Mussolini or Spain under Franco and it was hardly a system that was segregated to the Southern States.  By the Constitution and under the judicial rule of slave-owners who had a corrupt financial motives in their rulings protecting and extending slavery, the entire country that acquiesced to its existence was implicated in it.

And then there is the long history of American imperialism, in the Americas, starting with the campaign to murder and carve a country out of the continental United States but also in such things as the campaign Jefferson started to ensure Haiti would not have a Black democratic republic, the long history of American imperialism in Latin America.  If there was anything in Lincoln's terrible fear that God would take a drop of blood in the Civil War for every drop drawn by the slave masters' whips, consider what a cost is due to us.   Perhaps we are also experiencing the debt due in Mark Twain's statement that you could not have democracy and imperialism.  Now we find ourselves colonized by foreign despots able to use TV to install their puppet in the presidency. 

Evil may not be evenly distributed in the United States but it is present in all fifty of the states in large enough representation to be more than getting on with.  And so is stupidity.   If Covid-19 doesn't sober enough of us up, it is clearly not a strong enough experience to definitively defeat Trumpism.   I now doubt anything but a total disaster will.  Appealing to the moral sensibility of a dangerously large, catastrophically indifferent part of the population is not going to do it, the only thing that will work is destroying the institutions that empower them as the slave-owners constructed them to enhance the power of the minority that they were.  And that's only two examples of why we are now surprised to find that the United States, which even educated Americans love to see through Aaron Sorkin glasses, how we are shocked to find that even a Trump is acceptable to a dangerously large number of Americans, helped even as a minority to exercise outsized power through the very institutions set up by the slave power and their Northern allies,  Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, foremost among them, to prevent democracy from happening.   That check written in the Declaration of Independence was, in fact, reneged on in that Constitution which we are all supposed to revere and respect even as its history has been as brutal as what we are seeing now and will probably endure for the rest of our lives short of a civil war which goes decisively to us.   

In reading the Prophets with the aid of Walter Brueggemann, I see we are reenacting the sins of Israel and as they were given fair warning,the results will be terrible.   The "Enlightenment" discounts the value of that huge literature of the consequences of injustice, the conceit of the Enlightenment, of science as an ideology instead of the tool and method that it really is led us to the superstition of human perfectibility or at least close enough to be reliable.

The Electoral College must go, the state administration of federal elections must go, the unequal distribution of power through the anti-democratically apportioned Senate must go - if that can't be done through the power given to states with small populations by the Constitution, those parts of the country which favor democracy over despotism should leave the United States and fortify their borders against what were once our former countrymen.  I don't like that but I like living under the tyranny of an evil minority even less.   

This election proves that there will not even be a very hard, very hard fought, fix under the Constitutional system of the United States. Until that is altered to take that extra power out of the hands of the minority through the institutions of government this will happen again and again as surely as Jim Crow and the legal-economic regime from before FDR are coming back.   I doubt much progressive era reform will stand against this Court which we now know is not likely to be changed.  

We are about to reap the whirlwind. Even if Biden wins.

I Wish To Associate Myself With Her Comment

 

Bud Powell Trio - Off Minor - In Honor Of My Niece Who Worked As A Poll Worker All Day

   

I don't know if this is still her favorite piece of music as she once told me it was but I'm sure she still likes it.  Bud Powell's solo in this recording is great, a quite different emphasis than the composer gives it.  

Bud Powell - piano

Kenny Clarke - drums

Pierre Michelot - bass

And here's an earlier Bud Powell Trio:

Bud Powell - piano

Curley Russel - bass

Max Roach - drums
 

Mary Lou Williams & the Trumpet Giants 'Autumn Leaves' 1971

 

Live in Overseas Press Club New York City (1971) 

Mary Lou Williams - Piano 

Bobby Hackett - 

Trumpet Dizzy Gillespie -Trumpet 

George Duvivier - Bass

Grady Tate - Drums 

One thing I intend to do, no matter what happens tonight and in the coming days is getting back to posting music.  And to the study of The Prophetic Imagination. 

How Can You Tell? You Can't, You Can Only Be Told And It Doesn't Make Any Difference

I had a couple of comments telling me that that dim dolly Trump supporter I linked to the other day was not a real one,  I answered the polite comment in the comments, I'm answering the impolite one here.

The Republican-fascists, their media whores at FOX, Sinclair, etc.  have made Q-insane a force in American politics of which up to two-fifths of the American public are either true believers in that or its like or are OK with it. 

This is worse than when Red Channels, Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper were the model for the outer limits of propaganda and lies being empowered by a huge factor.

For those reasons, the ability to do satire in the United States is nullified.  It can't be done, what you call satire is merely mimickry, if you go over the top you can bet that some Trumpzi will have already raised the top above that. 

You can't do it under these conditions.  You want it back you're going to have to get the lies out of the media, the mass media, especially broadcast and cabloid and also socially transmitted dementia, the STDs of today,  Facebook, Twitter, the googlebombed search features on a number of search engines, general and on sites such as YouTube.   Dan Savage's "Santorum" stunt seemed hilariously impressive and gave the left an illusion that they could control that kind of thing, now we know the billionaire gangsters, the Mercers, the Kochs, the Putins, Erdogans, etc. or, rather, their hirelings were paying attention and like all such things they've got the money to really show how it's done. 

Everything is different, now.  The old rules not only don't apply, they're weaponized by the billionaire gangsters against us.  Anyone who doesn't realize that is an idiot or a sucker.  "More speech" is ever so much more "more speech" when it's powered with billions of dollars and the stupid gullibility of the "free speech-press" dogmas of the long dead early post-war period.   Once the Supreme Court made money speech, at the behest of the "civil liberties" industry, they changed that equation, making it go from a simple addition problem to one you'd need to write in scientific notation to represent the billionaire gangsters' "more speech."  

You "First Amendment" types are such ineducable suckers.   I don't automatically distrust someone who uses the word "liberty" but it gets my resistance up.  You'll notice that the "civil liberties" industry doesn't much do equality.  I think equality is a lot more of a protection of freedom and democracy than "liberties" that ignore reality.   Anyone who hadn't figured that out by the 1980s is an idiot or too young to have seen the history that proved it.

Biden's Virtually Gaff-Free Campaign

Whatever happens tomorrow and the next days, one thing I will admit is the Black Women Voters of South Carolina who are credited with giving Joe Biden the push past the first contests of late winter and onto the nomination are more politically savvy than I am.  I still think that Elizabeth Warren would be a great president as I expect Kamala Harris may well be but I don't think my first choice would be as competitive as Joe Biden has been.  

I had once considered Biden a very credible presidential candidate up into the 1980s but his proneness to gaffs and missteps led me to give up on the idea.  Then . . . well, I won't mention those.  I think those gaffs are largely a result of knowing the media would attack him or any Democrat who endangered the Republicans' chances of keeping the presidency which was so profitable to the media companies, their owners, their advertisers and their well-paid talking heads.

I will admit that Biden has run a very good campaign, virtually gaff-free and refreshingly adult compared to the baby tyrant he's running against.  Never suspected he'd do it and I don't think it was all because of the difficulties of campaigning in a pandemic.   I think Biden knows this is the last time he's going to campaign for public office, that after this he is free of that.  The people running his campaign did a very good job as opposed to those who ran Hillary Clinton's campaign.  I am a big fan of those who mismanage a presidential or other important campaign the way some of ours have been never working for another Democratic candidate.  There are some things that are too important to be considered on the job learning.

Superstition against jinxing the outcomes are going to make me stop here.  Win or lose, I think Biden and just about all of the Democrats who ran this time did a good job.  I'm proud of being a member of their party.

If We're Unlucky, Barr Will Still Be There in February - I'll Bet The Supreme Court Will Get Into It Unless The Democracts Take The Senate

 

I hope you notice how all of those lawyers and DC media hacks near the beginning of this were reassuring us that the already obvious fascist William Barr was going to be a good Attorney General, one of them applying a label to him that we should have learned was a red flag, a flashing light and a blaring siren of danger, "an institutionalist".    I'm no lawyer and I'm no DC wise guy but I knew that William Barr was a fascist in service to Republican fascism because I remembered the role he played in the two Bush presidencies,  the use of the presidential pardon to shield a criminal president and higher ups in his administration, writing legal opinions as ass cover for Bush I in his election stunt of invading a country to arrest its leader and the even worse role he played in Bush II.

All of that was clearly known to all of those DC-DoJ insider lawyers while they were going on the cabloids talking up the transition from the fraudster Whitaker to the fascist hater of equality and democracy, the advocate of an interpretation of the Second Article of the Constitution which was overtly fascist, one dreamed up in some of the most elite of our Ivy and Ivy equivalent law schools.  I have not seen any evidence that the theorists of Republican-fascism have ever suffered so much as having to really answer for it among those well upholstered cesspools.   

I have mentioned before how, during the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committee hearings into Trump's crimes how I was rather shocked and surprised to realize that the courage that was shown by the witnesses strongly tended to come from the diplomats and how the timidity and cowardice came from the law guys and gals.  I concluded that was because diplomats sometimes have to be in situations where they have to really face the consequences of their actions and the actions of those with power whereas at the end of the day the lawyers pack up their offices and go home to their gated communities and genteel suburbs.  The culture of the legal profession is clearly as corrupt as the Supreme Court and the other federal courts, these days.   The same is true of most of the never-were-reporters who comprise the public face of "journalism" these days. 

The elite law schools have nurtured the peculiarly American form of fascism based on the words of the Constitution.   It doesn't much matter if that use of the language was envisioned by the deified "founders" because lawyers who are liars will lie about anything.  One of the best points made by John Oliver's narrative of William Barr was noting his use of long streams of legalistic babble in obscure language which, if you bother to listen to it, is clearly geared to be dishonest.  When you go back and listen to him or Brett Kavanaugh being questioned by Senator Kamala Harris, she was able, by persistent and skillful restating of her question, able to show what a bald and transparent form of lying it is, not even under the surface.  Most people don't have the persistence or the skill to do that, most lawyers probably wouldn't bother to because such lying is a part of the legal game as it's played.  By the way, that was the reason that though so many of the members of those committees are lawyers, the impeachment hearings in the House made the most progress when they let prosecutors do the questioning.   There are lawyers I respect, just not most of them and few who are part of the DoJ-FBI establishment.  

If the Democrats don't take control of the Senate, the Supreme Court will try to reinstall Trump,  Kavanaugh knows that if the Senate Judiciary Committee gets hold of the suppressed materials and investigates the crimes he was accused of and likely lied about, he'll be forced off the court, I wouldn't be surprised if investigations proved Alito and likely Thomas committed impeachable offenses, too.   Roberts knows that if Democrats take the Congress and the Presidency, his power will be dissolved in a reformed Court and, who knows, the process of ending lifetime membership of the Court might really make progress.  Some are talking about 18 year terms, I think that's far too long to keep an Alito, a Thomas or a Rehnquist on the court.  Ten years would mean there would be an overlap into a new presidency and, really, for most of them five years was too long to have them on the court.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg was great but she made the fatal mistake of believing she was indispensable.  Time dispenses of us all and there is no good reason to suspect it will do it at the best time to ensure safety.   I could never square her being Scalia's good buddy with the terrible person he was, especially to the powerless and the oppressed.   I don't see any evidence she influenced him to the better, though, who knows, maybe he'd have been worse if she hadn't.  I do see it as the same kind of chumminess with evil that is rampant in the legal profession, especially at its higher paid levels.  The kind of evil that is obvious in the writing and thinking of a Gorsuch or a Barrett or a Scalia.  

I hope if Biden makes appointments to the court, he doesn't go to the typical Ivy-Ivy Equivalent pool of those well thought of in the DC-DoJ world.  Just like it should be a rule that the Secretary of Education should be a product of public schools and public universities with children who went to or go to public schools.  The structure of American democracy is rotted out from the ivy that climbs up it.  They'll bring it down unless they're pruned back.