After a difficult day I came back to find that comment moderation had been turned off somehow.  I've put it back.  I don't choose to deal with anything I don't want to.  If I choose to again I won't go straight to the bottom of the barrel to do it.

Brother Jesus,

who wept at the death of a friend,

we cry out with all who are grieving loss during this time of COVID and political turmoil

You overturned tables in anger at the wrongful actions of leaders,

walk with us as we transform our anger into outpouring love and  passionate action for justice.

Aware  that your Spirit is moving through us in our grief and anger, may we become more like you as we  serve others each day. 

Bridget Mary Meehan inspired by Celtic Benediction Night Prayer for Monday

Aged, Redolent Hate Mail - Catching Up On My Delitions

IF the meat-headed liberals on the 1964 Supreme Court had not determined that it was required by the friggin' First Amendment that Democratic politicians and other Democrats who take on The Peoples' business as public servants, instead of as crooks and goons, could be lied about with impunity on FOX, ABC, CNN, NPR, in the goddamned New York Times, on Breitbart, etc.  a scumbag like Sydney Powell wouldn't dare to do what she does to try to discredit and destroy electoral democracy on behalf of the biggest, fattest goddamned liar in the history of the American presidency from the podium of the goddamned Republican-fascist National Committee.  Republicans, on whose behalf the media could predominantly be relied to lie on, had little to worry about.

It all stems from that, all of the lies that Trump used to put himself in power and all the ones he has told in office, all of the lies told on his behalf by Republican-fascists, by the freest free-press in our history - FREE FROM THE REQUIREMENT THAT THEY NOT LIE ON BEHALF OF THE BILLIONAIRES AND THEIR OWN FINANCIAL INTEREST.  

All of it is founded in lies, lies that the goddamned ACLU said were safe for us, that we could magically make them go away with magical "more speech" even as they filed amicus briefs to make the money of the billionaires and millionaires into "speech" which would swamp the pittiful little "more speech" belonging to those without billions and millions. 

It is the goddamned secular left that gave them the tools, fighting for the "rights" of pornographers - who I have no doubt were paying them to do it - valuing porn more than the need of The People to hear the truth that would free them and not the lies that would enslave them.   And I do, absolutely, believe that is based in the ideology of modernist-secularist atheism.  That there are suckers who are not atheists who go along with it is something else, such people obviously don't believe that we require the truth to be free or they diminish the power of lies crafted to appeal to the worst of our weaknesses.  I frankly doubt that the leadership of the ACLU much cared what effect their advocacy would have because it was clear from the start of it how this would turn out.  I knew as soon as I read the first article I did on the Buckley v Valeo decision.  

So you can take your ACLU and go to hell.  Like I said, they lost me for good in the Skokie case, I've despised them ever since.  You an tell Ira and Nadine that I said they were Republican-fascist tools, along with the rest of them.  They were always a fraud.  Liberals who support that fraud are some of the biggest suckers there are.  And now we can continue the count of the consequences in the quarters of millions

This Said It The Best I've Seen So Far

@ AriBerman

GOP traded 250,000 American lives for 225 Trump judges

Beyond Baron Munchausen

If there is any justice in the world the total liar-lawyer-lunatic Sydney Powell should be memorialized in a named psychopathology, akin, perhaps to the cinematically popularized Baron Munchhausen Syndrome, only with the added feature of it being a dangerous and criminal form of flagrant and elaborately fantastical lying to have a dangerous public safety feature as well.  

That she could retain a law license in any state of the United States proves how criminally inadequate that licensing is, and you can say the same for the rest of the Jack Levine painting of goons and creeps and criminally insane lawyers who appeared with her as the Rudy melted.  Apparently he colors his sideburns with mascara.  I remember when I was young there was a young man in my town who used it to enhance his mustache and something similar once happening.   I don't think he ever quite lived it down. 

If the Trump legal team, Barr, Giuliani, Powell, Ellis, etc. are allowed to operate as lawyers in the future there is something seriously wrong with that profession.   If I were a judge hearing a very serious case like their attempt at using the courts to mount a coup and they were lying about it on TV, I'd ask them about it in court to get them on the record about it.  Lawyers doing what they do should not be trusted to bring cases to court.  They shouldn't be allowed to appear before Judge Judy.

 

This Is The Difference Between The Democratic Party And The Republican Party In As Stark Terms As There Could Be

 

Do It - How To Know God

I am planning on going back to the Prophetic Imagination project after Christmas and New Year are over, I will post an index to all of the previous posts on it - I hope I get them all in - and continue.   At least that's the plan.  I'd originally hoped to go through it all before the start of Advent but illness and politics intervened.   

Being pretty impetuous, I'm preparing better for the continuation than I planned the beginning of it, I hope it's worth your attention.  What Brueggemann said certainly is.  It is remarkable how this forty-two year old book is still found to be current, I would bet that it is as much a matter of reading, consideration and discussion as it was in the first two years after its publication. Of course you can read the book yourself or re-read it and you can think it over, yourself.  If the publisher is looking, I intend this as being a long recommendation to buy the book and read it.

Until then, from time to time,  I'm going to be falling back on my practice of posting videos of lectures, sermons, interviews and there is no better way to start than with a 2015 talk that Walter Brueggemann did, starting with his lecture Justice: From Zion Back to Sinai.  He started by saying, "How about this. Justice is the maintenance of social relationships that keeps life viable and human. And injustice is the practice of social relationships that make life not viable and not human," and ending with the challenge for someone who thinks in English presented in God saying in Jeremiah 22 to the unjust king Jehoakhim, the son of the just king King Josiah,

 

 Are you a king
    because you compete in cedar?
Did not your father eat and drink
    and do justice and righteousness?
    Then it was well with him.

He judged the cause of the poor and needy;
    then it was well.
Is not this to know me?
    says the Lord.

 

Brueggemann's unsurpassed close reading of the text, his finding so much nuance in it that a "literal" "fundamentalist" reading is likely to miss, points out that God doesn't say you'll observe The Law and by doing that you'll know God, or that you'll understand The Law and get the reward of knowing God but that it is in the actual doing of it that you know God. Which is certainly not a modern conception of how you know something through analysis of fact or something that fits easily into English. Presumably, if that's the way to know God the only way to know God is to do it. Which is certainly as if not more radical than any secular articulation of either knowing something or doing what is right. The definition Brueggemann gives for justice is, in every way, superior to the legalistic notion of following a law code, which turns out to be inadequate as Lawrence O'Donnell and Lawrence Tribe's discourse over the lawless Emily Murphy of the General Services Administration whose violation of the law, based on the "honors system" carries no criminal penalty though she will just about certainly be responsible for thousands of deaths. The inadequacy of law writing under the Constitutional system is ever more clear.

 

Listen to this and see which approach you think is more reliable.  

No, There Is No Prospect For "Fixing" The Republican Party It Has Been Beyond Redemption For A Long Lifetime

What Lindsay Graham has admitted he said, which amounts to a lawyerly-liarly way of soliciting Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out legally cast ballots should be as serious a felony that would not only get him ejected from any elected office, any appointed office and which should result in him serving a very long prison term in a real prison. What Doug Collins is accused of and is known to have said to pressure him to do the same should result in his expulsion from the House and, if convicted, to also result in a very long prison term. And they are only a few of the Republicans whose crimes against democracy in this election should result in their incarceration.

We have not taken crimes against democracy seriously at all, considering the rapidly mounting death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic, the results of autocracy under Republican-fascism proves the stupidity of using the misnamed honors system as the first defense of it, there being no further serious defense of it made even now. 

 

The fact is our system has always been screw-ball, requiring elected officials and those appointed to judicial office and other offices to swear loyalty to the Constitution when the only legitimate source of their power is not the Constitution but the consent of the governed.  THE PEOPLE.  All of The People, that and egalitarian democracy are who they should be required to swear faith and faithful service to.  And those who violate that trust should suffer a harsh penalty. 

The Los Angeles Times had an op-ed in it that for any good ideas it might have contained, shows how inadequate a conventional, go along to get along analysis of the danger Republican-fascism poses for us.

The Republican Party’s refusal to write a platform for 2020 was a watershed moment. Instead of issuing a traditional document, GOP leaders put out a memo essentially saying that their only goal was Donald Trump’s reelection. That move revealed the current Republican Party to be completely untethered from the one that governed during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

The post-election drama shows this break even more starkly. Trump has refused to concede the race, falsely claiming the election is rife with fraud. Republicans in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and other GOP officeholders have overwhelmingly gone along with this, refusing to acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden’s clear victory and supporting Trump’s baseless legal challenges. The few prominent Republicans who have called on Trump to admit defeat, for the most part, have “former” in their titles.

One could argue that these two camps represent different factions of the Republican Party, motivated by different ideological visions for the party or representing different interest groups competing for influence. But that’s not exactly right. In some ways, it makes more sense to see these as almost completely different Republican parties. The Republican Party of 2012 — the one that nominated Mitt Romney for president and recommended moderation and an embrace of immigrants after his loss — bears staggeringly little similarity to the Republican Party of 2020.

That is total nonsense. The Republican Party of 2012 was the party that not only supported but insisted on the presidential ratfucking by a. Jeb Bush, b. the Republican Florida Secretary of State, c. Bush cousin John Ellis on FOX, etc. AND MOST OF ALL BY FIVE REPUBLICANS ON THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, ONE OF WHOM, SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, HAD BEEN REPORTED TO BE UPSET WITH AL GORE WINNING THE ELECTION BECAUSE SHE WANTED A FELLOW REPUBLICAN TO NAME HER SUCCESSOR.

No, the Republican Party of 2012 was also the Republican Party that, along with the billionaire astro-turf, cabloid fueled "tea party" weaponizing of racism against the first Black President, the party which had made the fully Trumpian Sarah Palin a powerful figure. It may have had one last gasp at a nominee who could pose as better than that, in a dishonest Susan Collins manner, Mitt Romney, but it had long been all-in on what's wrong with the Republican Party.

The fact is we have a party which favors democracy, the aptly named, at least after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, Democratic Party, and a party of aristocracy and oligarchy and, as conditions make it to the benefit of the oligarchs, fascism. There may be the odd Republican who is not a fascist and a few who credibly reject fascism. There were some of those who rightfully concluded that the turn to fascist authoritarianism was not something they were OK with at all and that's somewhat to their credit. Even flawed people are capable of rising above their flaws in a crisis and that is not to be rejected. But there was always something very wrong with the Republican Party, certainly from the time they gave Nixon their nomination in 1960 and Barry Goldwater - who ran a viciously racist, anti-Latino campaign in 1964. The "southern strategy" of winning with racism pre-dates the traditional attribution of that to the 1968 Nixon, who won on the power of Supreme Court permitted lies in the media. There is virtually no one who is a Republican now whose own participation in the party pre-dates that turn.

I believe, fully and totally, in the power of redemption and that once someone is fully and permanently converted to the good, the true, the politics of the Golden Rule and charity to all their previous life is changed to the better. If the sincere and consistent and wise "never Trump" faction of former Republicans truly are converted to that many of their previous stands will be found to be inconsistent with their new convictions. The authenticity of their conversion is as reliant on their changed behavior as that of any former Stalinist or Maoist or Trotskyite who rejected those forms of authoritarianism for egalitarian democracy is dependent on their changed behavior. I think I have established myself as enough of a critic of the "left" of such supporters of mass-murdering gangsters who flew the red flag to make that critique of the democratic right, assuming such an entity is possible. I have certainly not skimped in my rejection and criticism of those I formerly considered worthwhile of consideration, even admirable, even if I, myself, had rejected Marxism from the start.  I will admit that a lot of my former willing blindness to the evil of Marxism was quite similar to what obviously motivates the kind of journalistic cowardice that negligently fails to call Republican-fascism what it is.

But to pretend that anyone who has rejected Trumpism can reform the Repubican Party is to foster a delusion. It was fashionable, late in his life, as Barry Goldwater felt eternity creeping up on him to pretend that Goldwater was better than Nixon or Reagan or Bush I. That is the sort of media-based delusion that flows from that dodge of lazy, cowardly "journalism" both-siderism. There has been something seriously wrong with the Republican Party for a long, long time. It has always been a party with a small minority of decent people in it led by the servants of oligarchy and wealth. If it is true that you cannot serve both God and Mammon (wealth) then the Republicans have definitively chosen to serve the wealthy. That is not unknown among Democrats but there is a reason the billionaires support the Republicans.

If the sincere Never-Trumpers are not willing to sign onto a radical level of leveling in the post-Trump world but are unwilling to participate in the destruction of even the semi-democracy we have now, they would do better to found their own party and hope that they can topple the Republican Party like the Whigs were by the Republicans of 1860, the one and only example of a successful third party effort in our history. They will never fix the Republican Party, it is as stupid an idea as the idea that you could fix Nazism or Stalinism or fascism or Maoism. It can't be done. 

 

I remember, during one of the interminable "Whitewater" hearings that were held under the Gingrich House,that the officially designated "decent Republican" Iowa's Jim Leech, "What's a nice guy like you doing in a party like this?"  The answer was he was serving the same purpose as Henry Hyde, Lindsay Graham, etc.   It's what they all do.

The Truth Is We May Contribute More To The Delusion Of The Trump Cult Than We Care To Believe

I am finding it a slower recovery from my recent illness than I'd expected.  The exhausting attempt by Republicans to steal the election and torpedo the Biden-Harris administration is, too.  That's the reason for the days off. To remind you, it wasn't Covid, though it had me wondering.  

And speaking of Covid as it really is, I got this from screen captures of tweets from Jodi Doering, RN, an emergency room nurse in South Dakota, from Glenn Kirschner's YouTube channel

I have a night off from the hospital. As I'm on my couch with my dog I can't help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don't believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapoterm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that "stuff" because they don't have COVID because it's not real. Yes. This really happens. And I can't stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn't really going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It's like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There's no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again. Which is what I will do for the next three nights. . .

 

The comparison of her all too terrible reality and a horror movie is apt because entertainment and make believe, appealing to fears, envy, resentment and other base human emotions in order to manipulate people in reality is the source of the delusion of the patients she describes.   That rejection of reality is what the most effective educational force in the United States has taught a dangerously large percentage of the population, it brought us several of our worst presidents, two of them in this still young century, alone and it is where these dying, suffocating fools get the source of their reality denying delusions.  It would be hard to identify when such people are in the throes of oxygen deprivation or fever dreams because TV, the movies, radio, the internet as it is typically used produce that level of delusion as a typical mindset of the many millions of the susceptible.  The moderny delusion that all of that is innocuous is a delusion that a dangerous percentage of those not deluded in line with Nurse Doering's testimony, especially those who are lawyers, judges and "justices" is as much a part of how the American People are spoon fed lies for many many, many more hours than they spend in classrooms and many more times than that which they spend in church perhaps being told something of the dangerous consequences of lying and believing in lies.  

 

That we can go through this horrible lesson in reality, through the experience of counting up the lie after lie after lie that led us to Trump and which, until it is changed will lead us to even worse and deny that the dangers of allowing the media to lie and to carry lies is going to destroy not only democracy but us as well proves the power of delusions peddled through clever slogans and PR campaigns.  

You will know the truth and the truth will make you free,  so it truly says in the Gospels.  And Genesis tells the tale of the origin of human evil in attractive lies being told and willfully believed.  Which both are entirely wiser and smarter than the "civil liberties" peddled lies that a country that permits that, especially in the modern mass media, is going to sink as far down as any human society ever has.  That an egalitarian democracy can either be achieved or retained while permitting the mass media to lie with impunity and in ways that will be found to make those lies self serving is the hugest of all the widely believed lies.  It is the credo of even a dangerously large proportion of those who are officially in opposition to Trump and Republican-fascism.  Especially those who have a self-interest in the media being able to get away with it.  

So, don't feel so smug about the horrible delusion of the patients of this heroic nurse because the delusion you hold may be the reason they are so deluded, to start with.   I will believe there is some glimmer of truth shining through when I hear media figures confessing the role they and their colleagues have played in this, because they are among those most responsible.  That goes for both the "news" and the "entertainment" sides of it.  Both did it to this country, the lawyers who work for them and for "civil liberties" even more so.