Diane Feinstein's Death

leads me to think there should be an age limit of 85 placed on U.S. Senators, as RBG's death lead me to think there should be a term limit of ten years on Supreme Court members with a lifetime ban on them or their spouses profiting off of anything they dealt with on the Court. 

I'm not big on age limits or term limits but how many of these people do we have to lose with such disastrous consequences?   They don't seem to be learning what some of the last House Democratic Leadership has obvious learned, that there is a time to step aside and make way for new leaders.   Even the great Nancy Pelosi, the greatest Speaker of the House in its history,  knew that it was time to step aside and she convinced her colleagues to do so, as well.  And a House member dying or resigning mid-term is seldom as disastrously consequential as a Senator or a "justice" doing so. 

Alternatively, Democrats, the next time they really are in control of the Senate, should change the goddamned anti-democratic rules and customs that the goddamned Republican-fascists use in unprecedented ways to thwart democracy in that atrociously anti-democratically structured body.   I pray that after the next election we actually have what we don't have now, a real Democratic majority without Manchins or Sinemas which can once and for all stop such disgusting practices as the goddamned Republican-fascists have been using for decades, now.   I hope and pray that McConnell spends a long time in the depths of purgatory for what he's done.  If not hell.  Manchin and Sinema can join him wherever.

Paul reminds them that, quote, "the frame of this world is passing away." - The Basis of Paul's Radical Side And Its Mitigation In His Expectation of An Impending Eschaton

AS I SAID, I think Paul is often, perhaps more often than not, misread because of the length and subtlety of his arguments.  That is often due to some of his statements about the context in which his conclusions must for now lie are taken as the end point of a moral argument when it isn't. Being LGBTQ+ a group against which the first part of one of Paul's arguments have been wielded against by those who never apply what he said about their sexuality to their own identity, I didn't notice that the infamous condemnations taken to mean same-sex sex are immediately followed by what was artificially divided many centuries later by the beginning of "Chapter 2" in which Paul said to his pious followers, if they thought they had a right to condemn sinners, they don't because they're sinners, as well.  Though missing that has an earlier pedigree than the division of Scripture into chapters and verses.  That's something that I had to hear from evangelicals such as Pete Ens and Matthew Vines before I noticed it.  Those are NOT the "white evangelicals" you'll hear about in the media, their evangelicalism is something I can not only co-exist with but learn from.  This section of Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture about the paradox of Christian freedom points that out about as clearly as I've ever heard it pointed out in a much different context.

So let's look at Paul and ancient identity markers.

Characteristically, Paul's exhortations are conservative with respect for social structures. No one in antiquity could conceive of a family arrangement other other than that of a household or a political reality other than that of empire.  And, thus, Paul commands his readers to recognize and obey governing authorities and to pray for all manner of rulers. Along with this conservative posture, however, Paul's instructions bear a more subtly radical edge.  Slaves are to obey masters, he says, for the sake of the Lord, just as masters are to remember that they, too, have a master in heaven.  In First Timothy, 6:2, indeed, he reverses societal symbolism by telling slaves who have believing masters to regard their service to them as a kind of benevolent patronage.

No doubt Paul knew that those who he had converted who were held in slavery had practically no prospect of gaining their freedom, there was no underground rail-road in the Roman Empire that I've ever heard about.  There was no large area of land where slavery had been abolished, there was no prospect of them ever getting their freedom.  There had not been any articulation of politics of philosophy that asserted anything like the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence or the Rights of Man, and I'll point out the governments that resulted in those seemed to have no intention of abolishing slavery, Jefferson certainly didn't, France maintained brutal slavery in their colonies for quite a while, the tragic history of Haiti was it was thwarted by both France and the United States proves that.  The earliest declarations of a condemnation of slavery I've found explicitly stated are in St. Gregory of Nyssa several centuries after Paul's missionary work and his written advice to those he had already converted.  Also more informally in St. Patrick who, unlike Gregory of Nyssa, had the experience of being enslaved.  Paul was telling slaves who were going to remain slaves how to get by and giving them some hope even as he obviously expected Christ to return very soon.  In the meantime, he was also telling those who had been converted to stop treating their slaves as slaves were treated in the Roman Empire (see the first post in this series for a very short, abbreviated idea of how terrible that could be).  

The most subversive idea in human history is the idea that we are morally obligated to treat others as we would like to be treated by them, an idea which, if it were ever really followed, would end slavery, would end all manner of oppression and cruelty and exploitation and neglect.  

I think the limits of the modern imagination, that imagines Paul was addressing anything like what we unthinkingly take for granted as the world of the possible has constantly been at play in misreading Paul and taking messages from Paul that are the exact opposite from what he said.  The American slaver power certainly did that, many a priest and minister blatantly ignoring the conclusions that you would have to reach if you took his full arguments seriously, ignoring the obligations he laid on slave holders to treat those held in legal slavery according to the commandment to do to others as they would have done to them.  Which is one of the reasons that the 17-19th century "enlightenment" slavery was far worse than the slavery that is codified in The Law of Moses, which included, for example, the exact opposite of the Constitutionally consonant Fugitive Slave Law which the abolitionists constantly pointed out was a violation of the very Bible that the slave power used to excuse their enslavement of People.  I am tempted to go off on that idol of English language atheism, Thomas Huxley, sarcastically mocking the language derived from Paul that Black People were "brothers" as he cheerfully predicted the emancipated American slaves would be wiped out in a Darwinian struggle for existence, but there's more of what Johnson said to go through , so I'll put that aside for now.   

As wrong is to be outraged that Paul was not an ardent abolitionist in the style of those from the 19th century England and the United States.  I don't think it's necessary to argue from what Paul did say to get to abolitionism and, in 20th and 21st century terms, liberation theology.  The Golden Rule and the commandment to "Do to the least among you," which certainly includes slaves will get you there.  Gregory of Nyssa got there from the Old Testament as well.  Even as I have disagreed with Luke Timothy Johnson that Christianity is at odds with liberation theology, I do agree that to insist on judging what he did say on the basis of far later criteria, from a world he probably couldn't closely guess was possible is a very good critique or use of him.  I doubt it would have been possible for later abolitionists to get far without making use of the very Christianity that Paul had such a large hand in forming just as Christianity certainly made use of The Law and the Prophets.  


Note in the next passage, Johnson hints of the two-tracks of Paul's arguments that I talk about, writing about the conditions in which his followers would be trying to be living their way towards what he was really getting to, the endpoint being inseparable from his advice about getting on where you are living your life.  

Now, I use the term "radical edge" advisedly because in such passages Paul modulates the" hierarchical social order by means of properly religious language.  The social-political arrangements of antiquity are not absolute but relative.  Although his readers must, therefore,  continue to exist and act within a world of social stratification, Paul reminds them that, quote, "the frame of this world is passing away."  So that everything that they engage in the world, whether it be marriage or trade or anything whatever, it must be, as he says in First Corinthians 7, as though not. Such eschatological detachment derives from the realization that, quote, "If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, the old things have passed away. Behold everything is new."  Second Corinthians 5:17.  Christian existence in a world that is defined not by being in the best social class but by first being rightly related to God and second by being rightly related to each other in the community.  Within the  messianic community, indeed,  the new social order is to be based on the reality of the new creation, one which the three great markers of social distinction and value in antiquity are to be relativized.  In three passages, Paul states that the differences in gender, male-female, ethnicity, Jew-gentile, or social rank, slave-free, are no longer to distinguish and, thereby, separate those who are now in Christ.

In First Corinthians 12:13. he says, quote, " We have been baptized into one body and one Spirit, whether Jew or Greek, whether slave or free and we've all been made to drink the one Spirit."  

In Galatians 3:28, likewise, he declares, quote, "Whoever has been baptized into Christ has put on Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."  

Imagine if someone got up in front of the Republican-fascist caucus of the House "Christian nationalists" and quoted that, emphasizing the last one, NO LONGER MALE AND FEMALE!  Especially pushing things like the radical act in Acts of baptizing an African who had been castrated - which often included cutting off the penis as well as the testicles - into the Body of Christ, the Church.  What would the Madge Greens, Matt Gaetzs and the like make of that being thrown in their faces.  

Finally, in Collosians 3:11 he exhorts, "Put on the new human which is being renewed in recognition according to the image of the one creating it where there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all in everyone."

Twice, also, Paul uses the identity marker of ethnicity to make the same point. . .

I will leave the transcription at that till the next post.  Imagine how the history of Christianity if Paul's most radical egalitarianism had been as focused on and enforced as his throwaway terms about sex have been.  His radical leveling is clearly a major point in Paul's conception of Christianity, probably the part of it least taken seriously by the subsequent history of Christianity, especially whenever that impinges on economic justice and gender equality.   As I mentioned, about the first, if not the first, condemnation of slavery in written history comes from Gregory of Nyssa and it's, perhaps related to that, that his writing about his sister and teacher, Macrina, giving her teaching of him, by then a bishop and one of the major theologians of his and later times, a respect that I haven't yet found in anyone before him, pagan or Jewish or Christian.   That's not because others hadn't read Paul's radical leveling, though I would suspect Gregory reading it in the Greek original instead of the Latin translation might have made things clearer to him.  Or maybe it was because his sister Macrina, who he called "The Teacher" in writing about her had read it and, being a Woman, she noticed things in it that the men missed for so many centuries to come.  She was the one who talked their mother into treating the household slaves as family instead of slaves.

I Didn't Know That The Trump Regime's Child Stealing Was Going To Come Up Later Yesterday

 

So many criminals against humanity, so hard to keep track of them.  These two racists should be grilled and if they commit perjury they should be prosecuted and imprisoned.  That what they did hasn't yet landed them in prison for at least twenty years proves that the law and legal system of the United States permits such crimes against humanity.

Democrats Should Do A Take-Over Of The Green Party And End It

SOMEONE ASKS what I think of Cornel West's intention to seek the Green Party nomination to act as the Jill Stein of 2024, risking putting Trump back in office.

Why anyone would have to ask what I think of such a narcissistic, egomaniac, former activist doing such a thing I don't understand.  Of course I think he has destroyed any vestiges of his once over-rated activism and credibility. 

What is more interesting is that I think that Democrats should in large numbers switch their affiliation to Green and nominate  Biden as the Green Party presidential nominee and Harris for Vice President.   If a tiny fraction of Democrats did that they could control the absurdity that is and always has been the Green Party and likely euthanize the vile thing once and for all.  

Cornel West should fade into the same obscurity that so many other would-be leftist leaders have because he has clearly fallen into his own ego and can't get out of it.   That's a recurring pattern on the lefty-left, though it's certainly more characteristic of the atheist-materialist-anti-religious left than of any which claims to have a religious basis. 

What Did Cassidy Hutchinson Find To Love In Trump's Regime? How Can She Remain a Republican-fascist Now?

I RESPECT WHAT CASSIDY HUTCHINSON has done in exposing the criminality of Trump and his regime of fascists.  I listened to her public testimony with some gratitude.  But now that I've listened to the interview she did with Rachel Maddow and my gratitude for her exposing not just the criminality but also the degeneracy of the Republican-fascists, I can't claim I can really respect her.  Though if she clarified her own actions and motives, I might be able to.   Though I do hope that she grows past whatever it was, I think for the world in general, knowing how someone who clearly has some shred of decency to her could have participated in something so obviously evil.

When she said she used to love Trump and supported what he was doing in his presidency, at the beginning, I have to ask what was it she loved about it.  Did she love them ripping babies out of their mother's arms, separating them and putting the babies in concentration camps with Mylar blankets, sleeping on concrete floors with random nine and eleven year olds to take care of them?  Then there were the ones who were stolen from their families and given to strangers.  Something done by the Nazis, the GRD, during the Dirty War in Argentina, by Putin with Republican-fascists' support to children stolen from Ukraine.  I wonder how many of the then babies and toddlers stolen from their parents are still not with them and now many of the ones who were returned (due in no small part the Trump regime purposely not keeping records of parents and children) will never recover a normal relationship with their families because of Trump and his regime. And that's only one of the truly cruel and evil things he and is henchmen did.  Dozens, scores and hundreds of others could be described here.  

There was nothing hidden about the atrocities, the crimes against humanity that was not only his policy BUT WAS SOMETHING HE PROMISED TO DO AS HE WAS CAMPAIGNING. He said out loud what the likes of Reagan and the Bushes had to imply and symbolically declare, such as the unmistakable support of the most violent of white supremacy in Reagan's announcement of his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Bush I's Willie Horton ad.  From start to finish the Trump message was an orgy of hate, his entire life is a specimen of the power of affluent-gangster hate, and racism and a whole catechism of other sins and evil.  He is an example of what is called in the Rite of Baptismal "the glamour of evil" only in his case, a product of Hollywood, TV and the NYC media, it's just as vulgar and crass as can be.  

I'd like someone to ask during her book tour just what it was she loved about the actual acts  that were Trump's administration. Was it the huge giveaway of trillions of dollars to billionaires and millionaires racking up record deficits as he impoverished many in the working class and below, destroying lives even before his further crimes against humanity during the Covid pandemic?  Whipping up racism against Latinos, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Black People - his flagrant racism has been open knowledge AND ADJUDICATED CRIMINALITY by him and his father decades before Cassidy was born.  Him calling for the death penalty for innocent, rail-roaded Black teenagers and slandering of those tortured and murdered by the police goes back decades, too.  His membership in and courting of America's indigenous fascist group, white supremacists was no secret, it was blatant.  

As, by the way, was his treatment of Women.  Since she, rightly, held Matt Gaetz to be a sleaze, how did she overlook it in Trump?  The infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged to the young and stupid Billy Bush about digitally raping women with impunity was certainly something she heard before she chose to join his regime, his infidelity to his wives, his creepy sexualization of his own daughter, his treatment of Hillary Clinton, whipping up to his benefit that other and universal form of endemic fascism, misogyny,* in the last weeks of the 2016 campaign with the help of Republican-fascists like James Comey and the New York Times, leading to him winning through the goddamned Electoral College, not the popular vote. I have every confidence that Comey's policy breaking announcement right before the election was partly motivated by his sexism as it was certainly by the fact that he was a Republican hack.  I wouldn't be surprised if the almost simultaneous lie of an impending indictment in the NYT was inspired by the same.  I despise that paper.  It was one of the organs of media that created Trump to start with and it should never be allowed to live that down.

I'll insert here that anyone who is not working to abolish the Electoral College is colluding with the fascists, there will be another time it delivers an illegitimate regime and in this century they're coming mighty close together.   

Getting back to the question of what there was to like about the Trump regime.  Was it the revealed collusion with some of the worst dictators in the world to ratfuck American democracy?  His courting of Putin's regime during the campaign of 2016?  Soliciting their ratfucking of the American election?  His allowing them to penetrate the Oval Office during his first days in office?  His courting of the Saudi dictators?  The Xi regime in China?  THE FRIGGIN' KIM REGIME IN NORTH KOREA?  Making love to other overtly fascist, murderous dictators as he slammed our closest and most reliable allies?  As he tried to destroy NATO for Putin?  Or was it the indigenous class of traitors, the billionaires who colluded with foreign despots to ratfuck the election for Trump, no doubt anticipating the huge bonanza in making America's taxation system approach the regressivity of that of the Roman Empire.  Is that the policy she liked?  

The listing could go on in things like destruction of the environment, the infrastructure of the country, the educational system, even the Post Office, something listed as a responsibility of the Federal Government from the founding of the country.  Just what was it that a Cassidy Hutchinson found to love in a Trump regime?  How could she, as someone who is held to be a paragon of virtue now, have ever become a part of that?  And working under someone as slimy as Mark Meadows, being friendly with scum like Gaetz?  His history with teenage girls was hardly a secret. I wonder why she was surprised when he  so crudely and creepily hit on her. Perhaps she believed she was too old for him to hit on.

I have to wonder if the January 6th putsch hadn't happened if Ms. Hutchinson would have been proud of her service to the Trump regime.  That attempted putsch was certainly inspired by the successful Brooks Bros. putsch that put Bush II in office two decades earlier and I have yet to hear many Republicans regret their part in the massive and incompetent criminality that led us to two of the worst wars the US has ever been involved with and the crash of 2008.  I have to wonder if the Trump insurrection had succeeded if she would have continued to be a part of it because it's clear the majority of currently enrolled Republicans would have been OK with it.  I suspect there would not have been a major exodus from the Republican-fascist party in the second and interminable term of Trumpery, I doubt there would have been much in the way of opposition in the media or even in  that faded old drab, the New York Times.  Dowd would probably blame it on Hillary.  NPR would have just continued on business as usual.  The networks, too.

I have to wonder what it is about the increasingly fascistic Republican Party, on the trajectory to result in Trumpist style fascism since Barry Goldwater's racist warmonger run in 1964, that such Republicans as became Never Trumpers didn't see coming.  I'm hardly a sophisticated operator or member of the media or pundit class and I've seen it coming literally since I was in my puberty then, so many decades ago.  I've seen former family-tradition Republicans peel off certainly since the crimes of Nixon were revealed, I concluded about the time the likes of Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield,  Pete McCloskey either died or left the party or died that there was no such thing as a liberal Republican or even one with a shred of decency.  And I don't include Arlen Specter in that group. He, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins never had me fooled for a second.  Certainly anyone who remained after the revelation of babies in concentration camps, children dying under the abusive conditions Trump and his goons held them in could be held to have no shred of decency.  

Anyone who remained in Trump's regime has some explaining to do as to just what it was that Trump was doing that they thought they could support while retaining anything like human decency.   That he was mostly doing it visibly to People of Color and Poor People instead of affluent whites is something I suspect figures heavily in the inability of so many to see it.  That's not uncommon in the United States, the fact that white supremacy IS, in fact, and always has been our indigenous form of fascism, at times here as bad as almost anything that rose up in Europe in the 20th century, was always largely imperceptible to white People, even those of generally better will.  That misogyny is another indigenous form of fascism is even more imperceptible, and that's a shortsightedness that transcends race and ethnicity and religion.  It even transcends gender as mentioned above.

I do have to wonder how anyone in the Republican Party in 2023 can be held to not be an outright fascist when that certainly has been the absolutely clear nature of the Republican Party since Trump's takeover in 2016 and, I assert, certainly after the 2000 putsch by members of the Bush family and the five worst Republicans on the Supreme Court - remembering that two Republicans even then objected to that outrageous ratfucking by the Court.  I certainly don't trust anyone who chooses to remain in the Republican Party, certainly not after the Trump regime, even from before his attempted putsch.  I think that if we can figure out what twisted, amoral mental processes would allow a Cassidy Hutchinson to remain in the Republican Party still, we might start to understand the media that never learns a single damned thing even as they are the ones who produce the evidence that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger to American democracy, equality, justice and anything good.  I think James Comey is a good specimen of how an egotistical admiration of ones own virtue can co-exist with support for and commission of the opposite of virtue.  The repugnance I feel for him has a specific smell to it, high price perfume over an overall moral rot.  Maybe there's hope for Cassidy Hutchinson if she does some serious soul searching, she's still young enough to learn something if she's honest about herself, first.

I think money has everything to do with it, from the corporate funding of NPR to the wealth of the owners and advertisers of the New York Times to the financial strategy of FOX Lies to keep their hate addicted audience coming back even when they knew they were spouting lies, even as Rupert reportedly thought Trump was insane and dangerous.  That scumbag's greed is the only epic thing about him, other than his love of money.  St. Paul certainly got that right, it is the root of evil.  Though racism is certainly a strong motive in that party, as well. I don't see how anything within the Republican Party of 2023 can be held to be anything but saturated in it.

* There are Women lynched every day in the United States and around the world for the mere fact of their being Women.  That is something massively supported by media, by institutions, by the law.  In every way misogyny is to Women what Nazism is to Jews and Slavic People (would that today's Slavic Nazis knew that) and what white supremacy is to People of Color.  It seeps in so deeply that even many if not most Women believe it's just some natural and permanent condition of human existence, the price of them being alive.  
 

It takes an old Washington hand to make the kind of change that Democrats should make.

Republican's don't need experience or even sentience to do the evil they intend. 

THE GREATEST EX-PRESIDENT in the history of the United States is, indisputably a toss-up between Jimmy Carter and John Quincy Adams.  Adams for his career in the House of Representatives, a champion of abolition, Jimmy Carter for many more years doing so much in so many ways.  I was not enthusiastic for Carter as President but there is no ex-politician whose work I admire more, now.  Of all of those who lived after their presidency, those two have done the most with the rest of their lives.  Neither of them were, notably, successful as president.  John Quincy Adams' attainment of the presidency was marred by the sleaziness that is inevitably to be had when the goddamned atrocity of the Electoral College comes into play and the opposition to Northern presidents by the united slave power.  Jimmy Carter's presidency was a victim of a number of factors, not least among those is the constant hostility to Democrats by big media and small.  The use of demeaning stereotypes of Southerners was, ironically, one of the things that especially the DC and NYC based media used against him.   Some of that certainly figured into the hostility to Bill Clinton and held over to Hillary Clinton, though she was hardly a Southerner.   I've always wondered what the Sulzbergers had it in for them over.   Probably something as petty as that. 

He, like other Governors who have not worked before in Washington, made bad choices in staffing and appointments, more in line with being ineffective.  The Washington establishment doesn't play well with outsiders and the outsiders are seldom equipped to assert themselves.  Carter was certainly a victim of the always unrealistic demands of the left of the Democratic Party and, as is so often the case since 1960, the Kennedy myth.  In the end I think what really did him in was being gamed by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller who gulled him into letting the deposed Shah of Iran into the country, which, of course, set off the hostage crisis that effectively ended any hopes of Carter winning the election of 1980, ushering in the most criminal administration by numbers convicted till to day, the Hollywood created Ronald Reagan who both the DC establishment and big media adored because he gave the rich so much as he shafted the middle-class and the poor.  There is nothing the "liberal media" adores as much as they do  someone who will redistribute wealth upward, those who aren't all in on that can be counted on to either follow the corporate line to their own advantage or to disdain anything like effective administration by a truly progressive president.  We can see both of those at work on Joe Biden, the most effective Democratic President since LBJ, though unlike LBJ he managed to pull out of a hopeless war instead of getting mired in the one his predecessors set up as destroyed the great deliverer of equality and economic justice in 1968, leading to the previously most criminal president in American history, Richard Nixon.   

I have come to truly despise the racket that journalism is, though its necessity is an admitted reality.  It was that would-be, self-promoted alternative to corporate media that did so much to open my eyes as to the reality of self-seeking and corrupt journalism, National Public Radio when I noticed the abrupt change of tone between the coverage of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the beginning of when I came to regret all those donations I'd made to "public" radio.  After that it was other "alternative" organs of the media which I saw may not have been corrupted by corporate largess, as NPR and PBS certainly were, but which were as counterproductive in their unrealism.   The more idealistic they pretend to be, the sooner they cave. 

The Progressive magazine was the first subscription I dropped largely out of a realization that it was pretty useless in terms of realistic political action.  That massive asshole, the self-righteous Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff played an enormous part in my disillusionment with the Madison Wisconsin alleged radical POV.  I knew Hentoff was an a-hole before saying Hentoff was an a-hole was cool.  When he went to work for the fascist-right it didn't surprise me, I'd already identified that as a certain feature of the, especially, Marxist "left" in the neo-conservatives.  In the years since I've been online and have looked ad depth into the archived publications of the Marxists and near-Marxist "left" and seen how many of them sold out, some of them for their profit and as a boon to their careers in journalism.  I have, as well, due to reading more of the primary material than was ever available to me before, come to believe that any determined secular, atheist, materialist ideological orientation will eventually, in more ways than one, destroy the actual left of radical redistribution of material wellbeing equally.   There was not any Communist subjected to that legendary martyrdom of red-scare blacklisting who I know of who was not all in on supporting one or another of the greatest enslavers, oppressors and mass murderers in human history.  Though there were some non-communist lefties who got unjustly sucked into that due to their unwise and naive association to actual Stalinists and Trotsyites and, later Maoists, though Hollywood legend and published myth of the passion of the commies had made such targeting more informal and less an aspect of House Committee show hearings than in the low point of HUAC.  

Other organs of the "alternative" lefty media to disillusion me similarly were The Nation magazine, especially after it was bought out by it current owner, and In These Times.  While there are certainly some good people who wrote and still write for all of those, the history of those publications and their current in-house ideologies have been a boon for the Republican-fascists.  The ideology of "free speech-press" absolutism" is one of the worst of those among those who work in the media, especially those who claim to be lefties who support equality.  Holding that someone, especially in the mass media has "a right to lie" is a certain basis for fascism to win.  Media corporations, like all corporations, will, eventually prove to be anti-egalitarian and if not explicitly so, will demand abstract principals of corporate equality and professional privilege that will redound to the benefit of those with money and, so, power.

All of this is to get to the current media campaign to destroy Joe Biden's hopes of reelections and, with that, the hopes for any kind of real democracy to survive in the United States, certainly any hope of doing what he has done more than any Democratic president since LBJ, making real progress towards economic and legal equality.

There is a lesson in the history of Democratic presidencies in the post-WWII period.  Truman was an old Washington hand and won election after his first term in the wake of FDR's death.  Kennedy was sold as young and vigorous and was killed in office.  I think with him you have to put his brother Robert Kennedy whose nepotistic appointment as Attorney General is something which has never been adequately subjected to critical evaluation but which, the more I read about it, a mixed benefit to the country.  His central set of Harvard boy advisors  is, as well, something that needs to be looked at harder and longer than the Ivy League set who has been in charge of doing that has ever given it.  Robert Kennedy's hatred and, especially, disdain for LBJ had no small hand in sandbagging LBJ's presidency in the aftermath of JFK's assassination and one of the biggest landslide victories over the racist, nuclear-war fantasist Barry Goldwater.  

LBJ was another old Washington hand and a Texas politician.  Admittedly that almost certainly  guaranteed a history of corruption (certain states are endemically corrupt, it would seem) BUT AS PRESIDENT THERE IS NO ONE ELSE APART FROM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WHO DID MORE TO PROMOTE EQUALITY UNTIL JOE BIDEN.   I will repeat that the high point of the egalitarian-democratic traditional American liberalism that is in so many ways the opposite of "classical liberalism" came in the early years of the Johnson presidency when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a host of other such programs became the law of the land.  There is no other President in the post-WWII period who did more to further the promises of the Declaration of Independence than that old, crude, vulgar Texan.  Though the involvement in Vietnam is believed to have done in his presidency, RFJ having gone from an anti-communist member of Joe McCarthy's red-hunting staff to the AG in his brother's anti-communist presidency which entangled the country into the war in Vietnam, suddenly discovered he was really a peace-dove and an anti-war campaigner - once Senator Eugene McCarthy showed how vulnerable Lyndon Johnson was by almost winning the New Hampshire primary.  Gene McCarthy's post-senatorial career as an enemy of the Democratic Party is another example of how the "left" has been anything but an effective and reliable force in fighting against our indigenous American fascism which in the same period became the bulwark of the Republican, now Republican-fascist party.  

After that there were the presidencies of three young Democrats, all of them promoting their candidacies on the basis of their inexperience in Washington, Carter and Bill Clinton and in Barack Obama's case his youth and vigor, all of them in some ways trying to go for a repeat of the "Camelot" Kennedy cultism that was the basis of John Kennedy's candidacy and administration.  Clinton and Obama managed to get reelected in no small part due to their opponents being rather ineffective.  I remember someone saying it was his luck that Republicans nominated Bob Dole, someone that no one outside of Kansas liked.  Clinton made some of the same mistakes Carter did in bringing his staff and friends from his Governorship with him, where they were ineffective and at times embarrassing, though none of the many more embarrassing than Clinton who, as the late Molly Ivins said, we had a right to expect he'd keep his fly zipped.  His ineffectiveness as a Democratic President and an inept politician was on full display as Republicans and the mass media attacked him and his staff and made him a far less effective president than he could have been.  I used to say he was probably the smartest man to have been president till that time but one of the least wise.  His idiotic behavior during Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 certainly had a hand in her Electoral College loss to the worst man to have ever been elected president, Trump.  I will never forgive his meeting with the Attorney General as Hillary was under investigation, an investigation that about ran out before he pulled that grotesquely irresponsible stunt.  I blame the AG as much as I blame him for it, she should have known better.    I could go into other problems such as his appointment of the beyond her abilities Janet Reno as Attorney General and others.

Barack Obama's two years in the Senate were an even slimmer Washington experience than John Kennedy's and it showed.  No Democrat since Johnson in 1964 had a better hand dealt to them by the voters and no Democrat has wasted more of what he was given than Obama.  His one big accomplishment, The American Healthcare Act was in every way more an achievement of Nancy Pelosi who, when Obama and Harry Reid were ready to throw in the towel, insisted on it being passed.  Obama idiotically traded things away on the insanely stupid hopes of being crowned "a bipartisan" president by the national media to lying Republican frauds like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, he did that often enough that I came to believe it was an excuse for him not delivering what his own supporters wanted.  Democrats and the country paid a huge amount for Obama's futile attempt to get the love and respect of the people he obviously valued most, Republicans.   Many of his appointments were good but some of them were extremely bad, the corporate "Democrat" Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff one of the worst.  A lot of the good he achieved was through his choice of Joe Biden as Vice President, providing him with the long years of Washington experience that he didn't have and Hillary Clinton who, by that time, had put in the years of learning the ropes that neither Obama or Bill Clinton had.  

Joe Biden is under attack for the thing which has made him a more effective president in his first term than either Clinton or Obama was in their two terms or Jimmy Carter was in his one.   Just as Lyndon Johnson was a far more effective president, especially early in his presidency than JFK was early in his.  I will note that one thing about them, unlike Kennedy, Clinton and Obama, neither of them were a product of the Ivy League level of academic credentialing, the Ivy League level universities and colleges seeming to more often than not be factories for producing anti-democratic gangsters than public servants.  

But most of all I think the success of Biden and Johnson WAS A PRODUCT OF THEIR LONG EXPERIENCE, EXPERIENCE WHICH DOES NOT COME WITHOUT AGE.  The fetish of youthful presidencies, the Kennedy mystique and all that rot has certainly not worked to produce good Democratic presidencies.  When your motives are as corrupt as those of a Reagan (not a Washington insider) George H.W. Bush (a corrupt DC insider and corporate gangster) his son the youngish Supreme Court appointed BUSH II and, like Reagan a governor without much work in DC, you don't need the experience because they weren't working against the corrupt machinery of both the mass media, corporate criminal operations, the political corruption that is endemic at all levels of our politics and, especially, as elevated to ersatz sanctity by that most corrupt organ of our federal government, the Supreme Court.  

To promote equality, justice, ECONOMIC JUSTICE MOST OF ALL, you need a real Democrat who has long years of experience working among the gangsters and crooks and who know how to work things.  That won't come without blemishes and scars, Lord knows I used to be critical of Joe Biden for what he did in the Senate at times and I was very skeptical of his ability to win the election and do things.  But, as I pointed out, the Black Women of South Carolina knew better than I did.  He has won me over as his presidency has gone on, not lost me like the others did.  He got us out of the hopeless, unwinnable quagmire of Afghanistan that Bush II got us into and which neither Obama nor Trump got us out of. I will not forget that Biden first went to Washington as an opponent of the War in Vietnam, I think the lessons he'd learned by the time he got to that seat of corruption bore fruit as he refused to go back on Trump's irresponsibly set deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, though he certainly knew he would take a hit for how it happened and he bravely pulled out of that hopeless mess.  He did what Johnson was gulled by the Harvard Boys into not doing.   And don't believe for a second that any mainstream organ of journalism would slam Trump for the even worse consequences of holding to his deadline, that's something they only do when it's a Democrat. 

I will never again be supporting a "youthful" Democrat of little Washington experience.  I don't ever want another Democratic governor to figure they can do what they might have done in their state to the country because unless it's some kind of Republican corruption, such as Reagan and Bush II committed there and expanded in DC, it won't happen.  It takes an old Washington hand to make the kind of change that Democrats need and so many others hope for.  It won't be someone who is endorsed by the lefty magazines or sites because they're too busy preening in their lifetime extension of the collegiate experience or trying to relive the romance of the hopeless cause of the Marxists or imagining themselves as extras in some red-scare era movie or show.  I'm done with all of that, they were never really in it for real equality or real economic justice or anything real.  I looked at their sites recently and found out their heads are still stuck up the same asses they were in 1968 and, reading the archives online, the left has had its head stuck up since Victor Berger was being disdained as a "sewer socialist".  

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GIVEN THAT IT IS STILL THE RELIABLE ENGINE OF FASCIST MANIPULATION and attaining illegitimate power, that the Electoral College is not being attacked with full force in order to abolish it has to be a conclusive symptom of our own failure to protect democracy and its benefits.  Every voice that is not constantly raised against it, pointing out how Trump and Trumpist Republican-fascism, the Bush II crime spree and Republican-fascism in general openly relies on gaming it with the help of billionaire gangsters domestic and among foreign dictators is a voice that is selling out democracy by default.  

Any political commentator who is not attacking that slave-power imposed atrocity on our political system is a traitor to egalitarian democracy, the cannot even be held to be a supporter of what we traditionally consider to be American democracy.  The Electoral College is among the central corruptions of our system, that along with the anti-democratically structured Senate and the massive corruption inherent in the way the Supreme Court is structured are things that no real supporter of egalitarian democracy could possibly ignore as clear and present dangers.  That it will be hard to get rid of it is no excuse to attack it now and constantly until it is either made ineffective by state laws that respect the national majority vote or by its abolition in favor of direct election of the president.  The Trump scheme worked out by "constitutional scholars," no doubt an off-shoot of such Ivy League fascist schemes as the "unitary executive," could never have been tried if the  Electoral College was not there as an opportunity of corruption.  It has worked twice since 2000 to impose Bush II and Trump, it was the basis of the scheme to steal the 2020 election.  Its got to be destroyed or American democracy will fail and real, egalitarian democracy will not ever happen here.

Against The Pale Facsimile Of Christian Morality and So Slavery to Sin, For Real Freedom

I'VE DECIDED TO GO THROUGH at least some of the lecture For Freedom Christ Has Freed You: The Paradoxical Character Of Christian Liberty by Luke Timothy Johnson.  Not because I agree completely with what he says in it, though I agree with most of it,  but because I think it's one of the most dangerous things in American culture that what he talks about in his first paragraph (at least in my somewhat casual transcription) is so widely and wrongly believed.  And he talks only of the positive aspect of America's "civic religion"  That putrid O'Connor - Rehnquist name for that ersatz substitute for piety and religion, proper.  And because so many Americans profess to be Christians, it is important to explore the relationship between morality and notions of liberty and the real moral restraints that are necessary for any real freedom, as opposed to unequal privileges,  to exist at all and to be a moral benefit instead of a dissipating evil.  Today much, perhaps most of Americans and many Europeans notions of "liberty and freedom" is an amoral and evil practice of dissipation.  The neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and other evil political movements are based in such dissipation.

I will note before what has to say by pointing out Luke Timothy Johnson doesn't seem to much make of a distinction that I think is important, the difference between notions of "liberty" and a responsible, realistic conception of freedom.  That's somewhat idiosyncratic to me and not because of the denotation of the words but what I perceive is the cultural and habitual use of the terms "freedom" and "liberty."  There are things about the ideas that need to be specified and always separated.  I think "liberty" as it is more often used in talk and thinking is tied to an amoral notion of people being able to do whatever they want to regardless of the effects on other People and living beings, the environment, etc.  That "liberty" is inherently anti-egalitarian and inevitably destructive.  Freedom, if it is to be a virtue and not mere amoral license,  has to be restrained by the damage doing what you want to do causes to People, to animals, to living organisms, to the environment AND TO THE GENERAL CULTURAL CONTEXT IN WHICH SUCH FREEDOM IS PRACTICED.  It is, inevitably, limited by the rights of People and the needs of animals and organisms and the environment, it has to be exercised in a context which propagates the common well-being of People and other living beings and, so cannot be unimpeded and unlimited.  Any good society has to set limits on freedom, all freedoms, including those idolized by American ideology, most of all freedom of speech and, I would say the far lesser items of "freedom of the press" and, yes, "freedom of religion."   I don't think any moral or even rational egalitarian democracy can refuse to suppress ideologies and, yes, even religions of demonstrated danger to the lives and rights and the decent living of People and other living beings.   I think it is one of the things we are living with that the "new left" the commercial "counter-culture" and the Warren Court rather stupidly gave such libertarian notions free of what were traditionally considered conventional restraints and THE LANGUAGE OF SUCH LIBERTY to the traditional form of American fascists, the white supremacists and the self-seekers of selfish "liberty" the rich and those who were to become rich in their silly imaginings.  I think that is a huge part of how America got from the advances in equality from the late 1960s to the 1970s to where we are today.

I will assert that in the context of the Americas and Europe, at least, such a notion as responsible moral freedom is inevitably tied to the egalitarian morality of the Jewish religious tradition, Christianity being a further development of the radicalism of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel.  Most certainly the letters of Paul who, it should never be forgotten, considered himself a Jew till his dying day.  It is obvious in the use of the story of the Exodus among the "founders" such as Benjamin Franklin and even Thomas Jefferson in the proposed iconography of the new nation that they also saw the Jewish Bible as a fount of American freedoms.  I'm less familiar with that in the context of European countries or other countries in the Americas.  

I am seriously skeptical that within the sweep of history in which notions of such freedom and "liberty" rose to become in any way a part of political and legal reality can be divorced from its prerequisite religious holdings of morality.  One of the best things about the United States, especially within the context of the modern Democratic Party is that you don't have to be Jewish or Christian to fully and, in many cases, more impressively declare AND LIVE OUT out an allegiance to that radical equality and justice.  I have also said I think it has been present in other religious traditions as well, though  it would be dishonest to ignore that even within Christianity and Judaism its opposites have also been present.  I hold it is self-evident that when that has been true it has happened in oppositions to the radicalism of the Golden Rule and other central commandments of that religious tradition.  I think it is one of the glories of the Old Testament that it so impressively confesses the sins of the rulers and priests and rich people of Israel and Judea.   The conventional history of the United States, when it isn't hagiographic lies, has a lot of catching up to do and Florida and other Republican-fascist ruled states and the American media can be counted on to suppress any such introspective that might lead to moral correctives.  I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future they don't saw in half such prophetic critics as the kings did to the Prophets.  Currently its best recognized face is in the Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court and Republican-fascist controlled state houses.

If you want to skip over the introductory material and listen ahead, the lecture starts at about 5:00 here.  

Certain truths of our faith are so fundamental and yet so difficult to maintain with integrity that they must be repeated over and over again to check our tendency to slip and slide away from them into some kind of pale facsimile. Such is the truth of Christian freedom or liberty which is found expressed most explicitly in the Letter of the Apostle Paul. Our contemporary speech that's so dominated, even wrapped in and corrupted by political discourse, even within theology, that believes may be tempted to believe that when they talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness their speech is consonant with the Good News. Or that when they espouse some form of Liberation Theology they are advancing the mission of Jesus. But they are not.  The paradox of Christian liberty is not about political problem solving that seeks to adjust the furniture within social arrangements, it is rather about the mystery of God's presence and power within human existence.  And to grasp the paradox of Christian liberty, then,  we must be willing to relinquish our default mode of political speech and enter into Paul's properly religious discourse.  

The entire Republican-fasicst, "Christian nationalist," largely mid-20th century Hollywood bullshit presentation of Christianity, which is a totally denatured merely symbol waving secularized Protestantism,* mixed up with white-supremacist notions of Americanism, is, of course, not Christianity any more than it is actual American history.  It is what is on display every single time any Republican speaks about Christianity in a political context.  That such notions as "liberty" and "freedom" are tied so intimately into that dysfunctional dystopian mythology is, of course nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus either in Paul's presentation of it or in the Gospels and the other letters of the New Testament.   

As a strong supporter of liberation theology I can agree with what LTJ says in so far as even an authentic Christian theology of liberation has to be understood as something which is juggling fire.  But given the context of The Gospel and Epistles in the context of the Hebrew Biblical tradition, which centers around the liberation of The Children of Israel and the Prophetic critique of the political economy among the Children of Israel, any attempt to remove the Gospel from political and economic life is, I think, wrong.  But any political entanglement with Christianity is fraught with potentials for serious moral corruption THOUGH TO IGNORE THE MORAL NECESSITY OF POLITICAL ENTANGLEMENT IS A GUARANTEE OF MORALLY CORRUPT AMORAL GOVERNMENT.  Talk about being innocent as doves while being as cunning as adders.  It is such a difficult line to tread between political necessity and moral exigency that it's probably safest to admit right up front that constant reflection to prevent evil must be part of the process.  Only by constantly checking for moral adherence can such a thing hold together.  Look at the present situation in that tragic land, Nicaragua for a good example of the potential moral corruption that springs from any political program of "liberation"  so claimed by those seeking to rule.   I've gone over the reality of "liberty, equality and fraternity" in the French Revolution and, relevant to the next section of LTJ's talk, the slave-compact which is the American Constitution, the vehicle in which political liberty (in the mandatory imagination of Americans) drives through our history to the Trump dominated America of today.  The talk goes over something that could not be more relevant to our situation now.  It should never be forgotten that slavery and genocide were the law of the land for most of the time that the Bill of Rights has been part of the Constitution.   Indeed, neither of those has passed into the past.  

But let's start with some social realities.  Paul's language about slavery and freedom should be startling to us precisely because it was forged within a political context in which slavery was not only real but was omnipresent.  The Roman Empire inherited the practice of slavery from the Greeks and through military conquest massively expanded the number of slaves throughout the empire. And though ancient slavery had no racial dimension, and although it was at least theoretically possible for slaves to win manumission the actual experience of slavery was, nevertheless, demeaning, arduous and dangerous.  Some highly educated Greek slaves, to be sure,  served in households as scribes and tutors and poets  and musicians, such as was the great first century philosopher, Epictetus.  Countless others were worked to death in mines and mills.  And most significant is that all slaves were, under law, property rather than persons.  And they could be ill-treated, sexually exploited,  tortured and even killed at the whim of a master.  There were millions of slaves in the first century Mediterranean world, they constituted approximately ten percent of the population.  Across the entire empire and up to forty percent of the population within Italy about two to three million people.

That Paul would understand  the hardship of being under the power of another is clear from the extended period of time, between four to six years that he, himself, spent in local and imperial captivity, writing at least five of his letters from prison.  He could wear the self-designation of "slave of the Lord" and "a prisoner in chains" in more than a metaphorical sense.  

And that Paul's readers were intimately acquainted with real slavery is clear from the presence of slaves within his community.  The scribe Tertius who took Paul's dictation when he wrote to the Romans bore a slave name, "the third,"  number three.  The runaway slave [Onesimus] of Philemon  had become a co-worker in Paul's mission.  And Paul exhorts household slaves and masters concerning their respective responsibilities.   So when Paul speaks of slavery and freedom in religious terms he does not speak as some kind of Olympian remove from the harsh realities of social existence.

I think one of the most common misunderstandings in Christianity is that Paul urged slave-owners to stop treating those they held in slavery as slaves but as " beloved brothers".  If Paul, within the milieu in which he had to operate, was forced to treat the general ubiquity of brutal chattel slavery as a given and something which many of those he converted to an approximation of Christianity would be very familiar with and likely were bound up in, that's no reason we can't go beyond that.  As certainly as he struggled with his own imperfect practice of his conception of Christian virtue against his own unconverted personal life, he would have had to deal with social conventions and customs and habits even among those who had become converts to his Christianity.  Paul's confessed weakness about doing what he wanted to even when he knew it wasn't compatible with the Gospel is one of the rare things that is actually endearing about him.  I think it is a common misreading of Paul that so much of what he presents as personal confession and religio-social critique is mistaken as commandments of normative conduct and law making.  It is shocking how much of the reading of Paul totally misses his deeply subtle reasoning and persuasion.  

I have, also, discussed the attraction of the slave-ridden Roman Republic among the so-called "founding fathers," the slave-owning, almost to a man slavery-friendly group of rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the form of anti-democratic government we are saddled with.  It is clear that they were not in any way friends of general freedom, not only within the milieu in which they operated but going on into the future, they set many a booby-trap that would go off if any great move towards equal freedom, equal justice and, especially, economic justice were seriously pursued by even a majority of voters.  I would go so far as to say the discourse of the Gospels and the letters, even with their accommodation to the slavery within the culture they were written tends towards equality and freedom whereas the secular discourse of the American Constitution and the Supreme Court rulings have an actual, demonstrated effect of always acting as a roadblock for that equality and, so freedom.  I think the structure of court rulings and the legal system make any reform of things far harder in secular government than changes in religious thinking.   Though a lot of that is due to the usurpation of powers by the Supreme Court which our written Constitution has done nothing whatsoever to overturn and correct.  What gets corrected is the rare instance in which the Court uses that usurped power to promote equality under the law.  The Roberts Court is destroying all of that and all of the legislation to that effect.  The "traditional-Catholics" on the Supreme Court are as bad as the first Catholic on that blasted Court, Roger Taney.  Confession of evil is the first step in overcoming evil.

*  The understanding of the Republican-fascist, Protestant "Christian nationalist" alliance with Republican-fascist "traditional-Catholicism" is a product of the decision of racist TV "ministering" money and power seekers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to try to harness the independent force of the Catholic anti-choice movement, changing their traditional being OK with abortion in order to make common cause with them to dominate American politics.  It is, of course, ironic because much of that Protestant cultural milieu was viciously anti-Catholic, though among such people a little irony to get lots of power and, so, cash is a price they're very willing to pay.  Of course, none of it has anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus or the Letters of Paul.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama Posted Late Due To Computer Problems - Dianah McCorry - Dark Matter

Dark Matter

Kevin Corrigan
Chet Siegel
Ed Herbstman
Dennis Pacheco
Alexis Lambright
Anna Sale  RADIO HOST
Rob Webber JANITOR
 

Written by Diana McCorry
Produced by Jonathan Mitchell
This story was inspired by listener Christopher Tunnell

This is such a short play that I am going to post a provocative Youtube featuring Pavel Kroupa, an eminent scientist who believes "dark matter" is a myth.  

It's always interesting to find out that so many things that have been presented as certain knowledge are far from certain.   It makes you wonder how much of the "popular understanding of science" is a bunch of ideological or professional assertion that is just waiting to be destroyed.  I've mentioned before how much of the biology I was taught as reliable science has been either greatly modified or entirely overturned.   I think that scientists should be more modest in their claims, the credibility of science would probably benefit greatly if they'd start doing that.

I will say that though I hadn't looked at the site for a while before going back to post this, one of the best new audio drama sources, The Truth, has suspended production.  Considering the number of excellent dramas still available for hearing at their site, please go give them a try.  I assume the extended sponsorship commercials at the start of the videos are still paying and it might encourage them to resume.