Why I Am Not A UU With A Prelude About Advent

Making plans for doing an Advent series I was tempted to go back to the one I attempted and botched for reasons of illness and politics last year based on Walter Brueggemann's Gift and Task, a fine book of commentary on a Protestant lexicon LECTIONARY for "year 2" of their liturgical cycle, if I have the terminology right. It was written for the year 2017 and, aside from the peculiarities of the misfit between the liturgical and civil calendars, more or less matches the church year that begins on Sunday.

But I decided to go with a multi-denominational Advent this year, one based partly in Catholic resources, the commentary on the readings for Sundays and partly on Protestant sources. I'm no longer satisfied with only one denomination, good things having been said in so many of them. I should have started before Thanksgiving as one of the resources I'll be using does. Fr. Scott Lewis a Toronto based scholar, whose excellent online comments on the Catholic Sunday liturgy is posted a week ahead which gives you a whole week to read the readings and think about them. For beginners like myself, we might get more from a go-slower approach. I hope to, as well be using the excellent commentaries of the late Sr. Verna Holyhead from her commentary on the Year B lectionary, Welcoming The Word in Year B.

At least that's the plan. I will post other online resources from the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church and others, as I look around.

 

--------------------------

Not related, in looking around I came across an old article, Why “Unitarian Universalism” is Dying by David Loehr. an interesting and rather devastating criticism of Unitarian-Universalism that I think has things that mainstream American liberalism could learn something from.  As Loehr ministered a UU congregation I might have called it an internal critique but Loehr disclaims Unitarian Universalism, calling himself a "religious liberal".  He was also a member of the "Jesus Seminar".  

While I very much encourage people to read his essay because he raises many excellent points,  I don't agree with everything said in it about liberalism.  For a start I reject the assumption that the tradition that comes down to us from late 18th century secularism, scientism, etc. is the same thing as the far more radical though often intersecting tradition that was an outgrowth of Christian social thought out of a much earlier and much more explicitly Scriptural inspiration which has been in line with much we consider "liberal" since the early centuries of Christianity and, before, in Christianities older sibling, the Mosaic faith. I think to mistake the two is not only to get it wrong but it also leads to getting more wrong. The "enlightenment" tradition was already counter-productive for the struggle for social-justice by the end of the 18th century, the most appaling features of the United States Constitution, placed there by rational people, devotees of secular scientism, many of them early American Unitarians. It continues to sap the life out of the far more consequential and productive religious struggle for equality and the sustainence of life.

I don't share Loehr's belief in the impossibility of rational, informed people to believe that there is a divinely sourced aspect of life as we experience it because that is how it really is. There is the flavor in that which discounts the fact that many, even some of the most accomplished mathematicians and scientists, have been able to both say the times tables and to pray, despite what people believe Clarence Darrow claimed. Certainly you could contrast the failure of, for example, the Catholic Church to peter out the way that Loher bemoans the, probably, by now, decimation of the Unitarian Universalist sect. I doubt there has been any Unitarian who has been a greater and more exigent intellectual than the thoroughly up-to-date, informed intellectuals such as Hans Kung and Karl Rahner, I've read more of the trinity of those 19th century UU thinkers Loher rightly mentions, Channing, Emerson and Parker that I'll bet most UUs have and none of them could hold an intellectual candle to many modern Christian, Jewish, Islamic intellectuals. That as, for example, The Catholic Church fully participates in rational thought and the promotion of learning, scholastic, academic, scientific, etc.  - it's servicing of elite education is, in fact, one of the most scandalous things about it just now. But the article is very full of hard questions and points to consider.

One of his points around the issue of abortion is something I had been thinking of writing about at length, I do think his points are some that need to be addressed. Though that I have to use the masculine pronoun to describe either of us points to the fact that as males, we can hardly be thought to have the primary right to consider the issue. THAT WOMEN ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN BECOME PREGNANT AND DEAL WITH THE ISSUE OF BEARING A CHILD TO TERM MEANS THAT THEY,NOT MEN, HAVE THE PRIMARY CREDIBILITY TO ADDRESS THAT ISSUE. Which is why I'm reluctant to talk about it more than I do.  That inescapable quality of its appurtenance to women and not to men is not a negotiable or dismissible part of the issue.

This passage is a good example of both the good and the bad sides of the article:

Good social critics —both conservative and liberal ones —have written about the narcissism of the biases reflected in the Seven Principles/Banalities/Dwarfs. But you will seldom hear them from UU pulpits, and never read them in the movement’s guardian of orthodoxy, the UU World. Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Jonathan Rauch, Jim Sleeper, Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Todd Gitlin come quickly to mind as among the many authors who wrote widely-read critiques of the racism, sexism and narcissism of the liberal culture.

First, the "Seven Principles" are the often given banal set of "principles" that was meant to give the UU sect something, something, perhaps anything to stand for while studiously avoiding any "supernatural" commitment. As Loher notes they are indistinguishable from vague platitudes of conventional mid-20th century secular liberalism. I would note that they're something that "moderates" wouldn't have much trouble with,which is to say that there is little in them that would fuel something like the Civil Rights movement or a successful abolition struggle. I think they could never fuel much of anything because to be credible and effective you need more than a vague feeling of niceness to make a real committment to the difficult, hard and dangerous means to really change the universal habit of human selfishness in a better direction. The utopian political ideologies of the secular, scientistic type prove that an attempt to do that out of scientific assertion produces genocide and doesn't really change anything.

I do think his criticism of the attractiveness of seeing Black people who are subject to racism as hapless victims instead of survivors is one that white men must also take a secondary role in discussing. But I think his list is rather a disaster. There were plenty of religious critics of that condescending, disgusting and disempowering attitude whose criticism was more apt and effective, as exigent internal criticism can often be. And the subsequent reviving of extreme and widespread racism and sexism under the political movement that Sowell, Steel, Sommers etc. have been associated with is even more discrediting of their ideas. Loher may not realize it but the list he gives is as much a part of the secular, scientistic tradition that accounts for the moribundity of the UU movement as secular, scientistic flowing from the liberalism of the 18th century type. 

 

I utterly reject any assertion that Camille Paglia belongs on any such list.  I have no idea why he put her on it except that she's a foolish cultures concept of what an intellectual is, and modernism has produced one of the stupidest excuses for a serious intellectual scene in the history of human culture.

There has been plenty of such internal criticism, certainly in overtly theistic and scriptural liberalism, I don't think anyone is more exigent a critic of that kind than the Black Liberation theologians, other liberation theologians, Feminist theologians, etc. Walter Brueggemann's critique of mainstream Christian liberalism is extensive and unflinching.  That the devotees of respectable niceness is unaware of that doesn't surprise me and if the  UUs of Austin are anything like those I've known in Northern New England, that's what it is.  When the minor and, I expect, about spent movement of atheists' playing church started I wondered why they didn't just go to the UU church, it was pretty much the same thing.  What that most effective critic of Unitarians, Garrison Keillor noted as "the church of the brunch" was a replacement for religion that was ever going to do anything. 

I could go on.  I do think David Loher's criticism of American secular, scientistic, moderny liberalism has much to ponder, I think he'd have done better to consider the internal criticism of Christian religion as perhaps the more effective and proper criticism of it because a lot of it is the same problem.   But, then, that started as soon as the Children of Israel started back sliding early in Exodus. 

In Praise Of Moderation On Thanksgiving

Watching my old pirate disc of The Star-crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski I find that you can even have watched that one too many times.  Don't think I need to see his Christmas Story again.

 

Even something as funny as the work of Jean Shepherd gets old.  If you haven't over indulged, you can find pirates of it on YouTube. The one I checked out before this didn't exactly have the synchronization right.  Don't go full screen.

 

Still, it's better than watching a football game. That never much changes.  I'd rather watch a business meeting. And I don't want to watch one.

Geri Allen - Dark Prince: Two Performances

 

Geri Allen, piano Vernon Reid, electric guitar

Buster Williams, bass

Lenny White, drum

Geri Allen, piano

Ralph Armstrong, Bass

Ralph Penland, Drums

Rita Reys - Cole Porter's It's Alright With Me

 

 

1961, I know it's Pim Jacobs playing piano, I don't know who the others are. 

 

Update: Something quite different from 1963.

 

After You've Gone - Rita Reys & Dutch Swing College Band

 

 

Thanksgiving weekend in the States, my experience is that few people are reading blogs but I will keep going on a reduced schedule.   I promised more music would be posted, it got crowded out by politics. 

In accepting a pardon Michael Flynn is pleading guilty one more time.   The House should lose no time in sending him a subpoena as soon as Trump is out of office.

Part Of A Plan - Convincing A Winning Margin Of Our Present Opponents While Realizing We Are Probably Not Going To Get A Majority Of Them With Us

I have always held that there are people who are fully corrupt Republican-fascists and without some dramatic conversion experience that we don't have the power to bring to them, they are not those we can or should waste our time trying to convince. Those with guns should be disarmed, those who have the weapons far more deadly to democracy of a TV or radio network, a highly promoted internet presence should be disarmed, too, my favorite weapon to do that with is enabling those they lie about to sue them into the flames of hell, my second favorite one is removing their license to broadcast or cabloid-cast.

I think there are many of them, millions, maybe tens of millions that our best hope is in giving them the honest feeling that they are better than being a member of the Trump cult of being a greedy, racist, hate-filled, resentful Republican-fascist. There are certainly a lot of those who are deluded and corrupted with the encouragement to give in to their baser desires, the kind of thing that TV and the movies and hate-talk media are so good at, enslaving people with their worst weaknesses.

If the left really, sincerely let people know that instead of rejoicing in their degradation we had confidence that they could be better, many of them might realize we want what is good for them. That isn't something you're going to get by making fun of them, of pumping yourself up by feeling better than them, of trying to make them feel small and stupid. There are those who are stupid but more who are greedy and selfish and who love to do what works for them so much better than it works for the left, feel better than other people and we won't reach them.

By the way, there is a reason that that works so much for them than for the left, it is the substance of the Republican-fascist ethos that inequality favors them whereas an egalitarian democratic ethos cannot be sustained on the love of that kind of hierarchy of worthiness.

We are not going to convince all of the tens of millions who voted for Trump that we want what is good for them, at best we can convince a winning margin of them that we want what's good for them. I think some of those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but who then voted Republican after that were put off by Obama's clear love of alleged meritocratic hierarchy. And his weakening the things that would have helped the middle and underclass in the recovery, in his desire to be called "bi-partisan" by the media, of having Republicans like him and to please quislings like Joe Lieberman didn't help at all. Rahm Emanuel was an early warning signal that he was going to throw his own base of support under that bus.  The extent to which Nancy Pelosi was the one who, to some extent, was able to pull us from the worst consequences of Obama's bad choices in those first two years will probably always be underestimated.

I am hoping that Joe Biden who is far less of an habitual elitist than Barack Obama can cure some of that and we will see if he does. I'm hoping that his appointments of figures from the Obama years are of those who had more of an egalitarian commitment than many of Obama's appointees did. I'm still hoping he appoints an education secretary who is a product of public education instead of another Ivy Leaguer-private school product. While there are those who went to the Ivies who can break out of it, they've had their day, just look at how many of the Trump criminals were their classmates.

We need a winning margin and that is not going to be found anywhere else except in convincing those who didn't vote to vote with us and those who were duped into voting against their own interests that Democrats will try to do what's better for them. But there is no way which we can trade off equal justice, under the law AND IN THE ECONOMY for that. They either sign onto equality or they won't ever be reliable partners in securing and defending egalitarian democracy and a decent, sustainable life. We're all in this together or we are going to all go down together.

One thing we have to do is get rid of the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate structure, those things that the fascists have constructed the unitary executive theory and those things which have empowered lies to be the most effective weapon against democracy. We have to make it clear that the goddamned Supreme Court does not get to make corporations persons, that artificial entities like corporations do not have rights and they don't get to radically alter the protection of freedom of speech by making billionaires have billions of times more "speech" than those without money. Buckley v. Valeo has the name of one of the premier fascist families of the mid-20th century attached to it for a reason. That's who benefited from it.  Lots of counter-productive mid-20th century "liberalism" and even more of that "leftism" was as counterproductive as could be.  We've got to junk that, too.

More Hate - "How Dare You"

You don't have to take my word for it, here's what a document from the National Archives noted as to who, exactly, it was who was allowed to vote for the First Congress along with the First President and those who elected the legislative bodies which ratified the Constitution and who adopted the Bill of Rights in the First Congress.

At the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, only 6 percent of the population–white, male property owners–was eligible to vote. 

 

The adoption of the Bill of Rights as it was badly written by the First Congress was hardly a matter of metaphysical legitimacy, nothing that any government that prevents the majority of its citizens to vote can have such legitimacy, it cannot get that from the habit of its substance being asserted to have such legitimacy.  And, as I will never stop pointing out, the recent Supreme Courts in their gutting of the democratic reform of the Voting Rights Act as certainly as that led by Roger B. Taney has used the language of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to thwart the legitimate will of The People on anything like an equal basis. 

In his great study of the framing of the Constitution from an economic analysis, the 20th century historian Charles Beard noted that far from being the expressed will of even those white, male, adult, propertied land-owners considered to be eligible citizens voted on the matter.  Starting with the decision to call the Second Congress, the wrote the Constitution, to call them to write such a document or what it was to be like was not ever put to anything like a vote of those the "founders" decided they wanted to govern [see the chapters dealing with the ratification process].  The delegates to the Convention were not generally the product of anything like a popular vote and the ratification of the document was, if anything, a determined effort by the landed aristocracy to push it through against all possible objections by an informed public.   

That is a matter of historical fact, the expansion of the vote to include anything like "universal suffrage" of white male citizens of the United States didn't come until much later as states gradually, very gradually in some cases, expanded the franchise to even all white male citizens. Some states, at the same time EXCLUDED, BY LAW, FREE BLACK MALE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND RETAINED THE EXCLUSION OF ALL WOMEN. 

 

In every way, every extension of just the legal definition of who got to vote was more legitimate than the original Constitution was at the time of its adoption because nothing like a majority of We The People was either permitted or enabled to express their consent to it.  

So if you accept the principle that the only legitimate government is one that has the due consent of those who are governed, the U.S. Constitution, as an 18th century relic which has not fundamentally, even now, been amended to full equality and a full protection of the most sacred act of government, a vote which will both be counted and made to count, the original Constitution and even as it stands now falls entirely short of that. The fact that Trump's bumbling lawyers are trying to reproduce what the Bush family lawyers were able to do in 2000 and that the process doesn't reject that out of hand shows how dangerous it really is. If Trump and McConnell had succeeded in staffing the courts with neo-fascist Republican goons they'd have succeeded by law as what their efforts may do in fact, thwart the will of the decided majority in the election we just had and which has yet to conclude.

That we retain the dangerous relic of allowing a lame duck president to wreck as much as he can to leave the person who beat him in the election to deal with it is just another thing that the worship of the "founders" and the deification of the Constitution not only permits but, now that it's been done, will quickly become the norm for the worst people in our politics. The thing doesn't work to produce egalitarian democracy, it is a minefield to prevent even the conception of democracy which the white, male property-owning class of the 1780s feared would thwart their pursuit of wealth and power. The struggle to expand the franchise was violent and bloody and cost enormous amounts for The People in general and the results are anything from secure, as the Roberts Court and Rehnquist Court showed when they attacked the voting rights of Black People, etc. in their gutting of the Voting Rights Act on the basis of that Constitution. Making it a thing above criticism and of mindless reverence is dangerous. 

 

That's how I dare to say what I did. 

Hate Mail - Fuck The First Amendment That Opened Us Up To The Domination of Putin

Now that I've had coffee and looked at the comments, what do you think the chances are that Donald Trump ever heard of the Open Skies Treaty or the two specialized planes that were used to keep an eye on the Putin regime's military activities as an early warning of their moving on the countries that border Russia?

I think it is virtually a certainty that if you gave him a Hollywood dreamed up "truth serum" and forced Donald Trump to tell you everything he knew about the Open Skies Treaty or the two planes that his regime ordered destroyed to make compliance with our obligations under that treaty impossible, he would be unable to tell you anything about it because like everything else done under him, he's too lazy to have learned about it.

What Trump's regime is doing, as described by Rachel Maddow is certainly being directed by Putin's regime, as so many things that Trump's regime has done, there is no other conceivable motive for that being done. And either Trump is doing Putin's bidding knowingly - which I don't believe for the reason given above - or those who are part of his regime are knowingly doing it with the greatest likelihood that they know they are doing what Putin wants them to do on the general principle that they know Trump is his agent and that what that petulant, truculent 75 year old baby-man would instruct them to do if he knew what his sponsor wants is exactly what they did. I would include the recent James Comey figure of Mark Esper in that, seeing that he knowingly was a part of the early stages of making sure that a likely Biden administration would want to honor not only the treaty obligations Trump was illegally pulling out of but that that extremely important activity could not be easily resumed.  If I were in the Biden DoJ, I'd get Esper on record as to why he did what he did and at whose bidding he did it. He just might want to save his own ass.

When the Roberts court was opening up our elections under Citizens United, they were warned that they were opening the American government up to the direct influence of foreign powers, governments, but they chose to interpret the dangerously general First Amendment in order to leave us vulnerable to that influence as earlier courts had left us at the mercy of domestic and as corrupt billionaires and millionaires - Putin being just a more successful gangster of the kind who such rich people typically are. There is a direct line from the language of the First Amendment to the gutting of clean-elections laws WHICH WERE ADOPTED BY BOTH DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS STARTING AFTER THE CORRUPTION OF NIXON IN WATERGATE WAS EXPOSED AS A FACT and Trump's regime, not only Trump but those who he and Republican-fascists in the McConnell Senate have put into positions where they could do these things and, after some of the same species of law-breaking by Trump was fully exposed and proved, kept them there to do exactly what they are doing now.

It all comes back to the desire of corrupt "justices" on the Supreme Court to enable their party to win elections through lying and to steal elections through the manipulation of the Electoral College, softening up the country by having the mass media feed a susceptible percentage of the electorate complete lies such as those repeated by Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney (or "Sidney" wish they'd make up their minds which it is) Powell and the rest of those who should be disbarred if not indicted.

It really all does come back to the permission given by the Supreme Court for the mass media to lie with impunity and that is a direct consequence of the inadequate language of the First Amendment of the Constitution adopted in the far, far from democratically elected First Congress. The more I've looked into the actual record of how the Constitution was written, ratified and the early years under it, the seedier and more anti-democratic it obviously was. There is no more metaphysical legtimacy to it than any currently rigged election in the most benighted place in the country today. And thanks in no small part to the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, there are more of those today than there were when the Voting Rights Act was in actual operation.

THAT is how we have a presidency which is being run by the dictator of Russia as a Republican administration. Our Supreme Court knowingly, under warning that that's what they were doing, opened up to that corruption. 

 

That Bill of Rights as well as much of the rest of the anti-democratic Constitution written by some entirely sleazy characters (slave owners are uniformly that) is dangerous to a modern democracy,  it shouldn't be an object of reverence, it should be replaced by one that not only protects but promotes egalitarian democracy and its protection from its active and way too successful enemies.  I'm for knocking the fucking founders off of their plinths along with the Confederates.  It will have to be done sooner or later if this democracy thing is to long endure and not perish from the Earth.

Think Of This When You Hear "The Founding Fathers Intended . . ." - Your 18th Century Constitution On Full Display

 

Have The Courage To Admit What Will Have To Be Done To Protect Us From the Murdochs, The Limbaughs and the Trumps They Of The Fascist Media Bring To Power

 

 

You'll notice that every example that Chris Hayes gives for the source of the lies that he gives the dangerously polite name to is the same, electronic media, FOX, Limbaugh, the Murdoch operations, and most tellingly, a monster created by TV and the mass media, Trump.

In the face of him seeing the problem clearly he declares at the end of this very good presentation of the source of the real and present danger to egalitarian democracy, the idea of representative and elective democracy and life on Earth, itself, he says he doesn't know that solution to what it is that created this disaster in the English speaking world - it's hardly confined to English speakers but we are among the worst of the worst, Russians at least have the excuse for never having had anything like a democracy of that kind.

Well, the obvious solution is to make it a capital crime for media corporations to lie, something that will get their licenses to broadcast or be distributed electronically pulled, permanently and those responsible banned from ever having anything to do with a media company ever again. As even Hayes notes, this is a matter of life and death, not irrationally suspected of being a matter of the extinction of the human species, certainly, as we are seeing in the United States producing a climbing number of deaths, already rapidly climbing to at least a half a million killed by Trumpery, FOX, the Republican-fascist party and the lies they have spread to the susceptible population.

This isn't a matter of us eternally answering the dishonest question that is designed to shut down consideration "where's the evidence," which when answered only generates the claim that the evidence is bogus or inconclusive. The thing that the tobacco lawyers relied on to cover up the known fact that tobacco is a deadly, addictive substance. The evidence is all around us and grows in verification ever more and yet that dishonest lawyer-liar tactic and the fear of being blackballed or silenced by the conventional "first amendment" absolutist conformity will always keep us, the side that accepts fact, the truth, the findings of legitimate science, the product of rigorous consideration of those, stooped in a pose of impotent indecision.

The dangers of acting on behalf of the truth that allows us to have the potential of freedom and doing to others what we would have them do unto us that allows freedom to exist as a common good instead of a malignant libertarianism, the dangers that we may fail are real. But not trying is a guarantee of us suffering what failing to act with due consideration and courage is a guarantee to produce at least as bad and likely much worse. This is as much a lack of courage as it is a lack of the respect for the truth of those susceptible to the Republican-fascist, Murdochian swindle that those who believe in democracy have suffered. And some of the worst of those setting us up have been alleged members of the left, especially those with an ideological attraction to anti-democratic ideologies and the idiotic idea that the truth is not knowable. Like most of the intellectual poses of that kind, it is a self-impeaching stand because it has to pretend to be an exception to its general principle. We've been suckers for it for too long.

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.