Tuesday, August 02, 2016

Toto, we may not be in fucking Kansas but I think we've been here before...

In the past couple of months I keep coming across stuff like this: apologetics for the Trumpendross that basically claims that "It's NOT about racism, it's about Trump's embodying empowerment for and rejection of contempt for poor white working class people!"

Fuck that dumb shit.

Because these Trumpenproletariat had a perfectly good alternative that offered all the populism, all the ire against the "elites", economic insecurity, offshoring, inequality, and the New Gilded Age, only with 100% less racism, sexism, bombing-foreigners-ism, and the assorted idiotic nonsense that is embedded in a "Trump candidacy".

Sanders.

The C.H.U.D.s that have flocked to Il Douche could just as easily have turned out for Bernie; I mean, if the appeal there was really all about wanting a return to the Good Old Days when a Man could earn a Living by the Sweat of His Brow and not just about hatin' on some nigras and beaners.

Instead they ignored him in droves.

So Trumps appeal has nothing to do with "economics".

It's about hatin' on nigras and beaners (an uppity wimmens and lib'ruls).

I was a trifle too young – only 11 in ’68 – to remember much but what I do remember of the 1968 presidential race was my parents' incandescent hatred of Wallace and LeMay – “the bigot and the looney”, I remember my father the Master Chief calling them, between Wallace’s open racism and LeMay saying that he’d use nukes to win wars.

My sister and I set up our Halloween pumpkins in the backyard on election day, dubbed one “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” and pincushioned them with arrows with the old wooden bow my father had made back in the Thirties.

The economics are missing but in almost all other respects I don't see much of a difference between the Wallace-LeMay campaign and this year's Republican candidate's. It's all about scary dark people and more strength.

So I have no new outrage about Trump that isn’t tempered by my overall loathing of the renegade madness of the bizarre mashup of economic royalism and theocratic triumphalism that is the current GOP. Trumps’s a Republican so that is to say, he’s against civil rights, women not being property, equal prosperity at home and an absence of punitive violence abroad. His “positions” (those that aren’t utter nonsense, like the shitgibbonesque “border wall”) are bog-standard GOP positions, which is to say utterly Gilded Age punching-down punishment of anyone not in the two-yacht family.

So I can watch the latest metastsization of the brain-cancer that has destroyed the higher functions of the GOP since Reagan conned it into submission and Gingrich fed it the monkey brains with the ruminative calm of an arsonist contemplating where to place the accelerant so as to ensure that the shitheap of a madhouse goes up quickly and thoroughly enough to roast as many of the vile coterie of malicious gibbering loons inside as possible.

5 comments:

Ael said...

The Republican party is melting down from the inside and outside simultaneously.

The Democratic party is riven in this new gilded age (Hillary just attended a $100,000 a plate fund raiser sponsored by Warren fucking Buffet! and her primary competitor was a socialist!)

I think that American politics is undergoing a realignment not seen since the Democrats lost the south. Alas, the ultimate re-configuration isn't clear.

I blame the internet.

Big Daddy said...

Like I said when he entered the primary, Trump's message is distilled essence of Teatard id and he got the nomination by stroking the hindbrain of the party, and being less odious than Ted Cruz.
Trump is the ultimate Fox News infomercial candidate, generating ire and quotable soundbites on a regular cycle to keep the ratings humming. I hope Roger Ailes is proud of his Frankenstein monster.

Unfortunately I see Hilary as corrupt, vengeful, more closely aligned to the billionaire class than even GW Bush, and even more unworthy of my vote than she was in 2008 so I don't know what to do with this election. I feel a civic duty a to vote, but the only candidate I wanted is out of the race, and I know that Bernie stickers downtown notwithstanding, my county will go Trump, not Clinton and be overwhelmed by the Willamette valley voting Democrat anyway.

FDChief said...

Again, my whole question with this "HRC is corrupt" meme is...why? Why do you think that?

And my answer is "Because you've been told that over...and over...and over again by people whose interest it is to have you believe it."

Think a moment. This woman has been investigated more than perhaps any other political figure in U.S. history.

What have been the results?

Has she EVER been reliably - not "reliably" as in "the court of public opinion" or "in the writing of some journo ravenous for clickbait" but in an actual, verifiable investigation - been shown to have been "corrupt"; having traded favors for something, having acted out of cupidity or malice?

And "vengeful"? In her electoral positions she's had a fair number of opportunities to stab her political enemies. Has she? Is there, again, any proof of this?

Is she a corporatist Democrat? Yes. Try and find one who isn't; Citizens United and the overall climate of corporatist cash flowing into every level of government means that both parties are swamped with that filthy money.

Is she a rather uninspiring hack? Yep. The tragedy of the Democratic Party is that the furor of the Reagan-Bush years forced the party into a defensive crouch. I was exceptionally pleased to see the DNC reclaim the sort of "U!S!A!" patriotism that the GOP has tried to hug to itself. I'm sick of hearing foreign policy sense described as cowardice or, worse, treason. I'm sick of hearing simple social equality described as black bucks buying steaks with food stamps.

And as I said earlier; the notion that Sanders would Save the Union depends on both a Sanders and a GOP that I don't see as real. Sanders' would react to opposition with the sort of hectoring he uses in the Senate, and the GOP wouldn't let him get any of his policies enacted, anyway. Free undergraduate education financed by a transaction tax? From a House that thinks ALL taxes are theft? Yeah, that'll happen...

And here's the thing; democracy should be more than voting. You say your county will be as red as October. Well...how about getting in touch with the local "Oregonians for Bernie" chapter? Work with them to help get the folks in Deschutes County to see that the sort of things the GOP are advocating are actually WORSE for Deschutes County than a strong federal and state government doing things like opening up job opportunities and shutting down capital flight that does things like shutters lumber mills to ship raw logs overseas and favors agribusiness over small farmers and ranchers?

I know that I'm going to spend the rest of my life working with the Sanders people - actually, let's call them "left-wing Democrats", because the movement needs to outlive Sanders himself - to push the blue parts of Oregon even bluer. Somebody needs to do that good work out in the Red hinterlands.

Why not you..?

Big Daddy said...

I sit slightly chastened and needing to defend myself. I do see Hilary as corrupt because she committed a blatant violation of both the public records laws and information security laws that others would face loss of security clearances and federal indictments for and didn't even get a slap on the wrist. While I think she told the truth on Benghazi and was at worst, stupid, and Whitewater was a Jean Valjean moment, I still think she is too focused on power and personal wealth and not enough on what's right. That was why I voted Obama in 2008 and was disappointed by him. I also think some of her privately stated policies are more focused on getting even with those who opposed her or Bill in the past and again less on doing right for the country.
And you are right, it's time to do some grassroots activism to convince my red neighbors to go at least purple, because the new backlash against Brownback in Kansas shows there is hope.

FDChief said...

Here's Charlie Pierce, responding to the whole "Hillary is pretty much the same as Ethel Rosenberg!!!" meme:

"I worked with her for four years very closely when she was secretary of state and I was at the CIA. I provided her—personally provided her some of the most sensitive information that the Central Intelligence Agency has. She never misused it. She always protected it.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a47445/hillary-clinton-email-michael-morell/

Again; is she a great candidate? No. She's a living testimonial to the degree to which the craven fucking Democrats ran in terror from the New Deal because Ronnie Ray-gun called them commies and n!g#er-lovers. But did she commit a violation of records security (more blatant than Colin Powell and Condi Rice, both of whom used their personal servers for departmental correspodance...)? No.

And I hate to say this, but...politicians are always focused on power (and many on personal wealth) rather than "what's right". Because you can't DO what's right if you don't have wealth and power in our society. I hate that, I'd like to change that - which is why I talk about working with the left-wing of the Democratic Party - but if she is what she is then We the People have helped make her that way.

Largely by electing fucktards who come up with stuff like Citizens United...but, still, We're supposed to be sovereign and we've done a pretty damn poor job of it...