"I've already contacted my Representative, Mr. Blumenauer, but I wanted to reach out to you directly to let you know how critical I believe your role in upholding the republican institutions of this nation is now.
The conclusions of the Mueller investigation and, in particular, the shamelessness of the Republican Party in evading and denying those conclusions as they relate to the criminal conduct of this President, make it clear that if this is not the moment for impeachment there never will be, and if the House Democratic caucus does not use the impeachment process to uphold those institutions that they will not BE upheld.
Regardless of the foreseeable betrayal of the nation by the Senate GOP there is no reason not to begin proceedings against this President and his failure to faithfully uphold the laws of the United States.
Impeachment. Now."
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Impeachment
After today's release of the investigation into the 2016 election and the despicable performance by the lickspittle who is notionally my nation's chief "justice" officer, the choice of the way forward is brutally clear.
Either the United Stated House of Representatives opens impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump.
Or the United States becomes Putin's Russia, where "truth" is what The Leader says it is and the residents are subjects, not citizens.
Forget the man's obvious senile incapacity. Forget the self-dealing, the lies, the performative cruelty, the emoluments. Simply concentrate on this; a foreign power meddled in the internal politics of this country. The current President knew of it, did nothing to alert those responsible for preventing it, and, instead, expected to profit from it.
Does that excuse the U.S. meddling in other nations' internal business?
Of course not.
Does that justify turning a blind eye to the current Administration's role in what happened in 2016?
Of course not.
And then...consider all the things I've cautioned you to forget. The lies. The corruption. The vile eagerness to run the nation only for the rich, the white, and the notionally-Christian. The brutal vindictiveness. The crass eagerness to embrace Naziism. All the other lawbreaking, including recommending that federal officers break the laws and promising pardons if they do. The reality that the orange sonofabitch thinks he's a king.
If this Congress does not impeach, we might just as we stop kidding ourselves about being a "republic of laws, not men".
It's really just that simple.
Either the United Stated House of Representatives opens impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump.
Or the United States becomes Putin's Russia, where "truth" is what The Leader says it is and the residents are subjects, not citizens.
Forget the man's obvious senile incapacity. Forget the self-dealing, the lies, the performative cruelty, the emoluments. Simply concentrate on this; a foreign power meddled in the internal politics of this country. The current President knew of it, did nothing to alert those responsible for preventing it, and, instead, expected to profit from it.
Does that excuse the U.S. meddling in other nations' internal business?
Of course not.
Does that justify turning a blind eye to the current Administration's role in what happened in 2016?
Of course not.
And then...consider all the things I've cautioned you to forget. The lies. The corruption. The vile eagerness to run the nation only for the rich, the white, and the notionally-Christian. The brutal vindictiveness. The crass eagerness to embrace Naziism. All the other lawbreaking, including recommending that federal officers break the laws and promising pardons if they do. The reality that the orange sonofabitch thinks he's a king.
If this Congress does not impeach, we might just as we stop kidding ourselves about being a "republic of laws, not men".
It's really just that simple.
Thursday, April 04, 2019
Winter of my discontent
Sometimes it's hard even for me to remember, but I'm "old".
I'm over 60. I've left "late middle age" and entered the early stages of "elderly".
Mind you, I don't "feel old". I can see the age spots. I can see how my muscles have dwindled from the fullness of adulthood to that lean stringiness that seems to characterize age. I have all sort of aches, ohhellyes, and as of last week I'm bionic in both hips. Ugh. I'd forgotten how irking recovering from that surgery was.
But I don't feel like I've suddenly jumped two decades ahead from the sun-in-splendor of my forties. I don't feel ready to go down to the grave quite yet.
And yet, there it is. If I have twenty more good years I will be phenomenally lucky. I'm not dead yet, but my death - like a dragon on the roadside, to use Bill James' wonderful image - is increasingly visible. I won't make it into midcentury, and the bulk of my life is now part of history, and not future.
Not only am I now "old", I'm a very particular kind of old.
Born in 1957 I'm part of what I believe is called the "late Baby Boom" population cohort in U.S. society. I came of age - grew from late adolescence to early adulthood - between 1967 and 1977, so the way I look at the world around me is very much shaped by those years. Which were, as much as any period in American history, suffused with promise. The technologic and engineering promise that is perhaps best symbolized by the lunar landings of 1969. But also the social and political promise of the Civil Rights era, and the events of Vietnam and Watergate that led to what appeared at the time to be a great rejection of the ideas of an imperial America and a royal presidency.
It's fashionable now to mock the pretensions and naivete' of the Sixties and early Seventies counterculture. And, yes; that ideal and many of the people who embraced it were silly and naive and full of much of the poison that eventually killed the whole notion.
But for a time, and for me much of the time that I grew to a man's understanding of the world around me, my country seemed ready to live up to some of its noblest ideals. Freedom from want. Freedom of speech. Equal justice under law.
Yes. I know now those were largely illusion. I know now that even then they were flawed, and that many Americans hated them and fought them. But those were the times that made me. And that, perhaps as much or more than anything else, is what makes this time so bitter.
Because since 1980 I've watched my country reject those high ideals. In part simply because many of my "fellow citizens" would prefer immiseration to sharing prosperity and peace with "those people"; the dark, the queer, the poor. In part because many other of my fellow citizens would rather accept that the nation should fail "those people" rather than force a fight with the racists and oligarchs and theocrats. I've watched as malefactors of great wealth, people like like Rupert Murdoch, have worked diligently to turn my countrymen into aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes. Worse; aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes who insist that either the nation sway to their intolerance or that there be no nation at all.
Sure. I know that my country was founded by rich white guys and designed to be run by rich white guys for rich white guys. But it had seemed to me that this could and would be changed. That We the People would come to fully embrace the ideals of the documents we were taught to recite in school, y'know, "life, liberty...establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility..?" That stuff?
But that, instead, through my adult life, I've watched as the "conservative" people of my nation become meaner, smaller, more vicious, more angry and more vindictive and despite this obvious decline and fall take over more and more of the nation.
Despite being less than half of the country I've watched them steal two presidential elections and dominate the congress and the statehouses. Instead of arguing whether we should divest more of our empire sooner rather than later we now have a solid minority that insists on eternal war against phantasms like "radical Islamic terror" and "immigration". Instead of finding ways to reduce inequity and bring more Americans into comfortable prosperity we're fighting a rearguard action against legislation that shoves wealth upwards and further punishes the poor and disenfranchised. Instead of trying to decide which level of environmental health is healthy enough we watch as safeguards on poisons and pollutants are derided as "overregulation" and reduced or removed, as the people whose profits depend on the disregard of the public's health and welfare are placed in charge of "protecting" that health and welfare.
Instead of the promise of my youth, I find myself increasingly trying to defend the barest of minimums against the return of the predatory feudalism of the Gilded Age.If you wonder why I write so little here, it's because I have lost so much hope that anything I can say will do any good.
I don't intend to stop fighting these people. In the American Experiment to lose is to die, and though I'm old I'm not yet dead.
But it's brutally sickening to have to be fighting what I thought were battles won in my youth.
I never thought I'd see myself in twilight struggling over that same dark and bloody ground tens of years after the bright promise of my dawn seemed to sweep over it.
And yet, here I am, and here you are, too.
I'm over 60. I've left "late middle age" and entered the early stages of "elderly".
Mind you, I don't "feel old". I can see the age spots. I can see how my muscles have dwindled from the fullness of adulthood to that lean stringiness that seems to characterize age. I have all sort of aches, ohhellyes, and as of last week I'm bionic in both hips. Ugh. I'd forgotten how irking recovering from that surgery was.
But I don't feel like I've suddenly jumped two decades ahead from the sun-in-splendor of my forties. I don't feel ready to go down to the grave quite yet.
And yet, there it is. If I have twenty more good years I will be phenomenally lucky. I'm not dead yet, but my death - like a dragon on the roadside, to use Bill James' wonderful image - is increasingly visible. I won't make it into midcentury, and the bulk of my life is now part of history, and not future.
Not only am I now "old", I'm a very particular kind of old.
Born in 1957 I'm part of what I believe is called the "late Baby Boom" population cohort in U.S. society. I came of age - grew from late adolescence to early adulthood - between 1967 and 1977, so the way I look at the world around me is very much shaped by those years. Which were, as much as any period in American history, suffused with promise. The technologic and engineering promise that is perhaps best symbolized by the lunar landings of 1969. But also the social and political promise of the Civil Rights era, and the events of Vietnam and Watergate that led to what appeared at the time to be a great rejection of the ideas of an imperial America and a royal presidency.
It's fashionable now to mock the pretensions and naivete' of the Sixties and early Seventies counterculture. And, yes; that ideal and many of the people who embraced it were silly and naive and full of much of the poison that eventually killed the whole notion.
But for a time, and for me much of the time that I grew to a man's understanding of the world around me, my country seemed ready to live up to some of its noblest ideals. Freedom from want. Freedom of speech. Equal justice under law.
Yes. I know now those were largely illusion. I know now that even then they were flawed, and that many Americans hated them and fought them. But those were the times that made me. And that, perhaps as much or more than anything else, is what makes this time so bitter.
Because since 1980 I've watched my country reject those high ideals. In part simply because many of my "fellow citizens" would prefer immiseration to sharing prosperity and peace with "those people"; the dark, the queer, the poor. In part because many other of my fellow citizens would rather accept that the nation should fail "those people" rather than force a fight with the racists and oligarchs and theocrats. I've watched as malefactors of great wealth, people like like Rupert Murdoch, have worked diligently to turn my countrymen into aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes. Worse; aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes who insist that either the nation sway to their intolerance or that there be no nation at all.
Sure. I know that my country was founded by rich white guys and designed to be run by rich white guys for rich white guys. But it had seemed to me that this could and would be changed. That We the People would come to fully embrace the ideals of the documents we were taught to recite in school, y'know, "life, liberty...establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility..?" That stuff?
But that, instead, through my adult life, I've watched as the "conservative" people of my nation become meaner, smaller, more vicious, more angry and more vindictive and despite this obvious decline and fall take over more and more of the nation.
Despite being less than half of the country I've watched them steal two presidential elections and dominate the congress and the statehouses. Instead of arguing whether we should divest more of our empire sooner rather than later we now have a solid minority that insists on eternal war against phantasms like "radical Islamic terror" and "immigration". Instead of finding ways to reduce inequity and bring more Americans into comfortable prosperity we're fighting a rearguard action against legislation that shoves wealth upwards and further punishes the poor and disenfranchised. Instead of trying to decide which level of environmental health is healthy enough we watch as safeguards on poisons and pollutants are derided as "overregulation" and reduced or removed, as the people whose profits depend on the disregard of the public's health and welfare are placed in charge of "protecting" that health and welfare.
Instead of the promise of my youth, I find myself increasingly trying to defend the barest of minimums against the return of the predatory feudalism of the Gilded Age.If you wonder why I write so little here, it's because I have lost so much hope that anything I can say will do any good.
I don't intend to stop fighting these people. In the American Experiment to lose is to die, and though I'm old I'm not yet dead.
But it's brutally sickening to have to be fighting what I thought were battles won in my youth.
I never thought I'd see myself in twilight struggling over that same dark and bloody ground tens of years after the bright promise of my dawn seemed to sweep over it.
And yet, here I am, and here you are, too.
Monday, April 01, 2019
President Baldrick's Cunning Plan
As part of the massive GOP performance art project to convince their idiot rubes base that the patrie is en danger of being overrun by hordes of illegal flesh-eating zombie immigrants (or something) the Trump Administration has announced that it will cut off all aid to three Central American (or, "Mexican", as we MAGAts like to call them) nations; Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
We can save a lot of time and nonsense by beginning this discussion with the acceptance that there is no actual "border crisis", that immigration is not an existential threat to the United States, and that anyone who attempts to convince you that #1 and #2 are actual things is trying to sell you something rather like a bridge, or some Nigerian oil minister connections.
The thing about this, though, is that given the conditions on the ground in central America this is either the stupidest Stupid Trump Thing Ever or perhaps the most cunning of Steven Milleresque Cunning Plans.
Life in much of Central America is pretty Hobbsean; nasty, brutish, and short. We, the People, own a shitload of the responsibility for that, given our repeated and malicious meddling in Central American affairs ranging from the support of loathsome caudillos from Arias through Somoza to Rios Montt all the way back to the diddling of American corporations such as United Fruit and the filibustering days of people like William Walker.
One of the main reasons there ARE troubles south of the US-Mexican border is because the U.S. has helped ensure that conditions in those places - never conducive to good government and social stability to begin with, given their Spanish-colonial and post-colonial history - have made it difficult for the locals to simply survive.
When I talked about this almost ten years ago I pointed out the obvious:
But that would be assuming that you WANT to put out the fire.
As I've also said here before; the GOP in its current incarnation has nothing substantive to offer the non-plutocrat/non-theocrat constituency. Its entire policy agenda consists of returning the U.S. to the social, political, and environmental conditions of 1899. A New Gilded Age, in other words, with everything that implies for those of us not Rockefellers, Goulds, or Carnegies.
So, if the GOP is to gain power in a representative polity it MUST present the temporarily-embarassed-millionaires with another reason to vote Republican. Hence the booga-booga scares about tricksy transgender ladyboys lurking in the girls' bathroom. Hence the frantic insistence in the God-given right to Own Every Semiautomatic Weapon Ever Made. Hence the - as here - insistence that the Browns are Coming To Kill Us All.
And I think this is what this is.
If you treat it as actual foreign policy it's blindingly moronic. You have internal problems in neighboring nations, so you ensure that the relative pittance you've been devoting to helping those neighbors ameliorate the problems doesn't get used as a lever to try and force their dysfunctional governments into being more functional, but simply goes away. You're not trying to solve anything with it. You're just pulling it out from under them.
But...if you treat it was a sort of stupid-person's-idea-of-a-smart-idea that's really intended to ensure that those problems continue and provide you with your immigration Reichstag fire?
That's actually a stupid kind of cunning. You're making trouble for your nation, but making political gains for your party.
And that, my friends, is the State of the Nation.
WASF.
The thing about this, though, is that given the conditions on the ground in central America this is either the stupidest Stupid Trump Thing Ever or perhaps the most cunning of Steven Milleresque Cunning Plans.
Life in much of Central America is pretty Hobbsean; nasty, brutish, and short. We, the People, own a shitload of the responsibility for that, given our repeated and malicious meddling in Central American affairs ranging from the support of loathsome caudillos from Arias through Somoza to Rios Montt all the way back to the diddling of American corporations such as United Fruit and the filibustering days of people like William Walker.
One of the main reasons there ARE troubles south of the US-Mexican border is because the U.S. has helped ensure that conditions in those places - never conducive to good government and social stability to begin with, given their Spanish-colonial and post-colonial history - have made it difficult for the locals to simply survive.
When I talked about this almost ten years ago I pointed out the obvious:
"The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.If, indeed, your neighbor's house is on fire it would seem the heights of ignorance to turn off the little garden hose you've been using to help wet down the flames.
So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything wil be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real (i.e. white) Americans who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.
As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.
It is your business when your neighbour's house is on fire."
But that would be assuming that you WANT to put out the fire.
As I've also said here before; the GOP in its current incarnation has nothing substantive to offer the non-plutocrat/non-theocrat constituency. Its entire policy agenda consists of returning the U.S. to the social, political, and environmental conditions of 1899. A New Gilded Age, in other words, with everything that implies for those of us not Rockefellers, Goulds, or Carnegies.
So, if the GOP is to gain power in a representative polity it MUST present the temporarily-embarassed-millionaires with another reason to vote Republican. Hence the booga-booga scares about tricksy transgender ladyboys lurking in the girls' bathroom. Hence the frantic insistence in the God-given right to Own Every Semiautomatic Weapon Ever Made. Hence the - as here - insistence that the Browns are Coming To Kill Us All.
And I think this is what this is.
If you treat it as actual foreign policy it's blindingly moronic. You have internal problems in neighboring nations, so you ensure that the relative pittance you've been devoting to helping those neighbors ameliorate the problems doesn't get used as a lever to try and force their dysfunctional governments into being more functional, but simply goes away. You're not trying to solve anything with it. You're just pulling it out from under them.
But...if you treat it was a sort of stupid-person's-idea-of-a-smart-idea that's really intended to ensure that those problems continue and provide you with your immigration Reichstag fire?
That's actually a stupid kind of cunning. You're making trouble for your nation, but making political gains for your party.
And that, my friends, is the State of the Nation.
WASF.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)