Game recognize game

Now.

Then.

These numbnuts are deeply ignorant, profoundly stupid, and utterly incompetent. It's their good luck, and the rest of our misfortunes, that their MAGAt party is even more ignorant and stupid and cares nothing for competence so long as they get the performative spite and malice they crave.

And there is no remedy for them in the Constitutional system. No checks. No balances. Nothing.

The United States is now a Stupid Fascist state in fact, if not in name, and if We the People don't want that, well...history shows the path from autocracy to republicanism is ugly, brutal, and very often futile at least in the short and even medium term. 

The Revolution of 1789 led to military dictatorship by 1800 and decades of ruinous war. The Revolution of 1917 led to partisan dictatorship by 1921 and decades of brutal immiseration. Our own revolution was only prevented from a similar fate by a unique combination of individual probity and isolation from neighboring Great Powers.

So, no. There is no Good Way past this disaster.

The trope of 1776 is that roughly a third of the then-American colonies was Loyalist, a third were rebels, and the remaining third just wanted to keep their heads down. Logistical difficulties, strategic incoherence, and Great Power rivalry with France ensured the rebellion became revolution and overthrow of the ruling order.

We certainly have ruling incoherence and economic difficulty from the fascists.

But we have no Power to come to our aid, and the internal division is even less favorable; the fascists run from about 30% - the true hardcore MAGAts - to 40% and the "heads-down" lumpen herdbeasts are another 30-40%. The police and military will obey The Chief Executive; there is no competing "Garde National" or rebellious militias to opposed regime gunfire with rebel gunfire.

We are, in fact...

 

I honestly have no words of hope or encouragement. I can't figure out a way to overthrow these sonsofbitches short of actual violent rebellion, and history also shows how often that goes badly for the rebels.

The time for phone banking and postcard writing is past.

But I can't stand the idea of simply bending the knee to these people. Is it time for building IEDs? How can that ever work? 

I can only stand, shaking with rage, as my country devolves before my burning eyes.

Today's Wordle: Who Said It?

 “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections...They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy (the nation and it's promise)...the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within." 

Trump? Or Adolf?

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of...youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?"

Trump? Or Adolf?

We Report. 

You Decide...whether you want the promise of this nation...

...or this madman.

This is fine, too...

Responding to what seems to have now become a relentless drumfire of "WTF-how-does-this-even-republic?" shit from the Party of Gingrich Roy Edroso, whose opinions I normally respect, says that therein lies a seed of hope:

"I talked the other day about a Wall Street Journal poll that had the right-wingers convinced America had lost its way, at least partly because it showed that a lot of people didn’t share their narrow point of view. Polls are also showing that the wingnut campaign to make normies adopt their swear-word “woke” ain’t working.

And we all saw the recent election results in Chicago and Wisconsin. As with the “red wave” that never came in November 2022, the voters knew something that the wingnuts and trimmers predicting defeat didn’t know — that conservatives are actively and obviously fucking shit up and normal people want no part of them."

To which my response is: yeah, and normal people don't want any part of murderous thieves and criminals, and, yet, it took the Red Army and D-Day and the fucking 8th Air Force to beat down Nazis and Fascisti, and tens of thousands of dead on Okinawa and the smoking ruins of Tokyo to whack Imperial Japan.

When I look around me what I see is:

On the Right, a frothing shitpile of - thanks, Driftglass - bigots and imbeciles enthralled by plutocrats into jamming the 20th Century into the woodchipper for fear that their sprog might just possibly see a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

On the Left, a handful of powerless savants like Sanders trying to prevent that , and

In the middle a bunch of gormless flour sacks who can no more govern themselves than a cat can understand medieval Latin.

Self-government is HARD. 

Fucking hard.

You've got to pay attention. You've gotta read - especially read, since video "news" is not "news", it's "entertainment" and has to be by the design of the medium - and think and then act. You've got to look behind what public figures say. You've got to - and given the history of anti-vaxx I hate to use this term but it is what it is - do the research. You've got to understand history, and politics, and human nature. You have to listen to others, and do more than just suck in what they say but watch what they do, who with, and why.

So I get it. There's probably about a quarter of the human race that can do all that AND make a living AND have a social life, and if push comes to shove it's the "self-governing" thing that gets the push.

But that - now more than ever - is a problem.

Because the Right has figured out that they don't need to win over everyone, or even a majority of someones. If they have enough bigots and imbeciles - and enough people who don't know or understand or care what the bigots and imbeciles are doing - they can run the table.

I don't get the sense that those people in the "middle" are getting better at knowing or understanding or caring. More importantly, if they are, voting like they are. 

Or voting at all.

If they did no Republican would get more than 27 percent - the Dick Cheney crazification value - of the vote. Ever.

But they do.

Often.

And then they do shit like they did in the Tennessee lege, and the public response - outside the dirtbag Left - is "Ho hum. Those whaaaacky Republicans! How about those rascals?"

So no, Roy. This isn't a seed of hope. This isn't fine.

This is how you lose your fucking republic.

So the choice seems pretty simple to me. 

But, then, I'm headed to the fucking camps when the MAGA Regime takes over in 2024, so I got skin in the game.

Interestingly, in his usual Friday blog post Edroso seems to get it. While discussing "Why Republicans lie all the time" he says:

"Contradicting reality makes them feel powerful. They're not gonna pretend to care about what people they despise think because they believe themselves beyond the reach of voter consent. It's up to their enemies to show them they are not."

And there, my friend, is what I've just spent 500 words pointing out:

If you're not willing to whistle up the B-29s, then sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, because the liars, bigots, and imbeciles have won.

It's really just that simple.

And speaking of that...

 ...the post just  minute ago? Where I mentioned being kinda irked that We the People had looked the other way as "..a dive-bar's-full claque of criminals, fools, grifters, and clowns..." known as the Bush Administration started Gulf War 3?

Yeah, well. I linked to the posts I'd written about Iraq and after I'd posted the last one, went pawing though the old posts and found this, written about U.S. torture in 2014:

"And therein lies the horror and the tragedy that is the current Republican Party.

This country - every country - needs political representation for "conservative" ideas. The GOP as presently constituted is not "conservative"; it is a monkeyhouse of fiscal unreality and irresponsibility (when your answer to every fiscal problem is "tax cuts" you're not even kidding yourself anymore...), social toxicity (racism, sexism, every "ism" conceivable outside of "straight rich white people"), and scientific and economic weapons-grade moronity (climate change denialism, Christopathic theocracy, deregulatory fanaticism).

And torture."

 And this was years before Trump came gliding down the Golden Escalator.

So.

It's not him.

It's them.

And if that doesn't scare the shit out of you, you should go to your doctor and ask to have your head examined.

Die Braunen Battalionen

 

One year on, a reminder.

These people, and millions more like them, were not joking and were not playing. They intended to seize power by force. If you got in their way they were perfectly willing to kill you.

They are still there. They still want the same things.

And their "leaders" - the suit-and-tie-or-power-pumps sockpuppets like Greene and Cawthorne and Cotton and, or course, Trump himself - are happy to use the levers of power to please them while ruling the rest of us with as much of an iron hand as they can.

I have absolutely no idea 1) how you deal with these people - they don't want to play nice or compromise or "govern" with us; they want us silent and, if not silent, dead - or 2) how, in fact, you "govern" a democratic republic with them there.

I wish I had more optimism about this. I wish I thought that the wingnut right was just posturing.

I don't think that. I think that in less than a year they will pull all the levers they tried in 2020, and I think they'll succeed, and I think that, just as it worked in Germany in 1933, it will work again. 

And once these new "conservatives" take power they will not let it go.

So those of us who are not of their faction and who are their enemies will be presented with a horrible choice; fight them as they deploy all the power of the State, or let them have their will with us.

And that, frankly, is simply a choice between dying on our feet, or on our knees.

Quo Vadis?

John Scalzi has a fun post up at his site talking about the Tangerine-hued Shitgibbon. It's pure schadenfreudelich entertainment, except for this:

"I feel sorry for many of my individual friends who are Republicans and/or conservatives, who have to deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement, even if I belong to neither."

Because 1) if you're a "Republican" or a "conservative" you made this golem (as Scalzi points out), and 2) without Trumpism there are neither "Republicans" nor "conservatives".

Seriously.

Think about it. Because if you’re still a Republican at this point you’re either one of the deplorables or…what? Still in it for the tax cuts in perhaps the least-taxed of the industrial democracies? Hoping for a juicy piece of privatizing the Bonneville Power Administration? Wishing on a “deregulation” star that your chemical company can return to the fucking pre-Love-Canal Era of Dump Yer Shit Where Ya Wannit?

I mean…take the fantasy economics, the theocracy, the bigotry, and a vague yearning for imperialism (a new American Century) out of the GOP platform and what’s left? The Cuba Embargo?

First, I have absolutely zero “sympathy” for anyone who votes to foist that vile pottage of stupidity and used food on me.

Second - since I swore not to write about this election this isn't about this election - my point is that there is no way for "Republicans" or "conservatives" to "deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement" since fucking Trump IS their fucking party and their fucking movement. “Conservative” in the US has come to mean a credo-like faith in many things that are objectively vile. Trump has not made them more vile – he’s simply stripped off the pretense of civility that made them seem less vile.

For example; think about the Republican and “conservative” position about women. "Women" as in "what role do women play in American life?"

You know what the GOP/conservative version of that role is. Kinder, kirche, kuche. From marital subservience to forced reproduction to forbidden lesbianism to workplace harassment and underpayment to day-care to...well, to pretty much everything the GOP default position is; grab ’em by the pussy. Make ’em do what Daddy knows is best. Patriarchy, beeyotches!!!!

What is Trump doing...other than saying that out loud?

The Big Problem of the GOP, though, is that if you dump Trumping...what is left?

What other than DLC-style New Deal Democratic policies, that is..?

Without Trumpism all the GOP really has left is stooging for open plutocracy, and I can’t imagine even at this point that the Trumpenproletariat will be willing to openly go all D.B. Norton Motor Corps on 9 NOV.

I wonder, though...anybody willing to wager all the money in their pocket against all the money in mine that sometime over the next four years we see a mashup of the “alt-right” Stormfronters and the teabilly Trumpeters going full-on Blackshirt? The GOP becoming a genuine neofascist/white nationalist Fronte National?

Pre-Trumpialites Erwache!

Before our recent return to domestic comb-over authoritarian blowhard populist demagogues in the form of a certain thick-fingered-vulgarian-who-shall-not-be-named the last serious attempt by white people outside Louisiana to create a Pure and True Aryan Nation took place in, of all places, southern California at a place called Murphy's Ranch.

This thing was, supposedly, going to be the SoCal Berghof for the American Leaders of the Aryan race back in the day. Maybe. The story isn't exactly clear:

"...(LA) county records say a Jessie M. Murphy purchased the property in 1933...(however) there is no other record of her, and no one in the area ever saw her. The name Murphy Ranch, however, stuck.

Norman Stephens was an engineer with silver mining interests in Colorado, and apparently financed the operation. His wife, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, had a strong belief in metaphysical phenomena, and apparently fell under the spell of (a mysterious but persuasive German named Herr) Schmidt, who claimed to have supernatural powers.

Schmidt convinced the Stephenses that once Europe collapsed and Germany emerged victorious in the war, anarchy would break out across the country, and law and order would break down. His plan was to create a command center in which the National Socialist community would wait out the war. They could then emerge from their mountain retreat and impose order on society."

Needless to say, this plan had...ummmm...a few flaws.

But pieces of this California Alpenfestung remain, and you can wander through them today. It sounds like a fairly surreal experience, even for southern California.

In Oregon, I'm afraid, our homegrown fascists are both less imaginative and a lot less photogenic.

Fasci Trumpiani de Combattimento

I know I've promised not to write about U.S. politics, but this particular piece of merda is getting so brain-warpingly obvious as defy ignoring.

First, it's fairly clear that not only is the humanoid meat-object known as "Donald Trump" a perfect distillation (or, perhaps, continuing the meat analogy, a perfect sausage-filling) of the mendacious, belligerent Know-Nothingism, racism, sexism, Tentherism, and violently stupid individualism (in the sense of not just eliding but actively fighting against the notion of any sort of social or political "commons") that has overcome the modern Republican Party, and

Second, the bulk of the meat-like humanoid objects known as "Republican voters" are juuuuuust fine with that.

They don't care if what he says are obvious-to-a-retarded-gorilla lies, provided that the lies are what they want to hear. They don't care if his "policy ideas" are bone-stupid as the stupidest notion dredged up from the bottom of a bottomless well of stupid provided that they accord with the sort of ideas they like.

They like his moronic belligerence, his brainless bellicosity. They like his blatant racism and sexism. They applaud the inanity of, for example, his bloviating about Middle Eastern refugees murdering scores while bellowing about the unconstitutionality of denying firearms to white whackaloons who actually DO murder scores.

Back when I taught history to high-school freshman (which, by the way, is like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat; it just annoys the cat and it frustrates the hell out of you) I would have a handful of the more thoughtful kids ask me how in the hell a people as civilized as the Germans of the Nineteen Thirties could fall for the obvious lies and warlike bullshit of someone like Hitler and his cronies, or the peoples of Russia and China believe the propaganda and follow the murderous instructions of people like Stalin and Mao.

(Note that I never had a single kid ever mention Mussolini and Italian fascism. It was like the whole twenty years of European history had disappeared...)

I told them that it wasn't as simple as that. That a lot of time people in bad situations, or who believe themselves in bad situations, see and hear what they want to believe will help them out of those bad situations. I would tell them about something else that happened in the Thirties - the New Deal - and how FDR and his people weren't some sort of pre-free-love hippies and woo-woo socialists but hardheaded American aristos (a lot of them, anyway...) who looked around and saw the horrible examples of the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy as the sort of bad places that this country could go when people's lives were wrecked by poverty and unemployment.

So when I look at this Trump idiot and the idiots who love him I want to choke my country by the throat.

This country is NOT in a "bad situation" that throwing a couple dozen "investment bankers" in Joliet and revamping the tax code to put the blocks to fucking Pfizer and Merrill Lynch and Verizon wouldn't help solve. Christ, we're the 2,000-pound gorilla of nations economically and militarily. If we have problems, if some of our citizens feel like we're in a "bad situation", it's largely because we've decided to go full-on Gilded Age. Fucketty-doo-dah! If you think that letting two boys marry, or suctioning out a snowflake baby, or letting a guy who snuck in from Durango last month trim your lawn has placed the United States in a "bad situation" then you need to pull on your fucking big boy panties, not actively consider electing some fucktard who is fundamentally nothing but a dime-store Mussolini, an egotistical, short-tempered fascisti asshole with a bad combover in a real-estate shyster's Armani suit.

But damn near a third of the Republican "base" is doing just that. Don't they SEE how fucked up that is? Don't they see what would happen if they put this fucking nimrod in charge of the executive branch and the U.S. armed forces? As the voice of America?

Or...worse...do they see that and just don't fucking care? Is that what damn near a tenth of my country is? Pasty little fascisti looking for a dough-faced Duce to march them to Washington and kick out the "liberals"?

These damn people...

I'd laugh if this didn't make me want to...no. Not weep. Like I said; choke the fucking life out of these stupid motherfuckers.

(but a huge h/t to driftglass for the wonderful Photoshop of Il Douche)

On their behalf

One thing that used to kind of drive me nuts when I was a GI was listening to other GIs complain about "American society".

First, because half the time what they were complaining about was utter bullshit, the same sort of bullshit that GIs talk about money, alcohol, sex, and politics. It was based on stuff they'd seen on Fox News or Entertainment Tonight or heard on Rush or from some other bomb-throwing moron. It had about as much to do with "American society" as a picture from some girlie magazine has to do with a real woman.

Second, because it was almost uniformly complaining about how "American society" was soft and squishy, coddling criminals and giving money to poor people, worrying about sensitivity and kindness instead of being the sort of tough, hard-assed, "realistic" place that had hacked this country out of the howling wilderness with a jug of 'shine and a coonskin cap, goddamn it. The real problem with "American society" was that Americans weren't enough like Spartans, and I've already noted how I feel about that bullshit.

Anyway, this came up because one of the blogs I follow occasionally is written by a former USAF type. It's usually one of those "change from the inside" sorts of things, with the author trying to highlight things that he'd like to see change about the USAF. This week, though, he passed on some sort of screed from another wing-wiper that has supposedly gone viral. The blog's author says:

"His message struck a chord. At last count, it had been shared more the 23,000 times on Facebook and was popping up in news feeds prolifically. I had Grogan’s message sent to me privately by no less than a two dozen airmen in the last day or so, all encouraging me to share and comment on it."

The referenced "message" is an open letter to...someone - other servicepeople? The U.S. public? - as the writer ETS's from the USAF.

I won't give you the full text; you can follow the link if you want. But the TL:DR version is "You people are petty and soft. You're not worth my service." The message-writer complains that he barely makes $15 an hour and has deployed repeatedly whilst his fellow citizens "...give more attention and respect to stars and animals then we do to those who continue to give their lives for this country." He bitches about Caitlyn Jenner and Cecil the Lion, and that nobody remembers the names of the five guys blown away in Tennessee by "a terrorist".

You all know this guy. He's the guy at your VFW, or down at the local newsstand, or the bus stop, who will rant about "decadence" and "the homosexual agenda" and "political correctness." Tell me you haven't heard this from one of these guys before:

"If we as a society don’t toughen up and grow thick skin then we will definitely lose the battle to those who wish ill will upon us. Perception is reality, and right now we are more scared of speaking our mind and hurting someones feelings versus doing the right thing."

So. Yeah. This guy ETSed...because his fellow citizens are more obsessed with "Dancing With The Stars" than their troops lost in imperial cabinet wars most of them barely understand...or are barely understandable, period? Because "society" isn't tough enough? This guy's problem with taking Sammy's paycheck is that the society he serves isn't a stern, hard, ruthless society, hard as Krupp steel.

Let's remember that this guy was serving in the most powerful military on the planet, one capable of putting a "warhead on the forehead" (as he himself describes his work for the USAF) of an individual mook a gajillion miles away from the shores of North America. That seems plenty "tough" to me. If the public that funds that armed force could give a rat's ass about it because they want to know more about the Kardashians or Cecil the Lion that seems more like a testimonial to the civil peace that armed force has brought rather than a warning that the society needs to become more spartan.

Do we need soldiers? Sure. "Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf", Orwell said. But one of the things that sometimes drives me fucking nuts is that those violent men sometimes forget that their violence is not an obligation on the peaceful sleepers to be as violent as they are. We've seen those sorts of societies, and they are very unpleasant places indeed.

So that's basically what this comes down to; a guy who haz sadz because his country is frivolous and nonviolent. Who is ready to stop taking a government check because of all the fluffy bunny sensitivity around him, who longs for Sparta. His country can afford guns, butter, and "sensitivity" and driver training, that pays him a decent wage to serve all the above - and between pay and allowances he was doing a hell of a lot better than someone working the downstairs at Jiffy Lube part-time - and this dude don't like that?

Wow, sorry, guy.

Cry me a river.

I guess there's always Jiffy Lube.

Why I despair

One of the things that I find most difficult and at the same time most elidable is the persistence of "conservatism" in my country.

I've hammered away at this again and again; outside of the tiny fraction of people in the U.S. making an assload of money for nothing (and I count things like "investment banking" as nothing; moving piles of money from spot A to spot B should be worth about what you make for pumping gas, especially given that its become pretty obvious to me, looking at the performance of my IRA mutual funds, that you could duplicate the "market wisdom" of my "financial advisers" pretty closely by going to the zoo and taking a random monkey off Monkey Island, setting him up in the middle of a big chessboard and letting him fling his poop, and then moving your investment money around based on which square the shit lands in. Jesus.) the tenets of movement conservatism are bad for Americans and America. Bad socially, bad politically, and especially bad economically.

And yet, there seems to be a steady hard nut of about one-third of the electorate that refuses to budge away from this obvious idiocy. And, infuriatingly, I can neither explain nor understand it.

But along comes one Mr. David Grover who, in his comment on one of Pierce's posts, seems to me to nail it square in the 10-ring:

"30% of every OECD country polls fascist. That's just always been the case, for 150 years. In most modern wealthy democracies those people are afraid to express their opinions, because its commonly understood that people who hold those opinions are generally detrimental to the common good. That was the political lesson of WWII.

In the US however they get their own news channels and one-half of the political power, because for some reason around 1980 we all started feeling sorry for the narcissistic fantasists and sentimentalists that call themselves "movement conservatives," who told us they felt bad because they were left out of what they called "the Liberal consensus."

The Liberal consensus was really just an agreement not to let the aforementioned narcissists do what they do best, which is to monopolize the conversation and claim its all about *me* and *my pain* and what about *my people*, which in general prevents us from confronting actual real live reality, like genuinely poor people and genuine disasters like climate change. And we let down our guard, forgetting that these 30% always feel bad, because they really have nothing more to their belief system than a heightened sense of persecution coupled to a heightened sense of their worth. Everything else - their politics, economics, religion, sociology - is an attempt to rationalize those two basic principles: "I oughta be in charge, but my inferiors won't let me."

30 years later people in the media think they're entertaining and sell eyeballs so they give them a seat at the table, and they don't realize the fascists want all the seats and have bad table manners besides. And while the rest of us would like to pay attention to the reality we've ignored since Reagan first pretended he was President, the media and the conversation is dominated by these 30%, who refuse to give up their fantasyland, just as we should have known they would.

I'm not normally reductive when it comes to people, but that these 30% would hallucinate that they're hard done by and at the same time threaten the rest of us over their perceived injury is as predictable as flowers blooming in spring."

The nut graf is in the second-to-last paragraph: And while the rest of us would like to pay attention to the reality we've ignored since Reagan first pretended he was President, the media and the conversation is dominated by these 30%, who refuse to give up their fantasyland, just as we should have known they would.

Yep.

The connection between "for some reason" and "1980", by the way, is no coincidence. The election of Reagan and the whole "Reagan Revolution" was fundamentally the backlash of white people of both parties against Civil Rights. It was the result of the fraying of the New Deal coalition because the uppity nigras, beaners, wimmens, and other assorted dusky- and non-penile-Americans pushed for a place at the table. The wealthy white oligarchs who had been aching to reclaim what they saw as their birthright were able to use the anger of the poor white working-class who felt threatened by this to turn the national story around into blaming the poor people, the unions, and the Negroes for all the troubles in the world. This hasn't changed much since then. Look at us; mired in the sixth year of the Lesser Depression and talking about...deficits? Cutting people off food stamps and Social Security? While the rich are richer than ever and the stock market soars? While we farkle around fighting phantom "terrorists" in Africa and Asia?

Are we fucking mad?

And here's the despair part; a notional democracy cannot function where a third of the public is fascist. Fascism - that is, the belief in the mashup of political authoritarianism and crony capitalism - is perhaps the most pernicious form of government outside of theocracy. It has a terrible facility for retaining the outward flourishes of popular sovereignty while gutting the workings. Having one third of the nation willing to be openly fascist, having a congeries of Right wingnut "news" media that feeds these fascists their own worldview...the resultant trainwreck should surprise no one.

And I honestly have no idea how we reverse this.

The last time it took a massive global depression and a world war brought on by some of the less sane fascists. Assisted by what at the time was a hugely more vital and aggressive Left, a Left that included actual communists and socialists that controlled entire countries and were powerful in many others. It included "mainstream" news organizations much more committed to the ideals of equality and community and much more skeptical of the oligarchies and fascists. It also included an industrialized world that was insular enough that, while the plutocrats were able to play the poorer sections of the U.S. against the better-off in a race to the bottom of the wage scale, at least the industrial workers were protected from the truly desperate poverty of the Third World. While that sucked for Venezuela and Ceylon it didn't for New Jersey and Liverpool.

None of that remains.

The free global movement of capital and trade means that corporations and their wealthy owners can use the poverty of Sri Lanka to destroy middle-class wealth in working-class Detroit and Oxnard. The acceptance of the wingnut pity party as a "valid narrative" means that the centuries of hardship visited on people with dark skin and no penis can be excused and avoided, that the notion that wealth means human value can be exalted once more. The confusion of unbalanced opinion with verifiable facts as a "he said-she said" disagreement means that anyone and anything can be ratfucked, and the ratfuckers are still the same ones that were sending around fliers for Helen Gahagan Douglas on pink fucking paper all the way back in 19-fucking-50.

But to reverse this trend, to beat back these bastards, would take a WW2-level effort. For someone like me it would mean abandoning my home and family and my work to spend the rest of my life fighting this massive heap of bastardy without anything like the support that the people fighting in 1919 or 1929 or 1939 had. It would be becoming my late friend Charles Gittings whose entire later life was consumed by his drive to right one simple wrong; the "prison" at Guantanamo Bay.

A prison that remains open today.

I don't have Charles' kind of courage, the kind of courage that accepts the suffering and woe of fighting the good fight knowing that it is almost certain that you will lose. And it's that kind of courage multiplied ten hundred thousand times over that would be needed to change the drift that I see taking my nation into a dark place that I do not want it to go, where I do not want my children to go. I can see the dangers, but I cannot see how - short of self-immolation - I can aver them, and not even then.

I desperately WANT to hope. I fiercely WANT to find a reason to believe that those tens of hundreds of thousands of people will find the courage to fight back.

But then I think of the massive indifference that Charles met with, on the simple and easily-understood crime of an America that was and is imprisoning people without trial or hope of trial.

And I cannot.