Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Just a few short minutes to midnight

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Sometimes it’s hard to ignore the extent to which our past haunts us. I suspect that most senior news editors grew up during the cold war. That may be why our media culture seems to be stuck in a very retrograde vision of the world. That east v. west pattern was struck deep, and it will take more than a little rain to wear it off.

The current crisis unfolding in eastern Europe is a chilling example of this. If Americans rely on the mainstream media to shape their perception of what’s happening overseas, they will not hear a single skeptical voice regarding our current policy. And if this administration doesn’t get a lot of push-back on this issue, we may find ourselves on the brink of a terminal nuclear war before we even know what’s happening.

If you thought you were safe because Trump exited the White House last January, think again.

The cost of NATO expansion

I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s worth repeating. Nations have enduring interests, and regardless of who is running the country, leaders will pursue them any way they can. If someone interferes with this pursuit, there will likely be hard feelings, perhaps conflict. With regard to Russia, vital interests include, crucially, not being threatened with invasion from the West, particularly. That sentiment is the result of their having been invaded three times since the rise of Napoleon, the last time at the cost of 20 million souls.

When the Soviet Union fell, the United States (under then-president George H. W. Bush) pledged to Gorbachev not to expand NATO any further to the east. The United States quickly abrogated that agreement, bringing Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Baltic states into the alliance through the 1990s and 2000s. Further expansion into Ukraine would bring NATO right to the border of Russia, and they find that prospect to be unacceptable. And yet Biden and his foreign policy team will give no assurance that NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table.

This is nuts. The Doomsday Clock isn’t inching towards midnight for nothing. War with Russia simply cannot happen – so what the fuck are these people thinking?

The pivot to Asia

Speaking of indefensible positions, the Biden Administration is ratcheting up the pressure on China over various policy disputes. The administration tends to point an accusatory finger at Beijing over their treatment of the Uyghurs (with some justice), as well as their policy on Taiwan, Hong Kong, and shipping lanes around the periphery of Asia. There is merit in some of these positions, but it’s kind of hard to argue that Biden and his State Department are acting out of principle.

We can do next to nothing to affect how China behaves. But there are other bad actors amongst the family of nations with whom we have tremendous influence. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Israel … even Turkey relies on us to some extent. The Saudi-led, U.S. enabled war on Yemen has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and yet we’re still shipping arms to MBS. That’s to say nothing of what we ourselves have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.

Worthy and unworthy victims

Talking heads on Morning Joe spent most of the last decade obsessing over Syria and Russian aggression. Now roughly as many people have died in Yemen as during the Syrian conflict, and there’s not a peep out of those fuckers.

Hey, if you want to save lives and help the oppressed, start with the low-hanging fruit … namely those we actively persecute, by our own actions and by proxy.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Making half of us second class citizens

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I heard a few moments of oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health while they were underway. I didn’t, however, get the chance to dig into it until about a week later, when Michael Moore ran the full audio feed on his podcast, Rumble. You can also read the transcript posted on the Supreme Court’s web site, if you prefer.

Either way you access it, it’s pretty ugly, but that’s not surprising. The fact is, we’ve been seeing this slow-motion train wreck coming for decades, and many, many of us chose to do nothing to stop it. But before I get into that familiar diatribe, I want to comment briefly on some of what was said during these oral arguments – specifically, a few reactionary hot takes as analyzed by someone who is not a Con Law expert.

Being neutral on a speeding train

If you listen to the entire proceedings, you will hear Justice Kavanaugh dive into a discussion of precedent. Kavanaugh cited cases like Brown v. Board of Education as fodder for his argument that sometimes it’s appropriate to overturn decisions that are wrongly decided. Legal experts have pointed out that most if not all of his examples were cases that expanded rights, whereas overturning Roe would take rights away from Americans. But he also contended that the court should be “scrupulously neutral” on the question of abortion because, he claims, the Constitution is neutral on abortion.

Kavanaugh affects to consider Plessy v. Furguson as wrongly decided – fair enough. But wasn’t Plessy effectively the court’s way of saying that they were neutral on “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws? After all, the majority wasn’t forcing all states to adopt these laws. If a state wanted to do so, it was up to them. In light of that, what was Plessy, then, if not “scrupulous neutralism”? How can he describe this kind of neutralism as being a positive thing?

Fetishizing enumerated rights

Both Justice Thomas and Justice Kavanaugh appeared to agree with Mississippi’s Solicitor General that abortion was not a right explicitly laid out in our 18th Century constitution. If they mean the word does not appear in the text, they are correct. However, it seems more than unreasonable to expect that the only human rights we should honor must be spelled out in our founding documents.

For instance, is there anything in the Constitution about a right to breathe? How about walking across the street – is that buried somewhere in Article II? Reactionary Supreme Court Justices play this little game all the time. Now, I’m not even just an old country lawyer, but I’ll say this much. It seems to me that what happens under your skin should be your own damn business. That strikes me as the closest thing to a natural right as anything I’ve ever heard.

Ladies choice, please

I have a suggestion for the Justices. Your honors, take this as you will. If you are considering a decision that will relegate women to second-class citizenship, it seems only fair that the decision should be made by those amongst you who are best situated to understand the full ramifications. I’m speaking of the women currently seated on the Court. Let’s let them decide how to move forward on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. You boys just wait in the cloak room until they work it out.

Hey – if you don’t have a uterus, you should have a say in this. Simple as that.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Running out of Greek letters (and patience)

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News of the new Omicron COVID variant is settling in, and people are understandably wary and disgusted. Every time it seems like this thing is ending, this thing is not ending, and there are few things more frustrating than that. Life prior to the pandemic seems like this strange, distant, exotic state of being that can never be entirely restored.

Of course, we really don’t know very much about Omicron. The networks are doing their best to pre-emptively scare the living shit out of everyone. I try to tune out all but the most authoritative voices; nevertheless, it eventually catches up with all of us in one way or another.

The great, untried solution

Now, we know how to get out of this. In case you haven’t heard, this is what needs to happen: rich people need to defeat their hunger for more riches. And if that doesn’t happen, we need to do the work for them. In other words, we need to separate Big Pharma from their excess profits and aggressively distribute their intellectual property (i.e. the formulae for the COVID vaccines) to the developing world.

We need to vaccinate the entire world. The only way we can do that is by compelling these manufacturers to drop their patent rights. With Moderna, it would be easy – the United States participated in their vaccine development. They can compel the others to follow suit. In the medium term, that will help poorer countries protect their citizens. But in the short term, we need to push global vaccine distribution with all of the resources we can bring to bear.

No place like home

What’s just as important as getting people vaccinated in the developing world? Getting people vaccinated in the industrialized world, and that includes right here at home. We’re still seeing almost 1,900 COVID deaths every single day, with new cases in excess of 110,000 daily. That far outstrips countries we have travel bans against, like South Africa, which is seeing about 8,000 new cases and 80 deaths a day – too many, yes, but not a fly on us.

I know – I’ve been making this case for a long time. But it’s as true now as it was in July, and in some ways it’s even MORE true now. For one thing, we know a lot more about how safe and effective the vaccines are, despite the bullshit being thrown up by the right and some on the loony left. For another, we are seeing in real time what happens when you let a virus run rampant. It’s like a massive scientific experiment – let’s see how many freakish mutations we can spawn. And at 110,000 cases a day, the hottest corner of the test mass is right here in the U.S. of A.

Keep your head down, and your chin up

When I started getting take out again regularly, back in the summer, people were just starting to gather in restaurants and pubs the way they used to, pre-COVID. No masks, lots of drinks, and plenty of yakking at one another. Now we’re seeing COVID cases overrun our local emergency rooms. County officials are telling us not to go to the ER unless we’re having a heart attack, stroke, etc.

This is nuts. And it’s going to keep happening until we take action. We need to keep pushing our electeds to take this pandemic seriously, and push global distribution of vaccines and treatments. And we need to do it now.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Keeping an eye on the foreign policy blob

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After a week of nearly non-stop domestic news, good and bad, I’m going to talk about foreign policy. Think of this as the latest in an ongoing series of posts about how bad Biden’s foreign policy is. Frankly, the only good thing I can say about it at this point is that it is better than Trump’s version, albeit not by much.

Longtime readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast Strange Sound (now on hiatus) know that I have been critical of Biden’s imperial world view from the beginning. Since his candidate days, he has de-emphasized foreign affairs. His campaign web site, for instance, included almost no detailed information about his plans in this regard. That was not because he had no plans – it was because he didn’t want to talk about them.

Target Asia (again)

If you watch the mainstream media, you can’t miss the extent to which they are obsessing over China. They don’t do that unless our nation’s political leaders give them the space to bloviate. This is true of the so-called liberal networks, like MSNBC.

Morning Joe, for instance, platformed Indiana Senator Todd Young, who stuck to his party’s current insistence on referring to the nation of China as “The Chinese Communist Party”. (See Young’s pinned tweet about his “Endless Frontier Act”.) Young spent some of his time warning of China’s undue influence in the South China Sea (which, as the name suggests, is closer to them than it is to us). There have been multiple stories, also, about China’s supposed military hardware, like hypersonic missiles, and so on.

Enter the killer subs

This would be laughable if it weren’t so potentially dangerous. The United States accusing another country of throwing its weight around militarily is objectively ridiculous. We have a much, much more muscular presence on the periphery of China than China does. That includes massive military installations throughout the region, thousands of troops, fighter/ bomber squadrons, and a fleets of warships.

Case in point, as Noam Chomsky pointed out recently on Democracy Now!, a single Trident submarine holds enough nuclear weapons to destroy nearly 200 cities in Asia. We have more than one, of course, and have contracted with the Australians to ensure that there will be more killer subs patrolling the Chinese coast.

So, why the hell …. ?

Of course, this policy is about Asia writ large and who calls the shots in the region. American presidents have been focused on this for multiple administrations, with a significant uptick since the Bush II regime. A permanent presence is essential to our ability to project power – and, crucially, the credible threat of power – across the continent.

That’s why it’s target China time. Frankly, we can’t maintain a large military presence in the region without inventing some enemies. I’m personally convinced that that is the reason why the Korean conflict has remained in stasis for seven decades. We need to keep the threat level up to continue this toxic policy.

In short, regardless of what happens on the home front, we need to keep an eye on Biden’s foreign policy establishment, even – and really, especially – if they don’t want us to.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Get back onto that plague ship, you lazy prole!

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The chattering classes are having a hair-on-fire moment about labor. We’ve seen this coming for a while now. I commented on it back in July when retired ad man and political commentator Don Deutsch fired off a petulant little tweet about working people, then yakked about it with Joe Scarborough.

Well, they’re back, and it’s because the service is just not what it should be. Hell, do you realize Joe and Mika had to wait two hours for a flight because there weren’t enough baggage handlers? It’s like workers don’t want to work anymore. Unprecedented … or IS it?

An ill wind, indeed

When the Black Plague ripped through Europe in the 14th Century, it created a massive labor shortage. This was due to the fact that the disease may have killed as much as 1/3 of the population. The peasants who survived were reluctant to return to their rich masters’ fields. This compelled the gentry to sweeten the pot a bit – compensate the workers more, give them money, cut their rent, etc.

That was kind of a great leap forward for labor. Then the gentry passed a law that established a kind of maximum wage. This was to protect the essential feudal relationship between lord and peasant. (They had their own Donnie Deutcshes back then, of course.) It kind of backfired, though – there was a peasant rising, and they won some concessions. By 1500 the feudal system was giving way to another system of worker exploitation.

Here’s a tip for you

What television pundits are complaining about is simple: workers are saying “fuck this lousy job.” The wealthy underwriters of cable television don’t like this. This is the part of supply and demand that drives them nuts. Their pundits roll out the claim that lazy workers are all at home, eating grapes and collecting their federal unemployment enhancement checks.

The fact is, many workers who left their jobs were in tipped industries. Wait staff make sub-minimum wage plus tips, and it’s hard for them to demonstrate that they earned enough income to receive full unemployment. Worse, they get harassed and abused at work, and have to worry about catching COVID. Patrons will tell them to take off their mask if they want a tip. Who needs that bullshit?

Same old same old

Employers, large and small, are conveniently forgetting something: COVID is still killing people. The rolling three-day average is running over 1,100 deaths a day – that’s a 9/11 every third day. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to work remotely. The more poorly-paid, low-benefit occupations tend to be in-person only, and that’s why people are not returning to those jobs.

Also, if this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that withholding labor is an effective tool. If enough people do it, rich people start squawking. When you hear that sound, you know you’re doing something right.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Playing (and losing) at the same old game

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There was an old saying among politicos in Albany, according to noted New York State Government scholar and CEO of WAMC public radio Alan Chartock. It went something like this: “Don’t break the other guy’s rice bowl.” (I always felt there was some element of latent racism in this saying – why a rice bowl? – but let’s set that aside for a moment.)

This is, in essence, the principle of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. A legislator will not attack the pet project or campaign funding source of another, and therefore can rely on the same deference from their counterparts. While Chartock’s example is specific to New York politics, it applied at a national level as well, to some extent, and I think the Democratic leadership still plays by these types of rules. Trouble is, their opponents have changed, and they have not changed their tactics in response.

No Justice, No Peace

Honestly, I sometimes have to slap myself across the face to be certain I’m not having some weird, surrealistic dream. The leadership of the Republican party attempted a coup d’etat at the beginning of this year, and the Democrats are treating it like it’s some run-of-the-mill corruption issue. Let me say that again: TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS TRIED TO OVERTHROW THE CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT, and thus far NO PLOT LEADER HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE.

This is not business as usual. Whatever you think of the U.S. government (and I have plenty of criticism for it), the degree to which we have an elected government is a function of the Constitution, and that was very nearly set aside. Trump was actively lobbying state governments to throw out the legitimate results of the 2020 election. He sent an army of thugs into the Capitol to stop the tabulation of the electoral vote and take revenge on the clueless vice president. Again, this is NOT the usual shit.

Proud to be an authoritarian

This all wouldn’t be so bad if it were confined to just a cabal of nutcase politicians and hangers-on. The problem we have, though, is that propaganda works very well. All of that blather about supposed fraud risks associated with mail-in voting has convinced a large number of Americans that the last election was stolen. They are not the majority, but there are enough of them to ensure that the next insurrection will be successful.

Some of these people are truly out of their minds. I mean, we’ve all heard about the Q-anon types who gathered in Dallas last week, anticipating the arrival of John F. Kennedy Jr. They are part of a broader death cult that fantasizes about overthrowing the government, installing Trump as a dictator, and executing people associated with the Democratic party, shooting them in the streets. That’s a pretty dark vision to be shared so broadly.

Who you going to call?

The thing is, the police are doing practically nothing about these people. Some of them are even threatening election officials with murder, torture, you name it, and the cops are AWOL. The FBI is making noises, but little else. They are under very little pressure from Democratic office-holders to hold people like this accountable. It’s obvious that law enforcement do not see these people as a threat. It’s up to our elected officials to change their minds about that. We need to urge them to do so, before these authoritarians act on their warped fantasies.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

We have met the enemy, and s/he is you know who

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We live in an age of miracles, my friend. Well … minor miracles, anyway. Just this week a neighbor’s cat who disappeared ten days ago turned up. That almost never happens. Then, of course, there are the elections. As always, it was a night of many disappointments and few surprises. Elections always give me heartburn, frankly.

The thing is, there are only a few institutions in modern society that are even nominally responsive to the public will. The most important of these is government. And while government has become increasingly unresponsive to the concerns of the people over the past few decades, that fact is partly a reflection of our lack of interest or participation.

Through a mirror darkly

The last thing I want to do is sound like the morning-after prognosticators on MSNBC. But I will say that complaining about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema is something like displacement. Yes, they are tremendous assholes doing valuable service to capital. Yes, in the most proximate sense, it is their fault that we can’t have good things.

But, again, the Senate is a reflection of the voters, albeit in its very undemocratic way. If people are frustrated with the lack of progress in Congress, they need to work harder at getting progressives elected to the Senate. As a nation, we delivered a 50:50 split in that body, and you can see the result – we’ve basically empowered every senator to be a potential deal-breaker. The fact is, we need more votes … and we won’t get them until we organize more voters.

I wish I weren’t in Dixie

Of course, we’re dealing with some real challenges. We have a center-left party that is dysfunctional and shot through with corporate cash. In the other corner, we have a proto-autocratic party fueled by racism, misogyny, and other bad impulses. The clash between those two organizations was on full display this past Tuesday, particularly in Virginia.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that race-baiting still works in the heart of the old Confederacy. And as someone who knows the history of the PR industry, I also shouldn’t be surprised that propaganda is so effective. The thing they call “Critical Race Theory” is so vaguely defined that it could literally include anything. It’s just the most recent label the Republicans have slapped onto the perennial project of scaring white voters with stories about black people. So, not a departure.

Running the numbers

I haven’t seen the exit polling or any official results from the 2021 elections, but I have heard some comments from people who have. (I will try to dig into this data at some point soon.) From what I have heard, in Virginia, the Republican candidate for governor garnered about 80% of the votes that Trump received last year, while McAuliffe only received about 60% of the votes Biden got.

Since Youngkin only won by about 2%, this underlines the notion that the Virginia race was a turnout election. Republicans motivated their voters, while Democrats failed to do so sufficiently. The blame lies with the flat-footed candidate, but it is the citizens of Virginia who will pay the price for this failure, particularly the most vulnerable. That is what voters on the left need to bear in mind.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Time to do that thing we’ve got to do

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Has it been a year already? Mother of pearl. Election day is almost upon us, and the pundits are out in force, telling us what to expect, handicapping races, reminding us of historical trends, etc. We are defenseless against their onslaught of conventional wisdom! How can we stop the madness?

Well, as you can see, I’ve been watching (or at least listening to) way too much cable television. Every election is unique, as much as the talking heads want us to think otherwise. And while I know many of my friends on the left don’t like to focus on voting, I still feel strongly that we need to take the time to do it if only to stop the reactionaries from running everything into the ground.

Anyway, for those who are interested, here are my thoughts on this year’s elections.

Ballot measures in New York

Like most years, I wasn’t aware of any of the ballot measures in New York State this year until a handful of days ago. My sense is that three of them are no-brainers. Ballot measure #2 is a constitutional amendment that gives New Yorkers the right to clean air and clean water. Can’t argue with that. Measures #3 and #4 are about election law, the first eliminating the waiting period on registration (allowing for same-day registration) and #4 loosening the restrictions on absentee voting. Again, all good.

Measure #1 is kind of a mixed bag, but I think on balance it’s worth supporting. It would allow the legislature to pass a redistricting plan with a simple majority rather than 2/3. In a state run by Democrats, I think that’s a good idea, given that Congressional Democrats will be losing seats in red states like Texas. (Fixing gerrymandering has to happen on a national level; until then, no unilateral disarmament, please.)

Measure #5 is about access to lower courts in New York City in civil cases. I don’t have a strong grasp on the implications of this one, so I can’t really recommend one way or the other, but I am likely to support this as well.

Yes, Virginia, there is an election

One of the things pundits love telling us is that Virginia always chooses a governor from the party that did not win the White House in the previous year’s election. This year, Republicans are hitting hard on what they now call “critical race theory” in public schools, depicting red-faced parents scared of having their children read Toni Morrison. Democrats, on the other hand, are running Terry McAuliffe, who is …. Terry McAuliffe.

Okay, I know it’s hard to get enthusiastic about an old Clinton money-man like McAuliffe. The thing is, we don’t have the luxury of relying on enthusiasm every time an election comes up. I know you’re probably sick of hearing me say it, but we neglect voting at our own peril. We’re living with the results of having sat out multiple elections in sufficient numbers to ensure the victory of reactionaries. Trump was a manifestation of that failure, and the Republican party is the party of Trump – not because he took it over, but because it created him as a national figure.

Don’t say uncle

There’s no question but that the Biden budget agenda is not sufficient. And yet, it’s better than what it would have been had we not pushed Bernie to the front of the pack. And there’s no question but that the leadership of the Democratic party is fucking things up across a range of issues. But that’s because we haven’t elected enough progressives.

The fact is, we’ve got more progressives in Washington now than we’ve ever had previously, and it shows. And instead of getting frustrated over how difficult it is to pass meaningful legislation, we should redouble our efforts to expand those numbers in the next election cycle, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Yes, we need to do a lot, lot more than just vote. But we need to vote every freaking time, particularly now that we are seriously under the climate change gun. There’s simply no choice.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Albright: He always told the truth

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Former General Colin Powell died this week of complications from COVID-19. I’m sure you’ve heard this about a million times by now. You’ve probably also heard that he was a hero, a man of great stature, an inspiration, etc. I can tell you that a lot of hagiographic remembrances came floating up from the television on Monday and Tuesday.

I don’t think it will surprise any readers of this blog that I was not a fan of the former Secretary of State. Yes, like many on the left, I never forgave him for his Feb 5, 2003 performance at U.N. headquarters in New York – a key moment in the rush to the Iraq invasion. (Some may recall that they draped Picasso’s Guernica during Powell’s presentation, which was just a little too on-the-nose.) But his career had a lot of bloody patches.

Spinning from the beginning

Powell was a Vietnam veteran. He did, actually, play a small role in concealing the My Lai massacre, suggesting that the story was unrealistic because Americans and Vietnamese had such a great rapport. What? (For more on that love fest, I suggest Nick Turse’s Kill Everything That Moves.) This has been kind of a consistent pattern in Powell’s career – deflection from the facts and subservience to power.

He served in various capacities during the Reagan administration, working closely with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. When Weiberger was under scrutiny by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Powell helped the Secretary conceal his knowledge of that operation by initially supporting Weinberger’s contention that he didn’t keep a diary. (Powell later admitted that he observed Weinberger writing in a book or tablet that he kept on his desk.)

Worthy adversaries

One of the Powell sound bites the corporate media never tires of playing is the General’s comments at the start of the Gulf War: “First we’re going to cut it off. Then we’re going to kill it.” The “it” he’s talking about was a third-world army principally comprised of conscripts. The U.S. military did just what Powell said, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers in full retreat along Route 80 from Kuwait – the “Highway of Death”.

Of course, his most notorious failing was in laying out the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Most of the media describes this case as having fallen apart in the years that followed. Actually, the cobbled-together garbage that Powell handed out that day was debunked almost immediately, and the truth was available to anyone willing to see/hear it. That was immaterial to Powell – like many senators, he was thinking of his political future, not the human cost of what was being contemplated.

Mythmaking in America

The Trump phenomenon has brought many political dynamics into stark relief. But one of the most troubling effects of his presidency is the tendency to frame any conservative alternative to him as virtuous. This is what’s been done with regard to Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, etc. Powell was ahead of all of them, frankly. It largely involves reputation laundering on the part of media figures. We saw a lot of that this week.

When Madeleine Albright appeared on Morning Joe a few days back, her closing comment was that Powell “always told the truth.” It’s a little hard to know what to do with that. It made me think back to that moment I saw at the start of the Iraq war, when Powell mischaracterized the testimony of an Iraqi defector, Hussein Kemal. I had just read the transcript, and I have to think he had seen it in some form. The man just freaking lied about what it said, straight up.

If you can make Colin Powell into a man of peerless virtue, what value does truth have?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Towards yet another new cold war

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I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. As a society, we appear to be stuck in a holding pattern, circling our somewhat fractured collective memory of the Cold War. It seems we long for the illusion of a simple, good guys v. bad guys conflict, and we will stop at nothing to conjure one up again.

The echoes of the previous Cold War still reverberate, sometimes in odd and almost laughable ways. For instance, this week my Congressional Rep. Claudia Tenney called Pope Francis a communist. She is, of course, an unreconstructed Trumpist just visible under a faded coat of John Birch Society lacquer. But putting aside retrograde small-fry politicians mired in the failed policies of previous decades, we face a much larger problem.

Paging Howard Phillips!

Back in the days before the Internet, crazy people could only make their voices heard on radio and direct access cable television. One of those crazy people was the late Howard Phillips, co-founder of the American Constitution party or Taxpayers’ Party. Phillips had a regular show on direct access in the 1980s and 90s where he would rail against China, show scary videos, and look kind of grisly on his best days.

The reason I raise this is that even back then, this mentality was dated. We used to laugh about Phillips’s big map of “Red China” behind his desk, straight from the 1950s. Now he’s gone, but the anti-China rhetoric is still with us. Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty to criticize about China. But people in glass houses …. etc. The folks that angst over China’s policy towards Taiwan probably don’t give Puerto Rico’s status a moment’s thought.

Barry’s pivot, redux

True to form, Biden is resuscitating some of the worst parts of Obama’s foreign policy while preserving some of the worst elements of Trump’s. Both of his predecessors took aim at China, most notably Obama, whose “pivot to Asia” filled me with both dread and anger at the time. (What’s with the “pivot” language? Clearly meant to conjure up images of howitzers, or some gun fighter turning on his heel.)

This is obviously a priority for Biden, as indicated by the fact that he was willing to put the French government’s nose out of joint in service to their planned confrontation with China. They have continued training exercises, started under Trump, with the Taiwanese military, and extended arms sales. What’s more, their pullout from Afghanistan has freed up additional forces that they can devote to confronting China.

Slow-motion train wreck

Look, folks – this is not good. We are heading for a conflict with a nation of over a billion people The policies we are putting in place will eventually lead to military clashes between our two countries, whether intentional or accidental. That would have catastrophic consequences.

We need to stop this madness before it starts. Make clear to your congressional representatives that you do not want this coming war. Tell your friends and neighbors, even the Trump-ites. My guess is that no one wants this to happen, so the sooner we make our voices heard, the better.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.