Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

Old faithful.

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You know what’s really hilarious about American politics? It’s when news people, commentators, and even politicians themselves expect someone like Mitt Romney to act like someone who totally isn’t Mitt Romney – that is, someone who has an ounce of integrity or any impulse beyond self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. That was the spectacle this week, in the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s not-wholly-unanticipated passing. Almost immediately the speculation started bubbling up through cable television and the internet …. what will Romney do? Will he stand up to Trump and McConnell? Will he insist on fairness and a single standard that applies to both major political parties? I mean, it’s a regular laugh riot. Sure … Mitt Romney is going to stand between the GOP and the fulfillment of one of its most cherished goals: a radical transformation of the judiciary from top to bottom. Really, people?

As someone who has spent a good deal of time online doing bad imitations of Romney, I have to say that he has done his best to conform with my distorted caricature of him as a cluelessly greedy maladroit who spouts almost as much nonsense as his president. Today Romney described America as a “center-right” country. I suppose from his perspective it is, as the tiny number of people who own and run America probably fit that description, and those are the only people he interacts with. A little harder to grasp was his claim that his liberal “friends” had grown used to the idea of having a liberal Supreme Court, but that that is “not in the stars.” Not sure what he’s getting at – the Court has been majority conservative for almost fifty years, since the Nixon era. No one on the left who’s under the age of seventy has ever had the opportunity to get used to the idea of a liberal SC. I’m starting to wonder if maybe Mitt doesn’t allow himself a little pull off of a snifter once in a long while.

A couple of days later, Romney put himself back into relatively good graces with the never-Trump squad by tweeting his disapproval of Trump’s comments about not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. Pretty low hanging fruit, that – Hey, everybody! Romney’s nominally against a coup d’etat, at least on Twitter! Give him a freaking medal!

Okay, well … now that I’ve ripped him a new asshole (no charge, Mitt – now you can shit over your help twice as much ), I should get to the larger point that I wanted to make. Simply, don’t watch Republicans for signs of integrity or commitment to institutional norms, etc. Let me see if I can put this simply for the credulous media that incessantly speculate about these things: Republicans only care about winning. That’s it. The country can go straight to hell – and right now, it most certainly is. They don’t give a flying fuck. If the price of continuing a Republican presidency is democracy itself, then apparently that’s fine with them. They are a death cult, yes, but just as bad, they are comfortable with the notion of authoritarianism and an end to any pretense of electoral accountability. Just the fact that the Trump campaign has spoken with GOP state legislators about subverting the will of the voters should be enough to convince anyone of that.

Make your plans, people. This could be the fight of our lives.

luv u,

jp

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

Fearmongering.

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There’s a passage in the Bob Woodward recordings of Donald Trump that I’ve no doubt you’ve heard about a million times by now; the one in which our president claims that his decision to downplay the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic was all about avoiding a panic. That’s right – Donald Trump would have you believe that he is trying to prevent mass hysteria, or at least that’s what it sounds like on this tape. Either that or he was worried about a panicked stock market. (Given his conviction that the stock market is the only economic indicator worth consulting, perhaps that’s more like it.) I think it was Chris Hayes who commented that Trump’s campaign slogan is panic. This is the guy that brought us MS13 living next door, rapists and murderers coming over the border, killer caravans heading north towards Laredo, antifa threatening the peace, Cory Booker threatening the suburbs, and so on. Really?

Probably the only thing really surprising about these Woodward recordings is how halfway normal the president sounds. Interesting how when there’s no television or live audience he starts to act almost human, even chummy. Listening to this, you start to see why Joe Scarborough and Mika were so enamored of him for a while prior to his presidential run. He was a T.V. star, after all, and totally in on the joke, right? Not right. In all honesty, it’s no surprise that Trump was aware of how deadly and contagious the novel Coronavirus is. We’ve long known that he was briefed on it, and it only made sense that he would be. I mean, the man has a glass head – it’s not hard to see what his motivations might lead him to. The virus was not his fault, right? So why should he have to pay a political price for it. Just pretend it’s not there …. that trick works with everything else.

Unfortunately for the Donald, viruses – much like facts – are stubborn things. They don’t yield to our hopes and desires. They aren’t scared away by a little off-hand blow-hardiness. You can see Trump getting as frustrated as a five-year-old over how this thing is unfolding, grasping for anything that will help him put the scourge behind him. As usual, he’s working overtime to change the subject and focus the public’s mind on anything other than COVID. Typically, for Trump, that means playing the fear card, warning of an attack on the suburbs by some dark army of his imagination. So he’s saying the quiet parts out loud again, which is how he started in politics and likely how he will end.

Despite what their own domestic intelligence agencies tell them, Trump and Barr continue to insist that “antifa” and Black Lives Matter are somehow potent threats against the republic, NOT heavily armed, white militias. That’s the narrative they hope will carry them to victory this fall. Let’s prove them wrong.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Slow progress.

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The election is less than sixty days away, and already I’m sick of thinking about it. More than likely, that’s the predictable result of a news media that is hyper-focused on elections to the point where they literally begin reporting on the next big race before the votes in the current one are even counted. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I think the press likes the horse race aspect of elections – it’s an easy story to report, there are opposing sides, melodrama, jockeying for position, etc. I haven’t done the analysis, but I’m confident that horse-race stories far outnumber more substantive reporting. Whatever the proportion may be, it’s a silly thing to report on, particularly when there are such titanic issues facing the nation and the world, issues that are on the ballot this fall, in some respects.

To be clear, I don’t think electing Joe Biden will be enough to, say, turn the tide back on climate change, or expand affordable health care to everyone, or stop COVID in its tracks. The project of making Joe Number One is more about avoiding bad things than promoting good ones. He still seems married to the concept of employer-provided health care, just as Nancy Pelosi is, and his campaign was positively ecstatic over its endorsement by former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, who condemned a generation of young people in Flint to the depredations of lead poisoning. So yes, we have a lot of hard fights ahead of us, even with a Biden victory. But I think it’s fairly easy to see the writing on the wall this time. Look at the skies over San Francisco. Look at the legions out of work and on the edge of eviction. Look at the kleptocratic travesty that is Wall Street, gorging itself on public dollars like almost never before. This obviously needs to stop, as Trump said, right here and right now.

Still, I feel like the two opposing sides are playing different board games. It kind of amazes me to hear the reporting around Trump’s comments to Bob Woodward, the shock of his admission that he downplayed the virus, etc. Is it shocking? Really? The man’s public statements since the beginning of the year tell you everything you need to know. Did we really need to hear his conversations with Woodward to surmise that he wasn’t taking COVID seriously, or that he wasn’t leveling with the American people? Did we really need that Atlantic article to imagine that Trump would hold uniform military, veterans, or any group of people in utter contempt? While our representatives in the mainstream media project shock and surprise, the Trumpists just continue along their merry way, deconstructing the administrative state stick by stick.

I know the institutional Democratic party wants to make this an election about manners and integrity. But this election, like all elections, is about policy, and we have to drive the distinctions home if we have any hope of getting this loser out of the White House.

luv u,

jp

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

Rematch.

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Not all politics is local, but a lot of what people actually experience about politics is. I say this as someone who has spent much of my life being represented in city hall, Albany, and Washington by people who do not even remotely reflect my views. Such is the lot of a leftist in upstate New York, right? Still, when it came to some major issues, like acid rain or aid to the Nicaraguan “Contra” terror army, there was some alignment between myself and our longtime Congressmember, Sherwood Boehlert, an old-style Republican who represented our district for about 24 years. Boehlert was perhaps the most liberal member of the GOP caucus in the House towards the end of his tenure, and he was replaced by a Democrat who was almost indistinguishable from him ideologically.

I had come by that point to think of my hometown as Centerville – the town in the middle. And that held true for a short while thereafter – Democrat Michael Arcuri was replaced by Republican Richard Hanna in 2010, and Hanna proved to be a centrist as well, by the standard of his day. A deficit hawk, yes, and a little more circumspect than Boehlert; still, far from the worst in his tea party-driven GOP House caucus, and really about as far to the center as they got. He was primaried from the right by Claudia Tenney back in 2014, I believe, and survived that. I think at the time we all thought that the district was too centrist for someone like Tenney. Of course, two years later, that turned out to be wrong, as Tenney took the Congressional seat in a three-way race between her, a Binghamton-area Democrat, and a tech millionaire Independent who disappeared as soon as he lost.

Claudia got washed out by the Democratic blue wave in 2018, replaced by our current Congressmember Anthony Brindisi, who has restored the seat to being a bastion of centrism. I think he won mainly because Tenney was such a massive embarrassment to the region, earning national media fame as a crackpot Trump worshipper. Trump took a shine to her, campaigned for her in Utica, and boosted her in a number of different ways, as she dutifully supported Trump’s massive tax cut, bogus health care repeal plan, and so on. Well, now Claudia is back, running for her old seat against Brindisi, the GOP footing the bill for ads depicting the current Congressman as a puppet of Pelosi, to the left of AOC, best friend of the radical Joe Biden, etc., etc. Like her mentor Trump, she’s kind of playing the crazy card – not sure it works when you yourself are a crazy-ass mofo. We shall see. Upstate New York, as I’ve said many times, is a bit like Alabama, Confederate battle flags and all.

I’m encouraging people to vote for Brindisi, as lackluster as his stint in Congress has been, just because Claudia is truly a right-wing nut job, spawned in a toxic, stagnant backwater that is very, very familiar to me. Trust me … you don’t want that one back in Congress.

luv u,

jp

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

Empty room.

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You may recall from last week that I skipped most of the Democratic National Convention. Well, I gave equal time to the Republicans, though the thing they were broadcasting this week didn’t even pretend to be a nominating convention in the true sense. That process took place during the day on Monday in North Carolina, where the RNC was originally going to happen. I believe it consisted of a vote to not have a party platform, to simply endorse Herr Trump in all his glory, then to nominate him formally before getting to the main event: Trump giving a rally speech, full of the usual wild claims, distortions, and outright lies. The man should have a laugh track.

What was billed as the RNC is a long infomercial to white aggrievement that kicked off with Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA calling Trump the “body guard of Western Civilization” – i.e. white people. It always amazes me to watch these grifters attack the Democratic party from the left on trade, as it Trump represents any departure from globalized neoliberal capitalism. Of course, as soon as they’re done decrying outsourcing, they start in on socialism, communism, Marxism, whatever they’re calling it at any given time. Kind of a contradiction for those of you keeping score at home, but that won’t slow them down. If Republican conventions are mostly about owning the libs with nasty quips and jabs, they’re having a great week.

Many of the speakers – both pre-recorded and live – are speaking in a large, ornate, empty hall in Washington D.C. Watching them talk as if the Coronavirus has subsided, I thought of all those who have died as a result of Trump’s historic incompetence, and pictured their spirits populating those empty seats, bearing witness to this pathetic spectacle. Of course, so many things in the actual world seem to evade their notice. Police brutality, global warming, wealth inequality, exploitation of labor, etc., etc. … none of it made its way into the various remarks. Pence articulated a vision of law and order, channeling his Nixonian forebears, in hopes that they might repeat the 37th president’s landslide re-elect. That seems a tall order, though they still might squeak by.

Lord know … if we had a decent opposition party, this race would be over by now.

luv u,

jp

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

The loudest voice.

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I haven’t been watching the Democratic National Convention in its entirety, just pieces here and there. It’s no surprise that this thing is unlike any political convention we’ve ever seen before. What’s kind of astonishing is the degree to which it looks like a long political ad, with some variations in production values. A lot of it is just a crap show, putting a spotlight on some never-Trump Republicans and various center-right figures. I keep expecting some kind of technicolor tribute to Ronald Reagan, or a cameo by George W. Bush. Stuff like that makes it a bit more like drinking urine than it should be, but then I am a leftist, which means I’m just supposed to suck it up and offer my unqualified support. Still, being asked to sit through Colin Powell is a bit beyond ridiculous, in my humble opinion.

I have talked about this on my podcast, Strange Sound, so I won’t go into great detail, but my decision to vote for the Democratic presidential ticket is rooted in the notion of harm reduction, some of the contours of which have been highlighted throughout the virtual DNC. The fate of undocumented immigrants, the so-called “dreamers”, as well as refugees from both state sponsored or tolerated violence and economic hardship, hangs in the balance – a second Trump term would spell disaster for them, and very likely for so-called legal immigrants as well. It would not surprise me to see a second-term Trump move to strip legal residents of their rights, then perhaps naturalized citizens, particularly if they are members of the communities he most despises. (I can picture an Ilhan Omar-focused executive action revoking citizenship from those who escaped Trump-dubbed “shit hole” countries.)

Then there are those who depend on their health insurance … like just about everybody at some point in their lives. A second Trump term would mean a death sentence for many of those people. Hell, the first Trump term was enough to dispatch more than 170,000 unnecessarily. Single-payer advocate Ady Barkan made this case quite eloquently at the DNC in one of the better speeches. For as little effort as is involved in casting a ballot, it seems to me that we should listen to the voices of people on the edge of disaster, for whom four more years of this might amount to a death sentence. As I said on Strange Sound, we don’t need to invest in the new administration – quite the opposite. We need to be ready to push them from day one. And they will need to be pushed. The lobbyists always have the loudest voice, but we have the numbers. We can flip the tables of the moneylenders if we all do it together, but we need to have an administration that will respond to pressure. Trump won’t. Biden will.

That’s my two cents. What’s yours? Leave a comment or a question. Excoriate me. Shake your cyber fist! Always glad to hear from you.

luv u,

jp

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

Muddle in the middle.

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A snapshot from the day’s news – MSNBC is obsessing over Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s announcement that we’re withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany. The various former Republicans that populate its talk show panels are lamenting Trump’s undermining of the NATO alliance. In real time, we are seeing the Biden foreign policy take shape. I won’t say it’s a more aggressive posture, as Trump is aggressively pursuing conflict with Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, and others. There is, however, a somewhat nostalgic turn to the emerging centrist doctrine Biden will no doubt pursue. It appears we may be in for a slight return of the cold war model, the east-west divide, the Russian menace. If that’s the case, it would be a bitter trade in exchange for the crap show we’re living through now.

I am tentative about this observation because it’s hard to be certain what a Biden foreign policy will be when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has consistently avoided posting any details about it on his campaign site. Since it’s likely to be formulated by committee, I’m guessing it will be bellicose, but measured; assertive, but mindful of precedent; proactive, but not necessarily the first to any party. Where will we bomb, drone, invade next under a President Biden? One can only guess. Likely he will re-deploy those 12,000 troops to Germany, whether or not they pony up the Euros for costs associated with the posting. Indeed, the only net positives might be a return to some type of arms control regime with Russia, Iran, and others, and perhaps a re-commitment to the tepid, voluntary goals of the Paris Accord on Climate. Not nearly enough for my taste, but there you have it.

I think the most compelling case for this muddle in the middle, from a foreign policy standpoint, derives from the very nature of the presidency and who holds that office. The U.S. president is too powerful. It is an office that wields force, both military and economic, in unlimited magnitude. No one should be THAT powerful, particularly not someone who is accountable to an electorate that makes up less than five percent of the world’s population. Placing Donald Trump in the cockpit of that titanic killing machine is not only irresponsible, it’s sheer madness. Regardless of any minor departures from the hard-line Republican orthodoxy on foreign relations and national security, Trump has proven his propensity to flub his way through any situation, with disastrous consequences. We’ve seen this in his response to the Coronavirus. Even as he seems inclined to curry favor with Putin, we’ve seen him tear up crucial arms agreements with the Russians, hurtling us back into a deadly arms race.

Plainly, Biden’s foreign policy will likely be as imperial and neoliberal as he can get away with. But every moment Trump sits behind that so-called Resolute Desk, we are in mortal danger. He simply has to go.

luv u,

jp

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

Gaslight village.

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There’s something the president has been saying repeatedly lately that probably shouldn’t be allowed to pass without challenge, like most of his insane utterances. (It amazes me sometimes how much this reminds me of the Reagan years, when old right-wing Ronny used to say truly bizarre things and journalists would just wanly shrug and move on.) He keeps claiming that, in responding to COVID-19, he saved millions of lives. The claim goes something like this: If I (Trump) had not acted as decisively as I did, more than 2 million people would be dead of COVID. Instead, it’s a measly 140,000. Aren’t I a hero, then?

I wish I were making this up, but you’ve heard it, I’m sure. I’m beginning to understand why Trump is so determined to save all of those Confederate monuments. He must have gotten a bunch of loser trophies when he was a kid. Actually, his entire life has been a series of loser trophies and mulligans, starting with the fortune that was dropped into his lap, his various bankruptcies and failed scams, then being shoe-horned into the presidency via America’s ultimate grandfather clause, the electoral college. And yet through all of this (and much more), he has insisted that he is a big winner, that no one could have done what he did, and so on … and so on. At the same time, he whines incessantly (like so many on the right do) about how unfair life is to him. Poor little Donnie!

This is some grade-school level gaslighting, to be sure. I mean, the man is saying that by doing the bare minimum required of him as president of the United States, he prevented a precipitous, uncontrolled spread of COVID that would have cost millions of lives, and for this he should be thanked. I hate to break it to fat boy, but not engaging in massive criminal negligence does not exactly place you in Medal of Honor territory. Next we’ll be expected to thank him for NOT randomly noodling with the nuclear football and accidentally launching World War III. That saved billions! No, as president, you don’t get rewarded for NOT blowing up the world this week. (That’s pretty much expected of you, Don.)

R.I.P. Michael Brooks. When political commentator and leftist thinker Michael Brooks died unexpectedly this week, I thought of the people I’ve known who left this world far too soon – people who seemingly had a brilliant future ahead of them. Brooks was one of those people, and he will leave an enormous hole. Condolences to his family and his colleagues on the Majority Report, TMBS, and elsewhere. This year is for shit.

luv u,

jp

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

Why fat Donnie don’t care.

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I’ve been accused more than once of being cynical and of imputing the worst motives in every action of those I dislike. I suppose that’s fair – I’m certainly no better than most people in that particular category of failing. And I’m sure that fans of Donald Trump (yes, I’m looking at YOU) will take issue with what I have to say in this post, just as they are likely to frown at the title and decry it as a cheap shot. Again, it’s a fair cop. I think after what we’ve gone through over the last three and a half years, we’re due a few cheap shots, right? Friends can disagree on that point. As it happens, I take little interest in stories of the president’s personal boorishness, such as some of what is currently being reported with respect to his niece Mary Trump’s new book. Tales of his moronic sexism are as unsurprising as they are nauseating. He said his young niece was “stacked” – shocker! More evidence that he’s a titanic douche. Moving on.

No, I’m guessing that Trump supporters, if they read this blog, would take issue with my contention that the president doesn’t care about what happens to most COVID-19 victims … perhaps more than they would with my observation that he’s fat. Here again, it’s just acknowledgement of an obvious fact. If Trump cared what happened to COVID victims, he would do something about the pandemic (other than brag incoherently about how well he’s handling it). He is not doing anything to prevent these deaths, and in fact is going out of his way to advocate for policies and practices that will result in further spread of the disease. He lies about it incessantly, has done from the beginning, and attempts to push off responsibility for fighting the pandemic on other people, politicians, countries, etc. Why? Why would a president not want to preserve more lives?

I think the answer’s pretty obvious. Trump only cares about how things affect him personally. The people being killed by this virus are overwhelmingly drawn from communities that are less likely to support his re-election. The death rate for African Americans is more than twice that of whites. Indigenous and Latinx are dying at higher rates as well. Frankly, Trump doesn’t give a shit about those people. If more of them drop dead, there will be less of them marking a ballot for his opponent. Trump’s friend Bolsonaro offers an even more crass example of this – COVID is absolutely tearing through indigenous communities, the same people Brazil’s insane clown president thought should have been wiped out even more back in the days of conquest. Trump is a hair more subtle, but it doesn’t take Kreskin to work out his campaign calculus with regard to COVID victims. Fewer old white people, yes, but many, many fewer black people. What you lose on the milk you make back on the oranges.

What can we do? Defeat Trump in November, among many other things. This crisis has cast so many societal problems in stark relief – it’s clear what we need to do, and getting rid of Fat Donnie would be a good first step.

luv u,

jp

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

Intelligence and skepticism.

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I had a weird feeling of displacement this week, hearing commentators and political officeholders talking about intelligence reports regarding the Russians’ alleged payment of bounties to the Taliban for the killing of Americans. Such an allegation is not particularly far-fetched – the United States has been in Afghanistan for almost twenty years, and there are plenty of people there who would try to kill our soldiers without compensation, but they probably would accept payment if offered. Still, listening to the outrage, it felt like some of the conversation in the months leading up to the Iraq war. Powell’s presentation to the UN in February 2003; the insistent claims about evidence of WMDs in Iraq, etc. All bogus, incidentally, and no one responsible for the misinformation was ever held accountable, as far as I know.

Of course, that was an example of an administration using its intelligence services to a specific end – in effect, weaponizing it. In the current case, Trump seems at odds with the intelligence community, but I’m not convinced his administration is. Let me be clear; while I don’t think Trump is some kind of Manchurian candidate programmed by Putin to destroy America, I do think that he’s a tremendously crappy president who wants nothing more than to license a Trump Tower Moscow when he leaves government service. If the stories about the bounty on U.S. soldiers are even partly true, it would be just one more example of Trump putting his own interests ahead of those of the people he is supposed to serve as president. Is anyone surprised by that?

Look, Trump is not some kind of unicorn. Anyone who has worked at a small business knows who Trump is. If you’ve ever worked for someone who had their name on the door, you know what I’m talking about. Trump’s ignorance, arrogance, impatience, arbitrariness, bullying tactics, self-aggrandizement, and parsimony are familiar to all former employees of America’s beloved small businesses. They’re not all that way, of course – some are benevolent dictators – but the American myth of the self-made man is a compelling one, and I’ve heard versions of it spouted to me over the years. They all pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, no help from anyone.

Though I’ve never met the president, I did briefly work for him in 1987-88, when I worked with a band that played Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. His company was terrible to employees, bands, etc. Now we’re seeing the same thing on a national scale – relentless self-dealing and an almost cult-like belief in himself. What. A. Freak. But at the same time, I recommend skepticism with respect to the information products of the intelligence agencies, even if the asshole-in-chief says it’s bullshit. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.