Tag Archives: Joe Scarborough

Political Rants

The titanic struggle: A-holes vs. effers

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Another week of wall-to-wall reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That characterization of the operation is tantamount to a federal offense now in Russia. Whereas there they use force to make people think a certain way, over here we use the Edward Bernays method. That’s why polling shows a majority of Americans wanting the President to be “tougher” in his approach to the Ukraine crisis.

Majority support for policies that could easily result in total nuclear annihilation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Reporting on the atrocities Russia is committing in Ukraine flows in a constant stream from the corporate media. To be clear, it is 100% something that should be reported on heavily. But this is more than coverage. It is an influence campaign, and it may just get us all killed.

A game of absolutes

One of the sure signs that the networks are propagandizing us is the characterization of this war as part of a broader struggle between freedom and tyranny. Even Chris Hayes went on a tear about his last week, bizarrely extending this metaphor to the Cold War era. This claim doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Did we fight our near-genocidal war in Vietnam for “freedom”? I think not. Read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves. This is not good vs. evil, for we are not good.

Now, I expect this kind of thing out of the likes of Joe Scarborough, who is constantly laboring at the Reagan myth, desperately trying to keep it alive for another generation. Even on his show you will hear from people counseling caution, like Richard Haas. Those are the exceptions, though. It’s mostly a chorus of voices bearing witness to the suffering of Ukrainians in minute detail, showing frustration out of a lack of action on the part of the administration. The absolutism of good vs. evil is an essential component in their argument.

More like 1914 … or 2003

Frequent MSNBC guest Michael McFaul is back on the network, having suffered no real penalty for his endorsement of a comparison between Putin with Hitler, in which Hitler came out ahead. He was on Twitter telling people to stop talking about World War III, which was odd because he seems so wrapped up in World War II. McFaul is a fan of brinkmanship with respect to Ukraine – he thinks we can get a lot closer to open conflict without risk of nuclear war.

This is what happens when people take their own analogies too seriously. This is not World War II. We have nuclear weapons – thousands of them. We cannot do the kinds of things we did before those weapons existed. It’s simply not an option. There are many reasons why this period is nothing like 1939, but the nuclear question is probably the most salient difference. In all honesty, if you’re going to compare this with a world war, the closer analogy is 1914, when an accidental war prompted Europeans to slaughter each other by the millions for no good reason.

Don’t burn bridges

I’ve said it before. There’s only one way out of this horrendous conflict, and that’s through some kind of negotiated settlement. Cranking up the rhetoric makes this less likely, not more. For the Ukrainians’ sake, it’s better to make the deal now than later when their country is in even more of a shambles and many thousands more have lost their lives.

Ultimately Russia and Ukraine are going to have to reconcile themselves to being neighbors. That’s never going to change – it’s just geography. They need to find a path out of this mess, and we need to do everything in our power to help them get there.

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

Fire one.

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Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

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

Stalking horses.

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The Democratic race for president is one candidate smaller today than it was a couple of days ago. Kamala Harris dropped out this week, and it took about five minutes for the talking heads in the corporate media to attribute the failure of her campaign to the push for Medicare for All. By Wednesday morning, Claire McCaskill, failed candidate for senate, was on Morning Joe taking shots at M4A as a far-left government takeover of insurance, amounting to some kind of expropriation from hardworking Americans. They’re taking our corporate insurance away! People from the heartland won’t like this!

Let’s think for a moment of what would be taken away. I have one of those insurance policies people like McCaskill and Scarborough think so highly of. (I’m sure they have nothing like it, by the way.) My plan is what used to be termed a “Cadillac plan”, not because the benefits are so generous but because my employer pays 80% of my premiums. Even so, the plan costs me thousands of dollars a year even when things don’t go wrong. What M4A would take away from me are co-pays, which are considerable, and a $3,600 deductible, plus additional costs associated with out-of-network providers. Would I pay more in taxes than I do currently? Possibly, but when we’re sick, we can go to the doctor, to the hospital, to urgent care, and not even think about cost. That’s a level of liberation I have never experienced.

It’s not hard to work out why shows like Morning Joe make such a determined effort to scuttle any attempt at bringing about M4A. Just look at their advertisers. No, not the military contractor ads – they’re mainly shooting at a more specific target (i.e. lawmakers and congressional staffers). The drug companies, the hospital groups, the medical device manufacturers, and of course, the big insurance firms. They are dropping a lot of coin on advertising and lobbying, as always, but if either Bernie or Warren gets anywhere near the White House, you can bet they will be directing their ample coffers to a concerted comm strategy to kill M4A before it is even drafted. That strategy will include targeted ads, but it will also involve appearances on talk shows, columns, video news releases and inserts on local TV news broadcasts – you name it. We saw some of this during the Obamacare fight. This will be much, much more determined.

I don’t say this to discourage anyone on the left from fighting for M4A. Quite the opposite – with the forces arrayed against us, we are going to need a sustained effort like nothing any of us has experienced before. It’s a fight worth having, so please … be ready both before and after election day.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Debatable.

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I’m starting this post while watching the first Democratic debate.  Too many candidates, of course – I think that’s obvious. It’s kind of dizzying, frankly. John Delaney wants to double the earned income tax credit … whoopdee doo, right? What the hell is that fucker doing there? He wants to keep what’s working, like … private health care? What the fuck. This is like some kind of game show.

Highlights? Well, on night one, Elizabeth Warren put in a strong performance, but with nine colleagues to compete with on time – and sixty second answers – it’s hard to get to a substantive level on any issue. Foreign policy was, as always, a rough spot, with questions about “red lines” and “duty to protect”. In my mind, this points to one of the biggest drawbacks of these corporate-sponsored, major network hosted candidate forums. The questions strongly reflect what the mainstream media considers the broadly held political consensus on major issues.

With respect to foreign policy, when Lester Holt asks candidates where they would draw a “red line”, he’s drawing on the Syrian war debate during the Obama administration, when hawks backed the president into a corner of his “red line” comment, hoping to get another American invasion of the middle east out of it. Obama disappointed them, but has been called out for “fecklessness” ever since by the Joe Scarboroughs of the world. The idea that there should be some “red line” beyond which we plunge ourselves into a murderous, costly, and self-destructive conflict is simply ludicrous. I’m not a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard, but she was the only one on that stage that seriously pushed back on that and on the “humanitarian intervention” question.

Probably six too many.

Then there was the question, again from Holt, to Elizabeth Warren about whether she would agree to any restrictions on abortion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the premise for that question. Trump has been running around the country, describing with glee his fairy stories about newborn infant executions at the hands of craven women and their nefarious abortion doctors.  This question was an attempt to get the candidates to weigh in on mythical late-term abortions, and thankfully no one took the bait, though I wish one of these candidates would just swat that bullshit down, once and for all.

The second debate was kind of a crap show. I will return to that in next week’s installment.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week that was (again).

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Man, this week has been a clusterfuck. Not sure exactly where to begin, but I guess the best option is just to dive right in.

The Zombie Rises. Repeal and replace is back again this week, this time advanced by GOP senators Graham and Cassidy, and it’s the predictable formula. They basically want to block grant the program, including the Medicaid portion of it, which is the Republican’s favorite target just lately. According to a study cited by the Washington Post, 34 states would lose funding, and the states with Medicaid expansion and relatively generous benefits would be the biggest losers. It will also throw millions off of their coverage – no surprise there. The only thing that can stop this now is, well … us. Call, march, occupy, whatever you can manage. Delay this vote until after 9/30 and it will be dead for a while longer, at least, and that’s the best we can manage under the circumstances (i.e. good enough).

Active crime sceneHurricane Maria. What a horrible storm, and the fact that it took such a cruel path through an already distressed group of islands is heartbreaking. Puerto Rico, already flattened by international finance, has lost power entirely, perhaps for weeks or even months. Their grid is 44 years old, due to such a constricted colonial financial situation. Where is the outrage for the ill-treatment of these working Americans, Trump supporters? Crickets.

Mexico Quake. There’s a sickening regularity to this recent crop of disasters; a hurricane coinciding with an earthquake in Mexico. Again, suffering piled on top of suffering among a populace singled out by our president as the source of all of our woes. And as is so often the case, the lack of public investment in communities makes the disaster more serious than it needs to be. Such an outrage.

Hello, World! Speaking of the source of all of our woes, Donald Trump made his “debut” at the United Nations General Assembly, and duly threatened North Korea with total destruction. Withered talking heads like Joe Scarborough and David Ignatius found some encouraging themes in this poorly-wrought mad man’s tirade, but that’s just residual affection for the American empire. Trump waved the bloody shirt and threatened the world from that podium, and the threat was lost on no one. No doubt about it: Cheney’s back in charge.

Vietnam Revisited. I could write a whole column about Ken Burn’s latest effort to retell history, but suffice it to say that he appears not to have strayed much from the mainstream “bungling efforts to do good” narrative. Another lost opportunity to clarify this loathsome episode.

luv u,

jp