Politico | BIG GREEN

Anyone who’s been reading this blog and listening to my podcast Strange Sound for any length of time knows that I’m a sometimes harsh critic of the institutional Democratic party. That same anyone would be aware that I am even more critical of the Republican party. The reason for this is fairly simple: whereas the Democratic party has some individuals within it – albeit a minority – who are principled progressives who want to make a difference in people’s lives, the Republican party is now literally a death cult that wants to cut rich people’s taxes. This week we exceeded 300,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, and you would barely know it by listening to GOP lawmakers or their idiotic president. (And yes, he is their president, lock, stock, and cracker barrel. I’m of the opinion that Trump is the purest expression of Republican values – selfishness, ignorance, bigotry, and self-aggrandizement.)

I know both parties have a lot to answer for, but frankly, Republican politicians are almost universally out of their minds. As I write this on a day when more than 3,400 people died of this virus across the country, we’ve seen further evidence that the administration was explicitly pursuing a strategy of “herd immunity” with regard to the Coronavirus. As reported in Politico, part-time Canadian college lecturer Paul Alexander was helping to press the CDC into adopting a strategy of having everyone become infected … or as many people as possible. This was the crack-head notion they shared with Dr. Atlas that somehow everyone getting the disease was a good thing. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how “herd immunity” should work – the idea is to keep people from getting a disease by inoculating large numbers of them against it. Infecting people to prevent disease is like jumping off a building to avoid falling. These people are seriously cracked.

I can’t quite work out why Trump would choose to align himself with these people and take the hands-off approach he took to this virus when to do the opposite – investing heavily on safety and prevention – would possibly have made him a much more popular president and perhaps earned him re-election. The only thing that seems likely to me is that he thought the emergence of this novel Coronavirus was just unfair, and that like a five-year-old he didn’t want to accept it. And of course, because he is, as president, the head of his party, Trump set the tone for everyone else. But make no mistake – the Republican political class would have gone there anyway. As I’ve said before – every time they come back, they’re worse. Reagan was worse than Nixon, Bush Jr. worse than Bush Sr., and Trump worse than them all. Each one of these presidents was backed up by a party that supported practically every move they made.

With all of the challenges we are facing, we need to keep them out of power. We can no longer afford to play defense on these terminal issues.

luv u,

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This is the first week there was a general acknowledgement that Joe Biden is president-elect of the United States, and like a dam breaking, the news cycle was flooded with announcements of his cabinet picks. In a cleverly stage-designed event, Biden appeared with Harris and the beginnings of his “national security” team, inclusive of foreign policy. His nominee for Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, caused some serious crowing of approval on Morning Joe with the story of his Holocaust survivor uncle, who escaped from a Nazi death march and ran across an American tank, from which emerged an African-American soldier. “This is who we are,” Blinken said, referring to the image of America as a liberator and a light unto the darkness of a troubled world yearning to breathe free.

What Blinken’s story didn’t include was an acknowledgement that, in all likelihood, the Black soldier was part of a segregated unit, as mixed race units were barred in the U.S. military throughout World War II. That is who we are, too. But that part of American exceptionalism isn’t likely to find its way onto the set of Morning Joe anytime soon, aside from the contributions of Eddie Glaude and a handful of others. And so, while the largely bipartisan imperial consensus experiences a moment of bliss at the re-establishment of its place at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, the manifold failures of this longstanding policy set will fade into the background for hopefully a brief spell. (We’re fortunate to have Rho Khanna and others to jog our memories this time around.)

Let me be clear – I am overjoyed that Trump and his crew of warmongers will be leaving Washington in a couple of months. I think Biden’s administration will be an improvement in many respects. But to say that they will be better than the Trump team is not to say that we are embarking on a new era of enlightenment in American foreign policy. Michele Flournoy, for instance, appears to be edging closer to being appointed Defense Secretary (as attested to by Politico, of course). She was four-square in favor of the Afghanistan surge policy, supported the wars in Iraq and Libya, has worked extensively in the for-profit military consulting and lobbying world, and is poised to place China in the crosshairs of the U.S. “defense” posture in the years ahead – a direction The New York Times appears to be signalling ahead of the incoming Biden administration. (Yes, they’re mostly just reporting on what Biden’s advisors have been saying, but they’ve been drinking the Kool Aid on this for a long time.)

I prefer to remain optimistic about our future – that there are enough countervailing forces now on the left to prevent another Iraq-like catastrophe. But doing so will require constant vigilance on the part of my fellow leftists. No time for sleep, my friends.

luv u,

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