28 X 2021: Jeffrey Clark; miscellaneous trash.

News reports that Jeffrey Clark, the Trumpian mole in the Justice Dept who conspirted with the Great Deceiver and others to undo the results of the last election, has got himself a new lawyer. I surely hope that he needs one, for this thoroughly corrupt man tried to destroy our democracy and should be put on trial, and that very soon.

Viewed footage of AG Garland testifying before Senate committee about the memo he had issued urging that attention be given to the attacks and threats made against school board members, teachers, etc., by ignorant parents. The Trumpublicans made a big fuss about it. Sen. Marsha Blackburn embarrassed herself thoroughly as she tried to misrepresent the memo and Ted Cruz spoke up in defense of giving the Nazi salute at a school board meeting.

The same footage contained images of people menacing and threatening school board members with warnings like “We know where you live!” The people doing the menacing and threatening did not impress me as responsible parent types or concerned citizens, but as pitiable people duped through their ignorance and driven by their animal passions. 

TRASH! No one will say it, many won’t admit thinking it, but I’m afraid that “trash” is the appropriate epithet for these and a large part of the Trump base.

25 X 2021: “good old days”

I read that Trump is surprised and angered by Fox News’ running adverts that are not supportive of him. Here’s a quotation from the story on HuffPost: “What good is it if FOX News speaks well of me when they continually allow horrible and untruthful anti-Trump commercials to be run — and plenty of them,” Trump said in a statement. “In the good old days, that would never have happened and today it happens all of the time.” 

Trump should have realized that FOX News is not about Donald Trump, but about making money and doing whatever is necessary to make it. But what struck me most about Trump’s thunderbolt was “In the good old days, that would never have happened ….” 

To what “good old days” is he referring? Stalin’s U.S.S.R., Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s New Rome? In those regimes nothing whatever could be published that was insufficiently supportive or, heaven forbid, actually critical of the absolute rulers of these regimes.

Trump often speaks of the “good old days” with no specificity at all when addressing his believers. I believe it then means something like “when we ran things,” “when we were in charge,” “when they knew their place,” and so on. But I think that in this case, by “good old days” he means an imagined time in the past or in the future when the Dictator always had his way.

21 X 2021: Bannon

They want to put Skid-row Steve in jail for a while to see if forced fasting from booze and drugs will make him more talkative. But unbeknownst to the Left, in the last summer Donald Trump was ordained as a minister of the Yesterday Saints church, and so Stevie is planning to claim that his conversations with Rev. Trump are under the seal of confession. A long shot, but what the hell, anything is worth a try.

15 X 2021: Let’s take a shower

Donald Trump recently assured assembled Republicans that he is “not into golden showers.” Trump can speak for himself, but as for the Republicans, Trump has been pissing on them for 4+ years and far from objecting, they seem to have grown accustomed to it and some of them really seem to enjoy it.

11 X 2021: Jack Cade

In Henry VI Part Two, Jack Cade and his mob of Kentish peasants capture Lord Say, the Lord High Treasurer of England, for whom they held an intense hatred because they had been convinced by misinformation that Lord Say was to blame for the loss of English territories in France. And so, directed by Jack Cade, the demagogue who wants to be king, they put him on trial. Cade accuses Lord Say of a catalogue of supposed crimes, among them:

… Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thouhast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. …

When Lord Say attempts to address the mob he only does himself more harm:

Say:     You men of Kent,–

Dick:   What say you of Kent?

Say:     Nothing but this; ’tis ‘bona terra, mala gens.’

Cade:   Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin.

I am reminded of recent events in the United States. Donald Trump makes a very good Jack Cade, and Cade’s charges against Lord Say both display and incite the ignorance and unreason of their followers.

7 X 2021: Tucker Carlson

I received today an email sent to alert readers to the danger posed by Tucker Carlson, described as “the most dangerous demagogue since Donald Trump.” The notice focused on Carlson’s espousal of the “white replacement theory.” The theory is absurd, but it is a dandy BIG LIE that can delight xenophobes and racists by giving them a reason for their misdirected resentments and will increase those resentments very considerably.

Tucker Carlson calls to mind a remark by, if I remember correctly, Albert the Alligator: “That’s what you gets when you invites a pig into the parlor.” It is Carlson’s porcine qualities that give him so great an appeal with the “Trump base.” They feel that he is no better than they are and so will not “look down” upon them. The perception that he is “no better than they are” is created by his assuming a persona not unlike the persona assumed by people like Trump or Josh Hawley: down-home, good-old-boy, old-timey, straight talk masking vast cynicism and overweening ambition.

6 X 2021: Not all bad news

The news today is rather grim: our Senate rises to new heights of dysfunctionality; Trump claims that the 2020 election was the “real insurrection”; Missouri executes another condemned man after making him wait for 20+ years; the news is full of trashy figures, many of them in elective offices.

I was cheered, however, to see that Pat Robertson, an evangelical motor-mouth, is retiring from his “700 Club” talkshow. This man, a sanctimonious Rush Limbaugh, has for years made Christianity a laughing-stock and object of loathing for countless people. Good riddance!

5 X 2021: Our own College of Cardinals?

Some of the justices of the Supreme Court have become quite defensive lately, angered by application to them of epithets like “party hack.” They should not complain to those who call them “party hacks,” but to Mitch McConnell and other Republicans who selected them and, in some cases, forced their nominations through the Senate. Justice Barrett has declared that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties,” but they become so if political parties select judges based on their “judicial philosophies.”

Also, I wonder at the presence of six Roman Catholics on the Court. The Founders would have apoplexy if they could see this. But of course, Catholics come in several varieties, and I do not think we should lump Justice Sottomayor with the rest of the Catholics. But we can say at least that there are five right-wing Catholics on the Court. Is this simply a coincidence?

J. Edgar Hoover recruited Catholics for his F.B.I. Those Catholics were uniformly anti-Communist and so fit neatly into Hoover’s program. They were part of an authoritarian institution, and were pre-programed to avoid overmuch thinking and to obey unquestioningly.

I do not think the five reactionary Cathlolic justices of the current Supreme Court were appointed solely because they are Catholic, but their Catholicism, and their type of Catholicism, must have seemed to those who selected them to be an additional guarantee that they think our way and would “do the right thing” about Roe v. Wade.

Are these justices “political hacks”? We don’t have to be so coarse in describing them. “Politico-judicial ideologues” sounds much more classy and means the same thing.