I read that Sen. Rand Paul is still playing the fraudulent election card. He says we should have a debate about whether the election was a fraud so all those Republicans who believe the lies told them could have their say. It is said that everyone has a right to his own opinion, but the gullible and mis-informed should keep their opinions to themselves. This is just another of Rand Paul’s many unusual, often very bad, ideas. I’ve begun to wonder if he, like Lucius Iunius Brutus, is feigning insanity or stupidity.
24 I 2021: Arizona Republicans issue recommendations
I see that the Arizona Republican Party has issued some denunciations that are virtual recommendations in the view of all sane citizens. Meeting at the Dream City Church in Phoenix, they voted to censure Cindy McCain and Jeff Flake because they opposed Trump and “supported globalist interests.” They censured Governor Doug Ducey because of his emergency measures to contain COVID19, because these measures “restrict personal liberties.” They also re-elected as their chair Kelli Ward. In an interview Ms Ward boasted of being a committed Trumper who will “always put America first, who believes in faith, family and freedom.” She is parroting here a slogan that would have warmed the hearts of old-time fascists. By “globalist” I suppose she means anti-chauvanist. So of course she and her fellow Arizona Republicans embrace the crypto-insurrectionists Rep. Paul Gosar and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona.
If offered the choice of being praised with Gosar and Biggs or censured with McCain, Flake, and Ducey, any sane and honest citizen would elect to be censured.
23 I 2021: The “Patriot” Party
I’ve read rumors that former president Trump, by way of avenging himself on the United States of America, is investigating the possibility of founding a third party to be called “The Patriot Party.” Of course, “patriot,” as I’ve complained before, doesn’t mean patriot in any ordinary sense of the term. “Patriot” is the 21st-century equivalent of “Good old boy,” sc. Someone “like us,” one who shares our prejudices, and, when all is said and done, will hate the people we hate. So I guess The Patriot Party would be a good title for a party composed of the sort of people that Trump attracts.
Of course, the Patriot Party, like any other, is bound to have factions within it, and it may take someone with Trump’s charism to keep it all together. The factions would include The Evangelicals, The White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the Xenophobes, the Patriarchists, the Gun Nuts, the Downhome Soldiers of Fortune (militias), the Anti-environmentists, Anti-scientists, Conspiracy Addicts, and the Abortion-fixated. And, of course, non-violent criminals, like grifters and embezzlers and filers of fake bankruptcies, will be welcome, as will, no doubt, well-to-do sex-offenders and mobsters who have good tailors.
On consideration, however, I don’t think the diverse interests and enthusiasms will prove divisive. These factions have so much in common that no incidental differences could imperil party unity.
21 I 2021: Soaring/boring ambition
Two of the Trump residue, Stephen Miller, fascist, racist, and cruel, and Sen. Ted Cruz, Ambition’s son, have started what will be a barrage of denunciations of President Biden. Each was inept in his own way, but the details of their criticisms are less important, I think, than the timing.
They want to get an early start in the coming race to become the new Trump. They are both morbidly ambitious. Cruz has shown this again and again by his political shenanigans. Miller does not so much seek the public eye, but, brighter than Cruz, shrouds his Trumpism and implements his neo-Nazi cruelties in secret.
So the race is on and we wait to see which of these and many other power hungry people will be the Trumpers’ new messiah.
20 I 2021: Inauguration Day
O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good!
19 I 2021: Lindsey needs an exorcist
I see that Lindsey Graham has quickly relapsed into his old degeneracy and is mindlessly boosting Trump once again. He lapsed and distanced himself from Trump for a moment after the invasion of the Capitol, but now he’s back playing this old role.
Again I have to ask: What does Trump have on Lindsey Graham? Charity suggests that maybe Lindsey lost his mind four years ago. Otherwise we have to wonder what would compel him to support Trump and all his works and pomps so slavishly, even to the point of making himself a golfing buddy and looking away from the Trump’s cheating also on the golf course.
So is Trump blackmailing Lindsey? I’m sure Trump would if he could. Or is it something even more compelling? Is Lindsey, like so many Republicans, possessed by a devil? In that case, we need to find a brave exorcist to expel Lindsey’s devil along with all the demons that possess the Republican Party.
18 I 2021: Reactionaries set the Capitol afire
It is now clear that the crowd at the Capitol was not just a spontaneous gathering that happened to include criminals and crazies, but was assembled according to plan by a coalition of Tea Party leftovers, Trump campaign aides and former White House staffers, a rogues gallery of old and new right-wing women’s groups, and members of the House of Representatives.
Now one could say that these conspirators really meant no harm, that they were only bringing together genuinely concerned citizens for a peaceful protest against the imagined theft of the election. But that would be like claiming that the heap of oily rags purposely stuffed into a closed space had nothing to do with the ensuing fire.
17 I 2021: Final human sacrifice to Trump
Yesterday Dustin Higgs was executed at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, IN. He was the 13th death row inmate to be killed since July 2020 and the third to be killed in Trump’s final week as President.
The whole business has a queer, Republican smell about it. No honest pharmaceutical firm would supply the poison, so it was obtained from a secret supplier. Someone decided not to have employees of the federal government act as executioners, so the execution was carried out by “contractors” who were paid in cash. (I thought contract executioners were found only in the underworld.)
A lot of deceit was fired off in defense of these murders. The Justice Department proclaimed “Seeking the death penalty and carrying out capital sentences is not a political issue, nor have political considerations influenced the department’s decisions.” Clearly the Justice Department thinks we are all astonishingly gullible, or else it is simply without shame. Bill Barr himself played the family card, “we owe it to the victims and their families.” I don’t know how much these executions cheered up the victims or what they could do for the families except satisfy a need for revenge.
These executions were brought to us by a coalition of pro-life supporters: contributions from an unimaginably greedy President, an enslaved Department of Justice, a compromised Supreme Court, a manipulative Republican Party, and a host of false Christians made these murders possible.
15 I 2021: Naked without my gun
A number of Republican legislators, inspired, no doubt, by Rep. Lauren Boebert, a.k.a. The Capitol Glockette, have refused to pass through the metal detectors installed to protect our Congress. Clearly they are fishing for fanatic Trumpist votes, for the insurrectionist vote, and for the gun-nut votes.
Some of our fellow citizens are passionately protective of their guns because they have made the gun the symbol of their whiteness, their lawlessness, and their manhood. This firearms/phallus fixation is based on their inability to tell their pistols from their peckers, and, by gum, the feds are going to have to wrest both from their dying hands. The chief instigator of this falsehood-based paranoia is the NRA. That Association’s bankruptcy and flight to Texas show that the premier “gun rights” organization has long been an enormous scam.
14 I 2021: Trump Flag, the The new Stars and Bars
The news reports that the insurrectionist photographed parading in the Capitol with a large Confederate flag, Keven Seefried, has been busted. Mr. Seefried’s home state, Delaware, was a slave state, but the people of Delaware voted in early 1861 not to secede from the Union. Even so, Seefried chose to display the flag of rebellion, secession, and slavery of black to white. This constellation of evils was defeated in the 1860s, but has risen up again and again, and in 2020-2021 has once more attacked the United States of America.
But an additional flag of racism and rebellion was seen everywhere at the insurrection. Rep. Cori Bush reports in her account of her experience of the attack on the Capitol: “I could see Trump flags and Confederate flags gradually moving closer. I froze in disbelief.” This dramatizes the fact that the Trump flag is the new Confederate flag, for the Trump flag also symbolizes lawlessness, rebellion, and white supremacy.