Into the Darkness

 Our longtime friend-of-the-blog Sven (from Defence and Freedom) dropped by to ask what the hell was wrong with us? Why hadn't we had any content here for so long? And it took me a while to consider that, yes, I should say something, rather than let this place just drift along into the darkness.

So.

First, we've taken massive casualties. Look at the right-hand column. There, under "bar staff"? Seven names.

Well, here I am.

Lisa and jim, from Ranger Against War) left us after the 2016 election. Lisa, largely because (so far as I can tell) she went headfirst down the Trumpkin rabbit hole. She had been Trump-curious during the runup to the 2016 election and by that autumn had completely bought into the idea of Trump as a "rulebreaker" and "iconoclast" that was what was needed to shatter the corruption and oligarchy that had and has overtaken the United States.

She's right about the problem...but there was a massive dustup over her choice of solution, and we "parted brass rags" as theBrits used to say, and she decamped.

Jim, sadly, seems to have just given up in disgust. If you go to the RAW site and go to the comments on the last post, the second comment is jim's, and he says: "I cannot take fire from inside the perimeter.
If Lisa wants to write about Trump then i'd respectfully request that she start a new blog and not use up the RAW that we built so artfully."

And that's it. Radio silence since then.

We lost PF Khans some time shortly after that. He was already getting quiet, and I have to reach our to him and say how grieved I am for him. The ending of the Umpteenth Afghan War is hard for those who gave their youth and their strength in fighting it. I'm still certain that it had to end and that the ending we got was as good as ever possible...but that doesn't change the grief and loss that comes from seeing that end. I'm sorry, PFK, and I hope you and yours are bearing up.

Mike has just got too much else going on, and has largely (as so many others have) moved over to Twitter and the other short-form social media.

Seydlitz (of the immortal memory!) had moved on long before 2016. I miss his insightful wisdom and should be better about looking for him where the runs these days.

Sheerahkhan was a very rare poster and is evident (when he is) only in the comment section these days.

So it's just me.

I've - as everyone does - got a lot going on, too. Work. Home. Family. Other interests outside geopolitics. Knee surgery - I had both knees replaced at the end of the summer and I'm still achy and tottery on the new parts.

And I'm also sick and sad at what I'm seeing here in the Land of the Big PX.

But to explain that I have to go back a bit and give you some dreaded backstory.

I was born in Whittier, Califormia, in 1957 - yep, Dick Nixon and I are homeboys - to a chemical engineer of the 1951 postwar Cornell crop and his buxom redheaded HomeEc major wife. I was raised in what was a stereotypical Father Knows Best Fifties and Sixties middle-class white Protestant household in Chicago and outside Philadelphia as his big company moved my father around in classical Mid-Century Big Company fashion.

The old man was a poster child for Mid-century Middle Class White Guydom. Golfed. Smoked a pipe - an actual no-shit serious pipe (I still remember the smell of his favorite bowl, something called "Heine's Blend" that came in a big blue-and-white faux Delft tin...).

And was Republican because...of course he was.

So I was.

We stood for all things that Mid-century Republicans stood for. Prosperity. National greatness. Low (but fair) taxes. "Personal Responsibility" - sure, we accepted the New Deal, because nobody wants their granny to die in poverty, but you had to pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, goddammit!

We were "Rockefeller Republicans"; "liberal" on social issues - we didn't care who you screwed or what you did so long as your fist stayed away from our noses - but "conservative" on fiscal and geopoltical ones.

I think the beginning of the end came in the Civil Rights era and Vietnam.

 One thing that my parents, lovely complacent white folks that they were, couldn't deny was that the Land of the Free was kind of a tough place if you weren't...well, what they were. And they wanted to see that change.

They were also pretty smart people, and as such refused to fall for the classic blunder of supporting a land war in Asia.

And so it hurt them - my father most - to see the Dixicrats peel off and become Republicans, and to see Nixon cynically manipulating the war for political gain. While no fan of LBJ and the Democrats...these were the first cracks in the marriage.

Then came Reagan - who my father had seen and distrusted in the embryonic stage back in California - and his "voodoo economics" and his magical thinking and the goofy foreign policy adventures (Iran-Contra disgusted him and GHW Bush's pardons made him furiously angry; treason was treason and should be punished, the public be damned...).

And then came Newt Gingrich and the movement that metastasized first into the "Tea Party" and then into the real lunatic fringe, the QANuts and Three Percenters and the whole freakish shitpile of imbeciles and bigots that we have today running the rest of the GOP scared.

Thank God he died before Trump. That alone would have killed him, seeing that we both knew Trump from his shenanigans in the Tri-State area back in the Eightes and knew him as the ridiculous, egomaniac, corrupt buffoon he is...

And that's not even to take into consideration the mad rush on the American Right to return to the economic ways of the Gilded Age and Lochnerism. Tom Jefferson had some pretty goofy political ideas, but he was right about this - a democratic republic cannot be governed by a polity of wage-slaves. If your livelihood depends on the largesse of your patron - whether that patron is the Duke of Sandringham or Jeff Bezos - you cannot act against the patron's interests. 

You can have a concentration of great wealth, or democracy. Not both. We Rocky Republicans were totally jake with the 90 percent top marginal rate, remember? 

Today's GOP does not.

Anyway...that was my road to Santiago de Compostella - through my father's eyes, watching his beloved GOP become the party of Critical Race Theory and January 6th and the Bundys and Taylor Green and - even more terrifying - Tom Cotton, who has all the right Falangist genes and none of Trump's insane emotional problems.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because I see this country as poised on the edge of desuetude.

We have 30-40% of the U.S. public who, in the face of a pandemic, insists in fantasy "treatments" like equine dewormer while spurning effective vaccinations.

That insists that perfectly normal elections have been "stolen".

That is willing to believe, and act with violence to support, in the craziest things that their "leaders" say.

That supports a Supreme Court that appears poised to throw out not just the most sensible firearms regulation but the legal concept of "nondelegation" that will undo the Twentieth Century. 

And I despair.

The U.S. needs a "conservative" political party (and the electoral reality of the US means that there will be only two large parties, one "liberal/left" and one "conservative/right").

But it needs a sane conservative party.

And it doesn't have one.

Right now we - all of us - are confronted with perhaps the single most massive issue we will face over the next century; the way we are heating up the Earth's atmosphere.

It's not a mystery. C'mon! About 200 years ago we the human race started burning stuff - first wood, then coal, then oil - and all that smoke had to go somewhere. The receipts are impossible to ignore. It's going to push us close to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum if we don't do something, LOTS of somethings, and that is a world unlike anything we know.

And the mantra of one of the two political parties we allow ourselves in the US is "Crisis? What crisis?"

Confronted with that...well, spending three or four hours writing a post about field artillery seems...louche, at best.

I'm sitting here as almost half my country becomes something I don't even recognize. Or, worse, that I recognize as a bad dream from earlier times; No-Knothings, Klansmen, Birchers. All the whackaloon things that I thought that We the People had outgrown.

Is the Left a treat?

Christ, no. Idiotic things like "Defund the Police" ensure that my impatience with the American Left has not grown any lesser.

(Mind you, the Portland Police Bureau is still an incompetent shitpile of ignorance and arrogance just as it always has been; we'd be better off to replace it with a troop of sentient raccoons...)

But what the hell is a democratic republic going to do when damn near a third of it's citizens think - and act - like wearing a piece of fabric over your nose and mouth is an intolerable assault on Freedom?

That's just not supportable.

Look at the Congress this past summer?

A bill to fix all the things we know are breaking or broken - bridges, electric lines, roadways - and to help people and to bring some change to the warming climate - has been deadlocked despite massive support from the public largely because a handful of the notional "Left" - Manchin and Sinema - have been bought by big money - and the Right would rather own the libs than help out (although 13 of them finally did - good on you, Baker's Dozen! - and are getting pilloried all over the conservative airwaves for doing it).

We can't even fucking govern ourselves anymore. Geopolitics? How the hell can we hope to do that when we can't even rule ourselves?

So I'm looking around me and seeing an end to the nation and the people I thought I lived among and grown up in .

And I feel like Smokey the Bear standing helpless, with my dungarees and shovel and hat, watching all the trees in the world burn down around me.

Because watching a politically-indigestible minority of my supposed-fellow-Americans cheer enthusiastically for a New Gilded Age and home-grown Franco- or Peronism? 

The only response I can come up with is an inarticulate roar of rage and anguish.   

And who wants to read that?

Which is why I've been so silent.

The Swinged Cats Strike!

And those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!

Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes. 

Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.

Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.

"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."

Update 6/29: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:

How long can this go on?

George Packer has a thoughtful essay up at the Atlantic that discusses how fraught the political problems of the United States have become, and why.

Bottom line; "movement conservatism" in the US has become completely zero-sum and utterly irredentist. It, and the roughly 35-40% of the American public who support it, no longer see opposition to their beliefs as legitimate or transactional, but as dangerously illegal treason. If you look for a link between the sort of rhetoric (and policy) issuing from the Oval Office, the legislative agenda of the current majority in Congress, and the actions of the GOP in the various states they control you can see the connection; to modern movement conservatism there IS no legitimacy outside the "conservative" agenda. Opposition isn't simply politics, but betrayal of everything that the nation stands for - conservatism. That Trump emerged from this fever-swamp is no surprise, and neither is the reality that despite being obviously the least competent Chief Executive since Buchanan his popularity with the GOP voters is stratospheric.

It's no surprise that the base is in love. The base is consumed with...

"paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes."

The obvious problem here is that there is as currently constituted no rational alternative for someone who is hesitant to embrace the changes and challenges of a multipolar, multiethnic nation in an increasingly interconnected world. If people who see themselves as "traditionalists" don't see a way to organize around a reasonable opposition to things they fear they will be forced into choosing the unreasonable and irrational.

There will always be racists and lunatics who will embrace Naziism or bizarre nonsense like QAnon. The tragedy of US politics is that there is now nothing else for the non-racist and non-looney conservatives. It's Trump...or nothing. The reality of first-past-the-post voting is that if the Rockefeller Republicans were to organize and run someone against Trump in 2020 all it would do is hand electoral victory to the Democratic candidate.

This is not supportable. Not in the long term, and not really in the middle- or short-term, either. No nation can endure with almost two-fifths of its population 1) enmeshed in what amounts to a lunatic cult, and 2) unwilling to cede power and willing to accept any machinations to hold it.

Popular democracies and republics depend on the willingness of all parties to accept the legitimacy of their opponents. When in a republican system you have this:

"After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules (in order to emasculate the incoming Democratic executive): “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

you will very soon no longer have a republic.

The U.S. has already, in many ways, become an open oligarchy. The U.S. is, in many ways, not the democratic republic it pretends to be. The U.S. has and is already acting in many ways like any other Great Power, disregarding the good of its own populace and the welfare of those in the places outside its borders it acts, in order to maintain and expand that power.

But what if even the pretense of republican ideals breaks down? What if a plurality of the American public decides that power is better than comity, and that victory for their faction is preferable to the will of the majority? What if that faction prefers to become an open autocracy rather than compromise with their domestic enemies?

What will happen then?

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

We have not.

A tax measure that provides a road map to increased inequality in one of the already-most-unequal industrial democracies and shreds the social safety net woven in the depth of the Depression to prevent a hard turn to fascist or communist revolution, and that is "supported" by, at most, a quarter of the citizens of the affected polity (and that in the midst of a relentless, unashamedly vicious barrage of lies from the ruling party that suggests that at least a portion of that 25% would fall away if they understood how nakedly plutocratic this legislation is) is as close to the definition of "taxation without representation" as I can think of short of a genuine occupation government.

If our political system has devolved to the point where a coterie of neo-Gilded Age fantasists can impose their Sharia Law on three-quarters of the populace, then we have put a wrap on the American Experiment.

In a truly republican nation this would decorate Pennsylvania Avenue with a festive holiday display of heads on pikes.

It has not and will not.

And, as such, we have no one to blame for our failure to keep our own republic but ourselves.

Update 12/6: And a reminder that, as vilely oligarchic as the GOP has become domestically, it, and it's current Chief Executive, are aggressively moronic internationally, as well.

I suspect that the derp behind this reflects the degree to which 1) the Fraudulency Administration is chock-full of people whose understanding of geopolitics ends with the Little Golden Book version of the New American Century, and 2) Trump "foreign policy" is really not about foreign policy but providing red meat for the base. The Right has been jonesing for going all-in on Israel for some time now, but previous administrations (largely with functioning hindbrains, even if as evil as that living inside the carapace of Darth Cheney) punted on the Jerusalem move for the very reasons pointed out in the linked article; it provides no real geopolitical advantage for U.S. interests in return for one more brick in the wall of Arab ire.

I know that several here have taken me to task for being "angry" about all this.

But, frankly, what else is there? I live in Blue Oregon. Outside of helping defenstrate the reptile Walden there is no more I can do to make Oregon a force for the 20th Century in D.C. And yet, here I am, like Smokey the Bear watching these vandals burn the forest of the America I grew up in down around me in hopes that a tangle of Gilded Age weeds will grow in its place. And that briar patch will be what my kids have to grow up in, an America more like the sort of America that drove men into the streets of Homestead to be shot down by formed troops.

I don't want that, and I don't understand how anyone not in the American aristocracy would.

And yet, here we are.

Not doing it.

I thought I'd revisit this post from a year ago, in which I noted that:

"...the GOP in it's present incarnation really offers only two policy "things":

1. Working for open oligarchy, and
2. Comfort for white nationalism, Christian theocracy, and fear of the "others" (whether those others are gay, or brown, or Muslim)

I know that sounds harsh, but...that's really it, isn't it? It's all tax cuts and privatize and deregulate and unshackle Wall Street and shove the homos back in the closet and no abortion and open carry everywhere. "Small government"? Sure...unless you count the DoD. Or the NSA.

There's no GOP vision of a future United States that doesn't really come down to a return to the Gilded Age, is there?"

For which I was castigated as "...unpersuasive and mean spirited."


Well.

Now that we've had a year of open corruption on a scale that would have made U.S. Grant pale with disbelief and Warren Harding green with envy, a year of fire and fury, blowhard tweets and idiotic name-calling, a year of selling off the national patrimony to crony capitalists, of trying to yank medical insurance away from poor people, a year that included a tax measure that prohibits you from deducting your home mortgage, medical expenses, state taxes, and what your kid's teacher spends on crayons but lets me deduct the cost of my private jet, a year dominated by a federal government run by people who seem to have carefully watched the vile doings of every cartoon villain ever scripted and then turned to Skeletor and announced "Here. Hold my beer."

Is there really anyone who still thinks I was "unpersuasive and meanspirited"?

Jesus wept. Yeah, in one sense I WAS unpersuasive. I honestly didn't think these people could be this appalling. Yep. I didn't see that coming. I didn't think that it was possible for a grown human with a functioning hindbrain to WANT to act like a fucking cartoon movie villain.

And here's the thing.

It's pretty damn easy to destroy a social contract. And that's what's going on right now.

For about fifty years we lived with the social contract hammered out by the New Deal. The wealthy would give up a little of their wealth, the middle class a little less, and in return we'd get labor and social peace. Since the old and sick didn't have to fear dying penniless they could stop fighting the ownership class' greed. So our country still had very few rich and many poor, it just wasn't quite so vicious about it. The sort of riots and strikes and radicalism that tore the country in the 1880s and 1890s and Teens and Twenties. The sort of thing that produced the Russian Revolution and then Italian fascism and then the Spanish Republicans.

And that's going away now, folks, if the people who run things in D.C. have any say about it.

You and I are going back to the future, to a New Gilded Age where the rich do what they can and the poor suffer what they must.

And you know what's so infuriating about that?

It's that that's not even good for the idiot plutocrats that are pushing it.

You think "regulations" are the problem? Try going back to the time before the Clean Air and Water Acts, when you could dump anything and everything into the air and water and not give a shit who it poisoned.

You think financial regulations are a problem? Try going back to financial "panics" every other decade, as used to slam the nation in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

I'm here to warn you. I'm here to be MORE unpersuasive and meanspirited. Dammit, people, this isn't just a political disagreement. The Trumpkins and their allies have turned out to be far worse than anyone every thought they could be. They are demolishing the very society built on the social contract of the New Deal. They're doing the goddamn best to return the U.S. to the social, economic, and political environment of 1890.

And if that happens, assuming that rising seas and violent storms don't do the job first, we're going back to a time that almost none of us can conceive and no living American remembers.

But for those of us not in the two-yacht family I can tell you - it was NOT a good time for us.

I wish I had faith that We the People would recognize this and band together to defeat and destroy it. But then I see that damn near two-fifths of my "fellow citizens" think that the Tangerine Toddler, Crock-o-bile Dumm-ee, is doing a heckuva job and I despair.

As we used to say about Dubya's Great Mess-o-Potamia:

Unless We the People, unless you and me and him and her get together and kick these damn Trumpkins dead square in the ass, we are all so, so, SO fucked.

...the fun is having lots to do and not doing it."

I don't want the 'Pub to become a political commentary blog, but this election has me worried, and not (like Lisa) because I seem to becoming objectively Trump-curious or (like PF) I'm worried that Hitlery will invade Poland.

No.

I'm worried for what I see as the long-term implications for the United States' system of government.

First, let's agree that it is blindingly obvious to anyone that hasn't drunk the wingnut Koolade that the GOP in it's present incarnation really offers only two policy "things":

1. Working for open oligarchy, and
2. Comfort for white nationalism, Christian theocracy, and fear of the "others" (whether those others are gay, or brown, or Muslim)

I know that sounds harsh, but...that's really it, isn't it? It's all tax cuts and privatize and deregulate and unshackle Wall Street and shove the homos back in the closet and no abortion and open carry everywhere. "Small government"? Sure...unless you count the DoD. Or the NSA.

There's no GOP vision of a future United States that doesn't really come down to a return to the Gilded Age, is there?

Now...don't get me wrong. I'm not in love with the mainstream corporate-whoring Democratic Party. The Dems' neglect of the horrible effects of capital flight, economic inequality, and crony corporatism are a yuuuuuuge part of why we're in this mess right now.

But.

The Sanders movement shows that the Democrats CAN be pulled to the left.

Not only can the GOP not go there...it's obvious that it won't even let the corporatist centerist Democrats go there - it won't let them be corporate centerist Democrats because they're insufficiently fucking nutzoid for smacking homos, luuurving Jesus and snowflake babies, hugging rich people and big corporations, and bombing the shit out of darkies and fuzzy-wuzzies.

The ugly parallel that jumps to my mind (and I’m not the only one, given the spate of articles about this…) is the rise of Jacksonism in the 1820s.

And the reason that scares me is the damage Jacksonism did; the next thirty years of American politics were dominated by Jacksonians and Jacksonian policies like internal minority genocide and external aggressive war. Plus the malign neglect of slavery (or the outright approval of and expansion-encouragement of it). A whole bunch of our worst Administrations were Jacksonian, culminating in Buchanan. Basically Jacksonism was the bedrock on which the Civil War was founded. One of the worst features of the politics of Jacksonism was that it helped made it impossible for the United States to simply outlaw slavery as Great Britain did between 1830 and 1845. Jacksonism wasn't the only reason, or the main reason...but it was a reason, and not a small one.

The upside of GOPism (call it "Trumpism if you want, but can we accept the the Donald is just the inevitable culmination of 40 years of what the GOP has asked for?) versus Jacksonism is that we no longer have a franchise limited to white males.

The downside is that the GOP’s propaganda machine has done a helluva a great job pulling in the “white male allies”; Christian theocrats, people fearful of imaginary jihadis under the bed, and the plutocracy into a coalition that looks like it represents about 40% of the public.

And the downside of that is that this hard nut of "conservatives" is dead-set against allowing the United States any government but the one they desire.

Do I think that we will see “another Jackson Administration” anytime soon? Probably – and hopefully – not.

But I think that the GOP has become a self-licking icecream cone; I think that regardless of whether the media comes down hard on the Trumpeters after November that this hard core of Jacksonians will not dissipate, and the United States will be, in effect, dealing with the same situation that broke the nation in 1860; there will be a large, indigestible, irredentist minority that will never, NEVER accept the legitimacy of their opponents. No non-Jacksonian/Trumpter will be allowed to govern. Obstruction will be the order, not just of the day but of the week, the year, the decade.

And let's not even start into the nightmare place the GOP is taking us with it's "vote fraud" and "rigged election" fantasies.

And the problem with THAT (beyond the problem of a dysfuntional U.S. government) is that I think, eventually, the American public will get frustrated with the dysfunction. And, as now, there won't be an acceptance that one of the two major parties our first-past-the-post system allows us is a craven lickspittle for corporate power while the other has gone utterly Jacksonian-batshit-nuts but anger and frustration at "both sides".

We the People will writhe and fume - not at the oligarchy we have become, but - that the oligarchy itself no longer "works".

We the People will look for a “savior”, and in my horrified imagination that "savior" will be a Man on Horseback.

And then all the sort of worrying and fretting and discussing things like policies and strategies and politics that we do here will be over and done with, and I hope I am safely dead long before that happens.

Make America Fearsome Again?

One thing that has struck me about this year's U.S. election campaign is what - to me, anyway - seems like a very odd political meme. That is the whole business of "Rebuild the U.S. military!" that seems to be a feature of every Republican candidate.

Let me preface this by saying that I think that many of the bog-standard GOP talking points are nonsense. No, the Islamic State is not sending frogmen up the Mississippi to free the Gitmo detainees if they are shipped to Joliet. No, the gummint isn't coming to grab your guns. No, lowering taxes on rich people doesn't raise revenues.

But I'll accept that these are all debatable points. That's just me. I don't agree with them, but I won't argue that nobody should agree with them.

But the pathetic, horrifying, debilitating, globe-spanning weakness of the U.S. armed forces?

...the fuc..?

Where the hell did THAT come from?

Back in February Mike Zenko wrote up a good piece in Foreign Policy that sums up this whole nonsense and who was saying it. The answer? Pretty much everybody with an (R) behind their name.

The frustrating thing about this is that I know that most American voters don't bother to really think or know anything about actual military capabilities. They wouldn't know an Abrams from a deck chair. They tend to run on what they hear on the television and read on the Internet, and when you have enough people telling you something it takes a very hard-headed person to go counter to that. I hear from "conservative" acquaintances how "Obama has trashed our military" and I can't figure out what the hell they're talking about.

Is it because we have fewer armored divisions than we did in 1945? Or fleet carriers? Or heavy bomb wings?

Because when you think of it...why would we want that?

If we've learned anything from the ridiculous waste of blood and treasure in the Middle East over the past fifteen years we should have learned two things:

First, that there's no power on Earth short of the two other Great Powers, China and Russia, that has a hope in hell of challenging the U.S. in a conventional stand up fight, and that there's no point in arming up to fight either of those polities to a conventional "victory". The U.S. has more than enough conventional power to manage a local or small regional shootout, and anything larger has far too high a chance of going nuclear to be worth risking.

Second, that there's no power on Earth too weak to tie the U.S. into knots if it gets sucked into a local rebellion, civil war, or regional low-intensity spat. A low-birthrate, high-income nation like the U.S. simply doesn't generate enough spare bodies to form the sort of infantry-heavy constabulary units needed to fight such a war and as a news-permeated, middle-class-sensibility polity lacks - hopefully - the sort of callous brutality needed to prosecute such a conflict to a "successful" conclusion.

In other words, the U.S. has military power and more to handle any military adventure it needs to get into, and doesn't need to get into any military adventures it would need more power than that to handle.

I realize that the reason that these Republicans are saying this stuff is to make people afraid and make them run to vote Republican.

But the GOP posits itself as the "grown-up" party, the party of responsibility.

It would seem to me that a grown-up, responsible citizen would be very, very skeptical of all this military scare-mongering.

So why aren't more people saying that? The public press has no reason to simply repeat GOP talking points. Why give them a pass on this?

I cannot think this bodes well for my country.

Banana Republicans

I cannot express how depressing the "debt ceiling" deal is.

Not because of the substance.

We knew the wingnuts were going to kill the hostage. We knew that Obama would cave rather than let his financial interest cronies take a bath when Standard & Poors downgraded U.S. bonds. We pretty much knew how this was going to play out because we've watched Obama and the Teatards play this game for the past couple of years. The Nobel-Prize-Winner-In-Chief would make some good speeches, there would be some posturing and scuffling, like third-graders in a playground, and then the GOP would man up and Obama would roll on his back like a Gresham hootchie mama with six mojitos in her in a waterfront bar on Fleet Week.

No, the depressing part is that process has exposed us as the banana republic we are.

"Banana republic" is defined in Wiki as "...a pejorative term that refers to a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions (e.g. bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy, corrupt politico-economic plutocracy or oligarchy"

Accepting that we at least are not yet dependent on bananas - although video entertainment may be the New Yellow - but the rest seems to fit us pretty well. The bulk of the nation doesn't want the "shared sacrifice" to be shared between those making $7,000 a year and those making $70,000. The majority of U.S. citizens doesn't want to face an uncertain future without reliable food inspections, safe bridges, clean air and water, and some hope of dying outside of poverty and desperation.

But the GOP minority and the oligarchs who love them would accept all that and more rather than accept taxes on those oligarchs. And, to echo the Rude Pundit, the thing I keep coming back to is that through all this the wars continue. That we prefer war to roads and health care and education here is unfathomably depressing.

Well, I give up. It appears that the U.S. is going to get the squalid little dictatorship of the conservatives it seems to either want, or not care about. So I'm going to open my campaign for the GOP in 2012 with the slogan "Vote Republican; Let's Just Get It The Fuck Over With". Let's elect all these batshit fuckers and open the cage doors and let them rampage amongst the populace, flinging their teabag monkey shit, hooting and leaping, tearing down the remnants of the New Deal.

A New Deal, let's not forget, that wasn't built from a cloud of eleemosynary fluffiness of FDR but from that cold-hearted old patrician's savage political calculation that his own class had to pay up in order to prevent a destitute and despairing U.S. public from making the choice that the Russian people had in 1917, the Italian in 1922, and the Spanish and German people would in years to come; the choice between the freedom to starve and want and be forced to fight, and the peace-work-and-bread slavery of fascism or communism.

Well, all right, let's have it, then.

Perhaps when enough people have watched their parents sink into destitution, when we have returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality, to Hoovervilles and bread lines, when the gated communities of the few stand like proud beacons above the decaying suburbs of the many...perhaps then the two-thirds of those in this country who describe themselves as "conservative" or "moderate" will see what their moderation and conservatism has brought them.I only hope that I am long dead by then.

(Cross-posted to GFT)

Trust me: he'll do to the U.S. what he does to Callista

The Man Who Would Be King, Newt Gingrich, has decided that the REAL problem in the Middle East is that we just aren't warry enough.So he wants to

"Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. It’s also an ideological problem. The United States doesn’t need anybody’s permission. We don’t need to have NATO, who frankly, won’t bring much to the fight. We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening. And we don’t have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes."

All of which is true, and all of which means less than a zero in the calculus of national interests of which Mister Gingrich seems to care not a whit.

Does this idiot recall that, craptacular little Third World shithole that it is, Libya is still a Wesphalian state? That the very definition of national existence is the ability to prevent other people from flying around over your territory "without anyone's permission"?

Right now the Libyans are in the middle of a civil war. The opposing sides in civil wars are notoriously touchy about foreign meddling.We would have gone crackers if the British had openly intervened in ours, as was the Confederate intent (see "Trent Affair, The") or even attempted to "mediate" between the Federal government and the rebels. Why does Gingrich believe that the Libyans, rebel or government, would behave any differently?

This gormless wretch Gingrich is only one of the several right-flank characters who seem to be all excited about killin' them - no, wait, getting OTHER Americans to kill - some Libyans, and you know who these people are; the usual suspects - Hitchens, Krauthammer, and no, I won't link to those dopes. And the biggest single commonality between them is that they none of them suggest the simple expedient of asking the friggin' Libyans if they want help.

I'm all in favor of slotting some dictators. Ask my pals; I practically had to be sedated when the Ceauşescus got their 7.39mm pink slip. Gadaffi would look great dangling tastefully a la Benito, or in the dock alongside Charles Taylor.

But if I want to do that I'll have to wait until this knucklehead Gingrich siezes power; a Libyan dictator is a Libyan problem...until the Libyans ask for my help. So Gadaffi is still a Libyan problem, and if we expect and demand the rights of a soveriegn state we owe it to the rest of the world to behave like one. Even before we were a formally a nation we expected the French to go through channels and sign a treaty of alliance before taking a slap at the Brits on our soil; WTF, Newt? You're supposed to be all historical n' shit (at least you and your ghostwriters seem to pick American history to make up stories about); you don't remember this? Has Callista's botox done something to your brain?So, yes, dummy, we DO "need anyone's permission". We need the permission of the very fucking people you're so anxious to "help", if that's really what this is about and knowing you I doubt very much that it is. To even suggest that we just fly around over someone else's country uninvited reminds the rest of us why your skeevy ass only lasted two terms in the House; because you showed that you had no compunction about bullshitting, lying, shuckin' and jiving if it helped you or your political party.

So if you have something sensible to say about Libya I'd love to hear it.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Okay, fine. You now have my permission to put on your little hat and tool off to do something useful. Like shoving a sock in your pie-hole before you say more dumb stuff like this.

Die, Freedom!

It's embarrassing for a political junkie to admit, but I completely passed on the "health care reform" debate and votes this weekend.

Part of this was having two active and busy kids (and part of a third, with Christine's little guy the Poet coming over Sunday afternoon to give her a break), part of it was wanting to stay on top of home and house business.

But a big part of it was simple disgust.

This issue has become a Ministry of Silly Walks, really, and I've long since gone past irritation through anger to revulsion and into indifference at the ludicrous posturing over what is really a very minor adjustment in the U.S. medical system.

The reality is that the fundamental dysfunction - the idea of making a profit off giving medical treatment to the sick - is unchanged. The fee-for-service and for-profit health care business will, therefore, continue to swell up and swallow more of the nation's wealth. The well-duh realization that pretty much the whole rest of the world has reached - that sick people don't and won't "shop" for bargains, that the disjunction in knowledge-level between the medical "provider" and "consumer" is so huge as to be unbridgable and prevents even a smart guy like me from "shopping" for medicine even if I wanted to, and that the complete lack of external controls, either regulatory or market-based, on medical costs virtually ensures that they will bubble until they grow beyond sustainability - has utterly escaped us.

No, this is a band-aid on a tumor, and although it will help a relatively small group of Americans get medical insurance it stays well away from doing anything to actually help reform the for-profit system.

What I did get out of this mess, however, is the degree to which the U.S. party system is broken, and that because one of the two parties has become flat-out, no-holds-barred, bug-fucking crazy. Let's elide the usual political bullshit (John Boehner’s argument, for example, that you won’t be able to keep your health insurance under this plan is just a lie. But we've come to expect this sort of lying by now.) and look at some of the top GOP quotes on the health-care issue (courtesy of Alterdestiny):

Tom Price (R-GA): "If health care passes, "We lose our morality. We lose our freedom."

John Shadegg (R-AZ): "This bill will destroy freedom and do damage to the very fabric of our society."

Marsha Blackburn (R-MN): "Freedom dies a little bit today."

Devin Nunes (R-CA): By passing health care reform, Democrats "will finally lay the cornerstone of their Socialist utopia on the backs of the American people. For most of the 20th century people fled the ghosts of communist dictators. And now you are bringing the ghosts back into this chamber."

Waa...hunh? Obama is Stalin? Forcing people to buy expensive insurance is the COMINTERN? (Guess nobody told the auto-insurance KGB, hunh?) Freedom dies when poor people get medical coverage? Baby Jesus weeps when insurance companies don't get to kick people off their insurance when they get cancer? (Oh wait, they still do - there's nothing in here that prevents rescission.)

I do believe that these gomers are talking out their fourth point of contact. They don't REALLY believe any of this "freedom is dead" rhetoric. The problem is that there's a whole bunch of mouthbreathers out there that DO believe it, and this sort of playground bullshit gets and keeps them worked up.

You can't keep a republic when a third of the citizens believe that passing civil legislation in a majority-vote fashion means "We lose our freedom."

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. One of the deadliest things a republic can do is allow one group or faction to put it's interests not before the interests of others but before the interest of a functioning republic. If one side stops accepting that the other gets a turn at the helm, then there is no solution but conflict, and if one side stops accepting the results of that conflict as played out with votes then it must be played out with guns and ammunition.

Based on this sort of language a fraction - hard to say how large, but given the relative importance of the sort of people like Limbaugh and Coulter who say just the sort of things I've quoted above it is substantial - of the GOP, circa 2010 is already most of the way there.

And where is the alternative? Where is there a place for the "conservative" who doesn't want to hector people about profit!abortiongaysgunsandGod?

WASF.

(Cross-posted from GFT)