defrog | Entries tagged with ministry of batshit

I’m a little behind on political commentary and I know you’re all dying to hear what I think about that debate and the thing about his taxes, etc.

So:

1. I didn’t watch the debate, because (1) I already know which candidate I prefer, (2) I already know that debates never tell me anything I don’t already know about the candidates – it’s all trainwreck entertainment theatre that I can live without, and (3) I value what little sanity I have remaining. My Twitter feed of people watching the debate live assures me I made the right decision.

That said, based on the coverage and commentary, it went the way I expected. Which is also why I find all the hand-wringing over how it was a low point in Presidential elections and a total shit show and etc a bit disingenuous. I mean, yes, it was all that, but what honestly did they expect? Trump did exactly what Trump always does when you put him in front of an audience – lies and bloviates and bullies and disregards all rules and decorum generally shouts word salads at you He always does that. He’s never not done that. It’s his brand. Like, dude, where have you been for the last four years?

2. While we’re at it, the “Trump paid almost no taxes” story was welcome, but again didn’t say much we didn’t already know. If anything, it told us that Trump is like most rich people in America – he pays people good money to make sure his tax bill is as close to zero as you can get.

I don’t think it matters in terms of the election outcome. To be clear, I think it does matter very much in the sense of understanding how desperate Trump is and what he may do to save his own skin (rig an election, say, or cry fraud if he loses), and it matters in the sense that Trump’s tax returns are symptomatic of a much wider problem of systemic tax evasion that the rich have been utilizing for years.

But as a game changer in the 2020 election? It’s not going to move the needle much, if at all. It certainly won't turn Republicans and his MAGA base against him – most of them would love to know how he did it so they can do it, too. Remember how the Panama Papers showed just how many rich people with actual money do this kind of thing all the time? Remember how no one did anything to really change that?

So yeah. I don’t think it will affect the outcome of the election. It should. But it won’t.

Also, I admit I’d be kind of annoyed that this would be the dealbreaker for Republicans that have backed every other horrible thing Trump has done so far. The racism, the cruelty, the sexual assault and harassment, the bullying, the incitement of violence, kids in cages, collusion, corruption, nepotism, mocking the disabled, the constant lying – and this is where you draw the line? Come now.

3. Back to the debate, the big takeaway for me is his statement about/to the Proud Boys. It’s hard to make it more obvious that Trump supports them and approves of their intentions and activities.

Predictably he’s been trying to walk that back in his usual bizarre way – simultaneously claiming he has no idea who the Proud Boys are but he condemns them anyway. But like most of his walkbacks, he sounds like he just saying what his advisers told him to say and doesn’t really understand why he has to say it, and is just as likely to turn right back around and say what he said the first time. The fact that he didn’t condemn them the first time when he had a chance – and honestly, the fact that it has to be asked at all is not a good sign – speaks more loudly than his damage-control followups.

4. Even if you can somehow prove that Trump was just mouthing off and wasn’t serious, or misspoke, or whatever, the fact remains that the Proud Boys and groups like them are feeling mighty proud that that President Himself supports their manifesto and their actions, which makes them even more dangerous and more likely to pull a Rittenhouse in the belief that Trump will have their back.

5. Anyway, the debate experience was so awful that even before Trump got sick, people were suggesting maybe we cancel all the others. I cannot think of a good reason against this. POTUS debates don’t really add any value in terms of learning where candidates stand on topics and hashing out whose plan is better. The only people who benefit from TV debates are the candidates (cos hey, free airtime) and the TV networks (cos hey, trainwrecks are good television).

And in this particular election year, I’d wager most people already know what the choice is – four more years of Trump TV, or something that is not that.

Anyway, if the tone of that first debate really put you off, here’s the bad news: that’s as good as it gets, and it will not get that good again. Maybe the Harris/Pence debate is worth doing as a relative palate cleanser, but I think the other Trump/Biden matches are going to be more of the same, and once was plenty.

The talk about extra rules or tools for the next debate to make it more civil is adorable, but look – the first debate had rules. Trump characteristically did not bother to follow any of them. He’s already opposed the proposed changes for the next one. That’s no reason not to put the rules in, but Trump is gonna Trump.

And honestly democracy won’t suffer if we cancel the rest of the debates. Frankly, democracy has far bigger problems to worry about.

Muted,

This is dF

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So The Donald and The Melania have COVID-19 now.

Which, as October Surprises go, is a humdinger.

It’s also the kind of ironic plot twist that would get most scriptwriters thrown out of the room, but then that’s 2020 for you.

Commentary:

1. Understandably, there is a lot of talk that Trump is faking it to play the patriotism card, or to get out of the rest of the debates, or to push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, or to recover quickly and thus prove he was right that COVID-19 is no big deal, or claim it was an assassination attempt by Biden or Pelosi, something. Or maybe he’s planning to fake his death and disappear to a remote island fortress to avoid jail, his creditors and Putin’s assassins.

And of course – this being Trump – I can’t rule that out.

The obvious problem is that Trump is a well-established pathological liar who hires people to pathologically lie on his behalf, so it’s hard to know if this is true. And even if it is, it will be difficult to trust any info we get from him or the White House on his status. Granted, this would be true with most Presidents a month before their possible re-election. But it’s so much more true with this admin.

But for now I’m assuming it’s legit until someone can prove otherwise.

2. Despite his age and obviously bad physical and mental condition, I think there’s a good chance he’ll survive, if only because he’s the POTUS and thus has access to the best and most expensive healthcare anywhere. Knowing what we know about the coronavirus, the next 10 days will be the most crucial, but we also know that testing positive is not in itself an automatic death sentence.

3. Meanwhile – and I know this is a very unpopular thing to say – I hope he and FLOTUS recover. I don’t gleefully wish death on him, because that would make me more like him, and I want to be as much the opposite of him as possible.

4. That said, if he ends up in the ICU between now and then, I also hope he has some kind of epiphany that will make him a better, wiser and more empathetic person who will finally take COVID-19 seriously and come up with a real policy to deal with it.

Yes, that is very long odds, I know. I do think it’s far more likely that – like Boris Johnson – he’ll get back to being an awful person and milk the sympathy card for everything it's worth while making things tougher for everyone who isn’t his rich friends. Also, all the stuff I mentioned about Trump pretending to get COVID-19 to play the patriotism card, get out of the rest of the debates, push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, claim Obama ordered the Deep State to infect him, etc? Trump will probably do one or more of those even if he really has it.

But that’s why they call it “hope”, you know.

5. As for the election, who knows? There are too many “what if” scenarios at this stage to make any kind of reliable prediction, so we’ll just have to see how this plays out before we can get an idea. But it’s a fair bet that is MAGA cult – which is primed to accept no result other than a Trump landslide – can’t be counted on to take this calmly or rationally.

License to ill,

This is dF

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Previously on Senseless Acts of Bloggery:

As for what happens next, that’s a whole other post and it’s going to take me a little time to get that written – and it seems that particular story is fast-moving. So I’m gonna need a little time on that.

So yeah, about that:

1. We already knew what Mitch McConnell was going to say about whether the Senate should be accepting SCOTUS nominations during an election year – i.e. literally the exact opposite of what he said in 2016 when Antonin Scalia passed away and Presidente Obama nominated Merrick Garland. It was so expected you can’t call it irony, or even a plot twist.

2. We also knew that at the end of the day, the rest of the GOP Senate would back Mitch up on it. Apparently it’s worth being lambasted as shameless opportunist hypocrites if they can get a SCOTUS supermajority – not least since at least some of them have put up with Trump for the last four years for that very purpose. If they don’t push this now, they’ll have sold their soul for nothing and they may not have an opportunity like this again.

3. I don’t have much to say about Amy Coney Barrett, except to say that, considering who else was on the shortlist, it could be a lot worse. But then that’s kind of like saying it’s better for a kaiju to destroy the city than Cthulhu.

If it helps, all those memes claiming The Handmaid’s Tale is based on People of Praise are apparently incorrect. (Short version: wrong ultraconservative Catholic splinter group.)

That said, the thing about SCOTUS (and this is important to remember) is that Supremes tend not to stick strictly to party lines, depending on the case before them and the legal arguments being made. I’m not saying ideology doesn’t matter – I’m saying it doesn’t produce a predictable result every time. In other words, having a political majority on the SCOTUS bench isn’t the rubber-stamp slam dunk everyone thinks it is. In the past year, SCOTUS has made quite a few decisions in favor of the liberal side of the case in question.

Granted, this was largely because conservative lawyers presented legally weak and sloppy arguments to make their case – which in turn was mainly because conservative lawyers went in thinking they were preaching to the choir and didn’t need to work hard because hey, it’s a 5-4 majority and two are Trump appointees, how can we possibly lose?

They lost because SCOTUS generally doesn’t work like that. To be sure, a justice’s political leanings do matter – but mainly in terms of interpretation of the law. At the end of the day, the law – and its applicability to the specific case – is what matters, not the outcome a judge might personally want. Sometimes the decision is based on technicalities (the current conservative SCOTUS team saved DACA because of sloppy paperwork).

That said, a 6-3 supermajority may well change that dynamic considerably.

4. We’ve had supermajorities before, of course. However, this particular supermajority is problematic for a couple of reasons.

One: everyone’s view of the role of SCOTUS has become increasingly politicized (i.e. most people think the role of SCOTUS is not to serve as a check against unconstitutional laws, but to settle political arguments), which is not good.

Two: This conservative supermajority is arriving in the broader context of an unhinged authoritarian POTUS who has gone out of his way to undermine the election process to ensure that he wins, and that the 40% of people who support him will accept no other result as legit.

Which means if Trump loses and refuses to step down (which is a distinct possibility), the inevitable court case will go before a SCOTUS with six conservative Supremes, three of which were appointed by Trump. That might not go the way he thinks. But if it does, SCOTUS will lose whatever legitimacy it has and Trump will be an authoritarian POTUS with a federal judicial system rigged in his favor. That’s a bad combination – unless yr part of the MAGA cult, I guess, then it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for all this time.

5. Assuming Barrett is confirmed (and it’s not yet clear just how the Demos could prevent it at this stage), the question for the Demos is: what now?

There are currently three possible Demo strategies being bandied about:

(1) Pack the court

(2) Term limits for Supremes (18 years is the most common suggestion, though there are others)

(3) Both.

6. Both are old ideas, and both are legal. I confess I’m not a fan of either strategy, but I think the court-packing option is the worst of the two for the reason mentioned above – i.e. SCOTUS is supposed to be politically independent. It’s not meant to represent the will of whatever party controls the White House and/or Congress.

To me, court-packing legitimizes the idea of SCOTUS as political-ideology enforcer because the whole point is to intentionally stack the odds in your favor. Yes, this has become the objective of SCOTUS nominations under the current system, but it’s much harder to do – unless, like Trump, you get lucky. (While we’re at it, let's admit if HRC was POTUS under the same conditions, you can bet we’d be having the same argument with everyone’s roles reversed.)

But let’s be clear – the intention of court-packing is to give the political party doing the packing control over SCOTUS. I’m not cool with that, even if (as mentioned above) the SCOTUS rulings aren’t as predictable as people seem to think.

Also, on a more practical level, if the Demos can expand the SCOTUS bench to 15 justices to give liberal judges a majority, the next GOP admin could come in and add 15 more, or knock it back down to nine, or six, or whatever. Where will it end?

7. Term limits are a better option, although I disagree with the argument that it would make nomination battles less political. If anything, it will make them more political. Still, the politicization issue is a much deeper-rooted problem that no reconfiguration of SCOTUS will fix.

Meanwhile, whether term limits would result in a more balanced bench seems to depend on the outcome of each election – if (say) the GOP wins the White House four times in a row, you’re looking at an 8-1 GOP-appointed bench that would take up to nine years to reverse. (Feel free to check my math, because I didn’t.)

Still, it's not a bad idea in itself. And if the Demos do resort to court-packing, I'd rather they make term limits part of that deal.

8. The thing is, any of these options require a Biden/Harris victory AND the Demos holding the House and retaking the Senate. If Trump wins, and/or the GOP holds the Senate, that’s not going to happen.

And as mentioned above, if Trump loses and refuses to step down, we’ve got far bigger problems.

Developing …

Judge dread,

This is dF

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As you may know, the US Postal Service is in big big trouble – thanks largely to the guy who’s running it and the guy who appointed him.

And we all know why.

It’s actually one of several ways that Trump and the GOP are going out of their way to make it as hard to vote as possible – unless you think COVID-19 is a hoax or just another flu, in which case it will be as easy as it always is.

Guess which party this dynamic happens to favour.

FiveThirtyEight lists five ways TrumpCo is undermining the election process, and they fall into two basic categories: (1) making it harder to vote in general, and (2) pre-emptively delegitimizing the results in case Trump loses (which, according to current polling, he might).

For me, the latter is the more insidious of the two, and goes to the heart of Trump’s war on USPS. He’s been constantly labeling mail-in voting as susceptible to massive voter fraud (which it's not) whilst claiming the Democrats are actively planning to do just that (which they aren't). If millions of mail-in ballots arrive late, or even on Election Day, we won’t know the results for weeks, and you can bet Trump will exploit the ensuing uncertainty and chaos to simultaneously declare himself the winner and that any other result is due to the Radical Left Antifa Demos trying to steal the election. And you can also bet the MAGA cult won't take that calmly.

The Demos have been mobilizing to encourage people to plan their vote now, and they’ve been creating various alternative options to bypass the USPS such as drop boxes and curbside voting – and of course Team Trump is resorting to lawsuits to stop them.

But again, the USPS is just one part of a bigger push by Trump and the GOP to not only limit voting as much as possible, but ensure that the 40% of people who support Trump will refuse to accept any outcome that doesn’t result in him winning another term.

And to be clear, Trump isn't doing this all by himself – the GOP is fully complicit in this, whether they simply do nothing to stop him or actively help him (for example, here’s the GOP governor of Tennessee Bill Lee signing a state bill that says anyone who gets busted at a BLM protest will lose the right to vote).

Meanwhile, for fun, here’s a video of Trump telling people mail-in voting is bad whilst signing his own mail-in ballot.

Your cheatin’ heart,

This is dF

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Today marks the 23^rd anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from the UK to the PRC under the One Country Two Systems arrangement.

Alternatively, it’s Year 0 of the second handover to China in which One Country Two Systems has been changed to One Country Two Nearly Identical Systems.

Which means I might go to jail for posting this. Or not. Let’s see, shall we?

1. As expected, Beijing approved and enacted its national security law (NSL) for HK yesterday. Characteristically, they released the text of the national security law last night. In the middle of the night. In Chinese only. And only after the law was already in force.

Several people have already translated it into English. You can read this explainer if you like, or this more detailed translation.

Anyway, for the most part it's as bad as we suspected. And even where it doesn't sound so bad, there are two caveats: (1) the wording is intentionally vague to allow for very loose interpretation of what counts as an offense, and (2) the law basically says that Beijing has final say on what does and doesn't count, and that the law supersedes any HK law it might come into conflict with.

So for all intents and purposes all of the human rights violations that regularly happen in mainland China in the name of national security can now happen here.

Carrie Lam, for one, seems mighty pleased.

As well she should – Beijing has fixed the protest problem she created in the first place, and now she can go around blathering about how HK is harmonious and safe now that all political opposition has been suppressed.

2. The chilling effect is real – even before the details of the law was revealed, some people were taking cover. Which evidently was the point. Anyway, two of the opposition parties founded after the 2014 umbrella occupation have disbanded, some protesters are deleting their Twitter accounts, church leaders who opposed the NSL have deleted their posts, some “yellow economy” (pro-protest) restaurants have closed, and Chickeeduck is being evicted from a mall. And all that before we even knew what was in the law.

President Xi Jinping is smiling so hard right now his face may just freeze that way.

3. The HK police are also happy because why wouldn’t they be? They’ve already been greenlighted to do anything they want to anyone they don’t like.

4. Carrie Lam’s predecessor CY Leung is so happy he’s now offering bounties of up to HK$1 million for anyone who provides clues that aid the arrest of "national security law offenders", or to those who have information on "anyone who has fled the city".

Put another way, CY sees the NSL as his ticket to get revenge on every last pro-Democracy politician and activist who gave him crap while he was CE. (Indeed, a lot of his sideline commentary in the last year has included everything from the usual foreign conspiracy theories and saying the police should use even more violence on protesters to hoping the NSL would be retroactive to the point where anyone who staged a protest during his admin would get life in prison.)

5. Since 2003, we’ve typically marked July 1 with two activities: (1) a flag-raising ceremony that no one attends unless they’re paid to be there and (2) an all-purpose protest march covering whatever grievances the people have that year.

The latter is now illegal under the NSL, although police had already banned this year’s march under the COVID-19 social distancing rules that at this point exist solely for the purpose of enabling police to ban protests. Maybe now that they don’t need that excuse, they’ll drop the rules altogether?

Activists are determined to march anyway. It would be great if 2 million people (or more) showed up, though that’s unlikely. Anyway, the police have already prepared brand new warning flags for them.

[The running gag on Twitter is that protesters will be teargassed, beaten and arrested before they can finish reading the warning. Ha ha.]

6. As for what this all means for the protest movement, I suppose that depends on what happens next. There’s been a lot of chatter about how the protesters went too far and ended up accelerating the arrival of 2047 (the year our SAR status was to expire) and gained nothing. Others say the protests have worked in a broader sense because it not only exposed the corrupt violence inherent in the system and proved that the HK govt was always a Beijing puppet, but also forced the sort of crackdown needed to rally international pressure on Beijing, who frankly has been throwing its weight around a lot in recent years since Xi became President.

While we’re waiting for that to happen, I like to think that resistance in HK will take smaller, subtler forms – mini flash mob performances of the alt-national anthem, midnight graffiti, tiny acts of defiance to keep hope alive. But for now I think a lot of people will go silent, if only to regroup and figure out what to do next.

7. Since people have asked:

We are fine, and I don’t expect the current situation to impact us personally for the time being. The general wisdom (such as it is) is that the HK govt/Beijing will slap NSL vengeance on prominent opposition figures first – likely the ones who have already been arrested during the course of the protests. They’re the ones who will be prosecuted and jailed first to serve as examples to the rest of us. The objective is rule of fear, and the authorities will be just as happy if the average malcontents and dissenters either shut up or leave HK altogether – if only because jailing over 2 million people is time consuming, expensive and not the kind of thing you want to be doing when HK’s unemployment rate is as high as it is.

So for the near future, at least, I don’t think I have anything to worry about beyond having the occasional post deleted or flagged. Beyond that, who knows?

Developing (obviously) ….

Under the gun,

This is dF

EDITED TO ADD [3:30pm]: Well that didn't take long. The police have made their first arrest under the NSL. The offense: allegedly carrying a flag saying "Hong Kong Independence".

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It seems like we’ve crossed some sort of event horizon or cultural Rubicon when I scroll past protest photos and videos on Twitter and I have to look closely to see if they’re from Hong Kong or Minneapolis.

The parallels are striking, from the excessive and indiscriminate use of tear gas and gratuitously pepper-spraying and arresting reporters to pundits and leaders calling protesters thugs who should be shot and blaming teachers and church leaders for encouraging them.

And not just in Minneapolis, of course. Protests are popping up in other major cities. Even the White House was in lockdown temporarily.

And, you know:

1. To get the obvious out of the way, yes, all four officers should be arrested (Derek Chauvin has finally been charged with murder – the others should at least be charged with accessory), though it seems the police seem to be going with the defense that George Floyd would still be alive if he’d lived a healthier lifestyle, and I don’t see that helping to ease tensions.

2. And yes, institutional racism in America is most definitely a thing, and has been since we were still colonies of the Crown. Trump’s so-called presidency has made things worse, but the problem existed long before he invented Birtherism.

Indeed, the protests are not just about George Floyd. They’re about Kenneth Walker, Breona Taylor, Sean Reed, Ahmaud Arbery, Steve Taylor (and that’s just in the last month) and so on and etc all the way back to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the thousands upon thousands before them – to say nothing of the whole stupid Amy Cooper saga.

3. So IMO the anger and fury of protesters is 100% justified. The violence, not so much, but it’s understandable. MLK Jr told us this way back in the 60s: riots are the language of the unheard, and the inevitable result of systemic injustice – they don’t just magically pop up out of nowhere.

That said, it’s worth adding that protest violence is often the result of police handling the protests badly by escalating tensions rather than defusing them, whether intentionally or by accident. In cases where the police themselves are the object of protest anger, simply showing up in riot gear is almost guaranteed to make a bad situation worse. I’ve seen anecdotal accounts that this is the case in Minneapolis. It’s certainly the case in Hong Kong. Like the saying goes, when you send in riot police, you get a riot.

4. Like in HK, the law-and-order response from Trump and those who worship him has been predictably awful and likely to get people killed. One thing going for the US is that the police is not just one force that takes orders from the White House – it’s a diverse array of local and state forces, and at least some of them are trying to defuse tensions rather than escalate them.

5. It’s hard to know how bad this is going to get. Past history isn't much help – usually, things die down after a few days and we spend the aftermath discussing the problem and generally doing little to address it. Here in 2020, we have a white supremacist in the White House with a cult army of supporters fuelled by paranoid conspiracy theories that liberals, the media and PoC are all out to get them.

I guess we’re lucky the Open Carry buffoons who stormed capital buildings because they couldn't get haircuts on demand haven't shown up at these protests to “help” – not yet, anyway. That could change.

And I don’t even want to think about what all this could mean for the 2020 election.

6. Anyway, as I said, we’ve been living our own version of this in HK for some time now in terms of protests and police brutality. And it's almost like we’ve become a template for Minneapolis – not just the police going crazy with tear gas and targeting reporters (at least the non-white ones), but protesters reportedly throwing tear gas canisters back at police.

So there’s a certain hypocritical irony that Trump advocates shooting black protesters for rioting while he simultaneously takes steps to punish Beijing and the HK govt for oppressing protests here.

That said, I’m not sure he even knows what’s going on here. His statement on HK doesn’t say a word about police brutality or human rights. He’s concerned mainly with HK’s loss of autonomy under 1C2S, and I think he only cares inasmuch as it’s something else he can add to his anti-China rhetoric, which he deploys mostly to entertain his cult and push the nonsense narrative that China – not Trump – is to blame for COVID-19 killing over 100,000 Americans.

Which I only mention because a number of HK people seem to think Trump can somehow save us if he takes action. Thing is, Trump doesn’t care about us, or about human rights in general. He pals around with oppressive authoritarians and ruthless dictators, and even talks about Xi Jinping as a good friend. Sure, it's all in his head. The point is that if his actions do us any good whatsoever, it will be by sheer dumb luck.

And okay, when things look increasingly hopeless as they do here, you can't afford to be picky. If Kim Jong-un or Rodrigo Duterte intervened to save us, we’d probably take it.

Still, the thing about Trump is that his whims turn on a dime, and he regularly undermines his own policies on Twitter. Also, his “plan” is pretty vague and hasn’t actually been enacted yet. Everything depends on details and execution, and it’s always possible that his “solution” to HK will be worse than the problem.

7. Oh, BTW, shoutout to Laura Ingraham for coming up with the worst attempt so far to convince black people that Trump totally understands what they're going through.

Developing …

Revolution earth,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Voice of the Beehive, "Let It Bee"
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1629337.html

So yes, for the last week people have been out on the streets protesting for their right to leave their home any damn time they feel like it. Which was predictable, given that Trump, the GOP and Fox News have been going out of their way to encourage them.

So, to the bloggery:

1. Is it stupid and dangerous? Yes, very. We know this because (1) science and (2) history – we literally had this argument during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, with lots of people deciding it was time to stop wearing masks and get back to work. It went badly for everyone.

That said, we’re lucky that the turnout for these things isn’t as big as certain news outlets might be making it look – at least so far – and it’s encouraging that most people don’t support the protests or lifting the stay-at-home orders too soon. Still, it doesn't take that many people to get a cluster going.

2. Is it staged? To an extent, yes. There’s plenty of evidence it’s the kind of astroturfed protests we used to see with the Tea Party rallies that preceded Trump (complete with Fox News promos). This is essentially Tea Party 2.0, only smaller, and this time it’s serving as a re-election campaign strategy for Trump (namely, ensuring voters blame Demo governors for PPE shortages, economic damage and the rising body count).

3. However, that’s not to say all of the people attending these protests are paid actors or don’t have real grievances. I mean, yes, much of it (possibly most of it) is conspiracy theories, liberty-posturing, terrible white-privilege analogies and unlimited refills. But I have seen interviews with a few protesters who said their real complaint is that they can’t work from home, their workplace/job has been deemed non-essential and they have no income as long as the stay-at-home orders are in place. Unemployment is sky-high and they have no idea if they're getting their jobs back, and they’re worried that they’re going to be in huge trouble financially if the lockdown continues.

I think that’s a legit worry – in fact, it’s probably evidence that one of the downsides of extended quarantine or lockdown is that it’s bad for you both psychologically and physically. This (along with the economic impact) is why a number of experts have said that while it’s going to take as long as 2022 to defeat COVID-19 with a vaccine or herd immunity, we can’t realistically stay on lockdown until then.

4. The problem is that we can't go back to business as usual, either. What we need is the right balance of social distancing and PPE – plus adequate testing capabilities – to allow businesses to open and for people to work safely or generally go outside to minimize the risk of starting new clusters and starting the whole process over again.

This can’t be done state by state – it requires a coordinated national strategy with strong leadership, as opposed to (say) a vindictive whimsical man-child grifter.

Unfortunately, that’s what we have.

5. On a related note, regarding the evangelical churches defying lockdown orders …

Like with the protests, most of it is the usual posturing and scoring political points in the fictional Liberal War On Christianity™, but some of it is reasonable – particularly small churches (with congregations of maybe 20-30 people on a good day) who think they should be exempted because they’re capable of maintaining sufficient social distancing and other precautions.

I do think that’s a fair point – on the other hand, I don’t know how enforceable it is, and of course everyone will want to be an exception to the rule, so a blanket lockdown is probably the most realistic policy, at least for now (for the reasons mentioned above).

Also, as a Christian, I get that fellowship and worship are meaningful. But I also think as Christians we should take all precautions to not spread a deadly virus around. This just seems obvious to me. But then here in HK, my church has been holding Zoom/YouTube services for over 10 weeks. So it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make. We’re pretty sure Jesus is okay with it.

I should mention this is true for many churches in the US. It’s mainly the charismatic / evangelical megachurches who gleefully hooked their ministries to the Trump Crazy Train that have been refusing to cooperate and playing the “O look at the Atheist Deep State persecuting my Christian faith” card.

6. As for the politicians and pundits going on TV saying the economy is more important than living and if reopening businesses means 2% of the population has to die, that’s fine, two quick thoughts on that: (1) it would actually make the economy worse, and (2) I guarantee you the people who spout this line on TV are okay with it because they assume the death toll won’t include themselves, their loved ones or anyone of consequence, so who cares?

7. Anyway, it’s hard to be optimistic about this. Far too many people think COVID-19 is fake news, or they think it's real but overblown, and meanwhile the federal govt is hoarding PPE in an apparent bid to hold states for ransom, while Glorious Leader is using press briefings mainly as an excuse to gather the media in the room so he can work on his insult comedy stand-up routine.

I mean, I’m honestly not sure which is worse – that he actually believes that injecting yourself with Lysol while lying in a tanning booth will clear COVID-19 out of your system, or that he just says such things to pwn the libs and entertain his fans at a time when almost 60,000+ Americans are dead from this thing (which is a subset of 218,000 deaths globally) and counting.

Anyway, some states are already reopening, so I guess we’re going to find out the hard way if it’s a bad idea or not. If we’re lucky, enough people will keep washing their hands, wearing masks and social-distancing as much as possible when they go out. That will help. Let’s just hope it’s enough.

Catch the wave,

This is dF

POSTSCRIPT: If yr wondering, here in Hong Kong we’re doing surprisingly well. But we’re also an example of what happens when you get lax too early. We recorded our first case on Jan 24. Between then and mid-March we only had around 160 cases and four deaths. Then a new cluster emerged in Lan Kwai Fung (a popular club district) and in less than a month we shot up to 1,000 cases.

That’s now tapered off – we’re at 1,038 cases currently, and we’re at a point where we can actually go several days a week without a new case being reported. And we’re still only at four deaths total.

Still, be warned – lower your guard too early and you’re going to get hammered.

PRODUCTION NOTE: I have a lot of links for this post, but Dreamwidth isn't doing rich text, and I'm really not keen to write out all the html manually, so you'll just have to take my word for it. I'll repost this link-embedded version when Dreamwidth or my browser get their act together.

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In a couple of posts, I’ve mentioned that one of the wild cards in the 2020 election is the fact that the top candidates (to include Bernie Sanders at the time) were all in the high-risk demographic for COVID-19, which tends to be more fatal for elderly patients. Trump is the youngest of the bunch at 74, and both he and Biden are the oldest candidates in American history (so would Sanders if he was still running, obviously).

So considering that neither party has officially nominated their candidates yet, and as macabre as it may be, it’s worth asking now: what happens if one or both candidates either dies or is incapacited by COVID-19 before the conventions, or before the election, or between election day and the inauguration?

FiveThirtyEight explains the options here.

The TL;DR version: As it happens, both parties have backup plans, and have done for a long time. The biggest problem will be if the nominee dies too close to Election Day when the ballots have already been prepared with his name on them. The party would have to agree on a replacement in time to update the ballots, or at least make it clear to voters who their actual choices are. And then you have the problem of mail-in and absentee ballots.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of the article is this: in all of American history, this has never actually been tested. At most we’ve had to replace running mates at the last minute, but we’ve never had a scenario where a frontrunner dies before the convention or a POTUS nominee dies before the election.

Hopefully this year won’t be the first – not least because the American political landscape is already dominated by paranoid hyperpartisan batshit where the slightest irregularity will spawn a metric ton of half-assed conspiracy theories if the result is someone other than their preferred candidate – and that’s without the complication of COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing. If those conditions are still in place when it’s convention time – or on Election Day – people are likely to trust the results even less, unless the parties can make the process as transparent as possible. Which they probably won’t because lol no.

Put simply, you probably couldn't pick a worse year to experiment with this kind of thing. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that – the pre-plague situation was bad enough.

Keep yrself alive,

This is dF

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Well, that’s apparently that. Barring any weird disasters (and I’m including COVID-19 and deranged assassins here), it looks like it’s going to be Joe Biden vs D. Trump in November.

So a few thoughts on that.

1. There’s a lot of ink being written on where it went wrong for Sanders – some of it sensible, some of it otherwise. For me, the most sensible analysis is rooted in the point that Sanders was campaigning against the Democratic Party Establishment as much as he was against Trump. Turns out that wasn’t such a hot idea.

2. As I’ve said elsewhere, I wasn’t especially thrilled with either Biden or Sanders as a Demo nominee. And if those had been the only two choices in my state primary, I think I ultimately would have gone with Biden for the sole reason that (as I’ve mentioned before) I do think he stands a better chance to beat Trump than Sanders would have for the same reason he’s the presumptive nominee – he’s better at building the broader, diverse base of support the DP is going to need.

3. Speaking of which, in a nice plot twist, Sanders has not only endorsed Biden, but has joined forces with him to form working groups (consisting of staff from both of their campaigns) to shape the Democratic Party’s approach to six issues: climate change, criminal justice, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. Personally I find this encouraging – not just that Sanders is willing to work with Biden (albeit to have as much influence on his platform as possible) but that Biden is willing to listen to him.

But then that’s always been Biden’s strength – as I said, he’s always been a coalition guy, and the DP is a coalition party. He knows that if he’s going to lead the Demos to victory, he needs to get everyone involved, and that includes the progressives who supported Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Obviously the result isn't going to the Socialist Utopia that Sanders fans want, but it will probably beat the alternative.

4. On the downside, Biden’s dealmaking skills have traditionally reached across the aisle – which in normal times would be okay, but these are not normal times. The GOP is firmly in Trump Cult Batshit Fascism territory, and I don't expect that to change if Trump loses. Even if the Demos are able to take back Congress, I fully expect the GOP to do with Biden exactly what they did with Obama (and would have done with Sanders) – stonewall, obfuscate, weep and wail about socialist tyranny and generally do everything possible to trip him up and ensure Biden doesn’t sign a single gawdamn bill that comes anywhere close to universal healthcare or whatever.

Consequently, any attempts by Biden to bridge that divide and win GOP votes essentially means making deals with a party that has embraced white supremacy, xenophobia, fascism and gaslighting as a way of life – which is not only a bad look and morally suspect even by political standards, but also raises the question of what his legislative proposals will look like after the GOP committee reps get through with them, and whether the results would be worse than doing nothing at all.

5. That’s assuming Biden defeats Trump, which is the other big question. As I’ve said before, I would have voted for Marianne Williamson over Trump, so Biden already has my vote. But I am expecting Trump to win, despite the fact that as far back as September, Biden has mostly faired better in the polls in a hypothetical Biden vs Trump race, sometimes by as much 11 points on average. But lately it’s been a single-digit advantage, and Biden has yet to see a post-Sanders bounce in the polls.

Of course, it’s a long way to November, and we have a new wild card in the form of COVID-19. Assuming the coronavirus itself doesn’t take out Biden or Trump, the havoc it’s wreaking on the economy and unemployment are eroding the one advantage any incumbent POTUS has: how well the economy is doing. Trump’s handling of the crisis arguably isn't helping, though whether that will hurt him will depend on how many people (particularly Republicans) die from COVID-19 and how many of the surviving cult members either blame Trump or continue to believe his schtick that all this is somehow the fault of the Obama Deep State and the Fake News Conspiracy.

Then there’s the effect of COVID-19 on Election Day itself – if enough states are still in lockdown, and if the Trump admin succeeds in hobbling or even shuttering the USPS (which could impact mail-in votes), voter turnout will be impacted significantly, and certainly Trump thinks that will work in the GOP’s favor.

And even if COVID-19 is brought under control in time, there’s still the Russiabots.

So really, 2020 is looking like the most wildly unpredictable POTUS election in ages, possibly ever – at least for now. By the time we get to September, we may have a better idea. The one thing we know for sure (or should) is that we can’t take a Biden victory for granted, no matter how badly Trump screws up. So I’m going into this on the assumption that Trump can (and will) win. I will thoroughly enjoy being proven wrong.

Last man standing,

This is dF

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A clarification on my previous post regarding COVID-19 in HK, the difficulties of maintaining social distancing for long periods of time, and the role of govts in sustained social distancing:

In HK, we mitigate that with masks and hand sanitizer, etc. But it only goes so far. You need solid and consistent govt leadership setting the example and imposing limitations.

I should have added:

Not that we have that in Hong Kong.

The new social distancing regs that kicked in today are good in theory (if somewhat flawed). But a potentially bigger problem is enforcement – partly because the details are difficult to enforce consistently and fairly, and partly because consistent and fair enforcement is the responsibility of the HK police force, which is not especially renowned for being consistent or fair.

In fact, the HK police is probably the most hated organization in Hong Kong right now, and most if not all police officers hate us back. That’s not a good mix when a squad of cops walk into a restaurant and start measuring how far apart diners are and making them move if they’re less than six feet apart.

It also doesn't help that the HK police are currently obsessed with the fact that protests still happen in HK (and still receive a lot of public support), which means not every protester is in jail, and they remain convinced the way to fix this is to continue to arrest, jail, beat, pepper spray, tear gas and harass as many protesters as it takes until the protests stop.

<tangent>

They’ve also been going out of their way in recent months to establish a clear narrative that the protest movement is in reality a terrorist movement. Stephen Vines has a concise write-up on this, but essentially police have uncovered several stashes of bombs, weapons and ammo that they say is intended to wage a campaign of bombing and cop-killing across HK. They frequently describe this as if the campaign is already happening, even though the handful of incidents they can actually point to – though certainly illegal – have caused minor damage and injured no one.

The police have, of course, produced no evidence whatsoever that these stashes have anything to do with the protest movement or that the people arrested intended to use them to target the police. But apparently, according to Vines, that hasn't stopped Carrie Lam and other govt officials from reportedly telling foreign diplomats in HK that the protest movement is either a terrorist threat in itself or providing cover for a fringe terrorist group (funded by foreign elements! Probably!).

One aspect the Vines column doesn’t touch upon is the fact that this is happening while a number of adamantly pro-govt/pro-police legislators are calling for Article 23 legislation.

Quick history lesson: Article 23 of the Basic Law – our mini-constitution established with the 1997 handover from the UK to China – says HK must establish a ‘national security’ law by 2047 that specifically covers terrorism, sedition and treason. The HK govt tried this in 2003 and was countered with what at the time one of the biggest street protests in HK’s history, for the simple reason that we knew perfectly well that the ultimate purpose of the law sooner or later was to allow the HK govt to define terrorism, sedition and treason the same way China does: literally anything that criticizes or challenges any govt action, policy or official in any way. Simply disagreeing with the CCP could bring you up on charges of attempting to overthrow the govt.

Imagine what the HK govt would do with such a law right now.

The pro-govt people are practically drooling at the prospect. So are the police. Luckily, we’re in no immediate danger just yet – the whole protest movement started with an extradition bill that would have enabled HK anti-govt activists to be extradited to China for whatever China felt like charging them with (“soliciting prostitutes” is a classic go-to charge). It would be beyond stupid even by Carrie Lam standards to pursue an Article 23 bill now.

On the other hand, the police have just arrested a pro-Democracy district councillor for sedition using an old Colonial law that hasn’t been used for decades. The “sedition” was allegedly forwarding a Facebook post that allegedly gave details of a police officer who some people think was responsible for half-blinding Indonesian journalist Veby Indah covering the protests last September.

A doxxing charge would be understandable (flimsy and arbitrary, but understandable). Sedition? Come on.

The arrest itself is fairly obviously petty revenge by the police (who decided to arrest her at her home at 1:45am). It’s also widely believed to be a test to see if they can actually make a sedition charge stick, and if the public will go along with it, which would pave the way for more sedition arrests and maybe bolster support for Article 23. The police narrative about protesters = terrorists might also possibly being crafted for that purpose.

</tangent>

So anyway, THIS is the police force that will be tasked with enforcing the new social distancing rules – and arresting anyone found violating them.

To be clear, I don’t think they’re going to equate sitting five people at a restaurant table with sedition. But there’s a running bet on Twitter that the police will use the social distancing law as another thing they can arrest protesters for (wearing a surgical mask is technically still illegal, although right now enforcement is, to say the least, impractical). Or – absent any actual protests – they’ll use it as a pretense to shake down and arrest anyone they think might be connected with the protests – especially in restaurants and other businesses that have been openly supportive of the protests. And the police are widely expected to handle those situations the same way they handle anything protest-related – with lots of tear gas, pepper spray and gratuitous violence.

Or maybe they'll use common sense for once and realize that we're all in this together and if there's one thing we should be unifying over, it's this.

Ha ha. No.

So, yeah, the social distancing law might have been necessary, but enforcement is likely to be messy in more ways than one.

All this because some people decided going to LKF to drink a lot of overpriced beer was more important than flattening the curve.

Hope it was worth it.

Don’t go out there,

This is dF

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I didn’t watch the debate, no. As I’ve probably mentioned before, my state primary is over, so it’s no longer up to me which one gets the nomination, and I will be voting for the nominee regardless of who it turns out to be. (And this was true even when Marianne Williamson was still running.)

Still, I do have thoughts about the Biden vs Bernie battle. Would you like to hear them? Too bad, I’m posting this anyway.

1. One perennial question I’ve had is why the hardcore progressive wing seemed adamant on supporting Bernie over, say, Elizabeth Warren, who showed promise early on and policy-wise is as progressive as you would want. So why not her?

According to NPR (who interviewed several progressive orgs who support Bernie), it appears to be mainly about settling scores with the DNC. To paraphrase: Bernie performed great in 2016 and would be POTUS now if the DNC hadn't screwed him, so 2020 is the big chance for Bernie fans to prove they were right all along that Bernie was a more electable choice against Trump than HRC.

2. Speaking of the DNC, now that Biden is suddenly running away with this, the conspiracy tropes are back – the DNC and the Mainstream Media (this being the same MSM that Trump calls the Enemy Of The People) are actively conspiring to hand the nomination to Biden.

Yes. Well of course, I mean, what other explanation could there possibly BE that your preferred candidate is getting less votes? It can’t POSSIBLY be because most voters don’t like him as much as you do.

3. A lot of it comes down to this ideological debate about “the party decides” vs “the people decide” who the nominee should be, and that’s a fair question. That said, the last time the DNC left it to the people to decide that, we ended up with a second Nixon term.

So I find it odd that Bernie fans are furious that the DNC is trying to influence which candidate is going to represent it in the POTUS election. Of COURSE it is. Political parties are generally in the business of winning elections so they can drive the ship of state for as long as they can, which means they prefer the nominee be someone who can actually win. So of course they’re going to work the phones and call in favors to try and swing the endorsements to their preferred candidate. That’s how this works.

Whether you think it SHOULDN’T work that way is another matter. But that’s how this game is currently played.

More to the point, Sanders isn't even a Democrat. He’s a lifelong independent using the Demo Party to run because he knows third-party candidates have no chance. He slams the Establishment Demos every chance he gets, and his supporters talk at length about kicking the Establishment Demos out of power so REAL progressives can take over the party and turn it into the hardcore left-wing party they think it ought to be and needs to be to defeat the GOP.

And they have the nerve to complain that the Establishment DNC isn’t just letting them do that? You pick a fight with a bear, you can’t complain if the bear fights back.

4. A lot of this also comes down to a disagreement over electability. The DNC remains convinced that you can’t win by appealing only to the base – you have to be able to reach the mods, the fence-sitters, the casual voters who aren’t all that interested in politics, etc. The Bernie camp seems convinced the base is big enough, and the only thing holding back the undecideds or non-voters is the lack of a true progressive alternative to the GOP.

The problem is that electability is really, really hard to determine. Obviously, the candidate’s base will always think their candidate is the most electable because they have the best ideas, the best leadership qualities, the best ideological purity or whatever. The problem is that they think all of this should be blindingly obvious to any other voter with a lick of sense.

Only it doesn’t work that way. Lots of voters are not as politically engaged as the hardcore base, and they vote for the damnedest reasons. Often they’ll vote on a single issue that matters the most to them, even if the candidate’s other ideas are stupid or reprehensible. Sometimes they’ll vote for the most painfully superficial of reasons. My mom used to cast her vote based on who seemed the most pleasant. History proves repeatedly that being the smoothest smartest talker in the room with the best and boldest ideas doesn't guarantee a win.

That’s why I think the mod/swing vote still matters. As hard as it may be to believe, not everyone sees Trump as a corrupt megalomaniacal racist dingbat, or at least thinks that any old Democrat would do a better job.

Which is also why I think Biden has an edge here, and it’s why he’s winning. The weakness of the Bernie campaign is the often outspoken belief that they’re so obviously right about everything that anyone else who can’t see that is plainly a blithering idiot or a corporate stooge.

This Twitter thread explains why this is not a winning strategy, but the upshot is that if you want to appeal beyond the base, you need a message that brings them onside rather than insults them or treats them as part of the problem you're proposing to solve.

5. For progressives dismayed at a Biden Presidency, THIS Twitter thread offers a reminder that you do have a back-up plan: pressure Biden further to the left than he is. This is how it’s been done for a long time – when you don’t get the perfect ideological candidate (and it’s rare that you do), you pressure the one you do get to at least meet you halfway on as many issues as possible, because he/she needs your votes too.

Yes, that means compromise and hard work. Tough toenails.

6. For all that, though, as I’ve said before, I’m still not convinced either Biden or Sanders can beat Trump anyway.

Perhaps COVID-19 will change that. Trump’s response has been disastrous, and if enough people die as a result, even the GOP may be finally convinced he’s not worth the effort. Or, since the GOP insists that COVID-19 is a glorified head cold, maybe the coronavirus will thin their ranks out enough to give the Demos a numbers advantage.

Mind you, I don’t WANT that to happen. But I think it’s possible that the outcome of COVID-19 will have a direct impact on Trump’s chances if things get really bad. There’s only so much he can blame on Obama.

7. The other thing I can’t help thinking about (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) is the fact that all three of the remaining viable POTUS candidates are in the high-risk demographic for COVID-19. Just imagine the possible scenarios implicit in this.

Again, I don’t want that to happen. But if it does, the impact on the election will be absolute higgledy-piggledy.

Don’t let us get sick,

This is dF

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And so Trump has been acquitted by the Senate – inasmuch as anyone can be “acquitted” in a rigged trial in which everyone knows you’re guilty but the majority of the jury doesn’t care because you're their golden boy.

I have thoughts:

1. It’s hard to be disappointed in a result that we all saw coming all the way down 5^th Avenue. Mitch McConnell told you in advance how this was going to go. And while some liberals have complained about the Democrats’ overall impeachment strategy, the truth is it didn’t matter what their strategy was – the fix was in even before Mueller time.

2. It’s worth keeping a historical perspective – the outcome was ostensibly no different than any other impeachment trial. No POTUS has ever been removed from office via impeachment precisely because the trial vote inevitably splits along party lines without a two-thirds majority. (Okay, Mitt Romney is the sole exception, for all the good it did. And, you know, good for him.)

3. The other predictable outcome is Trump’s babbling, unhinged, free-verse “TOTAL EXONERATION” victory dance, which he will be performing every chance he gets from now until Doomsday. And of course, he will continue to do exactly what he’s been doing, only with the assurance that the GOP will cover for him and absolutely no one will be able to stop him. Characters like Lamar Alexander and Susan Collins who are going around saying “I think Trump has learned not to do it again” are either delusional or just trolling the libs.

You can also expect him to exact revenge on witnesses, Romney, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, James Comey, John Bolton, CNN and everyone else he hates for disloyalty. (Note: by “revenge” I’m mainly thinking of rage tweets, empty threats and firing anyone he can have fired, not arrests and assassinations, but on the other hand, who really knows at this stage?)

4. In a way it’s just as well when you think about the outcome of a conviction result – namely, President Pence, who would inherit Trump’s cult, who in turn would be so apoplectically outraged as to make the Evil Godless Crooked Demos pay by doing God knows what. And you can pretty much bet Trump himself would pour as much gasoline on that particular garbage fire as possible.

5. Which is why I stand by my current prediction that Trump is very likely going to be re-elected. After everything he’s gotten away with, there’s no reason to assume his base will abandon him now. Also, the economy’s technically great, which generally helps incumbents (even whacky ones).

6. I’ve posted about this before, but all of this raises the valid question of the utter uselessness of impeachment as a control against corruption, and if we should resign ourselves to the notion that the President will always be above the law and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. If that’s not the country we want, we should probably give this some serious thought while there’s still a chance to do something about it.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to leave this Bloom County comic from 1981 here. Because Berke Breathed knows what time it is.

Scott free,

This is dF

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I don’t have a whole lot to say about Trump’s SOTU campaign speech. But here’s a few things:

1. Nancy Pelosi tearing up the transcript was delicious political theatre. The only way she could have improved on it was to set it on fire (which probably would have violated the building code, but still).

2. As for the inevitable civility debate, well, I’ve posted about that before, but in this specific case: (1) I don’t think any of the Demos did anything that qualifies as “uncivil”, and (2) Republicans lost their credibility to lecture anyone about decorum and civility during the SOTU address somewhere around the time Joe Wilson got a little rowdy.

(And yes, I know about Fred Guttenberg doing something similar, but (1) he’s not a Congressperson and (2) he’s entitled to get emotional, all things considered.)

3. Rush Limbaugh’s Medal of Freedom – I guess it's only fair, since Trump has been ripping off Limbaugh’s schtick for years and really owes his entire presidency to the groundwork that race-baiting demagogues like Limbaugh laid for him.

4. While some may be tempted to give Trump credit for not spending most of his time complaining about impeachment or insulting his enemies and sticking mostly to his imagined accomplishments and upcoming policies, Ana Marie Cox offers the best response:

“Giving a speech that’s marginally competent while still banning immigrants, keeping kids in cages, taking assistance from those in need, and practicing relentless corruption isn’t much of an accomplishment, it’s another kind of lie.”

Which is apropos, as his speech was chock full of those, too.

Tear it up,

This is dF

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So Trump has been impeached by the House, and is fast on his way to acquittal in the Senate, after which Trump will double down, blather on about total exoneration and go on to commit as many high crimes and misdemeanors as he can before granting himself a third term.

Which is of course exactly how we knew this was going to play out. Yes, I know some of that hasn’t happened yet. But we’ve always known that with the Senate controlled by Mitch McConnell, Trump would be acquitted of any impeachment result, regardless of what he did, and his response to the Mueller Report is a good indication of how he’s going to treat his inevitable acquittal.

So, here’s some thoughts in the form of an FAQ:

1. Was there any point to this at all?

Well, we were asking that question back when Trumpeachment looked like a real possibility during the Mueller investigation, because as I say, we knew back then Trump would be acquitted. I wrote about this before, but the short version of the “pro-impeachment” argument was this: You should least do it on principle. And if you can’t remove him, you can at least hurt his re-election chances (and the GOP Congresspeople defending him) by exposing and documenting his high crimes and misdemeanors.

2. Did that work?

It doesn’t look like it. According to FiveThirtyEight, while more people are in favour of impeachment, the needle hasn't moved much in terms of election polls.

That could change, of course. But beyond that, I think Trump will not only survive impeachment, he’ll very likely win a second term.

3. Wait, did you just say Trump could actually be re-elected?

Yes.

4. Despite … [gestures vaguely at everything]

Yep.

Obviously that’s going to depend on what happens over the next few months – who gets the Demo nomination, the magnitude of Trump’s next batch of scandals, the government’s willingness to keep Russia and whoever else from engineering the election, etc.

But the polls show him either leading against various Demo frontrunners in several states or within spitting distance. His approval rating is still in the low 40s. He has an established cult, his own news channel, American Jesus and Russian hackers on his side. And remember that the 2016 polls assured us that Trump wouldn’t win. So did his behaviour. And yet he did. He can damn well do it again.

Also, ethnonationalist autocracy is very much in vogue right now. Boris Johnson is the UK version of Trump – a xenophobic, racist, sexist, pathological liar with bad hair – and he still won. So let’s not pretend it can't happen here. If it couldn’t, Hillary Clinton would be POTUS and Republicans would be impeaching her.

5. Well … hell.

That’s not a question. But yeah.

6. I see the House is stalling on handing over the impeachment articles to the Senate. Can they do that?

As far as I know, yes. I don’t think they can hold off indefinitely, but there’s no rule saying you have to hand them over right away.

7. Okay, in that case, why stall?

The official reason seems to be to force McConnell to promise a fair trial and call witnesses that the House didn’t or couldn’t. John Dean suggested something like this a couple of weeks ago – his idea was to just keep the articles, continue investigating Trump and make the list of impeachment articles even longer. Either way, the idea is to keep the issue alive so that Trump can’t move past it, and if he’s re-elected, then send them. Maybe if the GOP loses the Senate – or at least loses McConnell – Trump could be convicted and removed.

8. Right. Would THAT work?

Doubtful. McConnell doesn’t blink when it comes to these things – as far as he’s concerned, there’s no way this ends without Trump being acquitted. Also, the longer this goes on, says this guy at The Atlantic, the more Trump and the GOP will milk it to the point where it might backfire politically on the Demos.

I’m not sure if I agree with that – it depends on how long the delay goes on, but I don’t think the Demos would lose a lot of support over it. But it won’t get them a fair trial or a better chance at removing Trump, either. So apart from the satisfaction of letting Trump stew for awhile, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

9. Okay, so if impeachment can’t get rid of an unhinged crook like Trump, is there any point in even having it in the Constitution?

Well, I don't know if it’s worth the effort to take impeachment out of the Constitution, but it’s fair to say it’s a pretty useless provision, at least in an age of hyperpartisan politics. That said, it’s worth remembering only two other POTUSs were impeached in history, and neither of them was convicted by the Senate, so in that sense the Trump case is only unusual in the sense that no one in his party is breaking ranks.

10. If impeachment is useless and we’re going to go along with the notion that sitting presidents can’t be indicted, isn’t that tantamount to admitting the POTUS is above the law and can do whatever he wants?

Pretty much, yes. Which is why I think that if we as a country think that the POTUS should be held accountable under the law, we probably need to rethink how all of this works.

The catch is that it’s trickier than it sounds. The Founding Fathers spent a whole lot of time debating this very issue, because you don’t want to make it too easy to remove a popularly elected leader. There’s a very simple reason for this: if it were easy to kick out a duly elected POTUS, the party out of power would do it every chance they got, even just for spite or revenge or whatever.

There may be a workable way to do it. But I do think we need to have a very serious public discussion about this, because Trump has shown how bad the limitations of impeachment are.

11. Does Trump’s acquittal mean future Presidents will feel free to blackmail foreign leaders into investigating his political opponents and obstructing any investigation into his crimes?

They might. On the other hand, I’m not convinced precedent matters for things like this in the sense that political parties typically tend to operate on the principle that it’s only illegal or immoral when the opposition does it, and that’s even more true today. For example, if (say) President Biden did the exact same things Trump has done, and if the GOP has the votes, they’d impeach him in a heartbeat and argue it's not hypocrisy because Trump was innocent and Biden is guilty so they're two obviously different situations, yadda yadda yadda.

12. About that third term …

Ha ha. No. Maybe in the fantasy world he and the GOP live in where impeachment of Republican presidents is not allowed in the Constitution. But not here.

13. Any other pithy observations?

The House Republican defense during the impeachment vote was stunning in its hyperbole and diversity. Which is a nice way of saying they had no coherent defense of Trump and just threw as much batshit out there as they could.

Someone else already noted how in normal times, the GOP would have its people get up there with a fairly unified set of talking points that basically says, “We’re not convinced that Trump did anything worthy of impeachment, and we think it’s better to let the voters decide in November 2020.”

Instead, It was like the only instruction they got from the party leaders was: “Maximum bombast, be creative, have fun.”

So the defense has been … diverse. The President did nothing wrong, Democratic witch hunt, Democratic coup, Democrats hate Republicans, impeachment is unconstitutional, Biden is the real criminal here, Jesus got more due process, etc. If ever you needed an indication that the GOP is all in on Trump and will defend every scummy thing he does, no matter how ludicrous it sounds, well, this is it.

14. America is doomed, right?

In the short term, probably. I think the system can ultimately withstand whatever damage Team Trump inflicts on it. But the next few years don’t look good.

For one thing, history tells us Trump will come out of this thinking he can do whatever he wants and no one can touch him. If you thought he was an insane despotic man-child before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

What’s worse, he will whip his loyal subjects into a frenzy over this. He’s already branded Democrats and the media traitors and enemies of the country – he’ll dial that up to 12, and take zero responsibility for what his followers do after that. As I’ve said elsewhere, Trump is a temporary problem – the real danger is the 43% of the country who unequivocally support him.

To be clear, this would be the case whether the Demos attempted to impeach Trump or not. So I’m not saying it would have been better to not impeach. I’m saying we got way bigger problems. As John Scalzi has said before (and I agree): Trump is the symptom, not the disease.

Going nowhere,

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Previously on Senseless Acts of Bloggery:

[The protests are] expected to go on all summer long. […]

Update: they did. And they haven’t stopped. And they’ve gotten progressively worse.

Wikipedia can help you fill in the gaps, but suffice to say it’s gotten worse. Two unarmed protesters have been shot (neither fatally, but in both cases that was sheer luck), and a week ago protesters ended up trapped in Polytechnic University in a siege that came this close to becoming the Tiananmen 2.0 we’ve all been expecting.

Thankfully it didn’t.

It’s been quiet since then, mainly because this past Sunday was the District Council elections, and the protesters – wisely – stopped all activities for two strategic reasons: (1) the likelihood that the govt would use them as an excuse to cancel the elections, and (2) the likelihood that if the elections went ahead, the pro-Beijing (blue) candidates would get creamed by the pro-Democratic (yellow) candidates – hence the govt’s alleged interest in looking for any excuse to cancel the elections.

Indeed, the District Council elections were being touted by both sides as a de facto referendum on the 5 Demands and the current turmoil. And while I hate labelling general elections as de facto referendums on a specific issue, there’s little doubt that a lot of people were going to vote based on their feelings about the protests, even though the District Council doesn’t have much power to do anything about them – the DC really just exists to manage local issues and report them to LegCo. But if nothing else the elections were expected to serve as the strongest indicator of public sentiment about the situation.

And so they were.

1. Short version: The DC has 479 seats across 18 districts, of which 452 were up for grabs. When voting started, the pro-Beijing camp controlled all 18 districts and the vast majority of seats.

They now control one.

The pro-Democratic camp own the rest, and with 389 seats, they now have a much larger majority than the pro-Beijing camp had before the voting started.

2. Total voter turnout: almost 73%.

3. So, you know, that’s a pretty decisive message to CE Carrie Lam and her admin: we’re sick of tear gas and police brutality, neither of which is working and is actually making things worse, so you need to change gears and work out a political solution.

Predictably, her interpretation of that message is: “We’re sick of protesters, please stop them.” Hence her press conference in which she said (paraphrased), “Beijing doesn’t blame me for the results, and I’m not giving in to any more demands from protesters.” (The first part, I suspect, explains the second.)

4. And so nothing has changed. Which is no surprise. For one thing, a recent report claims she’s increasingly isolated herself in a Trump-like bubble of yes-men protecting her from reports of police brutality. Also, Lam didn’t listen when 2 million people marched against the extradition bill that started this sorry mess – why should she honor the results of an election just because her side lost?

5. Meanwhile, it's been fun watching Chinese state media contort themselves trying to explain the results after a couple of weeks urging HK’s “silent majority” to show support for the govt and the police. Most have resorted to the usual conspiracy theories: the CIA agents rigged the results, protesters threatened to beat up people if they voted blue, etc. Some simply declined to report the results: “There was a District Council election in HK today. Turnout was high. Now, sports.”

6. One other fun detail: On Monday, when we all woke up to find out the results, there was at least one incident of spontaneous champagne parties on the streets of Central celebrating the election results.

Which I mention just to point out that in the 23+ years I've lived here, I can't think of a single election in HKSAR history where people celebrated the result with champagne in the streets. Privately or at political party HQs, yes. On the streets, no.

I'm just saying.

7. What happens from here is anyone’s guess, as usual. Protesters have already released the protest activity schedule for the next month, and we can only presume that there will inevitably be violence as long as the police keep handling things as they have been. Lam has made her feelings clear that the beatings will continue until morale improves, regardless of whether it actually works.

This weekend will be an indicator of things to come. All I’m sure of for now is that the protesters are not going to leave it at this. Lam’s decision to ignore the concerns of 2 million people in June got us into this mess. Her decision to ignore the election results isn’t going to get us out of it.

Born to lose,

This is dF

BONUS TRACK: For those of you asking, "Wait, HK has elections? I thought the protesters were demanding democracy?"

We have elections, but not for everything. The District Council election is the only election where everyone can vote. For the Legislative Council, we can only directly elect 35 of 70 seats. For the chief executive, we have no say at all. This is what the protesters have been demanding when they call for universal suffrage – one person, one vote, for all elected offices.

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So now the Mueller report is publicly available (redacted, of course) and the hot take now is:

Mueller was indeed looking very narrowly at the Russian conspiracy part, but leaves no doubt that Russians were meddling in the election to help Trump, and Trump campaign officials were keen to get some help from them.
The reasons Mueller punted on obstruction were (1) he was working under the legal notion that a sitting president can’t be indicted, and he didn’t want to put that to the test, and (2) most of Trump’s attempts at obstruction were thwarted by his own people.
While Mueller didn’t think criminal indictments were feasible, he definitely hinted that impeachment was an option based on his findings.
The media, for the most part, got the story more or less right in terms of what happened.
William Barr's 4-page summary and pre-release press conference is so at odds with the content of the report that it's difficult not to conclude he was hoping to spin perception of the report in favor of Trump.
The report is a damning indictment of Barack Obama because he knew the Russians were interfering in the election and didn’t lift a finger to stop them. (Okay, the Mueller doesn’t say anything remotely close to that – that’s coming exclusively from conservative pundits because well OBVIOUSLY.)

Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack (this Lawfare blog post is very long but worth reading for a good initial analysis), but the report’s public release brings us to the next question: do Demos impeach him or not?

The current debate (such as it is) goes something like this:

FUCK YES
Well hold on, there’s an election on, see, and …

To expand on these:

1. Impeach: It’s not just about the Mueller report (which would be enough), it’s the totality of Trump’s entire presidency, from using it to enrich his business and installing his family into key posts without security clearance to his racist immigration policies, and general denigration of the dignity of the office. He had help from Russia (whether he actively colluded or not) to get elected. He is in every way unfit for the job. The process of impeachment was created for this very situation. If we don’t even try, we’re basically giving him a free pass and telling every POTUS to follow that they can abuse the office as much as they want without consequences, and democracy will be further undermined. We can’t let politics keep us from our constitutional duty.

2. Don’t impeach: Well, yes we can, because impeachment by design is a political procedure, not a legal one, so it’s reasonable to consider the political implications. On that note, there’s no point to impeachment because we know Trump will be acquitted, which means the ONLY way we’re getting rid of this clown is to beat him in 2020, and we can’t afford to blow it, not least by giving him tons of political witch-hunt ammo at a time when current polls suggest the majority of voters are NOT in favor of impeaching Trump. So, if defeating him in 2020 is the only way to kick him out of office, let’s focus on that.

So for me, since I assume both sides of this agree that they want Trump to lose his re-election bid, the two key questions to ask are (1) will a full-on impeachment bid (which we already know will fail) backfire spectacularly and ensure a second Trump term? And (2) is it worth putting principles and ‘constitutional duty’ first in the name of protecting American democracy if there’s a real risk that it could strengthen Trump’s push towards authoritarianism?

This of course raises the question of how big a political risk impeachment is. It’s possible as the trial goes on – and as more evidence of shenanigans comes to light – public opinion will shift in favor of it, and even if it doesn’t, the continual focus on Trump’s behaviour could at least hurt his re-election prospects. Some are already pointing to the apparent fact that the Mueller report indicates that either Russia has compromising sex tapes of Trump, or Trump thinks they do, which raises blackmail concerns. (I remember a lot of people justifying Clinton’s impeachment by saying his sexual proclivities could make the POTUS vulnerable to foreign blackmail – surely the same people would apply the same standard to Trump hahahahaha no, I know.) Maybe that could be an angle?

If nothing else, the redacted Mueller report did manage to knock Trump’s approval ratings down to 37% (from around 40%).

On the other hand, Trump could bounce back from that – certainly by now the Trump/GOP/Fox News machine is so perfectly aligned (and inoculated by the Fake News Enemy Of The People meme) that they’ll be able to maintain the Hoax Witch Hunt Total Exoneration meme with the base and maybe build his ratings back up to the low 40s. I know that sounds impossible, but then it seemed impossible in 2016 that Trump could ever win as scandal after scandal piled up.

So I think the Impeach Now camp is kidding itself if it thinks it thinks even an unsuccessful impeachment trial will increase his chance of losing in 2020.

But don’t get me wrong – I’m sympathetic to them, because I gather that they're also motivated by the fact that they absolutely cannot stand the idea of Trump getting away with this. Which he’s likely to do – whether he leaves office on 2020 or 2024, Trump will likely never spend a day in jail for what he’s done, and at least 40% of the country will swear blind until the end of time that he was a great president persecuted by the Evil Liberal Fake News Cabal run by the Barack Obama Deep State.

I hate that too. But let's be honest – impeaching Trump won’t fix that, and it won’t be a deterrent for the next Trump or Nixon or whoever. That’s because – like it or not – if the American democratic system is exploited by a crooked POTUS, the only remedies are the ballot box or impeachment (or the 25th Amendment, but that’s only for specific cases). And any effort to change that (especially if it involves constitutional tweaking) is likely to either fail or inadvertently make things worse.

Remember that there’s a reason it’s hard to unseat a POTUS – at its heart, impeachment is the political act of undoing the results of a democratic election. Yes, in this case we’re talking about a POTUS who not only lost the pop vote, but also benefited from outside interference from Russia. But the former is technically legit, and the latter has no legal recourse in terms of do-overs. If we do try to reform the system, it requires both sides to agree to the changes. And that’s a tall order in 2019 America.

So to come back to the question of impeachment: should the Demo-controlled House impeach Trump on the principle of constitutional duty?

My personal opinion: sure, go ahead, just don’t be stupid about it. Have a strategy that takes into consideration the political consequences – don’t pretend they don’t exist or don’t matter. Be mindful also that Trump will be acquitted – and set yr expectations and goals accordingly. The mission is not to kick Trump out of office early – it’s to defeat him in 2020.

If you can run an impeachment trial that helps accomplish that goal, great. If not, I’d rather you didn’t, because at this stage I’m not convinced that standing on principle is worth the tradeoff of four more years of Trumpapalooza.

The teaches of impeaches,

This is dF

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I’ve been too busy to blog about the Mueller report, which is probably just as well since it’s one of those potboilers that is going to be unfolding for quite awhile.

And I’m not sure what I could add, but I’ll give it a shot.

1. It’s hard to comment more on the report until we see it – which it seems every Republican in America does not want to happen. Which should tell you something about their “total exoneration” nonsense. It’s safe to assume there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s damaging to Trump, even if he can’t be actually prosecuted for any of it.

2. And in fact, we don’t really know that he can’t be, at least as far as the Obstruction of Justice part. Mueller left it open, possibly because he’d decided he went as far as he could go with it and wanted to make sure the work continued – perhaps with Congress.

3. Predictable MAGA hysteria notwithstanding, there’s now a lot of hand-wringing, soul-searching and fingerpointing about how the media got the Trump-Russia story wrong. Or did they?

Matt Taibbi certainly thinks so. Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg thinks Matt is kinda nuts.

As usual, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think Taibbi is cherrypicking radical examples (Maddow, MSNBC in general, Daily Beast, Jonathan Chait’s New Yorker story, etc) to paint the entire media with the same brush, but I do agree with his overall concern – that the media had to be really careful how they treated the Mueller investigation, especially at a time when Trump is actively stoking up anti-media fervor and labelling all critical stories of him as one-sided Fake News. And in the end, many of them gave in to their sensationalist tendencies that turned out to play right into his hands.

On the other hand, the build-up of the Mueller case was as much the product of people on Twitter and social media who passed around otherwise sober stories as though they were smoking guns. Liberals and other anti-Trumpers were reading more into what was there, conflated allegations with proof, and were banking on Mueller to nail the bastard, put him in jail and save the country, even though anyone who paid the slightest attention knew that Mueller was never going to do that. His job wasn’t to arrest Trump (which he probably can’t do anyway) – it was to look into specific allegations and report his findings to the AG, who would then decide what to do with them. And even if the AG wasn’t a pro-Trump appointee, the most he/she would likely do is hand over to Congress for impeachment proceedings – which, as I mentioned earlier, isn’t going to happen.

So I think media coverage was only part of the problem.

Also, I don’t agree with Taibbi’s claim that RussiaGate was a myth that the media clung to because it was the perfect explanation for why they totally failed to see Trump’s election victory coming. It may well be the case that Trump didn’t actively conspire with Russia to win the election, but it’s already well established that (1) Russian hackers did in fact attempt to influence the outcome of the election, (2) they succeeded, and (3) there was some sort of oddball connection between Trump and Russia that Trump and his associates did not want revealed to the point that they were willing to lie to the FBI and Congress about it. Indeed, five Trump associates are now in jail precisely for doing that, and a sixth one has been arrested. You can thank Mueller for all of those, as well as the 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer who have also been indicted.

Some myth.

I take Taibbi’s point that the media is supposed to respect the “innocent until proven guilty” tenet of due process, and it’s true that the media’s sensationalist tendencies tend to blur those lines, especially with TV news. But let’s not pretend there was no basis for the Trump-Russia stories, or that the Mueller report proves the entire mass media industry got it wrong.

4. Meanwhile, as you might imagine, I am not at all impressed with Team MAGA’s “Total Exoneration b/w Democrats and Fake News Media Colluded to Destroy Trump” line, complete with the authoritarian schtick of naming names, accusations of treason and making “recommendations” that TV producers think twice about booking anyone on their list.

But then I’m not the target consumer – the MAGA base is. They’ll be screaming the “baseless witch hunt” conspiracy between now and the next election, and every effort by Demos to investigate further (and the media’s coverage of it) will be presented as evidence of that – and their base will devour every word.

Taibbi argues that’s why Demos and the media really need to move on from Mueller (at least until the report is released) if they want to maintain credibility – why hand them ammo if you don’t have to? That might be true, but it’s also true that Team MAGA manufactures its own ammo, so they’d be screaming “baseless witch hunt” even if Mueller had produced smoking guns.

5. Meanwhile, there is of course also the matter of all those other federal and state investigations into a wide range of shenanigans allegedly committed by Trump and/or his minions, as well as the question of whether Trump colluded with Russia in a different way (i.e. by giving them sanctions relief for the express purpose of enriching himself even though he knew at the time Russia was attempting to hack the election).

Those should continue to be investigated and reported, of course, but as far as impeaching Trump or convincing the GOP to abandon him, you can pretty much forget it. The witch-hunt narrative is pretty much set in stone, and the GOP is all-in with Trump at this stage. In terms of election strategy, it’s probably time to stop using scandals as a weapon – Trump has essentially immunized himself from that (and it certainly didn’t stop him from getting elected in the first place).

Going nowhere,

This is dF

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I’ve seen all the dithering about Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN), her apparent tendency to say things about Israel that play into anti-Semitic tropes, and the subsequent House resolution to condemn anti-Semitic speech, which eventually blossomed into a more generic anti-hate speech resolution.

Aaaaaand you know, blog.

1. Having read Omar’s comments, I’m inclined to believe that she’s genuinely trying to raise legitimate questions or criticisms of Israeli government policies and the lobbying influence of groups like AIPIC, but has a tendency to express them in ways that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic dog whistles.

That in itself is something I think needs to be discussed a lot more than it is, for a couple of reasons.

One: the thing about dog-whistles is that by nature they have double meanings – they allow you to say racist/anti-Semitic things without actually explicitly saying them. The obvious problem is that they often tend to be terms or phrases that people often say with no racist intention whatsoever. Which means if someone says them, it is entirely possible the person said it without knowing it could be taken in a racist way.

I know this because I’ve seen a lot of comments blasted as racist and anti-Semitic that I had no idea had that kind of connotation. As an easy example, I had no idea that “sleepy-eyed” was a slur against Jews until Trump described Chuck Schumer that way. So I can see why Omar could easily fall into that trap.

Two: If we’re basically saying that we have to be very careful about how we talk about Israel because it might accidentally conform to some anti-Semitic conspiracy trope, we are in essence allowing the anti-Zionist conspiracy kooks to direct the conversation. We are allowing them to dictate how we talk about it and what we can and cannot say, which is making it extremely difficult to have conversations about legitimate issues because if we say the wrong word – regardless of the intention of the speaker – we’ll be handing ammo to the Nazis or playing into their rhetorical hands.

That last bit may be true. And I do believe that words have power, so it’s good practice to use them carefully in any situation, especially when it comes to public discourse, although not to the point of crafting bland sentences that say nothing, convey no emotion whatsoever and offend no one.

I’m just troubled by the notion that anti-Zionist conspiracy kooks have successfully turned any discussion about the Israel-Palestine issue into a verbal minefield. It gives them power that I’d rather not be giving them, if you see what I’m saying.

2. I’m not really impressed with the Republicans jumping all over Omar on this because they clearly only seem to care about anti-Semitism when Democrats do it. Right-wing anti-Semitism is a far more frequent and bigger problem – not least because it has actually resulted in people getting killed. Most Republicans haven’t had a thing to say about that, and when they do it’s usually some half-assed “both sides” trope.

Also, given recent history and the fact that a lot of conservatives are still warning about Sharia Law as if they actually know what it is and how it works (they don’t), I’m reasonably sure their sudden interest in condemning anti-Semitic rhetoric has a lot more to do with the fact that (1) it’s coming from both a Muslim and an upstart freshman who they associate with the dreaded AOC squad, and (2) it’s a political opportunity to get Demos to either throw one of their hot riding stars under the bus or make excuses for her, which enables Republicans to keep turning a blind eye to their own anti-Zionist wing. Honestly they’d be fine with either outcome.

3. Anyway, the Demo house resolution has been passed, and they managed to do it without calling out Omar specifically. But it's unlikely that the issue will go away, even if Omar manages to express herself more carefully.

Which doesn't seem likely – not because she’s uninterested in avoiding anti-Semitic word traps (I think she is) but because (1) Omar tends to speak honestly from the heart – which is admirable, but the heart can get us in trouble sometimes when we let emotion control our tongues (especially on Twitter), (2) politics has always been about twisting yr opponent’s words around and pretending they said something that they didn’t, even if your twist makes no sense whatsoever, and (3) it’s 2019 – this is the age of manufactured outrage. Omar could tweet something about a bad experience with Wal-mart’s exchange policy and every pundit on Fox would spend three hours each on how outrageous it is that Omar is harassing and terrorizing hard-working Americans in an all-American company like Wal-mart. Or something.

Freedom of speech (just watch what you say),

This is dF

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"Emergency! intro" (Watch on YouTube)

Trump has declared his national emergency over the wall (or lack thereof), and I only just now have found some time to blog it, but luckily this may be the easiest blog post ever, so it won’t take much of your time.

1. There of course is no emergency except for the one that exists in Trump’s empty little head. And there are no reliable facts or statistics to back that up except for the super-secret ones Trump makes up in that same head. Which says a lot, because he could only get away with this in a time where people have conned themselves into believing that any fact that contradicts their worldview or their POTUS is fake news.

2. Obviously this raises some issues over the ability of a POTUS to use otherwise legal national-emergency powers to circumvent Congress when it doesn’t give him what he wants. That said, I am generally not impressed with the modicum of Republican handwringing over this. We’ve seen this before – Trump does/says something radical/insane, some Republicans say, “Well, I don’t really agree …” then they eventually back him.

Some people have tried the “Look, if you allow this, the next Democratic POTUS will have the same powers and the precedent to use them for, say, banning assault rifles, and it’ll be all yr fault” argument. Unfortunately, we tried that back when when Bush Jr was President – he started wars all over the Middle East after 9/11 and gave himself wartime powers to curtail liberties, set up torture camps , etc to “fight” terrorism, and Demos made the same argument – “You realize if Hillary becomes President, she’ll have all these powers too, right?” Repubs didn't care then, and when Obama became POTUS they just complained about Presidential overreach as if it was never a problem until Obama took office.

The message is clear: only presidents in the Opposition Party have too much power. Presidents from your own party never ever do, even when they have the exact same powers. And they will never see the dissonance between these statements no matter how much time you take to explain it to them.

3. I don’t know what the outcome of the lawsuits will be, but I will say I don’t think it matters from a political POV because, as some have already pointed out, Trump – ironically – doesn't really want a wall that badly. He wants to be seen by his base demanding that wall and scrapping with libtards to get it so he can get cheap pops at his ego rallies. It doesn't matter if the courts rule against him, because he can simply blame the libtards, the activist judges and the fake news media. And his base will accept that.

Over the wall,

This is dF

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The 116th Congress is in session, and the new designated Enemies Of The People are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib for dancing and swearing, respectively.

And the internet is demanding I address these serious and grave issues. So here’s what I got:

1. You can’t say that on C-SPAN

All I really have to say about Rashida Tlaib’s “impeach the motherfucker” quote is: (1) Congresspeople swear all day, every day, and (2) at this stage, no one in the GOP gets to criticize or lecture anybody on civility and decorum.

Also, I’m pretty sure all the controversy is less about the MF-bomb and more about the I-word. Even most Demos don’t really want to talk about impeachment openly – at least not as if it’s a goal, mainly so that they can deflect the inevitable accusations from Repubs that the Demos planned to impeach Trump all along for no good reason. Which would be ludicrous, of course, but then so is politics, where the rule of the game is to always phrase things in ways that you can always claim meant something other than what you actually said.

2. You down with AOC? Yeah, you know me

Having seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance video, I honestly have no idea why anyone might have thought it would be a thing.

But I have a pretty good idea why they hoped it would be a thing.

AOC is basically the new Obama, in the sense that conservatives absolutely and viscerally hate her for the same reasons they hated Obama: (1) she’s young, (2) she supports democratic socialist policies*, (3) she’s non-white, and (4) liberals absolutely adore her. What’s worse (for them), she doesn't take stick from anyone and gives as good as she gets. She’s smart, she’s confident, she defeated a trad Demo to get her seat and she’s got a fan base. Worst of all, she might actually inspire young people in 2020 to do what she’s just done.

All of which makes her dangerous, politically speaking. If she wasn't, conservative pundits wouldn't waste so much time trying to discredit her. So – like with Obama – conservatives will criticize literally everything she does or says or wears (no matter how minor or inconsequential) as though it was the most scandalous and discreditable thing in the world. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it pleases the base and triggers the libs, which seems to be a nice consolation prize for many conservatives these days. Even getting her to quit Instagram would be considered a victory.

So we’re going to be seeing a lot of this. Given how well that’s going so far, I can’t say I’m not looking forward to future AOC smear attempts backfire as spectacularly as the dance video.

You should be dancing yeah,

This is dF

*Technically Obama differed from AOC on this point – he was more to the center. But conservatives swore blind then and now that he was full-on Commie, so I think it counts.

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July 2025

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Style: Energy Drink for Funky Circles by ninetydegrees
Resources: Techno Beat

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Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 12:08 am

MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

Entries tagged with ministry of batshit

WILL YOU SHUT UP, MAN?

HE CAUGHT THE COVID (AND LEFT ME A MULE TO RIDE)

SCOTUS SUPERMAJORITY BLUES

HOW TO STEAL AN ELECTION BY POST

OLD AND BUSTED: RULE OF LAW. NEW HOTNESS: RULE OF FEAR.

MINNEAPOLIS IS THE NEW HONG KONG

I KNOW COVID-19 IS KILLING TENS OF THOUSANDS BUT I HAVE FEELINGS TOO

WE’RE THE REPLACEMENTS

BIDEN MY TIME

ANARCHY IN THE HK, PART 392 (KEEP YR DISTANCE EDITION)

JOE MALARKEY VS COL SANDERS

ACQUITTERS NEVER WIN (EXCEPT WHEN THEY DO)

THE STATE OF THE UNION IS ON FIRE (2020 EDITION)

THE NEWEST MEMBER OF THE IMPEACHMENT CLUB

ANARCHY IN THE HK, PART 390 (DC ELECTION EDITION)

TO IMPEACH OR NOT IMPEACH

MUELLER REPORTS, YOU DECIDE

ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY MY ONLY POST ABOUT REP. ILHAN OMAR

IF THIS HAD BEEN AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY …

DANCING, SWEARING AND OTHER BUGABOOS

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July 2025

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