Tag: Uniparty

A Jaded Mandarin

photog Current Events , , ,

People are always trying to compare the present era to other historical epochs.  Thucydidean Athens or Caesarian Rome or pre-revolutionary France.  All these analogies are clever or foolish depending on the author.  And all of them are of necessity partial in their similarity.  What’s the expression, “History never repeats itself but merely rhymes.”?

And that is true.  This era is like no other because the assembly of characters is unique.  What I notice about the cast of this drama is that most of them are a poor lot.  Don’t look for a Pericles or a Julius Caesar or even an Augustus.  We’ve got the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas.  And when even these mediocrities walk away, we get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  Now I don’t mean to exhort Trump’s virtues as if he’s some messiah.  His feet of clay are legendary.  But he isn’t a politician.  He’s more of a supporting cast member dragged on stage because the headliners all forgot their lines and ran off stage in terror of the audience pelting them with tomatoes and oranges.

There’s something distressing about the people who run things from behind the scenes handing over the kabuki theater to really obvious fifth raters like Biden and Harris.  I can’t make up my mind whether they just don’t think it’s necessary to keep up the pretense of a republic anymore or that some bizarre sequence of circumstances has thrust these two truly unimpressive hacks into the limelight.  I’m not sure which of these two reasons is true and I’m not even sure which is a worse reason.

But for whichever reason, here we are.  And it is a spectacularly awful moment in our history.  For more than twenty years I have been steadily more and more dismayed by the path our leaders have been dragging us down.  Every presidential term has plumbed new depths until at this point it appears we may be well beyond the point of no return.  And so possibly the only thing left to do about our present situation is laugh.

Maybe mockery is all that’s left to do.  After all, exposing the stupidity and evil of our supposed leaders may even accomplish some small good.  Maybe it could even tip the balance by waking up even the terminally dense to just how imbecilic someone like Kamala Harris truly is.  And, if nothing else, laughter is good for the soul.  Watching those compilations of Biden stumbling and bumbling around trying to walk off stage or failing to remember words like government or health care were hilarious and without a doubt cheered me up.  And listening to Kamala expound on yellow school buses or the relationship of Russia and Ukraine on the map of Eurasia did my heart good.

But humor aside, I do think about what it means that Biden and Harris are now the caliber of leader that the dominant party of this empire finds acceptable.  It’s got to say something about how this country works.  We don’t elect political leaders.  We hire actors to read us the news from the regime.  In fact, it’s gotten so bad that we now have actors who translate the news from the actors we “elect.”  We have the Haitian Betty Boop come out and explain what Joe Biden meant when he mumbled incoherently about Russia or Gaza or ice cream.  We won’t get the truth but we’ll get today’s version of the narrative.

And so, looking at what we have devolved into I wouldn’t compare us to Athens or Rome.  I wouldn’t even compare us to Stalin’s USSR.  We’re more like one of the decadent Chinese bureaucratic dynasties right before the barbarians overran it.  We’re the Middle Kingdom that has always been and will always be.  It will go on regardless of ineptitude, graft and stupidity.  It will survive due to the titanic size and inertia of the whole interlocking structure.  Even the Mongol hordes were subsumed into its colossal bulk.  Maybe in a century a revolution will sweep the Earth and topple it to the ground but a century seems like the minimum time needed.

In the meantime, I hope for some miracle where Trump gets in and like some latter-day Heracles he beheads and cauterizes the polycephalic Hydra of the Deep State and returns sanity to our poor abused republic.  Otherwise, I better learn to bow.

Utopian Hangover

photog Current Events ,

My recent foray into utopian/dystopian nation-building has satisfied my desire to have my say about our disastrous political situation.  Amen.

Okay moving on.

In the here and now America Melting Down and its impact on Election 2024 including the Show Trials of Donald J Trump unfold in their Kafkaesque grandeur.  It’s hard to imagine a fictional cast of characters and a plot to rival the Keystone Kops film festival that we see unfolding around us.

Laughable prosecutions based on kindergarten versions of legal proceedings that keep getting bounced out of court by Appellate and Supreme Court reviews and cartoon judges and prosecutors strutting around kangaroo courtrooms trying to convince even partisan jurors that they know what they are talking about.

It’s preposterous.  But eventually this level of organized railroading must eventually culminate in at least one prison term for Trump.  I’m guessing it will be in New York.  And I’m also guessing that this will embolden the hapless and utterly corrupt Republican Party to ban Trump from the ballot in November.  And that will signal the end of the Republican Party as a viable political entity.  And it will also represent the end of belief in the legitimacy of American politics.  Unmask! Unmask!

Of course all of this is a cataclysm but I’m secretly looking forward to it as a relief from this sham theater that we have to endure every two or four years.  Having to imagine people like Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson as our “heroes” or even our allies is too nauseating to continue indefinitely.  Let it all crash and burn.  Let the Democrats steal every last penny left and pour in the millions of illegals and outlaw the Bill of Rights.  Hurry up and bring on the People’s Republic of Leftwingistan, with that haircut in California Gavin Newsom as its cardboard cutout “leader” and that mindless nitwit Kamala Harris as its poster child.

I’ll spend the apocalypse attempting to do the things that I find interesting and amusing.  Art will have to substitute for reality.  Sure, eventually deprivation and loss of freedom will put an end to any actual joy as we head down the road to neo-Marxian repression and poverty but at a certain point you stop fighting a losing battle and find consolation in whatever bits of life are left to you.

Even in a prison there is the potential for joy.  The inner life of the mind is something that can replace the outside world for those who no longer have access to freedom.  Gee, that sounds grandiose or ridiculous; depending on your point of view.

Well, I’ll watch our little passion play with a mind for the humorous and absurd situations.  I’ll record for myself and anyone who is reading along what strikes me as interesting.  But more and more I think that we are looking at a new world.  The people in charge have rigged the game thoroughly and the only consolation is that the pretense is over and we can see the progress of the game without much difficulty.  The Bushes and the Kennedys shook hands and agreed on Obama and now the Clintons have agreed that Joe Biden is the clown face of the Uniparty and we will find out just what that means in the weary years ahead.

But I’ll try to make it fun.

The ZMan and the Republicans

photog Current Events , , ,

Today’s ZMan post was very thought provoking.  He links to two other articles that take a pro and con stance on whether ineffective “conservative” parties like the Republicans in America and the Tories in England should be totally abandoned or reformed.

The abandonment thesis is that if the British Tories were completely abandoned by their supporters this would have the twin benefits of destroying the spineless Tory part, thus paving the way for a replacement and delegitimizing the whole Uni-party arrangement that the Labor and Tory parties have practiced for generations.

The reform opinion holds that destroying the brake on the power of the progressives that the half-hearted but at least existing opposition party provides will make things much worse with all the worst policies now happening unchecked.

It’s a very difficult argument to pick a side on.  It’s hard to imagine a worse situation than the one we find ourselves in presently with Joe Biden ruling by executive order.  That is until you imagine what would happen if he had even a two thirds majority in the Congress.  They’d impeach and remove Supreme Court justices and anyone else standing in their way.

So, the ZMan is staunchly on the abandonment side of the argument.  He’d let the Republicans go down to complete defeat and depend on an accelerationist scenario to drive the present government into disrepute and depend on a reset to produce a new system that suits him better.

I guess I’m currently in the reform camp.  But I will say, if the Democrats hold onto the presidency this year I may change my mind.  At a certain point you just give up on “working within the system.”

It’s a pretty good read.

Waiting For the Barbarians

photog Current Events , , ,

There is a somewhat famous poem by a somewhat famous poet that went like this:

 

Waiting For the Barbarians

-What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

-Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

-Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.

He’s even got a scroll to give him,

loaded with titles, with imposing names.

-Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

-Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

-Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some of our men who have just returned from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

 

Constantine P. Cavafy

 

Cavafy was a Greek living in late 19th and early 20th century Egypt, who was fascinated with the Byzantine past.  The history of that worn down vestige of the Roman Empire helped him define his place in the world.  After all Egypt where he lived had been an important part of the empire until the Muslim conquests sheard it away.  And so, he imagined what it was like to be in Constantinople after all those centuries of Goths, Bulgars, Turks, Arabs and other hordes washing over the lands of their realm and crashing against the impenetrable walls of the city but inexorably wearing away the “empire” until all that was left was the city itself.

And so, you reach the mindset of the poem.  The life of the Byzantines was defined by the idea of just resisting the passage of time, of the changing of epochs of even the disappearance of whole civilizations by shutting the gates and withdrawing inwardly.  Eventually you can justify almost any decadence or depravity by shrugging your shoulders and pointing at the chaos outside your walls.

This familiar end of empire mentality is appropriate for any number of decaying systems.  It applies almost equally well for western civilization as a whole, the British Empire, the American Global Empire, American “democracy” and in particular the Republican Party.  Waiting for the barbarians could be the description of how the “conservatives” have handled their campaign to resist the progressives.  It’s a crouching posture of weakness where resistance is merely a reluctant acquiescence to whatever new outrage has broken out under the eyes of the faithful standing on the walls of the city, above the wreckage of the empire.  As the last of their possessions are appropriated and converted by the enemy, the nobles and their lackeys look down from their protected heights and wonder how this all came to be.  The fact that they long ago gave up leading their followers into battle isn’t even a memory.  All they remember is the ancient glories of the “Gipper” and how wonderful it was back then to be real men.

But now a real problem emerges.  What if there are no more barbarians.  “Those people were a kind of solution.”  They could blame their uselessness on their enemy’s strength.  What if, heaven forbid, Donald Trump wins the election and they have to rule?  How could they pretend to be beautiful losers?  Well, they’ve come up with the answer.  Now Donald Trump and the MAGA conservatives becomes the barbarians and they’ll cooperate with the Democrats to destroy them so that things can go back to normal.

And that’s the situation we may be faced with.  Joe Biden is so incompetent and despicable that even Democrats have begun to mock him.  The Democrat party is beginning to sound desperate to find a convenient way to ditch him and Kamala Harris together.  And, of course, the bait and switch at or after the convention seems like the obvious ploy.  But what if they bungle this whole election and Trump wins so convincingly that even these master cheats can’t make it happen?  What then?

My belief is that the Republicans will sabotage the Trump administration just as they did during his first term.  They will cooperate with the Deep State and throw away the chance at reform.  They will see the Democrats as their natural masters and cripple all attempts at reform.

That’s what my instincts tell me.  But there is always the chance that Trump will find a way to get things done.  It’s not likely or even explicable.  How would he get things done without the Congress?  How would he break the power of the Justice Department?  To carry this already overtaxed metaphor to its utter absurd conclusion Trump would have to be the founder of a new empire and re-order the old world into something new and dynamic.

Of course, that’s a different era.  Ends of empires only go in one direction.  So, we won’t be on the walls but we’ll get a ringside seat to the next act in this drama.  “Those people were a kind of solution.”

Oh No! The Turtle is Done!

photog Current Events ,

Mitch McConnell has acquiesced to the reality that he has been dead for some unknown number of years and now should relinquish his spot on the sunning log in the swamp to some other awful swamp critter

And now the question remains can an even more reprehensible individual than the turtle be found to hold up his part of the Uni-Party deal.  I’m sure Raytheon and the rest of the truly awful people running the military industrial complex will strap one of Mitch’s lackeys to a Frankenstein table and zap him with a gazillion volts and turn him into the monster they need.  Someone with absolutely no concern for the welfare of the people living here and only a short program of responses to his masters’ calls.  Basically, “Send me the checks and I’ll release the votes.”

How Stupid is the Evil Party and How Evil is the Stupid Party?

photog Current Events , ,

Many people describe the Democrats and the Republicans combined as the Uni-Party.  Essentially it is alleged that because the main business of all congressional office holders is to make as much money as possible off of peddling their influence that there really isn’t much difference between the goals or actions of either.  As an example, is the support in both the House and the Senate for the Ukraine War.  It would be impossible to prove that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was any less enthusiastic than Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to send another hundred billion dollars to Ukraine.  Or look at the Democrats and Republicans who sit on subcommittees overseeing the FDA.  I’m sure that lobbyists from Pfizer know each of them by first name and routinely wine and dine them while informing them which bills need to be passed and who at the FDA is giving them grief about their latest “wonder drug.”

So, there is a lot of truth in this characterization.  But there is still a fierce rivalry between the two parties for control of the Congress.  After all, the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader have enormous power to set the agenda in their respective legislative bodies.  The Speaker especially has complete control to block any bill from ever seeing the light of day in the House.  And if for no other reason than to acquire this power the two parties are constantly at war to overtake each other in the number of seats they control.

So, the question I think about is how badly do the Democrats have to screw up before the Republicans recognize the situation as more momentous than just allowing them to steal more than the Democrats.  Put another way, if the country became so disgusted with the multiple crises that Joe Biden’s crime family has sparked that they gave the Republicans very large majorities in both the House and Senate would the Congress have the patriotism or at least the common sense to use the opportunity to try and save the country from the impending crash landing that we are surely headed for?  Or would they just use the opportunity to steal more stuff as fast as possible before the end?

I believe there is a little bit of hope out there.  Recently we saw the Republicans in the House of Representatives sack the Speaker of the House; an unheard-of thing.  And there have been grumblings against Mitch McConnell in the Senate.  Now granted, the Senate is a lot more bought and sold than the House.  Even if McConnell were replaced as Leader by someone who hadn’t yet reached his two hundredth birthday it would still be one of McConnell’s cronies.  But maybe the same forces that got rid of Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are working to build a more representative party out of the Stupid Party.

I think given enough time we could get enough somewhat honest people into the Congress to begin changing the direction of the laws in this country.  The real question, the only crucial question is whether we will do that before we run out of time and the whole mad house collapses and crumbles to dust.

Will the Democrats get bounced by the voters?  Will the Republicans seize the moment to fix things?  What do you think?

Legitimacy

photog Current Events , , , ,

I was listening to a dissident right pundit recently.  It was about the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.  A lot of it had to do with the process the Republican Party uses to vet its members.  Basically, it was said that it selects for those who will follow the orders of the leadership and by extension align with the policies that the donors want supported.  So, for Republicans that means providing legislation that helps for example, pharmaceutical and defense companies.  But it also includes the banks and Wall Street and any other power centers that have lobbyists that Republicans are paid by.

And I can see how a lot of that is true.  Guys like Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell are wholly owned subsidiaries of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and never saw a war they couldn’t get behind.  And during the recent COVID madness Pfizer was spreading all those billions it made on vaccines among the Democrats and Republicans like it was candy corn at Halloween.  So, I can see the point being made by the dissidents.  The system is rigged to keep out anyone but the kind of people who perpetuate its mercenary function.  And with such people the chance of the will of the constituents being honored is non-existent.  So, I grant that.

But then how do we recognize and support the people who somehow manage to sneak through this vetting and could be part of the solution?  Look at Donald Trump.  Trump crashed the Republican presidential primary.  He gutted Jeb Bush and disrupted Hillary Clinton’s coronation when everyone knew it was “her turn.”  Sure, he was hamstrung by Democrats and Republicans and most forcefully by the Deep State but I deny that he didn’t try as best he knew to accomplish the items on his agenda.  To claim he was just another bought and sold member of the Uniparty doing the bidding of Black Rock and the CIA seems completely false.  I don’t claim that he had immense success in reforming the federal government.  What I do claim is that he was a legitimate representative of the people who voted him into office.  He authentically wanted to fulfill the promises he made during his campaign.  He had legitimacy.

So the trick is figuring out who are the other bona fide conservatives who are willing to help us win the battles that we so badly need won.  Let’s start with Mike Johnson.  I heard the arguments about how Johnson was a part of the machine that produces “Christian” lawmakers.  But when I look at the cases that he was involved in and the laws that he fought for I see a very socially conservative record.

In 2003 he wrote an amicus brief in front of the Supreme Court for Lawrence v. Texas which struck down the Texas sodomy laws. And in 2004 he defended Louisiana’s law defining marriage as being between one man and one woman.  To me this sounds like someone whose priorities are in line with my own.  And after the 2020 election Johnson voted to overturn the presidential election results.  That doesn’t sound like someone who just follows the Uniparty to get along.

The only way I think I’ll be able to tell if Johnson is a legitimate conservative legislature is if as Speaker of the House, he shows a willingness to resist the very mercenary and illegitimate behaviors that were mentioned in the dissident essay I was discussing earlier.  For instance, Joe Biden asked for a hundred billion dollars of aid that would mostly go to Ukraine but had Israel getting about ten billion.  Instead of passing such a bill Johnson got a bill passed that just gave the ten billion to Israel.  The sympathy that Israel had among Republicans after the Gaza terrorist attack ensured that such a bill would be passed.  Refusing to tack on a Ukraine payment that is an order of magnitude larger seems what I would expect of someone who is practical and smart.

I’m willing to see what Mike Johnson achieves.  That’s how I’ll decide if he’s for real.  That doesn’t seem idealistic.  It seems pragmatic.

FISA Reauthorization – The Real Test of the House

photog Current Events , , , ,

Want to know whether Republicans have any legitimacy as a conservative entity?  The FISA  program expires on December 31, 2023.  Just wait to see if they reauthorize it or not.  The FBI has been documented by the Inspector General for the Justice Department to have abused this program systematically.

“On April 27, Inspector General Michael Horowitz gave a statement before the committee that stressed the need for “transparency and oversight” to avoid or mitigate the repetition of “mistakes, errors, and abuses.” Horowitz explained that factual accuracy when showing probable cause was a pervasive problem among bureau agents before 2021.”

The abuses of the FISA court during the Russia-gate actions proved that partisan elements in the FBI and the Justice Department routinely abused the FISA process at will.

Why would the Republican House renew it?  The only reason possible would be cowardice.  They fear that if they allow it to lapse the Deep State will allow a foreign government to launch an attack on the US homeland and then blame the Congress for the attack.  But if that’s the case then nothing will ever get fixed in our system and the intelligence agencies will have free rein to spy on us and persecute anyone that speaks against them.  From my point of view, this reauthorization deadline is the acid test of whether there is any hope of ever reining these people in.

Put it on your calendar and on January 1st see whether our conservative warriors stood their ground or caved in.  I’m dying to know.  And if they fail it just confirms what all of the “conspiracy theorists” have been saying all along, that the FBI controls the Congress and not vice versa.

Mark the date.

 

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 22FEB2023 – A Pattern of Deception

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors , , ,

Figuring out that the “Of the people, by the people, for the people” talk was an entire charade and farce is not an overnight realization for most of us. It is a process that takes place as one notices a pattern of deception that began centuries ago.

A few examples: Woodrow Wilson campaigning for president in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Less than a month after inauguration, American boys were stepping foot on French soil to add more bodies and carnage in a useless conflict, one that would be continued by their sons a little more than 20 years later.

Iraq part 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, China…the list is long of foreign entanglements that did nothing but drain blood and treasure from the nation. Not much needs to be added to explain the insanity of attempting to nation-build in a land of warring tribes and secular violence. Democracy? In Iraq or Afghanistan? How delusional does one have to be to believe in that?

More current is the gay marriage push that, while failing in 37 out of 39 state referendums, (including California-Prop 8) somehow ended up becoming the law of the land when it was decided by 9 unelected tribal elders (SCOTUS) that somewhere in the Constitution the framers accidentally left out the gays. (It should also be noted that many Americans were fine with legal protections such as civil unions, acknowledging one’s life partner, etc. But no, they had to have the ‘marriage’ label.)

Closer to home is the never-ending California state ballot propositions that are voted on, only to be stripped or watered down of their intentions once under judicial review. It is important to note that American citizens never wanted mass immigration to dilute the culture and Western world way of life. No, it was decided for them by the ruling class a long time ago.

The differences between political factions are nil. Rs pretend to be the loyal opposition while Ds appear to have lost their minds over DEI and wokeness ideology. We are not voting our way out of this, nor was there really a chance to do that for quite a while now. The goal now is to survive the coming collapse and hopefully build from the ashes.

Although, with intellectual giants at our country’s helm, we may not have much left to build from once everything settles. If Biden going to the Ukraine and Poland to basically have a measuring contest between Russia and China is the best we got, then it is not a good outlook for the future.

25JAN2023 – Shoveling Various Things

photog Current Events , , ,

So, I’ve been under a form of coercion for the last three days.  Between shoveling snow and shoveling paperwork I’ve been buried alive.  Now I’ve been reading the news and opinion for the last few days and thinking about what might be interesting.  There are developments on both sides of the Ukraine war and there are interesting developments in Kevin McCarthy locating his backbone but I just haven’t had any time to contemplate, cogitate, and rhapsodize on these themes.

Instead, I’ve been concentrating on just what awful people inhabit the cesspool that is the Uniparty.  Schiff, Swalwell and Schumer.  And that’s just the esses.  The bees, ems and the pees are no better.  It’s a whole alphabet full of sleazebags, crumb-bums and crooks.  But at some point, during my second day of shoveling I wasn’t too cold from the weather or too hot from the exertion and I was feeling curiously relaxed by the rhythm of throwing the snow over my shoulder that I started thinking about the bright side of our present situation.

For one thing McCarthy said categorically that Schiff and Swalwell were disqualified from being on the Intelligence committee because they were, respectively, a documented liar about classified information and a purchaser of sexual favors from Chinese spies.  And I thought, “Hey that’s right, McCarthy said these two guys are scumbags and he wasn’t afraid of hurting their feelings like that RINO Paul Ryan would have been.  He just said it as a matter of fact.  That’s kind of fun.

And he’s going to try to keep Ilhan Omar off a committee too.  He’ll have to whip his whole party to make it happen but he’ll probably succeed because she’s a lousy human being and probably almost no one likes her anyway.  And that’s kind of fun too.

And McCarthy looks like he’s going to at least try to negotiate with the White House on some kind of budget deal.  Sure, he may cave and go along with the continuing resolution on the obscenely bloated so-called budget because all the media outlets are screeching every hour on the hour that the sky is falling because we won’t be able to send out the welfare checks to the illegal aliens.  But at the least he won’t just roll over and add another $100 billion for Ukraine as far as I can see.  And he won’t ban guns by calling them assault weapons so that’s pretty good too.

And then I heard that Mike Pence found classified documents in his fanny pack or his nap room and I started to laugh.  Now Mike Pence is a threat to our democracy.  Who’s next, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger?  Should they rifle through Grant’s Tomb to see if there were any Civil War secret weapons that might end up in Russian hands?  Our Deep State have beclowned themselves in the last few months.  Sure, they’re a metastatic cancer on the lifeblood of our republic but they’re also the Keystone Cops.  Certainly, they destroy the lives of many innocent Americans but they’re also pathetic losers.  And it’s almost certain that they’ve already sown the seeds of their own destruction.

Any society that descends down the path of surveillance state eventually implodes from loss of legitimacy.  Eventually everyone pretends to believe the lies but no one actually does.  And one day pretend loyalty won’t be enough to save the state from a catastrophe and after that you get the Soviet Union and East Germany and Romania in the 1990’s.  And if they’re not careful they’ll end up with what Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu got, a kangaroo court like they gave their victims and a firing squad.

So, there’s no big news this week.  Just little stuff.  But I must be in a good mood because I had all these pleasant thoughts while shoveling.  Well, exercise is good for you.  Maybe it’s good for the soul too.