Words, words, words

The verbiage used by the media recently in announcing Trump's first place finish in the Iowa caucuses called to mind a humorous piece I read many years ago in a popular publication.

The writer posited a contest among sports journalists as to which of them could use the most colorful and nonrepetitive language to describe the progress of a football game and its outcome. I'm sorry I don't recall where it was published, because it was a hoot. I do remember descriptions of play-by-play announcers thumbing through thesauruses on air, with hilarious mispronunciations, and newspaper writers badgering their colleagues in the newsroom for just one more synonym or non-English term for "won:" "Come on, what is it in Russian? Wonsky?"

Sports journalists and their political counterparts may not seem at first blush to have much in common, but consider this: Both groups cover intensely played contests, and game theory tells us that the strategy used in sports contests is closely related to the strategy of political campaigns. So is the vocabulary used to describe them.

A quick scan of news feeds following the Iowa caucuses--some filed scandalously soon after the meetings were called to order--finds landslide, commanding, resounding, decisive, record smashing, stunning--need I continue?

Can you say hyperbole, Donny Boy?

Let's keep this in perspective. We're not talking about an actual election, but a contest for sufficient electoral points to be declared the Republican candidate for president. Here are the facts:

1. Only registered Republicans could participate in the caucuses;

2. There are approximately 752,200¹ registered Republicans in the state of Iowa;

3. Only about 110,298, or 15% of registered Republicans, participated in the caucuses;

4. Trump garnered about 51% of votes cast, or slightly more than 56,252;

5. About 7.5% of Iowan Republicans voted for Trump; 92.5% did not;

6. Eighty-five percent of Iowa Republicans, almost 642,000, chose not to vote for anyone;

7. And all those powerful words up top? Just so much fluff. Percentages do count, and we have to acknowledge that Iowa's vote at the Republican convention will likely go to Trump, but

8. Getting votes from only seven and a half percent of your base does not a landslide make.

The New Hampshire primary coming up on Tuesday should be interesting. There are about 267,905² registered Republicans in the state, and more than 340,000 independents, who are allowed to vote Republican or Democrat in the primary. That's a sizeable X factor that could well decide which way the state turns this year.

Will the flinty, winter-hardened Granite Staters come out in strength and kick Donny Trump's well-padded ass back to Mar-a-Lago, showing him to be the loser we all know he is?

We can only hope.

--- Diogenes, 21 January 2024

¹ The Des Moines Register, 1/17/2024: "Iowa Caucuses drew 15% of state's registered Republicans. Why the lower turnout?" https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2024/01/16/iowa-caucus-turnout-registered-republicans-15-percent-cold-weather-snow-donald-trump-expectations/72067396007/

² WMUR-TV, Manchester, NH; "Most New Hampshire voters are registered as undeclared, latest data shows," 1/15/24. https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-undeclared-republican-democrat-voter/46398747#

 

Just Another Slob

There is nothing special about Donald John Trump.

He is, and has been since January 20, 2021, a private United States citizen. He is an obscenely wealthy private citizen, but that is all he is--just another number in the approximately 340 million souls who make up this nation.

All of us--every individual in that batch of 340 million people who call themselves Americans--are governed by one set of laws.

I'll say that again because some people just don't seem to get it. Every person who claims citizenship in the United States is subject to one body of law.

And just one more time for the truly thick: No one, including Donald John Trump, is governed by any special body of law. We're all under the same laws and are all subject to the same punishments if we violate those laws, which are grounded in the Constitution of the United States of America. 

Trump is no different. He may be able to hire hundreds of expensive attorneys, but they all answer to the same law as the youngest and poorest public defender. 

When Trump is found guilty, as he will be, he will face the same punishment and will go to the same prison as the poorest defendants.

In Joan Osborne's eloquent phraseology, Trump is "just a slob like one of us."

Go back up a few lines and note again that the laws of this country are anchored in its Constitution. Then think back to Trump's several attempts to weaken or disable the Constitution during his presidency, and his last, most risky and egregiously illegal act: the insurrection of January 6, 2021, which he planned, orchestrated, and cheered while watching it unfold on television in the White House.

The goal of that insurrection was to overthrow the Constitution. Why does Trump want to do away with the Constitution? Very simple: so he can establish a separate set of laws that will apply only to him, which would probably outlaw democracy and make him president for life.

Think about that. I mean, really think about it for some period of time. 

Think what such a condition would mean to you, your job, your family, your church, your kids' schools, and everything else of importance to you. 

Read the Constitution, including the Amendments and imagine life without them. 

You may complain about politicians, but consider life without them, as attractive as that may seem. Not only no Congress, but very likely no state legislatures. Probably no councils in the larger cities.

Then think about the big one: You would have no voice.

You may be a white man who dreams of such a situation, imagining how you and your buddies would be empowered to do anything you want to anyone you don't like.

Think again, Bubba.

No rights for anybody. Period.

Think about it.

--- Diogenes, 13 August 2023

 

 

Quayle, Cruz, and . . . Barbie?

(When this post was originally published the wrong title appeared. We're republishing it just for the sake of having the right title on the right post. Our bad.)

We of a certain age remember an amusing dialogue between then-Vice President Dan Quayle, the Republican presidential candidate, and Murphy Brown, a fictional TV news personality played by Candice Bergen.

The story arc of the 1991-92 season of the show (titled "Murphy Brown") focused on Murphy's pregnancy and decision to raise her child as a single mother. On May 19, 1992, the day after Murphy's fictional childbearing episode was aired, Quayle gave a speech on the nation's social ills in San Francisco in which he said:

Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong and we must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.¹

The show's producers didn't take that challenge lying down. The hapless Quayle became the target of merciless pranking from the outset of the next season. When Murphy laments to her colleagues about the vice president's criticism of her life choice one of them simply says, "Murphy, it's Dan Quayle."²

That line, with the veep's name pronounced laced with equal parts disdain, scorn and contempt, is in my opinion one of the best-delivered in television history.

Fast forward to 2023, and Republican politicians are again--or still--struggling to discern between fiction and the real world.

This time the fictional character is the much beloved all-American Barbie, who finally has her very own feature length live-action motion picture. And who should come along trying to spoil it? None but the despiser of everything good, pure and innocent, Senator Rafael Edward Cruz of Texas.

Here's Cruz claiming the movie about a doll's desire to find her way to the real world is anything but:

There's a scene in "Barbie," where there is this map of the world, and it's drawn like with crayon. I mean, it's really a very simple cartoon. And so they have this blockish thing that is called "Asia." And then they've drawn what are called the nine-dashes . . . .

This is Chinese communist propaganda in which the Chinese are asserting sovereignty over the entirety of the South China Sea.³

Excuse us? Did the junior senator from the state of Texas just say that a movie about a doll's daydream contains Chinese propaganda? 

Yes, in fact, he did. 

As a child of the 60s I can authoritatively say that anybody that paranoid has to be very, very seriously messed up. Nor is this the first time Cruz has taken on the fantasy world. Not long ago he tangled with Big Bird and came out second. 

The people of Texas actually elected this clown to office? Come on, Texans. The eyes of the rest of us are upon you.

I almost hate to say it, but Cruz isn't the only Republican wingnut who's seeing the ghost of Mao Zedong wearing a pink dress and pirouetting across movie screens this summer. But I won't get started.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

--- Diogenes: 27 July 2023

 

¹ https://publicapologycentral.com/apologia-archive/political-2/dan-quayle-murphy-brown/. Downloaded 27 July 2023.

² https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TakeThat/LiveActionTV. Downloaded 27 July 2023.

³ https://www.businessinsider.com/ted-cruz-barbie-movie-chinese-communist-propaganda-2023-7. Downloaded 27 July 2023.

 

 

Infamy of Infamies

The phrase "a day that will live in infamy" was coined by President Franklin D. Roosevelt referring to the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941.

Since then the phrase has been used to describe the commission of an act so heinous and with such a calamitous impact on America and Americans that it is fitting to use the phrase as a means of tying such acts to the devastating Japanese attack that heavily crippled the U. S. Navy and cost the lives of 2,403 American military personnel and civilians.

Some infamous days:

• 11/22/1963: Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
• 4/19/1995:   Bombing of Oklahoma City federal building
• 9/11/2001:   Attack on World Trade Center and the Pentagon
•  1/6/2021:    Insurrection and attack on Congress and the Capitol
• Today, 6/24/2022:   Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

Set against the violent nature of the other events, a ruling of the Supreme Court may seem tame, but make no mistake: this is a declaration of war on American women.

With this ruling the Supreme Court has told the majority of Americans¹ that their reproductive health will henceforth be at the mercy of state legislatures, which are predominantly male.²

The House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack has shown in great detail how former president Donald Trump plotted for months to stay in power. The committee's focus is his attempt to overthrow a valid election, but his machinations included loading the Supreme Court with conservative justices who he expected to support him in his bid to deny the will of the American people.

That ploy did not work, but it is those justices who are responsible for the overthrow of Wade, carrying forward the hateful work of the ultra-right even when Trump is absent. 

Like so many injuries and insults the American people and their Constitution have suffered since 2016, the responsibility for this outrage tracks directly to Donald Trump, whose tyrannical impulses have brought this nation close to dissolution.

I have returned to Vox Populi because the times require action, not silence. Every American who loves justice should take a moment to grieve over the grave injustice committed today by a court whose members should be but are not impartial.

Then pick up your phone, call your congressional representatives, and tell them in no uncertain terms that if they want your support they will begin posthaste to develop legislation that will secure and safeguard women's right to control their own bodies.

--Diogenes, 24 June 2022

¹ Several sources bear this out, including the U.S. Census: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255220

² Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP). 2022. “Women in State Legislatures 2022.” New Brunswick, NJ: Center for American Women and Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/levels-office/state-legislature/women-state-legislatures-2022 (Accessed June 24, 2022)

 

Done

In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon explores the human condition in depth and concludes that virtually everything undertaken by humans is a vanity. In biblical terms "vanity" does not mean the kind of self absorption Carly Simon sings about in "You're So Vain." Rather, it refers to actions or acquisitions taken solely for one's own pleasure or self aggrandizement; things that by definition are vain and without substance.

 

Social media is a vanity. Politics is a vanity. This blog is a vanity.

 

I established this blog in the vain belief that one person with no money or physical resources, no contacts, and no sponsorship, but with a deep belief in the rightness of American democracy and the Constitution, and some talent for writing, could reach an audience with an anti-tyranny, pro-democracy message, and perhaps have some positive effect on society, however small.

I was wrong.

We are become a nation of cowards and idiots governed by fools. We deny the truth of science in favor of the latest conspiracy theory on social media. We allow uncouth philistines to dictate taste, boorish louts to set public policy, and bigoted, feckless drones to promulgate biased pronouncements disguised as news.

Nearly half of this nation's population has been duped by Donald Trump and his minions. Congress has become an albatross around the president's neck. Unjust and divisive laws continue to flow from state legislatures and the administration and the courts have seemingly lost the will to fight.

I have lost all faith in the Democratic Party to work effectively against Trumpism and its associated evils. The party has fallen back on its long held passive-aggressive mode of governing and is unable to respond to the Republicans' new barbarity and aggressive intolerance.

The American people will deserve whatever they get in the next election cycle. If that is tyranny they will discover it is too late to avoid disaster. 

This blog is done, and I am done. I will never say never, but I can envision very few scenarios that would cause me once again to lift my voice.

I sign off with this truth: As long as Donald Trump is alive the American system of laws and the Constitution that underpins it are in danger of destruction.

Do with that what you will.

---Diogenes, 2 January 2022  

 

 

 

Mes Haines: Tucker Carlson

I am still out of action, but not so much that I can't denounce Tucker Carlson as an enemy of the Constitution and of the American people, and "Patriot Purge," his predictable, inane, and masturbatory Fox Nation mini-me series, as an egregious waste of bandwidth.

Carlson is a liar, a con artist, a fool, and a Trump dupe, and "Patriot Purge" is yellow journalism at its worst.

Tucker Carlson, you are anathema.

--- Diogenes, 6 November 2021

Hors De Combat

Diogenes is on the injured reserve list again. I suppose when you're as old as he is things are bound to fall off here and there.

He'll be back.

--- RLB, 1 November 2021

Mes Haines: Tyranny

What do George Washington, George Orwell and a fictional sex slave have in common?

They all speak eloquently about the evils of tyranny.

In September 1796, toward the end of his presidency, George Washington made a farewell address to the American people. Among many other thoughts he shared with them the importance of loyalty to the government:

"The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."

He goes on to warn of the dangers of extreme partisanship:

"However combinations or associations of the above description [divisive and partisan policies] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."¹

Sound familiar? Today's Republicans are that "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled" rabble who are openly "subvert[ing] the power of the people and . . . usurp[ing] for themselves the reins of government." Whether they will destroy it remains to be seen, but their actions so far suggest that to be their goal.

I'm not suggesting Washington or any of the Founders was prescient. It's simply that they and their families had lived under tyrants for generations, and they were well aware of the processes by which autocrats rise. The greed and lust for power that are hallmarks of the contemporary Republican Party looked the same in the 18th century as they do in the 21st.

In his dystopian novel 1984 ² George Orwell introduced most of us in the free world to the fearsome reality of totalitarianism.

Published in 1949, 1984 explores the nature of a dictatorship as seen through the eyes of Winston Smith, whose job is rewriting history for the Ministry of Truth. The government is founded on a Big Lie focused on three self-contradictory statements: 

• War is peace
  
• Freedom is slavery
  
• Ignorance is strength

Those statements are the core of doublethink, a tool used by The Party to indoctrinate citizens, who are expected simultaneously to accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to their own memories or sense of reality.

That idea is at the heart of Trumpism. Infected Republicans claim to be protecting the Constitution and looking out for their constituents when they are in fact doing the exact opposite. Some of them probably believe it. Others are simply lying, trying to gain Trump's favor, which means absolutely nothing. He has neither loyalty nor fidelity toward his followers; they are nothing to him.

The goal of the Party, the governing authority in 1984, is to attain power--not to reach a goal, but for the sake of power itself. That is the same lust that drives Republican politicians to do anything, no matter how immoral, corrupt or nefarious, to win elections and to stay in office.

The year 1984 did not bring constitutional Armageddon, but if Trump and his followers are not stopped and stripped of power we may well see it forty years on, in 2024.

The Hulu series "The Handmaid's Tale"³ takes place in another dystopian society in which most women have become sterile. Fertile women are captured, called "handmaids," and held as sex slaves for child bearing by the ruling class men. Any children they bear are taken away to be raised by their masters' wives.

Gilead, as the society is called, has come about after a religious civil war in the United States won by ultra-conservative religious forces. It is a totalitarian theocratic state based on a twisted notion of Old Testament society in which men are men and women are chattel.

In Gilead women have no rights, female children are rounded up to be used as needed, and LGBT citizens are hanged as "gender traitors."

This plot may seem farfetched, but keep in mind the struggle American women had in gaining reproductive freedom and how bitterly that right is still contested. At this moment the cornerstone of that right, Roe v. Wade, is at risk of being struck down by a conservative Supreme Court.

This nation is nowhere close to gender equality. As long as women are paid less than men, as long as any police officer anywhere turns a blind eye to spousal abuse, as long as there are areas where men with names like Billy Bob refer to women as "little gals" we are not equal.

Throughout our lives we have enjoyed freedom, and we tend to believe it will last forever. But study just a bit of history, listen to the warnings. and consider the outrages of 2020. Freedom is not free; it takes work and sacrifice. 

If we don't cherish our freedom and our rights and work hard to protect them we will wake up one morning and find them gone.

--- Diogenes, 24 October 2021

 

¹ https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=15&page=transcript

² Everyone should read this book and be familiar with it. If you haven't thought about it since high school, find it online or in your local library, read it and pay attention.

³ Based on the novel of the same title by Margaret Atwood. 

Mes Haines: Enemies Of The People

U. S. Senate Republicans have once again voted against the Constitution, the right to vote, and the freedom of the American people.

Trapped in Trump's Big Lie and too cowardly to admit they have chosen the wrong path, Republican senators today blocked passage of the Freedom to Vote Act. 

The act is Senate Democrats' latest attempt to address the flood of voter suppression laws rolling out of state legislatures like sewage.

I am of the opinion that the Republican Party should be condemned as a domestic terror organization and its leaders, both in the Congress and the RNC, branded as terrorists for their consistent and unrelenting attack on our constitutional rights.

Senate Republicans are hiding, as they have for as long as I can remember, behind the curtain of states' rights. They claim the states have the power to shape their own electoral laws and that passing a national voting rights law would be a federal intrusion on those rights.

The problem is that the state laws that have recently been passed blatantly violate a number of constitutional rights, violating at the very least Amendments 14, 15, 19, 24, and 26, and should be peremptorily struck down by the courts. 

We see this Republican racism every election cycle: attempts to threaten or repress voters, disinformation about voting, false allegations of voter fraud.

After Trump these attempts have become more vicious and virulent.

Major news outlets are beginning to say what many of us bloggers have been saying for a long time. The entire Republican Party is corrupt and has only one agenda item: to get into power or to stay there. Republican intransigence and bigotry are the strongest arguments for term limits that we have.

The administration and congressional Democrats need to be far more aggressive, and to get the party in line.

Their battle cry should be: Stop The Goddamned Republicans From Destroying America!

 

--- Diogenes, 20 October 2021 

 

Mes Haines: Trying Trump Redux

I am reposting this piece on the weakness of the American system of jurisprudence in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal.

In my opinion, in the case of Donald Trump the president should suspend habeas corpus, have the Orange Golem blackbagged and dumped into a federal oubliette.

It would take years for the courts or Congress to act.

Original post:

On 23 May 1498 Girolamo Savonarola was publicly executed in Florence, Italy.

A popular preacher with a large following, Savonarola ran afoul of Pope Alexander VI. He was excommunicated and condemned as a heretic. He was hanged, his body burned, and his ashes thrown into the Arno River so his followers could not find any part of him to memorialize.¹

Now there's an effective disappearing act.

In my very darkest moments I admit I would not be sorry to see such a fate visited on Donald Trump. But it can't happen for three reasons:

1: It's inhuman;

2: It would violate the Eighth Amendment;² and

3: It's not the point. He needs to be gone, not necessarily dead. The goal is to neutralize him and make him forever ineligible to hold office.

How?

Unprecedented problems need unprecedented solutions. A few suggestions:

The Supreme Court: I believe, as I wrote on 11 October. that the American system of jurisprudence could not effectively try DJTrump. However, it is a foregone conclusion that any trial decision will wind up in front of the Supreme Court, so why not start there? Precedent should be set at the highest level.

The Constitution gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in specific kinds of cases, including those "affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;" that is, people who have taken the oath to uphold the Constitution. That oath, once taken, has no expiration date.

That puts former presidents among those who could be tried for criminal acts directly by the Supreme Court. There is general precedent for such trials, although none involve a former president.

Special Counsel: The attorney general can appoint a special counsel in cases where "it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter."³ A nonpartisan, independent special counsel can investigate a specific issue, e.g. election interference or incitement to insurrection. The special counsel has prosecutorial power, but being unattached to government would avoid any appearance of partisanship or conflict of interest.

The Psychiatric Option: Trump is mentally ill. The whole world has seen symptoms of his malignant narcissism. His niece Mary Trump, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, has written and said in public that her uncle has a number of obvious mental problems.

Like most states, New York, where OranguTrump resides, has a law obligating emergency and medical personnel to report encounters with anyone who might be a danger to themselves or to others. Trump is unquestionably a danger to others--to the population of this entire nation if not of the world. 

This law can allow involuntary institutionalization for an unspecified period of time if necessary.

There are any number of qualified people who could make that initial report, including mental health professionals who have already warned of the danger.

The Very Long Shot: The International Criminal Court is waging an ongoing war on tyrants and on those who believe they are immune to the rule of law. The United States is unfortunately not a member of the court for political reasons. It may nonetheless be possible to advance an extraordinary case against Trump if brought by a credible officer of the court or via the United Nations.

Those are my thoughts. If you have others, please leave a comment.

Trump must be nullified and forgotten.

--- Diogenes, 18 October 2021; reposted 22 November 2021

¹ It didn't work. There is a plaque in the pavement where the execution took place and people still leave flowers there.

² I know I've said Trump doesn't deserve the protections of the Constitution, but the "unusual punishments" clause should never be violated.

³ United States, Department of Justice, "General Powers of Special Counsel." 64 Fed. Reg. 37,042 (July 9, 1999).