Month: May 2020

Interesting because it so well expresses the real agenda of the current democratic party, to keep the order, to promote calm acceptance of a system that brutalizes many but serves the selfish interests of those who have much, like the party leaders and those they are willing to support as their candidates.

From The Hill: Democrats, and a few Republicans, condemned Trump over his tweets, a few of which dredged up memories of the violent response to the civil rights movement, saying his language fanned the flames and was unhelpful in deescalating the situation.”

IT IS NOT JUST TRUMP’S LANGUAGE THAT FANS THE FLAMES.  It is the manner of thinking, widespread beyond Trump and his supporters, that is spreading flames that constantly burn in this country because of its unjust economic and political systems that serve a few at great cost to a great many.  Any person with any sense at all would know that before Trump came to office the flames were burning, EVEN DURING THE SAINT OBAMA’S administration.  The last anointed candidate of the democratic party for the office of president was Hillary Clinton who seems to have supported his administration’s response to injustice and inequality by having “them” locked up en masse.

The reason that some want to fuck up the peace is because pease in American society is dependent on allowing the system to fuck up the lives of a great many people, disproportionately of people of color.  Right now, we don’t need no peace.  What we need is change that provides people the opportunities they deserve that allow them to lead peaceful lives.  We do not need a peace that is only for those who can afford the life worthy of peaceful existence.

Yet Trump and Pompeo’s rhetoric has some in the intelligence community concerned that the Administration may try to push on the origins of the virus much the way that, in 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, pressured intelligence agencies to provide material that might support the theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  New Yorker.

From:

This poll number shows something very important about the Tara Reade allegation

Opinion about whether the accusation is true is very, very divided. Roughly 4 in 10 (37%) — say the allegation is “probably true” while 32% say it’s probably not true, and 31% have no opinion.

Which isn’t great news for Biden. Except that when you dig into the numbers one level further, you find this: Among the group that says the accusation against Biden is probably true, he still wins 1 in 3 of their votes. (President Donald Trump gets 59% among that group.)

What that means — at least at this relatively early stage in the general election race — is that there is a decent chunk of voters whose dislike for Trump or support for Biden overrides even their belief that Reade is telling the truth about Biden. They so want Trump out that they are supporting Biden even in spite of believing the unproven (and denied) allegation that he sexually assaulted a woman in the early 1990s.

Important article.

The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions , George Packer, Atlantic , April 2020

How Trump is destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will

They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it.