Trump’s False Moral Equivalency

For context let’s take a look at WWII. One side invaded its neighbors, gassed 6 million jews, and did other unspeakable things. The other side put a stop to it. If Trump had been around for it, he might have commented: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides.”

Or maybe he might have said, as he did on Tuesday:

And you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in…and they were very, very violent…I am not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other and they came at each other…and it was vicious and horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side…And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides…So I only tell you this. There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment…a horrible moment. But there are two sides…

I don’t even know what to say…but what I do know is that Trump emboldens the enemy. Yes, the KKK, American Vanguard, neo-Nazis, and all of their ilk are–and must forever be–enemies of good people everywhere.

David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, said in Charlottsville, “we are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”

“Obviously the alt-right has come very far in the past two years in terms of public exposure,” [Richard] Spencer said. “Is Donald Trump one of the major causes of that? Of course. He never talked about this conservative garbage we’ve been hearing for years…he was a nationalist.”

Andrew Anglin, who runs (or ran) the racist website The Daily Stormer wrote, “People saying he cucked are shills and kikes. He did the opposite of cuck. He refused to even mention anything to do with us. When reporters were screaming at him about White Nationalism he just walked out of the room.”

Racist commenters on Reddit were also explicit in praising Trump, for example, “Clearly President Trump is condemning the real haters: the SJW/Marxists who’ve attacked our guys.”

Commenters elsewhere were more explicit: “Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us. He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate… on both sides! So he implied the antifa are haters.”

Again, “There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all. He said he loves us all. Also refused to answer a question about white nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”

After Trump singled out white supremacists on Monday, David Duke wrote, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror, & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

Heeding Duke, Trump came back on Tuesday and re-presented his false equivalency, to which Duke tweeted: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa”

It seems that Trump thrives on adulation, and if he can’t get it from the media, then he looks elsewhere for it.

Trump does not have to go far to see white nationalists and racists, they are in his administration in the form of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka. Trumpism which is indistinguishable from racism is going to lead us to another civil war.

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Sharia Law

Happy to see that counter protesters outnumbered the bigots in nearly every city yesterday. Thankfully with little violence involved.

What I don’t get about the folks who are fearful of Sharia Law being implemented in the US is how ignorant they are. We have church/state separation. As long as we keep prayer out of schools and the 10 Commandments out of court houses and wacky religious monuments out of parks, then Sharia Law will not be able to gain access either.

It is the same people who attempt to force their Abrahamic religious creed on the rest of us who are fearful of Sharia. Hypocrite much?

With all of the protests taking place yesterday I can only assume that these people will stand strong in keeping the 10 Commandments out of our public spaces.

Coulter’s Speech is Not Being Suppressed

Ann Coulter was on all the networks last night complaining that she doesn’t have an outlet to speak freely. I am guessing that she has lived so long in her make believe stipulated reality that she lost the ability to detect irony. 

If all she wanted was the freedom to spew her hate speech she could have done so while the cameras were rolling. Coulter reglarly appears on tv and has published books spewing her thoughts, delusions, and ideas. To claim that she is being denied freedom of speech is laughable. 

It is not freedom of speech that she craves but the freedom to instigate violence and to burnish her image amongst the whacky right. Sorry, Ann, there is no Constitutional right to incite violence. Get over yourself, the rest of us already have. 

The Left Has Only Itself to Blame

If you’ve read anything by Richard Rorty, then you know that–like many philosphers–his writing is dense and can be a slog to read. Some time back, when I had more self discipline, I read a couple of his books. The one that stands out is Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). Rorty argues that the “left” can be divided into two components: Critical and Progressive. The Critical Left is exemplified by thinkers such as Foucoult and is good at identifying problems but is short on providing solutions. The Critical Left is predominantly concerned with cultural issues (nearly to the exclusion of political issues). Rorty identifies with the Progressive Left which he refers to as reformist in nature.  He sees the Critical Left as anti-American and Marxist, with the Progressive Left offering pragmatic civil engagement.

Rorty believed that as the Left moved more to the Critical end of the spectrum that our basic institutions would fail even as we made cultural gains. As democratic institutions fail, workers would seek an outlet. He writes:

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

As I’ve written previously, only the educated elite were surprised by Trump’s rise. Sixty percent of American’s do not have a college degree, these people are under assault both from the Critical Left and the uncertainties of globalization. As pressure increases, an outlet will be found or created to release the pressure, Donald Trump is the current release. To some extent a conservative Supreme Court may also ease the pressure. After that it will be up to the Critical Left.

 

The Imperial Presidency (or how Obama f%$#ed us)

TL/DR: Obama, through cult of personality, has amassed unprecedented executive power, and now cedes that power to Trump

Bush the Lesser led the most imperial presidency since Nixon, at least up until his time. With no patience for due process, Bush set about changing the law through executive action. Bush showed very little knowledge of either law or political history, he may have been acting out of ignorance or bad advice.

In 2008 candidate Obama (rightfully) decried this as an unconstitutional power grab.

Evidently, sometime during the Obama regime the Constitution was changed, because it did not take long to change his tune. Obama is well aware that he is acting extra-Constitutionally, he is smart and he has studied the document.

The Constitution has not changed, still Obama has expanded executive overreach far beyond anything in history outside times of major war; certainly far beyond anything that Nixon could dream of.

Now Trump, the most unprepared person in modern history–whose behavior and character can best be described as erratic–is assuming presidential power.

I would love to see someone like candidate Obama become president some day.

Too Wounded to Govern

Rather it is Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum that wins the election, the question becomes rather s/he can effectively govern. Trump has been proven a misogynistic racist while Clinton seems incapable of telling the truth even when the truth is innocuous.

With nearly a month left before the election, it is only going to get worse.

So how does either one gain the respect to effectively work with congress, the bureaucracy, or world leaders to move any agenda forward? Do either of these candidates have the moral authority to use the bully pulpit to sway public opinion?

Trump is a charlatan, he does what charlatans have aways done. His lone goal appears to be self-aggrandizement. He does not appear to have much love for country, community, or even family; like Narcissus, he loves only himself. While his stated motto is “Make America Great Again”, his behaviour indicates that “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” would be more fitting.

Clinton is a classic Machiavellian, she changes her position to get ahead of the prevailing (political) winds. She can’t be pinned down on her positions or beliefs because they are constantly in flux as she judges the political tides and calculates which stipulated reality will increase her power.

On January 21, 2017, one of these psychically misshapen golems will wake up in the White House only to find that, despite years of public and private mechanizations, despite selling their very soul to the highest bidder, s/he does not possess the moral authority to lead.

For the sins of the few, we all will suffer.

Presidential Election 2016

Last time I voted for president was 1992, Bill Clinton’s first term. If you recall that election, he was the man from Hope who was going to build a bridge to the 21st century. I had spent the previous few years protesting Bush the Elder’s war on Iraq. That war lasted about 3 months and was followed by an extended bombing campaign masquerading as a no-fly zone. I protested Bush and Quail’s local campaign stops and went and listened to Clinton’s hope filled message.  I voted for Bill Clinton without reservation.

Within 3 hours of Clinton’s inauguration, US war planes were dropping bombs on Iraq; a message to the world that while the US regime had changed, its foreign policy had not.

I have not voted for president since. On that day I realized that choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Since then I have heard many argue that if you don’t vote then you don’t have any right to complain. However, I think that argument has it backwards. If you vote and your candidate wins, you can’t complain as you are getting exactly what you asked for; and if you vote and your candidate loses, well you knew the rules of the game and you should not be a sore loser by complaining about it.

I almost voted for Obama his first term, that whole hope and change thing had me a little giddy, but I resisted, and I am thankful that I did. Obama turned out to be as evil as any other president in my adult life. Habeas corpus has not been restored, our foreign empire has grown and not shrunk, black prison sites still operate, indiscriminate bombings continued and even increased, etc ad nauseum. Obama’s first term might as well have been Bush the Lesser’s third term. Needless to say, I did not consider voting for Obama his second term and am happy that I sat out his first election.

This brings us to 2016–Clinton v Trump. Of course I would not consider voting for Trump, a billionaire “populist” running on racism and tax cuts for the one percent. And I find the thought of a Clinton presidency of little more consolation. Hillary is gaining the support of the neo-cons who led Bush to war and she sits well to the right of Obama on foreign policy. She has not brought up the idea of restoring habeas corpus and has not mentioned wanting to bring any troops home, she has even touted Kissinger (a noted war criminal) as someone to look up to.

Of course the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Libertarian Gary Johnson will be on most ballots. Sure those are real choices, the first an anti-vaxxer with no political experience while the latter states that the solution to climate change is to colonize other planets; uh huh, real choices.

So after more than a year of hoopla, with election day just more than a month away, our choices are going to be a war monger, a space cadet, and a couple of wackadoos; I’ll leave it to the reader to determine which is which.