Slapping Ben Shapiro down

Little Ben Shapiro made this request of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Miss Ocasio-Cortez, I’m really excited that you’ve been elevated to that position and I would love to have a real conversation with you about the issues. You’ve noted that you think Republicans are afraid to debate you or talk to you or discuss the issues with you. Not only am I eager to discuss the issues with you, I’m willing to offer $10,000 to your campaign today for you to come on our Sunday special.

Before getting into Ocasio-Cortez’s reply, just think about that statement. It’s so patronizing — he is rich enough (why?) that he’ll pay her a substantial fee to appear on his show so he can argue with her. He is making the implicit assumption that he has something to contribute to a “discussion”. He is confident that he can debate her.

I’m just thinking that Ocasio-Cortez can and will discuss the issues without having to engage a twerp like Ben Shapiro. I don’t know what he would add to the discussion. It’s like all the creationists who want to debate me on evolution, and while my first thought is usually “ugh, debate”, I’m also wondering what makes these clueless ignoramuses think they’re even competent to talk about the subject.

Ocasio-Cortez made an excellent response.

Among the key words there are “entitled”: Shapiro certainly is feeling entitled. He thinks he’s negotiating from a position of strength, when the fact is that he has nothing to bring to the table. Except his money.

Others are “bad intentions”: Ocasio-Cortez can see right through him. Shapiro is not interested in an honest discussion. He thinks he’s found a chew toy he can bat around for the entertainment of the dull reactionaries that constitute his audience. The faux sincerity is an obvious ploy.

That tweet is a response to badgering from Shapiro fanboys. She had appropriately ignored Shapiro altogether, and here she’s responding to the hectoring crowd by telling them she doesn’t “owe a response”. She doesn’t. Shapiro is a nobody who plays no role in government, isn’t a political ally or opponent, isn’t a constituent, and is just a guy who babbles propaganda into a microphone. Guys who have an adoring fanbase of regressive men are dime-a-dozen nowadays. Yes, let’s start ignoring them instead of thinking they have some authority.

The comparison to cat-calling is apt. That’s what guys with an unwarranted, inflated conceit in their worth do.

A rip-roaring horror story

I picked up this book (actually, my brother gave it to me), and I couldn’t put it down. It’s got everything. It’s got a brave heroic protagonist. It’s got a god-soaked repellent psychopath for a villain who could have stepped straight out of a Steven King novel. It’s got establishment schemers who make everything worse. And most of all, it’s got grisly body horror. I kept reading because I had to know what abomination would be perpetrated on the innocent victim next.

Only it’s not a novel. It’s Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, and it’s about the assassination of James Garfield.

The protagonist: James Garfield was one of those forgotten, minor presidents I didn’t know much about, because he served less than a year and months of that was was spent slowly dying in agony. But, I learned, he was a rather progressive candidate who accepted a nomination by popular acclaim reluctantly, and was a vigorous defender of civil rights who campaigned for dignity and equality for all races. He was a Republican. That tells you how much the party has declined in the last 140 years.

The assassin: Charles Guiteau was a cheap grifter, a narcissist with delusions of grandeur. He wanted to exploit the spoils system, whereby an incoming administration would freely hand out jobs and high ranking positions to their pals and people with money (hey, so the system hasn’t changed that much). Guiteau talked himself into thinking he deserved to be ambassador to France and that he was good friends with various politicans (he wasn’t), and when he didn’t get his due, decided to murder the president for the fame.

The real assassin: Guiteau pulled the trigger, but the real killer were the swarm of incompetent doctors who wanted the acclaim that would fall on whoever saved Garfield. Worst of the bunch was Dr. Doctor Bliss — his first name was actually “Doctor”, which would have been improbable in a novel — who seized control of the patient and limited what could be done, all the while issuing enthusiastically optimistic daily progress reports as the President spent months in steady decline. A later analysis of the treatment found the aphorism “Ignorance is Bliss” appropriate.

The body horror: the American doctors did not believe in the germ theory of disease, and rejected Lister’s antiseptic technique. So, as Garfield lay bleeding on the filthy train station floor, what did Bliss do? He stuck his unwashed finger in the bullet hole. He pulled out a series of non-sterile probes and poked them in there. He’s looking for the bullet in the worst way possible, and further, he ends up misdiagnosing him. The bullet had gone through to the left side of Garfield’s body, but Bliss was confident it was on the right, and so he kept probing on the right — every day, he seemed to be torturing Garfield further with this pointless insertion of his finger into the open wound — and eventually got the confirmation he wanted: an abscess formed, and a river of pus ran through the track he’d made with his dirty tools.

Really, you will learn more about pus than you ever wanted to know in this book. Pools of the stuff form in Garfield’s body, streams of it drain out of him, boils full of pus erupt all over his body as sepsis sets in. It is not for the squeamish. I probably just ruined everyone’s breakfast by mentioning it.

It doesn’t have a happy ending. Garfield dies. Bliss is disgraced. Guiteau is hanged. Oh, sorry, spoilers.

The one glimmer of optimism at the end is in Garfield’s vice-president, Chester Arthur, another of those easily forgotten presidents. He is a product of the spoils system, and a minion of a scheming senator who opposed Garfield and who groomed Arthur as a tool to serve his ends. Arthur was also something of a bumbler who’d lucked into appointments without actually getting elected, and who was terrified at the idea of taking over the job. He spends most of the book offstage, blubbering in fear, aware of his own incompetence. But then, when the president dies, he steps into the role, tells the scheming senator to take a hike, and rises to the occasion. His main accomplishment is the reform of the civil service, doing his best to end the spoils system.

I guess that sort of counts as a happy ending.

Anyway, if you’re one of those people into horror novels, who enjoys harrowing, gut-twisting tales of nightmarish experiences, try reading some history. It’s far scarier than anything fictional.

These people exist

I’ve been seeing versions of this claim since at least the Reagan years.

I don’t think the proper response is to point out that Michael Moates is kind of homely himself. The core problem is judging people by artificial standards of appearance — something that is totally irrelevant to their humanity and moral standards and intelligence. Isn’t the “We win the political debate because we can find pretty women in our clique” intrinsically wrong and fallacious?

I think we can just say that someone who makes this stupid argument has already lost.

The Koch brothers are not on your side

The Kochs have been in the news lately because they’re expressed unhappiness with Trump, and Trump has sniped back at them. This is a reminder that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend — the Kochs are major backers of the Heartland Institute, and have been and still are promoting science denialism. They’re all evil liars, even when they’re having a falling out among themselves.

I agree with that video: keep all capitalist enterprises out of the school room. Capitalism promotes short-term thinking, and short-term exploitation. But of course places like the Heartland Institute and the fully-owned subsidiary of moneyed interests, the Republican party, have been working for years to starve the educational system so that teachers will be reliant on handouts from corporations.

Also, keep religion out of the classroom. Religion promotes delusional, fantasy thinking. Can we just keep the schools focused on reality?

Dam every river! Chop down every tree!

Our President* is now claiming that allowing rivers to flow into the ocean is bad, and that we could stop wildfires but clear-cutting everything.

We could probably end all the fires if we paved over the entirety of California.

We really need to elect a swarm of Democrats in the midterms so we can end this misery.

Joshua Preston for President!

OK, that might be a little premature. How about Joshua Preston for Minnesota House District 60B? One has to start on the cursus honorum somewhere, but give him a few years.

Joshua is a former UMM student, and also the creator of Giraffes Drawn By People Who Should Not Be Drawing Giraffes. He’s a good smart guy, so go to his campaign page and donate. Or at least cheer him on.

He’s only the president of Planet Trump

This seems like a good loophole: he’s not really our president, he’s a president who leaked through from a parallel universe. For instance, he thinks we’ve got invisible airplanes.

Amazing job, and amazing job. So amazing that we’re ordering hundreds of millions of dollars of new airplanes for the Air Force, especially the F-35. Do you like the F-35? I said how does it do it in fights, and how do they do in fights with the F-35. He says we do very well, you can’t see it. Literally you can’t see. It’s hard to fight a plane you can’t see right? But that’s an expensive plane you can’t see. And as you probably heard we cut the price very substantially, something other administrations would never have done, that I can tell you.”

He repeated this claim several times!

According to the pool report of the president’s Thanksgiving Day visit to Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet, in Florida, Trump told his audience he had discussed the invisible plane with some air force guys. He asked them, he said, if it would perform in a dogfight like similar planes he had seen in movies.

They said: ‘Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it, even if it’s right next to it, it can’t see it,’ Trump said.

I guess he’s from the universe where Wonder Woman is real.

Also, he seems to think we peons have to show our ID when we buy groceries.

You know if you go out and you want to buy groceries you need a picture on a card. You need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture. In this country, the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But we’re turning it around.

I’m kind of afraid, though, that he’s not a dimension-hopping alien, and that what he’s actually saying is what he hopes to be true, or wants to make true, and he’s unable to distinguish his fantasies from reality.

I guess we better make sure to bring our passports next time we visit the local Dairy Queen.

An inevitable child death in a detention center

Even if these ICE child detention centers were happy little paradises staffed by loving, caring child psychologists and nurses (they aren’t), it was statistically inevitable that at some point one of the children would die while separated from their parents. It seems to have happened.

The question is whether the institution takes responsibility for the death, and whether it made reasonable efforts to prevent the circumstances that led to it. The tweet mentions “possible negligent care” and an infection caught in the crowded conditions, in which case ICE is responsible for the death. ICE has also been aware that their policy actively damages children, and don’t seem to care.

Unfortunately, since law enforcement can literally gun down unarmed people in the back, I have no faith that anyone in our government will take responsibility. They’ll make excuses again.

Leslie Rutledge is an example of how every Republican has to be slimy

Rutledge seems to be one of those people representing the future of the Republican party.

Leslie Rutledge, the attorney general of Arkansas, is a rising star in the Republican Party, especially under President Donald Trump. She gave a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, which she dedicated to bashing Hillary Clinton with conspiracy theories about the alleged evil deeds of the Clinton Foundation. Rutledge is currently head of the Republican Attorneys General Association and has been Arkansas attorney general for three years. (She is up for re-election this fall.)

Rutledge, who worked for former Gov. Mike Huckabee both in state government and on his presidential campaign, appears to be tight with the Huckabee family, who are immensely powerful in Arkansas.

First sign of trouble: she’s buddies with the Huckabees? Why are those cornpone sleazy yokels “powerful” in Arkansas in the first place?

But, you should be asking, “What about her emails?” She has a very ugly history.

Most of the emails are smarmy sex jokes or contain foul language, which was clearly embarrassing for a Republican with a wholesome image. But one stands out, in particular, for the racist content.

Rutledge apparently copy and pasted another email from “a friend of mine” who “works d’town with battered women” that purportedly tells a story about clients coming to her office. Rutledge’s friend wrote it in a heavily stereotypical dialect that appears meant to mock the clients. Here is an excerpt:

De problem be wit his baby momma. Actually it turn out he not be de daddy (I saw the paternity test results) but he done been payin’ chile suppote fo 5 year cuz Jesus done sent dat baby and it doan make no diffence who be de daddy iffn Jesus want him to be de daddy and take o’ dat baby what nobody want ‘cept him and his own mama.

The email goes on for five paragraphs in that vein, as the author writes that “baby’s momma done turn into a ho and a stripper and she be raisin’ fusses” and mocks a client’s mother by writing, “we be getting de Gospel Punctuation from his mama: ‘Hallelujah! Amen! Oh yes Jesus! Um hm!'”

That’s the kind of thing that would be the kiss of death for a Democrat — we’d be waving their career bye-bye. It’s no problem at all for a “Christian, pro-life, gun-carrying conservative woman,” though.

Something did get her booted out of one Arkansas office, at least. We don’t know exactly what she did, but it must have been terrible if it offended an Arkansas Republican.

These two emails were sent in August and October of 2007. Rutledge left Arkansas DHS in December of that year. After that, a note was added to her file accusing her of “gross misconduct” and instructing that she not be rehired. It is unclear whether the alleged misconduct was related to these emails or to other matters. Emails from Salon to Arkansas DHS asking for further clarification received no response.

She’s definitely one to watch. At this rate, she’ll be running for president in 2020.