Conservatives always disappoint, but always in new, surprisingly repellent ways

You know, I really think we ought to burn the Republican party right down to the ground, salt the earth it stands on, and stand by with flamethrowers in case anything should sprout from it ever again. I was surprised, though, to see that Ann Coulter and Jason Chaffetz might be slowly creeping towards the same conclusion — at least, the title of the article says that ‘We need to disband the entire Republican Party’: Ann Coulter flattens her own party, which sort of implies that we’re converging on an agreement here (also, please, Raw Story, stop with they hyperbole in your headlines — no, she hasn’t flattened anything).

But then I read why they are unhappy with the GOP.

You see that with the left and the elite conservatives in the Republican Party that don’t want an honest dialogue about the successes of this president, said Chaffetz. Instead of joining together and moving forward with specific goals to restore getting wins in the midterms, they are being disruptive in a haphazard way.

Holy fuck. They’re unhappy with Republicans because they are insufficiently fawning and sycophantic to Trump.

They are a prime example of how the problem isn’t just Trump, but the whole damn Republican party and the fools who vote for them.

Lessons from Mordor

I get the impression that our Republican overlords read Lord of the Rings from a slightly skewed perspective — they seem to think that Mordor was the ideal fantasy state. I would just like to offer a few correctives.

  • You are entirely correct that you will deter immigration by earning a reputation as a domain of unparalleled evil. It is an effective strategy for warding off elves and dwarves who might want to settle on your plains. But what’s wrong with elves and dwarves?

  • Turning your plains into “a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume” will also dissuade immigration, so I can sort of see the logic of Scott Pruitt. I think, though, that you’ve forgotten the health and happiness of your residents.

  • Putting up walls is rather redundant. You’ve got your natural barriers, your Mountains of Shadow, what’s the point of building a Morannon or Cirith Ungol? No one wants to get in, anyway, and they just turn into convenient nesting grounds for unspeakable horrors.

  • You want orcs? Because this is how you get orcs.

  • It’s not even going to stop immigration. You’ll still get sneaky hobbitses coming in, only it won’t be to till a nice farm or build a homey little inn for weary travelers — they’ll be coming in with the intent of toppling your citadel of evil.

  • This part should chill you the most: when they succeed, the world won’t look on them as terrorists, but as brave heroes who saved the world. They’ll write books about them and make movies and cosplayers will dress up as them, and Mordor will be reviled as the cruel, foul land that was righteously overthrown. And they won’t be wrong.

Pointing out these comparisons won’t change anything. Unfortunately, Stephen Miller is quite enjoying being the Mouth of Sauron, and they’ve got a line of sadists eager to be transformed into Ringwraiths. Besides, they’re really into pissing off those smug, snooty elves.

Dear Leader

Have you seen the mural painted inside the children’s detention center, the former Walmart that is being used to house young immigrants?

Dear Leader. Glorious Leader. Maximum Leader.

Nice to know he’s taking credit for his inhumanity. I notice they also put a portrait of Obama on a wall in there, but no one is fooled — this is a Republican action.

And what the heck is that, with that strange choice of an inappropriate quote?

I don’t know whether I’ve been doing something right, or something wrong

It’s sinking in that I’m never going to be rich. I was just reading about Shane Smith and Vice, and how he built a company that’s nominally worth billions with nothing but chutzpah…oh, and lies and exploitation.

While Vice’s soaring valuation had changed Smith’s life, there was little evidence among its employees that they were working at a company more valuable than the New York Times. Smith had proudly boasted in the past that Vice was “a sweatshop for trustafarians” who could afford to work for little pay, and in 2014, it was still a place where an employee could find herself taking care of a more senior colleague who was wasted after a Vice party and be worried she wouldn’t have enough money in her bank account to give the cabbie cash to clean up any vomit. A senior manager once joked that the company’s hiring strategy had a “22 Rule”: “Hire 22-year-olds, pay them $22,000, and work them 22 hours a day.”

And then I read about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s barfalicious wealth.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, brought in at least $82 million in outside income while serving as senior White House advisers during 2017, according to financial disclosure forms released Monday.

OK, feeling better now. I’m not rich, but apparently you have to be terrible, horrible, conscienceless scumbags to become rich in America.

Played like a chump

I have to hand it to David Brin as a soothsayer: Brin predicted what would happen in the ‘negotiations’ between Trump and Kim Jong Un. North Korea would offer a token reduction in some nuclear facilities, which they don’t need anymore, and would ask for a reduction in sanctions and most importantly, a reduction in conventional arms.

For reasons of both economic and personal survival, Kim desperately needs a smaller army.

In contrast, nuclear weapons – once you have them – are cheap to hold, to hide and to maintain.

Kim’s current dilemma has only one solution, then. Keep enough nukes to deter any adventurous notions on our side… and hold onto those artillery tubes threatening Seoul… then entice both South Koreans and Americans to shout hosannahs over a “deal” to slash their own forces below the DMZ. Forces they can easily afford and that pose them zero risk.

Let’s be clear: any conventional draw-down is Kim’s chief aim, his win-win.

So what did this “historic meeting” actually accomplish?

North Korea is shutting down one engine testing site, and they’re going to return some American remains from the Korean War. These are token gestures. Trump did leave the current sanctions in place.

What is North Korea gaining? A reduction in military activity in South Korea.

Trump announced that he will order an end to regular “war games” that the United States conducts with ally South Korea, a reference to annual joint military exercises that are an irritant to North Korea.

Trump called the exercises “very provocative” and “inappropriate” in light of the optimistic opening he sees with North Korea. Ending the exercises would also save money, Trump said.

The United States has conducted such exercises for decades as a symbol of unity with Seoul and previously rejected North Korean complaints as illegitimate. Ending the games would be a significant political benefit for Kim, but Trump insisted he did not give up leverage.

He completely blindsided the South Koreans on that one.

So North Korea got what they wanted out of the meeting, and Trump got nothing of substance. Kim Jong Un also got one other thing: fluffed by America. Trump was silent on human rights abuses, and even said this:

Well, we’ve given him, I don’t wanna talk about it specifically, but we’ve given him, he’s going to be happy. His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor. They’re gonna put it together, and I think they’re going to end up with a very strong country, and a country which has people — that they’re so hard working, so industrious.

His people are slaves in a giant cage, who will be executed if they don’t show fervor. Trump has given Kim Jong Un a massive PR victory that he can use to quell any rebelliousness: America says you’re happy. America is going to stop even practicing opposition. America isn’t going to help you.

Isn’t it interesting how Trump can go from snarling at Canada and alienating the democratically elected leaders of allied nations, and then scurry off and express his warm appreciation of tyrants and dictators?

Hate doesn’t necessarily win elections

Some of you may have seen this awful video that was making the rounds a while back.

In May, Jazmina Saavedra streamed video of herself harassing a transgender woman in a Denny’s bathroom. For half an hour, Saavedra paced in the restaurant, shouted at the transgender woman through the stall wall, and laughed with a friend about how she carries a stun gun and pepper spray for situations like that.

“So, that guy is violating my right to use the ladies’ room here, and he’s saying he’s a lady! Stupid guy,” Saavedra said in the video, which Facebook removed.

The most appalling thing about it was Saavedra’s smugness: she was full of sanctimonious and self-righteousness as she harrassed this poor woman who was just trying to use the bathroom, and she also made unsupported accusations that she was a drug user. And the thing of it is, Saavedra was the one who posted the video of her own disgraceful behavior! She was proud of it!

She was also a Republican political candidate at the time. Good news: She lost the election in a landslide. We need more happy results like that.

All I see is that you think America is special and exceptional

How else can you interpret an article with the title, The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty. We are unique! We are spectacular! We are #1!

Unfortunately, we seem to be specializing in all the wrong things.

But by now, American cruelty is both legendary — and one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Just why would people in a rich country leave their neighbours to die for a lack of basic medicine, their young without good jobs or retirements, make their elderly work until their dying day, cripple students with lifelong debt, charge new mothers half of average income just to have a baby — not to mention shrug when their kids begin massacring each other at school? What motivates the kind of spectacular, unique, unimaginable, and gruesome cruelty that we see in America, which exists nowhere else in the world?

I can agree that the cruelty of our culture is obvious and manifested everywhere, but I hate to deflate our sense of exceptionalism, but we aren’t alone. Look at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how the United Kingdom and other European states are responding to immigration, how every human society reacts to the Other, how even a civilized nation like Germany could be stirred up by a demagogue to willingly commit atrocities, how Belgium afflicted criminal abuse on the people of the Congo. Our difference seems to be our willingness to perpetrate these torments on ourselves.

The author’s speculation about what causes us to be so horrible tends to fall flat, unfortunately.

My answer goes something like this. Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.

I disagree. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in this archetypical American society, and it’s not true that we “grew up in the shadow of endless war”, unless you take “shadow” literally. We didn’t experience war. Wars were something that happened elsewhere, to which we supplied cannon fodder. Wars were not something we suffered under, and while there was the ominous terror of nuclear war, we were also blithely confident that we’d win, no matter what. Wolverines! The American character was one of irrational optimism. The history we were taught was all about Manifest Destiny, the near-divinity of the Founding Fathers, our role as the Leaders of the Free World. We are always the winners, and the losers are always the worst people who fully deserved their fate.

The extreme capitalism part I agree with. To me, the best interpretation of the American spirit in literature is personified by Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch 22: irrepressibly cheerful, blind to the harm he does to others, willing to bomb his friends if it increases the value of his shares, and relentlessly sailing through a war that is nothing but a business opportunity to him. We are a people untouched by fear and unable to imagine the consequences.

The rest of the world has good reason to be terrified. Their only consolation ought to be that we’re probably going to wreck ourselves before we can exercise our full capacity for destruction on others.