Links? Who needs links? Not me, not today. You’ve probably already read about all this stuff, anyway.
Yes, the Left is filled with liars, hypocrites, and criminals of several kinds. Remember that conviction of intellectual and moral superiority? It’s their “Get Away With Anything” card, and they use it freely. Most commentators on the Right are loath to declare it overdrawn.
So Pramila Jayapal and the rest of “The Squad” can shriek anti-Semitic imprecations and denunciations of Israel from dawn to dusk, but when Republicans call them on it, the Left’s media handmaidens leap to their defense with “Republicans Pounce” articles, plus a few opinion columns from Michelle Goldberg and her ilk. And we dare not mention the times when those loyal Leftist lackeys have condemned anti-Semitism as purely a phenomenon of the Right, naturally. What else is new?
The Left can strain to its utmost to sexualize American children, convince them that they’re homosexual, or bisexual, or something other than the sex they were born – I’ll say it again: “gender” is for nouns and connectors; a human being has a sex – but for American parents to object to such treatment, or to demand that school libraries remove sexually explicit materials as inappropriate, is somehow oppressive. Never mind that the Left has condemned homeschooling and religious schooling as “fascist.” Never mind that among their declared aims is the abolition of parental rights and the parental bond. And never mind that attempts by parents to have those highly sexual materials aired at school-board meetings have been denounced as public obscenity. Those parents are unAmerican, period.
The testimony from whistleblowers about the preferential treatment Hunter Biden has received is utterly damning, but the Left is screaming that going after Joe Biden’s family members is both irrelevant and wrong. Does anyone else remember the treatment they gave George W. Bush’s daughters, or the children and grandchildren of a certain Donald Trump? It seems that was okay with them. Politics ain’t beanbag, y’know. But let Marjorie Taylor Greene show an open session of Congress a photo of the naked Hunter Biden doing one of the things he does best – i.e., smoke crack and bang prostitutes – and the gates of Hell are thrown open.
And for lagniappe, we have this:
Makes a nice after-dinner aperitif, doesn’t it?
But don’t look to the supposed political arm of the Right – the Republican Party – for salvation. It’s just not in the cards. They can’t bring themselves to represent their own constituents. Several Republican Senators are threatening to defect to the Democrat Party out of revulsion toward President Trump, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, and the mushrooming power of – gasp! – populism. Two of the best of the GOP Representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, are having a catfight, God alone knows why.
Alone among the declared GOP candidates for President, only Donald Trump has said that he intends to pull the nation completely away from the ever more deadly Russia / Ukraine conflict. All the rest of them think it’s Americans’ responsibility to bleed and beggar ourselves for that corrupt satrapy. So what if its chief kleptocrat has shut down the opposition press, imprisoned his opponents, and outlawed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church while amassing a fortune near to a billion dollars? Shovel some more at him! Send him F-16s! No sacrifice is too great for the preservation of Ukrainian territorial integrity!
Then there’s the “January 6” protestors and their fates. Some of them have been in detention for nearly two and a half years. Speedy trials, as required by the Sixth Amendment? Not for them; they’re insurrectionists. The only “insurrectionists” ever to mount their “insurrection” entirely unarmed, but hey, who wants to split hairs? No Republican of any stature has demanded that they be immediately tried or immediately exonerated.
The protestors claim that FBI plants incited whatever disorder occurred that day. They claim, with some evidence already marshaled, that they were admitted to the Capitol by the Capitol Police – that some of those police actually conducted a guided tour of the place. There’s a whole lot of video – federal video from federal cameras – that would put the matter to rest once and for all…but of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t want it released? Why not?
Election fraud? What Republican in either house of Congress is leading the charge on that? What have any of them proposed? Given that all the fraud-enabling changes that stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump are still in play, how can they reasonably hope to prevail in November 2024? None of them are willing to say on camera that the 2020 election was stolen; the press might call them “conspiracy theorists,” and they can’t have that.
These are the people, and the party, that claim to represent “your interests.” They bombard you with emails that thunder of the danger to the Republic. They demand your money and votes. They seek to have you infer that only they can defend what remains of your rights. But ask them to actually perform as they advertise? No, too soon; they have to have the White House, both houses of Congress, a clear majority on the Supreme Court, and fair treatment by the major media before they can do anything. And anyway, “[insert issue here] is not the hill to die on.”
Throw these guppies back; they’re too spineless.
I’m tired. I’ve already thrown all organized political activity on the refuse heap as a complete waste of time, energy, and money. What boggles my mind is how so many nominally intelligent, nominally sensible Americans remain passionately engaged. What do they tell themselves? “This time it will be different” — ? Great God in heaven, what evidence do you have to that effect?
What’s that? You want to know why I’ve boiled over this morning? Oh, nothing much. Just finding fundraising emails from eight different political candidates in my inbox when I awoke. The majority are sitting federal legislators – Republicans, of course – but two are from aspirants who claim that the edifice needs “change,” and that they can provide it. Change toward what? The emails get rather cloudy after that.
Not long ago, a colleague, an undeniably intelligent man, hit me with this bit of arrogant idiocy: “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” Hearing that from someone I respected was momentarily paralyzing. It took me some time to recover my sense of reality. Unfortunately, I think he took my incredulous silence for agreement.
American politics is now a sideshow. Our elections are cargo-cult exercises in which we simulate “democracy,” but with foreordained results and never any substantive changes. With vanishingly few exceptions, American officeholders are either lily-livered slaves to the media, or outright grifters, or would-be totalitarians. I sometimes wonder if the Men Behind The Curtain allow the presence of that handful of exceptions just to keep our hopes up. At any rate, I can’t think of a more plausible explanation.
Apologies, Gentle Reader. I think I’ll lie down for a while, perhaps with a cool washcloth over my face. Have a nice day.
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I’ve had run-ins with “conservatives” who told me I’m too harsh when I began promoting the SKUNC acronym. So I commissioned a cartoon to make the vision more tangible, and the darn thing turned out to be too cute. It is simply not nasty enough in appearance.
So I offer to you today a new avatar for the Uniparty.
Nobody can tell me this is too cute. I’ve seen images of Big Brother that didn’t look this sinister.
With all due respect to that “reader’s context” added since the tweet, let us inform the voters who won’t be told by TPTB, that Romney has been behaving worse than Arlen Specter ever did. And here is the history of that turncoat.
That handful of exceptions looks like the old Soviet “licensed dissidents” — basically, the loyal opposition. They fume and yammer, giving voice to the building public outrage. But they DO nothing. Apparently, if people think their grievances are aired, that’s enough to assuage their feels.
If a tree is known by its fruits, this handful of exceptions puts out a big showy bloom, but never manages to produce a single apple.
I know how you feel.
Perhaps, passionate disengagement is the order of the day. I find that disengaging takes conscious and even strenuous effort, but, it’s worth it. Griping and stressing over unchangeable circumstances is not healthy.
@ Francis
Re: ” American politics is now a sideshow. Our elections are cargo-cult exercises in which we simulate “democracy,” but with foreordained results and never any substantive changes. With vanishingly few exceptions, American officeholders are either lily-livered slaves to the media, or outright grifters, or would-be totalitarians. I sometimes wonder if the Men Behind The Curtain allow the presence of that handful of exceptions just to keep our hopes up. At any rate, I can’t think of a more plausible explanation.”
As usual, your analysis is on the mark.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” – Frank Zappa
The fix has always been in, it is just that now the folks doing the fixin’ don’t believe that they need to bother to hide it any longer. That is probably because they feel secure-enough in their grip upon power that they don’t feel they need to pretend any longer to be something they are not.
That “handful of exceptions” you mentioned has historical precedent. During the Russian Revolution, the communists ran an intelligence operation, an influence op, whose code-name (if memory serves) was something like “Operation Hope” or the like, whose sole function was to lull the White Russian opposition into a state of complacency that ‘someone’ was fighting the Reds. That meaningful resistance was occurring. By telling ordinary Russians that ‘someone’ was fighting the Reds, they relaxed and assumed that they did not need to take part in the resistance. Which was precisely the outcome desired by the designers of the psy-op.
Indeed, the entire exercise of voting and “democracy in action” has been a sort of psy-op – a Potemkin Village – for some time now. How? Because of the fact that the deep-state establishment has controlled both sides of the aisle for decades. If Obama doesn’t win, then they can work with Mitt Romney, and so on.
Controlled opposition is a fact of political life not only in the U.S. but all over the West. Genuine reformers are not allowed to get on the ticket in the first place, and on those rare occasions when one slips past the gate-keepers, i.e., Trump, the powers-that-be do everything possible to neutralize him. They don’t like it when someone who isn’t one of their own gets into power.
The oligarchs, you see, generally prefer to work via cutouts and intermediaries. That preserves the illusion that all of the dramatic changes happening around us have been arrived at via the “will of the people”and the democratic process. Lends an air of legitimacy to their designs.
Pascal… you know, Mittens LOVES hot dogs… enough to wear the hat, and tell us he likes “hot dogs in a bun, hot dogs out of the bun, hot dogs with chili… they are my favorite meat” he says… yes, I just bet they are.