Jen Psaki has always rubbed me the wrong way. There’s something passive-aggressively violent about her whole demeanor. One of the most insightful descriptions I’ve seen is that she cocks her head and stares like a bird of prey. It honestly confuses me that I can’t recall anybody I’ve known in meatspace agreeing with me that she’s alarmingly vicious. People I expected to notice something at least off about her find her gracious and warm. They can’t understand how I take her for her own walking tornado siren.
I react viscerally to Psaki the way so many of my native class peers react to Donald Trump. If they allow themselves to go full ad hominem against the Donald because they’re upset and alarmed by his vibe, I’ll allow myself to indulge in the same gut reaction to that mean stuck-up sorority bitch.
For what it’s worth, the only time I had a good reaction to Psaki was a very brief honeymoon upon Funny Uncle Joe’s inauguration, his synthesis of the rural versus earl, when she stood out from Trump’s succession of moronic coked-up press thots for reliably speaking in coherent, well-organized sentences. Then she reverted to the talking points and the mean girl shtick, violently stripping the bloom off that most fragile rose.
Trump has never provoked in me that existential fear. I horrify Democrats when I say this, but it’s true, and I think it’s reasonable. Trump keeps people around him and in his coalition who scare me away, Proud Boys and shit, and his defenses of bad cops are beyond the pale, but I still find the threats he personally poses highly contingent, in ways that I do not find the threats I face from people like Jen Psaki.
No, it is not because I’m a white man. That’s way too simple and every honest person knows it. Many of Trump’s most furious, most shaken opponents are white, and indeed they are Extremely White. He gets under their skin for reasons much deeper than anything having to do with race. Are we expected to entertain the notion that Roger Schafer was more privileged than Farai Chideya? By Albuquerque Chief of Police I. Juana Juacacraca he was not.
This calls to mind something John Hatfield once told Kirk Siegler: “Just because you’re Latino doesn’t mean you can’t be Hispanic, and just because you’re Hispanic doesn’t mean you can’t drive the black back into the back of the black by being the white on site with the Maglite.” Maybe it’s relevant to police violence statistics that Albuquerque has an unusually large white underclass. Race-reductionist stridency about white privilege and black lives has potentially life-threatening consequences for those who take it too seriously. It has the potential to make truly idiotic white listeners become complacent about their own safety and get themselves murdered at the hands of the police.
Look, I’m only saying this as a white guy who’s come frighteningly close to becoming a victim of violent, potentially homicidal police misconduct.
Yes, I’m aware of Trump’s outrageous campaign to suck bad cops off. It’s ugly and troubling, but it’s barely not beside the point. It was not a factor in 2016, and to this day there are other crucial factors complicating the feelings many reasonable people of goodwill have about Trump as an individual and Trumpism as a movement. The only serious movements for police accountability are coming from the margins. Are we actually out here ruing that Ricky Ray Rector’s killer’s wife didn’t save the nation from viciousness in politics? God, that makes even me, Fat Cracka, feel slow enough on the journey of life to wait for the pie that waits for me.
They won’t listen. I don’t know how to make this any clearer than I already have more times than I can count. The same flock of centrist shitbirds who now shriek hysterical lectures at me and people like me for even thinking about voting for Trump were on the scene back when I was promised the world for staying in school, then abused, traumatized, and dumped into a society where I could not and often still cannot find a fundamentally tolerable socioeconomic position and role. At the times in my adolescence and early adulthood when the dice were cast, Trump was a celebrity gadfly who dabbled in outsider politics, not an obvious political power player like the Clintons, the Bushes, or any of the other scumbags who have been rehabilitated as the “Resistance.” In this crowd, Trump stands out as the one who was conspicuously absent from electoral politics and official policy at a time when the rest of them were thrashing around and trashing it for me and the millions of other American misfits and failures they conspired to ruin. Trump looks and just feels better than them, in spite of evidence that he was supporting their project in private and playing dumb in public all along.
Jen Psaki stands out to me in a very different, much more objectionable way. She’s instantly recognizable as one of the bitches I wanted to hate-fuck in college. It was a coarse, embarrassing desire, but let’s not kid ourselves into dismissing it as senseless. The upper strata of the American academy are crawling with women like her, disingenuously using combinations of feminist rhetoric and sex appeal to manipulate pushovers in sociosexually dysfunctional environments, hurrying around with great looks but no morals and no manners. Psaki’s atrocious character shines through whenever she comments on those she perceives as social subordinates confronting those she perceives as their righteous superiors for doing them disservice. This drove her snark and smarm about student debt relief before it inspired her objections to protesters surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s house. To people of her class and worldview, people like me and probably all five of you aren’t constituents; we’re uppity, deeply ungrateful peasants.
The third-wave feminist horseshit so many of these women now spew makes them more obnoxious, not less. A fair number of their ancestresses had, as a few of their peers still have today, the honesty to declare their intention of rising in the world by marrying some psychopathic future oil executive who was presently off getting elephant-walked into his fraternity. It’s a cycle, kind of like women have. Who done did diddly unto Denny Dundiddly? I’ve never wrestled with that question before, and you can look away from all but the first three words of this wretched sentence. Hillary, the woman infamously scorned who stood by her compulsively promiscuous man for political ambition of the sort Lorena Bobbitt and even noted public speaker Melissa Ann Shepard never had, is emblematic. If She stood too closely by Her man’s name, voters might ask which one they were getting. If she’d ditched him, he might have had prized aides and advisors award themselves to him in the divorce.
God forbid, of course, that these asshats ever suffer the downsides of the sex appeal they leverage, along with the rest of their breeding, for the crudest possible advantage. This is what provokes the lust to hate-fuck. They’re imperious and manipulative, they’re deeply hypocritical, and they’re more easily thrown off balance than the average woman by unwanted expressions of sexual attraction from losers (think Garrison Keillor, not Matt Lauer). The environments where these women operate are not nearly hostile enough. They’d be less troublesome if they faced more humiliation for trying to throw their weight around.
Don’t ask me how I know that humiliation can inspire humility; I don’t currently wish to tell.
I am not describing good women here. I know many good women who are nothing like this. Many good women, I’m sure, despise Jen Psaki and her kind as much as I do. Saying “she’s a fucking bitch” about a bad woman is not misogyny. That, cracka, is what we call judging character by content. As vile and deranged as MRA/PUA types can be, they’re right about the problems with not discouraging women like these from pursuing hypergamous dating and mating strategies. The results are widening socioeconomic chasms on the demands of generations of antisocial dream hoarders.
“Yeah, the ones who aren’t all cat ladies.” *Antoine Yates family bucket voice* Hey now, what’s wrong with cats?
Christopher Lasch was right. Our elites are revolting indeed.
The cynicism necessary to defend either of the Clintons in the name of civil liberty is breathtaking. The civic hagiographies make Bill sound like a synthesis of the best parts of Jimmy Carter and Mario Cuomo, not the stone-cold manipulator who flew home to order the killing of the most retarded guy on death row so he could repeal Glass-Steagall, light the fuse on the Second Great Depression, and nearly privatize Social Security. There was never any actual principle at stake vis-a-vis either of the Clintons in the leadership of the Democratic Party. They blew their credibility pretending that Bill hadn’t been accused on the record not just of forcible groping but of forcible rape. They blew it further with orgasmic outbursts about Hillary as a badass girlboss out to break the glass ceiling when she’d coordinated smears of other women for accusing her husband of sex crimes, the same husband with whom she was furious for being an out-of-control cheater.
The Pied Piper misogynist scumbags of the alt-right are correct in their diagnosis of the PMC’s psychosexual relationship with the Clintons. The double standard they use to excuse Bill’s serial sexual assaults and Hillary’s role as a serial accessory is outrageous. They often strawman Trump and the rest of the Republican Party for supposedly still wanting to keep women out of the workforce (i.e., out of the girlboss jobs that matter, not out of the underpaid scut work that America’s poorest women have always done for a living), a retrograde stance that was more controversial than advertised on the right even when Phyllis Schlafly was at her most active.
The big exception, of course, is abortion. That’s something a critical mass of the right wing has actually, identifiably been organizing to ban for decades. PMC women’s assessment of the GOP on abortion are much more sober than their assessments of GOP attitudes towards women in general, which they quite often misinterpret through extreme caricatures that were already distortions in the eighties.
Trump is responsible for the current presumptive Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, but it’s important to reiterate that he is not solely responsible. By his own boasts he has never given a shit about the welfare or lives of the unborn, but he followed through on his transactional promises to shoehorn pro-life justices onto the court in exchange for the votes of the Christian right. The reason he isn’t solely responsible, and consequently is being scapegoated for something he enthusiastically did, is that any handful of the Democrats’ sensible centrist darlings across the aisle could have stopped Trump’s high court nominees dead in their tracks, in painful particular Brett Kavanaugh. The Judiciary Committee advanced Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate by a single vote. Any one of the Republican Judiciary shitheads could have sent Lord Sniffles back to the Circuit Court to be one berobed crook of many, but the consensus around town seems to be that certain unknowable members of the firing squad were issued blanks. The barest dissent from the party line in the full Senate vote looks for all the world like a ruse orchestrated in advance, with assigned roles, and most crucially with the outcome in which the Conscience Conservatives lost to the transactionalists.
This ultimate narrow loss featured an overpoweringly disgusting performance of troubled but sublimated conscience by everybody’s favorite moderate, Susan Collins. At long last that sleazy fucking bitch is getting a little taste of the flinty Yankee Sit Down And Shut Up she has always so richly deserved, or at least feels that way because protesters demanding the safeguarding of Roe recently chalked the sidewalk in front of her house, provoking her to call the police.
The whole sordid episode of the leaked draft opinion has convinced me more than anything before it that only scoundrels give a damn about the law for its own sake. Roe and abortion per se feel somehow collateral to the violently flaming illegitimacy of the American civic religion, showcased in this instance by the living, breathing, thieving focal point of nine semi-arbitrarily chosen high judges, at least two of them grossly compromised (Kavanaugh and his fellow horndog Thomas), all of whom we are badgered to lavish with constant fawning reverence.
It’s a fool’s errand to lend an attentive, respectful ear to a fucking word of it. It should come as the farthest thing from a surprise if a coven of this character fails to publish a coherent moral or philosophical appraisal of abortion stripped of all force of law. Of course, these nine assholes are judges–even I would probably be mercifully ignorant of them if they were professors publishing their dipshit musings in law journals–so it should be just as unsurprising if, in their functionally total unaccountability to their bar associations and to the Congress vested with the constitutional power to impeach and remove any or all of them, they publish disgracefully incoherent or evil rationales for granting every horrific state government in the country carte-blanche authority to have their dirty cops interfere in medical decisions they will never in their lives remotely understand.
This is why abortion feels so tangential to what’s really at stake here. Under the current political circumstances, a repeal of Roe will unleash atrocities worse than abortion and also more preventable. The thought of abortion makes me queasy, and the later-term the queasier, but as necessary evils go, abortion is much more necessary and much less evil than American cops and prosecutors. The cops and prosecutors we’re facing under this scenario are some of the worst. Some cops are humble and disciplined enough to do a decent job; these, by contrast, are exactly the violent busybodies who cannot be trusted to pass judgment on medical procedures of any sort precisely because they insist they’re eminently qualified and fit for the job. What the criminalization of abortion means in practice in the United States is imperious know-it-all retards eagerly letting their moralizing zealotry color their assessments of miscarriages for evidence of crimes.
When the draft opinion leaked, it summoned an indignant chorus of fastidious professionals including noted Zoomjacker Jeffrey Toobin, all fuming about the unprecedented breach of trust. These fuckers always manage to make their reactions worse than their triggers. The Supreme Court got exposed being shady about its plan to drop a bombshell ruling for questionable motives, and their reaction was to shriek that this hallowed institution had been betrayed and needed more privacy for the completion of its public duties, not less.
This outburst of Beltway outrage was one of the most radicalizing things I’d seen in years. Prior to it, I was willing to grant the Supreme Court the courtesy of private conferences and deliberations as a matter of custom. After seeing who swam up to the boat horny and naked, I changed my mind. All I’ll accept now is the compulsory conduct of all conferences and deliberations in full public view, enforceable by summary impeachment at the first sign of ex parte discussion of cases.
There’s no reason to allow these shysters to bar the courthouse door against a weasel flush. Many Americans have a rough intuition that Our Justices are illegitimate because they’re politicians pretending to be impartial jurists. What few grasp is how liberally the justices exaggerate their own work ethics, work hours, and sense of duty to the judiciary and the nation. With the sheer weight of the law the justices claim to bear, none of them should have the time or energy to give talks or have social lives. It turns out, however, that they chuck most of this weight onto their clerks and then bullshit the public about how seriously they take their jobs, when they provably face no consequences or even basic independent oversight for refusing without explanation to hear all but a tiny percentage of the petitions filed in their court. It’s past time Congress told them that if they don’t want to work in a fishbowl they’re as free to resign and take other jobs as Congress is to impeach them.
This righteous indignation about the breach of solemn trust comes from people familiar with Korematsu and Dred Scott. They could rue the Court for issuing rulings they consider atrocious. Instead, they’re on TV in high dudgeon about the justices getting criticized because official writings they had embargoed against publication got leaked and made them look bad. If judges aren’t satisfied to let the public examine and comment on whatever is published on their official duties because they try not to do anything in office that will have reasonable people accusing them of misconduct, they should not be on the fucking Supreme Court of the United States. Scurrilous accusations from political opponents are an inevitable part of the job they stepped on everybody in their way to secure. They’re human. They’ll say things that are brainscrambled. They’ll say things that sound okay in context but terrible out of context. Haters gonna hate. The problem comes when they express offense for being made to work under transparency and scrutiny. That only makes them look ill-tempered and shady.
This is a rare group of officials who in fact should be told that they have nothing to hide and should not be hiding. If they don’t like it, they can go jack it with Jeff.
Really, this shit is all just about privilege and power. Here we have an eminence grise of the law who was always kind of a blowhard, which actually made him extra fun when it came time for him to snicker on air about Anthony Weiner, but now he’s pretending that he got confused by the settings on his computer and didn’t masturbate in view of colleagues on a conference call, and he’s STILL getting interviewed about the impropriety of leaking the inflammatory official writings of judges Congress has always had the constitutional authority to remove from office. As a man of privilege, Toobin of course stands up tall and rock-solid for other men and women of privilege. He disapproves of subordinates publishing internal correspondence of public interest that The Nine ordered shielded from their constituents’ prying eyes. They all think high officials have a right to privacy in their public duties. Justice Alito is upset because he didn’t give anyone permission to air his nutty musings in the agora for general discussion. Chief Justice Roberts is upset because Justice Alito and Jackoffery Tuggin are upset.
Everything about this would improve if these whiny shits could imagine a world in which they, personally, might have difficulty finding another job after getting fired from Burger King for having a quick fuck in the walk-in freezer. That is, they might actually be all right if they could imagine being vulnerable to the rules they have enacted for to govern the rest of us who are stuck out here, more or less living in the real world.
This is what’s wrong with this country. We’re ruled by tyrants who have seceded up their own asses. They’re acting like the leaked draft opinion was a Marvel movie that got screened before its release date. We’re admonished that the leak endangers the court’s collegiality. Oh? The collegiality of what? The collegiality of the Honorable Clarance ejaculating on the Honorable Brett Michael’s cocaine suppositories? Do they realize who’s been hired for this gig?
Again, impeaching and removing these two freaks for sexual misconduct would moot the repeal of Roe pending the confirmation of replacements. All the Democrats would need to do is cull and then stall. It’s nothing that would make Mitch McConnell blanch if he did it himself.
Instead, the Democratic leadership flew to Texas to stump for Henry Cuellar, a notoriously corrupt pro-life member of the US House who fired a pregnant staffer for asking for maternity leave. They also piped up with their latest round of lectures about the necessity of voting, of course, just maybe not for Jessica Cisneros, who’s vocally pro-choice and not known to be under FBI investigation.
Jen Psaki’s boss is the serial hair-sniffer who shepherded Clarence Thomas’s nomination through the Judiciary Committee. Joe Biden has always been infamous as the guy who got Thomas onto the court by smearing Anita Hill.
It’s no mystery why the Democratic Party has spotty credibility as a defender of abortion rights, just as it does on all sorts of other positions its base overwhelmingly supports. Many of their own most committed voters don’t think the party is committed to its own platform or reliable enough to advance it. They’re appalled by the nomination fights that got Merrick Garland sandbagged but Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court. They do not trust the process. Hence the recent protests in front of justices’ homes. Every other bulwark the protesters were promised would hold appears to be failing.
These protests displease Jen Psaki. She thinks they set a bad tone and a bad precedent. Opposing factions, one imagines, might be emboldened by left-wing rallies in front of The Honorable Mr. Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s house to bomb abortion clinics or assassinate OB-GYN’s. These are of course tactics that pro-life extremists have been using ever since Roe. They were not and are not committed pacifists who for some reason decided to switch principles from nonviolence to reciprocal violence because their opponents had launched the first strike.
Psaki is trying to coopt and herd the left into the neutered center to appease the right. It’s the same as it ever was. Liberals love few things more than being cuckolds. If the Democratic establishment cared about its platform, it would go full-throttle LBJ mode on Joe Manchin for pulling his po-faced Uncle Values shtick over the deep-seated respect for life and concern for the unborn that he shares with his constituents. They’d ride straight up on his nuts and bunghole: strip him of his committee assignments, yank his campaign funding and aid, put his pork orders on the line, recruit Paula Jean Swearingen to primary his sleazy ass again, but this time with the full financial and operational backing of the DNC. As Bernie can attest, they know how to ratfuck their enemies.
Nobody in the Democratic electoral coalition wants any of the draconian crackdowns on reproductive autonomy that Republican extremists keep pushing at the state level. Theoretically persuadable voters who are zealous enough to demand fetal heartbeat laws, multiple preoperative ultrasounds for the purpose of emotionally manipulating patients, narrow medical, rape, or incest exceptions, or total bans on abortion are already Republicans. The party’s cherished “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” shitheads, a chronic philosophical and civic scourge on the nation, are as persuadable as ever to vote Democratic in spite of their misgivings (read: not wanting, even in small measure, to contribute to the commonweal in ways enabling social liberties for those poorer than themselves) precisely because the overturn of Roe will trigger every insane Republican law to meddle in the country’s bedrooms and examination rooms. As a rule, I’ll gladly be the first to rebuke these fuckers for being disingenuous, shortsighted, and incoherent, but this is an instance in which reality smashes through the rules like a persistent reporter through the hedges in Rob Ford’s front yard. Many of America’s shitty budget concern trolls will, in fact, show up to defend personal liberty this time. Pro-life extremists, of whatever nominal partisan affiliation, obviously will not.
Do we actually have to talk through the realpolitik of this standoff? There’s strong support, most likely supermajority, for the codification of Roe. A politically viable majority of Americans would be relieved to have the Supreme Court permanently relieved of responsibility and, more pertinently, jurisdiction over abortion law. This includes many Republicans. It includes many Democrats, independents, and third-party voters who are queasy about abortion, generally opposed to it, and wish for it to be used as sparingly as possible. Americans are generally aware, if to variable degrees, of the courts’ proclivity to assert jurisdiction at the same time as they wantonly abandon all ethical responsibility for their rulings and also their failures to act. With frighteningly rare exceptions, American courts are object lessons in rights without responsibilities. Ordinary constituents would love for Congress to override them for good and assert legislative responsibility over the courts to keep the sexually preoccupied creeps and outright perverts who push draconian laws on sex from having their way. The best that can be said for them is that Larry and Denny were too gay to really have to wrestle with the ethics of getting into trouble.
Put me in Coach!
Come on, now. Anyone who’s been around here much at all saw that one coming from a concourse away. Fundamentally, this discourse is only secondarily about reproduction. Hardliners on the right have ulterior motives for forcing women to give birth: paranoia about racial demographics, tangled eugenic preoccupations, a desire to breed adoptees for good Christian families, pure cruelty. They also have bad sexual hangups. They have ugly repressed sexual desires.
To see how unserious they are about pro-life politics as a safeguard of children’s welfare, just look at how derelict they are about supporting overwhelmed parents in their efforts to do a decent job raising their children. Oftentimes they’re openly hostile. These are routinely the same thugs who support school lunch debt, work requirements for welfare, burdensome means tests, and anything else to make parents prove their worthiness for meager charity, their children be damned.
It’s brilliantly easy to outfox Joe Manchin on his horseshit about family values: just confront him, in a spirit of empathy for the constituents he fucks over for a living, with the mountains of evidence that every sector and level of civil society in West Virginia is incapable of safeguarding the state’s children against genuine poverty and the horrors that always come with it. This is true at the national level as well, of course, all the justification anyone should need to push Manchin, a crooked legislator representing a small state that was established as a geopolitical afterthought during the Civil War, the hell out of the way.
A judicial caucus of no more than six is threatening calamity. Its opposing legislative caucus claims to be pursuing a permanent legislative override of this imminent ruling, but it’s allowing one of its most hated and most corrupt members to sandbag this legislation. How does any of this show that the system works? Vote? Okay, for what the fuck, exactly? Joe Manchin and Jen Psaki are members of the party that constantly shrieks about preventing exactly what the Supreme Court is threatening.
How does this not show a need–shit, at least a good use–for direct action against politically disagreeable judges?
The stakes here are very real. This is what makes scolds like Jen Psaki so uncomfortable. The political stakes here are extremely high personal, social, and existential stakes. This is what politics are determining in this case. Political decisions are being made to grant the powerful the right to get the weak killed. It’s always this way; it’s just that in more functional, less corrupt times, the weak successfully fight back and hold the line against their predators.
Moderates were clutching their pearls about exactly the same shit in the runup to the Civil War. Goodness, we mustn’t encourage Mr. Sumner to upset Mr. Brooks! That’s the caliber of political actors they’re always trying to appease: thugs who launch violent attacks to protect their privilege to use violence to get their way. Pretending otherwise just makes moderates foolish, weak, and dependent for their welfare and safety on the patience of whatever relatively tolerant violent factions will protect them from the violence of other, hostile factions.
This explains the gathering “liberal” compulsion to flatter the security services. They’re aware, on some level, that they’re exposing themselves to violent threats by being weak, unprincipled, sniveling little rats. No shit they don’t want anyone disrespecting their mercenaries. It explains Psaki’s reverence for Brett Kavanaugh as the holder of an office so many of her fellow Democrats insist he won illegitimately. If the peasants refuse to revere him as a judge, they may refuse to revere her as an all-purpose political functionary. Neither one has marketable skills. Both depend for their luxury and their very survival on the ongoing cooperation of people who do have marketable skills. Theirs is naturally and inevitably a very pro-clerical stratum.
Both sides of the abortion fight think of themselves as Harriet Tubman. This is self-esteeming, but it is not nearly as crazy as it may sound. Many of the moral and philosophical arguments on the pro-life side are thoughtful and disquieting. The American pro-life movement is dominated by hateful crazies, but there are aspects of their underlying worldview that really do deserve a fair, patient hearing.
This serves to make Jen Psaki look like even more of an out-of-touch piece of shit. It takes cosseting from the very real violence of the real world to imagine, as deeply as she wants to believe, that any dispute as heartfelt and raw as abortion policy will be settled without violence. Realistically, that just is not how the world fucking works. It sure as hell isn’t in a settler-colonial horror show like the United States.
What, after all, is the real purpose of the cops and spooks “liberals” valorize more and more by the year? The spook shops have continuity of staff with the heinous thugs behind the Bush-Cheney torture regime, officials who simply have to be purged from the ranks in full and for good to give the “intelligence community” a fighting chance at regaining the credibility it never should have been granted in the first place. The summer of 2020 blew the fig leaf off the big swinging dick of American policing. The violent attacks rogue cops staged in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Austin, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Portland, Denver, Aurora, Asheville, and, God knows, Minneapolis prove that the rot in American policing is not isolated or idiosyncratic.
Is it reformable? It sure as hell isn’t with the personnel who were on duty two summers ago. The Democratic Party, as America’s elected left, would have more credibility on police oversight if it demanded that everybody who was on riot control duty then get backgrounded again, with a focus on their conduct while on duty, not just potentially troubling incidents in their lives off the job. Let’s assume that the panic over rising crime rates has a genuine basis in reality and isn’t just hysteria. How the hell are the guys who cracked Martin Gugino’s skull open and then left him for dead on the street in front of live television news crews the answer? How are they our saviors? In fairness, those were just two cops who immediately got backed up by the other 55 cops on their squad, who resigned their assignments en masse, and only one in two to perhaps nineteen in twenty police officers in the United States at large subsequently reacted to the video out of Buffalo with something between uneasy complicity and vocal support.
Democrats’ equivocation on police oversight is emblematic of the smug, decadent flippancy with which they approach all sorts of horrors that actively expose their constituents to life-or-death stakes. When something telegenic happens to cops, they jump into bipartisan collegiality and open the treasury overnight. That’s what happened after January 6. When private citizens–peasants, not knights–get killed or ruined or threatened with hell on earth for falling through eligibility gaps in government programs, or when they get ruined by usurious student loans, or shot down on the spot by bad cops, they revert into deliberative mode. Let’s not do anything rash here, like arrest Derek Chauvin or Joey Baloney on the spot the way they would have been for committing exactly the same crimes as civilians. That kind of shit happens, and they act like Adolf Eichmann.
Bernie Sanders infuriates them because he does not. He sees the very real human consequences to dehumanizing constituents and knowingly standing by in the name of institutions and processes while they are killed. The Lyin’ Hawaiian had another of his embarrassing outbursts a month or two ago, recognizing Bernie as a prophet but proclaiming himself a king, the point being that prophets need to get out of the way of their kings. We expounded on Scripture for some folks. The surreal idiocy of this famously brilliant ex-president doing such a masterful job of knowing what the Bible says but getting ass-backwards what it means was predicated on the assertion that one of the most prominent and popular members of the United States Senate was nothing but a pain in the ass for criticizing other high officials for bad policies.
If Barry thinks Bernie is an uppity peasant, that’s all we need to know about what he thinks of the rest of us. Time and time again, they show their true colors (for the most part, White). None of it is about anything but court etiquette.
Court etiquette means not thinking or speaking like a regular visitor to the real world. One expression of this otherworldliness is the refusal to hound vicious freaks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert out of public life. The proposition that there should be social consequences, in their cases encompassing professional and political consequences as well, for carrying on like they do should be a pretty fucking easy sell. There’s no reciprocal duty to be fulfilled or tactical victory to be achieved by shuffling around and awkwardly exchanging pleasantries with belligerent nutjobs who are constantly shitting on the floor. For the same reasons, there’s nothing to be gained by equivocating about overt police brutality. There’s no halfway decent reason not to say, okay, you get caught on videotape trampling a nonviolent protester with your police horse, you immediately go to jail and get fired. There’s no higher process to uphold. Arrest at gunpoint for attempted murder, indictment, and immediate dismissal from police employment for gross official misconduct *is* the process.
The Democratic Party caters to and expects the support of the vast majority of voters who are actually liberal, e.g., who don’t want deputy sheriffs murdering innocent citizens for initiation into departmental gangs. At the same time, it comes up with excuse after excuse for not implementing policies its base very much wants, along with many nonvoters and affiliates of other parties, such as firing and jailing bad cops. Once anything to do with holding the police accountable to the governments commissioning them comes up on the agenda, the party bosses materialize with their concerns. Using the power of the purse to give police departments less money instead of all the money they demand every time they demand it might upset swing voters who approve of police violence in general, just not the kind in which Thomas Lane shoots Derek Chauvin point-blank in the head.
For every honest-to-God Quaker or Mennonite who might object to the citizen militia of one that I just proposed as unduly rash or tragic, dozens of Blue No Matter Who shitheads are standing by in this country to insist that the process ultimately worked in every bit as justifiable a fashion for George Floyd as it did for Ricky Ray Rector. The arc of justice is long, but it bends towards eventually not flying home from the campaign trail to appease the mob by having a retard who has no concept of death whacked for once having killed a cop, years before he tried to kill himself but spared enough of his brain to still know about times of feasting, times of fasting, and how to pass the test with much more at stake than just a marshmallow.
The concern trolls who show up with these objections are incredible worms. Their position is that the perfect is the enemy of the good, it isn’t politically realistic to save everybody the government could conceivably save with prompt, straightforward action, and some people unfortunately have to be sacrificed, but God help you if you determine that they or their cronies have heads that will fit on the chopping block. They raise holy hell if they’re so much as asked to sacrifice (“sacrifice”) a perfectly survivable portion of their home equity or portfolio values for the public good. What they actually believe, when push comes to shove, is that other, more vulnerable people should be sacrificed as necessary: convicts, addicts, the unemployed, the homeless.
Say, those last two have rather often included #MeToo! Again, I’m not crazy to revile the people who run the Democratic Party and the factions they work the hardest to cultivate. I am far from convinced that they’re fundamentally looking out for me any more than they were for Ricky Ray. Their crude zero-sum attacks on “dead white males” don’t help, either. Yeah, no shit they’re disingenuous, and no shit they’ve also deliberately killed African-Americans by millions. Do they really think it helps their case to come across not just as spiteful and predatory, but also as incoherent and erratic? It’s mostly just bluster, but they’re the ones who have me parsing their Kill Whitey rhetoric. I do not care for this, and I’ll be damned to take the blame.
If they don’t want elements of the grubby masses taking them for unstable homicidal zealots, they can always start by shutting up about the race bait distancing themselves from those who won’t. Is the white working class problematic? Given who’s always talking about that, and I certainly notice, I don’t care. It’s a red herring coming from the sorts of people who justify denying lifesaving government services to poor black Southerners as a way to punish uppity poor white Southerners.
Why wouldn’t they be more or less okay with the Rector execution? The Democratic Party enthusiastically embraces voters who show anything from callous disregard for human life to positive glee in its taking as a way to settle political scores. This is exactly how the functionaries who run the party think. The sentence for upsetting the right-thinking smart set doesn’t necessarily have to be death, but there’s no reason it can’t be.
The party’s leadership is now predictably applying the same political ethics to abortion policy. Are women facing childbearing and parenting decisions verging on the Solomonic if Roe is in fact overturned? Sure. Are they facing preventable threats to their health, bodily wholeness, and lives? Sure. Does the new “pro-life” dispensation waiting in the wings for the repeal of Roe promise to do a damned thing to make life more bearable for the additional children who will presumably be born and raised upon repeal? Of course it doesn’t.
Mind you, Roe didn’t increase abortions, just safe abortions. A key indicator of the ties between political debate and discernible facts is the historical American birthrate, which bottomed out in 1973. This nation is retarded.
In any event, what’s the Democratic Party gonna do about any of this? Uh, maybe some things, as long as we turn out and vote straight-ticket, and as long as Joe Manchin, who really should be allowed to enjoy his yacht in peace–
LBJ didn’t carry on like this. He didn’t lecture constituents to petition their Congressmen. He recognized politics as an exercise in power, and he exercised it. It’s all the new-school assholes who first showed up in Washington in real numbers with the Clintons who act like it’s all about being civil and ineptly flattering one’s sworn enemies. These worms can’t be smoked out soon enough. They’re marginally employable scolds who react to the preventable killing of innocent private citizens as statistics that ought not be aired and to the heckling of government officials as treasonous violence. They’re the last people whose feelings about appropriate venues for protest should be validated.
Don’t let them tell you to restrict your protests to the same courthouse steps they’ve fenced off for the convenience of the police. Don’t let Jen Psaki play ally. Friends don’t make friends feel bad for taking the protests all the way home, straight into More Than Friendship Heights.
Murica Derp 