The Storming Of the US Capitol 2021

Welcome friends!

I wasn’t really intending to post on this site again so soon, but my oh my, did you happen to watch TV yesterday and witness the violent mob storming the US Capitol? It was something I certainly never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It was horrifying, of course, but also weirdly entertaining. Certainly an unusual sight to see the unwashed hordes of fascist fanatics and homegrown American terrorists running riot in those august surroundings, hanging from the balconies, making off with the speaker’s podium, awkwardly slouching behind desks, muddy clodhoppers plonked proudly atop papers they likely could never comprehend if they had a thousand years to study them. What an amazing spectacle. We had comical figures like the semi-clad fellow with the face paint and Viking horns who apparently thought he was going to a football match. We had pretend policemen and pretend soldiers. We had ominous, vaguely Middle Eastern style hooded figures with zip ties in hand apparently looking for victims to kidnap and murder, an echo of the similar anti-democracy criminality that took place recently in Lansing, the state capital of Michigan, in which a similar mob was intent on kidnapping and murdering the governor of the state. And so many flags. You’d think our fascist nation within a nation would settle on one or the other. We had the incongruously blue flag of Trump Country, of course, but also the flag of the old Confederacy, what looked like a flag of Texas but with an assault rifle superimposed, a flag with a cross that looked vaguely like the Iron Cross of Germany, the flag of Mr. Trump done up as a character from the Rambo movies, the state flag of Michigan, and many, many others. I even saw, rather comically, a few US flags, the stars and stripes, being carried by what one can only presume were the most colossally clueless of the bunch. We had secret hand signals being flashed for the cameras. No, not that one. I mean weird groupings of fingers flashed in a particular sequence in the manner of childhood clubhouses and drug gangs everywhere. We had Neo-Nazis with T-shirts extolling Auschwitz and carrying large, hand scrawled placards about circumcision and so on. I’m telling you, it was a regular three ring circus. For all my foreign readers, who I sometimes suspect may not have an accurate idea of what the USA is really like, please do take a look at some videos of the remarkable event so you can get up to speed on the real America, as opposed to the fake, honey glazed, Hollywood version.

In addition to our public airing of the seamy underside of violent, right wing, anti-democracy, American redneck culture, the event was interesting because it had been immediately preceded by a rabble rousing speech by the outgoing president of the USA, billionaire puppet master Donald Trump, who apparently wanted a demonstration of popular support for his latest con: stealing the recent presidential election after the fact with the help of Congressional Republicans on the risibly flimsy pretext of alleged voting irregularities, which have already been thoroughly vetted by our legal system and basically thrown out of every court in which they have appeared for lack of evidence. Don’t exactly see that every day either. Mr. Trump, a former spoiled rich boy, bankruptcy artist, TV reality show star, and in the past several years Twitter personality, has always prided himself on his ability to whip up large crowds of imbeciles, and he was certainly in his element on the day, hamming it up for the crowd, exhorting the rabble to “fight like hell,” declaring in his best feeble minded American parody of Mr. Churchill, “We will never give up! We will never concede!,” and encouraging his base to be strong. No, not strong in the sense of having the emotional maturity to graciously accept defeat in a democratic election. Are you kidding me? Nazi strong. Willing to bash as many innocent heads as necessary, at least until confronted by an equal or stronger opposing force. His redoubtable stagecraft was augmented by an appearance of his personal ghoul, a ghastly apparition many call Rudy Giuliani, who backed up the president by calling for a “trial by combat.” Actually, that was pretty comical. Can one imagine that nitwit as a medieval knight going to a joust only to show up at the wrong venue, makeup running down his face, babbling nonsense? Or I guess the actual combat was meant to be undertaken by the mob of angry peasants, not by Mr. Giuliani himself, which seems even more comically misinformed. Of course, after the event, during which four of Mr. Trump’s minions died for one reason or another, one from the rather obvious cause of being shot by a guard, Mr. Trump did appear to pledge to what he called a peaceful transition using someone else’s Twitter account, as his own Twitter account had been shut down indefinitely for spreading dangerous and fact free conspiracy theories. Apparently, his felt his people had made his point. However, he was not so uncouth as to just let them die and say nothing at all. He thanked them for their service, saying, “You’re very special,” which is a phrase often used to comic effect here in the USA. He also noted his struggle to topple American democracy had really just begun, noting “it’s only the beginning of our fight.”

Interestingly, on the day, a total of one hundred and forty-seven Republicans in Congress ended up supporting Mr. Trump’s scheme to do away with American democracy, agreeing with Nazi youth leader impersonator Sen. Hawley (Republican - Missouri) and professional right wing agitator and southern good old boy first class, Sen. Cruz (Republican - Texas), that the US Congress should throw out the actual votes delivered from the states in favor of their own opinions or feelings about who should prevail in the election based apparently on their gut feelings, “people are talking,” or on a political calculus of some sort or other, but anyway certainly not for the ostensible reason proffered as the official rationale. As I mentioned earlier, it’s been well established at this point there is no factual basis or real substance to any of Mr. Trump’s various whoppers and tall tales about voting irregularities, which he may or may not sincerely believe, and which he seems to have gotten off the internet from sources unknown. Although it’s difficult to determine if Mr. Trump’s apparent ignorance and enthusiasm is the result of stupidity or a foxy feigned stupidity, one must presume the latter based on his history of business scams and cons of various sorts, there can be no such uncertainty about the one hundred and forty-seven Republicans in the US Congress. One can rest assured they harbor no illusions about the facts of the matter. Whether these politicians felt the mob trashing the Capitol helped or hindered their cause is anyone’s bet. The events certainly didn’t seem to bother them to any great degree, that much seems clear. One supposes they were satisfied with how it all played out on the various crackpot and fake news media that cater exclusively to right wingers, conservatives, and Republicans here in the USA.

So there you have it. The slide from a problematic, big money saturated, not entirely representational but moderately functioning political democracy to a fascistic, anything goes power grab supported by violent street mobs, took only four short years of conservative and Republican leadership to engineer. Seems they can do something after all, when they set their minds to it. On the bright side, the results do not appear to be what they had in mind, as they’ve managed to lose control of the White House and both houses of Congress in the process. One senses if they’re going to seize power in the future it won’t be through our democratic political institutions. No, seems there’s still some fight in the old USA after all. One imagines foreign despots like Tsar Vladimir of Russia being convinced if they helped Mr. Trump and our right wing conservatives and Republicans win the 2016 elections, if they gave American democracy a little nudge toward the abyss, the entire thing would collapse in short order, but seems we’re not quite as bad off as all that. There’s still some fight left in American liberals, progressives, and democratic leftists of all stripes. We’re not ready to accept conservative and Republican plutocratic, market-based fascism just yet. Long live democracy in the USA!

Addendum

After I wrote my post, the always unpredictable Mr. Trump finally delivered a video address in which he promised a “smooth, orderly, seamless transition of power” and referenced his presidency in the past tense. One must give credit when credit is due, no matter how late in the day nor how routine the activity may be for others. In the immortal words of President Trump, “America is and must always be a nation of law and order. The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy ... To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction: You do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law: You will pay.” So there you have it, again. Oh yes, and the body count increased by one, as a member of the Capitol Police died from injuries sustained during the attack. 

O Glorious Day

Welcome friends!

November 7, 2020. Oh my goodness. Truly a red letter day for the ages. The day we here in the USA finally found out the results of our recent presidential election. It was a vastly more important presidential election than the previous one, and not just because of the apparent absence of the well documented foreign interference that muddied the results last time, but more importantly because all American voters knew exactly what they were voting on this time. There had been a great deal of speculation that conservatives and Republicans didn’t really know what they were getting with Mr. Trump the last time, that he was an unknown, a one off, a loose canon. When he was revealed over time to be a dishonest, corrupt, nepotistic, greedy, egoistic, secretive, cruel, incompetent, wannabe authoritarian dictator, a great many Americans wondered if we would see a massive popular repudiation of the man including from his conservative and Republican base. The answer came loud and clear. We did not. Conservatives and Republicans showed up in even greater numbers than in the last election to ecstatically and enthusiastically support the man and do everything they could to keep him in the White House. They were not put off at all by what they had seen. Far from it. They loved it. They supported it one hundred percent. Fortunately for all of us, an even greater number of American voters were motivated to finally get off their backsides and prevent conservatives and Republicans from succeeding this time around. In the past four years, Mr. Trump has managed to inflict a rather remarkable amount of damage to our democratic institutions and traditions, the rule of law, the professionalism of our civil service, the economy, the standing of the USA internationally, the environment, the national debt, race relations, public health, and a great many other things. There was understandable concern about what further damage he might manage given an additional four years in office and indeed reasonable doubt about whether American democracy would even survive in any recognizable form. As it is, we seem to have given ourselves a little respite, a few moments to collect our thoughts. But surely a few moments only. The briefest of time outs. American voters did see fit to return to Congress the Republican politicians who unquestioningly and completely supported Mr. Trump the past four years in everything he said and did including notably corrupt Senate kingpin Senator “Moscow Mitch” McConnell (Republican - Kentucky). The long term future of American democracy is still very much in doubt. So let’s take a few moment to consider the two primary forces I believe are threatening to end American democracy at this time: racism and bad economics. Yes, I considered other important forces and currents in contemporary conservatism, including religious bigotry, nativism, and nationalism, but I really believe the two I just mentioned predominate.

Racism, the American Cancer, is the festering wound bequeathed to our nation by our so-called founding fathers. It is a bit of intellectual claptrap originally designed to provide a convenient if rather far fetched rationale for the slave labor required by immoral and greedy early European colonists to make a buck and build fancy manor houses on other people’s land. Later, it served famously as the primary cause of our most divisive and brutal domestic conflict, the American Civil War, a nauseatingly destructive bloodbath which one hundred and sixty years later still marches on in the minds of many Americans. Since that time it has been the inspiration for countless murders and other outrages against innocent men, women, and children. It was largely traditional American racism that was behind the immediate and automatic outrage and backlash against former President Obama, our first partially “black” president, an abomination for many. It is racism that underlies the obvious rural versus urban dimension of our current political struggle as racially homogenous rural areas fear and despise our thriving, diverse, cosmopolitan cities, the home of what they see as a dangerously racially and culturally heterogeneous and hostile cultural “elite” of the educated and competent that is perpetually out of step with their simple, time honored traditions. It is racism that underlies the geographic dimension of our current political situation with the deep southern states of the old confederacy voting always and automatically en masse in support of anti-democracy conservatism and the Republican Party, with the notable exception this year of the standout southern state of Georgia, home of the major thriving southern metropolis of Atlanta. It is racism that underlies as well the similarly single minded devotion to the conservative and Republican cause of the remote, sparsely populated Great Plains states, famous historically for their racial pogroms, lawlessness, corruption, and bloody mob violence. It is racism that makes conservatives and Republicans view the artifacts of American democracy generated in the distant past, before our more recent demographic changes and in many cases before even the extension of the vote to non-“white” citizens, as fundamentally different in character and far superior to the artifacts of modern American democracy, with its suspiciously swarthy and unreliable electorate. It is racism that leads conservatives and Republicans to their obsessive attempts to manipulate our voting system, gerrymandering voting districts, thinking always of new and inventive strategies to complicate and curtail voting. It is racism that has enabled arch conservative and Republican Mr. Trump to turn reasonable protests against apparently disparate police treatment for racial minorities into a charge that inchoate, lawless anarchism has taken hold in our American cites. It is racism that makes conservatives and Republicans see any and every attempt by our democratic government to help struggling people in terms of an us against them struggle against racial minorities and their allies that they imagine are trying to pick their pockets and destroy the ethical nature of our economic system. The racism of large segments of the population of the USA, both of the implicit sort and more recently of the rather more explicit, old school sort, remains one of the most vital and important drivers of American culture and politics. Racism alone may have the power to one day end American democracy.

Bad economics, a form of insincere and manipulative political rhetoric based on common and carefully cultivated misunderstandings of normative neoclassical welfare economics, is an independent but also very powerful generator of anti-democracy sentiment here in the USA. I discuss it often, although not as often as formerly now Hansel Krankepantzen is on the job. Bad economics suggests chimerical perfectly competitive markets or near enough approximations of the same (risibly assumed to equate to “free” markets in the vernacular) lead to socially optimal results if only democratic government can be prevented from “interfering” with them. That’s not really what neoclassical welfare economics says, of course, and is inconsistent with a well known feature of neoclassical welfare economics called distributional indifference, which derives from the definition of “utility” on which neoclassical welfare economics is based. Any given market result really has no normative or ethical significance until and unless democratic government assigns it normative significance based on synthesizing the subjective ethical or normative views of the populace on distributional and other controversial ethical issues not addressed within neoclassical welfare economics. What neoclassical welfare economics really says is that democratic government is absolutely essential to achieving socially desirable market results, not the opposite, that socially desirable market results can only be achieved if democratic government is eliminated or at least prevented from getting involved. Here in the USA, it’s largely the immense cultural popularity and significance of bad economics that makes so many people unrealistic, unreasonable, utopian, anti-democratic, and looking forever for scapegoats they imagine are “rigging the system” against them, as well as fighting a never ending war of the imagination against wily “communists” and “socialists” who fail to see the light and are cast as stock villains trying forever to muck up the works of the amazing clockwork mechanism for good that would prevail in their absence. If you’re interested in knowing more about bad economics and how it works its rhetorical magic, the best thing you can do is take a look at Hansel Krankepantzen’s blog, or if you’re a big spender his short book / pamphlet, and he’ll set you up and get you appreciating what’s really going on in that department a great deal faster than any competing resource in my opinion. And I should know. Because I’ve read them. And I thank you very much.

All joking aside, we’re not out of the woods here in the USA by any means. The forces of anti-democracy conservatism and Republicanism, based in sickly but powerful currents of American culture, racism and bad economics, and supported by vast economic wealth and foreign despots, is a foe not easily vanquished. It has its hooks in many millions of Americans and has proven it can make them do the most amazing, unlikely, and reprehensible things. If you live here in the USA, you should help me fight the dangerous influence of contemporary American conservatism and Republicanism. If you live abroad, be on your guard against conservative and right wing poison arriving from these shores. Know what it is, how it works, how to fight it. Stockpile the antidote. Prepare yourself, or like liberals and other democratic leftists here in the USA, you may find yourself one day suddenly, unexpectedly, on the ropes, fighting for your democracy like you’ve never had to fight before. Long live democracy!

Anti-Democracy Sentiment And American Popular Culture Of The 1980s

Welcome friends!

I was watching a movie from the 1980s the other day and it reminded me of something I’ve long been interested in and indeed have likely discussed a number of times before: the historical development of that influential element of the right wing conservative movement here in the USA concerned with fighting what they call “activist” democratic government, so groups like the so-called “libertarians,” devotees of so-called “Austrian” economics, and fans of market-based fake “anarchism” (so-called “anarcho-capitalism” or something along those lines). The most interesting part of that development to me is the relationship of that element of the American conservative movement to the worst excesses of the self-indulgent late stages of the similarly egoistic albeit rather more genuinely anarchic and nominally “leftist” utopian hippiedom of the 1970s; an echo of that fascinating and complicated era of popular American culture between the folk singing, sincere as all get out, idealistic, socially conscious progressivism of the 1960s, and the smug, oleaginous, cynical, money grubbing, proudly egoistic, Greed is Good, “yuppie” movement of the 1980s. Maybe I’ll discuss that a bit more today.

One of the popular tropes you’ll find in artifacts of American culture from the 1980s is that, in the immortal words of then president Ronald Reagan, (democratic) government is not the solution to our problems, it’s the problem. In fairness to Mr. Reagan, he may have been speaking specifically about a particular problem at the time, but the quote was widely taken as a statement of a broader principle of conservative ideology. The popularity of Mr. Reagan and the conservative movement at that time is reflected in films of that era in which every US government employee is dutifully depicted as, at best, a mean spirited, pencil pushing prig, and at worst, a wily super villain of near supernatural abilities. Many of these depictions still resonate with conservatives today such as, for example, the high handed, perpetually angry, emotionally unstable EPA inspector in Ghostbusters whose puny mind and unreasonable enforcement of draconian regulations nearly allows NYC to be overrun by ghosts, or evil slime, or threateningly foreign sounding Eastern Europeans of the supernatural sort, or whatever it was. Lucky for us the boys managed to sock democratic government in the eye and save the day. Conservatives are still fulminating against the EPA and I would suggest the character of the evil EPA inspector in that particular film could just as well have been written yesterday. Other films seem rather less fortunate in that department. In the particular film I was watching, a gratingly irritating bit of juvenile claptrap named Coneheads, the requisite US government villain took the form of a cold-hearted functionary intent on rooting out illegal aliens, the joke being the illegal aliens in this case were not desperate, struggling families from south of the border but the extraterrestrial Coneheads themselves. I know. What a jerk, right? Leave those aliens alone! Except, of course, unlike the evil EPA inspector of Ghostbusters the evil immigration official of Coneheads is actually right up conservatives’ alley just now. Indeed, if they were to have any criticisms of the character today it would likely be he was too incompetent or perhaps too humane or lenient to effectively eject the lovable Coneheads thus preserving American culture. Funny. Seems the two films straddled the line between two opposing notions of what we all were talking about when contemplating the evils of activist democratic government. And that really is the root of the issue, isn’t it? It was never simply the general proposition that activist democratic government is inherently bad, but that political democracy allows activist democratic government to sometimes end up doing things one does not personally support.

To make sense of this, it may help to appreciate the 1980s stock character of the evil US government functionary originated with popular opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The basic idea at the time was the “establishment,” including the military, the police, the courts, and indeed often democratic government itself, was not to be trusted. It was an anarchic, nihilistic mindset that was popularly associated with a sort of swoony, unmoored liberalism or leftism of the utopian variety and roundly despised by conservatives of the day. However, at some point some conservative group somewhere apparently realized conservatives themselves could make use of those themes to construct a bit of popular rhetoric to advance their own agenda. They did so by peeling off the activist democratic government they had long opposed under the influence of bad economics, in which markets are seen as panaceas and democratic government as unnecessary at best and harmful at worst, and identifying that specifically as “the establishment,” thus allowing the other erstwhile components of “the establishment” to go unchallenged and immune from criticism and revision. They did so by emphasizing the ills of democratic government not in the context of lawless utopian anarchy but in the context of their preferred baseline of markets, property rights, contracts, laws, police, prisons, militaries, etc. The legal and perforce ethical baseline associated with those institutions receded into the intellectual background to such an extent these conservative spinmeisters convinced many people those institutions were not, themselves, simply artifacts of the now despised political democracy, but natural laws or divine edicts or some such thing having no particular relationship to democratic government and law. The result is that a generation of what would have formerly been called, and are now again increasingly called, economic and political conservatives, became confusingly miscast as fake “anarchists,” fake rebels, people presented as carrying the banner of the let it all hang out, do what you want, self-obsessed hippies of the 1960s striking a blow against the strictures of democratic government and law and society itself, but really in their case doing so on behalf of existing power relationships and arrangements, on behalf of rich folk and the institutions that reflect the interests of rich folk, that is to say, on behalf of what real hippies of the day would have recognized as “the establishment.” Basically, they became what amounts to right wing anti-democratic fascists.

This coup of political rhetoric has led to all manner of peculiar and seemingly lasting consequences for our public conservation here in the USA. One notable example is the ascendency of wealthy, corrupt, lawless, power mad, anti-democracy businessman Mr. Trump to the White House based partially on the populist conservative notion the man is an “outsider” intent on taking on “the establishment.” Old timers, of course, will recognize immediately that the man exemplifies everything about the establishment those in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were concerned about such things wanted to fight against. It has also led to such comical notions that hoary free market ideology from the nineteenth century is a bold new idea no one has ever yet considered or tried because of opposition from “the establishment,” and that people like Ms. Rand and other “libertarian” writers of her ilk invented the revolutionary new ideas of selfishness, egoism, and greed, and it’s only the reactionary small mindedness of “the establishment” that prevents the power of their astonishing new discoveries being put to proper use. In other words, the American conservative movement’s bit of cynical nonsense and repackaging of bad ideas has done a lot to make the popular public conservation about political, economic, and social issues here in the USA what is today: ignorant, idiotic, confusing, dangerous, and unintentionally comical. All reasonable people will want to fight the intellectual rot of the conservative movement if only to discuss these important issues in a reasonable and responsible way.

The Different Worlds of Liberals and Conservatives

Welcome friends!

I was just marveling yet again at the mighty chasm that has opened up in what seems like a  very short time indeed between mainstream conservatives and liberals here in the USA.  It’s a commonplace by now or perhaps even already a cliché to say these two halves of the population live in different worlds but that’s really the only way to describe the phenomenon.  Of course, I’m sure we’ve all known or heard of people who inhabit different worlds due typically to mental illness, personality disorders, substance abuse, social isolation, and sometimes even idiosyncratic genius.  Such people appear more or less randomly on the right and left of the political and economic spectrum.  However, this new phenomenon is different.  We’re talking about huge tracts of the country and millions of people one had only a short time before presumed were for the most part reliably inhabiting one’s own world suddenly vanishing and then reappearing as strange unrecognizable denizens of a foreign and distant land.  It’s really like nothing in my experience.  Certainly we had plenty of social divisions and political and economic disagreements during other eras for example the 1960s but this one feels somehow different.  Those earlier social upheavals were gradual, expected, anticipated, even dare I say more or less understood.  The one we’re witnessing now is something I wouldn’t have believed would or could ever happen despite my sincere efforts to follow the twists and turns of conservative ideology over these past several decades.  I’m certainly in no position to try to explain the darkness that has fallen upon us; however, I thought this time out I might at least comment on the characteristics of the chasm itself to just remind future researchers of the mighty dimensions of the issue they may one day think to explain.

One issue that has become increasingly clear is conservatives and liberals hold very, very different values.  Well, OK, I guess we already knew that so I suppose I should say instead the differences between the values of conservatives and liberals are more comprehensive than we previously realized.  Indeed, cataloguing these manifold differences is clearly beyond the scope of a short blog post but maybe I can at least mention a few highlights.  

Liberals support political democracy based on the egalitarian notion of one person one vote.  Conservatives have become very suspicious and critical of this arrangement and appear fascinated with the myriad ways in which democracy may lead to less than ideal results on particular issues at particular moments in time.  They’ve become obsessed with the idea of shrinking the role of democratic government or in the striking imagery of some of their leaders “drowning it in the bathtub” by choking off necessary tax revenue.  Lately when conservatives talk about our democratic government they present it as just one more iteration of some generalized notion of “government” broadly conceived and thus comparable in their eyes to any other iteration such as fascism or totalitarian communism.  

Liberals are very concerned about the corrosive influence on our egalitarian democratic system of government of eminently non-egalitarian big money.  Conservatives leery and disapproving of the egalitarian basis of political democracy see no such problem.  They applaud the ability of wealth to dominate our political system and wish to enhance it as much as possible  

Viewing political systems as valuable mostly in terms of social control to enforce the wishes of a relatively small cadre of economically powerful people conservatives here in the USA like conservatives around the world encourage the idea of combining religion and government thus rejecting one of our traditional core principles: freedom of conscience and the separation of church (or more broadly religion) and state.  Liberals support our traditional values when it comes to the ability of citizens to choose to follow the religion of their choice or indeed no religion at all if they feel so inclined.  

Because American conservatives view government primarily in terms of social control and the legitimization of economic power similarly to other conservatives around the world rather than as a system of public deliberation and debate meant to be distinct from the structures of economic power generated by our interpretation of the market system and our laws governing the distribution and dissemination of wealth they despise the free press because of its ability to criticize and document the failures and shortcomings of their administration.  Liberals supporting the democratic process and taking it seriously consider a free press very important to our way of life and consider critical commentary and debate a sign the press is taking its social obligations seriously.  

Similar considerations apply to education including particular subjects such as critical thinking.  Liberals taking the democratic process seriously consider an educated and informed populace essential to a healthy democracy.  Conservatives are suspicious of education and wax eloquent whenever possible about their ostensible love of the ignorant and uneducated.  They argue vociferously against classes in subject areas like critical thinking, philosophy, logic, history, and the humanities in general.  

Liberals taking the democratic exercise seriously believe our society can accommodate and benefit from diversity along dimensions intrinsic to people’s constitution and logically and philosophically irrelevant to their duties as citizens, such as gender, sexual orientation, race, cultural background, and so forth.  Conservatives believe passionately that such diversity weakens the structures of social control that operate through contrived or enforced uniformity of opinion and belief and hence tend to believe any diversity inevitably weakens the nation.  They yearn for a society run by and for wealthy “white” heterosexual males with Christian religious views.  

Economically liberals see any number of potential ethical issues with how economic power is allocated by market systems, which of course goes some way toward explaining the significance they attach to political power generated by egalitarian democracy.  Conservatives see no such issues.  They’re all in when it comes to the basis and implications of our current distribution of economic power.  Indeed a good part of their rationale for opposing democratic government is precisely the fear egalitarian political power might be used to counteract, thwart, or even redistribute the much more ethically reliable economic power.  Under the conservative view if people are homeless, or jobless, or hungry, or even I suppose dying on the street corner, that’s all good and exactly as it should be because that’s what the market decreed and the market is an infallible arbiter of such things.  The conservative mantra is that greed is good; not honesty, not knowledge, not civility, not humane values.  Greed is their one and true objective and wealth the only characteristic they respect.  

These value differences reach even to the level of personal behavior.  Liberals believe the sort of low behaviors demonstrated by President Trump, lying, cheating on one’s wife, paying one’s mistress hush money and later sending people to threaten her, spreading baseless rumors and innuendo, insulting people, trying to enflame low prejudices for personal gain, skipping out on one’s bills, avoiding paying taxes, and so on should preclude him from holding positions of public responsibility.  Conservatives see no problem with that sort of thing and indeed feel it makes Mr. Trump very smart and uniquely suited to be president of the USA.  

When it comes to values conservatives and liberal are poles apart.  At one time in the not so distant past conservatives were cast as uniquely interested in values and referred to as “values voters” but it should now be clear to even the most obtuse of observers both conservatives and liberals take their values seriously but those values are very, very different indeed.

Moving away from the issue of the astonishing differences in values where only a few years ago most people might have suspected to find many points of similarity we arrive at some very stark differences in epistemological beliefs, that is, beliefs relating to how we should evaluate statements as true or false.  When it comes to statements about the physical world liberals tend to support the scientific method.  Conservatives famously believe the scientific method is simply one method of defining what is true among any variety of equally legitimate others including notably religious dogma.  According to their assessment one should be free to declare as true whatever one finds most appealing or consistent with one’s chosen worldview.  Science may say something about the age of the Earth or whatever and the Bible may say something else.  Both are true.  Take your pick.  

When it comes to evaluating claims made in the news media liberals tend to support the prevailing method of checks and balances and the records of reliability that govern serious news media.   They recognize of course that thenews reports both facts as well as opinions and values and endeavor to keep an eye on both by getting their information from a variety of historically reliable sources and referring to expert and academic assessments of claims and counterclaims.  Conservatives have become famous for their penchant for characterizing inconvenient news as “fake” apparently muddling the positive and the normative.  They feel news reported by mainstream media is biased and unreliable preferring to characterize as “true” unsubstantiated, unverified, and impossible to replicate claims from any number of offbeat and generally unevaluated information sources based apparently solely on how they feel about the ostensible facts being presented.  This difference in particular has created enormous communication difficulties as even the basic facts of any number of issues have been transformed into what is now cast as a matter of personal opinion and the mutually agreed starting points for discussions of important social issues have gradually vanished to near zero.

Then there is yet a third area which I think liberals and conservatives face very stark differences.  I’m referring now to their use of language.  Liberals consistent with their respect for democracy, freedom of speech, science, education, and the power of human reason tend to use language as an honest attempt to express and discuss ideas and values.  It has gradually become clear that conservatives think of language very differently and in rather more practical terms as primarily a tool one can use to manipulate others into doing one’s bidding.  This was very clearly demonstrated during Mr. Trump’s campaign for the presidency in which liberals found themselves constantly pointing out the falsehoods and inconsistencies in Mr. Trump’s utterances only to find indignant conservatives explaining they knew the man was not speaking honestly and they understood he was not to be taken literally.  In their assessment liberals were missing the whole point.  Mr. Trump was using language not to express what he really thought about issues but to establish emotional bonds with his listeners.  His emphasis was on expressing humor, anger, and resentment in an entertaining way (or what passes for an entertaining way for our less educated and intelligent comrades) to ingratiate himself with his political base.  Factual accuracy and even honesty had nothing to do with it.  

This manner of communicating that was never meant to be taken either literally or seriously has famously continued on into Mr. Trump’s presidency with the man spewing out seemingly randomly all manner of outlandish and inconsistent claims with a smirking disregard for the norms of normal mature conversation.  It’s largely this feature of contemporary conservatism that has made many liberals who may have previously attempted to engage conservatives seriously and honestly determine we are now too far apart intellectually for such an effort to be useful.  Liberals talk to one another honestly and reasonably and try to preserve the integrity and point of democracy. Conservatives lie and pose and try to manipulate other conservatives into doing whatever provides them with economic power, preserves their economic power, and weakens political democracy.  

I would suggest a good part of this may be a natural outgrowth of the differences in education, training, and experience of liberals and conservatives.  Liberals of course tend to be better educated and understand and respect the power of human reason and sensible discourse.  They often work in academia and the sciences.  Conservatives tend to have more practical backgrounds with an emphasis on such business related fields as marketing, advertising, and other forms of consumer deception and manipulation.  

Thus on top of the gigantic differences in values and the striking differences in epistemological beliefs we have the awkward reality that conservatives and liberals are not even using language the same way and in particular conservatives are not using language to engage with liberals in good faith to discuss and explain their beliefs and values.  Not surprisingly the level of public discourse in this country has fallen to new lows of stupidity, rudeness, and pointlessness.

Will American democracy be able to withstand the dire intellectual and moral threat posed by contemporary conservatism as expressed by the Republican Party and its legion of supporters?  Wait.  Didn’t I just ask that same question last time?  Well, it’s an important question so I suppose it’s fine to pose it again.  Will American democracy be able to withstand the dire intellectual and moral threat posed by contemporary conservatism as expressed by the Republican Party and its legion of supporters?  I don’t know.  We’ve seen many other cultures and systems around the world and throughout history devolve into mindlessness, greed, violence, and dysfunction, and there is no reason to suppose the USA is immune to the forces that have dragged these other nations inexorably to their dooms.  But fretting about the future is such a tiresome and unproductive exercise isn’t it?  All we really have to do now is resolve to argue against the intellectual and moral rot of conservative ideology to the best of our abilities.  The future of the nation may well depend upon it.  Long live the liberal ethos!  Long live democracy!

Bearing Arms and Dead Kids

Welcome friends!

Did you hear about the murder of those seventeen young people at a high school in the US State of Florida a few days ago?  Sad case.  Seems a troubled young teenager showed up at the school with a semi-automatic rifle, in this case something called an AR-15, which he had apparently legally obtained despite numerous brushes with the law and school expulsions and funny statements about wanting to shoot up schools and so on.  He gunned down a number of kids then apparently went for a little pick me up at the local McDonald’s hamburger restaurant and was apprehended without incident a short while later.  This type of thing is not particularly unusual here in the USA but there’s been a lot of talk this time around mostly because some of the youngsters who escaped being shot were not content to do the usual crying and graciously accepting the thoughts and prayers of ostensible well wishers routine but instead began agitating for tighter regulations on semi-automatic weapons, a move that infuriated many conservatives here in the USA.  Some right wing media pundits portrayed the kids as paid actors or unwitting stooges of “the left.”  The president of the main gun lobby group here in the USA, that would be the National Rifle Association (NRA) for my foreign readers, was in the papers arguing or perhaps raving might be the more descriptive term that people advocating for common sense gun control such as the kids presumably aren’t really concerned about gun violence at all as one might suppose but only about making people less free.  Oh my!  Can you imagine the scoundrels?  Thinking only about making people less free.  Taking advantage of the unfortunate tragedy to weave their devious designs.  Indeed, the NRA spokesman warned us about the dangers of the “socialism” he felt was being peddled by the liberal Democratic Party and urged his conservative followers to be “anxious” and “afraid” of any future political gains by the Democratic Party.  He suggested that if Democrats “seize power” I suppose by being voted into office for example then “American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever.”  Oh my goodness!  Them thar are fightin’ words!  President Trump chimed in to tell us he thinks the NRA is composed of patriots who want to do the right thing.  With national hysteria and vaguely threatening claptrap at this level I thought maybe I should take a few moments from my busy schedule to take another look at this whole issue of guns.

But first perhaps a bit of history might not be amiss.  It seems the seeds of this particular social malady were sown in the early days of the USA when the so-called founding fathers thought to include in the US Constitution the famous right to bear arms apparently specifically as a bulwark against the development here in America of what they viewed as the tyrannical government of their home country of Britain from which they had just extricated themselves.  Whether there was in fact anything particularly tyrannical about Britain at that time or whether the colonists just didn’t like the political results they were seeing is neither here nor there.  They didn’t like what they were seeing and decided they would do better on their own.  It was a closely run affair and one can readily understand their concerns that all their fighting and philosophizing and speechifying might be undone before it could take root by the devious designs of wannabe kings and queens of humble domestic pedigree.  Unfortunately this concern led them to introduce a legally awkward element into the US Constitution establishing that Americans have a constitutional right at least to the sort of weaponry they would have needed to engage the fledgling US government in armed conflict.

What makes it awkward now of course is that weaponry has long been one of the main beneficiaries of human labor and ingenuity due to our unfortunate inability to coordinate with one another sensibly and has moved on quite a bit from the old muskets, flintlock pistols, and swords of the colonial period.  As a result the sort of weapons that would really provide a level playing field if one had the inclination to embark on a private war against the US Army would now be things like automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, mortars, mines, missiles, bombs, biological weapons, jet planes, tanks, artillery, tactical nukes, ICBMs, and that sort of thing.  I’m talking about military devices specifically designed to kill a whole bunch of people really really quickly and with a minimum of fuss.  Not surprisingly no one here is really very interested in ensuring one’s fellow citizens have access to this kind of equipment because at any given moment a great many of one’s fellow citizens are likely to be high, drunk, insane, or just very angry and no one is really so deluded or optimistic as to want to take the risk of giving them control of something like let’s say a missile launcher.  But in that case what arms are we really talking about?  Which arms are the ones to which we have a constitutional right?  Hmm.  Yeah.  That’s an awkward one isn’t it?

To make a long story short some court somewhere apparently decided on what was assuredly a rather ad-hoc basis that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 should be included in the sort of weaponry we should be allowed to obtain or perhaps I should say have a constitutional right to obtain.  This has proven a bit controversial because like some of the other sorts of weapons I just mentioned one can actually kill quite a large number of school kids or gay people or I suppose anyone really with a semi-automatic rifle.  Some people understandably have begun to suspect semi-automatic rifles was possibly not the best place to draw the line.  It doesn’t help that I suspect most people don’t know the rationale for the current line if indeed there is one.  Are we still committed to ensuring people have the weapons that would allow them to effectively battle US law enforcement or the US military?  Or are we on to something else now?  Well, let’s talk that through a bit.  Not in legal or constitutional terms of course but in terms of common sense, a commodity perpetually in short supply here in the USA particularly now the Republican Party is in charge.

Well, first I would suggest if we’re not claiming US citizens have the right to any old weaponry and instead are attempting to distinguish what’s in and what’s out we might do well to think of a rationale for that distinction.  I suggest the most obvious rationale might take account of the variety of arms that are available, their uses, and their characteristics particularly with respect to facilitating mass murder.  I would argue we should probably give up the notion we’re talking about whatever weaponry we need to effectively fight the US Army because that’s just not very realistic.  To really fight the US Army we’d need access to advanced military weaponry and I suggested earlier I doubt many people would be interested in making that sort of weaponry available to the average Joe because of the risks involved.  Fortunately I’m not at all sure that would be the only source of weaponry were we ever to actually find ourselves in the position of fighting our own government.  The way these things usually play out in other failed sates around the world is that other countries are happy to supply the disaffected factions with the requisite weaponry for one reason or another.  We should know.  We’re in the habit of supplying all manner of people with military hardware for all manner of purposes.  In the case of another civil war or large scale popular uprising here in the USA I see quite a few friends who may be willing to fund and arm patriots fighting for democracy on principle and also quite a few enemies who wouldn’t particularly mind seeing Americans killing off one another no matter the pretext so it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the necessary weaponry would not become available some old way.  In other words, I doubt we actually need to store tanks in our garages in the off chance we need them one day. This is to say nothing of the fact that events in Eastern Europe in the latter half of the last century suggest that without popular support it’s rather difficult for any government to do its own thing for too long no matter the imbalance in firepower between that nation’s army and police and its citizenry.

Another consideration is that unlike the early days of the nation we now have a rather robust, stable, mature system of democratic government with many checks and balances.  It’s frankly rather difficult to imagine anyone being able to effectively seize power and do away with democracy at least without the acquiescence of the vast majority of our people and frankly if that’s what most people come to believe it doesn’t really matter whether we have a democracy or not.  What’s the point if we’re going to turn around and elect someone like Herr Hitler to escort us all to hell?  Here in the USA conservatives have been attacking government in the abstract, including our democratic government, for many decades now and naturally President Trump and Republicans in Congress have been expressing these now traditional conservative themes by attacking many of our democratic institutions including the free press, the separation of church and state, our scientific and regulatory agencies, the intelligence community, our educational system, our justice system, and various others not to mention demonizing their liberal political opponents but as far as I can see they’re not going to be able to take the country very much farther down that road to nowhere without the majority of the American electorate coming to their senses and sending them packing.

So I find I can’t really take very seriously at all the rationale provided by the NRA and seconded by President Trump and the Republican Party that we need semi-automatic rifles to fend off socialists or really anyone but according to conservatives mostly socialists from seizing control of our government and enslaving us.  Indeed the entire scenario is so far fetched and implausible I have to wonder if anyone really buys it at all.  One has to remember that American conservatives are prone to a rhetorical and political style of expression in which they say all manner of funny things that happen to suit their purposes but don’t really correspond to anything they believe or expect others to believe.  I suppose it’s possible given the long tradition in Hollywood of there being no problem that can’t be solved at the end of a gun that some intellectually challenged people may envision themselves taking on the US army with their AR-15s but really I can’t imagine there could be too many people like that.  

I suppose rather more people may envision themselves taking on criminals with semi-automatic rifles but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which one would need a semi-automatic rifle to take on criminals.  Violent criminals usually either walk up and pull out a gun or possibly kick in the door of one’s house while brandishing a gun.  One doesn’t typically encounter hordes of hoodlums charging at one from over the barricades or what have you.

Nevertheless it’s clear that many rank and file conservatives are very interested in owning semi-automatic rifles.  Why?  What do they want them for?  Well setting aside the paranoid and unworkable fantasies I’ve just discussed I suspect most of the people who want these weapons want them for three primary purposes: 1) to commit crimes (not just the conventional sort but racial conflict, domestic terrorism, and that sort of thing; one must remember that some people’s notion of a “police state” is basically any state where they are not allowed to do whatever they want to do for example robbing banks or dealing drugs or what have you; for many people we’re already living in a “police state” as oppressive to them as Nazi Germany of Stalinist Russia might be to normal law abiding people), 2) to play army or cowboy in their backyards, 3) to “collect” them and stick them on the wall where they can ogle and fondle them from time to time.  In the grand scheme of things I have difficulty attaching too much importance to these objectives and I certainly would not think they justify the increased risk of mass shootings at schools or anywhere else for that matter.

If we’re not drawing the line rather arbitrarily at semi-automatic rifles then where should we draw the line?  This is just the sort of thing that drives simple minded conservatives crazy.  One can hear the wheels turning: if I can’t have a semi-automatic rifle soon I won’t be able to own a teaspoon!  Well I don’t know.  Just drawing the line anyplace other than at a weapon designed to facilitate mass murder would probably be a big leap forward.

How about handguns?  Well, like semi-automatic rifles the only real reason for handguns is to kill people.  In this case no reasonable person would suppose we’re talking about an ability to take on the police or US Army so we can set that argument aside.  No, handguns are all about a sort of arms race between criminals and people protecting themselves from criminals or trying to protect themselves from criminals or imaging they’re protecting themselves from criminals.  Like all arms races there is something indeterminate about any given equilibrium.  If no one had a handgun then one would likely be able to defend oneself adequately with whatever the criminals were using instead.  Like what?  I have no idea.  Spears, swords, knives, rocks, tree branches?  Of course wielding those types of hand to hand weapons requires a modicum of strength and physical dexterity while using a handgun requires little more than an ability to point one’s arm and move one’s finger.  I can’t really see grandma taking on a ne’er do well in a knife fight but I can imagine her shooting the stranger in her front parlor with a handgun, which one may hope is a ne’er do well and not the neighbor kid come to return one of her cats or what have you.  So maybe handguns are reasonable?  Of course ease of killing people is a two way street and I suppose it’s quite likely a lot more criminals are interested in committing violent crimes if they know all they’ll need to do is point their arms and move their fingers so maybe we’d be better off overall if no one but police had handguns.  Similar considerations apply to the issue of the portability of handguns.  It’s great that people can carry them around easily but of course that applies to both criminals and law abiding citizens.  Although there are most likely cases where law abiding people have stumbled across ongoing crimes and managed to intercede including some shooting sprees I suspect this isn’t as common as one might think because a good deal of handgun violence most likely involves someone getting the drop on someone else, shooting that person, and promptly running away.  Rather difficult for a third person to contrive to be in a position to do a lot about that.  So I suspect for every person saved by law abiding people carrying handguns a much larger number of people are likely murdered by criminals carrying handguns.  One I think must wonder if the ubiquity of handguns is on balance a good thing or a bad thing.  Anyway, I think we can at least agree that handguns seem a lot more reasonable than semi-automatic rifles.  They’re a lot less useful for deranged mass murderers wanting to go on shooting sprees because they don’t fire as fast, the magazines don’t hold as many rounds, and one has to be considerably closer to one’s target to hit anything.

Other ideas?  Well, I would suggest hunting rifles and shotguns may be in a different category altogether because unlike semi-automatic rifles and handguns they have a purpose beyond killing people: killing animals.  Supposing one has a right to bear these sorts of arms makes rather more sense to me than some of the other weapons we’ve been discussing.  They have a legitimate and real (as opposed to fantasy) purpose, they’re not very well suited to shooting sprees and mass murder, and as a bonus they’re a lot more awkward to use in the commission of a crime than say a handgun, a fact which would seem to tilt the arms race back in favor of homeowners and other people with adequate space to store them.  In the old gangster movies the bad guys would often pull a sawed off shotgun from out of their trench coats or in the case of westerns I guess the varmints would pull them from out of their dusters but honestly how many people really wear trench coats or dusters these days?  And of course you have to be pretty much next to your victim for pulling a shotgun out of whatever article of clothing one happens to be wearing to make sense.  Seems a lot more awkward to use in a criminal context than a handgun for example.

So let’s summarize and wrap up or discussion of where to draw the line.  Hunting rifles and shotguns seem to me likely to be in the generally acceptable range.  Handguns are in a sort of gray area.  Pros and cons.  Might need some additional research on those.  Semi-automatic and automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and other more advanced military style weaponry appear to me to just not be worth the risk to innocent people.  Just talking out loud right now.  Not saying I have all the answers.  Personally I think we’d be moving forward leaps and bounds by just managing to sit down and discuss the issue like reasonable adults rather than small children who’ve missed their nap times.  But we all know what’s likely to actually happen after this most recent tragedy is what seems to always happen after these sorts of tragedies here in the USA.  Nothing.  Or not exactly nothing.  We’ll send out our thoughts and prayers.  Who knows, I might even get off the couch and light a candle but that’s pushing it.  And of course assuredly many people will rush out to buy more semi-automatic rifles to guard themselves against all the gun violence thus insuring the next mass shooting of school kids won’t be far away.

Before I sign off this week I thought I’d mention one other funny component of the discussion of guns here in the USA, which is a notion shared by many conservatives, Republicans, and other nutty right wing sorts not to mention common criminals, that they have what they call a “god given” right to semi-automatic rifles or really I suppose whatever weaponry they desire.  Where does that come from you ask?  You don’t remember that bit in the bible?  Jesus waxing eloquent on the AR-15?  Well, again one has to remember that the original purpose of the old colonists coming up with this particular bit of the US Constitution was apparently to allow people to fight effectively against the US government should things not turn out as planned.  But of course the US Constitution is a political and legal document implemented by institutions of the US government, so there is obviously something not entirely logically consistent going on here.  The so-called founding fathers may have been clever in some ways but they did tend toward rhetorical extremes from time to time.  Unfortunate in retrospect they didn’t have a few founding mothers around to help keep their feet on the ground.  Anyway, many conservatives particularly of the virulently anti-government including I may say anti-democratic government sort such as anarchists and so-called libertarians and other wacky groups of that ilk have apparently decided they’re talking about rights that don’t derive from the Second Amendment of the US Constitution at all but are instead issued directly from mystical beings in the next world.  In my opinion these dangerous anti-social lunatics really belong in prison along with other criminals who believe they are above the law but of course the tendency now with President Trump and the GOP in charge is to coddle and carve out special exceptions for such people.  Conservatives have argued successfully in the courts for example that although the US Supreme Court has found that the US Constitution does not allow state governments to discriminate against homosexuals in the area of marriage state officials are perfectly within their rights to choose not to process those types of marriages as long as their disregard of the law and their official duties is based on bigotry with a religious pedigree.  I’m not sure any old religion will do of course because I would be surprised if conservatives are willing to extend similar special exemptions to Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists let alone to any of the other more esoteric sorts of religions one hears about these days such as Wicca or followers of Voodoo or what have you.  No, I suspect it’s only Christians and possibly only certain sects within that general area who can choose to not follow the law if they feel so inclined at least in this area of gay people getting married.  On a positive note I believe the courts did find that the states in question would need to import someone from somewhere else at taxpayer expense who would be able to follow the law and fulfill their official functions to fill in for any state officials who decide to take an extended coffee break of this sort so at least gay people in those states can still ostensibly get their marriage papers processed by someone other than the person who would normally process them.  My point is one can very well imagine the GOP trying to exempt certain Christians from gun laws if they claim to have received special permission from the heavens to own particular weapons. All I can say is I hope none of these otherworldly entities had anything to say about nuclear bombs because honestly I think that would be taking this sort of lunacy a little too far don’t you?

Want to help school kids get through their youth without being shot by a psycho killer with a semi-automatic rifle or some similar murder tool?  Want to maintain the integrity of our democratic political system?  Want to bring some common sense and rationality to national gun policy?  Want to confront Christian exceptionalism and bullying and maintain our American tradition of freedom of religion?  Well you know what to do my brothers and sisters.  Join liberals in fighting the conservative menace to the American way of life!  Vote Democrat in the next election!

References

NRA chief accuses Democrats of pushing 'socialist' agenda in wake of Florida shooting.  Lauren Fox.  CNN.  February 22, 2018.  https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/politics/wayne-lapierre-cpac-speech-nra/index.html.

NRA goes on the offensive after Parkland shooting, assailing media and calling for more armed school security.  Mark Berman and David Weigel.  Washington Post.  February 22, 2018.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/22/after-silence-on-parkland-nra-pushes-back-against-law-enforcement-the-media-and-gun-control-advocates/?utm_term=.6dc33a0f848b.

Trump defends the NRA as a group of ‘patriots’ who want to ‘do the right thing.’  Kaitlan Collins.  CNN.  February 23, 2018.  https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/politics/donald-trump-nra/index.html

Conservatism and the Power of Negative Thought

Welcome friends!

Every now and then I read one of the frequent articles that have been appearing in the mainstream press here in the USA recently that try to shed some light on the thoughts and attitudes of supporters of President Trump for the benefit of people like me who imagine they may have some idea of what traditional conservatives think but find the mindset of the particularly febrile and inconsistent subset of conservatives who support Mr. Trump quite a mystery.  One hears accounts of them saying all manner of curious things in interviews and focus groups and surveys including such notable utterances as they can’t think of anything President Trump could do that would make them not support him, the more people complain about him the more they support him, and if they had a choice between believing Jesus Christ or Donald Trump they would believe Donald Trump.  These kinds of rather puzzling statements don’t seem to represent an entirely rational or mature perspective on the world if taken at face value.  However, after thinking about it the requisite five minutes I think there may be one plausible explanation for this sort of behavior: these people are not concentrating so much on what they think would be helpful for others or themselves but on the other side of the coin so to speak: what they think will be annoying or damaging to others.  In the USA contemporary conservative ideology appears to be drawing largely on the perverse power of negative thinking.  As such the depressing and unrelenting negativity of current conservative ideology and rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the optimistic, pragmatic, and forward thinking philosophy of liberalism.  Perhaps it would be worthwhile to say a few words about that this week? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Dishonest Don and the Moral and Intellectual Rot of Modern Conservatism

Welcome friends!  

I was just sitting around contemplating the rather remarkable level of dishonesty issuing forth from the White House on a daily basis as well as the complete absence of concern let alone outrage on the part of our current president’s conservative base and it occurred to me that beyond merely damaging the USA in the more obvious ways, economically, militarily, politically, socially, legally, diplomatically and so on contemporary American conservatism seems intent on destroying the very soul of the USA: our moral integrity and respect for the truth.

What got me started thinking about this issue this week in particular was an article I read about our president apparently making up a story relating to a recent speech he gave at the National Scout Jamboree, the annual meeting of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), in which he rather predictably annoyed quite a few people by telling the boys Washington DC is a “sewer,” attacking Hilary Clinton, attacking the media, and basically engaging in the usual sort of lowbrow rabble rousing he has used to such great effect when speaking to his adoring army of angry redneck supporters.  The story he apparently made up about the event for the benefit of the tarted up conservative rag Wall Street Journal was that he had received a call from the “head of the Boy Scouts” who told him “it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!