Summary: the events of the last week have read like something out of a very bad political potboiler/spy novel. An out-of-control President of the United States, a presidential contender suffering from a heart attack, and attacks on a presidential front runner have all combined to induce in much of the American public a curious mixture of Schadenfreude and low-level dread. What the hell will happen during the next 24 hours?
What will happen as Bernard Sanders recovers from his coronary "episode?" It's not unfair to speculate that his followers will seek to deflect and redirect discussion of Sanders' fitness for office by ramping up their attacks on Joe Biden with help from Donald Trump campaign.
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Donald Trump is unraveling before the eyes of a shocked American people as a cynical world takes a certain joy in The Donald’s self-induced impeachment drama. Never have we seen, not even with Richard Nixon and the Watergate coverup, not even with Bill Clinton and his Oval Office blow job, not even with the semiliterate Andrew Johnson and the donnybrook over the Tenure of Office Act, a president so obviously desiring to be impeached, and so obviously shooting himself in the foot at every opportunity.
Today’s “spit up your coffee” headline news leader was that The Donald was, or thinking about, entreating the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Given that The Donald has been busy whipping up an economic war against the People’s Republic of China, his apparent effort to enlist Beijing in some sort of outré effort to salvage his presidency strikes most Americans as risible.
Similarly, his insistence that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff is somehow guilty of treason for opposing The Donald also has Americans spitting up their coffee. Add to that the efforts of the once respectable Rudy Giuliani to gin up a false narrative of the alleged corruption of the Bidens, conduct which should by Rudy significant discipline of his professional law licensure (up to and possibly including disbarment), leads many Americans to and ineluctable conclusion that we are dealing with an American equivalent of the Madness of King George III.
But as much as many Americans find the Madness of King Donald vaguely amusing, and as much as many Americans are experiencing a certain degree of Schadenfreude over it, our Schadenfreude is not unmixed with a certain low-level dread. Now, most Americans probably have no idea who Alberto Fujimori was. Fujimori, an otherwise colorless politician in Peru was elected that country’s president in 1990, and who, two years later, with the support of the Peruvian military, carried out a so-called self-coup in which he shut down the Peruvian Congress, suspended the Peruvian Constitution, and purged the Peruvian judiciary.
The precedent of Fujimori’s self-coup cannot fail to appeal to Gospodin Trump and his inner circle advisors, corrupt men like William Barr, Stephen Mnuchin, Stephen Miller, and Gorka Sebastyén. Indeed, as an increasingly cornered and desperate Donald Trump lashes out, referring to his congressional antagonists as traitors, declaring that “[he wants] Adam Schiff questioned at the highest levels for fraud and treason,” and hurling all manner of false and unsupported charges against his potential Democratic rival for the presidency, Trump begins to sound like a Latin American dictator of the old “blood and thunder” school. The Donald apparently has never familiarized himself with Charles De Gaulle’s rhetorical question “[p]ourquoi voulez-vous qu'à 67 ans je commence une carrière de dictateur?” Why do you think that at 67 I would start a career as a dictator?
Trump, of course, has neither the wisdom, nor the courage, nor the sense of occasion the Charles De Gaulle had. For Trump, riding down the gilded escalator of Trump Tower represents his “greatest achievement.” Nothing The Donald can ever do could possibly match the sheer physical courage of De Gaulle walking unhesitatingly up the center aisle of the nave of Notre Dame in the face of German sniper fire before taking his place in the choir to join the Cathedral chapter in chanting the Magnificat on that glorious day when Paris was liberated from four years of Nazi occupation. Nothing Donald Trump can ever do could ever match the way in which de Gaulle saved the French Republic in 1958. But then, de Gaulle was a man raised with concepts of duty, honor, and country that entirely evade the mental wreck of a man that is Donald Trump.
Of course, if Donald Trump is a mental wreck, recent events have certainly suggested that wannabe president Bernard Sanders is a physical wreck. Sanders’ recent hospitalization to have two stents implanted after a coronary “episode” in Las Vegas has brought to the fore the issue of his health and fitness for office.
Of course, based on Gospodin Sanders prior performance, both in this campaign and against Hillary Clinton in 2016, we may assume that his supporters will attempt to deflect and redirect the conversation about Sanders’ overall health away from that topic by any means available. Their efforts will no doubt take the form of intensified and redoubled efforts to spread disinformation and defamation against Joe Biden. In doing so, Sanders and his feckless, redeless, followers will happily, eagerly, and uncritically borrow whatever talking points are available against Biden from the Trump campaign. They did this against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they will do it against Joe Biden in 2019/2020.
The Sandernistas’ eager attacks on Joe Biden demonstrate two unanswerable facts. First, it demonstrates that Gospodin Sanders and his followers will avail themselves of any means of attack available to them to do harm to Joe Biden, and to Elizabeth Warren as well. Second, it also demonstrates the willingness of the Sanders effort to make common cause with Donald Trump and with his Russian puppet masters. And the Sanders people will do this without any shame whatsoever, because, in the Sanders cult of personality, any dirty trick is acceptable as long as it advances the Sanders campaign.
Right now, Joe Biden remains the consensus front runner in the Democratic primary campaign. Both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders would like to change that. Both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders have demonstrated in the past their willingness to make common cause against a common adversary. Only time will disclose whether the cynical joint Trump-Sanders effort will be successful. Those of us who are loyal Democrats must work to ensure that it is not.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no secret of his profound, patriotic, disdain for Donald J. Trump and for Bernard Sanders. The views expressed herein do not reflect the views of the Riverside County Democratic Party, another organization for which Mr. Marchand feels a distinct measure of disdain. Call Mr. Marchand a "neoliberal," a "corporate Democrat," a "shill," or a "Hillbot" and Mr. Marchand reserves the right to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is available and ready to hand. Mr. Marchand also reserves the right to have yellow dogs bite you in a sensitive location.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
THE PERILS OF PERSONALISMO
Summary: Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been victims of hostile takeover bids from two men with deep sympathies for the Russian State and a distinct affinity for forming cults of personality about themselves. Bernard Sanders’ hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party in 2016 failed, as it will ineluctably fail between now and the Iowa caucuses. By contrast, Donald Trump’s Russophile takeover bid against the Republican Party has been a success.
Now, as we gear up for the hypertrophic, hyperactive, hyperventilating 2020 presidential campaign season, Bernard Sanders is attempting another hostile takeover bid against the Democratic Party. During the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers conducted a slash-and-burn campaign against Hillary Clinton. The acrimonious tone of the 2016 Democratic primary has very much carried over to this year’s Democratic pre-primary. Sadly, many Democratic hopefuls have adopted the Sanders slash-and-burn methodology to savage their opponents. This may very well give the election to a man who will almost certainly go down in history as the worst President of the United States to date.
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Cathedral City, October 2, 2019 -- Since the Democratic primary campaign in 2016, observers, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, have come to expect that the Democratic primary campaign of 2020 will be nasty, acrimonious, protracted, and unpleasant. And much of the blame for the unfortunate state of the Democratic primary can be assigned squarely to the Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, and his supporters.
Sanders has always been a contentious, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous loudmouth with a no-compromise “my way or the highway” attitude toward politics. Worse, Gospodin Sanders has always attracted to his campaigns similarly loudmouthed, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous, contentious, misogynistic, borderline racist, redeless, followers, the American equivalent to the interwar European street toughs who made the continent safe for fascism between 1922 and 1939.
What a contrast to the Democratic primary campaign in 2008!
In 2008, the last campaign before 2016 in which the presidency was open, i.e., in which the incumbent was constitutionally inhibited from running for a third term, the Democratic primary campaign, for all of the sometimes unfortunate jabs exchanged between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, was fought in a civil fashion between two adversaries who recognized that when the sound and the fury were over, both rivals were still Democrats, both rivals still had policy positions that merited serious discussion, and both rivals still held each other in a certain level of regard. And when the primary campaign was over, Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful candidate, made speed to throw her support and that of her loyalists followers behind Barack Obama, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President.
Not so, not so at all in 2016. Again, the presidency was open and the incumbent constitutionally inhibited from seeking election to a further term. Bernard Sanders, who was and is not a member of the Democratic Party, mounted a hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party, which foolishly allowed him to run in their primary. The jabs and the agitprop from the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton, the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, began almost immediately.
It became very clear that Gospodin Sanders despised Sec. Clinton at a visceral, personal, deeply misogynistic level. Moreover, his foot soldiers, never inclined to think things through or to tolerate any criticism of their Dear Leader, made haste to accuse Sec. Clinton of the same enormities that Donald Trump and his supporters were eager to belabor her with. Worse, some of Sanders’s followers eagerly reached into their worn-out grab-bag and pulled out the thought-terminating cliché of anti-Semitism, by which they proposed to shut down any criticism of Gospodin Sanders.
Anyone with any memory of the 2016 campaign will recall the demonstrations orchestrated by the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton almost everywhere she appeared. Add to that the crude sexist manner in which the secretary, and her daughter were routinely travestied, usually in the coarsest of terms, on social media, together with the ill concealed preferential option of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for Sanders and Trump.
Moreover, Sec. Clinton was routinely abused by both Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers for the 1994 crime bill in which she had no vote, as well as for somehow being responsible for her husband’s extramarital affair. Additionally, one should recall the riot at the Nevada caucuses orchestrated by Sanders and his campaign, together with the Sanders-organized demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, even after it had become clear that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee of the Democratic Party for president in 2016.
Throughout the entire primary campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers waged war against Hillary Rodham Clinton as if they were the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy waging a desperate rearguard action against the advancing Americans. And when Hillary’s nomination had become inevitable, Bernard Sanders and his followers insisted on behaving like angry Japanese holdouts, marooned on Pacific islands such as Saipan. Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, taking pot shots at the Americans.
One need not burden the record with a recapitulation of the behavior of the Bernie-or-bust bitter-enders, who, the evidence has now begun to show, were eager to share talking points – many of them generated by Julian Assange and the Russian State-- and opposition research against Sec. Clinton with the Donald Trump campaign. Put bluntly, Gospodin Sanders and his feckless, redeless followers behaved like sore losers determined to throw the election to a Republican out of sheer spite. Between 12 percent and 26 percent of Sanders primary voters cast their general election ballots for Donald Trump. The “Bernie-or-bust” vote gave Donald Trump his narrow margin of victory in the electoral college. In doing so, the Bernie-or-bust voters managed to cast the word “progressive” in distinct malodor among loyal Democrats.
Now, with the 2020 primary cycle starting to shake out, with the second and third tier candidates dropping out of the race or giving indications of an intent to drop out of the race, Sanders’s Birkenstock Bolsheviks are at it again. They began the campaign season by attacking former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. When O’Rourke’s poll numbers began slipping, and it was obvious that he no longer was a first-tier candidate, Sanders and his followers began lobbing their bombs at Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and at the front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. As was the case in 2016, the nastiness on social media, particularly the nastiness directed against Joe Biden, has become a subject of conversation throughout the political world.
Now, indications are that Sanders, always one to burn an asset that may be standing in his way, is about to launch an all-out war against Elizabeth Warren. We know that Sanders himself will question the Massachusetts Senator’s “purity,” to say nothing of casting a blind eye upon the inevitable efforts by his supporters to question Sen. Warren’s Native American heritage. And inevitably, Sanders’s followers will avail themselves of Trump’s talking points to attack a woman with far more education and qualifications than Bernard Sanders, with his undergraduate political science degree, will ever have. And when they savage a woman who is by far Bernard Sanders’ better and superior, it is almost ineluctable that David Sirota or some other Sandernista operative somewhere will avail him- or herself of the Trumpian racial slur “Pocahontas.”
Now bluntly, there is absolutely no reason that the Democratic primaries should become so ugly. But Bernard Sanders is a profoundly ugly man, just as is Donald J. Trump. Of course, both Sanders and Trump are interlopers in their respective parties. Sanders, the unsuccessful interloper in the Democratic Party, is still doing a burn over the fact that he got pwned by ... a girl! No doubt, if we were unlucky enough to see a Sanders presidency come 2021, he would practice the same kind of politics of grievance and resentment that we have seen during these last two and a half years from Donald Trump himself.
Indeed, as much a Sanders was an interloper — albeit unsuccessful — in the Democratic Party, Trump’s efforts to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, with the help of the Russian state and American domestic Russian assets, was entirely successful.
Now Donald Trump himself and the Republican Party which he has taken over, have no guiding set of principles, no defined Weltanchauung or ideology beyond the crude evangelical Protestant Nonconformist mass line which Trump and the Republican Party peddle eagerly to an uninformed, racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, base which eagerly laps up whatever sewage of Sodom Trump and his acolytes see fit to spew before them.
The crude mass line Trump and his acolytes have foisted on the American public resembles nothing quite so much as that seen in the United Kingdom and on the continent of Europe during the years between the Great War and World War II. Indeed, the similarity between the Trump and Sanders efforts is that both of them bear an altogether unfortunate resemblance to a whole clutch of “personalist” right wing authoritarian political movements and their “leaders,” among others, Charles Maurras’s Action Française, Jákfai Gömbös Gyula’s Hungarian Unity Party, Szálasi Ferenc’s Hungarian Arrow Cross, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde’s Spanish Falangists, Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP, Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, Ante Pavelić’s Croatian Ustaše, and the risible British Union of Fascists under their popinjay leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Every one of these politicians represented, in a European context, what has been referred to in Latin America as personalismo, defined by Britannica.com as “the practice of glorifying a single leader, with the resulting subordination of the interests of political parties and ideologies and of constitutional government.” In the United States, both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders reflect a kind of emergent personalismo.
Specifically, we have seen how both Trump and Sanders have called frequent (and fraudulent) attention to the alleged size of their rallies. Indeed, more than one commentator has called attention to the use by the Sanders campaign of an image of a May Day March in Havana that the Sanders campaign falsely captioned as depicting a Bernard Sanders rally in California. Similarly, the Trump campaign consistently overestimated the size of its own rallies; how can one forget the epic Trumpertantrum that ensued when the White House was caught grossly overestimating the size of Donald Trump’s inaugural address crowd? And as much as both Dear Leader Bernard Sanders and Maximum Leader Donald Trump were accustomed to overstating their crowd sizes, both men were equally wont to attack the news media for reporting accurately on their usually much smaller than advertised crowd sizes.
Of course, if crowd sizes, and Trunp's and Sanders's insecurity about them, are a reflection of personalismo, the almost cultish devotion of their redeless followers is another indication of the dangerous cancer of personalismo in American politics. Trump’s votaries tend to be older, whiter, and less educated. Sanders’s cultists, by contrast, tend to be in the 18-35 cohort. Many of them possess undergraduate degrees, often in traditional liberal arts fields. And whereas Trump voters tend to be nostalgic for the dispensations obtaining in, say, the 1950s or early 1960s, Sanders voters tend to pine for some kind of notional radical, transformatiional “revolution.” Neither contingent has much tolerance for, or interest in, the views of the other side. Both contingents claim that they are being victimized and misunderstood by some sort of nebulous “establishment.” Finally, both share in common an altogether dismissive Weltanchauung that finds expression in a condescending, combative, confrontational tone.
The similarities between Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have been described and discussed too often to require further repetition here. The similarities between the followers of Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have likewise been discussed and described too often to require further recapitulation here. Rather, the issue for loyal Democrats, those of us who would vote for a Yellow Dog before voting for a Republican, is to understand that we may well be confronted with a Hobson’s choice: Bernard Sanders is not enough of a yellow dog to deserve our vote. Bernard Sanders, who, like Ralph Nader before him in 2000, helped deliver the 2016 election to Donald Trump, is no Democrat.
Instead, Bernard Sanders is still carrying a torch for the Soviet Union, which landed on the ash heap of history a generation ago. Unfortunately, that renders Mr. Sanders susceptible of use by a Russian state in the throes of an identity crisis. Does Russia want to be a constitutional democracy? Does Russia want to retreat to its Soviet past? Or does Russia want to clamp rose-colored glasses to its head and become a simulacrum of what it was when St. Nicholas II the Passion-Bearer was Emperor? Until Russia makes a decision to commit to liberal democratic values, Russia will be our enemy. Right now, we have two men who are either ideologically connected to the Russian State (Bernard Sanders) or beholden to it in a way that compromises them and opens them up to manipulation and treason (Donald Trump).
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger!
Now, as we gear up for the hypertrophic, hyperactive, hyperventilating 2020 presidential campaign season, Bernard Sanders is attempting another hostile takeover bid against the Democratic Party. During the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers conducted a slash-and-burn campaign against Hillary Clinton. The acrimonious tone of the 2016 Democratic primary has very much carried over to this year’s Democratic pre-primary. Sadly, many Democratic hopefuls have adopted the Sanders slash-and-burn methodology to savage their opponents. This may very well give the election to a man who will almost certainly go down in history as the worst President of the United States to date.
------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, October 2, 2019 -- Since the Democratic primary campaign in 2016, observers, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, have come to expect that the Democratic primary campaign of 2020 will be nasty, acrimonious, protracted, and unpleasant. And much of the blame for the unfortunate state of the Democratic primary can be assigned squarely to the Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, and his supporters.
Sanders has always been a contentious, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous loudmouth with a no-compromise “my way or the highway” attitude toward politics. Worse, Gospodin Sanders has always attracted to his campaigns similarly loudmouthed, sharp-elbowed, self-righteous, contentious, misogynistic, borderline racist, redeless, followers, the American equivalent to the interwar European street toughs who made the continent safe for fascism between 1922 and 1939.
What a contrast to the Democratic primary campaign in 2008!
In 2008, the last campaign before 2016 in which the presidency was open, i.e., in which the incumbent was constitutionally inhibited from running for a third term, the Democratic primary campaign, for all of the sometimes unfortunate jabs exchanged between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, was fought in a civil fashion between two adversaries who recognized that when the sound and the fury were over, both rivals were still Democrats, both rivals still had policy positions that merited serious discussion, and both rivals still held each other in a certain level of regard. And when the primary campaign was over, Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful candidate, made speed to throw her support and that of her loyalists followers behind Barack Obama, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President.
Not so, not so at all in 2016. Again, the presidency was open and the incumbent constitutionally inhibited from seeking election to a further term. Bernard Sanders, who was and is not a member of the Democratic Party, mounted a hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party, which foolishly allowed him to run in their primary. The jabs and the agitprop from the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton, the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, began almost immediately.
It became very clear that Gospodin Sanders despised Sec. Clinton at a visceral, personal, deeply misogynistic level. Moreover, his foot soldiers, never inclined to think things through or to tolerate any criticism of their Dear Leader, made haste to accuse Sec. Clinton of the same enormities that Donald Trump and his supporters were eager to belabor her with. Worse, some of Sanders’s followers eagerly reached into their worn-out grab-bag and pulled out the thought-terminating cliché of anti-Semitism, by which they proposed to shut down any criticism of Gospodin Sanders.
Anyone with any memory of the 2016 campaign will recall the demonstrations orchestrated by the Sanders campaign against Sec. Clinton almost everywhere she appeared. Add to that the crude sexist manner in which the secretary, and her daughter were routinely travestied, usually in the coarsest of terms, on social media, together with the ill concealed preferential option of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for Sanders and Trump.
Moreover, Sec. Clinton was routinely abused by both Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers for the 1994 crime bill in which she had no vote, as well as for somehow being responsible for her husband’s extramarital affair. Additionally, one should recall the riot at the Nevada caucuses orchestrated by Sanders and his campaign, together with the Sanders-organized demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, even after it had become clear that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee of the Democratic Party for president in 2016.
Throughout the entire primary campaign, Bernard Sanders and his redeless, feckless followers waged war against Hillary Rodham Clinton as if they were the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy waging a desperate rearguard action against the advancing Americans. And when Hillary’s nomination had become inevitable, Bernard Sanders and his followers insisted on behaving like angry Japanese holdouts, marooned on Pacific islands such as Saipan. Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, taking pot shots at the Americans.
One need not burden the record with a recapitulation of the behavior of the Bernie-or-bust bitter-enders, who, the evidence has now begun to show, were eager to share talking points – many of them generated by Julian Assange and the Russian State-- and opposition research against Sec. Clinton with the Donald Trump campaign. Put bluntly, Gospodin Sanders and his feckless, redeless followers behaved like sore losers determined to throw the election to a Republican out of sheer spite. Between 12 percent and 26 percent of Sanders primary voters cast their general election ballots for Donald Trump. The “Bernie-or-bust” vote gave Donald Trump his narrow margin of victory in the electoral college. In doing so, the Bernie-or-bust voters managed to cast the word “progressive” in distinct malodor among loyal Democrats.
Now, with the 2020 primary cycle starting to shake out, with the second and third tier candidates dropping out of the race or giving indications of an intent to drop out of the race, Sanders’s Birkenstock Bolsheviks are at it again. They began the campaign season by attacking former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. When O’Rourke’s poll numbers began slipping, and it was obvious that he no longer was a first-tier candidate, Sanders and his followers began lobbing their bombs at Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and at the front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. As was the case in 2016, the nastiness on social media, particularly the nastiness directed against Joe Biden, has become a subject of conversation throughout the political world.
Now, indications are that Sanders, always one to burn an asset that may be standing in his way, is about to launch an all-out war against Elizabeth Warren. We know that Sanders himself will question the Massachusetts Senator’s “purity,” to say nothing of casting a blind eye upon the inevitable efforts by his supporters to question Sen. Warren’s Native American heritage. And inevitably, Sanders’s followers will avail themselves of Trump’s talking points to attack a woman with far more education and qualifications than Bernard Sanders, with his undergraduate political science degree, will ever have. And when they savage a woman who is by far Bernard Sanders’ better and superior, it is almost ineluctable that David Sirota or some other Sandernista operative somewhere will avail him- or herself of the Trumpian racial slur “Pocahontas.”
Now bluntly, there is absolutely no reason that the Democratic primaries should become so ugly. But Bernard Sanders is a profoundly ugly man, just as is Donald J. Trump. Of course, both Sanders and Trump are interlopers in their respective parties. Sanders, the unsuccessful interloper in the Democratic Party, is still doing a burn over the fact that he got pwned by ... a girl! No doubt, if we were unlucky enough to see a Sanders presidency come 2021, he would practice the same kind of politics of grievance and resentment that we have seen during these last two and a half years from Donald Trump himself.
Indeed, as much a Sanders was an interloper — albeit unsuccessful — in the Democratic Party, Trump’s efforts to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, with the help of the Russian state and American domestic Russian assets, was entirely successful.
Now Donald Trump himself and the Republican Party which he has taken over, have no guiding set of principles, no defined Weltanchauung or ideology beyond the crude evangelical Protestant Nonconformist mass line which Trump and the Republican Party peddle eagerly to an uninformed, racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, base which eagerly laps up whatever sewage of Sodom Trump and his acolytes see fit to spew before them.
The crude mass line Trump and his acolytes have foisted on the American public resembles nothing quite so much as that seen in the United Kingdom and on the continent of Europe during the years between the Great War and World War II. Indeed, the similarity between the Trump and Sanders efforts is that both of them bear an altogether unfortunate resemblance to a whole clutch of “personalist” right wing authoritarian political movements and their “leaders,” among others, Charles Maurras’s Action Française, Jákfai Gömbös Gyula’s Hungarian Unity Party, Szálasi Ferenc’s Hungarian Arrow Cross, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde’s Spanish Falangists, Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP, Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, Ante Pavelić’s Croatian Ustaše, and the risible British Union of Fascists under their popinjay leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Every one of these politicians represented, in a European context, what has been referred to in Latin America as personalismo, defined by Britannica.com as “the practice of glorifying a single leader, with the resulting subordination of the interests of political parties and ideologies and of constitutional government.” In the United States, both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders reflect a kind of emergent personalismo.
Specifically, we have seen how both Trump and Sanders have called frequent (and fraudulent) attention to the alleged size of their rallies. Indeed, more than one commentator has called attention to the use by the Sanders campaign of an image of a May Day March in Havana that the Sanders campaign falsely captioned as depicting a Bernard Sanders rally in California. Similarly, the Trump campaign consistently overestimated the size of its own rallies; how can one forget the epic Trumpertantrum that ensued when the White House was caught grossly overestimating the size of Donald Trump’s inaugural address crowd? And as much as both Dear Leader Bernard Sanders and Maximum Leader Donald Trump were accustomed to overstating their crowd sizes, both men were equally wont to attack the news media for reporting accurately on their usually much smaller than advertised crowd sizes.
Of course, if crowd sizes, and Trunp's and Sanders's insecurity about them, are a reflection of personalismo, the almost cultish devotion of their redeless followers is another indication of the dangerous cancer of personalismo in American politics. Trump’s votaries tend to be older, whiter, and less educated. Sanders’s cultists, by contrast, tend to be in the 18-35 cohort. Many of them possess undergraduate degrees, often in traditional liberal arts fields. And whereas Trump voters tend to be nostalgic for the dispensations obtaining in, say, the 1950s or early 1960s, Sanders voters tend to pine for some kind of notional radical, transformatiional “revolution.” Neither contingent has much tolerance for, or interest in, the views of the other side. Both contingents claim that they are being victimized and misunderstood by some sort of nebulous “establishment.” Finally, both share in common an altogether dismissive Weltanchauung that finds expression in a condescending, combative, confrontational tone.
The similarities between Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have been described and discussed too often to require further repetition here. The similarities between the followers of Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump have likewise been discussed and described too often to require further recapitulation here. Rather, the issue for loyal Democrats, those of us who would vote for a Yellow Dog before voting for a Republican, is to understand that we may well be confronted with a Hobson’s choice: Bernard Sanders is not enough of a yellow dog to deserve our vote. Bernard Sanders, who, like Ralph Nader before him in 2000, helped deliver the 2016 election to Donald Trump, is no Democrat.
Instead, Bernard Sanders is still carrying a torch for the Soviet Union, which landed on the ash heap of history a generation ago. Unfortunately, that renders Mr. Sanders susceptible of use by a Russian state in the throes of an identity crisis. Does Russia want to be a constitutional democracy? Does Russia want to retreat to its Soviet past? Or does Russia want to clamp rose-colored glasses to its head and become a simulacrum of what it was when St. Nicholas II the Passion-Bearer was Emperor? Until Russia makes a decision to commit to liberal democratic values, Russia will be our enemy. Right now, we have two men who are either ideologically connected to the Russian State (Bernard Sanders) or beholden to it in a way that compromises them and opens them up to manipulation and treason (Donald Trump).
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger!
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
STRAIGHTEN UP AND FLY RIGHT, DAMMIT!
Democrats need to get their shit together. Democrats need to straighten up, fly right, and stop sniping at one another. Democrats need to get over purity tests, virtue signaling, and holier than thou posturing. And they need to do it damn fast. Because, if we don’t straighten up and fly right, if we don’t embrace transactional pragmatism, and stop looking for utopia in a day, we will hand the 2020 election to Donald Trump, and we will ourselves responsible for the destruction of the American democratic project.
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Cathedral City, October 1, 2019 – as the hypertrophied 2020 Democratic campaign continues its endless, agonizing march to the election, we are starting to see the Democrats live down to the traditional stereotype of the Democratic Party as being a group of people with an amazing propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Notwithstanding the unexpectedly strong performance of the Party in the midterm elections of 2018, observers have already begun to note signs of fission within the Democratic body politic. We seem to be setting ourselves up for electoral defeat; we seem to be living down to the stereotype of Democrats as being weak kneed ideologues who would prefer to accept defeat with our “principles” intact, rather than achieve victory with dirt on our faces, having arrived first at the finish line hot, stinking, and bathed in sweat. In other words, Democrats aren’t willing to get dirty to win, and that is a serious problem for this Party.
Pragmatic Democrats (and there are more of us then is generally realized,) understand that this nation stands at the brink of an irrepressible conflict. Will this nation redeem once again the solemn promise made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth?” If we are to preserve the American project in democracy, this great experiment in representative self-government, this living political proof of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s observation that “Nothing great or living can be done except where [people] are self-governed and independent,” quoted in W. Ward, Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman 367, (London, 1912) we must be prepared to do more than clutch our beads at the crimes and misdemeanors of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization that the Republican Party has become.
What, then, must we of The Democracy do to save our darkened and desecrated country? We cannot content ourselves with polite discussions or debates with the party opposite. We must be prepared to wage all out political war to ensure that our view, our correct view, of what America is, can be, and should be, prevails. Yet, by the same token, we must also understand the importance of maintaining what Kaiser Wilhelm II described as eine Burgfrieden, a “truce within [our own] fortress.” Unfortunately, Democrats are piss poor at maintaining anything resembling Burgfrieden.
Instead of embracing Burgfrieden, Democrats turn and embrace the Chinese concept of luan, or chaos, indulging in all manner of internecine battles, including purity testing, virtue signaling, and vicious heresy hunting within the Party. Not only do Democrats want to fall in love, placing their candidates on pedestals and reacting like jilted lovers when their candidates prove to be human beings with feet of clay, (as opposed to Republicans, who are content to fall in line), but Democrats have an unfortunate tendency to take a pugnacious, censorious, condescending, and confrontational tone toward allies deemed guilty of demonstrating insufficient fealty.
During the 2016 campaign, I fell out with a substantial number of erstwhile friends who had declared their undying fealty and allegiance to Bernard Sanders. I, on the other hand, was a strong supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. As the 2016 Democratic primary moved toward its ineluctable conclusion, i.e., as Hillary racked up a prohibitive advantage in delegates, the followers of Bernie Sanders reacted with the same kind of desperate, Saipan/Iwo Jima/Okinawa anger that had animated the desperate, doomed, Japanese defenders of those island outposts.
For example, I participated in an unbelievably acrimonious exchange of emails with someone who had been a friend of mine for 25 years. His emails became so misogynistic, so conspiracy-theory-driven, and so borderline racist that I finally stopped responding to them.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this phenomenon was limited to the 2016 campaign. It is not. Fellow activists tell me that they have fallen out with old, much cherished friends, not merely over differences of opinion about whom to support among the Democratic candidates in 2020, but also over how Democrats ought to wage and prosecute a successful campaign against That Fascist Donald Trump.
Of course, let me throw my own bomb in this discussion. I believe that the 2020 presidential campaign is an existential test and turning point for the American experiment in representative democracy. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his Message to Congress of December 1, 1862,
Lincoln wrote those words against the background of the greatest existential struggle in our history. The unwillingness of the American South to accept the legitimacy of Lincoln’s election had led to the worst act of organized treason ever perpetrated in American history. And not satisfied with throwing down the gauntlet, the South had decided to appeal to violence to make its case, and the nation was riven in twain by the Civil War the “Confederacy” had inflicted upon it.
Now, nearly 160 years later, we find ourselves trembling on the brink of an irrepressible conflict, in which it is reasonable to believe that the incumbent president of the United States and his followers, who have seen fit to break every rule of civilized political behavior, are meditating the use of violence to ensure their continued political power.
In short, America is sliding toward fascism. It is not necessary to believe that Donald Trump will, himself, be the Fascist dictator who emerges at the end of the process. Some disciple of Donald Trump, some younger man, may very well be preparing himself in the wings against the day when Donald Trump suffers a stroke or coronary episode.
Democrats need to stop chiding one another for being willing to say such things. We must stop pooh-poohing one another for believing that fascism is a real possibility in this country and being determined to resist it by Any. Means. Necessary.
Therefore, when I suggest that Democrats need to start fighting dirty, like street fighters, I’m not suggesting such a thing simply to be provocative or to cause some of my timorous Democrats to clutch their pearls and emit manifest signs of the vapors.
We Democrats need to stop accepting uncritically the well-intentioned, but dangerous counsel of Michelle Obama, a woman whom I otherwise admire tremendously.
When Michelle said “when they go low, we go high,” I don’t think she intended her statement as anything more than an aspirational call to Democrats to seek to make America a better place. Unfortunately, it has become a formula for abject and unconditional surrender. We can go as high as we would like once we have achieved a victory that can only be won through fighting dirty.
We did not secure victory in the Second World War by negotiating politely with the Axis Powers. We defeated Japan, Germany, and Italy the old-fashioned way; we kicked their ass, nuked the Japanese, and kept on kicking their asses until they begged us to stop. We met them in the gutter, we fought them there, and then, in an act of magnanimity without parallel in the history of the world, we raised them up, we gave them the gift of freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and yes, we went low to make it possible for the entire world to go high.
But before we can go high, we have to win the political war we are prosecuting. Nothing makes me madder then to be remonstrated by Democrats for being “tiresome” when I repeat a mantra for victory riffed from the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: they pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
The Republicans fight this way. And when they do, and we insist on some kind of schoolmarmish purity, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as ineluctably as Judas opening the gates of the garden of Gethsemane to the Temple guards, before Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss. We must adopt the Republican style of combat, the way Patton and Montgomery adopted the fighting style of Erwin Rommel, the way Chester Nimitz adopted the wolf pack submarine tactics of Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz to break the Japanese Navy and merchant marine throughout the Pacific.
For Democrats to fall into squabbling with one another, reproving one another, remonstrating with one another, or attacking each other in vicious heresy hunts over who is more pure, who is more progressive, who is a better Democrat, is an assured recipe not only for the destruction of our own party, but for the destruction of the American democratic project as well. We are in fact the oldest still-extant political party in the world. We have survived across 200 years because what we stand for is nothing less than democracy itself. And that is something worth fighting for.
So, straighten up and fly right, Democrats!
They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a pugnacious, combative, "Yellow Dog" Democrat who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He misses the days when the Party could discipline its officeholders and activists. The views set forth herein are his own, not the views of any timorous, self-sabotaging, Stockholm syndrome "Democrat."
--------------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, October 1, 2019 – as the hypertrophied 2020 Democratic campaign continues its endless, agonizing march to the election, we are starting to see the Democrats live down to the traditional stereotype of the Democratic Party as being a group of people with an amazing propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Notwithstanding the unexpectedly strong performance of the Party in the midterm elections of 2018, observers have already begun to note signs of fission within the Democratic body politic. We seem to be setting ourselves up for electoral defeat; we seem to be living down to the stereotype of Democrats as being weak kneed ideologues who would prefer to accept defeat with our “principles” intact, rather than achieve victory with dirt on our faces, having arrived first at the finish line hot, stinking, and bathed in sweat. In other words, Democrats aren’t willing to get dirty to win, and that is a serious problem for this Party.
Pragmatic Democrats (and there are more of us then is generally realized,) understand that this nation stands at the brink of an irrepressible conflict. Will this nation redeem once again the solemn promise made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth?” If we are to preserve the American project in democracy, this great experiment in representative self-government, this living political proof of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s observation that “Nothing great or living can be done except where [people] are self-governed and independent,” quoted in W. Ward, Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman 367, (London, 1912) we must be prepared to do more than clutch our beads at the crimes and misdemeanors of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization that the Republican Party has become.
What, then, must we of The Democracy do to save our darkened and desecrated country? We cannot content ourselves with polite discussions or debates with the party opposite. We must be prepared to wage all out political war to ensure that our view, our correct view, of what America is, can be, and should be, prevails. Yet, by the same token, we must also understand the importance of maintaining what Kaiser Wilhelm II described as eine Burgfrieden, a “truce within [our own] fortress.” Unfortunately, Democrats are piss poor at maintaining anything resembling Burgfrieden.
Instead of embracing Burgfrieden, Democrats turn and embrace the Chinese concept of luan, or chaos, indulging in all manner of internecine battles, including purity testing, virtue signaling, and vicious heresy hunting within the Party. Not only do Democrats want to fall in love, placing their candidates on pedestals and reacting like jilted lovers when their candidates prove to be human beings with feet of clay, (as opposed to Republicans, who are content to fall in line), but Democrats have an unfortunate tendency to take a pugnacious, censorious, condescending, and confrontational tone toward allies deemed guilty of demonstrating insufficient fealty.
During the 2016 campaign, I fell out with a substantial number of erstwhile friends who had declared their undying fealty and allegiance to Bernard Sanders. I, on the other hand, was a strong supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. As the 2016 Democratic primary moved toward its ineluctable conclusion, i.e., as Hillary racked up a prohibitive advantage in delegates, the followers of Bernie Sanders reacted with the same kind of desperate, Saipan/Iwo Jima/Okinawa anger that had animated the desperate, doomed, Japanese defenders of those island outposts.
For example, I participated in an unbelievably acrimonious exchange of emails with someone who had been a friend of mine for 25 years. His emails became so misogynistic, so conspiracy-theory-driven, and so borderline racist that I finally stopped responding to them.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this phenomenon was limited to the 2016 campaign. It is not. Fellow activists tell me that they have fallen out with old, much cherished friends, not merely over differences of opinion about whom to support among the Democratic candidates in 2020, but also over how Democrats ought to wage and prosecute a successful campaign against That Fascist Donald Trump.
Of course, let me throw my own bomb in this discussion. I believe that the 2020 presidential campaign is an existential test and turning point for the American experiment in representative democracy. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his Message to Congress of December 1, 1862,
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Lincoln wrote those words against the background of the greatest existential struggle in our history. The unwillingness of the American South to accept the legitimacy of Lincoln’s election had led to the worst act of organized treason ever perpetrated in American history. And not satisfied with throwing down the gauntlet, the South had decided to appeal to violence to make its case, and the nation was riven in twain by the Civil War the “Confederacy” had inflicted upon it.
Now, nearly 160 years later, we find ourselves trembling on the brink of an irrepressible conflict, in which it is reasonable to believe that the incumbent president of the United States and his followers, who have seen fit to break every rule of civilized political behavior, are meditating the use of violence to ensure their continued political power.
In short, America is sliding toward fascism. It is not necessary to believe that Donald Trump will, himself, be the Fascist dictator who emerges at the end of the process. Some disciple of Donald Trump, some younger man, may very well be preparing himself in the wings against the day when Donald Trump suffers a stroke or coronary episode.
Democrats need to stop chiding one another for being willing to say such things. We must stop pooh-poohing one another for believing that fascism is a real possibility in this country and being determined to resist it by Any. Means. Necessary.
Therefore, when I suggest that Democrats need to start fighting dirty, like street fighters, I’m not suggesting such a thing simply to be provocative or to cause some of my timorous Democrats to clutch their pearls and emit manifest signs of the vapors.
We Democrats need to stop accepting uncritically the well-intentioned, but dangerous counsel of Michelle Obama, a woman whom I otherwise admire tremendously.
When Michelle said “when they go low, we go high,” I don’t think she intended her statement as anything more than an aspirational call to Democrats to seek to make America a better place. Unfortunately, it has become a formula for abject and unconditional surrender. We can go as high as we would like once we have achieved a victory that can only be won through fighting dirty.
We did not secure victory in the Second World War by negotiating politely with the Axis Powers. We defeated Japan, Germany, and Italy the old-fashioned way; we kicked their ass, nuked the Japanese, and kept on kicking their asses until they begged us to stop. We met them in the gutter, we fought them there, and then, in an act of magnanimity without parallel in the history of the world, we raised them up, we gave them the gift of freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and yes, we went low to make it possible for the entire world to go high.
But before we can go high, we have to win the political war we are prosecuting. Nothing makes me madder then to be remonstrated by Democrats for being “tiresome” when I repeat a mantra for victory riffed from the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: they pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
The Republicans fight this way. And when they do, and we insist on some kind of schoolmarmish purity, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as ineluctably as Judas opening the gates of the garden of Gethsemane to the Temple guards, before Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss. We must adopt the Republican style of combat, the way Patton and Montgomery adopted the fighting style of Erwin Rommel, the way Chester Nimitz adopted the wolf pack submarine tactics of Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz to break the Japanese Navy and merchant marine throughout the Pacific.
For Democrats to fall into squabbling with one another, reproving one another, remonstrating with one another, or attacking each other in vicious heresy hunts over who is more pure, who is more progressive, who is a better Democrat, is an assured recipe not only for the destruction of our own party, but for the destruction of the American democratic project as well. We are in fact the oldest still-extant political party in the world. We have survived across 200 years because what we stand for is nothing less than democracy itself. And that is something worth fighting for.
So, straighten up and fly right, Democrats!
They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a pugnacious, combative, "Yellow Dog" Democrat who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He misses the days when the Party could discipline its officeholders and activists. The views set forth herein are his own, not the views of any timorous, self-sabotaging, Stockholm syndrome "Democrat."
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
THE DEFECATION HITS THE VENTILATION
Summary: The shit is about to hit the fan in Washington City. As an increasingly unstable Donald Trump is more and more found to have abused the powers of his office in an attempt to gain political leverage against the Democratic front runner and former Vice President Joe Biden, the tide has begun to turn toward impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had widely been perceived as unalterably opposed to impeachment, now seems to be moving slowly, surely, “with evident qualities of conduct, if not a part, toward the manifest purpose of the nation.” The announcement by the Speaker of a formal impeachment inquiry is a good first step.
But, the Democrats, always prepared to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, may very well let Trump slip away from them because of their ideological propensity for self-defeating behavior, for bringing, as sometime Republican strategist Rick Wilson has said, a soup ladle to a knife fight. Democrats need to reassess their partisan orthodoxy. When they go low, we don’t go high, pace Michelle Obama, rather, when they go low we meet them in the basement with a switchblade.
------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, September 24, 2019 -- If what we have been seeing in the news today and over the last couple of days is any indication, the defecation is about to hit the ventilation in the capital of the nation.
The latest in a string of scandals facing the Trump presidency appears to be doing a lot more than merely causing some passing agita in the Trump White House. This latest scandal, in which Trump has been implicated in attempting to bully the President of Ukraine into complicity in an effort to gain political leverage against Democratic front runner and former Vice President Joe Biden, seems to have been a metaphorical straw that, in Washington-speak, severely adversely affected the structural integrity of the dromedary’s spinal structure. We do not know yet whether this scandal will be the straw that really broke the camel's back, but we do know that as of this afternoon, it appears to be the thing that finally pushed the ever-cautious but ever-politically savvy Nancy Pelosi into going to her House Democratic caucus to propose a formal impeachment inquiry into the President of the United States.
Now it is beyond doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Donald Trump is the most corrupt, venal, compromised, “individual one” ever to occupy the office of president of the United States. He manages to make Chester Alan Arthur, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and Richard Milhous Nixon appear by comparison to be almost men of probity. Now Speaker Pelosi had been rightly cautious about proceeding with an impeachment inquiry on the state of the facts as they existed when Robert S. Mueller presented his report. Though many of us believed that the Mueller report constituted, at the very least, ample evidence of probable cause to believe that Donald Trump had committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” sufficient to justify impeachment proceedings, I, unlike many Democrats, believed that we needed to let “Miss Nancy,” as Speaker of the House, be in the driver’s seat. It’s easy for Democratic activists in the metaphorical provinces to insist upon precipitous action. It is easy for Democrats in the provinces to shout “off with his head,” or “lock him up!”
But “Miss Nancy” is a cleverer politician than most people give her credit for being. “Miss Nancy” has not risen to the Speakership of the House not once, but twice, without knowing how to play the often Byzantine games of Capitol Hill politics without placing herself or her Democratic caucus at unreasonable risk. “Miss Nancy” is a master of the art of war in much the same way that Sun Tzu mastered it 2500 years ago during China’s “Warring States” period. The Speaker understood the importance, as the Taoists put it, of watchful waiting. Coming as she does out of the politics of San Francisco, much of which is influenced by the Chinese Six Companies, Miss Nancy understands the Taoist concept of wu wei, a "technique by means which the one who practices it may gain enhanced control of human affairs." In short, the Speaker has taught us a master class in the art of doing nothing, by which everything is done.
However, before we get lost in the weeds of Chinese philosophy of the Spring and Autumn period, let us return to more immediate political considerations. While practicing her wu wei, Madam Speaker had, in all likelihood, an understanding that sooner or later, The Donald would do something so breathtakingly stupid, so butt dumb, as my West Texas grandfather used to say, that he would deliver himself into her hands and those of the Democratic caucus in the House, while at the same time putting Republican senators in the position California politics calls a “Drill:” a situation where no matter how you vote, or what position you take on a given issue, you’re bound to piss off at least one powerful constituency that you can’t afford to alienate. And while The Donald was, depending on what metaphor one chooses, either shooting himself in the foot or cutting his own throat, there was Miss Nancy, sitting silently on the sidelines, possessing herself with perfect equanimity.
And as Miss Nancy has waited on the sidelines in perfect equanimity, sustained by the teaching attributed to Sun Tzu that if one waits by the river long enough, the bodies of one’s enemies will float by, exactly such a thing has begun to happen. As a veritable parade of Trump flunkies, sycophants, and hangers-on, including sometime campaign chair Paul Manafort, ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn, ex-campaign flacks George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, disciplined attorneys Michael Cohen and Alex van der Zwaan, has trooped into and out of various federal courthouses to face a series of federal criminal charges, the Speaker and her caucus had to do little but wait for the evidence to continue accumulating.
Yet, at some point, even so suave a political operator as Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, raised among the full contact, no holds barred, politics of Baltimore City and San Francisco, had to realize that, to overwork a weather metaphor, the winds had shifted and the tide had turned. Put another way, the overwhelming evidence Miss Nancy had declared she needed to see before coming around to supporting impeachment proceedings has now manifested itself. The coming days will see whether the Democrats can find their courage, put the Republicans in the Senate through a Drill, and lay the groundwork for driving The Donald the hell out of the White House.
* * * * *
Of course, while, or if, the Democrats and Justin Amash are laying the infrastructure for the constitutional overthrow of Donald J. Trump, they should also be prepared to acknowledge, to themselves and to the country at large, that the time may be at hand to face up to the necessity of a clear eyed reappraisal and possible rehabilitation of the legacy of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
It is long been a steadfast article of received orthodoxy among American liberals and on the American left that anything having to do with Joe McCarthy was saturated with unspeakable right wing evil. For years, Democrats and leftists alike inculcated their posterity with the idea that McCarthy had been wrong, and that even to suggest that the United States might be the target of Soviet and now Russian meddling, agitprop, and information warfare was inadmissible, wrong, and simply unacceptable.
As recently as 2017, one who suggested that we and our public institutions of self-government were under attack from Russia was to invoke pooh-poohing, tut-tutting, and assurances — usually uttered in a patronizing and superior tone — that any such talk was “McCarthyism.”
Indeed, so well known was the thralldom of the Democratic Party to its orthodoxy about Joe McCarthy that our enemies, both foreign and domestic, were able to use the invocation of “McCarthyism” to evoke what amounted to a Pavlovian, conditioned, self-sabotaging response for a great many people on the left side of the aisle. When Donald Trump was whining about how “unfairly” he had been treated by the American intelligence community, he invoked the tiresome trope of “McCarthyism.” When Julian Assange was engaging in his self-aggrandizing, Russia-assisting, behavior from his shit-smeared bedroom in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, he frequently invoked the trope of “McCarthyism” to try to deflect scrutiny of his wrongful conduct and to excuse his crimes.
Both Trump and Assange were, and remain, convinced that any invocation of the McCarthy trope would cause Democrats to curl up in a ball, wet themselves, and float away on their own fear pee. Now, many Democrats, in fact far too many Democrats, remain willing to do just that. These Democrats continue to pooh-pooh the existence of Russian active measures against the United States, and they will tut-tut and dismiss — in those patronizing and superior tones to which they are so well accustomed — us Democrats who have got over our fear of being called McCarthyite.
We Democrats who think the salvation of the country is important, and who are flatly unwilling to go down without a fight, are willing, when the Republicans go low, to meet them in the basement with a switchblade. In that regard, we are different from those Democrats who are willing to accept defeat, as long as their precious principles are intact. We fighting Democrats are willing to own up to the importance of a nuanced reappraisal of McCarthy’s legacy.
For years, prevailing Democratic and left orthodoxy postulated that there was no real cause for worry during the 1950s. That orthodoxy denied the reality of Soviet subversion. It denied that the Rosenbergs were guilty; it denied that Alger Hiss was guilty; it denied that the Soviets were engaged in active measures of any kind against the United States. We Democrats need to discard that orthodoxy. We need to be forthrightly the Party of national security.
Moreover, as much as we, the Democratic Party, need forthrightly to position ourselves as the Party of national security, we also need to be willing to countenance investigations of subversion, foreign and domestic, at every level. We need to look carefully at the behavior of the Republican national committee. We need to investigate the crap out of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the fashion in which Facebook turned a blind eye to massive and repeated ad buys from Kremlin-linked foreign entities while Zuckerberg pooh-poohed the possibility of Russian interference, and Facebook’s flirtation with Cambridge Analytica.
William Barr, Mike Pompeo, and the rest of the Trump cabinet should be investigated and interrogated before Congress. The attorneys in Donald Trump’s orbit should be investigated by their jurisdictions of licensure and subject to professional discipline up to, and including, disbarment.
Finally, since it is so terrifyingly obvious that one of our major political parties has been playing footsie with the bad guys, it may well be time to revive, either under that name or some other, the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a standalone committee, and not as a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. It will take a dedicated committee of the House, staffed and resourced as such, to get to the bottom of the corruption, the malfeasance, and the treason of which Donald J. Trump and his administration are so manifestly guilty.
Speaker Pelosi’s announcement today of a formal impeachment inquiry is a good first step. Every journey of 1000 miles begins with a first step. The salvation of America must be undertaken.
Now.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own. Any Democrat who wants to pooh-pooh his views is welcome to do so, at the acknowledged risk of being belabored upside the head by a cast-iron skillet.
But, the Democrats, always prepared to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, may very well let Trump slip away from them because of their ideological propensity for self-defeating behavior, for bringing, as sometime Republican strategist Rick Wilson has said, a soup ladle to a knife fight. Democrats need to reassess their partisan orthodoxy. When they go low, we don’t go high, pace Michelle Obama, rather, when they go low we meet them in the basement with a switchblade.
------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, September 24, 2019 -- If what we have been seeing in the news today and over the last couple of days is any indication, the defecation is about to hit the ventilation in the capital of the nation.
The latest in a string of scandals facing the Trump presidency appears to be doing a lot more than merely causing some passing agita in the Trump White House. This latest scandal, in which Trump has been implicated in attempting to bully the President of Ukraine into complicity in an effort to gain political leverage against Democratic front runner and former Vice President Joe Biden, seems to have been a metaphorical straw that, in Washington-speak, severely adversely affected the structural integrity of the dromedary’s spinal structure. We do not know yet whether this scandal will be the straw that really broke the camel's back, but we do know that as of this afternoon, it appears to be the thing that finally pushed the ever-cautious but ever-politically savvy Nancy Pelosi into going to her House Democratic caucus to propose a formal impeachment inquiry into the President of the United States.
Now it is beyond doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Donald Trump is the most corrupt, venal, compromised, “individual one” ever to occupy the office of president of the United States. He manages to make Chester Alan Arthur, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and Richard Milhous Nixon appear by comparison to be almost men of probity. Now Speaker Pelosi had been rightly cautious about proceeding with an impeachment inquiry on the state of the facts as they existed when Robert S. Mueller presented his report. Though many of us believed that the Mueller report constituted, at the very least, ample evidence of probable cause to believe that Donald Trump had committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” sufficient to justify impeachment proceedings, I, unlike many Democrats, believed that we needed to let “Miss Nancy,” as Speaker of the House, be in the driver’s seat. It’s easy for Democratic activists in the metaphorical provinces to insist upon precipitous action. It is easy for Democrats in the provinces to shout “off with his head,” or “lock him up!”
But “Miss Nancy” is a cleverer politician than most people give her credit for being. “Miss Nancy” has not risen to the Speakership of the House not once, but twice, without knowing how to play the often Byzantine games of Capitol Hill politics without placing herself or her Democratic caucus at unreasonable risk. “Miss Nancy” is a master of the art of war in much the same way that Sun Tzu mastered it 2500 years ago during China’s “Warring States” period. The Speaker understood the importance, as the Taoists put it, of watchful waiting. Coming as she does out of the politics of San Francisco, much of which is influenced by the Chinese Six Companies, Miss Nancy understands the Taoist concept of wu wei, a "technique by means which the one who practices it may gain enhanced control of human affairs." In short, the Speaker has taught us a master class in the art of doing nothing, by which everything is done.
However, before we get lost in the weeds of Chinese philosophy of the Spring and Autumn period, let us return to more immediate political considerations. While practicing her wu wei, Madam Speaker had, in all likelihood, an understanding that sooner or later, The Donald would do something so breathtakingly stupid, so butt dumb, as my West Texas grandfather used to say, that he would deliver himself into her hands and those of the Democratic caucus in the House, while at the same time putting Republican senators in the position California politics calls a “Drill:” a situation where no matter how you vote, or what position you take on a given issue, you’re bound to piss off at least one powerful constituency that you can’t afford to alienate. And while The Donald was, depending on what metaphor one chooses, either shooting himself in the foot or cutting his own throat, there was Miss Nancy, sitting silently on the sidelines, possessing herself with perfect equanimity.
And as Miss Nancy has waited on the sidelines in perfect equanimity, sustained by the teaching attributed to Sun Tzu that if one waits by the river long enough, the bodies of one’s enemies will float by, exactly such a thing has begun to happen. As a veritable parade of Trump flunkies, sycophants, and hangers-on, including sometime campaign chair Paul Manafort, ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn, ex-campaign flacks George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, disciplined attorneys Michael Cohen and Alex van der Zwaan, has trooped into and out of various federal courthouses to face a series of federal criminal charges, the Speaker and her caucus had to do little but wait for the evidence to continue accumulating.
Yet, at some point, even so suave a political operator as Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, raised among the full contact, no holds barred, politics of Baltimore City and San Francisco, had to realize that, to overwork a weather metaphor, the winds had shifted and the tide had turned. Put another way, the overwhelming evidence Miss Nancy had declared she needed to see before coming around to supporting impeachment proceedings has now manifested itself. The coming days will see whether the Democrats can find their courage, put the Republicans in the Senate through a Drill, and lay the groundwork for driving The Donald the hell out of the White House.
* * * * *
Of course, while, or if, the Democrats and Justin Amash are laying the infrastructure for the constitutional overthrow of Donald J. Trump, they should also be prepared to acknowledge, to themselves and to the country at large, that the time may be at hand to face up to the necessity of a clear eyed reappraisal and possible rehabilitation of the legacy of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
It is long been a steadfast article of received orthodoxy among American liberals and on the American left that anything having to do with Joe McCarthy was saturated with unspeakable right wing evil. For years, Democrats and leftists alike inculcated their posterity with the idea that McCarthy had been wrong, and that even to suggest that the United States might be the target of Soviet and now Russian meddling, agitprop, and information warfare was inadmissible, wrong, and simply unacceptable.
As recently as 2017, one who suggested that we and our public institutions of self-government were under attack from Russia was to invoke pooh-poohing, tut-tutting, and assurances — usually uttered in a patronizing and superior tone — that any such talk was “McCarthyism.”
Indeed, so well known was the thralldom of the Democratic Party to its orthodoxy about Joe McCarthy that our enemies, both foreign and domestic, were able to use the invocation of “McCarthyism” to evoke what amounted to a Pavlovian, conditioned, self-sabotaging response for a great many people on the left side of the aisle. When Donald Trump was whining about how “unfairly” he had been treated by the American intelligence community, he invoked the tiresome trope of “McCarthyism.” When Julian Assange was engaging in his self-aggrandizing, Russia-assisting, behavior from his shit-smeared bedroom in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, he frequently invoked the trope of “McCarthyism” to try to deflect scrutiny of his wrongful conduct and to excuse his crimes.
Both Trump and Assange were, and remain, convinced that any invocation of the McCarthy trope would cause Democrats to curl up in a ball, wet themselves, and float away on their own fear pee. Now, many Democrats, in fact far too many Democrats, remain willing to do just that. These Democrats continue to pooh-pooh the existence of Russian active measures against the United States, and they will tut-tut and dismiss — in those patronizing and superior tones to which they are so well accustomed — us Democrats who have got over our fear of being called McCarthyite.
We Democrats who think the salvation of the country is important, and who are flatly unwilling to go down without a fight, are willing, when the Republicans go low, to meet them in the basement with a switchblade. In that regard, we are different from those Democrats who are willing to accept defeat, as long as their precious principles are intact. We fighting Democrats are willing to own up to the importance of a nuanced reappraisal of McCarthy’s legacy.
For years, prevailing Democratic and left orthodoxy postulated that there was no real cause for worry during the 1950s. That orthodoxy denied the reality of Soviet subversion. It denied that the Rosenbergs were guilty; it denied that Alger Hiss was guilty; it denied that the Soviets were engaged in active measures of any kind against the United States. We Democrats need to discard that orthodoxy. We need to be forthrightly the Party of national security.
Moreover, as much as we, the Democratic Party, need forthrightly to position ourselves as the Party of national security, we also need to be willing to countenance investigations of subversion, foreign and domestic, at every level. We need to look carefully at the behavior of the Republican national committee. We need to investigate the crap out of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the fashion in which Facebook turned a blind eye to massive and repeated ad buys from Kremlin-linked foreign entities while Zuckerberg pooh-poohed the possibility of Russian interference, and Facebook’s flirtation with Cambridge Analytica.
William Barr, Mike Pompeo, and the rest of the Trump cabinet should be investigated and interrogated before Congress. The attorneys in Donald Trump’s orbit should be investigated by their jurisdictions of licensure and subject to professional discipline up to, and including, disbarment.
Finally, since it is so terrifyingly obvious that one of our major political parties has been playing footsie with the bad guys, it may well be time to revive, either under that name or some other, the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a standalone committee, and not as a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. It will take a dedicated committee of the House, staffed and resourced as such, to get to the bottom of the corruption, the malfeasance, and the treason of which Donald J. Trump and his administration are so manifestly guilty.
Speaker Pelosi’s announcement today of a formal impeachment inquiry is a good first step. Every journey of 1000 miles begins with a first step. The salvation of America must be undertaken.
Now.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own. Any Democrat who wants to pooh-pooh his views is welcome to do so, at the acknowledged risk of being belabored upside the head by a cast-iron skillet.
Friday, September 13, 2019
ATTACK OF THE BULLSHIT PEDDLERS: THE “PROGRESSIVE” ATTEMPT TO FABRICATE AN ANTI-BIDEN NARRATIVE.
Summary: Democrats, who can’t seem to stand prosperity, have foregathered to try to take out the front runner in the hypertrophied, hyperventilating, hyperbolic, Democratic primary campaign. The attempt to fabricate some kind of “Biden is racist/Biden is too old/Biden’s implosion is imminent,” narrative would be risible if it didn’t say such unfortunate things about a Democratic Party that does not seem to have the will to victory
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Like my close contemporaries Barack and Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris, I’m a late bloomer Boomer. Born toward the end of the baby boom generation which ran from 1947 through 1964 —and now, in the eyes of the supercilious millennials who make up the so-called progressive wing of my Democratic Party— teetering on the brink of antiquity, I find myself realizing that my frame of reference, my weltanschauung, if you will, is more similar to that of Joe Biden, the Obamas, and even that of Kamala Harris then it is to, say, my personal trainer, who was born in the 1990s.
Like Barack, Michelle, and Kamala, together with many other late bloomer boomers, I was experiencing of the not unmixed joys, if one may use such a word, of late adolescence and early adulthood when the digital revolution snuck up on us and mugged us. Those of us who were adolescents or young adults during those years in the late 1970s when the first personal computers had their advent, had spent our youth in a world very much like that of Joe Biden. When we wanted to send a message in writing, we either put pen to paper, we pecked it out on a typewriter --electric if we were lucky enough to have one, manual for most of us. We did our shopping either at brick-and-mortar stores or from the pages of a paper catalog which arrived at our domiciles courtesy of the United States Postal Service. When we wanted to listen to music on demand, we spun platters of vinyl on turntables, or, as the quondam Vice President might put it, on a record player. In my early adulthood, CDs were in their infancy and streaming audio was the stuff of science fiction, along with Captain Picard’s replicated tea, “Earl Grey, hot.”
The computers and devices on which all of us, even Boomers, depend, have largely changed our Boomer world. Unfortunately, the convenience afforded by our various devices has merely papered over a ravening gap between the generations. Indeed, Politico’s Ryan Lizza, writing the day before yesterday in Politico, observed that
Moreover,
The same objection has also been voiced by acerbic political commentator Bill Maher, who from his relative antiquity of 63, has made it fairly clear that he has little patience for the so-called woke left.
And if the Biden camp has felt a certain not unjustifiable disdain for the woke, millennial left, certain parts of that woke left have made no secret of their active loathing for Joe Biden and the moderate majority of the Democratic Party. For example, writing in Truthout not too long ago, woke left activist William Rivers Pitt (born in 1971) turned the quondam Vice President’s debate remark about record players into a racist screed apparently equal, in Pitt’s mind, to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Indeed, the largely Generation-X and millennial commentariat, smugly convinced of their own superiority to all those fusty old boomers and pre-boomers, and secure in their conviction of their own wokeness, has managed to do fairly well in creating a “but his gaffes” narrative of Joe Biden as a “fragile front runner,” and a doddering, superannuated, gaffe prone old man whose candidacy will inevitably collapse of its own age, its own inconsistencies, or its own un-wokeness.
Yet, what all the woke hipsters of Generation-X and the millennial cohort seem not to remember is a rather time-honored truth in politics, as much as in anything else, that youth, skill, and enthusiasm will be defeated by age and treachery. Much of the woke contingent, which, paradoxically enough, seems to profess a curious fondness and loyalty toward Bernard Sanders, the oldest candidate in the primary, seems to overlook the fact that the 40-plus voters who make up the majority of the Biden base are not looking for a candidate who will usher in enormous, transformative change in American society in the next four years. Rather, the 40-plus voters of the Biden base, having learned from bitter experience not to upset the apple cart, are looking for a candidate right now who can, in the words of one commentator of Boomer years, right the ship and get us out of the storm in which the antics of Donald Trump have placed us.
We don’t need, quite frankly, to be lectured by contingent of brats who have not yet acquired the wisdom or the understanding to realize that, as Bill Clinton, a Boomer of 73 now, noted, during his own 1992 primary campaign, that when selecting a standard-bearer, “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.” Older Democrats, accustomed to having had their asses kicked with the stolen election of 2000, the stolen election of 2004, and midterms and local elections around the country, have begun to feel a hell of a lot less need to “fall in love” with a candidate of absolutely unimpeachable purity on every conceivable issue. Democrats who have begun to see silver threads among the gold or the ebony have learned that sometimes the Rolling Stones were right, "you can't always get what you wanted, but you might find sometimes that you get what you need" if you're willing to hold your nose, swallow hard, and fall in line.
And while we’re still alive, we'll take the pragmatic option. We’ll opt for the candidate who doesn’t necessarily come trailing clouds of transformative, purist, glory. We’ll opt for the candidate with a history of experience; we’ll opt for the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief; will opt for the old guy who’s been around and yet who doesn’t insist on waving his finger in our face and shouting at us all the time, as that tiresome fellow Bernie Sanders is wont to do; while we are still alive, we who are teetering on the brink of an age range will opt for Joe Biden.
What we Boomer Democrats want, we Boomer Democrats who are teetering on the brink of old farthood, is for the Democratic Party to get its act together. We want the Democratic Party to recover what it had in 2008 and 2012, the will to victory. We're tired of being told our mettle is bred out, that we are to out of touch, that we are too "socialist," and that we don't have the temperament for the fight. Let's remember the words of the Sean Connery character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue."
We must be rude, partisan, unfair and hectoring to the Republicans, but we must have a truce within our own fortress.
And be damned to the woke left and their pretensions.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. At 392 (in coyote years), he is teetering on the brink of an age range, though AARP has been trying to recruit him since he was a mere stripling of 290.he makes no claim, and advances no pretension, to being particularly woke, just to being an old line yellow dog/coyote Democrat. Call him neoliberal, a corporate shill, or Republican-lite, and expect him to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is ready to hand. The views expressed herein are his own.
---------------------------------------
Like my close contemporaries Barack and Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris, I’m a late bloomer Boomer. Born toward the end of the baby boom generation which ran from 1947 through 1964 —and now, in the eyes of the supercilious millennials who make up the so-called progressive wing of my Democratic Party— teetering on the brink of antiquity, I find myself realizing that my frame of reference, my weltanschauung, if you will, is more similar to that of Joe Biden, the Obamas, and even that of Kamala Harris then it is to, say, my personal trainer, who was born in the 1990s.
Like Barack, Michelle, and Kamala, together with many other late bloomer boomers, I was experiencing of the not unmixed joys, if one may use such a word, of late adolescence and early adulthood when the digital revolution snuck up on us and mugged us. Those of us who were adolescents or young adults during those years in the late 1970s when the first personal computers had their advent, had spent our youth in a world very much like that of Joe Biden. When we wanted to send a message in writing, we either put pen to paper, we pecked it out on a typewriter --electric if we were lucky enough to have one, manual for most of us. We did our shopping either at brick-and-mortar stores or from the pages of a paper catalog which arrived at our domiciles courtesy of the United States Postal Service. When we wanted to listen to music on demand, we spun platters of vinyl on turntables, or, as the quondam Vice President might put it, on a record player. In my early adulthood, CDs were in their infancy and streaming audio was the stuff of science fiction, along with Captain Picard’s replicated tea, “Earl Grey, hot.”
The computers and devices on which all of us, even Boomers, depend, have largely changed our Boomer world. Unfortunately, the convenience afforded by our various devices has merely papered over a ravening gap between the generations. Indeed, Politico’s Ryan Lizza, writing the day before yesterday in Politico, observed that
To Biden’s advisers and allies, the gap between a press corps, as well as the wider online political class, that is largely in its twenties and thirties and a candidate who would be 78 at his Inaugural explains a lot about why the pundits and Twitter activists are so confounded by the former vice president’s resilience.
Moreover,
“The [press corps covering the Biden campaign] view this party as dominated by woke millennials and through the lens of coastal issues. They are products, increasingly, of fairly elite schools and they don’t talk to a lot of voters who don’t look and talk like them except their parents, who also tend to be similar to them. Occasionally they are shocked to learn they have relatives who voted for Donald Trump. And they were not on the ground in the Midwest primaries for governor races in 2018 in Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin where more moderate and older and more experienced candidates won against young cool left — often people of color — primary opponents.”
The same objection has also been voiced by acerbic political commentator Bill Maher, who from his relative antiquity of 63, has made it fairly clear that he has little patience for the so-called woke left.
And if the Biden camp has felt a certain not unjustifiable disdain for the woke, millennial left, certain parts of that woke left have made no secret of their active loathing for Joe Biden and the moderate majority of the Democratic Party. For example, writing in Truthout not too long ago, woke left activist William Rivers Pitt (born in 1971) turned the quondam Vice President’s debate remark about record players into a racist screed apparently equal, in Pitt’s mind, to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Indeed, the largely Generation-X and millennial commentariat, smugly convinced of their own superiority to all those fusty old boomers and pre-boomers, and secure in their conviction of their own wokeness, has managed to do fairly well in creating a “but his gaffes” narrative of Joe Biden as a “fragile front runner,” and a doddering, superannuated, gaffe prone old man whose candidacy will inevitably collapse of its own age, its own inconsistencies, or its own un-wokeness.
Yet, what all the woke hipsters of Generation-X and the millennial cohort seem not to remember is a rather time-honored truth in politics, as much as in anything else, that youth, skill, and enthusiasm will be defeated by age and treachery. Much of the woke contingent, which, paradoxically enough, seems to profess a curious fondness and loyalty toward Bernard Sanders, the oldest candidate in the primary, seems to overlook the fact that the 40-plus voters who make up the majority of the Biden base are not looking for a candidate who will usher in enormous, transformative change in American society in the next four years. Rather, the 40-plus voters of the Biden base, having learned from bitter experience not to upset the apple cart, are looking for a candidate right now who can, in the words of one commentator of Boomer years, right the ship and get us out of the storm in which the antics of Donald Trump have placed us.
We don’t need, quite frankly, to be lectured by contingent of brats who have not yet acquired the wisdom or the understanding to realize that, as Bill Clinton, a Boomer of 73 now, noted, during his own 1992 primary campaign, that when selecting a standard-bearer, “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.” Older Democrats, accustomed to having had their asses kicked with the stolen election of 2000, the stolen election of 2004, and midterms and local elections around the country, have begun to feel a hell of a lot less need to “fall in love” with a candidate of absolutely unimpeachable purity on every conceivable issue. Democrats who have begun to see silver threads among the gold or the ebony have learned that sometimes the Rolling Stones were right, "you can't always get what you wanted, but you might find sometimes that you get what you need" if you're willing to hold your nose, swallow hard, and fall in line.
And while we’re still alive, we'll take the pragmatic option. We’ll opt for the candidate who doesn’t necessarily come trailing clouds of transformative, purist, glory. We’ll opt for the candidate with a history of experience; we’ll opt for the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief; will opt for the old guy who’s been around and yet who doesn’t insist on waving his finger in our face and shouting at us all the time, as that tiresome fellow Bernie Sanders is wont to do; while we are still alive, we who are teetering on the brink of an age range will opt for Joe Biden.
What we Boomer Democrats want, we Boomer Democrats who are teetering on the brink of old farthood, is for the Democratic Party to get its act together. We want the Democratic Party to recover what it had in 2008 and 2012, the will to victory. We're tired of being told our mettle is bred out, that we are to out of touch, that we are too "socialist," and that we don't have the temperament for the fight. Let's remember the words of the Sean Connery character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue."
We must be rude, partisan, unfair and hectoring to the Republicans, but we must have a truce within our own fortress.
And be damned to the woke left and their pretensions.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. At 392 (in coyote years), he is teetering on the brink of an age range, though AARP has been trying to recruit him since he was a mere stripling of 290.he makes no claim, and advances no pretension, to being particularly woke, just to being an old line yellow dog/coyote Democrat. Call him neoliberal, a corporate shill, or Republican-lite, and expect him to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is ready to hand. The views expressed herein are his own.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
A WIND AGE, A WOLF AGE, A SWORD AGE, AN AX AGE: Why 9/11 Was More Like June 8, 793 than December 7, 1941.
Summary: 9/11 was not an attack like Pearl Harbor. Instead, it was more like the Viking raid on the island of Lindisfarne in June, 793. Since 9/11, the Roman West has been clenching its collective hands around the hilts of swords. Since 9/11, America has fallen into a more or less permanent state of hostilities; the very thought of peace has slipped away from us. Children who were toddlers when 9/11 happened are now serving second or subsequent deployments in Afghanistan. We have become mistrustful, distrustful, paranoid, and Balkanized. We have flung ourselves into the arms of the most dishonest and deceitful president in our history. We had not thought that even so large-scale a terrorist outrage as 9/11 could have undone so many, so badly, so completely
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Cathedral City, September 11, 2019 – Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it had become fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Such an analogy was tempting. After all, millions of Americans living on that day, my late father among them, could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack, much as my late father could remember sitting in Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx, munching peanuts and sipping an illegal beer as the news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy was and is inapt.
Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.
Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast. On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”
The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.
The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western, Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.
Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England:
In the aftermath of the events of 9/11, one could easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change:
Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda. To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers. Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.
Herein lies the paradox. While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.
By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.
For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping those sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful.
By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively. The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.
This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails. While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines. The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.
Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 was merely the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age. If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last eighteen years how to respond, it is because we have not faced an ongoing challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.
Our challenge, then, on this 18th anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.
First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. “Nous sommes tous américains,” the Paris newspaper Le Monde eopined the following day; we are all Americans.
Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time. Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.
Now, with 9/11 steadily receding into our distant rearview mirror, we once again find ourselves with a government that, influenced by the brazen truculence of its so-called Maximum Leader, has well-nigh squandered the good will of our alliance partners and the rest of the world.
That same Donald Trump administration has, to an even worse degree than the George W. Bush administration, equated dissent with disloyalty, aroused in the American people a sense of hyper- partisan tribalism, and has managed again to fragment beyond repair any unity we had had, and any hope of putting the Humpty Dumpty that was the American nation back together.
Second, we must overcome our solipsistic, parochial insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have, and can have, no understanding. As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11. We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Mumbai, in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere.
For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization. For when all is said and done, what draws us together, as the late Ursula K. Le Guin observed, is suffering. Suffering leads to the development of faculties of empathy, understanding, common effort, and common resistance. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump likes to speak so slightingly of the very concept of empathy, deriding those who feel it as “weak.”
Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in the terrorist outrages since 9/11 some kind of existential clash of civilizations. Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous. We know from direct observation, for example, that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities. We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general.
It may also be that Al Qaeda itself has become dated and unfashionable, rather like a ridiculous late 1970s hairdo; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated. With Osama bin Laden dead and the Arab world going through a process of revolution and civil conflict not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.
We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova. But eighteen years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead, even as we learn how to resist the blandishments of The Donald and his political tribe, and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,” may come to an unlamented end.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved. This post is an adapted an updated version of a post from the year 2011.
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Cathedral City, September 11, 2019 – Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it had become fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Such an analogy was tempting. After all, millions of Americans living on that day, my late father among them, could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack, much as my late father could remember sitting in Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx, munching peanuts and sipping an illegal beer as the news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy was and is inapt.
Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.
Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast. On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”
The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.
The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western, Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.
Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England:
“Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”
In the aftermath of the events of 9/11, one could easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change:
“'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever have been lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.
Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda. To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers. Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.
Herein lies the paradox. While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.
By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.
For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping those sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful.
By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively. The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.
This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails. While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines. The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.
Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 was merely the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age. If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last eighteen years how to respond, it is because we have not faced an ongoing challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.
Our challenge, then, on this 18th anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.
First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. “Nous sommes tous américains,” the Paris newspaper Le Monde eopined the following day; we are all Americans.
Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time. Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.
Now, with 9/11 steadily receding into our distant rearview mirror, we once again find ourselves with a government that, influenced by the brazen truculence of its so-called Maximum Leader, has well-nigh squandered the good will of our alliance partners and the rest of the world.
That same Donald Trump administration has, to an even worse degree than the George W. Bush administration, equated dissent with disloyalty, aroused in the American people a sense of hyper- partisan tribalism, and has managed again to fragment beyond repair any unity we had had, and any hope of putting the Humpty Dumpty that was the American nation back together.
Second, we must overcome our solipsistic, parochial insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have, and can have, no understanding. As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11. We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Mumbai, in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere.
For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization. For when all is said and done, what draws us together, as the late Ursula K. Le Guin observed, is suffering. Suffering leads to the development of faculties of empathy, understanding, common effort, and common resistance. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump likes to speak so slightingly of the very concept of empathy, deriding those who feel it as “weak.”
Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in the terrorist outrages since 9/11 some kind of existential clash of civilizations. Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous. We know from direct observation, for example, that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities. We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general.
It may also be that Al Qaeda itself has become dated and unfashionable, rather like a ridiculous late 1970s hairdo; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated. With Osama bin Laden dead and the Arab world going through a process of revolution and civil conflict not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.
We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova. But eighteen years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead, even as we learn how to resist the blandishments of The Donald and his political tribe, and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,” may come to an unlamented end.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved. This post is an adapted an updated version of a post from the year 2011.
Friday, September 6, 2019
LITTLE SNAPPERS, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
Summary: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole brouhaha over Brexit has turned into a huge humiliation for new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His party is fragmenting in the House, his base is subject to the inevitable demographic realities of age, and the Celtic nations of the United Kingdom regard him and his party with an increasingly gimlet eye.
Meanwhile, in this country, the Democratic primary campaign for president is shaping up to be another gift to Donald Trump. The Sanders-induced climate of rancor, which manifested itself so strongly in the primary campaign of 2016, has returned as strong and as cancerous as ever. When will Democrats learn not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The Militant Tendencies on the far left of the Democratic Party need to hear this message: straighten the fuck up and fly right; America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.
Anyone watching Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons the other day might have been forgiven for thinking that the Commons of the United Kingdom had lost their collective minds. From Boris Johnson violating decorum by using a barnyard epithet (hell, let’s shame the devil, tell the truth, and admit that what BoJo uttered was the word “shit,”) to Dr. Philip Lee, MP’s dramatic defection across the aisle to the Lib Dems in the midst of BoJo’s speech, the virtual mayhem in question time itself may well have been a low point in the institutional history of the Mother of Parliaments.
Indeed, the whole Brexit situation is curiously topsy-turvy. The most vocal pro-Brexit “change agents,” the “leavers,” are the base of the Conservative & Unionist Party, those Tories of Middle England who tend to share in common they are of great age and the fact that most of them are drawing pensions from HM government.
On the other side of this curiously topsy-turvy Brexit brouhaha are those “remainers” who prefer to continue Britain’s membership in the EU. They tend, as a rule, to break younger then the angry Tory “little Englanders” who make up the Tory base. They also tend to break more Welsh, more Northern Irish, and decidedly more Scots than the “leavers,” who in overwhelming numbers are Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen.
In short, the more Burkean conservative (small “c”) demographic, the demographic that prefers not to upset existing dispensations, is actually the younger demographic that should be expected to be willing to embrace change and to take the risk of burning down existing systems.
Nevertheless, in the topsy-turvy world of British Brexit, it is the older, “leave” voters who are more willing to burn down the system. To a certain extent, the hard-line Brexiteer Tory voters who are prepared to burn down Britain’s time-honored political system, and plunge the country into uncertainty where the pound is dickie, the royal house is on thin ground, and the rest of the world looks at England as little more than a laughingstock, the home of unruly, Sassenach soccer hooligans. In short, the "leavers" are the same people who have been mourning the loss of the British Empire since 1947.
Many of the sour, stolid, solid, superannuated “leavers,” when pressed hard enough, will evince a surprising degree of nostalgia for the palmy days of the Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Set. They will tell you all the Great Days of the Empire, reciting for you a doleful litany of how Great Britain taught a watching world the art of gracious Imperial leavetaking. “When we were in... India, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, The Sudan, The Gold Coast, Malaya, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei, Nigeria and the British Cameroons, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanganyika, Malta, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Swaziland, Trucial Oman, Aden, British Honduras, Hong Kong, and so many other shreds and patches once colored British red on a map of the world.
Now, in 2019, having seen the once mighty British Empire reduced to a few island outposts in the West Indies and in the far South Atlantic between Argentina and Antarctica, the Tory nostalgists of Empire, trooping off to hear “Rule, Britannia” at the annual Proms, have become embittered and disinclined to engage with the larger world of which the British Isles are necessarily still a part.
Nostalgic as much for the era of “Splendid Isolation” from Europe as they are for the era of Empire, it is easy for Brexiteers to conflate the two trends. They see the period of “Splendid Isolation” as being concurrent with that of the British Empire at its apogee, when the rest of the world trembled lest the British lion roar in their general direction. Much of the Tory base, the superannuated, Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen who voted “Leave,” have a fanciful view of Brexit as representing the accomplishment in some way of some sort of redemption of Britain’s conceit of itself as an imperial power.
Younger Britons, on the other hand, having no memory of Britain before September 1, 1939, when the balloon went up and everything turned to shit, tend to accept the idea of a “United States of Europe” such as that visualized by Giuseppe Mazzini, Napoléon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and Robert Schumann. For younger Britons, who have known only the reality of the EU, the EU, for all its bureaucratic aggravations, for all its imperfections, and for all of the demographic changes that have occurred under the EU, is still a hell of a lot better than the alternative, a cloistered Britain clutching at a collection of nostalgic remnants of its imperial past.
Better the EU devil younger Britons know than the Russian devil they also know. Better to have peace in Ireland and no hard border there, than to usher in a recrudescence of The Troubles. Better not to retreat into the castle as the “leavers” prefer, slam the front gate, raise the metaphorical drawbridge, and retreat to the parapets to hurl contumely at the wogs who, as any Sassenach Englishmen can tell you, begin at Calais.
What is happening in the U.K. right now is a confrontation between two fundamentally irreconcilable views of what Britain is, what it should be, where it’s been, and where it’s going. Ironically enough, the “leavers” seek new dispensations they believe will take England (but not necessarily the Celtic nations) back to a time of splendid isolation and imperial greatness. The “remainers,” on the other hand, the more Burkean “conservative” section of British society, want to keep Britain as it has become since joining the European Economic Community and acceding to the European Union; they want to see a Britain that is engaged in its neighborhood and a Britain which rejects the atavistic isolationism which the Conservative & Unionist Party has so insistently embraced in the years since Prime Minister David Cameron cynically threw a bone to the far right of his party by agreeing to a Brexit referendum he privately thought should never have happened and would never carry.
The battle for Britain is well and truly underway.
* * * * *
While the Tories are savaging themselves over Brexit, laying infrastructure for a general election in which Labour may well cruise to a commanding majority in the House of Commons, notwithstanding their own internal nets and quarrels, American Democrats may be preparing to gift wrap the next election and present it on bended knee to Donald Trump.
Simply put, the Democratic Party is living down to the traditional stereotype of the Party as a gang that can’t seem to shoot anything except its own foot. Barack Obama’s warning about a circular firing squad is certainly coming true.
Time was that Democratic presidential nominees were made in a metaphorical smoke-filled room, as the party elders argued and finally came to consensus with one another about who was the best candidate.
When that gave way, under the impetus of the civil rights movement and its impetus towards “extensive democracy,” to the primary system to which we are all now accustomed, that primary system itself seemed to work satisfactorily well; primary elections and state delegate selection caucuses seemed to produce, in fairly orderly fashion, a nominee for the presidency with sufficient delegates to be nominated on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention.
Until 2016.
In 2016 that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating bourgeois Brooklyn/Burlington Bolshevik, Bernard Sanders heeded the siren song of his ego and tossed his Mao headgear into the ring, determined to lead a “political revolution,” that would radically transform America and remake it in his own Leninist image.
And so the Sanders agitprop began.
In sharp contrast to proceeding primary campaigns, Sanders and his supporters went after front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton in the nastiest way imaginable. Aside from uncritically and enthusiastically repeating Trump’s talking points, they also gleefully encouraged WikiLeaks and the notorious traitor Julian Assange to act as an unlawful foreign surrogate for the Trump and Sanders campaigns.
The Sanders campaign also enlisted social media, particularly Facebook, making inroads to Mark Zuckerberg and the left-bourgeois Berniebros in Menlo Park.
Zuckerberg and his bros did not disappoint. Facebook soon gained a malodorous reputation for hosting grossly one-sided content on its platform, while overpolicing and aggressively censoring (a practice they refer to as “moderating”) any attempts by Hillary Clinton loyalists to state her side of the case. Facebook’s ill concealed preference for Bernard Sanders, and by extension, Donald Trump, was instrumental in poisoning the tone of the Democratic primary and dividing the Party against itself. If Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had sought to run an active measures information warfare campaign, he could not have found a better operative than Gospodin Zuckerberg and Facebook.
The divide in the party, with the Sanders "Bernie or bust" intransigents either protest voting for a third party candidate such as Gary “Aleppo” Johnson or Jill “I sit with Putin” Stein, or spite voting for Trump, proved to be fatal to Hillary in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where though Hillary outpolled Trump by nearly 4 million votes nationally, she lost by 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which because of our insane electoral college system was enough to give the election to Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders and his redeless followers are personally, jointly, and severally responsible for having inflicted Donald Trump and his racketeer influenced and corrupt organization crime family on the United States. A famous Internet meme, depicting a number of people sitting around a campfire against the backdrop of a ruined city, captioned
Now, in 2019, we see the same kind of nasty, bitter, offensive tone manifesting itself again against front-runner Joe Biden. The Sanders people, with predictable help from Donald Trump and from the Kremlin, have tried to start a “but his gaffes” narrative, accusing the quondam Vice President of everything from racism to senility. And as in 2016, the Sanders/Trump/Russia axis is making use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to spread this active measures information warfare through the Democratic electorate.
And again, Twitter and Facebook are knowingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, uncritically, complicit in the Trump/Sanders/Putin campaign of information warfare. Facebook is once again busily taking sides against Joe Biden. Facebook’s moderators have once again been policing and suppressing commentary favorable to Vice President Biden, while giving an indulgent pass to Sanders/Trump/Putin trolls and troublemakers.
What we’ve seen, every time Bernard Sanders’s ego gets the better of him, is a schism in a Democratic Party between those who understand how politics works, and the far left which doesn’t give a shit about the practicalities of politics, but was just wants what it wants, right now, and be damned to the rest of us. We see in Sanders and in his redeless followers a kind of neo-Bolshevism that is almost as irresponsible as the cynicism of the Tory Brexiteers in the United Kingdom.
The revolution came to this country in 1776 and is still ongoing. Hell, we Americans invented the idea of revolution. What we do not need is Gospodin Sanders and his bullshit so-called political revolution in 2019. We don’t need redeless Sanders followers such as Susan Sarandon telling us that there is no difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as she did when she told us that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Ms. Sarandon, after all, has the wealth and the wherewithal to ride out the shitstorm she’s responsible for creating in the relative safety and comfort of a flat on the Île-St.-Louis, or in one of the trendier arrondisements of Paris, or in Auteuil or some such other upscale Banlieue, where she may hobnob with snarky, anti-American, French intellectuals who will privately moan about their North African help and talk about the evils of immigration into the French Hexagon.
The left-bourgeois, like Susan Sarandon and Mark Zuckerberg, will do a great deal of damage to this country. Ron Wyden may be right to suggest that the federal government should criminally prosecute Gospodin Zuckerberg, and as for Ms. Sarandon, she is welcome to hang out in her trendy arrondissement of Paris until either Joe Biden is president or the 2nd Tamanskaya Guards Motor-Rifle Division of the Russian army rolls down the Champs Elysées.
The Democratic Party needs to discipline its discourse, purge its Sandernista dissidents, boot Bernard Sanders the hell out of the Democratic Party, drop the caucuses, require every state to have closed primaries, and send a clear message to the Militant Tendency on the far left of the Democratic Party: straighten up and fly right.
America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is a former two-term member of the Cathedral City city council. He is a pugnacious Democrat who, when he hears the word “progressive,” “corporatist,” or “neoliberal,” wants to reach for his revolver. He has no room for Militant Tendencies.
Meanwhile, in this country, the Democratic primary campaign for president is shaping up to be another gift to Donald Trump. The Sanders-induced climate of rancor, which manifested itself so strongly in the primary campaign of 2016, has returned as strong and as cancerous as ever. When will Democrats learn not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The Militant Tendencies on the far left of the Democratic Party need to hear this message: straighten the fuck up and fly right; America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.
Anyone watching Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons the other day might have been forgiven for thinking that the Commons of the United Kingdom had lost their collective minds. From Boris Johnson violating decorum by using a barnyard epithet (hell, let’s shame the devil, tell the truth, and admit that what BoJo uttered was the word “shit,”) to Dr. Philip Lee, MP’s dramatic defection across the aisle to the Lib Dems in the midst of BoJo’s speech, the virtual mayhem in question time itself may well have been a low point in the institutional history of the Mother of Parliaments.
Indeed, the whole Brexit situation is curiously topsy-turvy. The most vocal pro-Brexit “change agents,” the “leavers,” are the base of the Conservative & Unionist Party, those Tories of Middle England who tend to share in common they are of great age and the fact that most of them are drawing pensions from HM government.
On the other side of this curiously topsy-turvy Brexit brouhaha are those “remainers” who prefer to continue Britain’s membership in the EU. They tend, as a rule, to break younger then the angry Tory “little Englanders” who make up the Tory base. They also tend to break more Welsh, more Northern Irish, and decidedly more Scots than the “leavers,” who in overwhelming numbers are Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen.
In short, the more Burkean conservative (small “c”) demographic, the demographic that prefers not to upset existing dispensations, is actually the younger demographic that should be expected to be willing to embrace change and to take the risk of burning down existing systems.
Nevertheless, in the topsy-turvy world of British Brexit, it is the older, “leave” voters who are more willing to burn down the system. To a certain extent, the hard-line Brexiteer Tory voters who are prepared to burn down Britain’s time-honored political system, and plunge the country into uncertainty where the pound is dickie, the royal house is on thin ground, and the rest of the world looks at England as little more than a laughingstock, the home of unruly, Sassenach soccer hooligans. In short, the "leavers" are the same people who have been mourning the loss of the British Empire since 1947.
Many of the sour, stolid, solid, superannuated “leavers,” when pressed hard enough, will evince a surprising degree of nostalgia for the palmy days of the Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Set. They will tell you all the Great Days of the Empire, reciting for you a doleful litany of how Great Britain taught a watching world the art of gracious Imperial leavetaking. “When we were in... India, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, The Sudan, The Gold Coast, Malaya, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei, Nigeria and the British Cameroons, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanganyika, Malta, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Swaziland, Trucial Oman, Aden, British Honduras, Hong Kong, and so many other shreds and patches once colored British red on a map of the world.
Now, in 2019, having seen the once mighty British Empire reduced to a few island outposts in the West Indies and in the far South Atlantic between Argentina and Antarctica, the Tory nostalgists of Empire, trooping off to hear “Rule, Britannia” at the annual Proms, have become embittered and disinclined to engage with the larger world of which the British Isles are necessarily still a part.
Nostalgic as much for the era of “Splendid Isolation” from Europe as they are for the era of Empire, it is easy for Brexiteers to conflate the two trends. They see the period of “Splendid Isolation” as being concurrent with that of the British Empire at its apogee, when the rest of the world trembled lest the British lion roar in their general direction. Much of the Tory base, the superannuated, Sassenach Englishmen and Englishwomen who voted “Leave,” have a fanciful view of Brexit as representing the accomplishment in some way of some sort of redemption of Britain’s conceit of itself as an imperial power.
Younger Britons, on the other hand, having no memory of Britain before September 1, 1939, when the balloon went up and everything turned to shit, tend to accept the idea of a “United States of Europe” such as that visualized by Giuseppe Mazzini, Napoléon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and Robert Schumann. For younger Britons, who have known only the reality of the EU, the EU, for all its bureaucratic aggravations, for all its imperfections, and for all of the demographic changes that have occurred under the EU, is still a hell of a lot better than the alternative, a cloistered Britain clutching at a collection of nostalgic remnants of its imperial past.
Better the EU devil younger Britons know than the Russian devil they also know. Better to have peace in Ireland and no hard border there, than to usher in a recrudescence of The Troubles. Better not to retreat into the castle as the “leavers” prefer, slam the front gate, raise the metaphorical drawbridge, and retreat to the parapets to hurl contumely at the wogs who, as any Sassenach Englishmen can tell you, begin at Calais.
What is happening in the U.K. right now is a confrontation between two fundamentally irreconcilable views of what Britain is, what it should be, where it’s been, and where it’s going. Ironically enough, the “leavers” seek new dispensations they believe will take England (but not necessarily the Celtic nations) back to a time of splendid isolation and imperial greatness. The “remainers,” on the other hand, the more Burkean “conservative” section of British society, want to keep Britain as it has become since joining the European Economic Community and acceding to the European Union; they want to see a Britain that is engaged in its neighborhood and a Britain which rejects the atavistic isolationism which the Conservative & Unionist Party has so insistently embraced in the years since Prime Minister David Cameron cynically threw a bone to the far right of his party by agreeing to a Brexit referendum he privately thought should never have happened and would never carry.
The battle for Britain is well and truly underway.
* * * * *
While the Tories are savaging themselves over Brexit, laying infrastructure for a general election in which Labour may well cruise to a commanding majority in the House of Commons, notwithstanding their own internal nets and quarrels, American Democrats may be preparing to gift wrap the next election and present it on bended knee to Donald Trump.
Simply put, the Democratic Party is living down to the traditional stereotype of the Party as a gang that can’t seem to shoot anything except its own foot. Barack Obama’s warning about a circular firing squad is certainly coming true.
Time was that Democratic presidential nominees were made in a metaphorical smoke-filled room, as the party elders argued and finally came to consensus with one another about who was the best candidate.
When that gave way, under the impetus of the civil rights movement and its impetus towards “extensive democracy,” to the primary system to which we are all now accustomed, that primary system itself seemed to work satisfactorily well; primary elections and state delegate selection caucuses seemed to produce, in fairly orderly fashion, a nominee for the presidency with sufficient delegates to be nominated on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention.
Until 2016.
In 2016 that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating bourgeois Brooklyn/Burlington Bolshevik, Bernard Sanders heeded the siren song of his ego and tossed his Mao headgear into the ring, determined to lead a “political revolution,” that would radically transform America and remake it in his own Leninist image.
And so the Sanders agitprop began.
In sharp contrast to proceeding primary campaigns, Sanders and his supporters went after front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton in the nastiest way imaginable. Aside from uncritically and enthusiastically repeating Trump’s talking points, they also gleefully encouraged WikiLeaks and the notorious traitor Julian Assange to act as an unlawful foreign surrogate for the Trump and Sanders campaigns.
The Sanders campaign also enlisted social media, particularly Facebook, making inroads to Mark Zuckerberg and the left-bourgeois Berniebros in Menlo Park.
Zuckerberg and his bros did not disappoint. Facebook soon gained a malodorous reputation for hosting grossly one-sided content on its platform, while overpolicing and aggressively censoring (a practice they refer to as “moderating”) any attempts by Hillary Clinton loyalists to state her side of the case. Facebook’s ill concealed preference for Bernard Sanders, and by extension, Donald Trump, was instrumental in poisoning the tone of the Democratic primary and dividing the Party against itself. If Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had sought to run an active measures information warfare campaign, he could not have found a better operative than Gospodin Zuckerberg and Facebook.
The divide in the party, with the Sanders "Bernie or bust" intransigents either protest voting for a third party candidate such as Gary “Aleppo” Johnson or Jill “I sit with Putin” Stein, or spite voting for Trump, proved to be fatal to Hillary in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where though Hillary outpolled Trump by nearly 4 million votes nationally, she lost by 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which because of our insane electoral college system was enough to give the election to Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders and his redeless followers are personally, jointly, and severally responsible for having inflicted Donald Trump and his racketeer influenced and corrupt organization crime family on the United States. A famous Internet meme, depicting a number of people sitting around a campfire against the backdrop of a ruined city, captioned
“yes, a homophobic, Latino-hating, Muslim-hating racist, sexist pig won the US presidency, but for a beautiful moment in time I got to stamp my feet and refuse to vote for Hillary. You’d understand if you saw how many people on Facebook were impressed with me at the time[.]”depicted with mordant accuracy what Sanders, Stein, and Gary Johnson, with the help of Vladimir Putin, had inflicted upon this country.
Now, in 2019, we see the same kind of nasty, bitter, offensive tone manifesting itself again against front-runner Joe Biden. The Sanders people, with predictable help from Donald Trump and from the Kremlin, have tried to start a “but his gaffes” narrative, accusing the quondam Vice President of everything from racism to senility. And as in 2016, the Sanders/Trump/Russia axis is making use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to spread this active measures information warfare through the Democratic electorate.
And again, Twitter and Facebook are knowingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, uncritically, complicit in the Trump/Sanders/Putin campaign of information warfare. Facebook is once again busily taking sides against Joe Biden. Facebook’s moderators have once again been policing and suppressing commentary favorable to Vice President Biden, while giving an indulgent pass to Sanders/Trump/Putin trolls and troublemakers.
What we’ve seen, every time Bernard Sanders’s ego gets the better of him, is a schism in a Democratic Party between those who understand how politics works, and the far left which doesn’t give a shit about the practicalities of politics, but was just wants what it wants, right now, and be damned to the rest of us. We see in Sanders and in his redeless followers a kind of neo-Bolshevism that is almost as irresponsible as the cynicism of the Tory Brexiteers in the United Kingdom.
The revolution came to this country in 1776 and is still ongoing. Hell, we Americans invented the idea of revolution. What we do not need is Gospodin Sanders and his bullshit so-called political revolution in 2019. We don’t need redeless Sanders followers such as Susan Sarandon telling us that there is no difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as she did when she told us that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Ms. Sarandon, after all, has the wealth and the wherewithal to ride out the shitstorm she’s responsible for creating in the relative safety and comfort of a flat on the Île-St.-Louis, or in one of the trendier arrondisements of Paris, or in Auteuil or some such other upscale Banlieue, where she may hobnob with snarky, anti-American, French intellectuals who will privately moan about their North African help and talk about the evils of immigration into the French Hexagon.
The left-bourgeois, like Susan Sarandon and Mark Zuckerberg, will do a great deal of damage to this country. Ron Wyden may be right to suggest that the federal government should criminally prosecute Gospodin Zuckerberg, and as for Ms. Sarandon, she is welcome to hang out in her trendy arrondissement of Paris until either Joe Biden is president or the 2nd Tamanskaya Guards Motor-Rifle Division of the Russian army rolls down the Champs Elysées.
The Democratic Party needs to discipline its discourse, purge its Sandernista dissidents, boot Bernard Sanders the hell out of the Democratic Party, drop the caucuses, require every state to have closed primaries, and send a clear message to the Militant Tendency on the far left of the Democratic Party: straighten up and fly right.
America is at risk and this is no time for political foolishness.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is a former two-term member of the Cathedral City city council. He is a pugnacious Democrat who, when he hears the word “progressive,” “corporatist,” or “neoliberal,” wants to reach for his revolver. He has no room for Militant Tendencies.
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