Nixon, Reagan, Bush the Younger, Trump: A Continuum

Published at 11:20 on 10 June 2018

From the standpoint of many Never Trump conservatives it’s politically incorrect to point this out, but there really is not an quantum gap between Trump and the Republican Party from the era of Nixon onwards.

It’s been a party built on lies and bigotry, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s lies about welfare queens driving Cadillacs (no evidence of such a person existed), to Bush the Younger’s lies about Iraq and his acolytes’ expressions of love for myth and contempt for truth, and their dislike for the rule of law.

Trump is merely more crude and blatant (and thus, in a sense, more fundamentally honest) about his fascistic principles; that’s all. For more details, see this Twitter thread.

Barney Frank, Bankster

Published at 07:54 on 25 May 2018

Barney Frank’s claims that Trump is not gutting the regulations that were passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis should be taken with not just a grain but a large block of salt, given that he now sits on the board of a bank poised to profit from the deregulation (no doubt at taxpayer expense when the next crisis rolls around).

And the Dodd-Frank regulations themselves were weak in the first place; they failed to fully replace the Glass-Steagall Act (which itself was repealed with no small amount of Democratic Party complicity).

It’s not just the Republicans that are at fault; the Democrats are the party of banksters and capitalism, too.

The Embassy Move is Not a Favor for Israel

Published at 08:29 on 14 May 2018

It is a favor for domestic Christian fundamentalists (a core part of Trump’s base), who believe that:

  • The Old Testament of the Bible is a title deed that allows the Zionists to occupy and claim land by force, and
  • Israel needs to occupy that land (all of it, from the river to the sea) in order to fulfill the prophecies in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

That it is a favor for Christian fundamentalists (and not Zionists) perfectly explains why this pastor was invited to speak at the embassy’s opening.

Will the Democrats Pay Attention to This Article in the Post?

Published at 06:49 on 11 May 2018

The Washington Post had a good article that delved into the politics of places in the rural Midwest that typically vote Democrat but which didn’t in the last election. Two quotes stuck out to me.

Quote No. 1:

Shaynan Holen, who lives in nearby Vernon County, where a similar pattern had occurred, blamed Clinton’s defeat on an intraparty split among Democrats, caused by the bitter primary contest with Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). “Once Bernie was eliminated, they abandoned Hillary,” she said, referring to Sanders’s supporters. She added: “They came right out and said, ‘I’m voting Republican.’ ”

First, the attitude that Hillary was entitled to the votes of anyone who voted for Sanders. I may sympathize with the attitude that it was stupid to vote for such an obvious fraud as Trump, but nobody is entitled to anyone’s vote. Votes must be earned. (And if you think that quote shows a serious attitude of entitlement to votes, wait until you read some of the comments about it.)

Hillary quite simply failed to do enough to earn enough votes in those places, a failure that is underscored all the more by how those same places typically vote for the Democrat. Heck, Hillary’s campaign wrote many of those states off and decided not to even bother campaigning in them.

Second, it’s just an anecdote, but it shows once again that Sanders was almost certainly the more viable of the two candidates.

Quote No. 2:

Smicker recalled that many of those he encountered were mad, fed up with the state of things. “This is my observation, it is not necessarily my belief,” he said as he described their motivations. “Number one, they said minority political people have been well taken care of. Small business and working people have been identified as the source of income to take care of those people.”

This of course has prompted plenty of howls of outrage about the racism of Trump voters in the comments section. And yes, it is a racist sentiment. Minorities do not have it easy. Whites are privileged.

But, and this is critically important, there is still a grain of truth in the above sentiment. Whites are still privileged, but not as much as before. And many working-class whites have slipped down the economic ladder in recent decades. By contrast, identity politics has made things get gradually better for minorities. Bitter losers helped Trump win.

The problem isn’t so much the presence of identity politics as the absence of class politics in the Democratic Party. This has caused the white working class to be in the unique position of having grown collectively worse off over the past few decades. Of course they’re upset; who wouldn’t be?

And note that while, to reiterate, it is a racist sentiment to say that minorities are privileged, many of these same racist white people also voted for Obama… twice! It is simultaneously possible to be a racist while also not being an incorrigible racist, and still having a better side that it is possible to appeal to.

Absent any Democratic finalist that could appeal to those workers’ better sides, Trump alone was trying to appeal to them, to their worse sides.

Racism is an ugly thing, but it exists and must be dealt with. Candidates have to win in the world that actually exists, not in some hypothetical ideal world that we might wish existed. Throwing tantrums about how unfair it is that Trump can appeal to racism won’t help the Democrats win one little bit. Figuring out how to appeal to voters’ better sides with a class-based message can.

Sorry, Trumpers, It Won’t Help

Published at 10:48 on 10 May 2018

Any breakthroughs in Korea won’t act as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Trump’s corruption. And remember, there haven’t really been any big breakthroughs yet.

Nixon isn’t best remembered as the president who began détente with the USSR or who opened relations with China, he’s best remembered for Watergate, and for being compelled to resign in disgrace over it.

It bears mentioning that despite the parallels between the two leaders, Nixon was a much more thoughtful and cautious leader than Trump. Nixon didn’t run around ruining international goodwill and the trustworthiness of the USA by tearing up multiple international agreements (Paris, NAFTA, TPP, Iran) like Trump has.

It also bears mentioning that Trump’s corruption possibly rises to the level of treason, and thus is potentially vastly more serious than Nixon’s.

Finally, Nixon had a record of working across the partisan aisles and proposing politically moderate legislation that both parties could back. Nixon won landslide victories due to his ability to appeal to the votes of normally Democratic voters. Trump is an abrasive, rank partisan with historically low approval ratings for a president.

In trying to use foreign policy to distract from domestic scandal, Trump is playing from a weaker hand with a strategy that has proven a failure in the past.

NRA President Oliver North

Published at 16:25 on 9 May 2018

Some observations:

  1. It totally underscores how much the NRA is a right-wing moonbat outfit (and how little it is a civil rights outfit) that they would elect such a figure to their highest leadership post. If they took the Constitution whose Second Amendment they pretend to revere seriously, they would consider a figure like North, who subverted the rule of law at the highest levels of government, to be radioactive. They would be ashamed to so much have him as even a lowly routine member of their organization.
  2. By doing the above, the NRA has reinforced in the minds of a public increasingly skeptical of it how the right to keep and bear arms really isn’t a right worthy of being considered like the other rights in the Bill of Rights. It dovetails perfectly with the message that it’s just something the moonbat Right is a fan of, nothing more. The NRA has thereby made it easier for the Second Amendment to be successfully ignored* in the future. As someone who supports the right to keep and bear arms, and does consider it to be an important civil right, I personally find this distressing.
  3. That the Right would so elevate a figure whose claim to fame is illegally arming the Islamic Republic of Iran at the same time they are saying that Iran cannot be trusted is more than a little ironic. Sort of shows how hollow the reasoning is behind tearing up the Iran nuclear deal. They’re mostly just a brainless cheering squad for anything their Dear Leader does.

* Repeal is very unlikely, but ignoring is quite likely. All it would take is a Supreme Court ruling that there is no individual right to keep and bear arms enshrined in the Constitution. There’s even some very convenient “well-regulated militia” language in the amendment to help them do that. Make such a ruling and the Second Amendment might as well not exist anymore. It’s that simple to neutralize.