Month: November 2020

THE PIQUE OF A DESPOT

/ oleblacklady / Leave a comment

What’s wrong with allowing a self indulgent chief executive to cope with his own disappointment at losing an election? Are you kidding? We expect concession will follow after an election winner is projected. In fact, after the Bush-Gore delay, Congress moved to establish conditions so that there was the maximum time available for a new administration transition to prevent it from being ill prepared on day one for any emerging crisis. These changes were needed despite the fact that Bush 43 had already begun receiving daily security briefings while the Florida recount was underway. Information flow is one thing, but putting thousands of people in place to manage operations is critical to a functioning bureaucracy. One of the findings that emerged from investigation into 9/11 was that necessary leadership in the intelligence community had not been established allowing vital links in intelligence information to be missed.  

If this president is old enough to assume the office, and 72 should be sufficient, the office demands that the man occupying it step aside for the newly elected occupant for the security of the country. This is not optional; it’s imperative! Coddling a baby swaddled in fantasy can only injure the country. It’s an unconscionable affront to all Americans and an international embarrassment  that suggests the oldest democratic republic, the one that inspired all the others, is going down.

It’s now patently evident that the bedrock principle of the peaceful transfer of power has been shaken to its core. Apparently, peaceful transfer is not enshrined but wholly dependent on the graciousness of the candidates. Someone has to concede a loss. Al Gore’s concession was what made George Bush the 43rd president. Gore had the option to continue the Florida recounts but decided not to prolong the process. He sacrificed a presidency for the good of the country. But lofty human behavior is not in the BullyPresident’s repertoire; nor is middle-of-the-road normal behavior. If it ain’t gonna advantage Donald J Trump, he ain’t doing it. He has experienced the most stinging rejection he can imagine. Fine, he can slink off to one of his many properties to lick his wounds. But a fragile ego is not more important than the nation; hasn’t the nation been sacrificed to that fragility enough over the last 4 years?

Meanwhile the BullyPresident is engaged in an all out pressure campaign on Congress, governors, the federal bureaucracy, DOJ and anyone else he can think of to support his pretense of victory. He’s sent his minions to Trump/FoxNews to hammer home the message and social media organized a MAGA rally/march over the weekend. In a network departure, their news coverage was sparse and none estimated the crowd size. Can he sucker the country into falling for it? He’s big and imposing; he’s boisterously mean and angry. Can he convince GOP politicians that their political future is in his hands? Well, it is if they grant him that power. If they banded together to stand up for what is right, the Pied Piper could become a memory. But then again, they’re in pretty deep. They have sold their souls; they are transactionalists without an ethical or moral compass. They don’t know what is right, only what is expedient.  Since so many claim to be Christians, that’s ironic but not surprising; the Church was the principle architect of the theology of African inferiority redeemed through laboring in chains without compensation. The chains are gone, but somehow we are still burdened with the cross of white superiority. Republicans and many Democrats, in fact, are inextricably tied to that guiding principle although the latter express their white privilege differently.

So far, the mainstream media has refused to play 45’s game. Even Facebook and Twitter are trying to staunch the spread of false content in their inept and too late kind of way. The networks qualify every statement with a “without proof”, or “alleged”, reinforced by authorities, historians, lawyers and pundits who assert that in the absence of any evidence that there has been widespread voter fraud, there is no legal basis to challenge the election results. They are more frequently dropping the words “lie” and “falsehood” into their narratives. This shouldn’t have to be explained. But we know that facts don’t change minds and that false information circumnavigates the globe more quickly than the truth. Conspiracy theories fill in the mind’s void when things are unknown and can’t be observed. Thanks to Rupert Murdock, there’s a cable “news” network whose profit motive depends on the propagation of misinformation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In the meantime, the Emperor Without Clothes is holding the reins of government, afraid that if he lets the facade slip, his processional will end in ridicule of his private parts. He has pulled his government levers to block the transition to our duly elected leader. His GSA appointee is refusing to acknowledge that Biden is president elect, blocking access to personnel and information needed to prepare to hit the ground running on January 20. Most importantly, it blocks funding for the transition team to pay for the hiring process for the large number of personnel who will populate agency bureaucracies as well as high visibility posts. Biden should be receiving the daily national security briefs, because the world continues; there are 3 new military conflicts that have emerged in the last couple of weeks. The COVID19 wave across Europe may have implications for the US particularly the emergence of this new strain of the virus in Denmark. International foes are paying attention and perhaps looking for some advantage during the next 90 days; I would if I were them. Obama has recently revealed that they were anticipating a terrorist attack on his inauguration in 2008. The radical Islamists are less well organized today, but others, including domestic terrorists are becoming more so.

It turns out the presidential usurper had been so focused on winning reelection that he’s neglected the duties of the office he wants to retain. Sure, he’s had Jared and Pompeo whipping up documents to capture individual pockets of voters. There’s shoring up Netanyahu with agreements with a couple of Middle Eastern states to buttress his Jewish flank to counterbalance his anti-Semitic support of white nationalists and increasingly reinforce his evangelical flock. But the core responsibility of protecting the citizenry from COVID19 and providing economic support to those suffering as a result, he sloughed that mantle a long time ago. He opted out of pressing compromise with Nancy Pelosi, for fear that she would continue to personally outmaneuver the ArtoftheDealPresident. He generated a foggy mist that he hoped would obscure coronavirus raging but instead settled his nemesis in his own lungs as he careened through the White House and across the country carrying it in his wake. And lo and behold, COVID19 is exploding in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and neighboring states that drew rallyers along with the disinformation, the other product 45 super-spreads.

The Commander in Chief confessed he hasn’t read the PDB since sometime in October, not even during his brief hospitalization. His bubble is too fragile for even a sliver of reality to graze it. On the other hand, Biden will actually read it and integrate into his policy moving forward. Trump has remained absent from the Coronavirus Taskforce for at least 5 months, although if bleach is all he has to contribute, it’s probably better that he doesn’t, given that he’s an inattentive listener. But it does indicate a disinterest in running the country in its most critical circumstances; golfing and watching Trump/FoxNews, at least an 8 hour addiction have a clear priority for the chief executive, no matter how conditions in the country change. Consequently, he has no window into those conditions, sheltered by a circle of yesmen coddlers attuned to his moods and a network that shows clips of violence in foreign countries pretending that they were actually occurring in cities in the US. It’s a propaganda factory, not news. RT, international Russian state TV, uses the same technique.  

But the Tax Evader in Chief’s information blockade is not a mere temper tantrum; there is nefarious intent here to maintain the cloak of secrecy that surrounds all things Trump. Information is power; the daily brief may have information that security spokespersons have tried to distort or suppress. DOJ practices at the border through ICE may reveal information about immigration policies equally as horrendous as the kids who can’t be reunited with their parents. Barr’s exploits around actions taken against BLM protestors could have been more extensive than the clearing for the Bible walk. Biden administration personnel, considered more amenable to the mainstream press, could expose those transgressions. Even though the Trump/FoxNews silo is pretty well armored against any criticism or critical thinking about new information, the bigger picture is still an unstable balancing act where any small tidbit can topple the tower of lies. No doubt, part of the delay is to allow time to dump incriminating evidence, even as that is prohibited under federal law. All of Trump’s people believe they are above and beyond the law.  

This information blockade is not a mere temper tantrum; there is nefarious intent here to maintain the cloak of secrecy that surrounds all things Trump. Information is power. They’re probably erasing incriminating evidence too, although that’s a felony.

There is also Trump’s tendency to slash and burn; his mind is working overtime to find ways to sabotage a Biden-Harris administration right out of the gate. With this in mind, the replacement of 3 new top officials at the Department of Defense who are generally considered unqualified and radical right cooky even in Republican circles, could be ominous. One can’t rule out the possibility that 45 is positioning loyalists to mischievously create an international crisis or create a military response to his removal from the White House. A new offensive to declassify intelligence information that can embarrass 45’s perceived enemies is yet another front to consider. The president announced that he ordered the reduction of troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 from the current 5,000 before the end of the year over the objection of military brass. I wonder if that related to the concentration of military personnel in Georgia thinking about the Senatorial race?

The Donald is right, “This is a fraud on the American people”; the fraud is his alone. He’s telescoped it for months and in an unusual departure from most of his promises, he actually followed through. The obsession with remaining in power is consuming his every thought. Trump has said that his rhetoric is merely theater, a play to demonstrate to his Trumpophants that he will go the last mile to defend them. But their lives and ours are serious business. Now it is a matter of survival for the hundreds of thousands of future victims who will perish from COVID19 before any meaningful federal intervention. Trump’s stage play expresses his total disdain for the populace; he’s trying to squish the physical landscape beneath his stage scenery to bring the world in his head to life in the physical world. However, the premise for his actions is patently false. It’s all about him; he cares not a fig for anyone else. His is a desperate, naked grab for power as it seems to be slipping between his fingers. It’s prep to launch his next platform to retain his power base as a massive cudgel to scuttle the Biden presidency from its outset. 

Of course there is a strategy here, floated by Trump to the GOP for this emergency. Legal pinpricks to prevent or invalidate certification of state elections by the deadline and then have GOP legislatures instruct electors to vote for Trump. With a majority of Republican controlled legislatures, that could succeed. Nothing is out of bounds for an autocratic party desperate to remain in power. The GOP boat floats with Trump sails; if they are furled, so are party candidates. Remember back when McConnell’s refusal to even meet with Merrick Garland seemed outrageous and look how far they’ve come with Justice Barrett.

What’s not quite clear is how SCOTUS figures in; the court has no power to throw out ballots, although they can rule on which can be counted, possibly eliminating some Trump votes as well. Unlike Florida in 2000 with a difference of less than 1000 votes, 2020 involves several states and hundreds of thousands of ballots. Are the military ballots arriving after Nov 3 to be thrown out, invalidating that necessarily routine practice? I suppose the GOP might be able to hand pick devoted poll workers willing to throw out Biden votes, but that could threaten other close down ballot races unless they restrict it to presidential votes. Still, the justices have proven inventive in this latest round of buttressing the hegemony of the ruling caste, as far back as its ruling that infused corporate money into politics and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

The bulk of GOP legislators who were remarkably quiet during the Donald’s initial sulkfest, have emerged with the new strategy around the fraudulent election lie. One by one they have supported and expanded the claims and conspiracies in an effort to keep the Trumpophants fired up for the last remaining race. The Georgia senatorial run-offs will determine if McConnell can continue to obstruct legislation and confirm radical right wing judges. GOP voter turnout will be critical; normally run-offs draw far fewer voters, which would seem even more true after the grueling drawn out count. Infrequent, reluctant and first time voters are a critical component in close races. Republicans are selling the idea that Democrats are trying to rob them of their decision to vote. In Georgia, ads are telling the base that Chuck Schumer and national Democrats are trying to dictate to Georgians who their representatives will be. For Democrats, that task is easier. Simply put, the Biden-Harris agenda will be restricted to executive orders unless McConnell is dislodged. The question is, will the whole Democratic coalition of voters feel that urgency or simply core voters. Will the anti-Trump voters, having accomplished their goal, return for Senate candidates. Will the Lincoln Project, ex-Republicans trying to get their party back, enthusiastically support candidates who embody a liberal agenda that they disagree with? Their Instagram ads have disappeared.

Obviously, the GOP is willing to sacrifice trust in the election for short term political goals. What else is new? They don’t see it as short term. They’ve been playing the long game with people as inanimate chess pieces, unconcerned about their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. They’re planning an onslaught to hogtie the Biden administration, including failure to confirm Biden appointees and launching investigations into bogus Biden corruption conspiracies while blocking investigations into many Trump related transgressions until 2022 when they can regain Congressional control, continue to obstruct until they take the White House again in 2024. Various Trump supporters like Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo and Mark Rubio are positioning themselves to run, although another Remake America White Again will keep them out of the running until 2028 when luckily, they’ll still be young enough.  

And that’s a scary thought. Because it means that autocracy has won. Trump may not be in the White House, but the party that supported the establishment of an oligarchy and kowtowed to a president to insist that he won an election rather than support the winner of a free election will be one arm of our two party system. They have shown that their interest is in their power, not the views of the people who elected them. They believe they know a better way, their way. They have shown that they are immoral and unethical; that they will lie, cheat and steal to structure the political system to retain power. They believe that the other party has no legitimate claim to power. 

An inadequate census and the control of state legislatures will be combined to adjust district boundaries to further devalue the opposition party’s votes. These adjustments will retain ratios like 40% of the vote produces 60% of the legislators at the state level. A new twist to the census count comes from 45’s attempts to estimate and exclude the number of noncitizens from the count. That will have a big impact in Texas and possibly North Carolina, both too close for comfort in 2020 and Arizona that went for Biden. The plan for the party in power is to represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the population, reflecting the dominance of voters in overwhelmingly white sparsely populated states over the more densely populated urban landscape dominated states. People are moving into more densely populated chunks from rural areas suffering economic collapse. This then is the party’s response to forecasted ethnic and geographic demographic changes that will force white men into minority status.

Government as a contest between one honest party and one dishonest one will favor dishonesty; the party that dissembles most effectively to dupe a proportion of the population but not necessarily a majority will be the victor. That configuration was already present in 2012, strengthening in all the subsequent years. That government is the intermediate step toward politics resembling Russia, where there is a single party that manipulates the flow of information and holds sham elections against shadow opponents who represent noone with publicly observed voting irregularities. The real opposition is systematically eliminated, by imprisonment or death. This is not the distant future; it is the evolving present.

I leave you with a discussion of “Stalin’s Epigram” written by Osip Mandelstram, from Masha Gessen which seems to perfectly encapsulate our times: 

“the sense of not knowing where we live and who we share a country with; the stultifying feeling of not hearing and not being heard, of the isolation that is both the precondition and the product of totalitarianism; and most of all, the daily exercise of demonstrative humiliation and deliberate cruelty.”

WILL THE STOLEN ELECTION LIE FLY?

/ oleblacklady / Leave a comment
Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

I can’t deny that I am disappointed in America. I know I shouldn’t be; I’m always saying you can’t count on white people to do the right thing. I’m a victim of those rosy polls repeated endlessly across the media that Joe Biden was ahead by 6 to 11 points. But it turns out, the white majority dug down into its whiteness, that instinct to keep minorities down in order to elevate themselves, to reaffirm the Keep America White President. Biden may have squeaked out a win but nearly half the country voted for an ego-maniacal fraud whose every word is a lie in service of conspiratorial enemies popping from under every rock. People are dying because the man grew tired of a killer virus without understanding that he was the only one who could do anything about it. He claimed that mantle in his GOP acceptance speech but he seems not to understand its imperatives for action. 

It’s not like I couldn’t have guessed it would be so close or even that it could tilt toward Agent Orange. I understand the science of human behavior and the role of implicit biases in normal mental function even when I don’t always apply it. Confirmation bias provides individual reaffirmation of one’s beliefs, even more influential in this world where up is down, down is up and only Trump/FoxNews tells the truth. Trump/FoxNews is then sprinkled across the media landscape, as in network TV, social media, Facebook and its groups, into everyone’s lives, trying to displace the real world with an onscreen fantasy by validating it in the establishment press. The current political divide is proof of the ongoing influence of confirmation bias in everyday life. 

November 3 saw the largest voter turnout since 1900. No one can say that voters were not engaged; this is the kind of civic engagement that would outwardly suggest that democracy is thriving. Two other records were broken; Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in history and Donald Trump the second most. But the final Biden electoral college count may exceed the 2016 final count of 306 for Trump and 232 for Clinton. The Liar in Chief called 2016 a landslide mandate. He lost the popular vote by more than 4 million this time, more than he lost to Clinton.

 But nobody is shouting that this is an overwhelming victory; we’re wringing our hands that the vote reveals a 50/50 split. The difference is we didn’t understand it in 2016 but after 4 years of watching the country being sliced up into slivers that could be reassembled around adulation for an emperor without clothes, we didn’t believe they couldn’t tell he was actually naked. Is this what a thriving democracy rescuing itself from a would-be dictator looks like? We can’t tell because we don’t have any historical experience with it. While more people have voted than at any other time in American history, percentage-wise, the 66.8% turnout isn’t exactly thriving. The US is somewhere near the bottom of the list of national percentage of voting age adults who vote when compared with Sweden at 82% and 77% in South Korea. And in the recent past, it’s not a lot higher than the 60% in 2016.

Looking at the nail biting finish, finally projected by the press four days after voting day, I guess I overestimated the number of people who haven’t fallen down the Agent Orange rabbithole. But that’s because hope snuck in to jangle my belief in the predictability of basic human interactions. There are probably a variety of reasons that people tell themselves for supporting the RealityTVPresident.  I’m not talking about adoring MAGA ralliers drunk with the ecstasy of a tent revival. Those folks would follow him into the frozen tundra, like they found themselves doing in Omaha when their fearless leader flew out of town over his flock stranded in temperatures in the teens for hours. Some got a double whammy, coronavirus exposure and pneumonia, a veritable pulmonary playground. Is 45 not famous for his generosity? Many of these people have transitioned to identity fusion, where they embody the Donald’s amorality in their own personal behavior, much like many a political appointee in the administration and GOP legislators.

People don’t vote logically, they vote emotionally.

I mean assorted businesspersons with high hopes to somehow snag a contact with 45’s circle to get favorable treatment or even a government contract or special treatment for a corporate objective, or regulatory or legislative consideration; their reasons are self explanatory. That in and of itself is evidence of the corrosive effect of Trump’s transactionalism on the conduct of government business that augurs for an oligarchy rather than a democracy. Likewise, the big donors; tax cuts enough said. Fifty Cent frankly admitted he endorsed 45 for lowering his taxes, serving as a front man for other African American men like Herman Cain, rest in peace, who are doing well economically. Behind the big donors are the PAC and conservative foundation funders, the Koch circle, that plotted to eliminate regulation and shrink both federal and state government to a libertarian pittance. While the media is frantically chasing PiedPiperPresident voters, the masterminds behind the politicians and strategists have gone largely unnoticed.

As long as the subject of male descendants of the enslaved has come up, I’m disappointed with the media hoopla about how well the White Supremacist in Chief did with that demographic. In this election, 8% of Black men checked Trump on the ballot, a whopping 2% increase over 2016; some surveys have calculated as high as a 4% increase. It should be noted that included in this group will be African and Caribbean immigrants and their offspring, more recently arrived than 19th century captives, who have varying traditions and concerns. Perhaps it reflects what Agent Orange has been telling us, dark skinned individuals have done better under his watch than any other administration, not to include the number of individuals who’ve been murdered by the police for no reason beyond that dark skin. No joy for their families either. That’s a 33% or even 50% increase, part of the beauty of statistics. In what other circumstance would an additional 2% be considered significant?  It does reflect an editorial penchant for the sensational–don’t they care that he’s the most racist person in every room that doesn’t also have a Klansman in it, they ask? In addition, it betrays a few assumptions about the homogeneity of the Black community, when the press is all agog about heterogeneity among the Latinx. Perhaps some identify anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ rights as their central issue; after all, there are a considerable number of African American evangelicals, similar to the ones in the Latinx and white communities. 

It’s clear that a not insignificant number of the Biden voters split their tickets in a fit of pique at Trump while continuing to support Republican senators and representatives who enabled his many transgressions. Perhaps, they believe the PiedPiperPresident’s twaddle about his accomplishments and have that penchant for a strong leader, in part to thwart the do-nothing Congress. Maybe they think Congress is an impotent appendage to a president who wields the executive pen. All credit flows to El Trumpe! Susan Collins of Maine ran far ahead of the president, perhaps because of her name recognition and long standing service to local constituents. While that sounds logical, people don’t vote logically, they vote emotionally. Intuitively, split ticket Biden votes were for the preservation of the present as seen through a prism of the cultural environment rather than current health and economic debacles. 

The RealityTVPresident’s campaign wasn’t about issues; it was a series of dog whistles and threats, name calling, conspiracy theories and long riffs on revenge for a wide range of perceived insults and attacks. At times, he seemed to be running against Hillary Clinton, perhaps because that was easier, given the misogyny of his base embedded in a suspiciousness of the Clintons. “Lock her up” rang through some rallies and the slogan morphed onto Gretchen Whitmore. Mixed in was a blatant attempt to create enemies, anyone and everyone who didn’t agree with him. He failed to condemn his Michigan followers for an attempt to execute their duly elected Governor as he led chants for rebellion against public health measures that he was actively defying by holding his rallies. 

Socialism, Corey Booker, violence and the kind of Law and Order that more aggressively kills unarmed Black thugs is coming to your neighborhood.

As his signature expansive praise of Donald Trump the Greatest overflowed, Mohammad Ali’s, “it’s not bragging if you can back it up” came to mind as Trump’s grand acts have little substance and his horrendous acts have been extraordinarily painful. His gaping omissions have been equally devastating. He tried to throw a tidbit to each individual group. There was religious freedom and Supreme Court Justices for evangelicals. Socialism is coming for Hispanic immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela and Columbia was paired with violence and Corey Booker is coming to the suburbs and the kind of Law and Order that kills unarmed victims for cops. His promise to suburban housewives–is that even a thing anymore?– to generate jobs for their husbands may have ruffled a few feathers. Oh yea, there are a bunch of housewives on reality TV, but aren’t they superwealthy women whose cares revolve around broken nails, champagne flutes and backbiting insults? ThePiperPiedPresident blew a song of disjointed slogans rather than the well conducted symphony of dog-whistles highlighted by overtly racist taunts of 2016. He had no vision for the future and seldom recapped his exaggerated list of accomplishments as incumbents usually do. 

The RealityTVPresident avoided the subject of his biggest betrayal of the country by imposing his fantasy of a COVID19 free America on his crowded maskless rallies where the campaign literally pushed people into small spaces in larger venues to create the appearance of a large crowd. “There’s nothing to worry about here” in defiance of the fact that a not insignificant number would be carrying the virus home with them as cases were increasing out of control in rally locations. When he did mention the virus it was to portray himself as a superhero that anyone in the crowd could become too. And if they stood up to coronavirus, he would say, a consequence no doubt of Scott Atlas’s championship of herd immunity, they would win. The country can afford to wait because, as the Superspreader in Chief has told us, nobody is dying from coronavirus. People wanted desperately to believe that everything will be alright. The picture was so tantalizing that people wanted it enough to pretend that it was true in the real world, not just on Trump/Fox News.

Joe Biden, whose message was that an all out assault on the pandemic including economic supports for people trying to recover, stood in stark contrast to the pandemic denier. Ironically, his poignant evocation of empty seats at the dinner table may have had the effect of increasing support for the incumbent. The explanation is not intuitively obvious because it lies in behavioral science. 

James Baldwin has written that “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.” Everything about the American way of life has shattered, even for the very wealthy who are not able to jet around the world to countries that bar American travellers. The loss of social supports is really devastating; in their place is time spent on Facebook, an ecosystem for political vitriol and conspiracy theories. For many, those are a poor substitute for communing in prayer meetings feeling the physical touch of other worshipers and the heavenly touch of their lord. It is no different for Jewish Sabbath celebrations, particularly as the rituals of holy days crumpled under COVID19 restrictions. Humans have long sought to explain the world by connecting dots unrelated to each other. Filling in with ever more tenuous lines takes one farther away rather than closer to associations indicative of cause and effect. The creation of fantastic figures is integral to this process. Donald Trump as Quanon’s world savior? Hah!  

The coronavirus brought mortality into an ever present focus, whether it was family,  friends or the daily statistical recounting of the death toll. At the height of the first wave, there were corpses in refrigerated trucks on the streets. In the midst of the end of life as we know it, physical death reminders were everywhere, a powerful combination. Humans suffer from an existential fear of mortality. If death is part of the life cycle, all organisms die and humans have sought comfort in the creation of myths that extend the existence of individuals beyond their physical presence. The difficulty of imagining the nothingness of disappearing is countered by the idea that there is something beyond death. Moreover, man has constructed cultural systems of beliefs to validate that life has meaning and individuals have value that may remain after their bodies are no more. 

The downside of differing belief systems is that when they bump up against each other, a believer must establish that his system is the “true” one and the other must be discredited. This phenomenon can be seen broadly in the BullyPresident’s attacks on China, Muslim countries, immigration, terrorism and socialism, all tagged as mortal threats to bodily security intertwined with false belief systems, ultimately increasing death anxiety. The addition of COVID19, an invisible ever present threat to life may have broken the camel’s back. The Superspreader in Chief removed that threat, simply by recounting his experience in the service of denying that the disease was rampaging through the country. On the other hand, Biden’s emphasis on the physically and socially inflicted losses from coronavirus induced heightened  apprehension among some which may have pushed them into the opposition camp.     

If the Biden/Harris ticket got a mandate to bring the country together to tackle our pressing problems, why didn’t it translate down ballot for the Dems? A logical approach would have understood that Biden can accomplish little if Republicans control Congress. And yet, most of those promising Democratic Senatorial candidates, like Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Steve Bullock, the former governor of Montana and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina lost. Of course, that probably represented straight ticket voting, as all of those states went overwhelmingly for the PiedPiperPresident. The GOP candidates ran on closeness to Trump, basking in El Trumpe’s cult aura. Overall, Democrats lost seats in the House and are unlikely to flip the Senate. 

It’s come down to 2 seats in Georgia, now scheduled for a runoff in January. John Ossoff the Democrat managed to get into a runoff in his race for the Senate against Perdue, a staunch Trumpophant who also made a killing in the market in pharma and PPE stock from insider information about the threat from coronavirus while telling constituents it was no big deal. Georgia has been a reliably red state despite an almost win in 2018. But Ossoff ran almost 100,000 votes behind Agent Orange, an indication that there was ticket splitting for president, not a general switch to a Democratic approach to wrestling with the pandemic or economic problems. 

The foreign reaction to Biden’s victory has been interesting as well. While the Russians seemed to have concentrated on primarily social media interventions in this election, particularly because they have KGB mouthpieces in the Senate like John Cornyn and Devan Nunes, we have not heard of direct attempts to hack polling places or election apparatus like in 2016. Rudy Guiliani is doing interviews on RT, Russian state TV for the US, as is Scott Atlas, the Coronavirus Task Force advisor. Rudy’s gambit to use information from a Russian agent to denigrate Biden’s son Hunter and by extension the candidate himself fell flat, mainly because the media refused to take the bait, unlike 2016 where they had a field day with Wikileak’s email dumps hacked from Russian intelligence activity. Of course there is still the possibility that they will inject some propaganda that they did interfere if they didn’t, just to muddy Biden’s victory. There’s some good conspiracy theory material in this scenario and we may not yet know the volume of social media rumors. The NSA and FBI may have successfully thwarted foreign attempts from any number of foreign actors, information that may only emerge under the Biden administration.  

But the Kremlin has had an enormous global propaganda perk handed to them. They did not congratulate Biden on his win, as is customary once a winner has been announced. The world has never before questioned the peaceful transfer of power until now. For the Russians, there is no better illustration of dysfunctional democratic government compared to Putin’s easy overwhelming victories where the presidency is never in question. Putin has been able to squelch much of the information about protests in his country, at least enough to make them insignificant while maintaining that his government can tolerate dissent. The poisonings of opponents, in Putin’s mind, has plausible deniability for propaganda purposes. 

The Chinese, the other major global contender for model system of government, also adopted a wait and see attitude toward congratulations to Joe Biden. It makes their statement that American democracy is in such decline that it can’t manage its famous peaceful transfer of power in contrast to the stable Chinese system that doesn’t have any change. They have selected a ruler for life, just like the Russians. Other friendly dictatorships like Turkey have also held out, no doubt quid pro quo for the BullyPresident’s refusal to comment on the treatment of Kurds in Syria and attempts to blackmail the EU over immigrants held there. Erdogan’s positions are another piece of his bad boy anti-EU and NATO stance.  

Most GOP Senators and Congressmen have been silent on the election as a fraud gambit, except for a few strident supporters, notably Lindsay Graham, who is blowing on the orange tipped flame to whom they owe their offices. Graham is set for the next 6 years, so he can suck ass and then flip flop as he is want to do without fear. Still, the party is looking at a win-win. The GOP will likely maintain their Senate majority and narrowed the Democratic majority in the House. They will tie up most legislative initiatives or water them down to irrelevance. There will be no new tax reforms let alone a public Medicare option. Following a Supreme Court ruling that strikes down Obamacare, there will be no replacement. Even pandemic stimulus support may become a pittance or out of reach all together. McConnell can tie up Cabinet appointments, leaving temporary appointments with less authority to repair the damage from the Deconstructor in Chief. 

Election 2022 will be here in no time, an opportunity to potentially regain a Republican majority in the House and build on the Senate majority, a very common outcome in midterm elections. These efforts will be bolstered by redistricting and the recalibration of representatives from the 2020 census overseen by Republican controlled legislatures. By 2024, an electorate can look back on the Biden administration having delivered very little, not just to conservatives but to progressives inpatient to respond to climate, social justice, income inequality and healthcare while angry at the loss of hard fought rights in the Supreme Court. Bring Trump Back Again or Don Jr Is Next could make the White House Supremacist again.

Just in case Trump doesn’t come roaring back as a 76 year old candidate, positioning for a 2024 race is the basis of the politically motivated support of Trump’s tantrums to obstruct the transition. They all owe their election to 45, so they don’t want to ruffle his feathers. He will still have an oversized presence in the party, the power to crucify as he pursues vengeance, but only if they let him. The RealityTVPresident thrives on attention; Trump/FoxNews will only stay with him if it continues to generate huge profits and private citizen Donald will have to build a different media outlet to compete. But that’s the GOP’s problem, one to which I hope they have no solution.  

 The fight is not over until the authoritarians have been vanquished, no small feat if Democrats in the House and Senate see them as colleagues rather than foes bent on their destruction. Republicans who regard Democrats as illegitimate intruders rather than partners in governance in a game without rules is a recipe for the failure of the Democratic Party itself and the death of the republic itself. Joe Biden remembers a Congress with integrity whose members have for the most part gone, replaced by a breed of would-be Trumps, without policy ideas for anyone other than business and the wealthy. Given their dependence on corporate donors, they are better off passing no legislation than a bill that will upset the apple cart. The leadership by extension has simply hitched its fortunes to the Trump train and facilitated the legislative stalemate. 

Biden can’t extend a hand across the aisle to Republicans who are mooning him with naked asses. He will have to fight hard against this autocratic Republican Party, something he may not be able to do because it is a betrayal of his whole idea of politics. He hasn’t yet understood the transformation of the party made possible by the populism of Trumpism which captured the appeal of a strong leader who would relieve individual citizens of their civic responsibilities as long as they think their privilege over non-minorities will be maintained.

From the Equal Justice Initiative 2020

On November 14, 1960, white mobs threatened 6 year old Ruby Bridges as she integrates William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, LA.

AFTER HE’S GONE. . .

/ oleblacklady / Leave a comment

Whether it is January 2021 or January 2025, Donald J Trump will leave the White House. I can conjure up a scenario where 45 hatches a way to become the last numbered president in 2024, drafted perhaps for a third term after the two term limit has been invalidated by SCOTUS or reversed by Congress. Alternatively, Jr may run in 2024, a frontman much like Dmitri Medvedev functioned for Trump’s hero, Vladimir. And like Putin, Trump could return after Jr’s first term, but by then, his 80 year old mind might be a bit wobbly on the Man, Woman, Camera, Person, TV test. Alternatively, the ChaosPresident will have dropped it from his repertoire or simply forgotten it in the way that aging minds do. Who can remember 8 years ago, a history he will no doubt have bent and reimagined thousands of times before he drags it out again. Ahh, nightmare scenarios unwinding ad infinitum…

But if the 2020 election is not a resounding rejection of the politics of Trumpism, with all the down ballot implications, the battle to claim the White House will likely involve state legislatures, state and federal courts, the Supreme Court, the electoral college and the streets. Yes there will be demonstrations in the streets, Trumpophants, otherwise known as the minority, defended by the militias and white supremacists versus BLM, liberals, progressives, feminists, LGBTQs, indigenous peoples, Latinx, other minority groups and the disabled reclaiming their majority under the protection of Black self defense groups like the Black Panthers and NFAC (Not Fucking Around Coalition). There is no question that this is the largest portion of the population, no matter how the GOP has been able to gerrymander, purge, suppress, intimidate and discard cast votes to create the illusion of their competitiveness. The GOP simply claims to know better how the majority should be ruled while conceding in their more honest moments, now few if any, that they are a minority party. 

 The RealityTVPresident will move to shut down the count, just as the GOP is battling in court after court to limit the deadlines for counting mail-in ballots and to find criteria to invalidate already cast ballots. They’ve done what they can outside the court to depress turnout, from long lines at polling places to limiting mail-in ballot return routes outside the USPS. In GOP election boards, they will find whatever means necessary to throw out ballots. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots that arrive after the polls close at 8 pm will be set aside as provisional even as every person in line at the closing hour will be able to cast their votes or at least that’s supposed to be the way it works. That’s completely illogical unless you’re thinking like a Republican who can create any rationale related to voter fraud. However, Philadelphia has done this as a protective step so that in the wake of the inevitable court challenge, the integrity of those ballots will not be challenged if the court rules in favor of counting them. The majority will have to fight to ensure that as many votes as possible will be counted because let’s face it, what a random person in a counting room will do can’t be controlled. That is if a resounding blue vote in the state hasn’t put the question to bed.

In an effort to build Trumpophant support, the Coronavirus Superspreader in Chief exhorted a rally that the winner of the election must be declared on election night or his army of lawyers will pounce and by extension, the Proud Boys might want to upgrade from standby to high alert. In truth, this would be the first election in history where that would have happened. The TV networks project a winner through the magic of statistical modelling; election officials count ballots and declare winners at the end of the count. Military personnel have always voted by absentee ballot which can be accepted if it is postmarked by election day or sometimes later. Certainly it is mandatory that the men and women laying their lives on the line for the country should be given special consideration in selecting the Commander in Chief and legislators at the federal and local levels of their home states. In blowout victories, they may not sway a result, but they’re counted in the final totals.

The GOP goal is to get the outcome to the Supreme Court where justices have shown their willingness to rule in favor of the partisan conservative mission that placed them on the court. Yes, even as far back as Thomas. Still, it’s another turn to an unelected, unrepresentative body because the GOP as a minority party understands that it’s message is not popular and more voters reject it than support it. In their pre- and intra election lawsuits, the justices have been laying judicials crumbs to remove election boards, secretaries of state and even state legislatures from decisions about their local electoral processes, the traditional heart and soul of our dysfunctional elections. The dominating influence of McConnell’s court packing that installed partisan party hacks has smoothed the path to the highest court. Any pretense of something other than a power grab was undermined by the sloppily written opinion by Uncle Donald’s middle child Cavanaugh when he cited a case as precedent that stated specifically that it could not serve as a precedent, among other errors in that most recent opinion. He might have been working off a hangover so didn’t bother to fact check his clerks, possibly also loyal partisans, for factual errors let alone improperly cited precedents. Cavanaugh exposed the duplicity of the GOP narrative that he was a thoughtful, intelligent jurist rather than the vengeful party attack dog he revealed at his confirmation hearings. Unfortunately, what’s important is the court decision itself and the details of the explanation can disappear into law books that hardly anyone reads until it resurfaces in some other partisan ruling. 

The GOP has dropped all pretense of subtlety, now that the party’s been unmasked, as they are unabashedly hurtling toward a potential doomsday scenario. Their doom, not ours. Let’s face it, if Republican shenanigans were happening in Belarusse, Italy or one of a number of African dictatorships, charges of election rigging would be circling the globe. Most of those countries have less robust court systems to hear the kinds of legal challenges the GOP is racking up daily beyond the packing of the Supreme Court.  Jimmy Carter has monitored less flagrant misbehavior in elections in his duties as an election observer in other countries. 

Back to the moment upon us, Americans have been arming themselves since the pandemic seized our lives. Everyone who’s anyone is out their buying guns. Apparently, ammo is as impossible to buy as toilet paper at the start of the pandemic. Everyday African American women and men are no exception; I inserted the “everyday” to counterbalance the gangbanger/thug/drug dealer/thief that immediately came to many a nonminority mind. The number of guns in the street are ripe for multiple casualties. The vigilante and law enforcement forces amped up to a fever pitch over the presence of Black defense forces, their dark skin made 1000 times scarier by their weapons. Think how cops react to unarmed Black men they just imagine have a weapon and then exponentially multiply that when they see an assault weapon in full view across a kevlar girded chest. Armed white men will have to choose between opening up on the unarmed protesters, risking a volley in reply from Black defense forces or trying to take out the defense first. Either way they can get off their rounds before being fired on, but the potential to take out weapons will likely dominate. Just one little flippant word or car backfire could set off multiple bloodbaths. Oh I can imagine the unfolding of nail biting movie scenarios waiting to be scripted and shot.

One can’t speculate on the precise role of white provateurs looking to start that long anticipated race war except to say that they’ll figure somewhere in the mix. They might take out law enforcement to blame dark skinned groups or take them out to blame law enforcement to spur a larger community response. They might spread out to personally beat on both groups simultaneously. And Antifa loves the smell of violence in the morning, so they’ll be on hand to whack “fascists” as only they define them with a bat or club. 

And where will the National Guard stand? As a student of history, it will not be with the rainbow coalition. The National Guard has never stood with the descendants of the enslaved and has often joined in the destruction, both on duty and in their off duty lives. Will any of their bullets be equally distributed to the white bodies in a mixed crowd? Many will not have been alive for the nightmare of the Kent State student shootings in 1970, but I’ll bet there’s still some training education in the Guard, if not for the enlisted men then the brass. Maybe, armed militiamen will force their hands, being armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and all. Hell the white supremacists have been trying to start a race war for ages; here, summoning their instincts to finally prove their manhood, is where the rubber meets the road. There’s some dark skinned National Guardsmen, their presence difficult to discern under the layers of riot gear, masks and face shields. But then, white nationalists have always been fine with taking out nig#@! lovers too. 

In this atmosphere, Black people are rightfully scared and have joined the multitude of gun buyers leading up to elections. We have generational DNA that triggers an urge to seek weapons of defense when we can’t flee. Lawd, we been here so many times. If we have to go down, we can take some crackers out with us. Funny or really tragic that one of the refrains of my militant youth should echo so easily into my present old age.

Obviously, anxiety prickling the hairs on business owners across the country has prompted the boarding up of windows. 45 has built an unclimbable fence around the White House, creating the fortress compound that has twinkled in his eye, so contrary to the People’s House of a supposed Trump hero, Andrew Jackson. He seems to have forgotten that his current residence is only borrowed, not a palace for perpetuity. He’s channeling Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un and of course, the many palaces of Vladimir Putin. I’m channeling the movie “White House Down” where armed paramilitary personnel leap in waves from behind that barrier, firing methodically on unarmed protestors from behind that fence, not unlike the stroll to the church to fumble with a bible before a bevy of photographers’ whirling shutters. For that assault, Bill Barr cobbled together an assembly of ICE, DEA, Border Patrol and other special forces at the disposal of the Justice Department; I’m just waiting for the story to break in the NYTimes that those guys (and women) are secretly massing somewhere in DC.

Images of the streets might reverberate for the justices as well. SCOTUS might want to consider the millions of marchers that will be streaming past their offices as they craft their decisions on elections. Evidence of such power has not often confronted their deliberations and it is nearly impossible to believe that even cloistered originalist minds, recalculating crowd numbers by subtracting two fifths for each dark skinned body, will not see the implications for avoiding widespread violence or perhaps civil war. Supreme Court Justices have a long history of contorting the law to suit their purposes to maintain and support the powerful few from Dred Scott through Citizens United and Shelby County v Holder. Remember, that the laws are written and passed by those powerful few, able to maintain the illusion that our representatives represented our needs rather than the “special interests”. For much of that history, they made little pretense that the “our” excluded Asians, indigenous people and the perennial favorite, descendents of the enslaved. It is not a big stretch to interpret the law in ways that are even more favorable than the text itself; they work in fruitful harmony. SCOTUS is the status quo bulwark against full and equal rights for all citizens and residents, resisting changes in the national pulse by 2 or 3 decades. What else would you expect from a bunch of old gray haired white men?

Still there may be some hope that the court might at least adjust the time table for their return to a time when there were only two genders and those two were the only ones who could have legal intercourse and marry; when parents were unable to decide when to add children to their families and how many; when families were forced to choose between adding a child to their family and the mother’s death; when women had fewer, less effective contraceptive choices; when discrimination by gender, religion, and the color of one’s skin across all spheres was not only tolerated but encouraged; when immigrants had no rights at all. Remember that FDR only had to threaten to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court to help them see New Deal legislation in a new light. Perhaps civil unrest will inspire the justices to tread water until more stable times, but that’s a difficult call about people who have demonstrated that they have no shame and consciences seriously crippled by partisan identity fusion. Or if the forces of equal justice triumph, their power is counterbalanced during the usually slow judicial process. 

It’s futile for me to speculate on who will emerge victorious in the election over the next couple of weeks or the scope of showdowns in the streets. As voting comes to a close on election day, I’d love to believe that it will be a blowout for democracy preservers. But truthfully,  I have trouble believing that white people will do the right thing, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. To put it bluntly, they’ve muffed every opportunity to make the country live up to its ideals or the country wouldn’t look the way it does now. (And no Barack Obama doesn’t count, because very quickly afterwards Americans showed exactly who they are in rapid progression to the RealityTVPresident.) But, there’s always a first time.