What Do We Call It?

 

Times have changed,
And we've often rewound the clock,
Since the Puritans got a shock,
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today,
Any shock they should try to stem,
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

--Cole Porter

What do you call it when one side decides to play a different game entirely and you've shown up with your football helmet and shoulder pads?

Just Normal Tourists on January 6th

"Game changer," hardly covers the situation.

"Moving the goal posts?" Inadequate, as the idea of a touchdown or field goal no longer applies.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

So, when Hitler decided that the new game was not to define borders differently, or to talk about international law or to pay attention to judges and lawyers about what was constitutional or legal, he did not waste time on details.

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes

His game was all about racial consciousness, racial purity and making the state the guardian of race and using the state to enter the mind of the population under his control to make them function to enhance "racial health."

.

When mothers pack and leave poor father
Because they decide they'd rather be tennis pros,
Anything Goes.

If driving fast cars you like,
If low bars you like,
If old hymns you like,
If bare limbs you like,
If Mae West you like
Or me undressed you like,
Why, nobody will oppose!
When every night,
The set that's smart
Is intruding in nudist parties in studios,
Anything Goes.

So, in the Third Reich, young healthy men were told there duty was not to themselves as individuals, but to their race and the German race,  so they were to marry and produce as many children as possible. The Reich saw the fecundity of Black Africans and Jews as a threat to racial dominance. Fertile German males were advised, in a booklet distributed widely through schools and clubs, to look at women not as playmates but as potential mothers of their children, and to investigate the lineage of their mates to be sure they were not Jews or anything other than of German origin or of "Nordic" origin--so Scandinavians were allowable.

White Mothers Welcoming the White Messiah

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes

Anything which advanced the cause of expanding the race was morally and legally good. Anything which helped reduce the population of competing inferior races was good: So dragging children off the trains at concentration camps and marching them, along with their fertile mothers, into gas chambers was not murder, but racial hygiene, a necessary cleansing and controlling of populations. 

For Hitler's willing accomplices, marching a village of Jewish women and children into a church and burning them alive was a joyous thing, something they did with the sense of excitement you might see on youtube watching hyped up men hunting wild pigs in Texas, shooting them from helicopters, or trucks, or rounding them up in pens and shooting them through the bars.  People were regarded much as the wild pigs are seen now, as destructive, threatening pests, big vermin, a joy to kill, and a good community project.

So what the Third Reich did was to change the whole game entirely.  It wasn't about defeating an army any more, or drawing a new border or extracting wealth and resources (although that followed on the heels of the invasions) but it was about cleansing and purifying.

If saying your prayers you like,
If green pears you like
If old chairs you like,
If back stairs you like,
If love affairs you like
With young bears you like,

Why nobody will oppose!

At first, some British diplomats did not really get this, when they confronted Hitler's demands for a new chunk of territory, pushing back borders. They thought they were still playing the Treaty of Versailles border and nation state game.

The Reich said quite baldly, there was no such thing as universal human values that all societies,  no matter how different, embraced as part of being human or civilized. So killing people, killing woman and children was not necessarily a bad thing if it was racial cleansing. 

The Reich rejected participation in any international court. It rejected the idea that all men are created equal. White people are not equal but superior. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations because it no longer shared any values with that group.

And we are facing the same sort of phenomenon now with Trump. People are still saying, "It's unprecedented. It's never happened before in American history. It's unconstitutional. It's illegal. It's lawless."

Well, duh. Of course it is. It's a new game entirely.

There are no longer three branches of government. The judiciary has been decapitated, although some lower courts are still running around like chickens with their heads cut off. No matter: when the case gets to the Court of Last Resort, it will rule for Trump.

There is no longer an independent legislature as a check on the President's power. Congress does not really develop spending programs--Trump only spends what he wants to spend and anything Congress sends him he doesn't like, like money for medical research or vaccines or food stamps or healthcare, he just redirects to himself or to his billionaire clients.

When the fourth estate, the free press, challenges him about demanding $230 million from the Treasury because he's been offended by the cases brought against him by the DOJ, he tells the reporter she is a terrible person and directs her to leave the room.

New game.

New rules.

Anything Goes

His minions get it. They ape him: Karoline Leavitt tells reporters the Democratic Party is made up of terrorists, criminals and illegal aliens, she gets it. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recommends unpasteurized milk and there are outbreaks of Listeria, salmonella and bovine tuberculosis, there is nobody to gainsay him in the government. When he attacks vaccines and measles resurges and kills children and adults, well they were just defective people with weak immune systems and it's probably better they are gone and that means the nation is made of tougher stock now.

Modern Day Anne Franks 

So we are now no longer on a hundred yard field with boundary markers and goal posts. Nor do we play on a baseball diamond with bases and umpires who call balls and strikes. There is a new strike zone for each player, depending on how much Trump likes him.

We are not in a Brave New World. 

And though I'm not a great romancer
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes...
Anything goes!

--Cole Porter, "Anything Goes"

We are in an Orwellian dystopia, where there is no truth, only Truth Social.

Dunce Confederacy Does the White House

 

Tom Nichols assembles a platter of remarks from Trump's Merry Mopes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in his recent article in "The Atlantic."

What You See Is What You Get

Mad Dog had not seen assembled such a collection of piffle before, but in the aggregate, they gel into a pretty clear picture:

1/ Karoline Leavitt (Press Secretary)

When asked by a reporter who planned a meeting between Trump and Putin, a rather mundane, but staple question asked routinely, Ms. Leavitt replied, "Your Mom did." The reporter might have replied, "Uh, please? And thank you," but we'll never know.

Ms. Leavitt is clearly no C.J. Craig. 

She did not know the answer, or she knew the answer and knew it would be embarrassing, so she simply dug deep into that repertoire from the elementary school playground, which is about where her intellectual development stalled.

I'm Ready To Speak for Trump

2/ Pete Hegseth

Follow Me!

Announcing the end of "DEI" practices Hegseth said, "We're done with that shit."

That, of course, would have sufficed at Joe's Bar, but we were all hoping for something more quotable, something along the lines of, "Diversity has been distorted into an excuse for incompetence, replacing real merit with group think, as if being a particular race is a qualification or virtue." Or something. Some actual argument, you know?

But no. We get, "We're done with that shit." Did he lock and load and fire off a round after saying that, or just throw an axe at some poor drummer?

3/ Vice President Vance, asked whether destroying boats in the Caribbean, killing all on board, without first stopping and searching them, to establish guilt or innocence might be considered a "war crime," replied, "I don't give a shit what you call it."

And he's right to not care whether it's a war crime or not, as recent events, and distant events have demonstrated--you can do all sorts of war crimes for years from Ukraine to Gazza and there will be no calling to account. 

4/ President Trump responded to the No Kings rallies with an AI cartoon showing him joyfully dumping feces on the protesters.

Your President; I Kid You Not

At least Nixon tried to respond to war protesters by calling them "bums." Didn't work. But, you know. He tried.

One might ask:

1/ Do these players think profanity, scatological cartoons are edgy? Do they think if they respond to questions, which is a part of their official duties, with hostility, taunts or by passing gas, they are South Park funny?

2/ Or, could it be, they each realize they have no capacity to formulate a reasonable response, so they just resort to jibes and what they think are ribald jokes, believing themselves to be witty and/or commanding?

There's a wonderful scene in Roxane, the Steve Martin movie which updates the Cyrano De Bergerac play where a knuckle dragger in a bar calls him "Big nose," and Martin challenges him to come up with a better insult, which, of course this Hegseth like buffoon cannot do, and then Martin launches into twenty really funny insults to his own nose, each funnier than the next, which unmasks the goon as a simpleton and thoroughly humiliates him, while at the same time generating considerable sympathy for Cyrano, who has clearly had to live with insults about his nose his whole life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdf4g-LXk4

But neither Hegseth nor the bar dweeb are capable of any real wit.

Nichols calls this "post-ironic glib dismissal." 

They delight in the crass and the lewd, rude, crude and foul.

They think it makes them more accessible, less like the polished,  Hillary Clinton model, with her crafted sentences, designed to allow for plausible denial which came off as sounding to formulaic, dodgy and legalistic.

They delight the Hulk Hogan, Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS mob.

"Just tell it like it is!" the MAGA mob smirks. 

This is the segment of the population which consists of people who get drawn into an argument about tariffs or ICE kidnappings or January 6th, or shutting down the government and once they see, after a few sentences of exchange, that they are failing to persuade, pervade or punish, they expostulate, "Fuck you! You radical leftist effete snob!"

Noem skull

And then they turn their backs and strut away thinking they've just driven their opponent into a dot of humiliation. They have got attention and they think they've intimidated.

Trump is the patron saint  of the third stringer, Nichols suggests, and the only way to respond to them may be to say, "Feel better now? Well, good, Now answer the question. Who arranged the meeting? What is the difference between murder and blowing up a boat with human beings on board without warning--especially when there are other effective options?"

Many have observed you cannot argue with the MAGA mob, because they do not understand how to argue and they simply degenerate into name calling and insults, the way Trump does whenever a reporter asks him an embarrassing question: "You are a very bad person? Did you know that?"

But it's somehow a comfort to see it laid out: These are simple not people worth worrying about. They have been plucked out of obscurity and given their moment in the spotlight, but they cannot sing, dance or even be funny.

They can delight some folks with their insouciance and crudity and vulgarity, but that too grows old pretty quickly. We are only 9 months in this time. It's already stale.

All we can do now is persist and tune into Colbert, Kimmel, Adam Schiff, Paul Krugman, Paul Offit and Bernie Sanders.

And maybe now, Zohran Mamdani. 

Like most newcomers to the political scene, we really don't know much about him. He may be another Obama, or he may crash and burn. But, at least, his vocabulary includes words with more than four letters.

Every Journey Begins With A First Step

 

It's not the beginning of the end. It is not even the end of the beginning. But it might be, if we are lucky, perhaps the beginning of the beginning.

California passed Proposition 50 to allow the state to try to balance the cynical wild west tactic of Texas to pack the Congress with loyal MAGAts. 

And, in New Jersey and even in Virginia, the Democrats won governorships, so Trump cannot simply pick up the phone to the governors in those states to demand they Gerrymander their states to safeguard him from impeachment by a hostile Congress bent on bringing a lawless despot to justice. 

Trump is not impeached.

Trump cannot be impeached unless the Congress changes hands, both House and Senate, in 2026. 

We are a very long and improbable way from that.

And Trump and his MAGA mob are not stupid when it comes to political power. That's why Trump implored Texas to find him 5 more Congressional seats, just as he insisted the Secretary of State of Georgia manufacture 11,000 votes for him in 2020.

The mantra has been that would-be authoritarians always overplay their hands, and Trump's dictate to wimpy Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find him more Congressional seats did cause a reaction in California. Trump is out there stumping on the Gerrymander circuit to extract more Congressional seats for a reason, and that reason is not because he has a grand legislative program he wants to pass--although Project 2025 would be that plan if his acolytes could get him to read,  and he might embrace Project 2025 it if they can package it into small video pieces presented by blond women showing lots of leg on white leather couches.  

No, what Trump fears is a Democratic House which would certainly impeach him, and if the U.S. Senate turned 2/3 Democrat, they might just possibly work up the spine to convict him. 

The math, of course, is in his favor, even if redistricting delivered the House to the Democrats. There is no reasonable calculus for a Democratic Senate any time soon. We have six Senators from the Dakotas and Alaska who represent fewer people than live in Chicago, which has no U.S. Senators. 

The United States Senate is by design, anti-democratic, anti-Republic, a design meant to insure that the will of people is thwarted by wealth and aristocracy, a concession to fears that democracy would mean mob rule and trustworthy men of wealth and property had to be given a stranglehold on the processes of government, to insure "stability" and "reason."

A single Senator from Montana represents roughly a million people, where a Senator from California represents 39 million.

So we have the senators from tumbleweed ruling the Senate, and they have to be persuaded before the representatives of the people, in "the people's house" can do anything which might threaten the interests of the wealthy who have always controlled the country.

Of course, if you add up all  those Red states which look so big on those election maps--North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska you have fewer people living in all those states, represented by 12 United States Senators than you have people living in New York City, which has no U.S. Senators.

So, the founders were not clairvoyant. And they knew at the time their experiment was imperfect and would have to be adjusted to meet the needs of the future. But, of course, no adjustments have been made fixed the structural  problems of representation, beyond changing that rule that slaves count as 3/5 of a person.

But, for now at least, we've got a new mayor of New York City, who represents and will lead a jurisdiction with more people in it than those six red states combined. 

And the man was born in Uganda. A naturalized citizen. 

No doubt Trump will send ICE after him. 

Trump has already said he'll cut all federal funds from reaching New York City, if Mamdani won, which he's been itching to do ever since a NYC jury found him guilty of 39 felony counts and he got kicked out of the city, sent on his way to the sanctuary state of Florida and his Gatsby house, Mar-a-Lago.

Mad Dog has no idea what Mamdani's win says about New York or the USA, but he is pretty sure Mamdani did not win because he is a Muslim who was born in Uganda.

Maybe it had something to do with Mamdani's willingness to address actual problems faced by citizens who hoped or maybe even expected that government might actually solve problems rather than become the problem. 

Making buses free is one thing but providing affordable housing is not something governments have had much success doing--"the projects" became festering wounds in every city they were tried, except for some projects in NYC, where they worked well some of the time. In Baltimore they became such a center of crime and decay they simply had to demolish them.

So affordable housing and even more so, homelessness, may be complex problems beyond simple government solutions. 

But, at least, New York has voted for hope rather than cynical dismissiveness.

Meanwhile, in Mar-a-log the party goes on, and we've got the woman in the cocktail glass, the perfect symbol for the Trump/MAGA concept of the good life. 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e8pBQsDOa1E

The roaring twenties.

Just off Mar-a-Lago

And we know how that ended.

Boats Against The Current: Borne Ceaselessly Back Into the Past

 

Hard as it is to believe Donald Trump has ever read "The Great Gatsby," it is absolutely believable he seized upon the Gatsby theme when it was presented to him, likely with a clip of the Leonardo Di Caprio movie, the very best adaptation ever done.

It's got that Geoffrey Epstein vibe, after all.

Or maybe it's more Tony Soprano who owned a pole dancer bar.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e8pBQsDOa1E

And it's all of piece with the new marble in the bathroom off the Lincoln bedroom. And wait 'til you see the new ballroom. That'll make Gatsby turn green with envy!

Nearly naked women in cocktail glasses, women in flapper outfits, which is to say, very short skirts, flashing lots of thigh at rich men in tuxedos. 

It's so very Trump.

And his MAGA boys lap it up. 

I'm sure Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS will run with it.

After all, isn't that what FOXNEWS has been selling for lo these many years?

And as for those folks who rely on SNAP benefits, let them eat cake. They don't deserve any handouts, anyway, and it's all the Democrats' fault.

All of it.

What is the Democrats' fault? You may ask.

Well, just everything. All of it. 

What It Means To Be An American

 

All Persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [if you are born here or legally immigrate, you're in the club]

are citizens of the United States

and of the State wherein they reside.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; [so Alabama, Mississippi cannot refuse to let colored folk vote or run for office just because it's not what we do hereabouts]

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law;

[So you cannot just round people up and throw them into vans, or send them to concentration camps for being Japanese born in America, or break into their houses, or stop them while walking or driving while looking foreign or not white, or for Speaking Spanish or looking like an "illegal alien." ]

nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[So, guys gobbled up in vans cannot be sent to Alligator Alcatraz, without having been convicted in a court of law.]

--Fourteenth Amendment of the United States of America Constitution

Before the First World War, as Mark Mazower points out, if you lived in Europe, you were a subject or citizen of an empire, whether it was German, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish or Swedish. So, you could be a person raised in a home where French was your native tongue, and still rise to be an official or a businessman in Russia or Germany, as long as you owed your allegiance (and your position) to the emperor.

Getty Images: Japanese off to Concentration Camp

But, after the war, and the Treaty of Paris, what mattered was what nation state you belonged to.  A German speaking person living within the borders of Austria, was not German but Austrian. A German speaker living in Poland was Polish, or Latvian if he lived within the borders of Lativa, or French if he lived in Alsace-Lorraine. 

As Donald Trump observed after the Brexit vote, "They want borders." The English were sick and tired of looking around their streets in London and seeing men dressed in long Thobs wearing Kufi's on their heads, drinking coffee at outdoor cafes, as if they were in Bagdad. They did not like the fact that the women behind the counters in the convenience stores spoke Polish first and English as a second language. And they did not like seeing Bobbies walking the street whose faces were black as night. They wanted their "England" back. They wanted the rosy red checks of little children. They wanted those Bobbies on bicycles two by two to be White, to look like Roger Miller's Englishmen right out of "England Swings."

So, World War One did not make the world safe for democracy; it made the world safe for nationalism and democracies melted away, collapsed, unable to provide solutions to wealth disparities, inflation, economic Depression, and a capitalistic system which kept the masses down and the only alternative seemed to be either communism, which was totalitarian, or a system of cult leaders which went under the name "fascism."

As Mazower notes, there were different types of fascism: The type in Italy, Spain and Hungary allowed other centers of authority, like the church, the judiciary to continue (as long as they behaved) and there was Germany where Hitler and his mob were hostile or, at most, barely tolerant of religious institutions, demanding that all that mattered was the enthusiastic embrace by the populace of Der Fuhrer. 

The judiciary under Hitler embraced the idea that law, which is a process involving consistency and rules should support the goals laid down by Der Fuhrer, especially when it came to protecting the "racial hygiene" of the nation. Hitler's judiciary served the idea of supporting the state, i.e. Der Fuhrer, not protecting individual rights. 

Trump is different from Hitler in that he has no underlying driving philosophy of racial purity or anything else. He just wants to be loved, obeyed and enriched. He is more like Louis XV than he is like Hitler. Just kiss my ring, give me money, never criticize me and you're fine, no matter your color or your religion, which are matters of indifference to him, as long as you pay him.

Citizenship in other countries looks different. 

In Israel a major rift has developed because 14% of the population is now "Haredim," or "ultraorthodox,"  and as many of 18% of men of draft age are Haredi. This group poses a problem for a nation which perceives itself as being surrounded by hostile neighbors and beset by groups within its borders bent on its destruction, e.g., Hamas. Facing an existential threat, the Israelis perceive themselves in a position of needing "all hands on deck." 

But the Haredi do not buy in to this. For the Haredi, ideally, many young men should spend all day indoors reading and studying and arguing about the Torah. Their wives can go out and work and support the family, but these men live in God. They are often quoted as saying that the continued existence of the state of Israel is of no concern to them. They are concerned only with God. Serving in the military exposes them to a secular, and often sacrilegious culture, where they would have to violate the Sabbath, live in sinful proximity and style with women and simply be unable to devote their lives to God.  So for them, being good citizens is not the idea; being good Haredim is the idea.

This has provoked much ire among Israelis who are not Haredi, who are secular or who simply ask, "Why should I send my sons and daughters to fight and die for our country while you are protected in your yeshivas?"

It's not hard to understand the fury of citizens trudging home bloodied from Gaza and northern borders, looking at young men their own age, walking untouched to their yeshivas, scholars insisting that they should be able to continue their studies, their holy relationship with God, fed, protected, coddled, and tacitly demanding others to provide for them their safe space so they can live their lives almost as queen bees, supported by worker drones. In Israel, women have not been exempted from military service, but 18 year old Haredi men have been exempt.

Citizenship, it seems, in democracies can be a problem.

One reason Trump is able to claim the loyalty of men whose parents were Born in Mexico or Cuba or Guatemala is that these men were born in the United States and thus have played by the rules and are law abiding full fledged "Americans."  Even if one or two of them are swept up and thrown into a van and sent to Sudan or Gitmo or Alligator Alcatraz, these men feel Donald Trump embraces them as real Americans. Plus, they embrace "machismo," and Trump has plenty of that. 

Democrats used to taunt Republicans for being "country club Republicans," emphasizing that Republicans looked down their noses at the hoi polloi, and separated themselves in clubs and gated communities. But Trump has performed the neat trick of saying that it's the Democrats who look down their noses at the common man, with their Ivy League institutions forming a club the common man cannot breach, and if you are a born in America, legal American you are in the club that matters.

Except, of course, for some people who are born here by "gaming the system," i.e. those folks who crossed the border either illegally or legally, popped out their babies in American hospitals, got their legal papers and became birthright citizens so they could live off the generous welfare state of America which they do not really deserve. 

Of course, the argument is made that a child should not be able to benefit from gains made by the illegal activities ("ill gotten gains") of his parents, and so children born in America to parents who got here illegally cannot benefit from their parents' crime of illegally crossing the border. But, of course, the reason the 14th amendment was put in place was to benefit the children of slaves who were stolen from their homes in Africa and the Caribbean and born in America, the result of the crime of a  slave trade which was so illegal and immoral we had to fight a war over it to be sure it was outlawed. Slaves been transported on the underground railroad north to freedom were called "contraband." So when you invoke the history of how a particular person gets born on American soil, you get caught in the sticky web of history.

The MAGA crowd says if parents rob a bank and steal a million dollars, they should know that money cannot be inherited by their children, and the same for the financial benefit of their parents stealing citizenship for their children. But then we get into the definition of a "crime." Clearly, the million dollars was taken from someone and that money should be returned to its rightful owner. But what as been taken from whom in the case of an "illegal" or unsanctioned border crossing? You might argue, well, if they go on welfare...But what if they simply go to school and then become productive members of American society? What if they become doctors or engineers? Where is the crime in that? Well, but we paid for that with our public schools. But is that not an investment we make in any and all children, even the children of diplomats who go back to their native countries? The nation benefits from an educated workforce and so one might argue those children of illegals have paid back their debt to society by becoming productive workers. 

For present day people of Spanish speaking descent, Trump makes a distinction. If their parents were legal immigrants, they are in the club, but if their parents were "illegal aliens" at the time of their birth, they are excluded, they should be denied membership in the club, which makes those Hispanics who "really belong" feel like members of an exclusive club and they can feel superior to the "illegals," who are actually legal, under our Constitution, but, you know, not really.

So, where does that leave those White Nationalists, who believe, as Hitler did, that this is a White nation? And for some a White, Christian nation? That 14th amendment sure gets in the way. There is the argument that common law says children cannot inherit ill got gains from their parents, but now we are up against the "originalist" Supreme Court, who say that you cannot refer to anything other than what is written in that sacred text, the Constitution.  Of course, as always, this SCOTUS will find its way around the text of the 14th. They are only originalist when it takes them to the place they want to go. When the text gets in the way, they just make things up.

Trump's theme song has been Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA."

Not an American, But Beloved Not raised in a Camp

Greenwood tells us he's proud to be an American.

Now, pride, is an interesting thing. For Mad Dog, pride must involve some effort, suffering even, overcoming adversity--but being an American is really an accident of birth. You are proud because your parents happened to live in Kansas?

"And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me," he sings. And he avers he too would fight for that flag.

But Trump says you've got to be a sap, a fool to join the army, so fighting for the country can't be the virtue.

And, in fact, under Trump, men who were not citizens, who fought in the American army have not been granted citizenship--they are not members of the club.

Greenwood sings of the pride of being a member of the club which includes Detroit, Houston, New York and LA, which Trump decries as dens of iniquity which have descended into chaos and have to be rescued by National Guard troops from Texas, South Carolina and Mississippi.

So what is an American? What have you done to be an American that you can be proud of?