War Consigliere vs The Surrender Caucus: Where You Been, Bro?

 

It was no accident that Texas Representative Chip Roy became the spokesman for the Defund Obamacare Republicans in the Congressional hearing yesterday. Roy fought to keep the government closed to force the Democrats to cave and defund Obamacare when the Democrats were in power. He was scathing in his criticism of fellow Republicans who caved in and voted to fund it, so the government could re-open. He called them the "surrender caucus" in 2013. 

Now, Roy finds himself on the winning side, watching the surrender caucus of Senate Democrats cave in, while moving on the House side to drive the dagger in the heart of Obamacare.

Roy is cunning enough to frame Obamacare as:

1/ A scheme to enrich insurance companies--a good villain to pick in these times

2/ A program which limits the choice of doctors and hospitals so the government dictates which doctor you can and cannot see.

Of course, Obamacare was criticized at the time of its passage as a scheme to enrich commercial insurance companies. The Democrats wanted, and tried, to pass Medicare for All but ran into a brick wall constructed by Republicans who called it socialized medicine and, of course, lobbyists for the insurance companies were all over Congress and so, as happens in democracies, a compromise was struck handing insurance companies the business, but at least insuring that ordinary folks could buy insurance, no matter what "pre-existing conditions" they had. 

In fact, if Representative Roy had not been in Congress when he got his Hodgkins lymphoma and then applied for insurance he would have been denied coverage for his pre-existing condition. But what he complains about is that Obamacare would not have covered his care at MD Anderson, which is not really the fault of Obamacare, but of MD Anderson's business model.

It is also particularly rich to hear Roy inveigh about the Democrats holding the country hostage to Obamacare for 45 days, when he did precisely that to deny the country Obamacare back in 2013, and when his party caved, he called them "the surrender caucus."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPUJOpB2_Qg&t=1546s

Across from him, Hakeem Jeffries rises to attack the Republican assault on Obamacare, and he  confronts Roy for having tried to kill Obamacare 70 times, and for having fled Capitol Hill for 7 weeks rather than engaging in any kind of debate. 

"He couldn't see fit to ask us a single question, to engage in a debate. Where you been, bro? You don't have the time to have a back and forth? You want to repeal and displace tens of millions of people. That's the Republican plan. What I don't understand why my colleague (Roy) cut and run. The absence of any plan to make life better for every day Americans. Republicans literally stole food from children, mothers and veterans, and all of that was literally done to enact massive tax breaks for billionaire donors. And as if that wasn't bad enough, they skyrocketed the debt by trillions of dollars a year. So we are not going to be lectured about fiscal responsibility by you when you did that because Donald Trump ordered you to do that."

All this brought to mind the difference between a war consigliere and a consigliere who counsels accommodation, surrender and moderation. 

Sometimes fiction can instruct us on real life; it can provide a reference story we can refer to, just as many find Bible stories allegories to help them with the troubles they face in daily life. 

For Mad Dog, one such story is the movie, "The Godfather." When Tom Hagen, the Corleones' consiglieri, assesses the family's position after the attempted assassination of the Don, he advises accommodation or some might say, surrender, because it makes business sense. It's cheaper than a war, and it means everyone can make money. 

Michael decides to reject that advice and chooses to assassinate the would be assassin who had already missed his chance. And later, when the Corleone family decides to go to war, he excludes Tom, who is stunned and asks, "Michael, why am I out?"

"You're a good consigliere, Tom. And I love you, but you're not a war consigliere and you're out."

There are times when you need to follow your gut, or, to put it another way, to do what is emotionally and possibly morally the required decision. 

Winston Churchill, whose bulldog visage is at Donald Trump's elbow in the Oval Office, took the war consigliere position. Churchill's  predecessor had conciliated Hitler, had appeased him. Not Churchill. "We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. And we shall fight them in the hills. We shall never surrender."

Now that is the sort of leader Democrats need today.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9uEy5RKz6uI

Raping The Girl On 5th Avenue

 

It is a measure of desperation on the part of Democrats they continue to cleave to the idea there will be some one thing, one deux ex machina event which will bring Trump down and rid the Republic of this vexatious idol without the Democrats having to actually beat him in battle.

But it doesn't matter if Jeffrey Epstein sent an email saying Trump had sex with a "victim," at his house. It wouldn't matter if a video of Trump having sex with a fourteen year old girl surfaced. Or with a fourteen year old boy. Or having sex and then shooting them on 5th Avenue.

Trump is occasionally correct: He said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and people would still elect him President. In fact, he wound up doing something very close to that: He exhorted his MAGA mob to attack the Capitol and then, after they did it, he can pardon those captured and nobody blinks an eye.

Any text message, email, video will be denied. Fake news. Deep fake. Black's white today. Good's bad today. Day's night today. 

His die hard MAGA fans will forgive him anything. He's an imperfect vessel doing God's work. Or he's just a man's man. He talks like us. Humble yourself before them and they will do anything you ask--Frank Underwood.

                         Behold, the Real Problem

This America, man.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pay3qgmi8E8&t=145s

The Hollow Men: This Is The Way We End, Not With A Bang But with a Whimper

 It is not the intransigence and boldness of our adversaries we will remember, but the irresolute cowardice of our friends.

--Mad Dog

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

--Martin Luther King

Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe?

--Martin Luther King

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are built for.

--W.G.Thayer Shedd

Even a dead fish can go with the flow

--Jim Hightower

The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others

--Jose Rizal

The unkindest cut of all

--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang

But with a Whimper

--T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

The Ignominious Eight

The hardest part is not seeing our own two U.S. Senators bend the knee--Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen both voted to confirm Kristi Noem and they both voted to kill Dodd-Frank so that banks could profit over the common man. We have always accepted these two as useful but unreliable politicians.

John Fetterman has been a lost soul even before his stroke.

But Mad Dog expected better of Dick Durbin, Angus King and Thomas Kaine. These were men who attacked Trump boldly.

And now they vote to surrender.

Sometimes surrender is the right thing to do: The fanatics in the Japanese government, the die hards who wanted their fellow Japanese to fight on even after Japanese cities had been fired bombed and atomic bombed, even though the Japanese Navy was on the ocean bottom and the air force self destructing--those men were putting their own delusions ahead of their own people. (See "Embracing Defeat," John Dower.)

But our government shutdown was not Japan after the bomb.

It was beginning to hurt. It was beginning to become inconvenient. 

That's where you need courage.

There were two salient arguments for caving in to Trump and Thune and Michael Johnson:

1/ The people the shutdown hurt are mostly Democrats or people Democrats would like to keep in their fold: government workers, the poor, the hungry. Republicans do not consider these folks their constituents and are perfectly happy to see them suffer.

2/ The Democrats had no endgame: If the Republicans say, "Fine, we don't need no frigging guvment and we'll get paid for being Senators and Congressmen anyway and we can go home until the 2026 elections," then what do the Democrats have?

The answer to #1 is that we always hurt the ones we love, but we have to do that sometimes. Churchill did not say we'll fight them on the beaches thinking none of his constituents would be shot, and he did not inspect the bombed out London apartment buildings thinking his decisions had no part in that destruction. But he persevered because he knew what he was fighting for.

The answer to #2 is that neither side had an endgame, but the Republicans said, "We are willing to have no government," and the Democrats have to have the courage to say, "Fine, let's see how that plays out for you. We are willing to bet more Americans  will come to realize they need and even want a government than to not have one."

But what we did not know until these eight Democrats turned coward was whether we have strong enough leadership to justify having a Democratic party. 

And now we know.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40kN6-yAbdA

Best Way to Fight ICE: Get Out Your Camera

J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois knows what Donald Trump is trying to provoke: Another Kent State, a Border Patrol agent shot, an excuse to send in the troops. 

So far, in L.A., in Portland, Oregon, Trump has found his shock troops disarmed by giant green frogs and yellow ducks.

But the Border Patrol and ICE agents and Texas National Guard units sent to Chicago are ratcheting up the vice grip and trying hard to start something nasty. 

Governor Pritzker says the best counter punch is for citizens to take out their cameras and start filming every time ICE shows up.

Without that nauseating video, nobody would have ever heard of George Floyd, and Derek Chauvin would still be killing people in Minneapolis.

Without that famous photo of a napalmed naked Vietnamese girl running in horror from her bombed village, Americans would not have given Napalm a second thought. It smelled like victory, the man said, but with that image it looked like evil.

Without the images of My Lai, nobody would have paid much attention to what U.S. Marines were doing in Vietnam. Officials could claim they were only reacting to horrific behavior on the other side, to snipers or hidden threats. But those bodies of babies and their mothers exposed what was really happening.

The images of the Southern police beating protesters on the Pettus bridge in Selma turned stomachs even among some Southern women.

Martin Luther King being shoved to the ground by his neck meant more after you had heard him speak. But the photo played it's role.

The dog against protester photo was worth 10,000 headlines. Authorities could blame him. They could say he broke some law, that he put the officers at risk. But you can see what you can see.

So, let's get them on video. Let the world see what arresting the worst of the worst really means. Let us see the lie; don't tell us about it. 

An image can be powerful in ways words and even actions unrecorded cannot be.

CODA:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjCDDe-oh78&t=72s

Gerrymandering: A Primer

 

Listening to the media, print, social and TV, one might think an electoral map can be drawn up to assure that certain outcomes will obtain for a given party. 

So when the Texas governor assigns five new seats to the Republican party for the U.S. House of Representatives, it's a done deal.

And when Louisiana has 11 U.S. House seats and none of the elected Congressmen are Black, and yet 1/3 of the Louisiana population is Black, some have concluded district maps have been drawn to exclude Blacks from representation.

But how can you do that? Do Blacks not live side by side with Whites in Louisiana?

Apparently not.

The idea of manipulating maps, which reflect two dimensional geography to achieve an outcome in the composition of a Congressional delegation goes way back, to 1813 at least.

But how does that work now? 

Well, many states are "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in between," and for large stretches of land, the people living on that land have predictable opinions and political preferences.

So look at the state of Virginia's Red/Blue election map from the governor's election this week. Virginia gets 11 seats in the House. If you said, we'll divide up those Blue counties (Northern Virgina, Richmond, Delmarva, Albermarle, Montgomery) into different 10 Congressional districts and we'll make all those rural red counties one seat, then Virginia would send 10 Democratic Representatives to Congress and the Republicans would get only one. Currently, Virginia sends 6 Democrats and 5 Republicans to Congress. So the Republicans could lose 4 seats with the right redistricting. And repeat that in other similarly divided states and control of Congress depends on how you draw the lines, not on actual representation of opinion.

That's the big problem for a Republic. 

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVlpDV3D0DM

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.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RW8Gzln_L2k

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.