Yes, I Still Squawk About American Politics

My fellow Dems should be hoping and praying that Trump runs again in 2024 (with Ivanka for V.P., you heard it here first).

The young-ish fascist Hawleys and Rubios and Cottons and Cruz's will talk a big game about how Trump is still the head of the party, but when the rubber hits the road in 2023 these authoritarian egomaniacs will wake up and realize that every nomination they don't win puts them four years further away from ever getting the brass ring.

To put it another way, if four years of Biden / Harris isn't enough to convince enough Americans to vote for the Dem over The Disaster in 2024, our party deserves to go die in a dumpster fire anyways.

"All we need are the necessities and more"

 

X, "The New World" live 1985

Some thoughts:

1)  This was Trump's election to win.  All he had to do was half a have-decent response to COVID and start giving out 1,000 dollar checks last summer.  Couldn't be arsed, as Brits would say.

2)  Even the most extreme progressive deserves to give Biden a chance.  You can tell he wants to be there, and my hope is that Harris will also pull him to the left simply by her presence.  After four years of Cheeto Hitler, we deserve a little optimism at least.  A mostly-female cabinet alone makes for a good start.

3)  So much of the next four years will come down to the Senate.  Again, let's give ourselves at least a week of optimism before we see Joe Manchin cutting deals with Mitch McConnell.

4)  The inauguration was pretty good.  Biden's speech started kind of weak in my opinion, but finished strong.  To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, that's a good place to end.

5)  I'm in a much better head-space, as you can imagine, moving back to a country with Joe Biden in charge rather than Trump.

It's Over. It Begins.

It feels good to breathe again.

Lots to do though. Let's make people hurt less.

— James (@wetcasements) January 21, 2021

Feeling Better -- Some Election Thoughts

Sugar, "Feeling Better"

Every masterpiece a la Copper Blue should have a mandatory outtake / angry, dark shit EP like Beaster.  It is known.

Some more salubrious thoughts than the ones that went before concerning the 2020 Election:

1)  Loser stink.  We all fail, but there's a particularly foul scent that goes with being a one-term US president.  It just doesn't happen that often.  Carter has rightfully been restored due to his incredible humanitarian work, but that took a long time.  George H.W. never recovered.  Gerald Ford?  A walking punchline.  Trump's whole brand is based on "winning" (he's a fraud of course) and this will stick to him forever.  Conversely, defeating an incumbent president is hard fucking work, and Biden pulled it off.

2)  As predicted, Biden is set to win the largest vote total in American history, with the largest participation in modern American history.  Only the Electoral College and the media's insatiable desire to get vote counts within a mere few hours is keeping this from looking like objectively what it is: a blow-out victory against a guy who, along with his Republican Party, pulled out every stop to make voting difficult, if not impossible.

3)  McConnell isn't going to let a single damn thing go through the Senate.  Biden and Pelosi need to message the hell of the fact that the House is trying to Get Stuff Done, and the Senate won't allow it.  Frankly, this is a long shot.  "Both Sides Do It" is pretty much the mantra of even left-of-center US media.

4)  If Trump isn't dead or in a New York State jail come 2022 he's going to run again, probably with his daughter or less dumb, more evil son in tow.  Honestly, I really hope he does -- he wrecked the Republican primary in 2015 and he can do it again, no problem.

5)  Everybody, including me, underestimated Biden's ability to rise to the occasion.  Let's see if he has some more magic to pull out of his Vintage Mustang.  And let's hope Kamala Harris will rise as well.  She was my second choice after Elizabeth Warren, and I think she will.  At the very least, a strong, smart black woman taking the reins of power is going to blow more than a few blood vessels among the GOP and FOX.

6)  Breathe.  We won.  We didn't shoot the moon, but we won.  Remember that Trump is not the sort to go quietly into the good night -- there will be casualties, as one of his favorite things is to reward loyalty with bitter spite and legal peril.

Not a Pyrrhic Victory So Much As a Sad and Underwhelming One

Obviously, it's not over but then again it's kind of over barring Complete and Total Ratfucking.  This election was much closer than it should have been, and yet not so close that John Roberts would show his hand just yet.  With the Senate out of reach for Dems he has two solid years of pretty much rewriting the post-1945 legal status quo for America.  Why blow it so early when Biden will most likely not be able to enlarge the court?  Or even get rid of the filibuster?

Goodbye Roe for starters.

So it sucks.  I stand by my opinion that large turnout is a generally good thing, even if it means there must have been a ton of first-time Trump voters out there.

It's looking like Biden bombed with Hispanic voters.  Another reason to take the incredibly smart and motivated AOC more seriously?

Silver linings?

The Senate map for 2022 is looking good for Democrats, but again Biden has to think big and strategically.  If he goes back to Washington thinking he'll just charm the pants off of McConnell to get the Democratic agenda through we really are screwed.

And fuck the Electoral College.

In a few hours I have to walk into my adult night class and explain a lot of this shit to them.

Good times.

Dostoevsky Works Both Ways

Not long after Trump got elected I wrote "everything is now permitted."  Referring to an attempted murder by a Q-Anon supporter, I meant it in a very general sense, that of accepted norms and standards being destroyed.  I meant in in a scary-sad way, a "we're well and truly fucked" way.

With Supreme Court justice Amy Coney-Barrett taking less than a day between swearing in and then filming a literal Trump campaign video, I am -- surprisingly -- a little more sanguine and a little more focused on what could be positives moving into 2021.

After four years of this unending avalanche of Republican-enabled hatefulness and stupidity, of dire incompetence, I mean "Everything is now permitted" in a much more Congress-specific sense: fuck the filibuster, fuck the sacred norm of only nine justices, fuck the banal congeniality of the U.S. Senate, fuck the fakey bullshit hypocrisy of a "neutral and apolitical" Supreme Court forever.

You don't need to read Dostoevsky (you should, but you don't need to) to understand this attitude cuts both ways.  It honestly hurt for the past four years.  But now it's time to redirect the pain onto those who actually deserve it.

Biden's first act as president, Spaghetti-Monster willing we also win the Senate next week, is to put up Merrick Garland for the SCOTUS immediately.

And that's just for starters -- DC statehood, Puerto Rico statehood, automatic registration of all US citizens as voters, voting day as a national holiday all come next.

All of that by the end of 2021.  Then we really get down to work making the necessary structural changes to maintain our Democracy, without a damn drop more of counter-majoritarian compromise with a GOP that stands for nothing beyond tax-cuts for the rich and white identity politics.

Is Biden up to the task?  Maybe.  Harris could pull them there.  The outrageous actions of ACB could.  Pelosi certainly seems game.  But if not, he doesn't deserve a hypothetical second term.  Fuck cowardly hypothetical Biden and fuck David Brooks too.

Yawn

Kamala did fine.  (Notice a pattern here?)  I might have missed it, but she didn't mention Merrick Garland's name when Pence asked about court packing, which stood out for me as a missed opportunity.  Then again, maybe that's too much inside baseball for most Americans.

Mike Pence is obviously not quite as deranged at his master.  I don't see that carrying much weight in late 2020.

Biden is well within his rights to cancel the last two debates with Typhoid Cheeto.  They won't move the scale one inch either way.

Good lord, let's get this over with.

"no legitimate reason"

Bob Mould, "Next Generation"

He plays guitar harder than he ever has at the ripe old age of 59.  Anger makes you young.

We can't be complacent.  Donald Trump and the Republican Cult that supports him to the death are going to try and steal this election.

But frankly, it puts a spring in my step to realize that there's a more-than-zero chance that Cheeto Hitler and at least one or more of his horrible fail-children will go to jail in light of recent news:

"He pointed specifically to consultant fees paid by Donald Trump to Ivanka Trump. Since Ivanka Trump was already an employee of the Trump Organization, Akerman said, there was 'no legitimate reason' for those payments. 

He speculated the two could have been shifting the money around to avoid paying taxes on it.  

That, he said, could lead to an ominous development for the president should he leave office in January. 

'The only thing that’s saving him at this point is the Department of Justice’s guideline that says you can’t indict a sitting president,' Akerman said. 'Once he’s no longer a sitting president, he is subject to being indicted.'”

To quote a certain highly decorated starship captain, "Make it so." 

Electioneering

 I voted.

Washington State Ballot.

Same US address I've used for over a decade now (my last residence in America before moving to South Korea).

COVID changed things a bit though.  I usually send my ballots snail-mail, no insurance, because I've got pretty good faith in Korean and US mail.

But this year, and for months now, the Korean post office has warned that letters and packages can be delayed by over a month.

So I went to Daegu FedEx, and they told me they won't ship to PO Boxes.

Went to Korean post office, asked for "EMS" (express) service, and they said the same thing.

So, being that Washington State is primarily a Democratic one that actually wants folks to vote, I've done my first ever scan-and-e-mail ballot.

This is no shade on my Washington State county whatsoever -- they've been routinely excellent at letting me vote for over a decade now.

Anyhow, just thought it was worth sharing.  This election is not a normal one by any means.

Vote the bloated orange pussy-grabber out with enough vengeance that his inevitable cry of "illegal immigrants voting!" is drowned out by the joyful noise of a country that has an outside chance -- certainly not a definite one -- of making something of a comeback from the brink of tyranny and/or mediocrity.

Tediocraty?  Myranny?

This Wednesday is the beginning of Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) so I can get up and watch the first debate in the comfort of my boxer-shorts.  Lucky me.

I'm not expecting Ciceronian perfection from Biden, but I think he's got enough left in the tank and a sense of history to know that he needs to be sharp.

He can be.  He needs to be.