[same thing, except better copy-edited to expunge some possibly confusing gaffes] In which I recap Yank political follies for you, my Oz friends, once more. In case the jibe is unfamiliar, 'Faux News' is a US-familiar taunt denoting Murdoch-owned far-right mouthpiece cable television's supposed news organisation Fox News. They have long claimed to be 'fair and balanced', a cheeky claim that fools nobody except perhaps the 27.2% of the Nov. 2016 electorate who voted Trump/Pence. (28.4% voted Clinton/Kaine, and 3.4% voted third-party, but the decisive faction was the 41.0% who didn't vote.) ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> ----- Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 14:15:56 -0700 From: Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> To: skeptic(a)linuxmafia.com Subject: Re: [skeptic] Another rat flees the rapidly-sinking SS Trump Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already. Quoting Wade T Smith (skepticus(a)earthlink.net): Many Bruti with many knives would be required, not just one, _if_ that non-democratic remedy were ever the solution -- a second civil war -- because The Toddler-in-Chief and his Administration are, when all is said and done, irritating and continually boggling (and corrosive to the Republic), but a mostly ineffective reality-TV chaos sideshow, and not the real problem. (Say I, at least.) Which is to say, you're about to hear my What the Hell Happened to the United States quick-take. (I will also review some basics, as I have a mind to forward this to a group of my Australian friends.) It all traces back to way, way too much money in politics (thank you, Citizens United Supreme Court decision for turning a small trickle of corruption into the Johnstown Flood of corruption), and the plot to 'get' Bill Clinton through both Special Prosecutors (thank you, Ken Starr), and the weaponising of Congressional politics and poisoning of Congress's Executive Branch relations under any GOP majority with any Democratic President (thank you, Newt Gingrich). Under Gingrich, the House of Representatives (in particular) GOP majority was incredibly upset that Bill Clinton's ability to grab the centre of American politics empowered him and permitted him to start fixing Reagan's twisting of institutions and, worse, start appointing Supreme Court justices to have a lasting effect. Gingrich was the first of a new and growing breed of GOP leaders who want to overpower all opposition at all cost, and to have discarded compromise and democratic values. You may recall he was so determined to destroy the Clinton Administration that he literally defunded and shut down the Federal government for the first time ever. His intellectual heirs are the detested Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell the traitor. The government shutdown backfired in the short term, but showed GOP extremists they could conduct sabotage without being removed from office and pointed to the outer darkness. Meanwhile, the GOP extremists supported Special Prosecutor Ken Starr in his futile and stupid effort to remove Bill Clinton from office, settling for a consolation goal of reducing his administration's effectiveness while under attack. Although the Faux News propaganda narrative of moral equivalency between GOP extremism and (supposed) equal and opposite Democratic Party extremism is a barefaced lie, the Democrats have not had clean hands through this corrosion of politics. Honest and endearingly old-time conservative analyst David Frum listed some of the ways the Democrats have acted to worsen the partisan divide in his recent book _Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic_, which I recommend highly. I would add the extreme politicising of hearings for Supreme Court appointees, which started with the 1987 hearings over Reagan-appointed extremist ideologue Robert Bork. Bork was a disaster, but was totally, clearly _qualified_ for the post, and so it was a jarring and destructive break from all of American tradition for Democrats to deprive Reagan of his (foolish) choice. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/the-sad-legacy-of-robe… There were never ideological litmus tests in Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court appointees _before_ that. Since then, always and every time. The avalanche of money created the lunatic Tea Party as an astroturf (faux grassroots) far-right organising effort (and a branding concept rather than a party). This was actually just cover for finding gullible & trollable citizens and siphoning their donations money, hence was shut down when the targets _ran out_ of funds (I'm not joking), but was a harbinger of lunatic combines and astroturfing to come (Faux News, far-right believer online forums, the Freedom Caucus). The Democratic Party remained, throughout this process, a diverse coalition with modest goals, still aligned with pluralist democratic values, civil rights, and support for (and by) labour unions, but also undisciplined and gutless. To the best of my recollection, the only significant shift in its carefully moderate agenda was a late embrace of marriage equality (same-sex marriage) after the tide of public opinion already lurched in its favour. By contrast, the Republican Party became by degrees more militant and ideologically purist, with moderates (and principled conservatives such as David Frum) being forced out. Worst of all, top leadership became fixated with gaining and perfecting single party rule at any cost. After eight years of right-leaning but surprisingly steady by current standards (other than the horrible war thing) George W. Bush -- who at least, for all his faults, would not tolerate anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant idiocy -- the Republican aspirations for one-party rule were set back horribly by the surprising emergence of Barack Hussein Obama, who trounced GOP standard-bearers John McCain in 2008 and then Mitt Romney in 2012. In response, yet more dirty money poured in (especially from the toxic Koch Brothers) and the GOP turned in desperation to attempting outright sabotage and de-legitimising the new President, far _more_ than they did with Bill Clinton. Their near-total failure to destroy Obama drove the GOP and its craziest voters into greater psychosis including open racism and anti-religious bigotry (Obama's middle name didn't help), not to mention anti-immigrant demagogery. In the latter regard, to their credit, GOP leaders attempted to prevent that specific craziness, as reflected in their remarkably thoughtful 2013 97-page report on the Romney defeat, 'Growth and Opportunity Project', popularly called the GOP 'Autopsy Report'. This is where the GOP mandarins noted gravely the ongoing demographic shift where a massive number of legitimate citizen voters who are children of recent Hispanic immigrants, among others, were making the United States for the first time _truly_ multiracial and multicultural, to a degree it never has quite been before. In particular, it was no longer the case that Caucasian voters were an absolute majority, but just one huge ingredient in the melting pot among many. The Autopsy Report strongly urged reform of GOP policies towards immigrants lest all these newer voters create a permanent Democratic Party majority, and leaders began adopting all of its wise recommendations. But then, a low-cost but accidentally effective sabotage effort changed everything: This was Project REDMAP, Redistricting Majority Project, created in 2010 to take advantage of a unique, historic opportunity occasioned by decennial redistricting for both state and Federal offices _combined_ with unprecedentedly effective computer modeling, to do gerrymandering an order of magnitude more effective than ever before. This project cost only $18m, a pittance, was effective beyond Republicans' wildest dream, and has (ironically) made them captive of their own success. For reasons I'll explain, this plot twist forced them into extremism, killed the Autopsy Report reforms, and enabled The Toddler's bizarre takeover of the GOP. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/ratfcked-the-influence-of-red… But first, the unplanned success of Project REDMAP didn't _merely_ give Republicans artificial, undemocratic dominance in dozens of states and the US House of Representatives, but also created a deep reservoir of _crazy extremist_ GOP politicians in state houses and Congress's lower house, by making their newly gerrymandered districts 'safe' against non-GOP challenge: When a seat is so protected against Democratic and independent challengers that moderate policies aren't necessary to win, the looniest, most far-right, least pluralist GOP candidate tends to gain and hold that office. This emergent effect, more than anything else, made the Autopsy Report policies a dead letter, starting around 2015, as the GOP, while knowing this would be a long-term catastrophe, was forced by Freedom Caucus loonies to abandon the report's wise recommendations and about-face against them. Captive of its REDMAP-enabled lunatic fringe, the GOP still greatly feared being swept away by the future Democratic Party wave the Autopsy Report warned against and tried to avert, but now it was forced into stronger measures in place of Autopsy Report reforms. First up was outright appeal to (previously latent) racism and xenophobia, the best weapon against Obama; and misogyny, the best weapon against Hilary Clinton. The GOP tried and failed to sabotage Obama's first term, and he managed to pass an overhaul of health insurance (directly copying GOP Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's 'Romneycare' health insurance reform that originated in the right-wing Heritage Foundation) despite GOP refusal to participate. By now, REDMAP had transformed enough House districts that a large House GOP majority joined a bare Senate GOP majority in 2012, and the effort to neuter Obama's Executive Branch redoubled. Obama kept trying fruitlessly for a while to work out a bipartisan relationship with Congress, and eventually gave up and attempted reforms through Executive Branch orders _only_, having been left no other options. In this, he further enraged the GOP power-politics supremacists by transgressing norms and infringing on Congress's prerogatives. For example, the pre-2012 Obama had honestly admitted that he alone had no constitutional power to give relief against deportation to 'dreamers', American young people born abroad and brought to the USA by unauthorised immigrant parents, thus in violation of immigration law through no personal fault and knowing no country but the United States. (Congress alone could enact the necessary reforms.) The post-2012 Obama reversed course and decreed 'DACA', Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, through an Executive Order despite his earlier statement that this would unconstitutional, because the extremist-controlled Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act or take any other action. (Even with the justification of empathy towards enormously admirable, blameless young immigrants, Democratic President Obama, though this wrongful action and others, drove the militant GOP further into psychopathy.) The money-corruption problem continued to worsen. Koch Brothers money was now joined by that of radical-right billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca, who saw a chance to disassemble the regulatory state through the right extremist presidential candidate. Their standard bearer was the hated Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. When his campaign imploded, they switched to bizarre junk-television celebrity, multiple failed businessman and spectacularly failed business owner, one-time slumlord, and conduit for ex-Soviet money-laundering money Donald John Trump. Trump promoted himself with the tired, stupid line that he'd run America 'like a business' -- and some people failed to notice that his business was a _family_ business empire in which enforced secrecy (strong NDAs) covers up criminality and incompetence, with the sole sacred duty being personal loyalty not to the business but to The Toddler himself. GOP mandarins were appalled by The Toddler's multifaceted severe failings -- he's a malignant narcissist, he's a-literate and cannot even read a one-page memo or be taught the basics of his office, he has no policies (only intuition-driven urges), he drives away all but third-raters willing to abase themselves and show total loyalty (that is never returned) (this being why competent lawyers will not work for him) -- but the GOP by this time was carried along, hostage. The point is that The Toddler isn't _competent_ evil, but rather spastic and borderline self-defeating evil. If Mitch McConnell and Robert Mercer are Vito Corleone, The Toddler is merely Fredo. Trump's damage to the Executive Branch has been severe and ongoing, but amateur. In computer-security terms, it can be compared to a fuzzing probe of a codebase, trying semi-random nonsense inputs to government processes, to find unsuspected avenues of attack. The GOP in Congress, haunted by the prospect of being swept away by a Democratic wave driven by both revulsion and demographic shifts, in desperation crossed the Rubicon into outright treason with Putin and his captive oligarchs and well-funded hacking teams -- as did, of course, to a much greater and less well-concealed degree, The Toddler. One of the few areas The Toddler has done competent damage is by packing Federal judgeships solely with far-right loons whose names were tendered by the extremist Federalist Society. That will be a long-term problem. Fixing this situation, preferably without knives, will require a large purge of traitors, correcting the REDMAP 'ratf*cking' of district boundaries (the GOP apparatchiks' own term), and somehow overturning Citizens United. This repair, I fear, will take depressingly long, even if the traitors are swept away. But my point is, The Toddler is just a psychotic blip, madly waving his tiny little hands and distracting from the larger problem. My view, yours for a small fee.[tm] _______________________________________________ skeptic mailing list skeptic(a)linuxmafia.com http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/skeptic To reach the listadmin, mail rick(a)linuxmafia.com ----- End forwarded message ----- ----- End forwarded message ----- ----- End forwarded message -----