Didn’t want to go there, but here we are.

“Kara” said I. “You have always bemoaned the objectifying of women and refrained from pointing out men’s appearance. Sure I’ve made a few Chris Christie chubby jokes but qualified it by pointing out that Chris Christie’s figure is the most lovable thing about him. But, neglecting to call Donald Trump ugly is probably blogging malpractice.

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(not-Americans, please don’t read because you will want to bomb us).

When The Pisser King “won” the election, one of my first thoughts was: oh great, now we’ll get days of the left trying to figure out how this was our fault. The grim festival of blame-laying among progressives/the left/Democrats: Do you wish it would stop already, for the love of all that is left to cling to? So do I.

“Comey; The Russians; Wiki Leaks; Tim Kaine was boring; Hillary was a bad candidate/too shrill and she won the popular vote so doesn’t count; Bernie was an egomaniac who couldn’t bear to get out of the race; the heinous and frightening acts of right-wing voter suppression; the unending anti-Hillary propaganda machine; the “Bernie surely would have won”;  the cheating, plus too many of us are sexist, racist and stupid, and we forgot to sew the noble white laborer into our quilt of justice.”

The election swung on so few votes in the critical swing states that a logical case could be made for just about any theory (to that end I blame myself for not heading to my birthplace to swing Pennsylvania. Sorry Hillary you deserved better, I let you down and I know it). But basically, the lame stream media done it. By “it,” I mean degraded our political ecosystem to such an extent that Donald J. Trump was elected president. Right-wing media did more than any other entity to make this possible.

By “lame stream media,” I mean pretty much all conservative media, from the Alex Joneses and the Breitbarts to the David Brookses and the Wall Street Journals to the sewer that is Fox Nooz (The Fear-Mongering Propaganda Machine That’s Dividing This Nation).

Look, there is simply no way to make the conservative policy agenda sound nice without bullshitting. The things that conservatives want –  lower taxes on wealth, less environmental protection, less help to the poor, etc.,  – are not good ideas, so those espousing them must try to bullshit us. We will help more people by helping fewer of them, and we will collect more taxes when we cut them. Insinuation and hyperbole and question begging and no details, retreating into vague appeals to our freedoms. “Bullshit”, basically.

Who was it that relentlessly and over multiple decades portrayed Hillary Clinton as a scheming criminal when her actual record was that of a dynamic progressive feminist and advocate in her inner younger days and later a typical center-left politician, and nearly always cleaner than her detractors’?

Who worked the bellows of the Tea Party, birthers, idiots obsessed with death panels FEMA camps, gun grabbing and martial law, none of which ever materialized nor were ever likely to? Who fanned fear of immigrants and Muslims and “urban youth” and socialism and women’s bodies, and atheism and other things that are not particularly dangerous, while denying that we are globally killing ourselves with fossil fuel emissions? Who took safety laws, trigger warnings and safe spaces and morphed them from little things that barely even existed at liberal colleges into dastardly, outrageous threats to the Republic?

Who made it so that Republican members of Congress are shitting their pants over the possibility of primary challenges from their own party? (Gerrymandering and) the right-wing media, of course!

Who saw that there was an enormous amount of money to be made in telling a regular sort of person who is frightened of change, and maybe a little bit mean, that they are right to be hateful and fearful? (like most things terrible things in this country, it goes back to  Reagan. In 1987, when he had the FCC scrapped the “Fairness Doctrine” requiring tv and radio broadcasters to balance their political programming, there was no consumer internet).

This Guy!

Right-wing media is only a bit younger than media itself. But – YOUNG PEOPLE LISTEN UP BECAUSE YOU WERE NOT YET ALIVE TO REMEMBER WHEN THE REPUBLICANS CAME IN AN RUINED EVERYTHING THAT OTHER TIME – it was filtered, through an exceeding amount of editorial scrutiny and far, far, far, far fewer outlets than today. There was no national platform, known to all, readily available 24 hours a day basically for free, perpetually refreshed with new content, that was fully committed to advancing an extreme, ideologically right-wing agenda in 1987.

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So – I am going to give you my take, and it may or may not be true, but it is what gives me hope.

We had a brilliant, handsome, decent, dynamic man be president for the past 8 years, a real live constitutional scholar, who endured the slings and arrows of racism and obstructionism with more class than I could ever have exhibited.

Did he do everything right? I don’t know. He’s likely smarter, and more politic than me, and therefore I don’t criticize his decisions. I know that President Obama knows somet hings that we don’t know, and that’s the reason for no maneuvers and no dirty tricks at the end of his term. Of course, I could be wrong, he could be wrong, and we are all merrily going down the shithole. He could be asking for asylum in Switzerland tomorrow. He’d probably get it, what with his credentials. I just have hope knowing that he’s going to be a private citizen, and he ain’t going nowhere. He will fight on our side, and I think he’s a good ally.

What it comes down to is trust. I trust him. I don’t like all of anybody’s decisions, how could I? But I don’t doubt that I could change my mind if I were t have a conversation with him about it or was privy to the reasons, and then saw what the results were over time. (he’s a master of 11-dimensional chess, after all.)

One of the things that gives me confidence in his knowledge is his lack of bragging about it. Thinking back, I can’t remember a single instance of him saying “I know a lot about this” or that he ever said he was smarter than someone else. Ever. That’s one of the reasons he’s far ahead of me as a human being. I’d hold him up as a true role model, and I rarely think that about anybody. I don’t know a tenth of what this guy knows, and I certainly don’t have even that much of his experience dealing with any of this stuff. But he’s proven to me through his abilities and his behavior and his equanimity and his personal mien that he’s a man of great character who is completely capable of being an amazing President, and as far as I can see is an amazing President, and may look even more amazing through the lens of history. For one thing, he’s the first president in my lifetime who was actually a professional expert on the Constitution, as in that was his job. And more, a guy who came to the White House and spent eight years there with no scandals. Zero. Zilch. His enemies had to make up ridiculous shit about birth certificates and preachers because they couldn’t find anything in his actual life that a) would embarrass him and b) he hadn’t already admitted to. And you can’t gut a guy for smoking weed when the majority of the country wouldn’t care. He’s been upright, moral, compassionate, calm (I think we’re going to appreciate that far more in hindsight), knowledgable, humble, enthusiastic, simpatico, funny, deep, approachable, dedicated, and yes, cool.

Mr Obama is everything I’ve ever wanted in a president, with the exception of willing to engage in fisticuffs. But I keep telling myself that this is real life, not a movie, and I have no idea what that damn job entails day in and day out. I trust the guy because of who he’s proved himself to be, so I trust that his decisions were the best ones for the moment he made them. And that’s all anyone can expect from the President – that he make the very best decisions possible. That’s his job, and Obama won out.

Why do you all have such a hard time believing that the Russian hack stories are all a subterfuge to distract from Secretary of State Clinton and PresidentObama’s crimes of shipping chemical weapons from Libya to Syria to give to Al-Qaeda and ISIS in order to commit false flag operations to promote an invasion of Syria and overthrow Assad so the Saudis can build a pipeline to Turkey?*

I mean does that sound less plausible than Putin fucking with us in order to get a more pliable candidate elected?
* Yes there people on the fringe left who actually believe this.

not the same:

One thing that always seems to get swept under the rug about Americans with a progressive bent is that we are, in fact, patriots, with a clear understanding of realpolitik and the necessity of secrecy in statecraft. The “Pentagon Papers” seem to be the impetus for many, of a certain generation, to champion the actions of the holy trinity of  righteousness that is Assange/Greenwald/Snowden – but what they forget is that Ellsberg was a different animal entirely: he was judicious where they were slapdash, and he never shied away from the consequences of his actions (quite the contrary in fact). Richard Helms, DCI, had a quip: “there are two things you won’t find at CIA- communists and Republicans.” Meanwhile we have idiots here like llamaspit and jason, trying to troll with minutiae and namecalling- and missing the point entirely…Ellsberg’s actions spoke to a very specific instance of moral turpitude on the part of the DoD (they were lying to themselves about our own troops, and killing more of them because of it). Even so, Ellsberg’s actions were problematic; and he knew that, and owned it. Snowden et al are all about getting off scot-free, with no regard for the real stakes.

What the Wikileaks crowd did was a crime. The machinery of governance is ugly, underneath, but monkeywrenching it indiscriminately serves no one, and endangers everyone. When Ellsberg  leaked the Pentagon Papers, it was because he wanted to stop the Vietnam War, so he left out sections about peace negotiations with North Vietnam, so that Nixon couldn’t use the release as an excuse for breaking off negotiations with them. Ellsberg understood that some government documents should remain secret, at least for some period of time. Mr. Assange views the very notion of government secrecy as totalitarian in nature. He has referred to his site as “an uncensorable system for untraceable document leaking and analysis.” WikiLeaks offers no articles of its own, no context of any of the materials it discloses, and no analysis of them other than assertions in press releases or their equivalent. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told the Associated Press earlier this month:

“WikiLeaks seems rooted in a “simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency”.

I would have a lot more respect for Edward Snowden’s actions as acts of civil disobediance if he had faced his accusers rather than tucking himself firmly under Putin’s protective wing. Daniel Ellsberg didn’t flee the country, but rather fought the charges against him in the courts. Dr. King went to jail, not to Cuba. Flight to avoid prosecution is simply not the way civil disobedience achieves it’s goals. Also, pretty sure Daniel Ellsberg knew the content of the carefully selected documents he leaked. Unlike Snowden, who just scooped up as much as he could and forked it on over to people he barely knew. Ellsberg’s resistance actually created legal precedence and King’s changed national policy. Snowden just shotgunned a ton of documents into the public eye with no real, demonstrable change in government practice.

I really don’t see what makes these people part of “the left.” They don’t seem to share any of the priorities or core beliefs of the left, and they generally focus on left governments and politicians to the benefit of the right. Is there a reason we call them “left”? Because “right” seems a lot more applicable. Being insufferable assholes also helps them fit right in with that “right” label too. Assange’s gross alliance with white nationalists — shrieking about “Jews” – Snowden’s gun-nut Ron Paul politics; and Greenwald’s histrionic caterwauling that anyone who pointed out he was making common cause with assholes was “McCarthyite” — a slur that seems to have worked well for him, since now, all these years later, everyone’s using it. The “progressives” on Twitter who think the worst thing to happen to the world is America, and the worst thing to happen to America is the Democrats, particularly Barack Obama and DEFINITELY Hillary Clinton. Thank God Snowden/Assange/Greenwald worshipping “progressives” on twitter helped stop Hillary’s ascendancy, with her calls for every single populist policy their followers claim to demand. They’re currently holding the line in defense of that great humanitarian Vladimir Putin, while explaining to anyone who’ll listen that it’s Barack Obama who can’t be trusted. And lefties are buying it, along with the fiction that the three are anything like progressive themselves. Do avail yourself of the chance to read about how their opposition to American imperialism was totally coincidental to Obama becoming president.

One thing that’s nice is that, whenever someone who claims to be a leftist starts praising Greenwald or Assange, you immediately know that

1) they’re lying about being a leftist and not a self-righteous prick and useful idiot for actual fascists

2) they can be safely ignored (the same is true if they start calling perfectly decent liberal political figures like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton “neoliberal”, or if they angrily insist that they’re not liberals but leftists, and those are not synonyms but completely different things).