Could be Nothing, But...

 

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly hid free yacht trip to Putin's hometown https://t.co/8yf1w7OMJe

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 10, 2024

I mean, it was 20 years ago. However, it was part of 20 years of corruption and undisclosed gifts on Thomas' part, so even if it doesn't mean something more sinister--how bad does it need to look?

I'm not sure how far AOC filing articles of impeachment against Thomas and Alito will go, or how far a request for the DOJ to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Thomas's possible tax violations will go, but something has to give.

(This post is a nice place to remind everyone that when 13 years of Justice Thomas's financial disclosure forms were amended about a dozen years ago, it was because he failed to include his wife's income from Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation. We've obviously been hearing a lot about the Heritage Foundation lately)

60 Minutes: Ugly is as Ugly Does (UPDATED)

 

Still reputable CBS news program 60 Minutes did a spot on second term Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene, noting that she has amassed considerable political heft in a short time, and almost but not quite conveyed what is wrong about her. She is a conspiracy theorist who behaves in hostile and disruptive ways, often does not know what she is talking about, and simply does not care to do any better. But this is what they did: they let an extremist blow off her more radical statements (but by far, not the worst) and get soft-focused as she worked out and talked about her political journey. 

Lesley Stahl, a veteran interviewer, should have understood that 60 Minutes is a platform in this instance, a megaphone (or a MAGAphone), not the actual lab where a political character like Greene should be properly examined. She did bring up Greene's shameful ambush and stalking of James Hogg and staggering claim that the Parkwood shooting was a false flag, but she also allowed it to be blown off. She expressed wonderment at MTG's insistence that liberals are pedophiles, which she should have fucking expected, and had a follow-up for.  She also had nothing to say re: MTG's insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.

By not being able to press back, she let MTG air those lies in a way that lets them be validated for her fanbase. They see her say those things without pushback, and assume it is Stahl who tried a "gotcha" and failed. And the reason Stahl is unable is because she doesn't understand what Greene is: not a person guided by facts and reason, graced with the solemnity of a political office for merits we have yet to understand. 

The Example of Ilhan Omar

 

Swalwell: Finally. So I thought, we're going to hold someone accountable for anti-semitism. Surely it's the author of this tweet. Kanye, Elon. Trump… Don’t come here looking at us for anti-semitism. Look at your own damn mirror pic.twitter.com/dTYVinwsWZ

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 2, 2023

The one thing I loved about my Democratic party today was how they stood up for Ilhan Omar, who didn't do anything but be visibly a Black African Muslimah who said certain uncomfortable things out loud that a certain political party could with all the pettiness in the world deny access to the one committee where someone with her life experiences would be a complete benefit. These supportive people dropped so many receipts about the GOP it was like the trashcan next to an ATM. They cut up and brought up some real tea. They said who the extremists are. They called them out by name, and AOC brought her own persepective as a woman of color also derided and threatened at times by her "colleagues" across the aisle.

She still got bounced from that committee, but I think that the GOP made it clear it aways was about themselves, not her. They lockstep denied their colleague her place among them because it was politically expedient to be petty and bounce her. Not because of something she egregiously did a minute ago--but because of something she erroneously said years ago and had since atoned for. 

They made an example of her to prove their thin power-- that they could reject someone because of her identity. This tells me so much more about who they are than who she is. 

UPDATE: This is a day in her world. Because of her so-called colleagues,. Because the right is comprised of the religious wrong, who don't care if Ilhan Omar stays a living person or not.  That is what this pettiness leads to. No one deserves that. Ever. But this is the GOP in action. 

Budget Palin Wants To Be Part of the War on Christmas

 

One of the many ways to be a parent in politics is to not expose your children to the white hot spotlight of the gotdamb culture war, but this is apparently not the choice Lauren Boebert has made. She featured her kids in a gun-brandishing Christmas post in support of Thomas Massie, who was being a whole thing there on the internet for a minute. Yeah, very supportive of....displaying weapons of war to celebrate the Prince of Peace, dumbass. Nice job.

But as Dan Crenshaw (also a thirsty boy) has noted, there are definitely some famewhores in the GOP caucus right now. And Boebert was already being a center-stage clown regarding her jihad-squad nonsense regarding Rep. Ilhan Omar, which she has apparently been working out at the open mic nights that are GOP fundraisers for more than a minute. It's tacky, but it becomes her, like flypaper or a glue trap.

Now, far be it for me to say she's playing at using her own kids and the sacred holy day that is Christmas just to promote her branding, but I will note, that she did get a fundraiser in Las Vegas in support of her Islamophobia, so yeah, definitely.  It's exactly like she goes out of her way to to seek out attention, and is rewarded for it. And she will probably try to benefit herself from getting shut out of her committee assignments, too, because why wouldn't she try?

Because here she is responding to the backlash for her putting guns in the hands of her babies:

Oh noes! A Democrat is attacking her because of Christmas and children and somehow, not because she cynically used her kids to promote guns even while we are a country that has mass shootings, even at schools, even at schools with young kids. Even at schools with young kids really close to Christmas, like the babies of Sandy Hook. 

Ms. 1776 over here thinks her act is cute. But Iola Boylan's evil twin is not cute. It might be half-cute, but it's entirely not what anyone should want in a US Representative. 

Trying to Shame the Shameless

The problem with things like a censure vote against Rep. Paul Gosar (AZ, Repulsive) is that, while necessary, it also served to give the similarly-shameless, violent-minded and dishonest people in the GOP caucus something to grandstand about. And that is starting to feel like most of them, these days.

If ever an example of defense through "whataboutism" was ever mounted, it was on display here. The craven Rep, McCarthy displayed the permissiveness of a man led by his party rather than the other way around. Rep. Lauren Boebert used the opportunity to spread lies and hate. 

They were who we thought they were.

There really isn't any shaming the shameless. They wouldn't censure President Trump when he said malicious things about "the Squad", so why should Gosar's video be any different? They've already made their peace with an actual insurrection where a violent mob attacked their "house". Some of these members are already, themselves, receiving death threats because of one vote that displeased the mob--and find themselves incapable of even politely requesting the temperature be brought down.

It isn't for them--it's for those who are watching and understand: these are performers, not statemen. And very bad actors, at that.  Also, if they ever want to cry about civility again, this is what should be thrown in their shameless faces. 

UPDATE: Needless to say, after many GOP members cited his taking the video down from Twitter as a sign of good faith, Gosar re-tweeted it. The thing with people who do things for attention is, if they don't get quite the attention they want, in kind or in quantity, they will escalate. That's why people like him and Marjorie Taylor Greene should not be in Congress. We will just keep seeing these conflicts and this degradation of office on repeat.

Fascists Like Gosar Don't Really Joke

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Republican Paul Gosar will probably "face no consequences" for his disgusting tweet in which he's depicted, in an altered, animated video, killing her because Kevin McCarthy "cheers him on with excuses."https://t.co/v0v6gAKqbU

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 9, 2021

Of course, we've seen another political figure Tweet a video with figurative violence for the LULZ: remember Trump pointing us to an "amusing" video of mass violence against liberal politicians? Why, that was just Trump being Trump, after all! Joking! Why, how was that different from the photoshopped CNN-logo video he posted just a couple years ago?

Well, it was no different, and they were both incitement. One of Trump's merry little fan club sent apparent pipe bombs to multiple public figures, including CNN on-air journalists and politicians. And then, of course, January 6th happened. But that wasn't at all the entire story of the violence wrought in the wake of Trump's apparent endorsement of it--not at all! It is still in fact, ongoing. Quite ordinary people have become motivated to issuing death threats to people just doing their jobs for perceived slights or infractions against the MAGA cult. 

Thirteen Republican representatives voted for the infrastructure bill. Rep. Fred Upton, who was one of them, shared a death threat he had received. Death threats for votes one disagrees with should simply not be acceptable in a free and democratic society. But I drive past a house in the suburbs of PA which has, over the past year, had signs posted up: "Trump Won", "Biden Lied", "Save our Schools". And this week: "Fitzgerald = Traitor". Rep. Fitzgerald was considering the needs of Bucks County residents with his vote, not handing Joe Biden a "win"--who the hell thinks like this? A congressional vote isn't about "wins" for a President, it's about making laws--the actual business of doing a job in congress. (I definitely wonder how the neighbors feel about this house.)

And yet, it's the thirteen GOP House members who decided that childcare and drinking water and transportation and high-speed internet might actually benefit their constituents, who are in actual threat of some kind of censure. For doing what they reckoned to be their actual jobs in Congress, as opposed to just being partisan signifiers. 

The Dialectics of a Sexist Slur

‘Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man’ — Rep. @AOC sending a message to all men in response to Rep. Yoho’s non-apology pic.twitter.com/5JfzTK2VXI

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 25, 2020

It's been a busy few days since I mentioned Rep. Ted Yoho's reference of fellow Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as a "Fucking bitch", but because this speech mattered, I want to revisit what apparently happened, and take a look at the fallout. Because one of the things that needs to be understood is, AOC doesn't come to play, and she knows other people saw what went down. So if Rep. Yoho wants to imply that these words were not said, or not said to her, this can be contradicted. But here's the rub: if someone says something insulting not to your face, but about you within earshot, is that not the same thing? So what AOC heard was this man who never had a minute with her beforehand ran up and said things that did not comply with her understanding, but resulted in that dismissive gendered comment.

Eating Babies is Not Okay

President Trump attacked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after a speaker at her town hall went on a bizarre rant about how eating babies is the only solution to the climate crisis.

Turns out, the stunt was staged by a pro-Trump conspiracy group.https://t.co/24aaLyVlxL

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 4, 2019

There's several shades of fucking whacko going on here, not the least because RW media seemed to have taken this episode to infer the environmental lefties are just fine with the idea of people eating babies. Like, what? People pretty naturally go quiet when someone around them says really screwed up things because you never know when they might set off a batshit bomb and get some on you. That silence definitely does not signify consent to a program involving soylent green infant formula--made from real infants!

LaRouchies are a bit of a weird group, and their claim that their anti-environmentalism hoax is a take-off on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal sits a bit poorly with me. The 1729 proposal was intended as a dig at the exploiters who already took so much from impoverished people that what was left but blood? The anti-environmentalists' take doesn't point a finger at exploitation, so much as revel in it. It seems to exist in a cosmos where human life isn't already considered cheap by those who continue to pollute our planet.

But there's also something darker, there. The anti-choice right wing has recently made up and promoted a terrific lie regarding the compassionate care of neonates with poor survival prognoses, referring to it as a form of abortion. This kind of lie holds within it echoes of the monstrous "baby parts" hoax that influenced the mass shooter Robert Dear. (This has blossomed into aspects of the anti-vax movement, which alleges that vaccines are bad because they contain baby parts, and the even funkier idea that baby parts are used in food additives.)

But for the folding of the satirical concept of eating babies lifted from Swift and whipped into frothing nightmare fuel, you've got your guano-brains du jour, Q-Anon, serving up heaping helpings of adrenochrome. This is, apparently, the scared-child sauce that elite liberals have been drinking to stay looking so amazeballs and vigorous. It's basically Pizzagate with a vampire twist, and has its origins in one of the oldest and most bigoted conspiracy theories (which has killed countless innocent people) on the books--the Blood Libel.

It's batshit with a pedigree. Call the group you wish to destroy "child murderers"--say they eat babies--and watch it excite the part of the brain that wants to, quite rightly, desperately protect their young. Unleash the meme on people who already dislike this group. Watch as the people exposed to said unfounded slander decide that the claim is too grave to further investigate and action must be taken at once.

I'm not sure how this sort of bullshit is supposed to still be working in 2019, but here we are. As for me, I think eating human babies is horrendous. They have no muscle tone and their diets are grotesquely bland. The meat is fatty and without flavor. Children are best eaten at about the age of ten. They have active bodies and are not yet pubescent. Puberty hormones makes the meat far too gamy and unpleasant. And yes, I am joking. Who even owns such large cookware these days? It's nonsense, and the people who push these things in all seriousness should be laughed into obscurity.

No Holiday in Cambodia

"Ocasio-Cortez already receives a high number of death threats; by allowing this PAC to air an ad that links her to genocidal violence in Cambodia, ABC grants undeserved legitimacy to ideas that make her a target."https://t.co/fUWquQjDKc

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) September 13, 2019

This is probably deeply ill-advised of me to notice, but I'm a Gen-X blogger who realized a long time ago that I'm not really presidential material (even if the fitness of the current resident makes even me and my tattoos feel a little like, what the hell? Y not?) so let me just say--wow, but by the visibly melting frame of the yet-living Hank Kissinger, are we really going to go through whether the left-liberalism calling itself democratic socialism is kinda Khmer Rougey and not take notice of the entire right-wing foreign policy failure at influencing positive change with respects to....

Why, no. No we are not doing that. Or at least, you go ahead and do that history dissertation if you've a mind, but:  This is actually just my usual warning that conservative rhetoric is inflammatory and that inflammatory rhetoric is really the thing we should worry about regarding genocide, not mere issues of domestic economy. Because conservatives have been doing this thing with inflammatory and violent rhetoric. And sometimes it results in bad things.

For the Record

Today's vote to condemn President Trump's racist remarks regarding the House Democrats' "Squad" may not seem like a lot, but it is. For one thing, it is a highly unusual move for Congress to make, for another, the act of taking this move required an actual violation of parliamentary rules forbidding disparaging the president in order to properly characterize the things that he said.  The point, however, is that what Trump has said, and the final vote, are now a matter of record.

All Democrats, four Republicans, and Justin Amash voted to condemn. We now have a record of 187 Republicans who are comfortable, on record, with what the President said.

So, how do House Republicans want to deal with this matter. I would say, chiefly, they would prefer not to. They do want to complain that Speaker Pelosi "broke the rules" regarding decorum which is just a quaint thing to assert when defending Trump (not the greatest fan of rules or decorum). And Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney chose to follow Sen. Lindsey Graham's lead and talk about socialism. Because why not distract from the president's racism with a Red Scare (and, I guess, claims about the disloyalty of a certain "dark underbelly" that "pals around with terrorists" while we're at it, to not forget Kellyanne Conway's very busy day)?

In just the way this vote landed along more or less partisan lines, I think feelings about this vote and what it means will likely be interpreted differently by people based on their affiliation. To my thinking, it demonstrates that House Republicans will stick together even if the president's language is egregious, even if his behavior is egregious, for the most part. Time will tell whether this has any effect on the constituencies of those House members later on.

But the point of the exercise wasn't to shame Trump (he doesn't know what shame is) or even to change his behavior (which seems pretty baked-in at this point).  Based on prior behavior, Trump is likely to even double-down. It was to get the reaction of House Republicans down for the record.

And this is now what we have.

But also, just for the record, Rep. Swalwell also made some "unparliamentary speech"--he just quoted Donald Trump:

Holy crap. @RepSwalwell just went on the House floor and listed numerous racist statements made by President Donald Trump. Republicans were NOT happy. pic.twitter.com/Bntwc1LE4w

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 17, 2019

Still (And Always) A Birther

Click to Enlarge

These Tweets should remind us the Donald Trump is always going to be a birther because 

1) it works for him, 

2) he's racist and 

3) the truth means nothing to him

but as needed, he will direct his birtherism to new targets, in this case, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all of whom were born in the USA. 

It's really the Ur-"Ugly White Racist" stereotype he's leaning on here: "If you don't like it here, go back to Africa! (or wherever)".  He's deflecting criticism by implying that these people of color have no right to speak about this country's policies (even though they have been elected by their constituents to do so) because their experiences make them "migrant sympathizers"--in rather the way birtherism, and its companion, the "secret Muslim" hoax, were used to imply that President Obama's experiences made him sympathetic to Islamic nations to undermine his foreign policy goals. 

The simple message--they care more about "those people" than they care about American people. As if it were impossible to do both. And also, implicitly, that what you care about tells us how American you are, for a definition of American that is a certain shade of skin tone and a certain flavor of Christian. 

He lashing out with this particular viciousness because VP Pence's photo-op didn't shift the optics on migrant detention in the way Trump hoped. So, in his typical fashion--he smears the critics, in the same way he smears real journalists as "fake news".  

It's grotesque and overt, and exactly the sort of thing Trump's biggest fans are likely to applaud. 

Hanging Laundry

I've been thinking a lot about audiences, lately, especially as pertains to politics. It seems like we are moving away from a time when a politician can safely get way with crafting a message just for a particular audience because the internet never forgets. It used to be a candidate could safely chat away in a closed-door fundraiser or hold forth in front of a special interest group and not really be that concerned whether a cellphone video would come back to bite them--within hours.

After all, that's what happened to Mitt Romney with the 47% comment, and that's how we came to know of Barack Obama's infamous "cling to their guns or religion" comment, too.  The message only would have sounded acceptable to a given audience who spoke and understood the particular encoded message.  The speaker isn't necessarily even being fake or trying to hide what they are saying--they just would say something a bit differently in front of a different audience. Maybe more diplomatically. It happens in other professions, too. Doctors and nurses might speak to one another in more of a jargon that would be misconstrued by a patient or concerned family member, a salesperson will say something to their manager that they wouldn't say to a customer, and so on.

Politics is a different animal, though. More of what a politician says is subject to dissection for meaning and intent, and it should probably now be obvious that everyone is, for better or worse, in the room when speaking more or less publicly. The result of forgetting who "everyone" is now means opening oneself up to something a bit like what happened to Joe Biden at the last debate--maybe there is an audience (or was an audience) that could hear about working with actual segregationists without some offense, but there are also people in the room for whom that sounds very differently. The skill of speaking to the equities and investment of all the people in the room is a learned skill and probably no one can always do it without error, but thinking about all those people: the voters, the taxpayers, the constituents, the people affected by policies and either included or excluded by language, is necessary and matters a lot.

Social media is a room with everyone in it. It's not really a great place for nuanced messages. People read titles and don't click on links. People share things without considering the source. And people can read a message without actually considering "Is this for me--and if not, who is it for?"  Social media is good for crusades. It is good for reaching a lot of people. It is not especially surgical. It's a sledgehammer, not a Swiss army knife.

Without being very explicit, it looks to me like House Democrats of different factions are using social media (Twitter) in a way that I am not sure I agree with. I'm not screen-capping any damn thing, because I have no interest in getting bogged down in the minutiae and there are literally thousands of people who are not me who will line up to do just that. Having made politics their business, I don't know if they have momentarily lost sight of what audience they are intending to reach, but I have noticed we are all able to see them. So I openly wonder--are they being messy by design? Or should they just get their laundry off the timeline and take this nonsense to the DM's?

Or better yet, find themselves a quiet room? I don't know. I just hate to see it. I'll just add that message discipline should be the responsibility of not just members of congress but their staff and it isn't really too much to ask people not to do call-outs of co-workers for the sake of professionalism--no matter what that person's role might be.

Cages Where Sick Babies Sleep on the Floor

There's a weird familiarity I feel with regards to the recent argument over whether the term "concentration camps" should be used regarding the detention centers where the US government is currently holding undocumented migrants. It's not that long ago, really, that former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was raked over for disputing whether "cages" was the right term for the wire holding pens in which children were being kept. 

But leaving aside the semantics of "dog pound" and "freezer" and all that, the facts are, themselves, very grim. There are children without their parents in filthy, miserable conditions, being asked to watch after younger, more miserable children.  Conditions that children (and adults) are being held in are ideal for the spread of disease and the potential for preventable deaths.  The family separations, and even the process of reuniting families are handled indifferently with shitty logistics and negligence bordering on the insane. Whatever one might prefer to call the conditions under which human beings are being kept, they are inhumane. 

And yes, despite what no less an expert on inhumane activity as Rep. Liz Cheney is might claim, it is very reasonable to call these shelters "concentration camps."

The messengers, here, are part of the problem for me, too--this is where the familiarity really sets in. It wasn't that long ago that Liz Cheney was extolling the virtues of what she would call "enhanced interrogation" techniques, and simple bloggers like myself would call "torture", with its embrace of tactics like "stress positions" and "rectal feeding."  Euphemizing horrible things to try to make them palatable is. itself, a form of abuse. It's gaslighting. It's telling all of us that our eyes and ears and minds aren't working right--that we are crazy for thinking there is something seriously wrong with seeing a problem with cages where sick babies sleep, or try to, on the floor, or that a system that hides the deaths among its inmates is trying to minimize its violence, or that is staffed with people who use dehumanizing language is unable to humanely deal with a humanitarian crisis.

What I can see is that when the Trump Administration argues that soap and toothpaste and bedding are too much to provide detained children, we are seeing people who have no concept of duty of care regarding their fellow human beings--even the smallest and least offending among us. And while it is true that facilities are overwhelmed, how can it be that this much is not viewed as inhumane--when it is asked of children that they rest on the concrete on as much space as a severely overcrowded area affords (sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture) and somehow stay healthy when little basic hygiene exists?  When people are denied their reproductive rights for political reasons?

The US is housing migrants now where we once kept Japanese-American citizens during WWII. The Trump Administration has also considered keeping migrants at Guantanamo Bay.  The number of migrants coming to seek asylum or work or anything else here has not abated because of the administration's deterrence approach, and the decision to cut aid to Central America only seems likely to make things worse.  (And I'm not saying the Obama Administration had superb answers about what to do with detained migrants and asylees either--they deported at a greater rate than currently, conditions in facilities were also not ideal.)

The argument over whether to call the facilities "concentration camps" just seems to be one of throwing words at a physical and immanent issue. There are some people who can be moved by words. The people who most need to be, will perhaps already be beyond shame.  And have been for a long time.

It is useful, however, to see who falls into which group.