Tag Archives: Josh Hawley

We’ve Reached That Point. Give the Fools the Culture War They Always Want.

Posted on by

(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)

I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.

His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.

Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.

I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.

Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.

That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.

COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.

There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.

What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.

No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.

Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.

Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.

If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.

And What If a Black Cop Had Shot a QAnon Goon Yesterday?

Posted on by

For me, one of the most indelible images of yesterday’s Trumpist riot at the Capitol was the video of the (black) Capitol cop retreating back up flights of stairs as a pack of vandals — every reason to believe they were armed — pushed deeper and deeper into a supposedly high security government building. Clearly, that cop had every good reason to believe his safety, if not his life was in danger.

But he didn’t shoot. Not even a warning shot.

The contrast with the previous day’s decision in Kenosha, Wisconsin not to prosecute a (white) cop who pumped seven slugs into the back of black man … who was walking away from him, but later was discovered to have … a knife … and therefore acted in self-defense … is pretty damned stark. And it now fits much too perfectly with the attention DC cops are getting for doing, dare I say … fuck all … to impede TrumpNation from careening like feral pigs through Capitol chambers and offices.

Watching that feckless response, who among us didn’t recall Bob Kroll and dozens of Minneapolis cops rallying for Trump at the Target Center in October ’19? I’ve read in several places estimates that at least 60% of military personnel support(ed) Trump and that the percentage among American cops is even higher. (I apologize for not having links to that data. But I’m still looking.)

Despite the FBI telling Congress that white supremacists/nationalists are the primary terrorist threat to the “homeland” when push comes to sign-carrying protests only blacks get the full, tactile SWAT and “call-out-the-guard” treatment. (Remembering scenes from last June’s George Floyd/BLM protests in front of the White House, I kept wondering yesterday, “And where is the menacing helicopter blasting MAGA World with rotor wash to disperse them from the Capitol steps?”)

Everything about yesterday was disgusting. As obscene poetry it was, I guess, a fitting final scene for the Trump era. Rampaging mayhem. That is if, god help us, it really is the last atrocity he unleashes on us.

But I can’t say I was “shocked” by what happened. I wasn’t shocked by the flaccid response of the cops to a white mob. That’s the nature of the people who want to be cops and get hired to be cops. And I sure as hell wasn’t shocked that Trump and Rudy and Donny Jr. and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and the likes of Alabama’s new imbecile ex-football coach/senator Tommy Tuberville egged it all on, “inciting” being the legal term for the crime they committed.

It’s what’s been building and coming for years. It began well before Trump, as many have said. Trump merely exploited the ignorance and rage Republicans and their infotainment complex have been cultivating with reckless avidity since the early Clinton years.

In his famous book, “Explaining Hitler,” author Ron Rosenbaum (no connection to the deceased local lawyer), explored all the ways the “little people” with their liw information stew of fears and superstitions and greivances were cultivated for harvesting by a bizarre little man whose power lay in his willingness to tell the mob everything they wanted to hear. Mainly, that it was all someone else’s fault.

I often think of that when I reflect on the food chain of ordinary citizens “just doing a job” working, say, for a radio station spewing the noxious, self-serving bullshit of your Rush Limbaughs, Jason Lewises or Tom Emmers (before he rode radio power to a seat in the Trump caucus.) Unless you say those “little people” were too hapless and clueless to understand the effect of what they pushing out on the public, there’s responsibility and blame there for Trump and what happened yesterday.

I have no hope — zero — that yesterday’s riot will mark a sea change in American politics. Even if there is a mass prosecution of the selfie-taking, Facebook-posting vandals, it’s inconceivable that Trumpism will diminish enough that grifting sociopaths like Cruz and Hawley will shift course to some kind of neo-George H. W. Bush style of conservative politics. If not votes there’s simply too much easy money to be made off the mob raised up out of soil fertilized by FoxNews, NewsMax, talk radio and now, all the sewage of the internet.

Had that lone black cop in the famous video pulled out a gun and plugged some goon in a QAnon hoodie, or a maybe the guy carrying the “Trump/Jesus” flag, the “victim” would a hero on Limbaugh’s show ten minutes later and Hawley would be on the Senate floor railing against the “cancel culture” that shoots patriots for exercising their First Amendment rights … and encouraging everyone listening to send him a check.

The Race of Snakes for 2024 Has Already Begun

Posted on by

Very much true to form, 2020 is slithering back under its rock pretty much the same way it lived its 366 days in the sun. Which is to say covered in the ash and sewage of incompetence, grift and noxious self-interest. As we prepare to sing Auld Lang Syne by Zoom, the Trump administration is (again) blaming the state and local officials for the inept roll-out of vaccines … to fight a global pandemic. Meanwhile, never a crowd to let a crisis go unexploited for personal gain, big name Republicans are busting their first moves for 2024.

First among equals in naked self-service is of course The Donald himself. As of New Year’s Eve, the Lord of Low Information has scammed another $250 million from MAGA zealots, many of whom I’m guessing had to shave $20 off their welfare disability checks.

Looking at (known) debts in the $600 million range and facing the near certainty of criminal prosecution for bank and insurance fraud, His Grand Orange Incontinence is, I read, toying with the idea of charging the Red Hat Brigade to attend “Trump 2024” rallies, along with launching some kind of All-Donald-All-the-Time streaming TV service, which at say $5 month for even 10% of his 70 million Twitter followers adds up to $35 million a month, or a little over $400 million for the first year, little to none of which will be reflected on his federal income tax returns, of course.

There’s just too much easy fool’s gold to be picked up off the ground for Trump to ever say he’s not running again in 2024. Plus, even his putative opponents are falling over themselves to sustain his standing as the Anointed Redeemer of Aging White Deplorables. Pundit John Heilemann, (one of the few who emerges from 2020 with credibility intact), recently asked listeners to imagine a “hands up” question in the first Republican primary debates in 2023.

The question? “Do you believe the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump?”

Being Republicans trying to win votes out of a Republican base, all 30 of them on the stage, from Louie Gohmert and Don Jr. to Ted Cruz will of course raise their hand and attest that The Donald was robbed, thereby implying his rightful claim to the crown. (It will be an echo of that infamous moment in Iowa years ago when John McCain and every other Republican raised their hand when asked who took issue with the Theory of Evolution?)

Speaking of Cruz and the Republican affinity for grift, you have to love The Most Hated Man in the Senate taking a clue from Trump and making a Facebook appeal to MAGA Nation for money to help near billionaire Kelly Loeffler and China-trader/multi-millionaire David Perdue win their run-offs in Georgia. Except Ted did Donny one better. Where Trump had to peel off a percentage to the Republican Party, Ted … can keep it all. To himself. Without giving a nickel to his already richer-than-Croesus colleagues.

As the Brits so often say, “Brilliant!”

Post-Donald, the existential issue is early identification and a tactical plan to stop “competent Trump”, the not so mythical “conservative” who is not just smarter than Trump, (which is easy, hell even Louie Gohmert could jump that bar), but more disciplined. Cruz is one such animal. So is Tom Cotton from Arkansas.

But the horse breaking hardest from the gate here, 20 days before Joe Biden gets sworn in, is 40 year-old Josh Hawley of Missouri. As you may have read, he intends to carry the MAGA Warriors banner into the Senate chamber next week and refuse to certify the electoral college of Biden. This really won’t do anything but piss off every Republican who really doesn’t want his/her name on a forever vote to undermine an election that wasn’t even close. But as naked grifts go, it will create a mega-ton of publicity for Hawley and raise at least Cruz-size cash from perpetually raging Trumperoos.

As a candidate, Hawley is already on different track — or in a different lane — than Cruz and Cotton. His strategy is to aim everything at pissed-off rural/blue collar whites, promising them more free money. (He says he supports those $2000 checks, knowing Mitch McConnell will make sure he never has to actually vote on it.) All while reigniting their self-pitying grudges against mongrelizing immigrants, high-tech slicksters and sneering, anti-cop big city elites.

But unlike Trump, who can’t be bothered to read a cue card, much less a legal brief, Hawley, the former John Roberts law clerk, former half-term attorney general of Missouri, “educated” at Yale and Stanford, is all about utterly shameless, serpentine calculation. (Who can forget as a Senate candidate two years ago the fresh-faced Hawley appearing in TV ads underlining his support for the key elements of Obamacare while — at that very moment — leading the Republican court challenge to kill it?)

Hawley has chutzpah and strategy chops neither Cruz or Cotton have shown to date. Moreover, no major Republican donor is going to be confused or dissuaded by Hawley’s talk of moving significant cash downward toward “real Americans” in a “worker-focused approach”, as Hawley likes to say. GOP money men and women know a slick con job when they see one, and Hawley is the slickest on the scene at this moment.

You gotta hand it to Republicans, they have a deep, nearly fathomless well of these snakes.

The Biden years went by so fast … .