Biden, Obama, Clinton: Get Your Act Together
Literally, in an address to the nation.
Enough kindness. Enough respect. Time grows short. The dismantling of democracy is well underway. Dictatorship beckons.
We are not on the brink. We are past the brink. Because one political party has devolved into Christofascism, and the other seems to think that “independent” voters and the MAGA legions are somehow going to buckle under a supposed last straw.
You know, something worse than the ICE Gestapo, climate-denial, Ivermectin, extortion, sexual abuse, flouting the Constitution, mass deportation and high-seas murder. Something so shocking the whole megachurch archipelago decides to switch to AOC.
Don’t wish your democracy away. Humans fed only lies and delusions that validate their preexisting prejudices and superstitions adopt the lies as articles of faith.
As Goebbels so well understood. And also the GOP.
For the past 10 years, Republicans have daily, persistently (dare I say “religiously”?) characterized the Democratic Party as radical left thugs who hate America and will stop at nothing — including fake news and hoax prosecutions — to contaminate our society with foreign terrorists and destroy our sacred heritage.
Every hour of every day. It’s not just a Big Lie. It’s a Big Lie playing on a loop, an earworm that has awakened the inner bigot and suckered 100 million of our fellow citizens. The Democrats, for their part, have acted predictably: decrying every single wave of GOP monstrosity, as if the next wave weren’t going to follow where the first was absorbed into the wet sand and vanished from memory.
Meantime, the waves have undermined the structure of a democracy built precariously on that sand. And it is foundering. Because the damage didn’t begin with Trump. He is merely the closer, sealing a deadly deal in the works at least since Herbert Hoover. Say this about Republicans: they stick to their knitting. Trump has merely taken their century of disinformation and gone from the malign to the ridiculous.
Now the three living Democratic ex-presidents must at last fight fire with fire and shred the false GOP creed methodically inculcated for 75 years.
Yes, while the Democrats went from project to project advancing liberal democracy by codifying the indelible guarantees of our nation’s founders, they also made many errors — the most fatal and negligent being the ceding of hearts and minds to the propagandists of the right. Now, the three presidents must together dispense with their infuriating passivity and reveal the truth about the Republican Bill of Plights.
Article 10) “Job killing” federal regulations are so costly and inhibiting that our businesses cannot compete.
Nope. No economic research over a century has validated that canard. At worst, regulation to protect consumers, workers, the environment and economic fair play are GDP neutral. But, as we shall see shortly, they have been the lifeblood of business large and small by cultivating an orderly society and the marketplace that requires one.
Article 9) Tax cuts for business create capital for those businesses to expand plants and equipment, innovation and the workforce.
If only. History, going back to Ronald Reagan, shows that businesses divvy up those megabillions among their shareholders, feathering their own nests while individuals are expected to bear the burden. The 99% bust their asses to redirect yet more filthy lucre to the 1.
Article 8) Government healthcare is the leading edge of socialism, and the Centers for Disease Control, et al., are insidious purveyors of the Nanny State’s tyranny. Do your own research! Don’t be bullied by so-called experts! Keep the government away from our bodies (unless we’re speaking of abortion)!
Actually, both health insurance (including Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare) and the public health apparatus not only gird against catastrophe on a personal or national level, they are expressions of the framers’ literal founding promise. In fact, if you look at just the first three articles together, you can see the crux of the Democratic Party’s determination to promote a healthy, safe and stable society — not to build a profligate Nanny State, but to strengthen the society at its core. The reason the United States has the world’s largest economy is because for 249 years we have, as promised in the preamble to our constitution, promoted the “General Welfare.”
The result? GDP is high. Unemployment is low. The markets are orderly. The roads are passable. The mails work. Free education prepares our workforce. Social unrest doesn’t paralyze commerce. Our purchases won’t physically harm us. And, because one of the things the Free Market is free of is conscience, the consumer is largely protected from monopoly, defective goods and fraud. The borders are safe from foreign invasion. And social welfare reduces the crime that comes with rampant poverty. These together are the foundation of a robust, frictionless economy. What Republicans for decades have characterized as job killers in a “tax and spend” free-for-all are on the contrary fuel for our consumer society and the motor oil in our economic engine. It truly couldn’t be farther from “anti-business” policy. Instead — as Obama alluded to when he observed that successful entrepreneurs don’t succeed all on their own — in total it represents the largest subsidy of commerce in the history of the world. Now, in Trumpworld, the more trading partners we extort, bully and frighten away, the more global markets will slam shut in our faces and the more our general welfare is threatened.
But back to public health. Even standing alone, the active MAGA dismantling of these foundational guarantees of citizens’ medical and financial wellness would tell you almost everything you need to know about the soullessness of the GOP. I shall now resume with the GOP’s earworm manifesto.
Article 7) Science and expertise are tools of woke elites to control the rest of us. The “scientific method” is a leftwing “ideology” foisted on us as superior to our common sense.
Yeah and “the Law of Gravity” is a prayer. And when you need that surgical repair of your aortic aneurysm, you’ll DIY. (Try bloodletting. Back in the day, the superior European culture loved it.) What deluded fools, clinging to horse de-wormers while human beings die by the millions. What’s truly ideological is fealty to lies, superstition, conspiracy ravings and blanket vilification wholly untethered to research, evidence and documented facts, much less the scientific method. Much less truth. This is the thinking that led to burning “witches.” Republicans want to repeal Obamacare and The Enlightenment.
Article 6) We are under invasion by criminal, terrorist immigrants who will steal jobs from real Americans and undermine our traditional values. In Trump’s words, they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And the Great Replacement will just flood our shores with future Democrats.
Never mind “the tired and poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” a poet’s words etched in the base of the Statue of Liberty. Here are the (slightly abridged) words of noted Marxist thug Ronald Reagan:
“Yes, the torch of lady liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents the compact with our parents, our grandparents and our ancestors. It is the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumphs shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond.
Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity we are a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
If we ever closed the door to new Americans our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Article 5) Elections are rigged and rife with fraud, especially in Democrat-led cities and states.
Wildly untrue. Years of investigations and court cases at every level of law enforcement, in red states and blue, have yielded a small handful of fraudulent votes. (Not that any of these cases influenced an election, but the vast majority of these frauds were perpetrated by individual Republicans.) The only thing stolen in the “Big Steal” mantra was the trust of the American people in the sacrosanct institutions of democracy. The phony conspiracy — along with Republican rhetoric spewed by the likes of Senate Republican Ted Cruz of Texas justifying radical voter suppression because “Americans are concerned” — gave red states wide berth to gerrymander and make mincemeat of the Voting Rights Act. Blacks, overwhelmingly Democrat, are being squeezed out of the electorate in red America. That is a conspiracy, the rightwing-majority Supreme Court (itself decades in the making) is rubber stamping the attack on Americans’ most basic right.
Article 4) Protest against the government is unpatriotic.
The GOP House Speaker called “No Kings” a “Hate-America rally.” Texas Republican Chip Roy said, “The truth is, the Marxist, radicals and Islamists the Democratic Party promoted this weekend — they cannot handle the truth. The truth is that there is a king and that king is Jesus.” Trump, who suborned a violent attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, called “No Kings” protesters extremists and terrorists and repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.
And so much more: Defunding public broadcasting. Threatening the licenses of commercial broadcasters. Deporting pro-Palestinian protesters. Siccing ICE and the military on peaceful demonstrations. Declaring antifa — a nebulous political movement with neither money nor a known membership nor any specific alleged crimes — a mafia terrorist organization.
The onslaught on the Bill of Rights knows no precedent and knows no shame. In this Orwellian world, even the most hallowed of all democratic principles — free speech and the right “to peaceably gather” in protest — have been twisted into subversion to be suppressed by heavily armed stormtroopers. This is, along with the death of due process, the most un-American of all Trump predations, couched perversely as the triumph of “patriotism.”
Article 3) Patriotism is America First, America Right or Wrong, America the Greatest Country on Earth.
Oh, wait, there’s an addendum: True America is white, True America is Christian, True America is armed to the teeth, True Americans wave the flag as proof of their virtue. True Americans worship the military. And, most of all, True Americans do not brook criticism of America. Hence, acknowledging the evils of the Trail of Tears, Slavery, Tuskegee, Vietnam, Iraq, Japanese internment camps and Watergate are an “apology tour.”
Here, again, I defer to a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, who is on Mount Rushmore:
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official …”
Article 2) The Civil War ended in 1865. Time to stop coddling the blacks and every minority demanding special rights.
First of all, civil rights and all human rights are not special rights but equal ones, even when legislation or courts have to put their thumbs on the scale to restore equilibrium and guarantee ongoing justice. This is not a Marxist concept. It goes back at least to the Magna Carta, not to mention the U.S. Constitution. Yes, it has mutated into the politics of ever narrower grievance and tortured legal remedy — but the effect of transgender volleyball players on society is less than negligible. Twisting that into a war against straight, white, Christian males is as obscene as it is absurd. That paranoiac claim is just a stalking horse for re-codifying bigotry.
Article 1) By the way, the Civil War was about states’ rights.
Fuck off. It was about owning human beings as property to use or abuse, buy or sell, in propping up an agrarian economy. The “states rights” argument, a flimsy rationalization for America’s most heinous crime, is the oldest of Big Lies, predating even the war itself. And, yet, it has re-emerged with grotesque vigor. Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis proposed history textbook language that characterized slavery as a sort of apprenticeship in the trades: “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Then there was Georgia Congressman Drew Ferguson, who in his office displayed the book General Robert E. Lee: Soldier, Citizen and Christian Patriot, open to a page with this claim: “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, societally, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.”
I propose an experiment, Drew. Have you and your family shipped to West Africa in chains and live in bondage to black farmers. Live under the lash. See four of your six kids sold off to another landowner. Watch your wife being raped. Eat gruel. Then let me know how uplifting the experience is. You lucky Dawg you.
Misters President, for crying out loud quit speaking in measured phrases. Call racism and nationalism and bigotry and endless lies by their name. Do it, and keep doing it. This fascism talk is neither hyperbole nor abstraction. It is upon us, and we are at the point of no return.