Thursday, March 21, 2024

Saving Democracy By Killing It

The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is dispatching a whole "army of lawyers" on a special mission to aggressively seek and destroy any and all challengers to the unpopular incumbent's continued reign in the White House.

What - you still thought that democracy included giving voters an actual choice on Election Day? To the contrary. Anybody still operating under the delusion that our form of government is anything but a fascist oligarchy should be getting a cruel wake-up call with this latest news. Not only are they acting like the dictators that they accuse Donald Trump of wanting to be, they are flaunting their own authoritarianism right out in the open. No matter to them that they are also flaunting their abject fear of the voting public right out there in the open.

Not for nothing does the Times headline characterize such anti-genocide candidates as Cornel West and Jill Stein as "threats" - literal enemy combatants of the World Order.

These and other upstarts are, according to the article, "peeling away" votes that Joe Biden presumes that he, and he alone, rightfully owns. If this tired old flaying-alive nonsense doesn't plant an image in your head of a puckered rind being pulled off an old lemon whose pulp is revealed to be covered in toxic mold, then I guess you're not as much into horror as I am.

According to one of Biden's lawyers, the aim of the anti-peeling op is to police the usurpers and pretenders to ensure that they are playing by such rules as jumping through all the artificially narrowed ballot access hoops in the proper, normative order. If they should accidentally graze the top of the pole vault bar with a pinky finger, or trip over one of the many tripwires that the corporate Democrats have placed on the obstacle course, "we will hold them accountable."

Or as the Times more primly puts it, 

Gaining access to the presidential ballot is a complicated and expensive process for candidates, particularly for those not affiliated with a party, even a minor one. Laws vary from state to state, with some requiring merely a fee or a few thousand signatures, and others requiring tens of thousands of signatures gathered under tight deadline pressure, along with other administrative hurdles.

The lead legal warrior trying to purge the ballots of all challengers is former White House Counsel Dana Remus, currently a partner in the Covington and Burling white-shoe law firm. She is married to a State Department undersecretary for security who previously ran financial security for the Capitol One bank. Remus once clerked for right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade last year.

When, several years prior to that notorious ruling Alito was accused of misogyny by columnist Dana Milbank for allegedly making mean faces at the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg behind her back, Remus defended him against the charges of sexism, gushing in a letter to The Washington Post that her former boss "is a good man, who serves every day with humility, dedication, and incredible intelligence and insight."

It's really incredible how misused and overused the word "incredible" has become in polite, fawning discourse.  Whenever I hear it uttered by a famous or powerful person, my bullshit detector goes into full gear. An alternate interpretation of Remus's statement is that Alito's alleged respect for women and his integrity and brains are beyond belief. Her glib statement is simultaneously meaningless and non-credible. Ditto for the projectile belching of all the U.S. politicians and media stenographers who regularly proclaim themselves "unbelievably heartbroken" about the genocide in Gaza.

9 comments:

  1. News is that AIPAC has $100 million dedicated to bury anti-genocide "sanctimonious purists" running for office and re-election.

    That should pay for a lot of lawyers and oppo research.

    ReplyDelete
  2. voice-in-wildernessMarch 22, 2024 at 9:52 PM

    I had to look it up. It depends on who is the hammer and who is the nail.

    It was March 2002 when we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq that General Tommy Franks was asked about their dead in the fighting:
    "You know, we don't do body counts."

    ReplyDelete
  3. I wish I could say this overt propaganda wasn't working but I have had so many "friends" attack me for having a different point of view from their slavish devotion to the prevailing narrative and fairy tale that is Biden and Bidenomics. They buy in to the Biden = Angel, Trump = Satan, and anyone who disagrees is horrible, ignorant (stupid), and immoral. Any candidates like Stein, West, RFK Jr are "spoilers," turncoats, evil in their own right and are really just wanting Trump to be elected.

    This hostility reminds me of white men when the feminist movements or racial justice movements started getting some traction in the 70's and even the 80's. It is exactly like you wrote, Karen, Biden and his handlers feel entitled to the votes of certain groups (people of colour, young people, immigrants, members of unions) and like the entitled white men of the past, is outraged when he is actually expected to respond to the needs and wants of his constituency.

    Biden is just a spoiled brat who can't believe he can stir up two wars (and a coup in Haiti) causing untold suffering and spend billions of OUR tax dollars on foreign conflicts (enriching his buddies at the MIC) instead of focussing those dollars on the needs of the American people. He, like pretty much all our federal politicians, is clearly owned by a foreign government that sees the U.S. as a cash cow and is happy to do their bidding. Biden is and always has been a neocon - putting the needs of the ultra-rich (and himself and his) above the needs of the 95%. And yet, he is angry and annoyed when we use the only power we have, to shop elsewhere.

    And the attack on Free Speech is so fascist. Speaking of free speech, I have been reading lately that Biden is finally willing to throw Progressives a bone and make a deal with Julian Assange. As Margaret Flowers said, Assange should take the deal – it is not as if he is going to get any justice. In any case, I am willing to “play along” as long as Assange gets a proper pardon or some kind of deal that can’t be taken back. I’m not having Lunatic Trump go after Assange when/if he gets elected.

    I was just listening to Brian Berletic’s tribute to Aaron Bushnell. It is very moving. Brian is one of the good ones – and I know, had they known each other, - Aaron and Brian would have been friends. Brian speaks of his own experience as a marine realising the reality of the military and empire and of those becoming awake (to the truth) and how lonely that can feel. I encourage you to watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAEVBE5A1Y


    ReplyDelete
  4. This from Harper's Week in Review:

    “We see our history in their eyes: a story of displacement and dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger,” said Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Palestinians on St. Patrick’s Day at the White House, before endorsing a ceasefire.17 His words brought President Joe Biden to tears.18

    ReplyDelete
  5. Matt Taibbi has some things to add about Democrats and their efforts to 'protect democracy' starting with their legal battles against Ralph Nader and now full blown lawfare against Trump. No paywall. An excerpt:

    'Looking back, it’s clear Trump’s unsanctioned run and win were the violations of “norms” Washington insiders were most furious about. Now, when politicians talk about protecting “democracy,” what they really mean is restoring those old barriers of entry. The problem is, voters are wise to the game now, forcing insiders to resort to ever-cruder mechanisms of control, like the ten million criminal indictments and the recent ballot disqualification attempts.

    If those efforts fail, even more extreme action is surely coming, and “protecting democracy” is the pitch they’ll use to sell it. All of this will be justified based on the idea that the Trump threat is so grave that taking so much as one vote from Democrats is criminal irresponsibility, not really morally different from marching for Hitler.'

    The Anti-Democratic Movement Targeted Ralph Nader First. We Should Have Paid More Attention

    https://www.racket.news/p/the-anti-democratic-movement-targeted

    ReplyDelete
  6. Valerie said..."This hostility reminds me of white men when the feminist movements"

    Exactly. It is not a reasoned opposition. It is emotional. The display mental and emotional discomfort, when faced with an idea outside their comfort zone.

    There are issues with Biden. These are very important things, like genocide, and war in Central Europe both provoked and then mismanaged, and more things like student loans and abortion access that were much promised but totally failed (blamed on the Other Guy, but still a failure to govern by the guy in office).

    They can't talk about it. They just retreat into simple formulas, talking about a boogeyman instead of facing real problems and real failures.

    ReplyDelete

  7. My comment, once posted, I see has been deleted.

    “Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy ....
    Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.”
    ~ Edward Abbey, "Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast"

    ReplyDelete
  8. Not sure if everyone caught this one but Jeffrey Sachs wrote an excellent article for Consortium News about the origins of Covid 19. "The research was designed by U.S. scientists, funded mainly by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (my caps), and administered by a U.S. organization, the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), with much of the work taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)." https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/19/what-the-us-might-owe-the-world-for-covid-19/

    There was nothing natural about Covid. It was a manipulated virus, made worse by gain of function research. RFK Jr should gain a lot of legitimacy from this. Too bad he is a supporter of the genocide in Israel.

    ReplyDelete
  9. @Eric

    Well, Genocide Joe did make a BIG announcement. He "proudly" (×4) proclaimed Easter Sunday, 3/31/24, to be Transgender Day of Visibility!

    He's trying to buy indulgences for his war crimes. What an angel.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/03/29/a-proclamation-on-transgender-day-of-visibility-2024/

    ReplyDelete