National nightmare, localized

Posted on January 10, 2020 by oddmanout215

The flu bug latched on last weekend at the Farm Show and flattened me when I got back to the shack. My bones were creaky and my head was on fire, so I chugged NyQuil and climbed onto my hammock to sweat it out.

My swamp cats, Thoughts and Prayers, stretched out next to me. I was hoping for the bliss of sleep but what I got was a 24-hour nightmare about some orange-faced freak who became president despite losing the election by three million votes.

The freak mocked a disabled person on camera and bragged about being a pussy grabber. He used donations to a charity to pay his legal fees and campaign funds to prop up his ailing businesses. Published a book called The Art of the Deal during a ten-year period in which his businesses lost more than a billion dollars. Was fined $25 million for swindling attendees of his fake university. Retained the unwavering support of white evangelicals who ignored ample evidence of his corruption and bigotry. Separated immigrant children from their parents and jailed the children. Sabotaged the EPA as the climate emergency worsened.

I got up twice. The nightmare grew darker each time I went back to sleep. The freak threatened to start a war with North Korea, a nuclear power. Escaped criminal charges despite obstructing an investigation into his intimate relationship with a foreign dictator who interfered with U.S. elections. Was impeached for the attempted extortion of the president of Ukraine. Retained the unwavering support of almost all Republican senators who will serve as jurors at his Senate trial. Dashed hope of Mideast peace by ordering the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the second most powerful figure in Iran.

The next day I was still sick but back on my feet. Swamp Rabbit dropped by with some stale biscuits. “I dreamed that an orange hog monster became president and was trying to destroy the world,” I told him. “Thank God that’s over.”

“That weren’t no dream and it ain’t over,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s only just begun.”

Posted in apocalypse, climate change, Congress, environmentalism, history, humor, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The satire-proof president

Posted on January 3, 2020 by oddmanout215

I showed Swamp Rabbit a news story and noted that no one could write a more bat-shit funny satire of Donald Trump’s thought processes than Trump himself.

We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right? So they make these things and then they put them up.

“That ain’t satire,” Swamp Rabbit said, reading Trump’s remarks. “He don’t do no satires of himself. He don’t do no jokes at all except to pick on somebody weaker than him.”

“That’s my point, rabbit,” I replied. “He’s never joking when he says something stupid. He’s irony-free and satire-proof. He’s performing, but he believes what he says and so do his fans. If Trump says wind power is dirty — that turbines spew fumes — then that’s good enough for Trumpers.”

I told him it took the emergence of Trump to remind literate people that there are limits to the usefulness of satire and other literary devices that have been used through the ages to shame authority figures into behaving better. You can’t shame the shameless.

“What about Stephen Colbert and them other comedians on TV?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Why can’t they get through to Trump’s peeps?”

“Because Trump’s peeps don’t watch them,” I replied. “If they did watch, they wouldn’t get the jokes.”

Footnote: Trump’s bizarre opinion of wind power has nothing to do with pollution, of course. It dates to the bitter battle he fought to stop construction of an offshore wind farm near his golf course in Scotland because he felt the wind farm would spoil the view from the course.

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Happy Solstice + 6. (There’s light up ahead.)

Posted on December 27, 2019 by oddmanout215

We were on the highway again, squinting at the sun as it flatlined at midday on the shortest day of the year.

“Looks like the sun is just up the road,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Why don’t you crash into it before it dips under the horizon. Better to burn out than to fade away.”

He gets the blues on workdays, especially when he drinks bourbon the night before. I told him we’ve reached the winter solstice. We’ll all feel better as the days grow longer, even though winter just started, according to the calendar.

“You don’t believe that,” he said. “I read what you wrote last week about how history don’t make no sense. You’re a real downer, don’t you know?”

I tried to explain to him that history isn’t to blame; that the only reason it doesn’t make sense to most people is because they don’t read and learn the right lessons from it.

“You take for example that big story about the Afghanistan war, which has been going on for eighteen years now, ” I said.

I told him to call up the story on his phone and read a passage about the government agency that tried to piece together what went wrong:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

I asked Swamp Rabbit to recall the mood of the country shortly after 9/11, when Afghanistan was invaded. The yellow ribbons. The calls for revenge against Osama bin Laden. The Bush gang trotting out blowhards like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to dazzle reporters with double-talk and patriotic blather. (And, not long afterwards, the same blowhards lying all over again about Iraq.)

“Anybody with an ounce of sense who knew the history of what happened a half-century ago in Vietnam could have — should have — smelled disaster up ahead,” I said.

Some people did smell disaster, I reminded him, but not enough to offset the war fever generated by the Bush gang and the poor performance of the mainstream media, which helped spread the fever by dutifully presenting government lies as truths.

“Quit pretending you don’t remember, rabbit. The Afghan war was exactly what bin Laden wanted. So far, it’s cost us thousands of lives and a trillion dollars. Do you know how long it would take you to count to a trillion?”

“How long will it take you to shut up?” he asked.

It wasn’t even 5 o’clock when the sun went down. But the daylight would last more than a minute longer each day forward. “Things are looking up,” I said.

“We’ll see about that,” he groaned. “Do you think the next rest stop sells beer?”

Posted in history, humor, Iraq war, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

A rogues’ gallery of impeachment foes

Posted on December 21, 2019 by oddmanout215

Frankly, I don’t care what the Republicans say. It reminded me that our founders, when they wrote the Constitution, they suspected there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.

That was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responding to news that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had taunted her for saying she won’t send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until McConnell and his gang help draft rules for the trial that both political parties can agree on.

“She’s exactly right,” I said to Swamp Rabbit, who was huddled near a space heater he stole from Home Repo. “There’s nothing in the Constitution or The Federalist Papers that says our system of checks and balances might be upended by a carnivorous rogue turtle. If Hamilton and the others had imagined McConnell, they would have warned us.”

“No, no, no,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “It ain’t just Turtle Man went rogue, it’s the whole Republican Party. Every one of their Congress critters is pretending Trump’s impeachment ain’t real, that the law ain’t the law.”

I had to admit the rabbit had a point; that the party of Joe McCarthy, of Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew and Ronald Reagan, of law and order, of vigilance against anything Russian, is in effect saying Trump did no wrong when he implicitly threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine, our ally and an antagonist of Russia, unless Ukraine announced it would look for dirt on Trump rival Joe Biden. The Republicans are condoning Trump’s aborted attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into helping him get re-elected.

But it’s not too late, I told Swamp Rabbit. Pelosi and the Dems are still hoping for a better outcome. They want to be allowed to present pertinent documents and key witnesses at the trial.

The rabbit laughed. “Republicans ain’t gonna let that looney bird John Bolton testify under oath, or that dumb grifter Mick Mulvaney. They don’t want nobody to hear no more evidence. They just want to make sure Trump gets a quickie acquittal.”

Right. A quickie acquittal would cap Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, an outcome that suits Republican legislators, all of whom serve the “elites” and get rich in the process. They hated Trump at first but soon realized he was just what they needed — a dictator type who wows bigoted working-class white voters by appealing to their hatred of elites. (How’s that for irony?) They’re not going to let a little thing like impeachment mess up a good thing.

“They’re saying impeachment don’t mean nothing,” Swamp Rabbit said.

They’re saying worse than that, I told him. If inviting a foreign power to interfere with American elections isn’t an impeachable offense, then the entire Constitution “don’t mean nothing.”

Footnote: Did you check out the most recent Democratic debate? If history made sense, Democrats and the MAGA crowd would already be lining up to vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, two highly competent enemies of the elites. But history rarely makes sense except in retrospect, when the academic armchair quarterbacks pretend to know the cause and effect of all that happened.

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The ‘cold civil war’ is warming up

Posted on December 13, 2019 by oddmanout215

Brrr! America is shivering through a cold civil war. The longer it persists, the more likely it is to end not with a whimper but with a bang.

So says my friend Swamp Rabbit, a formerly apolitical drifter transformed into a fire-breathing left-wing activist by Trump’s attempted shakedown of a foreign ally.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with being an activist,” Swamp Rabbit said when I raised the issue. “It’s better than hanging out at your shack, watching them swamp frogs hibernate.”

“Never mind,” I replied. “My point is that you didn’t really care about politics until the impeachment hearings, but now you’re all fired up about the fate of the nation. People all over the country are fired up, and a lot of them are rednecks with rifles who don’t want to see Trump brought down.”

The case for bringing Trump down was presented this week by House Democrats in two articles of impeachment. The first says Trump abused his power by threatening to withhold military assistance to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unless Zelensky agreed to announce an investigation of Joe Biden. In other words, he tried to conduct a shakedown to “harm the election prospects of a political opponent.”

The second article says Trump blocked investigation of the shakedown by directing “the unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its ‘sole Power of Impeachment.'”

Republican counter-arguments are flimsy. They say Trump’s target was corruption in the Ukrainian government, not Biden. They insist, contrary to what the Constitution says, that the House doesn’t have the power to demand the evidence it seeks.

Ultimately, they’re arguing that Trump is above the law, which is what Trump has been implying or saying outright for three years now. It’s the argument his so-called base makes by standing by him, knowing he’s a career conman who paid $25 million to the people cheated by his sham university, and $2 million for stealing from his own charity.

They knew he was a crook but stood by him. They know he’s a would-be extortionist but stand by him.

None of this is news. The MAGA morons don’t care if Trump is a criminal, so long as he’s their criminal. They count on him to be anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-environment. They believe him when he says he’s anti-elitist, even though he’s backed by plutocrats.

“What’s scary is that Trump’s true believers get more loyal as his abuses get more flagrant,” I said to Swamp Rabbit. “They get more defiant of people who want to make sure he doesn’t shred the Constitution. What we’ve got here are two different countries, like back in 1860.”

“Like I said, it’s a cold civil war,” he replied. “But it’s gonna get a lot hotter, bet your shack on that.”

Footnote: The House Judiciary Committee approved the articles of impeachment today and sent them to the full House for a vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News — the other America’s main “news” outlet — that he’ll let Trump’s lawyers decide how his trial before the Senate is handled. So much for separation of powers!

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Little Caesar’s bid to buy the presidency

Posted on December 5, 2019 by oddmanout215

Watch the interview and see if you don’t react the same way as the guy who posted it, who “can’t believe how bad” billionaire Michael Bloomberg sounds when he defends Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

Swamp Rabbit can believe it; he thinks anyone who assumes Bloomberg is a real Democrat — even a small-d democrat — probably doesn’t know much about his record as mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013.

“Bloomberg is Little Caesar, and I ain’t just talking about his height,” he said. “He’s all for them First Amendment rights unless he thinks they might get in his way when he’s deciding what’s best for you.”

He noted that the former mayor, who just spent multi-millions to buy his way into the presidential race, is an autocrat with a long history of suppressing dissent. As mayor, he ordered police to squelch protests against the Iraq war (2003) and at the Republican National Convention (2004), and to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park (2011). He blocked media coverage of the eviction.

“No wonder he likes that Chinese guy,” the rabbit said. “If Bloomberg was the sheriff of Hong Kong, them protesters over there would all be dead or in jail.”

He poured himself a drink and continued. Bloomberg sent undercover agents across the country to spy on Occupy organizers and other radicals. He was responsible for NYC’s infamous stop-and-frisk policy. He’s lukewarm on environmental activism (behave yourselves, protesters) and unenthusiastic about the Green New Deal.

Furthermore, he has his own news network (!) and is tight with the Wall Street banksters who got away clean after they helped cause the economic crash in 2008. The crash triggered a backlash against so-called elites. It inspired legions of fools to put on MAGA hats.

“But Bloomberg isn’t Trump,” I said before the rabbit could go on. “Who would you rather elect, a fastidious technocrat or a fat, vulgar fraud?”

“Dictators come in all shapes and sizes,” the rabbit replied. “Bloomberg oughta be paying a wealth tax instead of pissing away all that dough on a race he shouldn’t be in.”

I hate losing an argument, but I decided to give up on this one. Anybody is better than Trump, but making a strong case for Bloomberg is a lost cause.

Footnote: Swamp Rabbit was referencing Julius Caesar, not Edward G. Robinson as Rico the mobster in Little Caesar. Bloomberg, after all, believes in law and order, at least when it comes to the peons.

Posted in economic collapse, environmentalism, Great Recession, history, humor, mainstream media, movies, Occupy Wall Street, plutocracy, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Thanks for not coming to dinner

Posted on November 29, 2019 by oddmanout215

This week the media cranked out stories about how to peacefully coexist with jerks who end up eating Thanksgiving dinner at the same table with you. The sort of stories that are especially relevant if there are Trump fans among your relatives, or among your relatives’ friends.

This is from a piece in Time magazine that I read to Swamp Rabbit during Thanksgiving at my shack in the Tinicum swamp:

Avoiding politics has always been a good rule of polite dinner conversation, but acrimony this season rivals the friction felt in November of 2016, when many Americans saw family members for the first time after Trump won his election.

“How ’bout you just don’t invite them Trump fans to your house and you don’t go to theirs?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Who says you gotta eat dinner with somebody you don’t even want to be in the same country with?”

I told him his attitude was 100 percent wrong. That Thanksgiving was about peace and gratitude and reconciliation. That it was exactly the right occasion to celebrate that we all live in a free country, and to demonstrate we can disagree with our fellow citizens without being enemies of them.

“Forget it, that dog don’t hunt,” Swamp Rabbit said as we set the table with my best paper plates. “Ain’t no way I’m gonna sit down with peeps who are cool with having a racist, climate change-denying old conman in the White House.”

We don’t have to agree with Trumpers, I told him. All we have to do is exercise tolerance, that noble quality that the great Enlightenment thinkers believed in — the thinkers who popularized the ideas that inspired the Constitution. All we have to do is be civil.

“Civil is a weasel word,” the rabbit said. He asked me what’s the point of being civil with white supremacists and other morons who know Trump has been a heartless liar and cheat his whole life, but who support him anyway. It’s important to not be civil with them, he said.

We ate the turkey burgers and cranberry sauce that Swamp Rabbit had swiped from the SuperFridge up the road. He fed his leftovers to my swamp cats, Thoughts and Prayers.

I noted that he was being more civil to the cats than he would be to Trumpers, if his words were any indication.

“That’s because them cats is a lot more civil than Trumpers,” he said. “They got better table manners, too.”

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GOP strategy — see, hear, speak no truth

Posted on November 22, 2019 by oddmanout215

We were on the way to a job upstate on Wednesday, listening to the impeachment hearings on the radio, waiting to hear what Trump’s foreign-service boy Gordon Sondland would say now that it was clear he hadn’t been forthright in his closed-door deposition for the House Intelligence Committee last month.

Sondland was more cooperative this time around.

YES, he told Democratic inquisitors, a quid pro quo was demanded by Trump. No way would Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky get a meeting with Trump, let alone $400 million in military aid, unless he agreed to launch investigations that might boost Trump’s re-election chances.

YES, all the president’s men were “in the loop” regarding the quid pro quo. Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, Rudy Giuliani and others knew Sondland and his amigos were pressuring Zelensky to announce investigations, and Sondland had the emails to prove it.

YES, the three amigos — Rick Perry and Kurt Volker were the others — received their orders to lean on Zelensky from Giuliani, who was acting “at the express direction of the president of the United States.”

“Great, it’s all over now,” I said to Swamp Rabbit. “Sondland is a snake, he’ll only cough up as much evidence as he thinks is necessary to avoid perjury charges. But the evidence he just coughed up is damning.”

Swamp Rabbit, who is off the wagon again, reached for his flask and took a swig. “That’s what you think,” he said. “By tonight them Republicans will be saying Sondland’s testimony don’t change nothing, there’s no smoking gun.”

He was right about that, of course. And right again the next day after two more credible witnesses testified — David Holmes, who overheard what should be an incriminating phone talk between Trump and Sondland, and steely-eyed Fiona Hill, who deconstructed the “fictional narrative” that Trump’s henchmen concocted to justify the investigations, which were all about trying to wreck Joe Biden’s presidential bid.

Swamp Rabbit noted this morning that Trump’s House boy Devin Nunes is still pushing fictive details about Biden — Kellyanne Conway would call them “alternative facts” — and that Nunes’s homeys continue to march in lockstep with him now that a Senate trial seems almost certain. And that there’s no evidence Trump directly commanded Sondland to tell the Ukrainians they wouldn’t get their military aid unless they went after Biden.

“But that’s crazy,” I said. “Trump’s commands are indirect, just like a mob boss’s, but everybody knows the commands come from him. That’s how mob bosses who go to trial get convicted, through the testimony of people who track the commands they receive back to the boss.”

“Maybe so,” the rabbit said. “But them other mob bosses ain’t president of the United States. And they don’t get to have a jury that’s mostly made up of Republican senators.”

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Stand by your monster

Posted on November 15, 2019 by oddmanout215

“Check it out,” Victor Cortez said, changing channels on the old Zenith I’d pulled out of a trash dump for Swamp Rabbit. The subject on MSNBC was the impeachment hearings. Same thing on CNN. But the big story on Fox News was “Kanye West spreading his message of faith” and — this may have been fake news — selling $55 pancakes at a breakfast event.

Victor’s point was that Fox would rather show anything but a bad-news story about Trump. And when there are bad-news stories they have to cover — the actual hearings, for example, which started Wednesday — they will ignore the facts and pretend they’re good-news stories.

“But even Fox has shown a few cracks,” Victor said later in the week, after acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor testified on the first day of the hearings and Fox News host Chris Wallace called Taylor “a very impressive witness and… very damaging to the president.”

Hardcore suck-ups — Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham, and so on — will follow Trump all the way to the Führerbunker, Victor explained, but actual reporters at Fox News with a shred of credibility are hedging their bets regarding Trump’s long-term political health.

“Not so with them Republicans in Congress,” said Swamp Rabbit, who had just arrived at my shack for his weekly appointment with Victor, his parole officer. “Trump got on the phone with Zelensky and said sure, you’ll get that military aid, but I want you to do something for me, meaning get dirt on Biden. That’s an impeachable offense, plain as day, unless you’re a Republican.”

“But Republicans are saying there was no explicit quid pro quo,” I said. “Trump didn’t explicitly say ‘You won’t get the aid unless you deliver dirt on Biden.'”

“It don’t matter,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “You don’t have to spell out the quid pro quo. All you gotta do is conduct it. If I’m holding your swamp cat and say ‘I’ll give your cat back to you but I want you to do me a favor,’ then I’m abusing my power and breaking the law.”

I reminded Swamp Rabbit that Trump’s toadies — people like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley — know he’s the lowest of the low, a guy who has cheated big banks and small business owners, robbed his own charities, betrayed foreign allies, taken kids from their parents and jailed them, and worse. They don’t care; they’re afraid he will denounce them to his base, that vast horde of lost souls who’d be happy if he made himself president for life.

“But that don’t make no sense,” the rabbit said. “They’re propping up a monster. Don’t they care what history is gonna think of them?”

All three of us laughed at that one. “Does Trump care about history?” I said. “Does his brother, Kanye West?”

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A wall can’t keep the future out

Posted on November 8, 2019 by oddmanout215

“So you’re telling me part of the multibillion-dollar wall Trump is having built on the Mexican border can be breached with a hundred-dollar saw? You’re not making this up?”

Swamp Rabbit wasn’t making it up. He was reading from a news article he’d called up on my laptop:

…When fitted with specialized blades, the saws can slice through one of the barrier’s steel-and-concrete bollards in minutes, according to [border] agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the barrier-defeating techniques.

After cutting through the base of a single bollard, smugglers can push the steel out of the way, creating an adult-size gap. Because the bollards are so tall — and are attached only to a panel at the top — their length makes them easier to push aside once they have been cut and are left dangling…

Swamp Rabbit’s parole office, Victor Cortez, interrupted to vouch for the story’s accuracy. “I’ve got one of those reciprocating saws,” he said. “With the right blades it will cut through anything.”

I don’t believe you,” I said. “That reporter is tripping.”

“Just because you can’t drive a nail don’t mean some saw can’t cut through steel,” Swamp Rabbit replied.

I asked why the U.S. Border Patrol didn’t build a regular old brick wall. The rabbit said it was because they thought the concrete and steel bollard system was the best design they could afford.

“They can peek through the bollards — poles is what they are — and see them pesky refugees coming,” he explained. “And they can fix the poles that get wrecked if the refugees are too fast for them and sneak through.”

I persisted, just for the sake of argument. Didn’t Trump say the new wall would be “virtually impenetrable?” Didn’t he assure all those good old boys in the MAGA hats that he would save them from the marauding rapists he warned about?

“The Mexicans were gonna pay for the wall, too,” Swamp Rabbit noted. “If Trump said it, you can bet it ain’t true.”

Footnote: The refugees or migrants or whatever you want to call them are using ladders as well as saws to get past the wall. Who would have thought?

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