A Good Day

And so we are finally free of the worst man to ever hold the office of president of the United States. One of the worst men ever to run for the office, a man who earned his place next to Andrew Johnson and John Breckinridge, though unlike them, a man who never did anything else in his life worth noting. All the old villains and failures in American history - most of them did something to get there. Maybe a few of them were just born to money and power, like this one - but hell, little George Bush at least made a show of trying to be worth something, he joined the guard at least! He ran a sports team that didn't go bankrupt, unlike some people who bankrupted whole sports leagues. Even Ronald Reagan, mid-level actor - was a mid-level actor. This one? went bankrupt running a casino; pissed away his daddy's money; revived by a reality show and the Russian mob! his uselessness is almost unprecedented in American National politics.

He's gone now. I imagine he will have a few sleepless nights, as now his creditors and many an ambitious DA can cast their eyes his way. Once the Senate gets through with him. Yes indeed. I am grateful that he didn't decide to double down on his coup from a couple weeks back - though it's not surprising. He was always in it for the grift - he never seemed to take anything seriously except the grift. There is a strange surreal quality to the insane right in this country - they are LARPers, they are playing a game - they claim things that are so obviously false it is hard to imagine they take them seriously. The coup attempt - seems to have been dead serious, with people certainly talking about killing politicians and the like - but they still somehow come off as though they were always just playing a game. And - I can't say I am surprise they dissolved on the first touch. The whole affair felt like a Coen brothers movie. Their ranting and raving had a very Walter Sobchak vibe to it - but I couldn't help hearing Walter condemning them too. "These men are cowards, Donnie..." 

All right. I don't have to think about the former president any more! That is a great joy. I can think about Joe Biden. A strange sensation, right, to have Joe Biden as president. It is a massive relief, and he gives off an air of calm, reassurance, but also strength and resolve. He will undo the damage that's been done by 4 years of undemocratic and un-American rule. I take great pleasure in seeing him take office - that in spite of the fact that he might have been my 9th choice among last years Democrats. (Especially in retrospect, which might let me take people like Julian Castro more seriously than I would have at the time.) But then again - there might have been a dozen Democrats running for president last year who were better choices than anyone the Republicans put forward in 2016, and that's even trying to filter out political preferences. And that again who didn't run who I would like to see as president. The Democrats simply are the serious political party in this country. The serious political debate in this country is al within the Democratic party. I just hope they manage to agree on enough to make some real changes.

Still: the cautious parts of the Democratic party will massively improve the country, just as they did in Obama's day. I hope they have learned the lessons of those days: that the Republicans are not worth working with. Do what you want to do, and do not give them an inch. Use every advantage you have, pass what you think will do the most good, do not try to work around their propaganda machine. The Democrats will be accused of socialism whatever they do - so do what you can get through congress, do everything you can do. They have the congress at least - taking over the senate today as well. I hope they use it. 

All right. It is a good day. A good week, from MLK day to Biden's inauguration, to Ossoff and Warnock being sworn into the senate - it is good. We are going to make it after all, maybe.

Salvation and Sedition

What a time to be alive. Should I be thrilled that Georgia's senatorial races both went to the Democrats, giving the Democrats a majority in the Senate? (That's 51 votes, representing an extra 40 millions people.) We have a functioning government again. We might save the old republic yet!

Or be "concerned" (that's the word) that a sitting president incited a coup to overthrow the government? invading the capital, proudly waving their confederate flags? 

What a time to be alive.

There is not much to do or say about all of this. This is not a coup that can succeed. It is hard to see what Trump thinks he is doing at this point. I know Trump himself is a spoiled child, an ignorant, destructive, incompetent grifter who simply doesn't care what happens to anything else. He never has - obviously. He has never cared a fig about the United States. I find it hard to think he even cares about the power or winning or anything else - I don't know what he is doing. He is pissing on everything to piss on it. It's mind-blowing.

The people around him - his family, everyone in the White House, Mike Pence on down - are as shameful a lot of hooligans as this country has ever produced. Cowardly, weak, sycophantic, to someone who clearly cannot and will not help them in any way - why are they doing it? Why didn't some of them stop this shit months ago? They could have: he is not a dictator, he is a weak old man who can be easily controlled by anyone willing. Stories about Trump tearing into Mike Pence - why doesn't Pence just recite the 25th amendment (section 4) to him and tell him to sit down and shut up? But you should not have to go that far. Why are these people all so afraid of Donald Trump?

There is, and has been a great divide in this country - people who somehow think Trump is formidable, good or bad, a great businessman or an evil genius, something - and defer to him. And people who think he is a clown, a buffoon, a bully, who should be mocked and ignored. That he is someone who has no power - just daddy's money (or Putin's now, I guess) and daddy's lawyers (or maybe Mitch McConnell) to do things with. If anything, he has more power now, having stoked the mobs and sent them out to break stuff - they can do real harm. But they have no real power. 

But here we are. On one hand, the bullshit will end - Trump will be gone in two weeks, his mobs are not likely to have a lot of staying power. But they can break a lot of stuff before they go. It is crucial, in the aftermath of this - and this has been true since November of 2016, since nothing Trump has done is really surprising, it was obvious in 2016 he was a crook and would be a crook in office and might well sell out the country to anyone who'd pay him - when it is done, he has to pay. Trump needs to be arrested, he needs to be tried, he should be convicted, since he has done it all in public. And the people who helped him should be held accountable - the leaders. It is important to arrest the ones breaking into the capital, making sure none of them go unpunished - but it is more crucial to get the ringleaders.  

Trump should be arrested, now. He's a traitor. The senators and representatives who encouraged this by protesting the certification should be punished - it is one thing to dick around with symbolic protests and the like, but they had to know what would happen here. They participated in this sedition. They need to be held responsible. The criminals and traitors int he Trump white house have to pay for their crimes. If we sweep this under the rug, we will be putting ourselves on the road to destruction. 

There's nothing else to say.

2021 Is Here at Last!

And good riddance to 2020! 

Here we are, 2021, a new year, and one that is very welcome. 2020 has got a very strong claim to being the worst year in American history. 350,000 dead of Covid, over 3 million total deaths, a 15% increase from 2019, the largest increase in deaths since 1918. That is very bad. And around this, we can watch the government collapsing, one of our parties openly embracing treason - it's not a pretty picture. Now clearly, there have been bad times in the past - 1918, say! War, the flu and all; the Depression, WWII; the 60s had some horrible times as well. But this one - especially as so much of it feels like a self-inflicted wound. And the way there seems to be so little to take as compensation. Sure sure, 1968 was horrible - but you got the White Album! This year - this was so bad I somehow managed to miss the fact that Tommy Heinsohn died. A couple months ago. Somewhere between Sean Connery and Alex Trebek. That bad.

So here we are. The virus is still wreaking havoc (we keep hitting new daily highs in deaths, 3900 odd a couple days ago); there are vaccines, but they are slow to get implemented, so we are a long ways from normal life again. There's a new strain out there, more contagious than the last. Not good. Meanwhile, the economy is in a dangerous place. Maybe it's still functioning, but it feels like it could crash at any time. And though $600 checks will help a bit, you need more than that, especially if we were able to take the necessary step of closing things down again until the virus subsides and vaccines are common. There is hope, I suppose, if the Democrats win two senate seats in Georgia - otherwise, we remain at the mercy of Mitch McConnell, and that is not a good place to be.

There is no escaping the utter depravity of the modern Republican party. Donald Trump - he's less than three weeks from being out fo the white house, but is doing all he can to ruin the country while he is still there. He bears personal responsibility for a lot fo those COVID deaths - half of them? Probably about right. He had an easy job when this pandemic hit - nod along with the doctors, tell everyone to stay at home and wear their masks and wash their hands - but he did not do that. He did the opposite, He politicized the disease - he politicized the obvious measures one takes to battle infectious diseases. He did worse than that - he fostered conspiracy theories, he acted the fool, he inspired his followers to act the fool. If he had hit the bare minimum, doing what the doctors said, the Republicans likely would have gone along with it. You always have nuts - but Trump encouraged mainstream Republicans to defy obvious health measures. I don't think they would have done this without his lead. There is almost no one else he could have been in his place who would have acted the way Trump did on this. Mike Pence, bad as he is (and bad as he's been as Trump's VP) is very unlikely to have acted like Trump in the face of this disaster. And that little might have made it possible to keep the disease under some control. Not complete (unless you live in New Zealand) - but we are way worse than anyone else.

But Donald Trump is a pretty uniquely bad human being. He has managed to fulfill all the expectations for villainy and incompetence in the wake of the election. It's interesting to note that the election went more or less exactly as everyone expected it to go: Biden won the popular vote easily; a half dozen states were close enough to make the Electoral College outcome iffy, though there never seemed to be much chance of Trump repeating his 2016 luck. Because of absentee voting, and the politicizations of absentee voting, most observers thought that Trump would seem to be ahead on election day, but the lead would disappear as soon as the votes were counted. It's obvious that's what Trump expected to happen - thus his relentless campaign against absentee voting, his attempts to sabotage the post office, to stop counting votes after election day and so on. 

And that is how it happened. Trump was ahead at the end of November 3, and started clamoring to stop counting votes. People counted the votes. Trump's lead disappeared fast, and a day or so later, it was obvious Biden had won, and would win big. Here, a normal villain would back down, whine about whatever there was to whine about, and pout as the country prepared to change presidents. Not Trump! he kept doubling down on his fascism, challenging votes, trying to intimidate officials, raising up his followers for violence, and when everything else failed, speculating about a military coup. They are still at it! Weird notions still circulating about straight up rejecting the results when congress certifies them, with grandstanding morons in congress still carrying on. Astonishing. Well - not for Trump. More or less par for the course. For the other Republicans - somehow they seem to have missed that the rest of the party sort of made gains in this election - Trump is the only one who got smoked, regularly. 

And so. 2021 is here, Joe Biden will be president in a couple weeks, with luck, the Democrats will have the senate, and might pass some fo the lawws the house has been passing all year. Might make it possible to get through the next 3-6 months it will take to get vaccines to people - we might survive as a nation. For a while anyway.

I will not dwell on the bad, though. 2020 will represent the low point in the Republic, even if worse times come, as long as we do start to get back to something resembling respectability. It's hard to get too optimistic, though, even there - with several others countries slipping into fascism and stupidity at the same time. (Brexit anyone?) But - it feels good to get out of it. There could be light at the end of this tunnel; there hasn't been anything to be optimistic about in a while. So take what you can get.