P.M. Carpenter

I expect Republicans' California circus to go on the road, and that bodes ill

It took a while and some doing, but California voters appear set today to reject Republicans' gubernatorial recall scheme by a wide margin. (They must be; otherwise President Biden would not have campaigned for the governor yesterday.)

The trend in favor of "no" has been advancing for weeks. By last Wednesday, a Suffolk University poll had the "no" column at 58 percent, a 17 point net advantage. Friday, an L.A. Times poll had no's net advantage at 21 points. Only a month ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom's advantage sat in the single digits.

Notes CNN's polling guy, Harry Enten: "While there are a few gubernatorial elections featuring a polling error as large as Newsom's advantage, it would take one of the largest polling misses in the last 23 years for him to be recalled [today]."

Perhaps modern polling's battered reputation will now get a boost, courtesy California. I pray this is so, for I love polls, odds, percentages, predictors of huge advantages and black-robed hangmen of electoral doom. How else to entertain oneself in the run-up to Election Days?

Beyond polling is this hard fact in Newsom's favor: "By Friday morning," reported WaPo, "registered Democrats had returned more than 4 million mail ballots, more than twice as many as were sent in by registered Republicans."

For that we can thank Trump. Given mail-in voting's ease, convenience and personal certainty of a civic job done, California's election officials cast pearls before the red swine. But the crimson masses have largely refused to pick up the gems, since that is a violation of Holy Trumpian Dogma, which has something to do with — frankly, I don't know. 

Nor has Trump been content with merely discouraging his brainwashed minions from voting via the United States postal system. From Maine to California, elections in general are rigged and riddled with fraud, he howls. Unless, of course, the Republican wins. Yet that's an increasingly difficult verdict when the Republican politician's party leader is running around the country saying elections are nothing but frauds, which would apply to victorious Rs as well. The klaxon also tends to suppress (deranged) voter enthusiasm. Just ask Georgia's David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

Or, ask the state's Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, who will answer: "The person that [GOP voters] most admired in their conservative beliefs was telling them that their vote didn’t count. And then the next day he would tell them that the election was rigged, and then the next day he would tell them, 'Why even show up?' And they didn’t. And that alone was enough to swing [Georgia's Senate elections] to the Democrat side."

In California, they've been hearing the same. Larry Elder — leading gubernatorial contender and black white supremacist — has voiced his "concern" about election fraud; yea, verily, he has foreseen Democratic "shenanigans." And Trump is still at it, predicting a "rigged election."

With all that said, California's recent history is nevertheless worrisome, since the madness will spill — not may, will spill — far from California's border. 

Republicans are realizing they can paralyze a state's governing system for months by organizing and executing wholly political recall efforts. (Granted, this is more easily done in California than elsewhere.) They can tie up public debate and Democratic movement on pressing, critical issues through the mammoth distraction of attempting to overturn the last election. Once completed, whether successful or not, another regularly scheduled election soon faces voters.

So, instantly, back to politics.

The result could be perpetual campaigning rather than governing, which is something Republicans are neither good at nor particularly familiar with, unless it's intended to harm conscientious citizens. Such recall efforts — exclusively focused, as they'll be, on Democratic evil — will also serve to distract voters from the straightforward reality that Republicans lack a coherent governing program to begin with.

What's more, woe to those who believe Republican activists of the Trumpian ilk — can there be any others? — will persist in instructing the base on the pointlessness of casting votes. This self-wounding stupidity initiated by Trump shall be soon be retired, embarrassingly shoved away and silenced.

For Republican politicians' designs on rigging federal elections will still require substantial base turnout to be tolerable short of blood on the streets in battleground states and swing districts. The party's pols, strategists, agitators and activists will, for sure, persist in characterizing past Democratic victories as fraudulent, but not upcoming elections.

Republican supremacy demands some level of faith in its legitimacy, no matter how illegitimately it may have been acquired. 

Thus, to me, today seems bittersweet. Democrats are likely to crush California's Republican schemers, dissemblers, deceivers and boneheads. Delightful. Yet Republicans are also likely to come out of this failed recall effort with three, pivotal objectives:

Suppress talk of future elections being rigged so as to bolster their turnout (while contradictorily telling the base that past elections were lost only because of pervasive, Democratic fraud); ensnarl Democratic progress in states where that party still dominates by engulfing the party's leadership in recall mania; and obliterate public attention to actual governing through the distraction of perpetual campaigning.

For the party of Trump, it's always and all about the game, nothing more. 

The Right's anti-vaccination madness was inevitable

Speaking for millions of the perplexed or just plain fed up, Bill Kristol tweeted on Saturday that "many of the views, attitudes, prejudices, and pathologies of today's Right seem to have pretty obvious intellectual, cultural, sociological or psychological sources. But I'm kind of bewildered by the source of the fanatical and fevered reaction to masks and vaccines."

To Kristol's list I would add "religious" and "geographic" (more on these in a moment), which, combined with the aforementioned sources of extreme partisan petulance, together establish the "pathological" foundations of "today's Right." With these additions, Kristol's multisided musing about the Trump Party's fevered fanaticism over masks and vaccines assumes the singular form of a Möbius strip: one source (one side) loops ineluctably to the next, which flips to the next, and so on, all of which leads the diagnostician to both the starting and end point of — political pathology, or, pathological politics.

Bewilderment begone, though we are still left with an intensely petulant, immeasurably dangerous Right. (Which reminds me of another writer's tweeted quasi-bewilderment, that of Andrew Sullivan's on Friday: "It’s paradoxical for Biden to say that a) the vaccines work and b) the vaccinated should fear the unvaccinated. The second argument is largely untrue, and deeply divisive." The second argument is, in fact, profoundly correct, since the primary danger from the unvaccinated is the amplified chance of a Covid mutant impervious to vaccines' lifesaving effect.)

Disconcerting as it is, bewilderment eradication may be the best we can do. Notwithstanding its unhinged warnings and psychotic tics over the Biden administration's Gestapo-like tactics and other jackbooted tyrannies hellbent on enforcing a national vaccination campaign, the Right will succeed in averting official efforts to persuade. It will go right on behaving like the truculent, reckless, unpatriotic body it is; it will persist in threatening America.  

For, as noted, in its politically pathological veins runs the immutable DNA of religious and geographic determinism — the mot virulent of all its noxious afflictions.

The modern American Right was born and swaddled in the antebellum, deeply "Christian" South, and there too was hatched American demagoguery on a vast scale — an elite core of politicians and propagandists at the top, bamboozling the rabble about Lincoln's tyrannical designs against the South's God-given, God-justified right to abuse and kill others while pissing on national unity and the furtherance of an enlightened, civilized society.

The madness took strong root, thus effectuating the sprawling Southernization of American politics — the long, sequential and painful history of which we need not review, given its universal familiarity. Now, here we are. In all its essence, the modern American Right writ large, but still of the antebellum, Christian South, still raging insanely against a president's tyrannical designs against its God-given right to abuse and kill others.

Having retained its regional concentration, the Right finds its malevolent voice most distinctly in Mississippi's Tate Reeves, Georgia's Brian Kemp, Florida's Ron DeSantis, Alabama's Kay Ivey, Texas' Greg Abbott and South Carolina's Henry McMaster. Together they have "declared war" on President Biden, his "blatantly unlawful overreach," his "outrageous" vaccine mandates, his "terrifying" "power grab"; they'll battle him, they say, "to the gates of hell." At least they won't have to go far.

Reinforcing their and the zealous rabble's malevolence toward all Americans is their Christian love. It's bad enough we must subsidize the Right's religious institutions of atavistic ignorance and petty prejudices through tax exemptions; we must also permit them to bodily assault conscientious Americans with claims of Godly fidelity. This, as is widely reported, shall be the Right's miraculous loophole to any national vaccination campaign. And they can play it in just about any manner they like.

As the Times relates: "The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has specified that religious objections do not have to be recognized by an organized religion and can be beliefs that are new, uncommon or 'seem illogical or unreasonable to others.'" I'll let that slide. Such objections "cannot, however, be based only on social or political beliefs." But good luck trying to separate the religious from the political among the artful dodgers of the Right. A cottage industry of snake-oiling, right-winging preachers will boom like the Oklahoma oil business in the 1920s. "An independent evangelist in Texas," for instance, "is offering letters [of religious objection] online in exchange for a donation."

Take them together — the Right's demagoguery of Southern yore against anything Bidenesque and its masses' professed obeisance to Christ's opposition to whatever may help others; a counterfeit, manipulative notion we and government must nevertheless "respect" merely because it is deemed religious — and what you get is a concerted, perfectly legal and above all successful resistance to the president's vaccination initiative.

America is reliving the sectional crisis of the 1800s: a national calamity geographically born of political grandstanding and sick theology. Once given these two essential sparks, anti-vaccination madness — an many other insanities — became inevitable. We should have seen it coming.      

An amendment

​​​​​Let's face it, guys. The day I stop writing is the day I drop dead. Writing is simply too much a part of me.

This I note as an act of partial reversal of my months-ago proclamation of hanging it up. I have not yet decided how much to write or how often to write; I'll probably revert to penning a column-length or near column-length piece as some sort of usual routine — which was the only manner in which I wrote years ago, for other sites — though that I cannot promise. All I can say is that I've canceled on self-cancelation. Perhaps I'll write once a week, or twice a week, or maybe five or seven times a week, short or long. I just don't know. Events — rather ominous events, appearing now in the offing (but definitely not "over the horizon") — will dictate much of that.

What I do know is that I shall not any longer drive myself crazy worrying about reader stats going up, down, or stagnant. Your reading this site is good enough for me, no matter how many of you there are.

I also won't worry about reader contributions. If you wish to donate to what you find here, that's great. And, of course, it'll always be much appreciated. So feel free but not obligated to pitch some cash into the till. I may ask from time to time, but I shan't beg. That I can promise.

It's been great, guys. And it's not over yet. I'm still breathing, still kicking, and I plan to keep writing.

A short treatise on Biden's … unpopularity?

Startling it was, the other day, when I ran aground and got snagged up in Jamelle Bouie's NY Times column, "How Has Joe Biden Become So Unpopular?" The title alone should have served as a lighthouse beacon of gratuitously troubled reading to come; I could have stopped there and turned my eyes to more salubrious material. But no, I ventured on. The beguiling siren of learning Jamelle's answer to such a stupid question was irresistible to me.

How has Joe Biden become so unpopular? The question's framing — its oozing of the extreme — conjured images of pitchforks at the White House gates, with a sweating, neurasthenic, Nicholas II-like character bunkered within, counting, perhaps, his last moments before the righteous provincials breach Secret Service security and render him a martyr to unexampled incompetence. Is Joe that unpopular? Or was I merely a victim of clickbait?

Turned out, yeah, the latter. For it also turned out that President Biden — according to the very author of his vast unpopularity — is not, after all, very unpopular. As Bouie trembled to inform us, Biden held a 46 percent approval rating after the last of his seven months in office — "the last" month having been about as problem-riddled as any early presidential month could be. Throughout, solid poop had been raining remorselessly on Joe from media know-it-alls and preening jackals on the right with reinvigorated intensity, and yet, Biden was — is — nowhere even close to, say, Truman's one-time 22 percent approval rating or Nixon's 24. Now they were unpopular.

Thus, though I love a good story, something in Bouie's premise seemed disturbingly askew from the get-go. Nevertheless I soldiered on, as did Bouie, who went on to explain that "there is a laundry list of reasons" for Joe's "downslope"; indeed, reasons why he is doing much worse — and that's a quote — in polling than at the year's beginning, when his approval rating was but a single digit higher than it is now.

In Bouie's "laundry list" (defined by dictionaries as "long and exhaustive") are all of three items: America's withdrawal from Afghanistan (sorry, our "shambolic" withdrawal, to use the media's obligatory descriptor), Covid's persistence, and a "slower" growing economy. To Bouie's list I would add inflation and the "border crisis."

I'd also add that these troubles incite the rather fascinating question of President Biden's responsibility for them. Yes, America's withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy — quite unlike the historical precedents of, for instance, Germany's graceful exit from Stalingrad or France's smooth retreat from Waterloo? Covid: Biden cannot force every moron to get himself vaccinated. The "slower" growing economy: It's related to those unvaccinated morons. Inflation: Though it's a global phenomenon, in the U.S. inflation was to be expected subsequent to Trump's blockheaded handling of Covid, the economic devastation it wrought, and then the economy's resurgence. The border: Biden cannot prevent Pedro from walking the 970 miles from Oaxaca, Mexico to Laredo.

At any rate, having worked my way through Bouie's abbreviated list of acute reasons for Joe Biden's vast unpopularity, which is nonexistent, I set off for further enlightenment. Which Mr. Bouie promptly offered: "There’s another dynamic at work, one that should guide our expectations for how popular Biden is and how popular he could become. Put simply, we’re still quite polarized."

That observation, to understate things just a trifle, was a letdown. Of course we're polarized. With few exceptions, we've always been polarized, as Bouie proceeded to relate. The deeper question is: Why are we so extraordinarily polarized today? And the answer is: As America's idiots have engaged politics more closely over the past few decades, the idiots have become even dumber — and some of their stupidity is bound to spill, from time to time, into the brighter, more rational mainstream (the Herd Effect). Which accounts for Biden's marginal decline in popularity of late.

Although Bouie altogether neglected the Great Polarizer's — Reagan's — seminal role in the further dumbing down of America's stupid, he did note our increasing polarization when Bush followed Clinton and Trump followed Obama. Now it's known by even today's yet-intellectually tainted schoolchildren that Bush was dumber than Reagan, and Trump was infinitely dumber than Bush. But here's the thing: With each of those presidencies, their rank-and-file disciples became all that much dumber by absorbing the assorted presidential imbecilities, the Republican Party at large became more dimwitted and rancid each year, and by now the whole lot of it is utterly bankrupt in the smarts department.

Hence the percentage of the American electorate that self-identifies as stupid — i.e., Republican — is bound to be the percentage of Americans disapproving of President Biden, who's done nothing to earn their disapproval. Therein lies our baseline: 46.9 percent of the American electorate was stupid enough to vote for Trump last year. Thus Biden's 48.5 percent disapproving group (Bouie's figure) is populated by the unspeakably cretinous, with a scattering of the stupidly susceptible, mainstream herd mixed in.

It's not so much that mere polarization accounts for the president's dip in his approval rating, as Bouie observed. Sure, we're polarized, and we pretty much always have been. Rather, it's what lies at the root of today's extraordinary polarization: staggering stupidity. And the only question that Joe Biden must ask himself is: Will we get even stupider?

I'm beginning to understand how it feels to live in a majority-oppressed nation

As George W. Bush was blundering his way into a minoritarian Middle East nation he did not understand, I understood from a historical perspective how its Sunnis had managed to rule over the Shia, even though, as noted, the Sunnis were a minority. The Ottoman Empire — whose official religion was Sunni — once ruled over the territory that became Iraq and which provided a buffer to the Shiite empire of Iran. Following the Ottoman Empire's fall, British colonialism reinforced Iraq's powerful Sunni minority over the Shia majority, which ultimately led to the Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush's blunder.

From a mere historical perspective, however, I had no way of really understanding — of feeling — Iraq's emotional mechanics in play during the reign of Saddam: the deep resentment of a majority population toward a ruling minority and all that goes with it, namely the humiliating omnipresence of the majority's electoral impotence, laws skewed to the likes of a few, the relentless hubris raining down from a hostile, hermetically ignorant, numerically inferior power.

As an American born and raised, I possessed no real understanding of any of that — until now, living, as I do, in this American nation increasingly ruled by the arrogant, unlearned, chronically dyspeptic few.

Now obviously the United States of today is not another Iraq of the early 2000s; not yet, anyway. But we the American majority are now daily experiencing the frightful sensation of being ruled by boorish political warlords hatched from sparsely populated fiefdoms of unutterable ignorance and unremitting hostility to civilized life. We are the nation's predominant centrists, moderates, liberals, progressives, socialists, Never Trumpers and Mugwumps — known broadly as Democrats — committed to civil rights, human liberty, freedom of conscience and democratic rule. And yet where we've not already lost power, we're losing it to the other guys — those Husseinlike Republicans.

So much of our growing impotence is — to use that overused word — structural, coupled with a complete and rather innovative lack of Republican scruples. Barely, just barely do Democrats now control the executive and legislative branches; yet even though their rank and file vastly outnumber the opposition, that control is at huge risk of being lost in 2022 and 2024 because of built-in, perfectly legal Republican advantages. Which means there's not a helluva lot Democrats can do about it.

The Trump Party's ruthless gerrymandering that would embarrass yesterday's Tammany leaders will almost certainly permit a fevered few to recapture the House; control of the Senate is, as always, at the mercy of voters in less populous states, where the uncivil brood; and the archaic, nitwitted and grotesquely undemocratic Electoral College, which enthroned our last two Republican presidents — both receiving less votes than their opponents — could easily present a trifecta of minority-based executive power.

As for the third branch of U.S. government? That instantly returns us to those two Republican presidents who were never democratically elected. For they appointed, for life, six of our nine Supreme Court Justices, who have ruled of late that states run by Husseinlike Republicans may pass nakedly unconstitutional laws which can then stand for months and, while they're at it, inhibit the voting rights of whatever and however many citizens they choose.  

What's more, one thus-liberated state (Arizona) has passed a law that allows for "post-election recounts." Get it? The Texas Senate has passed the same. Georgia can now oversee local voting procedures with national implications, and a freshly squeezed Florida law permits partisan "observers" freer access to ballot-counting.

Five states have passed intimidating laws by which election administrators can face felony prosecution should they violate whatever rules their state legislatures conceive, and nine states have vitiated the powers of state and local election authorities — in general, authorities who for years have performed in a professional, nonpartisan manner.

All of which will greatly help to propel Trump Party politicians from backwater enclaves and even reasonably sane districts and states into a congressional stronghold, coronate another unelected president, put a reactionary lock on federal court appointments, and further protect the entire, arrogant, ignorant minority against the majoritarian wishes of us centrists, moderates, liberals, progressives, socialists, Never Trumpers and Mugwumps. 

So yes, I'm beginning to understand, however mildly in comparison, how an Iraqi Shiite must have felt when the Sunnis ruled. 

(What to do? That's for another post. But this much I will say for now: The majority has to get mad — beyond, that is, a few cable-news hosts shaking their fists in outrage and speaking for the majority, wh0 must find their own voice — and their own means.) 

A careless, shameful piece of reporting, and what it - and other reporting like it - could mean in 3 years

Will Trump run again?

The question pops up in the press every few weeks, usually because some former consigliere to the still-sitting mob boss has proffered a premature answer. Earlier this month, for example, erstwhile Trump-advising Jason Miller ventured the odds of a campaign redux at 99 or 100 percent — "news" which made Medialite.com — while U.S. Representative and Insurrection Counselor Jim Jordan blurted in Iowa that Trump will announce "any day now," which the NYT's Maggie Haberman promptly re-disgorged on Twitter.

Yet however intriguing the question may be, its gruesome potential is nothing compared to the End Times reality that he could go all the way. Twenty-sixteen was a black political swan, we reckoned — a successful one-in-a-million shot; a crazy, guttersniping marketing scheme impossible to replicate. Four years and countless presidential disgraces later, the twice-impeached troll collected 11 million more votes. President Biden won by a mere 44,000.

It's old news that Republican state legislatures are hellbent on fixing the Electoral count of battleground states in the next go-around. Old news indeed, but still scary as hell. That said, the plausibly conceived and best defense against Republicans' outright theft of the 2024 presidential election has been a Democratic turnout so immensely staggering in numbers that the election thieves would be forced to give up their sinister game. The Great Backroom Election Robbery of '24 would be foiled by the sheer enormity of the self-evident reality on the ground and everywhere around that the Republican nominee got himself prodigiously, incontestably crushed.

There's something in play, however, that could upend this defense-cum-counteroffensive, and its quintessence came stealthily yet strikingly in one, careless NY Times piece on the Afghanistan evacuation. The story's unthinking characterizations, plus those of hundreds of predictably thoughtless pieces over the next three years on many other issues, could grind away at the national, indeed world necessity of a massive Democratic turnout in 2024.     

It's not that the story's meat-and-potatoes reporting in itself was inaccurate. It's that the reporting was seasoned with unwarranted, not-so-subtle Biden-scolding, and worse, the story was written in the near total absence of context in relationship to the president's intrinsic responsibilities and powers. Doubtless, this reportorial failing and gross unfairness left many Democratic readers rethinking their confidence in Biden's presidential leadership. And that's ominous, for 2024.  

The Times' most glaring scold: "Biden and his aides have insisted that the evacuation of Kabul after the Taliban seized the city on Aug. 15 was done as efficiently as possible. But State Department emails and documents from the Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Defense Departments, as well as interviews with officials and refugee advocates, suggest otherwise."

Note: The email and documents reveal huge problems. They do not refute an efficient-as-possible evacuation. In fact, the problems encountered appeared to be unavoidable. 

The scolding and context-vacancies continued …

"Within hours of Mr. Biden’s speech on Tuesday at the White House marking the end of America’s two-decade war, a private charter plane [from Afghanistan] … arrived at the air base in Doha [Qatar] … with no notice, carrying no American citizens but hundreds of Afghans."

Note: Biden possessed no authority over the chartering of private planes, their unscheduled landings, or who occupied their seats.

"'There are multiple other "rogue" flights that are seeking the same permissions' to land, emails from State Department officials sent that day said."

Note: What … Should President Biden have ordered the planes back to Afghanistan?

"Two days later, officials in Doha reported even more grim news: A 19-month-old child, who arrived from Kabul with 'pre-existing conditions,' died at the air base amid concerns about dehydration, norovirus and cholera among the refugees."

Note: Sad as it is, some children have pre-existing conditions, some children die, refugee camps are notoriously diseased, and President Biden could not change any one of those three hard facts.

"Two hundred and twenty-nine unaccompanied children were being held near the base, including many teenage boys who repeatedly bullied younger children. There were a 'large number of pregnant women,' some of whom needed medical attention, and increasing reports of 'gastrointestinal issues' among the refugees."

Note: Some teenage boys still bully, some women still get pregnant, some will need medical attention, and some refugees will suffer from gastrointestinal issues. Once more — hard, unalterable facts.

"Almost 15,000 Afghan refugees were packed into airplane hangars and wedding-style tents at Al Udeid Air Base, home to the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing."

Note: The world was screaming for Afghan refugees to be packed anywhere but in Afghanistan.

The story's criticisms go on, as would my critical notations, were I to go on. But I'll stop here.

The point, again, is that the story was almost entirely void of characterizing presidential power and its realistic capabilities in context. Its heavy implication was that Biden had somehow created the evacuation's chaos and consequent human pain, when the elimination or even alleviation of the delineated hardships was altogether out of his hands. 

That, from the New York Times' "objective" reporting, as well as many others', recklessly disaffecting millions of centrist-to-liberal minds. And there's more to come, a lot more, about a lot of issues, just like in 2016. 

If I were Trump, there'd be no question in my mind: Damn right I'd run, for I'd have this and another three years' worth of straight, context-free journalism on my side — cutting up my opponent with magnificent obliviousness every day, igniting disgruntlement and depressing turnout.

The women of Texas just aren't as tough as men on the right

​​​​​I have always been impressed by right-winging males' extraordinary fortitude. These men of men, these happy few but too many, this band of brothers who hold not their manhood cheap; O how their backbones straighten and arms rise when suffering visits — others. Especially women. Especially poor women. Especially poor women of color.

Accordingly I was profoundly impressed yesterday when reading how these rugged men of the right are coping with the Supreme Court's annihilation of Texas women's constitutional right to reproductive freedom. The women, being women, are of course sniffing and whining about the Court's rather abrupt theft of long-standing law and interference into personal(?) matters such as, say, whether a poor woman raped by her drunken, sociopathic father 43 days ago has a right to terminate the resulting pregnancy. Turns out, the men of the right are coping pretty well.

This I learned somewhat pointedly, which is to say, I learned it when reading Claremont College and University of Chicago Law School graduate Henry Olsen, fortitudinous craftsman of "The Supreme Court had no reason to block Texas’s abortion law." For the weak, I repeat: No reason. As in, none. Henry, you see, is strong, because Henry attended those manly institutions of higher education, Claremont College and the University of Chicago Law School, where he learned to remove humans from questions of human decency.

"The court’s majority was legally correct," he intoned in virile contravention of feminized snowflake Chief Justice Roberts' opinion that the majority Court was full of shit. But as the Court's originalists — Henry, too — so often remind us, the constitution is a living document which must take on different hues in different eras; we mustn't think constitutional principles such as stare decisis, for example, are nearly inviolable. (Just kidding, as do the originalists. Boy are those guys some real cutups.)

Why was the Court's majority "legally correct"? Henry explains. "A court can only act if there is an identifiable defendant whose acts could cause an identifiable plaintiff harm contrary to law." Should you be at all fuzzy on this legal concept, as articulated by Henry, permit me to clarify it:

If I, for instance, as a private citizen promised to pay someone, anyone, $10,000 to cause an identifiable plaintiff harm "contrary to law" — presumably, any kind of harm — I'd be legally protected from even the Court's scrutiny until someone took me up on my offer. For first there would have to be an "identifiable defendant."

Perhaps a poor, young, impregnated woman suddenly barred from medial access in violation of Roe? No, she's insufficiently "identifiable." In fact, she's invisible.

Besides, even though my offer might be "flagrantly unconstitutional," as Justice Sotomayor said of the Texas law, the Court added that it was, at least for the moment, uninterested in questions of constitutionality. Pretty nifty for a Court whose primary function is to rule on questions of ? ... constitutionality.

But enough of weird word wrangling and imaginary permutations on what the Court ruled. The vastly more important observation to be made here is that Henry and his fellow right-winging men among men are alway impressively, extraordinarily strong in the face of some poor woman's unwanted pregnancy or even rape, whereupon she then faces a 20-year sentence of having to raise her "love child."

I guess she's just not as tough as the men of the right, who are capable of bearing her pain with such admirable stoicism.

Permit me - or rather, them - to ruin your day

If by now you're not panicking and sinking into the watery depths of despair, you're either blind to the national calamity befalling us or you're one of the happy, calamitous few.

America is in the grip of an accelerating coup; a systematic, methodical upending of its constitutional — and constituted — fundaments; an interlaced collapse into brigandry and "official" lawlessness orchestrated by a relative handful of right-winging Robespierres and their rank-and-file lackeys. Everything is at stake, everything is at risk — and so far, everything is going to hell.

Consider merely the last 24 hours of our national decay. Building on four recent years of prototypical lawlessness, yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court decided — with no debate, no briefs, no lower-court rulings whatsoever — to peremptorily cast out every Texas woman's constitutional right to her most intimate womanhood. Just like that. Done. Gone — in one, unsigned paragraph.

The Court's decision was akin to upholding the Fugitive Slave Act, in that the ruling empowered every U.S. citizen to act as a kind of bounty hunter in the name of a brutal, anonymous state (and more to come). One dissenting Justice pronounced the decision "stunning"; another characterized it as, simply, "impossible to defend."

The ruling came from a Court tilted in its heinous majority by a U.S. president of unrelenting criminality but never removed from office by a crimes-sanctioning U.S. Senate led by the presidential crime family's enforcer who had earlier shredded the U.S. Constitution in denying a legitimate president his entitled choice of a Court appointee. Three national crimes ruthlessly compounded in one day. 

Added to the Court's sympathetic celebration yesterday of the 82nd anniversary of European fascism's opening blitzkrieg was the U.S. House minority leader's declaration of authoritarian war on the rule of law. In response to a congressional committee's perfectly legal issuance of subpoenas in the furtherance of investigating the Robespierres' Jan. 6 insurrection, the minority leader committed witness tampering and obstruction of justice. And he'll get away with it.

Why? Because the lawful, "reasonable" and majority opposition in Congress is fucking AWOL. Two-thirds of a year have passed since a small minority staged a violent assault on the very heart of American governance — the majority's home — and yet sedition's principal engineers and chief defenders remain untouched, with some of them actually sitting in Congress and openly advocating yet another violent insurrection. Hence a felonious minority leader is a trifling.

Plus — and again — eight months now and the Justice Department still has not announced a weighty investigation into a blatantly criminal presidency and post-presidency which, by the way, is still instigating and inciting rebellion against the United States government. Oh my, such an investigation would look political — for Christ's sake, isn't rescuing our politics the whole point? — and it might displease the rebellious minority and bloody insurrectionists. Can't have that!

So we have an indictable House minority leader and a Constitution-ripping Senate minority leader quite comfortable with a lackadaisical congressional majority; a former president steeped in constant criminality and yet free as a bird; more post-presidential insurrections to come; and, above all else ...

we have Republican state legislatures rigging future federal elections — to be condoned by a runaway, fascistic Supreme Court presently occupied with assaulting 51% of the U.S. population — which will promote both minority leaders to majority leaders in 2023 and guarantee Orbánlike authoritarianism in 2025.

Have a nice day. Which you can do only if you haven't removed the blinders and water wings.

The flip cometh

Biden's approval-disapproval ratings, Jan. 23-Sept. 1, as sourced from five, late-Aug. polls and aggregated by FiveThirtyEight:

FiveThirtyEight offers no analysis of why the recent turnaround in approval vs. disapproval. But we don't really need one. 

The essential point to remember is also obvious: Every president's shine wears off within the first few months. True, Biden's dulling came rather abruptly. The upside, however, is that he still possesses three-and-a-half years to regain net approval — and the opposition appears to be doing all it can to help him.     

The nature of the military beast

Baktash Ahadi was a combat interpreter who served with U.S. and Afghan forces. Now he's a sociologist, you might say. I do, because he's as culturally schooled in America's misadventure in Afghanistan as Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were culturally ignorant of Iraq, just as Johnson, McNamara and McBundy were culturally ignorant of Vietnam.

Ahadi is currently writing a memoir about what he knew and what we didn't about Afghanistan; in brief, he's exploring how our cultural ignorance contributed to our failure there. We built schools and highways and introduced democracy and "emancipated Afghan women," he observes. And yet "when comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils."

That may strike us as "outlandish," he notes. The short, simple and thunderingly obvious answer to our astonishment, though, is that we're not Afghans. And the American military, asserts Ahadi, made little effort to put its ground troops in locals' shoes. (Again, see: Iraq; see: Vietnam.) He offers three examples of our disconnectedness:

"The front-line troops were given zero training in cultural literacy. The Marines I worked with were shocked, for example, to hear me exchanging favorite Koran verses with my fellow Afghans, mistaking this for extremism rather than shared piety. When talking to Afghan villagers, the Marines would not remove their sunglasses — a clear indication of untrustworthiness in a country that values eye contact. In some cases, they would approach and directly address village women, violating one of rural Afghanistan’s strictest cultural norms."

I would interject here that all U.S. military officers on Afghan ground were almost certainly trained in cultural literacy. But therein lies a secondary disconnect. Ahadi writes not of U.S. officers but of "front-line troops" — those of 19-year-old kids from Little Rock, Arkansas or Casper, Wyoming with high school diplomas and about as academically familiar with Afghan culture as I am with hip-hop. According to Ahadi, it showed.

(Nor have front-line American troops ever been all that informed about what we at home debate about foreign wars. I recall reading a news story in the 2000s about something said by the nearly universally hated Rumsfeld about our "mission" in Iraq. The reporter went on to note that when he mentioned the defense secretary's name to a young American private serving in Iraq, the latter replied: "Who the fuck is Donald Rumsfeld?" One can imagine the private's knowledge of even the basic subject of why in hell he was there — other than, It's a paying job.)

Thus does Ahadi conclude: "From the point of view of many Afghans, Americans might as well have been extraterrestrials, descending out of the black sky every few weeks, looking and acting alien, and always bringing disruption, if not outright ruin. We failed to understand what made sense for Afghans time and time again. No wonder the Taliban maintained such sway over the past 20 years."

My guess is that Baktash Ahadi's memoir will become required reading at U.S. war colleges, West Point, Annapolis and Officers Candidate School. Our military professors will teach its lessons and our young officers will learn them. Then, during our next generation's faraway civil war or other half-baked intervention initiated by another Johnson or Bush, front-line troops will promptly behave as front-line troops have behaved since the Carthaginian and Roman empires. It's just the nature of the military beast.