I see the cracks. Yet every time I think the MAGA walls will come tumbling down, they seem to find the energy to strike again. Right now, we are seeing the chaotic effects of Trumpism in the court system, all the way up the chain to the SCOTUS. Will the depravity ever end? Holding the line is exhausting.
So that’s where Alito got it…The Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain…no just a grumpy, fat ass criminal who never really was anything butt {Intentional Spelling! 🇺🇸🌵😎💪🏽💯👍🏼💙💜
In maritime use it’s a signal for needing help he needs help alright
According to the U.S. Flag Code, flying the American flag upside down is only meant to be done "as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
I had almost given up hope but found Rick's "Crackup" in my Inbox today. At my advanced age, I had been thinking I would die before hope arrived and here it is! I was a Dem for many years but the one thing I always worried about was that they always "caved" to Rs. Now, we know the COST of doing that and it will take decades to repair. We've learned some valuable lessons about fellow human beings in America an around the world. New word for me: Necromancy!
If MAGA implodes, I’m hoping their base will not turn out. I believe that current criminal trial is also going to hurt if he is convicted. But the country needs a Dem sweep in November, so we must all vote Blue.
There are a lot of doomscrollers among my beloved Democrats and there are a lot of doomscrollers in this community. I can be pretty gimlet-eyed and cynical, but I've never been one and one of the reasons is I share Rick's theory of the case here. But let's make a critical distinction between the ultimate fate of the MAGA movement and the upcoming election, which are two different things.
Our biggest enemy is not Trump, but our own complacency, borne of the untestable conviction that the American people are just not going to want to go through more of President Trump. And hey, maybe this is true. Or maybe not. We have to run this race like we're 10 points down from now until Election Day. This is the lesson of Hillary Clinton '16 and it should be tattooed inside our eyelids.
As far as the MAGA movement goes, well, the postwar Republicans have had brainworms since Tailgunner Joe McCarthy (who conservative paragon WF Buckley, Jr. never renounced) but they managed to keep them more-or-less under control. But my goodness, could you imagine if the John Birch Society was led by a charismatic demagogue instead of Robert Welsh? Thing is, political extremism requires a permission structure, whether American boys dying uselessly in Vietnam (isn't it amusing that unified Vietnam is one of our trading partners and military allies and is still a communist country? Take that, cold warriors ;) or a shame-free demagogue driven by internal demons.
Trump is that permission structure. Take him off the scene, whether with a criminal conviction and/or a loss this November, and MAGA has nothing to unite them because there's no grand narrative, no martyrdom story, no heroic central character projecting his psychological wounds onto the country.
Doctor Dark is one of my favorite Captain Beefheart tunes, btw.
Mama mama here come Doctor Dark
Horse clippin' clappin' those hooves makin' sparks
I loathe Reagan with the fire of 1000 suns, but respectfully, I have to push back on this, Doc. Reagan didn't believe that the Army and the State Dept were crawling with crypto-Communists the way Robert Welsh (and Tailgunner Joe) did. Reagan was most beholden to Big Business followed by the emerging religious right. But he never launched a jihad against his political enemies the way you'd expect a conspirazoid Bircher to do. Or, that we all fully expect Trump will if gods forbid he gets back into office.
That's not what David Corn says about Reagan in his book AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS: A HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION OF HOW THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WENT CRAZY:
"Reagan was considering entering the 1966 gubernatorial race against Democratic incumbent Pat Brown. His speech for Goldwater the previous fall had turned him into the great hope of the right. A band of conservative California millionaires had embraced Reagan as their guy for what was certain to be a tough battle against Brown, who had defeated Nixon three years earlier.... More troublesome, [Reagan] had a reputation as a right-wing radical, a Bircheresque ideologue. Spencer and Roberts didn’t want another Goldwater on their hands, a contender weighed down by ties to fanatics and kooks...."
Corn, David. American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (p. 77). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The people in this section who are concerned with Reagan are Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts—two Moderate Republican political operatives who had previously worked for Nelson Rockefeller, and who apparently were responsible for "moderating" Reagan's image to make him palatable to Middle America.
Not to dispute David Corn, who's a great investigative journalist, but there's a bigger context here and as you relate, this comes from the perspective of the Rockefeller (liberal) wing of the GOP. Reagan had been on the rubber chicken circuit for GE since the war ended and he was a fairly simpleminded conservative ideologue, to be sure. But at the very same time, after the Goldwater fiasco, WF Buckley, Jr. was marshalling the right wing intelligentsia against the John Birch Society, exiling them from National Review.
You can be a full-throated ideological conservative without being a whackadoodle. You can believe that there were Russian influence agents in our government and in civil society, and at that time, you'd be right. But when you allege that these influences are so pervasive that essentially the army and the State Dept are controlled by the Kremlin, that's just nuts. I am no defender of Red Scare politics and J Edgar Hooverite law enforcement; these were some of the brainworms that Joe McCarthy enabled and legitimated. Buckley recognized that these things went too far and threatened freedom of thought.
Reagan was a more-or-less normal governor. He raised taxes and strengthened gun control (for the wrong reasons). What Reagan _didn't_ do (and Goldwater didn't, either) was believe in an all-pervasive Communist Conspiracy enabled by Enemies Within. Being described as a "Bircheresque ideologue" by a Rockefeller Republican is not same thing as being in lockstep with the John Birch Society.
I think Reagan is a lot more evil than you seem to, and can completely believe he was a Bircher with a friendly-looking smile.
If it weren't for Reagan, we wouldn't have been given the "choice" of Donald Trump or Hillary Rodham Clinton, two of the WORST possible people to be President I can think of! Every time I watch Hillary gloating to some talking head now, I remember that she's the person who was STILL calling Bernie Sanders(!) a "Russian Asset" as late as 2020. If God were just (any God, I'm not picky), she and Trump would both spend the rest of their days in Gitmo for treason—because YES, her e-mails!
With respect, Doc, lumping Trump with Hillary is an insane false equivalency and bringing up her emails (!) is a bit of left-wing demagogy, besides. I'm engaged in dialectical argument with you; don't turn my responses into straw men. I do _not_ think the Gipper was in any way benign; as Rick Wilson could tell you, I am a longtime anti-anti-Communist and a fierce critic of the cold war. My limited point was that Reagan didn't engage in a Robert Welsh-grade grand conspiracy theory that the Commies were in control of everything.
If Hillary called Bernie a "Russian asset" (I'd have to see the context), then she was wrong. But your line here that "both sides are the same" is definitely a fixture of Russian propaganda, just sayin'. Take a page from your boy, bro. Bernie endorsed and campaigned with both Hillary and Biden and has worked tirelessly on the issues important to us. He turned out to be neither a demagogue nor a personality cult leader, perhaps to the chagrin of some of his most ardent superfans. He's not a tankie; he supported lethal aid to Ukraine and his points about the Israeli onslaught on Gaza have been well-taken. He makes sure to underline that Trump would give Bibi a blank check and look the other way at war crimes. Bernie Sanders does not think both sides are the same.
Bob, thanks for mentioning Joe McCarthy in this conversation; it's also worth noting that his right hand man was the execrable (utterly detestable; abominable; abhorrent) Roy Cohn, who went on to become the New York mob's Number One lawyer, followed by a stint at Trump Org as Donald J.'s personal mentor. I think more background color is in order whenever discussing Trump.
And you're spot on about MAGA becoming leaderless and rudderless when Trump swallows his last Big Whopper. Unless there's a Trump 2.0 lurking in the sidelines. Or maybe they'll just get out their mighty arsenal of AR-15s and start shooting - you know, let off steam, show those demonic elites who's in charge.
Sorry, that's doom-scrolling. Let's just hope it all ends with the Last Burger.
Someone please shove that last Whopper down Trump's throat, no matter how much the reflexes of his alimentary canal and bronchial tubes protest. Make what must happen....happen. Stop leaving it to time and coincidence. They're failing us so far.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Abe; there's a tsunami of Republican shit coming down the pike from the MAGA SCOTUS, Trump's appointments to the federal bench and, of course, the less enlightened states. For crying out loud, two high schools in VA just voted to name themselves back after Confederate generals. Trump's biggest threat is that he's providing cover for these folks, implicitly promising to protect them if he gets re-elected. So it really is Trump or democracy. But even if / when he's gone, legally, electorally or by Holy Hamberder, it's going to be a bar fight with broken bottles just to tread water. This sucks.
I'm very liberal, both a strong civil libertarian and an economic populist, but I don't call myself a progressive, not because I have anything against "identity politics" or want to de-prioritize social justice, but for philosophical reasons. I have a very jaundiced view of human nature, closer to Thomas Hobbes than to John Locke. I think we've always been and always will be a highly imperfect, nay incorrigible species, which makes me somewhat of a temperamental conservative (and thus quite comfortable on Rick's feed despite being as commie liberal pinko as I am -- I love to razz him endlessly about the cold war, LOL). Progressives (and many liberals) tend to be lulled into complacency by an imagined telos of history (Progress!), that the arc of the moral universe is long but continues bending.
There was a real End of History moment on the left when Obama got elected. Finally we could kick those free market fundamentalists and warhawks to the curb. Didn't happen. I knew from his first foreign policy speech that Obama was a neoliberal Washington Consensus guy. He had one great achievement in his first quarter -- the ACA -- and increasingly less effective rearguard actions for his remaining three. The community organizer was completely inept at organizing the Democratic Party and we proceeded to get slaughtered, not just in Congress, but in statehouses and local elections. None of Obama's once-in-a-generation charisma and eloquence rubbed off on anyone else.
But my goodness were the lefty media spaces drowning in smugness. We were guaranteed a permanent majority as the hispanic / latino population grew! Millennials are more liberal than gen x and boomers were at that age! I remember the moment of celebration -- and it was pretty moving -- when the last great decision of a sharply divided but not hopelessly biased SCOTUS came down and gay marriage was legalized.
But this stuff isn't _automatic,_ boys 'n' garbanzos. As our icon of Hope and Change smiled down benignly on us while our majorities were in flames everywhere, we were all slapping each other on the back over the decision of a High Court that was existentially dependent on the health of an aging cancer patient too headstrong to retire.
It took WW2 to drag us out of the Great Depression. That's the way History most often works. History isn't going to drop the good stuff into our laps. History never did.
Hey Rick-can I go off topic here? I was finally able to read that WAPO article about the children who have me,pries of past lives and it really upset me! Not only for those poor kids, but the lost souls trapped in their little bodies. I know you took a different stance, but I went to bed last night feeling haunted myself, searching for answers. Does this mean reincarnation sometimes has a glitch? It’s terrifying to me.
Personally, Laura, I think all these things have psychological explanations. There has never been any proof of a spiritual realm that can be objectively verified.
Interested in your thoughts. Would you be willing to expound? As this is my wheelhouse, I approached my exploration of the article from a psychological point of view. Most 2 years olds don’t have pathologies unless they’re being abused. Maybe organic brain based abnormalities, but I would imagine the center is testing for those…I haven’t yet finished the article, so not sure if that’s covered.
I haven't read the article, Laura, just making a general statement from my philosophical POV as a physicalist. I believe the mind arises from the brain.
I’m pretty sure Elon Musk will be allowing Trump back on X in a very short while heading towards the election. It is in his wheelhouse to be that kind of a schmuck.
While I certainly hope it’s true, it seems like a lot of wishful thinking.
Liked and restacked
GOOD ALWAYS. Triumphs over Evil!
I see the cracks. Yet every time I think the MAGA walls will come tumbling down, they seem to find the energy to strike again. Right now, we are seeing the chaotic effects of Trumpism in the court system, all the way up the chain to the SCOTUS. Will the depravity ever end? Holding the line is exhausting.
So that’s where Alito got it…The Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain…no just a grumpy, fat ass criminal who never really was anything butt {Intentional Spelling! 🇺🇸🌵😎💪🏽💯👍🏼💙💜
In maritime use it’s a signal for needing help he needs help alright
According to the U.S. Flag Code, flying the American flag upside down is only meant to be done "as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
I am cracking up here
I had almost given up hope but found Rick's "Crackup" in my Inbox today. At my advanced age, I had been thinking I would die before hope arrived and here it is! I was a Dem for many years but the one thing I always worried about was that they always "caved" to Rs. Now, we know the COST of doing that and it will take decades to repair. We've learned some valuable lessons about fellow human beings in America an around the world. New word for me: Necromancy!
From your lips to God's ears. They were all set to blow apart but sold their souls to trump instead.
If MAGA implodes, I’m hoping their base will not turn out. I believe that current criminal trial is also going to hurt if he is convicted. But the country needs a Dem sweep in November, so we must all vote Blue.
This is encouraging. But please focus analysis now, too, on MAGA's endurance in your home state, and mine. I've honestly had it with this fckng bog.
Your lips to God's ears!!!
There are a lot of doomscrollers among my beloved Democrats and there are a lot of doomscrollers in this community. I can be pretty gimlet-eyed and cynical, but I've never been one and one of the reasons is I share Rick's theory of the case here. But let's make a critical distinction between the ultimate fate of the MAGA movement and the upcoming election, which are two different things.
Our biggest enemy is not Trump, but our own complacency, borne of the untestable conviction that the American people are just not going to want to go through more of President Trump. And hey, maybe this is true. Or maybe not. We have to run this race like we're 10 points down from now until Election Day. This is the lesson of Hillary Clinton '16 and it should be tattooed inside our eyelids.
As far as the MAGA movement goes, well, the postwar Republicans have had brainworms since Tailgunner Joe McCarthy (who conservative paragon WF Buckley, Jr. never renounced) but they managed to keep them more-or-less under control. But my goodness, could you imagine if the John Birch Society was led by a charismatic demagogue instead of Robert Welsh? Thing is, political extremism requires a permission structure, whether American boys dying uselessly in Vietnam (isn't it amusing that unified Vietnam is one of our trading partners and military allies and is still a communist country? Take that, cold warriors ;) or a shame-free demagogue driven by internal demons.
Trump is that permission structure. Take him off the scene, whether with a criminal conviction and/or a loss this November, and MAGA has nothing to unite them because there's no grand narrative, no martyrdom story, no heroic central character projecting his psychological wounds onto the country.
::could you imagine if the John Birch Society was led by a charismatic demagogue instead of Robert Welsh?::
You mean, like Ronald Reagan? He was a closet Bircher chosen by them for his genial smile and eagerness to spread their Fascist word....
Doctor Dark is one of my favorite Captain Beefheart tunes, btw.
Mama mama here come Doctor Dark
Horse clippin' clappin' those hooves makin' sparks
I loathe Reagan with the fire of 1000 suns, but respectfully, I have to push back on this, Doc. Reagan didn't believe that the Army and the State Dept were crawling with crypto-Communists the way Robert Welsh (and Tailgunner Joe) did. Reagan was most beholden to Big Business followed by the emerging religious right. But he never launched a jihad against his political enemies the way you'd expect a conspirazoid Bircher to do. Or, that we all fully expect Trump will if gods forbid he gets back into office.
That's not what David Corn says about Reagan in his book AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS: A HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION OF HOW THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WENT CRAZY:
"Reagan was considering entering the 1966 gubernatorial race against Democratic incumbent Pat Brown. His speech for Goldwater the previous fall had turned him into the great hope of the right. A band of conservative California millionaires had embraced Reagan as their guy for what was certain to be a tough battle against Brown, who had defeated Nixon three years earlier.... More troublesome, [Reagan] had a reputation as a right-wing radical, a Bircheresque ideologue. Spencer and Roberts didn’t want another Goldwater on their hands, a contender weighed down by ties to fanatics and kooks...."
Corn, David. American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (p. 77). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The people in this section who are concerned with Reagan are Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts—two Moderate Republican political operatives who had previously worked for Nelson Rockefeller, and who apparently were responsible for "moderating" Reagan's image to make him palatable to Middle America.
Not to dispute David Corn, who's a great investigative journalist, but there's a bigger context here and as you relate, this comes from the perspective of the Rockefeller (liberal) wing of the GOP. Reagan had been on the rubber chicken circuit for GE since the war ended and he was a fairly simpleminded conservative ideologue, to be sure. But at the very same time, after the Goldwater fiasco, WF Buckley, Jr. was marshalling the right wing intelligentsia against the John Birch Society, exiling them from National Review.
You can be a full-throated ideological conservative without being a whackadoodle. You can believe that there were Russian influence agents in our government and in civil society, and at that time, you'd be right. But when you allege that these influences are so pervasive that essentially the army and the State Dept are controlled by the Kremlin, that's just nuts. I am no defender of Red Scare politics and J Edgar Hooverite law enforcement; these were some of the brainworms that Joe McCarthy enabled and legitimated. Buckley recognized that these things went too far and threatened freedom of thought.
Reagan was a more-or-less normal governor. He raised taxes and strengthened gun control (for the wrong reasons). What Reagan _didn't_ do (and Goldwater didn't, either) was believe in an all-pervasive Communist Conspiracy enabled by Enemies Within. Being described as a "Bircheresque ideologue" by a Rockefeller Republican is not same thing as being in lockstep with the John Birch Society.
I think Reagan is a lot more evil than you seem to, and can completely believe he was a Bircher with a friendly-looking smile.
If it weren't for Reagan, we wouldn't have been given the "choice" of Donald Trump or Hillary Rodham Clinton, two of the WORST possible people to be President I can think of! Every time I watch Hillary gloating to some talking head now, I remember that she's the person who was STILL calling Bernie Sanders(!) a "Russian Asset" as late as 2020. If God were just (any God, I'm not picky), she and Trump would both spend the rest of their days in Gitmo for treason—because YES, her e-mails!
With respect, Doc, lumping Trump with Hillary is an insane false equivalency and bringing up her emails (!) is a bit of left-wing demagogy, besides. I'm engaged in dialectical argument with you; don't turn my responses into straw men. I do _not_ think the Gipper was in any way benign; as Rick Wilson could tell you, I am a longtime anti-anti-Communist and a fierce critic of the cold war. My limited point was that Reagan didn't engage in a Robert Welsh-grade grand conspiracy theory that the Commies were in control of everything.
If Hillary called Bernie a "Russian asset" (I'd have to see the context), then she was wrong. But your line here that "both sides are the same" is definitely a fixture of Russian propaganda, just sayin'. Take a page from your boy, bro. Bernie endorsed and campaigned with both Hillary and Biden and has worked tirelessly on the issues important to us. He turned out to be neither a demagogue nor a personality cult leader, perhaps to the chagrin of some of his most ardent superfans. He's not a tankie; he supported lethal aid to Ukraine and his points about the Israeli onslaught on Gaza have been well-taken. He makes sure to underline that Trump would give Bibi a blank check and look the other way at war crimes. Bernie Sanders does not think both sides are the same.
Bob, thanks for mentioning Joe McCarthy in this conversation; it's also worth noting that his right hand man was the execrable (utterly detestable; abominable; abhorrent) Roy Cohn, who went on to become the New York mob's Number One lawyer, followed by a stint at Trump Org as Donald J.'s personal mentor. I think more background color is in order whenever discussing Trump.
And you're spot on about MAGA becoming leaderless and rudderless when Trump swallows his last Big Whopper. Unless there's a Trump 2.0 lurking in the sidelines. Or maybe they'll just get out their mighty arsenal of AR-15s and start shooting - you know, let off steam, show those demonic elites who's in charge.
Sorry, that's doom-scrolling. Let's just hope it all ends with the Last Burger.
Someone please shove that last Whopper down Trump's throat, no matter how much the reflexes of his alimentary canal and bronchial tubes protest. Make what must happen....happen. Stop leaving it to time and coincidence. They're failing us so far.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Abe; there's a tsunami of Republican shit coming down the pike from the MAGA SCOTUS, Trump's appointments to the federal bench and, of course, the less enlightened states. For crying out loud, two high schools in VA just voted to name themselves back after Confederate generals. Trump's biggest threat is that he's providing cover for these folks, implicitly promising to protect them if he gets re-elected. So it really is Trump or democracy. But even if / when he's gone, legally, electorally or by Holy Hamberder, it's going to be a bar fight with broken bottles just to tread water. This sucks.
I'm very liberal, both a strong civil libertarian and an economic populist, but I don't call myself a progressive, not because I have anything against "identity politics" or want to de-prioritize social justice, but for philosophical reasons. I have a very jaundiced view of human nature, closer to Thomas Hobbes than to John Locke. I think we've always been and always will be a highly imperfect, nay incorrigible species, which makes me somewhat of a temperamental conservative (and thus quite comfortable on Rick's feed despite being as commie liberal pinko as I am -- I love to razz him endlessly about the cold war, LOL). Progressives (and many liberals) tend to be lulled into complacency by an imagined telos of history (Progress!), that the arc of the moral universe is long but continues bending.
There was a real End of History moment on the left when Obama got elected. Finally we could kick those free market fundamentalists and warhawks to the curb. Didn't happen. I knew from his first foreign policy speech that Obama was a neoliberal Washington Consensus guy. He had one great achievement in his first quarter -- the ACA -- and increasingly less effective rearguard actions for his remaining three. The community organizer was completely inept at organizing the Democratic Party and we proceeded to get slaughtered, not just in Congress, but in statehouses and local elections. None of Obama's once-in-a-generation charisma and eloquence rubbed off on anyone else.
But my goodness were the lefty media spaces drowning in smugness. We were guaranteed a permanent majority as the hispanic / latino population grew! Millennials are more liberal than gen x and boomers were at that age! I remember the moment of celebration -- and it was pretty moving -- when the last great decision of a sharply divided but not hopelessly biased SCOTUS came down and gay marriage was legalized.
But this stuff isn't _automatic,_ boys 'n' garbanzos. As our icon of Hope and Change smiled down benignly on us while our majorities were in flames everywhere, we were all slapping each other on the back over the decision of a High Court that was existentially dependent on the health of an aging cancer patient too headstrong to retire.
It took WW2 to drag us out of the Great Depression. That's the way History most often works. History isn't going to drop the good stuff into our laps. History never did.
What you say makes sense and I hope you are right and the MAGAs implode before November.
agreed, but, as Obama said, "hope is not a strategy" so let's get the vote out and flush Trump and MAGA into history's dustbin.
Hey Rick-can I go off topic here? I was finally able to read that WAPO article about the children who have me,pries of past lives and it really upset me! Not only for those poor kids, but the lost souls trapped in their little bodies. I know you took a different stance, but I went to bed last night feeling haunted myself, searching for answers. Does this mean reincarnation sometimes has a glitch? It’s terrifying to me.
Personally, Laura, I think all these things have psychological explanations. There has never been any proof of a spiritual realm that can be objectively verified.
Interested in your thoughts. Would you be willing to expound? As this is my wheelhouse, I approached my exploration of the article from a psychological point of view. Most 2 years olds don’t have pathologies unless they’re being abused. Maybe organic brain based abnormalities, but I would imagine the center is testing for those…I haven’t yet finished the article, so not sure if that’s covered.
Sorry for the typo
I haven't read the article, Laura, just making a general statement from my philosophical POV as a physicalist. I believe the mind arises from the brain.
Brain pretty much runs the whole system…
If that's fully the case, then there is no supernatural or spiritual realm.
love the ending Rick "....will be wild!"
I’m pretty sure Elon Musk will be allowing Trump back on X in a very short while heading towards the election. It is in his wheelhouse to be that kind of a schmuck.
I think he's got a contract with his media company not to do that. If he goes back on X, then Truth Social collapses.
How terrible that would be huh?
Ugh. Let's hope.