Knife to a Gunfight: Explaining Why We Lost

Despite all the attempts by some on the Left to try to put a bright face upon this year’s election debacle, any words of comfort ring hollow.  Republican’s control 2 out of 3 branches of our Federal Government and a majority of our States.  Soon the 3rd branch, the Supreme Court, will fall under their control with a new justice who will no doubt make Antonin Scalia look like a democratic socialist in comparison.  Along with the attempts to rally the Democratic Party and the Left,  we are also bombarded with dueling postmortems on the reason for this awful loss.  The results of this loss will be devastating for so many of us not shielded by wealth.  At this time the most important accomplishment that we of the Left can attain is to organize countrywide at the grass roots level for the 2018 congressional election.  At the same time we must work hard at the local and State level to regain control of these localities and that is indeed an awesome, nearly impossible task.

From my perspective we need to simplify our analysis of what happened to US this time and distill it down to its’ essence.  The battles that have been fought over the soul of this country, have been waged in earnest by the representatives of aristocratic and corporate wealth since the Goldwater loss in 1964.  They represent a well-funded strategy to disseminate propaganda undermining a sense of national community and perpetrating Right Wing mythology to such a degree that it eradicates history and become accepted as fact.  While the issue of a small federal government and an antipathy to taxation have be recurrent themes in American History, it took the Right Wing Billionaires fed up at Goldwater’s debacle to hire some of the best advertising and merchandising minds to craft the mythology of “evil liberalism” coupled with the accusation that the minorities without power were inexplicably in control of everything.  With Trump’s election this strategy has reached almost complete fruition.

However, even more important in the battle between the American Right and Left Wings has been the tendency by Liberals, Progressives and Left Wing radicals to be hoisted on their own  petards of pretense.  That pretense has been that America is a Democracy under a semi-divine Constitution and that if only the country can follow the forms laid down by our Founding Fathers all will be well.  I’ve written many times, in many different ways that this is an illusion that has little to do with the real state of affairs in our country. I’ve also written about the false narrative of history that we on the Left have incorporated into our psyches to such a degree that most of us too function in a “bubble” of diminished comprehension.

Following that false narrative causes too many in the Democratic Party to rely on institutional wishful thinking like the Rule of Law,  that dictate we play by the “rules of the game”.  Yet for many of us that means existing in a psychological state of denial because deep down we Know, or we suspect the truth that this battle is a war for the well being of the many versus the autocracy of a few. A brief look at past history confirms the fact that the other side plays dirty, while we stupidly play by the “rules”.

You’re Dead to Me Heidi Heitkamp With Your Losing Bi-Partisan Ways

To my mind the ideal of Bi-Partisanship that many purported Democrats and most of the Washington Beltway Pundits cling to is stupid and self-defeating.  Repeating themselves time and again throughout 2016 and now 2017, are news media pundits longing for the olden days of “bi-partisanship”. This is happening as we have a mentally disturbed, intellectually unfit President in charge of our nation and a Republican controlled Congress lusting over how high a tax break they can provide for the oligarchs who own them.  The Republican “Big Lie” about wanting “Tax Reform” is merely the cover they use to disguise that for them “Tax Reform” means lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans and the Corporations.  “Tax Reform”  is a reward for the One Percent for maximizing the gap between themselves and the rest of America. In the end it will always ends up costing the rest of us dearly in order to ensure that the One Percent are “rewarded“.  We know that the Corrupter-in-Chief really favors the “Tax Reform” Republican wet dream, especially because he and his corrupt family of kleptocratic desires will financially benefit.

Heidi Hetkamp hitched a ride with Trump on Air Force One today and was introduced warmly by him to a crowd in Minot.  Thus she served as a Trump stooge and he noted her presence in this manner:

“Both of the Reagan tax cuts were passed by a Democratic majority in the House, a Democratic speaker, and the vast majority of Democrats in the Senate, including a Democratic senator from the great state of North Dakota,”

As a leftist, political activist, I get at least 2 dozen E Mails daily from Democrats seeking campaign donations, even if I had no contact with their campaign.  I’ve been regularly getting requests for money from the Heitkamp team ever since she was elected in 2013.  Knowing her record and her Centrist leanings I have never responded, nor donated. To me and many others, Resistance means not cooperating with this unfit and traitorous President in any way, so as never to provide him the cover of legitimacy.  From now on her money please will go directly to spam.

Some might see my position as childish and self-defeating, arguing that cooperation is needed for government and to them my answer was given in the December 2016 post:

Knife to a Gunfight: Explaining Why We Lost:

From my perspective we need to simplify our analysis of what happened to US this time and distill it down to its’ essence.  The battles that have been fought over the soul of this country, have been waged in earnest by the representatives of aristocratic and corporate wealth since the Goldwater loss in 1964.  They represent a well-funded strategy to disseminate propaganda undermining a sense of national community and perpetrating Right Wing mythology to such a degree that it eradicates history and become accepted as fact.  While the issue of a small federal government and an antipathy to taxation have be recurrent themes in American History, it took the Right Wing Billionaires fed up at Goldwater’s debacle to hire some of the best advertising and merchandising minds to craft the mythology of “evil liberalism” coupled with the accusation that the minorities without power were inexplicably in control of everything.  With Trump’s election this strategy has reached almost complete fruition.

However, even more important in the battle between the American Right and Left Wings has been the tendency by Liberals, Progressives and Left Wing radicals to be hoisted on their own  petards of pretense.  That pretense has been that America is a Democracy under a semi-divine Constitution and that if only the country can follow the forms laid down by our Founding Fathers all will be well.  I’ve written many times, in many different ways that this is an illusion that has little to do with the real state of affairs in our country. I’ve also written about the false narrative of history that we on the Left have incorporated into our psyches to such a degree that most of us too function in a “bubble” of diminished comprehension.

Following that false narrative causes too many in the Democratic Party to rely on institutional wishful thinking like the Rule of Law,  that dictate we play by the “rules of the game”.  Yet for many of us that means existing in a psychological state of denial because deep down we Know, or we suspect the truth that this battle is a war for the well being of the many versus the autocracy of a few. A brief look at past history confirms the fact that the other side plays dirty, while we stupidly play by the “rules”.

• Nixon won election by secretly interfering with the Paris Peace Talks and prolonging the Vietnam War.
• The Watergate Scandal came to light when Nixon attempted to “bug” the Democratic Party
• Gerald Ford made a deal to pardon Nixon in order to become President
• The findings of the Church Committee that the Intelligence community was interfering in the political process were ignored.
• Reagan partisans interfered with Jimmy Carter getting the hostages released by promising arms and other benefits in what became The Iran Contra Affair.
• Bill Clinton was maneuvered into confessing adultery, after first perjuring himself by an elaborate, well financed sting operation.
• George W. Bush became President after dubious Florida voting tactics run by his brother Jeb and a SCOTUS decision unprecedented in our history.
• George W. Bush won re-election based on voter suppression and voter fraud in Ohio and John Kerry’s refusal to fight on.

By dint of a combination of voter suppression, Russian Interference,  FBI corruption,  overt racism and the “Big Lies” of Trump,  we have elected perhaps our most malevolent President. As his cabinet is formed from some of the worst elements of corporate greed, aristocratic elitism, and anti-democratic fascists,  most of us are threatened economically and socially.  the Trump and the Trump Cohort are in effect making war upon an overwhelming majority of Americans.  Yet for many in the Democratic Party establishment their response to this dire threat is to maintain the belief that in the end reason will win out over the doings of a narcissistic pathological liar.

Of the many flaws I observed in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, perhaps the most damning was the belief by her political strategists that all they had to do was to emphasize the historical nature of her candidacy and counter point it with Trump’s sexism and misogyny.  They overlooked the fact that this country is for the most part sexist (why the wage disparity?) and that many Fundamentalist Christian women believed only a man should be President.  Meanwhile,  this putrid Billionaire, whose money comes from selling an upper class brand,  was allowed to position himself as the economic savior of the middle class.  Virulently untruthful Republican campaign ads were met by cleverly bland  and obviously ineffective Democratic ads mainly showing Trump contretemps, racism and misogyny.  Never once did it occur to the Clinton Team that in truth a sizable minority of this country is sexist and racist.  The appeals to people’s higher natures fell on deaf ears.

The sad irony of all of this is that Trump ascended to the lead in the nomination battle by appealing to the racism and sexism of the Republican base.  With the nomination secured Trump actually adopted the message that Bernie Sanders had such success with, that many in the media disdained as a “populist” message.  You see just as Bill Clinton’s winning mantra was “‘it’s the economy stupid”, so Sanders had identified that the key issue in this election was exactly the unfairness of the American economic situation.  Hillary, belatedly moved towards Bernie’s position to secure her nomination, but then in the giddiness of positive polling numbers, began to retreat to he comfortable “Centrism” ,incorrectly believing she could reach out to that non-existent political cadre the oxymoronic Republican Centrists and the even more non-existent “undecideds”.

My upshot is this.  I see the battle for political power as a war between the “haves” and the “have nots” over the resources of the country.  We all know instinctively that when it comes to human affairs, “money and power” are fought for by warlike means, with no holds barred and the understanding therefore all tactics are acceptable as long as they result in victory.  Most Left Wingers,  myself definitely included, see the human condition as a need for harmony and community.  This is the thrust of most of our political action. However, when you are fighting a war against an enemy of implacable fortitude; contemptuous for the normal rule of law; and without qualms or compassion for the innocents hurt as collateral damage;  to respond to that enemy,  you mustn’t allow yourselves to be bound by chivalrous behavioral norms.

We can’t win a war with the antediluvian Conservative Corporatists by dint of weaponry, or violence, because they are already fairly violent and well armed people.  The battle to be fought is with the deadly weapon of propaganda and in Trump’s peculiar case ridicule.  This “war” needs to be fought by creating effective memes and by crafting a mythology that makes people despise our enemies.  The motto of my college was “the truth shall make us free”.  While that is a noble aspiration, we have seen in this election that the  “truth” is malleable to pathological liars and that “love does not conquer hate”.  My take on this, though many might disagree, is that “when they go low, we go lower”.  If we lose the battles to come in the next four years,  we will inexorably lose this country to a Fascism every bit as virulent as that practiced by Hitler and Mussolini. The stakes are high and they’ve got the guns.  I have to believe though that we’ve got the intelligence and the wit to prevail in the “War of Ideas”, but we need to unleash it ruthlessly, without regard for the niceties of comity.

A metaphor for my mindset is this iconic movie clip below and the surprise ending, that really shouldn’t be a surprise.  Let’s be sure we’re the ones bring a gun to the knife fight of the next four years.

 

Fighting the Thugs For the Future of Our Country

Politics throughout the 5,000 years of known human history has always been a brutal battle for dominance,  where the only rule is win or die.  I know that this is an awful state of affairs,  especially for those like myself who dream of a harmonious humanity.  Yet by not recognizing this underlying dynamic, those of us on the Left Wing of the political spectrum, are at an extreme disadvantage in our political struggles.  Here on the Left, we are bound together by the belief that humans can live together in a society of legal equality and economic fairness, celebrating the  beauty of our own complex diversity.  We believe that given the right conditions humanity will act in harmony for the common good.  We Left Wingers believe this, despite humanity’s six millennia of violence and warfare resulting from struggles for dominance.

Those on the Right Wing of the political spectrum share a pessimism about the good in humanity.  They embrace the notion that all life is a struggle for dominance and so the only true measure of an individual’s life is the wealth and power they have achieved. Their belief is not without some substance, given recorded history’s sagas of people destroying each other in bloody struggles for domination, waged with genocidal fervor.

Thus those on the Right can fairly be said to be the political skeptics and cynics. While those on the Left are in the main political idealists.  If the Right’s perspective is valid, then what flows from it is the belief that society should be governed by those who have risen to the top of the “social ladder” despite how that status has been achieved. If the Left’s perspective is valid, then the governance and the fruits of society should be shared by all.  Now obviously those are simplistic formulations and the tremendous diversity and complexity of political philosophies across the spectrum provides the evidence that is the case. However, as I see it these simplistic explanations of the political differences between Left and Right Wingers can be helpful in understanding the chaos of our American political system.

An article at Alternet demonstrates the reality that our American political Right Wing is only interested in winning power in order to advance their agenda.  The fact that The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory By Thom Hartmann, should come as no shock to those paying close attention to the American political scene. in the present, most of us are still in a state of shock caused by the continuing revelations of how Trump became President abetted by Russia,  the FBI Director and a cacophony of falsehoods about Hillary Clinton spread by billionaire oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch. As the Alternet article shows, fraud and deception directly led to the elections of Republican Presidents,  at least since Nixon covertly sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks. Those talks might have ended the War in Vietnam in 1968 saving the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians. The case made by Thom Hartmann  is irrefutable because it has become generally accepted history born out by subsequent Congressional investigations.

Add to the above, the massive Right Wing efforts to De-legitimize the past three Democraticis Presidents and the solidity of the Republicans in Congress actively refusing to cooperate in governing with them. Perhaps the two most egregious and thuggish examples of this Republican intransigence is the stealing of a Supreme Court Justice and the ongoing, concerted efforts to destroy a Health Care Plan, that is actually the creation of a Right Wing think tank.  In the former we have a Republican controlled Senate that refused to even give a hearing to the Obama Supreme Court nominee, a Judge who most Republicans actually thought highly of.  In the latter,  the Affordable Care Act,  a plan implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and developed by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think tank was vehemently vilified simply because it was proposed by a Democratic President.

The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this is that the representative of Right Wing politics in America,  the Republican Party, is interested more in achieving absolute power, than in positively contributing to the governing of these United States.  The Republican political philosophy glories in a belief that “the end justifies the means” and that “end” is certainly the accelerated accretion of wealth and power by the top “One Percent“, the American Oligarchs. From my perspective the only way to characterize those who believe that “the end justifies the means” is as “Thugs“.  When the word “Thug“  is used in English it connotes a violent criminal, unbound by the normal conventions of society.  The translation  into politics yields individuals who are more than willing to go outside of the legal boundaries for gaining elective office in America and who are willing to violate the political norms that have been established throughout the 241 years since the American Revolution began.

The overwhelming majority of the Republican politicians today are either actively “Thugs“,  or cowardly individuals afraid to tarnish their own political fortunes by opposing the “Thugs” who lead their party.  That is how that fraudulent epitome of a “Thug“  became President,  with the large majority of Republicans in Congress pretending that he is somehow “normal” and a leader to emulate and respect.  If you accept my premise, than those of us committed to RESISTING Trump the Thug and his cohort of Republican thuggery,  desperately need to  understand that these goons will use our own dedication to fairness against us.  We are Liberals, Progressives and Socialists directly because we Do Not Believe that “the end justifies  the means” and so it does appear that we are “bringing a knife to a gunfight”.

I believe that the answer Does Not lie in abandoning our moral compass that ”that the end DOES NOT justify the means” nor does it lie in appeasing these “Thugs” via the blissful ignorance of bi-partisan cooperation.  The path of our Resistance must be trod with our understanding that we are opposing a movement that will always descend to Thuggery when victory is at stake.  We can oppose this while remaining true to ourselves and to our beliefs. Let me present an example of a missed oppportunity that derives from our still painful political history.

“In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency – Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did.  (No Thomas recusal, either.)

And more than a year after the election – a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida – manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year – and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.

Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened – and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.

And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.

So for the third time in 4 decades – Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances.  Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.

And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.” Here.

What we tend to forget about that sad moment in American history is that not only did Al Gore give up the fight too soon, he could have won it decisively since as Vice President he could the have continued the fight:

“On January 6, 2001, a joint session of Congress met to certify the electoral vote. Twenty members of the House of Representatives, most of them Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose one-by-one to file objections to the electoral votes of Florida. However, pursuant to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, any such objection had to be sponsored by both a representative and a senator. No senator would co-sponsor these objections, deferring to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Therefore, Gore, who presided in his capacity as President of the Senate, ruled each of these objections out of order.” See Here

Gore’s mistake and indeed the continuing mistake of most Democratic Party politicians is that that believe their Republican counterparts should be treated as colleagues, rather than as the “Thugs” that they have become in the last 53 years. Their “thuggery” is the result of their selling out to a group of Radical Right Wing Oligarchs bent on destroying the last vestiges of democratic governance in our Republic and willing to use any means to bring this about.

Our task in our Resistance must be to maintain our ideals, while simultaneously understanding that our foes are ruthless in their determination to achieve power and so we can never yield to them by pretending that they are engaging in normative politics.  Al Gore should have never acceded to the “thuggery” of a stolen election and to the chicanery of a SCOTUS ruling by justices of a partisan stripe.  Yes that would have caused a Constitutional Crisis, but can we allow the blackmail of a threatened Constitutional Crisis, give power to illegitimate authority? The incompetent mountebank Trump gained office by colluding with a hostile foreign power, by widespread purging of voter rolls and with the help of a media too afraid to expose his checkered history. Our Resistance must Never accept that this fraud is a legitimate President and we must oppose all efforts to cast him as anything other than an illegitimate fraud who stole the Presidency.

While I have never been a fan of either Hillary or Bill Clinton,  I nevertheless voted for her in the November election because there was simply no alternative for any thinking person and it was no contest that she was the only qualified candidate.  In this disastrous aftermath, we see  Hillary chided by mainstream pundits for her continuing to assert the obvious that this was a stolen election.  She and WE must continue to voice the truth about this fraudulent past election and about the continuing efforts of these “Thugs” whose aim is an Aristocratic Oligarchy, rather than a democratic government.

 

To Filibuster or Not To Filibuster? That is the Neil Gorsuch Question

Democratic Party Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced his intention to Filibuster the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch,  which I believe is the right decision (the 3 previous links provide the details needed to follow my argument). Media Pundits wring their hands disparagingly at such a bold strategy;  Conservative extremist media predict failure;  and 10 Democratic Senators up for re-election in 2018 are dithering.

The Supreme Court seat is available because of the death of the late,  un-lamented by me at least,  Antonin Scalia.  That horrible man, who some said was warm and funny, was the intellectual leader of the Originalism movement of judicial interpretation.  While the Wiki link provides the schematic of the originalist concept,  in truth this theory is an exercise in Right Wing extremism searching for an intellectual justification that sounds meaningful.

Scalia for instance, was an originalist when it served his underlying religio-conservative political philosophy and something else when it served his partisan political preferences as in Bush v. Gore.

Of Bush v. Gore, Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz,  wrote:

“[T]he decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.”^[56]

For instance, regarding the political positions of some SCOTUS Judges in  Bush v. Gore.:

• On several occasions, William Rehnquist had expressed interest in retiring under a Republican administration
• On the eve of the election Sandra Day O’Connor had made a public statement that a Gore victory would be a personal disaster for her.
• Clarence Thomas’s wife was so intimately involved in the Bush campaign that she was helping to draw up a list of Bush appointees more or less at the same time as her husband was adjudicating on whether the same man would become the next President.
• Finally, Antonin Scalia’s son was working for the firm appointed by Bush to argue his case before the Supreme Court, the head of which was subsequently appointed as Solicitor-General.^[59]

The Supreme Court of the United States, despite the protests of Legal Experts who extol the impartiality of the “The Law” and the intellectual rigor of “Justice Is Blind”,  has always been a supremely political institution.  Every Law School teaches its’ acolytes how to successfully argue each side of every issue.  Every good, or great lawyer can supply cogent legal arguments in favor of their personal predilections and prejudices and make them sound as if they were the result of intellectual dispassion. Originalism is merely the intellectual window dressing used by those who believe in what we know as the current conservative viewpoint, which believes in unfettered corporate freedom,  choosing Christian religious doctrine as if ordained by the First Amendment and most of all that money equates to freedom of speech.

Neil Gorsuch  proudly proclaims himself an originalist.  Gorsuch also has related that he idolizes Antonin Scalia.  Despite the Judges pleasant demeanor, Judicial good looks and pleasingly soft-spoken manner he is a judicial radical of the extreme Right Wing variety, who is partial to religious tinged decisions like Hobby Lobby.  Given this, he will again give extremist conservatives a working majority on the Supreme Court.

In a display of partisan political petulance the Republican Controlled Senate refused to even hold hearings on Barack Obama’s nomination of politically centrist Judge Merrick Garland to fill the Scalia vacancy.  While advancing many specious arguments about a President not having the “right” to fill a SCOTUS vacancy in the last year of his term, enough Republican Senators stated their opinion that the “Scalia Seat” was theirs by right and that they would not even allow Hilary Clinton to fill it if she was elected. In my own opinion as well, I saw it as a final racist, finger salute to the President many so hated because of his skin color.

With all of this history and with all of the political posturing around this seat I believe that the only correct position, for Senators who claim affiliation with the Democratic Party, is to filibuster the Gorsuch nomination, even though they will eventually be beaten by Mitch McConnell using the Nuclear Option, the mechanics of which I explained here. The media pundits and Democratic Party centrists who caution against the use of the filibuster against Gorsuch argue it this way:

“But holding firm on Gorsuch carries real risks for Democrats. If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is pushed over the edge to get rid of the current rules — for which he only needs a simple majority — then all bets are off. Gorsuch would be confirmed, also with a simple majority vote.

If that’s how things go down, Democrats would have zero leverage in the event of a new court vacancy — if, say, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg retires.

“If you think things with the Supreme Court are bad for progressive[s] now they can get much, much worse,” Richard Hasen, a longtime Supreme Court observer who teaches law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a blog post. “Better to save the firepower for that fight.”” See here.

The argument about having “zero leverage in the event of a new court vacancy”  simply makes no sense to me.   The idea is that the Republicans don’t really want to invoke the Nuclear Option and so allowing the nomination now, will buy Democrats negotiating leverage for the future.  This viewpoint is premised on the same old noxious notion of the need for Bi-Partisanship collegiality inside the Beltway.  As illustrated by the current battle over Trumpcare, the Republicans are warriors for Class Warfare against everyone who is not part of the American One Percent. Their ultimate intention is to strip any vestige of the “social safety net”, any constraint on the economic strip mining of all non-wealthy Americans and the institution of Fundamentalist Christian morality in our legal system.  The Republican leadership have proven themselves to be the enemy of all the aspirations for equality of people of color and willing to use people immigrating to America as demagogic scapegoats.  This is not partisan speculation, but merely a re-statement of what the Republican leaders have already openly expressed regarding their intent.  Bi-Partisanship is a phony aspiration when one Party is actively making war against those represented by the other Party.

As far as the Nuclear Option goes I welcome its’ use.  While it is true that the filibuster is an old Senate tradition,  the fact that a Senator no longer has to actually speak and hold the floor has rendered it ridiculous and dilatory.  Although traditionally it has existed to protect their rights of a minority of Senators, its use in the past has primarily been to stymie progressive legislation and to provide cover for Senators who did not want to be associated with opposing progressive legislation.  In recent decades the Democrats who have had a Senate Majority have professed helplessness in the face of being able to muster 60 votes for cloture to stop filibusters.  The constitution mandates that passing votes in the Senate requires only a simple majority, let us go back to the constitution when it comes to the Senate and then let us make damned sure WE are in the majority.

Any Democratic Senator who votes to break the filibuster and confirm Gorsuch, should be marked for defeat,  since their presence in the Senate,  only dilutes the liberal cause and confuses the voters into thinking they are on their side.When it comes to politics I am sick and tired of Democrats Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight.  We are probably facing the greatest threat in American history towards the operation of a Constitutional Republic. We have a President and Administration who seem to want to institute full blown Fascism into our country and who extraordinarily seem to be under the thrall of a murderous Fascist Foreign Dictator. Against such opponents we cannot win by showing bi-partisan moderation and allow their bullying. We must stand up to the bullies even if we initially lose, because from that loss will come the strengthening of our backbones and our cause by knowing we have and we will express truth to power.

Perhaps Hillary Finally Gets It: That From Carter to Obama, Centrist Democrats Are Losers

It seems to me that Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic nomination, but won the ideological war.  One of the things that heartened me about the Democratic Convention,  its’ platform and Hillary’s campaign, is that they all have been shifted “Left of Center”.  Bernie’s resonance with the voters ensured that this Democratic Socialist finished very strong in the primary battles,  so strong in fact that Hillary has embraced many of his central positions.  A $15 minimum wage;  free college tuition;  student loan relief;  campaign finance reform; breaking up the “big Banking Institutions and Criminal Justice Reform are now mainstays on Hillary’s campaign trail.  No one,  but the foolish,  have denied Hillary Clinton’s massive intelligence.  Her critics on the Left though, rightly so, have seen her as an extension of her husband Bills’ triangulated Presidency.  I would like to believe that Hillary’s intelligence has perceived from Bernie Sanders’ success, that the majority of voters want a truly Left of Center, progressive President. In effect, my notion is that she has realized the past failures of Centrist Democrats,  who perceived that by acting more conservative,  they had developed the strategy for successfully governing the country.  In other words, the reality is that Centrists Democrats are not only losers,  but have actually caused a decline in American governance.

In my opinion the two writers I most respect in analyzing the political narratives of our country are Thomas Frank and Rick Perlstein .  An article at Salon , with Frank discussing his coming interview with Perlstein to be released at a later date, piqued my interest. The article titled: “Thomas Frank: We are such losers” compares and contrasts the Presidency’s of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, with side trips dealing with the losing Democratic Party candidates in between. The comparison between Carter and Obama surprisingly shows just how similar in political outlook these two men are and the false projection of their true politics that allowed them to become President. I’m going to present Thomas Frank’s preview of the larger interview below and you can follow this link to read the entire Salon interview which was published one month later: Thomas Frank on Ronald Reagan’s Secret Tragedy: How 70’s and 80’s Cynicism Poisoned Democrats and America.  Please note that the first article was published in October 2014 and the interview appeared in November 2014,  yet they remain completely relevant for today’s 2016 election campaign.

Liberals yearn to believe in post-ideological blank slates — and get disappointed every time. Will we ever learn?

“That we are living through an endless repeat of the 1970s is becoming more apparent all the time. Nostalgia and retro culture burn as brightly today as they did in the era of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti,” while distrust and suspicion of government hover at near-Watergate levels. Disaster dreams are everywhere, just as they were in the days of “The Towering Inferno” and Three Mile Island. The culture wars, the 1970s’ No. 1 gift to American politics, still drag on and on, while the New Right, the decade’s other great political invention, effortlessly rejuvenates itself. Jerry Brown is governor of California again. The Kansas City Royals are a good team.

No reminiscence of that decade of malaise would be complete without mentioning Jimmy Carter, the president who—fairly or not—will be forever associated with national drift and decline and all the other horrors that were eventually swept away by the Reagan magisterium. Indeed, comparing the hapless Carter to whoever currently leads the Democratic Party remains a powerful shibboleth for American conservatives, and in 2011 and 2012 Republicans indulged in this favorite simile without hesitation.

Moving Forward From The 2016 Election Whoever Becomes President

 

 

 

 

 

Benjamin Franklin understood that creating a Constitution and investing it with power was only the first step in maintaining a Republic   The Founding Fathers were all familiar with Edward Gibbon’s masterwork The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, since the first volume was published in 1776,  the year of our Declaration of Independence.  In his tome Gibbon described how the successful Republic of Rome,  which to some extent was a model society more than 2,000 years ago,  was gradually turned into an empire, ruled by an Emperor to whom it attributed “Godlike” status.  As Gibbon describes it, the decline of the Roman Republic was gradual and finally came upon the Roman citizens as a fait accompli.  Understanding the history of Rome and of Athens as well,  Franklin clearly believed that the future of the country he helped to birth as a Republic,  was uncertain.  From my perspective, it seems that so many years later, our American Republic is on the precipice of failing and turning from egalitarian to empire.

Besides technical structures such as Constitutions,  for a country using a republican electoral system, the most important ingredient is a common belief in the common government.  Bridling against the restrictions imposed upon their business dealings and also by the country’s system of  using taxation to create some sense of equal income distribution,  many of the wealthiest people in our country have banded together in a 40 year plan to discredit our National government and dissolve the sense of commonality of our citizens.  I’ve documented elsewhere that this movement coalesced in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 Presidential election.

In this election 52 years later, we see that the electorate is reaching the end of its patience and the meme that “Government is the Enemy” has taken deep root,  not only among the public,  but in the Mainstream media as well.  The coming coronation of Donal Trump as the Republican nominee and the widespread following developed by Bernie Sanders’ candidacy,  all speak to the public disaffection with the way our country is being run.  Those of us,  like myself,  who are firmly in the Left Hand column of the political spectrum find ourselves fighting a so far losing battle with the forces of corporate conservatism.  We see that the supposedly “left wing” political party has been captured by Centrists who veer right as they beg to be recipients of corporate largess.  What is needed is a movement to turn back the retrograde forces of corporatism,  by using new approaches,  because our old methods clearly aren’t working.  Even if the improbable occurs and Bernie Sanders captures the Presidency, he would be impotent without the political muscle to back him up.  The truth is that we must look beyond the Presidency,  while still making every effort for either Hillary, or Bernie to capture it. My sense of a viable strategy is what follows.