CSotD: Here’s the State of Things
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I hope Ratt is right.
He seems to be right about who is to blame and why. These aren’t the only suspects, but they’re the main figures in the process, which is less a conspiracy than a flow that includes past politicians like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, and entertainment figures who have created a rich soil of fear and paranoia in which simpleminded, undemocratic solutions could take root.
That is, you can avoid “politics,” but if you do it by watching TV, you’re seeing an endless procession of shows based on the idea that the world is a frightening, dangerous place held only in place by tough but remarkably good-looking men and women with guns and badges.
And they’re not afraid to break the rules if that’s the only way to keep things under control.
If you don’t avoid politics, if you tune in to talk radio, watch Murdoch’s news networks or read his newspapers, you’ll find that the scary world of Dirty Harry Callaghan and Rambo and the various TV cop shows has a parallel in the real world and parallel authorities with real guns and badges.
As Ratt’s version of Murdoch says, he’s just giving the people what they want. Getting them to want it was a group effort.
I hope Ratt is right that they are trying to kill American democracy, because there are signs that it’s no longer an attempt but a finished fact.
I don’t want to believe it, and I think there is still time to put on the brakes, but there isn’t a lot more time to sit around talking about it.
The talk has been of a cult of personality around Dear Leader, and we’ve heard it since he came down that escalator to the cheers of a crowd of excited people hired for the occasion.
But shelling out free campaign T-shirts and fifty bucks each for random folks to applaud Dear Leader’s political launch was only the opening act.
Telnaes does a good job of summing up a cabinet meeting in which people were hired at much greater cost to show much more sycophantic devotion to Dear Leader.
Fawning and flattery seem to be cabinet members’ jobs, while the departments they are named to head must largely run themselves. For example, the Secretary supposedly in charge of Homeland Security dresses up and does things like painting the wrong side of a fence that is, itself, more performative than practical.
As Granlund puts it, the strict hiring policy at the White House is based on loyalty, not knowledge or ability or experience.
Here’s a list of Trump hires who previously worked for Fox News, but that’s as of May, because being hired by the White House doesn’t always mean actually working there, and while department heads seem stable, those below them are in some turmoil.
For example, Dan Bongino, the utterly inexperienced talk show host named deputy director of the FBI, has proved so incapable of doing the job, and so aware of his own shortcomings, that he’s been given a co-deputy-director.
Not all cabinet secretaries are there strictly as show ponies. RFK Jr. has dug into transforming the Department of Health and Human Services with a passion that goes beyond ineptitude to such actual malicious incompetence that people who know how science and medicine work seem to be leaving in favor of delusional fringe-dwellers with a firm grasp on unfounded and dangerous beliefs.
Not to worry, however: The Department of Justice is absolutely determined to get to the bottom of this Jeffery Epstein business if they have to threaten Ghilaine Maxwell with a full pardon to make her tell the truth, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
We haven’t seen such a cruel, harsh interrogation since the days of the Spanish Inquisition, which, like DOJ, was known for surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency and almost fanatical loyalty.
I think perhaps John Bolton was fully expecting the DOJ Inquisition, though he might also have been expecting someone to speak up more forcefully on his behalf.
Banx gets a laugh here, but he also makes a point. We’re still largely in the opening phases of Neimoller’s outline of the overall process. Nobody has done much to speak up for Bolton, just as they’ve done little on behalf of the trans community and have left it largely to the people in the streets to speak up for the immigrants.
Thank goodness we have a three-branch government with a solid system of checks and balances to keep everything on the up-and-up.
In the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Founders created a document largely based on honor and good faith, despite how passionately the Federalists and Anti-Federalists quarreled over the details. They assumed that, while scoundrels would arise, the honorable majority would keep them in check, both within the government and in the voting booths.
We have, since their day, amended the Constitution to make governance more representative and less elitist, which is on the whole a very good thing but brings in the fifth member of Ratt’s collection of underminers: The fellow who throws out that tired, half-understood nostrum about our being a republic and not a democracy.
It is a sign of passion unalloyed with knowledge, and is more dangerous than apathy.
In eighth grade, we learned how government works and how various systems operate, including the difference between socialism, in which people shared everything they had, and communism, in which the central government controls the means of production.
The lessons apparently never took hold, because socialism and communism have not only been considered the same thing for the past century, but have become meaningless insults in the mouths of people who have also been told that we are a republic and not a democracy.
Ignorance functions well under dictatorship, though cults tend to fall apart when the charismatic figure at their apex dies.
In a participatory system, ignorance is more immediately toxic: Not knowing the difference between socialism and communism, or between direct democracy and democratic republicanism, can bring about a situation in which the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
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