Wait 'till the fire turns green

 This was something I wrote back on January 5th, 2021 - a day before a mob of complete idiots and their accompanying handlers decided to crash the Capitol Building in order to prevent the counting of electoral ballots that would seal their idiot king's fate in the 2020 Presidential election - and nothing I wrote in that or the follow-up has been proven in the least bit false or even inaccurate. 

I also knew what had been put in office back in November 2016, and although that post is full of far too much Monday morning quarterbacking the truth is that Donald J. Trump wasn't merely as bad as I thought he'd  be - he was worse. And all indications are after four years of increasing paranoia about criminal prosecution, cognitive decline and stupid fascist tricks he'll be even worse than that. 

So remember to vote on November 5th. Because your future really does depend on it. 

  (NOTE: the following is a video copy and transcript of Day 4 of the US House Committee hearings tasked with investigating the attack on the US Capitol Building that occurred on January 6th, 2021. I'll attempt to post videos and transcripts for all meetings until the Committee has finished its hearings.)  

Day 4 hearing (courtesy C-SPAN)

Day 4 transcript (courtesy NPR)

 This week wasn't just about Roe v. Wade. Not by a long shot.

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down a series of decisions this week that don't merely smack of an effort to return the court to a pre-Warren court era; they practically look like an effort to go all the way back to the Taney court instead, and the rulings they set down are at times so mutually contradictory at that it looks like they're not even trying to justify them through stare decisis or any other comprehensible form of legal precedent.

We've been told as a nation that although it's perfectly acceptable for state legislatures to regulate and even ban abortion, it isn't acceptable for them to regulate concealed carry rules for firearms. SCOTUS also ruled in favor of the proposition that if a state subsidizes tuition to private schools it must also subsidize tuition to religious schools, which effectively means that the only way out for states choosing not to do so is to cut off all tuition assistance to private schools, secular or otherwise. And then there's there's Vega vs. Tekoh, which weakens Miranda protections against self-incrimination. It wasn't a week where the Supreme Court covered itself in glory, and that's a huge understatement.

And then on Friday, Roe v. Wade was overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

My own personal view on the issue of abortion is that it's strictly between a woman, her physician and whoever else she asks for an opinion as to whether she chooses to obtain one or not. My view shouldn't enter into the issue unless I'm specifically asked about it, and if I'm not asked about it it's none of my business.

Women involved in making such a decision have enough to worry about without everyone else throwing in their own two cents, and if they can't negotiate the issue despite the input of their spouse or partner, friends, family members and their own religious views (or lack thereof) the opinion of someone who neither knows their situation or can be in their head to know what they're going through won't be of help, either. And because of Dobbs, that decision has just been made all the more excruciating. Considering how many states passed trigger laws greatly restricting or outlawing abortion that went into effect when Roe fell, the decision has become incredibly expensive as well. So is raising an unexpected child, but the majority of the court doesn't seem particularly concerned with that. And if the pregnancy is ectopic? Well, that's obviously the woman's problem, not the court's.

Regardless of this decision, abortion will not disappear. They'll merely become exceedingly difficult to obtain legally in several states and will be forced underground, but they'll still be performed - albeit at much greater risk to the health or even the life of the patient.

But as far as one of the things that could cut back on unwanted or unviable pregnancies - namely access to effective contraceptives - might be under assault as well. Clarence Thomas has already gone on record as stating that earlier decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut (which allowed married couples to buy contraceptives) and Obergefell v. Hodges (the decision that legalized interstate protection of same-sex marriages) might have to be revisited on the same grounds that Roe was overturned. Of course, the irony with is that the same thing could be said of Loving v. Virginia, and that means that Thomas' own interracial marriage of 35 years could be invalidated.

But I'm sure he'd be perfectly okay with that, right?

The first inkling that something was wrong that morning was a call I received from my friend Paul Carter where all he said was something like "Hey Chris, turn on the TV - you're not going to believe what's happening".

Then all hell broke loose.

And its effects have lasted for two decades afterwards, either directly or indirectly.

At the time, I was in the throes of an extended period of underemployment after I had been cut loose from my previous full-time job in late September of 1998, so I wasn't one of the thousands of people who evacuated downtown office buildings in Chicago after the planes hit in New York, Arlington and crashed after a passenger rebellion over Pennsylvania. I've worked in the Chicago loop for a total of nearly nine years, and I can only imagine how it was that day for people getting out.

A mutual friend of mine and Paul's was downtown that day, though, and what made it worse for Jeffrey Oelkers was that he had been in New York a few weeks before this happened. He had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center firsthand just like anyone else in the area could. And he saw the terrifying footage of them getting destroyed weeks later after he stopped off at a place that had a TV on after being evacuated from work.

Like the worldwide pandemic that we've been living through since early 2020, 9/11 was an event that brought out the best in people - and the worst. A gas station attendant was shot to death in suburban Phoenix by a moronic self-described "patriot" just because he was wearing a turban. Unsurprisingly, the "patriot" didn't know the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim and even if he did, it probably wouldn't have stopped him from doing it. Conversely, there are stories of women going grocery shopping with Muslim friends of theirs because the Muslim women were afraid of reprisals. Events like 9/11 serve as a psychological mirror since they strip away the detachment that goes with the ability to think at a remove from trauma, and this is ultimately how you find out what you are, unwillingly. The long-term psychological trauma of that otherwise sunny Thursday morning is another element of this tragedy that will continue to be studied for decades afterwards.

Two decades have passed since that morning, and although people eventually went back to a semblance of their normal lives many people were permanently changed by what happened: the surviving close friends, relatives and loved ones of the people who died in the attacks, either as victims of the hijackings or on the ground. The first responders who risked their lives and either died in the collapse of the twin towers or suffered long-term health effects as a result of exposure to the now-poisonous air at the site. The countless scores of active-duty troops, reservists and eventual enlistees who fought in Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks. And countless others who saw it unfold in real time.

But the saddest truth is that after all of this, none of what happened then or since will give those 2,977 people their lives back.

Nothing will.

And that might be the hardest fact to swallow of all.

Understand this: I'm not a petty person, nor am I particularly vindictive. It takes a lot to earn my hatred, and even more to earn my contempt.

Ultimately, Donald J. Trump got both.

When I say "hatred" or "contempt" I mean exactly that; there are any number of people I've met in my personal life who've earned one or the other due to their behavior towards me or friends and loved ones of mine, and most of them will only be able to get off of my shitlist for the things they've done by fixing the damage they've caused.

Politicians, at least in the United States, are different - they can always be voted out of office if you're in the right jurisdiction, and if you're not they can always be made targets of the derision they deserve in other, perfectly legal ways. It's a normal thing in a democracy to dislike people holding public office that you didn't vote for or ones that ended up a disappointment that you did, and there's no reason to feel guilt at that fact unless that dislike is based on irrational, ridiculous reasons.

The reasons that I hate Trump are hardly irrational or ridiculous. If anything, they're anything but that (see this link in RationalWiki that details a good number of them), and the idea that only one human being sitting in the White House for four years could do so much damage to the country he falsely claims to love so much is horrifying.

Unfortunately, that damage is real. And extensive.

I could go on and on about how his administration's feeble, incompetent actions during the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in a death total of over 400,000 (nearly twice the second worst national total, Brazil's), or the fact that his cult-like standing among his followers led a number of them to join with white supremacists and other armed wackjobs in attacking the assembled Senate and House of Representatives on January 6th in order to violently overturn the counting of electoral college votes. Those are only two of the most recent things he's managed to do to us in four years, and if I listed all the others it'd take hours to read in summary form and days to finish if I went into full detail. So I'll have to be brief and say that he was nothing but trouble since his inauguration and the closest thing to a walking plague in expensive shoes at his worst.

And in roughly an hour, he'll finally, mercifully, be out of office.

As expected, his farewell speech was full of the usual triumphalist, egotistic garbage and was singularly lacking in self-awareness or even a connection to outward reality, and I'll only listen to it if I have to remind myself of why I despise him.

Joe Biden may be able to undo a good deal of the damage Trump caused to the Federal government's ability to function, but it's questionable if he can undo the damage to our already fractious political culture. That latter issue may take years - if not decades - to address, and we can't keep going this way as a nation and survive. And in a way, this may be one of the greatest crimes Trump has committed. National politics in the United States since the 1980s have been increasingly zero-sum and unpleasant, and Trump and his enablers have succeeded in making it exceedingly ugly and even barbaric at times. Just one look at what happened on January 6th will convince you of that fact.

After all that, the nicest thing I can say about Trump being gone is this: "goodbye, and good riddance". He came close to ruining us. Here's hoping he never finds a way to finish what he started.

Understand this before you read any further: I am not in any way advocating a civil war. Not even close to that. Civil wars are invariably bloody, visceral descents into hell for any country that fights them, and this was true for us in 1861 just as much as it was in other eras for England, Ireland, Russia, Lebanon or the Balkans. You don't want to go there. Ever.

That being said...

The degree of unconstitutional fuckery currently being advocated by certain halfwits in Congress such as Louie Gohmert, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in order to support the mindless power fantasies of their thoroughly delusional caudillo seem guaranteed to push us in that direction, even if the electoral college vote is upheld tomorrow. Because there will be any number of Trump cultists (and forget about denying that it's a cult, since there's plenty of evidence affirming that fact) willing to do any number of stupid things if our Orange Caligula is turned out of office on January 20th.

In my opinion, this is the closest we've come to Fort Sumter in 1861 since Fort Sumter itself.

And if that's the case, you'd better hope that things proceed as normal on January 6th.

Because if they don't, we're all in deep trouble.

This is going to look like preaching to the choir, since many of you have already voted and I'm fully aware of who you probably voted for, but...

Tomorrow is election day. And the importance of this particular election can't be understated. It may be one of the most important election for President other than 1860, 1932 or 1968, and that's not hyperbole - not in the least.

Because Donald Trump has to go. It's just that obvious.

I could spend hours compiling all of the reasons why he needs to be driven out of office by January 20th, 2021 (there are articles in RationalWiki and the Encyclopedia of American Loons that have compiled a huge chunk of them, so look for those instead), but there's a simple set of facts that make it glaringly obvious:

There's the narcissism. The deranged Tweets that will end up in the historical record whether he likes it or not. The self-dealing. The filling of his cabinet with fellow would-be oligarchs, incompetents and fellow self-dealers. His need to browbeat the few competent ones into resigning when they're no longer sycophantic enough for his liking. His abject refusal to release his tax returns when every other Presidential candidate has been doing it for decades. The repeated accusations by women he's encountered of sexual harassment and outright sexual assault. The fact his family are mouthpieces for his knuckle-dragging brand of politics and simultaneously in on his grift. The fact that that grift is only further enhanced by his refusal to let go of his business holdings. The fact that he's used his position as President to enhance the monetary gain of those business holdings. His inability to handle criticism, hard questions from the press or any status other than someone never to be questioned, ever. His butchering of environmental regulations, national parks and wild spaces in the name of profit. His abject slavishness to Vladimir Putin. His cozying up to the likes of Kim Jong-un. His use of the race card and the xenophobe card every time he needs or wants to. His cult of personality among people who'll ultimately be humiliated when they finally realize what they've been worshipping. And on and on and on.

Donald J. Trump, in short, is not worthy to be President. He never has been and he never will be. And he doesn't deserve your vote, my vote or anyone else's.

People will still be foolish enough to give it, but that's because he's used his nascent personality cult to whip people into a state of fear of anyone or anything different from them. Never mind the fact that he's done everything he can to prove that he's a sociopath, a narcissist or both: there's always been plenty of room in Anerican politics for candidates who appeal to racists and bigots stretching all the way back to the Anti-Masonic and Know-Nothing parties, and there will be in the future. But no one has combined that with a hostility to - or an outright ignorance of - the workings of democracy and the Constitution more than Trump has, and that's one of the reasons that he's so dangerous. He wants to stay in power in order to avoid the consequences of his corruption, and he's practically willing to do anything to accomplish it. Which is precisely why he needs to be defeated.

So if you haven't voted yet, do yourself a favor and vote him out of office.

Because I don't want to end up in a refugee camp for exiled Americans somewhere outside of Auckland or Winnipeg four years from now saying "I told you so!" because they didn't vote.

And that's not hyperbole, either.

Not that anyone should be surprised at this by now, but over the last few days you have a real choice of things to know about Donald J. Trump: that he's probably a massive business and tax fraud, and that he's definitely giving aid and comfort (and probably veiled orders) to white supremacist groups.

Just keep all of that in mind if things get especially hairy in the run-up to November 3rd.

For those of you who scoff at the idea of getting the hell out of the country if Trump gets re-elected, let's put it like this:

You can wait until the November election is over and done with. At the first sign of the Orange Duce not accepting a Biden win or declaring some sort of national emergency or martial law to nullify a loss, you better be prepared for the worst. I don't believe for a minute that the lunatic in the White House will ever accept any sort of voluntary departure from the oval office as legitimate. He can leave on a stretcher with a blanket over his face after Tweeting himself into a stroke at 5 in the morning, or he can leave at the business end of several guns held by Federal agents next January. He's already made ridiculous noises about "negotiating" a third term as if all of this was just some business scam he's participating in, and he probably believes it.

So be prepared. The worst hasn't happened yet, and I'm doing my best to not be alarmist, but when your house is on fire you don't just sit there and let it burn. You call the fire department, or try to put it out. And we may be at exactly the point in time where we're all starting to smell smoke. I sure as hell hope we're not, but I'm not sure of much of anything any more. And I wish I was.