December 30, 2018

Republican AG John Ashcroft, Robert Mueller's Boss In 2001, Said This To America

Today and hereafter, Lindsey Graham, his partisan colleagues and other "wall" supporters, should heed John Ashcroft's uncompromising declaration to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

From Garret M. Graff's The Threat Matrix, The FBI At War (2011)


Turncoat Republicans were once the defenders of this country whose president, Reagan, gave amnesty to millions, and allowed the borders to operate with full funding.

Norquist bag men let their theocratic extremist wing quote Ezekiel and Matthew to make this "wall" part of some prophetic end times story. They hate democracy and love theocracy.

Every chance I get I'll quote Ashcroft to every Republican I meet.


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December 23, 2018

"It's A Wonderful Life, Comrade, by Renegade Cut

Not the traditional, off-the-mark analysis.

This holiday season, knowledge is a weapon, and our adult vigilance is a gift.

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December 23, 2018

FROM "HE WOULD HAVE BEEN A FASCIST" by Some Concerned, Brow Furrowing Dipshit

My Millennial son sent this to me on Facebook.

This essay is not what I wanted to read, but I needed to read.

I thought I'd share it with DU.

Trump would have been a fascist, many Americans would have let him, and his base truly wanted it. Hear me out here: they don't get to walk away from that like it's no harm no foul, but they will be trying to, very soon.

The one thing that I think will underscore how terrible this presidency truly is, as we search for meaning in the historical retrospective of this agonizing time, is that we'll come to conclude – and please put this in the galaxy's largest quote marks: that the ""positive side"" of this horrible period in American history will turn out to be that Trump 'at least' couldn't be the biggest inhumanitarian, rights-shredding butcher of all American presidents, simply because, well, he was mentally incompetent and temperamentally deranged.

He wanted to do all this horrible, terrible stuff, he totally would have, but he was profoundly mentally incapacitated, increasingly suffering from dementia, a pathological liar and narcissist, and you couldn't get him to pay attention to anything for longer than ten minutes and he spent most of his presidency sundowning, rambling out insane ideas, and shouting at televisions like a tertiary syphilitic.

Conservatives still desperately propped him up for (so far) two whole years of this excoriable horrorshow, but Trump was literally just too incompetent for them to manage.
In the end, Trump will still have been the worst president of all time, but he won't be the most successfully horrid. Trump 'at least' won't have delivered us the butcher's bill of presidents like George W. Bush, who were at least functional enough in their role as republican figurehead to successfully start forever wars that killed millions upon millions more people than Steven Miller's concentration camps could have ever hoped to.

It's like, sure, hooray? "Yeah," we'll be telling high schoolers in 20 years, "conservatives elected and then furiously, eternally stood by a vile asshole, but, uh, at least they elected a vile asshole who was mentally and temperamentally incompetent and you couldn't even get him to read things or pay attention to anything longer than ten minutes or so, so he blew his wad early and we didn't go full Gilead." Then the high schoolers will set our cities on fire and flip our cars over because we left them with an utterly and permanently wrecked climate, and we'll deserve it.

But we really seriously need to remember how scary this whole thing is, especially because conservatives will be desperately trying to rehab their image forever after this, and part of that necessarily involves pretending that the rest of us were ridiculous for having been so scared at all. "Ooh, what's the matter, did you really think America was becoming 'fascist?' Wow, what overblown hyperbole." Yeah, no, it's fucking not? Trump is an evil fascist! Nobody gets image rehabilitation points for being a failed attempt at evil fascism! This was bad!

Trump absolutely wanted to do horrendous things, and conservatives as a whole would have let him. Given half the capacity to, he would have been an angrier, more insecure, pettier and crueler Duterte. He would have been a fascist, a Maduro-esque tyrant of petty conveniences and power assurances turbocharged by the stature of American empire and the strength of the armed forces.

It's not even that hard to source, even if you're dealing with people who sidestep the reality that Trump has overwhelming 90%-ish support among conservatives, who across the nation still ghoulishly enjoy, support, and encourage every new trial balloon he ever inflated in the direction of straight fucking tyranny.

He would have literally given conservatives the Muslim Ban, if he could. He would have been happy to. They would have loved it. This is not hyperbole.

He would have forced those uppity football players to stand at attention or lose their jobs, because they angered him and he just absolutely fucking hated black people.
He would have built the actual fucking wall because he absolutely fucking hated Latinos.
He would have turned ICE into a burgeoning new Stasi, formally equipped to operate anywhere and disappear just about anyone darker than cardboard, because he actually just hated people who weren't white.

He would have actually gone to war with the media – please be sure of that. Please. Don't look at his deranged tweetstorms at SNL and try to pretend otherwise. He absolutely would have seized control of entire television networks over "unfair" coverage or mockery of him. He legitimately objected to its presence and desired it to be torn to shreds.

And conservatives would have wildly, overwhelmingly approved. This is what they wanted. They keep telling us that! They keep supporting Trump in overwhelming numbers, heaping praise on him when he tries anything like these things, and openly saying "We wish he would do more like that!" They tell us exactly who they are, and it is insanity not to believe them.

Trump is insane and he is evil and he has the overwhelming nationwide backing of conservatives and they would have seen this through to the historically expected end if they had been able to, and we can't just put that all behind us and tolerate people mocking us and/or having mocked us for being so concerned about it. "Oh, that's ridiculous," says every Principled Republican in 2021, discounting every eminently reasonable worry of any sane human being through this entire debacle. "Of course Republicans wouldn't have, we have so much more principles than that, what overblown puffery."

Never listen to these people again, until what they are saying is "I'm sorry, and you're right, and I shouldn't have made your fear into a subject of my reflexive derision, also I will be wrestling skunks with my face live on youtube as fully deserved penance." Then, you can totally listen to them or possibly even upvote the video.

Yes, we are fucking worried, holy hell. Trump would have been a fucking dictator, and he would have effortlessly become so out of a known, celebrated, demented, and furiously privileged frailty. Trump is a broken man with a broken need to fill his absolute black hole of a heart with attention and respect and submission and validation, and the requirements of that need grows commensurate to the power and privilege he obtains. It would have grown to fill the powers of a dictator.

He is evil, and he's the sort of evil that abhors separation of powers when the powers involve the ability to khashoggi his critics. Shout it from the rooftops. Trump would have been a dictator, and this was one of his greatest appeals to American conservatives.

Even as the degenerate husk of the Grand Old Party starts slithering away to a desperate, expected phase of image recovery, even as they gaslight to pretend this bullshit never happened quite the way we remember it, assuring us that Trump "wasn't who we are as a party," desperately retconning their cravenness and years of mendacious complicity, as they reach out for a period of "healing and national unity" hoping to "put this behind us," remember.

Remember. They would have banned Muslims if they could. They would have literally built the wall. They would have abducted children from refugees and put them in concentration camps as an intentional policy for dissuading migrants seeking asyl – oh, wait, my bad, that's one of the one they still got away with for real. I forgot this is the hellworld timeline, and that this is something they did actually do, and it was, hang on, let me check polls and facebook here, ... yup, overwhelmingly supported and cruelly, ubiquitously celebrated on social media by conservatives.

Again, one of the most important coherent messages of repudiation that we need to hold on to in the coming decade is to remind anyone trying to rehabilitate the rightfully demolished pretensions of American conservatism can miss us with the idea that our fears were overblown. Trump wanted to be a dictator, fucking period. End of questions. He would have banned Muslims. Don't you forget it. Conservatives would have loved him for it. And don't pretend that wasn't the case. They will, but don't make it easy for them.

The semi-functional protections of our creaking, intentionally sabotaged republic did crop up to stop Trump's Dutertian analogues from time to time, where and when they hadn't been institutionally pulverized into submission (yet) by the intentional antidemocratic predation of the Republican Party.

Where they did, like in the recent 5-4 decision that basically ruled against being illegally heartless ghouls to people fleeing violence, they only did so because the Conservatives just haven't quite have enough time to destroy any systems of justice that would have stopped Trump – an agenda which they had already been setting up for their own convenience. Why, if only they had just gotten one more justice appointed. Republicans would have done this, and don't forget it.

They absolutely did their goddamndest trying to set up the conditions that would have made Trump safe, but they just hadn't yet turned the judiciary into an accessory to the conservative party. They hadn't quite finished the whole thing where courts were stacked explicitly and sufficientlybwith the wildly whiteass selection of federalist society type weirdos selected mostly to let state and national level GOP institutions be autocrats with managed, noncompetitive faux-elections. A Supreme Court not yet sufficiently stacked with Brett Kavanaughs and Wendy Vitters and Ryan Bounds offered some challenges and repudiations to Trump's heavier trial balloons and at least managed to set up general boundaries of his executive actions, but only because the GOP had simply not done enough damage yet. Just some. A lot, really, which will be torturing our forward progress for decades. But not enough.

All this really has proven to us is that America is simply unequipped for what would have happened if Trump was not literally in a medical sense deranged and incapable of taking advantage of the GOP's craven complicity to his authoritarian attempts.

Trump may not sit in the Oval Office for much longer, but whenever he leaves, he leaves us with a painfully important question – "So how's this going to turn out if we do it with a competent autocrat?"

- by Some Concerned, Brow Furrowing Dipshit

December 8, 2018

End of year celebrations tell us It Will Get Better.

Add to that the fact that today is another great day of Justice in the U.S.

Thanks to tireless efforts of millions to bring us back to the light of democratic government, even this atheist feels on the move and in step with the spirit of future days.