Politics (brief)

[johnpalmer]

So... how bad is the political state in this country? Well... I saw a couple of references - anonymously sourced, so, possibly BS - that said one of the reasons Comey announced that he had a laptop that contained e-mails that he wasn't allowed to review, that might be evidence of a crime when there's no evidence a crime has been committed, but he's still going to try to get a warrant to review them, later....

Where was I? Right - one of the reasons Comey performed some unprecedented and extremely questionable actions is that there are several FBI agents ready to resign over a lack of indictment of Hillary Clinton.

This, if true, is beyond merely "wrong". Yes, there are times when officers know that someone is likely involved in criminal activity. But Hillary Clinton shows signs only of having been relentlessly pursued by people determined to ruin her, and having every investigation come up empty.

I'd assumed that "the Republican faithful" - the cheerleaders who chant "lock her up" and "build a wall" and such - was starting to believe that she was a criminal... but not officers of the law. I thought they'd respect the law too much for that.

Okay: but this is anonymously sourced, right? Which means it might be total BS, right? Sure. But that it's plausible, that it's not laughed off, shows that it's now so normal to declare a hated enemy is an actual criminal that no one bothers to think about it.

Oh, I know. Both sides do it. Some Democrats accuse former President George W. Bush and Richard Cheney of war crimes... thing is, we know they approved enhanced interrogation techniques, and that people were tortured. That's evidence.

And yeah, people got all het up about the Iran Contra game, sell weapons to an enemy of America, to illegally fund a war, but we know laws were broken there, too.

And if there are massive rallies with chants of "lock them up!" I've never seen nor heard of 'em.

This isn't okay. It's insanely dangerous.

Comments

[dubhain]

Yes. It is.
See, we were all indoctrinated, in school, to believe that our system was self-correcting, and that all we had to do was sit back, watch TV, play video games, and the Republic would run itself.

That was foolish. But it's what, basically, was drilled into us. "Checks and Balances." So don't sweat it, dude. Hell, people are still nattering on about how it can't happen here.

The GOP, since the run-up to the Regan election, has been trying to destroy or control what it saw as bastions of liberal thought and indoctrination: The media (especially public broadcasting,) and the education system (by legislating charter schools and the voucher system.) Additionally, they reached-out to the Right-wing religious base, and goaded them into a frenzy (before 1980, conservative churches generally stayed out of politics.)

The problem is that, according to standard Western practice, their goals were short-term, and didn't really contemplate what would happen after they got de-facto control of the country. They simply assumed that a new, utopian, Conservative age would result. The wealthy would be able to make money hand-over-fist, regulated and taxed only is it benefited themselves. They wouldn't have to worry about any social change that didn't benefit themselves, and that's the way it would remain, for the rest of their lifetimes. The rest of the population? Oh, they'd be fine. After all, "What's good for business is good for America." It was something of a mantra, throughout the 20th century.

What they didn't anticipate, in their short-sighted planning, is that the country was ramping-up for its regular end-of-the-century religious frenzy, which was exponentially magnified by it being the end of a millennium, as well. They also assumed that the ignorant hicks (as they believed the religious right to be) would be easily led and easily controlled. They'd vote the way they were told, and then quietly and smugly return to their churches until the next election.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

By removing the regulations and obstructions which prevented them from taking-over the government (ownership of media, content restriction — especially fair play doctrines and the requirement to air opposing points of view — weakening the separation between church and state by politicizing the pulpits) they also removed many of the regulations and obstructions which stabilized the government itself. Clear Channel bought-up most of the nation's radio stations (and a helluva lot of its television stations) and suddenly Rush Limbaugh and his ilk — a new generation of Father Coughlins — were blaring from our speakers. Schools wound-up teaching everything but good citizenship and the foundations of good government. Either they taught that GOD wanted everyone to vote Conservative, and that the government was corrupt, bloated, and needed to be dismantled as much as feasible.

Meanwhile, the GOP never knew what hit it, as its new Fundamentalist Christian majority brought their prejudices, their zealotry, their holier-than-thou obsession (transmuted here to "More-Conservative-than-thou,") and their belief they were operating under divine mandate to the party. This last being, perhaps, the most dangerous. In their eyes, it justifies any action, no matter how unethical, because as they're operating under divine mandate, anything they do is automatically justified and not their responsibility.

No, not everyone in the GOP believes this. But the party does. There've been multiple attempts by more traditional Republicans (what's erroneously called the "mainstream GOP" today,) to regain control of the party. Every one of them has failed, most recently their attempt to derail Trump at their convention and replace him with Romney.

Simply put, the GOP created a tiger, to destroy their opponent. Instead, they extensively damaged the world they took for granted, then found themselves holding on to the tiger's tail for dear life. Eventually, the tiger stopped running amok, turned around, and devoured them. To their utter horror.

This shouldn't be taken to imply that the Democrats (or the Libertarians or Greens, or any other party) are flawless and without fault. They're certainly not. But the GOP is responsible for a great deal of this mess, resultant from their attempts to wrest the country back onto a path which would forever favor the rich, the White, the politically and socially conservative. They destroyed a great deal of the world they were trying to preserve, in their attempt to preserve it.

These changes to the GOP (caused by their own short-sightedness,) have led to precisely this situation: Politics is no longer a discussion about how the country should be led and run. It's now a holy war of ideology. Good versus Evil. Apocalypse Electoral. Both sides are now approaching politics from this perspective, and, sadly, this time it may actually be that — with Putin wanting to remake the old USSR and both sides once again talking about the likelihood of nuclear war.

The United States may not be a Christian Nation, but it does have a deep Christian heritage. And with that heritage comes an obsession with messianic figures — especially political figures — and apocalyptic thinking. And, of course, human beings don't make workable messiahs. Messiahs have to be infallible, or they get nailed to crosses in the end. And if a nation engages in apocalyptic thinking, and constantly working itself into a frenzy, with the threat of even greater apocalypses, (yes, I know that's supposed to be impossible,) the likelihood that it's actually going to generate one trends toward certainty.

A week ago, Trump's chances of winning the election were one in ten. Yesterday, it was one in four. Today, it's heading toward one in three. I'm very much hoping that Clinton can win — not because I like her, but as Jim Wright wrote, simply because of pragmatism. I do not want to live in a United States that a Trump presidency will bring, nor one which spends the next few decades trying to redo the damage that a Trump presidency will do to the country (and the world) along with having do undo the damage done to the country since Regan gave us Reganomics and the systematic dismantling of America, back in 1980.

[onyxlynx]

What dubhain said.

With a side order of "Oh, that won't happen again! People are aware of those pitfalls!"

[johnpalmer]

Um. The fundamentalist insertion is something I hadn't thought about. But a long way back, I was very disturbed by how "Christianity" was being faced by people who claimed that "faith" was "certainty". And there was an interesting blog post here discussing a similar issue: http://www.mahablog.com/2016/10/13/the-christian-rights-original-sin/.

Fundamentalism, in the sense of biblical inerrancy, is a lost cause. I wish I'd copied down the quote, but someone said something to the effect of "creating the entire universe out of nothingness, appearing billions of years old in spite of happening 6000 years ago? I can believe that. But creating a book that is inerrant, across thousands of language changes and translations? Bullshit."

And we have proof positive of that. Abortion was explicitly *not* murder before the rise of the religious right. Oh, *Catholics* said it was, but not REAL Christians. Until one of the big Christian universities - Bob Jones? - was about to lose federal funding if they didn't allow black and white students to date. Racial discrimination wasn't allowed - not even if you claim it's based in religion. Then they needed a rallying cry. Strangely, "let our Christian universities engage in racial discrimination" didn't rally the troops, so they decided that abortion was the big issue.

After inerrantly claiming abortion was emphatically not murder, they're now inerrantly claiming it is.

I like the legendary Jesus - the guy who said to love what is good, and love *each other* - yeah, your fellow ugly, stinky, disagreeable REAL neighbors, don't just thump the holy books and make a big show of praying, but go love real people, living real lives. If there's a way to become a good person, that's probably a big piece of it. I like what I think Christianity *could* be. But this turnaround should really bother people... *EVEN IF* they think that they'd made a mistake originally, and corrected it, they should be fully aware that they no-way made just one mistake. It should be humbling.

For them? It ain't.

(The "them" here is a specific subset of Christians - and I'm too tired to try to explain the definition of the subset so I won't.)

[siliconshaman]

I rather suspect that Comey's actions are more to do with calls for him to resign over his earlier lack of indictment. Although, when you find on a Clinton staffer's laptop, a whole lot of damning emails in a folder titled "Life Insurance" you have to think that something is a bit more smoky than you originally thought...

Still, it looks like you have a choice between an insane incompetent psychopathic paedophile possibly in the pay of Russia, and a competent psychopathic criminal who's deep in the pockets of Washington Lobbyists. Personally I'd write in Saunders... or giant meteor, but really you're screwed whatever the outcome.

Bush jnr did deep damage to American society, but this might be the election that breaks it.

[johnpalmer]

When dealing with a story about Bill or Hillary Clinton, you must assume that anything too cute to be true isn't.

"Someone told a lie saying the e-mails were in a folder marked 'life insurance'" is the best explanation for the story you received.

I have no reason to think that Hillary Clinton is a psychopath, or a criminal. There have been a lot of claims to that effect, yes. In fact, that Hillary Clinton has been so relentlessly attacked, and so thoroughly investigated, that there are two possibilities:

1) Law enforcement is perfectly keeping the many cover-ups secret, even when the subject is a truly hated target, and the evidence of the cover up would be worth lots of money, or
2) she has, in fact, not been shown to have engaged in any wrongdoing.

If I believe the first, well... that would have me looking around, noticing that my side includes the firehoses and dogs, and the people who just happen to be carrying ax handles and baseball bats, and talking about "beat downs". So even if I thought it plausible, I'd have to re-examine the question.

The second is far more likely.

What you might not understand is that, there was always some political anger in the US, but during the 90s, it went completely through the root; the right wing was desperate to find reasons to destroy the Clintons. That hasn't stopped because Hillary Clinton wanted to continue in politics. But do you notice how her husband, the evil genius behind so many schemes, has been completely innocent lo these many years? It's almost like the point isn't to find and punish wrongdoing, but to damage a political career.

There's been so much crap flung at Hillary Clinton that I'm not surprised people think there must be something wrong with her. But that's because they don't recognize how many people will throw any old piece of crap they come across, with lots of anger and vitriol, at her... and without any regard for truth or justice.