Aquarian Weekly
1/2/19

Reality Check

James Campion

THE WALL – A SURREALIST PERSPECTIVE  

 Existence is illusory and it is eternal.
–  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

Don’t know what I want
But I know how to get it
 – Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the UK”

The bizarre nature of this illusionary resplendent wall that exists in the pantheon of incredibly stupid concepts rumbling around in the cracked frontal lobe of this game show president of ours has taken on at once a symbolic, political, racist, nationalist, and cultural slant on levels of geographical surrealism worthy of Salvador Dali. It has become artiste Americana – a kind of grotesquely abstract Dadaist performance craft meets paranormal emblem of strength and hate and protection and division. Yet it exists only in lore, like Paul Bunyan or Davey Crockett. It is neither a thing nor it is not a thing. It is all things to all people: an edifice, an abomination, a salvation and a joke. It lives in imagination and litigation, as well as legislative combativeness, all of it devoid of recognizable definition. Moreover, there appears to be no sane rationale for its proposal or battle, despite its stated imperative. No one, not even its conjuror can quite pinpoint what the fuck it is or what it means or what portion of it is real or something else entirely. It’s existence or vision is malleable, as if a child’s dream or Lewis Carroll’s obsession. It is not the wall…it is The Wall.

With deep apologies to Pink Floyd’s intellectual property, at the time of this writing a partial government shutdown over The Wall’s congressional funding continues as part of its strange journey through our lexicon. Its supporters demand it. Its detractors defy it. It’s not unlike the first years of Christianity or the final sequence to 2001: A Space Odyssey; it is mystery and mysticism and myth; Egyptian nu and a Coptic mindfuck; it has begun, but yet it has not. It is partial but permanent and it is must be at the same time it always has been. Again, neither its origins nor those who espouse its elixir seemed to have a goddamn clue, and perhaps they never did, for in the unknowing, there will be knowledge.

Cue the sitar.

A nearly two-thousand mile cement Wall, a real wall (we think) along the rocky, valleyed, mostly desert terrain the length and breadth of the American/Mexican border was first proposed by then celebrity candidate Donald Trump as a way to get cheers from rally participants in what was fast becoming a media sensation in the late months of 2015 into 2016. “We’re going to build what…?” Mr. Trump asked. The hooting throng would bellow, “…a wall!” And then after this line began to lose its swagger for El Douche, it became the now infamous, “And who is going to pay for it?” To which the crowd shouted gleefully, “Mexico!”

This piece of cheap carnival theater, which became the very foundation, some say raison d’etre of the Trump run to the presidency – a minstrel barker kind of tent revival meets the bearded lady to which the candidate bragged endlessly outdrew all the other normal tie-and-haircut political nonsense – tended to use hyperbole and National Inquirer bold type headline lunacy as pure showmanship. The Wall, its very nature and idea of conceiving it and building it, much less getting the very country it would be erected to flip off, was truly a work of punk rock genius. Those paid to say so, communicated this safety-pin-power-cord delusion as Trump merely riling up the base and kicking sand in liberal tree-hugging faces. None of it, they laughed, was meant to actually be real.

Somewhere along the line it did become real for Trump. It may have been the nifty scare tactics he used to try and stem the tide of the Blue Wave that would crash at his door last November, when the Caravan – another Grendel-like form created from the bowels of the Anglo-Saxon queer Puritan dysfunction of our national gene pool – was to bear down on us with disease and drugs and killer rapists and brown-skinned marauders. The commander-in-chief even deployed the U.S. Army in its wake, reminiscent of mad King George’s paranoia cum policy. This alerted his most loyal servants, who for reasons only known to them keep defending this car wreck presidency, to need The Wall. “Walls work” said a press release on the Homeland Security home page, framing what can best be described as a fourth-grade level explanation for why brick is heavier than a bag of leaves. But the question everyone within the Beltway was prompted then to ask laid it all on the line: Did Trump always believe this schtick or was he forced to eat it, like writing “I hope I die before I get old” and living way past 70? Because this summer a bipartisan piece of legislation made it to Trump’s desk that provided $25 billion in funding for this campaign rant and he refused to sign it, and only now does he demand $5 billion, five-times less, to build something he claims is already being built and/or he doesn’t seem to need congress to do so.

Did Trump always believe this schtick or was he forced to eat it, like writing “I hope I die before I get old” and living way past 70?

Trump’s latest shifts in truth – a master at work – has gone from a wall needed to one already partially built to a mysterious Christmas week signing of non-existent contracting bids for an out-of-thin-air 115 miles (no one knows where the number came from) and several curious tweets of a type of gothic, spiked fence taken from Getty images that no one involved can begin to surmise was ever part of the original hype. Suddenly the phrase “steel slats” was a thing, like emoji or hydroponic weed. And before the president traveled all the way to Iraq to call our military “suckers” and lie to them about pay raises they never received, there was a proposal of using them once again for a political prop and start laying brick. “I’ll just get the military to build it,” he tweeted.

Speaking of tweets, as I literally finish this up, the president has tweeted plans on unilaterally closing the entire southern border if he doesn’t get your tax dollars to realize this weird hallucination of his, throwing a grenade into U.S. commerce and halting aid to South American countries. Nothing, though, on Mexican funding.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth border security experts and high-ranking officials of Homeland Security, as well as cyber geeks in the U.S. military, not to mention actual contractors routinely scoff of the idea of building a mid-level barricade in an era of drones and electronic surveillance and other barely legal inspired forms of protecting the other three borders of the nation and aboard, not to mention the treacherous landscape it is meant to span, thinks any of this, any of it, is such for a good idea.

But yet it exists; a collective agreement of understanding that this is what happened or what happens, like say, Columbus discovering America or that somehow human existence has not affected the earth in any way.

In a very effective way, The Wall is a microcosm of this presidency which on a daily basis seems to secure the idea that artifice is the actual and that this is and always be that. It is art; Diane Arbus in its reach – horribly beautiful and damaged, set to music by Nine Inch Nails and wonderfully American.

Aquarian Weekly
12/12/18

GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH – 1924 – 2018

George Bush is guiltier than all of them.

Hunter S. Thompson, Portland, Oregon’s First Congregational Church, 1988

A mostly ineffectual one-term president, whose political and personal journey through civil service was miserably stained by queer controversy, roagish affiliations and dark secrets, George Herbert Walker Bush leaves us this week with three horrific legacies, not the least of which his son, the 43rd president of the United States, but specifically his foolhardy land war in Iraq that eventually led to the 9/11 attacks and this endless foray into turning the region into an anti-American fireball, and his prominent role in one of the great crimes against the U.S. Constitution, the dumb-struck Iran-Contra affair, helmed by his doddering and confused predecessor, Ronald Reagan. In his lame-duck exit in the winter of 1992-93 he would cement this criminal orgy by pardoning six convicted felons of its fallout, one of them preventing a trial in which he would have at least been a key witness if not a defendant.

Anything written about the legacy of George H.W. Bush in the annals of American governance must start with his place as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for 357 extremely active days between the years 1976 and 1977 in which he enthusiastically supported a clandestine illegal maneuver called Operation Condor. One of the last CIA edicts in a nearly 30-year international Cold War chess game played without the knowledge of the U.S Congress or (chuckle) the American people, it eventually resulted in the deaths of an estimated 60,000 Latin American dissidents, leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and “suspected” guerillas.

It was this kind of dedication to tainted patriotism, and his hearty primary challenge to Reagan, that would lead to the Gipper’s choosing Bush as his running mate in 1980, resulting in what would turn out to be an equally shady role as a mostly door-stop vice president.

For the final record, it must be written in stone that Ronald Reagan absolutely and with great relish hated George Bush. He repeatedly called him a wimp and a worthless Washington toady behind his back and in public. It would often get big laughs at GOP fundraisers and proved that Reagan knew where his bread was buttered somewhere in the deeper recesses of the far right. For Bush’s part, a mostly centrist, country-club, Connecticut elitist, he considered Reagan clearly insane, and after his overt attack on what would become Reganomics as “voodoo”, he was known to shout out insults from down the corridors of the White House when a crippling recession cost Dutch dearly in the 1982 midterms. This, and the infinitely stupid “Read my lips, no new taxes” stuff would bury Bush in conservative quarters forevermore.

Unlike his son, who would pick the bones of his father’s administration for damaged goods, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom religiously believed in quaint notions of nation-building, torture and bombing children for stock market spikes, Bush was completely and quite dangerously, for him, unaware of a violent shift in 1980s Republicanism the likes of which the country had not seen since the bizarre days of Calvin Coolidge, until now, in which the very core and soul of the party seems to be on trial daily. And for that, he never recovered.

The true right wing of the party abandoned him before he was ever handed a shoo-in nomination to run for president in 1988. Thus, the infamous Willie Horton ad against Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis, a blatantly racist and now considered arguably the ugliest and most divisive campaign low-blows in the history of American politics. It would help elect Bush while consequently championing the kind of scum-scraping tactics his son would use in 2000 to link his then Republican primary opponent John McCain to an illegitimate black child, and later the vicious attack on homosexuals to secure certain battleground states against John Kerry in the general election campaign of 2004. The brainchild of Bush’s campaign strategist Lee Atwater, a dementedly evil fascist who would later go on to run the Republican Party during the first two years of Bush’s presidency, the Willie Horton template would help create the kind of “alternative facts” cloud that infected Roger Ailes building and branding of FOX News.

it is this buttoned-down, smirking, billboard for backdoor, underhanded chicanery that may have been far more dangerous than this openly spastic buffoonery we endure currently.

Even after Bush’s completely outlandish defense of Iran/Kuwait/Saudi Arabia in his extremely popular and successful Desert Storm in 1990, which began the domino effect that would rile up Osama bin Laden in song and story and effectively lead to the great tragedy of this generation, 9/11, there was never any love for President George Bush. Of course, this “domino effect theory” is nothing new for readers of this space. Much of my defense of the Bush II Doctrine of “Iraq had something to do with 9/11” for years was based on the continued stance of al qaeda that Christian infidels were stationed on holy Muslim land in what was once the center of radical Islamic territories and later inspired the 1998 East African U.S. embassy bombing, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen’s Aden Harbor, and finally the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil.

What was absent from much of the reporting on Desert Storm at the time was the Reagan and eventual Bush administrations’ continued arms support of what was the origins of al qaeda, the Afghani Mujahedeen army to oust the Soviets from the country that went on a mind-numbing ten years as another covert illegal exercise called Operation Cyclone. This would turn out to be the origins of the quagmires that this nation has been sunk in now for 17 years running.

Despite a 92-percent approval rating after what amounted to Iraqi soldiers surrendering to CNN cameramen, Bush would eventually be booted from the job in 1992 by William Jefferson Clinton and Ross Perot, whose TV-induced populist (Trump before Trump) run for president sucked dry the last of his weakened right-wing support. Yet, in the face of all of it, on his way out, Bush pardoned the architects of Iran-Contra. Its most notorious figure, the convicted former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger went free to essentially keep Bush out of the proceedings after several documents surfaced that refuted the then vice president’s claims that he was kept “out of the loop” on the illegal arms trade with a hostile Iran to fund a wholly illegal Central American war.

This shameless over-reach in presidential power that began when Bush served under Gerald Ford during his pardon of Richard M. Nixon for high crimes against the United States, would first and foremost implicate him in the Iran-Contra scandal as a major player and later influence Bill Clinton, George Bush, and certainly this thing in the White House today, for presidents to duly ignore the general understanding that “no one is above the law”.

Certainly, in the current climate of trashing our game show goofball president, it became chic this week to praise George Herbert Walker Bush for not being vulgar, ignorant, and racist, but it is this buttoned-down, smirking, billboard for backdoor, underhanded chicanery that may have been far more dangerous than this openly spastic buffoonery we endure currently.

In the end, George Bush’s most lasting legacy may be that he masterfully hid the disgusting stuff better than most. And for that, he deserves the mantle of president of the United States.

Aquarian Weekly
12/5/18

It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
– Mary Shelley, Frankstein

The horrible creature Donald Trump created sits in a New York City courtroom on the 29th day of November 2018 and lets fly a whole new set of revelations about where this whole Russia Investigation is going. He is very much like the man lying in wait, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a creature also created by this mad Doctor Frankenstein because our game show president just had to fire the head of the FBI and then go on national television and brag about obstructing justice, despite very little evidence at the time that he committed any crime. But none of that matters now that the new phase – and really many of the prior phases of this political tragedy – has come home to roost on what made Donald Trump “The Donald” in the first place; illegal shenanigans in real estate dealings.

The most damaging information former Trump bagman, Michael Cohen, who crawled from his slime-ridden past, offered yesterday, which was reported in Buzzfeed back in May and corroborated by reporting in the Financial Times in July, is the planned Trump Tower Moscow that Citizen Trump was working on with the Russian government far into his time as candidate for president and later Republican nominee for that position. Part of it included (gulp!) a $50 million penthouse apartment gift to Mr. Vladimir Putin, Draconian leader of a hostile nation who was already waist-deep in cyber-attacking our democratic infrastructure. Not that any of this offends my ambivalence on moral turpitude, but the bank that was laundering the money to make this happen queers things.

Enter the specter of the Vnesheconombank or VEB, a state development institution described by one former CIA analyst as the “Kremlin’s cookie jar”, which operates in 19 countries legally but one of them is definitely not the United States due to strained Russian-American relations after the invasion of the Ukraine in 2014 and its ties to funding terrorist organizations in Syria and Yemen, some of which ended in the deaths of Americans.

I have maintained here that not collusion, but stupidity is what will bring Donald Trump down.

Cohen, instructed by Trump in the summer of 2016 to meet with Russians that was eventually scuttled for more obvious reasons than even the candidate could comprehend at the time, included a Trump-Putin detente corroborated by incriminating emails that was at first scheduled and then moved to lesser workhands, is damning not for this Russian Collusion thing, but for what the original Bill Clinton special counsel investigations of the early 1990s would begin to percolate on all of this: illegal real estate deals. The subsequent circumstantial evidence is that strangely enough someone smarter than the president has kept Trump’s Twitter hand on the wheel to keep claiming innocence of “Russian Collusion”, since some other really heinous shit is a-comin’.

Now, in the president’s defense, unlike Clinton, who was the governor of Arkansas at the time of the alleged crime (which was never proved), he was indeed a private citizen when this was occurring, even though there are vagaries in the constitution to what a candidate for the nation’s highest office can do in national or international business (especially with enemies of state) while seeking the office – one has to go back to Alexander Hamilton to unravel – but illegal business deals are another nut entirely.

I have maintained here that not collusion, but stupidity is what will bring Donald Trump down – and by down I mean what is fast looking like the inevitable House impeachment, (here come the Dems in January!). The president’s consistent actions that appear to be those of a very guilty man – most likely stemming from this raging insecurity of his petulant father, whose influence on this nation will be forever linked to his damaged son – has broken any reliable records for obstruction of justice, the latest being this boondoggle switcheroo of the attorney general to some half-assed lackey, etc. Even that one reeks of (with apologies to the late, great Jimmy Breslin) The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, since it appears acting AG Matthew Whitaker, another retread TV goof that seems to give Trump a hard-on, was not alerted to any of the information coming out of the special counsel’s office yesterday. It was overseen by Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who for the life of me still maintains a gig in this House of Freaks administration.

Meanwhile, sitting on the beachhead like some demented and sad King Canute – blathering on about forest floors and backing Saudi murders of journalists – Donald Trump awaits his fate. Not sure what that is, but for certain as the weeks have moved along and Democrats broke mid-term voting numbers records (nearly nine million in vote total victories) and gained nearly 40 House seats in what has turned out to be indeed a Blue Wave rebuke of this nonsense, how much longer could the GOP-controlled Senate eat this shit? I would maintain as much as Clinton’s senate did in 1998. As in ’98, we are two years from an election, but unlike Big Bill, El Douche has to run again, or he can repeat the Great Quitter’s 1968 maneuver and slink away like LBJ and rob us all of this much fun.

Aquarian Weekly
11/14/18

MID-TERM ROUNDUP
Women, Repudiation, Entrenchment & Reckoning

Lots of stuff happened on November 6, 2018. This was the second time the current administration – its polices, its tone, its corruption and investigations have had to face the voters since 2016, and the results were historic, contradictory and changed the face of Washington DC dramatically for the next two years. Let’s review the ten take-aways…

Women, Women, And More Women

Out of a record candidacy of 53 for Senate and 475 for the House, an unprecedented 110 women were elected to congress. Another record nine women were elected governor across the nation. As the proud father of a ten year-old daughter and the honored husband of a woman who traveled down to DC to join the Women’s March of 2017, this was one for the books. This election realized the first woman of color, Ayanna Pressley in the historically racist Massachusetts’ congressional delegation. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota will be the first Muslim women ever to serve in Congress. Sharice Davids toppled a Republican man in Kansas and Deb Haaland prevailed in New Mexico, becoming the first Native American congresswoman. In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, became the state’s first woman elected to the Senate.

Beyond party and politics, the real wave of the evening, and for the future of the heretofore mostly patriarchal construct of this republic, was the X chromosome. Shit, in response to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the 1992 election was considered “The Year of the Woman”, as a paltry 33 women were elected to positions of power around the nation. Of course, this is politics and therefore the numbers must be analyzed as such. A Gallup survey of registered voters on Election Day shed light on the shifting trend in America. The female electorate preferred Democrats by 58 percent to 34 percent. The gap between the genders is even more striking among millennials. According to Pew, a whopping 70 percent of millennial women affiliated with or leaned toward the Democrats, up from 56 percent four years ago.

This, I believe, more than anything else is the most strikingly concussive response to the current president, whose issues with women are well documented, along with the outpouring of outrage over the threat to a woman’s right to choose and a strange but impenetrable support for the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA? Yup, the ACA

Here’s the thing. The fight over pre-existing conditions absolutely led more to the flip in the House of Representatives and the closeness of gubernatorial and senate races in ruby red states than anything coming from this damaged and beleaguered president or what Republicans and Democrats will do for or against the country in the next two years. The groundswell of exit polling had now nearly 72 percent of voters (by far the most important subject of voting November 6) favoring the stabilization of the ACA.

In the final weeks leading up to the election, some Republicans who over a dozen times voted to repeal Obamacare, claimed they supported all of its elements, but apparently very little of the electorate bought it. If there was a true, unequivocal repudiation in this election beyond a controversial and divisive president, it is the defense of the ACA, which in the 20-plus years I have been penning this column is the oddest most unexplainable political phenomenon yet. It was abhorred mostly by the Left and the Right in 2009 when it was enacted, cost a record 63 seats in congress to the party in power in 2010 and had to survive a ridiculous amount of vote attacks on the Hill thereafter, including two squeaker decisions on the Supreme Court. Yet it was this past Tuesday the most important reason for voters to show up, especially ones voting to flip the House, and especially among the aforementioned wave of women votes and elections.

The future of the ACA was cemented on this Election Day. Period

The Rust Belt and Florida

Two bellwether results that came out of the 2018 midterms could, indeed, determine the 2020 presidential election: First and foremost is that Florida is no longer a battleground state. Not to say it will stay red past that election, but the current president is Teflon there. The rather bland and openly racist Congressman Ron DeSantis defeated Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a charismatic African American mainly on the wings of the 2016 late-surge voter that helped put a Republican in the White House. Florida is over for Democrats and the party should attack their plans to take back the executive branch somewhere else.

Beyond party and politics, the real wave of the evening, and for the future of the heretofore mostly patriarchal construct of this republic, was the X chromosome.

And that direction could be the Rust Belt, which absolutely solidified the current presidency two years ago on the wing and prayer of international trade and manufacturing jobs, both of which have not materialized in favor of those who rolled the dice in the other direction in 2016 but have come back to the Democratic fold just one major election cycle later. Michigan and Wisconsin (both voted Republican for president in 2016) elected Democratic governors and another flip state for the GOP, Pennsylvania sent a record three women to congress (all Democrats), although they split the senate races.

If the results of the midterm told us anything, the whole turn-back-the-economic-clock theory that galvanized enough independents and conservative Democrats to vote GOP in 2016 across the mid-west is swinging back and that is what the eventual Democratic candidate needs to concentrate on this time, and not ignore, as did the last one to her own detriment.

Okay Then, Who Should Be Celebrating?

Both Republicans (whew, this could have been waaay worse) and Democrats (whoopie we took over a branch of government) can celebrate this. The expansion of the Senate, the most probable outcome due to the amount of seats the Dems had to defend in mostly Republican districts, is important for 2020, as it will shift mightily against Republicans then. This past election provided them a cushion against that. It also allows whatever right-wing court appointments that come out of the executive branch a wide voter birth, including a pretty solid buffer for the highest court vote if that comes into play again over the next two years. Taking the House for Democrats, again, a known factor since so many GOP candidates had to survive in mostly suburban Democratic districts, is important for the party out of power to check this quite blatantly out of control administration, and to basically cripple any legislation that does not reek of centrist or progressive leanings.

Not to mention subpoena power and a resurgence of the congressional investigations into this presidency that had been thwarted by obstructionist defense of it.

Investors certainly celebrated, as the Dow Jones had its best day in over a year. Considering the historically low approval ratings for the president and the record numbers of voters that came out to turn over the government (it was a higher percentage than the 2010 GOP surge, but due to gerrymandering, kept the overall numbers down) it was a historic day all around and one that come January will turn things around quite a bit to say the very least.

Read More

Aquarian Weekly
10/31/18

ALT RIGHT UNDERGROUND – A PERSPECTIVE
When Mailed Bombs Become Teachable Moments

I was reminded of a couple of things this week when word came that enemies of the Trump administration – past political opponents, celebrities, old leftists and CNN – received to what amounted to half-assed non-working “bombs” in the mail by alt right domestic terrorists. The first is Randolph Hearst’s media empire calling for President William McKinley to be eradicated and some enterprising anarchist shooting him in Buffalo, New York at the turn of the twentieth century. The twenty-fifth president eventually died. And my own perhaps ill-advised challenge to a sitting US. Congressman to a fistfight in 2016, which ended in many discussions with local authorities and his eventual defeat. It was the first such defeat of a Republican congressman in New Jersey’s Fifth District in nearly a century to which I took partial credit.

Both of these were desperate attempts to change the body politic through random, and in my case, satirically driven violence. I mean, I would have fought Scott Garrett, but he refused. I was relieved. He seemed like the kind who goes for the groin. But let this be said of anarchists and me, at least we show up. Sending bombs, and poorly made bombs at that, is no way to make a point, political or otherwise. And it is a veiled attempt at stopping the inevitable mid-term backlash to what is now beyond rational argument the worst first two years of a presidency in my lifetime, and perhaps ever.

However, I am not here today to discuss politics, but motive. And I think the motive of these domestic terrorists have less to do with politics or social order than cult of personality, something Donald Trump has refused to give up since becoming president. Not that I blame him. It is the only reason he is president. He could offer nothing else. He is a one trick pony and he has clung to this act as best he can, and as a writer obsessed with the damaged, I get it. What comes of this cult of personality has to do with the people targeted. And either you believe the president knows what he is doing or not. There is very little grey area as it has been for other presidents.

But back to the would-be bombs and domestic terrorists.

In the 1960s when the idea of domestic terrorism came roaring back for the first time since the American Nazi Party began making inroads to use anti-communism and anti-Semitism and I guess right-wing politics to make a national play, it was a left wing response to the wholly illegal and astonishingly immoral Viet Nam War, in which many of the terrorists and radicals had been called to order to avoid being mutilated or worse in a god-forsaken stretch of Southeast Asia that a few geo-political intellectuals had deemed the linchpin of a spectacularly flawed domino theory.

Terrorism is horrifying, but it always made sense to me. It is what freed the nation from the yoke of British rule.

What happened this week is merely people wanted to, I guess, kill or threaten people who don’t believe Donald Trump knows what he’s doing. It is kind of like rogue Beer Hall Putchers from 1930s Germany created from the cult of Adolf Hitler’s political groundswell. None of what the eventual Brownshirts stood for was political or necessarily anti-Jewish or anti-Communist. It was simply to eradicate enemies of Hitler. It was for a personality and not a political movement or to cease a shift in the social order.

I find this extremely interesting since, as we know, Trump, whose father was a member of the KKK and was constantly sued in the 1970 and 80s for racist real estate tactics in New York, had infamously tried to rhetorically even-the-playing-field for neo-Nazis and Klansman (summarily applauded by such in social and mainstream media shortly after) with his now highly regrettable “both sides are bad” series of monosyllabic speeches after the Charlottesville riot and tragedy. And recently he celebrated on stage the attack of a journalist by a Republican congressman and continued to strangely defend the Saudi government for the torture and murder of a journalist with ties to America. None of this is to say that Trump is directly responsible for these “bomb” deliveries, any more than Martin Scorsese is responsible for the shooting of Ronald Reagan because some goofball decided he wanted to save Jodi Foster like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

However, it is hard to, as I have written in this space before, defend this president anymore when it comes to his drumming up of the “us versus them” theory, which is only based on Trump figuring out who likes him and who doesn’t. This is fine for a bedroom tweeter after his reality show wraps, but for the president it is dangerous. Because Trump has not abandoned his celebrity persona for that of the leader of the free world there continues this “playing to the base and sorting out enemies” approach that lends itself to personality over the national interest. It is, again, not about politics, right or left wing, it is about Trump, as most things end up with him – how Trump sees the world. It is why he chums up to Vladimir Putin, a man who internationally terrorized the U.S., while attacking his FBI that works to out him and make sure it never happens again. The FBI is investigating him and Putin helped him win the election. It really is as simple as that.

And to ignore the fact that his critics and political opponents were targeted (however haphazardly) with violent terrorist retribution is as silly as simply blaming Trump because he is a child and has no idea what the fuck he is doing.

Nevertheless, this is desperation. And it makes sense. Terrorism is horrifying, but it always made sense to me. It is what freed the nation from the yoke of British rule. It kept the Irish Republic alive for generations. But, to be fair, it is also illegal and, as stated, horrifying, and cannot go unpunished. And most likely, as these guys were sloppy in their bomb making and their postal service deliveries, they will be caught and tried as such and my guess will wonder why any of this mattered for a someone who is not going to be president much longer.

Aquarian Weekly
10/10/18

#FEMINIST
Notes from the Penis Underground

I wish to start out this week by denouncing this asinine argument that somehow this beer-soaked lightweight Brett Kavanaugh is somehow representative of the men in this country. He is not. He is a fucking wimp and clearly has issues with alcohol and women and should have been tossed into the trash heap of history weeks ago. There is enough evidence he lied under oath and most likely assaulted women in a semi-blacked out state of inertia. Fuck him. He gives proud alcoholics and men a bad name. I will not stand idly by and allow people to put him into any category I am in. None of my friends or the people they know did this. Just like the idiotic notion that “all guys talk like Trump grabbing pussies” during the 2016 campaign. Not all guys. Just assholes. And criminals. I was in plenty of locker rooms and not once did anyone brag about assaulting women. Ever. Fuck Trump.

Okay, so with that out of the way, let’s call it as we see it. This Brett Kavanaugh nomination process was bullshit. This guy is a lunatic and at best is 50-50 whether he sexually assaulted at least one woman, maybe two or three. This is the best we can do for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court? No. It is not, and he is not. Any other circumstance – weeks from a mid-term, nearly half century of a religious right push for a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican controlled federal government (for the time being) makes Kavanaugh the hold-your-nose and vote candidate. He sucks, that much is true. But whether that matters or not politically is not the issue. The issue is how the women citizenry has been treated throughout all this. That is a mountain of in-your-face-go-fuck-yourself bullshit for women. Period.

The abomination of a human being Donald J. Trump’s performance at a Mississippi rally (Mississippi, let that sink in for a second…sheesh) this week openly mocking Christine Blasey Ford was a new low even for this bleating moron. It was a misogynistic slap in the face of every woman in this country. I’m sorry. Go see for yourself. Watch it. How in the world can any woman listen to that fourth-grade nonsense, from a president, and not start throwing up? This man has been and always will be a slop-addled hog, but this took the cake. Shit, man, go ahead and defend your nominee, put doubt in the body politic, but even Kavanaugh himself and all the Republican senators laid low challenging Ford’s testimony, much less openly ridiculing it and her. It was a fucking disgrace and it is mounting evidence that this whole thing was a fucking disgrace, especially to women.

This is a blatant and vicious war on women.

I wrote weeks ago in this space that Kavanaugh or really any conservative judge considered for the swing vote on the Supreme Court would be a likely blow to women’s reproductive rights and a challenge to Roe v. Wade, the law of the land since 1973 that gives women the right to choose what to do within their bodies and not the federal government. That is a cogent argument that has been going on for decades. I respect those who think the opposite and feel that Roe v Wade was a legal mistake and a moral horror show, giving citizens the right to eradicate the lives of innocents. I get it. I get the religion and the science of it. And I also made the point last week here that this is all about politics, not the law – politics, as it should be and has been since the dawning of this republic. This is not about that.

We are beyond politics now. This is a blatant and vicious war on women. First, the ignoring of Ford’s allegations until it became publicly untenable. Then the obligatory and showboating senate hearing, which was, again, all about politics, in which Kavanaugh acted like a maniac throwing out Breitbart level conspiracies about a left-wing cabal and deep state and for some reason only known to his rage-induced brain farts, the Clintons. Most of it was to get a troglodytic president that only goes with the last thing he hears or sees on board. Trump was wavering on Kavanaugh once Ford had done a credible job parsing through the moments of whatever trauma she endured. It was a performance to get the senate and the president back on his side by pulling out the tired tropes of the 2016 election.

This is expected of politicians, but not judges up for lifetime appointments. They are supposed to remain hypocritically silent on these matters. That is the lowest bar to reach in this process and Kavanaugh failed to approach it. In fact, he obliterated it – loudly and crudely and quite frankly, for a grown man, embarrassingly. Kavanaugh went nuts, and once again, tried to make the case that Ford could not have possibility come forward on her own without being used as a puppet of the Democrats.

Not sure, as I write this and send it to press on the morning of this fifth day of October, if Kavanaugh has enough votes or not to be confirmed. Sure, this is being rushed, after, mind you the Republican senate saw fit to let the Supreme Court languish at eight justices for the last ten months of the Obama presidency and months into the Trump one. Again, that is not the issue. The issue, for women, is threefold: Why this man – accused of these heinous crimes, and Why now – when the goal is to clearly wrest rights from women, and How this came to be – nominated by a man who was accused over a dozen times of sexual harassment and abuse and paid women whom he had affairs with to shut up and then demonized them from the bully pulpit of the presidency.

Whatever the reasons, it is bullshit.

This is the issue: women.

#feminist.

Aquarian Weekly
10/3/18

I LOVE POLITICS
The Unraveling of Judge Kavanaugh & The Heinous Beauty of our Human Experiment

I love politics.

Always have. It is my grand flaw. I am mostly angry, somewhat dazzled by art, music and certainly the written word, I love to drink gin, smoke cigars, read until I pass out, love women (especially my wife, Erin and my daughter, Scarlet) and I love politics.

I would not have spent five minutes of my time on the subject much less the past 20 years penning this column or the prior 15 years as a freelancer, deriving pleasure and inspiration from its most heinous and glorious gifts. Whether Watergate or Iran/Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the 2000 election being tossed into a constitutional crisis, the intrigue and fistfights over health care and illegal wars and the kneejerk spastic reaction to 9/11 or even the more mundane bloodbaths over budgets and, my favorite, social issues. All of it is sadomasochistic thrill ride for me.

You see, I understand politics. I get what happens to people when they are in the midst of them and what it does to their brains and their nether regions and how it can at once titillate and mutilate. It always baffles me when people don’t get it. It’s like golfers or sexual deviants. They get it. You might not. But they really get it.

But nothing is more seductive than the every-once-in-a-while moment when political desperation kicks in – when politicians become like cornered animals and toss decorum, principle, almost everything they supposedly stood for or believed in and torch it in a self-immolated public bonfire. That is what the nation witnessed yesterday on Capitol Hill when Republican and Democratic senators put on the show of shows. Shouting and crying – citizens bearing their souls, righteous grandstanding, contemptuous lawyers, families paraded out like human billboards, staged interruptions and sweet-lord-jesus-there’s-a-fire speechifying – it had it all. And while it blessedly proved we are as fucked up a nation as can possibly be imagined that fancies itself “free”, I do not agree with these third-grade assessments about how it has lowered our public discourse and disgraced the “world’s greatest deliberative body”. That kind of hyperbole seems downright goofy when considering it happened in the same room as the McCarthy Hearings or the fact that a man who left a woman to drown in the car he ran into a Massachusetts lake was allowed to work there for nearly half a century.

Nevertheless, what happened yesterday was an education in both political mastery/buffoonery that reveals a great deal about the putrid, horrifying and wonderfully disgusting aspects of America.

And so, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, as conservative and politically motivated judge as we have seen being considered for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, appointed by the way, by an accidental criminal game show host man-child president, had all but been confirmed for some weeks, as he should, when the majority (and this is part of the putrid, horrifying and wonderfully disgusting aspects) is sitting with the power and therefore the right to confirm him. I only mention the “putrid” part because the previous president had appointed his nominee during his last year in office and the GOP-led senate decided to ignore the constitution and not even put that individual up for a vote for ten months and then when the last judge was up for a vote, they changed the procedure from overwhelming majority to mere majority to ram him through.

You see, Republicans have been fighting to swing the Supreme Court in their favor for decades. This, like health care for Democrats in 2009, which many of these same Republicans rightfully decried as a political disaster, has been a slow and deliberate slog to try and dominate the courts in the hopes to overturn marriage equality and Roe v Wade and defend corporations and banks and gun manufacturers and whatever defies the majority will of the people. This is what elections – gerrymandering, fear-mongering and electoral colleges – add up to. Elections, it should be mentioned, Democrats have been losing pretty consistently for the past dozen years or so on the local and legislative level.

The idea that a woman may or may not have been sexually assaulted by a judicial nominee is a speed bump to all this. FBI investigations? Witnesses? Search for truth? This is a kind of game and the people in it mere players. This is what politics is and has always been – from Washington’s crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion to Jackson’s Native American death march to Lincoln’s bribing of senators to LBJ’s and GW Bush’s phony intelligence – it is an immutable law, like physics and an AP reporter refusing to pick up a check. When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, charmingly nervous and intellectually elastic, came forth with 36 year-old allegations, Democrats saw a golden opportunity and that left Republicans, hemorrhaging educated women voters of all races, to have to have a hearing. But the very fact that there is a committee vote to confirm Kavanaugh after that fiasco as I write this proves there was little point to any of it, but to perform the duties of politics.

Nothing is more seductive than the every-once-in-a-while moment when political desperation kicks in.

Oh, those who don’t “get it” will predictably accuse this space, aptly titled Reality Check, of cynicism again, but come on, who was under the impression any of this was real? I guess it was as real as Johnny Cochran’s brilliant defense of O.J. Simpson by making it about LA cops. LA cops were racist and corrupt, but O.J. Simpson also killed two people. O.J. got off. And this is where we ended up yesterday. Kavanaugh probably sexually assaulted women, as did Donald J. Trump, but he will be on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Trump. Politics.

For the record, I believe Dr. Ford. She had no motive to come forward and lie. She was absolutely exploited by Democrats, but the idea that she was a conspiratorial tool as Kavanaugh shouted in his creepy snot-filled, cry-fest (excellent job coached by the Breitbart crowd to play angry and get Senator Lindsey Graham, angling for a job in the Department of Defense, to wake up), is asinine. Sitting on national television in the glare of that horde of miscreants had no pay off for Ford. Being Supreme Court Justice for life does. Kavanaugh had every reason to lie his ass off, as his friend and purported culprit, Mark Judge, who said he has no recollection of events, had to. What do you expect him to do, admit to assisting in a sexual assault?

Dr. Ford gets nothing out of this deal other than death threats, grief and ignominy. Kavanaugh gets to be on the Supreme Court. Again, he has every reason to lie. She has none. Plus, and this is important, not once, when asked about a half-dozen times if his impassioned plea to clear his name would benefit from a full non-politically tainted investigation – something you would need to do to make absolutely certain you are not a criminal, and something Dr. Ford agreed to – he declined to answer even no. Kavanaugh is hiding something. She is not. That’s what you get from that. You demand an investigation when you spend a half hour screaming and crying like a mental patient – to clear your name and reveal this woman as a fraud. I get being pissed, as Kavanaugh clearly was, but I do not get not wanting clear evidence that I was not guilty. The rest is pure political theater to get a gig from politicians. Period.

And why did Republicans choose a woman prosecutor to ask questions of Dr. Ford? To save political blowback. Why did they steamroll her once Kavanaugh showed up? To gain political points.

I love politics.

Speaking of which, I have been asked for weeks now if the two women/moderate Republican senators, Lisa Ann Murkowski and Susan Collins, from Alaska and Maine respectively, or Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin would scuttle this vote by denying Kavanaugh his seat. I do not. Makes no political sense. As I write this the American Bar Association has called for an investigation of this alleged crime and several outlets, including the leading Jesuit periodical (Kavanaugh was attending a Jesuit high school, Georgetown Prep when this all supposedly went down), have rescinded their support for the candidate. However, these people are living in the real world of consequences and conscience and ideological purity. This has zero to do with politics. Those things are actually a detriment to the artform. It makes no political sense for any of those senators to vote no on Kavanaugh. For Republicans, the fallout would be disastrous at the polls in November, as the deluge of Democratic fervor would be exacerbated by GOP voters staying home (the same thing that killed Hillary Clinton in 2016, as crestfallen Bernie Sanders’ backers refused to cast a vote for her). And with an election so close in a “Red State”, why would Munchin risk his hide? For principle? Law? Guts?

What makes politics such a wonderfully damaging subject to dive into – here, week after week – is what it reveals about the core of our nation, of every nation. How much shit would Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham eat, both personally and professionally eviscerated by this president, to get a politically motivated Supreme Court judge seated? A lot of shit. They wallowed in it yesterday, as did the Democrats in a desperate attempt to give a flying fart about a wronged woman, when so many of them defended Bill Clinton over and over again.

Brett Kavanaugh said this yesterday, in a desperate attempt to achieve his goal and make this all about politics: “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

None of that statement has a thing to do with law or the Supreme Court or defending one’s self. That is a political attack on the opposition. Politics. Plain and simple. That could have been written by FDR or Hitler.

And that is why I love politics.

May Benjamin Disraeli have mercy on my soul.