Aquarian Weekly
8/28/24
 
Reality Check
 
GOODBYE BOOMERS… AGAIN
The Evolution of Political Generations in 2024 

During a discussion that seems like a year ago but was only six weeks removed from this writing, I bemoaned to my wife that at 61 I’d have to wait another four years to be confronted with a candidate for president that is my age or younger. To think, I would have to be 65, retirement age (although writers don’t retire, we burn out and fade away simultaneously) to experience this. Then one month ago from the time I crank out these words, the entire political world flipped, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is 59, grabbed the Democratic baton. A few weeks later she tabbed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, 60, as a running mate. Voila! Suddenly, that four-year wait disappeared and with only weeks left in the 2024 campaign for president the Dem ticket trails me in age and quite apparently embraces my decades-plus call for a new generational voice even beyond mine.

This past week’s Democratic Convention layout and themes have reflected this. (Full disclosure: I am on this before the nominee speaks, as I am heading to our family’s annual sojourn to LBI, and I shan’t be taking up beach time in front of this word machine). There is clearly a concerted effort for the Party to shift dramatically from the past into the future – obviously for strategic reasons because their former presumptive nominee is 81 and mostly disliked – but nevertheless unfurls speeches jammed with wide-ranging buzz words selling Harris’s “Never Going Back” mantra. Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s spectacularly effective speech imploring a new generation to “Put down your phone and do something” speaks to the tech-heavy zeitgeist from Millennials to Gen Z. Followed by her husband’s “taking to the streets instead of a cyber highway to get involved in how their lives are shaped by politics” rhetoric highlighted by the “Don’t boo.. vote” phrase that challenges the anonymous Twitter-verse bitching. All of this combined nicely with appearances from the TikTok and YouTube influencers who set trends beyond alternative media, which is already drowning out traditional news outlets seals the deal.

Last week I described this race as one of feels, but it is also very much one of generational evolution. 

have written here many times about how I am not a Baby Boomer nor am I X. I have friends and colleagues around my age that were too young to be drafted into the Viet Nam War and/or gobbled acid at Woodstock and a tad too old to have suffered an MTV overdose or ridden the cynical waves of Reality Bites. For years, I called it the Lost Generation, but that was already taken by Fitzgerald and the Flapper set a century ago. Others tried Generation Jones, which makes less sense. By 2008, I alluded to the fresh nature of Barack Obama’s run for president – the highlight of my political lifelong obsession – as a nod to my generation. Obama was born in 1958 (four years before me) – too young to Hippy and too old to be “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

Up until Obama’s run against the Boomer priestess, Hillary Clinton, whose husband became the first of the post-WW II generation to take the White House, it’s been (more or less) 16 years of Boomertown: Bill Clinton followed by George W. Bush and then Donald J. Trump. All Boomers. And each one captured that generation’s strengths and flaws. Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden is an interesting generational cul de sac, as he, like my parents, falls into that category of too young to fight in WWII but not connected to the 1960s counterculture. Biden comes from another netherworld generation, not Greatest and not Boomer, but very much from that period of latter 20^th century turmoil.   

This could best explain part of his recent rejection as Dem nominee beyond his advanced age: he was too far out of touch with the times.

But so is the increasingly incoherent Trump, an aging Boomer shouting 1980s nonquitters about “radical lefties” and “commies,” as if the Cold War was still raging and he wasn’t Vladmir Putin’s lapdog. His comfort zone as an anachronistic proxy may well be his and the Boomers’ final stand.

[Harris/Wallz], by mere generational pull, are the way of the future

Boomers made up the first generation to create mass youth movements fueled by sex, drugs, and rock and roll, a bombastic mixture of activist meets selfishness that bore the “Me” Decade reflected in the damaged moral construct of Bill Clinton (dope smoker – kind of inhaled – anti-war, draft-dodging philanderer, who also possessed the ability to give himself completely to causes). Bush represented the youth backlash found in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America, the Big Chill death of the utopian dream, traded in for money-makes-the-kids-go-round fury (coke head drunkard, who woke up at 40 and decided to do daddy’s job.) And then there is Trump, who always wanted to be a Clinton, a spoiled, rich, bloated celebrity whore raised and defined by the two-dimensional hype of television. Like Clinton, he was also a draft-dodging philander, but maneuvered with zero care for causes beyond his own greed.

These were our figureheads until Obama came along – skeptical optimism, with a tinge of showmanship and a sense that none of that hippy shit was fungible and less so the “greed is good” nonsense that waged war on the middle-ground. He was, like me, a 70s kid who watched Archie Bunker arguing with Meat Head and wondered what was the point? How do we move beyond the gaps of age, race, gender, and those battle lines that were deepened by Bush before him? And as a backlash to his stoic “no drama” stance, Trump’s 24-hour reality show presidency appeared to be a cheap alternative. Nearly nine million people who voted for change-agent Obama voted for Boomer-redux Trump in 2016.

Harris, only a year younger than me, has broken entirely from Obama and the late-aughts sense that the 20^th century still had a lean on our ideals. Since the 44^th president exited the scene, the rise of isolationist fascism has permeated one party and a rather stringent fight for women’s and LGBTQ rights began – marriage equality, Me Too, Wokism, and, at its opposition, isolationist religiosity. The VP represents chance to end the incessant fighting over stuff well over a half-century old now – women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, environmental concerns, sane gun laws, and racial equity. I ask: We ran that gauntlet to end up here? And the country sadly answers, “Yes.”

The Harris/Walz ticket is trending towards the country saying “No” to all that. They, by mere generational pull, are the way of the future, or at least out of this quagmire of us v them and not trusting anyone over thirty and then becoming the very thing you fight against. Most of the DNC speeches have been non-partisan calls for unity, decency, tolerance – understanding our differences while counting our shared principles. 

This is what Obama tried and won in elections but failed to turn into governance, because where his cloaked Joe Cool persona provided him cover to soar above the fray as only the first African American candidate and then president can, Kamala Harris is less bogged down. She has Obama’s eight years and Hillary Clinton’s ignominious defeat and all that came with being the first woman to barely survive the gauntlet. There is a freeing quality about Harris that the kids can see. Even this old fucker writing this can see it.

If Harris wins, the Boomers will have no one else who can run. Former President Bill Clinton could barely make it through his rambling convention speech at 78 this week. And now it will be my generation, the lost Jones thing, that will turn the page and hand off something we could hardly have fathomed a few weeks ago, a path forward.

That’s how generations should work: Boomer’s out! 

.

Aquarian Weekly
8/21/24
 
Reality Check
 
TRUMP FATIGUE & THE FEELS MOVEMENT 

Two strange things are occurring at this juncture of the 2024 presidential race: the vice president of the current administration is running a change-agent, outsider campaign, while the same ignorant, petulant, angry goof trying for his third shot at the prize is suddenly boring. Such is the vagaries of celebrity vibes. Who is this year’s flavor? There is no other way to frame this, this is officially a feels election now. 

Harris is new. Trump is old. Harris gets 25,000 at her rallies and the guy who used to get that now attracts 1,400. The new candidate gets a 10-to-15-point bump approval on the same kick-ass economy that had President Joe Biden receiving a 20-point deficit. Trump, who’s economy was fair to middling, and most of it happening on the wind of the Barack Obama recovery from the 2008 banking crisis and the last part a complete meltdown due to the Covid Pandemic, was somehow crushing Biden on that issue. By every measure, as written here for months, Biden’s economy is far superior to Trump’s, but Americans failed to cop to it. That is until Harris showed up.

I know Biden is old and had a terrible debate performance and appears to not have the stamina to take on this evil dipshit, but how did the administration suddenly get a fantastic economy? 

Feels.

Now, despite my trenchant analysis here, I applaud the fickle nature of the voting public if it means Trump goes back to the golf course on November 6 and/or faces almost certain house arrest. And I must admit that sending a racist/misogynist packing at the hands of a woman of color is yummy. But to be fair, this makes zero sense, beyond its Marshall McLuhan moment: the medium indeed is the message. 

As discussed last week, Harris is our “joy” candidate. Her positivity is drowning out the rote angry rhetoric of Trump, and if this a cult of personality election, as 2016 surely was, then Trump has lost his mojo as “an outsider throwing stones” choice. Harris has stolen that mantle and is starting to edge into pop culture icon status. Which means, as the theory of cultural proximity insists, if someone goes up… someone must come down.

The reason I know this is that when it was Biden v Trump, the former president skated over his many faults. The entire story was Biden’s age. Now that there is a shiny new candidate across from him sucking up the limelight, people are reminded of how goddamn awful Trump is at campaigning and, of course, governing. Trump has never had an ideology, hell, he was a liberal until 2010. He has no political platform; he bagged the usual Republican one and made everything about him. But now, no one really wants him – tepid ratings when he shows up on TV, lower turnout in his rallies, which show people leaving halfway through his tired rambles, and badly conducted and technically glitchy interviews with despised rich dinks like Elon Musk on his bilge-pumping X platform. 

What we have here is good ol’ Trump fatigue. This happens to cult figures. They don’t fade away like old soldiers. One day you’re a thing. Next, you are not. So, the Republicans, who had ample opportunity since the horrors of January 6 to make sure this didn’t happen, are stuck with this sudden has-been, as he drones on in stale speeches about “radical leftists” and worn-out 80s blather about “Commies” and rusty 2016 fear-mongering about the hordes of the Brown people coming for you, and how his opponent has a “low IQ.” And all voters can see is corpulent geezer who is older today than Ronald Regan, our oldest president, was when he left office after eight years in 1988.

Fatigue.

Back in 2016, when everyone beyond the New York/ New Jersey area fell for Trump’s bullshit about being a great businessman and all the other falderal that came with it, there was a sense that it didn’t matter that the candidate told everyone he saw thousands of Muslims cheering in the streets of Jersey City on 9/11when it didn’t happen. His kind of cranky monosyllabic “winging it” was new to the political landscape. They kind of liked him and liked his moxie and “owning the libs,” challenging the press instead of pandering to it. But that was nine fucking years ago! Even the idea of vengeance for losing to Biden now that he has exited the race is a pointless dirge. It’s so bad, Trump peddles conspiracies that the president will take back the nomination. 

The Republicans, who had ample opportunity since the horrors of January 6 to make sure this didn’t happen, are stuck with this sudden has-been

So, here’s old Trump sinking badly in the polls, his rhetoric getting more racist and mean-spirited and unhinged by reality, once again, like the Muslims cheering in N.J., making up some shit about how there are no one actually at these massive Harris rallies. And each day it speeds his exodus from the public sphere.

The clearest stat of how Kamala Harris has upended this race in less than a month is that 70-percent of Americans have a fixed view of Donald Trump – positive or negative (mostly negative). However, six out of ten Americans want to know more about the vice president. A woman at the top of the ticket, who this time does not have the baggage of her husband having been president and the weight of being a public persona that has been dragged through the political mud for decades, appears strong, unflappable, and ready-for-primetime. Kamala Harris has grabbed that impenetrable celebrity veneer once enjoyed by Trump, but unlike Trump, comes with substance and a history of actually winning elections.

But, really, what does that matter when you got a lock on feels and you’re rolling in accolades? I expect this to wane, like all pop culture movements. But the idea that somehow Trump will regain his hold on the zeitgeist is no longer a factor.

Nothing could stop this craziness for nine years – elections, scandal, impeachment, high crimes.

‘Twas boredom that killed the beast.

Aquarian Weekly
8/14/24
 
Reality Check
 
 
IS JOY REPLACING GRIEVANCE? 
Kamala Harris Taps into Long-Lost Positivity Rhetoric to Great Effect

As the sudden and still inconceivable juggernaut that is the Kamala Harris campaign rolls across America on the heels of her adding the perpetually animated Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the ticket, a new and rarely heard message has emerged: Joy.

How novel. How radical. How refreshingly poignant.

Joy. 

I, for one, did not see that coming. But nevertheless, here it is.

Walz perceptively coined this wild concept at the rally to introduce him as the vice-presidential pick in Philly, when he turned to Harris and thanked her for “bringing the joy back.” Walz is apparently good at bumper sticker stuff – he was the originator of laying “weird” on his opponent J.D. Vance, which stuck and ain’t going away – and if there is one thing that is emanating from this paradigm-altering Democratic duo it is a forward-thinking positivity and youthful exuberance we haven’t seen on the campaign trail since 2008.

Joy?

Whatever the Harris machine is doing is working. To the tune of poll numbers that have completely flipped in her favor, as she now leads her domestic terrorist, convicted felon and thief of women’s reproductive rights opponent, Donald Trump in the national and many battleground state polls. Much of this, as discussed here last week, is the consolidation of Democrats who were lukewarm to outright turned off to vote for President Joe Biden again. But polls and enormous rally crowds, 300,000 new volunteers, 100,000 freshly registered voters, and considerable bumps in the youth, Black and Hispanic numbers do not answer the pressing question: Why has Harris’s appearance, rallies, and speeches seemed ever more joyous than we’ve seen around here in some time?

Because they are.

If you track our political trajectory since Barack Obama became the 44^th president of the United States, something broke in our vox populi. Obama’s run in ’08 was so furiously bright and inspiring, it had to tumble eventually. Nothing is otherworldly or infinite in politics, or anything, really. Okay, maybe art, but even that is fleeting. There is a shelf-life to “Yes We Can” and “Hope and Change.” I felt it days after Obama was sworn in when he began filling his cabinet with Clintonites and chumming up with Ted Kennedy and hunkering down to business as usual – the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars continued, Guantanamo Bay remained a stain on the nation, and the Affordable Care Act configuration, voting and roll-out was a political bummer. And this is the objective observations of a commentator: what of those people who thought that we were in a post-racist world, or that college and health care would be free and that the sun would shine brighter, and their food would taste better. There was very much an Obama hangover. 

So, the Dems coughed up the House and Senate in 2010 in a wave of Tea Party complaints, and then when Obama ran for re-election, he appeared tired and beaten by the gig, as all presidents do, limping along all summer behind in the polls until in the end he was able to retain much of his coalition but lost the significant enthusiasm he enjoyed four years earlier. His stump rhetoric homed in on “staying the course” and the usual incumbent thing, but our “outsider new guy” was “establishment” now. The joy was sucked right out of the thing.

Kamala Harris is engaging in something wholly different.

In comes Donald Trump and his angry, anti-American grievance shouting and name-calling. At first Republicans lashed out against the con man, this monosyllabic racist/misogynist blather that was unbecoming to the crap they’d peddled for decades – shining city on the hill, moral imperative, family-oriented conservatism. Trump didn’t give a shit about that nonsense. He cynically wanted to regain name recognition after his ignominious firing at NBC, get his speaking fees up, and toss some dirt on the Clintons, who he used to worship but now felt betrayed by, because it’s all about knocking people down and tearing apart solidarity for the “one man can fix things.” On the other side was another Clinton, as Hillary used her Party machine to snuff out the Dems version of populism, Bernie Sanders, and appeared at rallies to be a craven political mouthpiece for going back to a time before Obama, and there were many of his former voters who did not want that and took a shot with Trump.

Then followed the dismal four years of Trump’s presidency, which were exhausting to say the least. Constant haranguing on Twitter and negativity in his rallies that he held for only MAGA sycophants with more name calling, an avalanche of non-sequiturs, blatant lies, and childish tantrums, not to mention the traitorous cozying up to dictators. When the pandemic hit, he bungled it miserably with more lying and crazy shit. As the world shut down, he kept calling more people more names.

And when the Democrats were searching for an alternative to this dark insanity, instead of embracing another woman or a gay man or a true progressive, they went for convenience, and thank the good Lord they did, because Joe Biden – white, older, mostly centrist and a font of the Blue Wall/Rust Belt set – was the right nominee to beat Trump in 2020. But it was strategic not inspiring or joyful. Biden’s campaign became all about “recovering the soul of our nation.” It was a grim march to halt fascism, lunacy and returning the nation to something resembling a working construct and away from Trump’s back-alley profit grift. The ‘20 election was a battle against incompetence and evil. Hope and Change be damned.

But today, as I write this, Kamala Harris is engaging in something wholly different. Simply due to her gender, race, and youth (compared to the 78-year-old Trump and certainly her predecessor in the race, the 81-year-old Biden) she has flipped a switch and scratched an itch of this nation we have not experienced in some time. Emerging from the bleak and frightening days of the pandemic and this slow but prideful trek to come out of it (and we’re still the best economy in the western world), we can now see a light at the end of the tunnel and Harris is articulating that view: an America not framed as carnage with blood in the streets and dangerous Brown people threatening our daughters and starving children and dying pets and Lady Liberty slitting her wrists. It’s “We’re not going back.” And that works, as it worked for Ronald Reagan after Viet Nam and Watergate and riots and all the rest. Reagan defended America as a flawless beacon, and he did so because while the past is set, the future has possibilities. The future is what built this nation – King George is a nut, and while we might be better just sucking it up, let’s take on the most powerful army on the planet and see what lies around the corner instead.

You might remember, whether it was crazy-talk or not, Reagan was elected president, twice!

In a very real sense, Donald Trump is the King George of 2024. That rambling incoherent palaver he presented this week from his bunker in Mar-a-Lago is a fine example. Harris is this year’s revolution model. Trump is yesterday’s revolution filled with dour retribution and angry rebukes to “make America great again,” as if we needed to be saved by a privileged rich man-child who declared bankruptcy six times and bragged about assaulting women. People wanted change in 2016, anychange, but it was filled with griping anger. No one, if the polls are any indication, wants that in 2024. And they didn’t want the guy who stopped Trump the first time by simply “not being him” either.

Kamala Harris and her cheery partner, Tim Walz are turning on a light long since dimmed around here and it’s fun to watch them speak about having more in common than our differences and how America is not a hellscape peddled by rodeo clown cable hosts. Their message of positivity, whether it works all the way to November 5 or not, is connecting with a whole lot of people, many of them too young to remember “Yes We Can” and jazzed by the contrast to rancorous hate-speech about cat ladies who can’t or won’t procreate being ineligible to cast a vote.

“We are a nation of people who believe in the ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation,” Harris said in Detroit the day before I write this. “We know we are a work in progress, we haven’t yet reached those ideals, but we will die trying because we love our country, and we believe in who we are.”

Maybe, just maybe, this is the year of Joy over Grievance.

Right now, it sure looks like it.

More importantly, it feels like it.

Aquarian Weekly
8/7/24
 Reality Check
 

DOWNSIDE UP
Democrats Inhale the Wiff of Victory in Kamala Harris

So, I wake up in London last Sunday to a dramatic change in the American political landscape. The phalanx of texts from friends and colleagues that greeted me as I was six-hours ahead must stand as some kind of record. President Joe Biden, presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, and winner of millions of primary votes (not to mention the 2020 election) had dropped out and endorsed his Vice President Kamal Harris to take his place. Harris took the reigns as if this had been going on for weeks, even months, without missing a step; assumed the president’s ample war chest and consolidated the bitching contingent of her party, and most importantly, opened the coffers to mega-rich donors holding additional booty hostage unless a change was made. This, for all intents and purposes was a bloodless coup. And, quite frankly, I don’t care. Because it worked and it is working. Famously.

But it was a coup.

While not done all the time here, the bloodless coup has been a winning combo in most Central American countries and often in the Middle East. For much of the post-WWII period, we pretty much engineered all of them – either through the illegal machinations of the CIA or the in some cases out in the open through the State Department. Shit, the Dems pulled one of these in 1944 against “the will” of the voters at that year’s Democratic Convention to place an unknown Missouri Senator named Harry Truman in the VP chair in one of, if not the most consequential backroom deals to ever emerge from the dark corners of American politics. Truman, of course, would become president upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death and lead the country through the final months of the Second World War, which included arguably the most important decision to ever confront an American president, drop the atomic bomb on millions of innocent Japanese to effectively end the war and subsequently plunge the planet into a perpetual tinder box.

With less consequence to the planet, but immense implications for the future solvency of this republic, the Democrats gambled big time – but at least took my partial advice to not throw the party into a convention battle ala 1968 by contemplating the always dangerous yet enticing “mystery ticket” many were calling for by stepping over a sitting VP who happens to be Black woman and as a  consequence alienate the party’s two most reliable and powerful contingents.

So, fast-forward to later Sunday afternoon: I’m in a cab with my wife and daughter heading back to the Bloomsbury district where were staying and Harris is on the radio and she is thanking Joe Biden for his selfless service to the country by stepping down and the whole thing rings hollow, because the president was willing – for good or ill – to see this out. And despite a dismal debate performance and more than half the party, echoed by a shit ton of Democratic voters publicly pissing on him, he remained within striking distance of victory – as many of the polls cited. The only issue in these polls were those holding out to make it appear it was necessary to enact a coup. I maintain they would have returned home, as Trump’s latest KKK level of racist palaver performance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention attests. At some point, the nation would have chosen the Empty Gatorade Bottle over that monster. Biden was forced out. If it works, great, but that is what happened. 

It is this incredibly professional and unhindered roll out that convinces me this entire ordeal was less organic panic than institutionally engineered switcheroo.

Irrespective of this ugliness, I would have to be a complete fool to not acknowledge that Harris’s dynamic appearance from the ashes of the past three weeks has flipped the entire 2024 presidential race on its head. Not since before the debate has the Democratic nominee been consistently leading national polls and in the battleground states (some cases for the first time). Moreover, the numbers of young and minority voters are flooding back. The move, as the party insiders who conducted the coup surmised, has reenergized Democrats, and shifted many of what pundits have deemed “double haters,” who were unimpressed with having to vote for two old white men AGAIN, back into the 2020-level fold. This seemingly irrational maneuver has gone remarkably well. Strangely so, especially for a candidate who was abysmal when running for president four years ago and who, because of her job as being the deciding vote in a deadlocked Senate the first two years of the administration, has been mostly invisible.

But Harris came out right out of central casting as the vibrant shiny new candidate. She emerged slickly taught, impeccably styled, displaying an unerringly strong comportment, offering rousing rhetoric that’s been expertly performed. Kamala Harris has never looked or sounded better. She is for all intents and purposes a transformed party avatar. And the response is measurable. The VP and now presumptive nominee with nary of quibble from the masses, stepped right in and began doing what Biden detractors were convinced (and I still argue with this part) he could not or would not do – take the fight to the bully, Donald J. Trump. And although, as one colleague put it to me the immediate response to Harris resembles “a starving man treating a cracker like a three-course meal,” there is something else going on. Something powerfully attractive to a maudlin electorate tired of the same noises emanating from the same old places.

And it is this incredibly professional and unhindered roll out that convinces me this entire ordeal was less organic panic than institutionally engineered switcheroo. Democrats have historically been sloppy with almost everything. Republicans blithely walk around as if there’s nothing to see here while they run a domestic terrorist, convicted criminal lunatic who tried to overthrow the government three years ago. Democrats watch their old man candidate stumble through 90 minutes of a shitty debate, and they run around like their hair’s on fire for a month. But cooler minds somewhere beyond George Clooney were deployed and the results are hard to refute.

Again, except for political junkies like me, the sausage making is hardly the matter. The true goal here remains: Stop a deranged psychopath from entering the White House again and continue to hang loses on Republicans until the reproductive rights of women are restored nationally. And for at least the first three weeks that appears to be a distinct possibility with room to build out – a pending VP pick, a showbiz convention, and the guarantee of more incredibly dangerous and wildly stupid shit coming out of Trump and what appears to be his spectacularly putrid VP choice. J.D. Vance, whose entire talking points thus far have been the kind of alt right Christian fascistic nonsense that quadruples down on the MAGA bullshit that coughed up the 2022 midterms for Republicans, who at the time were barking that Trump was electoral poison. Worse still, for a media whore like Trump, Vance is a dud, a terrible soundbite and stumper, a wooden gaff machine that makes Ron DeSantis sound like Billy Graham.

Within days Donald Trump went from the strongman, the less feeble candidate, to an old fat pathetic goof without a playbook taking on a feisty, young, capable opponent. Suddenly the 2016 change-agent candidate tag is not his. He is old and bad news. “We’re not going back,” intones Harris on the trail, somehow balancing the incumbency shield without lugging the baggage of economic or international complaints – people (especially the ornery youth vote) don’t even see her as the unflinching supporter of the Israeli war machine that straddled old Joe. 

Look, the Harris move, if this continues and she beats Trump in November, worked and was genius. If she loses it was rash and ill-conceived. The proof is not in an explosion of excitement for three weeks, but the staying power of the next ninety days and through Election Day. That is the measure of the move. But it still stinks that a man considered too feeble to run or act as president by much of the media and even those in his own party has taken Joe Biden out and his opponent, a proud fascist, racist, convicted criminal, gets to hang in there. The NY Times does not call for him to leave the race. 

Why?

One left the race because he was losing and the other gets to keep being a horrible danger to the republic because he is… was… winning. 

If that isn’t the most American thing I’ve written in my nearly 30 years manning this space I don’t know what is.

Aquarian Weekly
7/24/24
 
Reality Check
 
SUMMER OF CHAOS
 
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
 – Mark Twain

Last week in this space I counseled calm. Then some right-wing loon tried to kill the Republican Party candidate and the entire Democratic Party began an all-out antidemocratic coup on its presumptive nominee and current president of the United States. Then, before what can only be described as a parade of surreal narcissistic fantasies at the Republican National Convention the ticket absorbed a vehement proponent of a national abortion ban and one of the main architects of the dangerous Project 2025, who once called his running mate, “America’s Hitler.” These events proved with nimble swiftness my influence on the vox populi continues its uninterrupted run of obsolescence.

And so… now what?

In a strange reflection of a distant Twilight Zone episode (pick any, they’re pretty much metaphorically the same), I wake up to rising poll numbers for President Joe Biden, despite the deluge of bad press and calls from inside his party and every middle-aged white guy with a Twitter account to drop out of the race. At the time of this writing, the rightfully lauded 538 election model shows Biden beating former president Donald Trump 56 out of 100 times in millions of statistical permutations and that as of mid-July the president is on track to win 276 electoral votes, which is more than the 270 needed to win the election. And, in case no one likes cold, objective data, I went to other poll-driven sources with less credentials and Biden is within four points of Florida and three in North Carolina, deep red states he lost in 2020, a few points down in swingy Arizona and Georgia, states he flipped from Republicans that year, and dead heats in the Rust Belt states, which, again, give hand him the election. All of them within the margin of error in a political environment that since 2018 Democrats have outperformed polling by six to ten points.

So, why is the Democratic Party engaged in utter chaos and public disharmony 120 days out from an election (less than two months before early voting, which Dems dominate)?

There are two theories that I am floating for the hell of it.

One: There is something genuinely and seriously wrong with Biden, and Party insiders have only recently been privy to this. It cannot be the terrible debate performance, because according to the polls referenced above, that event has stabilized back to even.

Two: The donor class, the billionaires funding the campaign has frozen funds and the Party elites are tossing out 14-million primary voters’ wishes and a close race with an incumbent sitting on a solid economy to toss this race into a cauldron of uncertainty and a coming shit show at the Democratic National Convention for money. Less has been destroyed over the almighty dollar, but had they stood strong instead of running around like feckless amateurs for the past three weeks, the money would be there. Not to mention the ugliness of a major political party openly bowing to rich elites, especially the “working class” Democratic Party.

I have stated again, as an independent who has hitched his wagon to Democrats after the disastrously unconstitutional striking down of Roe v Wade in 2022 that this is a mistake. I will vote for anyone other than the Trump ticket but, again, must state emphatically that to change candidates – especially for one that is not the president – at this juncture is political suicide. I could be wrong, but since this Party has shown no backbone and seems in complete flux right now, who can seriously trust that they will make any decision that leads to victory with any modicum of confidence?

So, yeah, chaos abounds. Not sure where this goes from here.

On the other side, the unabashed embrace of fascism by the Trump ticket by choosing J.D. Vance for its vice-presidential candidate is complete. Firstly, Vance is a charlatan, who in 2016, like most Republican sycophants (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham), did an about face from calling Trump a dangerous madman to getting on the power train. He has also emphatically stated he would have pissed on the constitution on January 6 and handed the government over to the loser of that election, and, as stated, is on record as calling for the criminalization of abortion and banning of contraception in a complete Christian takeover of the Republic, which, again, is outlined in frightening detail by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that I urge all Americans to at least become familiar with before entering a voting booth this November.

And of course it was Vance who advanced the outrageous notion that the Biden Administration was responsible for the attempted assignation of Trump last week, when the shooter was found to be an extremely vocal conservative who emerged from the Never Trump wing of the once important but now flaccid Nikki Haley movement to bring the Party back to the long-dead Reagan / Bush era of free trade, geo-political international leadership, moral guidance, and personal responsibility platform to this spastic revenge blather that will take the strongest economy in the Western hemisphere and plunge it into an isolationist quagmire that will abandon NATO and hand Europe to the Russians.

And, oh, yeah, Vance supports Vladmir Putin and doubles down on the anti-Ukraine wing of the Party.
So, yeah, chaos abounds. Not sure where this goes from here. I’ll remain at this post as I have coming on 27 years now and watch the chips fall. But know this, none of it appears to be falling in service of America and its citizens.

Aquarian Weekly
7/17/24
 
Reality Check
 
STAY CALM / BEAT TRUMP
 
“The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.” 
― Lenny Bruce

Never in its 27 years of existence has the title of this column been more aptly applied. It is time for a Reality Check, folks.

Let me begin by saying, if the goal of most of the country is to keep it out of the hands of a criminal, racist, misogynistic lunatic game show host with the force of a Christo-Fascist Project 2025 movement behind him (read it), then President Joe Biden is your best bet. Maybe your second-best bet, but by no means as effective, is Vice President Kamala Harris. Every other fantasy posed by pundits, celebrities and the whining liberal panic mob is doomed to failure. This is a political absolute. Period.

I understand that Biden shit the bed in that debate a couple of weeks ago. But I took a silver lining from the manic response to it, which has exploded into a phalanx of madness since, both in print, on the airwaves, and especially on that regurgitating treadmill of bile, Twitter. It appears the supposed “Democratic enthusiasm gap” is a myth. People freaking out for two-plus weeks for the president to “get out of the race for someone else” in an avalanche of the craziest, surrealistic, and ill-conceived plots known to modern political thought proves that people REALLY WANT TO BEAT Trump. A lot of people. People who heretofore had been on the sidelines doing lord-knows-what.

These people will be there in November for Biden. Trust me. People this nutty are not going to not vote for the president because he’s old or might not finish a second term or isn’t the sexy candidate they want. They will do it like they did in 2020, to stop the psycho. My theory of the Empty Gatorade Bottle is strong. Keep it in your heart. Learn it. Rince and repeat.

This is true of Independents, of which I am one. That 19-percent that ran from even considering Trump since his 34 felony convictions, is not easing back to him because Biden has a stutter or forgets names. This changes none of that. This has always been about Donald Trump. Either you vote for him and open the United States to an assault on its very foundation or not. Everything else is a distraction. Getting into these hypothetical piss fights is only shifting the attention to peripheral nonsense, like complaining about the rain during the massacre at Gettysburg. The goal has not changed, no matter who is on the other side: Trump is an existential threat to our democracy.

Also, it is important to point out that the hair-on-fire brigade needs to come to grips with the lateness in which they proffer these fantasy-football-like notions of pulling in the always enticing and mysterious “someone else” from the maw of their fertile if not skewed imaginations. That time has passed. And whether it is because the Party saw fit to stick with their unpopular incumbent or just the normal political respect shown for the sitting president to try for a second term (especially one who had the best mid-terms as any since I’ve been on the planet, and that’s over six decades), there was a primary. And Biden got nearly 90-percent of those votes – millions of votes. And those voters have heard for years how Trump and the Republicans don’t care about democratic norms or the sanctity of the vote or the primacy of the voter – and they are right, they don’t, 2020 proved that. You don’t want to alienate those voters. That would be far more damaging to the chances of beating Trump than people not loving Biden and desiring someone fiercer to bash a lying sack of feces every time he opens his rancid yapper.

And that’s the crux of this: people never really loved Biden. He is this generations’ Richard Nixon – not in comportment, moral turpitude or ideology – but that he is an avatar for the “against.” Republicans didn’t want Nixon in 1960, 1968 or 1972, but he hung around and won (he likely won in 1960, but lest we digress, I shall move on). He routinely had low approval ratings and there was never a groundswell of excitement around him. But conservatives were afraid of hippies and Blacks and kids burning draft cards and Commies and women burning bras, so they voted for him anyway. Fear is the great equalizer in elections. Biden is the bulwark, the cudgel to keep the barbarians from the front door and that has not changed at all since late June.

And you can see it in the polls. They have moved maybe one to two points to Trump for now, which has been static for months – two points either way. Even that movement has begun to subside. Moreover, Biden has put Arizona and Georgia back in play (within the margin of error) in the last two months – two states I thought were lost to him in April. There are still a ton of “undecided” voters out there, many whom are staying on the sidelines and keeping Biden at 44-45 percent because they are hoping for that “someone else” thing. Trump is in his usual 45-47 range. I believe the vast majority of those wavering will come home when this braying subsides and it is a binary choice between an old codger or the architect of January 6, who has been convicted of massive business and campaign fraud, and sexual assault.

What has also not changed since late June is Biden’s incumbency, which is a huge part of this. The mysterious “someone else” has no record, and Biden’s record is good – economic (while I write this, we have another record high in the DOW and inflation was down again in May), foreign policy, and non-wacky daily craziness of the last administration. People prefer calm over bedlam. They may want cheaper eggs but not 10-percent tariffs and using the Comstock Act to prevent abortion pills from being shipped interstate (both on Trump’s agenda). Status quo appeals to a great many voters historically. Which is why the only alternative, if you must go down that wild card road, is Kamala Harris.

If it is not Harris, you lose the most loyal and important voting block of either party – Black women. You cannot just push Harris aside and shove in a young governor. Plus, Harris, as mentioned, technically carries with her the incumbency tag. As recently as George W. Bush, who was, let’s face it, over his head and a gaff machine that would make both Trump and Biden look like scholars, won a second term on “stay the course,” despite shitty approvals and two badly orchestrated wars in which American lives were lost. Also, Harris gets to keep most if not all the money the Biden Campaign has pulled in – including a whopping $34 million the week after the crappy debate performance. I always say, follow the money, ignore the blather. 

I get that everyone is scared. But while there are no atheists in fox holes, neither should there be feckless vacillators.

Harris would trample the barely coherent, rambling lie-machine in a debate, sure, but she is still an unknown. She did not get 80-million-plus votes in 2020 or have an historically great midterms. But she can claim that staying the course is preferable to what looks to be a rather dark and chaotic alternative should Trump get in and fill the government with his gangster cronies who only pass loyalty tests and pull out of NATO, handing Eastern Europe to Putin and the Russians on a silver platter in a Chamberlain-esque appeasement-fest. 

Harris is also on the ballot in all the states, much of which have passed deadlines for getting on, which, if mystery candidates emerge, will cause lawsuits that will be tied up in courts until after November 5 and keep them off the ballot. The court route has been an unmitigated disaster in stopping Trump thus far, also an avenue I have been saying for years is a dead-end fantasy that the panic-mob insisted would work. 

And now these same people want to blow this thing up, as if this was a backup quarterback scenario. Put anyone else in! Force a contested convention, let the electors vote their conscience, and turn this into the kind of circus that handed the White House over to Nixon in ‘68 for a grim six years before he resigned in shame covered in massive federal crimes that the supposed “conservative” Supreme Court now considers simply “the job of the executive branch.”

I get that everyone is scared. But while there are no atheists in fox holes, neither should there be feckless vacillators. We are in a fight. A true war for the soul of this nation. Donald Trump is a dangerous idiot. We have already seen what he did with the Covid crisis, how his leadership led to death and destruction. After January 6, the Republicans should have gone somewhere else, (Lenny’s “what-should be” versus “what is”), but they stuck with their guy. Time to do the same for his opponent: right now, the best one who can keep this pestilence out of the White House, Joe Biden. That is the job before us. Win this election… or else. Not what happens in 2027. No one was thinking about the Marshall Plan when they were conceiving and enacting the D-Day Invasion. First things first. 

And think this through – if for whatever reason, Biden can’t finish the next term, well then, the only viable alternative Kamala Harris will do it. She is on the goddamn ticket already. Simple as that.

Stay calm. Beat Trump

Aquarian Weekly
7/3/24
 
Reality Check
 
AGE v LIES
First Ever June Presidential Debate Reveals 

Having followed politics since the early 1970s, becoming politically active in the mid 1980s and professionally writing about it since the mid-1990s, I have learned to do two things at once – parse the immediate reaction to an event and then (the tougher of the two) frame its consequence to the larger effect on campaigns and the eventual election. Both are not to be ignored. There can be a tendency to prize one over the other, especially in the last three decades when the immediacy of gaff, scandal and apparent victory can linger for a few days or even weeks but tend to skew the larger picture. This doesn’t happen sometimes; it happens every time.

Let me explain in the context of what may have been the worst showing of either candidate in a debate I have seen this side of Putnam Country dog catcher and its not-so hidden implications for the fall.

What transpired over 90 minutes during the first presidential debate of the 2024 race was exceedingly less ideal for the current president and frighteningly alarming for the last guy to hold the job. The former, Joe Biden, got the worst of it. Only because expectations were so low and his opponent so nakedly vulnerable on nearly every issue offered by the CNN “moderators.” I put the term in quotations merely because it seemed neither were inclined to moderate anything. They tossed up serious issues into the ether and watched silently as Donald Trump bloviated incoherently with a deluge of spectacular lies and the president mumbled disjointedly as he meandered into several competing subjects at once. 

The other reason this “performance” was more injurious to Biden’s campaign is because he had one job to do on that stage and that is to quell fears he is way over the hill and prove he is still sharp and able to fight against the domestic terrorist that stood across from him. Neither transpired. If anything, the opposite happened, and it scared the living shit out of Democrats from every corner of the political spectrum.

And for those of us who know that a repeat of the disastrous Trump presidency would be far worse for the nation than the productive current one, this was very bad. As I wrote last week, and these 90 minutes did nothing to refute its core principle, an empty Gatorade bottle would be better than another Trump presidency. The economic numbers (high GDP, lower inflation, increased jobs, wages, and a manufacturing boom) and legislative accomplishments (Chips Act, Infrastructure investment, codifying Marriage Equality) don’t lie. But I have already said my piece on that.

Yet, in a debate the candidate with a majority of the American electorate behind many issues – women’s reproductive rights, climate change, gun safety, support of Ukraine and NATO, etc. – should be able to easily articulate this. Biden could not. At all. And that is the very problem his campaign came in with and left with, the narrative that he is not up to the challenge to deliver this message.  

What happened Thursday was that Biden fucked up and Trump showed he was insane, both negative narratives equally on display, but one is getting the preponderance of backlash and furor, President Biden. And this gets us to the second part of the political equation – the long-range reverberation and overall effect of an event like this.

No one, and I mean even Trump, because it was the one thing he has ever apologized for, believed that the “grab them by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape that emerged three weeks from Election Day would not sink Trump in 2016. He won. When the Paula Jones sexual harassment scandal came out during the ’92 campaign it was pretty much written in stone that Bill Clinton was doomed. He won. In both cases, as in many others, there was a visceral explosion of fear and loathing in the support system of the candidates. We didn’t notice the larger picture that came to fruition on Election Day because we were focused on the immediate event. The deranged pitching of “Biden needs to step aside for a younger candidate” after this mess tells me more about the level of support for the president than any time before the debate. 

You want enthusiasm? You got it.

The one thing that has remained steadfast among the majority of people – many of them undecided because they are disillusioned about two old white guys we’ve already seen being the choice this November – is that they are quite apparently wanting, hoping, cringing, praying they can feel good about voting for someone than against the other. When people ask, “If Trump lied every time he opened his mouth (over 30 according to CNN’s fact checks) and said dangerous and crazy things in that debate, how come only Biden is getting shit for sounding and looking feeble?” It’s because more people than not want Trump to be humiliated and beaten. It’s the old, “Flip a coin to decide what you want… then as the coin is in the air ask yourself if you are rooting for one outcome over the other… that is your choice.”

Biden fucked up and Trump showed he was insane.

Democrats, clear thinking Independents and people who watch a convicted criminal, twice-impeached morally bankrupt and wildly fascistic Donald Trump bluster nonsense like a maniac at every turn want someone on the other side to smack him down. This is what I get from this panicked reaction, because it’s not the media or the moderators or the pundits or the pollsters to accomplish, it’s the guy on the other side, and that guy failed miserably to do that. This is why we have the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments on one side while the other just shrugs.

It appears more people would like to defeat Trump than want to have a reason to hold their noses and suspend their conscience to vote for him. And Biden let that majority down. 

To wit: When Trump said he had a better economy than Biden, the president failed to give blatant numbers that could easily shut him down. Even when the numbers in the topic question – highest national debt under Trump (over eight percent) and now Biden (four percent) – Trump just said Biden’s was higher. All the president had to do was simply say, “The moderator just read the numbers, my deficient is half yours.” Instead, he appeared flummoxed it was even uttered, as if he had never met this walking bullshit machine. When Trump blathered on about infanticide being legal in blue states (it is illegal in all 50 states) Biden went back to a question four minutes earlier. When Trump somehow twisted his blatant crimes against the state on January 6 into some weird takedown of then Speaker Nancy Pelosi and claimed he was asked to speak that day when he not only planned the event, tweeting, “Come to D.C. it’s going to be wild!” after telling the domestic terrorists that their election was stolen for months, Biden just mumbled some poorly reasoned shit.

This upset more people than not, reenforcing the notion that those people still do not want to vote for the guy who after four chances did not say he would accept the very election he is embroiled in. They were clearly and openly rooting for Biden to fight back when Trump claimed he didn’t create mask mandates in 2020 (when Trump was president, not Biden) or slashed prescription drug costs (a popular Biden accomplishment). In the same debate, Trump simultaneously claimed to have the widest deregulations ever while also being best president in history on the environment and got away unscathed. This was on Biden. So, they come on cable news to ask for someone else. 

The question before us today and for the next four months remains: Do those upset people now turn around and vote for the guy they wanted to do better at this debate or the guy they clearly from this reaction want to defeat? I don’t have the answer to that, no one does, except the voters, who will make that choice on November 5, but it still doesn’t change the evidence that the conundrum – debate or no debate – tells us more about what might happen that day than we can see now.

Aquarian Weekly
6/5/24
 
Reality Check
 
GUILTY!
Donald Trump’s Former Criminal Playground Finally Nabs Him           
 
 
The presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States is a convicted felon.

Roll that around your brain for a moment.

Never has this happened before in a republic over 240 years old.

Was it Confucius who said, “May you live in interesting times”?

Donald Trump makes sure of that.

For the former embattled president, despite a penchant for alluding justice time and again, this was inevitable. Like his being impeached, twice, another presidential first. Once he became president, no one from NYC who knew the Donald believed he could get through four years as the country’s chief executive without doing something illegal. I mean, it’s his thing. 

For decades beginning in earnest in the 1980s, breaking the law and flouting it with court-clogging counter-lawsuits, media-humping bluster, and blaming everything and everyone else but himself was the foundational principle of the Trump playbook in and around the Big Apple, like not paying contractors, repeatedly and openly cheating on his three wives, developing that interesting hair configuration, and calling up the NY Post pretending to be someone else praising Trump as a genius.

Earlier this year Trump’s business was found guilty of and fined $355 million for years of financial fraud, the first chink in his armor.

This ignoring of legal norms is nothing special, really, no matter where you live. The rich trampling on laws that would send us all away for a long time is part of the fun for them. And like most privileged effete frighteningly illiterate and deeply sociopathic children of the rich, Trump believes laws are for the great unwashed. There’s “the law” and then there’s “Trump’s law.” This is what he would like to do on a national level should he win back the presidency in a few months, and what he rehearsed in the weeks after he was defeated in the 2020 election – denied it happened, made a big stink, riled up people who were pissed it happened (supporters he suckered into thinking he was infallible) and then perpetuated an “event” wherein violence, death and destruction ensued. All of it to soothe his fragile, rich kid ego.

More on what’s ahead if he is re-elected in a moment.

But let’s deal with the convicted felon.

Trump’s four-decades-plus uninterrupted parade of malfeasance and mendacity ended in this conviction on a mind-numbing 34 guilty counts delivered by twelve jurors of his peers, fair and square. Despite his rich kid whaaaa! bitching, (“It’s cold in here!”) he was granted lawyers, a presumption of innocence, more leeway than any other American would get, especially for a domestic terrorist who tried to upend the constitution by trying to stop the ratification of our vote while serving in its highest office. This wide-ranging fairness granted him is something he felt should have been denied the infamous Central Park Five in 1989 when Trump took out a full-page ad in the NY Timeswith the headline, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY” proclaiming their guilt before a single piece of evidence was presented. Turns out those railroaded Black kids never raped anyone and were exonerated in 2002 with not only refuting evidence but a confession from the actual rapist. Learning this, Trump, living in Trump Reality, still believed they were guilty. He knew nothing of the case. They were guilty. Period.

Fast forward: I lost the election? No, I didn’t. 

Like most privileged effete frighteningly illiterate and deeply sociopathic children of the rich, Trump believes laws are for the great unwashed.

For the past four years, amidst lawsuits, recounts, cable TV blather, and riots people were living in the rich kid’s infallible fantasy. And now Donald Trump is the pick of the former law-and-order, family values, personal responsibility, socially conservative Republican Party to run for president again, meaning everyone running down ballot as a Republican must wear the shame of a criminal at the top of their ticket, despite the crocodile-tears whining from shills like Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, J.D. Vance, and the Speaker of the House. Trump may lose in November, he may win. But he is still a convicted felon. A criminal could lead this country. A man who cannot vote in most states, own a gun, or have anything to do with the military might be commander-in-chief.

That part is up to us. 

And so, let’s discuss November, shall we?

When we make our choice this fall, this is what we know for certain: Everything and everyone Trump comes in contact with is either destroyed personally or financially, humiliated publicly or goes to jail. Ignominious defeat awaits. Ask the people who were left holding debt after his six (SIX!) bankruptcies. Ask those lawyers and sycophants who went to bat for the fake elector schemes or the scores of people doing time for picking up his damaged mantle on January 6. Ask the USFL, which Trump infiltrated by owning the NJ Generals before muscling into the commissioner’s office and summarily tanking the league within months. Ask those who went to the skuttled Trump University or all those Trump-related “charities” that were determined in courts of law to be fraudulent fronts for money laundering. 

All the usual schemes over decades of sauntering through public life as Teflon Don were on display these past weeks in downtown New York, stripped bare of the myths Trump perpetuated. But it is always the same, Trump, the con man and now a convicted criminal, finding new ways to profit from his bullshit. Within seconds of the conviction, he crowed about his innocence like every other sad sack felon but then strategically pivoted to fund-raising while painting his plight as somehow a commentary on the death of America. Yeah, America is fucked. No, it’s not. Your fucked. I’m doing fine. My 401K is blossoming, crime is down everywhere, and so is inflation, gas prices, and the GDP and wages are up. I’m doing A-okay, pal. For one, I’m not a convicted felon. And I assume neither is anyone reading this. 

Don’t let the scoundrel drag you into his mess. Did you fuck a porn star while your wife was nursing your newly born son? Did you pay her off after the Access Hollywood tape revealed that you sexually assault women as a personal philosophy a month before the 2016 election? Did you falsify documents to hide those payments as campaign contributions to get elected? 

America didn’t do any of that. Donald Trump did. And he was convicted for it. Not us.

When Ted Cruz called yesterday a “dark day in America” he is implicating you in the actions of one man’s fucked. The feckless Cruz, who in a sad twist to his bootlicking was noted in the trial as Trump and the National Enquirer accused his father in planning the assassination of JFK, is glad to be part of fucked. That is his phobia. Leave the rest of us out of it. America is not in bed with criminals, Cruz is. The Republican Party is. 

The Republican Party, another thing Trump has wrecked, is in shambles. Trump’s daughter-in-law is running the RNC, a dozen party chairs in states across the country are dead broke. All the candidates Trump has endorsed since his 2020 loss have been defeated, even in ruby red states. He’s done to the GOP what he did to Atlantic City and the USFL and everything else he runs into the ground. He ran Roe v Wade into the ground. He almost ran America into the ground for four years. He left us sick, dying, mired in recession and debt, a laughingstock of the world. He wants to finish the job. But we decide that. Not him.

A convicted felon is the Republican presumptive nominee aiming to be the chief executive of this nation, your nation, not a de facto Trump Enterprise bolstered by religious lunatics who have conjured Project 2025 in which America turns into a Christian Fascist White Supremacy stronghold that will treat women as nothing more than baby containers, brown people are deported, and all enemies are eradicated, including a free press, the State Department, the FBI, and the Justice Department. But right now, that sounds like a “them problem.” Let’s not make it ours in 2025. One man’s misery, his own prison of misdeeds, are not ours. 

Let’s avoid hitching America’s wagon to fucked.

It took over 40 years of civil suits, pay-off settlements, fines, expulsions, and bankruptcies for New York City to topple its demon rich, spoiled brat. Don’t let America have to suffer for that long, because after 2020 if you think Trump is leaving office once he’s in, you really are stupid. This November we need to end this once and for all and when Trump’s three other trials – for far more egregious felonies – finally begin, then we’ll see if he wins or loses. Only then will we find out if he walks free or rots in prison as an enemy of the state. 

Or… we could put him in charge of America.

Your call.   

Aquarian Weekly
5/8/24
 
Reality Check
 
ABOUT THESE PROTESTS

No one supports the idea of waving a fist and shouting random musings in large groups against aggression, suppression, and general bullshit more than me. This is what this space has been about since August of 1997. I’d prefer, of course, to keep it to the words and not risk getting tear-gassed or hit with a projectile in a mob of submentals, but you get the gist: I’m into protests. The First Amendment is king around here. And even if the occasional thing gets wrecked, it happens, you deal. But as I watch these recent campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza or what some are calling “Pro-Palestinian” fervor or “Genocide Joe” outrage against President Biden, I can’t help thinking there is a theoretical disconnect in America’s role in this.

This is not Viet Nam where hundreds of American kids are coming home weekly in boxes for a nonsensical and morally corrupt war based on a lie or even Iraq, another hoax-induced military faux pas, which turned into a clusterfuck of corporate malfeasance wrapped up in vengeance and ad hoc world-building that lasted two decades. This is more than a half-century of fiduciary and ideological commitment to the Middle East’s only democracy that has spanned fourteen presidents. What we’re dealing with here is proxy complaints that need some nuance to deconstruct.

Ahhhh… nuance.

kay, so details matter little in the fine art of the protest. The overarching theme is the key. Nuance is not the bailiwick of someone in a ski mask heaving a brick through a window, I get it. But to be fair, if you are going for red-faced righteousness and morally impassioned voice-shredding, it’s important to know what you are protesting.

Now, I do not wish to see a country, especially one bankrolled by us, murdering women and children arbitrarily in what appears to be some half-assed terrorist campaign. I didn’t dig it in Afghanistan or Iraq, which, again was primarily a U.S. operation instead of a foreign investment. And there is no one more dedicated person to the idea of making the clearly insane Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu go away. I was in Jerusalem in the spring of 1996 when he was first elected and there was more than a little concern that he would wreck things. So, let’s say I was quite shocked to see his return to the position in 2009. He’s a lunatic hardliner, who’s now become that nation’s George W. Bush. – asleep at the wheel this past October when all of this started with Hamas’s attack and capturing of hostages and has only worsened things by taking what used to be the world’s most efficient fighting machine, the Israel Defense Forces, and turned it into an armed thug-fest.  

And I think the protestors need to understand that President Biden and our State Department have endeavored to put pressure on Netanyahu, but this is his country and his tactics. Pulling aid is not the answer here, just as the former president’s maneuver of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a religious hotbed of madness for well over three millennia from the innocuous Tel Aviv, was not the best decision to avoid inciting the violence we see today. Also, decades-long support of Israel by corporations or universities being personally responsible for what has happened in the last six months seems pushing it, even for young, privileged kids, who want to re-enact the 1960s. I get that they want some recognition of this abject violence, and the events on the ground are indeed horrific, but, again, there are degrees to which Columbia University is directly connected to the IDF’s war crimes.

And to address the “I don’t want to pay taxes to bomb children” argument. I pay federal taxes to a nation that currently enslaves the bodies of women to which I am less thrilled, but ya know, how taxes go: If you’re going to worry about blood on your hands by proxy, we’re all going to hell, so chill out. Shit, I’m typing this on a device, and you’re likely reading this on one, that was made by Chinese children in a sweatshop for half a dollar an hour. 

It’s good to have some idea what you’re protesting and, most importantly, have an end game: What do you want?

Finally, I think it’s important to point out that anyone who refers to the January 6 domestic terrorists that sacked the Capitol motivated by Trump’s Big Lie as “hostages,” as the current Republican nominee does, cannot weigh in on how “out of control” college students are. That afternoon’s activities and your dismissing it as “a tour” eliminates your credibility on this issue, and you should shut the fuck up. (I am aware of the ironic shift in my “First Amendment is king” eight-paragraph’s ago claim, but although it’s not illegal to be stupid, I nevertheless wish the purveyors of it would go away). This goes for the Speaker of the House calling these protests “nonsense.” Not a good look for the man two heartbeats from the White House and the most powerful Republican in D.C. shitting on the most sacred right we have – but again, he also calls the January 6 people who wanted to violently stop our other sacred right, voting, from occurring. So… there’s that.

Listen up; everyone supports a cease fire. Maybe not Trump, who appears to be all for razing Gaza to the ground, so you can go ahead vote against Biden and elect him, if you wish. Or cast your vote for that loon, Robert Kennedy Jr., who’ll just help get the game show host back in the White House, so he can sign a national abortion ban. Your call. Just know, that way before Netanyahu, and long after he’s gone, the United States must support Israel. As mentioned, it is the region’s only democracy. It’s bad enough we hang with nations like Saudi Arabia that are human rights abominations for diplomatic and financial reasons – a good subject to check out if you’re into all the protesting – this is truly the lesser of two evils situation. Also, it’s good to have some idea what you’re protesting and, most importantly, have an end game: What do you want?

Figure that out, and get back to me.

Meanwhile, it’s not the greatest balancing act to protest violence and oppression by violently oppressing fellow students and faculty and wasting our tax money sending police in there to stop you while you’re busy deciding on a plan.