Category: Mitch McConnell

Americans Need To Start Calling Things What They Really Are… Republicans, For Instance, Are "Traitors"

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Remember back to the good ol’ days when news networks, grasping at their pearls, saved us from now-POTUS Donald Trump uttering the words “grab em by the pussy”? Heaven forbid an American news audience hear those words.

An American news audience, the News Networks decided, could not possibly handle hearing what a candidate for POTUS said – on an open mic – to another man – about how he likes to treat women – because the word “pussy” would offend us. Not so much the pussy-GRABBING as that terrible, terrible word: “pussy”. The news networks had no such compunctions over Trump saying outloud how “Mexicans are rapists”. I’m guessing because none of those words offends. It’s just the idea the words express that should be bleeped from America’s airways.

George Carlin’s “7 Words” routine shouted volumes to us not just because it was brilliant and funny but because it was painfully true about us. The “two-way words” like balls comes to mind. A broadcaster can say a baseball player has “two balls on him” but wouldn’t dream of saying that on the very next pitch, he got nailed in “the balls”. A helluva lot of that nonsense comes from America’s religionistas who all think “doing unto others” means judging them.

America’s journalists have it in their heads that journalists must be neutral in every way, shape & form. They must assume that every person is pretty much the same — and what they say weighs exactly the same as what any other person says regardless of whether it’s the Truth or outright lies (because who’s to say what the Truth is?) This distortion of reality — that every argument has two exactly equal sides, one for, one against — has undermined our ability to see the Truth because we’ve already begun equating lies with Truth.

What’s worse — American visual journalists don’t grasp the power of the media they work in. For instance — they don’t understand that when you put two people in a fifty-fifty frame, the visual language says these two people have equal weight; what they say — their arguments — have the same possible validity. It’s up to the viewer to decide what’s true, what isn’t. It makes it hard to decide what’s “true” when one of the choices isn’t true — though it’s labeled as “maybe true”.

A climate scientist seen on-set with a climate denier in a 50-50 visual says “these two arguments have equal heft”. They don’t of course. The News Media is misframing and misrepresentng the Truth.

From the moment Trump was impeached, Moscow Mitch McConnell has made his partiality — his intent to ignore anything & everything Trump has done — crystal clear. He’s not been subtle about it. Yet Mitch — like all the Senators — took an OATH to do the exact opposite. That means Mitch, as we speak, is violating his oath (never mind everything he’s doing to obstruct justice).

Our MSM however presents a “strategic” Senate Majority Leader, cagily protecting his majority. They don’t see — though they should — the man who stood up at that Gang Of Eight meeting at the Obama White House in September 2016 where Obama and the Intelligence Community informed our leadership that Russia was actively engaged in impacting the election for the benefit of Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell REFUSED to let We The People in on what was being done to OUR ELECTION.

Now, WHY would Mitch do such a thing? Why wouldn’t Mitch want our election to be as free and fair as possible?

If one were thorough as a journalist — or even a base storyteller — one would have all these aspects of the character in one’s mind as one wrote about the character. A wife-beater doesn’t stop being a wife-beater just because he goes to the office. He’s a wife-beater at the office, nothing more. But our MSM seems to see it differently. When the Wife Beater walks out his door? He stops being a Wife Beater and becomes just another “Ordinary Joe” heading off to work.

No, the Wife Beater remains a Wife Beater. The Pussy Grabber (BY HIS OWN ADMISSION!) remains a pussy grabber — even when he then denies grabbing pussies or worse. He’s a self-confessed pussy-grabber, you see? And if the American Press aggregated the information we KNOW for a fact about Trump, we would START our reporting on Trump from a place far, far further along than we do every day.

it’s the Press’s instance on taking us backwards every day that’s killing the storytelling here. They keep asking the same people the same questions — because they keep ignoring the very good answers as if the very good information they just got couldn’t find purchase inside their heads. It is absurd that watching MSNBC, one is constantly whipsawed backwards and forwards in “news time” to places where we KNOW certain things to be so and places where we’ve never heard of anything and Trump’s the most normal POTUS imaginable.

There’s a reason Mitch McConnell & every Republican around Trump remains so incredibly loyal. It ain’t tribalism. To even think that is to think this is something we’ve gone through dozens of time before. To think hat is to ignore the context completely. To ignore Russia’s presence everywhere including an aluminum factory in Western Kentucky. Republican loyalty to Trump (think Lindsey Graham’s remarkable transformation) can be summed up in one word: “COMPLICITY”.

Despite their claims of “neutrality”, our Press, every day, presents arguments where, among the possible explanations is “Trump’s completely innocent of everything”. And the Press makes that possibility plain — cos they repeat Trump saying it. They allow for a bland “Well, if he’s not ‘innocent’ per se, who can say what he’s ‘guilty’ of?” But they NEVER report the other possibility — that Trump is guilty, guilty, GUILTY of everything indicated both by the evidence and by his own admissions of guilt.

Trump’s guilt is never, it seems, one of the possible explanations.

I guess, if the Press accused Trump of being a traitor, they fear they’d have to accuse a Democrat of being a traitor, too — since both sides do it.

Americans need to stop needing baby talk. We need to grow the hell up — and fast! We need to get over our unease at adult words and concepts. We need to stop putting icing on poison and calling it cake. We need to call things what they are.

Republicans are not patriots. They’re traitors.

Donald Trump is not President, he’s a criminal — gifted the presidency by both Russia and the Republican Party who were willing to hitch their wagon to this monstrosity because it gave them their last best shot at shoving permanent minority rule down the majority’s throat. Our News Media — babytalking — would euphemistically call that “Republican strategy”. What they mean is “rape”.

What else do you call it when someone wants one thing but has another imposed on them — repeatedly and despite vigorous protestations to please, STOP?

It’s time for us to speak plainly to each other — even if our News Media won’t. What’s happening to America isn’t “politics as usual”. It’s an act of political rape. While Russia holds America down, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are raping us. They’re doing something to us we do not want & did not vote for.

Traitors are raping us in real time as we watch.

Not a word of that is untrue.

At Last! We've Reached The Part Of The Story Where Mitch McConnell Gets Revealed As The Uber Villain He's Always Been

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

This won’t be news to the people who’ve been paying attention all along: Of all the villains in this story — and there are far, FAR more villains than heroes — Mitch McConnell will stand as one of our Uber Villains once all the secrets (finally) get revealed.

There are secrets to come. And Mitch has always lived with lots of secrets. It’s nothing to me who anyone else loves so long as the object of their desire is of age and the feelings between participants are mutual or at least mutual-adjacent (with a bottom line being that “no” always means “no”).

According to this 2013 post in the DailyKos (left wing for sure but not known for inventing stuff out of whole cloth), Mitch McConnell’s army discharge smacks of cover up. Sealed records? Strange, unexplained events? Sure, one could give young Mitch the benefit of the doubt — if one didn’t know what became of young Mitch. And what Young Mitch became Lying and deceit — keeping secrets from We The People — has always been Moscow Mitch’s stock in trade.

Who does Mitch represent? What I mean is — who, in Mitch’s mind, are his constituents. We know damned well it’s no one in Kentucky. Mitch’s history would tell us it’s money. Koch money, Russian money, too. Mitch hasn’t just been Donald Trump’s backstop, he’s been Russia’s backstop, too.

Let’s not forget the Gang Of Eight meeting at the White House in September 2016. The intelligence community is so concerned about information they’ve gathered about Russia’s desire to influence the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf that they blow all kinds of whistles. President Obama convenes a meeting at the White House where the IC presents evidence. What does Mitch McConnell do? Does he worry about Russia influencing the election’s outcome?

NO!

Mitch worries about the truth getting out to the American people. According to Slate — “McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.”

Get that? Mitch told Obama that he would accuse Obama of “partisan politics” if he tried to warn us — us being We The People — that Russia was actively engaged in impacting the outcome of the election. Think about it. What Mitch had just been told wasn’t some abstraction — “Russia’s up to something but we don’t know what…” — he was told specifically what Russia was doing. This wasn’t news to Mitch. Mitch had taken gobs of Russian money. He had already been influenced in various ways by Russia…

Mitch — deep in Moscow’s pocket — stood in the way of President Obama warning us about what Russia was actively doing.

Treason doesn’t get much more treason-y than that.

Remember that brand-spanking-new aluminum factory that’s going up in the poorest part of Kentucky — you know, the one paid for by Oleg Deripaska and his very Russian money? That’d be the same Oleg Deripaska who was sanctioned for participating in Russia’s attack on our 2016 election. Deripaska (once GRU, always GRU) received proprietary polling data from Paul Manafort — data for four states: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. We don’t know why Minnesota failed to ignite for Russia but clearly Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan did.

Deripaska turned the polling data over to the GRU who turned all that info about American voters into weaponized Facebook ads that showed up on individual Democratic voters’ Facebook pages (focused on Democratic voters of color) as propaganda. The goal: misinform or disinform the recipient into not showing up at the polls. This is voter suppression on the hoof.

It’s deceitful. It’s illegal. It’s so bad we sanctioned Oleg Deripaska and made it illegal for any American to do business with him. That meant nothing to Mitch. Putin wants all sanctions lifted. So does Deripaska.

So does Mitch.

See the team Mitch actually plays for? It’s not ours.

Mitch McConnell has himself done more to undermine the integrity of our Democratic Republic than almost anyone I can think of. He promised his constituents — the Republican Money — that he would hijack the judiciary for them. That’s exactly what he did. He hijacked a seat that was Obama’s to fill — and handed it to Donald Trump — a man Mitch knew for a fact was corrupt and working for a hostile foreign government.

I honestly believe that a day will come in the not-too-distant future when Americans wanting to call someone a traitor, won’t call them “Benedict Arnold” but, rather, will call them a “Mitch McConnell” instead.

By Their Very Nature, RW-ers Are Closed-Minded & Progressives Are Open-Minded

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

“Both Sides Do It” thinking (and journalism) would want us to believe that that headline is biased and wrong because both sides are equally closed-minded and open-minded. The fact is both sides are different not just because they want to be different but because they actually think differently. There’s even science to back that up (both sides are not equally interested in science by the way — because both sides are not equally “open-minded” about new information).

Conservatives, as their name says, want to conserve. They’ll accept conserving the present but what they really want to conserve is the past. The future — and any change — terrifies them. Progressives, as their name says, want to progress into the future of course since no one wants to progress into the past. Progress demands an open mind because one knows one will face new challenges that old ways simply won’t be able to resolve.

Progressive thinking, by its nature, is inclusive. We see that the answers to our problems could spring from nearly anywhere — and anyone — if only we’d give all these minds the chance to develop. We see America’s diversity as its exceptionalism. We aren’t just the greatest experiment in human self government ever, we’re also the greatest experiment in human diversity where our cultural dynamism is born out of the rich gumbo of ideas and approaches that flow from the variety of cultures who came to this place in order to be part of the first experiment.

Conservative thinking cannot tolerate uncertainty. That’s why it tends to be deeply religious (instead of being more openly-minded and just plain spiritual). Conservatives want a power structure in place. They want the world as it was (when they were in absolute control) to be the world as it always WILL be — with them continuing to be absolutely in control). Never mind the fact that they are an ever-increasing minority. They are the “god of the gaps”.

It’s painfully ironic that our news media — regardless of the topic — always demands equal open-mindedness from both sides. Lacking any perspective, they start from the false premise that both sides are the same and behave the same. They assume that both sides start off equally stuck in their ways — as if “their ways” were exactly the same.

This is why we get a press that demands Elizabeth Warren explain how she’s going to pay for health CARE for all Americans while they shrug off Republicans insisting (without a lick of data) that their tax cuts to themselves will PAY for themselves. This is why we have a main stream news media that gives equal weight to lies and the Truth. This is why we have a news media that insists that Democrats are impeaching Trump for entirely political reasons.

No, you idiots, the Democrats impeached (and will impeach Trump again) because he violated his oath of office the instant he took it. The Rule Of Law either is or it isn’t — and the instant we allow a POTUS to violate his oath brazenly and with impunity, our entire system of self-government is in mortal peril.

The Democrats did not drive us to this Constitutional crisis, the Republicans did. The Republicans are acting political because their interest is political — they want to HOLD ONTO the political power they now have AT ALL COSTS. They’re so determined to hold onto power that they’re willing to cheat every which way they can. They’re willing to suppress every Democratic voter they can. Those are all political acts. The person having their vote suppressed is NOT acting politically, they’re the VICTIM OF A CRIME.

Same token — the Democrats, when they point to the myriad ways Donald Trump has violated his oath of office, broken the law and shredded the Constitution, they’re NOT reacting politically, they’re pointing to criminal acts. When Democrats cry foul — that election 2016 was neither free nor fair because RUSSIA decided its outcome (isn’t that what Mitch McConnell was protected by refusing to let President Obama tell America that our election was under assault?) — they’re not acting politically, they’re being PATRIOTIC.

They’re also speaking for the real victims of the crime, The American People. Our electoral choice was stolen from us — our Will. That’s the majority of Americans. The 3 million plus (who knows how many suppressed votes there were) who wanted what Hillary and the Democrats were selling, not what Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Russian-owned Republicans were selling.

Mitch McConnell epitomized conservative closed-mindedness by not even giving Merrick Garland a hearing. Democrats wouldn’t even think of doing such a thing. Because it’s now how Democrats — the Progressives among them especially — think.

Even a glance at a conservative crowd versus a Progressive crowd tells you all you need to know about each crowd’s open-mindedness versus its closed-mindedness. A thousand words? No — a million words. More even.

Is there really a question?

It Really Is This Simple: By LAW, You Cannot CHEAT To Become POTUS; Therefore Donald Trump Has NEVER Been POTUS

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Now, that’s just The Rule Of Law talking and what does The Rule Of Law know? That’s how Republicans think these days apparently.

To be absolutely fair about it, they’re right. The Rule Of Law is a fiction that we invented for our mutual benefit. There are lots of places on Earth where the people don’t live by The Rule Of Law — so, The Rule Of Law is not some absolute, inviolable Law Of The Cosmos. The only thing actually keeping The Rule Of Law in place as our guiding principle as our faithfulness in maintaining it.

It’s like stamina, if you think about it. You can build your stamina. You can maintain it. But stop working on it and it goes away just like that. You can’t store it. Can’t bank it.

Part of our problem — here in America: we’ve taken The Rule Of Law for granted. Those following it always assumed that everyone was following it. Sure, sure — there are criminals outside The Rule Of Law but that’s why we HAVE a Rule Of Law — to isolate those people and handle them fairly but judiciously. We never imagined, We The People, that so many of those who swore an oath to defend The Rule Of Law (that’s what our Constitution is) were committed to overthrowing The Rule Of Law in a kind of soft white Christian male coup d’etat.

The Rule Of Law says foreign interests can have no say in American elections. The Republican Party violated the hell out of that throughout election 2016. Current GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy FAMOUSLY said to a roomful of Republican muckety-mucks “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump”. Pays for what, someone in the room should have asked. “Pays for what purpose?” even. Instead, then Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan (per the Washington Post) “…instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

According to The Rule Of Law, Speaker Ryan’s response should have been more along the lines of “Holy shit! Guys — get the FBI on the phone pronto! We’ve got a huge PROBLEM on our hands!” But Speaker Ryan didn’t say that. No one in the room even thought anything like it. Hmmmmmmm…

The literal instant we stop following The Rule Of Law to the letter, we compromise it. When we follow it for some people but not so much for other people — that violates The Rule Of Law’s core principle. Speaker Ryan knew he was violating The Rule Of Law — that’s why they all had to agree to “keep it in the family”. Another group of criminals would call that agreement an OMERTA.

It’s the kind of agreement people do when they’ve abandoned The Rule Of Law for their own set of laws. They just haven’t had the decency to tell the rest of us. You know — THE MAJORITY.

We don’t know yet the full extent to which the entire Republican Party was compromised by Russia (and, perhaps, other countries or bad actors). We can only imagine the kompromat Russia is dangling over Lindsey Graham’s pervy head. Even before this though, the Republican Party displayed a disdainful cynicism toward The Rule Of Law. They applied its full pressure whenever they could — while ignoring all the ways they were violating the hell out of it at the very same time.

We know that the Republican Money Machine turned its back on The Rule Of Law a generation ago when it saw the demographic writing on the wall: America was not going to be a predominantly white country for much longer. By 2050, it’s estimated, white people will cease being the majority of the population. Think that doesn’t scare the snot out of conservative white people?

The hard right in this country turned its back on The Rule Of Law the instant they saw it was going to STOP being their instrument of destruction. I don’t know if they feared retribution, but they certainly feared losing absolute power (and the money that goes with it). The Republican Party morphed into The Trump Party — and The Trump Party works for Russia. Russia made Trump POTUS (he did NOT win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan legitimately — he couldn’t have after Paul Manafort gave Oleg Deripaska proprietary polling data on those three states). Even Trump’s reported behavior on election night speaks to a kind of guilty behavior. Ever since, no one has obsessed more than Trump has on his presidency’s legitimacy. Why’s that?

IF we really do believe in The Rule Of Law then Donald Trump’s presidency violates it. The fact of his presidency violates it and stands OUTSIDE The Rule Of Law. Trump’s presidency and The Rule Of Law cannot exist at the same time and in the same place.

There is no precedent for what’s happening to us. We have to stop looking to the past for guidance. If Trump violated The Rule Of Law in order to BECOME president of the United States then, by law, he never was president. Not being president, he never had the authority to do anything he did. He never had the authority to negotiate on our behalf or nominate judges.

Let’s use a metaphor that even Donald Trump would understand: A Beauty Pageant. An American presidential election is a lot like a beauty pageant. If, it’s learned after a winner is announced, that the winner wasn’t honest with the judges (as, say, Vanessa Williams was about some mildly erotic photos she’d been part of), the judges can take away the winner’s crown and give it to someone MORE deserving. Someone, say, who followed the pageant’s rules about not doing things that might undermine the pageant’s “brand”.

Vanessa Williams lost her crown — and everything that went with it. If the judges had known before GIVING her the crown, they would never have crowned her, right? They would never have given her the rights & privileges that went with it. In their minds, they were lied to. Vanessa Williams mis-represented herself.

If part of Vanessa Williams’ rights had been to negotiate branding deals on behalf of Miss America, the judges — the whole Miss America organization — would have voided every single one of them for the same reasons.

I know what I’m saying seems impossible to pull off. HOW would we undo the results of an American election? Well, as one of the wronged in this equation — as one of the MAJORITY whose rights are being threatened by a willful right wing minority — HOW CAN WE NOT? Why, I’d like to know, are we always fair beyond fair to conservatives while demanding Progressives explain themselves relentlessly. When did the press lose its mind demanding from conservatives how they were going to pay for Trump’s tax breaks for the rich?

There’s a stone cold reality staring us in the face: Donald Trump was never the legitimate president of the United States.

That fact ripples a thousand ways in a million different directions. We cannot simply ignore it. We can’t “agree to agree” to get past it. We won’t. It’s exactly like slavery — a gross insult to The Rule Of Law.

But then… The Rule Of Law is only what we say it is.

Ball’s in our court.

Republicans Defend Themselves The Way Bullies Do; It's Not A Coincidence

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Listening to Trump or Moscow Mitch McConnell bray about how Democrats should have talked to their witnesses first before even thinking of sending Articles of Impeachment to the Senate for prosecution — tripe repeated via tweet by Donald Trump — one has to remember: the whole reason Democrats HAVEN’T talked to all those witnesses is because Trump & the Trump White House have refused to allow anyone to testify.

See how that works? The Republicans complain bitterly about the Democrats not “presenting” the very witnesses the Republicans are using to obstruct justice with. How can they be guilty, Republicans ask, if the witnesses who’d verify their guilt won’t testify (because the Republicans won’t let them)?

Republicans — criminals by nature — want to blame the victims of their criminality for… being their victims? I keep trying to describe this feeling — of being victimized by Republican behavior while they act as if THEY somehow are the victims. They’re kind of like a bully holding someone’s head under water — then taunting them by saying “Hey, if you want air, just say so and I’ll let you breathe.”

But, of course, the victim CAN’T say so because their head’s under water; they can’t breathe, can’t talk, can’t even resist really.

“I said,” the Bully repeats smugly, “If you want air — just tell me!”

The victim waves their hands frantically.

“I don’t know what that means,” says the Bully with a cruel chuckle, “Use your words.”

But of course the victim can’t — that’s the point of the cruelty. It’s rape behavior’s evil twin. The rape victim either wanted it or deserved it or had it coming.

Mick Mulvaney spoke Republican philosophy with bracing honesty. Don’t like the Trump White House (and the Republican party) forcing their way on The Rule Of Law, the Constitution and The American People? “Get over it”.

How rapey of him. How bully-ish. How completely and utterly Republican.

Abuse Of Power Is The Republican Brand & The Republican Brand Is Abuse Of Power

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

There’s no similar string of corruption on the Democratic Party’s side: Watergate… Iran-Contra… The Iraq War… Trump-Russia-Trump-Ukraine (it’s the same thing). It’s not because the Democrats aren’t “creative” enough. They’re plenty creative. They just spend most of THEIR creativity on improving the Commonweal, not raping & pilaging it like pirates at a free-for-all.

Both sides do not abuse power the way Republicans do. In fact, both sides do not abuse power. The reason Republicans impeached Bill Clinton wasn’t because he was abusing power. Ironically, that’s what the Republicans were doing — going after Clinton because of a blow job. The American People got it then just like we’re getting it now.

Republicans must abuse power in order to keep power. They’d try to hold onto power using the value of their ideas but — even they know that’s a non-starter. Gerrymandering is an abuse of power. It’s the minority abusing power to disempower the majority so that the majority can’t express its voice. Voter suppression is even more flagrant abuse of power. It only works for the powerful, ya see? It’s impossible for the powerless to do the same thing to the powerful.

Republicans are keenly aware of the demographic handwriting on the wall. By 2050, estimates say, white people will officially be a minority in America. White people (the conservative Christian ones) have decided they won’t go quietly into minority-hood. They declared culture war on the rest of us — and deliberately set out to hijack our Democratic Republic first by capturing the judiciary. You can see Moscow Mitch McConnell hard at work cramming unqualified but ideologically compliant baby conservatives info lifetime appointments Mitch flat out denied President Obama.

Apparently in an election year, it’s up to We The People to, um, decide who we want as SCOTUS judges (nevermind that we already ELECTED a POTUS to do that very thing). I bet Mitch feels the exact opposite if another opening suddenly appears in 2020.

Republicans abuse power like the rest of us breathe.

We all know what Trump and the Republicans are up to — the ultimate abuse of power — permanent one-party (the minority party) rule.

It’s Christmas and Republicans hope like hell that that’s what they find under the tree. It’s incumbent on We The People to make sure Mitch and his fellow travelers find only coal in their stockings.