Loving America to Death 2010-2011

Getting Elected is a Mandate

Getting Elected is a Mandate?

Then

March 1, 2011

Did I Miss the Coronation?

The newest Republican argument is that if people elect you that means they have given you permission to carry out your agenda without opposition. Where did they get this un-American piece of reasoning from? Perhaps someone has been reading a textbook of propaganda techniques. If government -by-slim-majority were the case we would not need any other bodies of government, no Assemblies, no Senate, no House of Representatives. A candidate would simply tell his/her agenda (or just bash the opponent), we would vote (maybe they could just do a poll) and the new official would carry out his/her agenda. President Obama probably would have enjoyed that. He was elected by a pretty fair majority, yet he has not been able to accomplish anything without slogging through molasses. Getting elected only gives you a ticket to enter the fray. This is a people’s government. Getting elected is not the same as being crowned.

Now

January 17, 2020

The Stonewall King of All Time

Trump may be having trouble getting his pricey steel wall-that-is-not-a-wall along our Southern border, but he has managed to build a living wall around himself right there in Washington, a wall that can travel with him and for him. Seems a living wall is far more useful and impenetrable than a physical wall.

The Republicans already had extreme chops as wall builders, building human stonewalls. After all they had the NRA, with Wayne Lapierre at the helm, that madman who inspires fear in gun owners, fear that any regulation amounts to nullification of the Second Amendment rights of American gun owners, as interpreted by right-wing nut burgers. Republicans also have that master of stonewalling, Mitch McConnell in the Senate who figured out how to stonewall even when he only led the Minority.

But when the Republicans got Trumped, they ended up with the Stonewall King of All Time. He treats our government as his own personal fiefdom, and he keeps hiring and firing until he has the perfect Order of Portly Knights and less portly vassals who swear fealty only to him. These people, most often male, not only resemble stone walls but know how to shut down any opposition with an ominous glare, an emphatic no, or a stubborn opacity. William Barr, with the misleading title of Attorney General, is a member of the Order of Portly Knights; so is Mike Pompeo. Mitch McConnell is a loyal vassal, as are all the Republicans in Washington. Did you see Martha McSally snarl as she dismissed one intrepid journalist as a “liberal hack?” It wasn’t pretty, Martha. You are a handmaiden to the powerful patriots loyal to King Trump.

It is clear when you approach these experts at stonewalling that they will shut you down with a glance or a growl. This is so far from what we expect or have usually encountered in our democracy/republic that we are rendered speechless. These walls are living walls. You can’t climb over them; you can’t tunnel under them. You have to out-strategize them, but liberals are not set up to design an effective attack on the fortress that Trump is building. Not only does he have his legitimate government-approved Knights, but he owns a posse of less palatable actors that he can use for illegal activities: people like Rudy Giuliani and even the talkative Lev Parnas (no longer recognized as one of the posse), Michael Cohen who believed, to his chagrin, that loyalty went both ways, Paul Manafort and many others – this posse can expand in size when needed. All it takes to win over a member of the posse is to make them think they are included in the inner circle, that they are courtiers with access to the king.

Trump has learned how to bend the courts of the land to his will, and he can do whatever he likes as long as he takes it to one court and then another court, locks up judgement in endless appeals and skates back behind his human wall of thuggish knights. Now he is on trial in the Senate, but it is highly likely that he will skate once again because the doors of the courtroom have already closed out anyone who is not a loyal member of the fiefdom, including all those pesky serfs in the neighboring kingdom, those Democrats, who are deluded enough to believe that they still have powers they no longer have. Is this what the American Dream has come to? It is the most frustrating thing to have a government run by an entitled bunch of bouncers who think they are knights.

2022

Even with their King dethroned the Republicans continue to exercise fake noblesse oblige, claiming the noble part, while putting forth the idea that with their privilege comes the obligation to do nothing at all for their “subjects”. Republicans have all kissed the ring of their former “King” and are just waiting for him to win an election they have kindly rigged in his favor. They will welcome him back to his throne from which he will never descend again, and he will be granted eternal life. Although Biden won the Presidency, he’s a Democrat so the ‘royal mandate’ does not apply to his Presidency. Only Republican wins count as mandates from the people, conferring absolute power. Trump may have brought us the all-powerful Executive, but the Republicans were already working on it.

The Daily Beast – “The Madness of King Trump”