Inspiration: a word image: “Imagine being a Democrat and having to pretend Joe Biden is competent, Hillary Clinton was innocent, and Barack Obama did a good job.”
From The Awesome Conversation
Joe has just won America’s toughest election; Hillary has no indictments pending; Obama didn’t do a good job: he did a terrific job.
Imagine waking up as an aristocratic deluded narcissistic head-nodding Republican incapable of a moment’s reflection on the distribution of power in a democratic society devoted to rule of law as opposed to unquestioning obedience — oaths of loyalty appreciated — to a “great leader”.
WHAT IF the United States of America were returned to aristocracy?
WHAT IF Americans less connected were returned to obedience to absolute authority?
Along the way, the Trump-hated Left has been off on its liberation trip with its eyes on universal basics and trashing of white male this and patrician that. What if the White Male Kingdom and America’s Old Money were gambling on some powerful representation themselves with the cooperation, of course, of police and military forces?
What if Trump’s World was primping to look like Putin’s World ordered by his loyal New Nobility and bounded by a corrupt faked up marriage between Church and State?
It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power in 2002 — for Turkey’s “Kemalist Occident,” or dalliance with the West, to end. With the mass resignation of Turkey’s military leadership last month, the last standing Kemalist institution, the army, has succumbed to the AKP’s decade-long political tsunami.
This political bookend for Kemalism suggests that AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey’s “new” Ataturk. He doesn’t have the cachet of being Turkey’s liberator, but he enjoys as much power as Ataturk once had.
The firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper kicked off a rapid-fire series of high-level departures at the Pentagon on Tuesday, setting off alarms on Capitol Hill that the White House was installing loyalists to carry out President Donald Trump’s wishes during an already tense transition.
In quick succession, top officials overseeing policy, intelligence and the defense secretary’s staff all had resigned by the end of the day Tuesday, replaced by political operatives who are fiercely loyal to Trump and have trafficked in “deep state” conspiracy theories.
In the way of some older men growing gray and tired, my patience for writing longer copy — and responding to endless online arguments — may be growing thin, so above I hope I’ve telegraphed a statement about political bullying, the sometimes ironic destruction of freedom by those who most pretend to represent it, and the related plundering of states by their own leaders. The “by any means” Far Out Left has indeed shouted down its favored targets, time and again, and it has carried forward from Russian anti-Semitic traditions its own brand of Jew-hate (reading recommended from other history: Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism, Cambridge UP, 2009), but Orwellian Left seems to me far from the moderate liberalism known to the best of America’s Democratic and Republican Parties.
Similarly, one cannot overlook the effects of 9/11 (2001 for kiddies) on both the promotion of necessary state security organizations and (less necessary) reactionary nationalists. On that tack, Erdogan, Orban, and Trump suffice for examples of a want of return to a medieval and frequently ugly political absolutism. All who would become dictators cannot wait to get their mitts on a state’s army and treasury — and then have at it with their perceived competitions — while “the people”, Left or Right leaning, may be seduced by dogma and made ready for plundering and damnation, and much to the delight of breathtakingly enriched family and friends.
I will have to find again historian Richard Pipes’ observations on Russia’s struggle with constitutional monarchy and with the concept of sovereignty. For the most part, Russia’s assertion of sovereignty considered property and persons alike in its dominion, and proof would be the right to destroy either at will and with impunity.
Think of that when you reflect, if ever, on Russia’s behavior across the so far long nine years of the Syrian Tragedy.
Europe chose a different direction in its comprehension and — in the end — consideration of others.
@AOC Know they Civil War history, especially Lincoln's instructions to Grant https://t.co/HT1yexi17x This is to defend the inclusion of Confederate generals in the preservation of America's military history and endowment without revisionism. We have black generals and heroes too.
The “they” should be “thy”. 😦 I don’t know how I missed “typos” and apologize for such errors. Fresh eyes? Proofing? I try.
@EsperDod My father worked for McNamara and wrote for LBJ, Dr. Esper, and I have not been exactly Right of his hero Ronald Reagan 🙂 , but on this matter, I believe in truth, warts and all. We should just say no to revisionism and instead update our inventory of noble statues. https://t.co/T2fdHGVkBe
Advice to Black Lives Matters and others who have taken up the cause of destroying American memory in its totality: let the past remain where it fell and where it has been remembered, but while attending to that preservation of memory, let’s build a better nation now and for the future. Since the Civil Rights Era — and from before it and far after — American political activists have confronted prejudice and sought corrections. Well, we are all still on it.
No truth (clear, complete, accurate, valid, reliable)?
No justice ever!
America’s Civil War ended the institution of slavery in America and affirmed the Federal government as sovereign throughout. It didn’t erase evil; it didn’t fix the more venal of hearts; it didn’t redress wrongs: what it did was set a much, much better course in and through our collective democratic modernity.
Related Online
Trump in June stunned NATO allies and senior DoD leaders when he directed the withdrawal of thousands of troops from Germany. Days later, he blindsided the Pentagon yet again by tweeting his opposition to the removal of Confederate leaders’ names from Army bases, just two days after Esper opened the door to doing so.
For those who have encountered the wild disinformation at times disseminated by The Epoch Times and either swallowed the bait, as with QAnon Conspiracy agitation and propaganda, or confronted and dismissed the same but didn’t fight, here’s a short list of additional reference online –>
Soviet Era Communist Party power gave up the ghost at noon on December 25, 1991 when the Soviet Union officially acknowledged its dissolving in bankruptcy and Party nomenklatura (elites) turned into jackals tearing away the assets of the former state piece by piece. While the Communist Party persists in Russia, it is no longer a power there. President Vladimir Putin has made himself a “Vertical of Power” surrounded by politically enfeebled but immensely wealthy and otherwise powerful oligarchs, quite a few of which have made the sanctions list of the United States government.
Regarding China’s Communist Party: it has proven helpful in the minting of billionaires.
Posted to YouTube September 29, 2019.
Loyalty to Party | Loyalty to Putin | Loyalty to Trump
The most important loyalty of all: the worship of money.
Where are The Communists?
China’s zeitgeist — from predatory international lending to its passion for totalitarian political, religious, and social control — is troubling for the west, and I will have a post out on that soon. In the meantime, true American conservatives would do well to shift their talk away from communists and globalists and a horde of made-up and talked-up bogeys and move toward engagement with more authentic and challenging domestic and global issues and themes.
China produced nearly four in every 10 new billionaires this year, outpacing the number of new faces in the US and allowing Shanghai to leapfrog Hong Kong for the first time in terms of the number of super-rich, Hurun Report Inc said.
The world’s second-largest economy added 182 of 479 new billionaires, taking the tally in China to 799, according to the latest Hurun Global Rich List 2020. The US minted 59 new ones to raise its total to 626.
Klett said that during his stint at the Epoch Times, he had a front-row seat to the epistemic crisis triggered by Trump’s ascendancy, one that has made distinguishing truth from political fiction increasingly difficult. “In that first interview, I was being honest when I said I could be neutral. I really believed that was possible,” Klett admitted, hands shoved deep into his pockets as we walked down a Brooklyn street in search of a quieter bar. “By the time I left, just a few days before the election, I realized what everyone is still coming to terms with.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That there’s no difference between the news and propaganda. That objectivity is about who has power.”
A fellow said to me last week that he took up law because there was no money or point to having taken a degree in philosophy.
He was wrong.
Are the humanities the “icing on the cake” of civilization — or the yeast that gives rise to civilization?
If you are American — or modern as opposed to feudal or medieval — you are part of a great western experiment and experience that has for its foundation Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman history, both beautiful in parts and in some horrendous (the signals of the end may be read in the inhumanity of Caligula and Elagabalus).
E Pluribus Unum
However arrived or stanced, we may all agree on our commitment to our Constitutional mission and the reshaping of so many fears and passions in the face of changing demographics and the presence of advancing and revolutionary communication and other technologies.
We have been witness to at least two NATO states marching forward into the past — Hungary and Turkey — and we should wonder why WE should have wanted to do that ourselves.
Well, that was a bit Hyde Park, wasn’t it?
🙂
Here’s a glimpse into how I believe we got here and became so temporarily given to an autocratic/authoritarian and medieval old nutty soul.
It takes a little patience to get the Moscow-in-America story and what it portended — or still portends — for authentic dignity, freedom, and security in America as well as a compassionate and working politics that adds to our national — and natural — political cohesion and coherence.
In consideration of present and future generations, a little intellectual exploration into the greater and more accurate image of our working democracy might be worth it.
WASHINGTON — President Trump repeated his unfounded claim that political foes were trying to steal the election from him during a briefing on Thursday evening as he trailed his opponent and remaining swing states were leaning toward a Joe Biden presidency.
So your eyes don’t glaze over with the legalese, here’s only the opening salvo fired at incumbent President Trump’s effort to derail or disrupt the election count in Nevada –>
For the fifth time since April, a conservative leaning entity or organ of the Republican Party has run to a Nevada state or federal court with entirely fabricated claims of voter fraud and vote dilution.1 Each time, their claims have been unsuccessful. Indeed, just four days ago, in a nearly identical case, Judge Wilson from the District Court in Carson City found after an eight-hour evidentiary hearing that the same lawyers who filed this lawsuit had failed to offer evidence of “any fraudulent ballot being validated or any valid ballot invalidated” or any evidence of “debasement or dilution of a citizen’s vote” because of Clark County’s use of a signature match machine. Ex. B, Nov. 2, 2020 Order, Kraus v. Cegavske, No. 20-OC-00142-1B, Dept. 2, at 4, 13. Similarly, Judge Wilson found baseless Plaintiffs’ claims that public observation of the process was being in any way unlawfully impeded. Id. at 10-11. Now, with nearly all of the votes in the state having already been counted, a group of plaintiffs backed by President Trump’s campaign has filed a lawsuit requesting a remedy that would meaningfully slow Clark County’s ballot processing just as its votes could swing the presidential election.2 The Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) and Nevada State Democratic Party (“NSDP,” together, “Proposed Intervenors”) plainly have a significantly protectable interest in this case.
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