Tag: GOP

The Next Four Years of Donald J. Trump

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Current Events

Whether he’s the President or not, we will be stuck with him

✎ WAYNE K. SPEAR | NOVEMBER 2, 2020 • Current Events

AMONG THE MORE foolhardy undertakings is the prediction of future events, especially now, when we are hours from an election and the speculations multiply on matters that would have been taken as granted only a few years ago. Will the President declare victory before all votes are counted? Will Republicans allow a thorough counting? Would Mr Trump accept a defeat? Will there be a peaceful transition of power, or is the country headed for chaos and violence?

Should this President remain in office, and by whatever means, what might we expect of the next four years? This is the concern of the present essay, and while I have meagre confidence in my ability to foretell, the past four years have provided decent material from which to conjure an outline. Some conclusions are plainly obvious—for example that the President will spend the next four years propagating lies and assaulting those who refuse to pay him tribute. No one doubts that wherever Donald Trump goes, chaos happens. What I aim to accomplish in the following paragraphs is a deliberation of outcomes that are less obvious but nonetheless plausible.

If re-elected, Trump will find himself surrounded by hills that need surmounting. Opposition to his government will be fervent and the Democrats will throw up every conceivable obstacle to his administration. Past experience tells us that the opposition to Trump is ineffective, but this will not discourage it. The second term will be more dramatic than the first. The thirteen current investigations into the President’s business affairs will yield shocking revelations and, if they are sufficiently lurid, efforts once again to remove him from office. These scenarios will be taken as granted by Mr. Trump, and he will set himself to the business of preventing them, replacing the bothersome officials that he can and pre-emptively neutralizing those he cannot. At some point the President’s rhetoric will have reached the pitch at which even his own supporters, driven mad by the constant spectre of dangerous radical leftists, will turn on him, unless he produces show trials and sentences.

The 2020 election will have taught the Republicans important lessons that they will begin to apply on day one of the next term, along the lines of how to maintain power as a beleaguered minority-rule party with a diminishing base of voters and a populous and dedicated opposition. The Trump administration’s approach to this election has been scattershot and improvised, especially their focus on mail-in ballots and what they consider to be voter fraud. It remains to be seen if this administration institutionalizes its thinking, by making systemic changes that reflect their pet theories. The general tenor of the administration will be of a heroic struggle against the organized forces of evil. Increasingly what Trump does will matter less to his supporters than what Trump is, the occupant of an office that would otherwise be occupied by The Enemy.

The transformation of a professional civil service into a political operative division will continue, as will the reconstitution of the federal justice system as a personal legal team whose chief purposes are to give teeth to the President’s grievances and to dispense absolution to loyalists. For years now Trump has endeavoured to reproduce the working conditions he knew as a businessman, surrounded by underlings who did what they were told, no matter how criminal or irrational the instruction may be. It will likely take another four years at least to purge the federal bureaucracy as well as the courts to the President’s satisfaction, and he will set himself eagerly to it. He will cast Presidential term limits as a Democrat conspiracy to steal offices from Republicans, and the Republicans will indulge this fiction as they have every other. 

The war on media will go on, even though the battle has been won. At least as far back as Reagan, conservatives despised journalists and paid them no attention, except to denounce them as dangerous hateful traitors. Now journalists and journalism are held in low regard across the political spectrum. When the revolution arrives, those who write for the papers or who serve as talking heads will be front of the queue for the guillotine. The uselessness of the media is evidenced in the fact that four years of damning news, some of it remarkably detailed and well-researched, has not dampened the President’s approval rating. In any case, many media outlets are only steps from insolvency and are no less likely to be gone in four years than Trump is.

I have said little so far about policy. Trump is less a policy President than he is a dealer in sentiment and symbolism. He is more interested in inciting crowds over the notion of a border wall than he is in building that wall. He knows that anger over a fabrication is real anger. The appearance of something will do just as well as the reality of it. Television taught him that an educated person will take medical advice from someone who once played a doctor, and for this reason he invests heavily in perception. Whenever he is asked about a specific legislative proposal, such as the Republican health care plan, he adverts to feelings rather than proposals. He can not say for sure what the Trump health care plan might be, only that it will be wonderful and everyone will be happy.

This administration of course has not been without policies. Where they exist, they are not that different from conventional Republican policies: tax cuts, generous spending on the military, deregulation. President Trump stands apart when one considers immigration, trade, and America’s relationship with the rest of the world. But as I have suggested already, these are less intellectual policy differences than they are a sentimental distinction, for all share a common emotional denominator: the frightening menace of the outside world. Foreigners take advantage of the United States with crooked trade deals, drag American soldiers into their wars, and send criminals and rapists to hollow out the country from inside. This bleak view of human nature is applied to the country itself, which is understood above all else as a struggle between Patriots and Radical Anarchist Antifa Leftists. Completely absent from the Trump worldview is the notion that people with whom one disagrees can ever have honorable motives. Trump policies are reducible to self interest and to psychological dramas and their attendant emotions, especially fear and ressentiment over perpetually being victimized.

As he has for the past four years, the President will make the noises that his advisors tell him are pleasing to his political base, white evangelical Christians. For the most part his concessions to them will be unserious, such as his yearly claim to have brought back the phrase Merry Christmas, but in other cases like abortion real things will be at issue. In the back of every Republican’s mind will be the hazards of 2020, which no one will want to repeat, and the GOP will feel compelled to work out once and for all how they can go on governing with little more than the votes of old white men to sustain them. The answers thus far have been gerrymandering, voter suppression, and political messaging that trades in apocalypse. Another four years would provide opportunity to work on other arrangements, such as incentives to boost white fertility rates. As improbable and outrageous as this idea may sound, it is the most obvious long-term solution to the challenge now confronting Republicans—the dwindling of their base—and it’s unlikely they haven’t thought of it.

A good many people are finding their comfort in the imminent removal of Donald J. Trump from the White House, but even if this happens, we should expect the man who has so much dominated the news for the past four years to continue doing so over the next four. At bottom this President is a propagandist and an agitator and a show business celebrity, roles he could fulfil as easily outside Washington as inside it. He will need money to finance his considerable debts, and he will need attention to satisfy his bottomless appetite for validation, and combined these needs will push him in the direction of the spotlight and megaphone. He is also now the leader of a massive cultural movement that is only incidentally Republican or even conservative, a fact that will not be lost on him and that he will exploit in both financial and political ways. If and when the GOP-Trump alliance breaks down, his movement will follow him and not the Party of Lincoln, and for this reason a November 3 defeat will not mark the end of the Trump era and will in fact mark the beginning of a new phase of it.

The Weaponization of Anti-Racism

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Politics

I Know Your Are But What Am I

In 2019 everyone is a racist and no one is

✎  WAYNE K. SPEAR | JULY 16, 2019 • Politics

THE BELIEF THAT human characteristics, abilities, and worth are determined by the colour of skin is useful wherever societies are organized along tribal lines. A nation founded upon genocide and slavery will be a nation with a very bad conscience—unless a justification for these can be invented. If one category of human being can be said to be beneath another, whether as a matter of natural law or of divine will, then the myriad inequities established by organized human effort can be treated as a mere expression of nature.

In other words racial classification systems are the product of human barbarities and not the source of them. A man will sleep better at night if he is able to convince himself that the people he enslaves and murders are not as fully human as he is, incapable as they are of thinking and feeling as he himself does. The English for example already ruled over a great many foreign peoples when the faux science of human racial differences developed. Social Darwinism came to America in the late 1800s, after the institution of slavery and the mass murder of Indigenous peoples. The utility of racial conceptions is reflexive, for these conceptions affirm that whatever the supposed injustices or inequalities, some categories of people are by their nature lords and masters of others.

Because this way of thinking about the world regards human beings in the broadest of terms, as groups, it tends toward systemic outcomes. A mass of unique persons must be treated as individuals, especially where character is concerned, but a group whose human characteristics are thought to be shared by virtue of the colour of their skin may be safely organized and managed en masse. This is done most efficiently by means of a systemic approach, which is to say through law and custom and the general dissemination of ideas and beliefs and habits required to maintain the dominance of one group over another. Once a group of persons has been reduced to a common denominator, it is no matter to erect and maintain a system that manages their supposed characteristics, and indeed such a thing will be deemed fitting and even necessary.

The term for apprehending the human world by way of skin colour and other physical characteristics is racism. Once a society has been thoroughly organized according to the logic of racial conceptions, the machinery runs itself almost beyond the notice of its beneficiaries. In a thousand small and subliminal ways these beneficiaries will absorb the habits and outlook of their ancestors and compatriots. Having read only the books written by their forebears, they will know as a matter of course that their ancestors were noble and benevolent. The material and ideological derivation of their outlook will be hidden from view, like the making of sausage, and for similar reasons. For the doctrines of racial human characteristics and racial supremacy to survive, the illusion must be maintained that no such doctrines exist, or exist only as matter of nature and not of human exploitation.

A generation ago it was understood by scholars and activists that racism is systemic in nature. To grow up in a society organized around racist conceptions of human nature and human society is to have planted within one’s mind racist ideas and habits of thought. The work of anti-racism in a society understood to be systemically racist is the work of exposing and critiquing systems—laws, customs, ideology, workplaces, institutions, and so forth. So long as ideas circulate freely and widely in a society, without being challenged, the tendency will be for individual members of that society to adopt them uncritically and in many cases unconsciously. Racism was considered a social and cultural artefact and not the product of an individual and degenerate mind.

Somewhere along the way the work of confronting the rot of racism took a turn. The understanding that racism is a universal toxin, mediated through social systems, gave way to a vigilance for the individual offender. In all likelihood this turn occurred at a time when the perception of political progress made it possible to imagine oneself, and indeed to present oneself to others, as above and beyond the mental disease of racism. In any case the critique of systemic racism has yielded largely to a conception of racism as the provenance of bad people, that is to say as originating in the diseased minds of offenders. If only one can shame enough of these offenders, and drive them out the public sphere, then perhaps racism can be defeated.

Combatting racism from a systemic point of view is one thing, and combatting it from an individual and moral point of view is another. Under the social conception of racism it is a matter of no controversy that we have all inherited a toxic legacy of racist ideas, actions, and arrangements. Understood as an individual and moral failure, however, the charge of racism will in every case be denied and repudiated in the service of career and reputational survival. Over time the characteristics and criteria of generally-agreed-upon racism narrow. The President is unlikely to be considered a racist by his supporters for anything short of shouting the N-word at passersby (if even that) and doubtless there are few if any Trump voters who would say that they are racist. The term is today a grenade lobbied at one’s enemies, not to inflict injury but to hearten the troops, so Trump and his people retaliate in kind. He says that he hasn’t a racist bone in his body—the racists are the Congresswomen who criticize him.

None of this is to deny or downplay the existence of actual, existing bigots or the responsibility that they bear for the contents of their minds. As the politics of America descends into identitarian, tribal warfare it is easy to imagine anti-racism itself becoming simply another weaponized posture with no force or purpose or value beyond immediate political expedience. Perhaps a decade ago leaders might have brokered a deep and nuanced national conversation about race in America, but the time for this appears to have passed. The President does all within his powers to ensure a divisive tribal fight between his inflamed base and an outgroup of migrants, refugees, liberals, and media. The opposition obliges him. Nothing is gained, no one wins, and nobody is better off. ⌾

Dirty Deeds and the GOP

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Politics

A brief history of the recent Pennsylvania race summarizes the moral bankruptcy of American conservatism

✎  Wayne K. Spear | March 15, 2018 • Politics

IT MUST HAVE BEEN a let-down for the President when Rick Saccone lost his Pennsylvania seat to Democrat Conor Lamb, earlier this week and in a Republican district Trump himself had carried by 19 points. But there was consolation. Paul Ryan claimed that the President had in fact helped Saccone, in a race that he described as even more dire before Trump’s rally, and on Fox and Friends the hosts re-cast Conor Lamb as a Republican supporter of GOP policies. Fake news, they call it. Anyways, Steve Doocy added, Lamb’s PA18 district won’t even exist after November, so no biggie.

PA18

What Doocy didn’t mention was that PA18, a suburb of Pittsburgh, has been redrawn by order of the state’s supreme court. It’s the first time a state court has abolished district boundaries ruled to be the work of partisan gerrymandering. PA18 was engineered to make Democratic wins impossible, and for a while the effort paid off. So, yes, PA18 won’t exist after November, but the reasons ought to shame rather than encourage the GOP, assuming they are capable of shame.

The rise of Rick Saccone corresponds with the fall of David Levdansky. For twenty-five years Levdansky represented Pennsylvania’s 39th, but the Democrats went into the Obama 2010 midterm with a narrow, one-seat majority. The Republicans made no secret of their plan. They would pour campaign money into the state legislatures and, if victorious, re-draw the state districts in ways that favoured the GOP’s congressional ambitions. The work was handed to something called the Republican State Leadership Committee, under Chris Jankowski, and is the subject of a 2016 book, Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. The Republicans code-named the operation REDMAP, the Redistricting Majority Project, and as I said made no secret of it.

The first step, ousting Levdansky, was simple enough. On Saturday October 9, with three weeks left in the race, the Republicans began a saturation campaign, filling the airwaves and the mailboxes each day with attacks on the Democratic candidate, claiming he had championed a $600M Arlen Specter Library. (Specter, as you know, had recently defected the Republicans to run as a Democrat. Thus by association Levdansky was labelled as not only a liberal, but a traitor.) The smear worked, the Republicans took over the legislature, and madly off in all directions went the gerrymander.

The redaction of PA18 was even messier than the GOP’s midterm assaults. The new congressional district excised Pittsburgh, and its urban Democratic voters, and produced a delirious map where one side of a street was in one district and the other side of a street in another. As I recall it, one of the candidates lived in a house that became the only house on the street in its district. The overall effect of this dog’s breakfast was to produce reliably Republican blocs in the southwestern suburbs of Pittsburgh, which was what the REDMAP operation had set out to do and what the state’s supreme court has now undone.

And let’s not forget what was special about this month’s special election. Rick Saccone was after the seat vacated by Republican Tim Murphy, a pro-life politician with a lover, an extramarital affair, and a “pregnancy scare” on his CV. Bad as that may be, it’s not what brought him down. Once the bad news started, it kept coming. Murphy’s staff provided the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with astonishing and lurid stories of an office culture spinning out-of-control, and soaked in abuse, hostility, and corruption, where there was 100% turnover and where it had become impossible to recruit and retain competent staff. (Sounds familiar, right?)

Down went Murphy, like the PA18 gerrymandering project, and up came Saccone. In a statement about the court-mandated map, he said he would run and win, regardless of the district, “because it’s not about the lines that are drawn, but about the values I represent.” Haha, and yes, the lofty values of the GOP—we’re all experts on that now, living as we are in a moral universe where Republicans hold Roy Moore godly and where President Donald Trump champions an abstinence-only curriculum. Saccone likes to brag that he was Trump before Trump, but the voters have now weighed in on the GOP’s values and there’s nothing to be proud of. Let the Trumpists fall, let the conversation turn to life after this administration, and may the work soon begin of undoing the GOP’s dirty deeds.

One Nation Under Theocrats

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Current Events, Politics

In Trump’s America everything depends on the manner in which Republican factionalism is resolved. In Alabama we may have come closer to a resolution

✎  Wayne K. Spear | September 28, 2017 | waynekspear.com

HOURS AGO, as of the time I write these words, the President of the United States deleted his endorsements of Luther Strange from the Twitter account @realDonaldTrump. Now, in the untidy corner of social media he alone controls, let the record show that the President is and always has been a Roy Moore guy.

The likelihood has increased that Alabama will send a theocrat and conspiracy theorist to Washington in December. There he’ll join fellow-travellers Trump and Co. in the work of stirring a witch’s brew of fake populism, culture war, and white resentment. (I can’t resist observing that, if Trump had won the day, it would be a Strange Brew.) An irony of the Strange-Moore contest is that Trump backed the lesser-Trumpist candidate and the more-Trumpist contender won. Moore is just what the Republican party needs in 2017—another Bannon-and-Mercer-backed extremist who loathes the government and who comes to Washington not to build but to destroy.

Alabama Capital Steps | Photo by sunsurfr (Creative Commons)

Across his career Roy Moore has agitated to “bring the knowledge of God back to the United States,” whatever that means. Eighty-six percent of Alabama voters self-identify as Christian, half of them as evangelical Protestants, and still Mr. Moore deemed his fellow citizens sufficiently god-stupid that he commisioned a 5,000-pound Ten Commandments granite memorial for the state’s Supreme Court building. Ordered to remove it by unanimous resolve of the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, Moore refused. This was the first occasion of two dismissals from public office—in 2003 and 2016—for (among other things) disregarding a federal injunction, abusing administrative authority, and demonstrating an unwillingness to follow the law. And so, to return to the theme of fellow-travelling, one can hope that if Moore goes to Washington, he might well go at the moment the President is facing dismissal on similar charges.

The only law Mr. Moore recognizes is the law of God. Under the law of God same-sex marriage is “the ultimate destruction of our country” and homosexuality is “an inherent evil” and the deaths of September 11, 2001 and Newtown, Connecticut are deserved punishments for America’s waywardness. Under the law of God Muslims are not fit for office and lesbians are not fit for parenthood and the laws of mere mortals may be ignored. It’s worth noticing that the victorious Alabama Republican primary candidate for the US Senate holds views that would be unremarkable in a Wahhabist-jihadist training camp. Also, why do these God people always have sex on the brain?

Beginning in the 1980s the Dixiecrat Alabama of George Wallace slowly morphed into the Republican Alabama of today. Here political diversity does not take the form of parties, but rather of Republican rivalry. It is easy for outsiders (and especially for northeastern urbanites) to sneer and condescend at Alabama, but what is happening in Alabama matters because it is happening everywhere. One need look no further than Washington, D.C. for confirmation. Conservatism has split into two principal factions, one grounded in political norms and institutions and the other in theocracy and resentment and the culture warfare of ethnic-nationalism. Everything depends on the manner in which this factionalism resolves, and in Alabama the nation just took another step closer toward resolution.

The Ones Who Know Jesus

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Fiction

Trumpetsound, a fissure of sky. A midnight darkness visible yields to His glory. The firmament echoes of angelsong. Jesus has come, and the many see and fear.

Hallelujah! He has come!

For centuries He has tarried. For millennia His people have waited, reciting His words. “Soon,” they whispered. In the streets they declared: He will return! The people of Jesus have held to His promises, lo these passing generations, and now He is returned.

Thy Kingdom, come.

The people of Jesus behold his greatness. The people of Jesus rejoice. A time of greatness has begun.

The first to speak is the Holy Press Secretary.

“Hello everyone,” says the Holy Press Secretary. “This is a massive crowd, the greatest crowd ever. Much larger than the crowds of Satan, our adversary. Look at this crowd! And now, I would like to introduce your King, the Son of Man, Jesus.”

The Host of Holy Angels parts, and Jesus floats into view. He wears a business suit and a red tie. He smiles, waves to the adoring crowd. He gives a thumbs-up to someone in the audience. He claps, just as they are clapping. It is a good day, and Jesus is smiling.

“It’s great to be here,” says Jesus. “I love Florida,” says Jesus. “Tremendous people. The best people.”

The people of Jesus are ecstatic. The Chosen One is among them and the time has come to fulfil the Promise.

“Blessed are the businessmen,” says Jesus. “The CEOs, the hedge fund managers. The heads of companies, tremendous people, the best people. They are going to help Me make the Earth great again. That is why I have appointed them to lead you during the transition.”

Then a voice among the crowd: “Blessed are the weak and the poor!”

“Get him outta here,” says Jesus. Two angels comply. They take the man by his arms and walk him to the edge of the crowd, where they shove him to the pavement.

Later, the Holy Press Secretary will explain that Jesus did not say “Blessed are the poor” or that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” The Holy Press Secretary will explain that these words are the product of the lying media. These words are fake news. What Jesus said and what was written about Him are two different things, the Holy Press Secretary will say.

In the meanwhile Jesus tells them there will be streets of gold and rivers flowing of milk. “Our hard-working dairy farmers, tremendous farmers, are the best. My infrastructure plan will put gold on every street. You’ll get tired of seeing gold, there will be so much gold.”

The people of Jesus are thrilled by these promises. Jesus says they will live forever, and that all tears will be wiped away. He tells His followers that He will build a mighty kingdom, and He will smite their enemies. And it will happen fast, He says, so fast. You won’t believe it, He says. Believe me, He says.

The people of Jesus believe. They are, after all, believers. They believe in Jesus and they believe in believing in Jesus and they believe in belief. It is by faith that they live and are are saved. Believing in belief in belief, hungering and thirsting for things unseen, fingers in the darkness.

*

Jesus has come with a sword. Those who question Him are deserving of fire. His people gird for war. The unbelievers, the doubters, the naysayers, the blasphemers—all are deserving of their perdition. “We are the persecuted,” say the followers of Jesus. “But no longer. The time has come for battle against our enemies.”

In the kingdom there is bottomless provision for war, abundant provision for force. Provision for weapons, provisions for the squadrons of angels who now patrol the streets, provision for displays of threatened violence against dissenters. Jesus reminds them each day that they are one People under God, one in thought and in belief and in nature. They are one nation under the Leader, and the Leader is leading them to greatness.

“No one gets to the kingdom except through me,” says the Leader. “I am the way, the truth and the life.” The people know that their Leader speaks the Truth. There ought to be no room for dissent or challenge, no opportunity requested for clarification, no court of appeal. Those who question the Leader are unpatriotic traitors, and the vile filth of their nature will be remembered.

The Leader withdraws to His mansion. He delegates His work to minions. He makes occasional appearances where He basks in the adulation of His people. He becomes obsessed with the doubters and non-believers, issuing threats against them. “They treat Me so badly, so unfairly,” says the Leader. “But I will prevail.”

The months pass. Somehow the streets remain paved, not of gold, but of dehiscent tarmac. There are no rivers of milk. The tears that were supposed to be wiped away instead wet the faces of children. The Leader tells them that greatness is coming, that the Kingdom will be the best kingdom they have ever seen.

“The Leader said nothing about milk,” reports the Holy Press Secretary. “The greatness is coming, only our many enemies encircle and frustrate us. The ones who are against us are and against you. Look to the enemy!”

It doesn’t matter what happens, or what does not happen. It doesn’t matter what the Leader says, or does not say. Nothing matters, save that the people believe in Him. Fear and loathing of their enemies keeps them strong. What the Leader hates, they hate also. They have built their church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

The Leader enjoys His throne yet He is restless. He is a jealous Leader, desirous of universal adulation. Every knee must bend or be cast into a lake of fire. When the Leader is not enjoying the repose of His many stately properties, He broods over the resistance. Why are there some who do not believe? Why do they take His name in vain? Why do they not honor Him?

The frustration and anger of the Leader grow. He dismisses every Judas among Him, but another Judas soon rises. He cuts down every obstacle, but another obstacle springs from the earth. This work of His will take longer than He realized.

Once again, He appeals to His people. “I am your Leader,” He says. “And our enemies are against Us. We must wage war against Our enemies.”

“Yes,” they say. “We must fight our enemies. And then the Kingdom will come.”

Yes Mister President Yes

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Fiction

Through the fence between the curling flower spaces the ones who make the words the mean words can see us hitting later they bring me the papers the papers papers papers and I tell them I say Enough of the fucking papers no papers tell me in words use your fucking words the fucking words FUCKING not papers and they say Everything is good Mister President the people love you they say which they do I think so yes the people love me but how do I know well there are the rallies my huge rallies they adore me and clap and hold up signs I hear nice words nice and they love me they all do every one of them they adore me and they wear hats and shirts with my name CRUSHER my name me they love me at my rallies me love me how I wish I were there now instead of here on the floor they have hidden the remote control again perhaps under a chair or carpet so I will crawl along the ground feeling for the remote and my phone is gone also where could it be I must make the words that go out into the world the words for my people the people love me the news is all good they tell me this they say You are doing a fabulous job Mister President and Look here Fox News is saying nice things about you Mister President You are a good President and Yes I say I am a good President so good only inside that feeling like fire or smashing things falling falling I sweat and soon my hands are pounding pounding pounding they should love me all of them I am pounding why do they not love me everything coming apart to pieces I hate them all what is going to happen it is all going wrong now I am Crusher the greatest CRUSHER no one is smarter or stronger than I am I always win I will win I will crush them they will see now the television is on I see bright pictures faces moving nice people talking will they be nice to me are they nice people or mean people nice or mean I go to that place now I am hitting the ball and it goes wheeeeeeeeeee up into the air and falls falls somewhere up the fairway under a blue sky a steak and ketchup fries gold the people love me I am everywhere on the newspapers the televisions everywhere the gold of my home steak I hit the ball I am happy the people love me they adore me they are mean they are mean to me so I hit back I hit them HIT HIT HIT HIT HIT them they are fucking mean they are mean I HIT them FUCK FUCKING FUCK these motherfucking No Mister President they say Please Mister President Give us the phone I am shouting FUCK then pick pick pick words pick pick pick words it is full to 140 that means it is full and it is done pick it is done the words out in the world I HIT HIT HIT them the ball into the air I am calm now there the ball is in the air it is up in the blue sky I breathe where is the ball I can breathe ah the ball and steak and ketchup and fries and ice cream I am calm the people say They love you Mister President and it’s true I think it is true what is this I am hearing words I hear words I hear them say Crusher I hear them say words names I hear mean words bad people FUCK FUCK my hands pounding YOU ARE FIRED FUCK poundingpounding Please Mister President they say Please sit Look your picture here look the words are nice about you they are nice words about you love the people love love warm it is warm Please Mister President they are saying Look at the nice picture and then I am calm I hit the ball wheeeeeeeeeee look! it goes up into the air they take the flag out and I am hitting then they put the flag back and we go to the table and I hit and the other hits and I crawl on my hands and knees looking for the remote the phone I am crawling Listen at you now Lester says Was it on account of them Russians Lester Holt says I can see him now up on the TV he is nice Yes I say the Russians Yes I say Yes

How is Arizona’s Bill 1062 Not Discrimination Against Gays?

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Politics

Roccos

REPUBLICANS HAVE AN extraordinary talent at crafting eye-grabbing viral legislation, and in recent years they’ve been upping the bar in the field of contentious law and law-making. My standing pick for sheer legislative chutzpah is North Carolina’s Motorcyle Abortion Bill, but it won’t be long before this triumph is surpassed. The GOP is playing a game of Neknominate, only using the country’s institutions and laws. Neklegislate, I guess you’d call it.

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The Roundtable Podcast 53

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Podcasts

• Week of 13.10.2013 | “SEND IN THE CLOWNS”

Sam Hyde

Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane | Quebec physicians ordered to stop performing virginity tests | Vatican withdraws Pope Francis medals after spelling Jesus’ name wrong | Mike Duffy billed Senate $65,000 to pay friend for ‘no tangible work,’ RCMP alleges | Recommended Article: I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss | This Comedian Hijacks a TED Talk And Basically Makes A Fool Out of Every “Thought Leader” Ever | Daniel Noehl Calls Police After Being Stiffed In Drug Deal | Music: Paul McCartney “New” | Charges that Canada spied on Brazil unveil CSEC’s inner workings | Scarborough residents report receiving robocalls after Toronto municipal Councillor Ainslie steps down | Giorgio Mammoliti is Back on the Toronto Executive Committee

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

The Roundtable Podcast 47

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Podcasts

• Week of 23.06.2013

Aboriginal Day

The National Research Centre for Residential Schools | The GOP’s Jaw Dropping “Scientific” Theories | Half of First Nations Children Live in Poverty, Says New Study | Recommended Article: Diary of Second World War German teenager reveals young lives untroubled by Nazi Holocaust in wartime Berlin | The Sovereignty Summer | Canadian Tire: Taking Over the World | Quiz Time

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

For the GOP, it’s 2050 in America

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Politics

I HAD JUST finished reading the New York Times article “Republicans Reconsider Positions on Immigration” when confirmation of President Obama’s Florida victory arrived. Had more Republicans heeded the advice of Florida’s Jeb Bush, this article, and the contest it describes, might have concluded differently. Having absorbed this uncontroversial bit of information, Republicans are at last coming around to the Bush and company point-of-view, which ten years ago was summarized as “The Big Tent” and the Party of Lincoln, and whose current mantra is the phrase path to citizenship.

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Republicans liked Todd Akin before they disliked him

by Wayne K. Spear, posted in Politics, World

HUMAN REPRODUCTION is nothing if not a fertile topic, and our fecund media have underscored the point in the current case of US Senate hopeful, Todd Akin. At issue is his recent musing on the improbable concurrence of rape and conception, but there are other curious branches and sub-branches to the Akin story which are instructive. As the elections and leadership conventions approach, let’s peer down the avenues opened up by this case of unfortunate phrasing.

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