Tuesday, June 28, 2022

THE JUNE 28 (2022) JAN 6 COMMITTEE HEARING FEATURING MS. CASSIDY HUTCHINSON — NAMING THE DEVI

The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's first term. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.                   --------

Thnx to Ms. Cassidy Hutchinson, today’s Jan 6 Select Committee's emergency hearing witness, for keeping her cool as she related the horrors around her as they evolved leading to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. And thanks to the Jan 6 Committee's Chair and co-Chairs, Bennie Thompson and  Liz Cheny, respectively) for guiding viewers and witnesses through the mire and muck of Trumpville. And thanks to Michael Cohen, for his fall from grace, imprisonment, and self-redemption to speak out about Trumpism. And thanks to others for background context from their own 'Trump' experiences. (Note the proper name of the 'Jan 6 Select Committe' is  U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.)

— — — — -

Today’s ‘Jan 6' hearing brought to mind watching two prior televised hearings equal to the Jan 6 House Select Committee Hearings’ import: the McCarthy Army Hearing in 1954‘ (“Have you no sense of decency, Senator McCarthy”), and the Watergate Hearings (1971’s “lordy there are tapes”).

All three hearings originate from the actions and/or warped thinking of sociopaths who somehow slithered to national attention in the age of television.

McCarthy died young. Nixon resigned during his second term. Trump, if not sent to prison, and even then, must be permanently barred from ever again filling any elected position or even serving in any public post.

(But even if Trump is banned from future elections, that might not be enough to neutralize Trump — recall that Adolph Hitler served less than a year of a five-year sentence for his 1924 seditious coup attempt to overthrow Germany’s Weimar Republic…much like with Trump’s Jan 6, 2021 coup attempt.)

Also, in the three American near-misses cited above, television, the nineteenth-twentieth century common man’s voyeuristic ticket to the world around us, opened windows to places that confirmed many of our suspicions, repelled us and yet had us fascinated to want more.

Yes, many of us were frightened as Hell sitting in the virtual front row of life’s Play. And those scary actors! But it all added up to great entertainment the evening before we had to return to work at the soup factory…and we remember our emotions as we watched.  Those peaks (‘highs’?) still reside as faint outlines in our minds…and we welcome  their return as new stuff appears from the foggy bog of American culture.

America's vicarious TV hearings, IMO, also ‘jumped’ America into a national addictions just as pernicious as real narcotics. And those experiences groomed us into real substance abuses, e.g., ‘Crack’, “Meth’, ‘Oxy’, Molly…all high-emotional-cost, escapist, chemical boosts that for a short time have given America repeats of the thrills we first felt on a national scale as we watched real life on television.

Now we are again via televised hearings we are watching from front row seats the unpeeling of the Trump orange (double entendre).

This time the destruction of America, by Trump, was narrowly avoided… largely because the plans of psychotic minds seem always to fall apart from the over-reaching hubris of their human hosts. (I distance the evil(ill) mind from its physical host in the belief that the illness is its own ‘self’, apart and above the human host.)  'Trumpism’, the extension of Trump's evil intentions into conned followers are are manifestations of an ill brain.

There is a kind of reptilian ‘beauty’ to Trump’s “-osis”. Trump , as reported he said, didn’t fear the Jan 6, 2021, mob, with their military-grade automatic weapons, because in his snake-kin inner brain, he ‘knew’ the mob and the surrounding crescendo-building chaos was the product of his own subliminal, rarely explicit manipulations of his staff and his zombie proxies at Congress, at state legislatures and the mob actors themselves.

‘Trump’, the ill brain, must be named to force it from the shadows into the light. We don’t see ‘Trump’ the brain. What we see is a shade, a sidewalk shadow cast by the ‘brain’ itself..like a 1930–40s BW horror film, that operates from a human body that is too quickly chosen and fits like a cheap suit.. but regardless is functional!

Evil ‘shades’ are not perfect in everything; they lack human aesthetics and are impatient to get about their business…so they sometimes make bad choices about things trivial to them even if important to the rest of us, such as physical health, nice ties, et. -that is how we catch them out!). 

Trump is not a perfect evil, nor perhaps not even earning top-of class evil when compare to world-class evil entities such as Adolph, or Genghis who killed millions. But if not neutralized, for good, Trump potentially may end American democracy. May the gods bless and continue to watch over us.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

THE REVERSAL OF ROE v WADE - THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FAILED ITSELF THROUGH POLITICAL NAÏVETÉ AND BICKERING

 The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's first term. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.                 ____

This post responds to 'Jamess's June 25, 2022, article in the DailyKos  (Simply Amazing! The "Common-law experts" that Alito relies on -- Weren't Even Americans)

Yes, we know that Alito's twisted-history argument leading to the reversal of Row v Wade is bogus. But the Jamess title implicitly carries two lessons for Democrats  -  become grownups, both politically and sometimes personally, and stop the Democrat Party's inclination to drown itself with ego-centered bickering?’  

The lessons from the Trump debacle are: 

POLITE DISSENT, viz., A SPLINTERED BALLOT LOSES EVERYTHING; and 
STOP INTERNAL BICKERING - UNIFY ON BASIC RIGHTS (COMMON GOOD) 

To repeat: the new reality of American politics for Democrats and progressives is that loyal dissent by ballot-splintering factionalism or by abstaining from voting is just 'patio chest-pounding' and the Dem intra-Party bickering is a self-destructive privilege, so 1950s', of a less complex past when we did not lose sleep over Republican or Democrat election winners. (Dems also have their MAGA aspects, too.) 

The Dems lost the 2016 presidential election, IMO, because of their 'naive' internal splintering. 

Democrat Party Loyal Dissent as expressed in do-or-die factionalism and abstaining from voting weakened the progressive vote and helped bring on a regression in America's cultural tone. Within weeks after his inauguration, Trump veered America from Obama's mid-road tone to a hard right wing direction. 

The sudden sharpness of Trump's  right-hand turn ofAmerican governance stunned and demoralized Democrats. More stunning was the barely hidden grift and greed behind Trump's foreign policy and his regressive use of America's national resources. Under Trump, government operations were hidden behind a personal, transactional style that created and favored policies that yielded financial gains for Trump, his family members, and for his corporate supporters. 

As Trump's government operations became more personally transactional, they also became less transparent, And our foreign policy was made a shambles.

Major examples illustrating Trump's radical shifting of America's foreign policy alliances were his November 2017, approval of Phillipine dictator Rodrigo Duterte's bloody campaign to rid the Phillipines of homosexuals and criminal suspects by murdering them on-site by roving right-wing para-military execution squads . 

Then came Trump's September 2018, declaration of "love" for Kim Jong Un, dictator-for-life of North Korea, a rogue nuclear state. 

This was followed by Trump's 2018 expressing that America should withdraw from NATO ... because NATO is a concept outside America's direct interest (which we now strongly suspect really meant that America's NATO membership offended Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, thus interfering with Trump's negotiations with Putin to construct a Moscow Trump Tower... with huge financial gains for Trump and his family.

This was the cess-pit where Trump had quickly, with a near-savant's nose for money, had lowered America.

America's regression under the Trump presidency could have been avoided if Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College. Hillary won the popular vote, but lost the election because of Democratic Party vote-splitting factionalism .... and additionally, as is now known, because of Russian intelligence's proxy operations that exploited America's addiction and vulnerability to its world of extremely profitable internet social media platforms. Facebook was front and center among Russian intelligence's social media targets leading up to the 2016 election.  (Russian interference in the 2016 election was known perhaps shortly before and then after the election...but this knowledge quickly was buried under Trump's threats and misinformation  programming.)

Dems must grow up from naive 'do-or-die' idealism ....look around at the pitchfork regressionism that followed Hillary's  2026 'loss' to the Trumpists.  

America's fall into regressionism has been recently capped by the American Supreme Court's June 24, 2022, anti-abortion reversal of its 1973 Roe v Wade decision that had legalized abortion for the past half-century.  

DEMS MUST LEAVE THEIR HIGH SCHOOLISH DREAM STATE AND BECOME ADULTS ABOUT AMERICAN POLITICS  (Yes, Dems feel outraged and disbelief about the Trump camp’s lies and disinformation...and their control of major parts of American governance, e.g., the Supreme Court, which Trump reshaped with the hypocritical support of the Mitch McConnell-led Senate and which is steadily eroding American life.  

But Dem reactions must be within Constitutional (legal) boundaries... because that is a core Dem message.  

Also, Dems can’t do a ‘progressive version of ‘Jan 6’  without becoming what is detested ..along with bloodshed. (MAGA supporters must be ‘itching’ for an excuse to use their automatic weapons on a destructive Dem protest… that is today’s reality). 

A solution to the Democratic Party's current stasis - Dems must first define what lessons have been learned from the 6+ years of the ‘Trump Era’ (his campaign years until Jan 20, 2021 … and in the future).  

LESSON #1: DEMS MUST STOP NAIVE INTERNAL BICKERING...while sustaining their major strengths which are INCLUSIVENESS and PROMOTING THE COMMON GOOD.  

The Dems lost sight of this in the 2016 election which they lost through their own egotistic, (childlike), internal-splintering of Dem voting power by offshoot, dissenting yet liberal Dem candidates who insisted on having their place on the November 2016 election ballot ...regardless of consequences.  

And we saw the consequence: HILLARY CLINTON’S 2016 ELECTION LOSS WAS THE RESULT OF THE DEMS’ OWN FACTIONAL CONTRARINESS ...that splintered the anti-Trump ballot from within the Dem party. 

The era of idealist sincere (but naive) LOYAL DISSENT VOTE, ‘I’ll show them, I just won’t vote’ or ‘I’ll vote for a splinter group, Ha!', ended on the morning after the 2016 national election.

A unified Dem voting bloc would have boosted Hillary’s Electoral College count beyond what was needed to win, but Dem self-centeredness prevented that.

LESSON #2: The Electoral College must be central to the DEM's future political calculus.  The Electoral College is a reality even if it is poisonous and a dinosaur CREATED FROM and sustained by entrenched structures that originate from America’s slavery past.  It seems the Electoral College will live on for a good while under America's two party system.

As stated above, Hillary’s substantial 2016 popular vote win meant nothing because Dems still lived in their own version of the MAGA dream that ‘proper’ America was or should still be life as it was in the 1950’s. 

In summary - ‘when are the Dems going to be adults about American politics and stop the Democratic Party's inclination to internal self-destruction?’ There is so much more to lose by bickering within the Dem bloc. 

Saturday, June 11, 2022

UVALDE'S ANNABEL & XAVIER: 'REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS, WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO PASS EFFECTIVE GUN CONTROL?' (UVALDE (TEXAS) - 21 SCHOOL SHOOTING VICTIMS)

 The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, from 2009 with President Obama's first term. The focus has been eclectic ...  the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impacts of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.                         -----------

Texas school shooting victims: 10-year-old sweethearts who texted ‘I love you’ to each other to be buried side by side

Annabel and Xavier were schoolkids murdered on May 24, 2022, in their Uvalde, Texas, classrooms ...at the hand of a teen shooter with an AR-15 assault rifle. 

They and 17 other children...and 2 teachers were delivered to Heaven in shattered body parts but in spiritual perfection.  And we know, from their state of grace and with the smiling innocence of children, Annabel and Xavier will still bestow on Republican members of Congress love and forgiveness for some of Congress's weakness to temptations in the wrong temples - adult prejudices, self-interest, and greed - which have blocked America from joining the other developed and lesser-developed nations of the planet with sensible gun control. 

The solution to America's gun problem must be found ...by us, the still living.  

Rest in Peace, Annabel and Xavier, pray for us who are left here to make this right. (..these shootings mustn't continue!)






[https://www.breezyscroll.com/world/texas-school-shooting-victims-10-year-old-sweethearts-who-texted-i-love-you-to-each-other-buried-side-by-side/]