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. 

TRUMP’S CALLOUT FOR INSURRECTION ON JANUARY 6, 2021 - THAT FORTUNATELY FAILED

It’s being debated but let’s face it, on January 6, 2021, there was an attempted, insurrection takeover of the  democratically-elected American government that barely failed. 

The intended, forceful takeover of the American government wras inspired by Donald Trump  (as he inspired prior to the 2016 election) and attempted with planned (premeditated) kidnappings, torture and executions-by-gallows-hanging on the Capitol grounds just in front of Congress. 

Although not a successful insurrection, bad actions were perpetrated by Trump’s followers resulting in deaths, injuries, and stealing and destruction of government property.

And it all began months earlier with Donald Trump’s pre-emptive whining, echoed by Fox News and other right wing voices, about his  possible 2020 election loses that could only happen except by Democrat cheating and vote rigging - which course, Trump’s state and national supporters were surreptitiously already putting in place for his benefit. (All of these ‘moves’ Trump committed leading up to the 2020 election.). 

Therefore, by Trumpist ‘logic’, his supporters had to anticipate Democrat Party cheating and ‘betrayal’ and prepare to act to take back their rightful 2020 election win. 

Hence, prior to the 2020 election, Trump began a program of anticipatory preparation for insurrection - culminating in a post-election call out for a ‘wild’ gathering of Trump loyalists in Washington DC at the Capitol Hall of Congress, on January 6, 2021.

TRUMP’S CALL TO INSURRECTION - ‘LETS HAVE A ‘WILDING’’.!

Trump’s invitation to a “wild’ time at the Capitol was an unsubtle reference to the term “wilding” which has been for some decades a label attached to Trumpist-like mobs and translates  to ‘destructive running amok’ with unconcerned, deadly consequences for persons and property — hence the gallows constructed by the insurgents and the plastic wrist ties, the guns carried, the Molotov cocktails, the bombs cached at strategic locations nearby, the feces smeared on the walls of Congress, the urinating on the Capitol carpets and elsewhere, the ‘wilding’ insane shouting for Vice President Pence, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other elected offices to come out of hiding.  To summarize, as planned, there was an incited deadly rampage (a ‘Wilding’)  carried out by a deliberately inflamed, run-amok mob … whose actions were pre-meditated to capture and kill elected officials (the wrist ties, gallows and guns) whose election legitimacy had prior been confirmed by 60 unsuccessful court challenges. January 6, 2021, was a Trump-inspired Insurrection, with tressxpassing, destroying property, gunfire and killings ... that failed.

WHAT LIES AHEAD FROM THE TRUMP DEBACLE?

Today, Pericles21 wrote a comment on John Amato’s Nov 27, 2020, ‘Crooks and Liars’ article on the future political effect of the 2020 election and was drawn back in memory to the honor of sitting in a small group college seminar listening to Hannah Arendt’s impromptu explorations on human vulnerability to authoritarianism manipulations and specifically on the rise and inhuman atrocities of 1930s-40s totalitarian Nazism (The Origins of Talitarianism, H. Arendt, 1951).  (The remarkable thing about Hannah Arendt is that her explorations, though not satisfying to everyone, were in my opinion 100 percent sincere ... one could tell by her visible pain in attempting, again, after no doubt many such presentations, to express ‘The Answer’, and we still haven’t figured this out.) Although Arendt’s thoughts, explorations and writings did not ‘close the book’ on authoritarianism, Arendt did leave vital ‘thought equipment’ outlining a path to frame, ‘see’ and describe how the human conditions leading to ‘modern’ authoritarian leadership and excesses (such as Trumpism’?). 

One feels that Hannah Arendt would be saddened but perhaps in a resigned yet ever hopeful way not shocked, that her musings and writings on authoritarianism continue to be sought out and critically pertinent after nearly a century ... and raise the same questions in current times! 

In his article referred to above, John Am@to asks ‘what did we learn from the rise, four years of the atrump ‘presidency’ and  the recent election details?  And, ‘can we prevent a future Trump?’ 

One answer, if not the most at-fault agent, is the pernicious effect of deliberate misinformation spread by profit-focused media outlets such as Fox News and similar right-wing outlets. But, in this blogger’s view, is this a too simple jand too quick jump to hand out ‘blame’ ... no matter how satisfying that might feel?  Does such an ‘easy’ labeling actually help create an opposite atmosphere of fear of expressing opinions, i.e., an equivalent misdeed?  

And an important corollary question is, ‘who will be the judge of media boundaries?’ 

Here is Pericles21’s comment on the John Amato article:

“Newsmax CEO Admits Airing Conspiracy Theories As News”  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars, Nov 27, 2020):

Pericles21: “We must be careful of capricious and dangerous censorship, I.e., ‘What is, or is not, News?’ And ‘who or what entity shall judge on that question?’  Why can’t we simply rely on the robustness of American ‘freedom of the press’? Hmmm ... but that ‘freedom’ got us Fox ‘News’, and Trump, didn’t it!!”  

 There is no doubt, in the minds of the majority of American voters (an excess of 7 million votes over Trump voters in 2020) that Trump and Trumpism was a bullet that America blessedly dodged ... and actually dodged back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the majority vote. How Hillary won but still ‘lost’ her election must be answered and preventive, but equitable, measures designed and implemented ... such as finally removing or neutralizing the Electoral College.

 

 

TRUMP’S BENT-UP, CROOKED TRUMPET HAS LED AMERICA TO BECOME A THIRD RATE DICTATORSHIP

To begin this post, Trump lost the 2016 American presidential election’s popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, but he ‘won’ the electoral college ‘tally’ by a significant number. However, that ‘Win’ resulted from a total margin of 77,000 votes spread strategically (through voter district gerrymandering) over three critical states - an accomplishment critically aided by a murky package of onion-layered data-mining and internet analysis-planting operations, shell companies and ultimately funded by Russian Intelligence. All of this added up to manipulation of the American 2016 election thru the ‘cooperation’  of Trump campaign managers, Wikileaks and an ‘independent’ Ukraine-based (not Ukrainian!), cyber-snooping startup that did ‘business with both the Republican and then the Democrat Party and alongside with  Russian Intelligence (GRU) - a fine mix as they would say in Boston. 

Once in office, Trump has openly, and without restraint from a partisan and blatantly enabling Senate, broached historically normative as well as some Constitutional presidential boundaries.

Trump has proven ignorant of, or ignores knowledge of American diplomatic practices, treaties and objectives; he has set his own personal, often erratic and short-term changeable, new ‘courses’ for American diplomacy that seems to change daily somewhere and appears to the international community to be a kind of drunken random walk. This has negatively impacted America’s trade and financial links.

Trump operates America like a small, sole-owner corner shop; or he wants to operate America that way.  He is a micromanager and to render America suitable to his small-scope managerial capabilities, he has unmethodically (but effectively) reduced America to a giant dressed in rags, now humbled and bent to his small store vision limits. Trump has stripped most of the major government departments of seasoned top staff, reduced significantly operational employees, and inserted his personal directors who like him are unfamiliar with the operations and purposes of their new jobs. As the result, America presents to the world a face of ignorance, amateurish bumbling and unprofessionalism that constantly throws historical allies off-balance and estranged America’s relationships with them. A telling sign of the Trump era are his apparently favorite international leaders, a consistent set of global autocrat dictators - principally those of North Korea, Philippines, Brazil and Russia. America, directed by Trump, is no longer a ‘peer’ within the diplomatic and trade circles of former allies…why…because America no longer knows what it is doing!

On other fronts, Trump has shown a propensity to associate with fringe elements from conspiracy-theory groups to pseudo-science to neo -Nazi racists. Nazi-flage wavers are tolerated in public now and have open-door access to Trump. 

Amid this and more, Trump has attempted to micro-manage America’s response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic - he has fronted new ‘cures’ as often as he hears of them even though some have been bizarre such as calling for testing bleach injections and throat sprays. Continuing with his attitude regarding the pandemic, Trump also displays a hostility to Science methodology and safety testing. Also in this regard, he has nearly destroyed the environmental regulations set up by former republican administrations to assure Americans of safe water, air and products. 

To summarize, but there is much more that can be described, the Trump presidency has been characterized by ignorance, unprofessionalism, anti-science, anti-regulatory, anti-intellectualism, anti-government, small-scope destructiveness and pettiness. Plus all of these characteristics are mixed in with what some see as psychopathy, malignant-narcissism and a projected self-destructive bent.

The question is, at this time, how further down this destructive path and to what darker corners will Trump drag America and the rest of the world?

A Solution for the Times: 'Daddy Let Your Mind Roll On' (Or, Why Worry, Suck Down That Kool-Ade) - Why Don'tcha?

Are 'we', America and the rest of Earth's inhabitants (all of 'us' - hominids and lesser 'folks')beset with the projected dis-ease of a 'canted' personality, that of our dear POTUS? Think carefully about that before you answer 'Nyet'! (Catch the insinuation?!?!)

Since the November 2016 POTUS election, it's been tough to gather oneself and 'find' time to ponder and collect one's thoughts about what happened in the election, and what is happening and what might still happen. Basically, it's all been 'batshit' crazy since November 2016.

For several months (geez, 6 months actually) Pericles21 has had an unfinished overview post about what happened last November 2016, but it seems - No! It does not 'seem', it 'is the case' - that America, and the world with us (because of us), has fallen into a whirlpool..a whirlpool in the middle of a cesspool..of confusing, too quickly changing but uniformly chaotic..'existence' if one can call it existence. It's hard to adapt to constant chaos isn't it?

How can one use the term 'uniform' with 'chaotic'? Well, for a start, just sit and try to describe what is now going on in Washington, DC, and globally. 'See' - thoughts go round and round...where it all stops is not possible to see. The current world and national situation can't be described using standard expositional structures and analysis and structures. There is so little sense to it all. And it changes so quickly. Too quickly. Chaos is a good term to use.

Some do adapt, though not exactly in a 'healthy' mature manner (depending one one's perspective and personal tools). A Zen perspective might help. But not everyone has the Dalai Llama's reincarnate centuries of Zen training.

'Taking the bullet' and simply ducking and avoiding the stage lights helps, too. Doesn't it?

But the 'normal' person (who gives a shit) is left with just dizziness - but that at least means plenty of company ( isn't that comforting?), over 60% of our American population experiences 'diarrhea-nervosa' trying to get its heads around our dear leader and his antics.

That's comforting, too. Isn't it?.

The rest of the world largely copes by laughing it's collective head off at our arms-a-flailing running around like headless chickens.

And that's real comfort...isn't it?

And there you have it,

there is comfort for everyone... we all can be happy, theoretically, if one is willing to walk around giggling like a mad person, or half asleep or mentally dwelling off-planet.

If these traits (artifices for us) sound familiar it's because they are all found in the person of Dear POTUS. In other 'words' we Americans and the rest of Mother Earths two-legged hominids have been gobbsmocked, bamboozled and smoky-mirrored by an ace carny clown into a state of high dis-ease.

But what does one do, many times, in that state ...of dis-ease? Why kick back, pop a top (or corn), fill a bowl (popped corn, cherries, or might be appropriate in your State, or state?), turn on TV and 'GET OUT' (Paglia). It works. For a while.

America re-discovers it's past remedy for this dis-ease(1970s at least, during the time of the Nixon 'illness').

'Sit right down, Daddy, let your mind roll on'

But, there is, at least, an analysis tool/phraseology that many Americans are familiar with who have experience with military. A unifying phrase, ultimate in simplicity, maximal in American linguistic abstraction that describes our current national state of existence pretty well and has been used a a safe drug by many military recruits whose minds have been have been dizzied by the whirlpool of immersion in a military world of commands and counter-commands and counters-to-counter commands:

'SNAFU..SITUATION NORMAL, ALL FUCKED UP'.

SNAFU pretty well describes the world we live in...a world in a chaotic 'non-sense' state since America's Nov 2017, POTUS election, and largely accelerated in non-sense by the principal (POTUS) of that election.

Are 'we', America and the rest of Earth's inhabitants (all of 'us' - hominids and lesser 'folks')beset with the projected dis-ease of a 'canted' personality, that of our dear POTUS? Think carefully about that before you answer 'Nyet'! (Catch the insinuation?!?!)

There, it's said - America's POTUS is the principal agent of a current, all-enveloping national and global Chaos - our global, existential WhirlPool. Will it end, this mutant sport presently occupying the Office of America's President? Of course it will end, sometime. Meanwhile, cope however one can, or must. Just don't forget.