Month: June 2016

David Neiwert, who’s a like-minded inspiration to me, has something to say on Facebook. You may not be surprised to know that I agree with every word of it. In fact, if I had penned two books on the subject instead of blogging incessantly about it, I could have written the following myself:

Friends may have noticed that I have become very cranky of late on the subject of voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Put into simple terms: If you are a ‪#‎NeverHillary‬ voter — or a Trump voter, which in the end is the same thing — just unfriend me now. You are not a friend of mine.

I have spent the past 14 years trying to warn the public about the proto-fascist threat coming down the road at us through the auspices of the increasingly radicalized conservative movement and its official organ, the Republican Party. I’ve even published two books describing this threat — five and six years before it actually emerged.

During that time, I’ve received fair amounts of praise from my fellow progressives for the work I’ve done exposing these trends, and lots of pats on the head. But what I’ve noticed is that many progressives are only interested in using this information as a hammer for bashing conservatives with, rather than taking seriously the underlying issues it exposes, particularly the progressive abandonment of rural areas. And I know that, when I’m not around, a lot of these progressives have been happy to characterize me as an alarmist.

Well, now those trends have all come home to roost, and that “alarmism” has proven precisely accurate. The warnings have come true in no small part not just because conservatives drove their bus over the cliff, but because many progressives — especially those in institutional progressive organizations — did not take them seriously either, and took few steps to address the underlying dynamic. And this is especially true of the leftist ideologues who seem to think that all you have to do is magically elect a progressive president and everything will be better, because their failures to keep the ball rolling in between presidential elections led to the rise of the Tea Party and the enshrinement of the radicalization of the American right.

And now these same, clueless progressives are insisting that — even with the steam train of extremist right-wing populism, the historical foundation of all fascist movements, heading straight towards them in the form of the Trump candidacy — their Purity of Essence will keep them from ever voting for the last remaining politician capable of keeping him from attaining the presidency.

Look, I support the Sanders campaign’s desire to take their movement into the convention, since I support most components of their agenda (though not all). I think progressives need to push the Clinton camp leftward — not just now, but after the election too. You’ll not hear me disparage the Sanders campaign and its doggedness.

But if you can’t understand that a Donald Trump presidency would be an extinction-level event for American democracy — and especially if you are so fanatically blinkered that you think that Clinton and Trump are actually comparable or similar — then you have neither paid any attention to the matters that I’ve spent the past 14 years focused on, and/or you simply have no respect for it. You are, on a very deep level, no friend of mine.

So you can just go hit that “Unfriend” button now. Because if you don’t, I will get around to it eventually.

It’s not going too far to say that this neatly summarizes my entire political outlook and the reason I’ve been blogging for over ten years instead of doing something more lucrative that might put some money in my bank account.

If David Vitter had been elected the governor of Louisiana, I know that this would not be happening:

Department of Health and Hospitals [DHH] will begin the massive task Wednesday (June 1) of enrolling 375,000 people into the state’s expanded Medicaid program. The department’s goal is to get Medicaid insurance cards into the hands of more than half of the people eligible for the program by July 1.

Here’s what happened after Democrat John Bel Edwards won a surprise upset victory and became the Bayou State’s governor, replacing the disastrous Bobby Jindal:

…the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced [yesterday] it had approved the state’s plan to use food stamp income eligibility to determine whether people qualify for Medicaid. Louisiana is the first state to receive such an approval through what’s known as a state plan amendment; six other states use a similar method but received approval through a different process that takes much longer to approve.

The approval is “a big deal,” [DHH official, Ruth] Kennedy said, because it will allow Louisiana to speed its enrollment of Medicaid recipients using income data it already has, rather than having to collect new income data from recipients. The food stamp numbers can also be used on an annual basis to reaffirm eligibility, Kennedy said, meaning “we won’t have a large number of people falling off the books.”

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell said that enrollment is “another step in our country’s march toward a health care system that works better for everyone.”

So, because a Democrat was elected governor in Louisiana, an estimated 375,000 people in that state will soon have access to health care that they did not have before and would not have otherwise.

How do you calculate the value of that?

When it comes to browsing the shelves of the National Review, I am a mere dabbler. If you want to know what to make of Bill Kristol’s recruit for an independent presidential bid, what you need is Roy Edroso, who is much more like the congressional librarian of NR wingnuttery. Mention someone like David French to me, and I have vague feeling of sickness in my stomach, as if he’s a restaurant that I know made me ill in the past but I’m not sure exactly what it was that I ate. Roy, by contrast, has specific recall that my brain poisoning wasn’t caused by the Clams Casino or day-old mayo, but by very specific dumb shit that really could have been sanctioned by some mental health inspector.

Stuff like this:

I enjoyed William Duncan’s analysis of the First Circuit’s opinion striking down DOMA. When you noted that the decision essentially provides “that since 1973 the implications of a handful of U.S. Supreme Court decisions have newly invested the federal courts with a power to second-guess Congress’s purposes,” I was reminded of the awesome power of implications in the sexual revolution. Let’s rewind for a moment to Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that overturned Connecticut’s contraception ban and provided a crucial foundation for the deadly Roe v. Wade…

…Think for a moment of the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic. Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment? Nondiscrimination regimes fall before sex-selective abortion, religious liberty falls before the “right” to free contraception, and free speech is increasingly subordinate to the “right” of a person to feel good about their sexual choices. Thanks to no-fault divorce, a marriage is less binding than a contract (most contracts carry with them stiff legal penalties for breach — not so in divorce court), and now in the eyes of some courts, the entire rationale for the traditional definition of marriage is reduced to nothing more than malice against gays.

This is proof that the brain functions that produce law and logic can actually curdle. It should be remembered that Griswold v. Connecticut revolved around the question of whether a state can have a law banning the provision of contraception to married couples who may have had medical, possibly life-threatening, reasons for seeking to avoid a pregnancy. Even Justice Potter Stewart, who dissented from the 7-2 majority in Griswold, conceded that the Connecticut ban was an “uncommonly silly law,” but David French seems to think it was an essential bulwark against female sexual liberation that ought to be reenacted by all 50 states and ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.

Probably for this reason, he also supports people’s “religious liberty” to refuse to provide health insurance that covers contraception to their employees. And he’d like to see women trapped in marriages from which the only escape involves costly legal proceedings and litigation. And he’d like to create some mechanism that can investigate every lost pregnancy in America to attempt to discover its cause. Spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) or just realized the father is an irresponsible drunk who likes to beat women? Severe fetal abnormalities or just didn’t want a third daughter? Dangerously high blood pressure and risk of eclampsia or a silly panic attack that might have passed? A ruptured fallopian tube or nothing more than a selfish desire for career advancement?

The American Taliban can settle these questions and decide whether the doctors involved should be prosecuted and the women assigned a scarlet letter.

This is what passes for moral seriousness on the right, and it’s less of a true alternative to Trump than you might imagine since Trump recently said that, once abortion is again illegal, there must be some punishment for women who get abortions.

Of course, abortion probably has nothing to do with why Bill Kristol wants David French to run for president. Kristol is trying to save neoconservatism from the natural consequences of its spectacular failures, and you won’t find too many better qualified Islamophobes than David French.