Friday 29th of November 2024
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a trumpian/deep-state dilemma.....

Thanks to a great response last week to an article about Klaus Schwab’s creep-tastic use of the term “transparency,” I’m pressing forward with a Devil’s Dictionary-style lexicographical project, tracking multitudinous dystopian alterations to American political speech.

 

Matt Taibbi: Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of ‘Deep State’ and ‘Working Class’

 

I absolutely want the list to be a collaboration with Racket/Substack readers, so this and future entries will feature open comments sections. I see this list working best if it also functions as a usage tracker, à la the Oxford English Dictionary. The best gift my father ever gave me was a full OED, a monstrous rack of volumes that still sits devouring space in my house, daring me to look up the earliest recorded use of pecker in the impertinent sense (“1902 FARMER & HENLEY Slang”).

Here cites are important because they allow us to see how a 1966 use of transparency that meant people seeing sins of government turned into a 2023 usage meaning government seeking out the people’s sins. The more completely such changes are tracked, the more damning the lexicon.

Today’s theme involves once-embraced liberal terminology re-branded as right-wing and therefore infamous, false, or seditious:

DEEP STATE:

In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece for the Daily Beast called, “You’re going to miss the Deep State when it’s gone: Trump’s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.” In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig of cable’s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage:

During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees — appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service — were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized.

This passage portraying harmless “government employees” as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast’s own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was “something fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes” with the “deep state.”

Rothkopf replied that “career government officials” got a bad rap because “about ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories…”

The real provenance of deep state has in ten short years been fully excised from mainstream conversation, in the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement.

Through the turn of the 21st century virtually no American political writers used deep state. In the mid-2000s, as laws like the PATRIOT Act passed and the Bush/Cheney government funded huge new agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the word was suddenly everywhere, inevitably deployed as left-of-center critique of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

How different was the world ten years ago? The New York Times featured a breezy Sunday opinion piece asking the late NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — a man described as an inspiration for Edward Snowden who today would almost certainly be denounced as a traitor — what he was reading then. Drake answered he was reading “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry” by Marc Ambinder, whose revelations about possible spying on “eighteen locations in the Washington D.C. area, including near the White House, Congress, and several foreign embassies,” inspired the ACLU to urge congress to begin encrypting communications.

On the eve of a series of brutal revelations about intelligence abuses, including the Snowden mess, left-leaning American commentators all over embraced “deep state” as a term perfectly descriptive of the threat they perceived from the hyper-concentrated, unelected power observed with horror in the Bush years. None other than liberal icon Bill Moyers convinced Mike Lofgren — a onetime Republican operative who flipped on his formers and became heavily critical of the GOP during this period — to compose a report called “The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight.” Here’s Bill railing against the state-within-a-state with Lofgren:

 

SEE VIDEO.....

 

This campaign gathered steam just as liberal America was beginning to become obsessed with the excesses of extralegal surveillance programs like Stellar Wind and CIA-run programs like “Targeted Killing” (the bloodless term for drone assassination). By 2014-2015 people all over the liberal blog-o-sphere were calling for consequences for operatives like the CIA’s John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Both were accused of lying to congress, including about the Snowden revelations — “No sir,” and “not wittingly,” Clapper answered, when asked if the U.S. was collecting “any data at all” about American citizens, leading even U.S. News and World Report to publish a headline asking, “Lock Him Up?”

The instant Donald Trump appeared on the scene, “Deep State” became myth. Its run as a focus of liberal angst was over the minute Sean Hannity teased a show in 2017 with a tweet praising Trump, and referencing Deep State “allies in the media”....

 

There was an effort among some recalcitrant journalists to remind audiences that negative feelings about Donald Trump weren’t irreconcilable with serious concerns about intelligence overreach — Michael Crowley’s “The Deep State is Real” in Politico in 2017 was one example, or the aforementioned Ambinder writing “Trump is Showing How the Deep State Really Works” in Foreign Policy come to mind — but ten years after Snowden and a parade of whistleblowers about torture and other abuses, relentless propaganda has succeeded in equating “deep state” with “conspiracy theory” in the public’s mind. Amusingly, this is taking place at the same time when every third show on Netflix is about an elderly CIA operative who has to come out of retirement and dust off perfect-killing-machine skills to save a wayward daughter (who inevitably looks like Jen Psaki or Alex Wagner) from a shadowy cabal of interagency goons with more power than the president.

Everyone from ABC News to the European Union (which describes “QAnon deep state conspiracies” as a product of “right-wing extremism”) to academics writing about how “Fake news promotes conspiracy theories such as Deep State” have accepted the core idea that suspicions of unelected institutional power are, like disdain for “elites,” fictional products of “misinformation” and rightist resentment. Criticism of “deep state” in fact is often used by Internet censors as a way to identify dangerous or foreign-aligned groups. What a coincidence that this same deep state just happened to be the chief fixation and worry of educated Democrats a decade ago!

 

THE WORKING CLASS

The term working class reached peak usage in 1970, while its replacement, white working class, is at its peak now and still ascending. The former suggests the existence of a multiracial working class, the latter reminds us to first and foremost associate working class with white, a concept much easier to demonize.

Working class began tailing off at the outset of the eighties, when two dovetailing phenomena became electoral factors. Once-solid-blue districts in places like Macomb County, Michigan began switching to Ronald Reagan, in some cases over issues like busing and immigration, in others over issues like pornography and crime, in others over the generalized anger. Strategists at the Democratic Leadership Council after wipeout losses in 1972 and 1984 also began to reconsider their party’s logistical and financial dependence on unions, moving to what Bill Clinton’s campaign called a more “pro-growth” profile. Class politics became associated with McGovern, Mondale, and loserdom. Saying working class on the stump was like walking around with a fly open, earning open catcalls from campaign journalists.

Working class wouldn’t come back until the insurgent candidacies first of Barack Obama (who re-seized a lot of union-heavy, Reagan Democrat territories with worker-friendly promises that of course were soon broken), then of Bernie Sanders. You can see above the revival of working class beginning in 2008. Just as quickly, the term leveled off, as Sanders fell into another dystopian punji trap, class-not-race. From 2015 on, every time Sanders made a gaffe about anything (but particularly on the race issue) articles pummeled his emphasis not on “class,” but “class-not-race,” the implication being that talking about class meant a commensurate disinterest in race issues.

When Sanders blurted out, “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto,” the Chicago Tribune hit him with, “Bernie Sanders’ ‘ghetto’ remark raises class vs. race debate.” When he got walloped on Super Tuesday in the last cycle, Politico explained “Bernie Sanders Isn’t Winning Over Black Voters” because he was “appealing to class, not race.” Class-not-race became code for an increasingly infamous form of racism encapsulated by other terms likely to find their way on this list, “color blind” and “color blindness.” Once considered an aspirational positive, a would-be “color blind” pol like Sanders who focused on “class-not-race” was understood to be denying the realities of discrimination, probably out of secret racism.

As the use of “working class” on its own began to carry more penalties even for politicians like Sanders whose entire raison d’etre was supposedly class politics, new entrants to the electoral scene were encouraged to refer instead to the “white working class,” perjoratively. This was soon described as a voting bloc that basically existed to make irrational/moronic demands, like:

The anthopological cast to this avalanche of “So, just what is this white working class derp?” stories that appeared after 2016 was as hilarious as it was infuriating. The white working class lives in barns! It feels anxious! It believes in aliens and QAnon! Most importantly, it votes for Donald Trump, which means whatever it thinks about anything can safely be ignored. It can also be blamed for all kinds of things, including not really being “working class” (this was a whole sub-genre of articles that popped up after 2016).

Through this switcheroo from one term to another, a phrase that was coined to express a specific political idea — that connections between people of a certain economic class are meaningful — once again came to mean more or less the exact opposite, i.e. that the only “working class” that really exists is fractious and separated by ethinicity. White working class, black working class, Latinx working class (really!), and so on. Workers of the world, split up!

More soon, and as usual, I’ll be following comments for suggestions.

 

https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/31/matt-taibbi-tracking-orwellian-change-new-meanings-of-deep-state-and-working-class/

 

 

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trump topping......

 Tucker Carlson: Liberals Will KILL TRUMP Before Letting Him Become President Again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq1D8wvrO2w

 

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stopping trump....

 

Could Trump be banned from the Presidency?       By Noel Turnbull

 

Could Donald Trump be banned from standing as President? Even in the world of Trumpist paranoid delusions and social media posts it seems improbable.

Yet an increasing number of US legal scholars – including at least two who are regarded as ‘originalists’ – are arguing that Donald Trump should be disqualified from standing as President.

They are all discussing whether Trump, and others who participated in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, are disqualified from holding office under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

William Baude, University of Chicago Law School and Michael Stokes Paulsen University of St Thomas Law School have published an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review detailing the argument.

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor, said in her regular newsletter: “This paper was a big deal because while liberal thinkers have been making this argument for a while now, Baude and Paulsen are associated with the legal doctrine of originalism, an approach to the law that insists the Constitution should be understood as those who wrote its different parts understood them.

That theory gained traction on the right in the 1980s as a way to push back against what its adherents called ‘judicial activism’ by which they meant the Supreme Court’s use of the law, especially Could Donald Trump be banned from standing as President? Even in the world of Trumpist paranoid delusions and social media posts it seems improbable.

Yet an increasing number of US legal scholars – including at least two who are regarded as ‘the Fourteenth Amendment, to expand the rights of minorities and women. One of the key institutions engaged in this pushback was the Federalist Society, and both Baude and Paulson are associated with it.”

Rather than trying to interpret their detailed arguments it is easier to just quote some highlights of the forthcoming 126 page paper.

The third section of the Fourteenth amendment, ratified in 1868, reads: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

The Baude-Paulsen paper’s abstract says: “Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions, Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.

“First, Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation.” Post Reconstruction amnesties were designed to produce a national reconciliation after the Civil War but instead it meant Southerners could just get on with what they had always been doing even if though they had lost the war.

“Second, Section Three is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress. It can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications.

“Third, to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them. This includes the rules against bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, the Due Process Clause, and even the free speech principles of the First Amendment.

“Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, including many instances of indirect participation or support as “aid or comfort.” It covers a broad range of former offices, including the Presidency. And in particular, it disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.”

It seems implausible but the authors point out that Section Three of the amendment “remains fully legally operative. It is constitutionally self-executing— that is, its command is automatically effective, directly enacted by the Constitution itself.”

It also takes into account lots of actions which may be encompassed by the law with the authors saying it covers a wide range of conduct by people attacking the authority of the United States including “insurrectionists, aiders and comforters of …a broad category of former oath-swearing officeholders turned insurrectionists or aiders and comforters of insurrection or rebellion.”

A wide variety of people can also act under the Section as the Amendment empowers and obligates “anybody whose duties provide occasion for judging legal eligibility for office” to take action.

Indeed, such actors have “a duty to faithfully apply Section Three.” What’s more “All possess legitimate constitutional interpretive authority to construe and apply this constitutional prohibition, many of them independently of other actors, including courts.”

The authors say “disqualifying candidates and official from office is not something to be done lightly, but Section Three was not enacted lightly. Section Three remains part of our Constitution, part of our nation’s fundamental law. If we honour the Constitution, we must honour Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Their conclusion: “At all events, if a President or former President of the United States; a current or former officer of the federal executive branch; a Member or former Member of Congress; a current or former state legislator or state executive official; or a current or former federal or state court judge, planned, supported, assisted, encouraged, endorsed, or aided in a material way those who engaged in the insurrection of January 6, or otherwise knowingly and wilfully participated in a broader rebellion against the constitutional system, such persons are constitutionally disqualified from office. In such situations, Section Three’s constitutional disqualifications can, should, and must be carried out.”

Now that could put a lot of Republicans in clink. Perhaps even in cells shared with large, tattooed and aggressive men.

…and to top all that the Trump has yet another problem – charges in the Georgia case are about a state offence for which Trump, if elected, could not pardon himself.

Not that any of this will deter some Republicans. A PNAS (17/6) article by Larry M. Bartels and Nicholas Carnes found that Republican members of Congress who in 2021 supported Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ by voting to oppose the certification of electoral votes from Georgia and Pennsylvania suffered little or no electoral penalty and were less likely to lose primary elections, more likely to run unopposed in the general election and less likely to retire from politics.

 

https://johnmenadue.com/could-trump-be-banned-from-the-presidency/

 

 

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fart wisdom....

US President Joe Biden has boasted that being an octogenarian has granted him “a little bit of wisdom,”and that he intends to stay in politics. However, polls show that more and more voters have their doubts about Biden’s mental and physical fitness.

Speaking at a Labor Day event in Philadelphia on Monday, Biden remarked offhand that some people say “you know, that Biden, he’s getting old, man.”

“Well, guess what?” he continued. “I can – the only thing that comes with age is a little bit of wisdom. I’ve been doing this longer than anybody, and I, guess what? I’m going to continue to do it with your help.” 

Less than a week earlier, Biden became visibly confused during a visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington DC, asking an aide “where am I going now?” as he walked away from a lectern. 

 

https://www.rt.com/news/582375-biden-elderly-mental-wisdom/

 

AMAZING, OLD FARTING JOE CAN READ A TELEPROMPTER 550 KILIMETRES AWAY...

 

 

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old useless.....

 

BY  

 

For Americans such as myself who came of age during the 1970s or early 1980s, the Soviet Union always carried the whiff of a decaying ideological empire, ruled by a decrepit political leadership class that had long since lost the trust of its own people.

Such was my opinion at the time, and nothing I have learned since then has changed it. Three Soviet leaders ruled during that era—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all elderly and infirm, with the reigns of the last two being so brief that our own President Ronald Reagan once quipped that they died too rapidly for him to schedule a summit. Given that the top leaders of the USSR were so obviously enfeebled, analysts recognized that they were hardly the real decision-makers of the declining Soviet colossus that they nominally controlled; instead, most power was presumably vested in the hands of shifting coalitions of their senior aides and advisors, persons often obscure to the outside world. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this severe weakness at the top, the USSR entered a period of steep social and economic decline, and within just a few more years it had disappeared from the world.

All this was certainly true, but it is quite sobering to consult Wikipedia and discover the exact ages of those elderly Soviet leaders, who had been so widely ridiculed in the Western media as decrepit or even senile. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, while Andropov came to power at age 68 and died fifteen months later, replaced by his successor Chernenko, age 72, who only survived a year. So in today’s America, all those confused, befuddled Soviet leaders whom we regarded with such scorn would be youthful political figures compared to our own President Joe Biden, currently seeking reelection at the age of 80, or his leading rival, former President Donald Trump, age 77. Medical science has obviously advanced quite a bit in the last four decades, but I think the total Western domination of the global media is a more important factor in this large difference of perceptions. Is Biden really so much sharper than Brezhnev and Chernenko, or is it simply that our media is better at hiding his inability from most of the general public?

During his entire political career, Biden had been notorious for merely reading the scripts and speeches written for him by others, and even in his 40s he sometimes seemed completely unaware of the falsehoods and total absurdities he was spouting. Lately he has sometimes begun confusing our official positions on crucial policy matters, requiring his aides to quickly “clarify” them. I’m sure that Brezhnev or Chernenko would have done the same if they’d been put into that position.

Although he ranked as the world’s leading Communist, Brezhnev personally indulged himself by accumulating a large collection of luxury automobiles, including Maseratis, Rolls Royces, and Jaguars, an embarrassing story widely promoted by the powerful Western media as proof of Soviet hypocrisy. But although the direct evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop revealed that Biden and his family had taken many, many millions of dollars in secret payoffs from foreigners, our mainstream media has hidden that reality, so much of the public probably still remains unaware of it.

Below the General Secretary of the USSR, political authority was held by the Supreme Soviet, a parliament generally portrayed in the West as a rubber-stamp body filled with corrupt, elderly time-servers, who mostly just approved the political decisions made by the figures who quietly pulled their strings. Such harsh criticism was probably correct, but is our own Congress today so very different? At the age of 81, Sen. Mitch McConnell has led the Republicans in the Senate for the last 16 years, and probably ranks as one of the two most powerful Republican leaders in America. But a few days ago, he revealed his inability to respond to a simple question due to a “brain freeze,” as shown in a video clip that drew many millions of views on Twitter.

 

In his sneering commentary, Andrew Anglin noted that McConnell had grown up in modest circumstances, and then spent his entire career in politics, never earning more than $174,000 per year; but he had nevertheless somehow managed to accumulate a personal fortune in the tens of millions of dollars. The corrupt and decaying USSR had far less wealth to siphon off, but its Communist leaders similarly enjoyed lifestyles vastly superior to that of their miserable subjects.

 

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has passed her 90th birthday and apparently is senile, yet still holds crucial positions on several important Senate committees. During her long decades in office, she exercised a great deal of political influence over our foreign relations with other countries, notably including China, and during exactly those years her late husband Richard Blum became a billionaire through his extremely successful investments in that same country.

 

In many respects, the signs of apparent political instability in the U.S. these days seem far greater than anything that had been visible to outside observers in the USSR of the 1980s.

Just last week extremely harsh sentences were imposed upon several additional January 6th Trumpist protesters, including those whose crimes hardly seemed to exceed trespassing or petty vandalism. Joseph Biggs received 17 years in federal prison for moving a portable metal fence, while Dominic Pezzola got 10 years for breaking a window. These individuals were protesting an extremely close Presidential election that had obviously been stolen from incumbent Donald Trump, and their angry political demonstration took place just months after an almost unprecedented national wave of riots, arson, and looting had resulted in few if any serious prosecutions. Moreover, some have noted that these Trumpist protests at the Capitol were really not so very different in kind from those that the Democrats had earlier organized against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court; yet celebrity Amy Schumer and her allies received media accolades rather than a decade or two in federal prison.

Commentator John Derbyshire, a conservative now in his late 70s, is normally quite restrained in his sentiments, but he described these extreme sentences and other related political developments as so outrageous that the recent Republican Presidential debate seemed like something “irrelevant…the acting-out of some formal ritual that no longer has any actual significance, from which nothing of any consequence will follow.” Indeed, the title of his piece suggested that the U.S. was “moving beyond electoral solutions.”

Trump himself had bitterly challenged that stolen election and as a consequence is facing some 90 felony counts in state and federal court that would put him away for 500 years. Yet on Friday the latest poll revealed that these charges had caused his Republican Presidential support to grow even stronger, now rising to 59% and putting him 46 points ahead of his nearest Republican primary rival.

 

READ MORE

https://www.unz.com/runz/the-rise-of-the-brics-and-the-fall-of-the-ussa/

 

 

 

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