The Republican moral rot chronicles: Team reality, bonkers or chicken?

One of the things that jumped right out over the last week or two is intense, copious colossal Republican elite bullshittrery. An opinion piece in the New York Times makes the point nicely: 

There Are No Winners on Team Chicken, Bonkers or Moral Rot.

“Team Normal” and “Rudy’s Team.” This is how Bill Stepien, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, categorized the two camps of advisers swirling around Mr. Trump in the chaotic days after the 2020 election.

According to recorded snippets of Mr. Stepien’s testimony before the House select committee on Jan. 6 that were aired at Monday’s hearing, Team Normal consisted of folks like him who acknowledged that there had been no mass election fraud and that Mr. Trump had lost the presidency fair and square.

By contrast, Team Rudy, captained by an increasingly erratic Rudy Giuliani, was stocked with the Trumpworld players who were either untethered from or unwilling to bow to reality. These dead-enders — people like the attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and the Trump adviser Peter Navarro — were committed to peddling the defeated president’s voter fraud B.S., no matter the cost.

“I didn’t mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal,” Mr. Stepien told the committee. Noting that he has been in the political game a long time, the political consultant, 44, boasted, “I’ve built up a pretty good — I hope — a good reputation for being honest and professional. I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time. So that led to me stepping away.”

“Stepping away” from Trumpworld’s dishonesty and lack of professionalism. Well, that is certainly one way to spin Mr. Stepien’s behavior.

A more accurate, less self-aggrandizing way might be to say that he slunk away, coat collar flipped up and hat brim pulled low in the hopes that no one would notice him fleeing the spiraling freak show to which he had sold his services and his soul. And he has since taken pains to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side: In the 17 months after the Jan. 6 insurrection, he has served as a consultant to the former president’s Save America PAC and signed on to work with Trump-backed candidates who have peddled, or have at least flirted with, the election-fraud fiction. Two of these candidates are challenging Republican incumbents, Representative Liz Cheney and Senator Lisa Murkowski, whom Mr. Trump has targeted for removal for their respective votes to impeach and convict him over his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Mr. Stepien may have tried to separate himself from the shadier schemes being pushed by Team Bonkers — er, Team Rudy. But he is apparently cool with Mr. Trump’s basic plan to burn down the nation by advancing conspiracy theories about a rigged election.

Team Normal? More like Team Chicken.

But let’s not pick on Mr. Stepien. His tale is sadly similar to those of so many other Trump courtiers. These are the people who could distinguish reality from delusion; they just chose not to do all that much about it. Some of them tried to privately nudge Mr. Trump in the right direction. But when that failed, most were far too frightened to kick up a fuss and risk ruining their special relationships with Mr. Trump. Many still haven’t totally abandoned him, even as he continues to spread the election-fraud lies eating away at the heart of American democracy.

Mr. Barr stressed to the committee how frustrating he found his former boss’s powers of denial and delusion. The second you finished debunking one ridiculous claim, he recalled, Mr. Trump would simply move on to the next. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” he said, noting that he became “somewhat demoralized” by Mr. Trump’s behavior, thinking that “if he really believes this stuff,” then “he has become detached from reality.”

When Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that there were no signs of systematic fraud, Mr. Trump took it about as well as you’d expect. “This is, you know, killing me,” Mr. Barr recalled a furious Mr. Trump telling him. “You must have said this because you hate Trump. You hate Trump.”

And yet, despite everything he witnessed — Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth, his antidemocratic machinations, his emotional instability and his possibly failing grasp on reality — Mr. Barr has publicly said that he would again vote for the former president if he secures the Republican nomination in 2024.

And herein lies the rot at the heart of Team Chicken. These normies found Mr. Trump’s lying and plotting disturbing enough to want to avoid standing too close, lest they get spattered. But they don’t care enough to take a strong, sustained stand in defense of democracy — to make clear that the former president’s ongoing efforts to defraud the American people and his assault on our electoral system are unacceptable. Not unacceptable in a mealy-mouthed, “Oh, well, I’d prefer that someone else lead the party, but I’ll support him if it comes down to it” way but genuinely unacceptable, as in, “I have seen this man up close, and he should be disqualified from holding high office again. Ever.”

The most notable and most galling member of Team Chicken — its M.V.P. — is Bill Barr, who became Mr. Trump’s attorney general in early 2019. Mr. Barr made more of an effort to push back against the big lie than most, going so far as to tell the president that the election-fraud claims not only were “crazy stuff” and “bullshit” but also were doing “a great, great disservice to the country,” as he testified.  

Mr. Barr, Mr. Stepien and their ilk recognize that they set their professional and ethical reputations aflame by joining Mr. Trump’s circus. They are now looking to rehabilitate their brands. They want credit, perhaps even thanks, for having refused to cross certain lines. And yet too many remain willing to support Mr. Trump and his corrosive brand of politics, enabling and emboldening him to blow past even more frightening lines in the future.  

This, apparently, is what constitutes “normal” in today’s Republican Party. No member of any team should feel good about that.

There we have it from Team Chicken, despite “crazy stuff” and “bullshit” and “a great, great disservice to the country.” Bullshit and self-serving, gutless lies from Team Chicken, is pure lying and unrepentant drivel. That’s what makes ’em deboned chicken. A great, great disservice to the country doesn’t faze them in the slightest.

Barr admitted he would vote for T**** again despite his own understanding that the ex-president was an utterly self-absorbed bullshitter/liar. T**** could not have cared less about our democracy or competent, honest governance. He cared about himself and his debts. Some of his closest advisors admitted that they knew he was full of crap. Others, like Team Rudi Crackpots were too intoxicated on alcohol, deranged ego and/or mental delusions to know what planet they were on, or what actual reality and facts were.

If anything can be more compelling real world evidence of the deep moral rot among Republican Party elites, what is it? The realists are deeply corrupted and utterly immoral or evil. There is not one shred of decency or moral courage in them or their rotted Republican Party and their deceived and betrayed rank and file.The Republican Party’s intent to win power at all costs is crystal clear.[1]

Q: Are Barr, Stepien and their ilk valiant patriots or lying, neo-fascist, self-serving human scum, or something else?

Footnote: 

1. The Washington Post writes today:

The Republican National Committee is spending millions this year in 16 critical states on an unprecedented push to recruit thousands of poll workers and watchers, adding firepower to a growing effort on the right to find election irregularities that could be used to challenge results.

The RNC was until recently barred from bringing its substantial resources to bear on field operations at polling sites because of a decades-old court order. Now, the party apparatus is mobilizing volunteers to scrutinize voting locations for suspected fraud.

“It’s super, super critical that if issues are identified, they’re identified real time,” Melissa Conway, the RNC’s election integrity state director in Texas, said in a virtual meeting last year, so that Republicans can “have a legal footing in addressing the election and if need be, doing any overturning of the election.”

Election integrity director is another way of saying election subversion director. The GOP’s intent to subvert elections could not be much clearer. Only an admission that elections are to be subverted and nullified could be clearer. Since Republican elites will never admit their true anti-democratic, neo-fascist intent, one can only look at what they do, and ignore what they say.

Melissa Conway

The Texas GOP enforcer of election subversion

Damage that climate change is causing

A favorite deceive and deflect propaganda tactic related to climate change is to ignore, deny and/or downplay the cost of doing nothing. Actually, that tactic was and is also used for cigarettes, gun regulations, and some other issues. The tactic isn't new by any means. But, it remains highly effective. Anything that climate change deniers and downplayers can to to deceive, distract, disinform, confuse and/or sow doubt is ruthlessly and shamelessly used against the public. It is protected free speech, regardless of how massive the damage it causes.

Given how serious and urgent that climate change and pollution as usual has become, it makes sense to bring up the issue of damage caused by anti-government ideologues, laissez-faire capitalist business interests that profit from polluting, e.g., Exxon-Mobile. Capitalism is great at (1) corrupting and subverting government, and (2) privatizing and trickling wealth up to the elites at the top, while trickling down to everyone else the social, environmental and governmental risks, costs, damage and harms of making profits. That's just how capitalism works and fights hard and dirty to have it. Along with campaign contributions and lobbyists, deceit and divisive propaganda is a critically important tool that capitalists rely to get their immoral deceit and dirty work done at our expense.

The New York Times writes on climate change damage accruing in parts of south Asia:

Hifjur Rehman, 40, a third-generation farmer, collapsed in a 

paddy field destroyed by floods in the Indian state of Assam

On Climate Change’s Front Lines, Hard Lives Grow Even Harder

Hundreds of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable live in South Asia, where rising temperatures make it more difficult to address poverty, food insecurity and health challenges.

FATEHGARH-SAHIB, India — When the unseasonably heavy rains flooded the fields, and then the equally unseasonable heat shriveled the seeds, it didn’t just slash Ranjit Singh’s wheat harvest by nearly half.

It put him, and nearly all the other households in his village in northern India, that much further from financial stability in a country where a majority of people scratch out a living on farms. Like many Indian farmers, Mr. Singh is saddled with enormous debt and wondering how he will repay it, as a warming world makes farming ever more precarious.

For India and other South Asian nations, home to hundreds of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable, a seemingly bottomless well of challenges — poverty, food security, health, governance — has only deepened as the region bakes on the front lines of climate change.

Global warming is no longer a distant prospect that officials with short electoral mandates can choose to look away from. The increasing volatility in weather patterns means a greater risk of disasters and severe economic damage for countries already straining to increase growth and development, and to move past the pandemic’s devastation to lives and livelihoods.

In Pakistan, which is grappling with an economic crisis and a political meltdown, a cholera outbreak in the southwest sent the local government scrambling, just as it was trying to quell massive forest fires.

In Bangladesh, floods that came before the monsoons stranded millions of people, complicating longstanding efforts to improve the country’s response to chronic flooding. In Nepal, officials are trying to drain about-to-burst glacial lakes before they wash away Himalayan villages facing a new phenomenon: too much rain, too little drinking water.

And in India, which is the region’s biggest grain supplier and provides hundreds of millions of its own citizens with food rations, the reduced wheat harvest has resurfaced longstanding concerns about food security and curbed the government’s ambitions to feed the world.

South Asia has always been hot, the monsoons always drenching. And it is far from alone in contending with new weather patterns. But this region, with nearly a quarter of the world’s population, is experiencing such climatic extremes, from untimely heavy rain and floods to scorching temperatures and extended heat waves, that they are increasingly becoming the norm, not the exception.

That March was the hottest month in India and Pakistan in 122 years of record-keeping, while rainfall was 60 to 70 percent below the norm, scientists say. The heat came earlier than usual this year, and temperatures stayed up — as high as 49 degrees Celsius, roughly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, in New Delhi in May.

Such a heat wave is 30 times as likely now as before the industrial age, estimates Krishna Achuta Rao, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology. He said that if the globe warms to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, from the current 1.2 degrees, such extreme patterns will come much more often — perhaps once every 50 years, or even every five.  

As its intensity became clear, the Indian government suddenly reversed a decision to expand wheat exports, with global supplies already reduced by the war in Ukraine. Officials cited rising international prices and the challenges of food security at home.  

The damage to the wheat crop has sent yet another tremor through India’s underperforming agriculture sector. In many places, traditional crops are particularly vulnerable to the depletion of groundwater and erratic monsoons. Farmers and the government do not agree on how far to go in opening agriculture markets. Deep in debt, farmers are committing suicide in growing numbers.

The agrarian crisis has pushed many to the cities in search of other work. But India’s economic growth, focused largely at the top, is not expanding employment opportunities. And much of the urban work is outdoor labor, which this year’s extreme heat has made dangerous.

It is reasonable to believe that climate change is going to kill millions of people. Most of the deaths will come in poor countries. US, which is able to react, remains paralyzed by corrupt government, powerful lobbyists backed by bribes called campaign contributions, and anti-government, neo-fascist Republican Party ideology. 

Amazon dislikes labor unions, a lot

The Washington Post writes:

Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide

As Amazon prepares to argue that the union victory in Staten Island should be overturned, employees around the country are accusing the company of using illegal anti-union tactics

Employees at Amazon facilities around the country whose union hopes were buoyed by the labor victory at a warehouse in Staten Island in April say in labor board filings and interviews that the company has been calling police, firing workers and generally cracking down on labor organizing since that historic win. Amazon has been accused of illegally firing workers in Chicago, New York and Ohio, calling the police on workers in Kentucky and New York, and retaliating against workers in New York and Pennsylvania, in what workers say is an escalation of long-running union-busting activities by the company.

On Monday morning, lawyers representing Amazon argued that representatives from the NLRB’s [National Labor Relations Board] Brooklyn office should be excluded from the proceedings entirely. Previously, Amazon had filed a motion requesting that the general public, including the media, should be barred from attending the hearing, but a labor board judge denied the motion last week.

In its opening statement, Amazon argued that both the union and the regional office of the NLRB that conducted the election acted in ways that unfairly turned the election in the union’s favor. The union, Amazon argued, intimidated, coerced and surveilled employees as they voted, specifically citing the “loitering” of union president Chris Smalls outside the voting tent. Lawyers for the union said the use of the word loitering, and implication that workers were afraid of Smalls, who is Black, had racial implications.

Eric Milner, a lawyer representing the Amazon Labor Union, called the company’s objections to the election “a frivolous sideshow.” Union lawyers tried and failed to have a slew of Amazon’s objections dismissed earlier on Monday.

In his opening statement, Milner denied Amazon’s claims that the union intimidated workers, saying that “if anything, the evidence is going to show that employees were afraid of and felt coerced by Amazon, not the ALU.”

He also defended the NLRB’s conduct. “It’s not Region 29’s fault that Amazon breaks too many laws to keep up with,” he said. “Amazon doesn’t get to sit here and flagrantly violate labor law and then claim bias when the agency investigating those laws decides to do their job.”

So here we go again. Another dispute with capitalism against labor, or labor against capitalism if that’s preferable. Who is lying and who is truth telling, if anyone? 

And not surprisingly, the company wanted to fight in darkness by keeping the media and public from witnessing the dispute. That tactic, along with historical animosity of capitalists toward labor, suggests to me that Amazon has things to hide and they aren’t nice and/or legal. So my starting assumption is that Amazon broke laws in its effort to prevent unionization of its facilities. If evidence comes to light that Amazon didn't engage in illegal activities, then that opinion will need to be reassessed and maybe reversed. 

HILARIOUS!

OR maybe not hilarious, but something else, YOU decide.

 Watch the following video, particularly from the 4:15 minute mark on.

SHORTER VERSION:

https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1535292815453786112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1535292815453786112%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdefendingthetruth.com%2Fthreads%2Fwhite-lives-matter.134619%2F

Violence is acceptable tactics: White neo-fascists threaten death to police officers

The kerfuffle up in Coeur d’Alene, ID has led to neo-fascist death threats to the local police. As discussed here two days ago, 31 neo-fascists were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to riot at a gay pride event there. NBC News writes:

Idaho police said they've received death threats since arresting 31 men affiliated with white nationalist group Patriot Front near an annual LGBTQ+ event over the weekend.

Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White spoke to reporters Monday, saying that his department has fielded about 149 calls in the aftermath of the arrests. He said about 50 percent of the calls have been praise from the community, who offer their names and express pride in the department.

“And the other 50 percent — who are completely anonymous, who want nothing more than to scream and yell at us and use some really choice words — offer death threats against myself and other members of the police department merely for doing our jobs,” White said. “Those people obviously remain anonymous.”

Officers have also received threats of doxxing, a practice in which someone publishes personal information such as phone numbers or addresses online, White said. The majority of the threats being made appear to be from outside the Coeur d’Alene community, according to the chief.

Coeur d’Alene police with arrested neo-fascists

This is yet more evidence of the acceptability of violence to America's radical right and the Republican Party generally. As the 1/6 Committee hearings have pointed out, the ex-president said that he believed the people in the coup attempt who called for Pence to be hanged had the right idea. No wonder the GOP embraces violence and death threats when they don't like the way things go for them. 

From the Republican Party point of view, those 31 White supremacists were merely engaging in legitimate political discourse, not conspiring to break any laws or to riot or to kill anyone. As the RNC nicely put it about violence on their own side, the 1/6 coup attempt was just some innocent patriots engaging in harmless “legitimate political discourse.”[1]

Footnote: 

1. Washington Post on Feb. 8, 2022:

When the Republican Party voted to censure two of its own members of Congress last week at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, it justified the move in part by declaring that efforts to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection amounted to the persecution of individuals engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”

John Oliver talks about tech monopolies

In this 26:49 video, John Oliver talks about monopolies and how they fight hard and dirty top protect their profits and markets from competition. He starts with some brief comments about the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T, then moves on to Apple, Google and Amazon.

Although the video is long, it is well worth the time. It's about as funny as a serious talk about the power and poison of monopolies can be. There's some pretty funny commentary here, including a brief but great digression into the intelligent evil and malice of dolphins.

Given the power of monopoly money to subvert and corrupt our broken congress, two narrow bills pending in congress intended to partly defang the tech giants probably won't pass. They are the Open App Markets Act and the American Choice and Innovation Online Act. As usual, conflicts of interest and ethical sleaze are all over the place with congress. Schumer's daughters work for Amazon. That says it all. Those two bills are probably dead, probably leaving us screwed.