Trump's Party? The Long Goodbye?
There's been a lot of debate about where the GOP is headed, post Trump, and it appears we don't know, as the post Trump era has not arrived. By all signs, he remains firmly in control of his party.
The former President delivered a speech at CPAC. It was really long.
Trump predictably insisted that he won the election, but in terms of the popular vote he's lost every election. Indeed, it'd be well worth remembering for conservatives that he lost the popular vote in 2016. That year he entered his Administration with the House and the Senate in GOP hands. He lost the House in 2018, and while the House made gains in 2020, the Republicans didn't take it back and directly lost the Senate due to his actions.
Given all of this, the GOP appears set to ride the Trump horse into 2022. We'll see how that works, but this week's past Senate vote on the COVID 19 relief bill suggests that the Democratic era of cooperation with the GOP, more hoped for among moderate Democrats than real, may have more or less come to an end. This may give the GOP a chance to really assert its conservative and populist issues, but the overall problem right now is that a party with Trump at the head, even though he's firmly in control inside the GOP, appears weaker and weaker nationally. If the GOP doesn't pick up seats in 2022, it'll be due to Trump. Right now, conservative columnists that stuck with him, and the columnists are normally the sounding boards for political ideas, are almost completely without credit, leaving only those who opposed him, who are now outside the GOP folds, with any credit at all, but no audiences.
On audiences, for much of Trump's presidency I'd hear from his supports, "he speaks just like us". This struck me as a couple of times I started, and then abandoned threads on the bizarre nature of New York political speech. Trump is a New Yorker. So is Mario Cuomo. It's odd to think that they're from the same state as Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. It's almost as if at some point all New York politicians determined that they had to watch Goodfellas for speech cues.
That other New Yorker
Mario Cuomo is in big trouble right now, of course, as well.
Cuomo is in the class of New York politicians that the New York based press loved, but outside of New York, he was really hard to take. Of course, in the American fashion, the same forces that adored him have now turned on him like a pack of wolves.
I haven't followed his decline but it all has to do with "inappropriateness" and women. I don't know if he's guilty or not, and I'm not going to investigate the whole thing as its not worth my time to do so, but its interesting how he went from hero to goat overnight.
Prince Harry, wuss
This will be inappropriate Prince Harry and his wife Meaghan are in the news once again as they were interviewed by Oprah.
I can't stand Oprah in the first place as she's too emblematic of false pop culture. It'd figure that she'd interview the royal whiners.
I figure that every family has its problems, and the British Royals are no different. Maybe their existentially set up for this due to a long history of narrowed genetic lines and a whacky institutional role that leaves them with less and less of a role very year. Their last period of real relevance was during World War Two and now its really hard to figure out what they do, and why they need to do it, if they do.
Be that as it may, Prince Harry had some merit until he married Meaghan, but now he just seems to be a full time drama queen. Enough already.
Getting the Amy Coney Barrett treatment?
Senator John Barrasso was front and center in the news concerning Deb Haaland's confirmation as Secretary of the Interior, and not in a good way. Various Native American spokesmen felt that she'd received the Amy Coney Barrett treatment, so to speak, in being singled out due to her ethnicity for abusive treatment. Sen. Barrasso interrupted her at one point and yelled "I'm talking about the law", which was apparently a reaction to what he thought were efforts to dodge questions he posed.
This wasn't as bad, however, as the statement by Louisiana Senator Joe Kennedy who called her a "neo socialist, left of Lenin, whack job".
Haaland is the first Native American nominated to the post. In reaction to her getting rough treatment Native Americans in Montana purchased a billboard advertisement supporting her. Senator Barrasso really can't stop her appointment and probably ought to back off a bit unless he's absolutely certain that the GOP is taking back Congress in 2022, which he can't be certain of.
Rebranding a Jeep Brand?
The Cherokee nation wants Jeep to quit calling the Jeep Cherokee the "Cherokee" and it will probably do so.
There are and were a lot of automobiles named after Indian tribes and it was meant as an honorific, not an insult. Jeep probably has no choice but to do this, but the fact of the matter is that it's better to be remembered as a Jeep name than forgotten, which is what is generally the case for Indian tribes. I can't say having your name on the side of an automobile leads to a lot of deep thought about your culture, but it might lead to at least some.
The term "cancel culture" is big in the zeitgeist right now, and this does indeed seem to be a legitimate example of it. At least it isn't a "woke" example, like the flap over UW's "The world needs more Cowboys" campaign of a couple of years ago.
Banning the pumps.
Petulma California banned the construction of new gasoline stations in an effort to address climate change.
I don't know that this does anything It sounds more like a city zoning matter ("we think gasoline stations are ugly") than a legitimate ecological effort. It's not like people won't be able to buy gas. Indeed, present owners of gas stations in Petulma are probably jumping for joy. . . as are lawyers who will soon be suing arguing that this is an unfair and unconstitutional restraint of trade.
But those why might be engaging in a little Schadenfreude right now would be well advised not to. I'm constantly hearing that electric vehicles "won't work here" as if cars are built for Wyoming, or that "Americans love to travel too much . . . " Auto makers are now making it plain that in 2030. . . and that's just nine years, the day of the petroleum fired vehicles is going to rapidly end. In that way, Petulma may be on to something, but not in the right fashion, as charging stations are going to be going up all over California, not gasoline stations.
Navy requiring sailors to re take their enlistment oaths
One of the things the recent insurrection brought to light is that there are a disturbing number of servicemen who have have brought radical politics into the military.
This has actually been known for sometime and was a pretty big story in military backchannels the past few years, but the general public seems to have been unaware of it. Now its getting some daylight and the services are openly taking steps to do something about it.
You can trace a lot of this back to at least 1973, and maybe a full history of it would have to go back to 1940. Traditionally, the US has had next to no standing military at all, with the Navy being the exception. Indeed, American culture prior to World War Two had a strong anti military sentiment to it. Career soldiers were usually looked down upon by civilians, including the officers. You'd not guess it now, but the Frontier Army was completely disdained by most Americans, including those who lived in the West, except times of real conflict. Cowboys, for example, had no use for soldiers at all.
This view carried on right up to 1940. Dwight Eisenhower's father in law, John Doud, tried to get him to leave the military at the time of his marriage to Mamie, as he regarded it, like most executives did, as a dead end career for the lazy.
I'm not endorsing that view, but I'm noting that it was a fact. Indeed, it was so much a fact that heroes of some big wars, prior to World War Two, had spent part of their careers out of uniform prior to them, even if they were professional soldiers. U.S. Grant and William Sherman provide such examples.
By and large, the nation relied upon the state militias, later the National Guard, for national defense if a bit war broke out. The two big World Wars of the 20th Century changed that view and we went into the Cold War with a large military made up of conscripts. When that became unpopular due to the Vietnam War, we went all volunteer once again.
There's a lot of merit to an all volunteer force. . . if its small, but we've never really achieved that. The current size of the U.S. Army is 475,000, which is actually a very large force. The Navy and the Air Force each have about 330,000 personnel. The Marines number 182,000. In contrast, for example, the Marine Corps in 1939 amounted to just about 20,000 personnel.
The population of the country is bigger, the pay for servicemen is better, and its much harder to get in than it used to be, of course. But the country has also gone into a period of real hero worship regarding servicemen which is unwarranted. People act as if every soldier is a saint and thank everyone whoever was in, including myself, "for your service".
It's not the case, of course, that the military is a reservoir of the far, far right, like the Reichsheer was or something. But there are a lot of things going on with the modern military that really need to be addressed. This is one of them. Social experimentation is another one. It may be that the military is recruiting some of the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and creating the wrong situation.
Before this seems too extreme, one of the insurrectionist who is most commented on right now is the dopey women who was an Army veteran. There are so many things wrong with this that it requires another thread. Less noticed is that one of the figures was a female Army captain, serving out a period in which she's anticipated to be released, who has a psyops assignment. That's really bad.
Dopey Virginia
So Virginia jumped on the dope bus and also legalized marijuana.
Are we not suffering from enough mental checking out already?
This trend is obviously going to keep on keeping on right up until lawyers file suit for health problems associated with weed, which will be coming. At that time, some Schadenfreude will be pretty justified.
Boy Scouts file bankruptcy plan
We've discussed the Scouts here recently, but there seems to be so much institutionally wrong with the organization right now that a person can really wonder what of it will survive. Much of what happened to it can't be discussed in the current political climate as no matter what a person says, it's going to be taken the wrong way. Given that, the organization keeps headed off in a direction which appears to be the wrong way itself.
More voting restrictions bills.
Most recently in Georgia.
These are suddenly a hot topic in GOP circles even though there's no evidence of any voting fraud. To a certain extent there's at least a little bit of a resentful backchannel feeling that making it easy to vote mostly makes it easy for Democrats to vote, a feeling not wholly without merit in the past. Republicans, for whatever reason, tended to go to the polls. The more numerous Democrats did not.
The irony is, however, that as the Republican Party has aged, it now tends to be the party that doesn't show up in person. These efforts therefore probably hurt the Republicans more than they help them.
Trumps take the vaccine. . .
There's a really anti vax sentiment in certain sections of the GOP. President Trump questioned the vaccines early on while also boosting dubious or even dangerous COVID 19 treatments. He himself received the best of care when he was infected and there's reason to believe that he would have died if he hadn't received them. He urged people to get vaccinated later, in complete fairness, but he didn't get them publicly. The reason probably has to do with not wanting to offend part of his base.
There are no medical or scientific based reasons not to be vaccinated. The lingering suspicion on the vaccines is wholly unwarranted. This goes back to an unfortunate, and lethal, movement that got started some years ago based on non science and boosted by people who didn't know what they were talking about. Now its hard to overcome.
The only legitimate reasons not to take the vaccine are medical and moral. There are those who would need to avoid the vaccines for medical reasons, although they'll be few in number. Some people hold religious objections to all vaccinations, and while I find that poorly grounded in sound theology, those who hold those views hold them and that must be respected. Often those same people eschew medial treatments of all kind.
Early on there were some Catholic Bishops who objected to the vaccines based on their stem cell lines, given the connection with abortion, but that was rapidly put down as an objection by the Vatican. Now there are some who are objecting to the Johnson & Johnson line for the same reason. That has yet to be fully resolved but that vaccine has just come out and, if a person has that objection, they can get one of the other ones.
People have generally been pretty good sports about this, but at some point people who are refusing on grounds lacking a solid base are going to be faced with the question of whether they pose an unfair risk to everyone else and society in general. That may sound heavy handed, but having lived through earlier really strong public vaccination efforts, no matter what a person might think about it now, there will likely be little sympathy as more and more people are vaccinated. I suspect that back when I was a kid plenty of children were vaccinated at school without any real involvement by their parents, and parents in the era would have disdained any parent who didn't have their kids line up for shots. People had lived through horrible diseases and they'd had enough. The Army didn't ask your permission to vaccinate back in the day either, as the ironically kinder and gentler Army of today does, which leads to this. . .
You may have freedom on conscience but businesses have the freedom of the marketplace
You used to see the "No shirt, no shoes, no service" signs up at restaurants all the time. Soon you are going to be asked for your proof of vaccination to get on an airplane, or a ride at Disneyland. Freedom of conscience on this issue will mean that you have the freedom to stay home and watch television.
I've frankly been amazed that more employers haven't required vaccinations. Universities require vaccinations for a host of diseases and they will on this one as well. Public schools are going to soon, almost certainly. Which brings me to this. . .
HPV? Oh, that's okay, as it involves sex.
It really says something about how messed up American society is right now that lots of people who won't get vaccinated for a disease that you pick up simply by being around somebody else who has it, and who even believe that the vaccination is part of some big plot, but they don't think twice about lining their teenage daughters up for the HPV vaccine.
HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, so yo have to be having sex to get it. If you subscribe to what was once conventional morality, prior to the days of Playboy, Friends and The Big Bang Theory, your chances of getting it would be next to nil. Now, of course, thanks to Hugh Hefner, Playboy and Cosmopolitan's charge against morality and ultimately biology, the disease is out there and lot of people basically forced into destructive sex are exposed to it.
I've only known one person who has refused to have a child vaccinated for it and I don't have an objection myself to anyone receiving it. I find it interesting, however, that people wills hove a kid as young as 9 to get a vaccination for disease that's perfectly possible to avoid based on the assumption that they can't control themselves from engaging in an act which at least takes some effort of the will, mentally, to engage in, as well as an exchange of bodily fluids in a sexual act, but they'll not get vaccinated for something you can get just walking down the street.
What's that Tat mean?
He's a Libertarian and says that he had no idea of the meaning of the tattoo, which I wouldn't have known either. Apparently it has "1776" and the Roman numeral "III" and is supposed to mean that only 3% of Americans at the time of the Revolution supported it.
In actuality, 1/3d, that would be 33% of the Americans at the time supported the Revolution, 33% opposed it, and the remainder waited to see which way it went or had no strong opinion. Unusual for revolutions, prominent figures in commerce strongly supported it. Frankly, if only 3% had supported it, that would be nothing to celebrate as that would mean that it was a completely illegitimate revolution. Even the fact that only 33% supported it is more than a little problematic in that regard, frankly.
I'll be frank that I'm not a fan of tattoos at all. It's not like I'm going to argue for banning them or something, but the more people that get them, the less they mean. And I suspect that this phenomenon of people not knowing what a tattoo means is probably incredibly common. People put Chinese or Japanese characters on their body being told they mean one thing, and not gasping at all how the writing in those languages work. I suspect that more than one message of that type is a joke by somebody who does speak those languages. People tattoo phrases and symbols from religions as well not knowing that those symbols carry a lot more meaning, and indeed obligation, than a person might suppose.
Tattoos have now become a massively common part of our society. It's curious. As we have come to stand for less and less, people obviously reach out to try to grasp something. But people don't grasp onto those things that really have meaning, as then you have to comport your life accordingly.
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