Someone is Meddling

Once again, the New York Slime reports that the Russkies are "meddling" in our elections, yet again.  Although "Russia’s interference measures and their intensity remain murky"  (oh those pesky details!)  Nevertheless, 

"Russia’s interference on behalf of both Mr. Trump, the dominant force in the Republican Party, and Mr. Sanders, a stalwart of the left, underscores its efforts to sow chaos across the political spectrum. Undermining the democratic system remains at the core of Russia’s effort to raise its own stature by weakening the United States..."

Chaos... is that what the Slime calls democracy?  

Let us assume for the sake of argument that Russia is "interfering" on behalf of Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders.  Whatever the murky details which have not been disclosed we can reasonably infer that Russia is doing something to boost Trump's chances while at the same time doing something else to boost Sander's chances.  That's what "on behalf" implies.  

What might this mean in practice?  Well... it would mean that Russia is taking out ads which praise Mr. Trump while attacking Mr. Sanders.  At the same time, it is taking out ads or funding bots that praise Mr. Sanders while attacking Mr. Trump.

So fucking what?   Is it suggested that in an election contest between Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders either will not take out ads attacking the other?   The only thing Russia will have done is save Trump and Sanders some money.  In all events, Russia will have done no more than promote a vigorous contest.  How in the fuck does that undermine democracy?

Well, it might be said, Russia promotes nasty ads.  Of course since murky details have not been disclosed we have no idea what quality of ads Russia has promoted.  But suppose they are of the nasty sort. As if American elections needed tutoring in nastiness and gutter tactics from Russia?  Oh puleeze.

What would the Slime prefer?  The subtext of its complaint is that contentious political elections weaken the United States.  That is an axiom adopted only by tyrants and oligarchs.

In 1933 Hitler made a campaign speech excoriating the fact that Germany had 30 competing parties.  In a rhetorical tour de force he went through each of the parties ridiculing their platforms and narrow self interests.  Then, after noting that the leaders of these parties had accused him of not working with them, he said: These gentlemen are right.  I am intolerant.  I have given myself one goal: to sweep these thirty political parties out of Germany!"  No more squabbling.  No more backbiting.  No more disunity. No more chaos. Nothing that will weaken the German State!

No doubt the pundits and pharisees of the Slime will taken the greatest offence and umbrage at being compared to that monster.   But, I ask, what else is the implication of their complaint that sowing chaos across the political spectrum is a tactic that weakens the United States?

For over two hundred years the assumption across the spectrum has been that the American democracy is stronger for the chaos.  Ours is an adversarial political system.  It is an adversarial judicial system .  And it is an adversarial economic system.  Competition and conflict is integral to what America is.  

In his famous Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison discusses precisely this issue.  He notes that it is the nature of democracies to be riven by political factions.   He notes further "The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man" and behind the factions is "the human propensity to fall into mutual animosities, such that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts."  Sounds pretty chaotic to me. But listen to Madison's answer:   

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.   It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.   The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise.

It is evidently the second expedient which the Slime would conveniently prefer, allowing it to be the arbiter of what opinions can safely and unchaotically be held. 

Madison's constitutional system was designed to blunt the effects of faction through an institutional system of checks and balances.  Chaotic, emotional, violently passionate liberty would be preserved but no one party or faction would ever get the sole upper hand.  That system has served its purpose well enough.  It does not need the Slime to impose  acceptable orthodoxies on the public in the name of "clean and orderly" elections.

If anyone is subverting American democracy it is the Slime.

However, behind the subversion (as behind all subversions) there lies a partisan interest.  Mr. Sanders himself alluded to it.  According to the Slime article,

Mr. Sanders said he was briefed about a month ago. Asked why the disclosure came out now, he said: “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out?”

Why do you think?  Did Russia leak the information?  Not likely.  Did Trump?  Also not likely since he "called the disclosures a hoax and part of a partisan campaign against him."   Did the Sander's campaign leak the information?  Obviously not.   Who then?  Qui bono?

Gee.  Let me see if I can figure out this brain-cracker of a puzzle. 

Sanders is leading in Nevada.

A news story in effect calling him a Russian dupe or asset is leaked.  

The expected effect of this libellous bombshell would be....?

The beneficiaries of the leak would be....?

Hmmmm.   Something in the back of my mind....  What is it? Ah yes!  Russian asset.  Where have I heard that before.  Seems to me someone else was recently accused of being a Russia asset.

Ja!  The shadowy claws of Hillary Clinton and her centrist, corporate demawhores.   Once again the DNC unleashes its Russian Troll Bullshit to undermine the opposition and preserve its power, privilege and prestige.

Once again the the New York Times obediently does the sliming.

Defence de cracher, svp. 

 ©barfo 2020

 

The Supreme Court's Frisk-A-Negro Doctrine

Billionaire Bloomberg is trying to explain away his notorious "stop and frisk" policy while mayor of New York City.  The squabble between his attackers and apologists is over whether he misused the policy in a racist manner.


This teapot tempest overlooks the more salient point.  The Supreme Court's stop and frisk doctrine undermined the Fourth Amendment for everyone.  Moreover, the nature of the doctrine was such that only a congenital imbecile could fail to see that it would be applied, invariably, in a racist manner.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons....shall not be violated , and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, ...

In 1968, the Supreme Court rewrote the Fourth Amendment so as to allow people to be detained without probable cause. This shameless decision was enabled by a previous one which allowed automobiles to be stopped without a warrant.

The Carroll brothers were known bootleggers.  One night, the police saw their Model T driving down the highway.  They had no information that the car contained contraband. Nevertheless they stopped it without a warrant. No matter.  The Supreme Court ruled that so long as the police had probable cause a warrant was not needed. (Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925).)  The only problem was that the police did not have probable cause either. No matter.  The Supreme Court left that wrinkle to another day.

That other day came around in 1968 when the police detained three Negro youths on suspicion of being up to no good. It was admitted that the police had no probable cause to detain the youths.  Nevertheless, the Court held that the boys could be briefly detained on a "reasonable suspicion” that they might be up to no good. (Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).) The Court did a predictable semantic dance around the difference between a "mere hunch" and a "reasonable suspicion."  They were not the same.  Hunch bad. Suspicion good.  What makes a suspicion good?  Well it had to be "articulable" ... you had to be able to put something into words.  What kind of something?  Well, Officer McFadden testified that he saw the Negro youths walking back and forth in front of a store for about 15 minutes and sometimes stopping to talk to one another.  Uh huh.   Oh... and in his experience and expertise as an experienced officer on the beat this "indicated to him" that the youths were engaged in behaviour "typically associated" with "casing a joint."  On this rock-solid basis, far be it from us to hold that an officer may not "approach" an individual to ask routine non invasive questions. 

Oh but wait....Far be it from us to hold that an Officer of the Law, a Man in Blue on which the safety of all our properties depends, should have to expose himself to potentially lethal danger upon approaching an individual!  Nay! Nay!  An officer may of course, of course, conduct a "limited superficial patdown" of the person detained to insure that he is not carrying a weapon. No probable cause needed for that either.  In fact, no reasonable suspicion even.  A mere unarticulated possibility is good enough.

It did not take long for the police to realize that the Supreme Court had invited them to walk all over the Fourth Amendment at will.   Police "expertise" became expert at knowing all sorts of "potential" nefariousness.  Their tactile senses became adept at detecting "hard" and "soft" bulges indicative of.... whatever... a weapon .. possible contraband.   New courses were given in police academies on how to create "escalating probable cause" where each "legitimate" step gives rise to further cause for further suspicion and further investigation. 

Despite the pious semantics, Terry v Ohio let loose a war on minorities who, in the expertise and experience of tried and true officers in blue, are all "potentially suspect" [sic].    Or as Bloomberg put it

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops, ...

“They are male minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city,” the clip continues. “And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are [sic] getting killed.”   

Bloomberg was just a sheriff without the white sheet.  But it is equally the case that the men in black robes were hardly so stupid as to not see that among the articulable reasons not to be articulated was the fact that the "youths" in question were minorities.  Just come up with some other feeble, thin, plausible expert excuse.
 

As McReynolds dissented 95 years ago....  "The damnable character of the "bootlegger's" business should not close our eyes to the mischief which will surely follow any attempt to destroy it by unwarranted methods."

©barfo, 2020

Dazzled by Bullshit

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Writing in the  UK's Alt Fem Guardian, Moira Doengan had this to say about Pete Buttigieg,

"He responded to questions ... with his accustomed air of rehearsed imprecision, never deviating from his robotic affect and never giving a straight answer

"His answers sounded more like marketing copy for a nefarious tech start up than like statements of political principle. He looked, more than anything, like a man who has not relaxed since he was a child.

"Through his cloud of consultant-speak and imprecision, it became clear that Buttigieg was trying to attack Sanders..."

Good copy!  Barfo has previously discussed Buttigieg's rehearsed emollient, reasonable sounding consensualism that covers all bases and none.    He is a master of evading the question in an ever forming cloud of words that say absolutely nothing but create an aura of high minded purpose. 

Or, as they might say down home, he dazzles 'em with bullshit.

And yet, his "demographic" is affluent, college educated whites - the profesional and managerial class that comprise the Nine Percent.    So I have been pondering: how is it that the better educated and erudite of our country are dazzled by bullshit?

The first answer is obvious: they want to be.  As I have said before, investment in a capitalist system is what fealty was in the feudal.  Gentrified Liberals are invested in the system and are its loyal vassals.  They instinctively appreciate it just as they instinctively resist anything that threatens the status quo.  Of course, they like to think of themselves as being in favor of change. After all, there are so many injustices out there!    Some may even feel a nagging guilt about that surely reasonable,  and hardly blameworthy injustice that is called "being comfortably well off."    In either case, they look for causes to fret about and injustices to change all of which have the one common feature of not affecting their real estate holdings or 401k's.

But there is another factor at work as well.  Precisely because they are well educated and erudite they tend to think (money aside) in conceptual categories.   They don't think of "fish" or "shoes" -- that would be too childish -- but of "goods" and from "goods" to summi boni

Aristophanes made fun of Socrates by depicting him as floating about in a basket hanging from the clouds.  Aristophanes was being most unfair because if anyone, it was Socrates who made a point of lancing the balloon of people's abstractions 

There is even on dialogue in which Socrates meets Pete Buttigieg -- although at that time he was called Gorgias.   "What do you do for a living?" Socrates asked.   Gorgias replied

Gor. Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art.

Soc. Very good then; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a teacher of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned?

Gor. With discourse.

Soc. What sort of discourse, Gorgias?   To what class of things do the words which rhetoric uses relate?

Gor. To the greatest, Socrates, and the best of human things.

Soc. That again, Gorgias is ambiguous; I am still in the dark: for which are the greatest and best of human things?

Gorgias:   What is greater than treating of justice in the courts and of governance in the assembly?

And so it went... Socrates trying to find out exactly what Gorgias believed in and what compass he used to guide his counsel and conduct; Gorgias ever sliding about in evasive generalities which sounded impressive so long as they were swallowed without being chewed.   In the end, Gorgias never provided an answer as to what he actually professed.  His discourse was committed to nothing above the technique of persuading.

In Socrates' day, rhetoricians were barristers or pleaders of causes.  Today Gorgias would just as easily be a branding or media consultant. In either case, what is involved is peddling an image.  It doesn't really matter what the image is so long as it sells.  Indeed, where everything is viewed as a commodity, selling is all that matters.

All of which leads back to the question of why Bootigieg's particular imagery is so attractive to the affluent educated?  We might begin by asking what the imagery itself is.  Its nature is to give the impression of treating an array higher goods in a disinterested fashion bearing in mind principles which are both fundamental and transcendent, uplifting and unifying.  By the same token, its nature is to ignore the specific class interests of the professional-managerial class; to act as if they somehow were not in the game or at issue.  Black lives really do matter!  Women's Right to Chose!  But not a question of the tax breaks I got simply because I am wealthy enough to "earn" them.

And so... we are left with our original hunch.  The "better sort" in our country are charmed by Mayor Pete because he presents no threat to their survival and distracts the "less fortunate" from seeing what is necessary for theirs.  

They talk of "working together as a country" or some such vaporous nostrum at which Buttigieg exells.   How come never sharing together as a country?

©barfo 2020

 

Enough Democracy!

Predictably enough, the vote-tallying snafu engineered by the DNC in Iowa coupled with Iowa's weighted caucus system that gives rural counties a more equal vote than others, has evoked cries to change the system. What's wrong with a simple majority vote?! Why should Iowa be the first pirmary anyway?! While these rhetorical questions are valid, they miss an underlying issue. Once again, Rome.

As the three or four students of Roman history in the United States might recall, the history of the Empire is one of chronic wars of succession relieved by shorter or longer periods of “stability and peace” in which a grateful and exhausted nation sought to recover. Most texts portray these wars as or battles between ambitious ego-maniacs grasping at the throne. But they were more than that. For the most part, the protagonists were point men for rival class, economic, or regional interests. More than just ego-driven “revolts,” they were the equivalent of an electoral process, in which different partisans compete. It has been said that in Rome politics was a blood sport.

The common feature of a “battle” and an “electoral process” is that both require and represent a tremendous martialing of resources. Then as now, behind every arrow or sword lies a legion of hewers of wood and blacksmiths and smelters, to say nothing of tanners and tailors and all the craftsmen needed to equip an army. But the social product does not end there. Then as now every campaign also included publicists and image consultants to make the contenders' case to the Senate and to the public. Making the case included putting on spectacles or “donating” some kind of public work. Running for emperor was an expensive proposition.

The greatest and most devastating effect, however, was the fact that the legions “lived off the land” which is a polite way of saying that they stole their food from the inhabitants who were unlucky enough to be in their campaigning path. Imperial elections in Rome were quite literally devastating.

Presidential elections in the United States are equally exhausting. Of course the media talk about elections as if they were “battles” but they do so in an insipid way that considers this to be “just a metaphor.” Not. While electoral campaigns are increasingly -- and outrageously -- costly, it is true that their proportional economic impact does not equal those of Rome's electoral wars. Instead, the devastation of American elections is wreaked upon the country's social capital.

As with individuals, a healthy civic society needs to be psychologically balanced. Societies, as individuals, can “only do so much.” Both must apportion their attention and energies. To give a simple example: exercise is necessary and good, but a man who becomes consumed by running or weight lifting or tennis neglects other aspects of his life which are equally required for health. He falls into being an obsessive fetishist. All individuals must devote a portion of time to the work of survival, but also to pleasures of leisure. They must devote time to their children and to forming relationships outside the family circle. Lastly, in a democracy, they need to set aside time for for civic participations and to thinking and discussing the needs of their greater “home”. The point of discussion is not to have a discussion but to make some correction or improvement in our collective life - the building of a school, the policing of streets, the preservation of water quality and so on. The expectation is that with such things accomplished we can go on to other things that make life enjoyable and worth living. With too much politics, the means consumes the ends.

But it gets worse. As with spectator sports, spectator politics is simply junk action. The man who sits in front of a teevee getting a vicarious thrill of combat while munching cheezoh's and drinking beer doesn't even get the benefit of exercise. The same can be said for the “political junkie” whose brain gets filled with endless political chatter devoid of civic accomplishment Both simply become useless, pathetic addicts. The endless chatter and clatter ultimately becomes uniform and meaningless. I would wager that one could run news interviews, reports and talk shows from 1988 and no one would notice the difference. People who value their time and sanity simply tune out.

No ruling class ever wants the ruled to have a say in their affairs. The trick is to engage the masses while disengaging them. Politics as the opiate of the masses is precisely want the ruling oligarchies want to see. A politics that consumes energy and focus while accomplishing only exhaustion after, perhaps, a brief moment of euphoria Endless democracy ends up being no democracy.

American democracy is a farce on many levels. But the worst aspect of the farce is turning a four year electoral cycle into an never ending electoral war. What gets devastated is the citizen's civic tolerance. The whole thing becomes tiresome; oft repeated promises ring hollow and meaningless rhetorical generalities dissipate in their own vapour.

There is no reason for a two year long election cycle, in which one and a half years are handed over to organizing, speechifying and primaries spread over successive months followed by a pointless carnival convention and a grand finale of sturm und drang. No other country handles elections in this manner. Elections in European countries are over in a matter of months. Voting is uniform and conducted on a single day with at most a run-off shortly thereafter.

This is not to say that politics goes to sleep at all other times. Of course not. But, at those other times, politics arises in connection with the ordinary, daily business of government. To promote a bill, to read about a policy, to discuss a particular pending issue that is of personal interest is not the same thing as being overwhelmed by the multi-front battle-ballyhoo of a campaign.

It is time to put some real democracy into the political circus. Personally, Barfo would prefer scrapping the current system altogether and reverting to a Parliamentary democracy. Way short of that, the primary season should be reduced by requiring all primaries to be held on a single day in the Spring when the weather is good and people are not snowed in. Winner-take-all voting should be eliminated. Voting should be unweighted with no preference to any geographic area. Conventions should also be held on the same day, in June. Elephant hats, donkey whistles, streamers and baloons should be prohibited. 

Next, we kill all the consultants!

©barfo 2020

Raging at One's Own Frustrated Incompetence

The New York Slime is outraged -- positively outraged -- that  the Senate has failed its constitutional duty by refusing to call witnesses in the “trial” of President Trump, thereby insuring his acquittal on the impeachment charges.  Fie! Ne'er more vile a thing.... and blah, blah, blah.  The inevitable acquittal will serve only to bring a second disgorging of more blah, blah, blah.

Was there any doubt that a Republican controlled Senate would stonewall the trial or -- if it came to that -- acquit?  Not a scintilla of doubt.

As if taken by shock and surprise, the Slime goes on to rant: “the Senate has become nothing more than an arena for the most base and brutal — and stupid — power politics.”

But what of the House?  Was it any less “power politics” to bring charges that were foreseeably certain to fail?  What then was the point if not to score  stupid political points in an election year?

The Demorats and the Slime refuse to grasp the very simple fact that Constitution sets a very high bar for the removal of a president.  This bar has nothing to do with the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” -- a semantic issue on which too much blather has been expended.  The bar is set by the simple and positive fact that, in order to convict, a vote of two thirds of Senate present is required.  (Art. 1, § 3 ¶ 6-7.)   That is the equivalent of what is required to table an amendment to the Constitution. 

One has to return to 1789 to grasp the significance of this threshold.  Then, as now, the House represented the people.  The Senate, however, represented the States as such and as sovereign entities.  Senators were not elected by, and did not represent, the people in the various states. That would be a ridiculous duplication of what was already provided for by the House of Representatives.   No -- the Senate was, in effect, a diplomatic council of legates from the States.  More to the point, it was the equivalent of a House of Lords, representing various estate and incorporated interests.  It was understood by the Founders that each State comprised certain geographical-economic interests and that each state would be ruled by oligarchies of leading and propertied men. The Senate represented not people but clusters of economic interests.   Thus to require a two-thirds vote on anything was to require a very high degree of political consensus on the issue in question. Not unanimity; but certainly more than a partisan plurality. A consensus that included a majority of citizens and a super majority of all political-economic interests in the land.

The reason for such a high bar was that removing a president had a revolutionary character akin to deposing a monarch.  The president, of course, is not a king but neither is he a mere minister.  The powers the Framers endowed him with fit to a “T”  Edward Gibbon's definition of a monarchy -- a definition published in 1776.  The obvious difference is that the president is (1) elected for (2) a short term of years.  Another difference, which Hamilton points out, is that the president can be impeached whereas the removal of a monarch requires the “crisis of a revolution.”   But it is that very distinction which points to the nature of impeachment.  It is not merely a forfeiture of office for malfeasance; it is an act which, at the very least, rattles the settled and regular order of the state, which presuposes a non-interruption of its fundamental processes.  The president was elected by a majority of the franchise plus two thirds of the state electors; he should be deposed by no less an equivalent process. 


Did such a consensus exist on whether Trump should be removed for office?  The Democrats might have been united in heart, mind and desire but -- oh surprise -- the Democrats are not the country.  In fact by the looks of how they have managed to loose governorships and legislatures they are far less than the country.  The same sense of petulant entitlement that afflicted Hillary Clinton appears to have infected the Democrat Party.  No, Scarlett, you don't get what you want because you want it.  Or were the Democrats simply pursuing “base...and stupid power politics”?

In law, substance and process go hand in hand.  One never gets to the merits of a criminal's case without meeting a procedural threshold, one of the most important of which is the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts.  Because they never get to trial, the public seldom reads about all those cases which a prosecutor choses not to bring because he knows (for whatever reason) that he will not be able to convince 12 jurors of the defendant's guilt.  A prosecutor who brought a case knowing it could not be won would be guilty of using his office for no other purpose than to vex and harass.

The New York Slime was intent to analogize the situation to that of a criminal trial.  Witnesses should be called!  The Republicans refused!  “Faced with credible evidence that a president was abusing his powers,  .... the Senate abandon[ed] its role as the ultimate guard against a dangerous president.”

    “Faced with credible evidence” is precisely the situation that daily faces a prosecutor who must decide whether or not to pursue the case against an arguably dangerous person.   That is a necessary condition for prosecution, but under our system it is not a sufficient one.  It could never have been in doubt that votes did not exist to convict Trump in the Senate.  With that point in mind it can only be concluded that the entire charade was nothing but stupid power politics aimed at vexing the president and scoring demagogic points.

What is colossally stupid is that there are no demagogic points to be scored.  Trump's base is unmovable and impervious.  The progressive working class wing of the Demorat party has more immediate and substantial things on their minds.  The only groundswell is the one in the brains of media pundits in Le Petit Trianon assembled.   Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff might as well have paraded down the Mall, hand in hand, under a sign reading WE ARE OUT OF TOUCH.  Brioche anyone?

But just for the hell of it let us reach the merits of the case against Trump.

According to the Slime, Trump “was abusing” his powers.  That sounds terrible.  But labels are facile.  How is Trump abusing his power?  In what way is he dangerous?  Saith the Slime,

"The core of the impeachment case against Mr. Trump: his extortion of Ukraine by explicitly conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid on the announcement of investigations into his political rival."

So... he leaned on a clown turned president in an effort to dig up dirt on a possible opponent in the upcoming president.  This undermines the Republic?  Really?  Not only is digging up dirt on rivals as old as democracy itself, it is an essential element of all politics.  Not only is extorting a foreign country an essential element of all diplomacy, it is one that the United States has excelled at perhaps more than any other in the past 200 years.  Do the self-infatuated pundits of the Slime really believe this garbage?  No.  Their duplicitous unbelief is proved by the way they try to metamorphose the “extortion” of the Ukraine into a “vital national security issue.” 

This is how the theory goes.  The stability and defence of the Ukraine is a vital national security interest to the United States.  By threatening to withhold military aid, Trump was, playing fast and loose with the country's national security.

The first defect with this line of reasoning is that the whole point of any blackmail threat is the expectation that it will not have to be carried out. The kidnapper does not want to kill the daughter; he want's the ransom and, at the end of the day, he doesn't have to kill his hostage. It's a nasty form of gamesmanship, but until the murder has actually been committed that is all it is.   Because military aid was never withheld from the Ukraine for more than 48 or so hours, it simply cannot be argued that Trump prejudiced the national security of the United States.  We are left with “fast and loose.”

    Beneath all of this is the assumed premise that the Ukraine is some kind of cornerstone to America's national security.  Since when?  Never, in the 200 plus years of the Republic has the Ukraine ever been regarded as vital to American interests.  Panama was far more vital.  It was always recognized that if anything the Ukraine fell in Russia's sphere of influence.  Never, at least, until 2000 when the Neocons espoused the doctrine of “pushing America's security perimeter eastward.”  (Rebuidling America's Defences , P.N.A.C., Sept.2000.)    Neocon doctrine is nothing other than the Terminal Dementia of empire, but the notion was that the United States had not only to contain Russia but to constrain her.  “To push her back beyond the Urals” as Hitler would have put it.   Yes, dear reader, this is what the Neocons area about.  But it is only under that demented Neocon premise that the Ukraine becomes a “vital piece” of America's movable security structure. 

    What is truly beyond belief is that the Demorats and the Slime should espouse a premise that was rejected by one of its chief architects.  Before he died, Zbignew Brezinski recanted his own theory of hedging in and breaking up the "Russian Empire." This policy, he admitted, was simply wrongheaded.  If tightening a noose around Russia is wrongheaded then Ukraine is simply not in the vital interests of the United States.

    Yet its precisely on this wrongheadedness that the entire case of impeachment hangs.  It is stupid beyond belief.  The average American might never have heard of Brezinski's The Grand Chessboard but they know in the intuitive way that common people know things that Ukraine means nothing to us.   We can undermine its elected government with the help of neo nazis, we can “stand by it” by funding the fascist Azov Brigade, we can use it to annoy and tweak Russia or to make money from IMF loans... but none of this is in the vital national security interests of the United States.

    The case against Trump simply fails to rise to even a serious level much less to cause for institutionalized revolt.

  

    This is not to say that Trump is not a threat to democracy, to what is called civil society and to the planet.   But if that is the case to be made, the Democrats have failed to make it.  Nor is it clear that they can make it given that the worst of Trump's policies have always been drawn behind a tissue of legality. The way to run him out of town is the way the Constitution provides: by not renewing his contract at the end of his term.   But that is not the way the Demorats have chosen and they have not chosen it because the DNC is nothing more than the alter-ego of a resentful, vituperative, narcissistic bitch. 

©barfo 2020