Opinion

Both Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon took cash bribes while in the White House and before. Agnew’s dated back to shakedowns he did as Maryland governor, while Nixon helped Jimmy Hoffa get out of a prosecution and allegedly ran interference for a group of milk producers.

Since then, bribing politicians has gotten a lot easier thanks to five Republicans on the US Supreme Court. Their Citizens United decision, decided 15 years ago this week, legalized political bribery so long as it is done through campaign, PAC, or SuperPAC funds.

I just want to remind everyone that America elected a demented criminal president and as a consequence, we can no longer assume what we used to assume when it came to matters of law and politics.

I know that sounds like a sweeping generalization, but sometimes you gotta swing hard if you’re going to get people’s attention, and right now, given that liberals and Democrats got their heads in the sand, I think it’s prudent to swing hard, even if I’m proven wrong in the end.

Welcome to your first full week in the new Confederate States of America.

Much like the old CSA, the new CSA (also known as MAGA America) is devoted to:
— Making American as white as possible,
— Stripping women and minorities of political and economic power,
— Gutting workers’ rights,
— Rigging election outcomes,
— Leaders nakedly taking bribes,
— Using a phony veneer of Christianity to justify brutal policies,
— Making queer people invisible,
— Reconfiguring schools for indoctrination,
— Having militias terrorize minorities and their opponents, and,
— Maintaining a government of, by, and for rich, white men.

It is worse than many of us imagined.

Not because we didn't know it would be bad, but because I reckon we practiced self-care by not fixating on it every hour of every terrible day since the horrid election in November.

Attending Trump’s inauguration yesterday were six of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the respective leaders/owners of TikTok, Google, and ChatGPT.

Want near absolute power in America with the approval of at least half of the American public?

Biden warns of ‘the tech-industrial complex’

There’s no guarantee democracy won’t turn despotic – again.

There’s no compromising with evil, although some Democrats apparently think they can. Evil, by its very nature, will always win in such situations, even when it appears to have compromised or cooperated.

“Evil” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a force that causes bad things to happen.”

At this point, I think it needs to be said that there’s a feeling among liberals and Democrats, and I would suggest especially affluent white liberals and Democrats, that liberal democracy isn’t really dead.

I would say there’s a deep sense of denial among these folks. They tell themselves that the dearly departed is much too dear to be truly departed. I would say there’s also a good deal of magical thinking in this denial, as if the criminals who shot their beloved will come to justice, and once they do, their beloved will rise again, good as new.

It may seem counter-intuitive, given that most people think of dictators as bad guys themselves, but the simple reality is that without proclaiming enemies — larger than life enemies — dictators have a hard time hanging onto power and accomplishing the things they want to do.

Hitler had Jews. Mussolini had the Italian Socialist Party. For Duterte it was drug dealers. Stalin vilified the “Kulaks” (wealthy peasants) as a threat to the Soviet Union. Mao blamed the bourgeoisie. Pol Pot said intellectuals were the enemy and so ordered everybody who could read killed. Idi Amin blamed Indians and Asians for the problems of Uganda. Robert Mugabe said white farmers were destroying Zimbabwe. Slobodan Milošević pointed to the Kosovo Albanians. Pinochet blamed the trade unions for Chile’s struggles.

The US Department of Defense is the largest government agency in the country. A sprawling and massive bureaucracy, the DOD houses the world’s largest military power, employs nearly 3 million people — greater than the population of many states — and has direct control over the armed forces of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Command.

The Secretary of Defense manages an annual budget exceeding $800 billion, with 1.3 million servicemembers on active duty, 825,000 Reserve and National Guard members, and another 600,000 civilian employees. Frank Carlucci, Secretary of Defense under Reagan, described the position as “one of the more difficult jobs anywhere in the world. He has to be a mini-Secretary of State, a procurement expert, a congressional relations expert. He has to understand the budget process. And he should have operational knowledge.”

As you’re reading these words, Trump and his Republican allies are spraying “a firehose of lies” accusing Democrats of responsibility for the fires in LA. And those lies are working; even mainstream media like The New York Times and The Washington Post are repeating them. Not to mention they’re being pushed like peanuts at a ball game into the faces of hundreds of millions by the right-leaning algorithms of social media.

If Democrats were to create a “Shadow Cabinet,” they could effectively neuter much of this BS. Details on that in a minute, but first some background.