"One Of Us! One Of Us!" Plus,

The press still have no feck, plus more comfort music, plus

Here we are all the same (credit Weldon Berger)

"One Of Us! One Of Us!"

Had I not seen with my own eyes the entire senate Democratic caucus sitting at their desks chanting “one of us! one of us!” before unanimously voting to confirm Marco Rubio as secretary of state, I would not have believed it.

Rubio is among the stoogiest of Chucky the homicidal dummy stooges, and very far from the brightest as well. How Democrats—all of them!—could fail to recognize that Chucky was not appointing anyone from whom he had not extracted a pledge of absolute fealty, even were it someone they sometimes shared a friendly elevator fart with, is almost but not quite beyond me.

I mention this because Chucky just appointed an avowed White Supremacist—not White Nationalist, because he’s not actually that wild about this country—as Rubio’s acting undersecretary in charge of public diplomacy.

The one statement just about everybody has been quoting from Darren Beattie, which he made on Musk’s personal Der Stürmer a few months ago, is this:

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

Roy Edroso, who Breaks It Down, flagged an MSNBC column by Jared Holt, a prolific researcher of and reporter on hate groups and other reactionary extremists (which includes much of the current administration), who expands on Beattie’s history of extremism and his relationship with Chucky and other far-right politicians and factotums.

It is a comprehensive slagging of a guy who undeniably belongs in a slag heap.

He once asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “done more to advance conservative positions in the U.S. than any Republican.” He once claimed that Britain and the United States treated their white citizens worse than China treated Muslim Uyghurs, whom China has arbitrarily detained in re-education camps and brutalized, and he has repeatedly mocked Uyghurs who oppose their treatment by the Chinese Communist Party.

And so on. Beattie got himself fired from both Duke University and the previous Reign of Chucky for his open palling around with the White Supremacy crowd, which he insisted was in the interest of intellectual exploration before deciding to go with “ah, fuck it” instead, which got him back on the inside.

So he’s now in charge of how embassies and consulates and other state department arms world-wide are instructed to interact with the people in the countries where they’re representing the U.S., which people are mostly not, well, white.

Who knows if Rubio is exactly happy with the situation, but he’s not objecting and could not have been expected to object; he is well known to be an extraordinarily craven man. But he was at the time of the vote “one of us! one of us!”

The press still have no feck

“Feckless” is one of those “less” words that actually has an apposite root. Feck, according to the OED, means “efficacy, efficiency, value; hence, vigour, energy.” Our bedraggled institutional press are so often feck-free these days.

Ethnic cleansing is considered a crime against humanity by both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. If you propose ethnic cleansing, and then follow it up proposing to claim the cleansed land as your own and repopulate it with other people, you’re proposing crimes against humanity.

When the U.S. president does that, you might expect (think, hope, gesticulate wildly at the possibility, whatever) that the paper of record would lead with the criminal part. You would, obviously, be disappointed in every respect.

In the initial version of the story, the reporters referred to ethnic cleansing as a violation of international law, a reference that has now somewhat astonishingly been edited to a crime against humanity—I expected it to be removed, not clarified and strengthened.

Then they sort of ruin all that hard work.

Past population transfers on this scale have often exacerbated social and political problems instead of solving them, and caused extreme hardship for the people forced from their homes.

As crimes against humanity sometimes will.

Some analysts do say it’s a negotiating tactic, and they’re likely right. It’s an extremely dangerous one, though, putting as it does an even larger target than the genocide has already done on the back of everyone who might be involved, even if only by carrying a passport of the U.S. of Chucky, and establishing that these United States no longer give even lip service to the concept of international law.

And what’s the payoff? Probably it’s everybody with an army saying phew, at least they’re not committing another crime against humanity in Gaza when Israel finishes annexing the West Bank. Just a crime against humanity in the West Bank, where, what with everything else going on, you could be marginally forgiven for not noticing that the Israelis are ever more actively blowing up Palestinian homes and Palestinians.

Or hell, maybe he really wants to give it a shot. Who’s gonna stop him trying? Whisky Pete Hegseth? Rubio? “One of them! One of them!”

It is unworkable. But that’s not the point.

“We create our own reality”

Everybody still thinks Karl Rove was the guy in Ron Susskind’s famous 2004 NY Times story who said that Susskind and other members of what the speaker dismissed contemptuously as “members of the reality-based community” were hopelessly out of step with the times.

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Is this ringing any bells, striking any sympathetic notes?

Rove of course was in power at the same time as David Addington, the Cheney advisor I’ve mentioned before, who had his fingers in many of the most toxic Bush administration pies and who said, with reference to expanding the scope of the imperial presidency, "we’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

Nobody has yet surfaced as that larger force against the current Chucky the homicidal dummy administration. Some things may have been paused, although that’s actually unclear, but nothing has reached a final disposition where we might determine whether Chucky or Musk et al intend to yield to courts or, assuming this ever happens, Congress.

I bring this up only to remind everybody that what’s happening now is not sui generis; it’s just the most radical and to this point successful implementation of what the reactionary right has been trying to get to for at least five decades, and which to this point had been best demonstrated by the Bushies, with plenty of acquiescence from the Democrats.

More Comfort Music

Comfort music for me, not necessarily and quite possibly not for thee.

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, Live on Audiotree (“Some Conversations You Just Don’t Need to Have”); Broken Social Scene, Forgiveness Rock Record (“Texico Bitches” official and somewhat strange video); Fantastic Negrito, Son of a Broken Man (“I Hope Somebody’s Loving You”).

I take it back. You will be comforted.

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