Some (Non)Problems Are More Easily Solved Than Others

This post is dedicated to Turnabout Records in recognition of its motto: “Turnabout is Fair Play.”

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Our fair play deed of the day is in response to the selfless desire of Republicans to keep us peasants from losing time for our prayers by having to scratch our heads trying to decide how we wish to be governed. (We discussed this in the recent post “Republicans Just Wanna Help You” https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2021/06/republicans-just-wanna-help-you.html.) So today we offer the GOP a simple plan to solve two of their perceived problems: Election fraud and voter suppression.

The Republicans insist that their recent avalanche of legislation in many GOP-controlled states to combat “election fraud” (yeah, it deserves scare quotes) is needed, even though most of them admit that there was no wide-spread fraud in the 2020 presidential election (a couple of jerks were discovered to have voted twice, once in propria persona and once pretending to be their deceased father; they were Trump voters). So, what is the defense of such legislation? It is allegedly designed to keep the non-existent from occurring in the future. I am reminded here of a recent article on Artnet.com* concerning a dispute about the invention of invisible art. Don’t laugh; an “artist” sold some schmuck “a work of art made of literally nothing” for €15,000 ($18,300). The GOP is trying that stunt on the political front.

The voter suppression drive is, of course, what the legislation is really in aid of. “Let’s keep the democratic voters from voting and we’re home free. To hell with the will of the people!” 

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Back to our Turnabout Fair Play. Here is our legislation help for the Republicans: Eliminate elections!  By one stroke of legislative magic they will have both eliminated election fraud (no elections, thus no chance of fraud) and of course will have entirely suppressed opposition votes (no elections, no votes). 

The GOP could then pay tribute to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its 100th anniversary by taking a leaf out of the CCP’s playbook. Only about 7 percent of China’s population are allowed to be members of the Party. The CCP, therefore, can

control politics, economics, and society without losing its exclusivity. Anyone can apply to join, but applicants are carefully vetted and huge numbers are rejected.**

Without elections, a small coterie of Republican true believers can control the destiny of the US. And isn’t that what they want?

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Harry Golden was a New Yorker who moved to North Carolina in 1941 and later founded his own periodical, The Carolina Israelite. He was a fierce opponent of segregation, which he attacked in his work. His most famous observation about segregation was that whites were fine with standing in line with black people but would not tolerate sitting next to them. Golden thus proposed “vertical integration,” eliminating seats in schools, theaters, restaurants, buses, etc. 

Golden was of course a satirist, which we would never claim to be (despite the motto of this blog being “Fools rush into my head, and so I write,” Alexander Pope). We are merely good samaritans who wish, as stated in the second paragraph, to return a favor to the GOP.

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* https://news.artnet.com/art-world/florida-man-lawsuit-invisible-sculpture-1984780

** https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/chinese-communist-party-most-adaptable/

Republicans Just Wanna Help You

Our thanks today to Jonathan Chait of New York magazine,* who alerted us to an article in the Wall Street Journal in defense of the filibuster. Chait’s own article is entitled, “Is This the Dumbest Filibuster Defense Ever Written?” 

The authors of the WSJ piece are Mike Solon and Bill Greene, identified by Chait as 

former advisers to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, respectively, and now (naturally) lobbyists.

Their defense of the filibuster, the way a minority of Senators can thwart the passage of legislation favored by a majority of that body, focuses on those citizens that the authors identify as “political innocents . . . political nobodies.” Solon and Greene see these Americans who spend their time

playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children

—if allowed to exercise their political rights—having to spend their time 

rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting.

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Now, the article by Solon** and Greene may well offer the “dumbest” defense of the filibuster, but it is totally in-line with standard Republican thinking. After all, don’t they want us all down on our knees praying rather than mobilizing to effect a fairer, more equal America? School prayer vs. desegregated schools—which side are Republicans on? Keep the “nobodies” from posting a mail-in ballot; restrict the franchise to the somebodies—who, miraculously, happen to be Republicans. 

A “dumb” but standard Republican argument.

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As a further example of this standard thinking, consider the words of the Republican lovechild the economist Milton Friedman, as reported in the most recent issue of The New Republic*** In a speech in apartheid South Africa in 1976, Friedman rejected the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Voting, Friedman declared, was inescapably corrupt, a distorted “market” in which “special interests” inevitably dictated the course of public life. Most voters were “ill-informed.” Voting was a “highly weighted” process that created the illusion of social cooperation that whitewashed a reality of “coercion and force.” True democracy, Friedman insisted, was to be found not through the franchise, but the free market . . . . 

After 45 years, the Republican song remains the same:

“Political innocents,” “political nobodies,” “the ill-informed” have no business partaking in the political process, no business in deciding who should establish the laws that they must live by. Once upon a time, our colonial ancestors declared, “No taxation without representation.” Today, our Republican somebodies are dedicated to keep taxing the “nobodies” (not the rich), while preventing them from voting. 

“We the self-identified ‘informed’ know what’s good for you; don’t worry your little heads over it.”

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* https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/is-this-the-dumbest-filibuster-defense-ever-written.html

** Irony alert: According to Greek mythology, the name of the wise Athenian who gave the laws (democracy) to that city was Solon.

*** https://newrepublic.com/article/162623/milton-friedman-legacy-biden-government-spending

Reds Under the Beds

It has fallen upon me recently to educate media types about the dark period of American life after WWII called the Red Scare. For example, there was the writer of an article in a California magazine who regularly called the House Committee on Un-American Activities (usually referred to as HUAC) the “House Committee on Un-American Affairs,” a minor quibble, perhaps. Then there was a writer in a left-wing British magazine who claimed that the egregious Senator Joseph McCarthy was the harasser of Hollywood, when it was the above-referenced HUAC that was the culprit. McCarthy mainly took aim at alleged communists in government. Worst of all was the confusion by a writer of a book on cabaret who seemed to have no idea that Congress is a bi-cameral institution; he had Senator McCarthy in charge of the House of Representatives committee.

I have received no acknowledgements from the first two periodicals. The book writer I did not try to reach, deeming him a hopeless case, as his tome was so chock-full of errors that I stopped reading early on.

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I bring all this up as it seems we’re into a new chapter of the Red Scare—with a strange twist. Republicans—politicos and shleppers—have been shouting recently about communists, but with a bizarre choice of alleged reds. For example, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney has been under fire from Republicans for quite some time over his condemnation of Donald Trump. At a state party convention Saturday in Utah, Mitt Romney was booed while taking the stage, shortly before a failed bid to censure him for voting to convict Donald Trump.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, some called Romney a “traitor” and a “communist.”*

It had never occurred to me before that the GOP had once been promoting a commie as leader of their party.

Another recent example of this Republican obsession with finding reds is found in a New York Times article about cherries, of all things. Mask-wearing and politics have divided a Michigan community, leading to a split having to do with who shops at what cherry stand. The Times tells us that a kook named Randy Bishop, “sometimes called the ‘Rush Limbaugh of Antrim County,’ ”

will boycott King’s [one of the fruit stands] forever . . . “along with other progressive, communist business owners in this county.”**

So, in addition to looking for reds in the forefront of the Republican Party, we should beware of business owners, who, presumably, desire to have their enterprises appropriated by the state.

With the disappearance of actual communists, the word communist is devoid of substance but still loaded with powerful connotation—muy malo.

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I sit here in silent hope that President Joe Biden in his Geneva conversation with ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin implored the Russian to resurrect the Soviet Union. That would bring real communists back into the world—and the Republicans could with truth assail Mischa in Moscow and Andrei in Arkhangelsk.

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*  https://thesource.com/2021/05/03/mitt-romney-booed-and-called-a-communist-at-republican-convention/https://thesource.com/2021/05/03/mitt-romney-booed-and-called-a-communist-at-republican-convention/

**  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/michigan-masks-covid-farm-stands.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage