AMERICAN GOTHIC!

 

NEW LOCKDOWN: Day 8, Friday.

 

 

As we continue to fret our way through the no-man’s-land of the space between the counting of the votes and some sort of definitive result from the interminable American election, I have mused over the future not only for America but also for the rest of us.

     What seems likely to happen is that Joe Biden wins the election and becomes President of the United States.  The Blue Wave of support for the Democratic Party has not happened and so the new president will be faced with a reduced majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate controlled by the Republicans.

     Already Republican slime in the human form of Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have stated that they will make it as obstructively difficult as possible for the new president and for the Democrats.  The Slime will have been emboldened by the fact that the election did not sweep away Trump and his sick ethos, rather it will now allow itself to be entrenched in Republican ‘thinking’ for the foreseeable future.  This means that Biden (if elected) will be faced with a frustrating period of government where every truly Democrat idea is frustrated by the Senate.

     At the end of four years (if he lasts that long) Biden will have little in the way of positive achievement to look back on.  He will also be four years older.  So, he will be fighting the 2024 election as an 81-year-old.

     This is where the choice of Kamala Harris as a running mate and vice president comes into play.  If there had been a Blue Wave, then she could have played her part in overturning the discredited actions of Trump and enacting a whole slew of legislation to bring the country back from the brink.  She could have been well-placed to become the candidate for the 2024 election if Biden was unable or unwilling to take on the next four years.

     But after four years of frustration and limited achievement she would be handed a poisoned chalice.  And remember, Trump was NOT trounced, a terrifyingly large percentage of the population saw four years of a grotesquely dysfunctional presidency and voted for four more years of it and Kamala Harris, a coloured, left-leaning, woman is going to tick all the bigot boxes to limit her election.  The incredible numbers of non-white voters who supported Trump, with a special call-out to those Latinos who respond to the word ‘socialist’ with instinctive horror, all combine to suggest that Kamala Harris would be a disaster at the polls in 2024!  And can you imagine either Biden continuing at 81 or the in-fighting in the Democrats in looking for someone else in the lead up to 2024?

     So, this is my horror scenario. 

     The period 2020-2024 is a disaster for Biden and the Democrats. 

     The Covid horror continues as anything that Biden says is immediately construed as an attack on basic liberty by Republican and far right (is there now a difference?) elements.  Covid therefore continues as an ongoing disaster with Democratic attempt to cope with the pandemic seen as anti-democratic (!) and as ineffectual -. Biden will be blamed for the mounting deaths in a way that Trump never was.

     Obama Care is struck down by the Supreme Court, this is seen as a triumph for the wrongly and unjustly forced from office Republicans.  Biden is blamed for the increased deaths and misery caused by the increased numbers of Americans who will no longer have any form of health insurance.

     Tax rises are implemented to pay for the financial disaster of Covid.  Biden is blamed for making ‘ordinary Americans poorer’.

     And so, it will go on, unfairly, with Biden being blamed for things that just seemed to slip off Trump.  Biden, emphatically, could not walk down 5^th Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it.  No way!

     And then, the final horror of 2024, when Trump returns as the ‘wronged’ President and stands as the Republican Party’s nominee to become the 47^th President of the United States of America.  And wins!

 

I fairly obviously hope to god that none of this (apart from Biden winning) comes to pass.  But 69 million bitter ‘disenfranchised’ (!) Tump voters is an awfully large proportion of the population to take with you if Biden (as he surely must) puts himself forward as the healing president trying to bring warring sides together after a more than bruising campaign.

     Trump will have lost the popular vote by millions.  Again.  But who seems to care about that?  The vagaries (or idiocy) of the American Electoral College is what decides, and the Trumpian Hordes are going to be a complicating factor in American politics for the foreseeable future – a future in which a hamstrung Democratic president, unable to count of both houses of Congress is going to fight a losing battle with the Trumpian Hordes baying for his blood.  I do not envy him his task.

 

What can help Biden now is that all the court cases which have been held in abeyance because the President could not be prosecuted are now all activated.  As should be court cases against the nepotistic scum with which the President surrounded himself.  Conflicts of interest should be examined and those suspected (!) of wrongdoing should be prosecuted.   

     Trump has done so much wrong that it is essential that all of his wrongdoing is prosecuted: for the sake of the Republic, he must not be allowed to get away with his trashing of legal norms.  Justice must show that no one is above the law, up to and very much including Trump.  It is essential that any member of his family who is suspected of corrupt wrongdoing should also be prosecuted so that their feelings of indemnity that have characterised the last four years are brought back into some sort of legalistic focus.

     By the way, I am not sure of the legal position of Trump in the period from whenever the final result is called until Biden takes over, but could Trump give presidential pardons to all those who have aided and abetted him in his occupation of the White House?  He has, after all, mooted the idea of giving himself a pardon!  

     Is it still possible for him to resign, have the odious Pence take over and then as president Pence (I refuse to accord even the hypothetical suggestion of office for that man a capital letter) give Trump an open presidential pardon for any and all crimes committed during his ‘presidency’?   

     Given how many of the norms of decency Trump has already broken with impunity, such a devious Get Out of Jail Free process would not be beyond his depths, so to speak!

 

As I type, we still do not know if Biden has been able to gain the 6 votes he needs (assuming Arizona is safe) to gain the presidency.  Presumably, if he is able to, Trump will demand a recount in all the knife-edge states, not to gain power, but rather to give him more time to spread further unfounded rumours and conspiracy theories.   

     Even if Trump eventually goes, his leaving behind a tarnished presidency and a ‘suspect’ accession will be enough for him and the shaeless Republican Party to work with for the next chapter in the sobering tale of Modern Political American Gothic.

 

 

A crumb of happiness!

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It shows how low the bar for ‘political satisfaction’ is set that the fact that a homophobic, racist, unconstitutionally acting, twice fired judge, bigoted, accused paedophile Roy Moore fails to make it to the American Senate as representative for Alabama.  By just over 1% of the popular vote.

As Alabama is a deepest red Republican state, a Democrat successfully elected is a triumph, no matter how small the margin of victory.  It has been estimated that over 70% of the white vote went to the Republican, no matter how vile a candidate was standing to represent them!  And they call themselves God-fearing Christians!

Well, amid the unrelentingly awful progress of Brexit in the hands of a group of Conservatives who, at cabinet level have yet to even discuss what sort of Brexit they are actually working towards, a little ray of reason in the form of the wrong person NOT being elected to office is something to relish.

 

As is the fact that the failed Republican candidate was enthusiastically supported by pussy-groper-in-chief, good old kiss-of-death-to-reason 45, POTUS.  In an astonishingly polite and reasonable twitter 45 actually congratulated the new Democrat Senator!  Could it have been written by 45 himself, or is there someone in his office with a shred of decency who managed to get in first? 

45 has, of course, started to twitter a ‘justification’ (sic) saying that he knew that the Republican would lose which is why he supported his opponent in the Primaries and . . . hold on, I am not going to repeat the mendacious Jesuitical (not that 45 could ever rise to the height of sophisticated casuistry that the Storm Troopers of Roman Catholicism reach) rubbish that spills from his mouth and dribbles from his small handed typing fingers.  He lost.  He backed a loser.  Who lost.  Like him.  Tarred with the same brush of failure.  Sad.

This loss of a crucial vote in the Senate should make the passing of the shameless tax grab by corporations, big business and greedy donors more difficult to pass.  Does anyone truly believe that the new tax cutting laws are going to be revenue neutral, or that they are going to create an economic miracle, just like the similar plans in Kansas didn’t?  One waits and hopes.

But, above all, congratulations to the voters of Alabama for doing the right thing and rejecting a clearly obnoxious bigot from high office - and that is something that I did not expect to write in my lifetime!

Is it just me, or is the triumph of May in the Brexit negotiations anything more than mere words?  Try as I might I can see nothing concrete about any of the three elements of Payment, NI Border, EU Citizens in Britain and we poor British buggers in EU countries.  Yes, vast sums of magic money, billions of pounds have been metaphorically waved in the air (presumably to the sound and rhythm of Boris’s whistling); the Invisible Border has been made concrete (so to speak) but the implications for the rest of Britain, following NI’s lead would suggest that we have no Brexit at all; the gambling chips of EU lives are still being thrown towards the baize table as the wheel revolves.   

It’s an unreal combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and ghoti.

For those not aware of ‘ghoti’ I should explain that it spells the word ‘fish’.  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from enough

Take the ‘o’ from women

Take the ‘ti’ from nation

Put them all together and you have all the sounds to make the word ‘fish’

But it doesn’t end there, ‘ghoti’ also has no sound at all!  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from night

Take the ‘o’ from people

Take the ‘t’ from ballet

Take the ‘i’ from business

Put them all together and you have . . . nothing.

And that, if you still remember what I was talking about, is like what has been ‘agreed’ about Brexit and what the British government (I use the term very loosely) have stated/promised/negotiated/said/suggested/mentioned/insinuated - or any other word you might think of to explain exactly what they have done, because for me, I feel that we are dealing with the second pronunciation of ‘ghoti’ and that we have a wordy nothingness to get on with.

The trouble is, of course, that ‘wordy nothingnesses’ while they might keep the perennially warring EU factions of the Conservative Party momentarily apart, they do nothing for life as it is lived in the real world where real people have real needs.

Living in Spain as I do, what does this ‘triumph’ of negotiation say about my entitlement to healthcare in my adopted country?  What does it say about my ability to travel on the continent on which I live?  My right or not to stay in Spain?  My rights as a Brexit blighted citizen in a re-defined country relationship?

You try finding concrete reality in the vacuous mouthings of dithering, incompetence from the British government, added to the astonishingly lazy arrogance of Davies as he ‘negotiates’ by the seat of his pants with no apparent need for projections of what his airy pronouncements might mean.  Because the Spanish government is going to ask all the hard ‘W’ questions like: What?  When?  Why?  Which?  Who? and so on.  To these our government has no answers, mainly because they have not had the wit to think of the questions themselves.

So, what about the Spanish government?

After the stealing sequestering of art works from Catalonia and sending them to Aragón in defiance of the natural course of law yesterday, the powers that be have today declared that the number of political prisoners jailed at the moment is woefully inadequate and there are plans to incarcerate 40 more of the officials who participate in the dangerously democratic referendum held on the 1^st of October of this year.  You remember, that was the referendum when the world saw pictures and film of members of the Civil Guard and National Police smashing their way into polling stations and into the people who were in them.

Our President is in exile in Belgium and, while the craven Spanish Government has withdrawn the international arrest warrant for him, because it was likely to have been thrown out of court and humiliated the government by its rejection, it has retained the Spanish arrest warrants.  So, if our President were to step foot on Spanish soil he would be immediately arrested.  For the time being our President continues to canvass and participate in the Catalan election via video from Belgium. 

Our President speaks a number of languages including French and English and so he is more than able to communicate with the International Press.  The Spanish President speaks one language, and his command of Spanish has been, um, a little individualist at times.  He has also rejected questions in press conferences which have not been in Spanish.  It is almost sad to watch Rajoy at international gatherings as he attempts to show that he is chums with people who look mildly irritated and embarrassed when he approaches.

We are now only eight days away from an election that could define the course of Spanish history for generations, and indeed the course of European history.  The election in Catalonia involves us all.  What happens to Catalonia will be seen as an indication of the strength of democracy not only inside Spain, but also within the EU and the wider world.

You are involved in what happens on the 21^st.  Keep watching!  Your future is at stake!