Hispanic Fanatic

There is something mathematically pure about the Republican Party. For the past 30 years, they have insisted that once they have the presidency, everything will be great, but the exact opposite — i.e., massive chaos — always occurs.

This predictable political formula of A plus B equals C would be charming enough. But it’s the specifics that amaze and astound.

Consider that the last three GOP presidents (Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Trump) all began their terms with solid economies and ended their terms with recessions. Although Jr.’s was the worst, Trump 2.0 has the potential to create a definite trend of economic downturns intensifying with each Republican administration.

However, the most amazing mathematical formula, too precise to be coincidence, is that the last three GOP presidents have waged an unnecessary war in the Middle East, with the rationale for each one becoming more ludicrous than the last.

We’ve gone from defending Kuwait to imaginary WMDs to… well, nobody really knows why we’re bombing Iran. It could be one of a dozen vague, contradictory reasons or no reason at all.

This latest round of GOP warmongering in the Middle East looks to end the trilogy with a full-blown scene of total Armageddon. Seriously, we have religious zealots who are eager to kill us all for the glory of Jesus (which theologians would tell you is not something Christ would actually want). But hey, if the apocalypse comes, at least we would be spared another GOP president.

In any case, I have long wondered about voters who insist that Republicans are better for the economy, despite a century of evidence that this is not true. However, now I have to ponder why any sane adult would look at Trump during the 2024 election, listen to the GOP’s shrieked bloodlust, and think “They are the party of peace.”

Yeah, Trump said he wouldn’t start any wars, but it was a minor miracle that he didn’t launch one during his first term. He was too busy golfing and denying Covid to attack anybody. Only a child would believe that our luck would last. Trump and his right-wing acolytes are happy only when Americans are dropping bombs on people.

Invading Venezuela was just too easy and didn’t deliver the carnage that conservatives love and the distraction that Trump needed. And that is why “the most powerful man on Earth is cavalierly bombing and reshaping one of the most geopolitically explosive regions in the world — and has offered nothing even approaching a coherent explanation for why he’s doing it or what he’s aiming to achieve.” We all know that it was horrific enough “for America to have a mad king, [but] now the world is seeing the rise of a mad emperor.”

Our lunatic president — who has really shot to hell his chances of winning that elusive Nobel Peace Prize — “is telling liesabout the war that not only contradict one another, but contradict themselves internally.” We have to ask if this misbegotten war is “about a nuclear program that doesn’t exist” or a regime change “that we haven’t thought through” or “an imaginary Iranian threat to elections.” Our befuddled commander in chief “has claimed both that he already destroyed Iran’s nuclear program and that he is now destroying it,” which makes it a Schrodinger’s cat of atomic weaponry.

This conflict — which has yet to gain a catchy name, so we will likely go with the Iran War — has been launched “without explanation, without Congress, without even an attempt to build public support, [and] without a coherent strategy.”

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Because according to the GOP ideology, “the dominance itself is the point; there is no other endgame.”

As for the war itself, at some point, America “may be forced to choose between an escalation or an embarrassing climbdown.”

Assuming that this campaign doesn’t end in a disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a mighty victory, our best hope is that our easily distracted president just gets bored with the war and impulsively calls it off. That would not be the first time he creates a cataclysm, leaves a mess for others to clean up, and declares victory.

If we tell him that America has won the war already, will he tweet himself congratulations and go back to ranting about paper straws?

Sounds like a coherent strategy to me.

I haven’t said much about Venezuela because I’ve been busy processing the fact that armed government militias are shooting women in the face and getting away with it. And when I’m not dwelling on that grotesquerie, I’m obsessing about the fact that millions of Americans are ok with this development, actively support it in many cases, and insist that a country where governmentalized thugs can murder people who disrespect them is just fine.

Yeah, it’s a lot to ponder.

In any case, the US invaded Venezuela a couple of weeks ago.

This was to stop the flow of drugs, or seize the oil, or end repression, or.. well, who even knows anymore? Certainly not the guy who authorized the incursion. 

Hell, just “a week after the mission to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, the chief executive of ExxonMobil called the country ‘uninvestable,’ undercutting the economic rationale for the military intervention.”

This shifting of reasons and mess of contradictions was not enough to dissuade an acquaintance of mine, a Latino conservative who plastered my social media with proclamations of how great it was that we bombed Venezuela and captured Maduro.

This acquaintance ended his rhapsodizing with the declaration “I hope we take care of Cuba next.”

I’ve said it before: There is never enough warfare for conservatives.

I wonder if people like this remember the Iraq War, where we overthrew a vicious dictator and then were shocked when the people of that country were not grateful. We were even more surprised when we discovered that rebuilding a country is not as easy as eliminating a second-rate despot.

Even more relevant, I wonder if they know anything about US military intervention in Latin America, which has almost always culminated in violence, death, and suffering for the inhabitants, and never freedom and easy living for the nation we invaded.

Why do they clamor for more of the same, insisting that this time, under the auspices of a volatile ignoramus, it will be different?

Perhaps they would like to know that repression in Venezuela has actually intensified since we kidnapped Maduro, and there is no indication that life will be better for anyone any place where US troops are active.

And speaking of Maduro and how it relates to ICE thugs shooting people in American streets, keep in mind that the “worst thing that Maduro did is just what Trump is beginning to do: killing civilians and blaming them for their own deaths.”

Conservative who agree with Trump that mocking federal officials is grounds for immediate execution should note that the Maduro regime “claimed that the people they murdered were resisting government authority, and that the men who pulled the trigger had been provoked by those whom they murdered.”

Yes, we can either believe our own eyes and intuition, or we can embrace the “conspiracy story that Trump and his advisors are telling: that all evil has to do with immigrants and drugs, and that everyone who wants democracy and human rights in the United States is somehow part of a giant invisible immigration/drug/antifa conspiracy directed from abroad.”

Your call.

Everything is a distraction, but nothing is a distraction.

The president receiving a $400 million jet from a foreign nation in an overt display of greed, corruption, and potential bribery? That’s a distraction. Also the motherfucker really wants that jet.

Once again, everything that Trump says is true — in his mind at that moment. 

For example, that whole Gulf of America imbroglio wasn’t on anyone’s radar until it popped into the Dear Leader’s head, ex nihilo, after which it suddenly became a top priority. The guy wanted to do it, and the process was surprisingly easy. So now we have a cartographic catastrophe.

In contrast, taking over Gaza and building Trump hotels on the land is substantially more difficult. That means it isn’t going to happen. Again, our butterfly-brained chief executive meant it when he said it. But when the endeavor turned out to be a chore, he forgot about this particular desire and moved on to some other scattered, ill-conceived project.

This brings us to the most troubling aspect of the Trump administration’s constant flinging of bizarre ideas and psychotic master plans.

You see, even though this bloviating sack of lies “never mentioned taking over Greenland—or Canada, or Panama, or Mexico—during the 2024 campaign, he has made such takeovers a key objective of his administration.” The reason these absurd threats keep surfacing is because of “a historical truism: when one country invades another, it usually reflects the problems of the invader’s domestic politics, no matter what the justification for the invasion is.”

So if Trump’s poll numbers keep falling, and there is every reason to assume they will, the warmongers and lunatics who surround him will no doubt realize that “war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts.”

It worked for George W. Bush, who likely would have lost reelection if not for the argument that he was a “wartime president.” Yeah, and that war, which he started, turned out great — didn’t it? And his second term was a raving success — right? 

But I digress. Let’s get back to our current Republican incompetent.

Now, we certainly aren’t going to pick a military fight with China. We can’t even win a trade war against them. 

But we can shoot it out with a smaller nation. Hey, didn’t you ever wonder why the Reagan administration invaded tiny Granada? 

The drive to dominate a smaller country is even stronger among conservatives than it was during Ronnie’s time. This is because “the reactionary patriotism we’re so familiar with is now infected with an apocalyptic mindset.” The Republican Party has morphed into “a toxic system of belief, capable of overriding material self-interest and logic because the main offering is revenge.” This goes way beyond “the shallow emotional fix of winning elections or sticking it to the libs.” At its core, Trumpism is “not so much a hatred for any one group … but a hatred of civilization itself.”

There’s a whole lot of civilization in the world that right-wingers want to vanquish. The hope is that we can white-knuckle it out for three years without bombs dropping. But it all depends on how easily we get distracted.

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

—Kurt Vonnegut

I know the basics about the Middle East. But that’s about it. I certainly can’t speak with any authority about the history, culture, or political issues that roil the place.

But I know America, and I see that antisemites are using the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians as a cover for how much they hate Jews. And I see that Islamaphobes are citing the grotesque actions of terrorists as a cover for how much they hate Muslims.

It doesn’t matter if you live in Jerusalem or New Jersey, we are all subjected to the violent whims of people who insist that their race, culture, or god is the best and far superior to those heathens living next door.

And there appears to be no end in sight to this sociopathic commonality among humans.

There is nothing intelligent to say about it.

All of us—me in particular and America in general—have been talking a lot about civil war lately. To describe the frayed state of our nation, we’ve even learned a fancy new word: anocracy. This indicates a floundering country that is teetering between democracy and authoritarianism. Its presence is the first indicator that a civil war may be coming.

And what is the second indicator?

Well, that would be “whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology—so not based on whether you’re a liberal or a conservative—but where the parties themselves are based almost exclusively around ethnic, religious or racial identity.”

So the fact that the Republican Party has become the white-grievance party is more than just disturbing. It is a possible harbinger of war.

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Recently, I wrote about the rise of white supremacist terrorism. As horrifying as that concept is, please note that violence is just a means to an end for America’s racists.

Sure, many homicidal bigots enjoy bashing in a black person’s head or shooting a Latino for sheer enjoyment. But most of them are not content to sucker-punch an Asian person and leave it at that. They want more. 

And that more consists of civil war.

Yes, I know that the idea of internecine armed conflict was laughable during, say, the Obama administration. Well, those halcyon days (which were only mildly halcyon by the way) might as well have been centuries ago. Because here in the post-Trump world, a full-fledged civil war is a distinct possibility.

Now to be clear, a second American civil war would not look like the 1860s version, which featured dueling governments and uniformed armies and generals with wacky facial hair. 

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All of this has happened before. 

No, a major American political party has never attempted to overthrow the government in a violent insurrection. That’s a spectacularly unique item for our charming day and age.

But white supremacist terror, culminating in an attack on democracy itself? Yup, we’ve done that.

You see, back in 1898, the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, elected a new municipal government that consisted of both white and black citizens. Thousands of white men—furious that the election didn’t go their way—refused to accept the result and overthrew the local government. They rampaged through the streets and murdered hundreds of black citizens.

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If, for some horrific and highly implausible reason, you found yourself on the front line of a combat zone, ready to charge into battle, and you glanced over and saw me standing next to you, I doubt you would feel comforted. 

That’s because I believe in nonviolence, so I wouldn’t be there shrieking war cries and boasting how I was going to drink my enemies’ blood. I would more likely be trying to figure out how to avoid shooting myself or anybody else, and this is not the quality you want in a soldier.

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Just like haters are gonna hate, apologists are gonna apologize.

Well, not really. As we know, the term “apologist” refers to people who rationalize and excuse reprehensible behavior. For ekrainxample, if you were a spineless toady for a scatter-brained bigot, but you still support him because you both dislike “woke” people, then you would be an apologist. In such cases, there is no actual apologizing taking place.

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In the weeks since Vladimir Putin launched his “genius” invasion, more than 2 million Ukrainians have fled their country. These refugees have scattered to neighboring European nations, where they have received warm embraces—unless they are black, in which case they are roughed up and detained. 

Of course, the Ukrainian refugees deserve the world’s sympathy and assistance. However, it is worth noting that because they are often blond and blue-eyed, their plight is eliciting far more empathy than, say, people fleeing war in the Middle East.

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