TygrBright
TygrBright's JournalImpeachment: Like Thanksgiving Dinner, it's all about TIMING.
What is the Democratic Party most worried about right now?
That the 2020 election will, because of the various election-tainting strategies perpetrated and enabled by the GOP, be close enough to steal (again) and/or precipitate sufficient violence to enable some kind of "martial law" move by President Windrip.
Democratic Party officials always knew there would be insufficient time, and insufficient leverage, between a massive takeover of ONE BRANCH of Congress and the next general election, to monkeywrench the election-tainting.
Insufficient time/leverage to deal with gerrymandering.
Insufficient time/leverage to deal with voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
Insufficient time/leverage to deal with vote hackability.
Insufficient time/leverage to deal with Russian interference.
Their ONLY viable strategy, with the Supreme Court in Russian-controlled hands, is to deliver an electoral victory large enough to relegate any kind of contest to the obvious "sour grapes" column into which it naturally falls anyway.
In other words, to deliver a MASSIVE electoral majority to the Democratic candidate, in as many states as possible, including the states most complicit in election-tainting.
Anyone who's ever tried to put an elaborate, traditional Thanksgiving meal on the table all at once, at a specific time on Thanksgiving Day, knows about timing.
Think about a Thanksgiving dinner for a moment: Multiple dishes. Multiple TYPES of dishes. Variable cooking times, variable cooking methods. A large array of ingredients, many of which are not part of the day-to-day meal preparation routine. For the dinner to be successful, hot stuff needs to land on the table still hot. Cold stuff cold. Early stuff- carrot sticks, appetizers, whatever- shouldn't destroy the appetite for the main course. There needs to be options- for vegetarians, for gluten-avoiders, etc.
It's not just "Hurry up and carve the turkey!!"
Even the turkey itself, needs lengthy preparation- to brine or not to brine? Deep-fry, or roast? Stuff or unstuffed? Can you keep the white meat moist while ensuring the dark meat is cooked through safely? Even serving required multiple presentations and formats: Giblets in the gravy for the giblet-gravy eaters, giblet-free gravy for those who can't stand giblets. White meat and dark meat. Are there enough drumsticks to go around? How do you share them creatively among more than two drumstick aficionados?
(This, by the way, is why Thanksgiving Dinner when our household hosts it consists of reservations to a really nice Thanksgiving Dinner buffet at a very warm and inviting local hotel. They are EXPERTS. With lots of practice. I'm not.)
To deliver that massive electoral victory on November 3rd, 2020, Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership are already doing the ingredient prep and planning the cooking of the most complicated and consequential "Thanksgiving dinner" political event ever in my lifetime.
If you've ever walked into the kitchen of a competent Thanksgiving Dinner chef anytime from several days prior to five minutes before the actual sit-down-and-eat time, you might recoil in horror. What? You haven't even STARTED mixing the dressing? Aren't you going to brine the bird? Are those whole pumpkins table decorations or future pies? Where are the cranberries? Haven't the rolls even gone into the oven yet? Isn't the red wine open to breathe? WTF??
I suspect Speaker Pelosi has delivered more than a few Thanksgiving dinners to the table. Both literally and in the political metaphor sense.
Me, I'm staying out of the kitchen.
But watching what's going in there... the shopping bags full of ingredients, the big ol' roasting pan coming up from the cellar, the tablecloth being transferred from the washer to the dryer...
I'm planning on showing up for dinner.
And I suspect it'll be a dilly.
speculatively,
Bright
No, Ben Carson ISN'T "stupid"... it's worse than that:
So the late-night comedians and the media are having all kinds of fun with Ben's shambling incoherency at the Congressional hearings the other day-- Responding "Amway?" when asked about the OMWI program, and "Oreo?" for REO.
The implication (and outright assumption) being, "What a dummy! Doesn't even know critical aspects of HIS OWN job! Stuff he's been asked about before, sent enquiries in writing, etc.! How stupid can you get!?"
He's not stupid.
He may not be the smartest brain surgeon on the planet but he did manage to qualify as one. I suspect his IQ is in the high normal range, at least.
The problem isn't stupidity.
It's that he honestly believes he doesn't HAVE to know about that stuff. That stuff is for underlings. How stupid are these Congresscritters to be asking him stuff that he very rightly (in his own mindset) leaves to "his people", who are supposed to take care of that kind of thing.
What do they think he is, some mid-level civil servant program manager? Idiots! THEY'RE the stupid ones.
Secretary Carson is a reflection of his boss's own philosophy of leadership:
You don't need to know anything about anything. You just have to have the authority to tell other people what to do.
This isn't just President Windrip's approach, by the way. It seems to have become the default for the entire GOP. NONE of them appear to believe they need to have any skills or knowledge to serve the public. Just authority, to tell other people to deliver on their campaign promises for them, whether the requirements of doing so are Constitutional or not.
It's why they get all self-righteous with fury when those underlings don't "do their jobs" and make the "leaders" look bad.
And here's what's even worse:
Their followers believe this, too. They're not upset that the ignorant, uncaring incompetents they've elected can't perform the functions of legislation or executive management. They're upset that the underlings aren't "making it so" and/or that pesky Constitution and those eeee-vile libruls are interfering with it being made so.
And all the while, we're thinking, "Finally, they'll see how incompetent these doofuses are, and come around to realize we need to elect people who understand the job and have the skills to do it."
We're the stupid ones.
And we are SO screwn...
gloomily,
Bright
A Modest Proposal: Can We Compromise With the Forced-Birthers?
Hear (well, read) me out, now... I know how dizzyingly rageful the latest round of forced-birth legislation has made everyone who mistakes women for human beings. And when the rage is that overwhelming, the very word "compromise" can be like a red flag before a bull. I get that.
But look at the playing field, particularly the Supreme Court. Not to mention all those other Federal Courts the forced-birthers are busily packing. We're in a real pickle, here.
Maybe it's time to negotiate.
I had an idea that will reduce the number of forced births women are subjected to by up to FIFTY PERCENT.
Yes, yes, I know... NO forced births is the morally, ethically, and humanly correct number, but we're a very long way from that now.
Fortunately, technology has stepped in with a potential partial solution (no, I didn't say "partial birth", put away that brick of C-4, dudes.)
See, now with modern medicine, we can tell the gender of a fetus at about nine to ten weeks with a simple NIPT screen. A few more weeks, and we can use ultrasound as well. This is critical, because it enables us to identify the VALUABLE fetuses. The ones who are fully human and can be accorded full rights as human when they're born.
Thus, we can also identify the second-class fetuses, the ones that are not quite fully human and thus can be legally treated like an advanced form of livestock.
So how about this: We allow the uterine hosts to abort ONLY THE LESS VALUABLE fetuses, and force them to carry only the valuable ones to term?
This will reduce the number of forced births by, well, maybe not a full fifty percent, since some uterine hosts may decide to go ahead and replicate another uterine host, but it will drastically cut down on the total number of forced births.
We only send them to jail for 99 years or whatever, if we find they've accidentally-or-on-purpose aborted one of those valuable, fully human fetuses.
We cool with this? I think it could work...
experimentally,
Bright
P.S. I suppose I should add the 
smiley here... there's always someone who needs it.
Quit calling it "Anti-abortion". Or "Pro-Life". It's the FORCED-BIRTH movement.
It's not about "saving babies" when you're talking about a fetus so impaired it will die within a few minutes of birth anyway-- AFTER killing the mother.
It's not about the "innocent unborn" when the conceptus was forced on a newly-fertile 11-year-old by an adult subhuman rapist.
It's not about "life" when you're requiring a human being to use their body as an unwilling receptacle for an unwanted pregnancy and all its metabolic, psychological, economic and social consequences.
It's about controlling women.
It's about denying them agency.
It's about "valuing" the potential life of a blastocyst above the humanity and self-determination of a living, breathing, feeling, thinking being-- because of her gender.
It's about FORCED BIRTH.
Which is what masters have always done to slaves. What owners do to livestock.
What Republicans want to do to women.
disgustedly,
Bright
The Sick Romance of Homophobia and Misogyny
...and why if you slay the dragon of homophobia you ALSO strike a killing blow at misogyny. (Yes, I've turned my response from this thread into an OP at the suggestion of several responders.)
Start with this beautiful image, the cover of today's TIME Magazine:
Sure, homophobia is definitely its own thing, and the whole "ick factor" of straight insecure males being terrified that they're going to be hit on by other guys... or that their daughters are going to take to comfy shoes and shack up with another woman... is rooted in its own existential inadequacy.
But homophobia is ALSO rooted, very deeply, in patriarchy, which rigidly defines gender roles, assigning them based on the supposed 'superiority' of the male and the 'inferiority' of the female.
The whole "traditional marriage is one man and one woman" thing goes back to that patriarchal requirement, heavily bolstered by (in the Abrahamic religious traditions and particularly the Catholic and Orthodox Churches) the tangled legal and economic webs of property assignment and inheritance.
I remember my genuinely ignorant but truly well-intentioned grandmother asking my gay sister, after she came out, "but if you and another woman are together, which one of you is the man?"
Cue a whole range of half-scared, half-mocking comments and queries about "tops" and "bottoms" in gay and kink relationships and a whole range of misogynist and patriarchally-fixated assumptions about "pitchers" and "catchers" in gay male relationships.
The assumption that a patriarchal misogynist culture has attempted to hardwire into us is that in any relationship involving sex, there is one party who "does it to" the other party. And the implication there is that the "doing it to" party is "the man" in the relationship, and the "done to" party is "the woman" in the relationship.
Gay people- and kink people- know that's bullshit. And that's a huge part of the reason that such sexual relationships have been outlawed and regarded as transgressive. It squicks the hell out of people who think in the patriarchal misogynist mindset that any two people in a sexually intimate relationship might actually both "do it" to each other and have it "done to" them in equal measure as their fancy dictates at any given time. That there might be a regular exchange of roles, and that power as expressed in sexual giving and receiving, soliciting and responding, might not be dictated by gender AT ALL!
HORRORS!!
And that is an often-unspoken but deep-rooted part of the objection to gay marriage- it does, indeed, 'destroy' the "traditional marriage" model in which gender dictates who does what and why.
Every gay marriage is also a blow at misogyny. I'm delighted for us all.
appreciatively,
Bright
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