#Michael Hussein Tallon

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Well, hey. These things just snap right off."

If you want a sharp image to explain Republicanism in the time of Trump, you could do a lot worse than this Gary Larson cartoon. For decades, men like Bush and Rove and even Reagan understood that the real power of the GOP was the brutal ferocity of resentful, angry white people who stayed muzzled at election time, under the watchful eye of the managerial class. But now that's all changed.

For decades, a balance was maintained by the Animal Trainers, who were rewarded with power, privilege, and low tax rates; while the dancing bears were tossed the fish of abortion politics, and the performative, dog-whistle racism that made them feel like the most special beasts in the circus.

Then Trump came along, and said, "Well, hey. These things just snap right off," and suddenly the guys with the whip were scared out of their goddamned minds.

Thus, the last four years.

Now we're at the end of that game, and what the media and the loudest assholes in the GOP still don't seem to understand is that we - the rest of America - don't need to be afraid of them anymore, because on November 3, we stepped out of the cage and locked them all inside.

I know there's still a whole lot of trauma around Donald Trump and "the base," but honestly, we kicked their asses - and since that thrashing, they have only gone nuttier, crazier, and more racist - while we're busy doing the people's work. One of the ex-President's lawyers tried to make the case yesterday in the Impeachment trial, that the Democrats are desperate to convict Trump, because we are afraid of running against him again in four years - but I just find that utterly laughable. There are several opponents who might pose a real challenge, but a defanged, de-Twittered Trump ain't one of them. The only power that fool has anymore is to the Republican whip-hands inside the cage with the ravenous bears.

I'd love to think that a few dozen Republican Senators would do the right thing, and convict that traitorous moral leper . . . but to do so, is to expect heroism from a coward. For years, this spineless pols manipulated and conned their own constituencies, and now they are utterly beholden to the whims of the radical crowd. The funniest thing right now is that their silence won't even save them. Several - regardless of their fealty to the monster - will face primary challenges in 2022 or 2024. That tragic simp, Marco Rubio will assuredly be forced to suck himself off in public for a year, all while blasting out Bible verses, and Ivanka will STILL come steal his seat. Hell, the beast will probably make him thank her for the humiliation, and he'll do it because he's a broken, terrified clown.

But us?

These people aren't scary at all.

I don't mean they're not dangerous. They are. They have killed, and they will kill again. But they're not frightening, now that the nation can see who they really are. They're not frightening, now that the Biden Administration is actually governing the nation again - with recovery checks, and vaccines, and a new child-benefit for families, and maybe even a serious bump in the minimum wage.

It would be wonderful if some Republicans would rejoin the civilized world, but the far more likely reality is a shrinking rump of radicalization as they move from national to regional party, and I'm okay with that. I do wish that we could get a conviction out of this trial. That would be far better for the nation, as we forge our own history. It would be wiser and more respectful to our founders and our deepest principles, if we could draw a line in the sand this week and say: NO MORE.

But if that doesn't happen, it just means we get to crush their treason more slowly. It means we get to keep the cage locked, and watch out of the corner of our eye while they devour one another, and we go on with the rest of the show.

Up next: Covid Relief, Cabinet nominations, and a growing economy; and before we get too bored with the smooth sailing of rational governance, you can be absolutely assured that Trump's warty orange ass will be hauled in front of judge and jury again, before you can say, "Aw, shit, that bear just bit Mike Lee in the bulbous, sweaty head."

Onward to Day Three!

Michael Hussein Tallon

[partisan-by-default]

First, the geography. Kurdistan isn't a country, but the Kurdish people have as much claim to one as the Iraqi people, the American people, the British people or anyone else. They just didn't get a seat at the table after World War I, when the rough outlines of today's map were drawn. As such, there are lots of Kurds in Eastern Turkey, Northern Syria, Northern Iraq, and Northwestern Iran. What they want, in the end, is to have a country that provides them a homeland in that rough area. That's not likely going to happen anytime soon, but it is the goal.

Because of that, they see the national governments in Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran as their nearby adversary.

Sometimes those relationships are not awful - like today in Iraq, where there's a tense peace between the Iraqis and the Kurdish Iraqis. Sometimes it is hell on earth, as it was after the First Gulf War (back when we were young, George H.W. Bush in charge.) In that war, when Bush attacked Saddam Hussein in the south (Kuwait), the Kurds rose up against him in the north under a PROMISE that we would defend them. Saddam had also moved many of the Kurds internally to the South, to divide their power, and they rose against him as well. Still, we PROMISED them we'd have their back if they did. And then George H.W. Bush sold them out and they were slaughtered.

[curlygirl84]

Michael Hussein Tallon’s Facebook Post (shared via Blue Dem Warriors)

Today has been a day of awakening for me, and I suppose it has been for many of my age-contemporaries, too. As a fifty-one year old man, I don’t cry much, but, wow, have I been a weepy mess all day today watching these magic kids. And that’s the term that keeps coming back to me: These kids are magic. They somehow don’t seem real. They seem more like fully formed wizards who just popped into existence, as if the shooter who tore through their high school just showed up expecting sheep and found warrior-paladins instead. But then it makes even less sense, because they aren’t just from Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. They are kids from everywhere. And they keep demanding that the media recognizes that they are from everywhere. These kids, these magic kids, keep saying to the interviewers, GO TALK TO THE OTHER KIDS. GO TALK TO THE BLACK KIDS. GO TALK TO THE POOR KIDS. GO TALK TO THE LATINO KIDS. Then, as happened time and again today, when the cameras finally turn to the black kids and the Latino kids and the poor kids, THEY talk about other kids. This isn’t a story about Parkland, Florida and a really smart AP class with great prospects. It’s about a full-on generation shift that caught me, and I’m guessing you, totally by surprise. These magic kids are from EVERYWHERE. Which begs the question: If they came from everywhere, then how did they happen? The NRA and their sad, angry ilk have a readymade explanation: They’re actors. They’re following a script. They’re shills of Big Peace. Whatever. All that is insane, of course, but you can almost understand the confusion. The kids just don’t seem normal. They aren’t what we understand children to be, which of course is to say, “They aren’t like us. They aren’t like we were when we were kids.” And so we cast about for an easy answer. But perhaps the answer isn’t easy at all. Perhaps the answer is through a mirror darkly. Millennials (who, believe it or not, are now in their thirties) and these Gen-Z kids have been painted with the most unflattering colors by my Gen-Xers and the Baby Boomers before us. We’re the ones in positions of power in the world and what do we do? We call them all a bunch of crybabies. We give them endless grief for their constant insistence on things like “white privilege” and “non-binary sexuality.” We mock them for their safe spaces and their sensitivity to being triggered by language. We tell them they need to toughen up. We tell them that the world is a harsh place, as if we know better than them that brutal truth. I think the reason we are so surprised by these kids is that we’ve spent so many years telling ourselves that they were “snowflakes” who were going to get blown away by the real world, that we missed the coming storm. God, were we wrong. The truth is these kids didn’t spontaneously erupt from Florida a month ago. They have been deconstructing the tribal bullshit of our generations for their entire lives, and now they’re ready. Not for nothing, these are the kids that were born, literally, in the months after September 11, 2001. They came into a world at war. They grew up in the shadow of ever-threatening “Red Alert Levels” and endless “Active Shooter Drills” and the ubiquity of “Rekt” videos on 4Chan. They did not know one day of school before Columbine. They did not know one day of life without the threat of terrorism. They have not known one day of their nation in peace. Like it or not, they have lived every day of their lives, twenty-four-seven, on the battlefield. We give them endless grief for playing video games. We tell them they should be outside, at school – but for so many of them, the schools and their streets are “soft targets.” God, I’d stay in and play games where the bullets weren’t real, too. These kids grew up with the native ability to parse the OBVIOUS racism of Trayvon Martin’s murder, of Tamir Rice murder, of Philando Castile’s murder, of African American teenagers in McKinney, Texas getting the shit kicked out of them by police for being in a “white” neighborhood for a pool party. Just two days ago, they watched Stephon Clark get put down by over-amped, trigger-happy police while he was in his grandmother’s backyard. They can see with their own two eyes that our society is grossly unjust – and so when the camera focuses on David Hogg, we shouldn’t be surprised that this smart-dressed white boy says, TALK TO THE CHILDREN OF COLOR, as he did just yesterday in an interview with Axios. We shouldn't be surprised when he says “Our parents don’t know how to use a fucking democracy, so we have to.” They’ve seen how badly we’ve screwed up a free society for their entire lives and they are, in their own beautiful way, “calling bullshit.” The kids didn’t magically arise in a fortnight; their whole lives have been calling bullshit. They are digital natives with an ability to see the whole grand world. As such, they note that we’re the only economically advanced nation in the world where 30,000 people die from gun violence every year. They aren’t cloistered in their own communities playing kickball, so they know that those deaths are skewed all to hell in the obviously racist, classist ways that are evidenced in the above mentioned state-sponsored crimes of racial bias. They know that Trayvon, Tamir, Philando and all the others aren’t aberrations in the data set. These kids might just be learning to shave, but Occam’s razor is intuitive. You need to train yourself into NOT believing obvious truths. Maybe Gen-Xers and Boomers have learned to bend themselves into a knot over that, but these kids? Not a chance. Of course they call bullshit on that. When the “adult” generations sit on our hands and say we can’t just get rid of AR-15s because of the NRA and their power, of course they call bullshit on that. When politicians who are blatantly sucking money from horrible people who manifestly make their world worse, of course they call bullshit on that. We adults — and FINALLY with some level of self-consciousness in these matters, I’m speaking as a middle-aged, white, privileged, man — have been so busy lampooning their beliefs, that we missed the point where they just went ahead and actually included everyone into their generational tribe – regardless of their race, gender-identity, sexuality, religion, or class. We’re still arguing about gay wedding cakes and we’re still OBVIOUSLY treating kids of color worse than white kids. Of course they call bullshit on that. What we missed, and why we’re so surprised that they have “magically” appeared, is that these kids threw our bullshit overboard years ago. They don’t need our rigidity. They don’t ever again need to hear someone say, “Hey, everyone is a little bit racist.” They have no time for our “God-hates-the-gays bigotry.” They have no place for our transphobia. Grow up on a battlefield and you lose your illusions. They’re well over our befuddling myths of the way the world must be. Moreover, they know they’ve got a fight ahead of them. They are looking square into a future denuded of the possibilities we older folks took for granted. They can see, quite clearly, that like plagues of locust, our grown-up generations have stripped the nation’s resources, beshitted the global environment like we had a spare planet tucked in the garage under a tarp, presided over the destruction of our own middle class, and for a kicker, welcomed a parade of nationalist buffoons with fascist tendencies back into power. These kids can see the tribalism and they know that soon they’ll be ascendant. Their tribe is different than mine or yours. For now, they’re young, but for all the rest of their time on this planet, they will be multiracial, non-binary, non-dogmatic, digitally native, omnivorously curious, and significantly bigger than either the surviving Boomers or the aging Gen-Xers. These kids didn’t spring suddenly from nowhere. They’ve been watching us and learning from our nearly countless, self-imposed mistakes. They’ve seen us run in pointless ruts, like cattle through an abattoir, and they’ve decided that’s not for them, and so they called bullshit. They're calling bullshit and they're not making any safe space with their language for us if you consider this withering fusilade of truth from Mr. Hogg. “It is truly saddening to see how many of you have lost faith in America because we certainly haven’t and we are never going to. You might as well stop now because we are going to outlive you.” Yes, thank God, you will. But for as long as I can, I'll follow you into the future. I just hope I can keep up. I have so much to learn. #Enough #MarchForOurLives

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

“I've just been reading about the cyberwar launched by the Russian government against America and nearly all of its Fortune 500 companies. It is mind-numbingly broad and dangerous. The attack did not come from the standard, Hollywood model of computer geeks in a basement spearfishing emails. 

Nor was it an operation where in a USB was dropped by an agent and then accidently pocketed by some low-level employee who plugs it into a networked computer at this-and-such agency. Rather, in an operation that likely took years to stand up, the vulnerability exploited was through a software provider with thousands of corporate and governmental clients. 

That company - Solarwinds - was hacked and a virus was inserted into the root program of their database-management software. Then, when the company sent out one of its regular updates, thousands of agencies and private companies downloaded the hack onto the systems - completely unaware that this routine maintenance had just granted network access to the S.V.R., the Russian equivalent to the C.I.A. 

It's brilliant, really. Brilliant, devastating, and demanding a response. One that certainly won't come with Trump still in office, that traitorous fool. Couple all this with reports last week that the current administration is preventing the incoming Biden team from meeting with U.S. Intelligence Agencies, and you might understand why. They don't want Biden to know how bad this whole fiasco has become. They don't want the blame, cowards and criminals that they are.

Meanwhile ex-General and eternal-Conman Mike Flynn calls for martial law, which provides us with a perfect bookend to the entire, disastrous reign of the Tangerine Tyrant. This whole damn thing started four years ago this month with Jared Kushner setting up a secret backchannel to Moscow, while Flynn undermined the Obama effort to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 election by getting word to Kislyak and Putin that there would soon be a new sheriff in town, and that he'd be a creampuff when it came to defending the nation.  Maybe there was a piss-tape, or maybe not. Who knows? 

Maybe Trump did all this because he had hopes for a business deal in Russia, or maybe not. Who knows? Maybe this was all the work of kompromat, or maybe the whole damn lot of them working in this White House are just bloody morons, but four years ago this month, they collectively showed their tail to the Kremlin, and it's been right up to the hilt ever since.  

Now, four years later - four years of fawning obeisance, and unmonitored late-night phone calls between a KGB handler and his simp - we begin to see the enormity of the results: Russian penetration God-only-knows-how-far into our government agencies, our defense agencies, and our economy. I'm a dove and a half, but this level of calamitous disarmament in a deadly, dangerous world is criminal. It's absolutely criminal. 

Meanwhile, Republican Senators and White House apparatchiks chase the ghosts of a voting-fraud conspiracy theory that involves all Democrats in Christendom, the entire mainstream media, Fox News, the ghost of Hugo Chavez, Hunter Biden's Laptop, Chi-com Radicals, Republican Governors, thousands of American poll workers, fifty-seven state and federal judges, and all nine Justices on the Supreme fucking Court. 

But not Russia. Never, ever, ever Russia. The damage Donald Trump has done to this nation may never be clearly measured - and that fills me with patriotic rage. I don't know how it's going to happen, or who is going to get the great and holy pleasure of finally locking that asshole up and throwing away the key, but whatever punishment Trump faces for his crimes, will never be enough.  

And that's before tallying the dead from Covid. 35 days to go. 

Thank god I quit drinking, or I'd go broke off whiskey alone.”

[commentary by Michael Hussein Tallon]