Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
There were several momentous legal cases heard this week, one about gerrymandering, one about public unions, one about keeping Muslims out of the country, and it was clear they were going to require careful consideration and intense analysis by the nation's most vital legal minds. Instead they were heard by the Supreme Court.
I'm appalled by SCROTUS, the Supreme Court Republicans of the United States. They're awful. And there are officially going to be five of them now. They're rotten, those SCROTUS.
I'm here to complain about Mitch McConnell stealing the Supreme Court seat from Obama. I'm here to say what everyone is already thinking and saying. But I'm here to say it on This Is Hell. I'll tell you what I think about Mitch McConnell. Now, if a Democrat had done a version of what Mitch did, and thwarted a Republican jerk from appointing a rightwing ideologue to the court, I would've said, Good job, comrade! Except, in Mitch's version, Obama wasn't a particularly left-leaning president, and Merrick Garland, whom Obama put forward as a sop to the GOP, anyway, was no left ideologue. But apparently being reasonable, compromising, polite and black are not things the GOP will allow to go unpunished. How many times did Obama learn that? Or, rather, experience it, because he never seemed to learn anything.
No Democratic leader would refuse a president his constitutional right to nominate a justice for a newly-empty seat, and, not since FDR at least, would any Democrat ever commit such a blatant violation of Constitutional and Congressional norms regarding the court. Certainly these days Dems wouldn't dare poke the GOP hornets' nest. They're keeping their powder dry. They got so much dry powder they don't know what to do with it all. And they're keeping it dry until the end of the world, which they think will be sooner if they keep their powder dry enough. Keep the powder dry to hasten the end times.
The GOP on the other hand is willing to burn their powder at the drop of a hat. They'll do anything to get what they want. The Dems are ready and willing to do nothing to get what they want, despite having done nothing, and yet not having got what they want. All the Dems have is a surplus of dry powder, over which they've erected a bulletproof dome to make sure it never ignites. Dry powder for dry powder's sake. There might not really even be any powder there. I've never seen any evidence of it. Maybe powder is like mental acuity: if you don't use it, you lose it.
Now waffling Agony Kennedy is retiring. Say goodbye to Constitutionally protected abortions. Thanks, Obama. Say goodbye to what's left of the voting rights act, organized labor protections, and Muslims getting visas. Oh, wait, that already happened this week. All right, well, say goodbye to freedom of the press – I mean, we weren't using it much anyway. It was just sitting outside, chained to a fence post, getting rusty in the rain, and someone even stole the seat and the front wheel. But have no fear, at least our powder's dry!
You know what you can do with that powder? Put about a foot's depth of it in a bucket, mix it with some water, put your feet in, let it harden, and throw yourself off a pier. It's the same result as keeping your powder dry, only quicker. And your surviving kin can reuse the bucket!
At least we won't have to hear Dems bellyaching about everyone having to vote for one of their Wall Street candidates for President out of fear of the court turning solid conservative. What's the point now? The court is a mess. You got Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, and ... I'm guessing... Stephen Miller. Maybe David Duke. Thomas, who just sits there waiting for the conversation to be over, Alito, who's like Scalia without the personality, Roberts, who's like a cop, and the next SCROT will be a race theorist, I'm sure.
Ginsberg, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan are the last remnants of reason on the court, and Ginsberg is in a race with Clarence Thomas to see who can live longer with their pre-existing condition, old age on the one hand and spiritual morbidity on the other. Kagan and Sotomayor will live forever, or at least until the rightwing patriots start assassinating anyone with an opinion that doesn't line up with the new pledge of allegiance, which says you agree to the superiority of Christianity, the dollar, and the white race.
It really is a worry, this fascist regime. There's already a plague of violence being perpetrated by cops and unstable white post-pubescent fledgling misogynist fascists. Be prepared for it to get worse. You hear? Be prepared for the violence to get worse. You know, these are violent, easily-misled people. There's always a huge percentage of violent, stupid, thoughtless, confused people in any nation. And eventually, thanks to whatever system that nation has for installing crooked imbeciles to rule its acreage, a prize-winning dancing swine of exceptional greed, mendacity, and shameless grandstanding inevitably gets his tiny hands on the tiller, willing to incite with lies and vicious rhetoric the cruel and cowardly of the land to take to the streets and punish the innocent.
And it's coming. It's started. Black people will tell you it's been going on forever, but that's just because for them it has. So they're biased.
But as already-here as it is, more and worse is coming.
For some of you this will mean getting into fighting shape. Or maintaining and sharpening your battle skills. For people like me, it means being prepared to cry and bleed and run and hide, sharpen my first aid skills, my bedside manner, and refresh my memory of recipes for preparing dumpster food and road kill.
I'm not saying we won't win. I'm saying I will be injured, and our new socialist candidate for Congress with undoubtedly be shot at by at least one 20-something white man. Remember all the people they assassinated in the 50s, 60s and early 70s? Guns fever.
It hurts to know that so many of our fellow citizens are willing to scapegoat helpless people. It hurts to watch our children, our journalists and friends murdered in cold blood. It hurts to get beaten, so I've heard. It hurts to have your child or your mother taken from you by belligerent authorities who are accountable to no one.
Because, when it comes down to it, who would hold them to account? The president's a vicious, vain idiot, useless for anything. Our legislature is made up of crooks who buy and sell influence, certainly worthless as a safeguard against tyranny, which they have shown they're all too willing to welcome. And now the final domino of the judicial branch has fallen.
Dump is a man who never met a deadly sin he could resist. And now Agony Kennedy is retiring, allowing Dump to seat another pervert on the bench. Let's see if the worthless, impotent Democrats, who are as complicit in this fiasco as anyone, can muster a show of resistance. It'll be half-hearted, though. It's beginning to seem a lot like Republicans are just the party that happens to be thuggish enough to carry out the crimes the Dems are fine with but too genteel to commit. For all the lack of energy they devote to stopping the GOP, they are rewarded a thousand-fold in lack of results. Which seems to suit them just fine. Let the GOP be the enforcement arm of the Democratic party. Dry powder is their brand.
The worst is yet to come. Crappy days are here again. Vulgarity is just around the corner.
It suddenly occurs to me that I may be overreacting. Dump hasn't even nominated anyone for Kennedy's seat yet. It may turn out to be another Souter, someone for whom the principles of law are more important than the ideology of the creature who nominated him. Or it could even be some great Mahatma, whose grace and gentle example of compassion will move the SCROTUS to change, to free their minds and attain enlightenment.
Yet have you read the three female justices' blistering dissenting opinions on the current decisions? Especially Kagan's on the Muslim ban? Have you read Justice Kagan's blistering dissenting opinion on it? I have not. I heard it was blistering, and I didn't want to get a blister.
But can even a Mahatma or a Thurgood Marshall succeed in expanding the stunted souls of the SCROTUS where these three mighty women have failed to make even a dent in their stolid skulls?
There's a lot of wishful thinking there. I like wishful thinking almost as much as I enjoy positing the worst. It keeps the mind nimble and the heart from sinking. Try it. But don't get too optimistic, unless you're a fan of crushing disappointment. I'm going to get back in shape for crying and bleeding. I'm already bleeding money, so that's a start.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!