Civil Commotion

With a majority of Catholics and 81% of evangelicals having voted for Donald Trump, the moral rot of these people has placed, in my view, a dangerous, narcissistic, pathological liar in line to occupy the White House. And now these same people want for the rest of us to normalize the sickness and danger that they have unleashed on the nation and the world.

Michael Hamar

Probably intending to criticize those annoying, hyper-enthusiastic preachers who strain so diligently to be your best friend — Is everything ‘awesome’? Really? — the Babylon Bee inadvertently upholds a criticism I’ve made of Christian teaching for years: If you don’t accept Original Sin, if you don’t believe you were born no damn good and deserving eternal punishment, Christianity has nothing on offer.

Wilson, who hasn’t attended church since she was a child, further reported she was “a little hurt” that the pastor would segue into an invitation to add Jesus to her life.

“It really undermined my confidence in myself,” she said, adding she wouldn’t be back anytime soon.

Hear this, Ms. Wilson: Your pastor needs for you to be insecure; his livelihood requires the annihilation of your self-confidence. If you don’t believe you’re no damn good, he’s got nothing on offer.

You can deny-deny-deny, you can stamp your feet and howl that it isn’t so — but there is no escaping it: Christianity is degrading at the root, and the pastor’s well-being relies on his ability to degrade you and then feed on you. Enough. It is time, time past, that we all be done once for all with those predators.

What do you know? After 8-years of no policy but vandalism, the Republicans now intend to break things on a grand scale. Next up, the professional civil service.

House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to a $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.

The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets a specific government employee or program.

Recall, now, that the incoming administration recently sought the names of State Department employees who work on gender issues, and NASA and EPA employees who work on climate issues. Did you wonder … why? Now we can guess: They won’t be fired outright, but their pay will be cut to $1.00/year, and they’ll have no choice to leave.

Imagine the case, as I speculated not long ago, of the mid-level scientist working in Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education. Not a Creationist? He won’t be fired, but he’s going to be living on noodle soup for a while.

The Republicans revived that rule for a reason, and the reason is to quietly get rid of the professional civil service — the well-educated pros who won’t go along with their crazy ideology or the diktats of Congress’ corporate owners. And they will do it while piously insisting, sort of accurately, that they haven’t fired anybody. (This compares closely to the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC. They didn’t fire anybody, but demoted, humiliated, and promised to fire, any non-fundamentalist academic who didn’t resign.)

Seriously: There will be no place for bona fide professionals in this administration. Get out while you can.

I suppose the most striking aspect of this morning’s ACA theater was the Republicans’ explicit acceptance of the premise that sanctioned passage of the ACA in the first place — that all Americans should have affordable health care, and it’s the business of government to intervene and make it so. Once that is universally accepted, attention necessarily turns toward how, rather than whether.

Obama and the Democrats have plainly won the premise, and won it decisively. If the Republicans had possessed the decency to cooperate and help sand-off the rough edges, the entire subject would have been ancient history years ago.

But, you know … a nigra moozlim!!, in OUR WHITE HOUSE!!

My best guess is that the Republicans will pass a bill that specifies some sort of repeal years from now, congratulate themselves, and then go to work doing what they should have cooperated to do years ago — fine-tune what is in place. This will be done to the accompaniment of cheering morons with the memory of puppies.

Kellyanne Conway, painfully smug liar-for-hire, will nod her head approvingly and remind everybody that orange is the new black. So there.

The really interesting question is this: Can The Donald stay in office for 4-years? His dishonesty has always been egregious, but now his sympathy for Putin, and contempt for our intelligence services, ought to have triggered the air raid klaxon.

The intelligence agencies unanimously deny that his briefing has been rescheduled. I believe them. And by the way, wasn’t today the deadline for Trump’s big reveal of his information that nobody else has about the hacking? I guess that has to be pushed back, too.

What plausible explanation could there be for Trump’s denial of Russia’s apparent presumption upon our sovereignty? The only one that I find very persuasive is that Trump knew long before Election Day that Russia was involved and collaborated with it — and benefited. Now, he proposes to do as he did in the matter of his tax returns (and so much else): deny-disparage-distract until it goes away. It won’t.