Political Commentary with a fringe of Economics

As a commentary goes, I consider this one to be a good one.It is on target with what we are facing today.

Whisky Pete’s Triumph Of The Swill, Bad Crow Review

As fascist productions go, the Whisky Pete and Trump show fell well short of the standards established by Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl. An auditorium full of stony-faced military brass spent their morning getting harangued by two men who, knowing what we know now, would both be drummed out of any service on grounds of moral turpitude—one for alcoholism, adultery, lying and domestic violence, and the other for, well, everything.

Were, I a member of the audience, the primary messages I would have heard are

1) you will kill who we say, when we say and where we say, military and international law be damned (from Hegseth), and

2) you need to be prepared to confront American citizens on American streets and to lose your jobs if you won’t (Trump).

Also you need to be white, male, clean-shaven and trim while you’re breaking laws and your oath.

I’ve read a lot of coverage of the event, and I’m in a distinct minority in thinking the speeches and the event itself were significant beyond the blatantly partisan nature of it and the flex of wasting everyone’s time bringing them in to hear things they’ve already heard.

A number of people lauded the assembled generals and admirals and senior enlisted personnel for not reacting to the speeches, something they were instructed to avoid by their military bosses, the joint chiefs, and which appeared to disappoint both Hegseth and Trump despite their having been briefed on the matter beforehand. Others said we were in good hands with a military where the combat commands would never transmit illegal orders from their civilian leaders and no one in the ranks would ever follow them.

I’ve known a few officers, including a Marine captain serving in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps (not a lawyer) who took a very generous buyout in the 1990s because the service was overloaded with people of his rank following the GHW Bush wars, if you can call them that, in Panama (you can’t call it a war) and Iraq (sorta maybe); and an Army major, a historian, who retired after 20 years when he was told a few years earlier that the way he taught history precluded the possibility of a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel despite an otherwise distinguished career.

They would both tell you there’s a big difference between the way the military are often presented, as a monolithic force trained to salivate at the mention of the constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the latter of which does tend to inspire the kind of caution Whisky Pete often rails against, and which, along with international law, is interpreted by the lawyers at JAG, the leaders of which were among his first victims, something which went unmentioned in all the coverage I saw—and the actual composition of it, which includes reckless people who don’t necessarily buy into the program, and what my two guys described as overcautious people, who will not make a move from fear of crossing a line, at the highest levels and down through the ranks.

The reality is that the US military has a fearsome reputation for going off the rails in its treatment of both civilians and armed opponents on scales both small and large, and for attempting to cover up war crimes or crimes against humanity, and for attempting to justify them if the coverups don’t work, and for pushing to expand what’s permissible if the justifications fail. And this is true too of military leaders from other countries whom we’ve trained, as at the Pentagon’s infamous School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). It’s cultural, no matter what apologists say. Take the handcuffs off.

Teaching the ubiquity of transgressions was in fact what spiked the major’s career. Identifying historical cases and teaching how incidents were or were not remediated was fine; teaching that it happens every time the shooting starts no matter how many lower-ranking commissioned and non-commissioned officers, along with the rare higher-ranking goat, got nailed for it the preceding time, was not fine. Not prohibited, exactly, but not fine.

So the notion that Whisky Pete and Trump may get what they want from the military if they keep pushing for it is not at all far-fetched, and we’ve already seen that on a small scale—numerically; legally it’s a pretty big deal—with the Venezuelans attacked and killed at sea by the US.

Given that Whisky Pete’s personal attorney Timothy Parlatore, the guy who passionately defended disgraced Navy Seal and war criminal Ed Gallagher and other service members accused of truly heinous crimes—and yes, I know, everybody is entitled to a defense but let’s please not pretend that when you get to a certain level you don’t get to pick and choose whom you defend, or that it doesn’t matter who’s paying the bills—is now a JAG commander for the Navy, we can hazard a guess at who greenlighted those attacks and why high-ranking combat commanders might reasonably expect to be covered in the event they’re given illegal orders.

“Is this even fucking legal?” “Yeah bro.”

It’s only down the road they have to worry about, and hardly anybody gets clipped down the road. We’re a bygones sort of nation.

So there’s a history of bad shit, much of which took place without the top civilian leaders of the military—whom the generals and admirals are taught represent the penultimate authority, just a comb-over beneath the constitution—publicly calling for it. And now they are calling for it, in person, while reminding the leaders responsible for preventing bad shit that they serve at the whim of their superiors, who can call them in from overseas at a moment’s notice or fire them for any or no reason.

Fraught shit, is what I think, and we don’t yet know if anybody in attendance has lost or will lose their job this week, or what plans for more crimes are in the pipeline, or if anybody at the lecture might be contemplating, you know, doing something about the state of affairs.

Working for the shutdown

Sort of impressive that with the exceptions of Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto and massive waste of space John Fetterman, Democrats held the line in voting against the massive GOP budget cuts to everything humane the government does. Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, also voted for the brutality, although none of the three explained their votes that way.

Regime officials had threatened that they would accelerate their assault on federal agencies and personnel in the event of a shutdown and the attendant federal employee furloughs; doubting them would be foolish, but it’s early days and we’re not seeing it yet.

One thing to keep in mind is that as the courts run out of money and have to furlough people, federal judges—who get paid regardless—have to start triaging their caseloads. Typically, they emphasize criminal cases during shutdowns, which could mean that some of the many lawsuits against the regime get sidelined as the shutdown continues.

One such potentially delayed lawsuit was filed yesterday, following a month’s worth of explicit and violent racial profiling stops which target Latino-looking citizens and legal residents along with undocumented immigrants after the Roberts court legalized the practice via the shadow docket, with only Brett Kavanaugh offering an explanation (barely even an inconvenience to citizens stopped for breathing while brown, he said).

The lawsuit doesn’t claim constitutional violations—it charges the breaking of a federal statute—and doesn’t demand emergency relief, so it won’t go to the head of the federal lawsuit queue, and although people who know about this stuff say it’ll eventually end up in front of the court, it doesn’t pose an immediate threat to what some attorneys have taken to calling “Kavanaugh Stops.”

So the shutdown limits regime spending in pursuit of their heinous agenda, but it doesn’t stop them from doing additional damage that will probably be litigated at some point down the road but not before large numbers of people, if fewer than what will suffer from the loss of health care should congressional Republicans decline to remediate the issue, pay a price.

An aside: military service members don’t get paid in a shutdown, so some 800 generals and admirals and senior enlisted people will be flown whence they came by people who may not get their next paycheck. And the planes used by Whisky Pete, JD Vance and Trump are flown by military pilots too.

I’m just sayin’. I’m not even just askin’.

The likelihood that Republicans will amend the resolution to include health care funding seems nonexistent to me. Why would they, even if they could get the necessary votes from their caucus? Certainly Trump wouldn’t agree to it. I’ve seen suggestions that whoever blinks first will depend on how the shutdown polls in light of the impending midterms, but as I’ve said often enough, if that’s possible, the executive branch officials do not seem at all concerned about the midterms—because they don’t intend to oversee meaningful ones, is why—even if congressional Republicans and Democrats are.

The safer bet for winner in a contest of senatorial will is usually on the side where Chuck Schumer isn’t, as evidenced by his short-lived waffle a few days ago, which he only quit when everybody else in the party except Fetterman and Cortez Masto yelled at him. And that’s still true despite his resurrected spine.

But if Democrats appear determined to hold the line, Republicans always have the option of nuking the filibuster so that a vote to unshutter the government requires only 50 votes plus the couch-fucker. They’ve shied away from that in the past, as have Democrats, from fear of how it’ll be used against them in the future. But there may not be a future to be afraid of, legislatively, and if there is one with a Democrat in the White House and a congress running roughshod over the GOP, it’s a ways down the road.