Another cycle through the vast wasteland of the media (and social media), done through the haze of the Boston Bruins’ elimination from the Stanley Cup playoffs. This could be the last year from longtime Bruins’ leader Patrice Bergeron, who seems to be leaning toward retirement instead of returning for a 20th season with the Bruins (albeit with the 2004-05 season spent in the minors due to the NHL lockout that entire year). To get a feel for how long Bergeron has been playing, the Calder Cup winner (NHL rookie of the year) in Bergeron’s rookie season of 2003-04 was his teammate Andrew Raycroft, who has been retired from professional hockey since 2014 and has spent the last five years as a studio analyst for Bruins’ TV broadcasts.
And one more hockey story. When the Bruins did their season-ending media interviews, Bruins’ reporter Conor Ryan noted that star winger Brad Marchand showed up wearing a Ramones T-shirt. So naturally, one of the reporters asked Marchand for his favorite Ramones song. Marchand: “I’ll be honest, I have no idea who Ramone is.”
After the heartbreaking one-goal loss in the seventh game with Carolina, I think I’d opt for “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
Political Neutrality
The beginning of the 2022 political cycle has brought out a lot of semi-hidden political angst. Partially this is a reaction to the “terrible trio” represented by Barack Hussein Obama, The Former Guy, and Joseph Robinette Biden, who have been steering — and sometimes hijacking — the American ship of state into perilous waters. But more generally it’s a reaction to the way both parties have internalized hypocrisy and double standards.
As the old saying goes, if [your less-favored party] didn’t have double standards, it wouldn’t have any standards at all. Both parties have adopted the Malcolm X motto — “By Any Means Necessary” — with regard to getting what they want. But both clutch their pearls when the other party applies the same principle.
In the May 13 edition of The Dispatch, in a column entitled “Hypocrisy All the Way Down”, Jonah Goldberg makes the argument that he has never been more sure about what he believed . . . and also never been more adrift from the two mainstream political parties in America.
I’m disgusted by the hypocrisy and I’m disgusted by the hypocritical bleating about hypocrisy. Our system works only if the rules count even when they’re inconvenient to your own side. And just because “they” are hypocritical or inconsistent in applying their proclaimed principles, that doesn’t give you license to be equally hypocritical or inconsistent. If your commitment to your principles stands only when they stymie your enemies, they aren’t principles—they’re weapons and nothing more.
In the May 14 Wall Street Journal, columnist (and former Reagan speechwriter) Peggy Noonan made an eloquent point about why the two parties are currently so adrift — their leaders are intimidated by the most powerful factions:
The Republicans are afraid of the Trumpers. The Democrats are afraid of the progressives. Both parties fear large parts of their base. So they lie to them — “I’m with you!” — or mislead. This is self-corrupting and leaves a frozen field in which not enough gets done. Why compromise with Republicans if you’re trying to assure progressives you hate them? Why compromise with Democrats if it opens you to suspicion [from] the Trumpist part of the base?
The fear of these factions is not without reason. Former Second Daughter Liz Cheney tried to stand up to TFG’s radical influence in the Republican Party. She is now fighting for her political life as TFG and his unhinged but opportunistic supporters try to oust her from Congress, with the active help of GOP hypocrite Kevin McCarthy. Jonah Goldberg goes one historical step further:
Oscar R. Benavides, the largely forgotten Peruvian dictator [during the 1930s], once said, “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” That gets about as close to a working definition of Trumpism as anything else I can come up with. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty spot-on for what counts as progressivism these days.
I’m sorry to admit that these columns also summarize my own thinking, which is why I become an independent during The Former Guy’s term — after being a Republican since Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign (when he was edged out for the GOP nomination by Gerald Ford, although I admit to voting for Carter in 1976 because of Ford, in those pre-Solidarity days, minimizing the oppression taking place under Soviet rule in Poland).
Each party currently is led by a very old man yelling at clouds. And, at least in one of the parties, the other main contenders are equally old (Bernie Sanders (80), Elizabeth Warren (72), Hillary Clinton (74)). Why is this acceptable to us as Americans? Do we secretly want to live in a gerontocracy?
And yet it continues, and the polarizing images spread. To the left, everyone in disagreement with its agenda is a clone of TFG. To the right, everyone in disagreement with its agenda is a clone of Pajama Boy. Reasoned debate is for losers who refuse to fight for ultimate triumph.
One of my online friends made the following point about the extremists on both sides:
What gets praised as “strength” these days—quickness to anger, unwillingness to control impulses, lack of regard for others, etc.—would have been seen as profound weakness in previous eras. It takes a strong person to have self-control and self-denial.
Where have all the real leaders gone?
The Putin Wing of the GOP
Speaking of real leaders, so far this month, congresspersons from both parties have visited one of the acknowledged real leaders in the world today: Ukrainian actor-turned-politician Vlodymyr Zelenskyy, who is leading the resistance to the attempted Russian conquest of his country.
Well . . . acknowledged by all except for certain followers of TFG, such as Madison Cawthorn, the freshman congress critter from North Carolina, who called Zelenskyy a “thug”, perhaps because he didn’t capitulate to TFG’s pal Vladimir Putin, and also called the Ukrainian government “incredibly evil”. But that didn’t sit well with certain less-TFG-leaning Republican politicians such as Senator Thom Tillis, who targeted Cawthorn with his own political machine. And Tillis was able to celebrate Tuesday night, when Cawthorn lost his primary election to GOP state senator Chuck Edwards. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
This week, Rep. Liz Cheney from Wyoming, who is TFG’s Public Enemy #2 behind Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, blasted the “Putin Wing of the GOP,” a group including both Trump and his nominee for U.S. ambassador to Germany, Douglas McGregor, who last week attributed Ukraine’s success so far to Russian troops being “too gentle” and also said that “I don’t see anything heroic” about Zelenskyy.
Former vice-president Mike Pence, who showed his own courage by refusing to steal the 2020 U.S. election for TFG on January 6, 2021 despite TFG’s threats and demands that he do so, also jumped on both TFG’s and McGregor’s pro-Putin remarks, stating that “[t]here is no room in [the GOP] for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.”
Unfortunately, the continuing pull of TFG illustrates that Pence is wrong and that the Putin Wing (and its enemies of freedom such as TFG) still hold a significant place in the party in 2022, despite the demise of Cawthorn. Perhaps this is their last stand. But probably not.
Isn’t MAGA already part of the Dark Side?
Rep. Cawthorn, like most morons, denies that he lost his primary because of the cumulative public relations train wreck resulting from his own stupidity, such as twice trying to carry loaded guns onto an airplane, a video of him doing naked wresting with his male cousin after he had posted an attack on supposed drug-and-sex orgies in D.C., a divorce after a marriage of less than a year, an accusation of insider trading, multiple traffic stops for driving without a license and other issues caught on film, cross-dressing photos, and so forth. Oh, and despite using a shell LLC for funneling cash to friends turned staffers, he burned through all of his campaign cash intended for the general election, leading to one North Carolina GOP operative referring to Cawthorn’s campaign as “a grift and a racket.”
But Cawthorn has now vowed to get even with his enemies, calling for them to be targeted by “Dark MAGA” in an Instagram post:
I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal. The time for gentile [sic] politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.
As one Twitter user noted, Cawthorn is apparently in the “channeling Voldemort” stage of grief.
But what is “Dark MAGA”, and how does it differ from normal MAGA, which already leans toward the dark side? Newsweek has a description:
More of a meme than a political slogan, Dark MAGA is a post-alt-right aesthetic that promotes an authoritarian version of [TFG] in dystopian, Terminator-like images. . . . Dark MAGA supporters are calling for a ruthless, unforgiving version of [TFG] to take revenge on his political enemies at the 2024 election.
In other words, they want TFG to continue to act the way he did during his first term — which also means they want him to continue to be The FORMER Guy — because I don’t believe there is any way that the American people want to subject themselves to the 2017-21 T-800 Terminator again, let along the T-1000 Terminator that Dark MAGA wants Trump to evolve into.
Moldova breaks from Russia’s grasp
Moldova, one of the two poorest countries in Europe along with Ukraine, and the European country with the third-smallest defense budget as a percentage of GDP (0.4%, trailing only Iceland, 0.0%, and Ireland, 0.3%), formally applied for membership in the European Union in March. This week, Moldovan president Maia Sandu began a tour of European capitals as part of that effort.
Moldova is an interesting story. Moldova used to be part of Romania until WWII, and it still speaks Romanian. Until 2020, Moldova was ruled by a Russian-friendly socialist government, which tolerated Transnistria, a Russian-recognized independent republic (read: Russian client-state), within its borders (on a fairly narrow strip of land between the Dniester River and Ukraine) but also looked to Romania as a European model. As part of that, the Moldovan government had returned to Latin script from Cyrillic, but the "independent republic" retained Cyrillic script.
But the detente between the Russian-leaning party in Moldova and the Romanian-leaning party in Moldova started to break down after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Moldova experienced public unrest over its official nonalignment policy in 2015-16, and Maia Sandu, one of the recognized political leaders in the country, formed an expressly pro-European party. Then in 2016, she ran for president and narrowly lost, but in 2019 she was elected as the head of parliament (thus, prime minister). Then she was ousted by a unified bloc of pro-Russian parliamentarians just a few months after taking over. But in 2020, she was overwhelmingly elected president, and in 2021 her party swept parliament. After that, her first move was to copy Ukraine and apply for membership in the European Union, expressly stating that Moldova’s future is in Europe, not under the fat thumb of Vladimir Putin.
So those days of 0.4% military expenditures will never recur again, because Moldova has expressly moved into the Zelenskyy lane with regard to Russia. As a result, the Russian client-state of Transnistria has been trying to create its own tensions during the Russo-Ukrainian war . . . and Ukrainians living near the border with Transnistria have noticed a buildup of Ukrainian troops in case Russia decides to open another front from an area less than 50 miles away from Odesa.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine rages on, with the fall of Mariupol after a long siege, while the Ukrainians have regained territory to relieve the shelling and pressure on Kharkiv, pushing the invaders back to the Russian border in that area. And new atrocities are being uncovered in the formerly occupied areas around Kharkiv. But what has been happening in the places in Ukraine that remain newly enslaved by Adolf Putin’s stormtroopers? The New Yorker had an excellent piece on the Russian-instigated violence taking place in Melitopol, which was captured in Russia’s initial military surge out of Crimea toward Mariupol, about where it petered out in trying to move away from the Sea of Azov.
Philip Sheridan didn’t say actually this about Indians, so I will about Russian soldiers: the only good Russian soldier is a dead Russian soldier. Yes, I know that is a brutal sentiment, but one thing that the 20th century was particularly notable for (other than its state-sponsored mass murders) was the end of the era of empires. Whether the empires ended peacefully (Britain, France, Soviet Union) or violently (Ottoman, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Japan), most of them came to an end. Why would we want to permit new ones to develop? And the only army currently fighting for that awful goal is Russian.
End note: it’s now Sunday night, and I’m taking a short break from work. Most of this was written on Tuesday and Wednesday, but then I took a break to see how the GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania came out. Well, it is still within 1,000 votes, and all the votes haven/t been counted yet, so we’ll still have to see how it come out. But I’m not going to have any more time to work on this in the next few days, and its “news” is turning into “olds”, so I’m going to go ahead and publish it now.
Be seeing you.