This is a brief follow-up of sorts to my article yesterday about Marjorie Taylor Greene ranting about how Red states should secede from the union – which, as I noted, was a) the definition of being anti-American, and b) would serve to almost literally bankrupt those states, since so many of them get around 40% of their budgets from federal assistance. Later in the day, I posted a comment on social media where I wrote, “The quivering impotence of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker has allowed MT Greene to be the most-vocal, lunatic, out-of-control face of the House GOP, and Democrats should take advantage of that to the fullest.” It got a few “Likes” and “Retweets” initially, but as the day went on I noticed that things picked up significantly. Not to the point of going viral, but still substantial by my standards. And I’m very sure that the approval was not about criticism of the quaveringly impotent Kevin McCarthy, but rather the point of making Ms. Greene the face and voice of the House Republican Party. Mainly, though, what I loved is that in the afternoon I saw a posting from Jaime Harrison, who is chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that did precisely that. He wrote – “GOP House control is a tremendous threat to American democracy. This deranged Congresswoman calls for secession but was elected unanimously by the GOP to the Homeland Security Committee. Her biggest enabler is the House Speaker!” And then embedded a video of Greene. Literally making her the face and voice of the House GOP. I was so happy to see that the DNC was properly pulling a no-brainer and making Marjorie Taylor Greene the face and voice of today's Republican Party in the House. Indeed, even in the Congress, because I don’t see any senator taking the lead in pushing the GOP agenda. Nor any senator even criticizing her for her monumentally divisive, counter-productive and ethereally stupid, out-of-control, non-stop comments. Republicans have long liked to pick one Democrat to specifically demonize as someone they want others to see as the face of the party. Usually, that’s been the Speaker of the House, and most prominently was done with Tip O’Neil. The GOP did a huge amount of fundraising off the bulbous, brash O’Neil, which made for a good target, even if he wasn’t even close to the voice of the party. But even that didn’t come close to when they made Nancy Pelosi their fundraising target as symbolizing all they hated about the Democrats and damn libs – a smart, outspoken, liberal woman, horrors! Moreover, not just liberal, but one who represented those damn hippies in San Francisco. And now it’s probably Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who they want to be the face of Democrats – a smart, outspoken, liberal woman of color, horrors! Or even more…“The “Squad” – three smart, outspoken, woman of color. Almost the worst nightmare of the far right. One of them a Muslim, no less. Not because any of them were actually the voice and face of the Democratic Party, mind you, but they terrified the GOP base enough for who they were as people and were great to fundraise off. So, it seems fair to return the favor with Marjorie Taylor Greene. To be clear, though, it’s not because she’s an outspoken woman. (Though not of color, nor liberal, nor smart.) It’s because she rants about seceding from the Union. And Jewish space lasers. And the national horror of Chinese balloons that might be carrying COVID-19 to drop on America. And saying black people should fee "proud" of seeing Confederate monuments. And crying out “Liar!!” during the State of the Union Address. And wanting to pass a law that if you move to a Red state “You don’t get to vote for 5 years" because she doesn't want Democrats to bring their "values." (All the other insane fascist stupidity of this "idea" aside -- she misses that some/many/most people moving to a Red state are moving there specifically because it's a Red state. And she wants to block them from voting!!) And threatening death on Nancy Pelosi. And also, because it's clear she dearly wants to be the face and voice of the House GOP -- to the degree that she has specifically put out wanting to be the vice president running-mate of Trump. And has almost usurped the impotent Speaker McCarthy by virtue of holding him up with concessions to get her vote (and those of her small group) that he needed to get elected, and so can get him to push her agenda. And thus far, neither McCarthy, nor any official in the Republican Party, anywhere, has stepped in to call her out. So, it’s not a case of creating a fake “straw man” to be the supposed face and voice of the GOP in the House. Even if others have more power and authority, she pretty much is its outspoken voice and face. It’s just a case of making this clear to the public. Her specifics might be outlandish and insane and not supported by all, or even most Republicans in the House. But they are all letting her take the lead for them in their silence and reticence. So, her face and voice is what the GOP is allowing her to position what they stand for and what they refuse to contradict. That’s why the lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene is, right now, actually the face and voice of the House Republican Party. And if Republicans have long been willing to single out a Democrat they hate to stand for all Democrats even if it has no merit, it’s more than fair and right and proper for Democrats to not just return the favor, but point to someone who has actually pushed herself to become truly it’s loudest and craziest voice, and face.
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I’ve long been a huge fan of the work of Robert Caro. The upside is that he’s brilliant. The downside is that one reason he’s brilliant is the unearthly meticulous research he does means that over 50 years he has written only five books (plus one additional book that was a short memoir of sorts) – though has won two Pulitzer Prizes. And received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And yes, is making his way through his fifth and (finally) final book on the life of Lyndon Johnson – what was intended to be a trilogy. (How unearthly meticulous is his research? When writing about Lyndon Johnson’s early days growing up in the desolate Texas Hill Country, he felt that he and his wife had to move to the Hill Country and live there for two years – researching and talking to people there, to understand that that world was like.) So, I was thrilled when I read that a documentary, Turn Every Page, was made about him and his working relationship with the only editor he’s ever had, the legendary Robert Gottlieb – who edited such books as Catch-22, Beloved, True Grit, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Heartburn, Jurassic Park, and such writers as Salman Rushdie, John Cheever, Ray Bradbury, John Le Carré, Toni Morrison, Bruno Bettelheim, B. F. Skinner, and memoirs by Lauren Bacall, Sidney Poitier, John Lennon, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan. The other day, I went to see Turn Every Page at the Writers Guild Theater. And yes, it was joyous. How can you not love loved about an ongoing, 45-year argument over using semi-colons -- and watching them at a loss as they wander around the publisher’s office looking for a pencil? But it’s all the stories in between that add such richness. And just to add a special touch, the fill would likely never have been made (since Gottlieb especially was against it) if the filmmaker pushing the project, Lizzie Gottlieb, was the editor’s own daughter. I can’t say that Turn Every Page was “snubbed” by the Oscars (a description I hate to use with the Academy Awards) because I haven’t seen the others that did get nominated. But I can say that all five better have been great to have been nominated instead of this. (And the Gabby Giffords documentary, Won’t Back Down.) What I can say is that a good friend in the Motion Picture Academy has participated in the documentary category every year, and has seen most of the films in consideration, and says that it’s ridiculous these two films didn’t get nominated, but that that’s par for the course with the category. While it’s unlikely that you’ll get a chance to see this in the theaters (though certainly possible), I’m sure it will get a DVD/streaming release because it’s from Sony Pictures. Here's a clip from the film. It’s one that delves into their battle on semi-colons, so you can see what I meant, that I wasn’t joking. And trust me, this is only a brief reference to it; the battle is longer... (And yes, the semi-colon there was intentional.) And here’s the trailer. It gives a nice sense of the film, but the movie is significantly richer – not only talking about writing and their work process, but going into their own histories and returning to locations important to their careers. The past few weeks, that great political strategist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been going around wailing about how the Red states should secede from the union. I don’t have it in me to repost any of her ranting tweets here, but a) all you need to know is that they have the word “secede” in them, and b) you can just use your imagination to think of the most lunatics things to suggest as “reasons,” and you’ll likely have it covered close enough.
And yes, of course, there are those who respond with their knee-jerk cries of “Yes! What a great idea!!”, something akin to when a doctor is doing a physical and taps your knee with a rubber hammer, and it automatically flies up. An action that has as much substance and cognitive input behind as this “Yes! What a great idea!!” But that’s pretty much all Ms. Taylor Greene needs to ratchet up her “The South shall rise again” rants of secession all the more lunatic. I'm in awe how utterly ignorant this is. To start with, no state has a right to secede, despite her ignorant (a word that can’t be used too much here) insistence to the contrary. And so, you can pretty much stop there. But more valuable is to explain why the depth of this ignorance is so deep, in order to get at least some of her constituents to make the realization that, “Oh, my, this is actually a truly, madly, deeply ignorant position for her to take and yell so loudly about because it will really crush my own life.” There are so many things that this gibberish completely ignores if a state ever did, somehow, miraculously manage to secede from the Union. Among them are -- It would need its own currency and monetary system. It would need its own military – Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, missile defense system – to protect its borders and be able to fight off an invasion from being taken over by another country. Or another state. And if the state thought, well, okay, it at least could rely on its National Guard – nope, because, oops, there’s that “National” part of the term. The National Guard receives equipment and funding from the U.S. Army and Air Force, and from U.S. Congress grants. It would be off the national power grid. That seems pretty important. It would get zero federal aid. This is an especially big one, since Georgia, for instance, gets 34.3% of its state budget from federal assistance. But as horrific a loss as that would be for Greene’s own state, the loss of federal aid would be overwhelmingly worse for other Red states that might think the MT Greene Plan sounds really cool. For instance, Montana gets 46.1% of its state budget from the federal government. Wyoming gets 44.5%. Louisiana gets 43.7%. Mississippi gets 43.3%. Well, okay, you get the idea. Can you imagine a state seceding and losing almost half of its budget?!! There would be no federal subsidies for industries that exist in states, which might drive some of those businesses out of the states. If any state actually could secede (it can’t), it would have no access to the federal highway system and to any interstate commerce. It would need its own postal service. Residents of any state that seceded, if it could (it can’t) would need a passport to travel outside it borders into the U.S. And need to go through immigration control every time they left – and returned. (In fact, it’s possible that they would need proof of vaccination to enter the U.S.) All business outside the state would require international documentation. The added costs of doing business might also drive some corporations from “foreign” states into states in the U.S. Every resident of Georgia over the age of 62 would lose their Social Security and Medicare benefits. In fairness, Ms. Taylor Greene might not care about that (yet), though I'm near 100% certain that almost every person in Georgia over 62 would be furious. And they'd first take their wrath out on her. But let's make it easier. Let's ignore all that and get even to the most basic: if Georgia, or any Red state, ever somehow managed to secede, it wouldn't be able to vote for Trump, Ron DeSantis or any Republican to be U.S. president. For that matter, it would no longer even have a U.S. senator or any members of the U.S. House (which, by the way, would include Marjorie Taylor Greene...) Sitting on the outside, Georgia and any Red state that thought it was a great idea to secede, would watch the power of the Republican Party disappear. I saw a response in defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene where the person chided Blue states for not being self-supporting and being in trouble when Red state crops and oil stop coming. Snarkily adding that “I'm sure all that big city paper pushing will generate heat and food.” The mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste. Because apparently this person (and I suspect others) think there are no farms in California. And Illinois. And New York. And Minnesota. And... Well, you get the point. Further, while Red states do predominate in oil production, three of the top seven oil producing states are Blue and Purple, like New Mexico, California, Colorado Furthermore, this is why it’s notable that Blue state are strong in developing renewable green power sources. But more to the point, faux-secession wouldn't mean no international trade (after all, if you have crops and oil, you have to sell them), just that it would be "international" and cause far more massive problems for those in states no longer in the U.S. (Like no farm subsidies, which could be devastating...) To be clear, if any state ever seceded from the U.S. if it could (it can’t), it would, of course, cause problems for all the other states still in the Union – but – most importantly, it would be totally devastating, absolutely crushing to the state that seceded. In the end, my hope is that the next time Marjorie Taylor Greene runs for re-election her opponent uses her insane rants about “secession” and shows her district the massive problems her "outraged" position would impact and cost them profoundly, to the extent that it would risk destroying the state, and lives of almost all those who live there. Moreover, when your mournful cry is to secede from the United States, it would show clearly, irrefutably, how LITERALLY un-American you are. This is just me, and I’m going out on a limb – and others may not agree -- but I don’t get the sense Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks things through… I like writer-director Judd Apatow. I don't like all his movies, I'm not sure if I even like most of them (I include in that list the ones he only produced, but didn't write or direct), though I do like many of them, and since he's made so many, that's a very good number. But mainly, when I see that he, personally, is going to be a guest on a talk show, he's one of the few people I try to watch. I find him very funny, open and profoundly self-effacing. On Saturday night, he was the emcee at the Directors Guild Awards. And was totally scathing. (And for my taste, even when I didn't agree with him, hilarious.) Apparently, if I’m reading things correctly, he had the feed cut off to the press room for much of the speech, so that he wouldn’t feel restricted, but then gave his OK for the second half. Reporters put their stories together from other people’s comments and tweets. What's got most of the headlines is how much he went after Tom Cruise, though he had an unending range of targets. Including himself. I fully acknowledge that his full monologue won't be to everyone's taste of humor. But it is to mine. Here are just a few examples. There are a ton more. One came in reference to his own 2022 Netflix film The Bubble which had a very low viewership. “Do you know what it’s like to work hard, and then go see the Top 10 on Netflix, and you’re behind Is It Cake? And then you watch Is It Cake? and you realize you like it better than your movie?” “It’s really nice what Glenn Weiss said [about thanking his family]. To my family, to Leslie, Maude and Iris, I couldn’t do what I do without you. Where are they seated? Oh yeah, they aren’t here because they don’t give a shit.“ “Our next presenter directed Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and Licorice Pizza. He has never won a DGA award, which kind of makes me think this whole night is bullshit. Please welcome Paul Thomas Anderson." But one in particular stood out for me the most. It apparently got gasps from the audience, which is sort of understandable on several levels -- “I actually watched Elvis the same way that he died: asleep and on the toilet.” Those are just a few jokes. But here are two articles about his full monologue. They're the most comprehensive of all that I've seen. While they overlap each other with some of the same material, each has material that the other does not. This is the first one I read here. And this here has a lot of additional material. For what it's worth, the winner of Best Director of a Feature Film went to Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's probably one of my two favorite movies of the years, along with All Quiet on the Western Front. Apparently it was a good year for movies with the word "All" in their titles. Yesterday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) posted a tweet which read – “My favorite painting is Washington Crossing the Delaware. I have a giant version of it in my office—to remind everyone who sees it that there is no obstacle Americans can't overcome if we row together in the same direction.”
And the same day, this same Kevin McCarthy handed over 40,000 hours of security footage on the January 6th Insurrection to, of all people, Tucker Carlson of Fox “News.” So much for rowing in the same direction. And so much for faux-transparency when you give the material to only one network. Whoever the network is. If Nancy Pelosi had given all the January 6 security footage to only MSNBC, it would have been the opposite of transparency. And would have been wrong-headed. (Side note to people who hate Nancy Pelosi: she did not give any footage to MSNBC. Not even 40-seconds, let alone 40,000 hours. And also, another difference: the Kremlin didn't order Russian media to feature the network.) Moreover -- This is the same Tucker Carlson who, lest we forget, was mentioned in a leaked memo from the Kremlin to Russian media that said it is “essential” for them to feature Tucker Carlson, because he was so supportive of Russian positions. (For those who don’t follow the news closely, Russia has been the enemy of the United States for over 75 years. Whose premier once said, “We will destroy you!”) And you don’t even have to follow news closely if you only go all the way back to just last week. That’s when Carlson was outed as being a monumental liar for what he says in private trashing Trump as a "demonic force, a destroyer" and in public kissing his rear and enabling his Insurrection efforts to the degree of insisting “it was definitely not a violent terrorist attack, it wasn’t an Insurrection,” nor even that was it “an outbreak of mob violence,” but rather just a “forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards” where “you see people walking around taking pictures; they don’t look like terrorists, they look like tourists.” Yes, he really said all that. Tourists. But in private, we now know from released emails that Carlson said that Trump’s lawyer “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” And yet only weeks later invited deranged conspiratorialist leading sponsor Mike Lindell – his show’s leading sponsor – to appear on his program and repeat those insane lies. He slammed what Trump’s lawyers Powell and Rudy Giuliani were spewing, saying that “It’s unbelievably offensive to me.” He called their charges 'ludicrous' and 'off the rails'. Yet still featured the charges on his show. We know, too, from the release of his emails that he tried to get a Fox report fired (his word) for telling the actual truth, saying she was hurting the company’s stock price! And this is the person who Kevin McCarthy gave exclusive access to the 40,000 hours of January 6 security footage. As Adam Schiff noted in a tweet -- “Kevin McCarthy turned over Jan 6 videos to right-wing propagandist Tucker Carlson. “A man who spews Kremlin talking points. Suggests Jan 6 was a false flag. And spreads the Big Lie. “Make no mistake: This isn’t about transparency, it’s about fueling dangerous conspiracy theories.” And make no mistake, it’s not just that Kevin McCarthy exclusively turned over 40,000 hours of January 6 security footage to, of all people, Russian apologist Tucker Carlson, but to Tucker Carlson on Fox “News.” The company currently treading water, struggling for its safety in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit over it’s known lies about the non-existent election “fraud” in the 2020 election. The lies that the network has poured out to its viewers were revealed last week in other private emails made public, completely undercutting their public faux-“outrage” at everything they derided in private as untrue. In private, Fox producer Alex Pfeiffer wrote that “many on ‘our side’ are being reckless demagogues right now.” On-air personality Laura Ingraham wrote in private that “Sidney [Powell] is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Maria Bartiromo presented supposed “evidence” about supposed election “fraud” that she got from a woman who – we now know from private Fox exchanges -- described herself as “internally decapitated” and capable of “time travel in a semi-conscious state.” And more – much more, all of which we now know from these released private documents about what Fox “News” actually believed, but on the air they lied about what they knew was non-existent fraud and fomented the Insurrection. And this is the network who Kevin McCarthy has exclusively given access to 40,000 hours of security footage on January 6. Kevin McCarthy, the weak-backed Speaker who himself criticized Trump in public and in private – and then was called down to Mar-a-Lago, clearly chastised by Trump, and almost immediately did an about-face and has enabled all efforts to block investigations into the truth of the Insurrection to overthrow democracy...which he himself initially noted. And who now also demeans himself by bizarrely protecting the clownish serial con man liar “George Santos.” That Kevin McCarthy who says “there is no obstacle Americans can't overcome if we row together in the same direction.” Alas, it makes it much harder to protect gun safety and abortion that the vast majority of Americans support, and protect Medicare, Social Security and the Affordable Care Act that the vast majority of Americans support. And decry Insurrection that...oh, you know -- when the Kevin McCarthy and the Republican won't row the same direction, but instead paddle as hard as they can against the current upstream. And hand over 40,000 HOURS of January 6 security footage exclusively to those who said it wasn’t an Insurrection at all, but just…tourists. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returned last night. If you missed it, their Main Story was about LSD and other psychedelics, but more specifically how they're used in therapy. They look at the convoluted past (including how it was demonized), current efforts and what lies ahead. It's a very interesting report, covering both the positives and risks, and as you can imagine, it was also a fertile ground for a lot of humor. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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