Oh dear Lord. Oh dear. Bless his heart.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, is having to remain in jail pending his trial on conspiracy. Why isn’t he afforded the right to a bond? Well, because he’s too damn stupid.

His ex-wife gave law enforcement pictures of a series of “escape tunnels” he dug in the backyard of his rented house.

 

And then because she hadn’t had enough get-even fun, she scampered over to Twitter and announced …

“Folks if you ever feel tempted to rent a backhoe and dig escape tunnels in the backyard of your rental house, keep in mind it may back to haunt you if you later attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.”

Another lesson here: if your wife has a camera, don’t piss her off. You know she’s got a picture of you doing something crazy.

 

We are a citizenry that seems to live and die by our Google searches. A quick Google search on civil war demonstrates that numerous people are thinking about it. Truth be told though, those fault lines have always been there. Conflicts have always been a part of our culture. You can identify historical periods based on where those conflicts arise.

You do that because you know full well that some of the conflicts we currently have weren’t major considerations before. LGTBQ+ rights have always been important, but those battles weren’t fought 20 and 30 years ago when my generation came of age. People always have worried about illegal immigration and undocumented peoples, but it could hardly be called a crisis back in those days.

Sometimes things happen to make these conflicts front and center. Sometimes their rights and needs evolve to the point where a conflict is unavoidable. Sometimes whoever they is decides it is time to break out of the shadows. Sometimes new issues arise that have to be addressed. This is a natural part of history that can’t be avoided.

The usual course of these things is that those other issues that were being debated suddenly aren’t anymore. The battles of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to other battles in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, new issues arose in the 1990s and 2000s. One or two issues came forward and those others naturally took a backseat. It’s not that they became less important or solved necessarily, but we seemingly made enough progress to at least set it aside for awhile.

If we were to characterize this age we would say that everyone has picked sides on everything and everything is a burgeoning crisis. Obviously women’s rights have become front and center as it pertains to the roll back of abortion rights. We still see African Americans and other minority groups still concerned deeply about policing and how suspects get treated. The LGTBQ+ community is still battling for recognition of their rights and what that looks like in different situations. Then, we have all the folks standing on one side or the other in the fight over income inequality.

The last part is part of the change. We seemingly stand on one side or another on all of these issues. The usual course is that for most of these issues we are standing on the sidelines. It’s not that we don’t care, but that it doesn’t directly impact us. We might consider ourselves allies to one side or another, but it really isn’t our fight. Now, we seem to fight about everything.

If one of us is being held back on these fronts then we all are being held back. If black lives matter then all lives matter. If women get autonomy over their own bodies then we all do. If transgender people get to feel safe in their chosen identities then we all do. So, supporting the fight on the side you believe pushes us all forward. Either it pushes us forward or keeps us from running headlong over the cliff.

All that being said, people need a break from fighting all the time. Not everything can be a battle. Something must unite us. Something must make us come together to acknowledge our shared humanity. Perhaps the worst sign of a coming civil war is the fact that more and more of these events are simply becoming another battle.

The pandemic might be the single defining event of this generation. It has become the “where were you when” moment. It is this generation’s Kennedy assassination. It is this generation’s Challenger explosion or fall of the Berlin Wall. It is this generation’s 9/11. Yet, the defining characteristic won’t be solidarity. It won’t be people coming together to defeat a faceless enemy. It won’t be people coming together at all. It will be yet another fault line drawn by forces not our own. Those forces aren’t us, but they are us at the same time. If you understand that contradiction then you are doing a whole lot better than me.

So, I’m pretty sure I have this right and I will apologize if I am wrong but it appears to me that Melania Trump is a giant bag of doodle. Yeah, I think so.  Bag ‘O Doodle.

The weird lady is selling her clothing.  Well, that’s incorrect.  Diane Von Furstenberg sells her clothing. Melanie sells her clothes.  Yeah, used. She goes on the Internet Machine and sells her clothes for all the world to see.  And she even provides pictures of when she wore them in the White House.

The website teasingly says that a portion of the proceeds will go to help minority children learn to use computers.  Yeah, it does not say what percentage and I’m sure that whatever tiny amount she does donate will be taken off her taxes, not the real donor’s taxes.

And she wants to be paid in some weird kind of money called Solana – probably Confederate Graybacks – that tanked the day before the auction ended.

Lurleen wants to know if the big game hunter get-up that Melania wore to Africa is going to be sold because Lurleen thinks the message of British-settler-here-to-take-your-land might not be the look our First Lady  should sport. Lurleen says if she went to Africa, she’d go for the Katherine Hepburn in African Queen look.  You know, because Katherine Hepburn came home with Humphrey Bogart and Melania came home to Crate O’ Doodle.

I will apologize if I am wrong about the former First Lady selling her previously worn First Lady clothes on the Internet. You know those people made off with some of the silverware they are going to sell, right?

Okay, it’s not everyday that I can tell you about two Texas Republican (cringing already, eh?) Congressman making money out the backdoor. And, lucky for really, really rich people, they are from districts close enough to rub elbows.

First up: Dan Crenshaw (think eye patch guy from the Houston metro area) spouts off on Twitter and then dashes to his checkbook to make money doing the exact same thing he just smashed on Twitter.

For example, here ya go. On November 29, 2021 Crenshaw attacked Secretary Pete Buttigieg as being out of touch for promoting electric vehicles. But, I’ll be damned if he didn’t make five separate transactions in Tesla stock earlier that month.

Then to finish out the year on a tidal wave of double talk, on December 13, 2021 Crenshaw sent out a tweet attacking Democrats for providing tax incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. The very next day, he bought stock in Rivian.

Crenshaw is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over legislation affecting electric vehicles, while he trades their stock. That just don’t seem right.

And in the #2 spot, we have My own congresscreep, Troy Nehls, who is the only man I know who can strut sitting down.  Buy, hey, you gotta give him credit for asking around with a haircut that makes him look like Baby Huey.

So he’s got the attention of the FEC. Bless his heart, he thinks secret people can funnel money into his campaign if he just lists the conduit instead of the donors. That would be like if Act Blue collects money for me and then I only list Act Blue as the donor and refuse to let you see that my donors are actually the entire front line of the Green Bay Packers, which automatically disqualifies me to hold any office of public trust in Texas.

I was kinda hoping Louie Gohmert would do something outrageous today so I could have a threesome, but the day is young and Louie has several more hours of daylight to chop cotton and the English language.

 

“The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.”– Stephen Marche

Today’s quote comes from the jacket in Stephen Marche’s new book. I hate to spoil everyone’s fun. I haven’t read it yet. The topic seems interesting enough, but I have a backlog of books on my nightstand that I got for Christmas and I haven’t broken into those yet.

Marche is a Canadian. He can certainly opine from a safe distance about the coming destruction of America. My sense is that this is somewhat similar to the collective works of Karl Marx. Everyone is familiar with his “Communist Manifesto”, but I was thinking more along the lines of Das Kapital. It was always my understanding that he felt the revolution was what would be and not necessarily what should be.

What he did not see is that other forces would rise up to prevent the inevitable revolution between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Unions and progressive politicians prevented his revolution and brought the change needed through more peaceful means. We certainly can hope that something or someone intervenes before we go down that road.

Of course, the tag line above is what Simon and Schuster sees as the money line. There is no official definition in literature for the money line. English teachers may call it a theme statement or the main idea. It is the one line people remember. I don’t need to know how this will happen. There are any number of ways it can happen. The real question is who would be involved in such a civil war. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit so nicely into a tag line we can use to sell thousands of books.

Our last civil war was the north versus the south. That seemed easy enough. The battle lines were fought over slavery, but what is so fascinating from 64,000 feet is seeing how people have tried to distort and deflect that over the intervening decades and century. Slavery became “states rights.” A simple fight over the “right” to own other people turned into some high-minded affair over the exact understanding of federalism.

So, where are the fault lines in this coming civil war? I suppose geography could come into play. Cities and rural areas seem to vote radically differently these days. However, the fault lines don’t seem to be fraying on those lines alone. It could be right versus left. That would make a lot of sense as the political parties seem to be moving further and further away from each other.

Yet, when compared internationally, the parties are not nearly as far apart as we are led to believe. Plus, there are examples that the difference in parties is not necessarily the only thing to consider. Sometimes there are coalitions between the parties that can be a positive or negative force. At any rate, preventing a civil war can be daunting when we can’t identify where the fault lines actually are.

It isn’t as easy as vaccine versus not vaccine. It isn’t as easy as racist versus not racist. It isn’t as easy as progressive versus conservative. It’s not as easy as fact versus fiction. However, there are commonalities between all of those things. At the end of the day we could simply label one side as individualistic and the other side of pluralistic. Yet, even those terms are not absolutely precise. Labeling one side as selfish and the other as selfless is a little self-serving. It might be just that easy. Either way, the who is far more fascinating than the what.

Peter Doocy, yet another example of nepotism being alive and well at Fox “News” is the White House “correspondent” for the propaganda network, and is the son of “Fox and Friends” talker Steve Doocy.  Like his father, he has made a career of making a fool of himself on national television, carrying the water for the network and the party of Trump.  Doocy, not that smart himself, always tried to catch Joe Biden out with leading questions from the “Do you still beat your wife” genre, and tried again yesterday shouting at the President if inflation is a liability to him.  Biden responded appropriately.  You can see the exchange here.

The network went into full on Karen mode, led by Sean Hannity, moaning and whining about how terrible Biden’s behavior was, while missing the irony that they worship a guy who has spent a lifetime engaging in childish behavior and public profanity.  Don’t remember?  Here’s a little reminder from Time about Trump’s language, and keep in mind this was over 4 years ago, less than a year into TFG’s infestation of the Oval office.

In 2018, Ari Melber of MSNBC did a piece on the hypocrisy of Fox and the evangelical right’s endorsement of TFG’s constant stream of profanity in private and public, when historically offended at that very same language from other politicians.  It’s a 6 minute segment, but a good listen.

Meanwhile, Biden has called Doocy to “clear the air” between them, something that TFG would never do, and who indeed banned from the White House any reporter challenging him or asking tough questions.  Personally, I thought Biden’s response to Doocy’s idiocy was pitch perfect and accurately described him, but that’s just me.