Split screen: Impeachment is all about counter-programming against Georgia trial

By Hal Brown

With House Republicans it's all about egos and eyes.

The clamor to hold impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden is a deafening cacaphony of caca. 

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It's quite a task for people like James Comer and Matt Gaetz to outdo Marjorie Taylor Greene who called for red state succession on the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 for mooning for the media. You may accuse the likes of these Republicans for lots of things but you can't say they are camera shy. You get between them and a camera at your own peril.

Now that Kevin McCarthy has bypassed a House vote (which would go down in defeat) and initiated a House impeachment inquiry (story) it is amusing to watch Greene erupt spewing molten lava like Mt. Kilauea claiming she was pressing for a Biden impeachment inquiry immediately upon taking office: see

Feud erupts between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz over Biden impeachment.

Still, try as they might media hogs like GOP members of the House Gaetz, Comer, Jim Jordan, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert et al, and Tommy Tuberville in the Senate, don't stand a chance of being immortalized in stone. It is Marjorie Taylor Greene who is vying to be sculpted on the Mt. Rushmore of GOP gigantism.

In the coming weeks thanks to Georgia courts allowing live video coverage we can expect compelling, perhaps dramatic, reality TV. The show will be starring well known "celebrities" whose faces are well known like Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheesbro, whose name not his face are familiar. If Trump doesn't get his case removed to federal court, the mega MAGA star Donald Trump, the only defendant who actually has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, will be must-see TV if he's in court, especially if he decides against his lawyers' advice to testify.

He has the star, once defaced and replaced, there, and it is the most prominent attraction:

Read article about the star

Ironically, in order to pry eyes away from the trial if Trump is a featured celebrity House Republicans will have to put on a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus extravganza.

This will be a challenge if their center ring attraction is only Hunter Biden. If President Biden testifies (the last president to appear before Congress was Gerald Ford) depending on what's happening in Georgia I can see the GOP winning the ratings rounds for a period of time. MAGAs want to see their GOP heroes make Joe Biden squirm under their barrage of goofball gotcha questions. Lots-a-luck with that. The president doesn't do squirm.

One crazy place to be will be in the control rooms of the major television  networks where directors will have to decide what to feature on the biggest portion of their split screen when interesting things are happening simultaneously. TV hosts and panelists will have to go back and forth as they talk about the House impeachment and the Georgia trial. Complicating all of this will be any other trial involving Trump which may be occurring at the same time but doesn't have live TV coverage.

The only thing that might wipe the political news off the media is a catergory nine earthquake along the San Andreas fault (aka The Big One) which literally wipes out large portions of coastal California, Oregon, and Washington.

Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead.

By Hal Brown

The GOP has gone wiggy in their war on woke.

The author lives in a suburb of wonderfully weird Portland, Oregon.

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Here in Portland, Oregon we are proud of being weird and wonderful. Keep Portland Weird is a frequently used slogan (read about it on Wikipedia).

This is the webpage of Travel Portland:

This conveys how Portland is both weird and woke.

This is from the website Boundless Roads:

Cities like Portland aren't the only promoters of weird and woke as a positive image. For example Weird N Woke is a line of clothing which combines weird with woke in their name  .

The company, founded in Lancaster, PA, offers clothing like the Liberty is Dead t-shirt. Here's their Facebook page. I am now a fan of the company and appreciate that the founder Austin Welk (about him) resides in the Republican Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It voted GOP in every presidential election since 2000 and in the last Presidential election the vote was Republican, 56.9% to 41.2% Democrat. 

Another way weird is used in a positive sense is in services. For example some of these are described here.

The first column I read this morning was this (subscription):

One word in a sentence prompted me to write a comment in the article:

But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.

Here's my comment:

I live in Portland, Orgeon, which proudly proclaims (as does Denver) itself as wonderfully weird. Thus I suggest that calling the Republican Party weird is a misnomer and does weirdness a disservice. I suggest the word wiggy which includes weird in the definition: emotionally uncontrolled or weird.

At this writing seven readers there recommended my comment:

Following posting this I realized I should have included Austin as a proudly weird city.

Then I looked at Raw Story where I saw this article:

The word was used in this sentence:

As a result, “They have to win the endorsement of a crowd in an echo chamber having a conversation that the rest of the country thinks is too nasty or weird to join,” he wrote.

Headline writers often use alliterations so anti-woke weird warriors sound good. In my opinion wiggy is a better word in this context.

This is how my online dictionary defines weird and wiggy:

Weird

weird | wird | adjective suggesting something supernatural; uncanny: the weird crying of a seal. • informal very strange; bizarre: a weird coincidence | all sorts of weird and wonderful characters. • archaic connected with fate.

Wiggy: 

wiggy | ˈwiɡē | 

adjective (wiggier, wiggiest) informal, mainly North American emotionally uncontrolled or weird: you've been acting all wiggy.

Since both word have the soft W sound wiggy can be used in phrases with anti-woke and warrior as an alliteration. Both words can mean bizarre. Wiggy adds emotionally uncontrolled to the definition. Therefore it describes the Republican war on wokeness. Not only does weird have a positive connotation, but another reason I'd like wiggy used instead is that weird is overused and wiggy is a far less used word.

Addendum:

We can thank Ron DeSantis for pushing the war against woke to and beyond the breaking point by going after Disney and continuing to dig in his heals in his utter bigotry. For example: 

DeSantis declines to say if he supports ‘mainstream human rights’

Here's one of my blogs about him.

Here's what an hysterical bigot had to say in a Fox News opinion piece.   I found his essay when I did my web search for woke and weird.

Here's what my tour around America taught me about the weird, woke and wicked

Here's what I'm hearing from panicked parents around the country

The author spews intolerance.

* "Why is there a seemingly sudden increase in pedophiles, sexual deviants? Why do we have so many amoral—or plainly immoral—educators, school administrators, school boards, politicians, community leaders, and even judges, hell-bent on advancing the sexualization of our innocent children, and pushing perversion into the hearts and minds of the most impressionable among us?

*Why are too many of these leaders hiding their aberrant "sex education" and "gender-affirming" curricula from the parents of their students, stripping moms and dads of their rights to determine when and how their children are exposed to sensitive topics in school?

* What do these groups of decadent influencers have to gain?  In short, their ambition is the total breakdown and collapse of the family. Their target is our children.  Their goal is social chaos.  In some cases, they have been successful. Tragically successful.

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He's a Republican, a vet who was a flight surgeon, is the chair of the House Security Committee and he shot Marjorie Taylor Greene down.

 By Hal Brown

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

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Former Flight Surgeon Cut Marjorie Tayler Greene Off

I thought it fitting that Raw Story used a photo of Marjorie Taylor Green holding a big gun to illustrate the article 

GOP enraged over Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee outburst — and are threatening to boot her: report 

I added the subtitle and the airplane going down in flames.

The article describes how the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, a West Point Graduate, war vet, and former flight surgeon, shot her down.

Excerpt:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blew up a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday when she called Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas a "liar" and blaming him for fentanyl deaths around the country — an outburst that violates House rules about impugning the character of a witness. The tirade forced Chairman Mark Green, a Republican of Tennessee, to shut down her questioning and bar her from speaking for the rest of the hearing.

According to CNN reporter Melanie Zanona, Republicans behind the scenes are furious with her, and are considering punishments — even including a threat of booting her off the committee for future disruptions.

"GOP tensions flaring over MTG's committee hearing outburst today," tweeted Zanona. "Source close to Chairman Mark Green said he was furious w/ MTG's behavior and planned to privately reprimand her, and also said he'd encourage McCarthy to remove her from the committee if she did that again. But MTG doubled down on her rhetoric, accusing her GOP colleagues of 'doing the bidding' of Dems. She told me went to [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy’s office to talk about it & said to him: 'I don’t know how we’re ever going to accomplish anything when we can’t call people a liar when they’re lying.

You may not have heard of Mark Green prior to this incident. I hadn't. Unlike the politicians who get lots of media coverage, my bet is that most news junkies couldn't pick him out of a lineup.

I knew nothing about him until now. He's no shining light for liberals. For one example, this is what a brief web search of his name came up with from 2017 when Trump floated his name to be Secretary of the Army: 

Excerpt: Army secretary nominee Mark Green's past statements and legislative record make him "a danger to every LGBTQ soldier," human rights groups claim.

LGBT advocates decried President Trump's Friday announcement floating the Army surgeon turned Tennessee state senator — who has called being transgender a "disease" and supported what critics branded a "license to discriminate" bill — to succeed the country's first openly gay Army secretary, Eric Fanning.

Green is "one of most extreme anti-LGBT politicians in the country," Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Stephen Peters, a former Marine discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law, told reporters in a call on Monday.

His politics are about as far-right as those of Rep. Greene's (from Wikipedia):

Abortion

Green opposes abortion. In a 2019 op-ed, he wrote, "modern science has revealed that mother and baby are, in fact, two separate persons—long before the baby is born" and argued that "a child becomes a child at conception".

Climate change

Green rejects the scientific consensus that human activity plays a key role in climate change.

Creationism

Green rejects the theory of evolution, which is consensus in biology; in a 2015 lecture he used creationist reasoning such as "irreducible complexity".

2020 election

In December 2019, Green voted against the articles of impeachment in the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

In December 2020, Green was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Vaccines

In 2018, as a congressman-elect, Green said at a constituent meeting, "there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines", a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by scientific studies and rejected by medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

I can imagine that someone who was an Army major who graduated from West Point and was a flight surgeon would be a stickler for following the rules and wouldn't tolerate the behavior demonstrated by Marjorie Taylor Greene coming from one of the soldiers under him.

Considering his politics, I think it is particularly significant that he shot Marjorie Taylor Greene down. In the military you could describe this as an officer dressing someone down. If she was a soldier such behavior could get her demoted. 

It is typical of Greene that she doesn't care and is doubling down. That someone would dare to diss her obviously was beyond the pale for her. She apparently hustled off to complain her House husband, Kevin McCarthy, about not being able to call a liar a liar when she thinks they're lying.

It represents cockeyed optimism to think that Kevin's House honey is going to face any consequences for this behavior.

Update: This moved up to be the No. 1 trending story on Raw Story.

 

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There is no longer a "We the People of United States"

 There is no longer a "We the People of The United States"

by Hal Brown

 The morning after Halloween I envisioned zombies dancing when I read title of this column this morning: 

America must step out of this self-destructive zombie dance

The title of the column by Amanda Ripley (the author of “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped — and How We Get Out”) suggests she is going to give us an answer.

Here are a few excerpts:

High conflict — the kind that is self-destructive and stubbornly resistant to resolution — is not mysterious. And we have much more wisdom about how to respond to it than we think.

The only good option is to do counterintuitive things. We must step out of the zombie dance we are in... One lesson I’ve learned in covering dysfunctional conflict for the past five years is that most people, even very violent people, want to live. And they want their families to be safe. That is one thing we all have in common. Horrific incidents such as the one at Pelosi’s home offer an unusual (and fleeting) opportunity to invite people to do something differently.

Here's where she began to lose me as she explained solutions The bolds are hers.

First, sign the contract. All over the world, the U.S. government has pushed politicians to sign codes of conduct in times of conflict. Gang-violence interrupters do this every day in Chicago and other cities — urging combatants and their supporters to join a nonaggression pact. It’s time to invite American politicians and pundits to do what we’ve long asked other people, in far more harrowing circumstances, to do.

Uh oh, with the word "invite" my wishful thinking alarm just went off.

She went on:

In politics, this might mean pledging not to dehumanize one’s opponent on social media or elsewhere (by saying they are evil or hate the United States, for example). The codes could include vows to accept the results of the election after reasonable due process and, of course, to condemn all acts of violence, especially when they are perpetrated against a member of the opposition. 

Really? What world is she living in?

Going down the rabbit hole to her next highlighted paragraph:

Walk the walk. Part of how we got into this mess is by watching politicians and pundits gleefully attack each other on TV. Part of how we get out of it is by doing the opposite: having credible messengers from each side demonstrate human decency.

She concludes that section with:

One thing Americans still do exceptionally well is to produce original, creative content. We tell stories that move people to imagine a better world. Now is the time to tell a different story, one of courage and decency alongside honest debate.

This is true, but assuming this content is produced, where does it go to reach the people who need it the most? Fox News, the fever swamps of social media? I don't think so.

Here's her next suggestion:

Right-size the fear. One predictable cause of collective violence is collective fear. When threat levels are high and fear is mixed with contempt, disgust and humiliation, humans will feel they have no choice but to annihilate one another. 

This is what disturbs me in the last paragraph of the essay. Who are the "we" (my bold) below?

We, the public, are being manipulated by conflict mongers. We are being turned against each other and we are all suffering, to different degrees. It is time to question these storylines, to question our fears as often as we have learned to question truth. And then demand something radically different, something that will enable us to coexist. We know how to do this.

There is no collective "we" in the United States and other countries where there is a battle between a group, call them "bad people" who want a facisist country as long as their side is in control, and "good people" who want democracy where, to be corny, the Gold Rule prevails. Here and in countries like Brazil the most recently, the good people barely outnumber the bad.

There is, alas, no "we the public" - just as there is no longer a "we the people" as in the first paragraph in the U.S. Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Democratic and Republican politicians have taken to holding up their pocket sized copies of the U.S. Constitution. Here's something Trump and Obama have in  common. Someone decided it was worth publishing pocket Constitutions with them on the cover. The Obama is $9.99 and Trump's is $14.99. It's as it if has become a prop.

Historians and constitutional scholars correctly debate what the Founders meant by "we" and the words in the preamble to the document.

It certainly wasn't everyone in every case in every way. But it was clear that they wanted "a more perfect union" and to insure a mechanism for amending the Constitution over time. Perhaps some like George Washington,  Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton  envisioned the 13th Amendment freeing the slaves would be ratified  about 100 years later in 1865.

It is now up to the Supreme Court to interpret what the Founders meant and how it should be applied to the issues of the day. The basic question remains: what is the meaning of "we the people?"

Clearly, there is a significant segment of the population that doesn't want "we" to mean everyone.

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