What do you know? He's not dead.

Pat Buchanan.

Today's column is a celebration of the Buchananite takeover of the GOP in the person of the Duce, Donald Trump.

For him, in utter delirium, Buchanan even abandons his decades of anti-Israeli sentiment and propaganda and celebrates Trump's Zionism.

Not entirely happy with the Duce's current hostility toward China regarding Hong Kong, however.

He doesn't see it part of the virus-connected shift for the election year.

He's very please with all the stuff about NATO and Putin and trade and Iran and global warming and and and.

And race.

A Most Consequential Presidency

A reminder of Pat's preference for authoritarian populism over rule of law republicanism and popular government.

A preference that emerged only when the rise of the Duce emboldened Buchanan.

Mandatory voting

If participation dropped so far as to significantly undermine the claim of government to rest on popular will I would favor mandatory voting, if it allowed casting ballots only partially filled out, or even not at all.

Are we already there?

Maybe, thanks only in part to the efforts of one party to discourage and diminish participation on a scale big enough to matter.

Guess which party would rather see blood run in the streets than see a smoothly functioning system of mandatory voting and overwhelming participation.

Steve took too narrow a view

Trump congratulates far-right activist Laura Loomer on GOP primary win

Loomer was banned from ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft in 2017 after a public tweet threat in which she told the companies that she "never want[s] to support another Islamic immigrant driver," along with others calling for "someone ... to create a non Islamic form of @uber or @lyft."

"Isn't it ironic how the twitter moment used to celebrate 'women, LGBTQ, and minorities' is a picture of Ilhan Omar?" she added in a 2018 message shortly before being banned from Twitter as well, referring to the Democratic Minnesota congresswoman. "Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro-FGM Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab. Ilhan is anti Jewish."

Loomer told The Hill previously that a victory in her primary would mark the "first time a deplatformed candidate will get a party nomination."

Republican Anna Paulina Luna Wins Primary in Florida’s 13th District – Will Face Democrat Charlie Crist in November

Steve has photos of both and a comment for David Brooks accompanying the photos of Luna.

Dear David Brooks: You want to know what the future of the Republican Party looks like? This is what it looks like.

I left a comment.

The future of the Republican Party? 

Nah, the future of the people's house, legislation to be decided by opposing teams of hot babe mud-wrestlers. 

Trump proved it. You can never have too much democracy.

Perhaps that came to mind because I was reading The Federalist just this morning.

Is it time for a return to republicanism in Spain?

Juan Carlos, a troubled monarchy and the crisis of modern Spain

Spain’s former king Juan Carlos had nearly 5,000 lovers, says retired colonel

Are there more pussy hounds than I had supposed, I wonder. Or just more among the very rich and very powerful?

Hilarious, when you think of it.

What do the coarse frat boy Bill Clinton, the stupid vulgarian Donald Trump, and the elegant, educated, and aristocratic both literally and figuratively Juan Carlos de Bourbon of Spain, have in common?

And the King has both of them beat into the ground at this game, too.

Yet another proof of the folly of allowing a constitution to be changed by a single, simple majority plebiscite

David Campbell stupidly blew the UK out of the EU with such a plebiscite.

This is just way too foolishly democratic.

I am terrified at the thought of what American voters might do with such power, and you should be, too.

Russian voters overwhelmingly back a ploy by President Vladimir Putin to rule until 2036

He has already been in power for about twenty years.

Really excellent video

The Abolitionists, a PBS American Experience series.

And very, very far from allowing any sort of moral equivalence to obtain between these folks and the slave owners and their broader alliance, the opponents of the abolitionists all over the country, including the mobs of the North.

Who, watching this, does not see that struggle as continuous with the struggles not only of the Civil War, but also of Reconstruction, and of the Civil Rights Era?

Or the struggle even today?

Oh, and last night there was the chilling Hitler on Trial, also on amazon video.

Also, in its way, the same struggle.

For liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

About His Majesty, Ubu Roi

Cuomo denies Trump has ‘total authority’ to reopen US economy

Donald Trump is not a “king” and does not have “total authority” to reopen the US economy from its coronavirus shutdown, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said on Tuesday.

At a chaotic, angry and rambling White House briefing on Monday night, Trump, champing at the bit to reopen the US as early as 1 May, made a startling claim.

“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” he said, referring to public health and police powers in the states and territories.

Constitutional scholars and state governors alike were quick to reject the idea with Cuomo leading the charge in a spat over tackling the pandemic that is pitting the White House versus state leaders.

“I don’t know what the president is talking about, frankly,” Cuomo told NBC. “We have a constitution … we don’t have a king … the president doesn’t have total authority.”

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, also chimed in.

“I am not running for office to be King of America,” he said in a tweet.

“I respect the constitution. I’ve read the constitution. I’ve sworn an oath to it many times. I respect the great job so many of this country’s governors – Democratic and Republican – are doing under these horrific circumstances.”

. . . .

On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund said the pandemic would lead to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

. . . .

On Monday, the names of a “council to reopen America” were reported.

All were Trump administration officials, among them the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

There were no public health advisers among them.

. . . .

Trump’s performance at the White House podium, meanwhile, prompted alarm.

His repeated claim of “total authority” reminded some observers of Richard Nixon’s infamous claim after the Watergate scandal that “when the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal”.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, tweeted:

“Nope. That would be the literal definition of a totalitarian government – which our traditions, our constitution, and our values all rightly and decisively reject.”

There was also dissent among some Republican Trump allies in Congress, many of whom spent years accusing Barack Obama of executive overreach, including the Florida senator Marco Rubio.

As TV networks and news websites continued to debate whether Trump’s briefings should be shown live at all, some observers reached for more colorful language to describe the president’s misleading claims, attacks on journalists and showing of a propaganda film largely culled from Fox News.

In a column for the Daily Beast, the former Republican consultant turned anti-Trump author and organizer Rick Wilson called the briefing “a manic, gibbering, squint-eyed ragefest by America’s Worst President, a petty display by a failed man who long ago passed the limits of his competence and knowledge”.

On Tuesday, the White House scheduled its next briefing for 5pm.

Trump tweets to congress: this is all the notice you're going to get, and I won't seek and don't need your permision

I will wage war without asking and without even advising in advance, he is saying.

Pompeo and other nutcases are fine with all this egregiously illegal and unconstitutional behavior.

And the congressional Republicans?

Trump warns of 'disproportionate' response if Iran strikes US targets

President Trump warned Sunday of a "disproportionate" military response to Iran if it carries out a retaliatory strike against the U.S. 

Trump said "these Media Posts" -- seemingly referring to his tweets -- "will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner.”

“Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!," he added in his tweet. 

Steve M. has been warning for months that the Duce will not leave the White House if he loses in 2020 or when his second term (if he wins one) runs out in 2024.

I took that to be entirely Democratic bullshit propaganda.

But maybe not, eh?

Unsurprisingly, justification for such a refusal has already been provided by Pat Buchanan in several of his columns about how democracy - the republican order of our representative government - is harming the US and authoritarianism might be just the thing.

The authoritarian being Trump, or anyone of his ilk.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

I can't really see that having sex with an intern is an impeachable offense, though it was way worse than merely tacky.

But Trump's entire term has been an uninterrupted string of impeachable offenses, and the Republicans will give him a pass on all of them.

That is how far their republicanism and devotion to the constitution and the historic American republic are all fake news.

Pat Buchanan continues his long, slow slide to almost fascism

Although not quite.

Anyway, not yet.

If you think that what, about supranational institutions like the EU, the UN, or even NATO, bothers the new nationalists of Europe and America in part is their democracy deficit you are a fool.

And if you think they are even in part moved by concern for the political position of the world's eurowhites, or the rayonnement of their civilization, the much touted and much damned Western Civilization, you are again a fool.

Their increasingly evident love for authoritarian nationalism wherever it is to be found, while strengthening racism and racist policies within infected states, undermines both.

Let Them Howl, Boris!

PB here continues to celebrate stupid things ever less compatible with the rule of law, with republicanism, with responsible representative government.

The bourgeois revolution in China.

China Is Waging a Disinformation War Against Hong Kong Protesters

Right now, that makes it a kind of latter day Cold War between the dictatorship of the Communist Party on the one side and the protesters on the other.

With the local government of Hong Kong a weak player in the middle

What do they want, these protesters?

What did the protesters of Tiananmen want?

The Revolution of 1848 in China.

The French Revolution - or any one of several - in China.

Think of that, but scaled back to cover only Hong Kong.

For now.

It is a direct challenge to the party's exclusive hold on power.

What a provocation it must be to Chicom nationalist eyes to see in the Times a photo of a gray-haired protester in the street waving the Union Jack, the banner of the former Western, white, racist, European colonial power, or demonstrators rushing around the Hong Kong airport, a youth among them waving the Stars and Stripes, as viewers of CNN saw this morning.

The talking heads of mainstream American cable news, all in varying degrees conscious or unconscious Children of Zinn, are accustomed to demonstrators burning the US flag and interviewees and guests who revile it as a symbol of slavery, genocide, misogyny, homophobia, Christianism - or indeed, simply Christianity - and racism.

They hear and repeat, day after day, that it is the banner of an evil regime of white males that is only a recent outpost of a larger evil white thing of millenia, Western Civilization.

They must have to try hard not to gag, reporting on a courageous democracy movement of nonwhites for whom the Stars and Stripes - and the colonialist Union Jack! Colonialism! What, better a Brit colony than one of the last Red Empire in Beijing? - are symbols of exactly the free society and government they want.

Meanwhile, the Beijing tyrants, relying on the Great Firewall of China to make easier their task, are incensing nationalist sentiment against the demonstrators with dangerous success, portraying them as criminals and terrorists manipulated and funded by foreigners and particularly the CIA.

The clashes have been off and on, and more on than off, since early this year.

The government clearly is in no hurry to send in the tanks and would prefer to wait it out.

And that could work, given enough patience.

Chaos Grips Hong Kong’s Airport as Police Clash with Protesters

And this inane remark by the moron in the White House is both hilarious and disgraceful, exactly as you would expect.

We are so going to get another four years of this orange jackass.

Trump on Hong Kong protests: 'It's a tough situation … but I'm sure it'll work out'

“We’ll what see what happens,” Trump said before boarding Air Force One for an event in Pennsylvania. 

“But I’m sure it’ll work out. I hope it works out for everybody, including China, by the way.”

UK should give British nationality to Hong Kong citizens, Tugendhat says

What, does he think they want to be airlifted to East Anglia?

Trump isn't the only moron.

The Youth of Hong Kong want a Bourgeois Revolution

While in America the ignorant young boobs, the kind who used to (still?) wear Che tee shirts, say they want socialism.

"Democratic socialism" is an oxymoron and the only really existing socialism that ever happened in the modern world was the ghastly horror of Communism.

But anyway.

In Hong Kong, It’s Now a Revolution

Hong Kong separatism apart, it's a rerun of the revolt in Tiananmen Square, decades ago.

No doubt it will share the fate of that revolt, too.

Hong Kong : Pékin lance une mise en garde sans précédent aux manifestants

“Nous devons mettre en garde avec fermeté les groupes violents et ceux qui les manipulent : à trop jouer avec le feu, vous finirez par en payer le prix. 

"Tous les participants auront à répondre de leurs actes en justice. 

"Ce message s’adresse à tous les fauteurs de troubles : ne prenez pas notre modération pour du laxisme, ne sous-estimez pas la détermination du gouvernement central à maintenir la stabilité [de Hong Kong].” 

C’est par ce message sans ambiguïté que Yang Guang, du Bureau des affaires de Macao et de Hong Kong, a mis en garde, ce mardi 6 août, les manifestants hongkongais, rapporte le South China Morning Post.

Pékin peut-il s’engager à ne pas recourir à l’armée pour trouver une issue à la crise actuelle à Hong Kong ? 

À la question, le porte-parole s’est contenté d’une réponse sibylline : 

“Mes réponses ont été préparées, mais je tiens à souligner une fois encore que le gouvernement central est attaché à la prospérité et à la stabilité de Hong Kong. 

"Nous ne laisserons impuni aucun acte qui s’en prendrait au principe ‘Un pays, deux systèmes’.”

What there is and what there isn't

There is democratic capitalism (capitalism under representative government, actually), as urged and celebrated by Barack Obama.

There is despotic, tyrannical socialism as urged and celebrated by Lenin and his followers.

There is not and never has been or will be democratic socialism.

Socialism under representative government.

That is a political myth.

Saving the Republic

Nazis, communists, and others can use means that shred the republic, since that's their aim.

But republicans cannot.

Which is why the Democrats, at some point, cannot employ the vicious means of the Republicans.

At what point?

I don't know.

Maduro and his Cuban pals against democracy

‘It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters

But not surprising.

Actually, the kind of move Bozo would admire, but he's been schooled by the GOP about viewing socialism - not authoritarianism and probably not dictatorship - as a scary plague upon the Earth.

They have to campaign against the Democrats, after all, and try their best to make Medicare for All and tuition free education at public secondary schools scary to voters.

Not an easy assignment.

Didn't work against the New Deal.

Didn't work against the Great Society.

But it's all they've got.

So maybe he'll control himself and not gush admiration for this.

But he might not.

Consider his oft expressed admiration for Kim.

Anti-democratic Democrats and how they will choose their candidate

If we Democrats are doing this with primaries at all - and the Duce refutes the claim that of course that's the best way to do it (he would never have got the nod from a bunch of old white guys in a smoke-filled room) - why not a single national closed primary on a nationwide primary day with instant runoff voting?

Or we could follow the French and if no one had a majority on the first ballot an actual runoff election could be held with the top two vote getters of the first the only candidates.

Either would shorted and cheapen the nomination process a lot.

And, sure, we could still allow early and absentee ballots and make voting day a paid holiday.

[And, yes, why don't we do the actual presidential election that way, eh?]

[And adopt proportional representation in the senate?]

[After all, there is absolutely no good reason to adopt electoral or representational arrangements intentionally in order to enhance the power of white conservative hillbillies vis-à-vis other Americans.]

[So when somebody starts blathering that it is essential to ensure political candidates campaign in flyover country to keep up hillbilly confidence that they count too and deliberately giving them insanely disproportionate power in the government is the right way to do that, shout "Nooooooo" in his face just as loud as you can.]

But, no, the Democrats are doing it this way.

For the next two years, the most interesting and consequential political leader in DC will be Nancy Pelosi

The key feature of republican rule is not that the power of the government is limited vis-à-vis civil society, as libertarians and other partisans of bare-knuckle capitalism and the power of corporations, the rich, and the owners of the means of production would have it.

That is to say, limited vis-à-vis corporations, the rich, and the owners of the means of production.

It is that the power of individual officials of the government is limited.

No one is "the Decider", C student GW notwithstanding.

Dispersal of power among multitudes of officials is the key to preservation of republican liberties.

Tyranny is impossible so long as the republic is intact.

Totalitarianism is impossible so long as the republic is intact.

Monarchy in any form is impossible so long as the republic is intact.

The power to make laws in our republic is dispersed among 535 congresspeople in two separate houses.

The highest authority to interpret the laws and the constitution is dispersed among the several justices of the Supreme Court.

Only the powers to see that the laws are faithfully executed and of ultimate command of the armed forces are put into the hands of one person.

And yet Nancy Pelosi was able to teach Bozo, the president of the United States and so the most powerful individual official in the American republic, what dispersal of power, what checks and balances, means.

A lesson he managed somehow not to learn with the failure of repeal of Obamacare in the senate by one vote.

Asked after Trump's speech today whether now at last she and the Democrats would give the Duce some wall money, Nancy said no.

‘Have I not been clear about the wall?’ Pelosi signals Trump still won’t get what he wants

Democrats say they will not agree to provide funding for the wall, period. 

If they were willing to entertain that, they would’ve done so before the government shutdown in December or in the more than a month since as roughly 800,000 federal workers went without pay. 

“Have I not been clear on the wall?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Friday when one asked if Democrats would continue to object to wall funding in the upcoming negotiations. 

“I’ve been very clear.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer was more direct: “Democrats are against the wall.”

Trump agreed to reopen government “without preconditions,” the New York Democrat noted, as he proudly pointed out that the agreement endorses the position Democrats have held throughout the shutdown. 

“Our unity is our power,” Pelosi said. 

“And that is what maybe the president underestimated.”

About that plebiscite thing

Brexit was not an issue to be decided by a single vote, by a simple majority, in a single mass constituency.

That was an exceptionally stupid thing for a Tory leader to set up.

George Will on the point.

Be warned.

Will's nostalgia for the "Europe of the nations" so beloved of Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump is as absurd and phoney as theirs.

None of the three wants a strong and united Europe emerging as an increasingly independent and significant player on the world stage.

Even though at least the latter two want America to abandon it.

European unification was conceived in fear — Europeans’ fear of themselves, a residue of wars produced by various atavisms, including unhinged nationalism. 

. . . .

The embryo of the EU was a free-trade zone — a single market. 

But as the unification project became more ambitious, it required the derogation of national parliaments and hence of nations’ sovereignties. 

So, in 1988 Margaret Thatcher voiced what became Conservative Euroskeptics’ cri de coeur: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

This is another objection to the EU Will has in common with Pat Buchanan and most of the Euroskeptical right wing politicians in Britain or elsewhere in Europe.

Liberal policies pursued by the EU are out of reach of local and national conservative politicians, and trump local and national authority.

It is as though conservative politicians in Georgia or Wyoming sought to secede from the United States because the federal government is too liberal for them.

Hoping to cauterize the Conservative party’s long-festering wound, in 2016 then–prime minister David Cameron succumbed to the plebiscitary temptation, scheduling the referendum that he thought Remain would win. 

It lost, he resigned, and Theresa May, who had voted Remain, became prime minister. 

She called an election expecting to increase her parliamentary majority and thus her leverage for negotiating terms of divorce from the EU. 

Instead, she lost her majority and was forced into an alliance with a Northern Ireland party.

. . . .

But why, with its primacy at stake, did Parliament punt one of the most momentous decisions in British history to a referendum? 

Precisely because the decision was as momentous as the adoption of a constitutional amendment, or even an entire constitution, there needed to be some sort of consultation of the voters.

Not being a federal republic, there could be no process of ratification involving consultation of or in the federated states, as there would be in American or Australia.

And the rather bizarre and hyper-democratic process for adoption of an entire new constitution, nowadays, seems to be a single plebiscite decided at one stroke by a simple majority voting to accept or reject a single proposed constitution.

Take it or leave it.

But David Cameron should really have thought of something better, requiring perhaps a series of plebiscites and the suffrage of a supermajority in each for so vast and momentous a change as leaving the EU.

Only idiots think constitutions should be amended by a single vote, by simple majority, by the electorate at large.

And, yes, I am aware that several US states absurdly allow their constitutions to be so modified.

The bedrock principle of representative government is that “the people” do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide. 

And once a legislature sloughs off responsibility and resorts to a referendum on the dubious premise that the simple way to find out what people want is to ask them, it is difficult to avoid recurring episodes of plebiscitary democracy.

. . . .

In 2016, a majority of voters over age 43 favored leaving, a majority of those younger favored remaining. 

Since then, mortality has taken many Leavers, and many young people have joined the electorate. 

So, demography, combined with a new understanding of Brexit’s certain costs and myriad uncertainties, could cause 2016’s big bang that began Brexit to end with a 2019 whimper of a referendum saying, “Oh, never mind.”

Has Brexit become unpopular?

This Guardian writer said so before Christmas, but others disagree.

Those calling for a second referendum are calling for another simple majority vote to, this time, once and for all, make the call.

Anne Applebaum says why a second vote is unlikely.

The People’s Vote campaign is calling for the deadlock to be resolved by a new referendum. 

One of its leaders told me recently that the campaign is now hoping to be “the last option standing”: After everything else is voted down, there may be no other choice. 

May continues to push back against a second referendum for a simple reason: Polling is showing increasing numbers of people opposed to Brexit. 

Indeed, when Britons are offered the choice between remaining in the E.U. and any other concrete option — May’s deal, or no deal — a clear majority favors Remain. 

But because that outcome would split the Conservative Party, and because the Conservative Party is May’s whole life, she wants to avoid that at any cost. 

And so here we are.

Brian Kilmeade, defender of the republic?

Fox Host Warns Trump That Future “Liberal” Presidents Could Use Emergency Declarations For Climate Change

“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade told viewers on Thursday that “big picture” the use of an emergency declaration to get President Trump’s border wall funding would be a “disaster” and set a “terrible precedent” for the future. 

“It would just be a disaster in the big picture and just show us being inept at govern around the world,” he said.

“And it would set just a terrible precedent that would continue, look, the next President, if it is a liberal president, will say a state of emergency will be climate change. ‘Look at what’s happening to the polar bears who have no place to walk on ice.’”

Update 1151EST 01102019.

But as of this moment it looks like the Duce will announce his bullshit state of emergency at the border, later today.

Not an off ramp, a constitutional crisis.

Leave it to the biggest asshole to ever get within miles of the White House to do that.

What kind of country are we if he can do this?

If a US president rightly regarded globally as an idiotic and malicious clown can declare a completely, egregiously fake national emergency justified only by what everybody knows are fantastic lies and under cover of that spend money denied him by congress on a project rejected by the congress and get away with it we are already a trash republic, a joke, a phony republic.