US Politics - 5. page

Dear Sir:

Remember back in 2008 and 2009 how America’s liberals, progressives and socialists were mightily peeved at your sponsorship and conduct of California’s notorious Proposition Eight, the initiative that sought to kill same-sex marriage in the state? Remember how mad we all were at the way you seemed to tear down the First Amendment and dance upon it as you not only sponsored the campaign but explicitly ordered your congregants to set aside their own judgement and conscience and instead follow your directives to ban same-sex marriage?

When the Church defended itself against these highly legitimate grievances, the Brethren suggested that the campaign might well have been the result of a revelation from the Lord, revealed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, as part of the charge to promote the Proclamation on the Family as just short of latter-day scripture. Nevertheless, you guys seemed to have learned your lesson and decided never to meddle so directly in US politics again. A year ago, I would have said, thank you for finding the maturity and decency to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.

Today, I say, forget all that! Unlearn your lessons! Never mind about Proposition Eight and all the people you hurt; the courts sorted that out in the end! Meddle in your nation’s presidential politics! Meddle like it’s 1844!

Remember that plan Joseph Smith was assassinated trying to pull off, how he was going to deadlock the Electoral College by winning one state in a three-way race and use that to get stuff done? This can’t be a totally bad plan. It was your founding prophet’s after all, likely one bestowed by divine revelation. My guess is that if you inquire sincerely of the Lord, after some prayer and fasting, he may let you know that plan is, once again, a “go.”

And I am confident that, if on Sunday morning, an emergency Church Educational System bulletin were to invite Mormons throughout the state of Utah to concur with the Brethren in granting the state’s six electoral college delegates to Evan McMullin, that would probably get done  Donald Trump is, after all, as the Deseret News editorial board, stated “evil” and completely unfit for any position of public trust. He is a clear and present danger to America and to the world at large.
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I’m pretty sure there is a non-canonical prophecy about faithful LDS members emerging from the mountains to save the Constitution at America’s hour of greatest need. You know the one I mean. Maybe there is something to that after all. If there is, there is much that the American people will have to thank you for next week.

Yours truly,

Stuart Parker,

Former Joseph Smith Seminar Fellow of the Mormon Scholars Foundation

Stop saying this current US election cannot be rigged. It’s a trap. Donald Trump is projecting. He is rigging the election.

There is an unacceptable amount of gloating going on among opponents of Trump right now, all centred on the idea that Trump and his cronies have been outfoxed, outwitted and are now flailing around desperately without the vaguest plan for winning the election. The New York Times, the 538, the Guardian and other media keep stating that Trump has “no path to victory” and that his incessant claims that the election has been rigged are evidence that he knows this.

But let us consider for a moment that these claims of election rigging are the centrepiece of a path to victory that has nearly worked in the US on occasions in the past and has been highly effective in electing the kind of leader Trump wishes to be, a kind of Third World strongman, as opposed to a US president bound by conventional checks and balances.

Let us consider the two acknowledged effects of Trump’s constant refrain of election-rigging:

1. It is causing both Republicans and Democrats to close ranks and state, in advance, that they will immediately and unequivocally accept the results of the election.
2. It is assisting Trump in recruiting a growing paramilitary force of “poll watchers” and “election observers,” who will be deployed, with guns, to areas where there is a substantial concentration of non-white voters.

Trump, furthermore, has focused his accusations of voter fraud in ways that specifically target black and Latino voters. His rhetoric has talked about “different communities,” “you know who I mean,” and claimed that the main forms of voter fraud will be black Americans in “inner cities” voting multiple times and casting votes on behalf of the dead and illegal immigrants who are being waved through the US-Mexico border and being immediately permitted to vote in close states.

Even without a specific order to commit violent acts, Trump’s army of second-amendment activist poll watchers will, almost certainly, produce some violent conflicts. If they begin to harass non-white voters even non-violently, their presence might well engender violent reactions and ad hoc responses by armed young men from the communities they are attempting to intimidate. With as many as 15,000 Trump poll-watchers already signed up and with numbers increasing daily as their candidate exhorts them to come out and stop the alleged theft of the election, America can look forward with certainty to, at least, some polling places erupting into violence.

From this foundation, it is clear to see that in time of supplying order mouthsofthesouth.com generic viagra canadian. Some of the other get cialis benefits of Acai are listed below. Safed Musli is one of the key works involves relaxation of the penile mouthsofthesouth.com cheap cialis muscles which thereby smoothens the blood flow inside it. If you want to share ideas on an irregular basis you may be better off setting up an account with a web-based merchant. tadalafil best prices That is probably why Trump is sending his poll-watchers to the least white, most densely populated places. The hope is not for orderly voting but for rioting, for his disorganized paramilitary to bring not order to voting but such disorder as to require the intervention of law enforcement and the consequent shuttering of polling stations.

For those who watch elections run by de facto dictator strongmen like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, we know what happens next: in order to restore public order, voting at that polling place is terminated and the voters are dispersed, in order to maintain public order. In a Zimbabwean election, ZANU-PF thugs go from one polling place to another and precipitate rioting and armed conflict, requiring that polling abruptly end in opposition strongholds before even half the votes there are cast. With no alternative place for opposition supporters to vote, massive vote suppression is achieved in the name of public order.

And what choice would local officials have, except to shut down polling places if people there were being shot, if there were rioting, if shop windows were breaking and businesses burning? The duty of law enforcement would be clear. And it is useful, at this point, to remember that in most places where Trump is mobilizing poll watchers, state law enforcement is being run by Republican governors and legislatures. Sudden and massive suppression of the non-white vote would coincide with the interests of local Republican candidates and, in the case of North Carolina, a Republican governor facing probable defeat without some kind of game-changing last-minute shift.

It is in this light that we should re-evaluate what appear, at present, to be Republican condemnations of Trump’s election-rigging rhetoric. “It is impossible to rig this election,” GOP officials in Ohio and elsewhere are telling us. There appears to be a sudden national consensus that no fraud or rigging can take place and that election night results should be immediately accepted, even if, for instance, law enforcement officers had been forced to shut down voting in Philadelphia, Miami or Columbus, even if tens or hundreds of thousands of black and Latino votes were prevented from being cast, votes that might sway the outcome in states that currently seem just outside Trump’s reach.

What if, after spending a month gloating about how we have manipulated Trump into walking into our trap, we are, in fact, walking into his by promising immediate concession in the event of election night defeat and declaring large-scale rigging impossible? While it may well be that even with substantial election day violence, America’s unwieldy popular front anti-fascist coalition of neoliberals, socialists and everything in between will still triumph, let us not confuse our opposition’s impulsivity with stupidity as we did when the fascists arose at the end of the last Gilded Age. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s thugs were figures of fun and their leaders impulsive fools incapable of achieving the great evil to which they aspired, right up until the moment they won.

Nor is this sort of thing unheard-of in America. The “Solid South” was born in the 1876 election, before the discriminatory, racist poll taxes, grandfather clauses and the like were placed in the election laws of the former Confederacy. In 1876, the irregulars who were never fully demobilized from the Confederate army in 1865, re-emerged as a paramilitary force known as the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has endorsed Trump and is actively campaigning for him this election.

When the Klan emerged onto the national stage, it did so as a force that used the very tactics to which I refer: voter intimidation, violent assaults on black voters, inducement of rioting and social disorder at poling places. They did so in support of the Democratic candidate for president, Samuel Tilden of New York. Through widespread violence against black voters, they flipped the states of North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas from Republican to Democrat, inaugurating the Solid South and ending Reconstruction, an era initially created not through Jim Crow segregationist laws but through extra-legal paramilitary violence.

It may be that Hillary Clinton’s margin is too wide, that too many votes will have been cast before election day, that states not targeted by Trump’s election observer brown shirts will be sufficient to provide Clinton with the 270 electoral votes she requires. But it is foolish to suggest that Trump has no plan for rescuing his campaign. And ultimately, as an admirer of fascists, thugs and political strongmen the world over, a Tildenesque victory is one that is more aesthetically appealing to him in any case. So let us be vigilant. Donald Trump is a madman, not a fool.

In David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Naked Lunch our junkie-hero, William Lee attempts to steal his sleeping co-worker’s tank of pyrethrum insecticide in a desperate attempt to get high. But his coworker awakens and grabs hold of his tank and begins questioning Lee about his motives for stealing it, “Is that why you tried to lift mine,” he asks Bill, having correctly divined his motives. “That’s unkind, Edwin. ‘Lift’ is unkind. No… I’m doing a job for a friend. You see… it’s the centipedes. Yes, the Centipedes are becoming downright arrogant. They’ve started attacking his children!”

In many ways, this scene is a microcosm of the whole film. It is about the collision between the Freudian uncanny and Americanism. No matter how depleted out hero becomes, not matter how bizarre and alien the landscape in which he finds himself, his responses, whether bewildered or heroic, remain those of an American interloper.

As America begins its next quixotic foray into the lands between the Levant and Persia, graveyard of occidental empires, this seems as good a starting point as any for understanding how it is that the president who came into office to pull American soldiers out of the Middle East will leave office as the commander of yet another American war effort in the region.

As William Lee illustrates, Americans are suckers for outrage porn. Theatrical gestures designed to generate outrage capitalize on one of the most important aspects of the American psyche. Republican apostate Kevin Philips, creator of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the associated book The Emerging Republican Majority, argued in his 2006 American Theocracy that one of the most important aspects of imperial culture is the capacity to become offended very easily. Comparing modern US senatorial debates with those of republican Rome, he observed that in order to constantly mobilize expansionist war efforts, an empire’s political consciousness must be extraordinarily sensitive to offense. In the public discourse of the Roman Republic, the state was constantly being threatened and insulted and its citizens abused in foreign lands; the republic’s honour demanded swift and devastating responses to these insults.

But if there were one form of political theatre more capable of mobilizing Rome’s lethal force, it was the public theatre of moral offense. Rome became an empire because of its capacity to continue mobilizing against the rival empire of Carthage for centuries. More than avenging the deaths of Roman soldiers in prior battles or protecting Rome’s expanding Mediterranean trade, what formed the backbone of war propaganda during the Punic Wars, was the sacrifice of babies to the Phoenician god Baal. While these sacrifices were not of Roman children, nor especially numerous, they inspired consul after consul to send legion after legion to war in North Africa.

It is in this context that we must understand the genius behind ISIS’s provocation of the United States. ISIS’s burnings and beheadings represent a tiny proportion of the death toll inflicted by the incipient Caliphate; most deaths are like those caused by its adversaries: deaths associated with seizing, sacking and occupying cities, deaths associated with conflicts between fighting men in planes, tanks and body armour. But is the ritualized, public executions that are galvanizing US opinion to the point where even the Bernie Sanders neo-isolationist presidential bid is becoming equivocal about the war.

Imperialists cannot bear to watch public acts that defy the moral code they understand their hegemony to uphold. Not only is inhumane suffering publicly dramatized and celebrated; so is the flouting of the empire’s power to impose its theory of the good upon the world. Theatrically-staged burnings and beheadings are not merely atrocious in humanitarian terms; they throw down a gauntlet and they shame the empire that will not challenge them. That would be like letting the Centipedes rip a man’s children limb from limb.

To some of my readers, it might seem surprising that Barack Obama would be, in the last full year of his mandate, so susceptible to this kind of challenge. Didn’t he come to power to end American imperialism? Such a view fundamentally misunderstands Obama and his foreign policy agenda. If George W. Bush was America’s Theodosius I, the emperor who ended the empire’s religious pluralism, closed its academies and sent its scholars to work as apologists for a nationalized Christianity, Obama is its Julian the Apostate, a man who understood himself not to be a destroyer of the empire but its restorer. Julian reopened the academies, re-legalized paganism and set Rome back on its pluralistic course. Like Obama, he was a personal beneficiary of the empire at its best, a winner in the pluralistic global order of Kennedy and Johnson, at the noontide not only of imperial power but of its original liberal ideals through the Alliance for Progress and the Second Reconstruction. Men like Kennedy and Johnson were so committed to liberal ideals that not only were they willing to send the army to Saigon; they were willing to send it to Selma.

The Obama presidency’s foreign policy has been about rebuilding the ruins of an empire, in a desperate attempt to prevent it from being overtaken by the harbingers of decline: ignorance, fundamentalism and a disregard for its plebians. Obama and Hilary Clinton will never receive the credit due them for the Honduran coup, when the first new US-backed military junta took power in decades took power in Latin America and ended the expansion of the Chavista bloc. Similarly, Obama’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been policies of rationalization, resource and expectation management. Obama’s policies are those of retrenchment project: federal efforts to limit the power of states to enact the New Jim Crow, universalization of basic material rights like health care, reinforcement of the Munro Doctrine after a decade of neglect and the rebuilding of America’s multilateral military coalition through cooperative efforts with its NATO allies. This is a presidency committed to restoring the empire to the greatness it possessed when it welcomed his father Kenyan father into a vast, pluralistic, liberal global order.

Would LBJ or Kennedy have been able to tolerate the theatrical provocations of ISIL? Not on your life; compared to the great, presidents of muscular liberalism, he is really being quite restrained. But the atrocity porn continues to stream out of Syria and Iraq, making a lie of the Pax Americana.

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Caliph Ibrahim of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant joins a venerable tradition of men who have made themselves and their ideas powerful and relevant on a global scale by mobilizing American outrage against them, a tradition whose hundredth anniversary we will be celebrating on March, 9^th, 2016.

This tradition is one that the US would do well to remember, were such a thing permitted by the deep structures of American historical memory. In 1916, Pancho Villa’s fortunes in the Mexican Revolution were in decline; first battling the regime of German and US-backed conservative usurper Victoriano Huerta, Villa had come to personally command an army of tens of thousands of Mexicans seeking land reform, democracy and an end to neocolonialism. But infighting had broken out amongst the revolutionaries and the moderates, led by Venustiano Carranza, had reduced Villa’s army to less than five hundred men, hiding out in Mexico’s northern borderlands. It seemed that all was lost for the Villistas until Villa hit upon an idea that would, indeed, turn the war around and inspire tens of thousands of new recruits to flock to his banner.

He staged a quixotic attack on the United States of America. Crossing the border into New Mexico, he attacked an armoury of the Thirteenth Cavalry in the small town of Columbus. While the initial attack took place on the pretext of replenishing his badly-depleted supply of arms, Villa’s inspired choice allowed him to reap far more than he, and the hundred men who joined in the attack, could carry off.

America had been humiliated, by a brown-skinned “bandit” and his handful of followers, its storied southwestern cavalry shown up as unprepared, weak and untrained. There was simply no way American could do anything other than make Villa into the titanic figure he remains in the mythology of the Mexican Revolution.

As we saw eight-six years later, America has no choice but to respond to the taunts of a guerrilla leader hiding in the hinterland of an arid, mountainous, impoverished state with population deeply resentful of the US and sympathetic to the guerrillas: send in a of fifteen thousand men to look for that one guy, to storm around the countryside pissing off the locals, searching dwellings and caves and asking for news of the fugitive in some kind of heavily-accented, ungrammatical version of the local language. While these responses never seem to work out that well for the US, even when they end up catching the guy—no thanks to the column of fifteen thousand troops turning over larger rocks—but they do work out awfully well for the movement that makes the successful provocation.

There is a grandeur and heroism that accrues naturally to the out-gunned ragtag band of guerrilla fighters or terrorists—and Villa was certainly called a terrorist—that dares to challenge the hegemony of a world-spanning imperium. This vast, heroic stature only a massive imperial punitive expedition can confer takes on an existence that mere military defeat cannot erase. Simon bar Kokhba, Pancho Villa: this is the league that Caliph Ibrahim seeks to enter. As has been the case since the Muslim armies first broke out of the Arabian Peninsula and tore Egypt away from its Byzantine overlords, one can only be a true Caliph if so recognized by one’s opposite, by the Pope, or better, by the Byzantine Emperor or Holy Roman Emperor.

Since George W. Bush’s shift in the legitimating discourse of American imperialism from anti-communism to militant Christianity through his appropriation of the power to pronounce national benedictions, as God’s vicegerent on earth, “may God continue to bless America,” the possibility of reconstituting an Islamic Caliphate through American aggression has grown. The more effectively the US can be provoked to send the armies of Christendom to fight ISIL, the more this war will resemble a Crusade, and the more it resembles a Crusade, the clearer it will be for all to see that Ibrahim must really be the Caliph. While Islamic jurists, political leaders and scholars will dispute that claim, the imperial response to these acts of public shaming and provocation will make a far more powerful argument to the contrary.

Whereas groups like Boko Haram focus their terror into striking fear into the people of Nigeria, Niger and Chad through atrocities staged for the benefit of local villagers, ISIL has been far more focused on and effective in its efforts at cultural translation. The kidnappings and murders of West African women and children by Boko Haram are not staged as outrage porn for Americans but as direct threats to West Africans. And in this way, they do not become America’s business.

It turns out that the problem with the Centipedes is not simply that they are attacking children. The problem with them is that they are becoming “downright arrogant;” the attacks on children are a necessary but insufficient condition for vengeful imperial ire; atrocities, acts that are beyond the moral pale of the hegemon, must not merely take place; they must be staged, with defiant pride, shaming the empire into its own quixotic, pride-driven retaliation.

Let us consider that one of the reasons Barack Obama chose Joe Biden over clearly superior running mates like Ted Strickland was for his alleged downside. Biden, the theory goes, is a smart guy and a great campaigner, save his propensity for verbal gaffes. Yet he’s such a loveable, train-riding old codger that the president chose him despite this deficit. According to this theory, Obama was going to announce his support for gay marriage on The View and the VP upstaged him, stealing his thunder and ruining his carefully-crafted policy rollout. Certainly, the White House leaked like a sieve, quite accidentally I am sure, to get that message out.

But let us consider the alternative: what better way could Obama reverse on gay marriage than to be dragged, kicking and screaming into supporting it by a silver-haired, loveable old gentleman from the Upper South, entirely by accident? I, for one, cannot think of better cover for such an announcement. With this rollout, Obama was not making social issues front and centre when Americans really wanted to talk about the economy but instead cleaning up Biden’s mess. Obama could not be accused to leading the charge for gay marriage; instead, he was grudgingly moving with the times, like a late-middle-aged church-going swing-state voter whose nieces, nephews or grandkids watch Glee on the big TV when they come to visit.

What if American political scripting is so good, and given the amount of money going through the US political system, it’s hard not to think it is being done by anyone other than the best and the brightest, that all the really important “gaffes” are also part of the script? That’s certainly my view and the one on which this essay is based.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and [Mitt Romney] feels that the relationship is special… [Obama] didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have,” one of Romney’s advisors announced to the British media on July 25^th, explaining that a key contrast between the two presidential candidates was Romney’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. This apparent gaffe was quickly addressed by Romney who concurrently affirmed the “heritage” argument even while he distanced himself from the attack on Obama, “it goes back to our very beginnings – cultural and historical. But I also believe the president understands that. So I don’t agree with whoever that advisor might be…”

Of course, the Republican base learned months ago how to interpret “I believe the birth certificate is valid,” “I think the birth certificate matter is closed” and “I believe the president was born in the United States.” Tepid denials following swift on the heels of clear signals indicating the opposite view is how Republican leaders’ racist and conspiratorial views of the world remain true in the FoxNews echo chamber while simultaneously being off the table in the mainstream media. And this strategy is spelled-out by Sean Hannity and his ilk for those who are too slow on the uptake to understand Romney campaign double-speak. FoxNews talking heads spell-out to viewers that it would damage Republican chances too much to just come out and explain that Obama is a Muslimatheist communist fascist born in Kenya and raised in a fundamentalist madrassa on Java to destroy America; and so Romney must focus on the economy while his allies like Donald Trump continue speaking the truth.

I class the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” remark with the finest work by Trump or Joe Arpaio on the birth certificate file: a clear signal to the Republican base dressed-up as an unintentional gaffe, yet another of the great orchestrated gaffes of the 2012 presidential election. But if that is the case, what is the point of this move?

As the son of a man born in a Mexican polygamous colony created by refugees in the late nineteenth century and as bishop of a religion practiced by only two percent of Americans, Romney must constantly remind the xenophobic white Republican base that his otherness is exceeded by that of Obama. As a member of the leadership class of a religion that is accused of polytheism, necromancy and fraud routinely by evangelical religious leaders, Romney’s hold on the racist right will remain completely dependent on depicting the president as more alien and unchristian than himself. Without Trump to remind the Haley Barbours of the world, who wax eloquent on the nobility of the Klan, that someone even more alien than him sits in the Oval Office today, the forces of intolerance might just sit this election out. And on that basis alone, the Anglo-Saxon gaffe is fully explicable. Romney’s Anglo-Saxon blood is what qualifies him to be president; whereas the African blood that taints the current president renders him intrinsically unqualified.
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But, as intentional gaffes go, there are other, more noteworthy ways in which this one delivers. In both his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Romney has praised the writings of W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen, a Mormon conservative activist from the 1940s until his death in 2006 produced a massive corpus of writing that largely languished in obscurity during his own life. Skousen dreamed of a united front among fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals and his coreligionists against communists, sodomites and all the usual bogeymen of the far right based on a shared set of teachings that he labeled “Judeo-Christianity,” something that had a very specific meaning for him.

The Five Thousand Year Leap, which was declared “divinely inspired,” vigorously promoted and ultimately republished by Glenn Beck in 2009, achieved posthumously for Skousen that which he had sought his entire life: widespread conservative evangelical endorsement of his teachings. As the top-selling book on amazon.com in 2009, Skousen’s idiosyncratic, Mormon-infused meta-history of the American Constitution elicited praise from Texas governor Rick Perry and a host of other unanticipated fans. As one of the most widely-read books among Tea Party types, Leap serves as one of the best means by which Romney can connect with the deeply suspicious Republican base. Not only does it domesticate and naturalize Mormon thinking into the evangelical worldview; it offers a powerful theory of world history that appears to speak directly to the 2012 presidential race and the urgent necessity of choosing Romney over Obama.

Today, nearly half a million copies of Leap line the shelves of America’s hardcore birthers and theocrats. Unfolding a story that Skousen spent six decades repeating in various forms, it begins on Mount Sinai where Moses received two documents from God, the Decalogue and the American Constitution. Upon receiving these documents from the Lord, Moses came down the mountain and was elected President of Israel, with Aaron as his Vice President. For centuries the Israelites lived under the American Constitution until they became involved in sodomy and miscegenation.

Following what was a scriptural principle in Mormon historiography until 1981, the skin of the iniquitous Israelites began to darken; and so the true, white Israelites fled north to the present-day Ukraine to avoid being tainted by this impure blood and the impure teachings that axiomatically accompanied it. After living there for a few centuries, they were led by Odin, a white Israelite prophet to present-day Saxony where they became – you guessed it – the Anglo-Saxon race.

Americans, Skousen explains, must understand that they, like their English progenitors, are the true Chosen People, the elect, pure Israelites of the Bible unsullied by the pagan sacrifice, miscegenation and sodomy practiced by the corrupt Jews who stayed in the Promised Land. Following their invasion of England in the six century, the Anglo-Saxons, who had maintained biblical law by oral tradition, re-established the American Constitution, under which they lived until the Norman Conquest of 1066. King Alfred the Great, according to Skousen, should really be remembered as the most successful president of the English republic.

According to Leap and the rest of the Skousen corpus, what makes America great is its Anglo-Saxon (i.e. white Israelite) blood. While the Constitution is divinely-authored and the basis of all virtuous states that have existed at all times on all possible worlds, it cannot be used to govern people who are not the Lord’s elect, a group that, for Skousen, is racially bounded. That is why high-level miscegenation is one of the greatest dangers an elect people can face. And he blames interracial marriage for the failure of Moses’ republic and David and Solomon’s kingdom.

For anyone who accepts Skousen’s theory of world history, like Perry, who, despite his anti-Mormonism, promoted the book far more vigorously than Romney, there is no greater imperative than to remove a dark-skinned, racially mixed person from high office in latter-day Israel. Indeed, the fate of the entire world hinges on the racial purity of the man in the White House. To do otherwise would be to invite the kind of scourging God visited on his people in the past for miscegenation and tolerance of sodomy. Anglo-Saxons, like any group of Israelites, might disagree about important matters but they must come together to protect the racial purity on which their nation’s elect status depends, even if it means electing a polytheistic necromancer who follows a false prophet for the next four years.