Better Dead Than Red (Don't Tread On Me, Three.)

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan

...

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.

...

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.

And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.

Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;

Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

~Isaiah 1:13-17 (KJV)

I saw this last night.

Trump, ranting about Communism like it's 1986.

Except it's 2026 and Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989.

More to the point, in what nominally Communist countries remain, there's lots of churches, mosques, temples, etc. The government might not trust religion, but they tolerate it because, among other things, that is the price of participation in our modern world...and it's funny how there's plenty of people in the governments of places like China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam who could well be described as Commies on the streets and Capitalist in the sheets. I mean, if you want to be serious about it, there's Evangelicals in the People's Republic of China who are just as much of fanatics about supporting the Communist Party as Evangelicals in the USA are about supporting Republicans (And for the same reasons.) 

No, that doesn't make much sense, but that's the state of the world these days.

Then you throw in that half the (American) Republican Party is on the payroll of KGB Agent Vladimir Putin, yet slouching rapidly towards something far more like Radical Islam than Soviet Communism.

Think about that one for a second.

It quite makes one want to start rooting for the Chinese at this point. And if we got our ass handed to us by the Iranians, yes, the Chinese would certainly fuck us over in a conventional war. 

Sorry, but maybe we need to lose a few, at this point, so we can figure out where we fucked up and get our priorities straight. Take the "Nationalists" and religious nuts down a peg or six while we're at it. Maybe idiots like Pete Keg-Breath would get a little smarter if some Chinese Evangelical wearing a T-shirt with the five-star flag on it.

Yeah, that's what Republicans, of all people, have come to.

They're basically the bad guys in a Tom Clancy novel at this point.

“The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.”
― Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October

(What the fuck is the difference between Soviet Communism and Christian Nationalism except their choice of excuse for oppression? I'll wait.)

Reagan Wept.

Let's get real, the only country on this Earth that is still Communist in the classic 1950's sense that Trump is trying to evoke here is North Korea and Trump literally said he was in love with Kim Jong Un. 

How the same people who keep pushing Trump to do antigay shit didn't notice that one, I have no idea.

Which is really weird because normally these assholes think about gay stuff more than actual gay people do!

I saw this last night too.

Jesse Watters ranting about distrusting bisexual women, and bringing up the recent Supergirl move for some reason.

I don't know if Supergirl is bisexual, I don't particularly care, I lost interest in that franchise years ago and I'm fine with it if she is.

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

Bisexuality isn't an issue for me. I support LGBT people and their rights.

And I learned that as a conservative kid in the 1980's too.

Like why the fuck wouldn't I??

Jesus ain't an excuse. Love Thy Neighbor. America ain't an excuse "We The People" means ALL of us!

I've served with and worked with and hell, worked for gay people and that was even in my earliest working days.

I've written about that in particular.

As I did about the gay troops that I served with, who were a damn sight better than some of the straight ones, better than me, for sure.

 My partner is bisexual and we manage just fine. Honestly, we joke on occasion that she needs to find herself a wife. Or that she needs a staff, like a cat. My partner isn't great with a lot of "feminine" things, like cleaning, and she works a lot, and that's perfectly fine. I write about our stuff, on occasion.

A hell of a lot of people these days don't fit These Fucking People's claimed patriarchal ideal, or want to, or even have the capability to do so, or to try in a convincing manner.

As if these Gatekeeping ass-clowns would let them?

Not that they themselves really believe even 10% of it, half the MAGA dudes I know don't even work or have any serious interest in supporting a family (or in paying child support if they previously had one) or, indeed, in doing anything other than sitting on the couch smoking weed all day while everyone in the house lives off Mama's SSI check. Or, as my partner has put it concerning a certain member of her family, Make Asshole Get A job.

These guys want all the Power of the Patriarchy but none of the responsibility, none of the work that earns them that right.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

And then they'll try to blame women for that, too.

These fucking people aren't conservative and they don't wanna be.

They want political power, and the "right" to hector others and be mean to them and feel righteous for doing it. That's all any of this crap is. I can't even talk the way that these people talk.

And if I could, I wouldn't want to. Come on.

These fucking people want to bother other people with their allegedly "Conservative" and so-called "Religious" bullshit...but they're all perfectly fine with Trump's granddaughter turning the White House into a goddamned Thirst Trap.

These idiots are no damned different than the Soviet Proles who tolerated the excesses of the sons and daughters of Communist Party elites in Moscow in the 1980's...except perhaps in that they want to do so rather than they have to.

Yes, you heard that right.

And let me tell you why, or at least what the excuse they tell themselves is:

And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama

A Black Man said "Yes We Can" so the whole goddamn Republican thing just had to become "No We Can't."

And that shit has eaten these fucking people's brains.

It was a small meal. Snack Size.

Republicans think all the rest of us should have to live like Soviet peasants but under an allegedly "Christian" and "Right-Wing" regime, because they got their feelings hurt. No. No is a complete sentence. Fuck all that!

And take it from this former Republican, there's always been some Republicans that were like that. Just, well, before about 2008 everybody else told these fucking people to sit down and shut the fuck up, except for (well, just like now) there was always some class of grifters and televangelists and performative "Anti-Communists" that appealed specifically to those idiots. Why? Because if you told them what they wanted to hear they'd throw money at you.

Didn't matter if what you said had one damn thing to do with reality or not.

These fucking people taking over Conservatism and the Republican Party was a pretty long process that, in reality, started with Newt Gingrich in the 1980's and 1990's. But even Newt doesn't really fit in anymore, naturally.

Here's the thing, when the Wall came down, I was just a conservative kid in Northern Michigan. I've written about this before. In early November of 1989 I was just a 15 year old kid who was a couple weeks from getting his driver's license. On that particular day, November 10th, I'd had a counseling appointment in Alpena that I'd gotten out of school a little bit early to go to, we had gone to the grocery store and the mall, and my Mom let me drive home. It was pretty well past dark by the time we'd gotten home.

We'd just got Cable, thus catching us up culturally to things like CNN, MTV, rap music videos, sports channels and the very beginnings of the 24-hour cycle we all take for granted today. After unloading the groceries and warming up the Pizza my Mom had got us from Dominos, we sat down in the living room and turned on the TV, which happened to be set to CNN. We watched, transfixed, as people partied it up and streamed through checkpoints while armed guards stared blankly, slack-jawed, with their AK-47's slung over their shoulders, and the common people, everyday Germans from either side, took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall.

The common person was right there live on international news, doing what all the bombers and jet fighters and guns and tanks in the whole Western world up to that point had not been able to accomplish.

Take that "Great Man" theory and jam it up your ass. 

Hans the Baker and Ingrid the Delivery Girl and millions of other people just like them took down Communism, Ronald Reagan just helped a little.

The world was changing, had changed, nothing would ever be the same again. Whole worlds of possibility had opened up within the span of hours, a whole separate world of evil and repression, gone in less than one day.

Think about that. Think about the fact that people like Donald Trump would rather that had not happened, they still want people worried about Communists under the bed...only now they want to target our fellow Americans, up to and including other Republicans.

I liked it better the other way, when there were whole new worlds of possibility springing into existence in the time it took to go to town or do your homework.

By the time I served, if there were air raid sirens going off it meant there was an Operational Readiness Inspection, and that was really a thing to fear.

And the worst part of these assholes kicking over the table on all that, really, was that it was all over *Checks Notes* screwing for political advantage. 

What's even the damn point of that when half the fucking people allegedly on the other team really aren't on the other team. But there's a bunch of nuts out there who think everybody who isn't a fire-breathing Republican Partisan is some kind of Communist.

But those idiots show up to vote, every goddamn time, and they throw endless money at MAGA grifters and Republican candidates and drive way too much of the attention/outrage economy...and honestly that shit has eaten the brains of a lot of what's left of the Republicans, and driven all too many of the rest into cowering compliance.

Republican Capitalism is basically doing all the shit they said the Communists would do when I was a kid, and nobody turned themselves into wannabe Stalinist proles (with a side of Idiocracy) faster than hardcore Republican voters.

Meanwhile a dozen or so Democrats want to declare "war" on the people that We The People are nominating to stop this bullshit. I'm not a primary voter, I'll vote for the Democrats no matter who they put up because Fuck Republicans, never again.

This cannot last, leadership requires courage. America is already falling apart like the Fyre Festival or Woodstock 99 at the end, like a goddamn high school beer party when the host kid finds out the parents are gonna be back from vacation a couple days early or some shit. Like my friend the Media Warrior says, though, Trump makes a lot of idiots that peaked in High School feel like jocks and prom queens again or some such bullshit.

Except these people are supposed to be adults, citizens, and use their heads for more than a hat rack.

Again, you either believe in freedom or you don't.

To be a free person requires a measure of intelligence and belief in Truth.

Truth is the only thing that gives most people a floor to stand on to push back against Power.

And the Truth is that Communism fell in 1989 and I watched it fall live on CNN.

And before anybody starts screaming "Better Dead Than Red" you better consider which color they've been using for which party on the maps since the 2000 election.

Yeah, that said, it actually fits. Better Dead Than Red. Fuck Trump.

We'll take that back right along with "Don't Tread On Me."

Слава Україна!

From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root....If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly....Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. ~Ronald Reagan

Two

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press.