I watched the Vice-Presidential Sweepstakes last night on Fox News which was falsely billed as a “Republican” debate of candidates vying to be the presidential nominee for the party I now bracket with quotation marks since “Republican” is the drag name used by the lawless theocratic authoritarian fascist movement that has hijacked the “GOP” which was only one of the ironies last night since drag performers are an element of the LGBTQ community being demonized by this American version of fascism that does alas adhere to the ur-fascist dictum of the demonization of the other. The second glaring irony was the additional billing that Fox News created for the evening. A giant DEMOCRACY was hovering over the podiums behind which stood eight candidates, six of whom raised their hands to say they would still support Trump if he were the nominee yet also convicted of any of the 91 indictments now hovering over him which include the overthrowing of the election of Biden who was elected with millions more popular votes and a majority of the electoral college needed to be chosen subsequently as president in our constitutional republic that itself is known by that hovering drag name: DEMOCRACY. DeSantis (Lumpy playing Eddie Haskell in Leave It to Beaver) has said that Florida is where “woke” goes to die but the “Republican” party is where irony - along with a constitutional republic and a belief in democracy - has gone to die because a cultish deference to dickhead dicta is one of the characteristics of a fascist mindset enthrall to a needed sociopathic autocratic Dear Leader. Indeed, DeSantis even bragged that he had fired two duly elected Democratic prosecutors and replaced them with those more loyal to him and his authoritarian bigoted thuggishness and got applause at what at times sounded like a fascist rally for overriding by fiat the will of voters. Trump wasn’t present - though he himself hovered like a stalled weather front over it all, each choral round of booing from the audience when anyone dared to diss him like a thunder clap of the dissimilar-but-dauntingly-the-same storm that approaches - yet they all (except for Nikki Haley who might be more popular in such a party if she added a third K to her name) dressed in Trump drag of dark suits and red ties and were trussed-up as well in his untrustworthy worst-ed yarns of vindictiveness and vengeance. Compassion can no longer be tailored to fit this part of our body politic. They were all often speaking over each other but it was Trump’s voice I kept hearing in the cacophony. If Trump is the “chaos muppet,” as the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle called him this morning in a post-debate roundtable, we witnessed last night a diorama of ventriloquist dummies - or, even more precisely, a bunch of chickens in a Fox coop.
The Yale and Harvard educated boyish billionaire Vivek Ravaswamy has reinvented himself as popinjay libertarian populist, a bantam fascist that gives ballast to Trump’s bloated version. He longs to be his VP - or his next valet to be indicted. He took a lot of incoming from Pence and Haley and Christie but I sensed that his numbers would go up with the MAGA crowd because they love a performative fascist like his idol Trump. Policy matters not an iota to them. Politics is even beside the point. Being outrageous stokes their own cultural rage, especially if it has a nihilism that cannot go unnoticed by more establishment types who believe in order and structure and the need for government in a civil society. He was catnip for those who think a guy who brags about grabbing women by their pussies is the cat’s pajamas. I hear Trump was praising him for praising him - the circuitous self-regard that keeps the fascist voters devotedly dizzy with deception and deceit and a surfeit of self.
Haley and Pence came off the best to me - especially the former. If the “GOP” were smart, it would nominate her. But then they both raised their hands to say they’d still support Trump even if he were a convicted felon. And this morning on CBS, Haley also said she, like Ravaswamy, would pardon him. I really wanted to like her - but she too is groveling to grab that VP ring. Plus, she had to bring up “biological” boys in girls locker rooms as a bigoted check next to her name re: transgender demonization.
Tim Scott has always been positioning himself to be VP - and last night he sort of shrunk into the lapdog slot left vacant by Pence once he honored his constitutional duty and certified the electoral vote and, doing so, disobeyed Trump and broke free of his leash after Trump told him to do it. He also had to demonize transgender people.
Hutchinson reminded me of Clara, Aunt Bee’s friend on The Andy Griffith Show (to cite another old cultural reference from television). A bit too prim and proper for this crowd and thus a bit of an outsider - and also relegated to day-player status and not really a member of the cast.
Christie didn’t even play the heavy as well as he had in the past. He’ll stick around through New Hampshire but hasn’t a snowball’s chance in this hellish landscape of demonizations.
Burgum, the rich guy governor from North Dakota, seemed sort of likable and I did respond to his line about having the kind of job as a kid for which he took a shower at the end of the day not at the start of one. That had a tinge of poetry about it in a night that was prosaic in its predictability.
Pence? I thought he had a good night even if I can’t stand how pious he is and thinks wearing his Christianity on his cuff-linked sleeve is a selling point to the nation. I even said out loud when he was citing it all in the abortion segment, “Not everybody is a Christian, you schmuck.” He represents the theocratic part of the fascist coalition but Trump no longer needs him to reach out to that segment because they were so easily coopted by Trump himself - and still are.
And as for the abortion segment - Haley (she of the raised hand and pardons) did have enough cynicism about that issue to try to find some sort of rational ground to stand on within the radical theocratic authoritarianism that is part of the “GOP”'s stance on this issue which would deny women the freedom to have dominion over their own bodies. I guess, that made sense since she was the only member of her sex on the stage.
But nothing changed last night. Oh, the popinjay might pop in the polls because the party’s voters love that nasty stuff that stirs up the more serious among us. But they all continued to throw down the gauntlet about radically outlawing abortion and demonizing transgender people and the denial of climate change when not refusing even to discuss it and defending the sociopathic Trump against the rule of law and ignoring the danger of guns and harping on the southern border and brown-skinned immigrants. Fox News and the two moderators moreover, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, kept contextualizing their scripted questions with negative tropes about President Biden.
And finally there was another irony that fascinated me. There was a lot of railing against China as our biggest enemy, but then there was the cutting away to all the commercials on Fox News about TikTok which has such dangerous connections, we are told, to China. Someone needs to make a TikTok about that.
Kevin, you hit the center of the target 🎯
“Not everybody is a Christian, you schmuck." Write on!