Democrats say that Donald Trump is incredibly dangerous and cannot be allowed to ever be president again. If they really feel that way, why are they re-nominating Joe Biden? It’s not like he’s the strongest possible candidate.
Burning a Police Station Led to Justice hi hi
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As people of good will celebrate or merely breathe a sigh of relief in response to the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the videotaped torture and murder of George Floyd, it is worth noting that this victory would likely not have occurred had it not been for a spectacular act of property destruction.
Yes, there was that damning video. True, the police chief testified for the prosecution. Those factors caused Chauvin’s rare conviction. But you can’t convict unless you indict first—and there was no move to indict Chauvin before city officials were scared into filing charges.
Floyd was killed May 25, 2020. Three days later, demonstrators burned down the Minneapolis Third Precinct police headquarters, which had been abandoned by fleeing cops. On May 29, the next day after the conflagration, prosecutors announced charges against Chauvin.
In October 2020 a right-wing “bugaloo boi” was charged with setting the building ablaze. But no one knew that right-wing infiltrators had been involved at the time of Chauvin’s arrest.
Throughout the modern history of the American left there has been a raging debate between militant pacifists who believe violence has no place in the struggle for political emancipation and revolutionaries who think powerful institutions and individuals will never relinquish control or allow the radical solutions we need to our worst problems unless they face violence or the credible threat thereof.
(Many on the left do not believe that destruction of property is a form of violence. Ignoring this question in this essay because it would be a distraction from the issue at hand, I use here “violence” as shorthand for any act of political resistance or protest which goes beyond physical passivity, including vandalism, arson, etc.)
From the 1980s until the current Black Lives Matter movement, the pacifists won the argument. Marches against Reagan’s budget cuts and globalization, LGBTQA demonstrations and antiwar protests were coordinated with local authorities to obtain parade permits and internally disciplined by so-called, ironically violent “peace police” who separated violent pro-“black bloc” marchers from the cops. When I raised the temperature of my speech to the Occupy rally in D.C., shouting pacifist organizers dressed me down afterwards for what they believed to have been incitement.
Everyone is for nonviolence as a tactic against oppression. Nonviolence is the dominant tactic to be used against a system we primarily oppose precisely because of its violence at home and abroad. But no one intelligent, no one who studies history, can deny that revolutionary change — the sweeping transfer of power from one class to another — has never resulted from the victory of a purely nonviolent movement. Indeed, the past 40 years of leftist activism in America, a period 99% characterized by nonviolent protest, is a case study in failure. Reagan’s destruction of the post-New Deal social contract was thoroughly internalized by presidents of both parties, including Barack Obama. Outsourcing American jobs and crushing labor unions is standard practice. We fight one war after another, none justified, all of them doomed efforts though we can’t admit it. We can’t even increase the minimum wage.
No one knows whether the conviction of former Officer Chauvin will set a precedent that holds cops accountable for killing unarmed suspects in their custody. Personally, I doubt it. Very few police killings play out on video over nine minutes; defense attorneys can create a bucketload of reasonable doubt among jurors who wonder what they would do in the course of a few confusing seconds. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pointed out before Chauvin was charged: “We are not talking about a split-second decision that was made incorrectly,” Frey said. “There’s somewhere around 300 seconds in those five minutes — every one of which that officer could have turned back, every second of which he could have removed his knee from George Floyd’s neck.” Frey called for Chauvin to be charged, but only after two days of rioting raised fears that the police had lost control of the city.
That’s when city officials decided to throw Chauvin to the wolves in a trial with a surprising feature: the police chief testifying against one of his own officers.
What we do know is that Chauvin’s conviction was a rare victory for a left unaccustomed to winning even when, as in the case of the brutal beating of Rodney King, the facts are not in question. We also know that that victory followed days of riots punctuated by a spectacular act of violence that terrified the powers that be into doing the right thing.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Broke? Declare Yourself a Church and Burn
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After a devastating fire laid waste to much of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, three spectacularly wealthy French industrial families pledged 700 million euros to re-build the iconic structure. It was a generous gesture. But it was disconcerting that purse strings would open so quickly to repair a damaged building while so many actual living breathing human beings in France were suffering that the so-called “yellow vest movement” was rioting in the streets of Paris just a few weeks earlier.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: If I Were Trump, I’d Totally Fire Robert Mueller
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If I were Trump, I’d fire Robert Mueller.
If I were advising Trump, I’d tell him he should fire Mueller.
I know: this directly contradicts conventional wisdom. Which is fine. If I’ve learned anything from this life, it’s that if you don’t have a clue about anything, do exactly the opposite of what the crowd does and you’ll come out ahead in the end.
If you follow the pseudo-liberal opinion writers at corporate media outlets who dictate conventional wisdom in American electoral political commentary, you know that the one thing that they are confident the president wouldn’t dare do is fire the former FBI director/special counsel.
Trump may be enough of a wild card to describe neo-Nazis as very fine people.
Trump might use his Twitter account to provoke a nuclear war with North Korea.
But fire Mueller? That would be crossing a very russet line.
At this writing, Trump says he has no plan to can the investigator. But that official White House line comes straight out of the CEO propaganda playbook: “has no plan” (present tense) isn’t the same thing as “will not decide to” (future tense). Future tense might be never, might be next week, might be tomorrow morning. The one thing we can all be sure of is that very few things would make Trump happier than ridding himself of this particular meddlesome priest.
The self-declared Democratic “Resistance” to Trump is warning that playing the Archibald Cox card would take the president and his administration a bridge too far, past his Rubicon, beyond the Pale, into unchartered territory that would provoke so much rage that it would mark the beginning of the end of his unlikely reign.
“ABSOLUTE RED LINE: the firing of Bob Mueller or crippling the special counsel’s office. If removed or meaningfully tampered with, there must be mass, popular, peaceful support of both. The American people must be seen and heard – they will ultimately be determinative,” tweeted Obama attorney general Eric Holder.
Bullshit.
First let’s remember what happened to Nixon in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre. Cox complained, the media freaked out, Congress was outraged, and for the first time since the Watergate break-in a plurality of Americans told pollsters they favored impeachment. But Nixon survived another year, and no student of history believes the outcome would have been much different had he not fired Cox. Firing Cox turned out to be just one of a series of drip-drip-drip outrages that ultimately led to the president’s resignation.
Besides, there’s a huge difference between that Republican president and this Republican president. In 1973, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. Now it’s the opposite.
Look, I think it’s really cute that Eric Holder (who, if I could get past his failure to resign over Obama’s refusal to close Guantánamo, I might kinda respect) thinks the streets are going to fill up with angry mobs if and when Trump dumps Mueller. But here’s a reality check for his ABSOLUTE RED LINE: there was an actual radical left in 1973, the antiwar movement was a serious force in politics, both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats, yet the only thing affected by getting rid of Archibald Cox was the size of the next morning’s newspaper headlines. If no one protested then, you can be damn sure no one will take a day off work to attend a Mueller-themed Day of Rage.
Never mind Holder’s fantasies. There is no Resistance.
What there is instead is a lot of self-delusion.
For example, progressive writers point to the Trump Administration’s inability to repeal Obamacare as a key victory attributable to this so-called resistance. Yet Republicans “essentially repealed” the ACA by eliminating the individual mandate in their tax bill — just as Trump is gloating. Anyway, wholesale ACA repeal failed due to John McCain…not the Resistance. Some win.
After the Women’s March on January 21st, there was just one more major street protest against in Trump, a spontaneous uprising at airports that helped slow the implementation of Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban in February. But that was pretty much it for the Resistance. And on December 4th, the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban. Another defeat.
No protests then.
Actual resistance requires actual organization. It requires actual people getting off their actual butts into the actual streets every actual day and occasionally throwing actual rocks at actual policemen. Revolution isn’t a dinner party and Resistance doesn’t spring up spontaneously like a weed in the crack between two slabs of sidewalk. We don’t have actual organizations ready, willing, or able to organize actual resistance; without those there can only be sporadic, unfocused political tantrums, like the Occupy and anti-WTO protests and the Women’s March, that fizzle out in the face of police brutality or the passage of time. We haven’t even begun to think about what a real resistance movement would look like, much less build one.
That’s why, if I were advising President Trump, I would tell him he has little to nothing to fear by firing that annoying special counsel.
Nothing would happen.
Post-Mueller, people would simply shrug their shoulders and go to work. Maybe there’d be a march — but only one march. Not two. And it would be 100% guaranteed peaceful — and thus 0% threat to the powers that be.
And the president and his corrupt cronies could go back to the nation’s their business: lining their own pockets.
Tell me: why wouldn’t Trump fire Mueller?
(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) brand-new book is “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” co-written with Harmon Leon. His next book will be “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Cops Gone Wild
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After video showed New Jersey police kicking the head of a man trying to escape a burning car, the police union came up with the most amazing excuses.
Smooth Transition of Power
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We keep hearing that Democratic officials are being polite and deferent to president-elect Donald Trump because they respect America’s tradition of smooth transitions of power. Given what Trump has said during the campaign, and the people he has appointed so far, however, that may not be appropriate.
In a Better World
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According to an analysis by Congress, Apple evaded $13.8 billion in US federal taxes using complicated foreign shelters and loopholes.
FEMA in Waziristan
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As Americans reacted with sympathy to images of homes devastated by Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast of the United States, one wonders why there’s a total lack of interest in the victims of America’s drone strikes against Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia–most of whom have been proven to have been innocent civilians.
Retroactive Courage
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For years Obama was too cowardly to support the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Now that that right is popular with voters, however, he has changed his mind. And now he’s bragging about his courage.
