I saw a bit of an interview with Dubya the other night and found it fascinating how well he has aged and how sane he sounds and realized in horror that The presence of Trump has rehabilitated every last one of the Rat fucking assholes that brought him to us like one piece at a time to a laboratory in a bunker in Washington to assemble the president of their wildest imagination.

I was feeling this all through the teabagger years, largely for the same reasons as with Trump, but always reminded me that it was, in fact, just optics. Trump or no Trump, Bush was a horrific president, easily one of the worst in our history by pretty much any metric conceivable, and much of that for reasons entirely within his control (the financial crisis was building for years due to a lot more than him, but there was nothing forcing him to start another war in the wrong country, or to stack FEMA with incompetent cronies). The fact that the Goopers are determined to continue sinker lower can’t change that, and fuck George W. for his attempts to now play a Reasonable Elder Statesman role, and anyone in the media who enables it.

…fuck George W. for his attempts to now play a Reasonable Elder Statesman role, and anyone in the media who enables it.

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize Bush as ‘attempting’ in this case to ‘play’ anything, as he just seemed to be the go to, in this case as a ‘counter-balance related program activity paradigm’ which seemed odd to me, and I possibly did not properly articulate that feeling, but yes, fuck the fucking media and anyone else involved in the Normalization of Trump or of the entire Republican fucking party!

This parade of nothing to see here, move along puff pieces serving to normalize a fucking coup d’etat…Which I guess leaves us on the same page…per usual.

Nice to see you, old pal!
…

I read It Can’t Happen Here for the first time last year. It was research of sorts for a satirical novel I was writing which centered around a fascist militia seizing control of a Midwestern city. No luck pitching it – evidently a book about ubiquitous surveillance technology, widespread voter suppression, escalating racial tensions and radical politics just doesn’t have much purchase in 2017.

For my part, I’ve been thinking about propaganda lately. Someone (Noam Chomsky I think, though he may have been quoting someone else) said that people in democratic nations are far more vulnerable to propaganda than people in autocratic nations as the former have no experience with propaganda and can’t recognize it.

I guess what I’m saying is that it was stupid to assume that the representatives of Our Wonderful Newsmedia would see through this shit. Hell, maybe they do. Maybe they just want to get back to normal – their normal, where they get to have bar room bullshit sessions on the teevee and get paid for it and the only people who hate them are filthy bloggers they can ignore. Meanwhile, I get to come home from a day of driving through the backroads colon of Kansas busting my ass on some tragically miskept vineyard that’s never going to produce fruit and relax with more of this “pivot” shit.

…What were we talking about? Oh, right. It Can’t Happen Here. Good book.

I have not read It Can’t Happen Here, but I’ve always been somewhat turned off from it by the fact that, according to everything I’ve read about it, its American-Hitler figure was modeled on Huey Long. Which… no. Just no.

Chris, Imma not sure what you have agin’ the great Huey Long, and that started, I realize that I thankfully know little about the man myself, and think I’ll keep it that way until I have to know more about him.

but I believe you are correct, and would still suggest you give it a passing graze, and if it fails to tickly your fancy 20-30 pages in, then I am certain that you can find better uses of your time.
😉

In a nutshell, the man was a generic Great Depression era economically populist demagogue. There was a good deal of corruption and yes, personalization of power that accrued around him. At the same time, he made Louisiana more democratic, not less (his repeal of the poll tax nearly doubled voter registration), and as far as race relations went, he was no worse and much better than most of his fellow Southern whites (he ensured that his relief efforts went to black as well as white people, leading to howls of outrage from what was left of the KKK which responded with portrayals of Long with his arms around black people promising them free rides, because some things never change). And, of course, he was an actual economic populist.

When you distill fascism down to the three basic elements of dictatorship, racism, and crushing the economic left, Huey Long’s score is not just zero but negative numbers – not only was he not a fascist, he was actively running in the other direction on all three. Throw in the fact that he was doing this in the Deep South, of all places.

The slandering of Huey Long as a fascist has a long history, and it comes with unpleasant overtones of Jonah Goldberg type gobbledegook (as in, not just using “fascism!” as a slur against your enemy, it actually muddies the water by linking fascism to the kind of things that fascists hated and persecuted). It doesn’t mean I’ll never check out the book, but that’s always held me at arm’s length from It Can’t Happen Here.

Thanks-forthebriefsynopsis-andalways-foryourtrenchant-observation-andwhen-iget-the-spacebar-fixed-or—-effthis