I don't actually have much to say, because I've refused to watch any of the 2024 clown show, so what little I know comes from headlines and chatter. Apparently it's a charm offensive and the whole thing seems so...scripted. "Assassination" (no I don't think it's legit) to get a boost of sympathy and a handy excuse for hustling Donald Trump further out of sight behind a wall of "security". A suddenly chastened mood, as if he were thankful to God for his deliverance! Meanwhile the sinister mercenary figure of J. D. Vance is ushered in. "Insurance," Elon Musk actually boasted, presumably clueless about the meaning of the word: Vance is like Spiro Agnew, so foul that he makes Trump look almost friendly in comparison. Superficially, though, Vance is a great American patriot and inspiring success story argle bargle. Who the fuck cares, right? I sort of want to see what Trump was like when he spoke but I'm afraid to find out that they'd somehow managed to get him to sound less garbled, for once, which means they score a win against the charge of senility.

Exactly one thing happened at the GOP Convention that actually got my special notice.

The more comfortable my older sibling Frisk and I feel with remembering childhood days of being political, eagerly following current events and investigative journalism, naïvely admiring the feats of Daniel Ellsberg and the Woodstein boys, the more estranged we feel from contemporary politics. We're still trying to get used to how different everything is today, even though I've been furiously trying to keep pace with it. When we were growing up, Watergate still felt somewhat novel, even though the 1980s papers were full of Reagan scandals. Frisk and I could read about Watergate, feel appalled by such a catastrophic breakdown of public trust, and try to make ourselves believe that such things were a rarity, a thankfully limited excursion from the routines of liberal democracy.

Then, uh, well, things happened, and now we're here in 2024, realizing that we were wrong to think of Watergate as a rarity. Now it's clearly a normality. U.S. politics and political media had hastily slammed the door shut on the Watergate scandal even though justice wasn't even nearly satisfied—Nixon went on to a lengthy post-Watergate period of propagandizing himself, and now he's practically a hero and model for others. Everyone decided that Watergate would never happen again, by which they meant they'd never let reporters threaten political stability again.

Once it was a massive scandal to report that a U.S. politician had a "slush fund", a secret war-chest to fund shady political activities. Now it's safe to assume that everyone has such a fund, and nobody calls it a "slush fund" any more but a "political action committee" or something else bland and corporate. It'll have a respectable brand name and liaisons with the press. Corruption is more fun than honest government, so long as there's a mutual agreement not to examine it closely; that way, journalism about corruption can stick to a lively and profitable and entertaining racket, a steady stream of political gossip that never adds up to anything actionable.

My sibling and I just aren't used to it yet. That sounds pathetic.

~Chara

I'll keep this short. I wouldn't ever dream of NOT voting for the Democratic side of any political contest, but holy fuck do they make it difficult.

If there's any one trait of the Democrats that's most useful to the plans of their enemies, it's that the party keeps stabbing its own in the back. Like any weak and fearful leaders trying to compensate for a lack of credibility, they're constantly demanding loyalty from their subjects. But internally they have no loyalty, and indeed the most powerful Democratic politicians are the traitors. It seems like some ghastly manifestation of their singleminded devotion to compromise in lieu of better principles: they compromise even each other, and take a certain relish in being compromised themselves.

I feel really sorry for Joe Biden now. I didn't think that was possible. Do these disloyal Democrats who are piling slowly onto the "Dump Biden" bandwagon actually know something about President Biden that's not obvious to the public? Maybe. But it seems more like they're merely timid and easily rattled by bad press and polling fads. The Republicans aren't quite wrong when they laugh at the Democrats for believing in nothing. They don't. At least, they don't seem to have much more going for them beyond a dull commitment to "process".

I tend to detest the corporate braggadocio about missions, but...what is the mission of the Democrats? Really? Do they have a single rallying principle? The Democrats don't even commit to defence of democracy itself! The Democrats believe in "Democratic brand integrity", I guess, much like Disney sticking hard to being a parody of itself, soggy with nostalgia. That's roughly how the Democrats carry themselves too, like the fabled 1980s Reaganite bipartisan conviviality had actually been real.

And they have the cheek to demand LOYALTY. Hell's bells.

~Chara

so Orwell named his leftist tract (which was written by the bad guys as a lure) The Book.

...the Bible. That atheistic so-and-so was riffing on the Bible. The thing serves the same social function! Gawd why do I miss these things ~Chara