Is War Necessary? Is the Constitution?
From a Ukrainian film director.
That’s just from the bombing of one city. I’m a pacifist. I mediate conflicts even within my own small personal sphere. I’ve been antiwar for more than 50 years. But I agreed that we had to go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 9-11. I’m a realistic pacifist.
This war on Ukraine was initially harder to assess. We’re wise to distrust the military-corporate complex and have to closely monitor that even during this war. War profiteers are ghouls. But the fight by Ukrainians is a defensive one against one of the most brutal and powerful dictators on the planet. Who clearly wants to control Ukraine and move on to other countries too.
Appeasement won’t work with Putin. At some point in this war, a treaty will have to come to fruition. And yes, I’m very attuned to the necessity to prevent the use of tactical nuclear weapons until that day arrives, and after.
These pictures are just another reminder of the futility and brutality of war. And guys like Putin, wielding so much power and using bombs and assassins against political opponents, should be tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for their war crimes.
China, North Korea, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, Nicaragua and others have dangerous and deadly leaders that require our constant monitoring as well. I hope the day comes when peaceful endeavors overcome the uncivil barbarities of past human history. We can do better. It’s why we cannot rest. And we can’t afford the moral burden of electing autocrats like Trump who would escalate the violence and bloodshed.
It’s my top reason for continuing an active role in US politics, even when I’m sick and tired of all the shitshows.
More reality: the US is an empire. Even though the colonialism is minimal, gas, oil, a number of vital minerals and raw materials are so essential to our economic well being that we’re compelled to protect access to them and regulate extraction, shipping and usage to protect the environment and labor involved.
And when allies can’t or won’t share the necessary costs, we’re largely compelled to do so alone because other options would be disastrous.
Among its other lessons, the covid pandemic demonstrated the supply chain holes that have opened up due to the outsourcing that’s occurred since Nixon went to China and globalization came in vogue. If China started limiting access to the semiconductor chips from a Taiwanese foundry, disastrous scenarios would unfold that could take as much as a decade to overcome. Which is why the Biden administration has made massive investments to get more US foundries operational, which will take at least half a decade to achieve. Good move by our president.
Yes, we subsidize a lot of corporate entities who’ll profit heavily. We need to create rules to recoup some of that investment as stakeholders, instead of all the profit going to shareholders alone.
It’s easy to wish we weren’t an empire and to hope for more equitable economic sharing. But it’s gonna take a lot of work and smarter approaches to get there. Playing ostrich won’t achieve anything at all.
Exploiting labor and the environment as has been done in the past also is a no-go. The footdragging by politicians and corporations on efforts to mitigate man-made climate change will not end well and requires all of us to force reasonable changes. Faster.
That’s a lot to weigh and requires huge responsibilities to be undertaken that many Americans aren’t fully aware of yet. The dollar and human costs will both be far worse if we don’t get on the ball faster than usual.
Today the NY Times buried an important story way down on the front page. About the 35th entry, shortly after sports headlines. Their big headline indicates that Iran has eliminated its Morality Police and loosened hibab rules after all the protests that have wracked that nation. Iranian protesters say these reports are false.
And the buried story? The strange ex-president, in his ongoing effort to steal the 2020 election declared yesterday that the Constitution has to be ignored to achieve this. That’s like HUGE.
»A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote in a post on Saturday on his social network, Truth Social.«
The fraud he refers to is the Hunter Biden laptop story, which so far has yielded zero evidence of anything done wrong by Joe Biden or any other elected official.
Every member of the military and Congress swears to protect and defend the Constitution. The president’s oath is slightly different but amounts to the same, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It’s an obligation of full allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America.
This strange ex-president is now calling for the opposite, claiming something ‘allows’ for the termination of the Constitution’s provisions. But nothing allows that. It would dissolve all our rights as citizens, suspend all law, including the authority for our courts to operate at all. THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE LEAD STORY in the NY Times.
It was right beside the lead on the Washington Post, the first op-ed by Ruth Marcus.
The editorial includes this:
This is insurrectionism by social media. Nothing — and certainly not imaginary “Fraud,” capitalized or not — “allows for the termination” of constitutional guarantees. Trump is laying the groundwork for a coup.
We can dismiss the post as just the latest Trumpian bluster, something he will never be capable of implementing. Yet the mere willingness to entertain and encourage extra-constitutional action is alarming coming from a man who is seeking to return to office.
Which is why Trump’s words must be highlighted — and called out. I’m past expecting Republican leaders to speak out. We know that, for most, their spines have collapsed and their courage reduced to a shrunken kernel.
And this:
The White House was right to rebuke Trump. “Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned,” spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. If anything, the words should have been issued in the name of the president himself.
That almost no Republicans rebuked Trump’s call is a clear marker that ‘constitutional conservatism’ no longer exists and the silence of the members of the Federalist Society means their claim to defend ‘originalism’ is also a lie, a completely empty promise.
Donald Trump is anti-American, anti-law and anti-government. He erased any lingering doubts with that statement. He thinks he, alone, matters and to hell with the rest of us. It’s an insult to every patriot, every member of the military from 1776 through today. And an insult to every citizen.
And once again, some major media outlets have failed to call him out for it in the strongest way.
They apparently don’t think freedom of the press matters either.
Early voters in Georgia think saving our democracy matters, though:
”more than 76,000 of early runoff voters did not vote in the 2022 general election, according to GeorgiaVotes.com, a site that uses public data to analyze voting trends.”
The turnout is breaking records so far and key statistics matter, like the fact that women are outnumbering men in early voting, 56% to 44%. And early voting Democrats are outpacing early Republican voters, 52% to 39%.
Three days from now I fully expect to see Senator Warnock re-elected.
And because the women are standing up in this time of national crisis let’s salute them this Sunday with a marvelous scat session.