Random Reflections on the Fading Wish Formerly Known As The U.S.A.
President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” has passed the United States Senate, surviving the No votes of the only three Republican senators who are apparently still able to muster a bit of shame. For the GOP, in abject obedience to the MAGA mob and its cult leader, has just produced one of the biggest and most beautiful instantiations of everything that is wrong with America’s legislative branch today, namely an “omnibus bill,” the quaintly abstract euphemism for “a bill crammed with hundreds of pages of congressional pet projects and vote-buying payoffs, which not one voting member has read in even a tenth of its entirety, and which is guaranteed to add trillions of dollars to the national debt of a country already in hock up to its eyeballs — including a trillion dollars owed to the Chinese Communist Party — for whatever is left of the rest of its increasingly miserable life.”
One provision that is not in the Senate’s version of the big, beautiful omnibust, by the grace of God, is a total sellout of private communication, intellectual property, and states’ rights, a pro-Big-Brother provision authored by none other than the world’s most humiliated Trump sycophant, good old Lyin’ Ted Cruz. This was a clause that would ban all U. S. states from regulating AI for ten years — by which time the rape of all private and public expression would be so complete that there would be nothing left on the internet that had not already been absorbed by the frauds and thieves of “big tech” to grow their fake thought algorithms at the expense of the self-ownership and productivity of every individual on Earth, and no one left capable of remembering why anyone ever thought plagiarism and intellectual property theft were once thought to be such a big deal anyway. I suppose those slaves of Ted Cruz’s America circa 2035 could ask their ChatGPT-12 household robot assistants about this, but I doubt they would get very helpful answers.
It is essential at moments like these to recall a maxim about political debate that I learned, and never forgot, from a joke book on “Murphy’s Law” that I read when I was a mere boy: “Whatever they are talking about, they are talking about money.” More specifically, as I may now add in the form of a corollary, based on my decades of experience since first reading that maxim: “Whenever they are talking about money, they are thinking about their own pockets.” This corollary, though perhaps always true to a large extent below the surface of public affairs, has effectively become the Republican Party’s unofficial slogan in the age of Trump. If a Trump-friendly politician is trying to regulate, deregulate, or protect anything, one must assume that he holds personal investments related to that item, and believes that the proposed regulation, deregulation, or protection will benefit his portfolio.
In other ho-hum news, President Trump, through one of his many bootlicking appointees, secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, has decided to “delay” a previously promised shipment of missiles to Ukraine. Trump claims he is doing this because the U. S. military has just realized they have a short supply of these missiles, and therefore he is forced to “put America’s interests first.” Of course he is really doing this because he is desperately trying to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky while buying time to help Vladimir Putin inflict the greatest possible damage in his latest barrage of pre-ceasefire-talks assaults on Ukraine’s civilian population and infrastructure, in order to make the terms of Ukraine’s eventual “negotiated” surrender as hopeless and Putin-accommodating as possible. If that explanation of motives bothers you, I submit that you are one of those — admittedly the majority today — who are more sanguine living with status-quo-saving fantasy than with disconcerting but self-evident truth. I tend the opposite way, sorry.
