As noted in the Whatz Up sidebar of 6 July (probably long since gone by the time this post gets read), I started this sometimes column because I got tired of documenting the signs and symptoms of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s mental health issues in the Unproductive Malignant Narcissism WATCH posts and page. It just got old singing the same song, different verse, if you know what I mean, especially after the diagnosis proved robust, durable, and, most importantly, predictive, and it never seemed to make a difference anywhere for anyone other than me. I fear a similar process will play out here.

As noted in the update to the standard About page, now titled, Updated: Who is Calico Jack? I lamented how disappointing it is to be using psychology to accurately predict the Ol’ Pussy Grabber over the past three+ years and have it do absolutely no good whatsoever. The problem with the predictions that others and myself have made is that no matter how accurate they are and how justified they are, the news media refuses to change. Sure there are some outlets that sometimes get it right. MSNBC and Huffington Post and Vox come readily to mind, but most adhere to a business as usual model of covering the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and the GOP as if they were adhering to our social democratic norms, values, and traditions. They aren’t, and it makes no sense to cover them as if they are.

Newsflash: when a lying liar repeatedly lies to you, you don’t publish their lies without labeling them as lies! The only thing you publish is that the lying liar is lying AGAIN! When a political party is frogmarching the country into fascism, you don’t cover them like they still support democracy — it’s only been eleven years since the GOP completely abandoned any pretext of being anything other than an authoritarian party! But, the media acts like anything the Ol’ Pussy Grabber does is normal and tries real hard to shoehorn this ugly stepsister’s foot into that glass slipper ignoring all the cracks and chips and shrieks of agonizing pain it causes. The media covers the GOP and Smitch’s assaults on our democratic traditions and norms as if they were just another day in the Jim Crow era. It is maddening.

New rule: We need to call this bullshit what it is, fascism. So, here we are documenting yet another sign and symptom of the creep and, our nonchalant almost unnoticed — if the MSM is to be believed — drift into fascism. Maybe someone will pay attention and some of the bells will begin to ring until we hit a full fledged klaxon of panicked warning!

The Census Citizenship Question & the Courts: A Timeline

The latest example of the fascism that the Repubes are bring us is the well documented fiasco of the citizenship question being added to the census questionnaire. We’ll recap the history of this embarrassing bungling bung-up of a “policy” and then match it to fascism.

None Dare Call It Fascism

Please indulge me one more aside: I can’t fucking believe I have to do this! I can’t believe the MSM ain’t doing it. (a) It is easy. It is amazingly easy to go through the details of the citizenship question and match them to the list of signs and symptoms of fascism. And (b) it is the single most important development in our democracy since the Civil War because it threatens to destroy us. Why isn’t that newsworthy? Fuck, they’re right, ignorance is bliss.

Okay, back to our show.

The Initial Threat

Over the past few years the question of whether or not to add a question concerning the citizenship status of the respondent to our national census questionnaire has crept out from under the rock where the racist Repubes had cleverly hidden it into the news where everyone gasps and is aghast and is expresses angst over the sheer effrontery of it all, and the Repubes kick it back under the rug and pretend like they aren’t racist vote-suppressing anti-democratic authoritarians. When in reality, they’re using it to test the water for how tolerant we are of their authoritarian ways. This time, they trotted it out as we approached the for real preparations for the 2020 census.

Blue States and Advocacy Groups Sue for the Block

As preparations for the 2020 census got underway, some racist somewhere convinced the Ol’ Pussy Grabber that adding the question would suppress the Dems voting base so that he would lose the popular vote by only a couple of million votes instead of three million. So, with dreams of a permanent majority and conservative judges doing the can-can dancing in their heads, the Repubes put the question on the census. Then, a coalition of blue states and advocacy groups sued to keep the question off the census.

Because the government has long maintained that they have to have the questionnaire finalized by 30 June so they can have it printed beginning 1 July in order to meet their deadlines for completing the census, the courts have hurried through the case. And, as a result, the courts have ruled against the government disallowing the citizenship question. At each level of court review, the government has appealed ending up at the Supreme Court.

SCOTUS Upholds the Stay

The Supremes issued an opinion or at least a waffle on Thursday 20 June — I think. They said, Meh! You can add the question, but you gotta do better on your reason. Remember, your Muslim ban? And how we had to rule against you until you could tell us a sweet convincing lie for why you did it? Same same. Lie to us, please, so we can enforce your racism without being forced to acknowledge our racist reasons for doing so. Okay, they didn’t actually write that, but that’s what they meant. You could tell. Honest, you could… that is if you were anyone other than the MSM who just can’t seem to accept — as a group — that the government is slowly going off its rails and shouldn’t be treated as anything other than the anti-democratic force that it has become.

The Tweet and the Chaos

Apparently, no one told the career officials in the Commerce Department that they were to be derailing the government, either, so after the ruling and with the deadline rapidly approaching, they collectively shrugged and proceeded to print the questionnaire without the citizenship question. This response was both logical and reasonable, so you knew it could not stand. Sure enough, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber said they would do the citizenship question anywho and the whole thing descended into now familiar if still decidedly uncomfortable confusion and chaos.

Essentially, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is undercutting his own DoJ who went before the courts and faithfully argued the case as outlined by the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur “Elmer Fudd” Ross. The courts ruled against them and in their rulings produced legally binding expectations for how to proceed. Now that the we have decree by tweet, the courts are a little annoyed and have responded within the law to these new developments demanding that the government explain what the fuck they are going to do with the citizenship question since the court told them no or at least not this time, please come back with something other than a bald-faced lie.

The court requested that the administration clarify matters, meaning, explain the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s tweet undoing the last six months of effort by the courts. The DoJ reported back, The Ol’ Pussy Grabber is putting the citizenship question on the questionnaire so we’re gonna make it “legal,” okay? Well, that is what Google Translate returned when I entered the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s DoJ lawyer’s response to be translated from Trump bullshit to English. Apparently, the MSM hasn’t been using Google Translate on it very consistently, but luckily, Ye Olde Blogge does.

Andrew Jackson & John Marshall

Essentially, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is pulling an Andrew Jackson, daring the courts to enforce their order even though John Roberts gave them an out by telling them to give them better cover before they could rule in their favor.

How is any of this fascism? Well, as we’ve reviewed, fascists follow the Milo Minderbinder edict of whatever is good for M and M Enterprises is good for the country, only they replace M and M Enterprises with the Repubes, the 1%, global corporations, the Russians, Smitch, Devin, and the rest, and, of course, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and the whole famn damily of pussy grabbers. Kompromat, cooptation, and corruption have become the bywords and watch words of all three branches of the US government.

Anything that challenges the party is seen as an attack on the country to be resisted by any means necessary, and, just like it did for Malcolm X, it just buys you more trouble.

Marbury v. Madison & the Establishment of Judicial Oversight

The brilliant jurist and the country’s first Chief Supreme Court justice, John Marshall, established the federal judiciary as the arbiter of the Constitutionality of laws and executive actions and the Supreme Court as the chief arbiter in the very political decision Marbury v. Madison.

This role became the norm almost immediately. It lasted a mere thirty-odd years until Jackson challenged Marshall to enforce his court’s finding in Worcester v. Georgia. Lucky for us, the norm returned almost immediately after Jackson’s departure from the White House. Would that we could be so lucky.

The Fascist Threat

Democracy is dependent on everyone doing their appointed jobs, playing nice, and coloring in the lines. If we don’t adhere to our democratic norms, traditions, and ideals — pretty hard when you don’t know that they are, amirite, John Q. Public? Then, we don’t have a democracy no more.

If we allow the Ol’ Pussy Grabber to ignore Congressional and Judicial oversight, then we cease to be a functioning democracy. If we allow the Repubes to succeed in pushing us into all out partisanship, then governance as a democracy is impossible and we follow Spain in 1939 and Chile in the 1970’s into authoritarianism.

It really is as simple as that. So, call your folks in Congress RIGHT NOW and tell them to knock the shit off and begin impeachment proceedings against the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and represent the danger we are all in in grave and drastic terms.

If we are not fearful of losing our democracy, we’ll never adequately protect it until it is too late.