As to the more serious charge of Russians hacking the DNC and Podesta computers, it's still fairly normal spycraft, which our own nation routinely practices, but far exceeds in "election interference" terms by actively overthrowing governments we dislike. To cite Russia's fairly mundane misdeed--where no one died--as a new Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is insanely irresponsible hyperbole, needlessly ramping up hostilities with a fellow nuclear power and giving literally dozens of nations legitimate grounds for declaring war on the US for our far deadlier "election interference." Only our nation's bullying 800-pound-gorilla status--and nothing connected with law or justice--prevents an international just war to punish our vastly greater crimes.
And what Democrats persistently refuse to mention--what makes their Russiagate excuse narrative so vile--is that ultimate upshot of purported Russian hacking was better-informed US voters, who now knew important, relevant information about sleazy, behind-the-scene misdeeds by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Even if the best argument for voting for Clinton was that she was a lesser evil than Trump, voters with restricted choices still gain much by knowing how evil that lesser of two evils is. Among other things, it gives us strong motivation to organize movements against a system where neither party represents our interests.
Democrats'
collusion in the "big lie," by crowding out all talk of Trump's unprecedented
crime against humanity by their self-serving Russiagate excuse narrative,
proves just how little even the better of our two major parties represents us.
Only by a massive, united
Wrapping Climate Activists in the Flag--as Our Patriotic Distress Symbol
As
needed shaming, demanding Trump's long-overdue impeachment for his way-beyond-criminal
policy--and asking Democrats the embarrassing question of why they've
In the final section of a previous article, I've already rebutted one false perception of shakiness in our position: that perverse climate policy, no matter how lethal in its consequences, is simply not an impeachable matter. The consensus of scholarly opinion seems to affirm what US Rep. Justin Amash claimed: that impeachable offenses need not be statutory crimes. What's more, statutory legality aside, the Constitution's "high crimes and misdemeanors" standard (a phrase from British common law familiar to the Framers) is, like British common law itself, deliberately vague about the subject matter of such offenses. As legendary Supreme Court Justice John Marshall explained, "[the] constitution [is] intended to endure for ages to come and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." If anything is a "crisis of human affairs," it's got to be the existential crisis of humanity's climate emergency, so Trump's unconscionable worsening of that crisis preeminently meets the Constitution's standard for impeachment.
But calling for Trump's climate-based impeachment is admittedly an outside-the-box "shock" idea, by that fact alone upsetting the perceptions of normal (or perhaps better for our purposes, normally brainwashed) US citizens. Pretty clearly, my contention that the bipartisan failure to denounce Trump's unprecedented crime is a "big lie" equates with saying that it is a form of mass brainwashing. Counteracting brainwashing inevitably involves giving shock, but it helps those giving shock to maintain as much respectability and high ground as possible, since the power elites benefiting from the brainwashing will surely use their propaganda weapons to denounce its counter-actors. Consequently, my concluding suggestion is that the US climate movement, united to demand Trump's climate-based impeachment, should "wrap ourselves in the flag": but in the US flag flown upside down, as a widely recognized distress symbol.
In my view, climate activists adopting the upside-down flag as our symbol gives precisely the right blend of shock and respectability to people hell-bent on forcing general acknowledgement of our climate emergency. The right wing has gone far toward co-opting our national flag as their symbol; I'd venture to guess that the vast majority of those now flying flags are Trump supporters, since openly displaying the flag implies pride in our nation--factually headed by a president engaged in racist climate genocide (to name simply the worst of his offenses). In such a circumstance, normally displaying the flag is generally a conscious (though perhaps in some cases unwitting) piece of pro-Trump propaganda. Why allow Trump supporters a totally undeserved claim to patriotism, when Trump is committing precisely the "high crimes and misdemeanors" for which our nation's founders provided the remedy of impeachment?
By adopting the upside-down US flag as their symbol, US climate activists would signal that we alone are answering the call of patriotic duty, seeking to impeach the racist, megalomaniac tyrant who has committed our nation to racist climate genocide. No one who accepts the deadly "big lie" that Trump's climate policy is normal--that it is anything but a crime against humanity--is fit to be called a patriot in these deeply troubled times.
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