RESPONSE TO CHARLIE SYKES

With respect, this is just wrong.

You keep saying "we can't treat any of this as normal" but that seems to be exactly what you are doing.

I don't believe Biden would have pardoned Hunter had Harris been elected. Because THAT would have fit the consequences you are saying will happen.

He simply saw what I thought you saw so clearly: the pro-democracy forces are fighting an asymetrical cold civil war against an emerging fascist attempt to capture the government.

And it looks like they could very well succeed.

Donald Trump's selection of Attorney General, FBI Director, and Secretary of Defense clearly shows he intends to make good on his multiple promises to use the DOJ and - "if necessary" - the military to seek revenge and retribution against his enemies. And to use his pardon power to free the "political prisoners" who attempted, at his instigation, to overthrow a free and fair election and the US Constitution.

The rules that obtained on November 5th are done.

Harris' loss to Trump is a wormhole through which we're being delivered to a dystopia whose final state would remind us of "The Man in the High Castle."

The only judgment a future free America can make on any of our actions is did we stay within the law (as did Biden's pardon) and were we disciplined enough to restrict necessary law-breaking of unjust laws to protect the Constitution and vulnerable targets of Trump's wrath (whether Hunter Biden or Alexander Vindman or undocumented immigrants) to non-violent civil resistance.

The Bible tells us we must be innocent as doves yet wise as serpents.

Or, as the Ben Franklin character in "1776" tells John Adams, "Don't worry, John, the history books will clean it up." <smile>

Bill Bekkenhuis
Bethlehem, PA

See Charlie Syke's blog at the link. I think he's totally wrong on this but he and other Republicans paid a price to warn America about the danger of Donald Trump.

"Remember. A clown with a flamethrower still have a flamethrower."
-Charlie Sykes

https://substack.com/home/post/p-152513566?source=queue

THE BIDEN REVERSAL (POSTSCRIPT)

The more I think on Biden's reversal of his - and his wife's - insistance on not pardoning his son Hunter, the more I tend to believe he would NOT have done so had Harris won the election.

Aside from a father's care for his son and the question as to whether Hunter got the book thrown at him for the crime of being named "Biden," I believe President Biden is letting all Americans of ONE THING through his actions if not his words.

He is letting us know that, informed by President-elect Trump's repeated promise to use the DOJ (and possibly the military) for a campaign of revenge and retribution AS WELL AS his EXTRAORDINARY cabinet picks, that Donald Trump - like fascists before him - means to do EXACTLY WHAT HE SAID he would do.

Response to Reed Howard in Maverick (substack)

Biden’s pardon undermines the integrity he…
Reed Howard
A father’s love is commendable, but the presidency demands impartial justice. This pardon is a grave mistake.

See Biden’s pardon undermines the integrity he promised to restore

In normal times, I would agree with you. But these are not normal times. 

President Biden did not set a precedent. Former presidents have made questionable pardon decisions. 

But it was President Biden's immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who ignored the entire pardon process and pardoned any number of people such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D'Souza, Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn, Charles Kushner (the possible future ambassador to France!), Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Steve Bannon.

And he has promised to pardon those who HE INCITED to storm the capital on January  6th in an attempt to throw out the results of a free and fair election. 

Donald Trump should consider himself fortunate if this is all President Biden does to monkey with the rule of law considering Biden is still president for another month and a half and that the Supreme Court has given him immunity from criminal prosecution so long as he uses the powers of the executive branch to commit the crime and to justify the crime through some broad reference to the official duties of his office. 

But I'm afraid we will have to wait for President Trump to cross that line.

THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS

 William Stringfellow considered this quote from The Revelation to St. John an exemplary verse regarding what Luther called the theology of the cross (as compared to theologies of glory).

For a book using such an abundence of symbolic, mysterious, and coded language, it's a plainspoken statement of Christian realism.

Christians and all of history lie within a Holy Saturday, of sorts, between suffering, crucifixion, and death of God in Christ on Friday's cross, and God's final, complete, and public victory over death at the end of time.

We live in the REALITY of suffering, death, and the temptation to nihilism and yet with the hope guaranteed by God at the end of temp, already anticipated in history by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[Yes. That's a mythological assertion. I know. Deal with it. ]

It is, indeed, the starkest biblical rebuke to the cults of positive thinking, prosperity gospels, and "7 Mountain" theologians of glory rather than humanity's broken toys living in a real world exemplified by the cross of Christ.

"5 The beast was given a mouth speaking arrogant and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months. 6 It opened its mouth to speak blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling, that is, those who dwell in heaven. 7 Also, it was allowed to wage war on the saints and to conquer them.[a] It was given authority over every tribe and people and language and nation, 8 and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slaughtered.[b]"

Revelation 13:5-8

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

AMERICAN ANTI-INTELLECTURALISM

 AMERICAN ANTI-INTELLECTURALISM

(or, in a more positive lights, Pierce's and Willaim James' philosophical pragmatism.)

The importance of rationalism - or the lack thereof - has been a Western cultural battle since the Counter-Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries.

But it's particularly close to the American "can-do" mythology.

I've studied New Thought for the last 30 years (though I didn't know it by that name) and, in the Age of Trump, have come up to speed on the Counter-Enlightenment, the actual HISTORY of New Thought, esotericism, traditionalism, the occult, chaos magick, and quantum mysticism (which sounds redundant, but I was a psych major so it's ALL mysticism to me )

Needless to say, since becoming an intentional Christian in 1972, I've always indulged what I would call the trans-rational (going beyond rationality, NOT overthrowing it)

Enlightenment thinking has emptied the culture of the language of mystery, paradox, poetics, emotion, along with the sense of individual and cultural significance, value, purpose.

THAT. As well as the cultural and economic threat to the working and middle classes, has left us vulnerable to demagogues and magicians of various stripes: including Christian Seven Mountain Dominionism and the Prosperity Gospel.

"In The Campus War (1971), the philosopher John Searle said,

"[T]he two most salient traits of the radical movement are its anti-intellectualism and its hostility to the university as an institution. ... Intellectuals, by definition, are people who take ideas seriously for their own sake. Whether or not a theory is true or false is important to them, independently of any practical applications it may have. [Intellectuals] have, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, an attitude to ideas that is at once playful and pious. But, in the radical movement, the intellectual ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rejected. Knowledge is seen as valuable only as a basis for action, and it is not even very valuable there. Far more important than what one knows is how one feels.[8]"

Anti-intellectualism (Wikipedia)