Barack Obama’s forthcoming memoir, A Promised Land, is coming out next month. The New Yorker is running an excerpt of the book, an account of his administration’s struggle to get the Affordable Care Act through Congress.

As time went on, though, it became hard to ignore some of the more troubling impulses driving the movement. As had been true at Palin rallies, reporters at Tea Party events caught attendees comparing me to animals or Hitler. Signs turned up showing me dressed like an African witch doctor with a bone through my nose. Conspiracy theories abounded: that my health-care bill would set up “death panels” to evaluate whether people deserved treatment, clearing the way for “government-encouraged euthanasia,” or that it would benefit illegal immigrants, in the service of my larger goal of flooding the country with welfare-dependent, reliably Democratic voters. The Tea Party also resurrected an old rumor from the campaign: that I was not only Muslim but had actually been born in Kenya, and was therefore constitutionally barred from serving as President. By September, the question of how much nativism and racism explained the Tea Party’s rise had become a major topic of debate on the cable shows-especially after the former President and lifelong Southerner Jimmy Carter offered up the opinion that the extreme vitriol directed toward me was at least in part spawned by racist views.

At the White House, we made a point of not commenting on any of this — and not just because Axe had reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race. As a matter of principle, I didn’t believe a President should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters — it’s what you signed up for in taking the job — and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism.

More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to desegregation and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social-welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who had just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labelling my opponents racist.

The harbingers of Trumpism throughout this piece are difficult to ignore.

Tags: A Promised Land   Barack Obama   books   healthcare   politics

1. The theme of the Republican National Convention, which started last night from various locations in Hell, was "All glory to Trump." There was no attempt to reach out, even in the smallest way, to people who might live in what we colloquially call "reality." Nope. You either rode the MAGA express straight to the Trump Pole where Trump would bestow upon you all the toys you could ever want, or you were a miserable leftist fuck who only deserved Marxist lumps of coal. Honestly, every single speaker could have gotten up there and talked about how great it was to give enthusiastic blow jobs to Trump and it really wouldn't have made one bit of difference. If Steve Scalise had sauntered up to the mic while wiping cum off the corner of his mouth, I'd've thought, "Yeah, I assumed."

2. There wasn't a word of sympathy for the 200,000 people in this country who have died of COVID-19, as if that never happened. In fact, in the telling of the RNC, some sneaky Chinaman defiled our virginal American shores and infected us with coronavirus, probably on purpose. And while all those evil Democrats ran around saying that it wasn't a threat, one man knew right away what to do, and that man was Donald Trump, and Donald Trump allowed the United States to suckle from his orange breast, his milk filled with the medicine that would heal us. This wasn't spin. We're used to spin, where you take the facts and make them look good in a context of your choosing. No, this was a complete, Soviet-level revision of recent history, where Trump never said it would go away, never said there would only be 1 or 15 or 60,000 deaths, never claimed there were cures and treatments that didn't exist, never accused governors desperately trying to get PPE and ventilators of just trying to make him look bad, never demeaned the scientists working on saving us, never politicized every fucking aspect of the pandemic. It has become an article of faith among the delusional MAGA hordes that Trump saved millions of lives by doing something, never allowing the corollaries, that the only way millions of people would have died is if he did absolutely nothing and prevented anyone else from doing anything and that, if he'd done more, we wouldn't have this ridiculous, ongoing death rate, to enter their empty minds. It's a madness that is so complete, so all-engulfing that they couldn't even pause for a second to acknowledge the piles of dead bodies that their bullshit convention was stepping on.

3. I don't get this strategy that the world is fucked and we need to re-elect Donald Trump to unfuck it. We were treated to videos of protests that turned violent and unemployment porn. We heard from coked-out morons like Donald Trump, Jr., saying shit like "Anarchists have been flooding our streets and Democrat mayors are ordering the police to stand down. Small businesses across America, many of them minority owned, are being torched by mobs." Or the repulsive St. Louis couple who, when not destroying a synagogue's beehives (no, really), pointed guns at peaceful protesters who walked past their home. From their mansion they said, "They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning." Does it need to be said that these rich cuntmites sued to prevent a gay couple from moving into their 'hood? (No, really.) So the country is on fire, protesters are in the streets, coronavirus is rampaging, the economy is in tatters, and Republicans' message is "You see how shitty everything is? We need the guy who made it shitty to fix it." Sure, sure, if a mad bomber has planted bombs all over the city and half of them have gone off, you want the bomber to tell you where the rest of 'em are. But then you fucking lock the bomber away forever. And at least everyone would agree that bombs are real.

4. The racist dog whistles were loud last night from the very beginning. Alien with a wig Charlie Kirk declared that "Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization" and "the defender of Western Civilization," which is such a thinly-veiled code for "white" that it's pretty much Saran Wrap. Rejected Muppet Matt Gaetz said of Democrats, "They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door," a sentence that is racist and makes no sense. Every mention of the border or "take away your guns" was code for "the dark people are coming and you need to be able to shoot them." Then there was Sen. Tim "Useful Idiot" Scott, who got in some anti-Semitic jams by saying that Democrats "want to take more money from your pocket and give it to Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls." Most absurd was former governor and UN ambassador and future failed GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who is Indian-American. A couple of seconds after saying, "In much of the Democratic party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country," she talked about she and her family "faced discrimination and hardship." Yeah, motherfucker, because of the racism.

5. So much of what they speakers celebrated was because of Democrats. Angry meat loaf Sean Parnell talked about how "In a century, we went from ground bound dreamers gazing to the stars, to doers who created the means to reach them," which was, you know, the doing primarily of JFK and LBJ. Teary Castro-hater Maxiom Alvarez talked about how he came to America during Operation Pedro Pan in 1961, when, you know, JFK was president. Ill-informed nurse Amy Ford talked about the expansion of telehealth services, which exist primarily because of the Affordable Care Act and Republicans at the state and federal level blocked it being paid for Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. 

6. Holy shit, Kimberly Guilfoyle must have done bath salts before heading out to yell at an empty auditorium like she had lost out on the part of Evita at the East Hampton Community Theater. I would not have been surprised if she had chewed the face off a kitten.

7. Joe Biden stories are about him forming relationships with ordinary people across the country. Donald Trump stories are about how he occasionally acknowledged that other people exist.

8. The news networks talked repeatedly about how the RNC was like reality TV. They're right because, see, reality TV is all bullshit. It's fake. It's a bunch of manipulated situations where people are prompted to act like their shittiest selves in order to fool stupid people into thinking that this is reality. So...well-done, RNC. You set the bar below ground level and managed to reach it.

DAIRY is a way of life in Wisconsin. Milk is the official state beverage. Locals proudly refer to themselves as “cheeseheads”. Hats in the shape of slices of Swiss are popular. A heart-stopping treat called “fried curds” is a staple bar snack. Local licence-plates read “America’s Dairyland”. All of which perhaps explains why the state authorities took the conduct of Vernon Hershberger so seriously.

Mr Hershberger runs a traditional dairy with 40 cows. State law prohibits selling milk to the public without pasteurising it first. But Mr Hershberger tried to get round this stricture by setting up a “club” which provided raw milk (also known as “moo-shine”) to its members—until state food inspectors raided his farm, destroyed the milk they found and put him on trial.

Members of the ARMi (Alliance for Raw Milk internationale) and other “food freedom” activists flocked to the courthouse, brandishing placards declaring, “My milk My body My choice” and “Land of the free? Tell my cow”, among other slogans. They likened Mr Hershberger to Rosa Parks, a celebrated civil-rights activist, and demanded the freedom to eat (and drink) whatever they like. The jury was sympathetic: on May 25th Mr Hershberger was acquitted of operating without the proper licences, although he was found guilty of moving food the authorities had ordered him to keep as evidence after the raid.

Mr Hershberger is not the only crusader for raw milk, and the Wisconsin Bureau of Food Safety and Inspection not the movement’s only foe. The federal government prohibits moving the stuff across state lines, although it has no power to regulate it within state boundaries. The Department of Agriculture’s website explains that unpasteurised dairy products are more likely to make those who consume them sick than pasteurised ones. It adds that moo-shine’s purported health benefits are unsubstantiated.

Raw-milk activists are not cowed. It is tastier than the processed muck, they say. In some of the 20 states that ban its sale, they operate “herdshares”. A farmer sells stakes (not steaks) in cows that he tends. He then gives raw milk to shareholders, and charges a maintenance fee. If not the land of the free, America is certainly the land of the ingenious lawyer.

The IRS "Scandal" Isn't a Scandal, But It Will Get Annoying:
Look, we know how this went down: Post-Citizens United, the Internal Revenue Service was flooded with applications for tax-exempt status for whatever organization a couple of fucksacks with a tricorner hat wanted to start. "Social welfare" groups, they were called, and they could not be involved with specific political candidates or advocacy (although, you know, c'mon). So the IRS told its low-level drones who had to look at all the fucksack applications to flag ones that looked hinky. So the low-level drones, who are overworked to begin with because Congress won't give the IRS the funding it needs to do its fucking job, used some search terms.

It's 2010 and who are the fucksacks who are everywhere? The "Tea Party" groups. So, sure, fine, let's fuckin' search that. Low-level drone 1 tells low-level drone 2 (and for god's sake, they live in the dull, dull, boring, dull city of Cincinnati, so give 'em a little break), "Hey, just use 'Patriot' as a search term and you'll get your job done faster because if there's one thing we know, it's that a whole bunch of these applicaations are from crazed fucksacks applying for tax-exempt status because they hate them that black guy in office." Low-level drone 2 might have said, "Oh, shit, that'll get us in trouble." But low-level drone 1 had a convincing argument by saying, "You wanna get to the bar sooner?" By the way, chances are that LLD 1 and LLD 2 have been LLDs forever, under at least one GOP president.

Does this narrative need to be completed? Sure, fine: Am id-level IRS drone discovers what's happening and says, "Whoa, whoa, you can't just go after the costumed fucksacks. You gotta look at everyone." At which point at least one LLD contemplated suicide, surely. So MLD went to the higher-ups, like Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations, who said, "Aw, fuck, don't you know that the fucksacks are gonna cause a ruckus over this shit? Change it up." And then the IRS started to look at any group that criticized "how the country was run." Then, because that stunk of Tea Party bullshit (even though it encompassed many groups), the standard  was then changed to "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement." And then, a year ago, that was changed to "organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention."

No group was denied anything because of the extra scrutiny. And as soon as someone higher than a low-level drone found out about what the LLDs were doing, it was addressed and changed. To say that Barack Obama had something to do with that is to say that Rupert Murdoch should be arrested every time Sean Hannity lies on the air.

If you want to call the IRS thing a scandal, well, shit, in this dumbed-down post-Clinton blow job era, the definition of "scandal" is meaningless, so why the fuck not? At least it looks like someone did something knowingly wrong, unlike Benghazi, which is a lonely penis looking for a hole to penetrate.

Hell, the Washington Post went all nutzoid on it, proving its street-cred to keep up the subscription rate among Republican readers: "One line of questioning should focus on how the IRS’s procedures failed to catch this 'shortcut' before its employees began using it. Another should center on how this misguided practice came to light, and on what the IRS planned and plans to do about it." Umm, the IRS caught it shortly after it was used. And did something about it. Isn't that the end of the story?

But, no, really, there should be an investigation. Go the fuck ahead, GOP (and, yeah, Democrats who wanna show that they can be all mightily outraged at a black man, too). It's not like you're gonna do anything better with your time. At this point, you've cried, "Wolf!" so many times that even the wolves are bored.