Election 2024: Image World (4)

Enfranchisement in Action, 2023 Edition

Yes, I will vote this morning. I always vote — doesn’t matter if it’s a national or local election. I’d have no objection if they made voting mandatory as a basic requirement of citizenship. I’d even approve a change to that effect. So I encourage you to vote today also.

Per my previous column, in this particular locale where I’ll vote for the first time we have candidates running unopposed, including Town Supervisor Rich Parete (pronounced Par-ee-tee), a registered Democrat who, after losing the Democratic primary in 2019, simply switched his affiliation to the Republican Party. Clearly a man of principle, he thereby got himself elected — by a 48-vote margin.

Rich Parete

Parete subsequently cost the Town of Marbletown a pretty penny in 2020 when, vindictively, he denied the Marbletown Democratic Committee the right to meet at the Rondout Municipal Center, the multipurpose rented facility that houses the town government’s offices. He also “instituted a Town policy prohibiting ‘political parties from having meetings on town-owned property.'” The NY State Supreme Court found these decisions unconstitutional, arbitrary, and capricious, granting the plaintiff attorney’s fees and costs.

Most recently Parete has provoked a lawsuit by tracking down and engaging in a physical altercation with a teenager he claims to have observed speeding on local roads — doing so while on duty in his official role. (As a side hustle, Parete is “a wrestling coach at Rondout Valley High School.”)

Partly as a result of these shenanigans, the area’s Democratic voters denied Parete the party’s line on this November 2023 ballot. (Though, peculiarly, the election circular from the Ulster County Democratic Committee that I received last week endorses him. Update: Parete did appear on the Democratic Party line on my ballot this morning. Not sure how that came about.)

Because he runs unopposed, I can’t vote against Parete. I can only not vote for him, as I plan to do. And I can, and will, vote against a proposal to extend his term from two years to four.

From coast to coast, Republicans have dedicated themselves not just to Donald Trump and the MAGA cult but to taking over the government, from the very top right down to the smallest of towns, installing themselves there as permanently and inextricably as possible. The recent selection of Christian nationalist Mike Johnson as the Republicans’ Majority House Speaker demonstrates that they have as their explicit agenda the transformation of this country into a Christofascist theocracy, grounded in a return to the wisdom and morals of the 18th century.

Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. We need to obstruct and oppose these insurrectionists — and their self-serving fellow travelers like Parete — in every way we can. Better a symbolic gesture than no gesture at all.

The 2023 Ulster County ‘I Voted’ sticker design winner, by Julia Deyo, a 16-year-old student from Rondout Valley High School. (Ulster County Board of Elections image)

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Republicans and Rashists in Disarray

The week of November 7, 2022 — one year ago today — should go down in history as a moment in time when democracy got saved — in the U.S., where the attempted Christofascist takeover (aided and abetted by Russia) got decisively beaten back by a liberal-left majority of voters, and in Europe, where Ukraine (with the support of NATO, led steadfastly by U.S. President Joe Biden) humiliated Russia, its terminally corrupt and incompetent military, and its decrepit and delusional dictator, Vladimir Putin. Icing on the cake: the corollary downfall of twice-impeached one-term former president Donald J. Trump, even then clearly headed toward inevitable multiple indictments. All of which took place by the light of a blood moon.

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Pix of the Day

Resonant images of the moment (ranked in order of impact):

1. Donald Trump at the defense table in the New York courtroom, giving everyone the stink-eye. Over the next few years we will see a stream of images of Trump at defense tables in various jurisdictions, but the first will always have a special place in our hearts.

2. Multiple-choice question: Which image best defines the Republican clown car at the moment — insurrection enabler Kevin McCarthy in defeat, insurrection enabler and sexual-assault enabler Gym Jordan in defeat, or 2x Trump impeachment defense team member Mike Johnson triumphant (for the nonce)? I’m going for one of Johnson wearing his habitual smirk.

3. Lauren Boebert vaping and groping her date at a Beetlejuice performance in her hometown.

You’ve seen these images enough times already that they’re already fixed in your memory. You can call them up at will. And you’ll see them many more times over the coming months and years. No need to add another repetition to your data storage wetware.

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Mainstream Media in Disarray

For accurate information, clear-sighted and informed analysis, critical thinking, and forward-looking polemics during this fraught passage in the national and international political environments, I do not rely on the mainstream media. To the contrary. With rare exceptions, I find the MSM worse than useless as sources of input regarding events on both fronts, and rarely bother even to check up on their in-house and guest reportage and op-eds.

The pervasive bothsidesism of the major outlets and their talking heads, their failure to call out Republican obstructionism and far-right insurrection as criminal and treasonous, coupled with their endless disparagement of Biden and the Democrats as both feckless and yet somehow responsible for all messes made by the Republicans — all of that has proven itself not part of the solution, and therefore part of the problem.

And their clickbait bandwagon-hopping when the fake polls promoting the fictional “red wave” came along, their abject failure to perceive that narrative as the hastily crafted new shiny object it was, has left them with egg permanently glued to their collective faces. We can track this tendency all the way back to the obsession of the Washington Post and New York Times with Hillary Clinton’s nothingburger emails and NYT columnist Maggie Haberman’s dogged anti-Clinton opining — which, in combination with FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute election interference and Russia’s disinformation campaign, gave us the Trump ascendancy.

For me, the MSM’s demonstrably irresponsible and verifiably wrongheaded coverage of Election 2022 proved the last straw. Now they’re soft-pedaling the right’s headlong rush to totalitarianism: See, for example, “If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda,” by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, in which these New York Times stalwarts precisely describe a hostile takeover of the federal government without once using the word “fascism.” See also the outlier NYT/Siena poll that has Trump beating Biden in key swing states.

These castrati have zero credibility around these parts.

My own preferred sources of information, analysis, and opinion re the political situation here and the 2024 elections: Bill Palmer at The Palmer Report (the other contributors there are less valuable); numerous staffers at, and other contributors to, the Daily Kos, including Kos (Markos Moulitsas), Mark Sumner, Laura Clawson, and Walter Einenkel; various contributors to Raw Story, which just received the 2023 EPPY Award from Editor & Publisher magazine as the “best news / political blog”; and  contributors to the Daily Beast.

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