The Affordable Care Act Is Barack Obama and the Democrats' Xanatos Gambit

And it has so far succeeded beyond any of their wildest dreams.

As we've seen since January 20th, while the House of Representatives -- being a highly polarized and deeply partisan shitshow thanks to the gerrymandering apocalypse back in 2010 -- was able to pass a bill that could actually become law, the far more moderate Senate has tried to pass their own version three times, and each time they've crashed and burned spectacularly. And unlike the Senate from 2008-2011, there hasn't been a single filibuster involved (as a budget maneuver, it can't be filibustered, and this was completely intentional). Despite having a majority in both chambers and one of their own in the White House, Republicans can't do this one thing they've been chomping at the bit and salivating to do for the last 8 years. Because rather than being a symbolic gesture they know will never happen, this time it has actual consequences because they have a stooge willing to sign it.

First, in case you don't speak fluent TVTropes terminology, a Xanatos Gambit is a plan that cannot fail, because it fulfills multiple goals simultaneously. Such that no matter how its opponents try to thwart it, one or more of the plan's goals will get furthered. They simply can't all be foiled. It's named for the character of David Xanatos, an antagonist from the Gargoyles TV show from the mid-1990s, because he had a penchant for these types of plans.

The Affordable Care Act has been implemented so far and become such an integral part of the American healthcare system that no matter what the Republicans do, Obama comes out ahead. Because there are only 3 possible outcomes. In 2 of them, Republicans are summarily fucked. In the third, they'll have to concede that the guy they've been trying to fuck over won in the end:

Scenario 1: Republicans Fail to Repeal or Replace the ACA (Status Quo)

This would, of course, mean that they've broken a promise they've been campaigning on for nearly a decade. The hardcore Republican voting base isn't going to accept this quietly. While they won't vote for a Democrat, they're more likely to just stay home and not vote at all out of disillusionment. As we inch closer to the 2018 midterms, this does not bode well for Republicans in vulnerable seats (which, as the special elections this year have proven, may be far more vulnerable than they think).

Scenario 2: Republicans Succeed in Repealing and/or Replacing the ACA

This is frankly the worst of the 3. Because for any bill to get the 51 votes it would need to pass the Senate, it would have to be cruel enough to appease sociopaths like Lee and Cruz, but restrained enough to get the votes of moderates like Murkowski and Capito. If by some miracle that happened -- and if by an even greater miracle, the House managed to pass it -- it would be a bill that would still kick anywhere from 22 million to 32 million people off their insurance. Many of these people live in Republican strongholds: the rural South, the Rust Belt, and the deep red center (Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, etc.).

These folks are going to see their situation on the ground rapidly deteriorate. As rural hospitals shutter without Medicaid. As areas hit hard by the opioid crisis -- areas that overwhelmingly voted for Trump -- suffer even more devastating loss of life due to overdose. As people who didn't even know that they have insurance because of the ACA suddenly find themselves unable to get even the simplest healthcare.

And they're going to blame the people in charge. Republicans. Because there will be nobody else responsible for their hardships. Again, as we inch closer to the 2018 midterms, this is going to become even more of a prominent issue.

Scenario 3: Republicans Amend and Improve the ACA

The most likely scenario, and frankly the only one that won't mean Republicans getting walked to the electoral guillotine next year. If, after failing like a snake trying to play Dance Dance Revolution, they finally decide that maybe it's time to work with Democrats and actually legislate to fix the ACA's flaws instead of pitching out baby, bathwater, bathtub, bathroom, and entire neighborhood, Obama will come out the furthest. Because he'll have forced their hand to build on his signature accomplishment. And history will forever remember that the Affordable Care Act was the work of the nation's first black President, whom a bunch of old racist white guys tried to blow up and found out they couldn't without taking themselves with it.

And the part that would really burn their biscuits?

Not only does Obama win, we all do.

Because even more than black folk in positions of power, that's what Republicans fear most.

The people winning.

Bernie Sanders Is Not Our Fucking Ally

I apologize in advance for the ridiculous amount of cursing in this post. Those who read this blog know I'm not adverse to dropping an F-bomb here and there, but when it comes to the shenanigans of the Bernie camp, I cope with my rage using good ol' fashioned sailor's talk.

Bernie needs to fucking resign as a Senator and take his shriveled old grandpa ass out to a desert fucking island with no wi-fi where he can't hurt anyone else.

The Democratic Party as we know it today has never been the party of the powerful. Black folk, Latinx, women, the disabled, LGBT folk, etc. have been the backbone of the party since the Dixiecrat revolt over the Civil Rights Movement (with the Dixiecrats becoming today's GOP). It has never been about throwing those people under the bus to win over the white working class.

But that's exactly what Bernie Fucking Sanders wants to turn it into.

Bernie Fucking Sanders has galvanized a "revolution" of freeloading angry white dudes to demonize the Democratic Party for demanding they actually do a fair share of the fucking work. Much like your stoned loser friend from college who couch-surfs through everyone he knows while eating their chips and puking on their carpets after a kegger, and then has the audacity to tell them their video game collection sucks. And just like that friend, they pitch a fit when you inform them they've grossly overstayed their welcome.

I put "revolution" in scarequotes up there because freeloading angry white dudes taking a giant steaming smelly dump on the already oppressed for their own benefit isn't a fucking revolution at fucking all; it's the status fucking quo. And Bernie Fucking Sanders is leading the charge.

That's right, kids. He's not a goddamned progressive and he never fucking has been. He doesn't want to go forward. He wants to go back. The only difference between him and Trump is how far back. Sanders wants to turn back the calendar to roughly 1960. Taxes were fairer, but life sucked enough for everyone but cishet able-bodied white males that it was still comfortable to look down on the rest of us. Trump wants to go back to 1860 so he can make slaves carry him around on a tacky golden sedan chair.

And because he's too goddamned lazy to start his own party and do the fucking work required to build it into something viable, he's decided to start a revolt within the Democratic Party.

This is a guy who literally takes a huge stinky shit on every principle he says he stands for. How many working-class people do you know who own three goddamn motherfucking houses? How is it standing up for the little guy to sponsor a bill that dumps nuclear waste from your rich white state on a dirt-poor Latinx community in Texas? How is he "new blood" in politics when he's been serving in Congress ten years longer than Hillary? Unless it's totally fine when he does it, in which case he's a fucking hypocritical bag of dicks who doesn't deserve your vote or your $27.

To make matters worse? This is a guy who, ten days after the election, says he can totally find common ground with Trump. On -- get this! -- "standing up to corporate America."

Let me repeat that: "standing up to corporate America."

Donald. Fucking. Trump.

Bernie Fucking Sanders is not our fucking ally. He's a goddamned motherfucking shit-eating collaborator. And has also probably been a Russian agent this whole time.

And I'll admit, I voted for him in my state's primary. I regret doing so. Because his antics prove every day that he does not give a single paltry constipated shit about anyone but himself. He's been on nobody's side but his own, gaming the system to get what he can out of it before moving on. He's as bad as Trump, if not worse; Trump at least makes no pretenses that he's a demented, narcissistic, self-serving son of a bitch. Sanders sells his followers his false self before he robs them fucking blind when they're not looking.

Therefore, if he wants to take all the freeloading angry white dudes with their heads so far up their own asses they could lick their own prostates out of the Democratic Party? Fucking let him. Let him lead them all into the river like the Pied Piper of Goddamn Hamelin for all I care, because these motherfuckers were never on our side, either.

If you're a "progressive" solely to improve your own station, to the detriment of other people, go join the fucking GOP, because that's where you belong. Get the fuck out of our way and the fuck out of our party, because we ain't got time for whiny, petulant, selfish children. We have fucking work to do.

The Shorter of Two Bullshit Mountains

You would think, by now, that there would be enough evidence of both Trump's corruption and unpopularity that any Republican worth their House seat would be drafting articles of impeachment the minute Comey's firing was announced. So why haven't they?

Here's the situation so far:

- Trump asked Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn's Russia ties.

- Trump fed classified intel to Russian diplomats.

- Trump's approval rating has dipped below 40%; his disapproval rating is close to 60% (as of this writing).

- Republican-controlled Congress' approval rating is 20% as of this writing. Down 4 entire points from March.

In a sane world, this would be a screaming neon sign for both impeachment and removal, and to push the Russia investigation full speed ahead, balls-to-the-wall, until the truth comes out. But it's not. Republican officials have either been silent, wishy-washy (saying it's "disturbing" but taking no real action; hi there, John McCain!), or outright defending Trump.

Despite his unpolularity. Despite their unpopularity. It makes no goddamned sense.

The working theory is the usual party-over-country mentality and the desperation to actually legislate now that they have control of everything, because for the last eight years they were too preoccupied with obstructing Obama to do anything else. But that doesn't hold up, either.

The first bill to actually pass the House was the American Health Care Act (AHCA). A bill that almost nobody in the country actually wants (17% approval; that's it). A bill that was so shitty Ryan had to pull it from the floor the first time, and only got it past the House by a hair because somebody made it even worse.

Why? Why, when you're a deeply unpopular Congress, would you stand by a deeply unpopular president just to pass a deeply unpopular bill?

Simple: the Republican Party knows that if the investigation is completed and Trump goes down? They go right down with him.

Let's back up a week.

On May 11, 2017 -- right on the heels of James Comey's firing on May 9 -- the FBI executed a search warrant on the Annapolis office of Strategic Campaign Group, a Republican PAC that failed gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli sued back in 2014 for scamming donors. The raid was directly related to Cuccinelli's lawsuit, but further research brings up some very interesting and very familiar names.

Strategic Campaign Group's senior adviser is Dennis Whitfield, who as it turns out also worked for a firm called BKSH & Associates. A firm founded by...Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Remember those guys?

They were gone before Whitfield came on board, but considering Paul Manafort and Roger Stone's history of shady shit going back several decades, and BKSH & Associates' history of even shadier shit going back to roughly 2002, the dots and the line are still there.

So we have a consulting firm raided for scamming donors, whose senior adviser used to work for a consulting firm that specialized in influencing foreign elections and whose founder with Russian ties went on to be Trump's campaign manager.

As the saying goes, where there's smoke there's fire. This? This is a tiny crack in the ground over Centralia, PA.

 And Republicans are scared shitless of the still-smoldering coal fire the full investigation will find. Because another interesting thing about BKSH & Associates? One of its founders, Charlie Black, Jr., was a top aide on the failed presidential campaign of none other than everyone's favorite spineless "maverick," John McCain.

This is why Republicans keep standing by Trump, and why they want the Russia scandal to go away. For the same reason Trump hasn't yet released his tax returns: whatever PR nightmare they're facing now is nothing compared to what will happen when the full truth comes out.

Republicans in 1973 turned on Nixon because at the time, they had more to gain by hanging him out to dry. Republicans in 2017 are protecting Trump because they have more to lose if the investigation keeps going.

They'll survive the stench of Trump. They won't survive Russia. And they know it.

Social Issues Are Economic Issues

If there is one thing I'm getting fucking sick of really fucking fast, it's the Straight White Guy lament in defense of Bernie Sanders that the Democratic Party focused too much on "social issues" instead of "economic issues" in the 2016 campaign. And the reason I'm sick of it is because that argument comes from a place of ridiculous tone-deaf privilege.

Issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/presentation, disability/illness, and everything else that straight white men consider "social" and therefore unimportant are directly tied to the economy in a number of ways.

Black and Latinx people incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, more harshly disciplined in school (suspension, expulsion, etc.), and reprimanded for everything from accent to hairstyle all contribute to these populations earning substantially less than white people. It's hard to get a decent job when you were raised by a single mom because your dad pled guilty to something he didn't even do because public defenders are awful and your family's too poor to afford their own lawyer, and nobody will hire your mom for anything other than fast food service because her name is too "ethnic" and she can't afford a hair relaxer treatment every week. This gets even harder when "pled guilty" means "your dad was gunned down in his car by police because he reached for his wallet while black."

Native Americans are also affected by extreme poverty, and not just on reservations. Native descendants face high rates of alcoholism and diabetes, both of which contribute to higher costs of medical care and future disabilities. Native peoples also face the same kind of racism and police brutality that black and Latinx populations do.

Being trans and too terrified to use your preferred bathroom at work means you're more likely to suffer a bladder infection, which means you miss work or get ironically reprimanded for using the bathroom too much on the clock. Trans youth account for nearly half of the homeless youth population, due to being kicked out by parents and guardians. Trans people also face rampant housing and employment discrimination, which is perfectly legal in many states. Trans people also face extremely high rates of sexual assault and murder, particularly trans people of color.

Women not having access to reproductive services are more likely to forego college not just because of pregnancy, but also other medical issues (hormonal birth control treats a wide variety of reproductive disorders like endometriosis and PCOS, which can be physically debilitating). Women unable to access abortion services are more likely to live at or below the poverty line. Women are more likely to quit a job than report sexual assault or harassment, and if they do report it, they're more likely to be fired in retaliation than aided.

It is still legal in 28 states to fire and deny housing to someone for being LGBT, which makes LGBT people a disproportionate share of the homeless population. As a result, a significant number of sex workers are LGBT, and it's not uncommon for LGBT people who aren't sex workers to be suspected of such and harassed by police. Even legally married gay and lesbian couples can have a hard time finding things like joint health insurance. LGBT people with HIV and AIDS also face extremely high costs of healthcare and job discrimination. And LGBT youth face much higher rates of suicide, assault, and murder.

This is why we get so fucking angry when straight white men dismiss our issues as "social" rather than economic. They are economic. They just affect our lives financially instead of theirs. It's us who need to shoulder the higher costs of rent, medical care, incarceration, fines, and everything else because we live in a society that hates the fact we exist.

Social issues and economic issues are forever intertwined. If you think they aren't, it's only because you've never really faced them.

What Star Trek Can Teach Us About the Danger of Ideological Purity

It's not every decade that I get to see firsthand what is meant by a work of fiction being "ahead of its time." Star Trek is certainly no stranger to this; the original series boasts the first interracial kiss on US television, at a time when people were burning down radio stations for playing Janis Ian's "Society's Child." It also featured a Russian character played by an actor of Soviet descent at the height of the Cold War.

But 24 years ago, the third series of the franchise premiered: Deep Space Nine. And over the course of the show, the story would take twists and turns that, re-watching it today in the current political climate, seem oddly...prescient.

I'm not saying Obama was the real-world Benjamin Sisko. But where we are as a nation is right around the end of the show's fifth season. The Cardassians have taken the station. The Dominion is on the move.

While there has been plenty of analysis of the show as a World War II allegory (which it was obviously meant to be), in relation to today's crisis, I think one of the most important points the series makes is that when dealing with existential threats, there is a razor-thin line to walk that will get you through to the other side. Deviate from that line in any way whatsoever? And you'll either end up as the monster you're fighting, or you'll be torn limb from limb by it.

Two sixth season episodes in particular illustrate this point: "Rocks and Shoals" and "In the Pale Moonlight."

"Rocks and Shoals" is an illustration, bit by bit, of how Major Kira -- who survived the series' equivalent of the Holocaust as a child -- slides into a mindset of rationalization and cooperation in order to survive the Cardassian takeover of the station. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome that one of her people's religious leaders, Vedek Yassim, tries over the course of the episode to clue her into. Eventually, Yassim commits a public suicide in protest of the occupation. And it's only after that, that Kira begins to realize that she's being complicit in not only her own oppression, but that of the entire Alpha Quadrant.

"In the Pale Moonlight" involves Sisko and Garak hatching a plan to get the Romulans into the war as allies against The Dominion. The plan involves manufacturing evidence that The Dominion were planning to violate the non-aggression pact with the Romulans. The short version is that while it doesn't go off exactly as planned, it does happen. Albeit with more unnecessary death and manipulation than Sisko originally wished for.

What these two episodes represent are the two fates on either side of that razor-thin line. Giving up all of your scruples in order to survive, as Kira did, or trying to keep your hands clean, as Sisko tried to do.

We have, at the moment, two extreme factions of progressives. The first faction are The Collaborators. People who think they can compromise with Trump's regime in order to escape unscathed, or at least minimally scathed. If you want examples, look no further than this chart. The only Trump cabinet nominee to receive zero votes from Democrats was Betsy DeVos. All others -- including Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and Rick Perry of all people for Secretary of Energy -- have received at least one vote from Democratic senators, many of whom have shown an astonishing willingness to placate the new administration. In particular Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND), whose No votes combined can be counted on a single set of hands.

And no, not even Bernie Sanders, the self-appointed anti-corruption guru of the Senate, has really stood up to Trump all that much. On the contrary, he even declared Trump would have him as an ally if he "stands up to corporate America" like he promised to do; Sanders then went on to vote Yes (along with the rest of Congress) to confirm Shulkin for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, despite Shulkin's ties to for-profit healthcare and his not even being a veteran, a first for the position.

But it's not just Sanders. It's the entire activist landscape and everyone in it who advocates "working with" the new administration rather than opposing it and "empathizing with" the people who voted for Trump, even when they'd been some of Trump's staunchest opponents during the campaign. Spineless louts like Jim Wright, Kyle Plantz, Michael Lerner, and Les Leopold -- unsurprisingly, all white men -- who gleefully throw progressive causes under the bus if they have something to gain in this new era.

Capitulating to oppression -- and that includes the "wait and see, give him a chance" kind of capitulation -- is like a bystander telling someone about to be raped "hey, you might enjoy it." It's just as callous, cruel, and morally reprehensible as committing the rape themselves. If you don't feel scared in Trump's America, it's because you have no reason to. And rather than going with the flow and being a Collaborator, it means you, of all people, have even more of an obligation to be part of the Resistance.

For Major Kira, it took witnessing Vedek Yassim's public suicide in the middle of The Promenade to knock that into her head. Dare we even ask what it's going to take for Manchin and Heitkamp?

The other faction is something of an ideological carbon filter. The side that seeks to remove "impurities" within its own movement. You'll recognize this group as anyone who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or wrote in Harambe or stayed home or literally did anything other than cast a vote for Clinton. People who are still screaming that Bernie would've won (but won't say how). People who are protesting against Democrats not because of how they're voting but who they're funded by. People whose only mission is "shaking up the establishment" and don't really give a rat's ass what happens as a result.

Some have begun to refer to this faction as the "Alt-Left" (as opposed to the "Alt-Right"), but I think that's giving them entirely too much legitimacy. Being made up largely of the same demographic that finds Trump an attractive candidate, I think it's far more appropriate to simply refer to them as populist anarchists. It's even more telling when, faced with direct comparison to white nationalist propaganda outlet Breitbart, Cenk Uygur is more perturbed at being compared to a publication with fewer unique viewers rather than because Breitbart openly promotes bigotry and Nazi ideas. They're not even two sides of the same coin so much as two parts of the same side of the coin; popular anarchy is the smooth and shiny background, while white nationalism is the stark, in-your-face relief.

This faction, like the Tea Party before it, seeks to essentially kick out everyone that doesn't fall into goose-stepping formation with their ideology of political campaigns run on everyone stuffing $20 in an envelope. For one thing, not everyone has that $20 to throw into an envelope. And even if they did? As someone who has had to work an annual fundraising event for the last 4 years, and for an organization that doesn't require anywhere near the kind of penetration that a political office campaign does, you can't get elected without money. It's just not possible. You have to court large donors if you expect to even win the primary, because coordinating advertising, voter registration drives, and the dissemination of info on vital shit like deadlines takes a fuckton of cash.

Bernie Sanders learned this lesson the hard way. A big part of the reason he didn't get the nomination was because he simply did not run his campaign very well, and his numbers in actual primaries (as opposed to caucuses) reflected that. A huge part of campaigning is registration drives, particularly in primaries because they're closed in most states; you have to be registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the Democratic primary (whereas the national election is completely open; it doesn't matter what party affiliation you have as long as you're registered to vote). Sanders did not do enough to get people who were already registered as Independents in closed primary states to change their party affiliation in order to vote for him in time, or to get new voters who supported him registered as Democrats in time to cast their primary ballots. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the DNC; Sanders could've done this regardless of how much the DNC favored Clinton's campaign (rightfully so, being that she is a Democrat, and the DNC actually gave Sanders some very generous accommodation by letting him run on the Democratic ticket without changing his party; they would've been perfectly within their rights to tell him "LOL NOPE"). But he didn't, because he couldn't. Because his campaign simply did not have the money to pull it off, since he snubbed corporate donors.

Sisko's lesson in "In the Pale Moonlight" is that sometimes, you have to strike a deal with the Devil in order prevent the apocalypse. You have to do things that aren't ideologically -- or even morally -- pure. But you have to do them in order to prevent a total catastrophe from happening. It was a lesson that anyone who voted third party and anyone who still insists they were right to do so is deliberately trying not to learn. Or to put it another way, they're ignoring the 109th Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

Resistance in the Trump Era is a moral imperative. We cannot compromise. We cannot "work with him." And at the same time, we may have to do things we find ideologically repugnant in order to have any chance at all of avoiding disaster. We fucked up not by "disregarding the economic anxiety of the white working class" but by not uniting against a very obvious threat. We fucked up by not recognizing evil when it was staring us in the face, and sacrificing unity and victory simply because doing something ideologically impure was an inconvenience.

We must learn from that mistake, or pay dearly for it. We have a moral imperative to fix this mess. Now is not the time for an ideological war with our party's establishment. Unify and survive. Resist or perish.

As Vedek Yassim's final words commanded, "Evil must be opposed!"