WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future, powerful alignment with anti-imperialism's historic chorus

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future
TAREQ BACONI
Washington Square Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A soul-stirring philosophical and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine—and all people—will look like in the twenty-first century, in the vein of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Edward Said.

Palestine is a litmus test for our global future. The ongoing genocide is showcasing what it means for Palestinians to be taken to the brink of extermination. The outcome will have repercussions that will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, and will determine whether the struggle for decolonization will succeed or fail, whether our world will move toward collective freedom or fascism.

Drawing from Tareq Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing strategies, What Now distills three strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.

Imagining a free Palestine is a political act of resistance. This is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that continue to animate global politics. It will tilt the world off its axis, away from annihilatory racism toward justice and peace.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa who were forced out of their homes in 1948, Author Tareq has lived in a diaspora much like the Jews have done since Rome evicted them in the first century CE. It is foundational to his identity as he's lived in foreign places like Ammann, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. It might just be that these foreign cities would not feel like home for a young queer man, regardless of his family origins; but an out queer Palestinian can expect to be an outsider.

A lifetime spent Othered has made Author Tareq an activist to his bones. I suspect that would always have been his fate, but his need to usher justice into the conversation and into the world is the driver behind the decolonial jeremiad of this book. It is simply incredible that, as the English were being forced out of India, they were setting up a Zionist settler-colonial state in Palestine as part of the world's attempt to make amends to the Jews for the Holocaust. Why they didn't simply hand over Austria and Bavaria to the Jews, and shoo the Germans out, I have never understood. Those were the cradles of Nazism. The Palestinians did nothing to aid the Holocaust that I've ever heard of...why punish them?

Ahem. Back to the book.

Given Islamic polities were generally more accepting of Jewish populations in their midst, there is no reason to imagine the cohabitation of Jewish and Palestinian Muslim would not have worked fine apart from the rise of the apartheid state post-1948. I think Author Tareq is on to something when he says the return of Palestine to its original people is the opening salvo of a second wave of decolonization, contra the United States' hegemonic control of the world's economies and militaries. The recent war on Iran, and its startling evidence of the loss of that hegemony, makes this the perfect time for readers on all sides of the political argument to read about how the idea of fairness and justice can re-enter the convesation.

I guarantee you, the US reader, will not like everything in this book. It is entirely sure that you won't agree with all his poposals...I didn't either. But all of us in the world need to know what all sides of the questions facing us in the world think, feel, want...and how they came to those ideas...as we decide how to steer the world with our votes, our money, our time and attention.

Starting here is painless. Author Tareq writes, and thinks, at a high level.

DECOLONIZING WEALTH, Second Edition: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, & WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises

WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises
MARJORIE KELLY (foreword by Edgar Villanueva)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful analysis of how the bias towards wealth that is woven into the very fabric of American capitalism is damaging people, the economy, and the planet, and what the foundations of a new economy could be.This bold manifesto exposes seven myths underlying wealth supremacy, the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth by and for the wealthy, and is the hidden force behind economic injustice, the climate crisis, and so many other problems of our day:

The Myth of Maximizing: No amount of wealth is ever enough.

The Myth of Fiduciary Duty: Corporate managers’ most sacred duty is to expand capital.

The Myth of Corporate Governance: Corporate membership must be reserved for capital alone.

The Myth of the Income Statement: Income to capital must always be increased, while income to labor must always be decreased.

The Myth of Materiality: Profit—material gain—alone is real, while social and environmental damages are not.

The Myth of Takings: The first duty of government must be the protection of private property.

The Myth of the Free Market: There should be no limits on the field of action of corporations and capital.

Kelly argues instead for the democratization of ownership: public ownership of vital services, worker-owned businesses, and more. And she sketches the outlines of a non-extractive capitalism that would be subordinate to the public interest. This is an ambitious reimagining of the very foundations of our economy and society.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My essential problem with the thinking about climate change in the world today...and a lot of thinking is taking place, including bolstering "it's inevitable, we're doomed, nothing can fix this"...is that it's successful at only one thing: obscuring the causal role untrammelled, unregulated capitalism has played in causing it in the first place.

Author Kelly rips that band-aid off, and then dismantles capitalism's supporting mythology. It's thorough. it's detailed, and it's endnoted. There are also resources given, so there is no lack of detail to feed your curiosity and bolster your ability to argue the topic with a friend of a differing opinion.

I suspect the prose will be a sticking point for many of y'all. The scholarly will want the tedious, excruciatingly boring details spelled out in Scholarspeak, dismissing this as written for a magazine; the magazine-reading folk will seriously exoerience MEGO on every page.

What I'll offer is this: If a reader in the MEGO population will read one chapter at a time, on one topic of pernicious misdirection or manipulation of your attention away from alternative modes of action, then sit to really *think* about it for a day, looking up stuff you need to, then move forward (or quit) you'll get more out of it. Worst-case reading ie picking up a sample and throwing up your hands because it's talking about stuff you've been told you don't understand, will short-change you. Author Kelly does a really good job of explaining the complicated ideas in an urgent way...communicating urgency, not sounding breathlessly upset, to be clear...and it's literally existential to our society to find new ways and new thoughts to guide us before the climate really gets weird.

We can't stop what's already in progress. We can and should and must act now to save millions, billions, of lives even at the expense of lifestyles.

Please, whenever you think "too hard" and walk away, imagine firing a gun into a crowd: You'll hit someone, no knowing who, and deliberately, negligently change or end their life.

The stakes are that high.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DECOLONIZING WEALTH, Second Edition: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
EDGAR VILLANUEVA (foreword by Bishop William J. Barber II)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.

Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic façade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the "house slaves," and those select few people of color who gain access. All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing.

With great compassion—because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing—Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US midterm elections are 3 November 2026, four days from now. No matter how they turn out...please, please turn out to vote!...there are issues now on blatant display that need to be addressed. Awareness of these issues, the extreme polarization of wealth centrally, is higher than it's been in over a generation.

You won't buy and read this book before the election. It's a topic that, now foregrounded in the awareness of many, needs thinking about as we head into the 2028 election without an incumbent. The old saying, "think before you speak; read before you think" has absolutely always been true. It is urgent now. What kind of world are you hoping to live in, from 2028 to your personal end? You should always vote with that in mind. The next few years are your chance to get ideas that resonate with you, then look for candidates running for office that best align with that world coming into being.

Edgar Villanueva, a charitable foundation consultant on Indigenous affairs and enrolled in the Lumbee tribe, offers a careful consideration of the manifold and manifest failings of a philanthropic solution to economic justice. As a Lumbee man he has seen philanthropies and social programs fail in their efforts to stem the submergence of Indigenous Americans into systemic poverty. Author Villanueva contends, with highly persuasive arguments, that this is all part of a system designed to support colonial, extractive economic activity. It is inherently racist, as it is controlled exclusively by white men, whether by birth or by training.

"If we are to escape the insidious hold racism has on our society, we must be intentional about truth and reconciliation. In Decolonizing Wealth, Edgar {Villanueva} lays a foundation that not only explains the history of wealth and racism but also provides a pathway to healing that we all need," reads Ibram X. Kendi's (National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist blurb for this read. It is a better distillation of Author Villanueva's purpose and intent than anything I could come up with. I know that I needed to see the techniques of wealth and resource extraction put into clear structures so I could perceive them as the problems for economic and social justice I want to live with for my remaining days.

It won't change my vote in 2026 because it changed me in 2022 when I read the book. I did not publish a review before the 2024 election because the fix was already in. Now is the time to buy or check out from the library this kind of reading. We need all hands on deck. We need informed, appalled, engaged citizens to *act* on their dissatisfaction, their offended sense of fairness and morality.

#ReadingIsResistance because and when it leads to actions. Like voting.

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America
KERI LEIGH MERRITT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history.

Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and then a magazine, devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence.

Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: We need another Lillian Smith after the upcoming midterms, regardless of the outcome. We need...have always needed...many Lillian Smiths, people willing to buck their systemic privilege to join the struggle for equity and equality.

She came by it honestly. Raised in a Methodist household that practiced (in theory) "love, acceptance, and understanding," Smith spent time doing missionary work in China where the actions of the white people often resembled their behaviors in her Georgia homeland. Awareness, once begun as a habit of mind, can not turn off or cease until death. Even a serious personal campaign to ignore awareness of injustice..."go along to get along"...is not turning awareness off, merely ignoring it. Lillian Smith remained fully aware of what she had seen, neither ignoring or avoiding her her perception guiding her actions in daily life. She was born into privilege, into a family whose wealth...in spite of their avowed christianity...was based on the exactions of slavery, and she was born with a voice.

Beginning at roughly the same moment as her forties, Lillian Smith began to pour out eloquent, cogent words against segregation and its legal and illegal rules, laws, customs. She and her lifelong partner, Paula Snelling, published a literary magazine called various things over its decade of issues. The women accepted submissions from Black writers, and submissions that quietly dealt with same-sex attraction. It became Lillian's conviction that she needed to write honestly about a miscegenous relationship. Thus was born her three-million-copy seller, Strange Fruit. (She insisted the title was unrelated to Billie Holiday's hit song {my favorite version from 1959 linked} but...)

Lillian Smith kept her romantic partnership with Paula Snelling masked until her death. It only made sense for them to do so in the Jim Crow South, riddled with hatred and violence as it was. They would've been in grave danger of death by mob. It was a worse time than any we've seen in the US until the invention of ICEstapo. It's been sixty years since Lillian Smith died of cancer. I like to think that her lesbian reincarnation was born on her centenary in 1997, and is preaparing to burst into outraged fury like Lillian Smith did, to goad decent but lazy or fearful people into action.

We need her. I think her biographer here has made a very good story out of Lillian Smith's life, filled with citations and with them, evidence of how important and inspiring Lillian Smith was to people across the spectrum of US society.

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, sobering and timely

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy
BRADLEY B. ONISHI
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling and urgently needed exposé on the forces pushing American politics and religion toward a post-constitutional autocracy

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural pulpits, from Catholic monasteries to Beltway think tanks and Project 2025, a convergence is underway. Reactionary Catholics dream of a new Christendom. Protestant pastors invoke divine right over democratic rule. Tech billionaires, led by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, argue that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Their solution? A singular ruler to bring “order” out of what they see as liberal chaos.

With a theologian’s sensibility, a journalist’s touch, and a historian’s eye for how movements evolve and adapt, Dr. Bradley B. Onishi traces the strange alliance between spiritual warfare and Silicon Valley libertarianism. At the center of it all is the desire for an unbound executive—one man, beyond checks, beyond balance, beyond democracy. This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s an organized attempt to abandon the American experiment altogether. A former insider turned academic expert, Onishi brings unmatched depth to this investigation—tracing his own path from evangelical pastor to co-host of Straight White American Jesus, the nation’s leading religion and politics podcast.

As the 2024 election fades into history and a new political order takes shape, American Caesar is not just a warning. It’s a map of how we got here—and a call to act before the Republic as we know it becomes just another chapter in a forgotten history book.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm highly suspicious of the notion that "order" is a Good Thing because who decides this for other people is generally who wants to control those other people's lives in close detail. Those kinds of people are almost always puritans of one or another sort, who believe "They" should not be thinking those thoughts/doing those things (usually, though not always, sexual) because *eeewww*.

Author Onishi adds in the tech industry's "thinkers" to the usual suspects but stops short of using the slurs I myownself hurl at them. Author Onishi is tendentious as hell, shouting and waving his arms at the public, determinedly pointing the fingers of both hands at sometimes strained parallels with a past distant enough to make comparisons very very broad. Human nature does not change from what I can see; the same playbooks are still effective because our psychology is much the same.

"Much the same" does not mean we're always going to succumb to the same ruses. Look at the demonization of immigrants that's largely limited to haters and shouters, who are always in every era a minority; how many more people did what Minneapolis did and showed up to disrupt ICEstapo raids? California's honking warners of imminent danger are not getting hate outside the small bubble of the haters and screamers or there would be giant crowds of people helping ICE instead of huge shortages of recruits.

I'm not trying to put you off the read, it says what I think and explains what I fear; it brings the receipts for its bases of argument; it's going a bit further into the "it's inevitable, prepare to suffer" direction than I suspect is fully supported by developments. I think its tone is alarmist in a time when alarm is not only justified, but required; however presenting the grim facts ought to serve, not presenting deterministic conclusions. Those tend to dishearten the ordinary person, not rile them into the resistance and non-compliance we so urgently need to support and spread as a mindset.

Flawed by an overly emotional tone or not, this book can and should be part of your pre-election reading.

JUNE/PRIDE MONTH/2Q2026 IN REVIEW

amazing advertising artwork promoting the new Dune movie

It was Pride Month here on my blog. I focused on queer reviewing for the whole month (and a little bit of May). I wrote twenty-eight specific-to-Pride reviews. Twelve of those were June 2026 DRCs (out of twenty June 2026 DRCs reviewed this month, and a slightly appalling SEVENTY-FOUR June DRCs I received. Seriously...one less than my LibraryThing home group's annual goal in one month?! Who do I think I am, Biblio-Terminator?).

I'm torn between The Invention of Nature, a biography of my elder sibling in gay-maleness Alexander von Humboldt, and Medea Sang Me A Corrido as my favorite Pride reads. I thoroughly loved Villain but it was less clearly queer than Hench so got a hair less luuuv from me. The Summer Boy was a lovely read, a story I felt was aimed directly at me; yet it wasn't as energetic, as actively pursuing my attention as my two favorite candidates. I read two Steven Rowley stories, liked both, but...not quite enough to warble my fool lungs out over them. It was a good 2026 Pride crop, one to savor in memory, and makes me very glad I didn't pressure myself with a numerical goal so I didn't fret about "making progress" or other such artificial stricture. I'm labeling this tracking project a successful trial. Maybe I'll aim for a numerical goal in 2027. I have a solid eight months to decide, no rush....

In June overall, I wrote thirty-six reviews. I received a slightly appalling SEVENTY-FOUR June DRCs; thus my reviewed-DRCs percentage is a barely tolerable 48.6%. I'm obviously quite greedy, and a fast reader, but THAT is worrying me. It could be years before I review those generously gifted-to-me books! I must work on my s(h)elf control.

Of the sixteen reviews for not-QUILTBAG books in June, one stands out like a lighthouse in the living room as a "please please pleasepleaseplease read this book": The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. It's important. Please read it. Get it from your library if you don't want to spend money on it. Just read it. Please. In those sixteen non-QUILTBAG reviews there were no fictions that I found terribly exciting. The crappiest book I read in June was Puck, and I am not kidding when I tell you the one I'm talking about here gets lost in one's search-results options because the hockey-romance craze is INSANE! Puck-the-character adapted here from Shakespeare turned me off completely.

So I soldier onward to July, and the third quarter of 2026. I expect to see a dramatic decrease in my blog's engagement because Bluesky no longer allows me to access it through my browser...it insists on being the only thing on my screen, being vertically formatted, and thus unreadable for me. I do not expect them to reverse course so I'll be on their site at most a few times a day. I hate it when tech scum make decisions for me. They *never* get it right. ENSHITTIFICATION is real. Like the way the goddamned motherfucking AI decided I wanted to capitalize "enshittification" when I did not.

The second quarter of 2026 saw me write reviews for 105 books in total, sixty-three in their publishing month. That's out of a total of 171 DRCs received for this quarter, or 37% reviewed in the month they were published and 60% of my total reviews written. I was most eager to read The Violence: My Family's Colombian War because Author Adriana is an old friend's daughter-in-law, who happens to be a very talented writer. It was a great success in the marketplace, and with me. The second of my two current possibilities for 2026's six-stars-of-five read is a non-fiction book for the first time ever: A Bird's IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World is by Louis Lefebvre and translated from French by Pablo Strauss. It was a surprise to me how much of Author Lefebvre's earlier novel-writing training held over into his non-ficton prose creation without making it feel as though he was book-horning pretty sentences into places they felt brummagem or incongruous.

Overall, I liked non-fiction a lot more than usual this quarter, with some tippy-top reads as well as a true shocker coming from that genre. The shocker was Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living by Peter Jones; self-help's a genre I view with great skepticism based on what "They" tell you it is, ie a way to fix problems. It's much more interesting to me as a barometer reading of the culture's current obsessions, and the average person's most pressing personal fears. This book managed to be a bit of both. That was a pleasant surprise, plus I liked Author Peter Jones's presentation of self.

Looking ahead to July, I'm not going to kid around: I have forty-two DRCs of July-date reads unreviewed out of forty-three received (as of 1 July, it could go up as the month wears on). I want to get half of those reviewed. I plan to prioritize political books as we head into midterms this quarter. I've got a lot of political-reads noted already from years gine by. I've always held back because so many people I know just flat refuse to put in the work of reading the books. That's no longer something I can factor in to my review-writing queue. The stakes are too high to pander to lowest-common-denominator reading habits.

Can't make y'all read the books, or the reviews, but you'll have to make a conscious choice to skip them.

WE'RE STILL RIGHT, THEY'RE STILL WRONG: or, What Might Have Been

WE'RE STILL RIGHT, THEY'RE STILL WRONG
JAMES CARVILLE
Blue Rider Press
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Every politico and pundit has tried to explain the 2016 presidential race, but James Carville, the multiple best-selling Ragin' Cajun and grand strategist of Bill Clinton's rise to the White House has largely stayed silent. Until now.

He straddled the punch bowl, dropped his pants, and whipped out his member, which, he assured everyone, was very large. Then Donald Trump pissed right into the punch of the Republican Party.

So begins We're Still Right, They're Still Wrong with that image of Donald Trump defiling the celebration that should've been the GOP Establishment's easy march to the White House.
In We're Still Right, They're Still Wrong, Carville updates his #1 New York Times bestseller from 1996, the campaign tract that Bill Clinton once credited for his re-election. Carville skewers the GOP's dumpster fire of a record over the past twenty years, and argues that Trump is the living manifestation of a failed party. From income inequality to race relations, Carville believes that Democratic Party is not only the dominant party of the past, but of America's future, too and he makes the case in his uncensored and earthy style.

Among other things, We're Still Right, They're Still Wrong features a hot take on the Clinton e-mail scandal, a story about Carville's momma schooling a pair of crawfish mongers, a lecture on political panics called The Anatomy of Bullshit, and a recipe for how to grill your (non-existent) Trump Steak.

And wit and sharp tongue aside, Carville turns it all into the most cogent and thoughtful analysis of the 2016 and how the Democrats can and must be victorious.

My Review: From its arresting cover image to its trademark homespun vituperation, this is a classic Carville rant with some fancy typography. You'll like it, in a certain wistful way, if you're a liberal; otherwise don't bother.

And why, a reasonable person might ask, am I reviewing a rally-the-troops book from a failed presidential bid?

In many ways, the Democrats have enjoyed the opposite record of Repblicans—we haven't been abysmally wrong about everything—and yet, we're not enjoying the opposite result. If the Republican Party is cracked and shattered, ours should be stronger than ever, right?

That right there is the first reason why I'm reviewing the book. This is a piece of soul-searching I am not seeing the Democrats do. Yes yes, the Donald's in the White House, the world will end shortly, Hillary won the popular vote, so now's the time to circle the wagons! Party Party rah rah rah!

Codswallop.

Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election. If she hadn't, she would have taken the oath of office instead of that orange buffoon whose temper makes him unfit to lead a troop of baboons and whose fitness for office—ANY office, second assistant vice-undersecretary of cat-boiling on up—is not, by any scale yet invented, measurable. And she lost it to The Donald. That *has* to hurt.

The Electoral College has failed in its Constitutional duty, to prevent by the exercise of wiser, older, whiter heads than prevail amongst the hoi polloi, the inauguration of a manifestly unfit candidate for the presidency. Now is the time, popular-vote quoting folks, to get after that Constitutional amendment to make the popular vote determine the occupant of the White House! Because, you see clearly now, as of this good moment, the popular vote matters less than a gnat's fart does in a tornado.

But the main failing was the Democratic Party's. The crooked and disgusting theft of the party's nomination from the candidate clearly preferred by the Democratic Party base was allowed to stand. That was and is the single most shameful moment in American political history. Everything that has followed after that is merely the result of the various nefarious shadow parties to the election realizing that the system is well and truly broken so any-bloody-thing goes. Half of registered Democrats stayed home on Election Day. And you bet the GOP-state voter restrictions had an impact; the margins of Clinton's loss in the key states was razor-thin.

A popular, untainted candidate would have motivated the voters to turn out. Mrs. Clinton, after years and years and years of nonsensical and deeply cynical political attacks and smear campaigns created in the fetid swamps of hateful, wrongheaded opponents of her very modestly progressive political stance, was not that candidate. The Democratic National Committee conspired with her campaign to ram her nomination through despite the base's clear absence of any desire to see her as the president.

And STOP ALREADY with the third-party "protest vote" horse manure. Had every single third-party voter in each and every battleground state cast their vote for Mrs. Clinton...it wouldn't have put her in the White House. She lost, guys. The more qualified, more prepared, almost infinitely superior as a human being candidate lost.

Because the Democratic Party did not listen to its base.

Sam Houston, the great Texan and patriot, said of a very similar and equally highly qualified candidate for a different presidency:

I have personally known Mr. Jefferson Davis for many years. [he lists the numerous and very important, influential positions held by Jefferson Davis] He is a gentleman imbued with all the instincts of Southern honor and chivalry, but I want to tell you something you may not know about him: Jeff Davis is as ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.

(from the book SAM HOUSTON by James L. Haley)
If *I* can't warm to a woman who championed a national health plan, a Medicare for All, in 1994 while she was the First Lady, then there's a real problem. Almost every factual claim about Mrs. Clinton hurled at her by the Republicans involved in the actual, real "vast right-wing conspiracy" was bull. It was piffle. It was fabricated from splinters and wisps and puffed to immense and unbelievably exaggerated proportions, despite being demonstrably untrue. You know why it stuck?

Mrs. Clinton is Hermione Granger. "She's a nightmare," squeaked a pubescent Ron Weasley in the memorable scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Yep. The swot of a snobby little priss who sat at a front desk in every class, had her own carrel in the library, and affected to eat her homemade lunch outside, "enjoying the air." We just don't like her.

Admire, perhaps. And to be sure she has her coterie, her Pantsuit Mafia. But the bulk of The People just...don't like her. All the mud slung at her, which was of no factual substance, would never have stuck to someone the people liked. Should that make a difference? Should the many and genuine contributions made by Mrs. Clinton to the body politic of the United States of America have outweighed the ick factor? Yes indeed. Hillary Clinton should, by any reasonable person's standards, be the 45th and first female President of the United States of America.

Yet she's not. And this book, this rah-rah get-out-and-vote book, this catalog of the accomplishments of each and every Democratic administration since FDR, mentions their candidate exactly once. Bill gets more page time. Bernie Sanders gets equal page time: One mention.

Do I really need to say that this is the single most telling fact (pesky things, easier to use "alternative facts" like "she lost because sexism") there is? Hillary Clinton couldn't energize her husband's old kingmaker to warble her praises throughout his book. Permaybehaps his editor at Blue Rider Press struck out the mentions, out of concern that the book would be rendered nugatory in the event of a Sanders nomination. Then why allow the unfavorable mention of Sanders that there is? Why mention Mrs. Clinton at all? It doesn't hang together; I can't see another line of reasoning for not including his whole-hearted partisan support for his girl, given Carville's political and public profile as a plain-speaking straight shooter, unless he...just doesn't really like her. Or he realized that The People don't like her.

I admit that these are equally likely to be my failures of imagination or my personal bias. But as a gay liberal life-long supporter of equality for all, a voter for Jill Stein, whose possession of a uterus was not a surprise to me, and the son of a single mother whose economic struggles in the wake of her divorce were perforce my economic struggles and her victories over them the cause of a great deal of pride for her in me, don't a single goddamned (sorry, Jo) one of y'all women say I'm being sexist in saying the simple truth: Your woman lost, and to a manifestly inferior man, and it had nothing to do with her gender.

In conclusion, let me hustle y'all out the door with a recommendation to read this book for its excellent policy history and for anyone the least bit interested in civil society, go read the Conclusion: Do Facts Matter Anymore? from pp213-222 inclusive. Sit at Hermione's old carrel in the library if you don't want to spend $25 (and had this book been an eight-buck mass market paperback instead, this election might well have gone differently). Let James Carville have his say into your private ear.

I'm done now.

THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country remains relevant

THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country
LATON McCARTNEY
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

***NOTE 7/11/18*** I'm amazed I wrote this review in 2012. Coulda been written today.

The Publisher Says: Big Oil bought the election of 1920 for Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, because he was amenable to giving away huge amounts of money to the oil companies, including using American power in Mexico to undo the Mexican nationalization of the oil companies' assets there. Part of the payoff to the oil interests was assigning leases worth about $100 million (in 1920 dollars...well north of a billion now) in the US Navy's strategic petroleum reserve in several locations.

Including Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

It all unraveled, the leases were voided, and thanks to a crusading Montana populist Sen. Tom Walsh, several really rich and really corrupt men spent some token time in jail.

Despite his proven knowledge of the transactions, Harding's vice-president was re-elected in 1924 (Harding died in 1923, some suspect at Mrs. Harding's hand, so he would never have to testify before the Walsh Committee).

Oh for the good old days.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR COLLECTIONS, LEVERAGE THEIR REACH! DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT NEEDS THEM.

My Review: This book was published in 2008, an election year. I do not think this was an accident. The GOP, a sink of depravity and greed since the Taft Administration, did not need any help losing that election...the fact that the sitting vice-president didn't run as the candidate tells you all you need to know there, the GOP knew what was coming and wanted someone else to take the blame for it...but this book, about a conspiracy of evil, greedy GOP pols, their money-men, and the full intent to defraud We-the-People for private wealth, was still well-timed.

Lest any stupid damnfool conservative start mooing about bias, I rush to report that the author does not say the words I've said. The author reports the facts as history has them. The Committee reports, the papers of all parties concerned, all extant documentary evidence, was used in a careful reconstruction of the actual events that led to the Teapot Dome Scandal, as we've come to call it.

The fact that the documentary evidence makes the conservatives look like evil, greedy rotters is just a bonus. Embrace the demon within, GOP/Tea Party supporters! Align yourselves with those who think nothing of splashing out millions to buy the votes and influence the course of the river of money that flows from any government into their own pockets, with the minimum of trickle-down into the Public Good.

Do it openly, and in full knowledge of what kind of rotten sleazebags you're supporting...they've never been any different. Read this book and see why.

2022 ADDENDUM Lest my ire seem more partisan than it is, I rush to assure all readers that Senator Joe Manchin ("D"—Corporate America) has demonstrated the continuing susceptibility of our representative government to overt, money-based rigging in favor of those whose greed exceeds their common sense.