Nov 28, 2017

November 27, 2017: Pocahontas, Ever the Demagogue, Ultimate Vandal.



Aurora Borealis
The icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water
In a long and hurried flight
From the white man
to the fields of green
And the homeland
we've never seen.

 
They killed us in our tepee
And they cut our women down
They might have left some babies
Cryin' on the ground
But the firesticks
and the wagons come
And the night falls
on the setting sun.

 
They massacred the buffalo
Kitty corner from the bank
The taxis run across my feet
And my eyes have turned to blanks
In my little box
at the top of the stairs
With my Indian rug
and a pipe to share.”

                                                                 -----Neil Young “Pocahontas” (1)


All he had to do was get through a simple ceremony observed Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. He couldn't do even that, quickly turning a ceremony honoring the Navajo soldiers into an ugly, gratuitous slap at a political adversary by referring to her as “Pocahontas” in an effort to refer to the historical native American figure disparagingly. In doing so, our very own Caesar Disgustus simultaneously outraged both the Massachusetts senator and our entire native American populations.

The group of surviving Navajo soldiers who, during the Second World War, distinguished themselves by volunteering for service and using their native language in a successful effort to pass commands and signals in a 'code' that the Japanese found impenetrable, were brought to the White House in order to honor their services. Instead the ceremony was converted into yet another effort by this White House to communicate to its white nationalist base.

This morning, Joe Scarborough, on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” held forth that this is not normal, that everything that has transpired in the last year or two has been the result of a 'blip', an abnormality occurring on election day 2016. This is a dangerous interpretation.

I have previously written about this at length. (2) This is not an aberration and the latest outrage by our very own public ass needs to be put in some context. On first blush it looked as if Disgustus had simply once again began to ramble and was soon off the rails. But look again at the video, here stood a group of native Americans underneath a portrait of president Andrew Jackson under whom the nation passed a law expelling the Cherokee, Seminole and other tribes from Georgia, Florida and other areas of the American Southeast forcing a march in the dead of winter which quickly became a 'death march' toward a homeland they'd never seen. (3)

It is no coincidence that the portrait of Jackson gazed down upon the ceremony, for Disgustus idolizes the seventh president of the United States. Jackson is celebrated in liberal circles for his 'populism', his so-called “Jacksonian Democracy” lauded by the likes of Arthur Schlessinger, but he also stands as one of the principle architects and practitioners of genocide and ethnic cleansing. There can be no doubt to which purposes the portrait, what part of the Jacksonian legacy, that Caesar Disgustus was drawing upon during this ceremony; another dog-whistle designed to denigrate those assembled and, by extension, the author of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and agency with which he is currently embroiled in yet another power struggle.

He has been attacking Warren for years, referring to the totally baseless charge that she had declared herself to be 1/32 native American when applying for college. Like many of us, anecdotal histories, passed on by relatives over the generations, led her to understand that she has native American lineage. I have no idea whether she has or not. It doesn't matter. In any case, at no time did she seek nor accept any financial aid, nor did it affect her acceptance or rejection when making application to colleges or universities. But Disgustus, ever the demagogue, has seized upon this urban legend and tagged her 'Pocahontas' as a means of conveying, through yet another dog-whistle, the message that somehow she didn't deserve her education, she doesn't deserve realizing the fruits of her accomplishment. It has become a dog-whistle conveying to his knuckle-dragging political base a larger charge than whites are discriminated against and that any acceptance or admission of a person of color into our larger community is illegitimate. “They” don't deserve to be here, brought into the corridors of power through ill-gotten means by liberals who have tipped the Ouija Board of life against them.

The senator castigated Disgustus saying “he had to throw out a racial slur”. The White House protested that it wasn't a racial slur but it is. To use the honorable figure of a revered member of our Native Americans as a means of denigrating someone. Let me be clear: Caesar Disgustus is the ultimate vandal: he debases everything he touches. Yesterday he accomplished, in a very short few minutes, the besmirching of an American Icon; making of Pocahontas a racial slur.

____________________

  1. August 8, 2017: Roads to Hell, Long and Tortuous Path,
    Reap the Whirlwind
  2. Ehle, John. “Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation” Copyright 1988 Anchor Books, Doubleday Dell Publishing Group New York. 424 pages.



Nov 6, 2017

November 5, 2017: Ye Public Ass, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Holding the Bag


The words president and  tRUMP go together like barn dance and polecat, or church and fart.”
              ----from "The Quotations of Chairman Joe"

Using the words tRUMP and president in the same sentence violates the sensibilities, for the stench that both precedes him and that lingers long after his departure betrays a corruption beyond anything in our national experience. Tales of sordid business dealing, racketeering and money-laundering await an anxious nation as the Mueller investigation proceeds apace. Today I want to focus instead upon the vandalism that this man is currently inflicting upon the presidency by behavior unbecoming the office.

To date one can envision several looming articles of impeachment:
  1. Collusion with a foreign adversary in order to subvert the duly constituted political process of a free republican government.
  2. Obstruction of justice by misleading, lying, fabricating, dissembling, removing from office several principle investigators, threatening possible material witnesses.
  3. Knowingly participating in the receiving of material assistance in the form of information and money from foreign nationals, many connected with organized crime.
  4. Failure to fulfill the oath of office by “Faithfully executing” the laws of the land, as in failure to enforce additional sanctions upon Russia, failure to enforce environmental protections, failure to enforce and support the Affordable Health Care Act, ad nauseum.
  5. Receiving gifts and payments from foreign governments and nationals by pressuring governments to do business with his hotels and resorts.
  6. And, last but not least: for conduct unbecoming, that is for BeingYe Public Ass.

It hasn't been enough that this man has been the most incompetent ass to preside over our government since at least James Buchanan. It hasn't been enough that this man has besmirched virtually everything he touches. It is that this man has been a national embarrassment, a national humiliation, a national obscenity while so doing. In short, a public ass.

It took years for Reagan and the Bushes to reduce the federal response to natural disasters. The response to hurricane Andrew late in George the Greater's administration and the greater failures of George the Lesser in response to hurricane Katrina proved low-water marks for both administrations ushering in, as they did, brief returns of Democratic dominance. But it took several years for the Rescumlicans to savage governance to the necessary degree in order to accomplish these objectives. With hurricanes Harvey and Irma having already savaged Texas and the Gulf Coast our Disgustus, still riding the headwinds of competent Democratic administration, was able to respond in a somewhat orderly and timely fashion. Not because of political leadership mind you (for our birdbrain spent his time 'tweeting' and playing golf), but because FEMA still had resources and institutional memory. But with hurricane Maria, there was no such response.

Why is anyone's guess but Keith Olbermann, among others, have pointed to the racism rampant in New York City during tRUMP's childhood as evidenced by the themes in the musical “West Side Story”and the movie “Twelve Angry Men”. Our Disgustus grew up in a New York was experiencing an explosion in immigration largely from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and all to familiar ethnic conflicts emerged.

In any case tRUMP in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane blithely announced that he wasn't suspending the Jones Act—a federal law prohibiting intrastate shipment of goods from the United States to the islands on foreign ships. The act was intended and serves to protect what is left of the U.S. Merchant shipping and merchant marine but is often suspended in emergency. Not this time. Disgustus also announced that he would not use the military in response to the crisis, also a common practice in such circumstances. Normally a president would order the military to airlift food, water, generators, gasoline, medicine and medical equipment, engineers and construction equipment as well as other supplies in order to alleviate the suffering. Not so our very own Caesar Disgustus. He did send the hospital ship “Comfort” to San Juan but two weeks after the hurricane the ship with over 800 medical staff and scores of beds had only treated 40 patients.

What the country witnessed instead was the self-absorbed little Lord Fauntleroy twitting away, venting his spleen on the National Football League in an attempt to settle a score involving his attempt to become a team owner decades ago and being rebuffed by Commissioner Pete Rozelle and the other owners. Having been rejected by this exclusive club, tRUMP set about joining the now defunct United States Football League purchasing the New Jersey Generals and signing Georgia's Herschel Walker. After some marginal success tRUMP then went about pressuring the other owners to change the marketing strategy from playing games in the spring of the year to going directly up against the entrenched National Football League in the fall.

Now the NFL has, principally under Rozelle, emerged as such a dominant force, commandeering entirely not only every Sunday during its schedule but the holidays as well. Indeed the last such force to command these time slots was God himself. Nevertheless our intrepid fool led his band up against one of the most powerful monopolies in the nation, if not the world. Other owners in the league were skeptical, even fearful, knowing it would be a hard climb. But Disgustus, always the bully, always the cock-sure megalomaniac would—surprise--not listen. The result was a disaster. A bankruptcy and end of the endeavor leaving the owners no choice but to sue (always a tRUMP stratagem) the National Football league. They won the case but the NFL was fined only one dollar. The real strategy was, of course, to lead the USFL up against the NFL knowing that it would strain the other owners but in the wake of its collapse tRUMP would leverage his position and force his way into the NFL as the old American Football League had earlier done by forcing a merger. But this time the NFL was having none of it, for the stench of tRUMP so greatly offends the sensibilities. Walker moved on to the NFL and Disgustus and his business associates were left holding the bag.

I bring this up because now decades later we find the swine confronted with a full-blown national disaster involving himself instead with a feud with NFL players over kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police-state practices involving minorities. Here we find the birdbrain 'tweeting' away while an island is without drinking water or power, where millions are homeless and desperate for relief in an effort to besmirch an institution that had slighted him.
Finally, when this display of childishness created a public outcry, he was convinced by White House staff to make trip to the island resulting in video footage broadcast to the world in which he was seen tossing rolls of paper towels to the afflicted and speaking only of the 'great success' of the federal (read tRUMP's) response. Indeed pressed to rank the response on a scale of one to ten, tRUMP—ever the megalomaniac—of course gave himself a ten.

Lost in the imbroglio, of course, was the fact that the Rescumlicans were planning a 30% cut in FEMA funding in their upcoming budget, the first full budget of this administration. I bring this up because the full effect of his blinding ignorance has yet to be felt. Had these storms ravaged this country into the third or fourth year of this administration the full effect of tRUMP and his ilk would have born down upon the unsuspecting residents of Texas and the Gulf Coast as well—that is not upon the people who don't look or speak like Disgustus but upon those who do and vote for him.

But let us make no mistake about it. When it comes time to remove this cancer upon our nation one of the reasons must be that he is and remains a public ass.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day.

Impeach and Imprison