August 31, 2020: Robert Reich on tRUMP, Abject Worship, Front Row Seat

Trying to wrap his arms about the enormity of tRUMP and tRUMPism, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich posted this synopsis today on Facebook:

“One week ago, Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police department, fired at least seven shots at the back of a Black man named Jacob Blake as he opened his car door, leaving the 29-year-old father of five probably paralyzed from the waist down.

After protests erupted, self-appointed armed militia or vigilante-type individuals rushed to Kenosha, including Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who traveled there and then, appearing on the streets with an AR-15 assault rifle, killed two people and wounded a third.

This is pure gold for a president without a plan, a party without a platform, and a cult without a purpose other than the abject worship of Donald Trump.

To be re-elected Trump knows he has to distract the nation from the coronavirus pandemic that he has flagrantly failed to control – leaving more than 180,000 Americans dead, tens of millions jobless and at least 30 million reportedly hungry.

So he’s counting on the reliable Republican dog-whistle. “Your vote,” Trump said in his speech closing the Republican convention Thursday night, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”

“We will have law and order on the streets of this country,” Vice President Mike Pence declared the previous evening, warning “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Neither Trump nor Pence mentioned the real threats to law and order in America today, such as gun-toting agitators like Rittenhouse, who, perhaps not coincidentally, occupied a front-row seat at a Trump rally in Des Moines in January.

Pence lamented the death of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” earlier this year, implying he was killed by protesters. In fact, Underwood was shot and killed by an adherent of the boogaloo boys, an online extremist movement that’s trying to ignite a race war.

Such groups have found encouragement in a president who sees “very fine people” supporting white supremacy.

The threat also comes from conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recently nominated Republican candidate for Georgia’s 14th congressional district and promoter of QAnon, whose adherents believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Trump has praised Greene as a “future Republican star” and claimed that QAnon followers “love our country.”

And from people like Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of Trump’s campaign advisory board, who was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention until she retweeted an antisemitic rant about a supposed Jewish plan to enslave the world’s peoples and steal their land.

Clearly the threat also comes from hotheaded, often racist police officers who fire bullets into the backs of Black men and women or kneel on their necks so they can’t breathe. Needless to say, there was little mention at the Republican convention of Jacob Blake, and none of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.

And the threat comes from Trump’s own lackeys who have brazenly broken laws to help him attain and keep power. Since Trump promised he would only hire “the best people,” 14 Trump aides, donors and advisers have been indicted or imprisoned.

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani – who ranted at the Republican convention about rioting and looting in cities with Democratic mayors – has repeatedly met with the pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach, whom American intelligence has determined is “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”\

In addition, federal prosecutors are investigating Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine with two men arrested in an alleged campaign finance scheme.

Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who had been a major Trump campaign donor before taking over the post office, is being sued by six states and the District of Columbia for allegedly seeking to “undermine” the postal service as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail during the pandemic.\

Not to forget the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who spoke to the Republican convention while on an official trip to the Middle East, in apparent violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits officials of the executive branch other than the president and vice-president from engaging in partisan politics.

You want the real threat to American law and order? It’s found in these Trump enablers and bottom-dwellers. They are the inevitable excrescence of Trump’s above-the-law, race-baiting, me-first presidency. It is from the likes of them that the rest of America is in serious need of protection.

What do you think?”

I think we are in deep shit. We are witnessing the destruction of the republic from a front-row seat.

An br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

___________

1. https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts

August 30, 2020: Vacuous Nonsense, Empty-Handed, No Promises to Break

The proceedings have finally come to a merciful end. Disgustus has had his day. The quadrennial gathering of swine have labored mightily and delivered a rat. For the ReSCUMlickan Party, the Grand Old Prostitute, is babbling vacuous nonsense and has left the country—desperately in need—empty-handed.

Disgustus, famously, promises the best steaks but delivers tripe. No matter, the maggot hats rush to the rotting meat falling from the carcass. It is their usual fetid fare. But now, he promises nothing at all.

For the first time in living memory, perhaps the first time since political conventions came into being early in the 19^th century, a major political party has failed to produce a party platform. In doing so, they tell us more than they suspect, for they have brought forth candidates but no ideas, confessing by their actions, and in-actions, that they have, literally, no idea where to lead the country.

We know, from bitter experience, that they have no idea how to lead the country, now they openly confess that they don't know where to lead it. Finally, the truth is out. The ReSCUMlickan Party is intellectually, as well as morally, bankrupt.

What we are left with is all tRUMP, all the time; a political movement that now exists for no other reason than to make a pig's breakfast of what has been built and to worship the golden swine. Vandalism and The Vandal; at least this time around there will some measure of honesty, for there will be no promises to break.

Our great and powerful Oz takes no responsibility and promises nothing. An empty shirt posturing and preening like unto a living god.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 29, 2020: Litany of Lies, Conceal The Culprit, Just Another Screed

Caesar Disgustus, besmirching yet another monument—this time the executive mansion—by emptying the latrine of the body politic, onto the White House lawn. Addressing a sea of maggot hats our erstwhile emperor told the assembled that, among other things: He is doing a great job fighting the tRUMP virus; he is not. That we lead the world in testing: we do not. That he is introducing approved therapies to deal with the tRUMP virus; we are not. That we have built three hundred miles of wall on the Southern border; we have not. That Joe Biden wants to bulldoze the suburbs; he has no such plans. It was a litany of lies.

Disgustus, a pathological liar unable to utter any truth except by accident, must now resort to his only known talent: gross deceit. The record demands it. Like any two-bit criminal he must cover up the evidence in order to conceal the culprit.\

For the facts tell the story: The United States has 4 percent of the world's population but nearly a quarter of the tRUMP Virus cases killing nearly 20 percent of those taken by the tRUMP Virus. Only Brazil, also suffering from jaw-dropping incompetent leadership, comes anywhere close to the United States in the mishandling of the crisis. Under Disgustus, the United States leads the industrialized world in unemployment, business failures, skyrocketing public debt, and a looming housing crisis that threatens to cripple the economy.

One would think that, violating yet another political protocol, this time the use—or misuse—of the executive mansion, that our erstwhile Caesar would have made an effort to rise to the occasion and deliver a serious, deliberative effort. Instead it was the usual tripe, red meat for the attending maggots.

It was all part and parcel to virtually everything else he's done. Disgustus never surprises, he can always be relied upon to scrape the scum from the bottom of the barrel and then smear it all over the rest of us. 

.

His promise that there would be a vaccine by year's end must be taken with the same veracity that, you may recall, he told Chris Wallace at the end of June that he would have a replacement for Obamacare within two weeks. With a straight face he assured the reporter on national television that a bill was in the works and that he would sign it within a fortnight. Another of the over 15,000 bold-faced lies told by this scum in his less than four years stinking up Oval Office.

So the effort, held before over a thousand mask-less denizens, had the fact-checkers working overtime, finally throwing up their hands and declaring the whole mess just another screed delivered with the same, predictable mendacity.

And so, another political norm has been shit-canned, another guard-rail dismantled, as Disgustus defiles yet another national monument. First it was Mt. Rushmore, now the White House itself.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 28, 2020: The Real Fraud, Nowhere to Turn, Despise His Ass

“They're trying to rig the election” Disgustus bellows before an adoring crowd of maggot hats. In tRUMPspeak this means that he is trying to rig the election. The Daily Beast is reporting today that the tRUMP campaign, in full panic mode, is doing its utmost to restrict Democratic turnout in the upcoming election.

“On June 29,” writes David Lurie, “the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit demanding the voiding of the efforts of Pennsylvania's state officials to facilitate mail voting during the pandemic. Among other things, Pennsylvania is allowing the use of ballot drop boxes, so voters can avoid returning ballots through the mails. In light of revelations that Trump's recently installed Postmaster General (and fundraiser), Louis DeJoy, deliberately engineered new inefficiencies and delays at the Postal Service (Particularly in Philadelphia), the need for drop boxes is even more clear. But that's only made the Trump campaign more determined to prevent their use.” (1)

Referring to “fraud” no fewer than 51 times, the campaign filed a motion before Judge Nicholas Ranjan, a tRUMP appointee who, recognizing the centrality of possible fraud, demanded evidence. The campaign could provide none, claiming that, well, it just makes common sense. It makes “common sense” only in the minds of those about to be run out of office by angry voters.

Indeed, Lurie sites a study by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative stink tank, revealing that over 9 years there were only 15 cases of voter fraud in the 5 states that provide for mail-in voting, hardly enough to rig an election.

But note that our Caesar Disgustus and his minions are not opposed to all mail-in or absentee ballots (for Disgustus and his larvae regularly vote by mail), but are seeking to restrict this means of voting in heavily populated areas, where people are most likely, given the congestion, to vote by mail. These, of course, are heavily Democratic precincts.

And, like the voter I.D. Law in North Carolina which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional because it discriminated against minority communities “with laser precision”, so the attempt to suppress the vote by legally restricting mail-in ballots only in certain communities and precincts, is yet another attempt by the GOP and our Caesar Disgustus to suppress Democratic turn-out and steal yet another election.

The problem is a serious one, since DeJoy has engineered a near collapse of the Postal Service, removing and destroying 671 sorting machines, mostly from large metropolitan areas, and tearing out postal drop boxes from street corners. These are only the latest in a series of outrages as he has curbed overtime and allowed mail to pile up.

The polls tell the story: Between 68 and 80 percent of Americans tell pollsters that the country is moving in the wrong direction. North of 50 percent of the general population say that they won't vote for the swine under any circumstance. Normally the greater the likelihood that those polled will vote the better the polling numbers for the Republican. That is, as you look over the polling numbers, what one sees is that tRUMP  logs far more unfavorable numbers among the general population than among register voters; and far more unfavorable numbers among registered voters than among likely voters. Those in charge of the campaign know that they cannot expand the electorate; that to do so will mean crushing defeat. 

He knows that he now has nowhere to turn, for registering a new voter will, on balance, only add to his electoral defeat as, far more than the likely jury that will show up election day, the general public despise his ass. There is only one avenue left: suppress the vote. And that, is what he intends to do.

Yes, there are those who are now working hard to rig this election, but it isn't the Democrats. It's tRUMP.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

__________

1. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-voter-fraud-proof-turned-022443280.html

August 27, 2020: Family Disown Family, Old Testament God, Negotiator Become Mediator

“Family disown family that vote Republican”

        ----from the Quotations of Chairman Joe

I posted this message on Facebook a couple of months ago only to receive a protest from one of my relatives who, undoubtedly and unfortunately, voted Republican.

It has come to this in tRUMP's Amerika. Not since the civil war has our politics pit family against family like it has now. As the great Ass Festival proceeds in North Carolina, Kelleyanne Conway, known in certain circles as Kellyanne Con-job, makes her farewell address to the faithful. For months a public war of sorts has played out between Kelleyanne and her husband George who, recoiling from the horrors of tRUMP and tRUMPism, has left the party and joined the Lincoln Project—a group of Republican refugees who have taken to the airwaves with scathing political messages excoriating tRUMP and everything he represents. Clearly the marriage itself became imperiled.  

Now comes word that their daughter has taken to twitter to bitterly complain that the politics has overtaken everything else in the household. In reaction Kelleyanne has announced that she is leaving the White House and George is leaving the Lincoln project. Perhaps the family may have stepped back from the precipice in time, only time will tell.

Kelleyanne, like Reince Priebus and many before her, began this association with tRUMP with her reputation intact. No more. Along with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and a host of others, she finds herself soiled by the whinny little tar-baby.

Like some Old Testament god, tRUMP is omnipresent; the great negotiator become mediator in all things, even between husband and wife, parent and child. Like some ancient jealous deity, tRUMP demands, controls and takes everything. Like some old-time religion, the idiotlogical and political dictates overrule common sense and understandings.

This is what life is becoming in tRUMP's Amerika, all tRUMP, all the time. Who else would appear every night at his convention? Clearly, at the Conway's he has worn out his welcome. Let us hope this is also true for the country at large. America has grown weary, sick, disgusted and angry. Yet still there is this rump group who, at the foot of Mt. Washington, are openly worshiping the Golden Swine.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 26, 2020: Straight and Narrow, Heresy and Treason, Ass Festivals to Holocaust

“So tenaciously should we cling to the world revealed by the Gospel, that were I to see all the Angels of Heaven coming down to me to tell me something different, not only would I be tempted to doubt a single syllable, but I would shut my eyes and stop my ears, for they would not deserve to either seen nor heard.”

            ----Martin Luther (1)

Amid reports that the Ass Festival held in Sturgis, South Dakota has now spread over 100 cases of Covid-19 to at least 8 states, the current Ass Festival continues unabashed and unabated. The vitriol spewed nightly by a range of the deranged paints a picture of the immanent destruction of the American republic should the country exercise wisdom, not to mention a measure of public hygiene, by flushing these turds from the forum. This, while back in the corridors of power they labor mightily to accomplish precisely these ends.

The Ass Festival known as the ReSCUMlickan National Convention also began as reports surfaced that Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the founder of the so-called 'moral majority' and wrong-wing political hack, is up to his gonads in sex scandal. It seems the president of “Liberty” University, which his father also founded, has joined his wife in a tryst with the pool boy producing a delicious decade-long manage a' trios. It appears that our 'religious' leader has engaged in behavior that the institutions his father founded, as well as the flocks that he sheared, would find repugnant. Accounts vary, but generally report that brother Falwell loves to watch his wife in action complete with photos and videos. It remains unclear whether Falwell joins in the proceedings and, if so, in what capacity.  

It's bad enough when the in-laws find out about it, bad enough when the friends find out, but the Falwell's have achieved national, if not international, notoriety by flogging virtually anyone who didn't stick to the straight and narrow, didn't walk the line, didn't conform, didn't happily don the intellectual and moral straight jacket that they call religious doctrine. Now the piper must be paid. 


Relax Jerry, we understand, we really do. Your only true sin is declaring war upon the Old Adam that is, natural man, teaching your flock to reject humanism; to alienate themselves from themselves through the rejection of reason, and denial of the senses-- foremost pleasure-- however arrived at. But what is mere hypocrisy when confronted with ideological and doctrinal imperative? Falwell will likely survive the tempest as has Jim Bakker and a host of other bible-thumping religious howlers. For the True Believer is nearly impervious to mere fact and will shut the eyes and block the ears when confronted, as a case in point: ask the ReSCUMlickan led senate.   Belief always trumps the senses. Faith always trumps reason. The heart must always trump the mind. 


“The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds” wrote Eric Hoffer. (2) Or, as Crash Davis told pitcher Luke LaRuoche in “Bull Durham”, don't think Meat, it will only hurt the team.

And, therein, lies the only path to salvation for either Falwell or tRUMP, indeed the entire ReSCUMlickan Party and American Conservatism: that the faithful will not think; that they will not connect the dots; and that, having fore-sworn reason they will rush to the rescue. How else to explain how tRUMP holds a nearly double digit lead among those polled on questions concerning the handling of the American economy. The Republicans have trashed the economy every time they've laid their hands on it: Eisenhower's recession in the late 50's, the “stagflation” of the Nixon-Ford years, the economic downturns at the beginning and end of the Reagan-Bush experience, the near total economic collapse presided over by Bush the Lesser, and now this. Oh! an let's not forget the colossal catastrophe handed to FDR by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Does one notice a pattern here?

Nevertheless, a plurality of the public conditioned on the visuals of television still believe that this common carnival barker is an accomplished businessman and great negotiator. They have been taught from early age to be good sheep, for they will follow. 

For the true believer “to rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason.” (2) Better still, as Martin Luther admonished his sheep when confronted with inconvenient facts and truths, one must shut one's eyes and stop one's ears.

Hoffer reminds us that, as Rudolph Hess swore in the entire Nazi Party in 1934, “He exhorted his hearers: 'Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.” (3)

Connect, if you will, the dots: It is but a short journey from Luther's admonition “It is the heart which is the consciousness of God, not the reason,” (4) to the destruction of a republic and the introduction of terror. It begins with Ass Festivals and ends in holocaust.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

_________________

1. As quoted by Erick Hoffer. The True Believer. Thoughts On The Nature of Mass Movements

Copyright 1951 Perennial Library, Harper & Row, New York. Page 75
1. Ibid. Page 77
2. Ibid. Page 77

August 25, 2020: The Gathering Scum, Snorkeling the Cesspool, A Bitter Screed

The time is upon us, that coalescing of scum, that quadrennial gathering of malignant ignorance and mendacious greed known to the world as the ReSCUMlickan National Convention. Aides, including boy blunder Jared Kushner and White House Chief of Staff Meadows, were telling the press, and anyone else who would listen, that our erstwhile Caesar would bring a tone of optimism contrasting mightily last week's Democratic message. But, alas, Disgustus can do no other. CNN reports that our Caesar Disgustus, snorkeling deep in the cesspool, accepted the renomination of his party with bitter screed reminiscent of the Grievanceburg Address given at Gettysburg Pennsylvania four long years ago. Bitching and whining our Disgustus can rise to no occasion. This was no exception.

Reporting on the proceedings, CNN observed that Disgustus “launched his convention week Monday with a bitter tirade against his rivals from four years ago and dark and unfounded warnings that voter fraud could deprive him of a second term. Speaking from Charlotte [scene of the famous crypto-fascist demonstrations three years ago] moments after he was formally renominated as the Republican Party standard-bearer, Trump delivered a screed that predicted a legally contested election in November and complained that Democrats were exploiting the coronavirus pandemic—still raging in the United States—to undermine his re-election.

'what they're doing is using Covid to steal an election. They're using Covid to defraud the American people, all of our people, of a fair and free election,' Trump said, without evidence, to applause from GOP delegates, who were gathering in North Carolina to conduct the formal business of the party convention.

' It was hardly the optimistic message that Trump's advisers have been relentlessly previewing ahead of this week's renomination festivities. Instead, Trump's speech was indistinguishable from the meandering, grievance-filled appearances he has been making in the lead-up to this scaled-down convention.

'He repeated claims that, should rival Joe Biden prevail, the country would be overrun with violence akin to protests seen this summer in Minnesota and Oregon. He warned that Democrats were seeking to take away guns, religion and American energy production. And he raised grave predictions about the November vote, saying there were courts and judges across the country 'who will hopefully give us a fair call' in a contested election.

'The only way they can take this election from us is if it's a rigged election,' he intoned, later warning delegates to 'be careful' amid what he cast as a Democratic plot to steal the election. 'Don't let them take it away from you,' he said. (1)

Let's see if we can unpack this nonsense.

It is rich that Disgustus would warn of violence in the streets should he lose the election, for we have violence in the streets now. And it's not just any streets. These are not the streets of Philadelphia, or New York, Newark or Detroit, scenes of so much carnage in the sixties. The neighborhoods are not Watts or Harlem but Minneapolis and Oregon for Christ's sake. Trump has managed to bring protest not to the inner city but to within the gates of Republican sanctuaries, suburbs and exurbs, middle class not the impoverished and downtrodden.

Disgustus is all about the past. Here he is trying to re-run the 2016 contest using as his guideposts the elections of 1968 and 1988. The great smear 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis in which such pressing issues as flag burning and pledges of allegiance trumped everything else including the economy as well as war and peace; in which the face of Willie Horten was used to, in Lee Atwater's memorable phase, 'take the bark off that little bastard'--referring to the diminutive governor of Massachusetts. Unfortunately it worked.

Disgustus has now gathered about him one Karl Rove, disciple of Lee Atwater and Roger Stone, skilled in political skullduggery and bereft of character now trying to re-run the 1968 campaign of Richard Shithouse Nixon complete with the southern strategy and appeals to 'law and order'. But Nixon was the challenger with the incumbent represented by Hubert Humphrey. Incumbency hasn't registered in his fetid mind, nor the responsibilities that incumbency brings.

So we have this dissonance in which our Disgustus sounds a clarion call that there will be violence when there already is violence; that there will be hardship when there already is hardship; that an election will be rigged when he and his ReSCUMlickan enablers are the ones once again hell-bent on rigging it. The dystopia described by tRUMP are not what he inherited but what he has, through monumental ignorance, stupidity and incompetence, created. His inaugural address was not a description of what stood before us, it was his vision of America's future; for tRUMP is nothing but a vandal, still the boy who knocks down the other kids blocks and then blames them for poorly constructing their creations. Clearly, our Caesar has no idea who he is, where he is, or what time it is. It is no wonder, given his psychosis, that tests—how ever rudimentary—were administered. The question remains: what were the real results? Inquiring people, as is said, want to know.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush the turd, November 3^rd.

_________

1. http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-uses-dark-message-to-kick-off-mc-despite-aides-claims-of-optimism.
   

August 24, 2020: Mental Acuity, Ridiculous and Pathetic, 'Round The Bend

“Regarding our Caesar Disgustus, the question is whether the fucking moron has finally gone 'round the bend.”

       ----from The Quotations of Chairman Joe


The journal Politico reports that tRUMP “has frequently referred to his 77-year-old opponent as 'Sleepy Joe' in tweets and speeches, has tried to paint Biden as mentally unfit for the presidency during the final stretch of the 2020 campaign. The Trump campaign has even zeroed-in on Biden's age and mental competency with television ads showing the former vice president stumbling over his remarks.” (1)

This is rich coming from Caesar Disgustus who, one may recall, spent the summer bragging about a cognitive ability test administered by White House physician Ron Jackson two years ago. This was the incident where tRUMP was spirited from the White House to the hospital under circumstances that were then never made clear. Apparently there was some medical condition requiring the administration of a cognitive test in order to determine the ability of our erstwhile Caesar to function.

Disgustus, of course, does what he always does: project an overblown facade by engaging in his pet pastime of outrageous bravado and braggadocio. Here the braggart tells the nation that the test was a difficult one and that he “aced” it adding, of course, that the doctors never saw such wonderful results. Upon examination the test involved identifying three animals, drawing a clock to indicate a certain time, and other questions to determine if the patient is aware of his surroundings. Normally a person in position of high responsibility would not bring this up; would not want to draw attention to the need for such examination. But, alas, our Caesar is not normal.

He has, once again, gotten away with it, for the press is now too cowed by the blustering bastard to press the point home. The question is not whether the president* (I) did well on the examination; the question is not simply the nature of the examination and how easy it was; the question is not why tRUMP raised the issue. The question is not why the president*(I) lacked so little cognitive awareness that he was not embarrassed to raise the subject. The question is why the test should have been administered the test in the first place. This question should have been pressed upon tRUMP in his televised interviews and at every press conference as to why the test was administered in the first place; for this is one of a battery of tests given when a patient has suffered a severe medical event. Could tRUMP have been suspected of having suffered a stroke?

Clearly, any examination of tRUMP, and certainly anyone who has been within earshot of the man throughout his adult life has witnessed a man of limited understanding and even less intellectual acumen. Those close enough to witness the man with their own eyes have been known to see broad daylight between the ears. But something must have triggered the response by the White House medical team to go to these lengths.

Disgustus is now so unaware of his surroundings that he doesn't see how ridiculous and pathetic he now appears when he raised the issue and then compounded the folly by protesting its difficulty. This too should be alarming.

This isn't idle observation: for in the aftermath he stood before the nation with a straight face and in all earnestness advocated the injection of bleach and ultraviolet radiation into the body in order to cleanse the Covid-19 virus. What had happened is that his team had told him about the ways in which one can protect oneself from the disease, washing hands, using disinfectants, wearing masks, social distancing. Disgustus, who had early on made the virus a political issue by falsely declaring the whole thing a “Democratic Hoax” and the wearing of masks a bit of Democratic fear-mongering, fell upon the use of disinfectants. This, in the mind of the eternal seven-year-old, got translated into the injection of same, much the the shock and dismay of those around him.

One is left to conclude that the mental acuity test, which he evidently passed, was meant to determine whether additional damage had been done to an already truncated understanding. In a word, whether the “fucking moron”, in Rex Tillerson's telling description had finally gone 'round the bend.

As observed many times in these columns the visceral reaction of our Caesar Disgustus is always one of projection in which his myriad nonredeemable faults are given over to others. In attacking Joe Biden's age, Joe will be older than any president to take office, tRUMP is actually telling the nation the he himself is not up to the job and that he has indeed gone 'round the bend.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

____________

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/watch-me-biden-hits-back-at-trump-over-attacks-on-age
   
2. Ibid.

August 23, 2020: Swirling About, Warp Factor II, Foundations Of Fascism.

It's an idea that for several years has been swirling about in conservative stink tanks. That it, to make protest illegal. It has its roots in American jurisprudence when decades ago the courts decided that the mall parking lot was private property and, therefore, off limits to not only protests but union picket lines. The International Association of American Stagehand Employees, which represented America's theater projectionists among others, found that their ability to picket a theater in order to take their message to the community circumscribed for they found themselves forced by the police power of the state to set up such lines not in front of the place of business but out on the street. Stage one in the movement to proscribe protest—in this case the protest of working conditions.

Warp Factor II, Sulu: Now comes the State of Tennessee with stage 2 in the process. You know, Tennessee, sight of the famous Scopes Trial, defender of creationism, citadel of ignorance. News comes that the Republican governor of Tennessee has signed into law a measure passed by an equally Republican legislature that makes it a felony for anyone to protest on state property. A felony conviction strips one of the subsequent right to vote. So one's civil rights are serially violated, first the right of free speech and expression, the right of peaceable assembly, then to compound the mischief, the right to exercise the franchise.

There are those on the idiot wrong who would go even further making it a felony to 'disrupt commerce' by marching down main street, picketing a place of business, occupying a commercial center in order to voice protest, a menacing prospect now given legal sanction as it applies to public buildings. The foundations of a fascist state are being assembled before our very eyes and in broad daylight.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 22, 2020: Ass Festivals, Shorn of Responsibilities, Wash These Sins

“We want to be free...free to ride...free to ride without being hassled by the man”.

So declared Peter Fonda's character in the motorcycle epic Wild Angels as he struggled to articulate the whole point of his existence. A declaration of independence, in a manner of speaking, but a declaration shorn of responsibilities. And so it was that the Generation of Swine were led to believe that freedom carries no responsibility, that freedom lies, like some motorcycle gang living on the fringe, deep in the woods, in total alienation.

As we speak, the bikers are wrapping up festivities at what has to be one of the great Ass Festivals in America. Over a quarter million of the great unwashed gathered from all over the country and descended, as they do every year at this time, upon the hapless town of Sturgis, South Dakota. The purpose of this demonstration is unclear except perhaps to rumble through the streets, buy souvenirs, and consume mass quantities of alcohol and petroleum; no masks, no social distancing. Pandemic be damned.

This is, in microcosm, where we are today in America. Half the country is not taking necessary precaution, wearing protective gear, nor social distancing. Thirty five percent is reported to have told pollsters if a vaccine were introduced that they won't take it. The mayor of Los Angeles has cut off utilities to homes hosting large parties, gatherings intended to circumvent the public closing of bars and restaurants. That large gatherings have proven lethal, notably former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died after attending tRUMP's little rally in Tuscon earlier this summer, goes unheeded. As the minister in charge of the national health, Mike Pence, so inarticulately put it, the guidelines established by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) will not determine how or when we reopen the economy or send our children into harms way. We will open our businesses and schools, authority be damned.

Another of the great Ass Festivals is about to convene, this the quadrennial gathering of the rarefied mendacity known as the ResCUMlickan Party. This time to renominate the most ignorant, vile, corrupt and incompetent man ever to disgrace the national political stage. The nation be damned.

The common denominator here is alienation. Here the denizens of society gather to express their willful ignorance, giving the collective society the great middle finger. This is not only deeply troubling, but is outright dangerous. As armed bands storm state capitals to somehow 'liberate' us from some wholly imaginary oppression, one is reminded of the films of the late sixties featuring motorcycle gangs terrorizing small communities for no apparent reason, except that they could be terrorized. Vandalism writ large.

Contrast this with the Democratic National Convention where national leaders ranging from Vermont's independent Bernie Sanders to former Republican Governors John Kashic of Ohio, and New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman, called for national unity to confront the barbarians at the gates. In a very un-Obama speech, the former president sounded the alarm reminding all of us that responsibilities attend the exercise of freedom, that to stand aside and not participate is to be complicit in the undoing of the republic. It has come to that.

“I met her on the strip three years ago

in this Camero with this dude from L.A

I blew that Camero off my back

and drove that little girl away

Now there's wrinkles 'round my baby's eyes

and she cries herself to sleep at night

when I come home the house is dark

sobbing baby if you make it alright

“She sits on the porch of her daddy's house

all her pretty dreams are torn

she stares off alone into the night

with the eyes of one who hates for just being born

All the shut down strangers and hot rod angels

rumbling through this promised land

my baby and me, we're gonna ride to the sea

and wash these sins off our hands

Tonight, tonight the highway's bright

out of our way, mister, you best keep

for summer's here and the time is right

for racing in the street”

----Bruce Springsteen, Racing in the Street

Fascism, as Hannah Ardrendt tells us, is not an ideology but merely a revolt; not a march to a glorious future but a vandalism of the present in pursuit of some imaginary past. It is a revolt born of alienation, an alienation, Eric Hoffer reminds us, rooted in self-loathing. A movement of manifest hatred. They hate the present because they have not lived up to the moment. They hate us because they hate themselves.

Always there is some small measure of truth supporting every noble lie. One could accept the rational that the great alienation beneath the maggot hats is born of economic hardship and stagnation, of middle class struggle for existence. All that is true, but the revolt began well before the conservatives got their hands about the throat of the republic. People like William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were haranguing Americans about 'freedom' well before the advent of hard times, indeed their screeds coincided at precisely the last time in which the middle class was invited to the party, the last time the middle class benefited from economic good times. Nothing about the critique computes, for this movement is not based on reason but rather passion, the passion of hatred. What binds Caesar Disgustus to his idolaters is not sound and rational public policy designed to advance their interests, but hatred. He hates the same people they do. That is the common denominator, that is the cement that binds One has only to confront the latest outrage in which the Scum-In-Chief twitted that he has just made the suburbs safe by signing an executive order limiting the spread of low income housing in suburbia. In this way those in our great suburbs will be 'free' to enjoy their middle class existence without threat of having rub shoulders with undesirables; and we all know who are these undesirables. Freedom is defined not as creating opportunity but in limiting it. The very ideal of Freedom is now perverted in a crass attempt to shore up a political base for the upcoming election.

“freedom's just another word

for nothin' left to lose”

----Chris Kristofferson “Me and Bobby Magee”

Freedom divorced from context; freedom alienated from responsibility; freedom as cudgel with which to vandalize the very foundations of freedom; freedom in service of a villain. Let us wash these sins off our hands.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 21, 2020: A Scathing Rebuke, Unfit To Serve, Dwarfed By The Office.

“More than 70 former Republican National Security officials,” reports Yahoo News, “including some former members of the Trump Administration, came out in support of Joe Biden's bid for president Thursday, according to an open letter that also offered a scathing rebuke of President Donald Trump's first term in office." (1)

The indictment includes a list of particulars that is at once universally observable and damning. He has damaged our role as world leader; undermined the rule of law; divided the nation; vilified immigrants; disparaged our armed forces, as well as our intelligence and law enforcement communities. He has solicited foreign influence in our elections; aligned himself with dictators, and imperiled our national security. Once could readily add a host of other acts offending the nostrils, including the trashing of treaties without consulting the Senate which ratified them, and damaging our alliances with juvenile and noxious behavior.  One could readily point to the grifting and the graft, and the general overall stench of this cloud of corruption that now pervades the public forum.  

“We are profoundly concerned about the course of our nation under the leadership of Donald Trump”, the officials wrote, “through his actions and his rhetoric, Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president.”

The undersigned including former FBI director William Webster, former Republican Senator and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, warn the nation that tRUMP is “dangerously unfit to serve another term”.

This comes on the heels of appearances by a former Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen. Serving in this capacity during the first years of the tRUMP maladministration, he had opportunity to observe the carnival barker become president at close range. He has characterized the encounters as frightening He describes a tRUMP  that corresponds with previously published accounts by Michael Wolf, Amarosa and others of a man with no attention span; a man who cannot receive or process information; a man with a narrow, bigoted and wholly truncated view of the world. A man wholly unfit for, and dwarfed by, the office he holds.

As our Caesar Disgustus praises a ReSCUMlickan candidate for Congress who just won her primary in Georgia, a woman who embraces the madness of Qanon (2) and other fascist conspiracy nuts, one looks upon a little man with no redeemable faults, with no discernible intelligence, and with even less character. Indeed, when asked about the support he gets from the bowels of internet madness, our Caesar Disgustus once again offends the nostrils replying that, of course he didn't know much about them--believable because he doesn't know much about anything—but that he understood that they support him and that's a good thing, citing the only criteria that determines the outcome in his fetid cosmos. Imagine, if you will, how Dwight Eisenhower would have greeted the emergence of Qanon. One has only to review how he and others dealt with the John Birch Society. And therein lies the measure of our time. Where once sat Abe Lincoln and Dwight David Eisenhower, Donald J. tRUMP now tweets and shits. This is the legacy of the Generation of Swine, this is the American tragedy.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

____________

1. Barr, Luke “More than 70 Republican Former National Security Officials Come Out in Support of Biden.” ABC News. Jwww. Yahoo.com/gma/more-70-republican former national-232142014.html.
2. QAnon is a crypto-fascist organization spawned by the internet.  It is known for pumping the poison of several hair brained conspiracy theories into the political body, including the famous "pizzagate" nonsense wherein Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and other luminaries were operating a child sex slave operation out of a pizza parlor in Washington DC.  Some jackass calling himself Q and, therefore, anonymous, tells the gullible that he is on the inside and has knowledge of what is really going on, portraying tRUMP as some kind of mastermind hero who behaves the way he does in order to distract from his real purpose which is to save the world.  Yes, it is crazy, but this is what happens when one's base of political support believes in faith rather than logic, which believes in miracle rather than hard work, and believes in saviors rather than themselves.

August 17, 2020: Of the Money, By the Money, For the Money

“It's absolutely unacceptable that 457 billionaires increased their wealth by 731 billion during the pandemic, while 30 million Americans lost their jobs and now face hunger and eviction. Now, more than ever, we need an economy that works for all, not the 1%. The Senate must act.”

         ----Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (1)

It is indeed a rare thing for a major politician to sound the alarm bell when it comes to greed in America. The statistics are alarming, indeed obscene.

With the Congress in recess, and the White House hell bent on punishing its 'enemies', real and imagined—and more imagined than real—much needed aid is being withheld because Mitch McConnell and Donald tRUMP have no intention of coming to the assistance of hard strapped state and local governments. Nancy Pelosi had shepherded a three trillion dollar relief bill that would have put much needed money into the hands of Americans, shored up the hard pressed state and local authorities who are the first responders and have born the burden of this pandemic, and rescued the post office. No matter, tRUMP is not interested in bailing out state govenments because failure to do so means the greater likelihood of privatizing those services if they cannot be eliminated altogether. Ergo, the Postal Service.

The Democrats, in negotiations with the White House Chief of Staff, had agreed to take a trillion dollars off the table in a good faith effort to get some money into the hands of the people. Not good enough said the chinless bastard from Kentucky, who promptly washed his hands of the whole affair and close up shop for nearly a month. Pelosi had sent the relief bill to the Senate back in May. McConnell sat on it for nearly three months, and then folded up shop and walked away, the country be damned.

This is governance in America, such as it is. As gridlock paralyzes the nation, tRUMP announces that the Alaskan wildlife refuge will now be vandalized by the petroleum industry. Government of the money, by the money, and for the money.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

___________

1. Sanders, Bernie. Facebook post 8/17/20

August 16, 2020: War on the Post, Founding Institution, Flush the Turd

tRUMP's war on the post office is truly Un-American. The post office was created by Ben Franklin and others in the mid 18th century as the first 'national' institution, helping to  bind the colonies together into one national consciousness.  The creation of the Post Office was instrumental in transcending consciousness from colonial to national, in creating a 'national' identity.  Americans no longer saw themselves as Marylanders, or New Yorkers or Georgians, but with the help o the first 'national' institution, we increasingly began to see yourselves as 'American."  The post office is a founding institution, as important as the Constitution itself and predates the Boston Tea Party, the shots fired during the Boston Massacre as well as Lexington and Concord. It predates Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown. It predates the creation of the Continental Congress and the Articles of confederation, and predates the creation of this republic by several decades. The post office was instrumental in creating this Republic and to wage war upon it is to wage war upon one of our founding institutions. Caesar Disgustus must meet defeat. Flush the turd on November third.

August 13, 2020: If I Win, To The Precipice, Beggars The Imagination

“I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all of the people of the United States. that I will totally except the results of this great and historic presidential election-- IF I WIN! “

----Donald Trump addressing a gathering of his deplorables, October 20, 2016.

In an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, John Nagl, a retired Army officer, and Paul Yingling, a retired Army Lieutenant colonel, warned the Chairman that our Caesar Disgustus might refuse to leave office and that the military must be prepared to remove him. “ The once unthinkable scenario of authoritarian rule in the United States is now a real possibility. The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months' time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional Oath “ (1) The officers concluded saying that if tRUMP refuses to go, the military must remove him by force and that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs must be prepared to issue the order.

As Ana Kasparian pointed out in a podcast of The Young Turks (2), looming constitutional crisis is now seen as so serious that military officers are now pondering what the response will be when our erstwhile Caesar pushes the country to the precipice.

The concern is well founded. Other commentators have likewise raised alarm as our would-be tin horn dictator once again in an interview with Faux News' Chris Wallace, told the nation that he would wait and see what the results would be before recognizing the outcome. It was Wallace, it will be recalled, in his role as presidential debate moderator in 2016, who pointedly posed the question. Disgustus, it will also be recalled, responded that he would wait and see; that he would keep the country in suspense.

What has been lost in the ensuing alarm is not only the quote above, openly declaring before his bucket of deplorables that he would only recognize the election as legitimate if he won!, but his declaring the returns of 2016 illegitimate even when he won!. It was tRUMP, after all, who raised the entirely bogus spectre of three to five million illegal aliens voting in California and elsewhere that gave the popular vote to Hillary, going so far as to appoint a commission to investigate the fraud, an investigation that has now meandered into the dustbin of history.

In the interview with Chris Wallace, Disgustus once again took aim at mail-in voting, a means of exercising the franchise long practiced by the professional classes...bankers, lawyers, the well heeled country-club class, now being made available by state and local authority in order to ensure participation in time of pandemic. Accordingly, the Secretary of State of the State of Michigan has, for instance, sent out applications to every registered voter to apply for an absentee ballot in order to mail in one's vote. Disgustus who, like his country-club denizens, regularly vote in this manner, now suggests that the process will be riddled with fraud—even going so far as to tell the nation with a straight face that foreign governments will somehow use the mail-in ballot as a means of hijacking the election; that dogs and cats will now be able to vote against him.

Now in most jurisdictions—especially since the GOP has instituted draconian voter I.D. laws—one is required to produce a birth certificate and other pieces of identification—including photo Identification—like a driver's license in order to register to vote. How this can be commandeered by a foreign government or how this can open the doors to a stampede of canines, equines, bovines, or felines beggars the imagination.

Of course it doesn't make any sense, nor is it so intended. What Disgustus is doing is sowing doubt among a class of low-information, intellectually challenged, and culturally retarded deplorables who have long since been taught to suspend disbelief, a dangerous undertaking since it gives license to the worst manifestations of paranoia. Witches, ghosts, goblins, conspiracies, treacheries have escape the confines of hate radio, cable television, anti-social media, and Faux News and are now marching upon the forum.

This is where tRUMP and his rescumlican enablers are leading us. As tRUMP works to cripple the post office, threatening to delay the results and give him time to further smear the record and discredit the outcome, the question is: What will the military do? The once unthinkable is now upon us.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach, Convict, Remove, Imprison.

_________________

1. Naal, John, and Yingling, Paul. Defense One. Cited by John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian in the August 13 podcast of The Young Turks.

2. The Young Turks is a progressive-leaning podcast founded in 2002, a format that briefly appeared on MSNBC several years ago when the network, under the influence of Keith Olbermann, briefly functioned as a progressive antidote to Rupert Murdock's Faux News.