Tyranny of the minority will not stand

I’ve been waiting to use this great meme for a while now. Now is the time. The right-wing, batshit-crazy push to prematurely open up the nation’s churches (and other public spaces) during a lethal pandemic exemplifies this meme.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

— Matthew 6:5-6:6

Gee, was Jesus Christ himself for social distancing and for staying at home to pray?

I say that only in half-jest. Indeed, today’s “Christians” rarely actually follow the teachings of Jesus Christ as they readily are available in black and white in the New Testament.

Indeed, today’s “Christians” — at least the “President” Pussygrabber-loving kind — are the demonic that they claim that they oppose. They certainly have a death fetish if not a death wish.

Despite a plethora of church attendees and church officials already having contracted and having become ill or having died from the novel coronavirus, the “Christians” and their “leader,” “President” Pussygrabber, are demanding that all of the nation’s places of worship be opened up immediately.

Pussygrabber is wrong about just about everything and represents only the minority, wackadoodle viewpoint on just about everything, including “treating” the novel coronavirus with a household disinfectant and with bright light somehow introduced inside the body. (Maybe just shove a very bright flashlight up in there?)

Of course, for Pussygrabber, everything these days is about his “re”-election*, such as his jihad against voting by mail, even though voting by mail is supported by almost two-thirds of Americans and will go on nonetheless at least in those states that are not paralyzed by anti-voting Repugnican “leaders,”** since Pussygrabber has zero legal authority to prohibit voting by mail anywhere in the United States.

Pussygrabber is pushing for the re-opening of churches right now — something else that he has zero legal authority to do — only because he wants the churchgoers’ votes in November. He is perfectly OK with many “Christians” dying from the coronavirus, because all that is important to him is his “re”-election. Marinate on that fact for a while.

To me, ever since January 2017 it’s been like we don’t even have a president at all. It’s like a vacancy in the White House. I mean that entirely. And, of course, in the most important sense of what a president should be, should not be, should do and should not do, we do have a vacancy, a gaping vacancy, in the Oval Office.

I believe that people who believe in God — and it’s almost always a God who hates everyone they hate and who likes everyone they like, and otherwise always agrees perfectly with them on everything, isn’t it? — range from being incredibly immature and gullible to being mentally ill, but I do believe in the First Amendment right to believe whatever cray-cray you want to believe; it’s the item in the Bill of Rights that Americans seem to exercise the most.

A right that Americans do not possess, however, is the “right” to harm others. The Second Amendment allows you the right to own a firearm for your own actual self-protection; it does not grant you the right to go around shooting people with whom you might have any issue or dispute.

Similarly, the First Amendment allows you to gather for religious purposes, but what happens if by so doing, you endanger all of those around you with a potentially lethal infectious disease? Is your “right” to infect other people with a potentially deadly pathogen absolute?

No, when it comes to the prevention of the spreading of illness and death, your constitutional rights that certainly are protected under normal circumstances may be — and should be — curtailed. You have rights, we all have rights, but it’s not actually all about you. You are a social creature, and your actions and your inaction routinely affect others.

But how great it feels to pretend that one is standing up for Jesus Christ and for God and for freedom and for liberty, blah blah blah, against that

But we don’t have modern-day martyrs. We have modern-day dipshits. A true martyr would care about not sickening or even killing others. Today’s “Christians” don’t give a fuck about that at all. They are, as I have said, in a word, demonic.

And what these demons want is total control over the United States of America. They want theocracy — their theocracy, a “Christo”fascist theocracy — as much as if not even more than do those who supposedly want to impose “Sharia law” on the United States of America.

Yes, this nationwide shutdown does suck. It affects all of us in some ways to different degrees. But thus far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we’ve had about 1.6 million apparently confirmed cases of infection with the novel coronavirus, and we are approaching 100,000 deaths from the virus.

Many more Americans will continue to die of the novel coronavirus, whose future course is unknown, and if you want a comparison, each year for the past decade, an average of about 37,000 Americans have died from the flu.

So while no, the novel coronavirus’ body count thus far has not been like that of the plagues that decimated huge swaths of the populace in world history, the novel coronavirus is not just like the flu. The flu, with rare exceptions, such as the 1918 flu pandemic, doesn’t wipe out this many people.

There is, therefore, not just a public-health justification for trying to impede the transmission of the novel coronavirus, but there is a public-health obligation to do so.

From what I can tell, the batshit-crazy “Christians” (redundant…) in the United States are too few in number to do much more than ludicrously claim to be persecuted “Christians,” you know, just like in the days when Christians were tossed to the lions.

Their deluded fantasies of being able to use national catastrophes like 9/11 and the novel coronavirus pandemic for instituting their own brand of theocracy on the entire nation are just that: deluded fantasies.

But, should these “Christo”fascists ever actually pose a threat, we can fight the coronavirus and these nasty viruses who call themselves “Christians.”

I might say that I’d be happy for the “Christians” to give each other a lethal disease by refusing to take sensible precautions — I remember how giddy most of these “Christians” have been over us gay men having died from AIDS (just like Jesus Christ taught them to be!) — but it won’t be only the “Christo”fascists who will be infected with the coronavirus should the nation’s churches return to business as usual right now. (And it sure is a business, isn’t it?) It will be probably tens of thousands of innocent people dying, too.

We, the majority of Americans, who aren’t batshit-crazy “Christians,”*** have the right not to allow a minority to cause actual harm to the rest of us. Our constitutional, human right to stay alive and well supersedes the “right” to infect others with a potentially lethal virus.

—

*To me, if you didn’t win the popular vote, as Pussygrabber did not and as George W. Bush did not before him, then your entire “presidency” is illegitimate.

Democracy means that only the candidate who won the most votes should fill that office. Otherwise, it means nothing.

**To clarify, the Repugnicans just don’t want you to vote if you have a propensity to vote for Democratic candidates. They’re A-OK with you if you’re going to vote for them.

***Per Wikipedia, only 6 percent to 35 percent of Americans are evangelical “Christians,” but I’ll be generous and go with Gallup’s finding that 41 percent of Americans say they are.

That’s still a minority of 41 percent of Americans to a majority of 59 percent of Americans.

The majority must rule again in the United States of America — including having a president who is elected only by an actual majority of the American people. (Yes, the Electoral College must go.)

Distraction barely accomplished in Syria

Former “President” George W. Bush and current “President” Pussygrabber have a lot in common: Both are baby boomers who were born into wealth, both evaded the Vietnam War, both lost the popular vote and thus had and have no democratic legitimacy, and both believed and believe in using military action to fascistically help themselves politically, knowing fully well that, as has been the case their entire over-privileged lives, they themselves won’t bear any of the pain and suffering caused by their own actions and inaction.

“Mission Accomplished!” “President” Pussygrabber incredibly stupidly proclaimed (via Twitter, of course) after U.S., British and French forces struck what they said were the Syrian government’s chemical weapons sites.

Syria is no 9/11 or post/11 Iraq, but Reuters does remind us that

Trump’s message [of “Mission Accomplished!”] echoed the words of a banner that hung behind former President George W. Bush when he gave a speech in 2003 from the USS Abraham Lincoln during the Iraq War.

That visual dogged Bush’s presidency as the war dragged out, with worsening American casualties, for the remainder of his two terms in office.

Again, “President” Gee Dubya had proclaimed “mission accomplished” way too early. The U.S. had illegally, immorally, unjustly and unprovokedly invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003; on May 1, 2003, Gee Dubya gave his incredibly laughable “mission accomplished” speech (Wikipedia even has a stand-alone entry titled “Mission Accomplished speech”) — replete in a “Top Gun”-like flight suit (just like Pussygrabber, Gee Dubya himself never saw war, of course, his daddy very apparently having saved him from Vietnam by getting him into the Texas Air National Guard).

But U.S. involvement in the wholly bogus Vietraq War that the unelected* Bush regime had created didn’t officially end until December 2011.

There was plenty more death and destruction and pain and suffering to follow in Iraq after May 1, 2003, including the carnage in Fallujah in 2003 and 2004 and the wholly inexcusable Abu Ghraib House of Horrors that was exposed in 2004.

In October 2005, the Washington Post reported that 2,000 U.S. troops had been killed in the Vietraq War, more than 90 percent of them after the mission supposedly had been accomplished by May 1, 2003. Wikipedia similarly notes that “The vast majority of casualties [in the Vietraq War], both military and civilian, occurred after the [“mission accomplished”] speech.”

The unelected Bush regime had strong-armed only two European nations, Britain and Poland, into supporting its launch of the Vietraq War, and the French wisely refused involvement, for which the U.S. right wing ruthlessly excoriated the nation (even branding French fries as “freedom fries,” because we Americans are always mature and high-minded).

Germany and Russia, as well as Canada and Latin America, also refused their support of the launch of the Vietraq War, but for some reason these wise nations for the very most part escaped the excoriation that France received.

Again, Syria is no Iraq, of course; “President” Pussygrabber has had no 9/11-like event to try to use to justify the invasion of another nation, like the treasonous Bush regime had 9/11 to use to justify the invasion of Iraq even though none of the 9/11 hijackers was from Iraq and even though no connection between Iraq and 9/11 ever was found.

Attacks on U.S. soil and war against other nations (especially following the quite-rare attacks on U.S. soil) are great for presidential ratings. Here is Gallup’s graph of Gee Dubya’s approval ratings throughout his disastrous eight-year occupation of the White House:

Note the spike that Gee Dubya got because of 9/11, the biggest spike he ever got, and note that his second, much smaller spike came in and around March 2003, after he launched his bogus Vietraq War.

The trend was downhill from there — Gallup notes that Gee Dubya’s average approval rating in his first term was 62 percent and in his second term was 37 percent — but Gee Dubya managed to leverage the ongoing Vietraq War to get a second term, albeit narrowly (he got 50.7 percent to John Kerry’s 48.3 percent of the popular vote).

Can Pussygrabber do what Gee Dubya did — use bogus warfare to get a second term?

I don’t think so, not absent another 9/11-level event, which I highly doubt is going to happen.

And with an approval rating stubbornly stuck around only 40 percent, Pussygrabber wouldn’t have the level of support that he would need to launch a bogus war like Gee Dubya did.

But mostly, probably, Pussygrabber really would need 9/11 redux. (The American sheeple supported the Vietraq War because they just wanted what felt to them to be revenge for 9/11; they didn’t care that the unelected Bush regime was planning to invade the wrong nation. Some Arabs [albeit no Iraqis] had attacked us on 9/11, so we were going to attack an Arab nation, so help us God!)

So what the fresh strike on Syria has accomplished politically for “President” Pussygrabber is about zero. I expect his approval ratings to remain stuck around 40 percent for the foreseeable future. We Americans know “our” “president” well by now, and I see only tiny movement, if any, from the anti-Pussygrabber camp or even the somehow-still-neutral camp to the pro-Pussygrabber camp.

And Syria never struck the U.S., and so most Americans don’t give a shit about Syria, which the vast majority of them couldn’t find on a good map.

The unelected* Pussygrabber regime still has a litany of scandals and political problems, including the fact that the feds are investigating Pussygrabber’s personal lawyer, special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into the treasonous Pussygrabber regime’s treasonous ties to Russia is ongoing, Stormy Daniels just won’t go away, and one day (maybe even soon) that long-rumored pee tape just might emerge.**

Pussygrabber probably won’t get a second term***, and even if he does, impeachment in a second term, by which time the Democrats might control both houses of Congress, ever looms. (After all, Bill Clinton was a fucking Boy Scout compared to Pussygrabber.)

In the face of all of that, lobbing some missiles at Syria — and tweeting “Mission Accomplished!” — is as nothing.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong; absent an attack on U.S. soil by another nation, Pussygrabber began to brazenly falsely demonize the denizens of Latin America as a serious and growing “threat” to the U.S. even before he was “elected.”

Fascists always must have their scapegoats, from within and/or from without, to divert attention from their own treason and other criminality.

—

*Again, in my book, if you didn’t win the popular vote, as was the case with both Gee Dubya and Pussygrabber, you aren’t the legitimate president of the United States of America. And, of course, if you never legitimately were elected in the first place, your “re”-election is bullshit, too.

**If there were no pee tape, Pussygrabber wouldn’t have nagged former FBI chief James Comey to look into the matter. (I believe the imperfect Comey on this.) I mean, you don’t worry about the public emergence of something that doesn’t even fucking exist, do you?

***As I type this sentence, PredictIt.org has 57 cents on a Democrat winning the White House in 2020 and 43 cents on a Repugnican. That seems about right to me. I put Pussygrabber’s chance of being “re”-elected at about 40 percent, the same as his approval rating has been for months now.

Pussygrabber Jr. met with Kremlin-linked lawyer, but Papa Pussygrabber assures us it’s ‘time to move forward’

Updated below (on Tuesday, July 11, 2017)

Getty Images photo

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Pussygrabber Jr., photographed above, met in Daddy’s tower with a Russian lawyer from whom he had expected to receive damaging information about Billary Clinton, he has admitted himself. Reuters reports that like all of the other swamp creatures in “President” Pussygrabber’s swampy orbit, Pussygrabber Jr. has lawyered up.

The unelected and thus illegitimate Pussygrabber regime’s ties to Russia continue to be exposed at the same time that “President” Pussygrabber assures us that it’s “time to move forward” and actually talks about the United States working with Russia on cyber security.

What is established and not in dispute is that in June 2016, during the presidential campaign, Pussygrabber Jr. met with “a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer” at Pussygrabber Tower in the hopes of getting politically damaging information about Billary Clinton for use by the Pussygrabber presidential campaign.

The New York Times reported yesterday (emphases in bold are mine):

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by the president’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians.

The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.

While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son.

It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. said that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.

But on Sunday, presented with The Times’s findings, he offered a new account. In a statement, he said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which his father took to Moscow.

“After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

Two people briefed on the meeting said the intermediary was Rob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant. He did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”

Lawyers for Mr. Kushner referred to their statement a day earlier, confirming that he voluntarily disclosed the meeting but referring questions about it to Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Manafort declined to comment. In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said he asked Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner to attend, but did not tell them what the meeting was about.

Political campaigns collect opposition research from many quarters but rarely from sources linked to foreign governments.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton. WikiLeaks began releasing the material on July 22.

A special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration. …

Again, this is a convoluted saga, but it boils down to the fact that Pussygrabber Jr. met with a lawyer from the enemy state of Russia in June 2016 on the premises of Pussygrabber Tower with the understanding that this Russian would give him usefully damaging information about Billary Clinton.

There is, methinks, a reason that Pussygrabber Jr. never mentioned Clinton in his first account of his meeting with the Russian lawyer in his daddy’s tower.

As The Times notes, “Political campaigns collect opposition research from many quarters but rarely from sources linked to foreign governments.” Indeed. That stench that you’re detecting is the whiff of treason.

I tend not to believe, by the way, Pussygrabber Jr.’s claim that the Russian lawyer “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton.”

Not only did Pussygrabber Jr. not state this the first time, but this claim is a way-too-convenient reversal of the fact that, as The Times notes, “American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton.”

However, even if Pussygrabber Jr. were telling the truth — and as Papa Pussygrabber is a pathofuckinglogical liar, there is no reason to believe that the acorn has fallen far from the rotten tree — the fact remains that, again, what is uncontested is that Pussygrabber Jr. met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign in the hopes of getting negative, damaging intel on Billary Clinton.

That Team Pussygrabber is claiming that Papa Pussygrabber had had no knowledge of any of this activity that happened on his own property — which I find hard to swallow — is indicative of how politically damaging it is.

Also indicative of how politically damaging this is are the fact that The Times (as I type this sentence) retains yesterday’s news story as excerpted above as its top story on its home page and the fact that Pussygrabber Jr. has now retained his own lawyer, like everyone else surrounding our swamp monster of a “president.”

(In a two-paragraph news story, Reuters reports today:

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, has hired New York lawyer Alan Futerfas to represent him in connection with Russia-related investigations, the lawyer and Trump Jr.’s office said on Monday.

Futerfas, a sole practitioner who specializes in criminal defense, would not say when he was retained or whether he had any input into the statements Trump Jr. made over the weekend about a meeting with a Russian lawyer.)

As if all of this weren’t enough, yesterday Papa Pussygrabber not only proclaimed that he spoke sternly to Pootie about it and so it is “time to move forward” from all of this Russian collusion stuff — everyone who is under criminal investigation believes that is it “time to move forward,” of course — but he also surreally indicated that the U.S. and Russia can work together on cyber security. 

Pussygrabber’s tweet from yesterday read:

Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded..

After The Universe roared in laughter, Pussygrabber later tweeted this:

The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t-but a ceasefire can,& did!

Gee, hear that? Pussygrabber simply spoke “strongly” to Pootie about all of that election-meddling hoo-ha, and so “a ceasefire can,& did!” happen where Russian espionage on and sabotage of the United States and its elections is concerned.

I feel so safe and secure now; the whole Russian problem has been solved in one tweet!

I’d say that this shit can’t go on, but our long national nightmare probably will continue for some time to come. It’s a steady drip, drip, drip of a politically corrosive acid that probably isn’t going to take down the unelected Pussygrabber regime in one fell swoop, but that dooms it nonetheless.

Almost six months into this debacle, Pussygrabber’s approval rating doesn’t make it to even 40 percent in most reputable national polls, especially in Gallup’s.

He hasn’t hit even a 50-percent approval rating in any reputable national poll since he took office on January 20.

And traditionally, the strongest numbers that a president is going to get are in his first year in office. Terrorist attacks and the launches of wars, such as 9/11 and the Vietraq War, do produce spikes in a president’s approval rating* as a scared and/or bellicose nation wants to show its support for its imperious leader, but the general direction for a president’s approval ratings throughout his time in office is a downward slope.

Pussygrabber’s supporters are an obnoxiously vocal minority of Americans, but with his approval ratings mired at below 40 percent in most reputable national polls, I don’t see how Pussygrabber can get a second term, if he survives this one.

Update (Tuesday, July 11, 2017): As I’ve noted before, The New York Times and The Washington Post have been doing a bang-up job on covering the illegitimate Pussygrabber regime’s collusion with Russia. I have subscribed to both news organizations’ websites because not only do I want access to their reportage, but I wish to financially support it. Without such coverage, we would have the wholly fascist nation that Pussygrabber and his treasonous, fascist ilk want us to have.

The Russian collusion story isn’t going away because it’s true. If it weren’t, it would have dried up and blown away long ago. There is a shitload of “there” there.

The Pussygrabber regime’s collusion with Russia is in the top three blows to the United States’ so-called democracy in my lifetime; I put it up there with the treasonous, illegitimate George W. Bush regime’s blatant theft of the 2000 presidential election and the same regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked — and wholly bogus — Vietraq War.

(I was just a tot during Watergate, but even Watergate didn’t involve the wholesale theft of a presidential election like we saw in 2000, a wholly bogus war like the Vietraq War, or the collusion with an enemy nation by a presidential campaign to win the White House.) 

The New York Times reports today (emphases in bold are mine):

The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”

Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.

On June 9, [2016,] the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.

Over the last several days, The New York Times has disclosed the existence of the meeting, whom it involved and what it was about. The story has unfolded as The Times has been able to confirm details of the meetings.

But the email exchanges, which were reviewed by The Times, offer a detailed unspooling of how the meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came about — and just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was to accept what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.

The Justice Department, as well as the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, is examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

The precise nature of the promised damaging information about Mrs. Clinton is unclear, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was related to Russian-government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. But in recent days, accounts by some of the central organizers of the meeting, including Donald Trump Jr., have evolved or have been contradicted by the written email records.

After being told that The Times was about to publish the content of the emails, instead of responding to a request for comment, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out images of them himself on Tuesday.

“To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails” about the June 9 meeting, he wrote. “I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet.”

He added that nothing came of it.

On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter that it was hardly unusual to take information on an opponent. And on Tuesday morning, he tweeted, “Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!”

At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, read a statement from President Trump in which he defended his son. “My son is a high-quality person, and I applaud his transparency,” the president said.

But Ms. Sanders said she was “going to have to refer everything on this matter to Don Jr.’s counsel.” She said she did not know when the president had last spoken with his son.

The back story to the June 9 meeting involves an eclectic cast of characters the Trump family knew from its business dealings in Moscow. … [I suggest that you read the entire Times news article for that back story.]

As others have noted, it’s not “transparency” when you release information only after a media outlet has told you that it’s going to release it. And indeed, as The Times reports, Pussygrabber Jr.’s account of his June 9, 2016, meeting with the Russian lawyer about how to fuck over Billary Clinton has changed over time, with him admitting to extra, incriminating details only after they’ve already been reported by The Times.

For instance, initially he had said nothing about speaking about Billary Clinton with the Russian lawyer on June 9, 2016. Now, we have the e-mail chain that proves that Pussygrabber Jr. knew from the very first e-mail in the chain what the agenda was:

“The Crown prosecutor of Russia … offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” Pussygrabber crime family crony Rob Goldstone** wrote to Pussygrabber Jr. in the June 3, 2016, e-mail, adding, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump…”

Without flinching — without a “What do you mean, ‘part of Russia and its government’s support’ of Daddy?” — and not even a half-hour later, Pussygrabber Jr. replied: “Thanks Rob I appreciate that. … Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?”

So Pussygrabber Jr., in his own fucking words, welcomed the proposal of receiving potentially politically damaging and thus potentially politically useful intel about presidential candidate Billary Clinton from an agent or agents of the Russian government.

It is the intent that is the crime; whether it’s true or not that Pussygrabber Jr. never actually received any damaging intel about Billary Clinton (useful or not) from a Russian agent doesn’t matter. What matters is that he tried. Treason doesn’t have to be successful to be treason. It can be treason in the attempt.

Yes, Pussygrabber Jr. is “a high-quality person” — if by “high-quality person” we mean a traitor. Of course, Muscovite candidate Pussygrabber Sr. is a traitor, too, so it’s unsurprising that he would call his offspring “a high-quality person.”

And something that we have to annihilate right fucking now is the “argument” that Pussygrabber’s underlings are new to this whole politics thing, and so they are to be held immune from the law — even for fucking treason — because of their naivete.

The Hill reports that South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham said today, “Anytime you’re in a campaign and you get an offer from a foreign government to help your campaign, the answer is ‘no,'” and “We cannot allow foreign governments to reach out to anybody’s campaign and say, ‘We’d like to help you.’ That is a non-starter.”

The Hill added: “Graham acknowledged [that] he knows [that] Trump Jr. and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who also attended the [June 9, 2016, meeting], are new to politics.”

So fucking what?

So we are to reinforce our two-tiered “justice” system in which you may commit treason if you are a rich white man — while the rest of us are told, unforfuckinggivingly, that ignorance of the law is no excuse?

Fuck. That. Shit.

If every person who has participated in the treasonous collusion with Russia, from the very top to the very bottom, is not punished to the full extent of the law — well, that would be the stuff of which bloody revolutions are made.

P.S. To be clear, I’m not a Democratic Party hack. I’ve been very, very critical of the Democratic Party here for years. And I’m registered with the Green Party. After what the pro-Billary weasels of the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie Sanders, I immediately switched my registration back to the Green Party, and I’m done with the Democratic Party establishment.

Initially, yes, the whole Russian collusion thing might have seemed like an attempt to explain away Billary Clinton’s “loss” in November 2016 (it’s not a loss when you actually won the popular vote by millions), but over time is has become clearer and clearer that the Russian government has been very, very involved in helping to put Pussygrabber into the White House so that he would do the Russian government’s bidding, and that should disturb anyone of any party. No one can be unperturbed by that and still call himself or herself a patriot.

Those on the supposed far left who still keep saying that there is no “there” there on the Russia collusion thing really need to stop embarrassing themselves by shutting the fuck up. The evidence of the Russian collusion mounts day by day, and they need to take their head meds. I share their dislike of the Democratic Party establishment, including, of course, the Billarybots, but let’s fucking face reality.

Finally, to be clear, I’m also no fan of Democrat in name only Billary Clinton, as I’ve written here for many years. I never cast a vote for her, in the primary or in the general, and I never gave her a penny. She’s an incredibly awful human being, if she is a human being.

But that is not what matters here; what matters here is that we have evidence that Team Pussygrabber at least attempted to collude with the enemy nation of Russia in order to put Papa Pussygrabber into the White House.

We are indeed a numbed-out, dumbed-down nation, but this some serious, serious shit.

—

*Yes, of course there is the possibility that Pussygrabber will fabricate his Reichstag fire like “President” George W. Bush had his 9/11, which he used as a bullshit pretext to launch his illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War for the war profiteers and for Big Oil, but I just don’t see Pussygrabber getting away with it like Gee Dubya got away with it.

Pussygrabber’s credibility already is nil and his approval ratings are too low for him to try to drag the nation into a distracting war, methinks.

I think he’d get pushback even from members of his own party, such as from South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, who said this of Pussygrabber’s recent meeting with Putin, which he called “disastrous”: “You [Pussygrabber] are hurting your ability to govern this nation by forgiving and forgetting and empowering [Russia],” adding, “The more he [Pussygrabber] talks about this in terms of not being sure [about Russia’s espionage and sabotage], the more he throws our intelligence communities under the bus, the more he’s willing to forgive and forget Putin, the more suspicion [there is]. And I think it’s going to dog his presidency until he breaks this cycle.”

He won’t break the cycle. It’s all that he fucking knows, and as he and his henchswampcreatures are as guilty as sin, he has to keep the attempted diversions flying.

**The New York Times describes Goldstone as “a British-born former tabloid reporter and entertainment publicist who first met the future president when the Trump Organization was trying to do business in Russia.”

 

Billary’s health is a non-issue now in this hyper-polarized presidential race

Updated below (on Thursday, September 15, 2016)

Billary Clinton collapsing into a waiting van in New York City on Sunday, two days after a pneumonia diagnosis, and then taking a few days off from campaigning in order to rest, very probably won’t be anything remotely like a game changer, much to the disappointment of the political vultures circling the chronically coughing Clinton’s carcass.

First: As much as I have criticized Billary Clinton — whom I still don’t want to see as president and for whom I still am not going to vote and to whom I still am not going to give a penny — I would rather have Billary on her fucking death bed in the Oval Office than Der Fuhrer Donald Trump in the Oval Office for even one day, even on the most healthy day of his life.

So no, Billary’s current bout with pneumonia changes nothing for me, and I agree with the Politico writer who noted:

… There are the people who hate Clinton, hate the changes they see in the country which they think Clinton would only accelerate. They’re voting for Trump. Then there are the people who hate Trump, are disgusted by his race-baiting and terrified about him actually being president. They’re voting for Clinton.

The slice of people in between is and remains very, very thin, and includes all those Republicans queasy about having Clinton and her way of doing things in the White House but who are so opposed to Trump that they’re not even going to cast protest votes for Gary Johnson (at least not if they live in swing states).

“The idea that there is a huge chunk of independent voters out trying to make up their minds is a myth,” said Jim Hodges, a former governor of South Carolina and a Clinton supporter.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll out Sunday showed 7 in 10 voters have “definitely” chosen their candidate already. That’s in line with the number of undecideds in 2008 around this point in the race. Notably, 60 percent of voters said Clinton is qualified to serve as president, while only 36 percent said the same about Trump — a big hurdle for the Republican to overcome in persuading them to vote for him.

“It’s people who are uncomfortable with both candidates, and it’s more about making someone so uncomfortable with one of those candidates that they have to vote for the other,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, about the few undecided voters left in America. “But it’s just playing on the edges at this point.” …

Absolutely. At this point, with less than two months to go before the election, it would take a lot more than Billary’s bout with pneumonia to move the needle significantly in Trump’s favor.

As unenthusiastic as I am defending Billary, it is understandable, I think, that Billary’s campaign didn’t tell us earlier that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday: with the right-wing rumor mill and smear machine at full tilt regarding Billary’s supposed poor health, of course the news that she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia would have been only even more grist for that rumor mill and smear machine. (But, of course, not releasing the information in a timely manner only fueled more charges of even more classic Clintonian slipperiness.)

And politically speaking, Billary pretty much had to make that ill-fated public appearance in New York City on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the perversely sacred cow that is 9/11. The choice was to appear or to have to explain the non-appearance (see the immediate paragraph above).

If a candidate for office has a chronic or even terminal illness that could hinder his or her ability to finish out the term in office that she or he is seeking (and to do a decent job in that office), then he or she ethically should disclose that so that the voters can make an informed choice, but a bout with curable pneumonia (assuming that Team Billary isn’t hiding anything about Billary’s long-term health) doesn’t make one unfit for office.

There are many things that make Billary unfit for the presidency, but her health status probably isn’t one of them.

On that note, Politico also ran a piece on how the Democratic Party, in the view of one former head of the Democratic National Committee (not Debbie Wasserman Schultz), does not have a fleshed-out-enough plan as to what to do should, heaven forfend, Billary Clinton die or otherwise be incapacitated between now and Election Day.

It’s a no-brainer to me: U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders won 45 percent of the pledged delegates in the Democratic Party presidential primary elections and caucuses, so the nomination should go to him should Billary die or otherwise become incapacitated. Cheating by the Billarybots (including the Billarybots within the DNC, some of whom [including Wasserman Schultz] resigned after their anti-Bernie e-mails were leaked by WikiLeaks) aside, Bernie Sanders was, after all, the Democratic voters’ second choice.*

Of course, the Democratic Party stopped being democratic long, long ago, and the corrupt DNC would pick Billary’s replacement, so don’t get too excited over the prospect of a house being dropped on Billary and Bernie Sanders being on the ticket in November after all.

P.S. Fivethirtyeight.com right now (as I type this sentence) puts Trump’s chances of winning the White House at 31.2 percent, which is exactly where it was when I last posted.

Again, I don’t expect the needle to move much, if any, really, between now and Election Day. Billary and Trump are known, having been in the public spotlight since the 1980s and the 1990s, and the nation is polarized.

Update (Thursday, September 15, 2016): Yikes. Fivethirtyeight.com right now puts Trump’s chances of winning at 37.4 percent. He’s been higher than that before — fivethirtyeight.com put him at a 50.1 percent chance on July 30 (soon after the Repugnican National Convention) — but the election isn’t that far away.

We’ll see if Pneumoniagate subsides; I think that it will, even though the larger issue, politically, I suspect, is the Clintonesque lack of transparency about the illness rather than the illness itself.

I also don’t see Basketofdeplorablesgate as a big deal. Again, this is a highly polarized electorate already. (Mittens Romney’s remark about the “47 percent” probably didn’t contribute much to his loss in 2012; probably the biggest factor in Romney’s loss, besides the fact that he’s an unlikeable plutocratic asshole, is that it’s incredibly hard to deny a sitting president a second term [ask John Kerry].)

Anyway, I’m not sure exactly at which point to panic, but it seems to me that if Trump hits 40 percent or above and stays there through Election Day, yeah, it’s time to panic.

—

*No, Vice President Joe Biden wouldn’t be an acceptable Billary replacement; if he wanted the job of president, he should have run for it, as Bernie did.

And no, Billary’s running mate Tim Kaine isn’t acceptable, either; the primary and caucus voters never got to weigh in on him.

Bernie would be the only democratic way to go should something happen to Billary between now and Election Day.

 

Live-blogging the 9th Dem debate

Getty photo

Billary Clinton and Bernie Sanders clashed tonight in a debate in Brooklyn, New York, that wasn’t as acrimonious as it could have been, but in which the audience members loudly booed Billary at least a few times and repeatedly chanted, “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” (There were no chants for Billary and no boos for Bernie [no loud ones, anyway].) Something that Billary didn’t respond to at all during the debate was Bernie’s quite-correct assertion that he pulls in a lot more independent voters than she does, and that independent voters are critical for winning the White House (as Democratic die-hards can’t win it alone), and that he long has polled significantly better against the Repugnican Tea Party presidential frontrunners than has Billary.

5:40 p.m. (all times Pacific Time): The ninth Democratic Party presidential debate is scheduled to begin in 20 minutes. I’m streaming it via CNN’s website. I expect the sparks to fly between Bernie Sanders and Billary Clinton tonight, and I expect Billary to lie as even she has never lied before.

5:55 p.m.: The debate is to begin in five minutes. My intent is to give my impressions as the debate unfolds, not to be a stenographer, so for complete, thorough coverage of the debate, you’d have to watch it and/or read its transcript after it’s posted online.

I tentatively plan to write only about new lines of discussion, but there may not be very many of those, so this might be repetitive of my past live-bloggings of the previous eight debates.

I’m still very much rooting for Bernie Sanders, but these debates have become a bit tiresome; they’ve been going on for six full months now.

6:00 p.m.: National anthem now. Yawn. Bernie came out first, followed by Billary. They had a cursory, not-very-sincere-looking handshake, and once again I’m wondering who the hell dressed Billary. Is that a raincoat? (In any event, anyone as chummy with gay men as she has claimed to be would be dressed a lot better, it seems to me…)

6:02 p.m.: Bernie reminds us that he started off 70 percentage points behind Billary in the nationwide polls but that a few recent nationwide polls have had him slightly ahead of her, and he reminds us that he won eight of the last nine primary-season contests.

Bernie rehashed his stump speech, but it seemed fresher tonight than it has in a long time. (Admittedly, it could just be that there was more than a month between the last debate and this one…)

6:04 p.m.: Billary reminds us that she represented New York in the U.S. Senate for eight years. She mentions 9/11 but not the Vietraq War that she voted for in October 2002.

She mentions “diversity” — a play to identity politics, because that’s all that she has left — but she doesn’t mention income inequality. (Perhaps because she’s a multi-millionaire…)

6:06 p.m.: Bernie, asked if Billary is qualified to be president, says yes, but says, “I question her judgment.” He mentions her vote for the Vietraq War and the million$ that she has taken from Wall Street.

6:08 p.m.: Oh, snap! Billary says she was elected as senator for New York twice and was selected by President Hopey-Changey to be his secretary of state. Therefore, her judgment must be swell!

She now claims that Bernie can’t explain how he’d achieve his central goal of breaking up the banks. Actually, I wouldn’t say that breaking up the banks is the central pillar of Bernie’s campaign. It’s only a part of it, one of many parts of it.

6:10 p.m.: Bernie is pretty red in the face while Billary has this self-satisfied, shit-eating grin on her face. She now says that an attack on her is an attack on Obama. She just got booed by the audience for that, appropriately.

Billary has tried to use Obama as a human political shield her entire campaign. It is demonstrative of her character.

6:12 p.m.: Repetitive stuff about breaking up the banks. (Again, this is the ninth debate that I’ve live-blogged…)

6:15 p.m.: Billary’s tactic clearly is to have this shit-eating grin, like she’s just so above it all. I don’t think that this tactic is going to work for her. (It worked for Joe Biden when he debated Paul Ryan, but this isn’t the Biden-Ryan debate.)

The audience tonight is dynamic, reflecting, I think, how the Bernie-Billary fight is coming to a climax.

6:17 p.m.: More repetitive shit, with Billary still trying to argue that although Goldman Sachs — which just paid billions in penalties — gave her shitloads of money for speeches, it has not affected her decision-making at all.

6:19 p.m.: To thunderous applause, Billary is asked why she won’t release those speech transcripts. She isn’t answering the question, but instead is trying to deflect.

6:21 p.m.: The moderator won’t let the question go, and the audience goes wild. Billary deflects again, saying that she has released 30 years of tax returns, but that Bernie hasn’t.

The moderator for a third time asks about those transcripts. Billary again says she’ll release her transcripts when everyone else (on the Repugnican Tea Party side) does and again says that she has released more tax returns than has Bernie. Apples to oranges, but that’s her game.

6:23 p.m.: Bernie promises to release more tax returns soon. He says they promise to be “boring,” as he is “one of the poorer members of the United States Senate.” (This is true. Google it.)

6:24 p.m.: Wolf Blitzer, who should work for Faux “News,” asks how Bernie, with his confrontational style toward corporations, as U.S. president effectively could promote U.S. business. (This is, you see, a U.S. president’s No. 1 job — to make the filthy rich even richer!)

Bernie is talking about how unethical, harmful corporate practices and corporate abuses must be curbed. Bernie indicates that corporations must treat their workers and the environment with respect. And that not all corporations are bad actors.

6:27 p.m.: Bernie speaks of the need to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour.

6:28 p.m.: Billary has laughed at Bernie at least two or three times. Again, while it worked for Joe Biden against Paul Ryan, it just makes her look arrogant and condescending — especially when most of her answers to these debate questions range from vague to evasive.

6:29 p.m.: Oh, shit. Wolfie reminds us that Billary publicly stood with Andrew Cuomo for New York’s new $15/hour minimum wage but that throughout her campaign, until only very recently, she has supported only a $12/hour federal minimum wage.

Billary now supports the $15/hour minimum wage. Seriously. She is acting like she’s always supported $15/hour. This is a fucking lie.

Wow. Bernie just said that “once again, history has outpaced Senator Clinton.” Absolutely. The audience is going wild.

The members of this audience have done their research and have been paying attention, so Billary’s sudden, magical time-space leap to always having supported a $15/hour federal minimum wage doesn’t fly with them.

6:34 p.m.: Bernie laughs at Billary, as she has been laughing at him, and she says, with her false concern that she displays so often and so readily, “This is not a laughing matter.” (The topic is guns.)

I don’t believe for a nanosecond that multi-millionaire Billary truly cares about any of us commoners, and of course she is well-protected from gun violence herself, but it’s an easy issue on which to jump on board, because who is for gun violence?

6:37 p.m.: Bernie says that the National Rifle Association gives him a “D-” rating on guns. Indeed. This is a non-issue, a red herring that a desperate, pro-plutocratic Billary & Co. created from thin air.

6:40 p.m.: Again the “issue” of whether gun manufacturers should be liable for the misuse of their products. This is another non-issue. If guns are that bad, then they should be made illegal altogether. You can’t blame the manufacturer of a legal product for its misuse. This is mushy-headed liberal insanity.

(I define “liberal” and “progressive” very differently, by the way, but that’s another blog post. In a nutshell, though, Billary is a liberal — she’s a multi-millionaire who pushes social issues and identity politics that, just coinky-dinkily convenient for her and her millionaire and billionaire buddies, for the most part don’t alter or significantly threaten or jeopardize the socioeconomic status quo — and Bernie is a progressive — he wants to change the socioeconomic status quo quite radically.)

Again, the whole gun “issue” is a distraction from Billary’s flaws and shortcomings, and a rather fucktarded one.

6:43 p.m.: Billary is asked if her hubby’s 1994 crime bill was a mistake. She states that portions of the bill improved things but that other portions created new problems. She reminds us that Bernie voted for the crime bill and also has said that portions of it proved to be good and others bad.

Billary says she wants “white people” to recognize systemic racism. I agree with that, but all people are capable of racism, not just white people — let’s please not single out and demonize only white people for the wrong of racism — and again, I am incredibly leery of the Clinton brand of identity politics, which has us commoners doing nothing about our common socioeconomic plight while we fight each other, stirred up by craven politicians who maximize identity politics for their own personal gain.

6:49 p.m.: Bernie is asked how as president he would reduce the number of prisoners within the U.S. when most of the prisoners are state prisoners, not federal prisoners.

Um, federal law trumps state law. Federal laws, including civil rights laws, can tackle the problem of over-incarceration. The red states can whine, but they have to fall in line. We can bring them to heel — again.

6:51 p.m.: On break now. Billary has been booed by this lively audience several times. This audience seems to be more pro-Bernie than pro-Billary. Especially when she tries her typical evasive and deflective bullshit and her lying, the audience boos.

6:55 p.m.: The topic now is energy.

Billary claims that both she and Bernie have taken money from the fossil fuels industry. Bernie says more than 40 lobbyists for the industry maxed out their contributions to Billary.

Both Billary and Bernie apparently agree that climate change is a problem.

Billary says she worked on bringing nations together on battling climate change as secretary of state. She says Bernie wasn’t appreciative enough of the Paris agreement.

Bernie says that we have to go beyond paper agreements and actually work to combat climate change, including banning fracking. Billary supports fracking.

Billary is at length equating Bernie’s criticism of the Paris agreement as not being enough to an attack on Obama — something that she wouldn’t need to do (piggypack on Obama’s popularity) if she weren’t so widely despised herself.

7:02 p.m.: Billary now seems to be backtracking on her historical support for fracking, which she now indicates she always only has envisioned as being temporary. (Riiight!) This is still yet another issue on which history has outpaced her.

7:03 p.m.: Bernie corrects the record, stating how Billary has supported fracking around the world, and he criticizes her incrementalism. Climate change is too serious for incrementalism, he proclaims, adding that we needed to address climate change “yesterday.”

7:05 p.m.: We are on “a suicide course” with climate change, Bernie says. Yup.

Bernie says we have to phase in new sources of sustainable energy and phase out old, unsustainable sources of energy while Billary still has that condescending, smug, shit-eating grin on her face that makes her more unlikeable, not more likeable. Really, she has no one but herself to blame for her upside-down favorability numbers.

7:08 p.m.: Wolfie reminds Billary that Obama says his biggest mistake as president was bungling Libya.*

Billary blathered about Libya. I didn’t listen much, to be honest. Bernie now talks about how “regime change often has unintended consequences,” and he has mentioned Iraq and made a bit of a comparison between U.S. meddling in both nations.

Billary says Bernie in the Senate voted for the Libya intervention. This is all rehashed from the previous debates.

Bernie says that just repeating something doesn’t make it true. Bernie says that he never voted in support of “regime change” in Libya. He says he voted only for “democracy in Libya.”

7:14 p.m.: Bernie points out how much Billary has been relying on Obama as her human shield (I paraphrase) and says that Billary as secretary of state wanted a no-fly zone in Syria that Obama didn’t and still doesn’t want.

7:16 p.m.: The stupid moderator points out to Bernie that both Donald Trump and he state that the United States has to pull too much of the weight within NATO. This is supposed to be a gotcha! question, but so the fuck what?

Although I’d never vote for Der Fuehrer Trump, in the mishmash of his political “offerings” he does present some libertarian leanings, and I do agree with some of the libertarian views, such as an anti-war and anti-war-profiteering sentiment and a fierce respect for and defense of privacy rights. (I disagree with them on pretty much everything else.)

And even a broken clock is right twice a day, so there can be one or two or maybe even three whole things that Trump is actually accidentally right about.

7:21 p.m.: Israel now. Oh, God. Bernie says he is “100 percent pro-Israel,” but “we have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.” Bernie (who is Jewish) says his views on the Palestinians don’t make him “anti-Israel.”

Billary takes her predictable pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian stance. After all, it’s AIPAC that gives her the big campaign contributions, not the impoverished Palestinians. Her “right-to-defend-yourself” rhetoric makes her sound like a puppet of wingnutty war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. (Because she is. His hand is entirely up her ass, moving her mouth and her arms.)

Cool. Bernie says that Billary’s fairly recent speech to AIPAC made no substantive mention of the rights and welfare of the Palestinian people. Of course not! She gave AIPAC the speech that AIPAC paid for!

“You gave a major speech to AIPAC … and you barely mentioned the Palestinians,” Bernie reiterates after Billary tells us how badly poor Bibi Netanyahu has had it, with those “terrorists” in Israel’s midst.

(Israelis have slaughtered far more Palestinians than vice-versa, but since Israel uses shiny, high-tech, U.S. weapons, that’s not terrorism. Only poor people who don’t have access to such high-tech killing methods can be terrorists, you see. We Americans and Israelis are civilized killers — not terrorists!)

Wow. Bibi Netanyahu, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright — Billary Clinton sure loves a war criminal!

7:34 p.m.: Bernie tiresomely is asked how the nation would pay for his initiatives to improve the socioeconomic status quo, such as health care and higher education.

Bernie says he is “determined” to transfer the money that has gone to the 1 percent back to the working class and middle class.

Billary says we’re at “90 percent” coverage for health care, but we still have for-profit health care, replete with shitty health care plans that bankrupt people with the out-of-pocket-costs anyway.

Bernie reminds us that other major nations guarantee health care for their people at a much lower cost than in the U.S., and that they don’t make their college students slaves to student-loan debt. “Please don’t tell me that we can’t do what many other nations around the world are doing,” he says. Yup.

This is mostly rehashed, but it’s important. There indeed is no good reason, outside of incredible greed and politicians who treasonously sell us commoners out to moneyed interests, that the U.S. doesn’t provide health care and education for all of its people.

7:43 p.m.: Talk of Social Security now. (It’s a complicated topic. Read the transcript of the debate when it’s up.) Billary says that she and Bernie are “in vigorous agreement,” but Bernie indicates that Billary has changed her position on Social Security, as she has on so many other issues. The audience is chanting, “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!”

Billary, under fire, now claims that Bernie isn’t a real Democrat. Wow. But this is how she operates when she is backed into a corner.

7:46 p.m: Bernie and Billary are “in vigorous agreement” on the issue of the U.S. Supreme Court, except that Bernie says he’d pick a nominee who would overturn Citizens United, and apparently that wouldn’t be President Hopey-Changey’s current moderate nominee.

Billary says her Supreme Court nominee would have to overturn Citizens United and uphold Roe vs. Wade, and she goes off onto the topic of abortion and reproductive rights.

Abortion/reproductive rights are important — I always have been and always will be pro-choice, and I believe that birth control, including entirely voluntary sterilization, should be provided to all people free of charge — but abortion and reproductive rights so easily can be used as a hot-button distraction from other issues.

Bernie says his pro-choice voting record is 100 percent, and he adds that he supports the LGBT community, and adds that Vermont led the way on same-sex marriage.

7:50 p.m.: We’re done pandering to identity groups now, thank Goddess. (I’m gay, but I sense when I’m being pandered to, and I hate it.)

Bernie is asked whether or not he’s a real Democrat. He says that he is, and reminds us that he does better among the independents than Billary does, and that the White House only can be won with independents, and can’t be won with Democratic die-hards alone — this is absolutely true, as I’ve written lately — and Bernie reminds us that in match-up polls against the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidates he does better than Billary does.

Bernie says the “future of the Democratic Party that I want to see” doesn’t rely on big corporate cash.

Billary reminds us that thus far she has received more votes than has Bernie or Donald Trump. She claims she leads a broad coalition. Hmmm. Not really. Not when she doesn’t have the youth vote or the independent vote.

Bernie, who says he’s going to win the nomination, says “Secretary Clinton cleaned our clock in the Deep South.” But, he says, “we’re out of the Deep South now.”

He said he will “obliterate” Trump or whoever the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate is.

Billary resists the charge that she’s a darling of the Deep South, but that is indeed her power base. I mean, here is the map of where the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary race stands right now:

Wikipedia graphic

Yes, Billary (whose victories are in golden-yellow [Bernie’s are in green]) has won a few states outside of the South (as I’ve noted, I consider Arizona to be part of the South more than part of the West), but without her wins in the South, she wouldn’t be the putative frontrunner right now. (Duh.)

Billary says she will win and “unify” the party. She has indicated that her delegate lead is insurmountable.

7:59 p.m.: On break now.

Billary can brag about her delegate lead — she leads by 214 in pledged/democratically earned delegates (1,309 to Bernie’s 1,095), and the “super-delegates” can’t vote until the party convention in late July — until she’s blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that while John Kerry sewed up the nomination in March 2004, Billary is so widely disliked that the race is stretching out, just as it did in 2008, when she finally conceded to Obama in June.

She might win this thing, but she will remain a weak candidate. Nothing substantial has changed since the party’s voters soundly rejected her in 2008.

8:04 p.m.: Closing statements.

Bernie first. He reminds us that his father was a Polish immigrant to Brooklyn.

Millions of Americans can create a government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent, he proclaims.

Chants of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” as Billary tries to begin her closing statement.

Billary reminds us that New Yorkers elected her to the U.S. Senate twice and that they experienced 9/11 together. (Geez, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors used 9/11 endlessly for political gain.)

She does not mention her support of the Vietraq War, the most important vote that she had in the U.S. Senate — and that she fucked up royally.

Billary again plays up the “barriers” to different groups, another shout-out for identity politics. She explicitly says that it’s not just income inequality that we have to tackle.

That’s true, but her corporate sugar daddies really, really want her to focus on identity politics rather than on income inequality; they want us commoners too busy fighting each other over race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. rather than coming after them for our fair sliver of the pie.

That is the central issue (well, only climate change is a larger issue), which Bernie Sanders identified a long, long time ago.

In closing, tonight’s debate probably helped Bernie more than Billary. There clearly was more love for Bernie than for Billary among the audience members. I don’t recall that Bernie was booed once, whereas Billary was booed at least a few times, or that Billary’s name was chanted once, whereas Bernie’s was at least a few times.

I mean, the overall audiovisual was of one candidate clearly more popular than the other, at least among that audience. How can that be good for Billary?

And Billary’s smiling/smirking and laughing — that was off-putting and probably worked against her rather than for her, as it only could have contributed to her net unlikeability and net unfavorability. Who the fuck advised her to do that?

Probably the same idiot who dressed her…

—

*A retrospective President Hopey-Changey recently cited his administration’s bungling of a post-Muammar Gaddafi Libya as his No. 1 failure as president, but I quite disagree.

His No. 1 failure as president, hands down, was his failure to use the shitloads of political capital that he had in 2009 and in 201o to push through a progressive agenda, when his party controlled both houses of Congress.

It was a colossal dereliction of duty as well as an unpardonable violation of his campaign promises (thus, I could not in good conscience and therefore did not vote for him again in 2012).

It also led to the rise of the “tea party” in 2009 and 2010 and lost the Democrats control of the House of Representatives for the last six of Obama’s eight years in office — guaranteeing gridlock for the last three-fourths of his presidency.

It was incredible political malpractice, something that a right-winger never would have done. (I mean, George W. Bush exploited political capital that he didn’t even have, whereas Obama refused to spend a fucking penny of the immense amount of political capital that he did have.)

Der Führer Trump hits new low with attack on physically disabled man

Updated below

A screen grab shows Repugnican Tea Party “presidential” candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday publicly mocking a New York Times reporter who has a congenital physical disability. The reporter’s “crime”? Telling the truth instead of supporting the dangerously fascistic Trump’s bold-faced lies against yet another already oppressed minority group. Reports USA Today: “Referring to Serge Kovaleski while on the campaign trail in South Carolina, Trump told a rally: ‘You’ve got to see this guy.’ He then ridiculed Kovaleski’s appearance by bending his wrists and jerking his arms around. Kovaleski has a chronic condition that affects his joints called arthrogryposis.” Kovaleski is pictured below, on the left.

Getty images

It should come as no shock to see Donald Trump make fun of a man with a congenital physical disability during a “presidential” speech. (Video of this wonderful event is here.)

The Nazis, after all — and Trump, unshockingly,  is of German descent — murdered tens of thousands of human beings with disabilities in a program that later was dubbed “Action T4.” As Wikipedia explains:

The program ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941, during which the recorded 70,273 people were killed at various extermination centers located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria. Several rationales for the program have been offered, including eugenics, natural selection, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the formal end date of the program, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices that had been instituted under Action T4, until the defeat of Germany in 1945. The unofficial continuation of the policy led to additional deaths by medicine and similar means, resulting in 93,521 beds “emptied” by the end of 1941. Historians estimate that twice the official number of T4 victims might have perished before the end of the war, exceeding 200,000.

So as not to be a hypocrite, and to provide full disclosure, I myself have used the term “fucktard” (and other iterations of “retard”). Many times. But my first job out of college was working with mentally and physically disabled individuals, and while I probably shouldn’t use the term “fucktard” to denote a person of low intelligence (who has not actually been diagnosed clinically with mental retardation, let me add, importantly), I don’t make fun of people with actual physical or intellectual disabilities, because to do so is to show a stunning lack of empathy for another human being who has challenges that oneself does not.

And, of course, I am not running to be president of the United States of America.

There long has been no way in hell that I would or could support fascist Führer wannabe Donald Trump in any way, and to some degree I suppose that I’ve become immune to the venom and bile that has been spewing freely from Trump’s pie hole for months now, but this latest Trumpism should be the one that finally takes him down.

The Amazon.com series “The Man in the High Castle,” based upon a Philip K. Dick dystopian novel that envisions a scenario in which Germany and Japan actually won World War II and divvied up the United States between them, is timely. (Just last night I watched the first episode. It even makes rather chilling reference to eugenics, which the Nazi Germans occupying the United States are still practicing routinely.)

Here in Donald Trump is a patently fascist presidential candidate (of German blood, appropriately) openly mocking, in a “presidential” speech, a man who has a congenital physical disability.

How will the masses respond to this?

How will the masses respond to such utterly shameless bullying? I mean, other groups of people Trump has attacked — “illegals” from south of the border, Muslims, women, et. al. — can, for the most part, defend themselves against Trump’s bigotry to at least some degree.

But attacking those with disabilities?

Really?

How low, exactly, can Donald Trump go?

Should the masses actually allow Donald Trump to sit in the Oval Office, I can guarantee you this: In the future, if we even still have anything remotely resembling a democracy left, presidential candidates might be asked: If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Donald in order to prevent the crimes against humanity that he perpetrated?

The Germans claimed that they didn’t know what Adolf Hitler was all about until it was too late. Bullshit. The signs were all there all along.

With Donald Trump, similarly, the signs are all there.

If we actually allow this “man” to be president — whether we actually elect him or whether we just allow him to steal the White House, like we just allowed George W. Bush & Co. to do in 2000* — we won’t be able to claim, with any shred of truth at all, that we didn’t know.*

P.S. If you think that noting Trump’s German ancestry is out of bounds, well, apparently Trump possibly has had a problem with it himself, or at least his father apparently had a problem with it. Notes Wikipedia:

Trump’s paternal grandparents were German immigrants; Trump’s grandfather, Frederick Trump (né Friedrich Trump), was a successful Klondike Gold Rush restaurateur. In his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump incorrectly claimed that Frederick Trump was originally called Friedrich Drumpf and of Swedish origin, an assertion previously made by Fred Trump for many years. Trump later acknowledged his German ancestry and served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York City.

More disclosure: A while ago I participated in the Genographic Project, and my genes (if I interpret my results correctly) are a match for the dominant genetic populations first of the United Kingdom and second of Germany, so it seems quite possible if not probable that I have at least some German blood in me, as do many if not even most white Americans. That said, the Germans always have rubbed me the wrong way, even Nazism aside.

Update: Donald Trump has issued a lying, cowardly statement denying that he said/did what he said/did.

In the video I linked to above, Trump clearly says to his audience, “You gotta see this guy” (Serge Kovaleski, whom he has just called a “poor guy”) — this certainly indicates that he has met or at least seen Kovaleski, at least in a picture — and then Trump immediately mimics the distorted voice and gestures of someone with a physical and/or intellectual disability.

Yet now Trump alternately claims that he’s never laid eyes on Kovaleski and that “Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him” and “Serge Kovaleski must think a lot of himself if he thinks I remember him from decades ago – if I ever met him at all, which I doubt I did.”

The Washington Post has noted that “Kovaleski covered Trump while reporting for the New York Daily News between 1987 and 1993, a tumultuous period for Trump in which he struggled through several financial setbacks,” casting further doubt on Trump’s claim that he has no idea what Kovaleski even looks like. (Trump strikes me as the kind of individual who certainly would do opposition research; not only does he have the paranoia and the egomaniacal grandiosity, but he has the mean$ to have his henchpeople do this for him.)

Trump also took the page right out of the fascist/right-wing playbook in which he blames his victim; he proclaimed that Kovaleski “should stop using his disability to grandstand.”

Yes, it’s Kovaleski’s fault that Trump very, very apparently made fun of him and his congenital condition. Not only has Trump now attacked Kovaleski twice — Kovaleski, to my knowledge, has made no public statement, by the way (the New York Times has) — but Trump bizarrely has attacked the New York Times at length, criticizing its fiscal management and questioning its ethics, its quality and its relevance, which has absofuckinglutely nothing to do with the fact that Donald Trump very, very apparently recently publicly mocked a man for his congenital physical disability during a “presidential” appearance.

What started this whole fracas, of course, is Trump’s colossal falsehood that on television he saw “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center even as the twin towers burned and fell. This is a right-wing über-fabrication meant to further the wingnuts’ anti-Muslim agenda, of course.

But Donald Trump is too much of a fucking liar and a fucking coward to admit that he lied or, at the very minimum, very carelessly misspoke about “thousands” of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey on September 11, 2001. If he didn’t outright lie, which I think he most likely did, then he certainly didn’t care about the facts, the truth, because his overriding objective was to bash Muslims for personal political gain, not to tell the truth. Very presidential!

As I wrote above, we are seeing ample signs about what kind of “man” Donald Trump is. We ignore these flashing lights and sirens at our own peril.

And when I call Donald Trump a fascist, I mean it in the dictionary-definition sense of the term, not as a slam, although it’s perfectly fine with me if it’s also taken as a slam. (See Slate.com’s Jamelle Bouie on the topic of Donald Trump being a textbook fascist.)

Fuck the fascist Trump and the neo-Nazis who support him. They won’t turn the United States of America into another Nazi Germany without a fight.

P.S. I stand corrected; Business Insider reports:

… [Serge] Kovaleski told The [Washington] Post that he is confident that Trump remembers him and his condition. Kovaleski met with Trump several times when the reporter was covering Trump while working at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1993.

“The sad part about it is, it didn’t in the slightest bit jar or surprise me that Donald Trump would do something this low-rent, given his track record,” Kovaleski told the Post.

The New York Times, where Kovaleski is currently a reporter, also had a response to the incident: “We think it’s outrageous that he would ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters,” a Times spokeswoman told Politico and confirmed to Business Insider. …

—

*Of course, after George W. Bush brazenly blatantly stole the 2000 presidential election, it couldn’t have come as a surprise that he would not protect Americans on September 11, 2001, or in late August 2005 (when Hurricane Katrina struck), and nor could it have come as a surprise that the “man” who had refused to accept that his opponent Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election would go on to start the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, in which thousands of our troops died for nothing more than the treasonous war profiteering of the treasonous BushCheneyCorp and in which many, many more innocent Iraqi civilians, tens of thousands of them, have died — and which, of course, contributed to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has caused even more death and destruction.

There are terms for these high crimes: treason, war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.

That enough Americans not nearly long ago just enough allowed the fascist George W. Bush to rise to power anti-democratically should give pause to those who claim that Donald Trump couldn’t become president.

He probably won’t, but to ignore the possibility entirely is dangerous — and, dare I say, probably even treasonous.

My money is on ‘Bootstraps’ Rubio for the Repugnican Tea Party nomination

Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Marco “Bootstraps” Rubio of Florida has a thirst for power that the party’s primary voters just might quench by making him his party’s 2016 presidential nominee. But I don’t see enough Latino voters, most of whom are Mexican American, falling for the bait and switch (Rubio is a right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class Cuban American [which is fairly redundant]) and putting Rubio into the White House in November 2016.

Now that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin wonderfully has tanked, I agree with the many pundits who now eye Marco Rubio as the most likely 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate.

Now that the 40-something Walker — the anti-labor-union one-trick pony who once actually compared members of labor unions to terrorists in the Middle East (because everything comes back to destroying what little is left of our labor unions) — is out of the picture, the 40-something Rubio now gets to be the “fresh face” of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential field.

I use quotation marks there and I have nicknamed Rubio “Bootstraps” because of the 1950s-era if-you’re-not-rich-it’s-your-own-damned-fault-because-you’re-probably-lazy-and-refuse-to-pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps bullshit political rhetoric that spews like poison from this right-wing Cuban American’s fangs as though he had just stepped out of a fucking time machine.

So now Rubio, at 44, is the youngest of the bunch of fascistic presidential wannabes, and so I expect the Repugnican Tea Party ultimately to view him as Their Latino Answer to Barack Obama. (U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the bat-shit insane reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, is less than a year older than Rubio, but he seems older than that…)

Of course, when you look at the two Latinos who are vying for the Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination, both of them, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, are Cuban-American, which makes sense, since most Cuban Americans are to the right. Most of them are rich white (European-stock) Cubans who fled Cuba some decades ago because their plutocracy and their kleptocracy and their advocacy of insane income inequality (since the inequality benefited them) didn’t fly under the new, much more egalitarian Castro regime — and are the progeny of these former Cubans who have passed down their wingnuttery to their progeny. (Rubio’s parents, it should be noted, immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, a few years before Castro’s rise in 1959, but Rubio, representing Florida, is wholly on board with the right-wing, anti-Castro Cuban Americans who believe that although they relatively are a tiny minority, they should dictate U.S. policy in regards to Cuba.)

While white supremacists don’t differentiate Latinos — a Spanish surname is a Spanish surname, and these racists tend to believe that all Latinos are “Mexicans” (or that, at least, it’s just easiest to just call Latinos “Mexicans” rather than try to sort them all out [much like how Middle Easterners attacked us on 9/11 and Iraq is in the Middle East — close enough!]) — it’s important to note that in 2010, 63 percent of Latinos in the U.S. were of Mexican descent, and only 3.5 percent of Cuban descent.

So Cuban Americans are not representative of most Latinos in the United States, so neither Rubio nor Cruz is representative of most Latinos in the United States.

But again, such distinctions don’t matter to those of the Repugnican Tea Party, who probably ignorantly and cynically will view Marco Rubio as their best shot at trying to reverse at least some of the damage that El Trumpo has done to the party with the Latino demographic.

Most Mexican Americans won’t buy it; the majority of them are quite through with the Repugnican Tea Party, and of course most of them are acutely aware, unlike whitey, of the differences between Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans.

But why do I predict Rubio and not Cruz? Because Cruz is so much of a nut job and a douche bag who can’t win a national election that even most of those in his party recognize that fact, that’s why. Perhaps to a lesser extent it’s also because his state of Texas will continue to be tarnished for a while because the last president who hailed from Texas was so fucking abysmally awful. That George W. Bush was the governor of Texas certainly harmed former Texas Gov. Prick Perry’s two bids for the White House, although Perry himself, like Cruz, is a shitty candidate, so in the cases of Perry and Cruz you can’t put all of the blame on Texas.

Let me list others who can’t and won’t win the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination: Lindsay Graham, Bobby Jindal, Prick Santorum, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Carly Fiorina. None of them (along with Cruz) is averaging even 7 percent in recent nationwide polls. Fiorina is a bit of a darling for the moment, but once more information is released about her — trust me, she ran for the U.S. Senate here in California in 2010 (and lost, of course), and her record and her character are seriously bad — she’s toast. She’s having her Michele Bachmann moment right now. Let her have it, as it’s all she’s going to get. (Well, no, she might get the veep spot. After Sarah Palin, anything is possible.)

So this easy elimination leaves us with Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb! Bush and Marco Rubio, whose average nationwide polling right now is in that order, first through fourth.

It’s not impossible for Trump to emerge the victor, of course, but I doubt that he will. His campaign has money but no substance, and the party establishment wants him eliminated, so I can’t see Team Trump not sputtering out eventually. As some have posited, Trump might make some noise at the Repugnican National Convention, but it’s unlikely that he’ll win the party’s presidential nomination. Again, Trump has flash but no substance, and flash has a short shelf life.

Of course Ben Carson won’t win the nomination. Even if the party’s voters could get over his race in enough numbers to win him the nomination, no president in my lifetime of more than four decades had not been at least a U.S. senator or the governor of a state before ascending to the Oval Office, so that hurts Carson (as well as Trump). Of course, Carson very apparently has been in this only to sell his brand of life-advice bullshit anyway.

Jeb! not only has the Godzilla-sized albatross that is his brother’s presidency around his neck — it’s interesting that Jeb! says that Gee Dubya “kept us safe” when almost 3,000 Americans died in September 2001, the month that followed Gee Dubya’s receipt of the U.S. presidential daily brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”; when almost 4,500 of our soldiers have died in the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War (more than 3,500 of them combat deaths); and when almost 2,000 Americans were killed by Hurricane Katrina when there had been at least two or three days’ warning before it made landfall that the hurricane could be absolutely devastating — but Jeb! is only mildly more charismatic than is Scott “Dead Man” Walker.

I mean, the use of “Jeb!” perfectly encapsulates Jeb!’s problems: He runs away from the surname of Bush because it’s so politically toxic, and he has to use an exclamation point! in order to try to gin up some excitement for himself.

Even if Gee Dubya’s stolen presidency had been much, much, much better than it was, we Americans never would put three people from the same fucking family into the White House, so it’s unlikely that Jeb! ever was going to break the previous record of two U.S. presidents from the same family (the Adamses, the Roosevelts and the Bushes are the record holders).

So we are left with Marco Rubio, whom the Repugnican Tea Party will view as the perfect 2016 presidential candidate: He’s young and he’s not Anglo, so he’s the Barack Obama of the Repugnican Tea Party. He is Latino, but he’s the “right” kind of Latino — right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class, light-skinned Cuban-American. And again, after El Trumpo has bashed the party like an elephant piñata, the party needs all the help with the Latino vote that it can get, so the cynical fronting of a right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class candidate with a Spanish name will be mighty tempting.

Rubio — unlike Trump, Carson and Fiorina — has been a U.S. senator or the governor of a state, so he has that going for him, too.

Rubio, like Ben Carson, is a wingnut but can pass (for the low-information/“swing”/“independent” voter) as a fairly sane and decent individual, so there’s that factor as well. (As I noted, Cruz can’t pass for decent and sane, and neither can Jindal, Santorum or Huckabee, or Paul, to a lesser extent.)

And Rubio’s state of Florida is an important swing state; recall that Florida and its 25 electoral votes were pivotal in the stolen 2000 presidential election, when Jeb!, who then was governor of the state, worked with former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and others to steal the presidential election in the state (and thus the presidential election for the nation) for his brother.

All in all, the stars align for Marco Rubio to become his party’s champion for this presidential election cycle.

Could he win the White House?

I don’t think so. The Democrats and those who lean Democratic won’t vote for him, of course, and I don’t think that Rubio’s presidential candidacy could fool enough Latino voters, as much as they would love to see one of their own finally in the White House. Not just because the sulfurous stench of El Trumpo probably still will be lingering enough to damage the Repugnican Tea Party come November 2016, but also because Rubio’s socioeconomic and political philosophy in and of itself is pretty fucking odiferous.

Contexte est tout

I’m semi-fluent in Spanish, but know only a handful of words in French. (I’m perfectly OK with that…) So I went to babelfish.com and typed in “Context is everything,” translating it into French. The result, which may or may not be accurate, is the title of this piece.

As I’ve noted, I don’t know much about France, and I’m not a huge Francophile. For every positive thing that we can say about the French, there seems to be an equally off-putting thing that we could say about them. So I have mixed feelings toward the Frenchies, frankly.

Speaking of which, already we’re seeing starkly different depictions of what life is like in France for Muslims, and to be able to comment intelligently on the Charlie Hebdo killings of the past week, we need to understand the context in which they have occurred.

Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir, who should know better, essentially white-mansplains in his latest column that Charlie Hebdo was attacked because the “terrorists” hate France for its freedoms! This is the rosy portrait that O’Hehir paints of France:

… Amid its evident difficulties, France remains a peaceful, prosperous and culturally vibrant nation with a relatively well integrated and increasingly secular Muslim minority. (As has been widely reported, one of the police officers killed on Wednesday was a Muslim.) That model of democracy — or perhaps we should say that possibility — is exactly what came under attack from the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Their aim was to pry open that model at a tender spot, expose its contradictions and undermine its stability. …

Again, this is analogous to the post-9/11 bullshit American claims of “They [those “evil” Muslims, of course] hate us because of our freedoms!”

In contrast to O’Hehir’s belle (again: babelfish.com…) portrait of France, left-wing editorial cartoonist and columnist/commentator Ted Rall, who has dual American and French citizenship because his mother is French, and who has spent a lot of time with Muslims in Afghanistan (about which he has written books), writes this of Muslims in France (I present it in whole, because I think it’s important information; emphases in bold are mine [and links are Rall’s]):

This week’s terrorist attacks at the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, leaving 12 dead at the scene and four others killed during the assassins’ attempt to flee two days later has prompted a political crisis in France centered around that country’s Muslim population, and whether it has been successfully assimilated into French society.

To most American news consumers, even those who follow developments in Europe closely, the debate over Muslim assimilation in France is difficult to dissect. This is because the situation there is significantly unlike the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West that Americans have been dealing with in the post-9/11 era.

The first thing that you need to know is that, in France even more than in the United States, assimilation is something of a national religion.

“A French government report has proposed a radical overhaul of the ‘assimilation’ model which requires immigrants to abandon their culture for that of France, including ending the ban on Muslim headscarves in schools and naming streets and squares after notables of foreign origin,” the UK Telegraph reported back in 2013.

“But it has drawn a furious reaction from the country’s conservative opposition, which said it amounted to an abandonment of French culture and secular values. ‘It will no longer be up to immigrants to adopt French culture but up to France to abandon its culture, its values, its history to adapt to the culture of others,’ Jean-François Copé, leader of the UMP main opposition party, said.”

For now, assimilationism stands.

In France as in the U.S., ethnic and religious minorities congregate in certain cities and neighborhoods. In France, however, these ethnic enclaves are viewed less as charming places to grab a meal than as a failure of the state. This is because, when foreigners are granted French citizenship, they are expected – not just culturally, but explicitly told by government officials – to become fully French in a traditional, pre-mass immigration kind of way.

Those who speak foreign languages are pressured to refrain from speaking them in public as much as possible, and to learn French not just enough to get by, but fluently in writing as well as in speech. This attitude isn’t not quite as attenuated as it was 75 years ago, when children who spoke internal non-French French languages like Basque and Breton were beaten by their teachers, but it’s still an expectation shared by both the political left and the political right.

Even today, when the government offers an immigrant French citizenship, he or she is even encouraged to “Francify” their name to a more traditionally sounding French name. So Mohammed might become Michel.

The second thing you need to understand is that France does not offer birthright citizenship, i.e. automatic full benefits as a citizen simply for being born on French territory. Americans take birthright citizenship for granted, though there has been criticism on the right over the possibility that some foreign-born parents might travel illegally to the United States in order to have so-called “anchor babies.”

Perversely, considering how important assimilation is to the French, the country’s lack of full birthright citizenship rights for everyone born in France, or full right of jus soli, has done more to breed alienation, systemic poverty and distrust than just about any other policy. Although I was able to obtain French citizenship (while keeping my U.S. citizenship) merely because my mother is French, there are millions of second- and third-generation illegal immigrants – people who were born in [France], and who may even have French foreign parents, but who have never been naturalized because their grandparents arrived in the country as undocumented workers.

Many of these people live in impoverished suburbs outside major cities which, not coincidentally, have on occasion been the site of violent uprisings. Don’t be surprised if the perpetrators of Wednesday’s horrific mass murder at Charlie Hebdo have their roots in the banlieue (suburbs).

Finally, France has accepted between 3.5 and 5.0 million Muslim immigrants in recent years, amounting to between 5 percent and 10 percent of the population. (This liberal immigration policy recognizes France’s history as colonial rulers of countries like Algeria and Morocco.)

Obviously, the overwhelming majority of these people are like everyone else, just trying to get ahead and make better lives for themselves and their children. But their presence — different clothes, different languages, different food — is jarring for “traditional” (i.e., white, Catholic) Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who yearn for the France of wine, coffee and baguettes. This is the constituency that France’s far-right political parties, like the National Front, are capitalizing upon.

Rall, himself an editorial cartoonist, of course does not support the slaughter of fellow cartoonists, and he has used the occasion of the Charlie Hebdo massacres to point out the plight of editorial cartoonists in the American media (such as here and here).

I give kudos to Rall, not only for telling the ugly truth about France’s other-culture-crushing assimilationism and nationalism — and its resultant Muslim ghettos — but also apparently for pointing out that the “Je suis Charlie” crowd don’t actually give a fuck about editorial cartoonists* as much as they are just using the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as a vehicle with which to bash those “evil” Muslims, the perennial “bad guys” against whom the “freedom-” and “democracy-loving” Westerners can compare themselves in order to feel much better about their own hypocrisy, their own deep sins (such as the fact that in modern history the U.S. and its Western partners in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including Israel, the United Kingdom and France, have slaughtered far more Muslims than vice-versa).

Even a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist (who wasn’t present during the massacre at the publication’s offices) himself has called bullshit on the public outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo. Reports the UK’s DailyMail.com:

One of the surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonists has scoffed at the surge in support for the satirical magazine after the attack, which killed eight of his colleagues and four other victims.

Bernard Holtrop, who was not in the office during the massacre on Wednesday, admitted the publication’s new-found fame was “laughable” and comes from people who have “never seen it.”

The Dutch-born artist reportedly said the provocative weekly had unexpected “new friends” including the pope, Queen Elizabeth and Vladimir Putin.

He told Dutch newspaper Volkskrant: “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” and added that most of the support has come from people who have “never seen Charlie Hebdo.”

“It really makes me laugh,” he added. “A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite.” …

Bernard Holtrop is at least one Frenchman I guess I can like, even though that might be because he was born in Holland…

P.S. If I understand the Charlie Hebdo cover above correctly (French is somewhat similar to Spanish), it is positing that were Mohammed to return today, some jihadist would behead him as an infidel. Admittedly, this is in line with my position that were Jesus to return today, those who claim to be his followers would (mostly metaphorically speaking) crucify him as a heretic.

However, again, contexte est tout, and the Charlie Hebdo cover above is much more offensive to your average Muslim than would be a similar depiction of modern-day “Christians” crucifying a returning Jesus, methinks. Also, so-called “Christians” already are in the majority in the West, and so they have a lot of political power, so such a cartoon would not feel as personally threatening to them as the Charlie Hebdo cover above would feel to France’s Muslim minority (which, again, is estimated at 5 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s population).

—

*Frankly, I don’t know that I’m willing to call Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists “editorial cartoonists,” because the word “editorial” elevates them to a level of discourse that I just haven’t seen in most of their cartoons thus far. Similarly, just as I can’t call Charlie Hebdo a “newspaper” (I call it simply a “publication”), I can’t call what Charlie Hebdo does to be “satire” or to be “satirical,” because to me, satire requires intelligence (in the form of wit), and to me, satire’s ultimate goal is to uplift the body politic. I don’t see that Charlie Hebdo is witty or uplifting.

Charlie Hebdo still has free-speech rights, of course, but, as I’ve noted, after having seen some of its content I’m not going to align myself with Charlie Hebdo. The Ku Klux Klan and the so-called “Tea Party” have their free-speech rights, too, and I’m not on board with them either.

Repugs bash ‘subhuman,’ ‘naive’ Obama, ask, ‘George W. WHO?’

So stupid white man Ted Nugent recently (fairly redundantly) referred to President Barack Obama as a “subhuman mongrel.” Arizona U.S. Sen. John McCainosaurus recently remarked of Obama, “This is the most naive president in history.”

Although the likes of Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen Rand Paul of Kentucky and Repugnican Tea Party Texas Gov. Prick Perry were quick to call Nugent’s words inappropriate, McCainosaurus essentially expressed the same sentiment — only in a “nicer” way.

I respect Nugent more than I do McCainosaurus for Nugent’s at least honestly having expressed his thoughts and beliefs, as nauseating as his rank white supremacism/racism is.

McCainosaurus, however, is “nice” and “polite” and “above it all,” you see, so he’ll couch his probably-race-based criticisms of Obama in “statesmanlike” terms.

Obama is a flawed president — no argument there — but every time that a Repugnican (Tea) Party traitor levels any criticism of Obama, I immediately think of the last Repugnican “president” (I use quotation marks, since he never legitimately was elected), George W. Bush, and I do the mental comparison.

So McCainosaurus pronounced that Obama “is the most naive president in history,” adding that “The naivete of Barack Obama and [U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry is stunning.”

No, what is stunning is that in November 2008 the American people voted for Barack Obama over John McCainosaurus by 7.2 percent of the popular vote and Obama won a whopping 192 more electoral votes than McCainosaurus won, but Sore Loserman McCainosaurus still is running for president.

Or, at the least, he’s still very bitter that he lost the 2008 presidential election, and thus he feels that he routinely must lecture us “naive” Americans that we made such a huge “mistake” in not putting his old white man ass in the big chair in the Oval Office.

On foreign policy, Obama and Kerry can’t win anyway. They’re Democrats. Obama especially is handicapped among the right wing because he’s black and the vast majority of the wingnuts are white supremacists.

Obama has no desire to revive the Cold War with Russia, as McCainosaurus does, because Obama is not stuck in the distant past like the fossilized McCainosaurus is. (And we, the majority of the American people, also have no desire to revive the Cold War, which is why we voted for Obama and not for McCainosaurus.)

And even if Obama decided to act militarily every time that there were some squirmish in the world — as though every battle around the globe were the United States’ to fight, even though because of the military overextension of the Bush regime, the American empire is rotting from within — the right wing still would find some way criticize whatever he did. Because Obama is a Democrat, and probably even worse, he’s a black man in the White House.

Were Obama actually to send troops to such troubled regions as Syria and/or Ukraine, many if not most of the wingnuts probably suddenly would find themselves to be populists and anti-interventionists and criticize Obama for squandering our resources abroad instead of helping more Americans here at home. (If it were a Repugnican [Tea] Party president launching a military action abroad, however, of course it would be, by definition, a sound presidential decision.)

Again: Obama can’t win. If he doesn’t intervene in another nation’s squirmish, he’s “naive” or “weak” or whatever, yet if he does, the wingnuts will find something about his actions to criticize. I mean, fuck: Since the teatard majority of the U.S. House of Representatives has a history of opposing Obama on everything — because it comes from Obama — do you really think that the House would OK any military action that the Constitution might require Obama to first get from the House (if it were not linked to a mass terrorist attack that already had happened on American soil)? Hell no. But they’ll criticize Obama if he doesn’t act.

As I already have noted recently, the central problem that the stupid white men of the Repugnican Tea Party (and those who support them) have with Barack Obama is that he violates their white supremacist, patriarchal notion that only right-wing white men should be president of the United States.

Ted Nugent is pretty open and fairly blunt about his white supremacism; with the likes of John McCainosaurus, you have to read between the lines, but it’s still not exactly difficult to get the message. In one of his presidential debates with Obama in 2008, McCainosaurus bizarrely referred to Obama as “that one,” as an object, not as a human being, and in his most recent quote about Obama, he again refers to Obama as though Obama were not a human being, but as though Obama were some kind of anamoly, if not even some kind of object: “This is the most naive president in history.” (At the very least, McCainosaurus refers to Obama as being very deeply other.)

The vast majority of the right wing’s criticisms of Obama start at that point (if they radiate outward or not): their deep-seated, visceral belief that Obama’s supposed illegitimacy for the presidency indeed is coded in his DNA (indeed, he is, according to teatard Nugent, a “subhuman mongrel”).

So: Whenever you hear criticisms of Obama from the wingnuts, think of that, keep all of that in mind, and also think about how wonderful a president George W. Bush was:

George W. Bush was so fucking great on foreign policy and national defense that he allowed terrorists to attack the U.S. on September 11, 2001, slaughtering almost 3,000 people, despite his having received, the month before, a presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, at the time, you see, and so he couldn’t be bothered with it. (Google it.)

George W. Bush was so fucking great on foreign policy and national defense that he pulled a colossal bait and switch, encouraging Americans to support his pre-2000-election desire to invade and occupy the oil-rich nation of Iraq in retaliation for 9/11, even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11. More than 4,000 of our troops were slaughtered in the illegal, immoral, unjust, unprovoked and wholly bogus Vietraq War, which all along was meant only to benefit Big Oil. (Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s oil fields were nationalized; since Hussein was toppled, Big Oil has been back in Iraq. [Google it.])

George W. Bush was so fucking great on national security that he just allowed almost 2,000 Americans to die in Hurricane Katrina.

Add it up — almost 3,000 killed on 9/11, more than 4,000 of our troops killed in the bogus Vietraq War, almost 2,000 Americans killed unnecessarily by Hurricane Katrina.

That’s quite a body count, but the traitors who comprise the American right wing so conveniently ignore all of this while they focus like a laser on the deaths of four (4) people in Benghazi, Libya.

Indeed, Obama is “the most naive president in history”! He is in way over his head! He’s clueless! He has no idea what he’s doing!

Yes, let’s talk about keeping Americans safe: Far, far more Americans died unnecessarily when BushCheneyCorp was at the helm than have died while Obama has been behind the wheel.

Yes, let’s talk about foreign policy: George W. Bush made the U.S. even more hated in the Middle East — the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis because of the Vietraq War alone hasn’t made the U.S. more loved in the Middle East — making us more likely, not less likely, to be the targets of future terrorist attacks.

George W. Bush & Co. started a crusade against the Middle East that Barack Obama apparently felt he had to continue, lest he be labeled by the wingnuts and their sympathizers as “weak” or “soft” or “naive” (which was going to happen anyway, no matter what he did or did not d0).

George W. Bush also left the United States of America in far worse shape than it was when he stole office in 2000. He started with Bill Clinton’s record federal budget surplus and ended his eight years of unelected rule with a federal budget deficit — in no small part because the Vietraq War was meant to be a massive giveaway of taxpayers’ dollars to military contractors and to Big Oil. (Indeed, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, which was involved with both military contracting and Big Oil, got to profiteer obscenely in Vietraq without even having to bid for the federal-government contracts.)

So it’s not like George W. Bush even left Barack Obama with the resources necessary to launch more military (mis)adventures, yet here are the Repugnican Tea Party traitors pissing and moaning that Obama isn’t sending troops to every nation where there is a squirmish.

There is so much about Obama that I don’t like, but when the Repugnican Tea Party traitors pretend that they have the solutions to our problems (most of which they created), you only have to think back to the last time that a member of their party was in the White House, and ask yourself if you really want a deja vu of all of that: a stolen presidential election, 9/11, the Vietraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the crashed national economy, etc., etc.

P.S. Before anyone accuses me of unfairly linking Ted Nugent to the Repugnican Tea Party, know that Nugent has made campaign (or other public) appearances with the likes of Sarah Palin, Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott (the state’s current attorney general), and many others of the Repugnican Tea Party.

Checks and balances wins out — for now

Associated Press image

The arrogant Barack Obama, shown during his nationally televised speech on Syria last night, has been humbled by actual democracy, but he’s only a part of the problem of a so-called “representative” government in D.C. that no longer carries out the wishes of the majority of the American people in our own best interests, but that carries out instead the wishes of the plutocrats and corporatocrats who fund the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party (a.k.a. the “Democratic” and “Republican” parties).

President Barack Obama has claimed — and, to my knowledge, has not backed down from that claim — that he has the right to order a military strike or strikes on the sovereign nation of Syria (or on any other sovereign nation that he deems a “threat”) whether he gains the approval of the U.S. Congress to do so or not.

The U.S. Constitution says otherwise — it dictates that only Congress may authorize war — and I’m not sure whether former constitutional law professor Obama actually believes that he has such war powers or whether he’s just another shameless, treasonous power-grabber — but the fact that Obama has backpedaled on striking Syria demonstrates, I think, that, politically speaking at the minimum, you do need the approval of Congress if you want to have a successful war.

You also need the support of the American people if you want to have a successful war. A war is too large a thing to have it widely among Americans considered to be your own personal war.

So while I don’t expect the lame duck Obama to ever back down on his claim to be a bad-ass who can do whatever the hell he wants — never mind that we elected him in 2008 because of his ubiquitous and relentless promises of “hope” and “change,” and one of those changes that we, the people, wanted was a president who does not act like the swaggering George W. Bush did — the political reality is that a war is unlikely to succeed without the backing of the majority of the American people and the U.S. Congress.

(Recall that even George W. Bush in October 2002 successfully fanagled Congress into rubber-stamping his illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War, which he launched in March 2003.

The Bush regime relentlessly had marketed its impending Vietraq War as a response to 9/11, a propagandistic lie that enough Americans bought to the point that most of the members of Congress were too pussy not to rubber-stamp the Vietraq War, fearing that there would be adverse political repercussions for them if they did not vote for it.

Remember also that at that wonderful time in our nation’s history, according to the unelected “President” Bush, you were with him or you were with the “terrorists.”)

Despite Obama’s bluster on Syria and on his alleged war powers, it seems to me that for once the broken American system of governance has worked.

A majority of the American people want no more war unless it’s absolutely, absolutely necessary; they — we — want no more wars of choice that benefit only the plutocratic elite who profit from wars of choice.

For once, the majority of the people in this so-called “democracy” have — for now, anyway — actually gotten what we want on an issue.

We’ll see whether or not this populism spills into other important issues to the point that the elites in D.C. realize that they no longer can get away with extending to us their gilded middle fingers and continuing to act against our best interests and in their own best interests.

And I agree with the gifted progressive writer David Sirota’s assertion that actually avoiding war with Syria was not, as the Obamabots will claim, the “genius” Obama’s crafty game plan all along.

(“More specifically,” Sirota writes that this argument goes, “[Obama’s] administration cited World War II and made a full-court press in Congress for war not to actually start a war, but merely to prompt Russia to intervene to prevent a war. You see, it was an anti-war play all along!”

The purpose of this argument, Sirota wonderfully writes, is “to cast the president as a godlike emperor whose reversals, contradictions and shifts are always a product of prescience and calculation, and couldn’t possibly be a product of pressure from the supposedly lowly, weak and otherwise pathetic rabble.”)

The Obama regime very apparently never seriously considered diplomacy with Syria until after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is not up to the job, off-handedly publicly remarked that Syria could avoid a military strike or strikes if Syria agreed to give up all of its chemical weapons, with international oversight ensuring its compliance. Kerry added, essentially, that he had said that only because he had figured that Syria never would agree to such terms.

But Sure, we’ll give up our chemical weapons, the Syrian government essentially said in response, which underscores the fact that the Obama regime very apparently never seriously had considered diplomacy with Syria over war with Syria (and lobbing missiles at another nation can only be taken as an act of war, as surely the U.S. would consider such an act against the U.S. to be!).

Which underscores the fact that this Syria debacle has demonstrated that the Obama regime’s foreign policy is a hot fucking mess.

To interpret it otherwise is to make the same mistake that the supporting characters in the film “Being There” make about the main character, Chauncey Gardiner, whose abject mental incompetence they take as actual wisdom and genius because that’s what they want to see in him.

Under these conditions, with a bunch of Chauncey Gardiners running the show, we Americans cannot feel safe.

And while imminent war apparently has been averted, it remains to be seen whether or not the elites in D.C. have gotten the message that we, the majority of the American people, want our best interests actually represented in this so-called “representative” “democracy.”