Author Archives: oinsketta

Take note again

In October 2020, Trump refused to denounce the far-right Proud Boys organization, instead telling its members to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys turned out for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, where they helped to lead those rioters fired up by Trump’s speech at The Ellipse, where he told them: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Heather

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing …

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The lessons of history require critical thinking

Take the case of John C. Calhoun, one of our nation’s most famous and influential advocates of the rights of slaveholders.

Read the short biography of Mr. Calhoun at the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. You can’t get much more official than the U.S. government’s Office of the Historian. Here’s the link.

Here is a quick hit on google. Compare the results, notice all the obvious things the official portrait has officially airbrushed out of the biography of Secretary of State John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina.

Then look at the tell-all fucking face of the official portrait of the one-year diplomat’s influence:

This is from Clemson University‘s website:

link

In 2024 this kind of meticulous research takes a few seconds at most, plus two minutes to skim over some of the entries and then one minute to think.

Think about these words from the last speech he wrote. In 1850, dying of consumption he had his colleague, Senator James Mason read this on the floor of the Senate.

The Union cannot … be saved by eulogies on the Union, however splendid or numerous. The Cry of ‘Union, Union, the glorious Union!’ can no more prevent disunion than the cry of ‘Health, health, glorious health!’ on the part of the physician, can save a patient lying dangerously ill. …

How can the Union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is, by a full and final settlement, on the principle of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections. …

If you who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.[16]

Link

Trauma for beginners

Trauma is the unbearable feeling of being powerless against a malevolent, deadly force intent on destroying you. It is the searing terror felt in a nightmare, the panicked vulnerability of not only being defenseless against a deadly enemy, but also finding yourself unprotected by anyone you’d expect to defend you. Trauma is an actual wound, of a different order from the things that annoy, frighten, hurt and threaten us because it is deadly, relentless and will certainly kill us.

A quick internet search adds this: trauma is a person’s experience of emotional distress resulting from an event that overwhelms the capacity to emotionally digest it.

Being traumatized regularly changes our reactions to the world, our health and even our DNA.

When you need understanding and a loved one suddenly shows you a face like this:

You are fucked. If you have experienced trauma, and a pattern of betrayal during moments when you were most vulnerable, you can smirk and shake your head at an old friend glaring silently with the implacable mask of an indomitable psychopath. You can opine to someone else about what an immature, enraged asshole the glarer is. You can shrug it off like an adult and go about your business.

It is only later, when you try to close your eyes and go to sleep that you find yourself unable to keep your eyelids closed. You are suddenly hyper-vigilant, disoriented, in a world unaccountably turned vicious and supremely threatening. The essence of trauma is that terrifying feeling of defenselessness, of betrayal by those who claim to love you.

There is a class of traumatized people who become reflexively brutal dominators of others. They only feel safe when they’re certain that they can control everyone around them, that there is no possible threat to them in any given room. They exert this social dominance using charm, guile, a politician’s toolkit, all sorts of devices, until they feel threatened. Then their only possible response is to attack and eliminate the source of the threat, and they do this by any means necessary. They will literally kill you, if it comes to that.

There are other traumatized people who, able to feel the heavy weight of betrayal without being crushed by it, maintain their empathy toward others. This type seeks reconciliation after a conflict with a loved one rather than demanding capitulation on pain of eternal, blind revenge.

I don’t know what decides which traumatized person emerges from trauma as the sadist/masochist or the injured nurturer. It may be that the latter group found themselves saved by someone who showed them real compassion when it mattered most while the destructive ones never found any relief when they were in the most extreme pain.

What I do know now is how essential it is to stay away from the extremely damaged type that lives in a dark, zero sum world where there is no possibility of redemption once hurt occurs. Those fuckers will kill you, if it comes to a choice between you and them. If they become dictator they will build death camps to put disloyal, betraying fuckers like you in. Count on it, their type has no other choice.

Orange turd in the punchbowl

Merrick Garland solemnly intoned that we have one rule of law here, the same laws for the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless and so on.  The last few years have shown that is clear bullshit. 

A young military guy showing off a secret document on-line to impress his buddies, well after the FBI searched Mar-a-Largo and seized evidence that Trump illegally held on to classified documents, has already been convicted and is serving a sixteen year Espionage Act sentence. 

The young man committed a crime that is a small fraction of what the Orange Polyp committed in taking a trove of top secret documents, lying to government agencies about having them, storing them in public places around his gaudy country club home, insisting he had every right to keep the documents he rightfully took, or that were planted by the FBI, obstructing an investigation into whether he had them, instructing lackeys to destroy surveillance video of moving the boxes of secret documents and all the rest.

One big difference in the two cases, the kid who put the classified document on line surely doesn’t have $230,000 a day to spend on lawyers like the Big Guy does. Another big difference, he didn’t get to choose a judge he’d appointed to lifetime office who’d already demonstrated her fawning loyalty to him.

A NY appeals court did the Orange Turd a big favor Monday by reducing the bond he has to post to appeal his fraud case from close to a half a billion to a more manageable $175,000,000.  On the same day he got the news that starting on April 15 he will be sitting at the defendant’s table in NY criminal court four days a week until a verdict is reached in that trial, a trial that also involves his fraudulent business practices as well as election interference.   The boy is not holding up well.  In a late night rant he wrote “CROOKED JOE BUDEN MISINFORMATES AND DISINFOMATES ALL THE TIME”.   Point taken, Honest Don.

He’s going down, whether you buy his gold-painted high tops or his special Make America Prey Again Bible or any of the other bullshit he’s peddling.  On Fox they’re screaming about NBC firing discarded former Trump lackey Ronna Romney McDaniel who will be paid $600,000 by NBC per her contract, even though she won’t be on the air after massive pressure to get rid of her.  Fox insists people have the right to hear all sides, someone still claiming that the election of 2020 was stolen, and that the fake electors were real, and that the Republican party must pay all of a certain criminal defendant’s legal bills is just as entitled to those credible views as anyone who honestly stormed the Capitol on January 6th, or sincerely believes that Jewish space lasers are regularly employed to control the world.

We are living in disorientingly crazy times, just ask any of the elusive Buden superfans the NY Times was hunting for recently…

Benghazi Impeachment news

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

As Justin Rohrlich of The Daily Beast put it, “Comer…stepped on rake after rake during the hearing, consistently undermining his own conference’s case.” Finally, after Democrats had pointed out the many missteps of the committee’s Republicans, Bobulinski told Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) that “the American people are well aware of the Bidens’ corruption.” “Perfect!” Moskowitz replied. He told Bobulinski to ask Comer why he hadn’t asked for an impeachment vote. Moskowitz even offered to help the Republicans out by making a motion to impeach President Biden, urging Comer to second it. Comer declined.

Moskowitz said he wanted “to show the American people that they’re never going to impeach Joe Biden. It’s never going to happen because they don’t have the evidence. Okay, this is a show. It’s all fake. They just want to do these hearings. It’s not leading to impeachment. They’re lying to their base on Newsmax and Fox leading these people to believe that they’re going to eventually impeach the president. It’s not going to happen. At all. Ever. Period.”  

Heather

Trump calls on Manafort

Convicted money launderer, witness intimidator, tax and bank fraudster and all around good guy Paul Manafort, pardoned by his benefactor Trump six weeks after Honest Don Trump lost the election in 2020, gave sensitive polling data to a Kremlin agent allowing a foreign power to help swing the four states that gave Trump his 78,000 vote Electoral College win in 2016.  This is according to the Senate Select Committee Report (chaired by Marco Rubio, R- FL), which should be released in its unredacted form now that Trump is in talks to bring Manafort into his presidential campaign again.

What could go wrong with desperate, deranged, cash-starved Trumpie hiring this longtime Russian oligarch-connected lover of obscene luxury and enabler of corruption to raise and launder foreign oligarch money for his 2024 legal defense and campaign run? 

It’s not as though Manafort’s former partner and fellow rat fucker, Roger Stone, is in any way involved in MAGA’s 2024 campaign or ever had anything to do with any right-wing riot to achieve a political end with violence or the loud threat of violence, neither the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot [1]  nor the MAGA/White Christian Patriotic Riot of January 6, 2021 [2] . Stone, Manafort’s long time partner in political crime, also pardoned by Honest Don, made sure to dismiss his Proud Boy body guard contingent and get out of town the night of January 5th.  USA! USA!!

[1]  The Brooks Brothers riot was a demonstration led by Republican staffers at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on November 22, 2000, during a recount of votes made during the 2000 United States presidential election, with the goal of shutting down the recount. After demonstrations and acts of violence, local officials shut down the recount early.  Details

[2]  On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob[33][34][35] of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep Trump in power by occupying the Capitol and preventing a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the House select committee investigating the incident, the attack was the culmination of a seven-part plan by Trump to overturn the election.[36][37].        details