The first thought I had reading about the bloody pogrom staged by Hamas on a recent Jewish holy day was how handy for Putin, and his America First/MAGA allies in and around the US government.
Blowing up a world hotspot with a horrific slaughter is a great distraction and the perfect way to divide stressed out, angry Americans against each other, Jew against Jew, Muslin against Muslim, Christian versus Christian. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum something about an atrocity like this calculated, humanity-crushing attack is bound to inflame you. News stories about decapitated babies, 85 year-old hostages, babies burned alive, babies dying in hospitals without medicine, water or electricity, bombs and missiles causing mass destruction. Making people too angry to assess the real horror is a time-honored technique to sew distrust, fear, hopelessness and tribal division. I thought that when the news first broke and I still think that. How Putin and his friends must be smiling.
Yuval Noah Harari talks about Israel’s challenge to preserve her humanity and describes the treacherously effective trap Hamas sprung on Israel, and the world, with their hateful attack on their hated enemies.
Here’s MAGA Mike Johnson celebrating the overturning of Roe v Wade, in the summer of 2022:
“Late yesterday the Louisiana Department of Health informed abortion facilities in our state that the Right to Life has now been restored. Perform an abortion and get imprisoned, at hard labor, for one to ten years and you’re fined $10,000 to $100,000.“
You really have to watch the polite, quietly seething ones, especially if they’re smart. Another zealot handpicked by the orange Hitler wannabe, don’t you know.
When Ginni Thomas and her invitation-only nonprofit Council for National Policy brokered the deal between Trump and the evangelical leaders, prior to him becoming the GOP candidate in 2016, a key provision was that Trump choose federal judges from Leonard Leo’s list of loyal, well-trained right wing ideologues. The promise to appoint only members of an extremist legal fraternity is one of the few promises Trump ever kept in his life. The litmus test was judges who believed in their Christian souls that abortion was murder, and in the sanctity of the wealth of America’s greatest citizens. The pastors threw their full weight behind the Flawed Vessel in their zeal to save fetuses.
Recall the other GOP candidates gathered on stage, at an earlier debate, none able to raise their hand that they agreed with the theory of evolution. It would have cost them the Big Jesus vote to publicly go against the childish notion of God’s Intelligent Design. Same with Climate Change, systemic racism, trickle down economics, regulation of polluters, tax breaks for billionaires, affordable health care, opposition to elimination of child poverty, opposition to an ethics code for their 6-3 Supreme Court majority, on down the list of their accursed orthodoxy.
New litmus test for the GOP: Biden stole the rigged 2020 election, in conspiracy with hundreds of RINOs. It is an article of faith now, believed fervently by 70% of Republican voters. The brand new Squeaker of the House has declared that Trump won in 2020, he signed on to the Hail Mary Texas lawsuit (along with Cruz and dozens of other Republican all-stars), to overturn votes, a lawsuit so dumb the 6-3 Supreme Court threw it out, he voted to decertify Biden’s victory when Congress reconvened after the Trump riot on January 6th. He swears Trump’s ass is delicious.
He passed the new GOP litmus test and was allowed to become Speaker. A new fucking puto for Chrumpie to manhandle, to make himself feel powerful as his fake world collapses in on him. God bless these United Shaysh.
Like it or not, we are all now living in a black and white world where irreducible moral sides must be immediately taken, to the death. Whose side are you on, freedom or tyranny? Who is good and who is evil, Israel or Palestine? Who is mostly perfect and who is an irredeemably sick fuck with no right to speak who must be silenced forever? Take a view I find hateful, after hearing just the first few words? CANCELLED!
As I recently wrote to a righteous old friend who had no intention of ever talking to me again:
In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing our friendship. In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.
In righteous anger you instantly, satisfyingly cancel the motherfucker who makes you angry. Boom — dead! Then, that person being dead to you, you have eliminated the risk of being infuriated again by someone who keeps maddeningly insisting there are at least two sides to a story you already wrote the fucking ending to.
The great virtue of buying into a belief system is that you don’t have to be blindsided by so-called facts, cause and effect and the rest of the exhausting, caviling so-called nuances you already firmly believe are bullshit.
Reading about the recent cancellation of a book-related event by an author who wrote a nuanced book about Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the firings and forced or protest resignations of others who made points about the horrific conflict in a way that was deemed indelicate, I had a creepy realization. What a cohort of old, dear friends did was cancel me. I’ve been cancelled.
Back to Israel and Palestine, for a flaming example. It is apparently a deadly sin, to some, to observe that Hamas behaved like blood-crazed Nazis, 100%, when they went on a murderous pogrom, and that Israel is behaving now, even if understandably in some ways, not like non-Nazis. To slaughter a Jewish baby is a Nazi-type war crime. To slaughter a Palestinian baby, in revenge for inhuman Nazi atrocities … what do you want to call it, boss?
The conversation is apparently taboo now, you have to be very, very careful how you phrase your opinion on the ongoing civilian slaughter in Gaza as Israel pursues the demons who hellishly rampaged recently. Israel has every right to protect herself, many people believe. But if you justify the murder of children on one side, you justify it on both sides
Got to be so fucking careful these days that you may as well say nothing about raging controversies that make people ready to kill each other. Your silence, of course, is assent. Whatever is going on, whoever is holding the noose, and pitchforks, and spewing hatred with veins popping on their necks, the torch bearers, the ones outside the makeshift jail chanting “bring him out!”, by standing among them silently you are part of the lynch mob, my friend.
That’s my basic problem with the righteously silent. Fuck those putos. You may cancel me now, asshole. And happy birthday, dear.
The Chaos Caucus has one objective, the agenda of global fascist Steve Bannon and the creepy billionaires who fund him: keep government paralyzed to prove that government itself is the problem. The wealthiest keep all of their money, get even more, and get to watch everyone else fight to the death over the scarcity they impose on the divided majoritarian hoards who greedily seek “entitlements” like food stamps, medical care and other frivolities.
With a slim majority in the House, and a rule change allowing any one of the most extreme members to torpedo the Speaker of the House, these loyal chaos agents take orders directly from der chaosmeister, Herr Chrump. Eight MAGA assholes voted to oust “My Kevin”, one of the leader’s most supple and spineless puppets, on orders of the Big Guy. The ousted loyalist immediately went on TV to denounce the Democrats for unanimously voting him out.
The current GOP proves to their base, by disabling the government, that government is not of the people, by the people and for the people, but a corrupt machine to fleece the richest of a greedy percentage of their hard-earned or hard-inherited fortunes! The Makers being fleeced by undeserving Takers who feel entitled, so entitled, to take and take and take!
Jim Jordan, finally pinned after a long, undefeated college wrestling career, was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom [1] by the undefeated Chrump a few days after the January 6th violence and chicanery intended to keep him in power. Why was this longtime legislator who has never passed a single bill given this honor? Ask his buddy, the guy he talks to many times a day, the man he plotted with at closed door White House meetings, the jolly good fellow with the irresistibly delicious asshole.
A loyalty medal, for service to the dream of a winner who never loses, no matter how many votes against him, how many bankruptcies, no matter how many of his businesses fail or are closed for fraud (Trump University, Trump Charitable Trust, the pending closure of Trump, Inc.). A pugnacious, shameless man who refuses to be pinned and will say and do anything for his master is hard to find. Jim Jordan is one such man, as deserving of the highest civilian honor in the country as truth-teller and oxycodone addict Rush Limbaugh.
Not for nothing did the J6 mob search for Mike Pence (next in line for the presidency) and Nancy Pelosi (next in line if anything happened to Pence) with the intent to kill both of them. That would have left 99 year-old reactionary Chuck Grassley as next in line for president and highest ranking surviving member of Congress, and he would have announced, as planned, that the election was stolen, needed to be decided by the Republican House (by states, not number of representatives) and that would have been that.
Violent fanatics, motivated by a well-funded lie about a stolen election, decapitated the government for several hours, but not quite long enough. After the riot 191 Republicans voted to decertify Biden electors in certain states, along with the Trump quorum in the Senate, Lying Ted, et al. Not one of them paid any price for that treacherous vote. Jordan was awarded the presidential medal of asslicking.
The eight diehard MAGA assholes who voted to decapitate Congress a few weeks ago wrote a sham letter to 25 of their fellow House Republicans who didn’t vote for Jordan, agreeing to submit to punishment if their fellow Republicans would stop preventing the elevation of one of the lowest among them to be Speaker of the House. Imagine if Jordan and others with advance knowledge of the illegal plans to seize power, by hook and/or crook, and were eager participants in those plans, had been hauled in front of an ethics committee right after January 6th. How many of them would not have been stripped of committee assignments, if not expelled outright? None were. Some had medals placed on their chest. Now we have this shit, as reported by the NY Times…
When I call a party that rules by obstruction, bullying, mockery, intimidation and threats of violent reprisal, a party blindly obedient to the iron will of a criminal maniac, Nazis, it is because all of these characteristics are identical to, and essential ingredients of, the core of the Nazi movement. Without the violence these folks would just be pathetic, unfunny clowns with no shot at getting or maintaining power. With the violence, and their sacred Scalia rewritten Second Amendment, they are grimly unfunny clowns with infinite money and assault rifles and you can place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.
[1]
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is — along with the comparable Congressional Gold Medal — the highest civilian award in the U.S. It recognizes those individuals who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
Do you remember that spineless Congress weasel Devon Nunes? He was one of Chrumpie‘s most debased lackeys. He stepped down from Congress to take a highly paid position as CEO of the boss’s imagined media empire. The other day, in the wake of a finding of fraudulent accounting in Trump Inc.’s fraud trial, Digital World Acquisition Corp., the “person” wishing to merge with Trump media/Truth Social amended its filings to say that it’s statement of financial condition “should not be relied on.” One billion dollars of investments evaporated. They are also paying an $18,000,000 fine and are currently under multiple investigations. Here’s the great Allison Gill, with a summary of how well Devon is doing as the steward of the Orange Polyp’s glorious media empire.
American exceptionalism. Make America great again. Freedom is on the march. Guns don’t kill people, not believing in Jesus kills people. The election was stolen, if the MAGA candidate loses. Government is the enemy. White people are being replaced, by racist Jews . Fetuses are sacred, babies can go fuck themselves. Global warming is a hoax. Immigrants are killers. Only communists believe in ethics for the Supreme Court. Only the wealthy and corporations are entitled to entitlements. God bless these united shaiche.
From today’s NY Times (well said by Michelle Cottle):
Mr. Jordan clearly fancies himself more of a Trumpian strongman. He has never been a leader or a serious legislator but is, rather, a career pugilist who seems developmentally stuck in his glory days as a high school and college wrestler. When nominating him on the House floor Tuesday, Elise Stefanik (one of the more painful cautionary tales about the corrosiveness of Trumpism) felt compelled to cite his mad skills “on the wrestling mat.”
The pugnacious pugilist’s entire brand is being a brazen bully who can never be pinned down, who is not afraid to stutter, tap dance and angrily defy when he finds himself in a tight corner (like answering questions about his involvement in the boss’s plan to keep himself in power illegally). Sounds like the ideal candidate to broker political deals and make the hard calls about where to compromise and where to fight to the death, no? The main thing, of course, is that the little bastard simply cannot be pinned down.
In 2017, former Republican House speaker John Boehner told journalist Tim Alberta: “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate…. A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.” In 2021, he clarified: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart—never building anything, never putting anything together.”
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