A broken clock is right twice a day. Tip of the skull cap to Heather Cox Richardson.
(Fucking Twitter apparently requires permission to reproduce a video from Twitter, which I don’t know how to get, so click the link and watch the 15 second clip of Trump nonchalantly saying the wall Mexico paid for would have been completed by now “had we won the election”)
And this refreshing bit of conceited honesty from the same source, just in:
The Anti-defamation League, a group of Jews who scream in the mass media and bring lawsuits whenever a mainstream outfit pushes an overtly anti-Semitic idea, threatened FOX “news” and forced them to take down this cartoon right out of Germany’s Der Sturmer 1936.
Before FOX was forced (by the Jews) to take it down 15,978 MAGA adherents liked it. 754 were moved to make comments, no doubt about the sinister truth of the cartoon, that fucking Jews control the child raping, child-blood drinking, godless, communist Democrat (sic) party. If that many FOX diehards had come out to vote for Joe Manchin III’s Republican opponent in the last senatorial race in West Virginia things would have gone differently. If the well-drawn cartoon (nice piece of artwork, credit where it’s due) hadn’t come down, the number of likes it would have by now would eclipse Centrist Joe’s 290,000 total votes in the West Virginia race he won by three points.
But a couple of larger points, before I get back to the meeting with my fellow rabbis to figure out how to get more gullible colored people into the country to vote for the party that supports intolerable affronts like affordable child care, skilled elder care, universal health care, slowing the destruction of our habitat, replacing police as first responders to mental health crises, and other communist pipe dreams like that, and to insert these coloreds to replace the “legacy Americans” (tip of the yarmulke to Swanson TV dinner heir Tucker Carlson) who embrace conspiracy theories about the one non-right wing billionaire we know about, George Soros. The story goes that Soros, at the age of six or so, worked closely with the Nazis and profited handsomely by selling Jewish homes. That’s some power, if you think about it. Diabolical, really. No wonder anti-Semites hate Soros!
This cartoon could work better as a real reflection of the USA in 2021 if you had a three headed puppeteer, say, Charles Koch, a descendant of Andrew Mellon and the reclusive, autistic math genius Robert Mercer (who put Trump over the top by hooking him up with Sloppy Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Alternative-Fact), working the puppets for tax cuts for the wealthy, right wing extremist federal judges and dismantling all government regulation (while enforcing laws prohibiting abortion). Or the monstrous Charles Koch could stand in for the rest of his network of philanthropic psychopaths, or Rupert Murdoch could, for that matter.
One more point, and I hesitate to make this obvious point, even as I make it with my traditional shrugging Jewish irony:
Doesn’t the fact that Jews forced super-powerful billionaire reactionary Rapert Merde-och to take down an arguably anti-Semitic cartoon showing a very ugly Jewish puppeteer controlling things kind of make the anti-Semites’ point for them? I mean, nu?
My Hebrew school teacher Miss Lipschitz was a young Israeli woman who, in the warm weather, favored sleeveless shirts. She had a habit, when the class was noisy and popping out of our seats, of extending an arm straight in front of her, snapping her fingers and loudly calling “Shave mahair!” This move would reveal a tuft of hair under her arm, something uncommon in American-born women.
In Hebrew “shave” is the command form of “sit” and “mahair” means “quickly”. She was telling us to sit down and come to order. But to some of us, hopped up on smuggled in candy, resentful about being back in school at 4:00, after a full day of regular school, not knowing a word of Hebrew, the sight gag of “shave my hair” was too good to resist.
When I was eleven I came back from the first day of Hebrew School and told my family that my new teacher was an Israeli woman named Miss Lipschitz. My family found her name as funny as I had. These unexpected moments of levity always came as a welcome relief from our ongoing wars at the dinner table. We all loved to laugh.
My father regarded me with a merry look for a second and said:
“Tell her, ‘if you’re lip shits, my ass chews gum.'”
This off-color deadpanned one-liner drew howls from my sister and me. My mother, though not managing to completely hide her amusement, made a show of reprimanding him for being such a bad example to his children.
If I’d repeated his crude army gag at Hebrew School (these off-color bits would usually be prefaced with ” a guy in the army would say…”), and got in trouble, of course, it would have been completely my problem, another illustration of my lack of common sense, in spite of my high intelligence. Both of my parents would have been on me without any mercy or sense of irony.
Which is funny too, in a way, looking back on it now.
“Oh, the honor system, of course, of course, we’re on the honor system, on my honor. I’m on my honor, absolutely. You have my word, 100%. I swear to you on the grave of my sainted mother, on my sacred honor.”
On September 29, Trump went to his scheduled debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, arriving too late for testing. Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who was the moderator at the debate, later said the event was relying on the “honor system.” Trump railed and snarled at Biden, who was close enough to him to have been in danger. Trump’s contingent refused to wear masks despite rules at the venue to do so. At least 11 people tested positive after the debate.
source
This honorable gentleman’s assurance was given after a man famous for his punctuality contrived to arrive at a live debate hosted by a FOX moderator too late for mandatory testing, three days after the first (undisclosed) positive test for the strongman who thought wearing a mask made him look vulnerable, weak, who’d made a strong branding decision to be the tough guy, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, as opposed to the wimpy and unmanly mask-wearing Pence, who he’d soon blame for betraying him and send a mob down to threaten, chase, perhaps rough up, or maybe actually hang. The strong contrast to weak, old Biden with his comically gigantic mask.
The tough guy assuring the others “on his honor” that this time he was actually not lying, that he’d never tested positive for Covid in recent weeks (let alone three days earlier) must have been thinking what easy marks, what pathetic losers noncriminals are… as he concealed his recent positive test for a disease that was ravaging the world, one he’d dismissed as a hoax as America led the world in Covid deaths, one he swore on his honor that he’d tested negative for (still his story).
That massive Covid disruption was not his fault in any way, whatever those exaggerated, fake death tolls supposedly were, he’d totally delegated that, to his dimwit alter-ego, his son-in-law the Covid Czar (rewarding his glorious work making historic peace in the Middle East, fixing the federal bureaucracy and ending the Oxycodone overdose crisis). Pence was also assigned Covid Czar, with equal responsibility for the outcome, but with less power than Kushner and a much better guy to send an angry mob after than the husband of his cherished daughter.
Of course, by refusing to wear a mask while bellowing at Biden he was probably hoping to spew enough active Covid to infect and kill the old man he hated and had vowed he could only lose to in a rigged election. He gave the people who prepped him for the “honor system” debate Covid. Loyal Chris Christie got a serious enough case of the deadly disease to need heroic, very expensive emergency treatment at a hospital, and hospitalization, extraordinary measures necessary to save his life. Measures unavailable to virtually any of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died of the pandemic and continue to die of it.
But really, when you’re at the top of the food chain, the apex predator, the only question is, how many more times with this stupid “honor system” bullshit? Isn’t it enough, already, with the make believe about honor systems, not lying, even if it helps you, being nice just so somebody else can fuck you? Nobody has honor, let’s face it, why insult people’s intelligence? You’re a mark that’s going to get strongly played if you believe in that honor bullshit, take my word for that, loser.
Now, did you take care of that little thing we talked about?
What could possibly go wrong?
Or the next governor of Tennessee, one.
Knifing through the water
Sadly this brain of his, the former chief strategist for the former president, worked for his billionaire patron Robert Mercer’s first and second choices in 2016, before throwing his support behind Lyin’ Ted and finally the last right-winger standing, Honest Donnie. Mercer also provided the GOP nominee with Kelleyanne Conway. The rest, as they say, is history.
The former president, always determined to be the smartest man in the room (he described this as part of his business genius while campaigning at wild rallies — surround yourself with loyal idiots to look smart) soon got sick of people giving Bannon credit for Trump’s victories. Trumplethinskin [1] fired Sloppy Steve a few months into his administration.
When it came time to overturn his election loss, Trump turned to a true strategist of chaos, anarchy and autocracy. You need a ruthless pragmatist like that in your War Room at the Willard Hotel as you implement your audacious plan and unleash your enraged mob.
Clearly, an insatiably ravenous reptile needs a cagey brain.
[1] tip of the cap to Stephanie Miller
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