Bagpiper Bill Barr took a walk of the protest perimeter yesterday and ordered peaceful protesters violently dispersed so his master, the unfairly persecuted president, could stage a photo-op holding up a bible in front of a church near the White House and pretend he is not the anti-Christ.  Peaceful protesters who’d been near St. John’s Episcopal church were dispersed with tear gas, blows, officers on horseback, with National Guard pointing guns at them, a wall of Military Police braced behind shields to “dominate the battle space” (the phrase of Trump uber-loyalist Mark Esper, the man who replaced Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense.  Esper, by the way, clarified his stance today.) 

The president whines incoherently (on Twitter) that a private company, Twitter, is violating his First Amendment (which begins: Congress shall make no law… [1])  rights by pointing out, with a link to a fact check, when he is lying.  SO UNFAIR!  THIS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!  Days later he uses military force to actively violate the First Amendment by depriving a peaceful crowd of the right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

At the photo-op, the falsely pious president holds a bible aloft in his gloved hand, presumably not to have to touch the filthy thing.  Next to him is the religious fanatic Attorney General doing what he fervently believes is Christ’s will on earth, as the original Jesuits did 500 years ago when they made their infallible legal arguments that the Prince of Peace wanted heretics tortured to death in His name.    The bishop of Saint John’s Episcopal church expressed horror, saying she was deeply offended by the president’s shameless use of the church as a backdrop for his strongman move and brazen photo-op.

I read in the NY Times that one of the architects of the photo-op was none other than former White House assistant Hope Hicks, the loyal, pretty young woman who told Mueller she’d never seen the president as upset as when he groaned “I’m fucked!” after learning a special counsel had been appointed to investigate his campaign’s collusion with Russia.    Hicks was surrounded by a large team of government and personal lawyers when she went to Capitol Hill to testify about this, answered virtually no questions, left government employment.   

To refresh our memories, Hicks resigned from her previous role in 2018, a day after she admitted to lawmakers in closed-door testimony that she had told “white lies” as part of her job working for Trump.

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She was quietly rehired (right after Trump was completely and totally exonerated by Barr and in the impeachment “trial” [2]), after a two year vacation, and is currently a top Trump adviser.   Loyalty pays.   Everyone around the man has demonstrated extreme loyalty to him.  It’s the only job qualification to work for the incompetent president.  [3]

An uncharacteristically somber Seth Meyers puts it all best:

[1]  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

[2]  I use the quotation marks because it was the first Senate trial in history where the introduction of evidence and the testimony of witnesses were not allowed.   A true Make American Great Again trial, just like on the frontier — if we like the guy, we let him go — if we hate the guy– execute him, after a fair trial.  Manafort?  Let him out of prison, there’s a pandemic.   Imprisoned whistle blower, migrant, someone who can’t afford bail?   Fuck him/her/it, let ’em die on dirty prison ventilators.  Like that traitorous singing rat Michael  Cohen.   There’s no favoritism here!   Ask Mike Flynn. 

[3]  The CNN account continues:

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Beautifully stated, my brother. 

Please take five minutes to watch this wise man, Art Acevedo.

It’s good to see sane, compassionate people in positions of power and influence addressing real problems directly, in the midst of all the hyper-partisan irrationality.

In less than four minutes you can see the stark contrast between the two presidential hopefuls, framed by an ad by a conservative group and remarks by one of the candidates himself:

In fairness to Mr. Trump, he only knows how to do one thing: win.  This has been his lifelong obsession since he was underdog child number four of five to a loveless gold-digging mother and a ruthless father, an unquenchable will to dominate, to be number one.   So when protesters express rage over yet another killing, by police, of an unarmed black man, this time handcuffed and slowly suffocated by a cop who kneels on his neck for almost nine minutes, Trump has only one move: double down.

These protesters, says the president of the United States, are thugs, like those black sons of bitches who knelt during the national anthem to bring attention to this so-called systemic problem of unaccountable, often murderous, police violence against blacks, those ungrateful malcontents, like Colin Kaepernick, who the NFL paid millions to and then did very well to fire and blacklist, the black son of a bitch.

Note:  I love that the mother of one of these black “sons of bitches” went on television to tell the president that she was a bitch who was very proud to have raised the son of a bitch the president had just criticized on national TV for taking a principled, respectful knee during the national anthem.   If the cops took a knee before these protesting crowds, used techniques to de-escalate tensions instead of responding with violence, there would be far less violence at these protests — in spite of the incitement of a handful of organized, largely white nationalist extremist, agitators intent on sparking a second Civil War.

Instead militarized police forces confront crowds in city after city with tear gas, mace, pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades (actually flash-bangs, used to disorient with a blinding flash of light as well as a deafening sound), phalanxes of truncheon wielding, helmet and shield wearing shock troops, and the Attorney General threatens to treat those crowds like a hostile army of enemy combatants, while America’s Greatest Winner calls for more police violence, while he cowers and fumes in the White House.   Then lashes out at “weak” governors who look like “jerks” during a long, deranged, Hitler-in-the-bunker-style conference call.   

Here are a couple of random digressions and observations from the man tasked with leading a violently divided nation at this supremely difficult moment, during a plague, at a time when its most influential demagogue is channeling his inner George Wallace.  And his spineless underlings, the ones still not humiliated and fired, the Trump Dead-Enders, continue to enable him, pretend his increasingly unhinged behavior is quite normal and nothing in the least bit odd:

“It’s a movement, if you don’t put it down it will get worse and worse,” Trump said. “The only time it’s successful is when you’re weak and most of you are weak.” 

A source on the call, who shared it with The Daily Beast, called Trump’s talk “unhinged,” noting that it often veered off in various directions. At one point, the source said, the president brought up flag burning and encouraged states to pass laws banning it. 

“Flag burning is a disgrace… We have a different court. And I think that It’s time to review that again,” he said. “They wanted to climb up flag polls in Washington in order to burn flags, but we stopped them… If you wanted to try and pass a very powerful flag burning statute, anti-flag burning, I hope you do it because we will back you 100 percent, all the way. I hope some of you do it.”

At another, he blurred legal lines when discussing the needs for prosecution. “When someone is throwing a rock, that’s like shooting a gun. What’s the difference?” Trump said. “You have to do retribution in my opinion.”

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We note that this rock throwing equals shooting a gun equation was the justification used by Israel’s racist, extreme rightwing Minister of Defense, Avigdor Leiberman, to authorize the use of deadly force against any Palestinian protester who picked up a rock, a clod of dirt, raised a fist, screamed in anger, etc.   This authorization, in practice, sometimes also applied to medics and journalists who insisted on being near any of these vicious terrorists. 

The violent tactics of authoritarians, and the provocative lines they draw in the sand before using deadly force, are remarkably consistent wherever they are applied.

God save these United States.    This deranged leader surely can’t.

Apparently the services of this talented cartoonist, Michael de Adder, were deemed no longer necessary to his Canadian corporate employer once he hit the nerve a little too directly:

Too soon?    The dead bodies were a migrant father and daughter found drowned after trying, unsuccessfully, to cross the Rio Grande river into Trump’s America.  They’d gone into the water hoping for a better life — they didn’t find it.

How about this photo?   The face of George Floyd, the man who was held down by three police officers, a knee on his neck for more than 8 minutes, the last 2:53 of which while he was “unresponsive,” until he died?   Too soon?

I truly can’t imagine what it feels like to be black, brown or genetically tan today in this country, this exceptional democracy run by some very fine people, very fine people, the finest power-obsessed racists and grifters money can buy.   

I can only compare it to how a Jew must have felt in the early days of the Third Reich, during the eight years or so before the actual death camps were up and humming, before the organized night of mass rioting against Jews almost five years in, before the special death squads went from town to town a couple of years after that.  Assuming, of course, that the Third Reich had already gone on for centuries at that point.

I’m angry, I’m numb, I feel helpless, watching the same murderous shit that has been done to people who look like George Floyd since 1619 when the first boatload of African chattels were offloaded in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  Done, as always, in the name of the greater good: law and order, preserving the peace, enjoying the freedoms of liberty.    I can only imagine how many orders of magnitude worse it must be for people who look like George Floyd.  In fact, I cannot imagine it, literally.   Fuck.   What do you actually do when you are up against  injustice this brutal and violent? 

A lynching in 2020, under cover of state authority, in broad daylight, on the public street of an American city, over the alleged passing of a counterfeit twenty.   Four cops, working together to make sure this suspect was not resisting their authority, deliberately inflicting their will on him, heedlessly persisting until the man was dead.  Only one of these motherfuckers has been charged with anything resembling intentional or recklessly depraved murder.   And that only because the wrenching video evidence, from multiple eye witnesses, where the now dead man pleads for his life and the officers continue to kill him, is indisputable. 

The fact that the Minneapolis Police Department immediately cut all four loose speaks volumes, as they say.  Usually this kind of bad cop stays on the payroll pending the outcome of a series of administrative hearings, sometimes for years, enjoying the protection of all sorts of union procedures.   The police are among the last American workers to still enjoy those very hard-won worker protections no longer available to most other American workers.

The predictable, smug,  red meat response from the authorities comes next:   seeking justice, a fair process for the accused, and not tolerating crowds that get enraged just because police may be forced to lob tear gas and mace them to get them to obey the curfew.   Angrily blame those who are rightfully upset, you know the drill, every asshole in the world masters it their first day in asshole school. 

Also, equally crucial:  blame outside extremists for setting the night on fire — how long can it be until we hear George Soros mentioned in connection with these dangerous, cynical, enraged outside extremist groups that are supposedly planning and coordinating (a la Koch Brother funded, spontaneous nationwide anti-Obama uprisings) all this violent mayhem?   Not to mention that government provocateurs have long been employed, since the days of the insane, racist J. Edgar Hoover, to incite violence and justify state violence in return. 

Martin Luther King called rioting the voice of the unheard.  MLK is often thought of as a saintly man of peace who was always gentle in resolutely trying to bend the moral arc of the universe.   His name is immediately invoked by men like Bagpiper Bill Barr, as an example for how angry protesters must always act.   That he was, for years, America’s number one most dangerous Negro, a controversial malcontent persecuted by the FBI for the threat he posed to the status quo, has been pretty much written out of the official history of our great nation.

What we forget today is that King was a radical with an incredibly strong spine, a genius sense of moral purpose, and personal fearlessness.  The thing he warned against, from his Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, as the biggest enemy of equality for all Americans, were white moderates, those lovers of order, and peace, and gentle compromise, and patience changing the intolerable conditions of people they had great sympathy toward, but not really much empathy for.   

It’s human nature — not one of these white moderates has ever had to bury a child killed by police who mistook him for a dangerous wild animal — and faced no consequences for their “justifiable mistake”.  Or ever had to plan a funeral for a little girl blown to pieces by klansmen, in her Sunday best, while sitting in a church basement learning about the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Not one of these moderates was ever in danger of having a cop kneel on their neck until no pulse could be found, and then kneel there for three minutes, just for good measure, or having vicious dogs unleashed on them, or high pressure firehoses, or truncheons, or tear gas, or the full violence of the state.   Not one of them even knows anyone personally who has to worry about any of those things happening to her.

What were these four now former Minneapolis police officers thinking as they were “unintentionally” killing a handcuffed prisoner?    What could they have possibly been thinking?   Probably nothing more than “fucking nigger.”