Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Dear Pete Ricketts . . . .


Dear Pete,

I hate to ruin your day and all with a little perspective, but my basket of f***s to give has been empty for a while now.

Tuesday, there were 318 new COVID-19 cases reported in Nebraska. Italy reported 114. That puts us 204 ahead of -- or, more accurately, behind -- Italy.

Nebraska's population is 1.9 million. Italy's is 60.4 million. Just so you know.

Perspective is a stone-cold bitch. And you are a catastrophically bad governor. We'll be damned lucky to survive you.

Thursday, May 28, 2020

100,000 and counting


One. Hundred. Thousand.

Dead. In less than four months.

Our economy is in ruins. We're not near done.

God help us, because Donald Trump and his followers sure as hell won’t.

And wear a damned mask.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Ben Sasse explains it all


More than 90,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus. For more than three months, the president of the United States did nothing, despite repeated warnings.

He repeatedly said the virus would disappear -- like a miracle. He repeatedly said it was a Democrat hoax. He repeatedly has touted quack cures.

Americans can't get tested when they need to. Doctors, nurses, first responders and "essential workers" can't get proper protective equipment. The elderly are dying in nursing homes -- alone.

The gravely ill are dying in hospitals, about one every minute. Alone.

America's governors and mayors are trying to manage the gravest threat this country has faced since World War II -- alone, with scant aid from the federal government.


ALL ACROSS our land, high-school and college seniors are graduating -- online. And their future? Up in the air, where the virus spreads.

And spreads.

And spreads.

The president -- many governors, too -- pushes to "reopen the economy." We have no tools, no procedures to intelligently and safely do it. Yet we plow ahead into the unknown, hoping magical thinking will conquer biology.

Into the darkness of the pandemic steps a learned man, a United States senator from Nebraska. He beams into little Fremont from the big Internet to shine a digital light -- to offer wise words and sound guidance from afar to the new graduates of his alma mater.

Ben Sasse speaks. He is unshaven. Well, many of us are these days.

The graduates listen, and so do his state and his country. What shall we do? Why is this happening? Where lies hope?

The learned man answers all.

What shall we do? Not major in psychology.

Why is this happening? Blame China. Maybe Jeremy -- you can't trust a guy named Jeremy.

Where lies hope? Obviously, not in Ben Sasse.

He's such a Jeremy.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

'Trump' ist Deutsch für 'no bottom'

There is not a single one of the Trumps fit to wash Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's skivvies. According to those who knew Donald Trump Jr., in college, the boy could have earned a minor in underwear-washing.

Friday, November 15, 2019

Dude's a #£¢§´#% miracle of modern medicine

I think our present state of affairs in these United (for now) States may lie somewhere between laughing to keep from crying . . . and dying laughing. That last thing isn't meant to be figurative.

God help us all, because we certainly haven't been able to help ourselves.

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

Didn't we all see this coming?


The most staggeringly unfit man ever to be president of the United States looks for all the world like he's trying to start the civil war he's been tweeting about this week.

I'm starting to think he might succeed. If you don't think that's enough of a possibility to be much afraid right now, you either are in denial or haven't been paying attention.

God help us.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

President Donald J. (for Jim Jones ) Trump


This is what the president of the United States posted on Twitter about two hours ago as I write this, after a day that saw compelling evidence surface that he engaged in a Mafia-style shakedown of a foreign leader to obtain dirt on Joe Biden.
It came a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened an impeachment inquiry against him over that same incident, which prompted a reportedly damning intelligence whistleblower report that one congresswoman termed "jaw dropping" when asked to characterize its contents.

"I describe it as explosive and jaw-dropping," Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said Wednesday night on CNN's Don Lemon Tonight. "I could not believe what I was reading."

ON A NIGHT such as this, I couldn't believe what I was seeing on the president's Twitter feed. Given what we've already seen from the tweeter-in-chief on his Internet Id-fest, that's saying something.

It's clear that we have come to such ruin in America that we no longer have a president, but a cult leader instead. And like Jim Jones, I fear the only way we'll remove him from the White House (God forbid) is feet first -- rather like the way Jim Jones left Jonestown in 1978.

No doubt, the crazy will be turned up to 11 in Trumptown as the end -- one way or another -- draws near.
That leads us to another horrifying thought, one we dare not admit but which surely haunts us nevertheless: How many Americans will this particular cult leader take with him down that highway to hell.

Friday, April 26, 2019

It's one of those flat states in the middle. . . .


I've lived in Omaha for 31 years now, and I have to tell you that it's news to me that Heidi Heitkamp is my former U.S. senator.

Oh . . . wait. She's not. She was a North Dakota senator until January.

Nebraska . . . North Dakota . . . seed caps, John Deere tractors, unbearable winters, old white rustics who wouldn't know a frappuccino from a woke meme. What's the difference?

Am I right?

I mean, if you've seen one part of Flyover Country -- And, really, why would you want to? -- you've seen it all. And now back to our breaking news . . . a gay Black Lives Matters activist is condemning some shit on one coast or the other.

Am I right, Time mag, mag?

Sorry, but as a proud rube out here on the flown-over Great Plains, my "inclusive" media betters out there in D.C. got me on the rag, rag.

And while they're at it, they can take their insults about the queen and shove them up their royal Timese machine.


News flash! Some of us prairie pigf***ers are familiar with Joan Baez.

YOU HAVE to be a lifelong resident of Flyover Country to get how grating it is to be so insignificant that you can have a story actually get onto the effing Time magazine website, and then onto effing Apple News without anyone effing noticing that Heidi Heitkamp is from effing North Dakota and not effing Nebraska. After all the news coverage about how the red-state Democrat would vote on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court after the Me Too furor over his high-school and college "boofing" (and how her no vote likely cost her re-election), how could you not effing know?

One could let it slide as a simple brain fart if it weren't for a lifetime of observing Coastal America being shocked that, for example, Omaha has goddamn paved streets, decent restaurants and broadband Internet connectivity. And that there are no cattle herds wandering down Dodge Street in search of forage.

This actually is an improvement over New Yorkers -- again, for example -- who've been here and point out what a relative backwater it is. Perhaps, but our house payment here might rent a cardboard box over a steam grate there.


What's sad is that folks in these parts actually are, on some level, desperate for the approval of our cosmopolitan "betters" and always have been. We seek validation from those who scarcely know we exist and, with vanishingly few exceptions, we ain't gonna get it.

But that's not the half of the flyover equation. I grew up in Louisiana. No, there were no alligators in my back yard. Yes, we did have indoor plumbing. Many folks can read, write and cipher some.

And you are one Category 5 hurricane in the wrong place from freezing in the dark, America.

LET'S BE honest here. The only damned reason Time magazine gives a good goddamn about former U.S. Sen Heidi Heitkamp of Nebraska . . . North Dakota . . . whatever . . . is that Donald Trump is president of the United States, lots of Forgotten America like Nebraska and Louisiana voted for him, and he's turned out to be a fascist nightmare.

There's nothing like the political equivalent of a global thermonuclear exchange to finally get your attention. Am I right?

Maybe, ultimately, that was the point of his election. After all, the alt-right may be on the upswing, but it's not an Electoral College majority. Plenty of reasonable, decent Americans in Flyover Country were content to throw a bomb into America's entire rigged, classist political and social infrastructure. Oops.

I'm just spitballin' here, but perhaps there was an element of "You can ignore us, but we can kill you" in there as well. Just like the "yellow vests" in France, who largely hail from the forgotten périphérique of the country, flyover folk know who couldn't care less about them -- and they have less and less to lose by blowing the whole damned thing the hell up.

And they also well know the limits of Woke America's inclusivity.

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

King of Kooks, Lord of Losers

The Passion of Steve King (Wikipedia photo)
I'm just gonna leave this right here. Because there is no bottom anymore.
U.S. Rep. Steve King invoked the story of Jesus Christ at a town hall in Cherokee, Iowa, on Tuesday, comparing his experience of being called out for racist remarks in the House of Representatives to Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.

“When I have to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives, and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know we just passed through Easter and Christ’s passion — and I have better insight into what He went through for us partly because of that experience,” the Iowa Republican said, referring to the biblical story of Jesus’ trek to Calvary and execution on a cross in Jerusalem.

King told the roughly 30 constituents at the town hall Tuesday that the prayers he has received from others have helped him through the tough time and given him a “certain peace,” the Sioux City Journal reported.

Thursday, November 01, 2018

Alles Alte ist wieder neu


Adolf Hitler, 1940.


Adolf Trump, 2018.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Here's your Enemies of the American People, a**holes


As Hurricane Michael hit Panama City, Fla., this afternoon with a massive storm surge and 155 mph sustained winds, the staff of WMBB television were in the studio, on the air and getting the news out.

That is, until the folks at News 13 weren't. The cement building was shaking, viewers could hear the roar of the wind outside the station, the wind gauge blew of the roof . . . and then Michael blew WMBB off the air and left the studios and newsroom dark.

Then this happened on Facebook. Live. Via somebody's cellphone.

My wife's college newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, used to have a T-shirt with the motto "Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down." That's how journalists roll. Even when the bastard is an almost-Category 5 hurricane.

Here's your damn "Enemies of the American People," folks.

And if this can't keep the "fake news media" down, neither will the halfwit tangerine toadstool-in-chief, nor will the other little Hitlers who occupied the Republican Party and populate Donald Trump's Nuremberg for Dummies rallies.

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Jesus is just all white


Democracy dies in . . . Bayard.

Bayard?


Bayard, Neb. If you were in Bayard, you'd croak, too.

Religious services have not been finalized, but interment will be in the back yard of state Sen. Steve Erdman, R-Greater Nebraska Trumpian Reich, in a plot between those of tolerance and decency. Erdman indicated that the funeral would be a white, Christian one.

No word on whether the funeral luncheon will be scheduled for before or after the book burning and Two-Minute Hate of University of Nebraska President Hank Bounds.

From the Omaha World-Herald:
A western Nebraska state senator recently criticized the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s plan to hire a diversity vice chancellor, saying it bodes poorly for “white Christian conservative males.”

State Sen. Steve Erdman of Bayard wrote in a column or letter last month to constituents that the NU system complains about inadequate state funding but it still has money for a “six-figure-salaried” person to assist with diversity.
Bayard, Neb. . . . The Florence of the high plains
Erdman said Wednesday that the reaction from some constituents was: “It’s about time somebody said something.”

The matter highlights some conservatives’ belief that universities are swarming with liberal professors who seek to indoctrinate their students. Edna Chun, a national consultant in diversity, said Wednesday that most universities have diversity officials.

NU President Hank Bounds said in a written statement Wednesday evening that he is proud that the university supports diversity. “Throughout my career, I’ve seen again and again that we are stronger when we serve alongside people who don’t look or think like us.

“I was shocked and deeply saddened when I read the column. For any elected official to champion these kinds of dangerous views only serves to damage our great state and our ability to recruit and retain the top talent that will grow Nebraska for the future.”

UNL has never had a vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion, although it has had employees devoted to those tasks. The vice chancellor is the first diversity administrator who will report directly to the chancellor.

The aim of diversity work, Florida-based consultant Chun said, is to broaden the awareness of all students and prepare them for a global society.

“The whole goal of it is educational,” Chun said. She said minority students can feel isolated when there are small numbers of them on a campus. Diversity and inclusion also refer to gender, religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identification, she said.

UNL data show that last fall, minority students made up 14.3 percent of the university’s student body — 3,719 of 26,079 students.

Erdman said he wants no preferential treatment for anyone. “Favoring people by way of their genitalia, the color of their skin and their sexual orientation is as much an insult as discriminating against them for these very reasons,” he said in his letter, which he called “Straight Talk From Steve.”

His letter says he can envision “white Christian conservative males” being “excruciatingly scrutinized against the backdrop of the new Vice Chancellor’s extremist progressive worldview.”

Erdman said his views don’t come from contempt for any race. “I’ve got black friends. I’ve got Mexican friends,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “I look at them as being a friend and an American.”

But some Nebraskans are rebelling against the university’s liberalism, he said. An acquaintance told him his daughter changed her mind and isn’t interested in attending UNL.

“People are starting to wake up,” said Erdman, a 68-year-old retired farmer who sells some real estate. He said in his letter that a student who suggests that marriage is the union of man and woman in the future might be “beaten down by a torrent of LGBTQ complaints followed by psycho-analysis and reprogramming.”
Ground Zero: Senator fears UNL will rename his favorite cereal 'LGBTQ Loops.'

I'M SO OLD that I remember when Nebraska was better than this -- when western Nebraska was better than this.

I remember when there were Democrats outside Omaha and Lincoln. I remember when conservative outstate Nebraska was, by today's standards, vaguely "libtard" and RINO-ish. I remember when state senators from outposts like Bayard, hundreds of miles beyond the last traces of black Nebraskans, weren't angry nativist cranks.

Some were even moderates. Hey, it was the '80s. In 2018, moderates are the new communists to mouth breather-friendly politicians like Erdman.

And raving, paranoid projection is the new Keeping Your Powder Dry Until There's a Demonstrable Problem With the University's Diversity Program. But when you're playing to voters' prejudices and fear, you gotta do what you gotta do.

That would include accusing the University of Nebraska-Lincoln of the nefarious thing you're actually doing.  For example, note that Erdman is calling an unknown vice chancellor who hasn't been hired an "extremist progressive" based on non-existent things not yet done by the chimerical administrator. Just look:
The addition of a Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion also means that every word spoken by White Christian conservative males at the school will be excruciatingly scrutinized against the backdrop of the new Vice Chancellor’s extremist progressive worldview. For instance, any student who dares to suggest that marriage should be defined as the union between a man and a woman will quickly find himself being beaten down by a torrent of LGBTQ complaints followed by psycho-analysis and reprogramming. If the student doesn’t understand the underlying reasons for his stereo-typical beliefs, one will be provided for him.
http://news.legislature.ne.gov/dist47/2018/07/20/straight-talk-from-steve-63/
MY GOD. Sure, it could happen. Than again, maybe not. Actually, probably not. 

This is the demagogic, academia-bashing version of an old Southern tactic for getting rednecks and white trash all riled up . . . just in time for a political Great White Hope to "defend their way of life" at election time.

Southerners had a term for that. I'll not use it.

We wouldn't want to encourage Sen. Erdman to use that word in his next "straight talk" session -- no doubt justifying himself with "Black people use it all the time in rap songs."

Besides, they're all just commies, anyway. No, really:
Recent Left-wing movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, have undoubtedly put tremendous pressure upon the administration to do more about diversity and inclusion. While nobody I know advocates for racial, gender or sexual orientation discrimination, we should still ask why NU needs a Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion, if not to impose favoritism upon these groups.
#MeToo? Being against sexual harassment and sexual assault is an ideological stance?

Outstate Nebraska sure ain't what it used to be.

Like much of rural America, it's emptying out. The young are leaving. The brains are draining. And the remnant is content to imagine itself superior to the citified sinners vilified by bumfuck mediocrities who imagine themselves leaders.

Increasingly, even in states like Nebraska, contempt is a two-way street. If rural Nebraska sees cranks like Erdman as features and not bugs, the day will come when it will end up with the short end of its own shtick.

Big time.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

This is a thing on Facebook. Probably Russian.


This is called "How We Lose Sure-Thing Elections." And November hardly is a sure thing.

This also is called "How We Start a Civil War." South of the Mason-Dixon Line, it's called "What Got Us to Fight to the Death . . . and Finally Win."

I despise Trump and what he stands for with every fiber of my being, but I'd join the fascists and fight to the death with 'em if this was the sort of revenge his removal would visit upon whole swaths of the country, entire religious denominations and entire demographic groups . . . including the region I live in and the religious demographic I belong to.


It wouldn't be a matter of me being a fascist; it would be a matter of simple, calculated self-preservation for myself and on behalf of people I know and love.
 

THIS IS stereotyping and demonization worthy of Donald Trump himself . . . and of his idiot followers. It is goddamned madness, and this sort of thinking will lead to a bloodbath like this country never has seen once it gets out of hand.

Which I expect it to do.


Madness is upon us, and we're all eating it up like a hog does slop.

Come to think of it, how much do you want to bet "Renee Torres" is really Renata
Torchinovich, hard at work in a cubicle at the Troll Factory in St. Petersburg. As psy-ops, this stuff is golden -- the dog whistle is blowing, and "progressives" are howling at the moon.

Friday, June 29, 2018

Oh, for f***'s sake

 
We know the right has lost its mind. It's been happening for years, and the EEG finally flat-lined with the dawning of the Age of Trumpquerulous.


With all the ugliness and stupidity -- and, frankly, Nazification -- of the Republican Party, it has been all too easy to give the Loony Left a pass. Until, of course, Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now the culture wars have gone nuclear (so far just figuratively), and the prospect that somehow, at some time, Roe v. Wade might be overturned has led to widespread hysteria among those who care. Who really care. Who. Really. Really. Care.

Those who care about some women's bodies, just not those in utero. It seems the only shared belief across America's great cultural divide is that everything is a zero-sum proposition. For every winner, there must be a loser, and for every survivor, there must be a corpse in her wake.


For social liberals, dogma says "Kill your kid now. In the womb."

For social conservatives who've given themselves over to the worst devils of the GOP's nature, dogma says "What's your hurry? We can always kill 'em at our leisure after birth. And then we can blame someone else."


BUT I'M NOT HERE to talk about abortion. Or same-sex marriage. Or Obamacare.

I'm not even here to talk about the chipping-away at the Voting Rights Act and the further mischief a conservative court could inflict upon it.

I am here to stare dumbstruck at Item No. 3 on this "progressive" Democrat's Twitter laundry list of "OHMYGAW! OHMYGAW! OHMYGAW" -- Brown v. Board of Education . . .  gone? The court-sanctioned return of "separate but equal"? Jim Crow?

Really?


What the actual f***?

Do you people even listen to yourselves? Don't answer that.


And now, a message from our sponsor.


Thursday, June 28, 2018

Nazis to the right of me, Jacobins to the left . . . .

GOP TV ad . . . fresh from the propagandist's

Kara Eastman isn't going to know what hit her.

Kara Eastman
Eastman is the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Nebraska's 2nd District, which is purplish but often goes red. She beat the purplish former Democratic holder of that seat, Brad Ashford, who lost last time to the redder than red Republican, Don Bacon.

Now, the state and national party couldn't even get Heath Mello elected running against Mean Jean Stothert in just the city of Omaha, which is a lot more Democratic than the 2nd Congressional District as a whole. And Mello was a hell of a lot more attractive candidate -- one with plenty of political bona fides and a lot more in tune with average Nebraskans than Eastman.


And, yes, Eastman really is to the left of Nancy Pelosi. Bacon has been mentioning that early . . . and often.

To Nebraska voters.

Who are not to the left of Nancy Pelosi.

Or Brad Ashford, who got cashiered by the "progressive" Democratic activist base in a low-turnout primary.

Kara Eastman ain't gonna know what hit her.


BEFORE THE PRIMARY, one of Eastman's canvassers actually tried to convince me that Ashford was corrupt. I was born, raised and educated in Louisiana. I think I know a thing or three about political corruption. Brad Ashford ain't a crook.
 

The kid canvasser also told me -- as ominously as a 20-something can conjure -- that Ashford (adopt low, menacing voice here) "used to be a Republican."

My simple, yet brutally effective, response?

"So did I."

Game over. And also in November, most likely.

Despite everything, right now I intend to vote for Eastman. Maybe.I think.

Probably.

We'll see.


It is a massive ask of me to do that -- vote for the "progressive" true believer. At 57, I've been around long enough to distrust most true believers and under ordinary circumstances, I'd just write in my customary protest vote. And I still may not be able to make myself do it, despite Oberpeein'führer Donald Trump and despite the GOP having gone full Nazi.

Why? Because, to paraphrase Gustave Flaubert, "Heath Mello, c'est moi."

And what the Democrats did to him, they'd do quadruple to me.

Why? Because I ain't running for squat as a Democrat and therefore do not have to fudge a damned bit of what I believe as a practicing Catholic. I know what the Kara Eastmans of the "progressive" world think of folks like myself, and I'm reasonably sure of how badly they'd love to shove us right out of civil society.

Why? Because many have been really open about that.
 

THIS JACOBIN IMPULSE on their part absolutely would negate my agreement with about half of Eastman's platform -- and possibly being to the left of her on a few items. Pro-life? To the guillotine!

In saner times, when you agreed with someone on half of the issues, politicians like Ronald Reagan would count you as an ally. Hell, he'd also kick back with Tip O'Neill, the Democratic speaker of the House, for a few stiff ones after a hard day's political brawling.

Unfortunately, these are not saner times. Now, it's "purity or death."

Oh . . . and now Anthony Kennedy is retiring from the U.S. Supreme Court, and the future of Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion is back on the national table. And how. 2018 has just asked 1968 to hold its beer. We will be lucky to survive it.

So, turning back to "Will he or won't he vote for Kara Eastman in what's likely her lost cause of a congressional race?" . . . I'm still at probably. Well, definitely maybe. Or not. Basically, what I'm being expected to do is vote for my own figurative death in order to stop Trumpism, otherwise known as not-so-creeping fascism. Or perhaps I'm being asked to vote for my own literal death.

Who knows? We're not near done with the crazy in this country yet.

 
Not near done.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

There's no arguing with the hate-filled heart


I'm just going to leave this here, just so you can see that you don't have to leave the United States to find all the "shithole" you can stand.

As it turns out, "shithole" is a state of mind. "Shithole" is cultural. 

"Shithole" is directly proportional to one's -- to a culture's, to a political entity's -- willingness to tolerate the shitty thoughts and shitty words and shitty actions of shitty people.

From all appearances these days, it's getting a little ripe around here, "from sea to shining sea."

Our present political crisis is not Donald Trump and his stupid, malevolent and -- ultimately -- deeply counterproductive policies. Trump and what Trump hath wrought merely are symptoms of America's ongoing political, cultural and -- indeed -- spiritual crisis.

THE CRISIS is not difficult to understand.  Roughly a third, maybe a little more, of the American population is completely and demonstrably . . . fascist. Extremism in defense of cruelty, racist scapegoating and authoritarianism is no vice for a large subsection of our fellow countrymen.
 

And tolerance, ordinary human compassion and liberty is one. "Socialist," even.

What can we say about ordinary "'Merkuns" who look at a traumatized, crying Latino child and have their first instinct be "Well, if her parents weren't criminals. . . ."? Lots. Little of it would be safe for work or fit for mixed company, however.

Furthermore, by the time one's mind is so warped and one's heart is so hard as the average member of the Trump base, there are no arguments to be made -- because the intended audience isn't listening. At all.


If Adolf Hitler were alive today, and American -- you can call him Al -- and if he were running on some variant of his 1933 platform, you can bet he'd be President Hitler. Because to a significant degree, he is.

Thus is our land . . . let's call it Amerika. Thus always have been various regions of our land at various points in our history. I know. I grew up in one during the waning days of Jim Crow and in its aftermath. And from this right here, being that WAFB is the leading news station in Baton Rouge, I see that Louisiana hasn't much changed.

Left alone, it's not apt to, either.


The fascist political tradition, like the hardened human heart, does not crack absent extreme pressure and a workable, moral alternative. The fight for the soul, and the very idea, of America is not going to be easy. It may well be as bloody, ultimately, as it was from 1861 to 1865. We can't know these things.

What we do know is we must fight . . . for our country as well as for our souls, too. God help us.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

'Well, just shoot up here amongst us --
one of us has got to have some relief'


Don't look at Boris and Natasha, who stole the 2016 presidential election for the biggest, vilest buffoon and existential threat to ever soil 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

No, look at the Mexicans! The Central Americans! They're overrunning our southern border! Raping our women! Sucking at the taxpayer teat! Talking funny! Montezuma's revenge! AAAIIEEEE!

And don't look at all-American concentration camps! They're . . . they're . . . essentially summer camps! Yeah, that's the ticket! Summer camps! Ex-cel-lent. . . .
If you thought Kirstjen Nielsen’s defense of the Trump’s administration’s policy that separates immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was disturbing, wait until you see what Laura Ingraham had in store for her Fox News viewers on Monday night.

“Consistent with American law, when a party is arrested, your children are either sent to relatives or they become wards of the state,” Ingraham said. “So since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents, and are temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps.”

The host did not show any images of children being held in cages, nor did she play audio of them screaming for their parents in agony as border agents callously joked, “We have an orchestra here.”

Instead, Ingraham channeled Ann Coulter when she used air quotes around the words “separated children” and attacked Democrats for supposedly feigning outrage in an attempt to “emotionally manipulate” the public for political gain.

SUMMER CAMPS populated by . . . "child actors"! Ooooooooh! That's good!

Just two days into this week, I got nothing left except despair and smartassery. And a Jerry Clower story tailor-made for a nation sick unto death of Donald Trump and his sycophants (pronounced something like "sicko fans").

To wit:


YEAH, ol' Jerry pretty much summed up our predicament with his tale of the coon hunt, John and the bobcat he tangled with way up a sweet gum tree. Most sane, nonauthoritarian and unbigoted Americans, I think, can identify with John.
"What's the matter with John?"
"HOOOOOOOOO! Shoot this thing! Have mercy! This thing's killin' me! Shoot this thing!"

"Johnnnnnn! I can't shoot up in there. I might hit you!"

"Well, just shoot up here amongst us -- one of us has got to have some relief."
SO . . . until somebody gets some relief, here's some smartassery which, I fear, comes way too close to the truth.



Monday, June 18, 2018

White God never has to deal with this. Real God always does.

Dr. Seuss (1940)

A Miami Herald columnist is just askin'.

"What if God were one of us?" Leonard Pitts wants to know.

"Singer Joan Osborne famously asked that question in 1995," he went on. "In her Grammy-nominated hit, 'One Of Us,' she envisions the author of all creation as 'a slob like one of us, just a stranger on a bus trying to make his way home.'"



Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article213298284.html#storylink=cpy
Hmmm . . . well, um. . . .
The idea of eternity contained in mortality was controversial. But it turns out that envisioning God as “one of us” is not at all uncommon. Indeed, our conceptions of God tend to be colored, perhaps inevitably, by our social affiliations. So says a new study in which University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers tested 511 American Christians to see how they envision God.

The one thing respondents agreed on was that God does not resemble Michelangelo’s stern old white man with a flowing beard. Other than that, there was no consensus. African Americans saw a God with African-American features. Young people saw a younger God. Liberals saw a loving God with younger, more feminine features. Conservatives saw a God who was white, older and who radiated power.

In other words, when we see God, we see ourselves and our values. But we may want to look again.
NO, we have gazed at our pseudo-spiritual navels quite enough, thank you very much.

We should look for all the ways God has come to us throughout creation -- how He comes to us still. Perhaps, just perhaps, we should for once consider what the hell has happened to heaven whenever it has come to earth.

It should not be necessary to point out, as much as I love the Joan Osborne song, that "One of Us"  merely restates what Christians have known for millennia -- God was one of us. He was . . . is . . . a Palestinian Jew, name of Jesus.

By contemporary American standards (and particularly those of the combed-over troll we call our president), Jesus Christ -- second Person of the Holy Trinity, son of Mary and one with the Father -- was a loser. He had neither a pot to piss in nor a window to piss out.

If the Border Patrol caught Him on the Mexican border . . . "Oh, Jesus. Another damn Honduran" . . . God incarnate would not find His predicament an unfamiliar one.

Children in detention facility, McAllen, Texas

WAIT. We were talking about how God is like us, remember?

Shut up.

When Jesus was an infant . . . His parents had to flee with their firstborn son across the Egyptian border as undocumented aliens. King Herod, of the MS-13 Herods, had put a price on His head.

Years after the family returned from exile, folks in God's hometown tried to throw Him off a precipice. Something about crazy talk and blasphemy.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, the Roman centurions tortured and lashed Him until His back was divinely raw hamburger, then they jammed a crown woven of 2-inch-long thorns down onto His head. They mocked Him, and then the local man from Rome, Pontius "What is truth?" Pilate sentenced Him to death at the unruly urging of a first-century conservative political base.

Then the authorities made Him carry the heavy, assembled wooden beams he would hang from to the site of His execution. Then the guards nailed his wrists and ankles to the cross and raised it up, so He would hang there and eventually suffocate.

While His mother watched.

Pitts again:
Consider that, then consider this: On the same day the study was reported, CNN.com ran a story about an undocumented immigrant from Honduras who says federal authorities grabbed her infant daughter from her as the baby was being breastfed When the mother complained, she was handcuffed.

It was just the latest outrage of the government’s so-called “zero tolerance” immigration policy, i.e., its decision to criminally prosecute every person who attempts to illegally cross the U.S. border. Until that decision last month, detainees primarily faced civil deportation hearings.

Since that decision, hundreds of children have been separated from their parents. Some detainees say U.S. officials told them their children were being taken for baths, then stole them away. They say no one will tell them where their kids are. Toddlers are being left in an unknown land with strangers, crying for parents they cannot find. The emotional trauma America is inflicting on these kids is incalculable. . . . 
No, this is evil — a just-following-orders, look-the-other-way, not-my-fault species of moral putrefaction brought to you by the most ostentatiously Christian political party in one of the most noisily Christian nations on Earth. The hypocrisy of it reeks to, well … high heaven.
Wikipedia
CHRISTENDOM HAS been giving varying degrees of that treatment to random individuals and groups for nearly 2,000 years now. Usually, we find some way to claim the God Seal of Approval when we do.

Ask me how -- I'm a Southerner, and we specialize in that shit.

What Trump is doing isn't new, it's just that he's so brazen about it, media technology is better now . . . and this administration adds a whack je ne sais quoi to every single thing it touches.

Furthermore, the only point to this Hitlerian spectacle on the Mexican border is sheer terrorism. It's that simple. You terrorize anyone thinking of illegally crossing the border -- or legally seeking asylum -- into not doing it.

Please. The administration has admitted as much any number of times. Don't even argue the point.

Al-Qaida flew jetliners into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to terrorize Americans right out of the Middle East. That terrorism worked about as well as this Trumpian terrorism will.

We Americans are the biggest hypocrites in the world, and the stupidest. Laura Bush correctly compared the aesthetic and means of this terrorism to the Japanese internment camps we built during World War II, but the spirit and tactics of what's being done in the name of the American people today is pure 9/11.

About which I'm sure Jesus Christ was giving Osama bin Laden a big thumbs up. Yeah, that's the ticket. Right, Jeff Sessions?