Praise the Lord And Put More Money In The Slot

 

I shouldn't be surprised. After all televangelism is all about putting money in the slot...sorry...collection plate to get the jackpot of salvation from your "big imaginary friend in the sky"©*. The other night I was watching a movie that someone else had put on the television when a Caesar's Casino ad blared forth (blare is a modest term for what they do) with the news of the...I am not making this up "The Jesus Slots". Now we have one-armed bandits to match the two-armed bandits like Creflo Dollar, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Greg Locke, and their Simoniac ilk.

I thought that I had seen the ultimate when I saw the Jesus on the cross flicker picture that Cheech and Chong so effectively satirized. I also, years before that, saw at Easter season a chocolate-marshmallow crucifix, your sweet, chewy way to consume the body and the blood together. Yet "The Jesus Slots" bring us to a whole new level of religiose absurdity, I fear.

I have said before that Evangelicals have given Christianity a bad name what with their incessant money grubbing, not to mention their using religion as a pretext for tax avoidance and expounding and encouraging neo-fascist politics. Evangelicalism is the untreated sewage of Christianity. In fact, the marriage of Evangelical CHRISTIANS and the neo-Nazi Republiscum Party is a match...dare I say it?...made in heaven (the one that's only a myth like Santa Claus). Evangelicals will swallow whole and in amazing quantities any bullshit that the con artists posing as pastors and prophets feed them. The Rapture? Sure! Qanon? You betcha! Then there are the old standards like anti-Semitism, white supremacy, religious bigotry and hate of anyone who doesn't adhere to a lifestyle that they find glancingly referred to in some passage of the inerrant Bible that Jim Bakker or some other charlatan has just edited for his own flock of bleating sheep. The Republiscum Party is for "the little guy"! Sure!! That's why so many million and billionaires fork over a chunk of their quarterly dividend payments to keep the sheep thinking that nonsense.

But wait, you might say, most of these "bleating sheep" are simply good people, good, simple people. There's no need to insult and denigrate them. To which I say, your standards of "good" and mine differ widely. I exclude from "good people" the racists, the xenophobes, the hate-filled fools who rail against the gay or lesbian or transgendered, the religious bigots who insist that only their religion worships their particular and special, one and only "big imaginary friend in the sky"©* properly and that all others must be converted or destroyed, any "good people" who insist on following a "prophet" none of whose predictions come true, who insist that demons possess anyone not playing a part in a movie, who insist that women do not have a right to choose what happens within their own bodies or an education or work outside the home or refuse to have sexual relations with their husbands ever or report their husbands to police when the husbands abuse either the women themselves or their children. Such folks are not ever included in my definition of "good people".

These same insane people who insist that women have no individual right to choose abortion now rally to insist that they have the individual right to go maskless and infect others as well as refuse to take a safe and effective vaccine which could save their lives, the lives of those in their families, their neighbors, fellow congregants and also prevent the Covid-19 virus from mutating into more dangerous and deadly forms. To call these people insane and imbeciles is not hyperbolic. They can't discern that their refusal to get vaccinated and masked is as inimical to human life as they claim abortion to be. If they can't figure that out they are either insane, imbeciles or insane imbeciles or, worse yet, insane imbeciles who credit Fox News, Newsmax, Sinclair or OANN.

Too harsh?

Let me put it to you this way: vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna, and several other companies, including Johnson & Johnson, have proven safe, effective and have reduced both infection and death rates in the United States and around the world. Those vaccines have allowed many areas' businesses to reopen, sometimes fully, and encouraged economic growth but that doesn't matter to the insane, the imbeciles, insane imbeciles and, to be redundant, Evangelicals among us whose latest snake oil cure-all is horse dewormer. The con men selling Ivermectin to their audience of fools will tell you that the Covid vaccines can make men sterile. They can't and don't but when have the facts ever stopped a con man? In place of the actual effective vaccine, they tout a veterinary medicine that actually can sterilize humans. When the con men know they have the attention of the insane, the imbecilic, the insane imbecilic and, to again be redundant, the Evangelicals their villainy knows no bounds. Yet a part of me thinks that sterilizing these fools is a thing devoutly to be wished.

We should not be surprised at this. Evangelicals are so steeped in the idea that this life is a "world of sin", "a veil of tears", a world so deeply flawed that their "big, imaginary friend in the sky"©* has decreed that it should be destroyed and that we are thus in "The End Times", that their great joy is the total destruction of their "big, imaginary friend's" handiwork. It never occurs to these fools that planning your life for the destruction of your god's creation might be offensive to that very god they claim to worship.

The bleating sheep who trust that their "big, imaginary friend in the sky"©* will protect them from a world-wide pandemic are dying like flies. In states run by the Republiscum Party, the infection and death rates soar while their preachers and radio blabbers tell them that their god is angry at the United States for allowing (take your pick from the following list):

• Abortion
• LGBTQ rights
• Black Lives Matter
• The Anti-Fascist Movement known as antifa
• Eliminating prayer in schools
• Feminism
• Not reelecting The Failed Orange Führer
• Rigging the 2020 election to defeat The Failed Orange Führer
• Allowing anyone to even think about Critical Race Theory
• Teaching Evolution 
• Liberalism
• Communism
• Any "ism" that your preacher says is bad
• Some cabal of politicians, celebrities and folks they don't like that are actually reptiles who steal the essence, blood, pheromones, something from babies and children and wear red, high-heeled shoes
  
• All of the above

They never seem to wonder why their "big, imaginary friend in the sky"©* is taking it out on his worshipers of the "one, true faith" and not killing off the nasty people included in the list above. Could it be that the disasters inflicted on these "good people" happen randomly, or because of climate change (oops! I almost forgot. It's not climate change it's Chinese weather machines and Jewish Space Lasers!") or maybe, just maybe, if their is a god looking out for his special planet, those disasters get visited upon the "good people" because their god is pissed off that they are so utterly stupid and wants to sift the Evangelical chaff from the Liberal grain so that creation, with all it's nasty flaws, can continue to chug along without their bullshit?

We'll just have to wait and see who gets the jackpot from the "Jesus Slots" of life.

To close, let me quote Maxwell Anderson's lyrics for the title song of the musical Lost in the Stars:

Before the Lord God made the sea and the land

He held all the stars in the palm of his hand

And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand

And one little star fell alone.

Then the Lord God hunted through the white, night air

For the little dark star on the winds down there

And he stated and promised he'd take special care

So it wouldn't get lost any more.

Now a man doesn't mind if the stars grow dim

Or the clouds roll over and darken him

As long as the Lord God's watching over them

Keeping track how it all goes on.

But I've been walking through the night and the day

'Til my eyes get weary and my head turns grey

And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away

Forgetting the promise that we heard him say

And we're lost out here in the stars.

Little stars, big stars blowing through the night

And we're lost out here in the stars.

Little stars, big stars

Blowing through the night

And we're lost out here in the stars!

*©George Carlin

SPRING THOUGHTS 2021

The Proud Boys have little to be proud of and much more that is their shame.

Are you really a "patriot" if you want to tear down the democratic government of your country?

The people who attacked the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the lying scum who encouraged that attack are "PATRIOTS" in the same sense that right-wing Evangelical CHRISTIANS are Christians (i. e. they are not!).

Dr. Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel." Ambrose Bierce, writing in America and over 100 years later, corrected Dr. Johnson noting that patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel. I think we need a new word for love of country. The word "patriot" has been so abused for 60 years that it has no positive meaning anymore when lunatics, fascists, cultists and assorted other scum can call themselves by that name.

If people like James Dobson, Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson and Roy Moore are CHRISTIANS it is just as well that Jesus of Nazareth has been dead for more than 2000 years.

The Oath Keepers might want to look for an oath that's actually worth keeping.

If Stewart Rhodes is an actual patriot, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Please note: I have never been a queen in any sense of the term and have never visited "Sheba" in any sense of that term either. 

The Second Amendment to our Constitution reads as follows:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

We have only to look at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021 to see that these self-styled militias are anything but "well regulated" and oppose "the security of a free State". In consequence of their NOT meeting the conditions set forth in the Second Amendment their right "to keep and bear Arms" needs to be "infringed" and actually curtailed in the same way that we would take a firearm away from any other lunatics.

When we're being polite we call Republiscum office holders, candidates and voters Republicans even though they can't. The Republiscum Party and its adherents have made a disastrous mess of the national economy causing a total of 22 Recessions and Depressions of the 35 Recessions or Depressions since the Republican Party was founded. In almost every case it is Democrats who have had the task of cleaning up the mess that Republiscum have left the nation. Please note that the Republiscum Party bills itself as the party of "fiscal responsibility".

We also call them "Conservatives" when "Fascists" is the correct term. Why?

Once upon a time there were Republicans and Conservatives but largely since the 1950s there have been Republiscum and Fascists with few notable exceptions.

Jeffrey Epstein, his girlfriend and abbetters Ghislaine Maxwell and fellow trafficer(?) the Failed Orange Führer, trafficed in underage girls. Now Rep. Matt Gaetz, who describes himself as the most dedicated of dedicated Failed Orange Führer supporters, is under investigation for trafficing in underage girls. One of the most basic lies of the QAnon Cult involved in the sexual exploitation of underage children. I wonder how the right-wingnuts came up with that idea?

Antifa is shorthand for anti-Fascist. Other notable anti-Fascists include Dwight D. Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, Mark Clark, Omar N. Bradley, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Josephine Baker, Frederico García Lorca, Berthold Brecht, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Alan Turing, Reinhold Niebuhr and most of the soldiers and sailors who fought in World War II. So what's not to like unless, of course, you are a Fascist?

About half of white, evangelical voters say that they will refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19. While their decision is both stupid and a prime example of sheep being led by the Judas Goat of disinformation  to the slaughter by from Fox, OANN and other right-wing media outlets, look on the bright side: many idiot right-wing evangelicals will be culled from the national herd, an outcome devoutly to be wished. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.

Unfortunately, many of those unvaccinated imbeciles will go out and infect smarter people and some imbeciles will survive this pandemic. That is a tragedy.

One of the reasons that the Republiscum Party has been so successful in locking in the evangelical vote is that the majority of evenagelicals will believe any bullshit that's fed to them. They believe in The Rapture. They believe that mental illness is caused by demonic possession. They believe that they can tell who is possessed by nonexistent demons. In short, they believe the same utter nonsense that allowed 20 citizens of Salem, Massachusetts to be murdered in 1692 and 1693. Technology progresses but we remain the same ignorant apes  century after century.

MARVEL-ING AT FASCISM

 

First, let's understand the term. Fascism is a right-wing authoritarian political philosophy which melds corporations and the state. It opposes unions, workers' rights, free speech, democratic government, a free press, an independent judiciary and all education which is not in service to the state. The term was coined by Benito Mussolini who became the Fascist Party's Dictator of Italy in 1922. Adolph Hitler's Nazis were Fascists as was the Spanish government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. World War II was started in Europe by Fascist Axis powers of Germany and Italy. Britain, free military forces representing many countries conquered by the Nazis and, eventually, the United States fought Fascism in Europe during the war that lasted from September 1, 1939 to May 8, 1945. A slightly different species of Fascism was practiced by Japan in the period from July 7, 1937 to September 2, 1945. World War II in the Pacific officially ended on October 14, 1945.

For decades the Republiscum Party and its toadies in neo-Fascist media (e.g. Fox, Sinclair, OANN, Rash Lamebrain, Glenn Beck, Alec Jones and others) and right-wing fundamentalist religious fanatics have been brain washing their adherents with the farrago that Communism and Fascism are both left-wing political philosophies. They insist that because Communism is a spin-off of Socialism and the Nazis called themselves the Natzionalische Socialistische Partei (National Socialist Party) that Communism, Socialism and Fascism are all the same. That assertion is patently false. Russian, Chinese and several other forms of Communism are or have been Totalitarian (the state, usually in the form a a single strong man, is all powerful in Totalitarian states) as was Italy under Benito Mussolini and Germany under Adolph Hitler, the authoritarianism and violent tactics are the same but the similarity ends there. The Republiscum Party has given itself over to Fascism wholeheartedly since the end of World War II. Those who would say otherwise are either uninformed or incapable of thinking for themselves.

I am proud to say that my father and my Uncle Eddy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill were all anti-Fascists.

One of the main characteristics of a Fascist government is it's readiness to set aside law and even common decency to achieve and maintain power. Murder, mob rule, vigilantism, assassinations, all outside the law and usually in flagrant opposition to established law, are Fascism's hallmarks. Usually this lawlessness is carried out in service to some special hero/strong man. Which brings me to a series of shows on NetFlix that I have been watching with some pleasure but great trepidation recently.

As a boy, I was a DC Comics lover. I had a huge stack to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Green Lantern comics as well as their spin-offs like Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl et al. I wasn't much of a Marvel Comics fan at all. Still, here I am, an old man, in a universe that Marvel Comics dominates.

Not surprisingly at all as a pre-teen I was fascinated by superhero comic books. Every child feels powerless. Children must do as parents say. Even the best of parents deny their children agency to some degree. That denial is the nature of parenting while rebellion against that denial, sometimes in the pages of a superhero comic book, is the nature of the growing child. I would suggest that all fascination with superheroes is a function of feelings of powerlessness.

In July, 2020 I heard some good things about the series Jessica Jones so I started watching it and fell in love with Kristen Ritter, the damned good actress who plays the conflicted, post-traumatic stressed Jessica brilliantly. I like the fact that Jessica is very down scale, distressed and wary of her super power that is also pretty limited. I watched the whole 3 seasons of the series before finding out that it was one part of a larger Marvel universe that includes the ethically and morally ambivalent Daredevil, the invulnerable Luke Cage, the rich boy turned Kung Fu monk, Danny Rand aka The Iron Fist and the vengeful, violent ex-Marine, Frank Castle, The Punisher. I have viewed the whole series and become increasingly anxious about my country while doing so.

So how can Captain America, who started out fighting the Nazis, be a fascist or any of these characters be such? Let's take a look.

Each of these characters is him or herself a "strong man" who carries out his or her vengeance/actions in furtherance of his or her individual goals. That those goals are established as "the good of society" is a tissue thin distraction. Adolph Hitler murdered between 9 and 12 million people in concentration camps for what he claimed was "the good of society".

Each of these characters fights some sort of super-villain whose over-the-top viciousness makes an over-the-top response logical and even necessary. Let me return to Chancellor Hitler for a moment and note that "The Eternal Jew" (The Ewige Jude) was his super-villain that made "The Final Solution" codified by the Wansee Conference, logical and, to these fascist scum, necessary.

Democracy, literally government of, by and for the people, is the antithesis of "strong man" autocracy (literally government of, by and for one's self). When the "strong man", however noble his or her goals, makes the rules and up ends the laws of the people we are in a dictatorship. Dictatorships may be of the political right or left but they are never a democracy. By definition a Dictator imposes the rules of government, the definitions of right and wrong behavior. Government by a Dictator imposes restrictions or allows license at the whim of the Dictator. We all know how that goes whether it was the show trials and purges under Stalin in Russia, the state sanctioned murders and repression under Mussolini and Franco, the murders of Jews, gays, the disabled, Roma, socialists and communists under Hitler, Mao's Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot's Killing Fields.

In the United States we have periodically faced calls for dictatorship. For all the superficial gloss of "states' rights" our Civil War was about a dictatorship that allowed enslavement of human beings simply because of their skin color. Dictatorship by slave owners, after the 13th and 14th Amendments, morphed into dictatorship by corporate magnates who denied workers their basic rights and commodities speculators who denied farmers fair prices for their produce. Calls for right wing dictatorship produced the ultimately thwarted "Business Coup" of 1934. Over the last century and a half corporate dictatorship and monopoly practices have had few setbacks to their growth and no restraints whatever since the 1970s and the farrago of "supply-side economics". This right wing corporate Fascism has brought great wealth to the few and stagnant wages, ever increasing debt and calls for a strong man to right the wrongs that strong men have imposed. The most laughable, were it even slightly funny, argument is that "a business man" would right the wrongs that "business men" have imposed on the middle class.

All of the Marvel heroes come equipped with doubts about their actions and worries about how they will be perceived. The super-villains who oppose them, however, make those heroes' actions necessary thus overcoming the heroes' doubts and worries. Let me say quite definitively that super-villains do exist. The 45th President of the United States, The Orange Führer, is one though about the least competent of the bunch. What is true of most super-villains is that they hide in the shadows. They send their support for Fascism through dark money paid into protected and untraceable accounts to fund right wing militias, white supremacist groups, foundations designed to put forward plausible but utterly false reports to confuse otherwise decent people about corporate depredations, pollution and climate change, evangelical religious organizations that teach falsehoods as writ from one god or other and always to fund the political campaigns of frauds and demagogues so vile that only distractions keep them from being laughed off the ballot.

Though I am certain that super-villains exist I am just as certain that super-heroes do not exist. The only way to resist the super-villains is through an educated and active people who cling to truth, science and decency toward their fellow men and women. We are all immigrants, early or late. We are all human beings regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, language or heritage. We are all Americans simply by the fact that we choose to live in this nation. We are all neighbors regardless of the distance, physical or philosophical, between us. We are all heirs to a history of greater and greater democracy. We deny all of those things by insisting on divisions, succumbing to hatreds and giving in to the Fascists who would dictate to us. 

No Superman or Luke Cage or Jessica Jones is going to rescue us from America's decades long slide toward Fascism. We, the people, collectively are powerful. Anyone who denies our power is looking to delude us for his or her own ends We, the people have proved our power several times over in Georgia over the last few months. We are and must be our own super-heroes. We are the only ones who can rescue ourselves.

Post Script: During the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U. S. Capitol a former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Larry Randall Brock, Jr., invaded the Senate Chamber in full tactical gear. He had previously been fired from the military for threatening and racist statements to airmen under his supervision. He also had posted messages on social media about taking members of Congress hostage and executing them. Mr. Brock wore, among other patches on his riot gear, a Texas flag over the skull logo of The Punisher, one of the Marvel series discussed above.

THE MOST BASIC OF RIGHTS

I write today about the right to vote and the need for every citizen to exercise that franchise. Please bear with me while I establish my bona fides and indulge, as I too often do, in a bit of history.

In an absolute monarchy as existed in Britain and its colonies in the 1770s no one could vote for the king. In fact, no one votes for king or queen in any country with one today. Back in the 1770s there was some unpleasantness that lasted for more that 6 years between Britain and her American colonies over the fact that the people of those American colonies could not vote and be represented in the British government. In consequence of that unpleasantness those British colonies became the United States of America, the nation in which I was born and have lived all my life.

Not only am I a native of the United States of America but I also feel a special bond to this nation that goes beyond my lifetime. My earliest ancestors on the North American continent were William and Suzanna White. Suzanna was pregnant when she left Europe. Before she could even land she gave birth aboard ship to a son and named him Peregrine after the falcon that travels great distances. Peregrine White was born on November 20, 1620 (Old Style) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor off the tip of what we now know as Cape Cod. Other ancestor immigrants from Britain were among the first settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts and Chandler's River (now Jonesboro), Maine. Some of those ancestors stood to stop the progress of General Howe's troops at Lexington Green and also fought "by the rude bridge that arched the flood" in Concord, Massachusetts later that day.

As I say, I feel a special bond to my nation. Man and boy I have visited many of the shrines of our nation from Saratoga, Ticonderoga, the U. S. S. Constitution, the Bunker Hill Monument, Ulysses Grant's Tomb, Valley Forge, Independence Hall, the Gettysburg battlefield, the many monuments in Washington, D. C., and the battlefields of Virginia including Yorktown, Fredericksburg, Winchester and others. I've been to Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods and walked through Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, Illinois as well as been awed by his monument in our capital, my capital.

I've been able to do all these things because my ancestors, including my Father and Uncle Ed who fought Fascism in Europe during World War II, could and did vote. The ability to vote for your representatives in government is the first and foremost right for which we fought our Revolutionary War. Some will say that the Revolutionary slogan was "No Taxation without Representation". That was one of the Revolutionary slogans but it is utterly wrong to place the sole emphasis on the word "Taxation" and forget "Representation" and the vote that elects representatives.

We have a flag that I cherish. We have all those monuments that I've named and many more. Yet the flag, the monuments, the ancestry and history is meaningless without the right of franchise, the right to vote.

During our Civil War, with the nation torn apart over the disgusting idea that one group of people had the right to enslave another group of people because of the color of their skin, our nation held Congressional elections in 1862 and a Presidential and Congressional election in 1864. That right to vote was so essential, so sacred that even a civil war could not gainsay it.

Today, however, we face a different kind of crisis which some try with all their might, money and influence to turn into a civil war. We are faced with an epidemic. Today it is not armed traitors in grey uniforms that we fight; it is a microbe that is passed from infected person to uninfected persons by our very breath. Today the traitors who would do us in are our very breath or that of someone near us. In our 19th Century Civil War, Maine, Michigan and Minnesota were far from the battlefields. Today every state, every town, every community is the battlefield against this virus and. once again, we face an election.

The only effective way we have at the moment of winning this war against this CoVid-19 virus is by limiting our contacts with others. I don't like it much. No one I know likes it much. However, using social distancing and wearing face masks means that I am, so far, not infected and am not potentially infecting people with whom I come in contact. With our national elections just over two months away, the safest way for us to conduct that election is by limiting our contact with others. We are fortunate in having a fine postal system through which we could readily conduct our election this year so why shouldn't we do so?

The answer to that is that there is no real reason other than the fear that our Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party have that they will lose catastrophically if everyone votes. The propaganda that voting by mail opens the process to fraud is nonsense. The state in which I live has voted entirely by mail for a decade without any hint of fraud. In fact the only instances of verified and actual fraud in elections have been carried out by the Republiscum Party in North Carolina and Georgia. Further, there is no evidence whatever that shows an advantage for one party over another in voting by mail.

But it isn't the method of voting that is really under attack here. The Orange Führer and the Republiscums are attacking the universal franchise itself. They know that they lost the fair and honest popular vote in 2016. They also know that their crony capitalism, treason with Putin's Russian dictatorship and influence peddling both in and outside the United States isn't likely to claim even the Electoral College in 2020. Their best hope is to keep as many American Citizens from exercising their most basic right, the right to vote. We have already seen their nefarious attacks on voting. In 2018 voters in predominantly white wards in Georgia waited an average of 3 minutes to vote while citizen voters in predominantly Afro-American wards had to wait 51 minutes to vote thanks to closing of polling places, intimidation and intentional delays. Similar things happened in Republiscum dominated Wisconsin. 

Attacking the right to vote is anti-democratic and a clear violation of our Constitution. Attacking the right of every citizen to vote is absolutely and incontrovertibly UnAmerican. Coupled with the use of Gestapo-like tactics in Portland, Oregon and the Orange Führer's encouragement of neo-Fascist vigilantism our nation, my nation is descending into the same sort of Fascism that my Father and uncle fought against 80 years ago. We MUST stop it here, now and in this presidential election if we are not to forsake our history, our democracy and all that my ancestors fought to save so that "this government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth." If we cannot stop the Orange Führer and the Republiscum now we will not have a democracy in 2024 and won't deserve to have one.

MODERATION IN...NOTHING

Two years ago I listened to a lot of news up to and following the 2018 mid-term elections. One of the tropes that kept coming up was the "demise of the Moderate Republican". It seemed to be something that news outlets enjoy discussing and airing interviews with self-appointed experts and even alleged Republiscum Moderates. The problem with this Republiscum Moderate trope is that it comes 50 or 60 years too late, possibly even more. The only reason that some Republiscum look "moderate" is that, like Ivory Soap, the Republiscum Party is 99 and 44/100ths per cent pure fascist shading over to full Nazi. If you're a Republiscum elected official who doesn't think that our military should be shooting refugees from Central America, you're a moderate because you only want to make it impossible for those same refugees to gain acknowledged refugee status and ultimately become U. S. citizens. The only way that is "moderate" is in contrast to the "build the wall and shoot anyone who tries to climb over" vast majority of Republiscum.

I'm sorry, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and a few others but you would have been right-wing extremists in 1950 and Goldwaterites in the early 1960s. Now that the vast majority of your colleagues are goosestepping to whatever tune The Orange Führer is tweeting you look moderate but you are absolutely, definitively not anything like moderate. Jeff, brokering a week of seriously curtailed investigation of Brett Kavanaugh and then voting for the alcoholic, rapist, ultra-right-wing bastard is not the stuff of which moderation is made. You may be a fascist looking for some cover in case we ever get a U. S. version of the Nürnberg Trials but that is not the stuff of moderation.


I have been paraphrasing General Philip Sheridan for decades saying the only good Republiscum is a dead Republiscum. That doesn't mean I or anyone should go out and start shooting Republiscum. By ignoring sensible precautions to control the corona virus pandemic the Republiscum will be making plenty of dead Republiscum without my or anyone's intervention. What I mean by that phrase is there are plenty of good Republicans but they are all dead: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Robert LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick and Elliot Richardson to name but a few. All moderates and even Progressives of their day but they are all dead.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair because Pete McCloskey is still alive at 93 and William Ruckelhaus only died last November at 87. Some might point out that Mitt Romney passes as a moderate but that is sort of like saying that Albert Speer wasn't much of a Nazi. Mitt, whether governor of Massachusetts or senator from Utah, is a vacuum filled by whatever makes Mitt look good for the moment. That self-serving thing of the moment can then be whisked away in the slightest breeze from a different direction. Mitt Romney is the walking, talking personification of there being no "there", there.

Currently the Republiscum Party has committed itself to Trumpist dictatorship. Mitch McConnell has been running the U. S. Senate with a playbook cadged from the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Parliament. Like the rise of the Nazis in 1929-33 there is no concern with venality and corruption in government as long as those corrupt, venal Republiscum in question adhere to the Republiscum Party line. There is no concern with actual violation of the Constitution so long it is a Republiscum who's violating it.

There are some differences between the Republiscum of today and the Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s. For one they don't resort to assassination, so far as we can tell. They just make as many legitimate voters as possible ineligible to vote so that their inability to attract a majority, one they congenitally despise anyway, won't be a bar to elective office.

Unless I am somehow mistaken, along with every dictionary and close to two hundred and fifty years of political rhetoric in this country, "democracy" means "government of the people, by the people and for the people" just to add in Abraham Lincoln's apt phrase. Keeping "people" from casting votes on specious and spurious grounds is the very definition of "anti-democratic", that is opposite to democracy itself. But that doesn't bother the Republiscum. They are only interested in the oligarchs who fund them and in hugging a flag now and then for show or using a Bible as a prop and means of paying no taxes.

The Orange Führer and his Republiscum allies like Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton decry voting by mail as an invitation to vote fraud. They ignore the fact that many states have used vote-by-mail for a decade or more without any hint of voter fraud. Meanwhile the only confirmed case of voter fraud in the nation over the last fifty years was a systematic action by the Republiscum Party in one Congressional District in North Carolina in 2018. If we are worried about vote fraud, it is the Republiscum Party whose actions we must vigilantly check, not the individual voter mailing in a ballot.

When the demos, the Greek word for the people, take to the streets peaceably because, regardless of our skin color, we have had more than enough of police abusing their power by murdering citizens, most often citizens of color, the Republiscum start screaming about riots and suppressing dissent. I seem to recall that their attitude was a bit different when smaller demonstrations by the Astroturf "Tea Party" group their oligarchs funded were carrying idiot signs that read things like, "Keep Govt out of my Medicare!" The Orange Führer's attitude toward protesters was different when neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of their number used his car to murder and maim protesters. Also, it's particularly interesting to watch the talking heads of the Volkische Beobachter (i. e. Fox News) scream about violent protesters when time after time in Minnesota, Colorado, Washington and California it has been police who have initiated the violence or the Republiscum and "Libertarian" supporters like the "Proud Boys" or the "Boogaloo Bois" (spelling and, more broadly, education are not the strong suit of these thugs) who have infiltrated peaceful protests and initiated violence.

The fact is that the Republiscum have no shame and no moderation at all. They incite and condone violence in defense of their anti-democratic attempts to establish a neo-Fascist oligarchy in the United States. There is no instance in which we can rationally speak of a "Moderate Republiscum". Like fairies, demons and unicorns the "Moderate Republiscum" simply does not exist except in the rhetoric of some news networks desperate to fill air time. How "moderate" is the Mussolini-style Fascist when compared with his Simese Twin brother the neo-Nazi anyway?

MISCELLANY, JUNE, 2020

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Donald Trump is an intellectual micro-midget who is incapable of governing himself, let alone the United States. He is an embarrassment to the nation and a danger to it as well. Trump is a congenital Fascist. Eighty years ago we combined with Britain, the Free French and forces from many other nations to defeat Fascism in Europe and the Far East. It is crime for us to allow Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Republiscum Party to bring Fascism to America and it is also an insult to the men and women, living and dead, who fought Fascism in the 1920 through 1945 period. If we want to honor "The Greatest Generation" we must remove these Fascists from government no later than the November elections if American Democracy is to survive.

I have been homeless for just over a year. I currently live in a dorm in a shelter run by a Calvinist fundamentalist religious group. We are in Washington State. The manager of our shelter expressed his distress at the "tyrannical orders" of Governor Jay Inslee in March when sensible regulations for controlling the Corona Virus came down. I am in one of three dorms with ten other men who are either pigs or babies when they are not being bigots. The fellow, a young man with very serious physical and mental problems, in the bed next to mine spent months saying that he'd decided he was Jewish because Jews are all rich and control the world. He also uses the word "Negro" as if it were the even nastier variant on that term. The fellow next to him is very sympathetic to him and is also a big Trump supporter. Two others of my dorm mates are very distressed that NASCAR has banned the Confederate battle flag.
You, dear reader, if there are any dear readers out there, need to know this background because this morning (June 11, 2020) I awoke at 7:30 A. M. to find myself utterly alone in the dorm. That situation is so completely unusual that my first reaction was, "Well, finally The Rapture has happened and I get my choice of cars!"
Sadly, about ten minutes later one of the Confederate flag supporters came back and my plans for a road trip evaporated.

When I tweak the folks who run the shelter in which I now live, please don't misunderstand. They are good people and are expressing their faith in the way truest to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as set forth in the Book of Matthew 25th Chapter. Their failings all centre around getting bogged down in the Old Testament prophets, the Revelation of St. John and the letters that purport to be from Paul of Tarsus. They believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of god but have no compunctions about editing it to comport with their belief that demons are abroad in the land. I choose to know them by their acts rather than their failings though I still like pointing out the absurdities of those failings.

I have some hope that the Corona Virus in the United States is natures way of weeding out the Republiscum. I encourage "Red" states to abandon sensible virus control measures especially in towns and counties with big Republiscum majorities.

Isn't it great that Stephen Miller looks like the villain he is?

Remember how we were sold William Barr as a solid defender of law and an adult in the room? Remember how we were sold first Dubya and later Trump as a "business man" who would bring a responsible business perspective to government? Now, I ask you, do you really think that we aren't going to order some other dose of Republiscum snake oil in the future?

Yes, I know I was getting the Trump matter out of the way at the start but there's just too much of it to to fold into one paragraph.

I am so relieved that Donald Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine. It is supposed to be dangerous for the elderly, you know.

I'm glad that Donald Trump refuses to wear a mask in public. It wouldn't improve him any and might allow inattentive people to mistake him for a decent human being.

Let's give a cheer for the unsung hero Warren G. Harding. When his administration was rife with corruption and beset by scandal he had the decency to die in office.

I have been going to demonstrations and singing We Shall Overcome for 60 years. Now, thanks to cell phone videos, we just might.

Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins so why do we expect him to act nobly now?

How come we don't see anti-vaccers out demonstrating against creating a Corona Virus vaccine?

The Republiscum are constantly talking that our sovereignty is threatened by international treaties and organizations while they threaten our Constitution. Could there be a connection there? A distraction?

Can we agree that Twitter is for Twits?

I have fallen in love with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Rachel Brosnahan (Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel respectively). What more can a man want than a lovely, smart woman who is sexy, sensual, funny and talks dirty?

Republiscum believe that patriotism means wearing a flag pin or hugging a flag while trampling and then pissing on the Constitution. Over a century ago Ambrose Bierce wrote that Dr. Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. He then corrected Dr. Johnson by definitely stating that it is the first refuge of a scoundrel. The Republiscum prove Bierce correct every minute of every day.

Once we include African-Americans and Latino Americans, the black and brown peoples who are our neighbors, brothers and sisiters, in "All Lives Matter" we can use that slogan. Until then Black and Brown Lives Matter is something to push for.

Wouldn't it be nice if the CHRISTIAN Fundamentalists actually followed Jesus of Nazareth?

If this world is the creation of the Judeo-Christian god, then isn't it a bit presumptuous to be so all fired up and eager for the "End Times" and the destruction of their god's handiwork? Wouldn't it be more respectful to step back and let their god get on with his or her work and take things as they come?

The United States has had over 100,000 deaths from CoVid-19 with the death count rising daily. Is anyone surprised that that total could have been much smaller if we weren't led by a congregation of fools who despise science and think that mental illness is caused by demonic possession?

And, by the way, bad Christian Rock is redundant. It falsely implies that there is good Christian Rock which, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, does not exist. I know this from a year's worth of experience.

If you've been stuck at home since mid-March and need something to do, read a good book -NOT THE Good Book. Read a novel that you've never read before by an author you've never read before. If you have children at home, read to them. Read them Harry Potter or the Oz books of L. Frank Baum or the Gormengast books or Lord of the Rings or something else that's age appropriate like Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins or The Saggy, Baggy Elephant or A Child's Garden of Verses. Reading is what got us to the heights we've reached so far. Not reading is what got us Republiscum and Donald Trump.

While I'm on the subject of reading, a couple of years ago I waded through Herschel Parker's 2 volume, 1937 page biography of Herman Melville. The other day I came across another quotation from Ambrose Bierce that fits that work exactly. The quotation is , "The covers of this book are too far apart."

Well, that's all for now. I'm sure that there will be more to recommend or skewer in July.

SOUTHWEST OF FASCISM

It didn't start with Barry Goldwater though his 1964 presidential campaign began the realignment of racists, Klansmen, and similar bigots to the Republican Party consolidating them with the fascists of the American First Movement, the neo-fascist McCarthyites, the John Birchers and the militia movement's progenitor, the Minutemen. No, Arizona grew its own species of racism, bigotry and fascism that, honestly, Goldwater was less a part of than he was a symbol for.

But now Arizona has followed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the contemporary avatar of Birmingham, Alabama's Jim Clark, off a cliff with its immigration legislation. Despite much blather to the contrary, Arizona has adopted a racist law under the influence of fired con-man, Lou Dobbs, the looniest ultra-right wing members of the Republican Party and it's Frankenstein monster, the Tea Party Movement.

 The right wingers object to "aliens" because they are "illegal" as if "illegal" were a quality that is genetically determined, like hair or eye color. As always we can divide those with this opinion into two groups: the sheep/fools/idiots who are too incapable of reflection to understand that they have been sold some snake oil and the scum who manufacture and sell the snake oil for fun and profit (e.g. Lou Dobbs). No person is born an "illegal" anything. Immigrants to America are those who have documents issued by the United States Government under a series of laws that favor wealth and power, white Europeans and suspect cronies of some dubious Americans and the corporate and governmental agencies who employ them. No one ever called Rupert Murdock an illegal alien even before he became a naturalized citizen in order to consolidate his media empire though he is certainly the most vile and destructive immigrant to American since Al Capone. Our laws make people, primarily black and brown people from neighboring countries, "illegal" and afford them little or no avenues to "legality". In fact, few of the parents and grandparents of those screaming about the threat of "illegal" immigration and none of their ancestors who came to America before 1879 would be "legal" under today's laws.

Plenty of people, governments and organizations are contemplating or have already instituted boycotts of Arizona on some level or other. The Arizona legislation has also energized the movement for immigrant rights while presenting President Obama with a dilemma that he doesn't need.

A poll released this week by the Northwest Health Foundation, public radio stations of the Northwest and the polling agency Davis , Hibbitts and Midghall finds that the citizens of Washington state, Oregon and Idaho finds that 61% of residents of those states support Arizona's immigration law. Another 58% would deny government benefits, including schooling, to the children of undocumented immigrants and think that those children should be deported "back where they came from" ignoring the fact that most "came from" right here and are citizens of the United States by birth. Those might seem significant majorities and lead one to cite the Federalists on the "tyranny of the majority" along with reminders that an even greater majority of residents in states from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas east through the rest of the old Confederacy supported segregation in 1954. But the poll contains its own analysis of those attitudes. You see some 73% of residents of the three states polled also state that immigrants of all sorts are honest, hard working people. Even more people state that they have no contact of any kind with immigrants, documented or otherwise. These people who have such clear and strong opinions on immigrants are utterly ignorant of the people who are the subject of those opinions.

What comes out of the survey and information from other polling is that people are insecure in an economy destroyed, not by immigrants or poor folks, not by Al Qaeda or some Islamic fanatics but by bankers and businessmen, by the greed of executives motivated solely by profit. Yet rather than focus on the true predators in our midst, we're out with torches and pitchforks in great numbers after the people who sneak across our borders to do unskilled day labor in building our homes or to empty the bed pans of our neglected and ill elders.

British Petroleum has destroyed the livelihood of thousands if not millions, besides the 11 they initially killed, along our Gulf and Atlantic coasts in the name of saving, relative to their income, a vanishingly small amount of money. And yet we have the spectacle of Republican Representative Joe Barton apologizing to BP executive Tony Hayward in a flirtatious wave to the man as he endured a day's grilling by angry Democrats before spending a weekend relaxing at yacht races off the Isle of Wight. There has not been a more perfect display of the Republicans' true allegiance. They care nothing for the nation that suffers from their greed and malfeasance. They have no patriotism for they have reduced that to wearing a flag lapel pin and given it no more thought. Their oft spouted concern for the intent of the "founding fathers" ends the moment that the express intent of those same men runs counter to corporate interests.

No the Republicans are true fascists in Mussolini's sense of the seamless marriage of corporatism and government. Their only allegiance is to the people who pay their bills. Send Sarah Palin to Bloomingdales and pick up her bills? She'll spout any nonsense the script writers can ink on her hands. Drop an acknowledged million on Joe Barton's campaign fund and probably much more in unacknowledged perks and he'll apologize to satan for Christianity if you want him to.

Yet we allow these frauds and the scum who thump for them on Fox News to misdirect popular ire toward immigrants and the poor. No one questions these con artists when they pontificate about the injustice of passing huge national debts down to our grandchildren when the obvious answer is that they should accept the "personal responsibility" they so often trumpet and decide that we will pay higher taxes now to relieve that burden on our dear grandchildren. That's too hard to do. Besides, the corporations have legions of flacks who will trot out to disparage any attempt to fairly tax the rich and corporations, confuse the ignorant already, like the people in the Northwest survey, fearful for their continued livelihoods and squelch the true solution to our debt: pay the bill ourselves.

We are left with fear for our abilities to provide for ourselves, ignorance of the cause, confusion and ridicule of anyone who points out the real villains in the piece. Confused and ignorant we gather to the loud screeching of a Tea Party rally that becomes a lynch mob looking for someone who might be an undocumented immigrant. Sheriff Arpaio will provide security for the lynching and several Tea Partiers will bring the rope. Full coverage on Fox.

The Newspeak of Freedom

We are all familiar with George Orwell's remarkably insightful focus in 1984 on how perversion of language controls thought and discourse. In Orwell's world the "Ministry of Truth" redefines freedom as slavery, war becomes peace and anyone who notes a discrepancy between reality and definition must be re-educated in Room 101. Unfortunately, we too often reassure ourselves with the lie that Newspeak is "just fiction" or simply a critique of Nazi and Stalinist propaganda. We don't like to believe that it is being practiced on us now, here in the United States of 2009.

The Orwellian perversions of language start with the titles of organizations. The Heritage Foundation is only interested in the heritage of fascism which it constantly promotes for the United States. The Manhattan Institute's name is meant to evoke the urgency of the World War II Manhattan Project when it's real focus is nuking American institutions, particularly free public education. The very term Conservative in politics has nothing to do with a conservation or deliberation that might have been recognizeable to Theodore Roosevelt, Everett Dirksen or even Barry Goldwater. It is an entirely different creature that is wholly owned by major corporate sponsors, a cadre of ultra-rich oligarchs and neo-fascist lunatics who have spent forty years attempting to destroy government with the deregulation and militant jingoism that has succeeded in destroying American power in the world and the world economy with it.

But there is a far more perverse and insidious use of Newspeak that seeks to murderously distort the very language of our human and civil rights for the purpose of destroying those very rights. I've noticed this for a long time but what has gotten me exercised at present is my listening to an alleged bastion of Liberal "bias". Recently a Seattle NPR affiliate spoke with a couple of practitioners of the current incarnation of Newspeak and largely let their perversions of language and ideas go unchallenged.

The first instance came in a discussion of same-sex marriage a Joseph Backholm of one of those Orwellian-named organizations, the Family Policy Institute, put forward the bald faced lie that legalizing same-sex marriage would infringe the "religious freedom" of "people of faith".

The first bit of nonsense in that assertion involves in defining "people of faith". By Mr. Backholm's construction same-sex couples are not and can never be "people of faith" and that no "person of faith" could believe that same-sex couples have the right to marry as do couples of mixed sexes. That implied assertion is nonsense on its face. He is actually saying that the people he represents, afflicted by a narrow, bigoted, shallow religiosity rather than anything resembling true religious feeling, oppose same-sex marriage. The fanatical people who fixate on a few select scriptural passages rather than a large overview of their religion's writings would be challenged by general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage.

In a sense Mr. Backholm is correct. The minority of religious fanatics who share his views will be offended by the general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage...just as Holocaust deniers are offended by the newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps. To which we should simply say, "Screw them!"

But the truly appalling bit of Newspeak in Mr. Backholm's specious argument is that legalizing and recognizing same-sex marriage is an assault on freedom of religion. I am tempted to assert that only the Prince of Lies could put forward a perversion of the concept of freedom - let alone religion - as extreme and horrible as that. In fact, what Mr. Backholm is asserting is that his narrow, bigoted religiosity is threatened with suppression by the free expression of a differing view of religion. I do not think that it is news to Mr. Backholm that his one, specious assertion of "freedom" should not, should never suppress the the freedom of others. In point of fact, Mr Backholm's argument amounts to an assertion that the practice of any religion at variance with the one he espouses should not be permitted. The whole point of creating the United States as a secular state in which religious freedom is guaranteed was to prevent fanatics and bigots such as Mr. Backholm from suppressing the religious expression of others.

But Mr. Backholm has no shame. He claims that a religious organization, for example, Catholic Charities, that refused to place children for adoption with same-sex couples would have its freedom of religion infringed. He asserts that this very thing has already happened in Massachusetts. But lets examine that a little closer.

Faced with potential discrimination complaints for refusing to place children with same-sex couples, the Archdiocese of Boston - the very organization where the scandals of church subornation of child abuse by priests originated - decided to withdraw from the state sponsored program and contracts under which it had placed adoptees for many years. Please note that it was the choice of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, not an order by the state. Massachustts correctly determined that placing a child with a stable, loving couple, regardless of the sexes of the members of that couple, was a boon to the child. Just as it had determined that refusing to place children with families based on race, religion or ethnicity was prohibited discrimination, Massachusetts rightly included sexual orientation in that list of prohibited discriminatory practices. Having done so, the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Massachusetts, who had no visible moral compunctions or firm principles when it came to protecting a minority of abusive priests, suddenly grew a sense of morality and a set of unyielding principles and withdrew from the state sponsored, paid and contracted adoption system.

Note that Massachusetts officials expressed their regret at the withdrawal of Catholic Charities from the adoption system but no one tried to force Catholic Charities to place adoptees with same-sex couples. They simply shook their heads and waved goodbye. The Roman Catholic Church's freedom to practice its selective version of morality remains intact. The Archdiocese of Boston, if it is threatened at all, is under no threat except that of its own behavior in suborning child abuse. And, more to the point, a very questionable allocation of taxpayer funds to a religious organization has ended. No bands of torch-bearing same-sex couples have roamed through Boston burning Catholic Churches and Convents as the Protestant Know-Nothings did in the 1850s. Freedom of religion remains intact in Massachusetts and, happily, the separation of church and state so dear to the framers of the Constitution has been strengthened.

In a similar propagation of Newspeak the same radio station gave a forum to a con-artist from the ultra-rightist, labor-rights suppression group called the Evergreen "Freedom" Foundation. The subject was a bill, killed in this legislative session thanks to a stupid and ill-considered e-mail from a supporter, that would have given employees the right not to attend employer mandated meetings that have the purpose of expressing the employers views on politics, religion or union organizing. That doesn't seem so terrible, does it? Employers have held meetings in which they have implied that employees would lose their jobs if they did not vote the way the employer approved, joined a union or even did not accept the same religious dogma that the employer espouses. That seems like a clear violation of individual and civil rights.

But the Evergreen spokesperson Scott Dilley made the Orwellian assertion that this legislation to protect workers' freedoms is an infringement of the employer's freedom of speech. It's utter nonsense of course but for neo-fascist cultists like Scott Dilley it is an effective way of perverting the dialogue. What Mr. Dilley refuses to acknowledge is that we all have a freedom to speak or withhold our opinions and we have a concomitant freedom to listen or not. No one has to read this blog. In fact, were someone to attempt to force it on anyone, I would fight for that person's right to not read it. Not so Mr. Dilley.

What Mr. Dilley wants to sweep under the rug is the vast power gulf between employer and employee. A fanatic who owns a company can rant to his employees at will on any subject but employees exercise their freedom to ignore those rantings at the peril of their jobs. In an economy destroyed by the excesses of the very employers Mr. Dilley represents, no employee can take the whims of his or her employer lightly. In this era when workers need union protections more than at any time since the 1930s it is perfectly reasonable to rein in employers' excesses. But Mr. Dilley obfuscates by introducing the language of freedom and civil rights in service of enslavement to employers' whims.

Mr. Dilley's argument on behalf of employers is exactly the same as arguing that arresting and jailing a rapist or child molester is an infringement of his freedom of expression. It is an argument that deserves no credit and no unchallenged hearing. But George Orwell has been dead for over half a century and no one likes to think that a neo-fascist propaganda machine as effective and as vile as Josef Goebbels' is operating in 21st Century America.

After all, isn't Fox News "fair and balanced"?

[Note: In the many years I spent working in social services in the Boston Area I knew many Roman Catholic priests and nuns as well as Salvation Army officers and other people of faith whose religion was strong and broad and decent. All of whom were appalled at the minority of their fellows who abused their positions to abuse parishioners and even more so at the church structures that hid those abuses and allowed them to continue. The Archdiocese of Boston may have behaved appallingly but many individuals within it behaved responsibly, morally and in keeping with the expressed principles of their faith. It is their church heirarchy that has tarred them, not I.]

Georgie, We'll Hardly Miss You

In the couple of months between Election and Inauguration Days we were treated to reviews and tweaking of what has been referred to as "the Bush Legacy". The main problem with that phrase is that we no more want Dubya's legacy than we want Dubya himself.

We've heard the utterly meaningless mantras of "I've made the hard decisions" and "history will decide" and "protected America" repeated in the typically Republican magical thinking that insists that repeating a nonsense phrase enough times makes it so. Bush apologists have trotted out people who, largely with straight faces, claim that Dubya is "intelligent", a "nice man", "pleasant" and "engaged".

My parents' generation knew such propaganda for what it truly is: "The Big Lie". "The Big Lie" was the shorthand applied to Nazi and Soviet propaganda that painted monsters like Hitler and Stalin as benign patriots and benefactors to the world at large when in fact they were dangerous, totalitarian, psychopathic dictators. Dubya and his Svengalis, Poppy Bush and Dick Cheney, may not sink to the level of monstrousness of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. They may not even sink to the slightly less appalling level of Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Slobodan Milosovic but that doesn't mean that they are not denizens of some level of the same hellish pit that houses those refutations of the term "humanity".

I began writing this as the inaugural ceremonies for Barak Obama were under way. The pomp and circumstance of that day are now a bright, warm memory. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is well and truly over we can say with some certainty that it was a presidency begun in fraud, pursued through crime and lies and concluded in unmitigated disaster for the United States and the whole world. Dubya has descended into an occasional run to a convention of congenial oil men sufficiently foolish, fascist or clueless to pay for a few inept words from him and a bit of glad handing. He's traveled as far as the plains of western Canada being careful not to venture into any country that might arrest him for his many and manifest war crimes. Cheney too emerges once or twice a month from the evil darkness that he carries within himself to croak warnings that restoration of the U. S. Constitution is an lure for terrorist attacks on Americans. However, Cheney's demeanor of hatred makes one wonder if his friends at Halliburton and the "re-branded" Blackwater are not arranging for the attack he predicts as inevitable.

Obama and his Administration have repeatedly and strongly expressed the desire to put the last eight years behind them even as they root about in the back-up of sewage that the Bush Administration left in its wake. In a pragmatic sense they are correct. Once the neo-cons turned the American ship of state into a Titanic, courts martial for the captain, designers, navigator and engineers would only get in the way of evacuating the ship and saving as many as possible. In the larger scheme of American politics, both parties understand that the vengeful Republicans would bide their time and hone their skills at hiding their criminal acts until they could again destroy a Democratic president out of sheer revenge for Nixon's impeachment and exposure of the Iran-Contra Affair as they did with the noisome prosecutorial misconduct known as "Whitewater". Never mind that the Republican wrong doing was criminal at best, traitorous at worst while the Democratic wrong doing amounts to some raunchy heterosexual diddling.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, to his credit, has proposed investigating the criminality of the executive branch from January 20, 2001 through January 19, 2009 but his proposed investigation is limited and entirely toothless. I have come reluctantly to believe that we need a full exposure of the criminal acts of the Bush Administration regardless of the distraction it might be. What has decided me on this point is the repeated croakings of Dick Cheney.

Cheney's allegations that Obama's policy of treating prisoners lawfully poses a threat to America needs to be challenged. We desperately need a wide declassification of documents to debunk the canard that the Bush Administration's disregard for human and civil rights, Constitutional and International Law and treaties did anything but make America and Americans less safe, less secure and more vulnerable.

I understand that I should "be careful what I wish for." The possibility that even one of those tortured in secret, foreign prisons may have provided some pertinent and useful intelligence could blow the whole process up in the Democrats' faces and make credible the Republicans who have so effectively discredited themselves. Still, I am confident enough that all the illegal, draconian acts of the Bush Administration were completely ineffectual that I'm willing to risk it. After all, would they have been so excessively secretive about the information they received if the least little mote of it had been of value? You might pose that question to Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The only way they can claim that their descent into fascism was justified is by the absence of results remaining a secret.

Also, we hardly need worry that the demagogues like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rash Lamebrain and Ann Cun...er...Coulter will come up with a rational critique of the policy. They are already off the deep end, flailing about in search of some epithet that will arrest the attention of and re-mobilize the lazy and thoughtless who filled out their core audience of knuckle-walking idiots.

No, we need an investigation, out in public. We need evidence of malfeasance and misfeasance and names, not just of the prime movers but of the quiet, minor bureaucrats insinuated into the government. We need the dismissals and resignations that root out the Monica Goodlings, Kyle Sampsons, the graduates of the "Law Schools" of Regent and Liberty Universities, the Bob Jones-ites and similar pseudo-scholars and shyster lawyers. In short, we need the kind of purge that the neo-fascists worked from 1946 through 1956 through HUAC and Joe McCarthy only this time for actual cause.

But then, we're Democrats and Liberals and unlikely to be so effective or decisive. Yet were we to act outside our nature this once we might finally, actually know the real Georgie, Dickie and their appalling attempt to destroy our nation. We might even go a long way to avoiding a repeat in the foreseeable future.

A Diablo, Alberto!

The Garden of Ironic Delights

So Alberto Gonzales, Dubya's legal minion, has announced his resignation from a post for which his sole qualification was his toadying eagerness to torture people and the U. S. Constitution into any contortion that pleased his neo-fascist puppetmasters. As of September 17, 2007, the Constitution will be slightly better protected than it has been since January 20, 2001.

But that's not exactly the most striking statement of the day relative to this bit of news.

In responding to his minion's resignation, Dubya stated, "It is sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

Don't you just LOVE irony?

Those words in the mouth of the entitled scum who attacked all and sundry to steal the 2000 election in Florida, who suggested that Ann Richards was a lesbian to get elected governor of Texas, who intimated that John McCain had an illegitimate black child to win the South Carolina primary in 2000, and who suborned the Swift Boat Veterans' scurrilous attacks on John Kerry are obscene despite the fact that Dubya is just plain too dumb to understand that he was being ironic.

I am reminded of Richard Nixon's speech accepting the resignation of 2(?), 278(?) "of the finest public servants it has ever been my privilege to know" when Haldeman and Ehrlichman departed the White House. The problem with the Republican Party is that they honestly believe that Alberto Gonzales is "a talented and honorable person" and that the criminals H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were "the finest public servants". For America's neo-fascist party no crime no matter how petty or how vicious is beyond ignoring as long as the perpetrator is of their ideology. They also believe that no crime, no matter how petty or specious is beyond magnification if it will reflect badly on the political opposition. It is one of the reasons that we should be honest and declare the Republican Party to be the criminal conspiracy that it is instead of pretending that it is simply an American political institution.

Impeach Earl Warren

Most people won't remember the billboards that went up in the states of the old Confederacy and some plains states as well after Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Furguson and outlawed segregation in America. Those billboards exhorted people to get behind a movement to impeach the new U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren. Warren had led the court to a unanimous decision that when our Constitution proclaimed equal rights to all men, it meant it regardless of minor distinctions like skin color, ethnicity, and the like. But that upset a lot of people, rich and poor, who thought that equality was fine for those who were most like themselves and inappropriate for those they preferred to hate.

A decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision one of the things at stake in the 1964 presidential election was implementation of that decision. Senators like James O. Eastland, John Stennis, Richard Russell and Strom Thurmond couldn't hold back the 1964 Voting Rights Act but they could nullify it if right-wing fanatics took the White House. They didn't get their wish then.

When they did finally elect a neo-fascist in 1968 the majority of Americans' popular perception was that all men and women were indeed created equal. Richard Nixon rode into the White House on the disarray of the Democrats following Robert Kennedy's murder and an effective campaign to blame peaceful protesters in Chicago for the police riot that victimized them. But Nixon also rode into office on his "Southern Strategy". That strategy involved pandering to the racists, segregationists, states-rights proponents, Klansmen and the like who'd been loyal Democrats since 1865. Suddenly the scum of American politics were following Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party that had been anathema to them since Abraham Lincoln's first campaign.

Truth to tell, the populist Democrats from the South in the 1920s and 1930s such as Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Sam Rayburn and others were less concerned about race than they were about economic standing. That concern allowed them to come to an uneasy accommodation with Northern Democrats, whose more liberal views on race were out of sync with that of their Southern constituents, focused on moving America out of the Great Depression. The understanding that the chains that weighted people down had more to do with class than color opened those populist leaders to change. The casually Democratic and casually bigoted voter did not share that openness and were ripe for picking by Republicans cynically eager to heave Lincoln overboard for racist votes.

But Nixon couldn't manage to shove onto the Supreme Court the candidates of his racist backers, the Klan tainted Clement F. Haynesworth and G. Harold Carswell. He did get the Arizona racist, William Rhenquist, onto the court but Southern racists simply couldn't pass muster. The Haynesworth and Carswell fiascoes taught the Republicans that they needed to reframe their arguments and concentrate on subtlety.

They propagandized their position as opposition to "activist judges" and a focus on "the original intent of the framers of the Constitution". In fact, those catch phrases have always been an Orwellian smoke screen for promoting right-wing extremists who would take us back, not just to the Vinson Court of 1952 but to the Taney Court of 1852. Right-wing fanatics like Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia and Scalia's puppet, Clarence Thomas, have no more respect for or knowledge of the "original intent" that they trumpet than they have for the rights of individuals against corporations. They are exactly what they profess to oppose: activist judges, though they are themselves activists for neo-fascism.

The next attempt to neutralize the Supreme Court during the Reagan Presidency narrowly avoided afflicting the nation with Robert Bork. We despised Bork for firing Archibald Cox in 1973 but the reason for keeping him off the Supreme Court was his neo-fascist extremist vision of the Constitution. No one questions the contradiction inherent in the belief that Bork, Scalia and their ilk can use some bizarre telepathy to mystically understand the "original intent of the founders" even as they insist that the Constitution is ossified and unchanging, that things not specifically delineated in it do not exist. There is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution because "the founders" (sounds awfully like Star Trek: Deep Space 9, doesn't it?) never heard of personal privacy and were utterly unaware of the concept when they drafted the 3rd and 4th Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

But persistence counts for something. Having packed the court at last with reliably neo-fascist jurists 53 years later, the Supreme Court that couldn't be rid of desegregation by impeaching Earl Warren has now achieved a reinstatement of Plessy v. Ferguson in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It is an uneasy reversal given that Justice Anthony Kennedy who swallows a great deal of rancid neo-fascist tripe choked on some of the reasoning and consequences that his even more extremist colleagues served up.

As many of us believed when Roberts went before the Senate Judiciary Committee all but wearing a t-shirt that read, "I (heart) Stare Decisis," the new Chief Justice has no compunctions for dragging us back to the 1850s. And that return to segregation if not to slavery is cynically couched in the rhetoric of being "color blind". The irrational explanation for that catch phrase is that if race should not be an occasion for discrimination then ignoring race will magically make racism disappear. One of the requirements for being a right-winger is voluntary an selective disassociation from reality and a kind of magical thinking in which idiocy like closing ones eyes and ears makes bad things go away. The 5-member Supreme Court majority has stuck its collective fingers in its collective ears and intoned "La-la-la-la-la! I can't hear racism!" As if that would make it go away.

Segregation in America was the next best thing to having "happy darky slaves" picking in the "ole cotton fields back home." Had the South been able to completely undo the Civil War it would have done so. The violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the 1960s proved that. The graves of Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr. prove that. The more recent murder of James Byrd proves that the agenda has not changed. At long last Scalia, Kennedy, Roberts, Alito and their houseboy, Thomas, can effectuate that agenda. How they are going to negate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments remains to be seen but we can have confidence those who'd sacrifice a mother to save a deformed and non-viable fetus will find a way.