LET ME SEE IF I GOT THIS...

 

    So... according to the Republiscum/Trump/MAGA Cult...

    You're not a REAL Roman Catholic if you deliver a prayer at the Democratic National Convention.

    You're not a REAL Christian if you're a Democrat.

    You're not a REAL Christian if you believe that Christianity focuses on God being love and calling for acceptance of others.

According to Christian tradition, Satan is "the father of lies". The Orange Fuhrer lies about his wealth, on his taxes (for which he is a convicted felon), about the size of any and all crowds to which he speaks, about "winning" the 2020 presidential election, about "winning" his debate with Vice-president Harris, about encouraging organized groups of thugs like the Proud Boys, 3%ers, etc. to mount a coup, knowing that Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist and anti-Semite, his "right" to hoard classified government documents, encouraging the January 6, 2021 insurrection, wanting dictatorial powers, wanting to suspend the U. S. Constitution, his criminal activity, his convictions for his various crimes and, basically everything down to his golf scores and yet he is the anointed of God? Is it not obvious that anyone who claims to be your one and only salvation is out to scam you, especially if he has scammed others in he past?

You're not a REAL American if you're not a Christian.

    You're not a REAL American if you believe in the separation of church and state.

    You're not a REAL American if you live in a city.

    You're not a REAL American if you live in a state that touches the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic north of Cape Hatteras.

You're not a REAL American unless you're white.

    You're not a REAL American unless you're as white (supremacist) as Tucker Carlson.

    You're not a REAL American if you believe that the U. S. Constitution is the law of the land instead of a talking point.

    You're not a REAL American unless you live in "Fly-Over Country" because there are definitely no airports west of Pittsburgh and east of Las Vegas.

You're not a REAL American unless you think that the murderer, Kyle Rittenhouse, is a hero.

    You're not a REAL American unless you fetishize our flag, using it for ridiculous, public displays of affection overkill without giving a damn about anything it actually stands for.

    You're not a REAL American unless you're willing to use the hallowed ground of a national cemetery for a political photo opportunity.

You're not a REAL American unless you believe any bat shit crazy conspiracy theory that validates your own bat shit craziness.

You're not a REAL American unless you believe that immigrants whose delicious, traditional cuisine centers on goat meat are suddenly inclined to eating household pets.

You're not a REAL American unless you want to "deport" millions of people you deem "illegal" after giving them an identifying number just like those magnificent role models, the Shutzstaffel, gave to their "deportees" at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Treblinka.

I am appalled that my fellow Americans hold "these  'truths' (above) to be self-evident" when they are not self-evident at all.

I am appalled and frightened that a majority of my fellow citizens swallowed the lies above with incomprehensible gusto on November 5, 2024. Henry Louis Mencken observed a century ago that, "No one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public." And that's not lie!

FASCISM IS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE U. S. AND, AMONG OTHER COUNTRIES, IN ISRAEL

 

 I am an American citizen. My ancestry in what is now the United States goes back to Peregrine White, the baby, born November 20, 1620, to William and Suzannah White aboard the good ship Mayflower. My mother and her sisters were members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I did not support the mal-administration of the Failed Orange Führer and think that that con man and criminal should never be allowed to run for public office at any level again, a prohibition that should extend to his biological and affiliated crime family unto the fifth generation at least.

At the risk of jumping with both feet into a cliche, I have Jewish friends, many of them. Some of the teachers I revered most were Jewish. Nine of my grandchildren are Jewish. I also support Israel's right to exist. I support a Jewish homeland. I do not support the Netanyahu government. 

The Failed Orange Führer attempted to overthrow not just our Congress or our government but our Constitution. The Maga insurrectionists of January 6th and the Republiscum who excuse and support them and their Führer are nothing like patriots despite being born in this country.

The recent purge of Liz Cheney confirms that the Republiscum Party and the great majority of its office holders and supporters have no respect for or allegiance to our Constitution. Their only fealty is to The Failed Orange Führer. As such every Republiscum office holder at every level of government who does not reject The Failed Orange Führer should be removed. They have, by swearing fealty to The Failed Orange Führer and his Big Lie, violated their oaths of office and should never again be allowed to serve in any level of government.

Speaking of con men who should never be allowed to hold office, I give you Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Netanyahu has called repeated elections in a decreasingly effective quest for a solid majority in the Israeli Knesset. He failed once again in the most recent elections and subsequently failed to form a majority government. In need of some excuse to whip up support within the most extreme Israeli communities, much as his friend, The Failed Orange Führer, did following the 2020 election in the United States, Netanyahu suborned evictions from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Palestinian East Jerusalem a program that has continued for decades thanks to corrupt Israeli courts and refusal to recognize historical documents that give the lie to Israeli claims to ownership of property there. This action also whipped up anger among Palestinians who gathered for prayers in large numbers on the last Friday of Ramadan, May 7th.

Into this powder keg, Netanyahu tossed a lit match by sending Israeli "Defense" Forces (I"D"F) onto the Al-Haram Al-Sharif and into the Al Aqsa Mosque igniting Palestinian anger and inciting Gaza. Now Netanyahu's planes have bombed Gaza repeatedly and subsequently invaded Gaza. Palestinian armed resistance has fired many rockets into Israel, as Netanyahu knew they would. Several Israelis have died as a result while the Palestinian death toll is exponentially higher.

The I"D"F is Netanyahu's primary instrument of genocide against the Palestinian people. I do not believe that the average Israeli soldier is a genocidal monster but I believe that there is ample evidence that Netanyahu is such a monster. His lust for power has plunged Israel into repeated conflicts with their Palestinian neighbors.

The answer to peace for Israel is peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian population. Bombing and invading Gaza, expropriating Palestinian property and insulting the faith of their neighbors may be a route to short term political gain for Netanyahu but it is the dark, vile route to never ending war and insecurity for both sides. It is past time, long past time for the Israeli public to understand that Israeli's killed by an Hamas rocket are less the victims of Palestinian animosity than they are of Netanyahu's cynical and corrupt quest for power, just as the January 6th insurrection was the cynical and corrupt result of The Failed Orange Führer's similar quest.

Respect for Palestinian rights will go much further than bombs toward increasing Israel's security just as rooting out the Maga fanatics in government and the military in my nation will go toward creating a just and peaceful nation amongst neighbors and all of our states.

A MELTING SNOWFLAKE

 

Two days after our national election at about 9:00 P. M. Eastern Standard Time a national embarrassment embarrassed the nation further while undermining American democracy. Let's face it, when our Orange Führer opens his mouth he embarrasses everyone in the nation and most of the world except for himself and his family and his cadre of grifters, yes-men, white supremacists and just scumbags that form the Republiscum Party. He came forth to meet reporters in a house that he never should have occupied in the first place because he was and is unworthy of the office that racists, lunatics, fascists and stupid "reality" television show fans elected him to in 2016.

 The Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party have never been thrilled with the messiness of democracy. In Republiscum ideology they know what's good for the nation and they have to tolerate, at least, and manipulate, usually, the "great unwashed" so that democracy doesn't get too "uppity" and try to do positive things for the poor and middle class. In Republiscum ideology fascism is the object; they just don't like to be up front about it. 

William F. Buckley, looking at the problems of the Republiscum Party in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the formula that Republiscum could be as fascist as they wished in private as long as they pretended to patriotism and gave lip service to democracy in public. Buckley's formula began to degrade with the election of Richard Milhous Nixon in 1968. Once Nixon and the Republiscum absorbed the white supremacists in the "Southern Strategy" at the urging of dyed-in-the-wool racist, Strom Thurmond, the marriage of fascism and native racism brought both a bit too far out in public. It was the equivalent of the drunk relative at the family gathering who forgot to zip his fly though he was still tucked in.

Since the Reagan Administration, however, what once was trucked in has (there isn't any good adjective for this) increasingly hung out to the disgust of many. A lot of revisionists in politics have tried to find positive things in the Reagan Administration. I lived through it. The only positive things about the presidency of corporate spokes clown, Ronald McReagan, were the positive brakes imposed on him by Tip O'Neill and a Democratic Congress.

What Reagan did manage to do was upset the Democratic coalition of working class Americans by convincing millions, with no evidence but empty rhetoric, that the Republiscum Party really had the interests of the middle class at heart. It doesn't and never has had but as Abraham Lincoln put it, "you can fool some of the people, all of the time and all of the people some of the time...." Thus, for 40 years the Republiscum, with the complicity of many Democrats, have cut taxes on the wealthiest few in America while also cutting services to the poor and middle class. This farrago has the effect of making the middle class angry at the poor, who do get a small and shrinking safety net, while adoring the rich which they delude themselves into thinking they can be with the correct lottery bet.

Very few understand that the taxes "cut" were providing them with essential services and reliable ways out of poverty and debt for themselves and their children. Those tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited the small percentage of the wealthiest Americans have brought on higher tuition at public colleges and universities, stagnant wages, greater personal debt and decreased upward mobility for themselves and their children. Meanwhile phony "news" services like Faux, Sterling and NewsMax con the unwary into hatred of those who are worse off than themselves so that few of the middle class understand that they are being fleeced by the wealthy.

This election saw the Republiscum Party and our Orange Führer move from their ambient fascism to full totalitarian Nazi mode by undercutting democracy itself and inciting violence against even their own elected officials, those who had the temerity to break with the Orange Führer's party line and tell the truth for once.

American democracy has evolved over the last 233 years. That evolution has seen us move to a greater and greater inclusiveness in our electorate which is a good thing as long as that electorate is informed by actual facts and genuine concern for the broad education of the public. That is what our Freedoms of the Press and of Speech were intended to promote. When those freedoms are perverted into the spouting of lies in the guise of news our democracy breaks down into camps of those who can be fooled "all of the time".

For the 7 weeks since the national election the Orange Führer and a majority of Republiscum office holders have lied, obfuscated and generally undermined our democratic institutions in order to promote the false claim that the Orange Führer actually won an election that he lost by 7 million votes of the people and 39 Electoral College votes. Even a U. S. Supreme Court heavily weighted with Republiscum ideologues could not stomach the Orange Führer's false claims or the lunatic conspiracy theories of his unethical lawyers.

According to legend, as Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a person in the crowd outside of Independence Hall shouted, "Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" To which Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." It is the job of every American to keep it. The self-styled "patriot" militias, Proud Boys, Bugaloo Bois, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klansmen, "Patriot" Prayer members and right wing evangelicals that make up the Republiscum Party are not keepers of our republic. They seek to undermine it with every foul breath they take. They are abetted in their treason to their nation by the right wing extremist television and radio media that trumpet nonsense instead of news, conspiracies instead of facts and idiocy disguised as opinion.

Thanks to the Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party we are on the verge of not being able to keep the republic we have and of losing the democracy that we have won at great cost over the last 2 centuries.