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.

WIDDLE PEETY AND THE QANON CON

 

In the past year and currently I have had the utter displeasure of encountering a couple of QAnon Cultists. 

One was Jeff, not the racist, anti-semetic Jeff who was just a garden variety bigot. No. This Jeff was a self-made imbecile. He was 20-something and had devoted himself to Meth. Jeff hadn't a single tooth left in his face and not two brain cells to rub together. That latter characteristic may have been the reason that he'd gotten involved with Meth in the first place but the Meth had killed off any brain cells that might have helped him overcome his addiction.

One of the things about many addicts is that they never overcome the addiction qua addiction. They simply switch an addiction to drugs or alcohol for an addiction to religion or some other, more acceptable object of desire. Jeff had transferred his addiction to Meth to QAnon. Jeff's faith in the QAnon Con was absolute, as absolute as had been his addiction to Meth. He constantly had his phone tuned to some right-wing loonie channel. His earbuds carried directly to that malfunctioning brain messages of fiction that he never questioned. Worse yet, Jeff felt, with the zeal of the new convert, that everyone within earshot needed to hear the latest verse in the Gospel According to QAnon. When told to shut up and not annoy those who had not had his vision on his personal road to Damascus, Jeff would, in true Republiscum fashion, became irate that someone would impinge on his "Freedom of Speech". Explaining to Jeff that he was welcome to speak his lunatic nonsense somewhere else had no effect on his well-schooled indignation.

Jeff moved on to somewhere - I neither know nor care where - though I would not have been at all surprised to have found him smearing shit on the Capitol's walls on January 6th. Jeff could do something like that but might well have no idea why. In any case, Jeff now fades completely from my narrative although I hold him up as one very dangerous type of the QAnon Con Cultist.

Let us now turn our attention to Widdle Peety. Please be aware that the sarcasm is mine alone but Widdle Peety's actions are all actual, verifiable facts.

Widdle Peety is 50-ish if not 60 already but that's only the outward appearance of Widdle Peety because in his heart, in his soul, in every fiber of his being Widdle Peety is only 2½ years old. At some point in the past Widdle Peety fell out of a chair at the charitable institution where he lives (and I live too) and "hurt his back". I place that in quotes because Widdle Peety can pick up a 35 pound dog and carry him 10 or 20 yards if he wants to but he cannot pick up a paper towel that he dropped on the floor or an empty plastic bowl that he dropped. He especially cannot pick such things up if there's someone around whom he can con into cleaning up his mess. In one notable incident Widdle Peety clogged a toilet in the communal bathroom. There was no plunger handy, not that Widdle Peety would have cared to use it had one been close at hand, but, in this case, no plunger was present in the communal bathroom. So Widdle Peety, being so little and defenseless, rousted out of bed another dorm resident, a young man with serious mental health problems who is both quiet and pathologically helpful, and sent him to find a plunger and unclog the toilet. And, no, Widdle Peety did not offer to help.

In any case, thanks to that fall from a chair Widdle Peety's back has the Worstestest Owie® in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD! Nobody should ask Widdle Peety to do anything that might aggravate that Terwible, Terwible Owie® and you should know that aggravating that Terwible, Terwible Owie® can be anything at any time that Widdle Peety doesn't want to do. Why it's even so bad that Widdle Peety's Terwible, Terwible Owie® makes it impossible for him to lift those terwibly heavy wrappers for toilet paper rolls and put them in a nearby waste basket.

In the interests of full disclosure, you, dear reader, must know that Widdle Peety thinks that Bahstan Rob is the Meanestest Man in the Whole Wide World and He's Fat too®! Bahstan Rob is fat. Widdle Peety is, on the contrary, just "big boned". 

Being only 2½ years old, Widdle Peety has very few ways to defend himself against the mean, nasty, horwibleness of Bahstan Rob. Every time Widdle Peety thinks of a way to get back at Bahstan Rob, Horwible, Horwible Bahstan Rob® makes it so other people think that Widdle Peety, who is the Bestest, Smartest and Most Wonderful Widdle Peety in the Whole Wide World®, did a bad thing but it's only because Horwible, Horwible Bahstan Rob® reported Widdle Peety for doing it that other people think that Widdle Peety did a bad thing which he would never, ever do, except maybe the time Widdle Peety shit in the communal shower stall and left it there for Bahstan Rob to clean up. But that was only because of the horwible, horwible things, like breathing or not wanting to clean up poor Widdle Peety's shit, that Horwible, Horwible Bahstan Rob® did to poor Widdle Peety.

It should come as no surprise to you that Widdle Peety is a QAnonsense cultist. Widdle Peety believes that The Failed Orange Führer is the Mostest Greatest Man to ever, ever live, next, maybe, to Jesus, but only maybe, Widdle Peety believes that all Democrats are demons who traffic in minor children and drink the blood of babies, especially Hillary Clinton and Oprah. You should know that Widdle Peety has only been married once (once was enough says Widdle Peety) and is now divorced because no self-respecting woman would want to stay married to a 2½ year old whose shit she would have to clean out of the shower. Rejoice, dear reader in the fact that Widdle Peety has not passed his gene cesspool along to a new generation. Widdle Peety knows for an absolute fact that there is no disparity between the pay of men and women because that lie has been debunked by the very knowledgeable people who tell him over the Internet that they or the researchers whose credentials they never cite have debunked it. He also knows that it is a crime that the Deep State® keeps Hillary from being LOCK HER UPed for her many crimes. The late, great Rash Lamebrain told him so before ascending bodily into Heaven.

In short, the shit that Widdle Peety left in the shower stall was only an infinitesimal fraction of the overflowing shit that fills Widdle Peety thanks to his commitment to QAnonsense and neo-Nazi radio and Internet sites. Widdle Peety is a bundle of misogyny, bigotry, hate and ignorance. Widdle Peety attended college but found it unrewarding because professors were "not open" to the "different ideas" that Widdle Peety expressed to them.

These QAnonsense cultists are, like Jeff and Widdle Peety, people of no mind or closed mind. Like the ultra-right wing Evangelical CHRISTIANs the QAnonsense cultists will believe any bullshit that a self-appointed prophet or preacher shovels at them. The critical reason that the fools and fooled accept these noisome piles of utter nonsense is that they come from a person who has some claim to authority. People who cannot think for themselves or simply don't want to do so deliver their autonomy to someone they trust and they trust people they see on television or on their other screens. They trust the loud voice on the radio that appeals to their weaknesses and/or bigotry. If you doubt this I would suggest that you look again at the ascendency of The Failed Orange Führer.

A friend of mine has a framed calligraphic saying on her wall that reads, "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It only frustrates you and annoys the pig." Widdle Peety is, unquestionably, a pig. I have never heard him sing and hope that experience continues to elude me. I certainly will never offer him singing lessons.

We who are capable of rational, critical thought have been bombarded with many messages urging that we learn how to speak with QAnonsense cultists like Widdle Peety and Jeff. That impulse is inherent to our rational thought and a fallacy that we cherish because we believe that everyone else is also capable of rational, critical thought. It is absolutely and unequivocally a fallacy. The QAnonsense cultists, Evangelical CHRISTIANS, 3%ers, Proud Boys, Bugaloo Bois, White Supremacists, Oath Keepers, Anti-Maskers, Anti-Vaccers and their similarly mindless, irrational fools have, as an inherent tenet, rejected rational, critical thought. In fact, they have rejected thought itself. We need to stop the frustrating practice of trying to teach these pigs to sing and simply ostracize them from all access to the institutions of rational society. They must be banned from all aspects of communication other than person to person meetings. The public media that promote their lunatic conspiracies need to have their licenses to use the public airwaves revoked. Their lunatic views must be exposed and disqualify them from holding public office. Colleges and universities, indeed even lower level private educational institutions that do not teach rational, critical thought and the actual scientific method, should not be certified as being like those public and private institutions that do teach those disciplines.

I am not for censorship but rather for separating lunacy and stupidity from rational behavior. We need to distinguish between fact and belief. Widdle Peety and Jeff have the right to believe any idiocy, bigotry and hate they choose to believe. They may communicate their lunacy to anyone they please and be heard, person to person, to anyone patient or foolish enough to listen. I will defend their right to their beliefs and right to communicate those beliefs in person. However, that does not stop any hearer from turning his or her back on them. If they wish to use a public utility, like the public airwaves, to communicate those lunatic beliefs they have no special right to do so. 

Belief is something that needs no factual basis. Belief is not and never is fact. Belief is not understanding. No belief should ever trump fact. The distinct difference between fact and belief must be a preeminent distinction maintained for the benefit of public discourse. If you have and can present verifiable facts you have access to public means of communication. If you have beliefs not based on facts, regardless of how venerable the mythology you accept, you are welcome to present your beliefs in person to others who are willing to listen but not to use public resources to vent your un- and often counterfactual beliefs.

I just don't want the multitude of Widdle Peetys, Sean Hannitys, Tucker Carlsons, Marjorie Taylor Greenes, et al. out there to be able to continue shitting in the communal shower.

RETHINKING WHAT IT IS TO BE AN AMERICAN

 

I was born in Connecticut almost 72 years ago. My mother was a direct descendant of immigrants William and Suzanna White through their son, Peregrine, who was born on November 20, 1620 on board the good ship Mayflower as it rode at anchor off the tip of what we now call Cape Cod. 

My father was born in Pennsylvania. His father came to the United States from Poland in 1913 and was immediately shipped off to Pittsburgh to work in the coal mines that fed the steel industry there. Because my grandfather could speak many languages he was recruited by the mine workers' union and became an organizer for them who was blacklisted and shot at by thugs in the employ of the mine owners.

My grandmother, from Eastern Poland, left there as the war clouds of World War I were lowering. She and her brother, Vincent, snuck across the border of Poland into East Prussia where they caught a Baltic steamer to Amsterdam from which port they sailed for the United States where they had a brother who had already immigrated and landed in Pittsburgh. Vincent was just another strong back to be sent to the mines in and around Pittsburgh but my grandmother was seen as a potential public burden. She was confined to Ellis Island for a month while pleading with her brothers to send her $10 that would allow her to be released into America. She and my grandfather met when she was called in to translate for my grandfather. He was in the Allegheny County Hospital having contracted Black Lung. My grandfather was fluent in Polish, German, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Russian, and had some Czech as well but none of those languages was English, a language that my grandmother had picked up easily.

This woman that the Immigration Officials deemed a potential public charge went on to give birth to three American citizens: a daughter who became a registered nurse and one of the founders of the Connecticut Nurses Association, a son who was a tank mechanic in the 3rd Army during World War II and who was at the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and another son who was a radio operator and waist gunner in B-17s honored for saving his entire crew when their first plane, The Old Shillelagh, was shot down over the North Sea following the Regensburg Raid and was wounded in bailing out of their second plane when it was shot down over southern France in 1944. He became a prisoner of war and wasn't repatriated until January of 1945. Because of the service of their sons to the nation both my grandparents became U. S. Citizens.

I am an American in every way one can imagine. I am the embodiment of 300 years of immigration to this great nation. I have ancestors who served in the Continental Army during our Revolution and who served in both World Wars. I have studied American history since boyhood, both the common history and many of the more esoteric parts of the last 2 and a half centuries of our nation. I have been to Gettysburg and Saratoga, Fort Ticonderoga and Lexington Green, to Concord Bridge and Antietam and to Fort McHenry. I have been to Washington, D. C. several times and visited the memorials there. I have been moved to tears reading Lincoln's words inscribed on his memorial and at  the sight of the Iwo Jima Memorial near the Arlington National Cemetery. My present for my 14th birthday was attending the Centennial reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. I've been to the Smokey Mountains, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Acadia and many of our great cities. I have thrilled to see the U.S.S. Constitution, Old Ironsides, under sail and reenactors of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry march down Beacon Street in Boston as if they were on their way to glory at Fort Wagner.

I am an American. I believe in our form of government as established by our Constitution, its amendments and the laws promulgated on that Constitution. I believe that the words of its preamble, as was intended, define the broad purpose of our democracy. That "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Because I am an American I can say without the least ambivalence that the 8 Senators and 139 Representatives who opposed certification of the votes of the Electoral College are not Americans. They have set themselves in opposition to the most basic tenet of American democracy: that the majority vote of the people determines our elected officials. I can also unequivocally say that none of the riotous mob of seditionists that stormed our Capitol on January 6, 2021, whether they entered the building or not, are Americans. Those traitors and insurrectionists acted in concert to undermine our "more perfect union". Those traitors and insurrectionists acted to promote injustice, disturb the "domestic tranquility", attacked those trusted with our "common defense", opposed "the general welfare" of the people and sought to take "the Blessings of Liberty" from "ourselves and our Posterity" by destroying the Constitution ordained and established for the United States of America.

No amount of quasi-patriotic rhetoric can absolve the Republiscum in the Senate and the House of attempting to impose a dictatorship on the United States. No flag lapel pin, no Gadsden flag, not even an American flag waved by coup plotters and participants can make these scum Americans. Certainly no one who waves the Confederate battle flag or the Stars and Bars anywhere in this land, let alone inside the U. S. Capitol, is truly an American. No con man usurper of the presidency can call himself an American by instigating an insurrection against the will of the people.

We, the people of the United States, need to look at our definitions of what we mean by "an American". In recent years we have heard scum from the Republiscum Party and ultra right-wingers in media attack the birthright citizenship granted by the 14th Amendment. Were it not for that birthright citizenship my father, the decorated World War II veteran, would not have been a citizen. I must grant that even the adherents of the Republiscum Party and The Orange Führer are citizens of the United States but they are most definitely not Americans. Not one of them should be allowed to remain in public office. Not one of them should be allowed to run for or hold public office ever. Nor should any of these fascist scum be allowed to serve in any branch of our military, police or other law enforcement forces. The danger to our democracy is far to immanent and great to allow these insurrectionists public office, public trust or firearms.

We are at a turning point. Will we allow the seditious scum to continue to undermine our democracy and accept the probable dire consequences of their attacks on our Constitution, or will we decide that those who do not hold American values are unfit to serve the public at large? If we do not define them, as by their actions they have defined themselves, as opposed to everything that makes us Americans, we are undermining our democracy from within.

I am well aware that what I am calling for raises the vile shadows of HUAC, the Blacklist and McCarthyism. Let me point out that thousands of supposed "communists" never stormed the U. S. Capitol. No president of the 1940s, 50s or 60s every called for insurrection to keep him in office. Even Richard Nixon balked at that. We have allowed the McCarthites, the Goldwaterites, the Reaganites and the rest of the Republiscum, the militias, self-styled Minutemen, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Klansmen, Nazis and right-wing evangelicals who hide behind religion to carry out their anti-American goals to grow and fester within our body politic until their attacks on our democracy metasticized into The Orange Führer and his seditious minions both in government and outside storming the Capitol. Let us not confuse a real cancer in our nation to an imagined and feared one. The answer to this cancer is radical surgery. Anything less begs for it to recur in a more deadly form.

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.

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?