In one ear, out the other

It can be frustrating for people who see through the deceitful desperation of Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, Fox News, right-wing commentators, and familiars in the administration, that polls only show a bare majority supporting Trump’s impeachment. From Day One almost nothing intelligible or factual has evacuated from Trump’s mouth. The Washington Post’s current count of factually-challenged statements by Trump since he entered the White House now exceeds 14,000—which seems an impossible number for a “normal” person to acquire in an entire lifetime, but for an abnormal person who feels the need to spontaneously respond to any fact that bruises his bloated narcissism, it isn’t much of a surprise. It is always the most guilty people who express the most “outrage”; it is like when you call out a racist or a rude, thoughtless person, and his response is not to “discuss” the matter, but an “invitation” to a physical beating—I mean, what more does that person need to do to prove your point? 

It simply doesn’t matter to Trump apologists that he is unfit for his office, everything “bad” about him goes in one ear, and out the other as if none of it “computes” in that mostly empty space between their ears. In fact the only part of their brain that actually “works” is the part that “reacts” to stimuli, whether positive or negative. Negative stimuli might be like when they see, say, a Hispanic male in the vicinity and by instinct they move to check to insure that their car doors are locked. “Positive” stimuli is rhetoric that “justifies” this racism, which Trump and his familiars frequently provide. Immigration policy appears to be what Trump’s non-billionaire supporters most “appreciate” about him, and it isn’t just about illegal immigration—that was just the “appetizer.” After all, Trump’s most evil familiar, Stephen Miller, once told a high school classmate that they couldn’t be “friends” anymore because he was Hispanic, and more recently Miller privately admitted that he couldn’t be happier if all immigration from non-European countries ended. We are now learning that Trump has “quietly” promulgated policies that will cut legal immigration by 65 percent, primarily affecting those persons who most excite racism, such as those from what Trump labeled “shithole” countries.

But if it is true that Trump supporters are incapable of processing the fact of his criminality and his wholesale destruction of the tenets that really makes this country “great,” that doesn’t mean that those who do “process” it are necessarily “innocent” of all wrongdoing. I have found that many white “liberals” in race matters are only so in the abstract; they become uncomfortable when forced to deal with it as a physical presence. You see fewer and fewer blacks and Hispanics in Seattle these days, displaced by “gentrification” and “replaced” by an ever increasing number of east and south Asians with their own brand of prejudices that go unremarked on. Thus whenever I hear discussions about, say, migrant children in concentration camps on the border, I ask myself the same question as a border agent did when he overheard a white female reporter talking breathlessly about what she had seen to someone on the other end of the line: at the end of the day, does anybody really care enough to do something about it? After all, Trump supposedly signed an executive order banning child separations, yet those separations have in fact doubled since then.

Ironies abound in the discussion of immigration, of course. By any definition India would be the biggest “shithole” country of them all, given that a few years ago the World Health Organization found that 60 percent of that country’s population—800 million people—were so poor that they were not availed to indoor toilet facilities, although since then India’s current prime minister began a crash program of constructing what can only be truthfully described as outhouses for the poor. But the privileged castes from India who live like kings relative to the vast majority of the population are more than welcome to come to this country and import their own brand of class and caste bigotry, which explains why there are so many serving in the Trump administration. While white Americans with college degrees can’t find “suitable” jobs, even in so-called “tech” jobs that are nothing more than data-entry office drone work, because they are not “qualified.”

 “Qualification” has more to do with how people “fit in.” In the downtown Seattle office building I currently work in, there is a General Electric subdivision occupying one floor whose manager is Indian, and most of the people working under him are Indian as well; I recall on one occasion he approached me and inquired with undisguised apprehension if I had access to his floor “at all hours.” And caste “privilege” isn’t just in the virtual takeover of convenience store, motel businesses and by Indian-owned companies that employ only Indians through the H1-B visa program. I recently observed to my astonishment a commercial truck being driven by a Sikh, with an image on the door announcing the truck was owned by a company called “Punjab Transit,” with those words superimposed on the outline of the Indian state of Punjab. Huh? Are we talking about a people who are trying to create their own “state” within a state? And racist fanatics like Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Jeanine Pirro are fulminating over the “great replacement” of the country by Hispanics?

When it comes right down to it, instinctive bigotry against Hispanics in the generality is the principle fodder feeding Trump’s support. I recall when I was in Army basic training, a drill sergeant asked me “Is that the way you fold your socks, you Mexican?” I told him I wasn’t “Mexican,” and he “corrected” himself by calling me in turn a “Puerto Rican” and a “Cuban,” before settling on “whatever you are”—anything but an American just like him. Thus I don’t live in a world of illusion; I know where I “stand” in the eyes of a world filled with paranoia and ugly stereotyping. I know that the spaces between white, black and Asian bigotry are hard places. I take with a grain of salt the hypocrisy of gender fanatics like Elle Reeve, who made the hypocritical assertion in a recent CNN story that “misogyny” drives white supremacy, claiming that it is “rare” for white women to be racist. Naturally she either ignores or blames the “patriarchy” all those incidents of racist ranting toward Hispanics or threatening blacks with guns for just being in the vicinity that seem to involve white women far more often than white men. I mean, you don’t have to be a dues paying member of a white supremacist organization to be a raving, nonsensical racist who believes in paranoid racial conspiracies (and let’s not forget that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, and that number probably won’t drop under 50 percent in 2020 if he is still around).  

And it isn’t just trailer-trash blondes, but supposedly “educated” and self-styled “progressive” women who are infected by paranoid racist stereotyping—especially toward Hispanic males. Instead of being a hypocritical self-congratulator, women like Reeve need to sit down with a good book, like Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s recent tome, Mothers of Massive Resistance, and rediscover how white women were the foot soldiers in the war against integration and resistance against civil rights—and not all that much has changed in the mind—in evidence by the frequency of white women who have served as the “face” of anti-affirmative action lawsuits involving college admissions, even though historically they have been the principle beneficiaries of affirmative action, and remain so with Title IX, which because the vast majority of its beneficiaries are white (and are voters), it is not politically fashionable to call it what it is and thus “harm” white women.

Ah, hell. I started this post to talk about the insanity of Trump supporters, and ended-up talking about the world that I have been forced to live by mendacious people of any ideological stripe. In the end, for me, all this hypocrisy renders virtually everything I hear as a little more than a grain of salt, small enough to pass through one ear and out the other. I don’t have a great deal of faith that if Trump somehow survives to stand re-election, that enough voters will do the “right” thing. Trump is doing what his “base” wants him to do, and those who oppose him are too fraught with their own competing agendas that don’t stand particularly close scrutiny.

Unlike white nationalist "patriots," real patriots like Lt. Col. Vindman believe in the democratic principles this country was founded on

Yesterday was yet another day of pathetic scrambling by some desperate Republicans and Fox News commentators to find a way to undermine an impeachment witness who gave the lie to yet another talking point they have been trying to fake on the public: that the original whistleblower complaint was “unreliable” because the information gathered was “second-hand.” A Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army, Alexander Vindman,  came forward to testify that he not only was sitting in on the infamous phone call as it occurred, but reported his concerns about its substance at the time and attempted to correct omissions in the Trump-approved, “perfect” transcript. While Vindman’s principle “bombshell” claim—that one omission spoke of Trump’s belief in a previously unrevealed conspiracy theory that the Ukrainians had a “secret” recording of then Vice President Joe Biden—did not dramatically alter the impact of the whistleblower complaint, Vindman’s deposition did confirm its essential facts beyond a “reasonable” doubt, as if there ever was such a thing save in the minds of Trump and his familiars. Vindman also added to the speculation that Gordon Sondland may have committed perjury during his deposition. 

Republicans like John Yoo and Sean Duffy joined in with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade to question Vindman’s “loyalty” to the country, given that he and his family immigrated from the old Soviet Union when he was three-years-old. Yoo made the ludicrous suggestion that Vindman’s was guilty of “espionage,” and Ingraham even more ludicrously alluded to “damaging” information about him “buried” in a New York Times profile—that since he was fluent in Russian and Ukrainian, and sometimes spoke in those languages to counterparts during diplomatic missions to those countries, he must “guilty” of “disloyalty” and is perhaps even a “double-agent.” Such talk did manage to arouse pushback from a few Republican lawmakers like Trump loyalist Rep. Liz Cheney, although interestingly she did not address directly Trump’s own predictably wild accusations against Vindman. 

You might notice on occasion some white people posting American flags on their SUVs, pickup trucks or in front of their homes. They do so because they want to advertise themselves as “real” Americans and “patriots.” In reality, for almost all of these people being an “real” American and a “patriot” stands for nothing more than being a member of the race that “founded” this country, rather than just a member of the race which stole the land from the original inhabitants. They don’t “stand” for the credo that everyone—not just white people—have the right to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and that all men are created equal, meaning that one person’s humanity is no more or less than another's; while how they end-up is part of the nature vs. nurture debate, to a greater extent it is about the privileges they are born with, and how those privileges are used and abused. Trump himself is proof that not all men are created “equal” morally or ethically; if Trump hadn’t been born with the silver spoon thrust firmly down his gullet, one could imagine him being an infomercial conman selling a worthless bill of goods to gullible people, maybe even winding-up behind bars after all. 

A real patriot is someone who believes in what this country stands for and will defend it against all those who would destroy those principles. Regardless of how one may feel about migrants on the southern border, there is one thing quite clear: they at least believe in what this country stands for far more than so-called patriots/xenophobes/nativists/racists who would deny them even the right to seek asylum. All those who have come forward to tell their stories about Trump and his familiars’ crimes against democracy and democratic principles truly deserve to be called patriots, because they believe in the high-minded principles of the founders (not the fake “principles” that far-right outlets like The Federalist espouses to) that know no partisan boundaries. If anyone is guilty of “treason” against what this country stands for, it is Trump and all those who have jumped into his dumpster fire. 

Republican lawmakers may continue to issue forth illogical defenses of Trump, but we should all know by now that these are desperate bids to prevent the Trump tsunami from swallowing them all up. But while we can write-off white evangelicals as the moral and ethical hypocrites that they are, it is still possible that if there is a discernable crumbling around the peripheries of Trump’s “base,” then perhaps we will discern some mumblings about to persuade Trump not to run for re-election for the good of the party; this was suggested by liberal commentator Christopher Hahn, who believes that if John Bolton testifies in the impeachment inquiry, it will be the final “nail in the coffin” for Trump’s presidency. Can we say it? That John Bolton—in the past much disliked by the left—has more patriotism in his pinky finger than Trump and all his familiars put together? We can certainly say that those who have defied Trump and testified to his crimes have more patriotism in the tips of their finger. 

But even if Trump chooses to “resign” from seeking a second term, that is no reason for real patriots not to remain vigilant; Mike Pence is one of those hypocritical white “Christians” who does not believe in what this country truly stands for, either.

Some thoughts after federal judge blocks Alabama abortion law

A federal court in Alabama just issued an injunction against a controversial abortion law passed in Alabama which among other things bans all abortions in the state with the sole exception if a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother-to-be. Doctors who perform an abortion can be sentenced to up to 99 years in prison. Other states have passed similar laws that have also been blocked by the courts; it is difficult to say if the Republican lawmakers and governors who are promulgating such draconian laws are doing so merely to advance their “cred” with a certain element of the electorate, or actually believe that the five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court will actually have the political stupidity to approve any of them in their entirety. Overturning Roe v. Wade won’t stop abortions from occurring any more than they did before that decision, and in this day and age to do so will likely have the same partisan political effect as the infamous Dred Scot decision. 

For many people, acceptance of Roe v. Wade merely means that they have to eat whatever their moral and ethical feelings that may trouble them, and recognize that people make “mistakes” and should not have children they don’t want or properly raise. With some women it is difficult to ascertain just what is in their minds. Take for example actress Shirley MacLaine; I am a fan of her films, but in real life she is no “Sweet Charity” by the definition of either word.  It pains me to say that it is disappointing to discover that as a person she is a “new age” oddball and a bit of a jerk; in interviews she turns nasty when her alternate fact universe is the least bit threatened. I mean, a lot of celebrities are jerks both at work and play; but some people, like MacLaine, Madonna, Cher and Cardi B are like Donald Trump: they seem to think that “normalizing” their personal failings in public makes it all “OK.” MacLaine has one child, a daughter of a very “open” marriage. She once claimed that she shipped her daughter to live with her father (who apparently was a stand-in for some spirit being inhabiting his human form, or something) because she didn’t want her “creativity” as a woman interfered with by even the pretense of being a mother. Her daughter, Sachi Parker, wrote a Mommie Dearest-type tome describing her childhood which naturally upset her mother, but equally naturally the daughter backtracked and insisted it was not her “intent” to upset, but to “educate”; Parker continues to pine for affection, maybe because she expects a deathbed apology asking for “forgiveness” and be left a lot of money in MacLaine’s will. The question is why people like MacLaine have a child in first place; are they merely satisfied that a part of them will survive after their death? Is a child like a dog that they expect unconditional love from, but don’t believe they have to give of themselves as long as it is fed?

I’m sure that MacLaine’s daughter is happy to be alive and to be connected—however tenuously—to a famous “parent.” But MacLaine is one of those fortunate well-off few who can afford to have a child that they are free to mostly ignore. For some less well-off people, their children are a vindication of their own existence, and they actually derive some satisfaction in the raising of children (although that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good parents).  Yet it is these very people that Planned Parenthood largely targets in their advertisements, in the assumption that they have the same “values” as “career” women who see children as an impediment. Planned Parenthood’s patron saint and “bible”—Margaret Sanger and The Pivot of Civilization—has this to say about such women in reality:

The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective…Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

Sanger espoused the scientific racism and eugenics of the time to justify abortion; to her, non-white people and those of “inferior” European “ethnicities” qualified as “feeble-minded” and “mentally-defective.” In fact, this belief was the principle driver behind the 1924 immigration law. Sanger even went so far as to concoct a scheme to convince black preachers to help her convince their congregations of the “positive” benefits of placing a “limit” on the number of children a family should have; it isn’t just the cynically racist underpinning that is not difficult to detect, but the fact that Sanger and her abortion lobby was trying to take away the right of choice from women they considered “inferior.” We can see that in the attitude of many on the paranoid right (like Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro) who whine about Hispanic women having “too many” children as part of some sinister “plan” for the “great replacement.”

But as much as one can be cynical about the moral hypocrisy of the pro-abortion movement, there is no escaping the fact that women who don’t want children—whether for purely self-serving reasons or the fact they admit that they are do not have the motivation to properly raise a child—should not have children, and should not be forced to by the happenstance of unwanted pregnancy, and men don’t necessarily want to pay child support for children they were not expecting to have, either. People make “mistakes” all the time, and the question of “responsibility” doesn’t enter into it, because the lack thereof occurred on both ends—especially in relationships where there is no expectation of permanence or stability. While I think it is a long-shot that the U.S. Supreme Court will gamble on a politically-suicidal reversal of Roe v. Wade and permit state laws that ban all abortions save for the life of the woman exception, even most Republican lawmakers (especially those in “swing” states) know that it would be suicidal to allow such a ruling to hold for long without passage of some sort of federal law restoring abortion rights—which of course should have been done long ago so that people wouldn’t be arguing about it now. The right has had its fun using the issue to pretend to support “superior” moral values; we’ve seen enough evidence of their hypocrisy in their support of a president completely devoid of moral and ethical values; they needn’t pretend to have any now.

Expecting to be "cheered" at the ball game, Trump forced to confront what real Americans think of his criminality

Donald Trump learned a hard lesson last night, or should have: A lot of people hate him—I mean really hate him for the ignorant, immoral and unethical bigot he is. Despite the fact that Trump had almost nothing to do with the operation that eliminated ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in fact was so distrusted by intelligence services that he was not informed until it was certain that there wasn’t enough time for him to leak its details, he seemed to fall under the spell of his alternate fact universe, where people who hate him would suddenly change their tune. Thus he and some of his Republican familiars like Lindsey Graham and Matt Gaetz showed up with him during Game 5 of the World Series, supposedly there to cheer on the Washington Nationals, but in reality this raging narcissist and self-flatterer expected to receive all of the cheers. Instead, when his face appeared on the big screen an eruption of boos went forth, followed by the chanting of “Lock Him Up!” 

As we know, Trump encouraged a variation of this chant in regard to Hillary Clinton before crowds of mindless fanatics; that he was receiving some of his own “medicine” was doubly gratifying not just because it was a spontaneous, public rejection of a man living in a world of self-created illusion, but that it was broadcast before millions of television viewers across the country and around the globe. For a man who has spent his whole life marketing his personal “brand,” this public rejection of him as a man worthy of respect should have stung. Other presidents may have been “booed” when they appeared at a major sporting event, but never before was there a president whose own depravity was so openly and angrily tossed back into his orange face with those unsightly ringlets around his eyes.

The Democrats’ continue to soldier on with their impeachment inquiry in spite of Trump’s “victory.” Why? For one thing, as evil a man as al-Baghdadi was, hardly anyone even knew who he was in the country, probably because his name didn’t “roll of the tongue” like Osama bin Laden’s did.  In fact, he was so nondescript a presence that his occasional forays out in the open elicited no particular notice, since the people living in the neighborhood of his last hideout didn’t even recognize him as a man of any particular notoriety. Joel Mathis points out in The Week that had it not been for George Bush’s pointless adventure in Iraq, religious fanatics like al-Baghdad would have remained marginalized and not even worthy of a footnote in history, and that part of the Mideast would have remained merely a power stalemate between Sunni-led Iraq and Shiite Iran, with radical Islamists being under tight control by a secular Iraq. 

But more tellingly, most people were not buying Trump’s braggadocio; we have heard it all before, and Trump has even less reason to claim “credit” for it than usual. U.S. intelligence agencies that Trump has ridiculed and marginalized, Kurdish allies that he has denigrated and an ISIS defector were responsible for al-Baghdadi’s downfall. Trump even had the audacity to “thank” Russia—Putin apparently “approving” the operation to hasten the U.S.’ withdrawal so that he can muscle in. The obviously staged photograph of Trump allegedly viewing the raid even calls into question if he actually saw it in "real" time; one suspects that if it had failed, he wanted people to know that he wasn't "personally" involved in it. Perhaps Trump’s bragging was just that much more sick because in his description of al-Baghdadi’s final moments, we could see that he was actually describing himself in a fashion. Trump called him “a sick and depraved man,” “a coward” and “a dog,” "whimpering and crying and screaming." Trump has tended to use language like this toward his political enemies, celebrities who have crossed him, and to migrants. 

But his own reactions to the current impeachment hearings, either on twitter and during public pronouncements, reveal him to be a desperate man who at least in a rhetorical fashion, is “whimpering and crying and screaming” in face of finally being forced to account for his crimes. This is a man whose sickness and depravity continues to prevent needed humanitarian aid to an island of U.S. citizens, leading to the death of thousands, simply because he feels contempt toward human beings who happen to be Hispanic. This is a sick and depraved man who has kept thousands of children in virtual concentration camp conditions. Like a bullying coward, he has used his executive power to beat-on the most vulnerable. Like a coward, he has engaged in willful and unlawful obstruction of justice for crimes that well-informed, intelligent people recognize that he has committed. If Republicans like Graham and Gaetz want to drown in the cesspool with him and kill-off any shred of human decency they ever had, this country will be better for it. 

“Lock him up.” Now that sounds like an appropriate anti-Trump slogan. Some on the left have said it was "inappropriate" and "un-American," but it is the only language that Trump and his supporters understand. Hopefully it will catch on. It fits Trump like a wet rag.