YELLOW

 

The FBI informs us that Thomas Crooks was scouring the Internet for the most “convenient” opportunity to shoot a political figure to achieve some personal notoriety, and it really didn’t matter who the target was. He discovered that the site of a Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania with a building right across from the rally stage a “safe” distance away offered him that opportunity.  Yet we must consider the fact that if Biden had been the target (and he could just as easily have been), would not Trump be essentially “finished” for the same reason that most people have moved on from feeling “sorry” for him after the shooting that did occur? Trump’s violent, demonizing and dehumanizing rhetoric punctuated unabashedly by lies and fabrication (coincidentally he was ranting about the border at the time) would be seen as a “rationalization” in either instance.

And then there was the Arlington National Cemetery incident. Are the people who invited Trump to that event that ignorant about him—or about themselves? Do they really want to believe he gave a damn about the soldiers who lay there? Why? He called them “losers” and “suckers”—well, maybe if they only watched Fox News they wouldn’t know that. Didn’t they inform themselves that the reason that allowed the attack to occur at the airport in Kabul was that Trump had made a deal with the Taliban that he would leave them alone if they didn’t attack American troops? That this allowed the Taliban to infiltrate the entire country unmolested, and made it so that neither Afghan government or U.S. security troops could have reasonably stopped anything they were up to?

Some people are so cowardly they are incapable of self-reflection, telling themselves that if I hadn’t done this, maybe this other thing wouldn’t have happened. You know, like egging-on a mob of fanatics who worship your every word to engage in insurrection? No, the yellow-belly can’t admit fault, and doesn’t even listen to advisors who tell him (privately) to just shut up. Thus Trump, who avoided the draft by his father apparently paying off a doctor to fake a foot injury, didn’t give a damn about those troops; it was hypocritical, self-serving politics to first blame the current president for the Kabul attack (what about the “experts” in the military and intelligence services on the ground there?), and then use the cemetery invitation as a cheap campaign stunt, which Trump did on TikTok.

What about these Trump supporters who don’t see this?  Is it that they see too much of themselves in Trump to admit any personal cowardice in revealing themselves? And what exactly do they “see” anyways?

On Labor Day I was walking down a street when I heard some banging and bustling going on; it was that Sikh-owned truck cab repair shop that serviced Sikh-owned trucking and driver operations. Now, there isn’t anything particularly wrong with this—except that it was Labor Day. If you are an “assimilated” American, you should be celebrating its holidays; after all, that’s not the kind of business offering a “Labor Day Sale.”

This of course brings up the question of what is “assimilation,” and if people think that is even important, and not just some slogan. Some groups come to this country to just take up space and “service” their own people (outside of convenience stores) who belong to their own “caste” and unassimilatable culture (despite what you see on TV or Spider Man movies). They don’t care about “assimilating,” it is just better to live here than there: 

 

And yet you have people like Laura Ingraham continuously wailing against people whose “culture” is largely based on the “model” imported from Spain (which, believe it or not, is a European country), like that “vermin” invading the country from south of the border bringing their “alien” ways. But it isn’t that they won’t “assimilate”—they already are—but that people like Ingraham themselves don’t want to “assimilate” with them. It’s amusing to me how Ingraham gets into a tizzy when people like white supremacist and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke expresses support for her views: is she too “yellow” to admit that they both share the same racist views? That she is more like him than most people are?

So we may ask ourselves, if people are in such self-denial, then what are they really afraid of, especially far-right, power-mad politicians? We saw in the raids in Texas conducted at the order of Ken Paxton, who is ten times more corrupt than Bob Menendez (which only shows us that it is Democrats who have more respect for “law and order”),  were meant not to find voter “fraud” but to intimidate and frighten lawful voters from voting. 

As Thom Hartmann noted in The New Republic, if Republicans can’t cheat to win as they tried to do in 2020, they choose voter suppression, either though laws or intimidation. We also saw this in Florida, where the state passed an initiative to remove the Jim Crow-era ban in the state constitution that took away permanently a person convicted of a felony the right to vote even after served their time—which mostly effected black (i.e. Democratic) voters. But then the Republicans in the legislature immediately took action, passing addendums that delayed or prevented felons who served their time from voting. Hartmann writes

Gov. Ron DeSantis put together a special police force to go after “voter fraud,” and they executed a number of arrest warrants against Black voters who’d been told by various state officials that they could vote even though they had a felony conviction. They all believed they were eligible, and apparently most were. There was absolutely no effort to commit voter fraud involved.

Remember when Florida was a “swing” state that voted for Obama twice? Once they gained power, Republicans did what they could to keep it, even to the point of ignoring the will of the majority of people:

With 64 percent support, Florida’s voters had approved a ballot measure in the 2018 election giving voting rights back to the roughly 20 percent of Florida’s Black citizens—1.5 million potential voters—who’d had a felony conviction. The Republican-controlled state legislature then—quietly—essentially overturned the ballot measure in 2020, although many Black voters never got the memo.

It worked, and Florida appears to be solidly “red,” at least until people get wise to the fact that in order to keep power, Republicans have gone all-out on suppressing free speech and voting rights, with the “aid” of political stunts that should anger people and expose their real motives:

With cameras rolling, around 20 Black former felon voters were arrested for “illegal voting” and paraded before the media in shackles. As a result, many Black voters that November concluded showing up at the polls just wasn’t worth the risk. As the Palm Beach Daily News noted shortly after the 2022 election: “In 2018, before the new voting laws were enacted, the state had a 63 percent turnout among registered voters in the midterms. This year, turnout dropped to 54 percent.…”

Shades of Jim Crow; but “acceptable” to the yellow-bellied as long as they perceive themselves as not the targeted group. As we recall, the U.S. Supreme Court controlled by the far-right held in its 2013 Shelby decision that the “preclearance” of laws effecting voting rights passed in states under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was “out of date,” and that the southern states and districts with a history of voter suppression of racial minorities could pass laws without regard to whether they are clearly intended to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning constituencies. 

These voter suppression laws would normally have been reviewed by the Justice Department or by the DC district court before being allowed to become law; but now far-right partisan state courts can “decide” on the constitutionality of such laws. Republican lawmakers claim that they are meant to prevent “fraud,” but there has never been any real proof of that; the only proof we have is that Republicans are consumed with fear, and they want everyone else to be too, regardless of what “side” they are on.

So what are Republicans afraid of? They are afraid of the people, like all those with authoritarian and power-mad impulses are. They have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections. Florida used to be a “swing” state, and Texas’s non-Hispanic white population is less than 40 percent. We can figure it out if we put on our thinking caps: Republicans have become desperately fearful of changing demographics, and even more “yellow” when it comes to voters who might not like them for good reason; if you kick a dog often enough (like Hispanics have been), it’s going to bite back. Listening to racist assholes like Stephen Miller would tend to cause such a reaction:

 

Under a second rule of Trump, a Nazi like Miller who wears his racism like on his sleaze like a Swastika arm band is what government posts are going to be filled with. People like Miller and the newly readmitted Corey Lewandowski are fanatics of the worst kind, and have no business in formulating public policy, since they have zero self-control, and if they are not going off the reservation on their own, then they are speaking Trump’s “language,” which means that Trump is even that much worse—like Hitler, who was not a “policy wonk” but someone whose underlings did whatever they believed “pleased” him.

And yet some people still refuse to accept the danger, likely because they are too blinded by personal hatreds and paranoia that they cannot see, or do not wish to, because they no longer have the “energy” or self-respect to conceal or control who or what they are. This goes for politicians, perhaps even more so. How many Republicans before the 2016 election denounced Donald Trump as a dangerous fraud—even JD Vance, who once called him “America’s Hitler”—before they bailed on their moral ethical “principles,” fearful of the fanatical mob behind Trump?

In 2016, many Republicans who didn’t want to be associated with someone like Trump and believed that he was a sure “loser” who only “appealed” to trailer trash, racists and other low-brow sewer-dwellers. The fact that Trump actually won the electoral vote with razor-slim victories in swing states despite losing the popular vote frightened the hell out of supposedly “normal” people concerned about their “reputations.” Was it still “safe” to be “normal”—or was this the new “normal”? Sure, some people would delight in locker room talk and bathroom graffiti, but surely not the immature ramblings of a non-stop blow-hard who constantly lied about his “achievements” and was constantly airing out ugly grievances punctuated by ignorant beliefs?

Trump of course is coward, because bullies are cowards. Trump is a cruel, vindictive individual whose natural instinct is to destroy those he views as a “threat” to his personal fantasies. He can’t stand up on his “merits”—all based on lies, fraud and cheating—so he must belittle and exclude those whose own self-control exposes Trump’s own lack of such. Kamala Harris certainly seems more “grounded” than the spaced-out Trump, so it isn’t a surprise he can’t stand a “fair fight.” Recall the first debate that was decidedly “unfair,” since Joe Biden just couldn’t compete with a non-stop liar and do what was necessary to discredit him. So Trump has tried to get Harris to agree to a debate “moderated” by Fox news, which we know is the principle Trump cheerleader and “advisor” in the media.  

Trump is a person without a shred of principle that most of us recognize as such. He just wants to “hang” with people who like him, but he doesn’t care about making himself “likeable”; if people like the nonsense and lies he spouts, all that does is convince him that the more the merrier if it “sells.” 

Trump was once a “Democrat” for reasons of pure self-interest; he lived in a Democratic city and he wanted to be associated with the local power brokers. But he wasn’t a Democrat in “principle,” since he was (and is) a racist. Why not? His father was a Nazi sympathizer, and Woody Guthrie felt compelled to write a song about him…

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project

…followed later by the Nixon administration DOJ lawsuit against Trump properties for racial discrimination. Then followed his ugly public campaign against the Central Park Five, who were later exonerated of the crime they were convicted and imprisoned for, which Trump never acknowledged or apologized for. Exposed, Trump turned to those people who were more like-minded, meaning the Republican Party, Fox News and other extremists of the far-right ilk.

Of course not every Republican was enthused about Trump, but when he ultimately “won” the 2016 election, Republicans who previously denounced Trump were running scared. What to do? Voters were not listening to them anymore, especially those who wanted a “change” for no other reason that OK, the country voted for a black man we didn’t want, now let’s vote for a crazy white man who speaks “our” language—“those people” had their “turn,” now it’s our “turn.” 

Long held grievances of feeling “under-appreciated” and imaginary ideas of being “cast aside” were unleashed after being pent-up for so long. Being “civilized” was for another time. There was no time for “civility” when you had all these “criminals, rapists and bad people” running around the country, as Trump told them. It was time to “fight back” and “take back” what was “theirs” that they had only agreed unwillingly to “share” with others.

So they “fought back” by allowing ignorance, paranoia and conspiracies to be the basis of public policy. How do you fight against lies when facts don't matter? Once that Pandora’s Box was opened, what was unleashed could not be recaptured or returned to the box; it was absorbed into the body politic, and the only way it could be expelled was for the voters who were themselves infected realized that the “cure” was not to make things worse by voting for incompetents who like themselves did not know the first thing about how to govern a country based on democracy and law (You know, people like MTG and Lauren Boebert).

But for others, like Jeff Sessions and his protégé Miller, this was a golden opportunity to convert thought into “action” on a national scale. Let us return to this video again to remind ourselves of why we don’t want another Trump administration:

 

Miller doesn’t even try to hide his racism or single-minded lunacy. What is wrong with this man? He is clearly beyond control of his thoughts and certainly has nothing we can ascertain as a “soul.” He is of course radioactive to mainstream Jewish activist organizations, who don’t want anyone to know that for all their hand-wringing about anti-Semitism in this country, it is a neo-Nazi like the Jewish Miller as an individual who has wielded far more power than they do as a group. They may pretend that he doesn’t even exist, but that only enhances him. With the leavers of power given him by Trump to act with impunity, he wields more power for the cause of evil than all the “good” of those Jewish anti-defamation groups.

Jonathan Blitzer in The New Yorker wrote that Miller, during meetings with DHS officials, betrayed ignorance of issues that caused immigration (you know, U.S.-exported violence), constantly talked over people, would ask question and then cut off answers he didn’t like. Once he told people in a meeting that immigration was “all I care about…I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” Some even mentioned in these meetings that Miller was so infused with hate that in his efforts to convince people that the white way was under “threat” he moved himself to “tears.”

He also noted that if Trump is elected again, Miller, who is “famously vindictive,”  will “grow only more powerful,” because  “Miller doesn’t have to get Trump to believe everything he does,” according to one official. “He just has to get Trump to say it all.” In fact, “Miller’s obsession with restricting immigration and punishing immigrants has become the defining characteristic of the Trump White House, to the extent that campaigning and governing on the issue are no longer distinguishable.” Miller has “choreographed” anti-immigrant initiatives, “convincing Trump that his political future depends on them.”

The definition of a fanatic, the kind that Julius Streicher was (at least he faced justice before the Nuremberg Tribunal). This was no more obvious when Trump supposedly “agreed” to a bipartisan bill giving DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship:

On January 11, 2018, Trump summoned Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, from South Carolina, to the White House so that they could explain the terms of a bipartisan deal they’d reached. It would offer a path to citizenship for DACA recipients in exchange for increased border security and enforcement measures. The President told the senators that he was ready to back their plan. But, two hours later, when they entered the Oval Office, they found that they were not alone. Miller had invited a group of far-right Republicans—including Tom Cotton and David Perdue, the sponsors of a bill to cut legal immigration in half—to join them. The “fix is in,” Durbin told an aide. When Graham brought up Haitian immigrants, while explaining an aspect of the agreement, Trump asked, “Why would we want all these people from shithole countries?” He now refused to endorse the deal he had supported that morning.

In the weeks that followed, whenever Trump responded positively to an overture by Democrats, Miller interceded. “Whoever has access to the President last—that’s what sticks,” a White House official told me. “Miller always made sure he was that person.” Graham said, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere.”

How things “change.” Blitzer noted that after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, “the Republican National Committee commissioned an emergency report on the future of the Party, in which pollsters and elected officials concluded that Republican candidates had moved too far right. The report warned that if the Party did not ‘embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform’ its appeal would ‘continue to shrink to its core constituencies.’”   Immigration—the “third rail of American politics—had an opening for “comprehensive reform” that “even a blind person could see” according to one Obama White House staffer,

But it never happened. Even the toughest “bipartisan” immigration bill yet failed because the pathetic Trump ordered House Republicans not to give Biden a “victory,” and they were yellow-bellied enough not to even allow a vote on the matter, since Mike Johnson and company knew that it required the support of only a few swing-district Republicans to pass. 

In this interesting video we hear Trump accusing Democrats of supporting infanticide, the same person that his nephew, Fred Trump III, recalled having this  attitude toward people with disabilities: "Those people...The shape they're in, all the expenses, maybe those kind of people should just die." Hmm...this sounds like Trump has heard of the Nazis' T4 euthanasia program:

 

Here we also encounter Lewandowski, who obviously has control issues as well, Here he is seen horse-collaring a protester at a Trump rally: 

 

It was incidents like this, and the grabbing of a female Brietbart reporter and a sexual assault charge in Las Vegas, and a general feeling he did not get along with others that led to his firing from the Trump campaign in 2016. But now he’s back making mind-numbing claims, reminding us of the “quality” of people we should expect in another Trump presidency. Even billionaire Elon Musk reportedly is being offered a position of power, to both seek ways to cut Social Security, Medicare and government aid programs for the poor, and to wreak vindictive vengeance on his critics in the business sphere.

Oh and by the way, why do people insist on using the term “AI” in regard to that image of Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” that Musk is spreading around on X? As I said the last time, “AI” does not exist yet; Jason Aten at Inc. tells us to stop calling “AI” a computer just doing “computer stuff.” It is just a “cute” term “cool” people like to throw around. That image was created through the input of crazed human beings, yellow-bellied by the idea that voters might actually prefer someone who can only be attack with faked-up imagery, and not anything based on fact.

The previous video also includes snippets from an interview with far-right nutjob Mark Levin on Fox News, who needs to do his own personal “fact-checking” since tries his level best to turn Trump into a god-fearing man, which is impossibly difficult to take. For balance, Texas State Representative James Talarico, an avowed evangelical, wonders why so many Christians have “forgotten all about Jesus, and now worship at the feet of Donald Trump, a business cheat, a pathological liar, a serial adulterer, a twice impeached insurrectionist, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist. I guess its hate the sin, elect the sinner. That seems to be the motto of too many Christians.”

The hypocrisy and cowardice of the far-right is monstrous, taking the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court where corruption and bribery is just a part of the “perks” of the job; they can’t stand to see what they see in the mirror, so they don’t even look. Judges in the January 6 cases have received thousands of death threats, apparently none prosecuted, and which explains why here we see (courtesy of Reuters) Trump attacking a judge without any real legal consequence…

 

…and yet in Florida a 66-year-old former teacher is sentenced to twice the prison term that prosecutors’ recommended by a Trump-appointed judge for sending similar messages to another Trump-appointed judge who threw out a lawsuit against Ron DeSantis’ “don’t say gay in schools” law. This is where we are at: the cowardly bullies on the far-right beat on those who criticize them, while they cowardly give themselves immunity over their own corruption. As the old saying goes, some people can dish it out, but they can't take the heat.

How long will this go on? As long as too many people in this country are too “yellow” to face their own failings as human beings, and vote for those who will do the dirty deeds that they can only “wish” they could do.