Is âDefund the Policeâ a gift, or a curse for the GOP?
Irony is lost on the police:
The fight continues:
Wrongo is somewhat conflicted about the statues. OTOH, the Confederacy only lasted for five years. It isnât Ireland where families lived and died fighting for their freedom from England for centuries. The band Nirvana lasted two years longer than the Confederacy. People who say theyâre proud of five years of an ancestorâs life really are just white supremacists. They should stop pretending there’s something else they like.
Wrongo said he wouldnât look back, but has reconsidered. Itâs time to declare war on those who refuse to use facts or science. Think about what these true believers in either faith or ideology have brought us:
Will we continue on this road, or will we make a turn for the better? Will 2020 usher in a better decade than the one we just closed? Doubtful, unless each of us stand up and do what we can to make a difference.
Those who think Trumpism is so new and novel should remember that Norman Lear made a hit TV show about it in the early 1970s. Since then, many American white people have taken a dark turn: They would rather have Trumpâs government enforce a whites only voting policy than put in the work required to make our system benefit everyone equally, while decreasing the cut taken by the corporate class.
Building this better society requires hard cognitive work. So far, Americans arenât up to thinking about solutions beyond “Build that wall!”
Another example: 50% of white people are actively against government bureaucrats making their health care decisions. They insist that something that important should only be decided by employer HR departments and multinational insurance companies.
Theyâre perfectly fine casting their fates with insurance bureaucrats. Even if those corporate bureaucrats deny their care most of the time. Worse, theyâre told by the media that they shouldnât pay any more damn TAXES for health care when they could be paying twice as much in premiums to insurance corporations.
Remember the song In the year 2525? âIf man is still alive…â
Thatâs 505 years from now. What do you think the odds are that weâre still here?
“The Justice Department has canceled a news-clip service for employees in its immigration review office after Mondayâs edition included a link to and a summary of a blog post from a white-nationalist website that used an anti-Semitic slur…”
The Justice Department said the articles came from a third-party internet service that scanned the internet based on keywords and automatically delivered the DOJ articles from “various sources”. It wasnât a surprise that the DOJ canceled the service, blaming the third-party.
DOJ spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said:
 âThose hateful beliefs do not reflect the views of EOIR employees and the Department of Justice.â
BuzzFeed spoke with the third-party service (TechMIS) and found out that the Trump administration has been regularly sending out articles from some far right-wing and white supremacist sites. And they’ve been doing it for months:
âSimilar newsletters sent to the Labor Department, ICE, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security included links and content from hyper partisan and conspiracy-oriented publishers.â
TechMIS sometimes included links to VDare, an anti-Semitic and racist site whose editor has claimed that American culture is under threat from nonwhite peoples. While these newsletters shared articles from local and mainstream national news outlets, they also regularly delivered content from partisan publications touting anti-immigration rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Among these publications: the Western Journal, a hyper partisan publisher whose founder once questioned if then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was Muslim.
And to say that the DOJ was blindsided by the contractor was debunked by TechMIS CEO Steven Mains:
âThatâs absolutely incorrect…Mains added that EOIR {division of DOJ} was the most specific and particular of the companyâs clients. The agencyâs staff would review its work âdown to misspellingsâ if there was anything wrong before sending.â
So, they reflect the beliefs of the entire administration.
Whenever you hear Trump apologists say that the Donald isnât racist, or that the administration takes an even-handed approach to the brown and black people, remind them that White supremacists are running the government, and sharing racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and radical conspiracy links across the federal bureaucracy.
You would be a fool to believe that these links arenât being approved by someone high up in the various administration cabinet departments. This is absolutely being done on purpose to radicalize the government against those people. On to cartoons:
The buck never stops at HIS desk:
Trump may have been chosen, but heâs just the Mess-iah
He did say that he wanted suspicious characters off the streets:
This weekendâs G-7 meeting will be more of the same:
Letâs hope that Justice Ginsburg is with us for some time to come:
Bidens seem nice, but they represent a time that has passed:
Weâve just celebrated a monumental American achievement that happened half a century ago. The courage, commitment and science that landing on the moon required hasnât been helpful here on earth in order to cleanse the darkness in human hearts.
Our president has no interest in addressing that problem. He doesnât see it as a problem, but as a tool to be exploited. Thatâs reminiscent of what movie president Andrew Shepherd (âThe American Presidentâ) said about his reelection opponent, Bob Rumson:
âWe have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you that Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who is to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time…â
Why canât our real president think and speak like that?
Mix that thought with what The Atlanticâs Adam Serwer said about the âsend her backâ chants at Trumpâs rally:
“If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America…it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever.â
Timeâs up America. On to cartoons.
Would we get to the moon if we were starting today?
2020 will tell if this is our future:
Trumpâs strategy:
Hear the big lie often enough, and you may just believe it:
Torres del Paine NP, Chile – 2016 photo by Andrea Pozzi
After our granddaughterâs graduation in PA (summa cum laude), we had a few wines and beers, and talk turned to politics and the mess America is in now. Son-in-law Miles, (dad of next weekâs grad) asked a very good question. âIs now really the worst of times? What about when Martin Luther King was assassinated?â
Wrongo immediately flashed back to JFKâs assassination. He was a DC college student when JFK died. But his focus wasnât on the loss of a president, or what that meant to the country. His focus was on what the loss of JFK meant personally.
That changed in 1968 with the assassinations of MLK and RFK. Wrongo was in the Army, stationed in Germany when Dr. King was killed. There was great tension in the enlisted menâs barracks. For a few days, it took a lot of effort in our small, isolated unit to keep anger from boiling over into outright fighting between the races.
By the time we lost RFK, it was clear that the Vietnam War would drag on, killing many of Wrongoâs friends. But, Wrongoâs job was to defend America from the Russians, with nuclear weapons if necessary.
It was difficult to see how or when Vietnam would end. It was hard to imagine Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or Robert McNamara doing much to stop young Americans from dying in Asia.
The year 1968 also included the Tet Offensive. Mark Bowen in his book, Hue 1968, says:
âFor decades….the mainstream press and, for that matter, most of the American public, believed their leaders, political and military. Tet was the first of many blows to that faith in coming years, Americans would never again be so trusting.â (p. 507)
When Americans finally saw the Pentagon Papers in 1971, they learned that Americaâs leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years, in spite of their doubts that the effort could succeed. The assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate changed us forever.
Our leaders failed us, it was clearly the worst of times. We were in worse shape in 1968 than we are in 2019. Back then, it felt like the country was coming apart at the seams, societyâs fabric was pulling apart. Then, May 4th 1970 brought the killings of college kids at Kent State, which was probably the lowest point in our history, at least during Wrongoâs life time.
Last week, we acknowledged the 49th anniversary of Americaâs military killing American students on US soil. We vaguely remember the Neil Young song âOhioâ with its opening lyrics:
âTin soldiers and Nixon coming, weâre finally on our own…â
Thatâs why the decade from 1960-1970 was the worst of times. We got through it, but we have never been the same.
In 1968, we saw that change can arrive suddenly, fundamentally, and violently, even in America. Bob Woodward spoke at Kent State last week, on Saturday, May 4th. He offered some brand-new information about Nixonâs reaction to the student shootings: (emphasis by Wrongo)
âIn a conversation with his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman in September 1971, Nixon suggested shooting prisoners at New Yorkâs Attica Prison riot in a reference to the Kent State tragedy. âYou know what stops them? Kill a few,â Nixon says on a tape of the conversation.â
Woodward continued:
âWe now know what really was on Nixonâs mind as he reflected…on Kent State after 17 months….Kent State and the protest movement was an incubator for Richard Nixon and his illegal wars.â
Woodward meant that what was coming was a war on the news media, creation of the âPlumbersâ unit to track down leaks, and attempts to obstruct justice with the Watergate cover-up.
Many of us see 2020 shaping up as another 1968. Some see Nixon reincarnated in Trump.
We havenât faced this particular set of circumstances before, so we canât know just how it will go. Will it be worse than the 1960s, or just another terrible American decade? Is it the best of times, or the worst of times?
Are we willing to fight to preserve what we have anymore?
Wake up America, you have to fight for what America means to us. Constitutional liberties are under attack. The right to vote is being undermined. Extreme Nationalism has been emboldened.
To help you wake up, listen once again to âOhioâ by Neil Young in a new solo performance from October, 2018. Heâs added some documentary footage and a strong anti-gun message:
You may not know that Chrissie Hynde, the future lead singer of The Pretenders was a Kent State student, and was on the scene at the time.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Thereâs no escape, weâre staying on the hamster wheel
And this:
All these killers used the same weapon, the AR-15 (or a knock-off of the AR-15). And just how many âlone wolfâ killers will it take before America realizes theyâre a pack? Do you have any hope that the Congress will rein in assault-type weapons?
Time to wake up, America. This weekend we saw two more acts of domestic terrorism against non-Christians. One by an Islamophobic Christian who mistakenly thought Sikhs are Muslim, and another by an anti-Semitic white supremacist who targeted Jews.
In the first case, a white man drove into a family of Sikhs in Sunnyvale, California, believing they were Muslims. He was allegedly on his way to a Bible study group, and was praising Jesus when authorities caught him.
In the second, another white man, gunned down several people in a synagogue in Poway CA, killing one and injuring three. He apparently wrote an anti-Semitic manifesto. The letter talks about planning for the attack. The letter writer also claims responsibility for an arson fire that blackened the walls of the Islamic Center in Escondido on March 24th, but no one was injured.
The Poway suspect also championed Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people and wounded six others in the Tree of Life synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh six months ago.
None of this is to downplay the ISIS killings of Christians in Sri Lanka. But today, weâre focusing on America, and two converging trends: The ubiquity of guns in America, and the growing and unbridled domestic racism that has returned to daylight.
We can blame Republicans for some of the escalating number of US white terrorist acts against non-Christians and non-whites. We all know that Trump has in many cases, encouraged hate to come out of the closet. This from David Atkins:
âWhite supremacist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and misogynist rhetoric runs rampant across the entirety of the conservative movement. The transformation of the Republican Party into a vehicle of violent white male grievance has rapidly accelerated its longtime trend under Trump.â
Atkins notes that the weekend attacks came one day after Trump congratulated the white player picked second in the NFL draft while ignoring the black player picked first. In 2016, Trump won both states that the two players played for, so it wasnât politics. Thatâs who he is, and he doesnât care who knows it.
We on the liberal side of the ledger continue to debate whether the âreachableâ Trump voters are as racist as the rest of the MAGAs. Some Democratic pols wonder how many of them could be persuaded to vote for a Democrat in 2020. Itâs unlikely that the âreachableâ Trump voters are more than 4% of the electorate, but that could well swing what shapes up as a very close presidential election.
Can Democrats appeal to their base and to the persuadable Republicans by hammering on the moral repugnance of these white terrorists, while downplaying any program to weaken the Second Amendment?
At the same time, what will Republicans do? We can be sure that Trump will double down, but will the rest of the Party follow him? More, from Atkins:
â…violent acts of terrorism by their own base are much harder to sweep under the rug. Vague statements of general condemnation against violence wonât cut it as these despicable acts continue to increase, and as the Republican Party becomes increasingly associated with them.â
The thing is, the fires of hatred are not a tool you can use only to fire up your voters to do what you want. Once ignited, itâs not your kitchen stove, where you can turn the heat up, down, or off at your choosing. These are wildfires. You can ignite them, and use them to heat things up, but they can take on a life of their own, burning whatever they reach.
Weâre told over and over that we have a civility crisis in this country. That the Democrats arenât being polite enough to the right.
We do have a civility crisis in this country. We are far too civil to bigots. We are far too tolerant of those who would oppress, or kill others.
The right wing needs to pay a price for its toleration and cultivation of bigotry. It has no right to demand civility when it allows some of its base to treat people with contempt just for being who they are.
