Trump Admin Should Be Call to Arms for Decent Americans

Another perceptive commentary on Trump and the Nuremberg-lite State of the Union comes from Roger Cohen in a New York Times op-ed column.

The piece entitled, Trump’s Volk und Vaterland, explains and denounces the mocking, racist call for nationalism, more walls, prisons, police, military against the dark enemies within and without our glorious borders.

Cohen's use of the German words Volk and Vatherland refers to mythical and virtuous German people, the Volk, propagandized as beset by foreign, Jewish, Communist and other unclean agents of evil despoiling the fatherland, Vaterland.

Writes Cohen:

President Trump declared in his State of the Union speech. 'There has never been a better time to start living the American Dream.'

But which American Dream? Trump portrayed a dark and menacing world in which immigrants, who stand at the heart of the American idea, were equated with gangs, murderous criminals and 'horrible people.'

In his 80-minute speech, the word 'woman' did not come up once. Other words or phrases never mentioned included 'peace,' 'human rights,' 'equality,' 'Europe,' 'multilateral,' 'civil rights' and 'alliance.' The Constitution flitted onto Trump’s radar chiefly in the context of appointing his kind of judges.

If there was a theme, it was the demonization of immigrants and of the rest of the world, combined with an exaltation of American might. ...

He spoke of building a 'Great Wall' on the Mexican border, but it may as well have been against the rest of humanity. Trump once again put the world on notice that the rules-based, post-1945 world order founded on alliances like NATO and American-backed multilateral organizations is one he would rather shred than bolster. ...

Trump spoke of American grit, of 'total American resolve,' of American heart and American hands, whipping his audience into chants of 'USA! USA! USA!' Trump’s America is, in the end, a reflection of himself: male, militaristic, white, mean and macho. ...

This was 'Volk und Vaterland' in American guise, stamped with his speechwriter’s clunky and cliché-ridden prose. ...

In the place of hope, Trump needs fear, a lot of it, to build the cult of his personality. His so-called American Dream is made up of the nightmares he imagines and that now hang over the world.

Like all dictators, Trump remains a frightened, immature child, not capable of perceiving humanity in other people.

Classical liberal values were never learned, so Trump concluded his address with his partisan slogan:

[I]t is the people who are making America great again.

As long as we are proud of who we are, and what we are fighting for, there is nothing we cannot achieve.

As long as we have confidence in our values, faith in our citizens, and trust in our God, we will not fail.

Our families will thrive.

Our people will prosper.

And our Nation will forever be safe and strong and proud and mighty and free.

Thank you, and God bless America.

Fuck Trump, this white supremacist human garbage is an continuing assault.

Any member of Congress who legitimized this crap by attendance owes his or her constituency a long list of explanations why.

Only 12 members of Congress boycotted the State of the Union.

None were from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

David Duke: Thank you President Trump. Americans are "Dreamers" too

America's first white supremacist president* hit his applause lines well last night.

Fascist overtones, explicit demonizing of immigrants, calls for increased militarization and policing of our country, this repulsive display by Trump continues.

David Duke, Stormfront and myriad other white supremacists were listening.

The reviews are in:

Thank you President Trump. Americans are "Dreamers" too.

— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) January 31, 2018

Charlie Pierce in Esquire offers words of sanity, commentary that is succor roughly one year before we declare war with Iran.

It was the most elaborate of charades, the most sophisticated of masquerades, that played itself out in the chamber of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night. The amount of pretense required to keep all sensible people—which is to say, any person who was not a Republican—in their chairs must have been heroic.

All involved had to pretend that Donald Trump makes sense as a president, that his administration makes sense as a government, and that his first State of the Union address made sense as either a description of national policy, or as a rhetorical summons to national unity. All involved had to pretend that his thoughts were coherent, that his words made sense, and that the complete and universal collapse of civic responsibility that propelled him onto the podium was not the most singularly destructive event in the history of American democracy since the Civil War. Everyone had to pretend that a freak show was Shakespeare, and that a rumbling, stumbling geek was Lincoln, and that the whole tableau unfolding before the Congress was somehow made noble despite the obvious fact that the whole event was an endless procession of lies and half-truths, and that the only truly remarkable thing about the speech was that it was such a perfectly round and complete crock of shit.

I don’t know how long the institutions of the republic can sustain this much pretense. Over my lifetime, the American presidency has tested what were believed to be the outer limits of counterfeit grandeur, but now we see that there is a vast universe of untruth and malignant fantasy of which we were painfully unaware. It is a burden to maintain the masquerade. It is beyond the strength even of the sturdiest democracy to be led by such a vanguard of unreality. Why anyone showed up on Tuesday night is a mystery to me.

Yes, Trump is happening, right now. Norman Cohn would have been impressed.

Desperate GOP: Block the Black and Brown from Voting

Andrew Goodman - Murdered in 1964 for
standing up for voting rights of our black brothers
Born  Andrew Goodman

(1943-11-23) November 23, 1943
New York City
Died June 21, 1964 (1964-06-21) (aged 20)
Mississippi, U.S.
Cause of death   Murder
Ethnicity   Jewish

Minorities are actually voting in the Wisconsin recall elections!!!

Early absentee voting in Milwaukee foreshadows a heavy turn-out in Milwaukee County.

And the GOP is already busily at work trying to discredit the recall election against Scott Walker and gin up hatred towards Milwaukee African-Americans.

The nerve of minorities for voting!

See Cognitive Dissidence.

Hatemonger, Charlie Sykes:

"If this election turns out to be neck-and-neck; if it turns out to be decided, let's say Tom Barrett were to win this election by, say, 7,000 votes, I can tell you right now: There is not a single conservative, not a single Republican in the state of Wisconsin that would think that was a legitimate election, that it was not stolen. ...

On fellow hatemonger, RNC chair Reince Priebus:

The chairman of the Republican National Committee said Wednesday GOP candidates have to perform 1 or 2 percentage points better than they otherwise would to overcome voter fraud -- claiming that voter fraud is far more pervasive than what official reports have shown.



Ralph McGill (1898-1969)

Writing on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution in 1958: "You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."."
- Ralph McGill
Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958
McGill won the Pulitzer Prize for a furious column denouncing the 1958 bombing of a Jewish Temple. The journalist, who had covered the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, linked the bombings of the 1950s-60s to the racial hatred of the South’s white leaders. History is repeated today, as GOP leaders denounce blacks and Latins' voting as "fraud," as hate crimes rise with the approval of the Republican Party.

The GOP Went Racist, Again

Update: See David Neiwert's The right's irrational view of race is on full display in Sotomayor hearings.

The biggest question when the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings began was: Would the GOP be so foolish as to make race an issue and taunt and condescend to the Latino community?

The answer is Yes, and to the GOP's detriment; those boys still just couldn't accept the brown and black as equal people.

I'm not surprised or disappointed, just happy that the GOP will suffer politically for its ultimately infantile display.

From ThinkProgress; Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ryan Powers, Nate Carlile, and Ian Millhiser report on the hearings:

A TAINTED LEADER
In what may be the biggest strategic blunder since Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) chose Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election, Republicans selected Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as their point person on the Sotomayor hearing. Sessions, whose own nomination to the federal bench was rejected by the Senate in 1986, has a long history of controversial statements about race. He once quipped that he ‘used to think [the KKK] were OK’ until he found out some of them were ‘pot smokers.’ He routinely referred to an African-American attorney who worked for him as ‘boy,’ and he once warned that attorney to ‘be careful what you say to white folks’ after Sessions overheard him chastising a white secretary.

Yesterday, at Sotomayor's confirmation hearing, Sessions wondered aloud how Sotomayor could have voted differently than another judge of ‘Puerto Rican ancestry.’ So, it's odd that conservatives would pick this man as their leading voice against the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court. The selection suggests that Senate conservatives wholeheartedly embrace Sessions' views on race.

SOUTHERN STRATEGY
It is clear, however, that Sessions is the architect of the conservative strategy against Sotomayor. In a campaign that echoes Lee Atwater's infamous Willie Horton ad and Jesse Helms' ‘white hands‘ ad, attacks on Sotomayor have focused almost exclusively on race. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the Republican Party, called Sotomayor's remarks ‘worse than Macaca,’ claiming that she ’doesn't have any intellectual depth‘ and that she is a ‘bigot’ and a ‘racist.’ Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) spent six uninterrupted minutes lecturing Sotomayor about her so-called ‘wise Latina’ speech during yesterday's hearings. And conservative senators repeatedly raised the specter of Frank Ricci, the white firefighter whose discrimination claim was rejected by a panel of judges that included Sotomayor, even though Sotomayor simply followed a 1984 precedent, whose facts are nearly identical to those presented by Ricci's case, when she considered his claim. Apparently conservatives believe the facts must take a backseat to race-baiting.

THE KITCHEN SINK
Race may have been the centerpiece of Sessions' playbook against Sotomayor, but in their desperation to keep her off the Court -- or at least tar her as a liberal extremist -- conservatives have resorted to throwing everything they can imagine at the nominee. The right-wing Committee for Justice, whose leadership played a key role in selecting President Bush's nominees, launched an ad yesterday claiming that Sotomayor led a terrorist organization, and linking her to ‘Obama's buddy Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist who bombed American buildings in the seventies.’ Meanwhile, conservative senators have accused her of being hostile to the Second Amendment, even though her only major Second Amendment decision relied entirely on a binding Supreme Court precedent. They have painted her as an enemy of property rights, citing an eminent domain decision where she held that a land developer who filed his eminent domain case two years after the statute of limitations had run shouldn't get a special exception from the law. And many have repeatedly claimed that Sotomayor is disqualified because President Obama once said that judges should have ‘empathy.’ Amusingly, when NPR pointed out that forbidding judges who use empathy in their decision-making would bar ultra-conservative Justice Samuel Alito from the bench, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) responded that he shouldn't have voted in favor of Justice Alito. Ultimately, however, no one actually believes that conservatives are regretting their support for Alito -- and certainly no one believes the Committee for Justice's claim that Sotomayor is akin to terrorists. Conservatives are simply demonstrating, once again, that they will say absolutely anything to obstruct President Obama's agenda, no matter the facts.

Judiciary Comm. Members Vary Radically

Amazing the disparity in the quality and diversity between the Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary.

On the Democratic side, we have women, Jews, humanists, scholars, civil libertarians and classical liberals. Now, check the out the Republican Members: White men, genuine bigots, racists, ignoramuses, a closeted gay-basher, among other sordid social-political characters.

Enjoy the hearings this week live at C-Span.

U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary

Democratic Members...........................Republican Members

Patrick J. Leahy Chairman, D-Vermont.............Jeff Sessions R-Bama
Herb Kohl D-Wisconsin......................................Orrin G. Hatch R-Utah
Dianne Feinstein D-California..........................Charles Grassley R-Iowa
Russell D. Feingold D-Wisconsin......................Lindsey Graham R-SC
Charles E. Schumer D-New York......................Tom Coburn R- OK
Richard J. Durbin D-Illinois.............................John Cornyn R-Texas
Benjamin L. Cardin D-Maryland......................Jon Kyl R-Arizona
Sheldon Whitehouse D-Rhode Island........................
Amy Klobuchar D-Minnesota......................................
Edward E. Kaufman D-Delaware................................
Arlen Specter D-Pennsylvania....................................
Al Franken D-Minnesota..............................................