That CRT/DEI Stuff Meant American History

 

The Air Force confirmed it has dropped a training video with the famed Tuskegee Airmen following Trump’s DEI crackdownhttps://t.co/bU3AoQ1LHG

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) January 25, 2025

The story of the Tuskegee Airmen doesn't take away from the story of America, it only challenges some of the myths of White America.  It stays a story about American greatness if we accept that they, like the Navajo code-takers, were a part of this nation's cherished diversity being a boon to us. Just like the story of Japanese-Americans who fought even while their families were interred by our government because of their patriotism. 

Pete Hegseth is far too young to know about "That's no lady, that's my WAF" jokes. The Trump Administration fired a Coast Guard Admiral and maybe the reason was because she was a woman.  Was she the problem? Or was the problem--the metrics she supposedly failed by--culture war ideology that detracts from the actual mission to protect the homeland?

Deep in the Dark Heart of Texas

 

BREAKING: Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardons Daniel Perry for killing BLM protester Garrett Foster pic.twitter.com/lSn3WafPE4

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 16, 2024

I could just blog about how TX Gov.  Greg Abbott is a signifying sociopathic fascist who is pardoning a racist and pedophile murderer to send a chilling message to his state about his values, but I need to point out that he is not just following through on a political promise, but that the Texas Pardon and Parole Board recommended it. 

Let me repeat that: this was not without the consent of other people who sit in judgment over who gets pardons or parole, but with their express approval. Greg Abbott isn't a brand-new baby governor trying to feel out the ethos of his state--he is a monster who has figured out that many people will clap for a particular kind of monster. 

In Texas, anyway. 

Governor Abbott is Who He Is

 

I could write rather a lot about what pardoning a man who said he was thinking of killing people on his way to work, who did plow into a crowd of peaceful protesters who were exercising their 1st Amendment rights, and then fatally shot someone in the crowd who was lawfully exercising his 2nd Amendment writes would mean: the sanctioning of murder based on whether you agreed with the choice of victims--

But let's face it, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas choosing to do just that based on Fox News and the opinions of no less an intellect and subject matter expert on this than Kyle Rittenhouse is very, very on brand, And saying more just feels like a waste of words, in a way. 

He Was Just Trying to Get Home

 

I have no interest in sharing the video that some of us had to watch to take in, once again, the brutality human beings can inflict on one another, and that some of us had to avoid, unable to see another violent, avoidable death. So, I choose this image from a video of a skater, full of life, arms stretched out in the light, in motion as he should still be. 

Tyre Nichols should be alive. We don't even have a good answer as to why he was stopped. But what I saw was disproportionate force on a compliant individual undertaken with what looked like enthusiasm. This video of police brutality was twice as long as the Rodney King video I saw so many years ago--and which then felt to me like watching an eternity of a human suffering--he lived. This is watching Black officers of the law behave unlawfully, keepers of order being without order. This feels like watching something primal and ritualistic. 

I am not better for having seen it. It leaves me wondering what trapdoor in the human soul drops open in the midst of serving one's job that reveals a monster below--not for one depraved individual, but for a collective. 

And what also breaks me is that he called for his mother--and yeah, I've heard that before too, and I, without kids by choice, hear that and I am suffering for that human, so close the last of his life calling out for she who was there for the first part of it. If I am so moved, what is it like for one who carried a child under their heart, and lived with a child in it, concerned for their every breath under the sun, until the time that breath was stolen? 

This Sums Up the Day For Me

 

You signed a bill last year eliminating the requirement for Texas schools to teach about MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. https://t.co/Lm8m1cXazN

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 16, 2023

All Republicans who have promoted anti-CRT (which is so nebulous it might as well be "anti-Black History") curriculums and also who have gone out of their way to support voter suppression and create hateful divisions among people based on race and creed have no business putting Martin Luther King, Jr.'s name in their mouths--but they do try. And they do it in a way that tastes like an insult, to be honest. If they are going to stand for everything the man fought against, they could just as well choose to stay quiet and let their actions speak for themselves, because that's what will actually be remembered of them, anyway.

UPDATE: More of this, actually:

delete your tweet rand. https://t.co/KzovVTcQOW pic.twitter.com/NettLrb0HQ

— Annie Wu (all socials: annie_wu_22) (@Annie_Wu_22) January 16, 2023

We all know the senator changed his mind in an election year and supported the act he previously blocked.  But we don't forget a lot out here on the internet. 

You Won't Steal Our Joy

The Senate confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson got super emotional when Sen. Cory Booker brought Jackson to tears with his touching testimony on racial progression. https://t.co/imXiGk6ZeS

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 23, 2022

Where Republicans mugging for the camera and showing every willingness to swim in the sewer to drag an exceptionally qualified Black woman through the mud for the dopamine hit of a Fox News spot exist, I am refreshed to focus on the only US Senator who brought Judge Jackson to tears, Senator Cory Booker, because he supported and respected and showed his joy for this glass-ceiling shattering woman. 

If the calumny and slander of the mugging mental mites, the political parasites, the social media self-checkers like Cruz and the drama-queens like Lindsey Graham, the unapologetic militant police state loving fuckfaces like Tom Cotton and the weasel-headed insurrectionist sumbitches like Josh Hawley made anyone ever want to take a long Silkwood-style shower, he gave us this refreshing moment, this shower of love, to study how Judge Jackson has borne up during an onslaught intended to rattle her and shake her faith. 

And she has persevered throughout questioning that has more to do with right-wing axe-grinding and the next election cycle than her own nomination. She is being accused because less qualified candidates than her were rightly challenged, but a party that no longer has a grip on right and wrong can only see tit for tat. 

I've raged, because I can, watching this, and she cannot, because she is living this and has to be professional. When Sen. Cotton accuses her of loving terrorists because of her service as a public defender, I want to intimately introduce him to the concept of due process that actually is a cornerstone of the Constitution he himself swore an oath to and is pretending now not to know about by shoving said document down his narrow throat. Also, I think GWB and company actually are guilty of war crimes and I've been saying so for years. 

When Josh Hawley accuses her, a woman and mother of daughters, of being soft on sex criminals, I want to throw out the discussion of whether he was slow as MO AG to investigate Gov. Eric Greitens' crimes until it was politically convenient to do so. His silence on Roy Moore. And the general disapprobation he is rightly receiving for this slander. 

As a woman, I cringe at the contempt and condescension thrown her way, the interruptions by men who think they are great because the Fox News camera is going to love them. I can only imagine what it would be to be a Black woman seeing this appalling display of white men in power, trying to disempower a woman every bit their equal in education and dignity, and their superior in mastery of herself. 

I have no doubt she will be seated on the highest bench, but I am appalled at this display by such obvious political maneuvers by pure partisan shitheads. Have they no shame? Of course not. Can their shame-glands be kickstarted by anything at all? I don't even know, but I have feet and time. 

The Federalist Society is Affirmative Action for Shitheads.

 

Hey, I just wanted to get this out here, but is there any good reason that so many of our SCOTUS picks for all of the history of the Supreme Court have been white guys? That's pretty suspect to me. I definitely think this is the result of some serious gaming of the table. Actually, I think the Federalist Society is a problem. I mean, like, why are Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and Sam Alito even here, except that they managed to apply in the broadest sense of the word, to the job of SCOTUS eligibility by way of social associations many of us never would have understood existed?

What if that structural injustice, where you had to know someone to be someone, wasn't so much a thing? Ah, but what if extremely well-qualified Black women were actually extremely well-qualified?  (Like--managed to finagle the right kind of connections?) What if several Black women were eminently qualified?  What if people who pretended that the answer to Joe Biden's decision to make the next SCOTUS a woman of color was to complain that great white hopes existed actually obviated the need for someone who was not them? 

What if fuck your white guys? What if Lani Guanier  deserved better?  What if Pauli Murray should have been a SCOTUS? What if we could have been representing the POV of Anita Hill and not Clarence Thomas for all this time? Would we have had a fairer country? A more equitable court with more representative judgement?

I don't pretend I know that, but I will say that the people who want to claim that Black women judges who are fully qualified and would somehow have their experience called into question by Biden's political pronouncement are absurd. Of course, their qualities exist in spite of and because of at once their identities. They bucked a curve, and they overcame false expectations to get here. So, screw Roger Wicker, and other unconscious Confederates who don't appreciate that to be good enough to even be considered, Black women have had to be twice as good to be considered at this point. 

The reality of an appointment to SCOTUS is that you aren't likely to even be in the running. It isn't like being an associate at the local department store. And of course, a POTUS will have some political reasons--but I'm just saying. It would be nice if the next SCOTUS understood where I'm from. I support the Biden's choice because he would be making this decision. And I approve of his criteria. 

Here's What You Voted For, Virginia

 

His administration first off banned mask mandates in schools and vaccine mandates for state employees and banned CRT (let's get real: he banned Black History) and totally fired the parole board, the Conviction Integrity Unit and staff working on human trafficking. I'm genuinely not sure that Virginia exactly voted for all that, but it was the stuff Youngkin decided to do first off. 

Also his wife's dress is the worst. I am so sorry to bring this up, but it is unflattering in every possible way. Maybe she spent a lot on it, but it is colorful in a bad way, and demure in a bad way, and frowsy in every way. This is not to blame her for any of her husband's policies, but she is married to him and she did choose that dress. And Virginia did vote for Youngkin and these half-assed culture war positions are what they will now have to deal with, because some people thought good effective Republicans who weren't culture war weirdos was still a thing. 

It is not. All Republican politicians should be regarded as potential culture war weirdos. Because if you fall for their promises, you will be stuck in photos (history) wearing them like a bad frowsy regrettable frock. It's just not that easy to tear off a stupid and out of touch governor with bad ideas in the way one tears off an ugly dress that looks like chintz curtains with minimal tailoring, except for unnecessary flourishes.

I don't know why I went so hard on that dress. But it all applies to ever voting for a Republican. And if you stick up for the dress on that regular middle-aged woman who could look so much smarter and actually has, I will hiss at you with great vehemence. It's grandmother's parlor upholstery.  I am for liberating Suzanne from all relevant disasters as a feminist and my support starts with saying no to this Calvinist one room church get-up. I am for liberating the US from wannabe famous signifying politicians, so Glenn is on the shitlist. 

Make of any of that what you will. 

Where's Your Dr. Seuss, Now?

 

Texas school district pulls 400 books from libraries after state GOP lawmaker's inquiry https://t.co/YFZ3PoP9VI pic.twitter.com/gn68pUEnTi

— The Hill (@thehill) December 7, 2021

Before I freak entirely out:

Many of the books on Krause's list center around abortion, teen pregnancy, sex education, LGBTQ narratives, the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism. Some of the popular titles on the list are "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Styron, "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving, and "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" and "Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

"Most of those are appropriate and will stay on our library shelves as is, however, some may contain content that needs further review to ensure the books are accessible based on age appropriateness," Aubrey Chancellor, executive director of communications for the school district, said in a statement obtained by NBC. "For us, this is not about politics or censorship, but rather about ensuring that parents choose what is appropriate for their minor children."

Look, I feel like it's thought-policing the kiddos to limit their choices based on what adults think is age-appropriate because I can not begin to tell you what my hyperlexic reading list was about when I was like, 10 or 11, and my dad gave me a dollar to not read Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women when I already had reread it a few times. (This logically drew me to want to read D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other verboten authors--and I still don't know exactly what made my dad find that one fraught because it isn't exactly a well-known title and I don't know if he skimmed it and went "whoa!" or what. My baby brain never saw the "Whoa!" bit.) 

Justice and the Bittersweet Exhalation

 

Three white men, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, were convicted by a Georgia jury for murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who ran through their neighborhood. All three face a federal trial next year on hate-crime charges https://t.co/Sz19nnLTFM pic.twitter.com/umFrpBm2Cm

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 25, 2021

It shouldn't be so hard to expect that people who murdered a young man on video (and were so certain of the situation that one of them leaked the video of the slaying with the idea that it would resolve public opinion) would be convicted of the deed, but we don't live in the most logical of times (and never have!), and not even video of some slayings has been enough to condemn certain malefactors for one of the most heinous of crimes--because it is the most irrevocable--the taking of a life.

And yet, the system almost failed. It almost failed in many places and with several different people.  It took work to even bring charges. It shouldn't have been so in doubt that the Arbery family would get justice for their son. 

What I know is, while the judge and the prosecution in this case were excellent (and I look to the Rittenhouse case as I say that), the defense seemed disturbingly wed to the notion that the victim was the one on trial and that calling attention to the racial issue would somehow be beneficial to them. (Although it should have been clear that it was a factor--one that will be discussed in the federal case.) 

It should have been obvious that Ahmaud Arbery should not have had his life taken from him, but one of the comments the defense made me suck in such a gasp--that shamelessness about the dead man's toenails. The disrespect and denigration of a person in death as if acknowledging that, not anything Arbery did, but his appearance alone, could have warranted his death. 

That gasp--that inhalation at the realization that on some level, this expectation of bigotry was considered not an unfortunate bug of society but a feature to be relied on, was something I hadn't fully exhaled until the verdict was read out. How many others were holding their breath? How many others have held their breaths like this for an exhalation of justice that never came? How many times did it feel unsafe to breathe in freedom, or breathe out that fear and misgiving that a Black life mattered? 

The system isn't perfect but it's correctable. I am not big on faith, but I will believe in that. We just have to keep correcting as we go along. 

Where I Defend Kyle Rittenhouse

 

Let me take a departure for a minute from what you know are my stances to acknowledge a handful of things: the overlap between justice and the law is not a perfect circle. A judgement can be legally accurate while still being ethically or morally disappointing at best and supporting a dangerous or untimely precedent at worst. We don't have to love the outcome of the Rittenhouse decision to come away with the idea that the right to self-defense, even if it is broad and subject to conjecture about state of mind on the part of a person who has taken life, isn't something that should be denied someone just because their background doesn't comport with our ideas of the ideal self-defense scenario. 

I'm going to perform a teeth-gritting exercise about what we can know from this case, and I don't think anyone will be happy with it, not even myself. Kyle Rittenhouse is an under-parented kid who thought he was doing something he needed to that he entirely did not. He was on the side, to the best of his teenage education, of law and order. The side where the cops were. He was not any more racist than the people he was surrounded with (you know, regular white folks). He considered the city of Kenosha his community even though he did not live there, because he had family there and had worked there. And he acquired an AR-15 because guns are for self-defense, and he was in a place he competently understood to be dangerous based on his understanding of what he had read and seen on the news, and wanted to also be dangerous. Because self-defense. The thing he went into danger to do. 

To be exact, even if no son of mine would ever, etc., Kyle Rittenhouse looks like he could be my kid. So I get what his sources of information were and the biases he grew up with. And this isn't a privileged kid in spite of his whiteness. He was only privileged in that our laws were so constructed to be very broad with respects to self-defense and the Castle doctrine has, over the years with the help of the NRA and other pressure groups, made the frontier logic of the Wild West, the duty to never retreat anywhere if you happen to be armed, the law of the land. In a gunfight, it privileges the one who lives and can take the stand to testify to his state of mind, As the survivor of a gunfight, Rittenhouse has emerged from a gantlet to arrive at another kind of challenge. 

His lionization by the actually worst people. Like the Proud Boys, the association with which, while Rittenhouse was out on bail, was something not viewed by the jury, and also, it was irrelevant to his case, having happened afterwards. 

The Driest Eye

 I'm obviously not the intended audience for Kyle Rittenhouse's time on the stand, because in my universe, I would never have entertained the idea that putting him on the stand would necessarily elicit sympathy, so it would have been best avoided. But it certainly happened, and somehow, news stories got written with "burst into tears" or the like in them. 

But I don't see any tears here. He looks like he swallowed a hot chip the wrong way. He looks like he tried for a snot bubble and it came up dry. He even looked over to see if anyone was responding to his "breakdown". And I feel very mean for saying this, and you know what? My eyes are dry, too. 

This kid was in a state that was not his, with a gun he had no right to carry, claiming he was offering medical aid which he wasn't qualified to render, in a place where he knew there was physical conflict which meant possible physical threat, but was scared even though carrying that gun. He chose all the things that put him in this circumstance, and his heavily and genuinely weeping mother helped.

The judge appears to be in Rittenhouse's corner. The farce was capped off by us hearing the ringtone of "God Bless the USA". And he also might have been doing some holiday catalog shopping during the trial. That's how much this guy seems to have already decided how the case should go. He doesn't see the people Rittenhouse slew as "victims"--they are the wrong kind of people to be calling "victims". Implying some people are, well. You know. Fine to kill. 

I wish this opinion was a bit more rare, but I see Supreme Court Justice Alito wondering why people shouldn't be armed on the "crime-ridden" city subways, because obviously, shit is just looking to go down in these big cities. Whoa.  We got us a Bernie Goetz fan here. A guy who doesn't miss an opportunity to watch "Death Wish" am I right? (This is a whole part and parcel of our national gun-toting religion.)

See, my problem with this scenario is when the so-called "law and order" people start waxing heroic about vigilantism and extrajudicial violence, when they are supposed to uphold the Constitution which is actually very much about due process and not--that sort of thing. This is why I wonder with a sinking heart how the nearly all-white jury will look at the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. Will they suppose this was a case of a fouled-up citizens arrest? Once again, we have people, with guns, making decisions they had no authority to make, that even duly constituted authorities can get entirely and regrettably wrong. 

I mean, consider this: in a political system built on a framework holding the innocence of the accused as a value until proven guilty, the fatal result of the Charlottesville free-for-all is that "poor" James Fields' fault lay in being the first to ram a car into protesters before elected officials tried to legalize such a thing. Regardless of those people's rights to do....anything at all, Express their First Amendment rights to speak freely or peaceably assemble.  

And so we get to the conservative/fascist problem: the idea that the the law protects some, but the others can have order. At any price. When do we universally acknowledge the price of order is too high if it comes with violent oppression and valorizes privileged lawlessness? 

Not a minute too soon, if you asked me. 

TWGB: Hot Accountability Summer?

 

I know, I know. At this point in my blogging about Trump, my expectations should stay low. Of course Trump has been impeached twice and is a one-term wonder, but he never was convicted by the Senate and his staunchest defenders insist his political story is not over. (Indeed, his most looney-tunes defenders maintain he never left office at all and that the Biden Administration itself is a kind of hoax, which, like the moon landing, a round planet, and the existence of birds*, seems pretty hard to pull off without an improbable amount of people in on the gag, but since when do facts persuade the self-deluded of anything?)

But news that indictments against the Trump Organization could happen as soon as next week have me like a child again, full of hope that maybe, the shambolic obscenity that disgraced the presidency for four years will get some measure of reckoning. Maybe an indictment means all his business loans, dubiously obtained at this point in the Trump credit history, are abruptly called to a disastrous effect. Maybe his resorts lose their liquor licenses (would you stay in a Trump property without booze?). Maybe someone with the Trump last name gets perp-walked. 

Sugar-plums dance in one's head and the heart fills with the honeyed yogurt* of schadenfreude. 

Maybe it helps that I subscribe to the rolling snowball theory of karma. A comeuppance starts with a small thing, but then small things lead to a lot. The Fates aren't merely weavers, but the authors of tragedies. They start small--and build. And Trump is a small thing, hoisted upon his own pedestal by so many--but when do they lose faith?

You could wonder about the 500 folks now arrested for the insurrection attempt at the Capitol, and how their hero has little to offer them, now. Or the "Trump train" members who are being sued under the Klan Act. Do they wonder what they were doing it for--how very little return they would get on their emotional investment in their idol? What does it say about the Republican party and its operatives that they engaged in spy shit against Democratic and liberal groups and so reminded us again that Republicans are mostly paranoid assholes representing Big Money when they aren't minging theocratic authoritarian busybodies or exhibitionistly and grandiosely prolix racists*? (I'll bet those emmerdeurs  are actually pretty satisfied with themselves, and of such is life.)

Things Do Happen in Philadelphia

 

Protesters took to the streets for a second night after officers in Philadelphia shot and killed a Black man who was holding a knife in an encounter city officials say raises questions https://t.co/lHvUfovmkE

— CNN (@CNN) October 28, 2020

I see right wing media focusing on the looters rather than the fact that a mentally ill man armed with only a knife was shot multiple times when, having guns, the police officers on the scene could have taken a bit more time, called for back-up, or found some non-lethal means to subdue the young man. 

If he had to be shot--why not once? Why multiple times? He was killed in front of his mom and people on his block who knew him. No one is congratulating anybody for the looting and vandalism or considering that activity to be great activism--but you can't look at one incident and think you get what the whole dynamic of an area is. 

You can't look at the aftermath and decide that the incident itself was suddenly redeemed because of the response. The entire city isn't being "destroyed". We'll still be here. Riots and looting look bad, there's broken glass and strewn merchandise and things look ugly. There are injuries and conflicts. But it's remediable. Sure. It looks bad. 

 Having a police department that scares the shit out of its citizens is also bad though. The looters and rioters don't represent all of the people here, but I watched several city blocks burn on my tv when I was a kid and realized why some people didn't love cops. Many families here have at least some personal knowledge of brutality or police misconduct. Without respect or a good community relationship, though, how are things supposed to be? When law and order means law for some and order (violently imposed if need be, or even if it doesn't need to be) for others? I don't think it does police any good for things to continue as they are either. 

Beautiful things also happen in Philadelphia, and our problems are not about what party our mayor or our governor belong to--they go deeper and have a lot of history. Viewing this incident solely through a partisan lens, like calling looters "Biden's base" or whatever, dismisses the reality that this isn't what any of us want, it's just what is happening right now. In an America where Trump, who is pro-police brutality, happens to be president. 

Trump's original comment that "bad things happen in Philadelphia" was about, in all honestly, lying about voting here, in order to (further) suppress voting. But I feel like he might seize an unfortunate opportunity to lie about us some more. 

There is a bad dynamic in here also that I think is being encouraged--but Philadelphia is bigger than this mess. We are (despite what Boston thinks) the cradle of liberty. 

This city is not here to be disrespected. 

Trump's Brave Boy

There are documents from DHS that suggest that there was a policy recommending officials refer to Kyle Rittenhouse as "defending small businesses" and informed that the media were overstating the connection of racism with the group "Patriot Prayer". I'm casting a mild eye on the description of Kyle Rittenhouse because I'm going to actually give some space for the right of the accused not to be depicted in a necessarily inflammatory light and considering that the youth already has the full-throated support of a significant part of the right wing (his mama is depicted in the above picture with noted white supremacist Michelle Malkin and certain Christian groups have been assiduously fund-raising on his behalf), there are certain "equities" * going into assuring that he isn't placed in the worst possible light pending his trial.

Among them, the potential for litigation (I literally will say absolutely nothing about Lin Wood's case, but that discovery should include a dive into Rittenhouse's social media habits which, among some of the young these days, is quite eyebrow-raising. There almost certainly were racist and racism-adjacent folks he was being "fellow-travelers" with. This isn't nearly as clear-cut as the Sandemann civil case was.)

Conservative media has lionized him as having been brave to take up arms in a....completely unnecessary and fatal way. I can't imagine law enforcement being genuinely happy to have freelancers popping off rounds on their behalf and I can't imagine what benefit exists in creating an avenue for legitimizing vigilantism. We'd certainly look long and hard at the dangers of vigilantism against law enforcement deemed beyond the reach of the justice system--same here. He just did not belong there. He wasn't some Spartan soldier sent off by his mother to return with his shield or on it to defend the city-state of small businesses from hordes of barbarians. (But vigilantism is a strong component of the US Religion of the Gun.)

He was a kid. But now he's killed people.

He wasn't a "little boy" though, as Pam Bondi tried to imply. I'm really trying to fathom depicting the young Kyle, strapped into his Hush Puppies and Osh Kosh B'Gosh elastic waist jeans, with his Capri Sun juice and extra Lunchables and Fruit Rollups in his backpack, being armed with his Red Ryder AR-15 and driven by his ma to his first day at the race war.

"I charged your phone, so you be sure and call me first thing if you need me because you need a ride home or killed people or need a warm sweater!"

It's insulting to the intelligence of everyone who knows that young people are charged as adults and treated like adults all the time. The image of George Stinney sitting on a Bible in the electric chair because he was too small flits across my mind.

This young man isn't a mascot. He stands accused of murder, and his mental ecosystem seems to have been pretty fucked up. Trump seems at home with the idea of vigilantism and white supremacy. He denies the white supremacy is a bigger problem than antifa, even though he should have been briefed in what we all know.  I don't think Rittenhouse needs to be treated like a symbol of anything good, but a symptom of something gone wrong.

Trump is also only a symptom of something having gone really wrong, more than a symbol of anything good. But he is older and has more responsibility. He shouldn't use the tragedy of this kid being a killer to make any point at all. This wasn't a soldier in his culture/race war. We shouldn't even be having a culture or race war. There should just be justice under the law, and people using the democratic process to further policy goals.

That would be, after all, the American way.

* "Equities" are the things Senate Republicans are looking into regarding whether white supremacist terror can be considered bad, actually, and I am not sure I want to know whose equity they are thinking of.

Wanton Endangerment

When Louisville called for a curfew and started to prepare for protests, it was pretty clear that there was an understanding that the decision reached by the grand jury regarding indictment of one of the officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor for charges not related directly to her slaying would be, to put it simply, inadequate.

The system in Louisville was ready to prepare for protests, but it is questionable whether the case was fully pursued in establishing how procedure so completely broke down that a young woman was shot dead in her own bed. Managing protests, and finding them more agreeable than performing the basic duty of the full pursuit of justice is a form of wanton endangerment because of the harm it does to the justice system itself by rendering it less credible and more broken with every failure and needless loss of life. And it harms the public by allowing such failures to continue.

Governor Beshear has called for AG Cameron to release an accounting of the evidence so that the public can know for themselves whether this seems just. I'm hung up on that--there are reasons we try people for indictment in grand jury courts, not in public, but knowing what Cameron's office had to work with and how they did it would be instructive, because it is quite possible that a certain minimal result was desired, and certainly a minimal result was obtained. There are valid reasons why prosecutors might take on no more case than they think they can try and win, but here, I just can't help but think there is something incredibly wrong with a result that has people beset upon in their home, possibly not even hearing or being cognizant of any announcement that these were law enforcement, and not being protected by the law.

I highly question the use of a no-knock warrant in the first place, because it seems to me that this would have been better handled in broad daylight. I question how clearly law enforcement announced themselves, and whether the barrage of bullets in response to a shot fired by her partner, Kenneth Walker, was even at that point a reasonable level of force. And I always wonder why, after this kind of force is applied by police, the call for medical assistance never comes quick enough.

I don't know everything, but I know that when people have been marching for justice on behalf of black lives for the past six months looking for some sign that it is understood that they do matter, this doesn't feel like it. And I deeply sympathize with people who feel that results like this mean they too, are just endangered by a system that isn't here to serve and protect them, but operates on the basis of political will and racial bias. Wantonly.

A wanton system is not law and order. A system that assumes people are innocent until proven guilty, and does not treat people as a suspect class because of biased reasoning is the fulfilment of our constitution, it's what all Americans should be entitled to, and it isn't exactly what we have right now. But we should aspire to that, because without it, we do not have peace. We have a breach of faith.

And no, the protesters did not start that. They protest because they want that faith restored, and because they believe justice is a thing that can be achieved. They want faith in a system that has not protected them, and they want it from a system where rubber bullets and tear gas can be fired at them. They love the America they want to believe in and see someday, and keep getting this bullshit. But they still want this American experiment to work.

(And the only price we'd all pay is we get accountable government, which actually is not a price so much as something we all should want anyway.)

They are better institutionalists and patriots than a lot of flag-kissing gun-toters out there could ever hope to be.

STAY THE F*CK CALM!!

On one hand, Trump doesn't want people to PANIC about COVID-19, like the Churchillian stateman that he calls himself, but on the other hand, liberals are going to ban energy (because with wind, you know, on a breezeless day you won't be able to watch your seven-eight hours of Fox News), take your guns, shutdown the economy and auto production, destroy the suburbs, get rid of cows, and kill you with soup. (And apparently do a "reverse racism" by teaching kids history I think he's saying, right?)

I feel like we are getting very mixed and very silly messages here. Is it possible that Trump....always lies? Wow. Stay tuned, folks.

UPDATE: Brief addendum--Trump has said a shit-ton lately about the destruction of the suburbs and about Democrat-led cities being "on fire". You know what can destroy suburbs? Wildfires. You know what's on fire? The fucking West Coast. If Trump wants to do presidenting, now would be a pretty good time to pull his big-boy pants up and try it, right?

Soup of the Day

Today, Trump most strenuously denied that he had had a series of mini-strokes, and got a doctor to back him up on that, and I am personally not the one to claim otherwise, because for one thing, I can't retrace the scoop that Michael Schmidt choose to put in a book about the president's abrupt trip to Walter Reed from last year, and for another, I choose to grant the occupant of the White House some measure of privacy regarding what might actually just be a minor health kerfuffle that is merely embarrassing.

I mean, like, let's say he got himself caught in his zipper? Or had a perfectly normal bagel-cutting mishap? Is that actually necessarily for everyone's public consumption?

Biden Condemned Violence, Trump Defends It

Biden returned to Pennsylvania on Monday to offer his most comprehensive response yet to Trump's claims that he's weak on rioters and looters https://t.co/o0tartwCmu

— POLITICO (@politico) September 1, 2020

It should not have actually shocked anyone that former Vice-President Joe Biden strongly condemned violence and and vandalism in Pittsburgh yesterday, because he had strongly condemned them in Philadelphia back in June:

But there is no place for violence.

No place for looting or destroying property or burning churches, or destroying businesses — many of them built by people of color who for the first time were beginning to realize their dreams and build wealth for their families.

Nor is it acceptable for our police — sworn to protect and serve all people — to escalate tensions or resort to excessive violence.

We need to distinguish between legitimate peaceful protest — and opportunistic violent destruction.

It also isn't that shocking that the Trump Campaign (and the White House, since heaven knows there is no barrier between them anymore) misrepresented Biden's words--as departed White House Counsel KellyAnne Conway said quite out loud and in front of cameras, TrumpWorld thinks that violent images work for them.

It is a bit shocking, however, how nakedly Trump can't even decry an actual case of murder, using a White House press briefing to promulgate a self-defense case for Kyle Rittenhouse.

What is beyond shocking, however, is that in what anyone would consider a friendly interview with Laura Ingraham, Trump compared police shootings to a bad day on the links, dabbled in batshit conspiracy theory (it must have killed him not to use the name "Soros"), and insinuated that America's suburbs were in danger from....Cory Booker.  Basically, he made it pretty clear he was going to actually double-down on racially divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, and that he was A-OK with violence he considered to be "on his side".

The difference couldn't be more stark.

The Very Fine People On a Very Particular Side

Imagine for an instant your Kyle Rittenhouse was outside of a movie theatre, or a school, or a shopping mall, or a country music concert, kitted out in that very same weapon, and ask yourself if there isn't something about this picture that doesn't seem half-familiar. This lad showed up very deliberately at a very particular place with a very particular weapon with a definite intention which he in fact carried out.

There just happen to be people who think this was fine. Wasn't he defending himself by shooting people? (Was he anywhere he needed to be? Was he extravagantly armed? Was he not indicating he meant to use his firearm to extralegally defend the people who were there doing it for their actual living--why? Should his youthful behind not have been home instead of looking for the trouble he got? Why weren't the cops enough to protect and serve themselves?)

There's a reason we don't use kids as soldiers or cops. Yet somehow this kid got hold of a firearm and travelled across state lines to stand up for people we expect to be capable of standing up for us, with his underage barely trained ass supporting trained law enforcement? Are we seeing the problem with this?