Trump Discusses a Back-Stabbing

 

Trump: If I don’t win this election.. the Jewish people would have a lot to do with that if that happens pic.twitter.com/N9skHU0hnu

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 20, 2024

This reminds me of so much history that as human beings, we all should shudder to repeat. Trump has moved on from how US Jewish people would be crazy not to support him, to possibly threatening them that they should support him, if they understand what's up. 

There's an ambiguity there, as the threats of strongmen sometimes contain--a plausible deniability, Maybe the "blame" won't be repaid by anyone associated with Trump at all.  But maybe he wants people thinking about that. 

Here's what I'm not going to do--pretend I don't notice it. That was a threat. Maybe he meant that a Democratic administration would not be as supportive of Israel as his would be--but that is also conflating Jews with the state of Israel--not the same thing at all. He's basically saying what a "good Jew" is vs. someone who might "have it coming." 

I need not tell you what it reminds me of because most of us won't ever forget. 

Eric Swalwell Nails It

 

Kevin McCarthy can’t denounce Trump’s dinner with known white nationalist Nick Fuentes because if he did, McCarthy would also have to call out his new boss MTG pic.twitter.com/qjihmRc67l

— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell) November 26, 2022

You know it's true. He needs a bigoted conspiracy theorist's support to become Speaker. He isn't interested in what he accomplishes as Speaker, he only knows that to do any of it, he needs to not alienate his own party's worst members. 

And it is the same bargain the whole party makes with Trump. They have been mainstreaming evil.

UPDATE:  Per Axios, GOP spokespersons for major Republican electeds had no comment because of course they didn't. Speaking out against evil isn't about who has got your back, sometimes it's just about whether you can find your own spine. 

Lara Logan's Grotesque Agenda

 

Fox host Lara Logan says that people tell her that Dr. Fauci doesn't represent science, but represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the "Angel of Death" for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz: "I am talking about people all across the world are saying this" pic.twitter.com/fF2DAWfG7d

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 30, 2021

Fox News has amply demonstrated over the years that they don't give a fuck if what they put out into the ether is even news: they exist as a propaganda racket, and their decision to give a berth to Lara Logan after her 60 Minutes Benghazi debacle demonstrates their concerns regarding journalistic integrity. (No one escapes whipping regarding how Benghazi was covered, but Logan's failure to vet was very concerning.) 

They gave Lara Logan a show and let it be called Lara Logan Has No Agenda in the po-faced tradition of feigning "fair and balanced" coverage. 

You know, unlike those "mainstream media" assholes that unload whackadoodles like Logan after fuckups. (But to be fair, Fox News eventually unloads whackadoodles too, and they go to OAN or Newsmax or whatever. It's the circle of life.) After all, Fox's claim is that the other guys are too liberal and you should get the real news from straight-talkers like folks at Fox who, I guess, don't bother checking facts if a story is too good not to pass on. 

Now, I'm not calling Logan batshit because I have respect for what she used to be, and I get that she has been through some shit. I'm calling her a propagandist because she's given up on journalistic standards entirely and has decided to be no better than one's wine-sotted Facebook aunt forwarding bottom-of-the barrel conspiracy theories about antifa and now Dr. Fauci. 

Look at the language she's using--comparing Fauci to an actual monster of the Holocaust--what actions is she talking about? What research, what actual practices have put people at harm? Holocaust analogies are intentionally incendiary and also insulting to the real victims of that horror. She is using inflammatory language to liken Fauci to a person who did known, documented horrific things, but she never says what exactly Fauci did that she has a problem with. And she says people "all across the world" are saying this. Who? And why are they saying it, and why is she so emphatically co-signing? 

Or are these "people" as meaningful as the "some people are saying" that fabulists like Trump use to back up their nonsense? 

Here's the grotesque thing: the Republican Party wants to consider the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a failure on the part of the current Democratic presidential administration. They are fully comfortable slandering legitimate scientists and demeaning legitimate science to do this. Take the case of Two-Faced Nancy Mace, who went on Fox this Sunday to tell us that she thinks natural immunity (i.e, catching COVID-19) is best. It's not, and it isn't what she said elsewhere. 

I mean, who is actually fighting against people getting vaccinated?  And Fox News has been right there with them, being entirely full of shit. And who even knows the damage they have done and the lives lost because they have a grotesque agenda--that might require some sacrifice (human lives to Covid-19) in the service of a greater good (Republicans get a narrative that Biden can't fix Covid-19 by ensuring that the problem stays very real). 

People can ask what ever happened to Lara Logan, but I don't. Shit certainly has happened to her, but what she's doing now is a choice, and you can take it to the bank because as wild as she sounds, she's serving the Fox News agenda.  And I don't have to compare her to Goebbels to point out that lying so casually about life and death matters leads to more death--should it have to be said? 

She hasn't lost her mind--she just sold her soul. It's hardly news, these days. 

UPDATE: Witness: 

It's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. And they are okay with their own folks dying from it. I can't pretend it doesn't disturb me. But I also can't pretend it isn't real when I'm looking right at it. 

The Massacre of Innocents

They never rose up. The dead of the Shoah will never rise again, and are remembered because their lives were disrupted by a great evil that cut off their existence. Their world was abruptly ended. They  at one time could not find livelihoods. They could not own property. They could live in some places--and then? They could not live at all. These people who were slowly erased from time, need to be understood as the victims of lies and propaganda that annihilated their humanity and then took their physical bodies. They were victims of lying. They were the victims of religious bigotry. Mike Pence, I believe, has a justification for why some humans should not live or be served by businesses for religious reasons. His pious claims are full of bullshit.

Zionism gave a homeland to other Jewish people--but it did not make the victims of the Shoah rise again. Nothing will. This is the wretchedness, the horror, of Vernichtung, the destruction or attempted destruction, the genocide, against the Jewish people enacted by the race-selective policies of the German nation. The dead rose from no ashes. They stayed as memories and were maybe remembered in the naming of babies, and as grainy photos, and in the stories of old people with tattoos on their arms and the dignity of remembered sorrow haunting their lives. 

The race and sexual-orientation biases of a very particular strain of conservatism remind us of how near we always are to the horrors that the Nazis promised. Pence is the wrong one to try and tell us #Neveragain when he himself is a reminder that discrimination is everywhere, and eliminationism is happening right now. 

What Fresh Fuckery is This?

This poll was put up by @lancelaifer without consulting @Scaramucci who is traveling in London.
The poll has been taken down. pic.twitter.com/SKaaPZAPow

— ScaramucciPost (@ScaramucciPost) October 17, 2017

I can't even.