PMC Commentary

The ironic case of Stephen Miller

    

                             

While looking at the NYT photo of Stephen Miller, I noticed a subtle as well as suitable resemblance to the children-caging, family-separating, genocidal Joseph Goebbels. If only Joey's hair had receded a bit more.

Knowing what both men have stood for, however, deepens the resemblance.

Investigative journalist Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda, observes that the "violent anarchists, agitators and criminals … language at the [Republican] convention comes from the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory, which warns, among other things, that brown and Black people will destroy white civilization with the help of their anti-racist allies. It echoed that of the racist-dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, which Stephen Miller … promoted in 2015 through the right-wing website Breitbart…. 

"In July, Mr. Miller told Tucker Carlson that the federal crackdown on anti-racist protesters in Portland, Ore., was about 'the survival of this country'" against people-of color "monsters" and "beasts."

Such language "lumps together and demonizes critics of white male supremacy" — or of Aryan supremacy's world-master race and its right to oppression, slavery and, ultimately, genocide.  

The racist politics of Republican nominees Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were once considered outlandish. But two of those three men went on to win the White House, twice each. With favorable historical odds like that, Trump reasonably figured that tripling down on white racism would be a good bet.  

He wasn't wrong the first time around. But evolutions in American society and demographics that Trump "stands athwart … yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so," as Bill Buckley would still put it, will almost certainly ruin him in 2020, and remain ruinous for any Trumplike nominee hereafter. 

And Stephen Miller? How ironic that he's a second-generation Jew — whom Goebbels & Friends would have slaughtered — from modern-day Belarus, whose Jewish flight to America the federal government cracked down on in the odiously discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924. What was forbidden to thee was right for me is Stephen's typically narrow-minded motto. 

Trump, from dubious dictator to violent gang leader

The half-minute video below, considered worthy of retweeting by the president, was shot by the NY Times' Mike Baker. It shows pro-criminal elements — that is, Trump supporters — firing paintballs and pepper spray on Portland protesters before the lethal shooting of a member of Patriot Prayer, a local far-right gang. The Justice Department estimates around 10,000 MS-13 members, who send Trump into rhetorical fits of high dudgeon, but organized, violent, far-right pro-Trump gangs are just dandy.

As for the president's introductory comments to the video, the Times calls them "a remarkable instance of a president seeming to support confrontation rather than calming a volatile situation." I'd call them, simply, "inciting a riot." In modern political history we've had two "law and order" presidents — and both were titanic crooks.

At a news conference yesterday afternoon, Portland's mayor, Ted Wheeler — whom Trump has so presidentially characterized as "whacky" and a "dummy" — asked "Do you seriously wonder, Mr. President, why this is the first time in decades that America has seen this level of violence?" Trump's reply: "He would like to blame me and the Federal Government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet." (My emphasis.) Comforting, is it not?

The big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected after 95 days of watching and incompetent Mayor admit that he has no idea what he is doing. The people of Portland won’t put up with no safety any longer.The Mayor is a FOOL. Bring in the National Guard! https://t.co/bM6ypak94t

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2020

​​​​​Bloody, Kristofian Quotes of the Week

Nicholas Kristof:

"The anti-fascist protesters known as antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds." He substantiates that claim by quoting from the Center for Strategic & International Studies: "Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020."

Also from Kristof:

"Trump and his proxies used the G.O.P. convention to defame Democratic-run parts of America as caldrons of violence. In fact, the single state with the highest rate of violent crime is Alaska, a red state with Republican leaders. The state with the lowest violent crime is Maine, a swing state that currently has a Democratic governor."

And:

"'Don’t let Democrats do to America what they’ve done to New York,' Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, pleaded in his convention speech. Hmm. Let’s just note that there were 319 murders in New York City last year under Democratic leadership; when Giuliani was mayor, the lowest annual total was 649, under a police commissioner who later went to prison."

Finally:

"This is an old game that the Trump campaign is playing," said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard scholar and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is out of the authoritarian’s playbook."

***

But the Washington Post's media correspondent, Margaret Sullivan, recalls that "scholars have observed [that] calling out falsehoods forcefully may actually cause people to hold tighter to their beliefs. That’s the 'backfire effect' that academics Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler wrote about in their study "When Corrections Fail" about the persistence of political misperceptions."

That's what makes attacks such as the "swift-boating" of John Kerry in 2004 so effective, even if he did unwisely stall his counterattacks. Still, the mainstream media and commentators' corrections of all the swift-boating lies only intensified the Kerry-haters' "ideologically grounded factual beliefs," and persuaded not a few non-ideologues.

Straight out of the "authoritarian's playbook," Trump is attempting the same in a fusillade of malicious falsehoods about Joe Biden. The lies are so extreme and equally absurd, most Americans find them laughable. Yet the president isn't trying to persuade or intensify the preexisting hatred of most Americans — only a winning percentage of intellectually stunted voters among all those who "bother" to vote, which means the exhausting, herculean act of dropping a completed ballot into their daily mail.

Charlie never parked

The amazingly, perpetually stoned Charlie Parker, whose fingers could fly on the sax even quicker than Trump's lips can lie. Johnny Hodges could make you cry or fall in love, but Charlie could give you a stroke, just trying to keep up. (His doctors were also amazed that he could he survive until the age of 34, given his hyperactive, heroin-saturated lifestyle — even though that was the only way he could live and play.) Dizzy, as noted, is on the trumpet — two stunningly talented jazz artists.

Biden opens up on Trump. Dear media: Please take note.

Could "radical leftist, Antifa-supporting, violence-inciting" Joe Biden be any more clear that Trump is a shameless demagogue?

"The deadly violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable…. I condemn this violence unequivocally. I condemn violence of every kind by any one, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same....

"We must not become a country at war with ourselves. A country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you. A country that vows vengeance toward one another. But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are.

"As a country, we must condemn the incitement of hate and resentment that led to this deadly clash. It is not a peaceful protest when you go out spoiling for a fight. What does President Trump think will happen when he continues to insist on fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters? He is recklessly encouraging violence. He may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong – but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is. He may think that war in our streets is good for his reelection chances, but that is not presidential leadership–or even basic human compassion.

"The job of a President is to lower the temperature. To bring people who disagree with one another together. To make life better for all Americans, not just those who agree with us, support us, or vote for us.

"Donald Trump has been president for almost four years. The temperature in the country is higher, tensions run stronger, divisions run deeper. And all of us are less safe because Donald Trump can’t do the job of the American president."

Finis.

"Deficiently responsive" is the media's new narrative about the Democratic nominee, along with witlessly citing Rasmussen's post-RNC polling that purports the race has narrowed to a six-point lead by Biden. A fucking Rasmussen poll, for Christ sake, which sits at the children's table at Thanksgiving dinners and draws nothing but groans from adult pollsters. 

Must we really suffer another two-month media extravaganza that untruthfully dwells on Clinton's Biden's vulnerabilities rather than reporting the plain and obvious facts, such as Biden's forceful response today? 

Trump's "revisionist history"

​​​​​Trump’s convention speech was "a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history," as the Washington Post's fact-checker notes and E.J. Dionne quotes, delivered in a droning way that put viewers to sleep or drove them away. But when compressed into 3.5 minutes, as CNN's Daniel Dale has done, it's engrossing. As a bonus, during the last minute of Dale's machine-gun retelling, Anderson Cooper does a superb job of suppressing his laughter.

Little wonder, then, that the speech consumed 71 minutes. Unless Trump had spoken like the old Fed Ex guy or Daniel Dale, it was rhetorically impossible to pack that many lies into a less-than-one-hour speech.

Dionne adds that "seemingly sober commentary about how 'effective' Trump’s attacks are plays down a core truth: He lies, and lies, and lies again." It's true there's been less commentary about the effectiveness of Trump's lying in this election cycle. In 2015 and 2016 it was stunning news worthy of tomes of analysis, since never before had a presidential candidate and nominee lied so prolifically — and nakedly. Now it's just assumed that whenever Trump opens his mouth, a lie will gush out. How effective can that be?

Aside from his changing yet increasingly monotonous attacks, if Trump has any one strength in a voter's mind, it is indeed, and falsely, his "strength" — that is, his "I alone can fix it" garbage, in which masses of sympathetic voters don't appear to realize he's had years to "fix" whatever, and things are only worse. Loads of short-term memory-loss cases are needed to form an entire bloc of voters under the impression that Trump, in 2021, would be a first-term president.

Terrific cab service in NYC

My last cab ride in New York City, even though the cabbie had disguised his ride as a police car for faster service. I was hiding behind the front seat, where he advised I sit, but by God he got me to my destination on time.

You can hear the queasiness on the right

The Washington Post's Gary Abernathy, a 21st-century Babbitt whose harshest criticism of the criminal Trump is that his ties are too long, was evidently stuck this week for something encouraging to write about for his fellow citizens of Main Street. His man is far down in the polls, the economy's a wreck, the horror of the bungled pandemic has no end in sight, and his presidential opponent is a clean, articulate and non-radical white guy. 

That this is the best of times, this is the worst of times is only half-true for the Donald — and Gary. For the latter, trying to maintain morale among the nervous rabble who recently believed that their president is an unstoppable force is no easy job. So Abernathy had to get creative, fast. And I'll be damned if he didn't, with "To everyone who thinks Trump is a goner: He’s just getting started."

In recent weeks, Trump-bashing media pundits have already written the president’s political obituary. They cite Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s lead in the polls, an economy in shambles, the ongoing pandemic, racial unrest and Americans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction.

"I told you so" postmortems abound. How will the GOP rise from the ashes of the Cult of Trump? Will Republicans finally wake up and acknowledge the error of their ways? Almost indistinguishable epitaphs were produced in the weeks leading up to November 2016. For the anti-Trump crowd, so great is this year’s anticipation of Trump’s electoral doom that they have fallen once more into embarrassing episodes of premature gloating.

Unfortunately for Trump haters, the election isn’t being held today…. The courting of voters is only just beginning…. After all the noise of the past four years, the early obituaries, the meaningless polling to date, it’s finally time for his consultants to turn to Trump and say, "Okay, now we do it."

Begin heavily advertising, that is. Yes, that will be the great distraction from roiling protests and economic wreckage and nearly 200,000 lives lost to Trump's incompetence, believes Gary. Never mind the stability of Biden's lead, the accuracy of professional polling, that Trump's political obituary is indeed already written and stored in newspaper file cabinets. And never mind that immutable polarization has the vast majority of the electorate sewn up.

Trump can advertise till he's even redder (orange-er?) in the face but it won't move the needle much, if at all. Yet Abernathy dangles the Great White Hope of Trump's boodle to broadcasters and Facebook as a sop to the base — or perhaps just to himself — some of whom might be losing their religion.

Why would that be? For the very reasons Abernathy himself delineated: "Joe Biden’s lead in the polls, an economy in shambles, the ongoing pandemic, racial unrest and Americans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction."

Thanks, Gary. And you know what? Biden just may want you as a speechwriter.

A new way for Biden to debate Trump

Speaker Pelosi is absolutely correct, even if unrealistic.

Still, I do believe Biden should debate Trump, but with a twist.

He shouldn't squander his and our time trying to debate Trump, live, on matters involving evidence, data, and facts — and when it comes to this president, truth is unthinkable. Yet Biden should debate him on national television — i.e., he should debate Trump's many video clips in which Trump lies with abandon while ignoring any resemblance to facts, which is every Trumpian video clip. Why not? In a real debate, Trump would just lie and molest facts anyway. But in this manner Biden would deprive him of a live presence on stage.

And I'm only half-joking. 

Trump desperately wants voters to blame Biden

​​​​​Even though Trump is currently "in charge" of national meltdown events as president, he persists in shrieking that should Joe Biden become president, the nation will experience … MELTDOWN EVENTS! — such as the rare violence connected to BLM protests taking place during his presidency.

The logic of Trump's reelection rhetoric — You won't see all this violence if I stay around — is as illogical as that of any other serpent-tongued grifter and con man. It is to be expected, and, to most of us, laughable.

What worries, however, is that throngs of independents, soft Democrats and once-realigning Republicans will decisively fail to appreciate the full Montyism of Trump the Emperor's pronunciamentos. 

"In Kenosha County, where the president won by fewer than 250 votes in 2016," notes the Times, "some voters who [have benn unsure] of their choice said the chaos in their city and the inability of elected leaders to stop it were currently nudging them toward the Republicans."

Take, for instance, John Mr. Geraghty, 41, "'100 percent on the fence' about who he will vote for in November." He "said he was disturbed to see his town looking like 'a war zone,' and he feared that the Democrats in charge were 'letting people down big time.'" Added Geraghty: "The Democratic agenda to me right now is America is systematically racist and evil and the only people who can fix it are Democrats…. I’m really not happy about how Democrats are handling any of this." The gentleman was speaking specifically of state leaders, but straight-ticket voting has become preponderant in this era.

To repeat, as does the Times, "The politically calculated warnings of President Trump and the Republican Party about chaos enveloping America should Democrats win in November are reverberating among some people in Kenosha." We can't know how many people are "some people," yet if the number is in the 250 range, in a county of 170,706, then the Dems have more work to do — within only 66 days.

On a related note, it seems to me that MSNBC's programming hasn't helped much, however earnest its many guests are. In watching most any interview on the BLM protests, especially those interviews with black activists, one does get the impression that America is "evil" — without or without Trump's leadership failures. That is critically unhelpful to Biden.

Few fence-sitting, middle- or working-class whites, such as factory worker John Geraghty, want to hear that the country they love is a wicked one, through and through. They may agree it suffers from systemic racism, and condemn it — but racism of the type that extends rearward to 1619? This they will only resent, and perhaps tie Biden to what they see as activists' rhetorical hyperbole. Please, activists, always separate the Democratic presidential nominee's future from your present anger.

Trump's renomination speech

OMG.

"They Call the Wind Maria"

I am trying to imagine all those courageous he-men on the Texas-Louisiana shore who stayed put, for whatever imbecilic reason, as "unsurvivable storm surges" and winds were about to wash or blow away their homes — leaving them
standing there, exposed to furious Nature, with nothing but their dick in their hand. (h/t, Sonny Corleone.) 

Just another of God's gifts to his beloved Earthlings. Yet it's quite probable that many of these manly morons believed the Almighty, in all his atmospheric Old Testament wrath, would look out just for them, and spare them. Noahs, all.

Such God-fearing, Nature-defying dead folk are reminiscent of that grown woman, months ago, she could drive a car and everything, who told a national reporter that she was immune from covid because she was "washed in Jesus' blood." 

Where do these people come from? North Korean and Chinese interrogators in 1951 had nothing on America's religious fanatics and the expert brainwashing they can do to themselves.

God help them indeed, because millions of sane Americans just say to them, "Good riddance."

Maria blows the stars around
Sets the clouds a-flyin'
Maria makes
The mountains sound like folks was out there dyin'

(1951)

In honor of Jerry & Becki Falwell - Word of the … times(?)

Fuck.

These days, even six-year-olds know its meaning, so no pondering of a $20 vocabulary word today. But do know its origins? Actually, who would? Not many of us are that keen in the academic discipline of etymology, and I'm certainly no etymologist myself. Yet many or perhaps most Americans seem to believe the word is a symptom of our times. 

A typical example: A few years ago I was at a theatre showing some new Western (I can't recall which) when one of the rootin-tootin bad-guy cowboys on screen, sittin on his faithful steed, turned to a fellow rootin-tootin bad-guy cowboy and said "What the fuck …" something or other. I then heard a woman behind me whisper to her husband, "They didn't use that word back then."

But for sure, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln used it, and assuredly, U.S. Grant used it prolifically. So, likely, did Frederick the Great — as well as just about everyone else in European fashion and in American-English.

It originated from 15th-century Dutch, in which fokken meant "to breed," which in turn led to fokka, "to copulate." From there it traveled to ficken in German, and soon to its sister language, English, in which it is featured in virtually every new film release and is a staple of stand-up comedians, US presidents, and six-year-olds at the mall. 

But now, far apart from the masses and their prosaic use of the word, with your newfound knowledge you may consider yourself an etymological "elitist" — which stems from Latin's eligere … but that's another story.

From the "Where are they now?" department

I'm not sure if this self-promoting commercial airhead of an ideological adolescent is any longer "relevant" — especially since his 2014 felony conviction for political corruption. But I must assume he still is among his ideological adolescent suckers.

Indeed I haven't thought of him for some time — until today, when I noticed he's appearing tonight on C-SPAN2's "After Words": "Dinesh D'Souza examines what he calls the new face of socialism."

Why would anyone but those on the lunatic right in need of psychological comfort invest an hour in Dinesh's "examination"? I haven't a clue.

Yet, the exciting television alert did inspire me look at a few of his recent tweets. Here's one from two days ago, which, if it had come from anyone but Dinesh, I would have taken it as literary sarcasm:  

So many people attest to Trump’s personal generosity. His largeness of heart contrasts sharply with his mean, vicious, ungenerous critics. They hate him for the same reason Iago hated Cassio. “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 26, 2020

A few who reasonably question "Trump's personal generosity" just might include the dozens of contractors and subcontractors who've been screwed by him over the years. Also veterans. From WaPo, 24 May 2016: "Almost four months after promising $1 million of his own money to veterans’ causes, Donald Trump moved to fulfill that pledge … [but only after] he came under intense media scrutiny" for having shafted the vets.

The saintly Dr. Dinesh Frankenstein has created from dust Trump's "largeness of heart," unless he meant "enlarged heart" — either way, that heart is manifestly "mean, vicious, ungenerous," notwithstanding the tweeter's delusions. As for Dinesh's Iago? At least he was once an honorable man, and he never opened an "up-yours" university. 

But keep yours up, Mr. D'Souza: Keep hawking your books and DVDs and making an ass of yourself on C-SPAN. And always remember that that orange dude has your back, or front, as it were.

                                                     credit: Pablo Dickasso

From the defamation of a Scottish Terrier to this week's Republican National Convention

As I follow the Republican National Convention's nightly slanders and imbecilities through reporting or the occasional transcript, they almost always remind me of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's table-turning "Fala speech."

On September 23, 1944, at a Teamsters Union campaign dinner for FDR, this greatest master of political rhetoric was compelled to defend his "little dog Fala" against attacks by Republicans, who, knowing they could not possibly defeat Roosevelt in the upcoming election, had been reduced to this laughable insignificance as a national distraction. (Notice, particularly, Roosevelt's brilliant comedic timing.) The incident was just one of the many origins of the modern GOP, from Fala's canine innocence to Goldwater's "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" to Trump's 2015 hydrophobia.

 

Added Roosevelt, "[Fala] hasn't been the same dog since."