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Monday Mourning Reads

Posted: August 5, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads |39 Comments

Pablo Picasso – Weeping Woman 004 1937

It’s a sad morning and an ongoing reminder of what kind of deviant is occupying the White House.  His diminished capacity was on full display as he dryly read a script completely  defying everything he’s ever said and done in his life.  He could’t even get the location of the last mass shooting straight as he read as if he could care less.   He said Toledo.  Yeah, right up there with the Bowling Green Massacre you know that we all will remember…

But, we know…

We know that the El Paso shooter’s manifesto echos the speech of Trump

and we know that the shooter has not shown any remorse for what he’s said and done just like his role model who occupies our White House never takes responsibility

At campaign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”

Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

The suspect wrote that his views “predate Trump,” as if anticipating the political debate that would follow the blood bath. But if Mr. Trump did not originally inspire the gunman, he has brought into the mainstream polarizing ideas and people once consigned to the fringes of American society.

We’ve all seen clips of the MAGA Rallies which are resoundingly White Nationalist in nature.

There’s just only so much I can write about today and share with you so this is likely going to be short.

Gely Korzhev Mother 1964-1967

Including this headline from the Washington Examiner:  “Confusion: Biden offers sympathy for the ‘tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan’”.   Are these two sad, old men plus Bernie Sanders the best leadership we can offer for our ongoing moments of crises?  Old guys that can’t even remember where the slaughters happened?  And demented old Bernie who has his own history with the NRA and suggested Trump doesn’t want his words to kill people?

I don’t think so.  This all does not have to be baked into our cake.

In August 2017, three men from rural Illinois—members of one of our country’s numerous heavily armed and rather poorly regulated “militias”—drove to Bloomington, Minnesota, just south of Minneapolis, to plant an IED in the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center. Following their arrest, two of the men admitted their guilt. They had set out from Illinois, they said, determined to scare Muslims into leaving the United States.

The story barely made a ripple in the political press, focused, as it was, on the already routine chaos of Donald Trump’s Washington—the president was engaged in a complicated beef with Senator Richard Blumenthal; Mike Pence was supposedly setting up a “shadow campaign” for 2020; North Korea was maybe going to nuke us. All this squalid executive-branch rancor left the right free to spin the incident before the facts were known. (Shortly after the bombing, Sebastian Gorka, the Breitbart editor turned White House foreign policy adviser, suggested on MSNBC that the attack had been a false flag “propagated by the left.”) The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville would happen a week later, forcing still another news cycle devoted to the president’s response, or nonresponse, to right-wing political violence.

This summer, Trump took aim, on Twitter, at Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who, he said, “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all).”

“Why,” he asked, “don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?”

And then the ” Go Back” chants started.   And while some one erased Trump’s tweets calling immigrants an infestation we all know that he can’t disappear them.  He can’t disappear all those speeches and pressers where he says “infestations”  over and over and over and called caravans “invasions” over and over and over.

The Widow (1882) by Frank O’Meara

Is this how our nightmare will end?  From Politico:  “Nadler: Judiciary panel could recommend articles of impeachment by late fall.”  Well, no, but it’s a beginning.  We still have the #MoscowMitch problem.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said Monday that his panel could recommend articles of impeachment by late fall, sketching a rough timeline for potential efforts to remove President Donald Trump just days after a majority of House Democrats signaled their willingness to support an impeachment inquiry.

“If we decide to report articles of impeachment, we could get to that late in the fall, in the latter part of the year,” Nadler said on MSNBC.

Nadler is petitioning a federal judge to get lawmakers access to grand jury evidence collected by former special counsel Robert Mueller, and his committee is preparing to sue former White House counsel Don McGahn to compel his testimony in the committee’s ongoing investigation into potential abuses of power by Trump.

“I think that we will probably get court decisions by the end of October, maybe shortly thereafter. We’ll have hearings in September and October with people we don’t — witnesses who are not dependent on the court proceedings,” Nadler said.

Käthe Kollwitz,Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead, etching , 1910;

I’m going to end this post with something from Slate and the keyboard and mind of Tom Scocca: “Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us”.

Within last week’s story of how Ronald Reagan made a racist phone call to Richard Nixon, there was a second story—a parable, effectively: a small point that contained a much larger point. It had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with Ronald Reagan’s own character; it happened after Reagan had finished fuming to Nixon about how African leaders who’d thwarted American foreign policy at the United Nations were “monkeys,” and the two men had gotten off the phone.

Nixon then called Secretary of State William Rogers, to relay Reagan’s message and to warn Rogers that the White House should not express too much public support for the U.N., given the anger of the conservatives that Reagan represented. “As he said,” Nixon said, “he saw these, he said, these, uh, these cannibals on television last night.” At the word cannibals, the men shared a chuckle.

But Reagan hadn’t said cannibals. Nor was Nixon calling the leaders cannibals himself. He had conjured the word from somewhere, and attributed it to Reagan—in Reagan’s role as a voice of the bigoted faction of the public—and passed it along to Rogers, without anyone having directly produced it. It was a racist slur, yet no particular racist person could claim authorship of it. It just happened.

In response to the El Paso massacre, it’s been easy enough for people to draw the connection between the vitriol that Donald Trump and Fox News express toward immigrants and the professed motives of the person arrested for the slaughter. Open, seething hate of nonwhite people has become a recurring presence in this country under Trump.

The point to this article is to provide examples from the NYT and others that coddle the same sentiment. And that’s the deal, we can’t afford to coddle the feelings of people who have a philosophy of life that is anathema to the principles the underlie our Rule of Law and our Democracy. We protect their right to grasp and display their ideas under their right to Free Speech.  Our Government can only do so much and that is why it’s up to us but it’s also up to our Leaders.  Our Laws may not imprison folks for free speech but our leaders must not defend the indefensible nor make excuses for it or support the hatred and bigots that reside in their political parties.   Our President should not represent everything our society has moved against on our path to a more perfect union.

We have to get rid of this scourge and it’s up to every one of us to do something in the space we have around our lives.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

39 Comments on “Monday Mourning Reads”

  1. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 5, 2019 at 11:52 am

    Twenty Two people have now died in the El Paso Shooting.

    Please hug your friends, family, and fur babies for me!

    We’ll get through this!!!!

  2. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 5, 2019 at 12:01 pm

    Ohio Republican blames mass shootings on ‘drag queen advocates,’ Colin Kaepernick and Obama

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/05/ohio-republican-blames-mass-shootings-drag-queen-advocates-colin-kaepernick-obama/?fbclid=IwAR3RnysvXZ_bOxEYUsUMHzvHOHvZSqq1MZ_URND9fLSkF0yhAWTQG8LoR7Y&utm_term=.524698e2947c

    In a laundry list of reasons why the United States is grappling with mass killings, an Ohio state lawmaker has settled on immigrants, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, disrespect toward veterans and “drag queen advocates.”

    Candice Keller, a Republican state representative from Middletown, near Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed early Sunday, offered her diagnosis on her personal Facebook page, the Dayton Daily News reported. Her post came only hours after the Dayton shooting, as the nation still reeled from the Saturday mass killing of 20 people in El Paso and the discovery of an anti-immigrant, white nationalist manifesto believed to have been written by that alleged gunman.

    Keller’s post sent shock waves through the state and local Republican Party, where there is a groundswell of calls from fellow conservatives urging her to resign, said Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones, who oversees law enforcement across Keller’s district.

  3. Pat Johnson's avatar Pat Johnson says:
    August 5, 2019 at 12:07 pm

    I turned on the t.v. at exactly the same time the Moron in Chief was making his teleprompter speech. Then heard him refer to the Dayton massacre as “Toledo”.

    Are you kidding me? This ass is so unprepared to handle even correctly referring to the city involved!

    And Biden couldn’t even get his facts straight. Is this where we are? Two Grandpas speaking on behalf of this nation?

    What a sorry mess we have on our hands. Words fail.

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      August 5, 2019 at 12:46 pm

      I know. It’s just an ongoing nightmare and we’re all stressed and worn out from it.

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      August 5, 2019 at 1:14 pm

    • Enheduanna's avatar Enheduanna says:
      August 5, 2019 at 2:00 pm

      He didn’t know the name of Paradise, California either. Called it “Pleasure” and said”…what a name!…” Idiot. I think he’s done that a few times. Called his own wife “Melanie”.

      He definitely self-medicates before these things. The slurring and sniffing happens especially when he has to make an appearance he doesn’t want to make.

  4. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    August 5, 2019 at 12:19 pm

    Morning Joe brought out NBC’s in house racist this morning.

    CNN: NBC calls Tom Brokaw’s assimilation comments ‘inaccurate and inappropriate’

    NBC News, facing mounting backlash stemming from former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw’s comments that Hispanics should “work harder at assimilation” into American culture, distanced the network from his “inappropriate” commentary.

    “Tom’s comments were inaccurate and inappropriate and we’re glad he apologized,” an NBC spokesperson said Monday.
    Also on Monday, an alliance of Latino advocacy groups wrote an open letter to NBC demanding more than just an apology.

    “Mr. Brokaw’s comments are more than just out-of-touch musings,” the letter said. “Mr. Brokaw’s comments are part of a legacy of anti-Latino sentiment that is spreading freely in 2019.”

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      August 5, 2019 at 12:34 pm

      That’s like a rape culture apology … blame the victim!!!! He should be put out to pasture. Why do we keep having to listen to these out of it old white men?

  5. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    August 5, 2019 at 12:52 pm

    The Slate article is good, but I have a problem with this:

    Within last week’s story of how Ronald Reagan made a racist phone call to Richard Nixon, there was a second story—a parable, effectively: a small point that contained a much larger point. It had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with Ronald Reagan’s own character; it happened after Reagan had finished fuming to Nixon about how African leaders who’d thwarted American foreign policy at the United Nations were “monkeys,” and the two men had gotten off the phone.

    Nixon then called Secretary of State William Rogers, to relay Reagan’s message and to warn Rogers that the White House should not express too much public support for the U.N., given the anger of the conservatives that Reagan represented. “As he said,” Nixon said, “he saw these, he said, these, uh, these cannibals on television last night.” At the word cannibals, the men shared a chuckle.

    But Reagan hadn’t said cannibals.

    No, he said monkeys who still aren’t comfortable wearing shoes. How does that not reflect on Reagan’s character?

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      August 5, 2019 at 12:57 pm

      I see his point–that the media is reinterpreting Trump’s racist remarks, but still . . .

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      August 5, 2019 at 1:01 pm

      From Adam Serwer:

      The bald racism of the remarks makes it hard to look beyond the words themselves and focus on the worldview they expressed. Reagan and Nixon were declaring their belief that the African delegates were rendered unfit for participation in world affairs by virtue of their ethnic background, a perspective that inevitably reflects on the rights of black people in the United States. No belief in American history has been more threatening to democracy, or consumed more American lives, than the certainty that only white people are fit for self-government, and the corresponding determination to exclude other citizens from the polity.

    • quixote's avatar quixote says:
      August 5, 2019 at 3:24 pm

      Of course it reflects on Reagan’s character. The man was an actor. And I would have said a pretty mediocre one. But when it came to acting the Fine Upstanding President™ he beat all the non-actor politicians hollow.

      But there were times when the mask slipped. One priceless moment was during an award ceremony for an old Navajo woman. Her acceptance speech was to stand there before the nation and give him a piece of her mind about what his ideas were doing to people.

      There was no elegant way to shut her up. All he could do was stand there, visibly trying to keep from clenching his hands into claws and trying to wipe the scowl of hatred off his face.

      His whole campaign strategy, going way back to running for Gov of California, was always nothing but transparent calls to hatred.

      There’s nothing very unusual in him on that score. The people grabbing the benefits of society always everywhere make up stories about how they deserve it and the people they’re robbing are stupid / churlish / angry / scheming / whatever and deserve what they get too.

      Men do that to women. Whites to blacks. Upper class Han Chinese to lower class. Herdsmen to farmers. Farmers to herdsmen. It’s always and everywhere.

      What’s different is people recognizing those roots in themselves and working not to propagate the cycle. Everything else, even being anti-racism in someone else is not necessarily fighting on the side of the angels.

    • RonStill4Hills's avatar RonStill4Hills says:
      August 6, 2019 at 9:26 am

      The BIGGEST problem I have, leaving aside the chosen slur, is the one persists to this very day, “Keep you black ass out of white men’s business, don’t say nothing, don’t do nothing, unless we tell you too.”

      the U.N. delegates were entitled to precisely the same freedom of thought and action as Colin Kaepernick.

      • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
        August 6, 2019 at 12:17 pm

        I never felt more hopeless about eliminating the effects of racism, misogyny, and bigotry against GLBT and religious minorities as I do now. At least during the Civil Rights movement you could see forward momentum and the Federal Government was helping. One Party that has the senate and the white house represents white nationalist theocrats of the fundamentalist xtianity flavor and theyr’e just hanging the rest of us out to dry

      • quixote's avatar quixote says:
        August 6, 2019 at 3:09 pm

        That’s pretty much the definition of any bigotry, isn’t it? One group applying rules to another group that could *not* be applied to everyone equally.

        I mean, if everyone is to do nothing equally, nobody could do anything, right?

        It *has* to be unequal, which is the root of privilege, and then all the -isms. And it’s the opposite of having rights which, by definition, have to be equally applicable. Else they’re not rights, they’re privileges.

        So, yup, it persists. It has to persist since it’s the very point and center of the crap.

        If somehow that stopped, we’d have the dawn of a new age of humankind. Stereotyping would become no worse than the English calling the French effete brie eaters and the French calling the Brits crude porridge swilling clodhoppers.

  6. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    August 5, 2019 at 1:09 pm

  7. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 5, 2019 at 1:15 pm

    • Enheduanna's avatar Enheduanna says:
      August 5, 2019 at 2:50 pm

      As Susie Madrak would say – WHEEEE!!!!111!!

      Dump’s gonna lose the donor class. He’s already lost the Mercers and Kochs, right?

  8. palhart's avatar palhart says:
    August 5, 2019 at 1:28 pm

    I’m as overwrought as any one here over the recent two domestic terror attacks. Prior to these shootings, I have had the thought that someone could open fire in this grocery store, in this parking lot, on the road beside me. It’s a cultural, national, and gender issue. This male who kept a kill list owning an AR-15 style rifle and a rape list with his HS classmates’ names on it is a coward. Killing innocents with weapons meant to kill war enemies is sick and not heroic or manly, but just the opposite. I could add caging infants and toddlers is an act of extreme cruelty imposed by this president who lacks compassion or mercy. This little, greedy, egomaniacal president must be slammed at every turn for the carnage he’s produced or allowed to happen.

    All is too outrageous for words, especially with Mitch doing absolutely nothing about gun reform.

  9. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    August 5, 2019 at 2:05 pm

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      August 5, 2019 at 3:14 pm

      I hardly remember what it means to have a cogent president who writes and speaks like this and with such moral authority. I miss him and I miss Hillary and I miss everything about waking up everyday to nothing horrid going on.

    • palhart's avatar palhart says:
      August 5, 2019 at 6:46 pm

      Yes, I do miss a cogent, non-tweeting president and an involved, equally impressive first lady.

      I am astonished that the South African apartheid (1948 to 1990s) wasn’t included in his list of global racism, however.

  10. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    August 5, 2019 at 2:34 pm

    https://twitter.com/JasonLeopold/status/1158455569159561216

  11. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 5, 2019 at 3:13 pm

  12. Enheduanna's avatar Enheduanna says:
    August 5, 2019 at 3:45 pm

    I know everyone here is aware of this, but I found this Vox article informative:

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/9/16618472/mental-illness-gun-homicide-mass-shootings

    Stop blaming mental illness for mass shootings. Good recap of statistics and studies quoted here for laypeople like me.

  13. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 5, 2019 at 4:40 pm

    How Fox News pushed the white supremacist “great replacement” theory
    Fox News figures have repeatedly warned of an immigrant “invasion”

    https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/how-fox-news-pushed-white-supremacist-great-replacement-theory?fbclid=IwAR0W9yYezT7BswxpG9A_6jncA2M9y8jV77lcRHc_s4SKJ9YtBROl_j7K4Xg

    The gunman in El Paso described immigrants as “invaders” flooding into the United States, which is rhetoric that both President Donald Trump and Fox News personalities frequently employ. Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who both have a history of pushing white nationalism and bigotry on cable airwaves, blatantly push the theory that white Americans are being replaced through immigration to the benefit of Democrats. Variations of the white supremacist “great replacement” theory have also appeared on other Fox programs.

    You can go to the lists of examples of you can stomach knowing how long it is and seeing they’ve got links to the specifics.

  14. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 5, 2019 at 8:17 pm

    And it appears he was a Uber Bernie Bro

    I’m actually kinda freaked to think about this but he was harassing one of my friends on Twitter and I actually had some contact with him but blocked him pretty quickly. Just found this out and I’m a little weirded out atm.

    • Enheduanna's avatar Enheduanna says:
      August 6, 2019 at 8:53 am

      I don’t blame you Dak – I’d be very weirded out. And now I know there is a thing called “pornogrind”. How long has that been around….

    • RonStill4Hills's avatar RonStill4Hills says:
      August 6, 2019 at 9:04 am

      When I heard that this guy had a liberal online footprint I thought that he was trying to smear the left with a false left leaning identity.

      If he really is a liberal, even a Bernie-Bro, it makes me a little sick to my stomach.

      • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
        August 6, 2019 at 9:48 am

        They’ve labelled him Antifa now so they can say both sides do it

        • RonStill4Hills's avatar RonStill4Hills says:
          August 6, 2019 at 10:44 am

          Do you think that he linked himself with Antifa for some low budget ratf*ckery?

          I have heard that in Dayton they are saying that they think that his attacks were focused on blacks, that does not jibe with what I “thought” I knew about Antifa.

          Also hard to believe that a Bernie – Bro would go on a rampage targeting blacks.

          It seems awfully shady. I am not exactly a conspiracy theory guy, but sometimes I give the bad guys too much credit for skullduggery.

          • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
            August 6, 2019 at 5:15 pm

            My friend on twitter he went after was black and gay so I don’t know …. can’t see that conversation now because Dane went offline and I can only talk to him through FB now and of course they took the angry white dude down AFTER he killed people and not while we were complaining he was harassing every one

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