Clear and Present Danger

 

Sure thing, Donald, sure thing.

 

 

 

 

 

Memo to Stew Peters:  GFY.

Meanwhile — J.D. Vance’s wife’s name is Usha Chilukuri – – her family is from South Asia, India to be exact, she is a practicing Hindu.

The Republican Party (and the rest of the nation) MUST move on from Trump, and the way that that will happen is that he and the Republican Party are not just defeated but repudiated and all but destroyed. 

In fact, the Republican Party is going to be historically renounced and repudiated in November. I think the Republican Party knows this.  Then, after November, the Republican Party can come to its senses, dump Trump and the MAGAts, dump the gunnuts, dump the white supremacists and the biblethumpers, dump the old Tea Partiers, and get back to governing.

Go fuck yourself, you ignorant piece of shit.

Republican representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee has introduced articles of impeachment against Kamala Harris for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The articles blame Harris for a crisis at the southern border, claiming that she had failed her duties as “border czar”.

The deeply political effort is unlikely to get very far. Harris was never a “border czar” – that’s a misleading label that Republican critics applied to her. Harris was never put in charge of overseeing border or immigration policy. Rather, she was tasked with handling diplomatic efforts to address the root causes driving a surge of migration to the US –namely, poverty and instability in central America.

This is just a partial list.

-robbed his own charitable foundation
-committed business fraud
-falsified business records
-cheated on his three wives
-been Indicted in multiple jurisdictions
-labeled captured servicemen NOT heroes
-called military KIAs losers and suckers
-filed for bankruptcy six times
-pardoned his own administration officials for crimes committed
-promised to get out of NATO
-ran for office to stay out of jail
-lies repeatedly to everyone
-refused to return classified documents
-obstructed attempts to reclaim classified documents and white house gifts
-questioned the legitimate birthright of America’s sitting President
-hid his tax reports
-falsely claimed charitable donations that could not be verified
-discriminated against Black tenants
-stiffed contractors
-reneged on leases and contracts
-bankrupted a casino
-stood before a worldwide audience and invited Russia to hack American servers
-colluded with Russians
-called Mexican immigrants “criminals and rapists”
-lied by saying “Mexico would pay” for his wall
-spoke of “black and latino jobs” that immigrants were supposedly taking
-separated families at the border and put children in cages
-caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the p—–
-questioned whether America would buy a N(word) winning the Apprentice
-paid off a porn star to hide his affairs
-falsified documents to conceal the payoff
-palled around with Epstein
-walked in on nude and partially nude beauty contestants, Ivanka says ‘he does that’
-named dozens of times in Epstein related court documents
-stands accused of rape of a minor
-accused by dozens of women of sexual assault
-found guilty of raping via assault E. Jean Carroll
-called his own daughter a hot piece of a—-
-lost the popular vote
-stood alongside Putin while questioning, disparaging America’s intelligence
-debased and denounced his own military leadership while
-loving authoritarian despots like Putin and Kim Jong Un
-profited from the office of the presidency
-engaged in nepotism
-installed heads of cabinets and agencies whose resumes were contrary to the goals of said agencies, to deliberately undermine or sabotage them
-used the office in foreign dealings to personally enrich himself or his own brand
-obstructed justice and attempted to obstruct justice by silencing or censoring the Mueller reports
-hired an attorney general to achieve the suppression of information (Mueller report)
-attempted to install an “election integrity” agency to gather the personal data of every voter in America
-gave Afghanistan a withdrawal deal wholly advantageous to them while leaving allied forces little in return
-abandoned the Kurdish Army on the battlefield
-wants to dismantle NATO
-wants to nationalize abortion, falsely claiming Democrats abort babies after birth
-wants to impose a tariff economists say will cost the middle class dearly
-wants to end the Affordable Care Act
-wants to undermine Social Security and Medicare
-wants to abolish the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau
-promised to end environmental regulations in exchange for a billion dollars from oil tycoons.
-wants to dismantle clean energy initiatives
-denies climate change
-instituted a tariff on China that proved costly to Americans, particularly farmers
-ordered hundreds of law enforcement agencies into cities
-wanted to deploy us military and national guard to put down George Floyd protests
-sent federal agents into Portland to do same
-installed far right radicals to the judiciary including three scotus justices
-railed against Kapernick for protests in support of George Floyd and others like him, while
-calling Nazi flag carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville very fine people
-lied about Covid, a pandemic he knew was deadly, by calling it a hoax
-intercepted and confiscated PPE supplies heading to states in dire need of them
-blocked, disputed, and or obfuscated professional medical advice from CDC and other health agencies
-railed against masking, safe distancing and other measures designed to slow the spread of Covid
-encouraged mass gatherings in protest of such
-proposed unproven alternative quack cures including bleach injections, ivermectin, and ultraviolet light
-caused the unnecessary deaths of an estimated half a million people due to his lies, obstructionism, denials, and deceit
-attempted to extort a foreign government for dirt on Biden, in exchange for defensive weapons
-told known domestic terrorists to “stand back and stand by” when asked whether he’d accept to 2020 election results
-lied to the American people about an election he knew he’d lost
-attempted to coerce state governors to falsify voting results in 2020 election
-lost over 60 court challenges to the 2020 election results
-orchestrated a fake elector scheme wherein his imposters drew up phony documents, fraudulently certifying him the winner, and presented them to the National Archives
-invited his election deniers to arrive in DC on January 6, 2021
-incited a riot on January 6, 2021, falsely claiming a ‘stolen election’
-sat back and cheered his insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence”
-subsequently praised his insurrectionists as “warriors” “martyrs” and “hostages” demanding their immediate release
-stole classified documents, hid them out when fbi searched his residence
-stole items intended as gifts to the White House
-bragged about bringing an end to Roe v Wade
-claims Black people relate to his criminality
-said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America
-plans mass deportation of millions
-says he’ll be dictator from day one
-threatens to prosecute, jail political opponents and journalists
-believes he’s above the law and entitled to immunity
-wants to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists he can fire at will
-praises dictators like Kim Jong-Un, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin
-lied that Pelosi was responsible for summoning the national guard on J6
-TWICE impeached and
-convicted on all 34 counts in hush money trial, by a UNANIMOUS jury of his peers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Corleone’s consigliere asked him, at the Godfather’s funeral “Do you know how they are going to come at you?”  Meaning — You know the other mob bosses are coming after you, do you know how they will do it?

Michael knew and he stopped them.

We know how they are coming after Kamala Harris.  We know.

The GOP standard smear operating procedure is to hit on one or two pseudo-scandals and hammer them home endlessly, until clouds and shadows appear, or at least until there are enough meta-stories about how while this isn’t really a scandal the fact that people think it’s a scandal makes it a valid issue because the views of the Common Clay of the New West must not be dismissed out of hand by people who are really into sopressata and mid-century modern etc. So we had Swift boaters and the whitey tape, and the long form birth certificate and Hunter Biden’s laptop, and of course the Platonic Ideal of the genre, EMAILZ.

Right now the scream machine is in overdrive, looking for a scandal that does not exist, so it will be necessary to invent one (h/t Voltaire).

This is how they will come at Kamala Harris.

(1) The DEI candidate. Of course they tried this with Obama back when you said “affirmative action” instead of DEI, but Harris seems like a very poor target for this. Unlike Obama, who did have a fairly thin political resume in 2008 for a major party presidential candidate, Harris has held high profile elective office for 20 years now, creating a long track record of accomplishments, after a successful career as a line prosecutor, prior to become San Francisco’s DA. I mean they’re still going to go with this because throwing some racism into the Republican meme machine is like tossing a bowl of Colombian into a Led Zeppelin afterparty in 1973, but as a line of attack I would say it’s pretty weak sauce.

(2) She has a weird laugh. “Weird” here just means hey look it’s a woman! Since misogyny is an even stronger force in this context than racism (h/t Karen), the sheer absurdity and pettiness of this kind of thing doesn’t preclude from becoming something Fox News will mention 1,743 times in the next 100 days.

(3) She’s Not a Real Mom. A feminist colleague of mine who may wish to remain anonymous pointed out to me recently in a related context that, in the standard patriarchal model, all women are either wives/mothers or whores, and Harris does not have any biological children. For the last ten years she’s been the stepmother of two children, who were 20 and 15 at the time she married Doug Emhoff, and she apparently has a great relationship with them, but she’s not a Real Mom as these things are calibrated in fundie land. This kind of thing is pure red meat for the loathsome Trumplandia base, but in a post-Dobbs/look out for Griswold next environment it seems like an incredibly risky thing to emphasize. If the scream machine does it anyway it will be largely out of some combination of desperation and it just can’t help itself.

(4) Closely related: She’s a slut who slept her way toward the top. The basis for this is that Harris dated Willie Brown for about a year around 1994-95, when he was at the end of his 15-year term as speaker of the California house, and was running for mayor of San Francisco. Brown appointed her to a couple of commissions at the time, and it’s an unfortunate detail for propagandistic purposes that he was still legally married, although by that point he had been separated from his wife for 12 or 13 years. Thus to call his relationship with Harris an extra-marital affair is an abuse of the term, since the relationship was out in the open and Brown had long been married in only a purely formal legal sense. An even thinner reed upon which to construct a slut shaming narrative is that Harris dated Montel Williams for a few months in 2001, after Williams was divorced. This again will be an extremely tricky line of attack, given that in recent centuries the idea that it’s OK for women to have sex even if they’re not married has become widely accepted outside of fundamentalist religious circles, and the GOP knows that Dobbs etc. has been blowing up in its face. But, as with the case of the childless Career Woman line of attack, it’s going to be very hard for the right wing in general, and Vestal Virgin Donald Trump in particular, to resist going there, although in Trump’s case I expect it will largely come in the form of the sort of sleazy innuendo he loves to slime people with.

(5) She’s not really a Christian, because she was raised as a Muslim, specifically the Hindu type of Muslim, where they have thousands and thousand of gods, rather than the theologically approved three-in-one combo package. Again, we’re in dangerous territory here, but if the GOP gets desperate enough in the fall I don’t doubt they’ll start trying to hammer this one in some way or another.

In any case oceans of slime are going to be flowing very soon, to the extent they aren’t already, and a key question will be: How much will the mainstream/elite media launder this stuff, by doing meta-stories about the “controversy” that has arisen about the existence of these stories, with the discussion in respectable venues being not about the stories themselves (heaven forfend!), but about the stories about the stories, in good postmodern Zizek fashion.

But we know all this is on the way, because that’s how the right wing works, and it works that way because they’ve been rewarded for it, over and over again.

Trump has never released medical records to the extent that other candidates have.

Trump is an old man who shows signs of creeping dementia.

We know that Trump gets no exercise.  When he plays at golf, he rides in a golf cart, including driving the cart onto the greens — which is a mortal sin for any other golfer.

We know his diet is heavy in beef and Diet Coke, with him consuming around ten Diet Cokes per day.

His father died of Alzheimers and his onset was at an age slightly older than Trump’s 78 years.

A professor of Neurology at George Washington University says he believes there may be legitimate concerns over President Donald J. Trump’s “forward-listing posture” that goes beyond the comical memes and gif responses normally shared on social media.

“I know something about political figures and observable signs of illness from afar,” Richard E. Cytowic M.D. wrote in Psychology Today. “. . . The American public deserves an accurate account of our president’s health.”

“While most frequently observed in Parkinson’s Disease, the bent posture so evident in Trump may also be seen in Alzheimer’s Dementia, movement disorders of the basal ganglia, and as the side effect of certain medications,” Cytowic continued. “Also noted are the sudden, jerking movements of Trump’s right arm. Since they occur only on one side, the prefix “hemi” is applied, while “ballistic” means sudden or flinging in the manner of a projectile. Trump’s hemiballistic arm movements are evident in news clips from Memorial Day (also here via C-Span) at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as are his uncontrolled swaying and forward tilt. He is seen to grab his wayward arm with the left one in an effort to keep it under control.”  (4:00 – 4:20)

According to Cytowic, “It is true that individuals who have balance and gait issues similar to those observed in Trump can have degenerative brain disease in the frontal lobes, such as fronto-temporal dementia or Pick’s Disease. Other possibilities are normal pressure hydrocephalus, sensory ataxia, peripheral neuropathy, small lacunar strokes in the basal ganglia, supranuclear palsy, the effects of too many medications, and Parkinson’s Disease, which can begin on one side and also show early cognitive impairment.”

Regardless, “The president is a public figure whose judgment we must trust,” Cytowic said. “The American public is entitled to know about his neurological health given the enormous responsibilities placed on our commander in chief.”

On Monday, Ohio state Sen. George Lang introduced Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, at a rally by saying, “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically.” Fair enough.

“I’m afraid if we lose this one,” Lang continued, “it’s going to take a civil war to save the country.”

The rally was held in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, at the high school he attended. As for Vance’s speech? He attempted to make a joke about liberals being oversensitive about race.

All joking aside, this isn’t the first time a Trump ally has threatened violence if the majority of Americans don’t comply with the MAGA agenda. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts recently said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

In May, ABC News reported that it was able to find 54 cases of violence, threats of violence, and alleged assaults against Americans where Trump’s name was invoked. The 54 cases were linked through both law enforcement and court documents.

And here is my response

I spent two years in a place called Vietnam with an M16 in my hand and I used it damn near everyday for its intended purpose.  You assholes want a civil war, bring it the fuck on . . . I now own an AR-15 and a number of other firearms and am quite proficient in their use.  I may be an old guy, but I’m ready to meet your punk ass in the street.  Name the date, time, place.

And don’t forget:  If Trump starts this “stolen election” shit, Joe Biden is still President and he will NOT tell the DC National Guard to stand down as Trump did — Biden likely will unleash not just the DC Guard but also the Regular Army.