The Real Invasion Our Country Faces Is Not What Trump Incessantly Whines & Rails About

Reality doesn’t matter in the fact-free miasma inside Trump’s putrid pumpkin head – and fear, the most potent of weapons, does.

By Abby Zimet
Common Dreams (11/1/18)

No, not these spent and sweet-faced kids asleep on a floor in God knows where, having trudged for days with their families and thousands of bedraggled others seeking safety and a better life. The invasion is the fascist clown spewing racist loathsome lies about them, most recently in that nauseating, neo-Nazi, George-Wallace-esque, “dog whistle of all dog whistles” nativist political commercial featuring immigrant cop killer Luis Bracomontes who, as the ad shrieks, “killed our people!…Democrats let him in our country!” – except that, as pretty much everyone in our country swiftly noted, he was deported by Clinton, let back in by Bush, inexplicably released by Arpaio, and conveniently armed with his AR-15 by the NRA.

No matter. Because reality doesn’t matter in the fact-free miasma inside Trump’s putrid pumpkin head – and fear, the most potent of weapons, does – he sticks to his sinister, fictional narrative of an “invasion of our country.” He’s ordered thousands of troops, dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot, a more catchy moniker than Operation Let’s Distract My Unthinking Neanderthal Hordes Before the Mid-Terms, to protect a border 1,000 miles away. He’s gone on Fox (again) to babble, “You look at that caravan and you look largely, very, you know, big percentage of men, young, strong… A lot of bad people in there. People that are in gangs”- though it remains unclear if the gangs include the feeble people he’s charged are bringing in leprosy and smallpox (WTF?), or, say, the 17-year-old brothers who, as they walk from Honduras, have  “shared a single pair of pink sandals – found on the road – with their father.”

Ever more lurid

Trump’s tale keeps getting ever more lurid. He threatened to up the number of troops to 15,000 – roughly the size of our Afghanistan occupation force – and, on Thursday, to shoot any migrants who dare throw a rock, citing “some very tough fighters and people who fought back violently and viciously against Mexico at Northern Border.” Clearly heedless of the regrettable David/Goliath/ Palestine/Israel visions he was summoning, he blustered on, “I hope there won’t be that, but I will tell you this – anybody throwing rocks… we will consider that a firearm, because there’s not much difference.” Understandably confident in his knowledge of warfare, Major Bone Spurs added, “I told them (troops) consider it (a rock) a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexican military and police, I say consider it a rifle.” [Editor’s Note: There is nothing “heedless” about Trump’s words. They are calculated and well tuned to gin up fear, hate and violence to then justify fascist authoritarianism. — Mark L. Taylor]

The cruel distortion of the quest by destitute, terrified families “to find something better” – heartrendingly documented in an essay on one family’s earlier journey – coupled with the final vile straw of that Willie-Horton-on-steroids ad led Al Cardenas, former chair of Florida’s Republican Party, to issue a memorable rebuke to the monster his party helped create. “You are a despicable divider, the worst  social poison to afflict our country in decades,” he wrote on Thursday. “This ad (will) condemn you and your bigoted legacy forever in the annals of America’s history books.” To which we add: If you need a reminder why it’s time to fight back – improbable, we realize – check out “Blue Wave,” the most kick-ass, spine-tingling political ad ever from Eleven Films, who were not paid. Beto O’Rourke: “We’re here to define who we are.”

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.)

Link to Story and 2-Minute #BLUEWAVE Video

  • Former White Supremacist Gives Chilling Warning: Extremists ‘will act’ when they hear Trump’s ‘bullhorn’ to violence —  On Saturday, CNN’s S.E. Cupp interviewed reformed white supremacist Christian Picciolini. Picciolini said that violent extremists are likely to act when they are called to do so by President Donald Trump. As the former leader of a Chicago gang of racist skinheads, Picciolini was an organizer in the rightwing hate movement before reforming at age 22 and later leading a group set on deprogramming young extremists. … Read the Rest and 5-Minute Video

(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

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From Charleston To Pittsburgh, An Arc of Premeditated American Tragedy

The biggest indictment of the moral calibration in Trump’s Presidency is found in the sheer frequency by which he is absolved by his most ardent supporters. 

By Jelani Cobb
The New Yorker (11/1/18)

n the afternoon that the first of the funerals for the eleven people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, were held, a crowd began to spill over the street and onto the sidewalks and lawns along a stately stretch of Beechwood Boulevard. There is not a word in the American lexicon for such gatherings—the semi-spontaneous assembly of people in the wake of tragedy, who are united by both grief and by anger, and whose public mourning serves to reaffirm their civic bond to one another. But we need such a word, because this ritual happens frequently enough to be familiar—so frequently that its purpose need not be explained to those in attendance. “Are people here to protest against Donald Trump?” I asked a man in the crowd. “They’re here because of everything,” he answered.

The events in Pittsburgh, and those three years earlier in Charleston, suggest that the problem is not that certain people among us cannot remember history. The terror has emerged precisely because they do.

“Everything,” in this instance, meant the entire sequence of events that had preceded the shooting deaths of Rose Mallinger, Melvin Wax, Joyce Fienberg, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Irving Younger, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Jerry Rabinowitz, and Richard Gottfried; the factors that had enabled them; and the subsequent ways in which the murders have been woven into the larger rubric of premeditated American tragedy. Tree of Life now enters a glossary of such events; among them, the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of another mass shooting, on June 17, 2015, in another house of worship, committed by another white nationalist, became the closest case study.

Jamie Gibson, the senior rabbi at Temple Sinai, which is not far from the Tree of Life synagogue, had helped to organize a vigil three years ago, for those who had died in Charleston. The attack in Pittsburgh on Saturday brought recollections of that vigil back into focus. …

Read the Rest

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Broad City’s Ilana Glazer: Why I Canceled My Event At New York City Synagogue After Anti-Semitic Hate Vandalism

 

Democracy Now (11/2/18)

A political event hosted by Ilana Glazer of Comedy Central’s “Broad City” at the Union Temple Synagogue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, was canceled Thursday night after anti-Semitic and racist messages were found scrawled on walls throughout the building. Among the messages were “Jew Better Be Ready” “Insert Oven Here” “End is now,” “Hitler,” “Free Smoke for [N-word] Jews” and ”FPEE PR.”

The graffiti comes amid a surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes nationwide, including Saturday’s massacre of 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Amy Goodman was scheduled to speak at the event about coverage of the midterm elections. We speak with Ilana Glazer in New York City. She is the co-creator and star of the hit Comedy Central show “Broad City.”

Like to Story, Transcript and 10-Minute Video

 

  • Trump-Supporting TV Host Fired For Incredibly Racist On-Air Comments About ‘slanty-eyed’ Chinese Tourists — Sky News TV host has seen his career end at the network after he was fired for making deeply racist comments about Chinese people visiting Disneyland. According to the Guardiancommentator Ross Cameron has been shown the door after first making a stab at defending the Chinese … Read the Rest and 40-Second Video

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“I’m not saying Trump is Hitler; Hitler volunteered for the army.”

— Bill Maher, Real Time With Bill Maher (10/2/18)