Friday, August 9, 2019

Catching Up


Here's my next newspaper column:

So much winning. Hard to keep up.

·      Reading his teleprompter like a forced hostage video, Trump condemned white supremacists and division. Which is like Jeffrey Dahmer condemning meat-eaters and freezers. His moral high ground cratered within hours.

·      Previously, at a rally, Trump: “How do you stop these people?” “Shoot them,” someone shouts. Attendees cheer. Trump laughs. But, we’re told, an inflammatory “president” bears no responsibility for inflaming the inflammable. A solitary Republican with guts and a conscience calls it what it is.

·      Democrats want reasonable gun regulations, Republicans blame video games. (Video games are in every country. Mass murders aren’t.) Trump added “fake news,” of which he’s the prime vendor, and poison on the internet, for which he’s patient zero.

·      Trump wants to designate Antifa, some of whose members have stood up to and had fisticuffs with Nazis, a terrorist organization. White supremacist groups and Q-Anon qrazies, though, are welcome at his rallies.

·      FBI director Wray testified to Congress that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we've investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” No mention of Antifa.

·      Anticipating this flaying of the body politic must be among the reasons Russia chose Trump. Accordingly, their social media trolling pushes conspiracy theories and custom-curated lies, weaponizing Trump’s.

·      Kim Jong Un, Trump’s objet d’amour, launched another fusillade of nuclear-capable missies. Trump says not to worry, because they’re friends and Kim “will do the right thing.” Murderous dictators always have.

·      Iran fired missiles, too, and will resume enriching uranium. Under the agreement out of which Trump pulled, because, you know, President Obama, they were doing neither. Trump asked nations to join him in sanctions. Including the US, he’s amassed a coalition of one. Thus we see the respect he’s engendered around the world.

·      Fresh off maligning US Representative Elijah Cummings and other non-white citizens, Trump, who’s definitely not racist, gloat-tweeted about a burglary at Cummings’ home, virtually suborning more. Decent people would have abandoned him long ago. For hold-outs, therefore, his indecency must be the point.

·      That, and his cruelty to people unlike them. Trump’s latest budget throws three-million Americans off food assistance, adding to poverty and hunger. But, hey, small price for enriching wealthy donors. Mega-fraud – sorry -- megachurch leaders defend it, so it must be WJWD.

·      Exceptional among the holy, the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. criticized Trump for “diminishing our national life.”

·      Yet again, Trump is muzzling government climate-change researchers. In Greenland, unprecedented glacial melt is occurring, twelve-billion tons per day. July was the hottest month in recorded global history. Seventeen countries plus thirty-three highly-populated cities are running out of water. Those who deify Trump don’t care. At long last, have they no grandchildren?

·      “Conservatives” castigated President Obama for costing taxpayers $106 million in eight years of vacations. Trump’s golf excursions alone surpassed $110 million in two-and-a-half.

·      Trump’s ignorant, self-referential, national-embarrassment response to the anniversary of the anti-Nazi Polish Uprising: “The people of Poland like me, and I like them… And I know they’re building an installation that — and they’re putting in all of the money... So they’re building something very nice for the United States to have.”

·      But all’s well: “We will be ending the AIDS epidemic shortly in America, and curing childhood cancer very shortly.” (And Mexico will pay for it.)

·      In North Carolina, more Republicans were indicted for election fraud. But dead people voted for JFK sixty years ago, so we need discriminatory voter ID laws.

·      The founder of “Students for Trump” pled guilty to wire fraud, stealing thousands as a fake online lawyer. A student of the master.

·      ISIS is regrouping in Syria, says the Pentagon.

·      Moscow Mitch broke his shoulder. False flag? Then he retweeted his opponent’s name on a tombstone. AFTER the weekend murders.

·      Asked about his vetting process when defenestrating abysmally unqualified John Ratcliffe as DNI, Trump said he relies on the press (DBA “enemies of the people”) to do it. Nine cabinet secretaries have left, many in disgrace. Not counting nominees withdrawn. At this point, President Barack Obama had had zero.

·      This week saw the perils of using tariffs as instruments of “presidential” pathology, especially when the target is smarter and has a plan. Despite those tariffs, trade deficits with China are setting records. We’ve now learned taxpayer-funded reparations to harmed farmers (socialism!) are going mostly to the wealthiest. And China just stopped purchasing US farm products altogether.

·      “Trade wars are easy to win.”

[Image source

8 comments:

  1. Sid,
    I just want to Thank You for your columns. You are willing to say the things that are unpopular and take the heat for them. Our country is in great peril and far too many folks have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.
    Please keep speaking out.

    Floyd Ply
    Arlington WA.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dr. Schwab,
    I don't know if it is the new editor in chief at the Herald, but I'm disappointed your current column has not been posted. I appreciate your searing commentary on the "president" every week, which I'm sure you may know by the comments I regularly leave. A small point of pride on my part is that I use my real identity and photograph. I don't want to hide behind an alias as so many do.

    I'm very happy this week's column is about racism. I was hoping it would be. Thank you for your continued efforts to educate those who would resist the truth.

    Mary Ellen Hardy
    Everett, WA

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Ms Hardy. The regular op-ed editor has been on vacation and in his absence, the online opinion page has been skeletal, to say the least. Few if any columns have been published, even tho they're all in the printed version.

    I was disappointed, too, because I think this one might have been particularly important, which is not to say it'd have received anything but the usual lame stuff from the usual nay-sayers. (Yes, I do read them, but have so far managed to resist chiming in. It's hard, sometimes.)

    Your comments are always well-written and thoughtful and on-point. I admire your willingness to take on the Trumpic idiocy. Were you to email me, we might have interesting conversations. Meet, even, somewhere, for coffee.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You were prophetic brother. The list is now a really short one. Almost none of the names listed are employed as elected officials. Their shows were cancelled. They are still cancelled...lol

    Alex Jones is an asshat too.


    I was reading the right margin...

    "Right Wing Screamers,"

    "...which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There no is longer a place for sanity, ethics, or morals to dominate in our "leadership". Too bad sanity, ethics, or morals aren't a "thing". Too bad profit and power are. I doubt they'll ever be reconciled. Maladaptive. Unfortunate for me- pessimism is a thing. But I'm ok with it. The national anxiety has infected me too. Big time. How bout some happy pills Doc?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sorry, Cory. I'm keeping them all for myself. They don't seem to be working, though.

    ReplyDelete
  7. True story...

    My cat attacked me and sent me to the emergency room twice. I have a med bag I bring with me with all my crap in it.

    The PA is yarding through my bag and she's like "Wow, you get the good shit"....lol

    ReplyDelete

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