The Virginia GOP's Slow Suicide

As a former Republican and Republican activist - I held a City Committee seat in Virginia Beach for eight years roughly two decades ago - watching the Virginia GOP's slide from power has been watching a form of slow moving suicide, a process which, as I have said before, began when Republicans foolishly began embracing far right Christians and, worse yet, voting them onto city and county committees. To my mind, that move that focused on short term advantage set the stage for the exodus of moderates and educated suburban voters from a party that became increasingly defined by an embrace of ignorance, rejection of science and knowledge and hatred to anyone deemed "other" - a category that includes basically anyone who is not a white right wing Christian.  The move also ushered in the beginning of the GOP's embrace of white supremacy since so may evangelicals in my experience are racist as exemplified by The Family Foundation which traces its roots to supporters of "Massive Resistance" when confronted with school desegregation.  As Virginia's urban and suburban areas have grown, a critical mass was reached where these regions can out vote the racist, knuckle dragging rural regions.  This new reality is not going to change and unless the Virginia GOP can reform itself - something not likely in my view given the grip the Christofascists have on the party even as Millennials exit religion entirely - Virginia will be a "blue state" for the foreseeable future (a view confirmed by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball).  A Washington Post editorial looks at this new reality.  Here are highlights: 

IN POLITICAL terms, Virginia is no longer a Southern state; it’s an Eastern one that tilts heavily Democratic. That transformation, affirmed in Tuesday’s watershed elections that flipped both state legislative chambers to the Democrats’ control, was long in the making and helped by Republicans who fell radically out of step with the increasingly diverse voters who populate the state’s booming suburbs.

Long before anyone imagined Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans such as Corey A. Stewart, last year’s failed GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate and the soon-to-be-former top official in Prince William County, rose to prominence as right-wing culture warriors. Mr. Stewart, assessing this week’s Democratic gains, said Republicans would be “toast” in Virginia for 10 years. That may be right; if it is, Mr. Stewart himself was a prominent toaster.

Mr. Stewart’s brand of Republicanism — immigrant-bashing, Confederate-monument-revering, gun-loving, abortion-blocking, trash-talking and, lately, Trump-lionizing — has been ascendant in Richmond and elsewhere. It has methodically alienated moderate and swing voters, especially in the vote-rich suburbs of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads. In a state that won the competition for Amazon’s second corporate headquarters partly on the strength of a well-educated, multicultural workforce, Republicans who threw red meat to their base by attacking undocumented immigrants found their appeal waning.

[T]he GOP’s problems have deep roots. No Virginia Republican has won a statewide election in a decade. And in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties — Washington suburban localities that together comprise nearly a quarter of Virginia’s population of 8.5 million — elected Republicans at any level are now an all-but-vanished breed.

The party’s enfeeblement was accelerated by its rejection of moderate, substantive GOP officeholders such as former lieutenant governor Bill Bolling and former congressman Thomas M. Davis III. And it signed its political death warrant by blowing up the summer’s special legislative session on gun safety after just 90 minutes, without considering a single bill. That act of cluelessness and arrogance came weeks after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach left 12 people dead.

Virginia Republicans are at a defining moment. If they reverse course and tack to the center, they may again become a force in a state that would benefit from a vibrant two-party competition. If not — if they double down by continuing down the Trumpian path blazed by Mr. Stewart and his like — they might become “toast” not for a decade but for a generation.

There Are No Excuses for Moral People Supporting Trump/the Vichy GOP

Many Republican "friends" have argued that we should not allow our "political differences" to separate us despite their support for the foul individual in the White House and a Republican Party that continues to enable him and push an agenda that is harmful to the majority of Americans and downright dangerous for minorities, including members of the LGBT community.  The husband is more tolerant of them than I am and argues that dialogue must continue.  For me, however, things are no longer a matter of political differences.  It has come to a matter of morality versus immorality.  Perhaps it's a hold over from my Catholic upbringing where things were black and white, right and wrong.    There are clear moral choices on November 6, 2018: (i) a vote against hate, bigotry and immorality if one votes for Democrats or (ii) a vote to support hate, bigotry and immorality if one votes Republican.  One can be complicit in evil or oppose it.  Each of us has the choice and history will judge us just as 1930's Germans are rightly judged.  It is really that simple as a column in the Washington Post lays out.  Here are excerpts:

This time, our eyes are wide open.  Exactly two years ago, many Americans held their noses and voted for Donald Trump. Some were conservatives willing to tolerate his vulgar excesses in hopes of getting tax cuts, a repeal of Obamacare and a friendlier judiciary. Others had Clinton fatigue. Sure, they were concerned about Trump’s words about Mexican “rapists” and what he liked to do to women — but maybe those were just words. Maybe Trump could build a coalition across traditional party lines to get things done.

Now, all Americans have seen the results with their own eyes:

Trump defended neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.

He oversaw a policy separating young children from their parents and warehoused the kids at the border, including some who have yet to be reunited.

He took Vladi­mir Putin’s word over that of the U.S. intelligence community, accepting Russia’s denial that it interfered in our election.

He had hired Paul Manafort and three other senior campaign advisers who eventually pleaded guilty or were convicted in a sprawling and ongoing criminal probe of Russia, Trump and the 2016 election.

He attacked the news media as the “enemy of the people.”

He befriended some of the world’s most loathed autocrats, including Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whose extralegal death squads have killed thousands; and he refused to take serious action after the Saudi regime murdered and dismembered a Post contributing columnist in Turkey.

He opened personal rifts with the leaders of Britain, Germany, Canada and other countries that had been stalwart allies.

He has released an unending stream of invective on Twitter and in speeches, often in vulgar and misogynistic terms.

He insulted John McCain after the Arizona senator’s death, initially not ordering flags to be flown at half-staff.
He has established a whole new level of mendacity, averaging 30 false or misleading statements a day now, and totaling 6,420 such bogus claims during his presidency.

And he has exploited and worsened divisions among Americans, coarsened public discourse and used racial hatred, resentment of women’s gains and fear of immigrants and minorities as political weapons.

Now, we are seeing Trump close the midterm campaign with openly racist appeals.

He offered more conspiracy theories even after a crazed Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to CNN and a dozen of the president’s oft-cited enemies, and when a lunatic apparently motivated by the Trump-inspired paranoia about the caravan murdered 11 Jews worshiping at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And he closed the campaign with a vile ad showing a Mexican man who killed two police officers, accompanied by the message: “Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay” — though the killer came to the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush.

On Tuesday, voters will make a decision in what is the purest midterm referendum on a sitting president in modern times:

Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country?

Or will we affirm that we are really the intolerant and frightened people Donald Trump has made us out to be?

If we choose the latter, 2018 will in some ways be more difficult to take than 2016. This time, we don’t have the luxury of saying we didn’t really know what Trump would do.  Our eyes are wide open.

A President Who Condones Political Violence

In a piece in The Atlantic, former Republican David Frum looks at the irresponsible and dangerous behavior of Der Trumpenführer who has openly encouraged violence at campaign rallies and through his constant demonizing of the .mainstream news media - which has mere reported the truth about Trump, his cronies and the cesspool elements of his party  - and numerous Democrats and Trump critics who not surprisingly were targeted by Cesar Sayoc, a/k/a the "MAGA Bomber."  When asked if he would tone down his inflammatory rhetoric, Trump - always the malignant narcissist - shockingly said he might "tone it up."  Trump's rhetoric and the behavior of his supporters continues to careen towards political violence and one can only assume that Trump condones what is happening.  Decent, responsible Americans should be appalled.  Hopefully they get out and vote on November 6, 2018, and give Democrats control of at least the House of Representatives, if not the Senate as well.  Trump must be contained.  Here are column excerpts:

Bombs are sent through the mail to CNN, George Soros, James Clapper, former President Barack Obama, and other persons targeted by President Donald Trump for vilification and abuse. A theory begins to circulate on the far edges of the right that the bombs are a “false flag” intended to discredit the president and his party. The theory rapidly moves from the edge to the center.  There the theory lingers, even as police apprehend a suspect and tow away a van festooned with pro-Trump stickers.

On the afternoon of October 25, the false-flag theory gained a respectful hearing from The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, a Fox News contributor and one of the president’s most outspoken defenders on TV and social media, who in a tweet compared the current incident to the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001

That same afternoon, a tweet from an anonymous account that alleged “FAKE BOMBS MADE TO SCARE AND PICK UP BLUE SYMPATHY VOTE” gained a “like” from Donald Trump Jr.

And at 10:37 a.m. on October 26, the false-flag theory was winkingly endorsed on Twitter by [Trump] the president himself: Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows - news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!

It’s striking that [Trump] the president has not offered a word of sympathy for any of the targets of the bombs. After all, even if the “false flag” theory were true to any degree, the people targeted were indeed targeted.

[Trump] The President did offer a generalized, perfunctory condemnation of political violence at a rally in Wisconsin on October 24, calling the bombs “an attack on democracy itself” and urging “all sides to come together in peace and harmony.” Yet even within those apparently scripted remarks, he could not refrain from an attack on the media institutions that had been targeted by the bomber: The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories.

Later in the rally, in apparently unscripted remarks, he added an extra gibe all his own: The media, he said, “can’t take a joke.”

When people talk about Trump condoning and inviting political violence, his behavior over the past 48 hours—and that of his followers—is exactly what they have in mind: the utter lack of sympathy for those attacked or threatened; the readiness to blame victims of terrorism for being terrorized; the determination to exonerate the president of any consequences for his own wild behavior; the indulgence of wild conspiracy theories as a means to achieve that exoneration, piped directly into the Oval Office from the furthest extremes of American life.

Only eight days ago, Trump praised a Republican member of Congress who physically attacked a reporter without provocation and then lied to the police about the attack. Today, Trump claims that there’s a conspiracy to blame him for bombs mailed to CNN and other people he has abused. And this claim is not Trump’s alone; it is echoed by many of the apologists and defenders of his government. Democracy has a rule, an absolute prohibition on the use or threat of violence to coerce political ends. Trump is walking the road away from democracy, and he is not walking alone.

Read histories of Hitler's rise to power in Germany - the parallels are terrifying.

GOP Candidate Attacks Parkland Teen Emma Gonzalez

GOP igot Leslie Gibson

Sadly, nowadays if one hears foul and disgusting (not to mention often totally untrue) attacks on minorities, LGBT individuals or non-Christians, it is a safe bet that the individual or individuals launching the attacks are either (i) a Christofascist, or (ii) a Republican.  Demonstrating the veracity of such assumption is Leslie Gibson, a Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, who has attacked Emma Gonzalez, one of the student activists from the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018.  Gibson attacked Gonzales and called her a "skinhead lesbian."  As an "out" bisexual, a Hispanic, and an opponent to unrestricted gun ownership, Gonzales is a trifecta of those hated by today's Republican Party.  NBC News looks at Gibson's rank bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

A Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives has used Twitter to attack two students who survived a mass shooting at a Florida high school, calling one of them, who is openly bisexual, a "skinhead lesbian" and the other a "bald-faced liar." Gibson is the only declared candidate for the 57th District . . . Pat Fogg, a Democratic organizer in the town of Greene, Maine, said, "That sort of stupidity really turns people off." Fogg added that she hopes someone will jump into the race to challenge Gibson.

Gibson has since deactivated his Twitter account, but multiple news outlets have taken screen shots of his offending remarks.

Meanwhile, furor over Gibson's comments has erupted on social media, with some, like Fogg, calling for another candidate to join the race just to oppose him.  Gonzalez has not yet responded to Gibson's remarks.

And yes, the everyday bigotry of Republicans is being noticed internationally.  The London Daily Mail reports om Gibson's foul 

Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?

As the previous post noted, America offers two different worlds for LGBT Americans.  But increasingly, that division of America into two strongly differing worlds extends far beyond how LGBT citizens are treated - or perhaps more on point, mistreated.  One the one side there are the world of the racists, white supremacists and Christofascists (who from my experience are usually racists as well) and those who want to revive a mythical world where whites were supreme. Opposing them are those welcoming to modernity and a world of diversity and tolerance and equality for all. Yes, the division has perhaps always existed in some form, but it seems to be intensifying.  The divisions seem to be worsening and sadly we have an unfit occupant of the White House who is only too happy to intensify divisions if in his warped, self-centered world it maintains the loyalty of his base, a base that Hillary Clinton rightly described as a basket of delporables.  Where will it lead? That's anyone's guess.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this near cultural civil war.  Here are excerpts:

A day after the brawling and racist brutality and deaths in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, St. Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the Union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.

America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years.

Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.

“We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.

To test Mines’s conjecture, I reached out to five prominent Civil War historians this weekend. “When you look at the map of red and blue states and overlap on top of it the map of the Civil War—and who was allied with who in the Civil War—not much has changed,” Judith Giesberg, the editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and a historian at Villanova University, told me. “We never agreed on the outcome of the Civil War and the direction the country should go in. The postwar amendments were highly contentious—especially the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law—and they still are today. What does it mean to deliver voting rights to people of color? We still don’t know.”

She added, “Does that make us vulnerable to a repeat of the past? I don’t see a repeat of those specific circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we are not entering something similar in the way of a culture war. We are vulnerable to racism, tribalism, and conflicting visions of the way forward for our nation.”

Before Charlottesville, David Blight, a Yale historian, was already planning a conference in November on “American Disunion, Then and Now.” “Parallels and analogies are always risky, but we do have weakened institutions and not just polarized parties but parties that are risking disintegration, which is what happened in the eighteen-fifties,” he told me. “Slavery tore apart, over fifteen years, both major political parties. It destroyed the Whig Party, which was replaced by the Republican Party, and divided the Democratic Party into northern and southern parts.”

“So,” he said, “watch the parties” as an indicator of America’s health.  In the eighteen-fifties, Blight told me, Americans were not good at foreseeing or absorbing the “shock of events,” including the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the John Brown raid, and even the Mexican-American War. “No one predicted them. They forced people to reposition themselves,” Blight said. “We’re going through one of those repositionings now. Trump’s election is one of them, and we’re still trying to figure it out. But it’s not new. It dates to Obama’s election. We thought that would lead culture in the other direction, but it didn’t,” he said. “There was a tremendous resistance from the right, then these episodes of police violence, and all these things [from the past] exploded again. It’s not only a racial polarization but a seizure about identity.”

In the wake of Charlottesville, the chorus of condemnation from politicians across the political spectrum has been encouraging, but it is not necessarily reassuring or an indicator about the future, Gregory Downs, a historian at the University of California at Davis, told me. During the Civil War, even Southern politicians who denounced or were wary of secession for years—including Jefferson Davis—ended up as leaders of the Confederacy. “If the source of conflict is deeply embedded in cultural or social forces, then politicians are not inherently able to restrain them with calls for reason,” Downs said. He called the noxious white supremacists and neo-Nazis the “messengers,” rather than the “architects,” of the Republic’s potential collapse. But, he warned, “We take our stability for granted.”

He dug out for me a quote from the journalist Murat Halstead’s book “The War Claims of the South,” published in 1867. “The lesson of the war that should never depart from us,” Halstead wrote, “is that the American people have no exemption from the ordinary fate of humankind. If we sin, we must suffer for our sins, like the Empires that are tottering and the Nations that have perished.”

“Obviously, we have some pretty deep divisions along multiple lines—racial, ideological, rural versus urban,” he told me. “Whether they will lead to civil war, I doubt. We have strong gravitational forces that counteract what we’re seeing today.” He pointed out that “the spark in Charlottesville—taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee—doesn’t have to do with civil war. People are not debating the Civil War. They’re debating American society and race today.”

Given these divisions, decent, moral people cannot be complacent or refuse to take sides. Throughout history, bad things happen when good people do nothing and fail to act until it is too late. With a would be autocrat in the White House who seems to revel in cruelty and division, one must get involved and act now.  One of the easiest ways to act is to get out and vote against those who market hate and division.  Sadly, these hate merchants are usually Republicans. 

White American Terrorism in Trump’s Heartland

One of the main theme's of Donald Trump's, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, campaign pitches was to fan racism, xenophobia and a hatred of those white reactionary Americans deemed as "other."  The later category includes LGBT individuals, non-Christians, and, of course with skin of a different color. With Trump's election due to the failure of the Electoral College to protect the nation from a dangerous demagogue, the forces of hate within the ranks of both white supremacists and Christian extremists have been emboldened.  Even in gay friendly Key West, a gay couple was assaulted by an individual who sounds like a Southern red neck, who yelled to the victims that they were in Trump's America now.  A significant part of my client base is comprised of Indians from India who I have found to be loyal clients and wonderful people. After a hate crime motivated shooting in Kansas that left a young engineer dead, many in the Indian community in America are fearful.  Like other minorities, they fear what may be coming under the Trump/GOP agenda of diminishing the rights of those who are not white, heterosexual right wing Christians.  The Washington Post looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are highlights:

To most Americans, a shooting in Kansas last Wednesday will be remembered as just another incident of gun violence in a country where homicides are tragically commonplace and where far too many disturbed loners have ready access to firearms.

To many Indians, though, the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla was the harshest warning yet about the reality of President Trump’s America.

Kuchibhotla, an engineer at satellite navigation company Garmin, was having an after-work drink with his friend and colleague Alok Madasani at their regular bar in Olathe, a town 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. The duo, both Indian nationals who received master's degrees in the United States, were confronted by 51-year-old Adam Purinton, who hectored them with ethnic slurs.

"He asked us what visa are we currently on and whether we are staying here illegally," said Madasani to the New York Times. "We didn’t react. People do stupid things all the time."

But an enraged Purinton returned with a shotgun and opened fire, killing Kuchibhotla, 32, and injuring Madasani and Ian Grillot, an onlooker who intervened in defense of the Indian men. Eyewitness accounts suggest Purinton yelled at the pair to "get out of my country."

Purinton was arrested at another restaurant in Missouri after telling an employee there that he needed a place to hide because he had just shot some "Middle Easterners." News reports described Purinton as a mentally troubled man with an alcohol problem, but the racial undertones of his actions are unmissable.

The shooting led to anguish and anger both in India and among the South Asian diaspora in the United States, with many linking Kuchibhotla's senseless death to the xenophobic populism of the Trump campaign.

"There is a kind of hysteria spreading that is not good because so many of our beloved children live there," said Venu Madhav, a relative of Kuchibhotla, to India's ANI news agency.

Indians rank among the fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States, but there are signs they could face tougher times under Trump. The White House is reportedly keen on curtailing the H-1B work visa program that has enabled tens of thousands of Indian nationals like Kuchibhotla to work for American tech companies. Trump's chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, one of the architects of the president's "America First" doctrine, previously articulated his dismay with the way in which South Asians supposedly dominate Silicon Valley.

[T]he shooting has deepened the fears of many South Asians — and other minorities living in the United States — over the racial tensions taking hold.

"The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as the U.S. president," said Kuchibhotla’s distraught father to local media in India. "I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their children to the United States in the present circumstances."

The Trump administration dismissed any suggestion of a link between the shooting, which could be justifiably defined as a terroris attack, and Trump's rhetoric.

[T]he Trump campaign rose in part through the unleashing of xenophobic passions and with the gleeful support of white nationalists. . . . But while Trump tweets incessantly about jihadist threats around the world, the White House has remained rather silent about the violence carried out by white nationalists against minorities, including a deadly attack on a mosque in Canada last month. So far, he has not tweeted anything about the Olathe shootings.

"Toxic rhetoric has contributed to scapegoating immigrants and religious minorities," said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) in a statement on Friday in which he linked Purinton's alleged xenophobia to Trump's politics of walls and bans. 

Trump Finally Gets De Facto Newspaper Endorsement - From KKK Newspaper

I have noted a number of times how as Hillary Clinton has received endorsement after endorsement from traditionally pro-Republican newspapers, ranging from the Salt Lake Tribune, the Omaha World-Herald, and Arizona Republic to name a few.  Meanwhile, Donald Trump has received no endorsements from any significant endorsement.  Even the Mormon Church affiliated Deseret News advised readers to NOT vote for Trump. Now, at last Trump can claim an endorsement of sorts from the Crusader, the official newspaper of the Klu Klux Klan.  A piece in Salon looks at this fitting marriage of the KKK and Trump, a confirmed racist and bigot.    Here are excerpts from Salon:

The Republican Party is the United States’ largest de facto white identity organization. Its primary electoral strategy for the last 50 years has consisted of using a combination of overt white racism and subtle “dog whistles” to win white voters.

New research by political scientist Michael Tesler shows the power of this strategy: “Old-fashioned” overt racism now predicts if a given white voter will support the Republican Party. Public opinion polling data from Reuters/Ipsos has revealed that Trump’s supporters are more likely than other Republican voters to believe that black people are more “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy” and “violent” than white people. Demographics are important here as well: The Republican Party’s base is about 90 percent white while the Democratic Party’s constituency is multiracial and multigenerational.

Donald Trump is the current standard bearer for the Republican Party and a political moment when conservatism and racism are now fully and nakedly one and the same thing. This is why white nationalists such as David Duke — as well as the other bigots and hatemongers who constitute the so-called alt right — have flocked to Trump’s candidacy and embraced him as their champion and delivery system for mainstreaming their regressive white supremacist beliefs into the American body politic.

Moreover, this is not a claim that Trump is guilty by mere association or endorsement. Trump’s proposed policies are racist and nativist: He has suggested that Hispanic and Latino “illegal” immigrants are running amok in the street while they kill and rape white people. He believes that African-Americans in the age of Obama live in a dystopic hell worse than slavery and Jim and Jane Crow. And in violation of the Constitution he wants to ban Muslims from the United States while placing the ones already here on an enemies’ list.

Trump’s son as well as other political advisers have used social media to circulate white supremacist propaganda and talking points. Trump’s inner circle also has connections to white supremacist and white nationalist organizations.

What follows then is not at all surprising.

Trump has received not one endorsement from a major American newspaper. He has, however, received front page coverage and effusive praise from The Crusader, the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan.

His slogan, “Make America Great Again” is the outdated and unreflective speech of those who uncritically embrace the past, a recycling of the Know-Nothing rhetoric of the 1850s, and a maturation of Pat Buchanan’s white “ethnonationalism” screeds from white supremacist websites such as World Net Daily.

The Ku Klux Klan understands its origins and meaning quite well. The organization translates these for the unsure and those who may be somehow duped or tricked into thinking that “Make America Great Again” is race neutral and benign speech. The Crusader has explained:

“Make American Great Again!” It is a slogan that has been repeatedly used by Donald Trump in his campaign for the presidency. You can see it on the shirts, buttons, posters and ball caps such as the one being worn here by Trump speaking at a recent rally . . . But can it happen? Can America really be great again? This is what we will soon found out! While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, “What made America great in the first place?” The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did — but because of who are forefathers were, America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great.

This is Donald Trump’s America — the basket of human deplorables speaks again, unfiltered. . . . Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for president with a de facto endorsement from the Ku Klux Klan in his metaphorical back pocket.

Will Donald Trump, the Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate, and his basket of human deplorables reign? Or will the American people send them back into the shadows and the dustbin of history?

The American people will again have to decide what type of people they want to be and the country they want to have.

Will Saturday Night Destroy Trump?

For over 40 years Saturday Night Live ("SNL") has delivered blistering political satire and at times has helped to underscore negative aspects of candidates and to get across prevailing character flaws the mainstream media is too spineless to attack.  This past year has been no different.  Yet, in the wake of Monday's presidential debate and Donald Trump's disastrous performance, some are conjecturing that SNL may be particularly brutal on Trump - and deservedly so in my opinion.  A piece in Politico looks at the process underway at SNL in the lead up to Saturday's show.  Here are highlights:

Monday night was live from Hofstra. Saturday night is live from New York.

While Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton argue over who won Monday night’s debate, inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the winner in the all-important satirical showdown is still being scripted.

That’s where the cast and crew of “Saturday Night Live” gathered Monday night to watch the debate. And it’s where they’re still sketching out portrayals that will shape how Americans see their presidential candidates.

SNL, which timed the launch of its 42nd season for the weekend after the first Clinton-Trump clash, made one big reveal Wednesday: Actor Alec Baldwin will debut as Trump. But heading into Saturday, the biggest drama is how Baldwin and SNL will parody the GOP nominee: Will they mock his sniffles? His hair? His orange hue? His gesticulations? His supposed microphone malfunction? Or do they cast him in more ominous terms: as a racist hate-monger? Some comedians are pressing for the latter. Dean Obeidallah, who worked on the production staff of SNL for eight years and now has a radio show on SiriusXM, said late-night comedians “have a moral obligation” to highlight the darker elements of Trump’s candidacy. “Donald Trump is not a normal candidate. This is not Mitt Romney, not John McCain. This is a man who has trafficked in racism, sexism and bigotry,” Obeidallah said.

“Maybe it’s going to take comedians to do the job that cable news has relinquished for so much of the campaign.”

Samantha Bee took some of her comedy colleagues and network executives to task for coddling Trump and inviting him on their programs. “I guess because ratings matter more than brown people,” Bee exclaimed. “Sure, he’s making life palpably dangerous for Muslims and immigrants, but, hey, he’s good at entertainment!”

Last season, one faux pro-Trump SNL ad featured stirring testimonials from what at first appeared to be everyday Americans who ended up as a Nazi, a woman ironing a Ku Klux Klan hood, and a white supremacist. 

Historically, SNL’s political satire has penetrated the national consciousness. It was Will Ferrell as George W. Bush who coined “strategery,” not Bush himself. And it was Tina Fey as Sarah Palin who claimed, “I can see Russia from my house,” not Palin. The skewering tradition dates all the way back to Chevy Chase’s 1976 portrayal of President Gerald Ford as a klutz, and Jon Lovitz’s disbelief, as Michael Dukakis in 1988, that “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” In 2000, Al Gore’s own advisers made him watch Darrell Hammond’s stilted, stiff, sighing impersonation of his debate performances to show Gore how poorly he was coming off to others.

Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of SNL, told Parade this week that “fundamentally we’re non-partisan,“ but there are growing pressures inside the satire world to wage a comedic war on Trump in the election’s final weeks.

Spokespeople for SNL did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Debates have long been fertile ground for SNL and the Baldwin-McKinnon teaser suggested that’s how Saturday’s episode will open. As it happens, there will be a debate, including the vice presidential one next week, before each of SNL’s first four episodes this season.

The campaigns, if not the candidates themselves, will be watching on Saturday.

Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, hasn’t thought much about it yet even though she said, “‘Saturday Night Live’ will certainly matter from now until the election a great deal.”  “It’s among the things I can’t control,” Palmieri said with a hearty laugh. “‘Saturday Night Live’ — among the things I can’t control.”

Again, I hope SNL brutalizes Trump.  The husband and I will be at a wedding at The Greenbrier on Saturday, but we will be sure to tune into SNL afterwards.  

The 2016 Election Is Being "Graded on a Curve" by the Media

As note not only in recent posts but for some time now I have called out the double standard that the mainstream media has been applying in "grading" the 2016 presidential candidates and the manner in which many pundits and news anchors fabricate a false equivalency between Donald Trump's outrageous statements and innumerable lies and statements or actions of Hillary Clinton and/or Democrats in general.  The latest example is found in the feigned shock that Hillary Clinton accurately identified a large segment of Trump's base of support as outright bigots and racists as well as homophobes and anti-immigrant extremists.  Sometimes the truth hurts but it does not make it any less the truth.  A piece in Esquire looks at this irresponsible double standard and the manner in which Trump continues to figuratively get away with murder as anchors and pundits disingenuously grade the candidates' behavior on a bizarre curve so that Trump does not immediately come up failing.  Stated another way, these "journalists" ignore the duty they owe to the public and ignore the fact that similar irresponsible conduct allowed the nation to go to war in Iraq based on lies.  Here are article highlights:

And "basket of deplorables"—the phrase that pays for every cable-news wastrel in the mob . . . there isn't anything in that quote by which anyone who's spent five minutes at a Trump campaign rally in the past year seriously can be offended.

Nonetheless, the people who have attached themselves to a campaign that prides itself on not being politically correct immediately grabbed their badly chafed fee-fees and started screaming for safe spaces. And much of the elite political press immediately went into an ensemble chin-stroke—sagely parsing HRC's math down to the third decimal place and, yes, deploring the level to which the campaign has sunk. Or else they lit a candle at the altar of the Church Of The Savvy and whispered about what terrible politics it is to point out that bigots act out of bigotry. Is it exactly half? Maybe not, but it's damned close to it and everyone following this campaign knows it. Which brings us to Grading On A Curve.

Are we grading El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago, who doesn't know enough about any issue to throw to a cat, on a curve? The answer can be seen plainly enough in how everybody now is pretending that what HRC said isn't god's own truth, or how everybody is arguing that you can't say that stuff out loud because to do so is unkind to white people who are so concerned about unfair trade deals that they go to freaking Stormfront to argue about it. Talk about grading on a curve. There is an accomplished woman saying something everybody knows is true and there is a vulgar talking yam who apparently could set his own dick on fire and not pay much of a price for it on television. That is grading on the curve, but it's nothing new.

Hell, we've been grading Republicans on a curve for decades. We graded Reagan on a curve when he burbled about trees and air pollution. We graded him on a curve during Iran Contra on the grounds that he was too dim to know what was going on around him. We graded W on a curve for the whole 2000 campaign when he didn't know Utah from Uzbekistan, but Al Gore knew too much stuff and what fun was he, anyway? We graded Republicans on a curve when they attached themselves to the remnants of American apartheid, when they played footsie with the militias out west and with the heirs to the White Citizens Councils in the South. We graded them on a curve every time they won a campaign behind Karl Rove or Lee Atwater or the late Terry Dolan back in the 1970s. We talked about how they were "reaching out" to disillusioned white voters who'd suffered in the changing economy, as though African-American workers didn't get slugged harder than anyone else by deindustrialization. We pretended not to notice how racial animus was the accelerant for the fire of discontent in the "Reagan Democrats." That was, and is, grading on a moral curve.

We graded Republicans on a intellectual curve when they embraced a fundamentalist splinter of American Protestantism and brought themselves to a pass in which they are the 21^st Century Know Nothings.

It is timidity now that grades this ridiculous man running this ridiculous campaign on the biggest curve of all—the timidity of a people who have declined the responsibilities of serious citizenship and the abdication of its duty under the Constitution of a putatively free press too timid to call them on it. That is the political correctness that truly is hurting the country and may yet hurt it beyond all repair. There's only one candidate now running however gingerly against that.

Uncensored Trump Rally Videos: "Hang the B*tch!" "F*g!' 'N*gger!"

As the GOP feigns outrage over Hillary Clinton's remarks about the true nature of Trump's supporters, it is useful to revisit the uncensored videos that the New York Times released last month from Trump rallies:  The New Civil Rights Movement reminds us of what Trump's base of support is really like (if you have not done so, be sure to watch these videos, and then ask whether or not Hillary was right in here remarks over the weekend):

"Sieg heil!"

"Fuck you, Hillary!"

"Hang the bitch!"

"Kill her!"

"Trump the bitch!"

"Get out of here, you fag!"

"Fuck that nigger!"

"Hillary Clinton needs to get her ass spanked!"

"Ignorance and immigrants. They mix together!"

"Fuck those dirty beaners!"

"Hillary is a whore!"

The video, clearly, is disturbing, but what's more disturbing is the culture Trump has created, fostered, nurtured, and allowed at his rallies. 

The man who literally threw a mother and her crying baby out of a rally on Tuesday but not a 10-year old child who repeatedly yelled, "take the bitch down!" about Hillary Clinton, has made his priorities and what he finds acceptable crystal clear.

Perhaps even more revealing are the comments of one Trump supporter included in the video, an older man who says he feels Trump is his last chance to "preserve the culture I grew up in."

Trump's supporters have defined themselves by their own words and actions.  If they do not like how Hillary, I and others describe them, then they need to take a good look at themselves and change their behavior.  Sadly, we all know that that will never happen.  Indeed, I'm sure to much of Trump's base, I just a "filthy faggot" - or worse.   

GOP Convention, Day 2 - Another Night of That Ought to Strike Fear

Watching the GOP convention, part of me keeps asking "how do people become this insane and blind to reality."  Then I remember that much of the GOP base consists of evangelical Christians which by definition means that one is not living in objective reality.  Add to that the Paul Ryan's of the GOP who would seemingly sell their mothers or daughters into prostitution in order to cling to power. Facts, the truth, and decency towards others simply no longer matter in today's Republican Party.  I find it mind numbing how decent people (including a number of our social friends) - apparently who refuse to pay attention to what is happening - continue to cling to the GOP when the party they remember no longer exists.  A column in the Washington Post looks at day to of the hate fest in Cleveland.  Here are highlights:

The second night of the GOP convention was like “1984,” periodically interrupted by infomercials for Trump wines. The evening started with an uncomfortable explanation of why the rules obliged Alaska to vote for Donald Trump and went downhill from there.

Supposedly the theme of the second night in Cleveland was “Make America Work Again.” Those were the words displayed behind the stage. That was what was announced. But judging by the speeches, the actual theme was “Make America Salem Again.” Or, “Don’t Worry! Hillary Clinton literally worships Lucifer, but on the bright side, Donald Trump’s winery makes excellent wine and his children love him!”

The night’s prime-time speakers included Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ben Carson.

Ryan’s speech was upbeat and cheerful. This seemed odd, given that he had just handed the nomination to someone whose words he had called “the textbook definition of racism,” but it quickly became apparent that this Paul Ryan was just visiting from another, happier timeline and had no idea what was happening around him. He spoke of the Republican Party as a lively, exciting, aspirational party of ideas . . .

Then Chris Christie took the stage. Christie had honed his speaking style in Salem, 1692, and he opened by announcing that he had seen Goody Clinton with the Devil. . . . “Let’s do something fun tonight,” Christie suggested: specifically, hold a mock trial of Clinton. The crowd loved this idea and began chanting “Guilty!” when prompted. 

Yes, this is the party of hope and fresh ideas, the one shouting, “GUILTY!” and “LOCK HER UP!” as it holds a mock trial of its opponent in absentia.

Fortunately, the next speaker was Tiffany Trump, who reassured us that her father had written encouraging messages on her report cards when she was young, so, I guess, that was good. I am just saying, for future reference, if you don’t want to give off a Possible Dictator vibe, having your children speak up on your behalf and say that you have always been very nice to them IS NOT ACTUALLY REASSURING. Dictators tend to be nice to dogs and children. 

Then Donald Trump Jr., took the stage. . . . He spoke inspiringly of a Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches, up-by-the-bootstraps tale. Unfortunately, he was supposed to be speaking about his father, Donald Trump. If there is the opposite of a Horatio Alger novel, it is Trump’s biography. This did not keep his son from complaining about the people with Harvard and Wharton degrees who had stood in the way of his father (who only has a Wharton degree). He lamented the “new aristocrats and self-satisfied people at the top,” apparently without irony, perhaps mistaking himself for someone who was not literally Donald Trump Jr.

Not to be outdone by Christie’s fantasy mob trial of Clinton, Ben Carson announced that he had seen Goody Clinton with the devil . . . .

And that was the second night. I did not think I would conclude my recap of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland by quoting Ramsay Bolton, but then again I did not think that the evening would include references to Lucifer, a mock trial of Hillary Clinton, conducted by Chris Christie, with loud cries of “GUILTY!” and, of course, praise of Trump wines.

But “if you think this has a happy ending,” as Ramsay Bolton said, “you haven’t been paying attention.”

Be very, very afraid.

Ted Cruz Appoints Anti-LGBT Activists to "Religious Liberty" Panel

Even as the GOP civil war rages, the efforts to pander to bigots and win votes by fanning hate by Republican presidential candidates also continues.  Not counting Donald Trump and his cozy relations ship with white supremacy groups and the KKK is Ted Cruz who has formed a ludicrously named "religious liberty" advisory panel filled with hate group leaders, anti-gay theocrats and Christian dominionists.  Obviously, Cruz's idea of religious liberty is a Christian theocracy.  Once again we see that Paul Ryan's claim that the GOP doesn't prey on people's prejudices is bullshit.  Oh, and by the way, Marco Rubio, a/k/a Marcobot has formed a similar Christofascist advisory board.  Here are details from The Advocate:

Republican presidential aspirant Ted Cruz has formed a “religious liberty” council for his campaign, filled with antigay activists including Tony Perkins, the Benham brothers, and Bishop Harry Jackson.

The council “seems intent on undermining LGBT rights,” the Washington Blade reports. Cruz announced the council’s formation Monday, the day before he won three of Super Tuesday’s 11 state Republican primaries and caucuses.

Cruz’s press release on the council didn’t mention LGBT issues, but it was clear that the council, which has the task of guiding his policies, would sympathize with government workers and business owners who don’t want to serve LGBT clients, especially same-sex couples seeking marriage-related goods and services.

“Increasingly, renegade government officials seek to coerce people of faith either to act in a manner that violates their faith or forfeit their career,” Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, said in the release. “When I am elected president, that will change.”

Perkins’s group, by the way, has been designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center, because of the damaging misinformation it spreads.

The Benham brothers, David and Jason, are real estate entrepreneurs who in 2014 saw their planned reality show scrapped by HGTV after outcry against their antigay views. Among other things, they have claimed that “homosexuality and its agenda” are “attacking the nation” and thatSatan is behind marriage equality. Their father, Flip Benham, is head of Operation Save America, an antigay and antichoice group that split off from Operation Rescue.

Jackson, a minister in the Washington, D.C., metro area, was a leading opponent of marriage equality in D.C. After the district adopted a marriage equality law in 2009, he sued — unsuccessfully — in an attempt to force a popular vote on the issue. He also has made antigay remarks such as “Folks who cannot reproduce want to recruit your kids.” Find the full list of the advisory council’s members here.

Another Republican presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, has formed a similar advisory group, with members including megachurch minister Rick Warren and lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group that often fights LGBT rights. 

I find Ted Cruz to be very, very scary.