Donald Trump Bloviates in Virginia Beach

GOP windbag and liar in chief Donald Trump appeared before a small crowd in Virginia Beach and gave another one of his substance free speeches that played on white fears of minorities and implied that he's favor creating an even more oppressive police state.   The supposed purpose of the appearance was to address issues facing the military in this region of Navy, Army and Air Force bases.  For the most part, it turned out to be Trump's usual race based and anti-trade message.  Here are details from the Virginian Pilot: 

Calling himself “the law and order candidate,” Republican presidential contender Donald Trump said Monday that police need more authority to protect the public but acknowledged a growing problem of racial unrest.

Trump told a crowd of about 175 supporters in a Westin Town Center hotel ballroom that he had intended to focus his afternoon speech on his proposals to assist military veterans but changed his speech after Thursday’s ambush and killing of five Dallas police officers and wounding of 10 others. Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who introduced him, both argued for a stronger national focus on law enforcement.

“It’s time for our hostility against our police and against all members of law enforcement to end, and end immediately – right now,” Trump said. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country.”

The presumptive GOP nominee said the violence and resulting protests highlight a growing threat of racial unrest.

“I think it’s a bigger problem than people understand. I think it’s far bigger than President Obama wants to admit,” Trump said. “He doesn’t want to admit it because it’s taking place during his administration. I mean, when you have 11 cities absolutely ready to blow up over the last three or four days – and it could very well get worse. I mean we’re just going into the summer.”

The New York businessman said he could help solve those problems by blocking U.S. companies from moving operations overseas and keeping more jobs here.

Lamenting the persistent problems of veterans snagged in the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy, Trump promised a deep investigation as soon as he takes office. Among his proposed VA changes: Eligible veterans would be able to get VA-paid medical care from any doctor or medical facility rather than just the VA hospital system.

Acknowledging Hampton Roads’ dependence on defense spending, Trump said in the interview that he’ll release a detailed plan before the Nov. 8 election, outlining how he’ll grow the size of the military. It will include more personnel, more ships, more aircraft and other equipment, he said

Three hours before his speech, three former military officers who support Clinton spoke out against Trump outside the hotel.

“Donald Trump has said so many things over the years that are just so utterly insulting to the men and women who serve our country,” said Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel and unsuccessful 2015 state Senate candidate. “He calls our military ‘a disaster.’ ”
During the candidate’s stop, dozens of people stood outside the front entrance of The Westin.  The number of signs for and against him was about equal.
 

Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear

Donald Trump supporters - in addition to being noted for their low educational levels in many cases - are defined by their fear: fear of blacks, fear of immigrants, fear of modernity and fear of the erosion of their perceived white privilege.  Sadly, Trump, a reality TV/carnival barker, seems to know how to use these fears and ignorance to whip up the allegiance of those who resent others and see a threat under every bush - and behind every non-white face.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's cynical use of fear mongering that has parallel's with Hitler's use of fear of internal and external enemies to get his followers to ignore the growing fascist takeover that was underway.  Here are column excerpts:

Among the volley of lies spit out of the coarse mouth of Donald Trump on a daily basis is his claim that he’s leading Hillary Clinton in the general election matchup for president. “I beat Hillary in many of the polls that have been taken, and each week I get better and better,” he said earlier this month.

Nope, not even close. The Bloomberg Poll that came out on Wednesday had Clinton besting Trump, 54 percent to 36. The Wall Street Journal survey had Clinton up by 13. She leads by 10 in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And she’s up 11.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of all the polls. With each passing week he actually does much worse.

So, rest assured, yes? At the least, our country won’t be in the undersize hands of a crazed narcissist. I wish. What keeps millions of people up at night is the one-trick pony that Trump could ride all the way into the White House: fear. If enough Americans cower in hysteria, Trump might be able to pull this thing off. Without a filter of decency or a shred of diplomacy, Trump gloated about how the latest mass murder by the Islamic State barbarians helped him. . . . . [He] said the fear cast by Islamic State terror “is probably why I’m No. 1 in the polls.” 

Let’s pause to behold a rare Trump acknowledgment of a bit of truthiness: The more people who are murdered by the savages from the Islamic State, the better it is for him. The Islamic State is a gift to Trump. And he is a gift to them, playing into the grand scheme of the killers. He would make the world far less safe, and bring the Islamic State closer to the global clash of worlds that those monsters desire. Paris — the slaughter of 130 people in November. 

In Trump’s telling, it was a wonderful turning point for him. “Paris happened, and Paris was a disaster,” he said. “And what happened with me is this whole run took on a whole new meaning.” From there, he lumped Paris, the Mexican border and the Syrian refugee crisis in one big rancid stew of fear. He ran dark and spooky television ads, including some in Arizona last week, showing Islamic terrorists, a picture of the Moroccan border that was supposed to be Mexico, and his promise to build the wall. In the wake of Brussels, he again said the United States should “close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going on” and ramp up the torture of terror suspects. 

It gets tedious reminding people that Trump’s ideas on how to stop terror have nothing to do with the problem, but let’s give it another go. The Paris killers are not — repeat, not — Syrian refugees. Nor are they from Mexico. They are Belgian and French citizens, criminals and thugs, radicalized in the festering tenements of Brussels. The biggest wall in the world cannot prevent hatred from taking over a malleable mind, aided by Internet poison. 

As for torture, numerous military experts have concluded that it yields little useful information, and of course violates international conventions signed by the United States. 

[T] he Republican front-runner exposed himself, again, as someone who is monumentally ill prepared to be commander in chief. He listens only to himself, as he said this month, and what his gut tells him is that his only path to the White House is to do everything he can to make people feel very afraid.

Refusing to Give in to Fear

As regular readers  know, back in May of this year the husband and I and three friends spent a week in Paris and journeyed all over the city, including to points mere blocks from some of the sites that witnessed carnage last Friday.  I hear some saying that they won't be going to Paris any tie soon or may avoid going to Europe all together - which is precisely what the ISIS connected terrorists want.  They want to impose fear and they want to replace freedom and openness with fear and disrupted lives.   By giving into fear or by using fear mongering to exacerbate hostility to Muslims for self-promotion, those included to embrace fear and despicable Republican politicians are doing exactly what ISIS wants.  I for one would go back to Paris in a heart beat - I have a higher risk of being  victim of gun violence here in America.   A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to understand.

Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization.” No, it isn’t. It’s an organized attempt to sow panic, which isn’t at all the same thing. And remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists’ cause.

Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong.

It would certainly be a very bad thing if France or other democracies responded to terrorism with appeasement . . . .

A much bigger risk, in practice, is that the targets of terrorism will try to achieve perfect security by eliminating every conceivable threat — a response that inevitably makes things worse, because it’s a big, complicated world, and even superpowers can’t set everything right. On 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told his aides: “Sweep it up. Related and not,” and immediately suggested using the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq. The result was a disastrous war that actually empowered terrorists, and set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

[P]eople can and do exploit terrorism for political gain, including using it to justify what they imagine will be a splendid, politically beneficial little war. 

Oh, and whatever people like Ted Cruz may imagine, ending our reluctance to kill innocent civilians wouldn’t remove the limits to American power. It would, however, do wonders for terrorist recruitment.

Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues.  

Paris may have changed that calculus a bit, especially when it comes to Europe’s handling of refugees, an agonizing issue that has now gotten even more fraught. And there will have to be a post-mortem on why such an elaborate plot wasn’t spotted. But do you remember all the pronouncements that 9/11 would change everything? Well, it didn’t — and neither will this atrocity.

Again, the goal of terrorists is to inspire terror, because that’s all they’re capable of. And the most important thing our societies can do in response is to refuse to give in to fear.

GOP Is Using Black Lives Matter to Scare Whites Into Voting for Them

Sadly, among the base of today's Republican Party, black lives do not matter.  For that matter, neither do LGBT lives or the lives of those who are non-white and/or non-right wing Christian.  Yet, in typical form, the GOP presidential candidates are trying to whip up fear about crime and drive white voters - who they desperately need in higher and higher percentages - to vote Republican.  In many cities, police forces are out of control in terms of the unnecessary level of violence they use.  And sadly, blacks are often the targets of this excessive force.  By whipping up fear over crime, the GOP seeks to change the topic and push votes its way.  It's obscene, but then again, so is today's GOP.  Here are highlights from a piece in Slate:

Almost everyone has something to demagogue in the 2016 Republican primary. For Donald Trump, it’s Latino immigration, and Mexican migrants in particular. For Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, it’s the nuclear deal with Iran; for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, it’s the Kim Davis affair in Kentucky, where a county official was jailed for refusing to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples; and for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, it’s crime.

That may seem like a strange choice, given broad trends. National rates of violent crime are down to their lowest levels in a generation, with steep drops in gun homicide among all groups. And while violence is still a problem for isolated, low-income black Americans, the overall portrait is good: Twenty years after the crime waves of the 1990s, American cities and metropolitan areas are as safe as they’ve ever been.

Long-term trends can obscure short-term variations, however, and there’s contested evidence that we’re in the middle of a violent crime spike, sparked by a so-called Ferguson effect where less aggressive policing—fueled by “Black Lives Matter” protests—encourages criminals.
[H]umans are built to see patterns in unrelated events, and the crime increase—plus a rash of high-profile shootings aimed at police officers—has brought new partisan attacks on Black Lives Matter, even while 2015 stands as an unusually safe year for police officers, so far. “In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric,” wrote Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in an op-ed last week, citing “demonstrations and chants where people describe police as ‘pigs’ and call for them to be ‘fried like bacon.’ ” Walker was referring to a small group of protesters in Minnesota who by all accounts are unrepresentative of the larger movement.

A struggling Christie—who, along with Huckabee and Cruz, lags far behind in the polls—has picked up on this, and run with it. On Tuesday, during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the New Jersey governor slammed Democrats on crime. “It’s the liberal policies in this city that have led to the lawlessness that’s been encouraged by the president of the United States,” he said. “And I’m telling you, people in this country are getting more and more fed up.”

With crime and killings in the news, Democrats may be vulnerable to claims of indifference or even encouragement, given their support for Blacks Live Matter. Indeed, this violence threatens the whole project for criminal justice reform.

By blaming Obama and Black Lives Matter for an increase in crime or new attacks on police officers, they’re working to conjure the fear and uncertainty of the ’80s and ’90s—when violent crime was at an all-time high—and capitalize on them. And it’s worth noting the extent to which these appeals come at the same time that Republicans need to increase their share of the white vote to win a national majority. It’s no accident, . . . 

Gay Marriage: A Coming Watershed in Irish History

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been a dominant force in Ireland.  The drive for home rule in the 1800's was fueled by Catholics and Catholicism.  Now, with a referendum on legalizing same sex marriage set for May 22, 2015, the Catholic Church may be about to see its power and influence repudiated.  With surveys showing a majority of citizens in favor of marriage equality and every major political party, unions, and other civic organizations supporting a "Yes" vote, the Church finds itself resorting to what it has used in the past to try to force its will on the populace: lies and fear mongering.   A piece in The Guardian looks at the situation.  Here are highlights from the first article:

When Enda Kenny, the taoiseach of Ireland, recently announced that 22 May would be his preferred day for a referendum on marriage equality, an already drawn out campaign finally had a date. In May, Ireland could become the first country in the world to pass marriage equality by a popular, national vote.

To get this far is nothing short of a phenomenal achievement. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1993; the Civil Partnership Act passed in 2010. The dedication of LGBT rights groups has changed hearts and minds. And now, Ireland is staging a referendum that enjoys support from all major political parties and the majority of the public, something unimaginable just a decade ago.

The broad support for marriage equality has the no campaign on the back foot. It’s no surprise that the most vehement opposition comes from the Catholic church and small lobby groups acting as foot soldiers in what they perceive as a battle of ideologies, rather than the progression of civil rights.
Already, the no side has confused the debate by focussing on children, as opposed to consenting adults seeking the right to marry. Repetitive statements about “denying” children mothers and fathers are red herrings and at odds with Ireland’s social reality, where one-third of children are raised outside the traditional heterosexual, married family structure..

The actor Colin Farrell has emerged as a passionate advocate.

 The problem for the church is its depleted moral authority. With support and facts in short supply, the no campaign is using another powerful referendum campaign weapon: fear.

The bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran, said recently that gay people can get married, just to people of the opposite sex. “There is nothing wrong with being nice to them,” he said, “but that is not what the referendum is about.”

Factual inaccuracies and stridency are off-putting, not to mention offensive, but within the Irish media, there is a sort of paranoia about “balance” and giving equal air time to both sides of the debate. This is, after all, a country where the national broadcaster, RTE, still broadcasts the Angelus twice a day.

For now, the campaign is tentatively taking shape and the yes side is acutely aware of complacency. The world will be watching Ireland in the lead-up to May’s referendum. If the Irish electorate seizes this opportunity, it won’t just be a local victory, it could be the watershed moment the global movement for marriage equality has been waiting for.

I sincerely hope that the "yes" vote forces work hard to turnout marriage equality voters to send the Church a strong message that its days of power and authority are over and that Ireland will no longer be duped by lies, fear mongering and the embrace of ignorance.

Scaremongering Begins Ahead of Ireland Vote on Marriage Equality

Christian elements in Ireland - using that term loosely, especially in regard to the morally bankrupt  Catholic Church - have begun a scaremongering campaign in advance of the vote in May that would legalize same sex marriage in the former bastion of Catholicism.  Among the slogans being used is "Should children be exposed to the sound of sodomy" (I'm not sure what those sounds might be) and other phrases denigrating gays and depicting gays as child predators.  Gay Star News looks at the anti-gay effort to impose one set of religious belief on all citizens.  Here are highlights:

With a referendum due in Ireland in May on the issue of same-sex marriage, campaigning between opposing factions is intensifying.

Although early opinion polls estimated that 70% of the country supported equal marriage, in the last fortnight, several Government politicians have said that the vote could me much closer than previously anticipated, and that LGBT campaigners cannot afford to be complacent.

Now, in a controversial twist that has set Twitter alight, a Christian group has found itself widely mocked for producing pamphlets encouraging people to vote against same-sex marriage.

Why? Because, according to the group’s literature, children must be protected from ‘the sounds of sodomy’.

In the pamphlet, titled ‘Should children be exposed to the sounds of sodomy?’, the group says that, ‘it’s time for Christians of conscience to examine the dire consequences for the innocent if homosexuals are given access to the sacrament of marriage.’

Should children be exposed to this beastly obsession with unholy acts? Should the sounds of sodomy echo in the halls of a Christian home?’

The leaflets were reportedly handed out yesterday in Dublin. . . . the pamphlet elicited a huge backlash on social . . . 

Can't you feel the "Christian love"?   I'd say that children are better off hearing the sound of sodomy than being indoctrinated with the hate, bigotry and ignorance that passes for Christian belief.