Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples...

-Donald J. Trump, ruminating on The Central Park Five in the pre-trial advertisements that he placed in 4 New York papers at a cost of $85,000 in order to call for their execution of the accused and whip up public sentiment against them. They were eventually exonerated after years behind bars.*

Trump was a racist in 1989 and he's a racist now. Back in the 1970s, he and his KKK father lost discrimination cases when they refused to rent their apartments to people of color. It's safe to say that Donald J. Trump was born a racist and will die a racist. Yet, there are republican assholes (That's redundant, I know) who will still tell you that Trump isn't a racist even though he has continued to blatantly prove it every day. No doubt the majority of them consider the daily manifestations of his mental illness to be a bonus attribute. In my personal experience, I have found that Republicans will claim that they aren't racists even though they happily vote for a racist like Trump. At best, it's just not a deal breaker for them which, in my book, means they are supporters of racism and that makes them racist by definition.

Here in New York, I've encountered republican people who, like me, lived in this city during the time of the brutal Central Park Five rape and beating case. When confronted with Trump's virulent racist position on the case, they disingenuously claim that they've never heard about it even though it was about as big of a local story as it could possibly be for not just days, but months. It was a media firestorm on a monstrous scale. You could not escape it. The story was a horror made even worse by the horror of the dubious arrest of "the five" who, after serving up to 13 years in jail, were found to be innocent, exonerated by DNA tests. A big reason why the Central Park Five (five young male New Yorkers of color, ages 14 to 16) went through everything they went through and served time was the lynch mob frenzy whipped up by a pathetic excuse of a fake Democratic clown of a mayor named Ed Koch, and others, not the least of which were the shady aforementioned racist real estate developer named Donald J. Trump, (aka the self-proclaimed "least racist person in the room" who wouldn't even be the least racist person at a KKK or Gestapo meeting), and various republican radio talk show goons. Mississippi had nothing on New York City in 1989.

I mentioned one Democrat, the late Ed Koch, but too many present day Democrats will tell you, even to your face, that not all Trump supporters are racists. I've liked a lot of what Michael Moore has had to say on various topics very much over the years, but even he is one of those. Sorry, Michael. That's just not how I see it, but, hey, not to worry, most Democratic politicians are more tolerant and lenient than you when it comes to Republican racists (There I go, being redundant, again). I expect little or nothing from the political class because politicians are working parts of the corporatist system that masquerades as our government. They are of the system, by the system, and, sadly, for the system continuing along its merry bullshit ways. They do it out of love for a fetid gumbo of expediency, naivete, love of power, love of the dialing for dollars game, and politics. It's the system they embrace and addict themselves to because they lack the desire or intellect to be or act any other way. All of that trickles down on us like cold piss. No wonder we have a golden showers president. It was inevitable.

Some turkeys will tell you that the country has been the way it is now since Reagan. Yeah, until Trump came along, Ronnie Raygun was surely a candidate for worst president ever, right up there with James Buchanan, Dubya, and a dirty handful of others, but it was "the system" that not only allowed Reagan to get to the White House but promoted him for the job, and it was in place log before him. He started on that path as a grossly un-American witness for the ironically named House Un-American Activities Committee's 1947 blacklisting inquisition. Reagan was simply the accelerant used by the arsonist architects of the wave of fascism on which we are trying to surf without drowning.

A system governed by American ideals instead of our long-living corrupt American reality would have rightly crushed him like the roach that he was either then or while he was still just the Governor of California calling for bloodbaths like Nixon before him and Trump now. Those blacklist hearings were the corrupt American system showing what a cancer it is live on radio and TV 70 years before it opened the doors of the White House to a psychotic goon like Trump. The same system that gave Reagan a supportive platform gave the same one to Trump just as it gave us Jim Crow voter suppression in the post Civil War years. Today's republicans have become masters of voter suppression to an extent that would make the original Jim Crow advocates envious. All that's missing are the lynchings, and if you think any Republicans you know wouldn't join in or at least quietly acquiesce to that right now, guess again. I hear these people talk and I hear the silence of the others. Which is louder? It doesn't matter. Any one of them will gladly put on the armband if Trump or some other party leader gives them the sign. We are at that point right now.

Tonight's meme was created by The Revolutionary Communist Party. That may upset some people but, when a void is left by the two-party system, others will step in. So, blame those who created the void. If you look at the newspaper on the left side of the meme, you'll see that the system I'm talking about goes back a lot further than the last several decades. In fact, it goes back further than that newspaper to 1619 and has even older roots. Sure, our African-American friends and neighbors are no longer defined as 3/5ths human like they were in the "originalist" version of the Constitution but how are they (or any of us) considered by those pulling the strings in reality? African-Americans may now be considered "fully human" but people like Trump, McConnell, Carlson and everyone who backs them, supports them and votes for them are pushing back on that idea with everything they have. They long for the "good old days," hence their adoption of Confederate flags as their own, mixed in with the all too frequent swastika flag, of course. The engine of slavery was money and hate just as the engine of fascism is. It's a symbiotic relationship driven by the same forces that drove the 1933 attempt to overthrow FDR and the same forces that are now attempting to install a Trumpian dictatorship. Joe Biden is a secondary choice. How do you take your coffee? Dark or light?

The Revolutionary War of the 18th century was about tyranny but it was also about pieces of the pies. This corporatist system is in our nation's mental DNA. With the general population turning browner, we need to change that mental DNA for all of our sakes, fast, or this nation will cease to be. A positive mutation is long overdue.


*To this day, virulent racist that he is, Donald J. Trump refuses to admit he was wrong about The Central Park Five. In fact, he doubled down in a 2014 Op-Ed published in the New York Daily News where he called the exoneration and settlement "a disgrace."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

It's long past time for America to realize that Supreme Court Justice John Roberts is the Stephen Miller of the court. That doesn't mean he is the only anti-voting rights judge on the court. There are others and right now it looks like their number is about to grow by one more. But, Justice Roberts is their leader. He has devoted his life to the decimation of voting rights for selected citizens and we know who is at the top of that list. Conservatives may have changed their names and party affiliations over the decades but they haven't changed their targets. If Trump's spoken plans to take the election to the Supreme Court come to pass, Robert's position on suppression and ballot counting will be key.

Roberts started his career at the Supreme Court as a clerk for Justice William Rehnquist, one of the most arch conservitive judges to ever plague the court. Then, in 1981, at age 26, Roberts took a job as one of Reagan Attorney General William French Smith's aides. He was then chosen to make the case against our voting rights laws which were up for renewal and fine-tuning at the time. He was a perfect choice for such an evil.

The voting rights act that Roberts was so dedicated to overturning even as a young man was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law dismantled much of the post reconstruction era Jim Crow law system that blocked millions of American citizens of color from exercising their right to vote, especially but not exclusively in the states that, to this day, celebrate their heritage of being members of the Confederacy and fighters for repression and slavery. Jim Crow made many citizens pay "unique" poll taxes; guess the number of marbles or beans in a jar, recite poems they'd never heard before, and subject themselves to endless other indignities when they showed up to vote. This is what Roberts wanted to continue and wants to no doubt fully restore. Nowhere was that desire more evident than in the Roberts-led Supreme Court 2013 decision to finally gut the Voting Rights Act with Roberts leading the way by disingenuously saying the law was no longer needed since, in his opinion, racism is over. How's that for a big transparent screen to hide behind? He might as well have said that Black Lives Don't Matter since that has obviously always been his thinking anyway. Since the infamously immoral 2013 decision, every state with a typically racist republican legislature has moved to put Jim Crow style voter suppression rules back into place. And, of course, we haven't seen a bit of racism in our society since 2013, right?

Vote suppression and the twisted use of the Supreme Court have been two of the pillars of Republican Party strategies to win elections. There is no better example than the Bush Crime Family's strategy in Florida for the 2000 presidential election when Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, under the direction of Jeb Bush, did more than get rid of votes. She purged extreme numbers of voters from the rolls, thus taking away their ability to vote to begin with. The key determination usually used in such things is race and it seems that Harris removed names that "sounded African-American." In 2000, the Bush vs. Gore decision damaged the Supreme Court's credibility. This year, Trump is steering the court like a Titanic heading for a killer iceberg. Republicans across the country have already spent up to $20,000.000 to back up the voter suppression mechanics that they have previously put in place.

President Trump and his party are now pushing the envelope well beyond what was done 20 years ago. This time, purging and voter suppression tactics aren't enough to satisfy their plans for a white nationalist fascist dictatorship. The Republican Party's Dear Leader is openly calling it his "Get Rid Of The Ballots" strategy. It's Bolivian. It's Putinesque. It's however you want to call it. It's the deliberate final nail in the coffin of our long decaying Democracy. It is the Republican Party sum total be all and end all platform for 2020 and they hope to have the Roberts Supreme Court decide this year's election in their favor. Trump is being so bald-faced about this that he has publicly said that that is why he wants his new nominee confirmed immediately and you can bet that a commitment to rule in his favor on election matters and any other matters before the court was clearly made to be a qualification for being the nominee during the interviews. His record of demanding loyalty before country is well recorded. Just ask Jim Comey. Trump is a kiss the ring mobster and he plans on having one more immoral judge that will see things his way so he can consolidate power just like his pals Putin, Duterte, and Kim did it.

Our psychopathic president has made his plans obvious at least since his "president for life" statement 3 years ago. Now he is openly calling for getting rid of ballots and he's not just counting on Louis DeJoy's efforts at the USPS. He's got the sleaziest Attorney General of all time, William Barr, corrupting and commanding the entire so-called Justice Department to work overtime on finding ways to make our votes "disappear like a miracle."

Make no mistake. This has been the long term Republican Party strategy for decades. The proof of that is in the fact that, as I write this Friday morning, nary a peep or anything above a vague whisper of objection to this "Get Rid Of The Ballots" strategy has been heard coming from the mouths of Republicans anywhere in this country. There's no shock there. When they were against impeaching Trump and embracing Putin and his cash, they showed their colors. They've had days to object to Trump's recent public revelation of his plan to stay in office. There has been no patriotic, country first screaming from the rooftops. They are what they are.

By the way, I recently saw Chucky Schumer on MSNBC where he described Roberts as a "moderate." He did it with a straight face even though he was decrying the repbulican steal the election strategy. He is not alone. Many democrats and media hacks refer to Roberts as a "moderate." That just goes to show how far to the right the Democratic Party has moved in the past 50 years in a grotesque and nearly futile effort to keep up with the Republicans. As we all should know by now, that leads nowhere but to oblivion.