Filling in the blanks
How can a mega-church be a small business? By supporting Trump. The HuffPost managed to identify a number of religion purveyors who collected millions to see them through the pandemic hardship, when people were unable to drop their love offerings in the basket. Curiously, one of them is the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino, which will use our tax money to "pay staff wages and utility costs," and definitely not to settle claims from persons sexually abused by priests. That would be unethical. Most of the big-box churches refused to shut down or whined about the denial of "religious freedom" and then became loci for contagion, so one could ask why such selfishness should be financially rewarded. One could also point out that the Diocese is not a small business but a franchise of a multinational that takes in billions a year. Why can't the home office pay the staff and keep the lights on during this emergency?
My loathing for Trump's fake patriotism and vocal stylings has once again cost me: I was unaware that in addition to helping himself to Neil Young's music at the Rushmore outrage, he actually waddled on to "Garryowen," the theme song of Custer's Seventh Cavalry. Up yours, Injun protesters. (If they wanted to pretend it was a John Ford movie, "Red River Valley" is public domain and offends nobody.) The subsequent "Manifest Destiny" tweet leaves nothing to the racist imagination -- make America great initially by clearing out all the Mexicans and Indians. The incomparable Stephen Robinson reminds us that Manifest Destiny was also the foreign policy of a certain German chancellor: "There is only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins." Coincidence? Well, here's a fun fact: Hitler's personal train was called "Amerika." And to end with a joke, Trumpanzees shouted at the protesting Sioux to "go back where you came from." Thanks, I'm here all week, unfortunately.
No doubt the juicier parts of Mary Trump's book will be the ones that detail how he's basically a psychopath, but today I'm fixated on her revelation that he (probably Fred) paid a smart kid to take his Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). There goes one of my pet theories, about how he got into Fordham University for some remedial reading classes before transferring to Penn/Wharton. I always assumed Fred blackmailed Cardinal Spellman, who was rumored to move in the same social circles as Roy Cohn, if you know what I mean (not that there's anything wrong with that). But we also know why he bullied Fordham into keeping his grades secret (another job for bagman Michael Cohen). Pretty funny, considering all those tweets demanding to see Barack Obama's grades at Columbia and Harvard Law.
Every day the pandemic goes on, and we're only in the first wave, Trump does something to kill more people, from lying and denying to hustling quack cures to quitting the WHO and holding (relatively) crowded hate rallies. Today the candidate who shouted, "I love the poorly educated" became the official who tweeted, "SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!" with the fawning approval of the Secretary of Education who has spent four years wrecking the public schools, not to mention the governor of Florida, equally loyal and equally unconcerned by death. To cattle-prod the colleges, Trump proposes banning foreign students who don't (can't) physically attend classes, assuming they would flout their governments and risk their lives to study here at all.
Carsyn Davis won't be returning to school. The seventeen-year-old survived cancer and lived with an autoimmune disorder, so her parents must have thought she was immortal. They let her attend a large party of other maskless teens and, when she contracted covid, they dosed her with hydroxychloroquine. Now she is the youngest covid fatality in Lee County, Florida. No presidential tweet calling her "beautiful" and blaming China?
One thing at a time. Tammy Duckworth is being talked up as Joe Biden's running mate, and she was accused of "hating America" by Tucker Carlson because she seemed to suggest that racist monuments need to come down. He also called her "deeply silly" and implied she's only a senator because of her disability. She's also Thai-American, so it was a matter of time before the White Power Hour homed in on her. I've wondered how Trump managed to refrain from slandering Duckworth; she's also a woman, a Democrat and a veteran, which adds up to a quinella of hate for the man she named Cadet Bonespurs. In this instance, he handed off to Carlson. Carlson, go tuck yourself.
Trump has affairs of state to attend to, like declaring the display of the Confederate flag "freedom of speech." (Unlike painting BLACK LIVES MATTER in front of his Fifth Avenue firetrap, which is "hate speech.") Question: Would burning a Confederate flag constitute free speech? How about toppling a statue of a general who fought under said flag? You sure you want to get into this argument, Donzo? On the day we learn your SAT scores were a HOAX?
There is something about the battle flag of the losers that moves well-meaning people to "What the hell?" statements. Like this from the Marine Corps, banning it from all bases: "The Confederate battle flag has all too often been co-opted by violent extremist and racist groups whose divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps." I'm sorry, KKK, boogaloos, Dylann Roof and all the rest, when it comes to extreme racism y'all have got nothing on the Confederate States of America. They killed hundreds of thousands to preserve slavery. You will never catch up. "Co-opted"? The fuck?
In the face of so much unprecedented chaos, I can report that the usual chaos goes on. Over the holiday weekend, guns killed 160 people and wounded over 500. The urban hospitals look like dressing stations on the Somme in 1916. Can we somehow return to a condition of permanent lockdown, until we get this Second Amendment idiocy worked out?
My loathing for Trump's fake patriotism and vocal stylings has once again cost me: I was unaware that in addition to helping himself to Neil Young's music at the Rushmore outrage, he actually waddled on to "Garryowen," the theme song of Custer's Seventh Cavalry. Up yours, Injun protesters. (If they wanted to pretend it was a John Ford movie, "Red River Valley" is public domain and offends nobody.) The subsequent "Manifest Destiny" tweet leaves nothing to the racist imagination -- make America great initially by clearing out all the Mexicans and Indians. The incomparable Stephen Robinson reminds us that Manifest Destiny was also the foreign policy of a certain German chancellor: "There is only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins." Coincidence? Well, here's a fun fact: Hitler's personal train was called "Amerika." And to end with a joke, Trumpanzees shouted at the protesting Sioux to "go back where you came from." Thanks, I'm here all week, unfortunately.
No doubt the juicier parts of Mary Trump's book will be the ones that detail how he's basically a psychopath, but today I'm fixated on her revelation that he (probably Fred) paid a smart kid to take his Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). There goes one of my pet theories, about how he got into Fordham University for some remedial reading classes before transferring to Penn/Wharton. I always assumed Fred blackmailed Cardinal Spellman, who was rumored to move in the same social circles as Roy Cohn, if you know what I mean (not that there's anything wrong with that). But we also know why he bullied Fordham into keeping his grades secret (another job for bagman Michael Cohen). Pretty funny, considering all those tweets demanding to see Barack Obama's grades at Columbia and Harvard Law.
Every day the pandemic goes on, and we're only in the first wave, Trump does something to kill more people, from lying and denying to hustling quack cures to quitting the WHO and holding (relatively) crowded hate rallies. Today the candidate who shouted, "I love the poorly educated" became the official who tweeted, "SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!" with the fawning approval of the Secretary of Education who has spent four years wrecking the public schools, not to mention the governor of Florida, equally loyal and equally unconcerned by death. To cattle-prod the colleges, Trump proposes banning foreign students who don't (can't) physically attend classes, assuming they would flout their governments and risk their lives to study here at all.
Carsyn Davis won't be returning to school. The seventeen-year-old survived cancer and lived with an autoimmune disorder, so her parents must have thought she was immortal. They let her attend a large party of other maskless teens and, when she contracted covid, they dosed her with hydroxychloroquine. Now she is the youngest covid fatality in Lee County, Florida. No presidential tweet calling her "beautiful" and blaming China?
One thing at a time. Tammy Duckworth is being talked up as Joe Biden's running mate, and she was accused of "hating America" by Tucker Carlson because she seemed to suggest that racist monuments need to come down. He also called her "deeply silly" and implied she's only a senator because of her disability. She's also Thai-American, so it was a matter of time before the White Power Hour homed in on her. I've wondered how Trump managed to refrain from slandering Duckworth; she's also a woman, a Democrat and a veteran, which adds up to a quinella of hate for the man she named Cadet Bonespurs. In this instance, he handed off to Carlson. Carlson, go tuck yourself.
Trump has affairs of state to attend to, like declaring the display of the Confederate flag "freedom of speech." (Unlike painting BLACK LIVES MATTER in front of his Fifth Avenue firetrap, which is "hate speech.") Question: Would burning a Confederate flag constitute free speech? How about toppling a statue of a general who fought under said flag? You sure you want to get into this argument, Donzo? On the day we learn your SAT scores were a HOAX?
There is something about the battle flag of the losers that moves well-meaning people to "What the hell?" statements. Like this from the Marine Corps, banning it from all bases: "The Confederate battle flag has all too often been co-opted by violent extremist and racist groups whose divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps." I'm sorry, KKK, boogaloos, Dylann Roof and all the rest, when it comes to extreme racism y'all have got nothing on the Confederate States of America. They killed hundreds of thousands to preserve slavery. You will never catch up. "Co-opted"? The fuck?
In the face of so much unprecedented chaos, I can report that the usual chaos goes on. Over the holiday weekend, guns killed 160 people and wounded over 500. The urban hospitals look like dressing stations on the Somme in 1916. Can we somehow return to a condition of permanent lockdown, until we get this Second Amendment idiocy worked out?
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 6:05 PM
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