For the children

Putin's war appears to have claimed an unexpected victim in the relative tranquility of Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.  Natalia Aleksandrovna Hitchcock is accused of strangling her son Oliver, 8, and attempting to drown his eleven-year-old brother because she feared they would be kidnapped and tortured by the Russian government.  According to her husband, she showed no signs of mental instability until the invasion of Ukraine in February.  She was born in Russia.

One American child along with the thousands of Ukrainians killed, injured, orphaned and abducted in this war.  At Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region today, the Russians bombed the train station with a missile inscribed "For the children" and a series of cluster bombs, killing at least fifty people.  Yes, some were children.  From the Mariupol maternity hospital to the theater clearly marked "children" -- in Russian -- it's beyond question that Ukraine's children are deliberately targeted.  It is genocide, even when denied with numbing regularity, and even when Russians pretend to be avenging some imaginary crime against "Russian" children in Donetsk and the Donbas.

"Pedophile" (or "groomer") is the current term of abuse in the raging war of the right against the sane part of the population, an outgrowth of the QAnon obsession with trafficking and Hollywood liberals and their even more bonkers belief that Trump alone can fix it.  That may change now that Netflix viewers have been introduced to a real pedophile in Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story.  Before his death in 2011 the TV presenter was literally loved by millions and honored by the upper crust for his charity work.  It's true that he raised tens of millions for good causes while using his celebrity to gain access to the most vulnerable young people, hundreds of them still haunted by what Savile did to them.  Police worked hard to ignore the reports and rumors, though not as hard as the BBC.  British libel law kept them quiet -- who's going to believe reform school children when Margaret Thatcher is repeatedly demanding a knighthood for this creep?  At least one pope was bamboozled -- Jimmy was a good Catholic.

Sometimes they get caught younger.  The Q Qontinuum would have you believe that Democrats are pedophiles, so I don't expect them to comment on former RNC strategist and president of his college's Students For Life Ruben Verastigui, sentenced to twelve years in prison for possession of child pornography, the description of which is more than I wanted to know.  Raping and killing babies was but one of the fantasies this Ever-Trumper shared with Adam Hageman, an underling at Wilbur Ross's  Commerce Department.  Which is more disgusting, the random ravings of Empty Greene ("any Senator voting to confirm KBJ is pro-pedophile") or the reality of the sick right?

The Disney Corporation is the latest target of the sickness for its belated and very mild criticism of Florida's newest batch of anti-LGBTQ hate laws.  This automatically makes Uncle Walt a "groomer" and results in threats of boycott.  (The Southern Baptist Convention did that for eight years ending in 2005 with Disney as popular and prosperous as ever.  Pixar, Hulu, Disney+, ABC, ESPN, Lucasfilm, resorts and theme parks, I think they'll weather this brainfart.)  And just for laughs, Trump's coked-up eldest got involved today claiming that a picture of two cartoon mice is pornographic.  Another obsession of the right, the sex lives of the imaginary.  As Tom Lehrer observed long ago, "Filth...is in the mind of the beholder."  

Real children are in real jeopardy everywhere.  Stop grooming them for your Rightzi propaganda.  If you want to help children, vote for day care, free school lunches, Medicaid, prenatal screening and care, a higher minimum wage.  Vote against the six Congressional disgraces who couldn't even support a House resolution for the collection of evidence of Russian war crimes.  And the party they rode in on.