Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich (4) Thursday, Mar 2 2017 

Media and Politics , , , , victorgold 7:29 am

About Van Jones’ fawning praise of Tuesday night’s congressional speech:
Good career move. He’ll now be invited to lunch at the White House, lock in his
contract at CNN, and join Ben Carson and Don King as one of the Madman of
Mar-a-Lago’s favorite members of “those people.”

 

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich Friday, Feb 17 2017 

History and Politics , , victorgold 10:43 am

I have just finished reading Volker Ullrich’s recent biography of Hitler and came away with the impression that any comparison between the Fuehrer and Donald Trump is faulty because:

1. Though Hitler, like Trump, was a megalomaniacal narcissist, he sought adoration and acclaim in order to gain power, whereas Trump sought power in order to gain adoration and acclaim.

2. In his speeches before the Reichstag, Hitler did not constantly refer to the size of his election victory and Nuremberg rally crowds.

3. Asked about the rise in anti-Semitism throughout the country, Hitler did not reply that his son-in-law was Jewish and some of his best friends were Jews.

Sound bite to remember

“I don’t carry a pistol. It would slow me down if I wanted to run.”

— Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long (circa 1957)

 

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich (2) Saturday, Feb 4 2017 

Politics , victorgold 1:55 pm

Trump’s now claiming to be in the mold of the great populist Andrew Jackson. Really? If Jackson was Old Hickory, Trump must be Old Hackery.

 

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich Wednesday, Feb 1 2017 

Politics , , , , , , , , victorgold 5:50 pm

 

Two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, this much we know: If Trump were to issue an executive order suspending the first 10 amendments to the Constitution . . .

  1. Paul Ryan would issue a statement saying he was “deeply troubled” by the order but would withhold judgment until he had a chance to study it in full.
  2. Mitch McConnell would issue a statement expressing “concern” over the order’s effect on the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.
  3. John McCain and Lindsay Graham would issue a statement expressing “outrage” over the order and their intention to hold hearings on it as soon as they finished hearings on three other executive orders they were outraged about.
  4. Reince Priebus would issue a statement blaming CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post for reporting news of the order.
  5. Kellyanne Conway would issue a statement saying the election is over, Trump won, and the President’s critics ought to “shut up” and “get with the program.”
  6. Charles Krauthammer would write a column deploring the order, blaming it on Barack Obama for having set a precedent by issuing executive orders.
  7. Marco Rubio would make a speech saying while Trump’s order suspending the first 10 amendments was OK, “He’d better not mess with the Bill of Rights.”

 

Sound bite to remember

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side.

–James Russell Lowell

 

Twittering Abe Lincoln Friday, Jan 20 2017 

History and Politics , , , victorgold 7:30 pm

Selected tweets from our 16th President (1860-64)

November 1860:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Election won, BIGTIME! Whipped Steve Douglas, two other losers. Second win over Lyin’ Steve though Illinois Senate vote in ’58 was stolen

*                                  *                                  *

in rigged election. What a phony!

January 1861:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Southern clown Jeff Davis claiming my election not legitimate. OUTRAGEOUS! Looks like war. But

*                                  *                                  *

best way to stop spread of slavery is build a wall across Mason-Dixon Line and make rebels pay for it!

November 1862:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
McClellan turns out to be low-energy general. Told him, “You’re fired.” Probably will run against me in ’64 but he’s all talk, talk, talk, no action.

February 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Stanton-Seward arguing again. Should never have hired team of rivals. Totally embarrassing.

November 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Speech in Pennsylvania. Town called Gettysburg. Lousy staff work. Would draw bigger crowd in Philadelphia.

January 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Hired new general. Grant. Said to drink a lot but captured Vicksburg, wherever that is.

September 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Sherman marching through Georgia. He and Drunkie Grant claiming credit for winning war. RIDICULOUS! If I’d taken command myself

*                                  *                                  *

it would have been over two years sooner!

November 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Re-elected! HUGE win! Staff now talking about my legacy. Suggest face on five dollar bill and naming White House bedroom after me.

*                                  *                                  *

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Better idea. Face on Thousand Dollar bill, adding two floors and renaming building LINCOLN TOWER!

 

Sound Bite to Remember 

After a century and a half in business, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey will close down in May. They obviously decided they couldn’t compete with what’s going on in Washington the next four years.

–VG

 

PAGING JOE McCARTHY Tuesday, Dec 20 2016 

Ethics and History and Movies and Politics , , , victorgold 6:30 pm

Official GuidePost of the Alt-Center (2017-2021)

 

At last count, Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over Donald Trump was upward of 2.8 million votes. It would have been twice that number except for the millions of votes stolen by Russian hackers in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that would have made Clinton president-elect instead of Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian Candidate.

The second sentence of the above paragraph is untrue, the spurious kind of “fact” we’d be getting from Trump’s early morning tweets if the outcome on November 8 had been reversed. However, anyone who wants to pass it on through the internet is free to do so. There’s no point leaving the field of social media fabrication open to Michael Flynn’s pizza-porn crackpots.

Flynn, as you know, is the retired Army general picked by Trump to be his national security adviser. Among the general’s credentials for the job: He was the honored guest, seated next to Putin himself, at a Kremlin gala sponsored by the Russian propaganda channel RT, which Flynn gratuitously compared to CNN (much like George Patton’s 1945 equivalence of the Nazi party with the Democrats and Republicans, which got Patton removed as commander of the Third Army).

Leonid Brezhnev, Putin’s Communist boss when he served as a spymaster in the KGB, has to be chortling in his grave at the prospect of a White House national security advisor who takes luxury junkets to Moscow paid for by the Kremlin. And now, if the autocrat in Trump Tower has his way, we can look forward to a Secretary of State so much in bed with the Russian dictator he’s been bemedalled as a member of the Russian Order of Friendship.

And what exactly are Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic credentials? As CEO of ExxonMobil he’s spent the better part of recent years wheeler-dealing across the globe not on behalf of American interests but those of his multinational corporation. Not that the country’s interests and ExxonMobil’s coincide. But when they diverge – as when the State Department imposed sanctions on Russia after its takeover of Crimea – Tillerson earned his Order of Friendship medal by lobbying Congress and the State Department to lift those sanctions.

So we’ve come to this. Who would have thought, in the dim, distant days of the Cold War when Joe McCarthy was warning about Communist agents in the State Department, that it wouldn’t be a liberal Democrat but a Republican president who’d open the White House doors to a Russian dictator trained by the KGB?

And what would Tailgunner Joe be saying on the Senate floor at this point? I can see him railing about General Flynn’s dining with Putin (“a disgrace to the uniform”) and Rex Tillerson’s ties to Russian oligarchs (“an enemy within”). And on hearing the latest poll that shows no fewer than four out of 10 Republicans now have a “favorable” view of the Russian dictator, labeling them (as he did the Democrats at the GOP convention in 1952) “the party of treason.”

Sound bite to remember (by those gullible “anti-globalists” who voted for Putin’s poodle):

“There are no nations. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and ATT and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

–from the motion picture “Network,” Arthur Jensen’s (played by Ned Beatty) corrective lecture to Howard Beale (Peter Finch)

 

 

 

Uncivil War Sunday, Nov 13 2016 

History , , victorgold 8:52 pm

As a candidate, Donald Trump said the election would be rigged and refused to say he’d accept its outcome. His followers threatened to take to the streets and start a “revolution” if he wasn’t elected. Now his campaign manager calls for national unity and complains because Clinton supporters have taken to the streets and refused to accept the outcome of an election in which their candidate won a plurality of the popular vote.

What went around in Trump’s mob-inciting anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic, racist, misogynistic, campaign has come around in its aftermath. We are at the beginning of an Uncivil War which, like the Civil War a century and a half ago, is likely to last four years.

Don’t say we weren’t warned.

Soundbite to remember
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
–Edmund Burke

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »