“…all they [centrists / moderate Democrats] can do is bang their drum about what a racist bigot [Trump] is and hope they can catch him violating some technicality that will allow them to have him impeached or at least destroy his political clout.”
Every time someone fact checks Trump this is basically the sigh of despair I let out. “Oh no! A politician lied! Now we’ve got him by the balls! Such a naughty, naughty liar!”
In the meantime, they skip past what those lies are really doing: inciting people to violence.
He’s telling parables. Not Jesus parables that point to humanity and virtues like grace, humility, kindness, or liberation. Trump’s parables point to fear, scarcity, entitlement, division, and supremacy. Yet people are fact-checking him as if that in any way deflates the power of a parable.
Can you imagine being on the boat in the Sea of Galilee as Jesus told the parable of the sower, and having people return to shore and miss his point so magnificently that they call him out for clearly not having a command of the pH levels of the peat soils that predominate the nearby Hula Valley?
When Trump says migrants are eating kidnapped cats for dinner, he’s enraging people and inciting them to violence. But, sure, let’s conduct a community survey to trace lost cats and make note of how this is the 47,344th time he has been caught in a lie so we can take him on with that zinger.
Each time Trump gives his adherents a reason to want to kill or commit some other violent act toward a vulnerable person, the centrists ignore that moral felony and instead issue him a citizen’s ticket for lying as a politician. At this point, they’re basically accomplices. Or viewed most kindly, they’re unwitting dupes, enabling him by extending a form of clemency.
[Screw] fact checking. [Screw] the supremacist/mastery culture obsession with scientific accuracy in service of repressing those who testify to profound moral wrongs.
Trump’s not reporting news. Nobody really cares whether he’s sticking to the facts - except those who deflect from his true aims.
One of which is: he’s leading an angry mob. He wants many, many people to die. Human sacrifices to affirm his need to feel exalted.
And he’s getting away with that each time someone ignores that part to call him out as a lying politician.
Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.
Because today is the last day of my saleo, I thought I’d share the most popular images in some categories. Overturning is by far the most popular cartoon. 15 pur sent off use this on your way out: BF23.
It is amazing how conservative Christians can appeal to Jesus for views they themselves so heartily endorse. You may not know what the best-selling book on Jesus all time was. Was it a book by Albert Schweitzer? By one of the popes? By one of the famous late-twentieth-century biblical scholars? No, it was by Bill O’Reilly. Killing Jesus was the #1 book on the New York Time list in its very first week, and it remained on the list for a whopping 52 weeks. Nothing like this had ever happened with a Jesus book. (It completely overwhelmed in sales Reza Aslan’s Zealot released earlier that year.)
It’s an awful book, with no serious research or scholarship behind it, or evidence even of trying to do any. But my point here is about one of its central themes. O’Reilly (and his fellow author Martin Dugard; not hard to say who did most of the “work”) maintained that Jesus’ mission was largely directed against the Roman occupiers of the Promised Land. The Jews hated the occupation, and Jesus was completely opposed to it. The Empire had no business asserting its administrative, military, and cultural power over Judea and Galilee; and they certainly had no right to demand annual tribute to flow into the imperial coffers.
This was at the core of Jesus’ message. He wanted smaller government and lower taxes.
For many people, turning on the tap or flushing the toilet is something we take for granted. But a report released Monday, called “Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States,” shows that more than 2 million Americans live without these conveniences and that Native Americans are more likely to have trouble accessing water than any other group.
The nearest water station for Darlene Yazzie is 9 miles away at the Dennehotso Chapter House — a community center — in the Four Corners region of the Navajo Nation. On Tuesday, she counted her dimes and nickels to pay for water. It costs $1.10 plus gas money to fill up two 50-gallon barrels, and she has just been told the price is going up next month.
Yazzie lugged a T-shaped key as tall as her out to the well, where she dropped it down into the hole and turned the crank to open the valve.
Water gushed into the plastic barrel. A cool mist from a leak in the hose rained over her. This is Yazzie’s drinking water. For her animals, she usually drives to a windmill, but on this day it was empty and the sheep were thirsty.
“There’s no water in the windmill,” Yazzie said. “It’s dry because it’s not blowing. The only way they have water is if it’s blowing.”
Yazzie said the windmill water isn’t safe for humans anyway. Officials told her arsenic and uranium levels are too high. Yazzie and many others give the water to their animals, even though they plan to eat them.
Photo: Laurel Morales/KJZZ Caption: Darlene Yazzie typically hauls water from a windmill 5 miles from her house for her sheep. Officials tell her it’s unsafe for humans but OK for livestock.
