Tag: hypocrisy

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The Black Nazi — Ruckus has met his match—and more

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 19th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Fans of the old “Boondocks” TV animated show no doubt remember Uncle Ruckus. In a series renowned for its unblinking, razor-sharp satire of race and racial relations in America, Ruckus stood out as one of the most challenging characters. Obese, slovenly, and an absolute bigot, Ruckus was perhaps the most memorable element in a show filled with brilliant characters.

Ruckus was, to all appearances, an African American. However, he claimed (and presumably believed) that he was actually a white Irish-American who suffered from “reverse vitiligo,” which turned his skin black.

According to Wikipedia, “Ruckus constantly hurls racism at all things black. On being asked if he supports the use of the word “nigga“, he says, ‘No, I don’t think we should use the word, and I’ll tell ya why. Because niggas have gotten used to it, that’s why. Hell, they like it now. It’s like when you growin’ crops and you strip the soil of its nutrients and goodness and then you can’t grow nothin’. You gotta rotate your racist slurs. Now I know it’s hard ’cause ‘nigga’ just rolls off the tongue the way sweat rolls off a nigga’s forehead, but we cannot let that be a crutch. Especially when there are so many fine substitutes: spade, porch monkey, jiggaboo. I say the next time you gonna call a darkie a nigga, you call that coon a jungle bunny instead.’” Well, OK then.

Ruckus routinely says things about black people that most Americans haven’t heard since the 1960s.

It’s a sign of the absolute genius of show creator Aaron MacGruder that Ruckus is actually a relatable character who sometimes is even sympathetic. His mother was a severely damaged woman who internalized feeling of inferiority and self-disgust emerging as self-hating racism. His father was an violent and abusive drunk whose rampages cost a young Ruckus his eye. For all his vicious racism, he was capable of kindness and generosity, including to the protagonists in the Freeman family, all black.

I’ve referred to some African Americans in the Trump orbit as Ruckuses before: Clarence Thomas, Herschel Walker, a couple of others that Bartcop used to call “lawn jockeys.”

But none of those unworthies even came as close to Ruckus-hood like North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson has come.

Robinson not only matches Ruckus in his speech (he referred to Martin Luther King Jr as “Martin Lucifer Coon”) but actually sinks below Ruckus in his vileness and horrific self-image. CNN blew the doors off his long and extremely sordid long-lived role in the resident porn community. Starting with a grandiose claim that Ruckus, in his worst possible moment, couldn’t approach. He described himself as “a black Nazi.” It turns out that his utter hatred for transexuals and “immoral” people such as gays or liberals is an utter sham: He’s a huge fan of transexual porn.

He was already widely known as a porn-dog of long standing, and already had a long resume of dark and incendiary statements including mass killings of various groups of people. In normal times, no self respecting political party would hire him as a janitor, let alone as the candidate for governor.

But these aren’t normal times. Trump took him under his wing, once praising him as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” The GOP, having thrown away any and all pretense of integrity, ethics, common sense or patriotism, went along docilely.

Just for some perspective, Christine O’Donnell saw her political career end when she felt it necessary to deny she was a witch. Bill Clinton was impeached for fibbing about having sex with a consenting adult. Obama endured weeks of abuse for wearing a tan suit. Bush Junior had a questionable service in the Texas Air National Guard. Dennis Hastert retired in disgrace for actions that these days would put you in charge of the House Judiciary Committee.

The standards of the GOP have fallen from sleazy and contemptible to outright nihilistic and demented.

But today’s reports on Robinson were a bridge too far, it seems. Tonight, there are widespread demands for Robinson to drop out of the governor’s race since his very presence will damage the party in an important swing state. Without North Carolina, GOP chances of winning the White House are effectively zero.

But there’s a couple of problems as of 6:20 pm PDT. First, Robinson denies all the stories despite overwhelming evidence (he even claimed they were written by AI, which apparently has the ability to travel back in time over more than a decade to post in his identity), and refuses to leave the race. Second, the GOP face a deadline after which Robinson’s name must remain on the ballot as absentee ballots go out. That deadline is in about 158 minutes: midnight Eastern Time, 9pm here.

For the GOP, it’s pretty much an unwinnable situation. Should Robinson withdraw, they have virtually no time at all to pick a sacrificial lamb to replace him on the ballot. He would surely lose (Robinson was trailing by 18 points anyway) but it would minimize damage to the rest of the party, including Trump, in a state that should have been solid red but was teetering before this happened.

If Robinson stays, the Democrats are going to waste no time running ads showing Trump calling Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Yes, Trump said that in front of cameras.

Robinson deserves what’s coming to him, and so does Trump.

But if there is anything else good coming from this, it may cause many more Republicans to realize the sick and disgusting poison that has taken over their party, and begin to resist.

I’ll hold off until 9 to finish this. I suspect it may sound the death knell for Trump. We shall see.

Whelp, the magic hour has passed, Robinson is still in the race, and both the Harris Campaign and the Lincoln Project have their first ads out.

Trump is going to be wearing Robinson as his own personal codpiece for the next seven weeks.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of guys.

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Potemkin Ethics – Republicans and their make-believe morals

October 1st 2019

Republican sanctimony and hypocrisy, normally just an irritating mosquito whine, has changed as they circle the wagons to deal with the Trump catastrophe, to a roar of White Water. And Benghazi. And Her Emails. And, and, and.

For example, even as Democrats consider the vast array of criminal charges they can prove against Trump and his corrupt administration, the Republicans have suddenly developed a deep concern over the business dealings of one Hunter Biden. Now, Hunter is just a dodgy American businessman who had dodgy business concerns in a dodgy country. Nothing unusual there; there have to be thousands of American businessmen overseas who like the Los Angeles Dodgers because they think they are related. Just more profiteering Americans gouging corrupt regimes for fun and…well, you get it. Nothing to attract the attention of the President of the United States, or Faux News, or Congress, any of whom, truth be told, spend most of their time working on their own corruption. Not battling it; profiting from it.

But Hunter’s daddy is one of the leading Democratic contenders for next year’s election, and thereby hangs the petard. It’s had some small mention in the news, so stop me if you’re heard about this.

Oh, you have heard. Well, good.

“But Biden…” is a buzzphrase sounding from all parts of the vast right wing echo chamber, all the way across and slightly down from the Heritage Foundation to the true snake pits of the American fascist right, Breitbart and Trump. They’ve developed elaborate and utterly fictitious conspiracy theories, each grander and less lucid then the last. In their narrative, Viktor Shokin is a brave and intrepid reformer who was trying to save Ukraine from corruption. In reality, Shokin was the resentful and corrupt leading holdover from the Soviet Union days, when prosecutors, rather than judges, were the deciding force in court cases. Deeply pro-Russian, it’s likely that his efforts to persecute Hunter Biden for holding a seat on a deeply corrupt oil company were brought about at the behest of Vladimir Putin in hopes of orchestrating damage to a possible Joe Biden candidacy. Vlad has form on doing that sort of thing, you know.

Trumpkins who try chanting “But Hunter” at me quickly get a course on the interesting role of Jared Kushner, a skyscraper in New York City, and the events that led to the State Department suddenly declaring a strategic ally, Qatar, an “exporter of terrorism.” The brighter ones shut up and go away, and the rest come up with the other orchestrated talking points.

The Whistleblower isn’t a traitor—quite the opposite. He reported a president who, by his own admission since, was engaging in activities subverting America in order to gain personally and politically, and undermining an ally’s ability to fend off a potential Russian attack. And while his reporting may have been the result of second-hand information, it has been corroborated by the President in question, making the point, utterly irrelevant in the first place, completely moot now.

Do any of the Republicans who underwrote Linda Tripp’s sordid foray into the spotlight of Monicagate believe she had first hand knowledge of what went on there? Did she take a puff on the infamous cigar? Ken Starr didn’t seem to mind using her testimony, did he? Ken Starr, who has made a career of intellectual self-fellatian, now considers it wrong to criminally investigate Presidents.

Presidents do have a right to conduct their business without it all being relayed to the media. However, advisors by any normal standards listen in on such calls in order to guide subsequent policy. You can be sure Putin, who also whined loudly that privacy and confidentiality were being violated, had his own flock of people listening in.

The same crowd whining about presidential privacy now sued successfully to have Secret Service agents on White House detail be forced to report anything they saw or heard.

Republicans also support ignoring subpoenas and other demands for information issued by the investigating committees of Congress. During the Clinton years, the administration turned over 25 MILLION pages of documentation to Congress, and Republicans managed to simultaneously complain that it wasn’t enough, and that it was too much.

Speaking of investigating committees, the President and all his party hatchlings are howling about ‘presidential harassment!”. Note that they have had, over the years, 25 different committees investigating the Clintons, and 8 more for Obama, and with the exception of Monica, found nothing at all. Hillary had to testify for 8.5 hours in front of Congress, all in one marathon day, over the non-story of Benghazi. Trump’s people have raised $25 million over the past few months to try to revive the email story.

Speaking of which, Trump, and various members of his administration, have been caught storing official emails on private servers. Trump himself has shown amazing disregard for national security, but is willing to abuse the top-secret apparatus in order to keep his personal dealings secret.

Republicans believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor basement. Without a shred of evidence, nothing supporting that belief except malice. Trump has thousands of kids locked in cages or dumped into the American foster home system, and you can bet at least several dozen of those kids have ended up as sex slaves by now.

But for too many Republicans, ethics and morals are a pretend, a vicious game to passive-aggressively dominate others. The only thing that can generate their endless howls of moral outrage is if a Democrat or liberal is the target. But when it comes to the sewage in their own house, they are utterly, and hypocritically, silent.

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Kava-no-no – The wrong man for the wrong job

September 4th, 2018

The Senate confirmation hearings to place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court began today. It turned into a circus immediately, with Chairthing Chuck Grassley blowing off Democratic complaints that a 42,000 page document dump, performed late the night before, needed to be examined. Grassley is demanding they use these documents now in their deliberations, while not giving them enough time to even check to make sure the boxes are not just full of New York City telephone books from last year.

Grassley justified the 100,000 other documents withheld on ground of executive privilege on the weird grounds that one or more of them were in video form, and the Senate had never had to deal with such evidence in an SC nomination hearing before. And he refused to entertain a motion to adjourn so members of the committee could look at the new evidence and continue to determine what legal advice he had for the Bush administration on such matters as civil rights, worker rights, abortion and freedom of speech.

William Rivers Pitt observed that Grassley is what happens if your toilet doesn’t flush. The toilet in question is the corrupt and authoritarian Republican Party, which believes it is entitled to impose questionable candidates such as Kavanaugh on us, and not have to put up with any dissent. As a result, we have “hearings” that are on about the same level as Soviet show trials in the 1930s.

The Republicans, tiresome and vicious hypocrites, sat on the nomination of Merrick Garland for over a year, and now say that this nomination has to be rushed through before September 15th, eleven days from now. But they are withholding much of the government records needed to assess Kavanaugh’s stances on vital matters that he may be ruling on for the next four decades. The claim of “executive privilege” is insane, given that Kavanaugh was working for the GW Bush administration, and not for Trump.

His stances on the Constitution and rights in general are enough to suggest opposing his place on the Supreme Court. He strongly favors the rights of corporations and churches over people, and the court is already over-represented by fascists.

But even though that represents legitimate reason to oppose his nomination, it doesn’t disqualify him from the court. One of the greatest weaknesses of a free society is that it gives freedom to those who would work tirelessly to destroy that freedom, and creatures like Scalia and Roberts are part of the cost of freedom. Ideally, they are there to make us stronger. In practice, they make us stronger in much the same way that termites repair homes. But you can’t have freedom without tolerance for such types.

But there is another reason why Kavanaugh must be kept off the court: he is morally and intellectually unfit for the office.

In 2009, Kavanaugh authored a legal thesis entitled “Separation of Powers During the Forty-Fourth Presidency and Beyond.” In it, he wrote, “The decisions a President must make are hard and often life-or-death, the pressure is relentless, the problems arise from all directions, the criticism is unremitting and personal, and at the end of the day only one person is responsible.”

This led him to conclude, “I believe it vital that the President be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible. The country wants the President to be ‘one of us’ who bears the same responsibilities of citizenship that all share. But I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office.”

Therefore, he now believes that no sitting president should ever have to respond to a summons or indictment on any civil or criminal matter.

It’s easy to see why he would be extremely attractive to Donald Trump, a man neck deep in a vast criminal and civil morass of his own making. He would love to have an automatic vote to dismiss on the Supreme Court.

But Kavanaugh didn’t always feel that way. He was a member of the Starr Chamber during the politically-charged impeachment process against Bill Clinton, and very avidly pursued the persecution, to the point where Kenneth Starr had to draw him back. Among other questions he wanted Clinton asked in order to add to his humiliation were these gems:

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she [be] lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid with her in the Oval Office area, would should be lying?” Kavanaugh liked the cigar a lot, it seems. He asked about it twice in ten questions.

He was one of the lead authors of the Starr report, and responsible for its gruesome and loving obsession with the salacious. Kiddies, if you need to know what ‘analingus’ is, just ask your Uncle Brett.

Kavanaugh’s high moral dungeon stemmed from a belief that he thought a president should be impeachable for “lying to his staff and misleading the public.” Neither are criminal acts, by the way. If they were, Trump would already be in jail.

He now claims that his actions above were a mistake, and his cohorts have even offered the explanation that he was sleep-deprived when he wrote the memo.

I can see it now: “Sorry about that SC ruling making Trump Dictator for Life. Brett needs his nappie.”

But Kavanaugh now believes, ““Looking back to the late 1990s, for example, the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.”

OK, it takes a mensch to admit that he’s wrong, but something about this suggests that it wasn’t so much a change of heart as it was a total abandonment of principle, if principle was ever a part of his stance on Presidential liability to begin with. He wanted Clinton to be shamed, attacked and driven from office because Clinton was “lying to his staff and misleading the public.”

OK, that just about describes the Trump presidency in a nutshell. The man is an absolute and inveterate liar. He lies to his staff. He lies to his lawyers. He lies to us. He lies to everyone. With Clinton, it was some personality flaws. With Trump, it is the entirety of his existence.

I can see Kavanaugh changing his stance on immunity, even though I believe the Founders never intended for a President to be above the law, and a nation that holds a president in such regard has no future as a country.

How can any man with integrity or decency migrate from wanting to destroy a man for fibbing about a consensual affair to utterly forgiving a man in advance whose sociopathic and demented antics threaten to destroy the country?

Answer: He cannot.

Kavanaugh is not fit to sit on the court.

 

 

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