3 cheers for Eags! In today's op-ed column, he calls out Die Liegen Blödmann (The Lyin' Dumbas2) for the "Unrepentant Scum" that he is. Of course, the fools who attend his "rallies" are even beneath "Unrepentant Scum" and this blogger hates them all and is sorry that there isn't more of 'em. As for the Vichy Dumbos in Congress and the leadership of the Dumbo party, film documentarian Ken Burns was spot on by labeling them with the term for French collaboartors with the Nazis after the French surrender of 1940. In fact the Vichy Dumbos in Congress are beneath "Unrepentant Scum" because they have put their Dumbo majority above country. If this is (fair & balanced) detestation of all Dumbos and their ilk, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
A Week For All Time
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech.
The shrug from Mitch McConnell, the twisted explanation of Paul Ryan, who said Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, but he’s ours — party before country. As well, the duck-and-hide Republicans, so quick to whip out their pocket copy of the Constitution, now nowhere to be seen when the foundation of that same document is under assault by the man carrying their banner.
They will remember, in classrooms and seminars, those who wrote Trump off as entertainment, a freak show and ratings spike, before he tried to muzzle a free press, and came for you — using a page from another tyrant, Vladimir Putin, admired by the homegrown monster.
As well, they will call out the enablers. In the run-up to the presidential primary season, few candidates received more favorable press coverage than Donald Trump, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School found. The watchdogs were in on the ride. Sure, he’s a know-nothing and fraud, incapable of processing information or getting through a day without a half-dozen lies — but it’s just a role. Get a load of Ted Cruz’s wife! Heidi Klum is no longer a 10! And when he talks like a fascist, when he uses the America First slogan adopted by Nazi sympathizers in this country in the 1930s, it’s all for play, you see. He is historically illiterate, so the rest of us must be as well.
They will remember, in a week that gave us a scary peek into the heart of American darkness, how the civil ties that bind a nation of people from all nations could be shredded. The blood from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, no less a battlefield than Shiloh or Bull Run, was not yet dry when Trump was congratulating himself — a sleep-deprived narcissist on a morning me high. The worst mass shooting in American history was not about the murder of everyday people; it was about him: “Appreciate the congrats for being right.”
They will hang their heads in sorrow at the time when the man leading the party of Lincoln suggested that a sitting president was a traitor, somehow sympathetic to Islamic nihilists who slaughter innocent Americans. Trump implied it. Then he banned a newspaper for its headline about it.
He wasn’t finished, this 70-year-old with the temperament of a 7-year-old. He made no rousing call for unity and courage, no plea for a partisan pause. He said the president must resign, as if it wasn’t an assault rifle easily obtained by a New York-born fanatic that killed 49 people, but the American commander in chief. He compared the nation to a terminally ill patient. All is lost. For good measure, he suggested that our soldiers were thieves.
It comes in such waves, the preposterous lies, the breaches in honor, from this man who wants to use high office to attack his enemies in civil court, who would apply a religious test to fellow citizens, whose mass deportation plan would likely round up the parents of some of the Latinos killed in Orlando. And because it comes in such waves, there is no time to process it all. Was it just a few weeks ago that he attacked a federal judge, hearing a case in which Trump is accused of fraud on a mass scale, because of the judge’s ethnic heritage?
They will also remember the Republicans who did not look the other way. Mitt Romney and Meg Whitman and the Bush family showed more decency in a day than Trump has in a lifetime.
“Man up,” wrote the Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “Show courage. Say what’s in your hearts; he’s insane. He’s poison. He’s doomed. He’s killing the party.”
The American public, for once, seems to get him. While Republican Party leaders cower or remain silent, voters by a 2-1 margin in polls conducted this week disapprove of the way Trump acted in a crisis. He’s disliked by nearly 70 percent of the people, which only makes you wonder about the other 30 percent.
“There comes a time when I — and you — can no longer remain neutral, silent,” said Burns at Stanford last Sunday, the morning we all awoke to news of the slaughter in Florida. “For 216 years, our elections, though bitterly contested, have featured the philosophies and characters of candidates who were clearly qualified. That’s not the case this year. One is glaringly not qualified.”
In this week of trial and tragedy, Trump showed us how he would govern — by fear, by intimidation, by lies, by turning American against American, by exhibiting all the empathy of a sociopath. Seal this week. Put it in a time capsule. Teach it. History will remember. But come November, will we? Ω
[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009).]
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