OK, it's a holiday and as an alternative to the doom-and-gloom heavy stuff in these drear days, this blog offers an alternative — not exactly happy news, but a holiday quiz. The NY Fishwrap's op-ed veteran, The Krait (Gail Collins), provides her annual pop quiz to "...Test your knowledge of what politicians have been up to before you share it between bites at the dinner table." Click here to "test your knowledge." Warning: this blogger achieved a perfect score on the eleven questions. No brag, just fact. Now, this blog also features a Thanksgiving Jeremiad by the NY Fishwrap's Blowhard (Charles Blow) on Resistance. If this is the (fair & balanced) word o'the day, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Thankfully Recommitting To Resistance
By The Blowhard (Charles M. Blow)
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
Last Thanksgiving I wrote a column titled, “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” in which I committed myself to resisting this travesty of a man, proclaiming, “I have not only an ethical and professional duty to call out how obscene your very existence is at the top of American government; I have a moral obligation to do so.”
I made this promise: “As long as there are ink and pixels, you will be the focus of my withering gaze.”
I have kept that promise, not because it was a personal challenge, but because this is a national crisis.
Donald Trump, I thought that your presidency would be a disaster. It’s worse than a disaster. I wasn’t sure that resistance to your weakening of the republic, your coarsening of the culture, your assault on truth and honesty, your erosion of our protocols, would feel as urgent today as it felt last year. But if anything, that resistance now feels more urgent.
Nothing about you has changed for the better. You are still a sexist, bigoted, bullying, self-important simpleton. But now all of the worst of you has the force of the American presidency.
The degree to which Russia aided your ascendance, and the degree to which people connected to your campaign were willing and eager to entertain entreaties from Russia, are coming into clearer focus everyday.
The legitimacy of your presidency is in question. The corruption of your administration is not. You are a national stain and an international embarrassment. You are anti-intellectual and pro-impulse. The same fingers with which you compulsively tweet are dangerously close to the nuclear codes. You are historically unpopular and history will not be kind to you. It is all so dizzyingly distressing.
But what irks me most is your targeted attacks on historically marginalized populations as a political ploy to secure the support of the racists, misogynists and homophobes.
During your campaign, you pathologized black people and generalized about their daily lives, ultimately making this pitch: “What the hell do you have to lose?”
You hovered over a taco bowl and insisted, “I love Hispanics!”
You told CNN, “I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people.”
All of these were lies, demonstrated by your actions in office. Your hostility toward minorities and your courting and coddling of the people who hate them has become a standard practice of your presidency.
We see that in your continued attempts to institute a Muslim ban and your continued insistence on building your wall of hate.
We see it in the way that you attack Antifa but make excuses for white supremacists.
We see it in the way that you attack NFL players protesting police violence, while you encourage police officers to be more violent. We see this in the way that your Justice Department is moving to return to rigid, racially skewed drug policies that helped to fuel our unconscionable level of mass incarceration, a phenomenon Michelle Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow,” while also returning to a reliance on private prisons.
We see this in the devastating contrast between the ways you have talked about and treated hurricane victims in Texas versus in Puerto Rico.
We see it just this week in your “ending a humanitarian program that has allowed some 59,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States since an earthquake ravaged their country in 2010,” as The New York Times put it.
Trump is clearly, blatantly, virulently hostile to people who are not white and non-Christian. That is not a statement of opinion, but a statement of demonstrated fact.
During the campaign, Trump tweeted: “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.”
And yet, it is Trump who is proving to be a threat to the LGBT community, particularly to transgender Americans, with his ban on trans people in the military, his rescinding of federal protections for trans students, and his Justice Department’s reversal of a policy protecting trans workers.
Trump repeatedly said — or tweeted — during the campaign that he respected women. Anyone who had been at all aware of Trump or had access to a search engine knew that was a lie. But then, as real-time proof, the “Access Hollywood” tape was released on which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. And women came out in droves to personally accuse him of sexually inappropriate behavior, the kinds of accusations that people are now losing jobs over.
To add insult to injury, Trump the Groper has just thrown the weight and word of the presidency behind Roy Moore the Alleged Pedophile, choosing the claim of a single horrible man, even aside from the allegations, over nine women who seem to have nothing to gain by coming forward.
Trump not only doesn’t respect women, he doesn’t even hear women.
This man is a pathological liar. He commends and conforms to anyone who pretends to love him, whether they are Russians or racists. He is inherently a patriarchal white supremacist and it seeps out in all sorts of ways, but it is most pronounced in the way that he attacks people who are not white and male.
When you accept those truths, everything else makes sense.
But accepting the truth is not the same as accepting the liar. Trump is unacceptable in every possible way, and must continue to be met at every turn with the strong arm of defiance.
That is why today I recommit myself to resistance, and so should you. # # #
[Charles M. Blow is The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears every other Saturday. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper's graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for The Times's information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Charles Blow went on to become the paper's Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic magazine. Before coming to The Times, Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News. Blow received a BA, magna cum laude (mass communication) from Grambling State University.]
Copyright © 2017 The New York Times Company
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2017 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
No comments:
Post a Comment
☛ STOP!!! Read the following BEFORE posting a Comment!
Include your e-mail address with your comment or your comment will be deleted by default. Your e-mail address will be DELETED before the comment is posted to this blog. Comments to entries in this blog are moderated by the blogger. Violators of this rule can KMA (Kiss My A-Double-Crooked-Letter) as this blogger's late maternal grandmother would say. No e-mail address (to be verified AND then deleted by the blogger) within the comment, no posting. That is the (fair & balanced) rule for comments to this blog.