The Remarkable Pleasure Of Coffee & Cannabis

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I love mornings. I didn’t used to love them but these days my day doesn’t so much “start” as spark to life. My morning routine feels a lot like the lights suddenly going on inside a factory.

That’s the caffeine in the coffee of course but even more than that? It’s the cannabis.

I hope there are heads nodding as they read this — those who know whereof I speak. As those same people also know it can be damned hard to explain to people with no experience of cannabis what cannabis does for us.

Here’s the tricky part. No one knows how anyone else feels. That’s a fact. Unless you can crawl inside someone else’s skin and see the world literally through their eyes, you cannot really know what they’re seeing, hearing or feeling. By the same token, no one can walk a mile in your shoes either.

The best any of us can do — if we care to — is pretend to know what others feel. Cannabis has the same problem. No one else can ever actually know how cannabis effects each of us. No one else can actually know how cannabis makes us feel. It’s especially tricky to to explain to those who’ve never tried cannabis that the cannabis experience is nothing like the bullshit mythology that was built around it for racist purposes.

I can predict with Swiss clock precision the head tilt, furrowed brow and genuinely taken aback “Really?” when I tell people I use cannabis (Durban Poison specifically) to play tennis. I actually do. DP’s a sativa. It delivers a smooth, soft focus to everything I do (writing, driving — yes, driving — tennis). On the tennis court the DP slows me down (my bi-polar brain is very hypomanic) so that I can stop thinking about everything else and focus just on tennis — on the court — on the point I’m playing — on the ball — on its spin — on where I want to put the ball on the other side of the net — on attacking the ball aggressively and following through.

I process every bit of that distinctly (but much faster of course) when Durban Poison is in my brain. The improvement to my game — to my consistency and focus — is distinct. I don’t see it as gaining an advantage over my tennis partner, I see it as losing the disadvantage of unfocused inconsistency. My tennis partner gets a better game out of me. Better games equal way more fun. I don’t know if cannabis’ effect on my brain lifts it to the level of PED, but I’ve never heard my tennis partner complain that she has less fun on the court after I stop to smoke a bowl.

Cannabis improves my mornings, my morning routine and the whole rest of the day that follows. Cannabis’ focus — even its mild euphoria — marries well with a caffeine buzz. I like to start my day (my mornings begin around 5 a.m.) with a hybrid. GG4 has always been a favorite. Dutch Treat, too (though it’s way, way harder to find regularly). The caffeine delivers its familiar jolt of energy. The cannabis however feels like warm syrup pouring slowly from the crown of my head downward. The syrup feels lovely all by itself — its warm, enveloping. But there’s more to the syrup than just its euphoria. There’s the focus. And there’s cannabis’ version of mental energy — it’s distinctly different from caffeine’s.

Caffeine’s jitters are familiar to lots of people. Decaf coffee solves that problem but you don’t get the jolt. Cannabis strains like Moby Dick, Super Lemon Haze, Jack The Ripper open your eyes but they don’t suddenly turn you into Gene Krupa — tap-tap-tapping away on the drum kit furiously. It’s more a feeling of being imbued with knowledge. You find it as much as it finds you. It’s like your mind has simply become more open — more cognizant and aware of details that, without the cannabis in your brain — you would probably have missed (as usual).

Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that all these great CHEMICALS all with the letter “C”? Coffee… cannabis… chai… chocolate.

They all match up well with cannabis. At the very least, one always knows the coffee (or chai or chocolate) will taste amazing with cannabis inside of you. It’s the same effect. THC lets your brain process more information (that’s why it makes some people paranoid). There’s a lot to love though in all that additional info.

How does one explain to a non-user of cannabis how amazing even a simple cup of coffee can taste?

Advertisements

Dear CNN & MSNBC – Virtually All Of Your Talking Head Analysis is RUBBISH Or Worse – Here’s Why

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Stop me if this is too familiar: you’re watching a cable news show — they show Trump on the White House lawn pitching bullshit so bullshitty it hurts your ears. They cut back to the studio where the show’s host introduces three or four regulars to poke at what they just heard.

Now, some shows bring real conversations to these segments. Nicolle Wallace’s Deadline White House on MSNBC is consistently excellent. That’s because Nicolle doesn’t suffer bullshit. She doesn’t suffer bullshit guests and she doesn’t suffer bullshit conversations on her show. What a wonderful difference it makes. Put Nicolle (and Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow — though she rarely does whole panels, preferring to go one-on-one) off to the side. We’re talking about pretty much everyone else.

Having watched Donald Trump lie egregiously for the gazillionth time, the host will turn to their panel and ask the epitome of the Bullshit Question: “What do you make of this?” They might as well say “The sky’s blue… GO!” Into this shapeless, lazy intellectual void, trudges the Talking Head. They start excitedly chirping — almost verbatim — what Trump said, the equivalent of a chirpy open mic.

Then the Host will ask what they think is a solid follow-up. Why do the think that is? So — a bullshit analyst is about to employ buckets of bullshit to answer a bullshit question. What could go wrong?

The first thing the Talking Head invariably does is put themselves into Donald Trump’s place. Huuuuge mistake. The Talking Head, for starters, isn’t a treasonous, corrupt sociopath like Donald Trump is. The Talking Head has a heart and probably can’t buy their way out of trouble like Trump always has. The Talking Head’s whole way of seeing the world is completely different from Trump’s — but they’ll ignore that fact as they answer “why Donald did it” from THEIR point of view and not Donald’s.

That’s why — bet the ranch on it — every last word they spew will be pure drivel, unconnected to reality (certainly unconnected to Donald Trump’s reality). They’ll chalk the most recent racist rant as Trump’s strategizing or “solidifying his base”. They’ll describe thought processes they can’t back up with any sort of data. They’ll put words in Trump’s mouth that he would never ever say. They’ll characterize Trump as a normal potus doing normal things. Except he’s not.

Donald Trump is a career criminal. He’s a rapist. And a racist and a misogynist and a tax cheat and a money launderer and a fraud, and a charlatan and a con man and a traitor. At the very least, he’s a liar. We have ample proof of it.

Yet, that TV Talking Head will represent what Donald Trump thinks as if he’s never lied in his life. In other words, the TV Talking Head is talking about and analyzing a Trump who doesn’t exist. What, I ask you, is the point?

This isn’t just masturbation, it’s unproductive masturbation. Indeed – what’s the point?

Want to know how to fix it? Watch TV. Watch Nicolle Wallace.

Otherwise, you’re just a bunch of morons on the Titanic, arguing over what time to have dinner tomorrow.

Can We PLEASE Get This Straight? NO ONE Loves Their Health INSURANCE…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere, an evil genius is smiling so hard his face hurts. It might be the same evil genius who came up with a “Mission Accomplished” banner for the background of a speech by George W. Bush — on an aircraft carrier — during a war he started for no reason.

Yeah, I know the banner SAYS “mission accomplished” but I doubt BushCo could have actually pointed to what mission they meant and what, if anything, had actually been accomplished. “Americans love their private health insurance” comes from the same wellspring of evil-genius-strength bullshit.

The core problem with American healthcare is that its emphasis is immediately on the wrong syllable. When anyone walks in the door of the American Healthcare System, the first question isn’t “How can we help you?”, it’s “How are you gonna pay for this?”. If you can’t answer that question satisfactorily, you might just be screwed. But, hey — even if you DO have insurance? Between the co-pays, the deductibles and all the other out-of-pocket bullshit, you could STILL be screwed.

No other civilized healthcare system anywhere on the planet has profit incentive at the core of its healthcare. There’s a reason. Profit incentive and human well-being are completely incompatible when they’re both dependent on the same dollar. A corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to do the very best it possibly can for its investors. That means a choice between an expensive but uncertain procedure that might save a customer’s life (that’s what they are to the insurance company after all — customers) and a happy board of directors able to announce a bigger dividend at the next shareholder’s meeting. Guess who the corporation’s gonna choose?

Like I said — it’s their responsibility to do that. It’s not their fault exactly — it’s history’s. Ever wonder why it is that only in America does anyone’s employer pay for their health insurance? For real. This doesn’t happen anywhere else. And there’s a reason. It’s bad for business.

FDR toyed with making universal healthcare part of social security but the AMA didn’t want doctor’s fees limited by the government (cost controls, in other words). FDR made the political decision not to risk losing on both social security AND universal healthcare. He put all the chips on social security alone. Then WWII happened — and history caused American healthcare to zig when maybe we should have zagged.

Because all available money needed to go to the war, employers were not allowed to give good employees raises. Those same frozen wages made it hard to lure new talent (who could go elsewhere to an employer whose wages were frozen at a higher level). Thinking outside the box — what other benefits could be offered that would feel like salary? — produced the first direct employee sponsored healthcare.

The idea spread. People liked the benefit. In their minds, it was saving them money and providing them comfort. What’s not to love? Then the war ended.

With the war over, companies were free again to offer whatever salaries or bonuses or raises they wanted. They also were free to end the war-time benefit (replacing it with salary). They didn’t. Hell, instead of ending these programs, the big companies held onto it. This was back at a time when your average middle class American (remember them?) entered the work force at 18 or 22 (if they went to college) and whatever employer they started with? That was likely to be the employer who’d be handing them a gold watch upon their retirement 40 years hence. Your employment relationship was supposed to be as durable as your marriage.

While the big companies (who’d done a shitload of the hiring during the war) held onto providing healthcare to their employees, they farmed out the work of administering this employee benefit — and the healthcare insurance industry was born. Didn’t take long before the baby took over the nursery. Then the whole house.

Ask a company like Boeing what having to provide healthcare insurance to its tens of thousands of employees does to its bottom line and its competitiveness. The cost of that healthcare is massive and it gets reflected in the cost of each airplane.

Airbus, by contrast, doesn’t have to pay for its employees’ healthcare. In Europe, the government takes care of it, paying for it with tax dollars. That gives Airbus an advantage because they don’t have to build that cost into what they charge for an airplane. See? Employer-based healthcare is bad for American business because it makes them less competitive.

As for the healthcare itself — all the employer is providing is the insurance coverage. What that coverage is? That’s up to the insurance company.

The insurance companies can make up any rules they want. And they do. The most important rules of all — to them — is who they contract with and therefore who their customers will be allowed (by their made up rules) to see. Every last bit of this, remember, is made up. By a company put there to administer this thing.

To gate-keep.

Insurance companies are gatekeepers. Border guards that — so long as we pay our premiums and stay employed by the same bosses — will smile at us benignly each time we pass by. But we fear them. We dread them. What if they don’t smile next time?

What if, next time — when we’re really sick — they turn us away? What if they point to language in their dense boiler plate (something on page 58) that says our particular situation (as they’re interpreting it) means they don’t have to cover the procedure we need. We’re free however to pay for it retail-retail out of pocket.

Hey — we charge hundreds of dollars for insulin that costs relative pennies in Canada. Every last penny of that difference is profit. Let me repeat: PROFIT. People are dying cos they can’t afford their insulin. Retail-retail in American healthcare means the cost of a procedure and the procedure’s actual cost have nothing to do with each other. It’s like being charged a million bucks to go three blocks in a taxi.

What’s wrong with America’s healthcare system isn’t that the inmates are running the asylum. It’s that insurance companies are. And they couldn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to any of us.

Americans Despise Paying Taxes Because They Perceive It As Money For Nothing

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Ask just about any American “What do you get for your tax dollars” and I’ll bet you next year’s minuscule tax refund they’ll reply “Nothing. We get NOTHING!” There’s even a chance they’ll spit, too. Several times.

Want to lose an election? Tell an American you’re raising his taxes. Doesn’t matter what the raised taxes are for, the American will assume it’s bullshit. It must be bullshit — because no one can ever seem to tell us what our taxes pay for except in the very abstract: our taxes pay for the military and Congress and the president and “government”. We see most of that (if not all of it) as money out with nothing coming back in return.

Oh — occasionally what comes back in return is a $100 toilet seat or some other expensive boondoggle that did no one any good except the politician who made the deal. You couldn’t buy or invent worse press.

In Europe, by contrast, they pay a huge tax bill. But they get so much in return. The Danes, for instance, pays the highest taxes in the world. Yet they’re also the happiest people in the world. Those taxes are buying them complete health care coverage and educational expenses. The Danish government spends more money on its youngest and oldest citizens per capita than any other country. And every Danish tax-payer knows this.

Belgium’s citizens pay 4% corporate tax rate, 21% VAT and upper limit of 50% on personal income. Belgium still ranked 18th in the world in GDP and consistently ranks high in the quality of life ratings published in the United Nations Human Development Report. It’s not perfect. An influx of immigration has strained the economics — but that’s because Europe’s economies aren’t really geared to absorb immigration the way America’s economy is (and always has been).

On the flip side — in the interest of fairness — there’s Italy and Greece. They approached the same desire for social democracy but without the discipline required. It does require discipline.

If Americans walked into a restaurant and were told, more or less, to fork over X dollars for their meal — sight unseen — they’d balk for sure. Rightfully so, too. It doesn’t help that Americans don’t see the government as theirs or representative of “them” but as some interloper and part-time thief.

What if We The People — in order to perfect our imperfect union – re-imagined our government and how we fund it from the point of view of its citizens. You know: “We The People”.

What if, instead of just paying taxes — or having them taken from us by an unseen and unstoppable hand — we had paying taxes explained to us. What if we gave Americans a solid civic education that made it clear how they, Americans, are an essential part of this Great Experiment in Human Self Government?

What if we made passing a real civics test part of any high schooler’s high school graduation. It should be hard, too. No pass? No graduate. It’s for real. What if, as part of that education — and it doesn’t have to be a dull, trying experience; we could just as easily make it exciting — as exciting and meaningful as actually being an American.

And what if part of the excitement of being an American was the healthcare your tax dollar was buying you — in addition to the military protection, the infrastructure, the college education, the supplemental pension and the assistance if you need it? The data set says that populations that don’t have to worry about losing their homes should they get cancer — they’re happier than, say, US.

The data also says that people who don’t spend half their working lives paying for their educations also are happier than Americans. We could bring Guaranteed Basic Income into the conversation but — another time.

Americans have a bad habit of telling themselves things about themselves that simply aren’t true. We loves us some mythology, we do — especially when it paints us as rugged individualists. Yes, sure — there are lots of Americans who fit that description. Part of America’s lure is that anyone from anywhere can come here and — if they’re willing to work hard enough — accomplish anything. But no one – NO ONE – every does that alone.

We keep bumping into the sharp edges of our own hubris. That is, the white minority of this country continues to paint a phony picture that Americans (white guys in their minds) are exceptional just because they’re who they are. They have bought into a phony mythology that, left to their own devices, each white man is a great commercial success just waiting for his moment to shine. Taxes on such a junior level captain-of-industry are budensome.

Horse shit.

American exceptionalism is its diversity. Its exceptionalism does not extend to rich white guys and their money. It doesn’t extend either to the phony belief that Americans, somehow, are different — that we love “freedom” more. No, we love keeping money in our pocket more. We love indulging our greed and calling it by a nicer name — “prudent”.

Americans need a tax system that 1) taxes them fairly and with the understanding that those tax dollars are meant — ever dollar spent — to benefit them, their family, their community, their state, their country. If there’s waste — let’s get at it with a sledge hammer FFS! The goal is for Americans to see their taxes as their money that their government is spending for their benefit.

An itemized tax bill — as itemized as a tax return — would be nice. Even nicer — if the line items showed not just the outflow of tax dollar to the government but the inflow of benefits (assuming health care & college & the security that you won’t die a pauper). If Americans could see their taxes in terms of a cost-benefit analysis — where they were clearly getting something — they’d think of their taxes very differently.

I doubt they’d ever be happy paying taxes but at least they’d understand their taxes — their relationship to them. It could even quiet their moaning about taxes. I’m not holding my breath though.

Donald Trump “Winning” The 2016 Election Is A Total Fiction; We Need To Start Treating It Like One

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Let’s get this straight: without Russia MAKING him president, Donald J Trump would not BE president.

We felt it collectively on Election Night 2016 as the results went toward the unexpected. It felt strange — not just because it wasn’t going the way we expected. No, it felt strange on a whole other subcutaneous level, down in our guts where our animal selves live. Our animal sense got it immediately. This stinks.

Trump winning the election felt like a lie. I still cringe on hearing the word “President” when attached to Trump’s name. It doesn’t compute or add up. I wouldn’t want him as the president of my condo association never mind of the United States.

Trump’s “win” (quotation marking it feels totally honest) felt like a lie. Like the Truth had been compromised somehow. Marginalized. That would make sense — that Trump would come for the Truth first. Truth will always be Trump’s enemy. That and human decency.

Chapter One in Authoritarianism For Dummies makes it abundantly clear: Destroy the Truth first!

From the moment even his campaign started, Trump — like a good prodigal authoritarian — went after the Truth. If he lost, he insisted, the election was rigged. The trick wasn’t so much denying the Truth as getting the rest of us to buy into his version — and damned if the American Main Stream Media didn’t oblige. How long did it take to normalize “Mexicans are rapists?”

“Grab em by the pussy” normalized even further. To be fair, it grabbed pussies had to compete with “but her emails”. You can see how that’d be challenging…

Though he sucks at everything else, Trump excels at destroying things from the inside out. He’s like a virus, always trying to turn everything else into him. That includes America.

The Mueller Report did not deal with the totality of Russia’s interference in or impact on Election 2016. They didn’t deal with the totality of Trump’s multi-faceted criminality. They didn’t deal with all the other ways (aside from Wikileaks) that Russian actors & Trump actors played nicely together for the purpose of destroying American Democracy. It was never in their purview (as much as some of us hoped it would be).

The Mueller Report came back “smaller” than we expected in part because Team Mueller’s investigation was continually compromised and obstructed by everyone on Team Trump — even the ones Team Mueller thought were cooperating. This is no ordinary group of criminals up to no good.

These are traitors and seditionists. These are confederates and anti-American greedists who cannot abide that they are already a minority party representing a minority (shrinking minority) point of view.

Want to know why Mitch McConnell won’t protect our election infrastructure? It’s because he knows for a fact that without Russia literally STEALING election 2016 on Trump’s and the GOP’s benefit, Hillary Clinton would be president now. We shouldn’t be naive. A Clinton presidency would have been under constant siege from every one of these nefarious asshats — at Russia’s urging and behest.

But we wouldn’t be facing a moment of very real peril.

We’re getting the story now in dribs and drabs. Donald Trump has been a work in progress for Putin going back years. So has the Republican Party. Election 2016. Brexit was a dry run for Election 2016. Election 2016 succeeded beyond Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams — not only did he put his own guy in the White House, he set in motion the means to keep us under his thumb forever via permanent (Republican) minority rule.

The Projector In Chief TOLD us this was so almost as soon as he “won”: He knew questions about his legitimacy were themselves legitimate. That scared the crap out of him — which he projected like the manic sociopath huffed up on powdered Adderall that he is.

I dare anyone to look at a SINGLE thing Trump’s done since “winning” that hasn’t looked like, felt like or sounded like he wasn’t compromised in every way imaginable.

Better yet, let a thousand words do the talking…

I’ll repeat: without Russia’s direct help, influence, money & ACTIVE MEASURES, Donald Trump doesn’t win the presidency of the United States. Hell, he doesn’t even get his corrupt, bloated orange ass through the primaries — which is followed by the Republicans coming up empty.

Donald Trump won nothing in 2016. It’s questionable if the GOP won much of what they claim they won. If a single dollar of money flowed from Russia into a single Republican campaign coffer (lots more than a single dollar flowed), every victory by every Republican has to be re-examined in the light of conspiracy to defraud the American electorate and commit Treason.

Dear Donald Trump – Coming From QUEENS Is No Better Than Coming From Baltimore

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Let that sink in for a second — a bloated orange schlub from QUEENS is throwing shade on Baltimore. Screw you, Donald Trump and drop dead (from either the heart attack or the stroke you’ve been working on — it’s time already)! Even coming from Brooklyn has more cachet than coming from Queens FFS.

I grew up in Baltimore. Well — I grew up in Pikesville, a mostly Jewish suburb northeast of the Beltway. Being a mostly Jewish suburb, anti-Semites called the place “Kikesville” because anti-Semites are clever that way.

Baltimore, while a city, never felt big or threatening the way Manhattan could. It always felt provincial to me — which it was; it’s changed a lot since I grew up there. As I was applying to colleges, the old harbor had been torn down and the Rouse Company was building a controversial project called Harbor Place. As a measure of how provincial Baltimore used to be, the biggest opposition to Harbor Place came from the restaurants in Little Italy, not far from where Harbor Place would open shops and lots of brand-spanking-new restaurants. On the one hand, the Little Italy Restaurant Association had a point — what if Harbor Place put them out of business? But that reflected the smallest of little picture thinking.

The Rouse Company had bona fides. They’d resurrected Faneuil Hall in Boston, turning it into a thriving tourist attraction and marketplace. They’d imagined and built Columbia, Maryland. They’d been building shopping centers in Baltimore for decades already. They were a local company who really did want to see all the boats floating in and around Baltimore’s Harbor rise on the tide and thrive.

I remember going to Harbor Place’s opening. It was thrilling (and tasty). And Harbor Place went on to do exactly what the Rouse Company said it would — it revitalized Baltimore, Baltimore’s downtown and even all the restaurants in Little Italy. Everyone benefited from the massive influx of tourists and locals eager to spend money and enjoy the feeling of a revitalized Baltimore.

Harbor Place’s success didn’t spread as far as it should have or could have however. We all still live in Reality, don’t we? Baltimore was always a hybrid — a Northern city with Southern leanings. Or a Southern city with Northern leanings. Hard to tell which sometimes. Urban blight is as constant as the tides. That’s because we’re a deeply racist society still — and Baltimore was always bad at hiding that fact.

I left Baltimore for college in 1977, returning for a year or so right after graduation in 1981 before moving up to White Plains, New York then Brooklyn then Los Angeles. I’ve always joked about Baltimore — and my need to escape it — that I moved 3,000 miles away and would have moved farther had I not out of real estate at the Pacific. I have not missed Baltimore for two seconds. I haven’t even missed New York, really.

But Baltimore is nothing at all like what Donald Trump called it. I won’t repeat his bullshit because why bother. It’s just more Trumpian bullshit. Suffice it to say that more great stuff has come out of Baltimore than has ever or will ever (or even COULD ever) come from a Trump — even if we let them cheat.

A short list of cool (and useful) things that came from, have history with or originated in Baltimore —

Edgar Allen Poe, Dashiell Hammett & Upton Sinclair

The Star Spangled Banner & Old Bay Seasoning

Harriet Tubman & Frederick Douglass

Gertrude Stein, H L Mencken & Te-Nihisi Coates

Babe Ruth & Brooks Robinson

Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Ric Ocasek & Frank Zappa

Thurgood Marshall, Elijah Cummings & Nancy Pelosi

Barry Levinson, John Waters, Jada Pinkett-Smith,

Blue crab cakes (all other crab cakes are bullshit — sorry)

That’s a short, short, SHORT list. By comparison — all the good things to come from or originate or have history with anything Trump. Are ya ready?

Aside from greed, incest, corruption, racism, rape & treason – what of any value has come from a Trump?

I rest my case.

Racism – Like Beauty – Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Asking a racist if he’s a racist is like asking a stupid person if he’s stupid. Guess how he’s going to answer.

In fact, even having to ask if someone’s a racist usually means the person asking the question either IS a racist himself or has no idea what racism is — which means he absolutely is a racist. Journalistic “neutrality” is not an excuse for tolerating racism. Racists count on that sort of tacit approval (that’s what tolerance is) to normalize and legitimize them.

We need a MeToo movement for racism. I bet a lot of the same shits that treat women like sex toys think nothing of their racism. Hell, they think their racism — like their sexual predation — are rights of white privilege. Don’t like it? Go back where ya came from.

Is there anything more flat out racist than bloated orange jackal turd and racist Donald Trump bleating that HE (of all people) is the least racist person on earth — that there’s not a racist bone in his body? Dude, there ain’t a sinew in you that isn’t racist — never mind bones. Every neutron & proton inside every cell in Donald Trump’s bloated orange body is racist.

And is there anything more racist than racists running to a racist’s defense — insisting that the racist can’t be racist? Is there anything more absurd?

It’s very racist, by the way, to call out the victims of your racism as being the actual racists – like Donald Trump regularly does…

Racism is America’s Kryptonite — the thing that kills us the closer we stand to it. Donald Trump — being the poorly conceived Bond villain that he is — working for Vlad Putin who’s even more racist, vile and pernicious — gleefully rips the scabs from our racist wounds and pours salt in them.

The correct response to anyone claiming not to be a racist — or claiming Donald Trump isn’t one — is “Oh, shut up!”

The louder the better.

And if you want to throw in a “You racist piece of shit” — they’ll understand.