Tag: Pussy grabbing

Quick Reminder — The GOP Knew During The 2016 Convention That Donald Trump Was Owned By Russia; They Kept It A Secret

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

This is from the Washington Post, May 17, 2017: “A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.” What current GOP Leader McCarthy said was “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump”. Then Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan — one of the fellow GOP leaders present “…instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.””

The Republican family behaved exactly like a mafia family. It was all about protecting “la cosa nostra” — this thing of ours.

I’m curious. Has ANY member of the American press corps EVER asked Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan or anyone who was in that room what they were thinking? Has any reporter or journalist stuck a microphone in their faces and asked “Why didn’t you call the FBI if you thought that?” Or “Why didn’t you call the FBI if you even SUSPECTED it?”

That was their obligation — to tell something. To DO something. Because they had more an an inkling that their presidential nominee was corrupt to his bone marrow. And not just corrupt — TREASONOUSLY corrupt. Perhaps Paul Ryan’s response — let’s keep it a secret — had more to do with all the Russian money they ALL had taken on the down low. Pull a thread on Trump’s Russian dalliance, you might as well pull threads on every one of their dalliances — and there were plenty.

As documented as the Republican knowledge that Trump was dirty is the knowledge that Putin had contemplated cyber war against us for years. Cyber war (or asymmetrical warfare if you prefer) is as much a war as an old fashioned “bombs ‘n bullets” war. If the Russians shut down our power grid today, we’d have to sue for peace tomorrow — on their terms. Hell, the Russians placed themselves inside the Oval Office without firing a shot. On a cost basis alone, Russia’s cyber war against us has been the greatest military victory of all time.

How much money flowed to Republican campaign coffers via the NRA? How much flowed via Russian emigrees whose Russian government pensions suddenly rose from enough money to live on to enough money to cash flow a political campaign? How many Russian contacts did the Trump campaign have — and how many have they worked overtime to hide from us? And why?

Our news media, incapable of aggregating the Donald Trump story, forgot apparently that Donald Trump was the first president EVER to run for re-election having BEEN IMPEACHED for CHEATING in the very election he was running in! And the cheating he was impeached over? It was a replay of the exact kind of “foreign government involvement” in our election as in the 2016 election. Even back in 2016, our news media couldn’t grasp how to report on Trump. They thought “but her emails” was far more important than “Mexicans are rapists”, “Pussy grabbing” and “What’s wrong with making nice to Vladimir Putin?”

It boggles the mind that journalists — still unable to tell the 2016 election story — would be just fine with Democrats “forgiving and forgetting” should the moderates somehow convince everyone else that letting criminals get away with the highest crime against We The People — stealing our votes and the intended political outcome our votes demanded — won’t have permanent, negative consequences. “Both sides do it” journalism has convinced journalists that they can never “judge” anything. Moral v immoral behavior — it’s not for them to say. The president only behaves treasonously in the minds of Democrats. And their accusation is purely political.

Oy.

This happened. This photo. At Helsinki. Way more than a thousand words are being spoken here.

I’m old enough to remember when lunatics like me would get rolled eyes from fellow progressives when we’d utter the word “treason” in reference to Trump. Now it’s part of the landscape. It should be a featured part of the landscape — the fact that the sitting POTUS is a stone cold traitor. It should also be part of the landscape that the entire Republican Party — everyone who’s known or suspected anything nefarious since 2016 — also are traitors. It kinda matters in a cyber war.

And an election.

America Is Divided But The MAJORITY Of Americans Were Not Divided About Donald Trump

~ A L Katz ~ 2 Comments

Chicken Little — journalism degree in hand — dashes hither and thither squawking “the sky is falling!” or, as he now puts it, “America is hopelessly divided! What are we all to do?” Shhhh, calm down, Chicken Little. Stop believing your own hype. Stop believing that “both sides do it”. They don’t. That brand of “journalism” has destroyed your sense of perspective; it’s convinced you that you can’t possibly arbitrate between bullshit and truth for your audience; THEY’LL have to decide for themselves if bullshit can be truth and truth can be bullshit. Just for the record, no, it can’t and no, it can’t.

“Both sides to it” is bullshit. And bullshit can never be true. Cos it’s bullshit.

The gun-toting, Christo-fascist, liquored-to-their-bloodshot-eyeballs Trumpanistas do not care about representative democracy and never have. Let’s be generous and call them 30% of America. That’s the slice of America that still approved of Richard Nixon on the day he quit because of Watergate (actually it was 29% — I’m being even more generous!) The truth is, the hardcore-iest of the hardcore Trumpanistas are a thin slice of the larger half-baked tranche. When you stop and do the math — who they are vs who we are? It’s batshit crazy insane that “these people” hold the sway that they do.

I wonder if it’s because they’re all white (or white aspirational)?

The slow but steady attrition of gerrymandering, minority rule and elections stolen from the majority brought us to a place where that disempowered majority finally had enough. Donald Trump himself said the unspoken but true part out loud: when more Americans vote, they vote for Democrats. If too many Americans vote, Republicans would never win again.

Wow. Donald Trump got one right. He spoke a truth.

Why do you suppose Trump thinks that? If more Americans took part in the decision-making process, they would NOT struggle with their choice. They would choose a Democratic, PROGRESSIVE way forward over a Republican, REGRESSIVE way back to what we were: a country that compromised with SLAVERY. Seen as a trend line, a diversifying America is NOT divided on that subject and hasn’t been for a long, long time. That’s the MAJORITY I’m speaking of.

“Both sides do it” insists on giving equal weight to both sides of an argument regardless of any argument’s actual heft. That’s why climate science and climate denial got to share 50-50 screens on every single news network. Quick note to the news networks who apparently don’t understand how the visual medium works. Anything presented in a 50-50 screen is saying (even if unintentionally) “these two things are equal”. If it’s two people making diametrically opposite arguments? Those two arguments (climate science and climate denial) could BOTH be equally valid.

Just like that, NEWS NETWORKS gave credence to rubbish. They said, in the visual language, “this argument could be true”. Bullshit could be true.

Oy.

Once you’ve gone there, there’s not bottom. Mexicans “could be” rapists. Women might “like” being grabbed by their pussies. Children might prefer to grow up in cages, separated from their parents. Voters might not care if their president shoots them on Fifth Avenue — as a bizarre way to keep their vote. Once you chase a rabbit like this down its festering hole, you’re lost. That’s why our news media could never tell the Donald Trump story. It’s why they can’t today.

This story will happen IN SPITE OF our news media mostly and NOT because of it. The majority of heroic reporting on Trump has come from WITHOUT mainstream American journalism and not from within as it should have.

I watched MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhl report the other day how the spontaneous celebrations that broke out across America once Joe and Kamala’s election was a fully established fact that those celebrations weren’t about Donald Trump, they were about a hopeful return to normalcy. My response to Stephanie (through my TV — I don’t think she heard) was “What the HELL are you talking about? I was IN one of those spontaneous celebrations (masked and distanced — but needed see and feel the vibe). I know for a fact what and how WE were celebrating. I wasn’t an observer, ya see, I WAS A PARTICIPANT.

But Stephanie — an observer apparently who didn’t speak to ANY participants — adjudged our motives for us. We weren’t doing it for OUR reason, we were doing it for HERS.

She was “both sides doing it” it to us. The one time we WERE reacting politically, Stephanie (to whom the left is ALWAYS being political rather than reactive) had us being purely reactive.

Um, no, Ms. Ruhl. Everyone as far as I could see and hear at the street celebration I attended was there because of the relief we felt at RIDDING OURSELVES of Donald J. Trump. Please get that distinction. We had to do this OURSELVES because our news media couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

We have to look into this. We will. As badly as the news media has reported on Trump, they are reporting on us. They’re gravitating toward the most visible — the loudest, gun-totingest, bleary-eyed Trumpanistas — the ones with the most white, Christian male grievances to grieve over. Stories of angry white people are easier to tell than stories of everyone else — struggling to get into or stay in a game that remains entirely stacked against them and for the RICH, white, Christian men who are actually oppressing everyone.

Even Charles Koch now realizes how deeply he stepped in it. Charles isn’t being contrite as much as he’s being strategic. He’s seen the same handwriting on the wall that the 21st Century Fox Board of Directors did when they fired Bill O’Reilly on April 19, 2017. The handwriting was female. It belonged to America’s women. They make up most of the buying decisions in American households. If you lose them, you lose. And Bill O’Reilly — a sexual predator — had lost America’s women.

More precisely, Bill O’Reilly lost his advertisers. His show lost its advertisers because all of them saw they’d lose their clients — the companies that made the products being advertised. And those companies didn’t want to lose their customers — all those women making all those buying decisions. It was between Bill O’Reilly and staying in business. We all know who won. That victory should be shouting at us. It is — if only we’d listen to it.

I’ve written here about how I believe our view of the American electorate walks in the door skewed because of who owns most of the voting machine-making companies (and who’s on their boards and to whom they make healthy political campaign donations). Please don’t ask me or anyone to trust people with an aversion to transparency, a cash-paying love for an authoritarian fraud and vehement resistance to Americans using much more secure hand-marked paper ballots to vote. Something about them smells.

If I’m even half-right about Republicans padding their numbers, our perception of who we are and how we vote has been significantly perverted. They’re still as crazy as we think they are, but there are a lot fewer of them than we’ve been told.

That, ya see, is the point of the exercise. Republicans now are like an animal whose sole defense is to puff up its feathers. That “defense” is still just feathers. Republicans aren’t who they present themselves to be. They’re neither growers not show-ers.

We, on the other hand, are both growers AND show-ers. Our numbers grew (significantly) and we showed up — both on election day and after to celebrate.

Hey, Stephanie Ruhl — you’re a good reporter when you stick to matters financial. The moment you wander away from that beat, you lose your super powers. Completely. We’re in a forgiving mood though (with some people). We’ll blame your j-school education instead of you. We’ll assume you were sharp as a tack before “both sides do it” blunted your analytical skills. If you HAD wandered into one of those spontaneous celebrations BEFORE reporting on it and characterizing it, I feel certain your eyes and ears would not have betrayed you.

Four years ago, the MAJORITY of us (and had this many Americans voted, the disappointed majority would have been significantly larger) were shocked when the minority got to rule. We protested. We tore at our hair and ripped at our clothing. But we allowed Trump to take his place in the White House. We now know we were bamboozled. The whole country was — by a man who always favors”me” over “we”.

This past election day, We The People spoke clearly in the loudest, clearest, most steady voice a shitload of voter suppression allowed: “Ding dong, the witch is dead”.

Hear, bloody HEAR!

Can We Please, PLEASE Agree: “Cheating To Win” Does NOT Equal “Winning”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

This shouldn’t need to be stated: Cheating to win is NOT “winning”. It’s “CHEATING”. The moment we make cheating one “way” to win, we’ve made cheating the ONLY way to win because only an idiot would play by rules while his opponent laughs at the rules — and wins every election. It’d be like playing Monopoly by the rules while the other guy starts the game with all the bank’s money and all the good properties already “hoteled up”. Free and fair elections demand genuinely level playing fields. If the playing field isn’t level because someone is cheating, we need to stop the game right there and at the very least call a red card foul.

For the record (or the scoresheet to beat the analogy to death), we’re not talking about the offenses to our sensibilities. Trump’s presidential bid should have ended at “Mexicans are rapists”. It should NEVER have made it as far as “pussy grabbing”. The onus is on us — on our news media since they’re the ones with the megaphone — for letting Trump get away with such egregiously unacceptable behavior from ANYONE in public life never mind a presidential candidate. All terrible, terrible behavior, but none of it criminal.

No, I’m talking about actual Class A Felonies. Geez, you’d think a few of the lawyers-turned-journalists would glom onto that and refuse to let go, visions of Pulitzers in their heads. I’ll reference here for what might have happened had our news media done the same due diligence on Donald Trump that Fusion GPS (founded by former Wall Street Journal reporters) did when they first got hired by the Republican-owned, Jeb-Bush-backing Washington Free Beacon to do oppo research. Fusion found so much evidence of Trump laundering money through his bankrupt Atlantic City casinos IN PUBLICLY AVAILABLE MATERIAL that they hired Chris Steele (former head of MI6’s vaunted Russia Desk) to check it all out.

As I’ve also screamed and shouted here, alas — if the American news media could aggregate the Donald Trump story, it would have ended eons ago. The starting point for their daily reporting would be (worst case scenario): “Hey, news audience, guess what the corrupt-to-his-gills traitor and his corrupt-to-its-gills political party did and said today”. We’d have busted a cap in “both sides do it” journalism and stopped equating bullshit with truth.

Let’s go back to the sports analogy. Let’s stop equating scoring a legitimate goal with literally — with your hands — throwing the ball into the net and calling it a goal (a game-winning goal no less!) It’s not. It never was.

Offside is offside (we even have the VAR now to nail it by a shoelace). A hand ball is a hand ball (that bloody VAR again!) It’s all painful when it goes against you but it’s proof that the rule was violated. Putting emotions aside, we follow the rule. In the end, it will serve everyone better that way. If we want to adjust the rule, fine tune it and its application — that’s always open to us. But, if we had been following the rules — the ones that dictate how we play and don’t play this “game” — how this game played out would have been different.

Donald Trump buying Stormy Daniels’ silence, for instance. That, right there, was a red card foul that should have been whistled. Michael Cohen went to prison for his role in that bit of blatant criminality. Donald Trump inviting Russia’s assistance — OPENLY — was a red card foul that should have been whistled. “Hey, Russia, if you’re listening…” was an act of open TREASON. Especially when you consider what Russia literally did next: they DID SOMETHING. Russia ACTED ON Trump’s invitation — and Trump, rather than being appalled by Russia’s reaction, USED IT as part of his campaign.

Russia, mind you, was actively engaged in a CYBER WAR against us. Cyber. War.

Treason is treason is treason.

Cheating that’s also treasonous? We’d be insane to accept that in place of the results we actually voted for. I, for one, do not accept it. But then, I don’t accept cheating to win as winning — and neither should any other American.

Cheating to win is un-American. It’s immoral. It’s not winning.

The moment We The People make THAT our reaction to Trump’s cheating — to the entire Republican Party’s blatant abuse of the rules and the law — that anything accomplished via provable cheating will not stand — we will END the Republican Party’s reliance on cheating to win as their only means to win. Either they’ll adapt — and try selling their ideas instead — or they’ll die. Actually, if they adapt and try selling their ideas, they’ll die anyway — which they know — which is WHY they cheat.

Let’s stop indulging them. Let’s stop allowing their fatal flaw to be OUR fatal flaw. When they claim “We won!” the correct answer isn’t “Oh well, I guess they ‘won’ since they say they did”, it’s “NO, you didn’t”. And that’s it. The rules are quite clear. No, they did not win.

In our system of government, the authority to govern flows from US, We The People. If We The People know for a fact that our authority — it’s baked into our vote — has been not only questioned but attacked — then We The People have every right to respond accordingly (though within the law of course). Good thing the rule of law backs us here: demonstrable cheating to win is not winning.

All we have to do therefore is FOLLOW the rule of law and ENFORCE IT EQUALLY like we’re supposed to.

For starters, we’ll automatically be far healthier as a society because we’ll actually be living up to our ideals (or trying to a lot harder to anyway). Restoring justice to its rightful place — that will help a lot, too. But then the rule of law will demand that we deal with the criminality that drove us to the brink of authoritarianism — against the majority’s will. The rule of law will demand that we address every last nuance of criminality — and every last criminal. Got the stank on ya, Republicans? There’ll be no getting it off.

Gonna be a lot of old, rich, Christian white guys shouting “Out, out, damned spot!”

Maybe it’s time for a new “Scarlet Letter”. Let’s put aside the “A” for Adultery that Hester Prynne was forced to wear and, instead, repurpose those stupid red hats Trump’s sold all his dumber-than-a-rube-on-angel-dust followers by sticking a giant Gold “C” on them. That’s “C” for Cheater. By then, it should be understood that the “C” is interchangeable with a “T” — for “Trump”.

And for “Treason”.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that the word “CHEAT” begins with a “C” for cheating — but ends in a “T” for “TRUMP”.

Indeed — let’s make it “end” in a “T” for Trump. Better still, let’s make it all end in a sentence.

Why Does Our MSM STILL Tolerate Being Lied To By Republicans? Because They Still Think “Both Sides Do It”…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Among the false narratives we have to negotiate daily — the rubbish that we start with any sort of “level playing field”. Bullshit.

Keep in mind — we’ve already normalized “Mexicans are rapists” and “pussy-grabbing”. We’ve got it in our heads now that you can say what should be career-ending hate like that and “get away with it” because that’s exactly what’s happened. It isn’t the public that ultimately shrugged off those things. Mexicans didn’t — I assure you.

And women have absolutely not forgotten — or shrugged off “pussy-grabbing”. Did you see what happened in 2018? The sentiments that motivated the massive swing in the House that finally returned oversight to the tool kit has not diminished. It’s gotten stronger in fact. The Democrats didn’t shrug off such hatefulness.

America’s news media did. They LET THEMSELVES be seduced. They stopped asking about Mexicans being rapists and pussy-grabbing and simply went on to the next outrage — accepting that the outrage they HAD BEEN outraged about was now just part of our collective past — how it was… how it now IS? No — no, that’s not how it is — it’s how “is” is being portrayed by a lazy news media who care more about access than they do the Truth.

By all rights, we shouldn’t be starting each news day from some “neutral” position where Republicans are behaving as honest actors. They haven’t been honest actors since they cast their lot in with Trump. It wasn’t just ideology that bound them to a man they all KNEW was a career criminal. FFS — our press keeps asking the same stupid question: “Why, do ya think, the GOP stays so loyal to Trump” — even in the face of 80% of the country wanting witnesses and evidence at Trump’s impeachment trial?

The bulk of our press insists on seeing EVERYTHING through a political lens first. That corrupts their whole view. They appoint political motive where it isn’t. A Democrat reacting to a Republican violating the Rule Of Law & the Constitution isn’t reacting politically. They’re reacting as a citizen — alarmed that another citizen is VIOLATING THE LAW. That ain’t politics, it’s patriotism.

But if you see the victim of a crime (and the Democrats most definitely are the victims of a crime) as somehow “guilty” of the crime just because they were “part of” the crime — as in, “well, it could be the victim’s fault — what were they wearing?” — then, yeah, to you, both sides will always “do it”. Too bad that’s 100% wrong.

If the news media were half-way competent, they’d be aggregating the information they learn every day into the narrative as a whole. It’s called “adding information”. It’s how storytelling works. You don’t keep going back to “In the beginning…” because we’re already at the part where Moses just parted the Red Sea. We know all the stuff that got us here — start from THERE ffs!

Consequently — because our press can’t keep track of what they already KNOW — despite the fact that it’s been repeated to them so many times and despite how much effin’ evidence that’s out in public already — we end up acting like we don’t know what we DO know. We keep asking “Why, do ya think, Republicans are sooooooo loyal to Trump?” and “Why, do ya think, Republicans are soooooooo afraid of hearing witnesses and seeing actual evidence at a Senate Impeachment Trial?

We should NOT be scratching our heads here.

We should NOT be staring at a connect-the-dots picture of Treason — with all but a few of the dots connected — like it was a picture of nothing but unconnected dots. The aggregated story says Republicans are all compromised. How many times can “journalists” ask “Gosh, what do ya suppose happened to Lindsey Graham?” If they had any instincts as storytellers — or journalists even — they’d be pushing Lindsey so hard, he’d have given up already. But our press has bought Lindsey’s bizarre flip-flop as “normal”. It’s just how Lindsey is. It’s just how Lindsey is about Trump (regardless of everything he ever said about Trump in the past). It’s just Lindsey acting in a way that defies all logic, all reason — unless we see dark motives.

The only way you don’t see a dark motive in Lindsey Graham (for example — Mitch McConnell fits the bill even better) is if we equate dark behavior with normalcy. Again — We The People don’t do that. We don’t report the news. We don’t have any sort of Big Megaphone the way the News Media does. Most of what we “know” flows from them. If they don’t equate dark behavior with dark behavior — and report dark behavior as NORMAL behavior instead — the news-consuming public will, in no time, begin to equate dark behavior with “normal”.

Both sides do not suppress the other sides voters. Both sides do not do everything in their power to LIMIT Democracy in America. Both sides do not reach out to hostile foreign powers for help winning elections. Both sides don’t gerrymander their way into permanent minority rule. Only one side does this — does it in public — and does it repeatedly. It ain’t the Democrats.

The only way you can think both sides do what the Republican Party is doing to America is if you equate truth and lies. If you honestly believe Democrats — in power — would even think of doing the same thing? You also think our playing field is level.

Americans Need To Start Calling Things What They Really Are… Republicans, For Instance, Are “Traitors”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Remember back to the good ol’ days when news networks, grasping at their pearls, saved us from now-POTUS Donald Trump uttering the words “grab em by the pussy”? Heaven forbid an American news audience hear those words.

An American news audience, the News Networks decided, could not possibly handle hearing what a candidate for POTUS said – on an open mic – to another man – about how he likes to treat women – because the word “pussy” would offend us. Not so much the pussy-GRABBING as that terrible, terrible word: “pussy”. The news networks had no such compunctions over Trump saying outloud how “Mexicans are rapists”. I’m guessing because none of those words offends. It’s just the idea the words express that should be bleeped from America’s airways.

George Carlin’s “7 Words” routine shouted volumes to us not just because it was brilliant and funny but because it was painfully true about us. The “two-way words” like balls comes to mind. A broadcaster can say a baseball player has “two balls on him” but wouldn’t dream of saying that on the very next pitch, he got nailed in “the balls”. A helluva lot of that nonsense comes from America’s religionistas who all think “doing unto others” means judging them.

America’s journalists have it in their heads that journalists must be neutral in every way, shape & form. They must assume that every person is pretty much the same — and what they say weighs exactly the same as what any other person says regardless of whether it’s the Truth or outright lies (because who’s to say what the Truth is?) This distortion of reality — that every argument has two exactly equal sides, one for, one against — has undermined our ability to see the Truth because we’ve already begun equating lies with Truth.

What’s worse — American visual journalists don’t grasp the power of the media they work in. For instance — they don’t understand that when you put two people in a fifty-fifty frame, the visual language says these two people have equal weight; what they say — their arguments — have the same possible validity. It’s up to the viewer to decide what’s true, what isn’t. It makes it hard to decide what’s “true” when one of the choices isn’t true — though it’s labeled as “maybe true”.

A climate scientist seen on-set with a climate denier in a 50-50 visual says “these two arguments have equal heft”. They don’t of course. The News Media is misframing and misrepresentng the Truth.

From the moment Trump was impeached, Moscow Mitch McConnell has made his partiality — his intent to ignore anything & everything Trump has done — crystal clear. He’s not been subtle about it. Yet Mitch — like all the Senators — took an OATH to do the exact opposite. That means Mitch, as we speak, is violating his oath (never mind everything he’s doing to obstruct justice).

Our MSM however presents a “strategic” Senate Majority Leader, cagily protecting his majority. They don’t see — though they should — the man who stood up at that Gang Of Eight meeting at the Obama White House in September 2016 where Obama and the Intelligence Community informed our leadership that Russia was actively engaged in impacting the election for the benefit of Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell REFUSED to let We The People in on what was being done to OUR ELECTION.

Now, WHY would Mitch do such a thing? Why wouldn’t Mitch want our election to be as free and fair as possible?

If one were thorough as a journalist — or even a base storyteller — one would have all these aspects of the character in one’s mind as one wrote about the character. A wife-beater doesn’t stop being a wife-beater just because he goes to the office. He’s a wife-beater at the office, nothing more. But our MSM seems to see it differently. When the Wife Beater walks out his door? He stops being a Wife Beater and becomes just another “Ordinary Joe” heading off to work.

No, the Wife Beater remains a Wife Beater. The Pussy Grabber (BY HIS OWN ADMISSION!) remains a pussy grabber — even when he then denies grabbing pussies or worse. He’s a self-confessed pussy-grabber, you see? And if the American Press aggregated the information we KNOW for a fact about Trump, we would START our reporting on Trump from a place far, far further along than we do every day.

it’s the Press’s instance on taking us backwards every day that’s killing the storytelling here. They keep asking the same people the same questions — because they keep ignoring the very good answers as if the very good information they just got couldn’t find purchase inside their heads. It is absurd that watching MSNBC, one is constantly whipsawed backwards and forwards in “news time” to places where we KNOW certain things to be so and places where we’ve never heard of anything and Trump’s the most normal POTUS imaginable.

There’s a reason Mitch McConnell & every Republican around Trump remains so incredibly loyal. It ain’t tribalism. To even think that is to think this is something we’ve gone through dozens of time before. To think hat is to ignore the context completely. To ignore Russia’s presence everywhere including an aluminum factory in Western Kentucky. Republican loyalty to Trump (think Lindsey Graham’s remarkable transformation) can be summed up in one word: “COMPLICITY”.

Despite their claims of “neutrality”, our Press, every day, presents arguments where, among the possible explanations is “Trump’s completely innocent of everything”. And the Press makes that possibility plain — cos they repeat Trump saying it. They allow for a bland “Well, if he’s not ‘innocent’ per se, who can say what he’s ‘guilty’ of?” But they NEVER report the other possibility — that Trump is guilty, guilty, GUILTY of everything indicated both by the evidence and by his own admissions of guilt.

Trump’s guilt is never, it seems, one of the possible explanations.

I guess, if the Press accused Trump of being a traitor, they fear they’d have to accuse a Democrat of being a traitor, too — since both sides do it.

Americans need to stop needing baby talk. We need to grow the hell up — and fast! We need to get over our unease at adult words and concepts. We need to stop putting icing on poison and calling it cake. We need to call things what they are.

Republicans are not patriots. They’re traitors.

Donald Trump is not President, he’s a criminal — gifted the presidency by both Russia and the Republican Party who were willing to hitch their wagon to this monstrosity because it gave them their last best shot at shoving permanent minority rule down the majority’s throat. Our News Media — babytalking — would euphemistically call that “Republican strategy”. What they mean is “rape”.

What else do you call it when someone wants one thing but has another imposed on them — repeatedly and despite vigorous protestations to please, STOP?

It’s time for us to speak plainly to each other — even if our News Media won’t. What’s happening to America isn’t “politics as usual”. It’s an act of political rape. While Russia holds America down, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are raping us. They’re doing something to us we do not want & did not vote for.

Traitors are raping us in real time as we watch.

Not a word of that is untrue.

Life In Trump’s America: The Political Thriller Of Our Lifetimes Is Also Theater Of The Absurd

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Our inner animals knew it instinctively even as the tide was turning election night 2016. We were being told something that every fiber of our being knew was untrue — or knew was truth complicated by layers of deception, deceit and treachery — that Trump had “won” the presidency.

Ever read the details on exactly what happened chronologically on election night in the Trump campaign — especially between Trump and his flotus to be? Trump wasn’t just “surprised” that he won, he was shocked. And not because he had “pulled it out”. Trump knew better than anyone that THAT was not what happened election night. Trump knew better than anyone that “The Boss” — Vlad Putin — had suppressed, propagandized or — via internet-connected-voting machines — literally stolen just enough votes in three key states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin & Michigan, three states for which Oleg Deripaska had received proprietary polling data from Paul Manafort) to GIVE Trump the EC victory.

Melania wept openly. She raged at Trump — who, per Steve Bannon, morphed from a “disbelieving Trump into a horrified Trump”. That’s disbelieving he could win to being horrified that he HAD “won”. Winning wasn’t part of Trump’s plan. Using a presidential run to platform launch a Trump-branded news network was. Winning — once victory was gettable (via cheating) — was absolutely Vladimir Putin’s plan. Putin saw a way to put Trump in the White House — the greatest intelligence coup in the history of intelligence — and he took it.

Keep in mind — Putin had already compromised enough of the Republican Party that he knew he could keep them in line. Take Lindsey Graham, for example. You can practically see the Kompromat Vlad’s holding over Lindsey play in Lindsey’s mind’s eye every time he speaks.

That’s where it starts crossing over from John Le Carre territory into Becket — from George Smiley realpolitik into waiting for a Godot who will never, ever appear. Our spy movie as real life beats anything any writer could possibly imagine — or get away with if they did imagine.

We’ve got intrigue and treason and cyber war and actual war and murders out the wazoo. We’ve got a handful of heroes and scoundrels by the bucket. And we’ve got a Main Stream News Media that makes an unsatisfying hash of the whole damned thing. We’ve got liars lying, rapists raping and con artists conning.

The feeling, watching this madness rush by on a daily basis, is a lot like watching an English pantomime (a Christmastime tradition in England). Based on old chestnuts like “Puss In Boots” or “Cinderella”, panto’s are very much the groundlings having a good time at their local theater — talking back to the characters on stage as if a fourth wall never existed.

One of the moments every panto must have — the villain (upstage) creeps toward the hero who’s downstage — while the audience tries to warn the hero. Every time the hero looks toward where the audience points — the villain ducks or disappears — then reappears the moment the hero has turned away again. It’s absurd, of course, because the truth is so apparent — and yet so impossible to hold onto.

It is numbing — by design — how far from “normal” we’ve shifted. It’s inconceivable that Donald Trump’s presidential bid didn’t end the moment he started it by telling us all how Mexicans were rapists. More absurdity compounded by pussy grabbing — compounded exponentially when “Mexicans are rapists” and “pussy grabbing” went back seat to “her emails” sitting in the front seat of the news media’s Scooby van.

Looking back today at “But her emails” — even Ionesco at his most obtuse couldn’t touch the absurdity of our news media obsessing over an abstraction over constant evidence of dubious, devious behavior. Despite three years of this madness, of Trump’s lying, deceitfulness and cruelty, our news media still wants to give him the benefit of the doubt — as if “this time”, Trump “could be” telling the truth.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve shouted far too often at the news “professionals” on your TV set — “FFS, don’t be absurd!”

Is it really asking that much to have our political theater be one thing and our theater of the absurd be something else entirely? Apparently so…

Dear Journalists: Recognize That We, The News Consumers, Are Your Audience; If We Tell You We Have A Problem With You, LISTEN!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I had a little back-and-forth this morning (using my Mulligan Jesus Twitter account) with the Washington Post’s Philip Bump. Nothing significant. For some reason my tweet annoyed him enough to respond.

I view Bump the way I view most journalists – he’s a guy doing a job, sometimes well, sometimes not. I hold journalists in no particular regard. I’ve worked in show biz most of my life. I honestly don’t care how famous you are if you not doing your job screws with me doing mine.

Like a lot of American journalists — like too, too many of them — Bump refuses to take any responsibility for the way American journalism has covered & still covers Trump. They refuse to see how their relentless normalization of Trump — from “Mexicans are rapists” to “Pussy grabbing” to putting brown children in cages to even claiming the entire Russian investigation is a hoax — has destroyed their ability to report Trump.

Reporters like Bump will insist he’s been objective down the line. Perhaps. But object relative to what? To the actual Truth or to some “truthy” version of Truth?

Bump’s hardly the worst of the worst. Reporters like NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell fill that role. 3+ years in to a president notorious for rarely telling the truth and STILL Kelly O’ reports every word Trump says faithfully — like he was speaking Gospel Truth instead of total, unadulterated bullshit.

I don’t watch the amount of news (mostly MSNBC ) that I do for the “news” (except for “breaking news” — whatever that is), I watch it like a canary in a coal mine, tweeting my head off to warn that the environment is toxic in the extreme. One of the things I tweet about with neurotic intensity is how poorly our press has performed in telling the Trump story.

From the beginning, they’ve treated Trump as if he was a normal candidate and a normal POTUS. He was neither — because Russia was doing everything it could to make Trump POTUS. If we take Russia out of the Trump equation, he would never have made it through the Republican primaries in 2016. Trump is a Russian intel asset. Any discussion or analysis of Trump that doesn’t start there, is nonsense.

What Philip Bump – and most American journalists fail to grasp — is that if i perceive a news source is unreliable, I’m not going to rely on it — or, as with the Washington Post, pay my subscription. Yes, I’m just one customer. But if enough customers like me experience the same failure of faith, the Washington Post will go belly up that much faster.

That I perceive Philip Bump or anyone in our MSM as incompetent or incapable or inept is a problem for them, not me. “Well, you’re wrong,” as Bump tweeted at me (“…thank you for your wise assessment” is how Bump put it), misses the point entirely. My “opinion” is an opinion. It may be mis-informed but it can’t (cos it’s an opinion) be “wrong”.

My opinion is that Philip Bump needs to open his mind to constructive criticism. My opinion is that America’s press has failed to meet its Constitutionally mandated responsibilities. My opinion is that America’s press needs to do better.

Hey, Philip Bump — fight me on that. I dare you.

If Our MSM Reported Voldemort The Way They Reported Trump, They’d Describe Voldemort As A Man In Need Of A Little Rhinoplasty

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Dear CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post Et Al — You seem to have a persistent problem reporting on Donald Trump. After all this time and bullshit, you STILL don’t know who he is. Maybe if you pulled back the lens you use to look at him, you’d see that the various different Trumps you report on are all parts of the same “Uber-Trump” where all the horrible Trumps pool into one giant cess pit of corruption.

You can’t seem to grasp that the ludicrous Donald Trump who wants to buy Greenland is the SAME Donald Trump named as an Unindicted Co-Conspirator in court documents for having committed ELECTION FRAUD.

It’s the same Donald Trump who the Mueller Report accuses of persistent Obstruction Of Justice — and whose obstruction didn’t permit a thorough investigation into possible conspiracy (within the narrow scope of stolen data, it’s passage to Wikileaks and Wikileaks’ transmission of said data out into the world as part of a GRU (Russian military intelligence) active measures campaign.

It’s the same Donald Trump who we KNOW had a deep, abiding friendship with pederast Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s the same Donald Trump who — on day one of his campaign — announced his overt racism to the world: “Mexicans are rapists”.

It’s the same Donald Trump who PROUDLY confided in another privileged male that HE was so privileged that he could grab any woman’s pussy — and she’d let him do it.

It’s the same Donald Trump who insisted after a white supremacist mowed down anti-hate protester Heather Heyer that “both sides had good people”.

It’s the same Trump who shared OUR SECRETS with the Russian Ambassador in OUR WHITE HOUSE.

It’s the same Trump who meets privately with Vladimir Putin because he knows — if WE THE PEOPLE knew what HE was saying out of our earshot, we would have him on trial right this second for TREASON.

It’s the same Donald Trump who puts brown children into cages after kidnapping them from their parents — the whole point of the exercising being to dehumanize, brutalize and dis incentivize asylum seekers (many of whom are seeking asylum because of violence caused in their home countries by American drug gangs).

It’s the same Donald Trump who bragged about walking in on GIRLS in their dressing room at a beauty pageant he owned.

It’s the same Donald Trump who cheated on his wife just after she’d given birth to his child.

It’s the same Donald Trump whose own WIFE accused him of raping her.

It’s the same Donald Trump who has lied over 10,000 times (by a conservative count) since literally STEALING the presidency.

It’s the same Donald Trump who would not be POTUS if not for Russia MAKING him POTUS.

These aren’t “different” Donald Trumps (no more than Trump is a “different kind of POTUS” — there’s no such thing. All these Trumps are one and the same with THE Donald Trump — the bloated orange jackal turd who literally STOLE the presidency.

You cannot report on just “one” Donald Trump because that’s not who he is. It’s like reporting on Voldemort as a guy in need of some rhinoplasty.

There’s so much more to Voldemort of course — just as there’s so much more to Donald Trump. If only you (our MSM) had perspective… then you might see Donald Trump for who & especially WHAT he really is — just like Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson (a former WSJ reporter) did when first hired by the RW Washington Free Beacon to do oppo research on Trump.

The real Donald Trump has always hidden in plain sight. That our MSM refuses to see him for what he really is — that’s entirely on them.

Having A “Normalcy Bias” Isn’t Abnormal; It Should Be…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

If a presidential contender coming down an escalator announces to the world that he’s running for President because America needs a wall to keep out all the Mexican rapists — and everyone (after an initial burst of outrage) shrugs because they’re already consumed by that contender’s next outrage — somewhere inside that shrug was born their “Normalcy Bias”.  Calling Mexicans rapists went — within a sentence — from being an outrage to being… “normal”.

That’s just how Trump speaks, the MSM told us.  Racism?  No.   Poor word choice — yes.  And, just like that, the MSM had built absolute racism into its Normalcy Bias.  Racism was — IS — now completely legit.  Pussy-grabbing worked the exact same way.  A few moments of outrage tempered by the “timely” release of a Wikileaks dump — which, too, got NORMALIZED.  Shall we toss LYING onto the bonfire?

How quickly did the MSM normalized the fact that a president of the United States lied more reliably than he told the truth?  Though they knew what Trump was saying was a lie, still they continued to report each lie as if it WASN’T a lie and therefore had to be considered as possibly the truth.

Sorry, but a turd is a turd is a turd. Call it a “perfumed package” if you like or a “surprise” or even just “poo”.  It’s a turd.  It stinks.  It has to be cleaned up.  Making it “palatable” while making it “do-able” also makes it “palatable”.  Maybe it shouldn’t be.

What our MSM can’t seem to grasp is how badly THEY are being fooled every day by their own Normalcy Bias.  When, say, you know going into a (rare) press conference that the Press Secretary is going to lie to you — and then you LET HER LIE & (worse) let her GET AWAY WITH IT, you are further solidifying HER Normalcy Bias that she CAN get away with just about every time.  What’s the cost of lying?  Nothing.

Normalcy Bias is no one’s friend.   It’s comfort with what is even if “what is” is utter bullshit. Normalcy Bias is how that frog slowly gets boiled to death without ever realizing it.

Drip… Drip… Drip… How Authoritarianism Works

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The most frustrating arguments I have these days aren’t with Trumpanistas.  They’re with people completely on ‘our side’.

The question isn’t ‘Is Donald Trump the worst thing (aside from slavery) that ever happened to America?’  The question is why are so many ‘informed’, progressive people so reluctant to fully embrace — and act upon — a simple, empirical fact?

Why are they so reluctant when their whole way of life is threatened.  Not make believe threatened — For Real, No-Shit, No-Kidding Threatened.  The kind you look back upon afterward and ask yourself, ‘Gee, considering how clearly and obviously threatened we were, why didn’t someone do something?’  That someone would be YOU, pal — and the why is YOU NORMALIZED THE THREAT.

The steady ‘Drip-Drip-Drip’ of Normalization.  It is DEADLY.

Remember the feelings of outrage you felt over the words Donald Trump spoke about Mexicans on DAY ONE of his campaign?  He said that about human beings he didn’t know, about AMERICANS (many of them) — hard-working, patriotic Americans.

The moment we didn’t stop what was happening and insist that Donald Trump’s campaign to be POTUS end right there, right then — he had us.  It was over.  We had just ACCEPTED — and therefore NORMALIZED overt racism and bigotry.  It poked its nose into the Commonweal’s tent — saw no resistance — and so came right in and made itself at home.

When we next ACCEPTED ‘Pussy-Grabbing’ as ‘Just how this candidate talks about women‘ — we were gone, gone, gone.  Now it was more than HALF THE POPULATION whose DEBASEMENT we ACCEPTED and NORMALIZED.

Authoritarians need the mob BEHIND THEM, not opposing them for this reason and that reason.  Divide & Conquer is so basic even bad dictators usually get that one right.  Donald Trump certainly did.

Donald Trump managed to get the wishes & desires of 16% of the American population — yeah, as a percentage of the whole American Population, that’s the sum total of hard core Trumpanistas.  Throw in the fact that — with the assistance of Russia and Cynical RW White Christian Male Money — Election 2016 was fraudulent top to bottom and you get the recipe for an Authoritarian soft coup just the way the chefs drew it up.

Each little drip was bad enough.  But those drips add up.  Like now — into a whole trough FILLED with Malicious, Un-Democratic Intent.  And the ‘Coffee Maker’ looks and smells like it’s about to explode.

Fer Christ’s Sake — Can we PLEASE turn the ‘coffee maker’ off before it shorts out and burns the whole house down?