The Blue Country Gazette is the successor to the Rim Country Gazette, reflecting our evolution to a nationwide political blog for readers who identify as "blue," liberals, progressives, and/or Democrats. Our mission is to provide distinctive coverage of issues during a time of extreme polarization in the U.S. We strive to provide side-stories and back-stories that provide additional insights and perspectives conventional coverage often doesn't include.
On Monday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made it clear that the
U.S. has a broader goal in assisting Ukraine against the invasion by
Russian forces. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that
it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,”
said Austin.
The secretary of defence’s words have generated a good deal of faux
outrage and blustering from those who claim this represents some sort of
change from the mission of seeing Ukraine preserve its nation against
an illegal and brutal invasion. It’s not. This is that same goal, elevated.
In 1987, historian Barbara Fields said this about of the importance of battles and tactics when discussing the American Civil War: “It’s
not about soldiers except to the extent that weapons and soldiers at
that crucial moment joined a discussion about something higher, about
humanity, about human dignity, about human freedom.”
That’s where we are in Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is, as Fields said then, not about “battles
and glory and carnage.” If that’s all there was to it, this would be a
very ugly story, no matter which side we were on. For this story to mean
something, for the cost of the war in both blood and money to be
redeemed, requires a greater goal. The weakening of Russian power under
Vladimir Putin might not have the same incalculable good as equality and
freedom, but it is an almost unsullied good.
Decades ago, Putin turned his back on joining the family of nations and recreated Russia as an engine of destruction. He
has used that engine in disrupting democracies and furthering
authoritarian governments, not just in Russia, but around the
world—including the United States. He’s used the Russian military to
expand his own power by systematically attacking civilian populations in
Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere. He’s turned his own nation into
a crime-driven and criminal-obsessed parody of what it could be.
Reducing Russia’s ability to conduct more invasions like the one
underway in Ukraine isn’t just a side note, it’s a noble goal. It’s a
goal that elevates both the contributions we are making to this cause,
and the suffering and sacrifice by the Ukrainian people.
Putin's tanks in search of more innocent civilians to slaughter in Ukraine.
She said, “What it is, is Satan’s controlling the church. The church
is not doing its job, and it’s not adhering to the teachings of Christ,
and it’s not adhering to what the word of God says we’re supposed to do
and how we’re supposed to live.”
In many ways the success of the contemporary Republican Party depends
on an Evangelical-Catholic political alliance against abortion rights
and the sexual revolution. Evangelicals in Congress have been willing to
vote six Catholics onto the Supreme Court for this reason. Greene’s
vitriolic diatribe, however, raises the possibility that the QAnon white
nationalists who are taking over the Republican Party are breaking with
the Church over some of its social policies, which are often liberal or
at least humanitarian.
She later said that foreign aid should be cut to countries from which
refugees are fleeing to the US and that “If the bishops were reading
the Bible and truly preaching the word of God to their flock and not
covering up child sex abuse and pedophilia, loving one another would
have the true meaning and not the perversion and the twisted lie that
they’re making it to be.”
She had said that the Christian principle of “loving one another”
should not involve surrendering to a “globalist agenda” to make “America
become something that we are not supposed to be.”
I have thought about her diction here and I can’t make it mean
anything other than “we Christian white people are supposed to love one
another but that doesn’t mean we have to love brown or Black people, and
certainly doesn’t mean we have to minister to non-white refugees. And
if the Roman Catholic Church interprets Christianity as requiring
charity to all, then it has itself become a tool of Satan.”
In other words, she views Christianity only through the lens of white nationalism.
But the (literal) demonization of Catholicism stands out in her
remarks because it resonates with a long-term strand of Protestant white
nationalism, as with the mid-19th century “Know-Nothing Movement,” a
conspiratorial hate group that burned Catholic churches and attacked
Catholic Americans.
Although Greene was brought up Catholic, she says she fell away from the church.
Being an army brat, I traveled around the world growing up, but in
between postings we would spend time in Northern Virginia. I can’t
remember now how it happened, but somebody once dragged me to a Baptist
revival meeting when I was a kid and I was given a pamphlet about how
the Pope was the antichrist and had 666 sewn into his mitre. Our branch
of the Coles are fallen-away Catholics, but I remember being appalled.
My generation had a positive impression of Pope John XXIII and the
reforms of Vatican II. In fact, the latter helped inspire my BA thesis,
the field work for which I conducted in Beirut, about the
inter-religious dialogue it kicked off with Muslims.
The vicious anti-Roman Catholic sentiments expressed by Greene, as I said, evoke an ugly side of American history.
Three decades ago, historian Bryan Le Beau
wrote in his address “Saving the West from the Pope”: Anti-Catholic
Propaganda and the Settlement of the Mississippi River Valley,”
“Arthur M. Schlesinger, the elder, once told John Tracy
Ellis, dean of the historians of American Catholicism, that he regarded
prejudice against Roman Catholics to be “the deepest bias in the history
of the American people.” By this, he did not intend to suggest that it
was the most violent, though at times it certainly was; or that it was
the most consistent, as it tended to wax and wane throughout American
history; but rather, that the roots of anti-Catholicism lay buried in
the depths of the American consciousness, bearing fruit over time across
the American cultural landscape.”
On the East Coast from the 1820s forward, as German and Irish
Catholics came to the country, the slogan of “no popery” was raised and
riots were staged against the latter. In 1844 St. Michael’s Catholic
Church in Philadelphia was burned
and 20 people were killed. Between 1800 and 1840 a million Roman
Catholics immigrated. (My paternal ancestor Georg Kohl [Anglicized as
Cole] arrived in 1830, so he and his family would have known that
atmosphere.) A Protestant riot greeted papal nuncio Archbishop Gaetano
Bedini when he came to Cincinnati in 1853, Le Beau reminds us.
Catholic associations that had begun in Austria and France were
attacked as threats to Republican liberties, since, it was alleged, the
Church supported royal absolutism and opposed the idea of a Republic
with the sort of individual rights adumbrated in the US constitution.
Although it is true that the 19th-century Church profoundly disliked the
French Revolution and its ideals, and much preferred monarchies that
would back Catholicism, it isn’t the case that American Catholics were
seditious. Some did object to Protestant hegemony, especially in public
schools, and one man burned some King James Version Bibles, which made a
bad impression.
It is ironic that in the 19th century Catholic Americans were
attacked for being too conservative, and now Greene is attacking them
for being too liberal. I pointed out
some time ago that some right-wing Catholics make a big deal of their
faith but completely ignore or even oppose the contemporary church’s
social teachings.
The 19th century hate groups, however, did associate Catholics with
immigration and saw a danger that they would convert the other
immigrants, so that Nativist concern is common to our moment and the
1840s.
If Greene’s anti-Catholic sentiment becomes widespread in today’s
GOP, it could be fatal to the party, since of the 72 million Catholic
Americans, about half now vote Republican.
"Ohmigod, it's a Catholic! That means Satan is here pulling the strings!"
Your day probably hasn't been weird enough, so let's fix that right
now with a quote from an ex-President of These United States.
"I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that
they were going to do fruit," said Donald J. Trump, previously in charge
of this nation's nuclear arsenal.
As reported by The Daily Beast,
this and many other important fruit-related quotes have now surfaced
thanks to an October deposition just now being filed in the civil
lawsuit against Trump brought by Trump Tower protesters who were
assaulted by Trump's private security force back in 2015. Lawyers for
those protesters were probing Trump's history of encouraging violence
against protesters in general, including his public request to a crowd
at one of his 2016 rallies that "If you see someone getting ready to
throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?"
This led the man who could once issue orders to nuclear submarines,
perhaps orders demanding that they pull up to a seaside McDonalds and
order him some fries, to explain that he was justified in asking the
crowd to "knock the crap" out of anyone who might try to throw fruit
because his campaign had learned somebody might possibly be planning to
throw fruit and the fruit-throwing could have been "very dangerous."
Via The Daily Beast, then, are some of the fruit-related highlights of Trump's testimony:
"You get hit with fruit, it's—no, it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that."
Tomatoes are: "very dangerous stuff."
"You can get killed with those things."
"Some fruit is a lot worse than—tomatoes are bad, by the way. But
it’s very dangerous. No, I wanted them to watch. They were on alert. I
remember that specific event because everybody was on alert. They were
going to hit, they were going to hit hard."
"You can be killed if that happens."
The specific fruits Trump enumerated as "dangerous stuff" consist of
"pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that." While the threat of
pineapples is obvious, there remain few to no incidents of American
politicians being pelted by pineapples, because they are simply too
heavy to throw very far. Bananas could potentially be dangerous because,
being of a boomerang-like shape, a skilled thrower could potentially
throw a banana that would approach from an unexpected direction, foiling
even the most skilled of Secret Service agents and resulting in a
potential Dear Leader being poked somewhat annoyingly by one of the
banana's two somewhat pointy ends.
As for the "very dangerous," "very violent," and "you can be killed
if that happens" nature of a thrown tomato, the dangers are a bit less
clear. Is it possible the tomato juice could have combined with Trump's
velvety facial make-up to produce some sort of napalm-like solution? Is
there a way for tomatoes and other thrown fruits to combine to produce,
say, thermite?
These mysteries have not been cleared up, no doubt because government
agents demanded that those explanations be deleted from deposition
tapes lest terrorists from fruit-rich nations discover them.
Or, possibly, Trump had a dream about somebody pelting him with fruit
onstage and was so terrified of such humiliation that the next day he
ordered an entire rally crowd of chanting weirdos to "knock the crap"
out of anyone in the building who was suspected of having fruit.
I mean, you could probably poke an eye out if you threw a chicken
wing at someone—but Trump didn't request similar assaults on those
holding meat. Very suspicious if you ask me.
And how did the Trump campaign make it through such a trying time
without any announcement, ever, declaring that from now on Jared Kushner
was going to be put in charge of Fruit and Fruit Trajectories? How are
we supposed to believe that Trump’s inner circle was concerned about
fruit attacks if Kushner was tasked with authoring not even one
Google-researched report on fruit dangers?
Anyhoo, this has been your regular reminder that the Republican Party
put Donald Freaking Trump in a position of mind-boggling power on
purpose, knowing full well his positions and histories and having many,
many videotapes, some of them pornographic, on hand as documentation.
And a bunch of preachers came to lay hands on him, and a bunch of top
intelligence analysts tried to wedge a bit of vital knowledge into his
head by giving him pretty pictures to look at when it became clear he
wasn't going to read intelligence briefings that weren't pretty-picture
based, and a bunch of Republican lawmakers stepped forward one by one to
declare that Donald Trump was the most brilliant tax-dodging rapist
they had ever met even after a lifetime of sucking up to other
tax-dodging rapists, and none of it stuck and the man who wanted to
dissolve NATO and proposed bombing a hurricane and thought that he and
he alone had the chops to stand up to world dictators and bravely do,
er, whatever they asked him to do ...
... left office only after violence and is now carrying on a quiet
life of explaining which fruits are dangerous (spoiler: all of them) and
what his crack security team or just random Trump devotees ought to be
able to do to someone Suspected Of Holding Fruit.
Enjoy the rest of your day, America. This is not, by any means, the last you will be hearing about this.
"Fruit is very scary. It can kill you. Especially tomatoes. If you see someone getting ready to
throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?"
Washington, DC: A super-majority of Americans say
that the use of marijuana should be made legal for adults, and most
respondents agree that it is less harmful to health than drinking
alcohol, according to national survey data compiled by the market research firm SSRS.
Sixty-nine percent of respondents – including 78 percent of
Democrats, 74 percent of Independents, and 54 percent of Republicans –
support legalization. When asked whether cannabis ought to be permitted
for therapeutic purposes, support rises to 92 percent.
Commenting on the polling data, NORML’s Deputy Director Paul
Armentano said: “Voters support legalizing marijuana regardless of
political party affiliation. At a time when national politics remain
acutely polarized, elected officials ought to come together in a
bipartisan manner to repeal the failed policy of cannabis prohibition.
It is one of the few policy reforms that voters on the right and on the
left can all agree upon.”
Fifty-eight percent of respondents, including 71 percent of
millennials, said that “alcohol is more harmful to a person’s health
than marijuana.” Only four percent of respondents perceive marijuana to
be more harmful. Prior surveys have similarly reported that most Americans say that cannabis is far less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco.
Sixty-five percent of respondents, including 72 percent of ‘Baby
Boomers,’ acknowledge having tried cannabis at least once during their
lifetime. That percentage is significantly higher than has been reported in other national surveys. Members of ‘Gen Z’ and the ‘Silent Generation’ are least likely to report having ever used cannabis.
The poll possesses a margin of error of +/– 3.5 percentage points.
The United States of Weed.
NORML advocates for changes in public policy so that the
responsible possession and use of marijuana by adults is no longer
subject to criminal penalties. NORML further advocates for a regulated
commercial cannabis market so that activities involving the for-profit
production and retail sale of cannabis and cannabis products are safe,
transparent, consumer-friendly, and are subject to state and/or local
licensure. Finally, NORML advocates for additional changes in legal and
regulatory policies so that those who use marijuana responsibly no
longer face either social stigma or workplace discrimination, and so
that those with past criminal records for marijuana-related violations
have the opportunity to have their records automatically expunged.
Find out more at norml.org and read our Fact Sheets on the most common misconceptions and myths regarding reform efforts around the country
I can’t say for certain that Vladimir Putin has kompromat on
Donald Trump. It seems just as likely that Putin feeds him McRibs and
Filet-O-Fishes like a SeaWorld dolphin whenever they visit, and along
with repeatedly telling Trump how beautiful Melania’s husband is, that’s
enough to make the big ocher arschloch a de facto Russian agent.
For a while we all fixated on the alleged pee tape, as if that was
the smoking gun that would finally reveal Trump’s perfidy to the world.
Well, we have something worse than the pee tape—it’s the record of
everything that happened at the 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, where
Trump micturated upon the post-World War II security apparatus like the
reincarnation of Hitler’s beloved German shepherd, Stephen Miller.
(Hitler was way into the occult. He knew what was coming.)
We knew all about Trump’s serial attempts to undermine NATO, of
course. In 2016, while he was campaigning to purple-nurple the tender
areola of our eternal, numinous souls, he set off waves of alarm in
Europe and some of the less benighted regions of the U.S. when he suggested he might not come to the defense of other NATO countries if they were attacked by—oh,
I don’t know, let’s just pull an example out of thin air—Russia or
something. He couched his criticism in bullshit, claiming other NATO
countries weren’t making their “payments” (NATO countries don’t
make payments, of course), but even if he was sending a message to other
NATO members, he was sending a much stronger message to
Vladimir Putin, who somehow got the idea over the past several years
that the West was divided and lacked the resolve to fight creeping
authoritarianism.
Of course, Trump’s comments in 2016 should have been immediately
disqualifying. You can’t have the leader of the free world wavering on
one of the United States’ most sacred and vital commitments. That kind
of loose talk makes (and made) Russian aggression far more likely—and
now here we are. Yet as we all know, Trump’s incandescent stink lines
blanched the Oval Office wallpaper for four woeful years before someone
with a firmer grasp of history thankfully replaced him. But not before
Trump spent those four years undermining our alliances and—most
alarmingly—our most important military alliance.
And now, as if we hadn’t already made this mole, Trump has blurted
out what we’d all pretty much assumed. He threw acid on the foundations
of our post-World War II Pax Americana while implausibly claiming he was trying to make the alliance stronger:
Appearing at an event held by the Heritage Foundation in
Florida, Trump claimed that he told fellow NATO leaders that he might
not abide byNATO’s Article 5 collective-defense clauseif those countries didn’t pay more for the alliance.
A fellow leader “said, ‘Does that mean that you won’t protect
us in case — if we don’t pay, you won’t protect us from Russia’ — was
the Soviet Union, but now Russia,” Trump said. “I said, ‘That’s exactly
what it means.’”
Now, the idea that NATO countries somehow have “dues”—and that several of them were in arrears—has been repeatedly debunked.
But once an idea has settled into Trump’s head, it’s almost impossible
to dislodge it without a heavy crowbar and an Adderall suppository the
size of a Learjet battery. And so Russia’s Hero of Helsinki plowed full
steam ahead.
Of course, this was hardly the only time Trump played coy when it came to fulfilling our NATO commitments.
Trump has previously danced around whether he would commit to Article 5, including conspicuouslydeclining to endorse itin May 2017. The following month, hedid endorse it. But by the summer of 2018, he was again calling that into question, suggesting it might not be worthwhile for NATO countriesto commit to defending “tiny” Montenegro, which was at the time a new member.
Again, it’s super shocking that Putin thought the West couldn’t mount
a unified response to his invasion of Ukraine. Where did he ever get
that idea, I wonder?
Pretty much everything Trump did as president—from pulling out of Syria (while betraying our Kurdish allies in the process) to (oh, this seems significant!) seriously mulling a complete U.S. withdrawal from NATO—seemed specially designed to palpate Putin’s pud.
So how is this guy still in the 2024 conversation? Is it just because
the media love a horse race? Well, what if one of the horses carries a
horseman of the apocalypse? Here come War, Famine, Death, and—bringing
up the rear on the syphilitic pinto—Lunch Meat Sweats!
Do your job, media. Do the job you were supposed to do in 2016 before
the unthinkable happened. Donald Trump is a Russian asset and a clear
and present danger to liberal democracy. The evidence is everywhere.
Stop tiptoeing around it and do your jobs!
You can’t have the leader of the free world wavering on
one of the United States’ most sacred and vital commitments. That kind
of loose talk by Donald Trump made Russian aggression far more likely—and
now here we are.
US billionaires now own a combined
$4.7tn, according to a new analysis – but to Elon Musk, since he doesn’t
have a yacht or own a home, that’s totally OK
Us billionaires now own $4.7tn –but that’s OK, says Elon Musk.
“We’re
all in this together.” Remember that corny catchphrase from the early
days of the pandemic? Remember when there was a smidgen of hope that the
collective trauma the world was facing would reshape people’s
priorities and the pandemic could be a portal to a better, fairer society?
Well,
two years on, precisely none of that has happened. People clapped for
essential workers for a bit but didn’t stop exploiting them. Meanwhile
it’s boom time for billionaires, who saw their already obscene wealth
grow exponentially during the pandemic.
A new analysis released by Oxfam America
on Monday, to mark tax day in the US, found US billionaires now own a
combined $4.7tn in wealth. Much of this goes untaxed; last year ProPublica
analyzed leaked tax returns and found the 25 richest people in the US
paid a true tax rate of just 3.4% from 2014 to 2018. The average
taxpayer, meanwhile, pays a true tax rate of 13%.
It wasn’t always like
this. As Oxfam notes,
it really wasn’t that long ago that the ultra-wealthy paid their fair
share in tax; during the second world war, the federal income tax rate
peaked at 94% and was still 70% three decades later. The rich haven’t
just gotten richer, they’ve also gotten a lot more selfish.
While
billionaires have seen their bank accounts balloon and corporations are
raking in record profits, ordinary people are hurting from decades-high
inflation. By some accounts,
the inequality gap in the US is worse now than it was in France in the
1780s just before the French Revolution.
It’s easy to get angry about
all this, but you might want to wait a moment before jumping to the
seemingly obvious conclusion that gross inequality is bad and we really
ought to do something about it. You see, in a recent (embarrassingly fawning)
interview with Chris Anderson, the head of Ted, Elon Musk helpfully
billionaire-splained why it’s actually OK for a handful of people to
hoard obscene amounts of wealth.
“There are many people out there
who can’t stand this world of billionaires,” Anderson said to Musk in
the interview. “Like, they are hugely offended by the notion that an
individual can have the same wealth as, say, a billion or more of the
world’s poorest people.”
Only an idiot would be offended by
something like that, Musk essentially replied. “I think there’s some
axiomatic flaws that are leading them to that conclusion,” he told
Anderson. “For sure, it would be very problematic if I was consuming,
you know, billions of dollars a year in personal consumption. But that
is not the case. In fact, I don’t even own a home right now. I’m
literally staying at friends’ places … I don’t have a yacht, I really
don’t take vacations. It’s not as though my personal consumption is
high.”
Musk, who is worth almost $300bn, did concede that the one exception to his incredibly ascetic lifestyle is his $70m private jet, but said its use was justified because it gives him more hours to work. It’s essentially in the public good.
So
there you go. Put down your pitchforks everyone! Stop sharpening your
guillotines! Anyone getting angry about inequality simply needs to
examine their “axiomatic flaws”. It’s perfectly OK that the world’s
billionaires have more wealth than 60% of the world’s population combined,
as long as they buy private jets instead of yachts and couchsurf at
their mate’s mansion instead of paying property tax on their own house.
Really glad Musk cleared that up for us all.
“There are many people out there
who can’t stand this world of billionaires.”
Congressional Democrats had apparently decided to do zip in the
face of Republican attacks that they are nothing but a den of
pedophiles "grooming" children for sexual abuse.
After GOP representative and MAGA enthusiast Marjorie Taylor
Greene of Georgia called Democrats the "party of pedophiles," a member
of the House Democratic leadership offered that the best response was
effectively no response.
"I don’t even really pay attention to anything she says because she has nothing rational to say," Rep. Jeffries told VICE News reporter Cameron Joseph
last week. “We’re focused right now on getting things done for everyday
Americans: lowering costs, addressing gas prices, and inflation. They
can continue to peddle lies and conspiracy theories,” Jeffries added.
It's kitchen table issues, stupid. That has been the
Democratic mantra for years, and it worked spectacularly in 2018 when
Donald Trump was a one-man wrecking ball tearing down the GOP on a daily
basis from within the White House. Trump was a walking, talking human
advertisement for why Americans should reevaluate their political
priorities and general sense of urgency.
Fortunately, Trump remains a factor today, but his toxicity
isn't quite as omnipresent for Americans as it was when he occupied the
Oval Office. That means Democrats don't have the luxury now of focusing
exclusively on kitchen table issues while Trump single-handedly dooms
Republicans at the polls the way he did in 2018. Instead, Democrats must
accomplish two things at once: telling people what they stand for while
also indicting the GOP.
That's where Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow's impassioned rebuttal of GOP smears that she is grooming
and sexualizing kindergartners comes in. A Republican colleague, Sen.
Lana Theis, made the accusation in a fundraising email after McMorrow
and two other Democrats walked out of an invocation Theis delivered on
the Senate floor in which she claimed children were "under attack" from
"forces."
To put it mildly, McMorrow was on fire when she delivered a
response that was anything but a bland recitation of Democratic work on
pocketbook issues.
McMorrow stated who she is and what she stands for:
"I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom. I
want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for
whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind. ...
I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and
supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight
white and Christian.
She named the trick Republicans are trying to play on voters:
People who are different are not the reason that our roads are
in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs
are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. ... We cannot
let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the
fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact
people's lives.
She enlisted voters in her righteous cause:
Each and every single one of us bears responsibility for
writing the next chapter of history. Each and every single one of us
decides what happens next and how we respond to history and the world
around us. ... And I know that hate will only win, if people like me stand by, let it happen.
The nearly five-minute speech certainly
qualifies as textbook, but frankly, it was a little piece of genius,
which is why the YouTube video of it currently has more than 13.7
million views.
Sen. McMorrow told TheWashington Post that the widespread interest in her speech “sends a really clear message" that Democrats have to "stand up and we can’t be afraid of going in on social issues."
“We have to talk about hate and identify it and say it’s ugly
and disgusting and what it means as a deflection of other issues,” she
added.
Amen.
Congressional Democrats absolutely must walk and chew gum this
election season: highlighting their successes while calling out the
morally bankrupt duplicity of Republicans—who have no plan whatsoever to
help Americans weather inflation along with the overall uncertainty of
the times in which we live. Doing both in tandem is not only politically
smart, it’s the right thing to do, and voters will reward Democrats who
follow McMorrow’s lead.
We need to remember the fighting spirit of Democrats like RBG.
