CHIPPED AWAY
As we celebrate the first hundred days of the Trump presidency, this fractured country can at least all agree on one thing: hate is the new black. From Washington to Paris, hate is the new haute couture. And we should be angry. Very angry. We should also be frightened. Very frightened. Our own President surrounded himself in the first days of his presidency with an almost all-white, nearly all-male advisory team of bigots, racists and white nationalists. Most are on the way out now — not because they are haters and bigots, but because their advice helped bring down Trump’s approval ratings. Let’s have a look at some of these clowns that were controlling our country’s strategy, safety and security. Chief strategist Stephen Bannon (now on the outs): The hatemongering Breitbart News honcho was put in a position of power despite having once said about women who should be in politics, “They wouldn’t be a bunch of d---s that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England.” Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser: Flynn, who quickly got the boot for getting caught doing dirty business with the Russians, tweeted last year that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL ... the truth fears no questions.” Attached was a rabidly anti-Muslim link. Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Denied a federal judgeship back in the 1980s amid allegations of racism, Sessions was given one of the highest positions in the country, despite having once said, “I thought those guys (the Ku Klux Klan) were OK until I learned they smoked pot.” So, what, it’s OK to lynch black people, but just don’t smoke weed while doing it?
National security aide Sebastian Gorka: Seriously? This lunatic, The Forward reported, is a member of Vitézi Rend, an anti-Semitic, Hungarian nationalist paramilitary group that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. The Daily Beast just reported, thankfully, that Gorka, too, is probably getting the boot — but not the full jack boot in the a-- that he deserves. He’ll be placed elsewhere in the government.
Elsewhere? There is no “elsewhere” for someone with ties to a Nazi group — on the government payroll or anywhere in America.
But we’re not alone in our hate of everyone who isn’t us.
Far-right-wing French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who makes Donald Trump look like a civil rights worker, is gaining in the polls. All that ethnic hate is working for her like it worked for him.
She even might win considering she’s got it all going on — anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Even though it’s a crime in France to deny the Holocaust, her father, who founded her political party, the National Front, and her top adviser are Holocaust and gas chamber deniers — hell, she’s even hinted at it herself.
On Friday, she tried to distance herself from anti-Semitism, saying that Holocaust deniers have no place in her party. What? Her Holocaust-denier father founded the party!
And Le Pen herself once claimed that the French didn’t round up Jews in Paris. Le pomme does not fall far from le tree.
With any luck, the French voters will not vote the hate line as we did. But don’t bet your croissants on it. What? Are they saying that people involved in real estate and house renovations are crooked? What will they say next, that Wall Street investment bankers are crooked? Shocking as it is to believe, HGTV’s real estate “Fixer Upper” star Chip Gaines is being sued by former partners, the impossibly named Lewis and Clark, for fraud because he “bought them out” for $2,500 apiece without telling them their real estate brand, Magnolia, was about to bust out on TV. The real question here though, is how did a guy with a $7,500 fixer-upper real estate company get HGTV to make him a star?