Shamelessness

Where do I start in talking about the incredible hash that the Republican Party has made of our clueless, blundering nation and the bloody mess that we're making of the rest of the world as a result?

Today a shameless, completely corrupt Supreme Court, with a supermajority of Catholic Republican theocrats, who scoff at the very concept of ethics when it comes to their robed eminences, handed down a ruling that essentially says that the Constitution's 14th amendment doesn't really mean what it says in plain English; that those who engage in insurrection against our country are disqualified for life from serving in any official capacity in this country. Is it any wonder that the Scotus now enjoys approval numbers that are at wildly historical lows?

Or perhaps we should consider the case of the Trump manufactured `immigrant crime wave', despite the fact that statistically, towns and cities with high immigrant populations tend to have LOWER crime rates. Of course, reality has nothing to do with the `stable genius's' prattle; he is clearly an idiot savant when it comes to getting people riled up enough about something, anything, designed to leap right over their logical faculties and get them to join in with the mindless MAGA mob worshiping the One Great Leader who is going to solve all their problems. Never mind that immigration, both legal and undocumented, serve an important role in our nation's economy, filling jobs that are eschewed by American citizens. They contribute mightily to Social Security (which they will never get to draw from), local economies, etc. and that the reason most of them are here is the fact that in recent decades and even centuries, the US has intervened in almost every Central and South American country, almost always to deter or overthrow any dangerous outbreak of democratic rule.

As one who has followed in detail the decades of bloodletting in Central America during the 80s, where, at the behest of one corporate interest or another, whether United Fruit or Citibank, sincere and popularly elected leaders were overthrown, murdered, their supporters dragooned into dungeons to be tortured by US paid troops `educated' in `democracy' in places like Alabama's School of the Americas. It will never fully leave my consciousness to have read about the activities of our proxy soldiers in places like Guatemala and El Salvador, where whole Mayan villages were lined up, their skulls smashed with a sledgehammer blow, then dumped into the village's well.

Of course when one destroys the government chosen by the people and replaces it with a comprador class of lackeys willing to do whatever their bosses and New York or Washington tell them to do, all respect for law and order is destroyed, which is why so many of these countries are now ruled by ruthless murderous gangs who want to take your teenage child to join their ranks, and if you have a problem with that, they might just kill your whole family.

Gee, I wonder why they want to come to the United States instead, despite the incredible hardships they might face along the way.

WE OWE THEM ALL! No amount of money, no generous immigration policy can ever fully make up for our crimes against them!

The stupidity of the MAGA worshipers is indistinguishable from that of the stupid Germans who went along with the Nazis scapegoating of the Jews as the source of their economic misery. There are millions of Americans whose lives have simply stopped penciling out; the bipartisan ` free trade' agenda, which put American workers on the same playing field as coerced and exploited workers in countries where we would commit suicide rather than accept the going work conditions, where protesting can be fatal, has made the economic lives of millions of Americans no longer viable.

Clearly, it is not the itinerant farmworker who is responsible for their economic dislocation, but Trump has clearly hit pay dirt when it comes to distracting people from the real cause of their situations by blaming it on people who should be their comrades.

Similarly, this horrifying disaster in Ukraine was brought to you, 100 percent, by the US military/industrial/congressional/journalistic/academic complex. If the US had not, through kind of a knee-jerk tendency, funded all kinds of dirty tricks to overthrow the popularly elected Pres. of Ukraine years ago, who was apparently judged to be too friendly to the Russian regime for our Cold War hangover tolerance, the guy we replaced him with was sufficiently anti-Russian for our tastes, to the point where he was basically making war on the Ukrainian provinces that were largely Russian speaking and probably would have voted for uniting with Russia rather than Ukraine.

Think about it; if a Chinese/ Russian military alliance overthrew the Mexican president in order to install an anti-American leader there, and then began to build military bases in Tijuana, would the US government scrupulously observed every right of Mexican autonomy?

Finally, and most seriously, the horrific Israeli campaign of starvation and mass murder of the Palestinians in Gaza brings to mind an image that anyone who lived at that time with any interest in the news will never forget; that of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sitting motionless in lotus position while fire consumes his body and life.

Just the other day we had another such martyr make the most emphatic statement it is possible for a human to make. An Air Force member in good standing, Aaron Bushnell, doused himself with some petroleum distillate, set his phone down to live stream the event and lit himself on fire in front of Washington's Israeli Embassy, yelling his last words, “free Palestine, free Palestine”. Unfortunately for him, a nearby policeman came up with a fire extinguisher to delay his demise for a number of, no doubt, tortuously painful hours.

The idea that we don't even discuss cutting back on the $10 million a day that we send to the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv, and that we meekly accept Israel's turning back of our food aid trucks to those poor Gazans starving and dying of thirst as I write this sickens me.

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