Thanks for not coming to dinner

Posted on November 29, 2019 by oddmanout215

This week the media cranked out stories about how to peacefully coexist with jerks who end up eating Thanksgiving dinner at the same table with you. The sort of stories that are especially relevant if there are Trump fans among your relatives, or among your relatives’ friends.

This is from a piece in Time magazine that I read to Swamp Rabbit during Thanksgiving at my shack in the Tinicum swamp:

Avoiding politics has always been a good rule of polite dinner conversation, but acrimony this season rivals the friction felt in November of 2016, when many Americans saw family members for the first time after Trump won his election.

“How ’bout you just don’t invite them Trump fans to your house and you don’t go to theirs?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Who says you gotta eat dinner with somebody you don’t even want to be in the same country with?”

I told him his attitude was 100 percent wrong. That Thanksgiving was about peace and gratitude and reconciliation. That it was exactly the right occasion to celebrate that we all live in a free country, and to demonstrate we can disagree with our fellow citizens without being enemies of them.

“Forget it, that dog don’t hunt,” Swamp Rabbit said as we set the table with my best paper plates. “Ain’t no way I’m gonna sit down with peeps who are cool with having a racist, climate change-denying old conman in the White House.”

We don’t have to agree with Trumpers, I told him. All we have to do is exercise tolerance, that noble quality that the great Enlightenment thinkers believed in — the thinkers who popularized the ideas that inspired the Constitution. All we have to do is be civil.

“Civil is a weasel word,” the rabbit said. He asked me what’s the point of being civil with white supremacists and other morons who know Trump has been a heartless liar and cheat his whole life, but who support him anyway. It’s important to not be civil with them, he said.

We ate the turkey burgers and cranberry sauce that Swamp Rabbit had swiped from the SuperFridge up the road. He fed his leftovers to my swamp cats, Thoughts and Prayers.

I noted that he was being more civil to the cats than he would be to Trumpers, if his words were any indication.

“That’s because them cats is a lot more civil than Trumpers,” he said. “They got better table manners, too.”

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GOP strategy — see, hear, speak no truth

Posted on November 22, 2019 by oddmanout215

We were on the way to a job upstate on Wednesday, listening to the impeachment hearings on the radio, waiting to hear what Trump’s foreign-service boy Gordon Sondland would say now that it was clear he hadn’t been forthright in his closed-door deposition for the House Intelligence Committee last month.

Sondland was more cooperative this time around.

YES, he told Democratic inquisitors, a quid pro quo was demanded by Trump. No way would Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky get a meeting with Trump, let alone $400 million in military aid, unless he agreed to launch investigations that might boost Trump’s re-election chances.

YES, all the president’s men were “in the loop” regarding the quid pro quo. Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, Rudy Giuliani and others knew Sondland and his amigos were pressuring Zelensky to announce investigations, and Sondland had the emails to prove it.

YES, the three amigos — Rick Perry and Kurt Volker were the others — received their orders to lean on Zelensky from Giuliani, who was acting “at the express direction of the president of the United States.”

“Great, it’s all over now,” I said to Swamp Rabbit. “Sondland is a snake, he’ll only cough up as much evidence as he thinks is necessary to avoid perjury charges. But the evidence he just coughed up is damning.”

Swamp Rabbit, who is off the wagon again, reached for his flask and took a swig. “That’s what you think,” he said. “By tonight them Republicans will be saying Sondland’s testimony don’t change nothing, there’s no smoking gun.”

He was right about that, of course. And right again the next day after two more credible witnesses testified — David Holmes, who overheard what should be an incriminating phone talk between Trump and Sondland, and steely-eyed Fiona Hill, who deconstructed the “fictional narrative” that Trump’s henchmen concocted to justify the investigations, which were all about trying to wreck Joe Biden’s presidential bid.

Swamp Rabbit noted this morning that Trump’s House boy Devin Nunes is still pushing fictive details about Biden — Kellyanne Conway would call them “alternative facts” — and that Nunes’s homeys continue to march in lockstep with him now that a Senate trial seems almost certain. And that there’s no evidence Trump directly commanded Sondland to tell the Ukrainians they wouldn’t get their military aid unless they went after Biden.

“But that’s crazy,” I said. “Trump’s commands are indirect, just like a mob boss’s, but everybody knows the commands come from him. That’s how mob bosses who go to trial get convicted, through the testimony of people who track the commands they receive back to the boss.”

“Maybe so,” the rabbit said. “But them other mob bosses ain’t president of the United States. And they don’t get to have a jury that’s mostly made up of Republican senators.”

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Stand by your monster

Posted on November 15, 2019 by oddmanout215

“Check it out,” Victor Cortez said, changing channels on the old Zenith I’d pulled out of a trash dump for Swamp Rabbit. The subject on MSNBC was the impeachment hearings. Same thing on CNN. But the big story on Fox News was “Kanye West spreading his message of faith” and — this may have been fake news — selling $55 pancakes at a breakfast event.

Victor’s point was that Fox would rather show anything but a bad-news story about Trump. And when there are bad-news stories they have to cover — the actual hearings, for example, which started Wednesday — they will ignore the facts and pretend they’re good-news stories.

“But even Fox has shown a few cracks,” Victor said later in the week, after acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor testified on the first day of the hearings and Fox News host Chris Wallace called Taylor “a very impressive witness and… very damaging to the president.”

Hardcore suck-ups — Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham, and so on — will follow Trump all the way to the Führerbunker, Victor explained, but actual reporters at Fox News with a shred of credibility are hedging their bets regarding Trump’s long-term political health.

“Not so with them Republicans in Congress,” said Swamp Rabbit, who had just arrived at my shack for his weekly appointment with Victor, his parole officer. “Trump got on the phone with Zelensky and said sure, you’ll get that military aid, but I want you to do something for me, meaning get dirt on Biden. That’s an impeachable offense, plain as day, unless you’re a Republican.”

“But Republicans are saying there was no explicit quid pro quo,” I said. “Trump didn’t explicitly say ‘You won’t get the aid unless you deliver dirt on Biden.'”

“It don’t matter,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “You don’t have to spell out the quid pro quo. All you gotta do is conduct it. If I’m holding your swamp cat and say ‘I’ll give your cat back to you but I want you to do me a favor,’ then I’m abusing my power and breaking the law.”

I reminded Swamp Rabbit that Trump’s toadies — people like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley — know he’s the lowest of the low, a guy who has cheated big banks and small business owners, robbed his own charities, betrayed foreign allies, taken kids from their parents and jailed them, and worse. They don’t care; they’re afraid he will denounce them to his base, that vast horde of lost souls who’d be happy if he made himself president for life.

“But that don’t make no sense,” the rabbit said. “They’re propping up a monster. Don’t they care what history is gonna think of them?”

All three of us laughed at that one. “Does Trump care about history?” I said. “Does his brother, Kanye West?”

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A wall can’t keep the future out

Posted on November 8, 2019 by oddmanout215

“So you’re telling me part of the multibillion-dollar wall Trump is having built on the Mexican border can be breached with a hundred-dollar saw? You’re not making this up?”

Swamp Rabbit wasn’t making it up. He was reading from a news article he’d called up on my laptop:

…When fitted with specialized blades, the saws can slice through one of the barrier’s steel-and-concrete bollards in minutes, according to [border] agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the barrier-defeating techniques.

After cutting through the base of a single bollard, smugglers can push the steel out of the way, creating an adult-size gap. Because the bollards are so tall — and are attached only to a panel at the top — their length makes them easier to push aside once they have been cut and are left dangling…

Swamp Rabbit’s parole office, Victor Cortez, interrupted to vouch for the story’s accuracy. “I’ve got one of those reciprocating saws,” he said. “With the right blades it will cut through anything.”

I don’t believe you,” I said. “That reporter is tripping.”

“Just because you can’t drive a nail don’t mean some saw can’t cut through steel,” Swamp Rabbit replied.

I asked why the U.S. Border Patrol didn’t build a regular old brick wall. The rabbit said it was because they thought the concrete and steel bollard system was the best design they could afford.

“They can peek through the bollards — poles is what they are — and see them pesky refugees coming,” he explained. “And they can fix the poles that get wrecked if the refugees are too fast for them and sneak through.”

I persisted, just for the sake of argument. Didn’t Trump say the new wall would be “virtually impenetrable?” Didn’t he assure all those good old boys in the MAGA hats that he would save them from the marauding rapists he warned about?

“The Mexicans were gonna pay for the wall, too,” Swamp Rabbit noted. “If Trump said it, you can bet it ain’t true.”

Footnote: The refugees or migrants or whatever you want to call them are using ladders as well as saws to get past the wall. Who would have thought?

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The ‘biggest’ impeachment ever?

Posted on October 31, 2019 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, Victor Cortez, dropped by a few days ago and quickly started jabbering about current events. He was upset because Donald Trump had claimed the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by U.S. forces was a great triumph for Donald Trump.

“Trump gave final approval for the raid,” I said to Victor. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Not really,” he replied, noting that Trump had nothing to do with the planning of the al-Baghdadi hit. If anything, he jeopardized the impending operation when he let Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan talk him into a withdrawal of American troops from Northern Syria and a betrayal of the Kurds, who had done most of the fighting against ISIS.

Then Trump dashed his chance to look presidential, Victor said, by lying about the circumstances of al-Baghdadi’s death (“[He] died like a dog. He died like a coward.”) and by claiming the al-Baghdadi hit was the “biggest” ever, more significant than the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I wondered aloud if Trump and his flunkies would spin his ongoing impeachment saga with the same vigor they brought to the al-Baghdadi story. Trump could justifiably boast “This will be the biggest impeachment ever. Clinton didn’t come close to being convicted. Nixon didn’t even hang around long enough to be impeached.”

At that moment Swamp Rabbit emerged from the swamp and approached my shack for his weekly check-in with Victor. “Trump ain’t gonna get convicted by the Senate,” he predicted. “But I’m looking forward to him losing the election then getting hit with criminal charges.”

“He could spin that, too,” I said, handing him a Kit Kat for Halloween. “Trump could say he’s the biggest American politician to ever face criminal charges after leaving office.”

“Damn right,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Then after he gets convicted and tossed in the slammer he could say ‘I’m the biggest federal inmate ever, bigger than Al Capone. They treat me like a king in here. My cellmates have to settle for ratburgers, but I get Big Macs with cheese.”

I said, “Big Macs in jail? That’s far-fetched, rabbit.”

“The idea of Trump getting elected in 2016 was far-fetched, too,” he replied. “Look how that turned out.”

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Zuckerberg unbound

Posted on October 25, 2019 by oddmanout215

A curious item from a story about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance before Congress:

[Rep. Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez went on to ask [Zuckerberg] about Facebook’s policy on exempting political advertising from fact-checking, asking if she could pay to advertise an incorrect election date to people in a primarily black zip code, for example.

Zuckerberg said Facebook does support removing content in cases of violence or of census or voter suppression. He did not answer whether the company would take down outright lies if they were in political advertisements.

I asked Swamp Rabbit for his two-cents worth. Is Zuckerberg a closet right-winger or is he merely sucking up to conservatives to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump, who has accused Facebook of censoring conservative viewpoints?

“AOC asked if he’d take down lies from Facebook, yes or no,” he said. “There weren’t no wiggle room. He didn’t say yes.”

The rabbit mentioned the Cambridge Analytica data-dumping scandal and its effect on the 2016 elections. He noted that Zuckerberg is hosting dinner parties for Trump flunkies — Lindsey Graham, Tucker Carlson, and so on — who presumably want to be reassured that right-wingers can continue to use Facebook and other big tech companies to lie and slander with impunity.

“The Zuck must have got the message,” Swamp Rabbit added. “If he don’t play ball and spread Republican misinformation, Trump will sue Facebook for being biased against him.”

“But that’s crazy,” I replied. “Screening out lies and other inaccuracies isn’t the same thing as being biased.”

“It is if you’re the Zuck,” Swamp Rabbit said. “He thinks lying is covered by free speech laws. He ain’t just a billionaire, he’s an expert on free speech.”

He thinks he is. In a recent speech, Zuckerberg argued that so-called social media are “the fifth estate,” exempt from the same rules that govern the fourth estate — the news media. He pretty much ignores the harm that can be done by powerful information sources that aren’t legally bound to refrain from overt lying.

He apparently thinks his money and power make him a sage, too enlightened to abide by the same imperfect rules that keep the news media from becoming totally untrustworthy. But he’s still young, maybe he’ll reconsider his apparent willingness to side with the Trumps of the world. Maybe he’ll crack a few books and realize how stupid his arguments are.

“Don’t count on it.” Swamp Rabbit said. “Them techie entrepreneurs don’t read, not unless it’s a book about how to make more money.”

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If your bottom line is big money…

Posted on October 18, 2019 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was desolate. His favorite basketball player, LeBron James, had let him down by criticizing Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey for tweeting something supportive of anti-China protesters in Hong Kong:

Yes, we do have freedom of speech, but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you are not thinking about others and only thinking about yourself. I don’t want to get in a word sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand, and he spoke. And so many people could have been harmed, not only financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually.

“I don’t understand what LeBron is saying,” I said.

“Yes you do,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “He’s saying Morey did a mean thing when he posted that tweet — ‘Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.’ He’s saying Morey didn’t consider how all them millionaire players would feel if them Chinese honchos decided to block the NBA from making money off them hundreds of millions of Chinese fans.”

“Put yourself in LeBron’s sneakers,” I said, playing devil’s advocate. “How would you feel if some management dweeb posted a tweet that endangered your multi-million-dollar Nike deal in China? This is a very sensitive issue.”

I told him he was being unfair to LeBron, who has spoken out against Donald Trump’s bigotry and against trigger-happy cops who kill black kids, and has funded initiatives to help the poor in Akron, OH, his hometown.

But Swamp Rabbit wasn’t having any of it. He said people who let their conduct be determined by financial considerations are slaves to the powers that be, whether at home or in China. They can’t pretend to champion human rights if they ignore China’s campaigns to wipe out Tibetan culture, brainwash a million imprisoned Uighurs and negate the rights supposedly guaranteed to Hong Kong residents when Britain agreed to give their former colony back to mainland China.

“What about those bloodless Silicon Valley tycoons who run Apple and so on?” I said. “The masters of the universe who grovel to please the Chinese? They’re worse than the NBA, but you’re not saying anything against them.”

“I ain’t defending them,” he said. “Alls I’m saying is if your bottom line is big money, then keep your mouth shut about human rights. Get it?”

I smiled. “Sure I get it. But what about the ramifications?”

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Isn’t it obvious? He’s become a god

Posted on October 9, 2019 by oddmanout215

My friend Swamp Rabbit read the tweet aloud and said, “You see that? What I tell ya?”

We’d been arguing about whether Trump’s tweets will become more delusional as his impeachment becomes more likely. Some people think he’ll blame his loyalists for not saving him from House Democrats and abruptly resign. Others say this is only the beginning, the would-be dictator will do anything to hang on to power so long as he thinks his base and Senate Republicans are still with him.

Swamp Rabbit thinks the Unmatchable One sees himself not as a dictator but rather as an emperor, skimming money from a worldwide network of Trump-branded properties like Trump Towers Istanbul. Are Trump’s business ties to Turkey the main reason he gave his blessing to Turkish forces that have attacked areas run by Syrian Kurds, who did most of the fighting against ISIS and assumed Trump was their ally?

“That’s too deep in the woods for me,” Swamp Rabbit said. “All’s I know is a hog monster like Trump ain’t gonna stop feeding at the trough, not without a fight.”

I grudgingly admitted that Swamp Rabbit was at least half-right. The time is out of joint, as Hamlet said, and it’s not clear who will set it right. But I told him to keep the faith, this isn’t the first time the world’s leading power was ruled by a monster. Is it likely Trump is more unhinged than Caligula, the murderous Roman emperor who, if certain historians are to be believed, tried to appoint his horse to a consulship in order to humiliate Roman senators?

“Trump wouldn’t do that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “He don’t like horses. He don’t like any animals.”

Footnote: In the novel I, Claudius, Robert Graves depicts Caligula as a madman for the ages who imagines himself having a “metamorphosis” that lifts him above all laws. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asks Claudius, his uncle, in the TV adaptation. Claudius, afraid for his life, guesses the right response: “You’ve become a god!”

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How about a moat? And toss in some alligators

Posted on October 3, 2019 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were drinking coffee from tin cups, listening to a Jimmie Rodgers album and reading a surreal story in Guardian UK:

Donald Trump discussed shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down, after ordering advisers to shut down the entire US-Mexico border, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The president also suggested electrifying the border wall and fortifying it with spikes, and deterring migrants with a moat stocked with snakes or alligators, according to the Times…

Guardian UK noted that The Times story came from interviews with White House insiders who witnessed “a frantic week of presidential rages” last March, when Trump snapped at advisers who cautioned him against using illegal tactics to keep migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border.

“I’ll bet he ain’t worried about them migrants no more,” Swamp Rabbit said. “He’s too busy worrying about Democrats.”

No doubt about it. The liar-in-chief managed to dodge possible impeachment and criminal charges despite Robert Mueller’s two-year probe into whether he colluded with Russians to sabotage the 2016 election. But his dumb luck ran out last week, thanks to news of a phone call in which he pressured Ukrainian President and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky to get dirt on Joe Biden, his main political rival.

“An impeachable offense,” Swamp Rabbit said as he spiked his coffee with whiskey from his beat-up flask. “Ain’t no way he can bluff his way around this one.”

Everybody can sense the change. Timid congressional Democrats are suddenly fired up. Trump flunkies are running for the exits to avoid answering reporters’ questions as Rudy Guiliani, Mike Pompeo and William Barr — the hog monster’s main henchmen — frantically try to fabricate a counter-narrative in which Dems are the bad guys. What’s next, I wondered.

“Maybe Trump will build a moat around the White House,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Fill it with alligators. Order the Secret Service to shoot them nosy reporters in the legs.”

“Too late,” I said. “He just hopped on the impeachment express. It might move to a House vote and then trial in the Senate. If he survives that, there’s the election, which he would lose. After that, who knows?”

We stopped jabbering and listened to more Jimmie Rodgers, who seemed to have heard my question. He was singing “In the Jailhouse Now.”

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Thunberg’s warning to Earthlings

Posted on September 24, 2019 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit couldn’t get over it.

First the 16-year-old, internationally famous environmental activist Greta Thunberg delivered her save-the-planet message to tens of thousands of protesters in Battery Park. Then she went to the United Nations and made a similar speech, but in a more accusatory style, to so-called world leaders who aren’t doing enough to slow global warming.

Climate change deniers on Fox News hit back — hacks like Laura Ingraham and some guy named Michael Knowles, who referred to Thunberg as “mentally ill” because she has Asperger syndrome.

“‘Mentally ill compared to who?” Swamp Rabbit said as we watched the clip from Fox. “Donald Trump? Trump’s boy Rudy? She ain’t sayin’ nothin’ that ain’t true.”

Here’s part of what Thunberg said to the U.N. crowd:

People are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

To call Thunberg rude would be an understatement, but so what? This is no time to be polite, because the powers-that-be — especially in the three worst-polluting countries, the U.S, China and India — keep pretending half-measures will solve the climate problem.

“She’s like Joan of Arc,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I’ll bet Joanie had Asperger’s, too.”

She is not like Joan of Arc, I told him. She’s like the humanoid visitor from outer space in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a classic sci-fi movie that seems to get better with each passing year.

The humanoid’s name is Klaatu, as most movie fans know. He looks like he could have been David Bowie’s father. At the end of the movie, he warns a bunch of world leaders that “Earth will be eliminated” unless humans start behaving themselves and don’t try to wreck the rest of the universe with their nukes and other weapons.

But Thunberg’s concern isn’t about protecting outer space from humans; it’s about saving humans from themselves. More accurately, about saving young people and future generations from the generation that’s in charge now. She speaks to the Trumps of the world as if they are a separate, hostile species, intent on destroying the world even as they pay lip service to the idea of cleaning it up.

“Just like I said,” Swamp Rabbit said, interrupting my lecture. “She ain’t sayin’ nothin’ that ain’t true.”

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