The plot against America thickens

Posted on October 30, 2024 by oddmanout215

I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that Philip Roth would have been appalled but not surprised by the deification of Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden earlier this week. Roth, who died in 2018, depicted a fascist nightmare taking shape in his novel The Plot Against America (2004), which traces an alternative history in which FDR loses the 1940 election to Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh and the United States becomes an ally of Nazi Germany. The author’s message is that the bad guys could take over here as quickly as they did in Germany in the 1930s.

“What’s all that got to do with Trump?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Didn’t you hear Hulk Hogan say there weren’t no ‘stinkin’ Nazis’ at Trump’s Garden rally?”

I did indeed hear a recording of Hogan’s speech. And I heard the comedian who said Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage,” an old friend of Trump who called Kamala Harris “the antichrist,” a radio guy who complained that “f$#%king illegals get everything they want,” and similar statements by a whole raft of uglies eager to kiss Trump’s ass.

Trump spoke last and vowed to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” perhaps unaware he was echoing the German American Bund leader who expressed similar anti-immigrant sentiments at a pro-Nazi rally held in February 1939 at Madison Square Garden (one of three previous incarnations of the Garden, not the current arena).

“There you go again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Making a big deal of the fact that Trump’s fans are as dumb and nasty as he is. Implying that he and them MAGA boys, just because they talk and act like Nazis in the 1930s, are planning to make America a fascist state.”

He smiled, unable to disguise his irony. He knows what the Trumpers will do to the country if they get the chance.

“Don’t forget to vote for Harris,” he said.

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WAPO’s ‘premature capitulation’

Posted on October 28, 2024 by oddmanout215

Media critics and informed people in general were bewildered and angered this week when the Washington Post announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate. This move was made “in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds,” according to the Post’s publisher, William Lewis.

“No one believes that guy, he’s a yes man for the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said, noting that the Post, in making this move, had scuttled the endorsement of Kamala Harris that its editorial board drafted earlier this month. “Bezos wanted to stay on Trump’s good side. He ain’t foolin’ nobody.”

My pesky friend and I agreed that Bezos, by bowing to Trump, has damaged the newspaper’s credibility as an independent news source. The billionaire Amazon founder has reminded the world that the news business has changed drastically in the half-century since the Post defied the powers-that-be by pursuing the Watergate burglary story and by fighting, along with the New York Times, a successful court battle to finish publishing the Pentagon Papers.

Many readers have opted to “make up their own minds” about the Post‘s non-endorsement by canceling their subscriptions to the newspaper. Many of the Post‘s writers and editors are as upset as their readers.

Former Post editor Marty Baron tweeted that the move was “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned from the Post over the weekend and called the endorsement fiasco “premature capitulation,” meaning that Bezos and his minions, even if embarrassed, must have felt it was prudent to back away from Harris just in case Trump wins the election.

Historian Timothy Snyder cautioned against this sort of thing in his 2017 book On Tyranny:

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

I noted that the Post‘s slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” seems sadly ironic in light of its decision to cave to Trump.

“Kagan nailed it,” Swamp Rabbit said, shrugging. “Bezos is scared his rocket ship company might be in trouble if he don’t play ball with the orange beast.”

“It’s all about the money.” he added. “Greedy, unaccountable creeps like Bezos can’t never get enough of it.”

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Are Trump fans blind? No, it’s worse than that.

Posted on October 25, 2024 by oddmanout215

Here’s Robert Reich, echoing the thoughts of sane people all over the country:

… At this moment, I’m frankly worried. How is it even possible that Trump is tied with Harris in the battleground states that will determine who becomes president? How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he intends to do?

Good questions. Donald Trump says the 2020 election was rigged despite abundant evidence to the contrary. He’ll claim the 2024 election was rigged if he doesn’t win. He has falsely accused immigrants of being rapists even though he’s the guy who was convicted of sexual assault. He has threatened to order the military to crack down on “the enemy within,” meaning anyone who disapproves of him. He praised Hitler and his generals, and eulogized Arnold Palmer’s penis.

“Is Reich right?” I asked. “Is the MAGA crowd blind?”

“Not really,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit replied. “Angry and hateful maybe, but they ain’t blind.”

But Trump has been impeached twice and faces multiple criminal indictments. He encouraged an insurrection to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 and called for “termination” of the Constitution to clear the way for his reinstatement as president. John Kelly and other former members of the Trump team say he’s a fascist. Like us, they fear for the survival of democracy in America.

“In light of all these facts, how could Trump supporters not be blind?” I said, persisting.

“They see what they want to see,” Swamp Rabbit explained. “They ain’t concerned about high-fallutin’ concepts like democracy, or about freedom of speech and freedom of the press and all that other good stuff in the Bill of Rights. If the Constitution got terminated a lot of them wouldn’t even care, not if Trump brought down the price of eggs, blocked immigration, didn’t raise taxes and kept black people in line. They wanna feel safe.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, frustrated now. “Trump wants to be dictator. If he gets elected again, no one will be safe except for billionaire pigs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel who think freedom and democracy are incompatible. They want to replace democracy with corporate government.”

“You ain’t listening,” my swampy neighbor said. “The MAGA crowd don’t care. They’re mad at the government. They can live with a tyrant if they think the tyrant is on their side. Quit thinking they can be nagged into doing the right thing. Just vote for Kamala Harris and hope most voters do the same.”

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From Red October to Dead October

Posted on October 11, 2024 by oddmanout215

Editor’s note: Red October was the name used by the Philadelphia Phillies’ corporate advertising machine to herald what was supposed to be the team’s victory march through the National League playoffs and the World Series. Here’s a transcript of my phone texts with my neighbor Swamp Rabbit right after the New York Mets demolished the Phillies in the playoffs this week:

Swamp Rabbit: I really, really, really hate the Phillies.

Swamp Rabbit again: And I really don’t want to hear any more excuses from [Phillies manager] Rob Thomson.

Odd Man Out: Yes and yes, but I feel sorry for Thomson. What can you do when your star players all fail at the same time — bench them and send in their mediocre backups? And how can you explain what went wrong if you’re not really free to speak your mind? You can’t criticize the stars, especially in front of reporters, lest you get on their bad side and risk losing your job.

Swamp Rabbit: I don’t get it. Why is Thomson the guy who might lose his job? Them stars get paid to win the big games. It ain’t Thomson’s fault if they lose because they swing at bad balls and try to hit home runs instead of just trying to get on base.

Odd Man Out: The four guys at the top of the Phillies’ starting lineup are collectively making about $800 million over the course of their contracts. They have more power than the manager. They can’t be traded for screwing up because the other Major League Baseball teams won’t pick up their enormous salaries. And if they’re fired, they still get their money.

Swamp Rabbit: That don’t make no sense. Why get yourself into a mess like that?

Odd Man Out: A capitalist’s dilemma. The team owners invest a ton of money trying to field a championship team. They get a lot of that money back from broadcast rights and from the team’s mostly middle-class fans who can afford to spend big money on super-expensive tickets and concessions and souvenirs and all that. But the whole scheme can go south if the team loses, and the fans lose faith and stop spending.

Swamp Rabbit: You’re sayin’ there ain’t no way to fix the mess?

Odd Man Out: The team owners can make Thomson and his coaching staff the scapegoats to appease Phillies fans who want to see heads roll. They can stop spending money on the team and eventually sell it at a huge profit. But they can’t sanction players with great long-term contracts in the hope of getting them to perform better.

Swamp Rabbit: Like I said, I really hate them guys. Baseball stars are a bunch of pampered, overpaid, unaccountable prima donnas, as smug as the zillionaires who own the teams. I’m done with following baseball.

Odd Man Out: Give me a break. You’re done until April when the next season starts. We need sports to take our minds off what’s going on in the real world.

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Trump’s dog day debate performance

Posted on September 12, 2024 by oddmanout215

In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating — the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.

“Trump is right,” I told my neighbor Swamp Rabbit as we watched the presidential debate together. “It’s a damn shame what’s happening in our country.”

The shame is that a twice-impeached, insurrectionist nutjob and felon was allowed to run for President of the United States again, and that he still has a fair chance of being elected. But the odds of this were narrowed Tuesday when Kamala Harris suckered him into making a fool of himself in front of millions of viewers.

I spelled it out for Swamp Rabbit: Harris must have sensed that Trump would fail to keep a lid on his looniness if she pushed the right buttons. Sure enough, the old fraud flipped out and launched into his cats-and-dogs rant regarding Haitian immigrants. He also accused Democrats of advocating not only unrestricted abortion but also “execution after birth.” And, of course, he tried to weasel out of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a MAGA mob. In Trump’s adolescent mind, he was indicted not because he tried to subvert the 2020 election results but rather because Joe Biden and Harris have a vendetta against him.

But it’s the cats-and-dogs lie voters will remember, just like they remember Trump’s running mate’s “childless cat ladies” insult. (Taylor Swift alluded to it when she endorsed Harris.)

I said, “The funny thing is that Trump doesn’t care about pets. I doubt he ever owned a dog. He hates dogs.”

“I guess so,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “But I betcha he’d eat one of them if you served it up with a big side of cheese fries.”

Posted in humor, mainstream media, Philadelphia, weasel | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Give Harris a chance. (Don’t sit this one out, cynics.)

Posted on August 31, 2024 by oddmanout215

American politics, especially now, does not offer us a choice between a party that favors the rich and one that favors the poor. Clinton cannot be called to account by an electorally nonexistent left. We must choose between a party that neglects the poor and one that savages them, between a party that defers to the rich and one that deifies them, between a party that abjectly apologizes for government and one that demonizes it. One party signs a Faustian contract with the devil. The other party offers the contract. Better Faustus than Mephistopheles.

The above is from a piece Garry Wills wrote in 1996 after President Bill Clinton was nominated for a second term at the 1996 Democratic convention. Wills noted with regret the party’s ongoing efforts to prioritize the interests of rich campaign donors at the expense of rank-and-file Democrats. He may have already sensed that the Dems’ embrace of neoliberal ideas — deregulation, globalization, etc. — might help get Clinton elected again but was alienating a large percentage of working-class voters.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit read the article and said, “I don’t know about this Faustus guy, but the election racket ain’t changed much since 1996. We still gotta choose the lesser of two evils.”

“This is no time to be cynical,” I told him. “There’s only one evil person running for president, and it’s not Kamala Harris. The left is still ‘electorally nonexistent’ in this country, but it’s important to make the best of things by electing someone who’s more likely to work for the common good than make common cause with billionaire reactionary pigs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. It’s common sense.”

Swamp Rabbit tugged on his wispy goatee. “What you mean by common sense? Americans knew Trump was a lyin’ hateful fraud in 2016, but he got elected anyway. “

It was a valid point, but I shrugged it off. “People do stupid, spiteful things when they feel betrayed or threatened. They went for Trump in 2016 but rejected him in 2020, and I’m confident they won’t go back to being stupid in 2024.”

Footnote: Harris can be inconsistent but, as the New Yorker’s John Cassidy recently noted, she thinks “being accused of flip-flopping is a lesser threat to her campaign than giving her opponent the ammunition to brand her as a radical.” I’ll buy that; she’s less than honest at times, like all politicians, but she’s clearly pro-choice, pro-labor and even pro-environment, despite backing off from her previous anti-fracking stance. She’s unlikely to sign a contract with the devil. (Trump already did that, long before he went into politics.)

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The solution is fewer cars, but who wants to hear that?

Posted on August 14, 2024 by oddmanout215

The Philadelphia Parking Authority will more than double the price of a yearly residential parking permit to $75 and cap at three the number of permits each household can buy in an effort to better manage curbside congestion, officials said.

Those changes are scheduled to take effect Sept. 1. The base permit price has been $35 since 1983, when Philadelphia’s neighborhood parking program began.

“This here is an outrage,” Swamp Rabbit said as he showed me the news story about parking permit price hikes. “It’s an attack on my God-given right to own as many cars as I can get financing for and park them where I please. Give me liberty, or give me a house in the suburbs where I don’t have to put up with this shit.”

He was joking, I think. He and I live in adjacent shacks near the Tinicum swamp, in a part of Philly so poor and so far south that the city hasn’t yet bothered to extend its parking program here.

I reminded him that he doesn’t own a car, doesn’t like public transit and is too drunk most of the time to ride a bicycle or one of those sneaky little electric scooters.

“There ain’t no room for bikes in this city,” he said. “The drivers would run me off the road.”

He has a point. There are bike lanes here and there, but parked cars line South Philly streets, many of which have room for only one traffic lane. If there are no legal parking spaces the drivers park at street corners or on the sidewalks. But most pedestrians in South Philly and elsewhere seem unruffled by the fact that noisy, polluting cars take up almost all of their outdoor living space. Drivers are even more oblivious to this reality, of course. My hunch is that most of them could get used to seeing corpses swinging from the light fixtures on telephone poles so long as the corpses didn’t hang low enough to block the roads.

“You’re wrong, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said. “They would drive around the corpses, or just knock them out of the way.”

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Beware cat-less ladies who have too many kids

Posted on July 28, 2024 by oddmanout215

We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. — VP candidate J.D. Vance, while running for the Senate in 2021

“Please don’t write about Vance again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That phony populist ain’t worth the keystrokes it takes to delete his lame emails.”

I rejected his request. “Vance crossed a line by attacking cat ladies. As a proud cat gentleman, I find his remarks highly offensive.”

We were on the front porch of my swamp shack on a nice day, in between heat waves. Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer Victor Cortez was with us, checking up on his unreliable charge.

“Harris could have countered by complaining that cat-less ladies who have too many children are the real menace, but she’s not as mean as Vance,” Victor said. “Or as stupid.”

My cats Thoughts and Prayers licked their paws and nodded approvingly as they lazed on the front steps.

After Victor left, I walked to Vincenzo’s Pizza Jawn for a slice of Sicilian. Tommy Gravers, a former newspaper colleague of mine who later became a test subject for experimental drugs, was at the counter drinking diet soda and looking alarmingly thin. He told me that our time on Earth is like a 20th century sitcom – a promising premise and some amusing initial episodes followed by stagnation, cancelation and many seasons of reruns, with characters so predictable, you know their lines even before they speak. Tommy’s prognosis is iffy, but watching sitcom characters confront the same problems again and again distracts him from thinking about mortality.

“Time has no meaning when I watch TV,” he explained. “Decades from now, Barney Fife’s handgun will still misfire. Arnold the Pig will still win at checkers. The Soup Nazi will never serve soup to George.”

I nodded. “Yes, but will Kamala Harris be the first woman president of the United States?”

“Possibly,” Tommy said, “but she’d better get off to a successful start. If her show gets canceled, there won’t be any reruns.”

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Regarding Trump’s infatuation with Hannibal Lecter

Posted on July 21, 2024 by oddmanout215

“Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.” — Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was wondering about the Republican presidential nominee’s bizarre fixation on Hannibal Lecter, the fictional, flesh-eating serial killer played by Anthony Hopkins in an old movie called Silence of the Lambs. This wasn’t the first time Trump praised Lecter.

“It’s just Trump being Trump,” I said. “He tells a big lie then caps it with an outdated reference from mass culture that he knows will endear him to the ignoramuses who are susceptible to his lies.”

One of Trump’s favorite lies is that the influx of migrants from south of the border is made up of extreme undesirables — rapists and killers, maybe even cannibals. He ranted about migrants in his speech, right before pivoting to the one-liner about Lecter’s dinner preferences. This was to suggest there are many Hannibal Lecter types among the migrants, ha-ha.

“But ain’t he supposed to be a humbler guy, a unifier, now that he almost had his head blowed off by that nutjob in PA?” Swamp Rabbit asked. “That’s what them pundits are writing.”

“That’s just mainstream media bullshit. There’s only one Trump.”

Trump is the guy who thinks testimonials from the likes of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock reflect well on him. He’s the candidate who said “107 percent” of jobs created under Biden “were taken by illegal aliens.” That he, Trump, oversaw “the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” That “Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare.”

He seemed to become more unhinged with each new sentence during his convention speech. His audience cheered and waved placards. Swamp Rabbit said, “Trump’s suck-ups are even sicker than he is. I bet they’d nominate Hannibal Lecter if they could.”

I thought about this for a moment. “That’s impossible, but they’re happy to settle for Hannibal’s alter-ego.”

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Why JD Vance no longer calls Trump ‘America’s Hitler’

Posted on July 15, 2024 by oddmanout215

Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly chosen running mate, wrote this on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign:

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

It seems he ultimately decided Trump is both of those things — a Hitler type and a cynical asshole who could help Vance further his own political career. The irony here is that Vance is at least as cynical as Richard Nixon — note his use of the word “useful” — or he wouldn’t have become so shamelessly loyal to the wannabe dictator who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

My friend Swamp Rabbit called up a recent New York Times interview with Vance, a lengthy piece that shows how much the Ohio Republican revels in being perceived as both a populist firebrand and a staunch opponent of those who don’t believe in the sort of populism that allows for hostility toward Blacks, immigrants and everybody else who doesn’t fit the resentful white working-class MAGA mold that Trump has exploited so successfully.

Vance said this in the Times interview: “I think people really, really underrate the sense to which there is palpable and actionable frustration, and I’m always surprised that their assumption appears to be that Trump is the worst, rather than the best, expression of that frustration.” 

Just what we need, another pugnacious hustler pretending to be a spokesperson for the people. Vance is as familiar as the rest of us with Trump’s appalling personal history — the housing discrimination lawsuit, the failure to pay an army of small business contractors in Atlantic City and elsewhere, Trump University and other major scams, the unending stream of documented lies, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, the impeachments, the election subversion charges, the conviction for sexual battery and defamation, the convictions on 34 counts of business fraud, and so on.

“Up means down, worst means best,” Swamp Rabbit said when I asked him to explain Vance’s reasoning. “It don’t make no sense unless you drink the Trump Kool-Aid.”

Footnote: In case you thought Vance might have some redeeming qualities, check out the person he chooses to blame for Trump’s recent brush with violent death: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Posted in humor, liar, mainstream media, New York Times, plutocracy, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments