"Eat your greens."
It's a sentence I heard as a child; I suspect many of my age and older heard it, too. It means one should eat celery, lettuce, cabbage, and other boring foods that seem to take forever to chew. Carrots, too, can roll around in bits inside the mouth seemingly endlessly. Vegetables, though, are good for the body. Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, are not. Still, right now, I have a half-eaten bag of Cheetos Puffs in the kitchen. I found earlier today that I couldn't stop eating them. They seem to have been designed to make you think you're done with them, so you close and rubber band the bag, but a few minutes later you open it up again. I've noticed that Pringles are also like this.
Walking away from raw broccoli, for me, is very easy.
With each primary or caucus, the remaining presidential candidates enter a state, talk their stuff, most of which we've heard before (with variations depending upon the latest twists, turns, and outrages), and then voting day comes, the news networks predict winners with one percent of the vote counted, and by then the candidates have left the state they so praised while they were there.
What a great place! Look at all those fresh faces! You know, I had a great dinner at Von Torpensteiner's Bistro in beautiful downtown Anywhereville! It's likely I'll never come back to this place again, and I won't even mention your great state and its wonderful people in my biography ghost-written sometime in the next ten years! I don't give a fuck about any of you! I only give this smile to those for whom I feel contempt!
Yeah, I'm a little jaded by the political situation in America these months. The persistence of total horseshit maintaining a steady place in the news can run any thinking person downward in mood, at times. It's as if I've only been eating Cheetos Puffs for the last nine or ten months. A man whose face and neck are close to the same hue as Cheetos Puffs still commands the attention of news organizations, even while he's ten percentage points behind Ted Cruz in Wisconsin (primary to be held on April 5). Since February, when Trump enjoyed a high point (well above Cruz) in the polls in Wisconsin, his lead has dropped severely, while Cruz and Kasich have risen, with the latter currently at nine points behind Trump. How could this be? Why is Trump's charm decaying in Wisconsin?
On Monday he gave three phone interviews to Wisconsin conservative radio talk show hosts, one of whom, Milwaukee's Charlie Sykes, has been for the past year a vocal critic of Trump. That Trump's intelligence people didn't realize Sykes would give their master a tough interview (in fact, maybe the only one the billionaire bullshitter has received since he began his candidacy) indicates the low quality of minds running Trump's campaign. Sykes gave Trump a real interview; gave him a hard time for reverting to "playground" levels when griping about Cruz and the now infamous "whose wife is more beautiful" battle. The interview revealed Trump's utter lack of knowledge on just about everything a reasonable person should expect a presidential candidate to know.
Trump hung up on one of the other talk radio hosts (a woman). By then, I guess he realized this wasn't as easy or as fun as tweeting about Megyn Kelly's alleged (by him only) incompetence as a journalist.
Any man or teenaged boy who's been in a situation with a woman or girl, in which, for whatever reason or reasons, he's unable to get off before the experience ends, can perhaps understand me when I suggest that Donald Trump is basically a perpetually unsatisfied cock. I am not referring to his actual, by his own admission during a televised debate, "there are no problems there, believe me," sixty-nine year old possibly Cheetos Puffs-colored cock. The unsatisfied cockness of Donald Trump, rather, is his striving, whiny personality always attempting to seize attention, to have his mistress (America) receive his semen all over the nation's face, his ultimate goal that must be denied him as surely as a sane, competent American leadership (currently non-existent) should attempt to curb, drastically, the effects of global climate change, the real apocalypse slouching towards us, a global disaster feeding right now on human stupidity.
We need to eat our greens. Instead, the leading Republican presidential contender has tweeted, just recently, a side by side comparison of his former model wife's face with the unflatteringly photographed face of Mrs. Ted Cruz. That's the kind of thing that actually matters to Cock Trump.
Let's let the world die so that Trump can satisfy his ego, and the networks can reap good ratings.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Sunday, March 27, 2016
I voted for Senator John Kerry for president in 2004. I would've voted for anyone but Bush. I never believed Bush's and Cheney's accusations and threats about Saddam Hussein's cache of weapons of mass destruction. For one thing, if Hussein had had access to such weapons, why didn't he use them against U.S. military forces when they attacked his country in 2003? Did he get scruples after having gassed thousands of Kurds in 1988? His chemical weapons technology and materials came from Singapore, the Netherlands, Egypt, West Germany, India, France, and the United States of America. We in first world nations often help the murderers we call monsters.
By 2003, as proven in U.N. disarmament records, Hussein's access to WMD was fantasy concocted by Bush and Cheney, distributed and published by U.S. news media, believed in by, among many American politicians, John Kerry, who, on October 9, 2002, said, "I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
He may as well have said, "I will be voting to the give the President of the United States the authority to use lies..."
Two years later Kerry lost to the son of a bitch. By then, the fall of 2004, the senator must've realized that the president had lied; in fact, he and Cheney had told an effective lie, based (for chuckles) on an utter absurdity: that Hussein, even if he did possess nuclear weapons, would actually use them on U.S. soil, an act that would precipitate hellfire on his own country.
The U.S. news media at the time missed this absurdity, too. It's the kind of ridiculous idea that persists even in the face of authorities attempting to use logic in the general political discourse, which, these days, consists of presidential candidates boasting about their wives' looks, and also debating about Donald Trump's prick size.
John Kerry, as Secretary of State, is worried about what the leaders of other nations think of the current U.S. political scene. Today's The Guardian, in an article on Kerry's appearance on Face the Nation, shows this grave concern: "I think it's fair to say that [leaders abroad] are shocked [by this year's presidential election]. It upsets people's sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they're posed to me, it's clear to me that what's happening is an embarrassment to our country."
Really, Kerry? You figured that out a year and five days after Ted Cruz announced his presidential run at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, to an auditorium filled with students who had to attend? You didn't think before now that world leaders, regarding the low quality minds of such lunatic politicians as Cruz, Walker, Trump, and Jeb Bush, all of them in the race by last June, have been alarmed by the American political scene for a long time?
The Guardian article amusingly states: "Kerry did not specify which candidates or remarks had embarrassed the US, but he was clearly alluding to controversial proposals from the Republican candidates."
For "controversial," read "illegal."
Yes, Kerry, like most people who think things through, believes Ted Cruz's notion to have policemen surveil "Muslim neighborhoods" is fucking crazy, although the Secretary of State would probably describe it as "imprudent and impractical." Trump's hard-on for torture and for killing family members of suspected terrorists also rubs Kerry the wrong way; he's a humanitarian.
Kerry says we shouldn't live in fear. Don't be oblivious to your surroundings. Try telling that to the Millennial generation, a mass of young humans who cross street intersections while looking at their iPhones. In any case, Kerry has this advice for us: "It means avoid a crowded place where you have no control over who may be there. Have a sense of vigilance to watch who's around you."
This, from a man who was conned by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who resembles the Penguin played by Burgess Meredith, when Cheney lied to politicians and Americans at large, to the U.S. military, so that he could help his favorite corporation, Halliburton, reap the harvest of death in Iraq.
Kerry's warning about "avoiding large crowds," which I've heard other government officials say, I guess means you should never go to an airport, mall, bus or train station, outdoor market, cities, popular museums--in fact, you probably shouldn't even be living on Earth.
Here's the irony as I see it: except for Bernie Sanders, who focuses on domestic economic issues (so-called "bread and butter"), the other candidates, Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, all believe in American might, in stomping on opposition to that dominance. They're unremarkable in this viewpoint. U.S. foreign policy, its practitioners and supporters, its apologists among the common U.S. populace, is dedicated to control of the world, or as much of it as possible to control at any given time. Total control always eludes, but a chronic aspiration for containment of problems threatening that quest for control continuously abides, regardless of the White House's occupant.
Kerry's lament about America becoming an "embarrassment," is another way of saying that he, as Secretary of State (prime representative of U.S. foreign policy since 2013) is watching the rise in the Republican Party of fools who don't know what the fuck they're doing, Trump and Cruz being the two most dangerous, and also the greatest threats to American security, i.e. dominance--an offensive posture calling itself "defense." Kerry worries about recklessness in the possible next president. I think it's safe to say he's not worried about Hillary Clinton, because she exemplifies traditional American foreign policy. She'll kill and exert control, just like Barack Obama does. Trump and Cruz, Kerry worries, will go apeshit with the killing and alienate allies in the process. They're jokers; Hillary's the Queen of Diamonds, the trigger card that makes Laurence Harvey shoot his wife in The Manchurian Candidate; in other words, Clinton's underhanded, crafty, while Trump is a sledgehammer and Cruz is a tapeworm.
Kerry's message today is, "Republican candidates...don't fuck up American exceptionalism."
Vic Neptune
By 2003, as proven in U.N. disarmament records, Hussein's access to WMD was fantasy concocted by Bush and Cheney, distributed and published by U.S. news media, believed in by, among many American politicians, John Kerry, who, on October 9, 2002, said, "I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
He may as well have said, "I will be voting to the give the President of the United States the authority to use lies..."
Two years later Kerry lost to the son of a bitch. By then, the fall of 2004, the senator must've realized that the president had lied; in fact, he and Cheney had told an effective lie, based (for chuckles) on an utter absurdity: that Hussein, even if he did possess nuclear weapons, would actually use them on U.S. soil, an act that would precipitate hellfire on his own country.
The U.S. news media at the time missed this absurdity, too. It's the kind of ridiculous idea that persists even in the face of authorities attempting to use logic in the general political discourse, which, these days, consists of presidential candidates boasting about their wives' looks, and also debating about Donald Trump's prick size.
John Kerry, as Secretary of State, is worried about what the leaders of other nations think of the current U.S. political scene. Today's The Guardian, in an article on Kerry's appearance on Face the Nation, shows this grave concern: "I think it's fair to say that [leaders abroad] are shocked [by this year's presidential election]. It upsets people's sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they're posed to me, it's clear to me that what's happening is an embarrassment to our country."
Really, Kerry? You figured that out a year and five days after Ted Cruz announced his presidential run at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, to an auditorium filled with students who had to attend? You didn't think before now that world leaders, regarding the low quality minds of such lunatic politicians as Cruz, Walker, Trump, and Jeb Bush, all of them in the race by last June, have been alarmed by the American political scene for a long time?
The Guardian article amusingly states: "Kerry did not specify which candidates or remarks had embarrassed the US, but he was clearly alluding to controversial proposals from the Republican candidates."
For "controversial," read "illegal."
Yes, Kerry, like most people who think things through, believes Ted Cruz's notion to have policemen surveil "Muslim neighborhoods" is fucking crazy, although the Secretary of State would probably describe it as "imprudent and impractical." Trump's hard-on for torture and for killing family members of suspected terrorists also rubs Kerry the wrong way; he's a humanitarian.
Kerry says we shouldn't live in fear. Don't be oblivious to your surroundings. Try telling that to the Millennial generation, a mass of young humans who cross street intersections while looking at their iPhones. In any case, Kerry has this advice for us: "It means avoid a crowded place where you have no control over who may be there. Have a sense of vigilance to watch who's around you."
This, from a man who was conned by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who resembles the Penguin played by Burgess Meredith, when Cheney lied to politicians and Americans at large, to the U.S. military, so that he could help his favorite corporation, Halliburton, reap the harvest of death in Iraq.
Kerry's warning about "avoiding large crowds," which I've heard other government officials say, I guess means you should never go to an airport, mall, bus or train station, outdoor market, cities, popular museums--in fact, you probably shouldn't even be living on Earth.
Here's the irony as I see it: except for Bernie Sanders, who focuses on domestic economic issues (so-called "bread and butter"), the other candidates, Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, all believe in American might, in stomping on opposition to that dominance. They're unremarkable in this viewpoint. U.S. foreign policy, its practitioners and supporters, its apologists among the common U.S. populace, is dedicated to control of the world, or as much of it as possible to control at any given time. Total control always eludes, but a chronic aspiration for containment of problems threatening that quest for control continuously abides, regardless of the White House's occupant.
Kerry's lament about America becoming an "embarrassment," is another way of saying that he, as Secretary of State (prime representative of U.S. foreign policy since 2013) is watching the rise in the Republican Party of fools who don't know what the fuck they're doing, Trump and Cruz being the two most dangerous, and also the greatest threats to American security, i.e. dominance--an offensive posture calling itself "defense." Kerry worries about recklessness in the possible next president. I think it's safe to say he's not worried about Hillary Clinton, because she exemplifies traditional American foreign policy. She'll kill and exert control, just like Barack Obama does. Trump and Cruz, Kerry worries, will go apeshit with the killing and alienate allies in the process. They're jokers; Hillary's the Queen of Diamonds, the trigger card that makes Laurence Harvey shoot his wife in The Manchurian Candidate; in other words, Clinton's underhanded, crafty, while Trump is a sledgehammer and Cruz is a tapeworm.
Kerry's message today is, "Republican candidates...don't fuck up American exceptionalism."
Vic Neptune
Friday, March 25, 2016
Iggy Pop spoke at my university the year I graduated. It was a talk in a gymnasium. I can't remember if we sat on bleacher seats or on chairs, or both. He was funny at times, natural in manner, although I think he referred to prepared notes, with spontaneous asides now and then.
On the Lecture Circuit With Iggy Pop was never a TV show, so this speech wasn't part of some second career. He was still making music. He had the status of living legend, although I wonder how many students in the audience (this was 1990), knew who he was, or that he was closely associated with superstars like David Bowie.
I recall a story Iggy Pop told about receiving a phone call from the film director, Ridley Scott, who wanted the singer to perform a song for the soundtrack of his new film, Black Rain. Scott, according to Iggy Pop, and here Iggy did an amusing imitation of the director's refined Englishman's voice, said, "I want your song to play at the very beginning of the film. Your voice will be the first thing the audience hears..."
Iggy Pop accepted the tempting offer. After all, this was the director of Alien and Blade Runner. He recorded the song, time passed, and when he saw Black Rain, Ridley Scott's dangled fruit of Iggy's voice being "the first thing the audience hears" wasn't at the beginning of the film.
"They fucked me," Iggy said to us in 1990, adding, "They fucked me."
He went on later about how he had taken to writing essays; that it's an effective way to develop one's ideas and powers of expression.
Over the next few years, I found out that quite a few people I knew at the time, and even some I didn't know until later, were at the Iggy Pop speech. The woman I was dating at the time was there, something I found out only the next day. A year or two later, a friend (whom I didn't know in 1990) told me he and some of his pals approached Iggy Pop after the talk and had a pleasant conversation. They invited the singer to hang out and drink some beers. Iggy Pop declined, saying he had a prior commitment, but he was nice about it.
At the time, I didn't know his music at all, and I'm still sketchy about his biography and artistic output, but I bought his album Brick By Brick when it came out in June 1990, not long after his speech at my college. The song, "Candy," a duet with Kate Pierson of The B-52s, is great, and worth listening to.
Iggy Pop's recommendation about writing essays stayed in my mind. I didn't write essays regularly until many years later, but I then found he was right about the benefits coming from their composition.
Vic Neptune's habit derives from a few words Iggy Pop said in a crowded gymnasium in 1990.
Vic Neptune
On the Lecture Circuit With Iggy Pop was never a TV show, so this speech wasn't part of some second career. He was still making music. He had the status of living legend, although I wonder how many students in the audience (this was 1990), knew who he was, or that he was closely associated with superstars like David Bowie.
I recall a story Iggy Pop told about receiving a phone call from the film director, Ridley Scott, who wanted the singer to perform a song for the soundtrack of his new film, Black Rain. Scott, according to Iggy Pop, and here Iggy did an amusing imitation of the director's refined Englishman's voice, said, "I want your song to play at the very beginning of the film. Your voice will be the first thing the audience hears..."
Iggy Pop accepted the tempting offer. After all, this was the director of Alien and Blade Runner. He recorded the song, time passed, and when he saw Black Rain, Ridley Scott's dangled fruit of Iggy's voice being "the first thing the audience hears" wasn't at the beginning of the film.
"They fucked me," Iggy said to us in 1990, adding, "They fucked me."
He went on later about how he had taken to writing essays; that it's an effective way to develop one's ideas and powers of expression.
Over the next few years, I found out that quite a few people I knew at the time, and even some I didn't know until later, were at the Iggy Pop speech. The woman I was dating at the time was there, something I found out only the next day. A year or two later, a friend (whom I didn't know in 1990) told me he and some of his pals approached Iggy Pop after the talk and had a pleasant conversation. They invited the singer to hang out and drink some beers. Iggy Pop declined, saying he had a prior commitment, but he was nice about it.
At the time, I didn't know his music at all, and I'm still sketchy about his biography and artistic output, but I bought his album Brick By Brick when it came out in June 1990, not long after his speech at my college. The song, "Candy," a duet with Kate Pierson of The B-52s, is great, and worth listening to.
Iggy Pop's recommendation about writing essays stayed in my mind. I didn't write essays regularly until many years later, but I then found he was right about the benefits coming from their composition.
Vic Neptune's habit derives from a few words Iggy Pop said in a crowded gymnasium in 1990.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
2016 already looks like a year crafted by a psychopathic personality.
Barack Obama and his family flew to Cuba. He attended a baseball game featuring the Tampa Bay Rays playing a Cuban team. I didn't follow that story from a sports angle, so I don't know or care which team won, but I heard invective against the president for watching baseball during the Brussels crisis. If Republicans were to acknowledge history's significance as it pertains to what happens in the present, instead of saying things like, "That was in 2003! We're not here to litigate the Iraq War!" then they might admit to President Bush's reading of My Pet Goat to elementary schoolchildren while the Twin Towers burned. Great men, even non-entities holding high office, find themselves in the present, when, sometimes, confusing events occur.
The non-great man, Governor Chris Christie, should be able to relate to Obama's watching baseball during the aftermath of the latest ISIS bombing in Europe. Christie, during his presidential run and even before that, spent very little time in New Jersey. Recently, while acting as Donald Trump's support-weight (the governor endorsed Trump after "suspending" his own campaign), Christie had to endure, in public, a cruel joke told about him by his new master. Complaining about Senator Rubio's absences from his regular Washington job, Trump said Christie had done the same, which is true. There's no way of knowing what went on in Christie's mind when Trump insulted him thus. I've heard him say in the past that he keeps in touch with what's going on in New Jersey every day; I'm sure he does. There are phones and computers, after all. Obama, too, we can assume, is also well-informed even when he seems to just be enjoying an afternoon of baseball with Raul Castro.
While writing this I decided to link to YouTube and listen to an album by the great Belgian band Front 242, called No Comment. I've loved this band's music since I first heard them in the 1980s. The power of the artistic impulse, contrasted with the utter stupidity and black-heartedness of murdering people, as happened yesterday in Brussels, is a vast gulf illustrating two poles of human existence: greatness and sublimity, as against pettiness and cruelty.
My own views on ISIS are these: I hate the motherfuckers. I have no sympathy for their cause. The Caliphate is an impractical joke a thousand years and more too late. The Middle Ages are over. They pollute Islam, a great religion, with utterly insane apocalyptic beliefs that leave no room for life to exist and flourish. In my view, they are anti-Islam, anti-life; if Heaven exists, I hope it rejects ISIS martyrs, catapulting them in the other direction. They are not only anti-life, they are anti-culture. Their destruction of ancient ruins, such as their devastation project at Palmyra, earns them a place among the most reprehensible criminals of all time. May they all be annihilated.
With these views, I may sound like Cruz or Trump, or the Le Pens. The difference, though, is that I regard the problem quite differently than does Trump, whose minuscule logic identifies Islam itself as an enemy. Cruz, too, contributes to the hate project against Muslims. Their views and policies (if actually implemented) would isolate American Muslims, a practice more common in Europe, where radicalization is thus more potentially widespread, a ghettoization that helps ISIS recruitment.
Trump and Cruz want to institute repression because they, like ISIS leaders and nation-snatching brutes throughout history, are authoritarian in their viewpoints, filled to capacity with propagandistic horseshit pouring from their mouths, U.S. news cameras, microphones, and Twitter, bubbling their poisonous fumes into the ears of gullible and fearful citizens who don't recognize the violence inside their favorite politicians--violence that can inspire movements, Horst Wessel-style.
The next president should realize that ISIS derived, albeit indirectly, from bad decisions made in Washington, D.C., and in the Pentagon. America is Frankenstein. If you read Mary Shelley's novel, you'll find that Doctor Frankenstein embarks on his project with good intentions.
Vic Neptune
Barack Obama and his family flew to Cuba. He attended a baseball game featuring the Tampa Bay Rays playing a Cuban team. I didn't follow that story from a sports angle, so I don't know or care which team won, but I heard invective against the president for watching baseball during the Brussels crisis. If Republicans were to acknowledge history's significance as it pertains to what happens in the present, instead of saying things like, "That was in 2003! We're not here to litigate the Iraq War!" then they might admit to President Bush's reading of My Pet Goat to elementary schoolchildren while the Twin Towers burned. Great men, even non-entities holding high office, find themselves in the present, when, sometimes, confusing events occur.
The non-great man, Governor Chris Christie, should be able to relate to Obama's watching baseball during the aftermath of the latest ISIS bombing in Europe. Christie, during his presidential run and even before that, spent very little time in New Jersey. Recently, while acting as Donald Trump's support-weight (the governor endorsed Trump after "suspending" his own campaign), Christie had to endure, in public, a cruel joke told about him by his new master. Complaining about Senator Rubio's absences from his regular Washington job, Trump said Christie had done the same, which is true. There's no way of knowing what went on in Christie's mind when Trump insulted him thus. I've heard him say in the past that he keeps in touch with what's going on in New Jersey every day; I'm sure he does. There are phones and computers, after all. Obama, too, we can assume, is also well-informed even when he seems to just be enjoying an afternoon of baseball with Raul Castro.
While writing this I decided to link to YouTube and listen to an album by the great Belgian band Front 242, called No Comment. I've loved this band's music since I first heard them in the 1980s. The power of the artistic impulse, contrasted with the utter stupidity and black-heartedness of murdering people, as happened yesterday in Brussels, is a vast gulf illustrating two poles of human existence: greatness and sublimity, as against pettiness and cruelty.
My own views on ISIS are these: I hate the motherfuckers. I have no sympathy for their cause. The Caliphate is an impractical joke a thousand years and more too late. The Middle Ages are over. They pollute Islam, a great religion, with utterly insane apocalyptic beliefs that leave no room for life to exist and flourish. In my view, they are anti-Islam, anti-life; if Heaven exists, I hope it rejects ISIS martyrs, catapulting them in the other direction. They are not only anti-life, they are anti-culture. Their destruction of ancient ruins, such as their devastation project at Palmyra, earns them a place among the most reprehensible criminals of all time. May they all be annihilated.
With these views, I may sound like Cruz or Trump, or the Le Pens. The difference, though, is that I regard the problem quite differently than does Trump, whose minuscule logic identifies Islam itself as an enemy. Cruz, too, contributes to the hate project against Muslims. Their views and policies (if actually implemented) would isolate American Muslims, a practice more common in Europe, where radicalization is thus more potentially widespread, a ghettoization that helps ISIS recruitment.
Trump and Cruz want to institute repression because they, like ISIS leaders and nation-snatching brutes throughout history, are authoritarian in their viewpoints, filled to capacity with propagandistic horseshit pouring from their mouths, U.S. news cameras, microphones, and Twitter, bubbling their poisonous fumes into the ears of gullible and fearful citizens who don't recognize the violence inside their favorite politicians--violence that can inspire movements, Horst Wessel-style.
The next president should realize that ISIS derived, albeit indirectly, from bad decisions made in Washington, D.C., and in the Pentagon. America is Frankenstein. If you read Mary Shelley's novel, you'll find that Doctor Frankenstein embarks on his project with good intentions.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Trump says he wants everybody to be stopped from coming into the United States until "we figure out what's at the bottom of this."
Everybody. Sloppy with his words, as usual, but to expand his anti-Muslim rhetoric to every human being outside U.S. borders, including, presumably, U.S. citizens traveling abroad, smacks of hyperbole masquerading as foreign policy in a Tom Clancy-based video game. U.S. journalists continue to accept Trump's insane ideas without going after him relentlessly. Truth is nothing compared to ratings.
Ted Cruz, reacting, like Trump, to the terror bombings in Brussels, called for mass surveillance of American Muslims; make Dearborn, Michigan, I guess, into a police city state. These idiotic ideas pass for serious solutions in today's America. Just because Trump is the Republican frontrunner, we supposedly must accept his intellect as sound, yet all he can come up with is predictable, and useless, bigotry against, primarily, practitioners of a major world religion, most of whom have nothing to do with acts of terror.
Trump and Cruz remind me of Osama bin Laden. The late bin Laden carried out his dirty work from a distance; he got minions to put their own safety at risk. Currently, Cruz hasn't reached Trump's level of degeneracy as the latter encourages violence against protestors, but Cruz nevertheless uses rhetoric designed to inflame the passions of the stupid. Putting Muslims in America under surveillance simply because they're Muslims is hardly far removed from the same spirit of post-Pearl Harbor mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans, none of whom piloted the warplanes that sank American warships on December 7, 1941.
Pearl Harbor was an act of war, not terrorism. The U.S. military was targeted, not civilians. In Brussels on March 22, 2016, civilians were targeted, killed, and wounded, by probable ISIS assholes. I heard someone on CNN today say that ISIS leaders regard Europe these days as "the soft underbelly" of the West. The term, "soft underbelly," was used by Winston Churchill as he urged Allied commanders to attack Mussolini's Italy and the Third Reich from the south; a more feasible series of violent hits against the Fascists and Nazis, Churchill believed, than going at them from northern Europe. The Allies hit from both sides, and one of their soldiers later said that Italy proved not to be "soft."
The dredging up of old descriptions to account for what goes on in Europe now, with fanatical Muslims so extreme they're not recognizable as Muslims, seems weird. A pundit on U.S. cable news using Churchill's memorable put-down of southern Europe makes Europe itself, to some anyway, seem weak and pliable, when it should be kevlar-strong. Belgium today has been described in the U.S. news media as a messed-up fragmented country, lax in security, a poster child for the fragility of the European Union, with its open borders, which allow asshole terrorists to pass from one country to another freely.
I recall that a decade ago, during the Iraq chaos-causing Bush administration, hundreds, thousands, millions of Iraqis fled their war-ravaged nation to neighboring countries, including Syria, which, like Jordan and other Middle Eastern nations, had to deal with a massive swelling of alien population. Syria's troubles, caused by Assad's rule but also by seething civil problems exacerbated by the overall chaos created by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their partners in war crimes, led to a civil war still raging, involving a group that mutated from al-Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of bin Laden's own assholes, into what came to be called ISIS, among other names.
Ridiculing "soft" Europe for letting itself be fucked by ISIS, an organization that would never have existed had it not been for the Bush-caused radicalization of disaffected Middle East men and women, misses the reason why the War on Terror has been so successful. After all, if ceaseless conflict is the goal, as Dick Cheney admitted on Meet the Press soon after 9/11, explosions and gun violence in Europe are just the thing to keep the stew bubbling. Cheney said the war would "go on for a very long time." The only purpose such a war can have, from a practical standpoint, is to profit those who perpetuate it, through policy decisions and actions. Obama, in spite of seeming like some to be a relative peacenik compared to Cheney and Bush, carries on the successful war doctrine. His attitude toward NATO member Turkey can only be understood if we realize that going against Turkey, which bombs and antagonizes the Kurds, would be akin to a betrayal of a regional ally, one which opposes both Assad and Russia. The Kurds, the only ground force practically capable of possibly defeating ISIS, is therefore left standing on the ledge of a high slowly burning building.
Obama, therefore, is not trying to defeat ISIS, but to, as he's put it many times, to "degrade and destroy," with most emphasis on degrade, or containing the threat with aerial bombardments. Putin and his military also bomb Syria, but they're not attacking ISIS, but the enemies of Assad, including lots of civilians. The whole thing is so disgusting. They're all motherfuckers. I don't think they care.
There isn't an expression I hate hearing more than, "the greater good." Put up a photo of a child with no head, blown up in a Russian, or U.S., airstrike, and caption it, "The Greater Good." The politicians, including the wannabes in America these days and months, all speak like everything they're up to is sacred, patriotic, worthy of posing near American flags. Big sacrifices required, security is more important than ever, and still, just four months after Paris on November 13, some ISIS motherfuckers blew up a bunch of people and ruined a lot of dreams. This bullshit will just keep happening, but don't expect the power brokers of the world to really give a fuck, because chaos is coin.
Vic Neptune
Everybody. Sloppy with his words, as usual, but to expand his anti-Muslim rhetoric to every human being outside U.S. borders, including, presumably, U.S. citizens traveling abroad, smacks of hyperbole masquerading as foreign policy in a Tom Clancy-based video game. U.S. journalists continue to accept Trump's insane ideas without going after him relentlessly. Truth is nothing compared to ratings.
Ted Cruz, reacting, like Trump, to the terror bombings in Brussels, called for mass surveillance of American Muslims; make Dearborn, Michigan, I guess, into a police city state. These idiotic ideas pass for serious solutions in today's America. Just because Trump is the Republican frontrunner, we supposedly must accept his intellect as sound, yet all he can come up with is predictable, and useless, bigotry against, primarily, practitioners of a major world religion, most of whom have nothing to do with acts of terror.
Trump and Cruz remind me of Osama bin Laden. The late bin Laden carried out his dirty work from a distance; he got minions to put their own safety at risk. Currently, Cruz hasn't reached Trump's level of degeneracy as the latter encourages violence against protestors, but Cruz nevertheless uses rhetoric designed to inflame the passions of the stupid. Putting Muslims in America under surveillance simply because they're Muslims is hardly far removed from the same spirit of post-Pearl Harbor mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans, none of whom piloted the warplanes that sank American warships on December 7, 1941.
Pearl Harbor was an act of war, not terrorism. The U.S. military was targeted, not civilians. In Brussels on March 22, 2016, civilians were targeted, killed, and wounded, by probable ISIS assholes. I heard someone on CNN today say that ISIS leaders regard Europe these days as "the soft underbelly" of the West. The term, "soft underbelly," was used by Winston Churchill as he urged Allied commanders to attack Mussolini's Italy and the Third Reich from the south; a more feasible series of violent hits against the Fascists and Nazis, Churchill believed, than going at them from northern Europe. The Allies hit from both sides, and one of their soldiers later said that Italy proved not to be "soft."
The dredging up of old descriptions to account for what goes on in Europe now, with fanatical Muslims so extreme they're not recognizable as Muslims, seems weird. A pundit on U.S. cable news using Churchill's memorable put-down of southern Europe makes Europe itself, to some anyway, seem weak and pliable, when it should be kevlar-strong. Belgium today has been described in the U.S. news media as a messed-up fragmented country, lax in security, a poster child for the fragility of the European Union, with its open borders, which allow asshole terrorists to pass from one country to another freely.
I recall that a decade ago, during the Iraq chaos-causing Bush administration, hundreds, thousands, millions of Iraqis fled their war-ravaged nation to neighboring countries, including Syria, which, like Jordan and other Middle Eastern nations, had to deal with a massive swelling of alien population. Syria's troubles, caused by Assad's rule but also by seething civil problems exacerbated by the overall chaos created by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their partners in war crimes, led to a civil war still raging, involving a group that mutated from al-Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of bin Laden's own assholes, into what came to be called ISIS, among other names.
Ridiculing "soft" Europe for letting itself be fucked by ISIS, an organization that would never have existed had it not been for the Bush-caused radicalization of disaffected Middle East men and women, misses the reason why the War on Terror has been so successful. After all, if ceaseless conflict is the goal, as Dick Cheney admitted on Meet the Press soon after 9/11, explosions and gun violence in Europe are just the thing to keep the stew bubbling. Cheney said the war would "go on for a very long time." The only purpose such a war can have, from a practical standpoint, is to profit those who perpetuate it, through policy decisions and actions. Obama, in spite of seeming like some to be a relative peacenik compared to Cheney and Bush, carries on the successful war doctrine. His attitude toward NATO member Turkey can only be understood if we realize that going against Turkey, which bombs and antagonizes the Kurds, would be akin to a betrayal of a regional ally, one which opposes both Assad and Russia. The Kurds, the only ground force practically capable of possibly defeating ISIS, is therefore left standing on the ledge of a high slowly burning building.
Obama, therefore, is not trying to defeat ISIS, but to, as he's put it many times, to "degrade and destroy," with most emphasis on degrade, or containing the threat with aerial bombardments. Putin and his military also bomb Syria, but they're not attacking ISIS, but the enemies of Assad, including lots of civilians. The whole thing is so disgusting. They're all motherfuckers. I don't think they care.
There isn't an expression I hate hearing more than, "the greater good." Put up a photo of a child with no head, blown up in a Russian, or U.S., airstrike, and caption it, "The Greater Good." The politicians, including the wannabes in America these days and months, all speak like everything they're up to is sacred, patriotic, worthy of posing near American flags. Big sacrifices required, security is more important than ever, and still, just four months after Paris on November 13, some ISIS motherfuckers blew up a bunch of people and ruined a lot of dreams. This bullshit will just keep happening, but don't expect the power brokers of the world to really give a fuck, because chaos is coin.
Vic Neptune
Monday, March 21, 2016
Barack Obama joked that it took Calvin Coolidge, the last president to visit Cuba, three days on a battleship to reach the island, whereas it took him just three hours on Air Force One: one difference between 1928 and 2016. A similarity between those two years consists of a coming crumbling of stability. In 1929, capitalism committed suicide, not for the first or last time, when the stock market crashed, causing a worldwide ripple, economically devastating numerous countries, creating fertile soil for authoritarian regimes, exploiting the turmoil, to gain and hold power. Herbert Hoover, a well-meaning man with his head up his ass, succeeded the laissez-faire capitalist Coolidge, but failed to turn a nation around, employing the same dumb ideas that put the world in the shitter in the first place.
In 2008, just weeks before the presidential election, another major stock market crash shuddered the world. This one, traceable entirely to unpunished greed, happened during laissez-faire capitalist and war pig George W. Bush's presidency. The Republicans looked and sounded particularly bad in 2008. Senator John McCain and his unmanageable puppet, Governor Sarah Palin, were profoundly wrong as executive possibilities during such a fucked up economic period. Along came Obama.
He hasn't stopped the overall war begun in 2001 and carried out on various continents. He escalated remote control warfare; he hardened the national security state. If he's a liberal, so is Clint Eastwood. He did open relations with Cuba, a country ostracized and abused by the United States since 1959, when the wily Fidel Castro showed his true color, red, and assumed the leadership of a nation that had been run by American-approved dictators, had supplied American mobsters with casino lucre; had, in short, been one of the many whore countries scattered about the Caribbean and Latin America, that part of the world James Monroe deemed it right and good we fuck with impunity.
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, spent a lot of money, compromised morals, to get rid of Castro. He outlasted all of them, including the efforts of CIA men working with American mafiosi, to assassinate him. The relationship between America's Cuba obsession and the death of John Kennedy cannot, logically, be attributed to mere coincidence.
It's popular opinion among America's Right, both the smart and stupid, that making nice with Cuba is a huge mistake. It's funny when you consider the capitalistic gains American businesses will obtain by infiltrating and dealing with a country now ready to go to bed with Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. Cuba will gain a great deal economically, but, like in America, its poor will be treated the same as they are in the U.S.
Senator Marco Rubio, the recently failed presidential candidate and a Cuban-American of the old school (no deals with Cuba as long as the Castros are alive), grumps about Obama's Cuba policy, but the older generations, the exiles--the kinds of people who toasted the death of JFK--are reduced before the ever-growing number of young Latinos who don't give a shit about what happened in 1959, but are excited to now have the chance to visit lost relatives in a homeland that may as well have been Atlantis so long as the typical American view prevailed.
What does Donald Trump say? Shall I indulge the reader with another Trump story? Will he surprise us with his newfound sense of generosity and compassion? Will he think twice about sounding like an ignoramus?
Reacting to Obama's arrival in Havana and the fact that Cuba's leader, Raul Castro, didn't meet the president at the airport, Trump complained that Pope Francis got met by Castro, that other leaders have also been met at the airport by Castro.
"This is amateur hour," Trump griped, earning himself another minute of coverage on the cable news shows.
"He [Obama] should've gotten back on the plane and flown back!"
But, you see, Trump, he's a professional. Meeting Raul Castro at the airport wasn't part of the plan in the first place. A president who would get so pissed off because the head of state of another nation doesn't arrive at the airport for a meet and greet photo op, sounds exactly like an amateur. If Trump becomes president, even Herbert Hoover would seem like the Messiah.
Vic Neptune
In 2008, just weeks before the presidential election, another major stock market crash shuddered the world. This one, traceable entirely to unpunished greed, happened during laissez-faire capitalist and war pig George W. Bush's presidency. The Republicans looked and sounded particularly bad in 2008. Senator John McCain and his unmanageable puppet, Governor Sarah Palin, were profoundly wrong as executive possibilities during such a fucked up economic period. Along came Obama.
He hasn't stopped the overall war begun in 2001 and carried out on various continents. He escalated remote control warfare; he hardened the national security state. If he's a liberal, so is Clint Eastwood. He did open relations with Cuba, a country ostracized and abused by the United States since 1959, when the wily Fidel Castro showed his true color, red, and assumed the leadership of a nation that had been run by American-approved dictators, had supplied American mobsters with casino lucre; had, in short, been one of the many whore countries scattered about the Caribbean and Latin America, that part of the world James Monroe deemed it right and good we fuck with impunity.
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, spent a lot of money, compromised morals, to get rid of Castro. He outlasted all of them, including the efforts of CIA men working with American mafiosi, to assassinate him. The relationship between America's Cuba obsession and the death of John Kennedy cannot, logically, be attributed to mere coincidence.
It's popular opinion among America's Right, both the smart and stupid, that making nice with Cuba is a huge mistake. It's funny when you consider the capitalistic gains American businesses will obtain by infiltrating and dealing with a country now ready to go to bed with Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. Cuba will gain a great deal economically, but, like in America, its poor will be treated the same as they are in the U.S.
Senator Marco Rubio, the recently failed presidential candidate and a Cuban-American of the old school (no deals with Cuba as long as the Castros are alive), grumps about Obama's Cuba policy, but the older generations, the exiles--the kinds of people who toasted the death of JFK--are reduced before the ever-growing number of young Latinos who don't give a shit about what happened in 1959, but are excited to now have the chance to visit lost relatives in a homeland that may as well have been Atlantis so long as the typical American view prevailed.
What does Donald Trump say? Shall I indulge the reader with another Trump story? Will he surprise us with his newfound sense of generosity and compassion? Will he think twice about sounding like an ignoramus?
Reacting to Obama's arrival in Havana and the fact that Cuba's leader, Raul Castro, didn't meet the president at the airport, Trump complained that Pope Francis got met by Castro, that other leaders have also been met at the airport by Castro.
"This is amateur hour," Trump griped, earning himself another minute of coverage on the cable news shows.
"He [Obama] should've gotten back on the plane and flown back!"
But, you see, Trump, he's a professional. Meeting Raul Castro at the airport wasn't part of the plan in the first place. A president who would get so pissed off because the head of state of another nation doesn't arrive at the airport for a meet and greet photo op, sounds exactly like an amateur. If Trump becomes president, even Herbert Hoover would seem like the Messiah.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Last Friday, March 11, 2016, while the violence in Chicago between those protesting Donald Trump, and Trump's supporters, looked enough like mayhem to inspire news commentators to invoke the political climate of 1968, some of the same commentators suggested that the volatile candidate's reckoning had arrived.
A turning point.
Sure, Trump's incitement of violence at his rallies can be demonstrated by showing clip after clip of the man enthusiastically yelling at protestors, complaining about the "politically correct" environment of the present day which disallows, or at least frowns upon, beating the shit out of those who demonstrate the gall to exercise their First Amendment rights.
Since Chicago, Trump himself and his mouthpieces have complained that the candidate's own freedom of speech was infringed upon when he "had to" cancel his appearance there, a decision that actually caused the violence. For a few hours, Trump's supporters and those protesting him, waited in the arena without fighting. Tension existed, yes, but once the campaign spokesman announced Trump's decision to be the Unholy Ghost at the gathering, protestors chanted their victory and supporters' adrenal glands began ejaculating aggression into vocal cords and fists.
Trump's tactic of pretending victimhood when it comes to what tends to happen at his rallies should make all honest Americans sick, and pissed off. This is a man who phones in interviews to numerous cable and network talk shows. His voice and ugly orange face are on television all the fucking time. He owes his success to the very news media he so often gripes about and puts in "pens" at his rallies. Sarah Palin, remember, also owes her success, and her millions, to that "lamestream media" she claims to hate. Blaming the very thing that makes you successful may sound counterintuitive, but it works. Hatred, acted or not, calls attention to itself; a necessity for power-obsessed creeps like Palin and Trump, both of them essentially reality TV stars with nothing substantial, brain-wise, to offer their country.
The deluded notion that the violence in Chicago last Friday can be solely attributed to Democratic supporters of Senator Sanders and Mrs. Clinton derives from the lying mind of Donald Trump, reinforced by surrogates and even the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. Today, Ryan blamed "the Left" for the violence at Trump rallies. Does he really believe this? Does he think Trump's bullhorn rhetoric, his Ernst Röhm-like viciousness, has nothing to do with inspiring violent acts among his brutal followers? We are witnessing damage control, both by the Trump Campaign apparatus and also, dishearteningly, by the fucking head of the House of Representatives!
Paul Ryan, thus, tacitly supports Trump, because he knows the famed businessman will most likely win the Republican nomination, and the poltroon Ryan, like hundreds of other Republican politicians, would rather see a demagogue with a dictator's ambitions, win the November election, than a Democrat. If Ryan and others in his contemptible party think they can control Trump once he's president, they haven't understood what's been happening in this campaign "season" since last summer.
Trump, using a combination of bravado and manipulation of voters' fears, has bulldozed his competition. Jeb Bush, once the favorite to win the nomination, went down before someone he had failed to imagine. That failure could be the nation's. We must imagine, as Van Jones said last night on The Daily Show, that Trump could be the president, and in November he must be humiliated in all fifty states; otherwise, look at this man, right now, and project forward to 2017 to 2021, and maybe beyond, and realize what he could do, after already having done what he's done. He incites violence at his rallies; he inspires and encourages bigotry and racism; he alienates religious groups worldwide; he advocates violating domestic and international law regarding torture; he advocates killing civilians; he laments the "good old days" when public violence was more tolerated; he pretends he's persecuted for his words and actions; he harks back to an unspecified time when America was "great," and he'll make it "great again."
All of these qualities mentioned above, among the semicolons, point to an essential truth:
Donald Trump is a fucking Fascist.
Make America Hate Again.
Vic Neptune
A turning point.
Sure, Trump's incitement of violence at his rallies can be demonstrated by showing clip after clip of the man enthusiastically yelling at protestors, complaining about the "politically correct" environment of the present day which disallows, or at least frowns upon, beating the shit out of those who demonstrate the gall to exercise their First Amendment rights.
Since Chicago, Trump himself and his mouthpieces have complained that the candidate's own freedom of speech was infringed upon when he "had to" cancel his appearance there, a decision that actually caused the violence. For a few hours, Trump's supporters and those protesting him, waited in the arena without fighting. Tension existed, yes, but once the campaign spokesman announced Trump's decision to be the Unholy Ghost at the gathering, protestors chanted their victory and supporters' adrenal glands began ejaculating aggression into vocal cords and fists.
Trump's tactic of pretending victimhood when it comes to what tends to happen at his rallies should make all honest Americans sick, and pissed off. This is a man who phones in interviews to numerous cable and network talk shows. His voice and ugly orange face are on television all the fucking time. He owes his success to the very news media he so often gripes about and puts in "pens" at his rallies. Sarah Palin, remember, also owes her success, and her millions, to that "lamestream media" she claims to hate. Blaming the very thing that makes you successful may sound counterintuitive, but it works. Hatred, acted or not, calls attention to itself; a necessity for power-obsessed creeps like Palin and Trump, both of them essentially reality TV stars with nothing substantial, brain-wise, to offer their country.
The deluded notion that the violence in Chicago last Friday can be solely attributed to Democratic supporters of Senator Sanders and Mrs. Clinton derives from the lying mind of Donald Trump, reinforced by surrogates and even the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. Today, Ryan blamed "the Left" for the violence at Trump rallies. Does he really believe this? Does he think Trump's bullhorn rhetoric, his Ernst Röhm-like viciousness, has nothing to do with inspiring violent acts among his brutal followers? We are witnessing damage control, both by the Trump Campaign apparatus and also, dishearteningly, by the fucking head of the House of Representatives!
Paul Ryan, thus, tacitly supports Trump, because he knows the famed businessman will most likely win the Republican nomination, and the poltroon Ryan, like hundreds of other Republican politicians, would rather see a demagogue with a dictator's ambitions, win the November election, than a Democrat. If Ryan and others in his contemptible party think they can control Trump once he's president, they haven't understood what's been happening in this campaign "season" since last summer.
Trump, using a combination of bravado and manipulation of voters' fears, has bulldozed his competition. Jeb Bush, once the favorite to win the nomination, went down before someone he had failed to imagine. That failure could be the nation's. We must imagine, as Van Jones said last night on The Daily Show, that Trump could be the president, and in November he must be humiliated in all fifty states; otherwise, look at this man, right now, and project forward to 2017 to 2021, and maybe beyond, and realize what he could do, after already having done what he's done. He incites violence at his rallies; he inspires and encourages bigotry and racism; he alienates religious groups worldwide; he advocates violating domestic and international law regarding torture; he advocates killing civilians; he laments the "good old days" when public violence was more tolerated; he pretends he's persecuted for his words and actions; he harks back to an unspecified time when America was "great," and he'll make it "great again."
All of these qualities mentioned above, among the semicolons, point to an essential truth:
Donald Trump is a fucking Fascist.
Make America Hate Again.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, March 12, 2016
"Is there anything more fun than a Trump rally?" asked the man himself at a Dayton, Ohio, gathering today.
Eating a bag of gumdrops and getting sick is more fun than a Trump rally.
Last night in Chicago, Trump cancelled ("postponed") a rally attended by about two-thirds supporters and one-third protestors--who organized several days in advance to disrupt a rally led by a hate-monger in a city with a thirty percent Latino population.
The "postponement" announcement caused cheering by the protestors in the arena and boos and howls by the supporters. Fighting among some on either side broke out intermittently. There weren't very many cops in the arena, not enough to clear the place in an orderly manner. Cops in riot gear were outside on the streets, including a horse patrol. At least one protestor outside the arena ended up in the hospital.
MSNBC last night covered this edifying event for several hours. Comparisons to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 were made. Violence stemming from political actions, words, and decisions, is not a new thing in America or anywhere else, but last night at least we at home got to watch thousands of people, "passionate" as Trump called his supporters, expressing their hot-headed in the moment uses of straining vocal cords, fists, and heightened blood pressure-elevating emotions.
One recurring image on MSNBC was of a red Make America Great Again cap waved to the point of almost blurring within the camera's frame. This shot appeared so many times, as if being looped by the MSNBC show director, that I started calling it "the hat orgasm." I began to think of it as symbolic of Trump's campaign: a hat with a stupid and meaningless slogan; a money-making product for the man who created the stupid slogan; a hat the color of the Republican Party, shaking like a windblown leaf clutched between the fingers of a man thwarted by those who despise his leader, deprived of the chance to see that leader in action; an empty hat with no brain inside.
Trump, interviewed by phone by Chris Matthews (who, though he talks tough against Trump when the man isn't present, was nearly as deferential and soft as Sean Hannity of Fox News) took no responsibility for the violence in Chicago last night. He blamed the protestors, of course. He acted as if all of his encouragements at recent rallies to rough up protestors, claiming that he'd like to punch protestors' faces, or that one protestor deserved to be removed from the rally "on a stretcher," has nothing to do with inciting violence in the more violently inclined of his supporters, like the man in Fayetteville who assaulted a young black protestor in front of several law enforcement officers who waited a day before arresting the offender, but treated the black protestor like a criminal, forcing him to the floor and threatening further violence.
A few months back I thought, How can I feel more disgust with Donald Trump than I already do?
Last night's events in Chicago showed a new beginning to the vileness and viciousness of America's own proto-Fascist would-be dictator--a man who has already realized how much he can get away with while the news media continue to fail to utterly condemn him, pretending objectivity and feeding the beast, while a major political party gives itself up to the power fantasy of the worst man in America.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Nancy Reagan's death leads me to wonder about what she really thought of the 2015-2016 Republican presidential race. The candidates, though they invoke the spirit of Mrs. Reagan's late husband, dead since 2004, another election year, as if Ronald Reagan would've approved of their faux Conservatism, will doubtless extol the virtues of the former first lady who brought, after the relative plainness of the Carter administration, aristocratic trappings to the White House.
Nancy and Ronald Reagan's aristocracy, of course, was the ersatz American variety: Hollywood royalty. Anne Robbins, originally, she acted in films in the 1940s and 1950s under the name Nancy Davis. I've seen her in only one film, East Side, West Side, an excellent melodrama starring James Mason, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ava Gardner. She plays Stanwyck's friend, has one good scene sitting opposite Stanwyck listening to her problems. I noted how elegantly dressed and coiffed Davis was, with white gloves, a trim hat, and perfectly styled dark hair. This image translated later to the nation's regard of President Reagan's wife, both of them actual movie stars, if a tad minor-scale compared to performers like Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor, Bette Davis, and Joan Fontaine. Even so, the White House had never held such occupants. If Trump and his Slovenian ex-model wife ever occupy the White House, a similar kind of glamor, the type that attaches itself barnacle-like to famous people, will probably reign again in Washington, D.C.
All of this is, from a substance standpoint, on the illusory end of things. We see presidents and their wives at fancy functions. Barack Obama had Paul McCartney serenade Michelle Obama with the Beatles song, "Michelle." Who gets to do such a thing for his wife? You have to have significant clout to ask a Beatle to further your chance of getting laid good and right by your wife of many years on the night of the soiree. Obama has been criticized by grumps on Fox News as being too friendly to Hollywood and also to music industry powerhouses like Jay Z and his wife Beyoncé Knowles. Obama's reaching out to glamor is aided by the fact that most movie actors and actresses are liberals. The Right, pathetically, can boast of such luminaries as Stacey Dash and Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent and the Duck Dynasty family.
Complaints from the Right about Nancy and Ronald Reagan's Hollywood connections are non-existent, even though, created in the stew of American moviemaking in the classical studio period, they had an abundance of friends and colleagues of multiple political perspectives. Nancy Reagan's dear friend, Frank Sinatra, was a major John Kennedy supporter.
It's often said that the Reagans brought class to the White House; a renewed spirit of pro-Americanism as well. His accelerated nuclear weapons program stoked America's arms industry, helped cripple the Soviet Union financially. His feel-good invasion of Grenada in 1983 renewed the hopes of militaristic nutjobs in the ability of American might to conquer undermanned and outgunned third world armies.
Nancy Reagan's own crusade, "Just Say No," was an attempt to prevent kids from trying illegal drugs. Promoting this, she appeared in an episode of the sitcom, Diff'rent Strokes, in 1983, the year before crack use in Los Angeles expanded to epidemic proportions. Under her husband, the CIA during that time, heavily involved with Nicaraguan Contras and their cocaine trafficking, contributed to the overall problem of cocaine and cocaine-derivative use in the United States. Was Nancy aware of this? Was Ronald? Did they live in a dream world, inhabiting a dream castle of power wedded to the nation's entertainment complex?
I don't suggest that Nancy Reagan was a bad person. In many ways, I liked her. I'm fond of first ladies (except Barbara Bush). They tend to come off much better than their husbands. Even Laura Bush, whose husband I resented during his presidency and still despise for the harm he did to the Constitution, to his own country, to the people of the Middle East and South Asia, strikes me as a decent enough person in her own right. Will I like Trump's wife if she becomes first lady? Some "controversy" surrounding her thus far deals with her modeling career, and allegedly risqué work-related photos. Can America handle a first lady who has shown off her body? This question, asked on TV news programs, misses the main point: if this woman becomes first lady it means Donald Trump will be president, a far more frightening prospect than his wife having bared herself to photographers when she had a job that logically called for her to do so.
I fantasize that Nancy Reagan, though ninety-four, really died of despair as she contemplated the bleak possibilities in her husband's party as the Republicans seek to reoccupy the White House. Maybe she didn't want to find out the results of the November election.
Vic Neptune
Nancy and Ronald Reagan's aristocracy, of course, was the ersatz American variety: Hollywood royalty. Anne Robbins, originally, she acted in films in the 1940s and 1950s under the name Nancy Davis. I've seen her in only one film, East Side, West Side, an excellent melodrama starring James Mason, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ava Gardner. She plays Stanwyck's friend, has one good scene sitting opposite Stanwyck listening to her problems. I noted how elegantly dressed and coiffed Davis was, with white gloves, a trim hat, and perfectly styled dark hair. This image translated later to the nation's regard of President Reagan's wife, both of them actual movie stars, if a tad minor-scale compared to performers like Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor, Bette Davis, and Joan Fontaine. Even so, the White House had never held such occupants. If Trump and his Slovenian ex-model wife ever occupy the White House, a similar kind of glamor, the type that attaches itself barnacle-like to famous people, will probably reign again in Washington, D.C.
All of this is, from a substance standpoint, on the illusory end of things. We see presidents and their wives at fancy functions. Barack Obama had Paul McCartney serenade Michelle Obama with the Beatles song, "Michelle." Who gets to do such a thing for his wife? You have to have significant clout to ask a Beatle to further your chance of getting laid good and right by your wife of many years on the night of the soiree. Obama has been criticized by grumps on Fox News as being too friendly to Hollywood and also to music industry powerhouses like Jay Z and his wife Beyoncé Knowles. Obama's reaching out to glamor is aided by the fact that most movie actors and actresses are liberals. The Right, pathetically, can boast of such luminaries as Stacey Dash and Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent and the Duck Dynasty family.
Complaints from the Right about Nancy and Ronald Reagan's Hollywood connections are non-existent, even though, created in the stew of American moviemaking in the classical studio period, they had an abundance of friends and colleagues of multiple political perspectives. Nancy Reagan's dear friend, Frank Sinatra, was a major John Kennedy supporter.
It's often said that the Reagans brought class to the White House; a renewed spirit of pro-Americanism as well. His accelerated nuclear weapons program stoked America's arms industry, helped cripple the Soviet Union financially. His feel-good invasion of Grenada in 1983 renewed the hopes of militaristic nutjobs in the ability of American might to conquer undermanned and outgunned third world armies.
Nancy Reagan's own crusade, "Just Say No," was an attempt to prevent kids from trying illegal drugs. Promoting this, she appeared in an episode of the sitcom, Diff'rent Strokes, in 1983, the year before crack use in Los Angeles expanded to epidemic proportions. Under her husband, the CIA during that time, heavily involved with Nicaraguan Contras and their cocaine trafficking, contributed to the overall problem of cocaine and cocaine-derivative use in the United States. Was Nancy aware of this? Was Ronald? Did they live in a dream world, inhabiting a dream castle of power wedded to the nation's entertainment complex?
I don't suggest that Nancy Reagan was a bad person. In many ways, I liked her. I'm fond of first ladies (except Barbara Bush). They tend to come off much better than their husbands. Even Laura Bush, whose husband I resented during his presidency and still despise for the harm he did to the Constitution, to his own country, to the people of the Middle East and South Asia, strikes me as a decent enough person in her own right. Will I like Trump's wife if she becomes first lady? Some "controversy" surrounding her thus far deals with her modeling career, and allegedly risqué work-related photos. Can America handle a first lady who has shown off her body? This question, asked on TV news programs, misses the main point: if this woman becomes first lady it means Donald Trump will be president, a far more frightening prospect than his wife having bared herself to photographers when she had a job that logically called for her to do so.
I fantasize that Nancy Reagan, though ninety-four, really died of despair as she contemplated the bleak possibilities in her husband's party as the Republicans seek to reoccupy the White House. Maybe she didn't want to find out the results of the November election.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Last Thursday's "debate" featuring Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, and Trump, had the effect of turning off some Republicans who got to watch the remaining four right wing party contenders for the presidency this year yell at each other about nonsense. Kasich managed to be dignified, although he lapsed when answering the question put to the non-Trump trio, "Will you support Donald Trump if he's the nominee?"
Kasich acknowledged that he would; Rubio said he would, after having spent the last two weeks acting the part of a lousy insult comic, mocking, for instance, Trump's small hands, implying he has a small penis. Cruz, in his oily manner, invoked his past "promise" to support the nominee, no matter who that is. All three, after demonstrating on stage, and for the last several weeks, their clear antipathy for Donald Trump, agreed they'll support him if he's the nominee. Each of them could've scored points of a different kind and stood out in the news media cycle for the following days if they'd said, "I will not support Donald Trump, for I contend he will make an atrociously bad president and will be a curse on America and the entire world."
Instead, the three mollified Trump, and in vulgar terms, behaved like pussies, making obeisance to the most obnoxious piece of shit occupying U.S. news airwaves for the past eight months.
Today, I watched Trump bellowing at a rally somewhere in Florida. On Super Tuesday, March 1, he won seven states to Cruz's three and Rubio's one. Ben Carson wisely dropped out. Kasich banks on winning his home state, Ohio, an important piece of the pie. If he loses Ohio to Trump, he's fucked. If Rubio loses his home state, Florida, to Trump, he's fucked. Cruz won his home state, Texas, on March 1. That Ted Cruz, in my opinion, is a more appealing prospect as president than Trump, says much about my contempt for the self-alleged billionaire. Cruz, himself, is a horrible pseudo-Joe McCarthy; a bullshit artist on a par with Trump but of a different kind--not the type capable of Trump's self-aggrandizement. Cruz, however, is a skilled politician, the kind of asshole in high school who wins the class presidency and deigns to speak to you like he's your friend, but behind his exterior is a howling wind of nothingness.
Would you rather be fucked, metaphorically, by Trump or by Cruz? Would Cruz enjoy some of his popularity if Trump hadn't entered the presidential race? Cruz seems competent as a statesman compared to Trump because the latter doesn't know anything about statesmanship. Cruz's rhetoric oozes like peanut butter on hot toast. Trump's rhetoric is a sock filled with coins repeatedly hitting a baby on the head.
Trump's rally today was characterized by what seemed to me to be particularly harsh braying by the man. Amid the boasting, the reveling in the ousting of protestors, the claim he always makes that journalists are "the most disgusting people in the world," an overt violent ethic, cheered on by his idiot supporters, presented itself. Trump, the more he wins, the more his Republican opponents "suspend" their campaigns, becomes more and more a brute, not disguising it, but baring it glaringly for all to see. The journalists at the rallies condemned by him should turn off their cameras and microphones, the news organizations should cease covering him. That's not how it works, though. Judy never assaults Punch.
In Trump is a voracious ogre growing bigger daily. His accession to the nomination, should it happen (it probably will), promises to reveal something Americans seem to want: an asshole telling us what to do--a man with the sensibilities of an ignorant prison guard keeping an eye on his charges, using them as he deems proper. Fourteen years ago, after 9/11 and the waking of the American vengeance dragon, I thought George W. Bush was the asshole who wanted to tell us what to do. He lacked the necessary bravado, the Trump we now see who can make the most hateful statements and it doesn't matter. A leader, imagine this, whose words stir up the worst of Americans' latent evils, but words that also have no consequences against the leader's fortunes in his quest for power. No wonder the debate on Thursday, brought to you by Fox News, but it could've been any network, had the feel of an argument in a bar at one o'clock in the morning.
The utter degradation of political discourse in America isn't one of the signs of the Apocalypse, but it is an indication that America has no chance with leaders so incapable of reason and good judgment. When your toilet breaks down you want a good plumber to fix it. You don't want someone who's totally unsuited to do the job. In politics, total inadequacy and appalling incompetence have no negative bearing on candidate suitability. Donald Trump, America's worst plumber, wants to fix America's toilet, and because words don't matter anymore in the Orwellian nightmare world we live in, enough people on the Republican side of looking at things believe the toilet will work "great again," so long as we surrender our common sense to the man "who can get things done," the man who told Rubio and America at the debate that "there are no problems" with his penis, referring to Rubio's jibe about the small hands.
Listen up, America: Donald Trump has a tremendous penis. A vote for him on that basis alone is a good enough reason to commit your mind to performing an insane act when you darken the oval next to his name.
Vic Neptune
Kasich acknowledged that he would; Rubio said he would, after having spent the last two weeks acting the part of a lousy insult comic, mocking, for instance, Trump's small hands, implying he has a small penis. Cruz, in his oily manner, invoked his past "promise" to support the nominee, no matter who that is. All three, after demonstrating on stage, and for the last several weeks, their clear antipathy for Donald Trump, agreed they'll support him if he's the nominee. Each of them could've scored points of a different kind and stood out in the news media cycle for the following days if they'd said, "I will not support Donald Trump, for I contend he will make an atrociously bad president and will be a curse on America and the entire world."
Instead, the three mollified Trump, and in vulgar terms, behaved like pussies, making obeisance to the most obnoxious piece of shit occupying U.S. news airwaves for the past eight months.
Today, I watched Trump bellowing at a rally somewhere in Florida. On Super Tuesday, March 1, he won seven states to Cruz's three and Rubio's one. Ben Carson wisely dropped out. Kasich banks on winning his home state, Ohio, an important piece of the pie. If he loses Ohio to Trump, he's fucked. If Rubio loses his home state, Florida, to Trump, he's fucked. Cruz won his home state, Texas, on March 1. That Ted Cruz, in my opinion, is a more appealing prospect as president than Trump, says much about my contempt for the self-alleged billionaire. Cruz, himself, is a horrible pseudo-Joe McCarthy; a bullshit artist on a par with Trump but of a different kind--not the type capable of Trump's self-aggrandizement. Cruz, however, is a skilled politician, the kind of asshole in high school who wins the class presidency and deigns to speak to you like he's your friend, but behind his exterior is a howling wind of nothingness.
Would you rather be fucked, metaphorically, by Trump or by Cruz? Would Cruz enjoy some of his popularity if Trump hadn't entered the presidential race? Cruz seems competent as a statesman compared to Trump because the latter doesn't know anything about statesmanship. Cruz's rhetoric oozes like peanut butter on hot toast. Trump's rhetoric is a sock filled with coins repeatedly hitting a baby on the head.
Trump's rally today was characterized by what seemed to me to be particularly harsh braying by the man. Amid the boasting, the reveling in the ousting of protestors, the claim he always makes that journalists are "the most disgusting people in the world," an overt violent ethic, cheered on by his idiot supporters, presented itself. Trump, the more he wins, the more his Republican opponents "suspend" their campaigns, becomes more and more a brute, not disguising it, but baring it glaringly for all to see. The journalists at the rallies condemned by him should turn off their cameras and microphones, the news organizations should cease covering him. That's not how it works, though. Judy never assaults Punch.
In Trump is a voracious ogre growing bigger daily. His accession to the nomination, should it happen (it probably will), promises to reveal something Americans seem to want: an asshole telling us what to do--a man with the sensibilities of an ignorant prison guard keeping an eye on his charges, using them as he deems proper. Fourteen years ago, after 9/11 and the waking of the American vengeance dragon, I thought George W. Bush was the asshole who wanted to tell us what to do. He lacked the necessary bravado, the Trump we now see who can make the most hateful statements and it doesn't matter. A leader, imagine this, whose words stir up the worst of Americans' latent evils, but words that also have no consequences against the leader's fortunes in his quest for power. No wonder the debate on Thursday, brought to you by Fox News, but it could've been any network, had the feel of an argument in a bar at one o'clock in the morning.
The utter degradation of political discourse in America isn't one of the signs of the Apocalypse, but it is an indication that America has no chance with leaders so incapable of reason and good judgment. When your toilet breaks down you want a good plumber to fix it. You don't want someone who's totally unsuited to do the job. In politics, total inadequacy and appalling incompetence have no negative bearing on candidate suitability. Donald Trump, America's worst plumber, wants to fix America's toilet, and because words don't matter anymore in the Orwellian nightmare world we live in, enough people on the Republican side of looking at things believe the toilet will work "great again," so long as we surrender our common sense to the man "who can get things done," the man who told Rubio and America at the debate that "there are no problems" with his penis, referring to Rubio's jibe about the small hands.
Listen up, America: Donald Trump has a tremendous penis. A vote for him on that basis alone is a good enough reason to commit your mind to performing an insane act when you darken the oval next to his name.
Vic Neptune
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