Bernie’s Deal
Bernie, baby, you carried couple of huge hammers in your Carhartt work pants tool loops as you went into last night’s scheduled meeting with Hillary.
Use ’em properly and do not let them drop to the ground.
Hammer 1) +10 million voters picked you to become the Democratic nominee for president.
Hammer 2) Hillary wants nothing more than to get your endorsement.
Hillary’s the toughest person you’ve ever come up against. She knows how to negotiate. She knows all the tricks. But you don’t need any tricks. You’ve got +10 million supporters and your blessing to bestow upon her. She knows it and she’s ready to do a little hondeling.
You don’t have to hold your breath and you don’t have lose that famous temper of yours. All you have to do is sit back and let her drool over your goodies. She’ll come to you. She’s too smart not to.
My guess is we’ll be seeing an announcement of Bernie’s endorsement sooner rather than later. Then come the July convention we’ll be seeing the kind of Democratic platform the party has blown raspberries at since 1976.
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Breaking The Chains
Just a reminder: This is the 151st year of Juneteenth. The remembrance of the horrors of slavery and the celebration of emancipation is this coming Sunday, June 19th.
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Action
The next time there’s a big gathering of caring, outraged folks in response to a mass shooting there’d better be scads of voter registration tables surrounding the crowd and fiery speeches by elected officials laying out specific strategies to counter the NRA’s dominance over Congress and the 50 statehouses.
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Otherwise, all people have done is pat themselves on the back for being caring and outraged.
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Oppressors And The Oppressed Who Love Them
Pencillistas, you can hit me over the head with Godwin’s Law all you want but with every passing day Donald Trump aligns himself quite comfortably with the Fascists and tyrants of the first half of the 20th Century.
His decision to bar the Washington Post from his campaign events is only the most recent example. Giving the 86 to WaPo is the equivalent of Hal Steinbrenner forbidding New York Post reporters from entering Yankee Stadium because they’ve written the team is battling to stay out of last place.
Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the rest of the bêtes noires of the last century came to absolute power not only by dint of their willingness to vilify minorities, turn their brutes loose when necessary, and control or quash the press, but because the people egged them on. Whatever they became was the end result of the evil in their own souls and psyches and that in the thousands and millions of citizens who cheered for them.
In fact, their bloodthirst likely was magnified by the mirrors they looked into when they scanned their adoring crowds.
The same thing has happened during the rise of Trump. The more he ejaculated hateful, terrifying verbal excreta, the more his throngs roared and bared their teeth. The love he feels has spurred him on to even more hateful, terrifying blather. The relationship between Trump and his crowds is a textbook example of a positive feedback loop.
Trump may have harbored animus in his heart for the news media before he started running for prez (he’d been savaged in newspaper and magazine articles since the early 1980s) but he never shied from ink. Until now.
Emboldened by his countless idolators, he’s now enjoying the perks of being an autocrat.
Hey there, you Muslims can’t come into our country!
You newspapermen with your embarrassing stories, you’re out!
He wouldn’t have had the stones to utter these things before the salivating crowds emboldened him.
I shudder to think what will come out of his mouth as the lovefest continues into November.
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