Evidence has been presented to show that Donald Trump is both a racist and a rapist, but which of those labels is more central to your image of the man?
POLL: With #TrumpIsARacist trending this evening, it may be time for this question again.
When confronted with the incomplete phrase "TRUMP IS A RA_IST," are you more apt to fill the missing space with a "C" or a "P"?
Is "racist" or "rapist" more central to your image of Trump?
— True Blue Liberal - #BidenHarris2020 (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 30, 2020
POLL: Both labels are appropriate and easily verified, but which hashtag is more upsetting to the easily-upset current temporary occupant of our @WhiteHouse, #RacistInChief or #RapistInChief?
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 15, 2019
There are too many syllables and letters in "White Nationalism" for most white nationalists to keep track of, so within their pale brotherhood they are fond of calling themselves "Whiners" to identify themselves to fellow white nationalists.
When America's most famous and "Most Fabulous Whiner" was asked by PBS NewsHour White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor today about white nationalism, he interrupted her and "whined" about her "racist" question (even though he never let her complete it).
Attacking an esteemed African-American reporter as a racist was, of course, an open message to his fellow "Whiners" that he was still on their side and working in their interest.
This led me to post another True Blue Liberal Poll on Twitter earlier this afternoon. What percentage of Donald Trump's base is made up of "Whiners"?
If the White Nationalists were removed from @realDonaldTrump's base of supporters, what would his overall approval rate be?
The White House just announced that Donald Trump is weaseling out of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner again this year. We all know that he's intellectually intimidated by the people in that room, but is there anything that scares him more? (This Twitter poll will be up for a week.)
No, America's worst painting is not from "The Painter of Light™," but from Sean Hannity's favorite painter, Jon McNaughton.
It's turning out to be right-wing art history week. A few days ago we heard commentary on statues from the Tweeter-in-Chief. Today Fox News' Dumbest Anchor® tweeted the video above with the comment "Amazing video and Art! Love this." As an investor and collector of McNaughton's work, he's only coincidentally trying to increase the value of his own collection, but as an art expert I'd also like to ask Sean if the black snake being crushed under Donald Trump's heel represents
who we think it represents (Hint: not Satan). If there's any doubt that the black snake is Barack Obama, all one has to do is to look at the artist's earlier "Forgotten Man" masterpiece in which President Obama is standing in the same spot with the Constitution under his foot while getting dirty looks from all the earlier white presidents as the forgotten man hangs his head sitting on his bench. Now, in the glorious Trump years, the forgotten one is off his bench and planting a tree of hope, and Barack Obama is being trampled underfoot.
Heavy-handed symbolism in representative art is always ugly, but heavy-handed racist symbolism gives this waste of canvas the prize for America's Worst Painting.
Defender-of-Nazis Donald J. Trump took to Twitter this morning to defend Confederate statues again, typing a string of tweets with an unexpected and completely out-of-character lesson in art history and the appreciation of beauty.
August 17, 2017
June 6, 1980
The first time that Donald Trump's name was linked to beautiful statuary in the news was back on June 6, 1980 when an article about Bonwit Teller on the first page of The New York Times ran with the headline, "Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures." Trump's name itself didn't appear until the sixth paragraph about the landmark Fifth Avenue department store that was being razed to make room for a "$100 million 62-story bronze-colored glass tower of apartments, offices, and stores" that we now know by its shorthand name, Trump Tower. Trump had promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he would donate two 15-foot-tall Art Deco bas-relief panels by Rene Paul Chambellan if the cost of removing them was not "prohibitive." In the next paragraph, Trump's fictional "vice president of the Trump Organization John Baron" explained, in a voice that sounded very much like Donald Trump's, "the merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the effort to save them." Even though the Met was anxious to add these pieces to their collection and the appraiser consulted by the Times valued them at "several hundred thousand dollars," the unnamed three independent appraisers that "John Baron" cited had valued them at "worth less than $9,000 in resale value" and not worth his estimated $32,000 cost of removal. So the Trump Organization removed the sculptures with jackhammers instead. The Met was interested in acquiring the decorative metal grillwork above the main entrance as well; Trump sold it for its scrap value.
Would Donald Trump or his spokesman "John Baron" have taken more care if the sculptures depicted Robert E. Lee or Nathan Bedford Forrest in "beautiful" equestrian poses?
In my last post I pointed toward the dramatic end of Dr. King's life, which took place 49 years ago today. Exactly one year earlier, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he gave what very well may be the best and most important speech in his brilliant career.
The speech is commonly referred to as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." In 1967 it was a brave move to come out so strongly against the war, advocating (among other things) conscientious objection among draft-age men, an end to U.S. bombing and a unilateral cease-fire, but the speech was so much more. It would be just as radical, and just as timely, if delivered today, 50 years later, when we have a billionaire president looking to increase a bloated military by another 54 billion dollars while cutting programs for the poor and middle class to exacerbate atrocious economic inequality.
... When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. ...
One of the things I don't like about Twitter is the way that the past quickly disappears in the constant flow of the new; I think that's one of the reasons it was impossible for voters to keep a handle on the accumulating weight of Donald Trump's baggage as we chased the outrage of the moment (which tended with Comey's loose lips and the media's penchant for balance to be Hillary Clinton's emails in the latter days of the campaign).
One of the advantages of blogs is that they are organized with less clutter and with an easy-to-follow timeline, so today I'm starting something new here on trueblueliberal.org. I'm picking one tweet from the previous day to highlight, honor, and embed in amber. The first honor goes to @ezlusztig. I know nothing about Elliot Lusztig outside of his tweets and his Twitter cover photo showing one of the world's great artistic moments, Phillipe Petit's 1974 walk above lower Manhattan.
This tweet is not in my style (which prefers using all 140 characters in complete grammatical sentences), but the brevity was perfect here in response to racist Anne Coulter's racist rhetorical question about the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, "Why do these 'Native Americans' look exactly like the Trump protesters, Ferguson rioters, college hooligans, Occupy Wall St, etc?"
Unlike most of the new features that I have introduced on this blog from time to time, I am going to try to keep this up every day (except when I'm traveling or otherwise engaged in computer-free activities). If I follow you on Twitter, maybe you'll get to be the #TBLTweetOfTheDay soon.
This morning, however, I stumbled on this video of a very short-tempered Donald himself actually voting (or attempting to vote) at various locations on the Upper East Side in November 2004 ... with a camera crew and the notorious Billy Bush at his side. While he does finally vote (or at least fill out a provisional ballot) by the end of the video, this still doesn't inspire a lot of confidence about his knowledge and familiarity with the mechanics of the process that he is now loudly questioning.
The frame of this video is interesting too. Billy Bush and his co-host Kit Hoover at Access Hollywood are in the studio on election day of 2012 looking back at Donald's antics of 2004 and giving an update about Donald's current (2012) racist attempt to get Barack Obama to release his college transcripts and passport documents.
"Your vote is one vote. His vote is a GIANT vote." --Billy Bush, Election Day 2004
Is it time for David Letterman to repeal this half-assed 2012 apology to Donald Trump for having called him a racist on an earlier show?
In case you're wondering why David Letterman had called the slumlord dope a racist, it goes back to Trump questioning President Obama's intelligence:
"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?... I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."-- Donald Trump, April 25, 2011
The insinuation plays into some of the deepest and most common racist resentments -- that somehow a less-intelligent black man was given the place at Columbia University and Harvard Law School that could have gone to a more deserving white right-wing nutjob or a rich child using the more traditional forms of affirmative action known as nepotism and family ties to grease his or her easy path through Yale University and Harvard Business School, or Wharton.
The quote comes at the 1'30" point in the video up above, but watch the whole thing to see how Letterman won't let Dr. Phil jokingly let his friend Donald off the hook. "If he comes back on this show -- and I'm not sure we want him back on the show under those circumstances -- he ought to be prepared to apologize ... ought to be prepared to apologize just for that kind of behavior."
Speaking of apologies now in 2016, it's time for David Letterman to rescind his "apology" to Donald Trump in 2012, even if it was glib and obviously insincere.
I missed the Super Bowl this year, but I did watch this public service advertisement from the National Congress of American Indians about the District of Columbia's NFL franchise, which is still bitterly clinging to its racist name and logo. This video deserves to be shared widely and watched even by those who missed this year's celebration of Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy:
On Tuesday night Jon was shoot-milk-out-your-nose-because-you're-laughing-so-explosively funny when Fuckface von Clownstick joined the Presidential race, but on Thursday night he gave us this, the most succinct and truthful statement about the Charleston racial terrorism of the night before, and our predictable and insufficient response to it.
Rather than focusing on the terrorist who shot and killed nine people, including Clementa Pinckney, inside Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last night, please watch this video from 2013 in which this Pastor and South Carolina State Senator tells the history of the church to a group of visitors...
Looking for a way to move from the 19th into the 20th Century (16 years too late), the Grand Old Party's media consultants couldn't help but look longingly at the successful Comic-Con San Diego 2014 that just wrapped up. Rebranding their convention as Republi-Con Cleveland 2016 is the easy and obvious first step, but they also see real possibilities suggested by nerdy cosplay. Having a stale brand name is only one part of the Republican problem; image consultants have also pointed out the poor optics of having a convention audience nominating Willard "Mitt" Romney in the summer of 2012 that was 98.7% white. Creative cosplay could radically change the look of those traditional monochromatic crowds in 2016.
The first trial was a pig circus and so was the re-trial in 1976 that took place after Bob Dylan's hit song. I attended a couple of sessions of the second trial in Paterson and it's the young railroaded John Artis I remember most clearly. The fact that John Artis was still his "longtime friend and caregiver" when Rubin Carter passed away in Toronto today is a piece of information that I find simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking.
R.I.P. Hurricane.
"I feel like 'embattled' or 'disgraced' will always follow my name. It's like that black football player who recently came out. He said, 'I just want to be known as a football player. I don't want to be known as a gay football player.' I know exactly what he's saying." --Paula Deen
Always one to follow a recipe correctly, Paula's Fine White Whine does have just the perfect proportion of self pity mixed with the mandatory grabbing of the picked-on underdog's mantle.
Donald Trump's "major announcement" has been the subject of twittering speculation this week, and now he's announced his major announcement on YouTube and Facebook. If you can't stand his voice, the gist of the following video is basically this: If President Obama releases all of his college applications and records and passport applications and records by October 31, America's self-anointed Birtherist-in-Chief Donald J. Trump will donate $5 million dollars to a charity of the President's choice.
Of course this is as meaningless -- and as racist -- as the campaign for the "long-form birth certificate."
How much is Donald Trump offering to Willard "Mitt" Romney to release as many years of tax returns as Barack Obama has released? What if The Donald offers Willard one million for one year? He won't. And we won't even see 2009, let alone any tax returns from any of Mitt's years in the private sector.
The press is playing dead and it's obvious that the richest man to ever run for the Presidency is going to give us the least financial information, even though his financial expertise is supposedly his main qualification for the office (Slogan: "Elect Me for My Business Experience, but My Business Experience Is None of Your Business."). Maybe Mitt's plan involves cheating America back to prosperity.
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Review this past list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
"I'm dreaming of a white President / Just like the ones we've always had / A real live white man / Who knows the score / How to handle money or start a war / Wouldn't even have to tell me what we were fighting for." --Randy Newman, "I'm Dreaming"
Mitt Romney will be giving his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention tonight and we can be pretty sure that he won't be saying, "I've got nothing to hide and I'm proving that by having my campaign release a dozen years of tax returns to independent news organizations as I address you here tonight." OK, we can be more than "pretty sure" he won't do that. It's as certain as death and (the fact that most of us will pay) taxes that we won't be seeing #MittsMissingReturns that easily.
I stumbled upon the following video this afternoon in which even the formerly staid and sober Wall Street Journal joins the racist "Obama's Sealed Records" chorus, equating school records from 30 years ago with Mitt Romney's business records from 2 years ago.
Watch the talking heads above repeat the same hypothetical "trade" that Donald Trump proposes:
Female WSJ Talking Head at 1'28":"Has the Romney campaign caught onto this, this kind of tit for tat fairness. 'If you want me to release the tax returns, you gotta release the transcripts.' Or no?"
1) There is no "tit for tat fairness" here.
2) Mitt Romney would not honor his side of this trade if Barack Obama's records from Columbia and Occidental and high school and kindergarten were all released tomorrow.
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Keep up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
