ICYMI, three members of the Malignant Fascist's Cabinet of Clowns were testifying the other day on Capitol Hill. Here are short snippets demonstrating their lack of knowledge, temperament, and basic decency (all that and blind loyalty to the psychopathic MF are job requirements):
It's reported that Secretary of State Marco "Little Marco" Rubio has embarked on a trip to central America to sell countries there on trying to block immigration to the U.S. However, the first stop on his itinerary will be Panama, where opposition to the Malignant Fascist's colonial designs on the Panama Canal is wide and deep:
"....Rubio’s first stop on the five-nation tour Saturday will be Panama, whose president, José Raúl Mulino, says there will be no negotiation with the United States over ownership of the canal. He said he hoped Rubio’s visit would instead focus on shared interests like migration and combating drug trafficking.
'It’s impossible, I can’t negotiate,' Mulino said Thursday. 'The canal belongs to Panama.'
Yet Rubio said he will make clear Trump’s intent. In an interview Thursday with SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly, he said Trump’s desire to retake control of the Panama Canal is driven by legitimate national security interests stemming from growing concerns about Chinese activity and influence in Latin America."
The MF's threats to seize the Panama Canal echo long-discredited, paternalistic policies toward the countries of Central and South America, as the U.S. fought the Soviet Union's (and later China's) attempts to influence the often corrupt governments of those regions. Much like he's eager to violate U.S. laws in the first two weeks of his dangerous Presidency, the MF appears willing to apply the same disregard for treaties, like the one giving control of the Canal to Panama a quarter century ago.
With his tariff assaults on Canada and Mexico, his nutty focus on acquiring or seizing Greenland from Denmark, and his malicious, and clueless statements about making Canada part of the U.S.. the MF is spending more time attacking and undermining our friends and allies, rather than dealing with our adversaries. Not really surprising.
(photo: Protesters burn the U.S. flag with Rubio and MF images in Panama City to protest Rubio's visit. AFP)
ICYMI, earlier this week a GQP canvasser working in the Hialeah neighborhood in Miami-Dade County, FL, was assaulted. The story was eagerly picked up by right-wing media and by spineless careerist Sen. Li'l Marco Rubio (who's in a battle with Democrat Rep. Val Demings for re-election) who changed the facts to protect the guilty:
Monday morning, Senator Marco Rubio sent out a tweet with the horrifying news that “one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a Desantis hat was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood.” Rubio’s account was quickly repeated by conservative organs like the New York Post (“Rubio campaign canvasser ‘brutally’ beaten by man who told him GOPers not allowed in his neighborhood”), National Review (“Rubio Supporter Savagely Beaten While Canvassing in Florida”), Washington Free Beacon (“Marco Rubio Canvasser Violently Attacked in Dem Neighborhood”), and Washington Examiner (“Rubio canvasser brutally assaulted in Florida, senator says”). [snip]
There is no question the canvasser, Christopher Monzon, was the victim of a ghastly assault. But mainstream media reporting on the episode quickly cast doubt on Rubio’s central claim: that the assailant told the canvasser Republicans weren’t welcome there. The initial police report noted no political motivation for the attack, which took place in a high-crime neighborhood. The assailant had been charged with two prior felonies and, according to his mother, has never voted and has no interest in politics.
The true significance of this episode is a detail that emerged shortly after Rubio’s tweet: Monzon turns out to be close with the Proud Boys, a right-wing paramilitary organization. The Proud Boys, a sort of hybrid social club and political gang with racist and violent tendencies, played a central role in organizing the January 6 assault.
Last June, the New York Times reported on how the Proud Boys has begun to take over the powerful Miami-Dade Republican Party organization. It is one of the more alarming signposts of the Republican Party’s evolution into authoritarianism — I would say “most,” except that there are so many — because it signals violent and explicitly racist organizations are being formally welcomed into the party structure.
Monzon was one of the characters featured in the story. Before he joined the GOP, Monzon was involved in other white supremacist causes. He participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where he allegedly used his Confederate flag to attack counterprotesters. His social-media posts from that period are filled with slurs like “Here’s to all the filthy n- - - - - - out there” and “Dirty n- - - - - - love abusing power.” [snip]
The HuffPost reports that Monzon was paid more than $10,000 by the Florida Republican Party this year. Rubio described him as one of his canvassers. Rubio was the Republican establishment’s choice to defeat Donald Trump in 2016, and he briefly gave a convincing performance as a person who was anguished by Trump’s abuse and lies. That he appears perfectly comfortable to work within a party that is developing a racist paramilitary wing is the clearest sign of the party’s complete surrender to extremism. (our emphasis)
Li'l Marco and his Christofascist party would like you to ignore that they paid a racist Proud Boy thug to represent them, and are now defending him. They'd like to distract you by falsely claiming there was a political motivation behind the assault, which is more typically a tactic of the fascist paramilitary groups the GQP relies on. That this little careerist shit is favored to win re-election over an outstanding Democrat is an indictment of our sick and broken politics and of how vile and low the Christofascist/GQP and its supporters have become.
Bush also pines for the days of “pillories and public dunkings,” and regrets that “much of today’s criminal justice system seems to be lacking in humiliation.” He endorses one idea, proposed by a Miami Herald columnist, that juvenile offenders should be shamed by dressing them “in frilly pink jumpsuits and making them sweep the streets of their own neighborhoods.” This sounds a lot like the infamous pink underwear inmates wear in Arizona’s Maricopa County, but apparently even that would be insufficiently emasculating.
Perhaps most astonishingly, Bush advocates using corporal punishment in public schools, because he says the humiliation involved (rather than the physical pain) is so effective. [snip]
Bush has some other strange and/or relatively retrograde things in the text, including some histrionics about the rise of no-fault divorce (as well as “no-fault psychotherapy”) and fierce objections to the fact that a criminal defendant’s childhood and life circumstances are ever taken into consideration before passing judgment. [snip]Prescriptions for the moral instruction and betterment of society whether by the likes of trust-fund heirs like "J.E.B." or by the likes of erstwhile "populists" like Mike "Huckster" Huckabee and Scott "Koch Head" Walker, all amount to the same thing: privileged =cough= white =cough= authoritarians want to maintain their increasingly shaky grip on power by being "tough" with "those people" that aren't their moral, financial or societal "equals." It goes hand in hand with Republican efforts to strip voting rights from "those people," fight marriage equality, curtail a woman's reproductive rights, fight immigration reform, and stick it to the poor while lavishing tax benefits on the rich. Let's bury this myth of "moderate Republicans" once and for all, please.
But even if Bush no longer directly embraces, say, corporal punishment, his underlying philosophy is clear, and it’s consistent with attitudes we’ve seen among conservatives now in power in places such as Kansas and Wisconsin: that the main reason people are broke, unmarried, in prison or unemployed is because it’s all just too much gosh-darn fun.
"It’s not nation-building. We are assisting them (Iraq) in building their nation."Brilliant formulation, sir. That should quiet those that say you're not ready for prime time.
"Then don't vote for me. Because I'm telling you what's coming."We can see his campaign slogan now: "War's coming. And Graham's Bringing It!" That's a winner!
