Make America What Again?

"'Make America Great Again?'"

"Yes, that's what Donald Trump wants to do, and that's why I support Donald Trump."

"Well, when was America last great?"

"Oh, I'd say, around the 1950s or so."

"So you want to go back to what made America great then?"

"Yes."

"What was it, then?  Was it rock and roll records from Chuck Berry and Little Richard?  Or Elvis?"

"Uh, no." 

"Was it the vibrant urban downtowns in cities like Detroit and Newark?"

No.

"Studebakers?"

"No."

"Streetcars?"

"No."

"Hollywood movies like Mister Roberts and Rebel Without a Cause?"

"No."

"Social mores that had everyone dress in their best clothes even to go shopping?"

"Er, no."

"Malt shops?"

"What?"

"President Eisenhower's steady, stable leadership?" 

"No." 

"Three-cent first-class postage?" 

"Nuh . . . no!"

"Well, then, what was it that made America great then?"

"You don't know?"

"Oh, wait . . . white people being 87 percent of the U.S. population and having all the power?"

"Yes!  You couldn't get that sooner?  Are you kidding me?"

(Oh yeah, the 1950s, when this country was supposedly great, we also had Joe McCarthy, the Korean War, suppression of socialistic ideas, Pat Boone, Roy Cohn, the Edsel, sexual repression, racial segregation, chrome on just about every appliance you bought, no rights for women, and a lot of black people hanging on trees.  What's so "great" about any of that?)

Rage Against Trump

My only problem with the House of Representatives impeaching Trump when it did is that it did it soon.

Thanks to Bob Woodward's latest book, "Rage," which comes out on September 15, there's plenty of proof for impeachment and enough to ensure a conviction in the Senate.

Seems Trump know how bad COVID-19 was back in late January and early February but he didn't want to tell anyone how bad it would get because he didn't want to panic anyone and cause the economy - his only strong suit in the 2020 presidential campaign - to crater.  But it did crater, largely in part because Trump tried to downplay the pandemic, which he continues to do today without embarrassment.  Information he had that could have saved lives and even his Presidency was cast aside for political reasons.

Oh yeah, there's more.  Woodward has assembled numerous indictments of Trump's ability to lead - that is, he has none - from people as diverse as Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and Anthony Fauci.  Especially indicting is Woodward's quote from former Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, writing that Coats "continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that [Vladimir] Putin had something on Trump. . . ..  How else to explain the president's behavior? Coats could see no other explanation."

And, of course, no one can see another explanation either.

Woodward also reveals that Trump's association with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has gone far beyond détente and blossomed into a full "bromance," with Trump gushing over Kim's abilities as a leader and agreeing with him that Barack Obama is a rhymes-with-glass-pole, Trump telling Woodward that Obama is "overrated" as a leader and laughing at the idea that blacks are victims of systemic racism, a belief that Woodward, a privileged white man like Trump, subscribes to.

As does everyone else with a brain.

I hope the election ends with a Biden victory, and I hope the time between now and November 3 passes soon.  I don't think I can take much more. 

And in the meantime, can we impeach Trump again? 

Roseanne's Reboot Is Booted

Roseanne Barr had it all.  A successful comeback.  A reboot of her late-eighties/early-nineties sitcom.  Eighteen million people watching.  A cash cow for ABC.  Then Barr wrote a racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarratt and blamed it on medication.

What prompted Barr to lash out at an adviser to a President who left office in January 2017 is unknown.  But I don't think it was Ambien.

This isn't the first time Valerie Jarratt was on the receiving end of a spew of hatred that came out of nowhere.  When she was on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, as you will recall, to talk about helping young black men get ahead, Billo went on an anti-rap rant even though the topic had nothing to do with rap. 

Just like Roseanne's racism has nothing to do with over-the-counter sleep medicine.  (Oh yeah, O'Reilly is long since gone for an unrelated incident.)

Quite frankly, I don't know why ABC wanted to give the most vulgar and the most unlettered comedian in these United States a reboot of her old TV series when the network knew she was a loose cannon.  But then, controversy draws viewers to TV, and more viewers mean more ad revenue, and ABC was profiting handsomely from the reboot of "Roseanne."  ABC could have stood behind her and accepted her non-apology - and kept making all of that money from her show - but the network did the right thing and got rid of her.  

In a bizarre twist of fate, this comes less than three decades after Jackie Mason's sitcom "Chicken Soup" premiered on ABC and earned solid ratings because it followed . . . "Roseanne."  It was produced by the same production company that gave us "Roseanne" as well.  Then Mason, campaigning in the 1989 New York City mayoral election for Republican nominee Rudolph Giuliani, referred to Democratic nominee David Dinkins, aiming to become the first black mayor of New York City,  as a "shvartzer."  Accused of racism, Mason, a Jew, explained that "shvartzer" merely means "black man" in Yiddish and was not meant to be disparaging.  Jews who spoke Yiddish and who peppered their English-language speech with Yiddish words defended Mason, but the fact that Yiddish-language ethnic references are sometimes used disparagingly - in Yiddish, the word "Americaner," for example, is a disparaging term for an Americanized Jew, I've been led to understand - didn't help his case.

On the same day Dinkins was elected mayor of New York, in November 1989, "Chicken Soup" had its last serving.  A few days later ABC canceled it with the official explanation that the network realized the show was only getting good ratings because it followed "Roseanne."  Everyone knew what the real reason was (and by the way, "Chicken Soup" was a substandard show, but had Mason not opened his mouth, it would have stayed on for as long as its ratings were respectable).  This time, "Roseanne" was itself canceled, and there was no sugar-coating the reason why . . . and Mason's "shvartzer" comment seems harmless by comparison.  Ironically, the negative publicity Roseanne Barr received overshadowed the series finale of ABC's "The Middle," which ended its nine-year run following . . . "Roseanne."

Oy vey.  

Back in 1989, no one felt sorry for Jackie Mason, whom New Jersey Star-Ledger TV critic Jerry Krupnick said "shot himself in the mouth."  While I feel sorry for Barr's co-stars, who distanced themselves from her like vampires from garlic, I don't feel sorry for Roseanne herself.  She shot herself in the tweet. 

Oliver's Story

Sheila Oliver, the Democratic speaker of the New Jersey State Assembly, is not a happy camper. Her party recently was forced to give concessions on the state budget to Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, who played hardball with the legislature on the issue.

Oliver, who is black, had some choice words for Christie and his advisers on the subject of race and class, and it caused a stir not unlike the comments Shirley Sherrod was depicted to have made. Except that, though Oliver did say what she was reported to have said, she was expressing frustration with the arrogance of others; she did not show any arrogance of her own.

Oliver said that the Christie administration is an inner circle of white men who fail to understand the effects bus fare hikes and canceled tax credits are having on struggling working families. "That's why it’s so easy for them to sit around a table, slash this, put a line through that," Oliver told Tom Moran of the Star-Ledger. "How many of the guys sitting around that table have ever even sat on a bus?"

Sure enough, Oliver was criticized in letters to the editor for her racially derogatory remarks. Of course. Because apart from slavery, colonialism, genocide, predatory capitalism, and British art rock, what have white men wrought to warrant such abuse? :-O

Other letter writers liked to point out that white men take the bus just like anyone else. Really? You mean a city bus, not those snazzy commuter buses with sarcophagus seats that connect New Jersey to New York City? That would be news to anyone who rides city buses. I rode on one just yesterday, because I had to go to nearby East Orange (Oliver's hometown, incidentally), where the parking availability is atrocious. I think I saw one or two other white males on the bus. I was surprised to find that many.

If Christie has ever been on a bus, it must have been a long time ago. And, given his horrible driving record, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to ride them before he got himself a chauffeur.

Sandbagging From Teabaggers

It finally happened. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People finally demanded that the Tea Party movement address the growing racism among its ranks, though the NAACP wouldn't accuse the Tea Party movement itself of being racist.

This of course, is exactly what the Tea Partiers said the civil rights group did. Sarah Palin - no stranger to overreacting - took a page out of Rush Limbaugh's playbook in insisting that supporters of her ideology are average people concerned about the country. The Tea Partiers, she said, are normal, everyday folks who work hard, raise families, and support smaller government. She completely overlooked the butchers, doctors, and insurance salesmen who carry around sings depicting President Obama as Hitler and spit on black congressmen. Palin also added that the Tea Party is a "DY-verse" group.

And it is. Ask Rick Santelli - it happens to include a few Italians!

And at least one South Asian.

No, I'm not saying Nikki Haley is racist. Of course she doesn't have anything against white people! Sorry, I couldn't resist. No, seriously, I don't think she's bigoted toward blacks, but as a woman of South Asian decent - and as someone who was on the receiving end of a racial slur during the gubernatorial primary in South Carolina - she should be among those to take the first step to condemn the bigotry in the movement that helped get her the Republican gubernatorial nomination in her state. If she has Palin's personal contact information, she should call Alaska's most famous book-banning wolf killer and tell her to do the same.

Nikki, don't lose that number.

Sonia's In!

Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as the 111th U.S. Supreme Court Justice in the Senate by a a vote of 68 to 31, with Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) absent and nine Republicans voting in favor, many of them - George Voinovich of Ohio, Mel Martinez of Florida, Kit Bond of Missouri - leaving the Senate when their terms expire at the end of next next year. Senator Lindsay Graham was among the Republicans who voted for Sotomayor, which doesn't surprise me - a former military lawyer, Graham is a grown-up when it comes to these things. So are Maine's to Republican female senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

Most Republican senators, even those representing states where the Hispanic population is growing by leaps and bounds, voted against her on the grounds that her past liberal rulings and her involvement with ethnic activist groups would influence her decisions. Personal perspectives and the influence of her own ethnic background were somehow considered far more troubling than a Chief Justice who neglected the fact that the deed to his house was illegal because it forbade the sale of his house to blacks and Jews.

Republicans, having already ticked off Hispanics by making Sotomayor sound like some wild-eyed left-wing Latin militant with a bias against whites, have shrugged this off as their most virulent allies go after health care reform by sending thugs to derail the discussion of the issue at congressional town hall meetings. A lot of them are bringing placards depicting President Obama as Hitler and hanging Democratic politicians in effigy, and the Republicans say little if anything against it. Many of these people, already ticked off with the idea of a black President, are apparently ticked off with the idea of a health care plan that could actually help . . . other people!

The far right didn't get into the corridors of power in the last election. Now they're trying to get in by breaking the door down.