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Sorry again to return to this execrable human being, but it keeps getting worse and weirder. This weekend, the "fascist-to-the-core" GOP candidate held an "Ultimate Trump Boat Parade" featuring neo-Nazis flying swastikas and yelling "Make America White Again!" Then he held a garbled "town hall" that mostly featured 40 minutes of him woodenly, inexplicably swaying glassy-eyed on stage to James Brown and Ave Maria. The consensus: "The October surprise is that Trump has completely lost his marbles."
Since the start of his vitriolic political rise, Trump has brazenly trafficked in once-unimaginable racist tropes. But in recent weeks, with his campaign and mind spiraling, he's increasingly embraced outright, blood-and-soil, fascist rhetoric: Brown-skinned migrants are monsters, rapists, stone-cold killers "infecting" our pristine shores with their blood libel against lovable pets while allying with Dems, Jews, queers, people of color and other "enemies from within" to usher in an amorphous apocalypse, ingeniously merging fascism and Marxism, only he can stop. Many note this is Authoritarianism 101, from a time-worn playbook in which a demagogue appeals to a disaffected populace who feel they've lost their political, economic or cultural power and need someone to blame for that loss; a Great Orange Leader gives them that, along with a welcome moral pass, in exchange for their unswerving loyalty in the face of what are often his lunatic, growing flaws and failings. Hence the judgment of Mark Milley, formerly the nation's and his own highest ranking military officer, that Trump is "now the most dangerous person in this country - a fascist to the core."
In one recent move toward totalitarianism, Trump said he'd use the military to quell "very bad people" like Adam Schiff and other dangerous critics, prompting brave GOP pols like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, when asked about it, to literally stammer in terror, "I don’t think that, again, I can’t speak for him, but I do - I do think that you are misinterpreting his 'thoughts','' even when directly quoted to him. Another dubious move: Announcing an upcoming rally at New York's Madison Square Garden suspiciously akin to an infamous 1939 Nazi rally, also at the Garden, organized by the pro-Hitler German American Bund. It featured an image of George Washington flanked by American flags and swastikas, uniformed Bund members giving the Nazi salute, and rhetoric about the need for a "white gentile America" to protect against "the oriental cunning of the Jew." “If ever there was a moment to make such a comparison," Dems argued, "it’s now." Still, the GOP was faux-outraged. "Shame on you," said one GOP candidate, noting half the country supports Trump. "You just called 150 million voters Nazies (sic)." Not to mention bad spellers.
Given all this, it was less than shocking when a boatload of swastika-flying, skull-masked neo-Nazis joined Sunday's "mother of all TRUMP boat parades" in very rich Jupiter, Florida. Also there, on a boat with a huge bust of a blood-streaked Trump - "Fight Fight Fight" - was Lara Trump, who organized the event, grinning Dumb-and-Dumber Eric, who'd boasted of "flags soaring," and their two kids, without life-jackets. Nearby the Nazis, reportedly led by the head of the hate group Goyim Defense League, gunned their boat, shrieking "Heil Trump!" and ”Lookit those beautiful swastikas! We gotta make America white again!" When MAGA patriots in another boat, evidently queasy about them saying the quiet Nazi part out loud, deliberately splashed the yahoos, they yelled "Sieg Heil!" and "fucking pussies!" Online, several MAGA-ites argued the Nazis were "infiltrators," "agitators," "Antifa scumbag imposters" sent from the left, "just like on Jan. 6." Trump later dismissed them as "liberal activists." Sneered one supporter, "Kamala WISHES she had this much support." Mary Trump, in despair at the ugly, clueless spectacle, wrote, “What the fuck are we even doing?”
Most distressing, of course, is that one of our so-called presidential candidates is not just a fascist, but a fascist with dementia who often seems to be emulating the blithering idiot of Steve Martin's The Jerk: "A cosmetologist? That's unbelievable. Must be tough handling the weightlessness." "For weeks and weeks, I'm up here ranting and raving. Flawless. Ranting and raving," he whined. "Then they'll say he's cognitively impaired...But Biden was obviously cognitively repaired.” In Detroit, he insulted Detroit: "Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president (with) a mess on your hands." Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: "Keep Detroit out of your mouth." In Las Vegas, "stunningly senile,” he told Hispanic voters "crazy" Democrats want to ban cows and windows. After backing out of a 60 Minutes interview - also a second debate and CNBC interview - he raged "Kamala was very crazy or dumb" when she did it. His tirades - sharks, windmills, bacon - are deemed "unhinged," "rambling," "meandering," "absolutely incomprehensible." One pundit: "He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon."
This weekend, he went to must-win Pennsylvania for a Q&A "Town Hall" moderated by puppy killer Kristi Noem that got so weird even mainstream media called it out. "Trump Sways and Bops to Music for 39 Minutes in Bizarre Town Hall Episode," read the Washington Post headline. (The New York Times, ever hedging, dubbed it "an improvisational departure.”) The event began with a handful of questions from pre-selected attendees that Trump pretended to babble-answer. Then, someone in the room fainted from heat or boredom; during the pause for medical help, Trump mused, "While we're waiting. So we had a beautiful evening." Then, "Let's just listen to music." Cue, randomly, Ave Maria, a perfect choice "if your target voter base is white people who died in 1958." Another pause as another patriot faints. Trump hilariously asks "if anybody else would like to faint." Then, he gives up the ghost and the questions: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” And for 39 minutes he swayed, pointed, stared blankly as Noem nodded along. Nothing to see here.
They ran through nine tracks of his Mar-a-Hell-Go playlist. James Brown sang It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World as a lurching Trump watched Brown on a video screen. Sinéad O’Connor sang Nobody Compares 2 U. More bobbing, interspersed with words - "Great song...This is the most important election in the history of our country...I like it so we will do some songs" - plus an ad for a Trump Combat Knife. Awkward pause, then "a couple of really beauties...Let me hear that music." Andrea Bocelli sang Con Te Partirò, or Time To Say Goodbye. Trump teetered. Online sage: "Goodbye. Forever. You piece of steaming garbage." A nervous Noem: "Sir, do you want to play your song and greet a few people?" Trump: "What song?" Then, "We're gonna have a good time, make our country gayer." Cue YMCA, the 1970s gay cruising anthem: "Nice and loud! Nobody's leaving, what's going on?" The dazed crowd "danced." The old man in the sweaty Joker makeup wobbled. Wonkette: "Go have some pudding." Rufus Wainwright sang Hallelujah. The next day, Leonard Cohen's estate issued a cease and desist order; Wainwright called it all "the height of blasphemy."
When confounded reports of an event charitably dubbed "unorthodox" started emerging, even Fox News deemed it "very strange." But the Trump campaign, masters of alternative reality, wasn't having it. "Total lovefest!" declared repugnant spokesperson Steven Cheung. "Everyone was so excited they were fainting. Nobody wanted to leave and wanted to hear more songs from the famous DJT Spotify playlist!” Bigot and wingnut Laura Loomer also loved it. "Trump jamming out to YMCA at his Town Hall, which he just turned into a concert!" she exclaimed. "There will never be another like him." (For God's sake, let's hope not.) Trump declared the event "amazing!" "When people began fainting from the excitement and heat. We started playing music while we waited, and just kept it going. So different, but it ended up being a GREAT EVENING!" Not, evidently, to a stunned-looking Nicolle Wallace, who described as "meandering and bizarre and uncomfortable to watch" a "town hall if you're still calling it that, but we're certainly not," especially when "the wheels came off" with his "musical fest, oh looky looky." The Harris campaign: "Hope he's okay."
Obviously, by any reasonable measure, he's not. Never mind the bonkers musical interlude. In Aurora, Colorado, he raged against "savage gangs" of migrants, aka poor people seeking safety: ”We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long." At an economic event in Chicago to talk about worker shortages, he veered uncontrollably into his hatred of immigrants: "These are killers, by the way, these, these, some of these killers are among the most evil killers...They'll look at you and they will kill you." On Sunday, he threatened to sic the military on them and every other "enemy within" - anyone who rejects his rabid racism. "Just a former president suggesting he’ll use the military against his fellow citizens for exercising their freedom of speech," said Jimmy Kimmel. "Nothing to worry about, folks. Seriously, when is he going to grow that little mustache already?" For Tim Walz, he has "crossed a line," one too many. "Just so you're clear," he told students in Wisconsin, "That’s you, that’s what he’s talking about. This is not some mythical thing out there. I tell you that because we need to whip his butt and put this guy behind us." Hallelujah.
Sorry, but much like your kids' projectile vomiting - remember it? - the them-and-us vitriol spewing from a crumbling, raving Grand Wizard and his Nazi-adjacent minions still persists in a "disinformation maelstrom" aimed at Fake News, "dumb women," raping-and-dog-eating "vile animals," windmills that "aren't wind," and Dems doing gender transition surgery on kids at recess as he pot-kettle-calls Bob Woodward, reporting on his Putin love-fest, "an angry little man, truly demented and deranged." Please make it stop.
Trump's rancid word-salad has gotten so garbled even the both-sides New York Times finally deigned to write about it. Starting with the by-now-common lunatic moment when Trump claimed the audience "went crazy" for him at the Harris debate where there was no audience, they broke the shocking news it wasn't the only time he's seemed "confused," noting, "He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought," (sic) which are often incoherent, half-finished, or "factually fantastical." How does he ramble? Let us count the ways. Sharks, boats, Hannibal Lecter, his "beautiful" beach body, his "wide margin" in the polls, Komrade Kamala paying for “transgender operations on illegal aliens,” his "great day in Louisiana" which was in Georgia, his fear "North Korea is trying to kill me" though he meant Iran and his imaginary dystopian hellhole of an America where you can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped by immigrants "living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers."
Wednesday, the Times undid whatever meager good they may have done with a breezy piece on Trump's rallies - "freewheeling performances full of jokes and audience participation," presumably like shrieking "Send Them Back!" - to help readers see his "themes." WTF NYT? We wonder what "themes" they'd uncover in his call for a new Muslim ban, his plan to imprison people who oppose the overturning of Roe v Wade as well as climate protesters for up to 10 years, his strategy on Iran - "Hit the nuclear button first, that's what it's for, and worry about the rest later" - his "stunningly stupid," The Purge-like public safety idea for "one really violent day" - "and I mean real rough" - and "the word will get out and it will end immediately." He also said JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon endorsed him (not), charged migrants "are ripping down and burning our shopping centers," and mused about a fly at the podium: "I wonder where the fly came from? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. We can’t take it any longer.”
Not just the crazy is escalating; so is the stomach-churning misogyny. Color us shocked. Fishing for any schoolyard diss that comes into his mean wee brain, the accomplished Kamala Harris is "stupid," “low IQ,” "mentally disabled," "a bad person": "Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way." The master of projection on his debate loss: "We had a woman debating. She just talked about, like, the birds and the bees. She didn’t talk about...when you asked a question, there was never an answer...It's all lies. Everything she says is lies." The sexual predator on Roe v Wade: "And the women thing - they'll understand I did a great thing." The ultimate, infantalizing patriarch on a choice-free future: "I will be your protector. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” On The View's hosts who welcomed Harris: They're “degenerates” and "dumb women." The ugly bottom line from women who know and want better than his "thoroughly stifling" 19th century vision of womanhood: "The truth is, he hates all of us."
Most grotesquely, the racism is spiraling, gushing, curdling, ever more vicious. Brown-skinned migrants are “vermin,” "foreign jihad sympathizers," "not humans," and "infesting" America, says the blood-and-soil eugenicist who's openly embraced Nazi race science: "I'm proud to have that German blood." "Murder is in a person’s genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now," he says. "American girls are being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens." His last Wisconsin rally featured huge photos of three people killed by undocumented migrants - two stabbings, one meth-crazed car crash - and banners urging, “Deport Illegals Now!" Each day, a local right-wing site helpfully highlights those "horrific" crimes by non-citizens, declaring, "Every state is a border state." Trump vowed to "liberate Wisconsin from the mass migrant invasion" of what he called "stone-cold killers and monsters" wanting to “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of America." The crowd roared, "Send them back!"
Of course the lunatic nadir of this racist frenzy was in Springfield, Ohio where, Trump famously declared during the debate, "They're eating the dogs!" Improbably for a party boasting puppy-murdering Kristi Noem and a Project 2025 author who killed a neighbor's dog with a shovel, the fictional story proved wildly popular: Incorporating the key "they are taking from us" concept, it extends the migrant threat to a blood libel against beloved pets, a perfect, wrenching parable of American decline. After the tale prompted 33 bomb threats against schools and terrified Haitians, city officials repeatedly insisted there is "no evidence" of said pet-eating by what are legal Haitian migrants revitalizing the economy, and a Haitian advocacy group filed seven charges against the idiotic Vance and Trump's "aggravated menacing" - after that, Miss Sassy Pants, the missing Maine Coon cat who started the insanity, emerged uneaten from a few days' nap in the basement of MAGA owner Anna Gilgore, who's likely leery of her new black neighbors - we love the poorly educated! - but apologized to them anyway.
Of course the return of Miss Sassy Pants did nothing - we also really love alternative facts! - to stem the flood of vile immigrant demonizing at the core of Trump's otherwise entirely hollow campaign. The bonkers, brazenly false claims that migrants are to blame for all of America's ills still rage: They've “unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime," they're draining social services, trying to vote, making housing expensive, taking jobs, bringing fentanyl, boosting inflation - all ugly fiction. Often, state and local officials take their purported leader's malevolent lead and run with it. Arizona is furiously combing voter rolls to look for illegal voters; so far they've found 97,688, but they're all old, white Republicans. Ohio's Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski asked constituents to report nearby homes with yard signs for Harris, aka "the Flip-Flopping, Laughing Hyena"; that way, when they arrive in the neighborhood, he'll know where to direct the perpetrators of the "migrant crime wave," aka the "illegal human locusts.”
He has much deplorable company. Louisiana GOP Rep. Clay Higgins, a failed ex-cop and David Duke fan who argued the FBI brought feds to Jan. 6 on "ghost buses" and once filmed a selfie inside an Auschwitz gas chamber, called the Haitians "wild thugs" and “slapstick gangsters” from "the nastiest country in the western hemisphere" who needed to "get their ass out of our country.” He later deleted the post, but when confronted he dug in. "It's all true," he squawked. "We do have freedom of speech - I’ll say what I want. It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life." Jasmine Crockett had a word; so did Hakeem Jeffries, calling Higgins "an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist - this is who they've become. Still, fellow Louisiana Nazi MAGA Mike defended "the gentleman": "Look, he prayed about it, and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down...But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around here."
They also believe in mass deportation so fervently they won't let facts - like Miss Sassy Pants is fine, thanks - get in the way of their racist narrative. Vance, who also blames kids' car seat rules for bringing down American birth rates (don't ask), never apologized for starting the Springfield furor, but he did pivot to attack the media: “Did you ever think about listening to people instead of harassing them...Listening to people speak their truth?" (Weirdo Scumbags 'R Us). Meanwhile Trump, whose enduring daddy issues spark outbursts like, "THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER,” has lumbered ahead with rants about the "beautiful little town (he's never seen) taken over by 32,000 illegal immigrants" - though they're legal and it's about 10,000 - who will be "the first rounded up...That's a terrible thing that happened. They've gotta get much tougher. We’re gonna get these people out. You have to get them the hell out."
Weeks ago, he said he was going to deep, dark Springfield. "You may never see me again, but that’s OK. I gotta do what I gotta do," he said. "'What ever happened to Trump? Well, he never got out of Springfield." (Cue Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon of a dog trying to lure a cat into a washing machine with a scribbled "Fud" sign as he mutters, "Oh please, oh please...") After both the GOP mayor and governor said it'd be "fine" if he didn't visit, Trump instead descended on Charleroi, Penn., another now-"totally different place" with another "foreign invasion" he promptly "warped and weaponized." Seething about "the cruelty Kamala Harris has inflicted" with "thousands and thousands of migrants from the most dangerous places on earth," Trump seethed, "You have to get 'em the hell out." Again, local officials pushed back, noting it's 700-800 Haitians and they've really helped rebuild their post-Covid economy. The Manager Joe Manning: “There’s what the former president is saying, and then there’s easily observable reality."
Regrettably, the former president is wholly uninterested in observable reality, which is why he's doggedly charging on with his plan for "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen." Appropriately, key to this dystopian, despicable initiative to deport over 10 million people is dystopian, despicable Stephen 'Goebbels' Miller, whose last project of brutally separating screaming babies from their distraught mothers at the border and/or putting them all in cages we all remember so fondly. Reportedly using as a model Eisenhower's infamous, deadly Operation Wetback to push migrants back into Mexico, a vast militaristic venture using trucks, planes and cargo ships later compared to slave ships, Miller giddily envisions a nationwide “detain-and-remove strategy”; for this noble cause, he will build enormous prison camps, each housing up to 70,000 immigrants, that he excitedly boasts will be "greater than any national infrastructure project in American history" - a vision one former DHS official likens to "Schindler’s List."
In this election season, the loathsome Miller has been popping up in interviews to confirm he's implausibly grown ever more vile. This week, he inexplicably appeared on Fox to offer "vomit-inducing" dating tips to other white supremacist ghouls. (Please don't ask). Last month, he had an on-camera hissy fit after NTN24 reporter José María del Pino challenged numbers he was spouting to support his claim that Venezuela is now safer than the U.S. after sending all their criminals here, a theory based on a debunked story about Venezuelan gangs taking over a Colorado apartment complex. As the Venezuelan-born del Pino kept asking, "Are you trusting the figures of the dictatorship?" Miller got redder, and louder, and burst. “I am trusting the fact (Harris) is letting illegal immigrants into this country who are raping and murdering children,” shrieked the reviled-by-his-family descendant of immigrants. "CHILDREN ARE BEING RAPED AND MURDERED!" Del Pino: "Why are you yelling?" Miller stalked off. Only the best people.
Clutching at the only sorry facsimile of a "policy" he has - hatemongering and scapegoating poor people of color (along with Dems) for everything wrong in the world - Trump continues to play the vicious race card. The details can vary: In a recently unearthed audio from an August fundraiser in Colorado, he unleashes, for bootlickers willing to pay up to $500,000 to listen to it, a foul tirade claiming Democratic Republic of Congo officials just dropped 22 newly released prison inmates into the U.S - a charge the DRC flatly denies. In his supposed encounter with the supposed former inmates, "We said, ‘Where do you come from?’ They said, ‘Prison’. ‘What did you do?’ ‘None of your fucking business.'" "You know why? Because they're murderers," he sneered. "These are the toughest people, coming in from (all) the bad parts, the parts where they’re rough, and the only thing good is they make our criminals look extremely nice." He only left out one exquisite bit of the supposed story: He flew in on Jeffrey Epstein's former jet.
From Bob Woodward's new book - he's suing him - it also transpires that as "president" and in the face of 1,125,000 American deaths from COVID he was secretly talking with and gifting Daddy Putin much-needed tests. Vance in response to outrage: "Is there something wrong with engaging in diplomacy?" So many lies, so little time. At a Pennsylvania rally, he bragged of his "beautiful" rallies, “We never have an empty seat, look at it.” Cue video of half-empty arena. At a Michigan rally, non-auto-worker yahoos wore Auto Workers For Trump shirts. At a flamboyant return to Butler, "this hallowed place" where his ear was grazed - "This man cannot be stopped," "In a true miracle God saved him" - he honored "our beautiful Corey" who died instead though he's joked about him. Then he lied about Dems: "They impeached me, indicted me tried to throw me off the ballot (and) maybe even tried to kill me. We have a very sick world." No wonder "undecided" voters look bewildered when asked about his "policies."
Because, per Paul Krugman, "The Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening," he has now turned to another "firehose of lies" about the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which he obviously calls "the worst ever." The lurid charges mount: Biden was at the beach, "they" control the weather, "they" only care about diversity not disasters, "they" stole all the FEMA money "so they could give it to illegal immigrants to vote for them" - which it turns out is what Trump did as president to fund migrant detentions; he also repeatedly, repulsively tried to deny disaster funds to blue states. A furious Biden pushed back - "He's lying" - as did peeved GOP pols demanding an end to "completely false" MAGA lies dangerously obstructing recovery efforts, and, again, observable reality.. They are in fact "deeply appreciative" of feds who are "working quickly," "working well," "a great team effort" and doing a "superb" job. Trump on the other hand, notes The Liberal Redneck, stays busy "tellin' lies and stirrin' shit."
And whining: 60 Minutes "must be investigated!" for their "FAKE NEWS SCAM" of editing Harris' interview, like every interview on every show, to make her look “more Presidential"; it's also "a major Campaign Finance Violation." "TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE!' he screeched. "An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems (should) concede the Election? WOW!” Yes, wow. He's also making windmill word salad - "The wind is bullshit" - trashing Detroit in Detroit - "Fuck this guy"- and as usual grifting. Having claimed the economy is so bad nobody can afford bacon - "the stomach is speaking" - he's launched a $100,000 Trump Victory Tour watch - "These watches are truly special" - and a $600-ish “Fight Fight Fight” watch - "Don’t wait, they will go fast!" He's also hawking crypto - AI needs a lot of electricity? with brilliant Barron as “DeFi visionary”? - and of course his $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bible, which is not only selling fast in Oklahoma but, it turns out, is made in China. For under $3. Get your patriotic Chinese Bibles here. Don't wait, they will go fast.
O God who avenges, shine forth. - Psalms 94:1-2.
“God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time (to) judge every deed.” - Ecclesiastes 3:17
Unfathomably, it's been a year since a horrific Hamas assault set off a more horrific Israeli genocide in which an insatiable, unraveling Zionist project has slaughtered, burned, starved, maimed and broken hundreds of thousands, mostly women and children, in the ungodly name of vengeance. A year of blood, terror, protests, rulings, another self-immolation and ceaseless dead babies, doctors, teachers, poets. Yet still, "The word 'ceasefire' is a wish, a dream." And in Gaza, "Every day, we live in hell."
The official death toll in Gaza is now almost 42,000; doctors who have volunteered there say the true toll is at least 118,908, or almost triple that. There are over 97,000 wounded, and most of Gaza's two million people are homeless. Given the ongoing violence, the tens of thousands missing, the unprecedented humanitarian crisis - famine looming, illness spreading, meager food, water, medical care - those obscene numbers will likely continue to soar. Meanwhile, Israel's unhinged genocidal campaign has failed to achieve its mythical "total victory" over Hamas while successively obliterating one red line of "civilized" warfare after another - bombing schools, hospitals, mosques, shelters, using starvation as a weapon, killing hundreds of civilians to rescue four captives, targeting journalists and doctors, and so heedlessly, relentlessly bombing residential areas that entire families, babies to grandparents, have been wiped out. Still, complicit Western allies, mostly us, send killing weapons and look away.
The result: "A year of war against children that has made Palestine the most precarious place in the world to be a child." Duly sacrificed on the altar of Israeli impunity are over 16,700 children killed, including newborns; at least 30,000 wounded, some as young as two with multiple limbs amputated; and many thousands of already disabled children seeing their fragile worlds implode: "They destroyed what was inside us." In an angry letter to Biden urging, "End this madness now!" 99 U.S. doctors who worked in Gaza describe healthy newborns dying of malnutrition, the "first time I held a baby's brain in my hand - the first of many," children regularly shot in the head or chest despite international rules deeming them innocents, and, in their dreams, the cries and screams of maimed children and grieving mothers "our consciences will not let us forget....Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty."
Still it goes on, so pitilessly some media have changed update headlines from "Operation al-Aqsa Flood" to, say, "Israel's Genocide: Day 356." Last week, Israel intensified strikes on whatever's left of Gaza in eight massacres that killed 99 people, mostly sleeping women and children sheltering in schools - a sentence that should not exist. Among those killed was Wafa al-Udaini, a prominent English-speaking reporter who wrote for Palestinian and U.S. outlets. The 175th journalist killed by Israel, she documented the Palestinian struggle - what women endure in Israeli prisons, the horror of children's bodies shredded in a night strike, kids' occasional joy - to reflect their pain, courage, resilience and longing; she also mentored young Palestinian women writers to help them "tell their own stories in their own voice." Her words and work as both journalist and refugee, said one editor, were "her way of reclaiming her people’s narrative, why we do what we do on a daily basis...She was not just a storyteller – she was the story."
Untold thousands more dead, of course, have not been even identified, never mind celebrated. Last month, Israel tried to deliver 88 bodies, badly decomposed with no accompanying data, to Khan Younis' Nasser Hospital in a container truck, a grotesque repudiation of an International Law mandate that victims of armed conflict be "handled with dignity and properly managed." Gaza's Ministry of Health refused to receive them, and sent the truck back. "We cannot allow them to disappear into an anonymous grave,” they said. “Each of these individuals has a family, a history, a life that deserves recognition. We are demanding that their humanity be honored.” For families of over 10,000 missing, caught in a harrowing, months-long wait, ""Every day feels like a cruel game. You cling to hope, then you lose it again. And there's no end, no peace." Says Amina Nasir, 52, who's lost both her son and her brother, “I have nothing left. No news, no body, no grave. Just memories and questions. Its a torture I can't describe."
And now Lebanon, where Israel burrows ever deeper into another quagmire without end or strategy, another place of dust, screams, sirens, rubble, bodies in pieces, nowhere to go. "We are all the same," writes Mohammed Mhawish of "a solidarity beyond words." "For the people of Lebanon, Gaza is not a distant cause; it is a mirror of their own suffering, a continuation of the story we’ve been living for decades. We know the bombs killing their children are the same ones killing ours." On the mournful one-year marker, that sense of oneness prompted tens of thousands worldwide to protest, and fight to end, the ongoing genocide. In the U.S., the focus was rightly on our persistent, unconscionable, American-taxpayer-funded arming of Israel despite its routinely revealed war crimes, and irregardless of Biden Administration claims it's been "working tirelessly" on a ceasefire. Critics: "That is not a thing." The brutal, bottom-line truth: Without U.S. arms, funds and diplomatic cover, "This genocide would not have been possible.”
On Saturday, the anniversary also spurred Arizona journalist Samuel Mena Jr. to set himself on fire during protests to renounce the genocide and what he saw as his own role in it. In a long essay, he described a U.S. of "hypocrisy, falsehood, and misdirection" that joins global colonial projects as its leaders and journalists deny their deadly impact. Despite so many dead children, "We took at face value this war is a war against Hamas. How many Palestinians were killed that I allowed to be branded as Hamas..struck with a missile cosigned by the American media?" To the painful query, "What are you going to do?" he said to the thousands of children who lost a limb, "with as much of my conviction as I possibly can, that, "I give my left arm to you (and) pray my voice was able to raise up yours." After he was hospitalized with non-life-threatening burns, the post was met with ugly comments - "They should've let you burn" - and calls for empathy. "However you view what Sam did," said a friend, “Sam was (only) asking for (us) to see each other’s humanity.”
To date, Israel's unrepentant leaders seem unable to do so. "Israel doesn’t need an excuse to exterminate Palestinians," said one weary Gazan. “Where is justice in this world?” "After a year," said another, "our souls feel suspended in time...as though the world has simply accepted our suffering as the natural state of affairs." Still, people endure "the long wait for the day the death stops." In the small coastal city of Deir al-Balah, where fishing, palm trees and calm have been erased for rubble, tents, traumatized children, a resident grows a yellow rose, a jasmine tree, basil, two palm trees, three olive trees: "That's how I define hope." A 24-year-old teacher writes for "the heavenly souls" of her family of 14 killed in a strike that "flew them away to fairer places"' as she, the only survivor, wheelchair-bound in the hospital, tells the stories of the burned and mourning children there. Once we die, her father said, "People will listen to our stories." Now, "Out from under the rubble, I see my martyrs waving for me. They all stand again. They smile. They live. They go back home."
Once they started invading us.
Taking our houses and trees, drawing lines,
pushing us into tiny places.
It wasn’t a bargain or deal or even a real war.
To this day they pretend it was.
But it was something else.
We were sorry what happened to them but
we had nothing to do with it.
- Naomi Shihab Nye, with thanks to Vox Populi
To begin a conversation
about Palestine & Israel
First, you must say:
I am your brother
& you are my sister...
Then, you can speak of history
and compare your losses.
- Yahia Lababidi, whose new book is now out
If you missed it - staying in the cave is so enticing - there was a vice-presidential "debate" Tuesday night. What you missed: Walz did fine, Vance lied about everything - Trump saved Obamacare, we got no abortion ban plans here - working hard not to say anything weird or hateful about women, migrants, children, house pets or cat ladies. Still, he emerged creepy as hell, because "a smooth lie is still a lie." Maddow: Vance was "much slicker," and the other guy won.
Commentators at MSNBC offered a pretty cogent analysis of what was a performance, not an actual policy discussion, and as such marginally useful. Noted Lawrence O'Donnell, "There was one person on stage who's actually capable of dealing with reality, and one who will say anything, whatever is necessary, to thread the Trump needle." Again and again, Vance declined to answer questions, dodging and weaving in service to the historic revisionism his daddy-god-king relishes. Chris Hayes was blown away by Vance's "astounding gaslighting" on health care - Trump allegedly "worked in a bipartisan way" to "salvage" Obamacare," when in fact he did everything he could to kill it and was famously thwarted by John McCain - and on Trump "peacefully handing over power," that is after "the coup failed, the cops’ brains had been bashed in, and there were dead bodies and blood on the Capitol."
Nicole Wallace described Vance “building an intricate and beautiful fort out of toothpicks. And it was perfect. And at the end, he sneezed on it, and the whole thing fell apart." The sneeze was the vital moment Walz asked Vance point-blank if Trump lost the 2020 election, he tried to squirm away by intoning, "I'm focused on the future," and Walz pounded him with, "That is a damning non-answer" - now featured in killer Harris ads. "He lost the election. This is not a debate," Walz declared, and if anyone forgot about the gallows built by rioting yahoos on Jan. 6 he added, "That's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage." Right then, Walz was a Minnesota-nice-dad, straight-talking good guy; Vance was a power-grabbing weirdo who said he was "proud" to have the support of "great leaders" like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr., a boast, one viewer noted, "so off-the-wall crazy I startled the cat with my laugh."
Still, many felt Vance's most brazen lies came as he tried to white-wash his longstanding opposition to abortion. Thus did the "100% pro-life" guy so obsessed with American birth rates he argues child-car-seats decrease fertility, who's supported a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks, said he'd "certainly like" abortion to be banned nationally, and charged anyone who disagrees would be "making the United States the most barbaric pro-abortion regime anywhere in the entire world" - this guy dismissed the idea of a national abortion ban as "kind of a ridiculous hypothetical," much like hysterical Dems fear-mongering about the repeal of Roe v Wade, and never mind the women now bleeding out in parking lots. All he wants is a “minimum national standard." Oh, and just ignore the rabid policy declaration appearing on his website, until it was magically scrubbed in July, titled "END ABORTION."
Exacerbating his "smooth bland lies" was Vance's whining, self-righteous indignation on the (rare) occasions he was called out on them. When he persisted in peddling his racist, much-debunked fiction that Haitian "illegals" who'd invaded Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors' cats and dogs, CBS moderator Margaret Brennan stepped in to clarify the non-cat-and-dog-eating Haitians are legally there, with "temporary protected status.” At that, a petulant Vance bleated, "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check"; when he tried to gripe and mansplain his point, moderators cut his mic with a curt, "Thank you for explaining the legal process.” Only then did he lose what Steven King called "that snotty little half-smile -the expression of a used-car salesman who just convinced a potential buyer the CHECK ENGINE light on the used Toyota he’s trying to get off the lot is a computer glitch."
Meanwhile, his Orange Highness gave a play-by-play of "the Brilliant J.D. Vance and the Highly Inarticulate ‘Tampon’ Tim Walz," which was mostly random, all-caps shrieking, perhaps with ketchup-throwing: "EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,” "FULLY DEBUNKED RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA," "COMPLETE VICTORY FOR 'PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.'” The next day the rants got even louder - "PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!" "ELECTION INTERFERENCE!" - after "deranged" Jack Smith's bombshell, 165-page court filing was released with new details of Trump's "increasingly desperate" efforts to stay in office: "The defendant resorted to crimes." Trump also took time out to mock Jimmy Carter on his 100th birthday; Carter has said he's “only trying to make it to vote for (Harris)."
On Wednesday, Vance doubled down, refusing to concede Trump lost the 2020 election - "The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago" - and vowing to uncover all the imaginary “election integrity” issues due to all the imaginary non-citizens, probably black, voting illegally. But alas, he was still weird. Not helping with the whole weird thing was a "perfected" image of Vance posted by totally normal Georgia GOP Rep. Mike Collins on Twitter. It shows the pudgy Vance "yassified" - made more feminine and glamorous - into a chiselled exemplar of a ripped, hot master race, which we don't think is what American pols are supposed to be doing with their time and our money. Responses: "I am weeping" and "Republicans are insane." But slick. Farah Stockman, a NYT editorial board writer, on the slippery truth: “Vance did an excellent job of impersonating a decent man."