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I feel that
anyone who supports him, or votes for candidates who support him, doesn’t know
what it means to be an American. That includes many elected members of the
Republican Party.
Somehow, within the framework of our judicial system and our history of democratic principles, this man must be taken out of circulation and silenced. His words encourage his supporters to threaten and even physically attack those who are the subject of his verbal abuse. That is wrong and threatens our nation’s ‘rule of law’ by undermining our legal system.
If elected to the presidency in 2024, Trump will live up to his campaign promises, and destroy representative democracy in our nation. He makes no bones about that. He intends to keep those promises. His are the words of a dictator. Read the following article and pass it on to your friends, family, neighbors, and others whom you feel are willing to stand up for democracy. It is very important that you do so.
Here's the article:
“Trump’s Bloody Campaign Promises”
By David Remnick
Oct 4, 2023
It's tempting to ignore the former President’s expression of rage, but the stakes for American democracy demand that attention be paid.
“Recently, I was talking with Patricia Evangelista, a
journalist from the Philippines, who is about to publish an astonishing book,
called “Some People Need Killing.” Evangelista, a fearless reporter in her late thirties,
covered the regime of Rodrigo Duterte, a provincial mayor who won the Presidency promising to
execute, without trial or even arrest, drug users or anyone else whom he deemed
threatening to public order. Evangelista is not a pundit. She was a police
reporter working for Rappler, an independent Web site co-founded by Maria Ressa,
who was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2021. Every night, Evangelista
went into the streets and alleyways of Manila to see the wreckage of Duterte’s
state-sanctioned violence, the bullet-riddled bodies cooling in the gutter, the
bored cops muttering uselessly into their radios. She wrote down the names, the
histories, taking care to get the details right—her way of honoring the dead
and their families. In her news reports, and in her longer investigations,
Evangelista was, in essence, recording the “achievements” of an elected tyrant
who had fulfilled his campaign promises. His was an honesty written in blood. A
Duterte-era vigilante gave Evangelista her title: “I’m really not a bad guy,”
he said. “Some people need killing.” According to human-rights organizations,
Duterte’s extralegal rampage killed more than ten thousand people.
Over time, Donald Trump has been no less truthful about his intentions than
Rodrigo Duterte. (In fact, Trump is an admirer; in 2017, he congratulated
Duterte for “the unbelievable job” he was doing “on the drug problem.” Trump
was also undoubtedly delighted that Duterte had referred to Barack Obama as
“the son of a whore.”) In recent weeks, Trump has made it plain that his plans
for a second term are no less unbelievable than Duterte’s, no less vengeful or
unhinged. We should listen. These are campaign promises. For many years, Trump
has hidden in plain sight—he makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his
lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises
it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is
no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of
politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action. Trump has
always delighted in the way he could arouse a crowd with implicit or explicit
calls to vengeance, from his admonition to “Lock her up!” to his smirking at a
protester at one of his rallies, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” He was
the inspiration for Charlottesville. The insurrection of January 6th was a direct response to his callout to his
supporters: “Be there, will be wild!” During the protests that followed the
murder of George Floyd, Trump asked his advisers, according to the former Defense
Secretary Mark Esper, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs
or something?” According to a recent report in the Times, since the legal
search of Mar-a-Lago last year and the subsequent confiscation of confidential
documents there, which caused Trump to vent his rage against federal
authorities, threats against F.B.I. personnel and facilities have skyrocketed
by more than three hundred per cent.
Now Trump has intensified the rhetoric. There is nothing he will not say. Suggesting that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was guilty of a “treasonous act,” he has suggested that the best sanction would be execution. (“This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been death!”)
At a recent speech in Anaheim, California, Trump explained
how, if reëlected, he would approach the problem of shoplifting: “Very simply:
If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that
store.” Trump added, “The word that they shoot you will get out within minutes,
and our nation, in one day, will be an entirely different place. There must be
retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country.” This
is consistent with Trump’s general view of law enforcement: he has raised the
prospect of shooting migrants attempting to cross the border. (Migrants are
“poisoning the blood of our country,” he has said, which is a particularly
fascistic formulation.)
Trump’s reëlection campaign is, by necessity, being
conducted as much in and around various courtrooms as it is on traditional
podiums. The once and future autocrat has decided to make his legal jeopardy a
virtue, to portray himself as the persecuted Everyman standing up to a
prosecutorial system riddled with hypocrisy. In August, one day after a federal
magistrate judge in Trump’s 2020 election-interference case in Washington
warned him not to threaten or intimidate witnesses, he went online to post
this: “if you go after me, i’m coming after you!” In New York, the judge in Trump’s civil fraud case,
Arthur Engoron, had to issue a gag order after the former President baselessly
branded a court clerk as “Schumer’s girlfriend” and added, “How disgraceful!
This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Engoron ordered Trump to take down
the post, though, of course, the damage was done: the word was out, and the
court clerk could expect endless harassment online and worse.
Trump reveals his troubled mind even in his casual asides.
Speaking to Republicans in California, he railed against “crazy” Nancy Pelosi
“who ruined San Francisco.” He then grinned and improvised: “How’s her husband
doing, by the way? Anybody know?” (The reference, of course, was to Paul
Pelosi, who had been attacked and badly wounded last year by a hammer-wielding
man who broke into the Pelosis’ house.) The laughter of the crowd was as
disturbing as the speaker, from whom we expect nothing less.”
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(If you
have never forwarded a posting from Jackspotpourri to a friend, relative, or
neighbor, now is the time to start doing so, and this is the one with which to
start! It is a clarion call to the American people to stand up and fight for what the German people did not fight for in the 1930s. Instructions for forwarding it appear below.)
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Trivia Quiz # 11 –
Professional Football Teams and States
(We know teams sometimes are based elsewhere than their name suggests, such as the Giants and Jets playing their home games across the river in New Jersey, but for the purposes of this quiz, we will stick with the teams’ names. And the District of Columbia, for the purposes of this quiz, is a State.)
1.
How many teams are in
the National Football League?
2.
In what States are
there three NFL teams? Name them.
3.
In what States are
there two NFL teams? Name them.
4.
How many States in
which there are NFL teams do NOT also have a major league baseball team?
5.
What two teams (it’s a
tie) have won the most Super Bowls?
1. Hair combed down almost covering one eye – Veronica Lake
2. Skirt blown up by
breeze from air vent below her – Marilyn Monroe
3. Also was an inventor in real life – Hedy Lamarr
4. Brought film sex to the fore in Howard Hughes' 'The
Outlaw' – Jane Russell
5. Played the discoverer of radium - Greer Garson
JL
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the
blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells
and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com and referring to the date of the posting ... or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I
think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you are now reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to the blog's archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. This is particularly true because of David Remnick's article.
JL
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