A pivotal scene from the movie, Batman vs. Superman came up for me as I watched, incredulously, the wheels flying off the President of the United States live on television Tuesday night.
In the film, Lex Luthor (Jessie Eisenberg) wants clearance for getting Kryptonite found (in the Indian Ocean) so he can weaponize it.
Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) doesn’t buy it. In the scene, attempting to be charming, (he’s decidedly not charming) asks whether he can call her ‘June’. (her first name).
She coolly replies, “You can call me whatever you like. Take a bucket of piss and call it Granny’s peach tea. Take a weapon of assassination and call it deterrence. You won’t fool a fly or me. I’m not gonna drink it.”
With that gauntlet thrown, Lex, not one to take “no” for an answer, hatches a scheme to get what he wants.
Then, it dawned on me.
This is all MAGA theater. Red meat for the Proud Boys. This shameless farce isn’t a mistake, it’s by design. Carefully crafted to appeal to our lesser angels.
A plot to get Batman to fight Superman must be carefully crafted. And so must the swindle to end all swindles.
The theft of a Presidency.
Luthors ALWAYS get what they want. I suspect Trumps do too.
Far-right groups today continue to celebrate on social media after President Trump responded to a debate question about white supremacists by saying that the extremist Proud Boys, a male-only group known for its penchant for street violence, should “stand back and stand by.”
Here’s how you denounce Nazis –
FUCK NAZIS!
See, that was easy. I’ll even wave my consulting fee. But Trump already knows this.
Donald J. Trump never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to renounce Nazis or White Supremacists.
The Proud Boys quickly seized on the president’s debate comments, which they took as a call to action. (Because they were). Trump faced a torrent of criticism from Republicans after failing to denounce white supremacy.
Immediately! We REALLY mean it this time!…Please?
Too little, and far too late GOP. You don’t get to pearl clutch now with the blood of Heather D. Heyer still red on your hands.
The “Unite the Right” rally on August 12, 2017, drew hundreds of white nationalists to Charlottesville Va., to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The march stirred racial tensions around the country. Remember those tiki-torch wielding, khaki clad, polo shirt wearing Nazis shouting “You will not replace us!”
I sure as hell do.
I also remembered this –
You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group … There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest. — President Trump, Aug. 15, 2017
“Never Forget”, means NEVER. FORGET.
Say her name
James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove his car into a crowd of people who had been peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing Ms. Heyer and injuring 19 others.
Heather died standing up for what she believed in. Friends described her as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices. That sense of conviction led her to join demonstrators protesting a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va.
Tragedies like this are direct consequences of Trump’s racist dog whistles. And he doesn’t care.
Heather was a very strong woman,” said Alfred A. Wilson, manager of the bankruptcy division at the Miller Law Group in Charlottesville, where Ms. Heyer worked as a paralegal. She stood up against “any type of discrimination,” he said. “That’s just how she’s always been.”
El Maleh Rachamim
Trump whiffed it…Or did he?
You can say Trump saved his campaign last night, looked strong and virile, instead of petulant and juvenile.
And you’d be wrong.
What normal person interacts with people like this? He’s not normal. You can’t treat him like a normal person. No remorse, no empathy, just hunt, eat and procreate.
He’s like a shark. If a shark could play golf and bang pornstars.
You might have wanted Trump to score real debate points on the policies of his opponent, instead of personally attacking Joe Biden’s family. But that doesn’t matter either. This is more theater, a misdirection.
By the way. I thought families were off-limits? Except when they aren’t. The rules don’t apply to despots. Think Putin cares about playing nice?
But, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, who brilliantly turned Trump’s cruel dismissal of the victims of his COVID-19 pandemic response against him at the DNC Convention, “Donald Trump just isn’t who we need him to be right now. “It it’s what it is.”
We’ve had inelegant presidents and cruel presidents. But never before in American History, have we been cursed with an inelegant & cruel president the likes of Donald J.Trump.
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My takeaway from last night’s debacle?
We have a desperately unhinged president, who refused to condemn White Supremacy before endorsing a right-wing street gang and attacking the integrity of his own election.
Did I miss something there? He’s backed in a corner, so the gloves are coming off.
Chris Wallace, I suspect ran home and cried himself to sleep. Trump had the Presidential bearing of a toddler who needed a fresh diaper. By design.
The only adult on stage was Joe Biden. But being an Adult cost Al Gore the White House.
- Trump basically shouted his twitter feed for 90 minutes.
- Trump’s comments about “poll watchers” and his pick for the Supreme Court is undermining our election worse than Putin ever could.
- Trump lied (shocking, I know) that extremist violence is ‘not a right-wing problem.’ All while the Proud Boys celebrate Trump’s ‘stand by’ remark about them at the debate.
- Chris Wallace was useless. “Mr. President, I am the moderator of this debate!” ’borrowing a line from one of my favorite characters on Game of Thrones, patriarch of House Lannister Tywin- “A moderator, who must say, “I am the moderator “ is no moderator at all.”
- Commentators were not impressed with the debate, and some say they’ve seen enough. My 11-year-old daughter summed it up perfectly. “Biden’s brain is faster than his mouth, Trump’s mouth is faster than his brain”.
- Do all schoolyard bullies grow up to be republicans? They are STILL going after Joe Biden for his stutter.
This is no way to run a rodeo, but it’s the perfect way to get yourself reelected after being the worst president in history.
After Biden called out Trump, rightfully so, for disrespecting our military, what does Trump do? He takes the low road and attacks Biden’s sons, “I don’t know Beau! Hunters on Cocaine.!”
All politics aside. Veterans and civilians, even ones who support Trump, were shocked and appalled by this attack. Spitting upon the memory of Beau Biden, a decorated combat Veteran who tragically died of cancer is low even for Trump.
Well, we can all shove our morality where the sun don’t shine.
His total lack of empathy for a grieving father who recently lost his son, only underscores and gives credence to his reported comments disparaging members of Gold Star families as “suckers”. Which he truly believes.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” is what anyone with a soul would say regarding Beau. Trump is a father. Can’t he relate? As a father myself, that offended me personally. But he doesn’t care about social graces. That’s not in his plan.
Trump’s comments about Hunter made clear that he believes that an addict’s actions can be used against their families to attack their character.
Hunter Biden, like millions of Americans, had a drug habit and is in recovery. Why shame him? Isn’t that what we want our struggling loved ones to do?
Mocking people for their addiction will only make them less willing to get help. A human being would realize that. But that won’t get him what he wants. He just wants to stay in power.
There is no rug large enough to pull over 200,000 Dead Americans.
This is deadly stuff,” President Trump said of the coronavirus in a Feb. 7 interview with the journalist Bob Woodward for his book, “Rage.” But it was a vastly different story than he was telling the public at the time. Mr. Trump would later admit to Mr. Woodward that publicly, he “wanted to always” play down the severity of the virus.
Woodward has him on tape six months ago talking about how bad it really was, that the virus was aerosol. Trump then went out and lied about it in daily news briefs. “He didn’t want to cause a panic,” he says, except of course, when panic benefits him.
Why do you think he was bragging about all this to the reporter who brought down Nixon? Because he knew to the people that mattered? It wouldn’t matter.
Murdered 200K in the middle of 5th ave. And won’t lose a single vote.
And while he was saying publicly that children were “almost immune” to the virus, he told Mr. Woodward in March: “Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people.”
In April, as he began to urge the country to reopen, Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward of the virus, “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”
The federal coronavirus response showed a president dead set on avoiding any responsibility for the pandemic.
Facts are inconvenient things. China and Chinese people have nothing to do with the U.S. response to a COVID Pandemic. But Donald Trump does.
What good has any of these daming revelations done for us?
The Trump administration has chosen from the start, to focus on its action against China as a benchmark for success — and that’s not accidental.
Caring about American lives is what Presidents do, not Predators.
In fact, Trump’s quick pivot to blaming China is a deliberate strategy, supposedly backed up by internal Trump campaign polling and designed to obfuscate the details of the truly inadequate US response.
But in the early days of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Trump himself took a very different line on everything from China to the severity of the virus itself and how bad things might get in the US.
The most poignant line, that I could hear over the shouting, was when Joe looked directly in the camera, and asked America how many of us “have an empty chair” at home because of loved ones who have lost their lives to coronavirus.
When I hear 200,000 deaths, I think of the empty chairs at dining room tables all across the country, which just months ago were filled by loved ones.
It didn’t have to be this bad.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 30, 2020
Trump has yet to do that. He’s yet to console anyone but himself for being treated unfairly. Trump has failed in his rhetorical leadership during this pandemic. He lacks empathy, compassion, and humility.
All three are mandatory to sit behind the Resolute Desk in my opinion. But my opinion and $2.75 will get me a subway ride.
Calling COVID-19 a “Chinese Virus” or “Kung Flu” Is Racist.
I’ve got to put a pin in this for good. Because this bugs the HELL out of me.
Trump blamed China in a racist tirade about “The China Virus” that name is both inaccurate and stigmatizing. President Trump shockingly doubles down on this racist term, endangering Asian Americans.
Trump claimed that he is using the term because China tried to blame the virus on US soldiers.
‘Cause it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate,” Trump said on Wednesday.
He also denied that it was a racist term to use. Racist words from the top lead to racist actions by those disinhibited by the president’s rhetoric and dog whistles.
Viruses know no borders and they don’t care about your ethnicity or the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization health emergencies program. “It’s really important that we be careful in the language we use.
The problem is not just the term “Chinese Virus,” but also the implicit linkage to a long history of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence.
Chinese (and other immigrants) have been targeted as filthy vermin and rats, parasitic locusts, rapists, hopeless burdens, and so on. The outstanding American Experience documentary “The Chinese Exclusion Act” is now streaming online, and documents the virulent racism that Asian immigrants faced in this country. Google “racist Chinese Exclusion Act cartoons”
This is what keeps me up at night.
Now I’ve got some bones to pick with Biden as well, distancing himself from The “Green New Deal“, and “Defund The Police” are big-ticket items for me.
However, Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to this country.
It’s not even close who I’d trust in the Oval Office come January. I’m just sad to see it’s already lost unless something drastic happens to change the Biden camp strategy of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security and F.B.I. have been issuing warnings, as recently as 24 hours before this “debacle” hardly a debate, about the dangers of disinformation in what could be a tumultuous time after the election.
What’s the playbook if the chief disinformation source and threat to the election is their boss?
We’ve all seen what Trump does to underlings who won’t toe the line or lose favor. We saw when he got impeached what protections whistleblowers enjoy. What career G-Man or Woman will take one for America now?
He’s gotten rid of them.
Patriots careers have the life expectancy of fruit flies in the Trump regime.
What happens when the POTUS is bought by a hostile government? He’s leveraged up the wazoo. That Apprentice money is long gone in golf courses and empty hotels. The IRS is still waiting to recoup that 100 million refund he falsely claimed.
He’s got 1/2 a billion, Capital “B” dollars in debt coming due and he can’t afford lunch money apparently.
Who’s holding Trump’s marker?
It all sounds like a far-fetched spy thriller but this is the reality we find ourselves in. He’s inexcusably exposed himself and our country to outside influences.
Today, I doubt Trump could garner the security clearance of a White House housekeeper. People far smarter than I am hopefully see a way out of this unforced error.
Because the harder I look, the more I see another Trump win looming down the track.
Honestly, I think the only true thing that trickled out of Trump’s mouth Tuesday night in Ohio was “This doesn’t end well.”
Here’s the good news
In the New York Times, Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen diagnosed the health of America’s body politic in the age of Trump and the pandemic he has empowered and accelerated:
If anything good emerges out of this period, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic. We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.
How’s the tea?
Getting back to my analogy.-
Lex Luthor took this slight as a challenge, He wanted to prove to the Senator that he can actually take a bucket of piss and call it Granny’s Peach Tea.
That he can actually fool her. and fool her he did. The Label he used on the bottle was just a symbol of his victory.
After Tuesday night, Trump is walking around with the bar cart. If enough Americans won’t believe Trump is who he’s showing himself to be to get rid if him?
If you’re patting him on back for that debacle then you’re team Luthor already and you’ve taste for his vintage.
You are deluded enough to think that what he’s offering you is “Greatness” and not Gross.
You are giving up your franchise without a fight.
Zach Snyder talks about the motivations of both characters in the film. And there are lessons for us as Americans to avoid the fate of our heroes. –
“We knew how to get them to fight, right? But how do you get them to stop fighting? That’s a tough one.
And we sort of were just throwing down on their humanity and Batman realizes Superman has humanity, he’s not just a creature, he’s a man — he’s an alien, but he is as human as, in a lot of ways, he’s more human than him, right?
He’s sort of embraced all the good parts of the human race, and so Batman’s able to sort of see, in a lot of ways, a thing that he is not.
And I think that that was how we started to talk about it… Then we started to talk about how it could work, and if it was Lois (Amy Adams) that said it, maybe it’s better, it’s that kind of thing.
Look, it’s a mythological construct, I have no problem with that part of it.”
Political parties aside, we’re all Americans, aren’t we? That’s the important thing. Despite all the bullshit when the chips were down, historically, we came through for each other.
There was no red & blue America on 911. I know, I was in town for the whole thing. Saw it with my own eyes
And these slivers of what’s possible for us as Americans are still worth fighting to defend. Aren’t they? Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And this is the endgame for Donald Trump. “Me or nothing”.
Recognizing eachothers shared humanity and as Americans is ultimately the only way forward for this country to be the United States of America.
The Elites will be fine under a new Trump regime. I won’t be, I suspect you won’t be.
The Constitution is what we all need to protect not Biden, not Trump.
Unless we embrace this truth, that the enemy isn’t each other, that we are all pawns being manipulated so Trump can stay in office, Trump will stay in office.
It’s crystal clear Trump won’t go quietly if he loses, he’s said as much and will try to destroy this country on his way out the door, and if he stays?
In the third act of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice near the end, Batman and Superman have a big CGI smack-down in the rain.
During the battle, Batman comes very close to murdering the Man of Steel but stops when he learns that Supes’ mother is named Martha – which was also the name of Batman’s mother.
It’s a moment of clarity that was meant to make the xenophobic Batman realize that Superman didn’t deserve his hatred. Both Superman and Batman catch on too late that they’ve been played by Lex.
Superman ends up dead and Batman is remorseful.
America.
The only way we avoid the inevitable is for Democrats and enough Republicans to share our “Martha” moment before it’s too late.
Oh and I’d skip the tea if I were you.
***
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Art credit – Warner Bros. YouTube /Author