No Means No.
Tag Archives: racism
Condemn Ralph Northam for what he did, not for what he said.
There is no question about it, Gov. Ralph Northam certainly has a lot to answer for in his insensitivity about blackface, but it is interesting how inartfully Donald Trump avoids condemning him for that and chooses instead to focus on remarks the pediatric neurosurgeon has made with regard to life-and death decisions concerning non-viable fetuses.
As I understand it, the remarks that Republicans have chosen to seize upon in embracing the call for Northam’s resignation are the following:
“[Third trimester abortions are] done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon, told Washington radio station WTOP. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
What Northam was saying essentially, is that, if a baby comes into the world either braindead or afflicted with a birth defect so severe that it could not survive and would potentially suffer if life were extended artificially, the parents and the doctors have to make a decision of conscience about whether or not to resuscitate.
This is true of end of life decisions for braindead patients and the last hours of the terminally ill.
I think you will find that the majority of Americans agree that these decisions appropriately belong to loved ones, informed by clergy and doctors of their choice.
In this instance, Dr. Northam was just stating the painful truth. As a pediatric neurosurgeon he would probably be the first to argue for extreme surgical intervention if there was even a chance it could succeed.
This is a stupid issue on which to prosecute the governor’s fitness for office.
In elevating this argument so that they can make a case to demand Democrat Northam’s resignation, the GOP faithful demonstrate their utter insensitivity to the real issues of racism at the center of the controversy.
Why am I not surprised?
Vermont Justice Fails Our Values; Over-and-Over Again
Like many other folks, ’outrage fatigue’ has distracted me from the everyday injustices that are happening right here in Vermont. That is one of the collateral costs of the Trump circus playing out like a bad soap opera in Washington.
It’s easy to assume that, in our tiny, generally progressive state, overtly threatening racist acts and sexual exploitation are both infrequent and met with swift justice. Would that it were so.
I am learning that Vermont justice seems ill-equipped to address these threats, even in the twenty-first century.
Case in point is the sorry tale of Kiah Morris, formerly our lone black female legislator, who was successfully felled by a self-entitled white nationalist by the name of Max Misch, who got his fondest wish when, in order to protect her family, Rep. Morris abandoned her reelection bid.
Sounds like AG TJ Donovan, who recently ran a strong campaign for Attorney General, caved like a cheap suit when Ms. Morris appealed to him for relief from Misch’s harassment.
Who buys his argument that Misch’s threatening behavior is nothing more than ‘free speech’, protected under Article one of the Bill of Rights? I don’t.
There is real harm in Misch’s menacing words and presence, not just to Ms. Morris and her family, but to her constituents who, it could be argued, were unjustly deprived of Ms. Morris’ future representation by a single bigot and not the electorate as a whole. That sounds like election tampering to me.
I don’t believe that Mr. Misch should be allowed to succeed by hiding behind a key provision of our Bill of Rights, which was, after all, intended to protect the individual from abuse; not to open them up to intimidation.
AG Donovan has a lot to answer for if he fails to make a better case than this.
And while we are at it, what about the shabby job done by the Franklin County States Attorney’s office in prosecuting accused serial sexual abuser and former state senator Norm McAllister?
No thunderous “Me too” challenge here! Instead, having outlived one of his accusers and gotten the benefit of another accuser’s unjust shame, his attorneys only had to answer for accusations from the third woman, who was a crushingly poor victim of marital abuse, low on self-esteem and easily intimidated under questioning. The attorney for the state only managed to get the least of the counts against McAllister to stick.
After pleading guilty to the one charge of procuring and receiving a laughably light sentence, considering the predatory nature of his still-alleged history; McAllister, all-lawyered up, has now managed to get a mistrial called on even that procurement charge and is scheduled for a new trial in March. None of McAllister’s other history of accusations from other women will be allowed to be heard at the new trial. The poor woman who must now repeat her grueling trial experience, was first encouraged by the state’s attorney to pursue her complaint against McAllister under the belief that she would not have to stand alone. Having witnessed her humiliating testimony first hand, it is difficult for me to believe that she will be willing to go through that again.
My guess is that the whole thing will be dismissed, a quiet footnote in the evening paper.
In other words, McAllister will, like Misch, get off scott-free.
Vermont justice, it would seem, is not just blind, but sclerotic and decidedly white-male.
Requiem for the Soul of the Republican Party
Today is the United States’ traditional birthday, and pollsters are scrambling to take the patient’s pulse even as we feebly attempt celebration amid record heat induced by unchecked fossil fuel consumption, and try not to notice the cries of refugee mothers and their children separated by “baby jail.”
According to CNBC, which could never be mistaken for a liberal source, less than half (47%) of U.S. adults call themselves “proud to be American.” That number has dropped 10 percentage points in just the last five years.
That’s despite our supposedly booming economy and all the “greatness” Donald Trump insists he is bringing back to the nation.
A CNN poll reports that half of all Americans view Donald Trump as a racist. Is it any coincidence that, also according to recent surveys, close to 90% of Republicans approve of the policies of Donald Trump while almost no one else does?
One can not resist reflecting on the other half of Americans who apparently do NOT see him as a racist. In order to subscribe to that position, one must either have never read any of his own comments on brown and black people; or must themselves be racist. Both possibilities are inescapably damning for the future of the democracy we attempt to celebrate today.
Every single day since and including his inauguration, another demonstration (or three) of his willful ignorance, epic narcism, unabashed dishonesty or pure unadulterated abuse of power has turned the nightly news into a spectacle not for the faint of heart.
Even today, as the Senate Intelligence Committee finally delivered its verdict in agreement with all of the nations intelligence agencies, that Putin’s Russia did indeed interfere in the 2016 election for the purposes of getting Donald Trump elected; Republicans, from Mitch McConnell on down to the last man standing, are doing all they can to avoid acknowledging the truth.
Such a demonstration of unquestioning allegiance to a complete scoundrel like Donald Trump pretty much confirms for me that they share all of his most odious positions, and that includes racism.
He’s their sick puppy; whether he plots to invade Venezuela, sleeps with our enemies, chokes our allies, maintains the most corrupt and incompetent cabinet in recent history, and ultimately destroys ten years of economic growth; he is aided and abetted by the party of Lincoln. Now isn’t that the greatest irony?
Let it henceforth be agreed that the Republican party is not only the party of Baby Snatchers and liars, but it is also the party of racists. Sorry, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain. I appreciate your heroic efforts to save the soul of your party, but if you lie down with dogs, you’re going to wake up scratching.
Happy Fourth of July.
Twilight in America
Truly inauspicious beginnings.
Even mainstream media outlet CNN is beginning to acknowledge the cancer they enabled with unlimited access to live air time whenever Donald Trump called into the station in his early candidacy. Remember how shamelessly they stooged for him? Even as they rolled their eyes at his outrageous antics, they never held him accountable for the poisonous lies he embraced. Donald Trump was making them his creatures, only to later dash them against the wall.
Many of us saw signs of proto-facism even in the early days of Trump’s bid for the presidency, when CNN and others, not recognizing his authentic potential to do harm, allowed Donald Trump free reign of the airwaves to propagate messages of hate, misogyny, dystopia and pathological nationalism. CNN slavishly covered every minute of his blood-thirsty rallies, accepting abuse and coming back for more.
Like a malevolent Pied Piper, Trump cleverly used these broadcast opportunities to reach into the dark hearts of all those in the shadows who have chafed at the evolution of race and gender roles in America, and felt their impotent rage suppressed by the forces of political correctness.
It is an all too familiar scenario, replaying the script of authoritarian adventure that has undone older republics than our own. Now, even this CNN opinion writer sees that it won’t end well for American democracy.
Amid a frenzy of increasingly irresponsible tweets, on Martin Luther King Day, Trump upped the ante by savagely attacking civil rights icon John Lewis for simply refusing an invitation to the Inauguration. If he had it in his power now to impose penalties for non-attendance, I have no doubt that Congressman Lewis would be in jail, once again, right now.
What’s crazy is that a number of pundits, and even a few Democrats, have taken the position that even though Mr. Trump’s characterizations of Congressman Lewis were clearly out of line, Lewis was somehow also in the wrong, simply for stating his reason for refusing to attend. Unprincipled shills for corporate ‘neutrality’, they priggishly invoke the importance of upholding the outward appearance of an “orderly transfer of power” etc., etc.
That is absolute bullshit! This is not the time to indulge in a game of false equivalence.
The President Elect set fire to those traditions himself, long ago; first of all by falsely imputing the legitimacy of the previous president; then by refusing to share his taxes with the American people; by indulging in flamboyant acts of cronyism and nepotism, and refusing to divest in order to avoid conflicts of interest; by public disloyalty to the national interest; and finally by lying so fabulously and unapologetically as to consign the notion of executive honor permanently to the scrap heap.
Other behaviors and comments showing a pattern of disrespect for minorities and women have so thoroughly violated his responsibility as the head of state as to leave little doubt of his illegitimacy, even before we consider the evidence of interference by a hostile foreign state and the possibility that his campaign was in cahoots with the Russians.
Donald Trump has no respect for the office or for more than half of his constituents; so why on earth should we be expected to indulge his vanity by pretending nothing’s rotten in DC?
To my mind, anyone who treats this transition and Donald Trump’s presidency as ‘legitimate’ is guilty of complicity.
Surely there has never been a better reason to set aside tradition than when the President Elect himself shows no interest in upholding the traditions of democratic consent.
Donald Trump and his sycophants have wrapped themselves in the delusion that he is somehow above reproach and possessed of an unimpeachable mandate from the people, when nothing could be further from the truth.
But even “truth” doesn’t have the weight that it did a year ago, before Donald Trump reshaped it as a negotiable commodity.
Racism and Gun Culture: the Perfect Storm
What happened last night in Dallas was tragic, but probably inevitable in a nation where racism and gun culture have long had the potential to seamlessly combine.
Plenty of attention, both useful and exacerbating, will be devoted to the role that racism appears to have played in this latest mass-murder, but I expect that far less will be said about the familiar signature of the lone gunman equipped to take out an army.
The penny has yet to drop on the likelihood that, following years of spectacularly bad news about the justice system and race in America, imbalanced and aggrieved individuals who exist in the black community just as surely as they do in the white community, have finally heeded the message carried by the NRA, and even Donald Trump, that the only way to deal with gun violence is to arm yourself and enter, guns blazing, into the fray.
Sadly, this day has been coming for a long time, as we allowed gun-rights advocates to dominate the regulatory conversation, and arms manufacturers took advantage of ginned-up paranoia to dump an arsenal of ever more lethal weapons on the streets.
On the books, gun manufacturers look like they’ve just been good businessmen, in the fine old tradition of free enterprise. In reality, the Wild West has been opening up all across America.
Who’d have thought that the disadvantaged and legitimately aggrieved might be listening to the same paranoid messaging that amps-up Trump rallies: “Don’t trust the government;” “Anyone who doesn’t look like you might be the Enemy,” “Arm yourself for Armegeddon.”
It used to be that white men were more likely to be packing heat than black men; but in just the two incidents within twenty-four hours that prompted the Dallas mass murder, both black victims of police shootings were found to be carrying guns; and that mere fact was cited by the shooters as a risk to their own safety that seemed to justify lethal force.
In neither case did the victim actually withdraw the gun from his person or threaten the detaining officer in any way. The mere presence of the civilian gun in the scene seems to have raised tension so much as to cost the carrier his life.
If history has taught us anything, it is that the pattern of shootings will continue and escalate into as yet unthinkable territory; and it may be too late to do anything about it.
Even common sense gun regulation, unlikely to ever get a vote in Congress, can only do so much to make us safer at this point.
By allowing the arguments of gun ‘rights’ advocates to twist and bend the Second Amendment into something it was never meant to be, we have, as a nation, surrendered our future to a perpetual cycle of unparalleled gun violence.
Anyone who thought that the poor and the downtrodden wouldn’t eventually arm themselves and turn their guns on their perceived tormenters was kidding themselves.
Welcome to the United States of Armerica.