Rachel Maddow has been covering the Alabama impeachment saga-- and for a long time. And she's doing a really good job of it. We haven't been writing much about Robert Bentley's plight because it looked like just another example of a hypocritical "family values" Republican caught in the act. "People bow to the throne." Yeah...But there is something beyond the salacious details to note in this unfolding scandal.
A couple of weeks ago I heard a 33 year old Hawaiian state legislator, Beth Fukumoto, being interviewed on NPR. She had a compelling story about criticizing Trump and being stripped of her leadership position in the state House by her fellow Republicans. I thought it might make an interesting story for this blog and then stopped myself with a promise that I would revisit when Beth, a former state party GOP chair and the Minority Leader of the state House, inevitably switched parties and became a Democrat.
Perhaps you noticed that Iowa's racist xenophobic congressman, Steve King, is bragging that his Republican colleagues in the House have been congratulating him and slapping him on the back for his latest bigoted outburst.
It's hardly news that Steve King is a hardcore racist and proud bigot. He's spent years building a political brand in rural western Iowa and inside-the-Beltway based on exactly that. Other racist garbage dumps have been automatically drawn to him.
[Also: no puppet, no puppet]I guess it was predictable enough that the new Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a notorious racist who famously explained that what he didn't like about his old comrades at the KKK is that they smoke too much pot, would change the tone of the Justice Department when it comes to equality. The Justice Department has been for it and is now against it.
Yesterday, NY Times reporters Jeremy Peters and David Kuhn were busy defending Trump voters by insisting they’re not all racists. OK, they’re not all racists and let's forget that Carl Paladino was a Trump campaign co-chair. Did anyone ever say they all were?
same-sameNot many people outside of New York have ever heard of Caril Paladino— and they’re better off for that. The aggressively senile far right 70 year old Buffalo realtor managed to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination against the hapless Rick Lazio in 2010. He went on to be absolutely shredded in the general election of Andrew Cuomo, losing 2,910,876 (61%) to 1,547,857 (32.5%).
What did Trump voters-- his potential victims-- enable on Nov. 8? In their mad dash to get even with the hated establishment, they unleashed something much worse. First I want to point out an OpEd by over 100 Jewish historians from universities all over America in last week's Jewish Journal.
