Kindergarten Fascists of the GOP

The mob of regressives is taking its schoolyard bullying routine to a whole new scary level.

Not for nothing has the newest chanted refrain at the Republican Party convention in Cleveland become "Lock her up! Lock her up!"

They're obviously thinking back fondly to the only school setting in which many of them excelled: Recess.

They envision over-achieving Hillary Clinton on the playground in her crisply ironed gingham pantsuit. Somebody (Newt? Toad? Donald?) suggests that she join in their game of London Bridge Is Falling Down. Wanting desperately to be tested, vetted and accepted on their skewed-right playing field, the Goldwater Girl in liberal clothing accepts the challenge.

  Their human arch comes swinging down and traps her. Take the keys and lock her up, lock her up....but then the tune abruptly stops. The play-school reactionaries leave out the "My Fair Lady" ending because it reminds them too much of a Broadway musical, and they're a bunch of homophobes.

So to augment the cries of lock her up, lock her up, one particularly dim Trump toady named Al Baldasaro suggested ending the song by convicting Hillary of treason and executing her by firing squad. The Secret Service hall monitors were duly notified and are said to be investigating the subtle little threat.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi helped keep the primordial "Lock Her Up" chant going strong last night at the extended thought-free recess known as the Republican National Convention. You might remember Pam as the hall of justice monitor who promised not to squeal on thieving Donald Trump in exchange for some of his lunch money. And since she, too, studiously avoided the My Fair Lady ending, you also might remember the "sick irony" of her sympathizing with the LGBT victims of the Orlando massacre after fighting against gay rights for the past dozen years.

School misery was on full display in a few other of its endlessly creative forms on Wednesday.

Ivanka Trump was apparently so traumatized by her own school experience that she spent recess time huddled in a janitor's closet, making daily phone calls to Daddy. Thank goodness the bullying that he himself had perfected in military school didn't apply to his own daughter, because he always deigned to accept her calls. His kindness apparently did not extend to calling the school to demand why his kid was locking herself in a closet during recess in the first place.. or asking why the custodial closet was even equipped with a phone. It's very odd - Donald certainly wasn't forking over $35,000+ in private school tuition for his child to attend Dotheboys Hall.

 Or was he?

And then there was the rare playground spectacle of Bully vs. Bully.

Ted Cruz got on the see-saw with Donald Trump. As soon as Donnie was high in the air, crowing in all his narcissistic glory, Ted jumped off his end and let Trump crash right to the ground. All Donnie could do was shake his fist helplessly as the still-traumatized Ivanka sent eye-daggers in Ted's general direction. The hall monitors hastily escorted Heidi Cruz from the playground for her own safety, as various toadies taunted "Goldman Sachs!" in her wake.

Later, a partially recovered Trump clumsily air-kissed his new toady (Mike Pence) right in the middle of his forehead. He perhaps hallucinated a little girl with a little curl lurking there and acting horrid, and then his misogyny got the better of him.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is effectively turning all the bullying to her own advantage. Since people are picking on her at the rate of about once every nanosecond, and since she and her team send out a GoFundMe email blast for every last insult, she is raking in the victimhood bucks at a truly astounding rate.

I got an email from Chelsea Clinton just this morning, going her former BFF Ivanka one better when it comes to parents and schools. Donald only talked to his daughter by phone in a janitor's closet, while Hillary was both a workaholic  and a helicopter parent for the ages. Far from being a GOP caricature, Chelsea wrote,

 My mom is compassionate, kind, and hardworking -- when I was growing up, it seemed like she could do anything. She’d spend all day in court litigating on behalf of children and families, then come home and ask me over dinner what I learned in school, what my favorite part of my day was, and what I hoped would happen tomorrow. And then she would sit with me while I did my homework or practiced the piano or worked on my science project.

Chelsea seemingly was never allowed to goof off, misbehave, play, or even be alone in her room to just think, either then or now. Thus did this very very good 36-year-old woman dutifully beg me to send a buck to her ever-present Mom as a sign of my gratitude.

And then there was the email a few hours later from Clinton's Deputy Communications Director, Christina Reynolds. It was temptingly slugged "Lucifer."

It seems that crackpot theocrat Ben Carson has accused Hillary of being the devil incarnate. To prove that I am exercised enough to disown exorcism as well as to renounce The Donald and all his works, I was asked to send a buck to Hillary. In return, I will receive a "free" sticker. 

Because as Christina so aptly observed: "This is not a normal contest, and no one is playing by normal rules."

 Back When BFFs Still Played by Normal Ruling Class Rules (Kiss, Kiss)

Cruz Missiles and Obombers

"We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion." -- Senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, speaking this week to his high-rolling donors and war profiteers.

"Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform are stepping up our campaign to destroy ISIL.  Our airstrikes are hitting ISIL harder than ever, in Iraq and Syria.  We’re taking out more of their fighters and leaders, their weapons, their oil tankers. Our Special Operations Forces are on the ground—because we’re going to hunt down these terrorists wherever they try to hide.  In recent weeks, our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya.  Our message to these killers is simple—we will find you, and justice will be done." --  President and plutocratic hopeful Barack Obama, speaking today to his high-rolling foundation donors and war profiteers under the guise of his weekly address to "the nation."

So, which man's gruesome bellicosity do you think the New York Times is wringing its hands over today?

Let the newspaper's editorial board explain its own convoluted thought processes:   

Mr. Cruz is a lawyer and a foreign-policy neophyte. Anyone with any understanding of military strategy knows that “carpet-bombing” is a term used by amateurs trying to sound tough. Indiscriminate bombing has never been a military strategy, and it would be senseless in an age of “smart” weaponry and precise targeting.

In Syria and Iraq, mass bombing would kill hundreds of innocent civilians and fuel radicalization. That’s why military leaders utter the term “carpet-bomb” only while laughing at Mr. Cruz.

Ted Cruz apparently has the same semantic problem as Donald Trump. He isn't discreet enough about his desired rampages. Unlike Barack Obama, he apparently wouldn't quietly meditate over St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas before checking his Kill List and therapeutically bombing people into oblivion. Unlike the mature and placid Barack Obama, he is using divisive fire and brimstone Biblical language to justify death and destruction.

Obama, on the other hand, uses Biblical mythology to unite everybody in the love of death and destruction. 

 He even crams the miracle of Christmas into his accelerated bombing campaign. The co-option of religion for purposes of Permawar is, as a matter of fact, the true centerpiece of today's address:

Faith communities have come together in fellowship and prayer.  Families lined the streets for the annual children’s Christmas parade—because we can’t let terrorists change how we live our lives....Churches and synagogues are reaching out to local mosques—reminding us that we are all God’s children....   Back in San Bernardino, people from across the community have joined in prayer vigils—Christians, Jews, Muslims and others.  They’ve sent a powerful message—we’re all in this together.  That’s the spirit we have to uphold.  That’s what we can do—as Americans—united in defense of the country that we love.

I guess his propaganda shop wrote his speech before the arson attack on a mosque near San Bernardino.

Meanwhile, everybody is piling on the odious Ted Cruz, for the sole reason that his verbiage on killing innocent civilians is distasteful and crass, while Obama is not only smarmily discreet, he keeps the details of his massacres as close to the vest and as hidden from the public  as possible. The thousands of people killed by his drone strikes, for example, are part of a sanitary "Disposition Matrix" in which Muslim men of military age are considered enemy combatants until never proven otherwise. When women and children are killed, their names are not revealed either. Mistakes get unfortunately made. Obama's targets not carpet-bombed, of course. They simply get turned into pretty pink mist by predator missiles, or decapitated by cluster bombs.

And Obama does continue to use sadistic cluster bombs, refusing to sign a near-universal treaty banning their use. This year alone, the United States and/or its puppets have cluster-bombed five separate countries: Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan and Libya. Cluster bombs are essentially horse-sized hollow point bullets. When they hit, they divide themselves into hundreds of smaller bombs, the better to wreak more death and injury for miles around.

When Obama dropped a cluster bomb on Yemen in 2009, killing 35 women and children, he tried to keep the atrocity quiet by arranging for the two-year imprisonment of the journalist -- Abdulelah Shaye Haider -- who exposed this war crime to the world. Since the regime change in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has taken over the sadism, purchasing an additional $640 million worth of cluster bombs from the United States.

As Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept, the modus operandi of the Obama administration has been to condemn the use of cluster bombs by other countries while continuing to stockpile, sell and use them itself. Just as the New York Times tacitly exonerated the Democratic president in today's editorial blasting Cruz over his carpet bomb rhetoric, so too did they exonerate him earlier this year by insisting that Obama was voluntarily abiding by the provisions of the treaty he refuses to sign.

When Obama's defense secretary, Ashton Carter, appeared this week before a Senate committee (that Ted Cruz "irresponsibly" missed) in order to demand billions more dollars for weapons and the building of several more military bases from which to launch murderous attacks, he and his minions even scoffed at the Texas senator in absentia. The Times editorial noted:

At the hearing on United States military  strategy against ISIS that Mr. Cruz missed on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, assessed Mr. Cruz’s prescription.

The wanton bombing Mr. Cruz repeatedly refers to, General Selva said, is categorically “not the way that we apply force in combat. It isn’t now, nor will it ever be.”

Ted Cruz, a man who thinks he’s qualified to be commander in chief, decries terrorists’ taking of innocent lives while agitating for bombing that would kill thousands of noncombatants and radicalize thousands more. What he’s saying shows an utter lack of fitness to command America’s armed forces.

When they kill under Obama's direction, they do so with steely Zen-like resolve rather than with salivating Cruzian idiocy. Better to have a president professing love for the people on his hit list than one screaming about how much he hates their guts. Screaming while killing and maiming your victims might make them despise America or something.

As Obama himself soothed, Bush-like, today,

This week, we’ll move forward on all fronts.  On Monday, I’ll go to the Pentagon.  And there, I’ll review our military campaign and how we can continue to accelerate our efforts.  Later in the week, I’ll go to the National Counterterrorism Center.  There, I’ll review our efforts—across our entire government—to prevent attacks and protect our homeland.  And this week, the Department of Homeland Security will update its alert system to ensure Americans get more information, including steps that you and your communities can take to be vigilant and to stay safe.

He's even bringing back those bizarre color-coded terror threats to help keep your minds off the fact that you don't have as much money for Christmas presents for the kids this year. When you're visiting family and friends during the holiday season, make sure you monitor them for suspicious language and activities. If you see that Uncle Joe's eyes are glittering maniacally as he carves the turkey, say something.

Who is the idiot here? Obama seems to believe that killing more people will magically prevent their friends and relatives from becoming "radicalized" and killing us. Who is the radical here?

God bless us, everyone. 

"We worship an awesome God...." -- Barack Obama, from the 2004 keynote address that lit the fuse under his own presidential campaign.