06-02-2020, 07:11 PM
(06-01-2020, 06:44 PM)gabrielle Wrote:(06-01-2020, 06:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:(06-01-2020, 12:05 PM)gabrielle Wrote:(06-01-2020, 06:51 AM)David Horn Wrote: Trump's faults are obvious. He watched as the pandemic grew outside the US and did nothing to prepare. Others were also remiss, but that's hardly a defense against nonfeasance. You're on somewhat firmer ground with your rioting comment, but Trump still managed to pour fuel on a fire with his comment: "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". Who does that? On the unemployment front, we see one of the least coordinated responses in the advanced world, and it will make recovery all the harder.
Trump is pathetic, and he knows it. It only makes him worse by the day as he tries to cover up the stench.
He calls the state and local governments "weak" while he hides in a bunker from his own people.
Standby. It's bound to get worse before it gets completely terrible.
Yeah, I saw he just tear gassed a bunch of people to make way for his photo op.
With the qualification that I am not clergy of any kind, although I took the role when it seemed most necessary... my father was in a condition in which I knew that he would be dead within a day. It was late on Saturday night, and try finding a Christian clergyman of any kind late on Saturday night. You can trust that they go to bed early on Saturday because they have a job to do on Sunday morning. I read Psalms 23 and Psalms 33 (the latter which I know from a glorious motet by Johann Sebastian Bach.
And that, my friends, is what happens when a thoroughly godless person insists upon a self-portrayal of devout behavior. Use of religiosity for an evil purpose -- let us say, praying for the blessings of the Lord upon a rape or the heist of an armored car -- is the worst form of blasphemy. So far as I can tell, God cannot bless sin! He seeks to free us of it! (Yes, I recognize that much Christian claptrap about sin puts together a minor indulgence such as eating a half-dozen jelly rolls in one sitting in the same category as perpetrating the Holocaust... maybe "crime" better describes the sin that hurts or is likely to hurt innocent people, as in taking shortcuts in mine safety if one is the owner of a coal mine).
I wish that Donald Trump would find Jesus as Lord and Savior and change his ways to follow God instead of his current, perverse ego. Obviously Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism would do, too, but neither is in his culture. (His daughter did convert to Judaism; in my experience Jews prove that people do not need Jesus to be honorable, ethical people). Or secular humanism, but that has ethical value only if one decides that agnosticism or atheism mandates some ethical code if it is not to be an excuse for extreme egoism. So far as I can tell, Donald Trump is a confused picker-and-chooser between Hugh Hefner on sexuality and Ayn Rand on economics. He recognizes that America is a Christian country on the whole, and thinks that some staged act of piety can solve much of his problematic image with such.
He chose a church -- not his denomination -- and used it as a prop for a political stunt. Any President could have a chapel installed in the White House fitting whatever religion is his.
... It gets worse. He was recorded using incendiary language about protests that people turn into riots. "They loot; we shoot" implies that the police or National Guard will fire recklessly once property is threatened. That could turn into the mowing down of peaceful protesters. Nicolae Ceausescu ordered something to that effect; he and his wife were recorded in the minutes of a meeting with top officials and advisers that people who protested his regime should never see the light of day again... and whether that means being locked up in a dungeon or dead and buried is ambiguous. Such harshness is possible among people devoid of any conscience. God help us should we have to treat Donald Trump as the Romanian Army treated Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu.
By the way... Melania Trump seems to be much more innocent than was Elena Ceausescu, who had genuine influence in the decision-making of her husband including on organizing revenge against his real or imagined enemies.
But this thread is intended to cause us to laugh about or laugh at Donald Trump. There are points at which laughter is completely pointless. At the extreme, there is nothing funny about Timur Lenk's towers full of skulls, the Atlantic slave trade, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, or incendiary or nuclear bombings of cities. Maybe one can get snippets of laughs as the late Peter Ustinov hammed the role of Nero (that was the only way in which to fit that horrible man) in Quo Vadis because we have the distance of nearly two millennia between Nero and a screenplay. OK, Mel Brooks (a Jew) can mock Nazis all that he wants for their amorality and intellectual emptiness, and Charlie Chaplin could mock Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator before Hitler had become much of a killer of Jews. (Hitler was killing large numbers of Polish gentiles.. and that may have made Poland a haven for the industrial-scale killings of the Holocaust which had yet to begin in earnest in 1940).
If I were a Muslim in the Pakistani or Indonesian film industry, I might remake The Great Dictator with Trump as Hitler (Adenoid Hynkel) and Benjamin Netanyahu as Mussolini (Benzino Napaloni)... there might be no more fitting movie for Americans or Israelis to see than this.
I also hold the President's tirades against Islam in contempt. I need not be a Muslim to do so. If God exists, then He is able to choose His Identity when judging people. If one was a Holocaust perpetrator, then He might be Jewish. If one mistreated Muslims and oppressed Islam, then He could be a Muslim. If one is Osama bin Laden, then God might identify as an American for the purpose. If one bombed the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and killed four black girls, then you might face an African-American God. Act unjustly, and you will have much to fear from the Almighty upon judgment.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.