Today’s headline: “15 People Killed In Mass Shooting At Prague University.” The United States continues to export its popular culture.

The Rightwing sometimes has to scrape its shoes to find its heroes. That was clearly the case with the McKloskeys whose apotheosis was staged at the Republican pep rally. The marketing boys and makeup people did quite a job on Get-off-my-lawn Mark and Pistol-packin’ Patty and managed to turn local laughing-stocks into gun-junky poster children. The Missouri Attorney General has tried to squelch local prosecution of the McKloskeys and the Governor of Missouri announced that he would pardon them if they should be found guilty. If these officials knew the law they would not be so anxious, because in the freedom-loving State of Missouri there is no law against being an ass.

Then there’s the other emerging hero of the right, Little Kylie Rittenhouse, who murdered some demonstrators. President Trump spread a little of his very own excrement on Kyle and now all the men in the Trump base who doubt their virility have hastened to embrace this woefully stupid and terminally misguided punk.

Americans boast of our love of children. Childhood is routinely idealized as the happy, worry-free stage in life. We will do anything for our children, for they are the future of our country. 

Of course, the facts of our treatment of our children deny this. If we really loved our children and placed all our hopes of the future in them we would invest gladly and heavily in public education. We would not pass on to them an insupportable national debt. We would not squander their resources. We would not leave them with a corroded infrastructure and irrecoverably polluted land, water, and sky. We would not be shooting them on the streets where they play. We would not slaughter them in their schools. We would not be abusing them at the rate of some 700,000 children per year. We would not have aborted 45,789,558 of them in the period 1970 — 2015.

At the local level: We would not have allowed the state of Missouri to lead the nation in the number of children dropped from Medicaid — 16% in the last two years, as Tony Messenger reports in today’s Post-Dispatch. This is due to a mindless, heartless determination to save state money at the expense of children.

We would not allow a culture to be so inured to criminality as to refuse to disclose the identities of those who murdered their children. The Post-Dispatch reports one parent of a murdered child saying: “Around St. Louis we don’t snitch on people. We keep it in the streets.” “Snitches get stiches,” we were told in Ferguson, but can fear of retribution so paralyze people that they refuse to help defend their community’s children?

We would not allow our government to be hijacked by a man who cannot control his impulses that will bring our country ever closer to war, nor would we allow an entire political party to shelter him with barely believable hypocrisy.

We would not allow this same government to terrorize immigrants by taking children from their parents and subjecting them to imprisonment and abuse, hygienic and medical neglect, and incessant psychological trauma. This is a part of a policy of undisguised cruelty all to please those among us who want to “keep America white.” For I don’t think the American people would tolerate this mistreatment of children if the children were white. These foreign children present in our land are being subjected to what would otherwise be regarded and cruel and unusual punishment.

No, our idealization of childhood and sentimentalized attachment to children cannot protect them from our predatory behaviors. Our children make manifest our traditional national selfishness.

I’ve read accounts and seen films of the Annual Rally of the CPAC. What a rally it was! Haters of every retrograde persuasion were there in the audience. I did not notice any neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but if they were not there in person, they were surely well represented in spirit. The Congress recalled the Nuremberg rallies in the animal enthusiasm of the audience who were all wearing party-issue MAGA hats. When their Grand Wizard finally came on stage he began by humping the flag, just as Hitler used to grope the Nazis’ sacred Blutfahne (Blood Flag). There was an illustrious program of speakers who would be an embarrassment anywhere else. Though this was a man’s gathering, a lot of women were allowed to speak, like slaves making a commercial for leg irons. I’m sure there must have been at one point a moment of silence to commemorate the fallen heroes of the movement like Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond.  The congress was a huge success, and coming when it did, it crowned the Leader’s foreign affairs triumph in Viet Nam.

Trump continues to pedal his wall. Anyone with a brain knows that it is a ridiculous idea, a mere public relations farce. But see how the Republicans are falling in behind him licking as they go. Disgusting.

I doubt that The Wall will be unable to stop, or even discourage, anyone who really wants to enter the United States illegally. The Wall itself will have to be guarded against demolition or tunneling and we would become like the East German regime with its Berlin Wall and like the Iron Curtain countries that spread miles of barbed wire and squads of shoot-on-sight troops on their borders. And, of course, if you want to get around the Wall, the extensive seaboard of the United States has always welcomed surreptitious entries. The only success that could be gained by the Wall would be to put more hot air into our presidential Windbag.

Figures in the Amerikan Nazi leadership are raising this cry, preparatory to the mid-term elections of course. Hordes of Hispanics swarming into the good old U.S.A. are going to take your job and change our WAY OF LIFE forever … as if our way of life were not changing constantly and permanently

You can get this sales pitch from Laura Ingraham who is competing with Ann Coulter for the Josef Goebbels Chair in Trumpworld. And, of course, you can hear the same blather from Trump himself and all the little Strumpettes in the Republican Congress and Fox News who echo his dire warnings.

What’s the problem with these Hispanics? Well, some of them are “hardened criminals,” and will take jobs away from our own hardened criminals. Many are seeking protection from illegal authoritarian regimes, and if they settle here they may question our own illegal authoritarian regime. Some of them smoke marijuana and we know what that leads to. But most of all, they are people of COLOR who produce LOTS OF CHILDREN, and if they get into this country, it won’t look like Kansas anymore.

Trumpie’s latest. There was a negative left out from his “remarks” (he says he “mispoke”). So, while the world is watching, Trumpie says the opposite of what he means? Maybe Trump intended, for form’s sake, to use a negative, but slipped and said what he really believes. What does it matter? More lies, and such obvious lies, to cover up such obvious weakness and foolishness.

The Trump and Putin Show was like an encounter between two bullies in a schoolyard. Trump, the weaker struts and swaggers and intimidates the other kids, but only when Putin is not around. When Putin, by far the stronger, more ruthless, and more intelligent of the two, is present, the weaker bully is so afraid that Putin will beat him up in front of the other kids that he abases himself before Putin, like a dog in a surrender posture.

For he’s a Benedict Arnold,
for he’s a Benedict Arnold,
yes he’s a Benedict Arnold,
and so say all of us!