The president is a racist piece of shit

The president is a racist piece of shit. Apparently that is considered somewhat of a controversial position to take at this point in time so just in case there was any confusion where I stand vis a vis the president and all the racism he’s been up to lately there you go. Does it make you feel better to hear it said plainly because another controversy that we’re going through this week – which we go through every other time the racist piece of shit president does or says something racist – is that a significant number of publications and news programs are tying themselves into knots trying to find other words to use besides racist.

This one in particular from the New York Times headlined Trump Fans the Flames of a Racial Fire was especially ghastly.

President Trump woke up on Sunday morning, gazed out at the nation he leads, saw the dry kindling of race relations and decided to throw a match on it. It was not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last. He has a pretty large carton of matches and a ready supply of kerosene.

Ok man.

The Columbia Journalism Review collected a bunch of similar euphemisms various outlets have employed in lieu of communicating clearly which is convenient because I was just about to go searching for them myself and now I don’t have to.

Yesterday the president of the United States “fanned the flames of a racial fire.” According to a panoply of major news outlets, Trump “starkly injected” “racially infused” and “racially charged” words into a morning tweetstorm; the language he used was “widely established as a racist trope” and “usually considered an ugly racist taunt.” The remarks were “called racist and xenophobic”; “denounced as racist”; an “example of ‘racism’” (note the quote marks).

Hold on a sec reading the words Columbia Journalism Review just reminded me of one of my favorite tweets ever.

lol

Brian Stelter who usually sucks shit noted how the cable and TV networks tried to avoid saying the president is a racist piece of shit. Many of the anchors attributed the accusations of racism to “critics” which is the preferred technique of cowards. What you do is you say critics or some people are saying something and that way you get to feel like you got the message across without having to risk anything or take any kind of stand no matter how obvious and necessary.

The big three nightly newscasts used the "critics" crutch as well. "Democrats are calling the remarks racist," ABC anchor Tom Llamas said. Later, he said Trump is "being called racist after firing off several tweets..." And the graphic next to him said "RACIALLY CHARGED TWEET."

On NBC, Kate Snow said the "inflammatory" Trump tweet was different than most, "with many decrying it as racist." A package by Hans Nichols quoted various condemnations from Dem lawmakers and said 2020 candidates "piled on" with criticism.

CBS was by far the weakest of the three, never getting close to the R-word. I was struck by this because the correspondent, Errol Barnett, did point out on Twitter that the hashtag #RacistInChief was trending. "President Trump took aim at a familiar target today, Democrats. This time, though, he aimed at four progressive lawmakers, all of them women of color," anchor Elaine Quijanosaid. Quite a nonchalant way to describe a racist rant!

To be fair a lot of other people in the media have started to use the word and that is supposed to make us feel better and I guess it does in a way but that’s a peculiar sort of relief isn’t it? Finally people are appropriately and accurately calling the president what he is which is a big time racist piece of shit. Congratulations to us all (?) It’s like being angry for weeks when your doctor won’t call to tell you what your test results are and then she finally does and it’s cancer and you’re like oh good at least someone is saying it.

I just went outside for a cigarette on my back porch and watched a bird slide down the roof of the house next door where the lady who yells at the little dog lives. All the roofs here are slanted because that way the snow will slide off and not pile up and crush us all to death and I wonder how long it took people to figure out they had to do that. I bet there was a lot of trial and error involved in that particular feat of architectural innovation. Ah fuck my family got crushed by the snow again I gotta rethink things.

So I was like holy shit that bird is falling down off the roof in slow motion but it wasn’t because before it reached the side it simply flew up and away and I was like oh right.

It reminded me both my father and my step father fell off roofs on more than one occasion in their lives due to they were both roofers which is a job I tried doing exactly one day with my father and I was like this fucking blows so much I’m gonna pass on this opportunity going forward. At various points in my life either one of them tried to expose me to manly things like riding a motorcycle or building a porch or whatever but it never stuck.

Probably the only guy I get madder at on Twitter than Stelter is Jake Tapper.

Incidentally it occurs to me that going on one and tweeting through it is usually a bad idea but how else can you wake up the next day and read your own posts for the first time as if they were written by someone else? It’s a radical act of empathy imo.

Tapper is the epitome of the gutless media class I probably don’t need to explain to you and yesterday he topped himself in the Both Sides Olympics by airing a segment of his show that featured a reporter from the Anti-Defamation League talking about Trump’s racist tweets being racist and then followed it up with an interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer who said well I don’t care what he said I don’t care what comes out of that guy’s mouth unless it’s his teeth. I can only guess Tapper had Spencer on because he heard how racist he was and assumed he was a cop so he wanted to kiss him on air out of respect.

CNN having a Nazi on to talk about if the president is racist enough is a new low. I'm sorry I know we're not supposed to say things are worse today than they were before but it's true in this and many other cases.

I know we’re not supposed to think all we have to do is get rid of Trump and things will go back to the way they were when we were all unbothered and thriving — I’d be at brunch right now! — and that is true because almost everything that is bad for people now was also bad under Obama but on the other hand I’m also starting to think maybe this guy is in fact uniquely terrible and we need to do something about it fast?

What happens now that we’ve determined who is going to call the president a racist piece of shit and who is not is we instantly and always shift the discussion into a matter of electoral efficacy. How is the president’s racism going to play to voters the people on the news ask and then they bring one guy on to say hm I think the racism is going to hurt him and then they bring another guy on to say I respectfully disagree I think the racism is going to be good for him and then the rest of us watching at home are like what.

I forget if I already quoted this in here recently but Adam Serwer explained how this all works very well recently.

“The tenets of objectivity by which American journalists largely abide hold that reporters may not pass judgment on the morality of certain political tactics, only on their effectiveness,” he wrote. “It’s a principle that unintentionally rewards immorality by turning questions of right and wrong into debates over whether a particular tactic will help win an election.”

Another super normal thing that happened yesterday or the day before I don’t even really have a good grasp on what day it is at the moment is that Kellyanne Conway asked a reporter at the White House what his ethnicity was before she would answer his question. What does that have to do with anything the guy said and I guess he’s Jewish so that also adds another whole layer to it and she said well my people are from Italy and Ireland for some reason which is just about the scariest thing a minority of any kind in America can hear.

Speaking of Irish Americans I told this story on Twitter the other day but here it is again.

My new thing the past couple weeks is not getting drunk at home for no reason except for last night ah shit. As a result I’ve been going to the local pub a lot more than usual because what am I going to do not drink at all come on. That’s also because it’s been so hot lately I can’t remember it being this hot and there’s no way we are going to turn on the stove to make dinner and I guess it’s just going to keep getting hotter every year until it’s all over.

I was at the Irish pub across from the Armenian American Social Club with all the signs in the window about Turkey being guilty of genocide and I overheard a really drunk dude telling a story to his family about a time his dad beat the shit out of him and the mom interjected Yowah fawthah never laid a hand on you which is the most Massachusetts mother thing a Massachusetts mother can say. If you want to clarify if your father ever hit you by the way you have to ask your mother’s mother as she has likely kept the receipts on that shit for thirty years in a shoebox next to a warm plastic jug of Gordon’s gin. Maybe that’s just me universalizing specificity here.

I got a plate of nachos and ate 1/5 of them then asked the bartender to take them away so I wouldn’t eat anymore of them which is a classic move for people who hate themselves to do and an older lady next to me asked me to pass her a Keno pencil and I thought about my own maternal grandmother Shirley Backstrom who was Swedish American and holy shit did you see Midsommar yet by the way? I woke up in the middle of the night the first few nights after I saw it thinking about [REDACTED] and I had to take 4mg of 30 Rock to reset my brain back to normalcy.

When my grandmother was about to die years ago her name was Shirley Madden at the time which meant she was Irish American at this point so I rushed to the hospital (South Shore hospital obviously) and we were all crying and she was still somewhat lucid and would be for a while after that but we didn’t know that yet we thought it was the end. I went to go hold her hand and tell her I love her and she’s literally one of three(ish) people to ever love me unconditionally in my life and I tell her I love her and I’m crying and she stirs a little and she says to me she goes Luke take that goddamn earring out of your nose. And then when we went to spread her ashes and so forth in Maine I finally took it out but then I put it back in so sorry about that.

Hey check this out it’s part of the table of contents for the Hell World book which as it turns out is 561 pages whoops!

Sometimes people say when the president is doing all the racism that calling it racism is bad because then the racists are going to get more racist. You can say racism is bad a certain amount mind you but if you focus on the racism too much I guess the racists get charged up with an additional level of fuel they were keeping in the racist anger tank in case of an emergency? It’s like when Hulk Hogan would be getting his ass kicked in and having chairs smashed over his back and such but then at one point he would be like ok that’s enough and he’d regroup and start wagging his finger in the other guy’s face like you fucked up now and then essentially the other guy was fucked.

I just remembered it turned out Hulk Hogan is racist too. That was bad to have to know.

Here’s an essay I just saw shared on Twitter about bullying from 2015 which is before we even had a bonafide bully as president.

This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.

Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack.

This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying “Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as the problem.

I guess the point that very serious news-knowers are making is to stop talking about racism so much if you want the racists to stop being racist.

Here’s another piece of writing I didn’t do but a friend just shared it with me and I want to share it here now. It’s by Donald Barthelme who is the only writer I’ve ever heard of.

The first thing the baby did wrong.....


The first thing the baby did wrong was to tear pages out of her books. So we made a rule that each time she tore a page out of a book she had to stay alone in her room for four hours, behind the closed door. She was tearing out about a page a day, in the beginning, and the rule worked fairly well, although the crying and screaming from behind the closed door were unnerving. We reasoned that that was the price you had to pay, or part of the price you had to pay. But then as her grip improved she got to tearing out two pages at a time, which meant eight hours alone in her room, behind the closed door, which just doubled the annoyance for everybody. But she wouldn't quit doing it. And then as time went on we began getting days when she tore out three or four pages, which put her alone in her room for as much as sixteen hours at a stretch, interfering with normal feeding and worrying my wife. But I felt that if you made a rule you had to stick to it, had to be consistent, otherwise they get the wrong idea. She was about fourteen months old or fifteen months old at that point. Often, of course, she'd go to sleep, after an hour or so of yelling, that was a mercy. Her room was very nice, with a nice wooden rocking horse and practically a hundred dolls and stuffed animals. Lots of things to do in that room if you used your time wisely, puzzles and things. Unfortunately sometimes when we opened the door we'd find that she'd torn more pages out of more books while she was inside, and these pages had to be added to the total, in fairness.

The baby's name was Born Dancin'. We gave the baby some of our wine, red, whites and blue, and spoke seriously to her. But it didn't do any good.

I must say she got real clever. You'd come up to her where she was playing on the floor, in those rare times when she was out of her room, and there'd be a book there, open beside her, and you'd inspect it and it would look perfectly all right. And then you'd look closely and you'd find a page that had one little corner torn, could easily pass for ordinary wear-and-tear but I knew what she'd done, she'd torn off this little corner and swallowed it. So that had to count and it did. They will go to any lengths to thwart you. My wife said that maybe we were being too rigid and that the baby was losing weight. But I pointed out to her that the baby had a long life to live and had to live in a world with others, had to live in a world where there were many, many rules, and if you couldn't learn to play by the rules you were going to be left out in the cold with no character, shunned and ostracized by everyone. The longest we ever kept her in her room consecutive was eighty-eight hours, and that ended when my wife took the door off its hinges with a crowbar even though the baby still owed us twelve hours because she was working off twenty five pages. I put the door back on its hinges and added a big lock, one that opened only if you put a magnetic card in a slot, and I kept the card.

But things didn't improve. The baby would come out of her room like a bat out of hell and rush to the nearest book, Goodnight Moon or whatever, and begin tearing pages out of it hand over fist. I mean there'd be thirty-four pages of Goodnight Moon on the floor in ten seconds. Plus the covers. I began to get a little worried. When I added up her indebtedness, in terms of hours, I could see that she wasn't going to get out of her room until 1992, if then. Also, she was looking pretty wan. She hadn't been to the park in weeks. We had more or less of an ethical crisis on our hands.

I solved it by declaring that it was all right to tear pages out of books, and moreover, that it was all right to have torn pages out of books in the past. That is one of the satisfying things about being a parent-you've got a lot of moves, each one good as gold. The baby and I sit happily on the floor, side by side, tearing pages out of books, and sometimes, just for fun, we go out on the street and smash a windshield together.

That is a story about a lot of things but it’s also about the Republicans’ reaction to the president being a big time racist piece of shit.

Ok bye gotta go I love you.