1/ To all my sisters who awoke this morning, feeling betrayed and insulted -- I stand with you. The court is wrong. The decision expresses a sweeping, reckless misogyny.
2/ The decision is unjust. Should it stand as Alito wrote it, it will rival Dred Scott in its infamy. Indeed it outdoes Dred Scott, for this ruling takes freedom away from the majority of the citizens of the country.
3/ Freedom means, most basically, that I make decisions about what goes on inside my skin. I am not in charge of what goes on inside your skin.
4/ Your thoughts, your beliefs, your conscience -- all the operations of your soul -- are sacred, given to you by God and enshrined for us all in the Constitution. This betrayal of your rights must not stand. I’ll see you on the protest lines.
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1/Most of us have been watching Vlad the Terrible murder the brave and innocent ordinary people of Ukraine. We are watching an evil man do genocide.
2/Last night we watched as Russia fired on a major nuclear power plant. The danger was the release of nuclear fallout -- ten times greater than the disaster at Chernobyl. Putin is an utter monster, ghoulishly spreading death.
3/We are seeing evil on an epic scale. He is at enmity with God, with the Earth, and with humanity.
1/ Trump in the West, Putin in the East. This is the age of Transactional Man. Our heroes compulsively deal. The more amoral the deal maker, the stronger they appear. They advertise themselves as “strong men.”
2/ The Russian tanks entering Ukraine are an object lesson in toxic masculinity. Freud would have some choice words about those cannons. Some combination of greed and unregistered self-loathing has pushed Putin to Hitlerian depths.
3/ Putin's analysis of his situation is apparently that Russia can’t be secure because it just doesn’t yet have enough land. So now millions of people will lose their freedom and hundreds of thousands may well get killed. Then Vlad will get his mojo back for a little while.
I listened briefly this morning to a tape of Trump in Texas Saturday night. Evil is rising. It’s contagious.
2/ As fascism spreads, evil enfolds first the surly outsiders who become the future tyrant’s goon squads, then the ignorant, then the envious, then the ordinary. It takes years. It suffers defeats and then regroups.
3/This was the pattern for Italy, Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia, China, Romania . . . What begins as folly ends in oceanic suffering. Already the GOP has become morally bankrupt, as its once-honorable membership accedes to Trump’s lies and threats.
1/ “So authentic! So sincere! He’s not a politician! He’s for real!” That’s what 30-40% of the country has been saying about Donald John Trump for the past 6+ years.
2/ I grant that Trump does have a great destructive power. He has single-handedly detonated the moral implosion of the GOP & threatens to end our Democracy. But he is not sincere. He is, as we all can see, a compulsive liar. How then does he carry off the appearance of sincerity?
3/ As usual, the answer lies within the word itself.
1/There’s a marvelous scene in Eric Larson’s "The Splendid and the Vile" when the great Harry Hopkins is preparing to leave England after his prolonged visit with Winston Churchill.
2/The moment was fraught. Hitler was preparing his invasion of Russia, and wanted to finish off England with even more saturation bombing. Roosevelt had promised during his third campaign not to join in the war (Japan had not yet bombed Pearl Harbor).
3/...The rest of Europe was tottering. England stood alone.
1/There’s a fair amount of chaotic evil swirling around America. We can start with the insurrection of January 6th and then the copious infusion of agitating rhythms coming through Facebook to denigrate young girls...
2/ the groveling adoration of He Whose Name Would Sully Our Lips, the lock-step robotic unity in the GOP as their overlord keeps assaulting the Constitution and common decency.
3/For starters, that should do it. Then if we dare lift our eyes, we can see that decency and democracy -- the fundamental idea that other people exist and have as much right to thrive as those who look just like me -- are unravelling on continent after continent.