1/ Life and career of longtime GOP Senate leader and 1996 POTUS nominee Bob Dole is instructive on the GOP's descent from respectability to depravity. Dole was someone I never liked but had at one time respected and even (Cont) #ResistanceRoots #ONEV1 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dole
2/ admired. Dole grew up in rural Kansas during the Depression. He enlisted in the army in 1942 and was wounded on the battlefield in Italy in 1945. As a result, he had limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left. Simply put, there's no denying Dole's valor. (Cont)
3/ And Dole overcame his injuries to lead an important and distinctive life. He joked that when he decided to run for office in 1950 for the KS House, he did so as a Republican because there were more of them in his district. Dole was elected to the U.S. House in 1960 and (Cont)
4/ supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dole was a mainstream prarie Republican when he joined the US Senate in 1969. But he was also a partisan rough edged Nixon Republican. Nonetheless, he partnered with liberal (Cont)
5/ George McGovern, a fellow WWII Vet to strengthen Food Stamps. His best friend in the senate was a fellow WWII vet and Democrat, Daniel Inoyue. In the early '80s, Dole partnered with NY senator Patrick Moniyhan to preserve Social Security during Reagan's far right supply (Cont)
6/ side insanity. But Dole had presidential ambitions, and that meant following the center of political gravity in the era of Newt Gingrich. After failing to secure the GOP nomination in '88, Dole was following the winds. He was still a patriot and supported Bill Clinton (Cont)
7/ in Bosnia and Kosovo. But the days of his supporting policies to help the poor were gone. Dole prevailed over far right nutjob Pat Buchanan to secure the GOP nomination. But he was selling his soul and supporting vodoo economics. Thankfully, Bill Clinton was easily (Cont)
8/ reelected. Dole had left the senate during the '96 campaign. His best role for America should've been to serve as elder statesman and advocate for national decency. Instead, this mainstream prarie patriot who had bled for America opted to support a depraved treasonous (Cont)
9/ uber wealthy draft dodger from New York. We New Yorkers saw through Trump, but the patriot from Russell, KS, who had to know better, supported him anyway. Hence, Dole's legacy was forever tarnished when he died in 2021. And sadly, the GOP he once led is now irredeemable.
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1/4🧵The Trump family's linkage w/an Iranian Revolutionary Guard via an oligarch is old news. I was employed with a corp due diligence firm in NYC at the time and a case we were working overlapped with Trump's scheme.
#ResistanceUnited
#ONEV1
#VetsResist motherjones.com/politics/2022/…
2/4 Bottom line is Trump has financial entanglements with despotic regimes in Russia and Iran. Iran has provided Russia with military parts and logistical support against Ukraine.
3/4 Russia passed on the intel to Iran and they shared it with their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies. Meanwhile, Netanyahu was paying money to Hamas to avoid a two state solution with the Palestinians.
Yes, folks all countries and societies absolutely have "enemies within."
🧵Content below is my opinion and is my last essay thread before 11/5 as I am strategically prioritizing real activism.
1/ I plea with my fellow citizens to not let their kids become like Germany's "Silent Generation."
#ProudBlueEditorials
#ResistanceRoots
#ONEV1
#VetsResist
2/ Silent Generation was born between 1928-1945.
In America, for many GenXers like me, these were our parents who were young children during the Great Depression and WWII. They were too young to be the "Greatest Generation" nor were they the attention seeking Baby Boomers.
3/ Silent Generation Americans fought in Korea. They didn't return home to parades like the Greatest Generation WWII vets nor was there rampant social strife as occurred with Boomers during Vietnam.
In Germany, Silent Generation counterparts had a very different experience.
2/ Truth is I needed a spiritual break from politics. I hadn't attended synagogue in weeks. My Financial Crimes Compliance job has been intense and I've prioritized activism over Shabbat.
But even activists with Vulcan avatars posting on toxic social media platforms are human.
3/ The one year anniversary of 10/7 is coming. It's also the season of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
It is a season of both aspirational renewal as we celebrate a new year as well as self-reflection and atonement about how to become a better person.
1/ We now live in a world in which our mobile communication devices can be instruments of assassination. Meanwhile, SCOTUS ruled presidents have criminal immunity.
1/ United States of America collectively is suffering from generations of PTSD. As a nation we are simultaneously the cause as well as victims of self-inflicted terror.
2/ Within individuals, PTSD may stem from a continuing family history of alcoholism or spousal/parental/child abuse over generations.
If not family related, other causes such as sex predators, horrorific experiences from military combat or surviving a random catastrophic event.
3/ Those with PTSD are often not aware how it impacts their lives, social interactions or choices they make. Victims may be regulated by constant fear or violently triggered from sights, sounds, odors or even sitting in a dentist chair.
1/ I was 13 when I became an activist in the early 1980s. Sadly, as a kid, I quickly learned to fear houses hanging American flags.
Invariably, they were hostile to any issue I cared about.
#ProudBlueEditorials
#ResistanceRoots
#ONEV1
#VetsResist
2/ This confused me as it was Democrat and liberal, John F. Kennedy that challenged us to, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
What's forgotten about that iconic line is how JFK linked patriotism to freedom.
3/ Twenty years prior to JFK's inaugural, Democrat and liberal, Franklin Roosevelt defined his vision of American patriotic values in his "Four Freedoms" speech (see below).
He delivered that speech eleven months prior to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.