Civil Commotion

Bill Donohue, famous cartoon character, claims that Satan is behind the Catholic Church’s sex abuse problem.

When we read that a cardinal asked young seminarians to sleep with him, thus corrupting them before they became ordained, and when we read that a few Pennsylvania priests used sacred objects like the crucifix to molest their victims, we cannot plausibly say that this is simply the work of men gone bad. No, it is the work of the devil. What other source would provoke such monstrosities?

Nice to have that cleared up.

Consider this tweet by Donald Trump, issued just this morning.

“When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!”

Notice the voice: “When Lester Holt got caught”, “they were hurt badly.” Trump writes as though these are settled, well known, universally acknowledged facts — and it’s outright fiction. Lester Holt did not “fudge” a tape, there was nothing to be “caught” doing, and this event which did not happen did not harm NBC.

Even so, the perfidy of that “fudged” tape is now going to become part of the Trump mythology, that time a corrupt newsman in thrall to the “deep state” produced a videotape in which Trump seems to say something that, of course, he would never have said. A mythology is being created right in front of our eyes, and his cult is eating it up.

I’m thinking somebody is feeling anxious about the Bob Woodward book, Fear: Trump in the White House, coming out, fittingly, on September 11^th.

The Buffoon-in-Chief claimed this morning that Hilary Clinton’s e-mail server was hacked by China.

The FBI says otherwise.

The FBI on Wednesday said it had found no evidence about President Trump’s claim that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server was compromised by hackers working for the Chinese government.

In a brief statement, the law-enforcement organization said: “The FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.”

I imagine that Alex Jones is working-out the details right now of how this is evidence that the deep state is colluding with China’s climate change hoax. Or, something.

We are seeing right now, right in front of our eyes, the birth of a hero mythology — Trump vs. the Dark and Mysterious Forces of Evil. If it weren’t so harmful, and cynically promulgated, it’d be kind of fun to watch.

Let’s build off the success we’ve had on Gov. Scott. The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases bankrupting the state. That is not going to work.

Ron DeSantis, on facing a black
opponent for election as Florida’s governor

The Republicans are now so debased that they don’t even try to hide their racist underpinnings, their moral squalor, their appeal to reactionaries.