We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan
...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.
....
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army VeteranI got me a question for Trump and all his MAGA ball-garglers:
Are you Americans, or are you not??
'Cause it seems to me like Trump...while demanding an endless narcissistic blowjob and basically Lese Majeste laws for himself from Americans along with lots of other anti-American crap...never misses an opportunity to trash-talk America nor a chance to blow literal Communist dictators like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.
That's just not what I was taught as an American, that's specifically the freaking opposite of what I was taught as a young American conservative 40+ years ago, and if I have to explain that any further?? No, I'm not going to, you're either Lost or you have no sense or understanding of history.
An American politician of either party praising Chinese or North Korean Communist rulers 30 or 40 years ago would have been run out of office with pitchforks and torches, probably be damn lucky if they didn't get beat up or tarred-and-feathered and they would have never been heard of or welcomed back into polite society ever again and that is not a joke.
Hell, go back to the early 1960's or before and it would've been Republicans who was trying to throw anybody that praised or supported Communist leaders in jail!
I mean it, if a candidate of either party had said this kind of shit in 1964, even as a joke, the John Birch Society's ragey smear-campaign alone would have ended them.
And now Trump is calling the ideological heirs to the Red Emperor, Mao Zedong, "brilliant" and praising them for ruling "with an iron fist?"
Excuse me?
Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidate is actively campaigning with Anti-Trump, Never-Trump and just plain Tired-Of-Trump Republicans...I mean, Kamala Harris is a gun owner, a former Prosecutor and has specifically run on not being a continuation of Joe Biden's policies (and with a very Capitalism-friendly agenda to boot!) and the media still (and disingenuously) wants more from her.
Meanwhile Trump could put in a gimp suit and bend over for Vladimir Putin live on a stage somewhere and RSBN or some MAGA idiot would call it a genius political move or improving, uh, relations with the Russians or some bullshit like that.
Republicans are basically Communists now, or at least the MAGA ones are.
And it's not even that the media likes Trump. I mean, Politico in particular dunks on, slams and often heaps scorn upon Trump their damn selves...but the media wants to cover all the crazy shit and be seen as the heroes and all that crap again. Never mind that they've showed their ass way too much for that. They think back to the Trump years and all they remember is an endless ocean of attention, clicks and likes...and they don't think about (or want to think about) how many people suffered and died to get them that.
These assholes will cover MAGA's bullshit-ass rebellion the same way they covered the Palestinians for years, and just like how they covered the Irish Republican Army, the Palestinians and various Communist-sympathetic terrorists 40 or 50 years ago, they'll do it with a sense of vogue anti-Americanism.
These media assholes will sit there in coffee houses and shit and they'll interview shaggy-bearded dudes wearing T-shirts with a picture of Trump in military uniform (likely taken to try and approximate the famous photo of Che Guevara by Alberto Korda) except that instead of being college radicals or hippies these dudes will be Incels and Theo-Bros pushing the same kind of fashionable hatred of America, if for radically different reasons and with vastly different goals.
But it's funny how they'll still be sucking up to foreign dictators who murder and persecute Christians in their own countries and who claim the same ideologies that terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction and fallen nations like the Soviet Union did.
I mean, Putin especially is still pushing the same old tired bullshit and literally re-Sovietizing Russia AND he invaded Ukraine specifically in the name of re-establishing the Soviet Union!. These fucking people are actively flying the Hammer And Sickle, for fuck's sake!
Whatever happened to "Better Dead Than Red??"
Oh, right.
Because that type of shit is all that really matters to them.
Because there's no way America and its capitalistic, free system could or would be hateful enough for them, at least not forever.
Sooner or later they'd be needed for military service or their money would be sought after by the corporations and social acceptance would and did follow, and here and now the LGBT community is just...part of America, the same as People of Color or immigrants and everybody else, and MAGA in particular has started othering themselves because, like Trump, they think they're too good for the rest of us. And yes, they will try and break a piece of America off for themselves because most of us refuse their abhorrent ideas of class and racial hierarchies and their bullshit social memes.
They'd rather be bottom bitch to somebody like Kim Short Dong or Putin or Xi than be Americans, if that's what it takes to perpetuate their generalized beliefs in serfdom and slavery.
And Trump is fine with that, so long as he gets to stand there and hold the whip.
Think about that for a second.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
And either you're willing to fight for it, or you ain't.
Time to make your choice.
Just because they want to be Slaves Of The Caesars with Trump as their Red Emperor doesn't mean we have to be.
Слава Україна!
And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama
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