(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Must We Appease- Religiously? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-22 Here we go again. Thanks largely to Big Media mongering a “red wave” last year, Donald Trump’s cult of “get rid of the ballots” now runs the US House. This week, the inmates of Kevin “Not Joe” McCarthy’s asylum held still more pro-Trump rallies masquerading as hearings. Perhaps most onerously, the judiciary committee staged one; its worst bad actor may well have been the converted donkey Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ). As Molly Ivins once quipped (re some screed from Pat Buchanan), Van Drew’s spleen “probably sounded better in the original German.” Granted, the Jersey killjoy loves to point to his brief, shining moment. Namely, when he implored Lame Duck Donald to “ask the protesters (sic) to leave the Capitol.” Just one problem. Ever since, he’s touted Trump’s Big Lie (which, of course, fueled the putschers-not-protesters in the first place). So now, with Trump in hot water, he doubles down. Yegads, the irony. Enraged at the behavior of an appointment made by his own fellow Catholic, President Biden, Van Drew effectively accused the appointee, Merrick Garland, of anti-Catholic thought crimes. Couching his bile in the form of a baseless, immaterial, quintessentially Fox-like question, he snarled at Garland, “Would you agree that traditional Catholics are violent extremists?” Would that the hectored AG had shot back “AGREE WITH WHOM? YOU?” and gone from there. (Perhaps to the point of saying, at some point, “NO REASONABLE OR DECENT PERSON COULD SEE ONE ATOM OF RHYME OR REASON IN YOUR AD HOMINEM OFFAL PARADING AS A QUERY. PERIOD.”) Here’s the thing. With vote-legitimized governance relentlessly besieged by the cult of J6, the plot thickens. And sickens. As it happens, Mr. Garland is Jewish. As it happens, Van Drew’s fact-free tirade comes on the heels of Trump’s Rosh Hashanah blast that “liberal Jews...voted to destroy America and Israel.” As it happens, weaponized racial and religious bigotry (of a piece with our own self-styled “knights” of the Ku Klux Klan) lay at the core of the 1930s-1940s conflagration that killed much of the world’s population- including millions of summarily murdered Jews and Gypsies. Like it or not, report it or not, that grim past still haunts us. Cozily enough, Trump chum Nick Fuentes is a 2017 Charlottesville hellraiser. A Holocaust denier. A monger of Christian “holy war” against Jews. And a smearer of Jews as “enemies of Christ” (quoting The New Republic, 7/17/23). If memory serves, Fuentes once snorted (fiercely and fatuously as you please) “It’s no longer anti-Semitic to hate Jews.” According to the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism’s 3/7/23 piece “Fuentes Delivers Anti-Semitic, Christian Nationalist Rant to Fellow White Supremacists,” the ever-Trump, Putin-rootin’ neo-Nazi howled (to a small crowd, on 3/4/23) “I LOVE YOU, AND I LOVE HITLER!” Ten-hut. What if an activist pal of Mr. Biden had spewed such evil? What if such vile invective were to dovetail with ANY Dem cooing that he-or-she “fell in love” with Kim Jong-un (as Trump has done)? Come to think of it, what if Big Media were to apply a single standard of conduct to nation-trampling tuskers, and likewise to wonky donkeys? What if we could count on full, fair, frank reports on the dangers posed by the likes of Trump. Van Drew. Jim Jordan. Mike ‘Bullets Not Ballots’ Huckabee. Marjorie Taylor “Secession” Greene. Josh “Fist Pump” Hawley. Mo “Kicking Ass” Brooks. And so on? But hey. Don’t take my word. I’m a card-carrying peon (whom “both sides” have been wont to pee on). So, let’s check with an authority in matters involving autocracy. For EIGHT YEARS, author/professor/pundit Ruth Ben-Ghiat has found Trump following what she calls “the strongman’s playbook;” the subtitle of her 2020 study Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present speaks volumes (all the more since it unabashedly alludes to Trump). And still CNN and NBC respectively (and respectfully) scrub and White-wash Big Blonder as if he were some superhero. (Ugh.) So now, wither Mr. Biden? By reclaiming his ‘religiously’ troll-usurped bully pulpit, he can drive home the vital truth that he leads our nation’s sole, one-and-only non-despotic major party. And that he therefore qualifies, with a view to next year’s elections, as an absolute no-brainer against the specter of absolutist, theocratic ruin. He can start by exhorting Dems to stop ceding religion to a divine-rightist cult of lords of misrule. Think of it. When we united against the racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, genocidal, purportedly God-blessed Nazis (their slogan was “God With Us”), our country performed magnificently. To be split (and, on J6 nearly destroyed) by a palpably similar brand of evil (patently rearing its ugly head in Van Drew’s attack on Mr. Garland) is a prospect we never should have allowed. Van Drew’s venom was so viciously evil, it nearly reduced Mr. Garland to tears. And yet donkeys (and indies) still crave “unity.” At this point, to appease anything like the Jersey juggernaut’s fascistic tirade cannot serve Lady Liberty, Uncle Sam, or the body politic. If so damnable a display cannot inspire Dems to start fighting back, it’s hard to imagine what could. 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