A Few Words in Praise of an Unhinged Lunatic

A Few Words in Praise of an Unhinged Lunatic from my Substack page: Blues, Jazz, Politics and Irony at richardcongress@substack.com SUBSCRIBE! It's free. Donald Trump is an authentic nut case; a narcissist, an ignoramus, a racist and who knows what else? BUT, he has done far less damage than those who are counterposed to him as upright, trustworthy statesmen (and women). George W Bush and his puppet master Dick Cheney have the blood of millions of innocent civilians on their hands. The servants of their crazed orgy of killing, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al should all have been jailed for life along with Bush and Cheney. Think about it: Based on a series of completely fraudulent lies each one more ridiculous than the previous: Iraq, a small, poor nation with an economy the size of Kentucky, which couldn’t win a war against Sweden was planning to attack the US and had developed “weapons of mass destruction.” Why? Because Saddam Hussein was…what? Nuts? An agent of…Satan, Iran? An Islamic fundamentalist? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed in a massive, indiscriminate ground and air assault by U.S. armed forces. Afghanistan, also invaded by the US military suffered a twenty plus year war in which the U.S. abjectly failed to win over the population to its side but managed to kill tens of thousands of people. The whole region was hard hit by the U.S. aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fighting spilled over into Syria and Lebanon. The war caused a wave of refugees to flee westward creating a crisis not just in neighboring countries, but also in European nations. This wave of refugees caused a rightward reaction in many countries and has led to the growth of ultra -right and neo-Nazi groups. The U.S. pro-war hysteria was triggered by the 9/11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Organized by a coterie of Islamic fundamentalists who were followers of Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi who was based in Afghanistan. The ones who carried out the attack were mainly located in Europe when they planned it out. All of them except one (an Egyptian) were Saudis. This accusation of Iraq’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks was obviously nonsense, but it was propagated by the Bush/Cheney administration and its Republican supporters and echoed by most Democrats, including then Senators Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton…and the press went wild to promote a hysterical war frenzy. Whoever questioned the validity of these claims were slandered as traitors and agents of Saddam Hussein (this means you Andrew Sullivan. He and fellow scumbag Christopher Hitchens…a pseudo progressive turncoat who has since died) went on TV to excoriate critics of Bush’s lying war propaganda. The New York Times featured articles that advanced Bush/Cheney propaganda without ever questioning the logic of the claims. The idea that Iraq, which was governed by a secular regime that was a mortal enemy of Islamic fundamentalists, was involved in helping Bin Laden attack the United States, is and was ridiculous. But counting on the bottomless ignorance of the American people, and the bottomless lusting for war and profits by the military/industrial complex the Bush/Cheney administration was able to get its desired war. If it was necessary to invade some country because of the 9/11 attack, wouldn’t it have been more logical to invade Saudi Arabia? All of the hijackers but one were Saudis. There has since been some evidence that some prominent Saudis had pre-knowledge of Bin Laden’s plans to attack the U.S. Is this valid or had it been investigated? Who knows? The Saudis have too much oil to criticize them anyway. Not only did that Republican administration manage to have its desired war (part of a glorified GWAT: global war on terrorism) but, again with the complicity of the spineless Democratic office holders, manage to inflict damage on basic democratic rights by enacting police state type legislation: The Patriot Act. This inaugurated a new frenzy of Islamaphobic McCarthyism and fueled physical attacks on Muslims and anyone who (to the average American moron) looked like a Muslim…like several unfortunate members of the Sikh religion whose origins are in India and have nothing to do with Islam…but they grow beards and wear turbans…so they have to be goddamn A-rabs! So gun them down in the best American NRA tradition! So due to our great two party (pseudo) democracy the government got more power to abrogate basic democratic rights at will. The legacy of the Bush/Cheney war of choice is that we now have a panoply of anti-democratic rules that can be used to persecute and prosecute anyone who questions whatever displeases the governing administration. CIA guy James Clapper goes on TV and lies through his teeth, claiming that they don’t spy on phone calls between Americans and foreigners. His punishment? Nothing. Ed Snowden tells the truth about U.S. Government spying on the American people’s phone communications—his reward? Prison threats and worse, so he goes into exile. Julian Assange is being crucified for unpardonable truth-telling and having the gall to show video footage of U.S. military helicopter pilots slaughtering of civilian new reporters and laughing about it. This bipartisan assault on democratic rights persists and is now being applied to anyone who criticizes U.S. government policies now about the Ukraine proxy war against Russia. We now have a repeat of the Iraq war frenzy applied now silence criticism of the U.S. proxy war against Russia (Ukraine is just tool of the U.S.). So, now do you think that Donald Trump is just the worst person in the world? He’s a con man and a jerk. He’s a crook. But how many children has he killed?

Taylor Swift: The Bland leading the Bland

this is from my Substack account richardcongress@substack.com Listning to Taylor Swift Mood music for the comatose RICHARD CONGRESS AUG 14, 2023 Listening to Taylor Swift: American Blandstand. A Taylor Swift concert is similar to eating tapioca pudding with whipped cream and vanilla jello. She exhibits a singing range of about 1/8 of an octave and lyrics that would be rejected from a Hallmark greeting card as too bland. What is it with this singer? The only distinguishing characteristic of her performances is a slight country twang to the backup music. Blues, Jazz, Politics and Irony is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribed Maybe she is such a sensational hit because of the anesthetic quality of her music. People don’t want to be worried about anything, given the state of the world and the country. But…then, why gather in huge concert venues and wildly applaud? Why not just relax at home and stream her on Spotify? It looks like getting up and actually going to a Taylor Swift concert requires an investment of physical exertion. It’s like getting physically worked up and then drinking 3 vanilla milkshakes. How about seeing it as a retreat from a disturbing reality of gun violence run amok, deteriorating pseudo-health care, income stagnation (if you are lucky and not seeing decline), constant war, etc? That could be the answer. Perhaps she has been created by the entertainment industry (I won’t say music business) as a purgative to get rid of and bury the effect of female vocalists who had feeling and ideas: Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Billie Holliday, or more contemporary, active performers like Shamka Copeland, Bonnie Raitt, or Lucinda Williams? Taylor Swift could be the designated soundtrack for a coming nuclear war caused by the lunatic neo-cons who populated the war-criminal Bush/Cheney regime and who have now migrated to the Biden camp (Hillary was already a Democrat and a war-lover). And as if it wasn’t bad enough, now the Biden Administration has raised from the dead Regan administration hack Elliot Abrams, the used car salesman of indiscriminate murder of civilians by contra mercenaries in Nicaragua, who also was convicted of lying under oath before a Congressional committee. Maybe Taylor Swift could do joint performances with Elliot Abrams, and Kamala Harris could sing backup.

Rich men north of Richmond vs the Kinkster Kinky Friedman made the best response

OK, I lied. That wasn't the last post on this site by me. BUT...I'm now posting on my new substack account: Blues, Jazz, Politics and Irony. You should go to that site and subscribe...it's free RICHARD CONGRESS AUG 25, 2023 Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” has made a big splash. Many people have praised it as a cry for help from a downtrodden sector of society. Which sector and how downtrodden, and who is actually treading them down is another question. Rather than dismissing it as another iteration of Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which reeks of an obviously racist, thug, vigilante response to big city, unpatriotic, not white “woke” people, many have tried to be understanding of Oliver’s dilemma of a hard working guy trying to survive in a tough, unfair world. Blues, Jazz, Politics and Irony is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribed This is a mistake. Anthony is another dumb ass racist shit trying to blame certain people for his hard times. Which people? Well, it’s actually the usual suspects: non-white people and northern liberals and their unpatriotic ways. Why is it so hard for many people to see this? If the song had been titled “Rich Men Screwing Over the Workers” it would have been on the right track towards naming the source of his problems. this title and the appropriate lyrics to go with it would not have gotten such a good response. When was the last time “The International” was listed on the Billboard top 50? Who wants to hear some commie anthem pointing out how the corporate rich are robbing everyone else blind? Even if it happens to be true, you are not supposed to say so. What about rich pharmaceutical company executives behaving like thugs and raking in super profits while poor workers like Oliver Anthony can’t afford insulin or other needed drugs? Anthony complains about his taxes being so high, but he doesn’t put that together with the fact that taxes on the very rich have been going down and the concentration of wealth at the very top is greater than ever. No, the problem is grossly obese (black) people on welfare living the good life consuming all the chocolate they can eat, while the poor (white )guy slaves away for a pittance. Why does he single out rich men north of Richmond? What about rich men who live in Richmond, VA? or south of Richmond? Because it’s got to be those fucking Yankees. You know: the Jews and foreign immigrants and those damn New York and New England fancy pants. Why Richmond as a dividing line? Because it was the capital of the Confederacy. Too bad for Oliver Anthony that they LOST! This whole…should I say brew ha ha, or maybe kerfuffle (what’s the right word here?) Anyway this whole thing takes me back to 1969 when country singer Merle Haggard release his song “Okie from Muskogee.” This song was a patriotic anthem praising the U.S. war in Vietnam and condemning antiwar protesters and traitors and dirty hippies, unlike the church going, upright and uptight, strait laced good people of Muskogee, Oklahoma who willingly marched off to the slaughter in Vietnam. The great Texas singer and songwriter, Kinky Friedman with his band (Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys) released a song in response to Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” It was titled “I’m Proud To Be An Asshole from El Paso.” I lived in Houston in the 1970s and had a chance to see Kinky & Co perform. Here are the lyrics to Kinky Friedman’s riposte to Haggard. Asshole From El Paso Lyrics We don't have no lovin's in El Paso We don't go to porno picture shows We don't swap our wives with our neighbors And we keep our kids away from Mexico And I'm proud to be an asshole from El Paso A place where sweet young virgins are deflowered You walk down the street knee-deep in tacos Ta-ta-ta-tacos And the wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour We don't wipe our asses on Old Glory God and Lone Star beer are things we trust We keep our women virgins till they're married So hosin' sheep is good enough for us And I'm proud to be an asshole from El Paso A place where sweet young virgins are deflowered You walk down the street knee-deep in tacos Ta-ta-ta-tacos And the wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour I'm proud to be an asshole from El Paso A place where sweet young virgins are deflowered You walk down that street knee-deep in tacos Ta-ta-ta-tacos And the wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour Blues, Jazz, Politics and Irony is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribed

My last post on this site.

If interested you can go to: BLUES, JAZZ, POLITICS AND IRONY ON Richard's Substack.com I started writing this about 2 years ago and then put it aside. Since then the election of the ultrareligious nut case government in Israel has occurred. The recent events are obviously a big deal, but that doesn’t change the fundamental character of Israel as a colonial settler state sponsored by Europe and the US. rc “Jewish” is not a nationality, neither is “Arab” and “Semitic” refers to a language family To understand what is happening regarding the State of Israel and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination it’s necessary to navigate through popular false narratives. Most people here in the U.S. don’t really know much of anything going on in this country, let alone the rest of the world. Getting through to people about the colonial-settler nature of the Israeli state and its systematic denial of basic human rights to the Palestinian people is made all the more difficult given the massive disinformation campaign organized and financed by groups like AIPAC, ADL, ZOA, plus prominent elected Democrats and Republican politicians. One problem to understanding what is happening is the false characterization of basic concepts involving nationality, ethnicity, language and “race.” Here in the U.S. we who are citizens are used to it meaning nothing more than we were either born here, or immigrated and then were naturalized: became citizens via a common legal process. Citizenship in the U.S. is secular. There is no religious criteria. Someone from Spain, Uganda, Iceland…wherever, who has been naturalized is an American citizen. Period. Racist white ethno-nationalists would like to make the U.S. a white, Christian nation (usually their idea of Christian includes only certain kinds of Protestants)., but so far they haven’t succeeded. It's the same in most countries. There are German Turks, French Algerians, British Jamaicans, etc. All citizens who, on paper, have the same rights as native born citizens. Actually several generations of German Turks are native born. Their parents, or grandparents were invited to Germany to relieve an acute labor shortage in the 1960s. Jews born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens. But the state of Israel claims these same Jews, along with all Jews in the world as would-be citizens. Israel’s founding documents and its recently revised Basic Law defines Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people.” I’m an Indiana/USA born Jew, but I could be an Israeli citizen (so long as they don’t know I support BDS and hate Zionism) while a descendent of generations of Palestinians living inside Israel or the Occupied Territories can never become a citizen. There are Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state, but that came about under duress. The United Nations refused to admit Israel unless it granted citizenship to the remaining Palestinians who were not killed or driven out in 1948 by Jewish force of arms. (see the book “Citizen Strangers” by Shira Robinson) Today about a quarter of Israeli citizens are “Arabs.” There are many more “Arabs” (about 2 million) living under the jurisdiction of the Israeli state in the occupied West Bank, but they are not citizens. They are seen by the Zionist state as problems that should be removed one way or another. The not-Palestinian “Arabs” who are citizens face more than 50 laws enacted to make sure that they have very few rights. The right to own land or live where they want is restricted, with the obvious goal in mind to eventually get rid of them all…if only the rest of the world would stop watching. The two million non-citizen “Arabs” in the West Bank have no rights at all. They can be killed by Zionist settlers or the Israeli army at will with no recourse; this happens with increasing frequency. Meanwhile their right to own land and homes (and many can show deeds dating back to the pre-WW I Ottoman Empire) isn’t recognized by the (Exclusively) Jewish State. Palestinian homes are regularly demolished and families are displaced. ETHNOCRACY Democratic states do not have an ethno/nationalist or racial, or religious definition of citizenship. Israel is not a democratic state; it is an ethnocracy. It denies equal rights (or any intrinsic rights) to those who are not Jewish. And in increasingly theocratic Israel it’s the most rabid, bigoted orthodox Jews who decide who is a Jew. Even Reform Judaism, the actual largest denomination world wide, is denied rights in Israel that are given to the Orthodox and Hasidim. By defining “Arab” as a nationality Israel can then use that to exclude Palestinians. Any reasonable definition of “Arab” says an Arab is a native speaker of Arabic. There are several countries in which Arabic is the dominant language. But only when speaking figuratively is there an “Arab nation.” Some “Arab” countries are populated by ethnic Berbers, who are distinct in appearance from Arabs in Egypt or other nations. Some dialects of Arabic in different countries are not mutually comprehensible. There are Jews who are Arabic speakers and adhere to common customs in Morocco, Yemen and other countries in the region. But their citizenship is of the various nations, not in an abstract “Arabia.” Druze are an Arabic speaking people who follow a religion different from Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. Some of them live in the Israeli state. They are denied equal rights to Jews (see “When We Were Arabs,” by Massoud Hayoun, an Egyptian, Arabic speaking Jew). The ethnic cleansing being carried out by Israel is aimed of ridding its territory of all non-Jews. Ie. Arabs. “Let them go to a country made up of their own kind,” Zionists would argue. All “Arab” countries are not the same. The Arabic spoken in Algeria would not be understood in Egypt, for example. Customs and degrees of religiosity and secularism vary from country to country. There are distinct national/cultural characteristics of each supposedly “Arab” country, be it Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. In the United States racists talk of wanting to get rid of the “Spanish” (among others). The Spanish spoken in Mexico is quite different from that of Cuba, which is very different from that of Paraguay (which contains a lot of Guarani, an indigenous language). The customs also vary greatly among Spanish speaking countries. Remember when the U.S. President Ronald Reagan was shocked to discover that down in South America “there were a lot of different countries there?” What gives most Jewish Israelis, and many Jews in this country the idea that it is perfectly fine and reasonable to ethnically cleanse Israeli territory of all Arabs is that they don’t consider them to be fully human. We can also include the supercharged Christian Evangelical “Zionists” among this group of people since they have the added Evangelical fear/hatred of Islam to keep them on the path to genocide. HUMAN RACE There is only one race of humans on this planet. Biologically and genetically all visible differences are trivial. These have been exploited, over time, to create hierarchies and phony scholarship to invent races that each have specific virtues or vices, abilities or lack of same. It’s all political and socially useful to justify stealing another people’s land, enslaving them, demonizing them. Now we now come to the invention of “Semites.” According to the biblical story of Noah and his ark, his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, repopulated the earth after the flood. Thus the term “Semite” was, if not coined, then popularized, by anti-Jewish agitator Wilhelm Maar in 1879. He was trying to give a pseudo-scientific and scholarly veneer to dress up simply saying “I hate the dirty Jews, let’s get rid of them.” The issue was put on the footing of finding inherent physical and cultural traits to mark off the Jews from Christian society as evil, scheming, parasites out to cheat everyone else. Why Shem got to be archetype instead of the other sons is not known; otherwise we could be dealing with “anti-Hamism,” or “anti-Japhethite.” There is no Semitic race. The only valid way to tie the term to a people is classify them as speakers of a Semitic language. Hebrew is one small member of the Semitic language family. Arabic is the largest and the languages of Ethiopia are also part of this family. According to Wikipedia: “The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, in the Caucasus, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. “ European People The Jews who founded the state of Israel were far removed from the “original people” of the so called “Holy Land.” Just consider blue eyed, fair skinned David Ben Gurion, from Poland. Jews have been a European people from long before the Roman suppression of the 76 AD uprising that led to the destruction of the 2nd temple. Jews were not summarily expelled from Israel. There was a period of a few years when the Roman rulers barred Jewish men who were under 50 years of age from entering Jerusalem. Deporting whole populations was never a tactic used by the Roman Empire. Long before Rome dominated Palestine/Judea there was the Babylonian Exile, where a selected elite were deported to Babylon (it was way to assert cultural and political domination. They didn’t exile everyone; the farmers and poor stayed where they were. Ironically (looking way back) it was Persia who liberated the Jews and allowed them to return to Judea. The Jews of Israel during the ancient time of Empires: Persian, Roman, the Macedonian Greeks who divided up Alexander’s conquered territory after his death, they were in a similar position to that of people from Honduras or Mexico nowadays. Those who didn’t want to be subsistence farmers, or without means to make a decent living emigrated to the cosmopolitan cities of the big, wealthy empires. By 200 BCE there were Jewish communities in Alexandria, Athens, Rome and Roman Spain. They were seeking a better life as merchants, shopkeepers, professionals. By the time of the 76 AD rebellion, the majority of Jews did not live in Israel. For more than 2,000 years Jews have been mostly a European people. Growing up in a Jewish environment (even in bland Indianapolis) I ate Borscht, Brisket, blintzes ,pickled herring and other fare that was commonly consumed by Jews in America. Some of my parent’s friends spoke Yiddish and everyone knew phrases and words to use when deemed appropriate (what a schmuck! For instance, very useful for current times too). So, Jewish culture in America and other places consisted of Polish and Russian food, a language that is a dialect of German (written in Hebrew). The garb of orthodox and Haredi believers doesn’t seem to come from ancient Israel or Judea. I don’t think people there went around wearing black hats, black suits, long sideburns, etc. What is considered typical Jewish culture comes from Poland, Russia and central Europe. From the start the Zionist leaders saw their movement as 100% European. They shopped around for a great power to sponsor them and found it in the UK. The spiritual and actual, in many ways, father of today’s Israel, Vladimir Jabotinsky (creator of Revisionist Zionism) insisted that Jews were a European people, Europeans being intrinsically superior to Arabs. Jabotinsky! One might wonder. Who is that? Wasn’t Ben Gurion the founder of today’s Israel? It’s true that Ben Gurion was the leader of the social democratic Labor Party which ruled at the beginning of the founding of the Israeli state. But, Jabotinsky (who transitioned from Vladimir to Zeev) had the last laugh. His followers went on to found the Likud party and set the direction of Israeli politics and policy towards the far right. Jabotinsky had been a university student in Italy in the 1920s and admired Mussolini. This predilection shows in the modern Israeli state. The social democratic veneer of Israel is dead and gone. It was a scam from the start. Socialism and the Kibbutz was a way to put a progressive face on stealing Palestinian land and creating agricultural military style forts to secure a conquest. The socialist liars of the Labor Party and the Histradrut trade unions worked to create a Jews only labor movement that excluded “Arabs.” REACHING THE END GAME Recently, with the coming to power of the new Likud/theocratic nut case government, we can see how the Israeli/Judeo Fascist state wants to escalate a “final solution” to the Arab problem. Ethnic cleansing is on the agenda for the Israeli state. The strong protests from masses of Jewish Israeli citizens against the governments proposed legal changes has nothing to do with support of Palestinian rights. It is exclusively about secular Jews who don’t want wacko religious zelots imposing a theocratic religious state. Both sides support keeping the Palestinians down.