I can’t imagine the inhumanity involved in raising a gun to a 97 year old woman and killing her in cold blood. In general, the victims of The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting were quite elderly.
Joyce Fienberg, 75
Richard Gottfried, 65
Rose Mallinger, 97
Jerry Rabinowitz, 66
Cecil Rosenthal, 59
David Rosenthal, 54
Bernice Simon, 84
Sylvan Simon, 86
Daniel Stein, 71
Melvin Wax, 88
Irving Younger, 69
On one level, their ages don’t matter. Murder is murder. But killing people in their eighties and nineties demonstrates just a little extra disregard for any actual threat, no matter how imagined it might have been. They were killed for who they were rather than for anything they might actually do.
This is how Nazis went about their business, too, killing the young, the old, the infirm, the most defenseless first, on the theory that that extermination was the primary point rather than any kind of self-defense.
I think James Fallows did an admirable job putting this in the correct context this morning.
Strangely…or maybe not so strangely…Donald Trump is only mentioned twice in that Fallows article, both times as lacking the abilities and understanding to take the place of a uniter in the face of division and injustice. There is no mention whatsoever of his responsibility regarding encouraging that sort of violence against “the other.” Granted, the gunman expressed his dislike of Trump and his policies, but that’s because said gunman is without a doubt a rabid, fully insane anti-semite.
Nevertheless…pro-Trump,. anti-Trump or anywhere in between…Donald Trump is responsible for ,U.encouraging violence as a way of getting things done even since he hit the Republican primary trail,/u.. His insults are those of a bully who will kick you in the balls if you stand up to him, his physicality in debate and at rallies is the same, and his numeropus explicitly admiring statements about many, many violent, extra-legal “leaders” across the U.S. and throughout the world all have as their plain subtext “When you can’t win legally, win any which way you can!!!” In point of fact, his entire business history carries the same message.
He is a morally bankrupt leader of a state that is…and has been for decades…rapidly falling into the chaos of mutual hates that has only one possible end if it is allowed to flourish.
Fallows?
As usual…mired in the centrist shallows.
Always careful not to offend potential winners.
I never liked his work.
Still don’t.
He’s a fake.
Later…
AG
Good Lord, you have become such a terrible community member, Arthur. So careless, callous, and willfully ignorant. This is a bad time for you to trot out your belligerent ass routine.
Here, try reading a writer who can help you understand the menace Jews are facing right now; it’s from a piece he composed in October 2016. Excerpts:
“…I’m 47 years old. I was born in St Louis, Missouri but I grew up in Southern California and since I was 18 I’ve lived on the East Coast, as far north as Sommerville, Massachusetts and as far south as Washington, DC. I know a lot about anti-Semitism. It shapes a lot of my view of life. Of course I’ve seen instances of it. But in almost half a century of life it’s pretty hard for me to think of many or even any examples where I’ve witnessed or been the target of the menace of anti-Semitism directly…It’s been so constant for the last six months that it feels like a new normal. The change has been that dramatic and that fast. I suspect there are few American Jews reading this who don’t get immediately what I’m talking about.
…
Many note that Trump has a Jewish son-in-law to whom he appears to be quite close. His daughter Ivanka is actually a convert. But to put much stock in that is to show an ignorance of the history of anti-Semitism. Many of the most virulent and consequential anti-Semites had Jewish friends and even relatives. One of the key forerunners of Adolf Hitler was a man named Karl Leuger, who served as Mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910. Leuger was a key figure, perhaps the key figure, who brought anti-Semitism from being part of the fabric of European culture and the outlet for the episodic violence of illiterate peasants to making it a force in a modern political context.
…
And yet Leuger had many Jewish friends. He dined with them. When asked about this seeming contradiction, Leuger said famously: “I decide who is a Jew.” Was Leuger a hypocrite or just conflicted and complicated? It’s a fascinating historical question. But as a practical matter it didn’t matter. Anti-Semitism, like racism, isn’t a matter of what you feel but what you do. My own read is that Trump has some instinctive anti-Semitics beliefs. He’s said before that he thinks Jews are good with money and wants them, not African-Americans, counting his money. But I don’t get the sense he has a deep animus toward Jews. He may even been pro-Jew in a way that many soft anti-Semites are. But none of that really matters. He’s embraced the normalization of anti-Semitism in American politics. That’s all that really matters. What he feels in his heart is unknowable and largely irrelevant…”.
Arthur, this is why your protestations against my claims that you are a hard right winger who is doing Trump’s bidding are so very weak. You admit to having a bunch of hard right wing policy preferences, so there’s plentiful evidence that my assessment of you is accurate. But’s it’s so much more than that.
Even at this perilous time, you come here to organize against candidates who are the only viable options to Trump and Republicans. That’s all that really matters. What you feel in your heart is unknowable and largely irrelevant.
Good Lord centerfielddj, it is you who has become a terrible community member. You are so focused on supporting the UniParty, DNC-controlled wing of the Democratic Party that you willfully ignore every point that I make and then throw it into your leaky, paranoid bag of “Arthur Gilroy is a secret right wing menace come to this lily-white, middle class, middle-aged blog of Dem supporters to help the far right come to power in America!!!”
This is a bad time for you to trot out your belligerent, neocentrist ass routine.
I am fully aware that there are antisemites in the world. Real ones, like that fool in Pittsburgh and many others, quite a few in positions of real power. There are also anti-white haters, anti-Muslim haters, anti-black haters, anti-Hispanic haters and God only know what other brands of hater throughout the world. Trump is not one of them. He is a stone criminal, a hater of gigantic proportions, a megalomaniac and an equal-opportunity hater.
You disagree with him?
He hates you.
Simple.
And…so far?
Frighteningly effective!
Come to think of it, except for the “frighteningly effective” part, he sounds a lot like…you!!!
I wrote:
How’s that for a virtuoso statement of support for Donald Trump?
That comment was written as a condemnation of James Fallows…and by extension, all of the fools who think that DemRat-oriented neocentrist pundits like Fallows serve any purpose in the world other than continued support for the murderous American Empire (murderous both internationally and domestcally)…not as support for Donald Trump.
The punch line of that post? The summation of what I was trying to say?
Reading his work always gives me little shivers of disgust up and down my spine.
Your posts?
Flamingly disgusting!!!
Go flail around on dKos, where you belong.
AG
P.S. I am still of two minds about you, centristfield.
You are either so stupid that you literally cannot read what I am saying, so much a neocentrist DemRat that you willfully lie about my work or…most likely…some horrid combination of those two states of being.
Great work.
Thanks.
Your every post illustrates the utter bankruptcy of your position…and the mainstream, DNC-dominated Democratic Party’s position as well…in the world.
In a time during which it is beginning to dawn on masses of U.S. citizens that the Democratic Party must reform itself into a true “people’s party” if it is to be able to effectively oppose the far-right, your mewling support for the current Dem leaders is Judas goat material.
The only problem is, Judas goats need need sheep…or sheeple, in this instance…to lead to slaughter, but the sheeple are beginning to wake up all over the U.S. Take a look at what is happening in Texas for all you need to know about that. Florida, too. Whether it’s this election or the next one, people like you and those that you support are eventually going to be discarded by the voters, just as they will…I fervently pray…discard the right wing and Trump.
Meanwhile…I’m going to be in your face here, 24/7.
Get used to it.
The more you write, the more you reveal yourself as a person arguing in extraordinarily bad faith.
Your ideology and policy preferences are far, far to the right of Fallows’. This makes you a singularly fraudulent critic of his ideology and the policy preferences of the Democratic Party as you describe them.
My aim is not to get you to leave this community.
I’m aiming to make you more and more ineffective in your goal, your goal of suppressing the vote for Democratic Party candidates from members of this progressive community.
You don’t even have the guts to make the case for which Party and candidates should get our votes.
What a despicable fraud you’ve become.
. . . courtesy Paul Campos at LGM:
But then we inhabit the Reality-Based Community, you and I (and Paul).
Saying Trump can’t be an anti-semite because he has a Jewish son in law is like saying he can’t be a misogynist because he’s had three wives.
This is absolutely sickening. The idea of that monster shooting these defenseless elderly people, and the hatred one must have to do it. Were it not for the trajectory of increasing hatred and violence we’ve been on, this would be unimaginable. Sadly though, its not.
I guess because of racism and/or the fact two victims don’t garner attention anymore as mass killings go, there’s little mention of this:
https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/kroger-shooting-kentucky-man-shoots-kills-two-people.html
“After the shooting, he reportedly told a white bystander, ‘Whites don’t kill whites.'”
His victims, Maurice E. Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, were 69 and 67 years old, respectively. Elderly people; defenseless.
And yet, at a time when America sorely needs moral leadership, and calls to unity; reminders that we are one people, all in it together, we have Trump. As Fallows mentions:
“Donald Trump has never once, in his life, spoken in that vein–as bearer of the whole nation’s grief, as champion of its faith and resolve–so there is no reason to expect that he could possibly do so now.”
Trump has been so consistent in stoking hatred and violence that its hard to see it as just a personal moral failing, but the actions of someone who is a fellow traveler with neo Nazis, racists, anti-Semites, misogynists and the worst society has to offer. A man who hates who they hate; who believe in the utility of violence, as they do.
I believe America is about to find out in the worst way what happens when morality and common decency are abandoned for political and monetary gain. If we don’t get Trump out and bring the GOP to heel, its frightening what may happen.
And today’s National Trumpalist gambit is to attempt to cow the (already feeble) corporate media into silence over the Pittsburgh massacre by inveighing against “fake news’, whatever that is supposed to be.
I guess news about an actual massacre by a “conservative” gun nut and National Trumpalist mail-bomber terrorist is “fake news”, while wall-to-wall coverage of the “national emergency” presented by a (totally phony) “criminal caravan” of dangerous ISIS-immigrants funded by Globalist Jews is “news u need to know!”
We mislead, you consume!
Fallows starts his piece with:
“Every society contains its monsters: people damaged or disturbed enough, or misdirected enough, to inflict cruelty….(emphasis mine)
So Arthur, Trump isn’t explicitly named (and maybe he should be), but I think we all get it.
Paging Mr. Miller, paging Mr. Stephen Miller.
Seriously, where did you think this was going?
Paging Mr. Adelson, paging Mr. Kushner. Paging Mr. Clarke, Mr. David Clarke . . .
Sen John Cornyn put out a tweet today, out of context, wrongly stated to try and charge Nancy Pelosi with both sides do it rhetoric. The day after this gawd awful mass shooting, all he could think to do was to point a finger at the Left.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/413524-top-republican-criticized-for-sharing-week-old-pelosi-com
ments-on-collateral
My 96 yr old grandmother was murdered in her home in Brooklyn, NY. She was taken from sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren that never got to know her. It has been almost 25 years and my family has never recovered from the loss. Mindless killing seems to part of our society.
The idea that the morally deformed and malignant personality of Donald Trump could possibly act or operate in a way that sought to “unify the country” is simply preposterous on its face. That quality he simply does not possess; even if he wanted to attempt such an act it is not in his repertoire.
Der Trumper loves openly inciting “his” people at his horrible Rallies of Lies. He certainly is not abashed by recent results as he is right back out there spewing the shit to his beloved Deplorables–and at this point anyone fighting their way into one of his Nuremburg rallies is a confirmed Deplorable. I imagine that they are tattooing the word on themselves as we speak.
The incompetent white electorate thought it would be great to have a spiteful degenerate turd as a prez–leave aside his utter lack of qualifications for the office. This political violence and rightwing terrorism is the natural and logical result of “electing”* Trump–a complete and irreversible dis-unification of the country. Heckuva job, electoral college!
The US of A effectively has no actual leader, and one can only wonder what exactly our useless stenographic media and failed institutions would expect of the citizenry if the country were to have an actual national crisis/emergency present itself with this ignorant monster at the helm. There would be open mayhem.
As for the loathsome middle-aged white male gun-nut who thought it was the height of “patriotism” to mow down elderly Jewish worshipers by the dozens, well, the “conservative” movement over the past couple decades has manufactured several million of them. And as always with living in a nation awash in a ocean of high power weaponry, it’s always just a matter of time until one or another of these previously “law-abiding” male gun nuts finally goes berserk and acts on their appalling fantasies of “patriotic” warrior-dom, fueled by rightwing hate media in a dozen forms. Criminal Caravans, yeah, that’s the ticket!
The history of the Holocaust demonstrates that rightwing extremism has no problem finding such turds. They can’t wait to volunteer, usually. Hell, we’ve got hundreds of them on the payroll right now who were simply delighted to separate 5 year olds from their asylum-seeking parents and run Kiddie Koncentration Kamps! How far away can “Sieg Heil!” be?
. . . and we’re seeing in realtime how the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media handle such a crisis (they further enable it).
But then again, I’m also inclined to say there IS “open mayhem” — so you’re not wrong!
Once fascists get a little running room you’re in big trouble as it snowballs like a malignant terminal cancer.
Fascism has crept into every public space in America through the GOP, religion and Fox.
It’s later than you think.
I called my Senators this morning. I don’t know what I expected but I got answering services from both. Bob Casey at least had the courtesy of sounding like he cared on his answering machine. Toomey had a staffer record his.