Showing posts with label JD Vance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JD Vance. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Shitposting and Pissposting


📌 Told y'all he is trash 🤮🐥

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— tweety (@bluskypolitics.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 7:45 AM

That's at https://bsky.app/profile/bluskypolitics.bsky.social/post/3m3ka37hh7s2z if you want to look at the video

Maybe what he's doing here is asserting that he isn't king, at least not yet, in the sense that if he was king that's what he'd be doing, jetting around in his shitbombing jet with his crown on, shitbombing all his  enemies in the urban streets, or maybe we should read it as a warning of what he's going to do once he's taken the final steps, or maybe we should read it as a metaphor for what he's already doing to his enemies, in which the jet stands for his weaponized Department of Justice and the shit for the bogus lawsuits and unfounded criminal investigations he's flinging at all the people who exposed his criminality, and he's claiming to be king already.

 Then again, there's this one:

Saturday, September 27, 2025

Note on Libel

 

JD Vance is now using the term "blood libel" to describe criticism of ICE, saying, "The Democrats and the media — because they so hate the idea of a real border — are engaging in a kind of blood libel against ICE agents." Somewhere, our ancestors wept.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 3:07 PM

That's not a very good choice of imagery, JD. I wouldn't expect you to know, because I wouldn't expect you to know much about these things, though you went to Princeton, but "blood libel" is a technical term in the history of Jewish people in medieval Europe, who were treated as dangerous foreigners, with their strange languages and strange religion, barred from various occupations, and confined to ghettos and shtetels where they lived segregated from the Christian population, and victimized by a particularly horrible myth; that Jews would steal Christian babies from their parents' houses and kill them, for their blood, which the Christians supposed was used for some kind of magical ritual—like the making of Passover matzoh, the weird Jewish analogue to the Christian communion wafer (historically it was the other way around: the communion wafer, the symbolic Lord's Supper, being modeled from the unleavened flatbread, matzoh, that Jesus would have eaten at his Last Supper, a Passover seder with his followers, telling them, according to the Gospel, that it was his own flesh, and the wine they were drinking was his own blood). 

This was a typical example of the dreadful lies that brought about the persecutions in which Christian peasants or townsmen periodically slaughtered Jews by the dozens and hundreds and thousands, and served as precursors to the 19th-century pogroms of eastern Europe and the 20th-century Shoah, the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish question". 

It's like the ancestor of all antisemitism, born out of the story that the Jews, as a collectivity, murdered God's own baby, his only-begotten son, which in the terrible history of antisemitism is the fons et origo.

ICE, in contrast, is a national police force that attacks ghettosful of aliens, and the story of their violence against the presumed foreigners is no libel, but attested in cell phone videos from all over the country. We've seen them knocking women to the ground and tearing children and their parents apart. If you're looking for a blood libel, you can find something like it in the words of *checks notes* Vice President JD Vance, in the 2024 campaign, spreading the false story that Haitians fleeing from the murderous violence of Port-au-Prince and living completely legally in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status had taken to killing and eating their neighbors' pet cats and dogs. Vance basically admitted that he had no citable evidence but claimed he needed to tell the story anyway, on the weird grounds that the mere presence of the Haitians in town was causing the good (white) citizens of Springfield some kind of "suffering" that couldn't be described, only communicated, apparently, by lying about it:

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents [although media reporting had clearly established by then that there were no such first-hand accounts]." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

Totally ignored what? How the American people were "suffering" from a thing that wasn't in fact happening. "It's not real, but the media must pay attention to it!" And given the way people feel about their pets, hardly different from the way they feel about their kids, it's not just like a version of the blood libel. Telling the local citizenry that if they were unhappy it was the fault of those dark-skinned, foreign-accented people in their midst

What's wrong with these people? 


Monday, July 28, 2025

The Stupid--It Ken Burns!

 

Unionist soldier's postcard, via PBS Learning Media.

Jamelle Bouie was writing about Vice President Vance, who seems to have been quietly and gradually  disappearing from public life in recent months (it's pretty funny by Bouie standards), and his bizarre speech at the Claremont Institute earlier this month attacking the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship:

At one point in Vance’s speech, when he’s scolding Mamdani for ingratitude, Vance asks whether Mamdani has “ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again.” It is striking that the vice president invokes the Civil War to make his point.
The great ideological victory of that conflict was to establish the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When, at Gettysburg, Lincoln pronounced a “new birth of freedom,” consecrated by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion,” he meant the egalitarian freedom that [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and others like him sought to deny.

Because, as Bouie shows, in his arguments against birthright citizenship, Vance is aligning himself with Taney, and the Dred Scott decision, against Lincoln and the outcome of the war.

Monday, March 3, 2025

White House Kayfabe

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II. 

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards. 

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Vance in Defense of the Lie

Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24.

Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:

This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance claimed that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...

—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender, and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:

Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since 2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.

So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990 Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with migration at the border at its lowest level since fall 2020 (when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).

And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard. 

Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.

JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.

Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was asked in early 2021 to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by 2023 just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who were not part of Harris's mandate).

It's true that some family separations took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the systematic destruction of families pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.

Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can drive: