"A bad hair day" in Pittsburgh!

Way back in May 2016, in writing about the looming dark clouds, I worried:

It starts with a swastika and 1488 etched on a bench on a bridge over a river :(  Here is to hoping that we will end it all before it even takes hold.

It has taken a firm hold!

A mere two weeks ago that I wrote in this post:

When the President says all the horrible things that he says on a daily hourly basis, it reflects an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy. 
It is not any surprise when he makes even tragic situations only about himself. Or, talks about the most nonsensical things like how a boat ended up in some guy's yard.  A lack of empathy means that the asshole-in-chief can never behave like the comforter-in-chief that Presidents are expected to be in the face of tragedies. 

Through his incendiary rhetoric, this President created the monsters who marched around shouting "Jews will not replace us" and shooting at the faithful who had assembled for Shabbat prayers.

True to his personality, which he never hid from the 63 million who voted for him,he could not be bothered with being presidential:

Now, after a week of fear, with pipe bombs being sent to a list of people whom President Trump has said horrible things about, and to CNN, which he consistently targets, 11 Jewish citizens were slaughtered in their place of worship on the Sabbath. Trump’s response? He joked that he almost canceled an event because, after having to speak to reporters about the shooting in the rain, he was having “a bad hair day.”

I agree with the author:

This president will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation. It’s not in him. When questioned after a tragedy, he will always be glib and inappropriate. So I have a wild suggestion: Let’s stop asking him. His words are only salt in our wounds.

Instead, "Let’s instead remember that the people in our daily lives are hurting too."

Shabbat Shalom.

In the 48 hours since the Pittsburgh attack, POTUS tweets:

- RTing D'Souza interviewed by the NRA
- going after Tom Steyer
- the press is the Enemy of the People
- calling Andrew Gillum a thief
- the caravan https://t.co/GSzqmDUjj6

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 29, 2018

Mel Gibson alert :)

Slate Video has a mashup video bringing in the latest of Mel Gibson audio.  Hilarious.

Also at Slate, Christopher Hitchens has a brilliant piece thanks to which I had to figure out what the word gauleiter means!  Hitchens writes:

what he is issuing is the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry—and sexual hypocrisy—that stretches from the Crusades through the Inquisition to the "concordats" between the church and Hitler and Mussolini. Yet he's still reporting for work. When will Hollywood, and the wider society, finally decide to shun and spurn him utterly, both for what he is and for what he represents?

Frank Rich is all about schadenfreude, and writes:

It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.
Take, for instance, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. During the “Passion” wars, he had tried to blackmail Gibson’s critics by publicly noting that Christians are “a major source of support for Israel” and that Jewish leaders would be “shortsighted” to “risk alienating two billion Christians over a movie.” That evangelical leader was Ted Haggard, the Colorado megachurch pastor since brought down by a male prostitute. Gibson’s only outspoken rabbinical defender in 2004, the far-right Daniel Lapin, would be sullied in the scandals surrounding the subsequently jailed Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. William Donohue of the Catholic League — who defended Gibson in 2004 by saying, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular” — has been reduced these days to the marginal role of attacking The Times for reporting on priestly child abuse.
The cultural wave that crested with “The Passion” was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal antihomosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.

I suppose Gibson is one of those celebrity wells that keep on giving.  Here is a classic from the Daily Show :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Highway to Mel?
www.thedailyshow.com
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Jon Stewart v. Jon Leibowitz

As my posts in this blog show, I am a big fan of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Ron Rosenbaum writes that it is high time Jon Stewart changed his name back to its original:

I want you to change your name. Back to Leibowitz. Stewart is just so 20^th-century, a relic of that dark age when Jews in show biz changed their names because they feared "real Americans" wouldn't accept the originals.

In the same piece, Rosenbaum wonders "whether Dylan would have become Dylan—despite all that talent—if he'd remained Zimmerman."

I think Rosenbaum has a great point when he writes:

Now, you have every right to wonder why I'm singling you out like this. I think it has something to do with what I like most about your show, which is that you, like the best satirists, focus on making fun of those who put up a false front. Not that Stewart is false in any malign sense of the word. (It was your middle name—well, Stuart was!) But that it's a kind of mask, and you spend most of your time making fun of the pretentious masks that politicians, celebrities, and big shots adopt.

You're all three now—a politician, a celebrity, and a big shot—in the sense that you have remarkable influence politically. In fact, pols and political writers often establish their identities in their appearances on your show because you have a way of exposing their authentic selves however inauthentic the "authenticity" is. They either pass or fail the Jon Stewart authenticity test. And now we learn from a new poll that you're the new Cronkite, the nation's most trusted news source. All the more reason not to use a name that doesn't completely pass the Jon Stewart authenticity test, does it right?