Friday Stuff

I want to digress from the way I usually start these posts with the videos and point out something (or someone, actually).

The individual pictured above is Arthur J. Finkelstein. I never knew anything about this person until I read this article in The New Yorker by Andrew Marantz about Viktor Orban of Hungary, which tells us the following (on how Orban rose to power)...

(Orban) enlisted (Finkelstein), a political consultant from Brooklyn who had worked to elect Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Ronald Reagan, among others. “Try to polarize the election around that issue which cuts best in your direction, i.e., drugs, crime, race,” Finkelstein wrote in a 1970 memo to the Nixon White House. In 1996, Finkelstein put this principle to work on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu, a candidate for Prime Minister of Israel who was then about twenty points down in the polls, and who started alleging that his opponent, Shimon Peres, planned to divide Jerusalem. This was a lie, but it stuck, and Netanyahu won. In 2008, Netanyahu introduced Finkelstein to his friend Orbán; Finkelstein became so indispensable that Orbán reportedly came to refer to him, dotingly, as “Finkie.” One of Finkelstein’s protégés later told the Swiss journalist Hannes Grassegger, “Arthur always said that you did not fight against the Nazis but against Adolf Hitler.” Orbán had been running against globalism, multiculturalism, bureaucracy in Brussels. These were abstractions. By 2013, Finkelstein had an epiphany: the face of the enemy should be George Soros.

So, if you’re looking for a link from the confrontational Republican party garbage of Tricky Dick all the way to the present moment of Trumpist insanity, Finkelstein might be the connection you’re looking for (another reason why I’m drawing attention to Finkelstein now is that yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of his death).

Modern movement conservatism IMO is built of equal parts stealth, deception, bombast, and every possible degradation of their opponents. And when it comes to the “stealth” part, it can only be beneficial as far as I’m concerned to take those responsible for the darkest deeds of this malign enterprise and drag them any legal way possible into the cold light of day. You can consider this my small attempt to do that in Finkelstein's case.

And as an example of what Finkelstein has wrought (along with many others to be fair), I give you that Trumpist loon Kari Lake, the Repug Party gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, talking about “BDE” (from the party that seeks to ban books all over the place because of alleged indecency)...Sam Seder of The Majority Report tells us more...



...and when it comes to crazy Republicans, I guess there really is no way to have a discussion like that without Marjorie Taylor Greene, who shows her tiny brain once more on the Green New Deal (concerning solar panels and wind turbines) and allegedly not being able to store renewable energy (Ana and Cenk of TYT tell us about it)...



...and as long as we’re near Georgia, let’s go a little further south into the land of Ron #DeathSantis, as Alex Wagner commendably does, speaking with a Florida teacher who recently was forced to take part in some ridiculous indoctrination scheme...in addition to the wingnuttery, this orientation they talk about is based on a lie (not surprising), since the First Amendment to the Constitution contains the Establishment Clause which quite literally says that the government shall not establish a national religion...



...and I’m not sure who this individual is who’s sitting in for David Pakman, but it looks like Madison Cawthorn’s replacement for the NC-13 congressional district (somebody named Bo Hines) is a chip off the old awful Repug block as it were, since he apparently doesn’t know what a banana republic is...not the most important issue out there I’ll grant you, but I think it’s telling all the same (and of course this numbskull MAKES it an issue when he tried to attack President Biden for allegedly not knowing what’s going on)...



Update 9/1/22: And speaking of Hines, this doesn't sound surprising at all.

...and apparently the entire police force of the town of Vincent in Shelby County, Alabama was suspended over texts mocking slavery were released – how many ways of “DUUUHHH!” are involved here I wonder (from Leah Cover of Rebel HQ)...



...and I’m not sure how I missed this the first time around, but somehow I did – sticking with Alabama, the Lawrence County Repug Party put up a Facebook post with what definitely appears to be 3 hooded KKK figures in the GOP logo, and of course the post has since been taken down...yeah, let me know when BLM or Antifa do something as inflammatory as this, OK...God almighty (Dr. Rashad Richey breaks it down with Yasmin Khan)...



...and I know we’ve had some fun this week with Mehmet (“CALL ME DOCTOR, DAMMIT!”) Oz and the Crudite/Veggie tray thing, but this is a serious look at food waste from Second Thought...and yeah, if you guessed that it has to do with the profit motive and what you would call second-hand food, then you win a free gift certificate good for any “Wegner’s” supermarket :-).

(“individual action isn’t the problem. The drive to always increase profits is,” indeed, and why am I not surprised that the IMF and the World Bank play into this? And by the way, I’m not including last week’s Second Thought video because it’s age-restricted on YouTube for some reason.)...



Update 8/24/22: Oz continues to be nothing but a clown (here).

...and it’s been awhile since I rocked out with a newer tune, so let’s give this a shot, OK?