Donald Trump is a liar - echo opinion from Missouri

Echo opinion letter published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in Missouri- identifying "Trump's scum".

Lost in the endless barrage of presidential Trumpzi tweets, there is one that is so outrageous and offensive that we cannot and must not overlook it.

Angered by the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry, Donald Trump recently tweeted that Rep. Adam Schiff (IMO, Representative Schiff is the equivalent of the Eliot Ness, in his relentless exposure of the failed Donald Trump corruption) is (not!) a liar and then tRumph admonished Republicans to “Keep fighting tough, Republicans, you are dealing with human scum.”  (IMO, Donald Trump is the equivalent of political swamp scum.)

Is this what we have come to now, that we accept words like this from our president? That politicians from the opposing party are human scum? They are wrongly labeling, "Our fellow Americans"?*  Who? Is tRump labeling "His fellow Americans"? Why haven’t Republicans objected to these despicable words? Is this the “new normal”, a toxic condition that we are told we are living under?

I fervently hope not! Moreover, I urge everyone to contact their senators and representative and let them know that Trump’s tweets are unacceptable.

Fron Ruth C. Bauer in Kirkwood, Missouri

*First They Came- the poetic form of a prose post-war confession, first made in German in 1946, by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy (including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself) following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Hate and domestic US terrorism: an echo history essay

Transcending dangerous times, an echo essay: 

Domestic terrorism -Reigns of Terror in America

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/reigns-of-terror-in-america

From a 1958 synagogue bombing in Atlanta to the events of recent weeks, the bloody-mindedness of broken men can be countered only by principle and fortitude.
By The New Yorker journalist Jill Lepore in print and podcast
November 4, 2018

"First They Came"

This article with an accompanying podcast was found while I was cleaning up past The New Yorker issues, as they accumulated in my "to read" pile. Indeed, Lepore's essay is even more relevant than when it was written, because several other hate crimes have occurred since last year, in 2018, when it was published.  

As I blog, the narrative, in my mind, can be summarized with the tragically familiar message by Martin Niemöller in "First They Came"* (See text at the end of this essay).  

Although Pastor Niemöller begins the stanza by identifying "socialists", in fact, the noun can be substituted with the name of any group being targeted for hate crimes.

Echo essay by Jill Lepore- On Friday, May 9, 1958, Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild, of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, in Atlanta, delivered a sermon called “Can This Be America?” Crosses had been burned and men had been lynched, but Rothschild was mainly talking about the bombs: bundled sticks of dynamite tied with coiled fuses. In the late nineteen-fifties, terrorists had set off, or tried to, dozens of bombs—at black churches, at white schools that had begun to admit black children, at a concert hall where Louis Armstrong was playing, at the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. One out of every ten attacks had been directed at Jews, at synagogues and community centers in Charlotte, in Nashville, in Jacksonville, in Birmingham. In March, 1958, about twenty sticks of dynamite, wrapped in paper yarmulkes, had exploded in an Orthodox synagogue in Miami. The blast sounded like a plane crash.

“Our first duty is not to allow ourselves to be intimidated,” Rothschild told his congregation. Five months later, some fifty sticks of dynamite exploded at his temple, Atlanta’s oldest, blowing a twenty-foot hole in a brick wall, toppling columns, shattering stained-glass windows. “We bombed a temple in Atlanta,” a man claiming to be from the “Confederate Underground” said, when he telephoned the press that night. “Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens.”

Rothschild grew up in Pittsburgh, in Squirrel Hill. His family went to Temple Rodef Shalom, just blocks away from the Tree of Life Synagogue, where eleven people were recently shot and killed during services. Robert Bowers, the man charged in the case, had repeatedly posted on social media about a Jewish aid organization he thought was helping refugees cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The shooting followed a series of mail bombs sent to prominent critics of the President, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc, Jr., a Florida man whose white van was plastered with Trump stickers. In the days after these atrocities, Donald Trumpannounced his intention to end birthright citizenship—to declare, by executive order, that millions of U.S.-born children are aliens. Can this be America?

Rothschild, the liberal from Pittsburgh, moved to Atlanta to take up his pulpit in 1946, the year that a white-supremacist organization was founded in the city. The Columbians asked potential members three questions: “Do you hate Negroes? Do you hate Jews? Do you have three dollars?” On Yom Kippur in 1948, Rothschild sought to stir his congregation out of its silence. “There is only one real issue,” he said. “Civil rights.” The reign of terror Rothschild decried in 1958 had begun four years earlier, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, when White Citizens Councils began forming across the South to oppose desegregation. And then the bombings started, targeting the institutions that hold societies, and nations, together: schools, houses of worship, newspaper offices.

Standing at the site of the Atlanta temple blast, Mayor William B. Hartsfield declared, “Every political rabble-rouser is the godfather of every sneaking cross-burner and dynamiter at work in the South today.” In the Atlanta Constitution, the syndicated columnist Ralph McGill wrote, “To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple or a school. But let it be understood that when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take law into their hands.” The F.B.I. investigated, as Melissa Fay Greene recounts in a book about the bombing, and five men were arrested. The American Nationalist, a California newspaper, ran a story that announced, “synagogue bombing a fraud: Jewish Groups Use Bomb Incident to Confuse Gentiles.” Only one man, George Bright, was ever tried; he was acquitted. McGill won a Pulitzer Prize. “If you call that a prize,” Bright scoffed. “Pulitzer was just a Jew.”

America’s latest reign of terror began not with Trump’s election but with Obama’s, the Brown v. Board of the Presidency. “Impeach Obama,” yard signs read. “He’s Unconstitutional.” In 2011, Trump began demanding that Obama prove his citizenship. “I feel I’ve accomplished something really, really important,” Trump told the press, when, that spring, the White House offered up the President’s birth certificate. This fall, Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, fell into the same trap. For the five years of Trump’s campaign for political attention, leading up to the 2016 election, and for the first two years of his Administration, attempts to fight Trump on his debased terms have only strengthened him.

Rothschild delivered a sermon to his congregation the Friday after the bombing, its title taken from the Book of Ezekiel: “And None Shall Make Them Afraid.” Eight hundred people crowded into the blasted synagogue. “Never did a band of violent men so misjudge the temper of the objects of their act of intimidation,” Rothschild said. “Out of the gaping hole that laid bare the havoc wrought within, out of the majestic columns that now lay crumbled and broken, out of the tiny bits of brilliantly colored glass that had once graced with beauty the sanctuary itself—indeed, out of the twisted and evil hearts of bestial men has come a new courage and a new hope.”

Courage and hope are not the language of Trump’s most vociferous political opponents. Blame and grievance are their language, the language of the times, the grammar of Twitter, the idiom of Trump, the taste of bile. Trump’s critics have often answered his viciousness with their own viciousness, his abandonment of norms with their abandonment, his fear-mongering with their fear-mongering, his unwillingness to speak to the whole of the country with their own parochialism.

But the bloody-mindedness of deranged and broken men can be countered only by principle and fortitude. Rothschild once introduced Dr. King at a banquet in Chicago. King, he said, had been met with “wild thunder.” Never did he speak with more thunder than during his Christmas Eve sermon in 1967, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, not far from Rothschild’s temple. “If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves,” King said. “There have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means really aren’t important,” he said. “But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.” 

Another tree has been cut down. May a new seed be sown. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the November 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “This America.”

Jill Lepore is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of history at Harvard University. 


*Martin Niemöller was born in the Westphalian town of Lippstadt, Germany, on January 14, 1892. In 1910 he became a cadet in the Imperial German Navy. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Niemöller was assigned to a U-Boat, of which he was eventually appointed the commander. 

Under the stipulations of the armistice of November 11, 1918, that ended hostilities in World War I, Niemöller and other commanders were ordered to turn over their U-Boats to England. Along with many others, Niemöller refused to obey this order, and was, as a consequence, discharged from the Navy.

In 1920, he decided to follow the path of his father and began seminary training at the University of Münster.

Niemöller enthusiastically welcomed the Third Reich. But a turning point in Niemöller's political sympathies came with a January 1934 meeting of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller, and two prominent Protestant bishops to discuss state pressures on churches. At the meeting it became clear that Niemöller's phone had been tapped by the Gestapo (German Secret State Police). It was also clear that the Pastors Emergency League (PEL), which Niemöller had helped found, was under close state surveillance. Following the meeting, Niemöller would come to see the Nazi state as a dictatorship, one which he would oppose.
The Quotation

Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation:

First they came for the socialists (immigrants, Muslims, Democrats) and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I predict Donald Trump is now marginalizing American Catholics

American Catholic Bishops are facing the prophetic revelation described in "First They Came"
by Martin Niemöller~ Donald Trump is challenging their "loyalty"

Confidant of Pope Francis offers scathing critique of Trump’s religious supporters

(AP) A close confidant of Pope Francis, writing Thursday in a Vatican-approved magazine, condemned the way some American evangelicals and their Roman Catholic supporters mix religion and politics, saying their worldview promotes division and hatred.

The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, editor of the influential Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, said a shared desire for political influence between “evangelical fundamentalists” and some Catholics has inspired an “ecumenism of conflict” that demonizes opponents and promotes a “theocratic type of state.”

Spadaro also took aim at conservative religious support for President Donald Trump, accusing activists of promoting a “xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations.” Trump has sought to bar travelers from six Muslim-majority countries and vowed to build a wall on the Mexican border.

The article, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism: A Surprising Ecumenism,” was co-written by a Presbyterian pastor, the Rev. Marcelo Figueroa, who is editor of the Argentine edition of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in the pope’s native country.

Articles in La Civilta Cattolica are reviewed and approved by the Vatican Secretariat of State. Under Francis, who is a Jesuit, the publication has become something of an unofficial mouthpiece of the papacy.

The political alliance between Catholics and American Protestants that is at the heart of Spadaro’s article emerged in the late 20th century.

Anti-Catholic bias once split members of the two traditions, both religiously and politically. But in the 1980s and ’90s, some conservative religious leaders built an affiliation over such issues as abortion and marriage, culminating in a 1994 declaration written by the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran who converted to Catholicism, and Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon turned born-again Christian.

Spadaro said this relationship has “gradually radicalized,” dividing the world into only good and evil and providing theological justification for a type of “apocalyptic geopolitics” advocated by such figures as White House adviser Steve Bannon, who is Catholic. (OMG~ #SteveBannon is "whaaaa?"....he's not Catholic, he's just evil.)

Spadaro specifically criticized the far-right Catholic American media organization ChurchMilitant.com. Spadaro said the media outlet framed the presidential election as a “spiritual war” and Trump’s ascent to the presidency as “a divine election.” (MaineWriter~ OMG, I'm a Roman Catholic and totally disagree with this description!!)

Michael Voris, who founded the outlet, said in an interview that he was shocked by the article.

“Here’s a fellow who is accusing us of trying to use the church to push a political agenda, which is completely absurd,” Voris said, when “they are using a leftist agenda to pursue leftist goals.”

Some political conservatives have accused Pope Francis of promoting socialism or Marxism, a characterization he rejects. 

The pope has frequently lashed out at the injustices of capitalism and the global economic system, and has urged governments to redistribute wealth to the poor.

Spadaro’s critique also appears aimed in part at America’s Catholic bishops, who have fought for religious exemptions from gay marriage laws and other measures church leaders consider immoral, and have often characterized those with opposing views as wishing to persecute Christians.

Spadaro wrote that “erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat.” But he warned against mounting a defense of religious liberty in “fundamentalist terms.”

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, who leads the U.S. bishops’ advocacy on religious liberty, said in an interview that the article doesn’t mention the U.S. bishops and refers only to “a very narrow band of ecumenical relationships.”  (Hello?  I think Archbishop Lori is doing a major political side-step.)

American bishops work on a broad range of issues that reflect Catholic social teaching, not any other theology, Lori said.

Dear American Catholic Bishops- Donald Trump is evil, just so you know.  Stop supporting him before we Catholics are the victims of the prophetic message in "First They Came".

Frankly, I believe Donald Trump is marginalizing American Catholics to oppose the opposition he is experiencing from Mormons who oppose his anti-immigration agenda.  

I am disappointed by American Catholic Bishops, who are still supporting Donald Trump, while he is behaving like an evil and bigoted idiot.