kpete
kpete's JournalRUDE PUNDIT: 9/11 Knows America Lies to Itself
9/10/2021
9/11 hates these years the most. Every half-decade, the annual commemoration is amped up, as if some magic exists in numbers that end in 5 or 0. Every time, the same speeches, the same images, the same patriotic fervor in some places, the same performative sense of loss in others, the same, the same. The only part she feels still has any power is the reading of names. It has an incantatory quality, like a Buddhist prayer, with the timed striking of a sonorous bell. She feels something then. 9/11 is accustomed to feeling nothing anymore. She has been used and brutalized and caressed and beaten and loved and raped and paraded on high and dragged through the streets.
She was degraded regularly by George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani and the monsters and ogres of that time, forced on her knees to choke as they forced their anxious pricks into her mouth, desperate to steal her power for themselves. She was told to get out and perform for the Obama administration, to dance a whore's dance, to masturbate for the masses in order to justify the unending war done in her name. And through it all, every ceremony, every time she's been dragged out to take her defiled part in, she has appreciated the reading of names. Because then it isn't about them. It isn't about Bush or Cheney or Osama or, ludicrously, Saddam. It isn't about every TV demagogue trying to force finger her or every candidate for office slapping her ass. No. It's not about them. It's not even really about her. It's about heart-wrenching loss and soul-breaking hurt, which is all it really should be. The rest is worthless.
9/11 hates the lie that Americans desperately need to believe. She wants to scream at her TV or her iPad whenever a report comes on that talks about how the country "came together," how there was "unity," how we "cared about each other." 9/11 knows the purpose of this lie, to cover up the instant divisions in the nation, to bury the hatred that welled up in the streets and in the police precincts, to spackle over the holes in the American conscience that could justify everything that came after. They say, "Never forget" over and over, like a mantra of the deluded inside a rubber room, as if a country that is devoted to forgetting its real past, its evil and its racism and its violence and its cruelty, has to cling to this illusion of a moment in time, a fantasy of togetherness across party, across identities, across the world.
9/11 doesn't remember it the way the overheated politicians and the frothing media figures remember it. She remembers how Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld got harder than they had in years at the chance to blow shit up. She remembers how completely a spell was cast over the American people, with anyone opposing blowing shit up being labeled a traitor. She remembers how many other lies were told, about who was responsible, about what bombing the shit out of them would do, about how people had too much freedom in their lives and that it needed to be limited. She watched, even from the pied-a-terre near smoldering Ground Zero where Karl Rove had stashed her in so she could be conveniently and roughly sodomized by him whenever it seemed the public was straying from walking the War on Terror line, and she saw how immigrants were mistreated and stigmatized by the Bush administration, even as so much lip service was paid to not blaming those immigrants. Or Americans. 9/11 has felt all the savagery done in her name, every drone strike in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Sudan, all under the banner of fighting them there so they don't come here when, really, almost none of them want to come here. She has heard every civilian scream. She knows the faces of the tens of thousands upon tens of thousands who were killed, the payback for the almost three thousand killed on her birthdate, when she emerged, whole and adult, from the burning rubble that was made of poison.
.................
The Rest:
https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/09/911-knows-america-lies-to-itself.html
Abbott was struck down by the gods of irony shortly after writing this tweet
Greg Abbott
Biden’s vaccine mandate is an assault on private businesses.
I issued an Executive Order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether they get the COVID vaccine & added it to the special session agenda.
Texas is already working to halt this power grab.
https://foxnews.com/politics/biden-set-to-announce-vaccine-mandate-or-weekly-testing-for-companies-with-more-than-100-employees
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1436110694492082178?s=20
A+++ politician Twitter dunk
REP. CONOR LAMB:I guess Trump & Robert E. Lee both know how it feels to suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of pro-democracy forces in Pennsylvania.
https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/1435784274721050627?s=20
W.E.B. DuBois on Robert E. Lee
Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.
Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.
http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/30/w-e-b-dubois-on-robert-e-lee/
Well said Amy McGrath!
Amy McGrathFor starters, having Kellyanne Conway and Spicer on the board of any national academy where a main premise is an honor concept in which students do not lie, cheat, or steal is a slap in the face to those institutions and anyone who graduated from there, including myself.
https://twitter.com/AmyMcGrathKY/status/1435931378588213250?s=20
Australian media outlets liable for Facebook comments, court finds
Australian media outlets liable for Facebook comments, court finds (Reuters Sep08)
Australia's biggest news publishers including Rupert Murdoch's the Australian are responsible for comments that readers post on their corporate Facebook pages, the High Court ruled on Wednesday.
"The acts of the (media companies) in facilitating, encouraging and thereby assisting the posting of comments by the third-party Facebook users rendered them publishers of those comments," Justice Rothman found.
Voller had said that after stories referring to him were posted on the news companies' Facebook pages, a number of third-party Facebook users made defamatory comments and he alleged that the news outlets were liable as the publishers.
At the time the comments were published, Facebook did not allow page moderators to turn off comments on posts, however it has changed that.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/australian-media-outlets-liable-facebook-comments-court-finds-2021-09-08/
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United Airlines staff granted religious exemptions to vaccine mandate will be put on unpaid leave
United Airlines’ employees who are granted exemptions to a company vaccinate mandate for religious reasons will be put on temporary unpaid leave starting next month, the airline told staff Wednesday, citing the recent rise in Covid cases.
MORE:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/08/united-airlines-staff-granted-religious-exemptions-to-vaccine-mandate-will-be-put-on-unpaid-leave.html
PSAKI shreds Abbott
WELL DONE!!!
Psaki: If Governor Abbott has a means of eliminating all rapists or all rape from the US then there would be bipartisan support for that
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1435680182988263424?s=20
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