Ipse Race Loquitur: The Fact Speaks for Itself

 

Need we say more?

Donald Trump posted to Truth Social and Mad Dog thinks no actual analysis is necessary, but he cannot resist asking a few questions as we scroll through it.

"As everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades."

Really? I guess I'm not everyone, or anyone. What has Mad Dog been missing?

"Canada is building a massive bridge between Ontario and Michigan...What does the United States of America get--Absolutely NOTHING!"

Well, a bridge is not nothing. They didn't even ask us to pay for it. Sounds like a good deal. Did Mad Dog miss something?

"Prime Minister Carney  wants to make a deal to China--which will eat Canada alive. We'll just get the leftovers! I don't think so. The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate the Stanley Cup."

So, we've gone from a bridge between Canada and the US to China and from China to ice hockey. Sorry, Mr. President, you lost Mad Dog. Oh, wait, the bridge is named after an ice hockey player, Gordie Howe,  who was born in Canada, but played for an American team (without ever paying us tariffs.) Is that the problem? Gordie Howe played for an American team and he never paid any tariffs? And the Canadians did not name it the Donald Trump Is the Best President Ever bridge. Is that the real problem? And well it might be.

Also, did you notice the "we'll just get the leftovers?" Which is to say, Mr. Trump is not upset about China eating Canada--what he is concerned about is there won't be much left for America, nothing but leftovers.

So, maybe, it makes some sense after all. You just have to get into your Donald Trump mode of thinking. 

"I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with Fairness and Respect we deserve."

Well, Mad Dog is all for the Canadians treating us fairly, but, to be fair, we elected this dimwit: What respect do we deserve? 

Better Hockey Player than Gordie Howe

Running on Murder and Mayhem

 

My first day in middle school I met a girl named Diana, who even at age 12 I could see was gentry, aristocracy in our suburban community. 

Clear skin, shiny, bouncy hair, she was also clear eyed and saw the world with a merciless clarity borne of someone born to privilege who had seen the less appetizing aspects of the country club set.

Years later, she organized our high school class reunion, and she still had that capacity to see the world with merciless clarity. 

I asked her how the response had been, now 40 years after graduation and she said, "Well, there's 30% I've heard back from who are really pleased and eager to see everyone again. And then there's 30% who are just sort of somnolent, apathetic or maybe semi comatose, like, 'Oh? Is it that time again? Yeah, well, maybe I will come. But, really, who's coming? Yeah, let me get back to you. When is it, again?' And then,"  and Diana paused a beat, "And then the last 40% is just flat out insane."

I don't think there was anything  special about our high school class; it pretty much reflects what most of our country is like, if not demographically, at least psychologically. There's always been, at least since I've been around, just that 40% flat out insane in this berserk country of ours.

And, of course, it's that 40% who are MAGA and who elected Trump with a little help from that apathetic crowd.

But now the MAGA mob faces the prospect of running in the next election on murder and mayhem.

The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti aren't mentioned much in the newsfeeds and papers so much any more, but it's hard to fathom that these deaths will be just another evanescent news cycle.

Murder is not a news cycle. Murder is forever. There is no statue of limitations on murder for a reason. Eternity is a long long time.

Even the most semi-comatose had to see these ICE and BCP agents were sent there to do exactly what they did: commit murder and mayhem.

It wasn't just some unfortunate accident they shot Pretti. They intended to shoot Pretti. They were there to shoot find a  Pretti to murder, to establish who is boss. As a warning to others. 

Worst of the Worst

This is the Project 2025 plan, in execution. 

Rick Scott, the Republican Senator from Florida said it was unfortunate, but that's what happens when you do not bend the knee to the police, and that's what J.D. Vance and Pam Bondi said. That was the party line. It used to be, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear." Now it's, "If you just mind your business, keep your mouth shut, you have nothing to fear."

Stephen Miller said Pretti was a domestic terrorist intent on killing ICE, and so did Secretary Noem, but even some MAGAt's had trouble seeing any indication of that in the videos, shot from six different angles, all showing Pretti covering up a woman on the ground, who CBP agents had put there and then being shot in the back 10 times.

The 40% may think this is what Law and Order is. Murder is what Law and Order looks like.

They may have trouble selling that to the other 60%.

But that's the platform, that's where machismo leads you.

When Pete Hegseth, the MAGA macho man, renames the Department of Defense as the Department of War, that's what he's selling: murder and mayhem. 

That kind of axe throwing masculinity is phony as a three dollar bill, of course. Hegseth wants to be a "warrior," and you can see him giving that talk in front of actual warriors who did not so much as smile.  Hegseth looked like that little 7 year old Black kid on the NFL Superbowl ad, exhorting his stuffed animals, "I'm a beast! I'm a monster!"

Yup, that's what we got now, in Trump, in his cabinet from Bondi, to Hegseth, to Noem, to RFKJR to Bessent to Gabbard to Lutnick, not true warriors but true monsters.

The Pledge of Allegiance and Indoctrination

 

Why do we say the Pledge of Allegiance before public meetings in our town?

Mad Dog surely does not know, but he thinks it may have something to do with the reason we sing the national anthem before sports events: We are about to witness a contest, a conflict between different tribes, and singing the same song all together beforehand reassures us the fabric of what unites us is stronger than what is about to tear us asunder.

 You may scream for the Seahawks or the Yankees, and Mad Dog may root for the Patriots (ahem) and the Red Sox, but we have, as Obama pointed out in his most famous speech, more which unites us than that which divides us.

It's a cohesion ritual.

Mad Dog would be happier if we simply did not pledge allegiance to a flag, an inanimate idol which symbolizes an idea.

Mad Dog's wife is the daughter of a major general in the United States army. He was of "flag rank" which meant he could bring his two star flag to any ceremony or occasion he wished, and, in fact, when he arrived at his daughter's wedding which took place at the Naval station in Newport, R.I., he kicked himself that he had forgotten his flag, which he could have displayed in the front of the Navy chapel where the ceremony took place, along with all the dozens of other flags displayed there.

Mad Dog's wife was happy he had forgotten that flag. She has never permitted a flag to be flown on Mad Dog's house, despite Mad Dog's love for design and some flags are really wonderfully designed. "Flags divide people," she said. "That's the point of flags." She is a child of the 70's. 

Her father had to be called out of a meeting at the Pentagon because his daughter had been arrested. She had chained herself to a chain linked fence, along with the President of Mt. Holyoke College, protesting the war in Vietnam.

"I raised three sons and one daughter," her father told Mad Dog. "The three of them, in aggregate, never caused me half the trouble that one daughter did."

So no flags at Mad Dog's.

But what about that pledge, that ceremony of unity?

The "under God" phrase got added in 1954 at the height of the cold war against "godless communism," along with the "In God We Trust" motto which had been on coins since the Civil war but got expanded use during the cold war.

That motto, "In God We Trust," was derived from a visit by Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase after his visit to Brown University, where he noted the Latin phrase, "In Deo Speramus," which was part of the university's seal, appearing on libraries and various gates on campus, so Chase added it to coins to suggest God was on the Union side in 1864.

Patriot

Mad Dog's reservations about The Pledge are not so much about its phrasing, (apart from the violation of Church/State) but about easy patriotism.

As far as Mad Dog is concerned anything which is easy, is not patriotism.

Patriotism must involve risk or sacrifice or  work to be real.  Wearing an American flag lapel pin is too easy. It's a phony patriotism. Saying a pledge is too easy. 

Paying your taxes, not easy: Patriotism. Going off to war, definitely not easy: Patriotism. Demonstrating to stop the Vietnam war: Patriotism. Holding up a sign on a street corner against ICE: Patriotism. Voting to support the First Amendment on a School Board: Patriotism.

"We must all hang together or we shall surely hang separately," Ben Franklin said. 

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were actual Patriots. They pledged their lives and their fortunes and their "sacred honor" to each other and to their country. How puny a group of citizens saying, "I pledge allegiance to the flag," sounds compared to all that.

Patriot

Why is Mad Dog ranting about something so trivial as The Pledge? It is because of a conversation he had with someone who  said he was opposed to public schools, the whole idea of public education because it was "all indoctrination."

Mad Dog asked him what he meant by that word, "indoctrination." 

"Telling kids there are more than two sexes. Hauling some kid into the principal's office and suspending him because, on the bus ride home from Exeter High School, he got into an argument with a girl and he said, 'There are only two sexes,' and she reported him for that. And the principal said that kid had violated some code about respecting all kids and their feelings or whatnot."

The boy was suspended and not allowed to play in the weekend football game.

Mad Dog agreed this was a grievous violation of that Catholic boy's First Amendment rights in the name of some sort of purity test, some sort of creed. 

If all the students at Exeter High School are forbidden to question the proposition that "sexuality is fluid and there are more than two genders" then what is being taught  there is not free inquiry, but dogma.

One Patriot, Dozen Thugs

Ironically, the case which established the right of the individual to not embrace the party line came from New Hampshire, to the Supreme Court of the United States in Woolely vs Maynard, 1977. In that case Mr. Maynard, a Jehovah's Witness, said that his religion taught him to value life over all else, especially someone else's idea of what constitutes freedom, and he did not want to have to drive around with "Live Free or Die" on his license plate, a plate the state requires him to display, in effect requiring him to embrace the state's idea which conflicts with his own. He taped over the motto and was promptly arrested.

The Court found that the right to not speak, to not embrace a state belief, is integral to freedom of speech.

So what of  the child in school who refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag?

The most famous case was West Virginia v Barnette, where a child, also a Jehovah's witness, refused to pledge, and Justice Robert O. Jackson (of Nuremberg fame) wrote:

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

The state argued the Pledge was necessary for national cohesion in a time when differing opinions and beliefs were threatening to tear apart the nation.

But such insistence may, indeed, amount to indoctrination.

As Dave Chapelle said, "I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?" 

What the under educated principal of Exeter High School did was to insist a student embrace an orthodoxy rather than initiating a discussion of the idea of what gender is, if it differs from sex, chromosomal or preferential, and to seek a way students with different opinions could be brought to understand the other person's thinking. Exeter High School failed on every important level.

But that does not mean we have to fail in Hampton by opening meetings with a prayer or a pledge or anything other than, "Glad you all could attend today to do our town's business."

There is a determined core in the New Hampshire legislature right now, who want to destroy public schools, which they regard as nothing more than indoctrination centers. Of course, part of that coalition is determined to replace these government indoctrination centers with "protestant teachers" of the True Word, but that's another subject. 

The question is, what is "indoctrination" and how does it differ from "education?"

Mad Dog would venture that indoctrination seeks to teach a single version of any argument, whereas education, which means "a leading out" seeks to explore all aspects of every issue, to hear all sides and to weigh them and to allow the student to come to his or her--or "their" if you believe in all that-- own conclusions.

A Dog In The Fight

 

"Dying. And that's what these white boys been doing for three years, fool, dying by the thousands. Dying for you, boy. I know because I dug the graves."

--"Glory" the movie

Mad Dog has never much liked the expression "American exceptionalism," as if America is something unique over the 2,000 year history of nations on this planet, which have risen, fallen and blown away as dust in the wind. As if we Americans just so "special" like some pampered children of affluent parents. 

But there is one way in which America may be unique. Mad Dog does not know enough world history to be sure, but if there is another country in the world's history which has fought it's most costly, devastating war to free an underclass, a slave class, Mad Dog would like to know.

And they fought not for economic reasons, not for conquest, but for a simple principle: that all men should be free, that no man should be thought to be the property of another man, that a human being cannot be property. If any other nation has fought a great civil war to free a class of underdogs,  then Mad Dog would like to know it.

Oh, all the Lost Cause revanchists will try to tell you the Civil war was not about slavery (because they know they can't sell slavery as a good thing in the 20th century--although Margaret Mitchell tried in "Gone with the Wind,"--the way it was sold in the 19th century as the best thing for the slaves and for the naturally superior white race), and they'll tell you it was just an industrial North trying to subjugate an agrarian South, or that it was about any of a dozen things other than slavery. 

Well, Mad Dog was not alive then, so he cannot be sure. He can only read history. But who writes the history, and for what purpose? 

But Mad Dog believes a man who was alive then, who should know, and who summarized convincingly the cause of the war, Abraham Lincoln. In his Second Inaugural speech, with his assassin standing just a few yards behind him, visible in the photographs, Lincoln explained the cause of the war, and he said there was a "peculiar interest" not distributed evenly over the country, but concentrated in its southern parts, and that peculiar interest was the cause of the war. Of course, everyone knew then, and everyone should know now, what he was talking about: slavery. Nobody wanted the war, but as long as slavery existed, nobody could prevent it. "And the war came." Inexorably.

But not so inexorable: why should free White men in New Hampshire leave their farms and homes and jobs and families to go South to die at Antietam, Gettysburg and Shiloh? Walk through graveyards from Gilmanton to Hampton, and you'll see gravestones of men in their twenties who died between 1861 and 1865. Look at the bronzed plaques on Hampton town library and you'll see the names of men who served--and one of four died--in the regiment sent south. 

In the movie "Glory," an old Union Negro soldier (Morgan Freeman) gets in the face of a young hothead Negro soldier (Denzel Washington) who has been raging about the discipline from his white officers and Freeman tells the younger man that rage has blinded him to the good men can do, that these white boys have been dying in the thousands to free him and all his race for three years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLisMDlb8IE

That is the simple, powerful, astonishing truth.

And now we have White people in Minnesota dying to protect their Black neighbors, and we have White high school students from Winnacunnet High School holding signs on the street across from the Old Salt, denouncing the murderers, denouncing ICE, protesting murder of people in far off Minnesota by people who have only one argument, and that argument is blood.

It's sort of amazing really. White Minnesotan men and women in the faces of a masked white army of hatred. (Our very own Whitewalkers.)

Do those Minnesotans even have a dog in the fight? Well, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, they apparently think they do, and even before that they thought they had a dog in the fight.

And what is that fight?

It's White men, armed to the teeth with assault rifles beating up and absconding with Black people, out of hate, out of racial animosity.

There can be no doubt those ICE and CBP agents are not there to defend the borders. They are there to imprison and remove Black people on the orders of a White President who pictures even a Black President as an unevolved ape.

These shock troops of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, and J.D. Vance and Trump are the army of hate, fighting for white supremacy, fighting to dominate and subjugate.

And White people, who could just walk by it all, and go home and watch TV and cook dinner and ignore it all are not doing that. 

Not in Minnesota. 

Not in Hampton, New Hampshire.

If There Was Ever Any Doubt

 

Of all the things Trump obsesses over, Barack Obama has clearly got into his head most destructively.

The reasons are obvious: Obama is lean, still handsome, moves with the grace of an athlete, played basketball with no holds barred in the White House, and Trump is obese, barely able to make it up the side stairs to the stage. Obama is, and always has been effortlessly superior to the debauched and dissolute Trump.

But it goes way beyond the inferiority complex, the comparisons. It goes back to Obama's roasting of Mr. Trump at the White House Correspondents dinners, where President Obama eviscerated, humiliated and nothing of Trump but a greasy yellow spot. You can catch a glimpse of Trump, leaning forward in the dark, trying to disappear into a dot. He could never forgive such a public flaying. And Trump never attended a Correspondents dinner after that. 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nykVn_XAEks

Obama speaking of Trump's birther campaign, a clear attempt to say that Obama isn't really from here, not a true American, because, you know, he's Black, not to mention the Hussein thing and the Obama thing. 

Obama showed comically photoshopped images of Trump signs on the White House, to suggest Trump would try to put his name on the White House, which seemed funny back then, but, of course, today Trump demanded Reagan-Washington National Airport and Penn Station in New York be named after himself.

So, still seething, burning with humiliation and pain never staunched, Trump puts out an AI image as both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.

Nothing wrong with that. They are laughing in Alabama, parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. 

Oh, that Donald! He's one of us.

One has to wonder what all those Blacks for Trump are thinking now.

Atticus Finch Comes to Hampton, NH

 

Sometimes, people will surprise you.

In deepest Red Virginia, Hanover County, where Donald Trump carried the vote by 27 points, at a meeting of their county council, a throng of protesters demanded that the county not enter into an agreement with ICE to use an empty warehouse for ICE prisoners.

In Rockingham County, New Hampshire, a board comprised of three county commissioners, one Democrat (Katie Coyle) and two Republicans reversed itself, one Republican joining Ms. Coyle to defeat a contract to set up an ICE jail in the County.

Atticus Finch

And Wednesday night, in Hampton, NH, the school board defended its unanimous vote against recommending the adoption by the town of a warrant article to set up a slush fund for the town's Catholic school, using taxpayer dollars for a religious school. This, in a town where the biggest voting block is the Catholic church. This in a state where state vouchers for private schools, religious schools are draining away money from public schools.

During the Deliberative Session, each board member was attacked by name for what congregation members believed was betrayal, anti-Catholicism and personal immorality.

Who are these women? Mad Dog has met three of the five: Wendy Riga, the town librarian and the chairman of the Board, Candice O'Neill, an attorney in town, and Andrea Shepard who has voted for the warrant article in past years, whose husband voted for it when they were on the Board together. And Molly McCoy and Sarah Elliott with whom Mad Dog has only a nodding acquaintance. 

By the bizarre rules of the Deliberative Session, which does not allow for "back and forth" --heaven forbid public officials be allowed to reply to citizen's concerns directly--the Board members simply sat there looking at their detractors, as members of the congregation, impassioned alumni of the school, the school principal waged war against them. 

But they did not waver, did not reverse their votes, as they might have done.

They stood firm. Stood tall.

Mad Dog was inspired by the book, and even more by the movie, "To Kill A Mockingbird," where Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) , a town lawyer defends a Black man accused of molesting a white woman. The courthouse floor is packed with angry white men and women who want to drag his client, the accused, out to lynch him, but Finch methodically picks apart the case against his client, which is clearly fatally flawed, and it is obvious the man is innocent. But Finch goes further: he speaks to the assembled townsfolk and says, "But what is Tom Robinson's real crime? Why is he really sitting in this docket? His real, unforgivable crime in this town is having felt sorry for a White woman." 

There, he said it. 

Of course, the jury finds Robinson guilty anyway. There was never any question about what the townsfolk would do with respect to the verdict. 

When Atticus gathers up his stuff to walk out of the courtroom, he has to walk under the balconies where the Black folk, the town's Negroes are allowed to sit. Among the Negroes is Scout, the White daughter of Atticus. A woman next to her tells her, "Stand up, child. Your father is passing!" All the Negroes rise as Atticus walks by, mute tribute to a man who braved the censure, the hate of his fellow townspeople on behalf of a principle, on behalf of the law, the truth and something that rises above hatred and ignorance.

But that was fiction.

John F. Kennedy, before he was President, wrote "Profiles in Courage," a book about eight American politicians who held resolutely to principle, despite attacks from their own party and friends: among them Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. 

Mad Dog hopes that someday a course at the Academy, maybe Civics, maybe history, will teach Hampton students about these five Hampton women who stood up to the hostility--rocks were thrown at their homes--and intolerance of their own neighbors that Hampton children might learn about what makes a nation a nation of laws rather than one ruled by passions.

Separation of Church and State

 For some years, the town of Hampton has been embroiled in a controversy over the use of taxpayer funds to create a fund for the town's Catholic church school  

Citizens who decried this as a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment's prohibition of government establishing a religion were vilified as being motivated by deep seeded anti-Catholicism masquerading as concern over separation of church and state.

Every year someone warned that Catholics are protected by separation of church and state but were told Catholics do not need that protection and that the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution of the United States, echoing rants from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert that separation of church and state (SC&S) is simply not a thing, not a real principle or idea.

John F. Kennedy was quoted prodigiously by supporters of SC&S, as JFK recognized that without that protection, people would think that as Catholic he would be under the spell of the pope. But JFK was adamant that "public funds should never be awarded to any church or to any church school." Without that absolute guarantee, Kennedy argued, "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed...tomorrow it may be you."

So, defenders of SC&S protested they were concerned to safeguard Catholics, the congregation of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal did not believe that for a moment.

Principal of Sacred Heart

But now, in Concord, at the State House of Representatives, three state representatives have introduced an amendment to the New Hampshire Constitution to replace the guarantee of non interference by government in religious practice or support, of neutrality of government respecting religion:

Article 6: NH STATE CONSTITUTION

“BUT no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination. And every person, denomination, or sect shall be equally under protection of the law; and no subordination of any one sect, denomination or persuasion shall ever be established.”

And what the representatives want to replace this with is this:

“As morality and piety, right grounded on evangelical principles, will give the best and greatest security to government…the people of this state shall have a right to empower the legislature to authorize…religious societies within this state..for the support and maintenance of PUBLIC PROTESTANT teachers of piety, religion and morality.

At the Deliberative Session, a long time advocate for SC&S read this out. 

"If there was ever any doubt in your mind, that separation of church and state protects Catholic faith from attack, this amendment should be your answer."

The amendment does not say the state government should support Christianity, but Protestant Christianity.

Oddly enough, the members of the congregation, who testified as ardently as ever for the taxpayer slush fund for their Sacred Heart School, were unfazed by news of this amendment.

As is almost required by the format of these Deliberative Sessions, townsfolk talked past each other, never acknowledging they have even heard the other side.

Democracy in action, small town New Hampshire.

Go figure.