Dear Charles...........

So some guy posted a screed, um, essay allegedly by Charles Krauthammer, and I'd just like to take a few moments to respond. On closer review, I'm not entirely sure it is The Kraut's work, but let's go with it shall we?

"Charles" begins, "I do not understand how living in a country with its democracy established over 200 years ago, and now, for the first time in history, suddenly we have one of our former presidents set up a group called "Organizing for Action" (OFA)."

Er, OK Charles, let's go with this idea that organizing for action (aka encouraging citizens to show up and participate in their democracy) is somehow a bad thing. I have to wonder tho, what were your thoughts on the Tea Party.

So unless I'm mis-hearing Charles, the Tea Party was a valid political movement that was eventually integrated into the Republican tent, but OFA is somehow a huge problem? I totally see how you could come to that conclusion. [NOT!]

Charles writes, "OFA is 30,000+ strong and working to disrupt everything that our current president’s administration is trying to do. This organization goes against our Democracy, and it is an operation that will destroy our way of governing. It goes against our Constitution, our laws, and the processes established over 200 years ago. If it is allowed to proceed then we will be living in chaos very much like third world countries are run. What good is it to have an established government if it is not going to be respected and allowed to follow our laws?"

Me: So let me see if I have this right. The former Constitutional Law professor, Hussein, is setting up a public organization that "goes against our Constitution"? Erm, wat? Is it your contention Charles, that engaging with democracy at a grassroots level is somehow unconstitutional, undemocratic and likely to "destroy our way of governing"? This is your claim? Question: how do you feel about the Kochs and the massive slush fund they've set up for actual legislators? Hm? You have any trouble with billionaires giving enough money to legislators that even when 90+% of the populace is in favor of gun control we gets nothing? Even when 80+% of the society is in favor of some kind of Dream Act we gets nothing? Basically you're saying, as oh so many of your compères on the right tend to do, that big money on your side is democracy in action, but organized public engagement on the left side is undemocratic. 

Charles again: "If you had an army some 30,000 strong and a court system stacked over the decades with judges who would allow you to break the laws, how much damage could you do to a country? We are about to find out in America!"

Me: I'm endlessly fascinated by people for whom their way, the conservative way, is the only right and true way. I wonder Charles, when Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat, how did you feel? When de ijit in charge, aka 45, starting filling the courts with right wing folks - many of them woefully unqualified - placing them in seats left vacant because congress wouldn't approve Obama's picks for those seats. Did you think that our democracy was "at risk" then? Prolly not. Oh Charles, your hypocrisy, it's hanging out there like over-exposed body parts that nobody wants to see. 

Here's Charles again: "Our ex-president said he was going to stay involved through community organizing and speak out on the issues and that appears to be one post-administration promise he intends to keep. He has moved many of his administration's top dogs over to Organizing for Action."

Me: This here is so petty I ain't eem gonna comment. Truly, all I have in response is a giant Cooper eyeroll. 

via GIPHY

Charles goes on: "OFA is behind the strategic and tactical implementation of the resistance to the Trump Administration that we are seeing across America, and politically active courts are providing the leverage for this revolution."

Me: Charles, oye vey! Seriously?! Do you actually believe this tripe or do you get paid by the word? Do you really think that the objections to DiJiT is centrally organized? Do you truly find it so hard to believe that people find your guy deeply objectionable in about ten thousand different ways? My guess is that if you weren't so wedded to your own power and privilege, you too might have the common decency to object to a great deal about 45. "Sh*thole"? "Muslim ban"? Unraveling civil rights left, right and center? I suppose you'll only be perturbed if he comes for the rights of some group of which you are a part. Oppression is only oppressive when it oppresses you directly. This is the problem with folk like you Charles. A thing ain't a thing until it's a thing to you. Well, hold tight brother, your turn may yet come. Niemöller was right. He was then and he'll be right again any day now. 

I'm not going to waste any of my words trying to respond to your "politically active court" comment because what would be the point? 

Charles continues: "OFA is dedicated to organizing communities for "progressive" change. Its issues are gun control, socialist healthcare, abortion, sexual equality, climate change, and of course, immigration reform."

Me: Well, I'm not sure where you're going with this Charlie, but so far no lies detected.

Charles: "OFA members were propped up by the ex-president's message "Organizing is the building block of everything great we have accomplished Organizers around the country are fighting for change in their communities and OFA is one of the groups on the front lines. Commit to this work in 2017 and beyond.

OFA's website says it obtained its "digital" assets from the ex-president's re-election effort and that he inspired the movement. In short, it is the shadow government organization aimed at resisting and tearing down the Constitutional Republic we know as AMERICA."

Paul Sperry, writing for the New York Post, says, “The OFA will fight President Donald Trump at every turn of his presidency and the ex-president will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House."

Sperry writes that, “The ex-president is setting up a shadow government to sabotage the Trump administration through a network of non-profits led by OFA, which is growing its war chest (more than $40 million) and has some 250 offices nationwide. The OFA IRS filings, according to Sperry, indicate that the OFA has 32,525 (and growing) volunteers nationwide. The ex-president and his wife will oversee the operation from their home/ office in Washington DC.

Me: Oh well, so much for the "no lies". "Shadow government"? For the love of heaven Charles! Get a damn grip! Shadow government? What kind of Faux Nooze nonsense is that? "Command them" from his "bunker"? Holy lolly guacamole! Where to start? So much hogwash! 

Question: where was Paul Sperry when the Kochs were giving the Speaker of the Damn House $500,000 shortly after the tax bill that serves them so well was passed? Hm? Where were you? What are your and Sperry's views of the Kochs funding grassroots campaign organizing or is that A-OK with you? And if it is OK, why is that organizing better than OFAs? And you're complaining at a paltry $40 million being spent on progressive causes, what were your thoughts on the $889,000,000 the Kochs spent in the 2016 cycle? No problems there I'm sure. Your hypocritic oath is peeping out again. (That's a dig at Krauthammer's former profession. He's a trained psychiatrist.)

This entire screed is filled with the kind of "The sky is falling!" bs rhetoric for which the right has become known over the last eight years. It's not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. It's toxic to the system frankly and it has brought us to where we are today, with a dangerously incompetent and probably mentally unstable man at the helm of a nuclear-armed nation, duly aided and abetted by white nationalists and surrounded by sycophants like yourself. Lovely. 

But never mind those challenges, it is Obama who remains the problem. Obama's efforts to activate the passions of citizens is, to Krauthammer's thinking, is what's gonna break America, not racism, not misogyny, not patriarchy, not homo- and transphobia, not extra-judicial police killings, not a lack of health care or more broadly a lack of empathy for the least of us. Nope. None of those are the problem, an engaged citizenry that's what's gonna break America. 

What becomes ever clearer as folk like Charles Krauthammer (or who-the-hell-ever-this-really-is) write and speak, is that they believe that democracy is only for some people. As far as they and their ilk are concerned, broad participation and engagement is a bad thing. So much for any claims about freedom and the virtues of democracy. It's all bullshit. Clearly. 

What they really want is for a small group of like-minded individuals to make all the decisions and for the rest of us to just shut up and know our place. Yeah, that ain't happenin'. 

You sir, are a hypocrite and an ass. Clearly you're taking that hypocrites oath seriously. It shows. 

Immigration: a pox on this house apparently

A friend asked me recently what the import of Black History Month might be to Caribbean-American immigrants and before I had time to formulate a series of intelligent thoughts, the 45th spake and in his speaking the reality was made known: MLK Day and Black History are life to the transplant, the immigrant - documented or not - to the POC native born or adopted, because people like the resident of the WH are out there and they have become far more bold in the last 12 months.

Some of us from developing nations come to the United States and take the view that the struggle for Black equality & justice here is not ours. We come knowing ourselves to be equal. We believe that our equal-ness will be evident and it will carry the day. Some of us choose not to know, and choose not to care, about the battle for the soul of this nation. We are here to participate in its bounty. We are here to work hard, pay our taxes and make our way smartly to the top. We are immigrants! We know about hard work and are willing to do it. Why have we need to participate in the freedom struggle of African-Americans? That's their journey not ours, or so we think. And then men and women like 45 come to town and we discover that we could not be more wrong.

When a sitting president can refer to economically challenged nations as sh*tholes, it's clearly past time for immigrants to sit up and take notice to the struggle.

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In October 2016, in an interview about the Saint Cloud, MN stabbings, the Donald said that Somali immigrants present a cancer from within in our society. What was the cancer? The cancer was immigrants. 

Between the October 2016 event and the events of the second week of January 2018, attacks against immigrants (especially Muslims or individuals who are thought to be Muslim) have increased. But this is of no moment to 45. While he has had time to create a VOICE - victims of immigration crime engagement - office, he has little to nothing to say about harms being visited upon us. We are a pox on his house after all.

Within the last two weeks, the Resident of the House of White has offered that Haitians all have AIDS and that the entirety of Africa, along with El Salvador and Haiti, are shitholes. (I'm going to presume that any and all non-White non-native born persons are also from shitholes, perhaps lesser shitholes, but shitholes all the same.) Poxes are Us.

And so while Republicans continue to hem and haw over whether their dear leader is in fact a racist; while White journalists continue to wrestle with the label 'racist'; while folk like Rand Paul continue to hair-split and claim that calling Donny a racist will harm the advancement of this or that piece of legislation, it behooves us Sh*tholians from Sh*thole lands near and far, to see these things for what they are and to understand where we need to stand at this time of existential crisis in our adopted nation.

Immigrants must be as invested in the freedom & justice struggle as the native born POC and if we didn't know that before this week, we know it now. Equality and justice are absolutely our fight too. MLK is our champion too. Black History is our history too, even if only after the fact.

There are but two sides to freedom struggles: for and against. There is no Switzerland. And as immigrants, we'd better be ready to suit up and pick the 'for' side because while the 'against' side may not harm us today, it surely will come for us tomorrow. (cf. Martin Niemoller).


The reason we immigrants are immigrants in the first place, is that First World policies towards our home countries have so hampered our growth; have so destabilized our politics, that this was our remaining choice: relocate right into the belly of the very beast that has sought our deaths. The lucky among us are able to do so legally, the not-so-lucky do not have that choice. Are our homes sh*tholes? That depends who you ask and what metrics you use. I'm not about that today but I've written about that here.

Yes, we who have relocated must acknowledge the dissonance of tying our fortunes to the very thing that has destroyed the fortunes of our countrymen. But we make the move, we immigrate, because the urge to survive is strong. Ask any Native American about survival. Read a slave narrative on what men and women have done to survive. The survival instinct ain't called an 'instinct' for sh*ts and giggles.

When a person in authority talks of cancers and of sh*tholes, maybe that individual should consider that perhaps the real cancer is in his nation treats foreigners and refugees? Maybe the true sh*tholery is in the extortion and economic violence meted out by his nation to less powerful ones? Maybe the real cancerous shitholery is in the way colonialism has stolen from others to enrich a few great men and make a few great nations? Maybe the cancer is the speaker's ignorance?

Whatever the source of the thinking that gave rise to those words, new immigrants; old immigrants; first gen Americans with hyphenated American parents; second gen Americans with strong native accents, are being reminded that the fight for justice for the children of Sojourner and Harriet; Martin and Malcolm is absolutely our fight too, not simply because the current resident of the House of White said what he said, but because there are so many people who quietly agree.

Niemöller was right, first they came for the communists. We may not be communists, or socialists, but we're definitely on the list. They will come for us. Correction, they are coming for us already. 




Garcia (above) was deported after living in this county 30 years. Brought here as a child. Married. Two children. Deported on MLK Day. 

There is surely a pox on this  house, but we who are new here are not it. We reveal it. That is all. 

A quick thought about sh*tholes....

If the developing world is full of sh*th*les (otherwise known as struggling economies), may I just point out that that's because the developed world has stolen every good thing from them? And bombed or otherwise sabotaged whatever they couldn't steal?

If a country is a sh*thole, trust and believe that either Europe or the United States has dug the latrine and deposited their waste therein.

If the developing world is sending its shitholians to your shores and you'd prefer they not come and toxify your pristine environment, may I perhaps suggest that you invest in disincentives to immigration like say, foreign policy that doesn't turn their countries into desert wastelands; doesn't denude their green spaces; toxify their air and water; doesn't turn their people into 21st century slaves making shitty products that they themselves will never own?

Just a thought.

Let's be truthful shall we? Immigrants immigrate for opportunity. Opportunities not available where they are are typically unavailable because powerful nations have so tilted the scales in their favor that desperation is the lot of the majority of the poor in those countries. Middle and upper class people in Sh*tholia either choose immigration for educational opportunity or choose to remain in sh*tholes because they can be safe and comfortable. Poor people grab opportunities for immigration (legal or illegal) when the imperative is survival. 

If you want to discourage immigration, maybe you should consider discontinuing your colonialist policy (and paying reparations for the centuries of harm you have done).

Just a thought.