I Am A Jew, And They Want Me Dead.

I am a Jew, and they want me dead.

By gas, by stone, or bullet in my head,

I am a Jew, and Ye & Q want me dead.

I am the Universal Scapegoat,

The object of Hitler’s hate;

The bone in Father Coughlin’s throat,

Eternal enemy of their “faith.”

I am a Jew, and they want me dead,

Christian Nationalists, Fascists of dread.

Unable to convert me,

Their “final solution” is to hurt me.

I am the Enemy of Their State

Of mind, so blind to anything but hate.

I think, therefore, I am humanity —

Challenging their poison of insanity.

I am a Jew. Crazed Savonarolas want me dead.

Not because of what I said, but for how I pray & think.

“Christian Nations” hell-bent on purifications,

Pushing democracy and people, over the brink.

To them, I am the fault for all their failure,

The brunt of all their blame,

Resentment is their deranged jailor,

Vile actions recognize no shame.

I am a Jew, and Ye & Q want me dead;

To Def-Com our world with violence and strife.

Unwilling to learn what’s in our head —

That to be a Jew, is to improve all life.

In filmmaker Ken Burns’ remarkable documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust: A History to be Reckoned With, the truth about America’s culpability in the slaughter of 6 million Jews is carefully documented in devastating detail.  

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It may be the first time the story was told with such excruciating exactness on American television, where human brutality toward fellow humans is usually sanitized before being televised.

Burns, a master at making history come alive, wanted no part of sanitizing this particularly grotesque part of U.S History.  In fact, he insisted on moving the documentary’s release date up from 2023 to before the 2022 mid-term elections, “because I felt the urgency that we needed to be part of the conversation.”

Calling “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” his most important work, Burns has not been reluctant to say why.  In an interview with The Guardian last month when his documentary premiered on PBS, Burns said:

“We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with anti-Semitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and eugenics.  We’re obligated then NOT to close our eyes and pretend this is some uncomfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.”   

 Burns and his team had plenty of original material to mine– in 30 race-based Jim Crow laws enacted throughout the US following the Civil War to systematically deny Blacks—state-by-state— federal constitutional rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; and, the blatantly racist U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Asian immigrants and dramatically reduced the number of Jews, Italians and other non-Nordic people allowed into the US.  

Many of those state and federal statutes were drafted by members of the Ku Klux Klan—at their peak of power in 1924, when 50,000 hooded hoodlums marched through the streets of Washington, DC.    The Klan’s chokehold on Congress and State Legislatures was eerily similar to how today’s MAGA-made legislators, Governors, and dark-money groups, are behind the drafting, passage and implementation of contemporary race-hate laws and actions against immigrants, voter suppression laws designed to repress the Black vote, and draconian limits on the healthcare rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community.

In fact, Adolf Hitler and his cult of fanatic, anti-democratic criminals—also captivated by Blood Red and black symbols made famous by the Confederate Flag and later mimicked by MAGA imagery—used America’s Jim Crow laws, anti-immigrant fervor, and American genocide against Native Americans, as their inspirations for codifying the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews.  If a democracy like the United States could deny legal rights to and murder people on the basis of race, then surely a newly elected Fascist government in Germany could do the same.

In the meticulously researched book by Yale Law School Professor James Q. Whitman, entitled “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of the Nazi Race Law” (Princeton University Press, 2017, Princeton, NJ) the horrifying details are spelled out, of how the Nazis copyied American legal precedence to justify their plan to annihilate the Jews. 

Hitler couldn’t believe his good fortune when Nazi lawyers presented him, after his election in 1933, with the evidence that even a “great” democracy like the United States of America, believed in racial purity.   Yale’s Professor Whitman shows — through never before published material and verbatim transcripts — how the Nazis, as early as 1920, were inspired by the American States’ Jim Crow laws and increasingly xenophobic Federal anti-immigrant laws.

 The Nazis were so inspired by these American laws reflecting our “racial madness” that they based the Nuremberg Laws upon them — sham “laws” which resulted in systematic dehumanization and eventual annihilation of 6 million Jews.

 Professor Whitman uncovered the transcripts of debates among Nazi lawyers, drafting early versions of the Nuremberg Laws, which revealed that even the most radical Nazis thought that America’s anti-miscegenation laws against Blacks, “went too far.” Until, of course, the Nazis went even more insane, making interracial marriage with someone even slightly Jewish  punishable by death.

Ironically, as Burns illustrates in this explosive documentary—and in his earlier masterpiece entitled The Civil War–the Jim Crow laws were the law of the land in the Confederacy of the U.S. prior to 1865 and formed the basis for a Civil War.  That war, witnessed an illegal, violent militia of White Supremacists commit armed treason against the government of the United States, resulting in the deaths of more than 365,000 official U.S. Army troops.  That number of deaths almost equaled the number of American soldiers (400,000) killed while battling Fascism abroad, during WWII.

 But the U.S. Civil War, and America’s racist Jim Crow laws, weren’t the only inspirations for the Nazis that were made in the USA.

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf how thrilled he was by the United States willingness to commit genocide against Native Americans in order to achieve America’s “Manifest Destiny” and acquire new territory. The Nazi’s would later use America’s “gunning down of redskins” (Hitler’s own words), the racist slaughter and aerial bombing of hundreds of Black Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood Neighborhood (“Black Wall Street) in 1921, and the Klan’s Immigration Act of 1924, as justification for murdering Jews.

Burns unapologetically links the spread of authoritarianism, racism, and anti-Semitism with the life and death threats being posed to democracy today. He is unafraid to end his three-part series with scenes from the blatantly anti-Semitic “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, or the armed attack on the United States Government and Capitol police by maniacal Trump supporters on January 6, 2021:

“The story of the Holocaust reminds us of the fragility of democracies…Certainly lots of the smoke that preceded the American Civil War is proceeding now:  the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric, the isolated, sporadic incidences of violence. That’s true also of Nazi Germany…the time to save a democracy is BEFORE it’s lost.”

Think of the vilest villains

Who have disfigured the faces

Of nightmarish graphic novels, movie screens,

Or other such rot.  Than, think of Rick Scott.

If Lex Luthor & Voldemort

Mixed their twisted sperm into a test-tube,

And steamed it in a fetid swamp for

Many months or years, or what,

The end result would be…Rick Scott.

His glowing orb, fresh from the Dark Lagoon,

Sucked life from ailing humans far too soon,

Hissing his seductive tune of health care savings each day,

Killing them harshly, through Columbia HCA.

A mere warm-up for the spawn of Voldemort & Lex,

His deprivation of care, sheer insanity.

How easily Scott shilled the slimy hex,

Manipulating it, Mengele-like, against humanity.

Crazed Eyes ablaze with dollar signs,

Gleefully pulling the plug on yours and mine.

 Then, foraging for more to defraud, or scare,

Scott’s ghoulish-gaze grabbed Medicare.

With Frankensteinian flare,

He raped and pillaged taxpayers bare.

His scandalous fraud hit the multi-billion $$ scale,

So Scott “Fifthed” away the truth 75 times, cheating jail.

The cretinous creation of Voldemort & Lex,

Dripping with dirty wealth, limped close to political death.

His continued existence could not look horrider—

So, of course, he became Governor, then Senator, of Florida.

If Medicare was ripe to raid,

The State of Florida was tailor-made

For the soul-less son of Slytherin.

Pots of Gold to gorge on, from ESCAMbia to Dade.

Slithering into the Everglades,

Disappearing into the Upside Down—

Ferretting away tax money he filched

From Florida’s workers, cities and towns.

The Sunshine State was blinded

By the reflection from his pate,

By his attack on the words “Climate Change,”

And other objects of Scott’s scornful hate.

From The Villages to South Beach,

They dozed while Scott’s wealth tripled.

His hurricanes of self-dealing, his Naples mansion,

Causing barely a political ripple.

With blistering Daytona-like speed,

Few could keep pace with Scott’s lying and greed.

He force-fed the State a pipeline, in which his family invested,

And, directed State Workers to his company to get mandatory drug tested.

He rejected Fed. billions for FLA. for a high-speed train,

So he and his wife could, invest privately, get All Aboard and capital gain.

No-bid Scott, loved controlling State contracts,

Enriching himself and his contacts, who bankrolled his campaigns.

From I-95, through the marshes of sawgrass,

Drivers though Florida pay for travel with SUNPASS.

So, of course, Scott personally profits from every cent,

Through his “No-bid” company which owns SUNPASS, named Conduent.

While Florida floods, and its citizens drown,

 Scott, “not-a-scientist” gives climate change two-thumbs down;

Yet, pockets ALL the other change that he can find around.

Making money off of misery; such evil is unbound.

###

Through the miracle drug of television, video and never-ending internet  photo files, the once Great and Powerful Dr. Oz, has made himself the laughing stock of this year’s 2022 Elections.  I doubt if even Oprah will have anything to do with him anymore.

Shortly after Dr. Oz of New Jersey declared his candidacy for the US Senate Seat in Pennsylvania last year, I wrote about how the mere thought of the synthetic, slippery Wizard of Oz, Donald Trump’s  hyper Hydroxychloroquine cheerleader,  turning that cradle of American Democracy into its crypt, was enough to make me want to swallow some of Oz’ ostracized Green Coffee Beans.

This year, Jon Fetterman—a brilliant, humorous, no-bullshit Democratic Candidate for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat—has masterfully used those same magic green coffee beans, and a host of other Ozzian scams, to repeatedly roast the hapless TV host and hydroxycloroquine hawker.

While New York Times columnist Frank Bruni reminded us two years ago that Dr. Oz was “not a virologist; not an epidemiologist,” even though he plays one on TV,  Fetterman reminds us daily that Oz prefers his $35 million New Jersey Mansion, to the streets of Philadelphia. 

 For more than two years, before emerging as fellow TV liar Donald Trump’s magic cure for the US Senate, the Wizard of Oz appeared regularly on Fox News, disseminating misinformation about COVID like Johnny Appleseed, while hundreds of thousands of Americans died from the disease.  At least, to Dr. Oz’ credit, he didn’t tell them to swallow bleach.

Instead, in advising Donald Trump and White House staff during the early, deadly days of the COVID Pandemic, Oz relentlessly promoted Hydroxychloroquine as a “wonder drug” for COVID, much as he hawked “green coffee beans” as a “miracle cure” for obesity (they weren’t), and told millions of mothers that their childrens’ apple juice had “dangerous levels of arsenic” (it didn’t).   Columbia University’s Institute of Human Nutrition has called many of Dr. Oz’s ideas about food “just plain nutty.”

Eight years earlier, the Great & Powerful Oz’s Medicine Show cures—spoonfed to his four millions daily viewers—got him hauled before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, chaired by then-Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. 

 Senator McCaskill blasted Dr. Oz for spreading lies and misinformation:  “I don’t get why you have to say this stuff because you know it’s not true.”  Oz promised the Senate he wouldn’t do it anymore.  But, with his hyperbole and hypocrisy increasing his personal wealth to $100 million, Oz just couldn’t resist.

In 2016, only two years after the he pledged to the Senate that he would stop his medical charlatanry, Oz was oozing lies again.  This time, it happened during the heat of the Clinton/Trump presidential campaign when the public was demanding that Trump release his medical records, Dr. Oz—“America’s Doctor” as he billed himself—came to the Mar-A-Lago Liar’s rescue.

 On Oz’s nationally televised show, Trump dramatically reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two pages he claimed were his medical records and handed them over to Oz.   Using his best bedside manner, Dr. Oz—who never physically examined Trump– deemed the records—and Trump’s health–to be sound.   Now, pop a few of these green coffee beans Donald, and you can go from being morbidly obese to Mr. America!

Vox, in it’s September 15, 2016, review of the two men in front of the curtain of the Oz show, said:  “ These men (Oz & Trump) are the personification of not just bullshitting to the public, but getting away with bullshitting—and profiting from it.”

Now, the Great and Powerful Oz wants to take his Traveling Elixir Show to the US Senate, where, if successful, he’ll join that other medical genius, Senator Rand Paul, an eye doctor with absolutely zero expertise in virology or immunology, and a penchant for picking fights with his next door neighbor in Kentucky and Dr. Anthony Fauci in public hearings– both of which Rowdy Rand embarrassingly lost.  Imagine Oz and Rand Paul, in a GOP-controlled Senate, as the leading Republican “medical” experts on a pandemic which has killed more than one million Americans.

Perhaps Dr. Oz figures that one way to escape another Senate grilling, under oath, for his newest massive waterfall of false information during the final year of Trump’s toxic term, is to spend millions of the dollars he amassed with his monumental medical mendacity, to sit side-by-side with Senator Paul in the US Senate to compare notes, magical thinking, and hold up charts of the color of good earwax and bad earwax, waxing inelegantly on its’ link to socialist ideas.

Just think of the even greater damage these fountainheads of falsehoods and myths can do, when they can somberly spout more medical misinformation with impunity, under the protection of Congressional immunity.  And to think, we wouldn’t be able to sue either one for malpractice…

Fortunately for all of us, Toto has appeared in the form of a 6’8” Fetterman Pincher who gleefully shreds the flimsy curtain from in front of all of Oz’ latest scams, revealing the Great and Powerful One for the carnival barker and carpetbagger he really is.  Crudite, anyone?

###

(A timely tribute to Malvina Reynolds, the writer of the original “Little Boxes,” and Pete Seeger, who popularized the folk song.)

Little boxes, on his backside,

Bankers boxes filled with SECRETS TOP,

Little boxes, bankers boxes,

With the contents he won’t name.

There’s a secret, there’s a NUKE code,

There’s the name of our super SPY, 

Little boxes, bankers boxes,

With their contents all aflame.

And the secrets, in the boxes

Brightly marked “HIGHLY CLASSIFIED,”

In the boxes, bankers boxes,

With their contents all aflame.

There’s a passport, there’s a TRUMP note,

There’s a SECRET with his SHARPIE scrawl,

In the boxes, bankers boxes

With the contents all aflame.

One for Putin, one for Kim Jung,

And one for Saudi ‘Rabia,

In MY boxes, BONKERS boxes, 

With the contents all aflame.

They’re my ticket, Golden Ticket,

To riches & ASS-I-AL-LUM,

In MY boxes, all MY boxes,

And we’re going down in flames!

I knew I heard that arrogant, defiant, stupidly-smug tone of voice before.

At first, I thought it was my brother’s voice, condemning the “fuckin’ FBI,” for laying out the evidence that sent him to prison for Income Tax Evasion over 30 years ago. 

When Trump told his advisors that the highly-classified, top secret documents he had in his possession were  “not theirs; it’s mine,” shades of my oldest brother’s, and his associate John Gotti’s, brazen bravado, bullying, and whining about law enforcement came to mind. 

Then, I sat straight up in my chair.  I knew where Trump got this gallows gangsterism from.   Ironically, it was in an earlier FBI Affidavit that sent another political leader—and a pal of Trump’s– to prison 10-years ago. 

I tore through my copious files of past cases of political corruption, and came upon the utterly damning 75-page racketeering and criminal corruption affidavit  

against the disgraced, impeached, convicted,  ex-Governor of Illinois, Rob “Blago” Blagojevich, who tried frantically to sell Barack Obama’s old Senate  seat in November, 2008, right after Obama was elected President, and resigned from the Senate.  

Caught on an authorized wiretap, in an ongoing, 6-year government corruption case, Blagojevich’s, conduct dripped with desperation and criminal intent to use his public office for personal gain.  Blago was under enormous personal financial pressure.   He could feel the hot breath of the Illinois’ State Legislature’s case for impeachment against him.    His sense of urgency to cash in on his public office—while he still held it– leaped off of every page of the FBI’s meticulous affidavit against Blagojevich–an essential part of the government’s case for showing probable cause of the commission of crimes, and getting Court approval of an arrest warrant of the powerful Democratic politician.  Blago’s voice was unmistakably loud and clear to FBI Agents listening in:

“I’ve got this thing and its fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.  I’m not gonna do it.” 

                              — (Page 59, FBI affidavit in support of an application for a criminal complaint and corresponding arrest warrant charging ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, December 7, 2008).

Bingo, or “Blago” more appropriately!   There it was.  

I could clearly hear Trump making similar statements in precisely the same, self-righteous, victimhood voice:  “I’ve got these things, these classified documents, and they are fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving them up for fucking nothing.  I’m not gonna do it.”

Only, unlike Blagojevich, Trump wasn’t caught on a government wiretap:  his own people, his own recklessness, ostentatious obstruction of justice, and colossal callousness toward consequences of his own actions,  did him in.  And, he was playing with far more fire than Blago was:  top-secret, highly classified documents with enormous national security implications.  Selling a Senate seat was chump change in comparison.  Trump’s extortion of the United States was potentially jeopardizing millions of lives, and thousands of “human sources” in our Intelligence Agencies.

Of course Trump would view Blago’s blatantly illegal behavior as giving him a green light to “monetize” everything he could get his hands on in government.  They were buddies who first bonded on “Celebrity Apprentice,” April 4, 2010—nearly one year to the day after Blagojevich was charged by a Federal Grand Jury on 16 counts of racketeering, fraud and extortion. 

 Although Trump “fired” Blago that night on “Celebrity Apprentice,” he saw at least one thing in him he greatly admired:  

“ I have great respect for you, Governor.  I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up.”

Two years later, on March 15, 2012– the day Blagojevich reported to Federal Prison in Colorado to begin serving out his 14 year term—Trump, always acutely attuned to trotting out a “victim-model” that he might someday find useful, tweeted:

“ It’s outrageous that Blagojevich goes to jail for 14 yrs, when killers and sex offenders are walking the streets.  Is this Justice?  I don’t think so.”  (Trump Tweet March 16, 2012)

Trump must have had his old friend Jeffrey Epstein on his mind when he lamented “sex offenders walking the streets.”  Just the year before in 2011, Epstein told the New York Post:

“ I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an offender.  It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”

Rather than bloviating about stealing bagels, Trump continued to be obsessed with Blago’s case and his  “unfair” punishment well into his Presidency.  One month after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Blagojevich’s appeal for the second time, in April, 2018, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was “considering” commuting Blagojevich’s 14 year prison sentence, which he described as  “an overly harsh penalty” for what essentially amounts to a “foolish statement.” (Chicago Tribune).   Typically, Trump failed to mention that his buddy Blago’s “foolish statement,” and his actions, were illegal. 

One week after Trump’s May 31, 2018, statement on Air Force One, Blago’s lawyers filed a request with the White House for Executive Clemency.  The following summer, Trump reiterated that he was “very strongly considering commutation of Blagojevich’s sentence because he felt the corrupt, racketeering, extortionist, impeached, ex-Illinois Governor had been “mistreated.”   There it was again.  That “fuckin’” FBI acting against such cute and curmudgeonly criminals, like the Teflon Don Gotti, with whom Trump did business, and Blow-dried Blago, for whom Trump had “great respect .”

In February, 2020, when he was up for re-election, Trump commuted Blagojevich’s 14-year criminal sentence, after the guy who actually did try to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, had served 8 years in prison.   On February 19, 2020, Trump Tweeted:  

“Rob Blagojevich did not sell the Senate seat.  He served 8 years in prison, with many remaining.  He paid a big price.  Another Comey & Gang deal!”

It didn’t matter to Trump that Blago “did not sell the Senate seat” because he was caught, or that James Comey was notthe head of the FBI when Blagojevich was arrested, convicted and sent to jail.  That happened during the 13-year tenure of Robert Mueller as FBI Director, who also sent Gotti and Bernie Madoff away to prison, where—regardless of how both appeared to be coated in Teflon while killing and swindling people–they died.  Which is, perhaps,  “Teflon” Trump’s biggest fear.

But there it was again, the old gangster grievance against the “fucking FBI,” which  John Gotti and other New York mobsters–put away on airtight evidence and federal wiretap transcripts gathered by the FBI–considered to be a competing and dangerous “gang,” since the “Feds,” had the power to end their criminal enterprises.

Now, that may simply be Mar-A-Blago speak, with Trump making the reckless, illegal and utterly bonkers bet that  his “fucking golden” tickets of classified national security documents—which he fraudulently claims are “his, not ours,”—are  his final “get out of jail free cards.”  

Maybe he’ll call his buddy Blagojevich to see how that worked out for him.  After all, Blago owes him one.