What Would You Say to an Embarrassed Trump Voter?

by D.R. Tucker



Oh, I can’t believe it
And people are strange
Our president’s crazy
Did you hear what he said?

–Talking Heads, “Making Flippy Floppy,” 1983


Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!

–Denzel Washington, “Malcolm X,” 1992

They’re embarrassed now.

They have to be.

If they’re capable of embarrassment, that is.

You know them. You know them. You went to high school or college with them. Perhaps they are lifelong friends. You could have dated them 20 years ago, and you still keep in touch with them today.

They voted for Donald Trump. They told you last fall. They did so because they just couldn’t bear to vote for Hillary Clinton. They told you that to vote for Clinton was to vote for political correctness, radical feminism, transgender bathrooms, abortion on demand, racial quotas, inner-city gangbangers on welfare, neutered law enforcement, illegal aliens from Mexico and Guatemala taking all the good jobs, liberal judges, Black Lives Matter, Lena Denham and those Hollywood elitists, secular humanism and every other bogeyman Rush Limbaugh and Fox News told them to fear.

Now, they know–some of them, anyway–that Trump is nothing more than raw sewage flooding the Oval Office. They know–some of them, anyway–that it was a sin to bring on board Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. They know–some of them, anyway–that Kellyanne Conway isn’t qualified to do anything besides star as Joan Crawford in a remake of Mommie Dearest, and that Sean Spicer–the miniature intellect with a name like an ‘80s male porn star–is so close in terms of behavior to the Melissa McCarthy parody that one can barely tell the difference.

Let’s say they call you or e-mail you today, telling you how embarrassed they are. What would you say to them?

Would you tell them to reconsider their hatred for the Democratic Party, and for progressive politics in general?

Would you tell them that voting for Trump wasn’t going to make people of color magically go away, that people with a different shade of skin have the same hopes, dreams and aspirations as they do, that they believe in America just as much as they do?



Would you tell them that Democrats and progressives are not the demons they have been indoctrinated to regard them as? Would you tell them that there is nothing wrong with wanting the civil rights of everyone in this country to be protected, regardless of where they were born, what language they speak, what they look like or who they love? Would you tell them that there is nothing wrong with wanting a woman to make a dollar for every dollar a man earns? Would you tell them that equity in employment is not, and has never been, “reverse discrimination”?

Would you tell them that the agenda of Trump’s opponent would have led to a better quality of life for the average American? Would you tell them that Trump’s opponent would not have disarmed cops–or private citizens, for that matter? Would you tell them that Trump’s opponent would have been vigilant in the defense of this country from “radical Islam,” without wantonly violating human rights?

Would you tell them that the incompetence Trump has demonstrated shows weakness, not strength, to the rest of the world? Would you tell them that even folks who grudgingly respected Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush see this man as dimwitted and dishonorable?

Would you tell them to consider, just for a moment, the idea that Democrats and progressives are not their enemies, and that their actual enemy may well be the man who posed as their friend? Would you tell them to consider the possibility that Donald Trump is the destroyer disguised as savior, that he will abandon them, their hopes, their dreams, to save his own skin?

Would you tell them that you’re not angry at them, but that you just want them to think things through before they cast their vote the next time around? Would you ask them to consider the national and international implications of their vote the next time around?

Or would you not be able to resist the urge to yell at them: “You damn fool!”

Quote Anon- I hope he stays in for 8 more years!

Anon Do you still feel this way about Chetto and his band
of Fascist?
Or do you feel like many Trump supporters that they have been Bamboozled?
just wondering how and what supporters think?

I hope you will not be to sad when you see soon the people
of America are going to Impeach this money worshiping freak.

Trump makes me want to puke, But I give him a medal of honor
for breaking up the Good ole boy network.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2017 10:12AM by riverhousebill.

Textbook Malignant Narcissist
Lies
Manipulates
Braggs
Needs constant affirmation
When called out on lies either doubles down on the lies or suddenly becomes the victim.
He's in the victim stage now. Everybody is doing this to me...

Bill, I hope he stays there for 8 years.

Also, don't let all these fake news people and agencies get you crazy. The bastards gave NObama a free pass for 8 years.

He won't kill freedom of the press, but he will try and de-legitimize it. The danger isn't so much that the mainstream will be silenced--the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN and the like are too powerful for that--but that they will be deemed "fake" or so biased as to be untrustworthy. Into that vacuum comes the fake media, Alt-Right, and all the stuff that would make Goebbels proud. The strategy has already worked. The country is divided between people who want to know the news, and others who simply don't and would rather live in fantasy.

Have a Happy Fantasy Anon, but hold on with two right wing
Air Force One ís in for a crash landing.

Bet you a nickel Dump wont finish 4 years.




"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his state of mind."--William James

The same thing I'd say to an embarrassed Obama voter.

Black politician ‘threatened with lynching’ after calling for Donald Trump's impeachment


Al Green spoke out against US President, accusing him of 'obstruction of justice'

Heavy Jim Crow cackles from supporters wow!
This seems to be the mind set!

A new Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday shows a majority of American voters are embarrassed to have President Trump leading the nation. Fifty-two percent of voters said they were embarrassed of Trump, including 85 percent of Democrats. Just 27 percent of voters said they were proud to have Trump as president.

The poll also found Trump losing ground with key segments of his supporter base, including men and white voters. Fifty-one percent of men disapproved of Trump, while 39 percent approved, and 48 percent of white voters disapproved with just 43 percent approving. Overall, Trump's net approval rating is -22 percent, with 35 percent of voters approving of his job as president and 57 percent disapproving.

Trump's Republican counterparts in Congress didn't fare much better, with 70 percent of voters saying they disapproved of the GOP's job performance on Capitol Hill, including 41 percent of Republican voters. Fifty-seven percent of voters disapproved of Democrats' work in Congress

Republicans and Democrates alike- One big cesspool
No respect for the children or future , Mother Earth.
Shame on ús all

politics- poly-of many-tíc blood sucking insect



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/26/2017 12:27AM by riverhousebill.

PROGRESSIVE ENERGY POWER,

To paraphrase the Buddha- Three things cannot be long hidden;
the sun; the moon; the truth;


(HuffPost)

POLITICS
12/21/2017 03:25 pm ET | Updated 1 hour ago


The GOP Knows The End Is Near

Republicans are looting the store, taking everything they can grab off the shelves, anticipating the demise of Donald Trump as progressive energy explodes

Republicans in Congress, as well as people surrounding Donald Trump’s inner circle in the White House, clearly know something. They’re trying to get everything they can, looting the store, taking everything off the shelves like it’s the end times. The walls are closing in as the special counsel investigation continues unabated ? causing some in the GOP to to try to damage it ? and as the Resistance becomes supercharged, expanding the Democrats’ chances of making big wins in 2018.


The GOP has even lost its last fig leaf of moderation?Maine senator Susan Collins?who’s been having a meltdown in the past few days after being exposed in much of the media, having voted for the Trump tax scam and not received in return promised votes on shoring up Obamacare markets. (Now GOP leaders are telling her they will come in 2018...sure.) Collins, who voted for Trump’s most misogynistic judicial nominees, hostile to a woman’s right to choose, has devolved into claiming she’s now a victim of an “unbelievably sexist” media, sounding every bit like what the alt-right would call a whiny snowflake.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/22/2017 03:06AM by riverhousebill.

I'd say, "Sucks to be you!"

Quote
riverhousebill

Collins, who voted for Trump’s most misogynistic judicial nominees, hostile to a woman’s right to choose, has devolved into claiming she’s now a victim of an “unbelievably sexist” media, sounding every bit like what the alt-right would call a whiny snowflake.

So you think women inflicting pain on their unborn babies and killing their unborn babies is fine, rhb?

Quote Trumps failed pick to run the Council on Environmemtal Quality



“There’s almost no real environmental problems. —Kathleen Hartnett-White

Maybe just a little embarrassed?

You know what I consider a "@#$%&-hole" country? A country where visiting the ER costs thousands, where cancer can mean both bankruptcy & a death sentence, a country where education costs more than most people's mortgage & a country where cops can gun down black men and face no justice

Quote Mia Love, "The President comments are unkind, divisive, elitist and fly
in the face of our nations values



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2018 09:43AM by riverhousebill.

@#$%& Mouths father- Fred was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. racism is in their DNA.

By Thomas Kaplan

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Woody Guthrie Wrote of His Contempt for His Landlord, Donald Trump’s Father

New






Photo

Woody Guthrie, the American singer and musician, circa 1960.Credit Getty Images
More than a half-century ago, the folk singer Woody Guthrie signed a lease in an apartment complex in Brooklyn. He soon had bitter words for his landlord: Donald J. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump.

Mr. Guthrie, in writings uncovered by a scholar working on a book, invoked “Old Man Trump” while suggesting that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex, near Coney Island.

“He thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it,” the scholar, Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain, said in an interview.

Mr. Kaufman said he came across Mr. Guthrie’s writings about Fred Trump while he was doing research at the Woody Guthrie Center’s archives in Oklahoma. He wrote about his findings last week for The Conversation, a news website.

In December 1950, Mr. Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex, Mr. Kaufman wrote in his piece. Soon, Mr. Guthrie was “lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood,” he wrote, with words like these:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project

Mr. Guthrie even reworked his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a critique of Fred Trump, according to Mr. Kaufman:

Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

Mr. Guthrie died in 1967, and in the 1970s, the Justice Department sued the Trumps, accusing them of discriminating against blacks. (A settlement was eventually reached; at the time, Trump Management noted the agreement did not constitute an admission of guilt.)

A spokeswoman for Donald Trump declined to comment on Mr. Guthrie’s writings.

Mr. Kaufman, the author of “Woody Guthrie, American Radical,” said Mr. Guthrie would be repulsed by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. He pointed to Mr. Trump’s comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and contrasted the candidate’s sentiments to those of Mr. Guthrie in his song “Deportee,” written about a plane crash that killed Mexican farm workers.

“Woody was always championing those who didn’t have a voice, who didn’t have any money, who didn’t have any power,” Mr. Kaufman said. “There’s no doubt that he would have had maximum contempt for Donald Trump, even without the issue of race



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2018 01:31PM by riverhousebill.

Quote
Prana

Maybe, but the competition, the debate, the fight is so much fun...

Quote
riverhousebill
You know what I consider a "@#$%&-hole" country? A country where visiting the ER costs thousands, where cancer can mean both bankruptcy & a death sentence, a country where education costs more than most people's mortgage & a country where cops can gun down black men and face no justice

Oops, looks like Trump was right - Haiti is a @#$%&. As per Oxford English Dictionary -

[en.oxforddictionaries.com]

*******

"Definition of @#$%& in English:

@#$%&
NOUN

vulgar slang

An extremely dirty, shabby, or otherwise unpleasant place.

‘this place is a @#$%&, I hope you know that’ "

Quote Jennifer Oops, looks like Trump was right - Haiti is a @#$%&.

JENNIFER NEXT TIME YOU HAVE TO GO POTTY MOUTH ON A COUNTRY
LEARN SOME @#$%& REAL HISTORY.


This is how ignorant you have to be to call Haiti a ‘@#$%&’


President Trump's defenders don't know anything about Haiti's history — or the United States's.



By Jonathan M. Katz January 12
Jonathan M. Katz, a freelance journalist, is the author of "The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster." He is the director of the media and journalism initiative at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

2:29

The U.S.’s complicated relationship with a country Trump called a ‘@#$%&'



President Trump is under fire for referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as “@#$%& countries.” (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

The president had no respect for Haiti. He could see as well as anyone following the news that the country was a basket case — racked by political unrest, filthy, incapable of handling its own affairs. cc which included praising members of the Ku Klux Klan. He had criticized his predecessors’ foreign wars while running for office. But in the White House, he realized he was willing to flex the country’s muscles abroad, as long as the mission fit his motto: “America first.”
Taking Haiti was a U.S. priority, he decided. The United States would invade.
That president was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1915. And if that was the beginning of a story you’ve never heard before, you aren’t alone.
Since news broke that Wilson’s unwitting heir, President Trump, called Haiti — along with El Salvador and seemingly all 54 nations in Africa — “@#$%& countries,” the president’s defenders made it clear not only that they do not know Haiti’s history but also that they’re unaware of their own. As soon as they heard his comments, Trump’s partisans went defensive, claiming that while Trump might have been rude, he was right.

Fox News regular Tomi Lahren tweeted: “If they aren’t @#$%& countries, why don’t their citizens stay there?”
“Trump should ‘vehemently condemn’ the Haitian government for running a @#$%& country,” wrote Will Chamberlain, one of the organizers of last year’s inaugural “DeploraBall.”
Some on the right particularly applauded a segment on CNN in which National Review editor Rich Lowry asked political commentator Joan Walsh whether she would “rather live in Norway or Haiti.” It was a reference to Trump’s reported wish that the United States ring in more Nordic immigrants instead of those from Latin America or Africa. Walsh refused to answer, noting she’d never visited either country. Tucker Carlson accused her of dishonesty. “Those places are dangerous, they’re dirty, they’re corrupt and they’re poor,” the Fox News host said, with an indignation Wilson would have admired. “Why can’t you say that?”
Trump’s supporters on cable news appear to believe that they, and he, are brave tellers of unvarnished truths others are too timid or politically correct to say out loud. (Never mind that Trump is a notorious, if not pathological, liar — or that, hours later, he tried weakly to walk back the “@#$%&” remark after his favorite TV show told him to.)

But in reality, they don’t know many truths at all. To rail against poverty in countries such as Haiti and argue that it’s some naturally occurring, objective reality ignores why that poverty exists and what the United States’s role has been in creating it. And ignoring that means not only making bad and hateful decisions today but risks repeating the errors of the past.
***
Haiti was founded Jan. 1, 1804, by people of African descent who were tired of being slaves. They fought and won a revolution against France, ultimately defeating an expeditionary force of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, then the most powerful in the world.
France fought so hard to keep the colony because it was basically the Saudi Arabia of coffee and sugar at the time, providing the majority of both commodities consumed in Europe. The money it generated fueled the entire French empire. But it was made with blood. The slave regime necessary to produce those crops was so deadly that 1 in 10  enslaved Africans kidnapped and brought to the island died each year. As historian Laurent Dubois has noted, the French decided that it was cheaper to bring in new slaves than to keep the ones they had alive.

[Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable.]
As soon as Haiti was free, the world’s most powerful empires did everything they could to undermine it. France refused to acknowledge the new nation existed. In the United States — then the only other independent country in the Americas — President Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was uninterested in seeing a free black nation succeed nearby. The slaveholding powers refused to set up official trade with Haiti, forcing the country into predatory relationships. Haiti’s independence remained a cautionary tale U.S. slavers used to counter abolitionists until the Civil War.
France finally offered much-needed diplomatic recognition in 1825, at gunpoint. King Charles X demanded the Haitian government pay restitution of 150 million gold francs — billions of dollars in today’s money — to French landowners still angry about the loss of their land and the Haitians’ own bodies in the war. If they didn’t pay, he would invade.
Haiti’s leaders agreed. They spent the next decades raiding their own coffers and redirecting customs revenue to paying France for the independence they had already won, ravaging the economy. By the 1880s, Haiti had paid what France had wanted. But now it owed huge sums to foreign banks, from which it had borrowed heavily to make ends meet. In the early 20th century, much of that debt belonged to banks in the United States. Americans had also established extensive business interests in Haiti, exporting sugar and other commodities.

The United States, meanwhile, was looking to expand. Starting in 1898, we began using our military to secure new territory and markets overseas. By 1914, we had annexed the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and other islands in the Pacific. In the Caribbean, we had Puerto Rico and a permanent base in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay. The Marine Corps had also helped carve out a new Central American country, Panama, in exchange for rights to dig a canal providing a trade route to Asia — and the United States invaded Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere.
Haiti was next. Haiti’s politics, roiled by the economic turmoil caused by the debt, were in a tailspin. Presidents were repeatedly assassinated and governments overthrown. The banks demanded payment; U.S. businessmen wanted more security and control. Newspapers had been paving the way for U.S. public opinion — a New York Times dispatch in 1912 declared, “Haitians acknowledge the failure of a ‘Black Republic’ and look forward to coming into the Union.”
In late 1914, U.S. Marines came ashore in Port-au-Prince, marched into the national reserve and carried out all the gold. It was hauled back to the National City Bank in New York — known as Citibank today. Months later, declaring his concern that European powers, especially Germany, might gain a foothold in the Caribbean (even though they were all busy with World War I), Wilson ordered an invasion, then a full occupation.
The U.S. flag was run up Haiti’s government buildings. The Haitian government and armed forces were dissolved. For the next 19 years, the United States ruled Haiti. U.S. Marines fought a bloody counterinsurgency campaign to stamp out resistance. The Haitian government, constitution and army were disbanded and replaced with new U.S.-friendly ones. Intending to embark on a major public works program, the Marines instituted a system, drawn from Haitian law, called the corvée, in which peasants were essentially re-enslaved. Many of the occupation’s leaders were explicit white supremacists who used lessons they had learned instituting Jim Crow at home to create new, American forms of discrimination in Haiti. One major organizer was Col. Littleton W.T. Waller, a child of antebellum Virginia who assured his friend Col. John A. Lejeune — the future commandant of the Marine Corps: “I know the n—– and how to handle him.”
Not all Americans were fans of the colonial regime in Haiti. Anti-imperialist lawmakers, journalists and organizations including the NAACP protested, held hearings and wrote screeds against the occupation. But most Americans, then as now, were essentially unaware. As reports of massacres and other abuses mounted, though, embarrassment grew. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had served in the occupation of Haiti as assistant secretary of the Navy, came to office promising to end U.S. imperial policies in this hemisphere. The occupation ended in 1934. Haiti had some new roads and buildings, a legacy of scars and abuse and a new U.S.-made economic and political system that would keep wreaking havoc over the decades to follow.
In 1957, a U.S.-trained physician, François Duvalier, came to power. Known as Papa Doc, he was a black nationalist who positioned himself in part as an heir to the Haitian Revolution and an opponent of U.S. imperialism, but he also knew how to manage a nearby superpower. U.S. presidents gave him, and his son who succeeded him, support at key moments (when they weren’t trying to sponsor coups against him), until the dictatorship ended in 1986.
***
So in light of all that history, to be convinced that Haiti just happens to be a failed “@#$%&” where no one would want to live, you’d have to know nothing about how Haitians view their country and themselves. You’d have to know nothing about the destructive U.S. trade policies that continued past the end of the dictatorship, destroying trade protections and, with them, local industries and agriculture. You’d have to not know about the CIA’s role in the 1991 coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, or the U.S. invasions in 1994 and 2004. You’d have to know nothing about why the United States sponsored and took the leading role in paying for a U.N. “stabilization mission” that did little but keep a few, often unpopular, presidents in power and kill at least 10,000 people by introducing cholera to Haiti for the first time. And you’d have to not understand the U.S. role in the shambolic response to the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake — which was a mess, but possibly not in the way that you think.
[Haiti’s ‘redevelopment’ hasn’t been about helping Haitians]
Haiti is indeed a difficult place to live for many of the people who live there. Poverty is rampant. There is no good sanitation system, in part because the same international system that introduced cholera in 2010 steadfastly refuses to meet its promises to pay to clean it up. (Before the outbreak, the United States withheld funds to pay for water and sanitation infrastructure for more than 10 years for purely political reasons.) After centuries of exploitation and abuse, the best hope for many Haitians is to move away — and suddenly encountering infrastructure and opportunities, they thrive. For many migrants, the ultimate goal is to earn enough money to retire, build a home in Haiti and go back.
In trying to walk back his slur Friday, Trump insisted that he “has a wonderful relationship with Haitians.” There is no evidence of that. As he decided to move forward with forcing the deportation of tens of thousands of Haitians allowed to take refuge after the 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s leading newspaper pronounced him the country’s “worst nightmare.” Last summer, he reportedly said all Haitians have AIDS — a slur that cuts deep in the Haitian American psyche. And now this.
I lived in Haiti for 3½ years, by choice. I saw many people struggling, many beautiful and terrible sights, and lived through some of the hardest days of my life. I learned a lot about the complicated relationship between that country and ours — the ways in which our power can be used for good, and to do incredible harm. Many people pointed out this week that Haitians have been through far worse than a racist president calling their country a “@#$%&.” The question is whether, knowing the truth, we all want to go through it again.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2018 06:25AM by riverhousebill.

Quote
riverhousebill

JENNIFER NEXT TIME YOU HAVE TO GO POTTY MOUTH ON A COUNTRY
LEARN SOME @#$%& REAL HISTORY.

This is how ignorant you have to be to call Haiti a ‘@#$%&’

So if Trump had called a country a 'shitshow' would that have been acceptable?

And you say your not a trump supporter just his @#$%& hole comments OK

Glad to hear you don't back Trump. Just his @#$%& hole comments I get it now.
Sorry for the misunderstanding

quote Jennifer-
So if Trump had called a country a 'shitshow' would that have been acceptable?

The only thing acceptable with Trump for me would be Gitmo, Levensworth, Pelicans Bay, Oswald.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2018 01:30AM by riverhousebill.

Quote
Jennifer

Quote
riverhousebill

JENNIFER NEXT TIME YOU HAVE TO GO POTTY MOUTH ON A COUNTRY
LEARN SOME @#$%& REAL HISTORY.

This is how ignorant you have to be to call Haiti a ‘@#$%&’

So if Trump had called a country a 'shitshow' would that have been acceptable?

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." -Thomas Paine

Quote
riverhousebill

And you say your not a trump supporter just his @#$%& hole comments OK

Glad to hear you don't back Trump. Just his @#$%& hole comments I get it now.
.

Duh! It never happened! See here -

[www.rawfoodsupport.com]

And no, I'm not a defender of Trump's - I'm a seeker of Truth as it pertains to Lib Lies and Spin.

And a Hater of the Lib Political Correctness Culture - where we're not allowed to call a place a hellhole if we think it is without being called a 'racist'.

Thanks for the history lesson on Haiti; it inspired me to look it up. And the article is correct that it was Woodrow Wilson - the first 'Progressive' president of the US and a racist as is historical fact - who fjrst took control of Haiti.

100 years ago, the U.S. invaded and occupied this country.

[www.washingtonpost.com]

A century ago, American troops invaded and occupied a foreign nation. They would stay there for almost two decades, install a client government, impose new laws and fight insurgents in bloody battles on difficult terrain. Thousands of residents perished during what turned out to be 19 years of de facto U.S. rule.

The country was Haiti, the Caribbean nation that's often seen by outsiders as a metaphor for poverty and disaster. Yet rarely are Americans confronted with their own hand in its misfortunes.

On Tuesday, a group of protesters marched to the U.S. Embassy in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince in commemoration of the grim legacy of the U.S. occupation, which began in July 1915 after President Woodrow Wilson used political chaos and violence in the country as grounds to intervene. Some in Washington feared the threat of competing French and German interests in the Caribbean.

The liberal, democratic values Wilson so famously championed in Europe were not so visible in Haiti, a largely black republic that since its independence from France a century earlier had been regarded with fear and contempt by America's white ruling classes. "Think of it! N------s speaking French," quipped William Jennings Bryan, Wilson's secretary of state, in a chilling echo of the Jim Crow-era bigotry of the time.

Though framed as an attempt to bring stability to an unstable, benighted land, the United States "also wanted to make sure that the Haitian government was compatible to American economic interests and friendly to foreign investment," writes Laurent Dubois, a Duke University academic and author of "Haiti: The Aftershocks of History."

"In Haiti, the reality of American actions sharply contradicted the gloss of [American leaders'] liberal protestations," wrote the historian Hans Schmidt, whose 1971 book on the U.S. occupation is still a widely cited text. "Racist preconceptions, reinforced by the current debasement of Haiti's political institutions, placed the Haitians far below levels Americans considered necessary for democracy, self-government, and constitutionalism."

***********

Woodrow Wilson: This So-Called Progressive was a Dedicated Racist

[fee.org]

More than one hundred years ago, Woodrow Wilson brought Jim Crow to the North. He had been inaugurated on March 4, 1913. At a cabinet meeting on April 11, his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, suggested that the new administration segregate the railway mail service; and treasury secretary William G. McAdoo, who would soon become Wilson’s son-in-law, chimed in to signal his support.

Thanks to Wilson, champion of eugenics and racial pseudo-science, segregation in the civil service would become law. Wilson followed their lead. He had made a bid for the African-American vote in 1912, and he had attracted the support of figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, but, as he put it at the meeting, he had made “no promises in particular to Negroes, except to do them justice.” Burleson’s proposal he welcomed, but he wanted “the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.”

Real Racism

Today, self-styled progressives are wont, with considerable abandon, to label as racists those who object to their attempts at social engineering. They would do well to rein in their rhetorical excesses and curb their enthusiasm for the administrative state — for the Progressives of yesteryear, on whom they model themselves, really were racists in the precise and proper sense of the term, and in formulating public policy they were true to their principles.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ordinary Americans may generally have been in the grips of ethnic prejudice of one sort or another. The Progressives of that time were not, however, ordinary men, and they knew it. Like their successors today, they dominated America’s universities. With some justification, they thought of themselves as an intellectual elite; and, with rare exceptions, they enthusiastically embraced eugenics and racial theory.

That the inchoate racial prejudices of their contemporaries were grounded in fact they took to be a truth taught by science; and, being devotees of rational administration to the exclusion of all other concerns, they insisted that public policy conform to the dictates of the new racial science.

Racial Science was His Creed

It was only after Adolf Hitler gave eugenics and “scientific racism” a bad name that segregation came to seem objectionable. Wilson, our first professorial president, was a case in point. He was the very model of a modern Progressive, and he was recognized as such. He prided himself on having pioneered the new science of rational administration, and he shared the conviction, dominant among his brethren, that African-Americans were racially inferior to whites.

With the dictates of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement in mind, in 1907, he campaigned in Indiana for the compulsory sterilization of criminals and the mentally retarded; and in 1911, while governor of New Jersey, he proudly signed into law just such a bill.

Prior to the segregation of the civil service in 1913, appointments had been made solely on merit as indicated by the candidate’s performance on the civil-service examination. Thereafter, racial discrimination became the norm. Photographs came to be required at the time of application, and African-Americans knew they would not be hired.

The existing work force was segregated. Many African-Americans were dismissed. In the postal service, others were transferred to the dead-letter office, where they had no contact with the general public. Those who continued to work in municipal post offices labored behind screens — out of sight and out of mind.

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Independent Political League objected to the new policy, Wilson — a Presbyterian elder who was nothing if not high-minded — vigorously defended it, arguing that segregation was in the interest of African-Americans.

For 35 years, segregation in the civil service would be public policy. It was only after Adolf Hitler gave eugenics and “scientific racism” a bad name that segregation came to seem objectionable.

If Wilson’s new policy encountered little opposition, it was because a change of sentiment had taken place. Jim Crow had not been the norm before 1890, even in the deep South. As C. Vann Woodward noted nearly 60 years ago, in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, it became the norm there only when it received sanction from the racist Progressives in the North.

Their influence was profound and pervasive. In 1900, E. L. Godkin, founder and longtime editor of The Nation, saw the handwriting on the wall. In the pages of that journal, he lamented that “the Declaration of Independence no longer arouses enthusiasm; it is an embarrassing instrument which requires to be explained away. The Constitution is said to be ‘outgrown.’”

Those who once “boasted that it had secured for the negro the rights of humanity and citizenship” now listen “in silence to the proclamation of white supremacy” and make “no protest against the nullifications of the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Wilson the Anti-Liberal

Wilson wanted to "interpret the Constitution according to Darwinian principle."
Wilson championed the trend identified by Godkin. In his presidential campaign in 1912, he told his compatriots, “We are in the presence of a new organization of society.” Our time marks “a new social stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life,” and “the old political formulas do not fit the present problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.”

What Thomas Jefferson had once taught is now, he contended, utterly out of date. It is “what we used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple.” Above all, Wilson wanted to persuade his compatriots to get “beyond the Declaration of Independence.”

That document “did not mention the questions of our day,” he told his countrymen. “It is of no consequence to us.” He regarded it as “an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.”

For the rights of individuals celebrated in that document and for the limits on the scope of government implicit in its celebration of those particular rights, he had no use. They were, he recognized, an obstacle to rational administration of the very sort exemplified by his subsequent segregation of the civil service.

Wilson's Total State

For similar reasons, Wilson was hostile to the constitutional provisions intended as a guarantee of limited government. The separation of powers, the balances and checks, and the distribution of authority between nation and state distinguishing the American constitution he regarded as an obstacle to the formation and pursuit of rational public policy.

“Government” he considered “not a machine, but a living thing . . . accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” Nothing of that sort could, he believed, “have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.” Its health was “dependent upon” the “quick co-operation” of these organs, “their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose.” Wilson was the first to call for there to be a “living” political constitution “Darwinian in structure and in practice.”

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I see that the history you cut and pasted neglected to mention that the Democrat Clintons exploited Haiti and deceived their donors.

SHUTDOWN ON TRUMP INAUGURATION ANNIVERSARY




Trump Promised To Be A Man Of Action. A Year Later, The Government Is Shut Down.

Trump Flubs Key Line In Anti-Abortion Speech

President says it’s “wrong” that laws allow babies to be born in the ninth month.





Donald Trump bungled a major line in his anti-abortion speech in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, saying that it is “wrong” that state laws allow babies to be “born in the ninth month.”


Trump made the flub in his address during the 45th annual March for Life rally, which marks the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. The address was broadcast on giant screens at the National Mall, where marchers were gathered.


“Right now, in a number of states, the laws allow a baby to be born from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month,” Trump said. “It is wrong. It has to change.”


He intended to say that it’s wrong for babies to be “torn” from their mothers’ wombs in the ninth month, an apparent reference to late-term abortions. Trump called on legislators to outlaw late-term abortions in his address.


While some listening to the speech may have been perplexed by the president’s comment, Twitter was fast off the mark in attacking the president’s goof. Wags at Quartz, highlighting several of Trump’s misstatements about abortion laws in his address, admitted that, yes, it’s true that all states, indeed all countries, allow babies to be born at nine months.








During a presidential campaign debate with his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed that doctors can “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day.”


In fact, that is “not happening in the United States,” Dr. Aaron Caughey, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University, told The New York Times after the debate. “It is, of course, such an absurd thing to say.”


Only 1.3 percent of abortions are performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights. An estimated 80 percent of those procedures are for birth defects, according to Huffpost contributor Dr. Jennifer Gunther, an obstetrician trained in later term (16 to 18 week) abortions. Others may be done to save the life of the mother.


“After 24 weeks, birth defects that lead to abortion are very severe and typically considered incompatible with life,” Gunther noted.


And fetuses are not “ripped out” of wombs. Even if there is a crisis in the last month of pregnancy — such as a car accident — labor would be induced or an emergency cesarean section would be performed, Caughey told the Times.


In his address to the anti-abortion marchers, Trump said that “Roe v. Wade has resulted in some of the most permissive abortion laws anywhere in the world,” even though America’s laws are similar to those in several countries. “We will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life.”


In a 1999 interview with NBC, Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.” He added: “I hate the concept of abortion ... But you still — I just believe in choice.”