Lashing out against tweets from twit

It’s almost become the news judgment equivalent of “dog bites man,” President Donald Trump uses his Twitter account to post yet another rant that somehow singles out Mexico for everything The Donald wants to believe is wrong.

The latest anti-Trump retaliatory rant … 

Although there’s something many of the ideologues who chant and cheer every time Trump spews more rhetorical trash ought to keep in mind – the level of contempt is returned.

AND IN THE end, the amount of contempt people wind up feeling toward the United States is escalated – because many figure we were either stupid enough to vote for the buffoon OR were to weak to prevent a man who couldn’t get a majority of the vote from rising to the presidency.

Seriously, people ought to see and/or hear the trash talk that comes from Mexican-Americans whenever the topic of Trump comes up.

Much has been written and spoken of the number of piñatas made in the image of Donald John Trump. Since the ultimate purpose of a piñata is to be smashed by partygoers, it gives people the chance to vent their contempt by taking a two-by-four upside the paper-mache skull of the presidential image.

There also are many t-shirts printed up that take the image of Trump in vain.

… based off the hot-sauce logo

I COULDN’T HELP but notice one shirt I encountered just this weekend when I ventured into the Taste of Mexico festival – held in various cities across our nation. I spent a little bit of time Saturday at the one in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.

The shirt was a mock-up of the Tapatio hot sauce logo – only turning the product brand name into a Spanish obscenity, and proclaiming that Trump was all about “hate sauce.”

That, and it reinforced my long-held suspicion that the way to make anyone look ridiculous is to portray them in a sombrero – as this t-shirt did to our sorry excuse of a national leader.

All provoked because Trump himself has a desperate need for someone to bash about, and feels Mexico is an easy target, Largely because it’s right next door. He picks on the one within easy sight. Resulting in the return fire.

Bashing Trump -- literally!

TRUMP’S LATEST TWEETS made Sunday morning were an extension of his threats to impose tariffs that would escalate steadily against Mexican-made goods being brought into this country.

He says he’s more than willing to punish U.S. companies that have transferred operations to Mexico to take advantage of lower labor costs. As Trump put it in his less-than-articulate manner, companies will be, “brought back into the United States through taxation (tariffs). America has had enough!”

While also referring to Mexico as “an abuser” that is “invading” our society.

Actually, what we, the majority of our society, has had enough of is the notion of Donald Trump as president. It’s the reason a growing number of people – including two members of Chicago’s congressional delegation, Jesus Garcia and Danny Davis – are calling for impeachment proceedings.

Garcia and Davis (below) have joined … 

NOT THAT I think such a tactic would work – because I have no doubt that the ideologue nincompoops who run the U.S. Senate and would preside over any impeachment trial would wind up undermining any effort to remove Trump from office – then try to claim it as “God’s will” that Trump remain in office!

The fact is that we’re stuck with him through the end of next year, and will have to hope the political opposition can put together a credible enough campaign on behalf of a candidate who can defeat Trump at the polling place.

… the impeachment parade

Perhaps then, we’ll be able to look back on all the anti-Mexico rhetoric and find some of it amusing – such as the portrayal of Trump in the Tapatio hot sauce sombrero. Or find it as historically telling as we now view much of the anti-Japanese propaganda of the World War II era.

Or perhaps we’ll regard Trump someday similar to how late night television host David Letterman once put it to right-wing radio host (and Trump proponent) Rush Limbaugh, when he asked him on live television, “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think to yourself, ‘I am just full of hot gas’?”

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A Christian takeover of the Loop?

I remember being a pre-teenaged kid back in the early days of WLUP-FM when it was at its late ‘70s peak – when Steve Dahl was a young smartass rather than his cranky aged self and before he tried turning Comiskey Park into a funeral pyre for bad music.

Back in the days when Lorelei’s lips gave many a 12-year-old boy a wet dream.

AND BACK WHEN “the Loop’s” listenership would have been people inclined to listen to “the Devil’s music” of hard rock ‘n’ roll!

So what should we think of the fact that the radio station formally brought its programming to an end this week, and on Saturday will officially be taken over by a company that desires to turn the 97.9 FM radio frequency into one that broadcasts Christian-themed programming.

Is this The Lord himself trying to purify a radio frequency that the hard-core ideologue fanatics would say for four decades has given Chicago various forms of Satan’s tunes?

Is it truly some sort of bad irony that the station would become Christian? With Dahl himself publicly suggesting that the final tune he thinks should be played on the station before it becomes religious in them is “Highway to Hell.”

AS THOUGH WE really need another playing of AC/DC before the new owners turn it into a sister station of Arlington Heights-based WCLR (The Educational Media Foundation now owns both, along with 342 others across the country)!

Should one of these t-shirts go on exhibit at the Chicago History Museum?

Personally, I think too much is made of this theme. The reality is that the radio business is ever evolving and changing. The fact that the WLUP format and image survived from 1978 to the present means it had a long run.

One much longer than many other radio stations can even dream of having.

For all the crackpots who are eager to say WLUP ultimately failed, I’d say its successes put it at a level that make it an image permanently a part of Chicago. Although I think that now-unemployed broadcaster Mancow Muller overstates his significance when he says he can now go off to broadcast retirement like past Chicago iconic figures like Ray Rayner and Bozo the Clown.

One-time WLUP competitor also now has religious image

ACTUALLY, WHAT THE WLUP situation makes me recall is another hard-rock radio station of my Junior High school years – the old WMET-FM. I can remember being a 13-year-old listening to my fellow students quarrel over which station was better.

WMET ceased to exist in Chicago decades ago. The call letters are now used by a Washington, D.C.-area radio station that is part of the Guadalupe Radio Network.

As in it offers up programming meant to appeal specifically to Catholics. The two rockin’ images of the late ‘70s on the radio are now in the hands of people determined to serve God.

I still remember when I did a stint in college in Washington in the mid-1980s and being shocked to hear the “MET” call letters in the use of the Lord. Even though none of my non-Chicago counterparts in D.C. could appreciate the irony.

From the Beatles to Rush (as in Limbaugh)

I MUST CONFESS to not having actually listened to “The Loop” in years. I don’t doubt the people writing broadcast eulogies who say the station reached its peak in the late ‘70s and failed to adapt to the changing times.

But the idea of “the Loop” going religious isn’t the biggest abomination that could have occurred.

That, in my opinion, occurred many years ago when the one-time “Music Radio” WLS-AM that gave us Top 40 rock ‘n’ roll with its “Silver Dollar Surveys” of the top records decided to become a serious talk radio station.

The concept of Rush (as in Limbaugh, not Geddy Lee) filling the Chicago airwaves’ same frequency that once gave us Larry Lujack (and sidekick ‘Lil’ Tommy Edwards)? That’s more abhorrent than any programming change taking place now at “98 FM.”

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Might as well stick to your guns; you’ll lose by trying to compromise too much

If there is a lesson that President Barack Obama should have learned from the Shirley Sherrod fiasco, it is that he might as well stick to his ideological beliefs. Because any attempt to compromise them out of hopes of gaining a few brownie points from “the other side” is only going to tick off his so-called political allies.

The fact is that we have an ideologically split nation, with just as many people inclined to look down on Obama as are inclined to back him. (On Sunday, the Gallup Organization gave Obama a 44 percent approval rating, with 47 percent not approving of him).

SHERROD IS THE former Agriculture Department employee who got fired from her federal job because of comments she made on a 25-year-old videotape that are now on the Internet – comments that made her out to be some sort of black bigot who wants to single out white people for abuse.

Of course, that was before we got to see the whole thing – which is that Sherrod admitted the error of her decade-old ways and has gone out of her way to make amends.

The political observer take on the situation (at least those observers without blatant ideological hangups) is that Obama and his aides jumped the gun and fired Sherrod because they wanted to cut off conservative pundit attacks. Had he waited and found out the full story, he would never have been put in the position where he wound up having to make a personal telephone call to Sherrod to apologize for his presidential conduct.

Yet I couldn’t help but notice a pair of commentaries that appeared recently on this issue. The commentators are Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, and talk radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh.

THEY’RE BOTH TRASHING Obama for this situation. They’re both using it as a microcosm for what is wrong with this man. Yet it also is clear that their underlying logic is so different that there would have been no way Obama could have pleased both.

In fact, the only way he could unite them is by bungling the situation so badly.

In the case of Dowd, she is one of those pundits who says that Obama was too eager to appease the conservative pundits. It’s almost like the Latino situation, where many activists wonder about an Obama who says he supports immigration reform because he knows the system is flawed, yet seems eager to appease the conservatives by first bolstering the enforcement mechanisms of that same flawed system.

As far as Sherrod is concerned, Dowd offers up the idea that the president’s Harvard Law pedigree and Hawaii upbringing are so radically different from the African-American mainstream of this nation (remember the Campaign ’08 allegations that Obama wasn’t “black enough” to be the first African-American to become president?) that he didn’t realize upfront how ridiculous the allegations against Sherrod truly were.

SHE THINKS THAT if there were more black people on Obama’s White House staff, perhaps one of them would have flagged this for the president, and he could have averted a situation that wound up making him look foolish.

I can’t help but think, however, that if Obama had those extra black staffers with backgrounds more in touch with the Southern experience of old (the “slave thing,” as Dowd quotes one black Democratic advisor as saying), we’d have the pundits such as Limbaugh all worked up into a frenzy even more than they already are.

As it is, Limbaugh is upset by the situation because he thinks too many people caved in by accepting the idea that Sherrod’s comments initially were taken out of context. He wishes we were still trying to portray Sherrod as some sort of black bigot, with her very existence on the federal payroll then somehow blamed on Obama (even though back in the days when she made these comments about how race affected her judgment on the job, it was Ronald Reagan who was president – she’s NOT an Obama hire).

In short, Obama’s initial reaction to this situation was meant to cut off people like Limbaugh – who would have feasted on the story to engage in their usual ideologically conservative rhetoric. There is a sense that he was trying to appease them – perhaps justifying it in his own mind as a sense of bipartisanship that includes giving the other side something.

I WOULD HOPE that this experience would teach him that some of these people don’t want to be appeased. These are the ones who voted ABO back in 2008, and are determined to vote for anyone but Obama two years from now. There just isn’t any reaching out to them.

When you do, all you’re doing is setting yourself up for a symbolic smack upside the head (a literal one will get you tackled by the Secret Service, which will then cause the conservative pundits to complain about the high level of security being wasted on this man who they don’t consider worthy of the presidency) from the people who are supposed to be your political allies.

Bipartisanship is a nice concept. The fact that we don’t seem to be able to achieve it is something that is wrong with our society.

But the reality is we do have a dual political party system for picking our government officials. And there are times when one has to remember what “team” gave them a uniform so they could play the political game.

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Limbaugh tries to give career a “Rush” by going on offensive against Obama

It appears I was slightly off when, on the day after Election Day 2008, I speculated about which political person of the Republican persuasion would try to give his/her career a jolt by becoming the de-facto leader of a conservative movement against the Obama Administration.

In short, I wondered which member of Congress would step up and become the equivalent to what Edward R. Vrdolyak was in the City Council during the mayoral era of Harold Washington.

NOW I’M NOT at all mistaken in thinking that there are people who are grossly offended that anybody like Barack Obama could be chosen by a majority of the U.S. population to be our president. I’m certainly correct in realizing that some people have a visceral reaction to Obama, and some will do whatever they can to try to portray anything he does as a failure.

But it appears I was wrong in figuring out from where the opposition would be led.

Instead of some otherwise obscure member of Congress from the middle of Nowheresville, U.S.A. trying to turn himself into a significant politico, it appears we’re getting an attempt to lead this movement by the blowhards of Right Wing Radio.

Yes, I’m talking about Rush.

LIMBAUGH, THAT IS.

By now, anybody who cares what the one-time aide to the Kansas City Royals baseball team thinks about anything (personally, I wouldn’t even care what he thought about baseball) knows that Limbaugh this weekend spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he made it clear he intends to use his microphone to persuade all those rural residents who hear him on the hundreds of tiny radio stations that carry his program across the country to stir up enough resentment among the potential voters that those people put pressure on their members of Congress to get them to vote “no” on anything that Obama wants to do.

It would appear that Limbaugh is determined to prevent his career in radio from becoming a thing of the past (personally, I can’t remember the last time I listened to one of his broadcasts) by becoming the vocal leader of the Obama opposition.

Now this is a free country. If Rush wants to be a blowhard on the air, he has every right to do so – as long as anyone is willing to pay him for it. If anyone out there seriously finds his drivel entertaining (it certainly isn’t informative), they have every right to listen to him.

BUT I’M EXERCISING my right to ignore his broadcasts, and to use this commentary to criticize his lack of logic. Seriously, most of Limbaugh’s rants amount to telling people who choose to isolate themselves in rural communities that they’re the only people who ought to matter.

It gets old.

And quite frankly, Limbaugh’s weekend rant wasn’t much deeper than that.

It boiled down to the trite (and selfish) rhetoric that says poor people are being hurt by liberal social policies that try to help them in life, although what the conservatives usually object to is that anybody is bothering to pay attention to people they would prefer to think of as the riff-raff of our society.

PROVIDING ASSISTANCE TO a single mother with young children is somehow bad in that it discourages men from being a part of the lives of those children. In reality, it is a policy that recognizes reality – many of those fathers are gone, and the mothers still need help to cope with their children.

But help is bad, according to Rush. And voting for Obama, in the mind of Limbaugh, merely means that the silver-tongued orator has managed to pull a con job on this country so that he can impose “liberal” policies among all of us.

Some non-conservative pundits are making much of the fact that Limbaugh has come right out and used the words, “I want Barack Obama to fail.” In fact, we’re now subjected to broadcast advertising spots that quote Limbaugh, although the audio has been edited so tightly that I want to know what else was said immediately before and after it.

For me, none of these sentiments is surprising.

IT IS THE same rhetoric that we have heard from the social conservative faction of the Republican Party (as opposed to the business-oriented wing that is also conservative on social issues, but not so preachy about it) for years.

It was the faction that gave us two terms of George W. Bush, and probably thinks it is some sort of plot that Bush could not have a successor of his own choosing as president.

These are the same kind of people who held protests in Chicago and in other cities across the United States to show opposition to the Obama Administration’s success in getting a stimulus package through Congress (even if it took heavy Democratic partisanship to pass it).

These protests took on aspects of a mock “Boston Tea Party,” the 1773 protest against British taxation policies that is seen as a major uprising by English colonies that later became the original United States. They want to portray themselves as the equivalent of the original revolutionaries.

WHY CAN’T THESE people realize that the real act of speaking out against what had become U.S. policy came last November when a majority of voters picked Obama? If anything, they’re the equivalent of the backers of George III.

If we, the people of this country, truly supported such Limbaugh-esque ideas, we’d have President McCain to kick around these days.

By stirring up trash talk against Obama, he hopes to bolster his career. Because Limbaugh is at a point where he’s been around for so long (I first heard him during the days of the original President Bush) that people just automatically assume his best days are behind him.

If he could become the face of the Obama opposition, that would make him a significant figure. Keep in mind that not all significant figures are positive influences on our society.

IN FACT, IT could go a long way toward creating a legacy for Limbaugh that would be seen by historians as having some significance.

Because the way things stack up now, Limbaugh as a broadcaster has a lot more in common with Father Charles Coughlin’s racist rants than it ever would with the middle America homespun viewpoint of the late Paul Harvey, whose contributions to broadcasting (which definitely weren’t liberal) will be remembered long after Limbaugh departs the public scene.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Figure out for yourself how nonsensical the rantings of Rush will be (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/01/transcript-rush-limbaughs-address-cpac/) when it comes to Barack Obama.

I’d like to think that political people on Capitol Hill would have enough sense to ignore the (http://chicagoargus.blogspot.com/2008/11/if-obama-is-harold-then-whos-national.html) loopy logic that comes from the lips of Limbaugh.

The American Conservative Union held a relatively uneventful conference last week in Washington (http://www.cpac.org/) until Rush Limbaugh opened his mouth.