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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One-fifth of Illinois Legislature in Havana? What if they got trapped!

Call it my wildest fantasy come true – the 33 state legislators who on Wednesday arrived in Havana for a six-day journey through Cuba somehow get stuck on the Caribbean island nation.

How would Dan Burke ...

They are unable to return to the United States. Should we consider Fidel Castro a hero for helping us to do away with legislators who (had they been permitted to return to their political playground in Springfield) probably would have caused significant governmental mischief?

YOU HAVE TO to admit the thought is worth a chuckle. Because if we try to look at this trip on a rational level, the first (and only) question that comes to our minds is “What are you doing going to Havana?!?”

It may be one of the few logical statements made by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he tried to mock the actions of his gubernatorial predecessor – George Ryan – by saying that any action by Illinois officials to expand business with Cuba was a waste of time.

That trade embargo wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon, so significant business opportunities would continue to be thwarted in the name of ideology and trying to embarrass the Castro regime (which has shown throughout the years that it has no shame whatsoever).

But this week’s trip by 33 legislators is reminiscent of that journey that Ryan took to Havana back in 1999. It may be one of his finest moments as governor – or it may be further evidence that he was craven in character. It all depends on your own ideological hang-ups.

I'LL CONFESS TO believing the former stance, and saying that I think the people who want to bash Ryan for his Cuban sojourn do little more than show how small-minded they truly are.

One of the results of that first Cuban trip (Ryan later made a smaller-scale trip to Havana later in his gubernatorial term) is that Illinois companies worked out a deal by which they can sell foodstuffs and medical supplies to companies providing direct aid to Cuba.

... and brother Edward compare ...



Of course, that was only permissible because of some changes made back during the Bill Clinton years that allowed for some humanitarian aid.

Now, the legislators who went to Havana have hopes to build upon what can be sold, so that Illinois companies can make even more money off of Cuba when it eventually goes through a rebuilding period (which won’t truly start until the demise of the Castro brothers).

AND QUITE FRANKLY, Fidel and Raul aren’t showing any signs of dying off soon – even though the ideologues have had us thinking of the pair as decrepit old men on their death beds for decades.

What we really have happening this week is the same thing that George Ryan tried to do a dozen years ago – put the name of Illinois in the mindset of Cubans so that when they need precious goods, they will come to our companies.

Cuba is already Illinois’ fifth largest trading partner, with most of those items being agricultural products. There are a lot of business people who would like the figure to go up significantly.

That is what makes state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Marengo, think it worthy of  paying for this trip out of his own pocket, while state Rep. Dan Burke, D-Chicago, and brother of almighty 13^th Ward Alderman Ed Burke, and all the other legislators who went along for the journey decided to use the money in their campaign funds.

AS AN ASIDE, I can’t help but wish that Eddie Burke could have gone along on this particular trip with younger brother Dan. What would los hermanos Castro make of the brothers Burke?

Would the two brother pairings meet, exchange pleasantries, then depart, while exchanging snide comments about how the other was a couple of power-hungry, political animals?

And if they did, who would be more correct. Eddie and Dan Burke on the Castros? Or Fidel and Raul on those lovable Irish-American politicos who manage to survive each Election Day, despite the fact that their ward/legislative district is turning increasingly Latino?

Although not Cubano. We’re talking about a Mexican-American mix that the Burkes will represent both in the City Council and in the Illinois House of Representatives.

I COULDN'T HELP but note Dan Burke pointed out that fact in some of the news coverage written in advance of the trip – as though he thinks people who come from places like Guanajuato or Guerrero are going to be swayed because he took a propaganda trip to the land where Che Guevara is a real icon – and not just some hairy dude who turns up on t-shirts!

... to the Castro brothers when it comes to tough politics?

So if it seems like I’m being disrespectful of this trip, I’m really not. I think it is a noble goal – because the day will come (no matter how many aging Miami exiles rant and rage against it) when Cuba becomes a part of the real world again.

Heck, beginning next month there will be direct flights from O’Hare International Airport to Havana’s Josè Martì International Airport. No more having to catch a flight to Montreal or Mexico City in order to get to Havana.

I’m just wondering how much our sometimes-bumbling state legislators (this is the governmental body with a member who this year tried to give a full tuition waiver to the kid of an organized crime figure, then tried to rescind it rather clumsily) are up to this trip.

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Is it really big. Big, big, big, big. Big?

DALEY: More excited than usual these days

Chicago is an internationally-known city that has throughout the decades attracted its share of world leaders.

I still remember the presence of Lech Walesa within our city limits, and there is a certain generation that recalls it as a significant moment when Queen Elizabeth herself visited the city on the shores of Lake Michigan back in ’58.

SO WHY IS it that Richard M. Daley earlier this week got himself so excited that Hu Jintao, the president of China, is visiting Chicago that a part of me wonders if he wet his pants with glee at the very thought,.

The visit that Daley proclaimed to be Big times Six has arrived. Following time in Washington with President Barack Obama earlier this week, the Chinese president arrived in Chicago Thursday night and is getting the civic tour of the city on Friday.

My understanding is that the president will be taken to Walter Payton College Preparatory School, which has a Chinese cultural education center (known as the Confucius Institute) among its programs.

Which to me seems like we in Chicago are all eager to show that we’re not a batch of bumpkins like the people in our surrounding Midwestern states. We have the capacity to comprehend other cultures – which may well be the biggest difference between us in Illinois and those people in Indiana who in recent days have taken to trying to bash us on account of tax rates (that really aren’t as favorable to them as they’d like to dream).

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN us and them is that Chicago gives our state the ability to attract certain business opportunities within the global community that those other states can only dream about.

HU: What will he remember of Chicago?

I can’t envision any international leader getting all that interested in visiting Indianapolis (unless he has some real desire to see auto racing). In fact, I can’t help but think if Hu Jintao tried to visit one of the surrounding states of the Midwest, he’d probably encounter so much hostility as to make him deem such a visit pointless.

Not that he didn’t get such hostility in Chicago.

The protesters whose disgust for China’s apathy toward including human rights with economic freedoms makes them want to cut off the mainland altogether were grouped outside the Chicago Hilton & Towers, the downtown hotel where the president stood during his Midwestern U.S. visit and where Daley and first lady Maggie held a formal dinner that city officials were quick to point out was paid for through private donations.

IN SHORT, THE business interests that want to have ties to China paid to arrange for the leader of a Communist nation to have a nice meal while in our city limits.

After bopping about the Internet, I have read enough conspiracy theories telling me the “real” reason why Hu Jintao included a Chicago stop on his U.S. tour. After all, if he really wanted to see people of Chinese-American descent, he could have just as easily gone to San Francisco or New York.

I think my favorite of these goofy theories are the ones that imply Chinese leaders visited Obama’s adopted hometown because they’re secretly planning to fund Obama’s re-election bid. Therefore, what we have is a gathering between Chinese communists and “the Machine” – that dreaded cast of Chicago political characters who are imposing their autocratic ways on the federal government.

Daley’s brother, William, after all, is the new chief of staff. Now we know whom Daley takes his marching orders from. At least that’s what they’d like us to believe.

ONLY THE KIND of people who are determined to believe that Obama wasn’t really born in the United States and there has to be some way to think of him as a “foreigner” unfit for the presidency would believe this kind of nonsense.

Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the fact that Obama is president did somehow subtly play into the fact that Hu Jintao and his aides included a Chicago visit on their trip to the United States.

This is a city whose public profile has elevated significantly on the international level because of the fact that Obama still owns a home here, and still thinks of himself as such a native that he says he’s traveling to Dallas on Feb. 6 for the Super Bowl – IF the Chicago Bears manage to qualify by beating Green Bay on Sunday.

While I have my own qualms about the Chinese government (not Chinese people themselves), I also realize that we exist in the world with them, and we will have to engage in some business dealings. Any attempt to use the Cuba treatment to isolate them from the world would make us look so ridiculous – moreso than the Cuba trade embargo does these days.

I REALIZE THAT our economic future is going to be advanced through cooperation, not isolation. Besides, I can’t help but wonder if China eventually is going to feel the pressure to give in on the human rights issues – lest they become too cut off from the rest of the world (like the Soviet Union of old)  upon which they want to be a part of.

I just have one hesitation about this trip.

I only hope that Hu Jintao doesn’t catch too long a glimpse of our Chinatown neighborhood. I’d hate to think he’d go back to Beijing with his head filled with examples of Chinese/American gaudiness.

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