Tariq Aziz.
For decades, this dapper man would stand in front of the cameras, meet diplomats and ministers and sit with presidents as a representative of the murderous Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
He was a silver fox with a narrow, trimmed mustache, owlish eyeglasses, silk western necktie and tailored suit. Every morning, he would rise, bathe and look in the mirror to shave and dress. He’d breakfast on fried tomatoes and eggs then be chauffeured to work. And there, day after day, for decades, he would advance the policies of a cruel regime and offer preposterous lies in defense of the indefensible — notably gassing Shia by the thousands in southern Iraq, using American hostages as human shields to stave off a Desert Storm invasion and perpetrating decades of domestic political terror.
He had a warm smile. He looked like your rich uncle. But every morning, in the midst of his ablutions, what did he see in that mirror?
I always wondered. What motivated him, members of parliament and the rest of the Baath leadership to adjust the knots of their ties, kiss their wives and labor day after day, year after year, in the service of brutal tyranny?
Was it mere cowardice? Corruption? Co-option? Power? Privilege? Ambition? What? When their countrymen choked their last breaths in the marshland of the south, or when their troops invaded Kuwait, or when suspected opponents were tortured in Saddam’s unspeakable prisons.
I think about him often. This weekend especially, when Donald Trump — the rapist, fraud, wannabe dictator and America’s most popular politician — said the following about immigrants:
They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world — not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia — all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.
Was he speaking of all immigrants? Only undocumented immigrants? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. The world homed in on “poisoning the blood,” because it was an explicit Hitlerism. Just as it was a few days earlier, in Iowa, when he used the same phrase. And just as it was last month, when he not only other-ized but literally dehumanized his opposition.
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.
“Vermin,” he said. Are we surprised? No, we are not.
This was a guy who hosted virulent anti-Semite Nick Fuentes (“Those people, when we take power, they need to be given the death penalty. Straight up. … Absolutely annihilated.”).
It just don’t get much Nazier than that. Yet, the New Republic found:
No members of Republican leadership ever explicitly condemned the meeting. Some lawmakers even tried to claim that Trump didn’t know who he was meeting or that he had condemned Fuentes’s previous comments.
But that’s not what I’m about here; this country has had many a demagogue over the centuries, some of whom (Andrew Jackson, Father Coughlin, William Jennings Bryan, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long, Alabama Gov. George Wallace) had substantial followings. What we haven’t had before was a cult of personality so powerful that an entire political party was captured in its thrall, like the armed Winkies guardsmen in The Wizard of Oz, chanting, Old one. Old one. Oh we love the old one.
Or, put a better way: a Republican Congressional conference populated by 270 shades of Tariq Aziz.
In the eight years of Trump’s political ascendancy, every single rhetorical outrage — and every single official and unofficial act of depravity — has been met with acquiescence or worse by 99%-plus of the Republican Party. And God knows, because the press is under its own delusions and trapped in its own cowardice, they've had ample opportunity for disavowal. As if. Though confronting a Republican about Trump outrages will never, ever be met with a straightforward answer, the furrow-browed reporters and anchors feign journalistic rigor by teeing up the acolytes for non-sequitur soundbites or talking-point filibusters about freedom-hating Democrats, “crooked” Joe Biden, Soros-backed prosecutors, woke obsessions with human rights and climate crisis and the general category of things more important than Donald Trump’s occasional rhetorical excess.
“Real Hitlers are called Hamas,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a seasoned veteran at changing the subject. A common version of that skill is what-about-ism, often featuring swipes at Hillary Clinton, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “Is that [dehumanizing humans] worse than ‘deplorables’? I don’t use that kind of language, but it’s a free country.” (Answer: Yes, “vermin” is worse than “deplorables.” A lot worse.)
When the most popular figure in your party is a sociopath, changing the subject becomes a reflex. This was former Vice President Mike Pence, while he was still a Trump opponent in the nomination race, reacting to Trump’s felony indictments over hush-money payments to a porn star:
At a time when there’s a crime wave in New York City, the fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting president Trump is his top priority just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country.
No, what it tells you is that a craven politician trying not to antagonize MAGA World will invent crime waves and demonize a career prosecutor and former Sunday school teacher to avoid criticizing the man who riled up the Jan. 6 mob demanding Pence’s own lynching. Then, using another standard talking point, Pence added that Trump’s prosecution isn’t “what the American people want.”
Possibly. Big chunks of the American people also don’t want life-saving vaccines or the teaching of history. They want Hot Pockets and more water pressure in the shower. That is not a standard for governance, much less justice. Oh, and 62% of the Republican electorate wants Trump to be nominated, even if he is convicted of fraud or trying to overturn an election. That’s because they are bigoted, gullible and/or stupid. Please note that I have not spent any space on the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) or Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) — “I’m mad he wasn’t even tougher than that” — because they themselves are bigoted, loudmouth imbeciles.
Others don’t have that excuse. And, my God, the contortions required to ignore the fascism they embrace are sometimes quite breathtaking. On CNN, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) spun a lie to make George Santos blush: “He never said immigrants are poisoning, though,” she argued. “He didn't say the words immigrants, I think he was talking about Democratic policies.”
Yes, those poisonous Democratic policies “coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia — all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.” He also wasn’t demonizing human beings the same night, when he posted on Truth Social: ‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS POISONING THE BLOOD OF OUR NATION.’
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) embroidered an even more extravagant interpretation of “poisoning the blood.”
“I think this is ridiculous,” Vance said. “If you watch the speech in context and you look at what’s going on, it is obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic. To take that comment and then to immediately assume that he’s talking about immigrants as Adolf Hitler talked about Jews is preposterous!”
Oh, absolutely. Fentanyl, which crosses the border at U.S. checkpoints in 18-wheelers, not immigrant fanny packs, is indeed absolutely what Trump was speaking of. No matter how explicit he’s been at rallies and on social media, he wasn’t warning about the pollution of our precious, white, European, Christian, God-fearing DNA but Fentanyl sepsis. Obvs.
Congratulations, J.D. You also dress up real nice in your dark suit and red tie. Very dashing and utterly loyal. Tariq Aziz would be so proud.
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Amen, Bob. A few observations:
In this country we get to choose our leadership. That means that we deserve the leadership that we get.
You can take JD Vance out of the hills but you can't take the hillbilly out of JD Vance.
I personally doubt that The Donald read Mein Kampf. I personally doubt that The Donald has ever read anything more demanding than the Peanuts comic strip and probably didn't actually understand even that.
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I have been thinking a lot about humanity, intelligence, AI. I am left with the impression that we actually aren't all that and a bag of chips. We (in the largest sense of we) remain puppets of our selfish genes, slaves to evolutionary responses that served us well enough when mysterious gods unleashed volcanic eruptions and capriciously ordained bumper crops or desperate famines and survival hinged on competition for scarce resources. Those responses serve us much less well today when our long term survival depends more on cooperation than competition. Technology moves fast. Evolution moves slowly. lt is that time scale mismatch that likely pens the score to our future. Homo habilis gone wild has turned the tables on the vicissitudes of the environment. We can increasingly manage the abundance of food that we eat, the temperature of the structures in which we live, the speeds at which we travel. But the better part of a million years in we are little better at managing ourselves than we were in 1939 or 27BCE or whenever it was that Thum smacked Legog with the femur of an antelope.