Carl Davidson – 1/8/2019

This page was last updated on January 30, 2019.

Instant Analysis: My Two Cents [President Trump speech]; Carl Davidson (KD); Facebook; January 8, 2019.

KD describes himself on Facebook as a “Truthseeker, Changemaker, Student of The Way, Pilgrim on the Road.”

You can learn more about BCR’s leftster management here. “Leftster” is the combination of leftist and gangster, inspired by the left-originated “bankster.”

There are two versions of this post. KD posted the original on 1/8/19 @ 10:49pm and the final version on 1/9/19 @ 11:07am. Both versions are shown below, but I commented only on the final. Both versions link to a cartoon entitled “Moby Brick.”

KD’s “analysis” is of President Donald J. Trump’s Address to the Nation on the Crisis at the Border on January 8, 2019.

In at least a couple of posts, KD implied he would fact-check President Trump’s (DT) address.

KD’s first post was, “TRUMP’S LIES TONIGHT: SHALL WE START A POLL? I’ll start with a conservative estimate of one per minute.”

KD’s second post was, “HERE’S A TRUMP PINOCCHIO DETECTOR for tonight’s speech. Think of it as your secret decoder ring. But watch out for ‘national emergency’ flim-flams. Those require much more from all of us defending truth, justice, and the American way.”

You will find KD did not fact-check DT’s address, at least not in this “Instant Analysis.”

Final Version of KD’s post

Carl Davidson 1/9/19 @ 11:07am: “INSTANT ANALYSIS: MY TWO CENTS: On Trump’s Teleprompter Tirade against Murderous, Thieving, Dope Smuggling and Cop-Killing Illegal Immigrant Rapists of Our Women and Young Girls–All in Less than 10 Minutes.

“To get at the heart of Trump’s 10-minute performance on prime time January 8, we need to get clear on a long-standing feature from the dark side of American politics and culture, i.e., race-baiting. Or to be more precise with Trump’s closing rant, illegal immigrant-baiting.”

[RWC] I watched the entire speech and didn’t hear or see DT “rant.” KD knows all about race-baiting.

“‘He just turned immigrants all into ‘Willie Horton’’ was the crisp and succinct way my partner put it. Those of you who were around for the infamous ad in the campaign by the elder Bush against Michael Dukakis back in 1988 will know exactly what she meant. For those of who weren’t, Lee Atwater, a GOP operative, took a case of an inmate on furlough in Massachusetts, one William Horton, who was arrested soon after and convicted for raping a woman and stabbing her friend, and turned an ugly mugshot of Horton into an ad blaming the crimes on Dukakis.”

[RWC] Lee Atwater was Bush 41’s campaign manager.

KD went easy on WH. First, KD failed to mention WH was not just “an inmate on furlough in Massachusetts.” WH and his two accomplices were convicted of first-degree murder for stabbing (19 times) to death a 17-year-old gas station attendant during a robbery ($276.37) and were serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

Second, “William Horton, … was arrested soon after” not returning to prison from his furlough only if you consider 10 months (June 1986 – April 1987) to be “soon after.”

Third, incredibly, “raping a woman and stabbing her friend” understates what WH did to the couple while he was on furlough. According to the Baltimore Sun, WH broke into the home of “a woman and … her friend” engaged to be married in two months. (Note: There are numerous “typos” in the Sun’s piece. Since the original predated the use of the Internet as we use it today, I suspect the errors are the result of scanning the original into a form more Internet friendly.)

“Then the torture began. Horton told Cliff he was going to han him by his neck in the basement and watch him strangle. Then he jammed the gun barrel into Cliff’s eyes hard enough to blacken them. Then he rammed the gun into Cliff’s mouth. Then he began slashing Cliff with a knife. He slashed him across the stomach in all directions.

“‘Do you know how scary it is to have somebody drag a knif across your body and never know when they’re going to push it in?’ Cliff said later.

“Cliff told Horton where his credit cards and bank cards were. H told Horton everything Horton asked. But the torture did not stop.

“About 2:30 a.m., Angi came home. She walked up to th bedroom, where she noticed a broken beer bottle and Cliff’s eyeglasses. As she walked back out into the hall, Horton jumped her.

“He rammed the gun into her face, grabbed her by the throat and dragged her into the bedroom. He tied her hands behind her back and blindfolded her. Then he tore open her shirt and camisole. He cut her jeans open with his knife, dragged the knife over her body and raped her.

“‘Total disbelief,’ Angi said later, describing her emotions during the rape. ‘Then fear. Constant fear. Constant survival mixed with fear. Do anything you can to just get out of it alive. And then if you get a chance to kill them, that’s what you want. You just want to get a chance to get ahold of that gun.’

“After he was done, Angi tried to distract him. She asked him t get her a beer, which he did. She asked him to watch TV, which they did. All the while, Horton held the gun to the back of her neck. Then Horton raped her again, in the living room this time with the stereo turned on. Angi tried to grab the gun, but failed. ‘He got really violent with me,’ Angi said.

“She did not know if Cliff was dead or alive, but Cliff could hea her screams while she was being raped and beaten. When he heard the second attack starting, Cliff knew he might be able to escape.

“‘This is really terrible, but if he hadn’t attacked her, raped her a second time, I wouldn’t have tried to escape because the way he had me blindfolded, I couldn’t really tell where he was at,’ Cliff said.

“Cliff managed to get free. Bleeding from his many knife wounds, his clothes hanging from him in shreds, he fled the house and ran for help. He pounded on the doors of four neighbors before one let him in to call the police.

“When Horton had finished with Angi, he discovered Cliff haescaped from the basement. Knowing the police would soon be there, he began loading up Cliff’s Camaro with booty from the house. While he was doing this, Angi escaped through a bathroom window.

“Horton took off in the car and led police on a chase northboundown the southbound lane of a nearby highway. After a shootout with officers in which he was wounded, Horton was captured. It was now about 7 a.m.”

Al Gore (AG) first brought WH into the 1988 campaign, not Lee Atwater. AG was an opponent of Michael Dukakis (MD) in the 1988 Democrat primary campaign. AG was clever, however. During a debate, AG simply mentioned he had a problem with furloughs for convicted criminals, never mentioning the WH case.

“‘By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate,’ quipped Atwater at the time. Years later, facing an early death from cancer, Atwater apologized to Dukakis for ‘naked cruelty’ that grew from a ‘tumor of the soul’ in American racialized politics.”

[RWC] Not exactly. According to the New York Times, “‘In 1988,’ Mr. Atwater said, ‘fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.’” KD’s trying to make the apology a tad more expansive than it was.

“What does a race baiter do? He picks a particularly vile example of an outrage, real or fiction, attached to a person of color, and uses it to condemn an entire category of people, whipping up a generalized fear of ‘The Other’ in the minds of his designated popular base, to entice them into supporting repressive responses. The outrage is the ‘bait’ on the hook of social control and manipulation.”

[RWC] Please read Lefty race baiters.

“Trump’s aim was for us to take the bait. He knows as well as anyone that the illegal immigrant population, as a whole, once living in the U.S., is more law-abiding than the American average. He knows that a majority of the undocumented in the U.S. enter the country legally, then overstayed their visas. He knows that most drugs entering the country from Mexico do so on trucks and cars at ports of entry, or planes at airports. He knows that his immigration policies are designed to curb all immigrants from ‘shit hole’ countries, legal or otherwise, while enticing the highly educated from ‘Norway’ instead.”

[RWC] If true, what’s wrong with “enticing the highly educated” regardless of their countries of origin? FYI, the number of Norwegian immigrants was 23,000 for 2017, 0.1% of the total.

“Trump wants you to see him as your savior against ‘them,’ those seeking safety and work. And to keep you fired up, he has to insist on including the irrational into any rational package of reforms making for decent treatment of immigrants at well-regulated and efficient border crossings.”

[RWC] “well-regulated and efficient border crossings?” Translation: Open borders without monitoring.

Why does KD really want open borders? In his Facebook post of December 31, 2018, KD wrote, “WHY IMMIGRATION? Among other things, we need them to keep social security functioning. Contrary to some imaginations, nearly all immigrants work and pay into FICA, even with fake SS numbers. Moreover, illegal immigrants are excluded from safety net programs.”

Why do we need immigrants “to keep social security functioning?” That’s not what KD thought back in 2016. In 2016, KD said, “There [was] only one way to improve Social Security,” and it wasn’t via immigration. Back to the present, KD wrote, “SO IT BEGINS. There only one way to improve Social Security: Take the cap off FICA (Now at $116K, a kind of affirmative action for those with higher incomes) and if that is done, set the maximum payout at, say, $50K. Anything else will ‘make America great’ at the expense of the elderly and infirm.”

KD and Robert Reich (RR) are on the same page; they both think immigrants are needed to keep SS and Medicare afloat. RR says, “The basic reason SS and Medicare are running out of money” is because we geezers “continue to age and live longer.”

KD (“Ya gotta love Robert Reich”) and Robert Reich (RR) are on the same page; they both think immigrants are needed to keep SS and Medicare afloat. RR says, “The basic reason SS and Medicare are running out of money” is because we geezers “continue to age and live longer.”

RR’s “easy fix” is to exploit immigrants and their current and future children by taking 15.3% of their paychecks (12.4% for the SS tax and 2.9% for the Medicare tax) to pay for his SS benefits and medical care. That’s incredibly selfish. RR doesn’t say who will pay years from now when today’s “young immigrants” “continue to age and live longer.” Finally, neither KD nor RR told us how many “young immigrants” they need to exploit.

“But what’s the larger purpose? My guess is that it serves as a distraction. It diverts our attention away from a more serious challenge to his presidency, his business and his family, the step-by-step relentless series of indictments and convictions coming from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is likely soon to reveal a Donald Trump that no one voted for. Then we’ll be tested more seriously.”

[RWC] Though we got a lot of opinion, what happened to the fact-checking?

In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity. <g>

Original Version of KD’s post

Carl Davidson 1/8/19 @ 10:49pm: “INSTANT ANALYSIS: MY TWO CENTS. To get at the heart of Trump’s 10-minute performance on prime time tonight, we need to get clear on a long-standing feature from the dark side of American politics and culture, i.e., race-baiting. Or to be more precise with Trump’s closing rant, illegal immigrant-baiting.

“He just turned immigrants all into ‘Willie Horton’” was the crisp and succinct way my partner put it. Those of you who were around for the infamous ad in the campaign by the elder Bush against Michael Dukakis back in 1988 will know exactly what she meant. For those of who weren’t, Lee Atwater, a GOP operative, took a case of an inmate on furlough in Massachusetts, one William Horton, who was arrested soon after and convicted for raping a woman and stabbing her friend, and turned an ugly mugshot of Horton into an ad blaming the crimes on Dukakis.

“What does a race baiter do? He picks a particularly vile example of an outrage, real or fiction, attached to a person of color, and use it to condemn an entire category of people, whipping up a generalized fear of ‘The Other’ in the minds of his designated popular base, to entice them into supporting repressive responses. The outrage is the ‘bait’ on the hook of social control and manipulation.

“Trump’s aim tonight was for us to take the bait. He knows as well as anyone that the illegal immigrant population, as a whole, once living in the U.S., is more law-abiding than the American average. He knows that a majority of the undocumented in the U.S. enter the country legally, then overstayed their visas. He knows that most drugs entering the country from Mexico do so on trucks and cars at ports of entry, or planes at airports. He knows that his immigration policies are designed to curb all immigrants from ‘shit hole’ countries, legal or otherwise, while enticing the highly educated from ‘Norway’ instead.