Bernie!

An embarrassing kerfuffle started this week when an über-liberal website published a nearly 3,000 word “portrait” of self-proclaimed socialist, Bernie Sanders, the saggy-balled old man running for president as a Democrat in 2016.

In the writer’s effort to be “thorough” in his portrayal of Sanders, there appears a sentence that literally glosses over Sanders’ rape fantasies:  “He dabbled in carpentry and tried to get by as a freelance journalist for alternative newspapers and regional publications, contributing interviews, political screeds, and, one time, a stream-of-consciousness essay on the nature of male-female sexual dynamics.”

Sanders’ essay, published in 1972 in the Vermont Freeman, reads in part:

“A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.”

 “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.”

According to CNN, Sanders’ campaign spokesman Michael Briggs is dismissing the bizarre article as a “dumb attempt at dark satire” that “in no way reflects his views or record on women.  It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the 70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then.”

No, Mikey, the essay is a glimpse into the psyche of a typical non-violent socialist with sexually violent fantasies.  Now, frankly I’m not particularly concerned about what this delusional socialist sot said 43 years ago.  What infuriates me is how the press poodles perpetually hyperventilated for three months over a comment made by then-Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO) who, at the time, was running for Claire McCaskill’s senate seat in 2014. 

Akin was being interviewed on a St. Louis TV station when he was asked about his staunch opposition to abortion in cases where women became pregnant after being raped.

“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

Akins’ remark was both scientifically absurd and politically inept and rendered him irrelevant in his challenge to McCaskill.  He was roundly scolded by the GOP and asked to drop out of the race.

It’s pretty clear that the aforementioned website is running interference, a smear job if you will, for Hillary Clinton.  Many on the right took the bait rebuking Sanders for his weird theory.  In actuality, it’s best to ignore his dark little world in view of the Duggar and Hastert soap operas.

Bernie is irrelevant.  He’s got a snowflake’s chance in hell of surviving the primaries much less being nominated by his party at their convention.  Yes, there’s an ick factor here.  There’s at least one woman who doesn’t fantasize about violent sex.  So, Bernie got that wrong, but damn what a rumpled, unshorn little maple-syrup-swilling little creep.

Russia: A Totalitarian Abattoir

During my 61-and-a-half years of life I have always been a nationalist.  I have been devoted to my country, pride-filled and content in the belief that America was the greatest country in the world.  I have never been a jingoist.

Over those many years, the Olympics were something I watched with great interest because it showcased the American athlete.  No greater pride was felt than when an American athlete mounted the podium at the medals ceremony and the national anthem played to the assembled crowd in the stadium and the watching world.

To witness an American cry during the rousing anthem or to see them wrap themselves in Old Glory when they bested their competition raised my sense of pride.

America throughout its history has always been a force for good around the world.

When I arrived home after a hard day at work, I turned on my television and caught the last 30 minutes or so of the Opening Ceremony.  I sat there and watched Putin’s revisionist whitewashed history play out inside Fisht Olympic Stadium including the glorification of a giant hammer and sickle; the unadulterated icons of communism, the theories of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels and the butchery of Uncle Joe Stalin.

As a young girl growing up, I did something for which I am deeply ashamed.  Born in 1952, just 7 years after the end of World War II, history classes taught school children about World War II.  Invariably the lessons would include discussions about Nazi Germany.  Every American knew about the atrocities committed by Hitler and it was widely held that every German citizen knew about what was happening to the Jews.

Since 1966, post-war historians reckoned that “most Germans did not know” precisely about the “evolving terror of Hitler’s Holocaust” because the Nazis seduced an unwilling or passive public.  Robert Gellately, professor in Holocaust history at Clark University wrote, “For decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy.”

What I did during those history lessons in school was hold my tongue.  You see, my mother was German.  My dad fell in love with her while he was stationed in Berlin as part of the Berlin Airlift and was part of the constabulary responsible for guarding Rudolph Hess in Spandau Prison in West Berlin.  I held my tongue because I did not want my classmates to think my mother was a Nazi.  You see, the hatred for Nazis was towering and it was deserved, but my mom was not a Nazi and didn’t deserve to be hated.  I had no way of countering the hatred.  I just wanted to protect her.  I felt trapped and I wound up denying my mother.  I deeply regret having done that.

After they were married he brought her home and arranged for her mother to join them.  I grew up hearing stories of how elderly men were shot and killed while trying to stop Red Army soldiers from gang-raping their wives.  My grandmother would cry as she recounted how “the mongrels” would pillage and plunder the homes that had been turned into rubble destroying what was left of the furniture smashing it with bayonets and rifle butts.  She spoke of one incident where her neighbor’s home was invaded and the Red Army soldiers pulled a faucet from the wall to take back to the Soviet Union thinking it would bring running water.

The movie, A Woman in Berlin, reviewed in the LA Times by Kenneth Turan and described far more vividly by Andrew Roberts for The Daily Mail, authenticated the stories I was told about as a child.

What does all this have to do with the Opening Ceremony and that hammer and sickle?  It’s about the obfuscation of the truth—Yezhovshchina—the deaths of 20 million Russians, labor camps, manufactured famines, torture and a complete toll of bloodshed that will likely never be known.

What NBC did by televising that segment of the ceremony was to cover up the atrocities of which Soviet Russia is guilty in the manner and style of Walter Duranty who notoriously lied about Stalin’s infamies. 

The New York Times Moscow correspondent wrote 13 articles that were complete works of fiction.  So egregious was the palter that the Pulitzer Prize Board was asked to revoke the prize awarded him.   They did not because they were goddamned cowards.

NBC further propagandized “the evil empire” by creating a lead-in to the Opening Ceremony by hiring Peter Dinklage to narrate a pabulum piece in which the audience was lulled into a belief that the images they were seeing was one of industry, of construction, of building upward to a bright new future of hope and change leading to a perfect society where all comrades are equal and flowering in the glory of a Utopian collective.

“The towering presence, the empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint. The revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures. As a more reliable right to their collective heart. What they build in aspirations, lifted by imagination. What they craft, through the wonder of every last detail. How magical the fusion of sound and movement can be. How much a glass of distilled perfection and an overflowing table can matter. Discover the Russian people through these indelible signatures. Discover what we share with them through the games that open here tonight.”

It is, in fact, a failed political system, a legacy of gulags, Chernobyl nuclear nightmares, corruption and oppression of the highest order.

Sally Jenkins rightly noted, “The most expensive Olympics in history is partly a Potemkin village, an elaborate facade built to impress foreign passersby and to enhance the image of a small, odd, chill-faced man who likes to pose menacingly shirtless in order to seem much taller than he actually is.”

It is a totalitarian abattoir.