Peter David's Blog, page 22

Len Wein

Dammit. As if there isn’t already enough stuff to be depressed about this time of year. I realized yesterday that today was September 11, and once again we as a nation would collectively open the wounds of the Twin Towers, of the thousands of people who died that day.

But then yesterday I was driving and Kath was on the Internet, and she suddenly said, “Shit. RIP Len Wein.” I immediately pulled over as she ran quick verifications to make sure it wasn’t somebody’s sick idea of a joke. It wasn’t.

Unbelievable. First Jerry Pournelle, whom I saw just a few days ago at Dragon*Con, and now Len. I still remember when we were out at dinner at San Diego during the con, and he was telling me with great enthusiasm about this new television program called “Pushing Daisies.” I knew from his description that the show wouldn’t last, but it sounded great. And I also recall when Hugh Jackman thanked him on the SDCC stage for giving him a career. His health was obviously deteriorating but I thought he would outlast us all.

Shit.

PAD

So let me see if I understand this Jennifer Lawrence thing

When right wing evangelicals declare that LGBTQ are responsible for Hurricane Harvey rather than, y’know, climate change…when even Ann Coulter declares, “I don’t believe Hurricane Harvey is God’s punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor. But that is more credible than ‘climate change,” that’s just standard issue and can be ignored.

When Rush Limbaugh states that Hurricane Irma is actually being amplified out of all reason by the news media, well, he’s just talking like a wrong headed righty.

When Pat Robertson says Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for abortion, well, that’s just Pat Robertson being an idiot.

But Jennifer Lawrence does an interview in which she comments about how hurricanes are representative of nature’s wrath (poetic but okay), that climate change is due to human activity (it is), and that the only voice we really have to try and do something is through voting (that’s right.). She said that Trump’s election was startling (it was; Hillary Clinton wrote a whole book about it) and that was pretty much it.

And insanely, news coverage is declaring that she’s blaming Trump for the hurricanes. And naturally Twitter idiots who aren’t bothering to actually READ the articles and realize that she’s saying no such thing have erupted and declared that she’s an idiot and should be boycotted.

Basically, this is genuinely fake news, but the idiot Trump supporters aren’t capable of realizing it as such and are fully embracing it.

Me, all I can notice is that Mar-a-Lago is right in Irma’s path and might be obliterated. I would find that further proof of Voltaire’s statement that God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – September 8, 2017

Y’know what? Just to shake things up, let’s start with something that Trump did right this week.

The enemy of my enemy. Trump has regularly gone after Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and pretty much all the GOP as they have failed to build his wall or repeal Obamacare or…well, pretty much anything, really. Naturally the Party of No’s impulse is to blame everything on the Democrats, even though they’re in the majority.

So now with a desperate need for Harvey aid calling for the attention of the same people who couldn’t be bothered to help victims of Hurricane Sandy, not to mention a deal on the debt ceiling required lest the government shut down, the Democrats came up with a plan that would solve it for at least three months. Ryan naturally turned it down. To the utter shock of the GOP, the Democrats met with Trump and Trump took the deal. Why? Because the GOP forgot that for the majority of his life, Trump was a Democrat. His turn to the GOP was just a matter of convenience so that he could get some publicity in running for President, never dreaming that he would actually get the job. Now that he’s there, though, he’s starting to remember that the GOP is largely composed of dicks who are interested in two things and two things only: holding on to power and stopping the Democrats at every turn. And there is an outside possibility that Trump has begun to realize that that attitude isn’t going to serve him in the slightest. So suddenly Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are referred to as “Chuck and Nancy” and Trump is extolling the virtues of reaching across the aisle and working with the people that Ryan, McConnell and the others cannot stand.

Now of course the problem is that, this being Trump, his syphilitic brain could turn him against the Democrats tomorrow or even later today. But at the moment I have to admit that I am loving watching the GOP trying to downplay their obvious panic over this turn of events.

Meanwhile, even his stupidity this week has a positive turn to it.

Dream a little dream. . During the Obama era or, as we like to recall it, last year, Obama swore that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was solid. There are seven hundred thousand people in this country who have never had the opportunity to go anywhere else. They were brought here as kids or even infants, and now while their American-born siblings are allowed to stay, immigration wanted to throw them out of the only country they’ve ever lived in, even though they committed no crimes and have been loyal, upstanding citizens. Obama said don’t sweat it. But this infuriated Trump’s hardline conservative nutbag supporters who wanted every immigrant thrown out of a country that was largely founded by immigrants. They apparently came up with an alternate plan: Kick All Foreign Kids Away, or KAFKA. And Trump originally swore that he was going to adhere to KAFKA, even going so far this week as to explicitly say he was going to do away with DACA. This naturally caused panic. Chelsea Handler summarized the situation perfectly: “We’re sorry for making it clear that white supremacists and Nazis are welcome in this country, while young hardworking immigrants brought here as children are not.”

And yet astoundingly Trump wound up calling Nancy Pelosi and she suggested that, at the very least, he let everyone who is currently applying to DACA know that they shouldn’t get worked up about KAFKA. Which prompted Trump to perform a metamorphosis and tweet “For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about – No action!” So he is definitely waffling now, and while it’s still a shame that hundreds of thousands of kids are living in fear in an uncertain world, it’s evident that–at least for the moment–Trump’s priorities are swinging back to the side of people who are interested in reason and compassion instead of the GOP assholes.

So it’s been a good week.

PAD

Freak out Friday – September 1, 2017

Sorry, folks. I’m at Dragon*Con and my mind is far away from Trump. Talk amongst yourselves.

PAD

Cowboy Pete: The Inhumans

In recent days I had been restricting Cowboy Pete to my Patreon account (yesterday I put up reviews of the Game of Thrones season ender and “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” But I wanted to get word out a bit more widely about the upcoming “Inhumans” series, having seen the first two episodes last night at the Marvel screening. Warning: there are spoilers.

People have been relentlessly bitching about the TV series based upon, well, pretty much everything that we’ve seen of it thus far. Photographs? They don’t look right. Scenes released? They don’t act right or sound right. Which moves me to ask the following question:

What the hell is WRONG with you people?

First of all, they cast fricking Ramsey Bolton as Maximus. How can you NOT love the casting of the man who cut off Theon’s junk and was last seen being eaten to death by his own starved dogs as Maximus the Mad?

In “The Defenders,” they strive to make the world so real that Jessica Jones had huge amounts of trouble accepting various concepts that comics fans take in stride. There is no hint of reality in “The Inhumans.” How could there be? It starts out on the damned moon where the Inhumans currently live in hiding, afraid that humans will discover them there and then…what? If humans discovered that they were there, humanity would probably shrug and say, “Fine, as long as they stay there, who cares?” Well, except for Trump who would do God knows what. Hmm. Maybe their paranoia is more well founded than I first thought.

But naturally you couldn’t have much of a film if they just hung out on the moon and didn’t do anything. Maximus winds up staging a coup, splitting up the royal family and sending them to different parts of Hawaii, where one would expect Five-0 to be all over them. Fortunately enough, Five-0 is safely on CBS, so the Inhumans have to deal with police of a far more pedestrian nature.

One really has to congratulate the producers with coming up with ways to minimize their make-up and CGI expenses. The heavily made-up Triton? Gone within the first five minutes, ostensibly dead although we can be fairly certain he’s not. Lockjaw? Knocked out three quarters of the way through the first episode where he then basically slept through the entirety of episode 2. Medusa’s hair? They shaved her head in a scene that was so brutal it was as if they were raping her on screen. (Yes, that’s a major plot point, but Marvel just released a trailer where Medusa is shown with her shaved head, so they’re not trying to hide it.).

The bottom line is that shows like “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage” are grim and gritty detective or action shows with superpowered people. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was a political action thriller with superpowered people. “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is a spy series with superpowered people. “The Inhumans” is a comic book show. That’s it. It doesn’t aspire to be anything beyond that. They took Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s characters and said, “Let’s make a series that Stan could have written and Jack could have drawn,” and they are perfectly happy with that. Now my hope is that fans haven’t become so sophisticated that they have outgrown a perfectly entertaining comic book program.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – August 25, 2017

I think it reasonably safe to say that no president in the history of this country has ever started his reelection campaign eight months into his presidency. The answer as to why is obvious: Trump is constantly being barraged with polls that are telling him how incredibly unpopular he is. How the majority of the citizens do not trust him. That he’s an idiot or has syphilis or is just insane. And his inflated ego is so fragile that the only way he can survive is surrounding himself with mobs of brainless supporters who will cheer everything he says. This despite the fact that several thousand protestors swarmed outside. This despite the fact that it was observed that people who had waited on line to get in were swarming toward the doors the longer he went on.

You know, I hate to say this, but I’m honestly feeling sorry for him. He is clearly miserable in office. Nobody goes on tweet rampages if they’re happy.

1). Clever editing.. At the Tuesday rally, Trump read from his attacks upon the demonstrators in Charlottesville in which he said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” He held that up as proof that he had remonstrated the White Supremacists and Nazis. However he conveniently dropped out the very words that got him in so much trouble: “…on many sides. On many sides.” His condemnation of the right wing instigators got him into no trouble; it was his attempt to draw a false equivalency between the haters and the protestors that landed him in hot water. He was obviously aware of this, which is why he left out the key words that he has since defended. Perhaps he truly believes that people are so unaware of history that they forget even something that was said only a week previously.

2). Filibuster Rhymes. Trump is insisting that Mitch McConnell use the nuclear option and remove the filibuster so that the Senate can vote bills into law with a simple majority. Unless that happens, Trump declares, “8 Democrats control the Senate!” Of course, since his grasp of history is tenuous-to-non-existent, Trump hasn’t considered the possibility that the GOP will not remain in control. That as of 2018 they might be in the minority, in which case the lack of filibuster will backfire against the GOP. By taking advantage of the nuclear option, it will be the GOP who suffers from the fall out. But it’s useless to explain that to Trump because, like any toddler, he wants what he wants when he wants it.

3). Climbing the wall. “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.” He said that in Phoenix. “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix the mess!” he tweeted as well. For someone who purports to be a good businessman, how can he be unaware that the last shutdown in October of 2013 resulted in $24 billion in lost economic output? Yet Trump is threatening to do just that: to shut down the government if congress doesn’t give him $20 billion dollars to build his wall. You remember the wall. The one that the Mexican government was going to pay for? Except now it turns out that no, he wants US taxpayers to handle the cost while the Mexicans will wind up reimbursing us somehow, magically. How will he make that happen? He’s given as much detail on that plan as he did with his plans for health care.

You know what? I think that if Disney puts him into the Hall of Presidents, he should be standing with his back to the audience. Or behind Obama so he can’t be seen. That would be the ultimate commentary on his idiot tweet in which he portrayed himself as eclipsing Obama, oblivious to the fact that he was implying Obama was the sun and Trump was just passing through briefly casting shadow before disappearing.

Did he do anything right?. Yes. He looked directly at the eclipse. He proved once and for all that he listens to absolutely no one.

PAD

See, THAT’S how it’s done

The following Tweet from chairman of the Democratic coalition Jon Cooper appeared today:

“After alt-right organizers saw huge counter protests in Boston, they’ve canceled 67 America First rallies scheduled in thirty six states.”

It’s what I’ve been saying all along: the answer to free speech is always more free speech. Kudos to the people of Boston for doing exactly the right thing and organizing counter rallies to these Nazi/White supremacists assholes and saying, “Not in our city. Not in our country.” That is the purest essence of free speech. Great going, guys.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – August 18, 2017

I have been writing about Trump’s presidency pretty much every week since he took power. And I can say this with utter confidence:

This week was the low point. Until he is thrown out of office, this is as low as it gets.

I don’t have to number the entries this week because it’s all been one huge f*ckfest since Charlottesville. This is a man who has not hesitated to condemn pretty much anybody, within hours or even minutes of being provoked (or seeing something on Fox and Friends that triggers him.). Yet when the insanity reigned in Virginia, which is apparently now not just for lovers, but lovers of violence), Trump did not step forward and condemn the Nazis and White Supremacists who started it and were collectively responsible for Heather Heyer’s death. Instead he declared there were problems “on many sides.” He equated the two sides, giving them equal involvement and equal responsibility.

That is, of course, bullshit. One side was there to protest the removal of a statue commemorating a man who basically committed treason, while simultaneously advocating death to Jews, blacks, and every other inferior race. The other side was there to object. The Supremacists were the instigators, the promoters of violence. They were, in short, the bad guys. Yet Trump was unable to admit to this, and believe me, the right wing got the message. They chortled in joy over the fact that Trump didn’t denounce them, elevating their sense of power and feeling encouraged to conduct more such assemblages in the future. Two days later, when he finally condemned them, they took that as a “wink wink,” “I have to say this” speech that was undoubtedly foisted on him by Jews. He claimed that he had not wanted to rush to judgment, that he wanted to get “all the facts.”

Seriously? This is a man who has not hesitated to post within hours, even minutes of hearing stuff on “Fox and Friends” attacks and assaults on…oh, let’s see. CNN. MSNBC. The New York Times. Reporters in general. Joe Scarborough. Mitch McConnell. John McCain. Meryl Streep. Alec Baldwin he can attack, but Nazis? Gotta draw the line somewhere. As for facts, he may understand what facts are, but he willfully ignores them in favor of his own agenda.

And on Tuesday, he rolled back his purely token comments slamming the Nazis and instead went back to his Saturday rhetoric of tossing everyone in the same cauldron. This was a shock to his staffers, who later admitted that he said stuff like this all the time in private, but they never thought he’d say it publicly.

To any rational, thinking person, his comments are shocking. Outrageous. Unfathomable.

But if one studies Trump and accepts the inevitable conclusion, it’s not surprising at all.

Trump is a racist.

This is not a description that we have wanted to embrace previously. We wanted to believe that he was just catering to a base that could help him rise to power and stay in power. He didn’t really believe Mexicans were violent rapists. He didn’t really refuse to rent apartments to blacks. Those were all misunderstandings, or political gamesmanship, or misreported by a press that was out to get him. When he made Tweets that smacked of racism, he was just trying to get us to think he was racist so that we would argue about that and ignore the fact that congress was trying to get rid of health care again. It couldn’t be that a modern man born and raised in New York was really a racist.

Yeah, well, that hope is gone. It vanished when he refused on Saturday to condemn Nazis and white supremacists and then again on Tuesday equated the left wing with them (do NOT toss his alt-left designation at me. Stephen Colbert said it best: “The opposite of alt-right isn’t alt-left. It’s Not Nazi.”)

Barack Obama would have condemned the Nazis. George W. would have. So would Clinton and George H.W. Hey, all you idiots who couldn’t see any difference between Hillary and Trump: do YOU think she would have dropped the ball? Jesus Christ, the makers of TIKI torches knew what to say; how could the goddamn President not?

Except he did know just what to say because he is definitely, absolutely, ultimately a racist. He shares at least some of their principles. He values their support over more reasonable members of his party and voting public. The President is a racist. When David Duke is congratulating you on what you have to say and calling you an ally, there is no better tip off to your sentiments than that. And if we are willing to accept that he’s a racist, then everything about his behavior makes perfect sense and tracks consistently.

And here’s the bottom line: any member of the GOP who continues to support him is, by extension, aiding and abetting a racist. As long as they continue to stay behind him, they are helping a white supremacist, neo-Nazi supporter. They are as responsible as he is as long as they allow him to continue in power.

He has to go. This isn’t some guy who worked for a hot dog stand. This is the leader of the free world (a title that he has abrogated since the rest of the world considers him to be a joke.)

If the only reason Mike Pence is there is to provide someone who seems better than Trump, even though he’s just as bad, fine. It worked. I can live with Pence because I have no reason to believe he’s a racist asshole. An asshole, yes, but not a racist one.

It is incumbent upon Mike Pence and congress to say, “Enough,” and invoke the 25th Amendment. Get this racist lunatic out of the Oval Office and away from the nuclear codes. This is no longer an issue of “I hate Trump.” This is a man who is demonstrably a racist and has absolutely no business being in a position of power.

PAD

Firing Charlottesville Fascists

There’s an upcoming TV series starring Jeremy Piven, “Wisdom of the Crowd,” in which Piven’s character gathers the combined input from millions of computer users/observers in order to solve crimes. That appears to be happening in real life as pictures of the far right protestors in Charlottesville are being widely circulated and their lives are crashing down around their ears. There are already several instances where they have been fired from their jobs because their employers didn’t know that they were employing right wing Nazi sympathizers. Observers are cheering these results because they are determined to destroy these guys. Indeed, that’s why members of the KKK always wore hoods, so they could do whatever they wanted while avoiding the consequences those actions might result in.

This may outrage fans of mine, but every time I hear about another far right guy losing his job or having his life destroyed, I hate it. Just hate it.

Now if it’s someone who performed a criminal action–he assaulted somebody, for instance–then I’m all for it. Bring him down.

But if all he did was open his mouth or wave a sign, I’m sorry, no. He shouldn’t lose his job for that. He shouldn’t be prosecuted for that. I mean, obviously it didn’t interfere with his ability to do his job because his employer was fine with keeping him on as long as he didn’t harass others with his views. But now they’re being fired because their employer knows where his sympathies lie? That’s just not right. For two reasons.

First of all, all it’s going to do is drive him further underground. He might indeed start wearing a hood and, cloaked in anonymity, do worse things than he was already doing. His boss and fellow employees couldn’t sit him down and say, “Why do you feel this way? Have you ever considered maybe you’re wrong?” Engage in conversation that might change his mind (as unlikely as that may seem.).

And second, getting him fired is simply going to galvanize his hatred of the left. Before his reasons for prejudice were all lies that were fed to him by right wing sources. Now, though, he has a genuine reason to hate those who were opposed to him: they got him fired. They wrecked his life. What’s to stop him from planning revenge against his enemies? What’s to stop him from hopping behind the wheel of a car and running over some of those lefty bastards and exacting some payback? Before he was just an asshole. Now he’s a genuine enemy.

It is NEVER a good idea to punish somebody just because you don’t like their opinions.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – August 11, 2017

On Comedy Central, they have a weekly sitcom in which a comedian imitates Donald Trump. It’s called “The President Show” and the announcer always declares Trump to be, at the top of the show, “the 45th and last President.” With what’s going on this week, I’m beginning to wonder just how accurate that may be.

1). Yeah, I can totally imagine Hillary doing this. As Trump glides us toward nuclear war with North Korea, I am reminded of all the idiot voters who saw no difference between Trump and Clinton. “Each,” we were told, “is equally bad.” Okay, I would like a show of hands. How many people can imagine Hillary Clinton threatening Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury, the likes of which no one has ever seen.” Well, yes, we have seen it. We saw it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki exactly seventy-two years ago. We’ve seen it in a variety of movies in which humanity was stupid enough to unleash Armageddon upon itself. And the odds of us seeing it in our lifetimes is rapidly escalating. Because Trump, rather than relying on diplomacy and sanctions and keeping one’s head screwed on as we have been doing for decades is instead basically daring Kim Jong-un to take his best shot and see what happens. So what we’re now in the position of hoping is that North Korea’s man-child of a dictator is actually mature enough to realize that Trump is nothing but a thundering oaf who should be ignored. That’s a pretty vague hope upon which to hinge the prospect of no-nukes continuing.

I mean, it’s always a given that the President has access to the nuclear football, but I don’t think on a daily basis that we gave much thought to the notion that he would actually use it to fire missiles. Yet now I can very easily imagine Trump hearing on Fox News that North Korea is preparing to shoot a missile in the direction of Guam and decide that a pre-emptive strike is the only way to deal with it. “I Warned him; he brought this on himself,” Trump would declare, and suddenly the missiles are flying. I wonder how China would feel about that? Or Russia? If China and Russia team up to retaliate against us, do we think we can win that war? Does ANYONE win that war? Or do those few of us who are left wind up in a Mad Max movie?

I think what it comes down to is this: Trump believes, and rightfully so, that he is a joke to the rest of the world. Other leaders ignore him or make jokes about him. For a control freak like Trump, that is intolerable. So he needs to make people afraid of him by endeavoring to take charge of something–anything. Preferably anything that doesn’t involve Congress. So he decides that North Korea is the perfect target and starts threatening the country with nuclear annihilation. Suddenly the world leaders are no longer laughing. Because they realize that they’re dealing with a serious nut bar who is perfectly willing to kill millions of people in order to prove that he’s tougher than anybody.

You know what? God knows I have no love for Mike Pence, but there’s a big difference between him and Trump: I don’t think he’s insane. I think they need to implement the 25th amendment and get Trump out of office in order to prove to the world that America is able to realize when we’ve made a mistake and are willing to do something about it.

But would Pence really initiate that? Probably not. But I know who might.

2). Making friends and then betraying them.. We already know that Trump’s MO is to make friends, use them for a time, then turn against them the moment they no longer serve his purpose. But now he’s taking on Mitch McConnell and that may well backfire spectacularly.

See, he can’t fire McConnell. He can’t throw him out. He can’t get him unelected. All he can do is make pissy tweets about him and say that McConnell should resign his position as the majority leader. Yeah, that’s not happening. Trump can blame McConnell for their inability to repeal and replace Obamacare, and there’s some validity to that. But let us not forget that Trump promised for months that he had a much better plan in mind that he was going to start running on Day One. He didn’t mention any specifics, though. I wish I could have been there the first time McConnell finally asked him what he had in mind and Trump naturally came up with zip. So yes, McConnell didn’t get it done, but Trump did nothing to help, and now he’s blaming McConnell entirely. I’m sure McConnell isn’t thrilled about that, and I’m positive that every day he contemplates how much better his life would be if Trump wasn’t in it. The 25th amendment would be his way of turning around and saying to Trump, “You’re fired,” and if he wasn’t considering it before, I’m sure he is now. His obsession with holding on to power is one thing, but if McConnell believes that Trump’s dementia could result in missiles rocketing toward D.C., you can bet your ass he’s going to want to do something about it.

3). National Lampoon’s Vacation.. Barack Obama, who Trump mercilessly accused of being a lazy, elitist bastard because he played golf, didn’t hit the links for the first four months of office. Trump waited exactly two weeks before fleeing D.C. for the golf course, and he’s been at it ever since. Since taking office in January, he has bene to golf clubs on forty days, which has cost American taxpayers somewhere around $55 million dollars according to the website Trump Golf Count. When one adds in his visits to Trump facilities, he has spent nearly a third of his time in office…out of office. This from a man who couldn’t snark about Obama’s golf habits enough and repeatedly declared that he would never set foot on a golf course during his presidency because he would be working too hard for the American people. No, he’s really not. He has passed no major legislation. He has endeavored to ban transgenders from the military, a move that was not recommended by his people and has not yet been implemented if for no other reason than that they can’t figure out how to do it without being sued. And now he’s off on a seventeen day “working vacation,” which is amusing because he hardly works when he’s at the White House.

Hey, Donald: how about going on a permanent vacation?

PAD