Direct Action (Red Hen Again)

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.- 16 April 1963

What you need to remember about these people is that not only are they spectacularly corrupt, inveterate liars, and actual factual traitors, they’re also a-ok with ripping babies from their mothers arms and sending them off to Concentration Camps.

Trump is not Hitler. Hitler was a patriot and had a mustache.

And all his Goebbels and Himmler’s and Goerings? Spare me not your Snowflake tears.

They taste delicious.

From Kellyanne Conway to Stephen Miller, Trump’s advisers face taunts from hecklers around D.C.
by Paul Schwartzman and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post
July 9, 2018

“Better be better!” a stranger shouted at Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser and the architect of his zero-tolerance immigration policy, as he walked through Dupont Circle a few months ago. Miller’s visage subsequently appeared on “Wanted” posters someone placed on lampposts ringing his City Center apartment building.

One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!” When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues.

Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.

On Saturday, as Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, browsed at an antiquarian bookstore in Richmond, a woman in the shop called him a “piece of trash.” The woman left after Nick Cooke, owner of Black Swan Books, told her he would call the police.

Before Vice President Pence’s swearing-in, his neighbors in Chevy Chase, where he was renting a house, hung rainbow banners to protest his opposition to equal rights for gay men and lesbians. When Pence went to the musical “Hamilton” in New York, the actor playing Aaron Burr concluded the evening by announcing from the stage that he was afraid that Trump wouldn’t “uphold our inalienable rights.”

A White House reporter, once on the phone with Sean Spicer while the then-press secretary was standing in his yard in Alexandria, said he could hear a passing motorist shouting curses at him. By then, Spicer had become a regular inspiration for mockery on “Saturday Night Live,” along with Trump, Conway, and Bannon.

Spicer said he spent his free time at home in those days because he didn’t want to deal with strangers’ interruptions — friendly or not.

“We were very deliberate about what we did and where we went because of the increasing notoriety,” Spicer said. “When we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle.”

More recently, Trump appointees have starred in a flurry of in-your-face encounters that ricochet around social media for days on end.

A week ago, it was a Sidwell Friends teacher who interrupted her lunch at Teaism in Penn Quarter to tell Scott Pruitt — eating with an aide a few feet away — that he should resign as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

By last Thursday morning, nearly half a million viewers had clicked on a video of the confrontation that the teacher, Kristin Mink, had posted on Facebook. By late Thursday afternoon, Pruitt quit.

“I would say it’s burning people out,” said Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director. “I just think there’s so much meanness, it’s causing some level of, ‘What do I need this for?’ And I think it’s a recruiting speed bump for the administration. To be part of it, you’ve got to deal with the incoming of some of this viciousness.”

On at least two occasions, demonstrators have assembled outside the Kalorama home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Both like to attend early-morning spin classes at Flywheel, a nearby studio, where the room goes dark when the class starts — the better to pedal unobserved.

At the conclusion of a recent session, Kushner, a baseball cap pulled down over his face, headed quickly outside to a chauffeur-driven SUV that whisked him away.

In recent weeks, say senior administration officials, Trump has voiced dissatisfaction with aides who have backed down during public confrontations, including his spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia last month by the establishment’s owner.

Two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen walked out of a downtown Mexican restaurant after demonstrators followed her inside to rail against the administration for separating children from migrant parents.

“Shame!” the protesters shouted while Nielsen remained in her seat, her head down as she typed messages on her smartphone.

If my Poker game has a weakness it’s that I play extremely tight and never bluff.

To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose.

And then my tongue I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don’t mean to duplicate tonight.

I wasn’t finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right.

And then my ears, I understand let’s get on with it.

WRONG. Your ears you keep and I’ll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, “Dear God! What is that thing,” will echo in your perfect ears. That is what “to the pain means.” It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.

I think you’re bluffing.

It’s possible, Pig, I might be bluffing. It’s conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, that I’m only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. But, then again… perhaps I have the strength after all.

Except when I do and then it’s very effective.