Rest in Power, General Powell

 

Five days ago, the news broke that one of the last respectable American leaders had become a statistic of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Colin Powell, the United States' first Black Secretary of State, died at Walter Reed of complications from COVID. 

The news disturbed me.  And the very public reactions of influencers from both the fascist right and the uber-progressive left angered and dismayed me.

What is wrong with people?   

I'll confess I was not familiar with the details of Powell's entire career.  I actually didn't realize how long, how distinguished and how REPUBLICAN it was.

But, you know, Powell was a Republican when the party was still comprised of human beings with a specific platform and agenda, an agenda which attempted to point the US in a particular conservative direction.  Human beings who had not yet obliterated the norms and traditions of effective leadership in favor of devolving into a federal government that no longer functioned on any level..so that their hold on power and riches could remain unbreakable and unchallenged, the welfare of the American people be double-damned. 

I mourn Mr. Powell because he was a good man; an honorable man. And, as such, he fell completely out of favor with the powers that overran the party he had served all his political life.  

It is to his credit that the party also fell out of favor with him.

"I can no longer call myself a fellow Republican," Powell told an interviewer earlier this year.  I think the January 6 Insurrection sealed the deal for him.  He was one of...no, the ONLY member of the earlier incarnation of the GOP who came out and publicly slammed Trump and everything Trump stood for.

Regardless, it seemed all the left could do is roast him for his role in selling Bush's Iraq war.  Yes, that was a BIG mistake, and, frankly, I think it spelled the end to Powell's political career.  I commented to one left-wing Twitter "influencer":

Colin Powell was an honorable man whose military-inspired dedication to duty and following orders were exploited by an immoral administration. Powell later made it clear he had no loyalty left for the GOP. It serves no purpose to trash him about his one failure of judgment.

And, of course, then there's this. TFG--still arguably the leader of the party from which Mr. Powell had to walk away to save his honor and self-respect--put out this statement commenting on Powell's death:

Normally, I don't read these things when people post them on Twitter.  My official stance is that TFG was banned from Twitter for a reason, and people need to quit  splattering his vicious, ignorant brain-puke all over the platform because the powers that be have ruled that the rest of us be spared exposure to his corrosive, fascist anti-American missives.  But, for whatever reason, I chose to read this one.  

And was nearly knocked off my chair by the vivid flashback to EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY of TFG's tenure as fascist-in-chief...when we were treated daily, almost hourly, to this kind of reprehensible propaganda issuing forth from the Presidential social media account. 

If I hadn't been outraged to complete insensibility by this...THING, I could probably write a six-page rant on the wildly sub-human impropriety of this garbage. Not to mention my utter disbelief that ANYONE would read this and pump their fists and holler, "Hell, yeah!" in response--and you know they are out there.

How any human being with a brain could look at that filth and say, "Yeah, we need to put this guy back in charge of the country!" or, worse, "See how great this guy is! He never lost the election! He's still MY president!"...

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

As for me... 

Notwithstanding the left's intransigent hatred for anything GOP, and trying desperately to turn away from TFG's disgusting "tribute" to a real, great American...

All I can say is--

Rest in Power, Mr. Powell!

More than Seventeen, Less than Twenty

 

For the NTH year in a row, I've completely spaced my blogoversary.  

On September 25, 2003, I sat at the keyboard and clacked out my very first post to the "new" AOL hometown construct-- "journal land."

 Infant, yea, almost embryonic social media.

And, you know what?

It was SO much more...SOMETHING...back in that fleeting moment of technological childhood.

But...I stick around.  

Because this little blog has remained the least sullied corner of social media that I can find. 

So, when I get sick of wading through the manure on Twitter (and I wouldn't go back to Facebook if you paid me big money), I come here and...splatter something.

Happy Birthday, Coming to Terms.

I still love ya.