American Idols

It has been a few months since my last piece in this space. I have been micro-blogging on the Facebook page because I've been lacking focus of late...too much going on all of the time (and for once, it has all been a little too much for even this Busy Black Woman). However, this was something I felt needed to post here.

Ever since I first heard the testimony of Fulton County election workers Wandrea Arshaye Moss and her mother Lady Ruby Freeman, I have been on a slow boil. Add to that my frustration at low voter turnout here in my city for a primary election where they literally gave out ballots and removed all barriers to voting and the bubbles in my pot boil faster and a little bigger. And though we're skipping past the fuckery of the Supreme Court's recent slate of opinions to address at another time, my pot runs over when I see all of the praise for Cassidy Hutchinson after she testified to what she witnessed in the hours before the Insurrection.

Y'all keep believing that this country will be saved by the very people who have at various times been hellbent on destroying it. 

Let's start with the movement to recast Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as some savior of democracy. I guess y'all forgot that her Daddy was one of the most vocal proponents of the Imperial Presidency when he was Vice President. This is the same theory that vested in then-President George W. Bush the power to declare an unjustified war in Iraq and authorize enhanced interrogation (torture) against enemy combatants. Recall how she never discouraged birtherism and hammered President Obama for being a globalist who didn't put "America First" in his foreign policy? And isn't that the same rhetoric that gave Donald Trump a rallying cry to go with his red trucker hats? Didn't she vote for Donald Trump twice, even in 2020, after having had a front row seat to all of his BS for four tumultuous years?

But she finally had enough when the rioters smeared shit on her chair in the House chamber...

No, I am not making light of the fact that Cheney the Younger has effectively ended her career in Congress through her participation in these hearings. That isn't a small thing...unless she has some kind of Golden Parachute awaiting her. My guess is that she has several, beginning with whatever cushy Ambassadorship she wants anywhere in the world. Of course, her Daddy still has connections at the various war-mongering corporations he helped make rich in the early 00s, so she can have her pick of board seats. But the real prize would be a run for President in 2024 and given the way some of y'all have fan-girled over that prospect, she could possibly go the distance.

She just needs to get rid of her most formidable opponent. And you want to know the craziest thing--it ain't even Donald Trump! However, before we travel down that yellow brick road, allow me to pivot to the newest staff assistant in Cheney's congressional office, Ms. Cassidy Hutchinson. Because here is where folks showed their hands (and their asses) in fawning over her alleged courage last week.

Like everybody else who watched/listened to her surprise testimony, I was riveted. I clutched my imaginary pearls as she recounted certain details, but in the end, there were no earth-shattering surprises that we couldn't have guessed. I mean, who didn't suspect that Trump threw man-baby tantrums when he didn't get his way and sometimes that involved breaking the White House china and/or crystal? 

Instead, it was the revelation that the Trump Organization fancies itself as the political equivalent of the Corleone crime family. Except to anyone who has watched The Godfather enough times, the Trump Regime is what would have happened in the alternative universe where Fredo becomes the Don instead of Michael. An utter calamity. Thus, when Select Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) lectured would-be witnesses about their reluctance to come forward for fear of retaliation, I think he should have reminded them that these are the same very smart people who held their post-election campaign event in the parking lot of the Four Seasons Landscaping Store.

Folks are hailing Ms. Hutchinson as a hero because that is how low the bar of expectation has been set for displays of character these days. It should be the bare minimum to testify against the cadre of lackeys and enablers who unleashed that angry armed mob, drunk on Trump wine instead of Kool-Aid, on the U.S. Capitol to 'stop the steal' of an election their cult leader had lost. And since she was an aide to his Chief of Staff, I'm sure she overheard every conversation in which Trump had been told multiple times by various people in any number of ways that he LOST. 

I'm not implying that agreeing to testify is not the act of bravery and patriotism you all want it to be. I am outright saying that it isn't.

It is NOT all that courageous when in comparison, those two election workers from Georgia, two Black women, really were intimidated and threatened by foot soldiers from the Trump Organization (dispatched by another one y'all forget is deplorable, Kanye West). When the threats of violence extended to Moss's Grandmother in the form of a home invasion to carry out a "citizen's arrest" (the same defense offered by the three men responsible for killing Ahmaud Arbery)...that y'all would even deign to use the word "hero" to describe the testimony of Hutchinson is offensive. Sure, I believe those bungling trumpets made threats. But she had protection in the form of legal representation provided to her by that same organization! 

Methinks Ms. Hutchinson did receive that suggestive phone call from her former boss, but then she got another offer she couldn't refuse. Because I bet Liz Cheney has seen The Godfather as many times as I have. Tessio was always the smart one.

Generally, I wouldn't bother to contemplate any statements issued by the former DESPOTUS wherein he disavows ever having known the person accusing him of whatever petty crime and misdemeanor because they all follow the same pattern: I don't know this insignificant person, they wanted something from me and I took pity on them, but because I don't know them whatever was done for them was the equivalent of me throwing change to a beggar from the window of my limo. True to form, he claimed that Hutchinson was a low-level staffer, but then he personally denied her request for a new job with his Organization in Florida. And that is some straight Fredo isht if you ask me. Specifically that scene in Cuba (in The Godfather II) the night of the Revolution when Fredo lets it slip that he knew Jonny Ola after having denied it hours earlier. 

Whereas for two Black women whom Trump never did meet or have the occasion to know anything about other than the fact that they were election workers from Fulton County GA, he certainly had a lot to say when he accused them of tampering with the vote counts. He called them thugs and scammers. He used language and invoked imagery intended to incite his true believers--the very mob that Gabe Sterling, the Republican Chief Operating Officer of the Georgia elections, explicitly warned would form. But since they were just practicing on a local Black family, there are no televised congressional hearings or criminal trials to seek justice. After all, terrorizing Black people over voting is as American as being moved by the crocodile tears of the white woman who watches from the safety of the window in the Big House behind her lace curtains. 

Y'all throw around the word hero too easily. Rudy Giuliani was once heralded as a hero, but only to the New Yorkers whom his broken windows/zero-tolerance policies exempted. Ask Abner Louima how heroic the NYPD acted when they sodomized him in 1997, or the countless Black and Latino men subjected to stop-and-frisk. I know, seasoned New Yorkers appreciate that Giuliani cleaned up the subway, Times Square, and stood up for the police and firefighters after 9/11. So surely, he had nothing but praise for Officer Eugene Goodman, a real-life good guy with a gun who put his life on the line on January 6th? Or offered sincere condolences to the family of retired Officer Aaron Salter, another hero cut from that same 'protect and serve' cloth who died defending patrons at the Buffalo, NY grocery store shooting rampage? 

You want to know what Mr. "Back the Blue" Giuliani said about those two brave men? Nothing. Because he was too busy hyping the Big Lie that Black and Latino and Indigenous voters stole the 2020 election instead of accepting that white suburban voters under-voted. Convinced that he is some kind of consigliere like Tom Hagan, instead of leaving behind the severed horse's head, Giuliani keeps making a horse's ass of himself.

America's mayor. America's sweetheart. American patriots. Yet none of those labels are applied to DC's Mayor Muriel Bowser who sent Metropolitan Police to the Capitol during the Insurrection even though Congress is under federal jurisdiction, and she doesn't have the authority to dispatch the DC National Guard. How many tears were shed with Wandrea Moss, who went above and beyond the call of duty in doing her job to assist voters, only to have her life turned upside down? "Back the blue" when they are upholding oppressive systems, but not when they are saving the lives of the Vice President or every Senator and Member of Congress on January 6th because you disagree with the outcome of an election. 

Here we go again America...only this time, I'm not going to let you celebrate your birthday without acknowledging some of the people who made this day possible. You will not erase them from the narrative!

You will not build monuments to the Cassidy Hutchinsons of the world because she looks like your impressionable and naive daughters. Sorry Douglas Brinkley, but I don't care that Liz Cheney is channeling Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) in finally standing up to the McCarthyism/authoritarianism in her party because until recently, it served her ambitions. We are not going to honor the white women who drove carpools during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts because it ensured that their Black maids made it to work on time.

So no, you will NOT skip over Madame Vice President Kamala Harris for some great white hope. It is courageous for Harris to show up to work every day in a country where the citizenship status of her immigrant parents is debatable; where the excellence of her college alma mater is improbable; where the significance of her career success is unprecedented; where the legality of her marriage is now uncertain; and where her step-daughters and nieces have fewer reproductive rights than she did at their age. You cannot compare the life stories of these two women and come away with the conclusion that Cheney is the profile in courage because she bucked the system ONE time.

Wandrea Moss got one of those awards too. 

You can be riveted by Liz Cheney's persecution of Donald Trump for inciting the Insurrection, just as long as you remember how well he was prosecuted by Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) in the first impeachment and Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) during the second impeachment. NY AG Letitia James already exposed the grift that was the Trump Foundation, and she's waiting in the wings to expose his other frauds. So are we really doing this America--making the Black women do all of the work? Because if you claim that the evidence is more convincing this time...

You're being set up America. While her Daddy is convalescing and playing with his grandchildren in the garden, Liz is settling all of her family's business. It's the smart move.