Last year’s Academy Awards discriminated against minorities so overtly that the Tweetosphere bore out the hashtag: #Oscarssowhite. Offering penance, Hollywood’s liberal-apologists duly proffered no less than a record 6 black winners including the African-American biopic Moonlight, which literally wrested the statues away from the Bannon-esque musical fantasy La La Land. Portrayed as a catastrophic gaffe, I suspect the entire episode was contrived to make the final result more impactful, you know, like getting OJ off one more time. (Well imagine if the events had been reversed; with Denzel already seething after losing out to the talentless Casey Affleck, no doubt those LA gangstas would have burned that muthafucka straight to the ground.) Either way it played like another of the Left’s impotent protests against the Herr Drumpf; the only thing left was for Meryl Streep to hide her housekeeper under her seat.

Democrats are enfeebled to a historic degree. It’s as if they are applying an acai berry poultice to a severed limb in an attempt to regrow it. Because Karl Rove’s gerrymandering master plan and the dearth of Republican senators up for reelection in 2018 means neither chamber of Congress has any chance of changing hands in the next election cycle, the Dems are reduced to fantasizing about Russia-gate or Trump’s own exasperation abruptly truncating his term. They would be better served to heed the words of George Gurdjieff: “If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison.”

Incarceration does look quite real for one Adam Purinton, a fifty-one-year-old Navy veteran who strolled into an Olathe, KS bar and shot two Indian technologists after yelling, “Get out of my country.” That Adam thought the victims – who both worked for Garmin on H1B visas – were Iranian underscores the flaw that our democracy not only allows stupid people to vote, but it also permits them to carry a gun. While many would argue that linking these shootings to Trump’s white supremacist rhetoric via some butterfly effect is fallacious, I would counter that hate speech by those in power normalizes the dehumanization of ethnic “others” and tacitly grants permission to engage in hate crimes. I mean would it surprise any of us at this point if Mr. Purinton wound up as our next Secretary of the Navy?

Recall that Betsy DeVos plagiarized, Jeff Sessions practiced manifest racism, and a litany of Trump advisors served, essentially, as Russian spies. While there have been a few casualties (e.g. Michael Flynn) no one sees fit to hide any of this behavior. And why should they when most Republicans, like chair of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, can’t sweep the breadcrumbs under the rug fast enough. Oddly, I reminisce about the Nixon administration when these kinds of transgressions were strictly hush-hush.   Spiro Agnew accepted each and every bribe in private, while Nixon was secretly dropping tons of bombs across South Vietnam’s western border for nearly a year before the April 28, 1970 authorization of the Cambodian Incursion. In point, nearly half a century after the fact, few even realize that Gerald Ford was blackmailed into issuing our nation’s most infamous presidential pardon. And while the protests back then had meaning – and consequences – it remains that Gen. Westmoreland’s need to lie about enemy troop strength or the Army’s impulse to cover up the My Lai Massacre seems almost quaint in this era of brazen thievery and prevarication.

That Hollywood was built by Jewish immigrants is not subject to debate. As they still run the show, one can only guess how Tinsletown will react to the recent desecration of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia. Culturally, the reflex is to avoid drawing attention to oneself, but as I overheard one exec over at Warner Brothers say, “Today they’re going after dead Jews. But if we wait until they go after the live ones, we’ve got a serious problem on our hands.” #Leni Riefenstahl.