And signature significance.
Was the image manipulated? Of course: I don’t really care. The image perfectly illustrates the ugliness and un-American essence of Trump Derangement. These two representatives of foreign values and foreign entitlement embody the sickness that our inattention to maintaining core prioritizes in our domestic policies and democratic institutions has wrought.
Ethics Alarms 
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this is what comes of allowing America’s enemies to sit in Congress. Irish people sit in Parliament and Windsor, Sinn Fein doesn’t. Arab people sit in the Knesset, but Hezbollah does not. You have to wonder what kind of thinking goes on in the minds of those who think that these individuals are appropriate Representatives.
Ilhan Omar is a fraud, an incompetent , and apparently a criminal if she is connected with this huge fraud Network recently perpetrated on the people of Minnesota. It’s one thing to bring home the bacon for your district, it’s quite another to steal the tax paying people of this nation blind to stuff your own pockets and the pockets of your cronies. Yet she has the audacity to yell at the president and accuse him of somehow doing wrong when what he is doing is cleaning up the mess that she is partly responsible for. I don’t know if you missed it during the State of the Union but the president said that he was going to appoint the vice president to start going after all this kind of fraud. There’s a somewhat limited amount of time but I hope before it ends this terrorist mole is looking at a long period of time in the cross bar hotel.
Rashida Tlaib? What has she brought to the table that is of value? All she did as far as I can tell is spew rhetoric and yell about how they were going to impeach the you know what, when she wasn’t kissing the asses of her terrorist friends in Hamas. She can shout all if she wants but it’s not going to change a damn thing. I’m not going to say that the Democratic party is made up of people who hate this nation, but it’s getting closer and closer the more of this it tolerates and brings into the fold.
Some on the left talked about outlawing the Republican party just like Germany has outlawed the Nazi party and Russia has outlawed the Communist party. Apart from that being flagrantly unconstitutional, to equate the Republican party, which has the temerity to stand for things that the Democratic party doesn’t agree with, with the Communist party, who weaponized every aspect of society to make anyone who dared disagree with it disappear, or the Nazi party, which we don’t even have to talk about, is ridiculous and should be all you need to tell you what these people really want.
What they want is permanent power and quite possibly a big pile of dead conservatives to go with it. To me, that is the characteristic of a party that needs to be outlawed if it does not reform itself. The scary thing is that it probably won’t reform itself and then you will have a new Joseph McCarthy Jr arise to try to force reform, and he’s going to do a lot more damage to this country and to the lives of a lot of people who really don’t deserve it.
I love your comment.
I am afraid that the voters will reward the Democrats’ intransigence this November and maybe in 2028 as well, due to the lack of fortitude of the GOP representatives and senators.
I am not sure about what to make of your reference to Joe McCarthy though.
Image is clearly manipulated. At the SOTU Tlaib and Omar were nowhere near that close to the podium. And it was Tlaib, not Omar, that was wearing a keffiyah-adjacent top.
I was pretty sure, and I will change the title, which I should have done at the starts. As I wrote, it doesn’t matter. It’s not evidence, it’s evocative of the truth.
Or, if you evaluate the image by the portrayal of Trump’s skin tone, it could be ethical image of the year.
No other President has been attacked on the basis of his “skin tone.” It reeks of desperation. “yeah, we had a President who was demented, senile and well into the shuffling stage, but Trump’s skin tone is oogy and look at his hands!” In FDR’s last term and the latter part of his third, he looked like death warmed over and was already in a wheelchair, but even Republicans didn’t mention it. Reporters and close associates went home and said, “Holy crap! FDR might drop dead any minute!’
What a pathetic comment.
Sorry, missed your point on that comment. Are saying that my comment or Jack’s was pathetic. I was attempting to point out the ethical ver·i·si·mil·i·tude of his skin tone… That its true to life quality overshadowed the obvious fakery of the screaming-karen-duo.
I (incorrectly?) assumed you were saying if the photo was ethical, it would not have photo-shopped Trump’s skin tone to hide his horrid and disqualifying “orange” skin, or some such. I assumed your comment was Trump deranged outrage. As I believe Jack did, I assumed your comment was an attack on Trump.
I apologize for my brevity. It tends toward leaving ambiguous intent. I cast my ballot 3 times in Mr. Trumps direction. My derangement only extends so far as to eat a stuck of butter for breakfast and a pound of ground beef for dinner.
Duly noted! Hah! Cheers.
President Trump set a trap for the Democrats during the SOTU, and the Democrats walked right into it. As a result the GOP campaign ads for the midterms almost write themselves. Screaming Omar and Tlaib are a gift of the gods for Trump.
A question is which alternatives the Democrats had during the SOTU. The Democrats who decided not to attend also walked into a trap. And so did the Democrats who did not yell and scream, but listened with stony faces and refused to stand and clap for anything, even when admonished by President Trump. They could have clapped of course, however that would have not sit well with their party. The Democrats in Congress were a captive audience, with President Trump holding all the cards and subjecting them to a humiliation ritual.
Below a video of an influencer (who creates YouTube videos on the use of media) explains on how the trap works. I am curious about what the commenters think of her analysis. She explains that President Trump made use of a rhetorical device called “forced binary”.
The following definition of Google AI about “what is a forced binary in politics”, which she uses in her video, explains it well but has some political biases:
A forced binary in politics is a framing technique or structural reality that compels individuals to choose between only two opposing sides, options, or identities, erasing the nuanced, middle-ground, or alternative possibilities. This “us vs. them” or “all-or-nothing” approach reduces complex, multifaceted issues into stark, black-and-white choices.
Here is a detailed breakdown of what a forced binary means in politics:
A forced binary is considered an obstacle to finding complex, innovative solutions to modern problems, which rarely fit into simple “either-or” categories.
Democrats had no ethical alternative but to attend, sit respectfully for the nation’s President as tradition and decorum required, shut up, and behave like professionals rather than assholes. They just couldn’t do it.
That would have been the best option (or least worst option) for the Democrats politically, as the video explained. However as the Democrat party is captured by the hard left, and the Democrat base has been radicalized as we saw after the Charlie Kirk assassination, that ethical option poses internal political risks for Democrats. So has the ideological radicalization of the Democrats brought them in a version of Zugzwang?
And I thought it was nice to explain how Trump prepared the sausage using a forced binary. Trump knew exactly how Omar and Tlaib and the other Democrats would react; and the SOTU was designed to make them react that way.
So, Cees, where is the Democratic party headed? According to Susan Rice, as soon as they are in the majority in congress, “it will not end well” for anyone who did not oppose Trump in every way imaginable. Once Trump is gone, won’t they have to formulate some sort of salable policy agenda? They seem to be self-immolating.
My hope is that the Democrats are headed for the electoral cliff. They deserve that, good and hard.
My fear is that they may win the midterms. The problem is the lack of fortitude of the GOP to successfully enact the Trump agenda, and that includes the SAVE act. Voting integrity should be common sense, but the Democrats are going to the mat to defeat that law. The reason is as Trump indicated in the SOTU: the Democrats want to continue cheating (e.g. having illegal aliens vote) by not having to present a voter ID. I am totally perplexed about the attitude of Senators Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis on this; the GOP has clearly a RINO problem who care more about thwarting Trump than in securing a meaningful victory, and the unwillingness of the GOP to go to the mat themselves by refusing to either nuke the filibuster or change to filibuster to a talking filibuster we had in the past (as shown in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”). The GOP politicians are a contemptible gaggle of spineless beta cucks and impotent geldings; the Democrats surely deserve to loose but that does not make the GOP deserve to win.