Craven is a Bipartisan Trait
Craven is a Bipartisan Trait
Rob Portman and P.G. Sittenfield are same type of gutless swamp creature.
[Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendering to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, April 9, 1865; wood engraving based on an illustration by Alfred R. Waud, 1887.]
A lot of Americans think we live in times of unprecedented political polarization despite having fought a Civil War only 135 years ago.
The right-wing has been particularly industrious in creating the myth of liberal media and erecting their own echo chamber a coalition of conservative constituents that wouldn’t believe a video of Donald Trump confessing to a life of crime because a liberal rag like The New York Times.
This didn’t happen overnight. It started thanks the Ronald Reagan, who no doubt looked up with pride when his intellectual project came to its stupendously stupid conclusion of Fox News cartoons like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson being the thought-leading cheerleaders behind a president who is almost as senile and incompetent as Reagan.
Republicans campaign on building a 2,2000-mile concrete wall along the southern border of the United States and attempting to legalize the extrajudicial murdering of protestors. Democrats campaigned on not being that kind of asshole but not much else. Just don’t call them socialist.
This has led to rural voters seeing cities as unlivable hellholes. It has led to wealthy liberals thinking their true enemy is uneducated white men from red states (like the one that writes this forsaken newsletter).
[A sympathetic northern cartoonist portrayed Senator Charles Sumner's May 1856 beating by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks.]
Say what you want about the scumbag racists that created the Confederacy of the United States, at least they had a cause for which they were willing to die, even as misguided as it was.
Senator Charles Sumner insulted the cousin of Congressman Preston Brooks and “his harlot, slavery,” and Brooks caned Sumner within an inch of his life as Sumner struggled to get out from under the wooden desk bolted to the floor.
I don’t think I would have handled the lack of electronics or the Comstock Act well, but how refreshing it must have been to live in an era where politicians meant what they said and weren’t two different slices off the same white loaf of bread.
I have zero tolerance for craven politicians. It ain’t like we’re asking them to storm Nazi machine gun nests entrenched along the beaches of Normandy. We all know guys like P.G. Sittenfield and Rob Portman would rather push pencils than perforate Nazi skulls.
These motherfuckers can’t even say what they truly believe. They would rather lie to their constituents than give their honest opinion. In their eyes, we are not even worthy of the truth. That can only belong to Really Serious People like them.
Let’s start with that friend of The Rooster, Cincinnati Councilman and mayoral candidate P.G. Sittenfield, or as the yahoos on Twitter have started calling him, Pretty Guilty Sittenjail.
When we last caught up with Sittenfield, he was pretending that getting caught accepting $40,000 in bribes on FBI wiretap was merely “property assistance to a project bringing jobs and growth to [Cincinnati].”
Sittenfield called a press conference yesterday to proclaim his innocence. I assume his lawyers sat him down beforehand and explained how any public statement could be used against him in the court of law and about how pretending being charged with federal bribery and extortion is actually a big deal.
Instead of a press conference we got this hilariously pathetic video:
My god. I have met ham and mayo sandwiches with more charisma than this man. And he was considered a rising star within the Democratic Party? Why? It certainly wasn’t for any of his bold ideas.
Every detail of a video like this is vetted by a team of public relation professionals, so it ain’t a coincident that Sittenfield taped this video from the one angle in his house that could showcase family pictures and children’s toys.
Sittenfield is a sociopath. Talking about keeping a senior citizen center open like that’s a grand accomplishment and not like, ground zero, for any competent politicians.
If Sittenfield had any shame or any shred of respect for his constituents, he would have already resigned. Cincinnati deserves a councilman who isn’t under the weight of federal investigation.
Instead we get to listen to Attorney Dave Yost proselytize and earn cheap headlines in removing Sittenfield from council like Yost didn’t give an accounting award to a cybercrime syndicate that defrauded the state for hundreds of millions of dollars and ruined tens of thousands of educations in the state.
I have zero doubt sickos have reached out to Sittenfield and said ridiculous things like, “I know your character.” No, they don’t; unless their working definition of the word “character” is opposite of the word’s actual meaning.
Liberals can properly diagnose Trumpism as a cult. That’s easy. What’s harder is a look in the mirror to the cult of personality that a lot of Democratic voters have around our incumbent politicians.
This is all tens of thousands of Cincinnati voters needed to hear to affirm that Sittenfield is a good guy, unlike that gotdang Cheetoh in the White House:
Oh my god. I have seen much more convincing videos from the hostages of terror cells. But I guess P.G. Sittenfield wasn’t bargaining with his life at this point; he was just another corrupt shitheel roleplaying as a humble public system only for so long as the cameras were in front of him.
I understand that you plead “not guilty” at your first court appearance even if the prosecution has you on tape shooting that man dead over an argument about a parking spot outside Sunoco.
This motherfucker can’t even face questions from the press. That’s how innocent he is. I don’t know, if this were some big misunderstanding, I would be singing my case from the top of a mountain to get the good word to any potential future juror.
He can’t even give of that, because again, he’s a coward who deludes himself into thinking we are too stupid to understand what anything in next three paragraph means.
From Alexander Coolidge of cincinnati.com:
The councilman not only solicited contributions, he showed them voting data to show them they were "making good bets and good investments." Sittenfeld also bragged that every successful developer in the city "already placed their bet with me."
He told an undercover agent he was politically popular throughout the city and was likely to become the next mayor.
"I mean look, people want to invest in a winning endeavor right? And I want to, I want (to) give to them the confidence and the comfort that that's what they're doing."
For those scoring at home, character is who you are when you think nobody is watching. I don’t say that as a man who is proud of every decision I made. I say it as a man who didn’t seek a public office with a $65,000 salary and then sell my constituents down the river to the first developer to throw a bag of cash in my lap.
[The one example of effective messaging from the Ohio Democratic Party.]
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown took to the podium two months ago to lambaste his Republican colleagues for keeping their criticisms silent of President Business Deals’ “lack of character and integrity.”
I griped in the October 27th dispatch of The Rooster about Brown protecting the secrets of his colleagues instead of naming and shaming them.
I apply the same standards to journalists. They have zero obligation to protect the anonymity of people who lie to them. Burn those motherfuckers to the ground, I say.
Who cares? Only a journalist who depends on that infamous word “access.”
Famed Washington Post Big “J” Journalist Bob Woodward chose book sales over informing the American public in February that President Business Deals knew the lethality of COVID-19 despite him proclaiming the novel virus was just another Democratic hoax.
Here is how his equally famous colleague, Carl Bernstein, decided to handle a similar situation during an appearance on CNN:
Ohio Senator Rob Portman is 64 years old, which makes him a spring chicken in the Senate. For comparison, the Senate’s oldest member, California’s Diane Feinstein, is 87 years old.
The only person who can stop him from winning two or three more elections is President Business Deals, a person that he reviles yet supports because the price of his soul is redefining federal courts for a generation.
Portman values his role as Senator much more than his personal integrity, which is why he couldn’t even call on President Business Deals to concede the reality that he lost the election by over five million votes.
From Marianne Levine of politico.com:
Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) on Monday both joined calls for the transition process to begin. While neither are saying Joe Biden is the president-elect just yet, both senators indicated it was time that he receive briefings on national security and the coronavirus pandemic.
In an op-ed published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Portman, who is up for re-election in 2022, wrote that any disputes over the election results should end by Dec. 8, the final day to certify their election results. He added that “in the meantime, the General Services Administration (GSA) should go ahead and release the funds and provide the infrastructure for an official transition.”
(Narrator: Last night, the GSA unleashed the funds to provide infrastructure for an official transition. I would have paid $10,000 to have been in the room when a henchman told President Business Deals.]
This is what qualifies as courage within Republican ranks these days. And there’s a certain kind of Democratic voter that will undoubtedly see him as “one of the good Republicans” because the average voter has a political memory akin to a goldfish.
Portman is worth $8.6 million. He does not need to be a Senator. He could be on Titty Island sipping liquor out of coconuts with tiny umbrellas in them.
Instead he’s living in fear of a man he knows is unfit for office. Here’s a statement in its entirety from Portman spokeswoman Emmalee Cioffi, who sounds like she just stumbled out of the Republican Name Generator:
“[Carl Bernstein’s report] is absolutely false. The senator has never talked to Mr. Bernstein and we don’t know where he’s getting his false information. The senator supported President Trump’s re-election and believes his policies are better for Ohio and the entire country."
Masterclass in political denial of the truth. Bernstein did not claim to have gotten the information from Portman. Emmalee — my God I’m still not over the senseless butcher of the name Emily — knows where he got the information but that implicates her boss so she has to pretend not to see it.
The rest of the statement proves what a punk Portman is. He served as a chairman on the re-election campaign of a man he knows is unfit for office. Because he is a coward, who, much like to P.G. Sittenfeild, thinks he has a monopoly on the truth and his constituents can’t handle that.
We would have a much tougher timber than the likes of Sittenfield and Portman if we were all doing our part to cyberbully politicians and heckle them anytime they had the heart to do normal things like pump their own gas or buy groceries.
The thinking that “all politicians are crooks” only helps crooked politicians. You get the positions you deserve as a society, and right now we’re failing that test. It’s time to dig deeper into our politicians beyond grand-standing soundbites and the letter next to their name.
THOSE WMDs. The Brent Spence Bridge is the infrastructure disaster that nobody is talking about... Amazon hired the Pinkertons (among other tactics) to suppress unionization efforts… Corporate America’s deal with the devil… The underground movement trying to topple Juce… The crimes of Seal Team 6.