Meanwhile the “Orange Jesus” Continues to Parrot Hitler, and President Joe Biden Calls Trump an ‘Insurrectionist’ –

The Rev. Munther Isaac lighting a candle next to an improvised crèche in the West Bank city of Bethlehem: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s hard to get excited about celebrating Christmas — or Hanukkah for that matter — when your country is torn asunder by war.

So there won’t be much of a celebration in Bethlehem this year, where Christians believe a baby named Jesus was born to save the world from sin.

According to reporting from Bethlehem in the West Bank by the New York Times, the annual music festivities and tree-lighting ceremony are canceled, while the war in Gaza rages on.

In one of the saddest pictures I’ve ever seen in a newspaper, in print or online, one Lutheran church put up its nativity scene crèche in spite of the war, except that the baby Jesus is not lying in a makeshift cradle of wood and hay. He’s nestled into a pile of rubble and broken bricks that represent Gaza’s destruction by the Israeli military in response to an attack by the terrorist group Hamas.

“We’ve been glued to our screens, seeing children pulled from under the rubble day after day. We’re broken by these images,” said the Rev. Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church who created the crèche. “God is under the rubble in Gaza, this is where we find God right now.”

CBS’s “Sunday Morning” show also ran video footage of the scene.

It all began on Oct. 7 in response to the surprise attack on Israel that left about 1,200 people dead.

“As the conflict enters its third month, some of the most ubiquitous images of the death and destruction have been of dead Palestinian children being pulled from the ruins of Israeli airstrikes,” the Times reports.

Nearly half of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million are children, and about 70 percent of those killed are women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations. Estimates are that about 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, and 90 percent of the population of Gaza has been forcibly evacuated.

Google map of the area: NAJ screen shot

The Gaza Strip is about 70 kilometers southwest of Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinians and others living in the area find their lives even more restricted than usual. The draconian Israeli limits on movement into and out of the city is even more strict now, and the economic fallout of the war is taking its toll, especially at Christmas, typically the busiest time of year for tourism.

As divided as we are still in the United States, where political weirdness continues to cause stress and anxiety for people on and off social media, it’s hard to imagine how bad things must be in Gaza, or Ukraine for that matter.

There is a trial balloon headline going around today hinting that Russia’s dictator president Vladimir Putin may be opening up to discussions of a cease-fire, as long as he can hold the territory he has already gained and can declare “mission accomplished” and some sort of victory.

I guess we should remain skeptical and believe it when we see it, right?

Meanwhile on the campaign trail for president, still facing a slew of criminal charges in four different federal and state cases pending against him, Donald Trump is plowing ahead with divisive language right out of Hitler’s writing and the campaigns of George Wallace of Alabama, accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” just as Hitler threatened his people in Germany with the “contamination of the blood” to water down his ignorant concept of a “superior” Germanic race.

Wallace also mistakenly fired up poor White people to vote for him for governor and president in the 1960s and ’70s by talking about a “mongrel race” when White and Black people intermarry and procreate.

But anybody who knows anything about how human evolution works knows full well that there is no such thing as a “pure” race. People from all over the world have been getting together for thousands of years, and nowhere is that more so than the U.S., truly a nation of immigrants. In the process, the “mixing” of the races actually serves to strengthen the gene pool, not make it weaker. When it comes to the “survival of the fittest” through natural selection, a pure race, if there was such a thing, would surely be at an evolutionary disadvantage.

Hitler outlined his scientifically ignorant position — yet politically motivating conspiracy theory — in the antisemitic manifesto Mein Kampf as well as in speeches at the time.

Of course when asked about it, Trump lies as usual.

“I never knew that Hitler said it,” Trump told conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt on Friday. “I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ … I know nothing about it. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement. What I’m saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country.”

Let’s tell it like it is. There is no difference between Trump claiming “immigrants” are “destroying our country” than Hitler saying mixing the races in Germany, including mixing Germans with Jews, resulted in the “contamination of the blood.”

“They’re coming in from Asia, from Africa, from South America. They’re coming from all over the world,” Trump said. “We are poisoning our country. We’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s word choice also drew comparisons to Hitler’s, according to the Washington Post, for describing internal enemies as “vermin” in a Veterans Day speech — “a term he has not repeated since.” The former president has talked since his 2016 campaign about wanting to forcibly deport millions of immigrants, emulating a 1950s enforcement targeting Mexican field workers, known as “Operation Wetback.”

A 1990 article reported that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, told her lawyer that Trump read a different book of Hitler’s speeches. Trump said at the time that he was given a copy of “Mein Kampf” by a Jewish friend. The 2022 biography “Confidence Man” by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said the friend was not Jewish and the book was “My New Order.”

“Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans on our democracy, and on public safety,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Sunday.

In the wake of a Colorado court ruling disqualifying Trump from appearing on that state’s ballot next year for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection and violating the 14th Amendment, President Biden had vowed to avoid commenting on Trump’s legal troubles or divisive rhetoric. But when a reporter on the campaign trail asked Biden this week whether Trump should be considered an “insurrectionist,” Biden stepped up to the cameras and the microphone and said this: “It’s self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero.”

See it all on Twitter or C-SPAN.

Meanwhile, I’m getting sick and tired of seeing and hearing all this talk about public opinion polls, which are meaningless 11 months before an election, or Biden’s age. Where are the news feature stories talking about Joe and Jill Biden being model grandparents for the nation? So what if they had one bad son prone to abusing his privilege, and one good one who died. They don’t try to dominate the daily social media dialogue with total bullshit just to get attention like Trump.

First Lady Jill Biden and President Joe Biden spending the afternoon at Children’s National Hospital reading with kids and parents: White House Facebook.

Now we will have way more to say about all of this in time. But I’m literally planning my own break from it all for Christmas, not because it is a religious holy day but because it is an American national holiday.

Established in 1856, Old Ebbitt Grill is the oldest dining saloon in Washington: Facebook

If plans come to fruition, I will be spending some of Christmas Eve down by the White House in President’s Park, where the National Christmas Tree is on display, not far from one of my favorite restaurants and bars in town. The Old Ebbitt Grill, Washington’s oldest saloon, was founded in 1856 when, according to legend, innkeeper William E. Ebbitt bought a boarding house and opened a bar.

It turned out to be a damn fine place to open a bar, right down the street from the White House.

The White House Christmas Tree, 2021: Glynn Wlson

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