#so he’s not going to give the outright command that’s his prerogative he’s going to soften it a bit (a get out or whatever)

[fideidefenswhore]

funniest and most underrated bit of the wenching with jane seymour scene is the line ‘jane, you best leave…’

[mountainsofwords]

I always thought if I was going to go through abuse in a romantic relationship in my life it would be very early. You know…teens to mid-twenties. But it didn’t. I had a fairly easy life as far as relationships went from 15-25 because, well, I didn’t date. I didn’t want to. I think I was so convinced that…well I’m not sure what I was convinced of. I just knew that dating wasn’t really my thing. I was scared of people in general but especially of males. Then I moved to Denver. About a year after I moved there, I got my own place and I started dating more and more. I kinda liked it. Then there were the times where I would look in the mirror before I was supposed to leave and think, “What’s the point even?” I think I felt that way because I honestly didn’t care about marriage or kids or a family then. I cared about what I wanted out of life. I cared about progressing into a better human being. I cared about friends and making people happy. The number of serious relationships I’ve had is probably the same amount of times I’ve listened to my gut tell me someone is right (not a single time). I’ve had a relationship here and there that I thought could end up serious and when it didn’t I was crushed. Only because I’d painted this picture in my head of what I wanted it to be. An image akin to what Bob Ross would paint on my grandparents small TV on Sunday mornings before church. Happy trees. Wonderful landscapes. Some fog and grey. And then I met someone I really, truly thought was the one. Even my heart was telling me he was. We liked many of the same things. We had a seemingly similar music taste (though mine ventures into a lunacy collection of Rave music and EDM and his steers more toward country wrap and rock). He couldn’t stand my driving or what I liked on Netflix and I couldn’t stand how he constantly had to have things his way – but let it be nonetheless. I wanted this to be my happy ending. You know? The first date was, well, great in my mind. We got along. We conversated. We had many of the same views. We laughed at a lot of the same things. I was so keen I practically threw myself at him to hang out the second night. So we did. And then we were hanging out almost every day a week later. I was staying with him almost every night two weeks after that. Things were moving so quickly. But by week three I knew something was off. He would get mad if he had to wait for me for even a few minutes. When we fought, it was always my fault. I couldn’t wear makeup because he didn’t see the point and he wasn’t waiting for me to put ‘that junk on’. If I tried to wear even a nice blouse with blue jeans he would say, ‘Why are you dressing up. We’re not doing anything special.’ But he wouldn’t ask as much as his words would hold the command for me to change. When I met him I was 30 pounds lighter than I currently am today. I ate semi-healthy. I didn’t eat fast food, drink soda, buy chips, or even really drink alcohol. I was a bartender. I also worked for a company that built trophies and put various other award-types together to include letters for lettermen’s jackets, medals, can koozies, etc. I can’t say I was particularly happy with everything, but I thought I was at least happy with him. But a few weeks into the relationship he made me feel so guilty for tending bar that I quit and then called in sick several times because he didn’t want me working. To be honest, even in the early stages of the relationship things didn’t feel quite right. As though if I were to disobey what he wanted (even if he didn’t outright tell me no or command things of me) there would be a much heavier price to pay. A few weeks after I quit the bar, I put my notice in with my other job at the trophy place and the next day after they let me go. I was on my phone too much (if I didn’t answer I was afraid of what would happen when I saw him later after work). They found my replacement already. Then…we up and moved and I let myself believe it was my idea to move. I turned a blind eye. The first time he had a lash out of anger I wrote it off as we’d both had too much to drink. I remember we were sitting around the fire in his backyard. His roommates weren’t home. I think we’d been at my parents’ that night and it’d been the first time he’d met them. We’d just gone to look at an acreage over by their place but decided it was too much room for us and it would be too expensive to heat in the winter (or at least that’s what I’d thought we’d decided). Anyway… We were sitting around the fire at his place discussing how he wanted to do something nice for a  friend of his. A friend I’d never met. He wanted to make sure this friend had money for their kids and whatnot and it’s not that I disagreed. I do agree with that. Today, this friend is now a friend of mine and I’d do anything within my power to help this person out. But at the time, I’d never met this person. And my boyfriend insisted we both go in on gift cards for her. I couldn’t fathom. I was only making $300/week and that’s if I even worked a full 40 hours. Which, most of the time I didn’t (a whole other story). I couldn’t afford to give someone else something that I couldn’t give myself. He got so angry with me that he took a wrought iron chair and flung it across the yard. I thought to myself, “It’s okay. Not a big deal. It was just a chair. We’ve had a lot to drink and we didn’t really eat anything today.” I should have left that night, though. I should have left and I never should have looked back. But I didn’t. And then, after that, every time I tried to leave when we’d fight he would get angrier. Sometimes he even got more violent. I’d set the stage for our future by staying. He felt he was allowed to treat me any which way he wanted. I was his doormat just there for him to wipe all his dirt, muck, grime, and shit on (excuse the language). Yet I stayed. There were times he would pin me against the wall by my neck and threaten me…my family. There were times he’d poke me so hard in the chest it would be bruised and sore for days…even weeks. I remember a few fights I had no recollection starting and somehow it was my fault. Those were usually the nights we were in the pickup on the backroads and there was generally alcohol involved. Not always. Sometimes he would tell me that I wasn’t allowed to drink anymore and then he’d drink alcohol in front of me. Not a huge deal except it stressed me out because, well, I knew what was coming. I remember one night in particular we were out cruising – this was a favorite pastime of ours – and we picked up a six pack for each of us. I’d written him a letter telling him I needed him to give me more room to breathe. Not that we were on a break. Not that I wanted to break up. I just wanted to be able to go and see my friends and family without him raising a fuss over it. I wanted to go and have a day with my mom or best friend without him feeling as if he had to insert himself into the plans, text me every five minutes, or even call me when he hadn’t heard from me in an hour. That night, after he read the letter and assured me he loved it and he agreed, he started a fight about how I drink too much and that’s all I wanted to do. I just wanted to be out partying and drinking all the time with my friends and being a ‘slut’ because that’s what women do. To preface this: my friends don’t even drink. Or, at least, if they do it’s one and then we’re all done. He popped me in the jaw for the first time ever. He’d pinned me against the wall by the neck. He’d grabbed my face so hard it left my jaw sore for days. He’d poked me violently. He’d pulled my hair to get me to the floor. He’d never once hit me in the face. As I sat in the passenger seat of his truck my brain was numb. The tears fell but I couldn’t even get any words out. And then he told me to gather my ‘shit’ and get out of his truck. In the middle of nowhere on a gravel road in the middle of the night. So I did. I gathered up my shoes, my dog, my purse, my phone (which he’d thrown out the window onto the gravel road shattering the screen), and got out. But he didn’t want me to take my phone. He was paranoid I’d call the cops and he was already in enough trouble with law enforcement. So he very angrily told me to get back in the pickup. And I did. Because it was dark and despite the fact that it was in July sometime, it seemed icy outside. So cold that I was shivering as I hopped back up into his old, beat up square body and sat quietly clutching my dog to my body. Tears falling but no noise being made. No thoughts swimming in the muddled pool that was my brain. But a few miles later when he was screaming at me to talk and screaming that the silence wasn’t helping things, he told me to get out of the pickup again. When I went to get out this time, though, he grabbed my shirt and pulled so hard that it left a line of bruises along the right side of my throat and neck. It left my neck and shoulders sore for days. I remember being afraid he was going to do more than just abuse me that night. I remember wishing I could call the cops that night. But also realizing that my heart is 20 sizes too big for the wrong people. I realized too late I should have called the cops. Except, the main cop in the town where we were was a good friend of his. I didn’t have any faith that my story would be heard. I’d heard how this particular cop had discussed the women of my now-ex’s past. As if everything was their fault and my ex had to shoulder no blame. I can tell you for a fact that 90% of the fights we had that ended in violence, I’m not even sure why we were fighting. I can tell you that for four months I was rarely allowed to go see my family. Certainly never my friends. When I did go see my family, he’d call me every 15-30 minutes and if I didn’t answer he’d call incessantly every 5 minutes until I did. I can tell you that his friends love him and cherish him and that’s their prerogative. But I can also tell you that I’ve never been through worse up to this point in my life. Thinking that people are actually capable of such horrid things terrifies me. I loved his family. I loved how I felt when I was around them. I loved going to his grandparents’ for lunch or just stopping out at his mom’s to see her and check on her. I loved visiting his brother and sister-in-law and their three adorably amazing children. I loved when we would go help with farm work. At the end of the day, though, I had to break up with him. I had to get away from him. When we first got together he told me he’d been in some trouble in the past. But when you go to look at his record, it looks like there’s 4-5 domestic abuse cases and at least one assault case. Then in July he was sentenced to prison time and I was sad. I was so brainwashed into believing that he loved me that I didn’t even stop to think about what it was doing to me. I wasn’t the same girl I was when I moved back to Iowa. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t independent. I wasn’t me. When he went away, suddenly I saw so many things in a new light. I dumped him after he was already gone. I broke up with him. I ended it. After I promised him so much. I ended things with him despite the fact that I loved him, his family, a lot of his friends. I risked becoming a bad guy in the eyes of people I’d come to adore just so that I could gain back a shred of strength; a shred of humanity. It’s taken me months to be up front and honest with myself. It took me months to be honest with myself and even my mom. Some days I look back and smile because, well, him and I did laugh a lot. We did have a lot in common. I did want to be with him. In the end, though, I realized I was the one doing all the loving. I was the one doing all the giving. I was the one nurturing. I wasn’t receiving anything in return. When is it time to leave such relationships? Immediately. No matter what. If you’re afraid, call someone. If you’re afraid, call the police. Don’t wait. I got lucky. I mean, yes in the process I lost so many. But I regained myself and I’m okay with that. You don’t marry their family. You don’t live with their family. You don’t. You live with them. You marry them. When you allow them to treat you like dirt, it becomes the norm. It won’t change.

[xtruss]

War Criminal George Bush Opposes the Government Murder of People of Color!

So is he going to turn himself in?

— James Bovard | Anti-Empire.Com | June 5, 2020 | Russia Insider | Mises Institute

Former president George W. Bush has returned to the spotlight to give moral guidance to America in these troubled times. In a statement released on Tuesday, Bush announced that he was “anguished” by the “brutal suffocation” of George Floyd and declared that “lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.”

Bush’s declaration was greeted with thunderous applause by the usual suspects who portray him as the virtuous Republican in contrast to Trump. While the media portrays Bush’s pious piffle as a visionary triumph of principle, Americans need to vividly recall the lies and atrocities that permeated his eight years as president.

In an October 2017 speech in a “national forum on liberty” at the George W. Bush Institute in New York City, Bush bemoaned that “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.” Coming from Bush, this had as much credibility as former president Bill Clinton bewailing the decline of chastity.

Most media coverage of Bush nowadays either ignores the falsehoods he used to take America to war in Iraq or portrays him as a good man who received incorrect information. But Bush was lying from the get-go on Iraq and was determined to drag the nation into another Middle East war. From January 2003 onwards, Bush constantly portrayed the US as an innocent victim of Saddam Hussein’s imminent aggression and repeatedly claimed that war was being “forced upon us.” That was never the case. As the Center for Public Integrity reported, Bush made “232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda.” As the lies by which he sold the Iraq War unraveled, Bush resorted to vilifying critics as traitors in a 2006 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Bush’s lies led to the killing of more than four thousand American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. But since those folks are dead and gone anyhow, the media instead lauds Bush’s selection to be in a Kennedy Center art show displaying his borderline primitive oil paintings.

In February 2018, Bush was paid lavishly to give a pro-democracy speech in the United Arab Emirates, ruled by a notorious Arab dictatorship. He proclaimed: “Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results.” He openly fretted about Russian “meddling” in the 2016 US election.

But when he was president, Bush acted as if the United States were entitled to intervene in any foreign election he pleased. He boasted in 2005 that his administration had budgeted almost $5 billion “for programs to support democratic change around the world,” much of which was spent on tampering with foreign vote totals. When Iraq held elections in 2005, Bush approved a massive covert aid program for pro-American Iraqi parties. The Bush administration spent over $65 million to boost their favored candidate in the 2004 Ukraine election. Yet, with boundless hypocrisy, Bush proclaimed that “any (Ukrainian) election…ought to be free from any foreign influence.” US government-financed organizations helped spur coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. Both of those nations, along with Ukraine, remain political train wrecks.

In that October 2017 New York speech, Bush proclaimed: “No democracy pretends to be a tyranny.” But ravaging the Constitution was apparently part of his job description when he was president. Shortly after 9-11, Bush turned back the clock to before 1215 (when the Magna Carta was signed), formally suspending habeas corpus and claiming a prerogative to imprison indefinitely anyone he labeled a terrorist suspect. In 2002, Justice Department lawyers informed Bush that the president was entitled to violate the law during wartime—and the war on terror was expected to continue indefinitely. In 2004, Bush White House counsel Alberto Gonzales formally asserted a “commander-in-chief override power” entitling presidents to ignore the Bill of Rights.

Under Bush, the US government embraced barbaric practices which did more to destroy America’s moral credibility than all of Trump’s tweets combined. Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” regime included endless high-volume repetition of a Meow Mix cat food commercial at Guantanamo, head slapping, waterboarding, exposure to frigid temperatures, and manacling for many hours in stress positions. After the Supreme Court rebuffed some of Bush’s power grabs in 2006, he pushed through Congress a bill that retroactively legalized torture—one of the worst legislative disgraces since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. During his years in the White House, Bush perennially denied that he had approved torture. But in 2010, during an author tour to promote his new memoir, he bragged about approving waterboarding for terrorist suspects.

Is Bush nominating himself to be the nation’s racial healer? When he was president, Bush inflicted more financial ruin on blacks than any president since Woodrow Wilson (who brought Jim Crow barbarities to the federal government). Bush trumpeted his plans to close the gap between black and white homeownership rates and promised in 2002 to “use the mighty muscle of the federal government” to solve the problem. Bush was determined to end the bias against people who wanted to buy a home but had no money. Congress passed Bush’s American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003, authorizing federal handouts to first-time homebuyers of up to $10,000 or 6 percent of the home’s purchase price. Bush also swayed Congress to permit the Federal Housing Administration to make no–down payment loans to low-income Americans. Bush proclaimed: “Core American values of individuality, thrift, responsibility, and self-reliance are embodied in homeownership.” In Bush’s eyes, self-reliance was so wonderful that the government should subsidize it. And it didn’t matter whether recipients were creditworthy, because politicians meant well. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign trumpeted his down payment giveaways, a shining example of “compassionate conservatism.”

Thanks in large part to his policies, minority households saw the fastest growth in homeownership leading up to the 2007 recession. The housing collapse ravaged the net worth of black and Hispanic households. “The implosion of the subprime lending market has left a scar on the finances of black Americans—one that not only has wiped out a generation of economic progress but could leave them at a financial disadvantage for decades,” the Washington Post reported in 2012. The median net worth for Hispanic households declined by 66 percent between 2005 and 2009. That devastation was aptly described in a 2017 federal appeals court dissenting opinion as “wrecking ball benevolence” (quoting a 2004 Barron’s op-ed I wrote). But almost none of the media coverage of the ex-president reminds people of the economic carnage of this Bush vote-buying binge.

It is possible to condemn police brutality and, even more importantly, the evil laws and judicial doctrines that enable police to tyrannize other Americans without any help from a demagogic ex-president who ravaged our rights, liberties, and peace. As I commented in an August 2003 USA Today op-ed, “Whether Bush and his appointees will be held personally liable for their [Iraq War] falsehoods is a grave test for American democracy.” The revival of Bush’s reputation vivifies how our political media system failed that test. As long as George Bush doesn’t turn himself in for committing war crimes, all of his talk about “achieving justice for all” is rubbish.

Source: Mises Institute