Dan Bishop: Plenty dangerous, and ignorant

So, as I do every morning, I was reading the local newspaper the other day to see what’s happening in the world around me, coming across all kinds of stories about life, death …and ignorance. 

It’s the stories about ignorance that really capture my attention because, even now in my late sixties, I still can’t believe some of the crazy stuff somepeople say and do (read MAGA Trump followers).

Take this story about North Carolina Republican candidate for state attorney general, Dan Bishop, and the absolutely asinine thing he reportedly told a Charlotte radio interviewer recently in reaction to his MAGA Massa’s NY felony conviction on 34 counts of cooking his business books to pay $130,000 to a porn star he allegedly “slept” with (though one could argue, from what I gather, that it was she who was doing most of the sleeping. Given the price tag, “…a mighty good sleep it was," I imagine).

Claiming the throne of righteousness for his corrupt party’s felonious overlord, Bishop, insisting that Convicted Man’s trial was “rigged,” reportedly, and shamefully said, “It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950, if a person happened to be Black, in order to get justice. And, that’s what they did in New York. So, it’s fundamentally rigged, and the people who attack me for saying so can attack all they want.”

Well gee, Dan, thanks for your generous permission. Just let me get my rhetorical knives and blades lined up and sharpened here so I can rip your ignorant behind a new one.

But before I get to cuttin’ and slicin’, let me cite some very serious facts here.

First, twelve jurors agreed that the big bucks Trump paid were to hide his slimy hush money scheme in order to protect his slimy presidential campaign.

And let’s not forget, Trump’s “fixer” attorney, Michael Cohen, who testified against him, was also convicted earlier for violating the same campaign finance laws on the same set of facts, for the same slimy crime.

        And served time in prison for it too!

        Let's hope Convicted Man gets sentenced to the same, come July 11th.

So this business crybaby Republicans, like Bishop, have been whining about claiming that Trump was sandbagged by Biden and the Democrats, is total B.S..

        Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg saw a Trump crime to convict, and he ran to the bank with it! 

        End of that discussion!

Now, there’s no question conservative Republican Dan Bishop was historically accurate about “a person who happened to be Black” in 1950’s Alabama who sought justice in a court of law, more times than not, fell victim to a racist, rigged and unjust criminal justice system. However, what Bishop was unknowingly describing was a little thing called “systemic racism,” something that conservative Republicans normally insist never really existed in this country.

Or if they do, they say Democrats were responsible for it.

Hey, don’t look side-eyed at me. Ask Bishop’s culture warrior buddy, Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson.

According to him, our students shouldn’t even be taught American history in school, just the “classical” subjects of math, English and grammar. Anything else is “Communism” and “pornography,” he bloviates, and if elected our next governor (GOD forbid), Robinson certainly doesn’t want our severely underpaid teachers instructing our students about documented examples of systemic racism in American history, because that would mean they’re actually teaching, according to Robinson,  “Critical Race Theory.” (It’s not, it’s just plain old unvarnished American history, but Republicans will never admit that).

So I wonder if Robinson intends to call Dan Bishop up, and tell him to stop using CRT examples, ‘cause the Black Republican is already on record calling CRT “garbage’ and “absolutely sickening,” and saying that systemic racism never really existed in this country.

In fact, Robinson is also on record as blasting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960’s civil rights movement, because “ so many freedoms were lost” and the movement was “…a Communist plot to subvert capitalism.”

Say whaaaaaat?

Now Robinson will come back and insist he never said systemic racism never existed in this country, just plain old racism, (trust me, folks, he doesn’t know the difference) and that he was only talking about whether or not it exists today. But you see, it’s hard to criticize Dr. King and others for leading a powerful social justice movement with the goal of eliminating systemic racism in schools, public accommodations and yes, the criminal justice system, if it never existed in the first place. Many say we’re still fighting to eliminate systemic racism today.

Robinson just doesn’t want little Johnny and Bonnie reading that truth in a NC textbook, which is just damn dumb!

So for Dan Bishop, who is as staunch a hard right-wing conservative as they come, to search all of American history, and choose systemic racism against black people in the Old South in the 1950s as a cogent example of what happened to Donald Trump being convicted for committing stupid white collar felonies, is both sad AND ignorant.

Black people who were brought before a Jim Crow court of law for any variety of alleged offenses back in the day were systematically lynched, beaten and even hung to death when, NOT if, found guilty by an all-white jury, Mr. Bishop. Your leader has not, and will not, experience any of those injustices, even after he’s sentenced on July 11th.

Trump has NOT suffered, nor has been targeted because of who or what he is, but rather because of the criminal acts he’s been convicted of, and the alleged criminal acts he must still stand trial for.

And guess what? Trump’s jury was anything but “all-white.”

To make any comparison between Trump and the legal and systematic brutalization and subjugation of Black people in the Old South is beyond the ice-blooded ignorance conservatives like Dan Bishop are famous for when it comes to race.

Hell, if Trump ever wins on appeal, Bishop will lovingly be comparing it to Juneteenth!

But none of this should surprise any of us who have been following Bishop’s career. 

And this is the dangerous part.

Rep. Bishop, a Republican attorney and former county commissioner who hails from Charlotte, was elected to the NC House in 2014 and to the state Senate two years later. He’s most notorious for being the chief sponsor of the infamous 2016 HB2 so-called “bathroom bill,” which attempted to legislate who could use a public bathroom based on their birth certificate. 

Bishop apparently wanted transgender people to find an outhouse someplace. 

The measure also blocked cities and local governments from passing anti-discrimination ordinances that protected LGBTQ+ citizens.

The catastrophic result of this hateful idiocy was hundreds of millions of dollars in lost events, jobs and opportunities for North Carolina, in addition to a plethora of lawsuits, and the worst national press imaginable. Fortunately, we were able to ditch that madness a year later before North Carolina went totally belly-up.

Then Bishop decided he wanted to cause more havoc on a bigger, grander scale, so he narrowly won a special election to represent the Eighth Congressional District in 2019. But being part of the bolts-loose conservative House Freedom Caucus in Congress, where he helped to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for not being conservative enough; voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election; and launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden that’s ongoing today, apparently wasn’t enough. 

Bishop is now running for NC state attorney general because, he says, he wants to “…restore law and order to our cities.”

Lord save us from this power hungry maniac, please!

Bishop has already attacked his Democratic opponent for state attorney general, Congressman Jeff Jackson of Charlotte, for being on TikTok, the popular, but controversial Chinese-owned social media platform. Bishop charged that Jackson is a “Chinese social media star” and “…will bring the same progressive, anti-police policies that ruined San Francisco, New York and Chicago to North Carolina.” 

“I am not going to let that happen,” Bishop vowed. 

Emily Trifone with the Democratic Attorneys General Association has made it clear that she sees Bishop as “the definition of a far-right, out of touch politician who is far outside the mainstream of North Carolina.”

Gee Emily, that’s all?!!

Make no mistake that Bishop is now part of the most divisive Republican political ticket in the history of North Carolina, with Trump vying for president, Robinson for governor, Bishop for state AG and Michele “Obama should be shot ” Morrow running for state supt. of Public Instruction.

Can you imagine what a NC Attorney General Dan Bishop would say or do if the issue of voting rights came up? After all, the job of North Carolina’s attorney general is to protect voting rights for everybody…not justRepublicans. 

Hard to do when you spend most of your time accusing Democrats of rigging elections and criminal trials. 

And it sure as shootin’ would be a problem if an Attorney General Bishop worked with a Gov. Mark Robinson and a Republican-led state legislature to turn North Carolina into a shameless conservative whorehouse, with a right-wing majority state Supreme Court  legally covering for them every crooked step of the way.

I can only hope that the right-minded people of this state would not allow any of that to happen. But, I can imagine it happening, because folks don’t realize just how dangerous Dan Bishop, or Mark Robinson, or Michele Morrow really are.

Bishop could be the most dangerous of all as state attorney general, however, because like Trump, he righteously believes that he has the power to destroy his perceived enemies (I guess I’m one of them now). All Bishop needs is the legal muscle to carry out his demented whims, and all of a sudden, we’ll live in something resembling a zombie right-wing Texas or Florida on steroids. 

I hate writing columns which make it seem as if I’m leaning one way or another politically, because believe me, I can find plenty wrong with Democrats without really trying.

But I’d be hard pressed to find plenty dangerous about Democrats.

Dan Bishop as NC attorney general, would be plenty dangerous, and ignorant, for North Carolina.