Going Positive

I never liked Jim Carrey as an actor/comedian but as a speechwriter, he's obviously very, very good. Accepting the Charlie Chaplin Award for Excellence in Comedy from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Los Angeles on Friday night. Carrey

praised his comedy hero, actor Charlie Chaplin, for the ingenious, subversive political commentary in his films.

With “Modern Times,” he criticized capitalism without a conscience, and that’s what we have now: capitalism without a conscience. He showed the common man being fed through years of brutal dehumanizing industrial age. He took on the American right wing of its day and its worst evils: hatred of immigrants, contempt of the truth, greed, and the abuse of power. We are fighting those same evils today.

Carrey went on to dedicate his award to people he believed to be true heroes ― a term the comedian says has been warped by reality TV ― Chaplin, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, professor Christine Blasey Ford and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Ford and Kaepernick boldly and patriotically went- publicly- where no others had. However, non-American citizens, as Carrey seems to understand, can perform an extremely valuable service to the USA.

"I'm a former intelligence officer, and we're your closest ally," Christopher Steele told the Federal Bureau of Investigation when presenting it with the raw intelligence of contacts between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin, the latter trying to sow disunity within the USA and also the transatlantic alliance. Making an enemy of Vladimir Putin has been known to increase mortality.

If such loyalty to the USA were present in the White House, Carrey wouldn't have to single (triple?) out Steele, Ford, and Kaepernick. Another worthy individual came up big the night Carrey accepted his award:

Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has declined an invitation to the White House from President Donald Trump.

In an interview with Turkey's Haberturk TV on Friday, Cengiz said she believed the invitation was aimed at influencing public opinion in the president’s favor. She added that she would not visit the White House unless the U.S. both made a sincere effort to solve Khashoggi’s killing and demanded that all those responsible be tried and punished.

Cengiz, a Turkish national, was placed under 24-hour police protection in Turkey on Monday, just days after Saudi Arabia finally admitted that Khashoggi had been killed inside its consulate in Istanbul.

She was one of the last people to see Khashoggi alive, having gone with him to the consulate on Oct.2. She waited outside for nearly 12 hours, alerting friends and officials when he failed to emerge.

A week after his disappearance, Cengiz wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post urging Trump to help shed light on her fiancé’s disappearance. “Jamal is a valuable person, an exemplary thinker and a courageous man who has been fighting for his principles,” she wrote. “I don’t know how I can keep living if he was abducted or killed in Turkey.”

Jamal Khashoggi was a legal resident of the USA and journalist for inarguably one of its three top newspapers. Yet, within days of his murder, Republicans began

mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.

Trump’s remarks about reporters amid the Khashoggi fallout have inflamed existing tensions between his allies and the media. At a Thursday rally in Montana, Trump openly praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter in his bid for Congress last year...

 Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and key political booster, shared another person’s tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was “tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden” in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden’s activities.

“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said

 “Trump wants to take a soft line, so Trump supporters are finding excuses for him to take it,” said William Kristol, a conservative Trump critic. “One of those excuses is attacking the person who was murdered.”

Colin Kaepernick, Christine Ford, Christopher Steele, Hatice Cengiz. True courage is hard to come by in Trump's America, but some people stand above almost all others.

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