If you aren't familiar with the book, or the Hulu TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, you probably don't know why Aunt Lydia is a role model for any aspiring sociopath. Aunt Lydia is the cruel, sadistic, and psychopathic overseer of all the handmaids. Her job was to teach the handmaids to be handmaids, a task which required her to break their spirits and keep them in line with jolts from a cattle prod and prolonged torture from holding stones at arm’s length to a staged mass execution.
Irma Grese was a female SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women's section of Bergen-Belsen. She was convicted for war crimes executed at 22 years of age. Auschwitz inmates nicknamed her the "Hyena of Auschwitz" (German: die Hyäne von Auschwitz).
What these women have in common is that they both worked for heartless men, in Aunt Lydia’s case a fictional despot and of course with Irma Grese, Hitler.
What they also had in common was a total lack of conscience, sense of decency, and of morality.
Trump has gathered a contingent of who try to put a female face on his poisonous messages. Perhaps he has decided that women are better at spewing his venom than men like Marc Short (right).
Kristjen Nielsen earned the top spot as worst of the worst female Trump enabler after her coldhearted evasive lie studded performance in the briefing yesterday. Hapless liar Sarah Sanders may have shown a glimmer of humanity because reports from CNN say she refused to take questions during the planned press conference about the child separations which is why Nielsen was flown in from New Orleans. Apparently, Nielsen was against the family separation policy but Trump recently had “the talk” with her and instead of doing the moral thing by resigning, she became the face of Trump’s diabolical callous policy.
“We were all wondering where she was and how long it would be until she got that talk,” said one Trump ally. “Everyone knew that talk was coming.” POLITICO
If Kellyanne Conway wants to catch up with Nielsen she's made a start trying to use her Catholicism as a talking point regarding separating children from their parents: “As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who’s got a conscience … I will tell you that nobody likes this policy,” Conway said on NBC’s “Meet the Press."
The jury is still out on Melania Trump. She issued a statement in the third person through her communications director: "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart." Every other first lady from Rosalyn Carter to Hillary Clinton to Michelle Obama to Laura Bush has made a strong personal statement abhorring the separation of children from parents in the first person.
Last night Lawrence O'Donnell suggested Melania go to the border and do what Barbara Bush did when she visited a hospital for children dying of AIDS a time when HIV/AIDS was considered by many as being contagious. She’d be doing it, Lawrence noted, as one immigrant to another.
Dishonorable mention
Mercedes Schlapp
White House Director of Strategic Communications.
Silent Bystanders — women who literally stand behind or next to their man
Ivanka Trump and Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation
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This is the second time I wrote about Aunt Lydia. I wrote this after the White House Correspondents Dinner. Who is Aunt Lydia and why Michelle Wolf comparing Sarah Sanders to her is a razor-sharp barb?
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Yesterday: FDNY psychologist says Donald Trump once crudely insulted her looks, she claims he's mentally unfit: “I wouldn’t let you s—k my d---k.”