Tag: anger

The Diseased Ignorance of Trump’s Base

The fact that Donald Trump’s core supporters—and maybe some mainstream ones as well—actually believe this, is a sickening and alarming statement about the level of intelligence and the prevalence of psychosis across a third of America. It may also be our swan song, the trumpet forlornly playing TAPS to our Republic.
 
Think about it. CNN, NBC, CBS, Reuters, Al Jezeera, the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, MSNBC, the BBC, PBS, the British, Canadian, German, French, and virtually every other news source in the world, are ALL liars.  ONLY TRUMP is honest. ONLY TRUMP knows what he’s talking about.
 
EVERY PERSON who has sued Trump for illegal practices, EVERY WOMAN he has sexually assaulted, EVERY LIE of his that has been recorded on paper, tape and video, ALL FAKE NEWS. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Intelligence Agency, the National Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, British Intelligence, ALL LIARS.
 
97% of the world’s scientists, ALL DUMB, because ONLY TRUMP has an instinct for science and global warming. ONLY TRUMP knows what’s right for the environment. ONLY TRUMP knows what kind of air our grandchildren should breathe, what kind of water they must drink.
 
ONLY TRUMP has any brains, despite the overwhelming evidence to the exact contrary. ONLY TRUMP is telling the truth about Russian interference in our country’s election process. Everyone else is out to get him.
 
POOR TRUMP!   TRUMP THE CHOSEN ONE!   TRUMP THE EMPEROR!  TRUMP THE CHAMPION OF NATIONALISM!  TRUMP THE CHAMPION OF WHITE SUPREMACY!   TRUMP THE MESSIAH! TRUMP ALMIGHTY!  ALL KNEEL TO TRUMP…or his supporters will punch you, knock the hell out of you, shoot you dead, blow you up for daring not to kiss his robes.
 
THIS is the disease which infects a full third of America. THIS will destroy us. THIS ridiculous, unreasoning, unimaginable worship of a documented cheat, double dealer, serial liar and sexual assaulter, this man who wears his ignorance as comfortably and proudly as his bigotry and white supremacist nationalism, this man who knows one, and only one, loyalty. ONLY TRUMP! PRAISE BE TO TRUMP. ALL KNEEL TO TRUMP.
America has always had this undercurrent, this third that thrives on racism and bigotry, this third that denies the very core values written into the Constitution by our forefathers. This is the third that now runs rampant with the approval and encouragement of Donald Trump. This is the third that would as soon kick you in the teeth as listen to criticisms of white supremacy and racism. This is the third that is so fervent in its anger over perceived mistreatment, it is blind to where the enemies of middle America truly lie. This is the third for whom violence is first or second option, not the last resort.  This is the third for whom patriotism is wrapped in a Confederate flag and festooned with swastikas. This is the third for whom reason doesn’t mean to think and analyze, but is an excuse for punching your lights out.
 
This disease has already destroyed what was left of a once honorable Republican party. It has turned them into sniveling courtiers and court buffoons, eager to have their particular desires met at any cost no matter how egregious, frightened to their core of displeasing the Emperor. In unison they throw their hands in the air, deny every obvious truth, and proclaim in chorus ONLY TRUMP. They praise the Emperor’s fine new clothes.
 
America may well not survive the ONLY TRUMP insanity. The epitaph on the gravestone of American Democracy will be aptly phrased in two words. HAIL TRUMP.
 
Pardon me now, while I go pour a stiff drink. If ONLY TRUMP cannot be defeated, it may soon be one of the last free actions left to us.

Butch and Sundance Were More Ethical Than the GOP

It’s going to happen. You know that as well as I do. They are going to do it. The Republican majority is going to push Kavanaugh through and right down our throats. Because they can. By the time you read this, they will probably already have done it. But even if by some miracle they should fail, the mere fact that they are attempting it is unethical, immoral, unjust, and a shot right through the Constitution.
It has nothing to do with right vs. wrong, with morality or ethics or justice. None of that matters. The Republican party has stopped even pretending to care about any of that.
It is about power. It is about taking advantage, by hook or crook, and there are plenty of crooks in the GOP, of the opportunity to control the country for the next 20-30 years through manipulation of the Supreme Court, which ultimately has more power domestically than the President.
It is about grabbing the power for 1/3 of America, the conservative to the point of regression third, the ultra religious cultists third, the racist and sexist third, the third of toxic masculinity and a yearning for the return of the 1850’s.
Make no mistake. The manner in which the Republican party has abandoned all ethics and all sense of morality in its ruthless manipulation of the SCOTUS selection process, is best described by one word. Coup. That’s C.O.U.P.
We can only hope that this is the very last straw, the final bullet through the Constitution needed to move independent and undecided voters to the left side of the line in the midterms. Only by retaking not just the House but the Senate as well can sanity be restored. Even then, it will be necessary for a new Congress to impeach at least one unfit SCOTUS judge as ruthlessly as he was shoved onto the court. Then Trump needs to replaced by a landslide in 2020, and a new, rational President should seriously consider adding judges to the court. Steps should also be taken to establish inviolate rules by which SCOTUS justices are nominated, vetted, and seated in the future.
Or the racist, sexist, economically ignorant and societally regressive one third of the country will continue to govern all of us. This is simply unacceptable.

Do NOT Call Donald Trump Stupid

Do NOT mistake or underestimate Donald Trump. He realizes damned well that informed Americans know this kind of tweet, and all the ones like it are bullshit. They are not intended for informed Americans. They are intended to keep his core supporters engaged and enraged. This is exactly what Trump’s angry,  poorly informed and analytically challenged supporters call “..talking like us.” He knows that the secret to his success is holding onto that rabid base, including racists, white supremacists, and the uneducated poor, then getting just enough others to cross the line because of various personal dissatisfactions, whether it be closet racism of Barack Obama, hatred of Hillary Clinton, or economic dissatisfaction. 
 
   Donald Trump is woefully ignorant in most of the ways that we judge as genuine intelligence and intellectual capacity. He is clearly narcissistic and psychotic, a veritable textbook sociopath. He is a serial liar, but one that can sell those lies like few in history.
   He is the granite statue of the con man who can sell ice in the Arctic and sand in the Sahara. He is the role model for ministers who live in million dollar mansions by taking the last dollars from already poor worshipers. If he had lived in the old west in the 1800’s, he would have lived in luxury while selling snake oil for fifty cents a bottle. If you believe in the antichrist, he will look and sound like Donald Trump.
   Donald Trump is brilliant in his understanding of how to manipulate the most vulnerable people around him in order to build and maintain a power base. His expertise is in doing this while preventing the people upon whom he preys (and depends) from seeing behind his curtain. He is then ruthless in ridding his personal power circle of anyone who disagrees with him.
  
   Calling Donald Trump stupid dismisses him without truly understanding the danger he represents. It creates a false sense of security. a comfortable sense of safety from him. It provides an illusion that he is mentally incompetent and therefore not really dangerous. It weakens resistance. It helps us to think it will all be okay because after all, he’s stupid.
 
That is the worst mistake we can make. Donald Trump is the most dangerous individual to surface since the end of WWII.
 
   Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, right down the line, all the way to the last point of comparison. All that remains to be seen is if he has the same kind of world domination psychosis as did Hitler. He cannot be allowed to answer that question.

Why the Democrats Keep Losing -or- It’s time to be mad as hell and say so in plain language

I submit that the Democratic party’s biggest problem is the same one Strother Martin had, a failure to communicate. Hillary Clinton was one of the most qualified individuals for the Presidency in recent history. She was not guilty of any of the lying claims the Republicans and Donald Trump threw at her. She was also without a doubt the worst Dem candidate in the 20th and 21st centuries when it came to communicating effectively with the average American. Or just about anybody with less than a college degree.
It’s hard to fathom why people like my own family, whom I’v always thought of as smart, would continue to vote Republican, when it is so obvious to me that Democrats represent everything the Trump voters say they want, while at the same time voting for a party that has been depriving them of those same things, and is now doing its damndest to literally cut the floor out from under them.
Hillary refused to fight in the trenches with Trump. She ‘stayed above it all.’ She refused to refute the lies told about her directly and show evidence. You see, the law may say that we are innocent until proven guilty, but the election wasn’t a courtroom, and the average person where I come from believes that if someone accuses you and you don’t refute it, then you must be guilty of it. It’s the John Wayne syndrome. If somebody takes a punch at you, you’d better punch them back, or you’re a coward, or guilty, or both.
The whole election might have gone differently if She had responded to each lie the Republicans tossed out by saying something like, “You lying dog (or son of a bitch), that’s a lie, and everything you’ve said for the last month is a lie, and here’s the proof,” then laid it out, point by point.
But Hillary usually lost most of the average American right, two sentences into a conversation. Because she always gave the impression she was talking down to them. And sometimes I had to listen very closely to make sure that I, with my multiple degrees, understood her.
I moved from being a right leaning middle of the road independent, to a full fledged liberal Democrat, because of what I saw the Republican party doing to Americans beginning with Reagan. What Reagan and the Bushes have done to this country makes Richard Nixon look like a saint. Now Trump, a lying, stealing, ignorant and mentally unstable con man is their hero. So why does the average American Republican continue to vote for the very people who are destroying them?
Because the McConnells and the Ryans and yes, the Trumps, KNOW HOW TO TALK TO THEM IN A PLAIN, NON-UPPITY FASHION. And they use that awareness to sell them lie after lie after lie, beginning with the trickle down economy garbage and extending through the idiotic “The poor and the downtrodden are stealing from you and the Bible says so” blasphemy. And on that last part, trust me, when you’re talking to middle and southern American, you had damn well better address that latter issue when it’s thrown at you, or you’re dead before you leave the house.
The Republican party has built an entire system of campaign rhetoric based on lying blatantly, calling names, making false accusations, and all the while smooth talking huge sections of the country into liking it, by pretending to be one of them. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are the best examples America has to offer in the 21st century, of classic Shakespearean villains.
If the Democrats, and the left, are going to break the mesmerizing hold these people hold on the “average American,” they are going to have to learn to communicate. To say it like it is in plain no nonsense terms.
Plain talk. In the trenches. There is no such thing as staying above it all. When punched, punch back harder, or you lose credibility. A cow is a cow, not a bovine. When Republicans tell their lies about Social Security being broke, roll up your sleeves and point right at the liar and tell them, on camera, “You’re lying to the American people.” When they bullshit America, shake your head and say, “I don’t believe you’re saying something so stupid. Do you think Americans are stupid enough to buy that line of bull?” TALK PLAIN AND GET ‘ER DONE, PILGRIM!
Oh, and would someone please tell Hillary Clinton that when Trump stalked the stage behind her, glaring at her while she was talking, she should have IMMEDIATELY walked back, right up to him and told him, on mic, “I’m right here if you want to look at me, you SOB. Don’t do it to my back, you sniveling coward.”
Democrats have to learn how to communicate on a grass roots basis. This high falutin’ intellectual superiority crap is destroying them.  And it’s destroying America.

Musings on the New Fascism in America

Re: This Disastrous Election and the Fall of the Constitution. Mother Liberty Cries Today.

The morning after November 8, the newest day that will live in infamy, someone texted to me “You’re disappointed. I get that,” then went on to chastise me a bit, in a kind and caring manner. Allow me to correct their initial assumption.

I’m not disappointed. Don’t even think I’m disappointed. I get disappointed when the Cardinals lose. I get disappointed and upset when Mizzou loses. And loses.  And I then make bad jokes about it.  That’s disappointment.  This election is far different from that.
I am not disappointed. I am afraid. I am afraid for my, and your, America. I am afraid for my children and their children. I am afraid for the people of the world who depend on the strength and freedom and example that is America to support and help them through their own darkness and who now fear us.
I am not disappointed. I am mad as hell. I am beyond angry. I. am. furious. I am furious at the hateful people who think that if you’re black or brown or anything other than white you are second class, that you don’t deserve the same rights as white people.
I am enraged at people who think that LGBT people don’t deserve the same rights as ‘straight’ people. I am enraged that supposedly Godly people choose to denigrate and persecute and relegate to the shadows people who are not just exactly like them. I am livid that these people try to blame God and Jesus for their hatefulness and prejudice and persecution of people who are not members of their personal club.
I am livid that these people claim it’s God’s will when a woman dies in childbirth or gets raped or a child is born with horrible defects that ensure a lifetime of misery, but don’t care to consider it’s God’s will when a pregnancy is aborted for the mother’s health or to prevent a tragedy.
I am angry and horrified to realize that I live in a country where more than half the people ascribe to beliefs and hatefulness and persecution that can only be described as those of a Christian Taliban. Tulsa, say hello to Aleppo.
When these ‘people’ who claim God and Jesus as their own personal puppets, and try to force everyone in the country to accept and obey their own personal distortions, install as our President a man who has no scruples, who has been shown to be an abuser of women and of all those who fall under his power; a hot tempered bully who has no respect for anyone or anything but himself and has been shown to be devoid of any character or morality whatsoever, I am terrified. I boil when I see my country being overcome by the practitioners of exclusion, of hate and bigotry and racism, to the cheers of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
I shake my head and wonder if some people were out of the room when logic and reason were distributed, when I hear someone say, as they vote for a tyrant in waiting, “Well, you know, maybe a change is good.” A change from ‘love your neighbor,’ to ‘beat the hell out of your neighbor if they are not exactly like you,’ is a good change how, exactly.
And I know we are lost when I see how many people in the aftermath are willing to just sit back, flip the channel to a rerun of a ‘reality’ show, and blithely proclaim “Oh, it’s okay, I’ll just be quiet and float along with it until the next election.” I am in dismay for our Republic and for all of the nations in the world that depend on us for their hope, our help, and  our example. I marvel darkly at the ignorance and self-satisfaction of people who wanted this, and now say, “Oh man up.  You just lost an election. It’s not a big deal.” I know then that I’m having a conversation with someone I never want to have behind me. I know I’m talking to someone who champions the bullies and the exclusionists and thugs.
Because it is a big deal. Because it was not just another election, it was an election that put every great ideal our country rests upon at risk.  Because it was an election that instantly changed the world from one looking up to us,  to one peeking fearfully at us from behind their drapes with their lights turned off. Because it was an election that refuted freedom and equality and chimed in the believers of repression, bigotry, racism, and a single-minded,  extremist, hateful  arm of Christianity: The Christian Taliban. And because other Christians helped it to happen. Because it was an election that assured there will be a lot more room in that streets of gold in the Heaven Christians profess to believe in, because the other place suddenly looks a lot more attractive. Because huge numbers of those supposed Christians just looked Jesus in the face, and spat. Because it was an election that warned us you can just look at the photo above and change the names to Trump, and McConnell, and Ryan, and Pence and their cohorts. Good Christians all. Because now, once again, a hate and intolerance and brutal pettiness which we thought we had moved beyond, has risen again and threatens to consume us. Because millions of good Americans and immigrants now fear for their lives and their neighbors have ordained it.

Because even as you sip your beer and check the TV guide and sagely say it couldn’t happen here, it’s starting to happen here. France may want its statue back. I couldn’t blame them. But no, I’m not disappointed.