Peter David's Blog, page 5

Freak Out Friday – January 10, 2020

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – JANUARY 10, 2019

The country has spent the last week in a most unexpected and unusual position.  

We have been praying that the Iranian government is smarter than ours.

We’ve been praying that they realize the actions of our president do not reflect the will of the majority of the citizens of the United States.  That as much as they shout “Death to Americans,” they come to the realization that most of us not only do not wish death on Iranians, but truth to tell, we don’t really give much of a crap about them.  We don’t advocate attacking them.  They haven’t launched terrorist strikes against our country directly; haven’t blown up a skyscraper or assaulted a mall or whatever.  On an average day, most Americans don’t give Iran a second thought.  

And absolutely none of us knew who Quassem Soleiamani was.  He may well have been a national figure, and people wound up getting stampeded on his funeral, but the average American didn’t know his name, and even now can barely pronounce it, let alone spell it.  Whatever plans he may have been scheming, it had zero impact on our daily lives.  We didn’t give the slightest of damns about him, and I can assure you that even the most advocate of Trump supporters wasn’t interested in launching World War III in order to take this guy out.

Yet the idiot joint chiefs presented the prospect of killing him as an option to Trump in order to make the other options look more palatable.  Yeah, I’ve done the same thing.  One time Pocket needed me to come up with three concepts for a Trek novel.  I came up with two really good ones and a cliché-ridden rehash of previous episodes in order to make the other two look better.  Naturally Paramount selected the rehash.  So that stunt doesn’t always work when you’re dealing with people of limited intelligence.  And Trump certainly falls into that category.

So for the past week we actively rooted for the Iranian government to display more restraint than we would in such a situation.  Especially considering that, whatever Soleiamani may have done in the past, we have seen zero proof presented that he was an “imminent” threat, despite all of Trump’s claims that he was.  We automatically know Trump is lying because Trump always lies, and the further proof of those lies was that in subsequent briefings, his people provided no evidence to back up the claims.  When both Republican and Democrat senators are saying the briefings were BS, you know that they most definitely were.  Not to mention that seventeen years ago we saw George W. and his people launch an invasion based upon a series of lies that Saddam Hussein presented a threat with weapons of mass destruction that he was discovered not to have.  

Yet here we were now hoping that the Iranian government wouldn’t launch World War III.  Because let’s face it:  if they had retaliated by killing, I dunno, Colin Powell, Trump’s response would have been scorched Earth.  Despite the Geneva Convention, he would have targeted cultural centers, day care centers…hell, you can’t convince me he wouldn’t have strongly considered just dropping nuclear weapons on them.  

Yet Iran’s response was remarkably restrained, lobbing some missiles at a military base and killing, as near as we can determine, no one.  Considering what they could have set into motion, we’re left breathing a sigh of relief and pray that Trump will not provoke further response.

Which of course we can forget about, because he’s busy hitting them with sanctions.  Even more ludicrous, he’s actually blaming President Obama for the missiles.  And for anyone reading this who only gets his news from Fox and Trump’s lying mouth:  No.  Obama, in a move that was coordinated with other countries, unfroze money that was already Iran’s in various banks.  And he reimbursed them for the purchase of weapons they bought in the 1970s that were never delivered.  

Yet, of course, Trump has to find yet another reason to blame Obama for things.  It’s become as reflexive as Trumpies crying “But Hillary’s emails!” every time Trump is criticized for some new outrage.  It’s expected from his blind followers, and is typical for Trump who is psychologically incapable of admitting or accepting blame for anything. He continues to blame his impeachment woes on Pelosi and the Democrats even though all of it is as a result of his own actions, phone calls, and duplicity.  He constantly presents himself as the most victimized president in our history.  No one has been treated worse! Declares the occupant of the office where others have been prosecuted for lying about sex or been shot or been killed.  He cries “witch hunt,” apparently oblivious to the fact that witch hunts went after innocent people as opposed to the investigations that have jailed and fined several dozen people.  

Meanwhile Mitch McConnell continues to protect his ass while the GOP completely abrogates their oath to support the Constitution and instead fall in line behind a bullying narcissist.  Oh, but don’t dare criticize the fact that his assassination of the Iranian General was ill-advised and poorly thought out, because then you’re on the side of terrorists.

You know what?  Assassinating a representative of a foreign government with which war has not been declared and then stating you’re going to blow up cultural centers?  Those are the acts of terrorists.  So if you’re on Trump’s side, you support terrorism.  Simple as that.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – December 6, 2019

It’s been quite the week as the Democrats have been doing what they swore that they would do:  uphold the Constitution.  I’m sure you remember the Constitution.  That’s the document with the emoluments (a word that, admit it, you never knew a year ago) clause that Trump dismissed as “phony.”  The document with Article II which specifies the duties of the President of the United States but nowhere asserts that he can do “whatever (he) wants,” as Trump claims it does.  The document that foresaw the eventual rise to power of a despot who could be removed from office when his crimes see the light of day.

Bolstered by three scholars who flat out said that Trump’s actions are impeachable, and one who was selected by the GOP to assert that they weren’t quite impeachable enough—hardly convincing—the Democrats are proceeding with impeaching Trump so that the trial can go and die in the Senate.  Indeed, Senate leader and Putin suck-up Mitch McConnell has even floated the idea of, with the approval of fifty-one senators, blocking the Democrats completely out of the impeachment trial.  For Trump the ideal scenario is that the GOP Senate subpoenas and grills Hunter and Joe Biden—what they say is irrelevant, all people will remember is that they were investigated—while the Trump-picked Supreme Court overturns the lower court rulings requiring that he turn over his financial records.  Then once the GOP clears him of the impeachment proceedings, he can go out on the road, talk about how Biden and Son were grilled for their connection to Ukraine who were the real villains in the 2016 election and how the Supreme Court said he was right about everything.  Meanwhile Biden will be scorched earth because of the Senate, Warren will get the nomination and Trump will likely beat her because, hey, no one objects to a woman president but, y’know, not THIS woman.   

Can you tell I’m not in the best of moods?

You think I might be because Trump left the country.  But no, no relief there, because he went to England and so embarrassed us in front of our allies that the leaders of several other countries bunched together like bored wives at a coffee klatch and gossiped about what an idiot he was.  And since nowadays it is literally impossible to speak in privacy pretty much anywhere, the conversation was broadcast.  Since Trump has the security level of a two year old, naturally he then bolted the country after pausing long enough to call the Canadian prime minister “two-faced.”  Right, because the guy who claims that he never met people who have been arrested even though there are pictures of him with them (he claims he doesn’t know Prince Andrew although there are pix of them together from June) really has the moral standing to claim that someone else is two faced.

Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi put noses out of joint when she acted like that thing that conservatives despise even more than liberals:  a strong woman. When a conservative journalist demanded to know if she hated Donald Trump, she slammed the lid down hard on him.  She asserted that her Christian upbringing precluded her from hating Trump, and claimed yet again that she prayed for him.  For what it’s worth, I pray for him, too.  I pray he’ll get hit by a bus or decides that he’s going to nuke Canada which will provoke a secret service agent to put a bullet in his brain.  I’m not expecting those prayers to be answered, but hey, you never know.

The bottom line is that Trump is a criminal. To anyone who believes in the Constitution, that much is indisputable.  Indeed, that is likely the bottom line reason why he pardoned several service men who were convicted of, or accused of, war crimes.  He feels that he’s sending a clear message as to who his sympathies are with:  those who believe that rules of behavior and. Laws do not apply to them. The tyrants and despots that he admires, he is endeavoring to emulate.  

Indeed, some are saying that Trumpism is, or is becoming, a cult. It’s an assertion that may not be too far off.  Whereas in previous administrations those who are a part of it are expected to swear fealty to the Constitution, in the world of Trump you are expected to be loyal, first and foremost, to Trump.  His will is not to be questioned and he is to be protected from all enemies great and small.  And in his world, an enemy is anyone who doesn’t want to let him do whatever he wishes.  Democrats, liberals, judges, they aren’t the opposition.  They are the enemy, and enemies must be crushed, period.  That is the lunatic to whom the Trumpies have sworn their allegiance.  

I know our country has been through difficult times before. Whether they were seeing Commies everywhere, or throwing native born Japanese-American citizens in prisons, or fighting brother against brother, the US has always managed to come through and grow stronger than it was before.  I’m reasonably sure I won’t still be around thirty years from now when the next generation is looking back on these times and trying to figure out how it all happened.  I just hope that the country will still be recognizable.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – November 15, 2019

So the impeachment hearings have begun.  The GOP got what they wanted—public hearings—and naturally Trump is complaining about there being public hearings.  Because what he wants, what he believes, is that he should be above investigation.  His lawyer actually stood in a court of law and stated that if Trump gunned down a man on 5th Avenue, he shouldn’t be able to be investigated.  Indeed, the next step in Trump’s incessant tax dodge is to try and bring it before the Supreme Court and see if his handpicked judges decide to overturn the 1970s court ruling that helped sink Nixon.

My guess?  They will. 

Because as far as Trump’s supporters are concerned, this country is no longer about the Constitution, no longer about serving the people, no longer about anything except aiding them in holding onto power and doing whatever they want to do.  That and demonizing Democrats, including blocking all the House’s efforts to pass laws and then accusing them of being the “do nothing” Democrats.  You know, not dissimilar from blaming a rape victim for dressing in a way that encouraged the crime.  Not identical, obviously, but the same spirit:  blame the people being abused for the actions of the criminal.

You know, kind of like what Trump is doing right now:  He’s on Twitter accusing Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch of being incompetent.  Of course he is.  That’s the way what we loosely refer to as his mind operates.  I’m sure that if Yovanovitch had a choice, she would be happy not to have to expose herself to this continuing butchery of her reputation.

Yet the GOP doesn’t seem to understand that, and they’re proving it as they continue to berate Adam Schiff for obviously changing his mind about calling the whistleblower.  The reason for his deciding not to do so is obvious:  Trump has stirred up his base, labelling the whistleblower a traitor and asserting that it’s a shame we’re not dealing with such a man in the way we did in the old days.  We know full well that there are people out there—mostly in Florida, it seems—who would be more than happy to carry out Trump’s wishes.  If the whistleblower were to go public, that would be the end of his life. Done.  He’d be signing a death warrant for himself and quite possibly for his family as well.  Plus everything he said has already been verified by other witnesses who were privy to the phone call, so exposing him to public view will accomplish nothing except put a time clock on how long he has to live.  But that doesn’t stop the GOP from incessantly hammering away.

Why?  Because they have no case.  But in a classic example of misdirection they continue to try and draw peoples’ attention away from this fact, even though Trump keeps making it difficult.  His timing of his tweet attacking Yovanovitch while she was testifying is just another case of proving that everyone who has ever worked for him has a reason to be afraid.  Sooner or later he’s going to turn on Rudy Giuliani, and it will be fascinating to see what Giuliani does then to assure his role of being “the hero.”

Meanwhile people keep comparing this entire business to Richard Nixon, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is completely different.  Nixon, remember, put forward a veneer of civility and being presidential.  It was only the release of the audio tapes which betrayed a foul-mouthed Nixon plotting his cover up that served as a cold dash of water on America’s face.  They realized they were being lied to and their support of Nixon evaporated.

That’s not going to happen here.

People knew they were getting a lying dirtbag when they supported Trump.  Since being elected he has lied publicly over 13,000 times and yet he still enjoys support on his base.  Foul-mouthed?  Trump uses profanity on Twitter, at rallies, at speeches.  He’s normalized language that, if Obama used it, Congress would want to impeach him on that basis alone.  His crime of extorting the president of Ukraine?  He boasts that people should read the transcript, which PROVES THAT HE DID IT.  He doesn’t care.  His supporters don’t care.  They have checked out on the entire concept of the Constitution, of civility, of the law.  They’re too busy hating liberals to recognize what it is that Trump has done.  “Leave it to the voters,” they declare.  Right, because maybe they’re interested in seeing how many popular votes the Democrat can win by in the next election before the Electoral college goes to the GOP again.  

We need to face facts:  the GOP is not going to impeach Trump.  They have thrown out any hope that they may remember the Constitution that they are sworn to protect.  Instead they have sworn to protect the President and given up the notion that they are an equal branch to the Executive.  They are laying the groundwork for an imperial presidency which they will only regret once the Democrats are back in charge of the White House

Let’s pray that happens sooner rather than later.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – November 1, 2019

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – NOVEMBER 1, 2019

As we all know, the House yesterday took the first vote on the path to impeachment.  It was not one they were constitutionally required to make, but the GOP has been relentlessly bitching over its absence and so the Democrats heeded the shouting and held it.  Which naturally prompted the GOP to continue its bitching by declaring that what was voted on wasn’t good enough.

Understand that the procedures the Democrats are pursing are the exact same ones that the GOP employed when they were going after Bill Clinton who dared to lie about a sexual encounter (as Trump has done repeatedly) and after Hillary Clinton for her noninvolvement in Benghazi.  But what was good enough for the GOP naturally no longer is, and so even though the vote they held affords more defensive opportunities for Trump than Nixon or Clinton had, they were still opposed to it.

That’s the thing I found most disturbing about the vote.  Except for a single vote by an independent who walked away from the GOP some months ago, the vote went straight down partisan lines.  A couple of Democrats voted “nay” because they represent districts that supported Trump, but the GOP remained in complete lockstep.

It was clear that they were sending a definite message, and the message was this:

You know how we swore that we were going to uphold the Constitution?  Yeah…not so much.

It has become indisputable that whether he was pressuring foreign leaders to interfere in the American election, striving to clear Putin of the indisputable charges that he helped Trump get elected, or ignoring the emoluments clause which he dismissed as “phony,” Trump does not give the slightest of damns about the Constitution that he swore to protect.  He is a money laundering, tax dodging, pussy grabbing narcissistic asshole, and yet the GOP has sent its message loud and clear:  He’s our guy and screw the Constitution.  They absolutely cannot deny the facts of his abuses of power, so instead they are ignoring them and focusing on the process.  They are endeavoring to paint this purely as the Democrats despising the outcome of the 2016 election and trying to overturn it, rather than publicly owning what they all know to be true:  Nancy Pelosi had no choice.  She had to activate the impeachment mechanism because Trump had made his violations indisputable.

The question is, why does the GOP continue to support him?  There are the obvious reasons, of course.  

 They are afraid of him.  They’ve seen how he heedlessly throws anyone who ceases to be of use to him under the bus, and no one wants to be next.Power.  Remaining in power is all that matters.  They fear if they turn against him, they will lose their power and so they remain in lockstep.

But I’m afraid there’s a broader concern at stake.  The major problem is that despite the incessant revelations of his wrongdoing, his approval rating remains pretty much the same.  His base remains in place behind him.  

Why?  Why in God’s name does anyone who considers himself a voter, a patriot, an American, support this bootlicker of despots and murderous leaders?

Well, to begin with, most of them are racists.  I mean, let’s face the reality of it.  For most of his supporters, eight years of a black president was absolutely murderous.  These same people who currently claim that we should unite behind Trump because he’s president didn’t hesitate to accuse Obama of not being American, accuse his wife of not being a woman, heckling him at the State of the Union, etc.  Mitch McConnell swore that his priority was to make sure Obama was a one-term president, relentlessly blocked initiatives, and wouldn’t even let him appoint a Supreme Court justice (you just know that if a vacancy occurs in 2020, he’ll fast track Trump’s nomination even though it’s an election year, which was the excuse he came up with to block Obama’s nomination.).  

The problem is that having a strong black man running the country is threatening to many racists.  They are worried that they were seeing the erosion of white power, just as many Christians falsely claim America is turning against Christmas.  Trump was the reaction to that.   You can’t go wrong when you support someone whom David Duke is behind.  And whether Trump was busy being sued for disenfranchising black apartment dwellers, declaring Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug lords, or claiming that there were many fine people in the Nazi party, he has lived up to the expectations of the racists and White supremacists who put him in office.

Furthermore we are living in a different time from the Nixon administration.  Back in those days, Americans still had a sense of what this country was supposed to be about.  They understood that even when there were political disagreements, there was more that united us than divided us.  They believed in American ideals.

That has deteriorated. 

Part of it has been the GOP’s relentless assault on the voting rights of blacks and Hispanics.  Whether they’re gerrymandering districts, passing new laws that curtail voting rights, blocking new laws that protect voting rights, or depending on the archaic electoral college that has screwed two Democratic presidential candidates in this century, the GOP has encouraged division and rigged the system to support their candidates and beliefs.  

Another part has been both the rise of social media and right wing extremist venues ranging from Fox News to Breitbart.  In the old days they were limited to Rush Limbaugh spouting his lies on the radio, but now they’re everywhere, feeding endless misinformation into the open minds of credulous fools who reiterate right wing talking points without caring that they’re spewing lies from either right wing tools or Russian ‘bots.  

And their attitudes and personalities are laced with destructive cynicism.  So Trump has lied over thirteen thousand times.  So what?  All politicians lie.  It’s just that so many of them are so skilled at it that those dumb, retarded leftists can’t tell the difference.  But Trump is so bad at it that we know it’s lies and so can ignore it.  Besides, it’s not really lies because he believes what he says is true.  He genuinely believes that the three million people who preferred Hillary over him were fake voters.  He genuinely believes Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers.  He genuinely believes his impeachable phone call to Ukraine was “perfect”. So those aren’t lies; they’re subjective truths.

So they continue to believe in him and support him because they’re credulous suckers who cannot admit he’s bad news because they don’t believe he is.  The truth is that while impeachment is big news in DC and in states bordering oceans, the vast majority of the country doesn’t give the slightest of craps about it.  They think it’s just some show those dumb Democrats have come up with because they hate Trump.  The news that reports Trump’s misdeeds is fake, the process is biased, and it has nothing to do with their lives.  

And that’s why the impeachment effort is doomed to fail.  The rigidity of the GOP defense in the House has proven that.  The Senate is going to spin Trump’s misdeeds as no big deal, his defenders will ignore testimony that flies in the face of it, the impeachment vote will run along party lines as the GOP, when presented with the opportunity to do the right thing in fact won’t, and Trump will use the failure of the impeachment as “proof” that he did nothing wrong.  And if the Democrats can’t get their shit together and find a candidate who is basically bulletproof, we’re going to have four more years of Trump and by the time 2024 rolls around, assuming there is still a United States anymore, it’s going to be unrecognizable.

PAD

Freaked Out Friday-October 18 2019

Watch this space for updates

Freak Out Friday – September 27, 2019

I’ve been through this before.

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon had a fairly high approval rating and a solid support base. And then the combination of the Woodward and Bernstein stories, the widening of the Watergate investigation, and ultimately the release of the White House tapes that sank Nixon’s support and got him to resign rather than face certain impeachment. The Republican support evaporated as they sensed Nixon had become a hot-button issue and Nixon himself was smart enough to realize his cause was doomed. So he left.

I still remember being at a friend’s party the night that Nixon went on television and announced that he was resigning. We cheered. Best party of my high school career.

This generation is now seeing the exact same thing that I witnessed back in the 1970s: the beginning of the end of a presidency.

Yes, I know, that phrase has been used before when it comes to Trump. He has displayed an astounding ability to survive screw up after screw up, one treasonous act after another. With the combined support of Mitch McConnell and Trump’s blind, typically racist, uniformly stubborn core base, Trump has managed to withstand every accusation hurled at him using the same means: 1) denying it; 2) declaring other people are guilty of it; 3) attacking is accuser(s); 4) claiming the “fake media” is fostering yet another untrue story.

That’s not working this time.

Deep Whistle remains anonymous, so Trump’s accusations of his being a Democratic foil are more baseless than ever before. He can’t deny it; instead he admitted it and boasted about the notion that what he unethically did wasn’t unethical at all…and to add insult to injury, threw his Vice President under the bus with him, declaring that we should listen to Pence’s conversations as well, which you know Congress is now going to do. He’s reduced to lambasting the media for allegedly deliberately screwing up the punctuation of his tweets, even though his history of spelling and punctuation errors and grammatical mistakes is on the record and legendary (not to mention typically compared to Obama’s list of word-perfect tweets.).

The most significant development, of course, is that he’s pushed Nancy Pelosi off the bench and onto the playing field. For months she has resisted the notion of impeachment; now she’s all in. And there is no smarter politician out there than Pelosi, which means that if she’s on board, she knows there’s a case.

What’s pushed it to a whole new level is the news that the White House attempted to cover it up. As opposed to the president’s secretary erasing a tape, we have the transcript being tossed into classified storage that’s designed for matters of national security, not political convenience. So we have a Watergate level burglary and, even more significant, a Watergate level coverup.

So after receiving a score of instances of Trump’s impeachable offenses, the House has finally been pushed into doing exactly what they are supposed to do. They are undertaking their constitutional obligation to oversee the executive branch and not allow fear of his tweets or accusations of his followers to deter them from doing what must be done.

And Trump, who is far more stupid than Nixon, has not yet realized that things have changed. That the end has begun. Instead he has declared that Deep Whistle is a spy…which he likely is since he works for the CIA, but he’s a patriotic spy who works for this country. And just as he declared that the innocent guys who were arrested for the assault on the Central Park jogger should have been executed, he has declared that Deep Whistle should be charged with treason and likewise executed.

Because that is one of the most common tactics of an abuser. When he is accused of an action, it is his habit to state that his accusers are the true criminals. So naturally when Trump is accused of treason–which he has in fact committed–his tactic is to turn around and claim that his accuser is the real traitor. Which is absurd, but that won’t deter him.

The fact is that Deep Whistle is a patriot. He saw the chief executive abusing his power and availed himself of the legally mandated avenues available to him. And when Trump goes down, he’s dragging Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence with him.

And he is going down. I know, I know, there have been many times in the past two years where it seemed that he had crossed the line. But his delays and obfuscations and stone walling have always outlasted the news cycle and people have moved on to something else. I don’t think that’s going to happen this time. It just feels too similar to Nixon this time.

And when he goes, I sure hope he takes plenty of company along.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – September 20, 2019

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – SEPTEMBER 20, 2019

We all know of the legendary Deep Throat.  No, not the Linda Lovelace one.  I’m referring to former FBI associate director Mark Felt, who fed information to the equally legendary Woodward and Bernstein that helped bring down the Nixon presidency.

And now we apparently have Deep Throat II:  Deep Whistle.  Deep Whistle is an unnamed member of the intelligence community who was so alarmed with conversations that Trump had with an unnamed foreign leader—including very disturbing promises—that he decided to make it known.  Naturally a coterie of Trump’s supporters/enablers/toadies endeavored to keep it bottled up.

Meanwhile—and I’m a little fuzzy on whether this is the same story or one that coincides with this one—word has gotten out that Trump has been endeavoring to strong arm Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of the Ukraine.  Why and how has he been doing that?  The how was by threatening to withhold financial aid to the Ukraine, which was finally released a week after the story was broken in the media. The why is even more problematic. He insisted that he wanted Zelensky to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son and his involvement with a Ukranian natural gas company.

Because of course when you feel threatened by a political opponent, you don’t try to face off against him on issues of merit.  You don’t try to argue with him.  You belittle him, call him demeaning names (while simultaneously talking about how much you respect him and other adversaries like “Pocahantas.”) And when that doesn’t work and he remains strong in the polls, you don’t raise your game.  Instead you try to strong-arm another national leader to try and dig up dirt on Biden’s son.  Because the reasoning is very simple:  Smear your competitor by smearing his family.  

Is there proof that the son has done anything illegal?  No.  Even more important, is there proof that the father colluded somehow with him and therefore has done something illegal?  Like, you know, falsifying a government weather map, which is a crime punishable by ninety days in jail?  No, of course not.

But since when has Trump been the slightest bit interested in facts?  He dismisses reportage from the most reliable news sources in the country as “fake news.”  He sides with the Saudi Prince who engineered the murder and butchering of a Washington Post report, dismisses climate change as a hoax, insists that the intelligence community is completely wrong about Russia rigging the election for his benefit, claims that he won the popular vote because the three million more voters who wanted Hillary were all illegal immigrants, and paints a portrait of Mexicans that may be solidly supported by the makers of Rambo: Last Blood but not by others (including me, who has been to Mexico several times and had a great time every outing.)  

Combine his threats to withhold money from the Ukraine unless they do what he demanded and his promises to an unnamed foreign head (probably Putin) and we have yet more proof that Trump is interested in one thing and one thing only:  himself.  The best was when he endeavored to dismiss the facts of his unspecified call by declaring that, knowing the phone call would be tapped, how could anyone think he’d possibly be stupid enough to say something disturbing/treasonous? 

That’s actually a fairly reasonable question.  I shall endeavor to answer it to the best of my ability.

We think he’d be stupid enough to say something disturbing/treasonous because he is stupid enough to do such a thing.  I fully believe he’s capable of saying something along those lines without even realizing that’s what he’s doing.  

Because that’s what he does, all the time.  Says and does stupid things, and then he has Mitch McConnell and his passel of followers laboring 24/7 to either try and cover it up or make sure that he never suffers consequences for his actions.  And so far, it’s been working like a charm.  He can’t hold a thought in his head for more than seconds at a time.  

Over the past two and a half years, we have been pushed toward the ineluctable conclusion that Trump was everything the Founding Fathers feared could go wrong with the presidency.  He’s why we have the language about impeachment.  The Emoluments clause.  The 25thamendment.  All the safeguards that were built into the document he swore to uphold, all of which are being ignored by people who are far more worried about preserving power than serving the electorate.

The fact is this: Trump is the single most destructive, lying individual who has ever inhabited the Oval Office.  And the GOP controlled Senate continues to cover for him over and over again.  They remain the reason that the Democrats are only half-heartedly pursuing impeachment.  They know that the GOP will shut it down should it get that far and Trump will use it to declare triumph, and unfortunately this will work with his stupid supporters.  

HAS HE DONE ANYTHING RIGHT?  Yes, although mostly it’s him trying to undo damage that he himself did.  He has lifted tariffs on 437 Chinese products, mostly because of pleas from US companies claiming that the tariffs will cause economic hardship.  So although our relationship with China is still a mess, at least he’s doing something to try and undo the massive snarl he created.  So that’s something.  Not much, but something.

PAD

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – FRIDAY the 13th, 2019

People screw up. They just do.

No one goes through their life without making mistakes.  It is part of the human condition.  I’ve made some whoppers in my time, and so have you.  And when you make a mistake, what you are supposed to do is admit the mistake, apologize if necessary, and move on.  Unfortunately we live in a world where doing so frequently isn’t enough.  If you screw up and apologize, there will always be those who refuse to accept it.  Who will feel that an apology doesn’t suffice for the depth of your error and instead you must be punished into oblivion:  fired from your job and shunned by all right thinking people until ideally you kill yourself.  So the fact is that our current environment doesn’t make apologizing the easiest thing to do.

But sometimes that’s what you have to do.  Admit you messed up and move on.

However if you have an extremely fragile ego, that presents a different problem.  A fragile ego will preclude the ability to admit that you were wrong.  You are literally incapable of saying, “Whoops.  My bad.”  Instead you will do anything to avoid it.  You will lie.  You will urge others to lie.  You will break the law.  You will warp reality, bend it to your will in order to force it to comply with the world as you are restructuring it.

This is why so many people have been wrongly convicted and sent to jail, some to death row, on mistaken eyewitness testimony.  Fortunately enough the rise of DNA evidence has cleared the records of some wrongly convicted felons, even saving them from death.

And yet people with fragile egos whose wrong testimony put them in jail will oftentimes refuse to admit they were wrong.  They won’t say the reasonable thing:  “Thank God science caught my error.”  No, they will insist that they were right.  That the DNA evidence isn’t reliable.  That someone else in the chain of testimony screwed up  Something, anything went wrong but they themselves were correct.

That is what we have from the current resident of the Oval Office.

I know of one time when he admitted he was wrong:  In 2016 when he copped to the fact that Barack Obama was a US citizen, after he had ridden his racist I-Doubt-It to the GOP nomination.  

He has never admitted that the alleged muggers of the Central Park jogger, whom he asserted should receive the death penalty, were innocent.  He has never admitted there were not thousands of Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers.  He has not admitted any of the thousands upon thousands of lies that he has foisted upon his followers, who blindly accept everything he says as true.  Or at least no worse than any other mistruths that have been spoken by other politicians.

His most recent screw up however, may well have set a new record for stupidity and subsequent ramifications.

It began, naturally enough, with a tweet.  He stated that Alabama was one of the states in danger from hurricane Dorian. Which it had been….several days earlier.  By the time he tweeted about it, though, Alabama was safe.  His posting alarmed residents of Alabama and the weather bureau corrected him twenty minutes later.  If he’d done a subsequent tweet thanking the bureau for stepping in, that would have been that.  It wouldn’t even have made mention on Colbert.

But because his ego is so fragile that he cannot admit when he is wrong, he had to double down and triple down.  He even went so far as to remodel a weather map with a sharpie to include a small piece of Alabama in the hurricane’s projected path, which is—by the way—a crime.  And then claim that he had no idea how the map got marked up. And then order his people to threaten to fire any meteorologists who said he was wrong.  And then deny ordering them to do that.  

And when any of his lies are pointed out to him, he claims that they are false stories planted by the “fake news” media to make him look bad.

Meanwhile under his direction the EPA continues to roll back environmental safeguards installed by the Obama administration.  It’s hard to say whether he’s doing it because it suits the will of big business and makes other millionaires/billionaires happy, or whether it’s just because he likes to do away with anything that Obama did. It’s really rather impressive. Anyone who declared that Obama didn’t accomplish anything during his administration is certainly seeing the lie put to that assertion.  He accomplished so much that it’s taken Trump several years to undo much of it. 

There is one thing that has become abundantly clear:  

Trump is insane.

That may be overstating it.  Not raving psychotic insane.  Rather he is a low-ego narcissist whose word cannot be trusted.  Who sides with despots over allies.  Who ignores the warnings of the intelligence agencies. Who owes a debt to Russia for screwing with the election that placed him in office.  Who profiteers at every opportunity, whether he is having his vice president stay in his Ireland hotel (and then denying it was his suggestion) or having $30K parties at another of his establishments, or accepting money from foreign dignitaries staying at his DC hotels.  He is, in every sense, a traitor to this country, as is any member of the GOP who continues to support him.  

And yet despite his repeated breaking of the law, the Democrats still refuse to impeach him. It’s still considered the third rail of the election.  Why impeach him when the 2020 election will get rid of him, certainly. Because between the Electoral college and Russian hacking, we can definitely count on that, right?

As of this point, he should be impeached because he’s broken the law repeatedly, and impeachment exists specifically for that reason.  We all know that if we were laying the specifics of this situation out to any of the Founding Fathers, it would be a no brainer for them.

Why isn’t it for us?PAD

Freak Out Friday – August 16, 2019

The presidency is often referred to as the bully pulpit, and that’s never been a more apt description than when Donald Trump has occupied the office since he is absolutely a bully.

MAYBE THEY CAN GO TO BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA

Trump took to Twitter to recommend that the country of Israel ban Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering.  Because when someone expresses sentiments with which you disagree, naturally you don’t fight to the death for their right to say it.  No, you use all the power at your command to punish them.  And Israel happily cooperated, right up until it was clear that they were preventing Tlaib from visiting her ninety year old grandmother and so reversed themselves, at which point she turned around and told them to shove their permission.

I must admit that I’m as familiar with their opinions on Judaism in general and Israel in particular as I should be…possibly because they’re from Minnesota and Michigan and don’t represent me or my views.  It doesn’t really matter to me.  Mitch McConnell could be the most pro-Israel, pro-Jewish guy out there and I’d still think he’s an asshole.

But when you’re the president, you’re supposed to be everybody’s president.  That’s the aspect (well, one of the aspects) of the job that Trump does not get.  He’s supposed to represent everybody, not just the people he likes and the people who praise him.  The concept of singling out two representatives and instructing another country to boycott them is as unpresidential as it gets.

POT. KETTLE.  BLACK.

Trump, who is clearly the least fit president we have had in decades, had the nerve to select a guy at a rally and attempt to fat shame him.  “”That guy’s got a serious weight problem!  Go home!  Start exercising!” said the red haired tub of lard whose idea of a gourmet meal is a Big Mac, fries and a Coke.

It gets better. The guy he shouted at who he believed was causing a ruckus was actually a Trump supporter who was busy shoving protestors and their signs away from the site.  So you can be a Trump fan attempting to trample on the first amendment rights of Trump haters and he’ll still condemn you.  Here’s the capper:  the guy’s such a Trump fan that he laughed off the verbal assault because hey, it’s Trump, what else can you expect?

MAYBE THE MURDERER IS HIDING IN A PIZZA SHOP

When Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell, naturally the conspiracy theorists went nuts. That’s to be expected.

Unfortunately we have a conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office, and Trump retweeted, i.e., endorsed a groundless, baseless notion that the Clintons were responsible for his death.  Because of course a couple who couldn’t keep a White House blow job under wraps has managed to be so masterful in concealing their crimes that decades’ worth of investigation hasn’t resulted in a single charge (as opposed to the dozens of charges, crimes and sentences from Trump.)  

The fact that the autopsy confirms suicide naturally will shut down the conspiracy theorists just as Obama’s birth certificate managed to cease the endless claims that he was born in Kenya.  Trump, who has according to the Washington Post lied more than 12,000 times in the past two and a half years, lives purely in his demented world of falsehoods and lies. He is the literal personification of the old joke about  you can tell when he’s lying because his mouth is moving.

EMPATHY FOR ME, NOT YOU

Of all the disservices that the Trump administration is foisting upon the country, the most significant is this:  He and his people are rewriting what this country stands for.

That stems from Trump’s utter lack of empathy.

He has made it abundantly clear that he has no sense of empathy.  He doesn’t care about other people’s needs or wants, families or desires.  The notion that people want to come to this country to build a better life is the underpinning of our nation, but his non empathy renders him incapable of understanding that.

And he keeps hiring people who support that message.  The latest is his acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli.  Cuccinelli is simply the latest of something that is all too typical for Trump.  He puts people in charge of agencies whose histories put them in opposition to the tasks of the agency.  He put someone who combated the environment in charge of the EPA.  If he could find a flat earther who could string coherent sentences together, he’d put him in charge of NASA.  Cuccinelli told NPR that he wasn’t a fan of the Emma Lazarus poem that has defined the country’s immigration ethos:  “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Cuccinelli disagrees, saying that it would be far more appropriate to declare, “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”  

When my father came to this country, he was not rich.  Trump’s people would likely have been standing at the border, determined to stop him from coming in.  My mother’s dad was rich, so she would have been fine, but my dad?  Not so much.  

GREENLAND? REALLY?

Trump has floated the notion of buying Greenland.  Has anyone told him that three quarters of it is frosted over?  What’s he want it for?  To have a permanent supply of ice for his Coca Colas?

DID HE DO ANYTHING RIGHT THIS WEEK?

Not that I’m aware.

Freak Out Friday – August 9, 2019

I’m back from almost a solid month of traveling, of ricocheting from one convention to another and having only limited computer and on-line access.  But I’m back and of course Trump has been a model of decency and presidential behavior, just as hopeful and optimistic news agencies claimed he’d be.

It’s really hard to know where to start with his idiocies because, really, there’s so much to try and process.

SHOOTING HIS MOUTH OFF

Let’s begin with the most recent shootings.  Now I feel the need to point out that the most recent assaults in Texas and Ohio are the most fatal attack on Hispanics in our history, just like the shootings in Pittsburgh were the most fatal assault on Jews some months ago.

Trump is of course declaring that anyone who blames him for the shootings is just a political type trying to score points.  Of course, the immediate counter to that is that anyone who isn’t blaming him is a political type who is endeavoring to score points with Trump, which is of course the case.  If we had a Democratic president who was spewing the litany of racist crap that Trump has been spouting, the GOP would have launched impeachment proceedings and labeling him as the most dangerous person in the country.  

Because he is. He hasn’t managed to wrap himself around that simple fact.  The truth is that he openly spouts white supremacist philosophies, trying to do everything except condemn the bastards behind the assaults (“I’m against all Supremacists.”  What the hell does that even mean?  It’s bad enough that he declared there were fine people “on both sides.”  Now he’s trying to diminish white supremacy as just part of some wider movement of a variety of supremes?  Unless he’s referencing Diana Ross, I’ve no idea what he’s talking about.)

Furthermore, I’m reasonably sure that his dismissal doesn’t apply to me because I’m not running for political office.  So when I say that he is at least partly responsible for the upswing in racial mass assaults, with whom would I be trying to score points? Appreciative fans who already agree with me?  Angry fans who declare that they’re going to stop supporting my work because how dare I disrespect the Second Amendment?  You remember the Second Amendment:  the one that protected the right to bear arms in order to form a militia, something I’m reasonably sure the majority of gun owners do not belong to.

The fact is that since the very beginning when he described Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists, he has been a single-minded supporter of racism.  That is indisputable.  And racists who have been hiding in the shadows believe that they’ve finally got a like-minded supporter in the White House who is sounding the call for them to wage war against “the invasion.”  So let’s gun down the Jews, the Latinos, the Mexicans, the Hispanics, the people who have absolutely no right to be here because this is America, dammit, a country founded by refugees who killed as many of the natives as they could to settle it.

Certainly Trump is not solely responsible for the rash of shootings.  But his racism, his insensitivity  and his constant divisiveness plays directly into the mentality of these gun wielding racist psychopaths.  The simple fact remains that what the President of the United States says matters.  JFK said we’d get to the moon by the end of the 1960s and he was right. It sometimes make people think in different ways, but in Trump’s case it exacerbates the worst instincts of racists and white supremacists.   

It’s also worth mentioning that in the year 2000 I wrote an issue of YOUNG JUSTICE in which a teacher with whom Cissie/Arrowette was very close gets murdered by a former lover. A politician at the scene asserts that the real blame for the murder should fall on violent video games and comic books rather than guns.  At the time I was condemned for writing what was seen as an anti-gun screed. Yet now it’s two decades later, guns are killing more people than ever, and they’re still blaming video games, not to mention gay marriage, Democrats, and Obama.  Everything except the goddamn guns.

Trump is of course paying lip service to the idea of background checks and other methods of gun restriction that are embraced by ninety percent of the population. However the only people that matter are the five million members of the NRA whose leaders are warning Trump and company not to screw with them.

The bottom line is that when children were slaughtered at Sandy Hook and nothing changed, that was effectively the end of the gun debate.  When our government was willing to protect the rights of assault gun owners over the right of children to live, that finished the discussion. The only way things are going to change is if a Democratic President steps in, declares guns to be a national state of emergency, and unilaterally makes assault rifles illegal while beginning a country wide gun trade in program.  That will help end it.

WHAT’S IN A NAME

To prove his utter lack of devotion to the concept of putting aside racism and fostering unity, Trump continues to use his bully pulpit to assault anyone he doesn’t like. Strangely, he slammed the Mayor of Dayton for “misrepresenting” his visit to the hospital, which was odd considering she said nothing but positive things about it.   So did he actually think it went badly and wanted to know why she put a positive spin on it?  Who know?  He certainly doesn’t.

Most recently he snarked at Beto O’Rourke, claiming that the whole reason he was nicknamed “Beto” was to sound Spanish.  Two things:  First, he’s called “Beto” because it was a nickname given him in childhood.  And second, a guy whose family name used to be “Drumpf” doesn’t get to criticize other people’s names.

DID HE DO ANYTHING RIGHT THIS MONTH?

No.