Congenial-speak #35

The World's a Stage

What does it say when the U.K., commentators, rockers (Bono, Roger Waters) are maligning our leader? When have we really cared how good or bad theirs is? He's insulted, snubbed, disparaged, or just appalled with behavior that's inconceivable of anyone stepping on a world stage, every nation with whom we have an alliance. Lord knows he has given them reason to from day one, beginning with the Aussies. He has criticized Canada, said boorish things that a ten-year-old would know not to say on foreign trips, and shown his ignorance of other country's' histories and customs.

The Scarecrow

A study, which also gave apt rankings to both Clintons and Obama, had Trump's IQ at 156. Now I have no question of whether IQ is a measure of book smarts. It is definitely not. Whatever intelligence Trump possesses, evidently 156 points worth, has been cultured to engrandize himself. He is totally unwilling to learn anything that will not help him. White-collar criminals are smart, geniuses in many cases. Frank Abignale, the “skywayman” from Catch me if you Can had an IQ somewhere in the 130+ range. Trump is a hack, a fast talking New York snake oiler. Abignale has said the cons he pulled off in the 60s would be a hundred times harder today. I seriously think Trump would fail as a paper-hanger then and now. The only reason he is succeeding at hanging America now is that he is not alone. He is POTUS , he has his core supporters who'd likely set themselves ablaze if he said it was good for the soul. He bullys people into giving him loyalty, he has people like Scaramoochie the talking douchie to kiss his ass. Trump is a demented Lex Luthor type. Superman's arch enemy was cunning, a method minded thug, but he had one man on whom his energy was focused every day of his life. Trump masquerades as an altruistic man who will make America great again. If his IQ is 156, it is some kind of warped self-indulgent intelligence that is so savant-like it is barely evident in every day life.

Colossal embarrassment

I kept waiting for the medal folding chair to be wielded on the debate stage. When “little Marco” spoke of the first million from daddy I really thought Trump was going for the foreign object. Rubio, for me, revealed Trump's Achilles's heel. He would no doubt say as much, but in all honesty (which is safe in D.C.) Trump is not a self made billion, or even million, heir. He kicks and screams and spews orange skin flint. When backed in a corner he attacks Megan Kelly, Rosie, or lying Ted's wife. He mocks the defenseless, glibly says he'll sue anyone who's crossed against his rights 20 years in his past, and tells his one and only African-American friend he has nothing to lose. He says they are living in a flaming dung-heap and that voting for him can only help their situation.

He got elected by making the poorest, angriest, most hungry-for-any-half-baked-deal, Americans trust him. He channeled that twisted hate-mongered 156 quotient though the gullible swampland that detours through Appalachia. A precious angry number of men and women believed him. They had given up on the “American dream.” For them, such fallacy was long dead and buried. The tiny demographic, that comprised an adequate number of the electorate, were nihilists who saw Trump, the man with big money (filthy money) the reality TV star who they watched on their big screen from Wall-mart they could ill-afford, as the Molotov cocktail to hurl into party politics.

Send in the Clowns

Prebis, Pence, McConnell, Ryan, Graham all had their parts to play in the mellow-drama. They all used their respected skills to enable those 156 points to work to create chaos in the WH. When you put someone who would be happier in a fascist government at the head of a functioning democracy it's a slippery slope. There are correlations, few, but far between. Hitler was at least as insane as Trump. Most good dictators are. The common gene, like the opposable thumb or right angled arm, is the one for megalomania. Der Fuehrer had his enablers. If they displeased him, infuriated him, in-subordinated him, I'd guess he had them killed. Trump only fires his dissidents. If they out-trump him, talk too much, or like to go their own way, they walk toward the WH door like lemmings.

Do people look at Germany and say, how did a nut like that ever lead your country in the 1930s? At first I thought it was something that could be a collective responsibility. I did not vote for the guy obviously, so I can rest easy. But all those who did, did note vote at all, wanted to be conscientious and voted for Stein or even Johnson, those a case can be made of collective responsibility. In any other election I'd say vote your conscience, even if realistically your candidate faces overwhelming odds. I spoke to one Green Party voter. She cast her vote for Jill Stein when she carried less the 10% of the popular vote. She said she was making a statement. Her thought process was that each election the door for the Green Party would open a little more. Fine, that is a noble goal. Here is a man who is threatening womens rights, LGBT rights, Muslim rights, basically the rights and ability to pursue a happy life of anyone whose daddy did not give them $1,000,000, went to Wharton business school, and is morally bankrupt. 2016 was not the time to score one for whatever gipper is misrepresented. To me, not voting for Hilary, if only to vote against Trump, was possibly an act ironically as self-centered as something Trump would do. It was totally ignorant of the communities that are now feeling his reckless laws. It was an act that ignored the families of the deported, the Mexicans on the path to citizenship suddenly having to fear deportation raids. Not voting against Trump ignored the LGBT community and now the transgenders in the military. It quite frankly ignored the military, their safety, by giving them a commander in chief who dodged the draft himself. It put thousands of lives in jeopardy by electing a leader of proven incompetence and proven refusal to listen to those with competence. This idiot withdrew from nearly unanimous world agreement on climate change. Now I think anyone with a scintilla of intelligence would agree that Hillary was not going to do any of this.

Retrospect

It is nearing the 7-month stretch. Polls usually gauge things, like a president's approval rating. If it were now asked, whether you are—or is America—better off than they were seven moths ago, what might the answer be. I wonder...........depends who you ask. If anyone said yes to that question, I'd seriously question their politics, their ideals of America, and what history they studied in school. But let's think big, globally, because Irish and English rock stars find our leader as toxic as I, and most of America do. They sympathize for the situations target groups in our country have been in since January 20. But I don't think they hold the non-voters, Trump voters and third-party voters responsible. I do. There's really no escaping it, god knows we've tried.

Congenial-speak #34

At the end of the day

push comes to shove

They looked for the DUH moment. The GOP found it. You can't make this stuff up, it is not fake news. Why you might ask, because the “POTUS” tweets it, nearly verbatim, he says it in interviews, his lawyers say it. So Trump is actually waiting patiently with a pen in hand to sign the next bill to which he can append his name. Will the bill go up in value? No, just in CBO scoring. What was the last count—thirty-two million? No bill, no matter how many U.S. citizens it could potentially kill, has ever become a law without the president doing something. Researching it, cheering it, opening it to hearings, doing some in-depth market study. McConnell's bill is the laziest piece of legislation I've ever seen. That, in itself, tells me these guys planned to fail. At the end of the day the ACA can be tweaked to the GOPs' liking.

Semantics

Careful, don't say Obama as a prefix or its unpopularity will defile the CBO. Funny, the ACA is amenable, Obama care is not. Trump stumped from the get-go that he would “REPEAL Obama care IMMEDIATELY” moments after the throngs of inaugural spec-tents began to disperse. Yes the Affordable Care Act was, by our own Democratic governor's assessment, “not affordable.” It fast became problematic to the middle-class who watched their premium sky-rocket. However, with Trump's bill giving major ta breaks to the wealthy I can't see how the middle-class thinks they'll be any better off. None of these guys give a shit about anyone but themselves. Half of them are not even politicians. Trump, his son, his son-in-law, his daughter, they've persuaded a few remaining to screw America for their own financial gain.

Who is your news source?

How is MSNBC biased? At this point how can anything be biased? There has been no aisle for a long time. I see Republican senators, current and former, blasting Trump all the time. By definition, there can not be a real bias. MPR, is that trustworthy? I watched FOX news one night and in 5 minutes I heard a half dozen contradictions. I heard how a witch hunt is going on, and pretty much a spicer take on the news. Now how do you take the word of Sean Hannity and a handful of mostly conservative politicians vs. noted journalists interviewing a wide range of politicians from both parties? Look at twitter, Facebook, SPAM for god's sake! The maority of its content is anti-Trump suggesting—no asserting—everything the news “speculates.” Yes, the nation is divided, but the approval of Trump has gone in the opposite direction of every predecessor in their first year. I think that speaks volumes. I agree that ever since Vietnam news, from any source, should be sieved through anythinng but blinders. If it whiffs of bias, the educated listener will know it. This issue, though, with shovels scooping fulls daily, leaves little to be questioned. Trump (and now it is a family affair) seems to want to bury himself, and thinks that somehow a functioning governance will grow out of it.

A distraction?

Then there are those who say a witch hunt prevents the POTUS from getting things done. It gets in his way. First of all, the GOP controls all three branches of government. More importantly, though, if the “ties to Russia” was a witch hunt, a totally unwarranted accusation, why is such an effort of defense being made? If the accusation was totally baseless why is everyone at the table of Liealot lawyering up? How come no one from the team answer a simple yes or no, an instead give a lengthily explanation of why a meeting happened. Does the idea of protesting too much not raise suspicion for the antithesis?

And this is also no excuse for the failure of a bill. The fact is it was pushed through the house. Minimal thought went into it. It was ever fully read, it was never heard. Trump just sat with pen in hand, waiting to sign a bill, just for the sake of penning his name to a bill. In forty years, who ever still lives on earth will look back and acknowledge how Donald J. Trump signed a health care bill and cut taxes for the super-rich with one stroke. Mazel tov! He'll be a footnote in wikipedia.

Congenial-speak #33

In my book, Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, I relish the days of Watergate. I recall hearing our president's hollow words echo across the lake at our cabin. They resonated, and sounded as desperate and lonesome as the loon calls they accompanied. Nixon beat impeachment by resigning “for the good of the nation.” I ran the song “Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean” through my head countless times in the summer of '73. I saw Redford and Hoffman in All the President's Men. It was unprecedented, not the burglary so much, but its cover up. That people risked their credibility and were willing to go to jail for a man who had protracted the Vietnam War five years is, in hindsight, a lesson on the statutes of loyalty.

Mr. Trump has yet to do anything for the good of anyone but himself and possibly his nine figured brethren. If and when his scandal ends in impeachment hearings, maybe through the summer of 2018, Trump will stay to for the end. He won't resign, too much pride. Will anyone write a song or make a movie? The movie that most resembles the DJT administration was made a few years before All the President's Men. It was called One Flew Over he Coo-coos Nest.

Ties that bound

Loyalty is a dish best served. LBJ wanted it. He wanted it at high noon, kissing his ass in Macy's window. Nixon wanted it, he just expected it, like it was supposed to follow the title of POTUS.

DJT wants it. He routinely asks for it and, ala The Apprentice, fires those who are disloyal. He fires or humiliates. Sally Yates, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, James Comey were victims. (Kasowitz is likely to be the first lawyer to self destruct under the Trump retainer fee.) With DJT it is a family affair. He is the Godfather, the Don, and no one should cross the family, least of all Fredo. Carter, Clinton, Obama, at least two of those I don't recall any real scandals. However in none of them do I recall loyalty ever being an issue. To need it, to go out of the way to ask for it, reeks of insecurity. It presumes trickles, perhaps billows of smoke coming from a WH. Johnson, Nixon and Trump all needed loyalty because something they were doing, some cake being baked in the kitchen, was not kosher.

Puppet regime

The onions have strings. The towers have lines that reach across the Atlantic. Putin has Trump wrapped around his finger. Trump is loyal to him. Putin knows just which buttons to push, strings to pull, levers to work. Ever since the FDOTUS scouted out the location of a tower in Moscow, the Trump brand of loyalty was as good as the gold crappers of oligarchs.

A dumber time

Phones were not nearly so clever in the ten years I speak about in my book. Or, maybe they were. Since that time communication has lost substance and, ironically, personal accountability. Every Tom, Jane, Doe, or Mary is tweeting their uppermost things on their mind. Trump can't keep his thumps away when each jab test the thickness of his skin. We, as kids playing in a suburban neighborhood, communicated with one another, audibly, to make things happen. We had each others back. Now no one “hears” anyone and having someone's back is hyperbole. Friends log into Facebook or video chat and never meet.

Watered down Russia-gate

In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I recall a politically pivitol time in America when long-term societal change was ripe. I honor the people who identified themselves as constituents to a Democratic administration that lost its way. I grew, I changed and, as I point out, my life changed before I was six years old. The war's proliferations and milestones followed me. I grew up through it, because my parents and almost everyone I knew opposed it. They sat in, taught in, demonstrated and went to jail to end it. We knew it in America though. We knew it in the whispers of trees, of codes on the windows as the sun set and painted them blank. We saw it in the crows' flight as they went like sentrys protecting us. We had a healthy hatred of Russia as the enemy. As the second-generation of Cold War shivers we knew red was bad. We knew, above anything else, that abetting the Russkies in any fashion was grounds for excommunication from the great U.S.A. The Soviets and the eastern bloc were the ones financing North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, our stealthy enemy.

The scandal, to me, has lost an appeal. Trump is so naive about any subject, foreign or domestic. He is such an embarrassment that any sense of identity was lost the moment Obama left the WH grounds. How can a “third rate burglary” and the cover up by people far more experienced in government, with the technology available to them in 1972, be compared to a series of tweets by dim-witted real estate investors? It can't. The homey feeling is gone. The patriotic feel is gone. The “look back one day and laugh” sentiment is gone. No one will laugh as Russia is being welcomed with open arms. At Trump, yes, I am laughing. Most of the world is laughing.

Congenial-speak #32

In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota a trail of breadcrumbs is left for abrogations. It leads to the house that was a closer-to-home replica of our clear and present danger. Our times mime the past, they mine it for its chutzpah, for its sense of morality. My book pictures a time, like now, when politics crossed the line at which humanity lies. Back then it was the troop train in front of which political dissidents lay. Today they are the angry mobs that die in senate offices, the citizens that rushed to the airports to welcome their Islamic friends, the people jamming WH phone lines

Trump is riding on a electoral win. His popular vote count was eclipsed by his opponent, but he squeaked by in the electoral clause. The 12^th amendment provides that elector cast votes for president. The idea of the college is not to leave the election of a president ultimately in the hands of the perhaps uneducated masses. Now, let's face it, how well did this idea work when the winner is not well educated himself. (This is not bias, theory or fake news. It is fact that tweets have proven time after time. Trump and Mrs. Palin need a world history class.)

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide. LBJ easily won both the popular and electoral vote. He won 61.1 percent of the popular vote, the highest since James Monroe's re-election in 1820. Trump's concept of reality and his ignorance of the consequences of things as epic as nuclear weapons have been compared to Goldwater. Both were conservative extremists. In the wake of Kennedy's assassination, a wave of despair fractioned America. By the end of 1963, when Johnson was sworn in as the 36^th POTUS. He executed landmark legislation, pushed his Great Society program that benefited many minority groups, but his policies on Vietnam quickly vitiated his popularity. In February of 1965 Johnson used the provisions of 1964's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to justify and authorize dropping bombs on North Vietnam in a sustained offensive strike named Operation Rolling Thunder. In a Gallup Poll taken that year 61 percent of Americans thought that our involvement in Southeast Asia was a good idea. By 1971 that number was reduced to 28.

Trump was widely unpopular from day one. He created his own reality, and for months after the alternative fact he insisted that his inaugural exceeded his predecessor's in crowd size. I would not be surprised if he brought this up today with Putin. And the press foolishly indulges his fantasy. How come every majority that mattered saw that Goldwater was a bit farshimmelt, delusive, ausgespielt? No one, enough to concern a plurality, saw that this real estate huckster, who made a name for himself on “Reality” TV, as a threat to democracy. No one saw, from the debate stage, from the campaign trail, his disrespect for anything and everyone without a TRUMP label on it. Enough people overlooked his outright refusal to play by the rules, his genuine lack of attention needed to learn or desire to learn U.S. and world history most high school graduates should know. Oligarchy, monarchy, autocracy, kleptochracy and, anarchy push the decent word from my mind today. Those forms of government are what we have steered clear of for 241 years. They are what our founders wrote a very certain constitution to avoid being. Democracy, the equitable way of life America has known all its relatively short life, is what all the veterans say they were defending. What would have happened when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? They didn't, but Mr. Blutowsky (Animal House) creates an interesting scenario. Had FDR not committed troops to beat Hitler back, we would be under what—well something like I imagine if the current administration is allowed to go on for seven more years.

In my book the “change” is the ten years, 1965 to 1975. It is the few years before, when the Vietnam conflict, the Second Indo-China War, was already creating a cult following of protesters. It is ten year of trying to work things out in a democracy, trying to hold a nation, or even a political party, together. A book written by a Trump child, a child that grew up in this web of lies, a child for whom there is literally no example of democracy at its best, after the alternative fact, would be different but similar. A child raised by parents, like mine, who were so political that their action were felt at the top (if rooted in grass). Parents, one or both, who went to the 2020 DNC, or protested at the RNC. Say the poor kid had parents who marched in every march, from the pink pussy to the tax day. Forty years after the facts he or she writes a memoir akin to Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota. In 2057 a generation Z looks back in their PTSD. They'll write about what their parents did for them when they came out of the womb. They'll write about the evil Mitch McConnell who, as I hear, is losing his gumption, discovering what Bernie said a year ago. How Mitch, the victor in a battle of childhood polio, tried to rob millions of their health care. I doubt they'll have the halcyon memories of Apple Jacks and hearing that Watergate song, of Casey Jones and Gopher Gulch Indians or politicians reading poetry like I did. But they'd be good. And they should dedicate it to their parents, to all the millions of milennials who never relented, who comprised an abrogation more than 231 million strong, conspirators of a theory to shake out the fake news of the world.