31 XII 2020: Hawley re-packaging himself

Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri (O, blush, Missouri!), is determined to become President of the United States, an ambition so radioactive that he glows. He has not closed his mouth since he was elected and latches on to anything that will get him a mention in the media. 

He has tried to sell himself as the Champion of the Common Man against “the elites.” This is a failed pretense, for the claim of a wealthy, Ivy-league elitist like Hawley to identify with the common man is laughable. He claims to be an advocate for “small town values,” though he spent only his early childhood in a small town, and the rest of his life in elitist institutions. So this ambition-driven plutocrat masquerading as a “country lawyer” has proven so unconvincing that Josh is re-packaging himself.

He’s trying to dress up in Trump’s old clothes and present himself now as the Champion of the Bigots and the Crazies. He, along with other unscrupulous Republicans, is competing to win the support of the dregs of Trump’s “base.” His recent announcement that he plans on January 6th to stand up for all the voters who share Trump’s delusions about the late election is ridiculous, but not to the baser elements of the base. So we’re seeing the entry onto the political stage of another demagogue who, like his hero, Mr. Trump, wants not to be President, but to be king.

30 XII 2020: They got Trump started and kept him going

The President’s ever more bizarre behavior raises a question I’ve long wanted to ask. How do his handlers keep him going? I mean the whole circle of handlers, including his physicians. What cocktails of psychotropic drugs have the psychiatrists been creating for him? We can surmise it contains Ritalin, his old drug of choice, but what additions have they made to get him over the breakdowns of his presidency? The present messes Trump is making and the countless messes he has made for the last four years and over the span of his life make it plain that the man is mentally ill. 

Whom should we blame for making a madman President? I wouldn’t blame all who have voted for Trump. Some Trump voters are, I’m sure, people of good conscience and good faith. But his calculated appeals to American racism, anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, anti-feminism, selfishness, and swaggering ignorance have been so effective that they must describe the character of very many who voted for him. They love him, because he shares their hatreds. They love him, because he never makes them feel embarrassed about their willful ignorance. They love him, because he has heard their cry “Please don’t make me change! Please don’t make me think!”.

But more sinister, in my view, are the Republicans in Congress. All but a few of them have been absolute Quislings, traitors to democracy. They have exploited Trump’s cancerous popularity for their own selfish ends, and have let the world believe that America is finished, because our President is mad and much of Congress is mad, or considers it advantageous to pretend to be mad.

So the mindless, by voting for him, his handlers, by cajoling him, his physicians, by drugging him, and the politicians, by fawning on him, gave us four years of maniac rule. They have put on display how lazy, feeble, and hypocritical America really is.

7 XII 2020: Republican demagogue Hawley wants to send out welfare checks

Hawley is urging Trump to veto the compromise COVID19 relief bill that Hawley has denounced because it does not include another massive handout. Is this “fiscally responsible” Republican standing up for the needy and advocating a welfare state? No, he is only an hyper-ambitious demagogue who tries to turn anything that comes along to his political advantage, always simulating a concern for the common people. If he craves political success he should keep his mouth closed.

4 XII 2020: Trumpist fanatic at Pentagon

I read a piece this morning about Sturmbannführer Scott O’Grady whom Trump has nominated for a high place in the Pentagon. He and another Trumpian fanatic, Michael Flynn, are dittoing Trump’s Big Lie about the election and calling for him to impose martial law as well. 

I suppose Flynn is so grateful for his pardon and O’Grady is so hopeful of the pardon that he will eventually need that they are vying with other Trumpist loonies to sit at the right and left hand of Trump in his Glory. I’m confident of Flynn’s success in this for he has already shown himself to be an accomplished liar. About O’Grady I’m not so sure. He has shown that he is crazy enough to claim a top place, but we’ll have to wait and see if he is a Trump-class liar.

Trump will, no doubt, continue to appoint incompetent ultra-Trumpists to important positions, and so Mr. Biden must immediately conduct a thorough detrumpification program within the government.

3 XII 2020: What a euphemism!!

An article on Politico today begins with the words:

President Donald Trump is considering preemptively pardoning as many as 20 aides and associates before leaving office, frustrating Republicans who believe offering legal reprieves to his friends and family members could backfire. Trump’s strategy, like much of his presidency, is nontraditional.

I am so weary of hearing Trump’s behavior described as “untraditional.” It’s like saying that if I rob my bank instead of cashing a check there, my banking is untraditional. Most of what Trump has done that could be call untraditional is of two kinds. Sometimes he has blundered or offended or broken the law because he did not know any better. More often, what political euphemism calls “untraditional” has been immoral, illegal, or criminal. “Preemptively pardoning”! Does this new kind of pardon, like baptism, forgive all offences? What if Giuliani and Jared and Stephen Miller have been running a secret white slavery ring on the side for the last four years? Would this novel “preemptive pardon” prevent their being prosecuted for white slavery?

We should all have seen this coming. It simply makes sense. If Al Capone had been elected Governor of Illinois, as he left the governor’s mansion on his way to  prison he would have issued pardons to his entire gang. That Trump would attempt something like this is only to be expected. I recall it was reported at some point that our “untraditional” leader told his staff to go ahead and break the law because he would pardon them if they were caught. Surely Trump’s gang has been taking it for granted that he will hand out pardons all around on his way out of the White House.

2 XII 2020: I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!

This is the mantra that the children chant in the film of Peter Pan to to revive the poisoned Tinkerbell. The alternative approach, from the stage play Peter Pan, is for the audience to clap if they believe in fairies. That was in Wonderland.

In America for the past 4+ years a substantial portion of the population has been clapping frantically and insisting on their belief in fairies to cope with the reality of President Trump’s psychotic and malicious behavior. And we now hear louder than ever the “I do believe in fairies” and the frantic applause as Trump’s managers, enablers, and followers try to revive Trump and his failed campaign.

Peter Pan is an amusing fantasy. It belongs in Wonderland. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2020 election is an evil fantasy. It belongs in topsy-turvy Trumpland where bad is good, lies are truth, and it’s every man for himself. And just as in Trumpland everything is its opposite, Trump can be said to be dying from the “poison” of democracy.

For me, the truly appalling fact that has emerged from the Years of Trump is that there are so very many people who will cry and keep crying “I do believe in fairies,” and so very many politicians who keep asserting the existence of fairies. Can democracy survive?

29 XI 2020: United States dying from Trump’s Disease

Donald Trump has, I think, been truly representative of perhaps half of the American people, for he shares and by example legitimizes their vices. Both he and they are selfish, anti-intellectual, racist, patriarchists, materialists; they are functionally amoral, anti-social, self-indulgent, self-centered and angry all of the time.

This can be seen clearly in the refusal of large numbers of citizens to accept or cooperate with measures enacted to try to control the spread of COVID19. They are zealous only for their own convenience and so refuse to wear masks. They choose to believe that their unaided common sense is more reliable than those who are truly informed, the scientists and physicians. They believe that their financial interests should be taken far more seriously than efforts to contain the plague. They assert that not wearing a mask and crowding together in bars and sporting events is their choice, that they will take their chances, and those with whom they come into contact will have to look out for themselves. They are unwilling to forego any of their usual pastimes and pleasures in the face of a lethal pandemic. In practical terms, they care for no one except themselves. They are, on the whole, resolutely ignorant, have little comprehension of the biological, sociological, and political aspects of the pandemic, and so view public health measures as only one more effort to inconvenience them.

I have been thinking that it would be appropriate, in the U.S., for COVID19 to called Trump’s Disease, for the President has done more than anyone to allow the disease to prosper and grow. But perhaps Trump’s Disease would be a more appropriate name for the complex of determined ignorance and childish self-centeredness that Trump inspires into the anti-maskers.

26 XI 2020: Kill all the prisoners!

Our psychotic President intends, with the help of William Barr, Attorney General and world-class asslicker, to see how many convicts he can exterminate before he leaves office. In aid of this, I should think, Trump is also re-thinking the method of execution: because there has been difficulty purchasing the poison currently used in murder-by-injection, maybe we should bring back the electric chair or even the firing squad. I am amazed at Trump’s uncharacteristically humane ideas for execution. Most dictators prefer to drop people from airplanes or hang them from the end of a crane or behead them.

And I don’t hear the fair-weather Christians, neither Evangelicals nor Catholics, condemning these upcoming murders. Of course, the Trump Base is keen on capital punishment. They say they want take a life in return for the life that was taken. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” they intone, “it’s in the Bible.” Yes, and it is also rejected by Jesus in the Bible (Matt 5:38-42). Will murdering another person make the person murdered feel any better? Will it make the living feel better? Oh yes, they want “closure for the family,” as if the long-delayed barbaric murder of the killer of a family member will wipe clean the family’s slate of sorrow with the sponge of revenge. 

Another pretense of the enthusiasts for capital punishment is that they want to “see justice done,” to see malefactors “brought to justice.” No, what they want is a legalized revenge, not justice. People carry on about justice as if they knew what is just, thus claiming as their own the divine prerogative. These want to be the arbiters of who deserves to live and who deserves to die, while mindlessly asserting their absolute “pro-life” convictions. It is for people like these that Trump, the Man Above the Law, and his hangmen in his Department of Justice are going to put on a show of not one, but five executions.

23 XI 2020: Will Trump issue a “Nero Decree”?

I came upon an article published on the site of The National WWII Museum entitled “Downfall: Adolf Hitler’s ‘Nero Decree’,” with this explanatory note: “Faced with his regime’s collapse, Adolf Hitler chose to destroy Germany’s infrastructure.”

This article reports that when the Russian armies were surrounding Berlin, Hitler turned against the German people: “For the Führer the impending defeat proved that Germans were simply neither strong nor ruthless enough to do what was necessary to achieve victory. Deeming Germany a failure of a nation Hitler prepared a decree that would seal the country’s collapse with catastrophic finality.”

This decree was entitled “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory.” It ordered the destruction of anything in Germany that might be of use to the Allies: mines, factories, docks, railroads, bridges, and utilities. Fortunately, Albert Speer managed to mitigate this decree and prevent the utter destruction of Germany.

I am frightened by the similarities of that earlier tyrant to Trump’s now that he has lost the election. Trump intensifying his efforts to dismantle America’s democratic government by employment of his by now familiar methods: barrages of lies, threats and coercion, appointment of incompetents, refusal to share crucial information. But what I fear more are the acts of sabotage Trump and his staff are going to commit as the will of the people closes in on Trump. I think we will see destruction of records (evidence) on a massive scale, concealment of important data, more abuse of immigrants, further diminution of America’s standing in the world, more accommodations of the Russians and Saudis, and maybe even the beginnings of a war with Iran. For once Trump comes to accept that he has been rejected by the majority of the American people, whom can he blame except the American people? If he feels he has been checked by the lawful functioning of American democracy, will not his antagonism towards democracy be magnified?

18 XI 2020: Guilty of RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT

Merriam-Webster defines “reckless endangerment” as “the offense of recklessly engaging in conduct that creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury or death to another person.” In my view, President Trump should, when he is no longer president, be prosecuted for reckless endangerment, for he recklessly endangered the people of the United States by failing to inform them about the coming danger of COVID19, by making light of it when it arrived, by obstructing and undermining the efforts of public health professionals to contain the virus, by setting a baneful example of indifference to the health and safety of others. I believe governors who behave in a similar way are also guilty of reckless endangerment of the people of their states. The same applies to officials in local government. From the President down to the mayor or county executive, these are guided by the basest of political considerations. 

Ordinary people carry on about their liberty and their rights when they are required to wear masks, when the sporting events of children are curtailed, when occupancy is restricted, when they are inconvenienced in any way by efforts to contain the virus. Business people resist efforts to limit the risk of spreading disease at their premises. Devotees of Trump consider disease prevention a criticism of their Führer and themselves.

All these aggrieved people, for their various motives, bring pressure to bear on elected officials to restrict efforts to contain this plague, and very many officials succumb to this pressure in fear of displeasing the voters, the businessmen, and their demigod, Mr. Trump.

Of course these people conceal their indifference to the common good by alleging that their “liberty” and “rights” are at stake. In these times, appeals to “liberty” and “rights” are too often the first recourse of minorities, like the evangelicals, the “gun rights” community, bikers against helmets, homophobes, misogynists, tobacco companies, in short any who press their own agendas against the will and welfare of their fellow citizens.

Pundits say that America is a nation divided in two, meaning divided into red and blue communities. I agree that America is a divided nation, but divided into many, many factions, parties, PACs, lobbies, movements, families, individuals who insist on their own way only and show their disdain for the common good. Does America have a death-wish?