In denial [Politics/Democracy]

TRIGGER WARNING!  I’m going to be using the word President in combination with Donald Trump and Obama. I will also be using the words Republican, Democrats, Hillary, Clinton, immigrants, Gypsies, liberal, sexual predator, conservative and variations of all these words. If your mind is made up either way about the current and ongoing crisis with our government please avoid reading this.

        We approach the world from our own history and perspectives. They are unique to us. I certainly have mine. Sometimes through personal enlightenment, experience or education we change our approach or ideas. Screwing up, and I mean seriously screwing up, is also a great teacher.

        And sometimes we have to rise above our personal beliefs and/or experiences.

 

        Now obviously I am going to be talking about President Trump because he is the current leader, and I use that term loosely, of our nation. (This sentence is one reason I provided a trigger warning at the very beginning.) I will only mention Hillary Clinton in passing. (Again remember the trigger warning and go to your safe place.) She’s gone. She’s outta’ here. Not going to be President. Not happening. That’s the way it is. Okay? Bernie neither.

        Watching the current train wreck of government would be easier if it was some other country and if it weren’t for the fact that we’re on the train. We have witnessed what is currently taking place in the United States in other countries. I am old enough to remember the Soviet Union coming apart practically overnight. I would not have said that was possible then but it happened.

        In the latest credible poll I read that 85% of Republicans still support President Trump. Eighty. Five. Percent. I thought to myself how in the world is this still possible after nine months of failure, corruption, chaos, pettiness and failed leadership on multiple levels. He’s a President that has both completely reversed himself on campaign promises and been incapable of delivering on his promises. At least this same 85% would have called for the impeachment of President Obama for even the smallest fraction of misdeeds that Trump has committed.

        How is this possible?

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” –Donald Trump

        That’s the answer. Trump provided it during the campaign. It’s as true today as it was when he said it then. From then on he never meant any of it and meant all of it. It was an easy con.

        He’s their man in the White House. Period. He’s white. He doesn’t like Mexicans, Muslims, black people, gays, immigrants, the disabled, Puerto Ricans, poor people, Democrats, Republicans, our court system, public education, the environment, etc. unless they’re working as servants at one of his resorts or hotels. He also has a good-looking white wife. (You can see naked pictures of her if you want. He helped with the photo shoot. BTW How many male world leaders have looked at those?) He likes insulting and making fun of people. He’s vulgar. Lying is as easy as breathing for him. Not only is he ignorant about world affairs he couldn’t care less, and they like that because they would just as soon stay away from the rest of the world anyway. He finds fault but doesn’t accept blame. He’s a white nationalist. He isn’t a President that is interested in the truth. Neither are his supporters. Simply put: they don’t care if the President lies.

        Now I don’t base these statements on the news. They’re based on watching actual videos of him and listening to actual audio files of him speaking. The internet is full of videos of him lying. In one of the earliest videos of his campaign he said without equivocation that he would release his tax returns. No excuses. No ifs, ands or buts. Just straight-forward look a person in the eye statement. Obviously that was a lie.

        Is Hillary Clinton in jail? Nope. But that doesn’t matter. He said that he wanted her in jail. They didn’t believe he would put her in jail anyway, just as they didn’t believe all the things that he said that he would do on the first day. It turns out he has plenty of time to golf. Plenty of time to tweet. Plenty of time to blame others. No time to govern.

        It has taken me awhile to understand that it is absolutely immaterial to the majority of his white supporters what kind of man and President he is, what he has or hasn’t accomplished. They aren’t in denial. They admire what he is. They aspire to be like him.

He is them.     

       

    

Social media weaponized [SOCIAL MEDIA/POLITICS]

        It turns out that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t any different than any other money-grubbing CEO. (Seriously, why did I think otherwise?) He took money from the Russians to run fake election ads in support of President Trump along with fake Black Lives Matter ads to increase racial division which also benefits President Trump and white supremacists.

        Russians understand our gullibility and racism better than we do. They have played us like a fiddle. They were able to do it with the help of CEOs like Zuckerberg. Their troll farms worked facebook diligently. They weaponized facebook and Zuckerberg profited from it. They were able to figure out that using social media is the most cost effective way to influence our elections and that it is a force multiplier. Not only were they able to reach people who weren’t normally targeted with ads, they were able to design, rework and rearrange ads for very specific groups, like those sympathetic to white supremacists views though they may not self-identify as such.

        Facebook, Google and Twitter had employees assigned to specifically to help the Trump campaign. Obviously they did a magnificent job.  They had inside information as to how to best manipulate users.

        Zuckerberg gives mea culpas after the fact. The election is over. He already made his money. As it turns out facebook the corporation is good at polarizing and dividing the country; that and making Zuckerberg filthy rich. Facebook gives lip service to doing the right thing but so far what they do best is protecting trolls, disseminating fake news pages, enabling those with evil intent like the Alt Right/Nazis et al and herding users into more easily marketable niches.

        Social media, along with the Russians and President Trump, will continue pushing fake news because it best suits their agenda of undermining a free press. A free press is their competition. But they don’t have to have the expense of all those people that it takes to support a free press. They just need laptops to make stuff up and upload it to a waiting public willing to believe any garbage they produce and ask for more. They understand the National Enquirer mentality and that there are a lot of people who want to believe the worst about our country. The leadership of the Republican Party has spent years helping make this possible.

        Think about that. Thousands upon thousands of sites pumping out disinformation 24/7. We are drowning in it. The reality of what is actually taking place gets lost in all the noise. Social media does it for money. The Russians did it to help elect a President and destabilize our country.

        Now we’re faced with having a seriously flawed and challenged President undermining the country with a fascist agenda and a Vice President pushing a theocratic agenda. In the meantime government is crashing. Now this may be something that President Trump supporters celebrate but be careful what you wish for. When governments crash civilization usually unravels in the chaos that follows. There are way more have nots than haves.

Laws are for little people [POLITICS]

       I saw the phrase “Laws are for little people” a lot during the campaign in regards to Hillary Clinton. The premise being that she was guilty as sin but not being prosecuted for her numerous crimes. The simple fact at this point is that she is/was not in fact guilty or she would have been charged already. Republicans have been after her for three decades and attempted several prosecutions to no avail. President Trump campaigned on throwing her in jail. Yet another campaign promise that he hasn’t delivered on.

       But this isn’t about Hillary Clinton. She’s yesterday’s news.

       There’s another old phrase about actions speaking louder than words. I don’t know how accurate that is because President Trump, our President, not only talks and tweets like a guilty man, he acts like a man who is guilty. He’s trying his best to shut down any investigation into his activities. He is operating under the delusion that the President can do anything, is above answering to anyone and is above the law. At times he says that he’s been found not guilty.

       We’ve seen this before. President Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon conducted himself in much the same fashion. He resigned from office rather than be prosecuted. President Gerald Ford promptly pardoned him. Laws are for little people.

        President Johnson also claimed that the press lied. We have since learned that not only was Johnson lying but so was his cabinet and most of his generals in regards to how the Vietnam War was being prosecuted and what was actually happening. He didn’t seek the office for a second term. Laws are for little people.

       What President Trump has been calling “fake news” is now being verified as being real by associates and members of his own family. The meetings with Russians did take place. President Trump, his family and administration did in fact lie about events. They lied to the press. They lied to congress. They lied when filling out forms for their security clearances. They lied about lying by calling it fake news. Most importantly though—they lied to the American people.

        Some excuses for lying include:

• ·         Oh, that meeting!
• ·         Oh gosh! Forgot about the meetings with the Russians.
• ·         Didn’t think it mattered.
• ·         Would have mentioned it but nothing happened.
• ·         Couldn’t provide an accurate count of how many attended. Was it 8 or 9?
• ·         Which meeting?
• ·         Never happened.
• ·         Didn’t know there were Russians in the room.
• ·         Oh, those Russians.
• ·         The Russians didn’t have any dirt on Clinton so the meeting was a bust.
• ·         Thought I was the only one there.
• ·         Talked about the business that we have with Russians that we don’t have.
• ·         We were too busy obstructing justice to remember.

        They lied until there was no more avoiding the reality of the preponderance of evidence. Eric Trump was the first to crack because he got caught. There’s always that first one. The first one usually gets the better deal. Besides, confession is good for the soul. They forgot the old rule that 3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead.

       The foreign power that they met with happened to be the Russians. (Russians that they are doing business with.) If they had met with the English or the French it would still have been just as illegal. But they met with a power that just happens to have a hundreds of nuclear weapons targeting our country. They met with the country that meddled in OUR elections. That doesn’t make it any more illegal. It does make it worse at a very fundamental level. It says that our democracy isn’t that important to them. It means that they placed America second. They wanted to throw in with a nation that would destroy our way of life.

       Now I don’t think that anything is going to happen to President Trump. I don’t think he will be impeached. The leadership of the Republican Party isn’t about to hold a Republican President Trump to the same standards that they held President Obama or even regular law abiding citizens. They are having success in dismantling government by simply sitting back and watching the chaos of ineptitude. Besides that they simply don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do what it takes. They’ll come up with all sorts of high sounding reasons for not doing anything. They’ll even talk about “The Rule of Law” a lot. Besides, they’re afraid of him and Bannon, and are seriously afraid of Trump’s supporters. Probably first and foremost the House of Representatives will never vote for articles of impeachment unless his illegal activity becomes too hard to ignore*. Then they’ll drag things out for as long as possible. They’ll continue to anonymously leak to the press what they won’t say in public about how incredibly bad a President he is. That way they’ll have plausible deniability at election time for President Trump supporters. They aren’t about to place the country, our nation and its people above their own self-interests. Because when push comes to shove…

Laws are for little people.

*The House votes the articles of impeachment. The Senate conducts the trial.