Dancing at the Grifter’s Ball

Pam Bondi’s anti-Biden nepotism speech is nestled into a night of Trump grifters living off their father’s/husband’s name. And The Trump Party sees no irony, can see no irony, in this.

He dirties everything he touches.

Everything. Trump spares no reputation, no tradition left clean, no ‘norm’ left unsoiled, any laws in his way are trampled into the dirt. His every touch is like a child with mud on their hands; filth is strewn over all. And like a child, he grins at the destruction in his wake. Last night Trump smeared his hands over the White House, the naturalization ceremony, the pardon, and used them all as petty, political tools to boost an election campaign that is already dirty with corruption and brimming with lies. He sullies them all not for any noble purpose or sense of justice, but to squeeze out just one more vote from those white, ‘suburban housewives’ that he keeps throwing hypothetical Black people at. 

Our government is reduced from a constitutional republic/democracy to no more than a political prop, the People’s White House as a stage for reelection, the employees using their office and power as campaign tools, and the taxpayer’s money blatantly being used to elect the most undemocratic leader the United States of America has ever seen. Nothing is sacred, nothing cannot be used to wrench what is supposed to be a government of the people, for all the people, to a thing to serve the power not of a small political base, but just one man, Donald J. Trump.

Last night RNC was a self-servering parade of corruption and lies, a weaponizing the American government for the benefit an amoral man at the head of a party ready and eager to serve that amorality. And, as usual with the entire Trump administration, the law breaking is right out in the open, proudly displayed, (“Russia, if you’re listening”) bragged about, passed around like a good joint at a frat party. This isn’t bending rules, this is snapping and breaking laws, flagrantly.

I said in a previous post that this convention was going to be a sort of ‘Woodstock’ for the Trump Party, ‘Four Days of Fear & Hate”. I feel I underplayed it. Speaker after speaker got up, lied and smiled about it. Pam Bondi of Florida spewed forth a much-debunked conspiracy theory of Joe and Hunter Biden and Ukraine, railing against ‘nepotism’ on a night where an array of Trumps (all benefiting off their father/husband’s office) overwhelmed the so-called ‘real’ people. And all the grifters danced in joy.

Through the looking glass, while denying you are actually in wonderland.

It was an evening of breaking laws, nepotism, lying, making bizarre claims (My father will put people on Mars!) and celebrating it all. All in an America, damaged, grieving, wondering how they will make rent and feed themselves, or as Trump calls 'it, '“Biden’s America.”

And an estimated 200,000 Americans are dead, with another 1,200 Americans died of the coronavirus on the Tuesday of this shitshow. One mention of the dead, in passing, from the First Lady, while everyone else acted like the virus was over, past tense, like it isn’t still burning, threatening, killing. A complete unreality show, with Trump and the Trump family the most unreal part of it.

Good lord, these fucking people. I can’t do anything more but shake my head at Trump’s American Carnage and wonder where it will end. Or if it ever will.

Trump says he alone can fix it; turns out only he alone could have brought it on.

What the Hell did I Just Watch?

Evita of the Trump Party.

Distorted history, outright lies, a lady angrily screaming into an empty hall, and a speech from Donny Jr, so disjointed and incoherent, that as he spoke, #Cocaine was trending on Twitter. It was supposed to be ‘uplifting, positive, very positive’, Donny Sr. promised! Instead, we got anger, bile, lies, lies and more lies. And yelling, lots of yelling. It was pretty… amazing.

The theme of the night was ‘The Land of Promise’, and they promised light, positivity, optimism, you know, all the good stuff. Right off the bat we had Trump storming in like your drunk uncle who wants to settle who took his favorite skateboard (you now, that one he put the ‘Hanging Ten’ sticker on) back in 1977. He started in attacking Biden, Democrats, China and claimed Democrats were promoting and using ‘voter fraud’, trying to steal the election by saying that votes should, you know, be counted. It was his usual disjointed rambling, a bitter grievance masterpiece. The Qanon cultists were taking notes so they could decipher the ‘breadcrumbs’ for the “real” message later. (When it comes to Qanon, “quote marks” are mandatory.)

Oh, and all the horrible stuff happening under Trump? Be totally worse under Biden. Totally. Fear Biden! Everything that Trump did is actually Biden’s fault!!

So there.

And he’s going to do this stream-of-consciousness ranting EVERY night! That means he’s going to work four whole night in a row. That’s dedication. That’s how desperate he is, he’s coming close to doing his job.

Nikki Haley was there, completely forgetting her trashing of Trump four years ago, trying to present herself as a sort of ‘sane version’ of Trumpism, Trump scrubbed of the overt racism and outright hate; Diet Coke Trumpism. It was a good speech, even if it had to, like most speeches of the night, ignore Trump’s actual record and rhetoric to make its points. Talking of ‘cancel culture’ and political correctness’ Haley claimed the president “knows that political correctness and 'cancel culture' are dangerous and just plain wrong.” This ignores the many times, like just last week with his attack on Goodyear Tires, Trump has put out a ’cancel’ fatwa of his own on journalists, Hollywood celebrities and entire organizations for not praising him enough. Ignore reality and blame whatever is going on in America on anyone but Trump.

As a possible 2024 prospect, she was the one of the calmest people in a night of yelling and arm waving.

There was a lot of that, of ignoring actual reality in favor of what they would like things to be, you know, like praising Trump on the now ruined economy (by time traveling back to December), rewriting his coronavirus response, dismissing his actual racial rhetoric and record. Some circus strongman level bending and twisting of the truth.

The most cringe-worthy moment of the night in the many on display, was when former hostage Andrew Brunson thanked Trump for getting him out of the Turkish prison where he’d been sentenced for 28 years. And Trump replied: “I have to say, that to me, President Erdogan was very good.”

That would be the brutal dictator that threw Brunson in prison in the first place. Brunson just sat there, looking at him while he went on to praise Erdogan some more. It was a version of “Well, sorry he killed people, but he’s never killed me.” Insane.

The ‘real people’ stars of the night were the two personal injury lawyers from St. Louis, Mark and Patty McCloskey, who thought it a good idea to wave guns at people who dared to walk past their house. They were there, again, to tell you the things happening in Trump’s America were actually happening in the mythical ‘Biden’s America’, where every day would be a mix of Soylent Green, Mad Max, and Planet of the Apes. You could boil the whole thing down to: The Black people are coming to riot and move in next to you. These are the ‘ordinary Americans’ the GOP wants to praise, protecting their gilded McMansion against… passersby.

That was a bigger theme than any openly announced; Be Afraid of ‘Those People’. There were several Black speakers on this first night: Senator Tim Scott, State Senator Vernon Jones, Kim Klacik, Herschel Walker, there to say how terrible Democrats are to Black America and how un-racist Trump is. Now, the Democrats do need to do better on race (we all do), but that’s not why these Black speakers were there. They were not there to appeal to Black and POC, (Trump support in the Black community is so small as to be a blip) they were there to reassure the white voters that they’re not racist. It’s okay to vote for someone with Trump’s abysmal record on race, it won’t make you racist. I’m sure that was not the intent of the sincere speakers, but it is the intent of the Trump Party.

The Promised Land indeed.

One of the most batshit things of the evening was Kimberly Guilfoyle, ex-Fox News host, ex-wife of CA Governor Gavin Newsom, girlfriend of Don Jr, and an important and effective fundraiser for the GOP. She gave the standard ‘Dems comin’ for your money, guns, and babies, gonna make you all socialists’ speech, but delivered it in a such a shouting, shrill, angry fashion I cringed at home. I thought something was wrong with her. I’m an actor, I wanted to tell her that they have microphones, you don’t need to yell. It was as if she had practiced it to be shouted at a noisy, crowded, and rambunctious room and couldn’t adjust to the fact the hall was empty. She even still had all the applause lines. To the echo of no applause.

Should I mention Guilfoyle got her own heritage wrong, claiming her mother wasn’t a citizen (she was born in Puerto Rico, which makes her an American citizen), and calling herself a ‘1st generation American Citizen;’ (getting the nomenclature wrong) when she’s not?

Nah, that’s petty. And I don’t want to be petty about pettiness.

We end here with probably the more anticipated speech of the night: Donald Trump Jr. Don Jr. started with his dad’s campaign, figuratively (sometime literally) fetching the coffee. It was Jr. who brought the Russian spy to Trump Tower to pitch her anti-Hillary, Pro-The Donald portfolio, which everybody knows was a great move. In the past few years though, his position has become point man for his father, and he and Guilfoyle have become a power couple in the Trump Party and a ‘credible’ prospect of running for president in 2024. Of course, that was before this speech.

Really, maybe he was just stunned by Guilfoyle’s speech, or deafened, but he delivered his usual ‘Imagine how the world would be if my father was not president’ speech with red, weeping eyes, and stuffed nose. It lite up Twitter for all the wrong reasons. This is the future of the Republican Trump Party.

What all these speeches have in common (besides Trump good, Biden evil) is trying to blame everything that has gone wrong under Trump’s presidency on the Democrats and Joe Biden. The coronavirus, the cratered economy, the double-digit unemployment, the protests, the est. 200,000 dead Americans and the rest of us not knowing how we’re going to pay rent or even eat. None of this is Trump’s fault. It’s all a plot against him, it’s all the Deep State ™, it’s really what will happen under Joe Biden. This night is like all other night’s in the Trump Party; they shout, they point, they exaggerate, they twist, they lie to avoid any sort of responsibility, and then say they deserve four more years to save you from… them.

Tuesday night; more of the same.

Four Days of Fear and Hate

Of course, Donny opens for himself. This is 2016, but ya gets the idea. Photo: Meg Vogel

In 1969, the small upstate New York town of Woodstock saw a music festival that had branded itself as ‘Three Days of Peace and Love’. Well, it turned into three days of mud and failed organization, but at least there was some of that peace and love going around. And some good dope.

Now, we have another hastily thrown together festival starting this week. Instead of a grassy field upstate, it’ll be held in rooms and cyberspace. It also has people (acts) who dropped out (where are Bush and Cheney? Mitt Romney?), and instead of hitting the stage during a rainstorm, it’s playing during a global pandemic. It’s four days instead of three, and it’s not about ‘peace and love’, but focuses, like the people throwing it, on ‘fear and hate’.

The Republican National Convention has begun.

The Democrats focused on inclusion, diversity, and a vision for what to do after Trump was gone. The Trump Party (as that is what it is) is focused on blaming someone (China, Democrats, Biden) for the wreck their own polices, and the lack of them, have made of America. If you look at the speakers, for every one of them slightly this side of sane, they have a pile of bomb throwers, cranks, grifters and grievance peddlers. And Trumps. Every night at least a couple of the Trump Crime family (and extended Crime Family) will be speaking. And Trump himself.

Every night.

That can’t go wrong, can it?

The RNC has become the Trump Show, that final season of the Apprentice he never got; all Trump all the time. In fact, producers of the Apprentice are helping to slap together this soggy bag of anger and hate into something ‘watchable’, like car wrecks are watchable, in the hopes that Americans will slow down and gawk.

Who’s speaking? All the Trump kids, their spouses, and Trump himself (every night, did I say that already?) Jim Jordan (still dogged by accusations he ignored the sexual assault of athletes when he was a coach) Matt Gaetz, liar in the service of Trump, who mocked the virus by wearing a gas mask in congress during a vote, as his constituents were dying of it back home, the idiot ‘gun couple’, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who demonstrated incorrect gun handling by waving guns at protesters walking past their house, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was part of gassing peaceful protesters and has used his offices to protect Trump, Sen. Rand Paul, who has proven himself to be an idiot several times over, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, whose covid policies have been killing thousands in her state, along with her refusal to seek help after the derecho devastated counties and towns, Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, representing a state whose policies have allowed the virus to rampage through nursing homes, beaches and bars, infecting and killing thousands. She should be home, working to make things right.

So, why double down on the hate and grievance?  

What else they got?

Trump can’t run on his record because, well, look around. Est 200,000 Americans dead, virus burning uncontrolled across the country, double digit unemployment, protesters in the streets… none of this is good. So, he tried tweeting ‘LAW & ORDER’ in all caps, because Trump, but seeing how he’s the shadiest President since Nixon (Nixon resigned before being impeached, btw) that hasn’t worked so well. Even his secret police only made things worse by being even more violent that the regular police. He’s got the lying thing down (Joe Biden is a radical leftist!) but he just lost his most effective liar as Kellyanne left, about to lose her family over her ugly job. He’s still showing pictures of burning cars and calling it ‘Biden’s America’, fooling nobody. Donny, it’s Your America.

Fear, hate, finger-pointing and grievance are what he’s got left. Point to immigrants, to Black Life Matters, to China, to Democrats to explain what can only be called a failed presidency. They are to blame! If only there was one of those forgotten caravans around to help! If you can’t inspire hope (and let’s face it, he can’t) then inspire fear.

We’ll see a lot of that the next four days.

It’s all brought to us by a party who has literally thrown out their GOP party platform (principles, hope, mercy…) to say the only thing they stand for is Trump. Where Goes Trump, There Go All. A cult-party of over 200,000 acceptable deaths (57% of Republicans think that, according to polling), ready to reward his performance with four more years.

And four more after that, as a spying/virus/economy crashing do-over.

And they’d give it to him.

Let the Four days of Fear and Hate… begin.

Lies Catch Up With Kellyanne

Kellyanne and her favorite locker-up of children. Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters]

Kellyanne Conway is stepping down to attend to her family. Her daughter, 15, horrified at the administration that her mother's lies are supporting, has said she will file for emancipation from her parents.

I feel for the daughter, I wish her well and hope she can get the help she needs.

But...

Ah, there is always a but, isn't there?

Kellyanne Conway has supported, lied for, and excused an administration that has committed human rights abuses, obstructed justice, carried out vindictive campaigns against supposed ‘enemies’, betrayed our troops, and she herself committed numerous ethics violations, cheerfully. She lied, knew she was lying, didn’t care and grinned while doing it.

No sympathy for her, none.

I hope she and her husband are able get their family whole, I hope their children can find their own peace with the family and the world. I do.

But I see no reason to excuse her behavior, no reason to excuse her cheerleading of the horrible policies of the Trump administration. No sympathy for the problems she herself has caused within her family with her support of this criminal administration, no reason to view softly her resignation after all she has said about immigrants, about ripping children away from their families, about excusing the crimes of this administration with eyerolls and lies.

No sympathy, none. And also, little for her husband, George Conway. He may have been a never-Trumper, and a founder of the anti-Trump ‘Lincoln Project’, but he was a lawyer who helped build today’s GOP that brought us Trump. George may not like Trump, but he was a carpenter on the platform on which Trump now stands. Thank you for your work against Trump, but can’t say it makes up for the work you did to get us here.

And here we are.

An est. 200,000 Americans dead, a virus burning uncontrolled through the entire country, Double digit unemployment, economy cratered, millions of Americans hurting… and I just can’t feel sympathy for the main excuser of it all.

Kellyanne leaves at the end of the week (after the convention, so she’ll still have a lot of lying to do), to go back to her family and tell them she was just ‘doing her job’, you know, ‘obeying orders’ so she could keep her ‘access’ and ‘power’. Maybe they’ll believe her (I pray they won’t excuse her), but I hope they ask her the obvious question:

“Why?”

Gee.

Hope she has a better answer than usual.

She might try, for one, telling the truth.

Where Goes Q, Goes the GOP

“Trust the Plan” they say, you know, when it looks to be insane bullshit. It’s not! Trust it!

The GOP has embraced a far-far right-wing conspiracy theory, or it has infected the Republican party enough that it has to embrace it or be swallowed. That theory, really a worldview and way of life, is called: Qanon.

What the hell is ‘Qanon?

Qanon is a bizarre, through-the-looking-glass movement, the new Tea Party, but crazier, stupider, and much, much more dangerous. The whole thing was started by an anonymous poster claiming to be a 'top level intelligence officer’ in the Trump administration. They posted on Reddit under the name ‘Q’ and started outlining their ‘insider knowledge’. After the initial drop, they would should back up and post what the increasing followers would call 'breadcrumbs' (and what one study claimed to be random keyboard hits) which true believers (now calling themselves Qanon, or just 'Q') would then 'interpret' as they saw fit. And boy did they see fit.

Essentially, the world is run by a cabal of Satan worshiping, pedophile cannibals, (this includes Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Tom Hanks. TOM HANKS!!!), and many many more, mostly Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities, anyone to the left of Satan. This ungodly cabal will, any day, be rounded up by Trump, who has been secretly working behind the scenes (with Robert Mueller, Yes, this is part of it!!) and then Trump will lead the nation back to the truth, the light, the church and Christ.

Trump. He's going to do all this.

Any day now.

We're all waiting.

Okay, I make fun, but.... there are several true believers running for seats in congress right now, and a couple that will probably make it in. What will they do, all the true 'Q' believers? What did the Millerites do when they waited all spring of 1843 for Jesus to show up to smite the non-believers, and he never arrived? They doubled down, and waited until spring 1844, really, really sure Jesus would show up this time. When Jesus still didn't show up (I assume they sent him an invitation) they tripled down, changed the name of the group to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and continued on thinking they were smarter and better than anyone else.

Because they knew 'the truth'. Just like the Q-anon believers do, as the Trumpers do.

They will double down. And I'm afraid they will do so violently. They've been violent before, killing police, shooting up a DC pizza parlor to free the abused children in the basement (no kids, no basement). The FBI considers them a domestic terrorist threat, and they like to show up at rallies with far-right anti-government extremists and Nazis. They are looking for a fight.

“Where We Go One, We Go All" is their motto.

 And when the Chosen One is in danger, (like losing an election) they will be there, ready for that fight.

Why Would Even Trump Want Four More Years of This?

What is the Trump’s ‘endgame’ here? Is he running for reelection to prove he’s popular (he’s not)? To ‘own the libs’ a little more? Is he doing it to not look like a loser,(well, too late for that) a dreaded one-termer?

Seriously? Why? He doesn’t seem to like the job, he didn’t even want it in the first place. According to insiders in the campaign, Trump was running to call attention to his ‘brand’, (basically, his name) as a substitute for the failing ratings of his shelf-worn reality show ‘The Apprentice’. He was shocked when he won, after working for weeks to set up that ‘voter fraud, stolen election’ excuse he’d honed to a fine point. He had reams of sucker lists now from the campaign, he’d be able to move all those Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka he had left over. He was good!

Then he won. And found out he had no idea how to run a government. So, he didn’t really bother doing so. Even after he won, after he took office, he still did dozens of campaign rallies, because that was the part of the job he actually liked, calling in to Fox News to ramble on from segment to segment while the hosts awkwardly smiled and nodded like people at a party stuck with the world’s biggest boor. Tweet odd, racist, or just dumb crap on Twitter at all hours of the night, and golf on someone’s else’s dime? Yeah! THAT was the good stuff, the fun stuff.  

But, the job is work. The job is details, the job is decisive decision making, the job is leadership. It’s not sitting at a desk, barking a few orders, then wandering off to the residence to hate watch CNN. He was miserable, he looked miserable. The stress was getting to him, he was rambling even more, and in public, he wanders off like he just walked into a room and can’t remember why he’s there.

He looks and acts unwell.

And people attack his poor little self, all the time. Like the hated Obama:

“I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.” Obama went on. “But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.” 

Obama kinda nailed that. Trump did his tired all-caps push back “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN” (no, he didn’t). he’s not really interested in the job anymore, if that interest ever went far beyond the trappings and the worldwide platform the spew from. People being mean, popularity never over 50%, staffers going to jail. Melania sure looks like she’s done with the whole thing. Seen he smile recently? But he wants to stick around for four more years… of this?

Why?

The clue, I think, is in that phrase ‘staffers going to jail’. Yep. Here’s my best guess why he’s trying to hold by any cheating means necessary. He doesn’t want to go to jail. That simple. His own misdeeds, ones that he was able to hide, (or at least better excuse outside the Oval) are waiting for him on the doorstep come January. Biden and Harris might have to step over a pile of subpoenas on the way in the door of the White House. The AG of the SDNY, Cyrus Vance, is waiting for him, Senate investigators are waiting for him, I bet federal fraud investigators are waiting for him, maybe even the United States Postal Inspectors are waiting for him.

Yes, I am amused by that thought.

Steve Bannon is arrested, and it doesn’t look good for him, Paul Manafort is in jail, Roger Cohen is in jail, Roger Stone should be, as should Michael Flynn. How many in Trump’s orbit has been indicted, jailed, waiting to be jailed, or still unsure where they stand legally, especially if Trump loses reelection and the power to manipulate/obstruct justice?

So, he fights like hell; keeping his taxes secret (but he promised!), pardoning, or commuting the sentences of those that stay loyal, demanding his subordinates not answer legal subpoenas, suing to stop books by those that know the crap he’s pulled, treading legal water hoping to figure out a way to stay in power. We’ve already seen that he will do anything to keep power; what’s rigging and election or questioning its legitimacy if someone else dares to claim to be the winner? He’s fighting to stay alive, to stay out of jail, to keep that power while using to erode the case against him.  

And if he wins? We’ve already seen in the aftermath of impeachment: the wholesale cleaning of everyone and anymore trump thinks is an enemy, a dismantling of any rules or legal apparatus that had been/might be used against him. He’s a cornered rat, being poked with the sharpest of sticks, and he’ll fight back, claw and bite just to stay where he is.

In power.

He has to.

Jail awaits.

Trump is Going Nowhere.

Trump smirks and then pouts his way though the grievance fest that is his ‘press conference’. BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

Trump is going nowhere.

I don’t mean he’s going to win the election, I mean he’s going nowhere, not him, and not the party he embodies. This is what many people (including Joe Biden, I believe) are missing, The GOP is Trump, Trump is the GOP. You can cut off the head, but the body will just go doing what it was doing before. And Trump himself, bar going to jail, will still be around, still be telling it what to do, think, say, and taking his network of grievance and hate and just installing it elsewhere, maybe in a new subscription TV channel that he can spew nonsense on 24/7, without any ‘enemies of the people’ to question him.

Trump is going nowhere. The GOP has not been so much transformed as it has come of age, reached the goal it (and others) set for itself back in 1964 with the defeat of Goldwater. It absorbed the John Birchers, it invited in the religious far right, it purged itself of anyone and everyone to their left (if there was such a place), embraced the crazy and conspiracy, and folded its supposed ‘big tent’. Gone is/was any talk of ‘compassionate conservatism’, hell, most of them never really knew what Bush was talking about… sounded weak, sounded left.

Trump is not the aberration, Trump is destiny, he is the messiah, riding his donkey into the White House, arriving to lead his people into the promised land of power. He is the ‘Chosen One’, the One they have been waiting for since Goldwater. He is the one who will no longer smile, no longer couch his words with niceties, or hide his meaning behind ‘dog whistles’. Trump is the human ‘fuck this shit’. They delight in his crudeness, his racism, his bigotry, because he’s finally saying what many of them have been thinking or whispering to each other for decades.

Trump is going nowhere. If he’s voted out, (and is dragged from the White House by his ankles, his hands clawing at the carpet), he becomes the Messiah-in-Exile, Napoleon at Elba, waiting for his chance at power again. Be serious with yourself; do you really think his minions won’t be working some angle to get him back in power? They’ve already proved, over and over, that they will lie, they will seek out enemies of America for help, they will go to any length to give him more, and more, power. And if not Trump himself, there are many Trump children and hangers-on to assume power while Trump whispers in their ear.

You might shake your head and think this is all crazy. Well, four years ago, did you think we’d have an American President who worked with the Russians to get elected, asked two foreign countries to help collect dirt on a political opponent, worked hard to undermine allies while showing sycophantic affection for murderous dictators, and who has stood by while an est 200,000 of his own countrymen died?  

This is where we are.

So, don’t fool yourself.

Trump is going nowhere.  

It’s Going to be Ugly.

What the GOP thinks matters. Insane. Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS via Getty Image

The DNC has been a pretty good show so far, making the case for Biden/Harris. They been very inclusive, and not in an over done ‘look! We have POC too!’ kind of way both parties have been guilty of in the past. All kinds of people, every walk of life are there, speaking truth and holding out a hand. They’ve tried to include everyone.

Even Republicans.

Really, Biden/Harris is not reaching out to just the ‘Democratic base’, they are reaching past them, reaching out to, well, everyone. And people are listening.

The RNC, who was holding out hopes for an in-person gathering up until a couple weeks ago (North Carolina! No, Florida, No….online?) are way behind and will have to play some serious catch up. The announcement that the the St. Louis ‘gun couple’ Mark and Patricia McCloskey will be featured speakers is not sign of outreach, ‘big tent’ style GOP (who remembers that phrase? Used to be thrown around quite a bit in the Reagan/Bush years.), it’s a sign of four nights of bitter white grievance and anger, finger pointing and ignoring (how could they not?) the est 200,000 dead from Trump’s negligence. There will be very little about that. Putting people like the McCloskey’s front and center tell us all we really need to know about what GOP thinks the issues are, and how seriously they will treat those issues.

And they will continue to call Joe Biden a ‘radical leftist’. Joe Biden… radical. Sorry, literally no sane person with eyes believes that. The fact is they keep pushing a losing narrative because, what else they got?

With a cratered economy, with those 200,000 dead, with an uncontrolled virus killing indiscriminately, with people in the streets seeking a racial justice denied them for centuries, Trump and the GOP thinks it’s a good idea to get two idiots who practice extremely poor gun safety and think pointing guns at people walking by your house, is a good and wise thing. They are not reaching ’beyond their base’, they are catering to them, and ONLY them. They do not care about convincing anyone beyond the ever-narrowing, ever-whitening, base. They have no real interest in adding to their party, no, they are actively subtracting from it; ‘canceling’ those not Trump enough, not toeing their lies enough, and not hating enough.

I fully expect the RNC is watching what the DNC is doing and taking notes. Except they’ll be tossing out the hope and dialing up the anger, the grievance at being a dying minority.

It’s gonna be a four day fear/hate fest, and Trump will speak every freakin’ night because… Trump.

It’s going to be ugly.

They Need Gone.

Robert E. Lee, basically the South’s version of Jesus. Traitor to his country, and wasn’t even that good a general.

You know what?

Confederate monuments have got to go.

Yes, they need gone, they need to be trashed and consigned to the dustbin of history.

This should not be a controversial position, but the insistence and butthurt of the right makes it so.

I really have to question why the right is defending traitors, slaveholders, and racists, but that’s beside the point…. Or is it?

Seriously, people, the monuments and plaques to the Confederates serve only one purpose; to reinforce white supremacy. That’s it. The ‘Daughters of the Confederacy’ worked hard to promote the racist ‘Lost Cause’ myth (the poor, poor put-upon South!), to try and turn a righteous and deserved defeat into a phoenix victory. They worked hard to promote white grievance, supremacy and the view of the South that the Civil War was about more than slavery (it wasn’t). Don’t @ me with ‘states rights’ because those ‘rights’ were the ‘right’ of the one race to hold another in chains, steal their labor, their children, their lives. And the were perfectly fine about it, they used the Bible (of course they did) to excuse their behavior, bending Christianity until it broke into very tiny, fine pieces. Want to know why there were Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists for decades? Slavery. They broke apart because the North could not bend their Christianity to accept slavery (they were okay with white supremacy though, but that’s another post) and the South, all high, mighty, and pissed off, took their bat, ball, and slavery-infested religion, and stormed off home.

And started a war. Yep, they started it, all so they could keep people in slavery. That was the cause and the war ended it.

Well, in name. The South was able to end ‘Reconstruction’ (an era when Blacks had the vote, held elected offices and had power) and start the Era of Terror, where whites would violently take back power through intimidation, terror, and murder. And to mark their white ‘territory’? Statues of the great Confederate ‘heroes’. The DOC started founding chapters (you just needed seven women who had bothers or fathers who were Confederate soldiers, that was pretty much the entire South) and started collecting money for monuments. And of course, passing out their ‘Lost Cause’ propaganda. (They even had a Confederate Catechism. No, really!) They erected as many monuments as they possibly could; statues of generals, soldiers, plaques to dubious ‘achievements’ of the South (like the time a white mob, angry at the election of a Republican governor and his Black Lt. Governor, took over the statehouse for three days. Yes! There was a plaque up for decades calling these racist vigilantes ‘heroes’!). So, yeah.

The statues and monuments were part of a disinformation campaign for the white South, and a campaign of intimidation against Blacks and any notions of equality they might have. Flags, monuments everywhere, on public land, some paid for with public money. Imagine if you were Black, walking through your town, (the places you were allowed to walk), and seeing soaring tributes to your oppressors, the people who killed friends and loved ones, literally everywhere you looked.

Pretty fucking horrible.

Intimidation usually is.

And no, these didn’t go right up after the war, the majority went up at the end of the 19th century to the revival of KKK in the teens and twenties, and then during the later 40’s through the 70s. Notice anything? The most monuments went up at times when civil rights were being pressed. It was the 50s and 60s, the ‘Civil Rights Era’ (really, every freakin’ year should be part of a ‘Civil Rights Era’) that the Confederate flag was being adopted (yes, I know it was never the real flag of the Confederacy, don’t ‘actually’ me) as a well, a flag for white supremacy.  

The statues, these monuments, these plaques, these named buildings were all part of a campaign to spread lies and to intimidates and terrorize innocents. They do not commemorate history, they push lies. Ugly lies. We don’t need any more of their crud in our public spaces or our private minds.

They need to go.

How to Steal an Election, Right in Front of Us

Trump has been railing against the United States Post Office for a while now, mostly as a way to get back at Jeff Bezos. Trump, the Fake billionaire, have a serious case of penis envy over Bezos, and the Bezos-owned Washington Post says mean things about him (except for Trump sycophants Hugh Hewitt and Marc Thiessen, their heads so far up Trump’s backside they know what he had for lunch). But, we figured, let him whine, it’s what he does, constantly. What can he do?

See, we sometimes forget, Trump has no moral compass, Trump is True North and everything points to him, they must point to him. If he can’t benefit from something, it’s of no use to him. He gets bored, and he walks (see: virus, corona, et al) So, he hatches a plan (documents now show he started this months ago). He installs a millionaire Republican donor as Postmaster General (who has millions of dollars invested in USPS competitors, because of course he does), in charge of PO operations. Louis DeJoy (yeah, that’s his name, kinda low-hanging, late-night comedy fruit, eh?) then starts in; DeJoy fires seasoned postal officials (you know, people who know what they’re doing, Trump hates that), and shuffles the rest around. Overtime is forbidden, mail starts to pile up. We get reports of the mails being slowed. Hell, we don’t need ‘reports’, we can see what’s going on as letters and packages are arriving late, if at all. When Congress drags him in to answer for the crap he’s up to (the stuff they know about) DeJoy claims he’s just trying to ‘save money’ and ‘make thing more efficient’. He would never ‘slow the mails’! Not him!

This is, of course, grade ‘A’ bullshit. Not the super fine, processed stuff you get at the big-box for the garden, this is the massive piles designed to hide things. Lies. Simple as that.

 Lies.

Anyone who has been paying attention the last three years should expect nothing else from anyone associated with Trump. Now, we have reports (and photos) of mailboxes being ‘decommissioned’, hundreds of sorting machines being removed from post offices in Michigan, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Texas, and that “more machine removals are planned in the months ahead,” according to documents now coming out. This is not ‘efficiency’.  

 No.

This does NOT 'save money'. This is a flat out attempt to slow the mail ahead of an election. Why? Here in WA, where I’m writing this, ballots just need to be post marked by election day, but in a majority of states, the ballot needs to ARRIVE by election day.

Trump's plan is to slow ballot delivery to the voter, and then slow the ballots getting to the election offices. Thousands, probably millions of ballots could be invalidated, tossed out, uncounted.

Also, the PO used to treat ballots (political mail) as first class, meaning it got priority, now they been ordered to treat it as 'bulk'. First class, has priority, it gets forwarded, they will try to find you and deliver your ballot, Bulk? It gets mulched. This will delay it even further, in fact many may never get their ballots in the first place. It may just get tossed, undelivered 

This is not an accident, this is by plan. Buy why? Why would a US President do this? Why would they destroy the integrity of a US election? Because Trump doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything but Donald J. Trump. Because Trump is scared, he may actually reading some of the polls and he’s decided that the cheating he was doing last time (working with Russia) will not be enough this time: he needs to steal and steal BIG. So he is. Trump is stealing the election before the election can take place and he’s using the United States Post Office to do it for him.

Right in front of us, in the open. And those in power are turning their heads.

Now the Washington Post is reporting that the USPS has told 46 states that their ballots might not be delivered by election day, disenfranchising millions of voters. This means the plan is working. Trump is winning before you can even vote.

What can we do? Congress is on vacation (McConnell is exhausted from denying millions of unemployed help, and from laughing at the 200,000 death toll). Find out where your representative is, call them, email them, make yourself a pest, demand a response to this naked power grab. Call your local newspaper (if you still have one), demand they cover this, respond to this, not lay down while democracy is getting trampled.

And it is.

Demand your voice to be heard.

They Just Don’t Care About You

Mitch McConnell, looking to get the F’ out of Dodge.

Congress has left town. They left for a ‘vacation from… what? The House has actually been doing something, they’ve passed some 400 bills that Mitch McConnell is using to hold up his TV so he and Lindsey can watch their ‘stories'. Not read the bills, not allow them to go to an up or down vote… nope, just sit there while Mitch puts up his feet and laughs. Now, they’re gone. They packed up their little brief cases and figured out ways to avoid their voters. Vacation until September 8th.

Of course.

So, no covid relief bill, Right now, the GOP is pretending to be ‘concerned’ about ‘spending’. They’re a couple months early, they usually only get concerned when a Democrat is in the White House. They probably wanted to be back in practice as they have faced the probable reality of Trump going down in a crushing Blue Wave (gonna capitalize that, yep). Maybe the GOP will lose the senate as well.

So, what happened? The GOP did. They’re busy denying the pain of millions of unemployed so they can politicize the virus even further. They don’t care. They will use the virus to pass tax cuts, to deregulate our water, air, and land, to try and protect companies from any responsibility for their re-opening and the safety of their workers, but they won’t help the ordinary people, you know, the people who can’t afford their own politician. They didn’t even bother to start ‘work’ on one until a couple days before the last one ran out. They don’t care.

Well, what about the Democrats? What have they been up to, huh? Yeah, huh? What?!!

Well, the Democrats passed a bill, two months ago that would help with virus relief. It's a big and pretty thorough bill with money for schools, cities, states, individuals, and extends the unemployment payments. But the bill would do something else; it would help Donald Trump.

Yep, it would help Donny.

 You get money out to people, they will spend it; pay bills, pay rent, buy food, the money going right back into the economy. This is what Trump supposedly wants, get the economy going or at least in a place where it's not going down anymore.

And he said 'no.'

And the GOP backed him up. Mark Meadows, professional bomb-thrower is supposedly 'negotiating' a deal. This is a guy who have never saw in deal in congress that he didn't blow up, and he's doing the same here. The whole Tea Party DNA is deep with this one.

The whole thing is not only against the interest of the people, but against the interests of Trump and the GOP as well. His policy of, basically, letting people die and now making sure those still here will be as miserable as possible is hurting us and hurting him. It's building a huge blue wave that is coming right at them. Their actions seem to welcome it.

And now congress has left town. Even the latest Fox News poll tells us people are hurting and need help. This would have made Trump and the GOP look good. For a change.

But… No.

The whole thing is insane. I'm not being cute calling it that, it is literally not sane.

Trump and the GOP Want to Kill the Post Office

Really? Kill the USPS? Freakin’ idiotic. Photo by Erik S Lesser

It is a meeting of tiny minds.

 The GOP has been wanting to kill the USPS for years (it is the biggest government employee union) and Trump wants to do everything possible to undermine an election he will most likely lose and carry on his petty (I mean really petty) feud with Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Two stupid and evil purposes have met, shook hands, and become one.

And America will pay for it with the destruction and probably selling off of one of the most valuable and useful government agencies. We can only hope we have the time to slow and stop them.

But, really… why? How? You say the United State Postal Service is near bankrupt, it must be poorly run! Yes, but no.

A long time ago, but in the some saner pre-covid days of 2006 (remember a time before the pandemic? Yeah, good times…) the GOP-controlled congress passed a little thing called “The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) and it was quickly signed into law by George W. Bush on December 20, 2006. Just in time for Christmas! What this little beauty of an act did, was give the Postal Service new accounting and funding rules for its retiree pension and health benefits. In the good ‘ol, wild west days, USPS funded those pensions on a pay-as-you-go-basis, pulling out of its pension fund and adding to it as retirees' costs came in. Like just about every other business in the free world. But the new Act now required the USPS to figure out all pension costs needing to be pass over the next 75 years, and then come up with all that 75 years of pension money between 2007 and 2016 to fund them. Basically, when they hired someone, the PO have to then fund their possible retirement. And that of all the other employees.

No other business is forced to do something this stupid, trying up billions of dollars, forcing them to de-invest in the business and put that money in the pension fund. They went from being in the black in 2005, to being billions in the red in just a couple years. This is insanity. Purposeful insanity, purposeful sabotage.

Why? Like I said, the PO has one of the biggest, and most powerful, government unions, and the GOP has a thing about unions; they hate them, every one of them. They want to destroy them all, burn them to the ground, and salt the earth afterward. All it took was to get a Republican President who wanted to see the PO destroyed (again, for petty, tiny penis reasons) to meet up with a GOP senate who also wants to see it destroyed. These two kissing cousins will now work to complete their job of killing something nearly every American relies on every day.

These fools can literally not be gone soon enough.

If Only We Had a Leader, Not a Whiner

Pouty McPouterson, pouting.

“Oh, you libtards! You blame Trump for the pandemic!”

No. The pandemic is not his fault (not the fault of China either, but that’s another post), no, we blame him for his response to the pandemic.  The fact he wasn’t ready hasn’t helped much. I mean, firing the people responsible for dealing with a global pandemic, cutting funds and eliminating the programs that were set up to deal with a major health crisis didn’t help when one actually hit (as he was warned it might) all pretty damn stupid, and thoughtless.

Now, 165,000+ dead. Virus is burning though the country uncontrolled. Double digit unemployment, economy cratered and not coming back any time soon. Ugliness reigns.

No matter how you look it (unless you just want to lie about it), Trump has screwed this up, big time.

Simply no other way to look at it. He didn’t act fast enough; almost all of his actions have been reluctant, half-hearted, like a kid told to clean their room and after an hour they’ve picked up one sock. He ignored his own experts, he undermined their advice and when guidelines were actually put out, he immediately ignored them, recommending the opposite. Trump is so focused on his reelection that he just doesn’t care about anything, or anyone, else. And this is for a job he didn’t want in the first place….

He just doesn’t give a damn.

I was making this very argument on the Book of Face yesterday while deep in the enemy territory of a Trumper’s post, and I got one of those smarmy replies; ‘well, what would you do, it you were President? With the laws and powers available and not overstepping them.”

You see the trick here is that he would consider anything Trump did within the ‘law’ and anything done by a Democratic president to be far, far outside it (see Obama, Barack). I see this smug little game all the time, if we talk facts to Trump supporters we all see it. But, we’re in lockdown, I ain’t doin’ nutin’, so why not?

The First Week of the Tom Stewart Presidency,: (What I would do if I ran the zoo)

I would put out national guidelines based on science AND FOLLOW THEM. Weird, huh? I do this because Trump immediately undermined his own recommendations, and his doctors. He never took it seriously, at all. It was like he was trying to 'will' the pandemic away, hoping if he ignored it, it would all just ‘blow over’. My mom used to try this with the light bill. She was soon sitting in darkness.

I would have a national testing and tracing plan in place, relieving some of the burden on the states, and I would work with the affected states, making sure they had what they needed, you know, instead of pissing, moaning and complaining about them, as Trump did. Trumpy’s way really worked well for all involved, especially the 165,000+ dead.

I would also use my power to order more ventilators and PPE manufactured (Trump threatened this, but didn't do it, because of many, many reasons… I’m sure) and then I would ensure the equipment got where it was needed through FEMA and the CDC. This is instead of walking away and letting all 50 states fight it out like a pack of hungry dogs over a bone.

I would reach out to our allies, ask for assistance and offer ours in return. I would learn from them (look at S Korea and New Zealand, they could have told us a lot, if we had leadership prepared to listen). I would have used my national platform to inform the people, stepping back to let the doctors give real, unvarnished information, (not get up, lie about the efforts, undermine what they just said, push phony cures, whine about how mean people are to me, etc…)

…and I would talk about the lives lost. The people, the friends, family, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters lost to the awful pandemic, and offer my empathy and prayers to the ones left behind.

No finger pointing, no crying about the election, no name calling other countries, none of that bullshit. There’s no time for nonsense while people are suffering, and people are dying. I would try my best to be a leader. 

We don't any of that right now. In case you haven’t noticed.

Now I’m going to sort my comic book collection and pray for better times, better leaders, and better hope than the tattered one I have left in my broken heart.

The Filtered & the UNfiltered

Here’s the thing, I’m on social media waaaaay too much. On Facebook, I have my posts set to ‘public’ because I’m obviously a glutton for punishment. I get a lot of support, and a lot of well, ‘Trumpers’, (Trump supporters ya know), and they love to threaten me, or call me names, the usual crap. Sometimes these love notes are attached to posts, but sometimes, they PM me and it lands in my ‘filtered messages’ folder. Sometimes it’s spam accounts featuring busty women looking for ‘friends’ (uh huh) sometimes threats:

“Hey pussy...come to Michigan so i can kick your teeth down your throat.” (Real message, blocked and reported.) Sometimes it’s a thank you for speaking up, sometimes it just a comment. Which brings us to…

Today's unfiltered message:

"You must like to cause trouble."

Do I like to cause trouble. Nah, not really. I don't like confronting people, I don't like being an 'againster', don't really like to make waves.

But.

I was a little brother, and as a little brother, I got blamed for stuff I didn't do, and felt that the siblings above me got things I didn't (which is true, and not true), and felt that justice (my mom) was not really on my side (she really wasn't, but that's another day). So I had to form my own idea of justice. It was a powerless-versus-the-powerful view. I have that little brother view of justice to this day.

That's the key word here, 'justice'. As a kid, I was fascinated with American history, not the big stuff, but the margins, the back waters, the seedy alleys were the real history lies. I read everything contained in that rabbit hole of forgotten history. Forgotten? No, purposely shoved aside and stamped down into the darkness. I was a pain to my history teachers, wanting to know more, questioning what they were teaching and wondering what was behind Big History and the narrative it taught.

 Before the internet, I had to search, I had to go to the library, (when I could convince my mom to take me, which wasn't often) and dig through the Dewey Decimal System (970 for North American history) for things that would tell me the other history, the backstories, the behind-the-flats stories of those whose shoulders many stood on. I wanted to know what they weren't telling me, and slowly (usually pieced together through several different sources) I learned. Today, I am still learning. Thank god.

 So, no I don't like pointing out people whose arguments are canvas, paint, and paste deep, who are are coming at me through belief and not facts, who would rather address my picture and looks than my argument (this won't surprise women, but yeah, I get a lot of comments on my looks from angry white guys). Don't like any of that, causes me stress, and worries my wife, but I have to. You know?

I have to. That stupid little bother in me is standing up to my mom and saying 'nuh uh!'.

I didn't do that.

Your argument ignores the facts

Your argument ignores reality

Look around you, is this the America you wanted?

So, I cause trouble. I set up this site to try to throw a little more justice out there in the world. I have that little bother's sense of justice. I don't like it. I want a quiet, easy life, no confrontation, no worries, just let the world wash over me.

I wish I could do that, I really do.

Aw well.

Come back around, because there’s more to come.

They Had a Plan, But Decided People Should Just Die Instead

Not even Jared can believe this nonsense. Stolen from Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post

They actually had a plan. They did. It would have been massive; testing, contact tracing, the whole thing.

They tossed it.

Why? Because they thought the virus was only affecting 'blue' states, so who cares? No, really. It wasn't spreading to the 'red' states yet, so it's just not 'politically advantageous' to, you know, give a damn and try to save people.

Everyday, every-damn-day I think this administration can't get any more heartless, reckless, stupid, and cruel. Every-damn-day they grin and say '"Hold my beer."The Trump administration decided it would be politically expedient to just let people die.

Seriously.

He is not, and has never been, the president for all America, just for the ones that voted for him, that cheer him at his rallies, that deck their boats with 'Trump 2020' signs.

The rest of us can just die. And please, do it before November, if you can.

And now, after scrapping the plan, they find themselves in trouble pretty much of their own making.

Shoocking.

So Trump paused, for a week, their advertising. They ‘couldn’t find a message’.

In the midst of a ruined economy, 155,000+ dead, a pandemic raging uncontrolled, and protestors in the streets, Trump can't find a 'message'.

Huh.

The 'Biden is corrupt' didn't work, 'Biden loves China' didn't work. 'Biden had dementia' didn't work, 'Biden will bring on the Mad Max apocalypse' (with pics from Trump's America), didn't work. He can't run on his record (see above, or the last three years), so he still looking for the magic bullet to save him.

Donny, buddy, chum, you want to improve your chances?

My friends will hate this, but hey! Here's how you do it:

Stop acting like a teenager told to clean their room. The covid IS the economy, fix the virus, you fix the economy. Take the pandemic seriously. Go on TV with a mask, tell people they need to wear them, tell them they need to follow CDC guidelines, and then follow them yourself. Work with the states to make sure they impose the guidelines as well. Tell your followers to suck it up and follow them. Get the GOP senate to take this seriously and pass a bill that will actually help people and not hedge fund managers. Stop whining and be serious.

That's basically it: BE SERIOUS.

Maybe go back to the plan you tossed because it might have helped someone who might not have voted for it.

Insane…

I give you this very good advice for one reason; I know you won't do it. You can't, you just can't. You can't admit to a mistake, you can't reverse yourself because you think that would be 'weak'. I know this is pretty much the same advice some of those around you (not Jared) are pushing, and THEY know you won't take it. We'll find out from the books they will publish to blamer others. You can't find a 'message' because the actual message should be 'Vote for Biden because I'm in over my head'.

And that is the message you will never, CAN never, acknowledge.

Worse Than Watergate, Nixon, and Vietnam

Former White House aide John Dean III is sworn in by Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin, in this June 25, 1973, file photo. About to drop serious dime on Nixon. (AP)

I am not the only person fascinated by Watergate. We are a hardy band of brothers, sisters and others who want the truth. We read it all, the doorstop books, the Sunday magazine retrospectives, the documentaries that have fewer and fewer original participants each time. We devour it, and then regurgitate it to devour again. Burt back in 1973, I was a resentful kid when the original hearings were going on (they took off reruns of Gilligan's Isle to play the hearings, yes, I'm old) the hearings occupying a bewildering space of my childhood. Hated them. I wanted to watch Dawn Welles, dammit!

Later, I got heavily involved, reading everything I could on the break-in, the cover-up, the immense crap that had gone on for years before, (oh yes, it started years before the actual break-in, with Vietnam and the Pentagon papers), the 'enemies lists', the people to watch (Carol Channing!), and the people to be paid off with CREEP funds. Amazing. The GOP has tired hard to hide and degrade this part of their history ever since, but it’s kinda hard to do. Anyone interested in the truth can find it in books and those documentaries. They need only look past their own prejudices.

I now watch what is going on in the Trump White House, the corruption, the incompetence, the arrogance, the lying that they know no one believes, but they know the MSM will report anyway without bothering to call it what it actually is (you know, lies) which gives it the impression of truth (the problem isn't 'bias' which is BS, but false 'objectivity'), and the grotesque, cynical attitude that the MAGA 'suckers' will believe and stand by them no matter what. This is not me saying this, it was Trump himself (''I can shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave...”) Yeah...

Nixon was a traitor. He undermined the Paris peace talks as a private citizen (in 1968, during the presidential election), this led to thousands of Americans dying (not to mention the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) just so the Republicans could win an election. That's kinda it, isn't it? As long as the GOP wins, anything is okay, anything is justified.

The Trump administration is criminal, it's as simple as that. Trump has committed several impeachable offenses (simply the truth) and if he were anyone else, he'd be gone (especially if he was a democrat), and would probably in prison for years. Anyone who values this country, and its laws and norms could not in good conscience vote for someone who ignores laws in pursuit his own enrichment, and his own power.

Nixon had his Watergate, but Trump has had several. Nixon had a GOP that still cared, to a certain degree, about the law and running an effective government, Trump... has neither. Trump need to go, but so does the institution that has supported him, encouraged him, who looked the other way and stood watch while he filled his pocked and smashed things. He's not an aberration, he's the he's the end of the long road the GOP has been traveling since they decided to go all in with the racists abandoned by the Democrats, go all in with the grievances of the far right Christians, so far in that both of these factions were not absorbed by the party, the party absorbed them. They became the GOP.

Nixon learned nothing from Watergate, he just made his lies more subtle, and in book form. He gave expensive speeches to people who thought he was poorly treated and became a 'grand of man of foreign policy', writing his books and giving advice to power. The GOP itself learned little, and worked hard to overturn the limits that Watergate had imposed on them, to shore up their base, gathering as many angry white people who remembered the 'good old days' as they could and making sure those who weren't pissed and white couldn't (or wouldn't) vote. The GOP became the gatekeepers to white power, and all that entails.

Trump is Destiny, the messiah the GOP has longed for, has deserved. He was come to save/ruin the party, they deserve it… and him. Nixon was never really punished for his crimes, and the GOP lost power for four years, but they were back in the 80s, using the power of White anger to fuel them until today, to get them to their shining 'Trump' on a hill. And here we are; criminals in the government, 155,000+ Americans dead, the economy in a shamble, people in the streets, a party in power that refuses to do anything that might effect that power... and the whole world watching in horror.

We need to tear the whole thing out, and throw it away. We had the chance with Nixon, and took the easy way out. This time, they all need to go to jail, they need the most public, transparent trials possible, before the entire world, and then fairly sentenced and punished. We need this, but so does the world. Otherwise we will never regain the credibility we have lost over the past four years.

We missed our chance with Watergate, we now have another chance in November. Trumpism must be finally rooted out and thrown in the dustbin of history. Vote, just vote.