So much winning…
A few days ago, my favorite Texas blogger summed it all up:
As of this moment, we have no Attorney General, no White House Chief of Staff, no Interior Secretary, no Director of the EPA, the Secretary of Education is a religious nut trying to destroy education, the VP is a religious nut who believes women should be subjugated, the Secretary of State is a political hack helping cover up the murder of a Saudi journalist, the Director of National Security wants to bomb Iran, 18 countries have no US ambassador (including Australia), half of the positions in the State Department remain unfilled, the stock market is down almost 3,000 points, China now owns Pacific rim trade, the US is the only major power to NOT be in the Paris accords, the entire world is either terrified or laughing at us, and the president has shut down the government for the last 10 days over his 5th century solution to a 21st century problem. Notice I didn’t mention anything about everyone convicted, in jail, or on the way to jail, or Trump’s current average of telling over 500 lies per month.
This is great? Are we tired of winning yet?
The answer to her (entirely rhetorical) question is: yes, some 60% of us are very tired of Trump and his version of “winning.
The question that is harder to answer is, what the f**k is wrong with that other 40%?”
Well golly; Juanita Jean and Sheila, he has a wall to build. We cannot expect him to resolve such petty details as providing an administration to aid and abet him in running this country…into oblivion. Wall development is nothing like hotel/casino/golf course development; it is a new area for him and he is still learning how best to distract the country from what he is NOT doing.
I fell asleep and missed his Oval Office speech last night; it appears I didn’t miss anything I haven’t seen before. He seems to have chosen a setting which he believed would give building his wall an appearance of higher priority on his personal to-do list. Glad I lost no sleep over this; or apparently the Democratic response. But; he gave them nothing new or of importance to respond to but that which they have been responding to for more than two years.
It is exhausting.
A moron in the White House.
Our Indiana Republicans continue to kiss his butt.
I fear this will NOT end well for any of us.
At least 45 now acknowledges a humanitarian crisis at our southern border. He fails to say, however that it is a crisis of his own making.
what the f**k is wrong with that other 40%?”
This is the question that keeps us perplexed.
The bigger question is why is he still there? In a parliamentary system he would have been long gone.
I know it can’t be answered logically, but WTF “IS” wrong with the other 40%. Too much processed food, I guess…
I think Maddow hit it on the head last night when she suggested that Trump felt he wasn’t getting enough ego time and had to give this campaign speech in prime time in the Oval Office to make sure everyone was watching HIM.
The other side of this “event” is that the broiling of our executive branch is creating a cornered rat. My “fear” is that when the indictments come – and come they will – for his children and start addressing the criminal enterprise and treasonous conspiracy with the Russians, he’ll pull WW III out of his hat and give John Bolton what he wants: War with Iran. That said, it is more incumbent than ever for the sane and rational people in this country, the 60%, to remove this raving maniac as quickly as possible before he starts fumbling with the nuclear codes.
Yesterday Vox,com quoted a story from the NY Times. In it, a reporter was interviewing people living in the Florida Panhandle who had been affected by hurricanes and now by the federal shutdown. A woman being interviewed said (and I am paraphrasing) that Trump is not hurting the people he needs to hurt. In my opinion, the 40% is still hoping and waiting for people to be hurt that they want to be hurt. The reporter did not follow up with the question I would have asked: Who do you think should be hurt?
What, indeed, IS wrong with the 40%?
Thank you Sheila and Juanita Jean!
Unfortunately, we also have to consider all the things that she didn’t mention and couldn’t have known about that are also going on thanks to our fearful leader that bolster the downhill slide we are on. Everything and everyone he touches in any way turns to rust, we either see or hear about it every day yet we still essentially only sit back and watch. How much worse can this get before we get off our sofas and demand that our elected representatives, particularly those with an “R” after their names, think of something besides themselves and their electoral prospects, like the fate of this country, and remove this fool from office before things get any worse when we know that they will. What will it take? Will it take a full blown international crisis that he will bungle badly and put us all at grave risk to get our attention? What will it take?
I think you can add to your list Trump declaring a National Emergency to build a wall and precipitating a constitutional crisis. Yesterday’s prime time address was the “crisis” prelude.
And his gambit might work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/politics/trump-national-emergency.html
From the standpoint of the 40%, nothing is wrong, because they have permanent control of the government and can safely, contemptuously disregard the other 60%. The Guardian explained this back in November:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/america-minority-rule-voter-suppression-gerrymandering-supreme-court
The President is holding 800,000 federal workers and their families hostage to a broken campaign promise to build a wall to be paid for by someone else.
We have a president who realizes that he is in over his head and now listens only to his rabid base of the Freedom Caucus and evangelicals. They know exactly how to build up his fragile ego so that they can manipulate him.
What are they getting away with behind the scenes to grab even more power while he is foolishly spewing lies in the news? This is what really frightens me.
You didn’t give Trump credit for reading his whole speech last night (the one written by literate others) with only a couple of minor glitches. I’m afraid that will be his sole accomplishment for 2019 for we the people.
Meanwhile things are on schedule. The House and Mueller are set to do their job, the Senate not yet. In fact it may be true that besides keeping his base afraid the whole wall thing is to slow down the House from organizing their top priority, restoring the US government to functional.
The DNC primary is warming up on the sidelines for now. Beto and AOC remain major forces keeping Trump from grabbing all of the headlines and working on inspiring the substantial youth vote to actually be represented in 2020.
BTW. You have to like the karma of the year 2020, as the year that the vision of our country was returned to “perfect”.
We should not feel we are alone here in America with challenges. The UK is having a melt down with Brexit.
Pastor Pence is out trying to make sure the bible thumper’s maintain their “faith” in President Agent Orange. McConnell, mean while is doing his obstructionist worst to hold the other flank.
We need to move on from the issue of why there are so many mistaken people who think they are gaining something from this disreputable and dysfunctional and treasonous administration to “what do we do about them?” How do we help them understand that they are being scammed by a notorious grifter who cares nothing for them as people? Can’t they grasp the principle of enlightened self-interest?
At their core they’ve concluded that “we’ve got nothing to lose, so let’s help him blow it all up. ” If you’ve ever dealt with someone who is clinically depressed, that attitude may sound familiar. As Eric Hoffer explains, these are people live lives devoid of empathy, who hate who they are, the environment that made them that way, and the hopelessness that is all they have to look forward to. It explains why people join nihilist groups like ISIS and why they support subversives like Mitch McConnell. It sheds light on how people can stop caring about topics like freedom and justice and fairness. For some that hatred is not all-consuming, but if they approve of Trump it owns a piece of their brain.
Fixing these people’s broken minds and spirits is akin to worrying over the problem of why there is evil in the world. That takes up valuable time and leads nowhere. We need to struggle to remain in the majority (Trump’s 38% is a disturbing number), get on with the business of democracy, and work on holding on to the awesome gift of freedom and the promise of check and balances.
In other words, don’t let the bastards get to you – there is too much at stake.
I can see an executive war powers grab if Kim’s missiles are en route to Guam, Honolulu, Seattle et al., but I will never understand a proposed power grab to build a worthless wall as a sop to human ego. The symbolism of keeping others out also keeps us in, and this in an otherwise globalized economy with multinationals roaming the globe for cheap labor and capital with unlimited mobility seeking ever higher returns.
It’s as though Trump wishes to introduce medieval remedies to 21st century problems, problems that he himself has dreamed up in his narcissistic Otherworld and that do not exist in the real world you and I inhabit.
Walls, in short, and even if free, and aside from all the drama, don’t work. Case closed.
Juanita Jean recently posted a homophobic slur about Lindsey Graham that elicited some even cruder comments.
i read that as fast as i could, wow. i combind that with chris hedges new look at our superiority complex,if we and japan were in the midst of 1941 again, we would be a easy target. and we would lose. i hope the euros help us stay alive this time, because we may also be looking at china kicking us out of the western pacific as we know it. maybe we need a world coup to straighten out our whinny ass politics.
Perhaps the speech and the trip to the border – both of which Trump told the media he didn’t want to do but his advisers wanted him to do both – was another distraction from the very damaging news that Manafort was sharing sensitive political polling information during the campaign with Russians close to Putin. That polling told Russians what demographics and states to target – just in case they were interested. The walls are closing in on Putin’s puppets.
An AOL news headline yesterday stated that an A-list celebrity had called Pence an “obsequious little worm”. I had a general sense of the definition of “obsequious” but because the term stuck in my head for two days I looked up the definition; “fawning, servile”. Those terms seem weak and missing the Pence we in Indiana, and now the nation, are watching with interest. “ass-kisser” is more fitting but still doesn’t relay the problem that Pence has never had an original thought in his life…at least not in his political life. I believe we are in for a more serious problem if or when he replaces Trump; Mitch Daniels left his playbook for Pence to follow set guidelines as governor of Indiana. Trump has no playbook but operates from minute-to-minute and thought-to-thought and has never had an unexpressed thought in his life. He has no guidelines to leave for Pence to follow and Daniels’ playbook is obsolete; we will be facing possibly deeper problems from a Pence administration than the chaos we have today. We will be operating in a vacuum with a leader whose vapid ideas come from Bible stories of old. How do we prepare to make the leap from chaos to nothingness; like the empty chair Clint Eastwood stoke to at the Republican convention?
Just askin’
Sheila, we (my Wife and I) lost a couple of what we thought were friends for the past 26 years… I was in conversation with the mr. and we got to talking about the present situation and I expressed to him my belief that djt is a traitor to our nation. “I can’t agree with you there Manny.) that was that , my WIfe and his have worked together on projects in the area for 26 years… and they have completely cut ties. These are educated people! (my Wife is an ABD in Anthro from Columbia,) and they are trained in skills my older Son only could learn in the Navy! Smart people – and they love the orange fuck! (As my Sister-in-Law D. calls him…) My Wife was appalled! And then she remembered that her friend had a thing for thinking Sarah Palin a real winner!… just never sank in. And after the performance last night… on TV. If anyone can support that man, I don’t want to know them. (!)
Come on now, face up to it. The 40% doesn’t do a damn thing because WE lack CIVIC COURAGE. We’re a planetary disgrace. So we continue to follow Senator Chuck Schumer, knowing full well, that one false move on his part could start a move to cut off all aid to the State of Israel by the Religious Right.
We might try getting in touch with reality. But I have to admit, it’s probably too late. Nevertheless, it’s “better late than never.”