Joe Scarborough was raving this week about how, if we want to get our message across, we have to engage Middle America. He did a whole spiel about how Johnny Carson and Mary Tyler Moore showed us that if we want t reach most Americans we have to appeal to those in the mid-west.
This is pure bullshit. Carson and Moore are certainly American icons but they existed in the entertainment field, not politics or government. What Scarborough was raving about, the progressive’s penchant for looking down on the mid-west mind, comes from the fact that most progressives do not understand why the mid-west conservative doesn’t seem to understand what is really good for him. Progressives see the conservative vote, at least the middle and lower economic part of that vote as constantly voting for candidates that are destined to betray them.
Conservatives filled the House with Tea party representatives and they turned out to know nothing about how government works or how to get any legislation passed. Conservatives voted for them again and they just stopped doing anything leaving us with six years of nothing. Then they voted for Trump, mainly because he promised that he would put them back to work and now they will realize that the jobs he promised them just do not exist anymore. So until these permanent victims get some smarts it is almost impossible for any thinking progressive to understand how to appeal to them, except to take a page from the GOP handbook and lie till their tongues fall out.
So there it is, Joe, that 27% of registered voters who voted Trump into office seem to be too dumb to appeal to, unless you are willing to lie to the suckers the way Trump did and is still doing. Sure we need a wall; despite the fact that we already have one that covers all the wall buildable land along the border. Sure Mexico will pay for it through a 20% border tax, but that will increase the cost of goods to American consumers who will then see that they are the ones who have actually paid for it. Yes, the same people who haven’t been able to come up with a replacement for Obamacare for the last seven years are now, miraculously, going to come up with that replacement despite the fact that they don’t want to replace it. Of course there were more people at Trumps inauguration then the last four, they were just painted to look like concrete.
And still, they remain true believers. And Joe Scarborough truly believes that the progressives can appeal to them with the truth. These people can’t handle the truth! More important they just don’t want to hear it.
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Trump has spent the week trying to live up to some of his campaign promises and being crucified by them. The Wall is the most disastrous. It’s something that he can’t seem to abandon, probably because all he did for a year was say that he would build it and that Mexico would pay for it. The line worked like a dream in front of the shit kickers who don’t think, but to anyone with half a brain it makes absolutely no sense.
The biggest argument against the wall is that for the last five or six years we have had a negative balance of immigration from Mexico. Very simply that means that more people are going back to Mexico and South America than are coming in. Why? Mainly because the jobs that are available to immigrant labor, especially illegal immigrant labor, are no longer available. They are the same jobs that the white middle class that voted for Trump lost. They weren’t lost to cheap labor but to robots. They are gone and not coming back. There is also the fact that Mexico’s economy is doing very well and there is work there for those that want it. They no longer have to sneak cross the border anymore to earn a miniscule living. Only Trump seems too dumb to understand this. No we don’t need a wall but he has made so much noise about it that his ego won’t let him back off. And the taxpayers will be out a billion bucks.
Trump may think he knows the book on negotiation, he did in fact write one, but he knows very little about people and is driven strongly by an ego that brooks no disagreement. Not qualities that we would desire in the presidency.
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Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, the asshole fascist that advises him, have attacked the media as the opposition party and made it clear that the media is definitely their enemy. Does that include Fox News, the butt boys of the administration? Yes, this view is unconstitutional but when did that ever bother the Orangutan? A strong media is the hallmark of any great nation. The first thing a fascist dictator does when he seizes power is to limit or completely destroy the free press. This is exactly the goal of the Trump administration. If you’re too dumb to argue your point you don’t want anyone making a point that disagrees with you.
What’s really strange about this attack is that it actually isn’t about the political opposition of the press but about the fact that Trump with his thin hide, sees them as insulting him and he has already established that any insult, no matter how miniscule, must be revenged. We have elected a childish, egomaniac that displays all the adult sensibilities of a bad puppy. Now let’s just hope we can keep him from shitting on the rug.
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Trump is making a lot of noise about voter fraud, claiming that there were over three million illegal aliens who voted for Hillary Clinton. Where does this come from? Anyone with even minimum intelligence understands that it comes from Trump’s ego. It drives him crazy that Hillary actually got three million (There’s that number again) more votes than he did.
A closer look into voter fraud over the years reveals it to be almost nonexistent. There have actually been four incidents in the last few years; four, out of millions of votes cast. And oh yeah, one of the four was a woman in the mid-west who voted for Trump twice.
Of course there are also all those dead people that Trump claims are voting against him. It’s true; there are a lot of dead people on the voter roles. Inconsiderate people just keep dying and never bother to take their names off the voter roles when they are doing it. This seems to have come as a huge surprise to Trump. The fact that nobody is voting in the names of those dead people hasn’t occurred to him, but then neither have a lot of other things. If he’s really worried about it the fix is very easy. All the authorities have to do is hook up the death certificate info to the voter roles and let the computers do their jobs. Course, I’m sure that never occurred to Trump either.
And back to voting twice; Tiffany Trump, Trump’s daughter is registered in two states, as are Steve Bannon and Steve Mnuchin. Does this mean that Mnuchin votes in California and then flies to NY to vote again? If you follow Trumpian logic that’s exactly what’s happening so why aren’t the FBI picking up the Presidential daughter, the nominated Secretary of the Treasury and the President’s lying chief advisor? Ridiculous, you say? Not if we use Trump’s own thought process, but then we have already seen how ridiculous Trump’s thought process really is; not just about voting fraud, but about the Wall, immigration, almost everything.
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No one was shocked when Fox news reported that the gunman in the Quebec Mosque was a Moroccan Muslim terrorist, even when he turned out to be a white neo-Nazi. That’s just Fox News and it’s also what many other news organizations often do in their zeal to get to a story first but when Sean Spicer used the “alternative facts”, to back up Trump’s Muslim ban, it was another example of what a sleazy administration we have in Washington. This blog felt sorry for Spicer after his day one catastrophe but he is turning out to be, more and more, a guy who never looked at a lie he couldn’t embrace. Between Trump, Spicer and Conway, we may never get another true fact from the White House and that will be the death of the Trump administration.
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One of the principal attributes that Donald Trump ran on in the election just past was his competence. He attacked the Obama administration and all Democrats on the idea that they had made bad deals, run incompetent operations and generally been dumb and pathetic. He on the other hand would be sharp as a tack, super functional and the most competent president in the history of the country.
Welcome to the Trump administration. The very first move by the Trumpets and the Donald himself that had immediate results has turned out to be one of the great clusterf**ks of current history. I‘m talking about the Muslim ban, of course. The White House that was going to show us all how to do things effectively did just about everything wrong when it issued the ban the other day. I’m not talking about philosophy or morals here, I’m speaking only of the functionality of the way the ban was implemented but we also have to take into account whether nor not the ban would make our country more or less safe.
The answer, according to almost everyone with experience and that includes members of Trump’s brand new cabinet is a resounding less. First it doesn’t take into account many countries that have sent the majority of terrorists to this country, especially, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but more important it gives our enemies a huge step up in propaganda against us. It helps the agents of terrorism to recruit. All they have to do is point to the US banning Muslims and they have the greatest recruiting tool imaginable.
Did Trump and his toadies even consider this? It sure doesn’t look that way, but more important than that and certainly more pertinent to this blog is the blundering, staggering, idiotic way the whole process was carried out. There were so many blunders it hard to know where to start but let’s take a first shot at Trump himself who got on the tube and instead of telling the nation that he was announcing a small program aimed at tightening the immigration process in order to make the nation safer, announced a huge ban on those coming in from selected Muslim countries and then, instead of leaving it at that, thereby allowing his lawyers to have some ammunition in the coming fight against religious based bans went on to say that we were going to give Christians specifically, instead of just minorities, preference in entry. That was a huge mistake that will be evident in all future litigation.
It seems the process was developed by Steve Miller and Steve Bannon; two of Trump’s more Nazified advisors. They released it on Friday but had no clarification, nor even a printed version of it until Saturday. No advance notice was given to any of the agencies tasked with carrying out the order. Sean Spicer idiotically explained this in a short interview when he said that the administration wanted to keep it under their shirt so no one could push up their travel plans and invade America. You can’t fix stupid!
With no advance notice the government agencies tasked with carrying out the process were completely unprepared for the situation, had no standard protocol with which to guide them and chaos followed. When the people at Homeland Security contacted the White House for clarification on Green Card problems, they got conflicting information from the officials there and then Steve Miller, a diaper dandy with vast governmental experience from his whole 10 days in the White House, overruled HS on the green card situation when he should have been in a closet holding his teddy bear.
If Trump and Kushner have any functional abilities left they will fire Miller, a product of the bowels of Jeff Sessions and send Steve Bannon along with him before the hubris of these two idiots does serious damage to our nation and our national image.