John McCain is dead. It will be a long time before we see the likes of him again and that is a tragedy for the nation. Our useless President sent his condolences to the McCain family without mentioning the Senator by name or referring to him in any way. This is par for the course. Everyone with any class has gone on record praising McCain for his courage, his intelligence, his political awareness and his moral stature. Few will ever forget his valiant stand on Trump’s pathetic attempt to crash the Affordable Care Act. It was one of t most dramatic moments of Senate history. But as much as that moment was lauded in the press and the nation it actually came in second to the moment that defined him as a man of morals and stature. That happened when he was campaigning for the Presidency and some woman in the audience stated that Barak Obama was an untrustworthy Arab McCain politely stopped her and told her she was wrong, that Obama was a good man of integrity with whom he simply had differences. That’s the moment that defined McCain as an American icon.
Bon Voyage John! You will be missed.
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There was an interesting discussion this week on Morning Joe about civility in government and how there is a big debate within the Republican Party about how the search for civility in our disagreements was a tool that the Democrats were using against them.
Now I’m not easily put off by any Republican reach for the bottom rung but this seems to be the real lower depths. The fact that there are actually enough people in the Republican Party that feel this is material for a debate is mindboggling. It’s hysterical that these fools really think a code of civil behavior is something , especially since civil behavior is something that has been absent from GOP dealings from the lowest member to the President since at least 2016. It’s no wonder these clowns are sticking with Trump. The President is the model for uncivilized behavior, a barely housebroken Neanderthal who most civilized people wouldn’t put up with as a pet.
And yet, a sizeable segment of the GOP applauds his lack of manners and degenerate behavior as something to aspire to. It’s no wonder this administration and its deplorable, yes deplorable, fan base are denigrated and looked down upon by anyone with any sense of manners, morals or intelligence. They are a stain on the fabric of the nation.
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Trump was at it again this week, announcing a great new trade deal with Mexico. Like everything else Trump does, he conceives it as the greatest, the hugest deal ever consummated in this area. What it actually is; is the biggest lies. Trump may announce the deal mainly because he needs some kind of accomplishment to show that he isn’t as useless as we all know he is but at this point there is no deal, no matter what he says.
Mexico wants Canada in any deal they make with us and so far Trump hasn’t even spoken to Trudeau. The only reason we are even in negotiations on this mess is, when he was a candidate, before he even knew what NAFT was, Trump announced that NAFTA had to go. Chances are he still doesn’t know what’s in NAFTA and chances are that any new deal will look suspiciously like NAFTA with a new name. The problem with Trump’s position is that NAFTA worked. It wasn’t 100% great for us but it was okay. The real problem is with China. That’s where Trump should be involved and he should be involved with the help of Mexico, Canada and Europe. This is all beginning to look suspiciously like the nuclear deal with North Korea or the world peace solution with Putin. It’s all bullshit as long as Trump is associated with it.
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With all the stuff that needs his attention and all of his former staffers that are convicted or about to be convicted, the moron in the White House can find nothing better to do with his time than roll back the last two years and attack, what else, Hillary’s emails. Yeah Donald, that’s what’s important. That’s what you should be spending your time on. Or maybe it is. Maybe that’s the only safe subject he is able to deal with. After all what damage can he do bitching about Hillary’s emails? To everyone else they are a dead issue. If he sticks to them at least he won’t be screwing anything important up. So the answer is for the fat liar to forget trade policy, forget immigration and forget taxes. In fact forget foreign policy all together and concentrate fulltime on those emails. It’s the only subject he can’t fuck up!
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Ron DeSantis is the choice of the bigot in the White House to run for governor of Florida. Big Surprise. DeSantis revealed his true racist nature the other day in what should have been a nice victory speech when he won the GOP primary in Florida. But like his mentor, DeSantis couldn’t resist displaying his racist colors when he made a crack about “monkeying up” what had to be done to make Florida a functioning state. The response from the Left was bombastic. From the Right we got a truckload of excuses. But whether he really did or did not understand what he was saying is irrelevant because if he didn’t, he’s too dumb to be governor of the third most populace state in the union. So the only question to be asked is, is he a racist or just too dumb to stand upright? Either answer disqualifies DeSantis for the job he is seeking. Now, we have to hope that there are enough smart voters in Florida to recognize this.
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So Trump is involved in another fight. This time it’s with Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, a former Republican congressman and former friend, now his enemy. This time it’s about whether or not Trump is smarter than University of Alabama students. It seems that Trump made a crack about Jeff Sessions and how because he had a southern accent he wasn’t very smart. I’m not sure how that traveled to Alabama and it’s student performance but Scarborough who went to Alabama and seems overly sensitive about that university’s well-deserved academic reputation decided to make a big deal about it. He should have just left it at the fact that they have the best college football team money can buy but he couldn’t leave it alone.
So now Joe has offered to pick any five hundred Bama students and let Trump pick any one to debate. Yes, it’s already out of hand. Does anyone see this as possibly beneath the Presidency of the United States? Trump doesn’t think so. Watch for future Tweets!
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The many ceremonies dedicated to the passing of John McCain would have appeared t be overkill except for the fact that they were absolutely necessary. Throughout the week as the praises went on, Donald Trump was conspicuously absent. This, like the entire event, had been McCain’s plan. It was a rehashing of his legacy as contrasted to the crass, cowardly, classless history that Trump has disgraced himself with. Each bit of dialog was, as it should be, a deliberate affront to Trump. But in our current milieu they were absolutely necessary to show our crude President how this nation says farewell to a hero and a gentleman. Every speaker, no matter what he said was sticking it to the fat liar in the White House. Yeah, it seemed to go on forever but it was a must. Every time I watched some luminary praise John McCain, I could envision an enraged Trump throwing Jeff Sessions or some intern across the room in fury. It was joyful.
The Sunday morning pundits made a big deal about the absence of Trump even as they all knew that McCain had specifically been banned him. All the good things that were said about McCain by a long line of memorial speakers may have been true, but one thing was absolutely certain right to the end. He sure knew how to hold a grudge.
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Listening to Ron Johnson the hack GOP Senator from Wisconsin spout about the 4,1% surge in GDP in the last quarter, one wouldn’t think that Obama had surpassed that quarterly goal four timeseven as he was pulling the country out of a depression handed to us by Republican George Bush and his evil crony Dick Cheney. But that’s just what happened and Johnson, trying to make Trump’s numbers something extraordinary, is just another example of how lacking in accomplishment this pathetic administration really is. Sure, 4.1% is good, but them how great does that make Obama’s economic policy, the one that the GOP is always denigrating?
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Trump was ranting about Jeff Sessions again this week. It seems he hates Sessions but is afraid to fire him because of the tornado that would result. So he was asked just what he wanted Sessions to do and he ran off a list of all the people he thought might cause him problems or who he wanted to get even with such as , Comey, Mueller, Stzrok, etc. along with any political enemies he had. It’s amazing how Trump has no idea what the people in his own Cabinet do or how the Justice Department works. He has no idea that Sessions isn’t his own personal prosecutor whose only job is to get even with anyone who gets in Trump’s way.
Maybe it would be a good idea for the 25% that still view Trump as an icon to also understand that the thought process by which their President operates is exactly the same as any petty dictator. If these overly stupid people really want to live in the Philippines I’m sure they could easily find some desperate citizen of Mindanao who would dearly love to switch places with them.
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Bret Kavanaugh had a bad day Tuesday at his Supreme Court hearing but no part of it went worse than when he rebuffed the father of a teenage girl who was murdered at the Parkland massacre. I’ve now watched the tape of the incident over a dozen times and listened to Joe Scarborough castigate Kavanaugh for almost a half hour. It’s not cut and dried. There is more than one conclusion one can arrive at when watching what happened.
The initial impression one has while watching the tape is that Kavanaugh snubbed the father, Fred Guttenberg and disdainfully walked away. But closer scrutiny gives us options of a more Kavanaugh friendly explanation. Maybe he didn’t realize who this man was and amid the chaos of the hearing just didn’t want to encourage someone who may have been a nut. This might be a legitimate reading of what happened but there is no excuse for the bungled follow-up.
No matter how incompetent his handlers, at some point, there had to have been some recognition of what had really happened. At that point Kavanagh should have extended an invitation to meet Guttenberg so that, if nothing else, he could apologize. Instead he sent security out to harass the father of a murdered child.
This act was so Trumpian in nature that to this writer it immediately eliminated Kavanaugh as a potential judge. We already have one crass madman in the White House; we don’t need little models of him on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh’s lack of basic human decency should exclude him as a potential judge of other human beings or the processes by which we live on this planet. No, the Democrats don’t have enough votes to dismiss Kavanaugh but surely, of the 51 Republicans in the Senate there are at least two who have the human decency to dismiss a man as lacking in human decency as Bret Kavanaugh.