Bits & Pieces #144

With all the real problems facing this country and with all the reasons why people say things, the media’s obsession with what Kamala Harris said to Joe Biden in the Democratic debates is nothing but counter productive. It was a debate. It was Kamala’s job to try and win. That debate is over and she’s now running as his VP, a VP that he chose. Get over it people and get over all the other silly BS like differences over healthcare delivery and how much to defund the police. It’s all a distraction from the important stuff. Grow up, cut the ridiculous PC bullshit and grow up. No one is 100% in agreement with anyone on anything.  If you haven’t figured that out by now, you are dumb enough to vote for Donald Trump.

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The reaction to the latest police murder was as expected, until it became more. That’s when the sports teams of America began to walk out on their games in righteous protest. We need more of that and less of violent street demonstrations that give the Trump campaign ammunition to ignore what some of our police are doing and just rant against the lawlessness of our protestors.

But walking out on your job in protest is not the only answer. That protest will be wasted unless those protesting make clear what they want. Saying, “get out and vote,” isn’t enough. The protestors must tell those they influence who to vote for.  They must tell their followers to get out and vote against Donald Trump.

No Trump didn’t start police brutality but he is the current voice that most supports it.

If Joe Biden isn’t elected in November all your protests will have been in vain because Donald Trump just doesn’t hear you. Not only doesn’t he hear you, he doesn’t care what you have to say. Trump is a bigot and a racist who just doesn’t see anything wrong with a black man getting shot, especially if it’s by a white policeman.

This week a black man was shot in the back seven times on the streets of Kenosha Wisconsin while his three small children watched.  A day or so later a white man carrying an automatic weapon on those same streets was never approached by local police, thereby giving him the opportunity to kill two people before citizens disarmed him. That is Trump’s America. You can protest your ass off but it won’t do one little bit of good if you don’t get him out of office.

There are many haters out there, evil, mentally crippled racists, but there will be no way to control them as long as Donald Trump is in office because he depends on them to generate the chaos that allows him to stay in the White House.

As a sidelight, it seems that the Kenosha police department is not infected by one or two bad cops but is a fish that stinks from the head. How else does one explain one cop shooting of Jacob Blake as he tried to get into a car that contained his three small children while any number of other cops ignored the deranged, armed and very white Kyle Rittenhouse until he shot and killed two people. And how does one explain why the paralyzed Blake was handcuffed to his bed while the punk Rittenhouse was given cookies and ice cream in jail? That department and its leaders have an awful lot to answer for.

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All politicians lie occasionally, most exaggerate a good part of the time, but we have never had an entire administration led by its president that lied so much that a major network required a fact checking mechanism for its broadcast of a party’s convention rhetoric. Such was the case with the Republican Convention just past. And as if to make MSNBC’s need become reality, the Retrumplicans appeared on camera and lied from beginning to end. They didn’t just lie about facts; they lied about intentions, presumptions and established history. They lied about everything except their names. But the most massive lie, the most damaging one to the people they were addressing was definitely about the pandemic. Just about every man and woman who spoke outlined a false history of when the pandemic was recognized, how that recognition was treated, and just what was done about it.

The Retrumplican version of history has the president immediately recognizing the threat, understanding its implications and organizing his troops to meet and defeat the virus. This is, of course, is in direct contradiction of the facts and even of Trump’s own words. This is a recurring theme in almost every instance in which a Retrumplican is forced to deal with, or comment on, events that happened during or just before the Trump organization took over the White House. Did Trump encourage a foreign government, specifically the Russians, to give him help during the last election and is he asking for it again? The Retrumplicans will tell you that this is ridiculous but Donald Trump has said as much in his own words on quite a number of occasions.

The administration is trying desperately to sell Trump as the Law & Order candidate but he has surrounded himself with an assortment of convicted criminals that would send any Mafioso to jail on a Rico conviction.

The Retrumplicans tell us that the Democrats want to ban cars and this will cost a million jobs. This is stupid. You can’t run a country without transportation. What the Democrats want to do is reduce the use of fossil fuels, which have poisoned our atmosphere and are causing the planet to burn up. I use the word reduce rather than eliminate those fuels because there will always be a need for some amount of fossil fuel but we no longer need it for energy or vehicle fuel, which are its two biggest markets.

But the fossil fuel toadies scream that we will throw a million workers in that field out of jobs. True! But we will create 10 million new jobs in renewables. Which is better?

The lies that spewed out of the mouths of the Trump family and the rest of the sycophants at the GOP convention were not just the normal kind of political lies. They were a new breed of lies, unconcerned with the real damage they could do to the American public, unaware of the damage they might do to national security and interested only in solidifying a place for Donald Trump, the man whose real slogan is Make America Lie More.

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Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf was on the tube this Sunday, trying to sell us on the idea that he has no idea why one black man in Kenosha was shot in the back seven times and then a white guy who had just shot three people in the street with an automatic weapon was ignored by police. This BS may sell in the White House but it drops dead with the thinking part of America.

We all know that kind of evasion is all part of the Retrumplican BIG LIE that wants to sell us the fantasy that this failing America in which we currently live isn’t Trump’s fault, that Barak Obama and Joe Biden are somehow at fault for the almost four years of hell and failure that have been the Trump administration.

When the guy in office points to the chaos around him and says, as does Trump, that his opponent will cause America to look like it does today, he is depending on the ignorance of those who support him to once again make the wrong decision.

Before he was elected Trump declared that he would make this a safe nation. Now almost four years later, this nation is far less safe than it was when he was elected.  There is rioting in the streets and nations all over the world are on the brink of war even as Iran and North Korea advance toward nuclear capability. How is this anyone’s doing but his?

Of course Wolf, like all Trumps appointees, has no answer to anything. He is as useless as tits on a bull.

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At least twice on the tube this Sunday, the question was asked, “What can Biden do to stop the demonstrations and the violence?” To begin with, he will attack the problems that caused the demonstrations, something that Trump has not done, something about which Trump has actually done the opposite.

Right at this moment the principle cause of demonstrations around this country is the rampant murder of innocent black men by elements of our police departments. Has Trump done anything to hold those police departments responsible? No, not a thing and the carnage continues. So we have demonstrations because that is the people’s method of having their voices heard on every day except Election Day, and that only comes once every four years.

You want to stop the demonstrations, show the people you are doing something about the problem. Show them you are doing something to change the police culture, to make them responsive to the populations they serve. Trump hasn’t done this and Biden will, and just by the attempt, Biden will cut back those demonstrations to almost nothing. No they won’t stop completely because there are always stupid people on all sides that just don’t get it. Hell, there are people in a district in Texas who just elected some idiot named Greene who thinks the government is being run by pedophiles operating out of a pizza joint and that only Trump can save us from them. Of course her fantasy would make more sense if Trump were running the pedophiles but that’s something for Ghislaine Maxwell to tell us about.

But I digress. The point is that every problem facing this country can be solved by some intelligent action. It’s just that Trump and his lackeys have neither the intelligence nor the functionality to solve anything. That starts with violence against blacks and spreads out to the pandemic, the environment, the economy and joblessness. You name it, Trump caused it, or made it worse and he has no solutions. And if you think he does, you are as big a part of the problem as anything else.

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This weekend Chris Christie tried to sell us on the idea that Trump has to make this election about issues. I laughed so hard I thought my pants would never dry. There is not a single issue that Trump can win on at this point. He was strong on the economy and to be fair he still has numbers in that department, but this is a guy who was handed a thriving economy and because of the way he handled the pandemic, tariffs and other trade problems, he has now driven our economy to the level of the Great Depression. If he can’t even keep a good economy afloat what other issue does he have a shot at?  He’s already a loser on the pandemic, he’s long been a loser on healthcare, he promised a wall and didn’t deliver, he said he was going to be an infrastructure president and he hasn’t put up so much as a stop sign. He is presiding over the most racist Presidency since before the Civil War and governments all over the world are laughing at us. What more can he do to destroy this country, drop an atom bomb on Washington?