Notes on Madness

 

It’s a fact, no matter what the parties want;the next election will be about Trump. Are you afraid he will be impeached? Do you think he should be impeached? Is he the most dishonest and incompetent leader in US history? Does that matter at all as long as he makes us think we’re greater? Is he a liar, racist, misogynist, bigot, egomaniac or isn’t that important?

*****

Iraqi leader Abadi, a Shiite, is unifying the Sunnis and the Kurds. He has gone from 5% approval rating to 71% approval rating in a couple of years by running a fair government. ISIS has been defeated and things are looking up. It there any way we can learn a lesson from this or are we really too stupid to ever back the right government in international affairs?

*****

I don’t have to repeat the idiotic statement that White House aide Kelly Sadler made about John McCain. Everybody knows about it and those who have some hint of intelligence or respect understand it as the bottom of the Trump style-setting barrel. This stupid child is an aide to Trump. She takes her cues from Trump. If she had been an aide to Obama or Carter or Truman the concept of such a sentiment would never have occurred to her, but it is in the Trump White House where concepts like civility, respect and manners are non-existent that the author of such a comment is protected and allowed to go on and do something just as stupid again.

Meanwhile the White House is worried, not about what Sadler said but about the fact that one of their defective layabouts leaked it to the public. It never occurs to anyone there that if such a disgusting, outrageous comment had not been made, there would be no danger of leaking it. But that’s the problem with this pathetic presidency; they worry about ego and image not conten or substance. That is what’s wrong with Trump and his whole administration.

***

A woman named Salena Zito, author of The Great Revolt,has written about the Trump base and during an interview on Face the Nationthat base was repeatedly referred to as “the heart of America.” Just because it is a smaller segment of political aspiration or because it dwells toward the geographical center of the country, that doesn’tmake anything“the heart of” anything. This group of bigots, religious fanatics, misogynists and racists who hate anyone smarter or at least more able to express themselves, is not the heartof anything. It’s more like the large intestine.

Zito claims that Trump’s base is happy with him. They are willing to accept 13% of the benefits from the tax bill while 87% goes to the rich. This just proves how dumb they are. They are happy, she says, about the appointment of Supreme Court Judge Gorsich, but that appointment was made possible by Mitch McConnell, long before Trump even became a serious contender.  They are happy with what they call the new religious freedom but that appears, only to be freedom to be bigots. Raving against intellectuals because you can’t understand what those intellectuals are talking about doesn’t make you the salt of the earth, it makes you the dog droppings. If you could forget your religious bigotry, your racist hatred and your frustration at your societal failures for just long enough to try to understand what is holding you back from your goals, you might just find the answers to why your life is such a mess and maybe, just maybe, you would see that it is your fault, not that of some desperate minority scrambling to make a living or some person who may not believe in your God but still believes that he or she has a right to live a decent life on their own terms.

Most important though, is that you might see that the man who now leads you, has sold you a bill-of-goods and that he has absolutely zero interest in making your life better unless he can find a way to have your betterment enrich his. Yes, you believed his lies and considering what went before him, that is in some ways understandable, but now you have to look at what he has done and what he is doing with a here-to-fore unused clarity and you have to realize that he just isn’t interested in what you need for a better life. Nothing he has done since entering office is aimed at fixing your life. Everything he has done is aimed at enhancing the lives of the already rich.

*****

Biggest laugh of the week. Sam Brownback, Trump administration Ambassador for Religious Freedom is nudging the racist in the White House to drop sanctions on China for their violations of their own people’s religious freedom. How exactly does that work? Does Brownback make a chart of the way Trump is handling religious freedom in this country and then use it to attack China? And how do the Muslims of the world feel about that? Is Brownback insane or just too stupid to stand upright?

*******

The equating of Donald Trump’s presidency with the Chancellorship of Adolph Hitler seems to be gaining momentum as Trump lunges from one insupportable action to another. The torture of children in order to gain leverage in his quest for an unneeded, unwanted, cost ineffective wall has now put Trump into a category with any number of political monsters including the likes of Pol Pot and Adolph.

But that’s not the whole picture. Clive Irving had a seriously effective article in The Daily Beastback in April where he pointed out many parallels between the rise of Hitler and our own little would-be dictator. I feel that these equations cannot be taken too lightly.  If someone had paid closer attention from 1925 to 1933 there might never have been a Dictator called Hitler. The parallels between what went on in Germany in those years and what is starting to go on here are just too close to ignore. That’s why it bothers me when other writers and pundits like John Podhoretz try so hard to steer us away from any comparison of the two eras. What’s particularly interesting is that most of those who follow the Podhoretz line are Jewish. Who should be more aware of the parallels than a Jew? Who should be more sensitive to them? It’s a very strange attitude. It’s almost like you can’t draw parallels between the Holocaust and anything else. It’s like, this was our catastrophe, keep your hands off it.  Nothing can compare to it. Okay, I may not understand that but I can’t argue with it. But that doesn’t mean that something so self-evident shouldn’t be spoken of. If everyone just looks the other way, no one will move to stop what Trump is trying to do.

 

This is an insane egomaniac whose actions follow no logical path and whose desires are unimpeded by any moral values. It’s hard to see why any logical viewer would no be aware of the parallels between what went on in Germany from 1925 to 1933and what is happening here at this time. Everything Trump has done at home, from his support of racist, misogynist, bigoted white fascist groups, to his systematic destruction of the environment, to his anti-immigration policies at a time when we are desperately in need of immigrant labor, points to a nationalist takeover of our Democratic system.

In a strange contradiction, Trump constantly attacks the justice department and our system of justice even as one of his most concentrated efforts is to stock our Federal judgeships and the Supreme Court with his own, friendly nominees.

On the international side it’s even worse. He is hard at work destroying an international trade structure that we built after WWII and which has held up successfully for the western world ever since. He is abandoning trade deals with allies; opening up markets to China, our chief competitor, and creating mindless tariffs that will ultimately cost American working families their jobs and their savings.

Even as this mad bomber is costing the world its economic balance he is looking to break up working relationships with our friends and allies, while setting up unplanned, un-thought out meetings with our adversaries in which he carelessly gives away concessions we have worked to acquire for years. Kim and Putin have already proved that all you need to be buddies with Trump is to tell him how big his hands are.

It’s time everybody paid attention to this destructive madman. If not there will come a time when he has destroyed our Democracy and we will not longer have the ability to stop him.

******

Just to prove that their incompetence in hearings matches their incompetence in passing legislation, the Republicans from the House dove into a set of hearings on Bob Mueller’s investigation and being the fools that they are, they decided to attack FBI director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Obviously the GOP has never heard about bringing a knife to a gunfight because all they brought to these hearings was their meager wit and that was light years away from what they needed to cross swords with Wray and Rosenstein.

The three most pathetically inept and offensive were some goon named Gohmert who could barely walk and chew gum, Jim Jordan who in the process of attacking Rosenstein accused him of using his powerful position to threaten his people by indicting their phone calls. You could see it coming a block away. Rod leaned back in his chair and quietly pointed out that you can’t indict phone calls, something that Jordan should have known and something that got a raucous round of laughs. Even a dummy like Jordan understood that he had just made a fool of himself and faded into the woodwork.

One would have thought that was enough for the floundering GOP forces but there’s always one more asshole that hasn’t discovered his place in the garbage heap. In this case it was the ever-dim Trey Gowdy. Gowdy decided to take on Rosenstein on the topic of the Mueller investigation taking too long and then ended his spiel with the incredibly stupid statement that no one had been indicted yet and the demand for immediate action on indictments or closure of the investigation. This is a guy who that had been a former prosecutor and should have been bright enough to see the cesspool he was stepping into. This time around though, he was facing not an indigent defendant but an experienced prosecutor who never even had to point out that there were plenty of indictments and that they were accompanied by guilty pleas fromFlynn, Papadopoulos and Gates and that Manafort, the man who ran Trump’s campaign was currently sitting in a jail cell.

What Gowdy didn’t know, probablybecause he was too lazy to do his research, or too stupid to understand the facts, wasthat the investigation he was bitching about has been in progress for just 397 days. That was nothing compared to previous such investigations like Iran/Contra which had run 2420 days or Whitewater which ran2978 days. Interestingly enough, Gowdy’s own unsuccessful Benghazi investigation ran 2 ½ years.It nevercame up with anything indictable and it didn’t finish until after Hillary had lost the election. Gowdy’s decision not to seek re-election seems to be the best decision he has made since he ran for office. He wants to return to being a judge. God Help the poor suckers that come up before this biased, witless fool.