Retribution by Trump

Once in a while I'll stumble onto a post on some conservative website and be floored by the hatred and irrationality. It is truly horrifying. The right-wing has had its way in America for decades and is sabotaging the government and systematically disenfranchising Democrats and especially the poorer, more ethnic and diverse populations they represent and yet somehow these hapless and powerless people get blamed.

Fox News and all the other objectifiers and hate-mongers are at work here. But Democrats have taken working people for granted and their contempt for cultural conservatives is obvious. Working people, as most others, will not respect someone in any context if they don't fight back when kicked in the teeth. Hillary couldn't reach them. Few Democrats can with their deracinated, bland, seemingly convictionless spiel. 

Say what you will about Republicans, they have an incredible drive to win. And a drive to screw everyone but the rich, wreck the country and ensure there is never any accountability for their crimes. The post I read recounted a Trump voter's rationale for his continuing support which was retribution. All he wanted was to get back at the left. He said so explicitly and, I will say, with eloquence and venom. But for what?

It's bizarre, since the left hasn't had their way for decades but that's where the lies, hate-mongering and tribalism of Fox and other conservative media come in. Still, Democrats won't fight back. They want to play nice. Fuck that. It gets construed by everyone as a lack of courage and conviction. It's time to fight back. Donald Trump is president and Americans can't even tell right from wrong any more. What does it take?

God Declares Texas Spiritual Disaster Area

Good job, God. Texas is an epicenter for more than flooding, being a proud home of the prosperity gospel and mega-churches with pastors living in mansions. By their logic and that of the climate deniers Texas has been decreed spiritually corrupt and unfit. Repent, Texans, once you've swum to safety. 

Cut Taxes and Deregulate Everything Miracles Will Occur

Ted Cruz had better be scrambling around trying to find some money to rebuild Texas. The points of light are all shorted out by now, I'm sure, in the areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. Tight-fisted Ted, always accusing everyone else of raiding federal funds, including victims of Hurricane Sandy, will be walking around with his palms upraised. 

Deregulate and cut taxes, that's what I say. Surely a private sector miracle will rebuild Texas for everyone, rich and poor alike, just as Republicans have been claiming for decades in relation to the national economy. Some of us are still waiting on that miracle but Texas is special and not to be messed with, as they are always anxious to assert. 

Good luck, boys. 

Texas Parade Float Massacre

Let's say you're one of those moronic, corrupt, climate-denying, Trump-voting, evangelical, so-called Christians from Texas whose life is now underwater. How ya' liking your apocalypse? Have you seen Jesus riding by on a parade float? Or, maybe, Sarah Palin? Elvis? 

Rejoice, idiot. The end is near.

Donald Will Never Stop Playing the Dick Card

He thinks it got him where he is. Being born incredibly rich got him where he is. Donald was an outsider and regarded as an upstart and a boor in New York. He's incapable of learning from this because he isn't acting like a dick he is a dick. He can't behave any other way. 

I Do Renounce Satan

Almost every group and faction has an institutional memory of being a minority or being oppressed. Christians can recall many such episodes beginning with the life of Jesus. Jesus was, after all, executed. Christians ought to think twice about capital punishment for this reason alone but of course they love it and now they are increasingly applying their sadism in other ways to average, innocent citizens, deliberately exempting the rich. 

I'm speaking of evangelicals here. Power necessarily entails responsibility. There were arguments in the Bush years about where he ranked among incompetent presidents. The question biases the answer, in Bush's favor. Bush's trainwreck presidency has to be viewed in relation to America's power at the time and its ability to do good or evil. Bush and America had a responsibility to ourselves and the world and it was an epic failure. 

Many people, including me, thought the election of Obama was a tacit admission of our sins and a kind of penance through realignment. Evangelical, so-called Christians however weren't having it. It is clear now they regard their alliance with Satan--Donald Trump--as a strategic move. But they aren't holding their noses and nobody partners with the devil. In dealings with the devil the devil always runs the show. Their souls are well sold. 

We have responsibilities inherent in our success and are fleeing from them headlong. We have the power of cultural adults and the consciences of infants. Who better to embody this than Trump, the deceiver. I thought Bush was the nadir--that it couldn't get any worse without complete societal collapse. Maybe we are there and we have evangelical, ersatz Christians to thank more than anyone. They have abdicated any sense of morality. 

Kelly Consolidates Power

Another high-level nutcase is out at the White House, a further indication that General Kelly might be able to establish order short of the instability and incompetence of the president himself. This only distracts from the main point, that Republicans have sabotaged and gerrymandered the government out of existence. It exists and it doesn't, being an illegal version of itself and so in some ways worse than whatever the result of an outright coup or overthrow might be.

Then the old ideals would probably be intact and the lines of disagreement would be clear. Now it is all confusion as Republicans market a bogus, illegitimate and ersatz version of Americanism to a susceptible, lazy and less than well-informed public. Failures and shortcomings are inevitable and it's no news to anyone that Americans have never lived up to their ideals or even the terms of their own laws and founding documents. But this is something different.

The ideals themselves are largely gone, lost in a torrent of Republican lies. Kelly's legitimization of Trumpism is the worst thing that can happen, Trump representing not just a challenge but the complete inversion of the American ethos. Democrats are fighting the transgender wars--maybe the final, ignominious battle in their complete defeat, alienating even true believers in the party with the incredible strategic stupidity of the effort. Trump is baiting them along.

Trump Pardons Fellow Asshole

Donald Trump has pardoned Joe Arpaio, another guy who thinks he is above the law and that he answers to no one. Both men bound themselves to certain duties, in oaths of office. They then ignored the vows and did what they wanted. Each man seems to enjoy power, conflict and cruelty as ends in themselves. 

Who Gets the Mantle

You will never convince me there aren't huge father issues at the heart of our darkness. All the recent Republican candidates for the presidency--running to be the national dad--have had very powerful fathers against whom, presumably, they were unconsciously weighing and finding themselves wanting. And then there were Obama and Clinton, who came from nothing.

Republicans wanted to destroy them before they were even in office. They were the usurpers, the false daddies, not because they weren't competent but because they were, thereby challenging the advantages of privilege. It operates independently of competence. Witness George Bush, being rehabilitated as we speak, a man of inconceivable functional worthlessness.

But he's our national dolt and so we find ways to try to like him to spare ourselves an audit of his crimes. They are our crimes now and the most important thing is to avoid a reckoning. And notice how this corresponds with Calvinism and its arbitrary form of salvation. It must be shown that good works never get you anywhere, so Calvinists are reassured by incompetence.

Everything is about luck, inheritance and the self-justifications of wealth and worldly success, the opposite of the founding ethos of the American State, whose originators knew the failures of primogeniture, hereditary rule and unaccountable authority. So there's a social corollary to these individual problems, what group among our generation gets to run the show.

The New Manichean Nation

America's fatal flaw is its self-righteousness. Everything ultimately gets distilled into an overly simplified frame of reference with a known result--we are always the good guys.

Salk vs. The Bomb

It's no wonder Americans are ambivalent about science. On the one hand, there's Salk. Characteristically, we overreacted--thinking there would be a cure, or vaccine, for everything from bursitis to bipolar disorder. 

On the other hand there's Hiroshima, my friend, and the implication of planetary annihilation. Again, typically, we failed to employ dialectical, rational and integrative thinking, preferring the bipolar route over balance. 

We insist on either utopian optimism and idealism or fear and despair. We can't think clearly about anything because we aren't thinking at all, having reverted to tribalism in everything, even science. It's utterly un-American.

Can Losers be Triumphalists?

Triumphalism is my standard for the removal of statues. It's weird to think of Confederates, the losers, as being triumphalists but in truth they never capitulated. Southern white people sure as hell triumphed in subjugating blacks. Ask some older black people. 

Yankees don't see that the South became a terrorist substate as Reconstruction failed. The Civil War never ended there. Following desegregation the battle moved to Washington as neo-confederates and their allies slowly worked to install an illegal government.  

Now we are the new Confederacy. Confederate values--property and privilege--are everything in today's Washington. Money is everything. The government is for sale. Hate is in the air. Every day the effort to establish permanent minority rule goes forward. 

Trump the Sap

Speaking for myself, Trump makes me not want to do anything. He saps my energy and drive. Why bother to work hard when Trump and the Republicans are trying to blow everything up.

Welcome to Democracy (paywall)

Welcome to "Democracy." Please insert your credit card. 

Somewhere Off the Coast of Sanity

I can't think of a good, extendable analogy right now but the battles being fought by the left are minor slave revolts within the confines of a conquered nation. Democrats have been so utterly defeated and swept from the field and they can't see it. 

We are granting assumptions by the nature of our resistance that aren't within the bounds of sanity. We are confirming lost ground and granting and ceding to Republicans things that are outside of the rules of the game. I know, we are supposed to play fair.

They don't. And we are the subjugated, opiated masses. An illusion of democracy sustains us, apart from actual opioids, to which half the country is apparently addicted. We are living a myth as much as our oppressors--that we still have any power at all. 

Lunatic Eclipse

Something has blotted out the sun. Donald Trump's science advisors report, after careful consideration of the evidence, that it is a sign from God. God is angry with the Democrats for resisting His will as manifested in the last election which Donald won by a HUGE margin. 

Donald hopes that Americans saw his recommendation to view the eclipse without eye protection. Democrats are such wimps and worriers. He suspects that America is becoming "pussified" and won't be able to fight in the war he intends to start one of these days. 

Just in case, though, Donald has decreed that any eye damage due to the eclipse will not be covered by health insurance. People must learn to be responsible for themselves. He has also established "bone spur awareness week" to combat that terrible, debilitating affliction.

All in a day's work.

"Hair"

There must be a musical one day on the life of Donald Trump. That is, once he has been neutralized and the threat he represents to all of civilization--check that--to global, planetary survival, is over.

Meanwhile it would be too traumatic to view. I think we should call it Hair. If only Robert Preston were still alive. This would outdo The Music Man by a mile in its depiction of chicanery. And it's real!

Chaos, Incorporated

Keep in mind that Trump is not the problem. Republicans still have plenty of other horror in store for us. A large chunk of the electorate has been conditioned by them for decades not just to be unable to tell the truth from fiction, and fantasy from reality, but to be intuitively drawn to certain kinds of lies--lies that are rooted in greed, personal ambition and a brand of comforting, ideological depravity. 

Trump was only able to hijack this Republican machine because it was so susceptible to deception. In fact it only runs on deception. But core Republican voters had also been trained to love a very specific, reassuring lie: that we're so special we're exempt from our own or any rules. This is a carryover from an evangelical outlook of fatalism, determinism and a belief that behavior doesn't matter.

In their minds we are necessarily "saved" and so relieved of any further worry about our fate. We can live secure in knowing that we were irrevocably chosen. Republicans are on the wrong side of the great human battle of accountability versus chaos. They are on the side of chaos. Now we are on the side of chaos. Republicans have put us there. It's most obvious with but much deeper than Trump. 

Though, to give him credit, Trump is Chaos, Incorporated. Republicans only wanted to blow up the government out of greed and assorted grudges. Trump is a massive loose cannon and Republicans are struggling to keep him pointed away from themselves. He is capable of destroying anything. It's unclear from what motive, though it appears to be adolescent experimentation and self-indulgence. 

Donald simply likes to watch the consequences of his actions, the bigger the better and ignoring any qualitative cast to the destruction. Trump likes to blow shit up to view the results, a form of indifferent vandalism. It makes him feel efficacious. God help us.

We're Losing Focus Here

I know, it's hard not to drill down on Trump--the indescribable awfulness of the entire situation. We want to comprehend it. But Trump can't be understood and that's good. He's inhuman or subhuman or something not lending itself to easy understanding by a normal, average, non-sociopathic person.

There's nothing there for us, personally. Trump's appeal is somewhere south of civilization and humanity in an area of despair, aboriginal fear and animal drives. But a little wisdom would be good. We need to understand Trumpism. We need to understand it enough to to implement a solution.

The solution is some form of strength--not the strength of stridency and reactivity but the strength to resist with consistent force and determination. We must fight back with conviction and with rational and aggressive arguments. Reactivity will not work. Kicking and screaming will not work.

How is it surprising...

that Donald Trump would identify with thugs, bullies, and racists?

Trump the Resignator

I think Trump will resign anon. He's miserable. We're miserable. But Pence is a horror.

Trump the Fomenter

Donald Trump is fomenting hatred at home and abroad. He likes to stir the pot.

Silent Sam

People are calling for the removal of a memorial on the UNC campus--in my town, Chapel Hill. "Silent Sam" is an anonymous depiction of a Confederate soldier, an emblem of sorrow and sadness and more likely to be regarded by neo-Nazis as defeatist. 

Sam should stand. This push for removal is puritanical and utopian in its thinking--a kind of left-brain lunacy--and is unproductive. Leave it to Democrats to focus on lesser battles, lose all the wars and wring their hands as the world crumbles around us. 

It would make more sense to regard the old parts of the UNC campus, the walks, walls and buildings, as a memorial to the black laborers, some of them slaves, who made them. I already do. And let's make it more official in other ways around campus.

I will bet that black people built Sam's pedestal, by the way. How fitting. The South, as an economic whole, stood atop black people forever. Let it be acknowledged. Sam would be on his ass otherwise, as would have been the entire antebellum South.

Ideologues Fear Loss of Influence

Republican ideologues, falling generally into classes of money-grubbers and religious nuts, are concerned about the loss of broader social influence as their president goes down in flames. Characteristically, even when confronted with the extraordinary risks to the country Trump entails, they think only of themselves and their narrow concerns, ignoring all else and especially their lack of any mandate at the executive level.

There is a precedent, however, for this kind of behavior. George Bush and his morally bankrupt gang of arrogant, selfish, ideologically driven thugs used the 9/11 attacks to implement a laundry list of bad Republican policies previously impossible to move forward and acted out aggressive instincts at every level. In no time we were mired in unwinnable wars and the economy was hustled along the path of implosion.

Pro-business, deregulatory lunatics are worried that their agenda will go down with Trump. It's impossible to separate actual moral revulsion to Trump from selfish concerns about being slimed by him and the damage he could do to a corporate brand but notice how uncaring they are about the existential threat of Trump to the greater society. They consider those responsibilities, actual patriotism, to be beyond their brief.

Gary Cohn, for example, has overcome any embarrassment​ and is still on-board with his Nazi-sympathizer​ boss, hoping to continue to screw non-wealthy Americans to the wall, an article of devotion among Republicans transcending everything else. There is no limit to their pernicious greed and they are probably concerned that average citizens will finally realize the thing is a scam and demand that it all be undone.

Please observe, for the record, that the pretense of patriotism is falling away. Republicans will relabel the whole mess later on. It's no wonder they resonate with the rationalizations of the "lost cause" apologists. Oh, and the religious fanatics, not to neglect them, have followed Trump into his foxhole where they cower and scan the skies for signs of the second coming. I'm curious what they will think of the eclipse.

To Be Sure We're Clear On This

Republicans control all three branches of the federal government.

Republicans control most of the state and local governments.

President Trump has defended people who openly claim to be Nazis.

Polls indicate that he still has the support of most Republicans.

Compassionate Release

To anyone without a brain infected by Fox News it's apparent that the presidency is a prison for Donald Trump. He chafes at its constraints. He bristles at its confinements. Neither of these terms quite captures the force of it but Donald doesn't take well to anything other than doing exactly what he wants whenever he wants. 

Donald's instinctive reaction to any kind of imposed order or discipline or even compromise is to go nuts. That's not a good fit for the office. He is clearly miserable in the job and his performance ratings are terrible. We must free Donald Trump from this curse. He must he allowed to run wild. He must feel the wind is his hair gel. 

He must again be a king in his tower--anything other than president. 

FREE DONALD TRUMP!

Katherine Franke's Recipe for Defeat

Again, if you want to see why Democrats are struggling to control America's bathrooms while Republicans are wrecking the world and planting "GOP" flags in paradise, just like Islamic fundamentalists, take a look at Katherine Franke's screed against Mark Lilla. Mark would like to win an occasional election and see the country not sink into darkness under Republican rule. Katherine wants to win the argument. She wants to win an argument she has already lost and she is guilty of a Republican speciality, a selectively weak stomach. 

Franke has more important battles to fight, about language and acceptance, than preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Think of what the world might be like if George Bush hadn't won in 2000. Think of what the world might be like if Republicans hadn't caused the 2008 recession by deregulating everything, ultimately with the complicity of Bill Clinton, another narcissistic, morally weak individual. Katherine can't seem to get it through her head that people are dying every day because of us. She doesn't care.

And, Katherine, tolerance is not about eliminating distinctions and pretending to like everything and everyone, it's about respecting the rights of others to be different even in ways that offend you as long as they play by the rules. Grow up. I doubt I would like you at all, finding you strident, overbearing, judgmental, puritanical, self-righteous, humorless and hypocritical. But, hey, nobody is forcing me to have anything to do with you. If your attack on Lilla is indicative you are too self-centered to judge an argument on its own terms. 

You are the intolerant one. Please step aside and let us win some elections. Go fester in the purity of your principles. My God, we lost to Donald Trump. What does it take to get through to you? George Bush thought, and probably still thinks, that history will judge him well. I think he will be seen as a pawn in his own, monstrous administration. You seem to think history will judge our side well. It will not, any more than a knowing parent should be forgiven for permitting a spouse's child abuse. We have a responsibility to resist.

We have a responsibility to win.

Watch the Democrats Screw This Up

Republicans have built a viable political movement on bankrupting the government, wrecking the middle class and creating an apocalyptic, boom-and-bust economy and Democrats still can't make a coherent case against them. Republicans would rather put a match to our national wealth than do anything that benefits average Americans. 

The Democratic political establishment is so feckless they continue with factional identity politics and politically correct blather that even I hate when the case has already been made for them by consistent Republican failures. All they have to do is attack. Now we have a babbling, sputtering goon as president and wait for Republicans to pull the plug.

Back at the ranch, Democratic operatives are positioning themselves to win the next election as the party of transsexuals. They are shrewd devils. No matter. Whatever that outcome, in their current time in the political wilderness they have their righteousness to keep them warm. That is, unless Donald actually does set everything on fire.

God Speed, Pyongyang

I have more hope in North Korea than in Donald Trump to prevent nuclear war. They have more to lose. Donald is probably weighing the expected outcomes, levels of destruction and survivability of various factions and locales. This should not even be on the table, not with Donald involved. It's a sad day when issues of such importance--life and death--depend on the whims of a man-child with a father complex, take your pick. 

I'm going with the fat boy. You know, Pyongyang.

Off With His Hair!

The only fitting punishment I can think of for Trump is to pin him to the ground and shave his head. This is my fatwa. In the name of justice, let it be done!

"Shoe-Gaze" Kelly, Our Man at the Insanity Front

John Kelly, I construed your remark at accepting your current position as a notice and warning to us and to Trump that you would not place loyalty to the president above the welfare of the country. Yesterday, you shoe-gazed your way through a press conference in which a madman, our president, showed unambiguously that he is unfit for duty. We're waiting for you to do the right thing, entrusting to you what that might be, but you can't continue to serve such a person. If you do you are complicit.

Trump News

Presenting Trump News, the answer to fake news and all the other biased media out there. This is news filtered through a Trump simulator and automaton generated by computer modeling and artificial intelligence based on data from decades of Trump's press releases, interviews, and official and other pronouncements from the brain, heart and soul of Donald Trump. By removing the human element, it is even better than Trump.

Filed today, August 15, at 5 PM. For immediate release:

Today at Trump Tower the president handled an unruly, unfair and belligerent press with characteristic restraint, flanked by two wealthy Jews, an unattractive Asian and a badass military dude who is entirely in accord with everything the president says. Fielding inappropriate, disrespectful and mean questions with a calm demeanor the president patiently answered and set the record straight on the left-wing activists who caused all the trouble in Charlottesville by interfering with a peaceful and permitted gathering and assembly by Civil and Second World War history buffs. The president is sorry that it all went south and hopes it won't happen again at the next such event so he asks that alt-left persons stay home and respect the rights of others to enjoy an innocent and harmless pastime. 

Back on the Fascist Bandwagon

American Catholics are back on the fascist bandwagon. Always susceptible to populism and authoritarian appeals, Catholics have eaten their shame over complicity in the holocaust, Franco in Spain and other such examples of degraded, submissive behavior and sided with Donald Trump.

Trump Grudgingly Condemns Atrocities

So, now what? Donald was forced to do something he didn't want to do. Donald believes in retribution. Payback is his. Someone is going to pay. Maybe we are all going to pay. 

Putsching America First

I watched a video of the Charlottesville marches and the white-power guys are pathetic. They are obviously sorry characters and losers. This is not some replay of Munich in the 1920's and 30's. That is going on in Washington. The overt racists are a distraction. The real stuff is much more insidious.

The really threatening people are already in power. Only our governmental system protects us and the system is crumbling against an onslaught of corporate money, greed and power-hungry authoritarians. Forget about the idiots marching around playing storm-troopers. They are not the problem.

Donald, we are waiting...

As the nation waits for Donald Trump to make a clear and definitive statement on the fascist meet-up and resulting murder in Charlottesville his underlings scramble to wipe his ass again after his first, characteristically incompetent, off-the-cuff effort. It's unambiguous, they tell us, trying to clear up the ambiguity. 

America is closing up shop...

Last one out, turn off the lights.

Fascists Feel Trump Love

It's too late. Whatever Trump does now the racists know it's politics. He can say anything but they know, since he didn't immediately condemn them for Charlottesville, he's with them in his heart. Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio, are using the tragedy to position themselves for the next election, in relation to Donald. What a spectacle of depravity. 

Trump Shrinks from Goon Rebuke

Donald, define "many sides." I see reactionary hatred, bigotry and intolerance coming from only one direction. That would be yours. You have cultivated an outrageous personality for ages and been a purveyor of indecency, lies and scurrilous attacks on innocent individuals.

Hang on, the White House has issued a statement from their place-of-business in exile, a Trump-owned golf resort, saying that Donald is a huge, huge fan of the Constitution and would love to defend it, as he is sworn to do, but he has bone spurs and is relaxing comfortably.

The big man will comment again on the Charlottesville hate crime. He knows that all of America is concerned about him. Everything else--nuclear war and racist unrest--must await the healing of the spurs. If only he could stop playing golf. But, you know how that is.

Prayer for the Death of Donald Trump

Dear Lord,

People die every day, in keeping with your wishes and inscrutable designs. Why can't it be Donald Trump today? And then you better take Mike Pence--and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. And, well, you better take the whole Republican ruling elite and their higher-level subordinates. 

If this tips the scales for you, Lord, and you deem it necessary, go ahead and get on with the Second Coming, Armageddon and the Apocalypse. I mean, living under Trump is just too painful, hopeless and degrading. Really, use your own judgment but things are just a mess down here. 

This can't possibly be what you had in mind when you created the world.

Thank you, humbly, Lord, and best wishes.

A Simple(ton) Explanation

Trump isn't an intelligent guy with behavioral quirks and an odd, infantile way of speaking. He's a simpleton. 

Tech Twat Loses Bid to Secure Beach from Rabble

A tech billionaire has lost a battle in California to keep locals from accessing a beach or to extort them for the privilege, a small​ but heart-warming victory for the little guy. Was there really ever a time when Americans​ weren't​ such​ dicks?

Fire Walk With Trump

We are all fired. We fired ourselves when we elected Trump. We voted ourselves out of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. We disenfranchised ourselves. Now all we can do is watch in horror as Trump and his two-bit administration take us down, aided by a Republican-controlled legislative branch and judiciary. Great job, dumbass Americans. And the worst is yet to come.

The United States is Burning

The riots in which black Americans burned and looted their own neighborhoods as an expression of anger and frustration hurt black people themselves more than anyone. Working-class Trump voters have accomplished the same thing. 

They got some attention but as the shock of it wears off guess who's left holding the bag. As long as Trump is in power, however, the burning and looting go on, the result of an electoral license to lay waste, the outsourcing of destruction. 

American Apartheid

The two party system in America is evolving into a kind of apartheid. Democrats are the new black underclass, the people it's okay to despise and disenfranchise. Republicans come at their spite and drive for domination from different places but, certainly, the old, southern racists and the anti-commies were in the market for new antagonists. 

These groups were at least partly defined in opposition to supposedly inarguably inferior peoples. Neither group has a stable sense of identity without animosity and fear. They need enmity. Demonizing Democrats conveniently captured most black people and those who saw the world in a less polarized, Manichean way. Polarization is an American speciality.

Self-righteousness is as well. There are black hats and white hats, good and bad people and not much in-between. We are good, by God, ultimately independently even of how we behave, which is my definition of racism. Democrats are becoming the bad guys--a fully, systematically shafted political underclass in the new, American apartheid.

On the Road to Find Doubt

Trump has us well on the way to self-destruction. It's nagging not knowing if we're already doomed, past the point of no return. If we were it would make sense not to care too much (it's so painful) and to abandon the fight--not the one to limit the human suffering but the fight to affect the outcome. Right now, as the racists crawl out of the woodwork and unreason has its day, it's hard to imagine that the foul trend can be reversed. 

Behavioral Matters

One of the breakthroughs of the Jews, as I understand it, was declaring that even the king was subject to the law since the law came from God. This was a huge step. It's hard for me to imagine it wasn't the deciding thing enabling civilization as we know it--in opposion to barbarism, tribalism and every kind of inhumanity.

It's equally hard these days to think that humans aren't fatally flawed and incapable of meeting this standard and thereby doomed to self-annihilation, what with Trump. Trump is the triumph of the assertion that behavior doesn't matter and the law doesn't matter and that power is everything and character nothing.

What do you do when there's no way out on the road you're on?

You turn around or you back the fuck up. 

Fear

Republicans want us to be afraid. The fear enables them to fool people into buying their lies and distracts us from keeping track of their failures, incompetence and corruption. An example: the zombie economic doctrine of cutting taxes on the rich.

It has never worked. It will never work but Republicans continue to push for it incessantly. Fear helps this irrationality go on. If we are fearful we empower the insanity but it's hard not to be. I'm fearful. I can't help it. Republicans are scary as hell.

Weather It Out

I think the best thing to do for the remainder of Trump's apocalyptic tenure is to work VERY HARD to limit the damage and weather it out. Pence is in many ways scarier than Trump. 

Could anyone be less competent? Then we work VERY HARD to drive all these nasty, crazy, ersatz conservatives back under the rocks and into the swamps from which they came.  

The Scumfest Continues

Trump's primordial presidency is oozing along, a truly unimaginable scumfest and I say this because he is sowing scum-seeds wherever he goes. The results of these will be with us for decades. We are still living with the catastrophic legacy of Bush and his reign of animosity, arrogance and incompetence. 

Again the beleaguered Democrats will have to clean up a Republican mess and try to forestall the country's descent into darkness. Such seems to be the longed-for outcome of the evangelicals who are impatient for Jesus, evidently heralded now by Trump, to ride in on a cloud and sweep them up to heaven. 

Donald Trump, versus The World (of Reality)

Our fantasist president, inheritor of a fortune so vast it would have been hard to lose, fancies himself a scrapper but he's delusional, beset only by himself. Scraped, he was, more likely, from the bottom of a psychological shoe--our hideous, unowned darkness.

He is the thing we most fear but can't recognize for what it is because it's both horrible and the essence of us, the accumulated, festering worst of us--the monstrous, simmering product of decades of self-righteous, exclusionary, defensive, exceptionalist denial. 

We have become monstrous because we thought we were, by definition and divine right, incapable of it. Now we are crap and encountering ourselves in an antihero who is the agent of Satan, the prince of (our) darkness, here to collect the debt we owe on our souls. 

Conservatives, Be Not Concerned

Conservatives, behind all the chaos in the Trump administration there is much going on to further your goal of the destruction of the American State and the protections it provides for our freedoms and civil and human rights. Since Trump's knowledge of the things required to do his job was a vacuum of total ignorance and incompetence and his character the lowest ever recorded anywhere--let alone at the highest reaches of American civic duty--all of that space has been filled by the insane, well-rationalized and massively harmful policies festering forever in the inner sanctums of the think-tanks funded by your prominent, wealthy sociopaths determined to assert complete control over the country. Be reassured. You are doing very well. 

Salvation Lottery: The Calvinist Roots of American Cruelty

There's a curious aspect to cruelty. It seems so inhuman. But think about the fatalism, helplessness and determinism of Calvinist doctrine and it begins to make sense. God appears to be cruel and unjust and arbitrary. A person's fate is inescapable and predetermined at birth. I can see how those with a Calvinist outlook would regard cruelty, injustice and suffering as unavoidable parts of life.

Like the Amish, Calvinists believe in effectively refusing to protect people from certain bad events--if what I have heard is true, that the Amish refuse, for example and among other things, to put lightning protection on their barns. There the similarity ends, though. Amish neighbors will all help you rebuild your barn if it burns down, regarding the catastrophe as individually arbitrary and bad luck. 

Calvinists, however, think that you suffer bad fortune because you deserve it and they will not only not help you they will mock you and look on you with contempt because it's a personal sign of God's disfavor. These are the roots of Calvinist and American cruelty and why evangelicals want to screw you. They want healthcare to remain a lottery and an insanely barbaric enterprise and utterly unjust.

They want everything to be cruel and barbaric because that's the way God made the world, patterned on arbitrary salvation, and it's wrong to mess with it or make it better. Good works are not only futile but anathema. Good fortune, especially wealth, is an indication of God's favor and poverty and despair are indications of moral depravity and bad character. In other words, Calvinists are mean, sick people.

If it seems to you that the country is run entirely by pernicious assholes it's because it is. If you can't believe they are as evil, cynical, smug, and serene in their depravity as it appears then get over it. They are exactly that. They don't give a shit about you or anybody else and we have somehow turned everything over to them. Evangelical, fundamentalist Christians are at fault. And Trump is their man.

Trump Hires Another Babysitter for Himself

With the last post in mind I now predict problems for John Kelly as chief of staff at the White House. Kelly is accustomed to structure, discipline, respect, and rationality within a given context. The problems in the White House with all of these originate with Trump and Trump isn't going anywhere.

Trump's tantrums and the disintegration of normal democratic, administrative function will continue and Kelly isn't going to like it. Trump will expect loyalty from Kelly and complete acceptance of his authority but Kelly will soon realize or may already know that he is dealing with a buffoon and an infant.