M. – The Daily Outrage

Day 51: America Held Hostage

Oh, America. How far we have traveled since 8 November 2016. The wonders we have seen. The tragedies, the euphoria … the horror. Is this “Heart of Darkness”, or “Apocalypse Now”? Can we tell the difference?

I have felt so many different things these last four months. For quite a while, I was terribly depressed, and I despaired for the future of our country. That lasted until 21 January 2017, when I joined thousands of women and men in Civic Center Park, here in the Mile High City. It was incredibly inspiring! I felt, almost for the first time in perhaps decades, that we the people still have power, if we will but use it.

There is so much to criticize, and so much to lampoon, about the fledgling Trump regime, and thousands of words have already been written (and will yet be written) about those aspects of the fix in which we currently find ourselves. But there is something else about which I want to write: Democracy.

Democracy is the thing that is most endangered just now. It is under assault from many sides, but mostly from the increasingly isolated clique found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. Well, I think they’re increasingly isolated. They appear to think that things have never been better; that the Greatness of Donny Small Hands is spreading across the land, lighting lamps that have been dark for eight long years, lifting up the marginalized, the salt of the earth, the backbone of our great land. Amazing!

You see how easy it is to slip into caricature. Ok, there’s a lot of material to work with. But still … we have more important work to do.

Democracy, as I wrote above, is endangered now in America. And if it is endangered here, that means – and makes – the danger even greater elsewhere in the world. Journalists, newspapers, and television news organizations are demonized. Oh, there are exceptions: Fox News and Breitbart prominent among them. American intelligence agencies are lambasted, criticized, and accused of colluding with … someone. The supposed goal of the supposed collusion is the thwarting of the Trump administration and its agenda, whatever the latter actually is on any given day. It’s hard to tell, I know, but so insecure is Donny Small Hands, and so great his need for adulation, to say nothing of affirmation of every random thought that falls out of his head, that he sees enemies and plots everywhere, and slights which must be answered in the form of tweets in the middle of the night, or perhaps unconstitutional executive orders.

Against this wall of noise from The Donald and his fellow travelers, there has risen up, in a miraculously short time, a great deal of resistance. Donny has only been president for 51 days – a bit over seven weeks. I know it seems longer, but, yes, only seven weeks. In this time, massive protests have arisen, in many forms and many places, all over the country. That has been wonderful to see, but it is also wonderful to see journalists really act like journalists. To me, that means approaching stories and events with a certain amount of skeptical curiosity. It also means speaking the truth, regardless of how unpleasant that may be.

It further means that when the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue lies, print and video journalists must call that just what it is: A Lie. Twice in the last few weeks, for example, an editorial in the Denver Post has carried a headline with the words “Lying Trump” in them.

Two newspapers must be singled out for their determined work to ferret out factual information (versus alternative facts), and then present it to the country: The Washington Post and The New York Times. Journalists and editors and publishers at both newspapers are providing an irreplaceable service for the country, and we must not allow the loud forces of obfuscation and distraction to change that fact.

It strikes me that the election of Donald Trump has had a galvanizing effect on the spirit of this nation, pushing us in directions of resistance and commitment that the election of Hillary Clinton might not accomplished.

So, hooray for ineptitude! Hooray for hubris! Hooray for narcissism!

We may yet save ourselves. The past indicates that such a reversal is possible. Difficult times call up unforeseeable acts and strengths out of ordinary people. But we cannot afford to be complaisant. We cannot afford to pretend that what is happening now to our country and our politics is even remotely ‘normal’.

I will do what I can. I hope you will too.

We Can Be Heroes …

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Today, I feel compelled to talk about heroes.

The word “hero” gets bandied about a great deal these days. It’s applied to almost anyone who has a dangerous job: firefighters, soldiers, cops, paramedics, and others.

As defined by Wikipedia, a hero is “one who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through impressive feats of ingenuity, bravery or strength, often sacrificing his or her own personal concerns for some greater good.” Given that definition, applying it to firefighters and soldiers (combat soldiers, anyway) is appropriate, even if its use seems hyperbolic at times.

It’s also a word that applies to the lives and works of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, and Mahatma Gandhi. They fought against great adversity and injustice for much of their lives, in the name of the greater good. King and Gandhi paid for that work with their lives.

Heroes can be found elsewhere, though. Such people are often not recognized for the heroic feats of bravery they perform in the face of adversity, perhaps because they seem unlikely candidates for the term “hero,” or perhaps because what they have done, the way they have tried to counter adversity or injustice, does not seem stereotypically heroic.

Nevertheless, now comes Mr. Walter M. Shaub, Jr. – bureaucrat, public servant –

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to prove to us that heroism can and does appear in unlikely places. His appearance on the public stage is a reminder that heroism such as his ought to be recognized, and applauded.

Like so much in America right now, this story is about the TiC[i]: Donald Trump, President-in-Waiting (waiting, but not silent). Mr. Shaub is director of the non-partisan U.S. Office of Government Ethics, a government agency that is generally unseen and unheard by ordinary citizens.

The reason we’re seeing and hearing Mr. Shaub now is a result of the TiC’s decision regarding potential conflicts of interest between his presidency and his business holdings. He has, with his usual unassuming brilliance, decided to turn over control of his little plutocratic fiefdom to his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, assuring us that he will not know anything about his businesses during the next four years, because Don and Eric will not talk to him about those businesses. They will not speak a syllable about how much money they are making or losing, what kind of great deals the boys are making in dad’s absence, or which foreign governments or businesses are attempting to curry favor with the TiC by doing deals with the boys, or by staying in a Trump-branded hotel.

Nope – not a word. Not a hint, not a wink, not a nudge. Nothing. The whole thing will be as blind a bat as far as the TiC is concerned. Oh, except there’s that bat radar thing; a skill that lets a bat understand a great many things, without actually seeing them. By chirping. Or tweeting.

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Mr. Shaub is not impressed with the TiC’s attempt to have it both ways: knowing about his businesses while pretending not to know. This sort of behavior is typical of the TiC, but that does not mean we should pretend that it’s ok; to just say that boys will be boys, and if they have sufficient star wattage, grabbing a woman’s vagina whenever you want is just so much silly locker room banter and … oh, wait … that’s a different ethical lapse.

Anyway, about Mr. Shaub and his concerns: One of the things that the TiC has said about himself and potential conflicts of interest is that being the president means you can’t have any conflicts of interest; that is, the fact of him being president means nothing he does can create a conflict of interest. By saying this, he was echoing something Richard Nixon said in 1977, during a series of interviews with David Frost: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

There is a crucial difference here, though. Nixon went on to explain what he meant: for example, a president’s orders to carry out an operation for the sake of national security gives those carrying out the president’s orders the ability to do so without fear of breaking a law. It gives them cover, in other words.

Nixon then goes on to say something important about this issue: “… so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate. We also have to have in mind that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress. We have to have in mind, for example, that as far as the CIA’s covert operations are concerned, as far as the FBI’s covert operations are concerned, through the years, they have been disclosed on a very, very limited basis to trusted members of Congress.”

The TiC seems to mean something rather different when he says, “The law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” It sounds an awful lot like what other pronouncements by the TiC have meant: I am above the law. The usual rules do not apply to Donald J. Trump.

That is not exactly what the law says, though. It exempts the president (and vice president) from conflict of interest laws for two reasons: (1) the assumption that, given his wide ranging powers and scope of action, whatever a president does in office could create a potential conflict of interest; and (2) an assumption that the president can be trusted to do the right thing – that is, to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest.

I’d like to know how many of you out there believe that the TiC can be trusted to do the right thing … about anything, except what benefits Donald J. Trump personally and financially?

I thought so.

Mr. Walter Shaub agrees, without coming right out and saying so. Or at least, he doesn’t disagree.

“Now, some have said that the President can’t have a conflict of interest, but that is quite obviously not true. … [T]hey are referring to a particular conflict of interest law that doesn’t apply to the President. … But Congress understood that a President can’t recuse, depriving the American people of the services of their leader. That’s the reason why the law doesn’t apply to the President.”

Mr. Shaub goes on to say that “our common experience of human affairs suggests that the potential for corruption only grows with the increase of power. For this reason, it’s been the consistent policy of the executive branch that the President should act as though the financial conflict of interest law applied.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Reminding the TiC (by inference) that he is “now entering the world of public service,” Mr. Shaub writes, “I don’t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the President of the United States of America.”

Ah, but the TiC would disagree. So too does Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), head of the House Oversight Committee (the committee that is supposed to protect entities like the Office of Government Ethics). He wants to haul Mr. Shaub up before that committee, behind closed doors, to ask him just what right he has to criticize that stunning example of American capitalistic genius at work; to wit, Donald J. Trump?

Several (Democratic) Congresspersons are standing up for Mr. Shaub, and demanding that any hearing be open to the public and the press, to make sure this is not a case of political retaliation by Rep. Chaffetz (which it most certainly is).

So, Walter Shaub qualifies as a hero, for the simple act of standing up in public and speaking the truth about the deceptive and inadequate actions of a man who will soon be president of the United States; a man who, through bullying and insults and demagoguery (and a little help from his Russian friends), has made his way into the presidency.

It was a great act of courage for Walter Shaub to go before the Brookings Institution on 11 January 2017 and speak the words he spoke. He must’ve known the backlash he would face, given the notoriously thin skin of the TiC, and the anti-democratic behavior of so many of his supporters (Mr. Chaffetz, for example).

This was a profile in courage on the part of Mr. Shaub.

Meanwhile, the TiC has recently said he wants to govern in the style of Ronald Regan and John F. Kennedy. As if to show his seriousness, the TiC said he would spend his first night in the White House sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom.

If this were not so pathetically absurd, it would be funny. But there is nothing funny about the least serious president in our history. He is even less serious than George W. Bush, something I never thought I’d write. But there it is.

I hope we can all profit by the example of Walter M. Shaub, Jr. The next four years are going to require of us, that we too stand up in public and denounce the madness that will almost certainly spew forth from a Trump-inhabited White House (and New York suite). This emperor not only has no clothes, he has no ideas, no manners, and no sense of his own inadequacy. Indeed, it is the knowledge of the latter of those which seems to drive him to defend his supposed prowess in business and politics: the great man who never loses.

But he is a loser, because he is bereft of morals and empathy, and we must bravely, heroically, do everything we can to make sure that he does not take the country, and the world, down with him when he falls.

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[i] TiC: Tweeter-in-Chief (see my previous posts)

The Prince of Lies

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We here at The Daily Outrage (we being me and my able assistant, Señor Gato) tried to take a much needed rest for a couple of weeks, in honor of the season of caring, brotherhood, the Prince of Peace and all that, by not watching or reading political news. Señor Gato and I are not religious; we just wanted a brief respite from the aggravation.

Nice idea, but it didn’t work. The news seeped in anyway, as it is wont to do, and my blood pressure was raised accordingly. It took a good deal of therapeutically-applied red wine and dark chocolate to counteract the negativity created by the Prince of Lies, known otherwise on these pages as the TiC (see my 22 December 2016 post, “Cчастливого Рождества!”). Meanwhile, Señor Gato did what he always does at times like this: he napped.

Well, that was last year, and now it’s 2017. A whole year (actually, only 357 days) stretches out before us, filled with the promise of opportunity, understanding, and enlightenment. It also holds the promise of disaster, chaos, and deception, for such is the nature of the TiC’s looming regime.

Much has been written, in various places, about the lying nature of the TiC’s campaign for, first, the Republican nomination, and then, for the presidency. Mostly, at first, it was just Lyin’ Don who threw out all the lies, but eventually everyone in his entourage – his minions, you might say – joined in the lie-fest. It seemed clear at the time, and depressingly clear now, that these were lies that a great many of our fellow citizens wanted to hear: that America is no longer great; that Democrats, and Hillary Clinton in particular, are to blame for that decline in greatness; that American companies are moving American jobs to Mexico and China due to the incompetence and irresponsibility of Pres. Obama (who was born in Kenya, by the way); that crime is rampant in our cities and getting worse; that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from honest, working class Americans; that illegal immigrants are contributing to the (nonexistent) crime wave terrorizing the country; that a Great Wall (as the TiC now calls it) can and should be built along the entire length of our border with Mexico; and, that Mexico will be forced, by the TiC, to pay for said Great Wall. The biggest lie of all is the one wherein the TiC declares that only he can save us from this myriad of fabricated disasters.

These are not the only lies, of course. There are also the slanders and threats against the press, which are nothing if not bald attempts to intimidate those whose job it is to honestly report to the rest of us about the doings of politicians (and those who claim to be politicians, but who actually are nothing more than pathetic, self-aggrandizing reality-show stars).

Then there’s the question of intelligence. By this I do not mean the intelligence of the TiC himself (of which, the TiC has an extremely high opinion, contrary to the opinion of many others, myself included). That’s a good and proper subject for discussion, but I mean national intelligence: CIA, FBI, et cetera. Apparently, there are sixteen separate intelligence agencies within the Federal government (why so many, I don’t know), and all of them have agreed that the Russian government, on orders from Vlad the Taciturn, hacked into various websites and email accounts (the Democratic and Republican National Committees, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, among others), looking for information that could be used to disrupt or discredit the recent national election, and simultaneously help propel the TiC into the presidency.

They found what they were looking for, and funneled it to WikiLeaks, which promptly threw it all out into the cybersphere, where, along with a little help from FBI director James Comey, it helped nudge enough people into Lyin’ Don’s column to ensure him a new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. All of this in the aftermath of the TiC himself, during the election campaign, encouraging Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email account. And of course, being BFFs, Vlad complied.

This is all bad enough, but the TiC, being a man of poor boundaries, thin skin, and extremely high self-esteem, has decided that the thousands of people in those sixteen agencies are incompetent idiots (Remember the Iraq WMD debacle of 2003!). Not only that, but the TiC knows, just knows, in his infinite wisdom, that such a thing is impossible, because, you know, hacking is difficult, and proving it is more so, and anyway, his bud Vlad wouldn’t do such a nasty thing after all the nice things Vlad has said about the TiC, and vice versa. No, no – of course not. And anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. Not only that, but that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, is actually a great guy – despite what the TiC said only six years ago.

The actual fools among us are the ones who were taken in by the TiC’s act, because that’s what it was, and what it continues to be. I suspect they will eventually realize they’ve been had, and that the swamp the TiC railed against does not in fact exist, and that even if it did, the former generals and current billionaires comprising the TiC’s cabinet are not the crew to drain it.

They will realize that starting a trade war with China, spending billions of dollars to build an unnecessary wall that Mexico will never pay for, and ignoring the manipulation of our election (and who knows what else) by a not-friendly foreign power, will not deliver – or return – stewardship of America into the hands of angry white men who need simple explanations for complex issues.

They have helped elect the most incompetent, pampered, infantile president in our history, and we are stuck with him until 20 January 2021. In the ensuing four years, though, none of us should refrain from calling a lie exactly what it is, nor should we refrain from mocking the absurd and even dangerous pronouncements that will issue forth from the mouth of this man who, with every word and every deed, proves that he is the real fool.

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Cчастливого Рождества!

Cчастливого Рождества, Владимир Путин!

Merry Christmas, Vladimir Putin! Happy Year of the Rooster, Xi Jinping! Congratulations on the Utter Destruction of Aleppo, Basher Al-Assad!

Do you gentlemen (I use the word advisedly) like surprises? If so, you must all be thrilled about the gift that has been made to you by some of my fellow citizens. Who knew an ignorant narcissist could become president of the United States? (Thanks, in part, to you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.)

See? In America, anyone can become president!

Ok, a case can be made that George W. Bush proved that in 2000, but honestly, by comparison with the soon-to-be Twit-in-Chief (TiC), W. doesn’t look quite as awful as he once did. Neither does Richard Nixon, which is a bit disturbing, but more about Tricky Dick in a later post.

Sure, W. and his crew started and then botched a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, based on the false allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in his hands. (Admit it: Don’t you sometimes wish Saddam were still in charge in Baghdad? Do you ever wonder how the world might be different now, if W. had just left him alone? One thing I’m pretty sure about is that Iraqi nuclear missiles would not have been raining down on New York City. And as for truck-driving terrorists, well, we’ll never know the answer to that one, will we?)

At least W. and most of his advisors and cabinet members knew something about governance, even if, like Dick Cheney, they used that knowledge in inappropriate, and illegal, ways. The TiC, on the other hand, is given to dictating – to say nothing of self-aggrandizement, at which he is particularly skilled. What he is not given to doing is collaborating and politicking, his “Art of the Deal” notwithstanding. It is true that, in the beginning of his administration, President Obama was disdainful of engaging in the sort of political horse trading that has historically been the main way things have gotten done in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, the number of rules and conventions and standards of which the TiC is disdainful is vast, and it grows by the day.

The same is true of a majority of the TiC’s appointments and nominations thus far. They are people who are either stunningly unqualified for the job or they’re committed to destroying the department or agency they will lead – or both. It’s a challenge to have a favorite horror story with this lot, but I’ll delve into it anyway.

Is it the neurosurgeon who didn’t want an important government post? If that’s the case, what was that recent run for the Republican presidential nomination all about? Now, if approved by the Senate, this fellow will run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The TiC tells us that the reason he chose this particular man is because he grew up in an “inner city” neighborhood. Oh, and he’s black, but the TiC seems to be ignoring that part. Or maybe he’s not ignoring it, and he hopes that nominating Ben Carson will somehow endear him to the millions of African Americans who voted by the busload for Hillary Clinton. I think it highly improbable that such a thing could come about, but then, I didn’t think the TiC could get elected in the first place.

And then there’s Rex Tillerson, currently CEO of ExxonMobil, the sixth largest company in the world, and the largest petroleum-centric corporation on the planet. Every day, ExxonMobil pumps some 3.9 billion barrels of oil out of the ground, from which, in 2015, they made almost $270,000,000,000. Mr. Tillerson has worked for ExxonMobile and its predecessors for forty-one years, which is to say, since he was twenty-three years old. He knows nothing else.

Well, that’s not quite true. He knows Vladimir Putin. They’re great friends. Rex and Vlad go way back; some twenty-five years, in fact. Vlad admires Rex so much that in 2013, Vlad awarded the Order of Friendship (OoF) to Rex. This is the highest honor Russia can bestow on a foreigner, and Rex earned his OoF by virtue of ExxonMobil discovering a huge new oil field for the Russians, in the Arctic. Prior to that, for about five years, Rex was director of a joint US-Russian oil company that was registered in the Bahamas (a.k.a., tax haven).

Sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea put a stop to the big (300 billion dollars big) Arctic oil project, but Vlad, being such good pals with Rex, did not ask him to return the OoF, because that’s the kind of guy Vlad is. And anyway, he probably figured that Rex would do something nice for him in the future, just to make up for the lost oil billions.

Assuming the United States Senate plays along, Rex will soon be in a position to do that nice thing, whatever it may turn out to be, since he will be the new Secretary of State. Funny how things work out, isn’t it? The moreso, when you learn that Rex, as CEO of ExxonMobil, appears to have made some decisions – purely business decisions, of course – that benefited ExxonMobil and its stock holders (and Rex), but did not benefit the United States. In other words, he placed corporate profit above patriotism. Or, to put it another way, his first allegiance is to his company, not his country. Will he now, after 41 years of faithful service to Big Oil, change his priorities and think first about the good of America? I hope so, but I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Seeing-is-believing is also the case with the TiC, since he has promised a variety of different, and sometimes opposing, things to a whole lot of people in the last year. But I don’t have to wait to see if the TiC is going to change his priorities, because it’s already obvious that he is not going to do that.

Speaking of oil, his selection of Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy reinforces what I have already written about the TiC’s priorities and his much (self) vaunted wisdom. Mr. Perry, besides being a former governor of Texas (the Republic of Oil), also sits on the board of the corporation that is attempting to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. The same pipeline that was opposed by Native Americans, over whose land the pipe would be laid. The Corps of Engineers has put a hold on the pipeline being routed beneath the Missouri River, which is the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. I wonder what the new Secretary of Energy will think about all this?

Coincidentally, during his own recent run at the presidency, Mr. Perry, in one of the primary debates, could not recall the name of one of the federal departments he wanted to eliminate. Oh yeah … the Energy Department. As I said, funny how things work out.

I do not think there has been any other in-coming presidential administration that has encompassed the range of incompetence, and hostility, if not outright malevolence, towards the government, that we see in the TiC’s choices. Incompetence is bad enough, but malevolence is dangerous, both to ourselves and to other nations.

At least with incompetence it’s out in the open, so you have a chance to withstand attempts to turn back the clock 40 or 50 years, such as this crowd proposes to do.

Malevolence, on the other hand, hides in the shadows. It is threatening, and it is subversive.

A lot of folks who supported and presumably voted for the TiC have been accusing people like me of anti-Trump hysteria for suggesting that the path the TiC is going down could lead to authoritarianism in this country; that it could lead to a diminution of free speech, oppression of the independent and questioning press (to say nothing of certain minority groups), and a weakening of our place and strength in the world community.

This is not hysteria. This is a profound concern about the malevolence I see and feel in the TiC and his followers (TiCists?). Their attitudes and potential policies – Muslim bans, loosening of libel laws, destruction of environmental protections, and repressing women’s power over themselves, among many other things – can lead to a creeping regime change that is undemocratic; a change that is antithetical to everything we have believed America stands for, everything it has represented to the rest of the world.

The TiC would love to shut down the New York Times, and get Saturday Night Live off the air, because he feels they are being mean and unfair to him. I have to believe that the good people who voted for the TiC did not think they would be sending a thirteen year old boy to the White House, but that, essentially, is what they have done. A thin-skinned, spoiled, and marginally educated thirteen year old boy, who wants everyone to love him and be nice to him, even when he taunts and mocks other children, and bullies them, and threatens them with violence.

Well, silence is the best weapon we could hand to this annoying and dangerous child, and I have no intention of remaining silent. I hope you won’t either.

The Man in the Chair

Donald Trump: Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2016?

For those inclined to make such comparisons, it should be noted that Time’s then-Man of the Year seventy-eight years earlier, in 1938, was Adolph Hitler.

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1938 vs. 2016

Of Herr Hitler, they wrote, “To those who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.” Nine months later, he did just that.

In like fashion, I think we can expect Herr Trump to make 2017 a memorable year. Hopefully, this will be done without him instigating World War Three, or attempting to stifle what free press we have left, or packing the Supreme Court with Scalia- (or perhaps worse yet, Thomas-) like justices.

I have written earlier about the talk encouraging people to “give him a chance;” to wait and see how he will actually govern. I’m waiting to see if he will govern at all, or if the next four years will be a stream-of-consciousness Twitter tirade, interrupted at times by photo ops with foreign businessmen and politicians at one of Herr Trump’s golf resorts, punctuated with pronouncements engineered by the regime’s éminence grise, Steve Bannon. If this pre-governing phase provides any clues (and it emphatically does), we should consider ourselves fortunate if that’s all the worse it is.

Other things written about Herr Hitler in that 1938 Man of the Year article should also give us pause. Among them is the description of Hitler as “moody, brooding,” “half educated,” and a “man of no trade and few interests … whose reading has always been very limited.” The people inspired by Hitler were described as a “demagogic, ignorant, desperate movement,” satisfying the “craving of large sections of the politically immature German people for strong, masterful leadership.”

Are you concerned yet? Well, there’s more.

Time pointed out that Herr Hitler’s solution to unemployment (the relocation of factories and jobs to Italy, or Mexico, not being an issue at the time) was “a far-reaching program of public works; … an intense rearmament program, including a huge standing army;” and “… putting political enemies and Jewish, Communist and Socialist jobholders in concentration camps.”

Oh, wait, that last one doesn’t apply to Herr Trump. Right? Well, there was that now-supposedly-disavowed letter to the Energy Department, a 74-point demand looking for, among other things, the names of all employees who have worked on President Obama’s climate initiatives; in other words, people who actually believe in science.

But, oh no, nothing to see here. No witch hunt, no inquisition. Move along now.

The potential for serious damage to our country and our democracy is real, and looming. The keys to the various departments of the federal government are being handed over to people who dislike the mission of the department they will soon head, or who haven’t the slightest clue about the workings of government, or both; and they will be led (insofar as leading will be done) by a man who knows little about, and cares less for, the laws, customs, and strictures of our government. I know: Some people have been saying for years that the government should be run like a business, and that a non-politician should run it. That theory will now get a test run, in real time, with real consequences, and we will all have a front row seat.

If we have to endure this (and we do), it would at least have been nice if the businessman elevated to the presidency had been truly successful, and had not presided over a family-run operation that was treated like a personal fiefdom, or a piggy bank, part of whose success has rested upon stiffing people who provided them with materials and services. But that’s not who 107,105 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan have given us (yes, only 107,105), and it’s going to take the vigilant efforts of hundreds of thousands – no, millions – of us to remind Herr Trump and his cohorts that the laws of this country apply equally to all of us, even him. Especially him, in fact.

The need for this vigilance has been made clear by the thin-skinned Herr Trump’s distant relationship with the truth, and in particular his constant efforts to shape the truth to reflect the high regard in which he holds himself. Among these was a comment made during a New York Times interview on 22 November of this year, in which he said, “The law’s totally on my side; the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

This is eerily reminiscent of something Richard Nixon claimed in May 1977, during an interview with David Frost. In the course of discussing his actions as president, Nixon said, “If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Oh, really? And how exactly did that work out for you, sir?

As Mr. Nixon found out, the Constitution, and other laws of our country, really do apply to the President of the United States, despite what, in his hubris and self-proclaimed exceptionalism, he may want himself and all of us to think. While not given to calling up the Bible, I feel compelled to quote now from Matthew 5:45, which says that god (or rather, God) “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” As it is with the sun and the rain, Herr Trump, so it is with the law.

We have before us an on-going, four-year challenge (and please, god, don’t let it be eight). It’s a multi-faceted challenge, one of which it would be easy to tire, to give up, to surrender to the rightward-lurching onslaught of revisionism that is headed our way. I won’t be doing that. I simply cannot sit quietly and let Herr Trump and his wrecking crew destroy what has been built up here, at the cost of so much effort, so many lives, so much time.

If you find yourself filled with a desire to stop listening to the news, if you feel overwhelmed by the tweets and the casual dismissals of law and precedence, I will understand, because I too will be feeling that. So, in those times, know that you are not alone in your feelings; know that it is not just you, not just me, but rather, millions who care deeply about this country, and who are resisting, in ways both large and small, the turning back of progress represented by the man in the chair, in the Oval Office.

One last thing: As the early twentieth-century labor activist and song writer Joe Hill wrote in a telegram to Bill Haywood, just before Hill’s execution, “Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”

###

Mr T. & the Wrecking Crew

“Red sky at morning …”

You probably know the rest of that quote. What you may also know is that a storm warning was issued for America on 8 November 2016.

Unless you have been sequestered on a tropical island, completely bereft of news from the outside world (and if you have, lucky you!), then you know we will soon be saddled with a thin-skinned, incompetent blowhard for our next president. This is bad enough, but of course Mr. T

mr-t_2

(no, not that Mr. T)

will not arrive in Washington, DC, alone. He will bring with him, to oversee and direct the various departments of government, an assortment of conspiracy fantasists, anti-government government employees, inhabitants of bubbles, sellers of snake oil, privatizers, insiders, major political donors, and the wife of a prominent Republican senator.

Among these, we find: a chief advisor and strategist who has encouraged racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements, to say nothing of proclaiming his most recent business venture a platform for white “nationalists” (i.e., KKKers and Neo-Nazis); a future Secretary of Education who hates public education; a National Security Advisor who hates Muslims; a Treasury Secretary who used to work at Goldman Sachs (I wonder if he was present for any of Hillary Clinton’s speeches there?); for Secretary of State, the CEO of the largest oil company in the world and BFF’s with Vladimir Putin; an Assistant National Security Advisor whose main qualification seems to be that she donated a lot of money to our future president’s campaign; a Health and Human Services secretary who wants to destroy the Affordable Care Act and reverse Roe vs. Wade; a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who knows nothing of government, except for a once-held desire to be president; a Labor Secretary who is opposed to raising the minimum wage and dislikes unions as a matter of principle. And so on.

Despite Hillary Clinton having won approximately 2.8 million more votes than Mr. T, she lost the election due to the nature of the Electoral College. So, we shall have to live with the results of the election. Living with it does not, however, mean we have to accept it. It does not mean that now we should all just link arms and sing Kumbaya.

To the contrary, I think it very important that we resist the calls we are hearing, to give our next president a chance to govern, a chance to succeed. That’s a nice, can’t-we-all-just-get-along sentiment, but I don’t want him to succeed, because his success, and that of his appointees, would be built atop the ruins of eight decades of social progress in this country. Therefore, I am going to do whatever I can to resist the coming attempts to return America to the supposedly bucolic days of 1956, and I encourage you to do the same.

One facet of that resistance is this blog. I’ve started this as an alternative to shouting at the television, which has accomplished little, except to scare my cat. While I may be outraged every day (and so far, I am), I will probably not write here every day. Nevertheless, I invite your comments and observations, as we move deeper into the storm that is about to envelop our country and, as a consequence, the rest of the world.

Thanks for reading!