THIS GUY'S THE LIMIT – Drawing the Line On Tyranny

 

To any Trump-supporter who feels his/her opinions can withstand a bit of critical thinking:

If you fit the mold of the reality-show president’s base, it seems you have no trouble at all drawing a  line in the sand on what’s acceptable behavior from people you don’t know — political rivals, folks with different beliefs and lifestyles, immigrants, educated people, uppity women…

And I assume that, because you value authority so highly, you let your kids and others in your own families know where their line is. Right?

So where do you draw the line on the behavior of the man you helped put in charge of the sacred trust that is our democracy? In whose hands rest the integrity of our precious democratic institutions; our reputation as a (mostly) honorable, generous, visionary world leader; accountability by corporations for the safety and reliability of things we consume; the habitability of our natural environment for generations to come; and the aspirations of a generation of young people hungry for decent, positive role models?

You are witnessing…no, you are condoning…this man’s systematic desecration and dismantling of one democratic institution, one piece of the moral bedrock of our country, after another. Blatant nepotism and cronyism, self-enrichment, elections tampering, abuse of power, obstruction of justice, benign acceptance of interference by our nation’s adversaries…not to mention adolescent judgement, petty vindictiveness, pathological lying…and other daily — sometimes hourly — offenses of both commission and omission. All to compensate for his wild insecurity and feed an insatiable ego.

Donald Trump has accomplished very little in his fools-gold lifetime without lying, cheating and intimidation. And you expected somehow he'd rise to the occasion to lead our country competently? Nope, he's done the only thing he knows how to do; he's dragged the office of the Presidency and our country down to his pathetic level.

And all you can do is put on your little red caps and shout for more of the same. What are you thinking? Or have you decided that somehow thinking about the behavior of a man who demands blind allegiance is now blasphemous?

(I’ve heard some of you say that, even if we abhor the man, we still must respect the office of the presidency. How utterly absurd. That’s like saying you’ll overlook your doctor’s incompetence because he’s a doctor.)

You are not president Trump’s children; you are not his subjects. In this democracy you are his constituents, the touchstone of his authority. In this democracy we elect representatives to oversee and maintain limits on that authority.

By not asserting this responsibility, you belittle both yourself and our country.

Nor is Donald Trump your goon, some hit man you hired to exact revenge on all your countrymen you complain have somehow discredited you. To protect you from all those thieving rapists swarming into our country just to impregnate your women, steal your stuff and use up all the resources you thought were yours alone to over-consume.

You, your fears and your sense of entitlement — yes, that’s exactly what it is — are what have opened the door to a despot’s plundering our country. You are what has kept him in power for three years, flaunting the boundaries the Constitution sets down for just such abuses, edging ever-closer to the status he knows better than to proclaim in so many words, but so desperately craves (Supreme Leader for Life).

If you can’t…or won’t…say where that line between right and wrong, integrity and corruption, democracy and oligarchy lies, you dishonor the very “American Values” and “Christian Values” you claim to be defending, and you spit in the faces all those soldiers and other brave defenders of freedom you claim so ardently to support.

HISSY FIT – How the Trump Chumps Got Their Way While Losing It

Since a crass, bigoted reality-TV star somehow, incredibly, broke and entered the pantheon of the U.S. Presidency, I’ve not hesitated to speak up about my disappointment, my apprehension and my deep embarrassment for our country.

Usually, I get ample proof from my friends and followers that I’m preaching’ to the choir. But lately I’ve also received a few of precisely the kind of responses I might have expected from some of Trump’s supporters. Comments like “You lost; get over it!,” “I’m sick and tired of all you cry-babies bitching and moaning!,” and “It’s your turn to be a loser, college boy; why don’t you just man-up?” And those are the polite ones.

Really! We’re the cry-babies?

AN INVISIBLE HOLE
So…a big chunk (not a majority, mind you) of the American electorate apparently has perceived themselves as oppressed, muzzled, getting short-changed in their share of the American Dream. This despite ample proof that, overall, the quality of life in this country has never, ever, been better.

After the Obama administration’s helped dig us out of the deep hole dug during the “Dubya” years, we now enjoy the best job growth in 18 yrs.; strongest dollar in three decades; gas a bit over $2 per gallon; unemployment cut in half; the annual Bush deficit cut by two-thirds; recovered housing market; growing exports; Dow Jones average tripled and surging once again…

What am I missing?

        What they'd really lost...was their ability to control.

They say they’d lost their voice, their power. And even some more charitable liberals than I believe them. But I’m going to call them on it. What they’d really lost during those eight hard-fought years of progressives’ gains was not the American dream. It was their ability to control.

And it was not simply control over themselves and their own fortunes they so lusted for. It was authority—control over land, people not like them, other countries, ideas they see as threatening to their rather narrow quasi-religious ideology. That’s what this election was really about.

LILY-WHITE CLONES
For the last eight years, while we progressives have been thinking positively, constructively, of ways to make the world a better place—connecting people; creating opportunity; trying, against the best-funded, most powerful lobbying efforts in history, to preserve a natural environment we’re proud to pass on to our kids and grandkids—conservative ideologues have put all their eggs into one big basket of NO!

          He held out a few cheap promises like a candy bar 
          to a health nut's child. 

By their own admission, their one and only goal during the eight-year administration of one of the most intelligent, visionary, positive-minded, decent presidents in history has been to derail absolutely anything he’s proposed. Not exert their own version of leadership, not offer constructive alternatives, not paint a picture of a better America; no, just stifle every glimmer of hope for a kinder, gentler nation.

What is it you want, folks? Federal hands off of public lands so you can gouge out more mineral wealth on the cheap, wallow in more ATV mud holes and build more rifle ranges? A sub-prime mortgage on the environment we leave our grandchildren in return for a few jobs in unsustainable industries? Your own little nation of God-fearin,’ lily-white clones?

THE PRICE OF A CANDY BAR
Well, looks like your political temper tantrum has, against all odds, gotten you the attention you so craved. And now the rest of us must live, for at least the next four years, with the consequences: a president who—at precisely the moment in history when we most need a leader with a constructive vision—has already proven himself an utterly ill-prepared, emotionally unstable, uncurious, vulgar, pompous, self-serving narcissist.

And none of this charlatan’s destruction should come as any surprise to those who ganged up—apparently with a little help from one of our nation’s arch enemies—to push him into office. He held out a few cheap promises like a candy bar to a health nut’s child. And you totally reached out and grabbed it.

Congratulations, you poor, self-styled victims, your little hissy fit worked big-time. You little brats set the house afire over a fucking Milky Way.

“We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.”  ~ NEAL GABLER