United States

Patriot/Traitor Games

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It’s on.

The deadly full contact practice on Jan. 6 that morphed into the capitulation and retaking of Capital Hill was a precursor for The Patriot/Traitor Games scheduled to kick off in earnest Jan. 16 -21.

CNN is planning full coverage wherever the carnage takes place. The action will pit neighbour against neighbour, brother against sister, daughter against father, mother against son, co-worker against co-worker, cop against cop.

Each side promises a fight to the death for the title of Patriot/Traitor.

The FBI has issued a nation-wide warning that armed attacks are imminent at every state capital in the union on the day Joe Biden assumes the Presidency. The shaken but retaken Capitol building is being touted as the safest place to hold the peaceful transfer of power. The White House was ruled out because it is in the hands of the Traitors.

The powers that be in United States national security are locking down Washington as they wipe egg from their faces. To ensure the peaceful transition of power, fences are up, the National Guard is mobilized, riots squads are drilling and the military drone operators who scope out snipers are practising flight maneuvers.

As the peaceful transfer takes place, the streets of the nation’s capital will bristle with armed men carrying automatic weapons. Their will be tanks and armoured Humvees parked discreetly nearby. And helicopter gunships overhead. Military leadership felt it necessary to remind the armed forces of their oath to the Constitution.

How did it come to this, sane people the world over ask?

To borrow a phrase from my late great friend Wayne Huk when dealing with disgruntled financial clients: “I’m not gonna say I told you so…. but I did previously inform you…” that a dark cloud hung over the U.S.

(See previous blogs Trump Exoneration America’s Indictment, The Shining City Goes Dark, Own up America, Many of You Are Deplorable and Trump’s U.S. Headed for Jonestown Finale, among others.)

Those scribblings do not make me prescient. Everyone not blinded by politics, religious fervour, conspiracy theories and cult indoctrination saw it coming.

Here’s the thing. Republicans who voted to invalidate the largest voter turnout and ‘most secure election in American history’, even after the Insurrectionist Mob chased them from their sacred chambers of democracy, did so at the behest of their craven voters.

The Cult of Trump exposed the violence, ignorance, bigotry and hypocrisy that has always been at the country’s core. Though in the minority, deplorable Trumpets loom above the American mental landscape in a dark cloud of anger and resentment, overshadowing the forgotten 82 million who turned out in record numbers for Joe Biden.

The Evil Apricot Gasbag, with the help of social media and right wing news outlets, has tapped into that bad vibe in a way that righteous Americans find appalling. They cannot fathom why so many of their countrymen believe his bafflegab.

The Malignant Mango Megalomaniac has fomented revolution with a torrent of lies about election fraud, before and after he ‘lost in a landslide’. He told his slathering Trumpets he could only lose if the election was rigged, then continued The Big Lie daily in the months after the vote was counted.  

Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

Lie big.

Lie loud.

Lie long.

He has been assisted in his treasonous endeavor by Republican politicians doing the bidding of the Trumpets they represent; by the profiteering media millionaires broadcasting from their estates far removed from the rubble; by the Washington Swamp’s bottom feeders and political flotsam.

The ugly, horrible, disheartening reality is tens of millions of Americans are Trumpets who revere a venal boor, a narcissistic sociopath who lies pathologically, a charity cheater who brags about assaulting women. They are drinking the Kool Aid in great gulps and are prepared to kill and maim their countrymen in the name of Dear Orange Emperor.

Many view him as a vessel of the Lord.

Think about that.

Make no mistake, cross Trump publicly and you will be wearing the hangman’s noose or slinking through the airport under guard as Trump supporters call you a “piece of shit” and a “fucking traitor”, as limp-willed Lindsay Graham discovered after declaring himself out.

Ever the survivalist, Lindsay jumped back in with Trump to tour the border wall. One last ride on Air Force One. That had to be so romantic after their recent split. Breakup sex is better than golf. He and Trump ‘have had quite a ride’, he told Senators while outing himself about the bromance with the gooey man recently called the most ‘masculine president’ in U.S. history by his press secretary.

The veiled threats of violence interlaced with the Republican calls for unity should not soften the Patriots’ stand. If Republicans want unity they would all stand up and say the election was fair and square. That Trump has been lying. They would pay tribute to the record number of voters who turned out in the Time of the Pandemic and congratulate the country on an election smoothly run under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

But they don’t want to slink through airports like limp-willed Lindsay.

The Trumpets want chaos and violence. They view Joe Biden as an illegitimate President and therefore feel justified in doing whatever it takes to make him fail.

Dear Orange Leader has not expressed even the slightest remorse over his role in the deaths of five people, including a police officer and an air force veteran who fell under his evil spell. One police officer is fighting to keep an eye.

One thing became abundantly clear as the traitor Trumpets attacked the Capitol. If Americans want to keep their democracy, the Patriot\Traitor games must be a rout. The insurrectionists must be stomped on and obliterated; the Evil Orange Windbag must be punctured and deflated with the sword of integrity; his family ostracized; his businesses bankrupted; his enablers disgraced and held to account; his traitorous minions imprisoned.

The Patriots must smash the Trump brand to smithereens, with their wallets. Ostracize the Big Orange Blowhard and his complicit family and all the companies that do business with them.

The price of treason must be too high even for the marginally unstable. This is not a time for appeasement in the name of national unity. It is a time for justice and reckoning.

Trump exoneration America’s indictment

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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the U.S. election, and the reaction to it, makes it abundantly clear how far the world’s oldest democracy has strayed from the founding fathers well-intentioned but flawed vision.

The report details the lies and plethora of bad behaviour by the country’s leader, who was not elected by a majority of its citizens but instead because the archaic electoral college devised 150 years ago to appease the defeated slave states allows the minority to rule. It affirms Trump received significant help from the Russians, who wanted him to win, and that his campaign was open to offers and never advised the FBI about this foreign intervention. It concludes Russians used social media to target more than 100 million voters in an election that was ultimately decided by about 80,000 votes.

Despite Mueller scrupulously outlining dubious ethics, slack morality and almost daily deceit, The Conman-in-Chief and his legion of debased lackeys are crowing about exoneration, as if the only standard a President must meet is to avoid indictment for a criminal offense, all the while knowing the constitution has been amended to exempt a sitting President from criminal indictment. A convenient Catch 22 for a budding despot and his duped or deplorable followers in a country that claims no man is above the law.

Remember Trump’s infamous admonition to his deplorable base: ‘Don’t believe what you see and read, believe what I say.’

Okay, Big Orange Brother.

The report meticulously notes how Trump did everything to hinder the investigation but walk over to the Department of Justice and fire the Special Counsel in person. It relates how various campaign officials, including Trump Jr. and his son-in-law, tried to collude with the Russians, then lied about it. It documents campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ongoing sharing of polling data with a Russian agent.

Exoneration?

Below is an abbreviated summary of some of the the Conman-in-Chief’s more egregious behaviour.

  • Trump had Russia on his mind when he fired FBI director Jim Comey, the man originally in charge of the Russia investigation, after Comey refused to guarantee his loyalty.
  • He pressured acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to lie about the reason Comey was fired.
  • Rosenstein was so concerned he appointed a Special Counsel.
  • Trump, fearful of what investigators might dig up, ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire the Special Counsel and relented only when McGhan said he would resign first.
  • He told aide Corey Lewandowski to ask then Attorney General Jeff Sessions to curtail the investigation.
  • He commanded his Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to pressure Sessions into ‘unrecusing’ himself so Sessions could control the Special Counsel and feed information about it to Trump or his lawyers.
  • He directed various White House staff to lie to the American people and personally directed the false narrative concerning the meeting his son and top campaign officials had with Russian operatives with the purpose of obtaining illegally obtained information on his election.
  • He denigrated patriotic Americans risking their lives in law enforcement and intelligence gathering.
  • He lied about conducting business in Russia while running for the Presidency.
  • While running for office, Trump authorized and coordinated an illegal hush money payment to a porn star he had sex with shortly after his wife gave birth.
  • He conspired with a sleazy supermarket tabloid to suppress the story of a Playboy Bunny he was fooling around with while his wife nursed their infant son.
  •   He attacked the media for spreading fake news which turned out to be accurate, while tweeting a stream of lies to his Twitter followers.
  •  He intimidated witnesses and dangled the possibility of a pardon if they refused to cooperate with investigators.
  • He refused to be interviewed in person by the Special Counsel, and in heavily lawyered written responses to investigators’ questions claimed he couldn’t recall specifics 30 times, despite his boast of having ‘the best memory’.
  • He hired an unqualified lackey to care-take the investigation while he searched for an Attorney General who would protect him like his mentor, disbarred and now deceased mob lawyer Roy Cohn.
  • He found his Roy Cohn after private lawyer and conservative ideologue William Barr sent Trump’s attorneys a job application that laid out reasons why a President can’t commit obstruction of justice.
  • He lauded his hand-picked new Attorney General when Barr provided a misleading narrative about the investigation to the American people and needlessly held the report for almost a month to let his spin ferment.

The Conman-in-Chief brays about personal exoneration because Mueller didn’t recommend criminal charges, but the report is a clear indictment of a sleazy democracy in the time of Trump run by immoral swamp rats supported by 40 per cent of American voters.

 

Protecting America’s national interest comes at too high a price for Third World

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“The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, f*** all the women and raise up a new race in these Islands.”*

American soldier serving in the Philippines, commenting on the message filtering down to troops from their superior officers, circa 1900

“I knew enough about the Philippines to have a strong aversion to sending our bright boys over there to fight with a disgraced musket under a polluted flag.”*

Celebrated American author Samuel Clemons, aka Mark Twain, speaking in New York

At the turn of the 19th Century, America defeated Spain in a one-sided war advertised by the government as a fight to liberate the Cuban people from Spanish depredations. Revolutionaries in the Philippines, also tired of being ruled by far-off Spain, joined America’s cause when the U.S. Navy anchored off Manila, a strategic Spanish possession. They did so with the expectation Filipinos would be given the opportunity to govern themselves when the conflict ended, in keeping with stated American values.

Instead, the alliance devolved into a brutal fight over control of the geographically important Archipelago, in which the better trained and equipped U.S. troops were given licence to kill and torture. Honing techniques the American military would later deploy in Viet Nam, soldiers roamed the countryside in search and destroy missions, indiscriminately killing, raping, torturing captives, often to death, and burning entire Filipino villages suspected of harboring the enemy.

The U.S. Colonel who tamed the Tagalog rebels, lionized at home as ‘Fighting’ Frederick Funston, pillaged his way up the military promotional ladder to General and a Medal of Honor. Theodore Roosevelt, the president who never met a war he wouldn’t fight in personally, declared it would take more than 30 generations for the savage islanders to be on a level with Americans and capable of governing themselves. The American public, who swallowed the official bullshit with no aftertaste, viewed the conflict as being in the country’s national interest. The hundreds of thousands of brown people who died, in their polluted view, possessed ‘limited intelligence and ability’. Collateral damage.

The Third World has been enduring America First for a very long time.

During the Philippine adventure, as in Viet Nam, the U.S. did its own dirty work, with Presidents William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and later Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, suffering the political consequences of the moral outrage heaped on them by progressive thinkers like Samuel Clemons, a staunch anti-imperialist. Similarly, Bush 45 and Barack Obama had to answer for Iraq and Afghanistan.

A hundred-plus years and many wars later, it is hard to ignore the cliché and truism—”History repeats itself.”—when considering the current conflict in Yemen, wrought by the Saudis with the full complicity of America.

But who is answering for the catastrophic despoliation of Yemen being wrought upon millions of brown people by proxy for America’s national interest? Where are the voices of outrage in the midst of the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis?

The Saudi-piloted murder planes, until recently being refueled by the U.S. air force, and the bombs falling from them upon innocent men, women and children, some of them riding in school buses, bear the Made-In-America stamp.

Death and mayhem in the Middle East mean billions of blood dollars for America and jobs for U.S. workers, rationalizes the  Bloviator-in-Chief. Donald Trump’s coverup of the Khashoggi killing told the world all it needs to know. America sanctions murder for the right money.

The Trump administration can’t be blamed for the cause of the conflict, which dates back centuries and is rooted in religious rivalry and intolerance. But there can be no question the U.S. trains and props up a despotic Saudi regime that tortures, decapitates and dismembers its opponents and only this year gave women the right to drive.

It does so, the U.S. government tells its people, because it is in America’s national interest. Saudi Arabia is a bulwark against the nuclear wannabe mullahs of Iran. A kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend rationale. And because they have oil money to pay for American weapons.

The Senate makes noise about limiting U.S. support for the murderous tyrant known as MSB as people starve in real time. Is anybody questioning the wisdom of providing billions of dollars in sophisticated weaponry to a psychopath who runs a country that spawned the 9/11 attackers? A country that is a friend of terrorist enemies.

If so, I haven’t heard about it on American media, currently obsessed with the top-rated multi-network reality show, Donald Trump’s Blackening of the White House, starring a villain who makes J.R. Ewing look like Mr. Rogers. Collectively, the media virtually ignores the killing of Yemenis as it does all but the most egregious interruptions in regular programming.

It takes a natural disaster of historic proportions in the homeland to shift the focus for a day and get anchors away from Washington and New York desks and out to affected locations in tight black t-shirts or stylish rain gear and boots. Only mass shootings in double digits can avert the media’s focus from its ratings winner. Or the killing of one of its own, especially if it involves a grisly dismemberment and a djellaba-wearing villain the American public can get behind hating.

It is a sure bet that most Americans are only vaguely aware of the country where the Made-In-America humanitarian disaster is unfolding, beyond that it is somewhere far away, maybe the Middle East, or Africa. On the periphery of their personal device-addled brains they know Arabs are fighting each other. They don’t know why or much care.

It doesn’t occur to them that it is not in Yemen’s national interest to have a proxy war on its soil. That Yemenis, though Muslim and brown, are parents and daughters and sons, grandparents and uncles and aunts, who want what Americans want–food, lodging and neighbourhoods where kids can play without fear of foreign made bombs, mines or machine gun bullets.

CNN managed to squeeze in a short segment last week on the Yemen man-made catastrophe at the end of one of its Trump’s Blackening of the White House episodes. After a voice-over warning about disturbing content, cameras took viewers into an emergency facility where doctors were unable to save a tiny famine-ravaged boy, following outside as his grieving Dad left cradling the body to his chest. Another scene showed children with ghastly wounds from bombs, shrapnel and snipers’ bullets.

But the most haunting images were of emaciated kids with sunken eyes, bloated bellies and skeletal arms and legs. Not a ratings winner with viewers slumped in easy chairs and on couches or bar stools, drinking beer and eating burgers, pizza and potato chips, growing more obese on four thousand calories a day.

Millions of people are homeless and hungry and the United States, using the same old ‘national interest’ trope it has relied on for a hundred-plus years, is complicit. That is not fake news or an alternative fact. It is the plain truth.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the country that elected a world class narcissist to its highest office is a country of navel-gazers bordering on mass narcissism. It is only natural to have a leader like Trump when the electorate has a propagandized view of the havoc wreaked in the name of America’s national interest.

Christian evangelists, so concerned about human life in the womb they will support a soulless, venal liar if he will give them judges that further their cause, care diddly squat about the brown kids their government is helping kill. Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr., well-fed and safe in their gated communities, prefer to rail against the “war on Christmas.”

Putting America First, the oft-stated goal of white supremacy groups like the Ku Klux Klan, has cost millions of brown, yellow, red and beige people their lives. As I have stated in previous blogs, there can be no argument that the U.S. is a great country, but to be the ‘greatest country’ requires more than self-proclamation. It means learning from past wrongs and making things right in the present. It’s well past time that Americans stop parroting the party line and start walking the righteous walk.

(*Quotes from the Statesman and the Storyteller, an exhaustively researched book on turn of 19th Century America by Mark Zwonitzer.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wisdom of Ted the Barber

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Contrary to what readers of this space might infer from my frequent scathing criticisms of the current U.S. administration and the people that put it in place, I am not a rabid anti-American.

Some may recall the piece I wrote at the end of a five-month road trip through America. It began by paraphrasing Charles Dickens–It is the best of countries; it is the worst of countries–and went on to note its fascinating cultural diversity, geographic splendour and the many contributions its citizens have made to the world’s betterment, from music to literature, from science to technology, from championing religious freedom to advocating for democracy.

The Dame and I recently travelled to the small Arizona town of Florence for a sunny break from the frequently gloomy skies of November in the South Okanagan. It was the first time we’ve been in the U.S. since the ascendancy of the Conman in Chief and like many Canadians we were hesitant about giving the tacit support of our tourism dollars to a country that would elevate such a repellent person to the nation’s highest office.

I rationalized that it would combine a holiday with firsthand research in a state Trump won by four percentage points.

Florence is a dusty desert town set along the Gila River amidst stands of saguaro cactus and sagebrush halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. To say it has seen better days would be kind. Sprinkled along its historic main street are boarded up businesses, a burnt-out bar and ramshackle buildings of limited aesthetic value. It does not have a grocery store and its main industry is incarceration.

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Nearby, the Del Webb resort community of Anthem at Merrill Ranch stands out in sharp contrast. Littered with snow geezers and the more prosperous of the local population, it has a mini-shopping mall, an 18-hole golf course and a modern recreation/fitness facility and pool.

Back in Florence, near the end of the main street, an old school barber shop seemed a logical place to scope out rural Arizona in the era of Trump while getting my ears lowered.

The shop is a comfortable place, roomy, with two barber chairs, an assortment of seating for waiting customers and a pool table covered over, either out of disuse or to keep the falling follicles from fouling the felt.

A young boy is getting clipped in one of the chairs, while his mom, dad and brother supervise from the sidelines. They are Canadians, I am soon to learn from the affable proprietor, who rises to greet me and usher me to the empty chair.

Ted the barber is a voluble man with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Florence. He looks to be in his mid-fifties and has lived here since his family moved from Oregon when he was a child. He wears a blue barber smock and moves gingerly with his back tilted forward from the waist at an odd angle.

The Canadian family, he informs me upon learning of my nationality, has moved to the Florence area for a business opportunity and will be staying five years. Preoccupied with the boys, the parents take no notice or offense at Ted telling a stranger their business.

After carefully determining the precise lowering of the ears desired, Ted sets to removing hair at a leisurely pace. The counter below the mirror is cluttered with the usual assortment of barbering tools and the mirror itself is framed with photos from Ted’s life.

Ted seems perfectly suited to the intimacy of his chosen profession. Loquacious without being overbearing he answers his curious customer’s questions with the authority and detail gleaned from a lifetime of living in Florence.

The town’s main employers are the 12 prison complexes scattered on the town’s perimeter that house by his estimate 39,000 law breakers, from juveniles in “training” camps to murderers awaiting their fate on death row in the super max penitentiary. He says the guards and personnel at the lower paying state prisons tend to live in Coolidge, a slightly larger down-at-the heels town about 10 miles up the road. The better compensated federal prison workers commute the 50 miles from Tucson and the suburbs of Phoenix with a smattering mingling with the snow geezers in the manicured Del Webb development.

There is a disproportionate number of courtrooms in town to deal with legal matters that inevitably arise from the plethora of prisoners who are officially considered citizens but cannot vote. The town receives a set annual amount for each prisoner housed in its jurisdiction. He says most of the lawyers and judges who preside over the courts commute or live in Anthem.

Having been cautioned about talking politics, I guardedly remark that Arizona has a new Democratic Senator for the first time in a while. Ted says, only slightly scornfully, the new Senator owes her election to the wave of liberal Californians who have moved to Arizona in recent years to escape the crowds and high taxes of California living. He says he cringes each time Donald Trump opens his mouth but notes that he has been good for the economy. I suspect he is one of the deplorables and so steer the conversation to more friendly ground.

One of the photos framing the mirror is of a local sports team. It is signed and inscribed with best wishes for Ted’s speedy recovery. Ted catches my eye settling on the photo and explains he had a little accident some years back. When asked if it involved cars he laughs and says somewhat sheepishly that his misfortune occurred at a family gathering.

Two teenage boys were causing mayhem pushing a small wooden merry-go-round at a speed that upset some of the smaller children. Ted went over to comfort one of the girls and inadvertently put a foot on the platform just as the youths resumed pushing. The resultant momentum propelled Ted onto the adjoining concrete where he broke his neck in four places. It put him in the hospital and he was bedridden and unable to walk for four years.

At the time of the accident Ted was a successful businessman in Coolidge, operating a number of cash-oriented retail businesses that fell on hard times with the boss unable to watch over them. He was eventually forced to sell the businesses at less than favourable terms.

During his long recovery, which he termed as near miraculous given the doctors’ original prognosis, he held no animosity toward the boys who pushed the merry-go-round. They visited him frequently and expressed great remorse.

“Accidents happen,” he says, matter-of-factly, with no discernible rancour or self-pity.

After relearning to walk and with his businesses now gone, Ted took up barbering and has been at it for six years. When asked about the physical rigours of being on his feet cutting hair, he says he owes his ability to work on the massive doses of morphine he takes daily. He says the furor over America’s opioid crisis caused his doctor to cut his prescription in half with another cut on the horizon. He’s not sure how he will get by when his current supply runs out and asks if I know anything about the marijuana derivative CBD oil used for pain and inflammation.

Ted lives in a large house on 10 acres a few miles from town. He’d like to sell the property and get something more manageable. One of his regular duties is removing the rattle snakes that sun themselves in his driveway and slither into crevices around the property. He scoops them with a shovel and sets them down away from the house. He used to kill them until the rat population ballooned. He and his wife kept a lot of outdoor cats that helped with the snakes and rats but lately the owls and coyotes have taken their toll and they are down to about four. They have a couple of small house dogs.

Ted is proud of his daughter who is entering pre-med school. There is a graduation picture of a teenage girl stuck on one side of his mirror and I suspect she is one of the girls in the sports team photo.

Ted does not seem beaten down, as one might expect, from all he has endured. He comes across as a proud, if slightly bent over American, determined to face the vagaries of life with the courage and resiliency that made the United States the envy of the world. He is a man of true grit, the kind of person the silver spoon rich guy Donald Trump could never be.

There can be no doubt the U.S. ranks high on any list of the world’s great countries and it is because of decent Americans like Ted, who persevere and make do with what life has given them.

Ted is a good and thorough barber. He lathers and shaves the back of my neck with a straight razor then places a soothing hot towel over my head while administering a brief scalp massage. He whisks away loose cuttings before sending his Canadian customer away with a broader understanding of the constituency that put Donald Trump in office.

The charge for the haircut is 10 dollars. The information and inspiration are free.

Watergate for Dummies

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constitution

Rational people watching what’s happening in the Divided States of America are rightly worried. Really worried.

Pulitzer prize winning journalist Carl Bernstein, the one-time Washington Post reporter who made his bones breaking stories on the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, calls Trump’s appointment of Matt Whitaker as head of the Mueller investigation a Presidential coup.

George Conway, husband of Trump propagandist Kellyanne Conway and a Conservative Washington lawyer with solid Republican credentials, felt compelled to write a New York Times op-ed saying Whitaker’s appointment is unconstitutional.

Even before the Whitaker appointment, retired U.S. Airways pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who demonstrated his coolness in crisis by landing a plane with 155 passengers aboard on the Hudson River, says he has never been more worried about the future of his country.

Former CIA director John Brennan, who called Trump’s slavish performance in Helsinki treasonous, warns the nation of a looming constitutional crisis.

Michael Hayden, a much-decorated four star General and former Director of both the National Security Agency and the CIA, cautions the country about the fragility of the veneer of civilization.

Brennan and Hayden, in particular, are serious men and American patriots of the highest order who have spent their lives in the service of their country.

As has Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, the rich kid who volunteered to go to Vietnam, where he was wounded in action, and later gave up a lucrative private law practice to prosecute bad guys for a comparable pittance.

On the other side of the ledger lives the evil presence of Donald Trump, a venal conman who dodged the draft in pursuit of money, proudly avoids paying taxes, cheated students at his bogus ‘university’ and on his three wives, bullies all who oppose him, praises murderous thugs like Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte and proclaims at his frightening mob rallies that he “loves” Kim Jong Un, the unhinged psychopath who starves his people, killed his half-brother and sent an American student home in a fatal coma for pilfering a poster.

When I first began writing about Donald Trump, I did so for amusement. He seemed the perfect comic foil with his ferret-top hair, orange-tinted perma-tan and ridiculous bombast. This is a man who phoned New York media outlets pretending to be his own publicist, confiding in a laughably concealed voice that he, Donald Trump, was being pursued by all the women in New York City.

I viewed him, as so many others did, as someone to be mocked, an orange clown with bad hair and a limited vocabulary.

I’m not laughing anymore.

Trump is a malevolent, malicious, criminal. A paranoid narcissist who views the world through the narrow focus of how it affects him. He has no ideology, no beliefs outside what benefits his shallow existence. No spirituality, zero empathy. No boundaries when it comes to his own survival, even if it means appealing to the worst element in America with fearmongering and lies. Even if it means violence and death. Even if it means bringing the country down with him.

Trump is cult leader Jim Jones without the mind addling drugs. He exudes unctuousness and demands total devotion from his mesmerized and often slow-witted followers. His hypocrisy is breathtaking, his lack of shame an indication of serious mental pathology. He once agreed with shock jock Howard Stern that his daughter Ivanka was “a piece of ass.” He values loyalty, on a one-way street.

Take his treatment of Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Senator who supported him from the beginning, the first serious sitting politician to join the Trump camp. Sessions gave up his safe Senate seat for his dream job of Attorney General, in his mind a fitting reward for his loyal service.

It should be said I have no sympathy for Sessions, who stood by Trump through his rancorous campaign of bigotry and lies. If he didn’t get the measure of the man during those months of daily contact he probably wasn’t qualified for the job of highest law enforcement officer in the land. But that is beside the point when looking at Trump’s view of loyalty.

Sessions, a proud conservative extremist who was nominated for a judgeship in 1986 but not confirmed because of controversial comments on race, proved to be more of a law and order man than Trump expected. Sessions took the advice of ethics people at the Department of Justice and recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his involvement in the campaign.

As Attorney General, Sessions implemented the extreme agenda Trump needed to appeal to his frightened mouth-breathing base. But this wasn’t enough for Dear Leader, who wanted a Roy Cohen-like pit bull who would use every dirty trick available to thwart the investigation that threatened his Presidency.

When Sessions couldn’t deliver, Trump began a campaign of public humiliation to get his resignation, so he could put in place a stooge. He called him weak and questioned his manhood. Sessions stood his ground, using the bad optics of his dismissal before the midterms to keep his job.

Within hours of the polls closing, Trump made his move, ordering Chief of Staff John Kelly to do his dirty work. Sessions asked for a few days to clear up his desk. The once-respected Marine General said no.

Trump got his stooge in Matt Whitaker, the wannabe politician who auditioned for the job on CNN by laying out a scenario in which an acting AG could shut down the Mueller investigation by starving it of funds. No matter that he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate, has a questionable past working for a Florida company that cost consumers $26 million before being shut down as a scam and is otherwise unqualified for the job.

To get to his stooge, Trump had to pass over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Senate-confirmed Republican he picked for the job, who was next in line under the normal succession.

One wonders what it will take for the Republican Congress to wake up to the danger Trump represents. What level of debasement will he sink to before the rational people of the “self-proclaimed greatest country on earth” rise up.

Hitler was a monster disguised as a ranting clown with a bad mustache and worse hair. Kim Jong Un is an overfed fiend masquerading as a messiah in fat-concealing custom suits and cropped clown hair. Donald Trump is a diabolical brute, a schemer without conscience who cloaks his malice in grade school insults delivered from a pursed-lipped, oily orange clown face shaded under a swooping aircraft carrier comb-over of indeterminate colour.

The Shining City Goes Dark

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The abomination that is the Donald Trump presidency can no longer be thought of as an aberration. The Conman-in-Chief represents the values of a significant portion of the country’s electorate. He is symptomatic of what the nation has become.

The U.S. midterms were viewed by many observers as a referendum on human decency. Nothing short of a total rejection of the Bloviating Orange Blowhard’s corruption, lying and fearmongering would qualify as redemption for a country that likes to bill itself as a “shining city on the hill.” The world now knows that the hilltop has gone dark. The blue wave upon which rode the hopes of humanity’s better nature washed ashore not as a tsunami but instead as a spent swell that failed to muster a whitecap in the political swamp.

Both sides will claim victory. Democrats will tout the oversight significance of taking over the House and Republicans will bray about expanding control in the Senate and through it the nation’s courts.

Winning without honor is America’s thing in the New Millennium.

American voters saw fit to re-elect two candidates running under felony indictments. They gave the blatant racist Steve King a seat in Congress to legitimatize his abhorrent world view. Trump toady Ted Cruz was rewarded for embracing the man who denigrated his father and insulted his wife. It’s a long way from the inspiration of the Alamo to modern day Texas.

In Florida, voters handed the keys to the Governor’s mansion to another Trump toady who campaigned with racial dog whistles and misused his infant son in a sickening sycophantic ad. The good people of Georgia empowered the guy who spent years rigging the vote as the state’s partisan Secretary of State and then refused to recuse himself from overseeing the voting process in which he was a candidate. It wouldn’t pass muster with democracy watchdogs in a third-rate country.

Voters handed the Conman-in-Chief what he interprets as a get out of jail card. And they did so with eyes wide open, knowing he was an unindicted co-conspirator with his former personal lawyer for flaunting campaign finance laws. They knew he was a pathological liar, a tax evader, a draft dodger, a philanderer, a fear-mongerer, a bully, a danger to their precious democracy and a petty person of low moral character.

It didn’t take the Malignant Mango Megalomaniac long to act out. With the results of the mid-terms still undecided in some races, the Conman-in-Chief moved to protect himself from the Mueller investigation by firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and appointing someone who has publicly discussed ways to muzzle the Special Prosecutor. He threatened a Democratic Congress with counter investigations if they dare subpoena his taxes.

Donald Trump, the silver spoon daddy’s boy who has never suffered the consequences of a life spent grifting in pursuit of material gain, is scared spitless at the prospect of his many financial wrongdoings being exposed. He is a desperate and dangerous narcissist capable of anything to save his orange skin.

With a constitutional crisis looming and unknown depredations waiting to reveal themselves as Trump’s legal troubles mount on multiple fronts, it is now crystal clear that Americans have the government they so justly deserve.

Enablers have blood on their hands

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Last week started with the President of the United States covering up the murder of a journalist and U.S. resident by a Middle East money lender who is Crown Prince Jared Kushner’s BFF, progressed through a nationwide bomb scare that threatened the lives of two past Presidents, among other high-profile Trump critics, and ended with mass murder in a place of worship in Mr. Rogers upscale Pittsburgh neighborhood.

The worried world watches and waits, wondering if Trump’s heavily armed deplorables will easily surrender their moment in the spotlight or if the Dear Leader and his plethora of bootlickers will inspire bloody insurrection from the mentally unhinged fringe element if the election doesn’t go their way. .

The self-proclaimed “greatest country in the world” is a boiling cauldron of hatred ready to bubble over into post-election violence that could engulf the country and impact the entire globe.

White House leakers say the Mango Megalomaniac, his feverish brain sweating the investigations a Democratic win will bring, is working on a scheme to discredit a negative GOP result with conspiracy theories and court challenges.

Few objective observers expect anything less from this malignant narcissist? But what about the supporting cast of sanctimonious sycophants, religious wingnuts and faux patriots who masquerade their cowardice in the folds of the flag.

Presumably unencumbered by mental illness, regular CNN Trump enablers like Rick Santorum, Steve Cortes, Alice Stewart and Scott Jennings, among many others, twist themselves into human pretzels denying the obvious unfitness of their choice for the highest office in the land. They cluck about entertainer Trump versus presidential Trump, separating the toxicity of his venom and evil clown antics emanating from the Oval Office as if he were a toddler going through the terrible twos.

They justify their advocacy by citing supposed successes, most notably the seating of two ultra conservative judges to the Supreme Court. The plain politically incorrect truth is that a monkey could put his finger on the list provided by the Federalist Society and get his picks through a Senate top-loaded with tree-swingers.

The much-vaunted tax reduction for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by a Congress and Executive Branch dominated by Republicans, is so unpopular GOP candidates aren’t talking about it in the run up to the midterms, instead preferring to vilify a caravan of poor people a thousand miles and weeks of walking away from America.

Family values stalwart and Republican operative Stewart, a crucifix prominent on her throat most nights, admits to being dismayed by the pussy grabbing tape, porn star and Playboy bunny payoffs, philandering and sexual assault accusations but rationalizes voting for Trump because he appointed Supreme Court judges who might overturn a woman’s right to control her own body.

Cortes, the Hispanic Chicago businessman and slavish Trump defender, overlooks Dear Leader’s divisive rhetoric and attacks upon his heritage by pointing out good job numbers bolstered by people of colour forced to work multiple jobs for subsistence wages.

Failed Presidential candidate Santorum, ever focused on future opportunities, smiles slyly to himself while mildly disavowing the most egregious Trump behavior, careful not to alienate the deplorable base key to his political ambition.

Jennings, the ‘aw shucks’ moderate, assuages his conscience and puts on a good guy face for his kids by disagreeing with the most offensive Trump methodology while supporting the man endangering the democracy they will inherit.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Leader Paul Ryan and their respective gangs of mouth-breathers, climate change deniers, religious ravers and NRA lap dogs have chosen to be on the wrong side of history for political expediency, implications for the future of the country be damned.

Evangelical scions like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, intent on their mission to preserve the power and riches bestowed upon them by their earthly fathers, will presumably answer for their self-serving actions when they meet their Maker. Meanwhile, their followers will have some explaining to do at the Final Judgement for eschewing the biblical values they exalt in favour of an agenda carried out by a demented orange emissary of the dark underworld.

The Murdoch family and the right wing mercenaries at Fox News betray the viewers who support their privileged lifestyle by spewing venomous conspiracy theories and pumping out fake news 24/7 while Dear Leader demeans real journalists.

Oblivious to the havoc he reeks, Donald Trump stumps the country spewing poisonous rancor against all who oppose him, ingraining his invectives in the sick minds of violent fringe players like accused bomber Cesar Sayoc, seen chanting CNN sucks at Trump’s frightening mob rallies, and Robert Bowers, who adopted Trumpian tropes by calling immigrants “invaders” and lamenting that Jews are “infesting” America before carrying out his murderous rampage.

Historians may recognize the Dear Leader’s mental illness as a mitigating factor for the damage he has done. Not so for the ‘sane’ people he relies upon for support.

All Trump enablers are culpable in the carnage endangering their democracy. All of them have blood on their hands.

 

 

 

Own up America, many of you are deplorable

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Until my mid-teens I bought everything America was selling. I swallowed brand USA with the naivete and fervor of a Trump University sucker.

I watched the westerns with chisel-jawed heroes like Randolph Scott and John Wayne fighting bad guys and blood-thirsty Indians. I idolized actor Audie Murphy who overcame his thespian shortcomings because audiences knew the decorated World War II veteran had the real life chops to play heroes.

Back before the Me Too Movement, I laughed  as Bob Hope delivered scantily clad show girls and double entendres to American service men protecting the world from communists in lonely far away outposts.

I worshiped Davie Crockett, Daniel Boone, Colonel Travis, Kit Carson. Resourceful men of integrity and true grit.

I looked up to your Presidents. I particularly liked Kennedy, the good Catholic family man whose philandering went unreported, when he faced down the tyrant Khrushchev. In my youthful mind U.S. Presidents represented a country with principles, a country that stood up to tyranny, no matter the cost, to keep us all safe.

The truth is, I wanted to be an American, not a polite Canadian with second rate celebrities, earnest heroes and boring politicians.

Then I grew up. Or at least expanded intellectually.

The illusion of America the Great, did not shatter immediately, smashed upon a sharp rock of reality. It peeled away, layer by layer, as historical truths gleaned from a lifetime of reading and travel began to sink in.

In this era of alternate facts and truth isn’t truth, here are a few myth shattering irrefutable facts easily verified on Google:

  • The Constitution Americans so revere was formulated by bigoted white men who viewed the concept of liberty through the toilet paper tube view of race. The liberty they envisioned did not include black people who slaved on their plantations, yellow people who died at back breaking labour for meager pay or red people whose lands were usurped in a cultural genocide that would eventually be given the highfalutin name of Manifest Destiny.
  • The United States is not a true democracy in which the majority rules. Money is the determining factor in getting elected. Lots of money. Even then the Presidential candidate who gets the most votes doesn’t always win, as evidenced by two of the last three Presidents. The Electoral College system was created to appease slave states. It is so complicated and antiquated most Americans could not tell you how it works, or why. The Senate is a smoke and mirrors democratic institution: in choosing a Supreme Court Justice who will determine the country’s direction for decades, a representative from Wyoming who might represent a couple hundred thousand voters carries the exact same weight as a Senator from California who represents 20 million constituents.
  • The U.S. is not a country in which no man is above the law. As if he were a Medieval monarch, the President retains the absolute power to pardon anyone of any crime, be it friend, family member or accomplice. It is an open question among constitutional scholars whether a President can pardon himself. Enough said.
  • The United States is not the land of the free. In America, incarcerating its own people is big business. The U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any country in the world. It’s not even close.
  • The Supreme Court is not an impartial body above politics. This is a claim stunning in its brazenness, given the disgraceful nominating process the world just witnessed. Justices are appointed by the politicians in charge on the basis of their ideology. Period.
  • The U.S. is not the greatest country in the world, a place where all the rest of us want to live. It is a country that spends more on its military than the next five countries combined while its infrastructure crumbles and Americans die because they can’t afford health care. Once great cities like Detroit have been reduced to Third World dereliction. Chicago is a war zone. No one wants to move to Flint and drink toxic water or go to Puerto Rico to sit in the dark. It is a scary country whose heavily armed citizens are killing each other in nightclubs and movie theatres, restaurants and parks, churches and schools in record shattering numbers. The majority of the non-desperate world citizens prefer to live in stable countries and many no longer want to visit the States.
  • The U.S. has never been the shining city on the hill, a beacon of integrity for all the world to see. It is a country that has always put its own interests first regardless of morality. It has pillaged the world’s resources, never putting a dollar into a Third World country without the expectation of getting two out. The feigned indignation expressed by Lindsay Graham at the Saudis for killing a journalist, the same red-faced sputterings he unleashed at the “non-political” Kavanaugh hearings, would make for great satire if the subject matter wasn’t so horrifying. As Graham well knows, the U.S. has a long sordid history of propping up murderous tyrants, from Anastasia Somoza in Nicaragua to the Shah of Iran, from Saddam Hussein to Manual Noriega in Panama, until the latter’s blatant drug dealing became too public. America threw in with corrupt Vietnamese generals while dropping bombs, napalm and Agent Orange on people fighting for the right to determine their own country’s fate. All in the name of  their own national interests. Meanwhile Graham’s new BFF is cozying up to the current generation of tyrants, professing love for the North Korean thug who had his half-brother killed in a Singapore airport and returned the broken body of a barely alive U.S. student who pilfered a poster. The hypocritical Graham will no doubt eventually fall in line with U.S. leaders who are blatantly providing a cover story for a repressive tyrant who murdered a U.S.-based journalist then cut up his body.
  • Perhaps the greatest myth of all is inherent in the country’s name. The United States of America is anything but united. The plain-spoken, politically incorrect fact that nobody on network or cable television wants to say out loud is that the U.S. comprises a society in which a significant portion of its populace has deplorable values. There can be no other explanation for Donald Trump, who is a symptom not the cause of the country’s spiritual sickness. Hillary had it right. Trump supporters are deplorable. They laugh uproariously when their Dear Leader mocks a disabled person or sexual assault victim. They chant “Lock her up!” when he chastises a political opponent and then nod reverently when he tells them accused sexual predators are innocent until proven guilty. Trump supporters are the “very fine people” who marched with tiki torches and killed a woman in Charlottesville. They profess their love of Jesus and family values while supporting a man who cheats on his wife with porn stars, lies pathologically and admits to grabbing women by their private parts, a guy who bullies the weak but barely stops short of oral sex for strongmen like Putin. They cluck when he takes babies and young children from their mother’s arms but take secret comfort in the fact desperate foreigners will soon have to climb over a 30-foot wall to get into the country. They give fealty to a man who drapes himself in the flag but avoided military service when his country called. They say America First but support a tax cheat who always put himself before his country. Deplorable is as deplorable does.

Locked & Loaded

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bloody gun

The next time you’re at a large concert or sporting event, say something with an audience of about 30,000, look around at the crowd and imagine each man, woman and child with a bullet hole in their forehead. That’s how many Americans die every year from gun violence, and that’s not counting the injured.

For people who never tire of telling us they live in the greatest country in the world, shooting each other is an everyday thing.

According to the non-profit monitoring group Gun Violence Archive, in the first year of the Mango Megalomaniac’s debasement of America’s highest office there have been 378 mass shootings, defined as four or more people shot at the same general location and time. This is down from 483 in 2016. Of course, the year isn’t over.

Despite these startling statistics the Conman-in-Chief has Americans convinced that terrorism is the greatest threat facing the country. This is an alternative fact not born out by the numbers.

An exhaustive study by Alex Norasteh of the Cato Institute concluded that from post 9/11 to 2015 there have been 24 Americans killed by foreign-born terrorists. Norasteh went further, crunching numbers from 1975 to 2015. He concluded during that 40-year span that 1.13 billion foreigners entered the U.S. legally and illegally and more than 28 million foreigners entered the country for each terrorist who killed somebody in a terrorist attack, including the thousands who died on 9/11.

Clearly, building a wall and banning visitors from Muslim countries won’t keep Americans safe. Gun-loving good old boys are murdering people with frightening competence, using high-powered weapons capable of killing dozens of their fellow citizens in mere minutes.

The Conman-in-Chief, pandering to his well-armed base of deplorables, signed an executive order in February making it easier for people with mental health issues to obtain firearms. That didn’t stop him from saying the latest outrage in a Texas church wasn’t about guns. It’s a mental health issue, he said, without a hint of shame.

That’s like saying smoking cigarettes is an inhaling issue. Leave them in the pack and they won’t harm your health.

The U.S. could build a 50-foot wall around its entire perimeter and its citizens would not be safe in any aspect of their consumer-driven lives because they have to live with each other in a country suffering from mass psychosis.

Not at elementary school:

Dec. 14, 2012, Newton, Connecticut: Twenty children and six teachers are mowed down at Sandy Hook Elementary with a semiautomatic weapon.

Not at high school:

April 20, 1999, Littleton, Colorado: Twelve students at Columbine High School are killed and 21 injured by two students armed with bombs, guns they borrowed from their parents and knives.

Not at university:

April 16, 2007, Blacksburg, Virginia: A disgruntled senior at Virginia Tech kills 32 people and wounds 17 others before killing himself.

Not on the job:

Workplace killings are too frequent to list them all but it suffices to say the phrase ‘going postal’ originated in the U.S., where making a living can be hazardous, whether you work in a beer warehouse or a financial institution.

Aug. 3, 2010, Manchester, Connecticut: A former employee shoots eight people to death at Hartford Distributors before turning the gun on himself.

July 29, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia: A failed day trader killed his wife and two children with a hammer before heading to his former firms, Momentum Securities and All-Tech Investment Group, with evil in his heart. The final toll—12 dead, 13 injured.

Not while taking in a movie:

July 20, 2012, Aurora, Colorado: A Batman fan dressed as The Joker shoots 82 moviegoers, killing 12 and injuring 70 during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises.

Not while eating dinner out:

Oct. 16, 1991, Killeen, Texas. A 35-year-old man crashed his pickup into Luby’s Cafeteria. He shot and killed 23 people before killing himself. Twenty-seven others were wounded. A former roommate said he hated blacks, Hispanics and gays, and thought women were snakes.

Not while dancing to Latin music:

June 12, 2016, Orlando, Florida: A sexually conflicted security guard killed 49 people and wounded 58 others inside Pulse, a gay nightclub hosting Latin Night. He was shot and killed by police after a three-hour standoff.

Not while listening to country music:

Oct. 1, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada: A lone gunman opened fire on a crowd of concert-goers at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, leaving 58 people dead and 546 injured. The man fired hundreds of rounds with a semi-automatic rifle he legally converted to an automatic weapon, firing from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Not while barbecuing at home with friends and watching football:

Sept. 19, 2017, Plano, Texas: An estranged husband killed eight people on his wedding anniversary while they were watching The Dallas Cowboys on Sunday Night Football.

Not even while praying at church on Sunday morning:

Nov. 5, 2017, Sutherland, Texas: A mentally ill man who had been drummed out of the military after spending a year in the brig for beating his wife and stepson used a legally acquired semi-automatic rifle to kill 26 people and wound 20 more at First Baptist Church. He was shot by a neighbour who grabbed his own assault rifle and rushed to the scene.

The gun carnage escalates with new records being set yearly while the gun lobby bribes and extorts Washington lawmakers who piously wave the Second Amendment, written in the 1700s by men who wanted to arm slave-owning militias with flintlock muskets against the threat of an uprising by the enslaved.

Americans might want to pause for a moment before allowing their government to build walls and seal their borders. Some of them may want to get out someday.

What a great country.

The Rot Within

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american dream

“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle merite.” (“Every nation has the government it deserves.”) –Joseph de Maistre, 1811.

Lawyer and philosopher Joseph de Maistre, a loyal subject of the King of Sardinia, was advocating for hereditary monarchy when he coined the phrase that became popular in the 20th century in a slightly altered version: “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.”

De Maistre, appalled by the violence and disorder that followed the French Revolution of 1789, favoured governments founded on a Christian constitution. As a Catholic and proponent of hierarchical authority, he supported the papacy’s hold on European monarchs.

However misguided his intention may appear through the lens of history, his words were never truer than in America in the time of the Mango Megalomaniac.

Out of a population in excess of 300 million, Americans chose as their Commander-in-Chief a pathological liar, a shallow, ignorant, thin-skinned bully, a con man who worships money above all else, a self-serving tax evader who avoided military service when his country called, a misogynist bigot, a mentally ill unstable opportunist. And they did so with their eyes wide open.

Donald Trump’s shortcomings have been on public display for five decades. His philandering, his bankruptcies, his stiffing of contractors and working people, his tacky taste and shallowness, his lying and conning (remember his election campaign vow to never settle the lawsuits over his bogus “university” scam), all played out in the media spotlight. He admitted to grabbing women by the pussy and called Mexicans rapists. He denigrated an American war hero for getting captured in the conflict he so deftly avoided and railed against a Gold Star family whose son gave his life for the country. He said it was smart not to pay taxes and called the political system that would eventually elect him rigged.

Knowing all this, Americans elected him as their President.

This should not have come as a surprise to the rest of the world.

The historical facts run contrary to the ‘alternative’ facts Americans ballyhoo while laying claim to being the greatest country in the world. America is a war-like nation founded on slavery and genocide. Conflict and violence have been its lifeblood, as evidenced by the ubiquitous war memorials in its capital. It maintains its standing in the world through military force.

The U.S. perceives its national interests extending into every corner of the globe. It is a country that sees enemies everywhere. The long list of direct armed conflict, meddling and fighting by proxy includes Britain, Canada, Spain, Mexico, Vietnam, Germany, Japan, Chile, Libya, China, Korea, the Soviet Union, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even tiny Grenada, among many others.

When deemed to be in its national interests the U.S. government has supported despots like Sadam Hussein and the Shaw of Iran, supplied arms to mujahedeen fighters like Osama bin Laden and helped in the overthrow of democratically elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Congolese Prime Minister, who was murdered with U.S. approval.

To deflect from investigations that could implode his Presidency, the beleaguered Bloviator-in-Chief ‘wags the dog’ by threatening to wage nuclear war against America’s old nemesis and newest arch enemy, North Korea, for wanting to arm itself against what it perceives as an imminent American threat.

Rest easy. Unprovoked, North Korea won’t be insuring its certain destruction by launching nuclear-armed missiles at the United States or its allies.

Like the Romans and other empires before them, what Americans fail to grasp is that the real enemy is the rot within. Military power aside, the U.S. is a country that’s world standing has peaked. It has been spiralling downward for decades while the top 10 percent get richer and the bottom 90 percent get disillusioned and increasingly bitter.

This so-called bastion of freedom imprisons more of its citizens than any other country, exceeding second place China by more than half a million inmates even though that country has a billion more people. Tens of thousands of Americans are shooting themselves or each other every year. Mass shootings are so common the national news media only focus on exceptional cases involving children, terrorism or racial motivation. Terrified police officers shoot motorists for reaching for a driver’s licence. An estimated 150 Americans overdose on opioid drugs every day.

American companies, with the First Family at the forefront, set up shop outside the country to increase profits on the backs of cheap foreign labour while companies that can’t pick up and move import foreign workers to do jobs they say Americans are too proud, lazy or soft to do.

More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. It is the only developed country that does not offer its citizens health care as a right. The United States is one of only three countries worldwide to opt out of the Paris Climate Accord.

Donald Trump has been a long time coming. He is made in America.