United States

Open letter to Trump voters

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Dear deplorables, crusty doughnuts and half-baked buns;

Are you tired of winning yet?

Harken back to the good old days of 2016, when the man you selected as your leader and role model for the nation’s youth, was caught bragging about grabbing pussy (boy talk, as wife Melania explained). Back then he knew more about fighting terror than the generals and was smarter than the intelligence community and everyone else on all other matters and was the only person who could solve the nation’s many problems.

He told you so and you took him at his word.

Double-dealing Donald was your saviour back in the day, someone who would pull the plug on the Washington swamp and get all those slimy politicians slithering in a political conga line with a magical wave of his tiny hands. A man who would make you feel great again, bring you back to the glory days of your grand delusions.

You knew it was true because he was a rich guy you’d watched pretend to fire people on television. You saw his name on buildings and on the airplane that took him to rallies with his trophy wife and Miami Vice sons Eric and Don Jr. and beautiful daughter Ivanka. You laughed with the naughty old orange philanderer when you heard he agreed with shock jock Howard Stern’s assessment of his daughter as “a  piece of ass.”

That happened before he found God, the Christians among you rationalized.

And as a bonus voters got his genius son-in-law Jared Kushner, someone who would overcome the Kushner family criminal stigma by brokering peace in the Middle East while simultaneously revamping the U.S. government and conducting diplomacy with Mexico, Canada and China. All while wearing a thousand dollar skinny suit with no cape attached.

What a great family, you said to yourselves, so accomplished at making money and avoiding taxes. Great kids with their collective eyes on the bottom line. You couldn’t wait for them to get into the White House and apply the skills they learned shilling for Daddy while your kids were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. You assumed the boys must have learned a lot about business while conning shady developers into buying the family name at inflated prices. Many of you purchased Ivanka’s tacky Chinese sweat shop fashion accessories to wear to the Make America Great Again rallies.

You watched the great man walking imperiously down the steps of his personal airplane, his tie hanging below his crotch like a red codpiece, trophy wife in her proper position behind, and listened rapturously on the tarmac imagining he would make your sad lives more gilt-edged, empty and vacuous, just like his.

It was basically the same pitch he gave to the suckers who attended his bogus university: “Trust me and you can have what I’ve got.” Of course, that was before he settled the law suit,  the one being unfairly overseen by a biased Mexican judge, and gave the swindled students their money back.

There will be no refunds for Trump voters. Only a bad case of buyer’s remorse and a sick feeling that will be deemed a pre-existing condition and won’t be covered by your health insurance. That is if you are able to get health insurance.

Health care seemed easy before the election. “It will be so great, and cheaper, too,” said your apricot-flavoured conman, neglecting to mention the fine print that says it will only be cheaper if you and your family don’t get sick. But cheer up, the health bill is mired in the undrained political swamp that is the U.S. Senate and might not make it back to the Congressional slough before the impeachment.

Who knew health care could be so complicated?

Remember when the honest-talking billionaire told you it would be a disaster to elect Crooked Hillary and have the office of the President mired in an FBI investigation over improper use of e-mails. And how his trusted campaign confidant and future National Security Advisor Michael Flynn led you all in a rousing chorus of Lock Her Up.

Such good fun in 2016. Looking back, the e-mail scandal seems so quaint and innocent as your conman’s Presidency, minus the disgraced Flynn, reels under four separate investigations, including the Senate, Congress, the FBI and a special prosecutor looking for crimes like treason, perjury and obstruction of justice.

Then there’s the wall. Remember what great fun it was to shout “Build the Wall” with all your fellow bigots at those great rallies. And to chant “Mexico!” with hatred in your heart when the Mango Megalomaniac pursed his pussy lips and asked who was going to pay for it. Some of you may remember getting a woody.

Turns out you’re going to be paying for pricey repairs to an ugly fence because those stingy Republicans won’t give their own President billions of taxpayer dollars for a border solution more suited to medieval China than the 21st Century. Guess it was hard to read that fine print all slathered up under the brims of your Trump ball caps with the little guy below imitating a banana in your pocket.

Fighting domestic terrorism was easy, too, way back on the campaign trail. All your conman had to do was ban all those pesky Muslims from coming into the country with a flourish of his Super Souvenir Executive Order Trump Pen, available after the impeachment for $19.99 on the Shopping Network. What a great gift for Uncle Billy Bob’s Klan induction anniversary party. Except, this time the fine print was written in the U.S. Constitution, a wordy document none of you could be expected to have read but one the country’s “so-called judges” hold dear.

Turns out the orange tax-avoider you chose to bring fiscal responsibility to government is anything but stingy with your money when it comes to playing golf and promoting his various properties. It’s costing you more than a million dollars a round for Trump to play his courses with other rich guys. Try not to dwell on it when you buy discount golf balls at Walmart.

Then there’s the huge expense of protecting the slicked-back sons as they traipse around the world at Daddy’s behest. Not to mention the three million a month you’re paying because your hero’s trophy wife doesn’t want to share a town, let alone a roof and bedroom, with a fat-assed senior whose greasy hair hangs down to his shoulder on one side in the morning.

Tax cuts and infrastructure spending? Senior Republicans are already calling the White House’s proposed budget dead on arrival and the country is headed for a fiscal crisis in September when the temporary spending extension runs out.

Turns out those Muslims aren’t so bad if they stay in their own countries. Salesman Donnie sold the Saudis a lot of heavy duty weapons on his first foreign trip, even though a lot of Saudi money has been funnelled to terrorists and Saudis were front and centre in the 9/11 attack. Minor concerns to the man who paid someone to write The Art of the Deal. After the apricot-arsehole’s recent roadie, you have to worry about staying friendly with the NATO allies he pissed off with his boorish behaviour in Brussels.

Not to worry, he’s already got new allies in Syria and Nicaragua, the only two countries on the entire planet not to sign the Paris Accord. Unfortunately, the rest of the world’s leaders are collectively shaking their heads in disbelief at your man playing politics by putting an ill-advised campaign promise ahead of the future of the world’s children. All you coal miners out there can assure your kids they might get a shot at black lung disease if they drop out of school before the planet burns up..

But you can take some pride in the accomplishments in the first four months of your man Donald’s reign. He sent his lap dog Mike Pence down to the Senate to ensure the appointment of a supreme court judge. Course, a monkey could have got his pick through a Senate dominated by tree swingers.

But even Trump’s biggest critics have to admit it takes a world class ignoramus to piss off the Pope.

I ask again, America, are you tired of winning yet?

All hail the Cheeto King

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I’ve been writing for a while that Donald Trump suffers from the mental disorder of acute narcissism as defined by the Merriam Webster medical dictionary. Last week the eminent psychiatrist who literally wrote the manual on diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Duke University Medical College, Dr. Allen Frances, sent a letter to the New York Times rebuking a group of renowned American mental health professionals who think Trump’s mental condition makes him unfit to serve as president.

Thirty-five psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, while acknowledging they were in breach of professional rules against evaluating public figures, deemed Trump’s unstable mental condition too threatening too ignore.

Their letter to the NYT asserted:

“Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behaviour suggest a profound inability to empathise. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).

“In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.”

In a subsequent letter, Dr. Frances told his colleagues that saying Trump is mentally ill is unfair to those who truly are.

His words are also worth repeating:

“Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabelled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

“Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

“Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

“His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.”

I stand corrected by Dr. Frances, which allows me to go back to calling Trump a Mango Megalomaniac and an Evil Orange Clown without fear of disrespecting the mentally ill.

But what does it say when calling the U.S. President mentally ill is deemed an insult to those who suffer from mental disorders.

It says there are a hell of a lot of dangerous fruit cakes in the Divided States of America.

Watching interviews with Trump supporters, some of whom look normal on the outside, is to see mass delusion. These people still believe their Mango messiah is the best thing since chicken-flavoured Cheetos.

  • They listen to his compulsive boasting and hear a plain-talking man of the people who will help them become the winners they have never been.
  • They see chaos in the White House and dismiss it as a vast media conspiracy.
  • They watch as their leader praises America’s arch enemy Russia and see a friend in dictator Vladimir Putin, in direct opposition to what most of them have believed since their childhoods in the nation’s hollows, swamps and trailer parks.
  • They listen as Donald Trump tells them the election he won was rigged and see millions of brown illegal voters streaming to the polls.
  • They hear about the Bowling Green massacre and insurrection in Sweden and reach for their guns.

The greatest threat to America is not immigrants, refugees, ISIS, Korea or even Russia. Instead it exists within its own borders in the heads of tens of millions of American citizens, heavily armed delusional fanatics who view an ignorant, incompetent, paranoid Reality TV star and pathological liar as the saviour who can transport them back to a time that never was, except in their distorted imaginations.

I ask again: Sane Americans, what have you allowed to happen on your watch? And more importantly: What are you going to do about it?

 

 

AMERICA THE BLESSED, REDEEM THYSELF

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trump-crazy

 

Ladies and gentleman of the U.S. you have put a mentally ill man into a position of power over the world’s most lethal military. You have placed the rest of us in grave danger.

The man you chose out of a population of 300-odd million to lead you through these most dangerous of times is exhibiting classic signs of mental breakdown, perhaps being brought on by the reality of the Presidency that cannot be so easily molded by denials, obfuscations and outright lies.

That said, I can no longer make fun of Donald Trump in print by calling him a Mango Megalomaniac, as that would be making fun of the mentally challenged. I will now refer to him by name, but not title, and officially join the conspiracy to delegitimatize his Presidency.

Donald Trump is a narcissist by the classic definition of the illness. Google the Merriam Webster Medical Definition of Narcissism: a personality disorder characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, persistent need for attention, lack of empathy for others. Excessive pride in achievements, and snobbish, disdainful or patronizing attitudes.

Never mind taking Donald Trump’s picture and pasting it beside this definition, these words are his political eulogy. And that is not good for any of us.

During his bizarre stop at CIA headquarters on the day of the record protests, his first official day in office, he appeared a mentally ill man under tremendous stress.

Think about it. There are at least three ongoing investigations with Russian connections. Some ‘400-pound’ computer genius sitting on a bed in a basement somewhere in the vast cyber world is trying to hack into his tax returns or his text messages or post a salacious video that could go viral.

A lot of smart people, motivated by professionalism, patriotism, party politics or revenge, are digging deep into the dirt of his life, including all his ‘alternative’ versions of it.

They are looking for factual facts.

Before taking office he began a public feud with the American intelligence community, going on international television and likening intelligence officials to Nazis in an attempt to delegitimatize future findings and the intelligence community’s credibility going forward.

He then chose to make the CIA his first stop as President. He stood before the cameras, enveloped in the narcissist’s world of ‘alternative facts’, in front of the hallowed wall of fallen American heroes and the people he has so recently denigrated, and claimed there is no better friend of the intelligence community than himself, before launching into a bizarre and disjointed ramble against the media, spouting conspiracy theories about the size of his inauguration crowd.

Are you worried yet people?

A man whose organization and associates are under investigation, not to mention the run of the mill national and world problems that a new President must deal with, is focused on the pettiest of issues, one that equates in the mind of a short-fingered narcissist to saying the first black President is better endowed.

Unable to let the crowd size issue go, he stewed and obsessed, finally sacrificing the credibility of his press secretary by sending him out for his first briefing to read a written list of ‘alternative facts’ that made him appear not only a narcissist’s lackey but a laughing stock.

Unprecedented has become a media cliché. If Donald Trump can unravel over an issue that basically boils down to ‘mine is bigger than yours,’ what unprecedented international actions will he take with Putin pulling his strings and pushing his buttons.

The lack of awareness in a man who made his political bones questioning the legitimacy of Barrack Obama, and is now whingeing and whining about a conspiracy to undermine his own Presidency, shows how far into the world of narcissism he has gone.

Fake intelligence. Fake news. Fake sexual assault claims.

The narcissistic mind whirls within a windstorm of ‘alternative facts’.

Americans? Do you understand what you have done? You ignored all the symptoms and put the planet in jeopardy and now it is up to you to get it undone.

Fortunately, you get a do-over.

As powerful as the office is, there are safeguards through which a mentally ill President can be thwarted. A narcissist cannot operate without the cooperation of Capital Hill. You must put enormous pressure on both parties to put patriotism ahead of politics. You must demand that your representatives in the Senate and House of Congress recognize the dangers associated with this disorder. You must ensure the investigations move forward without interference. Make him release his taxes. Refute his propaganda minister’s ‘alternative facts.’ Make your President live in the real world.

You must be vigilant for your democracy before Donald Trump starts dressing up in a gold-braided hat and military suits with flashy gold epilates and a chest full of medals.

 

 

 

 

Trudeau’s Castro problem

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trudeau-castro-composite

In this the era of populist demagogues like Donald Trump, with far right politicians crawling out from under their rocks in Europe and around the world with divisive messages of hate, Canadians can only hope Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision not to attend the funeral of Fidel Castro isn’t an omen of things to come for Canada’s foreign relations.

Trudeau’s bland praise of the Cuban dictator upon his death was met with a firestorm of criticism from the right. He called the iconic world figure a remarkable leader, which he was, and correctly said he made significant improvements to education and health care after ousting corrupt U.S.-backed strong man Fulgencio Battista. He also noted that Castro had garnered the deep and lasting affection of the Cuban people, which he most certainly has.

He was excoriated for this?

Republican Senator Marco Rubio questioned whether Trudeau’s comments were a parody, calling them shameful and embarrassing. Another failed Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, said Trudeau’s remarks were disgraceful.

Really guys?

This from a couple of spineless, self-serving, power-at-any-cost, double-speaking sleaze bags who supported Donald Trump after he said Russia’s murderous, thieving dictator was a better leader than their own president.

Shameful, embarrassing, disgraceful? Their pictures should be inserted into dictionaries beside these adjectives, which so perfectly describe their own boot-licking behaviour in the wake of Trump’s win.

The hypocrisy of these guys is stunning. Breathtaking. Nauseating.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history of supporting tyrants whose track records made Castro look like Mother Theresa, from the hated Shah of Iran, who received American sanctuary when the Iranian people finally kicked him out, to Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Manuel Noriega in Panama, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

When it comes to supporting tyrants, the U.S. government has been on the wrong side of history so often it’s too space consuming to provide a full list. If Castro had been open to corrupting American influence you can bet your last dollar U.S. politicians would have been singing his praises no matter how many people he killed.

The fact of the matter is that Castro and a small band of rebels overthrew the tyrant America backed, a man who ruthlessly exploited the Cuban people in partnership with the mafia. A lawyer who could have lived well outside of Cuba, Castro risked his life to take the country back, not for money but instead for love of the island nation.

Castro was no saint. He did whatever was necessary to wrest control away from the profiteers who privatized all the choice waterfront properties, keeping Cubans away from their own beaches. Battista’s supporters were not the sort to give up their privileged positions without a fight. People were killed and imprisoned during his 60-year reign, some of them no doubt unjustly. But the outpouring of affection from Cubans of all stripes upon his death is testimony that he was a respected and well-loved leader.

He brought in free medical care and access to education unheard of in third world countries, and he did so despite the punitive U.S. embargo meant to cripple the economy and cause unrest and regime change. He was left with no choice but to turn towards Russia for support in the early days of the revolution.

The irony is, the Cuban people are more suited, by inclination and temperament, to the American way of life than they ever were to the austere Soviet view of the world. They love rock and roll, baseball and blue jeans and could have been an ally instead of a hated enemy of the United States for all these years. It was U.S. paranoia and fear of communism that forced them into the other camp.

During a month-long visit to Cuba many years back I found it to be a safe country with no restrictions on travel, a nation that championed racial harmony among its mixed race population, a place where blacks, whites and all the colours in between got along despite the crushing poverty caused by the U.S. sanctions. In Castro’s Cuba black men weren’t afraid of being shot on sight by the police.

Unlike Donald Trump’s best bro Vladimir Putin, who lives like a king on his ill-gotten gains protected by his posse of thugs while Russian families of six huddle in one-room apartments sharing bathrooms down the hall, Castro was never accused of ruling for personal gain.

The disturbing thing about the Trudeau—Castro contretemps is not that he spoke well of the dictator but instead that he backed down from going to the funeral of the man who was an honorary pallbearer at his own father’s funeral because of criticism from the right. How will he stand up in negotiations with Trump’s ideological zealots?

One thing is sure, in this instance he did not demonstrate the fortitude his father showed when taking controversial positions. Under the elder Trudeau, Canada became a haven for American draft dodgers during the Vietnam war over the vehement protests of the American political establishment and he maintained normal relations with Cuba throughout the American embargo, even visiting the country and having pictures taken with the dictator cradling his children.

While Pierre Trudeau had his share of critics, Canadians liked the stands he took in opposition to our powerful and aggressive neighbour. He was nobody’s lap dog and by association neither were Canadians. If there is an afterlife, the elder Trudeau’s spirit is extending a famous middle finger to the right wing critics while his earthly remains pirouette rather than spin in his grave at the thought of his son caving on the funeral.

 

We needed a hero in a white hat

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Shortview Lincoln memorial

Remember when the Republicans had leaders like this…

 

The 2016 U.S. presidential election, more than any other event in recent history, has left the world feeling disillusioned. People of all stripes and political persuasions, in far off lands and countries bordering the U.S., went to bed early Tuesday night and stared at the ceiling or pulled the covers over their heads not knowing quite why they felt so bad.

Maybe it’s because things aren’t turning out the way our parents said they would. Hard work pays off, always do the right thing, treat people with respect, decency wins in the end, things work out for the better, good triumphs over evil. All the do-gooder clichés parents worldwide have been imparting to their children since the beginning of time were thrown into question on election night.

The country founded in 1776 as a nation refuge for the world’s oppressed, a place where no person was better than another because of birthright, colour of skin or religious beliefs, has been for centuries a shining beacon of hope in a sometimes dark world. A country founded on the best of human intentions. A place to go to get away from evil.

Of course, we all knew it wasn’t really so. After travelling the U.S. for six months, I paraphrased Charles Dickens in a previous blog, calling it the ‘best of countries and the worst of countries.’ However well-intentioned, the founding fathers had no problem with slavery and ignoring the rights of America’s indigenous people, who suffered cultural genocide in the name of Manifest Destiny.

No nation made up of human beings could live up to the ideals laid out in the American Constitution. The world’s oppressed suffered from bigotry and intolerance after arriving on U.S. shores, but in a lesser non-institutionalized form. The immigrants knew in their hearts the impossibility of legislating the dark side of human nature and that prejudices were inevitable. But in America bad intent was not officially sanctioned by a governing force. They could see others of their kind working hard and succeeding and held out hope for their piece of the American dream.

And so it went over hundreds of years, with good eventually winning over evil, industry over sloth. Slavery was abolished after a bloody civil war and the horrible mistreatment of indigenous people was reduced to levels a country blessed by God could live with. It was an imperfect Union that fell short of the founding fathers’ lofty ideals but a country that championed individual liberty and freedom above all else.

In the 20th Century, the little democracy that could, emerged from its isolationist stance to become the star of the world stage when American military might brought the First World War to an end. The nation came into its own as the world’s champion of freedom when it reluctantly joined the fight against the forces of evil in World War Two, its soldiers pictured in newsreels liberating European cities along streets crowded with adoring grateful crowds.

It was the dawning of the movie age and one-dimensional Hollywood heroes like John Wayne and Gary Cooper ingrained the image of the American good guy in the world consciousness. For children growing up around the globe, the United States stood for what their parents always told them. The cowboy in the white hat always draws faster and shoots straighter than the guy in black. Good wins over evil, every time.

For a brief while in the war’s aftermath, people felt safe in a world where the guys in white hats had nuclear weapons. Tensions ratcheted up when the Russians went over to the dark side and caught up, especially when Soviet ships laden with nuclear missile parts cruised towards Cuba and an American naval blockade. The world held its collective breath until the guys in black hats backed down. President John Kennedy came away as the free world’s greatest hero, the sheriff who stared down the gunslingers threatening the global community.

But with the sheriff dead by the country’s own hand, the world’s champion of freedom veered off course in the sixties, allowing paranoia about the spread of communism to overshadow the founding fathers’ original intent. Innocent people in a far-off land died by the tens of thousands, their blood on the hands of the guys in white hats.

With U.S. losses mounting and the nation being torn apart internally by opposition to what was clearly an unjust war, the nation’s leaders refrained from resorting to scorched earth annihilation of a far weaker foe and left the battlefield, if not defeated, then certainly chastised by world opinion with their white hats tattered and somewhat soiled. In the sense that the U.S. had shown military restraint and walked away without obliterating the enemy, it could be perceived that once gain good had triumphed over evil.

America began its next war of note on higher moral ground, ostensibly to liberate Kuwait, its weak but oil-rich Middle East ally. Most of the free world watched with pride as President George Bush Sr. told the murderous black-hatted Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein that his aggression in Kuwait ‘Would not stand.’

With overwhelming military superiority and complete control of the air, the U.S. made short work of the vaunted Iraqi army, leaving scores of enemy soldiers smouldering in charred heaps by the side of the highway as its army marched towards Baghdad. With Kuwait free and the tyrant sufficiently chastened, the guys in white hats pulled back on the military reins, keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, and brought the troops home. Good beat evil again.

Fears of a worldwide computer glitch aside, the 20th Century ended on a high note for the country that had emerged as the world’s only Super Power. Russia couldn’t keep up with its military spending and the Cold War was over, and with it the specter of nuclear annihilation. Its white hat image had mostly survived the fiasco in Vietnam and its various intrusions into the affairs of sovereign nations, including supporting despots and its hand in assassinating democratically elected leaders who weren’t deemed in keeping with U.S. interests.

Keeping the world free sometimes required putting your white hat aside and getting down and dirty with the bad guys. Reasonable people could see that.

The first unsettling rumbling that things might not go as smoothly for the world’s oldest democracy in the new Millennium came in the 2000 presidential election. Despite winning the popular vote, the Democratic candidate Al Gore lost to Republican George Bush Jr. in the closest presidential election in American history, with 537 votes separating the candidates in the decisive state of Florida, then coincidentally or not run by Bush’s brother Jeb. The result triggered an automatic recount which resulted in litigation that ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which gave the election to Bush in a 5-4 decision.

The Democrats reluctantly went along with the ruling and an orderly transition of power ensued but a shadow had been cast over the democratic process amid dark rumors that the election had been stolen.

The implications of that Supreme Court decision will be reverberating through the world for decades to come. While the dovish Gore went on to champion the environment, Bush surrounded himself in power with conservative hawks who saw foreign enemies everywhere, but especially in the Middle East where they viewed the job in Iraq had been left undone by Bush senior. When 9/11 shocked the world and shook the nation to its foundations, the hawks seized on the opportunity.

The good guys had a new villains to fight and the open-ended global War on Terrorism was officially launched with a strike against Afghanistan and the governing Taliban who harbored Osama Bin Laden. But the arch-villain of terrorism escaped and the hawks turned their attention to an old adversary, the  tyrant in a black bowler hat, Saddam Hussein.

In behind the scenes scheming to justify an attack on Iraq, the line between good and evil began to blur. Weapons of mass destruction were imagined and then used as a rationalization that would take the country to war on false pretenses. This time the army wouldn’t rein up short of Baghdad but would take the whole country regardless of the cost to innocent civilians.

Unlike Vietnam, an unjust war fought on the ill-conceived premise that creeping communism would threaten the world order, the second Iraq conflict was motivated by revenge and presented an opportunity for certain American companies, one of which had close connections to Bush’s powerful Vice President Dick Cheney, to reap huge profits. It destabilized the Middle East, resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and virtually bankrupted the U.S. No one could seriously say the world was better off after this unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation.

The U.S. wore the black hat in the Iraq war and the world began to view the country differently in the new century. The election of its first black president, with his campaign slogan “Yes We Can’, burnished the image somewhat but also brought out the country’s darkness as the far-right Tea Party emerged from under the rocks to hijack the Republican Party, bringing long suppressed bigotry back into the political mainstream. The far-right movement received financial backing from shadowy citizen groups with patriotic sounding names funded by top one per cent power brokers like the billionaire Koch brothers, whose father was a founding member of the John Birch Society.

With money flowing to the top one per cent and the middle class disappearing many people see their American Dream fading. Some believe the country is undergoing a slow-moving financial coup, in which corporations are the real power fronted by political puppets who do their bidding to keep their jobs.

Enter Donald Trump the improbable billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who won by claiming to be the guy who’s going to make America Great Again for the working stiffs. The man who will drain the Washington swamp. Throughout the campaign he displayed an appalling ignorance about world affairs and a temperament unsuited to be Commander-In Chief of the world’s most powerful nation. By his own words he showed himself to be a braggart and a bully, a pathological liar, a misogynist, a sexual predator, a bigot.

He is so obviously not the person our parents told us should win. Not the good guy of few words whose actions do the talking. Not a person worthy of the revered Oval Office once occupied by Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Obama. America you have let us all down. We’re pulling the blankets over our heads because the world has lost its hero nation. You gave us an evil orange clown when we needed a hero in a white Stetson hat.

The Clownfall of America

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eagle-crying

With the election of Donald Trump the United States has dropped the veil of progressive democracy and exposed its true face to the world. And it is an ugly made-in-America face.

The country that claims a special blessing from God, and along with it the divine right to interfere anywhere in the world that it deems necessary to protect its own interests, has selected an unstable Reality TV star endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan to lead it in these dangerous times.

How much damage can a Donald Trump presidency do to the world?

In 2000, the American people gave the world George W. Bush and company. We watched as George W. sat befuddled, stunned and confused in an elementary school classroom as he received news that the first massive terrorism attack on American soil was happening on his watch.

Bush and his Republican council of not-so-wise men reacted by letting the perpetrator of 9/11 escape on a donkey in the company of a one-eyed mullah, then invaded the wrong country under false pretenses, destabilizing the Middle East and bankrupting the American economy in the process. They went on to preside over an era of Wall Street financial malfeasance that very nearly sent the entire world into economic chaos.

With hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returned home so mentally and physically damaged that 22 veterans kill themselves every day, the true cost to the country cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

After eight years of Republican rule, the worldwide death toll directly related to Republican decision makers soared into the hundreds of thousands, with millions more displaced. At least with the first George W. presidency, it could be argued the electorate didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into. But then they elected him again.

The Obama administration came into power facing the biggest financial crisis of modern times. With calm hands on the controls and a reasoned approach to complex problems, Obama steered the ship away from disaster. He leaves office with Osama Bin Laden dead, the foreign wars winding down, unemployment numbers looking much better and the economy showing encouraging signs of recovery, despite eight years of ideological obduracy by the Republican Senate and Congress.

A reasonable person might think Americans learned something from the disastrous years of Republican reign and the ensuing stability and optimism nurtured by Obama’s Democrats.

Not so much.

In exit polls, 60 per cent of the 2016 electorate stated they thought Donald Trump temperamentally unfit for the presidency. Yet they lined up to vote for him anyway knowing the following:

*Eleven credible fellow citizens have accused him of the inappropriate sexual behaviour he bragged about on tape.

*He cheated on his wives and agreed with a radio host that his daughter is a ‘nice piece of ass.’

*He considers himself smarter than regular people for not paying taxes.

*His hidden financial dealings are so potentially damaging he is the first presidential candidate in modern times to refuse to release his tax records.

*He has so little respect for democracy that he refused to acknowledge he would accept the will of the people, “unless he wins.”

*He dodged military service during the Viet Nam war and later called into question the character of a war hero who underwent torture for answering his country’s call, because he was captured.

*He likened the sacrifices of Gold Star families who have lost children in the service of their country to the sacrifices he made doing deals for his own profit.

*He degraded an American-born judge and questioned his integrity solely because his parents are Mexican.

*He encouraged his supporters to demonize his opponent with calls of ‘Lock her up.’ and said he would follow through by putting her in prison if elected.

*He promoted a bogus university that is being sued by thousands of former students who say they were bilked by a scam.

*He said global warming is a hoax perpetrated by China.

*He called American military leaders losers and claimed to know more than they do about fighting terrorism.

*He praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as a strong leader who has done a better job ruling as an authoritarian thug than President Obama had done leading a democracy.

*He encouraged the Russian dictator to interfere in the American democratic process by hacking into the emails of American citizens and seized upon those same emails for political gain when the Russians heeded his advice.

*He stood on a podium in front of thousands of supporters and made fun of a reporter’s physical disability.

*He advocated for the proliferation of nuclear weapons to countries like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

*He questioned the usefulness of the U.S. nuclear arsenal if the country wasn’t prepared to use it.

*He called into question the legitimacy of the democratic process, saying the system was rigged against him and that the media is part of a large global conspiracy that includes international banks (read Jews).

*He banned select media outlets from his rallies because of unfavourable coverage and threatened to change libel laws to muzzle the press if elected.

*He questioned the integrity of the FBI and then recanted when its director tipped the election in his favor with only days remaining in the campaign.

*Ignoring the constitution and the rule of law, he called for a ban on people entering the country based solely on their religion.

*He called Mexicans rapists and criminals and said he would build a high wall to keep them out and then make them pay for it.

Sadly, the above list, though long and tawdry, is far from complete when it comes to the flaws of the man Americans selected as a role model for their children. In the eyes of the world, the American people have lost any high moral ground they like to claim when referring to their violent, bigoted, gun-crazy society as the best country in the world.

In fact, it is a starkly divided nation, a democracy in which candidates for elected office further encourage divisions by isolating voters with polls that separate them by class, race and religion—White, Black, Hispanic, Asian; Muslim, Jew, Christian;  working class, college educated; men and women–then tailor their messages to appeal to whichever group can deliver the vote in contested areas.

In electing a man born to wealth with an innate sense of entitlement, a man who lives with his trophy wife high in a garish tower that trumpets his name on the front for all to see, a man whose life has been devoted not to public service but instead to conspicuous consumption, gaudy acquisitions, vulgarity and narcissism, an opportunist who made his political bones questioning the first black president’s right to hold office and solidified his base with a message of hate and bigotry, U.S. voters have now got the man they so richly deserve.

It is not surprising that the Canadian Immigration website shut down mid-election due to the volume of inquiries coming in from south of the border. If Americans want to see how a truly great country functions they need only look north.

We Canadians, known for our strict gun laws, peacekeeping, racial tolerance, politeness and socialist policies like Medicare that provide affordable health care to all, look south and say to the Prime Minister of our resource rich nation: “Mr. Trudeau, build that wall.”

The Donald knocks himself out with low blow to democracy

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The Mango Megalomaniac delivered the knockout punch his supporters were so hoping for in last night’s debate but unfortunately for them his hay-maker missed Hated Hillary and landed squarely on his own jaw.

The man who finds ever more creative ways to lower the election bar finally reached his bottom Wednesday night in twice refusing to say he would accept the verdict of the people on Nov. 8.

How low did he go to inflame his base by questioning the legitimacy of his country’s sacrosanct electoral process? He went lower than the snake’s anus he has proved himself to be.

Earlier this year, after travelling the Divided States for five months, this casual election observer channeled Charles Dickens in suggesting the U.S. is the best of countries and the worst of countries.

The world is seeing the worst of it now.

The dirty dogfight billed as a presidential election is putting a dark stain on the democratic tradition Americans purport to hold so dear. It is not so much an election by the people for the people as it is a no-holds-barred cage fight between the much-reviled choice of the Democratic Party elite and a narcissistic, sociopath who tapped into widespread voter discontent and the nation’s dark psyche to steal the nomination from the Republican Party elite.

Is it democracy when the people are presented with two choices out of a population of 300-plus million, both of whom are deeply disliked and mistrusted by the majority?

But there you have it. On Election Day the people must choose between a foul-mouthed, bronze-tinted, accused sexual deviant and a trust-challenged, political schemer who has her own sex pervert, if not on the ticket, then at her side on the dais and stumping for her on the campaign trail.

How did it come to this in a country that bills itself as the world’s showcase of democracy? A nation awash in good-intentioned people with intellectual depth. A land whose institutions of higher learning are beacons for deep thinkers from around the globe.

To go over the months of mudslinging from both primaries to the final weeks of the campaign is too daunting. Let’s start at the pre-Third Debate low point with the accusations of sexual assault, which might seem an odd campaign issue to observers in other countries watching an election being fought by two senior citizens.

The heavily made-up, immaculately-coiffed Czech mate’s vested marital interest aside, few objective observers believe a diverse group of women now numbering in double digits would subject themselves to the abuse of the Mango Misogynist’s knuckle draggers on behalf of Hated Hillary and the Democratic Party. That leaves morally challenged Republicans and fundamentalist religious fanatics to point the finger at Bill Clinton, invoking school yard rationalizations like, “He did it too.”

Democrats deflect accusations against former President Clinton, the Fastest Zipper in the West Wing, by pointing out that he’s not running for election. Indeed he isn’t but with the issue of sexual assault front and centre, the country’s first female Presidential candidate chooses to send the gaunt pee-pee exposer on the campaign trail as her surrogate. At the very least, the optics are terrible and her judgement should rightly be questioned.

Is it any wonder sexual assault on the nation’s college campuses is being called an epidemic, with one in five female students claiming they have suffered some form of sexual abuse? Clearly, being a sexual predator doesn’t preclude one from reaching for the top in America’s democracy.

Despite her deep-seated unpopularity with a vast swath of voters, the Democratic Party power structure handed the 2016 keys to Hated Hillary as reward for being the good soldier when Barack Obama came out of nowhere in 2008 to take the nomination from her on a platform of change.

Remember the optimism embodied in Obama’s campaign slogan–Yes We Can. It seems so long ago.

In defeat, Hated Hillary played nice and toed the party line, helping to elect Obama, then serving as Secretary of State for four years before resigning to raise money and plot her return. The latest manifestation of her long obsession to become Mrs. President began in 2012, funded by big money and Wall Street bankers anxious to hedge their bets.

And who can blame her for vacating her important cabinet post with the Middle East in flames. It takes a lot of money to become the people’s President or even for a seat in the Senate or Congress. So much money that Senators and Congressman spend a great deal of time dialing for dollars when they could be attending to the people’s business or bringing their respective legislative bodies to a standstill with pig-headed devotion to their respective parties. These muddling ideological money grubbers aren’t calling Joe the Plumber for a hundred bucks but instead are concentrating on the big fish, none of whom made their money by giving it away without expecting something in return.

Meanwhile, The Evil Orange Clown, on the lookout for attention with his reality TV career winding down, stumbled upon a power base on the dark side by fronting a fringe conspiracy movement, calling into question the first black President’s right to hold office by questioning his place of birth. Sensing an opening with the country’s legions of mouth-breathers, he declared his bid for the Presidency by following in the footsteps of history’s most successful dictators, demonizing visible minorities by blaming them for the mouth-breathers’ many failures in life.

He insulted his way through the Republican primaries with a clownish swagger that the GOP elite treated like a bad joke until he began knocking off establishment candidates and belittling party stalwarts. Using money he saved from not paying taxes, he travelled the country spewing bigotry and hate while casting his opponents into the political dung heap.

After eight years of ideological obfuscation in the Senate and Congress, during which Republican legislators shut down the federal government, refusing to appropriate funds to the Obama administration for the coming fiscal year, and with the country’s infrastructure deteriorating to Third World levels and the economy sputtering, it became plain for all to see Washington is no longer working for the people.

Enter the Evil Orange Clown stage right wing, fresh off the set of the Apprentice, where his constituency of reality TV viewers deemed him an omnipotent boardroom fixer of all things broken. People desperate for change came out in droves to support a man who hasn’t changed his hairstyle in 50-odd years, except to add a few layers of orange lacquer to his comb over.

Things didn’t turn sinister until Ferret-top’s numbers dropped in the wake of the First Debate and his subsequent late night twitter war with a former beauty queen. By the Second Debate he had been outed by his own foul words as Billy Bush’s pussy-grabbing mentor.

Seriously folks, the GOP’s bad joke had turned into its worst nightmare, threatening to drag the party that gave us George W., Sarah Palin and the Tea Party into the political obscurity it so richly deserves. Republicans hoping to save themselves from drowning in the backwash jumped the sinking ship of deplorable fools like rats running from a ferocious shipboard tomcat, leaving Ferret-top unshackled at the helm.

Instead of dropping anchor to pick up any survivors Captain Clown Face is steering toward the reef, where he will jump into his billionaire lifeboat and do what he has always done in time of crisis, namely leave the little guys whose good faith he took advantage of to their fate.

In light of his whingeing about media bias and a rigged election, followed by his unprecedented disgraceful debate performance that questioned the validity of America’s venerated democratic process, it should be clear to all but the most obtuse fanatics and the un-Christian Right, that Ferret-top is willing to take the country down to save his fake-tanned face.

Hated Hillary may be the flawed candidate of the establishment but beside the Evil Orange Clown she is Mother Teresa with a PhD.

 

 

What’s new Pussygate?

/ The Meanderers Musings / 2 Comments

 

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The New York Daily news headline writers are praying for a Trump victory in November.

Just when you thought the U.S. election coverage couldn’t get any smarmier CNN outdid itself with a three-shower Friday night shit show that left even casual viewers feeling soiled and in need of a sponge bath.

With hundreds dead in Haiti and hurricane force winds blasting the south Atlantic coast and the streets of Florida’s cities flooding, sending millions of Americans scurrying for cover, the network news hounds spent the night baying for the blood of an evil pussy-grabbing clown.

And who could blame them, really. Pussy trumps run-of-the-mill disaster footage every time. (Pun intended.)

On the day the draft of Hypocrite Hillary’ s two-faced speech to the bankers was finally leaked, her mango-flavoured, ferret-topped opponent stole her thunder with a decade-old command video performance, a disturbing sexist tape recorded on route to his appearance on a television soap opera with the weasel cousin and nephew of two former Republican presidents egging him on.

This stuff is so good Ferret-top’s role model and e-mail hacking election ally, Vladimir Putin, can barely tear himself away from his flat screen TV long enough to order more genocide in Aleppo, the city of suffering that became a social media punchline when  Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson stared blankly at an interviewer and said, “What’s an Aleppo?”

Seriously, folks. What’s an Aleppo when you’ve got important things to cover, like Ferret-top talking about his failed attempt to ‘fuck’ a married Palm Beach socialite by coming onto her ‘very heavily’ with a trip to a furniture store. “How about this nice day bed, babe. We could do it in the back of the truck on the way home.” As the tape winds on, we learn his bitchin’ desire for her has waned somewhat because her new store-bought tits look too phony. This from a man who layers 15-inch strands of orange-lacquer over his bald spot every morning before slathering on a pound of fake tan gunk.

We find out on the tape that you can get away with the aging glam queen look when you have the kind of self-acclaimed, tic-tacky star power that makes every woman’s ‘pussy’ available to your touch, whether invited or not.

You’ve got to hand it to Americans. They know how to put on an election and they don’t give a shit if you have to send the kids out of the room to watch.

At one point in the CNN coverage two of the female talking heads, Anna Navarro, a no-longer-proud Republican strategist, and Trump sycophant Scottie Nell Hughes,  yelled at each other over the propriety of Navarro repeating the word pussy on a prime time news show.

Sycophant Scottie, who flaunts her love affair with Christ nightly with a cross that dangles conspicuously for the cameras to catch, objected to Navarro repeating the word pussy because her daughter was watching the show. This got Navarro’s Latin blood up since only moments before Nell Hughes had defended the man she’s touting for President for using the p-word in the explicit tape that CNN was repeating every 15 minutes, dismissing it as locker room banter. Even though Ferret-top was 59 at the time of the sexist tape, Nell Hughes seemed to infer that boys will be boys.

And boy oh boy, everyone knows Republican old boys—Rush, Rudy, and Newt–like their pussy, especially when it doesn’t belong to their current wives.

With Grand Old Party stalwarts frantically tweeting their disgust in hopes of distancing themselves from Ferret-top’s badly listing ship of deplorable fools, and the Trump family–the slicked back, dim-witted duo and daddy’s hot girl Ivanka–fighting it out over damage control strategy in the gleaming tower that bears the family’s depreciating brand, CNN further titillated viewers with ‘breaking news’ banners announcing Ferret-top’s upcoming apology video.

After 12 hours of strategizing, the pussy-grabbing billionaire appeared on the TV screen in an in-house video with the production values of a 12-year-old’s birthday party, shot by uncle Albert on a first generation Huawei cell phone. He stared defiantly into the camera in a poorly lit room with a fake cityscape backdrop, his angry red face taking on a purplish hue under the orange fake tan, and read off an apology that had all the sincerity of a hostage video, before launching into an attack on Hillary for enabling Bill Clinton’s sexual depredations, which he deemed much worse than merely talking about uninvited pussy grabbing.

Is that background noise hurricane-related or is it Republican presidents Grant and Lincoln spinning in their graves? Or maybe it’s the whir from Ferret-top’s running partner’s head spinning as the ‘man-of-faith’ struggles to reconcile his funerals-for -aborted-fetuses proposal and homosexual therapy theory with the merits of extra-marital humping and uninvited pussy grabbing. But Pence shouldn’t be too worried about losing the election; he’ll never be out of work as long as Mr. Clean needs a double.

Meanwhile, CNN anchors amped up the intrigue, speculating about the timing of the tape’s release, two days before the debate. Ferret-top’s sycophants pointed their pivot fingers at the Clinton camp but this political junkie thinks the evil clown may have pulled a diabolical Machiavellian fast one by leaking the tape himself. Nobody’s talking about his taxes anymore.

The country that gave the world Hollywood and Disneyland has turned this historic PG-rated election into entertainment for the entire world with something for everyone—sex, comedy, politics, mystery, show biz and dirty talk mixed in with Christian values–everyone except for the kids of course.

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What the hell happened?

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Shortview Lincoln memorial

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From Lincoln to this…what the hell happened!

Watching the U.S. election coverage makes a believer in democracy wring his hands and run for the shower while wondering how the great experiment in governance by the people for the people has gone so far off the rails.

Nightly immersion in the media cesspool is like wallowing in a fetid mental mud hole. It’s like being addicted to reruns of Mob Wives or Keeping Up with the Kardashians or consuming a steady TV diet of My 600 Pound Life. Hour after hour. Night after night. It leaves a grimy coating on the brain.

It wasn’t always so.

In 1868, the Republicans dumped the incumbent Andrew Johnson, who took over when Abraham Lincoln was rewarded with a bullet for leading the nation through its bloody internal upheaval. The Grand Old Party drafted the man hailed as the saviour of the Union in his place, Civil War hero General Ulysses S. Grant.

A brilliant military tactician who drove Union armies in relentless pursuit of the rebel forces tearing the country asunder, the chain cigar-smoking General was a humble man who before the war had once been reduced to selling firewood on street corners to feed his family.

He accepted the GOP’s invitation to head the 1868 ticket on the condition that he would not campaign. Grant viewed electioneering as unseemly. A man of few carefully chosen words, he disdained political speech-making, preferring to let the Republican campaign theme—Let Us Have Peace–spread his view across the war-weary land.

Grant had seen firsthand what happens when a divided country stops buying into majority rules, with a generation of America’s sons buried in makeshift graves and lame and maimed survivors returned home forever altered by the horror of what they experienced.

He governed so well during the crucial Reconstruction Era, championing the rights of the newly freed black population while soothing the embittered South, that he was elected for a second term, even after infuriating Republican insiders by rejecting party politics in making independent cabinet appointments. He respectively declined Republican calls to run for a then-allowable third term.

Fast forward 140 years to the digital media age. What the hell happened?

Hillary Clinton’s campaign recently announced an outstanding fundraising month in September—$150 million, most of which will be spent on TV ads trashing her opponent in the month remaining. She says she needs it because the Donald is threatening to throw $50 million of his own ‘tax-free-smart-money’ into his election pot to piss on his opponent.

The media loves it. And why not? The 2016 election makes Real Housewives of New Jersey look like Leave it to Beaver. It’s the biggest grossing (no pun intended) reality TV show in history and the 24-hour news networks get all their content free.

On the one side, we have historic Hillary the hypocrite, an advocate for all women except the ones who accuse her husband of coercion and sexual assault. That class of woman—lowly ‘cabaret singer’ Jennifer Flowers, whose ‘love’ for the married governor got her life scrutinized by private detectives looking for dirt; Arkansas government worker Paula Jones, who Bill paid $850,000 without admitting guilt; and the naïve campaign worker willing to donate her time but not her body to hubby’s election campaigns—are not Hillary’s kind.

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Bill Clinton portrait at the Smithsonian in Washington DC

Not to mention Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern a few years older than her precious daughter, whose life she was willing to ruin until DNA evidence proved what she already knew—that Bill was a serial philanderer, a sex pervert and a shameless liar.

After all, the Left’s political power couple had already faced down a special prosecutor while brazening their way through the Whitewater financial scandal that resulted in jail terms for friends and business partners Jim and Susan McDougal.

Then there was the time in the late 70s when Hillary, then First Lady of Arkansas, who had no history or expertise on the stock market, turned a $1,000 investment into $100,000 trading cattle futures over a 10-month period, ostensibly with the guidance of the chief counsel to Tyson Foods, the state’s largest employer. At the time, the cash-strapped Clinton’s combined annual income was $58,000. When later revealed, the eye-popping windfall raised eyebrows but no government investigation.

As it turns out, the stock market profiteering was chump change compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars she got for a single speech to the Wall Street bankers she’s vowed to reign in when she becomes President. You’d think a speech that got parsimonious bankers to dig so deep would be something to be proud of but Hillary refused to release a transcript despite repeated requests from her Democratic nomination rival Bernie Sanders.

Meanwhile, her 2016 podium partner Bill has been staying busy post-Presidency. While Hillary was Secretary of State, he managed a photo-op with Vladimir Putin after getting $500,000 to broker a deal to help the Russians corner the uranium market, the same Putin U.S. officials labeled a thug and a kleptomaniac. The beneficiary of that deal later donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.

But Putin seems like a good guy compared to another of Bill’s running buddies, billionaire and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who lawyered a sweetheart deal and served 13 months for soliciting a 14-year-old prostitute. Bill cut ties with Jeffrey before he had his day in court but not before earning frequent flyer points on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the Lolita Express, which reportedly had a large bed aboard for the passengers’ in-flight entertainment. Not to worry Hillary, Bill says he did not have sex with those underage women.

And these are the good guys on this reality show.

Hillary’s nemesis, Donald “if-his-lips-are-moving-he’s-lying” Trump, is the reality show’s villain and star attraction, an aging evil clown with pursed pussy lips. Manhattan’s answer to what happens when you give a vulgar misogynist with low intelligence and a short attention span too much inherited money.

Think WWF showboat Gorgeous George in a suit and an extra-long tie to camouflage his reputed shortcomings, an orange-tinted, overweight blowhard with a ferret on his head travelling the country with a greasy, obsequious entourage. And that’s just the grown kids.

Complete the story-line with a trophy wife who glides at his side with the fake self-awareness learned on fashion catwalks, a high maintenance model closer in age to his older sons, who in a not so subtle effort to differentiate themselves from the alpha male in the family, wear custom corporate suits with shorter ties and slick their hair back like the bad guys on Miami Vice. That the wife at least once overcame her physical revulsion to the aged patriarch is borne out by the Donald’s youngest son, appropriately named Baron.

Completing the familial package are two daughters, the oldest of which is whip smart and attractive enough to be a Playboy model, and as her father creepily points out, somebody he might have dated if she wasn’t his daughter.

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They grow up so fast….

Her prominent position in the family business is often cited as an example of the Donald’s respect for women, though it is more likely her intelligence so overshadows the dullness of the slicked-back sons that the businessman in the Donald won out over his misogyny, at least when it comes to family.

The younger daughter, born out of wedlock in the wake of a well-publicized affair with future trophy wife number two, makes grudging appearances on the show when she can tear herself away from the New York party scene.

Trumps seeming strategy is to tell so many lies, insult so many people and issue so many over the top proclamations that detractors will be overwhelmed by the material at hand. The short list includes:

*Responding to the numerous corporate bankruptcies that left hundreds of small businesses and tradesmen who did work for Trump companies footing the bill, the Donald boasted that it was good business and that he was smart enough to get out on time

*He launched his campaign at America’s bigots by singling out illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, most of whom work hard at low-paying jobs Americans won’t do, some of them for Trump companies, calling them drug dealers, criminals and rapists.

*He has vowed to kick out 11 million men, women and children (the Syrian refugee crisis pales in comparison) and proclaimed when he becomes king he’ll build a high wall thousands of miles long to keep out the riffraff and make Mexican taxpayers pay for it. No word on if he’ll use his self-proclaimed negotiating skills to make the Mexican government ban ladders south of the border.

*Trump tried to make political hay with his bushel of deplorable followers in the aftermath of a mass shooting in a gay nightclub by calling for a ban on Muslims entering the country, ignoring the fact that such an edict is unconstitutional and against the principles of a nation founded on the concept of religious freedom. His take on the Orlando tragedy curried favour with the powerful National Rifle Association. ‘Things would have been different if club-goers were wearing ankle holsters’, he said.

*The man who wants to lead the nation and by de facto become a role model for its children, told the largest Presidential Debate audience in history, 80-odd million citizens who pay the country’s bills, that not paying taxes is smart, leaving those who pay their share to ponder whether they are patriotic or plain stupid.

*Trump University, an ‘educational establishment’ you might expect to find advertised on the back cover of comic books or on late night TV infomercials, is being sued in a class action law suit by thousands of disgruntled students who allege they were charged exorbitant fees for information they could have got for free online. After unfavourable rulings in civil court Trump claimed the American-born judge hearing the case is biased because of his Mexican heritage.

*Responding to accusations of misogyny Trump bizarrely brought comedian Rosie O’Donnell into the Presidential Debate, claiming he was justified in calling her a fat slob because nobody likes her. When his treatment of a former Miss Universe winner was brought up, a woman he once called ‘an eating machine’, the man who aspires to the world’s most powerful job stayed up late tweeting insults about her, calling her disgusting and falsely claiming she appeared in a sex tape.

In the ensuing furor, he called upon his unsavory lickspittles to shine up his image. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, an unrepentant serial philanderer who turned the tragedy of 9/11 into a lucrative speaking career, pivoted with a finger pointed at Bill Clinton’s infidelities. When asked about his own marital indiscretions, he admitted that adultery is no big deal because everybody does it.

Meanwhile, Republican ‘family values’ stalwart Newt Gingrich, whose litany of extramarital affairs and profligate spending on mistresses are well-documented, took to the hustings to mock the former Miss Universe’s weight gain. “It was a beauty pageant,” said portly Newt.

Not surprisingly, this tacky twosome has six marriages between them.

With disdain for the women voters the candidate is wooing, the Trump campaign brought on as a consultant disgraced Fox News boss Roger Ailes, who resigned his job earlier in the year in the wake of multiple accusations of sexual harassment that resulted in the network paying $20 million to one complainant.

Did I already say you can’t make this stuff up?

Political analysts point at maps with blue and red states while pontificating on the percentages of various voting blocs the candidates need to win. They tells us without irony that the ‘United’ States is divided into black voters, Hispanic voters, other less important people of colour, college educated white women, college educated white men, blue collar white voters, millennials and baby boomers, the Christian Right (as opposed to the Christian Left?), Muslims, citizens who live in Rust Belt states, seniors in rust-free southern retirement states, the military and so on.

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An undecided voter ponders the choices

With polls showing record disapproval ratings for both candidates, the Presidential hopefuls are focusing their personal energies and insults in the handful of battleground states that will decide which of these unpopular choices will win the election by default, tailoring their messages according to the latest polls.

If the Donald needs to shore up his weak showing with blacks, a visit to a black Detroit church is sandwiched into his schedule. When Hillary’s numbers with young voters need buttressing, the campaign trots out Bernie and slots in a college campus. That pandering to polls is an obvious insult to voter intelligence seems not to factor in.

While the candidates fly hither and thither, there is no shortage of sycophantic surrogates eager to mouth up to network microphones to further insult voters’ intelligence by telling them that black is white, or white is black, depending on which way the political poll wind is blowing on any given day.

Even without notes from their respective doctors (one of whom, in keeping with the over-the-top script, is a hen-pecked Park Avenue gastro with a suspicious penchant for Donald-like hyperbolic diagnostics), the months spent fighting this dirty uncivil war leave no doubt about the stamina of either of these trust-challenged senior citizens. The real question is: Will they have anything left for the job of commander-in-chief?

With a month still to go, this well-showered, disillusioned, self-admitted reality TV political junkie, looks longingly to November 9.

In the words of General Grant—Let Us Have Peace.

A Gun Too Far

/ The Meanderers Musings / 1 Comment

Charleston and Magnolia Plantation tour 054

When are Americans going to get their collective heads out of their ample arses and admit their unhealthy love affair with guns is ending badly?

Gun lovers who cite the Second Amendment as justification for owning military-style arsenals have their heads buried so deeply the excrement has seeped into their brains.

The right to bear arms was enshrined in the constitution almost 250 years ago, in a century when the most prolific killing machine was a musket that required complex reloading after every shot.

When the founding fathers envisioned that an armed citizenry would act as a check on tyrants who might want to impose their will against the wishes of the majority, they weren’t thinking about assault rifles. Citing this tired Second Amendment argument in the 21st Century brings to mind Obama’s reply during the 2012 election campaign when his Republican opponent noted that the U.S. Navy had fewer ships than it did in the early 1900s. Obama wryly noted that the army also had fewer rifles with bayonets.

It’s going to take more than assault rifles to overthrow tyrants in the New Millennium. Fast forward a decade or two to a President determined to make America great again by restricting religious freedom, building walls around ghettos, monitoring its citizens electronically, muzzling unfavourable press and silencing all opinion, by force if necessary, that doesn’t comply with his vision, whether the majority likes it or not.
Think Donald Trump’s evil illegitimate child.

Picture this. Righteous freedom-lovers in the year 2040 organize on social media, gather their assault rifles and load up on ammunition before meeting in a stadium for an assault on Washington. NRA organizers pepper the clouds with bullets to hype the assembled 50-thousand dues-paying gun owners only to see their heaven-sent projectiles bounce off a shower of incoming hell-fire missiles launched from drones 10,000 feet above.

Information is the weapon of choice for today’s tyrants, backed by serious killing power that makes assault rifles as ineffectual as their single shot forerunners with fixed bayonets. The tyrants have nuclear weapons.

Where were the constitution-citing blowhards when the patriot Edward Snowden revealed the American government’s ability and willingness to spy on its own citizenry without benefit of warrant? He delivered his message at great personal cost: the government is spying on you, turning your cellphones into microphones and your computers into cameras.

Think about the implications.

The evil, illegitimate Donald Trump spawn can track your every move: when you go, where you go, who you talk to. And he can do it in real time.

Snowden was largely ignored by an apathetic populace. Instead of being revered by defenders of the constitution, he was labelled a traitor. Monitor everything we do 24/7 but don’t mess with our guns.

Do you seriously want Donald Trump’s sinister love-child having that kind of hold on you, or worse, a bitter overweight bureaucrat behind a desk in a bunker buried in a mountain? You can’t get to him no matter how many bullets a minute your assault rifle shoots.

The Democrats, under the stewardship of Obama, a former constitutional law professor, enlarged on policies implemented by the Bush administration in the hysteria that followed 911, even killing American citizens who have never been charged with a crime or had their day in court, citing national security concerns when asked by grieving family for proof of guilt.

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Without a hint of irony, NRA lapdogs in government drape themselves in the constitution while citing the remote possibility of citizens being mistakenly denied their Second Amendment right to carry assault rifles. Their argument (seriously folks) is that mistakes can be made on a no-fly list, thereby temporarily denying the gun-owner his right to pack.
And everybody knows the government makes mistakes.

Americans wring their hands at the latest cop-shooting, or in the cases of Dallas or Baton Rouge, deranged men killing police officers with assault rifles. TV talking heads look gravely into the camera while telling a weary, fearful public about another mass murder in Dallas, or Orlando, or San Bernardino or Sandy Hook.

Bad guys will always get guns, say the gun-lovers, so good guys need to arm themselves in self defense. People are the problem, they say. Bad people. Crazy people. Orlando would have been different if the club-goers were carrying, says the Donald, calling for ankle holsters for the nightclub crowd.

There is no stopping someone intent on carnage in a culture that reveres guns, in a country that makes it easier to get an assault rifle than a license to drive a car. There is no peace of mind in a nation where troubled teenagers can reach into dad’s closet for a deadly weapon, no sanctuary in a gun-satiated society where drugged out criminals can steal lethal killing machines from almost any home.

No one seems to connect the fact that cops kill so many Americans because they’re scared crapless every time they make a routine traffic stop or attend a domestic disturbance. To a jittery cop in gun-lover land, every person reaching for a wallet or cell phone, white, black, Hispanic or Asian, teenager or senior citizen, is a potential, armed cop killer.

While the percentage of cop shootings is disproportionately high for non-whites make no mistake, the cops shoot every shade, and more white people than anybody else.

It’s time Americans pull their heads out, dislodge the fecal material from their mouths, eyes and ears and demand their political lapdogs stop licking the NRA’s encrusted rump. It’s time to revisit an outdated constitutional amendment that made sense centuries ago but is far too dangerous in a society rife with unhinged malcontents.

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